Отрывок из книги
Another Country, Another Life: Calumny, Love, and the Secrets of Isaac Jelfs (Toronto: Dundurn, 2013)
Raw Life: Cameos of 1890s Justice from a Magistrate’s Bench Book (Toronto: Dundurn, 2012)
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Her expenses were a contentious subtext, but this was not news. At the CBC, where money flowed and budget management was so loose that at one point program director Trina McQueen had to face the public and explain some $28 million was missing and nobody could trace it, Wallin learned nothing about restraint with public dollars. For Toronto power lunches, to which other movers and shakers arrived by taxicab, she was delivered by a CBC limousine, and later fetched and whisked away by the shiny black vehicle. When she had her own production company, it was standard industry practice to run all expenses through it, since they related one way or another to the TV shows she was creating and selling. Now in Manhattan as consul general with a specific mission from the PM to forge new Canadian-American business links, she just shifted from high gear into overdrive. Wallin excelled in her social and cultural task of bringing American high-rollers into a Canadian orbit, creating a positive glow about Canada by imparting the sense that our country had verve on a par with New York’s.
Officials in the Department of External Affairs “had their hair on fire,” as one insider told me, trying to control Pamela Wallin’s spending, driving departmental comptrollers to complain to the Prime Minister’s Office that she was throwing around money like no other diplomat even knew how. This apparent concern for financial rectitude disguised their real agenda, however. Wallin was getting results that bread-and-butter career diplomats could not even dream about, and jealousy was a factor. But appointment of a non-diplomat to a foreign posting was an especially sore point. The reason for complaining directly to the PMO about Pamela Wallin’s expenses was that it was a choice way to rap Mr. Chrétien’s knuckles under the pretence of financial management.
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