This month, two Conservative candidates, Jerry Bance and Tim Dutaud, were dismissed for inappropriate past behavior— Bance for peeing in the mug of a client of his repair business, and Dutaud for prank calls involving fake orgasms and imitating a mentally handicapped person. Since records of both candidates' actions were online before the election was called, many have questioned how the Conservative Party vets its people.MP Julian Fantino, the Associate Minister for National Defence, has so far escaped the same kind of exposure and resulting condemnation. But that may be about to change.
The "worst choice" for the Conservatives
The end of Julian Fantino’s career as minister of Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) began in a stuffy waiting room in the bowels of Parliament Hill’s Centre Block.
It was January 28, 2014, and nine veterans – mostly elderly and wearing their service medals – had trekked to Ottawa from across Canada to meet Fantino, hoping to persuade the minister to change his mind about closing eight VAC district offices.
But Fantino didn’t show up to the meeting. More than an hour after he was supposed to arrive, as the veterans sat waiting to meet the press, Fantino walked in. Attired in a charcoal-grey suit and looking ill-at-ease, things started off calmly enough. But when a Newfoundland veteran, Paul Davis, asked a skeptical question about services, Fantino got shirty with him.
“You know, this finger-pointing stuff doesn’t work really well with me,” he said.
“It don’t work well with us that you didn’t turn up at a meeting you were supposed to turn up to,” snapped a visibly agitated Davis. “Don’t tell us that something came up. You bushwhacked us.”
After less than eight minutes, Fantino headed for the door. The next day, as the video of his confrontation with Davis whipped around the media turnpike, he apologized. Nevertheless, two days later, the VAC offices were closed anyway.
Fantino’s PR catastrophes continued. That May, Jenny Migneault, the wife of former Canadian Forces sergeant Claude Ranville — who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – tried to talk to Fantino in a hallway as he was leaving a House of Commons committee meeting.
Fantino, who later said he didn’t see her, didn’t stop.
“Mr. Fantino, I’m just a vet’s spouse,” she shouted at his receding back, which was also caught on camera. “You’re forgetting us once more. We’re nothing to you.”
Veterans were angry because of government cuts. In the 2012 budget alone, $226-million was slated to be chopped from VAC, leading to offices being closed and hundreds of staff who handle veterans' health problems laid off.
They grew more outraged with Fantino after discovering three other facts: his ministry was spending an extra $4-million on TV ads touting services to veterans; he flew to Italy to lay a wreath just as an Auditor General’s critical report on his ministry was released; and the fact his ministry returned $1.1-billion in unspent money to the treasury (in order to help balance this year’s federal budget, it was believed).
Bruce Moncur is one of the nine veterans who tried to meet with Fantino in January, 2014, after his local VAC office in Windsor, Ont., was scheduled to be closed.
“[Fantino’s] approach was all wrong,” says Moncur. “He thought he could bully and negotiate the way he had with police forces… and that proved to be an unmitigated disaster... He was as effective as eating soup with a fork.”
By last winter, with calls for his resignation coming from all quarters, and having alienated a bloc that traditionally votes Tory, Harper demoted Fantino, shunting him into an obscure national defense position as associate minister.
Yet Fantino’s disastrous tenure as veteran affairs minister is just the latest in a long career of fiascoes as a public servant.
“He was, for the Harper government, one of the worst choices they could've made when they appointed him,” says Walter Callaghan, a Toronto-based veteran who spent nearly 10 years in the armed forces.
Fantino has demonstrated that he’s incompetent, vindictive, petty, mean-spirited, intolerant, bigoted towards gays and lesbians, aboriginal people and racial minorities.
Prior to becoming a politician, during his career as a police commander, he turned a blind eye to corruption festering within one of the police forces he managed, persecuted competent and talented police officers, ruined careers and found any excuse for a photo op if it would advance his image.
As the Tory candidate for the new riding of Vaughan-Woodbridge, Fantino is trying to win re-election in one of the most critical regions that will decide who becomes prime minister on October 19th – in the voter-rich suburbs that encircle Toronto. And yet, to enhance his chances of winning, Fantino is spending taxpayers’ monies in a thinly-veiled attempt at vote-buying.
