I smell a stainless steel rat

That $1.1 billion had to be going somewhere and now we know where a chunk of it is going -- to a security firm that isn't even licenced in Ontario and is offering about double the going rate for its glorified bouncers. I'm sure the firm in question - Contemporary Security Canada - has absolutely no ties to the Conservative Party of Canada and that everything was strictly on the up and up in granting them the massive contract for providing about 1,000 security screeners, many of whom were hired last month so I'm sure they will be trained to a razor's edge.

“We’ve had some intense discussions about this at APSA in the last few days,” says Ross McLeod, president of the Association of Professional Security Agencies based in Toronto. “I’ve been doing RFPs and tenders for 30 years in this business, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.”

(snip)

On May 31, Contemporary Security set up a hiring office at Humber College in Toronto and was taking applications up until today.

Contemporary held the $97-million security contract for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. On its website Contemporary says they will be "Supervised by the RCMP and Integrated Security Unit" and will be responsible for providing "airport-type pedestrian security screening, including inspection of persons and items at  the G8 and G20 sites."

According to its own website, CSC has received its licence to operate in Ontario and since I can't determine the exact publication date of the article quoted above except to narrow it down to sometime this month, I suppose it is possible CSC has been licenced in Ontario for as long a two whole weeks.

(With apologies to Slippery Jim DiGriz for this post's title)

Documents? What Documents?

Oh! You mean these documents?

Chrolavicius sensed something was amiss when she independently obtained records related to Benatta's case through the Access to Information Act that had not come out through the court process.

Still, the government said in a submission to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice that additional documents and information "simply do not exist."

It said the allegation that the Crown's search for documents had been deficient was based largely on speculation, intuition, guesswork and erroneous assumption.

In December, the court ordered the government to come up with a more complete list of documents, saying the original was "deficient in form and substance."

Initially the government said 113 relevant documents existed, but it now acknowledges 972 items.

Gee, it's as if lower level civil servants were following the example set by those at the top or something.

Eternal vigilance and all that you know...