Conrad Black: Canada's Day, Canada's Era

[Urbane]

Conrad Black: Canada’s Day, Canada’s era

As the Houses of Parliament adjourn for the summer, Canadians can reflect on the fact that this country is in better condition than all but a few others. And that small group certainly does not include the United States.

The state of American policy is now beginning to transcend even the indulgence of the most tenacious believers in Barack Obama’s statesmanlike aptitudes. The “Reset” button with Russia has led to a torrent of insolences from the Kremlin, including increased intimacy with Iran in promoting the survival of the Assad regime in Syria. The corrupt Karzai regime in Afghanistan, for which thousands of Americans and their allies (including 158 Canadian Forces personnel) have died and a trillion dollars have been spent, has now embraced Tehran as a senior ally. And Washington itself has convened peace talks that include Mullah Omar’s Taliban, the host to Osama bin-Laden and his lieutenants when al-Qaeda was planning 9/11.

In the words of distinguished Wall Street Journal commentator Bret Stephens, it is “The Age of American Impotence: no peace, no peace process, no ally, no leverage and no moral standing.” President Obama still speaks of arms control while approaching what is now a high probability of an Iranian-led nuclear arms build-up in the Middle East. His strategy is bluster and threat without any follow-up, unless shamed into action (as in Libya by the French and the British).

In Berlin last week, Obama ascribed terrorism to “instability and intolerance,” as if we had gone back to the New Frontier theory of JFK’s Best and Brightest, that Indochinese Communism could be fought by the Peace Corps, and by building schools and roads. American liberals, like the French Bourbons returning in the baggage train of the Duke of Wellington’s army in 1815, “have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing.” There is now little likelihood that America will have anything to show for the mighty effort and sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan, except the evaporation of its influence in the capitals of the world.

Meanwhile, in Europe, including the United Kingdom, only Germany and its Scandinavian, Baltic, Germanic, Czech, Dutch and Polish entourage, are not gasping from the after-effects of decades of over-paying Danegeld to the working and agrarian classes. Japan has finally, after 20 years of recession and chronic ageing, embraced pell-mell inflation. (It won’t work, especially in a nation with a 20% savings rate.) The Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky, and even of Solzhenitsyn, is just a gangster-state. China has falling growth, 600-million rural people living largely as they did thousands of years ago, no social safety net, and a completely corrupt system of collective dictatorship with no system of laws or public institutions that command any credence at all. It’s a remarkable developing-country story, but not the stuff of any early claim to world leadership.

This is why Canada has a chance it has never had before to be an influence in the world, not by the traditional methods of arms build-ups, economic superiority, or by being the spear of a great and proselytizing idea. The opportunity lies in Canada’s potential to be a respected guide to reform of domestic and international institutions and practices that are not now functioning well.

The United States led the world to the triumph of democracy and the free market, and the world must always be grateful for that, but is not now one of the more exemplary practitioners of either. Canada is a rich and liberal society that has spread the wealth of the country around better than most, but also has gradually become a relatively low-tax country (even if household debt is too high, and economic growth is too slow). We will not attract the world’s attention by sanguinary drama, as the French and Russian Revolutions, the U.S. and Chinese Civil Wars, or the Battle of Britain, did. But Canada can assume a position of leadership by intelligent acts of policy innovation and proposal of reform of international organizations that will gain adherence and emulators.

Canada should lead the world in imposing some yardstick of currency value based on a combination of the prices of gold, oil, and a range of essential consumer goods

I have trod this path before in this space, and so will recapitulate just a few things that we Canadians should do and which would responsibly serve the world.

The currencies of the world are essentially worthless; they are valued only opposite each other, and all are being inflated simultaneously, even in deflationary times as followed the 2008 collapse of the housing bubble. Sixty years ago, a cup of coffee cost five cents and a hair-cut 25 cents. A return to the gold standard would put too much power in the hands of mining engineers and precious metals speculators, but Canada should lead the world in imposing some yardstick of currency value based on a combination of the prices of gold, oil, and a range of essential consumer goods. Other countries would follow, and the inflationary charge would be slowed and turned. We could put a rod on the backs of all the world’s serious treasuries and central banks to stop ruining the savers and fixed income-earners.

In the temporary vacuum created by the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s sustained malaise, Canada should take the lead in proposing that NATO be transformed into a world-wide alliance of reasonably democratic countries pledged to all-for-one collective defense and security, and in demanding withdrawal of the vote at the United Nations General Assembly from all countries that flagrantly disregard the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, until they reach a minimal level of conformity to it. When this is refused (as it will be, by China and Russia, among others), it should lead all the countries that meet that standard in the cessation of any funding to the UN, and the establishment of a parallel world organization, until the UN returns to its founding purposes.

