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What I would say at Heritage Committee

November 1, 2022 / 1 Comment

It has now been a little more than 2 months since the Laith Marouf affair hit Canada’s mainstream media. Although readers of this blog have known about Canadian government agencies funding hate for almost a year and a half, it was Jonathan Kay’s amplification of my social media stream that brought attention to the issue in mid-August.

In recent weeks, we have learned that the Prime Minister’s Office knew about the government funding of CMAC and Laith Marouf in mid-July, yet said nothing until the story left the Twitter-verse and made it onto the Canadian Press newswires about a month and a half later.

Why?

But there is still much that we don’t know, and it is unclear how much more we will find out.

According to the minutes of a recent Heritage Committee meeting, “the officials from the Department of Canadian Heritage that were responsible for the funding of Laith Marouf [will] be invited to appear before [the Heritage Committee] regarding the federal funding provided to the Community Media Advocacy Centre by the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Department officials’ handling of the situation”. The appearance will take place after the Committee’s deliberations of Bill C-18, likely late this year.

Two months ago, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Mount Royal, Anthony Housefather endorsed a thorough review.

Mr. Housefather (and a few other members of the Heritage Committee) leveraged the appearances of Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and CRTC Chair Ian Scott before the committee in the context of the review of the Online News Bill C-18 to ask a few questions. You can find the video replay on ParlVU.

The Heritage officials will certainly be grilled at Committee, but will anyone actually be held to account for what should be embarrassing and shameful lapses in judgment? There is so much that needs to be uncovered in this affair. Canadians need to understand how the funding was awarded in the first place. How could the Minister of Diversity have been quoted in a press release with such a shameless purveyor of hate? Why was there such a lengthy period of silence following the information reaching the Minister’s office and the Prime Minister’s office?

If I had been given the opportunity to speak before the Heritage Committee, these would be my opening remarks:

Let me start with a few statements that are important to have on the record.

I am a Canadian. I am proudly Jewish. And, I am unapologetically a Zionist, supporting the indigeneity of a Jewish state of Israel in its ancestral land.

Professionally, I focus on telecommunications policy. I have enjoyed a reasonably accomplished career over the past 42 years.

I tend to follow a number of Parliamentary Committee meetings and most CRTC proceedings as part of my work, often “live-tweeting”. Some of you may be familiar with my online presence.

That was how I first intersected with Laith Marouf. In 2016, I made a comment on Twitter about Community TV during a CRTC proceeding; his replies were less than cordial. And that was what put him onto my radar screen.

But it was his harsh responses to my tweets about his appearance at the CBC licensing hearing in January 2021 that were most surprising. So, I started taking screenshots and I have a collection of about 100 tweets of his that I thought should be archived.

Some, in my view, crossed the line set out in Twitter’s terms of service, so I reported them. In mid-2021, Twitter suspended his account <@LaithMarouf>. In violation of the terms of his suspension, he created a new account, fooling Twitter’s sophisticated algorithms by simply inserting an underscore between his first and last name <@Laith_Marouf>.

In July of 2021, I started writing on my blog about Mr. Marouf accessing a CRTC Telecom cost award in May of last year. Despite this, the CRTC awarded a further $15,000 in October of 2021. While some apologists like to distinguish between funding awards to CMAC the organization, versus Mr. Marouf the individual, the CRTC receives detailed cost sheets from each consultant and the Commission clearly knew that the overwhelming majority of the funds were awarded to Mr. Marouf personally. The CRTC also chose to award Mr. Marouf at a rate of $225 per hour, rather than its standard internal consulting rate of $470 per day. And the CRTC bypassed its own procedures, not accepting interventions when it reviewed CMAC’s applications for costs.

CMAC received more than half a million dollars between 2016 and 2021 from the Broadcast Participation Fund, which was created by the CRTC in 2012 to make up for a shortcoming in the Broadcast Act that doesn’t include funding public interest groups’ participation in regulatory proceedings in the same way as provided for by the Telecom Act.

