G20: Liberals demand inquiry, Reformatories say no
What do you think? As I’ve suggested a few days ago, both the police (reputationally) and citizens (constitutionally) would benefit from an independent review of some sort.
Comments are open.
New Campaigns and Elections mag, on new media
Found here. New column:
BUFFALO, N.Y. – Welcome to the bar scene from Star Wars.
So here I am, sitting in a line-up at the Walden Galleria Mall, waiting for Apple to open its doors, so I can be one of the first to snap up a shiny new iPad. All around me are acned geeks and pudgy, pale nerdlings. They are excited beyond description, like they have been subsisting for weeks on a diet of cheezies and fizzy pop (which, mostly, they have). The nerdlings have emerged from their Mom’s basement, pajama-less, to be one of the first to purchase Stephen Jobs’ much-hyped computer tablet thing.
It’s just past 5 a.m.: there are about twenty people here, divided into two tidy Apple-esque lines. One line is for people who have already paid for an iPad. The other line is for i-losers like me, who thought it would be fun for the readers of this column to see the lengths to which I will go to entertain and inform them about the iPad, and the political ramifications of same. Upon hearing about this plan, my 14-year-old daughter, who is way smarter than me, observed: “Dad, it’s just an oversized iPod Touch. Get a grip.”
She’s right, of course. But here I am, just the same, because I am dedicated to providing a memorable column-reading experience for You, The Reader. A guy beside me, a genial young engineering student, asks another guy in the reserved line – who looks like he was an extra in the Matrix movies, and forgot to remove his costume – why he was lined up three hours before the Apple store opens, to get an iPad he is guaranteed to get anyway. The Matrix guy shrugs and says: “Now we’re guaranteed guaranteed.”
God help me. I am now, officially, marooned on The Island of Misfit Dweebs.
A few minutes crawl by. One guy – a Canadian, I am ashamed to say – appears carrying a backpack. It has solar panels on it. He starts chatting amiably with the young engineer about the efficacy of different types of fibre optic cables.
Pause.
You know, I think no jury would convict me for what I am thinking about doing right now.
***
It is many weeks later. At first, I had thought about typing up this column on my iPad, which I have grown to love, like the child I never knew I had. I had also thought about telling you how the iPad is revolutionary and will change the way in which modern politics is done. I had considered opining that the iPad – along with the fab technological innovations that have preceded it, like smart phones and Blackberries and whatnot – will utterly transform the political campaign landscape.
But I won’t. Because it isn’t true.
I can certainly see the iPad being helpful on E Day, or in a door-to-door canvass. It’s the most amazing clipboard in the history of the world, to be sure, with endless possibilities for quickly storing and sharing GOTV data. It can be a crucially-important tool for campaign managers, too, because it can bring together so many facets of the campaign in one handy little one-pound device.
But change politics? Not quite. As with the myriad software innovations the gadget-crazy political class has seized upon – like blogs, and Twitter, and YouTube and Facebook – the iPad can be a useful addition to a campaign. But I don’t think it will ever supplant the traditional elements of a campaign – stuff like loping from door-to-door in a canvass, well-attended all-candidates meetings, positive earned media and (for central campaigns) smart TV advertising.
The problem, you see, is this: the strength of the Internet – and iPads and YouTube and blogs are all wholly dependent on the Internet – is its weakness. As you may have heard, the Internet is super-duper popular, and has attracted billions of eyeballs. But, because there are literally millions upon millions of web pages and choices to eyeball, it’s super-duper hard to know where to look. It’s harder, still, to get noticed. Ipso facto, what makes the Internet so popular is its weakness: it has too many channels.
TV doesn’t. TV, as my smart BC Liberal-and-Democrat friend Don Millar will tell you, TV is still the most effective medium to communicate with the voters you need to win. Don – an Alberta native who has toiled for big-wheel Democrats in Washington (like Dick Gephardt) and big-time Liberals in Ottawa (like Jean Chretien) – snorts at the suggestion that campaigns can dispense with TV, like it’s an Eight Track Tape machine. “Politics is about making important choices,” he says. And TV remains the best way to do that.
