Bollywood movie star shines light on Harper's bid for re-election

Posted by Allan Woods Ottawa Bureau

BRAMPTON – Prime Minister Stephen Harper popped out of his campaign bubble, linked arms with a movie star and went pitching for South Asian votes in a movie theatre Friday.

The reviews won’t be out until May 2, but the Conservative leader appears to have done himself some favours by showing up for the premier of Bollywood star Akshay Kumar’s latest film, Thank You, a comedy about adulterous spouses.

Kumar and Harper pulled up to the event in the riding of Liberal incumbent Ruby Dhalla on the Tory campaign bus, which played Indian music through loudspeakers. Harper had just released his platform, entitled “Here for Canada.” But it appeared the crowed was here for Kumar, who splits his time between India and Canada.

“We weren’t sure what was really going on,” said one woman seated inside the theatre.

Still, Harper may have done his party some good for showing up.

“I think it’s a great way to get the local community. And it’s smart, especially in an ethnic area, using (Kumar),” said her friend, who noted she would be voting Conservative in the election even if the Prime Minister hadn’t shown up.

In a short address to the crowd just before the movie started, Harper was recognized for building better relations between Canada and India and for signing a film co-production treaty between the two countries.

Some even credited the Tories for bringing the India Film Awards, the Bollywood equivalent of the Oscars, to Toronto this summer, even though the Ontario government is hosting the event.

Vicky Sharma and Del Smadder heard Kumar was coming to the premiere a few days ago on the radio and rushed out to get advance tickets. Harper’s presence was a big surprise.

Sharma says her election support is “still up in the air.” Smadder’s mind was made up for him Friday.

“Since (Harper’s) here, my vote goes to him now,” he said.

That could be the deciding factor for quite a few of the movie fans who turned out Friday.

“The fact that they saw him walking beside Akshay Kumar, that changes everything,” Smadder said.

Harper toned down his political rhetoric for the event, leaving behind his stump speech about the Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois plot to overthrow any election result. Instead, he noted that both he and the film star met their wives in Alberta, and said that in a job filled with great responsibility and great perks, this would be among the greatest.

“This is the first time in my life I’ve got to do one of the things I like doing most, which is to … sit and watch a movie with the start of the movie, one of the biggest stars in the world.”

The crowd went wild with applause, Laureen Harper did a little dance with Kumar at the front of the theatre and the movie began.

A few minutes later, the Conservative leader’s bus pulled out of the Brampton parking lot, bound for his next stop on the road to re-election.

From the email inbox: a closer look at a Guelph veterinary student and what the blogosphere is saying about him.

Posted by Joanna Smith, Ottawa Bureau

On Thursday Wednesday night I received an email from a reader named Catherine McMillan, who let me know that a blogger had found some stuff on the Internet about Izzy Hirji, the 22-year-old veterinary student at the University of Guelph I featured in my story on youth engagement in politics on Wednesday.

“I figure you should know that a blogger in Winnipeg has done the background work you didn’t bother with on a source you featured today in your Star piece,” McMillan wrote in the email copied to our public editor, Kathy English, who received a few more emails on the topic around the same time.

McMillan linked this post by a blog called The Black Rod, apparently run by a group of anonymous citizen journalists (more on that later).

The post details some things Hirji has posted on Facebook over the years, including one from 2006 (apparently since deleted) that McMillan included in her email to me:

"...stephen harpers plan is ridiculous, 40 years without results, and death to Kyoto!?!?!?! OMGWTF im ready to like go to Ottawa myself an take him down..."

UPDATE: Sean Ledwich, a freelance journalist in Winnipeg, notes the original Facebook post included an "lol" at the end, presumably to indicate Hirji was joking (which is an important bit of context). The Black Rod left that out, but referred to it later on in the post and McMillan included a screen shot in her post on the subject. It appeared Thursday night the original Facebook comment had been deleted, but Ledwich found it in a Google cache result on Friday.

“Perhaps less time on Twitter, and more on Google, yes?” wrote McMillan, the woman behind a popular conservative blog called small dead animals, where she is known as Kate.

