Rights and Democracy: Dept. of Office Memos

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 1:57 PM - 73 Comments

The document I’ve posted below after the jump was one of several that were tabled today at the Foreign Affairs Committee by three former members of Rights and Democracy. The three, Marie-France Cloutier, Razmik Panossian and Charles Vallerand, were fired weeks ago by bailiff’s letter on the order of interim president Jacques Gauthier, a member of the new Rights and Democracy board majority, on the day before the appointment of Gérard Latulippe as the agency’s president. The document lists several “incidents” between members of the Rights and Democracy staff and members of its board over the past 15 months. While this document has been tabled at the Foreign Affairs committee, none of the assertions in it has been proven. It should be considered only a list of allegations made by one aggrieved party in a continuing dispute. — pw Continue…

Rights and Democracy: Notes on the value of a man's signature

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 1:24 PM - 24 Comments

“We are looking to the future. We want the organization to get out of politics at home, and return to promotion of human rights and democratic development abroad. We call upon Parliament to hold public hearings so that facts can replace fantasies, and we can move ahead. Rights and Democracy should be nobody’s football.”

— Seven members of the Rights and Democracy board, including Marco Navarro-Génie, March 22, 2010

“So the combined opposition in Ottawa has forced Parliament to waste its time and taxpayer money holding hearings on Rights and Democracy. It will be a real gong show, a kangaroo court, to try and then convict good Canadian citizens whose only crime is to do their duty to look out for Canadian taxpayers. Get your tickets now, folks. The show opens Tuesday morning.”

— Rights and Democracy board member Marco-Navarro-Génie, eight days later

Both pieces, and I would say especially the second, are picturesque and will reward readers’ close attention.

Access-to-Information request on Rights and Democracy ignored

By Michael Petrou - Monday, March 29, 2010 at 11:42 AM - 18 Comments

Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that Canada’s Access to Information Act is a legally-enforceable piece of legislation that is relevant to how this government and bureaucracy comport themselves.

Here, then, is section 7:

“Where access to a record is requested under this Act, the head of the government institution to which the request is made shall, subject to sections 8, 9 and 11, within thirty days after the request is received,

“(b) if access is to be given, give the person who made the request access to the record or part thereof.”

As readers of this space may recall, last November I filed an access-to-information request to the Privy Council Office asking for a copy of a performance evaluation report on the now deceased president of Rights and Democracy, Rémy Beauregard. Continue…

Rights and Democracy: Let 100 schools of thought contend

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 4:16 PM - 100 Comments

The current print edition of Maclean’s contains a guest column from Sen. Linda Frum, a friend of this magazine who pauses to say some nice things about me while attempting a general rebuttal of my coverage of the Rights and Democracy controversy.

Frankly I hope readers commenting under Sen. Frum’s column will start to tone down the vitriol a bit. For what it’s worth, I’m happy Maclean’s remains a place for opposing views on important issues. I wish only that the Senator had shown up with a fresher arsenal of arguments. I see no point in wasting much time on her column because every single point she makes comes pre-rebutted in my earlier writing on this issue, except perhaps for her assertion that the R&D staff were “aided” in their conflict with the board “by the disappearance of managerial laptops and computer records.” The laptops disappeared in a burglary. What, precisely, is the Senator alleging?

Anyway. Elsewhere in today’s news, the Braun Seven majority on the board of Rights and Democracy has published another in their series of occasional op-eds wondering why the world is so mean to them. “We call upon Parliament to hold public hearings so that facts can replace fantasies, and we can move ahead,” they write.

Here’s a fact: after first confirming he would appear tomorrow before the foreign-affairs committee of Parliament, Braun has now sent word that he’s too busy to show up.

