The PBO and your right to know

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 at 5:35 PM - 0 Comments

Paul McLeod tries to wrap his head around the dispute between the Harper government and the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

Taxpayer-funded lawyers are about to take on taxpayer-funded lawyers to keep tax spending secret from taxpayers. If this already sounds silly, it just gets worse. Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page has asked for details of budget cuts. He’s given today as a final deadline before he calls in the lawyers. The government has refused to comply and is readying its own legal guns.

By the end of the day, Page will have to pinch himself and decide whether to launch a court battle over something as inane and obvious as Parliament’s right to know how tax dollars are being spent. Unfortunately, it looks like he has no choice.

The departments of Public Works and Public Safety and CSIS contacted the PBO today and the PBO has granted each of them extensions past today’s deadline for information: see here, here and here.

Ambrose appoints businessman to work with defence industry, government

By The Canadian Press - Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

OTTAWA – Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose has appointed an Ontario businessman to help improve Canada’s often-troubled defence procurement process.

She says Tom Jenkins will be a special adviser and will work with defence contractors to boost competitiveness.

Jenkins is executive chairman and chief strategy officer of OpenText Corp., of Waterloo, Ont.

He was chairman of an expert review panel which looked at federal support for research and development and made recommendations for the government’s 2012 economic plan.

Ambrose says Jenkins will look at ways to streamline procurement and increase job opportunities in defence-related industries.

The military procurement process has long been a source of complaints, with some projects delayed for years and others hit by cost overruns.

“I look forward to working with Mr. Jenkins to improve our ability to leverage military procurement in support of Canadian jobs and industry, including innovation and technology development,” Ambrose said in a statement.

Survey by fed ombudsman suggests feds may be cooking sole-source contracts

By Dean Beeby - Sunday, September 2, 2012 at 11:20 PM - 0 Comments

OTTAWA – A suspicious number of federal contracts for goods and services appear rigged to favour one bidder, suggests a new survey.

The report, from the contracting watchdog at Public Works, provides further evidence of problems with the Harper government’s efforts to clean up procurement practices.

The office of procurement ombudsman Frank Brunetta examined all 442 sole-source deals that were posted electronically between July 2011 and January this year.

These so-called advance contract award notifications, or ACANs, are required whenever the federal government plans to buy something without competitive bidding.

The notices are intended to alert unknown potential suppliers, giving them 15 days to challenge the deal by making a better offer.

The survey found that only 247 of the notices, about half, contained enough information about the goods or services the government needed to allow another supplier to mount a competing bid.

And only 100 — less than a quarter of the total — appeared to be a “legitimate attempt by the contracting department to test the market for an alternative source of supply.”

“The results of this analysis raise questions about whether the policies governing the use of ACANs are sufficiently explicit and unambiguous,” says the report.

Brunetta ordered the survey after complaints from former public servant Allan Cutler, whose career was damaged when he blew the whistle on graft during the so-called sponsorship scandal under Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien.

Cutler, who in 2008 co-founded a watchdog group called Canadians for Accountability, alerted Brunetta to a series of sole-source contracts at the Public Service Commission of Canada that looked tailored to favour four people.

Brunetta’s investigation concluded in July last year that the contracts were indeed cooked. Cutler then claimed the case was just the “tip of the iceberg,” prompting the latest survey of 442 contracts.

In July this year, Brunetta also reported on a separate but similar case at the Canada School of Public Service. He found school officials had stacked the deck to ensure up to $170,000 worth of work went to a favoured supplier between 2009 and 2011.

Over the last few years, the Harper government has been mired in criticisms about non-competitive contracting, most recently for its now-stalled efforts to buy the F-35 stealth fighter jet. The auditor general of Canada delivered a scathing indictment of the F-35 acquisition process in April.

The military also came under fire from the auditor general in October 2010 for its sole-sourcing of helicopter purchases. Sheila Fraser singled out the Defence Department and Public Works for their blatant misuse of ACANs to justify their favoured supplier.

In January this year, Public Works responded to Fraser by posting what it said were tougher rules surrounding the use of ACANs.

A spokesman for Brunetta said the office has no immediate plans for further work on abuses of ACANs because “it makes sense to allow time for the impact of the notice (by Public Works on new rules) to take effect.”

Cutler, who welcomed Brunetta’s latest findings as empirical support for his criticisms, says the Public Works notice hasn’t fixed anything.

“Although the revision says ‘significant’ changes, I couldn’t find a significant difference,” he said in an interview.

Cutler ran unsuccessfully for the Conservatives in the 2006 federal election.

A spokeswoman for Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose says the government will address the issues raised in the report.

Your region in power

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 16, 2012 at 9:52 AM - 0 Comments

The Canadian Press obtains the paper trail behind meetings Christian Paradis’ office organized for two businesses in his riding.

