Jack's Newswatch

Wearing a navy pinstripe suit, a blue check shirt, and a vibrant yellow and lime-green striped tie, Rahim Jaffer cut a dapper figure in a courtroom in Orangeville, Ont., a sleepy town of 27,000 northwest of Toronto. The former politician, his hair gelled neatly in place, sat near the back of the gallery on the morning of March 9 while the court dealt with its quotidian diet of scandal: a domestic dispute, a 17-year-old arrested for marijuana possession, a woman caught skimming from her employer. For his part, Jaffer, 38, looked confident. With good reason.

Jaffer would shortly plead guilty to a charge of careless driving, and promise to pay a fine of $500; the court was told he had already made a charitable donation of an equivalent amount. As part of the plea deal, the Crown had agreed to drop two more serious charges against Jaffer—drunk driving and possession of cocaine—but did not offer much in the way of explanation. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2009, Jaffer had been pulled over by police for speeding through the village of Palgrave. The OPP officer detaining him was said to have smelled alcohol on his breath; the ex-politician was reported by the OPP to have failed multiple breathalyzer tests, and when he was arrested and searched, an unspecified quantity of cocaine was allegedly found “on his person.” Nonetheless, there were “significant legal issues” surrounding those charges, Crown attorney Marie Balogh told the court, and she foresaw no reasonable chance of conviction. She refused to answer questions from reporters after the trial. Brendan Crawley, a spokesman for the attorney general of Ontario, stated later that “there were issues related to the evidence that led the Crown to determine that the most appropriate way to proceed was with the plea resolution.”

Justice Douglas Maund wrapped up the proceedings, telling the accused: “I’m sure you can recognize a break when you see one.” Outside the courthouse, Jaffer did not respond to the judge’s remark or to any questions about the dropped charges. “I know that I should have been more careful,” he said. “I once again apologize for that and I take full responsibility for my careless driving. And that’s really all I have to say this morning.”

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Notes:

Colby has done a good writeup on this issue and I like it. Having said that I will say this:

The situation goes directly to the heart of our system of justice and answers from the Ontario Crown are required if we are to continue to believe in it.

It’s no longer about Helena and Rahim. It’s about justice “seen to be done” and plea bargaining which, in my humble opinion, is a nasty mess. I will also add that I do not hold Helena at fault because as she boarded the aircraft in PEI she must surely have been worried sick about the situation.

All she wanted to do was get home and I’m cutting her some slack.

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$50bn is not a trivial sum to hide from investors, creditors, rating agencies and the US government.

Which is why the assertion by a US court-appointed examiner that Lehman used an accounting ruse to keep from public view some $50bn of loans and investments – and thus appear to be taking fewer risks than was really the case – is a serious charge.

To be clear, the examiner does not say that this device was responsible for Lehman’s collapse. Its demise stemmed from its excessive investments in the US commercial property market and its dangerous reliance on short-term finance that could and was withdrawn.

However Lehman might well have collapsed earlier if the full extent of its loans and investments had been in the public domain.

Which is why it is at the very least highly embarrassing for Ernst & Young that the examiner says that global accounting firm is liable to claims for damages because of its alleged “failure to question and challenge improper disclosures” by Lehman.

And the examiner also says claims can be made against Dick Fuld, Lehman’s erstwhile chairman, and a trio of its former chief financial officers.

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Notes:

This is no longer an accounting matter in my mind. It’s a criminal conspiracy and the FBI should be all over it.

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I love newspaper headlines, the way that they shout at you competitively from the stand on a Sunday morning – imploring your attention like a bunch of gape-mouthed nestlings. I have always admired the art with which the headline writer will take the story before him and bleach it of conditionals, sharpening and condensing and pushing it to the limit of credibility so that the faltering fingers of the deluded consumer will feel unable to resist. And yet in all my years of knowing chuckling at the headlines, I don’t think I have ever come across such a brazen confection of suggestio falsi and suppressio veri as appeared yesterday in large print across one of the Sundays. “Brown on course to win election,” it said.

