Following is a guest entry written by Bill Dunphy [originally posted here by Mr. Dunphy] in response to ‘Stirring it up again‘. Back in the 90’s Dunphy worked as an investigative reporter for the Toronto Sun and was responsible for exposing both the white racist Heritage Front’s efforts to infiltrate the Reform Party and the key role a CSIS mole, Grant Bristow played in creating and running that organization. He now works for a large newspaper chain managing an in-house web and digital technology training centre.

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A response to: “Stirring It Up Again“

by Bill Dunphy

As the reporter who exposed Grant Bristow, the CSIS mole in the Heritage Front, and also revealed that group’s efforts to infiltrate the Reform Party, permit me to set the record straight where I can, and to add some opinions which your readers might find helpful. My opinions are based on four years of ongoing, contemporary research of the Heritage Front while working as a reporter for the Toronto Sun. During that period — 1991-1995, I had access to, and earned the trust (or at least the ear) of significant players within each of the forces at work: the local white racist leadership; the police and intelligence forces that monitored them; the mainstream Jewish community groups; and anti-racist groups that sprung up to oppose the Heritage Front and their allies.

Your post raised several issues. Let me deal with the Reform Party first.

I do not believe the efforts of several Heritage Front members to join and then gain control of a couple of Toronto riding associations of the Reform Party back in 1991/92 was part of any grand conspiracy by Conservatives or Liberals or any other group. Certainly I can say as a matter of fact that my exposure of those efforts had nothing to do with the actions or wishes of Jean Chretien or Warren Kinsella. Chretien’s 1992 letter attacking the Reform Party and its policies as racist had nothing to do with the Heritage Front or Bristow — it was a common and politically expedient accusation leveled against the party by it’s opponents at the time.

The fact is, the HF’s initial efforts to infiltrate the Reform Party were genuine and motivated by the belief by several of the secondary players (especially Alan Overfield) that the Reform Party was, if not an answer to their political prayers, then at least an opportunity too good to miss.

Your readers may not know that 20 years earlier Overfield and some of the same people had moved in on the Social Credit Party (an earlier party giving voice to Western disaffection) as it expanded to Ontario (just as the Reform Party was doing in 1991). Indeed that group had actually succeeded in taking control of the Ontario wing. Briefly. They clearly hoped for a repeat success with the nascent Reform movement. It is conceivable, I suppose, that this earlier take-over was also an elaborate conspiracy by Liberals or Conservatives or papists or Masons — but I suggest we shave with Ocham’s razor and in the absence of contrary evidence assume the obvious is likely — this marginalized group hoped to achieve some measure of power or at least attention by leaping aboard a new movement and reaching for the the steering wheel.

Droege and SOME of the HF actually believed that they could build a “legitimate” public movement around their racist philosophy. In this, Droege was following in the footsteps of his mentor, friend and fellow former Ku Klux Klan cell leader, David Duke. The year before the HF was born, Duke had succeeded in getting elected to the Louisiana legislature, despite — or because of — his racist past.

No one tipped me to this story, no one suggested or planted it. It was a chance remark by one of the HF security at their Sept 91 meeting/coming out party (”Hey, didn’t I meet you out at the International Center last month?”) that led me to uncover the connections between Reform and the HF, which I exposed in Feb ‘92 after a hell of a lot of licence plate, home ownership, newspaper archive and public record searches.

AFTER the HF was exposed and expelled from the party, HF leader Wolfgang Droege was stung by Preston Manning’s swift denunciation and what he felt was a betrayal by “kosher conservatives”. Droege then did conspire with Michael Lublin, a young Jewish activist and Reform party member, to embarrass the Reform Party by showing up at several Reform public events. There was some evidence (recounted in the SIRC report) to suggest the Tories (not the Liberals) assisted in those efforts. If true, it was opportunism, not conspiracy.

As for Bristow’s (and CSIS’s) role in Operation Governor, you wrote:

If you look at what Bristow did during Operation Governor, it’s obvious his mission was more than simple infiltration.

