Why is the CBC speaking on behalf of Amanda Lang about her dealings with the Globe and Mail?
Sources close to Amanda Lang, who spoke to CANADALAND on the condition of anonymity, confirm that she has been in a romantic relationship with RBC Board Member W. Geoffrey Beattie since January 2013 at the latest.
Multiple sources within CBC News have revealed to CANADALAND a shocking campaign Amanda Lang undertook in 2013 to sabotage a major story reported by her colleague, investigative reporter Kathy Tomlinson.
On yesterday’s SHORT CUTS Jesse Brown and Jen Gerson argue that, in the wake of Wednesday’s attack on the magazine’s office in Paris, news outlets ought to share Charlie Hebdo’s racist caricatures of Mohammed.
Alongside many publications at home and abroad, CANADALAND has reproduced a selection of Charlie Hebdo’s most racist cartoons.
Love and respect to Jesse, Jen and CANADALAND, but they’re full of shit.
Jesse’s justification for running the racist cartoons aligns with two common arguments we’ve heard over and over this week.
First, there’s the belief that reproducing the cartoons is vital to news consumers’ understanding of the Paris attack. Second, there’s the belief that running the racist cartoons shouldn’t be a question because it is a simple matter of freedom of speech.
Neither of these beliefs holds up.
Seeing Charlie Hebdo’s racist cartoons is not vital to understanding Wednesday’s attack.
Words are a journalist’s trade. If you’re a journalist and you can’t describe to me a drawing of Mohammed naked with a star on his ass, it’s time for you to get a new job.
I am familiar with the details of the cartoons because I have learned of their content, as a media consumer, without seeing them. And I am under no obligation to look at racist bile.
It’s my decision as to whether I want to consume racist content because I live in an era of digital literacy and democracy. Readers and consumers can and should be able to curate the extent to which they participate in Charlie Hebdo’s bigotry.
If publications don’t understand and respect the capability of their audience to make its own judgments about whether to consume widely available racist content, they don’t understand how access to information works in 2015.
Radio-Canada, The National Post and other publications running the racist cartoons has made no contribution to my understanding of the story. It has, however, rebroadcast pernicious stereotypes of Muslims across a country where ¾ of the population is white and where media institutions are packed to the gills with pasty old men.
And, if I choose not to take part in or rebroadcast racism with said pasty old men, the free speech of racists is not imperilled. There was racist speech before Wednesday, there is racist speech today, there will be racist speech tomorrow. It’s all there for you to Google, should you so choose.
The news organizations that recognized this and did not run the cartoons were in the right.
Jesse, Jen and others online were quick to praise the Quebec media, in particular La Presse, Le Journal de Montreal and Radio-Canadafor republishing the racist cartoons with haste.
But this is because they completely missed the point. Quebec’s papers and media institutions, federalist and sovereigntist, reported on last year’s proposed Charter of Values, which sought to impose racist clothing restrictions on Jews, Muslims and Sikhs, as a credible legislative proposition.
During the Charter debate, Le Journal de Montreal published an op-ed by Richard Martineau arguing that television viewers would (and should) be outraged if a broadcaster appeared on their screen wearing a kippa or hijab. His views were not salacious, but mainstream.
When Sugar Sammy, a Quebec-born and raised comedian of Punjabi descent, made fun of the province’s language laws late last year, aJdeM columnist called it “a political manifesto and a declaration of war against the principles of Bill 101.” In the fallout of this hostile media environment, Sugar Sammy received death threats.
Quebec is the only jurisdiction in Canada where the language of racial purity – of pure laine – carries valid weight among media institutions.
This is what those who have praised Quebec’s media institutions in the wake of these attacked have endorsed: bigotry, not freedom. In fact, they’ve sided against the freedom of news consumers to access information on our own terms.
Posting Charlie Hebdo cartoons under the guise of “freedom” or “anti-terrorism” is nothing more than a thinly-veiled way of promoting Islamophobia, whether prompted by deep-seeded personal hostilities or by those of a wider culture like Quebec’s.