Now, here’s the thing: according to both the story that ran in the Guelph Mercury and my own interview with Hirji on Tuesday (where he confirmed all those details in his answers to questions I asked over and over again), Conservative party organizers asked him to leave the rally for Stephen Harper at the Delta Guelph Hotel on Monday because he had participated in the peaceful get-out-the-youth-vote flash mob outside, which they viewed as a protest. Hirji said RCMP Cpl. Tony Fowler of the “O” Division/VIP Security Section told him the same thing as he was reinforcing the Conservative party request that he leave the venue. Hirji said he had pre-registered online (as the rally was advertised as a public event in the Guelph Mercury), but his name was on the list at the hotel and he was let in without a problem – until the party official recognized his face from the flash mob.

“The people who did take me out, it wasn’t because I was a security threat,” Hirji said when I spoke to him again Thursday. “It’s because they saw our student rally as a protest.”

In other words, according to his version of events (and neither the RCMP, the Conservative party or Harper has contradicted it), something he wrote on Facebook in 2006 or anything else The Black Rod found on Google was not the reason he was kicked out.

And, let’s remember, the RCMP said Wednesday it overstepped its bounds and Harper has also apologized to everyone who was kicked out of his rallies.

Still, I had some extra time today and since I honestly do enjoy interacting with and learning from readers (one of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about Twitter), I decided to take a closer look. Instead of turning to Google (because the bloggers had that covered), I picked up the telephone.

My first call was to McMillan, as she was the one who had reached out to me first. I wanted to get a better idea of where she was coming from, given everything I and my colleagues had learned while reporting the different aspects of this rally story.

“I call it journalistic malpractice,” McMillan told me on the phone from Saskatchewan Thursday.

“I think you have to go back and look at the facts,” said McMillan, who throughout our conversation referred to Hirji and other flash-mob organizers as Green Party activists based on what The Black Rod had included in the post. “It isn’t a debate about this perception versus that perception. It was a report on an event and I think that when you quote someone who just happened to be there and just happened to get thrown out as thought he’s a non-partisan student who just wanted to go see the prime minister, it’s a little bit disingenuous when that’s obviously not who he was, not who he is…

“We see this all the time as bloggers, you know,” said McMillan. “For example, there will be a Liberal party meeting in Manitoba and they’ll quote an independent farmer and we Google the guy up and he’s the riding president. You know, this is a repeated pattern, which is why it gets jumped on so much by bloggers, because we see this over and over and over and over again, where people are quoted. Their story is taken without any investigation as to who they really are and it’s all so easy to do now. We’re picking this stuff up in five minutes.”

For the record, I had asked Hirji if he was a member of a political party when I first spoke to him on Tuesday. He told me he had joined the Green Party but couldn’t remember if he had renewed his membership. It was clear from the Facebook page advertising the event and the videos that the flash mob was billed – and executed – as a positive, non-partisan event, where political signs were forbidden and the crowd was ordered to sit down and boo anyone shouting political slogans. The Facebook page advertising the event also featured a comment from at least one member of the Guelph Campus Conservatives, who was told he was welcome to show up, although I could not confirm whether any of its roughly150 members did. So, I figured his possibly lapsed Green party membership was irrelevant in a piece that was more about youth engagement in democracy than the details of what happened to Hirji, which had already been widely reported. I’m pretty sure it’s not something the RCMP would have viewed as a security threat. Asking another student to leave a Conservative rally in London, Ont. because she had posed for a photo with Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff certainly didn’t go over so well. In hindsight, should I have mentioned this? I don’t think it would have satisfied McMillan, who argued the flash mob itself – quite apart from the five-year-old Facebook comment – was inherently dangerous.

“One of these may end up with a group of so-called anarchists in their midst and the whole premise of what they’re doing has inherent dangers,” McMillan said, although she added that of course she could not speak for what the Conservative party and the RCMP did or did not view as a security threat.

