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Stephen Harper's reaction

Send food, medicine and relief workers. Be amongst the first in the world to help. Dispatch our disaster response team within hours of the earthquake.

Save every child you can.

Make a personal example of donating, encourage other Canadians to donate, and match those private donations.

Host an international Haiti relief conference.

Pledge to make the upcoming G8 meeting about helping the world's poor, especially moms with infants, by funding "clean water, vaccinations and nutrition".

Michael Ignatieff's reaction

"Liberals support the plan so long as it includes abortion".

h/t sda

P.S. Surely it's just a coincidence that Ignatieff's first major policy statement about abortion has to do with Haiti and other Third World minorities, right? I mean, it's not like Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist woman who called blacks "reckless breeders" and had a special "Negro Project" right? I mean, Planned Parenthood would never argue that eugenics was the best solution of racial, political and social problems would they?

Right?

 

Medicare is for the little people. Big shots fly to the U.S.

Here's Danny Williams in 2008, speaking passionately about our socialist health care system (h/t sda):

 

Do you hear the dripping disdain he has for anyone who dares to even question the sanctity of socialist medicine?

Yet here's Williams today, making plans to get the hell out of our health care system when it comes to someone he cares about -- that is, himself.

His constituents can rot on a waiting list. Not for him, the King of the Island.

At least he isn't lying about it, and at least he's not using taxpayers money to fly there.

Unlike Jean Chretien. Here's my scoop from a few years back:

PM proves health care not equal for all Canadians

Calgary Herald
Tue Jan 15 2002
Page: A15
Section: Comment
Byline: Ezra Levant
Source: For The Calgary Herald

How will Jean Chretien respond to Premier Ralph Klein's free market-health care proposals?

Will he attack Alberta, as he did in the last federal election campaign, with negative ads on television, accusing Klein of bringing U.S.-style health care to Canada?

Or will he punish Alberta financially, as he did in the mid-1990s, by threatening to fine Alberta, dollar for dollar, for inviting private capital into health care?

Whatever Chretien does to our province, and whatever capitalistic acts he accuses Klein of engaging in, Albertans should know this: Jean Chretien takes his own family to private health clinics. In fact, he doesn't just use U.S.-style private clinics. He actually goes to private clinics in the U.S.

And he flies to those U.S. private clinics on Canadian government jets, paid for by Canadian tax dollars.

According to access-to-information documents obtained by the Canadian Alliance, on Feb. 8, 1999, Chretien and two aides flew from Vancouver to Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic. According to air force flight logs, they flew back to Ottawa that afternoon with Chretien's daughter. And on Dec. 11 of the same year, Chretien went back to the clinic, this time just with his wife and his aide.

These trips were courtesy of the Canadian Forces 412th Squadron, which has flown literally thousands of nautical miles taking Chretien back and forth to the clinic.

There is nothing wrong with Chretien wanting the very best in health care for his family -- even better care than he thinks he can get in Canada.

And there is probably nothing wrong with him spending tax dollars to fly to these international clinics. For security reasons alone, the prime minister should not have to fly on regular, commercial flights like the rest of us.

But it is wrong for Chretien to avail his family of private, U.S. health care while condemning Alberta for wanting to provide that same quality of care to all our citizens.

Of course, Chretien is not the first Canadian politician to receive private care.

Robert Bourassa, the late Quebec premier, flew to the U.S. for cancer treatment. Joe Clark, the leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, paid cash for a suite at Toronto's private Shouldice Hospital, where he had a hernia operation in the late 1980s.

Clark tried to explain that he wasn't guilty of secretly using two-tier health care, which he had publicly campaigned against. "It's not a tier, it's a particular facility," Clark explained to reporters.

Chretien was almost caught by the press, too, on his Feb. 8, 1999, trip.

Normally, no one would have known about Chretien's whereabouts that day. The official line was that Chretien was with his family in British Columbia -- with no mention of the stop-over in the U.S.

But then King Hussein of Jordan died.

Chretien was supposed to be at the funeral, but he didn't go. He wanted to go to the clinic in Minnesota, instead. So he claimed that the air force couldn't get him to Jordan in time.

"I was in British Columbia," he told Parliament. "It was physically impossible for me to get to Amman," he said. "I went skiing with my grandchildren."

It might have been embarrassing to miss a world leader's funeral because of a family vacation.

But Chretien's advisers thought it would be much worse to admit to using a private U.S. clinic. In Chretien style, the decision was made to tough it out, and stand by the Vancouver-skiing-couldn't-make-it excuse.

Under extreme political pressure, the air force released an unsigned press release, saying it had let down Chretien by not being ready.

No mention was made of the Minnesota flight. And the next day, Gen. Maurice Baril, then the Chief of Defence Staff, held a press conference to personally accept the blame. Again, no mention of the Minnesota flight.

But air force log books aren't subject to political cleanups: they show that Chretien wasn't in Vancouver on Feb. 8, 1999. At 7:55 a.m., he flew to Minnesota, and stayed there until 4:50 p.m., when he returned to Ottawa.

So the next time Chretien accuses Klein of promoting U.S.-style health care, the premier shouldn't get angry. In fact, he should look at the Chretien family as a customer, and try to get the Chretien family's health-care business.

