[Updated] More on the oil industry’s hand in a federal museum’s energy show

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

CBC has an interesting story (from its French service Radio-Canada) on the Imperial Oil Foundation’s involvement in the Canada Science and Technology Museum’s current exhibition “Energy: Power to Choose.”

Last month, here at Maclean’s we published an exclusive related piece, touching on the foundation’s sponsorship of the show, but focusing more on Access to Information documents detailing how the museum courted industry support, and how the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers influenced the museum’s portrayal of the oil sands. Over at Le Devoir, Helene Buzzetti has also done original reporting on this issue.

UPDATE: And, this morning, the Ottawa Citizen wades in with a follow that adds comments from the museum’s former vice-president, confirming what I called “pervasive influence from the energy sector in shaping the exhibition’s content.”

Le Devoir turns 100

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 3:49 PM - 0 Comments

Folks from Le Devoir were on the Hill with MPs to mark the Quebec paper’s
100th anniversary. (Left to right) Tory MP Steven Blaney, Le Devoir’s
publisher Bernard Descôteaux and Tory MP Maxime Bernier.

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Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe with Descôteaux.

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Alec Castonguay FTW

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 9:01 AM - 42 Comments

Le Devoir’s young political reporter, recently departed from Ottawa (no fool he) to ply his trade back home in Montreal, turns in easily the best tick-tock of the events leading up to Denis Coderre’s unfortunate televised auto da fé of the other day. This sort of access reporting is obviously open to the obvious caveats — how do we know who his sources were? But couldn’t some of them be (gasp) (hand across brow) self-interested? — but it builds a plausible case that this entire business began as a simple case of crossed wires.

And the hero of the morality play is party president Alfred Apps, who went on his own initiative to Montreal in June to sound out Martin Cauchon as a possible candidate. Cauchon, who is lunching with the President of the Liberal Party of Canada and the man who helped recruit Michael Ignatieff into Canadian politics in the first place, believes himself to be the object of a serious, high-level recruitment initiative. Which, to his eventual woe, he takes seriously. Apps notifies neither his leader nor the party’s Quebec election apparatus of Cauchon’s summer-long ruminations because he doesn’t think he’s made any formal offer. The Quebec election apparatus, Denis Coderre, Esq., prop., recruits a candidate for Outremont, believing as one usually does that Outremont will need a candidate. Enter Nathalie Le Prohon, duly-recruited candidate. Almost simultaneously, Cauchon accepts the offer he believes he was given from the party president. Hijinx ensue.

This sort of reported insider narrative is about 90 light-years removed from the kind of journalism (zzzzzzz) Le Devoir practiced for most of its history. I wonder whether they’ll be debating the déontologie of it all at the next FPJQ meeting. Ah well; it’s a ripping good yarn.

'Tendentious and sensationalist'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:24 PM - 32 Comments

Maxime Bernier responds to today’s Le Devoir report.

The journalist grounds his assertion not on the nature of the information itself – which he has not seen – but on the fact that the word “Secret” is marked on sections of the documents, which was obviously already known; and on the fact that paragraphs were taken out by civil servants before he obtained the document, which was totally predictable since we’re talking about secret documents. The civil servants simply deemed it prudent to keep the content of these sections secret, even if releasing it would not cause any significant injury to national interest.

Bring on the storm and fury

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 83 Comments

OMG, you guys — can you feel the political electricity in the air as we count down the hours before Michael Ignatieff is slated to take the stage in front of a standing-room-only throng of journalists with the fate of the country — or at least, this government —  resting on his patrician shoulders? Or, alternately, have you already been spoiled by Le Devoir, which is reporting that the prime minister is about to score another point in his ongoing blinkoff against the Official Opposition?

Anyway, on the off chance that this press conference turns out to be something more than an attempt to rationalize his party’s now seemingly pathological cognitive dissonance over its confidence in the PM’s competence, ITQ will be liveblogging from the NPT, so be sure to check back at 11am for full coverage.

In the meantime, the ITQ polls remain open, so feel free to cast your vote if you haven’t already done so.

10:47:58 AM
Greetings, and welcome to the must-see political news probably-non-event of the century, or at least the first part of the day! ITQ is on location in the fourth row of the historic National Press Theatre, where the tensions are — pretty much nonexistent, although the intragallery pre-pesser banter is no less witty and erudite for all that. Before we get started, though, an equally witty and erudite reader sent along the following bit of verse. Competing jingles, limericks or epic poems welcome:
ITQ’s Poetry Corner,
The grand old Count of York(ville)
He had ten thousand men
He marched the up to the edge of the cliff
And marched them back again.

