This one’s a dead skunk in the middle of the road — or maybe a dead flounder on the Highway of Hypocrites. Here’s the bare-bones version:
A Jewish community centre in Markham applied for a federal grant from the federal Department of Human Resources to pay for an expansion to its facilities under the Enabling Accessibility Fund. Totally cool.
Public Works Minister Diane Finley’s department received 355 such applications, which her bureaucrats reduced to just 25. The cut-off to make that shortlist was 82 out of a possible 100 points. The top 25 applications were then sent out for external evaluation. Out of that number, just four were ultimately approved for funding.
Since the application at the centre of this scandal scored a lowly 52 out of 100 points, it didn’t make the short list and didn’t qualify to be sent out for external evaluation. At least, it didn’t qualify until the minister personally intervened and overruled her professional staff. Another victory for putrefied politics over sound public policy.
Finley’s extraordinary intervention — which involved multiple violations of the Conflict of Interest Act, according to Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson — was entirely about politics. The application was submitted by Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn of the Canadian Federation of Chabad Lubavitch, a group dedicated to the world-wide Hasidic outreach program.
Rabbi Mendelsohn is a crony of the Conservative Party of Canada and the Harper government. He is an adviser to the PMO on Jewish cultural protocol, travelled with the Harper delegation that visited Israel in 2014 and accompanied then-foreign minister John Baird on his 2012 trip to the same country. Baird referred to Rabbi Mendelsohn as a “dear friend.”
Despite the fact that public servants in the department of Human Resources disqualified the Mendelsohn application on its merits, a crew of Conservative political heavies revived it. Baird, Peter Kent, Nigel Wright and others in the PMO either advised, strong-armed or lobbied Finley into reconsidering the project. Wright told Dawson that he had advised Finley that the matter had to be considered “carefully and fairly.”
What on earth was the PM’s then chief-of-staff talking about? Considering the matter “carefully and fairly” is exactly what Finley’s professional staff had done, according to the criteria of the program they were running. Or was the man the PM claims he fired for making an unethical deal with suspended senator Mike Duffy suggesting that staff at Human Resources were incompetent, biased or unjust?
If so, he should say it. The probability is that Wright was merely being political. At any rate, Finley got the message from the PMO and her cabinet colleagues. Using her ministerial discretion to overrule the decision made by her own staff based on the facts, the minister ordered that the Mendelsohn application be sent out for “independent” evaluation. This was neither being careful or fair. This was judge-shopping.
But the outside evaluator gave the minister a new migraine. He scored the project 51 out of 80, or just 67 per cent — 15 percent below the departmental threshold for turning the project over to outside evaluation. He also warned that he had reservations about funding the project. Despite an evidence-based shortage of enthusiasm in the department for the Chabad application, Finley personally decided to award the group more than a million dollars of public money.
Dawson found that the rabbi’s application “clearly received preferential treatment.”
Finley is lucky that Dawson isn’t Kevin Page, the former Parliamentary Budget Officer who made his reputation through calling a spade a spade. Dawson could have — and should have — found that Finley was in violation of Section 7 of the Conflict of Interest Act. That section prohibits public office holders “when exercising an official power, duty or function, from giving preferential treatment to a person or organization based on the identity of someone representing that person or organization.” The section Finley was found to have violated — subsection 6(1) — only bars officials from making decisions that “they know, or reasonably should know, would place them in a conflict of interest.”
In the end, Finley’s professional staff at Human Resources and the outside assessor saw their honest judgements vindicated. The Chabad project flopped and the lion’s share of the funding was withdrawn. In the end, the minister’s unethical intervention cost Canadian taxpayers $50,000. Fifty grand to a dutiful friend with a bad idea.
All of which amounts to corruption, plain and simple. What’s far worse is the fact that Stephen Harper, despite his factitious bloviating about values and integrity, endorsed the actions of a minister found to have acted in an unethical manner. The PM’s office said that Finley had “acted within her discretionary powers and in good faith …”
In other words, Mary Dawson, the watchdog with no canines, can go to hell.
An isolated example of Harper experiencing an ethical meltdown? If only. In 2012, his Industry minister, Christian Paradis, was found guilty by the same Mary Dawson of breaking the government’s own ethics standards. Paradis was found to have given preferential treatment to Rahim Jaffer by telling his departmental staff to meet with the former CPC MP about his company Green Power Generation. Before the ink had dried on Dawson’s finding against Paradis, Harper was dismissing the ethics commissioner’s finding as meaningless. He told reporters in Bangkok that Paradis didn’t act with “ill intention of any kind,” and “did no harm.” Again, go to hell Mary Dawson.
Stephen Harper rode into power on a tide of popular revulsion against Liberal corruption in the ad sponsorship scandal. He took office on the promise of accountability and transparency, but delivered neither. The new sheriff failed miserably to clean up Dodge.
Instead, after nearly ten years in power, he has a clothesline buckling under the weight of his own dirty laundry — stretching all the way from the In-and-Out scandal of 2006 to Dawson’s report on Finley.
Now we’re being told by suspended Conservative senator Patrick Brazeau that Finley pulled funding from a community centre because the NDP won the riding in which it was located. Brazeau alleged that he met Finley — then the Social Development minister — and Nigel Wright, then the PM’s chief-of-staff, about the pulled funding.
As long as Stephen Harper enjoys his majority, he can do whatever he wants. But the PM is facing a judgement day of his own. Conservatives didn’t drop five-dollar bills into Kentucky Fried Chicken barrels in basements in Calgary to finance born-again corruption.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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