Saturday, December 06, 2008

The Mick Gzowski Affair

The Chronicle-Herald is reporting that Liberal sources told them "Stephane Dion’s chief of staff is firing an underling to cover her own mistakes in preparing a poor-quality video for national broadcast Wednesday." The paper quotes a veteran Liberal staffer as saying, "Email traffic will show [Dion's staff] were screwing around with text hours later than they should have been" and "They gave the video guys 25 minutes to shoot 20 minutes worth of video."

This is serious and needs to be investigated immediately: thoroughly, transparently, quickly, and with great sensitivity. It has the potential to unfairly blacken reputations and to become an enormous scandal for the party. The paper quotes a Liberal staffer as saying, "I am a f---ing Liberal and I don’t think they’re competent enough to run the government."

In his death spiral, Dion is doing more damage to the Liberal party every day.

Thanks to Challenging the Commonplace for publicizing this article.

4 comments:

James Bowie said...

Sucks

Anonymous said...

"In his death spiral, Dion is doing more damage to the Liberal party every day."

People have been saying this for weeks, and you have defended Dion as a good and competent leader. Perhaps now you see why he's responsible for so much of this. In fact, if this continues,and he refuses to go, the non-confidence vote to come will be a farce; we'll go to an election and the Conservatives will win, another mandate. Minority or majority, for Harper it's been the same thing because of not having an opposition that can calll itself an opposition.

p.s. number of seats or not, the last thing the Liberals need is a coalition with the left. Unless they unite as one party, how will the Liberals take seats from the Conservatives if they haven;t been able to do it the last two elections?

VW said...

Glen McGregor is reporting a clarification:

"Although one news report yesterday suggested Mr. Dion's office is moving to fire Mr. Gzowski, that scenario is unlikely and the story has only served to further anger party staff on Parliament Hill. Mr. Gzowski works for the Liberal Research Bureau, a parliamentary office that functions independently of Mr. Dion's staff in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. The bureau remains neutral in leadership races and reports not to the leader, but the head of party's national caucus.

The internal investigation ordered by Mr. Dion's chief of staff, Johanne Senecal, is to be presented to caucus at a meeting Wednesday by Derek Ferguson, Mr. Gzowski's boss. The report is expected to highlight the late start on the video and the fact that Mr. Dion's tinkering caused serious delays. It could be particularly damaging at a time when Mr. Dion's leadership is hanging in the balance."

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Liberal+party+infighting+explodes+over+Dion+video+mess/1043798/story.html

Yappa said...

Thanks VW -

I wondered if the original news report was inaccurate, and it seems it was. I'm glad that the party's moving quickly and decisively on this...