Documents tabled in the House of Commons earlier this week reveal that “letters addressed to Santa Claus” is listed among the hundreds of search terms Canada’s Privy Council is spending tax dollars to monitor – right between Leona Aglukkaq and the Liberal Party of Canada.
“These are new heights of paranoia,” scoffed NDP MP Mathieu Ravignat. “I don’t know what his government has got against Santa Claus.”
Raymond Rivet, spokesman for the Privy Council Office, says he does not know how Santa Claus got on the list, suggesting that it may have been added by the media monitoring company.
“How the term Santa Claus got in there, your guess is as good as mine but it certainly wasn’t by design.”
Rivet said the media monitoring companies cast as wide a net as possible in order to capture news about the federal government which is why the list also contains the names of many members of Parliament.
The revelation comes in the wake of a question Liberal MP John McCallum placed on the order paper in March, asking for a detailed list of search terms provided to media monitoring companies hired by each government department between April 2011 and March 2013.
The response, tabled in English and in French, spans 1,379 pages.
News that many of the people Harper’s government is monitoring are Conservative MPs fuelled opposition attacks in question period Thursday with questions about why the government was spending money to keep an eye on its own MPs.
However, Conservative MPs aren’t the only people the government is watching closely.
The Privy Council alone has two separate media monitoring companies, Mirems Ltd and Cision Canada, on the lookout for hundreds of search terms. The range of people being watched include government officials, deputy ministers, political aides, political opponents and even journalists.
While most of the MPs being monitored by the Privy Council are Conservatives, some of government’s political adversaries also made the cut like Bloc Québécois Leader Daniel Paillé, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
While former Liberal leadership candidate Deborah Coyne has yet to be elected as an MPC, she is included on the list as is the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.
The Privy Council is also monitoring references to several heads of Crown corporations and to top officials like Bank of Canada head Mark Carney, Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser, Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson and Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.
Heads of government agencies are also being monitored by the Privy Council including Myriam Mérette, head of the Canada Council for the Arts and Elaine Feldman who is retiring as head of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.
A handful of Conservative senators are included on the Privy Council’s list including Hugh Segal, Linda Frum, Marjorie Lebreton, Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, Patrick Brazeau and Josée Verner.
The list of search terms being monitored also provides a fascinating glimpse into the issues that figure high on the radar of the Privy Council, which answers directly to the prime minister.
Among the phrases it is keeping an eye on are honor crimes, identity theft, gangs, gun control, medical marijuana, money laundering, racism, refugees, bath salts, Iraq. Keystone XL pipeline, the Northern Gateway pipeline, Omar Khadr as well as both tar sands and oil sands.
While some search terms would be predictable, others are less so such as the instruction to monitor references to Travis Baumgartner, a former armored car guard who faces charges of first degree murder and attempted murder in connection with an armored car heist in Edmonton last year.
Why the Privy Council is monitoring phrases like “child rearing” and “CN Tower” is also not obvious.
While Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has distanced itself from the robocall scandal, the allegations of misleading phone calls in the last election designed to direct voters to the wrong polling station, Privy Council is monitoring all references to “robocall” and “robocalls.”
The Progressive Conservative Party may not exist any more on the federal level, but the Privy Council is monitoring references to it as well as any references to former Conservative Prime Minister Kim Campbell. Former Conservative Prime Minister’s Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark are not included in the list of Privy Council search terms.
Former Conservative MPs Gary Lunn, Inky Mark, Jay Hill, Jim Prentice and Sylvie Boucher are on the list as well as former PMO staffer Dimitri Soudas and his fiancé, Conservative MP Eve Adams.
Journalists Don Martin and Mercedes Stephenson of CTV are on the list of people the Privy Council is watching but not the CBC’s Evan Solomon.
The Privy Council is monitoring Grand Chief Shawn Atleo but Idle No More is not on its list.
Ravignat said media monitoring is supposed to be used to keep an eye on issues of concern to Canadians – not the government’s political opponents.
“This is about taxpayers money and it’s about the abuse of taxpayers money to monitor members of parliament in a highly partisan way.”
Ravignat said the NDP will likely call for an investigation into the government’s media monitoring by a parliamentary committee.
McCallum, who says he plans to raise the government’s media monitoring with the Government Operations committee, said he is most concerned about the names of dozens of Conservative MPs on the list.
With the money it is spending to monitor its own MPs, the government could hire 800 young Canadians.
“That’s a much better use of taxpayer’s money than spying on their own backbenchers.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Elizabeth Thompson
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