Security was the main issue for The Black Rod too, said a “designated spokesman” for the blog I was asked to call in Winnipeg on Thursday afternoon who refused to give his name.

(“Is this speed dating? You want a name? You’re not getting one,” the deep, male-sounding voice said on the phone when I pressed for some identity, stressing that speaking to people without any name was not particularly sound journalistic practice, especially since this whole exercise was a response to my being admonished for not entering a name into Google. I warned that readers would therefore have to take his words with a grain of salt and he said “Please! They can take it with a mound of salt.” So, readers, there you go.)

“There is a thread that runs through this,” the anonymous designated spokesman said, which begins with the Facebook post in 2006. “Do you call it a threat? In hindsight you can look at it and say was that a threat? Well, maybe not, but had he pulled out a gun and shot somebody, then it would have been a threat.”

The anonymous designated spokesman went through the other items listed on The Black Rod, including a November 2009 environment-related “strip mob” in Guelph associated with one of the organizers of the Monday “vote mob”, an event that Hirji noted on Facebook he could not partake in because he had class.

“So if you’re a security official, you look at this and go ‘Okay, what’s the plan? A publicity stunt inside? Are they going to take off their clothes?” the anonymous designated spokesman said, later linking the flash mob to the environmental movement at large, with the risk of anarchists breaking off and smashing windows like they did during the G20 Summit in Toronto last summer. “You just simply say: ‘Let’s err on the side of caution.’”

“Well, no, it didn’t happen in this case. But it could have,” the anonymous designated spokesman said.

Now, what I found interesting about my conversation with the anonymous designated spokesman for The Black Rod was that he fully believed the RCMP removed Hirji because of the stuff he had been able to find on Google, fully expected the RCMP to run the list of attendees through Google and remove people based on what they find and, even more interesting, was fully okay with that happening in Canadian democracy.

I’m going to give last word to Hirji.

“I do acknowledge the validity in what they’re posting, but I mean, to dig up something from six years ago when I was a teenager and spewing angry comments at my government, that has nothing to do with my professional conduct as a voter right now,” Hirji said Thursday. “Yeah, sure, I’ve attended a Harper protest before, but that doesn’t make me a protester every time that I want to engage in a political event.”

Actually, I’m going to give the last word to Ray Novak, a long-time aide to Harper, who posted a photo on Twitter Thursday evening, with this as the caption: “PM meets with student pro-vote activists after Hamilton rally.”

Ready, set, Google.

 

Tories aren't behind riding's sign war

posted by Allan Woods, Ottawa Bureau

Campaign sabotage, such as the crosshairs painted over an Ottawa Liberal candidate’s election signs, is unacceptable, Conservative leader Stephen Harper says.

Liberal Ryan Keon’s campaign for the riding of Nepean-Carleton reported over the weekend that 100 signs had been vandalized at a cost of about $2,000. A number of them had targets spraypainted over the candidate’s face. Others claimed he was a “tree hugger” or sought to revive the memory of the Liberal sponsorship scandal with the words “ad scam.”

Conservative Pierre Poilievre was re-elected in 2008 by a 22,000 vote margin over his closest oppoent, a Liberal.

Harper said the vandalism could never have been perpetrated by members of his own party, because they’re way too busy.

“Defacing of other candidates’ signs is never acceptable for any campaign,” Harper said at a campaign stop Sunday. “Our campaign does not have the time to do that. We’ve got enough to do to get our own signs up because we’ve got lots of demand for signs all across the country.”

After the Conservative leader’s morning event, he did venture into Poilievre’s riding. But it wasn’t to console the Liberal victim of the attack. Harper chose instead to partake in a 20-minute game of street hockey, a photo-opportunity to promote his promise to expand a tax credit encouraging youth to take part in physical activity.

Nevermind that there would be no tax relief for parents whose children dodge cars all summer while imitating their NHL favourites.

-30-

 

Guelph Tory candidate reacts to Star story

Posted by Allan Woods, Ottawa Bureau

A Toronto Star story I published Friday about Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke raised some dust in the riding.