Can anyone point to an instance where publishing content that was created specifically in order to hurt, provoke and ostracize an already marginalized ethnic group effectively treated any one of the root causes of terrorism? Has it ever produced a positive geo-political or sociological output? No, it hasn’t.
I mourn the death of the twelve people who were killed on Wednesday. I am devastated by the brutality of their murderers.
But I won’t participate in the rebroadcasting of racism. I am notCharlie Hebdo. And I hope I never will be.
In an apparent attempt to keep pace with Kim Jong-un, a Canadian federal agency has blocked government employees from accessing a paywalled news site that reports on the government’s inner workings.
CBC “stands by” her journalism
When a young woman first told me that she had been brutally abused by Jian Ghomeshi, I checked the Q archives.
Earlier this year a source informed me that a Toronto city councillor was involved in corrupt land dealings. To verify this claim I needed to access a variety of public records, but as a freelance investigative journalist, the money paid to obtain documents comes out of my own pocket.
I was priced out.
Purchasing a ‘Corporate Profile Report’, from a ServiceOntario office, which provides the names and addresses of the directors of a corporation, costs $12. Searching for the same records online rather than in person costs $22 or more.
While Ontario is one of the provinces that charges for these records, the same information on corporations from Nova Scotia, P.E.I., Quebec, Newfoundland & Labrador and federally registered corporations is available free online.
Searching properties at the Ontario Land Registry Office costs $8 per search, but as part of a deal Ontario struck with Teranet Inc, a private company that makes money from every search, that price will more than triple next year to $28. This will make buying these documents in person match the current cost of purchasing them online.
These fees may not seem huge, but think about how often one needs to run a search in order to find relevant information. How much less would you use Google if each search cost fifty cents?
Charging for public documents reduces the degree of scrutiny brought to bear on corporations and public officials, which in turn increases the secrecy that allows business interests to buy influence from unscrupulous decision makers.
Ontario’s Premier Kathleen Wynne pledged to “unlock” public records in an open letter dated October 21st 2013. Wynne championed transparency, promising an increase of freely downloadable data through the government’s open data portal.
“I believe that government data belongs to the people of Ontario and so we will make government data open by default, limiting access only to safeguard privacy, security and confidentiality,” wrote Wynne.
She called on the people of Ontario to become engaged in choosing which records should be added to the open data portal, by voting on an inventory of possible datasets. However, the corporate and property records, which are vital for investigations of corruption, were not listed in this inventory.
“There are no plans to make corporate or land registry records available through the Open Data initiative,” a government spokesperson told me in an email, “we are not currently looking at eliminating fees for [these] records”
In my own case, when I got a tip on municipal corruption, the costs involved in researching it were just too steep.
I was told that a Toronto city councillor had voted to have land zoned for industrial purposes converted for residential use, even though he had a personal interest in the decision. There are millions of dollars to be made from such a conversion, as it can allow condos to be built on land that had previously been reserved for other uses. It can triple the value of a property overnight.
Unfortunately my source did not inform me which specific property the councillor had a stake in, instead pointing me to a general region of the city. I learned that the councillor had previously indicated that his family owned land in the area, but again it was not clear which property. To find out I would need to visit the Land Registry Office to look up numerous properties, and then visit ServiceOntario to find the directors of the companies that own these properties. If I could find any connections to the councillor, I might have a good story on my hands.
But the cost of this research would far exceed the money I would make selling this story, and there was no guarantee I would find any signs of wrongdoing.
Without proof I can’t even name the city councillor.
Large media organizations don’t have the same budget constraints that freelancers and small media organizations do, but the costs still limit the number of searches they conduct.
