Authors: Michael Harris
Carson returned briefly to the PMO on January 5, 2009, on unpaid leave from CSEE, and was soon in trouble. Harper’s then chief of staff, Guy Giorno, sent two letters to ethics commissioner Mary Dawson in 2009 to say that Carson was being screened out of 2009 budget talks, or talks about his school, while he remained in the PMO. The firewall was triggered when Carson’s January 6, 2009, email to government requesting funding for CSEE turned up at the Department of Natural Resources at the same time as he was heavily involved in preparing the 2009 budget. The subject of Carson’s email, Carbon Management Canada, which he chaired, later received $25 million in federal funding from the government’s Centres of Excellence Program. That program funds research into technology to reduce carbon emissions. Carson was soon replaced as chair because of obvious concerns there could be a conflict of interest. He claimed the email was drafted before he went to the PMO, and mistakenly not sent until after his return to work for the prime minister.
Then, on March 16, 2011, there were new and disturbing allegations against Carson. The allegations were the result of an investigation by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), which reported that Carson had allegedly lobbied Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, including the minister’s office, on behalf of an Ottawa-based water filtration company. It is illegal for anyone who once worked in the PMO to lobby government for five years after leaving the office. The company was called H2O Pros and it was trying to sell filtration systems to First Nations reserves with water quality problems—a big market.
APTN reported Carson’s alleged activities directly to Dimitri Soudas in the PMO. The prime minister directed Ray Novak, his
deputy chief of staff, to hand the material over to the RCMP with this message: “These materials contain troubling details about recent actions and claims made by Mr. Bruce Carson. The materials we have seen may provide evidence of matters inquiring [
sic
] investigation by the RCMP.” Then Stephen Harper consigned Bruce Carson to the outer darkness. Privately, some of Carson’s friends were upset that the prime minister had banished his longtime advisor without waiting for the results of the RCMP investigation.
Carson had been a senior member of Harper’s PMO since the first days of the new government. Active in conservative politics since the early 1990s, he had helped develop the federal Conservative Party election platform in 2004 and was director of policy and research for Harper when he was leader of the Opposition from 2004 to 2006. Left of the prime minister politically, and older, he was also known to have a moderating effect on the PM.
As a result of the allegations, Carson stepped aside from his position as founding executive director of the Canada School of Energy and Environment. In taking a leave of absence, he declared, “Out of respect for this process, the office of the prime minister, and many business and community leaders with whom I work, I will be taking a leave of absence effective immediately from all of my professional responsibilities until the investigation is concluded.” CSEE temporarily went offline and secured Carson’s laptop.
His personal landscape darkened. On April 3, 2012, APTN reported that the RCMP’s Commercial Crime Unit was actively probing the Mechanic regarding his dealings with government on behalf of an Ottawa water filtration company, and the role played in the whole affair by Carson’s fiancée, a twenty-two-year-old former escort he involved in the scheme after meeting her as a client. The RCMP had thousands of emails written by Carson, and documents from his computer during the time he headed the school.
In addition to the RCMP, the commissioner of lobbying and the conflict of interest and ethics commissioner were also looking into Carson’s alleged dealings.
Bruce Carson was not the only person with some questions to answer. A lot of people wanted to know why Stephen Harper had ever hired the disbarred lawyer in the first place. Why had the convicted fraudster been given top-secret security clearance and become a senior advisor of the prime minister of Canada? Remarkably, an embarrassed prime minister confirmed that he had known about the fraud convictions in the early 1980s before taking Carson into the heart of government power. The prime minister then tried to say that he hadn’t known about the second set of fraud convictions against Carson dating from 1990. He sounded a little less than prime ministerial in his explanation: “The fact is I did not know about these revelations that we’re finding out today. I don’t know why I did not know.”
Harper insisted that he would not have hired Carson if he had known about the second set of convictions in 1990, an explanation that raised more questions than it answered. Is the rule really “One criminal conviction is okay, but two is not”? Shifting the blame to others, the prime minister told the CBC in early April 2011 that it was the PCO that was responsible for giving Carson a top-secret security clearance, not him. Carson’s lawyer, Patrick McCann, disputed that Carson had disclosed only the first set of convictions. He said his client remembered telling them everything in his security clearance application: “He honestly believes that everything was disclosed in his application for security clearance. All his criminal convictions, in other words.”
