BREAKING NEWS AT OTTAWACITIZEN.COM
MONDAY, AUGUST 27, 2012
THUNDERSHOWERS, HIGH 27
ESTABLISHED IN 1845
NEW SEASON,
NEW SHOWS
LIVING LARGE
IN TOUGH TIMES
ARTS & LIFE, D1
BRIAN DOYLE IN CITY, B3
Peter Simpson sees promise
in the city’s visual arts calendar
Growing up in the Depression
helped burn off the calories
Inside Brian Card’s contracting machine
CRG stays connected despite its bid-rigging plea, but government reviewing latest win
JAMES BAGNALL
In the past two years, CRG
Consulting president and
owner Brian Card has been
sloppy and crossed ethical lines, yet his business ties
with the federal government
appear firmly intact.
He repaid $304,000 to Pub-
lic Works in 2010 after an outside accounting firm concluded that some of CRG’s contracts lacked proper documentation. The trigger for the
audit: Card’s friendship with
Tim McGrath, a senior government official in the realty
branch.
Then, last month, Card ac-
knowledged something far
more serious. CRG paid a
$125,000 fine after pleading
guilty to criminal charges of
bid-rigging.
That case involved a
$5.25-million contract awarded by Public Works to CRG
and two other firms in 2007.
The allegation was that CRG
One
giant
leap into
the dark
collaborated with a Carpbased firm to grab 80 per
cent of the contract — for the
provision of real estate advice — without making the arrangement known to Public
Works.
G overnment lawyers
are now analyzing whether to apply further sanctions
against CRG, which continues
to sell professional services
and advice to the government
through dozens of standing
offers and other legitimate arrangements.
What they have discovered
is just how deeply embedded
CRG’s relations are with the
civil service. The 30-year-old
Ottawa firm supplies the federal government with hundreds of independent contractors, many of them former bureaucrats. Since 1998,
CRG has sold more than $65
million worth of advice —
most of it to Public Works —
on everything ranging from
property appraisals to risk
assessment.
See CONTRACTS on page
GOLF’S NEWEST ‘IT’ GIRL
(10)
Putting a man on the
moon in 1969 was a
great achievement,
but Neil Armstrong
made his small step
onto the surface 50
years too early, argues
MICHAEL HANLON.
LONDON
I
was one of the 600 million
people who watched Neil
Armstrong’s Small Step
on to the Sea of Tranquillity
live on a tiny black-and-white
television. Dragged out of bed
in the early hours on July 21,
1969, I only vaguely understood what was happening. I
was 4½.
But I knew that a man on
the moon was a big deal. Back
then, everyone assumed this
was indeed a giant leap into
the future, the beginning of a
space age not for the chosen
few but for us all. By the time
I was in school, we all took it
for granted that we would be
following in Armstrong’s footsteps when we grew up.
We collected the Apollo badges and, later, glued
together models of the
magnificent spacecraft, towering machines that looked
more like cathedrals than
vehicles. The future beckoned, as shiny-white as those
sun-drenched rockets on their
Florida launch pads.
See MOONWALK on page
Neil Armstrong:
A reluctant American hero, A7
IN WORLD
Putting a damper on
the Republican party
Hurricane Isaac disrupts
National Convention
proceedings in Tampa, A6
IN OPINION
The real threat
posed by the Arctic
Nature is the biggest
concern to sovereignty
of the North for Canada, A9
DARRYL DYCK/CANADIAN PRESS
Too young for the more-traditional beer shower, Lydia Ko, a 15-year-old amateur from New Zealand, receives a
congratulatory dousing from her fellow golfers Sunday after she became the youngest winner in the history of
the LPGA Tour with a victory at the CN Canadian Women’s Open tournament. See the story in SPORTS, PAGE C1.
QUEBEC VOTES
Charest takes west Quebec for granted,
says leader of upstart CAQ party
PAULINE TAM
With the polls showing a softening of support for Premier
Jean Charest’s Liberals, the
leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec made a direct pitch
to Outaouais voters Sunday to
give his upstart party a chance
and push it into power.
François Legault made the
request during a whistlestop
tour of west Quebec, which
has reliably sent Liberal MNAs to Quebec City for
decades.
However, with just more
than a week left until voting
day on Sept. 4, two polls released over the weekend suggested the region’s Liberals
could be in for a tough fight.
Both polls put the right-ofcentre CAQ in second place
provincewide. The CAQ is
ahead of the Liberals and
within striking distance of the
first place Parti Québécois.
Legault, travelling in the
same west Quebec areas as
Charest on Sunday, painted
his opponent’s visit as a desperate attempt to shore up
the Liberals’ federalist and
anglophone base.
Rebels gunned down ‘execution-style’
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER
BRUNO SCHLUMBERGER/OTTAWA CITIZEN
François Legault told Outaouais voters Sunday that
opponent Jean Charest ‘knows he’s in trouble’ in the region.
“I think that he knows he’s
in trouble in the region,”
Legault told reporters.
In a bid to wrest the region’s
five ridings from the Liberals, Legault promised west
Quebecers improved health
services, citing emergencyroom wait times that have
stretched to 25 hours and a
chronic shortage of family
doctors as evidence of Liberal indifference.
He pointed to a high drop-
GERRY NOTT, Publisher
out rate among Outaouais
high-school students — 23 per
cent overall and 31 per cent
among boys — as another example of Liberal neglect.
“This region has been taken
for granted by the Liberal
party for too long,” Legault
said.
See VOTERS on page A5
Man of the people: Charest
boasts of Liberals’ success, A3
ANTAKYA, Turkey • Syrian soldiers loyal to President Bashar
Assad stormed a town outside Damascus over the weekend, killing more than 300
people in what the activists
opposed to the regime called
“the worst single atrocity of
the 17-month conflict.”
The activists claimed Sunday to have found more than
200 bodies, mostly killed
“execution-style,” in houses
and basements in Dariya, a
rebel holdout, after government troops stormed it early
Saturday.
One video released by activists showed more than 80
bodies, apparently of men,
lying in Dariya’s Abu Suleiman al-Darani mosque. Some
were arranged into lines, and
others were strewn about the
floor. Many were covered with
blankets or shrouds, but at
INDEX
PUBLISHED BY THE PROPRIETOR
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‘Vengeance
massacre’ in Syria
leaves 320 dead
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ARGUMENTS
A9
ARTS
D1
ASTROLOGY
C7
BIRTHS & DEATHS C10
BRIDGE
BROWN
CITY
CLASSIFIED
C7
B1
B1
C8
COMICS
EGAN
LETTERS
MOVIES
D4
B1
A8
D5
PUZZLES
SCOREBOARD
SPORTS
TELEVISION
C7
C4
C1
D6
TODAY’S WEATHER
Thundershowers.
High 27, low 15.
Sunrise: 6:18 a.m.
Sunset: 7:48 p.m.
SEE PAGE D6
least 15 showed signs of gunshot wounds to the head,
chest or torso. “Assad forces’
vengeance on Dariya, 150 bodies in this mosque alone,” said
the voice of an activist on the
video. Another video showed
scorched corpses in the streets
and in a graveyard, allegedly
killed by army shelling.
In all, opposition rebels
claimed to have found 320
bodies in Dariya, and at least
another 120 in other parts of
Syria, all of them believed to
have killed since Friday.
Both the United States and
United Kingdom were quick
to condemn the massacre.
Alistair Burt, the U.K.’s Middle
East minister, said that if confirmed, the killings “would be
an atrocity on a new scale requiring unequivocal condemnation from the entire international community.”
See MASSACRE on page A5
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