How is it that Bill Blair is still Toronto’s Chief of Police this morning? How is it that, in the wake of the damning OIPRD report on the “policing” of the G20 summit in 2010, he hasn’t stepped down? How is it he isn’t waking up in his PJs at home this morning, with no headquarters to go into anymore, and telling his wife, “Gee, honey, sorry I lost my job, but I really fucked up”?

The papers in Toronto are calling for him to apologize. Apologize? That’s what he should have done on June 27, 2010, the day after his officers went gonzo. We’re with the Ontario Federation of Labour. So long, sucker.

Does he really think four (or is it five?) of his senior commanders are going to do the perp walk, along with some 40 other officers, and not take him with them? Does he really think that, if he doesn’t resign and somehow doesn’t get fired, he’ll be able to continue to command after this? After the OIPRD report said responsibility for the police riot went all the way to the top? (Guess who that would be, Bill.) And revealed that Blair was present at the meeting where the whole thing went haywire:

At 5:18 p.m., Saturday, June 26, 2010, Supt. Mark Fenton said, “I attended the conference room that was set up as an area for the chief and command to view some of the CCTV video being generated … I entered and Supt. (Hugh) Ferguson was immediately to my left. The chief (Blair) was sitting at the head of the table. Beside the chief was Dep. (Chief) (Tony) Warr…The chief was asking why he could not see police officers in the pictures … The chief appeared to be angry and frustrated in his demeanour.”

Fenton asked, “Why are we not arresting these people?”

He said he was “referring to the terrorists that were attacking police and property” when “the chief responded by looking at me and saying, ‘That is a very good question, Mark.’ ”

Fenton said, “Immediately Dep. Warr spoke and said “OK, this is what we are going to do: We are going to take back the streets.” Deputy Warr looked at me and said, “I want you to take back the streets.”

McNeilly’s report also deals with a similar exchange where Ferguson asked Fenton “about direction from the chief.” Supt. Fenton answered “Own the streets” and “as soon as groups of people are seen, arrest them for breach of the peace.”

The implication there is that, at some point, it was Blair himself who gave the command to “own the streets” and violate the civil rights of Torontonians willy-nilly. If not in that room, then at some other juncture. Regardless, Big Bill stood by while the order went out. And now he wants his underlings to take the fall.

Shameful.

However, let us tip our hats to those few officers who, at the finale of Blair’s lost weekend, when hundreds of people were illegally kettled in a torrential rain storm at Queen and Spadina, disobeyed their orders and, according to the report, “personally removed non-protesters and peaceful protesters.” On a weekend ripe with the smell of bad apples, they were among the good ones. And to those officers who knew they were breaking the law but went ahead and did so anyway, because a superior told them to — you owned the streets, all right. Now own your complicity.

But for Bill Blair, let there be nothing but disdain until, for the first time in this whole grotesque episode, he does the right thing and steps down. And then he can apologize. And then, maybe, the people of Toronto, and of the country whose laws and liberties he treated so cavalierly, can think about forgiving him.

But not until. Resign, Chief Blair. Resign.

OK. So I was wrong.

When Christy Clark became the latest Con stooge to denounce Thomas Mulcair,  for simply pointing out that the Dutch Disease is killing our manufacturing sector, I said it could only mean one thing.

Big Oil and its Con puppets were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I forgot I was living in the sinister petro state of Harperland.

Where the bottom of the dirty oil barrel goes all the way to China.

And I forgot about the Con Senate, and particularly Pamela Wailin’ . . .

“This is a cheap political ploy to pit eastern citizens against those in the West. Will Mulcair next attack the lentil business, the wheat and grain producers who have long fed the world — or perhaps the potash industry that allows the poor to bolster their depleted farmland in overpopulated areas?

“It’s time for Mulcair to act like a Canadian.”

And that like the Con turkey Mike Duffy, Wallin is capable of saying ANYTHING.

I mean can you believe that? As if Big Lentil is as dangerous as Big Oil. As if Mulcair wasn’t right. As if telling the truth was a crime.

These diatribes against anyone who even acknowledges potential downsides or side effects of the bitumen boom seem to herald a new, dangerous tendency in Canada’s political culture. Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive. And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious. I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s de-industrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.

As if those Cons weren’t selling us out to foreign interests. As if Albertans haven’t been screaming at those damn Easterners for 40 years over the National Energy Program. Which did to Alberta what Harper’s oil pimp policies are doing to the rest of Canada.

