Liberals continue to republish the libel posts on new web pages
Are the Liberals digging themselves deeper? Stephen Harper identified two specific webpages on the Liberal Party website that contained allegedly libelous statements in connection to the Chuck Cadman controversy. Stephane Dion, Ralph Goodale, Michael Ignatieff, and the Liberal Party have each received a notice of intent to sue.
The webpages are still up.
But what's interesting is that the Liberals have opened a new online presence called Forum Liberalis. And guess what? It includes a blog with links to those two posts, and distributed via a new RSS feed.
Does that mean that the Liberals are compounding their problems? Are they guilty of further distributing the content even as a libel suit has entered its preliminary stages?
And does it mean that everyone involved in the Forum Liberalis website, including Joan Bourassa (National Policy and Platform Committee Chair) and Dominic Leblanc (MP and Vice-Chair of that committee) are now subject to the electronic discovery outlined in the notice of intent?
Go to Forum Liberalis and check it out. Of particular interest is the forum where people are complaining about the lack of leadership in the party. But of immediate interest are two entries (here and here) in the Party News blog. These are links back to the two posts that are the subject of the libel suit being pursued by Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.
In effect, the Liberals are continuing to redistribute the allegedly libelous material after they have been formally warned that the material has been deemed libelous by the injured party who is now seeking an apology.
Worse, that blog has its own feed which is different from the feed for the Liberal Party website, adding yet another new channel for distributing the posts.
Does this mean that the notice of intent could be amended now to include all electronic files that related to the design and content of the Forum Liberalis, including all communications between the people involved in the design and content of the new site? It's not likely that there was much discussion related to these posts, but then that's what the discovery is for.
Hey, maybe it's just me, but when someone starts a legal action, even if you think you're in the right, you suspend doing whatever it is you were doing that got the other party upset until things get sorted out. It just makes sense. If you don't stop, and the if the decision goes against you, you just made the punishment worse. And more than that, you are likely making your case harder to win but acting in a way that suggests you aren't taking the issue seriously.
So to the Liberal Party of Canada, you ought to stop republishing these two posts and providing new links to those posts on official Liberal Party web pages and news feeds. It's just making things worse.
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Stephen Harper Conservative Party Stephane Dion Ralph Goodale Michael Ignatieff Liberal Party libel Chuck Cadman
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