Category: Columns

First published at True North on January 4, 2020.

Canada’s state broadcaster is sending a family on an all-inclusive Cuban vacation in a contest sponsored, in part, by Cuba’s communist government.

The CBC Holiday Escape to Cuba Contest, which is accepting registrants until Jan. 5, is also sponsored by the Canadian vacation company Sunwing. 

The winner of the contest gets economy airfare for two adults and two children on a Sunwing flight to Cayo Coco, as well as seven nights at the Memories Flamenco Beach Resort and an all-inclusive meal plan. The value of the package is $3150, according to CBC’s legal department.

CBC News has published numerous stories about the Cuban dictatorship over the course of 2019, including one about a Canadian tourist sentenced to 10 years in prison. The family of Benjamin Tomlin says he was denied access to adequate consular services because of staffing shortages at Canada’s embassy in Cuba.

CBC/Radio-Canada’s conflict of interest rules prohibits employees from accepting travel “that could influence, or be perceived to influence, their judgment and/or their performance of duties,” though a spokesperson told True North this promotion is “entirely independent” from CBC’s news division.

“This contest is a partnership between Sunwing Vacations and CBC Media Solutions (sales department), which has normal ongoing business relations with many companies and organizations as part of its work,” said CBC public affairs spokesperson Kerry Kelly. 

“It is entirely independent from CBC News, and the contest has no connection with how CBC News might cover issues relating to Cuba.”

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault had no comment on the promotion, with a spokesperson telling True North “CBC is an autonomous Crown corporation responsible for managing its own operations.”

The Cuban government is currently under the leadership of Miguel Diaz-Canel, who was handpicked by communist dictator Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl Castro.

Cuba has a long record of political executions, arbitrary imprisonment and torture. 

“Many of the abusive tactics developed during [Fidel Castro’s] time in power – including surveillance, beatings, arbitrary detention, and public acts of repudiation – are still used by the Cuban government,” says Human Rights Watch.

First published at True North on December 18, 2019.

Bureaucrats within Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada were tracking public sentiment and reaction as Canada’s confidence in the Trudeau government’s handling of the immigration file declined.

Documents obtained under Access to Information laws by True North reveal how the government thought this lack of confidence was a communications problem, rather than a policy problem.

A communications staffer sent a “sentiment comparison” report to his colleagues on Aug. 3, 2018, acknowledging that the “Conversation is 136% more negative than positive” in 2018 compared to the year prior. He also noted that the overall volume of conversation – in particular “negative conversation” – increased.

In response, the director general of the communications division of IRCC, David Hickey, said he is planning to start “rethinking the narrative going forward.”

Hickey, who did not respond to two requests for comment, told his colleagues he would be flagging the communications problems on an upcoming call with the deputy minister.

Tracking public response to the government’s immigration policies wasn’t just limited to IRCC, however. The Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic arm of the Prime Minister’s Office, commissioned a study on asylum seekers in June, 2018, which that over an 18-month period, confidence in the government’s management of immigration dropped significantly – from 51 per cent of Canadians believing the government was “on the right track” to 34 per cent.

In an Aug. 3 social media monitoring briefing, one staffer says the problem is a “significant lack of knowledge when it comes to policy on this issue,” suggesting that Canadians believe a majority government can do more than it actually can.

At one point, someone prepared a PowerPoint presentation that listed “Influencers” as a consideration. Also in the presentation was a “Case Study” about a tweet from conservative lawyer @manny_ottawa, which the presentation said “resulted in increased scrutiny of IRCC on social channels.”

In July, True North reported that IRCC officials were monitoring social media posts and flagging content for “condemnation of the Trudeau government,” among other descriptors.

First published at True North on November 13, 2019.

The Supreme Court decision legalizing assisted suicide in Canada was shaped by judges with biases, conflicts of interest and personal connections hindering their impartiality, a motion filed at the very same court alleges.

The explosive allegations in the motion, filed by an Ontario man battling a terminal illness, seek to upend Carter v. Canada, the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that struck down the ban on assisted suicide, upholding an earlier ruling in the BC Supreme Court.

In his 162-page application, Roger Foley alleges a web of connections between Justice Lynn Smith, the judge who decided the case at the BC Supreme Court, and one of the plaintiffs, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA).

His filing also accuses then-chief justice Beverley McLachlin of prejudicial personal bias in favour of legalizing assisted suicide.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court dismissed Foley’s motion without a hearing on Oct. 21, the day of the federal election. No reasons were provided.

Through his lawyer, Foley declined to comment on this story.

Foley has no direct connection to the case, though he previously made headlines for exposing a London, Ont. hospital’s offer of assisted suicide despite his desire for home care.

The allegations in Foley’s affidavit have not been tested in court.