Which explains why the Cons and the other Big Oil stooges are attacking Mulcair like piranhas. They know a killer issue when they see one. But why is Stephane Dion joining in the feeding frenzy?

Stéphane Dion, the former Liberal leader, says he turned down a proposal from advisors to accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of favouring Alberta and the oil sands industry during the 2008 election campaign because he feared it would harm national unity.

He said Mr. Mulcair is effectively “giving up” on much of Western Canada and, if he forms a government in 2015, risks having little or no representation from provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan in his Cabinet.

Oh boy. When will he ever learn…

What Thomas Mulcair understands so well. He doesn’t have to win any seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan. All he has to do is win most of the seats in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, and he will BURY the Cons in the Tar Sands.

Which is one of the reasons he’s looking like a winner, and thanks to people like Stephane Dion, the Liberals are going nowhere.

Liberal support in Canada is steadily slipping as the New Democrats and Tories continue to battle for the top spot, the results of an exclusive poll for Global News indicate.

While the Grits may say that their troubles lie in finding the right candidate to lead the party, Ipsos Reid’s Darrell Bricker suggests the party may be losing a distinct voice in the political arena.

“The problem they’ve got is that they’re having a hard time finding their place in a debate about economic issues,” Bricker told Global News.

Yup. Mulcair is ruthless, the kind of leader these times demand. 

He has found a mighty issue, the truth is on his side. That’s why the Cons are running scared.

For 40 years Alberta used regional alienation like a blunt weapon.

Now it’s our turn . . .

As a follow up to my earlier chart showing Steve’s Margin of Victory in ridings with the closest vote margins, I’ve adjusted it to include only the seven being contested in court for voter fraud and added two columns of polling data from an EKOS research paper based on a recent phone survey of 4797 voters. It compares 106 ridings where there were no reports of suspicious activity to the seven ridings where there was a lot — election phone calls made to voters to identify who they intended to vote for followed up by a call falsely telling them their polling station had moved.

Only one of them — Vancouver Island North — had an actual polling station change.

So according to the Ekos poll, if you lived in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, where the Cons took the riding by only 1.8% of the vote, you had a 71% chance of getting a phone call asking you who you were going to vote for. And if you subsequently got a follow-up call regarding polling stations, you had a 30% chance of being told your polling station had changed even though it hadn’t.

If however you lived in one of the 106 other ridings used as a control group, you had a 44% chance of being asked your voting intention and only a 14.7% chance of later being given false polling station info.

From the Council of Canadians, who commissioned the EKOS poll and are supporting the court actions, come these other key findings:

• 16.9% of eligible voters received calls related to polling stations. Of those, 22.3% were told of polling station location changes (amounting to 3.77% of eligible voters).
• Of those who were told of polling station changes, the voter intentions were as follows: Liberals 32.6%, Greens 28%, NDP 25.6%, and Conservatives 10%.
• 42.5% of eligible voters who received calls related to polling stations had a call claiming to be from Elections Canada.

And I can already feel a chilly if friendly wind blowing from the infinitely more rigorous Alice Funke at Pundits’ Guide, who would never mix up apples and hand grenades like this in the same chart (ie., adding a polling sample onto Elections Canada Official Voting Results).

But if the EKOS poll is accurate, then up to 15% of the vote in those seven closest vote margin ridings — some 50,000 people — received phone calls deliberately intended to suppress the non-Steve vote.

Margin of victory riding data from Elections Canada Official Voting Results Table 12.

Last two columns in chart taken from data in EKOS Study

The Cons’ somewhat belated talking points about their use of the US voter contact firm Front Porch Strategies in the last election have been all about only using them for townhalls :

U.S. phone firm was just for town halls, say MPs 

“Jim Ross [Front Porch's Canadian liaison and Con MP Rick Dykstra's former campaign manager] said telephone town halls were about the only service the company provided in Canada. As for other calls, “Rick got all his live calling from Canada just like all the other (Tory) candidates.”  

and  “Del Mastro stressed that the U.S. company wasn’t hired to do any telemarketing or solicit votes. Front Porch Strategies was hired to host an April 7 telephone town hall on its server, he said, and was booked through its Canadian affiliate and paid in Canadian dollars.” 

Yet here is Front Porch Strategies President Matthew Parker sitting in the campaign offices of Con MP Julian Fantino with a phone to his ear, a pencil in his hand, and a paper with the header “Election Day is Monday May 2nd – You Can Vote Now” in front of him.

