Did you know that in Canada, the courts can not only order a publication ban, but they can place a publication ban on publishing the fact that there is a publication ban ?
I kid you not.
Via John Gormley of 650 CKOM, who is scheduled to interview Winds Of Change’s Joe Katzman today. I will try to liveblog the segment, but no promises. Events of the past few days have left me a little behind in my work, and deadlines are looming.
On the lighter lighter side…
A few more updates as I surf today;
Greg Staples is making a well deserved name for himself with posts like this.
Jeff Quinton is receiving a traffic surge from Canadians searching for “Instipundit”. (It’s Instapundit, folks – welcome to the blogosphere, and I’ll direct you to the real deal. If this is your first foray into this media, be sure to bookmark Glenn and add the site to your daily reads.)
Montreal Gazette – Gomery’s publication ban backfires

In keeping with the theme of the past few days, I invite new readers to visit the following links on research done by various bloggers into the distribution of donations to the major political parties in Canada – and the list of questionable sources.
Shortly after the results of the investigation began to make its way onto the pages of major publications, Elections Canada pulled down the database search function and replaced it with a version that renders the site useless.
(The following are all my own posts, but within are links to more comprehensive information at other sites.)
Did you know that the Liberals have been recieving donations from charitable institutions?
Canada, We Have A Problem
More Stones Unturned
And municipalities or your favourite zoo? First Nations recieve billions per year in Canadian government largesse.. and donate handsomely (and virtually exclusively) back to the Liberal party. How about your fondest assumptions about where big business spends its political buck?
A Liberal Slice
Now here’s another question. Why have our dataminers been unable to find evidence in the Elections Canada database of the donations alleged to have been given to the Liberals under the Gomery Inquiry testimony? (There are private copies of the downloaded database out there with new and improved search functions running).
Speaking of “old” and unreported news, don’t let this Adscam story consume your attention. Read this post from last year on the Auditor General’s report on national security, airline screening, and the abysmal state of border security. It’s been out for months – your professional media hasn’t bothered to crack the thing open. It’s due to be formallly presented by the AG tomorrow.
$7.7 Billion in terrorist “initiative” is buying us nothing.
Sound boring? Give it a chance – you’ll discover that Canadian airport security screeners does not exclude employees who have links to organized crime – because of their charter right to “freedom of association”.
And that’s just the small stuff.

A chill is settling on various blogsites over this rumour.
Now, on to updates:
I’ve had over 38,000 sitemeter hits today, and there’s “miles to go before we sleep”*. I read somewhere that fully 7% of the hits at Captain Ed’s are from Government of Canada servers. (On the blogosphere the watched watch their watchers). He’s probably going to clock half a million hits today alone.
Ed is going hoarse talking to Canadian media outlets – and he had larengitis to begin with. He’s supposed to appear on CBC Vancouver tonight. Go check it and the page that follows.
A question: Has anyone besides me noticed yet that the testimony leaked has very, very little to do with Brault? Exactly what is the publication ban protecting him from? Sympathy?

Wretchard weighs in, and Instapundit has been focusing his formidable audience on the muttered threats to bloggers.

Faster, please.

An anonymous source tells me there is more on its way to Captain’s Quarters today.
I am again compelled to leave the computer and do some work so you kiddies are on your own for a few hours.
In keeping with the publication ban, I ask that any commentors limit their discussion of the actual content of any newly released information to Haiku and/or limerick form.
There will be prizes for the best entries.

April 4, 1974:

President Nixon calls in FBI to investigate possible fraud perpetrated against Republican party.
Full story here.
Government officials suspend hearings of Senate Watergate Committee and decline to comment further on details surrounding the allegations against the Party, for fear of compromising the official investigation, which is expected to conclude in 2008.

