Apr. 25 - What can we say about the Australians? Solid friends, valiant warriors, the kind of people you can trust to watch your backsides - which they do every day in a region just as deadly with terrorist activity as the Mid-east - and first in whenever there's a catastrophe, be it tsunami, cyclone, or bombs.

The generic Australian news site has a wonderful flash show (probably only for today) and has the video for services in Gallipoli, where over 17,000 gathered for the dawn services to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the the beach assault in 1915.

Australia's prime minister addressed the assembled:

"It lives on in the valour and sacrifice of young men and women that ennoble Australia in our times," Mr Howard said.

"In the scrub of the Solomons, in the villages of Timor, in the desert of Iraq and the coast of Nias.

"It lives on in the nation's easy familiarity, in Australians looking after each other through courage and compassion in the face of adversity.

"So we dedicate ourselves at this hour, at this place, not just to the memory of Anzac but to its eternal place in the Australian soul."

Commander of Australian forces in southern Iraq, Lieutenant Colonel Roger Noble, said he felt a sense of history with the new mission effectively starting on Anzac Day.

"I think it's fantastic to get there for Anzac Day," Lt-Col Noble said.

The Australian military had historic links to the region with a number of Australian soldiers during World War I having operated across southern Iraq, he said.

[...]

Australian troops also remembered Anzac Day at Camp Victory in Baghdad.

About 200 troops and guests attended the dawn service despite the sandstorm and light rain.

Senior officers who laid wreaths at the service included multinational force commander US General George Casey, Australia's Middle East national commander Air Commodore Greg Evans, Lieutenant General David Hurley and British Major General Mark Mann.

Australian army chaplain Major Dave Hoskin officiated at the service, which included a moving audio-visual presentation to the song And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

Colonel Orhan Goktepe, commander of the Turkish contingent in Iraq, read Kamal Ataturk's tribute to the Anzacs and spoke of a mutual respect and friendship between Turkey and Australia.

In Sydney, 250,000 people lined the streets to cheer participants in the Anzac Day march.
In Brisbane, 15,000 cheered the march and many held signs that said "Thank you."
In Adelaide, Bill Denny, chair of the RSL Anzac Day committee said "We must never glorify war on Anzac Day. .." Five Turkish veterans had travelled from Turkey and participated in the ceremonies.
There were up to 30,000 in Victoria, where

The parade featured a large contingent of children and grandchildren of war veterans proudly wearing war medals on their chests and carrying black-and-white photos of their relatives as they marched towards the Shrine of Remembrance.

WEAKENED by recent illness and hunched low in his seat, Australia's oldest World War I veteran Peter Casserly led the Anzac Day parade through Perth, attracting heartfelt cheers from the thousands who lined the streets.

Australia is a young nation, and so finds it easy to place itself on the right side of history. We are not swung off course by the historical ballast carried by older countries; we fight the right wars, for the right causes. Australian servicemen and women have prevailed in many heroic conflicts. Yet AustraliaÂ’s national day of remembrance for our fallen is tied to a battle ninety years ago that we lost, catastrophically. ...

Anzac Day is less to do with loss or victory than it is to do with struggle and defiance, even when facing certain defeat. But Anzac Day also serves to remind us of Australian triumphs ...

Some other great reads:

Ozguru's excellent post on Anzac Day,

James Ozark and his daughter mourn the loss of her great-great grandfather in that war.

Bastards Inc. writes what ANZAC Day means to them:

It is claimed that Australia lost her innocence on the shores of Gallipoli. I would counter that rather than losing anything, Australia gained a reputation.

Just 170 men out of the Australian 4th Brigade that landed ashore on the 24/25 April 1915 made it off 8 months later. Out of over 4000 men, 170 left.

While paying tribute to the 8709 Australians who died at Gallipoli, and the 50,000-60,000 who served on the peninsula, Mr Howard also remembered the 2701 New Zealanders, 21,000 British, 15,000 French, 1358 Indian, 49 Newfoundlanders and 86,000 Turks who died in the campaign.

I also dropped by Kathy's site, knowing that she too would remember to thank our valiant ally today. Well done!

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1 Just gave you quote of the day for that second-to-last line. I'd track you back but that could start getting a bit circular so I thought I'd leave a comment instead...

Posted by: Kathy K at April 25, 2005 11:48 AM (iONpT)

2 Thanks, Kathy. I smiled when I saw you had beaten me to Ozguru's site this year. This has become one fine tradition.

Posted by: Debbye at April 25, 2005 11:57 AM (36r6u)

3 "we fight the right wars, for the right causes" I guess we can use that as an indicator of how we're doing, since they've always been on our side. If they ever say no, we'll have to wonder.

Posted by: Jay at April 25, 2005 01:29 PM (PuNh2)

4 If ever they say no, I will certainly take a second look (and probably a third and fourth) at the situation.

Posted by: Kathy K at April 25, 2005 10:46 PM (hvmeN)

5 Debbye, "This has become one fine tradition." That it has. Let's do it again next year!

Posted by: Kathy K at April 25, 2005 10:48 PM (hvmeN)

6 Kudos for saluting our Australian brothers in arms. They are certainly deserving of it and America is fortunate to have such steadfast allies. As an aside, within my circle of friends, who have no other connection to Australia, three have separately visited Australia on vacation flying halfway around the world for that pleasure.

Posted by: mikem at April 26, 2005 06:39 PM (EzNXf)

7 Decided to take a vacation in Oz?

Posted by: Jay at April 30, 2005 10:18 PM (PuNh2)

8 Debbye lost her password again...

Posted by: Tuning Spork at May 02, 2005 10:23 PM (C05iP)

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Apr. 24 - Seems everyone has an opinion about the latest study which concluded that slightly overweight people live longer, and David Brooks weighs in happily, opining that Living Longer Is the Best Revenge:

Mother Nature, we now know, is a saucy wench, who likes to play cosmic tricks on humanity. If the report from researchers at the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is correct - and it is the most thorough done to date - then it seems that Mother Nature has built a little Laffer curve into the fabric of reality: health-conscious people can hit a point of negative returns, so the more fit they are, the quicker they kick the bucket. People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.

