Muzzle Watch 2010: PMO trying to shield Julian Fantino from media?

Stephen Harper was in Vaughan on Friday to help launch former top OPP and Toronto cop Julian Fantino's campaign as the Conservative candidate in the yet to be scheduled by-election.

A few interesting things emerged from the coverage, such as the revelation that apparently Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak didn't show him the love, or perhaps he might have run provincially.

This brief line in the Toronto Star story caught my eye though:

“I think this is the place that best fits my desires to make, hopefully, a significant difference on the things that threaten Canada, of which Vaughan is very much a part,” he told reporters after a Harper handler initially barred the media from speaking to him.

Could it be that the infamous Harper muzzle is back? After all, Conservative candidates have a long history of dodging the media, all candidates meetings, and other unscripted public interaction.

It appears Fantino has fought off the attempted muzzling, at least for now. He's certainly not the sort to calmly consent to keeping his mouth shut. We'll have to see if they try to slip the muzzle back on as the campaign gets underway.

I, for one, look forward to hearing what Fantino has to say on the issues of the day. Particularly on all the things he thinks threaten Canada, of which he assures us Vaughan is very much a part. Certainly, his past comments on a variety of issues have proved noteworthy.

Also, this site would seem worth watching: Conservatives Against Fantino.

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The Honourable Minister for Minitrue

I haven't been paying too much attention to the Conservative policy convention happening this weekend in Winnipeg. Which is probably how the Conservatives like it.

There has been news of a few wacky socially-conservative policies coming out of the Conservative membership. We'll see if they go anywhere but I'm doubtful. The powers that be, I suspect, will stage manage this thing pretty tiightly.

Speaking of which, that does seem to be the theme I've seen emerging from my cursory scanning of convention coverage: keeping the media far, far away from any potentially controversial discussions that may be happening.

A Tory spokesman said party officials made the decision to restrict the media from workshops until the roughly 2,000 delegates have a chance to discuss dozens of resolutions up for debate.

Resolutions include health-care privatization, declawing the Canadian Human Rights Commission, protecting the unborn from criminal violence and moving on creating balanced-budget legislation.

The media restriction will be lifted today and reporters will finally get a chance to find out what the Tory grassroots really think. The convention ends Sunday.

"Membership has its privileges," Charleswood-St.James-Assiniboia Tory MP Steven Fletcher said. Fletcher was recently appointed by Harper as minister of state for democratic reform.

Fletcher said the media blackout gives delegates a chance to get to the heart of issues. He compared the closed-door discussions to that of a private company charting its course.

But Fletcher said as a government, all new policy is open and transparent. A party spokesman fielding media complaints about the ban, said if reporters didn't like it they could join the party and become a delegate in the next convention.

I just wanted to share this passage because I find it delightfully Orwellian that the Conservatives dispatched their “minister of state for democratic reform” to explain why the media re being kept in pens, away from delegates discussing policy. What's next, renaming DND the Ministry of Peace?

If you're looking for some on the ground blog coverage of the doings in Winnipeg, Liberal blogger Danielle Takacs has been providing a lot of great coverage from the belly of the beast, and for an NDP perspective, Dr. Dawg is there as well.

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Join the muzzle watch at Harpocracy.ca

The Liberal Party’s BC campaign recently launched Harpocracy.ca, a new Web site that tracks and documents the epidemic of Conservative election candidates skipping all-candidates meetings, dodging media interviews, and otherwise avoiding public scrutiny and accountability.

The list began as primarily BC in focus, but is now going national in scope documenting Conservative candidate muzzlings across Canada. To date, some 67 muzzlings have been recorded, and more are being added daily.

There’s a form on the Web site where people can submit news of a Conservative candidate being muzzled in their own communities, and there’s also a list of quotes from when some Conservative candidates have, with unfortunate results, broken free of Stephen Harper’s muzzle and spoken their minds.

And for bloggers, there’s a dynamically-updated muzzle count widget you can add to your blog, which will be updated every time a new muzzling is recorded.

Check it out at www.harpocracy.ca, and start reporting your local Conservative muzzlings today.

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