“He just has contempt for anyone who is not in the $200,000 income bracket,” says Lawrence Hay, a former RCMP officer and Mohawk aboriginal band chief whom Fantino fired in 2007. “He's a survivor, you know…. He’s got very important friends, obviously, who are keeping him in his job. He's bulletproof.”
Checkered career as a cop
Before becoming a politician, Fantino was a cop for 40 years. Born in Italy, he emigrated to Canada as a boy. He joined the Toronto police force in the late ‘60s, serving in the drug, criminal intelligence and homicide squads before moving into command.
The Toronto police force has a long and bitter relationship with the city’s black community, largely due to its officers’ proclivity for shooting and harassing young black men.
Fantino first came to attention by throwing gasoline on this tense situation in 1989. As head of one of the force’s divisions, he released a report to a municipal committee saying that while blacks made up six per cent of the population of one of the city’s highest crime areas, they committed most of its robberies, muggings and drug offenses.
Fantino released this data despite the fact police in Ontario are forbidden to compile race-based crime statistics. Ontario’s solicitor general, Joan Smith, condemned Fantino for releasing information that “accomplishes nothing useful.” Black groups and social agencies castigated him for fueling prejudices.
In 1991, when he was superintendent in charge of the force’s detective services, Fantino ordered a lengthy spying operation – which included wiretaps – that targeted Susan Eng, the soon-to-be head of the city’s police oversight board (ostensibly over concerns that a lawyer friend of hers was associating with drug dealers). Eng, an Asian-Canadian lawyer, was a vocal critic of the police chief over issues such as use of force and racism. The Toronto police not only listened in on her conversations, but those of her friends and colleagues, even eavesdropping on Eng at restaurants.
When the wiretapping came to light in 2007, Fantino refused to answer reporter’s questions about it and then claimed he had not ordered such an operation.
Fantino’s next career stop was chief of police in London, Ont. Between 1993-’95, London police laid 371 criminal charges against 45 men, with Fantino and his department claiming they were busting up a child pornography ring. This sensational accusation led to the creation of Project Guardian, an Ontario-wide investigation into similar rings.
But soon journalists discovered no such child porn ring ever existed in London. Instead, what they found were gay men primarily having sex with other men, or sometimes teens, and often young hustlers. While some of this sex was filmed, the videos were never sold or distributed commercially. (Fantino once appeared at a press conference beside hundreds of tapes seized from one man – although a minority of the tapes were pornography, none involved children, and all had been approved for public sale by Ontario’s censors).
When a young journalist in London, Joseph Couture, helped produce a CBC Radio exposé about the non-existent child porn ring, he found himself being harassed by London police, who once surrounded his house with cruisers and dogs. Couture was forced to seek help from the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists, who complained to Fantino in 1995. Fantino was unrepentant.
After Fantino was appointed Toronto’s police chief, the outraged gay community demanded a meeting with him to discuss what happened in London. Five members of the community attended. “He came in like gangbusters and acted as if we were the bad guys,” recalls James Dubro, a highly-regarded author and gay activist. “He almost left the room at several times.” Dubro says Fantino was unapologetic about his London tenure.
Fantino’s appointment to Toronto’ police chief in 1999 surprised many because the Toronto mayor said he was not in the running. It was clear, though, he was the candidate favoured by the police union, the provincial Tories and the right-wing head of the civilian oversight board.
Yet Fantino was returning to a police force out of control, bullied into submission by a thuggish union and reeling from allegations of widespread corruption. Once again, Fantino dropped the ball.
Fantino sabotages corruption probe
By the time he was appointed chief, criminal lawyers had documented numerous complaints from drug dealers that some Toronto drug squad officers were stealing huge sums of money from them. Fantino had no choice but to act.
But an internal 2001 memo reveals that the department was determined to avoid a public inquiry over fears of receiving too much bad press – and suggested keeping the investigation in-house, which goes against all protocol for police corruption cases. The accepted practice is to have the investigation done by an outside police force.
