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6/30/2009 The O’Brien Trial: Judge Dismisses Defence Motion for Acquittal
L ast week, Mr. Justice Cunningham – the judge presiding in the O’Brien trial dismissed a defence motion for a “directed verdict of acquittal”, which would have brought the Ottawa Mayor’s legal troubles to an immediate end. But, no such luck – the Judge didn’t buy defence arguments, despite experts following the case suggesting a likely victory for O’Brien beforehand. Click the video associated with this blog entry to drill into Cunningham’s ruling and how O’Brien might well have done himself in as early as his Ottawa Police interview back in April 2007. For related stories and links, visit:
O’Brien Quotes from Video:
6/23/2009 Iran Election “Free & Fair” Say Callers to Conservative Talk ShowI couldn’t believe my ears driving to work this morning, listening to a morning talk radio show on Ottawa’s CFRA radio. CFRA’s listener demographic is largely Conservative, which is one of the reasons I was so surprised to hear a number of callers voice support for the Iranian government’s claim that the recent election, which had sparked riots in Terhan and other Iranian cities this past week, were “free and fair”. This view contradicts reports yesterday that international observers had uncovered evidence of widespread fraud at numerous polls – enough irregularity for these observers to harbour serious doubts concerning the overall result of the election. In particular one caller cited evidence that the regime hadn’t been toppled yet as evidence that it must have majority support, “else it wouldn’t be in power.” Sometimes I gotta wonder what people use for brains. I suppose according to this fellow, we might as well do away with elections in Canada because the government could be changed by means of an armed uprising. And if such an uprising should fail; well, obviously the majority must want the government to remain unchanged. Might is, after all, always right, isn’t it? Even more incredible was the show’s host – whose name wasn’t announced during the time I was listening, unfortunately, seemed unwilling to challenge the caller’s facts or intone a peep of disagreement. I’m starting to think CFRA takes this Conservative thing a little too far….the word isn’t supposed to mean preserving the status quo at the expense of hundreds or thousands of innocent lives. Or so I’d thought, anyway. Even were I willing to concede that the incumbent Iranian president (Ahmadinejad) actually won despite obvious evidence of fraud; no government that sanctions fraud, arrests journalists en masse, or is paranoid enough to blame “the west” in some kind of huge international conspiracy to control its destiny by agitating such a huge segment of its own population – to the point of becoming an enemy of the people it’s supposed to govern – no government of this sort can legitimately claim to represent the people, regardless of whether it or one of its candidates won an election. And, for the record, I don’t believe for a moment that Ahmadinejad won the election. A snowball staying frozen in hell would have a better chance; but the best thing Ahmadinejad could do at the moment is concede. Frankly, I don’t think he’s either courageous or smart enough to do so – but this movement that’s started in Iran might prove to have more longevity than his own political career otherwise. (Not that I’m all that hopeful he’ll emerge from any revolution with any kind of political voice.) Premier says apology punishment enough after Alberta MLA's commentsF reedom of speech is often cited by those defending politicians like Alberta MLA Doug Elniski, a Conservative back-bencher who joins a number of his kin on the political right embroiled in scandals sparked by what they said before and now regret. Conservative apologists complain he and others like him are merely doing what so many other politicians don’t – speak their mind – and it’s led us to a political culture dominated by image, spin doctors and political correctness. So they say, Liberals are just better at not getting caught. Speaking as an elector – and not one who, admittedly, tends to vote Liberal – I find this an extremely odd bit of reasoning. While it’s certainly true that our political leadership has honed its collective expertise at managing appearances over the last several decades, why shouldn’t we hold that leadership responsible for making ignorant remarks when they’re made? I really believe Conservative voters are understandably frustrated when yet another story of this sort breaks, but the solution isn’t stowing the cameras and microphones when someone like Mr. Elinski screws up. It’s shining the spotlight on him – and, as Conservatives, making sure that others like him don’t end up representing you in the future if he stumbles and somehow reveals what twisted thoughts are really occupying his mind. At the very least, such faux pas are “fair game” for the media to report on – for the simple reason Conservatives don’t raise this same complaint when a Liberal makes remarks of a controversial nature. Besides, muzzling the media really is more a game for regimes like the theocracy that’s clinging to power in Iran than Canada’s governing political party, isn’t it? 6/19/2009 WS-HTTP-Based Windows Service: Last Choice of WCF Devs?Y ou might not think that WS-HTTP isn’t the last choice of WCF developers when developing a Windows Service. Despite the protocol overhead of HTTP, often developers will default to this protocol in setting up a WCF application because of network rules, compatibility with other applications based on HTTP or just out of raw familiarity. Whatever the reason, HTTP still ends up being the first choice – as it was for me recently (albeit at another’s urging) and, being a veteran of net.tcp, I ran into trouble pretty quick:
