Update 2:
ADSCAM - if this took place in the USA , it would probably fall under racketeering sections but of course these are mere allegations -- yes, allegations, of course.
Search: intimidation , Denis Coderre , Liberal Yvonne Charbonneau. , Conservative MP Diane Ablonczy , Irene Marcheterre , Jean Lapierre , Benoit CorbeilUpdate: a new post on the Gomery Inquiry
UPDATE ON ADSCAM via Kate posted on Newsbeat1.
Politics Watch is reporting on the Corbeil testimony, and the Paul Martin camp makes another appearance.
The former director of the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal party testified at the Gomery inquiry Monday that he paid nine party staff members and officials $50,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes shortly before the 2000 federal election. [. . . . ]
Link for the rest and for other items.
Desperadoes holed up in No Hope Canyon--The Liberals await "justice"Day by day, more evidence is presented against the Liberals. As Chuck Guite played tag team match with the twin bruisers, Benoit Corbeil and Michel Belliveau, the Gomery Inquiry was turning into the Liberals' worst nightmare. Corbeil and Beliveau could not be tossed off as minor players by Martin, or by his mouth-piece, Scott Brison. These men were at the highest levels of the Quebec wing of the Liberal party. The testimony from Jean Breault about $25,000 slush fund money stuffed into an envelope was put in the shade by Beliveau's testimony about Mr. Corriveau bringing him between $75,000 and $100,000 in an envelope. Belliveau was happy to receive this illegal donation and no receipt was given. It went to finance the "orphan ridings" in Eastern Quebec.
Even though Guite has changed his testimony to accept his guilt and to finally provide names of other conspirators, the Liberals could try to paint his testimony as false. However the two Quebec Liberal officials could not be so easily dismissed.
To compound the problem, Martin has shown he can do more than dither. When Jack Layton presented his budget demand after Martin's TV quasi-mea culpa, Martin caved almost immediately. Thus has the vertically-challenged Layton got to play the mini-me role to Ralph Goodale.Now, to appease David Kilgore, who quit his party to sit as an independent, Martin is talking about boosting Canada's role in Darfur. So we have the spectacle of an erstwhile Liberal dictating foreign policy. What's next? Perhaps Chuck Cadman will be appointed Justice minister to garner his support against a no-confidence vote.
There seems to be
no limit to how far Martin will abase himself to stay in power. As for his promise to reduce the "democratic deficit", he didn't allow his cabinet a free vote on the same-sex union vote, and he appointed Art Eggleton to the Senate, despite Eggleton's being banished from Cabinet for giving his girlfriend a plum salary for a shoddy piece of research. To finally put the kibosh on any shred of democratic reform, Martin is resorting to procedural tricks to avoid a May no-confidence vote. This, he hopes will give him more time to smear and slander his Conservative opponents as scary KKK-types.
Having
Reg Alcock claim that Inky Mark is rather far down in the gene pool was a blunder, however. Meanwhile, Martin is reduced to having his caucus sing a hosanna chorus every time one of his ministers trots out, "Let the Gomery Inquiry finish its work".
As though Gomery can do anything except detail the failings of the sponsorship plan. Justice Gomery can't even name the villains behind the scam. Unfortunately, for Martin and his party, the average Canadian can do just that. Let it come down!
© Bud Talkinghorn Amen to that, Bud. NJC
Maybe because it's tax time againTo honour a friend's request,
I must mention Paul Martin's Herculean battle against tax-dodgers. Yes sir, he was going to close all those tax haven loopholes. Well, not the Barbados of course, since that is the flag of convenience port for his--sorry, his sons'--CSL business. My friend finds this multi-million dollar tax dodge by Martin as the height of hypocrisy. Then there was
that "few thousand dollars of government aid" to his CSL steamship line that actually turned out to be a staggering $161 million.
