It’s probably not very helpful to the United Conservative Party effort to hang onto power by its fingernails that party founder and former premier Jason Kenney found himself back in the news yesterday, his effort to mount a novel Hyperlink Defence against a defamation lawsuit by five environmental organizations as much of a flop as his “Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns” itself.
No, you can’t pretend you didn’t identify someone by not naming them in your remarks but providing hyperlinks to web pages that identify them, Madam Justice Avril Inglis of the Alberta Court of King’s Bench said in a ruling Wednesday.
West Coast Environmental Law, the Dogwood Initiative, Stand.earth, Environmental Defence Canada, and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee sued Mr. Kenney for defamation in the spring of 2022 for remarks he made about the findings of the so-called public inquiry, which issued a report without a single public hearing.
Inquiry commissioner Steve Allen was extremely careful about what he said about the environmental groups in his report, finding no wrongdoing by any of them, which effectively meant the inquiry was a dud that failed to deliver on Mr. Kenney’s political promise to take the fight to critics of oilsands development.
But in their statement of claim, the five plaintiff organizations argued that Mr. Kenney himself deliberately misrepresented the findings of Mr. Allan’s report in social media posts with the intention of defaming them when he said “foreign-funded misinformation campaigns to landlock Alberta resources caused untold hardship for thousands of energy workers and their families. Today, we released a report that shines a light on these co-ordinated efforts to harm our province.”
In his statement of defence, filed on March 9, 2022, Mr. Kenney advanced the novel argument that by not specifically naming the groups he attacked in his social media comments about the findings of the inquiry, which his government initiated, he therefore didn’t identify them.
“The Facebook Post and the Tweet do not mention any of the Plaintiffs, nor do they link to the Web Page or the Key Findings Document,” said the statement of defence.
Asked about it by reporters the next day, Mr. Kenney huffed: “Obviously, we’re not going to apologize, we’re simply telling the truth about what they’ve done.”
Well, it turns out the Hyperlink Defence is novel because it’s no defence.
“There are no uncertainties in the facts or the law in this matter,” Justice Inglis wrote in her decision. Since it was perfectly clear who Mr. Kenney was talking about, she said, “the protections of defamation law cannot be avoided simply by using embedded links instead of paragraph returns.”
Well, sometimes you have to get a judge to confirm the obvious, and Justice Inglis has obliged.
This is not the end of the matter, of course. The five plaintiff organizations have not proved their case that Mr. Kenney defamed them, they’ve just established that he can’t use the Hyperlink Defence.
“He took the findings of the inquiry and decided they didn’t meet his needs and just reinterpreted them and made stuff up,” Environmental Defence Executive Director Tim Gray told the CBC for a report published yesterday.
Mr. Kenney will now have to defend his remarks in court.
The organizations are seeking $15,000 each in actual damages and $500,000 in punitive damages from Mr. Kenney, “to dissuade him and other Canadian public officials from using the power of their office to bully their critics.”
Who will be the UCP’s response to Thomas Lukaszuk and Doug Griffiths?
Speaking of Mr. Kenney, there has been some speculation about the identity of the UCP’s anticipated high-profile endorser, to be trotted out in response to former Progressive Conservative office holders and officials who have come out in support of the NDP.
Former Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk and former municipal affairs minister Doug Griffiths are the most prominent examples of PCs who have called for Conservative Albertans to lend their votes to the NDP in Monday’s election in light of the dangers presented by Danielle Smith.
Both men ran for the leadership of the PC party at different times.
Idle speculation seems to have it that the most likely candidate is the alarmingly pale former prime minister, Stephen Harper, whose bloodless endorsement last month failed to mention either the UCP or Ms. Smith.
Perhaps he’s been persuaded to actually choke out the initials, UCP, some wags have speculated.
Ask yourself, though, what if it’s Mr. Kenney himself, after an 11th hour repentance for calling Ms. Smith nuts and her supporters lunatics?