10:55:51 AM
You know, for a guy who’s about to make the opposite of news – or so, I should note again, for the record, we all assume – this Ignatieff fellow sure can bring in the crowd — I’ve not seen the press theatre this full since our last parliamentary crisis, and that one was actually *interesting*.
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What, already? Cabinet shuffle metaspeculation

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 16, 2008 at 8:58 AM - 0 Comments

A cabinet shuffle tomorrow? Really?

With all due respect to Le Devoir, and its no doubt impeccable sources, I can’t quite believe that the Prime Minister is so frantic to push the bishops, knights and Jim Prentice that comprise his current cabinet around the board that he would buck tradition and do so before the summer recess – which is, after all, just four days away. I can’t even remember

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Bernier: A handy reminder

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments

The Chinese wall between what Stephen Harper cares about (loose documents) and what he claims not to care about (other loose objects) is an artificial construct, as we pointed out here 10 days ago, in a post that pointed to this article in Le Devoir. Because that article is now over the subscriber wall, here are pertinent points: Continue…

Dress up, dressing down

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

Le Devoir reports that Prime Minister “none of my business” Harper called Maxime Bernier in to complain, among other things, about the minister’s girlfriend. Last October. He’s just turning into a gossipy busy-body, isn’t he.

GEE-I-WONDER-WHAT’S-UPDATE: Incidentally, who could be leaking so diligently against a senior Quebec Tory minister? Who would have information about a senior Quebec Tory minister and want to harm the advancement of a senior Quebec Tory minister? I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea.

Highest bidder

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 10:37 AM - 0 Comments

We tease Le Devoir because we love it. You had to read that paper’s Alec Castonguay this morning to begin to understand the true extent of the Harper government’s clapped-together, carefully-obscured, clumsily-exercised plan to rebuild the Roman legions on Canadian soil. I refer, of course, to the 20-year, $30-billion defence plan, which the Globe is calling a $50-billion defence plan and which Le Devoir explains — I believe credibly— is actually a $96-billion defence plan. Details after the jump.

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Quebec and modern memory: a brief sequel

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 9, 2008 at 2:09 PM - 0 Comments

I will translate larger portions of André Pratte’s editorial when I get a minute, but here it is if you want to chew on it yourself. All I can say is that since I wrote this long post yesterday, the usual suspects at Le Devoir are continuing to chew the guedille over the Charest-Harper-Michaëlle Jean “rewriting” of history. Pratte’s editorial in La Presse will be distinctly embarrassing. He opens with a quote from….Champlain:

“Your Majesty must have enough knowledge of the discoveries made in his honour of New France (called Canada) through the writings that certain Captains and Pilots have made.”

That’s from 1613. Hmm. Continue…

Terre de nos aïeux

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

When lecturing others on history it is almost always a good idea to read some first.

This morning’s Le Devoir is topped by this front-page banner headline: “Jean Charest rewrites history.” The article, by reporters Robert Dutrisac in Quebec City and Christian Rioux in Paris, is only the latest in an endless series of alarums on one of the paper’s favourite themes, that Quebecers have somehow managed to elect (twice; it’s so embarrassing) as their premier a man who betrays and denies the Nation’s True Nature.

“To justify the great visibility that Canada has obtained in France thanks to the festivities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Quebec City,” Dutrisac writes, “premier Jean Charest devoted himself to a rewriting of history by asserting that Quebec City founded Canada. This conception is similar to the views of the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, who judges, for his part, that the foundation of Quebec City in 1608 marks that of the Canadian state.”

It is perhaps best to imagine the rest of the article as though it was being whispered to you in urgent tones by a guy who has buttonholed you at a bistro and is sharing the details of a vast conspiracy he has only just uncovered. Continue…

It's French for "Do what you have to"

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 5, 2008 at 12:14 PM - 0 Comments

I see nobody is talking about this story in Le Devoir. Time to change that.

Translated highlights:

“Conservative Party apparatchiks in Ottawa decided to spend $800,000 in extra advertising in Quebec during the last federal election campaign, and it’s among them, in a few hours on a Wednesday afternoon in December 2005, that they decieded how to credit these sums to several Quebec candidates to shake Elections Canada off their trail. … Continue…