Hey, Mr. Pinata, can you spare a billion or so?It was a swift transition from Ralph Goodale telling Ontario that it didn't deserve any equalization money to Martin's initial offering of $3 billion--now reportedly $5.7-billion--though it may be broken down into different envelopes; check that. However, Premier McGuinty knows that, if you just gave Mr. Pinata a few more good whacks, he would spill out more than that. Having bought off two of the
Atlantic provinces with natural resource exemptions from equalization, and setting out "an assymetrical health transfer agreement" with
Quebec, there wasn't much room to stiff that huge voting bloc in Ontario. Already, the Liberals had doled out vast sums to Ontario's cities in the form of a share of federal gas taxes and the province will get another $2 billion in daycare payments. As a result,
McGuinty gave one final whack and Mr. Pinata split open to the tune of $5.75 billion more. On top of this largesse with other people's money, that is, taxpayers' money, the feds have scattered billions in grants to every conceivable interest group. A little digging would show that many of these clients are a tad leftish in orientation. However, with Layton as stand-in Finance Minister, that is not surprising.
The Liberals do have some sense of fiscal restraint, so the West had better not come a'calling.While Martin was stingy during his days as Finance Minister, he did occasionally loosen the purse strings for worthy causes; therefore
Bombardier will again receive a huge federal loan. This deadbeat company might be the champion of corporate welfare, but Martin can't afford to alienate Quebec either.
The only question left is how much of this Johnny Appleseed-dispensed swag will end up being kicked back to the Liberal Party.
© Bud Talkinghorn--And to think that the election hasn't even begun. You had better get in line for the goodies.
The Air India trial--its sad conclusionI haven't seen
a travesty of justice to match this one since the OJ Simpson trial. Just as a sidelight, I was in a restaurant in the Florida keys when this verdict was announced. The audience was white and most of them were aghast at the conclusion. A few of the Key's bad boys were high-fiving each other, however. Later in the day, I stopped at a supermarket in south Miami and I watched the Negro checkout girls and the aisle boys do the same.
It was frightening to see such tribal empathy for that murderer.
Now we have the same thing happening here. There were numerous witnesses who testified that Bagri had confessed to the crime; yet, their testimony was excluded. Some witnesses admitted they wouldn't testify becuase they believed they would be murdered, as was Mr. Hayat, the publisher of a newspaper who criticized Sikh extremism. In fact, there was evidence that a few potential witnesses were threatened with death if they went to court.
I can't help but wonder if the judge, himself, or members of his family hasn't been threatened. We are entering a new dark era of terrorist thuggery. The CBC presented a special on the background to this trial and it highlighted the intimidation that followed the entire affair. Malik, Bagri's co-defendant paid the wife of convicted Reyat, $116,000, for her silence, presumably. Perhaps more chilling was the scene where Bagri stood in front of a NY crowd of Sikhs and called for 50,000 Hindu deaths as revenge for the seige of Amritsar. That scene cut away to hundreds of sword-waving Sikhs protesting in downtown Toronto. The cops obviously decided to stay away from those fanatics.
Now we have the spectacle of the government appointing Bob Rae as the "special investigator" for this shameful miscarriage of justice. This is a man who, as Ontario Premier, turned a blind-eye to the notorious infliltration of the Tamil Tigers into Toronto. This group used brutal methods of intimitaion to extract money from innocent Sri Lankans. Heck, Paul Martin showed up as an honoured guest to a Tamil Tiger fundraiser, so why not appoint Rae--another mush-mouthed multicult liberal. We are heading for deep trouble with some of our new citizens--the terrorist sympathizers and the criminal types--often the same ones who have entered as
"refugees" without documentation or, as Brian McAdam and Cpl Read testified, as people and "business investors" who should not have been able to enter Canada at all, given what the police here and elsewhere knew about them. [Police in Hong Kong, for example. Scroll down for their testimony and the links to even more:
The government silences whistleblowers while beavering away--squandering public money -- &-- The Whistleblowers. NJC]
Those who have lived in and / or travelled in a goodly number of these Third World countries, will testify as to
the rampant corruption that pervades these societies. It is not simply a case of the elites being corrupt; rather, that mentality has suffused the entire populace. The government is totally corrupt, so why don't we get what we can, is the message.
The worst of our immigrants/ refugees have explored our weaknesses and exploit them. Isn't it informative that the man who accused ex-Immigration Minister,
Judy Sgro, of promising him immunity from a ten year deportation order, was
involved in a massive passport counterfeiting scheme. The reason that the police gave for his not being jailed was that he had threatened the witnesses with the death of their relatives here and in India. Shades of Bagri and Malik. It is time for our justice system to build a little backbone or we will be be held ransom to the thuggery of our worst immigrants.
© Bud Talkinghorn