I can't tell you how happy this makes me. Since I read about this report a few days ago, I haven't been able to stop grinning.

I've been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded. If this study is correct, I'll be ordering second helpings on into my 90's while all those salad-munching health nuts who have been feeling so superior in their spandex pants and cutoff T-shirts will be dying of midriff pneumonia and other condescension-related diseases.

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Apr. 24 - Oil-for-food man quit on principle:

One of two investigators who resigned earlier this week from the commission probing fraud at the United Nations' oil-for-food program released a statement Saturday in which he disputed a report that he did so because his work was finished.

Instead, Robert Parton said in the statement, he resigned "on principle."

[...]

Parton and Miranda Duncan resigned from the panel headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker on Wednesday.

In an interview with CNN, a member of the Volcker panel, Richard Goldstone, discounted a media report that the two resigned to protest conclusions the panel had reached about U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

He said Parton and Duncan had completed their work and were already set to leave.

"Contrary to recent published reports, I resigned by position as senior investigative counsel for the IIC not because my work was complete, but on principle," Parton said in the statement. He declined further comment.

The question is: What specifically led them to decide that their principles would no longer allow them to be part of that Inquiry?

Maybe I'll hop over and ask Roger Simon. Bingo - not just one but two links! The goods are in the second:

Last night, in the most explicit criticism so far directed at the report, Robert Parton, one of the senior investigators, told a lawyer involved with the Volcker inquiry that he thought the committee was "engaging in a de facto cover-up, acting with good intentions but steered by ideology".

The lawyer, Adrian Gonzalez, told The Sunday Telegraph that he believed the committee, headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was determined to protect the secretary-general.

According to Mr Gonzalez, Mr Parton felt that the committee had effectively divided the body of evidence relating to the oil-for-food scandal into testimony that it did want to hear, and testimony that it did not.

While the "field teams" led by Mr Parton and Miranda Duncan, who has also stepped down, were coming to one conclusion, he said, committee members appeared to want to draw a different conclusion to protect senior UN officials.

De facto or not, it isn't the crime that will bury them but the cover-up, and the revelations about Maurice Strong came uncomfortably close to the resignations of the two members of the inquiry, Adscam, and Martin's connection to his mentor Strong. Throw in Volcker's connection with Power Corp and thus to Total Oil, surmises that inquiry member Reid Morden tried to cover up the name of U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette, his protege, to shield her from criticism for blocking the submission of reports on the Oil-for-Food program to the UNSC and Kojo Annan's failure to report his continuing financial ties to Cotecna and ... I know I've forgotten something ... what-farking-ever, the Volcker Inquiry has zero credibility now, especially with the Iraqi people, who have to pay for their investigations and Benon Sevan's defence.

Fox News has a short item on the resignations and the recent State Dept. appraisal of Annan's fatuous claim to have been exonated here.

Funny, Richard Goldstone's lies attempt to spin the resignations of Robert Parton and Miranda Duncan backfired and brought the reasons for the resignations more out into the open. Now Americans have two U.N. cover-ups to contemplate and I expect constitutents will fire off letters to their representatives in Congress demanding that the bums be thrown out and all funding for the U.N. cease.

We hate cover-uppers and liars. That's why Oliver North is widely respected and the name Richard Nixon is synonymous with sleazeball.

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Apr. 23 - The impact of Adscam is finally returning to the one arena that most needs to be challenged: the Ontario voter. I say "returning" because when Ontarians went to the polls last year far too many of them surrendered to the devil they knew and returned the Liberal Party to power - albeit limited as other Canadians were less willing to consort with that devil.

There's no getting around it: Quebeckers punished the Liberal Party. Albertans punished the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party leads a minority government because some Ontarians punished the Liberal Party but those in greater Toronto area did not - and the mayor of Toronto is setting the stage for us to be bribed - again:

"It would be very serious," he told reporters Saturday. "It would cost us, directly, $40 to $50 million this year. That's equivalent to about a four per cent tax hike. And indirectly, tens of millions more."

The impact would only get worse in succeeding years, he said.

Miller is worried about his city's share of federal gas tax revenue promised by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin.

The Toronto Star newspaper published an editorial Saturday opposing an early election. The newspaper said if the Martin government were defeated without the budget being passed, it would cost Canada's cities $600 million in lost gas tax revenue.

Kateland recognizes the tip of an iceberg when she sees it:

Adscam only represents one Liberal run government program. If this is how the Liberals ran the sponsorship program in Quebec; whatÂ’s to say that all the other liberal government programs in Quebec and the rest of the country are not run the same way? Think GUN REGISTRY or STRIPPERGATE for starters. Adscam is only where they got caught holding the smoking gun - not evidence of innocence.

Joe Clark, the last leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party, actually endorsed Paul Martin and the Liberal Party over Stephen Harper and the newly merged Conservative Party of Canada one year ago. Greg Weston wrote a column last May in which he accused some very senior Tories of making a secret deal with the Liberal Party in the 2000 election to secure Clark's re-election in return for securing Alberta Liberal Anne McLellan's re-election - and then some:

Two weeks before Jean Chretien called the country to the polls in October 2000, reliable sources say, a small group of top Tory officials cut a secret deal to help Chretien's ultimately successful national campaign for a third majority government.

In return, the Liberals agreed to throw the vote in the Calgary Centre riding of then Tory leader Joe Clark.

In what may have been a series of similar deals, sources say the Tories also agreed to "stand down" to help Liberal Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan hang on to her Edmonton seat, which she won by only 733 votes.

