Tagged: Halifax Chronicle-Herald
That NDP news conference – ctd.
Martin MacKinnon writes:
I am appalled by these NDP apologists — I do hope they’re getting paid — on the $42,000* press release. Regardless if some of the $42K should not have been included, it did include funding for things like buses and “marketing consultants.” If this was a Rodney MacDonald Tory event, I am sure these people would have also pointed out that the $42K was overstated. These NDP’er’s are double hypocrites. One because they are governing like Tories (John Buchanan should be proud) and because they told their party members they would govern differently. Shame on them.
*The $42,000 is overstated, a concoction of the Chronicle-Herald that mixes $11,000 in announcement expenses with $31,000 in expenses related to producing an electricity plan, and pretends they are all news conference costs. The Herald repeats this misrepresentation for a third time in today’s edition, along with the false claim that Dan O’Connor twice denied posting a comment to the Herald’s website.
This double misrepresentation of the story, repeated three days running despite clear contrary evidence, is a blatant display of dishonesty. Apparently, the Herald prefers to misinform its readers and defame others rather than acknowledge its error.
And speaking of begrudgery – updated
In response to this, someone called Peter Watts or perhaps Paul Buher, writes from a cryptic email account:
You, sir, are a pig, and no different than Darrell Dexter.
You hide under the guise of a political blog during the day, only to be writing for the NDP at night. A $15,000 pay cheque isn’t too bad I suppose. Good for you.
I have news for you. Anything you write on that virulent blog from this day forward is tainted with the stink of NDP orange, corruption, and self-serving interest. As I said, you sir, are a pig.
I wonder how Mr. Whateverhisrealnameis would feel to learn that Rodney MacDonald’s Tories hired me to write that government’s energy strategy.
Andrew Terris chimes in:
15K for 26 pages of text with lots of white space?
SWEET!
On the other hand, an erstwhile Daily News colleague writes:
That was a breathtakingly shoddy piece in the Herald this morning. Seems like Dan et al have made up their minds about the Dexter government.
I’ll leave it to others to decide whether the Herald’s shoddiness was breathtaking in this case, but I do think Judy Myrden’s story falls into a category of invidious reporting sensible people can see through without knowing much about the topic. She calls it a $42,000 press conference, but cites only $11,000 in costs (including transportation, catering, audio-visual, and event-management) related to the event.
The other $31,000 was part of the process of producing the plan, an effort that included several government departments, and discussions with interested companies, organizations, and individuals. Myrden falsely conflated production costs with news conference costs to make the latter appear four times larger than they were.
The sad thing about this is that if Myrden, or any other Herald reporter, would bother to read the energy plan, they would find it choc-a-block full of issues vital to Nova Scotia’s future—questions that could use robust discussion, debate, criticism, and even, dare I say it, investigation. Alas, that would take time, effort, imagination, and intelligence. Unlike finger-wagging.
Perhaps all provincial announcements should take place in Halifax, the centre of the known universe. Perhaps government should aways communicate with one hand tied behind its back, issuing reports written in bureaucratese and printed in gray ink on newsprint, Enver Hoxha-style.
[Update:] Stan Jones writes:
Sorry, Parker, but when you are sucking $15,000 from the same tit as the MLAs I really don’t think your opinion is going to sway me.
Perhaps Mr. Jones, who bills himself as a consultant specializing in social, health and educational research, is too pure to take government money. I’m not. About a quarter of my consulting work is with government. I relish these assignments because they give me a chance to work on the most important and difficult public issues facing our society, and to interact with thoughtful, energetic, well-motivated people.
The cynical assumption at play here is that doing government work automatically makes one corrupt. If that’s true, then it stands to reason that the most important and difficult decisions of our time will be worked on only by corrupt people, while all the good people (like Jones, Terris, and Watt) stand on the sidelines. Enjoy your purity, folks. Some of us want to tackle these issues.
Less pure readers can check out the Energy Plan here. They tell me it’s a pretty good read.
Comforting the unafflicted
Former reporters turn up in the darndest places. Alan Jeffers, erstwhile ink-stained wretch for the Chronicle-Herald and Canadian Press, turned up this week on the website of Mother Jones, the “smart, fearless” left-wing American magazine once edited by Michael Moore. Jeffers was defending his current employer, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, from claims in both MoJo and Forbes Magazine, a rather more conservative journal, that it paid no US income tax in 2009 despite earnings of *cough* US$19.3 billion. And a fine job he did.
