OTTAWA-A key Conservative strategist based in Chicago has left Stephen Harper’s election team following accusations from senior management at Sun Media Organization that he used the news agency as a pawn in a Tory plot to “seriously damage Michael Ignatieff’s campaign.”
The accusations from the group’s president and CEO, Pierre Karl Peladeau, were related to a front-page story in Sun Media newspapers last week which alleged that Ignatieff was “on the front lines” with former president George W. Bush’s administration in planning the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
In a scathing critique published Wednesday, Peladeau accused the long-term Harper adviser, Patrick Muttart, of coordinating the misleading media reports about Ignatieff which appeared in the newspapers.
Peladeau said Muttart approached Sun News’ vice president Kory Teneycke, also a former adviser to Harper, to deliver a “report” from a U.S. source about Ignatieff’s alleged activities.
The material, supplied by Muttart, included a photo which was supposed to provide proof of the claims, but that turned out to have nothing to do with the Liberal leader.
“But it is the ultimate source of this material that is profoundly troubling to me, my colleagues and, I think, should be of concern to all Canadians,” Peladeau wrote.
“It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff’s campaign but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News.”
Responding to the report last week, Ignatieff explained that he did humanitarian research with non-government groups about reducing casualties during an armed conflict.
The controversy was among several back-to-back front page headlines from the newspaper chain which attacked Ignatieff’s credibility, patriotism and past remarks.
But Peladeau wrote that the entire affair demonstrates that the news divisions of his media organization are not “the official organs of the Conservative Party of Canada.”
“I offer this unfortunate episode as Exhibit A,” Peladeau wrote.
The Conservative party has dismissed suggestions that it was using inappropriate campaign tactics.
But it distanced itself from Muttart, considered to be one of the masterminds behind Harper’s first electoral victory in the 2006 general election.
“Contrary to what some have reported, Patrick hasn’t been working in the (Conservative) war room or been in Ottawa,” wrote Conservative spokesman Chisholm Pothier in an email. “He has however done some paid consulting work for the campaign. Patrick has no further role in our campaign.”
Muttart, a former deputy chief of staff to Harper, is now a managing director at Mercury, a U.S.-based public relations firm. But the Conservatives did not answer questions about whether he had done the paid consulting work from Chicago, where his office is based.
The Tories said that its campaign team gave Sun Media information “acquired during Internet research,” including the photo.
But the Conservatives also noted that it told Sun Media that it could not verify whether the picture confirmed the allegations.Muttart was considered to be one of the masterminds behind Harper’s first electoral victory in the 2006 general election.
mdesouza@postmedia.com
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