Here’s another fact: that’s how the guy rolls. Continue…

The real trouble at Rights and Democracy

By Linda Frum - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 11:52 AM - 64 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Wallace/ Toronto Star

Let’s say I gave you $11 million of Canadian taxpayer money and told you I wanted you to use the money to repair the ills of the world as you perceived them. Let’s say I told you that you could spend the money entirely as you saw fit. No questions asked. Odds are you would have little difficulty identifying your favourite causes in the most deserving regions of the world. Lovely fantasy isn’t it? Spending other people’s money to cure the troubles of the world, as you identify them, exactly the way you deem best? Well, for the senior managers of Rights and Democracy, Canada’s publicly funded human rights organization, this was no fantasy. It was a blissful reality. That is, until a group of pesky governors, burdened by such governance concepts as accountability and responsibility, came along to spoil the party.

If you have been following the controversy surrounding Rights and Democracy, a “short-arm” organization set up by prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1988 to promote human rights in the Third World, you know that the organization is in crisis.

Some claim that the crisis pits a professional management against a partisan board controlled by the Prime Minister’s Office. (That is the view, for example, of this magazine’s otherwise brilliant analyst Paul Wells.) But every key player in this story, on both sides, is a Harper appointee. And, as a short-arm organization, R and D is constitutionally autonomous of government but not independent of it. Each fiscal year, the chair of R and D is required to table a report with both houses of Parliament. In other words, R and D is not an arm’s-length, independent NGO.

To really understand what’s truly at issue here, you must go to the heart of the trouble.

It really heated up in March 2009 when newly appointed board chair, University of Toronto political science professor Aurel Braun, discovered questionable grants made by R and D’s president Remy Beauregard. One such grant was made to a group called Al Haq, based in Ramallah, West Bank. According to the Israeli Supreme Court, Al Haq’s leader is a senior activist of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group. The $10,000 grant for Al Haq—distributed from a discretionary fund controlled by Beauregard and his management team—alarmed Braun and the majority of his current board. What other grants, they wondered, might be equally suspect? What about, for example, the $144,000 donated to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a sponsor of 2009’s scurrilous Durban II conference, which was boycotted by the government of Canada? What exactly was that $144,000 spent on? Or the several hundred thousand dollars that R and D sent to that UN office over the past few years?

Anyone who has ever served on a board knows that such inquiries on the part of a board chair and the audit and finance committee are necessary in order to fulfill the duty of “due diligence.” But to the managers of R and D—unaccustomed to any challenge to their authority and hostile to investigations into their pet projects—the board’s interest was deemed “harassment” and requests for “sensitive” information were rejected or stonewalled. To this day, management refuses to co-operate fully with an audit being conducted by the respected firm of Deloitte & Touche. Instead, they have launched a self-righteous campaign of media sniping and obfuscation—aided by the disappearance of managerial laptops and computer records.

The sudden death in January of Remy Beauregard has injected an element of sorrow to the situation, but it does not alter a public body’s duty to account for public money. By January 2010, even Beauregard finally came to the conclusion that giving money to Al Haq (and like organizations) was wrong and voted to repudiate it. But the staff he left behind remain resentful of the board’s scrutiny.

The R and D staff’s anger at the board’s curiosity suggests that something has gone very wrong at R and D. On March 29, Gerard Latulippe, an experienced administrative law and labour lawyer with professional expertise in promoting democratic accountability in the third world (most recently in Haiti), will take over as Rights and Democracy’s new president. He has the tough task of reforming an agency gone rogue long ago. Yes, some of the staff are complaining anonymously to the press. But the complaints do not prove them right. On the contrary, their complaints prove how very deep the problems go.

Linda Frum is a Conservative member of the Canadian Senate.

Read this response by Paul Wells, published Monday, March 22

Harper’s hard right turn

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 465 Comments

Photograph by Chris Wattie/ Reuters

It says in all the papers the well has run dry. The commentators keep writing that Canadian conservatism has died on the vine, that four years into his reign of tactical obsession and fiscal profligacy, Stephen Harper has forgotten why he ever went into politics.

