Angry in the Great White North

L. Ian Macdonald starts with the obvious.  Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez doesn't speak English all that much:

According to Hansard, the official journal of the House of Commons, Pablo Rodriguez rarely asks questions in English. In the recently completed seven-week fall session, Rodriguez asked only one of his eight questions in English. The other seven were entirely in French.

First elected as a Liberal from Montreal in 2004, Rodriguez is not remembered for asking questions in English during the two years of the previous Parliament, when as a freshman backbencher in Paul Martin's government, he wouldn't have had any opportunities anyway. "I never heard him ask a question in English," says Jean Lapierre, who sat in the Martin government as transport minister and Quebec lieutenant.

Frankly, I noticed that too, though I wasn't certain about Pablo Rodriguez's past history with speaking in English.  But I did think it strange that a Quebec Francophone MP would ask such a long and detailed question in English.  Brian Mulroney is perfectly bilingual.  There was a simultaneous translation taking place.

So why English?

Unless the person who wrote the question doesn't know French well enough.

Here's the video of Pablo Rodriguez asking about the wireless spectrum auction:

Macdonald continues:

Rodriguez had two exchanges with Mulroney, and it was the second round that was quite striking for its specificity in English:

"Mr. Mulroney, you said you made no presentation to Maxime Bernier on the wireless spectrum issue. While he was the industry minister, have you ever had a private or public dinner or lunch with him in Montreal, or any other city? Have you ever met with him at all? If so, how many times, in which city? Have you ever placed a telephone call to him, or has he called you? On any of those, did you discuss the wireless spectrum issue?"

The entire line of questioning was completely outside the frame of reference for the committee hearing, which was to focus on the events in 1997 connected with the Airbus controversy.

Liberal MP Paul Szabo, the committee chairman, was ready to make sure that Brian Mulroney would answer the question, and would not consider even the argument that it was outside the committee mandate:

The entire line of questioning could have been ruled out of order, since the committee's mandate was to examine "the Airbus settlement" of 1997, not the wireless auction process of 2007. But the Liberal chairman, Paul Szabo, allowed it, and wouldn't even permit Mulroney to read a letter from the committee clerk defining the terms of reference.

CTV on-air analyst and former Liberal MP Jean Lapierre then made his dramatic allegation:

No sooner had Mulroney's appearance concluded than Jean Lapierre went on television and said the following: "I knew all about those questions. They were written by the CBC and provided to the Liberal members of Parliament, and the questions that Pablo Rodriguez asked were written by the CBC, and I can't believe that but last night, an influential Member of Parliament came to me and told me those are the questions that the CBC wants us to ask tomorrow."

Those are the questions that the CBC wants us to ask tomorrow.

I never gave that phrase too much attention until now.  Who is running this hearing?  Apparently the CBC is, through pliant Liberal MPs happy to do the CBC's bidding.

It seems like a paranoid interpretation of the situation, but Macdonald makes the compelling case that Pablo Rodriguez would simply not have asked that question, that precisely, in English.

Is Pablo Rodriguez a sock puppet for the CBC?  Maybe.  But consider this.

If you look at the membership of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, Pablo Rodriguez is not a member, or even an associate member, of which there are nearly one hundred.

So why would the Liberal Party have asked Pablo Rodriguez to ask the question?  The obvious conclusion is that the Liberal Party did not.  What if a CBC reporter went to Pablo Rodriguez with a set of questions to ask Brian Mulroney, and he or she wanted to have Mulroney face these questions in front of the committee under the glare of the TV lights, even though the questions had nothing to do Airbus or Karlheinz Schreiber?

Why go to Rodriguez instead of a Liberal MP who was an actual member of the committee?  If we knew the identity of the reporter, we might know the answer to that question.  But the implication is that the CBC selected Pablo Rodriguez for some reason.

So Rodriguez goes to the Liberal members of the committee, busily working on the questions for the next day.  He shows them the CBC-written questions, perhaps promising fireworks if the questions are asked.  The Liberal committee members are interested, but Pablo Rodriguez insists that even though he is not a member of the committee, he wants to be the one to ask the questions, so that he'll be remembered as the Liberal MP who embarrassed Brian Mulroney.

The deal is struck to give Rodriguez permission to sit on a committee of which he is not a member, and Rodriguez dutifully practises reading the complicated English text.  Perhaps there are follow-up calls from Liberal researchers to the CBC reporter to polish up the questions.  Meanwhile, an "influential" Liberal MP, maybe even a committee member, put off by Pablo Rodriguez's spotlight-hogging attitude, sneaks off to tell Jean Lapierre what's up.

The next day, Pablo Rodriguez asks his question.  On cue, Paul Szabo runs interference, delivering a ready-made decision on the relevance of the question.  The twist is that Jean Lapierre is also waiting on Pablo Rodriguez to begin his rote delivery of the English text on the paper in front of him.  Lapierre makes his bombshell allegation of CBC-Liberal collusion on live TV.

The result?  Today the real story has nothing to do with Brian Mulroney and wireless spectrum auctions, but of the nature of the relationship between the CBC and the Liberal Party.

Pablo Rodriguez did not embarrass Brian Mulroney, but Rodriguez might have succeeded in embarrassing himself and the Liberal Party.

Pablo Rodriguez gets his wish of being in the spotlight.  Be careful what you wish for.

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