Keith and Ed,
How lucky we are in the US
not to have “All this patronage talk, corruption and stuff”.
We have the best Congress that money can buy.
Harry
*******************************
Henry
George School
of Social Science
of Los Angeles
Box 655
Tujunga CA
91042
818 352-4141
*******************************
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:50
AM
To: Ed Weick
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW:
Backward Canada?
-- was Breakdown inUKstateeducation
Ed,
At 13:02 10/05/2005 -0400, you wrote:
Thank you Husain, and WOW you do
make a rather strong statement! What I believe often happens when people
find themselves to be part of an elite is that they begin to believe they are
entitled to special privileges. This probably happened in the case of the
people working in the sponsorship program. After all, weren't they doing
one of the most important things you could possibly do, saving the country?
Weren't they entitled to extraordinary pay, the best of housing and so on?
And, of course, you had to do whatever was necessary to stay in the loop and
one of those things was kickbacks to the Liberal party. You had to make
sure the party was able to stay in power. That may have been bending the
rules a bit but not really criminal because it had to be done for the sake of
the country. I'm sure the cynics among them recognized the criminality of
what was going on, but what the hell, that's what life is like.
Everybody's on the take.
I experienced a bit of this
in the two to three years I spent in the oil patch in Calgary with Dome Petroleum back the late
1970s and early 1980s. Because of the oil shocks of the 1970s, the oil
patch was booming and because of the National Energy Program and Petroleum
Incentives Program grants which moved money from the oil patch in the south
into the frontier, exploration in the Arctic
was booming. Whenever you had to fly anywhere, you went by private jet.
Your time and comfort were too important to depend on commercial scheds.
I recall being in Inuvik once with a small
group of oil patch colleagues. It was Friday afternoon. Our options
were to take the sched back to Calgary the
following morning or to have a Learjet come up from Calgary to get us that evening. What do
you think we did? After all we were important people - busy, busy, busy
looking for oil!
I believe that if you
peeled back the National Energy Policy layer by layer you might find something
quite similar to the sponsorship program in the PIP part of the policy.
It was widely known, though not publicly discussed at the time that Jack
Gallagher, Chairman of Dome, was one of the architects of the PIP program.
Dome was one of the program's principle beneficiaries. It had an
important and highly connected point man in Ottawa. He became a Senator after Dome
collapsed. Were there kickbacks to the Liberal Party? I'm sure
there were, but as corporate donations. For some reason, kickbacks in the
form of corporate donations are clean, money under the table is not.
Ed
P.S.: Apologies to
Futurework members or lurkers outside of Canada. We Canadians have
become a little parochial. We tend to do that every once in awhile.
It won't last.
Not to worry! It's all very interesting. All this patronage talk, corruption
and stuff sounds very much like home. So I see that you (plural) are
susceptible, too!
Keith