Burke's campaign and the party's central war room in Ottawa wouldn't respond to my repeated requests for an explanation about his assertion in 2004 that the Afghan mission was "near worthless" days.

But he did get back to the Star's sister paper, the Guelph Mercury with a statement that they included in a follow-up story.

Apparently his beef was with former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin's government sending Canadian troops to Afghanistan without the proper equipment. One can understand how this would strike a nerve with the air force officer-turned-Air Canada-pilot-turned-Tory candidate.

He didn't, however, explain his complaints about the appointment in 2005 of Governor General Michaelle Jean and why he was so upset that another female, immigrant, visible minority was being named to the post following Adrienne Clarkson.

Burke's opponents in the riding weren't so convinced with Burke's explanation, accusing him of being whipped into supporting the official party lines.

But It seems Prime Minister Stephen Harper is fine with his candidate being off-side with the party's policies and positions at the time. The Conservative leader plans to land in the Guelph riding, where they hope to unseat Liberal MP Frank Valeriote, on Monday evening.

I'll be there and I'll report back how things go.

Day 7: Layton in Sudbury to talk about health care; will have to talk about the gun registry

Posted by Joanna Smith, Ottawa Bureau

Good morning from Sudbury, where New Democrat Leader Jack Layton will begin the day by doing some radio interviews, including a morning talk show with with local country music station Kicx FM. Expect the debate over the gun registry to be a hot topic.

NDP candidate Glenn Thibeault took the seat from former Liberal MP Diane Marleau in the 2008 election, but this riding looks like a three-way race and Thibeault could be vulnerable. Thibeault was initially one of the dozen NDP MPs who supported Conservative Candice Hoeppner's private member bill to scrap the long-gun registry, but then switched  sides for the final vote that shut down that Conservative dream. NDP incumbent Claude Gravelle (Nickel Belt) did the same thing but with 46.5 per cent of the vote in 2008 he might be in less trouble. Nonetheless, both Thibeault and Gravelle will join Layton as he visits the Sudbury riding for some support. They will be joined by Wendy Wilson, the NDP candidate running against Conservative cabinet minister Tony Clement in Parry Sound-Muskoka.

Layton will then make announcement concerning health care at Laurentian University at 9:30 a.m.

Expect a proposal to train and hire 1,200 doctors and 6,000 nurses, which was one of the things Layton demanded from Harper in the failed federal budget. It was also a 2008 NDP campaign proposal. So was a plan to reduce the student debt of health professionals who practiced family medicine for at least a decade. Given most of the campaign promises Layton has made so far are recycled, it is a good bet that forgiving student debt for family doctors will be in there too.

Another clue: I recall Layton made this promise at an event at the Dalhousie University medical school in Halifax when I was travelling with the campaign in 2008. Laurentian University, where we will be this morning, is home of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, a joint initiative with Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. If the NDP handlers line up a bunch of med students in white coats to stand behind Layton as he makes his speech, then I will know for sure.

At 2 p.m. there will be a "town hall" meeting, the first event of its kind for the Layton campaign this year. I will be watching for whether the people that show up and the questions they ask are scripted.

 

 

Cheryl Gallant issues late-night Twitter apology to Michael Ignatieff

Posted by Joanna Smith, Ottawa Bureau

It appears Conservative incumbent Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew--Nipissing--Pembroke) has pulled a Kanye West and issued a late-night Twitter apologyto Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff for changing his name so that it sounded like that of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Gallant, who goes by the handle @cherylgallant on Twitter, posted the following at 11:24 p.m. on Thursday:

@M_Ignatieff, sorry about remark on day 1. No place in debate about ideas and values

Unlike the belated Twitter mea culpa from the controversial rapper, which everyone knew was for having so rudely interrupted country music singer Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, it was not immediately clear what Gallant was apologizing for.

But searching for her Twitter handle suggested Gallant had appeared to play on Ignatieff's name so that it seemed like she was comparing him to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The alleged tweet cannot be found on Gallant's Twitter timeline, but someone named Tricia Wood, or @pkbwood, captured a screen shot of the tweet being archived on OpenParliament.ca, which keeps track of tweets by politicians.

