2000 — Jean Chretien is elected prime minister again.
June 4, 2000 — Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) reports that the police doused photographers with pepper spray during a protest against the Organization of American States, which was meeting in Windsor, Ontario.
July 2000 — Toronto police seize photographs and videotape shot by 14 news channels at an anti-poverty protest that took place on June 15. The police claim they need the photographs and video footage to identify participants in the riots. The Toronto Superior Court of Justice upholds the police action, noting that the images have been seized several weeks after the protest, and therefore there have been no adverse effects on the media's ability to 'fulfill their function as news gatherers and disseminators'.
Sept. 13, 2000 — Michel Auger, a veteran crime reporter with the French language daily Le Journal de Montreal, is shot after the publication of an article he wrote about organized crime in Quebec. The article entitled "Chaos Among the Gang Bosses" reports that the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang and the local Mafia are ridding themselves of troublesome elements.
Auger specialized in covering turf battles among Quebec's motorcycle gangs. After the attack, he undergoes surgery and survives.
Oct. 21, 2000 — Former premier of Canada's province of British Columbia is charged with fraud and breach of trust after a scandal that forced him from office last year. Glen Clark resigned from office after he was accused of helping a friend with a profitable casino license. He is the third premier of British Columbia to leave office amid controversy in less than 10 years.
The police assert that Clark's friend Dimitrios Pilarinos offered the premier 15 percent of the profits from a casino in return for help in approving the casino license. The license was revoked once the investigations began.
June 24, 2001 — Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers confiscate video footage and other material from Todd Lamirande, a correspondent of the Aboriginal People's Television Network, according to the CJFE. Lamirande was covering a protest against the development of a ski resort that eventually turned into a clash between protestors and local supporters of the project. After Lamirande refuses to hand over his footage, RCMP officers seize his vehicle with all of its contents, including his videotapes. The officers hold on to the tapes until duplicates are made.
October 2001 — Canada's House of Commons and the Senate pass anti-terrorist legislation that allows law enforcement officials to hold investigative hearings aimed at preventing terrorist acts, noting that journalists who contact known or suspected terrorists for information could be compelled to testify about their conversations. Another section proposes allowing the Defense Department's Communications Security Establishment to monitor communications between Canadians and foreign entities. CJFE asserts that the new law is too broad and will leave journalists, who contact foreign sources, unable to assure them confidentiality.
March 2003 — Canada decides not to join the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq. The move sparks heated domestic political debate and Prime Minister Chretien comes under fire from Washington.
December 2003 — Former Finance Minister Paul Martin is sworn in as Prime Minister. Chretien retires after 10 years in office.
Jan. 21, 2004 — RCMP raids the home and newspaper office of Juliet O'Neill, a reporter for the daily Ottawa Citizen. The police were looking for sources of a government leak concerning the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian born Canadian citizen deported by the U.S. authorities to Syria in 2002. According to the local press reports, the police confiscated address books, Rolodex and downloaded the reporter's computer files.
The raids were carried out in response to O'Neill's article about Arar, who was detained by U.S. authorities in 2002 while on his way to Canada. The authorities deported him to Syria where Arar claims that he was tortured. O'Neill's article claimed that the RCMP identified Arar as having links to al-Qaeda, although Arar has denied such allegations.
February 2004 — A scandal over the misuse of government funds intended for advertising and sponsorship erupts and Prime Minister Paul Martin, head of the governing Liberal Party, orders an inquiry into it. The government supposedly mishandled US$188 million of state advertising money between 1997 and 2001. Auditor General Sheila Fraser says that many of the transactions involved false invoices or contracts and sometimes no contracts at all. She calls the practices a blatant misuse of public funds and a waste of Canadian taxpayer's cash. Martin, who was finance minister at the time the alleged abuses took place, insists he was unaware of this fraud taking place.
Later in May, an audit finds the money was siphoned off by Quebec advertising and communications agencies with ties to the Liberal Party.
June 29, 2004 — Prime Minister Paul Martin wins the general elections.
Jan. 14, 2005 — Judy Sgro, Canadian immigration minister, resigns over allegations that she agreed to help a pizza shop owner, Harjit Singh, avoid deportation in return for free food. Singh, currently in detention awaiting deportation on fraud charges, claims he went to see the minister in the run up to general elections in June of 2004. According to Singh, after explaining his situation to her, Sgro assured him that if he 'helped her out during election campaign' she would get him immigration in Canada. She supposedly wanted Singh to deliver pizza and garlic bread to her campaign in North York.
May 2005 — Government wins a confidence motion in Parliament. Martin's minority Liberal government is saved by a single vote in Parliament motion, keeping Martin in power. The opposition conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois previously said the financial scandal meant the government had to go. They were determined to beat the Liberal Party-led government, which has been dodged over the financial scandal.
November 2005 — A commission set up to investigate the scandal involving misspent government funds, clears the prime minister. In the same month, the Martin-led liberal government is brought down in a vote of no-confidence.
Judge John Gromery, however, finds that the Liberal Party-led government run by former Prime Minister Jean Chretien had used the government advertising campaign as a way of obtaining illegal election funds. Gromery in his interim report asserts that a select group of advertising companies in Quebec received profitable federal contracts and knowingly gave back some of the money to the Liberal Party's Quebec wing, enabling it to side step electoral financing laws. Although there is no evidence that Chretien was aware of this scheme, he has nevertheless been held responsible for such 'maladministration'.
Feb. 22, 2006 — Roger Perrault, head of Red Cross, John Furesz, a former Health Canada director and Ward Boucher, head of a blood products division in the department, face charges including criminal negligence causing bodily harm. The charges relate to the infection of more than 1,000 people with HIV in the 1980s and 1990s. Another 20,000 people contracted Hepatitis C after receiving tainted blood transfusions during that period.
The tainted blood products came from the U.S.-based Armour Pharmaceutical Company.
Aug. 18 2006 — A former HSBC Bank USA Vice President, Raymond Payne, pleads guilty in Manhattan federal court to a conspiracy charge over his role in a US$30 million telemarketing fraud targeting low-income people with poor credit histories. The co-owner of the Canadian telemarketing company, First Choice Tele-Services Corp. in Montreal, Stephen Clark pleads guilty in September on two counts of conspiracy that falsely offered credit cards for a fee to people with bad credit. None of the people solicited received credit cards. Clark pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. At a hearing before U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Griesa, Clark admitted to laundering the proceeds through the HSBC branch in New York.
Leslie Pinsky, co-owner of First Choice Tele-Services Corp. is undergoing extradition proceedings in Canada and has been charged criminally in that matter.
April 2007 — Jawaad Faizi, a columnist for the New York based Urdu language biweekly Pakistan Post, is attacked by unidentified individuals in Toronto. Faizi tells local reports that his attackers screamed at him in Urdu and Punjabi to stop writing about the Muslim group, Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. They warned him to stop writing about their group and leader Allama Tahil-Ul-Qadri, a Pakistani cleric. Faizi had previously received repeated telephone threats. The calls began in January when he first published an article criticizing the Pakistani cleric. Faizi published a second column on him only two weeks prior to the attack. Canadian authorities are investigating the incident.
