Foreign Affairs Committee on April 1st, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I'd like to welcome everybody to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development as we continue to work with the Rights and Democracy organization.

I want to take a second to thank all of our witnesses for being here today. I understand you all have very busy schedules and we've been trying to arrange times to get you here. It's great to finally have you.

Each witness has eight to ten minutes for an opening statement. Then we'll have a couple of rounds of questions and answers.

For my colleagues, we talked about maybe only going to 12:30. We will reschedule our subcommittee meeting agenda for another day so we can get through a couple of rounds of questions while we have the witnesses here. I hope that's all right with the witnesses as well.

I'm going to start with Dr. Gauthier. You have the floor for 10 minutes. Then I'll move it around. We'll get to the questions and answers after the opening statements.

Welcome. The floor is yours, sir.

[Jacques P. Gauthier, Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors, Rights & Democracy]

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, it is my privilege today to be representing the Board of Directors, and Jacques Gauthier, as an individual, as he has gradually, in the last few months, become a central figure in this drama.

Who is Jacques Gauthier? Born in Montreal, I grew up in Paris for the first ten years of my life, and subsequently in Ottawa, where I attended the University of Ottawa Secondary School, Richmond Secondary School, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. I then spent several years in Geneva doing my PhD, followed by studies in The Hague. After that, I settled in Toronto where I have been practising international law for more than 30 years now, with a concern for international justice and human rights.

A major concern for me, in these last 30 years, has been children's rights. In Toronto, I established Justice for Children and Youth, which is now recognized as one of the most important institutions for the protection of children's rights in Canada. I took an interest in children suffering in Africa and became involved in missions organized by the Canadian Save the Children Fund; I visited the site of a number of projects being carried out in Africa dealing with these issues. I have serious concerns about refugees from Africa, and in the last ten years, I have focused on the rights of refugees from that region of the world.

I have also taken a great interest in the rights of Francophone minorities in Ontario, as chair of the Association des juristes d'expression française, and as a founder of the Official Languages Committee of the Canadian Bar Association, as well as a teacher with the Canadian Bar. I trained legal counsel in Ontario to practice the law in French at a time when there was absolutely nothing available. French-speaking lawyers had no tools and no documents to work with in that area.

I also took an interest in human rights in China. I headed a mission to China for Rights and Democracy in November, and this is an initiative that continues to be of concern to me.

For 66 days—I may write a book one day entitled Sixty-six Days as Chair of Rights and Democracy—my life revolved around the onerous responsibilities of the chairmanship, looking after my firm in Toronto and—something that has been a concern for many years now—my five women—a spouse and four daughters.

My adventure with Rights and Democracy began in February of 2008. I was appointed to the Board of Directors by the Conservative government with three other persons: Professor Tepper, Professor Payam Akhavan and Mr. Guilbeault. Of the four people who were appointed at the same time, two are considered, by those who have been opposing us for months, to be friendly directors, and Professor Tepper and myself found ourselves in the eye of the storm.

I should point out that when I joined the Board of Rights and Democracy, it was a fairly troubling period. Several months earlier, in December of 2007, a report had been issued by the Inspector General of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, DFAIT. That report looked at a considerable number of demands and attacks against Rights and Democracy, suggesting that the institution was poorly managed, and that there were major financial or accounting problems. When I came on board, I was told a number of times, by both Board members and members of the employee team:

we have just gone through a near-death experience.

The government took quite a bit of time appointing the four directors. In fact, the government took so much time appointing them that the impression was left that they would not be appointed, and that this was the end of Rights and Democracy.

To those who support the theory that we came into a healthy institution, with no issues, I can confirm that that is not true. Everyone appointed in February of 2008 was well aware of the concerns that had been reported in the newspapers for weeks and weeks. We were told that changes had to be made.

So we came in very conscious of the shortcomings and allegations and with a mandate to fight to make things right.

When I arrived—I was a member of the Board—the Chairman of the Board was Ms. Janice Stein, and Mr. Hubert was the President of Rights and Democracy.

Several months after my arrival, since Ms. Stein's mandate had not been renewed, she asked me to step into the position of Vice-Chairman of the Board. After some hesitation—if only I had been more clairvoyant and understood what awaited me subsequently, I might not have accepted—I did end up accepting.