Sources refuse to divulge details of what, exactly, the Tories agreed to do for the Liberals. One would say only that the deal "without question, helped them (the Liberals) nationally."

People should be outraged that the government give or withholds their money according to "correct voting," (it isn't that different from the kind of tactic that people like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe uses.) Nevertheless, the Liberal party was elected in Ontario with a general expectation that the federal Liberal party would loosen the purse-strings more readily for their provincial cousins than they had for the Progressive Conservative-led government and once the Liberals were installed, the federal government re-opened talks about extra money for Ontario - and nobody so much as blushed.

Kateland analyzed the reaction to Martin's pathetic speech April 22:

My conclusion was that the typical Ontarian will give him [Paul Martin] kudos and high marks for stating the obvious and delivering it with obvious sincerity. ..

Will that work? Canadians are neither naturally politicos or idealistic. We tend to take people at their word rather than judging them by their actions. I think the most common phrase in Canada is that “he means well.” That excuses all.

This should be easy, because it is for that monetary incentive that they voted Liberal last year. (Sheesh, sex workers have more brains than had the average Torontonian voter because they demand to be paid before rendering service.) The only question is how easily Torontonians can be fooled twice.

Martin's plea to let him "clean up the mess" sounds very reasonable unless you're alert like Laurent and remember a 1995 assertion from then Minister of Finance Paul Martin:

The problem is that Paul Martin has been claiming for the last 10 years that he was cleaning up. As soon as his 1995 budget speech, he claimed that he had introduced "a new and much tighter system to manage its spending" and that his first priority was to "eliminate waste and abuse and ensure value for Canadian taxpayers." We saw the results.

One of Benoit Corbeil's assertions was that lawyers worked for Liberal party candidates with the expectation of receiving appointments to the bench. (Kind of a neat Canadian twist on "will work for food," eh?) Damian Penny and Bob Tarantino write eloquently of their outrage so I won't cover the same ground here.

I seem to be the only person I've read that liked Duceppe's rebuttal last Thursday (and I'm disappointed that CTV didn't see fit to post the text to his speech yet included NDP Leader Jack Layton's) but my impression of Duceppe's remarks was that he appealed to Canadians to restore honesty to the Canadian government, and however cynical one might be about the Bloc Quebecois, there really isn't much we can say to urge Quebec to stay in Canada especially as voting Liberal would be to condone the dirty tactics they used in Quebec which gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "special relationship."

Maybe it's because I'm coming at this whole thing with an American anti-federalist (i.e., pro-States rights, pro-provincial rights) attitude. I can completely sympathize with the desires of both Quebeckers and Albertans to be free of a federal government that increasingly usurps power from provincial governments, takes the revenues of the provinces and then uses that same money to reward or punish according to how the electorate votes.

But this is the interesting part: I think that Ontario and Toronto will get a better deal from the Conservative Party than the Liberals can offer. The Liberals can be fairly confident that, as Toronto voters love platitudes and scare pretty easily, the election is in the bag for them so they can afford to make promises they don't intend to keep, but Conservative MPs would, if elected, have to go extra lengths to meet their promises in order to be re-elected and retain power.

Ah, power. It really is all about power, but there seems to be a perverse disinclination in Canada to examine the pursuit of power. Maybe that's why "he meant well" has such traction and why people seem actually surprised that the Liberal party is as corrupt as it is, and maybe that's why Torontonians, under the veneer of their sophistication, are stupid voters.

The Liberal Party has ruled Canada with unchallenged arrogance for 12 years -- how could anyone realistically expect them not to be corrupt? It defies logic, psychology and history. Mark Steyn puts it succinctly:

In a one-party state, the one party in power attracts not those interested in the party, but those interested in power.

It looks as though the Conservative Party is putting together a slate (Conservatives line up high-profile candidates) and, if you can believe anything Layton says, he isn't selling out to the Liberal Party but is willing to go with the proposed Liberal budget if they meet his demands to, er, fight smog (and, socialist to the end, drop plans for a tax rebate cut for businesses.)

Although I don't know if Toronto will vote Liberal or Conservative (or Green, NDP or even Rhinosaurus) I do think it urgently necessary that an election be held now rather than later. Those who vote to oust the Liberals will at least have the knowledge that they personally did not give tacit approval to corruption.

Fighting isn't only about winning, but about reclaiming honour, self-respect and human dignity. People who give into outrage without a fight lose more than those who lose a fight: damage to the spirit lasts longer than bruises and, knowing they wimped out, it gets harder to fight back as each subsequent outrage piles higher like stones on a burial cairn.

(Globe and Mail and Reuters links via Neale News.)

Apr. 24 - 07:56: Criminey, even CNN has noticed that the Liberals are desperate to forge a deal with the NDP and that Bono is disappointed in Martin.

18:12 - I should have read Sari before I posted; she articulates what I felt about Duceppe:

Duceppe had me wishing - not for the first time - that he wasn't on the wrong side, because as usual he stole the show with a fantastic opening line to his speech, something to the effect of "the last time a prime minister addressed the nation, it was 1995 and Chretien was fighting to save Canada; this time, Martin's fighting to save the Liberals". He picked up votes for sure.

Apr. 25 - 11:00: RJ at Thoughtcrimes.ca has a key observervation about Duceppe:

Duceppe does not have to maneuver for position nationally as do Martin, Harper, and Layton, so that gives him a bit more room to step up and be statesmanlike. He talked about how the BQ are not supporters of federalism, but that the BQ had pledged to work within the system.

Key to both Harper and Duceppe's speeches was the distinction that the scandal allegations emerging from the Gomery Inquiry are Liberal scandals--not Quebec scandals. An important point that will continue to get much play from both BQ and CPC talking heads over the next few weeks.

