Blue Like You

The boys were fishing all day and are almost ready to come in for a fresh pickerel dinner!

Lyle Hewitt makes a good point in today’s Leader-Post about the flagrant abuse of privacy rights concerning the other individuals in the 1991 tape who are not public figures at the present time.

Hewitt worked on the campaign in question, but is not on the tape. His concerns are for those private citizens whose faces have been plastered in the media from coast-to-coast over the last several days:

…No one on that tape was doing anything illegal. No one was making any sort of policy statement.

No one was making a declaration to reporters or issuing a personal vision statement.

The context of the tape is perfectly clear. It was an after-hours party at a stressful workplace, where most of the people, underneath it all, were well aware that they were going to be losing their jobs soon. They took a night off to let their hair down and relax a bit.

From the video, it’s obvious that alcohol had been consumed. After people had had a few drinks and were feeling uninhibited, some goof with a camera started wandering around and goading people into doing and saying silly things.

If there is anyone out there who can honestly say that they have never been in a situation even remotely like that, please allow me to buy you a ticket to the Vatican so that you can go and apply for sainthood.

Most of the people in the video were and remain private citizens. They do not deserve to have their Candid Camera moments from two decades ago splashed across the media. Why weren’t the faces of the other people pixelated out or why wasn’t the film edited in some other way so as to show only the public figures that the media was gunning for? To those of you in the opposition and the media who have blown this story so ridiculously out of proportion, I say shame on you. You had better hope that your own drunken antics from past prorogation parties (the legislature’s annual post-session all-party booze-fest) don’t come to light some day.

And for those of you in the public who sat back and snickered as you watched the video, I hope you enjoyed your cheap, voyeuristic thrill — and I hope it never happens to you.

The media should be ashamed.

And every Canadian citizen planning to attend a private party that’s being recorded in any manner should be aware that if any of the participants ever becomes an elected public official, your antics may very well become the fodder for a humiliating media feeding-frenzy any time in the future.