As vice-chair, I had the opportunity to get to know the members of the finance committee because I was appointed to the finance committee. I had also become acting chair of the performance review committee of the president of the organization. As acting president, I was exposed to a lot of information. I had access to a lot of documentation. Keeping in mind the concerns that had been voiced in the media in the report of the inspector general, I started to ask a lot of questions.

Rémy Beauregard, it must be underlined, was appointed by this government and really started to assume his responsibilities in July 2008. I started to work with Monsieur Beauregard on a multitude of files. We met in different places, sometimes in Toronto and sometimes in Montreal. We attended functions of Rights and Democracy and broke bread on several occasions. I must say that for the initial period of four or five months, when we were together things went very well.

When I started to ask questions, I discovered that the staff, the management team around Mr. Beauregard, were very uncomfortable with the questions I was asking, for instance, about a very peculiar payment of $100,000 that had been made to one of the staff members who left the organization. The more questions I asked, the more difficulty I had in obtaining answers. In fact, it was only over the last week that I finally got to the bottom of that question.

I asked questions about the more than $800,000 that had been sent to the partner of Rights and Democracy, the high commissioner's office in Geneva. I asked questions about the discretionary funds and the contract that was used to send funds. Over the last five years, we're talking about over $1 million sent in little chunks without authorization from the board--which is part of the rules, it's structured that way--with very little information given to the board in due course.

I asked questions about many other things.

I want to underline that the difficulties with the staff began when these questions were raised by members of the finance committee, me, and the chair of the board when he arrived, Professor Aurel Braun.

I want to deal with the issue of ideology. It has often been suggested in the media that we as directors, or I as acting president, was under a mandate to transform this organization and alter the direction of the organization. The truth is, if you study the contracts that were approved by the board of directors for the projects that were authorized by me over my 66 days and by the board previous to that, you will have an enormous amount of difficulty identifying any project or contract that has not been supported by this board or this president.

The suggestion that we have been given instructions to alter the course of the direction of Rights and Democracy is not truthful. I have never received a call from the Prime Minister's Office or DFAIT asking me not to do something about a project in this organization--to this day--as a director, an administrator, or an acting president.

For those who fear that this board or the current leadership of Rights and Democracy has been mandated to totally transform this institution into something that it hasn't been over the last 20 years, I want to emphasize that's not true, as far as the programming is concerned, but it is true as far as lack of accountability and transparency.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Dr. Gauthier.

We'll now move over to Mr. Farquhar.

Welcome, sir. The floor is yours for 10 minutes.

[Brad Farquhar, Member of the Board of Directors, Rights and Democracy]

Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.

I would like to preface my remarks by saying that my experience with Rights and Democracy is only limited to the last 11 months, as I was appointed to the Board at the end of April, 2009.

I'm glad to be able to take this opportunity to introduce myself to you, because comments have been made by some members of Parliament and others that directly and indirectly impugn the board of Rights and Democracy by attempting to undermine the credibility of individual board members, including myself.

My name is Brad Farquhar. I'm a management consultant and an international democracy development practitioner with a wide array of lifelong experience. By the time I turned 19, I had moved 11 times, lived in three countries, and visited some 32 others, culminating in a summer spent in northeastern Zaire, as it was then called, working on a water development project between high school and university. It was a great start for a career that would take me around the world.

I spent a number of years at the start of my career working in federal and provincial politics. During that time, I became somewhat of an expert on electoral financing in Saskatchewan, and I sat on an all-party committee that made recommendations to the Saskatchewan legislative assembly on changes to the Election Act of Saskatchewan. I also completed a master's degree in election administration from Griffith University in Australia, and I am quite possibly the only Canadian to hold a degree specifically in election administration.

It was on the basis of this background that I received a telephone call in 2004 from IFES, formally known as the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, inquiring whether I would be willing to go to Tajikistan for four months over Christmas to work on a political party development project. Tajikistan was about to have its second parliamentary election in history, and the six registered political parties and their candidates needed support in learning how to campaign in an open contest. These parties included the governing People's Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and the Islamic Revival Party, which is the only registered Islamic party in Central Asia.