All of this preceded the revelation that Heritage Canada’s Anti-Racism Action Program engaged CMAC. When I learned of this in mid-April of this year, I wrote a blog post and tweeted links to that, tagging the official Heritage twitter handle, Minister Rodriguez, and MPs on both sides of the House. This was in advance of the first of 6 scheduled workshops. I also immediately notified a Jewish advocacy organization that informed me that it would reach out to its contacts at Heritage right away.

In July, when Mr. Marouf retweeted someone else’s tweet that included what I perceived to be a threat for an armed attack, I notified law enforcement, as well as a retired senior law enforcement officer and the Honorable Member for Mount Royal, Anthony Housefather, with whom I had engaged during some INDU meetings. At the same time, I asked Mr. Housefather to look into the Anti-Racism funding of CMAC and I provided considerable background material.

He replied to me on July 19 that he had informed Minister Hussen’s office. “The Minister is looking into it and will get back to me”. I followed up a few weeks later and was told on August 12, “I have gotten no good answer yet”. On August 16, “I have escalated this and finally got this moving at the highest level. Should have a resolution shortly”

By August 11, Jonathan Kay had already picked up on the story and moved the issue into the mainstream with his Twitter following of 68,000 (I had just over 5,000 at the time).

And here we are.

MPs on both sides of the House were notified in advance, including members from this Committee. Most did nothing until coverage of the story became too embarrassing to ignore. I don’t want this to be a partisan issue, although I do want to see some real accountability for the disbursement of public funds to this organization, and to this person.

The Honourable Member for Don Valley West recently posted a video on YouTube with a powerful message. He told us how he became sensitized to antisemitism when his father told him to apologize to friends of his for remarks he didn’t make. Mr. Oliphant was told by his father, “It doesn’t matter. You overheard it, and you didn’t counter it.”

Honourable members: too many people in Ottawa knew about this funding and didn’t act on the information. And didn’t speak out. Did nothing to counter it.

And that is why we are here today.

It will be up to Heritage Committee to ask officials why all of the money was paid up front, before services were rendered, and without so much as a web search to investigate the person receiving the money.

Perhaps the Committee will ask whether my blog posts or Tweets from July 2021 or April 2022 were part of the department’s news scan, or the Minister’s office news scan, and why there was no action taken by the army of communications and social media people who work for the Department.

The Committee might want to ask what screening was performed before the Minister was quoted in that press release with Laith Marouf saying, “Our government is proud to contribute to the initiative”.

Will there be any further investigation asking why there was more than a month of silence after the Minister’s and the Prime Minister’s offices were made aware of the situation? Surely it didn’t take more than a month for some communications person to compose a statement. I just keep thinking of that “actions speak louder…” thing, and I’d suggest the inactions of so many created a deafening roar.

Frankly, I’ve had enough of “bended-knee” apologies for past wrong doings. We don’t need another statement expressing regret for the lack of judgment in engaging with CMAC for anti-racism programming. We don’t need to see tweets from the Minister that he convened an antisemitism roundtable. Proclaiming “Online hate and violence doesn’t stay online” comes across as somewhat trite, when a government anti-racism action program sent more than $100,000 to someone who generates hate and calls for violence online.

As Michael Geist recently wrote, The House of Commons Committee Process is Broken. “The reality is probably that unless Ministers prioritize accountability and MPs show some independence, nothing will change.”

What questions would you want asked? [You can leave your comments here.]

PMO knew and said nothing

February 15, 2023

For more than a month, the Prime Minister’s Office was aware that the government’s anti-racism action program had provided funding to Laith Marouf, failing to issue any public statement until pressured to do so. That is the latest revelation in a story that merits far more investigation than it currently is receiving.

For well over a year, I have been sounding an alarm over public funding of a purveyor of antisemitic social media messaging. For details, please see “Feeding at the funding trough”, a blog post I wrote in late August.

It all started with my observations about Canada’s telecommunications regulator awarding “costs” with the Commission failing to follow its own public processes, in stark conflict with last week’s statement issued by the CRTC’s Chair. I continued to sound the alarm after Canada’s Heritage Department awarded a contract, ironically as part of the Ministry’s anti-racism action program.

