TORONTO - Doug Ford may indeed turn out to be a good Premier. We won’t know for a while yet “if he has the stuff”.
The first Act was relatively easy: blame the other guys for all the ills of the nation (during a honeymoon, the public will accept everything). But it is never enough.
It appears that whatever security check was conducted on PC candidates, aspirants to Cabinet or to Sta for those Cabinet Ministers may have been a tad shy of thorough.
No one checked what the bases for Minister Ti-Bullo’s self description as an expert on certain aspects of the Law. No one checked if he was “close to Castro”. No one checked if he had a license to sell Securities. No one checked to see the number of Court cases in which he was a Plainti or Defendant.
Now Staff have been fired or “shu¢ed”, including his Chief of Staff and at least one insider in the Premier’s office.
Of course, one should dismiss rumours that they were involved in the Securities business on company time. The fact that Minister Ti-Bullo had been investigated for Securities related issues may also have had a pronounced negative view of their potential conflict of interest.
The Premier could not allow that sore to fester in the Government’s midst. After only four months on the job, the Minister responsible for the police authorities who would be conducting the investigations – if the allegations were to be investigated - did not seem so attractive politically. How did he merit only a demotion?
They are only “civil proceedings”, he was reported to have answered to a question during a scrum after Question Period last week, before turning his back and walking away.
The judge who heard the case eight years ago saw it through a dierent lense “…by anyone's arithmetic, this was a massive, colossal fraud”. Ti-Bullo is now demoted to Minister for Tourism. Why stop there?
Ahmed Hussen was an immigration lawyer specializing in the lucrative refugees and humanitarian & compassionate (H&C) applications side of the business prior to seeking office and being sworn in as Minister. It would appear logical to expect that he might bring special insights to his new role.
Insights that might alleviate the “backlogs” in applications received, in the number of border-crossers or in the handling of the H&C applications to be considered. The Citizenship and Immigration Canada website says that there is a growing backlog.
In other words, it cannot handle the numbers it receives. Canada’s international reputation as an accepting and considerate country hangs in the balance. Hussen’s solution? Increase the numbers for 2021 … maybe. The number of Refugees Canada agrees to accept is 15% of the overall number of aspiring immigrants who receive permanent residency.
If the number of immigrants increases by 50,000 over the next four years, it means we would have another 7,500 Refugees … four years from now. Maybe the world will become a safer place and we will not have any. The number of H&C applications stays locked at 3,000 nationwide (for Ontario, probably at 1,200) – that’s the limit to our reservoir of compassion, according to Hussen.
Too bad for the Demitri children and to the tens of thousands of other children of “undocumented workers” facing the wrath of Minister Goodale – the Great Remover - and the indierence of Minister Hussen. Prime Minister Trudeau may be setting the stage for his own version of the Ti-Bullo shuffle.
He has already taken away from Goodale the responsibility for CBSA and border crossers as they relate to Ontario. What does he have in store for Hussen, whose Pilot Projects in Atlantic Canada are a total bust?
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