Another former colleague – genial former Harper PMO supremo Patrick Muttart, now based in Chicago – has also resisted the temptation to abandon traditional paid spots in favour of, say, a YouTube-based advocacy campaign. Muttart’s ubiquitous “Stand Up For Canada” spots were everywhere to be seen on TV during the crucial 2006 federal election campaign – because TV was, and remains, the most effective way to reach the widest voter audience. Despite earlier predictions that the Internet would smash TV’s political primacy, that just hasn’t happened: since 2006, U.S.-based campaigns, in fact, have seen television broadcasters smashing records with revenue derived from political campaigns. The Internet is more of factor, to be sure. But my shiny new iPad notwithstanding, TV will dominate the political wars for the foreseeable future.
For your next Star Wars convention, however, the iPad can’t be beat. Wave one around on a crowded street, and you’ll need a stick to beat off the pajama-clad nerdlings and geeks!
G20 and the McGuinty government
I am an Ontario Liberal. I have also given comms advice to the Ontario Liberal caucus, for ages. You may have noticed.
As such, in recent days, I’ve received many emails and comments and calls from folks about what the McGuinty government did, or didn’t do, in respect of the G20. Specifically, the allegation that a law was passed secretly to trample on individual liberties, etc.
I got in touch with people I know in the government. Here is what I can report about the three main criticisms, which are:
1. That the McGuinty cabinet passed new, sweeping/extended/expanded powers for police.
2. That they did so in secret.
3. That these secret new sweeping/extended/expanded powers were what the police used to arrest people, arguably unconstitutionally.
None of the above, I can report, are true.
The Public Works Protection Act has been in place since 1939. It is what is used in courthouses, city halls, police stations and airports to protect citizens and promote security and so on. The relevant part of the Act, today, is the part where you may be asked to produce identification, and have your bags possibly searched, in order to gain admittance. Using the air travel example: you have to show ID, and your bags, prior to boarding the airplane. If you don’t want to get on the plane, you don’t have to do those things.
The same rules were in effect, my sources tell me, to gain entry to the security perimeter (the inner fenced-in portion). That is, you can choose not to show ID or allow your bags to be searched in an airport, but it means you’re not getting on the plane. The same requirement was in effect for the G20 – but, there, it meant you weren’t getting in, near or behind the security perimeter. As at an airport, if you were asked to show ID or to show what you were carrying in your bag – and you refused and still tried to hang out and (possibly) cause trouble – you ran the risk, but not the necessarily guarantee, of arrest.
Next, I asked about this “new” power. Was it needed? Who requested it? Why? Good questions.
I was told police already had this power – both in the above-noted public works legislation in court houses, etc., and through common law for just about anywhere. What Toronto Police asked was to codify the security perimeter fence in regulation for greater clarity. The McGuinty government did that.
Now, the “secrecy” allegation: I was told the notification about the rules were posted online on June 16, many days before the summit. On June 21, the City of Toronto and the joint police forces took out ads in the Toronto Sun and Toronto Star and quite a few community papers. Those ads ran throughout the week, and again on the G20 weekend. The ads specifically said that, if you come down to the security fence you will be asked to show ID and – at police discretion – could be subject to a search. That ad is below.
Finally, on the actual arrests and protests. As far as anyone in the McGuinty government knows, and according to what the Toronto Police Service has told them, nobody was arrested under this public works regulation. As one senior Liberal told me: “People may be upset that police were able to search their bags or ask for ID on the corner of Bay and College, or Queen and Spadina, or sitting in Queen’s Park. I understand that. But the police always had that authority as it is – it had nothing to do with any recent regulations we had passed.”
There you go. That’s what I have been able to find out. Comment away.
