Alberta MP Rathgeber resigns from Conservative caucus - Edmonton - CBC News
Lack of transparency cited.
Will he be the only one?
Lack of transparency cited.
Will he be the only one?
PMO communications director Andrew McDougall said on Twitter that Rathgeber should step down as an MP and allow a byelection because people in his riding elected a Conservative MP.
Really? I thought they elected Rathberger.
PMO communications director Andrew McDougall said on Twitter that Rathgeber should step down as an MP and allow a byelection because people in his riding elected a Conservative MP.
I do not think elected officials that resign from the party any party should step down and
run in a by election. It would cost even more money. Secondly this guy has a valid reason.
Harper is short on facts on the Duffy mess and no one believes him period I think this is a
road to ruin if the party continues to play the same game.
There are rumours and just rumours that a number of MPs are not too pleased
I think he did the right thing here for the right reasons. he knows he's likely finished but he
did the right thing anyway.
Sour grapes.
His proposed legislation would have amended Canada’s Access to Information and Privacy laws to provide salary disclosure for employees of government institutions who earn as much as the minimum salary for a deputy minister, currently about $188,000.
Instead, a Conservative amendment put forward by Butt, the MP for Mississauga-Streetsville, suggested raising that number to the highest possible total income a deputy minister could make, about $444,000. The two NDP and one Liberal opposition members were vehemently opposed, saying the government’s amendment would make the bill useless.
“I joined the Reform/conservative movements because I thought we were somehow different, a band of Ottawa outsiders riding into town to clean the place up, promoting open government and accountability,” he wrote in a blog post Thursday. “I barely recognize ourselves, and worse I fear that we have morphed into what we once mocked.”
“What happened to the party of Preston Manning? What happened to accountability,” NDP critic Charlie Angus asked aloud.
“Everyone is on my side but my side,” Rathgeber said, watching from the sidelines as his disclosure and transparency bill was eviscerated.
“The whole thing was just really a farce,” he told The Huffington Post Canada. Rathgeber said that months ago he had been informed that his bill would be amended, but he was given no indication that the bar for disclosure would be set so high. The Commons standing committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics held six meetings and heard from eight witnesses, but “it didn’t matter what any of them said.”
“The decision had been made months ago by staffers between the Justice ministry and PMO (Prime Minister’s Office), and it didn’t matter what evidence was presented or how persuasive the arguments were. CPC (Conservative Party of Canada) members had their voting instructions and without even speaking to support their amendments, they voted in lockstep, and you see the result,” he said, frustration ringing in his voice.
“Before I got into this, six or eight months ago, I didn’t know that these performance variances existed, and when I saw they were as high as 39 per cent for the highest level of deputy minister – I mean that is a lot of money. That’s $124,000. That’s more than double the average Canadian salary, and that compensation is flying completely under the radar, and the government for its own reason wants to keep it that way,” he said.
“I know that they were worried about some bad news story about mandarin X or deputy minister Y who makes an exorbitant amount of money in a department that is not doing very well, but as with all decisions that you’ve seen come out of PMO lately, even the political acumen is completely short-sighted,” he said.
MacKay told National Post columnist John Ivison that if Conservatives vote to change the current leadership rules at a convention in Calgary this month and adopt a process that gives each member a vote, he may be one of many Tories who could bolt from the party.
When MacKay and Prime Minister Stephen Harper agreed to merge the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties in 2003, the PCs insisted that each riding would have an equal say in a leadership vote. MacKay has said if that wasn't the case, there would have been no merger.
The idea was that regions with larger numbers of members, such as Western Canada, could not diminish the influence of other areas of the country such as Quebec or Atlantic Canada, where riding associations are smaller.
"Nobody can describe it as a unifying issue," MacKay said. "It's divisive. It pulls at old affiliations and old fault lines and I don't think we need that."
“What happened to the party of Preston Manning?
I ask myself that question all the time. Unfortunately, the Conservative Party abandoned fiscally conservative democrats like me.
I wasn't a reform supporter, but there were things I did like about their platform, responsible government being one of the big ones. We certainly don't have that with the current conservative party, which seems to put expediency first even more than the last liberal government.
Yep, lots of that from the PMO these days.