User talk:Tow/Archives/2015/September

Generating a new WIKI entry

I'm trying to work up a new WIKI entry but the instructions are quite confusing. I have pasted the entry, with citations, from a Word file, but it's not clear how I add a title or circulate it for review to other editors.

ConflagrantCortex (talk) 20:54, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Question about balance and use of sources in a BLP

Please ignore my previous message. I discovered the article wizard and should not have bothered you.

I work for the Conflict of Interest Commissioner of Ontario and I offered to write a Wiki entry for him. He is a quite distinguished public servant who has held a number of important positions, often setting up new organizations. He asked me to help him with his Wiki biography.

One of his major contributions was as Commissioner for the Ipperwash Public Inquiry, involving the shooting death of a native protester back in 1995. The inquiry took place 2004-2007.

The biography is quite detailed and, I hope, very thoroughly sourced, dealing with his various roles in separate sections.

For source material, I have been given access to the Commissioners extensive private archive. I have also done some other research on my own. I would not purport that my research, though extensive, has been exhaustive.

In the section on the Ipperwash Inquiry, I discovered three articles, two by a well-know journalist working for a prominent Toronto newspaper, the other an opinion piece by a Senator, who was Solicitor-General at the time of the shooting death, and published in the same newspaper (The Toronto Sun).

All three pieces are hostile to the inquiry report and claim that its recommendations exacerbated a subsequent native occupation in another part of Ontario, namely Caledonia.

Indeed the government is on record as invoking the Ipperwash report to justify a "hands-off" policing model in Caledonia.

About a year after these articles appeared, a university professor published an article in a scholarly journal debunking the use of the Ipperwash Report to justify policy in Caledonia, and saying that the actual report repudiated the Caledonia model. The article does not mention the pieces by the journalist and the senator.

All of the above pieces are referenced in a paragraph on this controversy in the draft entry. Due to the scholarly debunking by the professor, the Commissioner comes away looking good.

The Commissioner insists that I not mention the journalist and the senator or cite their articles. He is OK with just summarizing the scholarly piece as refuting the government's invocation of the report. He thinks the articles were insignificant and that there was in fact no real controversy. He also has a low opinion of the authors, and does not wish to give them a platform.

My response is that the pieces are news articles from a major, reputable newspaper, that the opinions they express were consistent with articulated government policy in Caledonia, and that the thesis was significant enough to warrant an investigation and an article by a public policy professor. To omit the articles would be to leave out reference to a documentary source dealing with a controversy related to the commissioner's work and report. Now, the articles were from the same newspaper that had a clear editorial stance on the Caledonia incident, which I suppose might increase or diminish their worthiness as sources.

(There was an article by another prominent journalist discussed the professor's piece in another paper - it is how I became aware of it - but this article was basically a precis of the piece and so I only footnoted it without mention in the actual text.)

While the views expressed in the news articles are certainly not mainstream (and were written several years after the report was completed), and the commissioner's report has received a high level of praise, they appear relevant to any balanced discussion of the commissioner's work. The fact that the professor thoroughly debunked the thesis allows the commissioner to come away quite unscathed and looking very good, as I said. He realizes this but simply does not want the articles sited.

As your BLP says: "If an allegation or incident is noteworthy, relevant, and well documented, it belongs in the article – even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it." They also say "...the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all."

Here is the section, the second paragraph being the one in question:

Commissioner for Ipperwash Inquiry

In 2004, Linden was appointed Commissioner for the Ipperwash Public Inquiry, established to investigate the shooting death of aboriginal protester Dudley George at Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995. Linden spent two years listening to 139 witnesses, 229 days of testimony and was presented with 23,000 documents. His four-volume report was 1,533 pages long. The report was well received and is considered a landmark contribution to aboriginal, police and government relations. He was also commended for handling a delicate and potentially explosive inquiry with skill and diplomacy, to the satisfaction of all parties. Many of the report’s 100 recommendations were adopted, including the return of Ipperwash Provincial Park to the first nations and the establishment of a provincial Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs.

News reporter Peter Worthington and Senator Robert Runciman, who was Solicitor-General at the time of the Ipperwash incident, claim that Linden’s report was overly sympathetic to native concerns and led to a two-tiered, or race-based, policing model that exacerbated the subsequent and more chaotic native occupation in Caledonia, Ontario, where police ignored unlawful acts by natives and failed to protect residents from harassment and abuse.(28) Indeed the government of Premier Dalton McGuinty claimed to be following Linden’s recommendations in dealing with the Caledonia occupation.(29) However, Professor Andrew Sancton of the University of Western Ontario, in his review of police actions in Caledonia in light of the Ipperwash Report, notes that Linden’s analysis of police-government relations “effectively repudiated the hands-off position taken by the McGuinty government concerning Caledonia.” Rather, his model of “democratic policing” required the responsible minister to be informed of aspects of police operations and to set high-level policing policy expressed through public directives for which the minister would be accountable. Sancton concludes that the McGuinty government’s invocation of the Ipperwash Report to defend its “hands-off” approach in Caledonia had no basis in the report itself.(30)

(28) Worthington, Peter, “Caledonia Crisis of Facts”, Toronto Sun, November 13, 2010, and “Inquiry into Caledonia settlement not needed”, Toronto Sun, July 12, 2011; Robert Runciman, “Inquiry Needed into Caledonia Occupation”, Toronto Sun, July 12, 2011. (29) For just one example of the government’s invocation of the Ipperwash Report to defend its policy in Caledonia, see Hansard Official Report of Debates – Legislative Assembly of Ontario, Second Session, 39th Parliament, October 26, 2010: “The Linden inquiry was good advice: we’re following it…” (30) Sancton, A., “‘Democratic Policing’: Lessons from Ipperwash and Caledonia”, Canadian Public Administration 55.2 (September 2012), pp. 365 ff. Linden rejected the extremes of “full police independence” and “governmental policing”. The Caledonia occupation began as the Ipperwash inquiry was winding down and before the report had been issued. Sancton suggests that had the Linden model been implemented, there may have been less ground for the successful $20 million lawsuit against the Crown by Caledonia residents. Reporter Christie Blatchford, who has written extensively on the Caledonia occupation, concurs, noting that the democratic policing model recommended by Linden got “virtually no public attention”, and that a vacuum of policy accountability persisted. See Blatchford, C., “Police operate in vacuum of accountability with aboriginal protesters,” National Post, January 11, 2013. Of the Linden report, Blatchford says “A more intelligent and sympathetic view of aboriginal and Canadian history would be hard to find.” On her documentation of the occupation and police inaction, see Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us, 2011.

The Commissioner is so passionate about this that he has told me to stop work on the piece. One of his counter-arguments is that controversy often attended his various postings and I have not written about them. My response is that this particular controversy relates to the substantive content and policy effect of his report, not to how the government is doing certain things. For instance, there was controversy to the model adopted when he was Police Complaints Commissioner. But that would be a different type of controversy. I also offered to do more research into these other areas to find out in any similar controversies arose, but he does not want me to.

I would very much appreciate your views as a Wiki roster editor on this. If I am appearing unreasonable or in error, I am happy to consider revising my position (He did not want me to consult Wikipedi on our disagreement but I feel obliged to do so). There may be ways of tweaking the paragraph to make it more acceptable to the Commissioner (I could bury the news articles in the footnote but this seems rather disingenuous), but I am not seeking editorial feedback at this point. I just want to know if the position I have taken would be consistent with the Wiki guidelines and notions of objective and balanced authorship.

ConflagrantCortex (talk) 16:45, 11 September 2015 (UTC)