Strangely, I didn’t visit the Help and Support Center, as directed at the bottom of the stack trace above. Instead I tinkered with my .config file for about an hour before it dawned on me that the settings were actually correct and I should follow the instructions. To summarize my visit to the Help and Support Center, there is an extremely obscure tool called HttpCfg.exe which is used on that platform I’m currently developing for – Windows Server 2003 (it’s netsh on Vista/Windows Server 2008, and less obscure). It demands that you divine an arcane string to pass as parameters for your application, security context, etc. Certainly, one could achieve the desired settings to make their HTTP-hosted service work…eventually. But I was fortunate enough to spare myself another indefinite period of maddening trial-and-error by stumbling upon an extremely helpful blog article by one Paul Wheeler, a former Microsoft SDE who apparently did some WCF development for the company’s Connected Systems division. In the article, Wheeler provides a tool for configuring local system HTTP settings with source code under Creative Commons (public license). The tool offers other advantages over HttpCfg for this purpose and was a lucky find indeed! I am still debating whether or not to push a lot harder to move my app to net.tcp. The decision rests with the project’s technical architect; and I’m not he on this project. But if you, like me, are stuck in a situation with HTTP – Wheeler’s HttpNamespaceManager is for you! 6/16/2009 Punditry Through a Looking Glass
P erhaps I am naïve. Or maybe I’m in some parallel universe watching a parallel version of CBC’s At Issue Panel. But I had a lot of trouble swallowing their characterizations of Canadian Liberal Leader Michael Igantieff’s interviews today. Ignatieff was expected to announce a decision on whether to make a concerted effort to bring the Minority Conservative government down on a motion of non-confidence today. The assertion of the pundits was that he’d threatened an election based on a “report card” on the government’s session performance last week, but instead Ignatieff had a list of things he wanted to discuss with the government and see sufficient progress on before making a final decision. Well, this has resulted in the pundits trotting out some very dismissive characterizations of Ignatieff – in sharp contrast with what they had to say about the man before. Suddenly Ignatieff is now “weak”, “afraid” and “back-peddling”; words used to describe Ignatieff’s defeated predecessor Stéphane Dion. Not that I thought this gang’s analysis of Dion was particularly on-target either, but just because Ignatieff didn’t up the drama by stating he’d bring down the government when he actually never said that he was about to seems a bit wild. No – a lot wild. Ignatieff might be guilty of allowing expectations of an election call to soar. He didn’t deny that forcing an election was one on a list of possibles he could have announced this morning. And he’d said he wanted 300-something hours as a new minimum set for EI qualification, among other things. But common sense sort of dictates that it was never actually going to be in his party’s interest to simply fail the government on its report card and state a non-confidence motion would be levelled at the first opportunity. Canadians aren’t in an election mood, to say the least, having been through 4 in the past 7 years. If an election call is to be had, the Liberals have to force it making it appear they’ve made every reasonable attempt to make Parliament work. During today’s round of interviews, Ignatieff looked neither indecisive, weak or afraid. He looked like a politician making an honest effort to get concessions from the government. And he may not want an election – he says so if you ask him, and did several times today. But “afraid”? If so, he handles stress well enough one might think he’d been emotionally lobotomized. So why the At Issue Panel found his responses as evidence of “back peddling” from an imagined threat to bring the government down is anyone’s guess. They did latch on to him supposedly “ditching” the 300-plus hours reduction for EI as a requirement for their support, but I’m not sure I’ve either heard Ignatieff say it was a demand; compliance with which was a condition for Liberal confidence in the House or that it was even off the Liberal wish list. Again, I have to wonder if I’m either watching or, more probably, in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Maybe Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in here with me, since today he also complained that Ignatieff had delivered no actual demand, joking it was unusual to have an ultimatum phrased with no condition prior to “or else”. Maybe Harper and the media are cobbling together separate facts to create these notions of demands, ultimatums and weak leadership. Sill, if there’s anyone back-peddling here it’s the NDP, not that you’d hear anything about that from the media. Thomas Mulcair, the lone NDPer from Québec elected in the Liberal stronghold of Outremont last election, amused the audience of CBC’s Politics with Don Newman today trying to explain how the party could claim to be making Parliament work while maintaining a policy of automatically voting against the government on all confidence motions, no matter what. How is it the Liberals are always to blame for singularly breaking Parliament when the other two opposition parties get away with automatic ‘no’s on non-confidence motions? If the Liberals adopted that policy, rest assured the media would be painting the Liberals as opportunists for defeating the government while riding high in the polls. But not the NDP, not the Bloc Québecois. They can do whatever they like without penalty. The best reason to not call an election is to ensure that infrastructure funding continues uninterrupted over the summer months. If the media can still be believed, apparently an election might jeopardize some of that money – and with the economy doing badly, it’s funding badly needed in Canada’s industrial heartland – where the Liberals are polling well at the moment. But if there is an election, hopefully my countrymen (and women) are able to see through this blame-the-Liberals game. Because if Parliament fails, all the parties have dirt on their hands – no matter what Ignatieff and his Liberals do this week. 6/9/2009 When a Pigeon Stumbles Amidst Cats
