Tories throw ministerial responsibility under robo-call bus

Michael Sona is living every political aide’s worst nightmare. The 23-year-old Tory resigned last week in the growing shadow of the Conservative robo-call controversy. His name is now forever affixed to the fallout.

Adam Carroll will meet a similar fate. The recently resigned Liberal staffer published details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’s divorce on Twitter under the handle Vikileaks30. Thanks for the memories.

Every staffer lives in the shadow of self-immolation. Every tweet, every joke, every Facebook message invites the prospect of personal catastrophe. If you screw up, the error is permanent, carved into stone by Google, Twitter, and 24-hour news.

Dire consequences deter indiscretion. Even the most bull-headed staffers would rather ask permission than forgiveness – as Mr. Carroll now knows, the latter often ends in revising your résumé.

Former Tory staffer urges ‘guilty party’ to take blame in robo-call controversy

A key Conservative campaign worker in Guelph in the last election is calling on the “guilty party” to step forward and acknowledge his or her role in the ongoing robo-call controversy.

Emerging from a week-long silence, former Conservative staffer Michael Sona is denying any involvement in the automated phone calls that directed voters in the Ontario riding of Guelph to the wrong polling station last year. Mr. Sona was the director of communications to candidate Marty Burke during the election campaign.

He resigned last week from his position in the office of Conservative MP Eve Adams, but he said he did so only because the controversy prevented him from doing his job.

“I have remained silent to this point with the hope that the real guilty party would be apprehended. The rumours continue to swirl, and media are now involving my family, so I feel that it is imperative that I respond,” Mr. Sona said in a statement to CTV News.

'Made in Canada' is hard to find

The  words 'Made in Canada' on products are hard to find  these days, not impossible, but hard.

Call me a nationalist, but I try to employ my neighbours when exercising my purchasing power.  My husband and I finally took the plunge recently and bought a couch at Barrymore to last us until our 50th wedding anniversary.  The best part about it was that it’s manufactured not 10 km from my home. Even the men who delivered the sofa work for the company and treated that couch with the respect it deserved.

Curtains for the master bedroom are next on my list, but replicating the couch purchase for ready-made-drapes is proving impossible. I can find cosmetics, toiletries and local fashion such as Cake and Fresh Collective - but it’s difficult finding home décor products made on this side of the Pacific.

 If I could sew, life would be dandy, but the last time I made curtains, an elderly neighbour examined them and exclaimed, “Dear, they’re beautiful! Here, let me take them home and fix them.” And she did. They still hang in my daughter’s bedroom.

Allegations of fraud, sleaze a turnoff to voters

OTTAWA—Pierre Poutine from Separatist Street?

Why not toss a disposable cellphone registered to this fictional character into the toxic mess playing into the nation’s capital?

It played perfectly into the tenor of debate over the past couple of days, climaxed by a Tuesday Question Period dust-up over alleged election fraud in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper merely parried allegations of sleaze from the opposition benches by tossing their sleaze back at them.

It’s quite an appealing picture — previously anonymous Twitter details of a cabinet minister’s divorce, robo-calls by the NDP aimed at an MP who defected to the Liberals and sanctimonious stonewalling on the government side.

There may have been orchestrated vote suppression last spring, but there’s a lot of vote suppression going on here every day.

This country already has a problem with voter engagement, fuelled by an overriding view among many Canadians that their votes don’t count, that all politicians are the same, that they all play dirty.

Mayor Rob Ford’s subway dream for Sheppard could be dead March 15

City council will gather ahead of schedule, on March 15, to decide what kind of transit the city wants built on Sheppard Ave. E.

The meeting, originally slated for March 21, is expected to spell the end of Mayor Rob Ford’s move to extend the Sheppard subway.

The city gave notice Tuesday that the meeting would happen during March Break to avoid conflicts with other meetings.

It is expected the panel charged with recommending the best transit for Sheppard will advocate light rail on the road, rather than the subway extension Ford promised in the election.

“It’s the vote the province has been waiting for,” said TTC chair Karen Stintz.

Council’s endorsement of a Sheppard plan is among the signals Premier Dalton McGuinty says the province needs to move ahead on spending $8.4 billion for Toronto transit.

ORNGE fiasco could hurt Ontario’s ability to cut deficit: Former deputy health minister

The ORNGE fiasco represents a “colossal failure” of governance and accountability and is hobbling the province in its ability to cut the deficit, a former deputy health minister says.