Finally, we should re-establish our claim to being a truly liberal state by abolishing incarceration for all but violent offenders and chronic recidivists. It is a practice that continues only because it has always been done and is an easy target for politicians playing on public paranoia and the general respect for the less productive versions of vengeance. I do not believe it is necessary for me to establish my credentials as a commentator on the effects of prison; it was my good fortune to be sent to two of the highest quality prisons in the United States, where I had no difficulties with anyone, in the regime or among my fellow-residents. But I can attest that they are very corrupt, hideously expensive to the taxpayer, do almost nothing to equip people to reenter society, to deter crime, or even to impart increased hireability to the unskilled labour among the prison personnel. Contributed, supervised, community work would accomplish much more and much more cheaply. And Canada demeans itself and compounds ancient injustices with a policy that leads to the incarceration of an inordinate number of native people.

It is well-known that I generally support the present federal government, but I am concerned, and I know that many others are also, that it too much resembles a competent government of caretakers rather than an administration aggressively seeking to reform what is decayed and lever on Canada’s strengths to be a more effective exemplary influence in the world. There is much cause for pleasure and pride, but none for complacency, this July 1.

National Post

[A_Britishcolumbian]

urbane! so good of you to post this. i am a former avid observer of Lord Black's writings having enjoyed his productions for the great majority of my/his life, and now only read The Right Honourable's works when brought to my attention.

this piece i find to be somewhat exceptional in that His Lordship seems to attempt to show more faces than even myself. :)

i have often wondered if Lord Black has such a morbid, dark sense of humour due to his name, this article bringing the question to mind once again.

i very much appreciate that he was kind enough to break from the comedy to present this fact, "Canada demeans itself and compounds ancient injustices with a policy that leads to the incarceration of an inordinate number of native people."

beyond that, i will ask of you to take my next comment, in the style of the sycophant himself, as not a slight to yourself.

forgive them Lord, for they know not what they read :)

[Urbane]

^^ Glad you enjoyed the column :-)

[A_Britishcolumbian]

another fun read :) a review of Lord Black's interview of rob ford.

Conrad Black and Rob Ford — two fools in one room keep the lies coming: DiManno
Who better, really, to interview a shameless politician than a shameless felon?

By: Rosie DiManno Columnist, Published on Wed Dec 11 2013

Mayor Gaga just keeps the hits coming.

Zooming to the tops of the charts — on Zoomer TV Monday night — was the latest tissue of lies issued by Rob Ford, a man who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on those elephantine flanks.

For this particular bundle of tripe from our crack-smoking, gang-slumming, vulgarity-spewing chief magistrate, the enabling arrived courtesy of Conrad Black, the disgraced former global media baron whose pontifications have now nosedived from the pages of The Telegraph in London to up-dial cable channel television in Toronto.

Who better, really, to interview a shameless politician than a shameless felon?

So Black, who still considers himself some kind of journalistic noble when he’s no more than a fatuous poltroon, didn’t say boo after Ford slandered ace Toronto Star city hall reporter Daniel Dale.

Mr. Mendacity repeated and monstrously embellished the calumny he flung around way back in May 2012, when he accused Dale of eyeballing over his backyard fence and taking photos. An investigation proved no such thing had happened: Dale wasn’t doing the skulking paparazzi thing, hadn’t stood on a block to snap Ford’s children, wasn’t lurking, wasn’t peeping and wasn’t invading the Ford family’s privacy. A police investigation — Ford had called the cops — found no pix of Ford or his domicile on the cellphone Dale had dropped when confronted by an apoplectic mayor, no evidence of bush-lurking on surveillance camera footage.

The reporter was on the opposite side of the fence, casing out adjacent public property that Ford was seeking to purchase, a perfectly legitimate story.

But Ford continues to sputter and spin. “Lucky he fled on foot because I was upset, because that’s just crossing the line.”
Unsatisfied with merely resurrecting the hyperbolic falsehood, Ford went reprehensibly further. “He’s taking pictures of little kids. I don’t want to say that word, but you start thinking what’s this guy all about.”

The word he did not say but clearly meant is pedophile.

One has to stoop awfully low to come up with an accusation worse than crack-smoker, ass-grabber, hood-consorter mayor. RoFo leaned way down to get there. And fart-catching Black let it pass.

Doug Ford, attached to his brother at the running-mouth, reiterated the patent nonsense in an ornery scrum with reporters at city hall yesterday. “I find it pretty repulsive that the media would actually condone hiding in someone’s backyard . . . lurking in the bushes taking pictures over the fence.”

Never let truth get in the way of a rant.

