the 007 of toronto star
by Angelo Persichilli
TANDEM  (Italian version)

After digesting its rage for Italy’s World Cup victory, The Toronto Star has again turned its eyes to the Canadian community of Italian origin. Last week, the issues were mafia and the Liberal lead­ership race.

The former is a constant favorite of the English-language media when they feel like play­ing 007. Are there any mafiosi in Canada?

Of course there are; mafiosi of Russian, Chinese, Japanese origin. Most of all, there are the Bikers, a "mafia made in Canada."

Organized crime is a world affliction, and every country is committed to fighting it. What The Toronto Star fails to mention, however, is that Canada is one of very few civilized countries that lack a law against organized crime. Canada is an Eden for criminals of the past (e.g. ex Nazis), present and future.

They come from allover the world, exploiting a control sys­tem that is the joke of police forces everywhere. Julian Fantino, when he was the chief of the Toronto Police Service, had mentioned cases of criminals from several countries, including Italy and Jamaica, repeatedly deported, who always returned to Canada. The Star attacked Fantino,

Canada crawls with terrorists of every nationality. Canadian officers have denounced the presence of organizations that raise funds for foreign terrorist organizations. The Star -and the English-language media in general - only get upset when obvi­ous mistakes are made, such as in the Arar affair, and put the system under scrutiny: not because it does not catch terrorists, but because a mistake was made arresting one person in the frantic days following the 9/11 attacks.

But all of a sudden, The Star’s sense of lawfulness awakes when writing about some people of Italian origin who live in Woodbridge. I don't know these people, and I always rejoice when criminals get their just dessert.

What I do know is that those fellows, like others of many other origin, are freely living in Canada, with passports, homes and jobs address.

What does the Star do? It takes a handful of Italian names, it goes without saying --slaps them on the front page, and voila, draws the usual cliché of Italian mafiosi and, of course, of the Italian government that has no intention to arrest them.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Star: if you really want to get rid of criminals and riff-raff, take a good, hard look at Canada’s laws; start from Ottawa, leaving Rome and other capitals alone. Canadian crime is here in Canada, nowhere else.

Let's now move on to the Liberal Party.

Next week, the Liberals will select their delegates for the Montreal convention that will choose their new leader. The event is so boring that nobody deems it newsworthy. But the English-language media, on the contrary, see it as a leadership race unlike any other: for the first time a candidate of Italian origin, Joe Volpe, has a fighting chance. Most experts agree that his support among party members is very significant for the final tally. In other words, he can influence the choice of the new leader.

This fact is scaring the day­lights out of prominent Anglophone and Francophone Liberals, used to alternate at the helm of the party using 'ethnics' only for photo ops. It also upsets the English-language media. Obviously, it is giving The Toronto Star epileptic fits.

So, this weekend the Star slapped another 'monster' on the front page: did anyone notice the similarity between the photos of the alleged mafioso and of Joe Volpe, published on consecutive days? Not a photo of Volpe in Parliament, where he's sat for the past 18 years; not a picture of him speaking during debates; the photographer took a snapshot at the last minute, in front of Volpe’s house, while the MP ­after a day of tiresome work ­was coming out with his family to attend the first birthday party of a granddaughter. The photo speaks for itself: it was chosen with the same criteria that were used for the only pile of litter on St. Clair after the oceanic party for the World Cup victory.

Let’s take a closer look at the scoop uncovered by the secret agents of The Toronto Star about Volpe: they discovered that, out of some 4,000 Volpe supporters in Quebec, a few hadn’t paid their membership in person. Also, one was dead.

Far from contesting their findings, I’ve got some news for these fourth-rate secret agents: recruitment for the Liberal Party has been done like that for decades. In the past, other parties have also recruited the dead. In short, this is the ordinary state of affairs for the Canadian political system, which ,Star reporters should know inside and out.

What did they do, instead? They checked only Joe Volpe's supporters, and only Italian­Canadian names.

What did they find? Exactly the same elements that marked very leadership race in the national parties. Wow, stop the press! Someone is guilty of doing what everybody else in Canada does (remember the battle, also in Quebec, between Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark? Or the more recent one between Paul Martin and Jean Chretien?). They reported these irregularities as if they had been invented by Joe Volpe.

If Volpe can be accused of anything, it is of learning too well what years of Liberal membership have taught him, when he worked at recruiting members for Trudeau, Turner, Jean Chrétien and finally Paul Martin. The only difference is that Volpe is now running on his own.

The fact is that the other par­ties, from the NDP to the Tories, have changed how they choose their leaders; taking advantage of new technologies and expanding democracy with a direct election. Only the Liberals have kept a complicated, antidemocratic sys­tem where the winner is not the best but the one who best games the system. Abstruse rules favour schemers and punish those who want to clean up politics. When someone understands the tricks that Liberal manipulators have been using for decades, they dress up as moralizers highlighting every smallest mistake. Knowing the tricks, they know of course where to look; and then, it's front page time.

It had already happened months ago with cheques signed by a minor for Volpe's campaign (Volpe knew nothing about this): the payments were fully legal, respecting the law and the rules set by the party. Despite this, those cheques were used to damage some honest individual who were using honest money in honest ways. Volpe gave the cheques back and asked all candidates to publish the list of all their donor on the Internet. Nobody did so.

Nothing will be done to check the lists of any other candidate leader, because right now the Liberal Party is a free for all. People claim indignation for four membership cards in one organi­zation, while the party withdraws money from Alfonso Gagliano's credit card to pay for his applica­tion and, four silent months later, tells him he was expelled.

The reason is that this cam­paign does not aim to bring integrity back within an obsolete and antidemocratic system, but only to remind the 'ethnics' that they are most welcome in the Liberal Party, as long as they don't pretend to become leaders.

Note to the Toronto Star reporters: last week Paolo Bettini - yet another Italian - won the world cycling championship. Maybe he won because his bicycle had square wheels?