I directly approached a Liberal MP in mid-July with information about my concerns. As the Globe and Mail has now reported, this information reached the Prime Minister’s office nearly immediately. However, it wasn’t until a month later, after social media amplified the story, that there was any official government reaction. It took another week until the Prime Minister addressed the issue.

As Michael Geist wrote on his blog, “I can’t shake the reality that the Minister knew for a month. The Prime Minister’s Office knew for a month. And they did nothing.”

It calls to mind the message from MP Rob Oliphant on the lesson he learned from his father admonishing him for ignoring acts of antisemitism. He protested saying that he didn’t do it. His father responded, “It doesn’t matter. You overheard it, and you didn’t counter it.”

It simply isn’t credible that its delay in responding was because the government needed to consult with lawyers to look at how it could unwind the arrangements. Lawyers weren’t required to look at the “vile” tweets and come out with a statement.

Looking at the initial statement issued by the Minister of Diversity and Housing, it is clear that the lawyers had not yet completed their examination.

So why the delay?

They knew for a month and they did nothing.

This statement could have been released immediately after learning about the issue. It should have been released by the PMO in mid-July.

It took another day for the Minister’s lawyer’s to have a “resolution”.

We are left wondering why the government was remaining silent for a month. Were the political strategists hoping that the matter would simply fade away on its own?

The fallout from the funding of an antisemitic hate-monger is far from over.

  • The parliamentary Heritage Committee needs to continue its examination of the matter to explore the complete timeline and ensure accountability for this shameful episode.
  • The CRTC needs to carefully examine why it failed to conduct a public process in the case of awarding costs, in conflict with its own standards and procedures. If appropriate, it should review its cost award decisions on its own motion to correct its error.
  • The Broadcasting Participation Fund needs to operate with increased transparency.

In order to bookmark reference articles about the affair, I will try to keep this bibliography up to date:

Cancel culture and online harms legislation

October 12, 2022 / 3 Comments

A recent interview on The Hub caught my eye: “Cancel culture comes to the classroom: Professor Deborah Appleman on how teachers are navigating the new culture wars.”

In the article, Sean Speer and Professor Appleman discuss “how culture war politics are intruding into the classroom.”

I had been reading a number of articles on similar themes, such as the blowback against cancel culture at Yale Law School by some US Federal judges who will no longer offer clerkships to graduates of the program (see “Yale Law clerk boycott now up to a dozen federal jurists”), and a ban on speakers who are from Israel or who support Zionism by 9 student groups associated with Berkeley’s law school (see: “Leading US Jewish groups blast Berkeley Law school amid anti-Zionism uproar”).

As Professor Appleman describes, “this pressure of canceling, this culture war, is coming from both liberals and conservatives.”

Classroom teachers are used to conservative critics who think that the books that teachers choose are inappropriate because of profane language or explicit sexual content. We’ve been dealing with that with support from the American Library Association, and we’re about to celebrate Banned Book Weeks coming up.

We’re sort of used to that. What we’re not used to is the canceling that’s coming from the Left, canceling because of problematic portrayals, because of use of offensive language, and canceling because someone has made a judgment about the appropriateness of the life of an author, for example, Sherman Alexie, and the degree to which that author’s behaviour should keep us from teaching their books. It’s a particular moment in time where we’re being pressed from both sides. And that, of course, in the United States is exacerbated by a lot of movements, a lot of anti-gay movements, by movements of critical race theory, even though the people who talk about it don’t really exactly know what it is, a real backlash.
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On one hand, we don’t want to have kids read things in our classroom that perpetuate harm.

On the other hand, the purpose of reading literature is to unsettle you, is to hurt you in some ways, and is, maybe, in my opinion, most importantly, giving you the opportunity to feel the hurt of other people.

I encourage you to read the entire interview, including the discussion of the “need to confront ideas or arguments that [students] may find distasteful or even offensive as part of the process of learning.”

