Public Relations

Friday August 20, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday August 20, 2021

Not the Bad Guys Anymore

When the Taliban first sacked Kabul 25 years ago, the group declared that it was not out for revenge, instead offering amnesty to anyone who had worked for the former government. “Taliban will not take revenge,” a Taliban commander said then. “We have no personal rancor.” At the time of that promise, the ousted president, Mohammad Najibullah, was unavailable for comment. The Taliban had castrated him and, according to some reports, stuffed his severed genitals in his mouth, and soon after, he was strung up from a lamppost.

November 14, 2001

The reports from Kabul are probably more reassuring to those unfamiliar with this history. The Taliban has once again declared a general amnesty, and asked everyone to show up for work in the morning and prepare to unite behind a Taliban government that will rule according to Islamic law—but perhaps, the group has suggested, not in the harsh manner that made it infamous during its rule from 1996 to 2001. Women can continue their education so long as they wear the hijab, and the Taliban will guarantee human rights and freedoms of speech and expression, it said, so long as they comply with sharia. (Spoiler: The Taliban does not believe they do.) A Taliban spokesperson consented to an interview with a female television presenter whose face was visible. During the Taliban’s previous regime, it discouraged depiction of the human form, and would certainly not have countenanced the broadcast of a woman’s face to the entire world.

The Taliban now owns Afghanistan, and its first priority is avoiding anything that resembles chaos. In 1996, the group’s leader, Mullah Omar, told residents of Kabul to resist the temptation to flee, that the Taliban would keep them safe. Omar died in 2013, but his successors—who include his own son, the Taliban’s top military official—are saying exactly the same thing now. They have made sure the police phone number works, and they are calling for workers, including cops formerly loyal to the previous government, to report for duty. The Afghans I have reached by phone in Kabul say the same: Taliban are in the streets, acting not as avengers but as guarantors of public order. They are not executing people on street corners; instead they’re watching for looters and troublemakers. (The Taliban has always returned to this core role, since the movement’s founding: In the 1990s, when the Afghan countryside was beset by highwaymen, murderers, and rapists, the group won its first followers by securing the roads and providing order where the worst kind of anarchy had reigned.) (Continued: The Atlantic) 

August 17, 2021

Meanwhile, in Canada, there may be no better example of the unique and difficult challenge Erin O’Toole faces as leader of the federal Conservative Party than his recently announced policy on mandatory vaccinations.

Mr. O’Toole is against measures that force Canadians to get vaccinated, regardless of what line of work they may be in. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has said federal workers must be vaccinated, as well as anyone who wants to fly or travel by train.

The Conservative Leader says he believes in the power and safety of vaccines, but doesn’t feel people should be forced to take them. Mr. Trudeau doesn’t believe people should be forced to take them either, but nor should the unvaccinated have the right to potentially pass COVID-19 on to others. Thus, the mandate.

July 15, 2021

A majority of Canadians are fully or partially vaccinated. And most of them, polls suggest, support vaccine mandates or vaccine passports that bestow certain rights and privileges on those who have chosen to get jabbed. In his heart, I think Mr. O’Toole believes this also. He just can’t endorse that policy because it would alienate a faction of his base – the libertarians and vaccine deniers – who think the state has no right imposing restrictive measures on anyone. These are voters Maxime Bernier and his People’s Party of Canada are trying to steal away from the Conservatives.

Welcome to Erin O’Toole’s world – or rather, his nightmare. While his central challenger in this election, Justin Trudeau, can be many things to many people, the Conservative Leader does not have that option. He is bound, in many ways, to a segment of the population resistant to change and who are suspicious of government intrusions of any sort into their lives, regardless of the reason. (Continued: Globe & Mail)

L E T T E R S  to the  E D I T O R  The Hamilton Spectator, Saturday August 21, 2021

Letter to the Editor, The Hamilton Spectator, August 23, 2021

Letter to the Editor, The Hamilton Spectator, August 24, 2021

Social Media chatter:



 

Friday April 3, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 3, 2020

Trudeau must reveal COVID-19 national projections

It’s time for Justin Trudeau to tell us just how bad the COVID-19 pandemic could get in Canada.

Coronavirus cartoons

The prime minister holds in his hands science-based models that project how many people might get this illness and, just as crucially, how many might die from it.

Yet he’s doggedly keeping this vital information secret, despite the fact many other political leaders are levelling with their public about the viral tsunami barrelling their way.

Even Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who had previously resisted publicizing such projections, just did a complete about-face.

“You deserve to know what I know,” he told Ontarians Thursday as he announced that the province’s top doctors would on Friday provide the modelling numbers for where Ontario was, is and could be. 

It was only Wednesday when Ford said people might panic if they learned those projections. Now, he says the information will provide the public with “a real wake-up call.”

