Iran upset Canada's Foreign Minister called their sham election a "sham election"

TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has called on Canadian officials to take a “rational” and “wise” approach toward Iran.

Salehi was referring to the recent interfering comments by his Canadian counterpart John Baird on Iran’s presidential election in which he raised doubts on the credibility of the election, calling it a “sham election.”

Baird also made allegations that the Iranian government had rigged the results by banning women candidates, silencing democratic voices, and censoring the press.  

How Ontario's Liberals ripped off taxpayers for $585 Million

McGuinty/Wynne Liberals broke law in Gas Plant cancellation cover-up scandal

Art by Blazing Cat Fur

TORONTO -- Opposition accusations that Ontario's Liberal government intentionally deleted emails to cover up the cost of cancelling gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga were given more fuel Wednesday by the province's privacy commissioner.

Top Liberal staff in former premier Dalton McGuinty's office broke the law by deleting all emails related to the cancellation of the two gas plants, Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian reported after conducting a special investigation into NDP complaints.

"It truly strains credulity to think that absolutely no records ... responsive to the Speaker's ruling were retained," Cavoukian wrote in her special report called "Deleting Accountability: Records Management Practices of Political Staff."

"It is difficult to accept that the routine deletion of emails was not in fact an attempt by staff ... to avoid transparency and accountability."

It will be interesting to see if The Toronto Star undermines its now almost non-existent credibility by minimizing the corruption in the Ontario Liberal provincial government, which effectively embezzled half a billion tax dollars for political purposes, while obsessively pursuing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford over an unproven personal matter that cost taxpayers nothing. 

New studies on Global Warming could make David Suzuki's head explode

Challenges to the unproven notion that human-driven, carbon-dioxide emissions are causing the world to go to hell in a handbasket appear to be on the increase. 

According to surprising new research from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are responsible for global warming since the 1970s, not carbon dioxide. 

And researchers at Oxford University say the climate is less sensitive to carbon emissions than had been believed. 

Daily Telegraph reporter Tom Chivers says the new U.K. findings may bolster the argument of those who argue there are better responses than making "grandiose pledges to cut emissions." 

Chivers quotes Prof. Bjorn Lomborg, economist and high-profile author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, as saying rich countries are in a better position to deal with climate-change problems than poor ones are. So it's crucial to foster economic growth.

Plus: More on the Oxford studies at The Economist 

and 

Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims

Important lessons from the Nortel trial

On Jan. 14, 2013, nearly nine years after the claimed fraud was alleged to have occurred, Ontario Superior Court Judge Frank Marrocco dismissed all charges against former Nortel Networks Corporation chief executive Frank Dunn as well as former chief financial officer Douglas Beatty and former controller Michael Gollogly.

All three executives were accused of defrauding Nortel and the public by deliberately misrepresenting Nortel’s financial results between 2001 and 2004, in order to maximize corporate bonuses due to them. The demise of Nortel — a telecom giant — is complex and the context of the telecommunications industry at that time is important to a deeper and more penetrating understanding of what went wrong.

More on this item from Terrence Corcoran at the Financial Post

Nortel Fraud Trial Verdict due today

Three men accused of perpetrating the largest fraud in Canadian Securities history are anxiously awaiting to hear whether Judge Frank Marrocco will decide that their lives and reputations are ruined or if they are the victims of a politicized and inept prosecution case.

The judge will most likely not frame the case in those terms, but over the course of a lengthy, expensive trail, the prosecution has not offered a shred of actual evidence that former Nortel executives Frank Dunn, Douglas Beatty and Michael Gollogly conspired to commit fraud. Indeed, a great deal of evidence was offered by the defense to establish that everything the defendants did at Nortel was disclosed to and had the approval of the firm's auditors, Delloite and Touche.

The RCMP unit that gathered the evidence for the Nortel case is feeling apprehension about the outcome, as the only major conviction the ever secured was the slam-dunk Drabinsky fraud trial. The apparent reason for Nortel's ills was the legal, if stupid spending spree on ultimately near-worthless dot-com investments that the Board made before the executives on trail headed the company. The Nortel collapse was the biggest financial tumble in Canada, and will billions lost to investors, there was enormous pressure to find scapegoats and the Board was hardly likely to offer themselves up.

