Last fall, it was the Torries that made completely baseless allegations against David Dingwall and the Vancouver Sun reported them as fact. Reporter Paul Samyn Vancouver Sun September 29th 2005

“Mint documents show Dingwall and top aides racked up $846,464 in expenses in 2004, including $1,235 for his annual golf membership, $13,228 in one day of foreign travel, and a $5,728 meal at an Ottawa restaurant. While Dingwall has a leased car courtesy of the Crown corporation, his office also ran up a $2,500 tab on limousines in 2003.”

Why the Vancouver Sun bought into the Conservatives tails of how, for one, a two day seminar for 24 mint personal was really $5800 dinner for two and how, for another, a 11 day business trip was really a one day travel charge is an open question.   

Give the Vancouver Sun points for consistency though. http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/ 2005/10/26/dingwall051026 .html" title="http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/ 2005/10/26/dingwall051026 .html" target="_blank"http://www.cbc.ca/story/canad...

When an audit cleared Dingwall of all aforementioned charges, the Sun naturally led with this headline: “Mint president billed improperly, review finds”. Needless to say, such a headline was entirely consistent with what Canwest columnist Don Martin had to say in a Vancouver Sun column on October 22 2005.

“OTTAWA - So he was fired. Or, in the curious and evasive language of former Royal Canadian Mint president David Dingwall, ‘compelled to resign because of the situation.’

Okay, did somebody compel him to resign after newspaper front pages were filled with details of his wacky expense claims?”

Fast forward to 2006. The Vancouver Sun has changed it tune. Vancouver Sun editorial Feb 7 

“the auditor found that the 747,000 Dingwall had racked up in expenses was fully in accordance with the Mint’s rules. Dingwall always maintained that he would be exonerated and he was right. Sure, he was living the lavish life of a coddled CEO, but he did nothing improper. In fact, in his 23 months at the helm of the Mint, he introduced management practices and cost controls that helped turn its financial fortunes around from a $3 million in 2003 to an $11 million profit in 2004.”

It is now poor Dingwall.

“It turns out that David Dingwall’s defiance was really an honest effort by the former chief executive of the Royal Canadian mint to be paid severance legally owed to him. An independent arbitrator’s ruling has confirmed what had long been suspected: Dingwall’s departure from the Mint last fall was involuntary. People fired without just cause are entitled to severance.”

Dingwall was indeed entitled to his entitlements!

Reading the Sun one gets the feeling that Dingwall’s firing had nothing whatsoever to do with “wacky expense claims” the Conservatives made and printed in Canwest papers across the land. No sir. In fact the Vancouver Sun writes as if the Conservatives “wacky expense claims” ever had a chance to be validated by Price water House Coopers and by impliction that the Conservatives claims were anything other than complete BS. 

“Much to the chagrin of the Conservatives, the auditor found that the 747,000 Dingwall had racked up in expenses was fully in accordance with the Mint’s rules.”

No Sun editorial, guest or otherwise, has ever condemned Conservatives and Pallister of any wrong doing during the whole affair. The Liberals are held to a different standard. The Sun rightly points out that not only did the Liberals fire a competent fellow and in the process cost the Canadian tax payers $420,000, they also lied about doing so. The Sun calls the later an “affront” to “democratic principles”

“One of those principles is telling the truth in parliament. We expect spin, but not lies.”

I guess calling a 2 day conference for 24 a romantic dinner for two is best characterized as spin.

North News Columnist Trevor Lautens begins his 2006 election wrap up http://www.nsnews.com/issues06/w012206/0143 06/opinion/014306le1.html" title="http://www.nsnews.com/issues06/w012206/0143 06/opinion/014306le1.html" target="_blank"http://www.nsnews.com/issues0...  with “So the West wanted in.”  He must be recycling old material from elections past.  The Liberals won the most seats in Vancouver and NDP the most seats on the Island.  Both are West of Alberta, and Prince George.  Politics in Canada is no longer dominated by regional animosities the way it once was.  If there is a geographical split it is more rural/urban than Western Canada/Eastern Canada.  The Conservatives took no seats in urban Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.  This was a trend that was readily apparent last election too.  In other words the “west” died before it ever got in.  

