The Sixth Estate

As one commenter noted in my previous thread, the timing of this is unfortunate, to say the least. I assume it is only because Corbett is reaching 65 or some such, and not because of the present investigation. But even if that’s true, it would throw a monkey wrench into whatever investigations are still ongoing:

Elections Canada is currently seeking a new Commissioner of Canadian Elections...

The successful candidate will be a senior executive with significant experience in legal and/or regulatory decision making on complex and sensitive issues for a private or public sector organization. As a seasoned professional, the successful candidate will have significant experience in interpreting the provisions of statutes, regulations, policies and other enabling frameworks, as well as in assessing the relevance of precedents in order to render decisions, and will have the ability to make recommendations within the framework of the law.

The successful candidate must have proven experience in handling sensitive and complex matters. He or she must be able to build and maintain effective relationships with parliamentarians, senior government officials and other stakeholders. The candidate must be a Canadian citizen with a degree from a recognized university in a field relevant to the position. The place of work is located in the National Capital Region. Proficiency in both official languages is required.

An additional statement outlines the job qualifications:

• a “degree from a recognized university”
• management experience
• 20 years’ experience in legal practice and/or government regulation
• knowledge of the Canadian parliamentary system (duh)
• “ability to analyze differing opinions and viewpoints in complex situations”
• “no partisan activities or party affiliation in at least the last 5 years”

If you want the job, email your C.V. to Lynda Naveda at LNconsulting@rogers.com (I wish I was kidding on this point). Applications are due this Friday, March 2.

First, the government asked their pet Speaker to “investigate” who is behind Vikileaks30. Now, they want the police to investigate everyone who is behind the Twitter attacks. (Lest you think that Toews will limit his investigation to people threatening physical violence against him, remember that this regime currently defines groups that are “publicly critical of government policy” as national security threats.)

Now, for the record, I don’t care who was behind Vikileaks30. Maybe it was an NDP staffer (though they wouldn’t have denied it if they thought it might be — much too embarrassing.) Maybe it was Elizabeth May. Maybe it was a Liberal staffer. Maybe it was me. Or you. Or the guy down the street.

I’ll tell you who I think it was, though: a Conservative staffer. Someone who doesn’t like Toews and figured this would be a good chance to ruin his career. Or maybe someone who does like him, and figured this would be a good chance to deflect attention from the Big Brother bill into a wild goose chase for mysterious dissidents, police state-style. Sound unlikely? Maybe, but the opposition parties don’t really have any better motivation for it. The surveillance bill stinks to high heaven without adding in any juicy stories about Toews cheating on his wife, fathering children out of wedlock, and cheating on his election expenses, all of which were already common knowedge among those of us who avidly follow politics in any case.

If I really wanted to dedicate a mysterious anonymous online persona to bringing down the government, I wouldn’t do it by attacking Toews. I’d do it by supporting him. Or, better yet, someone else — Peter MacKay? Jason Kenney? It doesn’t really matter who, as long as it’s plausible. Pick someone, and start building a leadership campaign for them. Allude to support within the caucus, who are afraid to speak up themselves because of Harper’s heavy-handed management style. Spread rumours. Create uncertainty. Suggest, for instance, that a new formation is being established by Stephen Woodworth and Brad Trost to support a palace coup by Jason Kenney, in exchange for a quid pro quo on the abortion issue.

The best part is, there’s probably a kernel of truth in it somewhere. This is still a political party, after all, and Stephen I isn’t going to be around forever. No amount of evidence will convince me that MacKay and Kenney, at the very least, haven’t been arranging for at least a few cautious backroom conversations over the last year.

This is the most paranoid government in Canadian history. The best way to knock it off course is to give it a thousand potential palace coups to worry about.

Unfortunately, unlike the government, I have a strict ethical code which prevents me from deliberately spreading false rumours about political opponents. So Sixth Estate will not be beginning the Jason Kenney for Dear Leader campaign just yet.

Yesterday, I suggested that the Ottawa Citizen was playing into the Conservatives’ hands by trying to turn the new government snooping law into a story about, above all things, NDP propaganda exercises. That ploy continues with the publication of an op-ed by Andrew Mitrovica, which blames the Liberals for giving Big Brother powers to the secret services. Which, he says, they already have.

I respect Mitrovica’s work, and I agree with him that the Chretien government should never have been allowed to get away with authorizing the Communications Security Establishment to freely monitor communications between Canadians and foreigners (which they are). However, what is now being proposed is completely different. CSE is not allowed to spy on Canadians (they can, however, spy on foreigners when they talk to Canadians) and they are not involved in law enforcement.