After all, clinics in Calgary are a lot closer to the ski hills than the Mayo Clinic -- and we accept payment in Canadian dollars.

Jews in the Senate

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UPDATE: See correction at bottom

On Friday, when Stephen Harper appointed five new Senators, my Liberal frenemy, Jason Cherniak, wrote the strangest thing:

waiting for expressions of disappointment that Harper is not appointing Senators active in the Jewish community

Cherniak, readers will recall, is one of the last 100 Jews in the Liberal Party.

Well, it’s true that in those five Senatorial appointments, none were active in the Jewish community – or at least none were Jewish. But Harper has already appointed three Jews to the Senate, all of whom are very active in the Jewish community and philanthropy: Linda Frum, Judith Seidman and Irving Gerstein. Add to that Harper’s appointment of a Jew to the Supreme Court, and you’d think the man was trying to start a synagogue on Parliament Hill. And, to the chagrin of anti-Semites like the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, Harper has appointed a Jew as the chairman of the GONGO Rights and Democracy, and a Jew-loving Gentile as its new president. (That’s really what all the opposition hullabaloo is about: R&D is no longer going to be allowed to send cheques to Palestinian terrorists.)

I pointed out some of this to Cherniak, who responded by listing a number of great Jews in the Liberal Party, most of whom are now in their 70s and 80s, and some of whom have actually been dead for quite some time.

In other words, the golden age of Jews in the Liberal Party – if it ever existed – is long past.

(I dispute that it ever existed; it was the Liberal government during the Second World War that turned back ships of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, with the motto “none is too many.” Liberals have mythologized and sanitized their party’s anti-Semitic past, the same way modern U.S. Democrats have willfully forgotten that theirs is the party of the KKK (including the lovely Senator Robert Byrd) and that the Republicans are the party of Abe Lincoln.)

But that’s the past. What’s the future? In my own travels, I find that on most Canadian campuses, the Hillel or Jewish students clubs are overwhelmingly Conservative. That’s the future.

Cherniak asked me: who is “the Jewish Senator” in the Conservatives, and I actually replied. But that’s a mistake. Even accepting the concept of “the Jewish Senator” is to agree to the ghettoization of Jews and to relegate being pro-Israel to the level of an ethnopolitical hand-out, not a function of a principled foreign policy. More than that, it accepts that a Jew's only place must be on "Jewish issues". The Liberals have so conditioned Cherniak into thinking that being pro-Israel is a ghetto issue, that he believes it: he thinks his place is to have one token in Parliament. Maybe he thinks it’ll be him, if he really serves the party loyally.

This also makes the false assumption that any one Jew can speak for the community – a fallacy proved every day by the “Official Jews” who run the Liberal-sympathetic Canadian Jewish Congress.

I’d rather have a government run by principled Gentiles like Jason Kenney, Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper, to name just three, who are pro-Israel for reasons of conservative principle, than a government stacked with either the “Jews of Silence” as Izzy Asper called the Official Jews, or worse. And by worse, I mean that according to Cherniak’s litmus test, a party dominated by Naomi Klein, Judy Rebick and Noam Chomsky (the NDP, I guess) would be the bee’s knees, but a party run by Israel-loving Christians wouldn’t.

There are plenty of Jews active in the Conservative Party. Much more importantly, there are people in the Tories, Jewish and non-Jewish, who for reasons of principle, not ethnicity, support democracy and liberty, be it in Israel or Taiwan or Iran.

But let me close with a little bit of research that I did, on a whim.

Cherniak is upset that Harper has only appointed three Jewish senators. Jews, of course, make up about 1% of Canada’s population, but Harper has made them 9% of his 33 appointees.

How about Jean Chretien? How did he do?

In ten years as prime minister, unless I'm missing someone, he didn’t appoint a single one.

And Paul Martin? Unless I’m missing someone, the only Jew he could find to appoint was a Conservative named Hugh Segal, Brian Mulroney’s former chief of staff.

I say again, simply counting Jews isn’t the right way to measure a party’s commitment to Jews or Jewish issues. But even on that basis, Chreniak’s desperate apology for his increasingly Jew-free party fails.

UPDATE: A correspondent points out that the Senate website to which I have linked to do my count only lists Senators who are currently sitting, so it excludes Jewish Senators who were appointed but have since retired. So, for example, a seventy-year-old named Yoine Goldstein was appointed for a short term by Paul Martin -- a little token for a little token.

Here's the full list of all Senators appointed by Paul Martin -- it's just Segal and Goldstein.

And here's the full list of all Senators appointed by Jean Chretien. It includes a three-year stint for Sheila Finestone, and that's it.

Seriously in ten years as prime minister, with 75 appointments, he chose one Jew for three years. That's Jason Cherniak's Jew-loving party for you.

I'm also advised of the hilarity that ensued when "Goldstein's seat" -- or as Liberals would say, "the Jewish seat" -- came open. The Official Jews around the country all busied themselves campaigning for "their" Official Jew -- they're power broker, their choice for "the seat".

Imagine the gnashing of the teeth when Harper ignored their official choices and picked his own. I can't tell you how happy I am that none of Harper's Jewish picks have the CJC hechsher.

Someone's in love

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Which is more surprising?

That Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the Liberal MP from Etobicoke Centre, called up the Globe and Mail to trash Jason Kenney's visit to Auschwitz, demanding Kenney come back to Canada and calling that somber trip a "jaunt";

Or that the Liberal Party's house Jew, Irwin Cotler, is as silent as a churchmouse, just as he was when Michael Ignatieff himself called Israel a war criminal in its fight against Hezbollah?

Answer: neither is surprising. Just depressing.

 

I’ve spotted two Haiti-oriented NGOs that readers should stay away from, for reasons of corruption. Simply put, not enough money given to these NGOs actually winds up helping Haitians – too much is spent on lavish luxuries for NGO staff and managers.

Yele Haiti

The first is Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti foundation. Jean is a Haitian-American pop singer, most famous for his work with the band The Fugees. May I recommend his song by the same name as his NGO, Yele. Here’s the heart-breaking and heart-warming video:

 

That fortress in the video, by the way, is the Citadelle Laferrière, the largest citadel in the Americas.

I love Wyclef Jean’s sound, but I wouldn’t give a cent to his charity. Jean has been ubiquitous these past weeks raising money for Haiti, and no doubt his tears are real. But financial records from Yele Haiti show that Jean has made sure the first person to get paid from Yele Haiti events was himself – including a staggering $100,000 fee for him to perform at one of his own events (that benefit was cancelled because of his demands) and other gigs that poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into companies he controlled. Here’s one where he took nearly $100,000 out of $150,000 raised. Even if Jean’s fading star could still fetch that on the open market (he can’t – here’s a contract showing he performs for a fraction of that), it’s still outrageous that people donating to Yele Haiti are told the money is going to help Haitians, when the poor Haitian benefiting the most is Wyclef himself.

Best to take Jean for who he is – a talented musician who has helped spread the Haitian creole sound around the world – but put your trust (and money) into accredited charities that take only a modest sum for administration and overhead. The Red Cross is probably your best bet.

Rights and Democracy

Another corrupt NGO that donors should stay away from is Rights and Democracy (R&D), the ironically-named Canadian government-funded NGO that has recently been rocked by scandal for donating money to a Palestinian terrorist.

R&D has a Haiti program, but like Yele Haiti, an inordinate amount of money received by R&D is spent on their own jet-setting staff. Here's a 22-page internal audit memo from just two years ago, for example, that looks into a raft of corruption allegations – and unfortunately finds many of them to be true. The review, conducted by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Foreign Affairs found “weak internal controls” over money.

For example, on a junket to Cairo, R&D staff racked up over $5,000 in expenses like booze, mini-bar booze, and booze at the pool. The review actually had all three of those categories of booze (see page 7). Page 11 of the review shows that board members funneled money to their pet organizations and that large contracts are being handed out without public tender, in violation of the "rules". And the president of R&D billed for 46 nights in Paris – not bad considering R&D didn’t have any business there. For comparison, he only spent 42 nights in Ottawa.

Page 13 outlines widespread labour-management strife and low morale, going back years; page 16 notes more than a dozen staff fired and 65 labour union grievances; page 18 refers to harassment of staff by management. Bitchiness alone isn’t a reason not to donate to an NGO; but lavish expenses and a lack of financial controls is. This broken corporate culture has been going on for years, but has only recently received media coverage, largely due to the staff's rebellion against a new, anti-corruption-oriented board.

Conclusion: if you’re an individual donor and want to help Haiti, don’t give your money to Yele Haiti. And if you’re a government shoveling $11 million out the door each year to a sullen staff who think that taking boozy trips to Cairo or Paris counts as “international development”, you may wish to direct your funds elsewhere, too.

Last week I wrote about a scandal at a taxpayer-funded organization called "Rights and Democracy" (R&D), set up in the 1980s by Brian Mulroney to help fund fledgling democracy groups around the world.

Canadian taxpayers give $11 million each year to R&D, which is overseen by a board of directors appointed by the federal government. The scandal is that several newly appointed board members caught R&D staff red-handed giving thousands of dollars to extremists, including a $10,000 grant to a group called Al Haq, run by a member of the terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

If you're not familiar with the PFLP, here's an Amnesty International report that describes some of their activities. Let me highlight one sentence:

The PFLP has claimed several other attacks, including... a suicide bombing in a pizzeria in Karnei Shomron, Israel on 16 February 2002, killing three civilians - Keren Shatzki, 14; Rachel Theler 16; and Nehemia Amar.

There has been some reportage about the scandal in the mainstream media, but it has mainly been cast as a debate between warring factions of R&D's board, or between the board and the staff. That's mildly interesting, but it falls into the Parliamentary Press Gallery rut of reporting about personalities and gossip, instead of policy substance.

Of course personal and political feuds are part of the story, and they can be interesting. But surely that is less important than the substance they're fighting over, which is: "what priorities should that $11 million be spent on?" and "is money being properly accounted for"?

A more specific formulation of the first question might be: Is a member of the terrorist PFLP really that interested in either "rights" or "democracy"? I think most Canadians would want their board to ask that.