E-mail traffic shows that when bureaucrats first got the edict from Mr. Paradis’s office to hold a meeting with Pultrall, they suggested the company simply attend a seminar offered close to the riding on how to do business with the government. Pultrall manufactures composite materials for construction. But Mr. Paradis’s office rejected that idea, and asked for the meetings to be held in the Ottawa area, specifically naming ten bureaucrats it wanted to attend the meeting with Pultrall in April 2009.

At one point, an employee in the deputy minister’s office raised a red flag. “There is no need to have 15 representatives at this meeting,” wrote the bureaucrat. “The DM would not see this as the best use of their time.” But in the end, about a dozen bureaucrats attended the meeting from across Public Works and even a pair from Foreign Affairs.

Spring break is over

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

The House doesn’t reconvene until Monday, but the public accounts committee will meet this afternoon to, presumably, launch its study of the F-35 procurement. The committee won’t hear from witnesses today, but might settle on a list of witnesses it wishes to hear from. The Liberals have identified ten individuals they’d like to hear from:

Michael Ferguson, Auditor General of Canada
Kevin Page, Parliamentary Budget Officer
Dan Ross, Assistant Deputy Minister (Materiel)
LGen J.P.A. Deschamps, Chief of the Air Staff
Michael J. Slack, F-35 Project Manager, Director of Continental Materiel Cooperation
Col D.C. Burt, Director, New Generation Fighter Capability
Tom Ring, Assistant Deputy Minister, Acquisitions Branch
Johanne Provencher, Director General, Defence and Major Projects Directorate
Richard Dicerni, Deputy Minister, Industry
Craig Morris, Deputy Director, F-35 Industrial Participation

For your study, Amy Minsky has assembled some of the paper trail. You can review all of our coverage here.

A farmer’s final stand

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 3:44 PM - 0 Comments

For six years now, Frank Meyers has been doing his best to ignore the elephant on his farm. Ask him about it—the fact that the federal government wants to kick him off his beloved land in order to build a new headquarters for the military’s elite special forces squad—and the 84-year-old brushes it all aside, like the dirt on his pants. Meyers, a dairy farmer for seven decades, is dealing with his bad luck the only way he knows how: with pride, toughness and a bit of humour. “What are they going to do?” he asks. “Bring a task force in to take me out? They might have to.”

But on Thursday, during a public hearing that will finally decide the fate of his historic property, not even Meyers could stop himself from tearing up. As one of his daughters read an emotional statement for the record, he sat two chairs over, quietly wiping his eyes. “By the time my father was 14, his fulltime job was maintaining this farm,” said Elaine Meyers Steiginga, speaking into a microphone. “I cannot begin to imagine what he is feeling right now, thinking about his lifelong hard labour that he put into this farm, only for it to be gone with just a signature. This wouldn’t just be the end of our family farm. It would be the end of a family legacy.”

For Maclean’s readers, the Meyers legacy has become a familiar one. The direct descendant of a loyalist war hero, Frank Meyers farms the very same plot of land that King George III bestowed on his famous forefather as gratitude for his legendary service during the American Revolution. Now, more than two centuries later, the Canadian government wants it back—ironically enough, to build a new headquarters for Joint Task Force 2, the army’s top-secret commando unit. Since 2007, the public works department has been buying up hundreds of acres directly north of CFB Trenton, the country’s largest and busiest air force base. But Meyers insisted, over and over, that he would never part with his portion, approximately 220 acres. In February, the inevitable happened: Ottawa filed a notice of expropriation.

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Towards the eject button

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Whoever the next leader of the opposition is, he or she will apparently soon receive something of a gift from the auditor general.

The Auditor-General has both National Defence and Public Works in his sights when it comes to the troubled F-35 stealth fighter program, senior government sources say.

A draft copy of the scathing review, circulating in Ottawa for weeks, suggests the air force didn’t do its pricing homework and government officials failed to follow procurement rules, those who’ve read it say.

The Globe says the auditor’s findings are behind the Harper government’s recent change in tone. John Ivison has reported that a draft of the auditor’s report accuses the defence department of misleading Parliament.

Communicating like a bar fight

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments

Jennifer Ditchburn connects the dots between Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, the health care accord and oil exports.

Armour says the Conservatives have put three main principles at the centre of their communications strategy: message discipline, acting on insight and opportunity.

The message control has been well documented. The insight comes from properly reading and analysing the landscape and the players, and the opportunity is the moment that presents itself to act.

Somewhat relatedly, Bill Curry reports the Conservatives are turning to public relations firms to manage government communications. And on both counts I’ll refer back to what I wrote earlier this month.

