— Ottawa lawyer Richard Mahoney
Actually, we did.
And now we have another example of Stephen Harper riding roughshod over due process at the expense of five talented people.
The man named as Canada’s new privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien, placed dead last in the competition for the job in the opinion of the selection committee that interviewed all six candidates.
He was considered by the panel to be a work-a-day deputy minister — competent, not brilliant.
Therrien was not even interviewed by the panel at the same time as the five other competitors — all of whom had direct experience as privacy advocates, while Therrien had none. His interview came two weeks after the others, and after the panel agreed that the top candidate was Lisa Campbell, a lawyer and rising star at the Competition Bureau.
On top of that, Therrien had zero experience in the private sector, a shortcoming the panel thought was vitally important. There were reservations about his language skills — was he fully bilingual?
In the end, Tony Clement chose Daniel Therrien because he was someone the prime minister would be “comfortable with.” He did interview Ms. Campbell, who thought the interview went well. The headhunting firm that had put her name forward was apparently “shocked” at the decision.
In addition to Campbell and Therrien, the selection panel interviewed Elizabeth Denham, British Columbia’s information and privacy commissioner, and Chantal Bernier, Canada’s interim privacy commissioner.
Treasury Board President Tony Clement received the panel’s recommendation from the short-list. It was Clement who supposedly interviewed two people for the job, including Therrien. But how did someone who placed last in the competition get on the shortlist, as the minister implies? Why did Clement interview and then recommend the Justice Department lawyer to Harper?
Tony Clement needs to say who made the shortlist and who else he interviewed. Given that the selection panel recommended Campbell, why was that recommendation disregarded? Why bother with a selection panel at all if you are going to ignore its recommendations?
Even masters of understatement in the mainstream media are beginning to add up the damage to the country inflicted by this PM. Chantal Hebert described the havoc Harper has visited on many Canadian institutions, including the CBC, as “self-destructive madness.”
How many times do we have to see this movie before people realize that Genghis Khan is indeed raising dust across the country? Interfering with the Nuclear Safety Commission, the Parliamentary Budget Office, Elections Canada — even the Supreme Court.
When the Harper government dumped the long-form census, Clement falsely declared that he had acted on the advice of Munir Sheikh, then chief statistician at Statistics Canada. Why should anyone take Gazebo Tony’s word for anything?
Sheikh himself paid with his job for not allowing Clement to lie about him publicly. Munir Shiekh never recommended abolishing the long-form census to his minister. The PMO saw abolishing the long form census as its ticket to a majority government. It was the PMO, not Clement, which gutted the long form census; Tony merely answered the dog-whistle back in 2009.
Disgracefully, the PCO threw Munir Sheikh to the Harper hordes, when it should have protected him. The Harper government wanted a public servant to legitimize a decision that was then, and remains, indefensible and unimaginably destructive. In Munir Sheikh, they just happened to run into a man with something they don’t understand: principles.
Too bad that in Harper’s Ottawa, the Clerk of the Privy Council has become almost exclusively the PM’s deputy minister, instead of the senior non-partisan official who enables the government to understand the conventions of a constitutional monarchy. Someone in the PCO should have told the PM he isn’t the Commander in Chief and had no business receiving the last flag from Afghanistan.
Like Munir Sheikh, the public service has been cut loose — just in time for the savage attacks coming its way over negotiating a new contract, and just in time for the next election.
Sadly, it would be hard to find a worse candidate for privacy commissioner than Daniel Therrien. As assistant deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, Therrien is a government man, not a defender of the people’s rights. He helped write some of the laws that have allowed authorities to whittle away at the privacy of Canadians. He gave legal advice to the spies and cops who want more and more access to our information without the bother of warrants and due process.
The Harper government has always preferred lapdogs to watchdogs. It has always valued obedience far more than intelligence and experience. With Michael Chong sitting in your caucus, who but a lapdog-lover would put Pierre Poilievre in charge of democratic reform?
With James Rajotte in your caucus, who but a lapdog-lover would make Peter Van Loan House leader?
If you can be dog-whistled by Master at any time, it seems you are fit for any job with Stephen Harper. Those who don’t come when called — people like Kevin Page, Marc Mayrand and Linda Keen — are not wanted on the voyage.
Daniel Therrien has had a long and successful career in Justice. The fault in this is not his. But that doesn’t change the fact that he has zero experience in the world of privacy advocacy. In fact, he has worked the other side of the canal on the privacy issue.
Think about that. Who in the real world gives out highly sophisticated, specialized and powerful positions to candidates with zero experience? How did a guy with zero experience come out ahead of people with direct working knowledge at a high level?
Not even the hopelessly glib Clement wanted to wade into those waters. That’s because the answer is unflattering to the Harper government. They don’t really want someone to safeguard the privacy of Canadians from government agencies. They want someone skilled at working with those very agencies, someone willing to turn the office of the Privacy Commissioner into just another Harper ally.
If Therrien actually takes the job, we will see if he allows that to happen. There’s precedent for hoping he might surprise; Michael Ferguson has certainly come through in spades as auditor general, though there were fundamental questions about whether he was qualified when Harper appointed him. Therrien says he will be independent, but he hasn’t mentioned anything about how he will resolve the many conflicts he will face in dealing with agencies he once assisted in a totally different cause.
In appointing a new privacy commissioner, Stephen Harper managed to diss Parliament yet again. The best practice in these matters is to seek unanimity in the choice, because this parliamentary officer has to work with all members of Parliament.
Instead, Harper used his Order-in-Council powers to the maximum, making zero effort at achieving all-party approval. As a result, Daniel Therrien will spend his first days in his new office with the Official Opposition roasting him on the spit of nasty committee appearances.
Genghis Khan was never much interested in democracy and neither is the PM. Stephen Harper is poisoning Canadian governance by politicizing the whole damn thing. As a result, five people better qualified than Daniel Therrien lost out.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
No comments:
Post a Comment