The former head honcho of the UCP was just looking for a place to get political perks, from his tenure as a career politician, and Alberta was the place to do it. The R.C.M.P still haven’t given the results of their investigation into his leadership race. It’s been so long since it started. The Steve Allen inquiry turned out to be a very costly dud, which found nothing. You can’t expect anything good to come from these phony conservatives and Reformers. Regardless of this, we still see columnists, such as Licia Corbella promoting the UCP. Pierre Poilievre is doing it too. These phony conservatives and Reformers will only rob us of our oil and tax wealth, lose so many jobs, do the priciest shenanigans, harm our public healthcare and our public education, damage the environment, make costs of insurance and utilities rise, and make poverty and crime increase. I can see why Pierre Poilievre wants to get rid of the CBC, because they are exposing the lies that he, Danielle Smith, Scott Moe, Heather Steffanson, and Doug Ford are saying. Peter Lougheed would never support politicians like this, and why are Albertans dumb enough to support Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre?
Regardless of the wacky hi-jinks used by Jason Kenney to get his grasping fingers on the levers of political power in Alberta, the fact remains that a substantial number of adult Albertans exercised their democratic franchise and voted for him. A similar phenomenon produced Stephen Harper governements, and those of Mike Harris, Doug Ford, etc. Democracy in mass societies is going to produce this sort of absurd outcome more often than not. The propagandists studied the population in the UK and realized that it was as easy as 1,2,3 to get the great unwashed to vote against their material interests by manipulating their emotions, and the result was John Major and then the odious “Labour” governments of war criminal Tony Blair. Human beings can’t really work very well in groups much bigger than a few dozen. The tendency toward dominance hierarchies and the technology of thought reform compose an irrestible force for corruption and inequality. I will never tire of reiterating the tale of Licia Corbella’s war-mongering in 2003. Despite her “work”(?) in journalism, she was blissfully unaware of one of the greatest propaganda scandals of all-time, that being the great Kuwaiti Incubator Hoax. Despite the war-mongering imperialist US propaganda apparatus having been exposed as comprehensive liars in that affair, twelve years later Corbella was still urging an assault on Iraq on the premise that Saddam and friends were so wicked as to have cast out the unfortunate Kuwaiti tots from their machines. Twenty years on from the launch of the attack that remains the greatest war crime of the current century, she’s still channeling news from an alternate universe, and few people seem much bothered by it.
Murphy: Arguably the Vietnam War and its spillover into Cambodia and Laos was a bigger war crime. In addition to more than one million U.S., South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, Chinese and other military personnel, an estimated 2.5 million civilians died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And yesterday was Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday. There is no justice. DJC
I dunno the Iraq war plunged the entire region into a chaos it may not recover from in our lifetimes. Then there’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one this is certain a country that committed not one, but all of these crimes is certainly unrivalled in recent history, to be their allies is a most shameful thing.
DJC, well I’m thinking that may be why ” at this late hour in the race”, PP decided to step up, with I’m guessing a little nudge, to throw caution to the wind, or as the guest on P&P said today- ” could be high risk and low reward “. But then PP might have not been at his best, given the 4:00 a.m. tweet deletion/new version because he didn’t seem to know which church he was at when he posted thanking them for having him on Wednesday..LOL
Sadly for him ( tongue in cheek) it was too late, screen shots are a useful little thing when you’re following someone who has a propensity to PoLIEvre ;,so he does have that in common with Dani, fellow rogues.
As for Jason it’s a good thing he’s an advisor with the law firm B Jones , or did he give that up to go to Atco?
This would be the spot where the ‘old time ‘ investigative reporters, would perk up, and maybe they could delve in and see if JK is renting PP’S rental property in Calgary, since he seems to have a penchant for conservative tenants.
I wonder what legal advice someone with no education could give?
Am I incorrect in believing that Stephen Harpo has evolved into a Nightwalker? The other Stephen (King) would be impressed.
While Jason Kenney’s ongoing legal troubles are the result of his own doing, maybe it’s time for him to just take a small slice of his lavish, enormous, king’s ransom of an MP’s pension and pay the plaintiffs in the defamation suit to just go away. At the very least, Alberta will not have to pay anymore for Kenney’s nonsense — but I suspect the UCP and Danielle Smith will pony up the cash for … reasons.
