Read this carefully and think very, very carefully about the implications contained herein. Add it to all you know about the Liberals and the sponsorship program and the courts and the RCMP and the CBC and everything else. (Hat tip: “odie441”)
Think of the word or words that describe this kind of thing.
Canada’s civil servants are apparently working for the Liberal Party now. It’s no wonder the Liberals confuse their money with ours, and their party’s interests with Canada’s. They think it’s all one and the same.
DND analyzing Tory policies
researchers: Queen’s team says civil servants violated rule of political neutralityDepartment of National Defence officials have been researching opposition defence policies and passing on their findings to Liberal ministers for at least the past five years, defence researchers say.
Documents obtained by Queen’s University researchers under federal access to information legislation show that federal civil servants and military officers analyzed the defence policies of the Conservative party and its forerunner the Canadian Alliance for the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns.
Another research paper was prepared in 2003, when the Canadian Alliance released its official platform on defence.
The information was sent to three Liberal defence ministers, according to the briefing memos, obtained by researchers Douglas Bland and Roy Rempel.
The documents detail the costs and feasibility of the defence policies and in some cases offered critical analyses of the opposition platforms.
“It’s essentially using civil servants as researchers … [and] giving the government an inappropriate political advantage,” said Prof. Bland, a former army lieutenant-colonel who now holds the chair of defence management studies at Queen’s, in Kingston, Ont. “They’re giving them arguments to use against the opposition in an election campaign.”
Prof. Bland said the practice appears to violate ethical guidelines that, according to the official publication Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service, require public servants to “maintain the tradition of political neutrality.”
A spokeswoman for Bill Graham, the Defence Minister, said departmental officials provide advice on military and defence issues but denied the officials were used to gather political intelligence for the Liberals.
“This Minister does not receive political advice from his [departmental] officials,” she said. “They do not provide political advice or recommendations.”
She did not know whether similar research had been carried out on other parties’ defence platforms and could not say if DND staff were preparing an analysis of the current Conservative defence policy.
However, the briefing notes and internal correspondence obtained by Prof. Bland and Mr. Remple, a former Canadian Alliance staff worker who now works as an independent policy researcher, show defence officials were tracking and evaluating opposition election platforms as early as 2000 and passing weekly policy reports to the defence minister’s office.
A 17-page report on the Canadian Alliance defence platform, produced six weeks before the start of the 2000 election campaign, notes the opposition party’s policy would be “extremely costly” and gave then-defence minister Art Eggleton a cost estimate of $32-billion to $39-billion.
Prof. Bland said it is not unreasonable for bureaucrats to look at the policies of parties that could become the government after an election, but they should not be providing such research to the minister.
“Civil servants and military officers should be doing this kind of research,” he said. “But in an election campaign or a pre-election period, they should not be providing the minister with expert information not available to the opposition.”
In May, 2003, a briefing note for John McCallum, the defence minister at the time and now Minister of National Revenue, called the Canadian Alliance defence policy too expensive.
“It would be very difficult for any government to afford such equipment purchases without significant reductions in other federal programs,” said the document, prepared under Kenneth Calder, the assistant deputy minister of policy for DND.
During the last federal election, officials in the department’s Cabinet liaison division provided then-minister David Pratt with a detailed cost breakdown of the Conservatives’ defence proposals, concluding they were “feasible” but noting some of the programs “would likely require comparatively significant increases to baseline defence spending.”
The analysis worked out in detail how much each plank of the Tory platform would cost: $700-million to $1.5-billion for a “hybrid carrier;” $3.167-billion for new heavy-lift aircraft; $690-million for new tanks; and $500-million to increase the size of the Canadian Forces by 5,000 personnel.
David Taras, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, said civil servants are supposed to be apolitical and should not have been asked to do such work. “If there’s a sacred line between what bureaucrats should be doing and what political staff should be doing, then this is definitely over that line,” he said.
“This sounds like completely political work being done by the civil service … and that can’t be justified.”
The analyses were conducted by the office of the assistant deputy minister (policy), a group of about 90 researchers and policy experts, most of them civilian employees of the defence department. About a third of the staff in the policy branch are Canadian Forces staff officers.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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