“Where’s the big, strategic agenda for the next election?” John Ivison quoted a senior Conservative in the National Post. “I haven’t found one yet.” In the same paper, Terence Corcoran ran a string of columns identifying programs the feds should cut, because Harper seems unwilling to do the work himself. And Andrew Coyne delivered his annual post-budget verdict of despair and mourning. “Those Conservative faithfuls who have been hanging on all these years, in the hopes that, eventually, someday, with one of these budgets, this government would start to act like conservatives, must now understand that that is not going to happen. Conservatism is not just dead but, it appears, forgotten.”

But it’s a funny thing. If Canadian conservatism is dead, somebody forgot to tell Canadian conservatives.

Continue…

CIDA's democracy promotion in Zimbabwe

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 4:55 PM - 9 Comments

Longtime visitors to this space have read me raging, like an increasingly maniacal King Lear on the heath, about the Canadian International Development Agency not answering an access-to-information request that I filed in 2007.  Last week, almost three years later, they did.

I had asked CIDA about a multi-million dollar democracy promotion program in Zimbabwe. At the time, back in 2007, I had recently returned to Canada from Europe, where I had reported from countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Belarus, where pro-democracy movements had tried to overthrow autocratic governments. In Georgia and Ukraine, these movements were successful; not so in Belarus. A factor in all three cases – and also earlier in Serbia – was the involvement of Western governmental and non-governmental organizations, such as the Soros Foundation and the National Democratic Institute, that promote political parties, civil society, and democratic governance.

This got me thinking about CIDA’s work in illiberal societies. CIDA’s self-described mandate says nothing about promoting democracy and good governance abroad, instead referencing the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which in turn focus on things like child mortality, disease, and education. But CIDA spent millions in Zimbabwe on a “Rights, Democracy and Governance Fund” with explicitly political goals: “This project supported civil society organizations in demanding and promoting democratic governance and respect for human rights in Zimbabwe.” Continue…

I'm not writing about Rights and Democracy…

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 132 Comments

…but when there’s this many clowns tumbling out of a Volkswagen marked “accountability and transparency,” nobody should be surprised when it starts to draw a crowd. Bruce Campion-Smith’s Star story is in some ways the funniest one about the doofus-stricken agency in weeks.

Difficult-to-Access-Information on Rights and Democracy

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:41 PM - 14 Comments

There’s little I can add to colleague Paul Wells’ reporting on the mess at Rights and Democracy. He has almost single-handedly driven this story and though mentally exhausted by his efforts should be proud of them.

My own involvement in the story started last year when I got word that trouble was brewing at the organization. No one was willing to go on the record at the time, so I filed several access-to-information requests to the government, including one to the Privy Council Office asking for a copy of a performance evaluation report on the now deceased president of Rights and Democracy, Rémy Beauregard.

Continue…

Rights and Democracy: I say tomato, you say this has nothing to do with the Middle East

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 12:16 PM - 220 Comments

Yesterday’s display of bulbous rubber noses and floppy shoes from the seven clowns running Rights and Democracy is wearyingly familiar in every particular.

Tossing a dart from across the room, I hit this passage, at random out of any number of others, to rebut: they write that the executive review committee “gave the former president repeated opportunities to meet and discuss the evaluation in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal. He chose not to avail himself of those opportunities.”

Rémy Beauregard actually addressed that point in a long letter to the board of Rights and Democracy on Oct. 26, 2009. “With respect to the efforts made to accommodate the President for a meeting of the Committee,” he wrote, “it is important to clarify that of the 55 days proposed by the Secretary of the Board for such a meeting, the President indicated he was available for 45 of those days.”

Then why was there no meeting? Because, as I’ve learned when trying to seek comment from them, Aurel Braun and his pals can be difficult to pin down. Continue…

Rights and Democracy: the Board replies. "It's not about the Middle East"

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 12:15 PM - 177 Comments

The seven members of the Rights and Democracy board who support Chairman Aurel Braun are back in the pages of the National Post today, with a concerted effort to explain their side of the current dispute. This is the first time they have submitted such a piece of writing since Jan. 20, and anything from this majority faction of the board deserves the attention of readers who have been following this story closely. In part, the Braun faction’s op-ed stands as a sort of answer to the questions I put to Braun and Jacques Gauthier earlier this month. Since Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon’s actions yesterday amount to a wholehearted endorsement by the Government of Canada of everything Braun and the board have done in recent months, that’s all the more reason to consider carefully the board majority’s arguments.

