All posts tagged Conrad Black

Considering plagiarism? Just forget it! Nowadays you’ll be busted for sure!

by David Climenhaga on September 27, 2012 in Margaret “Peggy” Wente, Media, Plagiarism with 3 Comments

Peggy Wente gets ready to write her next column. Globe and Mail columnists may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below, the real Ms. Wente, looking like she’s in a mug shot after being busted for plagiarism; the late Ken Adachi.

There has never been a shortage of plagiarism in Canadian letters.

The sins of the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente are literally nothing new, and hardly unique, although the highly entertaining social media furor about them may be.

Indeed, I feel just the tiniest bit of sympathy for Ms. Wente – who in the interests of full disclosure I must acknowledge briefly supervised some of my work at the Globe and Mail back in the 1980s. This is why I know about Conrad Black getting his driver to deliver his columns to her in the comfort of the company limousine.

The incidents of plagiarism uncovered by blogger Carol Wainio on her Media Culpa blog, while certainly a legitimate topic for reporting, do not seem to me to be particularly egregious examples of the cutting and pasting of other people’s intellectual property.

That said, Ms. Wente is an exceptionally bright woman, and it seems unlikely to me that she didn’t know what she was doing when she borrowed these materials.

Nevertheless, it has to be pretty easy to unintentionally lift a sentence or two from another writer and pop them into something you’re writing simply because it’s the most efficient way to explain a bit of background. I worry about this all the time when I write this blog – and I often find myself backwards putting some piece of elucidatory prose just so guilty I won’t appear of plagiarizing something I’ve drawn out of one of the many journals whence come my backward blog ideas.

Certainly more exciting examples of Canadian plagiarism exist than Ms. Wente’s pedestrian contributions to the genre. If you want to make an interesting prose comparison, for example, take a look sometime at Heather Robertson’s entirely original “The Last of the Terrible Men,” published in 1980, and then at a certain very well-known male journalist’s book on a similar topic, published two years later.

Or how about a long passage from a very well known sports novel by a much-honoured Canadian author and an obscure where-are-they-now article in a minor upstate New York newspaper inscribed by a much-less-well-known Canadian reporter?

The consequences for the high-profile stenographers in both cases? Zero, as far as anybody knows.

One might argue, as has been observed by many commentators, that Ms. Wente and her employer were their own worst enemies in this matter. Instead of just owning up to a mistake and getting on with their lives, they tried to wiggle off the hook, refused to address the problem, and (in the Globe’s case) even hinted darkly at the revelatory blogger about the possibility of expensive defamation actions. Then, when that didn’t work, they crankily blamed the messenger.

Ms. Wente has a point when she complains that her sanctimonious views had something to do with the intense interest in her current predicament in social media. After all, she has made a point of being outrageous from the vantage of a highly visible national pulpit. She has enjoyed it and benefited from it, I have no doubt.

Alas for Ms. Wente, now the worm has turned. Really, she can hardly be surprised that the many voiceless people she irritated with her unsympathetic harangues feel a modest degree of Schadenfreude at her present unhappy circumstances. This is true even if the sin she stands accused of is quite different from what irritated her readers in the first place. It’s simply human nature. And who knows, there may even be a few folks who share these sentiments within the white brick walls of the Globe’s bunker at 444 Front Street West.

But, je digresse, my main points today are a little different.

First, it has always griped me how some people get away with plagiarism while others have their careers or even their whole lives smashed.

Maybe this has more to do with our personalities and how easy it is for some of us to blow off being caught doing something naughty, while others among us feel devastatingly guilty for even meaningless infractions. But it’s fair to say, there’s no justice – and no consistency at all – in the way the consequences of this particular sin are meted out.

Who can forget Ken Adachi, the Toronto Star’s excellent literary reviewer, who was fired by the Star in 1981 after being accused of plagiarism? He was taken back for a spell, but was allowed to feel driven to take his own life in 1989 after being accused of stealing three paragraphs from a book review in Time Magazine.

Mr. Adachi knew he faced being fired again from his livelihood, and his vocation, this time without much chance of appeal.

Ms. Wente faces what? Well, we don’t know, because the Globe won’t tell us. But it’s unlikely to be much more than the proverbial slap on the wrist.

Maybe we should all agree now to what an appropriate punishment would be, and hold everyone accused of plagiarism to the same standard. A failing grade on their report card, perhaps, or two weeks in the stocks on Twitter, being pelted with soggy bons mots by the Twitterati. Or does that sound too much like a trade unionist’s compromise solution, designed to protect the sinner as much as the sinned against?

My second point, which I think is the most important one, is that technology has now made plagiarism obsolete. So if you’re pondering getting up to it, you’d better think about this!

You just can’t do it. You will be caught. Nowadays, every one of us can be a literary CSI technician busting scholarly malfeasance wherever we think it occurs.

This started with college professors who suspected their students of stealing prose. Having taught a few college courses myself, I can tell you the alarm bells always ring when some kid who couldn’t spell “CAT” if you spotted him the C and the T* turns in a polished and literate effort. (* I plagiarized that line from my friend and mentor Doug MacRae, a great journalist, long dead, alas. Since Doug is in no position to complain about it, I guess it’s mine now…)

As a result, the technology now exists to compare passages of prose and spot similarities with other passages that exist anywhere on the Internet.

I’m not merely talking about enclosing a phrase in quotation marks and looking for an exact duplicate on Google. These applications are something altogether more sophisticated, capable of spotting even suspicious patterns.

What’s more, while it may be high-tech stuff, it’s not billion-dollar software that can only be afforded by the likes of the National Security Agency or the Communications Security Establishment. Free versions are even available on the Internet! Here’s a link to one.

So you don’t have to just suspect Ms. Wente and some of her colleagues any more, you can check up on them and confirm your suspicions. What’s more – also thanks to the Internet – you can drop the dime on them without having the Globe’s Public Censor … I mean Public Editor … getting in your way.

Count on it that a lot more journalists and bloggers than Ms. Wente face a similar level of scrutiny in future. Indeed, some of them are doubtless being closely examined as this is being written. They – and you – will just have to get used to it.

This will also probably happen to bold fellows who crib sweet little poetic love notes from literary sources as well. Busted! Only with mockery or ardour dealt out to them unequally and unjustly based on such additional factors as appearance, size of bankroll, mood or recipient’s degree of charity.

In other words, there’s just no point in plagiarizing any more. You simply can’t get away with it.

If you steal someone’s words, you should just do what I advise my journalism students: put a comma after it, and follow that with the word “said” and the name of the person who said it. No one will criticize you. Indeed, they’ll hail your research.

Surely Ms. Wente must have known this.

