A rchive Date
[ 25-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/brodbeck_jan25.html
Feels like we're living under Stalinist rule
By TOM BRODBECK - Winnipeg Sun
January 25, 2004
For a minute there, I thought I was living in Turkey. Or maybe Syria or North Korea.
How else are you supposed to feel when your country's national police agency rides roughshod over a news media outlet, invades a journalist's home and starts rifling through her drawers because they didn't like a story she wrote?
Feels like Stalinism.
That's what happened to Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill last week when the RCMP raided her home and her city hall office because of some classified documents she had access to.
Ten Mounties - count them, 10 - stormed into her Ottawa home and left with a number of her belongings, including her address book and her Rolodex. They wanted to know how she got secret information about Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen deported to Syria who was tortured for 10 months.
"It is outrageous," said David Asper, chairman of the National Post, owned by CanWest Global Communications Corp. which also owns the Citizen. "It's a very unnerving tactic."
Yes it is. And it's one of the worst attacks on democracy I've seen in Canada in a long time.
Once you start strong-arming the news media by trying to force them to turn over their confidential sources, you don't have much of a democracy anymore. Because for democracy to work, you need freedom of the press. That's why it's enshrined in the Charter.
Without freedom of the press, you don't break the Watergate story, the public doesn't get to know about a prime minister's misdeeds and the story of the corrupt police chief never gets uncovered. It's that simple. And when cops are allowed to bully their way into reporters' homes to try to uncover their sources, we're all in big trouble.
"It is an issue of grand proportions," said Asper, whose company will be fighting the issue through the courts. "It's the state being a bully and I don't like that a bit."
The funny thing is, on the same day the RCMP raided O'Neill's home, an Ontario Superior Court justice ruled in a strikingly similar case that journalists have a constitutional right to protect their sources, even if it gets in the way of a police investigation. Too bad the decision didn't come down a day earlier.
Cops wanted the National Post, nearly three years ago, to hand over documents that were leaked to the newspaper regarding bank loans and property investments made by former prime minister Jean Chretien.
The Post refused to hand over the documents (police wanted to do DNA testing on who licked the stamp and the envelope) and fought the matter in court. The issue was so critical to the basic tenets of journalistic freedom that even the Post's competitors, the Globe and Mail and the CBC, threw their support behind the Post and got intervenor status in the case. And they won.
"To compel a journalist to break a confidentiality would do serious harm to the constitutionally entrenched right of the media to gather and disseminate information," wrote Madame Justice Mary Lou Benotto. "Without confidential sources, many important stories of considerable public interest would not have been published."
Chalk one up for the Charter.
If that right is violated and journalists can no longer rely on confidential sources, the public doesn't get the information they have a right to know. Which means the police raids are really an attack on the public.
"This is certainly a definitive, landmark decision," said Asper of the court ruling. He said CanWest will fight to the death any attempt by the state to intimidate the news media with police raids. "We'll keep fighting you and keep fighting you until you stop," said Asper.
My bet is all this will be settled, eventually, at the Supreme Court of Canada. And as much as we complain sometimes about court-made law, it will likely be Canada's top court that puts an end to these kinds of totalitarian tactics once and for all.
And then I won't feel like I'm living in Turkey anymore.
Tom Brodbeck is the Sun's city columnist. He can be reached by e-mail at tbrodbeck@wpgsun.com Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@wpgsun.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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