CTV knuckles rapped by broadcast ethics panel for Dion interview

Posted by jsallot under All

Jeff Sallot

CTV News broke a promise to Stephane Dion when it broadcast the false starts by the then Liberal leader during a taped interview just days before the last election, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council says.
The council’s ethics panel said the network had given a commitment to Dion to edit out the start of the interview, a segment in which Mr. Dion did not seem to fully grasp interviewer Steve Murphy’s awkwardly worded question.

The panel’s full decision can be found here. 

Were ministers duped in Harkat security case?

Posted by jsallot under All

Jeff Sallot

A string of  Liberal and Conservative politicians should feel quesy today about their part  in the troubling case of Mohamed Harkat, an Algerian man Canadian intelligence agencies  want deported as an alleged security risk.

Two former Liberal ministers – Wayne Easter and Denis Coderre – and two ministers in the current Conservative government – Diane Finley and Stockwell Day – signed deportation warrants alleging Harkat is a threat to Canadian security.

Harkat’s supporters say that these would in effect become death warrants if the man is ever forced to return to Algeria. The Algerian regime deals harshly with suspected security threats.
But it now seems that the case against Harkat may have been cooked up, and the politicians fell for it. Read more…

Why?

Posted by ealboim under All

Elly Alboim

Two days into the $50 billion dollar deficit and I still don’t understand why. There are actually a few whys I don’t understand.

Why was the forecasting so far off?

Why has the deficit risen so high, so quickly?

And why are we getting a new deficit projection not even two months into the new fiscal year?

I was involved in ten full budget cycles while consulting at Finance Canada. I learned a lot about how the data flows in, how projections are made, what considerations come to bear in public reporting, and when in the cycle adequate certainty develops.

No part of what’s going on now makes much sense.

Read more…

Some pension suggestions

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

Further to Elly’s interesting post about pensions, some have been thinking about this for quite a while. Here’s what then Governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge suggested in a speech in Montreal in November 2005 needed to be done to address some of the concerns Elly quite correctly noted are even more important issues today.

“If defined-benefit plans are to survive, grow, and provide a source of funding for long-term, riskier assets, it is important that Canadian policy-makers consider taking steps to rebalance the incentives for sponsors to operate defined-benefit plans. Let me mention a few of the things that could be done.

Read more…

The looming politics of pensions

Posted by ealboim under Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Elly Alboim

Fixing the Canadian pension system is now emerging as one of the urgent public policy priorities arising from the financial meltdown. It is also becoming a significant political priority because not fixing it will likely have significant electoral consequences.

When Canada’s governments came together a decade ago to ensure the sustainability of the Canada Pension Plan, the result was a triumph of political will and good public policy. The CPP has become a hybrid somewhere in between a fully funded plan and the pay-as-you-go pyramid scheme that many other countries cling to because they are unwilling to set premiums high enough to sustain future benefits.

The CPP is now sound although its maximum annual pay out still falls below $10,000.

That achievement masked an earlier failure to come to terms with the future costs of the other part of the public pension system, Old Age Security and its low income companion program, the Guaranteed Income Supplement. The OAS is clawed back progressively as income grows but the claw back doesn’t fully recover all payments until fairly high (and politically sustainable) thresholds of income. It is also indexed against inflation. Further, eligibility is based on individual income not family income the way the GIS is. That means that a low income partner in a high income family still qualifies for OAS, sometimes at the full benefit level.

Read more…

Cable canoodling

Posted by padams under Media Commentary

Paul Adams

The CTV/Canwest Global campaign to get us to pay for their local stations through cable fees seems to be breaking new ground. Not only are the TV networks using their news programs to shill for their request to the CRTC individually, they have now teamed up to make the front pages of a Canwest newspaper part of their PR campaign.

Today’s Ottawa Citizen has a front page story celebrating the local CTV station’s “Save local television” event. 

A “huge crowd” turned out, and local anchor Max Keeping “appeared touched” by the crowd. 

