The Tyee Trolls Andrew Scheer

The headline says it all - "SCHEER AMBITION: The Private Sector Months. And Then - to Government."  It's apparently the first in a series on the life and times of Chuckles, our would-be prime minister.

Andrew Scheer has a problem. No one likes to be labelled a career politician — particularly not a Conservative. The conservative ideal is Cincinnatus, that noble Roman who left his fields to save the Republic before returning once again to his plow. But the Conservative leader is neither Cincinnatus nor silver-tongued Cicero. Nor, as his zig-zag to power shows, is he Voltaire, the defender of free speech whose mantle Scheer has often sought to don.

...It stands to reason that Cincinnatus might have had a more difficult time taking power had he been revealed to be a resume-padding stable boy, but ultimately no one is likely to have supported Scheer due to a sterling career peddling supplementary hail coverage anyway. His qualifications, for good or ill, are political.

You Loved Him When He Tore into Stephen Harper. Probably Not So Much Now. Michael Harris Takes Justin to the Woodshed.

Corruption, the exercise of official powers without regard for the public good, exacts a monstrous cost on multiple levels.

Michael Harris is at it again, casting bones and reading entrails, Justin Trudeau's this time. He writes it's not looking good for Canada's prime minister.

None of this needed to happen. 

The PM could have admitted to a terrible judgement call two months ago when the story of his interference in a criminal case broke in the Globe and Mail. He could have apologized to the former attorney general and let justice run its course. 

Instead, the prime minister and his PMO have staggered from one communications disaster to the next as their story kept changing. Along the way, four very senior public figures, two Liberal cabinet ministers, the clerk of the privy council, and the PM’s principal secretary have bitten the dust. Now Wilson-Raybould and Philpott are tossed off the stern of the party’s boat. 

[Yesterday's] ethical ineptitude was preceded by another — the PMO and Privy Council Office’s reaction to the “secret” tape that the former attorney general made of a call with the clerk of the privy council. It was the death march of absurdity. 

The clerk, Michael Wernick, would have Canadians believe that he never briefed the prime minister on what was arguably the hottest file on the government’s radar — the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin for bribery and corruption in Libya. If true, Wernick makes Rip Van Winkle look hyperactive. 

Wernick’s explanation for this comic narrative is that it was Dec. 19, 2018, and “everyone went on holidays.” As every clerk of the privy council knows, the PMO never sleeps. And as Wernick may or may not know, Trudeau remained in Ottawa until he visited the troops in Mali on Dec. 22. The PM did not go on holiday until Dec. 23 that year.

Besides, there are Wernick’s own words on the Raybould tape: “Well, I am going to have to report back before he leaves.” Nowhere did he say “after the holidays.” 

Wernick’s account was adopted with slight modifications by the PMO. The office claimed that Trudeau had not been fully aware of what had been said in the conversation between the clerk and Wilson-Raybould. You might call that implausible deniability. The weasel word here is “fully.” 

Now that the Wernick tape is public, it is obvious that it would have taken a five-second briefing to convey to the PM Wilson-Raybould’s bottom line: She was not happy about the perceived pressure, and she was not going to change her mind. 

...The plain words on the tape explode the heart of the PM’s defence in this story. Trudeau had maintained that if his ex-minister had had a problem with how the government was handling the SNC-Lavalin case, she should have come to him. The “if only I’d known” gambit. 

The tape makes crystal clear that Wilson-Raybould did exactly that with the clerk. In fact, Wernick tells Wilson-Raybould on the tape that he would be reporting their conversation to the PM. 

The crowning irony of the Wernick tape? On it, the clerk says that the prime minister still thinks there are lawful things Raybould can do to square away the SNC-Lavalin case without a criminal trial. 

Think about that. The PM giving legal advice to the very person who, as chief-law-officer of the Crown, is supposed to be giving advice to him. She, the attorney general and lawyer who had already decided the matter; he, the prime minister and former teacher, who wanted that changed. 

Besides, Trudeau didn’t have to wait for the briefing that Wernick claims he never gave to know where Wilson-Raybould stood on the SNC-Lavalin case. 

Five days before she “took the extraordinary and otherwise inappropriate step” of recording what she believed would be an “inappropriate conversation” with the clerk of the privy council, the attorney general wrote a letter to the prime minister himself. It was a reply to an earlier letter from the PM written on Dec. 6, and received at the Justice Department on Dec. 7.

Trudeau’s letter to his then-attorney general included a copy of a letter that Neil Bruce, SNC-Lavalin’s CEO, had sent to the PM. In that letter, Bruce complained that his company had not been granted negotiations for remediation under Canada’s new Deferred Prosecution Agreement law. He asked for a meeting with the PM at his “earliest convenience.” 