Instead, Fantino appointed 26 of his own officers to a taskforce and asked the RCMP to put one of their commanders in charge – Chief Supt. John Neily. Early on, Fantino met with the taskforce and told them that they were engaged in “God’s work.”
The taskforce soon discovered that as many as 30 police officers might have engaged in thefts. But they ran into resistance from within the force, with commanders openly undermining the probe. And then Fantino began undermining it too.
For example, one night the taskforce was trying to interview a suspected dirty officer at an RCMP detachment. But then the officer’s union boss showed up and demanded to speak to Neily, telling Neily the interrogation must be terminated. When Neily refused, the union leader called Fantino and handed the phone to Neily. Fantino told Neily that he was not supporting him in this interrogation. The officer was let go.
Then, when Neily wanted forensic accountants brought in to examine the finances of some of the suspected dirty officers, Fantino refused. “I think [Fantino] lost his stomach for that investigation at that point or wanted it wound down,” says James Lowry, one of the taskforce detectives who now works as a lawyer in Manitoba. In the end, Neily went to the RCMP for the funds to complete the audits.
Lowry says that, at a certain point, they were instructed to only focus on the six most corrupt officers (five of whom were later convicted). But this meant that other suspect officers, in particular a second team also thought to be stealing huge sums from drug dealers, were not properly investigated.
Documents have since come to light in a court case which show that Fantino was informed about this second team. In 2002, Neily told Fantino on two occasions that “there is no doubt in my mind” that “there was a thief” on that team, citing two of the officers in question. But the investigation into this team was eventually dropped.
“Utterly ridiculous,” says Julian Falconer, a Toronto lawyer representing an alleged victim of this second team’s actions. “Offensive to standard principles of accountability. That’s not how we manage corruption in this country.”
Stonewalling on racial profiling
In 2002, the Toronto Star, after analyzing data collected from 480,000 incidents, published a series that exposed how “racial profiling” was being carried out by the Toronto police – meaning they were charging blacks more frequently and more severely for the same crimes committed by whites.
The data also showed the police were targeting black motorists far more often than whites, and were deploying the practice of “carding” – whereby police stop primarily black citizens not engaged in criminal activity and document their personal information.
Fantino immediately denied the allegations, saying “we do not do racial profiling … There is no racism… We do not look at nor do we consider race or ethnicity or any of that as factors of how we dispose of cases, or individuals, or how we treat individuals."
In 2003, a group of black Toronto police officers and commanders held a meeting where they agreed that racial profiling was indeed occurring because they themselves had been victims of it when not in uniform. They also said they experienced racism on the job. Fantino was made aware of their views, but did not revise or recant his statements on racial profiling.
It was Fantino’s successor, Bill Blair, who had been one of his deputies, who finally admitted racial profiling and bias by police was, in fact, a reality in Toronto.
Bullying at the OPP
Fantino’s insensitivity towards minorities would continue during his next major posting. In 2006, he was appointed Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
Yet the OPP had a poor relationship with the aboriginal community, especially after an OPP officer shot and killed an unarmed Native activist during an occupation of an Ontario provincial park in 1995.
In 2007, Mohawk activists began blockades over land issues. Shawn Brant, a Mohawk activist, led some of those protests. Fantino had Brant’s phone wiretapped and called him on three occasions to pressure him, saying at one point "your whole world’s going to come crashing down" if he didn’t end a blockade and Fantino would "do everything I can within your community and everywhere to destroy your reputation.”
Lawrence Hay was police chief for the Mohawk Tyendinaga First Nation in eastern Ontario at this time and adept at keeping aboriginal protests peaceful. Hay had been the band’s police chief for eight years, and an RCMP officer for almost 20 years previously.
Hay says that when Fantino took over, “the OPP became very aggressive towards [aboriginal] community members…There had been several incidents with OPP officers… where they were stirring the people up, no question about that.”
In April 2007, Hay was quoted in a student newspaper saying, “I realized just what a racist organization the RCMP was, and I came here to learn that the OPP and the (Sûreté du Québec) ... are no different. It's deep-seated racism.”
