All posts tagged Order of Canada

Order of Canada for Stevie Cameron sets the right tone for the coming Year of Mulroney

by David Climenhaga on December 31, 2012 in Brian Mulroney, Canadian Politics, Lobbying with 5 Comments

Happy New Year … and this time I mean it! Author and cook Stevie Cameron wearing the official regalia of a member of the Order of Canada. Actual Order of Canada recipients may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Ms. Cameron; Brian Mulroney, the 18th prime minister of Canada, wearing his OiC pin in his official portrait by Igor Babailov, which kind of captures the guy, you have to admit.

What a delightful and ironic twist on which to end one year and start another was the announcement yesterday that Stevie Cameron had been awarded the Order of Canada!

And here I thought I was finished writing about – or at least during – 2012, with my bloviations yesterday on the future of Alberta’s NDP.

Ms. Cameron’s appointment on the cusp of 2013 makes up for some of the rather inferior choices by the committee that has picked the Order’s recipients over the past few decades. (You all know who I have in mind, I’m sure.)

Now, Ms. Cameron was supposedly given “Canada’s highest civilian honour” for her work as a philanthropist and a chef, but we all know better, surely?

The fact that Ms. Cameron strove to drive a stake (metaphorically speaking) through former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Conservative heart must have been factored into this decision – if only at the committee’s subconscious level.

Alert readers will recall that Ms. Cameron is also a journalist and author, who wrote about Mr. Mulroney at some length in her 1994 tome, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years.

For some reason, the Toronto Star did not mention this notable fact of authorship in its summary of this year’s excellent crop of OiC winners, a list that also includes former Liberal Deputy PM Sheila Copps, former Newfoundland Liberal premier Brian Tobin, former B.C. NDP premier Mike Harcourt and pianist Jane Coop.

But who can forget On the Take, which Amazon.com describes on its sales site to this day as the “stunning expose of greed and crime in the Mulroney era” that “confirmed and detailed” the “widespread corruption the public suspected during Brian Mulroney’s regime”?

Mr. Mulroney and his many supporters of course vigorously dispute this assessment by the editors at Amazon – a fact that leads us to the irony in Ms. Cameron’s elevation to the heights of Member of the Order of Canada. For 2013, whether we like it or not, is surely bound to be the Year of Brian Mulroney.

That is, 2013 will be the year that Mr. Mulroney – a Companion of the Order, its highest rank, since 1998 – will almost certainly subject Canadians to the full-court press in his tireless campaign to salvage his tattered reputation before the final judgment of history is rendered. (The court referred to in this expression, I am reasonably certain, is the kind on which one plays tennis, not the kind Mr. Mulroney’s former associate Karlheinz Schreiber appealed to in hopes of not being extradited back to Germany to face accusations of tax evasion.)

Mr. Mulroney will do this, as has been previously reported in this space, with the able assistance of the professional lobbyists at the Earnscliffe Strategy Group, many of whom have past associations with the former PM.

For her part, Ms. Cameron has a fairly low opinion of Mr. Mulroney. She once told an interviewer she’d really rather write about serial killers.

That cruel assessment notwithstanding, Mr. Mulroney did some things right, and history should recognize his achievements.

But his record, in toto, is hardly universally lustrous. Perhaps Ms. Cameron’s appointment to the Order of Canada late in 2012 can remind us, at those moments in 2013 when the 18th prime minster of Canada positively seems to glow, that may be because a group of professional lobbyists are shining us on.

Again, Happy New Year! And Happy New Year to you, Stevie!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Time to wax philosophical about Ralph Klein and the Order of Canada

by David Climenhaga on June 25, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Conservative Party of Canada, Order of Canada with 3 Comments

Former Alberta premier Ralph Klein, back in the day. Below: Former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau, also back in the day.

Now that the campaign to give the Order of Canada to Ralph Klein has all but met its goal, one wonders when the effort to hang the same gong on Jacques Parizeau will begin? Seriously! The former premier of Quebec meets the essential qualification.