O Canada: G20 stories, questions and silence
I’m a Liberal, and I have always been pretty pro-police. But stories like these are simply too numerous, and too detailed, to now be simply dismissed as false. They need to be fully investigated.
The federal Opposition parties – including the one for which I used to work – have apparently said nothing about the disturbing events of this past weekend. None of them, we’re told, have called for an investigation – or even raised a question.
I’ve looked all over Google for something, anything, that one of them has said about The Battle of Toronto. I’ve found nothing. (If you can find something substantive, send it along, and I will post it.)
Why? Why haven’t they called for some sort of a probe, to determine if these allegations are true? Whether you are pro-police, or pro-protestor, you have to agree that we have a collective obligation to determine the truth. Both citizens and police officers – whose constitutional rights and reputations, respectively, may be on the line – need to know what really happened. The rule of law, in fact, demands it.
As a long-time federal Liberal, I would hope that my party will now start asking some questions that need to be asked.
UPDATE: Via Twitter, Parliamentary Press Gallery journalist Juliet O’Neill kindly referred me to this, from the NDP. Much appreciated. Anything from the Liberals, yet?
UPPERDATE: The Liberals, represented by Bob Rae, will be speaking about this issue live on The Mark at 11 a.m. Good stuff. Better late than never.
G20: the morning(s) after
What the world saw as the face of Toronto this weekend.
Knowing the Harper Reformatories a little bit, as I do, I can tell you this: they don’t give a tinker’s damn if you are (a) a Toronto resident and (b) a Toronto resident who is angry and upset about what happened this past weekend in this city.
They don’t care because they don’t have any seats here, and aren’t likely to anytime soon. Moreover, they don’t care because they think the rest of Canada dislikes Toronto, and they believe that, when Toronto is unhappy about something, the rest of Canada is amused. Ipso facto, they don’t care about Toronto.
They may be right. But they are sadly mistaken if they think the communications disaster that was the G20 weekend won’t be a significant political problem for them in the coming weeks and months. Mainly, that is because Canada’s mainstream media establishment are all in Toronto. And – due to extraordinary events like this one, and this one (which – because I know the family who was terrorized – has left me livid about the truly fascistic quality of it) – the media establishment is seriously pissed off.
They’re also pissed off that an event like the G20 was held in the centre of a major city. They’re pissed off about the obscene cost. They’re pissed off that the police seemed much more interested in protecting a few politicians, and not at all interested in protecting taxpayers and taxpayers’ property. They’re pissed off about the police doing little on Saturday, and then way too much on Sunday. They’re pissed off that a few black-clad scumbags were able to shut down the centre of one of the world’s largest cities with total impunity. They’re pissed off that the scumbags seemed to get out of town, and won’t pay for the damage they did. They’re pissed off with the repeated violation of law-abiding citizen’s constitutional rights. They’re pissed off that what should have been an important discussion – about a world beset by recession, and terrorism and war – was completely overshadowed by “The Battle of Toronto.”
So, as Conservative staffers and ministers and MPs sit at their desks this morning, scanning for some news coverage that will convince them that it was worth all the trouble, I say: good luck to you. With the coming onslaught of investigative reports, lawsuits, complaints and demands for inquiry, you’ll need luck aplenty, boys and girls. Watch this little bit of footage, if you doubt my words: this what singing ‘O Canada’ got some people this weekend.
The Toronto Star’s publisher – someone not to be trifled with, and no bleeding-heart liberal, either – says it better than I ever could. He speaks for many of us, in fact:
G20 EDITORIAL: BRUTAL SPECTACLE FAILED A CITY AND ITS PEOPLE
From this morning’s Hill Times: coalitions and CSIS
KINSELLA: I always get nervous when Tim says nice things about me.
Look, I told CBC’s Wendy Mesley what no less than David Herle and Jean Lapierre also said: various important NDP and Liberal folks had been talking about cooperation/coalition/ merger. Some of these people included Jean Chrétien, Ed Broadbent, Roy Romanow and so on. You may have heard of them.