Ford the Elder, well accustomed now to translating his sibling’s commentary by way of get-me-rewrite dissembling, claimed RoFo hadn’t insinuated Dale was a pedophile. That was just another Fordian absurdity to throw on the pile because the mayor’s remark could not be construed any other way, except on Planet Ford.

“What he was very simply implying — the media shouldn’t be hiding in the bushes, not only at his house. They’ve hidden in the bushes up at my cottage. They go down to Florida.”

On Tuesday, Deputy and de facto Mayor Norm Kelly said Ford should apologize for his “beyond the pale” slur. As of last night he hadn’t, blowing off most questions about his conversation with Black during a late-afternoon press conference, sticking to his land-transfer tax script — except for the weird segue exploitation of Const. John Zivcic’s funeral — in the prepared statement. Only afterwards, because reporters kept asking, did Ford address his sliming of Dale.

“I stand by my words, what I said with Conrad Black. . . I stand by every word I said with Mr. Black in my interview.” Then he exited, barreling through the crowd.

His “pu--y” yip from a couple of weeks ago notwithstanding, the mayor only does Q & A with tame inquisitors and puzzled American TV presenters, as the Brits call them.

In any event, what would be the value of one more insincere sorry from a serial prevaricator whose string of sorries doesn’t amount to a hill of beans?

Most reporters, apart from those who stoke their ego by clinging parasitically to the insider-access margins of scandal, hate becoming part of the story. That’s been near-impossible with Ford, who’s made reporting on the endlessly jaw-dropping revelations part of the narrative. He bullies, he sneers, he ridicules and oh, does he lie, now dipping into the muck of pungent slander.

First he was the media-persecuted innocent — back in the days whilst still denying drug use, public intoxication and the existence of a crack video. Then he was the target of a left-wing political conspiracy filling journalists’ notebooks. And, finally, the victim of a politically motivated campaign unleashed by Bill Blair, linking the investigation of his pal Sandro Lisi — charged with trafficking and extortion over an attempt to retrieve the crack video — with a nefarious plot by the police chief as retribution for proposed budget cuts, on top of orchestrating the mayor’s removal from office.

That’s a theme — authority jackals — that resonates with Black, who, since his release from a Florida prison last spring, has railed against the American “prosecutocracy” that put him behind bars for fraud and obstruction. During an interview with BBC news anchor Jeremy Paxman, who’d refused to soft-lob his questions, the Great Blovarian Black fulminated: “You’re a priggish, gullible British fool who takes seriously this ghastly American justice system that any sane English person knows is an outrage.”

There was only one fool in that exchange, and he continues clinging to his Baron Black of Crossharbour peerage for which he sacrificed his Canadian citizenship.

In Monday’s TV tête-a-tête, however, there were two fools in the room, sitting knee-to-knee, both sons of privilege, although only Ford represents himself as bourgeoisie. Black would rather drive needles into his eyes than relate to the hoi polloi.
What a pair: The crooked and the crapulous.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/12 ... manno.html

[logicalview]

This Star journalist you quote is very brave, but I'd like to see her debate Conrad Black one on one instead of berating him from behind the protection of a dying leftist rag. Conrad is smarter than 20 Rosie Dimanno's put together.

[A_Britishcolumbian]

no doubt.

what i liked was the style she used, mimicking His Lordship's style to a certain degree, with the infrequently/uncommonly used words.

not sure if you ever noticed, in my reply to your op, i mentioned 'in the style of the sycophant himself', and while using the word sycophant might have been seen as similar mimicry as well, what my example was, was actually the coining of the original phrase "forgive them Lord for they know not what they read" which is the Baron's style as well, a recent example being his "prosecutocracy".

[rvrepairnut]

Conrad Black is a convicted criminal and he renounced his cdn citizenship.He should have not even been allowed into the country after he got out of prison never mind be allowed to beek off every day in the national post
hes a theif

[logicalview]

Conrad Black is a convicted criminal and he renounced his cdn citizenship.He should have not even been allowed into the country after he got out of prison never mind be allowed to beek off every day in the national post
hes a theif

You are right. When a Canadian is convicted in a foreign country for a crime and then is released, his right to free speech and to be heard should be taken away. Let's get on that right now.

[A_Britishcolumbian]

much thanks to castanet for reminding us of the true nature of conrad black and his co conspirators.

A whistleblower's fight
by Carmen Weld | Story: 137565 - Apr 15, 2015 / 5:01 am

“Why did you leave Kelowna?”

A question one former Kelowna couple has been asked hundreds of times and one they were so steadfast on answering, they wrote a book about it.