In Tajikistan I wrote a curriculum for parliamentary candidates that was taught across the country. I organized the first ever election trade fairs, which allowed the public to meet candidates from all six parties at once, and I was part of a team that organized the largest training event for election officials in Tajikistan history. In the middle of winter, we brought over 450 election-day officials from their remote mountain valleys to the capital in a massive logistical exercise. Then, on election day, I was accredited to the OSCE observer mission as an election observer.

Several months after returning to Canada, I was awarded the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal in honour of my contribution to democratic development in Tajikistan. Since then, I have worked on election finance reform projects in Jamaica and authored proposals for democracy development projects in Egypt. I co-founded the Democracy Promoters' Network, an online networking forum for Canadian democracy promoters. The University of Regina engaged me to teach a third-year political science course on elections, and I have been a panellist on international democracy assistance alongside Saskatchewan Lieutenant-Governor Gordon Barnhart.

In the midst of this, I have also made it a priority of my consulting practice to spend about one month of each year volunteering in developing countries with my entire family. In 2008, my wife and I worked on the development of a school and a teacher training centre in eastern Niger. In 2009, we went back to Niger with our three young children shortly after Robert Fowler and Louis Guay were kidnapped by al-Qaeda, close to the area of where we would be working. People thought we were insane to go to Niger and take our children along, but we are committed as a family to making a difference in our world and to teaching our children that the world is much larger than their comfortable, middle-class lives here in Canada. With privilege comes responsibility.

This summer we will spend a month in Mongolia, working with grassroots Mongolian entrepreneurs and NGOs on several agriculture projects, to help the people of Mongolia recover from a disastrous winter in which more than half the country's livestock died of hunger and exposure.

So why have I told you all this? I've told you this because we have been called here today in an effort by some to prove that we are nothing more than partisan stooges in some kind of conspiracy at Rights and Democracy. I know what partisanship and partisan politics look like. I spent a number of years working in that environment. I, too, ran for public office, albeit somewhat less successful than all of you. But those who claim that partisanship defines my character prove they don't know me and they don't know my motivations. Like you, I have a desire to serve and make the world a better place. So let's leave politics aside and let's look at Rights and Democracy.

Yes, there have been disagreements over a performance review and over unwise grants to some organizations in the Middle East. Disagreements take place in every organization, but at Rights and Democracy, disagreement took on a life of its own because the now late president decided to fight.

There was a deliberate campaign to divide the board and turn it on itself. The staff were politicized against certain board members by trying to convince them that the board consisted of evil envoys of the Conservative government bent on destruction. Legal means were used to pursue a resolution to the disagreement in a way that would be satisfactory to the president, but which would undermine the governance structures of the organization.

But there is something that concerns me far more than disagreements over performance reviews or grants in the Middle East. I have observed a culture at Rights and Democracy that is not predisposed to openness and accountability, even to members of the board. I have observed board members trying to do their jobs by asking questions about projects and results and being consistently met with non-answers, with bobbing and weaving, with disdainful contempt, and with delay tactics.

What I have observed at Rights and Democracy is a clear belief among staff that the organization's quasi-autonomy from the government of the day should translate into independence from the oversight of their own board. When board members' questions are met with non-information, physical blockades, and leaks to the media, it sets off alarm bells that prompt the board to ask more questions to get to the truth of the matter. When this is construed as harassment, as government interference, or as the implementation of some kind of partisan vendetta, it is an outrageous attempt to politicize something that does not deserve the label.

Rather than talk in generalities, let me share with you two examples of what I mean when I talk about accountability and transparency. This will take a few minutes, but I want to beg your indulgence, if I could.

I listened to the recording of your meeting earlier this week with the former employees and there are inconsistencies, so I want to outline for you a timeline of certain events that took place this January.

As you all know, we were shocked to learn on January 8 of Mr. Beauregard's untimely death. Later that day, the union president sent an e-mail to the staff about these events, and he said they would meet with management on Monday--that was a Friday--to discuss ways and means whereby the union could contribute to preserving the interests of Rights and Democracy.