 

Photo caption from FPS: “Matt lending a hand for MP Fantino here in the greater Toronto area (GTA)”

What?

Okay, maybe Matt Parker and his business partner PJ Wenzel flew up from Ohio just that one time to do a little campaigning for Fantino, now the Assistant Minister of Defence, on their day off. Let’s go to twitter:

So how did all this front lines taking over business get started?

Sorry – wrong one. That’s one of their other causes – overturning Roe vs Wade in the US for the fetus fetishi.

Is this it?

Nope, not that one either.

Okay, here we go :

You mean effective communications like this?

Perhaps the Cons require another presentation from their Republican friends because their current credibility on RoboCon communications is in the fucking toilet.

Why Nobody Believes the Conservative Talking Points on the RoboCon Scandal.

Meanwhile in other RoboCon news:

Dawg : “The Speaker of the House of Commons is now ruling opposition questions about Roboscam out of order. … And what should be front-page news barely gets a mention in the corporate media — it’s as though the Parliamentary Press Gallery is on an extended sleepover with Rob Anders.”

Pogge does a round-up including a link to a great editorial on the above CBC story, and also notes that although the Elections Canada investigation into harassment phone calls in Eglinton (Volpe’s riding) was closed last May, now that over 2700 ballots of last minute unregistered voters with no or bogus addresses have turned up in the same riding, perhaps someone could take a mo to look into that please.

Dave unravels the stuffing of ballot boxes, plus the strategic targeting of voters over 60 for phone calls telling them to go the wrong or non-existent polling station: “Every single person I’ve contacted has been (born) between 1947 and 1949,” said one unidentified Elections Canada employee.”

Just one day in the media half-life of RoboCon.

…

Arghhh Update: Or, had I known, I could have skipped doing the first part of this post and just linked to this more complete version: The View From the Front Porch Looking North

By Alison@Creekside

In writing about the Cons’ dirty tricks robocall election fraud, John Ibbitson muses whether the Cons might just bear some “measure of responsibility” for creating a political climate in which their “rogue” campaign managers impersonate Election Canada officials on Election Day in order to send voters off to the wrong or non-existing polling stations to vote.

OK, let’s look at just one such riding where things went rogue.

During the last election, Kitchener-Waterloo voters reported being phoned on Election Day and told their polling station had been changed to another location. Complete bs, of course, and the calls were traced to a Conservative Party phone number.

K-W is represented by Con MP Peter Braid. In 2008 he won the riding by just 17 votes.

His campaign manager Aaron Wudrick also works for Campaign Research Inc — this Campaign Research Inc. Braid paid the company “$19,210 to do automated dialing and voter identification” (h/t cultureguru) and hired one of their CEOs to be his Election Day Chair.

Two years prior to this, Braid, Wudrick, another Campaign Research founder named Richard Ciano (previously VP of the federal Conservatives and now president of the Ontario Con Party), and the 9th VP of the Ontario Con Party, Ryan O’Connor, were all off at a workshop hosted by the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association and Preston Manning’s Manning Centre for Building Democracy . . .

And this is where things got just a tad . . . roguey.

Transcript via WikiLeaks audio. Yes, I’m pillaging a previous post here:

(37:10) Aaron Lee-Wudrick : I say we, because, even though [Ryan O'Connor] was the forced neutral [as Student President] and me as the Tory president, it was all orchestrated obviously behind closed doors, and it actually worked out well because it looked like different groups of stakeholders, like I’m the outsider coming in, and you guys were just the responsible student government and we had other members of council, a guy he appointed to council, he got speaking rights but he wasn’t an elected member, but just as another voice at the table, it made it look like there were all kinds of different corners where in fact we were all on the same team.

(42:14) Aaron Lee-Wudrick: Campus Radicals for Action on Zimbabwe Yes, or something like that, they were a great shell group. Feel free to use Campus Coalition for Liberty, that’s ours so we have a logo and everything.

(50:05) Ryan O’Connor: When Aaron was doing the petition campaign, which “I knew nothing about;” I was printing them in my frickin office in student government, of course I knew about it, of course we were behind it, I couldn’t take a public position on that issue because although I wasn’t running for reelection, this was three months before the end of my mandate . . . if we had made them an issue, no Tory would ever get elected to student government again.