In a story often compared to that of David and Goliath, Paul Winkler took on his notorious bosses Conrad Black and David Radler in a fight of ethics, integrity and staying true to your moral compass.

The now infamous court proceedings against international media giants Conrad Black and David Radler has its genesis right here in Kelowna.

“This is a tale of being morally courageous, taking a stand and staying true to one's values and principles,” reads the prologue of their book "A Costly Stand – My husband's brave and lonely fight for justice against his powerful bosses at Hollinger."

In 1997, Paul Winkler and Mary Lynn McCauley-Winkler came to Kelowna with their four children for new and exciting opportunities.

Paul had been brought here as publisher of the Capital News and five other regional papers, while Mary Lynn (a reporter) took on freelance work for the organization while raising their family.

The couple and their children quickly fell in love with the city. But that all changed when Paul smelled something fishy when Todd Vogt was announced as owner and publisher of The Daily Courier.

“I was told that (Vogt) was basically a front man, and they were using him to disguise Hollinger's ownership over both newspapers in the community, because the competition bureau would not have allowed a common owner,” says Winkler. “So now I was in a dilemma.”

All of the sudden, Winkler was being asked to treat his competitor like a sister, to work together behind closed doors.

“I refused to do it, and I became a thorn in their side,” says Winkler.

“I just couldn't believe that Canada's largest media company was involved in this cloak and dagger game. Why would they risk it?”

He says promotions promised to him disappeared, and it eventually became intolerable. They were trying to get him out of the way, suggesting he switch markets. He decided he couldn't work for the company any more.

At first, they agreed to pay out the rest of his one-year contract and let him leave. But then Winkler was fired in November 1999 without severance. Less than a year later, after taking the company to court, his wife was fired and their family was forced to move back to Ontario.

In January 2002, his civil suit against Hollinger went to court in Kelowna. Months later, Winkler won his case, but it didn't end there.

“Over time, we discovered Horizon Operations Ltd., was privately and secretly owned by Conrad Black, David Radler and other key executives. So now we are talking about securities issues ... and it became a much bigger story,” says Winkler.

Despite his best efforts to get local authorities, securities commissions and media to pick up the story, it wasn't until the Chicago Tribune gave Winkler a call in 2003 that the story blew up.

“Three years had passed since I had been fired, I had gone through all the court stuff, and it was like nobody gave a damn, it seemed to me, about what was going on,” says Winkler.

“Then, out of the blue, the phone rings."

The Tribune reporter flew to Ontario the next day to meet with Winkler, and within days, he was on the cover of the Sunday edition.

IFrom there, it was a whirlwind. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Times, BBC and Globe and Mail all picked up the story.

For months, Winkler prepared to testify in court in Chicago, but Radler took a plea deal and testified against Black. Winkler's testimony was no longer needed.

“I wanted to go, I was vested at that point, and I wanted people to know what took place,” says Winkler, who adds that is why they decided to write the book.

In 2005, Radler was charged with mail and wire fraud and sentenced to 29 months in prison and fined. In 2007, Black was also sentenced to six and half years in jail for mail fraud and obstruction of justice.

Both served their time, and Radler continues to own The Daily Courier.

“It doesn't sit well with me,” says Winkler. “I still scratch my head. They were never charged in Canada. It took the Americans to bring them to justice.”

The Winklers are in Kelowna promoting their book, one they say was cathartic to write and finally gave them some closure.

It's written from Mary Lynn's point of view, and she says it tells the story of how trying the situation was on their family.

“How our family handled it all, how our marriage got strong and better, because it either tears you apart or brings you together," she says.

“Paul knew this was the only decision he could make.”

The couple lives on the Niagara peninsula now. Mary Lynn teaches French, and Paul runs their own small company while in retirement. Their children are grown.

The authors are holding a reception/signing event at the Ramada Inn Wednesday evening from 5 to 7 p.m.

The book is for sale at Mosaic Books for $19.95.

http://www.castanet.net/news/Kelowna/13 ... t#comments

[Barney Google]

much thanks to castanet for reminding us of the true nature of conrad black and his co conspirators.

A whistleblower's fight
by Carmen Weld | Story: 137565 - Apr 15, 2015 / 5:01 am

http://www.castanet.net/news/Kelowna/13 ... t#comments

Totally agree that this is a GREAT story brought to us by Castanet - THANK YOU! Maybe Castanet should consider going a step further and find out what The Winklers were like to work with while they were here in Kelowna and what they brought to the Capital News making the story even more relevant to us here at home in Kelowna. Not going to be buying their book or recommend it to anyone. The reference to innocent Biblical "David" is very interesting. Things are(were) not always as they appear(ed) or people would like us to believe. Could make for an interesting read.

[goalie]

*removed*