On Monday, the now-famous letter calling for the resignation of the board leadership was sent out. Simultaneously, management retracted the main sticking point in its negotiations with the union so an agreement in principle was reached on a new collective agreement. At present, this board remains in the dark regarding the contents of the sections that were removed, which were retracted to break that logjam. The section generally deals with disciplinary measures, so we're left to speculate on what was removed.

The next day, the union president indicated to the staff that there would be a meeting to discuss a ratification vote on this new collective agreement. On Friday of that week--this is one week now after the death of the president--a new collective agreement was signed on behalf of the centre by Marie-France Cloutier, Anne-Marie Lavoie, and France-Isabelle Langlois, who are directors and deputy directors at Rights and Democracy.

The following Monday, the president of the union sent an e-mail to the staff indicating that the contract had been signed, and the next day there was a ratification vote in which the new contract was overwhelmingly approved.

Why is this important? This is important because for months and months the board had been told that the employees did not have a contract, there was an outstanding discussion, and that this was a very tough union to deal with. Suddenly, very quickly, they managed to get an agreement at a time when they needed the support of the staff. It's highly unusual.

On Tuesday, January 19--so this is the day of the ratification vote, two hours after the ratification vote--Mr. Braun received an e-mail from the management committee at the centre to inform him that they were respectfully declining his request as chair to reconvene the board meeting in Montreal later that week.

On Friday, the board met anyway in Toronto, and my colleague, Mr. Gauthier, was appointed as acting president. Dr. Braun sent a memo to the staff in which he indicated that Mr. Gauthier had been appointed as president. Less than two hours later a response was received from Marie-France Cloutier, and cc'd to the board and the staff, that she refused to implement the details of that memo, and she announced for the very first time that she was now on sick leave for three weeks. This is the only notice ever received from Madame Cloutier regarding her sick leave, and it comes five days after the date she indicated here in this committee, on Tuesday, that she had gone on sick leave. So five days later was when the board was notified. Even after she announced her sick leave, we know that she attended Mr. Beauregard's funeral, she went to Ottawa and met with officials at DFAIT, she wrote an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen, and she went on a long-planned trip to Disney World.

Here's the thing, though. I have learned most of these details in the past two days. On Tuesday morning, just two days ago, the board of Rights and Democracy did not know that a new collective agreement had been agreed to, and signed, and ratified over two months ago. This board has met three times since this agreement was ratified, and no one on the management team ever brought it up. The collective agreement with a union is one of the most material contracts to an organization, and it is incomprehensible to me that the entire agreement was put together without board knowledge or consent, and that it remained hidden from view for over two months.

I had another point. I will leave that and maybe it will come up in the questions.

In summary, Mr. Chairman, in 11 months on this board, I have witnessed a method of operation at Rights and Democracy that is not consistent with good governance norms for transparency and accountability. This example that I gave, plus the other one that I'd be glad to discuss, are two examples among many, and they are the reason why the board has been consistent in its message in demanding more transparency and greater accountability. Without this, we are unable to do our jobs.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Farquhar.

We're now going to move over to Dr. Matas.

The floor is yours, sir, for 10 minutes.

[David Matas, Member of the Board of Directors, Rights and Democracy]

Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to appear.

I was appointed to the board of Rights and Democracy in November 2009. My first board meeting was January 7 and 8, 2010. The evening of the first day of that meeting the president, Rémy Beauregard, tragically died of a heart attack. Four days later, a letter, with the names of all staff appended, called on the leadership of the board, the chair, vice-chair, and chair of the finance and audit committee, to resign, citing harassment of the president.

So I had to ask myself what was going on here. The charge of harassment, I could see, was absurd on its face. None of the three accused of harassment lived in Montreal. They were busy people, and in my experience were often hard to contact. The chair, in the weeks before the meeting, was virtually incommunicado, spending most of his time in hospital with his then dying wife. She died just a few days before the board meeting.

Moreover, the sole specific complaint in the letter requesting resignations had nothing to do with harassment. The specific complaint was that the performance evaluation committee of the board treated the president unfairly, because it sent the performance evaluation of the president to the Privy Council without first having given the president a copy and an opportunity to comment. The president did get a copy of the performance review from the Privy Council through an access to information request and did have an opportunity to comment on the review before any decision was made in the Privy Council on that review. In my opinion, as an administrative law lawyer litigating the duty of fairness almost constantly for decades, there was nothing unfair in that.