Meanwhile the ongoing and heavily promoted endorsements for Rachel Notley and the ABNDP by former PC politicians of the olden days is, for me, concerning. The ABNDP’s sudden swing to the centre-slightly to the right is problematic, especially if one is of the social-democratic bent. While repairing the damage to everything wrought by the UCP is one thing, the long needed reforms to everything may not be in the pipeline for … reasons. While Danielle Smith’s sudden tidal wave of spending on everything smacks of opportunism and insanity, it does comes from a mindset that recognizes that the government does have a role to play in at least easing chronic social ills. Progressive action, even if, as in the UCP’s case, is demented, it is still action.
The preplexing question is will an ABNDP government accept the challenge? Or, will they do nothing?
Don’t you worry JM, that tidal wave of spending promises (the ones that have sent fiscal conservatives into cardiac arrest) will disappear the moment she is reelected. We will all be told now’s not the time for spending, so pull up your bootstraps and enjoy the pain because we can someday look forward to living in the debt-free Promised Land. And the unwashed rubes will vote them in yet again in another 4 years. Keep the perpetual cycle of insanity keep on rollin’
After you’ve stepped in it enough times, you’re likely to utter it’s name as epithet in disgust.
Deep down Stephen Harper was probably wanting to endorse Rachael Notley since she’ll probably be a much more reliable partner in the various neoliberal agendas. Danielle Smith has a tendency to let loose quips that are outside the boundaries of acceptable political discourse.
“He took the findings of the inquiry and decided they didn’t meet his needs and just reinterpreted them and made stuff up.”
This is the UCP way. Lies, lies and more lies. Kenney paved the way for Smith to make stuff up, and she does. Don’t like facts? Then you are a UCP supporter.
Try to get away with behaving this way with your employer and you might soon find yourself looking for a new job. Jason Kenney found himself looking for a new job. Danielle Smith should be shown to the curb where she belongs on May 29. Lying to your employer, who are the people of Alberta, is a firing offence. This is the people’s court.
A number of years ago, long lost. I attended the Calgary Stampede. My father told me at that time, I would learn. He was right. I accidentally was at a table next to one Jason Kenney. What I overheard? It would curdle mother’s milk! This human was parsing the value of political pressure. It was as if there were pawns and he was a rook, a knight and a bishop at the same time! A queen you say? That’s how I see him these days! https://youtu.be/FP808MiJUcM?t=2
POGO: Maybe THE Queen. DJC
Yeah, I don’t think the I didn’t name them, I just used a hyperlink defense was a good one. A very modern approach perhaps. I’m not sure if it Kenney did it this way to cleverly try evade defamation laws or not, or that argument just became their defense afterwards but in any event it didn’t work.
I’m not sure how much impact this will have on the provincial election, but any bad news about their past leader can’t be helpful to the UCP. Likewise, I wonder how much impact the various endorsements by former important PC ministers will have on the election. On the one hand, they are mostly people no longer active in politics and not that high profile now, but they may have some influence particularly on certain past PC voters. However, I feel the issue is not just impact, it is also a sign of something.
For what it is worth, the UCP doesn’t seem to be getting many good endorsements. Harper’s past sort of endorsement was even weak by his standards. So I am guessing they are working on getting something clearer and stronger from him. I suspect Kenney will not be saying anything about his successor who he has reservations about. Even if he did, I’m not sure it would resonate much with the group of moderate voters they need to try shore up.
Dave: Some genius in the UCP Meme Department probably thought it was a good idea. But from a legal perspective, it would have come afterward. No trained lawyer – and all lawyers are trained, aren’t they? even the bad ones – would have suggested that as a defence. It’s pathetic, really. DJC
citizen004
Alas, this column is but a distraction from the inevitable oncoming train of a UCP majority. My mom tried the same strategy while trying to get me to swallow some ghastly syrup. Perhaps it was a cookie or a new toy but it didn’t erase that awful taste. Kenney could go to jail or Harper could be found in flagrante delicto with a squad of Albanian cheerleaders, it won’t matter a puff for Monday night’s results. Sorry, but we have to turn our attention to the possibility of Jagmeet pulling the plug on his support for Trudeau and Skippy winning a surprise fall election. Sleepless nights, my friends, sleepless nights.
