When disaster strikes, when mistakes happen, what’s the best corporate response?

Well, to respond, for starters. Not to pretend nobody’s noticed.

Last week, as you are certainly aware, was The Great Berry Crash of 2011, and plenty of folks noticed. Across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, millions of us peered at our inert BlackBerry screens for day after interminable day, cursing.

Cursing one of the all-time Canadian business success stories, BlackBerry’s Research in Motion (RIM). Cursing the company’s near-total silence about a system-wide collapse that inconvenienced — or hurt — countless businesses and individuals around the globe.

No e-mails. No instant messaging. No web browsing. For days, our BlackBerrys were great big digital clocks, and nothing more. An apology (of sorts) came from one of RIM’s bosses only after four days of corporate silence. It was beyond maddening — it was pathetic.

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Sorry, I ain’t buying it. Rumours of our death have been greatly prognosticated, etc.

The very folks saying the Lib brand is dead said the same thing about the Conservative brand in 1993. They were wrong then, they’re wrong now.

I’ll have more to say about this on CBC radio tomorrow morning (don’t ask me which program, however – it was me and Jim Armour with Brent Bambury, but God knows what show/time it’ll be on). But, in the meantime, I’ll simply note that everyone said Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals were goners, too.

Guess we weren’t.

UPDATE: Man, you guys are fast.  A regular has told me the show I was on was Day Six, and a clip of one of my exchanges with Jim is found here. If I sound pissed off about the Conservatives’ ongoing flirtations with racism and homophobia, it’s because I was.

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…and I’m still walking around, grinning, as I ponder the collective fate of Phony Tony and Benedict Baldy.

Equally, I breathlessly await their run on the NDP ticket, somewhere, sometime soon.

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…and I was totally in love with her in my youth, too.

Too bad I called iMessage “iMessenger,” by the way.  Factual errors on a global scale. Sheesh.

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Chantal Hebert is way, way smarter than me.  But this column has me befuddled.  To wit:

“Notwithstanding the party’s victories in Ontario and Prince Edward Island, the decline of the Liberal brand in Canada has continued unabated this fall.”

Well, no.

Grits were written off as dead in Ontario – and we did a 20-point turnaround to win a minor majority.  Grits were supposedly in big trouble in PEI, and came back with a big majority.  Quebec Grits were supposedly beyond hope just a few months ago, and now it is their main opponent that is dead or dying.  Newfoundland Libs, with a new leader, were supposedly going to be replaced as Official Opposition by the NDP – but they weren’t. B.C. Liberals had joined the ranks of the walking dead, too, until Christy Clark made them competitive again, and the NDP aren’t looking nearly as smug anymore.  And so on.

I’m not one to be complacent – we won the Ontario election because we weren’t, and because we took our opponents very, very seriously.  But these periodic obituaries being penned by the commentariat are really starting to piss me off.  They’re just wrong.

Anyway, I shouldn’t let the crepe-hangers irritate me, I guess.  As Chretien once said to me, when some of his opponents were (again) spreading rumours that he was dying:  “The best way to disprove these rumours about me dying,” he shrugged, “is to keep on living.”

And so he did.

And so will we.

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Discuss.

The solution, IMHO:

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Here.

And you probably wonder how I can be in so many places at different times.  So do I, frankly.

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As some of you may recall, the CBC and I were in court in Ottawa in 2009 to fight a libel lawsuit by Ian Verner Macdonald and his lawyer, Douglas Christie.

We won that case, which was a very challenging case, on every count. Shortly afterwards, however, Macdonald and Christie filed an appeal.  A few days ago, that appeal was heard.

Without boring you with a lot of details, I can tell you that the Court of Appeal summarily dismissed the appeal.  In fact, the appellate judges didn’t even call on our very capable lawyers (Scott Hutchinson and Brennagh Smith)  to respond to Christe’s arguments.  If you know the law, you know what that means.  So, the Court of Appeal left the costs award of $180,000 untouched, and they ordered the additional costs in the Court of Appeal of $25,000.  That means the total now owing is $212,000 – and counting.

The panel was the Chief Justice, Justice Sharpe (who I am told is widely touted for the Supreme Court of Canada) and ACJ of the court, Justice Cunningham (who presided over the Larry O’Brien trial).  The short oral reasons of the court should be available soon.

Can the case, which started in 1996 or so, drag on any longer?  Sure.  Macdonald and Christie can seek leave to go to the Supreme Court of Canada – which is something only rarely granted, in fewer than 10 per cent of cases.  They have 60 days to file their leave materials.

In the meantime, forgive me for feeling good about this one.  It feels really, really good.

(Oh, and since we’re talking about the far right and the law, let me simply say that Kathy Shaidle’s life is about to get rather complicated.  Stay tuned.)

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Is it racist to be critical of a liberalized immigration and refugee policy?

No, it’s not. People of good faith can disapprove of policies which are aimed at boosting the numbers of immigrants and refugees.

In fact, it’s well known among political veterans that one of the demographics often most hostile to increased numbers of immigrants is immigrants themselves. As one seasoned campaign pro — a Liberal — once said to me: “Lots of immigrants get here, and then they want to slam the door behind them on other immigrants.

Bit of a surprise, isn’t it?”

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