This suppression of political speech is something only a fascist, Leftist, or John McCain could love.

Captain's Quarters has been tracking a Canadian campaign finance scandal involving John Volpe, who is seeking the leadership of the Liberal Party.

The Liberals just can't seem to shake their reputation for financing shenanigans, and now it looks like they've decided to enhance it by attempting to silence Volpe's critics. A satirical website, youthforvolpe.ca, attempted to poke fun at Volpe's predicament by posing as a contribution website for civic-minded Canadian youngsters. Not seeing the humor, Volpe reacted by having the website shut down:

It was all the buzz in official Ottawa yesterday -- a hilarious political whodunit in this age of websites, platforms and templates.

Overnight, someone built a website spoofing Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe and his acceptance of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from children, including the 11-year-old twins of a former vice-president of a generic drug company.

By early yesterday afternoon, the Volpe team had the website pulled down. ...

Mr. Volpe's campaign had the site shut down without knowing, it seems, who put it up: "Hi Everyone," wrote Brenden Johnstone, who is with the Volpe campaign, in an e-mail to other leadership campaigns. "There has been concern about how the issue of the Volpe donations was reflecting on the leadership race.

"My Office has had the website suspended through CIRA [Canadian Internet Registration Authority] and CDNS [Canadian Domain Name Services] and it will be down as soon as 6 p.m. I think the issue with the website has been dealt with. . . ."

If Volpe's office thinks that pressuring the hosting service to silence his critics will "deal with" the problem, I suspect they have some naivete on the Internet. More than just showing a thin skin, Volpe and his office will likely provoke a torrent of criticism that will dwarf any consideration of questionable contributions. Does the Liberal Party really stand for government officials bullying hosting services into gagging their critics?

CQ notes that Conservative Party blogger Stephen Taylor is doing yeoman's work giving this matter the sort of coverage it deserves.

The censored site has been mirrored here and hereand here.

One has to wonder if Canada qualifies as part of the free world any longer, or if all the jokes about Soviet Kanuckistan are really true.

More coverage of this developing story can be found at Left Wing=Hate, The Daily Bayonet, The New American Citizen, Angry In The Great White North, Slashdot, Pajamas Media, Boing Boing, Little Green Footballs.

Posted by: Greg at 03:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 422 words, total size 4 kb.