Canada's Conservatives Need to Explain What They Hired Trump Operative Mike Roman To Do

Canada's Conservatives Are Making Baseless Accusations Aimed at Undermining the Election. Roman was charged in Multiple States for Doing the Same for Trump

Canada’s April 28 Election where Mark Carney won, there were some very close races, and there are some very close races where votes are still being counted.

Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Leader lost his seat by a significant margin of several thousand votes.

I’ll start by saying that the Conservatives and Poilievre in particular ran a campaign that was really morally repellent. It’s been my misfortune, in recent years, to see politicians tell some truly disgusting lies, and do some morally bankrupt things in office or to get re-elected.

There are various Conservative proxies, like Canada Proud as well as other astroturf entities, that pushed blatantly false stories. People used to get fired for trying to plant stories, and it usually involved some kind of cloak and dagger, manila envelopes, or a guy giving cryptic hints in a dark parking garage.

Now, the lies are as brazen as the corruption. It brings to mind the immortal cautionary poem by Hillaire Belloc, “Matilda, Who Told Lies, and Was Burned to Death.”

Matilda told such Dreadful Lies,
It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes;
Her Aunt, who, from her Earliest Youth,
Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth,
Attempted to Believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her,
And would have done so, had not She
Discovered this Infirmity.

On the campaign trail, Poilievre himself repeated statements that were blatantly false, and incredibly serious: they are both the sort of thing that can get you sued for libel or defamation, and win.

First False Accusation: Plagiarism

Poilievre repeated the claim that Mark Carney had plagiarized his doctoral thesis at Oxford, after Carney’s own thesis advisor had said it wasn’t true. Actual plagiarism is incredibly serious especially in academic circles. Students and professors alike, you can be expelled or lose your job in disgrace.

I think there is a real problem with a generation of political operatives who have no concept of the idea that there are both individual human beings, as well as entire professions, where accuracy, ethics, and standards all matter and there is active oversight to make sure that the standards are upheld. Science, medicine, the law, actual journalists, writers, teachers, researchers, professors, as well as officers of the courts, military and law enforcement

However, the McCarthyite toadies who plague campaigns and public life have no standards. Official spokespeople aren’t silvertongued spin doctors anymore: they have all the subtlely of an online death threat, while there’s a roar of abuse from an online mob that expresses itsels with all the subtlely of people vying for attention in a riot.

I think it’s assumed that politics has no standards, and most commentary is about performance, not substance.

I have also observed just how corrupting the discussion of politics is. Corrupting in the sense that when it comes to politics, it is incredible to see how quickly people are willing to say absolutely anything, no matter how vile or false.

The way politicians behave and lie is digusting, and the fact that they are able to get away with it to the extent that they are is that the only thing that matters is whether it works or not.

Second, False Accusations of Committing A Crime

That goes to the next blatant lie Poilievre told, which was to accuse Mark Carney of the crime of tax evasion, for which there is absolutely no evidence.

Let me be clear about a very important distinction that I used to teach my students.

Tax evasion is illegally find ways not to pay taxes you owe.

Tax avoidance is when you, as a person or business, use available and legal deductions to reduce your tax bill. Any deduction you use to reduce your taxes is tax avoidance, and it’s available to every single taxpayer.

Now, while I have issues with offshore taxes and tax havens, (Canada is also a tax haven, by the way). there is a huge continuum of types of tax breaks that range in their effects. Some are positive and useful, and some are genuinely wasteful and harmful. The one thing they have in common is that they are all legal.

Tax evasion, however, is not. And, while people may also have trouble believing or understanding this, but falsely accusing someone of a crime in Canada is not protected by freedom of expression.

The truth is an absolute defense, but it’s important to recognize Canada’s laws of freedom of expression are guided more by the British legal tradition, not the American.

In the U.S., there is wide latitude about the things you can say about public (not private) figures, to the point that you basically falsely accuse people of a crime and not get sued for it, if they are a public figure. In the 1990s in the U.S., after Vince Foster committed suicide, Republican Operatives were openly accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of murder. An absolutely incredible allegation to make, without any basis in fact.

In Canada, if you can prove damage, you can sue for statements like that. Of course, this capacity has been abused by figures like Conrad Black and Peter Nygard who used threats of lawsuits to silence critics, by making media outlets afraid to print the story. Still, accuracy is a defense, which means that true speech is protected. Even though, in practice these principles are undermined and warped by power and influence, the ideal is still important: the idea that the right to freedom of expression is balanced by a responsibility to be honest

Third False Accusation - Links to Epstein

There were also nonsensical attempts to link Carney to Jeffery Epsetin because Carney, when he was at the Bank of England, was at an event attended by Ghislaine Maxwell.

This is all part of appealing to disgusting conspiracy theories with which a certain segment of the population are obsessed involving underage individuals being sexually preyed upon.

Yet, in Canada, as in the U.S., Conservatives stubbornly ignore the deep and well-documented ties between Epstein, Trump and Conrad Black.

Fourth Accusation - Election Interference

Canada’s Conservatives are trying to undermine the results of the election. Poilievre’s former Director of Communications, yet another an openly abusive prick was laying the groundwork for it in the middle of the election.

Now, the irony here of Conservatives’ continual accusations of corruption and cheating are made by a party that has never been able to win without cheating. There were charges of the highest officials in the Conservative Party, and convictions from incidents in 2006, 2008, and 2011. The response from the Conservatives - and then-Minister Pierre Poilievre - was to gut oversight. At one point, Poilievre’s rules around voting eligibility stood to take 500,000 people off the voter’s rolls.