In my view, Ms. Smith and her followers are not lunatics. I cannot speak for Ms. Smith, but her followers out here are in heavy denial about the future of oil and gas jobs in Alberta. For them normal is boom and bust forever.
The UCP are promising them another oil boom when in fact oil has been booming for the last three years, as evidenced by the high prices for gasoline and diesel fuel. Even if we never deploy another windmill or electric car, the jobs in oil and gas are gone because of automation. However, denial may well give the UCP a majority government. This election is a real test of the viability of Alberta as a coherent society. How far can tolerance for systemic denialism and destructiveness stretch?
This is for David Climenhaga. Nobody but you sensei! https://youtu.be/nO9PYvzwsf8 I love our gamblin’ gal!
Not sure how to tell you this, but if they called for Albertans to vote for the NDP, they arent conservative.
For all the socialists that want wealth taxes, if the flight of wealth from NE states to Florida wasnt enough, even the Norwegians cant abide big government theft:
https://reason.com/2023/05/26/wealth-taxes-result-in-rich-people-fleeing-turns-out/
That was for going from 0.85% to 1.1%. So a 29% increase. What do you think a 38% increase will do?
Course, if you dont want people to leave you can always build a wall, add guard dogs and search lights, you know the schtick, the same as your friends in east germany in the good old days.
Heh, “math is hard”…
Yes Bret, taxes are for Nazis! despite the Nazi party being funded by British, American, and German business as a bulwark against communism, and you know, wealth taxes.
Also Godwin’s law; you lose again buddy. Everyone you hate isn’t a Nazi, that’s ridiculous and laughable. Yeah people that want a modest break on corporate power that has continued to consolidate since at least the sixties, they’re Nazis. Right.
I’ll miss you Brett once those commies send you to a re-education camp. The food is as boring as the endless lectures, and Hanoi Jane hasn’t aged that well. But, and it’s a big but, you do get to share an apartment with 8 of your closest friends AND the use of a co-op Trabant. So Brett, in closing, I would like to swing by later tonight and discuss Ron DeSanest’s plans re animal husbandry with you. All the best comrade.
As a prototypical harbinger of the post-truth era, it is most appropriate that Mr. Harper offers up his public endorsement for Ms. Smith, considering both their pedigree and their fondness for deception and deliberate misstatements, that is,
“I’ve never seen the leader of a Conservative party, certainly not Bob Stanfield, certainly not Joe Clark, lie — I choose the word deliberately — the way Mr. Harper has,” Broadbent said.”
The choosing of both individuals and the long grooming process also seems to to have been both calculated and deliberate vis-à-vis the outcomes [it is assumed that the maintenance of the political/economic status quo is preeminent by guaranteeing that no profound or extensive shifts in policy occur]; where, if it is the case that “ethics is the standards of “good and bad” distinguished by a certain community or social setting.” then the publicly displayed personal and normative morality [or lack thereof] of high profile individuals might be seen as attempts to redefine the spectrum of acceptability in both the social and political domains by processes such as conditioning, habituation, and normalization.
It has been my belief that, these days, the expectation that politicians will lie has never been higher. Or, as Bill Maher once sagely commented, politicians not only must lie, we expect them to lie. I’m paraphrasing Maher, of course. Also keep in mind that Maher once declared that the only men can be “naturally” gay, while gay women are just “quitters”. In any case, Maher’s observation about politicians’ seemingly natural and easy ability to lie is pretty amazing. I recall, from personal experience, when a number of young Reformers attended a series of leadership seminars in Seattle. The interesting part was the courses were sanctioned by the Republicans, so they must be good. A number of subjects were approached during these seminars, but all were related to matters of deception and distraction. Or, as the seminar leaders pointed out time and time again, ignorant voters are pliable and obedient. Who are these voters? The religious voter — Evangelicals and Catholics — have one issue only: abortion. Nothing else really matters. Military voters have their favourite interests: USA Strong; patriotism strong; nation strong. And the fearful voters, who tend to be racist, xenophobic, and gun obsessed, want any threat to their safety crushed, be they different … the Others. The best part is all you have to do is say you’re doing something, but you don’t really have to do anything. And if it all falls apart, blame the progressives and liberals for being such douches. Yep, that’s the level of the school yard antics that was communicated to the impressionable minds present.
