Steve Ashton: End of a Northern Manitoba NDP political dynasty?

 

 

 

 

 

 

A clever headline might say something like “Ashton fades to black” or “NDP  Orange: The New Black.” Clever perhaps. But not accurate. Because there is nothing about Steve Ashton that suggests fading away or going gently into the good night. That’s not who he is. Not quite House of Cards material perhaps, he is still one of the toughest bare-knuckle street-fighting politicians of any party in Canada, not just the NDP. Internal party opponents who underestimate his resolve do so at their own political peril.

In a two-way leadership race against 35-year-old rookie Fort Rouge constituency NDP MLA Wab Kinew, Ashton, 61, has decided on the high-risk gambit of revisiting two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when the leadership aspirant was 21 years old. The alleged victim has not been identified and both assault charges were stayed at the request of the Crown in 2004.  A charge that is stayed can be reactivated within one year of a judge granting a stay of proceedings, but seldom are, and such was the case with Kinew’s.

Wab Kinew, a former CBC Radio and TV reporter and host, author, rapper, and later acting associate vice-president of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Winnipeg, was born on the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation near Nestor Falls, Ont. in Northwestern Ontario’s frontier Sunset Country in the Central Time zone, but grew up mainly in suburban Winnipeg. Aside from the two stayed assault charges from the Spring of 2003, Kinew was no saint, a fact he readily admits.  Even before the later stayed assault charges, Kinew was convicted in February 2003 of failing to provide a breathalyzer or blood alcohol sample in a driving case, and was fined $922. After the stayed domestic assault charges, he was convicted in June 2004 of assaulting a cab driver and fined $300. As recently as October 2014, an unpaid speeding ticket eventually resulted in $606.50 of his wages being garnisheed by the Crown from his wages at the University of Winnipeg. Kinew has also apologized for several misogynist and homophobic tweets he made from his Twitter account, particularly back in June and July 2009, when he was actively rapping and by then 27 years old. And on Oct. 17, 2012, Kinew tweeted, “Riding in my limo back to my king size sweet [sic] feeling really bad for those kids in Attawapiskat #haha #terrible #inative.” Kinew was by now 30.

All told, CTV News Winnipeg reported Aug. 22, Kinew has been charged with more than a dozen offences, most dating back to 2003 and 2004.

So why is it such a high-risk gambit, one which clearly smacks of political desperation, some, if not many, would say, for Steve Ashton to go on the political offensive over those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when he was 21?

First, Kinew, if not in detail always, has nevertheless many times in many places in recent years, including on social media and in his 2015 book, The Reason You Walk,  apologized for his past behaviour.

Secondly, in April 2016, the voters of  Fort Rouge elected Kinew as their MLA, as he defeated then Manitoba Liberal leader Rana Bokhari, Progressive Conservative candidate Audrey Gordon and Green Party candidate Grant Sharp, to hold onto the NDP seat held by retiring incumbent Jennifer Howard, a former NDP cabinet minister.

Thirdly, the Manitoba NDP vetted Kinew, as they did Ashton, and sanctioned both their leadership bids.

The narrative that Kinew has apologized for his past and is a changed, albeit gradually, man is a powerful one for anyone who believes youthful indiscretions can and often are followed by remorse, forgiveness and redemption. Wab Kinew has clearly made something of his life and is a net contributor to society. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t make a good leader for the Manitoba NDP.

At the same time, it also true that much less is known publicly about those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 than the other matters, both criminal and non-criminal, that he has apologized for. Zita Somakoko, a Manitoba NDP member and domestic violence survivor advocate, has suggested to several media outlets this week that Kinew needs to be more forthright in explaining the stayed assault charges from 14 years ago. CBC News Manitoba reported today that Somakoko had “shared her dismay at Kinew’s responses with Steve Ashton….”

Several Manitoba media outlets received two anonymous emails last week containing previously-unreported details about Kinew’s legal history, including the two stayed assault charges against a woman from 2003.

Mohinder Saran, the MLA for The Maples, who was booted from the NDP caucus earlier this year as the result of sexual harassment allegations, which he denies, recently ordered copies of Kinew’s complete court documents.

Saran told CBC News Manitoba that he is unofficially working on behalf of Ashton’s campaign to attract delegates, but declined to comment about the court documents. Kinew currently has 588 committed delegates for the Sept. 16 leadership vote to Ashton’s 339 delegates. Saran denied sending documents to Ashton’s campaign or the media.