Personally—and I was speaking only for myself—I favour political realignment for five reasons. One, it reflects what is taking place internationally—most notably and recently (and rather smoothly, too) in Britain. Two, Stephen Harper did it, and it seemed to work out quite well for him. Three, this time—unlike last time—the separatists aren’t involved. Four, if you pursue a coalition/merger right after the next election, you might be giving Harper another golden opportunity to say you are attempting to overturn the election result (presuming the Reformatories win, of course). Five, there is a lot more that unites progressives than divides us.
Anyway, it took three election losses—in 1993, 1997 and 2000— before the Reformers/Alliancers/ Conservatives realized that they would benefit from cooperation/ coalition/merger. It’ll take three election cycles for reluctant Liberals and New Democrats to come to the same conclusion (by then, the election subsidy will be gone, however, but that’s a disaster we can discuss in another Wiseguys column).
Richard Fadden? The guy who said that “there are several municipal politicians in British Columbia and in at least two provinces there are ministers of the Crown who [CSIS thinks] are under at least the general influence of a foreign government.” That guy?
Fire him.
This genius identified China as the enemy nation. China! Days before Chinese President Hu Jintao was about to make an important visit to Canada, this seems epic dumb, no?
But that’s not all, of course. What about the “several municipal politicians in British Columbia” whom Mr. Fadden called traitors? Would not one or some of them now want to sue, to have their names cleared? The effect of Mr. Fadden’s words have been to smear all Chinese-Canadian municipal politicians in B.C. There is now a cloud over the reputations of all of them—until such time as we know who Fadden was talking about, and who he wasn’t, all are suspect.
Fire him. And, on the cooperation/coalition/merger thing, let’s talk after the next election. I suspect it won’t seem so unpalatable then.
Two G20 questions
Over the years, I’ve worked in politics and as a cops reporter, so I can confidently report this: precisely no one at the G20 summit gives a rat’s ass about what is being said this morning on blogs and web sites like this one. They just don’t.
That said, I have two questions, which I offer in my capacity as a Toronto taxpayer:
1. When they knew there was always going to be trouble (which they did, which is why they spent $1 billion on security), why did the Harper government continue to insist that the centre of Canada’s largest city would be the preferred location for the summit – when it clearly could’ve, and should’ve, been held somewhere else?
2. Out of that billion dollars, couldn’t a few bucks have been set aside to hire some police officers to prevent the violence and destruction taking place elsewhere in the city – as seen, to cite just one example, in this disturbing raw footage (click “Anarchist Tear Apart Yonge Street” in CTV News Video Player) showing not one cop (not one) intervening to stop mayhem on Canada’s biggest and busiest street?
Those are my two questions. Nobody, as I say, will be the least bit interested in them. But, as Sunday morning gets going, I suspect a few other folks may be looking for answers, too.
About a father and a son
Mine has been gone for more than six years – and, as I prayed for him last night with my youngest son, who was bursting with tales of his victory on the lacrosse field – I thought about what it was like before, and what it’s like now. Now, everything is palpably sadder; there feels like there is less air to breathe, some days. In the past year, in particular, I have picked the phone a dozen times to talk to him about what my family is going through, and then…I remembered. Whatever is begotten.
A reader let me know that David Olive’s Dad has died. Please send along your best wishes to David and his family, and make sure to hug your own Mom and Dad.
Best-ever protest sign
What can I say? I’m a big deal in China
Chinese press offer close coverage of G20, Hu visit
The China Daily website has several G20-related stories and there’s a lot of video and print coverage on the China Central Television website, too.
But there are always perils to reporting on tight deadlines at international summits like the G8 and G20 this weekend, as there is a lot of information to take in.
Case-in-point, check out the CCTV website photo of Hu alongside House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken and Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella — though the caption says he is a guy named Warren Kinsella, the same name as a well-known Liberal strategist.