To go with Canadian election season, I am reading books about Stephen Harper, his party, and his movement. I have got Lawrence Martin’s “Harperland”, Marci McDonald’s “The Armageddon Factor”, and I have ordered Christian Nadeau’s “Rogue in Power”.
I thought I might put some of the interesting quotes out on this blog as I encounter them.
I started with Harperland by Lawrence Martin.
A great quote from Harper on pg. 29:
To go with Canadian election season, I am reading books about Stephen Harper, his party, and his movement. I have got Lawrence Martin’s “Harperland”, Marci McDonald’s “The Armageddon Factor”, and I have ordered Christian Nadeau’s “Rogue in Power”.
I thought I might put some of the interesting quotes out on this blog as I encounter them.
I started with Harperland by Lawrence Martin.
A great quote from Harper on pg. 29:
“We are going to change the way government works in Ottawa,” the Conservative leader pledged. The sponsorship scandal, he said, happened “because of a culture of entitlement in the Liberal Party. And it happened because that party allowed the veils of secrecy to close around its actions.”
Gotta hate those veils of secrecy. Except when the Tories need them, for example, to hide the secret dealings of Harper’s senior policy advisor Bruce Carson, a major source for Harperland, and who “is accused of bragging to officials with the firm H2O Global Group that he had special access to the Prime Minister and was closely connected to the Tory cabinet. He also allegedly met with federal officials on behalf of the company, which was trying to get its water systems used by a federal pilot project to improve drinking water on native reserves.”
Carson’s fiancee somehow managed to get “an agreement that would have provided her 20 per cent of gross revenues from its sales to native reserves, but that was cancelled in February. Now her compensation is tied to “performance measures” such as bringing employment and education to First Nations communities.”
Veils of secrecy are also a real bane, except when the government needs to mislead the rest of parliament on, say, the cost of a crime program (which is better-termed a prison program), some fighter jets, or whether to throw a stray “not” into a funding memo for a development organization – and lying about it.
Ah, those veils of secrecy. Can’t campaign without them, can’t govern without them.
