It’s getting hard to explain Canada to my friends and family in the U.S.
Liberals looking after liberals, who are looking after liberals, who are being paid by us taxpayers to look after other liberals, who steal money from us to pay liberals who hire liberals to bribe other liberals who steal more cash from us so that they can pay-off liberals to monitor liberals in the hopes of electing liberals and duping non-liberal Canadians and ultimately making a Mo Liberal Canada.
Taxpayers foot $1M bill for Liberals’ sponsorship ‘war room’
Secret team monitors Gomery inquiry, prepares for fallout
The Liberal government has set up a secret war room—at a cost of about $1 million to Canadian taxpayers—to handle the fallout from the Gomery commission.Documents obtained by the Citizen through the Access to Information Act reveal that the rapid-response war room, which is in almost daily contact with the Prime Minister’s Office and the government’s top bureaucrat, Alex Himelfarb, operates out of the Privy Council Office.
The cost of the strategic office, which does everything from preparing answers for question period in the House of Commons to keeping the Prime Minister’s Office abreast of testimony at the inquiry, covers the salaries of staff and expenses.
The war room and its cost came to light on the heels of last week’s complaints from Justice John Gomery about officials exaggerating the cost of his inquiry.
[…] One memo to Mr. Himelfarb indicates the strategy office was set up almost immediately after the Martin government launched the inquiry in February 2004 upon the release of Auditor General Sheila Fraser’s damning report on the sponsorship program.
Dated Feb. 18, 2004, the memo describes “the intergovernmental co-ordination group” being set up in the PCO, the nerve centre of the federal government, under the proposed direction of bureaucrat Guy McKenzie. However, the summary and attachments are mostly blanked out, under section 23 of the Access to Information Act, due to “solicitor/client privilege.”
The office’s operating budget now totals $1,068,000 after its first-year budget of $534,000 in 2004-05 was renewed for a second year, according to Hali Gernon of the PCO.
Ms. Gernon said the office has a small staff of about “four or five” employees and since June 2004 has been under the direction of lawyer Ursula Menke, the former deputy commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard and inspector general of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Claiming “solicitor/client privilege,” the PCO did not release any of the meeting minutes or briefing notes of the co-ordinating committee in response to the Access to Information request made by Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin.
Ciuineas Boyle, the co-ordinator of the PCO’s access to information and privacy branch, said that no briefing notes to or from Ms. Menke had been located.
[…]
Sounds about right.
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