And the second question -- proper accounting -- is equally urgent, especially after recent revelations that staff and managers had used R&D as a personal piggy bank. Just to pick one example from an internal government audit, R&D's former boss, Jean-Louis Roy, expensed 46 nights in lovely Paris -- even though R&D has no programs there. Other expenses that were foisted on taxpayers included "laundry", "mini-bar" and "food and alcohol by the pool". Seriously -- you should read this horrendous report by the National Post's Graeme Hamilton.

That was the corporate culture at R&D before Stephen Harper started making his appointments to the board. What was meant as a fund for freedom fighters around the world had become a slush fund for corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and a source of free money for their left-wing fellow travellers -- and even terrorists.

No wonder R&D didn't like the new scrutiny being brought by the board.

I know the new chairman a little bit -- his name is Aurel Braun, and he's a universally well-respected professor at the University of Toronto. His personal style couldn't be more opposite that of the louche spendthrifts who have been using R&D as their personal ATM. I don't think Braun would take it as an insult if I called him rather anal about things. He's a stickler; a rules-follower; if he weren't a professor, he'd probably be an accountant. He's an inordinately conscientious man who saw his appointment to R&D not as an opportunity for lavish travel and other perks, but as a chance to actually promote R&D's idealistic mission. It was inevitable that he would clash with the staff who had become accustomed to the sloppy grift that was "normal" under previous administrations. Braun was simply relentless in his questions about where the money was going; that Anglo style of accountability was called "harassment" by R&D's Montreal workforce that was used to, for example, having gourmet meals paid for from funds that were supposed to go to freedom fighters overseas.

Ed Broadbent, Mulroney's bizarre choice for the first chairman of R&D, has condemned the new board and its scrutiny of R&D spending. So has the Toronto Star's house anti-Israel propagandist, Haroon Siddiqui. And the Liberal Party jumped into the fray, clearly siding with the staff. But the most grotesque comments have been those of the four past chairmen of R&D (including Broadbent), who insinuated that Harper's appointees were actually responsible for the death of R&D's president this month. (Remy Beauregard, who himself was appointed by Harper, had a heart attack after leaving a board meeting.)

Beauregard's death has been used as a political weapon by R&D's staff and their leftist allies, which shows their lack of any publicly saleable arguments. And how's this for a measure of their morality: they actually took down Braun's message of condolence from R&D's website, and replaced it with one from Shawan Jabarin, the PFLP terrorist to whom they gave a grant.

Is there someone who can get to the bottom of this? I think there is. He's a two-time Liberal candidate for office named David Matas. He's a distinguished human rights lawyer, going back to his fight against Apartheid. And he knows and loves R&D well -- Jean Chretien appointed him to a term on R&D's board, from 1997 to 2003.

Harper re-appointed him two months ago -- clearly a non-partisan appointment based on Matas's experience and expertise.

Tonight I received a copy of a 5,000-word essay Matas wrote about the shenanigans at R&D. For those who care about this issue -- and other than R&D's staff, it might only be me and Paul Wells -- I commend it to you.

Not only is it very well written and meticulously documented (see footnotes in the Word file I link to), it's also clearly written by someone who doesn't have a partisan allegiance to either the "red Tories" or "blue Tories", that some MSM reporters are casting as the fault-line here. Matas is neither, and he clearly has an affinity for the organization, having served it for six years before.

Here's a Word document of his essay, and below is the text of it, modified only by me bolding some of the more interesting points. I haven't seen it published anywhere yet.

I don't think Matas's essay will shut up fringe voices like Broadbent. But I think it should answer a lot of the questions that good faith reporters have been asking. And -- who knows? -- coming from a Liberal, it might even cause Michael Ignatieff to slowly back away from an organization that calls Israel a war criminal and funds a terrorist. Here it is:

Unravelling

(An analysis of the controversy at Rights and Democracy)

by David Matas

What is the cause of the current controversy at Rights and Democracy?  There is no doubt that there is a dispute.  But what is the subject matter of the dispute?

 

A letter from the staff asks three Board members to resign because they have, according to the staff, been guilty of harassment.  The charge of harassment is an invidious characterization of an activity.  But what activity?  To what, in neutral terms, is the complaint referring?  And why is the complaint directed against only three Board members?

 

The staff letter complains that the performance evaluation committee of the Board treated the President unfairly because it sent its performance evaluation of the President to the Privy Council without first having given the President a copy and an opportunity to comment.  This complaint, it should be noted, is different from the complaint of harassment and does not explain it.

 

The letter omits to mention a number of relevant facts.  One is that the performance evaluation committee had obtained a legal opinion that its evaluation was a confidence of the Privy Council and could not be disclosed to the President.  Second, the President nonetheless obtained a copy of the evaluation through an access to information request.  Third, the committee had agreed to reconsider and amend its evaluation based on the comments the President had made after having seen the copy of the evaluation he had obtained through access to information.  Fourth, the committee had made a number of changes based on these comments.  Fifth, the President was free to write to the Privy Council himself to express any disagreement he might have with the evaluation as amended.

 

The staff, in a letter signed by communications director Charles Vallerand, takes the position that the present dispute is not a policy difference between the Board and the staff.  Yet, the very first time I met the then Rights and Democracy President Remy Beauregard, (in Parliament at the launch of a book I co-authored with David Kilgour, to which Beauregard came in order to set up a briefing session between him and me) he referred to ideological differences within the Board and between a faction of the Board and the staff.