The second tweet up from the bottom, apparently posted three days ago, says:

Wilmer Verch had super efficient wood furnaces @ Renfrew Home Show.  No carbon tax please, Igaffi!

Gallant could not immediately be reached for comment and no one answered the telephone at the Conservative war room (it is pretty late at night, after all).

The official Twitter account for Ignatieff (@M_Ignatieff) had not yet responded by 12:31 a.m. Friday, as the latest tweet, posted Thursday at 2:11 p.m., was clearly not on the topic:

   You haven't lived until you've had a Kelekis hot dog and shoestring fries.

Ignatieff spokeswoman Leslie Church sent me an email at 12:38 a.m. Friday outlining her understanding of the story behind the apology:

"Cheryl Gallant was under fire tonight for calling Mr. Ignatieff 'Igaffi', in a poorly judged, less than subtle reference to Gaddafi on her Twitter account," Church wrote.

 

Day 5: Layton, jobs and the Greater Toronto Area

Posted by Joanna Smith, Ottawa Bureau

The events

UPDATE: Just as (un)expected, the hints about health care being the focus of the announcement on Wednesday morning were wrong. The announcement in Oshawa is about jobs. Details follow.

Since the New Democrats just released a television spot attacking Stephen Harper for his record on health care, there have been suggestions the policy announcement Jack Layton is scheduled to make at 9:15 a.m. Wednesday in Oshawa, Ont. will be on the same topic. If that ends up being the case, expect a proposal to train and hire 1,200 doctors and 6,000 nurses, which was one of the things Layton demanded from Harper in the failed federal budget. It was also a 2008 NDP campaign proposal. So was a plan to reduce the student debt of health professionals who practiced family medicine for at least a decade and so it is a good bet that if the announcement is about health care, that will be in there too. As an NDP staffer said yesterday when being ribbed about the recycled nature of Layton’s credit card rate announcement: “Everything is a new idea until implemented”. 

Layton will also tour a space technology plant in Brampton, Ont., where they have a piece of the space shuttle, and then finish the day with a rally at Artscape Wychwood Barns in the St. Clair W. and Bathurst St. area of Toronto. 

The ridings 

Oshawa: Conservative incumbent Colin Carrie won this riding over the NDP by about 3,200 votes, with the Liberals getting fewer than half the votes the NDP did. So, this is one of the ridings the NDP is targeting with the “New Democrats defeat Conservatives” message it has been hammering home in Blue vs. Orange ridings this week. The NDP is running Chris Buckley, president of CAW local 222, as its candidate this time. 

Bramalea—Gore—Malton: This riding is a different story, as the Liberal incumbent Gurbax Singh Malhi beat the Conservative candidate by about 3,900 votes in 2008. The NDP candidate came far behind in third. 

Day 4: NDP hits Southern Ontario; Layton chats about his health on the plane

Posted by Joanna Smith, Ottawa Bureau

Day 4: the events, the ridings, the chances.

Good morning. The NDP tour spent the night in Hamilton, Ont. but will begin the day in nearby Brantford, where Leader Jack Layton will make the first policy announcement of his campaign at 9:15 a.m. Tuesday, which will be about credit cards and household debt.

Conservative Phil McColeman currently holds the Brant riding, but the Liberals want it back for Lloyd St. Amand, who represented Brant in the House of Commons from 2004 to 2008. This is not a clear Blue vs. Orange race like the ridings Layton was targeting out west the first three days of his campaign, but the NDP still sees the Southern Ontario industrial belt as a potential for growth having won Welland in the last campaign. They are running social worker Marc Laferriere.

Layton will then head to Kitchener for a local radio interview followed by some mainstreeting at a sports store owned by a local family on Duke St. W. The Kitchener Centre riding is held by Conservative Stephen Woodworth, but he defeated former Liberal MP Karen Redman by just 339 votes in 2008 and she is running to take it back. The NDP is running retail manager Peter Thurley.