If you do it anyway and you get caught, well, awkward though your days may be, we’re still all better off if you respond to your literary malfeasance as Ms. Wente did than the tragic way chosen by Mr. Adachi.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

About Stephen Harper’s ambassadorial timeshare: maybe he missed the lesson on the Statute of Westminster!

by David Climenhaga on September 25, 2012 in Canadian Politics with 7 Comments

Canadian and British Joint-Embassy diplomats work out their timeshare arrangements. Below: The young Stephen Harper on the day he missed his history lecture after lingering too long over Atlas Shrugged; Perfesser Dave feeds lines to Opposition leader Tom Mulcair last weekend; Mr. Harper at the NCC.

Like Sir John A. Macdonald, a British subject I was born and now, apparently, a British subject I may die. What’s with that?

Or did I fail to get it right yesterday that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his gang of so-called Conservatives have decided to give up he trappings of independent nationhood and, just as the Scots are about to head out for the Highlands, go in with the British on a joint-venture diplomatic service?

This has got to be the weirdest story of the long, weird Harper government. Who thought we’d ever see the leaders of a sovereign nation state, even this one, so glibly toss aside the trappings of sovereignty and nation statehood?

What’s next, a cheerful bon voyage et bon chance to Quebec? (Scary answer: Don’t bet against it.)

What gives with these guys, anyway? Sovereign countries run by sensible politicians don’t just volunteer to stop being countries, even a piece at a time – not, leastways, until after a sustained bombing campaign by the U.S. Air Force and the other occupants of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Preferred Customer Lounge, formerly known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But Mr. Harper and his minister of foreign affairs, John Baird, have glibly done no less – all the while assuring us it’s just a cost-saving measure, doesn’t mean a thing, it’s simply a way to save Canada’s hard-working taxpayers a modest sum of free-floating Northern Credonias, or whatever the British-Icelandic-Canadian currency is called nowadays, by going back in with our previous colonial masters on their nice ambassadorial digs in Burkina Faso and what have you.

This prompted NDP Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair to sound like he was channeling Perfesser Dave and riff that there’s plenty more the Harperites could do next. “Why stop at the embassies,” he wondered. “They could merge our armed forces. No wonder they’re so nostalgic for the war of 1812! Why not merge the Senate with the House of Lords? It’s the same difference. …” (It is true, Mr. Mulcair and the Perfesser chatted over the weekend at the Alberta NDP convention, but I can assure you they didn’t talk about diplomacy.)

Seriously, speaking of the War of 1812, was the young Stephen Harper so excited about that conflict that he missed the lesson on the Statute of Westminster?

The Statute of Westminster, for those of you who voted for Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party and may like him have missed that class, has nothing to do with the port up the Fraser River from the offices of the market-fundy “institute” of the same name. Rather, it was a law passed in the British House of Commons in 1931 that essentially established Canada and the other dominions of the British Empire as independent countries.

Among other things, the Statute of Westminster meant that never no more would our Canadian interests abroad have to be represented by the British Legation, even before prime minister Pierre Trudeau got us our own Constitution with an amending formula and everything. At least, that is, until Messrs. Harper and Baird came along.

So, seriously, people … are they nuts? The answer, I think, is probably yes. Let me explain.

Canadians and the citizens of other Western democracies that have been pushed relentlessly to the right for the past 30 or so years still count on their most right-wing politicians to entertain a certain amount of sensible hypocrisy when spouting their foolish bromides.

They can’t actually believe that nonsense, we tell ourselves after a night like the one in May 2011 on which Mr. Harper and his party finally got their coveted majority government, so they’ll probably run the place in a pretty sensible fashion.

It’s like in George Orwell’s 1984, the Party – and especially the Inner Party – isn’t supposed to consume the same tripe they spout over the Prolefeed. It’s supposed to understand the true Party agenda and vision (a boot stomping on a human face forever).

Now, in deference to my one-time supervisor at the Globe and Mail, Peggy Wente, I have to confess that I didn’t actually write the previous line myself, but pretty much stole it outright from a blog post economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, just throwing in an extra word here and there to confuse the no-longer-so-anonymous blogger at Media Culpa. I just forgot to put quotation marks around it because I’m tired and have to get up in less than six hours and drive to Red Deer, and because, anyway, I don’t really care that I’m falling short of the Globe’s journalistic standards in terms of reasonable credit for the work of others because … oh, wait. I just provided reasonable credit!

Whatever… Don’t expect Ms. Wente to be punished very severely for her transgressions. She knows where most of the bodies are buried at the Globe, including who authorized the payments to Conrad Black for that column his driver used to bring her in his limo. (Really!)

Anyway, it’s kind of scary when you start unearthing bits of evidence that Mr. Harper might actually believe what he said back when he was the Top Dawg at the National Citizens Coalition (which, readers are reminded, isn’t national, doesn’t represent citizens and isn’t a coalition).

It’s sort of like finding out that Ronald Reagan was relying on a tarot card reader for advice and may have really believed it when he whispered into the microphone, “I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Alert readers will recall Mr. Harper’s actual words to the NCC’s Colin Brown Memorial Dinner in 1994: “Whether Canada ends up as one national government, or two national governments or several national governments is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion. … And whether Canada ends up with one national government or two governments or 10 governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be.”

In other words, yesterday’s embassy timeshare announcement suggests that Mr. Harper actually believes the kind of nutty tripe he spouts! He may sincerely be the pure, globalized market fundamentalist fruitcake that the more excitable residents of the tinfoil-hat-wearing corners of the blogosphere keep saying he is!

And if that’s the case, he really may not give a hang who represents us abroad, who owns all our bitumen or anything else – be it the British, the Chinese, the Americans, KPMG or Coca-Cola – as long as they share his market-fundamentalist convictions.

And if that’s really the case, we Canadians might just be advised to skid his loony government as quickly as possible while we still have a country!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Strikebreaker issues bizarre condemnation of Tory candidate for management role in strike

by David Climenhaga on September 17, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Centre By-election, Canadian Politics, Labour Relations, Media with 3 Comments

A strikebreaker drives across an early morning picket line during the Calgary Herald strike in early 2000. Below: Catharine Ford, Joan Crockatt.

It takes more than a little brass for retired Calgary Herald editor and columnist Catherine Ford to condemn Conservative candidate Joan Crockatt as someone who all but caused the strike at that newspaper in 1999.

In a Globe and Mail article last week that characterized the recently nominated Conservative standard-bearer in the upcoming Calgary-Centre by-election as a “polarizing candidate” – as a case can be made she is – Ms. Ford was quoted assailing Ms. Crockatt as “one of the main reasons workers went on a union drive in 1999 and ended up in long strike (sic).”

Ms. Ford also characterized Ms. Crockatt “as a ‘drive-by editor,’” which the Globe reporter helpfully described as “someone who makes significant changes in stories without consulting the writer.”

Just for starters, whatever Ms. Crockatt’s role in the Herald strike may have been – and it is said here it is preposterous to suggest she single-handedly provoked the strike or even was a major contributor to it – Ms. Ford also played a significant role in assisting the company to hurt her co-workers by busting their union.

