By Ray Rivers

December 22, 2018

BURLINGTON, ON

“Sexual misconduct is an umbrella term for any misconduct of a sexual nature that is of lesser offence than felony sexual assault (such as rape and molestation)…” (Wikipedia)

The allegations against Patrick Brown by two women, who remain anonymous, do not involve criminal charges. Though one of the women, who had worked in his federal constituency office, is calling her ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ encounter a sexual assault, He apparently tried to kiss her.

A younger but still very wary young Patrick Brown.

Brown’s accusers are claiming ‘sexual misconduct’, a non-legal construct, but the core essence of the #MeToo movement. The purpose is to bring some measure of accountability for the untold sexually motivated actions not covered by criminal law. These accusations have cost Patrick Brown his job as Ontario PC leader and with that most likely the premiership of the province.

In response Brown has levied a multi-million dollar defamation suit against the CTV news network responsible for the investigation and for breaking the story of the allegations against him. Rumours that Brown had apologized to and paid-off one of the accusers in the past may have prompted this investigation, but Brown denies that he paid anyone off. So we’ll have to see what the trial brings.

As for the other accuser she claimed she was still in high school at the time of the alleged incident and that Brown and a mutual friend picked her up at a bar and drove her back to Brown’s house. When the datelines didn’t match up with Brown’s timelines she changed them, which also made her a year older and of legal drinking age.

She also got the identity of the friend wrong. But the gist of the allegation is that Brown offered her a tour of the house and when they got to the bedroom he allegedly asked her to perform oral sex. She consented briefly before deciding that the act didn’t suit her taste.

Brown, in his book, has suggested that there was a conspiracy against him which led to these women coming forward. He flew up the pole the theory that Kathleen Wynne and her Liberals had a motive to try to do him in. Indeed his poll numbers were stellar, he’d built up an impressive war chest and membership list, and had won the last several provincial by-elections.

Cover of the election campaign magazine that set out Brown’s platform. It was the kind of thing even Liberals would like.

Brown had come off a very successful policy conference with a platform that would appeal even to Liberals who’d grown tired of their own leader. Taking him out mere months before the June election would have thrown the Tories into confusion, one might think, giving his main opponent a badly needed edge.

But while Wynne may have had the motive, did she or her party have the wherewith-all? If, as many conservatives hold, that the CBC is slightly to the left of centre, CTV (Conservative TV) is clearly to the right. It is questionable that Wynne would have had much influence with that network. And to suggest she had done this covertly when she had trouble cobbling together an effective election campaign is a major stretch.

Brown also mused that it might be the Russians. Russia is getting blamed for a lot these days and for good reason. There is concern that Russia is planning to intercede in Canada’s federal elections next year, though it’s questionable who they might want to help. But if so why not practice on Canada’s largest province by taking out the premier-in-waiting. And they are effective – they did give us Donald Trump.

There is so much intrigue I can hardly wait for the movie… and the trial. Of course it could also have been his own party that turned on him, the many disaffected traditional PCs. Perhaps they were trying to send their leader a message about the Liberal sex education curriculum he’d endorsed.

Patrick Brown being hounded out of the provincial legislature by media after his press conference announcing hes resigning as leader of the Progressive Conservative party.

Brown has demanded that the accusers report their complaints to the police if they are sincere. But Brown studied law and he knows that ‘put up or shut up’ no longer works in the era of #MeToo. These are not criminal offences or he might be fighting for his dignity from the big house.

Those female accusers might have been paid to voice these accusations. Or they might just be scorned women who want to get back at that SOB who tried, or didn’t try, to get into their pants. Or they might just be ordinary people who cared enough about the future to try to prevent the man they believe is synonymous with sexual misconduct from becoming premier of this province.

And the beauty of #MeToo is that it empowers us to accuse without having to fully account, to prove our allegations or even identify ourselves. These accusers may be right that Mr. Brown is unfit to govern the highest office in the province because of what they consider his proclivity for sexual misconduct. But what if they are wrong? Where is Patrick Brown’s MeToo moment.

To be continued…..

Ray Rivers writes regularly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington.  He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject.   Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa.  Tweet @rayzrivers

Background links:

#MeToo –      More #MeToo –      Sexual Misconduct –

CTV –      Doubts about Accusations –     Sexual Allegations –

By Pepper Parr

December 16th, 2018

BURLINGTON, ON

Simon Houpt, a Globe and Mail columnist, interviewed Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian, a British newspaper that has a very strong on-line presence. Their reporting on news world wide is superb; their coverage of the American President is frequently better than the major American dailies – including the New York Times.

The Gazette is certainly not in the same league as the Guardian but we do aspire to, on a local level, do what they do internationally.

Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, the News of the World phone hacking scandal: Readers around the world know these as some of the greatest hits published by the Guardian during Alan Rusbridger’s 20 years as editor. But he also oversaw – in the teeth of calamitous economic disruption and hundreds of millions of pounds in losses – the paper’s galloping expansion into a news operation serving millions of readers around the globe. He was in Toronto recently for a discussion sponsored by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, reflecting on his career and his new book Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now.