Before I was appointed I was not told a whole lot. I was asked if I had any skeletons in the closet. I said, “Well, I'm a Liberal”, but that did not seem to matter. I'd been on the board before, between 1997 and 2003. I was told there was a division in the board and my experience as a past board member would be helpful. I was told there had been a dispute about three small grants to organizations in the Middle East, but that the president, when criticized about the grants, had distanced himself from them.

Was this an issue or the issue, these grants? Apparently not. I decided to test the waters myself at the January board meeting by presenting a resolution repudiating the grants. The motion passed unanimously, with the president speaking in support and saying, “We could have done our homework better.”

A staff representative, Charles Vallerand, in a letter to the Globe and Mail on January 16, indicated that the dispute the staff had with the board majority was not about policy.

On reflection, it was my view that to look for one answer to the question of what was plaguing Rights and Democracy was overly simplistic. I considered there to be a sequence of issues, each issue related to the others, a set of nested dolls. The issue of the three small Middle East grants was not an irrelevancy but rather embedded in another issue, the performance review of the president.

The performance review of the president, completed by the performance review committee and sent to the Privy Council in May 2009, had a half-page reference in the 16-page review to these three grants. So there was a small reflection of the grants in the performance review. The performance review was a lot larger issue and was the immediate cause of division within the board. The president, as he was fully entitled to do, disagreed with the performance review sent to the Privy Council. But for reasons I must confess I still do not fully understand, he brought his disagreement to the board and not to the Privy Council. The president asked the board to decide that the performance review should be withdrawn from the Privy Council, but structurally the board had no authority to deal with the performance review. The president proposed a bylaw change so that the board could deal with the performance review. That proposal, as well as his request for withdrawal, was still pending the day he died.

The performance review was itself embedded in a still larger issue: the relationship between the board and the staff. From the paper record he left behind, I can see that Beauregard's concerns were not just the content of the performance review but also its scope. He considered the performance review as commenting on matters that were in his view none of the business of the performance review committee. An over-expanded scope for the presidential performance review committee meant that for the president to obtain a positive performance review, he would have had to conform to the views of the committee on matters that in his opinion were not properly within their jurisdiction but were rather part of the president's reserve domain.

We can see that the dispute is not about personalities but a continuation of the dispute, even though many of the characters have changed. The dispute about performance review was embedded in the larger dispute itself about accountability, about whether the staff or the board decided the course of the organization. But even that issue was embedded in a much larger issue, the role of Rights and Democracy.

Rights and Democracy was established to give grants to third world NGOs that would promote rights and democracy. It was set up at arm's length from government in order to avoid giving the impression of political interference in foreign countries, which direct Canadian government granting to foreign NGOs might give. Yet the staff and management of Rights and Democracy, from my perspective, has all but abandoned that original parliamentary intent.

There are NGOs, of course, to which Rights and Democracy gives money, but none of this is simply the awarding of grants among applications. All spending today by Rights and Democracy on NGOs results from elicited requests. The organization devises the programs and finds NGO contractors to deliver them. NGOs that receive grants today from Rights and Democracy are doing what Rights and Democracy wants, on contract.

The original vision was that the third world NGOs that received grants from Rights and Democracy should be independent from the Government of Canada. This has been perverted into a notion that the staff of Rights and Democracy should be independent from its board. Yet independence of the staff from the board violates the statute of the institution that vests authority in the board over the conduct and management of the affairs of Rights and Democracy.

As well, independence of the staff on the board makes no sense. The Government of Canada should take the NGO world as it finds it and not try to manipulate it through money, but that is different from saying that a government-appointed board should leave the staff of a government-devised and wholly financed creature to do whatever it wants. It is, on the contrary, bizarre to suggest that the Government of Canada should fully fund an institution to hire people off the street to run its own political agenda in the name of human rights without its appointed board raising so much as a peep.

This was a problem I could see even when I was on the board before. Again, the catalyst was the Middle East, where there are often disagreements. Rights and Democracy had a fledgling Middle East program, which the board terminated in 1998, when I was a member of the board.

