CANADA: Media Crucifies Green Party Hopeful for 9-11 Views

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Am Johal

VANCOUVER, May 4 2007 (IPS) - Kevin Potvin, a writer who was seeking to run for Canada’s Green Party in Vancouver, has had his nomination papers denied by Elizabeth May, the party’s leader, after an article he wrote expressing confusion and sympathy for the 9-11 attacks emerged from 2002.

Although the article was from five years ago and Potvin had run for the Vancouver City Council as an independent in 2005 without controversy, the national media turned it into a major news story. The conservative National Post accused him of “seeing beauty in the death of innocents”, and others charging that he supported al Qaeda.

Potvin is an independent writer, owns a popular magazine store and has published a weekly column in the Vancouver Courier for 12 years. He has also published the independent Republic of East Vancouver newspaper for six and a half years, and is a widely known political gadfly in the city.

Potvin was attempting to run in the Vancouver-Kingsway riding. He has now announced a possible run for the seat as a candidate for the Work Less Party, which has said it would welcome him on the ticket.

The controversy was precipitated on Apr. 12 when the Public Eye Online reported that Potvin had written an article in 2002 about the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in which he described his reaction to the planes hitting the twin towers in New York.

He wrote at the time, “When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, ‘Yeah!’ When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, ‘Beautiful!’ When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air.”

He admits that, “When taken out of context, the sentences are damning. They were my inner thoughts, which I also found confusing and revolting in myself. I was being honest about the complexity of my feelings regarding the spectacle of 9-11. I was overwhelmed by the scenes of horrific magnitude.”

However, he added, “The behaviour of the media was atrocious. I have been involved in independent media for years. Their mediation of this issue was appalling. They misplayed it. They piled on. It was despicable.”

“I was feeling complex emotions that follow a massive tragedy. I was expressing the guilt connected to not feeling the emotional connection of people dying. In my view, the Green Party does not respect free speech – they are amateurs on the national stage, but any of the major political parties would have refused to sign my papers. It is a deeper cultural problem in Canada about the acceptance of ideas,” he said.

Bob Hackett, a professor of communications at Simon Fraser University and a director of NewsWatch Canada, told IPS, “It almost happened to a Liberal Member of Parliament named Carolyn Parrish who publicly called U.S. President Bush a ‘moron’. She was kicked out of her caucus.”

“In a distorted media environment, the nuances tend to get lost. If ideas fall outside the sphere of acceptable discourse or are cast outside the sphere of legitimate controversy, it is labeled as deviant. The making of a national scandal is haphazard and you see a subordinate relationship that media has with politics and vice versa.”

Hackett added that media is a filtre to political candidacy in what has become a mainstream office. He adds that politicians in contemporary culture can’t afford to ignore their media image and questions the process of political gate-keeping.

“What we have, as a result, are standardised, conventional voices over forces of change or peripheral ones which are rarely given legitimacy. There is stronger party discipline and prepackaged ‘message box’ communications. We are increasingly voting for people who do not express what they are really thinking or feeling in the realm of politics. This is an alarming trend.”

After the article resurfaced. Potvin told the press, “If you read the story that I wrote, you’ll notice that I’m talking about it on a symbolic level… I go to great pains to make clear that I’m not talking about the deaths of anybody. After all, as you can imagine, I’m a human being. I’m a father, I’m a hockey dad, I’m a businessman, I’m a community leader. I’m obviously not going to be revelling in the deaths of anybody.”

However, Green Party leader Elizabeth May has refused to sign Potvin’s nomination papers allowing him to run as a candidate, saying that his apology to the media did not go far enough.