The Ottawa Citizen's James Bagnall is at the University Avenue courthouse this morning and will be live tweeting updates. The Globe and Mail has a crew live tweeting too.

UPDATE: THE VERDICT IS IN:

NOT GUILTY!

Just as Eye on a Crazy Planet has been predicting for the last year

Lengthy, expensive Nortel fraud trial comes to a close amid a flopped prosecution

Judge Frank Marrocco rarely put counsel on the spot during the five month long Nortel fraud trail and did so ever-so-gently yesterday with a simple question to lead Crown attorney Robert Hubbard. But during the Crown`s closing arguments on Thursday, the judge asked whether, in a company that did ten billion dollars in annual business,  a few million dollars in misstated accruals, an amount that represented one tenth of one percent of revenues, could not be the result of errors rather than a planned deception.

That question left Crown attorney Hubbard at a loss for an answer, leaving him to mumble that his junior colleague, who also appeared caught off-guard, would address that aspect the next day. This is a trial that has cost the taxpayers millions of dollars and was based on the fact that one of Canada`s largest companies went bust and thousands of investors lost millions upon millions. With all that pain, it was felt someone should be punished, but the Crown picked the wrong people and had no evidence against them.

There had not been a single shred of evidence to suggest that the three accused, former CEO Frank Dunn, Chief Financial Officer Doug Beatty, and Controller Michael Gollogly in any way deceived Nortel`s auditing firm Delloite or Nortel`s shareholders about any of their actions.

If a fraud was perpetrated, the way The Toronto Star reported what was said, the Crown`s argument is that it was perpetrated by telepathy, `The accused in the long-running Nortel Networks Corp. fraud trial didn’t need to tell underlings to falsify accounting entries to trigger return to profit bonus payouts in 2003, the Crown alleged in its closing arguments Thursday “Everybody just knew what to do,” lead counsel Robert Hubbard said.

The irony is that after billions of dollars of bad investments by the previous team of senior executives that had been approved by the board, Nortel`s subsequent leadership, who are now on trial,  had the company turned around after the largest ever restructuring of a Canadian company. The workforce was reduced by two-thirds, about 60,000 employees, and the company was on the verge of returning to profitability. But after a financial restatement had to be issued,  a frequent occurrence among major companies, the Board hired a forensic audit team to review Nortel.`s accounting practices After a brief investigation, which was not nearly long enough to examine the massive number of transactions involved, one of the forensic auditors, who was contradicted by members of his own team, said there were improprieties. Rather than conducting a more thorough investigation, Nortel`s board immediately went into a panic, suspended Dunn, Beatty and Gollogly, and that led the company into a series of events that caused an unstoppable tailspin.

James Bagnall at The Ottawa Citizen has summed up the matter clearly:

After more than five months of testimony from 17 Crown witnesses, the most puzzling aspect of the Nortel fraud case is that it was brought at all.    

Despite having culled millions of emails from the hard drives of Nortel employees, the Crown could not produce a single instance in which the co-accused — chief executive Frank Dunn, chief financial officer Douglas Beatty or controller Michael Gollogly — instructed anyone to do anything illegal. No gun. No smoke.   

Nor has the Crown been able to explain behaviour that suggested fraud was far from the thoughts of the accused. They designed a return-to-profitability plan that deliberately would not trigger payments until multiple conditions had been met over a full year. Nortel rival Lucent Technologies paid its employees a bonus simply for staying with the firm.    

When Nortel’s board convinced Dunn in 2004 to replace his chief financial officer, he hired Bill Kerr — a former Nortel CFO who knew more about the company’s accounting than nearly any other outsider he could have picked. Douglas Beatty, the executive Kerr replaced, refused to cut his staff of internal auditors, even though Nortel shrank by two-thirds.  

The Crown’s theory of the crime — that Dunn and his colleagues orchestrated a global conspiracy under the nose of Nortel’s longtime auditor, Deloitte — was difficult enough to accept as a starting point. But in the past few months, one witness after another testified about the wide open debate between auditors and Nortel managers over the proper accounting treatment for dozens of key entries in 2002 and 2003.  

