Reflection

Don't like the rain and snow today in Southern Manitoba?

Forget them! Live in the past!

I took this photo last Thursday evening, Sept. 27, at the Notre Dame campus of Red River College in Winnipeg.

It was part of an assignment for the Introduction to Technology in Education course I am taking for the Certificate in Adult Education.

Cameras in inquests: A no-brainer

A judge in the Western Canadian province of Manitoba will announce on March 19, 2010 whether he will allow televised coverage of an important inquest.

This should be a no-brainer. Cameras belong in inquests and courts, just as Canada allows them in public inquiries.

Local media outlets are seeking permission to broadcast and live stream coverage of the inquest in the case of Brian Sinclair, whose death after 34 hours in the emergency ward of a large hospital has raised all sorts of issues.

Cameras aren't allowed in inquests and other court proceedings basically because the rules were created before television was invented. But hey, TVs have been in almost everyone's home for more than half a century, long enough to be made almost obsolete by online live streaming and recorded coverage.

Journalists are already covering judicial proceedings on Twitter.

The nurses' union says it fears that disclosing identifying information would endanger some nurses.

Simple solution: if the union can persuade a judge that this is true in any case, the judge can simply ban the disclosure of that information -- just as the courts routinely protect the identities of undercover police and victims of sexual assault.

Judges should leap at this chance to get on camera, and not only because it would allow wide public access to judicial proceedings.

Televising judges at work would shatter myths, perpetuated by tabloid columnists, open-mouth radio hosts and their yappy acolytes, that judges are arrogant high-paid fatcats isolated from reality.

Canadian judges are serious to the point of being boring in court. They are very concerned about fairness and proper procedure.

Oh, and they really don't like people wearing hats in court.

Television coverage of this inquest and trials in general would demolish a couple of other misconceptions created by television dramas, many of them American:

Canadian judges never bang their gavels. They don't have gavels.

And perhaps more important, many Canadian judges are women.

Sit in a a Canadian trial court and you will witness the increasingly female face of justice. Not just the judge, but many of the lawyers and the court clerks and other officials are women.

We have lots to learn and nothing to fear from allowing cameras into this inquest, and into courts in general.

We can even wear hats while watching.

A Chinese joke? Should I laugh?

On Jan. 27 Manitoba's Lieutenant-Governor Philip Lee attended a Red River College convocation for the first time.

His Honour addressed the graduates briefly while an aide-de-camp, resplendent in a uniform, stood behind him.

The L-G mentioned that in August 2009 he became the first Chinese-Canadian person to be named the province's vice-regal representative.

Then he recounted a tale of a Grade 3 student who informed his parents that the Lieutenant-Governor has visited his classroom.

Parents: What was the Lieutenant-Governor like?

Child: He was tall and wore a military uniform. But a Chinese guy did all the talking.

Some of the grads and their families laughed. I did, too. But I felt uncomfortable about finding a joke about ethnicity funny, especially at a serious public event. And, as the announcer for the presentation of parchments, I was on stage.

The point of the story, I guess, is that the child (and perhaps, by extension, other Canadians) did not expect a Chinese-Canadian to represent the Queen.

If that is true, such Canadians have not been paying much attention to public affairs. Norman Kwong has been Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta since 2005.

Perhaps Manitoba's L-G could have eased any discomfort in his audience by making the point more explicitly that an accomplished Canadian of any ethnic background can become a Lieutenant-Governor.

Or am I being too sensitive?

Free information -- for a little work

Freedom-of-information legislation can unlock government files but not all bureaucrats know how to use it, Red River College Journalism students have discovered.

Sometimes you need to ask a librarian.

At the start of the Creative Communications term in the fall of 2009, I assigned the second-year Journalism majors to see what secrets they could dig out from the Manitoba government and the City of Winnipeg.

Now the Winnipeg Free Press has published the intriguing results. Wendy Sawatzky, the paper's online content manager, worked with the students to prepare their stories for publication.

Guided by Mary Agnes Welch, the newspaper's public policy reporter, the students paired up to create 11 requests for information ranging from wait times on the city's controversial 311 telephone information system to the workings of its cash-grabbing red-light cameras.

At the outset, the system generally worked well. In most cases the freedom-of-information co-ordinators in government responded to the requests within 30 days as the law requires.

But after that, it was as organized as the Wild West.

Some civil servants helpfully provided the information at no charge. Some said it would cost hundreds of dollars. Some said it was already available free and pointed the students to the source.

The students persisted. Some revised their requests so that the information could be found within the two free hours of searching that the legislation provides.

Then there was the bureaucrat who insisted that the requested information about the ages of people convicted of impaired driving did not exist, and that creating the software to find it would cost thousands of dollars.

That didn't sound right to students Joel Marcoux and Heather McGowan. They dug deeper, and they found an information hero in Leesa Girouard, a librarian at the Manitoba Legislative Library.

She found their answers and charged them 30 cents for photocopying. Oh, and they had to drop 50 cents into a parking meter while they visited the Leg.

Props to the helpful librarian who knows more about how to access information than one of the official guardians.