Wrong, I’m afraid. His mission was to monitor the newly-repatriated ex-con, Wolfgang Droege — a racist with ties to the deadliest white racist gang around, The Order. Droege had returned to Canada following a stint in US federal prisons for possession of cocaine and, if memory serves, a ceramic knife he’d smuggled onto a plane while flying to Atlanta. He was going there as an advance man for a plot by members of the The Order to murder Morris Dees, an anti-racist activist lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Centre. Droege’s racist activities stretched back to his teen years and included both political and violent acts ranging from punching a Toronto Sun journalist to plotting the violent armed overthrow of the government of Dominica. Monitoring Droege with a human agent (Bristow) was a perfectly lawful, intelligent decision by CSIS.

You can be forgiven for looking at the events as they unfolded and deducing that there was a larger game afoot, but my opinion is you’d be wrong. You’re forgetting the human element.

The problematic behaviours I saw were motivated by emotions and human need, not politics.

Bristow certainly played a key role in the founding and growth of the Heritage Front. And he exceeded his brief repeatedly over the course for his six year run, encouraging actions that on their face appear unlawful, ranging from obstruction of justice (in the Elise Hategan and Tyrone Mason cases) to criminal harassment with the infamous “It” campaign targeting anti-racist activists.

But there is no evidence to suggest those excesses were created in a conspiracy that ranged from Bristow to his CSIS handlers to the Liberal Party and beyond. Rather, Bristow had a vested interest in keeping that pot bubbling, in magnifying or dramatizing the threat, in keeping himself at the centre of this intriguing cat and mouse game between the HF and the intelligence community. Bristow, for the record, denies obstructing justice and says the “It” campaign served to redirect racist energies and anger away from real violence.

For those who weren’t on the “inside” of this intense political/police game, it is hard to explain just how addictive and exciting it was for many of the participants — especially the non-professionals. It takes a very certain kind of person to successfully infiltrate an illicit organization — and that kind of person is someone who thrives on and craves that secret knowledge, power and importance and that knowledge that one’s actions “matter.” This isn’t all ego — there’s a significant streak of altruism in people like Bristow, they make real sacrifices to do the work they do.

But the required personality traits of a good agent maximize the likelihood that they will mess up — “handling” infiltrators is a difficult task. CSIS blew it.

You are correct to assert that the “Bristow Affair” wasn’t properly investigated — despite the rather extraordinary report that the Security Intelligence Review Committee put together in such short order following my outing of Bristow in Aug 1994. The SIRC accepted far too much of Bristow’s testimony and CSIS reports at face value, ignoring evidence that pointed in different directions. This seemed to be partly because there was so many lies told AFTER I broke the story that many people destroyed their credibility, effectively constructing a field full of straw men that the SIRC report was able to busily demolish one after the other.

My story, nine months in the making, was based on the evidence of my own eyes and interviews with people who thought I was writing a history piece, a book, and had no idea that Bristow was a CSIS informant. As a result, mostly, they told me the truth.

Here’s the thing about Droege and the Heritage Front — I truly believe that Droege dreamed of building a movement that would tap into the race consciousness he imagined was present in “white” Canadians and most of the time he worked pretty hard to keep “his” people in line with the law. He always kept an eye on the law and the media, carefully calculating the impact of his group’s actions and decisions. Bristow — and others — would argue that, at best, Droege and the Heritage Front were the Sinn Fein to the white racist underground’s IRA, that the canny old ex-con, ex-KKK leader was aping David Duke and covering up his evil with a political patina.

To which I would reply — exactly.

Politics is where the 1990’s Droege’s arguments belong and where he tried to take them. Inside the political arena, Droege and the HFers stood revealed as delusional clowns, easily dispatched. Hell, the reality is that they were out-organized on the street and in the schools by a ragamuffin band of homeless street kids and anarchists — the ARA.

The danger lay, not directly in the very visible and aging Droege and his cartoon politics. The danger lay in the twisted types who responded to his call and then hung in the shadows, drawing nourishment from the ideas and attention and noise the HF created.

