Black and blue

BRUCE BUMSTEAD/BRANDON SUN Enlarge Image

Federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is also the MP for Provencher and Manitoba’s regional minister, scrums with the media after an announcement at Brandon’s Maple Leaf Foods plant Friday morning. Behind Toews is Brandon-Souris MP Merv Tweed, left, and Sun managing editor James O’Connor.

"Blue can win where blue acts like blue."

Enlarge Image

Outspoken Progressive Conservative member Ken Waddell in a file photo in front of a campaign poster. He was just elected to a second, non-consecutive term as mayor of Neepawa. (FILE PHOTO)

— From the Twitterverse following the Neepawa election

One of the rootinest, tootinest, red-meat Progressive Conservatives ever to hang his cowboy hat in Tory Town has done what has been hard for some of his ilk to do in Manitoba — win an election.

The feisty and formidable Ken Waddell was recently handed another shot at the mayor’s chair in Manitoba’s 16th largest community.

Waddell was the mayor of Neepawa from 1998 to 2002. He also sought the leadership of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party in 2006, losing to centrist Hugh McFadyen. Waddell even played sacrificial lamb for his beloved Tories and ran against then premier Gary Doer in the Winnipeg constituency of Concordia (Doer won with 3,862 votes, Waddell finished second with 1,209).

The former ag-rep, farmer and auctioneer is also a newspaper publisher — a very outspoken newspaper publisher — whose holdings since 1989 have included the Neepawa Banner.

Waddell’s known to speak his mind — luckily for those listening to him, he’s an entertaining and gifted orator — and has strong ethical and moral beliefs.

So a Tory’s Tory. For sure.

Waddell is also one of the members of the provincial PC party who believes it needs to get back to its political roots and abandon the race to the middle that caused the party to fail to unseat the NDP under Premier Greg Selinger in last fall’s general election.

"What Manitoba needs, and Canada for that matter needs, is a hard turn to the ‘right’ to the truth. We need policies we can embrace, policies that we can afford, policies that we can understand, policies that make sense," he wrote following the fall election.

I say Waddell has just proved that people with strong convictions and who speak their minds can get elected — even if they are on the far right.

Waddell received 644 votes, or about 49 per cent of the 1,309 votes cast in Neepawa on Feb. 28, according to released results. Voter turnout was 47 per cent.

While a lot of folks think Waddell is too extreme for the mainstream, I like the guy and look foward to seeing what he can do for the Lily Capital of the World and the home of author Margaret Laurence.

I also look forward to Waddell’s regular blogs.

Recently, he commented on the Vikileaks Twitter scandal in Ottawa that was spawned by the Conservative’s Bill C-30 that critics said would invade their Internet privacy.

This bill has posed a conundrum for Tories, as it is a Big Brother type of law proposed by a political movement that traditionally champions smaller and less obtrusive government.

And Waddell showed decent insight into the nuances of the bill, introduced by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who’s also Manitoba’s regional minister.

"While I still feel a little uncomfortable about the bill, the fact remains that anyone with a Facebook account is probably giving away more information than this law allows police to collect without a warrant," Waddell wrote. "However, not everyone is comfortable sharing their information and I think that the concerns of privacy experts have to be taken into account as the bill evolves into its final form.

"What information we share with the world is one of the few things we can control. While we are all concerned about the victimization of children and all manner of cyber crime, Toews didn’t do himself or his bill any favours by framing it the way he did."

A CRIME STALLING THE CRIME BILL

Procedural tactics by the NDP in the House of Commons managed to postpone a final vote on the Conservative government’s sweeping crime bill.

As reported by The Canadian Press, the stalling tactics mean Bill C-10 likely won’t come to a final vote until early next week.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson accused New Democrats of being more interested in procedural games than what he called doing the right thing for Canadians.

The omnibus legislation, which includes nine, separate crime-related bills on a wide range of issues, was a key plank in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s re-election campaign last spring.

The NDP seem keen on playing games with Canadians’ safety on this file.

Conservatives, victims rights advocates, some police organizations and some addictions organizations maintain the measures will lead to safer communities and fewer victims of crime.

Yes, the move to mandatory minimum sentences, longer jail terms, less judicial discretion and harsher treatment of minors will prove costly, as more criminals will be behind bars where they belong.