So once again, here is a link to the full op-ed, which I encourage you to read. Here are a few key paragraphs:

First some facts, which seem to have eluded critics of the Rights & Democracy board. Every Canadian member of the board was appointed by the current government, including those who are vociferously supporting the late former president, Rémy M. Beauregard, and who are openly hostile to the rest of the board. The government appointed Mr. Beauregard as well. Most members of the board have no prior political affiliation; a recently appointed board member is a well-known Liberal. Clearly, the board wasn’t “stacked.” The only discernible pattern is that board members were appointed to bring governance to Rights & Democracy. There is no imposition of a right-wing agenda, no interference in autonomy.

Accountability and transparency are the true issues. A December 2007 report by the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Office of the Inspector‑General discovered “persistent … accountability … problems” with Rights & Democracy, which regrettably remain. Whether it was the finance and audit committee requesting timely and adequate information; members seeking proper clarification of the operations of the Geneva office; explanations about a $100,000 expenditure which raised questions; or information about how $300,000 a year in discretionary funds was spent, we on the board have been stymied.

…The former president’s death was a gateway to surreality. Conflict entrepreneurs in the Canadian and Middle East political trenches could not resist interfering. Instead of determining how to resolve a real battle between those supportive of accountability and those who opposed it, Canadians have ended up debating the imaginary impact of the government’s Middle East agenda on Rights & Democracy.

Those of us responsible for the governance of the organization do not have the luxury of fighting national or Middle Eastern fantasy battles. Ensuring accountability and transparency is far less exciting than debating Canadian and Middle East politics. Yet, that is our task….

I’ll respond to these arguments tomorrow.

UPDATED: Rights and Democracy: The witness has rights

By Paul Wells - Monday, February 22, 2010 at 6:03 PM - 233 Comments

(UPDATE, Tuesday at noon: Jacques Gauthier replies to this post in the comments below. For readers’ convenience, I have reproduced Gauthier’s comment at the bottom of this post. — pw)

A letter arrived today at the Montreal office of Samson Bélair/ Deloitte et Touche, the financial-services firm hired by Rights and Democracy interim president Jacques Gauthier on Friday to conduct a forensic audit of the firm’s financial activities over the past five years. The letter is signed by several senior members of the Rights and Democracy staff. It is a blockbuster.

The letter’s authors — France-Isabelle Langlois, Michael Wodzicki, Dominic Tremblay, Nicholas Galetti — demand to know the details of Samson Bélair’s mandate as a condition of their cooperation in the audit.

And they level serious allegations of their own at Gauthier, arguing in effect that if Samson Bélair wants to investigate mismanagement at Rights and Democracy, they might as well start at the top. Continue…

Rights and Democracy: Loyalty and Competence

By Paul Wells - Monday, February 22, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 188 Comments

This one takes some twists and turns. Follow along!

Lawrence Cannon names Gérard Latulippe as president of Rights and Democracy. “An exceptionally qualified candidate,” says he. (Cannon also “expresses the Government of Canada’s support” for a forensic audit at an agency whose books are edited every year by the auditor general, an agency that was evaluated by Cannon’s own department in 2008 and found to have no irregularities in its books. A man of few words, or at least few coherent words, Cannon gives no explanation for his change of heart.)

