“We got the thumbs up,” Andrew McWhinnie, the national co-ordinator of the 15-year-old program, told The Canadian Press.
He’d originally been informed that the funding application had been
spiked by the minister’s office after getting bureaucratic approval.
McWhinnie credits news coverage of that rejection for reversing the
decision: “Had we not gone the public route, we probably still would be
dead in the water today.”
McCluskey insisted no decision was taken until Thursday. But he
conceded that McWhinnie did have the wording of a rejection letter read
to him over the phone almost two weeks ago by non-plussed officials at
the National Centre for Crime Prevention, which Van Loan oversees.
“The director of the National Crime Prevention Centre was not speaking for the minister,” McCluskey said.
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