For months now, a relentless campaign has been under way by a group of journalists, sometime Klein caucus mates and political allies, and other loyalists of the former Alberta premier to ensure that Mr. Klein is awarded the country’s highest civilian honour.

Mr. Klein – who is now 70 and was premier from 1992 to 2006 – is seriously ailing and that has added to the pressure not to deny him this award during his lifetime. So Mr. Klein’s supporters have now broken the rules (not that the rules matter very much for the well-connected in the Canada of Prime Minister Stephen Harper) and proclaimed that they have been privately informed the deal is done. It will be announced on or close to Canada Day, they say.

Mr. Klein deserves it, his supporters principally argue, because … because he used to be a premier.

At any rate, that Mr. Klein collected sufficient votes to become premier of Alberta is the foundation of the argument offered at various times by such journalists as Don Martin, Don Braid and the anonymous editorialist of the Edmonton Journal whose opinions have now evaporated from the Internet.

They also note that Mr. Klein, who was an undeniably popular political figure in this province, also balanced the budget, and sometimes they will remember too that he gave all us Alberta citizens enough cash to purchase a Sony Walkman or an iPod!

Understandably, Mr. Klein’s supporters often gloss over some of the more divisive qualities of his time in politics, such as his famous remarks about eastern bums and creeps, made when he was mayor of Calgary in 1988, and his intoxicated late-night visit to a men’s homeless shelter in 2001. Just as understandably, they defend Mr. Klein’s more controversial policies – for example, leaving the provincial health care system in a calamitous shambles that persists to this day – as necessary and laudable.

Now, there was a day when merely having held office as a premier was clearly not sufficient to get someone an Order of Canada. But it would seem by the arguments we have heard over the past year or two and, more importantly that seem to have been heard in Ottawa, that those days are behind us.

Well, so be it! And perhaps Mr. Klein’s supporters have a point when they say arguments he was a knocker-down of institutions rather than a builder-up of them are just sour grapes by people who disagreed with his policies while in office.

Which is why it seems not so outlandish that someone will soon argue that Mr. Parizeau, who managed after all to get elected premier of a majority government in a Canadian province just like Mr. Klein, should be awarded the Order of Canada too!

Thankfully for those here in English Canada likely to fly into a swivet at the thought of such a thing, one has the sense Mr. Parizeau would not be much interested in that particular honour. He has, after all, been declared a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. (And before you start to sputter and kick, dear readers, remember that our sullen neo-Con prime minister’s newest Quebec advisor, none other that former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, holds the same rank in the same order.)

What’s more – unlike Mr. Parizeau, I guess – when Mr. Klein received a manifesto urging sovereignty-association for Alberta from a gang of dangerous Western separatists, he had the good sense to file it where it belonged, in the trash bucket.

But all this history brings us to a serious point. Perhaps it’s time to recognize what has been obvious all along about this Order of Canada to anyone who has been paying attention – to wit, that it is now and ever shall be essentially political.

To the winners go the spoils and, in an era where conservatives dominate the government, a disproportionate number of conservatives are going to be awarded Orders of Canada. If Mr. Klein gets one too, well, there are certainly worse people who nowadays remain qualified to wear the pin of the Order in their lapel!

So let’s not lose any sleep about this particular award, although we should make darned certain that at least one more former Conservative Alberta premier gets one too. To wit: surely the hapless Ed Stelmach deserves the honour! To him, after all, fell the political risk and the political cost of trying – not always with much success – to straighten out the catastrophic mess Mr. Klein left in Alberta’s health care system, its crumbling infrastructure and its give-away petroleum royalty regime.

While we’re at it, perhaps we should change the rules so that no one who has been awarded an Order of Canada can be stripped of the award – no matter what his or her subsequent sins may be.