And that brings me back to my concern about legislation being considered to address the issue of online harms.

Recall that the mandate letters for the Minister of Canadian Heritage and for the Minister of Justice and Attorney General each contain a section calling for the Ministers “to develop and introduce legislation as soon as possible to combat serious forms of harmful online content to protect Canadians and hold social media platforms and other online services accountable for the content they host”.

As I wrote two months ago, from the outset, I have had concerns about plans to create new legislation addressing online hate, trying to establish a regime that defines what constitutes online harms, and places limits on our freedom of expression.

Then there is the case of Twitter suspending Laith Marouf, and the subsequent withdrawal of a government consulting contract for him to conduct workshops to develop an anti-racism media strategy. Frequent readers are familiar with this case and others can refer to the reading list at the bottom of my September 6 post. As I wrote in August:

That said, let’s examine a very current situation: a Montreal-based consultant who refers to Jews as “loud mouthed bags of human feces”, and threatens “Jews with a bullet to the head” (as highlighted in a Twitter stream last Friday by journalist Jonathan Kay).

Was this hateful or merely offensive? To me, it’s pretty clear that this kind of commentary crossed the line.

But we don’t actually need to consider whether or not Laith Marouf’s comments would survive Canadian Heritage’s prospective Online Harms legislation. Legal or not, it seems pretty inexcusable that this same department of the Canadian government has been providing funding to him.

It is worth noting that it didn’t require new legislation to deal with this case. Marouf was found to have violated Twitter’s terms of service and was suspended (again) without government intervention. Following public exposure, the government cancelled the funding agreement.

Canadian Heritage, the department charged with developing legislation to combat serious forms of harmful online content, found itself having funded a purveyor of the kind of content it was supposed to combat. The Minister’s mandate is to hold social media platforms accountable for the content they host, but two months after the story became widely known, no one has yet been held to account for the department’s failure to conduct proper due diligence before awarding the contract to CMAC.

I am doubtful of the ability of this government to introduce legislation that balances concerns about online harms with our Charter freedom of expression. Still, it is important to note that there are certain limits to our right to freely express our views. And the Charter clearly doesn’t include a right to receive government funding for those with a habit of spewing vile messages.

Collusion for a good cause

October 18, 2022

Last week a number of Canadian regulatory and policy folks talked amongst themselves to craft a letter that was sent to Minister of Heritage Pablo Rodriguez, and the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion Ahmed Hussen.

The letter was an unusual display of unity, as indicated in a tweet from Teksavvy’s Andy Kaplan-Myrth: “This may be a surprising list of individuals to sign a letter together — we are rarely if ever on the same side of issues. That’s how clear, important, and nonpartisan this was.”

The letter itself opens with an introduction to the group. “We are a group of Jewish Canadian communications lawyers and professionals. We are writing in our personal capacities to express our concerns with revelations that Canadian Heritage chose to retain a person with a demonstrated history of antisemitic statements.”

The group included people from Bell, CCSA, Distributel, Rogers, Teksavvy, TELUS, a former CRTC vice-Chair, academics and lawyers from small boutique firms as well as large Bay Street firms.

While we are happy to learn that the government has terminated CMAC’s funding through this program and that there will be a review of the program from which CMAC received funding, there has been no indication that the government will undertake a broader review of its processes across Canadian Heritage or other departments, and to date no Minister and no senior public servant has taken responsibility for this affair.
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In your publication “Building a Foundation for Change: Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019–2022“, you state that “The Government of Canada must take a leading role addressing systemic racism and discrimination when found to exist within our federal institutions and in public policies, programs and services.” We agree, and ask that in the spirit of this commitment, you commit to the following actions:

  1. Apologize and take responsibility on behalf of Canadian Heritage for retaining Mr. Marouf to provide anti-racism training;
  2. Undertake the inquiry into how this occurred in consultation with Canadian Jewish communities, and report publicly on your findings; and
  3. Provide a detailed plan on how the Government intends to include Jewish Canadians in its anti-racism strategy going forward.

