The Canadian Press obtains the paper trail behind meetings Christian Paradis’ office organized for two businesses in his riding.
The Canadian Press obtains the paper trail behind meetings Christian Paradis’ office organized for two businesses in his riding.
E-mail traffic shows that when bureaucrats first got the edict from Mr. Paradis’s office to hold a meeting with Pultrall, they suggested the company simply attend a seminar offered close to the riding on how to do business with the government. Pultrall manufactures composite materials for construction. But Mr. Paradis’s office rejected that idea, and asked for the meetings to be held in the Ottawa area, specifically naming ten bureaucrats it wanted to attend the meeting with Pultrall in April 2009.
At one point, an employee in the deputy minister’s office raised a red flag. “There is no need to have 15 representatives at this meeting,” wrote the bureaucrat. “The DM would not see this as the best use of their time.” But in the end, about a dozen bureaucrats attended the meeting from across Public Works and even a pair from Foreign Affairs.