Blacklock's Reporter

Lawyers should not make snide Twitter remarks about former clients, the Law Society of Ontario said yesterday. The regulatory guidance came on a complaint filed by Blacklock’s against Mark Bourrie, an Ottawa solicitor who lamented news coverage of the We Charity “non-scandal.”

“Mr. Bourrie appears to consider his comments to be a personal opinion made in the context of a journalist,” wrote a Law Society investigator: “Mr. Bourrie should be careful about any statements he makes about his former clients.”

Bourrie in an unprovoked series of tweets last August 22 called Blacklock’s one of a “rogues’ gallery of fake news” along with the website Canadaland and other publishers. Blacklock’s “started going off the rails five or six years ago,” he said.

Law Society Rules Of Professional Conduct state a solicitor must not “undermine the client’s position on a matter that was central to a previous retainer.” Bourrie in 2018 was retained by Blacklock’s to serve libel notice on yet another tweeting Ontario solicitor, Christopher Ball of Kingston, who published a post claiming Blacklock’s was a front for an Italian crime syndicate.

The Law Society yesterday said Bourrie was issued regulatory guidance “to remind Mr. Bourrie of his professional obligations and to help him comply with the Rules Of Professional Conduct.”

Bourrie, a former Parliamentary Press Gallery member, in Twitter comments blamed numerous media outlets including the Globe & Mail, National Post, Sun Media, Maclean’s and others for criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “The people attacking Trudeau on this are the same folks who claim the free market can solve our economic problems,” he tweeted.

“Opportunistic opposition MPs and a reckless desperate media drummed up the bogus We Charity scandal,” he wrote. Bourrie in other Twitter posts described media as “grotesque,” “flying monkeys,” “puppets,” “the Tories and their media stooges,” newsrooms that “collect scalps” and “put heat on people until they break” and reporters who “can’t speak French.”

“Thanks Justin Trudeau,” tweeted Bourrie. “Justin Trudeau is no Churchill, but I am damned glad he won the 2019 election”; “How many ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ questions is Trudeau expected to answer?”

“Sociopaths are succeeding in taking him down with the help of Hill media and reckless Opposition MPs,” tweeted Bourrie: “There are quite a few women in media, on the left and on the right, who are just as dishonest and vitriolic about Trudeau. You might be able to show a preponderance of men are hateful, but there’s a substantial number of women, too.”

Bourrie in 2019 announced in a CBC Radio interview he planned to quit social media as a New Year’s resolution. “There’s a lot of crap out there,” he said.

By Staff [photo: Tom Sandler, CNW Group/Charles Taylor Prize]

This morning,

along Rockliffe Parkway,

everyone drives the speed limit.

The red pickup truck,

the blue Hyundai,

the silver minivan,

the black Mercedes.

A law-abiding community.

Even the police cruiser

– at the head of the pack –

isn’t speeding.

(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)

Most everyone has a place that inspires reflection and contentment: a Paris café, a salmon run on the Miramichi River, your grandmother’s kitchen table. Roberta Laurie is an Alberta Rotarian who finds her place at a Malawian school for girls. The result is intriguing and joyful. Weaving A Malawi Sunrise never patronizes. Laurie is a delightful writer whose reportage is so skillful it draws readers who have no interest whatsoever in Malawi or the minutiae of public education.

Formerly Nyasaland, the country is small, corrupt and poor. The median age is 16. The national dish is catfish. Malawi has a million child labourers. May 14, a federal holiday, is the birthday of a local despot who ruled till age 96.

Laurie recalls her first encounter with Malawi while listening to a visiting lecturer: “She came to speak at our weekly Rotary Club breakfast meeting in Stony Plain, Alberta. So while digesting a full stomach of scrambled eggs, pancakes and sausage, I listened to her stories of poverty, hunger and – yes – hope from a faraway country whose name I hardly recognized and whose location I couldn’t begin to find on a map.”

The author is hooked – and so is the reader as Laurie recounts the country and its people without platitudes or condescension. She is wary of First World superiority. Malawi did not embrace public tax-funded education with the abolition of school fees till 1994, fully 130 years after Nova Scotia pioneered the practice in Canada, yet Laurie cautions foreign-funded schools are no remedy: “Children begin to perceive their sponsors as more deserving of their respect than their own guardians,” she writes; “It isn’t uncommon for African aid projects to collapse or go awry. In fact, it happens far too frequently.”

Madonna famously adopted a Malawian boy in 2006 and pledged millions for a new school designed by a New York architect. The school was never built, though Madonna did plant a tree. Laurie cannot contain her scorn.

Teachers earn $120 a month, a pittance the author blames on creditor restrictions to public service pay imposed by the International Monetary Fund. At Laurie’s adopted school tuition is paid in maize and beans. The neighbouring poor eat termites for protein.

Of course there is more to it than this. Weaving A Malawi Sunrise cites vignettes of the Third World like the striking absence of municipal lighting – “Darkness descends like a velvet curtain”, she writes – and the plague of township dogs: “They are vicious and unpredictable. I have not met a Malawian who is not fearful of dogs, and their fears are valid.”

What is it like to walk to school in Malawi? Laurie recounts the daily four-kilometre trek of students: “The girls were between thirteen and sixteen years old and none of them owned shoes,” she explains; “Along the way they crossed five streams, two lacking bridges. They also passed two graveyards, where the girls were afraid of encountering witches and hyenas, and they cut through numerous farmers’ fields where, during cultivation season, they were frightened of being chased off or harassed.”

Weaving A Malawi Sunrise is kind and eloquent, by turn angry and evocative in the manner of a writer who tells of finding her place. Laurie remembers Solstina, a schoolgirl who endured an unhappy marriage and many hardships for the privilege of taking a classroom exam: “Before I finish Solstina’s story, there is something else I’d like you to know. When the women of Malawi speak English, their voice sing. It’s as though something magical transforms their voices. There is a lilt and a rhythm that makes their voices sound like song. Solstina has one of these voices, and when she says, ‘Ahh, no’, it is like a sigh. As I type her words, I can her voice. It makes me want to weep.”

By Holly Doan

Weaving A Malawi Sunrise: A Woman, A School, A People by Roberta Laurie; University of Alberta Press; 432 pages; ISBN 9781-7721-20868; $39.95