$2,119 an hour. And you are paying it.

Snippet from next week’s Hill Times column, based on the intrepid reporting of CFRA’s Brian Lilley:

The dirty little contract was discovered by Brian Lilley of Ottawa’s CFRA.  Reports Lilley: “It’s a staggering amount for a contract that only lasts 8 months. The law firm McCarthy Tetrault is being paid $5,320,766.60 in a sole sourced contract. A contract worth almost 10 per cent of the inquiry’s $54 million budget,” he writes. 

“What is the work for? Well at this point, that is unknown. Despite phone calls and multiple emails, my simple questions to the inquiry have gone unanswered. Given all the coverage of problems at the inquiry, a contract like this should raise questions and those questions should be answered.”

The clandestine contract was to run from September 6, 2017 and end on May 15, 2018.  It wasn’t put up for competition because, Lilley reported, it supposedly related to “Consulting Services Regarding Matters of a Confidential Nature.”

A confidential nature.

As such, we still don’t really know why McCarthy Tetrault was handed this sole-sourced, “confidential” sweetheart deal.  We do know, however, the math about the cost.  Lilley worked it out.  “[The] $5.3 million fee is for a contract that lasts just 251 days. That works out to $21,198.27 for each day of the contract. If we assumed a 10-hour work day, that would mean McCarthy’s is billing out at $2,119 per hour.”

Read that again: $2,119 an hour.  Considering that the standard rate is $235 an hour, this contract verges on criminality. 


Five reasons why the David Livingston sentence is outrageous

David Livingston is someone with no criminal record – but he has a long, long record of community service and philanthropy. He is a good man who made a mistake. But it isn’t a mistake that deserves the outrageous and excessive sentence he received today – four months.

Here’s why:

  1. It is totally out of step with precedent.  Dean del Mastro, to cite just one recent and notorious example, falsified documents and had multiple violations of the Elections Act.  He got half the sentence Livingston did.  Half.
  2. There was no criminal act.  None. As the Judge himself admitted, more than once – no emails were deleted.  Not a single goddamn one.  How, then, could the same Judge arrive at such a ridiculous result?  It flies in the face of the law and the facts.
  3. It doesn’t fit the “crime.” In fact, it is completely disproportionate to the alleged crime.  Four months for “causing mischief to a computer”? Seriously: that’s what it came down to, at the end of a half-decade-long ordeal.  In Canada – where, you know, this supposed “offence” took place – people convicted of low-level mischief (as here), and who have no prior record (as here), will always receive a probationary period with either a suspended sentence or conditional discharge. Why didn’t Livingston?
  4. It flies in the face of the key principles of sentencing.  Those principles include denunciation and deterrence.  And does anyone truly believe, here, that Livingston hasn’t been utterly destroyed by this?  That his professional life is over, because he declined to listen to an ass-covering bureaucrat? Deterrence, too: I can assure all of you that every single political staffer in Canada has paid very close attention to this trial, and is appropriately deterred.
  5. It is so, so unfair.  True story: the guy who was brought in to prepare those computers for use by a new group of political staffers?  He’s a friend.  He’s a good man.  And, right around the time the OPP decided to target political staff for “deleting emails” that were never deleted – guess which organization he had been doing the same sort of work for, at the same time?

The OPP.  And they – like every Crown office, like every cop shop, like every judge’s chambers – has a shredder, and a delete button on every one of their keyboards.

I guess they’re all going to be charged with “mischief” now, too.

 


Donald Trump isn’t just an asshole

…he’s the biggest fucking idiot in the history of the world.



Ugly graphic

…but a beautiful trend line, if you are Mr. Ford or Ms. Horwath.

Perfect split on the Left.  For the only party on the Right, that’s about as good as it gets.



The United States of America is about to be saved by a porn star

…we live in interesting times.

Today’s front-page Washington Post report, headlined “A bomb on Trump’s front porch,” which is a just-as-interesting way of putting things:

…the FBI’s seizure on Monday of privileged communications between Trump and his private lawyer, Michael D. Cohen — as well as documents related to a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who has alleged a sexual affair with Trump — was a particularly extraordinary move that opens a whole new front in the converging legal battles ensnaring the administration.

Cohen is Trump’s virtual vault — the keeper of his secrets, from his business deals to his personal affairs — and the executor of his wishes.

“This search warrant is like dropping a bomb on Trump’s front porch,” said Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama.

…Tim O’Brien, author of the Trump biography “Trump Nation,” said the seizure of records from his private attorney probably would “smell of a mortal threat” by Trump. And, O’Brien added, “He is historically prone not to sit back and let the chips fall where they may. He is historically prone to come out with guns blazing.”

Cohen has long been a fixer for Trump, as well as his family and business, and associates said he was disappointed when he was not brought officially on board the campaign, and again when he was passed over for a coveted White House job.

“He’s done the dirty work that the president hasn’t wanted to do himself, and he’s been doing it for a decade,” O’Brien said.

 


One big happy CPC family

Once again proving my theory that Justin Trudeau is the luckiest politician on Earth.

