Assume every microphone is live.
Assume everything you write down could be seen by someone else, whether you plan it or not.
Assume all your e-mails are read by someone they are not intended for and any secret opinion you share with someone else will be shared with someone else’s someone else.
These are not the ravings of some Orwellian paranoid but the realities of life. Few secrets can be sustained.
Careers have been ended by inappropriate words uttered into a microphone the speaker thought was off.
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Prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King is known more for the weirdness exposed through his diaries than for his 22 years of successful governing. The diaries were supposed to be burned.
Few among us have not at some point been confronted with the unpleasant repercussions of the distribution of opinions or comments that had found a wider audience than intended.
Enter the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance and last week’s embarrassing disclosure of private internal communications about fears that the Conservative government may tilt too much toward protecting supply management in trade talks and away from the CAFTA dream of a world free of trade barriers, tariffs and subsidies.
The core CAFTA message would have been no surprise to most who follow the byzantine politics of Canadian trade policy. While CAFTA has always tried to steer clear of identifying supply management’s protectionist ways as the domestic enemy, that message has been obvious to anyone following the tortured story.
The controversy comes around the packaging of that anti-supply management message.
In a supposedly secret “Issue Alert” to CAFTA members in early afternoon April 5, CAFTA executive director Patty Townsend urged members to blanket
Parliament Hill with free trade messages by playing the Quebec card – one of the most volatile and politically charged gambits in Canadian politics.
The e-mail, sent to many CAFTA recipients and then re-circulated later in the day by the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, worried that Stephen Harper’s prime minister’s office seemed to be soft on aggressive free trade policies and hard on supporting supply management protections at world trade talks.
Why? It was apparently because Harper wants to accommodate Quebec’s interests as a political electoral tactic.
Oh dear. Not only was CAFTA’s anti-supply management agenda exposed but its critics were able to paint it as a group desperate to promote a sinking global free trade dream by any means possible, including exploiting Canada’s most sensitive political fault line.
It left CAFTA president Liam McCreery running for cover, distancing himself and the group from the message. The damage had been done, though, both in public perception of the CAFTA agenda and also probably in Harper’s inner circle.
Harper is intent on picking up at least another 20 Quebec seats in the next election on the way to a majority. Quebec sensibilities, like supply management, are a priority.
What was Townsend thinking when she sent this memo to many recipients, then multiplied by the CCA? Did she think it would stay among members?
As a onetime reporter with CFQC television in Saskatoon, Townsend would know the golden rule of broadcast: Assume every microphone is live.