Mr. Layton, how's your hip?

Layton joined the media travelling at the back of his campaign plane Monday night on the flight from Regina, Sask., to Hamilton, Ont. for a quick but casual chat about his health. Layton said he's keeping up with the excerises the doctor ordered with the help of his sister, Nancy, a phys. ed. teacher and a golf pro, who travels on the campaign as his assistant. Layton admits he misses his usual high-intensity workouts (he is known to hit the fitness centre twice a day on the campaign trail) but said he expects to be doing some cardio soon.

Three weeks after undergoing surgery for his fractured hip, Layton is still walking with the help of a crutch with an arm brace, but he said it's mainly for balance.

"The biggest worry is that you fall before all the healing has happened and then you have a real setback," said Layton, who usually has the cane at his right side during public events but rarely leans on it except while walking up to the microphone.

"You have to walk around and keep the blood flowing in your legs," he said while wiggling his feet back and forth.

Supporters always crowd around Layton and reach out to shake his hand when he makes his way through a crowd at a rally or campaign stop, but he said he isn't worried about getting jostled.

"I'm not nervous. These are all friendly people," he said.

Press secretary Karl Belanger looked a bit nervous and reached out an arm to steady his boss when the plane dipped a bit to begin its descent into Hamilton, but Layton pointed out his balance was better than some of those crowded around him.

"Now that the plane is beginning to weave and bob, you'll notice I don't have to grab a chair," he laughed.

One reporter asked if he was "fed up" with us asking about his health and he said no, or at least was too polite to tell us otherwise.

"No, I'm not fed up with you asking about my health," said Layton, who has also been successfully battling prostate cancer since last year. "It's always, I find, with a lot of good will."

Before heading back to the front, Layton had a message for all of us living out of a suitcase (and also missing our workouts...) with him these weeks, which I found rather touching: "Well, listen -- you're all away from your families and we appreciate that, so good for you."

Google helping Liberals steal NDP voters

Posted by Allan Woods

All parties are aggressively trying to capitalize on the growing use of social media. The New Democratic Party has launched an iPhone app, all parties are pushing their announcements and criticisms on Twitter and most candidates in the May 22 election have dedicated Facebook sites to attract supporters.

But if you were still doubting the parties' faith that technology can give them an edge, here's some more evidence.

Punch "NDP" into your google search engine, then peer over to the right hand side of your computer screen. 

There, you'll find an advertisement for Michael Ignatieff's Liberals and a fairly blatant attempt to steal the eyeballs, if not the voters, that would normally lean to the left leaning New Democrats. The small print reads:

"Learn more about Michael Ignatieff and his bold, new vision for Canada"

(Google seems to be alternating the ads between one for the Liberals and another for Ontario government tax credits)

The Liberal party's problem over the last two election campaigns has been fighting for votes with the two other left-of centre parties while the Conservative Party claims all those on the centre-right of the political spectrum.

The last two election campaigns have come down to Liberal leaders pronouncing in the dying days of the race that voters need to rally around their party to hold the Tories at bay.

It hasn't worked of course, and there's no evidence it will work any better this time around, but at least it's a bit more subtle.

 

Unlike other Canadians, Quebecers support coalition

Quebec really is a distinct society when it comes to support for the infamous coalition that has dominated the first days of the federal election campaign.

A new released Monday by Léger Marketing shows that the idea of a coalition between opposition parties – the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc – is supported only in Quebec.

Fifty-two per cent of Quebecers said they are favourable toward such a coalition, while 27 per cent said they were against, with 20 per cent undecided.

That contrasts with every other region of Canada. In Ontario 37 per cent are for, 43 per cent are against, with 20 per cent undecided. On the prairies and in B.C. the poll found the fiercest opposition to the prospect.

While Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has ruled out a coalition, it appears that most Canadians have bought into Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s claim that Ignatieff has a “hidden agenda.”

The poll found that 53 per cent of respondents didn’t believe Ignatieff.