That is to say, Ms. Ford was a strikebreaker. She lent her prestige, her high profile in journalism and Calgary society, and her undoubted talents as a scribe to writing for the Herald while her friends and colleagues took the risks and walked the picket line. And for what? Heaven knows. Her future was more secure than those of most of the journalists who actually stood up for the principles she had long claimed to espouse. It makes no difference that she crossed our picket line “electronically” – filing her copy by email and telephone – rather than in person.

Ms. Crockatt, whatever her journalistic and leadership sins may have been during her short tenure as managing editor of the Herald, was not a strikebreaker. She was legitimately in management at the time and owed a duty to her employer to show up for work, if not to take any pleasure in it.

The characterization of Ms. Crockatt as a drive-by editor, by the way, is ours, the strikers, and not Ms. Ford’s. We had mean nicknames for Ms. Ford too, although there was no exclusivity in that. We had mean nicknames for almost everyone long before we contemplated joining a union, including one another.

“I have seen this woman at work,” Ms. Ford went on, according to the Globe’s account. “I do not trust her. I would not trust and I will not in any circumstances vote for her.”

In the years since the Calgary Herald strike, which began in November 1999, there has been a lot of myth making about what happened and why. I was the vice-president of Local 115A of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada throughout the strike and I left the Herald afterward rather than try to work for an organization that treated its employees so shabbily, so I think I speak with some knowledge of the situation.

Was Ms. Crockatt “one of the main reasons” we went on a union organizing drive in 1999? Her management style, which was interfering and immature, was a factor, to be sure, but not much of one, in my view. I would characterize her more as an annoyance.

It is simply absurd to suggest, as the Globe’s story does, that Ms. Crockatt was a major cause of the strike. Like all the managers, she took the party line, as was to be expected in such a situation. But in reality, her role was relatively minor. She was an unseasoned manager, and she certainly alienated some journalists through her approach to her job, and I suppose a few of them may have signed a union card as a consequence, but really that’s about it.

Either acting on her own or someone’s orders, she did shut down the informal newsroom group and told it to meet off-site to discuss journalists’ concerns. In doing that, it is true, she gave us one more reason to unionize.

But the underlying causes of the strike were our concerns about job security at a time when the employer’s attitude clearly indicated an interest in the idea of eliminating the jobs of more experienced (and thus more expensive) older workers, and perceived pressure from the publisher’s office to insert right-wing, pro-government editorializing into our fair, accurate and balanced stories.

By the way, while regular readers of this blog will recognize that I am not a huge fan of Conrad Black, I don’t blame him for the strike either. As proprietor, Mr. Black must have played a role in the conduct of the labour dispute, and it is hard to believe that he did not influence strategic decisions as the strike progressed. But he would have had very little to do with the fundamental origins of the strike.

Nor do I blame the leadership of our union, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers, although it can be criticized for making strategic errors that may have made the strike harder to settle – for example, the demonization of Mr. Black, which may have been fair enough in moral terms, but which was strategically counterproductive.

My personal view is that no one deserves more blame for the strike than Ken King, who was the publisher at the time we joined CEP, and who as such surely made the strategic assessments of the strength and commitment of the union that contributed to the way the employer conducted itself. As a union activist, of course, I was not privy to those discussions within Hollinger Inc., the company that owned the paper. But, ultimately, ex officio, the publisher was the company’s man on the ground in Calgary and must take responsibility for the way things unfolded.

The push for news coverage that reflected the views of corporate Calgary’s boardrooms also must have originated in the publisher’s office, and certainly not in the mind of Joan Crockatt!

Mr. King was replaced part way through the labour dispute, before the legal strike actually began, by Dan Gaynor, who had a reputation within Hollinger as a successful tough-guy, effective at dealing with unions. Mr. Gaynor too must shoulder some of the blame for the company’s conduct during the strike, and the fact it was needlessly prolonged. However, he certainly wasn’t responsible for the simple reason he wasn’t publisher when we started down that road.

There were likewise many senior executives in Hollinger who surely understood that the striking employees were good people who had loyally served the company, and who would have accepted a reasonable or even a significantly inferior contract to settle the strike. But they too became caught up in the dispatches they were receiving from their leaders on the ground – led by the publisher of the day, whoever that was – and allowed the travesty to continue.

The false promises and cowardly decisions of the leaders of the Graphic Communications International Union in Washington, D.C., our supposed union brothers, also helped to encourage the strike, prolong it and ultimately contributed significantly to the defeat the strikers. Finally, the role of the Alberta Labour Relations Board was an utter disgrace, which rankles to this day.

So to cast Ms. Crockatt as the cause of the strike, or even a significant contributor to it, is risible. For heaven’s sake, one of her key roles once the strike was under way – if reports from inside the Herald Bunker are to be believed – was to deliver a welcome cake to strikers who had given up and gone back to work!

Anyway, the fact that Ms. Crockatt was an inexperienced manager or a lousy editor does not strike me as a sound reason to vote against her in the Calgary Centre by-election.

If you’re going to vote against Joan Crockatt, do it because she advocates a heartless and harmful economic philosophy and because the party she is standing for increasingly represents an existential threat to the survival of a unified Canada.

As for Ms. Ford, she and Ms. Crockatt were on the same union-busting team. For her to now attack Ms. Crockatt’s role in the strike is bizarre. If she so distrusted Ms. Crockatt, she should have said something in 1999!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Neocon slapheads beware! This may not be just a Frank Prank?

by David Climenhaga on September 14, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Media with 6 Comments

The message from worried Canadians, in and out of uniform, to former Frank publisher Michael Bate. Below: Frank’s semi-iconic logo, Mr. Bate, a typical Frank cover from the Paul Martin era.

TORONTO

If you’re a Canadian politician, you should be afraid, very afraid.

Frank Magazine will soon be back… Or so it’s rumoured and so we fervently hope.

The last Canadians heard officially from former Frank editor and publisher Michael Bate, back in 2010, was that he’d “morphed into a Canadian composer.” Like, of music.

This was disheartening news. I don’t care if the guy is Charlie Flippin’ Parker, what our country needs is his ability to spin hilarious yarns, not to make music with a steel guitar and a mouth harp or even a battered old anglo-saxophone.

Back in 2008, Mr. Bate pulled the plug on his venerable effort to keep Canadian politicians (and labour leaders, and media meat puppets, and senior bureaucratic elflords … no one was safe) honest. It wasn’t making money any more, he said at the time, and was no longer in tune with the zeitgeist of the era.

The publication was usually described as “a satirical magazine” or “a Parliamentary tip-sheet,” either of which goes only part of the way to explaining the Frank phenomenon, and neither of which does the concept justice. It wasn’t just that Frank was scurrilous, it was that under Mr. Bate’s editorial hand it was scurrilous, laugh-out-loud funny and in possession of an unerring sense of where to strike to inflict maximum damage to deserving targets.

No one was safe – even former Frank contributors. All of the aforementioned categories of subject matter despised it, and prime minister Brian Mulroney was said to have a particular loathing for the publication, probably because of a contest thought up by Mr. Bate about who would deflower the then PM’s daughter.