What follows is a Q&A the Globe and Mail published over the weekend. It is worth a read to understand where journalism is.

Simon Houpt

Simon Houpt (SH) You stepped down in 2015. How does it feel to no longer be in the thick of things?

Alan Rusbridger (AR) It took about 18 months for the adrenalin in the system [to subside]. It’s only when you stop that you realize, it’s not normal to have a knot in the stomach, waking up at 3 in the morning, thinking, “Did I get that fact right, did I double-check that?” That business of getting out of bed every morning and working till midnight, and feeling responsible for stuff we publish around the globe, around the clock – I’m quite relieved not to be doing that. Fun though it was at the time. Twenty years is a long time.

SH Before we proceed any further, I should ask: The Guardian, of course, remains free for online readers. Do you think we should charge for this article?

Alan Rusbridger

AR Well, I don’t feel it’s for me to lecture anybody else on their business model. If the only way of making stuff pay is to hide it behind a paywall, then you have to do it. But there are downsides to that: You get a highly informed elite who are able to pay for news, and you are taking yourself off the playing field where, to a degree never before in history, information is circulating. I should preface all of this by saying we’re five minutes into a gigantic revolution and almost everything we say today will look silly in 10 years’ time.

SH Your position seems to be that we should think of journalism in the same way as many European countries – and Canada, too – regard the arts, such as TV, film and music. These activities are often subsidized because there’s an understanding that the market can’t pay the full costs, yet they’re part of the lifeblood of a culture, something that a nation needs for self-determination.

AR Yes. I completely believe that. My worry is that the classical link between journalism’s ability to make people well-informed and how that created a better society – because well-informed citizens vote for better people – is fading quite quickly. So there’s an awful lot of education and rebuilding to do to get people to realize that we can do that. The good news is, I think people are waking up to that. The bad news is, there’s such terrible levels of trust in journalists and most journalists don’t seem very interested in that.

SH You believe there’s an arrogance there.

AR Almost worse than that. “We’re journalists. Nobody loves us, we don’t care.”

SH One of your prescriptions is what you call “open journalism,” in which a community helps shape reporting through intense feedback. Given some of the developments we’ve seen over the past few years – including the growth of bad actors spreading misinformation and capitalizing on naive openness – do you believe you were too utopian in your embrace of openness?

AR I think it’s too early to say that that is a utopian dream. I know journalists generally don’t agree with this, but I think the experiments I see, in which journalists ask those willing to talk to them, can produce much better journalism.

SH That can require bravery and humility, to really open up the reporting process and acknowledge that we journalists may not know as much as we should. How much of a challenge is that cultural shift?

AR It’s a huge shift. But journalists got Brexit wrong, they got Trump wrong, they got the last [British] general election wrong – they’re sort of blundering around in a world that they can’t really understand at the moment.

SH At the same time, the economic model is collapsing. Here in Canada, the federal government just proposed a series of funding initiatives, including one to provide tax credits to organizations whose eligibility – and this was especially concerning for some critics – would be determined by an industry panel. If you had, say, $100-million a year, how would you determine the recipients?

AR I think the way I would do it is to go out [and ask], What is it that people feel they need to know about their community? Do we want somebody covering courts? Do we want somebody covering police? Do we want somebody scrutinizing planning and education? Do we want somebody sitting in council chambers?

SH Do you believe people know what they want? Clickbait might suggest otherwise.

AR Yeah, they do. It may be that it rarely occurs to anybody to ask them. Maybe there’s an enterprising court reporting service that would have 10 reporters in city courts, and you could price that, and then we could say to them: “But you have to make all that reporting available for The Globe and Mail.”

Simon Houpt

SH You write ambivalently about the BBC: both as a “lighthouse,” as a public good, but also resentfully because of its size. How do you feel it should be regarded?

AR Overwhelmingly, treasured. When I look at America, I would shudder at the thought of Fox News coming in and replacing the BBC, which is I’m sure what the Murdoch company would like.

SH Are you concerned about the BBC’s economic effect on the industry landscape?

AR There’s no meaningful public broadcasting in America, but their media are in just as much trouble. So it’s a terribly easy argument to say, they’re spoiling our business. I think the business problem is bigger than the BBC or bigger than Facebook or bigger than Google. But I do think you need to watch them. I mean, the BBC at one point was sort of moving into glossy magazine publication. So I think it’s right to jump on them if they’re exceeding their brief.

SH Some publishers in Canada attack CBC for being on the internet.

AR Yeah. I don’t agree with that.

SH You began at the Guardian in 1979 and have had a front-row seat to extraordinary change. What do you think is more of a threat: the disruption to the industry’s economic models or the increasing tribalism of our culture?

Alan Rusbridger

AR I think it’s all of a piece, really. There’s a terrible flight from complexity. So we all want simple messages, we worked out that fear sells, emotion works. A little bit of that is fine. But if that becomes the sort of operating system of your news organization, then you will create politicians who do that. If you’re rewarding them and their kind of politics, [that leads to] the kind of populist leaders that we’ve got now.