CBC News Manitoba compared the metadata — essentially, the file’s digital “fingerprint” — from the PDF document containing Kinew’s court records sent to media anonymously to that of the PDF containing Steve Ashton’s personal disclosure statement from last week, showing no involvement with the criminal justice system, which was sent via his campaign’s email account.

The two files were created using the same make and model of scanning device, CBC News Manitoba reports.

This does not prove that the two files were necessarily created on the same printer, however, CBC News Manitoba says it analyzed dozens of PDFs sent to media from various other NDP groups and sources, none of which were made using the same device.

Political analyst Christopher Adams, vice-president of Probe Research, and an adjunct professor at the University of Winnipeg in the Department of Political Science, who has served as an election desk analyst for various media outlets in Manitoba, told CBC News Manitoba that while this is not proof of direct involvement by Ashton or his campaign, it does put his campaign under the microscope.

“If I were Perry Mason, this is strong circumstantial evidence,” he said, referring to the famous fictional lawyer.

“I am not a lawyer. I am a political scientist, but it does start showing you that maybe something is coming out of the [Ashton] campaign,” said Adams, who added “that sometimes supporters go ‘rogue’ and use tactics not authorized by a political campaign.

Ashton said Saran was not involved in his campaign and denied any knowledge of how the leaked court documents were sent to the media.

“I don’t know. I was a sent a copy [of the anonymous email received by media] last week, so I don’t know what the story is there,” Ashton told CBC News Manitoba.

“When the campaign received the [anonymous email] our decision was not to go public with it. Not to leak it, not to go public,” he said.

CBC News Manitoba says they requested a copy of the email that Ashton says his campaign received. “He has not responded to this request.”

“I think Ashton is right to ask about what were those things?” Adams told CBC News Manitoba. “Who was the person involved? What was the actual incident that caused this, that eventually led to the stay of charges? I think Ashton is kind of doing what we would expect him to do,” he said.

Ashton, who had been the marathon man of Manitoba politics, last year did what every political analyst and commentator in the province believed was impossible. He lost the supposedly safest NDP seat in Manitoba to Progressive Conservative rookie Kelly Bindle by 210 votes.

There have only been 13 provincial general elections since the Thompson constituency was created in June 1969. Progressive Conservative Labour Minister Ken MacMaster, who won the seat in the Oct. 11, 1977 election, and held it for four years until 1981, was the only Tory to ever hold the seat before Bindle. Before MacMaster, Ken Dillen, who ran against Ashton as a Liberal in the 2011 election, held the seat for the NDP from 1973 to 1977, while Joe Borowski held the seat in 1972-33 as an Independent NDP, and from 1969 to 1972 as an NDP member. Borowski defeated former Thompson mayor Tim Johnston’s father, Dr. Blain Johnston, by seven votes in the Feb. 20, 1969 byelection in the old provincial constituency of Churchill, which included the town of Thompson. He went on four months later to win the newly-created constituency of Thompson in the June 25, 1969 general election.

Ashton had won nine consecutive elections between 1981 and 2011 before going down to defeat in 2016 in his bid for 10 in a row. Ashton was first elected to the Manitoba legislature at the age of 25 in the Nov. 17, 1981 provincial election, defeating MacMaster by 72 votes.

He has a much less impressive track record to date, however, in his two previous bids for the Manitoba NDP leadership in 2009 and 2015. In a two-way race in 2009, NDP finance minister Greg Selinger took almost two-thirds of the ballots cast and sailed to victory in the two-way race with 1,317 votes to Ashton’s 685, while in 2015 Ashton finished third on the first ballot with a similar share of the vote totals.

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Earth faces sixth extinction-level event, scientists say, while the mass media, as we know it, faces its first, according to the fossil record compiled by today’s advertisers and readers/viewers

A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?

Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth  – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.

As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?

Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.

The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.

Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?

Consider these three exhibits, if you will.

Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.

Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.

I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.

As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.

Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.

Zero. As in zero-sum game.

Exhibit 3:

Mass extinction, niche survival.

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Who’d a thunk it? Readers says it’s a toss-up when it comes to whether robo-journalists write better than human journalists

OK … we’ve all heard the phrase “fishwrap” applied derogatorily by critics assessing the quality of newspapers wherever they live from time to time.  Methinks some weeks that does a disservice to how my favourite pickerel from Paint Lake should be treated, but it isn’t just local newspapers that are problematically bad at times. Take the venerable Associated Press, affectionately known by working journos simply as the AP. They managed to move this alert last Wednesday: “BC-APNewsAlert/17. New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Bear has died. He was 90.” Actually, Yogi Bear, the beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoon character is only 57. He was created in 1958, making his début as a supporting character in The Huckleberry Hound Show, and was the first breakout character created by Hanna-Barbera and was eventually more popular than Huckleberry Hound.

