Toronto Star attempts a smear-job on Jack and Olivia

MPs lap up free trips courtesy of groups, foreign governments - thestar.com
Towards the end of the election campaign, the Toronto Star very grudgingly endorsed the NDP. Before that they usually directly or subtly attacked the NDP. Now, we see they are back to their old tricks. Being one of the big corporate mainstream media, it is in their best interest that only the corporate-backing parties (Conservatives and Liberals) should get their support. Any other party they see as a threat. So, day by day they do what they can to make those parties look like what they are not. Today the Star took an issue which is not an issue, something that is totally legal and above-board, and tried to make it look bad. And, even though their favourite parties are the ones who took the most sponsored trips, they put the spotlight on the the federal party that took, by far, the least sponsored trips (over a 5 year period, the Conservatives took 132 trips, the Liberals took 142 trips, while the NDP only took 36 trips).

And "free trips" is misleading too. The Star is trying to make it look like these politicians were bribed. But, if that was the case, this would have been an issue a long time ago. The key here is that the Star wants you to think of these as bribes, although these trips were/are not . These trips are legitimate and totally above board. Many of these MPs were sponsored to
travel to have meetings, give talks, or to investigate/learn.

Yes, the article talks about the other parties at fair length. But, many people don't read the whole article, but just look at the picture and read the first few lines. With the placement of the picture and the choice of wording, the picture and the first few lines intend to make people who glance at this article think "Jack, Olivia and unions are bad".

This is the kind of slimy biased reporting that the NDP has always been up against. And now that they are the official opposition with a record 103 seats, there will be much more slimy biased reporting from the mainstream media.


Update:
The National Post also got in on the smear-where-there-is-no-issue game.

Toronto Star makes things up and plays the FEAR card to try to bring voters back to the Liberals

Tim Harper: Majority so tantalizingly close for Harper - thestar.com
Incorrect Tim.
Actually, if you look at all the polls (except for the Ipsos-Reid polls), they all show the Conservatives in the lead, but only in minority territory. And, the latest EKOS poll (random landline/cell phone poll of over 3,000 adults across Canada - which gives it a very high accuracy rate) shows the Conservatives slowly losing support, while the NDP, in second place, quickly catching up to them.

What is usually a sure-fire way to get soft Liberal-NDP swing voters to line up behind the Liberals is to scare them with a possibility of a Conservative majority. This has worked in the past. But now, with the NDP well ahead of the Liberals in most areas across the country, this tactic is not working. And, it doesn't make sense either. The logic would be that to stop the leading party, you would want to shore up support for the party with the next highest support. Well, today, that is the NDP. Logic would now show that a vote for the Liberals would split the vote and let the Conservatives in.

Even their readers, in the poll at the side of the story, don't believe them. The question: Do you think the Conservative Party is on the road to a majority government? Out of 63,999 votes, 58% said No, and only 31% said yes.

If you are scared of a Harper majority, the only party in position to stop it is the NDP. The NDP continue to gain in the polls and are now only 6 points away from the Conservatives. The trend shows that the NDP continues to gain support every day. If those on the wall throw their support behind the Liberals now, it will split the vote and may give the Conservatives a majority.

So, put away your fear and vote this time for a party that actually shares your values and beliefs. Throw your support behind the NDP now and we may just get an NDP government, a government that actually cares about what you care about.

Toronto Star invents story to attack Layton and Chow

Accidental Deliberations: The bigger picture
... And indeed it's worth noting that the decision to focus on Layton and
Chow looks to be designed to invent a story where none exists: with
average expenses in the range of $469,000 per MP, the choice to point to
the lone married couple in the House of Commons in order to be able to
talk about a "million-dollar" total looks to be entirely unjustifiable
except as either a cheap headline or a pretence to attack the NDP. ...

And from the comment by Malcolm+ on this post at the above link - Malcolm gets to the reason behind the attack:
With
Ignatieff mired in poor public perceptions, the Liberals are panicked
by the prospect they may actually fall behind the NDP in public support
if nothing changes. Thus, every organ of the Liberal Party - including
the Toronto Star - must be directed to attacks on the NDP and Jack
Layton, no matter how slanderous or bogus those attacks may be.

And, to back up the point about the Liberals failing and becoming less appealing to the public, check out this article in the Globe and Mail by Brian Topp:
The underlying bones don't favour Michael Ignatieff
Brian adds as a footnote, below his article reviewing what the latest polls mean:
A footnote: As if to prove all of this, the Nov. 7 Sunday Star in Toronto repeats the conduct that helped elect Rob Ford mayor of Toronto. This time the transparently political cheap shot targets are Mr. Layton and his wife, MP Olivia Chow. The Star devotes a page to adding up Layton and Chow’s boring and typical MPs’ constituency staff, office, travel and other expenses, and tries to frame them as some sort of scandal. This has nauseated even some of the Liberals the Star works so hard to serve. Blogger “Bigcityliberal,” for example, comments: “Toronto Star’s Layton and Chow story truly Seinfeldian... in that it’s about nothing. Probably the silliest part of it is how hard author Richard Brennan tries to crank this into a scandal. Oh my! The NDP party leader spends more than your typical MP on travel! And... a $2000 per month Ottawa condo-apartment? The horrors!” Indeed.

