No, It's Not "Short Sighted"

I've seen stories popping up recently where Justin Trudeau is being criticized for refusing to engage with Sun Media.  

The issue is that Sun Media has allowed people like Levant to run amok.  Of course, they're going to play the taunting card.  What Levant's tirade demonstrated was that Sun Media is acting as a mouth organ for the PMO.  

From the Liberal party's perspective, why would they engage with a group who is so obviously biased, and will no doubt take anything that Trudeau says before their cameras and splice it into something entirely different?  

If Sun Media wants Canadians to believe that they are a legitimate media source, they need to take a step back, and rein in the extremists that they are putting in front of the camera.  At this point in time, that may well include insisting that Ezra Levant issue a full, public apology ... on air.   Otherwise, Canadians, and Trudeau's family in particular, are quite justified in assuming that Sun Media is nothing more than a propaganda organ for Stephen Harper and Conservative Party.

Canadians deserve better from our news media than Ezra Levant's childish tirades.

Emotionally Loaded

Okay, Paul Bernardo is a sociopath.  This should not come as a big surprise to anyone who followed the investigation and trial that eventually put him in prison.

That he has managed to convince a woman that he is a "good man" comes as little or no surprise.  Sociopaths are often experts at manipulating and twisting things to their advantage.  Bernardo has spent the last 20 years in a high security prison.  One might imagine that he has relatively little to do, and no doubt all the time in the world to put into manipulating those people who present any kind of opportunity to mess with them.  

Frankly, if you engage with someone like Paul Bernardo, whether it is for research or personal reasons, caution is essential.  For a man like him, manipulating people and playing with their emotions is sport.  He thinks it is fun.  No more than that.

When the Sun chose to make the alleged engagement between Bernardo and an Ontario woman their front page story, they really just played into Bernardo's ego, and his notoriety.  However, like Bernardo, who has spent months or longer manipulating this woman to make her believe that they are in love with each other, the Sun spends its story and headline space trying to manipulate its readers.

In this case, the Sun has chosen to use the Bernardo story to try and pry open the capital punishment debate in Canada.

Someone like Paul Bernardo, or in the past Clifford Olson, regularly gets trotted out by the proponents of capital punishment as reasons why we should have such a punishment on the books. 

These are purely emotional arguments.  People like these are horrifying.  What they did to others is appalling, and their apparent lack of remorse is horrifying to anyone with a sense of empathy.  Of course they provoke strong, visceral reactions when brought forward of examples of the most heinous of criminals.

However, the discussion around "dangerous criminals" is nowhere near as clear and well defined as we might wish to suppose.  

Many have argued that Vincent Li should be held to the same standard and executed.  That said, it was quite clearly established that Li was suffering from a psychotic episode when he killed Tim McLean.  That doesn't make what happened any less horrible, but it raises the question of criminal responsibility.  Mental illness is a serious issue, and not one that you can simply sweep away with the rubric that he committed a heinous act.  Yes he did commit the act, but given that we know his brain wasn't working normally (hallucinating etc.), can we hold the person who emerges from a psychotic episode responsible for what happened during that episode?

Then there is the ever present spectre of applying the death penalty in a situation where the accused is factually innocent, or there are significant questions about the degree of their culpability for reasons ranging from circumstances to mental capacity.  The United States has numerous cases like this. 

The Sun is being manipulative and dishonest with its "poll" and the associated article.  They aren't trying to create a reasoned debate.  Instead, like a sociopath who enjoys pushing people's buttons until there is a reaction, they are trying to get an emotional response from Canadians on a subject that requires careful consideration and thoughtful analysis.

As SunMedia Mutates

... into being the official mouth organ of the Stephen Harper party, we find their editorial pages repeating the talking points out of the Stephen Harper Ministry of Truthiness.

Consider Michael Dent-Andt's defense of Bev Oda:

Harper knows this. He also knows, because he’s been around the block, that in the grand scheme Oda’s transgression was not so terrible. She was clumsy, not dishonest. That’s likely why he’s still protecting her.

Why just clumsy? Here’s where it gets interesting. For Oda is indeed being accused of lying to Parliament.

When she appeared before a Parliamentary committee in December, the International Cooperation minister insisted she had no idea who’d scrawled the word “Not” on her bureaucrats’ written recommendation to approve a $7-million grant to Kairos, a church-based, foreign aid group. Rejecting the grant reflected her own position and that was that, Oda said then. It didn’t matter who wrote the “Not.”

How utterly juvenile - a Minister of the Crown trying to evade responsibility for orders she later admits she gave by "not knowing" which member of her staff added the "Not" to those documents.

The cold, hard fact here is that she gave the order to amend the document in question, and whether she did the amendment by her own hand or not is irrelevant. She made the decision and then tried to avoid being held responsible for it - by playing silly little semantic games.

