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Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The mistakes of the "strong Conservative majority" coming back to take a bite


On the heels of the two Conservative senators' scandals, Pamela Wallin's travel expenses  that show she was  milking the taxpayers and Mike Duffy's living expenses exposing him to be a cheat...  now we have yet another appointee of the Harper machine connected to a much bigger scandal.   Are there more fearsome skeletons in the Conservative closet?  Wonder how many more errors in hiring judgement the Cons have made so far that we don't know anything about .... as yet.

Human nature being what it is, I will readily admit that people who are honest themselves, like our PM Stephen Harper, tend to think people they happen to  know and admire are also like them. Look in your own backyard.  Haven't there been times when you thought someone was a "good" person and then you got slapped in the face with that person's  alter ego  ... a cheat, a liar or even worse?

PM Harper has now learnt a bitter lesson and from the second link below  I can premise that  he will always from now on insist on thorough investigation of any and all appointees to any post within his government.  A wise man learns through his mistakes.

FromCTVNews:
....The man once entrusted to keep an eye on Canada's spy agency is now a wanted man.
An arrest warrant is out for Arthur Porter, the former head of the CSIS watchdog agency, for alleged fraud in one of the country's most expensive infrastructure projects.
He is among the five people named in arrest warrants issued Wednesday by Quebec's anti-corruption squad, in the case of the $1.3-billion construction of a Montreal mega-hospital.
The warrants say the men are wanted on numerous charges -- including fraud, breach of trust and document forgery. They say Porter and Elbaz are wanted under suspicion of having accepted bribes from some of the others.
Porter was the director general of the McGill University Hospital Centre when the alleged fraud occurred.
He was also head of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which he joined in 2008 before becoming its chairman in 2010.
Porter resigned under suspicious circumstances in 2011, and has since left the country. After that affair, the federal government tightened the screening process for nominees to the intelligence committee.
Quebec's provincial police anti-corruption squad has made numerous arrests over the last year in relation to ongoing scandals in the construction industry..........

From TheGobe&Mail:
The Harper government quietly introduced  strict security vetting for nominees to Canada’s spy watchdog after chairman Arthur Porter resigned amid concerns about his business dealings.
Appointees to the Security Intelligence Review Committee now must be security cleared to the top-secret level – a rigorous process that wasn’t in place when Mr. Porter joined in 2008 or became chairman in 2010............

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