Latulippe is the National Democratic Institute country director for Haiti. He has also worked for NDI in “countries such as Jordan, Libya, Iraq, Georgia, Mauritania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Egypt.” This blog is an unabashed fan of NDI, which admits a “loose affiliation” with the U.S. Democratic Party (its loose-affiliation counterpart is the International Republican Institute, and here at Inkless, we like them too.) NDI is a world leader in educating political parties about their own countries’ political systems and ensuring that elections are fought vigorously and fairly. But, as that notorious opponent of transparency and accountability Ed Broadbent likes to point out, Rights and Democracy has a broader mandate than NDI and IRI. That’s the “Rights” bit, which consists in advocating for the basic human rights of speech, association and so on, down to something as basic as the right to food in Malawi. Latulippe may be able to learn new tricks, but he will have to, because Rights and Democracy isn’t NDI, nor is it the “Canadian Centre for Advancing Democracy” advocated by Stephen Fletcher based on a report by Tom Axworthy and… and…

…Éric Duhaime?

Oh now that’s interesting. This corner is also fond of Duhaime (we like everyone today!), a wisecracking, whip-smart political staffer from Quebec City who served as an advisor to Mario Dumont right up until Dumont left his ADQ party in a flaming wreck. But before that, Duhaime ran the Quebec desk at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition back when the Leader of the Opposition was the then-beleaguered Stockwell Day. (Before that he was an advisor to Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, forcing this other Éric Duhaime to note that he is “not the Éric Duhaime who changes political parties the way he changes shirts.”)

But I digress. Except I don’t, really, because when Duhaime, who now wants a Canadian equivalent of NDI, was working in Stock’s shop, the Canadian Alliance’s Quebec political lieutenant was… Gérard Latulippe. “Stockwell Day is our leader, he is the only one who can win in every region of Canada,” reads a letter by Quebec Stockaholics that Latulippe signed when things got a bit dicey. Continue…

UPDATE: Rights and Democracy: So that's what you were doing in Ottawa when I saw you a couple of weeks ago, Peter

By Paul Wells - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 6:46 PM - 200 Comments

The Rights and Democracy board announces it has hired Samson Belair/Deloitte and Touche to rummage through the agency’s books for the past five years. Reporters are invited to direct their inquiries to the new freelance communications company that interim president Jacques Gauthier has hired, to go along with the freelance office manager, the freelance private investigator, and the blue-chip audit firm he’s put on the public payroll in his never-ending efforts to get value for the taxpayer dollar. Now, guess who picks up the phone when you call Prima Communication. Go ahead, guess. Give up? Hint.

UPDATE: Peter Stockland writes in the comments to this post:

No, it wasn’t, Paul. It had nothing to do with why I was in Ottawa. But you wouldn’t know that because even though you know me personally, you didn’t give me the courtesy of contacting me before posting this or sending out a Tweet suggesting some kind of nefarious agenda on my part. If you had bothered to contact me, you would have learned that I am trying to help the board of Rights and Democracy resolve exactly the sorts of issues you raised in your earlier blog about waiting 10 days to get answers. So, now we know what I am doing. But the followup questions arises: what are you doing, Paul? What kind of journalism are you doing these days? What is YOUR agenda that requires using nameless single sources, drive-by personal smears, groundless accusations? Who are you playing to exactly? I’d like to know.

Rights and Democracy: Transparency

By Paul Wells - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 6:29 PM - 73 Comments

This afternoon we taped tonight’s edition of TVO’s The Agenda With Steve Paikin. The topic for most of the hour was the recent controversy at Rights and Democracy. (Click the “Rights and Democracy” tag at the bottom of this post and it will take you to everything I’ve written on the agency. There’s a lot.)

As a sort of warm-up, I thought it’d be good to share the correspondence I had with the chairman of the Rights and Democracy board, Aurel Braun, and the interim president, Jacques Gauthier, who is also a board member, before I wrote this article. I think the questions I asked them are still germane, and 10 days after I asked them, perhaps these busy men have managed to come up with some answers. Let’s find out. Continue…

Rights and Democracy: Inspector Clouseau is on the case

By Paul Wells - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 2:49 PM - 66 Comments

FrumForum superstar investigative reporter Tim Mak is still on the case. We await further word from him on his earlier triumph, which he links to in the new story and therefore, incredibly, seems proud of.