The Defense will make its closing arguments next week. But based on the lack of substance the Crown offered, this trial which has destroyed the careers of three innocent men, and which appears to have only been brought for the purpose of appeasing public anger, cannot end soon enough.

'Tin Foil' Tom Mulcair`s NDP: Khadr good, Black bad

Law abiding Canadians concerned about their public safety have just had their worst fear realized.

We should be arming ourselves and barricading our homes at the terrifying prospect that convicted white collar criminal Conrad Black will soon be roaming the streets of Toronto and Ottawa. Black was convicted  in a Chicago courtroom on fraud charges in a convoluted case that a great many Canadian lawyers believe was unjustified and unproven. Meanwhile, self-confessed murderer and terrorist Omar Khadr should be given free reign of of land, an apology, and a huge compensation package for the inconvenience of incarceration after he murdered a US Army Medic and permanently maimed another following his surrender to American forces upon loss of a firefight in Afghanistan.

The NDP wants to keep this guy out...

At least that`s the way NDP leader Tom Mulcair seems to view things, showing that the NDP`s great new hope is no more competent than his predecessor, `Community Clinic` Jack Layton.

Conrad Black may be the personification of much that is bad about capitalism, from his raiding of the Dominion stores pension fund to the libel threats he would routinely issue to any journalist who tried to expose some of his shifty activities. But he has also made very real contributions to Canada in many ways, including raising the standard of journalism in founding The National Post, his authorship of historical works, and his often unheralded philanthropic contributions.

And the fact remains that while Conrad Black will likely continue to contribute to Canada, he most certainly has never or will never kill anyone or participate in an act of violent terrorism.

Contrast that with the unrepentant, violent Islamic terrorist Khadr, and the NDP's embrace of him, and it's easy to see how Mulcair and his party simply can't stop acting like idiots. As Libby Davies, the NDP's clownish Deputy Leader and resident 9/11 conspiracy theorist told CBC News, ""The whole situation has been quite a travesty since Day One in terms of the process that [Khadr] had to go through."

while they want to let this guy in

Most Canadians seem to think the travesty is that a murderous terrorist may soon have free reign to walk among us with the blessing of the Official Opposition.

The ridiculous example NDP leader Mulcair gave when complaining about the "double standard" applied to Black's request to return to Canada was to compare Black's case to that of a violent criminal convicted of shooting a police officer.

By failing to distinguish between a peaceful man with an admittedly mixed record and a violent, bloodthirsty criminal, the NDP isn't highlighting the hypocrisy of the Conservative government, they're reiterating their own incompetence and unsuitability to ever become the government themselves.





UPDATE: Never let it be said Tin Foil Tom has no sense of humour - with buffoonish Vancouver East MP Libby Davies at his side, Mulcair jokes, "we have the team to get the job done!"

I assume he means this job?

The people pushing the "robocalls" scandal have their own credibility issues

From a small office in Vancouver,  rented in a shared space with the Canadian branch of PBS station KCTS, Jamie Biggar and the people behind LeadNow.ca want to undo the decision reached by almost 15 million voters in Canada's 2011 election.

Biggar, LeadNow's Executive Director,  is a thoughtful, personable young man who was once the Chairman of the Sierra Club of British Columbia, the provincial branch of a US-based environmental group. In a talk last week,  Biggar pointed out that his organization is not partisan in that it doesn't endorse any particular political party and its goal is to hold the government, any government, to account for its potentially destructive policies. The goal, he said, is to serve the interests of democracy.

However the campaign to have democratic elections undone based on conjecture and unsubstantiated allegations would not appear to support those goals.

Biggar acknowledged that the much vaunted "31,000" number of complaints to Elections Canada were not actually people complaining about receiving calls misdirecting them to non-existent poling locations. That number, which has now grown to over 43,000 is merely automated messages of pre-written "concern" that are generated from LeadNow's website with the ease of clicking a "send" button. As we now know, the actual number of complaints to Election Canada about 700. But more significantly, not a single one of those complaints, on the basis of which LeadNow suggests new elections should be held, alleges that they did not cast their vote because of those calls.

