Matt Price writes in the Huffington Post, “Why would an ambitious, smart young political staffer like Alykhan Velshi leave the side of his rising star, Jason Kenney, just when the Conservatives achieved their coveted majority government, and instead join a start-up blog where he said (accurately or not) he wasn’t paying himself a salary?” And then why “after only a few months out” is he “back in the Conservative fold in the plum job as director of planning at the Prime Minister’s office.”
Price speculates, “One could reasonably assume that his whole gambit was planned from the start. But why? …Was this the equivalent of contracting out a hit?”
Here’s the theory: Velshi’s ethical oil ads attacked oil from Saudi Arabia. “The rules of diplomacy say that the Conservative government cannot directly attack Canada’s oil competitors — particularly the ones it finds distasteful — using the kind of inflammatory language Velshi resorted to (‘bastards’, all of them…), so did it prime an outside entity to do so?” Or, “If the plan is to keep doing nothing about tar sands destruction” did Velshi’s Ethical Oil campaign serve the purpose of trying “to change the channel by pointing fingers at others, and as loudly as possible?”
Price concludes, “Ultimately we’ll never know the answers to these questions unless Velshi or somebody else close to the action chooses to tell us. Velshi was certainly doing the bidding of several parties, but they are likely to remain hidden from us, and hidden by design.”
To read Price’s piece, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/matt-price. For more background on Velshi, please see ‘UPDATE: The Path of Alykhan (to the Prime Minister’s Office)’ at http://canadians.org/blog/?p=11961.