Warren Allmand then, without board approval, sent two letters to Bill Graham. One of them expressed shock at Canada's voting against one of the many anti-Israel resolutions at the then United Nations Human Rights Commission. Another was an anti-Israel diatribe condemning Israel for violating every international crime known to humanity. This time it was the Hezbollah terrorist attacks from Lebanon that generated that letter.

As a board member, I then wrote to Bill Graham, pointing out that I was a member of the board and disagreeing with what Allmand wrote. At that time, Allmand and his staff, in good grace, accepted what had happened and we moved on, but these were two trains moving on the same track toward each other on a collision course.

One could question the mission of Rights and Democracy as devised by Parliament, even as the organization stayed within the statutory vision. But it has not, by, in effect, creating programs that it is running itself with NGO delivery. We can see the notion of independence of staff on the board, not just because of what the staff have said, but also because of what the past presidents have said. We have a statement from four past presidents asking the Prime Minister to address a subversion of the independence of the organization.

Where does that leave Rights and Democracy? If this were just a matter of hot tempers, tempers could cool and time would heal. If it were just a matter of some misspoken words, apologies might remedy the rudeness. However, if the problem lies with the structure and relationship within Rights and Democracy itself, the resolution of the problem is not so simple.

Independence of a government-created and fully financed operation from a government-appointed board makes no sense. Unless and until we have a staff that have accepted that the board is responsible for the direction of the organization, the problems at Rights and Democracy will persist.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Dr. Matas. We're now going to move over to Dr. Braun.

You'll have the last comment, and then we'll go around the room for questions and answers. The floor is yours, sir, for 10 minutes.

[Aurel Braun, Chair of the Board of Directors, Rights and Democracy]

Bonjour.

My name is Aurel Braun and I'm the chair of the board of Rights and Democracy. Please allow me to say a few words about myself by way of introduction. I am a professor of international relations and political science at the University of Toronto, where I have held the highest academic rank of a full professor for more than two decades.

My interest and expertise in human rights and democratic development go back decades, and my willingness to take on the position of chair of Rights and Democracy has also been influenced by my background. I came to this country as a young boy with my parents in the early 1960s. My parents had been victims of right-wing extremism--Nazism--and of left-wing extremism--communism.

One of my books, in fact, is about extremism and the danger that both right-wing and left-wing extremism pose to human rights and democracy. As a child growing up in a neo-Stalinist state from which my parents brought me to Canada, I could sense the perniciousness of an extreme system in which merely asking questions was deemed to be subversion. Canada, however, gave me every opportunity to grow, and whatever I have achieved, I owe to this country.

The profound sense of fairness that characterizes Canadian culture has always been an inspiration, and joining Rights and Democracy seemed to be an opportunity to give something back and express my gratitude. Sadly, however, the current situation, which you've seen in the press and elsewhere, reminds me of the great liberal writer, George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm. The late Orwell must be ruefully smiling from the grave at what he is hearing.

The situation we've encountered in the past couple of months is truly Orwellian. If I had known fully what I was getting into, I would never have agreed to be chair of the board of Rights and Democracy. It was as if I'd been invited to attend a conference and was asked to get some papers in a back room, only to discover there land mines instead.

Let's begin with the obvious. You have been hearing all these months two completely incompatible versions of reality. In the situation of “he says, she says”, wise people avoid jumping to conclusions, because they do not know whom or what to believe. I urge you to believe no one, including me, before checking the documentable facts. By checking the documented evidence, a fair and objective person can know who is the arsonist and who is the firefighter.

Let's begin with what many of us can agree on. Rights and Democracy is a dysfunctional organization. Becoming a dysfunctional organization can be decades in the making. For this reason, you should not believe the words of ex-presidents any more than you should take at face value what I have to say. My view of Rights and Democracy is that it was seized by a culture of dogmatism, a rejection of accountability, and a lack of transparency.