The motion says the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to strike down the assisted suicide ban was “predetermined,” which Foley contends is why Smith’s alleged bias and conflicts of interest went unchallenged.

“There is a reasonable apprehension of bias that Chief Justice McLachlin’s decision was fixed, staged and predetermined, and infected with bias,” the notice of motion reads. It goes onto say McLachlin “infected the remaining panel of judges” to such an extent that vacating the judgement is the only option.

Justice Lynn Smith and the BCCLA

Before being appointed as a judge, Lynn Smith served on the board of directors for the BCCLA, though that didn’t stop her from presiding over the Carter case, in which the civil liberties organization was not merely standing as counsel, but as a plaintiff.

This is one of several connections presented in Foley’s motion before the Supreme Court that he says points to a biased judgement at the BC Supreme Court, which went unchallenged later on at the Supreme Court of Canada.

The connections presented in this story have been verified independently by True North based on publicly available documents.

Smith is named as a “past Board member” in the BCCLA’s 2003 annual report. The affiliation is also noted in several biographies of Smith published by the University of British Columbia, where she previously served as dean of the school.

The BCCLA’s communications director did not respond to repeated inquiries from True North regarding Smith’s role and length of service with the organization.

Her support for the organization was not limited to board membership, however. When Smith chaired the Law Foundation of British Columbia from 1996 to 1997, she “provided funding and extended and increased grants to the BCCLA at a rate higher than the BCCLA had ever received from the Law Foundation of BC previously,” Foley alleges in his affidavit, citing a 1996 report from the BCCLA treasurer thanking the foundation for its “generous support.”

Smith, who also served as a Trudeau Foundation mentor and is now the acting Conflict of Interest Commissioner in British Columbia, declined to be interviewed by True North.

At the time Smith was hearing the Carter case, her daughter, lawyer Elin Sigurson, was working on at least one BCCLA case. She also had working relationships with several of the lawyers representing the Carter plaintiffs.

Foley alleges Sigurdson was a “staff lawyer” for the BCCLA while Carter was before the BC Supreme Court. There’s no record of her being referred to as such by the BCCLA, though the organization’s 2011 and 2012 annual reports do name Sigurdson in their lists of “lawyers who have volunteered their time to the BCCLA.”

She was also co-counsel on a high-profile solitary confinement case alongside Grace Pastine, the BCCLA’s litigation director and a member of the Carter legal team.

Sigurdson previously worked with Joseph Arvay, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Carter, at his firm Arvay Finlay. She also worked with Sheila Tucker, another Carter lawyer.

Sigurdson did not wish to be interviewed, but addressed several questions raised by True North in an email.

Her work with Arvay, Pastine and Tucker was all on matters “unrelated” to Carter, she said, noting her employment at Arvay Finlay ended in 2010 and the Carter trial at the BC Supreme Court didn’t take place until November 2011.

“It is…my understanding that my having worked at Arvay Finlay was raised with all counsel and no objection was raised,” she wrote.

Sigurdson said she ensured there was an ethical wall – a process for lawyers to separate themselves from cases and processes that could generate conflicts of interest – between her and Carter.

“There were no occasions on which I spoke to Madam Justice Smith or any of the litigators involved about the Carter litigation while the matter was before Justice Smith,” Sigurdson wrote. “The sole reference made to me by any of these individuals about the litigation was to convey to me at the outset that no one involved would communicate with me about the case in any way while it was before Madam Justice Smith.”

Sigurdson also said she has “never been employed by the BCCLA as a staff lawyer,” though did not respond to an email asking her to clarify her role with the BCCLA and on its cases.

The connection between Smith and the BCCLA doesn’t sit well with André Schutten of the Association for Reformed Political Action, which intervened in Carter to uphold the assisted suicide prohibition.

“There’s an old adage in law that justice must not only be done, but that it must also manifestly be seen to be done,” Schutten told True North. “And as a human rights lawyer fighting for the full and equal protection of the law for persons with disabilities, I don’t see justice done when there appears to be a conflict here.”

Schutten said there are “lots of judges in British Columbia” without close relatives attached to the plaintiffs that could have heard the case.

“So while the rules of professional conduct can allow for this ‘ethical wall’ to be erected on this particular file, it’s too big of an issue, too fundamental a policy change, for that to be sufficient,” he said, adding it would have been “prudent” for Smith to have recused herself from the start.

McLachlin’s Memoir

Beverley McLachlin said in her memoir she “had come full circle” when the Supreme Court of Canada, with her as the chief justice, unanimously avowed assisted suicide was a right in the 2015 Carter decision.

In the same book, Truth Be Told, published earlier this year, McLachlin reveals a longstanding attachment to assisted suicide that, by her own account, may have jeopardized her ability to assess it impartially.

Her previous husband Rory, while dying of cancer, asked her to help him end his life, decades before it became legal.

