No background checks for Harper’s Mr. Fixit (Bruce Carson) or his friends

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UPDATE:  This salacity features of this story just grow and grow. Recent reports confirm that after Carson collected the keys to the executive washroom and the Afghan files at the Stephen Harper PMO, he struck up a fairly serious relationship with a convicted madam-money launderer-bawdy house proprietor in Ottawa, who had been deported from the US—a pretty common kind of felon. There was, as is usual in Carson relationships, talk of marriage. He apparently managed to get this felon-fiancée into some PMO shindig. I guess she didn’t have a picture of her with a known Liberal on her Facebook page, so she would have easily cleared the RCMP background check. Maybe she got to chit chat with the biker chick that Maxime Bernier always seemed to bring to those kind of events. Who knows? Who cares? It’s hard to throw this kind of mud without getting it all over your own hands and throwing arm.

However, what everyone seems to be missing here at election time (and tax time) is Carson’s tax situation. He was apparently no better at managing money than his personal life. Harper claims that he knew about the fraud matter that got Carson disbarred in 1980 but not about Carson’s more recent unpaid rental car dispute. If he’d known about the rental car matter, Carson would not have got the PMO job. No matter what government job he had during this period, he had a huge obligation in back taxes to the CRA (a pretty sweet settlement of $90,000 for actual back taxes owed of $369,000). Are all the opposition spinmeisters asleep at the wheel. A veteran PMO insider got special treatment from the CRA. No one knows or seems to care as to whether he ever even paid CRA the deeply discounted (75%) settlement. Isn’t this a natural story for income tax season? Something big enough to erase the Fraser Institute’s bogus annual Tax Freedom Day story forever? If the FI’s tax freedom day is June 5, what day would that be on the Carson Tax Freedom calendar?

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Locked out by the New York Times until the end of the month, we went off in search of other stories on (sigh) Google News. We thought we’d heard all we needed to about Bruce Carson, the “former” adviser to Stephen Harper. He was trying to shake down his “former” colleagues in Ottawa to get them to buy water filtration systems for native reserves. He was cutting his 22-year-old fiancée in on the action, which seems only fair to his prospective mother-in-law. This story was so salacious that I didn’t even bother to read it. However, the stories from the Canadian Press and the Montreal Gazette round out the tale. How does someone, who got disbarred as a lawyer 30 years ago for financial malfeasance and ended up bankrupt on a few occasions since then, go on to “reinvent” himself as a constitutional and energy policy expert and become a favoured adviser to every federal conservative government for three decades? He easily waltzed down the corridors of power into both the Harper PMO and the offices of many in the Harper cabinet. When he got a top-level job in Mike Harris’s provincial government, the Canadian Revenue Agency was actually garnisheeing his wages as part of a deal to pay a $90,000 settlement of the $369,000 in back taxes he owed. No background check? I guess not. The Common Sense folks and the  Harpoplicans were probably just trying to streamline government and do away with bureaucratic red tape that might have raised some troubling issues. But what an inspiring story this could be for Canadians during the income tax season! Call your local CRA office and ask for your personal Carson discount of 75%.