A local daily newspaper has suspended one of its regular columnists, a former editor for the paper, who apparently wrote a column at the request of someone he believed was with Premier Ed Stelmach’s office.
In Paul Jackson’s October 21 column in the Calgary Sun, he expressed support for Jonathan Denis, who was seeking the Conservative nomination in the riding of Calgary-Egmont. However, Jackson had previously voiced support for Craig Chandler, another candidate for the nomination. When Chandler e-mailed Jackson about his “flip-flop of endorsements,” Jackson replied: “I got an urgent call from the premier’s office asking me to back Jonathan. What else could I do?” (Chandler forwarded the e-mail to media in early December, days after the Conservative executive ousted him from the nomination he overwhelmingly won in November.)
Jose Rodriguez, the Sun’s editor-in-chief, says the e-mail is a “cause of concern.” “I need some answers,” says Rodriguez. “There’s some serious questions that that story poses, which Paul hasn’t answered to me. So I have to speak with Paul and figure out where we’re at.” Until then, Rodriguez says, the Sun won’t publish Jackson’s column. “I haven’t met with him yet because he hasn’t shown up in my office,” Rodriguez says. “Hopefully he calls me or pops into my office, and we can sort this thing out once and for all.”
Like Rodriguez, Fast Forward has been unable to contact Jackson, who previously worked as the Sun’s associate editor. (A message on Jackson’s voice mail says he’s currently at his home in Guadalajara, Mexico.) However, Jackson was asked about the incident in an interview aired on the CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener December 5. In the interview, which is available online, Jackson offered a confusing explanation of the phone call and subsequent column.
“It was a put up job,” said Jackson, who was travelling in the U.S. at the time he received the call. “I’m sure of that. Because it certainly wasn’t [Stelmach spokespeople] Paul Stanway or Tom Olsen who phoned me.” Olsen says no one from the premier’s office phoned Jackson.
Jackson said that after he received the call, he then sent Chandler the e-mail in question as a “courtesy.” “And then, on pondering this phone call whose voice I never recognized — and [I] never got the person’s name, as I was dashing from speech to speech — I thought, ‘gee whiz, this is all a put-up job.’ So I sent Chandler a second e-mail saying ‘I believe this to be totally false.’” Chandler, however, says he never received this second e-mail from Jackson. “He’s full of rubbish,” Chandler says.
At one point in the interview, Jackson suggested he wrote the Jonathan Denis column before he had received the phone call. But when Eyeopener host Jim Brown pressed him to explain how that’s possible in light of the e-mails between Chandler and Jackson, the columnist faltered. Brown asked why, “based on a phone call from someone claiming to be with the premier’s office, you would write a column supporting Mr. Denis.” Jackson replied, after a long pause: “I can’t quite recall.” When asked how the incident would affect his credibility as a columnist, Jackson blamed Chandler for ruining his career.
Jackson is known for deriding elected representatives on the “liberal-left” in his columns and writing favourably about small-c (and often big-C) conservatives like Prime Minister Stephen Harper. According to one column, Jackson regularly travels in the U.S. “speaking to Republican and Conservative groups, extolling Stephen’s virtues.” In another column published last year, he described controversial Calgary-West MP Rob Anders as having “an intellect that has to be one of the finest — perhaps the finest — in the entire House of Commons.”
This isn’t the first time questions have been raised about the relationship between the premier’s office and Alberta newsrooms. In January, Olsen and Stanway raised eyebrows when they left their jobs as political columnists for the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Sun, respectively, and joined Stelmach’s media relations team within days of filing their last columns. “I don’t think people writing columns should be doing stuff like that,” says SAIT journalism instructor Jim Cunningham of the columnists’ quick switch to the premier’s office. “But there’s no law that says they can’t.”
