COMH Corporate Communications Considered Candidate Censorship in 2021
By Kelly Allard
I finally received the results of my personal FOIP (Freedom Of Information and Protection of Privacy) that I filed on April 13 2024. There were some fascinating items amongst the dross.
Staff at the City of Medicine Hat were inquiring about whether they could remove candidate posts from their Facebook page. As always I bring the receipts
NB - the redactions were done by the City.
”Hey Colleen,
We had kind of touched on this idea a little earlier in the summer – but curious to know your thoughts and what (if anything) can be done about candidates using the City’s Facebook page as a platform for their campaign. Kelly Allard is probably the best example I have – she comments on anything Transit related, often throwing the City under the bus (get it?!) but the most recent example was a push I made for people to fill out the Parks & Rec survey over the weekend.
NB - the survey was fatally flawed - I took it numerous times. Anyone who has passed a basic probability and statistics course knows you need accurate sampling if you want statistically significant results.
It’s the most basic principle, often captured by the acronym
GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.
”There are 3 kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
(popularized in the US by Mark Twain)
In cases like this, do we need to be ready with factual information? Do we delete posts where it’s clearly a campaign push? Or do we have to let this all ride until after the election? It just doesn’t seem right for any candidate to use our page as a platform, but maybe this is all my politics class talking.
Happy to chat more!
I would love to know what is in the redacted part.
Yes, this is from 3 years ago, but the people involved are still employed at the City and we have a civic election next year. Colleen Graham, Director of Corporate Communications has long refused to treat Community TV /The Trash Panda as media. We receive no media releases like the other outlets do. We are not invited to press conferences. We have been told they will not respond to media requests from us.
