Transitory Records #nlpoli

In dealing with one aspect of the business of getting Carla Foote from Executive Council to The Rooms,  deputy minster Ted Lomond suggested to The Rooms CEO that he delete the email in which Lomond had forwarded a proposed draft of a letter.

cbc.ca/nl ran a story on it Monday based on the report from the Citizen's Representative into allegations against Lomond's minister, Chris Mitchelmore.  The CBC story included this quote:

"I talked to Mr. Brinton a number of times and I said to him that in light of everything that is happening, I would suggest you delete your transitory records," Lomond told the Office of the Citizens' Representative. 

Brinton said he knew their conversation would be subject to requests under the Access to Information and Privacy Protection Act [ATIPPA], and said he wanted to make sure his emails were in order.

"You knew this was going to get ATIPP'd," he told the citizen's rep. "So I would like to have my records neat and tidy, final versions lined up."

Transitory records are not described in ATIPPA.  They are covered in the law that governs how government maintains its records.  It's called the Management of Information Act. Anyone submitting requests for government documents under ATIPPA should know both pieces of legislation inside out.  For those who are interested,  the Office of the Chief Information Officer has a tidy little description of "transitory records".

Local pols to s**t bricks

Tom Hedderson, Fairity O’Brien and other lame local politicians will likely be re-thinking their political futures soon.

CBC announced Friday that Anthony Germain will be hosting the CBC’s flagship morning show in Newfoundland and Labrador later this summer.  He will replace Jeff Gilhooley, who is retiring in July.

His reporting career spans two decades from local radio in New Brunswick to CBC Radio's parliamentary bureau in Ottawa. In the nation's capital, Germain won investigative awards from the Canadian Association of Journalists for investigative reporting on both radio and television.

Germain has hosted CBC Radio's flagship political show The House as well as the local Ottawa morning show. He has been a guest host on The Current, As It Happens, and The Sunday Edition.

Germain is currently the CBC’s China correspondent.

Germain will be the latest in a series of heavy-hitter hosts on the corporation’s major morning broadcast in the province.  The CBC has three other morning shows serving regions of the province but the St. John’s show has the largest audience and has been growing in popularity with the local audience.

- srbp -

Canadian Press and CBC desperately need online fact checker

Someone needs to start doing some fact checking on stories posted on CBC’s web site.

A Canadian Press story on a Russian Proton K rocket contains this claim:

The Proton-K re-entry was reminiscent of a 2005 incident, when a U.S. military rocket splashed down in the vicinity of the Hibernia oil platform, on Newfoundland's Grand Banks, shortly after its launch from Florida.

The planned launch of the Titan IV B-30 rocket prompted Premier Danny Williams to order an evacuation of several offshore-oil platforms.

But the order was soon rescinded when American air force officials assured Ottawa the risks were small and the rocket would be destroyed if it veered off course.

None of it happened.

1.  Danny Williams didn’t order an evacuation of rigs – he doesn’t have the legal authority.

2.  Danny didn’t rescind the order not only because he didn’t give it  in the first place but because the evacuation  - or more accurately, a removal of non-essential personnel - went ahead. 

3.  The assurances from American authorities were the same all the way through the sorry-assed episode. The government reaction went through a few permutations mostly as people stopped making asses of themselves in public but nothing the Americans said produced any changes in the provincial government reaction.

4.  The Titan didn’t “splash down”.  The booster section broke up as it returned to Earth, as predicted. 

5.  The thing also wasn’t near the Hibernia rig unless more than 100 kilometres away is “near”.

Seriously, people.  This stuff happened within the past five years.  The facts are readily accessible on line.  It’s astonishing that CP would cock it up that badly and CBC would let the cock-up stand.

CP and CBC need a fact checker.

-srbp-

Down at The Mouth

CBC brass pulled Heather Mallick's September 5 opinion piece from The Mother Corp's website in the wake of a hail of criticism from many callers and e-mailer as well as coverage by such bastions of insightful, reasoned and factual commentary as FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh.

In his statement, CBC publisher John Cruikshank called the piece "intensely partisan."

Intense, maybe.

Partisan? 

Debatable.

Sucked?

Much better description that covers everything from its gratuitous smears to its overall poor structure.  Acceptable in some quarters of the blog world.  Not really Cebb fare.

You can still read it, though, at Mallick's website.  Parts of the piece are interesting counterpoint to Mallick's tonguelashing of some of her fellow female columnists' treatment of Julie Couillard's chestal assets.

The Palin column should never have made it to the corporation's Internet space in the first place.  That's a comment on its content and style; not anything on it's qualities, such as the claim by CBC that it is classic political invective - it wouldn't even make the short list on a CBC Great Political Invective series in which second and third rate invective is voted on by ordinary Canadians with nothing better to do with their time than (a) watch the show and (b) make phone calls to support their chosen turd.

Your humble e-scribbler would commend Adam Radwanski's post on it for those interested in the little controversy.

Incidentally, Mallick also writes for the Guardian.  Her September 5 piece for that organ contains a few comments that deserve fact-checking - but on the whole it a more reasoned and insightful critique of Palin.

I never claimed a higher moral standing for coming from a great big empty on the map. Small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home.

Canada has lots of hockey moms. They're called Fran and Nancy. They have cruel haircuts and their voices shake the rafters of the rink as their rink-rats play. How can I translate the hearty, jollying-along Palin for British audiences? She's a working class Joan Hunter Dunn. It's those volleyball shoulders and field-hockey thighs, the energy, the bullying, and the utter self-confidence in every lie she tells.

Salt-of-the-earthers don't lie! But Palins do. I watched Palin last night, my mouth open, my eyeballs drying out, my hand making shaky notes. I read them aghast.

Did she really joke, "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick."?

Yes, she did, Heather, and in the piggy lipstick kerfuffle south of the border, Americans seemed to miss that rather nasty slur at a female sub-group of which Palin obviously isn't a member. Being a hockey mom isn't a common enough thing among Americans for them to have noticed the Palin slur.  In Canada, she'd have been dragged behind the Zamboni for a few laps, then tied to the uprights so people could take turns pitching empty Timmies cups and stale Timbits at her from centre ice.

None of that matters.

What matters right now is that the mood at the arrogantly-styled Canadian Broadcasting Centre must be dark.

Bill O'Reilly took offense and the Ceeb caved.

-srbp-

...thy father's spirit

By the clicking of the thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

There is a ghost at the old CBC building on the Parkway, so it seems.

The ghost of one news producer long since past not from the Earth but from the building.

Your humble e-scribbler dialed a familiar number this weekend, in order to follow up on the strange case of the missing SAC story.

The number rang and rang, as it should on a weekend.

But instead of going off to message manager as it usually does, an unfamiliar voice suddenly entoned that the call had reached the desk of Bob Wakeham.

Bob was apparently not available but the call was then re-routed to the newsroom where some kind - and hopefully non-spectral - voice answered.

No message, sez your e-scribbler, maybe the cell phone is working properly.

Eerie that calls should go to Wakeham when one is inquiring about why a major political story never made to air at CBC. It's the kind of story people of Wakeham's time would have delved into until every ounce of information had been wrung from it.

Those sort of things never seem to happen in these days of Crackberries.

Odd that.

-srbp-

Time to worry: CBC and Indy both omit big story

Two different people with no connection to each other posed the same question to your humble e-scribbler yesterday:

Why hasn't CBC mentioned the SAC Mfg story?

It's a good question.

Every other news outlet in the province - except the Indy - has mentioned the story.

That's pretty odd company for the Mother Corp to be keeping.

Time to make some calls and fire off some e-mails.

More to follow.

-srbp-