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Imagine a 100-mile house
The 100-mile diet showed how difficult, yet rewarding, it can be to eat locally produced food. Now the Architecture Foundation of B.C. is trying to do the same thing – and start a movement toward local sourcing for home building – through a design contest that is sparking interest around the world.
read moreLinks between election fraud and oil interests are so thick, it appears bitumen itself is lubricating the connections.
OVER TWO DAYS in January, 2010, the Manning Centre for Building Democracy held a campaign school at Delta Ocean Pointe Resort in Victoria in preparation for the 2011 election. Revelations of what went on during those two days has yielded intriguing insight into what might lie behind the current robocall scandal. The Manning Centre is a Conservative think-tank operating out of Calgary, headed by Preston Manning, and board members include Gwyn Morgan, ex-CEO of EnCana Corp and other luminaries of the oil and gas industry.
Dear Canada,
We tried to warn you.
My name is Briony Penn—I am a journalist, lecturer, environmentalist and ran as a political candidate in the 2008 federal election. My other claim to fame is being the candidate that had the most to lose when our riding became the first “victim” of illegal robocalls. We were also the first to try and warn Canadians what was coming up in the next election, but our complaints were inadequately investigated by Elections Canada and ignored by most mainstream media. If the Elections Canada complaint had been investigated properly, then the outcome of the 2011 election may well have looked very different.
Back in 2008, I was running as a Liberal candidate in Saanich Gulf Island trying to defeat incumbent Conservative Minister of Natural Resources, Gary Lunn. This riding was a logical choice to try out new political approaches—it is as far from Ottawa as you can get and likely to receive less attention over attempts at either electoral reform or irregularities. The riding’s strategic location at the edge of the Pacific also put it at the heart of the national debate over whether bitumen should or could be safely distributed here via tankers and pipelines. Lunn’s agenda was well supported by some members of the Albertan oil patch who also chose to retire to this riding, like political colleague, Premier Christie Clark’s right hand advisor and former fundraiser for Harper and the Conservative Party, Gwyn Morgan, ex CEO and Director of EnCana Corp. with obvious attachments to the outcome of the election for his business interests.
The NDP, the Greens and the Liberals had all asked me to run, ( Globe and Mail, March 15, 2007) so electoral reform was on my platform—an informal coalition for progressive voters, in order to avoid splitting the vote and allowing Lunn to win again with only 37% of the vote. Stephane Dion, supported this idea, (which later the opposition parties implemented in Ottawa, before being pro-rogued by Harper.) Against the odds, our strategy for coalescing the vote appeared to be successful and after the NDP candidate stepped down in the last week of the campaign, I was leading the polls. The same poll listed the NDP’s share of the vote at 1%. That’s when strange things started to happen.
Lunn’s campaign manager Byng Giraud, denied being asked to do “dirty tricks” in an interview with Lawrence Martin (Globe and Mail, March 1 2012) but admitted that the party had a separate team that worked on swing ridings—an important point for a national investigation, as querying local riding staff might lead nowhere. Really dirty tricks started happening in the last week of the election.
Four so-called third party Conservative advertisers, all registered with the same lawyer’s office under the name of lawyer Bruce Hallsor, started bombarding the riding with new advertising for Lunn’s campaign. Bruce Hallsor is a prominent Conservative operative and not without his influence on electoral process. As former member of the BC Chief Electoral Officer’s Advisory Committee, Vice–President of the Conservatives’ Saanich Gulf Island Electoral District Association, former director of Fair Voting BC he was also named in Election Canada’s investigation into the in-and-out scheme for his capacity as co-chair of the Conservative campaigns in BC in 2006. I had met him—in the meeting convened by Elections Canada officials prior to the election for all candidates, their managers, agents and riding association presidents. Under the Canada Elections Act, third party groups must be just that, third party and arms length, with no collusion between the campaign workers and the third party. The man I was sitting next to in this meeting seemed far from arms length to his Conservative candidate sitting next to him.
These four groups enabled an additional $12,000 to flood the riding with money to fight the campaign. Gwyn Morgan’s wife Patricia Trottier was named as the contact people for one of the ‘astroturf’ organizations “Economic Advisory Council of Saanich” that both prior and after election day didn’t exist. Gary Lunn’s campaign manager, Giraud failed to mention to Lawrence that he didn’t need to be asked when paying for third party signs—signs that my canvas team watched (and reported to Elections Canada) being erected by Lunn’s official sign team alongside their official signs (Elections Canada Complaint S-GI). [Articles following this story are included in this PDF document Summary of SGI Election Articles-3]
On the eve of the election, October 13th, 2008, the last of a series of very irregular activities took place. A robocall went out to NDP supporters, purporting to be from the NDP campaign office and urging them to vote for their candidate. No mention was made in the call that the candidate had stepped down, or that his withdrawal was too late to have his name removed from the ballot. Confusion followed on election day. At the end of election night, I had received 25,367 votes, Lunn 27,988 and the non-existent NDP candidate went from the 1% predicted to 6% of the vote—3,667 votes. That this might be an illegal activity affecting an election outcome had crossed many people’s minds.