There were several truly dangerous developments within the HF and mostly Bristow and CSIS et al either missed them or failed to contain them. They failed because they were too dependent on Bristow — and Bristow had little or no success penetrating those fringes — the COTC and the “Crueller Gang”. (The Crueller Gang committed two armed robberies and had displayed an interest in bomb making. They were busted by a smart local cop in Durham, not CSIS and not Bristow.)

Which leads us to the curious case of the dog that didn’t bark in the night — Warren Kinsella.

Kinsella’s failure to even mention Bristow’s key role in creating and nurturing the HF — hell, his failure to even name him in the first edition of Web of Hate — is very curious and I’ve never been able to understand it. Either he was a sloppy researcher who exaggerated his intelligence community connections, or he withheld knowledge of Bristow deliberately.

Unfortunately both answers are possible — Web of Hate’s 1st edition suffered from a hysterical tone and more than a few critical errors of fact.

Perhaps the best way to judge is to understand that, whatever else he was by 1994, Kinsella was no longer a journalist. He had abandoned that role in favour of advocacy and the book, Web of Hate, should be read and understood as advocacy — not journalism. He fed the hysteria of the times (to sell more books? to advance his political views? for the hell of it?), he functioned as a partisan. And looking at his gleeful confessions in his later book on spin doctoring, we can safely assume that he would see nothing wrong with applying those tactics in Web of Hate.

Look at his response to your criticism here — a shamefully misleading distortion of the truth that he had the National Post print - telling readers there that he HAD mentioned Bristow numerous times in the 2nd edition of Web of Hate, but not telling any of his readers that:

1) Indeed he had failed to mention Bristow in the first edition and
2) The 2nd edition came out AFTER Bristow had been exposed.

Compare his public comments with his private email to Kevin. ‘Nuff said.

Any real journalist who misled his editors and readers like that would be fired. Kinsella however, is not, and hasn’t been for a very, very, long time, a real journalist.

And lastly, regarding the parallels between the Bristow affair and recent developments in the anti-terrorism investigation that resulted in the arrest of the Toronto 18: I was, and remain, deeply skeptical of our intelligence agencies when their “agents” turn up at the very heart of the alleged illegal action. Learning that it was an intelligence agency informant who arranged for the purchase and delivery of the supposed fertilizer to be used in the supposed bomb, and seeing that their training seems to have consisted of a few speeches and paintball game or two, only served to deepen my skepticism.

But.

Please remember that, for all his faults, Bristow took on a necessary and difficult job and, though he crossed boundaries with impunity, and though the media exaggarated the danger of HF and misdirected the public, the reality is that there was real danger inside that movement. And Bristow and CSIS did play a role, however hamfisted, in the dismantling of that danger.

I say we wait and see the facts in this newest case and then make up our minds.

It sounds familiar because agencies of the Canadian government have a track record of this—using agent provocateurs to inflame situations to discredit political dissent. The most infamous example was in the 1970s when the RCMP intelligence service committed illegal acts, setting fires, etc. in an effort to discredit Quebec nationalists. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was created in 1984 as a result of the controversy.

But the current controversy with Richard Warman started to sound familiar for another reason as well. Shortly after the evidence on Warman was made public (on Free Dominion, a web site that is the subject of human rights complaint), Warren Kinsella stepped into the fray to publicly defend Warman. If anything, Kinsella is consistent. In 1994, shortly after the exposure of CSIS agent Grant Bristow as an agent provocateur in the Heritage Front investigation, Kinsella defended Bristow in a column in the Ottawa Citizen.

In light of the accusations against Warman, it’s worth re-examining the Bristow Affair. There are similarities. Specifically, both involve the investigation of extremism on the far right. A good starting point is that column by Kinsella.

It’s a curious piece of work.