Questions for the PM

Questions for proroguing PM - thestar.com
The Star published a decent set of questions for the PM to answer, including things like "When will you release the documents demanded by Parliament showing communications among officials about the risk of torture for detainees handed over by Canadian troops to Afghan custody?", and others covering if he will recall Parliament earlier than planed, cutting off funding to KAIROS, how his GST Tax cut has helped create the deficit (the Star should have included the larger corporate tax cuts here as they are the largest contributor to the deficit, along with the mis-managed recession spending), unemployment, environment, and pensions.

This is a good starting point. It's unfortunate that Harper has prorogued Parliament because these are some of the urgent questions and issues that would be covered in Parliament were it up and running. So far Harper and members of his party and the MSM for the most part have brushed off questions about recalling Parliament and about the rising numbers of concerned Canadians speaking out and showing their disagreement with the prorogation of Parliament. it will be interesting to see if Harper and his team and the MSM continue to ignore the growing unrest in Canada.

Typo in the Toronto Star?

Thousands protest the prorogue - thestar.com
In Toronto, the estimated 3,000-strong turnout briefly forced the closing of Yonge St.
Yesterday, police estimated that there were about 7,000 people at the Toronto rally. Orgnizers estimated about 15,000. Other professionals estimated closer to 9,000 to 10,000.
The crowd in Ottawa was estimated about 3,000-4,5000.
Did the Star say 3,000 for Toronto by mistake? Or, are they lowering the numbers to make the rally look less than it was?

I was at the rally. I would say it was much much bigger than 3,000. I've been to many large assemblies and concerts in my life and estimate it was about 10,000.

For more details on the rallies, with more accurate reporting on the numbers, see:
Anti-Prorogue Rallies across Canada - Jan, 2010

Addendum

Any responsible media organization would find out how many people showed up by talking to at least one professional source. For most things like this, the source is the police who are at the event. They estimated 7,000. One of the organizers made a good point that the total must have been 10,000 to 12,000 as he said that they only close off all of ... See MoreBay St if the crowd is over 10,000. So, by the time of the march, the crowd had grown larger (than the 7,000 the police initially estimated). We were there. We know that the march filled the street for many blocks - segments of the route on Yonge, Queen, Bay and Gerrard were all totally closed to traffic as we filled the streets for many blocks, spilling onto the sidewalks.

So, this begs the question - the Star must have got the number of at least 7,000 for the Toronto rally, so - why did they report much less? Either they got it mixed up with the Ottawa number, which was about 3,000, or, they want to downplay the rallies. Or, maybe it was both these reasons. Regardless, if they do publish a correction, it will be buried and un-noticed by most readers.

Reason for downplaying the rallies? They, like the other large media companies, are large corporations. And Harper gave large corporations many billions of dollars in tax decreases over the past few years. (So much so that we will now see a great reduction in services as a result). The Star does not want to bite the hand that feeds it.

Toronto Mayor David Miller Did An Excellent Job Handling The Strike

The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail and the National Post have gone all out to attack Toronto Mayor David Miller's handling of the strike and of the deal he reached with the unions. They claim that he caved in and gave the unions what they wanted from the beginning. If not directly saying that he failed, they put a negative spin on his name and his achievements regarding the strike.

However, he was very successful in his handling of the strike and of the deal finally reached.
He set up temporary dump sites all over the city right away.
He got injunctions against strikers right away if they caused undue delays (so they couldn't keep on delaying people at those sites).
He organized existing management staff to work on keeping the streets and parks as clean as possible.
And, regarding the deal, he managed to get it so the banking of sick days will be phased out - this will save the city millions of dollars.

The unions wanted to completely keep on banking sick days. The city wanted to get rid of the banking of sick days. A compromise was reached to phase the banking of sick days out. This is about as fair a deal as could be reached. And, that's what you end up getting when you negotiate - a bit of give and take - a compromise.

The MSM seem to think that he should have been able to get rid of the banking of sick days all at once. This would have been very unfair to the workers, and impossible to get through the negotiations during the strike. And, it would have been impossible to get if the mayor had got the Province to legislate the workers back to work. If this had happened, the negotiations would have gone to binding arbitration. And with this, the unions always get a better deal - they most likely would have kept the banking of sick days completely.

So, what would you have preferred - a harder approach by the mayor, resulting in either the strike going on for months (and getting no better of a deal than we got), or back to work legislation sending the workers back to work and binding arbitration with no change in the banking of sick days,
OR
The deal we got with the phasing out of banking of sick days?

All in all I would say Well Done David Miller!