Media / Media Bias

Submissions are just that - submissions

By arthur Weinreb

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

as all trials and administrative and quasi-judicial hearings do, the Gomery Commission concluded its evidentiary phase by hearing submissions from legal counsel for the various parties to the inquiry. Submissions are not testimony, nor are they evidence; they are merely arguments by which lawyers try to emphasize the evidence that it most beneficial to their clients in an attempt to obtain the most favourable result possible under the circumstances. although lawyers cannot ethically mislead the court or the tribunal, they can put a spin on the facts to try and get the best result that they can.

Of all the submissions that were made to Justice Gomery, the ones that received the most coverage in the media were those made by David Scott and Peter Doody, counsel for former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. The media seemed shocked that Scott and Doody would ask that their client be exonerated by the inquiry’s commissioner in order to save Jean Chrétien’s supposed stellar reputation.

Well, when the golf ball sideshow is disregarded and Chrétien’s attempt to have Justice Gomery removed on the grounds of bias is ignored, there never was a smoking gun when it came to the former PM’s role in the sponsorship scandal. although there is now suspicion, as there was since adscam first surfaced, that Jean Chrétien was involved, there was no evidence that implicated him in the actual acts of theft, fraud and money laundering that had become away of life for the Liberal Party of Canada in the province of Quebec. Nor was there any evidence that he had directed any of these illegal activities.

What is interesting about the media’s reaction to the nerve of the lawyers who asked that Chrétien be exonerated is that this is the same media that loved the guy during his 12 year tenure as the prime minister of Canada. although the mainstream media were critical of Da Boss from time to time (as no doubt his wife was and still is) they completely ignored and marginalized the NDP while vilifying and making fun of Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper and aided the Liberal Party in their attempts to portray the leaders of the Reform/alliance/Conservatives as just too scary to govern.

Now, Chrétien is out of power and incapable of implementing the political agenda that the media so wants they seem to be surprised by the pleas to Justice Gomery to make a finding that Jean did no wrong.

If the mainstream media had spent more time uncovering exactly what happened during the sponsorship scandal and less time making goo-goo eyes at Chrétien and the Liberals, the evidence that Justice Gomery heard might have been different.