The thug-hugging NDP and their membership of academic deep thinkers and bleeding heart social workers shouldn’t stand in the way of a series of laws that are long overdue.

And this stalling comes from a party that resembles a peacock about to lose its feathers.

As its never-ending leadership campaign meanders across the country — we’ve had a handful of the candidates here for meetings with handfuls of supporters — some new stats show the party really isn’t capturing the imaginations of Canadians.

The NDP just released its membership number totals prior to the upcoming vote for NDP leader. According to political blogger Stephen Taylor, that number is 128,351 — with 39,219 new members sold during the leadership campaign.

Taylor compared Conservative and Liberal numbers during their leadership races and found the NDP is, well, not showing well. The numbers are tens of thousands below what the Tories and Liberals managed during their respective last leadership campaigns.

While I can’t supply regional breakdowns, I can only surmise from the low turnout in Brandon for leadership candidate visits — and the party’s traditional poor showing at the polls in Westman — that there is still little interest here in the federal NDP.

And you’ll recall they have already had a backbench MP — one of 58 NDP rookies from Quebec — defect to the Liberals, claiming the NDP are rudderless without Jack Layton at the helm.

And it’s clear by anyone watching question period daily that the depleted Liberals, led by former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae, are consistently outperforming the leaderless and largely inexperienced NDP Opposition.

And the clownish and rude antics of Winnipeg Centre NDP MP Pat Martin — given more media time than he should, as the leadership candidates are on the hustings — are only serving to embarrass the Orange party.

As a Tory friend of mine put it, the members of the federal NDP are on their "leeward side of their mountaintop experience."

So shame on them for stalling the crime bill.

TATTLING ON TOEWS

Minister Toews finally got to see who pulled his publicly available divorce file at Winnipeg’s downtown Law Courts Building to start the now-defunct Vikileaks smear campaign.

On Wednesday, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Rick Saull ruled the MP should know the names of those who asked to see the file. It turns out that anyone not connected to a court case, excluding the media, has to sign a requisition to see the file.

Toews had requested the information based on the belief that someone who had requested the file might have made copies of it and then published details of it on Twitter.

He’s trying to determine who’s really behind the @Vikileaks30 Twitter account, that on Feb. 14 began divulging embarrassing four-year-old details from Toews’ divorce proceedings. It was in retaliation to the Harper government’s Internet surveillance bill.

It turns out only one person, provincial NDP policy analyst Thomas Linner, signed out Toews’ divorce file. But that was on Feb. 17, three days after @Vikileaks30 was created.

We suggested in an editorial Friday that it’s clear to us that a copy of the original document pulled by the media — again, who don’t have to sign for such files — could have fallen into some mischievous hands on Parliament Hill.

Toews has enough enemies in the media — some really acrimonious relationships — that I could see a brown envelope being left behind somewhere by some jaded journo.

It wouldn’t be the first time an unscrupulous member of the media has tried to exact some revenge behind the scenes.

Using social media, and quoted by the Montreal Gazette yesterday, Toews also tried to link Linner, who is also a campaign organizer for NDP leadership candidate Paul Dewar, to some kind of other scheme that could involve Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger.

He attributed that info to the king of non-credibility, MP Pat Martin, who now looks as if he was pulling Toews’ leg.

So while in Brandon for an unrelated announcement yesterday, Toews walked that story back a few paces.

"I personally don’t believe that Premier Selinger has any interest in my divorce file, I know the story changed overnight and then suddenly it was the federal NDP that wanted the information for some reason," he told media at a scrum at Maple Leaf Foods.

And speaking of the media, Toews took the opportunity yesterday to lash out at his favourite targets: "What I’m very disappointed in is news organizations like the CBC harassing my family, you know, phoning my wife at work, phoning my wife at home — frankly I’m disgusted that CBC would do something like that," he said, as local CBC reporter Nelly Gonzalez directed her camera at him.

"You’d think their reporters would have better things to do than harass my family."

Hmm. The federal budget is coming down March 29.

There have been loud rumours that the CBC could be facing budget cuts. Bet Mother Corp’s really gonna get a little bloodied.

But I digress.

If a member of a media outlet did slip the divorce papers to an opposition party on the Hill, the reporter responsible should be sacked.

And all of this foolishness with secret brown envelopes and thoughtless 140-character tweets simply has to stop.

Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition March 10, 2012