When I had regained my breath, I thought of some other propositions the headline writer might have touted – with an equal measure of foundation. How about “Pope on course to win Wimbledon”? Or “Simon Heffer on course to win Miss World”? Or if you want a more direct analogy, what about “One-legged man on course to win arse-kicking contest”?

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How heartening to see a set of politicians tucking in, with just a soupçon of Canadian self-consciousness, to seal loin in port jus. They’ve got a pretty good point, our cousins. The EU’s ban on seal products, against which they’re protesting, is hard to justify on grounds of proportionality, economics or morality.

I know that plenty of readers find annual Canadian cull macabre. But be honest: your objection is aesthetic, not ethical or ecological. Seals are not an endangered species: on the contrary, their voracious appetite has played no small part in the reduction of cod stocks. And, while seals undoubtedly look cuter than, say, oysters, it is hard to see what places them in a different moral category.

Instincts matter, of course, even when they’re irrational. We are programmed to respond warmly to the features of our own young: big eyes, little button noses and so on. So powerful are these genetic impulses that the same features in other species still seem adorable to us. I quite understand why people hate the idea of a seal waddling trustingly towards the clubman: I’m not wild about it myself. But we can all choose whether or not to buy the resulting products. It is surely a bit much for the state – let alone the EU – to enforce what is essentially a matter of taste on its entire population.

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JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban.

This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land dispute, leaving at least 13 people dead, according to local officials.

The fighting was a setback for American military officials, some of whom had hoped it would be possible to replicate the pledge elsewhere. It raised questions about how effectively the American military could use tribes as part of its counterinsurgency strategy, given the patchwork of rivalries that make up Afghanistan.

Government officials and elders from other tribes were trying to get the two sides to reconcile, but given the intensity of the fighting, some said they doubted that the effort would work. At the very least, the dispute is proving a distraction from the tribe’s commitment to fight the Taliban, not each other.

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Last Friday, when Ron Liepert, Alberta’s new Energy Minister, turned up at Calgary’s Metropolitan Centre for a breakfast speech to talk about “the Future of Alberta Energy,” he may have made history. For the first time old Tories could remember, none of the city’s energy firms had purchased one of the $850 tables.

“You’ve got a Calgary guy, a Calgary minister, a tough-nosed Energy Minister, he’s going to be talking about the royalty review that’s coming, and he drew maybe 130 people,” says one astonished senior Tory. “Even in the bad old days under [former premier Don] Getty, the oil and gas guys would buy a table just to show their sign,” even, he says, “if they ended up sending the guys from the mailroom” to fill the seats.

Such are the depths of the strained relationship between Alberta’s energy patch and their old friends in the PC government — and the impetus behind the announcement yesterday in Calgary of a new and improved royalty regime.

Described as a “competitiveness review,” it might better have been called a make-up letter, intended to heal the deep wounds inflicted by 2009’s sweeping royalty adjustment, when Premier Ed Stelmach insisted the government wasn’t getting its “fair share” of the oil-boom windfall, and stunned the oil patch by grabbing a 20% bigger take.

Five different attempts to tinker since then seemed only to aggravate executives and investors who couldn’t bear the government’s unpredictability.

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The scandalous underequipping of soldiers in Afghanistan has uncomfortable echoes of 150 years ago

There is a moment in every war when it becomes necessary to wheel out the big guns, the heaviest weapons in the armoury. In the continuing war in Afghanistan, it is time to deploy the moral firepower of William Howard Russell, the greatest Times war reporter of them all.

In 1854 the 34-year-old Irishman began reporting on the Crimean War for this newspaper. Nearly two years later he returned home, having survived three fierce battles, witnessed the siege of Sebastopol, and penned the enduringly vivid description of the Charge of the Light Brigade that inspired Tennyson’s poem.

