Canwest Witnesses Go Under Oath
September 9th, 2009
Pursuing the managements of giant media conglomerates through the courts is a costly, time-consuming venture.
But eventually the long, steady climb up the slopes of procedure and the crags of delay ushers the parties onto the sunny plateau known as examinations for discovery. At last it’s time to look at the facts of the case in the full light of day.
Witnesses are sworn in and questions are put to them by opposing counsel. A court reporter notes every word for the record.
On July 14th, examinations for discovery began in Kent vs. Don Martin, Canwest Publishing, the National Post, the Calgary Herald and related companies.
I brought this lawsuit last year in response to the attack article published Feb. 12, 2008 on the nationalpost.com website and the following day in the print editions of the National Post and the Calgary Herald (please see The Page At Issue pdf at the top right of our homepage) and because both the Post and Herald refused to publish my response.
As detailed in previous entries on this site, commencing Oct. 20, 2008 with Challenging Defamation and Political Vandalism, the article grossly misrepresents my name and reputation, both in the New York-based network news industry and as a contributor to Canwest’s own newscasts and newspapers.*
As well, it falsely maligns my campaign as a candidate for the Progressive Conservative government in the 2008 Alberta provincial election. The article has had a devastating, wide-reaching impact.
During the campaign, as detailed in last autumn’s entries, I had urged Premier Ed Stelmach to respond to our constituents’ concerns over his energy policies and to address the PC’s culture of patronage. Both these issues later figured in Alberta’s pre-recession downturn in oilpatch jobs and investment, and the crisis that has seen last year’s projected budget surplus of $2 billion plunge to a deficit of $7 billion.
But recognizing the consequences of dubious practices and bad policy isn’t a priority for some old Tories. My warnings drew the ire of a number of shadowy backroom figures, and some of the premier’s campaign officials.
With discovery underway, it’s important to note that testimony and other evidence gleaned from the process before Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench is subject to confidentiality. From the outset, our side has respected this and all the other rules of the Court and we will continue to do so.
By way of context, it’s worth reviewing the salient points of our earlier entries here. Prior to the publication of his attack article, I had never met nor spoken with Mr. Martin. He afforded me no reasonable opportunity to comment.
As well, comments from my supporters are not included in the article, which is based on false assertions by unnamed sources identified only as “party insiders” and “senior campaign strategists” and “a veteran of half a dozen elections.”
I filed a rebuttal promptly after the election, but both the National Post and Calgary Herald refused to publish it. When my lawyer and I offered Canwest’s bosses an opportunity to resolve the matter, they were unresponsive.
The conglomerate’s lawyers sought a stay of the Alberta action due to our separate libel suit filed last November in New York State Supreme Court. On May 27, the Court in Calgary denied Canwest’s stay motion, clearing the way for discovery to commence.
The Court ordered Canwest to pay my costs in turning back their stay motion. Despite several requests, the defendants have not forwarded these funds.** Later, the New York court granted Canwest’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit there on a procedural issue, a ruling my lawyers and I are now appealing. No costs were awarded.
To understand the political tensions that existed prior to the article’s publication, here are excerpts from my entry A Rough Ride on the High Road, posted Oct 30, 2008:
“(The Globe & Mail’s) Roy MacGregor, a journalist who is no stranger to Alberta politics, had caught wind of the story. He asked me about Rod Love, formerly the senior aide and all round Mr. Fixit to Ralph Klein, Ed Stelmach’s predecessor as Progressive Conservative leader and Premier of Alberta. Love had forsaken me, so to speak, by singing the praises of my Liberal Party rival on CBC Radio. The Calgary Sun termed this an endorsement…
I told Roy: “We know where he’s coming from.” Mr. Love, I explained, probably hadn’t liked what he’d heard of my stump speech. I explained that like most of my neighbours in our constituency, I felt that the Klein government had “run out of juice,” leaving the province spinning its wheels. “It’s a new day,” I said. “The Klein era is over. People want to move on. They want a plan – I’m proud to say I have a plan.”
Of course I could have gone into more detail - mentioning, for instance, the mysterious appearance of both Ralph Klein and Rod Love at the launch party for my candidacy some months earlier. “What are they doing here?” one of my supporters asked. A seasoned, older Conservative among us replied: “They want a new guy, and you’re it.”
Despite never having met Rod Love, the suggestion was as plausible as it was distasteful. For days prior to the launch, one of Love’s close friends, Lee Richardson, a federal Member of Parliament from Calgary, had been urging me to appoint a Klein/Love associate named Alan Hallman as my campaign manager. I declined, explaining that we wanted to take a new direction with our campaign.
Mr. Richardson’s response? “Remember,” Lee told me, “if you make an enemy, it’s for life.”
That’s how it is with some old Conservatives in Alberta. Reject their intrusions, and you run the risk of retaliation. This echoed what another long time Tory insider had told me, that candidates were “commodities” – mere fronts for party strongmen and appointees.