 

What were these ideological differences?  And how is that they now seem to have disappeared?  Or, put another way, why has the staff narrative shifted from ideological differences to a claim of harassment?

 

It is impossible to answer these questions without reference to the February 2009 grants to three organizations "to continue their documentation of human rights violations occurring in the Gaza strip".  The three organizations are Al Haq, Al Mezan,, and B'Tselem.  The grant for each was $10,000.00 Canadian.  The grants came from funds not subject to Board approval, the urgent action and important opportunity funds.

 

The $30,000.00 spent was a small part of a multi-million dollar budget.  Yet, they have led to the unravelling of the organization.  The grants themselves were inappropriate for reasons I have set out in a separate memorandum.  However, the problem was not so much the grants, as flawed as they were, as the manner in which Rights and Democracy handled them. 

 

In a briefing session staff gave to Michael Van Pelt and me the day before our first Board meeting, we were told that Rights and Democracy does not receive and decide on unsolicited grant applications.  Rather all applications for grants it awards are elicited by Rights and Democracy in pursuit of its own program objectives.

 

At the Finance and Audit Committee meetings following the awarding of the grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem, in response to questions about how the urgent action and important opportunities fund was being spent, the staff was initially not forthcoming.  It took repeated queries at a sequence of meetings of the Finance and Audit Committee, as well as a number of e-mail exchanges, before the management provided information on the three grants, with all supporting documents, to the enquiring Board members.

 

The three Board members accused of harassment were those active in seeking the information about those grants.  What the management, from their perspective, refers to as harassment must have seemed to the enquiring Board members to be no more than due diligence in the face of what they saw as stonewalling, coverup and runaround.

 

The Middle East, it should go without saying, is a political minefield where the ignorant are all too easily led astray.  What distinguished the three enquiring Board members, aside from their diligence to attempt to pierce through generalities the staff provided about the urgent action and important opportunity fund, was their relative familiarity with Middle East politics. They knew as soon as they found out about them, without anyone having to explain it to them, that these grants should never have been made.

 

What is more, the staff disclosure of the three grants, at least initially, was not accompanied by an acknowledgement that something was amiss.  Rather the staff produced a lengthy memorandum defending the grants.

 

The eventual disclosure of all relevant documents about the three grants, only after prolonged persistent inquiry by the investigating Board members, accompanied by a vigorous defense of what to the investigating Board members must have seemed indefensible, led to a breakdown in trust between these Board members and the management.  If the management was hiding these three questionable grants from the Board, what else, the enquiring Board members must have wondered, were they hiding? 

 

In particular, how was all the money being spent which Rights and Democracy had been sending to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and its own Geneva office?  The United Nations is notoriously obsessed with beating up on Israel.  Was the UN/Geneva money, like the three grants, being spent on that?  In particular, was it being spent on the Durban review conference on racism held in Geneva which Canada had decided to boycott?  

 

The management had an innocent explanation for the expenditure of the UN/Geneva office funds, that the money for Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was going to its program on national human rights institutions and that the money for its own Geneva office was going to host visiting NGO delegations coming to participate in the United Nations Human Rights Council Universal Period Review.  But, in light of the obfuscation which preceded the eventual disclosure of the three grants Al Haq, Al Mezam and B'Tselem, could that innocent explanation be trusted? 

 

Persistent inquiry, in the case of the three grants, in the face of benign management generalities, led to a discovery of an improper activity.  The lesson of that experience to the enquiring Board members presumably was not to accept benign generalities in other areas as well, but rather to make further enquiries. 

 

The management, needless to say, does not have the same distrust of itself that the foot dragging over disclosure of the three grants had generated amongst the enquiring Board members.  So these persistent enquiries in other areas seemed to the staff to be excessive.

 

This explanation, though, only gets us so far.  Why the shifting narrative?  Why was there at first a dispute over the three grants, and then there was not? 

 

One answer was the manner in which the dispute was conducted.  It is easy in retrospect to go over any conversation and think of better phrasing.  Normally people will not care about the infelicities of verbal exchange.  However, once there is a breach of trust, small details loom large. 

 

I have had an opportunity to talk to both sides in this dispute. What struck me was the suspicion of bad faith on one side as much as the other, the spinning of conspiracy theories, the exaggerated focus on incidental comments.

 

Another explanation for the shifting narrative was what happened at the Board meeting of January 7th, my first this time round.  At that meeting, I moved a motion repudiating the three grants, with the detailed memorandum I had written in support. 

 

Because it was not written far enough in advance to be translated for the Board meeting, I spoke, at the meeting, to the substance of the memorandum, taking advantage of the simultaneous translation provided for the meeting.  The motion passed handily, with Remy Beauregard in favour, abandoning his previous position in support of the grants.

 

While, as I have noted, many to whom I have talked about the present dispute assume bad faith on the part of the people with whom they disagree, I will make the opposite assumption, that everyone, including Remy Beauregard, was operating in good faith.  That good faith assumption means that, when Beauregard supported the three grants, he believed that they were proper and that, when he voted against the grants, he had changed his mind and come to view them as improper. 

