A former spokesman for George W. Bush received a second sole-source contract from the Prime Minister's Office for American communications advice, according to filings with the U.S. Justice Department.
Ari Fleischer was hired for a month last spring to help Stephen Harper get American media exposure in advance of a critical G20 summit in London.
But a second communications contract with the PMO, worth the same $24,500 as the first, was paid out to Mr. Fleischer on Sept. 28.
“Mr. Fleischer provided the government with services that helped Canada get its message out in a time of global financial crisis, where Canada had a good story to tell,” Andrew MacDougall, a spokesman in the Prime Minister's Office, said Wednesday.
“We got good value for money, in our opinion, for those services.”
No details of the additional work were provided in Mr. Fleischer's latest filing under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is date-stamped Dec. 15, 2009.
A government source said that while the first contract was geared explicitly to the G20 and arranging U.S. media interviews, the second related to “a number of ongoing issues. We always have to be present down there.”
Mr. Fleischer's role, said the source, was as “somebody who knows how to get your voice heard.”
Follow-up information on the original G20 contract, provided by Mr. Fleischer in his filings to the Justice Department, sheds new light on his activities on behalf of the Prime Minister.
Canadian news consumers, who this week are seeing their first limited interviews with Mr. Harper about his Christmas holiday decision to suspend Parliament, might aspire to the access provided for conservative American opinion-leaders – eight of whom enjoyed dinner with the Prime Minister in Washington last Mar. 29 at the invitation of Mr. Fleischer.
It makes sense to me to perfect your message, to share your opinion with opinion makers in the United States, your No. 1 trading partner.— David Wilkins, former U.S. ambassador to Canada
The guest list included newspaper columnists Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks and Anne Applebaum, senior editors Fred Barnes and William Kristol, and conservative syndicated talk-radio host Laura Ingraham.
The following day, Mr. Fleischer arranged a lunch meeting between Mr. Harper and the president of Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes, and with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Fox.
While all Mr. Harper's individual media contacts tilt to the right, not all are employed by conservative media outlets.
David Wilkins, the former Republican-appointed U.S. ambassador to Canada, called Mr. Harper's media guests “a pretty impressive group. It's not necessarily a cookie-cutter group.”
“You've got people who write for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post,” Mr. Wilkins said in an interview. “So you've got a lot of different political opinion and a lot of high-profile opinion thinkers.”
The former South Carolina governor said Mr. Harper's employment of an American media consultant makes “good sense.”
“It makes sense to me to perfect your message, to share your opinion with opinion makers in the United States, your No. 1 trading partner.”
Both of Mr. Fleischer's contracts with the government of Canada were worth $24,500, just under the value at which departments are obliged to put most contracts up for public tender.
Treasury Board rules expressly forbid splitting contracts to get beneath the sole-source spending limit of $25,000. But the government source said Mr. Fleischer's second contract, unlike the first, was not related to a specific news event and that they were “two distinct contracts.”
Treasury Board policy also states: “Repeat commissioning of a firm or individual without competition should not become a practise, even if the value of the contract is under the mandatory threshold for the calling of bids.”
The source said Mr. Fleischer is not currently working for the Prime Minister and a third contract for his services was not issued.