But what Mitrovica is talking about is a situation in which CSE can, using its own equipment, attempt to spy on Canadians. No one is required to play informant for them, and there are (in theory) restrictions. Again, I don’t like it, and there is no effective way of keeping CSE from becoming a politicized secret service for their boss, Peter MacKay, who took personal control last fall by means of a pair of bizarrely Orwellian secret regulations.

In contrast, the new laws are granting powers to the secret service (CSIS), the national police (the RCMP), and, in the bill’s own terms, “any police officer” who wants to know the name, address, telephone number, Internet address, email address, and online habits of any Canadian, without a warrant. It requires every service provider to install surveillance equipment which can track everything we do online and everywhere we go with our cell phones. It requires every service provider to turn over information without a warrant. It requires them to allow government “telecommunications inspectors” — a new category of bureaucrat — to enter their premises in the company of a CSIS agent, use any computer system, and copy any information, again, without a warrant.

And it makes it a crime for anyone to obstruct such “inspections,” or to tell a customer that they are being subjected to government surveillance. These crimes may be charged in court, or, alternatively, the accused individual can be fined up to $50,000 as an “Administrative Penalty,” in which case the appeal is heard only by Minister Vic Toews or his designate, failure to reply within 30 days is taken as proof of guilt, and “innocent until proven guilty” does not apply.

Now, Mitrovica is right that the Chretien Liberals overstepped the bounds when they passed the Anti-Terrorism Act. But I dare him, or anyone else, to argue in good faith that what we’re talking about here is basically the same thing.

If you doubted the political proclivities of the Postmedia chain, you need look no further for proof than their scurrilous and indefensible coverage of the Vikileaks30 saga. Someone — perhaps an NDP staffer, maybe a Liberal staffer, maybe even (and I favour this explanation) a Conservative one who doesn’t like the convicted cheater-turned-Justice-Minister Vic Toews — started a Twitter account to attack Toews. The Ottawa Citizen, doing its best to mimic the powers of the police state that Toews is doing his best to build, set up an Internet honeytrap for the author. The author turned out to be — apparently — someone who works in the Parliament Buildings.

Now, that is where Postmedia’s story could and should have stopped. Instead, they spun this into “evidence” that the NDP were behind the leaks. The computer in question, we were told, had been used to put a “pro NDP” bias on Wikipedia pages. And to do various other things of a less political nature. In short, Postmedia all but explicitly argued that Vikileaks30 was an NDP front. Not that the NDP would need a front to attack the Toews snoop bill, but whatever. The Conservatives happily jumped on the accusation, and are trying with all their might to deflect attention from their own police state bill and turn this into a scandal about anonymous NDP libellers on Twitter.

Let’s go back to Postmedia for a moment, though. Postmedia is a national news network that theoretically calls itself to a higher fact-checking standard than your average blogger. When they printed this story, they knew, or they  should have known, that only four IP addresses link the Parliamentary network to the outside world. There are thousands of people working in Parliament. It quite literally could have been anybody. All that the Wikipedia business shows is that someone in Parliament also supports the NDP, which I’m sure will be a shock to many of my readers.

In the meantime, Postmedia has made these allegations without bothering to identify the email address they contacted, the website they set the trap at, the IP address they claim was being used by Vikileaks30, or, most importantly, the Wikipedia articles which they claim were edited by our anonymous propagandist.

Postmedia needs to come clean about its own little “research project” here.

I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that the responsibilities of a Cabinet minister in the Harper Regime do not include reading your own bill before introducing it in Parliament.

In fairness to Vic, in between violating election laws and having children with mistresses, there probably isn’t much time left over to read draft bills. Presumably he took the law more seriously back when he was, you know, a lawyer.

One of the problems with putting a man in charge of the law when he has already been convicted of breaking the law is that he may not take the job quite as seriously as he should.

Like all Canadians who respect the rule of law and the importance of firm law enforcement against reprobates, I was disgusted by yet another case of activist judges and left-wing prosecutors putting criminals’ rights ahead of the rights and needs of the general public. It is a travesty of justice when prosecutors claim they have evidence to convict someone on a serious charge but they let them plead guilty to a lesser one just so as not to waste the court’s time.

Now that that’s out of my system, I want to address the wave of commentary which swept the Internet yesterday. First of all, the Conservatives have now admitted they are guilty of doctoring their books and breaking our election laws. They have confessed to submitting misinformation to Elections Canada and in doing so attempting to defraud the public purse by seeking government compensation for expenses which were not legally incurred. This is now on the record, in court, and needs to be mentioned on every possible occasion.