Duceppe - well I didnÂ’t really listen to him. Although the bit I caught he sounded better than usual. If anyone is growing in stature through this thing itÂ’s him.

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Apr. 22 - Adscam may be the least of Paul Martin's worries. Canada Free Press has uncovered damaging information that ties Martin, Maurice Strong, Tongsun Park, Saddam Hussein, and the U.N. Oil for Food project: Hussein invested one million dollars in Paul Martin-owned Cordex.

The Canadian company that Saddam Hussein invested a million dollars in belonged to the Prime Minister of Canada, canadafreepress.com has discovered.

Cordex Petroleum Inc., launched with SaddamÂ’s million by Prime Minister Paul MartinÂ’s mentor Maurice StrongÂ’s son Fred Strong, is listed among MartinÂ’s assets to the Federal Ethics committee on November 4, 2003.

Among Martin’s Public Declaration of Declarable Assets are: "The Canada Steamship Lines Group Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned"; "Canada Steamship Lines Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned"–Cordex Petroleums Inc. (Alberta, Canada) 4.6 percent owned by the CSL Group Inc."

Yesterday, Strong admitted that Tongsun Park, the Korean man accused by U.S. federal authorities of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, invested in Cordex, the company he owned with his son, in 1997.

In that admission, Strong describes Cordex as a Denver-based company. Cordex Petroleum Inc. is listed among MartinÂ’s assets as an Alberta-based company.Read the whole thing.

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1 I see how this shows why the Chretien government was opposed to the War. Good Point.

Posted by: JAson at April 24, 2005 03:47 AM (doHxV)

2 Jason makes a good point. Just because Chretien has been otherwise corrupt and Martin has taken bribes from Saddam, should he be jumping to conclusions and discussing whether the Liberal Party made decisions based on bribes? Isn't this type of curiosity unCanadian? After all, should Canadians lower themselves to the point where they question the honesty and sincerity of their representatives. I think NOT.

Posted by: mikem at April 24, 2005 11:06 PM (EzNXf)

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Apr. 21 - We are taking time out from our regularly scheduled coverage of Liberal Party Corruption to relay an urgent message to France from the axis of countries that don't suck.

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Apr. 21 - Prime Minister Paul Martin gave his speech and begged for time to let the Gomery Inquiry finish it's task. He pledged to call an election Election 30 days after final Gomery report.

In short, he gave the Canadian equivalent of a Checkers speech.

Opposition Leaders Stephen Harper and Giles Duceppe responded with well-targeted, rapid-fire rebuttals of Martin's points. They both hammered home the point that it's not the country that is in crisis but the Liberal Party.

NDP Leader gave a foolish speech in which he made promises that would amount to raising taxes.

There are video links to the right of the CTV article.

More later, other people in this household want equal (ha!) time on the computer. I should toss 'em a second or two ...

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Apr. 21 - Damian Brooks has two impressive series of posts on the report from the Canadian Defence Committee and one on the purchase of submarines and the death of a Canadian sailor:

Big week

Defence review: first blush

The submarine purchase fiasco.

Good, solid reads.

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Apr. 21 - I woke up and turned on CPAC about half-way through Question Period (and a fine Question Period it was!) and nearly fell over when a member of the Opposition stated that Maurice Strong had stepped down from his UN post and went on to ask questions about the Canadian involvement in the U.N. Oil-for-food program.

I believe this is the first time that particular scandal has been addressed in the House of Commons.

The article is accompanied by no links to the ongoing investigations into the U.N. Oil-for-food program but does link to a glowing in-depth profile of the United Nations.

Yesterday, two investigators, Robert Parton and Miranda Duncan, resigned from the Volcker inquiry which is looking into the U.N. Oil-for-Food program Saying Probe Too Soft on Annan. Neither investigator was available for comment.

Back to Strong (see here and here for background to the story behind this story):

UNITED NATIONS - Maurice Strong, a long-time Canadian businessman and currently the top UN envoy for North Korea, will suspend his work for the United Nations while investigators look into his ties to a South Korean businessman accused in the UN oil-for-food scandal in Iraq.

Strong denies any involvement with the tainted program and has pledged to co-operate with investigators.

His ties to Tongsun Park are raising concerns about a possible conflict of interest in respect of his role as envoy to North Korea. (Emphasis added.)

Park is accused of accepting millions from the Iraqi government while being suspected of operating as an unregistered agent for Baghdad, lobbying for oil-for-food contracts.

Nice try by the CBC to imply the issue is a the propriety of being an envoy to N. Korea while maintaining business relations with a corrupt S. Korean ...

After Corbeil's revelations, the CBC needs to be scrutinized. After all, one of the first rules of warfare is to seize control of communications and news media, and the CBC is a federally funded body. I doubt it's an accident that they subtly altered this news items.

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Apr. 21 - It's hard not to wonder if Paul Martin had his own, personal corruption ring that was not attached to the Sponsorship Program. First there were some surprising revelations about Martin's knowledge of improprieties in granting contracts to Earnscliffe and now it appears he helped other friends and political allies: Contract boost by Paul Martin earned $75,000 for his friend, say documents:

MONTREAL (CP) - Prime Minister Paul Martin approved a contract amendment when he was finance minister that landed an ad man friend $75,000 for doing little work, say documents at the sponsorship inquiry.

Memos from January 1996 indicate Martin approved the boost in additional funding for a Canada Savings Bond direct mail campaign. The file, unrelated to the sponsorship program, was co-managed by Montreal firm Groupe Everest, headed by Claude Boulay, and resulted in the $75,000 commission.

Finance official J.P. Labrosse said in a January 2, 1996, memo that the contract amendment involving Everest was "approved by the minister (Martin) on December 21, 1995." The contract was boosted to $2.6 million from $1.7 million.

Documents show Boulay's ad firm was paid a 17.56 per cent commission for the campaign even though the bulk of the work was done by another agency, Pinnacle Advertising.

