[LINK] Bruce Carson on the rage of Stephen Harper

[rfmcdonald]

Bruce Carson, a former aide to Prime Minister Stephen Harper who resigned following a 2011 scandal, is promoting a new book, 14 Days: Making the Conservative Movement in Canada. (It can be pre-ordered on Amazon.) He has much to say about politics during his tenure as advisor, to the CBC for instance.

Carson went from a well-liked backroom adviser to headline news during the 2011 federal election when an APTN news story alleged he lobbied officials at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada about a water purification system.

Reporters soon discovered Carson had a history of financial problems and was convicted of five counts of fraud going back to the 1980s and 1990s before he was hired as an adviser to Harper.

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"We knew about problems in Mr. Carson's very distant past. We didn't know about more recent things. If I had known that we would not have hired him. I am obviously very disappointed to find out these things now," Harper said in April 2011.

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Some people, he said, are of the opinion that "everybody's entitled to a second and perhaps a third chance. And when I worked for the prime minister in opposition and in government, my past was known to him [Harper] and certainly to Ian Brodie, and I thought we accomplished really good things."

"Regardless of the negative stuff, nobody's attacked what I've been able to do or the kind of work I did as an adviser either to Ian or to the prime minister," Carson said.

"The time I spent with him, it was the best job I ever had, and I really enjoyed it."

The National Post/Postmedia article, by Jason Fekete, is called "Stephen Harper prone to fits of rage and growing increasingly isolated, former aide Bruce Carson says".

A former senior aide to Stephen Harper says the prime minister is prone to fits of anger, that his public dispute with the Supreme Court’s chief justice is ill-advised and that Harper is the kind of leader who would want to have known details of the $90,000 payment to Sen. Mike Duffy.

Bruce Carson, a former senior aide to Harper from 2004 to 2009, also said Tuesday in an interview with CBC News that the prime minister “has always been isolated” and is becoming increasingly so partly because he does not have a regular group of advisers across the country to whom he reaches out for advice.

[. . .]

He said he believes Harper when the prime minister says he didn’t know about the payment. Carson said that had he been in the PMO during the Senate expenses scandal, the prime minister “absolutely” would have known about the payment.

Carson also said Harper has a temper and is prone to fits of anger. Asked if the prime minister would dress down people and swear at them, Carson said, “Oh yeah.”

“You couldn’t run a country or take the position that the prime minister has without emotional outbursts, without displaying temper. And certainly it was there,” he said.

Carson, a convicted fraudster, has been in the news because of his new book, 14 Days. He is also expected to be in court early next month for a pre-trial preliminary inquiry into charges of influence-peddling, which he intends to fight.