Q uite a day in Question Period today – the first such political theatre since yesterday’s tape of Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt conversing with her aide Jasmine MacDonnell (since resigned). Yet, somehow (as only God almighty knows), the Conservatives figured that the best strategy was to simply persist in their defence of the Minister and claim her comments neither amounted to a critique in earnest about her colleague, the Minister of Health, nor did it suggest she was really out to take credit for fixing a “money-not-moral” issue, such as the unavailability of isotopes for critical diagnostic care – not only in Canada, but in many countries. (The Chalk River nuclear reactor supplies isotopes needed for medical procedures all over the world; over 60% of the world’s total supply of medial isotopes, in fact.) Like most folks, I missed the actual live video feed at work today (must concentrate on tasks at-hand). However, I was able to review today’s footage on CPAC (Canada’s version of C-SPAN) and was quite astonished at what I saw. Admittedly, Question Period is your basic circus most of the time. But today was exceptional.
Failing the ability to review the video feed, you might also consider examining Hansard – which is the transcript of proceedings for all business transacted on the floor of the House. Everything that is said and made part of the official record is there (including a transcript of today’s Question Period debate, focussed on Raitt and the isotope crisis); a valuable resource for political junkies trying to find quotable quotes or, as in this case, to simply see how nutty things can get in Question Period. I’m still laying bets that Raitt’s days as a member of the Conservative cabinet are numbered after so many screw-ups in so short a period. But as one pundit today said, “If you’re the government you’ve got to appear 100%…not 40% or 75%…behind your Minister.” Hopefully, that’s all that’s behind this otherwise absurd defence of Raitt and her bunging of the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) portfolio. 6/8/2009 This Week’s Theme in Canadian Politics: IncompetenceW hether it’s the Ontario Liberals appointing an apparently greedy, corrupt and/or person of dubious competence to Ontario’s eHealth Medical Records Agency, or tonight’s bombshell on the federal Conservative’s Natural Resources Minister, Lisa Raitt making extremely ill-conceived comments about her colleagues in taped discourse; this has been a bad week for politicians. Heck, it’s been a bad month, and it’s only the 8thof June! First we have Sarah Kramer, CEO of eHealth Ontario being fired – by mutual consent of the eHealth board and the Ontario government – because of numerous spending irregularities. Consultants were paid large sums for watching documentary videos and chatting on the Toronto subway. Of course, there was the mitigating factor that some of the consultants were either known personally by Kramer or her husband. And it was far more common for contracts to go untendered prior to being awarded. None of the consultants seem to have been doing work related to advancing the mission of eHealth – which is to design and implement a provincial health records system by 2015. Contrasted with another failed government technology project, the federal firearms registry, this is a vastly more complex project. Yet despite Kramer’s past experience serving as CIO of Cancer Care Ontario, there’s no public evidence (I could find) she’s ever led a technology effort of this scale. And whatever medical records experience she might have gained there would surely be inadequate to meet the challenges at eHealth. So why are unqualified people being asked to lead government technology projects? I speculate that the incompetent leadership, unsure how to proceed, deliver little but decide to work the levers of newfound power turning into these gigantic money-pits. Perhaps believing that because technology implies complexity and lots of subject matter auditors won’t understand, they can get away with lax standards managing expenses or even giveaways to friends. Such conduct might even suggest there’s a little truth in the matter – and that such practices are common elsewhere in government. Too cynical a view? Well to be honest, I thought I was being a little cynical having these suspicions – until our next story broke, thanks to due diligence by a Halifax Chronicle Herald reporter, based in Ottawa, went back over some material collecting dust in his office since January to find the latest torpedo to hit the Conservative cabinet: Stephen Maher is to be congratulated heartily for bringing us this rare glimpse of thinking within the Conservative cabinet. Tapes were left behind in the Ottawa press gallery and somehow ended up in Maher’s hands. Raitt’s assistant, Jasmine MacDonnell – already in the spotlight for getting fired thanks to leaving behind sensitive documents concerning the Chalk River nuclear reactor (embroiled in a medical isotope scandal) – was told about the tapes back in January, but never picked them up from