If you’re a Canadian, be advised: Your government doesn’t want
you to know what lies herein. If you’re a blogger in Canada, you
may actually get in legal trouble for linking to this column.
Our neighbors to the north have been rocked for the past two
years by a political scandal, nicknamed Adscam, wherein advertising
companies, ostensibly hired to run ads for the government, got
enormous contracts for doing little or no work; the money has long
been rumored to have slid back into the campaigns of Liberals,
Canada’s ruling party of the left.
Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed a commission last year, led
by Justice John H. Gomery, to investigate the scandal. While most
of the Gomery Commission’s activities have been public, some of the
most explosive testimony is subject to a “publication ban,” for the
stated reason that it may bias related criminal trials.
But unlike secret grand jury testimonies here in the States, the
Gomery Commission is not acting in private. The contents of the
testimony are an open secret in Ottawa, where the proceedings are
open to the public and a TV feed is broadcast to many newsrooms. In
other words, the testimony is accessible to the political and
journalistic elite, just not to the average Canadian, who the
Liberals have apparently been robbing for years.
Or rather that was the case, until someone leaked information on
some of the banned-in-Canada testimony to Ed Morrissey, the
Minnesota-based proprietor of Captain’s
Quarters, who, like all Americans, is as impervious to Canadian
censorship as Superman is to bullets. (Canadians are flocking to Morrissey’s blog in huge numbers, so
be patient if it takes longer than usual to load.) Morrissey has
published numerous details on the testimony of Jean Brault,
president of the ad agency Groupaction, that Canadian reporters
can’t.
The “sponsorship program” guaranteed a monopoly on government
advertising for five Liberal-connected firms, including
Groupaction. Morrissey reports that according to Brault’s
testimony, the sponsorship program developed into a $250 million
slush fund, over $100 million of which was paid to these firms for
doing next to nothing. (It is not always clear from Morrissey’s
reporting when he is talking about US or Canadian dollars; the
Canadian dollar is currently worth about 82 US cents.)
In return, Brault says he participated in hundreds of thousands
of dollars worth of transactions designed to benefit the Liberal
Party. He says that he hired “employees” who were in fact working
full time for the Liberals, including then-Prime Minister Jean
Chretien’s brother Gaby. Brault also testified that he paid
invoices to other companies for work actually done for Liberal
campaigns, and that he made large, untraceable cash donations to
Liberal officials.
Why is Morrissey reporting all this? Why am I repeating it?
Quite simply, the publication ban is an abomination. The
condescending notion that the jury in Brault’s criminal trial might
be irretrievably biased by media reports hardly justifies keeping
ordinary Canadians in the dark about things that Ottawa’s
cognoscenti can’t stop talking about. Canadian television reporters
show images of Brault weeping on the stand, but then say,
farcically, they can’t reveal what made him break down. (He’d just
recounted how he was told to hire a Liberal crony or lose a
contract with Via Rail, Canada’s state-run passenger train
service.) Canada’s attorney general has already talked about
pursuing Canadian bloggers merely for linking to Captain’s
Quarters, possibly charging them with contempt of court. What makes
the ban especially disturbing is the rumor that the Liberals could
call a snap election before the testimony becomes public to avoid
accountability at the polls.
As Canadian blogger and sometime TAS contributor
Colby Cosh
notes, free expression is a fundamental right under Canada’s
Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Judges are advised to use
publication bans sparingly and with grave concern for Charter
principles, and — unlike many Canadian judges — Gomery actually
did so, in such a way that suggests he might be amenable to lifting
the ban. The efficacy of the ban is a factor in the decision to
lift it or continue it; the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that
an infringement on Charter liberties must have a “rational
connection” to the intended benefit. If Americans are reporting
what Canadians cannot, the argument for the ban weakens. And so,
writes Cosh, “it would actively help free the hands of
Canadian webloggers and reporters if our foreign cousins
were to be aggressive about “publishing” the substance of the
Brault testimony outside the reach of Canadian law” (emphasis
his).
Happy to oblige.