Now, the Conservatives are fundraising based on undermining the integrity of Canada’s elections process, as well as the government, based on a yet another blatant lie.

I have worked on dozens of elections. Canada’s elections are some of the most secure in the world. We have paper ballots, that are counted by hand, under the supervision of scrutineers from multiple parties. Every single political party has the right to supervise the count. The paper has a particular surface so that when you write on it with pencil, the mark is very difficult to erase. It’s all run by people who have been hired to be independent and agree to be non-partisan.

It is simple and it is extremely difficult to tamper with.

You know who should know this well? Politicians who have been elected a lot. Especially Members of Parliament who have been elected many times over, like Pierre Poilievre and Andrew Scheer.

The thing about Scheer and Poilievre both is that they’ve never done anything but their jobs, and for them, they have been able to enjoy literally some of the best jobs, with the best benefits, in the world - with virtually no qualifications, and never having really worked in anything but politics, and they’ve been able to say and do whatever they want and still get re-elected. The only result that matters is their own: whether they’ve been re-elected.

But it’s that very willingness to say and do anything, whether it’s true or not, and do it with sincerity and conviction is what makes them useful. They will repeat brazen lies, and say things that are blatantly misleading, because they can.

That’s why they have that smirk, that says, “Yeah, I’m getting away with it. what are you going to do about it?

So, now that Andrew Scheer is leader again, and the Conservatives were quite clearly “seeding a narrative” (making up bullshit ahead of time) in order to prime people for more lies after the election.

Here’s Pierre Poilievre’s former Media guy, Mark Slapinski, priming the pump with election oracle @PuckDaddy93, in a tweet that encapsulates the excruciating stupidity of our age.

Now, this brings me to actual election crimes - ones that were investigated and for which there is evidence. Evidence of fraud, lies, and intimidation.

That is the U.S. Election of 2020 - the one that Donald Trump, and which his team knew they lost: their plan, ahead of time, was that they would say they had won, no matter what the results were.

This has been confirmed in sworn testimony. In the case against Trump

The evidence demonstrates that the defendant knew his fraud claims were false because he continued to make those claims even after his close advisors-acting not in an official capacity but in a private or Campaign-related capacity-told him they were not true…

One of the people who played a key role in this scheme - who was arrested and charged in multiple states, is Mike Roman.

I’ve written about Roman before - (the full link to the story is below.) Roman worked for the Koch Intelligence Network before going to work in the Trump White House, then advising the Conservatives and their new/old/current leader Andrew Scheer.

Here’s video of Scheer deflecting questions in 2019 about what role Mike Roman was playing on the campaign.

What’s also notable is that Mike Roman has a close connection to another Canadian Conservative politician, Stephen Harper.

While Scheer, Poilievre and other conservatives love to dogwhistle and accusing various organizations like the WEF or globalists or some other phantom enemy for of operating in secret to control government, they seem to have no problem with the “International Democratic Union,” of which Harper is the Chair, and Roman was the Vice Chair.

The IDU, whose name is so Orwellian it could give you tuberculosis, is an international organization dedicated to electing right wing governments, including that of Viktor Orban, who declared a number of years ago that “liberal democracy is dead.”

Roman appears to have been in Ottawa during the Freedom Convoy.

I mean, when you think about it, if you think of the Freedom Convoy as a big attempt to sway public opinion in Canada - a campaign on a level with the campaign to convince Americans that their election was stolen.

The organizers tied to the Freedom Convoy were openly already in facour of Western Separation - Canada’s Wexit Party.

The whole basis of the argument of the convoy was that they were dealing with a supposedly tyrannical government - even though every single court case since had determined that public health orders were constitutional. The fact that the level of government that was entirely responsible for their misery was provincial suggested either that the leadership were even less politically aware than you can imagine, or that someone was misleading people that the people to blame were the federal government. Given that a former Saskatchewan Premier, Brad Wall, was advising the convoy, that’s hard to resolve.

It’s also possible that the whole plan was to treat this as a Canadian January 6, and the goal all along was to provoke the federal government into declaring the emergencies act, and to paint the Trudeau government as authoritarian, even though the Emergencies Act doesn’t override the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The stated goal of the protestors was to topple the government.

Amidst rampant criminality and lawlessness by actual perpetrators, every single aspect of the orders and the Emergencies Act were found to be constitional, but one. In a decision that is currently being appealed, a Federal Judge ruled that freezing certain individuals’ bank accounts violated their Charter Rights.

There is important context here, which is that the convoy had quite literally become paid protestors who were receiving foreign donations, including from the US, and Russia, supporting illegal occupations at the border across Canada, as well as the Nation’s capital and the Manitoba Legislature. There is a legitimate case for freezing those accounts when people are being paid by foreign countries to paralyze the nation’s capital.

It’s almost the sort of thing someone the CIA or Russia or China would do if they were trying to soften up a country before invading it, to provide a phony pretext - all this painting Canada as a country that’s unsafe, when it’s a country that is trying to maintain order and enforce the law in the face of lawlessness.

Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, and an entire Network of far right media figures - including the Conservatives - have all been part of painting Canada as a place that is operating the way the U.S. is actually operating, right now.

You can read more about Mike Roman, the IDU, Trump’s 2020 election fraud, and his connection to the Conservatives below.

Roman made January 6 possible.

And it’s long overdue for Pierre Poilievre, Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives to explain all the work he ever did for them.

All of it.

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