It wasn't clear whether Martin knew the funding increase put money in Boulay's pocket.

Boulay, who continued his testimony at the inquiry on Thursday, had worked on Martin's 1990 leadership bid as well as his 1988 and 1993 election campaigns.

The funding approval went ahead over the objections of Public Works official Allan Cutler, who later blew the lid off of the sponsorship scandal.

Cutler said in a memo to a finance official that Groupe Everest's involvement in the contract was minimal or nil.

"Groupe Everest will presumably obtain a commission on the sub-contract without having done any work," said the memo dated January 26, 1996.

Cutler also noted the funding increase had been approved even though all of the mailing and distribution work related to the contract had already been completed.

Boulay testified Thursday that Cutler was in no position to know what work Everest performed on the campaign

"I don't know how he could make this comment," the ad executive said under questioning from inquiry counsel Marie Cossette.

"He wasn't there when we met with Pinnacle."

Cossette then asked: "So Mr. Cutler was mistaken when he wrote this memo?"

Boulay replied: "Listen. What I'm telling you is that he wasn't there. He can make a comment, but he wasn't there during our meeting with Pinnacle."

Alternate link here.

Note this change: Prime Minister Martin will be addressing the nation (earlier than first scheduled) at 7 p.m. tonight.

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Apr. 21 - Jean Brault's shocking testimony about the manipulation of the Sponsorship Program to funnel money illegally to the Liberal Party in Quebec has been corroborated in an interview with Benoit Corbeil, who is the first Liberal insider to admit to the money laundering scheme.

From the Globe and Mail, Insider backs Brault story:

Benoît Corbeil, the former director-general of the Liberal Party's office in Montreal, said in an interview that he received approval from some of his superiors for the cash transactions that were part of a regular flouting of electoral law.

At the time, Mr. Corbeil was at the top of the party's organization in Quebec, working under the direct supervision of then-minister Alfonso Gagliano.

“I took the bills [from Mr. Brault] and with that, I paid people, without declaring it [to Elections Canada],” Mr. Corbeil said, refusing to state exactly how much money he received that day.

“I have to admit it, that's the way it happened,” he said.

[...]

Mr. Corbeil said most of the recipients of cash payments were Liberal supporters who took unpaid leaves from their positions in ministerial offices to work on the general election.

“I liked to call them fake volunteers,” he said.

According to M. Corbeil, in 2000 Groupaction paid five "fake volunteers" by cheque through Commando Marketing, a Quebec City company owned by an employee of Groupaction, and Groupaction contributed $100,000 after Mr. Corbeil made an urgent plea for funds to a senior official in Ottawa who he declined to name. He said he relayed information about the transactions to "many of his superiors" and that his actions were approved. He also told members of the electoral commission.

Although Mr. Corbeil would not name names in the interview, he indicated he would do so under oath when he appears before the Inquiry.

“Many of them came and told me they wanted to get paid right away,” he said.

Mr. Corbeil said the people who received the cash payments were part of a larger group of party supporters who worked at the Liberal Party's headquarters in Montreal during the election campaign. He said most of that larger group were lawyers, engineers or accountants from major firms, which he said hoped to reap federal contracts after the election.

“They don't want to get paid right away, they want to get paid later,” he said, noting that many of the lawyers have since been named to the bench. (Emphasis added)

Mr. Corbeil said that in that context, the Liberals did not fully reveal the full cost associated with their campaign as required under Canadian law.

“We accounted for the provision of goods, but we didn't account for the majority of the services,” he said.

He said that after the [1995] referendum, two goals were approved by the highest authorities in the Liberal Party: Annihilate the Conservative Party in Quebec to unite all of the federalists in Quebec under the Liberal banner, and ensure that the Liberal Party became synonymous with Canada in the province of Quebec. (Emphasis added.)

But am I missing something? The 1995 referendum, like the one before, was defeated. Why would the Liberal Party decide to characterize it as a war and begin to fight it after it was defeated?

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but this explanation lacks credibility. It is entirely too self-serving, and I'd guess that they are using the unity card to conceal their true agenda: total and unlimited power by any means necessary.

Mr. Corbeil said the strategy was developed by the PMO and the Liberal establishment in Quebec, and that Mr. Corbeil's group only provided the foot soldiers.

Mr. Corbeil said that as the director-general of the party in Quebec, his biggest challenge was raising funds.

He said the Quebec wing of the party was in a constant rivalry with the national organization, which got the first crack at the biggest donors in Quebec.

He said the Quebec wing always wound up with the crumbs, and that it could never find a permanent solution to its funding woes.

“Maybe if more people had listened to us and paid more attention, maybe we could have avoided some problems down the road,” he said.

18:21 This indicates that the interview was on CBC (French) Radio.

Letters have revealed that Jacques Corriveau made Sponsorship pitches directly to Chretien and that Chretien replied - again in writing - that he would pass the request along.

But the request indicates Corriveau finessed his response when he testified last week that he never discussed sponsorship deals with Chretien.

The exchange of letters also raises questions about Chretien's testimony in February during which he said he never talked sponsorship with Corriveau and didn't know he was getting government business.

Corriveau provided a similar response at the inquiry last Thursday before he was even asked about it, saying "There was not, I can assure you, any request for any file that interests the commission."

Pressed further by inquiry counsel Bernard Roy about any possible sponsorship talk with Chretien, Corriveau replied, "It's certain. No."

But in his letter to Chretien, dated August 26, 2002, Corriveau said he was prepared to meet him to discuss an injection of cash into the 2003 show.

The letter contained a laundry list of items for the prime minister to consider, including:

$3.5 million in sponsorship funding for the event:
$2.6 million from other government departments:
$500,000 for similar botanical events in three African countries and for First Nations communities.
Lodging for 250 gardeners at a military base south of Montreal.