These sentiments left me cold. Were Alberta’s Conservatives looking for new blood, or just another generation of cronies? My supporters and I agreed that this mentality was a low-water mark in the Progressive Conservative Party’s history, one that we had to rise above.” (Excerpt ends.)
Further information on Rod Love is available in the public domain. For example, Love has been criticised by Alberta’s opposition parties as benefiting from the Tory government’s culture of jobs-for-the-boys.
In 2006, when it was revealed that Love had secured a lucrative consultancy with the troubled Calgary Health Region, the opposition leader told the legislature: “This is all about personal favours, buying access to power. There’s no other way to frame this than as an abuse of the taxpayer dollars.”
Mr. Martin, meantime, is widely known in Alberta as a long time friend and confidant of Love’s, and of other “party insiders.” Mr. Martin’s 2003 biography of Klein, King Ralph, makes clear that from Klein’s days as Calgary mayor in the 1980’s, Love frequently allowed Don Martin to read sensitive papers. They dubbed these chummy occasions “Document Perusal Opportunities” or “DPO’s”.
Klein is quoted on page 231 of his book: “I’ve given Donnie more scoops than any other journalist… But he just can’t remember them.” Mr. Martin states: “I’ve spent twenty-three years as a journalist, covering Ralph Klein almost without interruption…”
On page 181, Klein is quoted saying that leaks are “political currency.” Love confides that handling these wily disclosures came down to deciding “to whom and when to leak to get maximum political benefit.”
There’s even a beguiling passage describing how Love engineered stories to be fed to the National Post and the Calgary Herald.
Regarding Mr. Martin’s journalistic performance, documents available to the public at Calgary’s new Courts Centre reveal that he was a co-defendant in a costly defamation action, one of the longest-running lawsuits in the history of the Calgary Herald.
The Amended Statement of Claim includes a lengthy excerpt from an article by Mr. Martin published some 19 years ago – coincidentally, on the same section A3 news page of the Herald that carried the article that is the subject of Kent vs Canwest et al.
Mr. Martin, the Claim states, “falsely, maliciously wrote” about conditions in a Calgary day care centre.
The lawsuit was filed in November of 1990, when the Herald was owned by Southam Inc. It was settled a decade later, in March of 2000 during Conrad Black’s Hollinger era, and on the eve of the Herald’s sale to Canwest.
Thus Mr. Martin has the distinction of facing defamation charges in all of the Southam, Hollinger and Canwest reigns. The same lawyer who acted for the Calgary Herald defendants in the 1990’s action represents Mr. Martin and Canwest in our case today.
It’s hardly possible to assess the merits of a lawsuit settled nearly a decade ago. But in our case, an unmistakeable malice permeates the 754-word rant that is the subject of Kent vs. Canwest et al.
One example was evident upon first reading in February of 2008: the disparaging comparison of the personalities and abilities of two brothers, Arthur and Peter Kent. It’s a strange evaluation for Mr. Martin to make. He has never met or spoken with me, and bases his assessment solely on false assertions about one half of the Kent duo. But like the rest of the text, there’s more to these sentences than meets the eye.
The article fails to mention that Peter was a senior Canwest Global executive at the time. Or that Mr. Martin’s boss, David Asper, the Chairman of the National Post, publicly endorsed Peter as a Conservative candidate in the 2006 federal election (stressing, in his statement, that political discourse in Canada should abandon abusive “drive-by smears”).
The National Post’s leanings carried over to the 2008 vote, when Peter enjoyed his well deserved win in the Toronto constituency of Thornhill. “Our man in Thornhill”, was the headline of the National Post’s article of congratulations on Oct. 15th, 2008.
Certainly Mr. Martin is free to toady up to his bosses’ politics – provided he clearly discloses this bias in his article. But he failed to do so.
The article’s other, much more serious abuses contravene the codes of fairness, accuracy and balance that Canwest newspapers claim to adhere to, both as members of the Canadian Newspaper Association and, in the Calgary Herald’s case, of the Alberta Press Council.
As the plaintiff in this case, and in view of the insecurity so many of our colleagues are facing over their pensions and jobs in Canwest’s newsrooms across the country, I find it perverse that Canwest management appears bent on trying to defend this indefensible act of political vandalism.
After all, we know what Mr. Martin would demand of any politician revealed to have sewn poison and damaging lies, and who tries desperately to hang on in spite of the cold, hard facts.
Ultimately, it is a matter for the Courts to decide. Soon enough, Mr. Martin and his bosses can tell it to the judge.
*Please see skyreporter.com for “Taliban Leaders Mock U.S. 9/11 Legacy From Pakistan Havens” which includes an Oct. 2001 story for the Calgary Herald datelined “BAGRAM, Afghanistan”.
**Funds received on Sept. 11, two days after this entry.