In case you were wondering, $19.3 billion is enough to put a new Cadillac in every driveway in Nova Scotia. Taxes included this time.
Hat tip: CH
Colvin torture testimony – editorial roundup
Here is a roundup of newspaper editorials about Richard Colvin’s tesimony about Canadian military and civilian complicity in torture.
If his account is correct, the federal government was so determined to turn a blind eye to the treatment of the detainees by the Afghan National Directorate of Security and police that it discouraged record-keeping and other documentation – highly uncharacteristic behaviour in any bureaucracy. On this, Mr. Colvin gave evidence from his own direct experience, not hearsay.
The word “cover-up,” which evokes the Watergate scandal and a concealment of wrongdoing within an institution, or even obstruction of justice, may be excessive in this context. Instead, there is reason to believe that several parts of Canadian government preferred to look the other way, when informed that the Afghan government was abusing detainees, far from adhering to its side of the agreement.This week, the dismissive antagonism of some Conservative MPs, including Mr. MacKay’s parliamentary secretary, Laurie Hawn, in response to Mr. Colvin’s testimony, raises a disappointing inference that partisanism continues to prevail over a sense of common humanity.
[T]he reaction of the Harper government is not reassuring. First it claimed Colvin’s testimony would breach national security – a dodge used too often and too cynically, around the world, to cover up all manner of wrongdoing. By yesterday, the line was that Colvin is a dupe of the Taliban. This is preposterous.
Abuses are inevitable in wartime. But it’s not acceptable for our government to systematically undercut our national standards.
Ottawa must demonstrate its total opposition to torture, for the sake of Afghanistan and for the soldiers we send there.
[A]ll signs point to a culture of complicity at the highest levels of the Canadian Armed Forces and federal government, where the operative code was see no evil, hear no evil and write no evil in diplomatic cables home. That and never return calls from the Red Cross.
That pattern of damage control emerges from Colvin’s jarring testimony to a parliamentary committee probing the government’s handling of the issue… Conservatives remain in deep denial on the issue – and deeply partisan, including shots at the opposition for “accept(ing) the word of the Taliban.”
…When the first warnings of mistreatment arose in 2006, [Defence Minister Peter] MacKay’s predecessor, Gordon O’Connor, gave blithe assurances that the Red Cross was on top of things. Yet in Kandahar, the army was pointedly ignoring Red Cross phone calls, Colvin testified. He also suggested that the torture allegations inflicted grave damage on the army’s campaign to win the “hearts and minds” of increasingly alienated Afghans.
As for MacKay, he was foreign minister at the time his most senior officials insisted that torture allegations never be put in writing. Were they protecting MacKay, or was MacKay protecting himself?
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s top officials were also part of what Colvin described as a conspiracy of silence. All along, Harper vigorously defended the government line that there was no cause for alarm. Now, the harm has been done – to innocent Afghans, our war effort, and Canada’s credibility in demanding that human rights and the rule of law be respected by other countries.
To be blunt, Mr. Colvin was our war crimes insurance. By digging into allegations that Afghan security forces were torturing prisoners we sent them, he was doing the right thing to ensure Canadians did not one day find themselves sitting in the dock before the Court of International Justice facing charges for being complicit in a war crime…
Did the government and military act on these alarms? Ministers denied evidence of torture and did nothing about detainee handovers until a newspaper reported allegations in the spring of 2007 – at which point Mr. Colvin says he was told by superiors to stop putting his concerns in writing. Even now, Tory MPs are portraying Mr. Colvin as a dupe of Taliban misinformation. Defence Minister Peter MacKay says there are no proven cases of abuse and the diplomat’s evidence “does not stand up.”
Really? Since the government didn’t follow up – a gross negligence – how would it know? If the senior intelligence officer on the scene (and now our senior intelligence officer in Washington) wasn’t worth listening to, who was? What could be a greater disaster for the mission and for Canada than being entangled in a war crime? In still failing to grasp the gravity of this warning, the government is losing Canadian hearts and minds, too.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, at President Hamid Karzai’s inauguration Thursday, noted that in 2007 strict conditions were imposed on transferring detainees, who are now visited by Canadian Corrections officials. But Mr. Colvin’s evidence suggests the early warnings of the Red Cross were right, yet ignored by official indifference.