      & nbsp;
Anyway, who needs facts?   Not Lautens.  He has rhetoric, clichés, dogmatism and Conservative talking points.  Apparently, the Vancouver Sun, the Georgia Straight http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=15430" title="http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=15430" target="_blank"http://www.straight.com/conte... , the Vancouver Province, and the Tyee http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/01/11/Muffle dModerate/" title="http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/01/11/Muffle dModerate/" target="_blank"http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/0...  do not count as media.  All mentioned the fact that Bell and Silver went to the same church.  “the media glossed over the fact that her Liberal opponent, the aforementioned Don Bell, attends the same evangelical church Silver does.”  None mentioned though that only Silver had personally (A petition submitted by Ted White
http://www.parl.gc.ca/english/hansard/previo us/106_94-10-07/106RP1E.html" title="http://www.parl.gc.ca/english/hansard/previo us/106_94-10-07/106RP1E.html" target="_blank"http://www.parl.gc.ca/english... ) and professionally (the Vriend case http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/en/pub/1998/vo l1/html/1998scr1_0493.html" title="http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/en/pub/1998/vo l1/html/1998scr1_0493.html" target="_blank"http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca... ) pushed for employers to have the right to fire employees simply because they are gay, but hey Bell and Silver go to the same Church and so they are two peas in a pod right.  All Christians take such a position.

Finally, a Lautens article would not be complete without an attack on the country’s pro Liberal media; needless to say, the fact all of print media, with the exception of the Toronto Star, endorsed the Conservatives was not addressed by Lautens.      & nbsp;

“The Liberals tried to make much of some supposedly scarifying Stephen Harper statements in past speeches in the United States. But what bubbles up to the media surface can be remarkably selective. I can't recall hearing this reported: Stephen Lewis, as I found in an idle Internet moment, spoke to the Canadian Council on Social Development in Winnipeg in 2004. He told attendees that he had spent the previous week in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Washington and New Orleans, and went on, ‘Precisely, all of the pre-Paleolithic Neanderthals you can imagine at a variety of speaking events.” 

In one of their later ads, balloon, the Conservatives claimed that in 1995 Martin said crime would be down and Canada would be safer, but, they add, homicides are up and so is drug crime. So is violent crime up since 1995? Of course not. In 2003, the murder rate reached a 36 year low and violent crime is way down since the Liberals took office. The homicide rate did go up in 2004, but one year hardly a trend makes.

These are the facts:

The crime % change 1994 to 2004
Homicide -5.3
Attempted murder -29.4
Serious sexual assaults -32.6
Robbery -14
Total violent crime -9.7

The same broad decline can be found for property crime, down 24 per cent in the past decade, car theft (-3.5 %) and break-and-enters (-36 %)” http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/realityche ck/violent_crime.html" title="http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/realityche ck/violent_crime.html" target="_blank"http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes...

 

I am not inclined to give the Liberals much credit for the drop. If there is one thing criminologists agree on it is that the demographic makeup of a society plays a big role. The CBC does a good job of explaining this:

“Violent crime in this country rose steadily during the 1960s, '70s and '80s – the latter being the decade when the Brian Mulroney Conservatives were in power. It peaked in 1992, just before the Chrétien Liberals were returned to office, and for the most part has been dropping steadily ever since. Campaigning Liberals might like to take credit for this achievement, but that, too, would be to play loose with the facts.
The underlying reality is that crime rates are largely a function of demographics. Simply put, violent crime is carried out for the most part by young men between their late teens and late 30s; and probably has been since time immemorial. The decades-long rise that culminated in 1992 coincided with the miscreant faction among the baby boomers and the so-called echo generation that followed close on their heels. When that contingent hit middle age, the rates for murder and violent crime fell – and, perhaps not coincidentally, counterfeiting shot up.”
http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/realityche ck/violent_crime.html" title="http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/realityche ck/violent_crime.html" target="_blank"http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes...