Offensive, yes, but funny too given the way Mr. Mulroney was shamelessly using the lass to assist with his campaigning. There was also a regular feature, purportedly a diary written by Mr. Mulroney’s beloved wife Mila, known to Frankistes as “Imelda,” that was either a brilliant parody or really was written by Mila Mulroney!

Frank’s Remedial Media column was loved and hated in newsrooms across the land – loved by hard-pressed “sluggos,” that is, hated by the managers who made their lives a misery, a class of people who were notoriously unwilling to let anyone fearlessly report the media’s own foibles.

House o’ Labour happily skewered unions, specifically the people who ran them. But I’m sure there’d also be room under the general heading for the likes of the union-hating foes and their coruscating legalists. Now and again, as I recall, Frank would even go after the clergy. Identifying hypocrisy and cowardice among the puffed-up and self-righteous was Frank’s stock in trade, after all, and with Mr. Bate at the helm, no publication did better.

Loosely based on Britain’s Private Eye magazine – although Mr. Bate’s Canadian publication was always far funnier, at least from any vantage point on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, if as badly printed – Frank provided the useful function of a place where any unauthorized report from inside the Parliamentary Bunker or its environs could see the light of day. This was true no matter how shabbily researched the piece might be, but what the hey!

Just the same, often a week or two after a Frank report, a shamefaced little unattributed item could be counted on to show up saying pretty much the same thing in the pages of the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star.

Another staple was the Frank Prank, in which Parliamentarians and media had the opportunity to prove just how dumb they were, or, occasionally, weren’t. Case in point: In 2007, the Canadian Magazines blog reports, Frank fooled everyone by setting up a completely bogus support group for Conrad Black, then facing legal troubles in the United States.

Lord Black is now happily back in the land of his birth if not of his citizenship, so that function has been taken over by his Lordship’s Sherpas in the stenography department of the National Post and in the Harper cabinet. “I am again flattered by such a thing. I will give you all CONRAD WILL WIN shirts when you are here,” Lord Black is said to have written “Alistair Smith,” who, naturally, turned out to be Mr. Bate.

And speaking of his Lordship, who can forget Conrad’s Prison Diary, another product of the same imagination that gave us the Diary of Mo and Mila (Mo being Maureen McTeer) and the musings of Royal Canadian Legionnaire Dick Little. (Aesthete’s Diary in the early nineties is said to have been penned by none other than Michael Coren!)

Frank had its own private argot: men with balding pates were known as slapheads, over-enthusiastic authors of press releases risked being known as “wind therapists,” those rare journalists who actually did work were inevitably “sluggos,” government media spokesthingies were labelled “fart catchers,” broadcasters were “bingo callers” or “sock puppets,” bullying corporatists “obbergruppenfuhreren.” Drink too much and Frank might record your more “moist and garrulous” moments. And all that’s without even getting into details of what Canada’s notorious stickmen, avid pianists, flautists, ardent heterosexualists and the like might be getting up to.

Frank was founded in 1987 in Halifax, and a Halifax edition still exists. The Bluenose edition was published separately throughout the interregnum, never made any sense and still doesn’t. (It can be found at Frankmagazine.ca if you don’t believe me.) The two totally different editions shared a masthead and logo at least part of that time.

Mr. Bate’s “Central Canadian Edition” started publication two years later and managed to survive until its majority. It wasn’t run by Mr. Bate throughout that time, however, and therein lay a significant part of its problem, which it is said here was not so much with the zeitgeist but the fact the fellow who bought it from Mr. Bate and tried to run it for a spell in the early Zeroes just wasn’t very funny. Apparently he wanted to take it upscale. Well, that couldn’t be done, and it ought not to have been tried.

Now the rumour mill has it that Mr. Bate hopes to re-launch this important Canadian institution quite soon, possibly later this year. With the Globe in Mail a pathetic shadow of its former self, a revivified Frank would be a worthy challenger for the title “Canada’s National Newspaper.”

And if the zeitgeist isn’t right for Frank Magazine now – with Stephen Harper pulling the electoral levers behind the green curtain in Ottawa, the media reduced to flotsam by the reefs if the Internet and a separatist party back in power in Quebec City – well, Canadian civilization as we know it has already come to an end!

This is our nation’s hour of need. Your country calls you, Frank! You too, Bate!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

All hands to Damage Control! Edmonton Journal tips east-end printing press over the side

by David Climenhaga on August 13, 2012 in Media with 6 Comments

Some of the Edmonton Journal’s printers at work in the newspaper’s Eastgate printing plant, which will be shuttered next year, as described by Journal Publisher John Connolly, who is pictured below.

So much for the power of the press. As first reported in this space on Oct. 10, 2010, the floundering Edmonton Journal is about to push its valuable – or expensive, anyway – printing press in Edmonton’s East End over the side.

Starting next summer, the Journal announced yesterday, the moribund Alberta daily will contract out the work now done at its Eastgate plant to the Gazette Printing facility operated in St. Albert by Greatwest Newspapers, which publishes the St. Albert Gazette and other community papers.

Significantly, according to the short story in the Journal, “the change will provide the Journal with better reproduction, more colour and greater size flexibility for the print edition.” (Italics added by me, as Gore Vidal would have said.)

In other words, it’s likely only a matter of time before the Journal shrivels into a tabloid, a format familiar to the paper’s Sunnified senior managerial ranks. At that point, one supposes, readers will begin to refer to it regularly as “The Little Paper That Shrank.”

Evidently there were no buyers for the outdated plant, so the Journal will simply shut the doors and lay off its 70 unionized printers. “We are excited about the new possibilities for more colour and better reproduction,” Journal publisher John Connolly said. “However, we are sorry to be losing many of our dedicated Journal staffers.” Well, somewhat sorry, anyway.

Alert Alberta Diary readers will now be waiting for the other shoe to drop – that is, the prediction also made here in the fall of 2010 that this closing was but a step down the garden path to an all-Internet operation, along the lines of Seattle’s venerable Post-Intelligencer, at least for the time before the Journal gasps its last.

That may yet happen, of course, but not for a spell. The Journal will try publishing first without its Sunday edition, which was shut down on June 15. And after that, there is still the option of going to two or three print editions a week, like the New Orleans Times-Picayune, while a desperate search by Journal owner Postmedia News for a buyer continues.

Since the Journal pulled the plug on its Sunday edition, the competing tabloid Edmonton Sun boasts, the Sunday Sun’s circulation has increased by 6,000 and its one-off sales of Sunday papers by 4,000 copies for a net gain of 10,000 additional papers sold.

Interestingly, the non-union Greatwest press in St. Albert is owned half-and-half by a corporate partnership made up of Jamison Newspapers Inc., which is property of St. Albert’s Duff Jamison, and Vancouver-based Glacier Ventures International Corp., a company that started out selling bottled water and later enjoyed a significant if confusing involvement by David Radler.

