Karen E. Shepherd
Commissioner of Lobbying
Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada
255 Albert Street
10th Floor
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R5
Dear Commissioner Shepherd:
I am writing pursuant to section 10.4 of the Lobbying Act requesting that you conduct an investigation into what appears to be illegal lobbying by Bruce Carson in violation of the Lobbying Act and the Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct.
I am also concerned that rather than report this incident to your office for the proper independent review, senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) may have assisted in covering up the matter and preventing it from receiving the proper scrutiny.
After media reports on April 20, 2011, revealed that Guy Giorno, the then Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had written two letters to the Ethics Commissioner in January 2009, these letters, which I have attached, were finally released to the press. The letters contain a copy of a January 6, 2009, email that Mr. Carson sent, in his capacity as Executive Director of the Canada School of Energy and Environment (CSEE), to Cassie Doyle, Deputy Minister of the Department of Natural Resources, seeking support for the CSEE’s initiative to create a research organization called Carbon Management Canada (CMC), which he envisaged would be funded through the $25-million five-year envelope established through the Centres of Excellence research program.
As you may be aware, Carbon Management Canada was subsequently created with $25 million in federal funding and Mr. Carson became a member of its board.
Disturbingly, the letters also reveal that Mr. Carson (who previously worked as a senior official in the PMO between February 2006 and November 2008) had, at the time the email was sent, already returned temporarily to work at the PMO on the upcoming federal budget.
It would seem to me that Mr. Carson’s previous work at the PMO and the post-employment ban that prohibits former senior public office holders from lobbying government departments with which they had significant dealings while in office for one year, should have been enough to disqualify Mr. Carson from legally acting as a lobbyist for CSEE or CMC.
That this email was sent after he had temporarily returned to the employ of the PMO is especially troubling as he appears to have been acting in both the interests of the CSEE and the PMO simultaneously.
I find it very difficult to just accept Mr. Giorno’s rationale – which he sent to the Ethics Commissioner in a January 23, 2009, letter – that Mr. Carson had drafted the email prior to taking a leave from the CSEE and that it was erroneously sent on his behalf after he had returned to PMO. Again, given the one-year ban on lobbying Mr. Carson would have been subjected to, I do not see how the email would have been any more acceptable if it had been sent even before Mr. Carson returned to the PMO.
In any case, I note that there are no communication reports filed on the Registry of Lobbyists for this interaction.
In light of Mr. Carson’s later activities, including allegedly conducting unregistered lobbying on behalf of a water purification company which has now been referred to the RCMP for investigation, I believe that a thorough, independent investigation of Mr. Carson’s involvement with Carbon Management Canada’s successful application to secure $25 million in federal funds is clearly warranted.
I note that the investigative powers of the Lobbying Act are significant and that “in the same manner and to the same extent as a superior court of record” you have the authority to “summon and enforce the attendance of persons before the Commissioner and compel them to give oral or written evidence on oath, and …compel persons to produce any documents or other things that the Commissioner considers relevant for the investigation.”
Since it is without question in the public interest to assure Canadians that integrity exists in how the federal government interacts with lobbyists, I would encourage you to make broad use of these powers to independently ascertain and document the actual facts surrounding this incident. The second of Mr. Giorno’s letters indicates that Prime Minister Harper himself may have had some knowledge of this incident since, as Mr. Giorno notes, Mr. Carson was brought in to work on the production of the 2009 budget, but that “in order to strengthen the conflict-of-interest screen” a change was made to designate another PMO employee, Jasmine Igneski, as the PMO-PCO communication contact related to the budget. Mr. Giorno’s January 17, 2009, email to PCO clerk Kevin Lynch makes it clear the Prime Minister was aware of this change when he writes: “As the PM implicitly indicated when he mentioned the follow-up list, Jasmine Igneski is the PMO budget lead.”
Thank you for reviewing this matter. I am confident that you will address it with the seriousness that it deserves.
Please feel free to contact me if I can provide any additional information or clarification.
Yours truly,
Wayne Easter
First letter from Guy Giorno:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/85949/letter-1-guy-giorno-to-ethics-commissioner-mary.pdf
Second letter from Guy Giorno:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/85950/letter-2-guy-giorno-to-ethics-commissioner-mary.pdf