Ryan O’Connor: Sometimes you can’t attach the party’s name to something. You just can’t. If it’s a really controversial issue on campus or something that might show up in the newspaper, you want to be careful. You just have your shell organization and have the Campus Coalition for Liberty and two other Tory front groups which are front organizations, all of those groups might actually qualify for funding too.

Aaron Lee-Wudrick: Don’t think that the Party doesn’t like that, because they do. They’re things that will help the Party, but it looks like it’s an organically-grown organization and it just stimulated from the grassroots spontaneously. They love that stuff. And they don’t have to bear the burden of having any of it attached to their name.”

Ok, that lays out the “measure of responsibility” relationship pretty clearly, and here’s Steve yesterday to verify it:

“In this case, our party has no knowledge of these calls. It’s not part of our campaign.”

Number of  ridings in the last election allegedly hit by fraudulent robocall campaigns so far: 27

Number of ridings giving Steve his majority: 14

By Mark Evans

As an enthusiastic supporter of Canada’s high-tech community, I’m hoping RIM can somehow find a way to revive its flagging fortunes.

But the terrible debut of the PlayBook, the modest reception to the BlackBerry 9900, and October’s global network outage has not only put RIM on its heels but caused some industry watchers such as GigaOM to envision an even darker future.

As much as it would be hard to believe RIM and the BlackBerry could crumble before our eyes, it wasn’t that long ago that Nortel was king of the telecom world before it went stumbling and fumbling into bankruptcy protection and an embarrassing asset sale.

So what if RIM disappeared? Would there be anything good to come out of it? Here are some outcomes that accentuate the positive.

1. It would free up a lot of people within RIM, who have gained valuable experience and, in many cases, a lot of financial security over the past 10 years. These people could work for other companies that need talented people, as well as finance startups that would benefit from having smart and strategic money.

2. It would reduce the Kitchener-Waterloo technology hub’s dependence on one giant company. Now, I know my friends in K-W will contend there is already a large and thriving community but my take is that it could be even more diversified. It’s like when a giant tree falls in the forest. All of a sudden, the sunlight is allowed to pour in, which lets existing companies thrive and new companies to sprout up.

3. Given RIM went from start-up to world-class company, it would hopefully be a huge reminder that supporting Canada’s start-up community is essential to the health of Canada’s high-tech community and our overall economic prosperity. For all the talk about creating jobs and nurturing the New Economy, Canada needs more walk in terms of financial support.

4. Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis would be free to pursue other entrepreneurial and philanthropic pursuits. Over the past 15 years, they have done an amazing job building a world-class company. Along the way, they have also done some impressive non-RIM projects such as creating and funding the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Lazaridis) and the  Centre for International Governance Innovation (Balsillie).

If they were liberated from RIM, they could focus their time and efforts on such things as supporting start-ups, providing mentorship, and influencing policy and economic changes. Heck, Balsillie might even finally get himself a NHL franchise.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge RIM supporter, but you have to be realistic and pragmatic. Having covered the rise and fall of Nortel, nothing in the technology world surprises me. It’s a fickle, volatile, and ever-changing landscape in which anything could happen, and often does. While RIM’s demise may seem far-fetched, it is possible, so it’s a good exercise to consider the silver lining.

First published on markevanstech.com

The JIG is up. 

An RCMP “joint intelligence group” —  comprised of federal, provincial and municipal police — infiltrated activist groups prior to the G20 and Vancouver Olympics in what they call ”one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in Canadian history.”

Constable Bindo Showan of the Ontario Provincial Police, one of the two principal undercover Ontario spies, is a stunning example of their intelligence at work.

Earlier this fall, Showan told the court about how he attended a meeting prior to the Toronto summit. There, a protest-planning group that included several of the 17 main G20 defendants was discussing whether to lend their support to a First Nations rally.

Adam Lewis, one of the 17 accused conspirators in the G20 case, interjected, “Kill whitey!” The group chuckled. Lewis, like all but one of his co-accused, is white.

When a Crown lawyer asked the officer what he thought Lewis meant, Showan said in complete seriousness, to “kill white people.” 

Apparently we do not have the right not to be spied and reported on by morons or covert operatives pretending to be morons.

This 2009 RCMP “joint intelligence group” statement defines their mission:

“The 2010 G8 summit in Huntsville … will likely be subject to actions taken by criminal extremists motivated by a variety of radical ideologies. These ideologies may include variants of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, nihilism, socialism and/or communism. These ideologies may also include notions of racial supremacy and white power … 

“The important commonality is that these ideologies … place these individuals and/or organizations at odds with the status quo and the current distribution of power in society. 