 

One explanation for his shift was tactical, that Beauregard changed his views because of the shifting composition and majority in the Board.  The good faith explanation, in contrast, is to accept that Beauregard genuinely believed what he said at the January 7th Board meeting, that the information he had up to the Board meeting led him to believe that the three grants made sense but that the additional information about Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem presented at the Board meeting made him realize that the grants were improperly made.

 

His words at the Board meeting were: "We could have done our homework better".  Beauregard died of a heart attack the night after he made that statement.  A good faith explanation of his behaviour means that Beauregard went to bed the night he died with the realization that those three grants, which he had spent so much time and effort defending, which, within the confines of the management and the Board he had staked his personal reputation, were wrongly made.

 

So here we have two directly contrasting explanations for the conflict.  One explanation is harassment by three Board members.  A second is due diligence by these same Board members in the face of first a runaround and then a defense of the indefensible.

 

But there is a third.  Tempers are frayed; emotions are heightened; perspectives are blurred.  Yet, there is an argument to be made that the present dispute has little to do with how the Board has treated the staff or how the staff has treated the Board, and a whole lot do with the nature of the institution, that what we are seeing is the eruption into broad daylight of hidden but inherent contradictions embedded within the structure and mission of the organization.

 

Rights and Democracy was established to give grants to third world NGOS which would promote rights and democracy.  It was set up at arm's length from government in order to avoid giving the impression of political interference in foreign countries which direct Canadian government granting to foreign NGOs might give. 

 

The institution's governing statute sets out six particular powers of Rights and Democracy as well as a general power.  Five of the six detailed powers are suggested techniques of operation.  The five specific directions for spending the statute proposes are first, technical assistance, training programs and advisory services; second, information and data centres; third, research;  fourth, seminars, workshops and other meetings; and fifth, existing organizations, institutions and agencies.   All five suggested techniques are suggested directions for grants, suggestions about what the institution could give money for. The obligation in the statute to "carry out its activities through existing organizations, institutions and agencies" is particularly striking.

 

The statute does not to appear to contemplate that the institution spend money on itself for human rights advocacy work.  That, in any case, is a matter of common sense.  Human rights advocacy of a government funded agency has neither the credibility nor the resonance of human rights advocacy by individuals speaking out on their own or through their organizations.

 

The statute specifically limits spending the Parliamentary appropriation for the institution on programs and activities for the benefit of developing countries.  When Parliament stated that its appropriations must be used only for the purpose of supporting programs and activities for the benefit of developing countries, it is most unlikely Parliamentarians had in mind that the money be spent primarily on staff of a Canadian organization who in turn support programs and activities in developing countries.  Spending the Parliamentary appropriation primarily on a Canadian organization defeats rather than realizes the intentions of Parliament.

 

If one looks at the Parliamentary intent and compares it with Rights and Democracy as it now is, two problems are manifest.  One is that is not clear that the original intent still makes sense.  The other is that Rights and Democracy has evolved in a way to frustrate that original intent.

 

Since the enactment of the legislation creating Rights and Democracy, there has been an evolution in the way human rights NGOS are viewed.  One reason is the NGO Forum against Racism held in Durban South Africa in August 2001. 

 

That Forum was a cataclysmic event in the NGO world.  It presented a whole new experience, a landmark for the NGO world, an event of significance beyond the confines of the fight against racism. 

 

The Durban NGO forum was plagued by a group of NGOs who had a political agenda, not a human rights agenda, and who were willing to stop at nothing to realize that agenda.  Goodwill was not at hand to put order into the disarray.  Rather, the inexperience of the organizers, and the absence of both clear rules and institutional structures meant that those with a political agenda were able to turn the NGO Forum away from human rights and to their own agenda.   

 

It became clear from the Durban NGO Forum, that the nongovernmental world is no holier that the governmental world. Powerlessness does not sanctify.  What distinguishes governments from nongovernmental organizations, aside from money and power, is the range of interests.  Governments are multi-faceted, inevitably trying to juggle a number of different interests or causes simultaneously.  Nongovernmental organizations have the luxury of specialization.  They can and do devote themselves to only one cause or a small number of causes.

 

However, there is nothing inherent in the worthiness of the causes of non-governmental organizations.  Non-governmental organizations are as likely to preach human rights violations as human rights, as likely to resort to violence and incitement to violence as governments are.  Non-governmental organizations are, after all, like governments, just people, and often the same people on their way into or out of government.

 

Nongovernmental human rights organizations have the luxury of an exclusive focus on human rights that governments can not afford.  Nongovernmental political organizations are more easily obsessed by the monomania of their political causes than governments.  Governments are brought face to face with reality when they attempt to put their ideas into practice.  Nongovernmental political ideologists can live in a fantasy world of their own imaginations.

 

There has been a tendency for nongovernmental human rights organizations to focus on abuses by governments.  The explanation for this focus is, in part, historical.  The nongovernmental human rights movement arose during the Cold War when governments in the East were totalitarian and client governments of the West were authoritarian.  Governments were strong and opposition groups were weak. 

 

Now, big brother has been replaced by little brother.  Instead of communist regimes in the East and national security regimes in the West, we have state collapse and fragmentation, free for alls where war lords, terrorists and the mafia reign, too little government rather than too much. 