Chretien replied in writing just over two months later, saying he would send the request to colleagues including Sheila Copps, then heritage minister, as well as John McCallum, the defence minister at the time.

(Alternate link here.)

(Globe and Mail link from Damian.)

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Apr. 20 - Over 60 Bodies Found in Iraq.

Story developing.

To think I once fancied myself a pacifist.

20:30: It's bad. Over 50 bodies have been pulled from the Tigris and another 19, believed to be soldiers on leave, were found executed in a stadium in Haditha.

Murdoc has much more.

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Apr. 20 - Sometimes somebody gets a really great notion, and even though I'm kind of out of this fight I'm also in it because I believe that the system of consensual government works best when there's a viable Opposition (and besides, I'm tired of being ripped off. Aren't you?)

All things Canadian has issued a fundraising challenge to the Blogging Tories. I'm not one [either a blogging Tory or a Tory as I'm not a citizen] so I'm encouraging Canadians who want to force some accountability onto government to go here if you've finally decided that voting for "the devil you know" is a dumb reason to vote for the kind of government you don't want.

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Apr. 20 - I couldn't post anything coherent about the tenth anniversary of the Murrah Building yesterday.

This image is permanently engraved on my memory. What could I or anyone say to make it better?

I didn't post anything about the events in Waco 12 years ago either. There isn't a heart-wrenching photo, but the 21 dead children also had lives that should never have ended so abruptly.

Someone once characterized the attack on Waco as the Clinton administration's response to the first bombing of the World Trade Centre. That seems about right.

If God is merciful he'll eventually help me forgive Janet Reno and Timothy McVeigh. Please.

10:51 I missed another very important anniversary yesterday - the 63rd of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Thanks to Kateland and her Remembrance of those who did not go gently into that good night - a timely reminder that sometimes fighting back is an end unto itself and that even when we go into dubious battle it must - no, it does - suffice.

That post is a must read. Let the photos tell the story.

The bombing of the Murrah Building and the Waco attacks mean something to us because they happened within our living memories, but the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is more important because we urgently need to remember why "Never Again" matters - we already have the genocides of Rwanda and Sudan in our living memory yet turn away too hastily and risk the repitition of of watching more genocides and why? because we are faint-hearted. Because we rely on others to make the hard calls, and when those others are the U.N., we have an easy out but that damned conscience thing ... it never heard of international law either.

We have forgotten so much these past decades. Never again.

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Apr. 20 - Sorry about the length of the following posts. After years of having not much to post it's a damned avalanche and I'm still playing catch-up on Adscam on my half-a-weekend ... by the way, watching the testimony has been made the easier due to the fluid delivery of the interpreter.

I need to get some sleep, so I'll just post the relevant links and try to counteract all the coffee I drank last night.

April 18 testimony at the Gomery Inquiry: Chretien ally may have lied to press (Corriveau's testimony.)

Letter ties Martin to sponsorship figure: Tories which is a smoking gun if you actually believe Martin is a sincere kind of guy -- I assumed someone in his office wrote it and Martin just scribbled the obligatory "personal" comment, but Kate sees more and she has often been right.

Somebody is unhappy about their cut from Adscam. What to do? Sue!

Boulay denies discussing sponsorship program with Martin ... well, he would say that, wouldn't he. (Longer living link here.)

Opposition Day cancelled by the Liberal minority government. It made Question Period even more uproarious than usual. The Opposition fights back - or allows itself to be provoked prematurely, depending on your point of view.

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Apr. 19 - Is Maurice Strong the anonymous Canadian U.N. official No. 2 cited in reports about the arrest of David Bay Chalmers Jr? Sure looks like it ...

Oil-For-Food Probe Targets UN Aide Maurice Strong:

Strong, a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on North Korea and one of Canada's most influential entrepreneurs, acknowledged on Monday that he had ties to South Korean Tongsun Park, who is suspected of bribing U.N. officials in the oil-for-food scandal.

Park, a central figure in an influence-peddling scandal in Washington in the 1970s, was charged by federal prosecutors in New York last week with being an unregistered agent for the Iraqi government before Saddam Hussein's ouster in 2003.

The Independent Inquiry Committee into the oil-for-food program, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, has now opened an investigation into Strong, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

In 1997 or 1998, Park arranged a meeting in a Manhattan restaurant with a high-ranking U.N. official, who was not identified. Park later told an informant he had spent $5 million to "fund business dealings" with the official, a U.S. criminal complaint said.

Park, according to the informant, invested about $1 million in an unnamed Canadian company set up by the son of the U.N. official. The money was later lost when the company failed.

Strong, 76, acknowledged in a written statement that Park in 1997 had invested "on a normal commercial basis" in an energy company with which he was associated that had no links to Iraq.

Strong's son Frederick Strong is a Canadian businessman who has worked in the energy industry. He could not immediately be reached for comment but the federal complaint did not mention Strong or anyone from his family.

Maurice Strong has been active in the oil industry and has also worked for the United Nations for decades in various jobs including several senior posts. He had an office down the hall from Annan for about a year in 1997 when he served as the secretary-general's special envoy for U.N. reform.

He also briefly was a member of the board of Air Harbour Technologies Ltd. along with Annan's son Kojo Annan, whom the Volcker panel is also investigating for possible conflicts of interest in the award of a multimillion-dollar oil-for-food contract to Cotecna, a Swiss company that employed him.

Air Harbour Technologies, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is chaired by Hani Yamani, the son of former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani.

Strong, in a written statement on Monday, said he has continued to maintain a relationship with Park, who he said advised him on "North Korean issues in my role as U.N. envoy."

The United Nations was looking into whether it was appropriate for Strong to continue working for Annan during the investigation, spokesman Dujarric said.

Annan, however, would not be drawn into the controversy.