Kinsella’s column was published on September 2, 1994, a couple of weeks after Bristow was exposed in an August 14 Toronto Sun article by Bill Dunphy, “Stir It Up: Grant Bristow Didn’t Just Spy on the Heritage Front – He Used Taxpayers’ Money to Build Up the Racist Organization.” Dunphy, quoting from Heritage Front opponents, accuses Bristow of going far beyond simple infiltration of the Heritage Front and alleges that the agent was in fact inciting violence by playing both sides against each other (in other words, stirring it up). Kinsella in his column appears to be at once attacking Bristow for helping to establish the largest neo-Nazi organization in Canada while at same time defending him for exposing it. In all, he mentions Bristow’s name ten times.

Yet, despite these numerous references to Grant Bristow, Kinsella does not disclose to the reader that he has had intimate knowledge of the man. At one time, Kinsella made a police complaint against the CSIS agent. That incident came to light only a week or so before the column appeared, in an article in the Vancouver Province, August 25, 1994:

Bernie Farber, spokesman for the Congress, said Bristow posed as an Ottawa Citizen reporter doing research for author Warren Kinsella, who at the time was writing Web of Hate, a book about extremist right-wing activity in Canada.

Kinsella said he filed a complaint with police, who investigated and concluded they did not have grounds to lay a criminal charge.

That event would be probed in further detail by SIRC, the civilian body charged with monitoring CSIS activities. Following Bristow’s exposure, SIRC produced a report issued on December 9, 1994. SIRC would pin it down Bristow’s imitation of an Ottawa Citizen reporter pretending to work on Kinsella’s behalf to May 7, 1993.

Perhaps it’s best if you see a timeline of the events.

The previous March, Kinsella had published Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network. Bristow’s name does not appear once in the book. This has been brought up from time to time over the years, but nobody to my knowledge has explained satisfactorily why the omission appears to be deliberate and why this could be significant.

Web of Hate purports to be an authoritative study of the far right in Canada. The author claims the work is the result of ten years worth of research. The chapter on the Heritage Front, “The Wolfie and Georgie Show,” is the longest in the book, 52 pages. Yet somehow the author overlooks the fact that Grant Bristow was one of three founding members of the Heritage Front. More damning, despite the fact that Kinsella himself had made a police complaint against Bristow—in May 1993, long before the research for Web of Hate is completed in October 1993—in a very serious incident where a known member of the Heritage Front attempted to gain access to the files of a high profile Jewish organization, the incident does not appear in Web of Hate.

Of equal or even more significance is how that complaint supposedly came about. As the SIRC report tells it, Bristow presented himself to a Jewish student leader as an Ottawa Citizen reporter using the name “Trevor Graham” and claiming to be engaged in research on Kinsella’s behalf. Suspicious, the student leader checked up on Trevor Graham and discovered no reporter by that name. A few days later she went to Bernie Farber’s office at the Canadian Jewish Congress and identified Bristow through the picture that appeared in a major (nearly 2,000 word) November 29, 1992 Toronto Sun story, “Canada’s Neo-Nazis: White Rights Groups Readying for Racial War.” Farber alerted Kinsella and Kinsella made his complaint, first to the Ottawa police and then to the Toronto Metro police by fax.

That means that Kinsella was not only aware of Grant Bristow’s connection to the Heritage Front, but he was also aware of the 1992 Toronto Sun story. And in that story, Bristow is identified as a person captured in a car in Scarborough, Ont., with Aryan Nations member Sean Maguire with guns in the trunk. From the November 29, 1992 Sun article:

In the fall of 1991, Metro police ETF officers and immigration forces swooped down on a car in Scarboro [sic] and arrested an Aryan Nations enforcer, Sean Maguire.

In the car—driven by Front member Grant Bristow—they found a sawed-off shotgun, a semi-automatic rifle, binoculars, handcuffs and a police radio scanner.

Maguire was deported.

This is a serious incident, Aryan Nations, Heritage Front, guns. Yet not only is Bristow’s name omitted from Web of Hate, but Sean Maguire’s name doesn’t appear either. Why? It’s the one news event linking Grant Bristow to the Heritage Front prior to his exposure.

(Oddly, the fire bombings of Jewish activist Monna Zentner’s house are not in Web of Hate, either.)

