Good article and agree with your comments. Too bad the federal govt provides less funding for aboriginal students than other students receive so here we have a population with some special challenges which is getting less than your average student elsewhere in Canada. A scandal

Ignatieff is polling no worse than Chrietian or Harper did as opposition leader. There is a potentiallly big turning point in the next election when the number of voters who are really angry at the governments mismanagement may turn in droves to strategic voting. Economists are distraught at the economic mismanagement of the economy, envirionmentalists dispair at the governments continual refusal to do anything at all on the environment, etc.. This is the most ideological narrow minded government in Canadian history and voters are increasingly seeing this. Look at the way they have catered to narrow interest groups-ie the Rights and Democracy debacle.

This is getting more serious by the day. The appointment of an Islamophobe as the new President of R & D as noted in Chantal Hebert's is just unbelievable. Time for more Canadians to join the National Council for Canada Arab Relations
www.nccar.ca to stand up for Canadian values.

R & D has a small budget of $11 million and the Board seems determined to spend much of that on witch hunting and PR contracts to find anything to bolster their case. Can we find out how much of their small budget is going on this nonsense?
Only Erza Levant can be happy.

I don't remember now what the threshold is where proposed grants have to receive Board approval. Many organizations have set a limit of $50,000 beyond which proposed grants need to be taken to the Board. Clearly these three small grants of $10,000 each would have been below the threshold for Board approval.
In principle, R&D should not go to DFAT to get guidance but they may have decided to see if DFAIT had any negative evidence about the quality of these organizations. This might then have started out only asking for any info DFAIT had. It would not be surprising that DFAIT would give them a positive rating-CIDA has funded them a number of times in the past and Al Haq is an award winning organization.
I agree with you that it seems unlikely that the Conservative government will bend although they must be dismayed at the generally negative reaction this stacking of the Board brought about. Hence Lawrence Cannon's attempt to distance himself from this. By the way, Ignatieff did say that he knew B’Tselem was a quality organization from his own experience.

Le Droit has done its homework and carries a very different story than the english Canadian press. They analyze the background and links of Aurel Braun with right wing Zionist groups. See http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/282338/o...

The International Federation for Human Rights, which groups 150 human rights organizations around the world,has condemned the new Board regime, saying that Al-Haq and B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization are members of FIDH and FIDH vouches for their professionalism. See http://www.fidh.org/Preoccupying-infringements-on...