The Conservatives are right about one thing though; drug crime is up way up. It is up 52% over the past 10 years. Marijuana possession charges account for most of increase. Interesting enough, drug crime dropped 8% from 2003 to 2004. So the Conservatives are using 1995 as a bench mark for one claim and 2003 as a bench mark for the other.

Anyway, will drug crime go down when the Conservatives launch their War on Drugs? Not if the US is any guide. According to the US Bureau of Justice, Marijuana arrests have more than doubled in the US since 1991. There will be both an opportunity cost and real cost to the tax papers to cracking down on marijuana and failing to follow through on plans for decriminalization. Indeed, the state of California, for example, saved nearly a $ 1 Billion by decriminalizing the personal possession of mere one once of marijuana. M. Aldrich and T. Mikuriya. 1988. Savings in California marijuana law enforcement costs attributable to the Moscone Act of 1976. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 20: 75-81.  Add to this the cost to productivity of of needlessly saddling hundreds of thousands of Canadians with a criminal record.

Of course the aformentioned ad is not the only instance in which the Conservatives have lied by omission. The following really takes the cake though. The Conservatives have made a big to do about the Conference board of Canada saying their platform is fully costed. To put this into perspective this is akin to the NDP holding up the fact the CCPA says their platform is fully costed. That is not the problem though. The Conference board of Canada economist who did the analysis is now saying that the platform he examined is not the same platform the Conservatives released. In other words, the Conservatives were trying to pass off the new platform off as the one given the ok by Conference board of Canada. Global and Mail: “Economist washes hands of new Tory agenda”

“Paul Darby, deputy chief economist of the Conference Board of Canada, originally concluded that Stephen Harper's Conservative platform “is affordable in each fiscal year from 2005-2006 through 2010-2011.”
The Conservative party promoted that conclusion last week as evidence its election platform had been “independently verified” by the Conference Board, an Ottawa-based think-tank.
But Mr. Darby says the version of the platform he was given to vet didn't include a Conservative health-care guarantee which states patients will be transported to another jurisdiction if they can't get timely care at home.
It also omitted a Tory platform promise to redress the so-called “fiscal imbalance” between Ottawa and the provinces.
Mr. Darby wouldn't comment on whether the timely health-care guarantee would bear a significant cost.
“Talk to Harper,” he said. “It is not in the platform I received from them.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060115.weconn0115/BNStory/specia lDecision2006/" title="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060115.weconn0115/BNStory/specia lDecision2006/" target="_blank"http://www.theglobeandmail.co...

 

Finally I would be remiss if I did not mention the Gerwal tapping incident example.

The Tories hired audio expect Randy Dash last June.  Dash concluded that the audio “clips” he was given by the Conservatives were not altered. “Mr. Dash’s analysis of the recordings shows that they are clean and unaltered,” Conservative Jason MP Kenney said in a news release sent out on June 9th. The press release did what it was attended to do. It made it appear to anyone, but the most observant, that what you had here was a battle of audio experts. Some experts held that the tapes were not altered and others that they were. This is what NY Times reporter Clifford Kraus concluded in a June 19th article. However, there never was any disagreement. The Tapes spoken about in June 9th were different then the tapes released on May 31 by agent Grewal and the Conservatives. The Conservatives were amazingly brazen about trying to pass one off as another. Indeed, Randy Dash has been hired by Canwest news services to examine the May 31 tapes and concluded that they had probably been altered (e.g., The Star Phoenix (Saskatoon) Friday, June 3, 2005, Page: A1: News Byline: Grant Robertson, Anne Dawson and Allan Woods) “In reviewing some two hours of discussions between B.C. Conservative Gurmant Grewal and top Liberal officials, Randy Dash, a professor and sound engineer at Ottawa's Algonquin College, said: "it appears that on one of the recordings, an edit could have been done." By the time June 6 rolled around the experts were not mincing their words anymore.
The following from Campbell Clark June 6th article in the Globe and Mail:

