Angry in the Great White North

No Gun No Funeral is the website created by Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant to promote his "No Gun No Funeral" push for a complete handgun ban in Canada. What makes No Gun No Funeral interesting was that it was created by "a group of Canadians" who support this ban idea. As it turned out, the group included two members of Michael Bryant's inner circle, Glenn Brown and Nikki Holland. The phone number associated with the website was answered by the Michael Bryant constituency office, announcing that you have reached the "Michael Bryant Election Campaign".

Of course, none of this was obvious from the website. The website was studiously anonymous. That is, until I helped reveal this information. A couple of radio interviews later, and Michael Bryant was compelled to admit that the site was his.

Why didn't he mention this earlier? To connect the site to his name would defeat the purpose of astroturfing, which is to create the appearance of people spontaneously supporting Michael Bryant's idea. Now that his name is indelibly attached to it, the site looks like an attempt to promote Michael Bryant.

Which is what it might be.

But Michael Bryant insists that he wanted the site to be about ideas and not politics.

So which is it? A site to start a debate about a handgun ban, or a site designed to make Michael Bryant's ideas look popular?

What might help us decide is to see if the links to the Liberal Party in general, and to Michael Bryant in particular, go deeper than what we've discovered so far.

Fortunately there is more information.

One of the goals of Michael Bryant's site is to collect signatures for a petition. The petition was briefly available for view at the site, but quickly taken down. But now the No Gun No Funeral petition has appeared in the Google cache. Here are the names that appear:

• Marc Gendron
• Brian Clow
• Sarah Roberts
• Alexis Levine
• Roderick Elliot
• Jonathan Davey
• Lori Anne Thomas
• Molly Reynolds
• Kelly Anne Murdock
• Max B. Rubin
• Swetha Vishwanath
• Jason Collins
• Karri Becker
• Thomas Mathews
• Sophia Chen
• Chad Walsh
• Jason Murray
• Ryan Done
• Anton van Hamel
• roy german

Breaking it down:

• Marc Gendron: Vice-President of the Young Liberals of Canada (likely created the No Gun No Funeral website)
• Brian Clow: Vice-President of the Young Liberals of Canada
• Sarah Roberts: Communications contact at Michael Bryant's office
• Alexis Levine: Senior Policy Advisor to Michael Bryant
• Jonathan Davey: Friend of Brian Clow and member of the Liberal Party
• Roderick Elliot: Volunteer at Michael Bryant's constituency office
• Kelly Anne Murdock: Liberal Party activist at Queen's University
• Max Rubin: Queen's University student and advocate for Liberal Party idea for mixed-member proportional representation (Michael Bryant is actively supporting MMP and was the former Minister of Democratic Renewal, where the idea of MMP came from)

The others I can't track down. They might be unconnected to the Liberals and so might be legitimate signatures from supporters of the idea (as opposed to supporters of Michael Bryant or of the Liberal Party). Or maybe not. But number of connections to the Liberals, and to Michael Bryant in particular (including his senior policy adviser) that I could find with a search of publicly available information continues to reinforce the idea that this site is for Michael Bryant's election campaign and only incidentally about a handgun ban.

Remember that these are the very first signatures on the petition. And notice all the Liberal links are those people who signed first. After that, the Liberal links aren't clear. So did these people create the site as a political operation to help re-elect Michael Bryant, a plan conceived and managed by Bryant? When the site was ready, all these people signed up first -- of course, they were the only ones who even knew the site existed. After that, the signatures are less connected to the Liberal Party.

Update: Two of the supporting links (Roberts and Davey) were incorrect. It was a cut-and-paste error on my part. The correct supporting evidence is now linked in.

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