But I wish to point to the facts. The first type of verifiable fact involves actual facts about impropriety and sponsorship. The organization has spent, as we've heard, about $3.5 million in subsidies. We don't know where all of this money has gone. We do know that far too much of it has gone to terrorist front organizations that pretend to be human rights organizations, notably Al-Haq, in certain ways a front for the terrorist organization PFLP.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to the Geneva-based office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which is the secretariat of the disreputable UN Human Rights Council, an organization whose conduct has been characterized by the UN Secretary-General himself as totally unacceptable.

Thousands of dollars have gone to a Cairo conference organized with the inclusion of Hezbollah, an organization deemed terrorist under the laws of Canada and other democracies.

The second type of verifiable fact involves senior staff's disregard of due process and elementary fairness. Days after the passing of President Beauregard, the senior staff, as we heard, rushed to sign a collective agreement with their own union without even informing the board. It very much appeared that the purpose of the rushed collective agreement in January 2010 was to give unionized staff taxpayer money in exchange for the union's backing for the senior staff campaign to obscure that senior staff's long history of dogmatism and rejection of accountability.

Elementary fairness will also require the senior staff to be honest about who signed the famous letter of protest and who actually wrote it. Certainly the letter claiming unanimity was not signed by everyone on January 11, 2010. Days later, senior staff rushed around coercing employees to provide their signatures after the letter had already been written and sent. Further, elementary fairness would require the staff not to misuse the passing of the president to serve their personal agendas. It is true that the board and the president did not always agree, but it is a verifiable fact that the president took the side of the board, not the senior staff, at the all-crucial board meeting of January 7, 2010.

The third type of verifiable fact involves the disregard by the senior staff of their obligation to protect confidential information. By this I mean that staff had an obligation to guard computers so that information about Rights and Democracy's anonymous staff in war zones like Afghanistan would never leave the offices. Instead, a number of computers with sensitive information disappeared mysteriously without third-party confirmation that there was a break-in.

Furthermore, it seems that senior staff gave the widow of Mr. Beauregard his computer, with all its sensitive information, even though she had neither the right nor the clearance to receive such information.

In conclusion, please allow me to note again that dysfunctional organizations can take decades to become that way. Fair-minded people withhold judgment about who is telling the truth until they can get verifiable, documented evidence. We are here to present the facts. We have discovered the problems. We did not create them. We, as volunteers, have given our time and have made major sacrifices in order to ensure that Rights and Democracy fulfills its mandate to enhance human rights and promote democracy and that it acts in a fashion that is congruent with the good conscience of the Canadian people.

Thank you for inviting us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Dr. Braun.

We're now going to start with Mr. Rae. You have seven minutes, sir.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Thank you very much. It's hard to fit it all into seven minutes.

I'm trying to deal with the incongruity of the messages from the board, Dr. Braun. Last week you issued a statement--I have it from the Ottawa Citizen--saying that you welcome public hearings on Rights and Democracy. It was signed by seven members of the board. It said how much you were looking forward to it, and you were calling upon Parliament to hold public hearings so that facts can replace fantasies, so we can move ahead, and that Rights and Democracy should be nobody's football. That was signed by seven, including Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie.

Imagine my surprise when I read in the National Post two days ago an onslaught attack on this committee by Dr. Navarro-Génie. Did he discuss his letter or his publication with you before it went into the National Post? Did you have any knowledge of this?

[Aurel Braun]

I'm sorry. Are you directing the question at me?

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

I'm directing it at you, Dr. Braun, as chairman of the board.

[Aurel Braun]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for bringing this up, because we did welcome appearing here. I want to make it very clear that we came here willingly. I want to make it very clear that it is absolutely untrue what was said by a member here that I had refused to come on the 18th. There was no schedule for me to come. That can be verified, sir. On the 23rd, there was a request early on to change that and it was agreed upon. We gave an alternate date. So we are here voluntarily and we welcome being here.

In terms of what appeared in the paper, I did not read that. It was not sent to me directly. It's my best recollection. I perhaps would not have used the same language, but there clearly has been some concern at the type of things that have happened before this committee, the kind of irresponsible accusations that were levelled at us, the kind of utterly confused timelines that were given by the staff, an impression that was created--

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Dr. Braun, if I may interject--we only have seven minutes and you can talk out the clock--I have to try to get to the bottom of this article.