Second, those who are irate that they were allowed to cop to a lesser charge are right to be upset, but should also be realistic. In the majority of countries in the world, a charge of fraud against the ruling party would never have progressed as far as it was allowed to here. It’s true that the government would have insisted on full prosecution of an opposition party in the same circumstances. It’s true that we deserve a public inquiry to find out what happened. It’s true that we won’t get it. But we also don’t live in a genuine democracy.

All that said, I want to get a couple of reflective thoughts out of the way. First, the Conservative spin on this should be seen as what it is: the final nail in the coffin of democratic responsibility. This government has repeatedly argued that senior politicians are not responsible for actions of their subordinates. This compromise, and the Conservative claim that they have been exonerated, takes that claim to its full extreme. The party pleads guilty; in exchange, it is stated, no individual did anything wrong and therefore no individuals need face any consequences. It is, in legal guise, the same argument offered for why half of Harper’s Cabinet still have their jobs despite a litany of misdeeds ranging from embarrassing gaffes to outright crimes committed by their staffers.

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There will be a new chief  for the RCMP named soon, and the field of candidates appears to be notably weak and controversial, at least from the scanty coverage in Postmedia. One of the people on the list is Ottawa police chief Vern White, for instance, which is good news for cops who like to beat up women in jail and less good news for women who need to report a sexual assault. He may come in under a bit of a cloud given that he just signed a three-year extension on his Ottawa contract, too.

And yet despite all that, White is the best one on the Sun‘s list, mostly because the implications of the other ones scare me. At least according to Postmedia, the Harper regime’s other choices are a former CSIS officer now at the Border Services Agency, and an army general. That’s followed by some mishmash about the need for leadership in the police force, which frankly Postmedia reporters should be intelligent enough not to churn out (but apparently aren’t), but it’s the claim that the government is seriously considering putting the national police force under the charge of a military officer that bothers me.

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“God give our land a Conservative majority…”

Every time I read the press’s lamentable suggestions that left-wing anarchists caused the Vancouver Riot this week (a talking point they loyally picked up from the Vancouver police), I’m reminded of the decidedly right-wing idiot behind me belting out his modified lyrics to O Canada at the last game I personally attended. None of the almost exclusively young, intoxicated, expensive jersey-wearing and sometimes soft drink-sipping white dudes in the photos look especially like anarchists to me, despite what the police say. Nor is it, as the loudmouthed brat at Five Feet of Fury seems to think, a pent-up reaction to Human Rights Commissions and hate crime laws.

Here’s why I know this. In 1994, Vancouver rioted after losing the Stanley Cup. Much like in 2011, store windows were smashed, crowds clashed with police, etc, etc. More cars were burned this time, mind you. But that event happened before anarchist Black Blocs were organized, before HRCs and hate crime laws became social conservatives’ favourite punching bags, before any of that. Maybe Vancouver hockey fans, when they get riled into a frenzy by government advertising, heavily intoxicated, and then corralled into massive, uncontrolled mobs by official design (the better to watch on officially provided big-screens), just don’t take much to get pushed over the edge.

Oh, and speaking of history, you know when there was also an expensive riot, which did burn cars? Montreal in 1993. You know, the year they won. Which just proves my point. Pile 100,000 drunk hockey fans into the downtown core of a major city and see what happens.

Unlike the political columnists now yammering on about an event they plainly don’t understand, the sports columnists probably remember that there was a lost Cup in 1994, too. Maybe the two groups should have a sit-down and fill in their mutual blind spots.

The appearance of an op-ed by Conrad Black in this weekend’s National Post is an important occasion which should not be allowed to pass unnoticed. This is the third convicted criminal in recent weeks to emerge in the press in support of the Harper Government™, following the odious antics of oilpatch mouthpiece Bruce Carson and the media’s fawning praise of Jaime Watt, a Jim Flaherty associate who was behind last week’s scurrilous report on the Harper “mandate” for privatizing healthcare.

The emergence of so many felons in support of the Conservative government — a group I’m now dubbing Cons for Harper — probably says all that needs to be said about the Conservatives’ dedication to “law and order,” let alone the rule of law. If I was a reporter instead of a blogger, I’d probably opt for a clever headline, like “They Did Hard Time; Now Say Canadians in for a Hard Time.”

Update: Speaking of media atrocities, the National Post‘s old gasbag and self-proclaimed anti-voting activist Larry Solomon has another zinger of a column today, in which he claims that greenhouse gas levels are now high enough to save the Amazon Rainforest. Oddly he does not seem to feel that there will be any other consequences of rising greenhouse gas levels. Instead, in the final paragraph, Solomon crosses over from the merely irresponsible (denying climate change) to the insensibly ridiculous (the more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, he says, the better off we’ll be)!