“One morning, as he lay in his bed in our home, he asked a special thing of me – to give him the morphine we had been doling out drop by drop in a single massive dose. ‘I want to die now,’ he said,” McLachlin wrote.

“Tears in my eyes, I left the room. I could not do it. I had always thought of myself as gutsy. I had never shrunk from unpleasant things. But this, I knew in my heart, I could not do. Because it was against the law. Because I could not physically bring myself to do it.”

So strong were her feelings about the matter that she weighed recusing herself from the 1993 Sue Rodriguez case on assisted suicide. She even approached the chief justice at the time, Antonio Lamer, with her concerns.

“I do not have settled views on the outcome, but I feel very close to it after (Rory’s death),” she recalled saying to him.

“Judges are human beings. They bring their lived experiences to the cases they decide. That is good, provided they remember that their ultimate duty is to be faithful to the law,” she quoted him as replying.

Schutten agrees that lawyers and judges will have their own opinions on contentious social and political issues, but noted McLachlin’s admissions reveal a far more fundamental issue in Canada.

“I’d say the problem is not whether she was objective enough,” Schutten said. “It is a much deeper problem, post-Charter, that allos judges to set public policy on very complex political and social issues, when that is not their job. It is Parliament’s job…. Chief Justice Lamer reminded Justice McLachlin that her ultimate duty is to be faithful to the law, but the tendency of our Supreme Court (and lower courts as well) is not to be faithful to what the law is, but rather to change the law to what they prefer it to be. That’s the problem.”

McLachlin did not sit the case out, instead pushing to strike down the assisted suicide ban, though it was ultimately upheld in a 5-4 decision. She said in a 2009 interview with Steve Paikin that her dissent would “provide seeds for future developments.”

Interestingly, in an unrelated section of that interview, she draws a much firmer line for avoiding conflicts than she appeared to have done with Rodriguez, and by extension Carter.

McLachlin said even something like support for a sports team could be enough to warrant recusal if that team was involved in a case before the Supreme Court.

“I think we try to watch out for things that are issues that could come before the courts,” she said in the interview. “And we don’t want to either take a stand or be seen as taking a stand on those issues…. We have to preserve not only our actual impartiality, but the appearance of impartiality. So we try to avoid getting involved in anything contentious in the community.”

McLachlin did not respond to several emailed requests for comment.

First published at True North on October 31, 2019.

A British Columbia journalist was fired just eight days into the job, after his editors uncovered tweets critical of the mainstream media and in support of the People’s Party of Canada.

Alan Forsythe had just started work on Oct. 9 at the Hope Standard, a weekly newspaper published Black Press Media, a BC-based chain operating over 170 titles in western Canada and the United States. On Oct. 17, he received a letter from editor Ken Goudswaard terminating his employment.

“A recent review of your story on the all-candidates meeting led me to have concerns about your ability to perform the duties of a journalist in Hope,” the letter says. “Upon further investigation I learned that you had posted concerning statements on social media including, just days after you began employment with Black Press, a posting about ‘corrupt, bought off media” and which expressed partisan views with respect to federal political matters that you were covering as a journalist.”

The referenced story is about a community debate with candidates standing for election in Chilliwack—Hope. It remains available on the outlet’s website, though Forsythe’s byline does not appear on it.

The article exhibits no apparent bias. All candidates in the debate are quoted favourably. Forsythe told True North that one paragraph from his submitted version was removed, however.

That paragraph quoted PPC candidate and local teacher Rob Bogunovic as saying, “I’ve been called a Nazi and misogynist by Paul Henderson in the Chilliwack Progress,” in response to a question about his treatment by the media.

A Sept. 13 tweet by Henderson directed at Bogunovic does, in fact, accuse the PPC of “the language and technique of the Nazis in the 1930s,” adding, “It’s all eerily similar.”

It was this allegation that sparked the post singled out in Forsythe’s termination letter.

“The corrupt, bought off media tell you the PPC are Nazis, a slap in the face to the candidates running and we who support them,” Forsythe tweeted. “Let the MSM know, Canadians are sick of their lies and we are taking back our country.”

The Chilliwack Progress is also owned by Black Press Media.

Forsythe relocated for the job, which required him to join Unifor. He indicated there’s a double standard in how Black Press treated his political opinions versus Henderson’s.

“I was shocked that after all the effort (Black Press) went to to get me out there, and all the effort I made in moving there, they fired (me) after a week,” Forsythe said. “I would understand a formal warning. After all…they had a reporter slandering a local high school teacher, the union I was forced to join was very publicly campaigning for the Liberals, but I’m the one summarily fired for a tweet?”

In response to an inquiry from True North, Hope Standard publisher Carly Ferguson said “Black Press Media does not comment on personnel matters.”