Complaints were filed with the RCMP by Bill Graham, president of the NDP Saanich-Gulf Island riding association, the person whose name was fraudulently used in the call. Nothing came of that police investigation. We received dozens of emails, letters and phone calls encouraging us to make an official complaint to Elections Canada and many academics, Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch and Will Horter of Dogwood Initiative—one of the groups named by current Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver as an “enemy of Canada” waded into express their concerns for the dangerous precedent that had been set. The local mainstream Victoria newspaper referred to it as “spoofing,” sparking a response by Rebecca Johnson, associate Professor of Law at the University of Victoria who wrote an editorial response (Times Colonist, October 25, 2008) “to treat it as a spoof is to undercut public respect not only for democracy and democratic process but also for the rule of law. We deserve better.”
Our riding association, led by law student volunteer Sebastian Silva with riding association president Paul McKivett, put together a formidable complaint package to Elections Canada on all the irregularities dated February 5th of 2009. This included all the alleged breaches of the Canada Elections Act and the Criminal Code for both the robocall and third party Conservative advertising which we believed were linked, though had no evidence. We received this response on March 2, 2009 from legal counsel for Elections Canada, John Dickson. (page 1, page 2) “Our investigator found no one who had actually been influenced in their vote because of the purported telephone call. Nor was he able to identify the source of the person or persons who actually made the calls. As a result of the foregoing, our investigation has now been concluded.” With regard to the third party advertisers, Dickson wrote “it is within the discretion of the Political Financing and Audit Directorate to refer the matter to the Commissioner for his consideration.”
Following that inadequate response, we reiterated our concerns and notified the press, with little uptake except by Andrew McLeod of the Tyee who had been a tireless reporter through this issue, and the watch dog groups. Conacher publicly stated that there was evidence of collusion between the third party groups. He also pointed out that that it was illegal under the Elections Act to induce someone to vote or not to vote “by any pretense of contrivance” regardless of whether they were successful or not. (Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former Chief Electoral officer until 2007, confirmed that making fraudulent phone calls is still an illegal activity whether or not it affected the election outcome on CBC’s The Current, March 2nd 2012.) Both Conacher and Horter had written that the failure to fully investigate had ramifications for future elections. Conacher wrote “If they are allowed to get away with this [in SGI] what happens if there’s a case where the candidate is still there? Someone could do bulk calling on behalf of whichever candidate you think will split your candidate’s vote.” Horter wrote in his March 28th, blog of 2009, “If someone with subpoena powers doesn’t step up with some investigative muscle, I predict many more Karl-Rove like black-up operations in future elections.”
Meanwhile, the NDP ethics critic in March of 2009 called for Lunn to step down with regard to the third party allegations until the investigation was carried out—except no one had any way of knowing if and how the investigation was ever carried out. Our riding association and the citizen’s groups continued to push Elections Canada for over a year. My last personal email inquiry elicited this response in March of 2010. “In this case, this Office examined thoroughly the complaints received and advised the complainants that there is no evidence that the Canada Elections Act has been contravened.” No follow up was ever sent and the riding association president was told the case was closed. Conancher has subsequently done an analysis of Election Canada’s enforcement of the Canada Elections Act since 2004 “revealing that the main problem is no one can tell whether Elections Canada has been enforcing the law fairly and properly because it has failed to report details of how it has investigated and ruled on 2,284 complaints in the past years.”
Harper has come out on the offensive, characterizing people like myself as sore losers. Yes we are all sore losers when we start losing our democracy and illegal petrostate-like politics become the norm. These transgressions rank up there with stealing ballot boxes, more typically associated with unstable regimes. From my experiences in the last few years, we must demand an international review of this structured attack on democracy, because our current internal watchdog institution is either incapable of dealing with this issue, or has been instructed to ignore our concerns from the top.
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Stephen Harper’s government doesn’t want “socialist billionaires” messing with Canada’s resources unless they are from China.
Download pdf of current edition
February 2012 (14.9 MB)
read morehttp://ourworld.unu.edu/en/fishy-decision-herring-stock-depletion-in-canada/
In what many are calling a dangerous and reckless move, in November of 2011 Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans opened a massively scaled-up winter herring fishery on the country’s west coast.
To take last winter’s 238 tonnes total harvest weight and increase it to an unprecedented 6,000 tonnes could knock back all the recent small recoveries of many local resident herring populations in the Salish Sea, a large area of coastal waters off of British Columbia, Canada, and Washington state in the United States.”
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Coastal sandhill cranes are the extraordinary birds who nest on the remote offshore islands, around which the bitumen tankers would have to turn on their treacherous journey to Kitimaat. This paper that Krista Roessingh presented at the North American Crane Workshop in 2011 is in press but will be available soon. This represents the results of three seasons of our research into the coastal sandhill cranes—a small contribution to a very rich traditional Heiltsuk knowledge.
Many congratulations to Krista, Ingmar, Dessie, Jessie, Doug, Larry, Qqs Koeye Camp kids and everyone in Bella Bella that worked or helped on this project. Special thanks to Don Arney who devoted his time, skill and helicopter. Many thanks too to Tom Hoffman who seeded the project.
And a final thanks to the late Dr. Ian McTaggart Cowan who provided the only western data at the time from his 1929 trip to Spider Island where he first saw the cranes and whose field journals established the ‘western’ proof that cranes had been nesting and foraging in the same location 70 years earlier, when their numbers were perilously close to extinction due to hunting pressures. These cranes have only just recovered in the last 20 years and the threat of an oilspill would destroy their ability to feed their young. Read the story in Focus Magazine of the “Cranes of Spider Island” 2006 page 1 and page 2 and the “Cranes of Campania” 2008 page 1 and page 2.
June 2011 New Watercolours at Starfish Gallery on Salt Spring Island…