The affair left many people in a state of breathless incredulity. Former CSIS intelligence officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya told journalist Althia Raj, “Nobody would have recommended to keep that guy. Nobody.” According to the former agent, “The issue is that he
[could] have used privileged information for his own benefit. These positions are extremely sensitive, you get to know things ahead of time, where the government is going and everything, and you can leverage your access to favour, maybe, some friends.” Carson would have been given the security clearance by the PCO after the RCMP made its recommendation. But according to federal government guidelines, Carson’s manager in the PMO could overrule the security agency’s recommendations and hire him, regardless of any warnings. Ian Brodie, who was Harper’s chief of staff from February 2006 to July 2008, declined to be interviewed for this book.
The particulars of the new scandal were straight out of the
National Enquirer
. The water filtration company had signed a deal giving a 20 percent share (later reduced to 15 percent) of the profits on the filtration systems to Carson’s fiancée, Michele McPherson. According to the original Information to Obtain a Production Order, McPherson, the former Ottawa escort, had first met Carson around February 2010. Carson allegedly tried to use his federal government connections to get meetings with Aboriginal Affairs officials to promote the product. The First Nations deals could potentially be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Ottawa businessman Patrick Hill was head of the water filtration company H2O Global Group. Hill said Carson advised him on Indian and Northern Affairs (INAC) but they had no contract and Carson did not take any money from him. According to the former co-owner of the company, Nicolas Kaszap, Carson claimed he knew people—the then Assembly of First Nations (AFN) chief, Shawn Atleo, television handyman Mike Holmes, former cabinet minister Jim Prentice, Aboriginal affairs minister John Duncan, and Prime Minister Harper himself. Kaszap told the RCMP he believed Carson had high-powered connections that could help sell the water filters through AFN and Aboriginal Affairs.
Carson had sent Kaszap an email following a meeting with AFN officials, on July 26, 2010: “Thought we did as well as we could today—i [
sic
] told Michele and I will you because it means so much to her and I that we will get this done—the AFN need my help of getting rid of the Indian Act—so all of this will work together—I think six months from now we will be well on our way.” Kaszap said it was a message Carson repeated several times in person. Asked if McPherson did any work for the company, Kaszap told investigators she was not paid and did no work for the company. But according to a contract signed in a Chateau Laurier meeting room on August 31, 2010, McPherson would act as an agent of the company for all dealings with First Nations. Kaszap told the RCMP he thought the contract was a legal way for McPherson to get money for nothing. He had misgivings, but signed the contract with McPherson anyway. Carson initialled the document as a witness. No filtration units were sold to First Nations.
When asked how he had met Carson, Kaszap told the RCMP they met through McPherson in June 2010. McPherson had asked Kaszap to pretend to be her brother for the first meeting. The RCMP had an email showing Carson was being sent material from Aboriginal Affairs officials and the AFN that would normally be sent directly to the company. Kaszap told APTN reporters that he felt like he was working for Carson rather than the other way around.
During a series of interviews with APTN in March 2011, Carson said he had regular contact with Harper and several of his ministers. He also claimed to have been friends with the prime minister for nearly two decades. Freelance reporter Kenneth Jackson, who broke the Carson story with his friend APTN reporter Jorge Barrera, had a copy of an email Carson wrote indicating he knew about an August 5, 2010, cabinet shuffle the day before it became
public. When Carson realized how much the reporters knew about his activities, he said, “I’m in so much shit,” then walked to a window and stood looking down at the street six floors below.
The government fell a few days after the story broke, and an election was called for May 2. During the 2011 federal election campaign, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff said revelations about Carson’s fraud convictions raised the “fundamental question” over whether Canadians could trust Harper: “Can you trust this prime minister with power? Can you trust him to respect our democratic institutions?” In one of his few effective jabs in the election, Ignatieff observed that Stephen Harper “talks tough on crime everywhere but in his own office.”