At the moment, SDA is recieving about 2,000 hits an hour – about 15 times
normal traffic for this time of day. But look at Captain Ed’s stats:

My logs show that the vast majority of my hits are from Canadian sources, including media and government servers (there are few on normal days). I suspect Ed’s site is showing similar demographics. That means that a lot of Canadians are becoming aware of the information.
That raises difficult poltiical optics for a government considering prosecution of bloggers or news aggregators. How does one prosecute individual citizens for sending readers to the same information that politicians and media have been recieving via blackberry (elitist hypocrisy) – information that is deeply damaging to the governing party – without the appearance of abuse of power to protect your own political interests?
The traffic is causing some loading problems here and at Captain Quarters, who is anticipating more information – and another traffic surge – later today. Our host (this blog is also hosted in the US) is “clearing the decks” to smooth server problems. I’ll second his recommendation of Hosting Matters as a blog host par excellence.
update – Welcome, MIchelle Malkin and Wizbang (as well as Instapundit readers who have been surfing in for the past couple of days).
As I wrote on Kevin’s site – this is Canada’s “Watergate”, writ large – but in this case the blogosphere is playing the role of both “Deep Throat” and the Washington Post, and in the case of Canadian sites – doing so with the threat of legal action over our heads. Kudos too, to CTV News for naming Captain’s Quarters on their broadcast last night. It is no small assist to have the nation’s leading news broadcaster pushing the envelope along side us – especially NealeNews.com, who is going to need all the backup we can give him.
update 2 Colby weighs in and suggests now is the time for American bloggers to pour on the heat. I’ll exerpt the juicy bit, but it’s a good idea to read the whole thing for context.

Under the metaconstitutional Oakes test, any infringement of individual Charter liberties, such as a publication ban, must have a “rational connection” to the intended benefit and must be the most minimally restrictive measure that can bring about the benefit. The argument here is that if a ban doesn’t work in practice–say, because American webloggers are all printing the mind-blowing stuff Canadian ones cannot–it can’t meet Oakes. With due respect to the ban, which I consider myself to have observed herein, it would actively help free the hands of Canadian webloggers and reporters if our foreign cousins were to be aggressive about “publishing” the substance of the Brault testimony outside the reach of Canadian law.

Joe Katzman at Winds Of Change provides invaluable background for those readers not familiar with Canadian Liberal Party history, the Sponsorship scandal and Gomery Inquiry.
He also believes this is the first big test of the Canadian blogosphere – this episode having subverted their control over the trial and the timing of release of information. I tend to agree. We shall see. At any rate, I’ll bet there were more than a few who were shaken at the sheer speed at which the information broke.

Bound By Gravity is tracking the Canadian blogs commenting on the leaked Brault testimony, some directly, some obliquely. Captains Quarters has a new post up as well.
update Greg Staples is reporting that CTV news has mentioned that the Brault testimony is on a conservative American website. (See the Rosemary Thompson video)
Stephen Taylor has some thoughts worth checking out.

Now, we are becoming aware of the sordid and symbiotic money laundering scheme between the Liberal Party of Canada, the Government of Canada and Montreal ad agencies. Mix in some organized crime (as reported by the New York Daily News on Nov 18, 2004) and you’ve got a powder keg that will decimate the Liberal brand in Quebec for decades.

At the time of this update, Technorati’s politics link tracker currently has three Brault testimony – Adscam posts in the top 25. Considering the competition with the death of the Pope, that’s astonishing.
Typing keywords like “Jean Brault” testimony into a Google search will bring up any number of blog links to both the Free Republic and Captain Ed.
All in all – going rather swimmingly, Id say.
update 2 – The mainstream comes calling. Actually, I got one as well this evening, though it wasn’t nearly as exciting (nor I as useful).
Update
I suspect that concerns about Canadian bloggers linking directly to Captains Quarters post reporting testimony of the Gomery Inquiry can probably be put to rest. CTV provided the information tonight on the National News to their viewers, naming the blog and displaying the page – a move that would have been cleared by their lawyers before hand. Questions about the validity of the information were also cleared up by CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief, Robert Fife – whose comments suggest that the content is probably pretty accurate.
(If you want to see what a CTValanche looks like, Ed’s sitemeter just recorded over 7,000 hits in the last hour).
All of it seems to have a certain misogynist running about huffing that conservative bloggers are “repeatedly, proudly – the violation of a court-ordered publication ban, by linking directly to ban-breaking web sites in other jurisdictions.
That leads me to wonder if we both just play lawyers on the internet.
Websites in “other jurisdictions” by their very definition are not subject to Gomery’s publication ban. American sites may publish whatever their little hearts desire, and it’s their constitutional right to do so. They are not “ban breakers” – for they have no ban to break.