I found it particularly gratifying to see these regulatory and policy colleagues set aside their differences to come together to craft a strong message to these two cabinet members.

I thank them.

If you want to provide your support, please consider signing this petition.

In order to bookmark a few articles about the affair, let me point you to:

My summer vacation

August 30, 2022 / 1 Comment

As a kid, I never really liked the last week of August. The end of August meant the end of summer vacation, long drives back from family visits to the East Coast, teary goodbyes.

The start of school seemed to always include an assignment to write down what we did on our summer vacations.

Well, here we are.

It’s the last week before Labour Day. I have a lot to write about for that first school assignment.

Despite the crazy mess at Toronto’s airport, I managed to have extended visits with my kids and grandkids from far and farther, and that certainly tops my list of accomplishments. Despite the frequent video chats between live visits, there really is nothing like sitting together quietly on a dock fishing, or spoiling the little ones with visits to the bakery for rainbow bagels, or excursions by boat for ice cream.

Everything else this summer takes a distant back seat to the joy of quality in-person time together after a 3 year absence.

Still, I got an awful lot done, most of which found its way into earlier blog posts and some has been amplified in the general press.

There are various calls for an inquiry into the Anti-Racism Action Program and how it came to fund an organization so intertwined with a consultant with a pattern of “antisemitic comments” characterized as “reprehensible and vile.”

There are longer term issues to be explored that are related to this incident. As I indicated last week, The CRTC and its Broadcast Participation Fund shovelled more than half a million dollars to CMAC over the past 6 years. We have not yet seen the 2022 report to learn what was claimed and awarded in the past 12 months.

The CRTC might want to revisit the appropriateness of not allowing public comment on some of its cost awards, comment that may have challenged the appropriateness of the CRTC’s generous $225 per hour funding. It seems certain that the CRTC and the Broadcast Participation Fund will need to take a closer look at the public interest groups who are recipients of cost awards to ensure Canadians are comfortable with how public money is being distributed.

But in my view, the biggest impact will be the complete loss of credibility for Canadian Heritage to attempt to introduce regulation of online harms. A Liberal Member of Parliament made Ministers in the department aware of the potentially embarrassing contract last month – in mid-July. Nothing was done for more than a month about what the Minister now calls “antisemitic and xenophobic statements”. A department that couldn’t react in a timely way to “reprehensible and vile” statements made on a single platform (Twitter) by one of their own paid consultants has little credibility to introduce legislation seeking regulatory oversight of all online content in Canada.

Just a few weeks before the Minister was quoted in a press release with him, Laith Marouf tweeted, “Nothing is more harmful to any decolonisation movements [sic] in the world, especially Palestine, than Jewish White Boys/Girls. In my opinion, allowing them any space in our struggle is dependent on their complete abandonment of personal opinion & only parroting Palestinian voices.”

If only the Minister’s communications staff had access to a Google search bar.

The online harms bill is effectively dead. But, don’t blame Laith Marouf. This key piece of the Liberal Government’s digital plan was a victim of indifference and inaction in the department responsible for the impugned Anti-Racism Action Program.

Last week, Rex Murphy wrote:

No one could use the language, express the contempt and rage on Twitter about any other so-called “marginalized” group with even one-tenth of the ferocity that Marouf used in reference to “Zionists,” as he did for years, with reference to Jews and Israel, and not be called out, shamed and, yes, cancelled.

My point: Slander, insults and actual hate against Jews gets a pass — until some truly extreme example calls attention to it. Try referencing any “marginalized” group as “bags of feces” and see how long any journalist, politician or ordinary citizen would last.

A year ago, an antisemitic outburst from a university professor was allowed to slide with barely a wrist slap. The school likely didn’t want to have the incident impact a multi-million dollar grant announced a few weeks later.

In my part of Ontario, overall it was a great summer. The long range forecast is suggesting that it should be starting to get uncomfortable for some early this fall.

And, that is what I did for my summer vacation. What did you do?

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