It is easy to understand why the CEO would write such a letter. If the company were convicted in the current court case, it could face a 10-year ban on bidding on federal contracts in Canada. 

So SNC-Lavalin’s interest in appealing to the PM is obvious. But with a criminal case before the courts, why would Trudeau forward that letter to the attorney general? Did he really think it was okay to personally lean in with the full weight of his office on due process? 

After “closely” reading the PM’s letter, Wilson-Raybould replied to him on Dec. 14, 2018. It was an attempt to save a puppy running loose on the Trans Canada.

The real face of this "decent man."

What should bother Canadians about the PM’s take on this matter is that his stand on SNC-Lavalin is not just a one-off. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the first federal leader to argue that Trudeau is not the champion of the middle class he claims to be, but rather a consistent corporate cheerleader. He talks the talk for the environment, Indigenous rights, and human rights; but for Big Business, he walks the walk. 

Canadians saw Trudeau the corporate cheerleader in Houston, where he told a group of Texas oilmen that no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave it there. 

They saw the same thing when the PM dismissed the solid opposition of coastal British Columbians to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, and instead paid the Texas oil company $4.3 billion for this leaky relic and vowed to get the expansion to tidewater. 

They saw it again on Canada’s East Coast, where Trudeau denied that Ottawa had environmental jurisdiction over a project that plans to dump toxic pollutants from a kraft pulp mill owned by Northern Pulp into prime fishing grounds in the Northumberland Strait. 

And now, they see it once more with the PM and his minions interfering in an active criminal case involving SNC-Lavalin. That violates the heart of the judicial system: the complete independence of the prosecution service under the law. 

...It was the former attorney-general, Wilson-Raybould, who protected the government from the potentially deadly charge of interfering in a criminal case the way potentates do in corrupt Third-World countries. It was the PM and his over-zealous operatives who put the government in jeopardy by trying to violate the independence of the prosecution service, and arguably obstructing justice. 

Yet not a peep out of the Liberal lemmings about the PM tampering with the criminal justice process. Instead, general apoplexy about the former attorney general having recorded a conversation with the clerk of the privy council without his knowledge. That is like screeching about a leaky faucet while the house is on fire. 

Now, before you "Liberal lemmings" launch into your usual tirade about "Con media," this is The Tyee, not the National Post. And Michael Harris is no Con stooge either. If you've got a problem, it's yours and it's the way you recoil from the truth.

Enron's Patsy. How Kinder Morgan Played Trudeau and Canada for Suckers.

Steve Kean knows how to play hardball from his days as senior vice president of government affairs with the long defunct Enron corporation. Now, on behalf of the son of Enron, Kinder Morgan, Kean is using those skills to roll Justin Trudeau, Bill Morneau and the people of Canada. The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk casts the bones and reads the entrails. It's not a pretty sight.

The Trudeau federal government has made itself a pathetic hostage to a Texas-based pipeline company known for its cheapness and debt. 

The economic sleaziness of the drama, which should upset most Canadians, has been largely ignored by the financial mainstream press. 

But here’s the rub: Kinder Morgan doesn’t have the money it needs to twin a high-risk $7.4 billion pipeline, and has been looking for a way out for some time. 

Meanwhile, it has blamed entirely predictable and expected project delays on the B.C. government as well as First Nations and municipal resistance to the pipeline.

But then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a smiling hostage, walked into the room and declared the construction of the megaproject a matter of “national interest” — without so much as an independent cost-benefit analysis.

On April 8, Kinder Morgan grabbed Trudeau by his bituminous lapels and delivered a Texas-sized ransom note: bail us out or we’ll walk away from your stinking national interest on May 31.

...money and not political uncertainty — a reliable companion of the project from the first day of public hearings — is the central issue here.
Faced with the iron law of megaprojects (“over schedule and over budget and over and over again”), Kinder Morgan simply wants to walk away from an unviable project whose costs have ballooned from $5.4 billion to more than $7.4 billion. 

The con game has been unfolding for several years now. 

In 2011 Kinder Morgan, whose early business mantra was “Cheap, Cheap, Cheap,” finagled with the National Energy Board to get a special fee — paid by oil producers no less — to help cover the costs for regulatory filings on a carbon risky pipeline expansion. 

With other people’s money — about $286 million according to economist Robyn Allan — it then proposed to twin an existing 65-year-old pipeline across the Rocky Mountains to move 500,000 barrels of heavy oil to the coast. 

