Outing Tory Pals Costs Newspapers
Co-Defendants Don Martin and Rod Love...
A judge has ordered a Conservative lawyer and Canada’s largest newspaper chain to jointly pay this reporter and former candidate the costs of a key court application in the defamation lawsuit Kent v. Martin, National Post. Read More...
Cleaning
Windows
There’s a kind of mire obscuring our view of Alberta, Canada’s energy province.
It’s the residue of a tired, underachieving government, a political party that has been in power for far too long, forty years and counting.
The PC party machine is ring-fenced by appointees and patronage seekers, a network of dependants whose blind allegiance insulates the party leadership, cabinet and caucus from the dreams and everyday needs of Albertans.
This website doesn’t claim to have all the answers for our so-called “democracy deficit.”
But we can do a little window cleaning.
A Broken
Government
It is a government running on empty.
That's sadly ironic given that Alberta's Progressive Conservatives are perched on a wealth of energy resources.
A once-great party of the people, the PCs have been undone by their leaders’ rigid, authoritarian ways and their rank incompetence in managing the province’s business.
The government has lurched from one policy disaster to another.
Consider the PC government’s forlorn hallmarks since its last election victory four years ago…
Big Media
News Blues
They were once the proud mastheads of one of North America’s most respected newspaper chains, the Southam group.
Then Canada’s dominant urban dailies, titles like the Ottawa Citizen and the Calgary Herald, endured two painful changes of ownership.
Editorial and managerial upheavals brought on by Conrad Black (1996-2000) and Canwest’s Asper family (2000-2010) widened old fault lines and cracked open new ones.
It was this fractured landscape that produced the journalistic malpractice we chronicle in these web pages.
Death By
Lawyers
It is the tactic of first and last resort for many big corporate defendants who find themselves called into court for breaking the law: delay.
Delay, by shunning opportunities to avoid lawsuits in the first place.
Delay, by instructing lawyers to frustrate the scheduling of even the most basic pre-trial tasks.
And most cowardly of all, procedural delay: throwing obstructions in the plaintiff’s path, and transforming the truism “justice delayed is justice denied” into a game plan.
We’ve coined a jocular tag for the practice: Death By Lawyers.
Court Rejects Godfrey's Escape Bid
An attempt by newspaper mogul Paul Godfrey to be removed as a named defendant in Kent v. Postmedia, National Post et al has failed amid concerns over “problematic” affidavit evidence produced by Godfrey’s lawyers. Read More...
Welcome To The Dark Side Of Electoral Politics
Canadians like to believe that electoral sabotage happens to other people, to the unlucky citizens of third world countries and police states. Think again. Read More....