This article appeared before the employees appeared before the board. You've described the organization as deeply dysfunctional. It would be a little odd if Parliament didn't deal with that: it's our organization and we created the organization. The comments of the people who are saying we shouldn't be here or shouldn't be discussing this, of those who refer to it as a gong show or say the opposition can't tell the difference between democratic allies and terrorists, or of those who accuse us of being anti-Semitic because we had a meeting on Passover—and Parliament does meet on Passover, as we all have to be here, and the G8 meeting was held on Passover—and who then go on to attack all the other former people who were involved with the organization, do you see those as consistent with the working of a functional board, particularly when the member of your board who is making those comments decides to let himself go and attack every person on the board who's not a member of the Conservative Party?

What's going on in this board? Why would you countenance that kind of behaviour from a board member? You're chairman of the board; you have a responsibility to hold members of your board accountable. This is just bizarre behaviour by somebody at the outset of a hearing to be making these accusations.

You want to talk about George Orwell? George Orwell would have a field day with this. I know quite a bit about George Orwell. He'd have a real field day with this kind of nonsense appearing in the middle of our discussion.

Why wouldn't you ask for this board member's resignation?

[Aurel Braun]

Mr. Rae, again, I appreciate the concern you have. The member you are referring to is not here to answer for himself. You do see four members here. We are here willingly, we are here respectfully, we're here to answer questions. I hope the same respect we're showing to you and others will be shown to us in return.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Absolutely.

[Aurel Braun]

I hope you do understand our concern that in this type of hearing, it is very easy to make irresponsible and unsubstantiated statements, and perhaps this is what the board member was expressing, that is, the person who wrote what he did. I think it is very clear when we read the transcript what had happened, and what the employees have said is that there should be a very careful examination, especially what Mrs. Cloutier said. Mr. Farquhar gave you a well thought out timeline that is utterly inconsistent with that. I think in terms of fairness that those are the kinds of things we should look at. Very clearly, I think it is important that we get the facts out, and that is why we're here.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

I certainly have no intention of doing anything other than that, but I just want to ask a question with respect to one other fact. I've been involved as a board member of innumerable organizations in the private sector and the public sector. I've been a manager of organizations. I've worked in law firms. I have never heard of a situation, and Mr. Matas commented on this, where a review was done of the work of a senior employee, in this case the president, and he was not shown the results before a final determination was made on whether or not it was a fair evaluation.

You've talked a lot about fairness and the duty of fairness. How does it match with the duty of fairness that a president has to make a request for information before seeing the document? Don't you find it unusual that somebody would get what, in effect, was a negative evaluation and not be shown it, and not be given an opportunity to respond to it, before it's passed to the Privy Council?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Dr. Braun, we have less than 30 seconds, but I do want you to answer the question, so go ahead.

[Aurel Braun]

Would you like me to answer it? David Matas would also like to answer that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Or whoever wants to answer it.

[David Matas]

Since I addressed this issue, I certainly don't mind answering it. The performance review that was sent to the Privy Council was an advisory one; it wasn't constitutive, and the actual decisions on the performance review were made by the Privy Council. The decisions were about a pay raise—actually, they were about a bonus. Rights and Democracy got a legal opinion about this stating that it was a confidence of the Privy Council and that only the Privy Council could release it.

I wrote to the Privy Council and asked that they release the review publicly, because there's a lot of dispute about it. They wrote back to me and said, your lawyers should talk to our lawyers. I was just trying to avoid a legal expense, so I left it at that. However, because this was advice given to the Privy Council, Rémi Beauregard got the review. He had different views, and he did express contrary views. Then it would have been up to the Privy Council to decide what to do, and that strikes me as fair.

[Aurel Braun]

May I just add one comment?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Just be very quick.

[Aurel Braun]

Mr. Rae, as you know, any organization has to live by the laws of the organization, by the rules of that organization. No one is above the laws of the organization and no one is below them. If we had proceeded differently, we would have been in violation of our own bylaws.

Second, Mr. Beauregard was given every opportunity to meet with the committee before, but refused, and to meet with the committee afterwards, but refused. He had that document in less than four weeks, and he was able to see it, at any rate.

Thank you.