Last year a monument of interest to Edmonton’s Ukrainian community was defaced with red paint..Now, Duncan Kinney, editor of the Alberta NDP/Alberta union-affiliated publication, Progress Report, stands with a criminal charge of mischief for the incident. .That the monument was defaced is not in doubt. Whether Kinney was responsible has yet to be proved in court..What does not have to be proved however — because it’s there on the website of Progress Alberta/Progress Report for which he works — is that he wrote a dead-pan news report about the whole thing..“Edmonton’s statue of Roman Shukhevych, an infamous Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, has once again been defaced with red paint. This time, a second local monument — a memorial honouring the 14th Waffen SS Division — was targeted as well. An unknown person or persons painted the words “Nazi monument” and 14th Waffen SS Division on the latter monument, which is housed t St. Michael’s cemetery [sic] on the north side of the city.”.And so on. He had also phoned up stakeholders for reaction and went to press. .Whether Shukhevych is infamous or much to be admired is something for the Ukrainian community to determine. Whichever it may be, the monuments were on private property, which in a normally tolerant state should make it nobody else’s business..However, should it also be determined in court that the ‘unknown person or persons’ and Duncan Kinney were one and the same, this would be a pretty sad affair. Journalists are not supposed to make the news… Clark Kent does not report on Superman. That sort of thing..At the Western Standard, a stunt like that — if proved — would bring your reporting days to an abrupt end. And, with some inexplicable exceptions, even the mainstream media don’t try to defend what is clearly indefensible. (An exception would be the continued defence by the New York Times of Soviet stooge Walter Duranty, who as their Moscow bureau chief suppressed coverage of Stalin’s planned genocidal famine that killed 4 million Ukrainians in the 1930s — the Holodomor.).So, a career-ender. You would think..We shall see..For on the basis of past writings. Kinney appears to me more as an activist with a website, rather than the purveyor of “Independent journalism from Progress Alberta,” as his twitter site proclaims. If that's so, then why would he quit? It’s not as if the Progress Report has any reputation to lose: Outside the four-legs-good, two-legs-bad crowd that drinks from that particular trough, it has the credibility of a three-dollar bill. Sort of an Alberta Pravda really, owned and supported by a complex paperwork network of levers and mirrors at the centre of which one finds the NDP, the Broadbent Institute and the Alberta union movement..And by the way, what’s wrong with that?.In this country we supposedly have a constitutional right to free expression. The left doesn’t seem to be as tolerant to our right to free expression as we are of theirs, but freedom is us. If Alberta’s left-wing borg are happy to pay for the Progress Report, let ‘em, says I..Of course, if it’s found that Kinney did the job on the monument, they’d better be prepared to pay for the cleanup, too.