Such information is critical to catching weaknesses that might undo Canada’s pledge to ensure the safety of detainees. Mr. Colvin’s evidence should not have become a bone in the partisan, parliamentary dog fight, but Ottawa fought to keep him, and others, from appearing at the military commission. The Harper government must let the independent inquiry to proceed unobstructed so the evidence can be tested vigorously under oath.
For MacKay and Cannon to attack Colvin as not credible is, itself, not credible. Why would Colvin, presumably credible enough to be posted to Washington, risk his career with baseless allegations? For MacKay and Cannon to demand absolute proof is also specious. Nobody goes to court with absolute, irrefutable proof, only strong evidence.
NSP meets its customers – feedback
Getting this done (or almost done), together with pressing client chores, have kept contrarian from blogging much these last two weeks, leaving a backlog of unacknowledged feedback on the NS Power customer consultation, and the recent outbreak of hurricane hysteria. After the jump, reader feedback on NS Power.
CBC weather panic – (cont.)
Tropical storm Danny is currently a ‘disorganized’ system that may or may not become a hurricane, ‘albeit a weak one.’
By contrarian‘s back-of-the-envelope calculations, it lies roughly 2300 km south-southwest of Halifax. At its present speed of 17 km/hr, it could reach Nova Scotia in a just under six days—if it traveled in a straight line, which it won’t.
But that’s close enough for the weather hysterics at CBC News to warn that it “could strengthen into a hurricane and affect Atlantic Canada by the weekend.” Gee, maybe they should cancel normal programming.
This continues a policy established last winter, when the first hint of a suggestion of a rumor of a snow flurry launched local CBC stations into full panic. Lock your doors! Stay off the roads! Snowflakes have been spotted in East Green Harbour, and they’re Headed This Way! Call 1-800-582-5526 to cancel all planned events.
Abetted by Environment Canada’s lengthening and bewildering menu of ominous Alerts, Advisories, Watches, Warnings, and Special Weather Statements, CBC forecasts go from zero to shrill faster than you can batten a hatch.
For the love of Pete, cut it out. Over-warning about weather and wolves is just as dangerous as under-warning. Someone is going to get hurt or die because more and more citizens are simply tuning this crap out.
I know it’s summertime, but please, push back your chair, get out of your office, and go find some real news. Stop predicting possible but unlikely news five days before it fails to happen.
UPDATE: The Herald gets in on the act.
The arrest of Anne Calder – feedback
Contrarian reader David Smith has doubts about the Anne Calder arrest story:
Too much about this story is starting to look like a setup to me. First, there is the bit about the police not identifying the lawyer, but “sources” naming her. Somebody wanted her identity leaked, and the front-page photo in the Chronicle the next day certainly made sure everyone knew who she was. Then there were the two “tidbits” about her legal career: that one client had a mistrial, and that another client had fired her. How many other trial lawyers in Nova Scotia could have both of those things said about them? I’m willing to bet a fairly high percentage. Again, it looks to me as if this information is being reported in an effort to embarrass and humiliate her. Just to make sure, the Chronicle-Herald repeated those “details” again the next day.
Just who did Anne piss off, anyway?
The arrest of Anne Calder
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald details the arrest of Anne Calder, a defense lawyer and former Crown prosecutor, on suspicion of smuggling prescription narcotics to a client in the Burnside Jail.
As it happens, contrarian knows Calder slightly. She has always struck us as an idealistic, compassionate, conservative woman. She was also an outspoken admirer of Peter MacKay, with whom she served when they were both Crown prosecutors in Pictou County.
An Amherst native, Calder followed an unconventional career path. She graduated from Dalhousie and Carleton Universities, then worked as an airline flight attendant before earning her law degree at the University of British Columbia. At various times she worked as as a Crown prosecutor, either staff or casual, in Halifax, Truro, Pictou, and New Glasgow. Along the way she spent a few years in New Zealand, and graduated from the one-year, masters in journalism program at King’s in 2006.