In addition to these generally held tenets, a variety of grievances exist: These grievances are based upon notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations’ resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc.“

And it is apparently still in operation :

RCMP records suggest that the reconnaissance continues. Report logs indicate at least 29 incidents of police surveillance between the end of the G20 summit and April 2011 — more than nine months after world leaders departed Toronto.

The same document indicates that the RCMP-led intelligence team made a series of presentations to private-sector corporations, including one to “energy sector stakeholders” in November 2011.

Good to know.

After millions of dollars and 70,000 pages of Crown evidence, conspiracy charges have been dropped against the 17 activists held in jail or under house arrest for the last 18 months, but 6 of them will serve jail time for counselling mischief, with an additional charge of counselling to obstruct police leveraged against Alex Hundert and Mandy Hiscocks

Toronto Star: Behind the G20 plea deal

Below is a message from the So-Called “G-20 Main Conspiracy Group,” below. And their written statement regarding the charges can be read here. 

About ten years ago I saw a young couple throw themselves in front of a subway train at the McGill metro station in downtown Montreal. It was all over in a flash.

All I saw was two people on the opposite platform suddenly rush forward, and then the body of one of them lying like a rag doll under the middle of the train when it came to a full stop.

But the incident haunted me for years. I couldn’t help thinking if only I had been on the other platform, I might have been able to do something to save them.

So I can’t help but note that Saturday was World Suicide Prevention Day. Because suicide is a huge problem in Canada and not enough is being done about it.

Every month about 300 Canadians take their own lives, and many more attempt it. The young and the old are particularly vulnerable, and so are the mentally ill.

In native communities, where suicide rates are many times the rate of non-native Canadians, they call Autumn the suicide season. And what’s happening in one native community is an absolute horror show.

Pikangikum, a fly-in community of 2,400 people in northwestern Ontario, is thought to have the highest suicide rate in the world . . . Of the 16 suicides examined by the coroner, four of the children were 12.

The top recommendation is for Ottawa to build a school in Pikangikum to replace the one that burned down four years ago. Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada has committed to rebuild it, but that has not yet happened.

Our failure to stop this slaughter of our suffering native youth is a gaping wound in the side of this country. Our apparent inability to talk openly about our suicide problem only makes things worse.

The good news, and the point of Suicide Prevention Day, is that we CAN do something about it. We can force governments to do more, we can help more Canadians choose life, and we can help reduce the shattering pain of those who loved them and lost them so suddenly.

We just have to educate ourselves about the problem. We have to be able to recognize the symptoms and the warnings in those we know and love, know what to say and how to help them.

But perhaps the simplest and most effective thing we can do as ordinary people is just say “TALK TO ME.”

Which just happens to be this year’s slogan of The Trevor Project, an organization that helps LGBT kids, who attempt suicide at a rate four times higher than their straight peers.

Here’s Kevin McHale from “Glee” speaking to them . . .

And here’s a flash mob in Los Angeles sending out a message that I’m dedicating to everybody, young and old, gay or straight, who are feeling sad and hopeless tonight . . .

Yup. Talk to me. Three simple words that can save a life.

Knowledge is strength.

And love can work wonders . . .

As God’s cruel jokes go, this one’s a doozy. Jack Layton, having built the NDP into the Official Opposition and created a sense of hope for the resurgence of a genuine left in Canada, one that would keep the right from running roughshod over the poor, the middle-class, and those who see the country as more than a balance sheet, is dead at 61.

As a westerner, I had watched his emergence on the national scene with an ingrained distrust. He seemed to be yet another Ontario pol elected to reinforce the NDP’s base in that province, but who would make little headway elsewhere. It was the same old centralist story — or so it seemed. And then there was that moustache — that moustache! — that made him look like a used car salesman, or worse.

But gradually he grew on me (as he did, obviously, on many other Canadians). He had a surprisingly good grasp of the entire country — of the issues in BC’s struggling forestry industry, say, or of the way a flood on the Prairies could wipe out years of hard work. And apparently he got Quebec; in any event, they got him. Maybe he had just whipped his party sufficiently into shape that he was well-briefed before heading out on a trip, but that in itself suggested a new competence that allowed one to conceive of the NDP as, one day, a governing party.