 

The nongovernmental human rights world has been slow to adapt to this changing reality.  Human rights NGOs are so used to mobilizing civil society to call governments to account that they find it hard to grapple with threats to human rights from the nongovernmental world.  Human rights NGOs have seen other nongovernmental organizations as potential allies in the struggle for human rights, rather than potential threats to respect for human rights.  

 

Human rights NGOs have learned to be suspicious of governments that mouth the human rights vocabulary and do little else. Governmental human rights hypocrisy is easily identified and condemned.  These same human rights NGOs have been far less likely to scrutinize the incantation of human rights platitudes by political nongovernmental organizations.

 

The naivete and misdirection of human rights NGOs have created an opportunity for political NGOs.  Political activists who have little regard for human rights use human rights discourse to discredit and delegitimize their opponents.  They turn to human rights NGOs to endorse their cause, asking human rights NGOs to condemn their opponents as human rights violators.  Human rights NGOs, as often as not, have been blind to this political manipulation and have bought into the agenda of those political movements which use the proper human rights vocabulary.  

 

Political NGOs are sometimes nongovernmental in name only.  Human rights NGOs are reluctant to take money from governments, for fear that it might compromise their independence.  Political NGOs are not as reluctant, and are often financed by sympathetic governments.  GONGOs, government organized NGOs, have been a traditional feature of communist regimes, but they proliferate wherever repression is found. 

 

The turmoil of NGO forums, the naivete of human rights NGOs, and the fixations of politicized NGOs all came together in Durban to produce a witches brew.  The atmosphere was poisoned and so was the result.  After that Forum, it was impossible to look at the NGO world in the same way as Parliament had done when Rights and Democracy was created.

 

A second change in context since the enactment of the Rights and Democracy legislation is the suspicion repressive governments bring to foreign financed NGOs.  The various NGO led revolutions in dictatorial countries has taught perpetrators a lesson. 

 

The October 2000 revolution in Serbia, the 2003 rose revolution in Georgia, the 2004 orange revolution in Ukraine, the 2005 tulip revolution in the Krygyz republic, the 2005 Cedar revolution in Lebanon, in all of which foreign financed NGOs participated, have led perpetrators to be wary of this financing.  The notion that Canada might be seen to be independent of NGOs it finances through an arm's length organization has become illusory in light of the heightened suspicion of that sort of funding.  The political objective of appearance of non-interference intended by the arm's length relationship is no longer attainable through a structure like Rights and Democracy.

 

One could question the mission of Rights and Democracy as devised by Parliament, even if the organization stayed within the statutory vision.  But it has not.  And its straying, rather than correcting the problems the statutory vision now poses, has made the working of the organization even more problematic.

 

The staff and management of Rights and Democracy has all but abandoned the original Parliamentary intent to "carry out its activities through existing organizations, institutions and agencies".  Canadian law requires a charitable foundation to spend 4 1/2%  of its investment assets and 80% of receipted gifts in the previous year on grants to qualified donees.  Rights and Democracy does not spend anywhere near 80% of its funds on existing organizations, institutions and agencies. 

 

There are, to be sure, NGOs to whom Rights and Democracy money goes.  But, none of this is simply the awarding of grants amongst applications.  All spending today by Rights and Democracy on NGOs results from elicited requests.  The organization devises a program and finds NGO contractors to deliver it.  NGOs who receive grants today from Rights and Democracy are doing what Rights and Democracy wants, on contract.  That, of course, made the grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan, and B'Tselem in the minds of the opposing Board members particularly appalling.

 

There is much human rights work to be done which meets with overall consensus.  Whether programs are delivered by a Government of Canada department, by Rights and Democracy, or by the NGO world on grants, matters little.  Arguing over the agent of delivery is a quibble when the program is incontestably worthwhile.

 

The reason the fuss about the small grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem loomed so large is these grants should not have been made.  How they came to be made mattered in a way that the spending of Rights and Democracy money on uncontroversial matters did not.  The making of these grants raised questions not just about these NGOs but about Rights and Democracy itself.

 

The letter of Charles Valleyrand to the Globe was striking not just for its shifting narrative, but also for its claim of independence.  The author writes that the institution is by law independent.  But independence of whom, from whom?  The original vision was that the third world NGOs which received grants from Rights and Democracy should be independent from the Government of Canada.  This has been perverted into a notion that the staff of Rights and Democracy should be independent from its Board.

 

I have come across this notion of independence of the staff from the Board not just in the letter from Charles Vallerand, but also in conversations with others connected to the institution.  Indeed, what must have seemed to the three inquiring Board members to be stonewalling and coverup may well have been for the staff an attempt to protect what it thought of as its independence.  Yet, this form of independence makes no sense at all.

 

The Government of Canada should indeed take the NGO world as it finds it and not try to manipulate it through money.  But that is different from saying that it should behave that way towards its own devised and wholly financed creature.  It is, on the contrary, bizarre to suggest that the Government of Canada should fully fund an institution to hire people off the street to run their own political agenda in the name of human rights, without the Government and its appointed Board raising so much as a peep.    

 

It is this issue of independence which explains why three Board members in particular became the target of the complaint of the staff.  The three are Aurel Braun, Jacques Gauthier, and Elliot Tepper.  They are respectively the chair, vice chair and chair of the Finance and Audit Committee.  They are, in other words, the leadership of the Board.  They are people with distinguished careers and different personalities. 

