Court documents ‘validate’ allegations of PMO involvement in committee business: Rathgeber – Hill Times
Aug. 24, 2015
The emails and memos entered as evidence in Sen. Mike Duffy’s criminal trial speak to what’s become “the new normal” in the Prime Minister’s Office of interfering with Parliamentary business, says Conservative-turned-Independent MP Brent Rathgeber.
Mr. Rathgeber didn’t know it then but around the same time that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office was working to clean up the mess around improper expense claims in spring 2013, staffers also began their “battle of wills” with the then-dissenting Conservative MP over whitewashing his private member’s bill on public service salary disclosure.
The bill, C-461, the CBC and Public Service Disclosure and Transparency Act, was supported by the Conservative caucus but, for what Mr. Rathgeber understands to be political reasons, the PMO instructed MPs on a House committee to amend it, raising the threshold for disclosing salaries from $160,200 a year to $444,000.
