Well, obviously changes can be made as the document goes through the revision process. Here’s a link that includes a statement from the office of the Auditor General.
There must be something in this report, but it sounds doubtful that it will be officially released prior to the election.
Has John Baird seen any other draft of the report? If so, how, legally? Has he seen the final draft of the report? Perhaps the conservatives would like us to believe that Sheila Fraser is biased, brain-washed by the left wing media.
It seems much more likely that John Baird is trying to ‘mislead’ until after the election. It’s okay - lots of good people have had their names cleared after the election is over. Ralph Goodale is a prime example. If he ever got the front page 20-point type apology he deserved, I seem to have missed it.
I don’t believe Sheila Fraser is able to release the final report until Parliament is sitting again. So, after the election.
I see the official spin from Baird now is that the money that was not spent on anything to do with the G8 summit was simply a gift to the region "to thank the greater region of Muskoka for hosting the summit.”
Nothing to see here. Just gift giving to the nice folks from Muskoka.
Curiously, Baird did not seem to explain why this “gift” money actually came from supplementary spending estimates that requested $83-million for a Border Infrastructure Fund aimed at reducing congestion at border crossings.
And now, this:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/story/2011/04/11/cv-election-weston-ag-fraser.html
Nor does it explain why the conservatives gave city of Toronto the steam off their piss, despite hosting the G20 and suffering the worst of the vandalism and police excesses.
It’s actually worse than a simple mis-quote.
The report quoted the auditor general as saying: “We found that the processes and controls around that were very good, and that the monies were spent as they were intended to be spent.”
In actual fact, this quote of Fraser’s had nothing whatsoever to do with the recent G-8 summit; it was from an interview she gave with CBC News on security spending by a** previous Liberal government** after the 9/11 terrorist attacks** a decade ago.**
That’s gotta be really embarrassing; when the best quotation you can come up with from the Auditor General is from the previous Liberal government and you’re desperate enough to use it anyway.
The current conservative party has clearly learned everything they know about ethics from Brian Mulroney.
Which is slightly terrifying, when you take into the account today of Mulroney implying (or someone choosing to infer, at least) that he’s not too pleased with the current conservative party!
Seriously, it’s not alleged conservative principles that worry me (even the social conservatism, as backwards as I think a lot of it is). It’s this party, these people - it just all feels like a power grab, with lies, denial, cover-ups. Sure it’s happened before and it will happen again, but that’s no reason we need to tolerate these people any longer. I want my government to at least pretend they’re doing the right thing, you know?
At least they are being honest, and admitting that they are rewarding support with tax money:
Paiken’s TVO interview of Mulroney: Brian Mulroney: Past and Present - YouTube
Mulroney says who he will vote for at 20:23. I think the Star is trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, for throughout the interview, it is obvious that Mulroney is taking the long view of a senior statesman, as opposed to the view of someone running for election.
Canada was already in defiance of the Protocol before the Conservatives took power; we essentially ignored our commitments starting the day after we signed.
According to the Protocol there was supposed to be demonstrable progress by 2005. There was effectively none; Canada in particular did nothing, and overall carbon emissions were soaring.
I’m not saying the Conservatives don’t have a bad reputation in this regard but dude, Kyoto was as dead as dogshit before they took over. The idea was nice but it quite obviously was stillborn.
The Conservatives are happily digging their electoral grave on other issues, but this one seems to me to miss a greater point. Indeed, whereas there are legitimate criticism of their honesty, with regards to Kyoto they’re refreshingly honest; the protocol was a sad joke and a complete failure.
We’re talking Brian Mulruney here? He’s probably just upset that he has little-to-no pull with the Conservative party on account of him being a crook.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the most you can tell about someone is not on the account of what they say makes sense but rather that they are being honest. Like, you know he`s a racist and bigot but at least he is being honest.
And today`s article headline in Globe and Mail has got to be one of the most surreal in recent memory - Five years later, Tories see their ethical advantage slip away
They never had any ethical advantage to speak of and, it did not “slip away”, it stormed off in a fury.
Er… in the context of wha the Globe article is talking about, elections, obviously the Conservatives had an enormous edge on the Liberals in the 2006 campaign, when the Liberals were drowning in scandal and the Conservatives had been out of power for so long there was nothing about them to be scandalized about. How is that not an edge?
Not to mention that this particular variant of the Conservative Party had never been in power, and were starting with a clean slate.
It is not in a sense that in order to be comparable at a point in time (5 years ago) both sides should have a demonstrable record of governing where one record of governing shows to be ethically better than the other at the same job. Since Conservatives as such did not have experience to speak of there was no ethical advantage to speak of. They had, at best, potential to be better. As demonstrated (5 years later) they suck big time.
Or, as John Tory on his radio talk show yesterday called – and Im paraphrasing - thats what always happens with a ruling party (my point he is only saying that now that Conservatives blew it).
Well, that slate while “clean” was quite ugly. Now it’s deep in the mud.
Absolutely, it seems part of the Canadian political experience that the party in power grows more corrupt in time - Libs, Cons both do this. When corrupt enough, the public gets pissed off enough to turf the bums out and elect the other set.
The question is - why, according to the polls, is this not happening now?
To the point - so far the Libs have run a tight campaign, whereas the Cons have not - they have lots of scandals to explain, their attack ads suck balls, and Harper as usual exudes negative charisma (remember last time, when they tried making him look human by putting him in a sweater? 
).
Yeah, all this is true … and still they are not dented in the polls. Even with all the crap pulled by the Cons, with an unsympathetic PM making shitty attack ads, overall people don’t want the Libs in power.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/305586
Why is that?
I put it down to the notion that, overall, Canadians feel that while they do not love their government one bit, they love the alternative even less. Harper may be an autocratic bastard, but at least he appears to be in charge - Canadians seem to like that in a leader (after all, they liked Trudeau, who was every bit as much an autocratic bastard - albeit one with charisma too). With Iggy, you get the sense he’s been imported for his resume. He’s not a career politico (all the better for him personally, but still). The impression is that he’s just a mouthpiece.
Combine that with the economic thing. Canucks are taxed to the limit already - or at least, feel like they are, which amounts to the same thing politically speaking. We came out of the recession in okay shape overall (the Cons may take credit for that, but much of it is surely owed to the previous Libs) but shaky on our pins … the last thing Canadians overall want is an orgy of public spending (which is why the recent Con frolic of pork-barrelling hurts 'em - albeit pretty minor). The feeling is that a Lib gov’t, particularly a Lib gov’t beholden to the NDP and the Block (whether in actual coallition with 'em or not), will spend like a drunken sailor on his last night in a Manilla brothel before the Japanese invasion …
In short, Canucks will but up with (albeit not love) a tight-fisted autocratic bastard, and perhaps even love a free-spending autocratic bastard who also has some sort of claim to charisma and political vision (who can convince 'em that they are opening their wallets for some sort of social purpose), like Trudeau. They will not vote en mass for a guy they think is a mouthpiece who promises free spending but doesn’t appear to have a real grip on his own party, much less one probably beholden to two other parties, one of which is socialist to a degree most find unreasonable and the other of which wants to break up the country.
Nah. They’re not deep in the mud, and the latest polls will tell you that.
The Liberals and the left-biased media are throwing anything and everything at the wall right now and trying to get something to stick: very little has.