Another curious thing happens when Bristow is exposed. Almost immediately after the CSIS agent is outed, SIRC announced it would conduct an investigation (they jumped in with such speed it almost looks like they saw it coming). Their December 9, 1994 report cites Web of Hate as an authoritative study on far right extremism and deals with Kinsella’s police complaint. Yet Kinsella himself doesn’t appear to have been called in for an interview. The guy’s living there in Ottawa. Why not telephone him?

Then there is the matter of Jean Chrétien’s letter. A day after Grant Bristow appeared at a major Reform Party rally on January 22, 1992 in Pickering, Ont., as a bodyguard for Preston Manning, opposition leader Jean Chrétien released a letter accusing the Reform Party of being racist. The letter was reported in the press. A month later, the news of the Heritage Front’s connection to the Reform Party breaks in the news and forever after the party is accused of being racist. A coincidence, you could say, except that Warren Kinsella was working for Chrétien at the time, and these coincidences pile up around Kinsella.

The SIRC report on the Heritage Front is a strange beast. It presents the hypotheses that the effort to discredit the Reform Party was actually a plot by the extreme right wing. In other words, Canadians are presented with the bizarre idea that these neo-Nazis thought to themselves, “Hey, we’re so disreputable; if we attach ourselves to the Reform Party then we can discredit them.” It’s preposterous. Disreputable people don’t think of themselves as disreputable.

The above produces a lot of questions. Why doesn’t Bristow’s name appear in Web of Hate? Specifically, why didn’t Kinsella mention the police report in which Bristow attempts to obtain info on Jewish organizations, using Kinsella’s name, especially after a Jewish activist’s house was set on fire twice, the first a confirmed arson? Why were neither of Monna Zentner’s fires described in Web of Hate? Why wasn’t the Sean Maguire incident described? Why did Kinsella mention Bristow ten times in the Ottawa Citizen column without mentioning his intimate connection to Bristow through his police complaint? Why didn’t SIRC interview Kinsella, despite SIRC using Web of Hate as a source?

In the timeline, Bristow’s non-existence in Web of Hate certainly looks less like editorial license or carelessness or stupidity on the author’s part. When the sequence is examined, it looks deliberate. If Kinsella removed references to Grant Bristow from his book because at some point he learned that Bristow was a CSIS agent, then he suppressed knowledge that the Heritage Front had been infiltrated by CSIS at the highest level, making the book worthless as a description of the far right. Further, it would make Web of Hate look like a contrived CSIS asset and, by extension, its author would be an asset as well. And being an asset of Canada’s secret service would pretty much negate anything Kinsella has written or said on the subject of hate laws, human rights commissions and free speech in the last 13 years.

If you look at what Bristow did during Operation Governor, it’s obvious his mission was more than simple infiltration. An infiltrator doesn’t start major organizations. He doesn’t build them up. He doesn’t play both sides against each other to create violent confrontations. He doesn’t go anywhere near politicians. It’s pretty clear Bristow tried to centralize Canada’s far right in an effort to control it. He took a small, ineffectual lunatic fringe and turned it into some much bigger. And then he deliberately attached the Heritage Front to the Reform Party to discredit it.

In a huge article—over 7,500 words—in the September 2004 issue of The Walrus, Bristow spoke publicly for the first time. Based on a Bristow interview by Andrew Mitrovica, the article, “Front Man,” is a self-serving account of Bristow’s activities. The only thing on the record that supports Bristow’s version of events is the SIRC report of 1994. That report, written by a bunch of Progressive Conservatives, is discounted in court testimony and articles based on eyewitness accounts all over the place, from people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

Bristow would’ve had good reason to wait so long before going public. Memories had to dim before he could put forward his revisionism. Memories had to dim because what Bristow was accused of at the time—and actually still stands accused of because the timeline supports it—is being involved in an effort to discredit the Reform Party by associating it with racism. That is illegal involvement in the democratic institutions of the country, the exact same thing that led to the downfall of the RCMP intelligence service in the late 1970s.

The Bristow affair wasn’t properly probed, so everyone is left asking themselves, just how far would our state agencies go to support the nanny state hate laws, to justify the suppression of liberty in Canada?