Yesterday, Jack Mitchell, a U.S. forensic audio expert who conducted a preliminary review of portions of the originally released recordings, said they had been altered. He said he did not believe the changes occurred in the digital-copying process.
"These tapes have been edited. This is not a maybe. This is not something that's unexplained. This is not, 'Oh, this is odd.' This is a definitive statement. The tapes have been edited," Mr. Mitchell said.
He said he could not say with certainty how the alterations occurred, or conclude definitely that it was done intentionally.
However, Mr. Mitchell said that he not only found instances of possible edits, including sections where it appeared that phrases had been added to the recordings, but also a telltale repeat of a brief snippet of conversation that was repeated exactly.
"The entire thing repeats exactly. It's not the speaker repeating his phrase. This repeats exactly in the same way, with the same rhythm, with the same timing, with the same noise signatures. This is impossible," he said.
Mr. Mitchell said that he is not aware of such a glitch ever being produced in a digital transfer.
"I don't know how it could. I really don't," he said.
Errors in digital transfer can produce crashes that end the recording, or "dropouts" where brief gaps lasting a fraction of a second to a few seconds are created.
"But as far as it actually taking the digital file and sort of combining them and doing its own editing and changing things, I think that's nonsense. I've never seen it, I've never heard of a report of it."
The same repeat -- where Prime Minister Paul Martin's chief of staff, Tim Murphy, says "cup of tea" -- was found last week by Glen Marshall, a former RCMP engineer hired by the Liberal Party to examine the recordings.
Mr. Harper's communications director, Geoff Norquay, and his press secretary, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, could not be reached yesterday.
Mr. Mitchell operates a forensic audio firm called Computer Audio Engineering in Albuquerque, N.M., which has done work used in court cases for U.S. federal prosecutors, several U.S. police forces, and prosecutors and defence attorneys.
He said he has not seen any reports of any other examination of the recordings, except a written statement issued by Mr. Dosanjh's office that alleges at least six sections of the tape were altered, which was sent to him by The Globe.
Mr. Mitchell reviewed two portions of the recordings where Mr. Dosanjh claimed to have found changes, totalling about eight minutes, to determine if there was evidence they had been altered.
The repeated "cup of tea" section is not on a new version of the recordings issued by the Conservatives last Thursday. Those new versions contain 14 minutes of new audio material -- pieces of conversations that are interspersed throughout the recording in a variety of places, which were missing from the first version that was released to the public.
Mr. Mitchell said he thought it was unlikely that such interspersed material was accidentally cut when it was copied to compact disc, as the Conservatives maintain.
"I've never heard of it. Is this something new taking place out there that I haven't heard of? Well, you know, that's always possible, but I don't think so. It would be all over the place if this happened. There are people out there making audio CDs all the time, and nobody has mentioned anything like this ever happening."
In addition, a section of another conversation reviewed by Mr. Mitchell, in which Mr. Dosanjh asserts that any arrangement made with Mr. Grewal "requires a certain degree of deniability" appears to have been edited in from another conversation, as Mr. Dosanjh had alleged. But Mr. Mitchell said it would take further analysis to determine that with certainty.
"The phrase is suddenly -- the amplitude is higher, the frequency content is different, meaning that essentially there are more bottom frequencies in it. The noise signature is different, and on either side of that phrase, they're the same."

For a full run down of the Grewal incident see Buckets of Grewal.

http://bucketsofgrewal.blogspot.com/2006/01/welcome-to-bu ckets-of-grewal.html" title="http://bucketsofgrewal.blogspot.com/2006/01/welcome-to-bu ckets-of-grewal.html" target="_blank"http://bucketsofgrewal.blogsp...

Martin was one of the worst politicians in modern Canadian history.

