Foot-and-mouth disease again!

Dear user,

A user, Good Ol' Vic would like to share this article/content with you. To visit this article/content, simply click on the following URL / URI:

Site: http://metisonline.ca/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=manitoba-metis-federation-president-threatens-legal-action-over-t-shirt-255.html&Itemid=60

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Public Eye (Truth To Power - www.accesstoinfo.blogspot.com; vicpopuli1@gmail.com).

Dear Mr. Populi:

Thank you very much for the link. One would think with an election approaching President Chartrent would have the presence of mind to choose his words more carefully.

Clare L. Pieuk

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Manitoba Metis Federation President Threatens Legal Action Over T-shirt
People can't come along and re-assassinate my leader - David Chartrand

The media has been reporting this week that Manitoba Metis are furious about a homemade T-shirt design that showed up on the website of CafePress.ca featuring our hero Louis Riel. As you can see from the image above we can conclude that it is in poor taste but also is it worth it to pursue legal action against the anonymous creator of the t-shirt design?

In steps Manitoba Metis Federation president David Chartrand with his two cents on the media generated controversy and one suspects he is without his handlers whose duties are to help him to keep his mouth shut.

The Manitoba Métis Federation is outraged by T-shirts once for sale online that said, "Hang with me on Louis Riel Day."

The T-shirts, selling for $27.50 Canadian, showed Riel with a noose around his neck.

"I think it's like a hate crime," an outraged MMF president David Chartrand said by phone from Toronto on Wednesday. "People can't come along and re-assassinate my leader."

He said the offending T-shirts were brought to his attention by MMF staff. The Métis Federation's legal team is pursuing the matter, he said.

"If it's necessary, we'll take it to a human rights tribunal or have someone charged with a hate crime." [...]

The T-shirts have since been removed from the CafePress.ca website, but Chartrand's not dropping the matter.

"I'm going to go after these people," he said. "I want to ask them, 'Why did you do this?'... If it's hate towards my people, I want to find out who it is." (Winnipeg Free Press)

I get a fun mental image whenever I picture a chubby red-faced Chartrand all riled up and angry but I better leave that alone else I face 'our' posse of paid lawyers who lurk the internet looking for people to sue on 'our' behalf. I say ours because we pay for them and when David Chartrand says, "I'm going to go after these people" it means we are. You the taxpayer and/or you the member of the publicly funded Manitoba Metis Federation which rumour has it is almost broke and is deep in the red.

The President's Mid Term Report available here (pdf) on the Manitoba Metis Federation website includes no financial data at all and is filled with fluffy feel-good symbolism and assurances that the MMF is doing it's job "protecting our rights" and "fostering strong and healthy Metis families." Of course this is all well and good if there was any information at all to back it up and prove it but this president tends to have a closed door policy on releasing the cold hard numbers and as has been reported from the many regional meetings this past month this president tends to sluff off any hard questions that come his way. We don't really need to know...

What we do need to know is that President David Chartrand is willing to 'go after' some anonymous T-shirt designer, hunt them down to the ends of the earth with help from 'our' posse of lawyers at a cost of $250 dollars an hour with the intent of asking them "Why did you do this?".

Darcey

Darcey Jerome is blogmaster http://www.dustmybroom.com and Communications Director for Presidential Candidate Frank Godon (http://metisonline.ca). He can be contacted at darcey@metisonline.ca.