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Wayne Crookes is a businessman in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Lender to Green Parties He is best known for his involvement in the Green Party of British Columbia, to which he donated substantial funds in 2001, and the Green Party of Canada, to which he lent nearly $440,000 in 2003-4. It was his activities as that party's major creditor that brought him to the public eye. Theories began in 2001 about Crookes' motives, with some persons claiming his intent was to "split votes" and elected the BC Liberal Party. Crookes quickly suppressed such suggestions, notably at rabble.ca, a left-wing political chat site, whose publisher Judy Rebick published a boilerplate apology to Crookes, who was otherwise generally successful at avoiding media scrutiny until 2005-6. Control of the Green Party of Canada In return for this, "Mr. Crookes was also appointed to a newly- created Green party election readiness committee -- an appointment that rubbed many Greens the wrong way", according to a May 2006 article in the Ottawa Citizen. After raising concerns about "having a rich guy buy his way into a position of power", Gretchen Schwarz, the Party's Chair, a sentiment she claimed was shared by "a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Greens", "she and five other members of the executive council resigned in 2003." She later complained that financial statements prepared by Chief Agent John Anderson had not ever been made available to the party's elected Council. During the Canadian federal election, 2006, this and other criticisms of Jim Harris' financial relationships and reporting during the period in which the party was repaying Crookes prompted the party to file a number of lawsuits and accuse several critics of lying to alter the outcome of an election, a crime in Canada. After the election, the suits were apparently dropped, were taken by some as proof of their original political motivation. Though he had resigned as head of the GPC's Management Committee, just before that election, it was widely believed that Crookes' personal penchant for libel actions had influenced the party to take these actions. During 2005, the party had undergone another crisis very similar to 2003, and this was also widely attributed to Crookes' influence. During the Canadian federal election, 2004, Crookes had served as national campaign manager. Afterwards, he continued to lend the party bridge funds until public funding was received. His close associate George Read took over the post for the Canadian federal election, 2006. Crookes was very involved in all operational matters, approved spending proposals personally. He was called "Uncle Wayne" in Council meetings by John Anderson, the party's chief agent, according to Elio Di Iorio. His influence grew as staff were hired, some of which had originally reported to Crookes during the 2004 election. There were tensions with volunteers and especially with those who working on policy research, who saw the staff as sometimes usurping political work. In January 2005, elected Fundraising Chair Kathryn Holloway came into conflict with Debbie Hartley, who had Crookes' trust and had replaced him as head of the election readiness and campaign team, a conflicted body which included both staff and the Council that they in theory reported to. Holloway was "suspended" from the Council, an unprecedented action with no precedent in the party's constitution. This triggered another set of events usually called the GPC Council Crisis. Protests about Holloway's treatment grew, and analysis of it was published in party forums. In early February 2005, a memo from Crookes, who had formally withdrawn from the election readiness committee now controlled by Debbie Hartley, was forwarded by Hartley to other insiders. It claimed that "dysfunctional" officers were "driving out the talented", an ominous claim from the party's major creditor. The very next day, the Green Party of Canada Living Platform was taken down, material relevant to the party's governance removed, and staff were fired. This despite strong protests from the party's candidates for office, the GPC Shadow Cabinet, that led to it demanding that Hartley's committee be disbanded. It was, but only to be replaced by a Management Committee once again headed by Crookes. Several months later, in protest to the actions of this Committee, another group of GPC Council and Committee and Shadow Cabinet members resigned with strongly worded resignation letters. Some of these used strong language ("fraudulent", "illegal") that led to the epithet gang of Crookes becoming a common way to refer to Crookes and his colleagues and favourites. While Crookes and colleagues represented this as a "transformation into a professional organization -- others say it has sold out", according to the Citizen, which characterized the party's self-image prior to the crisis as being "Less secretive. More transparent. Less autocratic. More democratic. Less power-hungry.... former leader Joan Russow, feel it has already sold itself out." The critics of Crookes, Harris, and the staff and Council members they favoured grew steadily more visible in the Canadian Press and the CBC. A May 2006 letter by Crookes claimed that the critics of the takeover had cost the party "hundreds of thousands" in cash and kept it "off-message" for at least a week during the election. He accused the critics including Holloway and Di Iorio of making "false charges" against his team, and published the details of lawsuits that he had filed and intended to file. Online journalism After the election, Crookes had taken further legal actions against critics of his allies and friends in the party. As one of what Michael Geist described as a "spate of lawsuits against Canadian online news sites", in May 2006 Crookes sued openpolitics.ca, a "political chat site, after he objected to several comments posted on the site." These had cited the resignation letters, discussed the gang epithet in that context, and reported the allegations of Crookes personal favourites, friends of Crookes, wielding power not granted to them by the membership. According to Geist, online journalism itself was at issue. He claimed that the case resembled Apple versus DOES, in which anonymous sources were found to be protected in California, and was likely to set an important precedent in libel law within Canada. The lawsuit, "Crookes versus openpolitics.ca", also attracted some interest from the Vancouver Province, perhaps because of its humorous name. The Province story focused on the wiki technology used by the site. As with Wikipedia, users of openpolitics.ca edit articles without the service having prior clearance of the content. They rely on what Mike Godwin calls the "right of reply" and for those aware of factual errors or other problems to edit and refactor pages. Mr. Crookes rejected these options and other offers to have editors change the pages using facts provided by himself, and pursued the lawsuit with no attempt to answer to the claims or charges made by the resignation letters which were reported on pages. He pointed out no factual errors on any page, but only claimed that they implied he was "dishonest" and had "abused power". Which was already implied by the strong language in some of the resignation letters and the other insider information cited in the articles. Accordingly, the case was being closely watched by civil liberties lawyers as a good test of how little the plaintiff in a libel action was obligated to do to reply or respond before they could succeed in a suit - even one regarding political speech and critiques of actions in the public arena. And also closely watched by wiki users who edit news with public input, receive information from whistleblowers, or collaborate anonymously to expose political insider activity. As Crookes had filed against an Ontario-based service in BC, and as BC has reciprocal judgement enforcement with many US states, suits of this nature could be filed by anyone who felt any version of any article in any wiki visible to the public had defamed or derogated them. If plaintiffs could require exposure of anonymous sources and shut down wiki-based news services by holding them strictly responsible for every word of every version of every page, Geist argued, all forms of journalism would suffer: "In order to persuade sources to reveal information hidden from view, they depend upon assurances of absolute confidentiality...online journalism... deserves the legal protections crafted for the press." He echoed the principles avowed by users of openpolitics.ca, Wikipedia, SourceWatch and similar news services that "we can all play a role in keeping our leaders accountable. We are all journalists now." Sources | ||||||||
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