Remember Stephen Fonyo, who made a valuable contribution to Canadian life by raising money to fight cancer, which had taken his leg, yet who was stripped of his membership in the Order for flaws not so different from those that bedevilled Mr. Klein.

Mr. Fonyo’s greatest failure, it can be seen now, was not having been the premier of a Canadian province.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Black is the new Red: Why Stephen & Jason love Conrad more than they love Canadians

by David Climenhaga on May 7, 2012 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
Powerful symbolism, no matter how you look at it: Lord and Lady Black. Below: Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, Canadians. Did any of us ever truly doubt – even for an instant – that the “Conservative” government of Stephen Harper would not welcome Conrad Black back to the Canadian fold as soon as the American correctional authorities escorted him to the border and handed him his coat and hat?

Do you now imagine Lord Black isn’t here in Canada to stay?

Well, if you do, disabuse yourself of that notion!

Whatever you may think about Lord Black’s renunciation of his Canadian citizenship, the incontrovertible legal facts of his criminal conviction in the United States, or the appropriateness of welcoming this divisive former citizen and jailbird back to Canada, he has a blank cheque to remain in this country as long as he pleases: one year, five years, whatever.

Count on it, if the Harper Government remains in power, Lord Black is going to get his Canadian citizenship back as well, and he’s going to get to keep his Order of Canada, and he’s going to remain a member of the Queen’s Privy Council of Canada. Indeed, so warm are the feelings of the Harper Government for his Lordship, who would bet with confidence against it naming him Governor General or stamping his face on the new three-dollar coin they’re no doubt planning as a replacement for the penny?

So never mind the intentionally deceptive suggestions emanating from official Ottawa and the equally official news columns of the tame right-wing media that this notorious non-citizen’s stay in Canada is merely on sufferance, just a one-year temporary permit that can be revoked if circumstances warrant.

That’s just a soothing little bromide to shut you up and get you back to attending to your own insignificant and impecunious existence while the Harper Government carries on taking care of business – which, in this country, means taking care of the government’s pals and cronies in business, of whom Lord Black is most assuredly one.

Officially, the Globe and Mail pleaded with us to act like Canadians and forgive his Lordship for renouncing his citizenship (and insulting the rest of us who remained here in what he once called this “Third-World dump run by raving socialists”), reminding us that Canada is a place “of second chances for all.” (Well, all but Omar Khadr, who actually is a Canadian, but never mind that just now.)

But the triumphalism emanating from elsewhere on the nation’s editorial pages is a better guide to what our prime minister’s coterie, including his jumped-up little twerp of a citizenship minister, to borrow a felicitous phrase of Lord Black’s coinage, really thinks about him … and about us.

“We warmly welcome you back to Canada, Conrad Black,” slavered the National Post, which Lord Black founded to help elect people like Mr. Harper and the execrable Mr. Kenney, who as part of his cabinet role is Canada’s chief arbiter of ideological purity. “At the National Post offices in Toronto, you will forever be among friends.”

“I doubt that Lord Black is worried about the reception he will get back in Canada,” panted the Globe and Mail’s Peggy Wente in a typically lickspittle paean to the wealthy. “He’s already being swamped with dinner invitations.” And surely Ms. Wente is hoping to get one too from one of the society hostesses who are lining up to fete his Lordship.

Notwithstanding the enthusiasm for the return of this prodigal non-Canadian – for surely the purchaser of Lady Black’s infamous $62,000 birthday party was that! – there are, as several conservative commentators have pointed out in an effort to deny the Harper Government was being anything but beneficent and disinterested when it eased his Lordship across the border, some political risks associated with this decision.

So why did they risk it?

For one thing, as Ms. Wente states explicitly, many in Canada’s political and business elite believe his Lordship did nothing wrong. “Actually,” she wrote, “some of the smartest people in Toronto doubt there was a crime at all, and if there was, it wasn’t much of one.” (The cautious Globe editorialist observed while pleading for mercy, however, “Lord Black may not accept that he did wrong, but the U.S. Supreme Court did, and that is enough to establish the basic facts for Canada.”)