Readers will recall that Mr. Radler was once a business partner of Conrad Black, before the two had a falling our over their concurrent legal troubles south of the Medicine Line. Mr. Radler was the newspaper owner – known unfondly as “the Eradicator” by his unfortunate employees – who is said to have boasted he gave Canada “the three-man newsroom, and two of them sell ads.”

Like Mr. Radler, Mr. Black – also known as Lord Black of Crossharbour – spent a period of time in the United States free of the responsibilities of newspaper ownership.

Mr. Radler now runs a company called Alberta Newspaper Group Inc., which owns several small Alberta publications including the Medicine Hat News (once owned by the same company as the Edmonton Journal) and the Lethbridge Herald (once owned by the same company as the Globe and Mail), plus some in other provinces.

For his part, Mr. Black has recently returned to Canada after his sojourn abroad and is said to be pondering acquiring some newspapers anew with what remains of his fortune.

Perhaps one or the other of these gentlemen – or even both, happily together once again – will take a look at the Edmonton Journal now that it has shed its inconveniently unionized printing operation.

Black is the new Red: Why Stephen & Jason love Conrad more than they love Canadians

by David Climenhaga on May 7, 2012 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
Powerful symbolism, no matter how you look at it: Lord and Lady Black. Below: Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, Canadians. Did any of us ever truly doubt – even for an instant – that the “Conservative” government of Stephen Harper would not welcome Conrad Black back to the Canadian fold as soon as the American correctional authorities escorted him to the border and handed him his coat and hat?

Do you now imagine Lord Black isn’t here in Canada to stay?

Well, if you do, disabuse yourself of that notion!

Whatever you may think about Lord Black’s renunciation of his Canadian citizenship, the incontrovertible legal facts of his criminal conviction in the United States, or the appropriateness of welcoming this divisive former citizen and jailbird back to Canada, he has a blank cheque to remain in this country as long as he pleases: one year, five years, whatever.

Count on it, if the Harper Government remains in power, Lord Black is going to get his Canadian citizenship back as well, and he’s going to get to keep his Order of Canada, and he’s going to remain a member of the Queen’s Privy Council of Canada. Indeed, so warm are the feelings of the Harper Government for his Lordship, who would bet with confidence against it naming him Governor General or stamping his face on the new three-dollar coin they’re no doubt planning as a replacement for the penny?

So never mind the intentionally deceptive suggestions emanating from official Ottawa and the equally official news columns of the tame right-wing media that this notorious non-citizen’s stay in Canada is merely on sufferance, just a one-year temporary permit that can be revoked if circumstances warrant.

That’s just a soothing little bromide to shut you up and get you back to attending to your own insignificant and impecunious existence while the Harper Government carries on taking care of business – which, in this country, means taking care of the government’s pals and cronies in business, of whom Lord Black is most assuredly one.

Officially, the Globe and Mail pleaded with us to act like Canadians and forgive his Lordship for renouncing his citizenship (and insulting the rest of us who remained here in what he once called this “Third-World dump run by raving socialists”), reminding us that Canada is a place “of second chances for all.” (Well, all but Omar Khadr, who actually is a Canadian, but never mind that just now.)

But the triumphalism emanating from elsewhere on the nation’s editorial pages is a better guide to what our prime minister’s coterie, including his jumped-up little twerp of a citizenship minister, to borrow a felicitous phrase of Lord Black’s coinage, really thinks about him … and about us.

“We warmly welcome you back to Canada, Conrad Black,” slavered the National Post, which Lord Black founded to help elect people like Mr. Harper and the execrable Mr. Kenney, who as part of his cabinet role is Canada’s chief arbiter of ideological purity. “At the National Post offices in Toronto, you will forever be among friends.”

“I doubt that Lord Black is worried about the reception he will get back in Canada,” panted the Globe and Mail’s Peggy Wente in a typically lickspittle paean to the wealthy. “He’s already being swamped with dinner invitations.” And surely Ms. Wente is hoping to get one too from one of the society hostesses who are lining up to fete his Lordship.

Notwithstanding the enthusiasm for the return of this prodigal non-Canadian – for surely the purchaser of Lady Black’s infamous $62,000 birthday party was that! – there are, as several conservative commentators have pointed out in an effort to deny the Harper Government was being anything but beneficent and disinterested when it eased his Lordship across the border, some political risks associated with this decision.

So why did they risk it?

For one thing, as Ms. Wente states explicitly, many in Canada’s political and business elite believe his Lordship did nothing wrong. “Actually,” she wrote, “some of the smartest people in Toronto doubt there was a crime at all, and if there was, it wasn’t much of one.” (The cautious Globe editorialist observed while pleading for mercy, however, “Lord Black may not accept that he did wrong, but the U.S. Supreme Court did, and that is enough to establish the basic facts for Canada.”)

Regardless of the merits of the U.S. justice system, this tells us a lot about the Harper Government’s worldview and the place of the business classes in it. For, it is said here, if any attitude exemplifies the Harper Conservatives it is the notion the rules are for the rest of us, but they do not apply to the Masters of the Universe who call the shots in Ottawa, Toronto and Calgary.

More important, to them Lord Black is an avatar of that class of international business people whose market fundamentalist ideology continues to cause so much unhappiness in this world – grief that is now being meted out on the employees of Parks Canada and other federal departments but that will come to the rest of us in due time if we permit it.

So the Harperites may try to appeal to our basest feelings of nationalism as a way to try to control our behaviour – as we were called last summer to the irrelevant barricades of the War of 1812 by Parks Canada. But their true model is the globalized corporation that owes allegiance or obedience to no sovereign national authority, least of all Canada’s, and indeed can bend nations to its will.

So Lord Black is not just a friend of many in this neo-Con Harperite government, and as such deserving ex officio of special treatment, he is a clamorous symbol of the new totalitarian internationalism Harperism represents and exists to promote.

Just like the old totalitarian internationalism – the Red Army variety, not the Red State kind – the market fundamentalism of the Harper Conservatives justifies its actions as the historically inevitable creation of an ideologically pure and perfect world but delivers little but suffering for the bulk of humanity left in its wake.

It is said here the symbolic power to the Harperites of Black as the new Red is one of the key reasons they are so willing to take risks to ensure Lord Black’s comfortable return to Canada, and why they have never had any intention of paying the slightest attention to what the rest of us think.

Simply put, Lord Black is their kind of guy. We Canadians are not.

The answer is not to complain much more about Lord Black, or indeed to pay him much heed at all. We’re stuck with him now, but he’s really not much more than a largely irrelevant if occasionally irritating sidebar to this story,

The answer is to do as the people of France and Greece were doing yesterday and purge these detestable ideologues from our government at the first opportunity. To this end, the easy return of Lord Black to Canada is a helpful symbol of our own.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Today’s anniversary of a year of Tory rule in Ottawa: it just doesn’t get any better than this!

by David Climenhaga on May 2, 2012 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments
Contemplating the thought of three more years of Stephen Harper. Below: Mr. Harper himself.

