Who Edits Michael Harris' Columns, Anyway?

Recently, iPolitics columnist Michael Harris took some valuable iPolitics webspace to pout over a scathing letter to the editor by Peter MacKay. It was well-earned by Harris, who had bought into Amir Attaran's bizarre attempt to single-handedly re-write Canadian drug law. Whichever iPolitics editor decided it was a good idea to give Harris space to publicly mope over the tongue-lashing ought to have their heads examined.

Doubly so for his most recent work.

It's everything that Harris has managed to distinguish his work as: lazy, amateurish, and steeped in a Twitter-ized narrative that doesn't hold up to very basic scrutiny. It's less a coherent work of political journalism and more a list of complaints. But even as Harris piles on the complaints, he also manages to pile on the factual errors. To whit:

"During the Idle No More protests in Ottawa, PM Harper was as aloof as Louis the 14th, refusing to meet certain native leaders who were tired of the federal runaround on land claims and treaty rights. They learned that Stephen Harper doesn’t make time for nobodies.

The government attempted to humiliate Chief Theresa Spence during her protest by leaking an audit about her lack of managerial skills on her home reserve. That tactic was put in perspective when the Treasury Board later lost $3.2 billion in taxpayers money, but said that was okay because no one was alleging any misspending."

This is the kind of disaster that ensues when a would-be journalist takes their directions from social media.

First off, Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn't refuse to meet with First Nations leaders as Harris claims. Harper did in fact meet with Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo. Other First Nations leaders -- many of whom backed Spence's demand for such a meeting -- refused to attend such a meeting, and even threatend Atleo with political repercussions if he did attend. In fact, Spence herself attempted to emotionally blackmail Atleo.

Secondly, the Deloitte audit of Attawapiskat's finances was released at the time it had been scheduled to be released. Spence was fully aware of this, and decided to grandstand against Harper -- by faking a hunger strike -- anyway.

Then there's the biggest whopper of all: claiming that the $3.2 billion was "lost" only after the release of this audit, when in fact the money in question was budgeted between 2001-09. Which means that for approximately five years, that money was either spent or not spent -- the audit in question couldn't actually tell which -- under a Liberal Party government. (Update - the treasury board has tracked the $3.2 billion. Not a penny of it was misspent, misappropriated, or lost -- something Harris seems to have very little to say about.)

That's three staggering factual errors in just two paragraphs. It's enough to beg the question of just who does the editing at iPolitics -- or if Harris' work is subjected to any kind of editing at all.

One thing is for certain: if Michael Harris won't check his own facts -- and it seems clear that he won't -- someone needs to do it for him. Unfortunately for iPolitics, it was me.

Idle No More: No Peace, No Justice

Around the world, the rallying cry of radicals -- genuinely righteous and merely self-righteous alike -- has often been thus: "no justice, no peace." Meaning that until they right an injustice -- actual, perceived, or even invented -- they will not stop fighting.

But what happens when their fighting disrupts efforts to right ongoing injustices, and solve ongoing problems? Then we clearly have the opposite: without peace, we cannot attain justice. It has come to pass that this is what it has come to with Idle No More.

Yesterday, Idle No More protesters attempted to barge into a meeting in Saskatoon between the federal government and local First Nations Chiefs. The bizarre insistence of the protesters was that the Chiefs weren't actually being consulted on  The bill includes a plan to create regional aboriginal school boards, and gathering individual band schools into those boards. The bill would give First Nations bands the same control over their schools as non-aboriginal communities already have. The bill has already proven controversial, but the government and First Nations are working on it. Or at least they're attempting to.

Apparently Idle No More won't allow that to happen.

This isn't the first time Idle No More has set out to disrupt meetings between First Nations Chiefs and the federal government. When AFN National Chief Shawn Atleo met with the Prime Minister, Idle No More darling and fake hunger striker Chief Theresa Spence -- under whom the proverbial home ice was already thinning at the time -- texted a demoralizing message to his Blackberry. The punchline was that Chief Spence herself had demanded such a meeting as a condition of ending her fake hunger strike. She did not end her hunger strike, which was fair enough I suppose as she never really began a hunger strike in the first place. Of course she didn't stop telling people she was hunger-striking when she really wasn't, so perhaps it wasn't fair enough after all.

Moving on.

It's at times like this that it's worth remembering that Idle No More is as much a conflict between aboriginal radicals and the federal government as it is a conflict between aboriginal protesters and their elected leaders. Remember that even in the wake of a crushing defeat at the hands of Atleo, Idle No More "braintrust" Pam Palmater declared that her movement -- a movement that has very much harnessed Idle No More as a means of advancing their agenda -- wouldn't rest until it has had its way.

It's become increasingly clear that Idle No More is now doing Palmater's heavy lifting, working very, very hard to undermine the elected leaders of First Nations bands in Canada. Working very, very hard to ensure there can be no peace between First Nations and the federal government. And without that peace, the problems that must be solved for there to be lasting justice cannot be solved.

Which, it seems, is precisely how Idle No More prefers it.