Regardless of the merits of the U.S. justice system, this tells us a lot about the Harper Government’s worldview and the place of the business classes in it. For, it is said here, if any attitude exemplifies the Harper Conservatives it is the notion the rules are for the rest of us, but they do not apply to the Masters of the Universe who call the shots in Ottawa, Toronto and Calgary.

More important, to them Lord Black is an avatar of that class of international business people whose market fundamentalist ideology continues to cause so much unhappiness in this world – grief that is now being meted out on the employees of Parks Canada and other federal departments but that will come to the rest of us in due time if we permit it.

So the Harperites may try to appeal to our basest feelings of nationalism as a way to try to control our behaviour – as we were called last summer to the irrelevant barricades of the War of 1812 by Parks Canada. But their true model is the globalized corporation that owes allegiance or obedience to no sovereign national authority, least of all Canada’s, and indeed can bend nations to its will.

So Lord Black is not just a friend of many in this neo-Con Harperite government, and as such deserving ex officio of special treatment, he is a clamorous symbol of the new totalitarian internationalism Harperism represents and exists to promote.

Just like the old totalitarian internationalism – the Red Army variety, not the Red State kind – the market fundamentalism of the Harper Conservatives justifies its actions as the historically inevitable creation of an ideologically pure and perfect world but delivers little but suffering for the bulk of humanity left in its wake.

It is said here the symbolic power to the Harperites of Black as the new Red is one of the key reasons they are so willing to take risks to ensure Lord Black’s comfortable return to Canada, and why they have never had any intention of paying the slightest attention to what the rest of us think.

Simply put, Lord Black is their kind of guy. We Canadians are not.

The answer is not to complain much more about Lord Black, or indeed to pay him much heed at all. We’re stuck with him now, but he’s really not much more than a largely irrelevant if occasionally irritating sidebar to this story,

The answer is to do as the people of France and Greece were doing yesterday and purge these detestable ideologues from our government at the first opportunity. To this end, the easy return of Lord Black to Canada is a helpful symbol of our own.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Sorry, an Order of Canada for Ralph Klein is not appropriate

by David Climenhaga on January 27, 2012 in Uncategorized with 21 Comments
Ralph Klein, as premier of Alberta. Below: Kevin Taft, an Order of Canada gong.

Does the kind of man who would call immigrants to Alberta from Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada “bums” and “creeps” deserve the Order of Canada?

Surely one would think not! But anything can happen in the weird and wacky world of Canada’s “honours system,” so one supposes that, with a noisy campaign under way by the corporate media and various far-right bloviators, an Order of Canada for Ralph “Katastrophe” Klein is a virtual inevitability.

Still, just because one has been the premier of a Canadian province shouldn’t be an automatic ticket to a membership in the Order, nor has it been since the honour was established in 1967. But the Edmonton Journal seemed to think it ought to be, arguing in a recent editorial that since Mr. Klein got a lot of votes, he should therefore be welcomed to the Order. Klein biographer Don Martin made much the same argument.

One would also think that it would be more appropriate to use the Order to honour people who built things up, rather than those who tore them down, although in fairness the Order’s criteria seem to be a little vague. The website of the Governor-General, the vice-regal personage who administers the Order, says it “recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.”

It’s still a free country, so presumably what constitutes those qualities is open to a fairly broad range of public interpretation. Still, once he had left his job as the mayor of Calgary, where he contributed to the creation of the city’s light-rail transit system, Mr. Klein didn’t really do much but knock things down, although there are those who might try to make a case that some of the things he attacked needed attacking.

His famously offensive remarks about Canadians from more eastern regions of the country were also made while he was Calgary’s Chief Magistrate, of course, not after he had ascended to the more august role of premier of an entire province.