So, lying politicians are pretty de rigueur thing these days. And as those seminars revealed, at some point, voters will not only expect the lying, they will look forward to it, as though it’s some kind treat, like something granted to a faithful pet. Given this, the Alberta voters are the stupidest abused animals on earth.
JM: Generally speaking, if you tell the truth about unpleasant topics in a political campaign in Alberta – for example, that if taxes do not rise, public services cannot be maintained at the same level – you will lose. I have personal experience with this. So Bill Maher is right. Not only do voters expect politicians to lie, they demand it. Then they complain about it. DJC
Let us pray that yesterday was the last good Freya’s Day for the UCP. It’s so close that interesting and very measured mugs have gently sprinkled onto the latte foam of Alberta’s underrepresented urbanity: Harper, PP, Nenshi—and now even K-Boy.
Frankly I don’t think the last one will have much influence on how Albertans vote: he’s been subsumed by “crazy’ Danielle Smith (here I must differ with Abs, above, although probably mootly: when it comes to making things up, what came first, the Kenney hen or the Smith egg?)
But voters should take note of the former premier’s return to the news because if just making things up had anything to do with his ouster, then the current care-taker premier, his successor, should be gauged by the same measure: he had his Sasquatch (let us presume Disney won’t be relocating from Florida to Alberta) which cost Albertans millions of dollars for a feature-length cartoon trailer, but Danielle Smith has a much bigger bogeyman hit-list which, presumably, will cost Alberta much, much more (to complete the Disney analogy: “Why did Mickey have Minnie committed to an insane asylum?” Well, let’s just say it’s a play on a certain F-bomb involving Goofy).
(Kenney, of course, was taken out mostly for his Covid dithering; Danielle, naturally, might have committed an irony by likening vaccinations to, ultimately, stepping into a nice Zyklon-B shower and of course accepted the slim, 6th-ballot support of the most extreme demands to just make things up about Covid in these most-odious ways. If she wins tomorrow she’ll have finally garnered licence to do the same for everything from life-and-death pandemics to paper drinking straws. And they say it’s all about “freedom.”)
The main, last-good-Freya’s-Day mugs where two political personalities from the federal CPC endorsing the UCP, one PP, the current Opposition leader and, the other the first of three losing CPC leaders, the party’s founder and the current leader’s former boss and forever-mentor Stephen Harper—and, somewhat surprisingly, self-confessed nonpartisan Naheed Nenshi, former mayor of that battleground of the Bow, the great city of Calgary who endorsed the NDP. The common denominator is the nail-biting even split (as far as polls go) in Cowtown where this election will be won and lost.
In this election, in this city, we’re talking about usually conservative voters making the critical difference, so it’s to the lowest common multiple we must look to discern something, anything in this oh-so-tight contest. Nenshi makes an exception to his usual nonpartisanship, a position that probably garnered him (winning) votes from Calgary citizens who otherwise voted conservative in both levels of sovereign elections. His endorsement of Rachel Notley’s NDP was thoughtful and sensible (really, the Dippers could have simply listed his points in a mail-out, adopting them as their own); if Nenshi has any effect, it can only be salutary —that is, it could be the deciding factor to get critical numbers of centre-left Tories off the fence and vote NDP. The race is so close that even a little bit can tip it one way or t’other.
