Angry in the Great White North
You know it's spring when the slush appears [update]
Thursday, March 30, 2006 at 08:38 PM

Read other posts by Steve Janke published by the National Post
Leader

Update: Jason Cherniak responds. Apparently my post below was mostly crap, but at least one section did make Jason refine his thinking on one issue, so in that sense, my efforts were not wasted. My goal is always to get people to think about things, not necessarily agree with me. If I wanted people to agree with me, I'd just post anti-Bush anti-Harper messages laced with plenty of expletives on the rabble.ca message board. I still think there are unintended consequences bubbling under the surface of Jason's stated goal, and I still think he has to be careful of what other people might do to take advantage of what he is doing to advance their own agendas. But then I'm a conservative with my own hidden agenda, so of course I expect other people to be as devious and duplicitous as me.

Or is that slush funds?

From Jason Cherniak's blog:

Today I will obtain the final signature on the application to incorporate the list of Liberal Bloggers as an Ontario non-profit company. We have now approached the moment of no return, where I will begin paying the government to make this all official.

For those who do not know yet, this new organization has been created for two reasons. The first is to protect me from liability for what others might post on sites that the Liberal Blogs list will link to. The second is to create an organization that can receive donations and then spend excess money to help the Liberal Party.

Spend the excess money to help the Liberal Party? Like donations? Subject to the limit of $1000 per year for a corporation?

Well, after a flurry of comments such as this one...

Am I the only one who finds it odd that Chermiak [sic] decided to redirect blog donations to the Liberal party?

Aren't you just setting yourself up to be a fundraising wing for the party, not to mention all the objectivity issues it raises for you and the other Liblogs?

Or do the Blogging Tories do the same thing? Blogging Dippers? As far as I know, they are in no way associated with either of their "mother parties". With the financial relationship Cherniak has set up, I don't know he can say the same thing.

Maybe it's just me.

...Cherniak made it clear that the money raised would not go directly to the Liberal Party or any of its various wings.

And the comment was dead on about the Blogging Tories -- they do not collect funds and make donations as a group, though members are free to do as they wish as individuals.

So if the money being raised "to help the Liberal Party" is not going to the Liberal Party, where is it going? And how is it helping?

The main idea is to become a third party advertiser during elections. The other and less certain idea is to create a Liberal Blogger Scholarship.

Third party advertising is a choice fraught with danger during an election period. If the Liblog members combine into some sort of single entity under this umbrella organization, and then identify themselves as a third party, the group will have to be registered with the Chief Electoral Officer. Then each blogger will have to identify each pro-Liberal blog entry (and possible every anti-Conservative, anti-NDP, and anti-Bloc entry) as an ad authorized by the umbrella group. Presumably Cherniak would want to check each posting before granting that authorization.

Cherniak says that the purpose of the group is to protect himself, but now every Liblog is tied to every other like climbers on a rock face.

On election day, no new posts can go up. According to the rules, posts that have gone up prior to election day can stay, but they cannot be changed. I think that comments might be considered a "change", so comments would have to be turned off on the very day when election blogging would hit overdrive.

How about limits of election spending? As a registered third party, all the Liblogs would be required to submit to an audit run by an auditor appointed by Cherniak's umbrella group if the total money raised exceeds $5,000. How much does an audit cost? I don't know, but it's probably not cheap. Not to mention the irritation felt by all the Liblog members who are sucked into this. That means also tracking all the donations to make sure they aren't coming from non-Canadian sources.

Register as a third party advertiser? Unless Cherniak raises thousands of dollars, it hardly seems worth the trouble, and might chase more than a few good bloggers away from the Liblogs.

What about other uses for the money? Like this scholarship? Cherniak admits that's a long shot. Seems to me the real desire here is offset some of his own costs:

The main goal is to raise money to pay for startup and hosting.

Well, looks like he'll be lucky to hit that plateau:

We have now raised just over $100, but we will need at least $400 to cover all of the startup costs. As a result, all I ask is that Liberal bloggers donate $10 each to the cause. To do so, please click on the donation button to the right.

For me, the best help I can provide to the Conservative Party is insightful commentary and the odd investigative piece here or there. I can tell you that if I ever entered into a formal relationship including financial renumeration in either direction, the blog would be retired immediately. Blogging is, and should remain, the domain of unaffiliated observers. They should not be fronts for fundraisers and slush fund operators.

One more thing. There is a risk here that if Cherniak tries to take his blog and those of his Liberal friends into the some kind of formal relationship with the Liberal Party, people will think that other political communities such as the Blogging Tories and the Blogging Dippers are in similar cahoots with the political parties they support. At best, that will be a misleading impression that will colour the opinion of the reader of any blog. At worst, it could trigger some kind of regulatory interest in the Tories and the Dippers that rightly should be focused only on the Liblogs.

Ironically, during the last election, people at odds with the Conservative Party, disgruntled ex-Tories Carole Jamieson and Eugene Parks, tried to paint the Blogging Tories as some sort of arm of the Conservative Party of Canada and so subject to regulation. Frankly, I couldn't take it too seriously.

Why were the Blogging Tories targeted and not the Liblogs? Probably because the Blogging Tories were far more effective during the election campaign than either the Liblogs or Blogging Dippers as measured by the amount of interest garnered by the main stream media. Several stories first cracked by Blogging Tories were picked up by the main stream media and became part of the story of the campaign. And of course, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives won.

Despite this, Elections Canada dismissed the attempt by Jamieson and Parks to muzzle the Blogging Tories via third party regulation.

I wonder if the real value of Cherniak's Liblog corporation, for certain people, will be to force Elections Canada to clamp down on all blogs. I'm not saying Cherniak is playing some sort of Ludlumesque double game here. But if I were a Liberal Party strategist looking for a way to shutdown, or at least severely curtail, the work of those meddling Tory bloggers, I might take advantage of a situation in which Elections Canada is forced to regulate my own Grit bloggers. I might make a big donation to Cherniak's fund to make sure his non-profit organization is formed and then registered with Elections Canada, even though I know that, in the end, it would be a major blow to the Liblogs. Being less effective than the Tory bloggers, that sacrifice would be minimal for the Liberals, but I could then argue that Elections Canada should regulate all political bloggers in the name of fairness, formal incorporation or not.

The Liblogs might be sacrificed as a weapon to knock down the Blogging Tories, in other words.

Too complicated? Maybe. But then people who play politics are too clever by half sometimes.

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