Dear oh dear, what shall we do with Annan? (raises hand) Cut of his .... funding?

"Maurice Strong has issued a statement and is also in touch with the Volcker Commission and has indicated he will cooperate with anyone who is looking into this," Annan said."

According to this, Annan didn't know that Strong and Tongsun Park had a business relationship and U.N. officials say that Park and former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali were close.

Time to go hmmm (I'm kidding - it's way, way past time to content ourselves with going hmmm. It's rapidly getting to be time to grab those pitchforks and torches, though.) First Louise Frechette, then Reid Morden, and now Strong ... the Canadian bureaucrats at the U.N. are implicated in the Oil for Food scandal as deeply as their federal Liberal friends are in Adscam. Anyone see a pattern yet?

In seemingly unrelated news, Canada is revamping their foreign policy and forging stronger ties with its North American neighbours. I hope they mean the North Pole, because the revelations in the inquiry of the Oil-for-Food scandal have rendered Canada's profile as being, um, less than trustworthy with sensitive American security issues.

Oh, why mince words? They're the farking enemy! (I trust you know what Canadian "they" I'm referring to. Fourth member of the Axis of Weasels, right? Nothing must stand in the way of access to Iran's oil fields (scroll down.) They never met an enemy of the U.S. they didn't cozy up to. That them.)

True to form, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec are raising their fears over border plans, and just to clarify, they are referring to this one. That's right, the premiers of the two provinces that hate America most are upset that their residents can't enter a country they vehemently despise without a passport. (A curious person might wonder why on earth they'd want to visit such a horrible, dreadful, unenlightened country, but I don't. The Canadians who scream the most about being subverted by mysterious forces who envision Canada as the 51st state behave as they they have the same rights as the Phantom 51st State. Normal Canadians, I'm glad to report, are happy to be Canadian and just want to make this country better. Of course, they are also sane.)

It will be duck-and-cover time when the two aforementioned provincial premiers learn about this plan -- they are really going to be pissed off, but it will take awhile because they never pay attention to anything that is written in the West.

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Apr. 19 - Americans might wonder why the Liberal Party has been dubbed "The Libranos." In part it's due to allegations of mob involvement, but what makes the nickname so appealing is that they act like mobsters. The cliche "a falling out among thieves" also comes to mind as Chretien's guy tries to prove that Martin and his guys are also dirty.

The problem is clearly a symptom of the decayed education system: none of these people ever studied Greek or Shakespearean tragedies -- had they done so they would have known they were riding for a fall.

The hearings on Earnscliffe contracts awarded by the Finance Department outlined here have already produced fireworks. There were early warnings to Martin's chief-of-staff that the bidding process for polling contracts was flawed:

A letter from Warren Kinsella to Terrie O'Leary, made public at a Commons committee Monday, warned of flawed competitions for public-opinion polling contracts, excessive payments, unnecessary work and political interference.

But O'Leary and another former top Martin aide testified that they did nothing wrong.

"Terrie, all of this spells trouble and you know it," Kinsella wrote in his letter.

"The competition was flawed, the payment is excessive, the work is probably not needed, and the research community can be fully expected to blow the whistle on the political connections here."

Kinsella was an aide to Public Works Minister David Dingwall at the time and was responsible for ensuring that government departments followed contracting rules. He was later a fierce supporter of Jean Chretien in the leadership dispute with Martin.

[...]

Allegations of political influence by Martin's office in the awarding of contracts were raised last year by Chuck Guite, the former bureaucrat who ran the federal sponsorship program at the Public Works Department. He claimed, in testimony to the public accounts committee, that he came under pressure in the 1990s to channel work to Earnscliffe.

Further to Warren Kinsella's testimony, a more in-depth article today headlines that he proclaimed Martin knew about the 'rigged' contracts and that "someone" tried to intimidate him from telling the truth in his testimony. I'm excerpting out of order:

Paul Martin knew about claims of "bad behaviour" involving public-opinion contracts for a firm closely tied to his leadership campaign but threatened to quit his job as finance minister if his top advisor was disciplined, a former Liberal aide testified yesterday.

Warren Kinsella, a former advisor to Jean Chretien and a vehement political foe of Mr. Martin's, said the then-finance minister was aware of allegations that contracts in the mid-1990s had been "rigged" to favour the Earnscliffe Strategy Group.

"He absolutely had knowledge of these things," Mr. Kinsella told the House of Commons public accounts committee during hearings into a 2003 Auditor-General's report that looked at how the government handled contracts for polling and other public opinion research.

Mr. Kinsella said that, as then-aide to Public Works and Government Services minister Dave Dingwall, he wrote to Mr. Martin's office to express his concerns about money flowing from the Finance department to a firm so closely affiliated with Mr. Martin's leadership ambitions.

He called this "bad behaviour -- I considered it inappropriate that you cross-subsidize using the public treasury."

Mr. Kinsella's claims topped a dramatic session that saw him seated at the witness table next to two of the Prime Minister's most loyal advisors -- Terrie O'Leary and David Herle, her common-law spouse and a former partner in Earnscliffe -- and claim that he was intimidated in a phone call he received shortly before his testimony.

He provided the name of the person who made the phone call in confidence to committee chairman John Williams, a Conservative MP. Mr. Williams said he considered the alleged call a form of intimidation and would refer it to a steering committee today to investigate. Mr. Williams refused to release the name when pressed by reporters.

Earlier at the session of the public accounts committee, Mr. Kinsella said that he raised flags about Department of Finance contracts for polling and other public-opinion research as early as 1994.

He also echoed claims made by previously by another witness, former public works bureaucrat Allan Cutler, who claimed the open bidding process for the Finance contracts were tailored so that only Earnscliffe could win them. He said he received complaints from several other polling firms about the contracts and felt obliged to investigate.