“If land and corporate searches were free, you would see much more systematic research on public officials and companies doing business at city hall” says Zach Dubinsky, an investigative journalist at CBC, whose reporting on a different city councillor, Giorgio Mammoliti, showed that he was one of two councillors receiving discounted rent from a property developer, and revealed that Mammoliti held a $5000/table dinner to raise funds for himself, a fundraiser that led the police to launch a criminal investigation into the councillor.
Dubinsky has never found that the costs of records has held him back from pursuing a specific lead, but believes that if costs were eliminated he would dig more comprehensively into people and companies with business at City Hall.
“I am jealous of journalists in other jurisdictions where this data is free or pretty close to it, such as US jurisdictions”, say Dubinsky, “in Canada there are far fewer records available and you typically have to pay a lot of money for them”.
Dubinsky also pointed to the greater amount of information made available in Quebec. Unlike Ontario, that province provides information not only on the directors of corporations but also who are the shareholders of a company.
“It is much more difficult to hide behind a numbered company in Quebec”, he told me.
He believes that if the Ontario government put corporate records online for open analysis, it could have a huge impact on uncovering corruption and other wrongdoing.
“If there was one change I could ask for from the provincial government, that would substantially improve the calibre of the research we can do, and help the public hold officials to account, that would be making corporate information fully searchable” said Dubinsky.
Lack of flexibility with searches is as big a problem as the fees: right now it’s not possible in Ontario to search a person’s name and find out what corporations they are connected to.
OpenCorporates is one of the online tools that makes this sort of search possible. The website allows you to search records from over 55 million corporations from 98 different jurisdictions around the world that publish information on their corporations online. However only four of Canada’s ten provinces, Nova Scotia, P.E.I., Quebec, and Newfoundland & Labrador, as well as the federal government, make their corporate records available for free online.
“I think we should all be disturbed when corporate records are locked behind pay walls,” said David Eaves, a B.C. based expert on Open Data. Eaves sits on the Advisory Board for the OpenCorporates website, and was a member of Ontario’s Open Government Engagement Team, the group that advised the province on the open data policy Premier Wynne promoted in her open letter.
“None of this information should be expensive to extract anymore,” says Eaves , noting that fees were originally implemented in an age before records could easily be accessed from a database. He speculates that fees were not designed as means of making money, but now that they are in place there is a reluctance to eliminate them.
“The government is either saying we don’t want you to access these records easily, or we have bought an IT system that is so inefficient that we have to charge that much for this information.” Eaves explained.
Last year Ontario made $7.1 million dollars in revenue from the sale of corporate records. But this is a small amount of money compared to what the government has made from its deal with Teranet Inc. a company that is not only the sole broker of land registry records, but also makes money every time a property is bought or sold in Ontario.
Teranet Inc, was originally formed in 1991 as a public private partnership tasked with digitizing, the immense amount of paper records kept by Ontario’s Land Registry system. However in 2003 the government sold its stake in the company.
In 2010, the province struck a deal with Teranet that will see it maintain its monopoly on selling these records for an additional 50 years, in return for $1 billion and annual royalties. The deal includes an increase in the price of a property record. Starting in November 2015 the cost will be $28.
“Twenty-eight dollars is a high fee to put on that,” says Dubinsky. “It will present a barrier to investigative reporters.”
Teranet is currently expanding to other parts of the country. In June 2014, the company made a deal with Manitoba to become the broker of that Province’s land registry records.
While Eaves acknowledges that it may no longer be possible to make property records in Ontario available in a free and open way, he doesn’t think the same is true of corporate records. He believes that if people in Ontario put enough pressure on the government, it would open corporate records, emphasizing that the “benefit to society of doing so would be really high”.
“They did say they would do this”, said Eaves pointing to the government’s commitment to put public data online, “I think people should hold their feet to the fire.”
Tonight CBC’s the fifth estate will air an hour-long investigative documentary, titled The Unmaking of Jian Ghomeshi. I participated in this report. I gave the CBC information and documentation from my independent investigation and from my work with Kevin Donovan. I reached out to some of my sources on the CBC’s behalf and asked if they would be interested in participating as well. I gave the CBC extensive interviews, both on and off camera.
