The Fed's Advertising Scheme is a Joke

By David Agren

Big Brother is watching you. Actually, the rink boards and display ads in areas and stadiums across the country brandish the Government of Canada logo, but they might as well display the well-worn slogan from 1984, George Orwell’s chilling and prophetic vision penned over 50 years ago. The ads were placed throughout the country (mostly in Quebec) through the federal government’s mismanaged and recently suspended $250-million advertising program.

Auditor General Sheila Fraser recently rebuked the program in a tersely worded audit, saying the federal bureaucrats in charge “broke nearly every rule in the book,” and that the agencies hired to place the ads pocketed $100 million for work of dubious value.

Besides laundering taxpayers’ money through firms connected to the Liberal Party in Quebec, the advertising program stealthily subsidized professional sports — a practice Canadians rebelled against in 2000 when the federal government attempted to assist Canadian NHL teams.

The perpetually imperiled Canadian Football League collected almost $1 million to stick the maple leaf on its players’ helmets — similar to the tiny American flags its NFL counterparts voluntarily wear for patriotic reasons. A government-sponsored study found only six per cent of fans and one per cent of television viewers recalled seeing the government logo at CFL games while 25 per cent remembered the Molson ads. It also questioned the value of advertising in CFL stadiums when the league’s clubs fly the flag for free.

As with virtually all government spending decisions, the entire sponsorship program and process for placing ads became a political football. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien hatched the advertising scheme after Quebec voters narrowly rejected separation in 1995 to sell separatists on Canada’s value. Accordingly, most of the ads were placed in the province by Quebec-based ad agencies.

The minor-league Montreal Impact soccer club snagged $250,000 in ad revenue, while the bureaucrats rejected a request from the Edmonton Drillers, a soccer club that folded. Government ads blanketed the cavernous and often vacant Olympic Stadium, home to the Montreal Expos, even thought the team draws the majority of its fans from English-speaking parts of the city that voted overwhelmingly against separation. As far back as 1998, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Eastern NHL teams received more sponsorship money than their equally cash-strapped Western brethren.

Even worse, crown corporations like Via Rail and Canada Post and their provincial cousins regularly purchase advertising in sporting events despite having little reason to do so. Canada Post enjoys a monopoly on mail delivery, forcing Canadians to use its service. Chronic money-loser Via Rail still advertises in cities it abandoned.

The Liberals’ advertising fiasco drew in both crowns as they paid politically connected agencies outrageous fees for work that private corporations would balk at. While working for Via Rail in 2001, double Olympic gold-medallist Myriam Bédard questioned an inflated invoice sent by Groupaction — a firm mentioned in Fraser’s damning audit — and got fired for her trouble. Via Rail chairman Jean Pelletier, who was once chief of staff to Chrétien, disparaged the whistler blower in La Presse, calling her “a poor girl... a girl who doesn’t have a husband that I know of.” “She has the stress of a single mom who has economic responsibilities. Basically, I pity her,” he added.

But why does the federal government — and its provincial counterparts of all political stripes — advertise in the first place? Economists recognize that information is not free. Advertising simply imparts information to consumers, thus lowering their transaction costs. Political advertising drops the cost of voting — with the price measured in time, another economic good.

While corporations impart information to consumers to drive sales and swell profits, government ads strive to build political capital and concentrate power. The federal government’s ads frequently scold, nag and exhort Canadians to modify their lifestyles and behave in a patronizing fashion. Quit smoking, pay child support, register all your guns and don’t drink the water while hiking.

In the case of Quebec, placing ads at hockey rinks and other events reminds residents of where their prosperity supposedly flows from. It’s not Big Brother watching, but Big Mother, a benevolent entity responsible for their health, welfare, security and quality of life — even their recreation. It’s time for all governments to exit the advertising and sports sponsorship arenas.

This article originally appeared in The Reflector

Time to rethink Bowling for Columbine

By David Agren

While studying and interning in the United States this summer, many European students told me that Canadians never lock their doors. Without ever visiting Canada or meeting a Canadian, they shaped their stereotype from Bowling For Columbine, Michael Moore's Oscar-winning documentary on U.S. gun culture.

Moore scrutinizes the guns and violence in the U.S. and poses a thoughtful question no one could answer: Why do Americans shoot each other up with such disturbing frequency? Unfortunately, Moore´s analysis fires blanks as he spins a deceitful web of half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies throughout the film described as “a successful export of anti-Americanism” by Andrew Sullivan in The Sunday Times (London).

Despite Moore’s flimsy grasp on the facts, he performs a public service by highlighting the absurd nature the media. He scorns the scare-mongering, endless stream of violent crime stories and half-baked disaster scenarios — like Africanized killer bees invading the U.S. — that dominate the evening news.

Ironically though, Moore's ilk on the progressive left consistently scare the public with bogeymen like genetically modified food, global warming, pesticides, caffeine-laden pop and conservatives in general.

The method borrows a page from John Stossel's shtick of debunking nonsense in his popular 20/20 segments and ABC News specials. Long the bane of the American left, Stossel regularly gores sacred cows and broaches taboo topics like greed, freeloading, regulation and most egregiously to his critics, dares to portray capitalism and the free market in a positive light when warranted.

When caught broadcasting an error in a segment skeptical of organic food, critics called for his head. Stossel retracted the piece and apologized on national television. When a CNN host confronted Moore over "glaring inaccuracies" published in Stupid White Men, Moore dismissively responded: "How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?" With disturbing regularity, Moore vacillates between objective critic and standup comic, choosing whichever suits his purpose and leaving the audience to ascertain the facts and context.

Moore follows the same pattern of sloppiness in Bowling for Columbine. He casually associates his pet causes like U.S. foreign policy, health care reform and welfare cuts with heinous gun crimes.

He points out that a prominent defence contractor manufactured weapons of mass destruction a short distance from Columbine High School, scene of the infamous 1998 massacre. It would be an interesting coincidence, except it’s completely false. The factory instead builds rockets to launch T.V. satellites. Lockheed Martin spokesman Evan McCollum says that Moore’s people approached the company under false pretences, saying the filmmaker was shooting a documentary on suburban life.

On a further militaristic theme, Moore notes Columbine is also located near several large military facilities. But virtually every high school in the U.S. is located near some vestige of the military-industrial complex. Generations of army brats have survived such upbringings without falling prey to homicidal tendencies.

In another example, Moore mocks U.S. foreign policy as a source of gun violence, parading a sad reel of villains associated with misguided coups and wars. He repeats the fiction that the U.S. gave Taliban rulers in Afghanistan $245 million shortly before Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the money went to a United Nations food-relief fund for the famine-stricken nation. Conveniently, he omitted the sins of the U.S. Cold War opponents whose blood-thirsty regimes snuffed out over 80 million lives during the last century in his reel of vignettes. Murderous revolutionary Mao Zedong coined the infamous maxim: power flows from the barrel of a gun.

Unsurprisingly, Moore crosses into Canada to fawn over a country envied by American liberals. Moore's books and films sell well north of the border as they nourish the self-righteous feelings of moral superiority to the U.S. harboured by Canadian nationals. Predictably, he mentions the crumbling medical system and points the camera on a group of slack-jawed kids who state that health care is a "right.” It’s a brilliant insight into the mentality of medicine as a free good that’s sinking the system. Amusingly, Moore points his camera on gentrified slums, sedate newscasts and unlocked doors. He then finds a politician to take gratuitous digs at the U.S. – evil right-wingers of course, who “beat up” disadvantaged people.

Take, for instance, the woman in Flint, Michigan, who was kicked off of welfare and dumped her son at a crack house (a fact Moore conveniently omits) because she was forced to work. The boy discovers a gun used to pay for a drug purchase, takes it to school and fatally shoots a six-year-old classmate in Moore´s sad-sacked hometown.