Ms. Oda no doubt acted based on party policy - and therefore likely as not on the instructions given to her by the Prime Minister's office. (As there is little doubt that nothing happens in the current government without the PMO's approval)

Or perhaps you'd like to consider Eric Duhame's stunningly stupid article trying to deflect attention away from the direct influence that Harper is allowing certain religious groups:

Unfortunately, as often happens with the Crown corporation, it betrays a leftist bias and demonizes the political right.

Last week, Enquete journalist Brigitte Bureau tried to scare us with her report about the privileged access some evangelical Christians might have to Ottawa’s inner circle of power.

Opposition to abortion and gay marriage are presented as proof of the progress made by some obscure religious leaders. The report implies a Conservative majority would recriminalize the first and abolish the second, but it does not mention that a strong contingent of Conservative MPs are clearly opposed to going back to both issues.

The fact is that we already know that there is a significant number of TheoCon$ in Harper's caucus (and arguably Harper among them). Harper's already shown that he will ram whatever he thinks he can through by bullying the opposition - and that's with a minority. Give him a majority, and there's good reason to suspect that he will do everything in his power to slam Canada's society back a good century or more.

The fact that he has allowed his backbenchers to promulgate legislation that is clearly aimed at subjects like abortion is a telling statement all by itself, especially in a world where the PMO exercises absolute control over everything that is said and done by members of the government caucus.

Neither Nadeau nor Radio-Canada mentioned, however, that last Sept. 4 the Bloc MP received the 2010 El-Hidaya plaque of appreciation from the Montreal Muslim Community Center, a centre described by Canadian Muslim author Tarek Fatah as “a hotbed of pro-Hezbollah activities in Montreal.” Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist organization by Canada.

Given his participation in a rally under the Hezbollah flag in August 2006, it is not surprising to see Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe come back to that Radio-Canada story during his General Council last weekend while his party was officially reopening the door to a coalition with the Liberals and the NDP.

Ah yes, the standard CPoC tactic of deflecting attention away from the original point by trying to make someone else look as bad or worse. Nice try, boys.

It flabbergasts me to see how ready Bloc MPs — and to an even greater extent federal Liberals — are to denounce people of Christian faith in the Conservative party and use them to scare those of us who do not believe in God by telling us how they do not share our values and have a social conservative agenda, while at the same time they are caving in to the most radical elements of the Islamists in the name of political correctness, Trudeau’s multiculturalism or — less openly — a few thousand Muslim votes.

The real threat to the equality of women, gay rights and our fundamental Western values might not be the ones the publicly funded CBC is presenting us.

Oh yes, it's all about the muslims - of course, how silly of me. I won't even begin to address the underlying bigotry of that tactic.

Let's talk more bluntly about the matter. The issue that the Enquête show was really addressing was that of allowing any one religion have undue influence on the government of our nation. (and after suffering through the Duplessis years, Quebec has more reason than most to be edgy about any religion dominating politics)

I'm sure that in the coming months we can expect more of this kind of nonsense out of Sun Media publications, especially as they are clearly well on the road to becoming Stephen Harper's private propaganda source.

The Slide Continues

We already know that Sun Media's editorial policy is being driven out of the PMO these days.

So it comes as no surprise to this writer to see the overt bigotry and racism lurking in their editorializing on the Tamil refugees. The Con$ have never had a problem with throwing people under the bus for political gain.

But, I was surprised to see that Ezra Levant seems to have been rehired by Quebecor media after being punted a few years ago.

And I see that Levant continues in his usual patterns of writing:

As QMI’s investigative report shows, 71% of Tamil refugees here in Canada think things back in Sri Lanka are good enough that they’ve gone back home for a vacation.

Canadian immigration officials randomly surveyed 50 Tamils already here, who are trying to “sponsor” more people to come over, too. Of those would-be sponsors, 31 are refugees. And 22 of those admit to going back to Sri Lanka.

There's more holes and assumptions written into that statement than I can count. Of those who arrived here as refugees, how many are now Canadian citizens? Of those who went back, how many travelled under Canadian passports?

As for QMI's "investigative report", I find myself wondering about the quality of the data and how much of it is based on questionable inferences such as what Levant so blithely vomits up onto the page.

Each of the people who arrived on that boat have stories, and Canada (in theory) has this funny thing called "due process". They deserve to be heard out before we simply toss them on the next plane back to Sri Lanka.

As The Sun Paper Chain Becomes The Ministry of Propaganda

Today's lead headline on the Calgary Sun reads Canadian jets repel Russian bombers, and provides us with an overly dramatic scenario of Canada's armed forces "repelling" Russian aircraft from the Arctic.

Except, that these are routine patrols which the Russians have conducted for years - as The Galloping Beaver points out, the Russians also notify the neighboring countries of their activity.

In other words, the ministry of propaganda is out once again to sow the seeds of fear in the population - and they'll do anything they can to fabricate an adversary. Since Canadians are tiring of the Afghanistan mess, the HarperCon$ have decided to try and resurrect the old soviet menace meme. (I'll give you idiots a hint - the soviet menace isn't exactly a viable threat these days either!)