The prime minister’s office released a statement singling out Postmedia’s Stephen Maher for the high crime of pursuing a news story. This was done on behalf of the PM’s parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro.
Del Mastro, who is under investigation by Elections Canada for allegedly exceeding spending limits in the 2008 federal election campaign, and for allegedly filing a false document to create a paper trail, sent a letter to a newspaper in his riding trying to muffle the repercussions of the latest twist in this story.
Maher reported that officials at Elections Canada have asked the RCMP to assist in their investigation of Del Mastro. Del Mastro, formerly the PM’s attack-trained defender on matters touching the robocalls scandal, couldn’t even explain if it was the PMO or his own office that wrote the statement sent to the Peterborough Examiner. In the end, he adopted both positions.
The ‘talking points’ which formed the basis for the official letter included the statement that Stephen Maher was a “controversial reporter.” The basis for that comment was a clarification Maher’s newspaper had run on a previous story he had written about donors in the Conservative riding association of Laurier-Sainte-Marie.
The lack of clarity in Maher’s original story was based on the fact that the Conservative party originally had refused to provide the cheques to prove that certain donations had in fact been made. When they changed their minds about furnishing the cheques, Postmedia issued the clarification.
If the test for being controversial is that a reporter has had a clarification or — heaven forbid — an “our mistake” attached to his work, then all reporters would be controversial. The claim, of course, is absurd. Also dangerous.
It marks an escalation in the Harper government’s dictatorial attempts to control the message. The PM has never been a journalism-friendly kind of guy. But up until now, his method of stifling coverage has been to choke off the flow of information.
This has been accomplished by seriously limiting the media’s access to cabinet ministers, hoarding public information and abusing the spirit of conflict-of-interest legislation.
It has also been pursued by muzzling public officials and severing any connection between the media and the federal bureaucracy. Nobody makes a peep in public these days about what’s going on in their departments because they know it amounts to a trip to the woodshed — or the gallows.
There are a lot of good journalists in Ottawa — none better than Stephen Maher and his sometimes reporting partner Glen McGregor. They have published some of the most important political stories of the last year. Some of their investigative pieces continue to unfold and may play a big part in Canada’s political narrative.
The measure for the kind of work that Maher, McGregor, Tim Naumetz and Greg Weston do is not the metric of public relations. The question is not whether their stories are good or bad for the government.
The question is whether the stories are true. If they’re not, it doesn’t mean that the reporters hate the government — just that they’re wrong. If they’re right, they form part of the composite of facts that makes up public reality. The RCMP are now involved in the investigation and the public is entitled to know that. Thanks to Stephen Maher, it does.
At one level, no one should be surprised at this scurrilous attack on a reporter. The Harper government, and the prime minister personally, specialize in character assassination when opposed.
It is one of the oldest and dirtiest tricks in the book. Politicians avoid dealing with unpleasant facts by diverting attention to the motives of the people who present them. Never mind what they’re saying, the ploy goes — have you ever considered why they say it? The invited answer is always the same: they say it because they are our opponents, not because it’s true.
You’ve seen the movie.
Former nuclear safety watchdog Linda Keen took the advice of her professional staff not to re-start the Chalk River nuclear reactor, and the PM traduced her publicly as a Liberal appointee, suggesting a political motivation for her position rather than a professional one.
When diplomat Richard Colvin raised serious questions about who in official Ottawa knew what about the transfer of detainees in Afghanistan by Canadian Forces, the minister of defence savagely attacked him personally. To this day, the government has never dealt with the substance of his testimony and documentation.
After parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page questioned the government’s figures on a number of files, including the ruinous F-35 program, he was personally trashed by a number of federal ministers and excommunicated from the now hermetically-sealed world of the Department of Finance.
The latest example of the politics of personal destruction is Chief Theresa Spence. Chief Spence has been the object of savage and sometimes racist attacks sparked by a government-leaked audit of her stewardship of band funds.
The PMO knows full well that Chief Spence is not in that teepee on Victoria Island to stand up for her prowess as a band administrator. She is there to demand that the Harper government get its ass in gear on promises made over a year ago to Canada’s aboriginals which have been left in limbo ever since. The price of standing up to the Harper government is now a personal audit conducted in public to smear and discredit.
In the Del Mastro affair, the real question people should be asking is why a parliamentarian under investigation by both Elections Canada and the RCMP has been left in his position as parliamentary secretary to the prime minister.
This story has come a long way since last June when Pierre Poilievre invited the opposition to “take it outside” with respect to allegations of election spending offences against Dean Del Mastro.
The allegations expanded to include the claim that donors to Del Mastro’s 2008 campaign were reimbursed for their contributions and then claimed their donations as deductions on their income tax returns. Some of those donors have said they will give details of the alleged scam in return for immunity from prosecution.
Attacking Stephen Maher is not the answer to the prime minister’s problems with his parliamentary secretary.
As much as Stephen Harper might sympathize with the order the English Parliament once invoked to require authors to have a license approved by government before their work could be published, it is no longer 1643.
Milton’s Areopagitica, a tract defending freedom of the press, has been around for 369 years. Time someone in the PMO read it.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
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