Martin never had any feel for where the country was, or how things would play out politically. The BMD issue is a good example of the former. An overwhelmingly number of Canadians wanted to see John Kerry beat George Bush. That did not happen and the US election confirmed for many that Canadians were made of stronger moral fiber than their American cousins. The musings of Canwest aside, Canadians wanted nothing to do with “Jesus land” in the wake of Bush’s victory. The Bush administration either did not take into an account political realities in Canada, or did not care to notice. Either way, they pressed Martin to sign on to BMD. In the process they helped turn the whole BMD debate into a referendum on what Canadians thought of the Bush administration. Bush’s actions gave Martin no choice. However, rather than giving the Bush administration a quick and firm no, Martin “dithered”. As a result he was predictably pillared by people on both sides of the debate. Canwest and the Sun media chain pillared him for not joining on and majority of the Canadian people pillared him for being slow in saying no.

A good example of the later is SSM. Martin and crew figured that because SSM was contentious and not a winner with most voters (The population was equally divided on the issue. However, only 60% of Canadians vote and majority of likely voters were opposed. Indeed, as a rule of thumb the older one gets the more likely one is to a) a vote and b) oppose to SSM.) As such, right from the beginning they figured that they had to couch the SSM issue in terms of charter rights and respect for the rule of law rather than explicitly about the dignity of gay Canadians. This showed that party brass fundamentally misunderstood the cultural importance of the issue as well how much damage the issue could cause the Tories. 

SSM has replaced abortion as the new cultural litmus test. It separates old from young, progressive from regressive and to a lesser extent rural from urban. That said unlike abortion it is not likely to remain this way for long. Abortion is still an intellectually contested subject. Homosexuality on the other hand is not and as it is opposition to homosexuality that underpins most of the opposition to gay marriage, the whole movement toward gay marriage has come to seem as historically inevitable as the triumph of the civil rights movement. Opposition to SSM irrespective of the issue of homosexuality is also based on a weak intellectual foundation, albeit not as weak. There is simply no good argument for not going ahead with it. To top it all off, there are but two options within the context of the Canadian legal system, viz., the former status quo or gay marriage. The civil union “comprise” that Stephen Harper speaks of is so much pie in the sky. Civil unions are a provincial matter and not a Federal one. Moreover one of the reasons the issue landed in the Federal court in the first place was because the Provinces had rejected the civil union option. Equally specious is Harper’s contention that abandoning gay marriage would not require invoking the notwithstanding clause.

In sum, the gay marriage issue might not be a winner if viewed in isolation. However, having the Conservatives defend a legally, morally and intellectually bankrupt position certainly helped the Liberals. It also helped that Conservatives appear to be on the wrong side of history. Subsequently, Martin realized it was a winner. However, neither Martin nor the beer and popcorn boys realized just why; they mistakenly believed that Canadians admired them for defending the charter. This hurt the Liberals during last month’s election. Not knowing the truth of the matter, they shifted the debate from the Conservatives conceptually disastrous “defense” of “traditional” marriage to Martin’s rushed proposal to scarp the notwithstanding clause.

Any future Liberal leader must have a good handle on the national pulse and he or must have a sense of how issues will play out. Such leaders are difficult to find. Trudeau was such a leader. He was not only able to grasp many historical trends, he was often able to capture their essence in a turn of a phrase. “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation” is a good case in point. By way of contrast, Martin was what marketers call a late adapter. He seemed only able to grasp a historical trend when it had washed over him. All that being said, what will be more difficult still is getting the party to abandon polling for policy. With the temperamentally conservative Martin out of the way, things will be better. Still I sense reluctance on the part of the party brass to recognize that a winning issue is not necessarily a politically popular one. SSM is a good case in point. They also do not seem to grasp how volatile is the cultural landscape is right now. SSM is again a good case in point. Support for same sex marriage skyrocketed in a few short years. Some issues are simply in need of champion. Those how know me, know that I feel that the liberalization of Canada’s marijuana laws could be another such issue. Intellectual robustness accounts for something politically in some cases, but with regard to culturally significantly issues it almost always counts for a good deal.