By the time of the election, and his astonishing sprint to the finish, I found myself in an odd position for a died-in-the-wool Westy: of hoping this Ontario pol would be the one who eventually chased Calgary’s Stephen Harper out of office. And, in truth, I was looking forward to watching Layton manhandle the Conservatives in Parliament

And now he is gone.

Next month, in Edmonton, the nation’s rightists will get together for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Reform Party. What they will be celebrating is the imposition on Alberta of a lot of old Orange Protestant ideas out of Ontario, as peddled from a kitbag by the likes of Ted Byfield and, yes, Stephen Harper. The conservatism of that province is no longer of the Bible Bill Aberhart brand, so similar to the populist politics of Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas as to be, at times, indistiguishable. It is now corporatist, and mean. That is the Reform Party’s achievement, which they have since spread, under the name of the Conservative Party, across the land.

They did so by cynically attaching themselves to the West’s regional aspirations — hence the title of their conference, “How the West Got in.” But they do not represent this westerner, nor most of the westerners I know. If we no longer have the stranger from the East with the funny moustache to dig us out from under them, well, maybe that’s just as well. No use once again importing a kitbag of policies; we are, after all, where the NDP began.

We might just have to do it ourselves. That could be Layton’s biggest bequest to us — a boot in the butt.

Thanks for that, Jack. And Rest in Peace.

The Toronto Star just announced that you can’t trust a thing you read on their website — although that’s not quite the way they phrased it. Canada’s largest daily has joined forces with TheMarkNews.com, one of those free blogger sites, to acquire a small army of unpaid “community correspondents” to cover Ontario’s October 6 election.

A measure of how far removed newspapers are from the media of even 20 years ago can be seen in the badly written ad riddled with grammatical errors. They tell us correspondents will be expected to “use a variety of mediums with an emphasis on video and photos,” which left me wondering how anyone in the professional media doesn’t know that mediums are found only at psychic fairs and clothing stores.

But the breakdown in basic literacy skills is probably of little concern except to reporters from an era when they taught us to dread an editor bellowing across a newsroom: “Rupp! How the hell do you spell separate?” Far more disturbing is seeing the biggest (and many journos would argue the best) newspaper in Canada admit that it is planning to deploy lobbyists and political shills where once they fielded journalists.

“Community correspondents will receive no monetary compensation for their work. The value is being able to shape the debate and broadcast your ideas to the Toronto Star and The Mark’s national audiences,” the ad’s FAQ tells, without a hint of irony.

I guess we’ll have to edit Samuel Johnson’s famous line — no man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money — to say “nobody but a shill . . .”

Shills are exactly what the Star will be promoting under a banner that once explicitly stood for good journalism, due to the Atkinson Principles. When TorStar bought the paper that published the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan from the estate of publisher Joseph Atkinson in 1958, the deal came with strings attached. The new corporate owners had to continue to treat the paper as a public trust delivering journalism “conducted for the benefit of the public in the continued frank and full dissemination of news and opinions.”

I see no mention of the Atkinson Principles in the community correspondents ad. But the FAQ offers a hilariously ignorant definition of conflict of interest that makes it clear political operatives will be a big part of the “overwhelming number of applications expected.”

“A conflict of interest is defined as a formal or informal affiliation with any political party or interest group with a stake in the election. Conflicts do not disqualify candidates, but they need to be declared in order to maintain the credibility of the project.”

Uh, no. As any journalist can tell you, a conflict of interest is defined as serving two masters simultaneously. A conflict is often determined by who is paying for the service. And make no mistake, all bloggers are paid — just not by the sites running them.

Platforms like The Mark or The Huffington Post collect the copy of people who are paid to write promotional columns for a product or a cause. It’s a form public relations – copy written for self-serving reasons, rather than to inform readers. Some naïve would-be writers think they’re building a career by contributing free pieces to The Mark or HuffPo, but most readers know these sites are just publicity. Which isn’t a criticism: promotional sites have their uses. As journalism disappears, stories of genuine public interest have been ignored, and sites like The Mark provide a place for academics to advertise their books or charities to promote their beliefs.

But it’s not journalism, which is defined by journalists as newsgathering done on behalf of the public. Newspapers attract readers and lay claim to all sorts of privileges, including access to government, because they serve citizens. That’s the product they sell: independent information for participants in a democracy. Or rather, that’s the product they used to sell.

Apparently, the Star thinks there’s more money to be made in running online propaganda. For their sake I hope so, because they just devalued their newspaper by making it obvious they no longer adhere to the Atkinson Principles, or even have enough respect for their readers to bother using the words right.