A free press has an important, vital role in any true democracy; only mention Watergate to any North American and the connection is immediate. Recently, however, the concept of a free press has been at issue in Canada. The National Post has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to hear its appeal of a ruling given by the Ontario Court of Appeal last month demanding that the newspaper give the RCMP a document obtained from a confidential source.
The document is related to the National Post’s ongoing research into what has become known as Shawinigate. The scandal involves alleged conflicts of interest by former prime minister Jean Chretien and public money spent in his riding of Shawinigan, Quebec. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the appeal, it will be the first time that it has been asked to define the lengths to which Canadian media can go to protect its confidential sources.
The manuscript in question was mailed to the National Post in April 2001. It implied that Yvon Duhaime, the owner of a hotel, the Auberge Grand-Mere, owned $23,040 to a holding company owned by Jean Chretien. Both Chretien and the Business Development Bank of Canada, who loaned Duhaime $600,000 for renovations to the hotel, vowed that the document was a forgery, but the RCMP obtained a search warrant against the newspaper in 2002. Their intention was to conduct DNA and fingerprint tests on the paper to determine who may have sent it. The warrant was quashed by the Superior Court in January 2004 on the grounds that media information should be turned over to the police in very rare instances. This ruling was over-turned by the Ontario Court of Appeal the next month on the grounds that Mr. Chretien was the Prime Minister at the time and that the media had to prove that there was a greater benefit in keeping the information than in revealing it, when asked by police.
The question, of course, has nothing to do with Shawinigate. Doug Kelly, the editor-in-chief of the National Post, stated the case in an interview given to Canwest News Service and quoted in the Edmonton Journal of March 26, 2008.
“This issue is …about the media’s ability to do its job, to be able to bring forward information as part of its role in a functioning democracy. Stripping away a reporter’s ability to protect a credible source will spread a chill across journalism in this country and severely hamper our ability to expose wrongdoing and bring critical facts to light.”
If we, as a democratic nation, do not offer some protection to our newspapers, then our democracy is at risk. If government and police forces can obtain the names of confidential sources, then no credible source is going to come forward to give information that “the powers that be” would rather keep hidden. The current federal government is a secretive one, and this secretiveness is spilling over to such institutions as the RCMP. If the news media does not have the legal security to keep its sources confidential and itself free from prosecution for doing that, then Canada is in grave danger of losing its democracy.