Mr. Klein’s principal modus operandi in provincial office seemed essentially to be to take a complex area of activity in which government was involved, throw all the cards in the air and see where they landed. Usually someone else had to pick them up and put them away.

Thus he left our health system in chaos – unlike Tommy Douglas (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1981) who contributed mightily to creating the system of medicare from which all Canadians now benefit.

His government sold off publicly owned health facilities to private interests – unlike Peter Lougheed (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1989) who can be credited with building a network of modern public hospitals throughout Alberta.

However, as the Journal rightly points out, Mr. Klein did give us each a payment big enough to purchase an iPod or a Walkman, and “finally erased the provincial debt.”

Actually, if memory serves, Mr. Klein and his government announced several times that they had finally erased the debt. In reality, of course, they did no such thing. Mr. Klein merely pushed it off on another generation – of politicians, and of all Albertans – to deal with.

To lift a useful household analogy from Kevin Taft, the former Alberta Liberal Leader during the Klein era and the best premier Alberta never had, this is like refusing to repair your house for 30 years, then leaving it to your children with holes in the roof, vermin living under the front porch and rusted cars with no wheels and no engines sitting in the driveway, partly obscured by weeds. All Mr. Klein did was hand off the cost of maintaining Alberta to future generations – for whom the repairs will be more expensive, more complicated and more stressful.

Someone should have a quiet word with former Premier Ed Stelmach, for example, and suss out what he really thinks about Mr. Klein being admitted to the Order. Of course, Mr. Stelmach is too courtly a politician to say aloud what’s actually on his mind, but here’s betting it wouldn’t be all that complimentary if he were inclined to speak up.

After all, it was Mr. Stelmach who had to deal with the social debt and wear the infrastructure deficit that Mr. Klein’s irresponsible government created and left behind. Arguably, along with declining petroleum prices and a recession caused in the back rooms of the banking industry, it was part of what crippled his premiership. It will fall to the rest of us to sort out the chaos in health care created by Mr. Klein, presumably in hopes of justifying widespread privatization, an achievement we will struggle for a long time to accomplish here in Alberta.

Mr. Klein’s greatest claim to fame during his years as premier was that large numbers of Albertans said they thought he’d be a great guy with whom to have a beer. Ask the (sober) residents of an Edmonton homeless men’s shelter how much fun Mr. Klein really was after he’d had a few.

Some of us would rather have a couple of brews with Steve Fonyo (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1985-2009). Mr. Fonyo had his failings, as do we all, but he personally raised $14 million to fight cancer, and he deserved and continues to deserve the honour for that effort.

Mr. Klein’s current physical and mental infirmities are a tragedy with which any of us can feel sympathy and empathy. But he was a catastrophe as a premier, and hardly a unifying force in his treatment of Canadians from elsewhere. Awarding him this great honour – as debased as it may now be owing to the continued presence in its ranks of certain unsavoury characters – is not appropriate.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Carry on Up the Privy Council: Lord Black’s saga continues

by David Climenhaga on June 8, 2011 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Lord Black is greeted by fellow inmates at the Coleman Federal Correctional Centre. Note: Officers of the Order of Canada and members of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Mr. Bridger.

The latest chapter in the Tubby Black saga is enough to make us almost like the old reprobate.

Not enough, mind you, to conclude Lord Black ought to be readmitted to Canada, permitted to hang onto his Order of Canada gong or for that matter remain a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada.

Still, it’s hard to blame the man if it’s true that, as recounted in affidavits filed with the U.S. Federal Court in Illinois, his Lordship (as we now understand he insists on being called, and therefore do apologize humbly for the previous references to “Mr. Black”) shirked his duties as a tutor in order to take piano lessons, acted in a haughty manner and hired other prisoners to act as his personal servants, cooking, cleaning and ironing for the great man.