This may strike some as an odd choice.
After all, I’ve been highly critical of the CBC’s internal Ghomeshi investigation, which is currently being conducted by lawyer Janice Rubin. I felt that in that instance, the very idea that the CBC could be expected to do an honest job of investigating itself was a joke. So why have I now participated with a CBC news investigation?
It wasn’t for money. This was a different kind of partnership than my work with the Toronto Star; I volunteered my time and efforts to the fifth estate and officially I am simply a source in their report. It wasn’t for attention; I’ve turned down every request for a TV appearance about the Ghomeshi case before this one.
I helped the CBC (or more specifically, I helped some of the CBC’s last remaining investigative reporters) because they are in a unique position to find and report the truth about CBC management’s role in the Ghomeshi case. Since parting company with the Toronto Star, my own investigation has focused directly on CBC management. I have learned and reported some information on this, but my access to the highest levels of the organization is very limited, and my requests for comment are met with curt denials when they are answered at all.
The fifth estate‘s Gillian Findlay, her executive producer Jim Williamson, and senior producer Julian Sher promised me that they too were specifically interested in investigating CBC management. They have assured me that they have both the will and the license to hold their own bosses to account, even if it means implicating people they have personal friendships with. And they have institutional knowledge and access that I do not.
I chose to trust them.
The worst case scenario is that the fifth estate‘s report will be like the two CBC interviews executive Heather Conway requested and received in the early days of this story: a carefully managed attempt to provide the appearance of accountability with none of the substance. If I’ve helped the CBC fool its audience into thinking the broadcaster has properly dealt with this and we can all move on, I apologize in advance.
How will we know?
There will be many indications. In their advance hype for tonight’s episode, the fifth estate has promised “numerous revelations”. Perhaps some of these will concern the instances in which management was directly exposed to Jian Ghomeshi’s inappropriate behaviour. After all, Ghomeshi’s activities were not constrained to his staff. He rode in elevators with management and rubbed elbows with top executives at galas and fundraisers in Toronto and Ottawa. Ghomeshi was a fixture at these parties, where he was known as as a brazen operator. Is it credible that no CBC executive saw anything firsthand? Were they ever told about an incident after the fact? Perhaps we will learn something tonight.
Ultimately, there is one way we will know for sure if the fifth estate is for real. It has nothing to do with hints, warnings or red-flags that CBC executives might have heeded before anyone knew about the severity of Ghomeshi’s actions- it has to do with the direct behaviour of management at the highest levels, once they knew the truth.
In his infamous Facebook post, since deleted (possibly as a condition of his settlement with the CBC,) Jian Ghomeshi wrote:
“I was given the choice to walk away quietly and to publicly suggest that this was my decision.”
If true, this offer to deceive the public and cover up crimes would have been made to Ghomeshi by CBC executives after he showed them photo evidence that he had brutalized a woman. It’s possible that Ghomeshi was lying about this. But it’s unlikely: if such an offer was made, lawyers on both sides would have been present.
So: was this offer made by CBC management? If so, by who exactly?
For the fifth estate‘s investigation to be credible and legitimate, their report must at the very least pose these questions.
And that’s how we’ll know.
Finally, there is another reason why I helped the CBC. It’s an idealistic one from a recovering public broadcaster, a small hope that the many responsible and principled journalists still within the CBC might reclaim the place from those who have driven it into the ground in every conceivable way.
The only way the CBC can present itself to Canadians as an organization that is still in the business of telling the truth is by cleaning up its own damn mess.
I really hope they do.
In walking back its ban last week of retiring journalist Linden MacIntyre, the CBC presented the public with an official version of events which describe the decision to punish MacIntyre as a “heat of the moment” mistake by one CBC manager, Jennifer Harwood.
CANADALAND has learned that this is not true.
