What the pundits have missed, partly because Team Trudeau's initial ham-handed responses obscured it, is a defense that remains open to the PMO....
Former you-name-it Norman Spector (@nspector4) points out a glaring omission in my partial list of pundits who inveighed against BC Premier Christy Clark's demand for a share of profits from the Northern Gateway pipeline, while mostly ignoring Quebec's brazen extortion of Newfoundland hydro exports. Stephen Maher, late of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and now typing for the Postmedia chain, had a terrific column on the dispute last weekend, one that places the Quebec-Newfoundland precedent front-and-center. The nub: History suggests...
The Citizen's Glen McGregor sends three points of rebuttal to my post this morning about his story (co-written with Stephen Maher) on rule-breaking election-eve Liberal robocalls in the Guelph riding that has been the eye of the storm over Conservative vote suppression efforts in May's federal election: The Valeriote calls did give the Conservatives a new line of defence and did further muddy the water, as evidenced in any Hansard from this week. We didn't pass on judgment on whether the defence was valid. We never equated the Valeriote calls with the faux Elections Canada calls. Both were parts of the narrative of key...
Steve Maher and Glen McGregor, the two Ottawa reporters who broke the Robocall scandal, have a long story in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen that warrants a close read. The story leads with an account of Liberal robocalls in the Guelph riding on the eve of the May 2, 2011, federal election—calls that expressed dismay at CPC candidate Marty Burke's opposition to abortion "in all circumstances." In a glaring escalation of false equivalence, Maher and McGregor say "revelations" about the automated calls "are giving the Conservatives a new line of defence against allegations of vote suppression and further muddying the events leading up to...
PostMedia's Stephen Maher, whose blog post on the Toews contretemps I featured moments ago, has weighed in with a critique of Contrarian's first two posts on the subject. Here's what he wrote (and then let's close the subject for now): In your post on the Parliamentary Press Gallery, you say the gallery met @vikileaks30 with a "frenzy of denunciation," but provide no examples. You do not accurately describe the gallery's reaction to @vikileaks30. The journalists I know found it to be a matter of lively interest. Nobody reacted with anger, fear or embarrassment. Also, to point to the failings of the gallery, you...
Parliamentary scribe Stephen Maher, formerly of the Herald and now with PostMedia, offers a different view on why the Press Gallery all but ignored Vic Toews’s infidelity prior to #vikileaks30. (Previous views here, here, and here.) Maher's blog post is the more refreshing for its inclusion of updates from people who disagree with him. It rewards reading in full. I actually agree with most of what he says. Generally, I have little stomach for exposing the private lives of public figures, let alone their sex lives. But unlike Maher and his colleagues, I think there are clear grounds for an exception in Toews's case. Maher wrote: If [a] secretly...
During a brief stopover in Ottawa yesterday, a gracious member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery took me for a sail on the Ottawa River, where I snapped this photo: In case you don’t recognize the building, it’s the posterior of 24 Sussex Drive, home of Canada’s Prime Minister. Even without Bruce Cockburn on board, I was struck by the wondrous want of any obvious standing on guard for Stephen Harper. Our small party boarded my friend’s sailboat at the Hull marina, just across the street from the Museum of Civilization. No one checked our ID, demanded we sign a register, or x-rayed...
The unprecedented rise in support for the NDP is provoking a lot of reaction from various thoughtful observers. Here's a compendium. From Frank Graves of Ekos Research, author of yesterday's dramatic poll putting the NDP in second place nationally with a projected 100 seats, in a live chat this morning at ipolitics.ca: Nothing is absolutely ruled out. But I think the public is answering Mr. Harper's request for a majority with a pretty clear "No." The intricacies of vote splitting might confuse this as late campaign shifts, but at slightly under 34 points, the Conservatives are well short of a majority. In...
Contrarian is relieved to report that whoever kidnapped Stephen Maher and published Saturday's bizarre column under his byline has released him. His column this morning offers a useful reminder of the circumstances under which Richard Colvin went to Kandahar in the first place. In January 2005, Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry, the political director of the provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar, was killed in a suicide bombing that wounded three Canadian soldiers. After Mr. Berry’s death, while the Foreign Affairs Department was struggling to find diplomats to serve in the dangerous and challenging country, Richard Colvin volunteered to go to Kandahar to do...
The Chronicle-Herald's estimable Stephen Maher adopts Harper's view of the wafergate flap ("a low moment in journalism...