(Piano lessons in prison? Surely no such fripperies will be allowed in the new jails being hurried to completion by Prime Minister Stephen Harper as we challenge the United States for the title of most citizens per capita behind bars.)

The U.S. Attorney sought out the affidavits from people who say they had observed Lord Black’s naughty behaviour while a resident of the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida. The point, apparently, was to argue in the aftermath of his Lordship’s recent unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court that his original sentence of 6.5 years should be re-imposed and his Lordship himself be shipped back to the inconvenience and discomfort of Coleman.

But while painting Lord Black as a jailhouse slacker, the U.S. Attorney failed to provide the necessary context needed to help us understand his Lordship’s plight.

The Prisoners Code, in fact, is less concerned with the fate of rats and gunsels than the requirement that prisoners avoid working as much as humanly possible. A generally unco-operative attitude about everything while incarcerated, therefore, is essentially de rigueur. (Your blogger hastens to note that his understanding of this fact is based on an extensive study of the literature, rather than personal experience with the hospitality of Her Majesty.)

In this, Lord Black was doing no more than what was required of him by the PC, that is in this case the Prisoners Code, as any of us would have done in his Lordship’s handmade cordovan loafers.

The model for this role, of course, was introduced by Sir Noel Coward, playing Mr. Bridger in the original Italian Job, which was released in 1969, proving once again that life imitates art through the medium of Lord Black, who was released in 2010. His Lordship, indeed, even bears a passing resemblance to Sir Noel!

As for the PC behind Lord Black’s name, that is the Privy Council noted above, alert reader Kevin McLeod of Ottawa has brought to my attention the fact his Lordship remains a member of that august Canadian body, in addition to remaining an Officer of the Order of Canada. That this is in fact so, may be observed by clicking here.

Lord Black was appointed to the Privy Council – usually the turf of retired Speakers of the House, pastured-out cabinet ministers, superannuated Supreme Court justices and the like – by Brian Mulroney on Canada Day 1992, a gesture that should surprise no one, given the gesturer’s instinct for toadying. The stated reason was that the then Mr. Black belonged in a special category known as “distinguished Canadians.”

Notwithstanding his other troubles, that Lord Black remains a Privy Councillor of this particular variety – and as such is presumably entitled to the convenience of a Canadian passport – seems mildly odd as he is no longer a Canadian citizen.

Readers will recall that Lord Black renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 so that, well, so that he could become Lord Black. (As Alice cried, “Curiouser and curiouser!”)

However, as Mr. McLeod pointed out to me, no one has ever been kicked out of the Privy Council for Canada, not even the one-time associate minister for defence, Pierre Sevigny, despite his having carried on at the same time with Gerda Munsinger, a woman suspected of being an East German spy. (Nowadays, presumably, Mr. Sevigny would have been readmitted to the cabinet after a reasonable time had passed, perhaps as minister of state for tourism.)

Given all this, one supposes it is too much to ask that the non-Canadian Lord Black be the first, although we are entitled to ask, where is Jason Kenney whenever you actually need him?

The Sevigny case provides an interesting contrast with that of John Profumo, who did resign from the Privy Council of the United Kingdom after it was learned that he had similarly carried on with a model, who was also carrying on with a naval attaché from the Soviet Embassy. (That’s quite enough carrying on, thank you – ed.)

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Governor General must act decisively to protect the cherished Order of Canada

by David Climenhaga on June 1, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
Conrad Black, back in the day, lectures a Calgary Herald employee for having the temerity to engage in a legal strike. Mr. Black’s effort to have his subsequent U.S. criminal convictions overturned was rejected yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court. Below: Governor General David Johnston, wearing his Order of Canada gong.

Governor General David Johnston is a distinguished lawyer, so he surely understands the importance of precedent, both as a practical and symbolic matter.

Now, early in his term as Canada’s vice-regal personage, Mr. Johnston is faced with the urgent need to act decisively to protect a cherished Canadian institution.

