OTTAWA—International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda was out of town when her office handled the KAIROS funding memo, leaving an aide to stamp it with her signature and write “not” on it to reverse the advice of bureaucrats, the Conservative government says.
Fighting back against opposition allegations that Oda “doctored” the memo, government officials are supplying new details that portray the handling of the now controversial funding recommendation as routine and a simple use of ministerial powers.
In a briefing note distributed to Conservative MPs over the weekend, they said, “Hundreds of these internal memos cross ministers’ desks every day.”
“This is how elected officials transmit their decisions to the public service in our system of government,” they said. “The Minister had reviewed the memo, made her decision not to approve the funding application, and asked her staff to follow through on it.”
The issue has emerged as a flashpoint after it was revealed last fall that someone had written “not” across the 2009 department memo from senior officials at the Canadian International Development Agency recommending $7 million for KAIROS, a church-based aid group. The insertion overturned their recommendation.
Last December Oda told a Commons committee she didn’t know who had scribbled the word. But in a surprise admission last week, she told the Commons that it was she who had directed a staff member to make the change to reflect her decision not to fund the agency.
That admission prompted all three opposition parties to demand Oda’s resignation and call for a formal parliamentary probe into whether she should be found in breach of privilege for misleading MPs.
The Conservatives are standing behind Oda. To help her defence, they circulated additional details over the weekend about what transpired.
According to new information, senior CIDA staff sent a memo to Oda, recommending the government provide funding for KAIROS. However, Oda did not agree with the decision. But because she was not in Ottawa that day, it was left to her aides to handle the paperwork.
“They, with the minister’s authority, applied her automated signature, which is used when required because a Minister is unable to personally sign a document, and indicated her decision on the memo by clearly indicating that she did NOT approve the funding application,” government officials said in their memo.
They said the altered recommendation was then returned to the very officials who had sent it to Oda for a decision — and whose signatures were still on the document, even though their advice had been overruled.
“By definition, those who received the returned memo could not have been misled, and were not misled, by the manner in which the Minister’s decision was communicated in the document,” officials said.
They pointed to testimony by CIDA president Margaret Biggs before a Commons committee last December, who said the entire process was “quite normal.
“The inclusion of the word ‘not’ is just a simple reflection of what her decision was, and she has been clear. So that’s quite normal,” Biggs said at the time.