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Leaking Olympic village documents

January 17th, 2009 · 1 Comment

I’ve put this insert into my recent post about deconstructing the Olympic village and I’m repeating it here to make sure it doesn’t gets missed.

Daniel just called me to clarify that he is absolutely not the person who gave in-camera documents and Jeff Lee has posted on his blog that it is not Daniel and you can read his post here. Contrary to what Jeff thinks, I was not trying to “smoke” anyone out, nor was I trying to blacken Daniel’s reputation. There’s so much leaking going on these days and, with Judy the in-camera secrecy enforcer gone, I didn’t think it was that big a deal any more.

It was a logical guess, given that Daniel has spent the week hinting, on the Bill Good show, on his blog and elsewhere, that “a Vision councillor” had moved the controversial guarantee motion back in June 2007, waving a red flag for media types to follow. Jeff seems to indicate the in-camera docs came in a brown envelope (he says if anyone wants to send him “another” brown envelope, here’s his address), although maybe I’ve misinterpreted that, but it’s pretty clear that it’s someone on the NPA side who has, as they say, the motivation and the means to leak those documents from the June 2007 meeting.

Just as I would guess that it’s someone on the Vision side who had the motivation and the means to leak the documents from the October 2008 meeting that Jeff quotes from today in his interesting story, which has Jody Andrews’ ill-fated assessment of the Millennium project. (This would help counter the negative backlash they are likely getting over the resignation of Mr. Andrews, who was very well liked at city hall.)

And just as I would guess that it’s an ally of Estelle Lo’s who has been leaking some stuff to Gary Mason at the Globe. 

And just like the people who were telling me back in August about Millenniium’s problems had their agendas too.

Geez, people, we’re not idiots. These leaks have to be coming from somewhere, even in the current sieve-like conditions at city hall and, as history tells us (Watergate et al), the people who leak them usually have a mix of motives, one of which is self-interest. And there is a very limited number of people who have access to these documents. Unless everything is coming from some public-minded clerical assistant who happened to stumble across all of this while working the photocopier.

I’d just like to add the caveat here that, of course, I may indeed be totally full of shit and know absolutely nothing. That’s always the risk in this business.

I’ll reiterate, by the way, a point I made last fall about leaks. While it’s always instructive to find out who leaked documents and what their agenda was (there always is one), leaks should be judged by the ultimate criteria: Is this information that the public deserves to know? If it is, that’s what really counts.

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