Michael Decter, who served as deputy in the former Bob Rae government and continues to be a leading Canadian expert on health systems, told an audience of senior health officials Tuesday that the scandal at Ontario’s air ambulance service is making it difficult for the province to ask the health sector to cough up millions in savings.

“In my view it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the sector,” Decter said, noting that Don Drummond’s recommendations on paying down the $16 billion deficit were released earlier this month, just two months after the Star first broke the story about improprieties at ORNGE.

The different players in the sector can be adversarial, Decter said, referring to the fact that hospitals, doctors, community agencies and others often compete for funding and authority.

While they have been known to put their differences aside and work for the common good during tough times in the past, this time it’s different, he told about 300 people at a Breakfast with the Chiefs event at St. Michael’s Hospital, a speakers’ series organized by Longwoods Publishing.

Some ORNGE helicopters unable to enter U.S. airspace

Some ORNGE helicopters are forbidden from entering U.S. airspace and must land at the border and use land ambulances to cross to American cities.

A leaked government memo, initially obtained by the Progressive Conservatives, shows ORNGE is awaiting FAA approval.

The letter, dated Monday, says there is a delay in receiving necessary U.S. Federal Aviation Administration approval for ORNGE chopper flights across the border. Ontario funds the scandal-plagued ORNGE $150 million a year to provide air ambulance service.

“ORNGE helicopters based out of Toronto, London, Ottawa and Sudbury are not able to fly into the U.S. at this time,” according to a statement released by ORNGE.

A spokesperson for Health Minister Deb Matthews said the issue relates to ORNGE’s new AgustaWestland helicopters, and not its older fleet of Sikorsky helicopters, which have approval for cross-border flights.

Only one patient in the last fiscal year has had to be transported by helicopter in the U.S., said ORNGE spokeswoman Jennifer Tracey.

Compared to robo-scandal Vikileaks is a prank

Ottawa’s Vikileaks and robo-call affairs are being treated as equivalents. They are not.

The robo-call affair involves allegations of electoral fraud. If, as suggested by Liberals and New Democrats, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives deliberately misrepresented themselves to voters before last May’s election, it is a serious police matter.

The Vikileaks affair, in which a Liberal staffer released on the Internet publicly available details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ messy divorce, was at worst in bad taste.

At best, it was an example of brilliant — if nasty — guerrilla theatre.

The robo-call allegations are twofold. One is that political operatives in some ridings (most notably Guelph) used live or automated telephone calls to direct voters unlikely to support their party to non-existent polling stations.

In some cases the callers fraudulently identified themselves as officials of Elections Canada, the non-partisan body that oversees voting.

Dirty tricks against Cotler trigger misconduct probe for Tory pollster

The market research industry's watchdog is launching a full-blown investigation into a Conservative pollster involved in an alleged misinformation campaign against Liberal MP Irwin Cotler.

Brendan Wycks, executive director of The Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, said Tuesday the watchdog has received seven formal complaints of professional misconduct against Campaign Research Inc.

Campaign Research was behind a phone campaign last fall in Mr. Cotler's Montreal riding, in which constitutents complained they were falsely told their MP was about to or had resigned and that a by-election was imminent.

The company was given time to resolve the matter to complainants' satisfaction but was unable to do so.

As a result, the voluntary, self-regulatory MRIA is now striking a three-member complaints panel to investigate the matter more thoroughly. If Campaign Research is found to have violated the association's code of conduct, the company could face sanctions, ranging from a public reprimand to suspension or even expulsion from the MRIA.

Harper Conquers Canada, One Robocall at a Time

The widening "robocall scandal" is deeply disturbing -- as is its media coverage.

The language we use to describe a situation, the words that a journalist uses in their coverage of an issue, literally frame the issue and how we think about it.

This isn't a story about "dirty tricks," it's about election fraud. This isn't "stupid," it's illegal. This isn't "folly," it was a deliberate, systematic, strategic, targeted campaign to steal the election. This isn't "voter suppression," it's stealing democracy.

We should not treat this as some petty misdemeanor. This is a grave threat to our very basic freedom. This is a threat to our democracy. This is corruption.

You would expect this in some tin-pot dictatorship--not in Canada.

The stakes are much, much higher than most people or commentators realize. Harper won his "majority" with 6,848 votes. That's the difference between a Conservative candidate getting elected and the second place candidate in the 14 closest races that the Conservatives "won."