Canadian Politician Attempted to Quash Free Speech
Canadian conservative blogger, Stephen Taylor, chronicles the story of one liberal Canadian politician who attempted to silence dissent by having the domain name of his dissenter’s deleted on a technicality. Joe Volpe is a leadership candidate for Canada’s Liberal party.
(From Stephen Taylor):
Yesterday, a Joe Volpe parody site went up called YouthForVolpe.ca which lampooned the Liberal leadership candidate’s drug money (ahem pharmaceutical donations) from children of Apotex execs. When Volpe gave back the money yesterday (CTV News called it “Volpe’s volte-face”), the website went down. At the time, I thought that the designers had thought that it was irrelevant or that it had served its purpose, so they pulled it. It turns out that this is not the case.
Joe Volpe had the Canadian Internet Registration Authority sever the link from YouthForVolpe.ca to the server which hosted the website.
Read the whole entry on Stephen’s blog.
Here’s an excerpt from the Globe and Mail’s report on the story:
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.
Richard over at Let Freedom Reign has more information about the shady campaign contributions Joe Volpe accepted which spurred the development of the YouthForVolpe.ca website.
Canadian Liberal Party leadership candidate Joe Volpe got busted taking campaign contributions from children to the tune of $5,400.00 each. These children are the offspring of individuals directly connected with a pharmicutical company called Apotex Inc. who also seems to have a lot of employees who have maxed out their donations to Volpe’s leadership campaign. Long story short, it would appear that Volpe and his supporters are trying to do an end-run on election funding laws.
Captains Ed is also tracking this story.
UPDATE:
By trying to suppress dissenting opinion Joe Volpe has been wholly unsuccessful. Instead, he generated publicity for the very website he tried to take down. This demonstrates bad political judgement, if you ask me. So in the spirit of free speech, here’s a list of the mirror sites: