Angry in the Great White North

As part of his effort to convince Canadians that we need to paying a tax on carbon (which is essentially a tax on everything), Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion spoke with the editorial board of the Whig Standard:

Jenn Goodwin:You've said this is an especially attractive plan for a young family but it concerns me, as much as I think you are gutsy for putting it out there. But we can't afford to do an energy retrofit on our house, with new windows and that sort of thing, right away. We rely on a vehicle to get to a day care across town, where we can find it. And as parents of toddlers know, to get a car seat into a vehicle, it's a larger vehicle. While I'd like to cut back on them to take advantage of a Green Shift plan, I guess I'm nervous. How is it attractive to people in my situation?

Dion:You want to do the right thing for your planet.

Goodwin:Absolutely.

Dion:You want to give a good example for your children -and you care about their future. So you want a plan for that.

Goodwin:But I also need to get them to day care.

Jenn Goodwin is a member of the Whig-Standard's Community Editorial Board.

Funny, but this story comes up again, this time in an article by Christina Spencer for the Toronto Sun:

But typical of the arguments Dion faces as he tries to sell the Green Shift on the road is this exchange with a Kingston mother who told him that while she wanted to help the environment, her family couldn't afford an energy retrofit of their home or a smaller, fuel-efficient car because they had to cram in both children and carseats.

"You want to do the right thing for the planet," Dion said.

She agreed: "Absolutely."

"You want to give a good example for your children and you care about their future," he coaxed. "So you want a plan for that."

She responded: "But I also need to get them to daycare."

The two accounts are not incompatible.  But it is funny that Spencer didn't mention that the story was actually published in another paper, as original content developed by the Whig-Standard.

Indeed, one could argue that Christina Spencer lifted the content without providing attribution.  But that is a very serious charge to make against a journalist (and also not likely the case, as both papers owned in common by Quebecor Media -- see the update below).  For all I know, Spencer had permission from the Whig-Standard to rewrite that portion of the editorial as what sounds like an anonymous encounter unrelated to a scheduled and organized editorial board meeting (or that permission is automatically granted as a consequence of the common ownership).

What is more interesting, to me, is to understand what scrubbing the context of that encounter out, that is, it was in a meeting with an newspaper's editorial board in which the discussion happened, is supposed to accomplish. 

Update: I should point out that the Whig-Standard is owned by Osprey Media, part of Quebecor Media, which also owns Canoe.ca, which publishes the online version of the Toronto Sun, in which Spencer's news article was printed.  It is just as likely that there is no permission issue here.   But my curiosity is more about how the encounter was rewritten to eliminate mention of the context of an editorial meeting and why.