Porter, who at one point served as chairman of Canada's spy watchdog, also provides details on the inner workings of the Security Intelligence Review Committee that is entrusted with the country's most sensitive surveillance secrets.
Porter, 58, has been languishing in a Panamanian prison since the end of May 2013, fighting extradition to Quebec to face criminal charges alleging he was part of a conspiracy to defraud $22.5 million from the McGill University Health Centre he once headed over the awarding of a superhospital construction contract. These are some of the startling claims in the 240-page book, The Man Behind the Bow Tie: Arthur Porter On Business, Politics And Intrigue:
Porter says Harper urged him in 2009 to discretely lobby African and Caribbean nations in what proved to be an unsuccessful campaign the following year to win Canada a coveted seat on the United Nations Security Council. He blames Harper for the UN failure, saying the prime minister "faltered ... in the international arena."
Porter's relationship with Couillard, who was Quebec's health minister at the time, appears to be far more extensive than previously thought. Not only did Couillard and Porter go on fishing trips when Porter served as chief executive officer of the MUHC, he says, but Porter claims that Couillard phoned him every day for political advice. "Indeed, there was a period when Couillard called me every day, asking what I thought about this issue or that decision. He craved approval, I realized."
On April 1, 2010, the day of the MUHC superhospital's groundbreaking, then-premier Jean Charest initially refused to attend the ceremony as "word had spread that the remnants of the Front de libération du Québec ... were planning on crashing the party." Porter credits himself with driving down to Charest's Montreal office to pressure the premier to eventually show up at the event.
There are other outrageous political claims, including a phone conversation that Porter says he had with Al-Saadi Gaddafi, in which he urged the son of the late Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, to break away from his father during an uprising in that country following the Arab Spring of 2010. That conversation was made at the behest of a former SNC-Lavalin executive, Riadh Ben Aissa, who is also accused of conspiring to defraud the MUHC.
And Porter — who was appointed CEO of the Detroit Medical Centre in 1999 and was a registered Republican — says that when he turned down a job offer to become the next Surgeon General of the United States, newly-elected President George W. Bush phoned him in 2001 to reconsider. Is that your "final answer?" Bush is quoted as asking Porter in an allusion to the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Written in a tone that is equal parts boastful and self-pitying, Porter — who obtained his medical degree at Cambridge University in England — chronicles his rapid rise as medical resident at the Cross Cancer Institute at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1987 to the University of Western Ontario as chief radiation oncologist a year later, onto the Detroit Medical Centre three years later and finally the MUHC, where he ran the hospital network from 2004 until his abrupt resignation in December 2011. Along the way, Porter was keen to cultivate political contacts and make himself "indispensable," contributing financially to both the Republicans and then the Conservative Party of Canada.
Porter recalls first meeting Harper at a Conservative cocktail party in Ottawa within a year of being hired by the MUHC. He describes the prime minister who would later appoint him to the Security Intelligence Review Committee and the Privy Council as "not a man of many words. Harper resembled an accountant or economist, which I suppose he was, rather than the archetypal leader of a nation."
In contrast, Porter writes of Justin Trudeau, the federal Liberal leader, as having charisma and a "good shot at regaining the country's leadership."
Porter also discovered how to connect with Harper, realizing that "the way to Harper's heart was through his party. In my view, he put party first, country second."
Jason MacDonald, Harper's director of communications, said in a statement emailed to The Gazette that "the prime minister has no personal relationship with Mr. Porter, nor has he had any private conversations with Mr. Porter, including on the subjects he claims they spoke about. The assertions Mr. Porter makes from his prison cell in Panama are simply not accurate."
Philippe Couillard's press aide, Harold Fortin, had this to say about Porter's claims: "For the past 2 years, Premier Couillard has been answering the same questions about Mr Porter. He said a long time ago that they were friends at the time. The only fishing trip they had together was in New Brunswick after they received an official invitation from New Brunswick government. Mr Porter was offered hospitality once by Mr Couillard when they came back from that fishing trip. As for Anticosti, Mr Couillard never went there is his life."
While he served on SIRC, Porter notes that he carried an "imploding" briefcase that could destroy the documents inside it. He makes the shocking claim of an incident in which a "handful" of Canadian agents abroad were "tortured and hanged" in an undisclosed country, and that "we had to keep the truth of how they died from their families, telling them that they fell off a balcony in Dubai, for example."
What's more, Porter is highly critical of the Canadian government's handling of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who, at the age of 15, was captured by American forces in Afghanistan and who was held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 10 years without charge.
Turning to political affairs in Quebec, Porter says he developed a "very close personal relationship" with Couillard while he was in charge of the health portfolio under Charest. He recalls at first lunching a couple of times a week with Couillard, then spending dinner with him and his wife at his apartment in Quebec City one night and even sleeping over.
The friendship continued, Porter asserts, with the two of them going on fishing trips, with Porter sitting "in the back of a government vehicle." Another time, Porter remembered that he and Couillard "travelled via helicopter to Anticosti Island ... to a rather exclusive salmon fishing retreat in the Gulf of St. Lawrence." Porter does not make clear in the book whether the helicopter ride was private or government-operated.
Porter's assessment of Couillard is more generous than that of Harper: "Despite his faults, I thought he was a very smart man and would make a good premier. He understood Quebec and Canada, and he had a good grasp of international issues, too."
All of these claims about Harper, Porter and other political leaders are being made by a man whom one police detective has described as being accused of the "biggest corruption fraud in the history of Canada." They are also being made by a man who has not included any supporting documentation in the book to back up any of those claims.
To suggest this might be Porter's revenge, written while stewing in a squalid prison cell and fighting what he says is lung cancer that has spread to his bones, might not be a stretch.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: AARON DERFEL
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