Nenshi proudly wears purple—“between red [centre-left] and blue [centre-right]”—his endorsement of the NDP wisely tempered by his assessment of its single term in power (which it won more by strange default than its policy platform) as not perfect but not that bad, either, and by his common-sense comparison with the certain uncertainties (—nod to Rummy Rumsfeld) of a Danielle Smith-led UCP. So, then, let’s consider to the two CPC endorsements.
While Nenshi’s rationale for taking exception to UCP policy was succinct, Harper’s and PP’s were so clipped it seemed telling. Recalling Harper’s very tepid previous UCP endorsement in which he mentioned neither the party’s nor its leader’s name, his latest effort (I’m not going to predict that it is ‘last-minute’—it really ain’t over ‘til it’s over) was as dull as blotter paper. And PP’s? He’s also sounding dull, but by way of ‘the-boy-who-cried-wolf.’
Note that among the red, the blue, and the purple there’s been little Dipper orange but for their campaign signs (had they gotten Nenshi’s endorsement sooner—which he probably wouldn’t have given until the ‘last minute,’ anyhow—purple and orange would have made a very complimentary impression—just like our Sikh landlord’s interior decoration of our house in Port Alberni, back in the days of mill-rat-hood) and, conspicuously, no endorsements from federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh or pipeline gift-horse Justin Trudeau who’s under extremely minute oral inspection in the Wildrose province. Not even public dental care made either federal endorsement a safe bet in Alberta. But how safe are Harper and PP?
Their appearances appeared reluctant and so ‘last-minute’ that a palpable whiff of fear wafts from UCP riding offices all across Cowtown—with the possible exception of its most southerly. Well, okay: it’s tight, we know that. But I suspect that they know what everyone does: moderate Tories are as worried about increasing extremism in the federal Conservative Party as they are in the UCP. We have a couple of accurate snapshots of that: the 2015 NDP upset and the 2019 UCP victory in which a significant number of erstwhile conservatives approved of Notley’s governance, giving the NDP several times the number of Opposition seats than it had before what I would call a grand transition took place. (The lone red or orange in a sea of federal blue are also of some significance.) Thus, endorsements from either Harper or PP seemed more to reassure convinced UCPers than to help a probably significant number of fence-sitters make up their minds.
In short, their endorsements might have zero or slightly negative effect—and that’s significant in such a tight race. I’ve always rationalized today’s far-right, nominal “conservative” party’s hyperbolic rhetoric of blame, victimhood, otherism, and ‘justifiable’ revenge as primarily aimed at keeping their reactionary base, not growing their general electoral support—that’s why I maintain that a trend, a transition, a process is taking place, no matter what the outcome is on Moon’s Day next: in decline, keeping the base is absolutely vital. Unfortunately it drags out the inevitable and tends to cause pointless scorched-earth damage. Naturally the far-right views it as an existential, even rapturous crisis—about the only thing they get right—way too far right, in my opinion —even if they don’t admit it.
Nenshi’s right: it shouldn’t be about winning power for its own sake but, rather, about civil society, diversity tempered by tolerance. I hope his straightforward and wise counsel will make a difference. And if K-Boy’s mug helps, too, all the better.
Just ask my conservative relatives who lost thousands of dollars thanks to Harper’s lies about the Income Trusts. They haven’t voted for these phoney conservatives ever again. Thanks to Harper Canadians lost $30 billion, while we estimate that Albertans have lost $975 billion , and have a $260 billion orphan well cleanup mess to contend with. Isn’t it fun watching Reformers screwing the people out of their money and they’re so dumb they don’t even know they are doing it and are willing to let them do it some more? Alberta is full of Lunatics as Jason Kenney calls them, and a man quoted Ralph Klein as saying “I could tell these idiots anything and they would believe it.” It isn’t hard to understand who they are talking about is it.
Here’s a thought for the plaintiffs suing ex-Lord Jason. Didn’t Sonya Savage do exactly what our fallen Lord of Oilberduh did? I seem to recall her doubling down on the “anti-Alberta-oil” conspiracy, too. Right after Steve Allen released his report. (I’m certain it was Sonya Savage in the picture. Can’t find it, of course. It couldn’t possibly have been Jason Kenney in drag.)