 

The allegation that any one of them, let alone all three, was engaged in harassment of anyone is inherently implausible.  The fact that this complaint is directed to the leadership of the Board is itself an indication that the three were simply carrying out what they saw to be their duties as Board members.

 

Indeed, the complaint letter elsewhere indicates this accusing the three of "a complete misunderstanding of their roles as directors". What did the staff think the role of directors should be and why did they think the leadership of the Board had misunderstood that role?  This appears to be the nub of the dispute.  The staff thought that the institution should function independently from its Board of Directors.  The Board leadership thought otherwise.

 

This is why the grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem became so significant.  The issue of staff independence from the Board was immaterial for projects on which the Board and staff agreed.  The issue flared up only when there was a gap between Board and staff appreciation of a project.

 

The staff and the Board have been two slowly moving trains facing each other on the same track.  At some point a collision was inevitable.  The Board was well aware of the politicization of elements of the human rights NGO movement which the 2001 Durban NGO World Forum on Racism had highlighted and was determined to prevent Rights and Democracy from being complicit in it.  The staff, moving in the opposite direction, morphed the Parliamentary vision of third world NGOs acting independently from the Canadian government which funded them into a vision of staff acting independently from their own board of directors.

 

If the three grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem were an aberration, one could have said, let's forget about them and move on.  But they were not.  The problem the grants posed had existed for years.

 

Rights and Democracy used to have a Middle East programme which the Board terminated in 1998 while I was a member of the Board last time round. (I had previously been a Board member from 1997 to 2003.)  One reason we terminated the programme was that it was generating precisely the problems the present three grants have generated.

 

Though in 1998 the anti-Zionist abuse of human rights reporting, standards and mechanisms to demonize and delegitimize Israel had not reached the fever pitch it has today assumed, it was even then part of the arsenal of anti-Zionist weaponry.  It was apparent to the Board in 1998 that the Middle East programme had been corrupted by this anti-Zionist agenda. 

 

Despite this termination, Warren Allmand, then President, without Board approval, sent two letters to Bill Graham the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, in April 2002, purportedly on behalf of Rights and Democracy.  One letter expressed shock at Canada's voting against one of the many anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Commission.   Another was an anti-Israel diatribe full of the usual blather condemning Israel for violating virtually every international crime known to humanity for defending itself against Hezbollah terrorist attacks from Lebanon.  On becoming aware of these letters, I wrote to Bill Graham pointing out that I was a member of the Board and disagreeing with what Allmand wrote.

 

The problem resurfaced during the presidency of Jean Louis Roy, this time through grants in 2003 to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, between 2003 and 2005 to the International Women's House in the West Bank and in 2007 to the St. Iyves Society legal aid for Palestinians programme. None of these funding efforts was a repeal of the Board decision of 1998.  All were circumventions of that decision by staff who used discretionary funds to ride their own hobby horse.

 

These grants attracted the attention of NGO Monitor which wrote:

             "ICHRDD (International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development)'s campaign to promote 'democratic institutions in developing areas' has been used to justify a strongly pro‑Palestinian and anti‑Israel political agenda. The organization has approved funding grants for a number of projects conducted by very politicized recipients, including the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group and the International Women's House in Hares." 

 

The grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan, and B'Tselem were the most flagrant and, until then, the most recent episode in an historically entrenched pattern of behaviour.  This behaviour was far from particular to the presidency of Remy Beauregard.  Though Beauregard would have brought his own views and personality to this phenomenon, he inherited it.  He appears to be have been whipsawed between a staff insistent on running their own political agenda and a Board determined not to let it happen.

 

Moreover the problem persists even after his death.  The staff took down from the website a message of condolence for the death of Remy Beauregard from the chair of the Board and placed on the website a message of condolence from Al Haq's General Director, Shawan Jabarin, a person determined by the Israel Supreme Court to be a senior activist in The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated by Canada to be a terrorist organization.

 

Where does this leave Rights and Democracy?  If this were just a matter of hot tempers, tempers could cool; time would heal.  If this were just a matter of some misspoken words, apologies might remedy the rudeness.  If this were just a matter of the wrong people in the Board or staff, changes in the composition of the Board or staff would resolve the matter.

 

However, if the problem lies with Rights and Democracy itself, then resolution of the problem is not so simple.  Independence of a government created and fully financed operation from a government appointed board makes no sense.  But once the institution does nothing but run its own program, once the government finances the operation entirely and directs it through its board appointees, why should it exist at all?  Why should it not just be folded into a government department?  Does Rights and Democracy as it has become serve any purpose whatsoever, aside from delivering non-controversial programs which could be delivered in a myriad of different ways?

 

A crisis situation, where people are angry and upset, is no time to answer these questions.  They should be put off for another day.  But if answering these questions is necessary to resolve the crisis, it would be a mistake to gravitate to resignations or firings, which are likely to prolong the anger and the hurt, and produce no solution. 

 

We do not have to decide today what is to become of Rights and Democracy.  But unless we have identified correctly the problem which Rights and Democracy now faces, we can not hope for a solution.