Due to these comments, Fantino managed to have Hay terminated as police chief without consulting the band – which he was legally obliged to do. “In my case he ignored process and ignored the law,” says Hay.
Yet Fantino’s contempt for principled police officers was further underlined in the case of Ken MacDonald and Alison Jevons.
In 2004, an OPP police sergeant took a baseball bat and beat the car of his estranged wife. The OPP officers responding to the complaint did not arrest him but instead asked her to leave the house.
The wife complained, and eventually the matter went to the OPP’s professional standards bureau, run by Supt. Ken MacDonald. He asked one of his sergeant majors, Alison Jevons, to look into the matter. In her report, Jevons found that the domestic violence policy was followed up until the point where the husband should have been arrested. Eventually, the OPP officer who’d led the investigation into the domestic dispute was reprimanded.
This did not sit well with the OPP’s union. An investigation agreed with the union’s position that MacDonald and Jevons did not follow proper procedure. In 2006, Fantino moved to charge MacDonald and Jevons with neglect of duty and deceit for their handling of the investigation. Evidence later emerged that Fantino had a personal vendetta against MacDonald.
The two OPP officers fought back, saying they were victims of a witchhunt orchestrated by Fantino and the union.
During the disciplinary hearing against MacDonald and Jevons in 2008, evidence showed that Fantino meddled in the investigation of the two officers. When Fantino changed his testimony on the stand, the adjudicator chastised him. Fantino retaliated by trying to have the adjudicator thrown off the case - a person he himself had appointed. When that failed, the charges against MacDonald and Jevons were abruptly dropped in 2009.
The whole process cost more than $500,000 in public money. The woman whose car was damaged praised MacDonald and Jevons for doing their job, saying they should have received commendations instead of being charged.
Hustling for costly F-35 fighter
In 2010, Fantino retired from the OPP and was quickly recruited by Stephen Harper to run in a by-election in the northern Toronto riding of Vaughan – an area with a large Italian population and a long-time Liberal stronghold.
One person who helped Fantino win was now-disgraced senator Mike Duffy. Duffy hosted a successful electronic town hall for Fantino that went out to 40,000 homes. Fantino won with fewer than 1,000 votes, although he refused to engage in any debates with his opponents or speak to the media.
This soon changed. In a CBC interview not long after he was elected, Fantino said the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been a friend of criminals.
"In some cases, the Charter has been exploited and the rulings that have followed have, in fact, benefited some criminals, absolutely," he said.
When he was criticized by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, he responded by saying Trudeau was "promoting the hug-a-thug philosophy.”
Harper quickly put Fantino in his cabinet, making him minister of state for seniors. Following the 2011 election, Harper appointed him the associate minister of National Defense where he became the point man for the controversial F-35 fighter jet.
By that time, the plan to buy 65 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighters was devolving into a mess. The Tories claimed the price tag would be $9-billion to purchase and $7-billion to maintain. Yet the contract was never put out to tender – even though Canadian law requires this must happen for major defense purchases.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated the fighter would actually cost nearly $30-billion over 30 years. The Auditor General said the Tories were lowballing the sum, too. One other estimate suggested the total cost could be as high as $126-billion.
Fantino, who was responsible for procurement, went on the offensive, ripping critics over the cost issue. At one point he claimed that the government effort to buy the fighters was a “holy” undertaking. In November 2011, he argued: “We will purchase the F-35. We’re on record. We’re part of the crusade. We’re not backing down.”
Peggy Mason, president of the Rideau Institute, an Ottawa-based advocacy group on defence matters, says Fantino was a big part of one of the Conservatives' biggest financial blunders.
“It's hard to overstate the Conservative’s mismanagement of procurement and among the procurement debacles, it’s hard to overstate the debacle of the F-35 fighter. So [Fantino] was there at a critical time.”
By early 2012, though, as evidence mounted that the fighter was going to be far more expensive than the Tories claimed, Fantino began backpedaling. Eventually, the purchase was shelved.
