Skip to main content

A Holiday 12-Pack of Election News You Haven't Read in the Papers

Turncoat MP Belinda Stronach features in two election stories that ran in the local dailies Thursday.

In the story that appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, she was the centrepiece.

In the story that appeared in the Winnipeg Sun, she was not mentioned. Only readers who knew the entire story from the blogosphere knew of her role in it.

Yet these two stories speak volumes to readers about the newspaper election coverage they're getting.

The coveted Page One spot above the fold went to Free Press reporter Paul Samyn for his national exclusive about the trouble Belinda Stronach was in. He reported that the Elections Canada is "reviewing" her 2004 campaign for breaking the law on spending limits.

For a Liberal cabinet minister responsible for her party's democratic renewal policy, this is more than embarassing, especially during another election campaign. She denies she's being "investigated or probed" (her word, not ours, honest.)

Samyn, the Free Press correspondent in Ottawa, said he's sticking with his account.
"We stand by the story and we're continuing to follow it. "

Unfortunately, we're betting the Winnipeg Sun won't be following their story. They only managed to squeeze in three paragraphs for a story that was smaller than the picture of Paul Martin on the same page.

Yet their story is a bigger scandal than what appeared on the Front Page of the Free Press.


It's a story about the major election themes: the Liberal Party's sense of entitlement, the co-mingling of Liberal Party interests with public interests, the use of taxpayers money to fund Liberal election campaigns.

You would hardly know it from the truncated version of the story that showed up in the Sun, "Grit Staffers Back on Public Payroll for the Holidays, PM Says."

Read the story and you get the impression that some of the people working on the Liberal campaign will have to go back to their jobs over the Christmas holidays and Paul Martin is going to make sure they do some work on public business and not goof around.

Uhh. ..sort of, but not quite.

The actual story is that

* the Liberal Party plans to "lay off" campaign staff who have taken a leave of absence from the civil service to work on the election campaign.

* The layoff will last a week, during which the staffers will be paid by the taxpayer.

* This results in the Liberal campaign saving the cost of their salaries.

* The staffers will, by law, get paid for five days even though they will be at their offices for only three.

You can guess how busy they will be on government business in the week between Christmas and New Year's.

And how does Belinda Stronach fit into this? As the Human Resources Minister, she defended the plan while a guest on an election broadcast, saying -surprise!- it met with Treasury Board rules.

How do we know this? We read it on the blogosphere.

In fact, we read many important stories on the Net which never make the daily newspapers.

The Free Press has room for election stories about Kreskin the Mentallist and why a columnist can't find a candidate to talk to, but no room for a story about scamming the taxpayer for Liberal party salaries.

That's the story the papers have been missing. They don't understand the internet's role in news dissemination.

Find a good site and its a one-stop shop for the day's election news. And the ability of blogs to cross-reference sources and do research means that stories not only break immediately, but if facts are missing or misinterpreted they are corrected in short order, and not in an "Our mistake" entry hidden on page 2 the next day.

In half an hour on the Web, The Black Rod found a dozen stories that should have been reported in the daily papers:

1. The Liberal Party is having the public pay civil servants working on the Liberal campaign for a week while the campaign gears down before New Year's. This was revealed first on CTV's Countdown with Mike Duffy, but it was reported first and extensively by bloggers. It took a couple of days before the story got widespread coverage, and even then the MSM version hardly made sense. See

http://politicalstaples.blogspot.com/2005/12/when-will-they-ever-learn.html

2. The Liberal riding association president in Oakville resigned after sending a contemptuous email to a constituent who objected to Paul Martin's pledge to ban all handguns.

Mr. Elie Betito e-mailed back: "take your NRA , GUN LOVING ASS BACK TO THE U.S. WHERE YOU BELONG, E. BETITO." It sounds a lot like the beer and popcorn comment by Liberal strategist Scott Reid, which revealed what the Liberals really think when they're not reading from the script.

The post that started it all is here

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/003163.html.


3. The Liberal insider trading scandal is all but ignored by the mainstream press, but bloggers continue to dig up suspicious trading activity that preceeded the government announcement on taxing income trusts.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005922.php

4. One blog reports that the Ontario Securities Commission is planning an investigation of the allegations, which will put pressure on Finance Minister Ralph Goodale to step aside until the investigation is complete.
http://angrygwn.mu.nu/archives/145646.php


5. Was Paul Martin's spat with the U.S. over Kyoto a set-up? It appears the Liberals had ads of "ordinary voters" applauding Paul Martin's defence of Canada shot and ready to go well before the leaked stories about Canada's ambassador to the US, Frank McKenna, being summoned to Washington to receive a "dressing down" from the Bush administration over Martin's comments on December 7th.