In the ethical seas over which Captain Martin Of Canada Steamship Lines sails, “blind trust” means a patch over one eye.

Canada had signed a double taxation treaty with Barbados in 1980 when the corporate taxes of both countries were roughly comparable. But in 1991, Barbados created a new class of offshore company, the “Barbados international business corporation,” whose tax rate would be 1%-2.5%. This created for Canadians, if they routed their business through a Barbados company, a 10-fold savings in taxes.
The auditor general of Canada, in her report of December, 2002, noted that $1.5 billion in taxes was being lost to the Canadian economy annually as a result of this agreement, and she called for a rewriting of the rules. She noted that all of these concerns had been present since 1992 — throughout the period when Martin was finance minister, but he made no changes.
Martin’s hypocrisy again was shown by his announcing in his first budget of February 1994 that he would tighten the regulations allowing Canadian companies to bring dividends of foreign affiliates back to Canada tax-free from a number of countries. But Barbados remained exempt. This allowed Canadian companies, including CSL, to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian taxes by moving their foreign affiliates to Barbados.

Martin’s action did close certain tax havens, such as Liberia: CSL subsequently moved seven Liberian-registered ships to Barbados, where the tax haven continued.

The fact that Martin has since transferred his controlling interest in CSL to his sons did nothing to prevent this conflict-of-interest situation continuing.
Canadian companies are now stashing more money into offshore tax havens than ever. Between 1990 and 2003, the amount soared from $11 billion to $88 billion, according to a Statistics Canada report last month.

Apply here.

Via Brent Colbert whose suggestion it is to “Check out this old Larry Zolf article about Tony Mignacca, I can’t tell you why…just it’s a name that might soon be in the news again soon. I’m not suggesting that it has anything to do about Jean Brault..just check it out and get ready…”
The Friends of Alfonso Gagliano Inc.

In the Let’s Get Gagliano Affair, one of the public works minister’s closest associates is Tony Mignacca. This man, with 25 years experience in public real estate management, was recommended by Gagliano to Mr. Jon Grant, the former head of Canada Lands. Grant, a businessman-bureaucrat, with a bit of a Dudley Do-Right complex, waited for a considerable time before he told the media Mr. Mignacca was forced on him by Mr. Gagliano.
Tony Mignacca was forced to leave Canada Lands before the end of his $6,000 a month contract. These days Mignacca is an administrator -in a registered company called The Friends of Alfonso Gagliano Inc.- Once again, fact is stranger than fiction.
In this latest Chr�tien patronage uproar, Gagliano’s only friend seems to be the prime minister, as the press keeps bouncing and shuffling Gagliano out of the cabinet and right into the street. So far the media have not told us whether Jean Chr�tien is a charter member in the Friends of
Alfonso Gagliano Inc.

The article also provides background on why Gagliano was more than just another beaurocrat in the Chr�tien fold.

Gagliano’s mastery of Quebec resembles Mulroney’s mastery of la belle province. That mastery plus 101 francophone seats gave Mulroney victory. Gagliano and his Italian-Quebec alliance gave Chr�tien victory in Quebec in election 2000. […] Chr�tien and Gagliano now control the Liberal machine in Quebec. If Chr�tien is to steer the leadership succession away from his arch-rival Paul Martin, Chr�tien badly needs Gagliano in place.
A dumped Gagliano would enable Paul Martin to sweep the Quebec delegates and give him an almost sure first ballot victory in the Liberal leadership race.

Brent also features this information on a “few average Canadians” in the Gagliano orbit from a different 2002 article in the Globe and Mail. Give it a gander.

In what must be a Canadian first, the news aggregator Nealenews.com has directly linked to Captain’s Quarters on the Brault testimony. Technorati is showing the post is creating heavy linkage on both sides of the border.
The blogosphere has obliterated the publication ban in an electronic mushroom cloud, and more remarkably, bypassed the mainstream media in its entirety in doing so.

Sources tell me there may be something breaking internationally soon. No way to confirm that, but stay tuned. I’ll be out for a few hours, so if you run across something – don’t post it in the comments please. Send me a private email.
Update: See Captains Quarters. Note: I have no way to verify this information.