A losing battle

By Paul Wells - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 97 Comments

Last June, Rémy Beauregard, the president of a federal government-funded human rights organization called Rights and Democracy, read aloud to his fellow board members from a long memo he had written. The memo was his response to an evaluation of his job performance written by two members of the federal government-appointed board, Jacques Gauthier and Elliot Tepper. The board’s chairman, Aurel Braun, had sent along his own note endorsing the evaluation, which was highly critical of Beauregard.

Continue…

NOW WITH FUN UPDATE! BREAKING: Was Rights and Democracy on the grassy knoll in Dallas??!?!!!!?

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 7:32 PM - 121 Comments

It’s so good to find a sympathetic ear. And so the new board majority at Rights and Democracy must be so pleased to find Tim Mak, who splits his time in Washington between the National Post and David Frum’s website, where tonight he is breaking this shock-horror story suggesting Rights and Democracy might — before Aurel Braun and his confrères came riding over the hilltop to stage a gallant cavalry rescue — have bankrolled the Durban II conference in Geneva. Nut graf:

However, a FrumForum examination of United Nations annual reports show that the Canadian-based organization, Rights and Democracy — which received over $10 million from the Canadian government, or nearly 80% of its revenue — contributed nearly half a million dollars to the UN High Commission on Human Rights over the last several years. One FrumForum source puts the number closer to $700,000, accounting for unreleased 2009 figures. The UNHCHR is the parent organization for the Anti-Discrimination Unit, which organized Durban II in April of 2009.

I have fairly strong opinions about this story, but perhaps you are all tired of my fairly strong opinions, so I’ll leave you to read and discuss this one by yourselves. I’ll check back later to see how it’s all going.

UPDATE: In the comment section, anonymous comment-section person “Hannah” delivers a magisterial schooling upside the head of Tim Mak and his sources. Gee, that didn’t take long at <em>all.</em>

Rights and Democracy: Where to begin, where to begin

By Paul Wells - Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 4:24 PM - 194 Comments

David Matas’ letter, posted in its entirety below, gives such free play to misdirection, tautology and double-standard that one hardly knows where to begin picking it apart. But let’s start at the heart of his argument, which is that since the staff of the organization had “no dispute over policy” with the board, the staff has no right to disagree with the board over anything. Continue…

Rights and Democracy: "There is no foundation for a debate over process"

By Paul Wells - Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 10:10 AM - 112 Comments

Rights and Democracy board member David Matas was good enough to send along this new text about the dispute at the Montreal organization. (Today’s Globe story is one place you could go to get caught up on the controversy so far.) It’s a rather bold attempt to persuade everyone that there’s no reason to fuss. I’ll be writing more about Rights and Democracy this weekend. But first, since Matas is much better about getting back to me than Aurel Braun has been, it’s only fair to give him his say. What follows are Matas’s words, not mine:



Reframing

(A comment on the media controversy surrounding Rights and Democracy)

by David Matas

Remy Beauregard, the former president of Rights and Democracy, died of a heart attack the night of January 7, 2010. Some of the staff of Rights and Democracy in the name of all of them released a letter dated January 11, 2010 calling on the leadership of the Board of Directors to resign, accusing them of harassment of the former president. The accusation of harassment was directed against the chair and vice-chair of the Board, Aurel Braun and Jacques Gauthier, and the chair of the audit and finance committee, Elliot Tepper.

The letter did not indicate what was the activity of the Board members which caused concern. The fact that the charge was levied against the leadership of the Board indicated that in substance the issue was rather about the role of the Board. The letter itself hinted at this, accusing the three of having a “complete misunderstanding of your role as Directors”. Continue…

Rights and Democracy: Transparency and Accountability

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 6:11 PM - 137 Comments

From last October, the then-president of Rights and Democracy, Rémy Beauregard, speaks to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee about the work he did improving the management of the Montreal human-rights organization. Others have been making allegations lately about the work Beauregard did so I thought it was fair to let him speak for himself.