Now there is anecdotal evidence that CSIS agents were involved in the more serious allegations against the 18 Muslims in Toronto arrested on terrorism charges a couple of years ago. One agent was paid $300,000 and ran the training camp; another was paid $500,000 and was involved in the ordering of ammonium nitrate for a bomb. Reasonably, one has to wonder, just how involved were these agents in taking what appears to be nothing more than a bunch of disgruntled, incompetent kids and turning them into a terrorist cell? With the Bristow affair in mind and in view of the allegations against Richard Warman, it’s reasonable to ask how the current case has been used to support the extension of investigative police powers created in the wake of 9-11.

A backward glance at the Bristow Affair, a cursory look at the Toronto 18 case, and with the revelations coming forth in the Warman Affair, maybe it’s time for a full public inquiry into the use of government agents to create fear among Canadians in order to justify the suppression of liberties.

One final word on the Warman affair. For too long some Canadians have used the easy slur of racism to attack anyone who might disagree with them. The epithets “racist,” “fascist” and “neo-Nazi” have been hurled around in this country longer than Joseph McCarthy used “communism” to attack his opponents in the U.S. in the early 1950s. Nowadays these epithets are being tossed at just about everyone who supports our long traditions of an open, just society and its foundation of free speech. This behavior must be called out for what it is, demagoguery. With that in mind, I’ll end with a couple of quotes from Edward R. Murrow;

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate his responsibility.”

- From the March 9, 1954, “See It Now” television broadcast on Senator Joe McCarthy.

“Good night, and good luck.”

(Timeline Link.)

UPDATE: See Bill Dunphy’s guest entry A response to ‘Stirring it up again’

After the Western Standard folded last October, Kevin Michael Grace and I started talking up the idea of an online entity again. Neither of us could find the notes we’d made four years before. We did manage to reconstruct most of it from memory and I wrote it down and emailed it around. Someone asked, “How much would this cost?” So we worked up a budget. The result of combining the concept with the budget is “A plan for an online magazine.” If you want to invest, and you want the money to end up on the screen, as they say in the movie business, you’ll find contact info at the bottom of that page.

I’m reading this column by Michael Byers in the Toronto Star: From rogue nation to world leader and I’m wondering, why does this guy seem to be channeling Jean Chrétien and Maurice Strong?

"[Harper] has also picked unnecessary quarrels with China over human rights…

…Kyoto Protocol–arguably the most important treaty ever…

It’s time to move NATO troops out, and UN peacekeepers in.

And then, let’s get serious about the "responsibility to protect" where it’s needed most: in Africa."

There’s no little description at the bottom of the column telling me about this writer. Could he be this Michael Byers? Why, so he is. Byers works at the UBC’s Liu Institute which opened in 2000. Maurice Strong, sinophile, father of the Kyoto Protocol, was the chair of the institute’s International Advisory Council. You remember the Liu Institute because it was created as a place for former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy to warm his butt while helping to plot scams like the climate change jiggery-pokery (successful) and global gun control (unsuccessful).

Byers ends his column with "This year, let’s elect a government that shares this vision. Let’s shake the "rogue state" label – before it sticks." (I wonder which ‘government’ that’s supposed to be?) The rogue state label? Byers starts his column with a quote by some unnamed British wag: "So, how does it feel to be the citizen of a rogue state?" I mean, the guy could have been making a joke. And we’re supposed to care?

Now, let’s go back to Byers’ sub-hed: “Nation needs to cast off neo-conservatism and lead on human rights and the environment.” And look back at the things I’ve clipped from the column; human rights in China, Kyoto Protocol, NATO. These are not exclusively neo-con issues. Human rights in China, a lot of people are concerned about those and Harper’s approach isn’t "neo-con." He’s been confrontational, and that’s not been to the liking of Beijing puppets like Maurice Strong and Jean Chretien, but so what? The merit of the Kyoto Protocol is a scientific debate–the misuse of shoddy science to push a political agenda in my opinion. And NATO in Afghanistan? The UN Security Council approved the mission in Afghanistan and Canada’s then-Liberal government threw its support behind it. So it’s neo-con thing? Byers, cut the bullsh-t. The "neo-con" label is a ruse being used by the Liberal supporters to try to tie everything to the difficult situation in Iraq. We all know that. Told you I was being lazy.