Globe story:

Conservative MP Maxime Bernier says in a new book that party Leader Andrew Scheer won support from “fake Conservatives” set up by the powerful dairy lobby during last year’s federal Tory leadership race – a claim that could threaten party unity 18 months before the next general election.

Mr. Bernier, the four-term Quebec MP who currently serves as the Conservatives’ innovation critic, lost by a razor-thin margin to Mr. Scheer in last May’s leadership contest. A key plank in Mr. Bernier’s leadership bid was to scrap Canada’s supply-management system, which Mr. Scheer supports…

“Andrew, along with several other candidates, was then busy touring Quebec’s agricultural belt, including my own riding of Beauce, to pick up support from these fake Conservatives, only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges,” Mr. Bernier writes.

“Interestingly, one year later, most of them have not renewed their memberships and are not members of the party anymore.”


Column: faithlessness

Ah, ye little Faith.

Not that little, actually.  She’s tallish, slouching near the doors at Sun News Network, chain-smoking.  Smirking.

“Troll with a tan,” someone at the erstwhile network said about her. Uncharitably, but not inaccurately.  That indeed seemed to be the whole package: a suspiciously deep, orange-ish tan, and the sleeveless Fox News mien.  That’s it.

When she first appeared on Sun News, they’d hand her a microphone and tell her to go stand somewhere and pretend to be a reporter.  She’d slap on fake eyelashes the size of bats – and then she’d fire off words and sentences like a speed freak running an auction.  She was terrible.

In time, she’d slow down her delivery, reveal a bit more décolletage, and start sharing her views on-air.  Around the ill-fated right-wing network, it was pretty difficult to sound extreme: for many, fanaticism was the lingua franca.  But Faith Goldy – with figurative snakes slithering thorough her veins, and a clutch of metaphoric maggots in the spot where a heart should be – sounded extreme even to the extremists.

When Sun News slipped beneath the waves, however, no one was surprised to see her clutching at Ezra Levant’s dinghy, the S.S. Rebel.  The rightist trolls – living in their mom’s basement, pawing at their tiny gonads through their Avengers jammies as they eyeballed Faith’s clips on a continuous loop – loved her.  They positively ached for her. Faith was the one they wanted to marry, at a ceremony with lots of Wagner’s Rienzi, Die Meistersinger playing, and possibly an officiant from the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake.

But even as the rebels sought to curry favour with the so-called alt-Right, publishing columns titled “Ten Things I Hate About Jews” and doubting the Holocaust in commentaries, Faith Goldy went further.  She was more of a race-and-religion rebel than anyone at the Rebel.

The breaking point came in Charlottesville, which she was sent to cover for Ezra’s online lunatic asylum – where she’d be seen doing a stand-up not far from the woman who was mowed down by a white supremacist.  That terrible week, Faith appeared on the pro-Nazi Daily Stormer, opining that there was a need for a rise in “white racial consciousness.”  She also proclaimed that National Socialist types have “robust” and “well-thought-out” ideas on “the Jewish question.”  Levant, a Jew and no anti-Semite himself, finally fired her.

After that, Faith abandoned all pretense of restraint.  She was fully alone, piloting in dark, dark waters.

She started reciting The Fourteen Words, the credo of neo-Nazi terrorists in the Order – “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”  She went on someone’s show to promote a book about “the Jewish menace” – a book which calls for “putting an end to their unnatural, parasitic existence.”  She advocated for pedophile Milos Yiannopoulos, simply because she was encouraged by his brand of foul racism.  She tweeted “the future is Far Right.”  David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, took notice and commenced cheerily retweeting her stuff.  So did other lowlifes.

So, is Faith Goldy a neo-Nazi?  Who knows.  She certainly counts many Hitlerites among her friends and followers, doesn’t she?

Which naturally leads us to another question, one more relevant:  is Faith Goldy someone with whom Canadian political leaders should be seen?

Because they were, they were.  Lots of Conservative MPs – mainly male ones – scurried to get themselves photographed with Faith, for precisely the type of selfie about which they regularly criticize Justin Trudeau.

Faith’s biggest catch, in this regard, was one Andrew Scheer, aspirant to the Conservative throne.  At their February 2017 love-in, Faith pronounced that she was “so honoured and so blessed” to be elbow-to-elbow with Scheer, and the two chatted amiably about free speech (all for it), parental leave (for), and property rights (ditto).  At one point, Scheer suggested the two of them go duck hunting together.

Seriously.

Scheer gave at least two other interviews to Goldy’s Rebel network.  The fact that his campaign guru helped to found The Rebel may have had something to do with that.  Who knows.

But it is his congenial relationship with the vile, rebarbative Faith Goldy – and that of his fellow Conservative caucus members – that is likely to come back and haunt him.  What, in the immortal words of Jay Leno, was he thinking?  Is it ever wise to get chummy with a white supremacist, as Faith Goldy indisputably is?

No, it’s not.  And Andrew Scheer will be hearing and seeing more about Faith Goldy and her ilk, as his party edges ever-closer to an election.