Is The Channel About To Be Changed?

Always adept at averting attention from their criminal acts, look for a Harper push to change the channel with this information.

In my humble opinion, neither Towes nor any other member of his 'rat-pack' deserves any gesture of contrition, only contempt.

The Conservatives: Farther Gone Than I Had Realized

The Harperites are more out of touch with reality than I realized if they think this Tory bought-and-paid-for hack is going to do them any good in their voter-suppression crimes.

The Public Responds To Conservative Voter-Suppression Crimes

While I normally spend little time reading readers' on-line comments in The Globe and Mail, these, I think, help to capture the fury more and more of the public is feeling over Harper-inspired malfeasance.

John Ibbitson's Faith In Stephen Harper

While acknowledging the seriousness of the voter suppression crimes being uncovered, The Globe's John Ibbitson writes the following:

... we can be reasonably certain that Mr. Harper, who is Leader of the Conservative Party as well as Prime Minister, knew nothing about what was going on in Guelph or elsewhere. Campaign officials protect their leaders from that sort of direct knowledge.

To put it mildly, his is not a faith I share.

Is That Pungent Odor Coming From A Smoking Gun?

If the Canadian media and the Oppositions parties do their jobs, perhaps we'll soon have an answer.

The following is reported in today's Star:

Callers on behalf of the federal Conservative Party were instructed in the days before last year’s election to read scripts telling voters that Elections Canada had changed their voting locations, say telephone operators who worked for a Thunder Bay-based call centre.

The story goes on to report that three employees of a call centre in Thunder Bay, operated by Responsive Marketing Group Inc., were very concerned about the nature of their scripts; one of them, Annette Desgagné, 46, was so distressed over the fact that the calls were misdirecting voters to the wrong polling stations that she reported her suspicions to her supervisor at the RMG site, to the RCMP office in Thunder Bay and to a toll-free Elections Canada number at the time.

Desagne's response from the RCMP is troubling. She was told by an officer whose name she can't recall that there was nothing they could do. Nobody else followed up with her.

Given the politicization of the federal police that has taken place under Harper, one senses there is much more to ferret out here under the heading of Harper crimes and misdemeanors.

Let's hope that both the press and the polticians have the fortitude to follow this through.

You Know The Conservatives Are In Trouble When

....they start losing some of their biggest cheerleaders.

Another Kind of Power Abuse

Although the political abuse of power is endemic in this country, especially at the federal level, it is sadly not the only one in which innocent people are victimized.

While I have frequently written on police misuse of power, the instances of that abuse, and the difficulty in bringing the perpetrators to account, seem only to be growing. Both Susan Clairmont, of The Hamilton Spectator, and The Star's Rosie DiManno, in an especially hard-hitting piece, offer some important insights into the obstacles faced by those seeking to bring rogue authorities to justice.