Category: New

“And the truth shall set you free.”   And maybe not!

Stephen Harper stood up in the House of Commons late last month and suggested that he had incriminating videotapes to use against Leader of the Opposition Michael Ignatieff. It is a foolish comment. It shows him as mean spirited and desperate for something with which to defame his opponent.

The public has already tired of the campaign run by Harper’s Conservatives that attempts to vilify Ignatieff for spending years outside Canada, completing his education and teaching in England and the United States. What Harper and his friends do not understand about their own campaign is that it fails to make their point. They are trying to say that Ignatieff does not know about Canada because he has been away. Do Harper’s frequent trips away from Ottawa make him less aware of what is happening?

Liberal Leader Ignatieff is a very different person from his predecessor Stéphane Dion. Dion’s inability to respond effectively last fall played right into the Conservative election strategy. Ignatieff is not as easy a target. He can take the current Conservative smear campaign and deflect it back at Harper.

The fact that the Conservative attack advertising is not true is probably the least important rebuttal to make. It still needs to be made. A man with Michael Ignatieff’s intellectual curiosity, warmth, family ties and attachment to his country has kept well abreast of what has been happening and the why’s of Canadian current events. In the court of public opinion, the truth is not a defence for mud-slinging. In a court of law, the Conservatives would find that anchoring libel on truth is not a defence when the objective is to misrepresent and defame.

Regrettably, Canadians do not make full and proper use of libel laws. Most slander is ignored as it comes from the mouths of the angry and churlish among us. Libel is the slander that people publish. What makes it libel is not so much the content but the purpose of publishing the material.

As a young writer I had the advantage of working for some outstanding news people. An early lesson learned was having a story thrown back on my desk with the comment that I needed to remove a libellous statement. Knowing that I had written the truth, I was puzzled as to what was libel. All I had said that was derogatory about someone was that I thought he was in need of a bath. The explanation by my mentor was very simple: yes, the man was quite likely in need of a bath at the time but the man was also a competitor. If people who might hire him, hired me instead of him because of his hygiene, my statement became libel.

The only non legal expert in Canadian libel law over many years now has been that irrepressible bon viveur, British lord and now American jailbird: Conrad Black. He has used what is called “libel chill” very effectively over the years. Libel chill is using the threat of legal action to repress criticism. When his Canadian lawyer suggested recently that Black could finance his U.S. Supreme Court appeal with the gains from his string of libel actions in Canada, it gave the start to new ulcers for some Canadian writers. Luckily for them, Black will have a hard time getting paroled from the federal prison, where he is incarcerated, to appear in Canadian courts for those proceedings. After all, people not only have a right to face their accuser but we all want to hear how they did more damage to Conrad than he has done to himself.

– 30 –

I was born in the city of Toronto on the north side of Lake Ontario. From my early childhood, I watched the city grow from a dull provincial backwater into a vibrant cosmopolitan metropolis that has become home to millions of people from across Canada and around the world. You do not have to leave Toronto to see the world. It comes to you. I love the tumultuous mix of people who have made my city grow and mature. They bring a swirl of cultures, color and sophistication, rawness and an edge to life. No matter where I have travelled since in the world, in Asia or Europe, I am where friends were born and share a heritage. No matter where I go, I do not think of it as a foreign country, I am visiting relatives and friends of my friends.

I now live in Babel. Babel is my name for a smaller city in the Greater Toronto Area. It is a bedroom community for people working in Toronto. There are regular trains and buses and a six-lane highway goes straight to the city, an easy drive. In many ways, I have the best of both worlds. I have a magnificent view of the lake. It is a smaller lake than Lake Ontario but one large enough to disappear in the horizon. And, an hours’ drive away, I still have my Toronto.

The bay here in Babel affords an ever-changing vista. We shiver to the storms of winter and enjoy the happy cries of swimmers in the summer. We compare the lazy regattas of the yacht clubs with the remarkable speed of the iceboats. And there are always some of those ubiquitous misanthropes out there fishing.

Besides the view from my home, Babel offers the usual amenities. There are the same big box stores you will find in Toronto. Good shoppers can still find bargains at the grocery stores. There are two Canadian Tire Stores, one in the north end of town and one in the south. There is an excellent library. The main street downtown is wall-to-wall bars separated by the occasional struggling retailer, to break the monotony.

But Babel is not like the fabled small town of Mariposa fame. Babel is an accident. When the first British Governor of Upper Canada, Colonel John Graves Simcoe, ordered a great road north to be built by his engineers, they became lost in Babel. Everyone going north has been lost here ever since. It is deliberate. There are no signs in modern Babel to direct a traveller around the lake named for our first governor. His storied road ends abruptly somewhere in the middle of town, only to reappear in the wilds north of here. The unwary traveller who forgoes the province’s six-lane road, that now bisects Babel, is expected to stay and add to Babel’s burgeoning population.

Babel is now a city with a population of more than 135,000 lost souls. Regrettably, the city only has infrastructure and support services for about 85,000. The need for growth is the cause for the city enjoying a cacophony of pile drivers for the past two years as the city fathers add on to amenities such as the sewage capacity so that Babel will not foul its source of drinking water. This building boom, with its attendant road closures reached the point where, at one time, the city closed all of the major north-south arteries east of the provincial highway. One city wag pointed gleefully to the traffic jams and claimed we were becoming more like Toronto every day.

Babel grew in the time-honoured tradition of great cities: by stealing the adjacent serviced land from neighbouring communities

Babel’s traffic patterns are something else. It is a rare street, of more than two blocks, that continues to go in one direction. Mind you, there is also the rare street in Babel that uses the same name for more than two blocks. Before the availability of cheap global positioning systems (GPS), taxi trips in this city were a venturesome experience.

It is the influx of Torontonians that makes Babel an especially dangerous place in which to operate an automobile. Weird, illogical roads and the mix of farmers, small-town clerks and Torontonians adds up to trouble. The locals proceed at a dignified pace down the centre of the road with Torontonians skittering around them like fast moving balls in a pinball machine. Locals have to be sure there is no traffic seen, in any direction, before entering or crossing a thoroughfare. The Torontonians are the ones behind them leaning on their car horns.

Babel has its charms too. It is like the old Cheers theme: we need a place where everybody knows our name. Babel is that place.

– 30 –