I speak, of course, of the Order of Canada, and the pressing requirement that the notorious and unrepentant felon, Conrad Moffat Black, lately a resident of Coleman, Fla., be removed from the ranks of the Order’s membership post-haste.

It is mildly ironic and powerfully symbolic that Mr. Black, also known as Baron Black of Crossharbour, failed yesterday in his continuous and apparently well-funded efforts to have the United States Supreme Court overturn his 2007 conviction for fraud and obstruction of justice less than a week after 43 distinguished Canadians were invested with the nation’s highest civilian honour in a ceremony at Rideau Hall.

In 2007, Mr. Black was found guilty by a jury in Chicago of defrauding Hollinger Inc., the publicly held newspaper holding company that he led, and sentenced to six and a half years in the federal institution at Coleman.

Since then, it has been argued here and elsewhere that the former newspaper owner’s continued presence as an Officer of the Order of Canada, which he was awarded in 1990, is a stain on this hallowed national institution. However, for reasons known only to herself and her close advisors, whomever they may have been, the previous Governor General declined to use her prerogative as the chancellor and Principal Companion of the Order to purge it of this blot.

The suggestion has been made, though never officially confirmed, that the Governor General’s staff at Rideau Hall were waiting for Mr. Black’s attempts to clear his name to run their course. This has now happened, and there is no excuse for allowing this convicted criminal to remain an Officer of the Order.

Last fall, a U.S. appeals court upheld Mr. Black’s conviction on one count of fraud, as well as for obstructing justice, while overturning two other fraud convictions against the former Canadian.

Mr. Black had renounced his citizenship in 2001 because the government of what he called this “Third World dump run by raving socialists” would not allow him to accept a British baronetcy. This minor title of British nobility entitled Mr. Black to a seat in the House of Lords. Apparently this sort of foreign frippery was more important to the former Toronto resident than the honour of being a Canadian citizen.

After the fall ruling by the American appeals court, counsel for Mr. Black proceeded to the U.S. Supreme Court proclaiming their intention to see the remaining charges overturned. Yesterday, however, the Justices of the Supreme Court refused to hear Mr. Black’s arguments in a brief order, unaccompanied by further commentary.

This means that Mr. Black must return to court in Chicago on June 24 for re-sentencing on the two convictions that still stand.

Mr. Black, who continues to refuse to take responsibility for the actions for which he was criminally convicted in our neighbouring democracy, a country where the Canadian government is clearly persuaded the rule of law prevails with regard to the treatment of Canadian citizens, has made blustering statements that he will continue the fight to remain at large.

Perhaps he may succeed. After two and a half years in jail and the U.S. Supreme Court’s earlier redefinition of the legal theory used to convict him, he may very well be deemed to have served enough time for his crimes already. But whether or not the door to the room where Mr. Black lays his head at night is barred is not the issue here.

He is in fact a person who departed “from generally recognized standards of public behaviour” and who was “convicted of a criminal offense,” both grounds for revocation of membership in the Order under Article 3 of the Policy and Procedure for Termination of Appointment to the Order Of Canada.

We among the hoi polloi know this, because this was precisely the argument advanced by Mr. Johnston’s predecessor as Governor General in 2010 when she gave the tragic one-legged runner and cancer fund-raiser Steve Fonyo the bum’s rush from the Order after a series of minor criminal convictions.

Arguably, Mr. Fonyo made a more valuable contribution to Canadian life than the fractious Mr. Black.

Regardless, hockey commentator Howie Meeker, musician Robbie Robertson and actor and fund-raiser Michael J. Fox, all invested in the Order last Friday, are great Canadians. Conrad Black is not. Indeed, Mr. Black is not even a Canadian!