Rights and Democracy: Let's go to the video

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 11:19 AM - 176 Comments

From yesterday’s Power Play with Tom Clark on CTV News Channel, footage of most of the show, featuring Ed Broadbent complaining about the goings-on at Rights and Democracy; Aurel Braun complaining about Ed Broadbent; MPs complaining about Rights and Democracy, except for the Conservative fellow who complains about Paul Dewar; and Mike Robinson and Rick Anderson, rising above the fray. I had believed only Steve Paikin, on the public broadcaster TVO, would be able to devote a full hour to this controversy. Tom Clark is full of surprises.

There was a journalists’ panel at the bottom of the hour, and the guy sitting next to Joel-Denis Bellavance sure had a lot to say, but that doesn’t appear to be part of the online archive.

UPDATE: From the Inkless emailbox, this missive from Ezra Levant.

Hi Paul. In your Power Play segment, you mentioned that the 2007 audit of R&D was leaked to me by Aurel Braun.

In fact, I did not receive it from him. And as you probably know, that audit was reveleaed in a scoop by the National Post’s Graeme Hamilton, based on an access to information request. You can read Hamilton’s original story on the audit here: http://ezralevant.com/Waste%20at%20R%26D.pdf

Cheers.

Ezra

Always happy to reflect other arguments. I’ll note, however, that I can’t find any reference to this later audit, which tells a dramatically different tale, anywhere on Ezra’s site.

Rights and Democracy: Did the right hand know what the right hand was doing?

By Paul Wells - Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 2:28 PM - 212 Comments

In the Star, Haroon Siddiqui provides the latest update on the surreal weirdness convulsing the Montreal organization Rights and Democracy. Perhaps the most interesting part of this column is the following graf, about three Rights and Democracy grants to NGOs working in the Middle East, including Al Haq, the bête noire of the organization’s newly-installed board majority:

As it turned out, [now-deceased former R&D president Rémy] Beauregard had run the three grants by Cannon’s ministry, which approved. In fact, Al Haq had also received funding from CIDA. That was in keeping with the Canadian policy of promoting civil society in Palestinian territories to provide non-violent alternatives to terrorism. Al Haq was good enough for CIDA and foreign affairs but not [new board chairman Aurel] Braun and Co.

CIDA grants to Al Haq? I can find no direct record of that on the agency’s website (your help on this would be welcome) but I did find an awful lot of complaining about it, all from one source: Gerald Steinberg, who runs an Israeli organization called NGO Monitor. Its thesis is that international groups working to defend the rights of Palestinian Arabs are seeking to sap Israel’s defences. Steinberg’s a busy guy. Continue…

Hey look: Rights and Democracy and the bigger picture (featuring one of my trademark Harper-is-a-brain-in-a-jar bits)

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 29, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 109 Comments

From the print edition, this week’s column offers what may — may — be a coda to all this Rights and Democracy foofaraw (see Inkless passim, ad nauseam). Actually it probably won’t be. About two hours after I filed this column, which rather daringly assumed the fight was going out of the new board majority’s opponents, I got word that the Globe was breaking the news of the Saturday burglary at Rights and Democracy. (This morning’s Citizen contains a tribute to former R&D president Rémy Beauregard, written before the new board chairman put a gag order on his staff.)

But this column is about the bigger picture, which is that a government with a minority in the House and a shaky command on public opinion is still the government. And if it is patient and aware of all the many ways it can exert influence, very few of which will even be noticed by the Parliament Hill hivemind, it can shift a society. Not by revolution, not even really by evolution, but essentially by erosion. Which is the way mountains generally move.

In trying to take the measure of this change, it is asinine to reduce conservatism, as some of my colleagues like to do, to the single question of budget balance, a test Ronald Reagan would have failed utterly. Chantal Hébert got closer to the truth when she wrote a very good line early in Harper’s first mandate, to the effect that whereas a lot of Canadians like to claim they are socially progressive and fiscally conservative, Harper’s government does things the other way around: It is fiscally profligate and socially conservative. What Chantal didn’t add, because it wasn’t yet clear, was that this stance, so at odds with what Hill lifers are used to, works for Harper and is just popular enough to keep him in office, which is all the popularity he needs.