There was no mention of the fact that CTV recently shut down the evening news at its “A Channel” affiliate here in Ottawa.

The fact that it is lobbying for an new cable fee is mentioned only near the end of the story and the likelihood that this would translate into an increase in cable rates for consumers is not mentioned at all.

Nor is there any indication that anyone at the Citizen phoned up the cable companies to hear their vociferous objections to the plan.

Luckily, Shaw Cable purchased a full-page add in the Citizen today making their case — the only place in the paper where it is acknowledged.

What a journalistic embarrassment.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton

PMs redux: Chretien and Mulroney still make news

Posted by jsallot under All, Media Commentary

Jeff Sallot

The private business affairs of two colourful  former prime ministers continue to play out publicly,  providing fresh material for journalists.

So, thank you Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien.

The Mulroney case, involving cash payments from a German lobbyist for arms dealers, has been unfolding at a commission of inquiry, making headlines for many days.

The next chapter in the Chretien story opens at the Supreme Court of Canada this month.
Mr. Mulroney threw The Globe and Mail, the paper that first broke the cash payments story,  a curve the other day when he testified editors had suppressed a related story that would have placed him in a better light.

That’s not what Globe editor Ed Greenspon remembers. He says Mr. Mulroney tried to barter his way out of trouble, promising to provide information for another explosive  story if the paper would spike the cash payments story.

Read more…

The negative cycle

Posted by ealboim under Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Elly Alboim

The Conservatives’ attack ads have unleashed a torrent of comment that splits along a traditional divide – those who find negative advertising morally repellent (particularly in the current economic context) and those who report on it dispassionately as a political tactic.

The latter group, almost exclusively journalists and political strategists, generally says that while negative ads are offensive to most, they “work” because they tend to move opinion among target audiences. That is indisputably correct in certain circumstances and at certain times. And because they work, it is hard to imagine political strategists foregoing their use.

Read more…

Ghosts of prime ministers past

Posted by padams under All

Paul Adams

As I was watching Brian Mulroney’s testimony on TV this morning I received an email drawing my attention to this recent letter to the Globe and Mail from Doug Gibson, who edited the memoirs of both Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin:

Toronto — Lysiane Gagnon (An Atypical Politician With A Pen – April 27) is unfair to Brian Mulroney when she includes him among Canadian politicians whose books were “written by professionals hired for the job.”

There is nothing wrong with using a ghostwriter; some of my best friends are ghostwriters. But credit must go to those who, like Mr. Mulroney, spend years working hard to write their own book. What he did was so remarkable that, as his editor, I decided to illustrate the hardcover edition’s endpapers with pages from his handwritten manuscript.

It would appear that Ms. Gagnon missed that edition of his Memoirs.

Publisher emeritus, Douglas Gibson Books

Paul Adams just learned this morning that he is one of Doug Gibson’s best friends. He is also a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty.

What I missed

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

Having been out of the country for a week where news about all the important political things happening in Canada is hard to find, here are a couple of observations.

Is there so little for the House of Commons to do that a committee really spent its time investigating the employer-employee relationship between an MP and caregivers hired to work for her family, including having the caregivers testify? I had thought Parliament couldn’t be more irrelevant than a committee investigating who should be the captain of Team Canada at the world hockey championships but I guess I was wrong.  I’d hold off though for a while though on those stories about more and more people don’t vote and why it is so hard to persuade good people to give up interesting careers to enter politics to help improve public policy. The answer is a little too self-evident at the moment.

With the media staggered by a collapse in advertising due to the recession, why is so much media attention being devoted to the Conservatives launching an advertising campaign against Michael Ignatieff, including all the details of the campaign and the ads? Wouldn’t it be smarter and certainly more financially rewarding to force the Conservatives to buy ads?

Finally there is a very good review by Ron Graham of Ignatieff’s book True Patriot Love in the latest Literary Review of Canada. Although he has written widely on a range of subjects, to those in politics Graham is best known as the writer of Jean Chretien’s two books, Straight from the Heart and My Years as Prime Minister.