It is time for Mr. Johnston to earn his salary and strike Mr. Black’s name from the rolls of the Order forthwith! Anything less disgraces the Order.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Surely it is time to end the blemish on the Order of Canada by dismissing Lord Black

by David Climenhaga on October 30, 2010 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Lord Black in happier times … for him … debating Andy Marshall, leader of the strikers at the Calgary Herald 11 years ago. Mr. Marshall was one of many “gangrenous limbs” slated for amputation, in the then-Mr. Black’s description of participants in the legal strike at the Herald. Below: Steve Fonyo.

Yesterday, three judges of the Seventh Circuit Court in Chicago upheld two criminal charges against Baron Black of Crossharbour.

In other words, Conrad Moffat Black, late of the federal Correctional Complex in Coleman, Fla., where he resided for a spell at the courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, remains a convicted felon.

According to Article 3 of the Policy and Procedure for Termination of Appointment to the Order Of Canada, revocation of the Order may be considered when the holder has been convicted of a criminal offence.

Surely it is time at long last for the Governor General of Canada to revoke Lord Black’s membership in the Order. Indeed, it is a disgrace and a blot upon the nation’s highest civilian honour that this person remains an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Clearly, there is a strong argument to be made that such a measure is long overdue. Notwithstanding that, the still-well-connected Lord Black remains on the list of members of the Order of Canada, windily honoured on the Governor General’s Website as “a distinguished Toronto entrepreneur and publisher … a man of diverse achievements within the realms of Canadian commerce, education, literature and the arts.”

The previous Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, may have hesitated to strip Mr. Black of this great Canadian honour because he still had appeals outstanding against his multiple convictions for fraud, racketeering and conspiracy in the United States.

Reading between the lines, she suggested as much in a Jan. 23 news release announcing that Stephen Fonyo had been given the bum’s rush from the ranks of the order “related to his multiple criminal convictions, for which there are no outstanding appeals.” (Emphasis added.)

The hapless Mr. Fonyo, of course, hardly has the means enjoyed by Lord Black to pursue appeals against his convictions.

As has been argued in this space before, the treatment of the troubled Mr. Fonyo and that of Lord Black makes for an ironic contrast.

Mr. Fonyo, who when he was 12 lost a leg to cancer and who was made an Officer of the Order in 1985, has since had a history of criminal behaviour including assault, aggravated assault, theft, fraud, drunk driving and driving without a license.

However, he also ran across Canada in 1984 on one good leg and one artificial one – following and completing the route of the saintly, cranky and doomed Terry Fox – and in the process raised $13 million for cancer research. This was no small feat for an ordinary man with a serious disability and it is said here that Mr. Fonyo – bad judgment, substance abuse and all – deserved his Order of Canada.

This is somewhat different from the record of Lord Black, about whom it would be a fair comment to say that both his past remarks about Canada, which he once termed “an oppressive little world,” and his manner of conducting his business affairs both deviated “from generally recognized standards of public behaviour,” which may also be considered grounds for revocation of the Order. Lord Black, of course, renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 to become a member of the British House of Lords.

Yet Lord Black, by contrast to Mr. Fonyo, remains to this day a member of the Order despite having been properly convicted of serious criminal offenses by an impartial court in a neighbouring democracy.

Lord Black has had some success overturning some of those charges, but as of yesterday the unanimous decision of the U.S. appeal court upheld two charges and indicated the judges believe Lord Black, who at the moment is free on bail, should still face a stiff sentence for his crimes.

Lord Black was sentenced to six and a half years in jail in 2007 and had served about two years when he was released on bail. He will now be re-sentenced by Judge Amy St. Eve of the District Court of Northern Illinois, who was the judge in his original trial. If she chooses, she may impose the same sentence as before or let him serve his time in the community on probation.

But Judge St. Eve’s eventual decision regarding how Lord Black spends his time is really irrelevant to the matter of his Order of Canada. His conviction stands. Surely it is now time for David Johnston, the Governor General who replaced Ms. Jean, to say “enough” and end this blemish on the Order of Canada by dismissing Lord Black from its ranks.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.