It turns out McKenna himself requested the meeting---with the head of the Council on Environmental Quality, who had no authority to deliver any kind of rebuke.

http://www.stephentaylor.ca/archives/000495.html

6. A blogger has posted the storyboards for the Liberal attack ads that the Liberals plan to launch in the new year.

http://www.stephentaylor.ca/archives/000496.html

7. The Liberal Party is faring so poorly in Quebec that Paul Martin may well lose his own seat.
LifeSiteNews http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/dec/05122105.html

8. Liberal insiders aren't hiding the fact that if the party doesn't win a majority in the election, Paul Martin will be replaced as leader.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/003181.html

9. The CBC is forced to remove a "Nazi" image of Stephen Harper from its website.
http://www.cbcwatch.ca/?q=node/view/1623

See also our related story:

http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2005/09/cbc-bloggers-reveal-their-secret.html

10. Bloggers get to the bottom of a report that a Liberal candidate in Ontario made a victory speech in which he allegedly exhorted his audience, "This is a victory for Islam! Islam won! Islam Won! ... Islamic power is extending into Canadian politics". Digging shows the candidate was telling the truth when he denied making those statements.

http://relapsedcatholic.blogspot.com/2005/12/more-on-omar-alghabra-as-stuff-peters.html

11. The Abotech Affair: An employee of Public Works used a technicality to claim his computer company was "aboriginally owned". He then got uncontested contracts from the department.

Even though he claimed to have divested himself by selling the company to his wife and 2 (minor) children, he continued signing documents as a director. The company ran from his kitchen table the whole time, even after his election as a Liberal MP in Ontario in 2004.

Now in the middle of the election ethics czar Bernard Shapiro has cleared him, seemingly not knowing that a key bureaucrat that Shapiro interviewed - is also the MP's cousin.

"Why was he a director at a company for almost a year after he was supposed to cut ties?"

http://angrygwn.mu.nu/archives/145828.php#more
http://angrygwn.mu.nu/archives/145459.php

12. The press in Quebec is going gaga over the support being given to Stephen Harper by Liberal Premier Jean Charest and ADQ party leader Mario Dumont. Outside of Quebec, there's hardly been a mention. Zander is furious.
www.bdzander.cjb.net

( And just to show how this all fits together, just missing our dirty dozen is a story about good ol' Belinda and her brother, whose company is recruiting scantally clad girls for his internet... aw, here it is. )

Popular posts from this blog

The unreported bombshell conspiracy evidence in the Trudeau/SNC-Lavelin scandal

Wow. No, double-wow. A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist-- Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post--- has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story. The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It's bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money. The Trudeau-Snc-Lavalin scandal is

Crips and Bloodz true cultural anchors of Winnipeg's aboriginal gangs

(Bebo tribute page to Aaron Nabess on the right, his handgun-toting friend on the left) At least six murder victims in Winnipeg in the past year are linked to a network of thuglife, gangster rap-styled, mainly aboriginal street gangs calling themselves Crips and Bloods after the major black gangs of L.A. The Black Rod has been monitoring these gangs for several months ever since discovering memorial tributes to victim Josh Prince on numerous pages on Bebo.com, a social networking website like Myspace and Facebook. Josh Prince , a student of Kildonan East Collegiate, was stabbed to death the night of May 26 allegedly while breaking up a fight. His family said at the time he had once been associated with an unidentified gang, but had since broken away. But the devotion to Prince on sites like Watt Street Bloodz and Kingk Notorious Bloodz (King-K-BLOODZ4Life) shows that at the time of his death he was still accepted as one of their own. Our searches of Bebo have turned up another five ga

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. There, we said it.

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion.  We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak.  Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi

Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP's Christian-bashing, cop-smearing, other star candidate

As the vultures of the press circle over the wounded Liberal Party of Manitoba, one NDP star candidate must be laughing up her sleeve at how her extremist past has escaped the scrutiny of reporters and pundits. Parachuted into a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg's North End, she nonetheless feared a bruising campaign against a well-heeled Liberal opponent.  Ha ha.  Instead, the sleepy newspeeps have turned a blind eye to her years of vitriolic attacks on Christianity, white people, and police. * She's spent years  bashing Christianity  as the root cause of all the problems of native people in Canada. * She's called for  a boycott of white businesses . * And with her  Marxist research partner, she's  smeared city police as intransigent racists . Step up Nahanni Fontaine, running for election in St. John's riding as successor to the retiring Gord Macintosh. While her male counterpart in the NDP's galaxy of stars, Wab Kinew, has responded to the controversy over

Exposing the CBC/WFP double-team smear of a hero cop

Published since 2006 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up in 1871 to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever. Exposing the CBC/FP double-team smear of a hero cop Some of the shoddiest journalism in recent times appeared this long August weekend when the CBC and Winnipeg Free Press doubled teamed on a blatant smear of a veteran city police officer. In the latest example of narrative journalism these media outlets spun stories with total disregard for facts that contradicted the central message of the reports which, simplified, is: police are bad and the system is covering up. Let's start with the story on the taxpayer funded CBC by Sarah Petz that can be summed up in the lead. "A February incident where an off-duty Winnipeg officer allegedly knocked a suspect unconscious wasn't reported to the province's police watchdog, and one criminologist says it shows how flawed oversight of law enforcement can be." There you have it. A policeman, not

Winnipeg needs a new police chief - ASAP

When did the magic die? A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control. The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.) Property crimes were up almost 20 percent.  Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average. The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety. How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime? "Smart Policing" they called it.    A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem and nip it. The police