Blue Like You

So Elections Canada was concerned about the media fallout from the Tory accusations of an alleged leak - In fact they were so concerned that they considered various methods of "killing" the story (H/T National Newswatch ).

Today’s Globe reveals a fascinating glimpse into Elections Canada and their various aborted attempts to diffuse the allegations of bias. We hear tales of blacked-out emails acquired under access to information and panicked attempts at damage-control:

In one of the emails, chief financial officer, Janice Vézina responds to Marc Mayrand’s concerns about how to’ kill’ the allegation of a leak as follows:

"If we can dispel this story [the leak], we will have only positive media coverage," replied Ms. Vézina, the associate deputy chief electoral officer in charge of political financing. "And the alternative is that we appear to be partisan or biased or vindictive and at the moment the media seem to believe we tipped off the CBC and the Liberals."

And on April 18th Mayrand writes:

"Our internal review indicates no reasonable ground to believe there was a leak," he wrote. "This may be pure diversion tactic/competitive frustration from a media outlet vis-a-vis another. The central fact is that media were there more than two hours after the operation started. "

Uh-huh. And yet the CBC itself reported differently:

…Camera crews, including one from the Liberal party, were on hand as police arrived at the downtown building…

So the timeline is still somewhat contradictory.

And why did Elections Canada feel the need to have only positive press anyway? Usually only politicians need concern themselves with such matters. And if you have nothing to hide, why worry about killing stories and blacking out emails?

And why would you even go to the extent of paying attention to blogs, and furiously keeping track of all opinons:

The remaining documents show Elections Canada kept a close eye on media coverage of the raid and its political fallout. Summaries of blogs , websites and broadcasts were compiled.

On April 29, the agency wrote a summary of news articles on the ad-buy controversy and tallied the number that were positive, neutral and negative .

If you had nothing to hide, why would you be so concerned?

Oh, and if anyone from Elections Canada is reading this, you can put this post down as a ‘negative’. Just to save you some taxpayer-funded time.

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Update: The Globe provides a helpful Chronology of the so-called In-and-out ’scheme’ here . I’m not sure that this is complete. There seems to be some information missing regarding the CPC’s suit against Elections Canada, which I feel is very relevant. If anyone can add more info, please feel free to do so in comments. Thanks.

Background links : Elizabeth Thompson - "Ins and Outs of the Warrant."

Stephen Taylor - "The Elections Canada raid (Supporting information and Conservative response)."

Gerry Nicholls: "Elections Canada Bullies".

David Frum: "Elections Canada’s campaign against Free Speech". (National Post)

John Robson: "The Tories might have a point". (Ottawa Citizen)

Elizabeth Thompson: "The original in and out election financing".

Memo to Elections Canada: I think you can safely categorize all the above links as "negative."

Always glad to be of service.

Please also check out Halls of Macadamia - Scary hidden agenda.

Steve Janke’s Angry in the Great White North seems to have caught Election Canada’s eye(s).

In another strange twist we learn that some last minute changes are being made to the final version of Chuck Cadman’s biography.

Perhaps it should be renamed as well… How about ‘The Never Ending Circus’?

Sad, really.

…Mr. White said he “stopped the presses” to update the book with Mr. Harper’s denial and to remove the May 17 date.

“Now Wallace has acknowledged a meeting and he’s given a date for it, so we’ve had to take that into account,” he said.

“We’re just backing off on the date. We don’t know how many meetings there were and when they were, so we’re not going to hang our hat on either date” . . .

More from the Province.

Still planning to run with this one, Stephane?

Then don’t forget to use this ammo in court.

This whole Cadman controversy still generates a lot of unanswered questions.

One of the biggest ones is why did the Liberals hang onto this so-called ‘million-dollar bribe’ story for at least a year? Paul Martin who wrote the forward, (allegedly) had the manuscript in his hands since Feb. 2007. If this was such an egregious offense, why didn’t he immediately contact the RCMP?

Did the (alleged) leak come from Paul Martin who may have (allegedly) passed on the information to Liberal insiders? Or did it (allegedly) come from some friends of the author? (And who exactly were these friends? Anyone in MSM? Anyone in the LPC?)

…White said Zytaruk sent versions of the manuscript to a few friends, as well as Paul Martin…

Stephen Maher suggests various scenarios as to what may have happened:

…The Liberals were entering laughingstock territory, so what a welcome surprise it must have been for them that night to tune in to The National to watch Peter Mansbridge report that Mr. Harper was being accused of trying to bribe Chuck Cadman into voting against Paul Martin’s 2005 budget.

Suddenly, the whole focus of the media pack in Ottawa shifted away from the drab non-drama of the budget and onto the sensational (though unproven) allegation that the Tories sent a couple of heavies to offer a dying man a million-dollar life insurance policy for his vote.

The Globe and Mail had the same story the next day.

It turns out, of course, that this was not a surprise to the Liberals, since it looks like they helped leak the story.

The Chuck Cadman story is contained in the book Like a Rock, a forthcoming biography of Mr. Cadman. Former prime minister Martin, who wrote the foreword to the book, has had a copy of it for a year.

The Liberals seem to have passed the book on to the Globe. The rumour mill says CBC had been sitting on the story, perhaps because of an embargo agreed upon with the publisher. When the Globe moved to scoop them, they had to run with it.

Or not. Who knows? When you accept a leaked document, you have to promise not to tell where you got it!

By getting the Cadman story out when they were getting stomped in the media, the Liberals managed to change the channel to a program much more agreeable to them.

It is even possible that Michael Ignatieff’s people leaked this story to put pressure on Mr. Dion to vote down the budget after all, bringing about the election he is said to want. Or not. Who knows? It’s a leak. You never really know what’s going on with leaks…

If this is true, I think the LPC needs to explain why they sat on this so long. Is this about ethics or crass political opportunism?