More than that, Billy Russell changed the way war itself was perceived, and would in future be fought. He provoked a scandal back in Britain with his pungent criticism of the hopeless administration of the British Army, his descriptions of the suffering of the wounded and sick, the inadequate equipment and the lack of organisation and supplies.

“Am I to tell these things, or hold my tongue?” he wondered, as Lord Raglan, Britain’s Commander in the Crimea, tried to shut him up: “It is too probable that he will forbid our accompanying the troops.” Russell’s reports provoked the disdain of royalty (Prince Albert called him a “miserable scribbler”) but stoked real anger among the general public, prompting a surge of sympathy for the poor bloody infantry.

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Notes:

This is interesting because Canada was present in that war also.

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ATHENS — Vasia Veremi may only be 28, but as a hairdresser in Athens, she is keenly aware that, under a current law that treats her job as hazardous to her health, she has the right to retire with a full pension at age 50.

“I use a hundred different chemicals every day — dyes, ammonia, you name it,” she said. “You think there’s no risk in that?”

“People should be able to retire at a decent age,” Ms. Veremi added. “We are not made to live 150 years.”

Perhaps not, but that still makes it difficult to explain to outsiders why the Greek government has identified at least 580 job categories that are deemed to be hazardous enough to merit retiring early — at age 50 for women and 55 for men.

The law includes some predictably dangerous jobs like coal mining and bomb disposal. But it also covers positions like radio and television presenters who are thought to be at risk from the bacteria on their microphones and musicians playing wind instruments who must contend with gastric reflux as they puff and blow.

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Despite the myriad sources of information from which to draw in order to write a column that has a grain of truth to it, it would appear that the usual suspects from the usual media sources insist on getting it wrong. You can hardly blame them. Well, actually you can, but it will hardly help. At this point, people are merely going to believe what they want to believe, and truth be damned. When it comes to Afghanistan, has it ever been any different?

Thomas Walkom, in particular, seems to get it wrong the most frequently. This rather pathetic self-flagellation of Canadians throwing their hands up in the air and making excuses that nothing else could have been done, is as depressing as their inability to get basic facts correct. Journalists are treating this fluid battle with ever-changing dynamics as something static, as though everybody has morphed into Francis Fukuyama, mourning the end of history. Pakistan capturing half the Taliban leadership in the past month? Barely a whisper.

It’s certainly easier to report on a story if you have a prearranged view on what’s actually happening. The evolution of the detainee story is a prime example. What began as little more than hearsay from Amir Attaran in the CBC, became a report in the Canadian Press, which became a fact in the minds of the official opposition in the House of Commons, as Jack Layton and Ujjal Dosanjh asked ridiculous questions about secret spies, torture, and rendition. The latter word, as I mentioned before, being technically incorrect by definition alone.

The question is, what would make the critics of the treatment of captured detainees happy?

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Tackling the deficit and clamping down on the growth of government spending will avoid “devastating cuts” in the future, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday in Parliament.

“Bad choices now, unaffordable long-term spending commitments, ill-advised tax hikes, ditherings on deficits and difficult decisions will doom those countries who choose them to years of debt, stagnation and unemployment,” Harper said in the House of Commons.

Harper was elaborating on the throne speech delivered last week by Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean, which laid out the government’s agenda.

Harper said the economy cannot be taxed into prosperity, that the deficit must begin to come down “modestly now but quickly by next year” and that spending growth will have be moderated immediately.

“If we do these things, we will also be able to avoid the absolute levels of reduction and the kinds of devastating cuts to core services like health care, pensions and education that will occur if we delay as past governments did after previous recessions,” the prime minister said.

The government’s plan to get ahead of its $54-billion deficit is built largely on the back of $17.6 billion worth of savings over the next five years that will come from streamlining and reducing the operating and administrative costs of government departments.

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Tory triumph: They know where they’re going

Wells: Harper’s rut

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