Blue Like You

Archive for the ‘Juicy scandals trump privacy rights’ Category

I wonder if Dan Lett is still sticking to his story .

And does Don Martin regret gossiping about Toews’ personal life in the National Enquirer Post?

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Wednesday Update : Dan Lett responds here.

Michael Coren exposes some of Ottawa’s juicier gossip in today’s Sun - More hypocrisy in politics.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t mention the latest ruckus which has been amply covered in today’s Post by Don Martin :

But the 55-year-old Mr. Toews’ public face of self-righteous morality is now clashing with his troubled private life. An MP dubbed the "minister of family values" by Liberals is embroiled in a messy divorce after fathering a child last fall with a much younger woman.

That’s his business, frankly , yet it might explain why Mr. Toews was demoted to the Treasury Board and immediately cloaked by invisibility, stewing in Question Period silence while his junior parliamentary secretary juggles tough questions on election financing irregularities.

Is it his business, Don? You’ve just made it the business of every Post reader in the world.

But Michael Coren has amply demonstrated that Toews isn’t the only one prone to the odd indiscretion:

…Just a few years ago it was widely known in Ottawa and media circles that a member of the Liberal government maintained a wife in one home and a gay lover in another. This certainly brought the man’s integrity into question. Because it was a secret arrangement it also exposed him to potential blackmail .

The story was never told due to a form of "gentleman’s agreement." It also was thought unfashionable and suburban within the achingly trendy journalistic class to write of someone’s homosexuality unless that person requested it. ..

So, how much lurid detail do we need to know about our elected officials’ private lives? They are human after all, and we all make mistakes. But should they be punished for behaviour that our society finds quite permissible in the mainstream? And how much privacy are they entitled to?

Perhaps we the Canadian public should insist on some kind of an Access to Tawdry Activity website where each MP’s sexual proclivities and/or transgressions against their partners can be publicly aired. Maybe we can also ask for a Gossip Input Section where any suspected activity and be posted and checked out by the appropriate morality police. Is this where we really want to go?

Personally, I think it’s unrealistic to expect our elected officials to live up to a higher standard of behaviour than our own.

I’d be happy if they if they simply raised their own standards up to the level of the current societal norm.

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Sunday Update : Joan Tintor - Short memories at the Globe . Via Jack’s Newswatch .

Monday Update : Talk about Bernier heats up, likely to be shuffled, Tories say - Hill Times.

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.