In fact, LeadNow's campaign to delegitimize the 2011 election is based entirely on stringing together a bunch of ifs, could-haves, and maybes, without a solitary piece of solid evidence of wrongdoing by the Prime Minister of any senior Conservative Party member. One such piece of so-called support that Biggar referred me to was a report produced by Simon Fraser University Professor Anke Kessler which is based entirely on guesswork, corollaries and false postulations, such as the figure of 31,000 complaints being from people having reported receiving the robocalls rather than the actuality of that number only being LeadNow generated emails of "concern."

If one is going to make reasonable guesses based on corollaries, something more indicative of reality can be inferred from the people involved with LeadNow. Biggar was adamant that media reports of financial involvement from far-left activist funders like George Soros and the Tides Foundation were not true.

But LeadNow's Advisory Board reads like a who's who of vociferous enemies of the Conservative government, who have been known to become hysterical in their opposition to not only almost anything the Harper government does, but its very existence.

Zafar Bangash speaking at
robocalls rally in Toronto
(photo by Blazing Cat Fur)

People like Judy Rebick, who founded the fanatical website rabble.ca, which is financed almost exclusively by public service unions and NDP-linked organizations, Ian Capstick, a former top-level NDP backroom fixture, Jim Stafford, an economist in the employ of the Canadian Auto Workers union. The LeadNow-inspired rallies decrying the government over the robocalls issue went so far as to involve people like Zafar Bangash as organizers. Bangash is a Khomeinist propagandist and notorious hatemonger who advocates Sharia-Law and supports the Iranian dictatorship of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One of the many absurd ironies that the robocalls hysterics have produced is a criticism of Canadian democracy supported by the radical left coming from one of the most brutal, undemocratic regimes on earth. That came in the form of Rebick's rabble.ca republishing a report from Iranian state-owned Press TV condemning Canada's so-called election fraud.

Whilke LeadNow may not be dishonest in any outright, planned way, their zeal and hatred of the Harper government has made their commitment to honesty highly suspect and what they purport to be facts to be false. As an investigation proceeds into the robocalls matter, LeadNow's efforts to damage the credibility and validity of the Harper government may just have the reverse effect and discredit LeadNow and those associated with it.

Nortel Show Trial Update: Crown's case continues to unravel

The testimony of witness after witness in the Nortel show trial appears to demonstrate the the Crown doesn't have a case in the fraud prosecution of three senior Executives. Fraud by definition involves deceit, and the Crown has consistently been thwarted in every effort to show that Former Nortel CEO Frank Gunn, CFO Douglas Beatty and Controller Michael Gollogly were anything but forthcoming with the firm's auditors and board.

According to a report in the Financial Post, today's star Crown witness, Sue Shaw, the chief handler of financial consolidation records for the one-time telecom giant’s corporate books, testified to Crown prosecutors earlier this week that $66-million in accrued liabilities had been identified as early as mid-2002 as being no longer necessary to account for. It meant the sum should have been released into quarterly results, a common practice at Nortel at the time.

The Crown alleges the sum, alongside millions more in balance-sheet provisions, never made it to the income statement. Instead, the values were shifted to later periods, an Ontario Superior Court of Justice trial has heard.

Except, it turns out that Ms Shaw actually didn't know what she was talking about.

As The Post detailed:

David Porter, lawyer for former chief executive Frank Dunn, Wednesday entered into evidence a December, 2002 email between Nortel finance officials with an attached spreadsheet. A number of corporate reserves were listed as being dispatched to Nortel’s third-quarter 2002 income. It was presumably a document Ms. Shaw had not seen before.

“It appears that sixty-six million was released in that period,” the witness said. The direct repudiation undercut a central allegation by the Crown in its fraud case..

Oops! Seems yet again, the prosecution is made a fool of in this case. One wonders when pursuing obviously incorrect charges becomes an embarrassment and undermines the administration of justice in Ontario. The longer this trial continues without a summary judgement in favour of the defense, the more glaring that question becomes.

The Nortel Show Trial

The largest fraud trial in Canadian history is set to being on Monday. Nortel's collapse in 2003 cost billions to shareholders.  It had a major affect on pension funds and thousands of individual investors. Nortel's misfortune was one of the most sudden and extreme falls of an enormous corporation since the Great Depression. Billions were paid out in legal settlements and naturally everyone concerned looked around to find someone to blame.