Tory times, as the old saying goes, are terrible times. So it should surprise no one that as we mark the first anniversary of Stephen Harper’s majority victory today, the country is increasingly polarized, students are in the streets of Quebec where separatism is again rearing its head, and mean-spirited pink slips are being handed out right and left to public employees accompanied by the pitiless rah-rahs of the Online Tory Rage Machine, parts of which apparently operate out of the United States.

Here in Edmonton and presumably anywhere else in Canada “law-abiding gun owners” can buy an inexpensive Russian SKS assault rifle, complete with a bayonet and an unlimited supply of dirt-cheap full-metal-jacketed 7.62 mm ammunition, all without the nuisance of having to register any of it. A great gun for gopher hunting, they say, and one supposes the bayonet is particularly useful in that regard.

Indeed, you may need your SKS to hunt gophers if you want to eat before your pension kicks in, which pretty soon won’t be until you’re a couple years closer to 70 thanks to Mr. Harper’s neo-Con need to save money for military hardware at the expense of the elderly while fostering a sense of economic crisis.

If squirrels and gophers just won’t do the trick, maybe you can wander up to Banff or Jasper and pick off an elk or a big-horn sheep – by the sound of it there won’t be nearly as many Park Service employees watching out for you as there used to be.

Of course, the survival of any wildlife may be in doubt thanks to the parlous state of the natural environment, with environmental regulations being gutted right and left so that industrial development can proceed at the lunatic pace demanded by the foreign companies we’re selling out to as quickly as possible. And why not? It’s our grandchildren, not some Chinese or Middle Eastern corporate boss’s, who are going to have to clean up the mess!

We haven’t yet got a dead zone like the one around Chernobyl, back in the former USSR where they make all those lovely SKSes for export, but give it a couple more years.

Of course, you’d better be careful about speaking out about any of this, especially if you take some foreign money to run your environmental charity’s mimeograph machine, or the Canada Revenue Agency will come down on you like the proverbial ton of kiln-baked bricks.

Mind you, these rules only apply to people and organizations on Mr. Harper’s lengthy and Nixonian enemies list. Apparently it’s quite OK for the notorious U.S.-based Koch Brothers to shovel tens of thousands of dollars into the coffers of the market fundamentalist Fraser Institute, which enjoys “charitable” status in Canada and the friendship of the government.

Now, among the Fraser Institute’s and the Koch Boys’ shared dislikes is free collective bargaining. No worries there, the Harper government hates it too, and intervenes in labour negotiations on the side of the employer any chance it gets – just say Air Canada, or Canada Post.

But if you’re an employer and dealing with uppity Canadian employees is still getting you down, thanks to the Tories you’re now allowed to hire “temporary foreign workers” and pay them indentured-slave wages Canadians won’t work for. This is said to be popular with companies that bankroll the Conservatives.

Did I forget anything? I mean, other than Mr. Harper’s plan to slowly choke off federal funding for uniform public health care programs across the country? Without consulting the provinces, of course.

Don’t worry about it. You may not need health care anyway if you eat some listeria-laden luncheon meat unchecked by a federal food inspector, which you likely wouldn’t have heard about because the CBC has closed another station.

Meanwhile, we Canadians may not be able to afford park workers or equal access to health care, but, by God, we’re still going to get those F-35s, the stealth fighter-bomber that isn’t stealthy if it has to carry enough gas to intercept a bomber from Russia and that costs a million dollars to repaint – which you have to do every time you change the oil or put in a new spark plug, or whatever you do to routinely service a $100-million-plus aircraft with the aerodynamics of one of those kiln-baked bricks. Plus, of course, you can’t see out of it and the radios don’t work.

Speaking of the armed services, it looks as if we’ll now be spending a few more billions – and God knows how many more gallons of Canadian blood – fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan for … some reason. Maybe ensuring that adequate supplies of heroin produced by President Hamid Karzai’s family make it to Vancouver, where Mr. Harper would like to close down the Insite supervised injection site.

Did I miss anything, I mean, other than the fact Jason Kenney, Mr. Harper’s minister of immigration and citizenship, has taken a break from turning away qualified immigrants to celebrate the anniversary by inviting disgraced newspaper tycoon Conrad Black into the country after the man first impolitely renounced his citizenship and was then convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in the democracy next door.

Yeah, well, it’s only been a year. Conservative government: It just doesn’t get any better than this!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

About Conrad Black’s return: surely Canadians deserve honest answers

by David Climenhaga on May 1, 2012 in Uncategorized with 8 Comments
Lord Black gesticulates at Communications Energy and Paperworkers Local 115A President Andy Marshall in 1999. Below: Omar Khadr, Jason Kenney, George Galloway, Farouk Adatia.

Let’s mark this international day of the worker by having a grown-up discussion about the readmission to Canada of Conrad Black, the former Canadian citizen and newspaper tycoon, now that he is about to be released from prison in the United States.

We can do this without saying much at all about Lord Black, complimentary or otherwise, other than to acknowledge that he is no longer a citizen of this country and that he was convicted of a criminal offence in a neighbouring democracy with a properly functioning judicial system.

As a result of a ruling of the Canadian Supreme Court, as the Globe and Mail reported yesterday morning, Lord Black cannot be admitted to this country “without the special permission of the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.”

According to the Globe, “a government official said Monday that the court wasn’t referring specifically to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and that it will be bureaucrats in his department who will decide whether Lord Black gets a dispensation.” (Emphasis added.)

But notwithstanding the Globe’s servile verbiage, at last report Mr. Kenney was in fact the Minister of Immigration of Canada. So, since Lord Black is a controversial figure who very publicly, and some of us would say quite insultingly, renounced his Canadian citizenship long before his legal troubles began, and whose contributions to this country’s public life are furthermore subject to widely divergent perceptions, Mr. Kenney really can’t wriggle off the hook by blaming his decision on faceless officials in his employ.

No, for good or ill, whether or not he decides to allow Lord Black to return to Canada, and whether or not all Canadians approve of his decision, the Chief Gatekeeper and Censor of Canada who banned George Galloway from our shores and who has actively road-blocked the return of the child soldier Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who has done nothing to warrant criminal charges in this country, is going to have to wear this decision himself.

The newspaper also quoted the Canada Border Services Agency as stating most foreigners with criminal convictions are inadmissible to enter and remain in Canada, and that people with “previous criminality” normally must wait five years after the completion of their sentence before applying for permanent residency in Canada.

So it would seem clear from this that if Mr. Kenney decides to readmit Lord Black, he will be stretching and bending the rules to accommodate him.

And if Mr. Kenney is prepared to do that, assuming that he is an honourable public servant, the only conclusion available to us would be that he had determined that readmitting Lord Black to Canada is in the national interest.

Given this, it is very clear that whatever Mr. Kenney decides to do, he owes it to Canadians to explain clearly the reasoning and justification for his decision.