The tragedy reintroduces National Rifle Association (NRA) president Charlton Heston, who Moore chastised for delivering insensitive speeches in traumatized towns during times of mourning. Moore portrayed Heston as strolling into Denver and Flint uninvited and callously asserting his right to arm himself — rubbing salt into fresh wounds. But according to David Hardy, an Arizona lawyer and NRA member, Heston actually addressed a get-out-the-vote rally in Flint eight months after the six-year-old was shot in school, not days after the tragedy as Moore infers. The supposedly inflammatory speech given in Denver that Moore selectively edited near the beginning of the film features an opening line from a different NRA rally held months before the Columbine massacre.

When Moore finally grilled Heston in person over the rash of gun violence in the U.S., the man who portrayed Moses on film fumbled for answers, hanging himself with his respose — or lack thereof. When Moore changes the topic to the tragic Michigan death, Heston feebly flees the scene. And why not? Who would co-operate with a person with little interest in facts or context, and who is deft in the art of splicing film?

Unfortunately, Bowling for Columbine shamefully follows a parade of intellectually dishonest inquiries into gun control and gun culture where the truth never obstructs preconceived biases.

A study comparing suicide rates in Vancouver and Seattle and incorrectly concluded the Seattle rate was higher because of lax gun laws.

Historian Michael Bellesiles penned a bestseller asserting gun culture was a recent phenomenon, claiming guns were absent in early American history. Scholars analyzed the scant evidence he provided for scrutiny and discovered he fabricated many of his sources.

Economist John Lott undertook a massive study of concealed weapons laws and concluded in his controversial book More Guns, Less Crime that concealed weapons laws were highly effective. Yet he sabotaged his own creditability by assuming a pseudonym to praise his own research on the Internet.

A better question for Moore: What is it about guns that spawns such dishonest inquiries?

If Moore truly wanted to dissuade fears, he might have pointed out violent crime in America declined rapidly in the 1990s. Gary Mauser, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., wrote in the Vancouver Sun after the release of Bowling for Columbine: “Violent crime rates are twice as high in England and Wales as in the U.S.” He added that homicide rates are falling more rapidly in the U.S. than in Canada, and over the past 20 years and police statistics show a 50 per cent surge in England.

Brian Doherty summarized Moore’s bleak, near apocalyptic vision of the U.S. in Reason magazine as: “America is a naked city full of a million stories, all of them bummers.“ Sunset industries close up shop. The union gets busted. Welfare benefits vanish. Evil multi-nationals poison the water. Free trade deals kill the town by shipping factory jobs to China. Republicans supposedly steal elections. The military-industrial complex triumphs again. It plays like a bad country song. And Moore never tires of singing it.

For the record, this reviewer locks his door.


This article originally appered in The Reflector

I wrote a letter home for The Globe and Mail's Web site on life as an intern in Washington.

Tommy Chong's going to jail

On Sept. 11, 2003, the second anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks carried out on American soil, the U.S. justice system struck a blow for public safety by convicting actor and entrepreneur Tommy Chong for selling marijuana paraphernalia over the Internet.

Chong, now age 65, gained fame for the mildly amusing, but mostly dreadful comedies he filmed with sidekick Cheech Marin. Police and Drug Enforcement Administration agents snared him in a sting operation and confiscated a cache of pipes and bongs he sold via the Internet.

A headline-writers dream, the conviction spawned headlines like People Magazine’s: “Chong gets bonged,” and the Pittsburg Post-Gazette’s (a local paper in the city of Chong’s trial): “Tommy Chong Gets the Joint.” Even the usually staid Globe and Mail let loose with: “Chong’s Bongs” on its Web site.

Chong became one of the first victims of “Operation Pipe Dream,” an ambitious program undertaken by the United States Department of Justice to snuff out the billion-dollar drug paraphernalia business.

The conviction suspended his fledgling acting career and plans for another sequel in the Cheech and Chong movie franchise went up in smoke. A judge slapped him with a $20,000 fine and sentenced him to nine-months in prison.

Down the road in Shanksville, Pa., where rebellious passengers overran hijackers, crashing their doomed flight into the tranquil countryside two-years ago, mourners gathered to remember the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people.

While zealous drug warriors doggedly pursued the star of such cult classics as Up in Smoke and Still Smoking for supplying dope smokers with paraphernalia, Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and his confederates remained unpunished and unaccounted for.

At first glance Tommy Chong and Osama bin Laden share little in common except for unruly facial hair and gaining notoriety on the same date in different years. But the intimate connection between the War on Drugs and the more recent War on Terrorism dates back decades.

As syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum explained in a Reason magazine column published during the dark days following Sept. 11, 2001:

“Prohibition delivers to armed thugs around the world a handy stream of revenue. Every dollar spent intercepting cocaine, heroin, or marijuana is a dollar that could be spent intercepting bombs.”

While President George W. Bush asked the U.S. Congress for $87 million to prop up nation building efforts in Iraq, he and his drug-fighting predecessors hand their enemies a steady stream cash generated in a black market of illicit drugs at home and abroad. The United Nations pegged the worldwide drug trade’s value at $400 billion.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, the Shining Path in Peru, Hezbollah in the Middle East and FARC in Colombia, traffic drugs to finance their nefarious activities.

Prior to the NATO bombing of Kosovo, the KLA smuggled much of Europe’s heroin into the continent.

Australian officials recently seized a massive cache of heroin from a North Korean ship near Australian waters. Besides weapons, North Korean Kim Jong-il bankrolls his economically-backward state with drug smuggling and other black market enterprises.

Even the Mounties reported in 2002 that hashish smuggled from Afghanistan and sold in Canada funded terror activities abroad to the tune of $20 million.

The DEA changed its anti-drug advertising recently to reflect the fact that drugs fund terrorism. It aired a series of highly emotional ads starring thrill-seeking kids admitting to dirty deeds like killing judges and blowing up buildings by simply messing around with recreational drugs.

The ads depart from its previous attempts at tapping a nobler sense of self-respect or intellect in America’s youth. Past slogans included: “Winners don’t do drugs,” former first lady Nancy Reagan’s infamous, “Just say no!” and the often parodied, “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs,” which featured and egg (representing your brain) frying in a hot skillet.

While the DEA fingers drug users for America’s woes with terrorism, four fingers point back at an agency caught in a 30 year War on Drugs, which has destroyed lives, swelled the U.S. prison population and thrown entire nations into turmoil.

Tommy Chong will rot in a federal lockup, one of 600,000 drug offenders incarcerated in America’s overflowing jails.

According to Timothy Lynch, a CATO Institute researcher, in a Washington Post column titled: “Population Bomb Behind Bars,” the U.S. prison population doubled from one to two million inmates over the past 25 years. The increased incarceration of non-violent drug offenders fueled the boom.

Instead of kneecapping terrorists and diminishing the prospects of another Sept. 11 magnitude attack by ending the war on drugs, U.S. drug warriors soldier on and protect society by locking up pathetic, but harmless people like Tommy Chong and his pot-smoking ilk.

Tommy Chong’s going to prison; is America safer?

Published in the Reflector.

My reporting on hurricane Isabel made the front page of the Alberta and British Columbia editions of The Globe and Mail. I must thank my boss for keeping me at work instead of sending home at 11:00 a.m. due to the early closing of the Metro in Washington, D.C.

My first byline in The Globe and Mail. It's on the lack of marketing at the upcoming Women's World Cup of soccer.

£1bn contracts for firm linked to Cheney

I spent the summer interning in the Washington, D.C. bureau of The Daily Telegraph (London) under supervision - if you want to call it that - of correspondents Toby Harnden and David Rennie. Here's something small I wrote that hit Fleet Street on my final day.

£1bn contracts for firm linked to Cheney
By David Agren in Washington
Last Updated: 11:16pm BST 28/08/2003

An oil and construction firm that was headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney until three years ago has been awarded contracts worth more than £1 billion in Iraq and is poised to secure further lucrative deals without being forced to compete with other companies.

The size and scope of the contracts, reported yesterday in The Washington Post, are much greater than previously thought and prompted accusations of preferential treatment for Texas-based Halliburton.

Read the whole - short - thing at the Telegraph's website.