The next leader has to be a fighter. Martin was not. When under attack, his first inclination was always to turtle. As time wore on, he displayed all signs of suffering from learned helplessness. The best example was the whole David Dingwall affair, but there were others. For over a month the Conservatives made ludicrous allegations against David Dingwall and instead of fighting them, Martin, looking like a deer in headlights, “dithered” and then fired Dingwall. Thanks in no small part to the gross incompetence of the beer and popcorn boys and Martin, Dingwall was convicted in the court of public opinion, even though he was guilty of nothing more than arrogance. Indeed, "Among the audit's findings: The $5,800 allegedly spent on one meal was for a two-day seminar involving 24 mint personnel. The money allegedly spent on chewing gum was covered under the allowable $20/day incidental expenses. There was no evidence of the alleged $13,000 for one day of travel – but two claims for $13, 693.83 for a four-day conference in Phoenix and mint-related meetings in New Brunswick, the UK, Switzerland and Germany." In typical Conservative fashion, Harper dismissed the audit’s findings on the grounds that Dingwall had "made the [expense] rules up himself. And those rules allowed him to claim any kind of expense he wanted." However while “the facts don’t matter” to the Conservatives and to their leader, an independent auditor was of a different opinion. "A separate audit into the process of reviewing the mint president's expenses found that crown corporation "goes well beyond what one could expect to find in most private sector corporations.''

According to the review by Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP -- a firm specializing in corporate law -- the mint has a stricter process for monitoring the spending of its chief executives than most private sector corporations." 

 http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/st ory/CTVNews/20051026/ding wall_audit_051025/2005102 6?hub=TopStories" title="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/st ory/CTVNews/20051026/ding wall_audit_051025/2005102 6?hub=TopStories" target="_blank"http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/Art...

All that being said, Martin’s actions during Dingwall gate were not entirely unexplainable. The major media organizations ran with Pallister’s allegations as if they were fact and after that the legions of Tory Toadies at Canwest and the Sun media chains carried the “story” for a month; they only fell silent when the price water house report came out. That brings me to yet another point. Canwest is a de facto extension of the Fraser Institute and Sun media a de facto extension of the Conservative party. The Liberals can not expect a fair accounting from either. Indeed, as various media studies have shown these organizations were entirely hostile to Martin and Martin is about as right wing as a Liberal gets. The Liberal party must start making better use of alternative media to get its message out. Blogs and internet forums are two vehicles and independent newspapers and student newspapers are another. The former need information; the latter need connections. The Liberal party also needs to start establishing relationships with the latter for other reasons. Many people working on student newspapers and independent newspapers move into the MSM.

The Liberals will also have to do a much better job of framing the debate. For reasons that defy explanation, Martin allowed Harper to frequently determine the terms of debate. Part of the problem was that Martin used the very terms of reference opposition leaders used. Martin’s use of the terms “democratic deficit” and during the election “fiscal imbalance” are good cases in point. (Liberals need to develop their own catch phrases instead of disastrously using other parties. For example, I suggested in the past that the Liberals give Canadians more vacation and that they refer to gap between what Canadians get in terms of vacation and what Europeans get as the “vacation gap”.) However, it went beyond that. Certain parties are associated with certain policy ideas. The Conservatives have long been the champion of mandatory minimums and a triple E senate. (Both are completely without merit by the way.) It makes little sense for another party, who has traditionally opposed to these ideas, to adopt these policies on short notice. However that is exactly what Martin did during the election. He pledged to do something about the “fiscal imbalance”, said he favored an elected senate and promised mandatory minimums. In the process he gave all the credit the parties associated with these policies and gained nothing in the process.

The last thing that the new Liberal leader will have to do is to purge the social Conservatives from within the Liberal party. Indeed, once the Conservatives and Bloc finish dismantling the spending powers of the Federal government, the ability of the Federal government to establish various social programs will be highly constrained. The Liberals will have no choice, but to develop a platform that is in tune with the new spending realties and as social conservatism is the one aspect of the Conservative platform not liked by most of the MSM and is not well liked by urbanites, the young and the educated, a socially liberal agenda is really the way to go. Furthermore, the party also needs to reestablish itself in Quebec and part of rebuilding process will be committing to policies that appeal to socially liberal Quebec. Start slowly and start with, oh, Tom Wappel. The added benefit of such a purge is that the party will get younger. Something the party badly needs to do.