It is said here that this is a necessary precondition to the readmission of Lord Black to Canada. Moreover, since the man apparently has a few supporters here, a refusal to do so probably deserves an explanation too.

If Mr. Kenney refuses to come clean about his reasoning and Lord Black is permitted to return to our shores without explanation, Canadians will be left with no alternative but to conclude that under our so-called Conservative government there is one law for the rich and well connected and another for the rest of us.

Lord Black’s U.S. prison term is scheduled to end on Saturday, but he expected to be able to leave prison on Friday. We can be confident that he will attempt to return to his native land, which he once took pains to ensure was not also his home, as soon as possible thereafter.

Stephen Carter departs Premier Alison Redford’s office

Stephen Carter, for a time Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s chief of staff and more recently her campaign manager, has departed from her service, the Premier’s Office announced in a news release yesterday.

Whether or not Mr. Carter’s recent campaign was a glowing success or, as was suggested here yesterday, “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” will probably be forever controversial. However, it ended well from both the premier’s and Mr. Carter’s perspective, so it is likely a case of “no harm, no foul.”

It is hard to imagine that Mr. Carter will have much difficulty finding politicians willing to pay him handsomely to assist with their campaigns in light of the way this story ended on April 23.

Ms. Redford has named Calgary lawyer Farouk Adatia, the former Chief Financial Officer of her leadership campaign, as her chief of staff.

Mr. Adatia is proof that you can’t keep a good man down, at least if he’s a Conservative in Alberta that’s a friend of the premier.

Before the last election, Mr. Adatia tried for the PC nomination in Calgary-Hawkwood, but was unsuccessful. Then it was rumoured he was about to be appointed as Tory candidate in Calgary-West after the first nomination there was controversially overturned by the party. When that didn’t happen, he was appointed as Conservative candidate in Calgary Shaw.

Alas, on election night he was defeated in that riding by the Wildrose Party’s candidate.

Now, it would seem, God’s in his heaven, Mr. Adatia’s in the premier’s office and all’s right with the world!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Be thankful for our Canadian Charter of Rights, 30 years old today, and remember who hates it

by David Climenhaga on April 17, 2012 in Uncategorized with 13 Comments
April 17, 1982: The Queen signs the Constitution as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then Canada’s prime minister, looks on, apparently bemused. Below: The Charter; a sterner Mr. Trudeau.

CALGARY

Today is the 30th anniversary of our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On April 17, 1982, Queen Elizabeth signed our new Canadian Constitution, of which the Charter is part.

It should come as no surprise that the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper – normally so obsessed with history, at least when it involves feats of arms – is ignoring this turning point in Canadian history.

Part of this, naturally, is mere partisan politics. The Constitution would not have “come home,” and the Charter would not be enshrined in law, had in not been for a Liberal prime minister, and one unpopular in Mr. Harper’s circle to boot: Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

More significantly, however, it would be fair to say that the far right in Canada, of which Mr. Harper is part, dislikes the Charter, and certain extremist elements of the right despise and abhor it. Is his concern about “constitutional divisions” sincere? Not very likely.

The Charter is enormously popular among ordinary Canadians in all provinces, including Quebec, however, because they understand immediately and intuitively that stating clearly what our rights are in a document that overrides all other laws is an effective way to protect citizens from the wealthy and the mighty who throughout history have always acted in their own class interests.

The Charter is an imperfect document, the product of a difficult compromise. But most of us know we are much better off with it than without it, and we are thankful to Mr. Trudeau for pressing forward determinedly on his constitutional project throughout 1981 and into 1982.

Critics of the Charter, like Mr. Harper and former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, usually base their critiques in the notion we somehow had more rights when Parliament was supreme and our rights were traditional but undefined. Because the Charter is popular they tend to couch their criticisms in the bloodless language of pedantry.

So, Mr. Harper said in the Globe and Mail on June 13, 2000, “I share many of the concerns of my colleagues and allies about biased ‘judicial activism’ and its extremes. … Serious flaws exist in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Asked Mr. Manning: “Do Canadians enjoy more protection of their freedom because of a constitutionally entrenched Charter than the British do without one? I don’t think it’s made a quantum difference in that regard.”

But ordinary Canadians understand that our fundamental rights as individuals are far better shielded by a document that defines them and states which rights are protected than by Parliamentary and Common Law traditions that, as Mr. Harper has proved on more than one occasion, can be simply brushed aside and ignored without political consequences.

That is why – notwithstanding the far right’s obvious preference for what the PM has called “the traditional approach of common law and parliamentary supremacy,” which is to say the tyranny of the majority when they can muster the votes and of the wealthy minority when they can’t – the Charter is here to stay.

We can be confident that much harsher things are said about the Charter by its enemies in the privacy of their in right-wing clubs than are normally made available for public consumption. (Conrad Black has dismissed the Charter as “a farce” and “a nuisance that has turned many of our under-qualified judges into feckless social tinkerers.” And the ignorant blatherskites of the prime minister’s separatist-owned media auxiliary despise the Charter literally to this day, risibly and ironically dismissing it as a mere sop to French Canadians like their boss.)

As a consequence, most enemies of the Charter have moved from assailing it directly to trying to use it to advance their own corporatist hobbyhorses and by attempting to subvert it through various stratagems.

So the likes of Mr. Harper and Wildrose Party campaign strategist Tom Flanagan have used the Charter to fight against such democratic reforms as legislation imposing contribution limits during election campaigns on the spurious grounds they abridge free speech and to argue restrictions on two-tier health care interfere with our freedom. Said Dr. Flanagan: “The ban on private health is an obvious abuse of an individual’s rights.”

Undermining the Charter through subversion takes the form of appointing judges who can be counted on to direct partisan judicial activism in a rightward direction, and campaigning to eliminate human rights commissions to make the defence of our rights more difficult and expensive, as is now being proposed by the Wildrose Party.

A conference in 2006 organized by leader Danielle Smith and Link Byfield, the party’s candidate in the Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock riding northwest of Edmonton, explored some of these themes and concluded, according to Mr. Byfield’s website, that “the courts should be restrained from inventing new laws under the Charter.”

By this, it is said here, he meant keeping the Charter from protecting individuals’ rights when they are in conflict with the corporate agenda.

Mr. Byfield is also the founder of the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy, which stands, among other things, against expanding the influence of the Charter.

As quoted yesterday in this blog, Ms. Smith herself advises exploiting the weaknesses in the Charter by drafting laws that go as far as possible to abridge our rights through administrative rules without pulling the constitutional fire alarm. “Politicians are wily enough to find a way to violate Charter rights,” she explained in a column in the Calgary Herald on Jan. 14, 2006.

This is sadly true, and it is worthwhile remembering that many of the movers and shakers in the Wildrose Party as it creeps toward its goal of a reverse takeover of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives are friends neither of our Charter nor of our Charter rights.

Still, we are far better off with the Charter, which former New Democratic Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow described as a document that “embodies a set of values and ideals and principles that resonate with the Canadian public.”