Ottawa has no business plan behind pledge to consolidate IT networks

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 1 Comment

The Conservative government doesn’t have any business plan to follow through on last week’s pledge to create an agency that would consolidate federal information technology networks. Cabinet ministers Tony Clement and Rona Ambrose announced the initiative last week, promising that it will cut the government’s IT costs by at least $100 million per year. But Public Works has so far been unable to explain how those savings were calculated. The idea behind the initiative is to manage the government’s information networks as one entity, rather than as a disparate system of independent networks. Sebastian Bois, a spokesman for Public Works, told Postmedia News that, although no business plan exists over how to consolidate these networks, one will be developed “as we move forward with the new organization.” NDP MP Charlie Angus criticized the government for lack of planning, saying the solution to IT difficulties would be to produce a business plan for Parliament to look at.

Postmedia

The Commons: Why so bashful?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 6:12 PM - 16 Comments

The Scene. Here was Rona Ambrose’s chance. Late in the hour, the New Democrats had sent up Nycole Turmel with an urgent bulletin. ” ‘Public Works managers informed their employees Monday the department will shed about 700 jobs over the coming three years, including the elimination of 92 auditors,’ ” she informed the House, reading aloud from a freshly published news report.

“Is it true?” Ms. Turmel wondered.

And so here stood Ms. Ambrose, afforded a great opportunity to loudly and proudly luxuriate in those “Conservative values”—those “Canadian values,” as the Prime Minister is lately fond of putting it. Here she was practically invited to not only confirm the hundreds of public sector jobs eliminated, but proclaim her government’s belief in those hallowed principles of conservatism: limited government, fiscal prudence, personal liberty and the righteousness of the unfettered market. Here was her chance to champion with soaring prose, or at least exclamation points, a new awakening of freedom, a new day for an empowered nation casting off the shackles of tyranny.

Instead, she said this: “Mr. Speaker, as part of our continuous efforts to become more efficient and more effective, Public Works has achieved the strategic review target set out by Treasury Board.”

To Ms. Turmel’s yes or no question, this seemed the most banal way possible—a lullaby of bafflegab—of confirming the affirmative. Continue…

The quiet cuts

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 3:54 PM - 11 Comments

Bill Curry reports on cuts at Public Works.

Public Works managers informed their employees Monday the department will shed about 700 jobs over the coming three years, a move one union leader says will include the elimination of 92 auditors. The cuts to auditing staff at Public Works come just as the department is in the midst of overseeing a $35-billion wave of military purchases – including new ships and icebreakers – that carries political implications as Canada’s regions battle over the contracts.

The information era

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 39 Comments

While the RCMP has been called in to investigate a former ministerial staffer, the information commissioner details the filing system at Public Works.

Legault’s intensive probe of the Togneri case uncovered a so-called “purple file” process at Public Works, by which the minister’s political staff reviewed potentially damaging access releases at meetings with the responsible public servants. ”This purple file process creates a high-risk environment for potential influence or interference with ATIA release decisions and timely disclosure under the Act,” her report found. The report says Public Works has since changed the process so there are no more face-to-face meetings between bureaucrats and minister’s aides. The political staff are no longer allowed to know the category of requester, whether news media or opposition MPs.

How many does it take to get a minister fired?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 4:07 PM - 30 Comments

If the doctrine of ministerial accountability was still recognized by this government, it would be tempting right about now to ask how many members of a minister’s staff have to be implicated in wrongdoing before a minister is held accountable.

In October, Paradis adviser Sebastien Togneri resigned after it was revealed he had meddled in at least three different access-to-information requests while with the Public Works Department. Those incidents are the subject of an investigation by the information commissioner.

But two more policy advisers within Paradis’ office were also involved in dealing with records destined for public release under access-to-information legislation. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press show that Marc Toupin and Jillian Andrews both argued against the release of material on sensitive subjects.

Megapundit: James Moore, son of Trudeau?

By selley - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 1:48 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Don Martin on Gomery’s comeuppance; Susan Riley on the cabinet shuffle; Richard Gwyn on the Green Shift.

Stuck in the past
Some of us, apparently, haven’t quite gotten past David Emerson’s floor-crossing and the fact that Michael Fortier isn’t an MP.

If Fortier and Emerson awoke today with a burning sensation all over their bodies—less painful than white phosphorous, say, but not by much—it may have something to do with Susan Riley‘s piece in the Ottawa Citizen. She portrays Fortier as an idly rich, over-entitled, unelectable layabout who exacerbates Stephen Harper’s contempt for the democratic process in appointing him with his unconvincing promises to run in an election if and when a riding with a “winning profile” is located. Emerson’s personality fares slightly better, but his CV doesn’t: he stands accused of “negotiat[ing] a flimsy truce on softwood lumber” and, in his previous Liberal life, “putting the brakes on Stéphane Dion’s environmental ambitions” (Aha! So he’s why it’s so difficult to make priorities!) This is all several feet over the top, particularly Riley’s bizarre talk of “class loyalty” affecting the appointments, but we sure loved reading it!

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