This is one of those rare occasions when Trudeau should follow Ford’s lead. Trudeau’s condescending, father-knows-best rejection of the public’s right to know infantilizes mature Canadian adults and leaves them in the dark — just when they most need the bright light provided by the latest scientific research to guide them forward.

Not only are his excuses for doing this flimsy, they’re self-contradictory. In one breath, Trudeau says he won’t release the pandemic predictions prepared by Canada’s top public health officials until they’re more accurate. 

In the next breath, he suggests those projections are unreliable because the response of Canadians in the coming days will change them. But that argument, taken to its logical conclusion, means even Ottawa’s best projections will always be useless because they could always be altered by future events. 

And if that’s so, why does the government bother making such projections at all? If they serve no purpose in helping Canadians know how to act, they serve no purpose in directing federal policy.

Finally, if the pandemic models are so problematic, it made no sense for Trudeau to promise that he looks “forward to sharing more information with Canadians in the coming days” after he consults with the premiers.

The only way people will truly comprehend the life-and-death stakes of COVID-19 is if Trudeau gives them the facts as he knows them.

That’s what Premier Ford rightly decided to do. It’s what even the much-maligned Donald Trump has done. On Tuesday, the president allowed the release of sobering projections from the top U.S. scientists battling the coronavirus. They indicated it could kill 100,000 to 240,000 Americans. 

Likewise, in mid-March new modelling from the Imperial College of London demonstrated stronger measures were urgently needed to cut the projected COVID-19 death-toll in the United Kingdom from 260,000 to 20,000. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who entrusted the nation with these numbers, changed course almost immediately.

Trudeau owes the public this kind of transparency — and trust. There are too many rumours and fake news stories spreading alarms in this country. There is no cure, as yet, to COVID-19. A steady flow of solid information from the government, however, is the best cure for public confusion and fear. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

 

Wednesday February 5, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday February 5, 2020

Peter MacKay is becoming his own biggest obstacle to winning the Conservative leadership

Peter MacKay Cartoon Gallery

It seems increasingly that the greatest threat to Peter MacKay’s leadership bid is Peter MacKay.

The presumed front-runner in the campaign to replace Andrew Scheer as Conservative leader has stumbled more than once in recent days.

Peter MacKay’s team tried to portray their man in a sympathetic light, inviting CTV into a child advocacy centre that helps victims of abuse – an organization the candidate co-chairs.

MacKay talked about the new level of understanding, compassion and civility he has divined since leaving politics. “I’d like to do politics a little differently,” he said.

The reporter asked him if he felt that a tweet sent out by his account at the weekend, which criticized Justin Trudeau for using $875 in Liberal party donations for yoga sessions, was evidence of a new civility. He agreed it was not and said he had not had the opportunity to vet the tweet before it was sent out, at which point his media handlers shut down the interview while the cameras were still rolling.

It turned a good news story into a bad one and pointed to a lack of leadership. MacKay has more experience than anyone on his team and should have insisted on finishing the interview, even if the heat was rising.

The missteps add propellant to the smouldering anyone-but-MacKay campaign that is building inside the party. I have spoken to a number of influential and vocal Conservatives who offer a variation of the following – MacKay is a good guy but he cannot be leader; he is not that competent, not that bright and he doesn’t do the work. (National Post)

The Inking Process

 

Friday June 26, 2015

Friday June 26, 2015Editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 26, 2015

The Kathleen Wynne documentary that no one is allowed to see

The Toronto Star is lifting the veil on the political drama that no one is allowed to see.

It is a one-hour documentary ‎entitled, Premier: The Unscripted Kathleen Wynne‎, that was supposed to air on TVOntario earlier this month — before it was yanked.

The fly-on-the-wall account depicts Wynne under siege during February’s Sudbury byelection scandal, lashing out at the press for being “out to get” her, and discussing the toll of being Canada’s second most powerful leader.

Wynne complains the media “just seem obsessed” with the story.

“That’s what makes me so mad,” she fumes.

[slideshow_deploy id=’4298’]

She also dispenses campaign advice to a wide-eyed federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and, with help from spouse Jane Rounthwaite, artfully smacks down a Progressive Conservative MPP for homophobic comments.

Indeed, some of the film’s most illuminating moments are of Wynne and Rounthwaite in their Toronto home.

Their marriage is one of loving, equal partners who share a puckish sense of humour, a passion for politics, and a quaint affinity for the 1950s sit-com I Love Lucy.

But the behind-the-scenes portrait — filmed as the Liberals crafted the budget while coping with a police investigation into allegations a former candidate was bribed not to run in the Sudbury byelection — may never be broadcast.

That’s because the premier and her officials won’t sign release forms, the director and editor quit the project in protest in May, and TVO is demanding a refund on its $114,075 investment from the executive producer.

The Star viewed a copy of the film complete with titles and moody background music. (Continued: Hamilton Spectator)


The Art of the Possible by Peter Raymont, National Film Board of Canada