So we should give thanks for it today, whether or not the Harper government ignores the anniversary, and remember both how we got it and who tried to keep us from having it.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The last insignificant link between the Calgary Herald and downtown Calgary will fall soon … but so what?

by David Climenhaga on January 10, 2012 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Brian Brennan, at left, accepting a piece of paper from a copy boy. Your blogger remembers that haircut, and thinks he had one a lot like it himself. As for the copy boy? That’s Roman Cooney, now VP of Communications for Alberta Health Services. Below: Brennan today.

It seems that the Calgary Herald is the only media organization some corporate executives will talk to when it comes to the news stories they’d rather not talk about.

This convoluted fact goes a long way to explaining why, even though the last link between that newspaper and downtown Calgary is about to fall, it makes little difference because the ties that mattered were severed ages ago. And not just in Calgary.

The other day, a blogger working for one of those online news aggregators – no doubt for mere pennies – plaintively recounted a problem she had encountered while researching a story about extreme corporate executive pay packages.

She wrote: “In the case of Niko Resources Ltd., whose CEO Edward Sampson pocketed $16.4 million in 2010 … an operator at the head offices explained that the company only entertains media requests from The Calgary Herald.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, you can hardly blame Niko Resources or Mr. Sampson, now, can you? I’m sure they’d be just as happy not talking at all about how much the boss took away last year. But since it sounds as if the Herald’s mandate now includes not reporting the sorts of things oilpatch CEOs don’t want reported, how convenient for them!

Alas, we’ve come a long way from 1930, when the Herald and four other Alberta Newspapers were honoured with a special Pulitzer Prize for what my friend Brian Brennan called in a recent post on his blog “its spirited crusade against the Social Credit government’s attempt to gag the press.”

In the post in question, Mr. Brennan lamented the fact that the 100-year-old Herald Building at 7th Avenue and 2nd Street in downtown Calgary, where both he and I worked together in the early 1970s, is about to be torn down to be replaced by a 50-storey office tower.

“A lot of good journalism was done in that building,” Mr. Brennan wrote – a good deal of which, I should add, was done by him. “A columnist for the competing Albertan used to dub our paper ‘The Old Grey Lady of 7th Avenue,’ which he intended as an insult but which we accepted as a compliment because of the obvious comparison with The New York Times. … We earned that trust by dint of hard work and independent reporting. We didn’t pander to politicians and we didn’t pander to advertisers.”

“I always felt we were standing on the shoulders of distinguished predecessors,” Mr. Brennan went on, “who believed their fight to preserve the freedom of the press was a fight for democracy itself.”

Well, he was right about that. That’s what we thought, and we were right. Alas, that fight is over now. It’s been lost – and not just at the Herald.

Indeed, it’s a little unfair for me to slam the Herald for the demise of journalism that is more than perfunctory because that is a trend throughout the media business – and it has been ever since newspapers like the Herald started, metaphorically and literally, to leave their cities behind.

They did it by abandoning their downtown offices for suburban plants where they could more easily distribute their products during rush hours, and they did it by abandoning their local ownership to out-of-town media barons would saw towns like Calgary and Edmonton as profitable cash generators but looked down their noses at local journalists and the local issues that mattered to them.

It was business decisions like the moves to suburban plants like the one the Herald opened in 1981 near Deerfoot Trail and Memorial Drive that contributed long before the Internet to the unhappy, and increasingly unprofitable, situation in which most of Canada’s urban dailies find themselves today.

The Herald’s new building – known as “The Bunker” during my tenure there – was a long enough and expensive enough cab ride from downtown, where the political and corporate decisions still got made, that it wasn’t long before corporate bean-counters in Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, or wherever they happened to be located that week, were discouraging such fripperies as actually going to an event to report on it. (The notable exceptions, of course, were hockey games.)

As Mr. Brennan put it better than me – as is so often the case – the Herald Building “was connected to the downtown’s beating heart in a way that’s never possible when you live in the suburbs. City Hall, the police station, the courts, the library, the school board and the corporate head offices were all within easy walking distance. We did most of our interviews in person, not over the phone. If a freight train had derailed near the Palliser Hotel, the Herald’s reporters and photographers would have gotten to the scene before the fire trucks.”

The irony of course, is that the technology and business practices that mandated the move to the Bunker on Calgary’s east side were soon irrelevant – the Herald switched to morning publication, partly eliminating the need for a suburban press location, and communications technology not long thereafter meant the press and the newsroom hardly needed to be at the same address.

As Mr. Brennan wondered back in 1981, why not leave just the editorial offices downtown? That’s what the Edmonton Journal did, and perhaps that’s why the Journal is arguably a marginally better newspaper than the Herald today.

Similarly foolish decisions were being made all over Canada at about the same time – another disadvantage of chain ownership.

Here in Ottawa, for example, where I am momentarily residing, the press and offices of the Citizen were moved in the same general time period to a location so far in the city’s west end that it’s practically on the Prairies – remote from all the things on Mr. Brennan’s list, and Parliament and the Supreme Court as well!

Canadian newspapers everywhere also switched from afternoon to morning publication at about the same time as the Herald – mainly to solve the traffic problem of moving papers from the downtown core at rush hour. This was also the problem the move to the suburbs was also supposed to fix. Morning publication guaranteed the news in their pages was almost a full day behind the electronic news cycle – another shot in the foot.

And finally, there was chain ownership – soon concentrated into the hands of people like Conrad Black and Izzy Asper. This resulted in an editorial creep toward the right, as well as the bleeding of editorial opinion into the news columns.

For all the constant justification by newspaper bosses that this reflected their readers’ biases – and their claims that what resulted was “fair, balanced and accurate” – it is said here readers didn’t like it. When the Internet came along, it was the opportunity many newspaper readers were waiting for to get out of info-dodge and find their news somewhere more agreeable to their centrist sensibilities.

Newspaper profits began to fade. Newspaper executives, whose minds and hearts had long ago left their cities and the people who lived in them, couldn’t figure out how to pick up the pieces.

Postmedia News, which owns the Calgary Herald, continues to talk about “transformation and revenue development” but like most of the rest of us remains unable to figure out how to generate sufficient profits from the Internet. According to a report in the Globe and Mail earlier this week, Postmedia still relies on print advertising, a dying medium, for 63 per cent of its revenue.

As for providing the kind of genuinely fair, balanced and accurate news coverage readers crave, it’s become instead the favoured medium of executives who want only to massage the news, or keep things out of it.

So yesterday the Globe reported on how Postmedia is begging Ottawa to let it sell its Canadian newspapers to foreigners. There was a day that would have seemed like an outrage. Today, it hardly matters.

As Mr. Brennan rightly noted, the Herald Building itself is of no particular architectural significance. Still, he wishes Calgary wouldn’t destroy the landmark.

On this one, though, I have to say think he’s guilty of sentimentality. Let it go. The last real links between the Calgary Herald and downtown Calgary fell a long time ago and nothing is likely to restore them.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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