Maher. Maher finally decided to examine the contents of the tapes, and was set to publish his story on Friday until MacDonnell filed for an injunction to prevent publication. A Nova Scotia Superior Court Judge dismissed her motion earlier this afternoon. Where’s the story of incompetence here? Well, it’s hard to distinguish, frankly. I don’t think MacDonnell is entirely to blame for merely leaving a wake of sensitive material wherever she went (although there’s some truth in that notion), but the Natural Resources Minister doesn’t seem to have been particularly concerned about these items, until it was far too late. And it’s not as if Raitt was lacking systems to track these items – especially the Chalk River file. Someone asserted today that the tape was made without her knowledge, which seems incredible. And, even if true, and she didn’t know about the recording or the tape or its being misplaced; she still was the one responsible for hiring MacDonnell and putting her in a position to do so much damage. Yet the real incompetence of this leader wasn’t in the particular mishaps leading to today’s story. It was she herself stating how she thought of her colleagues and, more importantly, how she regarded the Chalk River matter – as something that money could fix. She was prepared, according to the tape, to do nothing about the problems of Chalk River and wait for money to fix the problem and then perhaps even take credit for it later! It will forever amaze me how we, as a people, can vote such personalities into elected office. That no matter how much scrutiny we expose our politicians to, there’s always enough disbelief, ideology and marketing gloss to cover up the inadequacies of our leaders and let them mis-spend or simply take all our money, compromise critical aspects of our health care system through technical or professional incompetence, and even destroy confidence in democracy; something for which we have ourselves partly to blame. Of course, I believe it possible to fix the system. But, as with anything, it will take our collective will to put greater emphasis on seeing our money spent properly. In the Ontario case, the eHealth fiasco is actually the second time this agency is facing overhaul – but the result might be success on the third attempt. As a closing note to this story: the CBC promises more to come on the eHealth file as they continue processing various tips filed from named and anonymous sources so, stay tuned! 6/3/2009 Why is Canada’s Federal Cabinet Haemorrhaging Secret Documents?W ell, it’s happened again – another Conservative government minister loses a secret document plunging the besieged cabinet into yet another document management crisis. And my question here, echoed on blogs and in news columns every which way you look: why is this happening again? Ministers, like any senior management, need to carry sensitive documents about with them from time to time. Indeed, they are legally responsible for such documents; it’s one of their core responsibilities as Ministers of the Crown. And they’re not unique in having this responsibility. Even a lowly consultant working in the Ministry of Justice (not the same portfolio as was the subject of this story – which was Environment) is responsible for ensuring the documents and any software materials I may have in my possession are secure and accounted for. In many respects, maintaining security on software is harder than hardcopy documentation because one is vulnerable to copies being made potentially without one’s knowledge. I would say that were I to simply lose a document or leave software files vulnerable to duplication on a public network that I should be held to account for such oversight. Although there is, particularly in my case, a certain motive to protect soft and hardcopy files merely by virtue of personal professionalism; holding someone individually accountable for materials which contain sensitive information is the final means by which the Government of Canada can offer its citizens some assurance such information is being handled responsibly. So if federal employees are rightly held to such a standard, why should the Minister be any different? We hear today through various media outlets that Environment Minister (and Minister Responsible for Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd. [AECL]) Lisa Raitt was not the one who left the documents in question in the CTV news room. Apparently, it was a 26-year-old political aide (believed to be Jasmine Macdonald), who has since resigned herself. But these documents sat at the CTV bureau for a full week before the broadcaster itself finally called the Minister’s office to say they had them. I simply can’t – in my most sunny, optimistic and forgiving mood – imagine why the AECL Minister would leave sensitive documents about the Chalk River nuclear reactor at CTV for a full week without wondering where they went? After all, they are supposed to have systems to monitor these documents at all times. Did those systems work? Or, in the more likely case they did, why did the Minister’s staff not advise her they were missing (assuming they didn’t)? Yes, it’s hard (really, really hard) to not consider the worst-case scenario here and, if the Minister is to keep her job, don’t we, the electorate, deserve some kind of explanation beyond “I offered my resignation,”. I think the CBC is being far too forgiving – treating Canadian secrets as somehow undeserving of serious attention. You’d think Canada didn’t have any real secrets – despite the fact we’re talking about nuclear secrets here. Indeed, there are some folks who would consider that kind of information somewhat valuable, even if the CBC or the Conservative Party of Canada don’t. |
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