Yogi Berra, the beloved baseball player, on the other hand, was created in 1924 and born in 1925. A native of St. Louis, Berra signed with the New York Yankees in 1943 before serving in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. He made his major league début in 1946 and was a stalwart in the Yankees’ lineup during the team’s championship years in the 1940s and 1950s.

Berra was a power hitter and strong defensive catcher. He caught Yankees’ pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game on Oct. 8, 1956, in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, the only perfect game in Major League Baseball (MLB) post-season history. After playing 18 seasons with the Yankees, Berra retired following the 1963 season. Berra was also famous for his string of truisms, tautologies and malapropisms, including “Nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded,” along with, “It ain’t over til it’s over” or, “Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked,” as well as, “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true” and, “If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.” My personal favourite, which I managed to inject into several columns, editorials or news stories over the years, was the well-known, “This is like déjà vu all over again,” which I had used again as recently as Aug. 24, less than a month before Yogi Berra died.

It was while I was pondering how a boo boo like the Yogi Bear/Yogi Berra obituary mix-up happens in journalism (I suspect the eagle-eyed Ranger John Francis Smith from Jellystone Park would have known the difference) that I came across the latest information on robo-journalism (not to be mixed up with Tory robo-calls during the 2011 federal election campaign, I should point out to my friends still remaining in Canadian journalism.) Turns out that unlike most human journalists, who are for the most part seriously mathematically challenged, robot journalists that already work for such illustrious newspapers as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes, the storied business magazine, have shown a natural aptitude for data, making them ideal for the sports and business desks, and as such are now about ready to branch out into breaking news and investigative journalism.

Neil Sharman (believed to be a human writer) and former head of research and insight at Telegraph Media Group on Buckingham Palace Road in London, writing Sept. 22 in TheMediaBriefing, also based in London, noted that robots, “Like junior reporters … can learn from and draw on a back catalogue of great writing – but with more powerful memories and analytical techniques.” You can read Sharman’s full piece here:  http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/robo-journalism-the-future-is-arriving-quickly

“Machines are adept at investigating data sets,” Sharman says. “Publishers have set them to tax records, homicide data, meteorological reports and more –looking for patterns and describing them. They’re thorough, not prone to error and they’re fast.

“The LA Times uses robo-journalism to break news about earthquakes because machines can analyse geological survey data faster than a human. It takes under five minutes to spot a story and get it online.”

Tim Adams, a staff writer for the “The Observer: The New Review” at London’s The Guardian newspaper, wrote a piece June 28 on Kris Hammond, a professor of journalism and computer science at Northwestern University and co-founder and chief scientist at Chicago-based Narrative Science, which developed a writing program for robots known as “Quill.” Hammond also founded the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He told Adams, “we are humanizing the machine and giving it the ability not only to look at data but, based on general ideas of what is important and a close understanding of who the audience is, we are giving it the tools to know how to tell us stories.”

Adams observes, “It’s not deathless prose – at least not yet; the machines are still ‘learning’ day by day how to write effectively – but it’s already good enough to replace the jobs once done by wire reporters. Narrative Science’s computers provide daily market reports for Forbes as well sports reports for the Big Ten sports network. Hammond predicts that 90 per cent of journalism will be written by computer by 2030. Automated Insights, one of Narrative Sciences competitors, based in Durham, North Carolina, does all the data-based stock reports for AP.

Adams also notes that “last year, a Swedish media professor, Christer Clerwall, conducted the first proper blind study into how sports reports written by computers and by humans compared. Readers taking part in the study suggested, on the whole, that the reports written by human sports journalists were slightly more accessible and enjoyable, but that those written by computer seemed a little more informative and trustworthy.”

Clerwall, an assistant professor in media and communication studies at Karlstad University in Karlstad, Sweden concluded that “perhaps the most interesting result in the study is that there are [almost] no… significant differences in how the two texts are perceived.”

In terms of narrative arcs, Hammond says, “Like any decent hack, the machine is coming to learn that there are only five or six compelling tales available: back from the brink, outrageous fortune, sudden catastrophe and so on.”

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