Friday, September 14, 2007

The Globe lays down the smack

Following-up my post last night on Janke’s laughable attempt to divert attention from his party’s shady election ad scandal, the Globe reports this morning that the Conservative caucus tried, and failed, to make hay with the same phony allegations against Stephane Dion in a committee haring yesterday:

The Conservatives also launched damage-control tactics by "revealing" complicated transactions employed by Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion in the 2004 election that, upon examination, turned out to be typical transfers to pay for election-campaign lawn signs and reimburse debt.

I love how the Globe put quotes around the word revealing. It’s like the print equivalent of air quotes. And who says it’s hard to convey sarcasm in print? It’s dripping off that paragraph. As the Globe reports, even a cursory examination of the Conservative “allegations” easily proved them to be without merit:
In fact, Elections Canada filings show that the transfer was one of two that the party made in the same month to pay back $44,719.17 it owed Mr. Dion's riding association - a debt reported publicly six months earlier.
So, that Conservative-initiated diversionary sideshow dealt with, what were the Conservatives really up to yesterday?
The Conservatives successfully staved off attempts yesterday to launch a Commons probe into allegations that the party circumvented national election spending limits in last year's election by funnelling $1.2-million through local candidates.

Tory MPs used procedural tactics to delay a vote on opening a probe - after engineering similar delays in three hearings this week. That means that the probe cannot be launched before Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogues Parliament this weekend, ending the current session of the Commons and delaying the return of MPs until a new session is opened Oct. 16.

Yes, they turned to their trusty old how to stonewall committee meetings handbook to stop Parliament from investigating their shady doings. Wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude they have something to hide, wouldn’t it?

Stonewalling investigations. Another example of accountability, Conservative style?

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9 comments:

le politico said...

Unless you can find money, in envelopes, being exchanged, in our cities..then this money moving exercise will never be a big deal.

It certainly won't stop the CPC, (along with the NDP, and the Bloc) from winning seats on Monday.

Jeff said...

This may surprise you, but to break laws it isn't necessary for envelopes to be involved. But keep spinning.

Lord Kitchener's Own said...

"It's like the print equivalent of air quotes".

:-)

That's hillarious. I can just see some scene from SCTV where some Medieval scholar is trying to figure out how to express in writing that thing people do with their fingers, and he invents the quotation mark! LOL

Priceless.

Lord Kitchener's Own said...

Sometimes, even when you find money being exchanged in envelopes it's not a big deal. As long as it's not a Liberal.

Or maybe it's because the $300,000 in cash Mulroney received in those hotel rooms wasn't technically in envelopes? I'd imagine $100,000 could require a big envelop. Maybe it was in some sort of bankers bag or something, so that doesn't count.

LOL

Oxford County Liberals said...

If the court finds the case in favour of Elections Canada, le politico, it won't matter if envelopes can be found or not.

It'll be pretty easy for people to understand "The court found that the Conservatives cheated"

le politico said...

Spin? I'm talking about it not being a "big deal" in the court of public opinion. Which it isn't. No need to spin that.

Like Dion, it's not sexy enough to gain any traction.

le politico said...

As for the court of law...I'm willing to wager a Timmy's run that the court (if it gets that far) will call on Elections Canada, or Parliament, to clarify the wording of the section in question.

Partisan arguments aside, obviously it is not cut and dried whether any actual wrong-doing occurred. Spirit vs. letter of the law, etc..

Scotian said...

Right, it won't be a big deal to the public that a party was willing to end run election laws designed to keep elections fair and honest. Only those that already hold the electoral process in contempt could think such nonsense. What makes this such a serious matter is that the CPC appears to have deliberately (and not for the first time either) played games with election laws so as to give themselves an unfair (and potentially illegal, which btw does not automatically mean criminal, something some folks forget is that there is more law out there than just criminal) advantage over all other parties. Worse, it appears this was engineered by the national leadership of the CPC as a deliberate end run around those laws, showing that this was no rogue operation but one sanctioned and designed by the very top levels of the CPC. Right, Canadians wouldn't care at all for such a thing...after all Canadians are so well known for holding the rule of law in contempt aren't we...

Jeff said...

obviously it is not cut and dried whether any actual wrong-doing occurred. Spirit vs. letter of the law, etc..

We'll agree to disagree there, and wait for the courts to decide I guess, because I don't really see it as that grey an area at all.