Democracy at stake in Oda flap: Ignatieff

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This article was published 17/02/2011 (5671 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — The case of a Conservative cabinet minister who doctored a signed document and misled the House of Commons is a test of Canada’s democracy, says Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.

All three opposition parties are calling for the resignation of Bev Oda, the international co-operation minister, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists Oda did nothing wrong when she cut funding to a church-based foreign aid group in 2009.

“In a democracy, ministers make the decisions,” Harper told the House of Commons on Wednesday.

However, the prime minister has yet to address the substance of the controversy — that Oda misled the House, misrepresented advice from the civil service and ordered a signed document to be altered.

“We’ve got a prime minister who lets a minister deceive the House of Commons, falsify a document, and instead of reprimanding her or dismissing her, gets up in this House and actually applauds her,” Ignatieff said.

Oda changed her story this week in the Commons and acknowledged she ordered someone to crudely hand-alter a $7-million funding recommendation for the ecumenical aid group Kairos. Oda apologized if anyone had been unwittingly led to believe by her government’s repeated assertions over the past year that the funding cut was made on the recommendation of bureaucrats.

“If some were led to conclude that my language implied that the department and I were of one mind on this application, then I apologize,” Oda said Monday.

The all-party foreign affairs committee agreed Wednesday to send a report to Commons Speaker Peter Milliken laying out the facts of a possible breach of parliamentary privilege — the first step in a lengthy and rare procedure seeking formal parliamentary censure of Oda.

House of Commons records show repeated and clear assertions by several different Harper ministers and parliamentary secretaries over the past year stating that officials at the Canadian International Development Agency made a routine rejection of the Kairos funding application on its merits.

Under the Harper government, such statements are rehearsed daily in advance of question period, often with the prime minister’s oversight.

It was only this week that Oda made it clear she ordered the handwritten changes to a signed funding approval in 2009. The alteration made it appear as though senior CIDA officials had recommended rejection of the application.

So far, the Conservatives have failed to address Oda’s document-doctoring or the long record of erroneous statements to the Commons.

Conservative House leader John Baird called the funding cut by Oda a “difficult and brave decision.”

If it was so brave, Liberal MP Bob Rae later noted outside the House, why has the minister never explained it, “except to say that it was a CIDA decision that was based on Kairos not meeting CIDA’s priorities?

All the opposition parties now agree Oda’s funding decision had to have been ordered from above — the only scenario they say makes sense of her signature on a funding approval that appears to have been doctored after the fact. Had Oda been against the funding approval from the outset, they say, she simply would not have signed the approval.

 

— The Canadian Press