Auditor-General Sheila Fraser began the hearing by reiterating her opinion that while public-opinion contracts were generally well-managed, there were some concerns about contracts in which the public-opinion advice was given to departments verbally, not in writing. But opposition members of the committee pressed Mr. Kinsella for details of what Mr. Martin knew about the contract awards.

By 1995, there was enough concern about Earnscliffe's contracts that they were the subject of a meeting in the Prime Minsiter's Office involving Mr. Chretien's chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, and his ethics advisor, former Liberal Cabinet minister Mitchell Sharp, he said.

The possibility of dismissing Ms. O'Leary over an alleged conflict of intrest was discussed, Mr. Kinsella said. "Mr. Martin said he would quit before that would ever happen," Mr. Kinsella recall learning in in a disappointing call from PMO. "I phoned my wife said it's time to leave Ottawa."

Mr. Kinsella injected a note of intrigue in the proceedings when he claimed he received an intimidating phone call minutes before the hearing that indicated Mr. Martin's office would pressure former public works Minister David Dingwall to appear before the committee to contradict his testimony.

There's an item about Dingwall's tendency to porkbarrel here, a profile from a year ago after his appearance before the House of Commons public accounts committee on Adscam here, and an item about Dingwall, Martin, Kinsella and Chretien here.

Dingwall was the subject of a wonderful column by Lorne Guntner partially quoted here (canada.com links to opinion columns are sadly short-lived.)

The Wikipedia entry on Dingwall says he was appointed to the Canadian Mint in 2003 - I thought it was 2004, but then my memory sucks.

Aug. 20 - 03:33: Frank Schiller is reportedly the "mystery man" who advised Kinsella not to testify against Martin:

Parliament Hill sources named the man Tuesday as Frank Schiller, who once worked with Kinsella in the office of former public works minister David Dingwall. Schiller also put in a stint on the staff of former prime minister Jean Chretien and is currently a principal of the Ottawa consulting firm IGRG (Industry Government Relations Group).

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Apr. 19 - An article in the NY Times looks at the dithering in the House of Commons as the Liberals try to retain leadership (Canadian Leader Digs in to Confront Scandal) and makes some oblique observations that I'll take as substantiation of some views I've been forming. (As an aside, the author notes this time that the current PM was Minister of Finance during the Sponsorship Program.)

The article focuses on the difficulty of running Parliament as a minority government but suggests the ways in which the Liberal Party is trying to shape the focus of a possible election. Some excerpts:

Prime Minister Paul Martin is scrambling to keep power as the scandal involving his Liberal Party grows, making deals that delay or even jettison central elements of his political agenda, including a bill to legalize same-sex marriages and a measure to control greenhouse gases.

The campaign debate is already emerging in Parliament. The opposition is emphasizing the issue of honesty in government, while the Liberals are claiming that the Conservative leader, Stephen Harper, has allied with the separatist Bloc Québécois on a secret agenda to scrap the public health insurance system.

With Mr. Martin's position deteriorating, action has been delayed on many of his campaign promises - including decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, establishing a national child-care system and cracking down on child pornography.

The long-promised legislation to strengthen regulation of the online pharmacy industry, which provides many elderly Americans with cheaper drugs, has also been delayed because Liberal Party lawmakers in western Canada fear they could be punished politically by the 4,000 Canadians who work in the industry.

Earlier this month, a threat by Conservatives to vote against Mr. Martin's budget forced him to remove the financing for an environmental measure that would have fined industrial producers of greenhouse gases.

Since Canadian courts have already made same-sex marriage legal in provinces and territories where 90 percent of the population lives, the legislation is mostly symbolic. But the delay makes it clear that it will be a campaign issue. (Emphasis added)

The Liberal Party has not backed down on these legislative matters but has deferred them in order to have a platform on which to campaign - the same platform on which they campaigned in the last election:

1. Chretien was the crook, and we're cleaning up his mess, and
2. If you want these progressive laws, you will have to vote for us.

David Frum, in the op-ed section, offers an analysis of the Liberal Party citing the reasoning behind setting up the Sponsorship Program as an indicator that the the Liberal Party is a "brokerage" party (that sounds considerably more cynical than "big tent") which is more intent on securing power to distribute the spoils rather than a party held together by shared principles and policies.

And it was presumably for these same reasons that Mr. Chrétien set in motion his kickback scheme. As Liberal strength in Quebec has decayed, the Liberals have found it more and more difficult to hold together an effective political organization in the province. How do you sustain a political party without principles or vision? Sometimes you do it with graft.

a huge unmonitored slush fund from which key political figures in the province could be rewarded. A large portion of those rewards, the judicial inquiry in Montreal is being told, were then kicked back as campaign contributions to the Liberal Party and as payments to Liberal insiders.

It was the Supreme Court decision recognizing the Charter right of gays to marry that finally resulted in the merger of the Canadian Alliance with most of the remnants of the federal Progressive Conservatives*, and the continued opposition of the CPC to gay marriage - but not "civil union" which would guarantee the same rights and benefits of marriage - keeps many whom I would call South Park Republicans Conservatives from supporting the new party. The CPC has yet to present ideas for reforming the "dividing of the spoils" that accompanies gaining federal power, which I see as a fundamental flaw in their program.

Frum ends on a hopeful note:

As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It's an exchange that is long past due.

* The provincial Progressive Conservative parties retained vitality and were even elected as the ruling party in Ontario after the demise of their federal cousins. The party here retains the Progressive Conservative name.

(South Park Conservatives link via Neale News.)

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Apr. 19 - Slick intro for another new Anti-corruption.ca.

(Via Nealenews.)

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Apr. 19 - This is cool, but weird. I've lived in the West, the Mid-west and the South, but never in the "upper midwest" which I'd hazard is Illinois, Michigan, etc.

Link via Blown Fuse

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