So I’ll do a little background work.

FYI 1 The Liu Institute says it gets its name from Dr. Jieh Jow Liou (so why it’s not called the Liou Institute, is umm a mystery). It was established with money from Dr. Liou and from The Liu Foundation. Here’s a UBC bio (scroll down) of Taiwanese businessman Jieh Jow Liou. The Liu Foundation was set up by
Chinese-American media mogul Arthur Liu of Multicultural Radio Broadcasting Inc.
The foundation is run by his wife Yvonne out of New York. Lui you may recall was in the news being pummeled by Democrat supporters for pulling the plug on Air America back in 2004. MRBI owns Sinocast Radio in Canada. Looks like in 2000 Liu was supporting Liberal causes (the institute) in Canada and Republican causes in the US, so I’m guessing he’s a business type who likes the winning side.

FYI 2 Another member of the founding Liu Institute board along with Strong back in 2000 was former University of Toronto president John Evans, chair,Torstar Corporation, owner of the Toronto Star.

"When the year began, Harper’s Conservatives were sitting at 34 per cent in public opinion approval, according to Harris-Decima, just ahead of the Liberals at 31 per cent. The NDP was at 15 and the Green party at eight per cent.

As 2007 draws to a close, Harris-Decima’s rolling three-week averages had the Tories hovering around 34 per cent, the Liberals at 29, the NDP at 15 and the Greens polling 11 per cent."

Michael Den Tandt in the Owen Sound Sun Times: Fearless predictions (and why Harper, and I, got it wrong)

"What better way to set those fears to rest, get ahead of a rising global political wave and severely undercut the Liberals than to go Green? It couldn’t fail.

But it did."

And then Den Tandt goes into the technicalities of policy. I’m sorry, I’m skeptical. Canadians I believe don’t pay that much attention to the technical aspects of policy.

The only lesson here is apparently you gain nothing by bowing down to people like Gore and Suzuki. Give an inch and they’ll just keep bashing. They don’t have to compromise because they’re not running for office. They can’t give an inch because that would p-ss off their core constituency  which wants control, power, and hates you for a whole lot of other reasons. And in passing, you alienate the people who did vote for you. Back to waiting for the wave.

"The court documents do not indicate how the people who obtained passports using falsified information came in contact with Mr. Villarceau, nor what Mr. Villarceau received for providing the passports."

Back on May 16, the CBC ran this piece; "Former government worker forged passports" which has these details;

"Villarceau, who worked as an examination officer at the passport office in Gatineau, Que., sold the fake passports between December 2003 and June 2004 to Canadians living overseas, RCMP Sgt. Monique Beauchamp said.

The buyers allegedly paid up to $10,000 for the bogus passport, which bore a false name."

The next day, May 17, the Citizen had this: Passport officer admits to document scam. It contains these soothing words from the RCMP;

"Sgt. Beauchamp said the RCMP has discovered no evidence that the passports have fallen into the hands of known terrorist groups or criminal organizations."

Okay, if the recent story is true and the court documents don’t tell us "what Mr. Villarceau received for providing the passports", and the CBC story is true, that "buyers allegedly paid up to $10,000 for the bogus passport" then somehow that detail didn’t wind up in the court documents. In stories I read, the other detail of how these people "came in contact with Mr. Villarceau" is missing. That is curious and I’m glad the recent Citizen story pointed out it’s missing in the court documents. So who would, or could, blow $10,000 on a false passport? Why would they do that? How did 14 people willing to spend $10,000 on a passport manage to get in contact with this one guy in the main office of Passport Canada-Foreign Affairs and International Trade? (btw just to be clear, the Passport Office changed its name to Passport Canada in Feb. 2005, right around the time Villarceau got caught and was fired–March 2005–probably, you know, to confuse criminals.)