During the dot com bubble of the early 2000's, Nortel's Board had approved billions of dolars worth of acquisitions of what turned out to be near worthless investments, and it fell to CEO Frank Dunn and CFO Douglas Beatty to try to turn that around. They instituted massive spending cuts that resulted in billions of savings and as far as financial markets were concerned, they were able to effect a miraculous resurrection at Nortel.

The Crown is alleging an extremely complex fraud on the part of Dunn, Beatty and controller Michael Gollogly to manipulate losses and earnings from one quarter to the next in order to meet the conditions for performance bonuses for the senior executives.

However there's no proof that ever happened.

Everything the trio of Dunn, Beatty and controller Michael Gollogly did was approved by the auditing firm Deloitte and fell withing the parameters of normal business practices and reporting. Just days before trial, amid the four million documents the crown has submitted as being relevant without identifying a single one that specifically shows fraud by the defendants, charges of falsifying documents were dropped. The fraud charges remain, but there is much speculation that this is simply a case of the government trying to look like it is doing something in the face of the anger and outrage from the public about a series of events which few people understand.

In today's National Post, James Bagnall provides an excellent summary of the issues:

"The deeper you dig into the accounting history of Nortel, the easier it is to believe that the board of directors, its private investigators and the RCMP just plain got it wrong - that the atmosphere may have been so poisoned by Nortel's spectacular fall from grace that many were simply looking for someone to blame."

It's an important article about a major case that details how, rather than bringing three criminals to justice, the government may be wasting millions more taxpayer dollars on an expensive show trial that will accomplish nothing other than to demonize three innocent men.

Internet Death Threat email scam

Here's a novel appraoch to scamming money through the Internet I received by email today (apparently it's been around for a while now):

From: robbinsj716@msn.com
Subject: Act Fast!
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:46:11 +0000

Hello,

This is the only way I could contact you for now,I want you to be very careful about this and keep this secret with you until I make out space for us to see. You have no need of knowing who I am or where I am from.I know this may sound very surprising to you but it’s the situation.I have been paid some ransom in advance to terminate you with some reasons listed to me by my employer. It’s someone I believe you call a friend, I have followed you closely for a while now and have seen that you are innocent of the accusations he leveled against
you. Do not contact the police or try to send a copy of this to them,because if you do, I will know,and I might be pushed to do what I have been paid to do.Besides, this is the first time I turn out to be a betrayer in my job. I took pity on you,that is why I have made up my mind to help you if you are willing to help yourself.

Now listen I need just $5,000. And you have to send it through western union; I repeat, do not arrange for the cops and if you play hard to get, it will be extended to your family. Do not set any camera to cover us or set up any tape to record our conversation, my employer is in my control now. Payment details will be provided for you to make a part of the payment of $3,000 first,which will serve as guarantee that you are ready to you co-operate,then i will post a copy of the video tape that contains his request for me to terminate you which will be enough evidence for you to take any legal action against him before he employs another person for the job. You will pay the balance of $2,000 once you receive the tape.

Warning; do not contact the police, make sure you stay indoors once it is 7.30pm until this whole thing is sorted out,if you neglect any of these warnings, you will have yourself to blame. You do not have much time, so get back to me immediately.

Note:I will advise you keep this to yourself alone, not even a friend or a family member should know about it because it could be one of them.

Regard
Don

ACORN: helping exploit underage sex slaves

In 2009, conservative activists exposed ACORN with this video, in which members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now offered their help in providing tax tips on how to pimp out what they are told are underage prostitutes smuggled into the US from Central America.

The exposure of these videos got ACORN's US federal funding revoked.





And they were involved in election fraud:




ACORN operates in Canada too. According to their website, "ACORN Canada is an independent national organization in Canada, but we draw on the proud history and tradition of ACORN USA (acorn.org)."

That's some proud tradition!

Look who's showing support in Toronto for ACORN Canada with with your tax dollars: Ward  30 Councilor Paula Fletcher and Ward 21 Councillor Joe Mihevc.

Way to go, Paula & Joe!