Lobbyist arranged Parliamentary Restaurant lunch meeting between Tweed and Omnitrax executive

PARLIAMENT HILL—A registered lobbyist arranged a Parliamentary Restaurant lunch meeting between now former Manitoba Conservative MP Merv Tweed and the head of Omnitrax Canada Inc., which owns the Port of Churchill in northern Manitoba, seven months before the Omnitrax executive left his post and was succeeded in the job by Mr. Tweed.

But Ominitrax lobbyist Leo Duguay, a former Progressive Conservative MP in the 1980s, said he did not arrange the meeting with any thought of Mr. Tweed eventually obtaining the post vacated in June by former Omnitrax president Brad Chase, and told The Hill Times in an interview Tuesday he was not even aware at the time that Mr. Chase would soon leave the job he had taken only a year earlier.

Mr. Tweed’s announcement on Aug. 12 that he was stepping down as MP for the Manitoba electoral district of Brandon-Souris became controversial because he and Omnitrax announced on the same day that he would be named Canadian president of the Denver-based rail company, but that he would stay on as an MP until Aug. 31.

Critics also said the fact that under existing Conflict of Interest Act provisions, Mr. Tweed, a backbench MP without the stringent post-employment rules that prohibit lobbying activities by Cabinet ministers or parliamentary secretaries when they leave government, would be able to lobby on behalf of Omnitrax as soon as he took up his new post.

Published news reports on the day of Mr. Tweed’s resignation announcement noted that Mr. Duguay reported Mr. Tweed as a participant in Mr. Duguay’s lobbying activities on Nov. 21, 2012, when Mr. Tweed was chair of the House of Commons Agriculture Committee. Mr. Tweed had been chair of the Commons Transport Committee from 2006 until September 2012, when he switched to become chair of the House Agriculture Committee.

Both committees have been involved in issues and government measures affecting Omnitrax and the Port of Churchill, including a $25-million federal program the Conservative government established in 2011 to subsidize grain shipments through the port and another program that provides $4.1-million a year through Transport Canada for the Port of Churchill maintenance.

Mr. Duguay, a former chief of staff to Joe Clark back when he was foreign affairs minister in the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, said he arranged the Nov. 21, 2012, lunch with Mr. Tweed and Mr. Chase, and that neither Mr. Chase nor Mr. Tweed requested the appointment.

“Let me tell you what that was about, Brad Chase was appointed president, the new Canadian president of Omnitrax, sometime in the summer of 2012,” Mr. Duguay told The Hill Times.

“I said to the president of Omnitrax, ‘It would be a good idea for you to meet Merv Tweed, because he’s been chair of the Transport Committee, chair of the Agriculture committee,’ ” Mr. Duguay said.

“I said to him, ‘You should meet Merv Tweed because he is one of the Manitoba MPs who is most interested in those issues, has been working on them for a long time, because he was chair of the Transport Committee, knows the file, and we should meet him.’ So I called Merv Tweed’s office and set up a meeting and we met for lunch to discuss a whole range of issues relating to Churchill, the Wheat Board, and grain shipments and the future of the port,” Mr. Duguay said.

Mr. Duguay said there was no discussion about Mr. Tweed replacing Mr. Chase at OmniTRAX until in July, 2013, after Mr. Chase had decided to leave OmniTRAX to join the Bison transportation company as part of Winnipeg-based Klysen Group LP.

“It was really Brad wanting to meet him and to talk about some issues,” said Mr. Duguay. “The really fascinating thing, I don’t think anybody at that time knew that Brad was going to resign in the summer of 2013.”

A Denver consultant whom Mr. Duguay said would speak on behalf of Omnitrax about the timing of Mr. Tweed’s hiring did not return a telephone call from The Hill Times. Mr. Tweed did not return a call to his number at the Omnitrax office in Winnipeg.

Mr. Duguay said Omnitrax did not ask him for references about potential replacements for Mr. Chase until after Mr. Chase decided in June 2013, that he was going to leave the firm.

“Brad Chase and I did not discuss his leaving until after he left and told me he left,” Mr. Duguay said.

“He called me and said, ‘I want you to know that I’m going to be leaving the company on such and such a date,’” Mr. Duguay told The Hill Times.

 “No discussion was ever held about Merv Tweed taking that job until after Brad Chase had left; none that I know of, none that I was ever a part of, and none that I was ever had with Merv or anyone else,” Mr. Duguay said.

Mr. Tweed was one of a number of backbench Conservative MPs who announced they would not run in the next federal election as Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) overhauled his Cabinet in July.

A Conservative insider told The Hill Times that Mr. Tweed, a former Manitoba provincial Cabinet minister and an unsuccessful candidate for the position of Commons Speaker in 2011, had known for some time he was unlikely to make it into Cabinet.

Former public safety minister Vic Toews, a former Manitoba attorney general who had represented the Provencher riding since 2000 and had been in Mr. Harper’s Cabinet since the Conservatives formed government in 2006, resigned unexpectedly on the eve of the shuffle.

Mr. Harper promoted Conservative MP Shelley Glover (Saint Boniface, Man.) to become the senior member of Cabinet for Manitoba as Canadian Heritage minister, and Conservative MP Candice Bergen (Portage-Lisgar, Man.) took over the other Manitoba Cabinet spot as minister of state for social development.

Brandon-Souris is one of four ridings where Mr. Harper could call byelections as early as Oct. 21. The other three are Mr. Toew’s former riding of Provencher; Toronto Centre, previously held by former interim Liberal leader Bob Rae; and the Montreal riding of Bourass, left vacant when former Liberal MP Denis Coderre resigned to contest the mayor’s position in Montreal city elections later this year.

Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: Tim Naumetz