Forsythe said he would have worked with his employer had concerns been raised with him prior to his dismissal, including deleting the tweet in question.

“That comment was in retrospect none too wise,” he said. “However, I was thinking of the CBC, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, where ridiculous, over-the-top, anti-PPC material was being published and ‘reported’ regularly. This wasn’t a matter of a difference of opinion on political philosophy; it was denigrating a diverse swath of Canadian citizens for daring to hold different ideas from the approved narrative. As a journalist, I find that distasteful.

A review of Forsythe’s Twitter feed for the period in which he was employed by Black Press shows numerous retweets of pro-PPC content, as well as his own criticism of CBC’s mid-election lawsuit against the Conservative Party of Canada. He also made clear that he voted for the PPC, though he told True North this wasn’t new information.

“I was tweeting (admittedly a lot) about the PPC before I was hired in the run up to the election,” he said. “It was an exhaustive interview process, lasting three weeks. Since I was already tweeting PPC support, I didn’t think too much about it.”

Forsythe pointed out that Unifor, which represents thousands of Canadian journalists, was tweeting explicitly anti-Conservative messages throughout the election.

“I’ve been a journalist for a while now, working in newsrooms that were always, and I mean always, uniformly left,” he said. “I’ve never made a secret of my right-leaning biases, which I feel challenges me to be as balanced as I can in reporting news.”

“The proof is in the pudding,” Forsythe said, pointing to a lengthy interview he did with former Treasury Board president Reg Alcock at the height of the sponsorship scandal.

“This despite the fact I had written anti-Liberal columns,” he said. “But I’d interviewed Alcock several months earlier and had covered other stories…so he felt I was a fair and balanced reporter.”

Forsythe said he aims to launch a news-focused podcast, though he hasn’t ruled out legal action against Black Press.

First published at True North on October 19, 2019.

A source who volunteered for Brampton North Liberal candidate Ruby Sahota in 2015 says Sahota personally stapled illegally donated campaign cash to membership applications in the lead-up to her nomination.

The source, who spoke to True North on the condition they not be named due to fear of retribution said that thousands of dollars in $5 and $10 bills were attached to Liberal Party of Canada membership forms by Sahota and a volunteer. Sahota’s campaign then submitted these applications to the Liberal party.

Sahota won the nomination, then went on to win her seat for the Liberals in 2015. She’s now seeking re-election.

True North has also obtained court documents alleging Sahota’s 2015 nomination and general election campaigns illegally received $50,000 in cash from a restaurant owned by Sahota’s family, as well as $17,000 in undeclared expenses incurred on the restaurant’s credit card.

The allegation appears in a divorce application filed by Sahota’s former sister-in-law, Satinder Kaur Johal, against Sahota’s brother, Rajveer Singh.

Also named as respondents in the file are Sahota’s and Singh’s parents, Harbans Singh and Surinder Kaur Singh, because of their involvement with the restaurant and other commercial ventures. 

Johal and Singh, who are now divorced, owned a Brampton Fionn MacCool’s franchise with Harbans Singh.

“In or around 2014, my husband’s sister, namely, Rabinder Ruby Sahota, decided to run as a nomination candidate for the Liberal party in Brampton-North (sic),” Johal alleges in the court filing. 

“My husband, without my consent gave her $10,000.00 for her nomination membership and spent $40,000.00 for her election. This money came by way of cash transactions at the restaurant as well as payment through his father’s MBNA Credit Card in the amount of $17,000.00. Even that amount was paid from the restaurant during the marriage.”

The case never went to trial and these allegations have not been proven in court. 

Sahota won the Liberal nomination at a March 2015 meeting that saw more than 3,700 Liberal members of Brampton North show up to vote. Reports at the time said this set a new record for the most members to vote at a nomination meeting in Ontario. 

While the Liberal party removed its membership fee in 2016, at the time of Sahota’s nomination it cost $10 to join the party: all membership forms required would-be members to affirm they were paying with personal funds and would not be reimbursed.

Donations to nomination campaigns are capped at $1,600 per person. Corporate donations are illegal, and all contributions over $200 must be publicly disclosed.

Sahota’s 2015 nomination campaign’s return filed with Elections Canada says the campaign spent $16,827. Most of this went towards advertising and bulk mailing, though a $3,616 payment to Sahota’s father, Harbans Singh, is listed only as “VARIOUS.”

The campaign claimed just under $22,000 in monetary and non-monetary contributions from 17 donors.

True North has chosen not to publish the entire court record because it contains a number of family details not relevant to Sahota or her campaigns.

Numerous inquiries to Sahota’s personal email address and campaign media representative went unanswered, as did text messages, phone calls and an email to Sahota’s brother.

Johal, who works as a lawyer in Brampton, declined to comment.