As director of CSEE, Carson had promoted Conservative tar sands policy. He supported the Northern Gateway pipeline to BC, and pushed the tar sands as sustainable oil rather than dirty oil. In April 2011, Carson’s interim replacement at CSEE was another energy industry player, Dr. Rick Hyndman. Hyndman was former deputy minister of energy in Alberta and a policy analyst for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). After his death in October, Hyndman was succeeded by Dr. Robert Skinner, a former oil industry executive. Funding for the school ended in 2014.
Gordon Lambert, a Suncor executive since 1997, began his career at Imperial Oil around 1982, by coincidence the same period when Harper also worked at the company. (Dropping out of university to join the oil company that employed his father had been his idea of adolescent rebellion. Lambert replaced Bruce Carson at Carbon Management Canada.) In effect, the oil industry had taken over the government’s clean energy program.
The man Stephen Harper had once put in charge of developing a national energy strategy was charged with influence peddling on July 27, 2012. Two hours before the charges were laid, Carson
sent a text apologizing to family and friends, saying he expected to be charged. It was alleged that Carson “accepted a commission for a third party in connection with a business matter relating to government.” He was scheduled to appear in an Ottawa court on September 10, 2012.
Like Porter, Bruce Carson wrote a book,
14 Days
, about his take on the modern Conservative Party. Stephen Harper offered no explanation for Carson’s close relationship with his government. Instead, the PM’s then spokesperson, Andrew MacDougall, said Carson’s activities took place “after he was in our office” and did not affect the image of the Conservative government. “Anyone who violates the law should be punished . . . they should have the book thrown at them if they violated the law.” It was getting to be a familiar refrain.
On July 27, 2012, Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird even tried to find the silver lining in the debacle: “We brought in the Federal Accountability Act to set the bar high, and we hope it’s enforced with the full force of the law. We are the ones that raised the bar for accountability and we strongly support people being held accountable.” Missing from Baird’s bluster was any account of the alarming number of his own colleagues who weren’t making the grade.
Even after Carson’s charges, NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus still had questions. In a written statement he said, “The prime minister still hasn’t explained, or taken any responsibility, for how his inner circle included someone with previous criminal convictions for fraud—who then went on to allegedly use his political connections to take advantage of impoverished First Nations communities for a quick buck.” Liberal ethics critic Scott Andrews pointed out that despite being made aware of Carson’s fraud convictions, Harper had hired Carson twice to work in the PMO, and given $40 million in grants to two of his projects. Andrews said
in a written statement, “If we are the company we keep, I would strongly suggest Mr. Harper re-evaluate who he chooses for his inner circle.”
On June 11, 2013, Bruce Carson called in to a special edition of CBC TV’s
Power & Politics
about the Senate expenses scandal, to say he was “surprised” Harper had been left in the dark about the secret financial deal between Senator Duffy and Nigel Wright. Carson said that during his tenure in the PMO, the PM would have been briefed “immediately” about something that significant, no matter how bad it was. “I guess I could say I’m surprised by it. But I guess each PMO operates differently . . . but certainly when Ian [Brodie] was there, we tried to, and certainly I did, tried to make him aware of whatever [he] had to be made aware of, immediately.”
Two and a half weeks later, on Friday, June 28, 2013, Carson’s scheduled July 22, 2013, trial was postponed. Instead, he was scheduled for surgery on July 15 to remove a growth in his lung suspected to be cancerous. Not only were he and Arthur Porter writing books, but they now shared another similarity: they couldn’t face justice for health reasons. Carson made an attempt to have his charges thrown out, but finally, on June 2, 2014, a four-day preliminary trial on influence-peddling charges related to the now-bankrupt water company began. Evidence was taken under a publication ban because it was a preliminary trial. Michele McPherson was the first witness, and no witnesses were called in Carson’s defence. On June 5, Justice Jonathan Brunet determined there was enough evidence against Carson for the case to proceed to trial. The case is still working its way through the courts.