Looking for a mini synopsis of what Liberals are capable of in a short amount of time? The good Greg Weston of Sun Media’s Ottawa Sun provides a goodie.
My fellow Canadians, this is just ONE out of the MILLIONS who are, work for, were appointed by, or who are “friendly to” the Liberal Party of Canada. Imagine what all of them together are doing. Or do like me: when you need to spend a bit of time day dreaming, sit back and imagine what we don’t know.
[…] The prime minister, seizing another golden opportunity to look ridiculous, rose in the Commons to praise Dingwall for having “dedicated most of his life to the public service.”
It’s quite a legacy, all right.
Back in 1994, Dingwall was Liberal public works minister when he publicly vowed to eradicate patronage and corruption from the awarding of massive federal advertising contracts.
The senior bureaucrat handpicked by Dingwall to clean up the advertising swamp was Chuck Guite, the same official who helped create it under the Tories.
The rest, as they say, is history. Adscam was born in Dingwall’s department the next year, $350 million was blown on the scandalous advertising sponsorship program, and Guite is now facing criminal fraud charges.
Last year, Dingwall testified at a Commons committee investigating Adscam that he couldn’t remember ever meeting Guite.
[…] In 1997, Dingwall was turfed out of office by voters who were evidently not nearly as impressed with his record of public service as the current prime minister seems to be.
Dingwall promptly hung out his shingle as a lobbyist, and quickly began raking in the big bucks in some unusual deals.
Testimony at the Gomery inquiry into Adscam indicated that in 1998, for instance, Dingwall was paid $12,000 a month by a Montreal advertising executive he apparently had never met, supposedly to provide lobbying advice to VIA Rail, a Crown corporation prohibited by law from hiring lobbyists for anything.
The Montreal ad executive, Jean Lafleur, is a key player in the Adscam fiasco, and told the Gomery inquiry he was ordered by VIA to hire Dingwall and send the bills to the public railway.
Dingwall also put his considerable lobbying talents to work to help a number of Canadian biotechnology companies get multi-million-dollar government grants.
In August of this year, Industry Canada froze $6.6 million in federal financing for one of Dingwall’s clients after it was discovered he had neglected to register as a lobbyist for the firm as required by law.
The industry department has also frozen federal financing for another biotech firm that agreed to pay Dingwall a $350,000 “success fee” if the company landed at least $15 million in government loot.
Dingwall said in a written statement yesterday that he looks forward to a “new chapter” in his career.
Teaching ethics, no doubt.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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