In the summer of 2012, Fantino was shuffled to be the Minister for International Co-operation. During his brief tenure there, Fantino shuttered the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the 45-year-old agency that gave billions in foreign aid. He also cut new aid to poverty-stricken Haiti.
Prior to CIDA’s dissolution, two partisan letters written by Fantino appeared on its website slamming the NDP and Liberals, with titles like "Dear NDP: CIDA does not need your economic advice." After media started questioning the propriety of partisan political letters on the site, the letters soon disappeared, with Fantino blaming bureaucrats, suggesting they posted them.
Disastrous tenure at Veterans Affairs
Given his long history of mistreatment and callousness towards the most vulnerable of society, it was surprising that Harper would put Fantino in charge of Veterans Affairs Canada in the summer of 2013.
By then, veterans had been struggling with the New Veterans Charter (NVC) passed by the Harper government, whereby wounded soldiers receive one-time lump sum payments instead of life-long pensions.
Meanwhile, health services for veterans were declining, with treatments for things such as PTSD and depression difficult to obtain.
“More Canadian troops died as a result of committing suicide than died in Afghanistan,” points out Windsor-based war veteran Bruce Moncur.
Moncur, who was struck with shrapnel to his head in 2006 while fighting in Afghanistan – and required two brain surgeries – spent nine years fighting VAC to get an adequate pension payment for his severe injuries.
Meanwhile, the Harper government paid $700,000 in legal fees to fight a lawsuit launched by veterans over the NVC. Harper had targeted the VAC for budget cuts, too.
By the time Fantino arrived as minister, the department was in trouble. Nine VAC district offices were on the chopping block. And in 2012, $226-million was slated to be cut from the ministry’s budget. But Fantino quickly claimed the changes would improve services and said the outcry over cuts was manufactured by public service unions.
“That's where you see this extraordinary combination of ineptness and mismanagement and callousness,” says Mason. “Just beyond belief. They shut these [VAC offices] when there were lots of internal reports saying this would put the delivery of services for veterans at risk.”
Long-time NDP veterans affairs critic Peter Stoffer says Fantino was “a very very good foot soldier for Mr. Harper. He and his department did exactly what they were told by the Privy Council and the Treasury Board and the PMO. He was told ‘You have to cut your department, you have to cut offices, and you have to return money’ and he did that very very well. The unfortunate part is, he did it on the backs of veterans.”
This spring, Postmedia News got hold of internal VAC memos showing that ministry officials felt Fantino’s public relations disasters had “intensified” what was already a glut of “bad press” which had “taken its toll” on the department’s reputation.
Vote-buying with taxpayers' funds?
This past June, the Globe and Mail ran a story saying a federal infrastructure fund aimed at fixing up arenas and community centres was being spent disproportionately in ridings represented by Conservative MPs prior to this fall’s election. Ridings that elected Tories in 2011 received, on average, 48 per cent more money from the $150-million Community Infrastructure Improvement Fund than ridings that elected opposition MPs, the Globe found.
The suggestion was that the Tories were engaging in old-fashioned vote-buying. And near the top of the list of MPs dolling out this cash was Julian Fantino. This July, he also handed out a $950,000 investment to a food company in his riding.
This time Fantino is facing stiff competition for his seat, especially from the Liberals, who have put up financial industry analyst Francesco Sorbara against him. “Fantino’s track record is simple,” says Sorbara. “He has a track record of being shuffled out of portfolios. That is his track record.”
Sorbara says the only time he met Fantino was at a recent event when Heritage Minister Shelly Glover came through the riding. “[Glover] was very very kind to me and congratulated me on becoming the candidate and winning the nomination,” recalls Sorbara. “[Fantino] would not look at me, he would not address me... And we were standing right beside each other!”
For the Harper government, holding on to this riding is critical to its fortunes – although they're depending on a candidate whose propensity for alienating people has now reached legendary proportions.
A call by the Observer to Fantino's campaign office seeking comment was not returned.
Original Article
Source: nationalobserver.com/
Author: Bruce Livesey
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