One Young Staffer is Not Enough

Conservative operative Michael Sona, is taking the fall for the voter suppression scandal and has resigned as a staffer.  What the conservatives would like us to believe is that he acted alone.  Give me a break.

Sona, in the background during Ezra Levant's sponsorship of Ann Coulter, is a product of the Manning Centre for Destroying Democracy, fashioned after Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute. 

Voter suppression is one of the courses taught.

Journalist Jeff Horwitz signed up for a weekend seminar and wrote an excellent article on the subject.

The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson -- that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: "This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put [the polling place] somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting." The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout.

Just a matter of turnout".

Sona was the young man who tried to steal the ballot box at the University of Guelph, forcing the rules to be changed, ending the practice of making it easier for students to vote.  Harper knew that he'd lost the youth vote, so had to make sure they didn't vote at all.

These are the kinds of things these young operatives are taught.  They don't dream them up on their own.

So how much is Sona's "resignation" going to cost the Canadian taxpayer?  Two decades ago, Ezra Levant and Jason Kenney claimed that $40,000 would buy a lot of silence, when they paid off Matthew Johnston.
 
In 2011, Christiane Ouimet, the Harper appointed ethics czar was given $500,000, when she promised to head to Florida so as not to explain why she ignored more than 50 ethics complaints against the government.
 
So what's the going rate for silence in 2012?  Enough for Sona to start his own firm, I'll wager.
 
Sigh!"

The Smoking Gun That Will Help us to Bring Down the Harper Dictatorship?

Canada's former "integrity" officer has been found in Florida. After ignoring a subpoena on the advice no doubt of Harper himself, she's been on the lam.

Ignoring subpoenas is Harper's m.o. When a committee was investigating the alleged election financing fraud, he told witnesses to ignore the subpoenas, then he shut down the committee and called an election, keeping everything tied up in the courts for years.

Taxpayers foot the bill.

When the Afghan Detainee issue was becoming too hot to handle, Harper told witnesses to ignore subpoenas and shut down the committee by proroguing Parliament and has kept that tied up in the courts for months.

Taxpayers foot the bill. (130 million for the prorogation alone.)

So should we be surprised that former, apparently "lack of integrity" commissioner, Christiane Ouimet, has ignored the subpoena and fled the country? And as Lawrence Martin says, Harper will drag this out in the courts, hoping to get an election out of the way before having to answer to over 200 serious fraud related charges?

There’s Bev Oda. Then there is someone who makes Ms. Oda’s actions, judging from a recent Auditor-General’s report, look rather angelic. The elusive former integrity commissioner, Christiane Ouimet, was finally located last week – in Florida. And now that she has been located, the Conservative government may face one of its stiffest tests of damage control. Ms. Ouimet (rhymes with Antoinette) is the public servant who, according to Sheila Fraser’s damning report, did not do her job properly – choosing to investigate just seven of 228 complaints about wrongdoing in the public sector – possibly saving the Harper government multiple embarrassments.

After failing to appear before a parliamentary committee despite being subpoenaed, she sent a rather terse message to the committee through her lawyer
saying she was willing to return March 10 to face interrogators. What a show it promises to be. Given the large number of uninvestigated cases that came before
her, the possibility of smoking guns suddenly appearing on the government’s doorstep can hardly be discarded.

Apparently many are very serious. Could we see some go to jail? I mean the Conservatives claim to be tough on crime. But then if they only stole from taxpayers it doesn't count, right?