In 2013 the U.S. company promised the National Energy Board that it would happily finance the project with 100 per cent of its own money.

Kaching, kaching, kaching

At the time the company estimated that the project would cost a modest $5.4 billion. 

Today that figure has now ballooned to $7.4 billion, and economists such as Robyn Allan predict the project can’t be completed for less than $9 billion.

Ottawa's Gross Ineptitude

If the federal government really wanted to act in the national interest it could insist that companies upgrade bitumen into a higher value petroleum product that doesn’t require imported diluent (costly natural gas liquids) to transport it through a pipeline. 

Such a move would create high-paying refining jobs and free up pipeline capacity monopolized by the transport of 600,000 barrels of diluent now needed to move 1.6 million barrels of raw bitumen a day.
But the National Energy Board, a captured regulator, never looked at these alternatives and never questioned Kinder Morgan’s ability to finance the project, even though a sharp Wall Street analyst aptly described the firm in 2013 as “a house of cards.” 

Nor did Canada’s pathetic energy regulator challenge bogus claims made by Kinder Morgan that heavy oil would fetch higher prices in Asian markets — a complete falsehood. 

The federal government, however, did appoint a Kinder Morgan consultant to the NEB board during the scandal-plagued regulatory hearings to highlight their bias.

Dupes and Saps, Making Suckers of Us All

After failing to raise money in U.S. markets — a clear signal that North American investors didn’t regard the project as a smart idea — the Houston firm used its Canadian subsidiary to raise a skimpy $1.7 billion in 2017. 

But those monies didn’t go to the pipeline expansion project. Instead Kinder Morgan used it to pay off more U.S. debt. 

Although Kinder Morgan Canada arranged $5.5 billion in construction facility loans from Canadian banks, that still left the subsidiary with a $2 billion equity hole to fill. 

Rather than admit that it can’t raise the money and face a financial drubbing, Kinder Morgan shrewdly blamed long-standing and predictable public opposition from First Nations, the City of Burnaby and the government of British Columbia as a project stopper. 

But it cleverly waited for the Canadian government, a modern shill for oil lobbyists, to first promise a $1.5 billion ocean spill response subsidy and then declare the project a matter of “national interest.” 

The Trudeau government, which promised the Chinese Communists an energy pipeline to the coast as part of any free trade deal, has now signalled to investors that if the marketplace won’t fund a foolhardy project then Canadian taxpayers will be sacrificed instead.

...Whenever you scratch a megaproject, says the Oxford business professor Bent Flyvbjerg, you’ll likely find a toxic brew of underestimated costs, inflated revenues, discounted environmental impacts and overvalued benefits.  

That description fits Kinder Morgan’s pipeline proposal better than a speedy downhill weld. 

And now a brain-dead federal government with unhealthy commitments to China wants to rescue a truly bad megaproject championed by the bastard child of Enron and a bunch of climate-denying Texans. 

The result will be an unprecedented disaster for Canadian taxpayers.

Want Some Real Election News? You'll Have to Visit The Tyee.

This week The Tyee is chock full of helpful opinion pieces on our curious federal election and what it means to Canadians.

It begins with a report on how the Conservatives could kill off British Columbia's shipyards.

In two British Columbia seaside ridings fears of job loss stem from a move by the Conservatives some see as a gambit to shore up support in Quebec leading into this election.
 
The concerns arise from a $35 billion contract the Conservatives promised to two shipyards -- a contract B.C. shipbuilders fear they won't get, spelling the end of the province's industry. 

Murray Dobbin laments "Our Wounded Democracy" in which voter apathy has paved the way for Stephen Harper to run roughshod over democracy in Canada.

What does it say about our democracy when the prime minister can with impunity demonstrate contempt for it and repeatedly violate its rules, conventions and the independence of its institutions and agencies?

Combined with a trend towards disturbingly low turnouts in federal elections, there is reason to start using the term crisis in describing Canadian democracy.

Visiting scribe Aleeza Kahn offers a "compare and contrast" piece on Britain's Conservative prime minister David Cameron and our own Conservative PM Harper.


While Cameron is desperate to be seen as fresh, Harper lumbers like a dinosaur of Canadian politics. He's ruthless, old fashioned, someone you wouldn't particularly want to have a beer with but wouldn't mind running the country. Bluntly put, he's dull. And has Lego-man hair.

Crawford Kilian examines "Tom Flanagan's Playbook for Ultimate Harper Victory."


The key lesson: Fear works. Raising money to support Harper's leadership campaign taught him to follow "the time-honoured advice for raising money by direct mail -- make people angry and afraid, and set up an opponent for them to give against."