Government ethics

Even in The Land Where Time Stood Still, a new standard of inertia has been achieved by Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson.

Tom Korski – April 16, 2012

There is time, and then there is Ottawa time.  It can be tabulated by phases of the moon. I know a branch of government, Archives Canada, that takes six weeks to make a photocopy. Delivery in three weeks is called “rush service.” I’m not making this up.

Yet even in The Land Where Time Stood Still, a new standard of inertia has been achieved by Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson. She recently cited Industry Minister Christian Paradis for violating the Conflict of Interest Act, but this was not startling; Paradis is quite a character. His misconduct had already been documented by enterprising reporters and the Commons’ Committee on Government Operations. More interesting was the fact it took Dawson almost two years to crack the case. 

Andrew Coyne – April 4, 2012

There are so many layers of misconduct in the F-35 affair that it is difficult to know where to start. Do we especially deplore the rigging of operational requirements by defence officials to justify a decision that had already been made? Or should we focus on the government's decision to buy the planes without even seeing the department's handiwork?

Is the scandal that the department deliberatedly understated the cost of the jets, in presentations to Parliament and the public? Or is it that its own internal figures, though they exceeded the published amounts by some $10-billon, were themselves, according to the Auditor General, gross underestimates?

Lee Berthiaume – April 6, 2012

Canada's auditor general dropped a bombshell Thursday when he said the Conservative government would have known before the last election that the F-35 fighter jet program would cost at least $10 billion more than what National Defence was telling Parliament and the public.

Auditor General Michael Ferguson refused to say whether the government allowed Canadians to be misled, but his comments have thrown more fuel onto a fire that has already seen the opposition call for House Speaker Andrew Scheer to launch an investigation.

Samuel Rubenfeld – March 27, 2012

The U.S. Justice Department’s kleptocracy initiative could spell the end of African leaders stashing stolen state assets in American financial institutions, said an expert in the region.

Herbert Igbanugo, the founding shareholder of Igbanugo Partners International Law Firm PLLC, said Tuesday during a panel discussion about Africa at the Dow Jones Global Compliance Symposium that the Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, which has a mandate to ferret out illicit assets belonging to “high-level” foreign officials and return them to victim countries, will have a great impact on the continent over the next couple of years as the U.S. pursues cases against African officials.