Anatomy of A Smear (Layton 2011)

One of democracy's larger problems is that the populace is fairly naive on how intelligence operations work and slimy media ops are a sub-category of these.  So let's break down a media smear campaign and see how it worked.

The 2011 federal election was a grab-bag of Conservative dirty tricks: robo-calls mislead voters in 40 cities to the wrong polling stations,  hidden bank accounts and illegal funding were the norms, a chunk of the G20 funding went to buying off Muskoka voters, their candidates had to repeatedly resign, all rallies were vetted  to keep out unhappy veterans while cultural centers were called to see if people in 'ethnic costume' would come to diversify the crowd. The crowning touch was a media smear in the final days of the campaign.

The Liberal candidate was a Harper-clone called Igantieff who inspired no one, but the NDP candidate, Jack Layton, was pulling crowds and high polling numbers. As the last weekend before Election Monday arrived Layton was in a good position to give the NDP their largest federal election result ever. This is when the Tory's pulled out one last smear from their dirty tricks bag.

The weekend before an election is a traditional time to launch weak smears with the hope of controlling the weekend news cycle with a negative story that will taint the candidate enough to shave a few points off their votes. It may have been imported to Canada from the US because I find the earliest mentions of it there, perhaps it came when Harper hired Republican PR experts to help him. The smear is often baseless or very old yet this is unimportant sense the hope is to swing emotions over that 3-day period before investigations can look it into it or even discover who anonymously leaked it. It is a base appeal to judgmental gossip over reason.

I saw it in my hometown of Sudbury when the leftist mayoral incumbent, was smeared during in 2011 when an anonymously-given reports of some City Hall labour dispute from a decade earlier was published by the Sudbury Star on the weekend before the vote.  This smear would serve as a virtual template for the Layton smear as both were anonymously -sourced reports about ancient information published by SunMedia outlets right before an election.

The Layton smear begins in 1996 when an anonymous "Asian crime unit officer" claims he was stopping by the cities 3,000 illicit massage parlours looking for underage Thai prostitutes. He says he found Layton naked in the 'Velvet Touch' parlor, Layton denied he was receiving anything more than a shiatsu to relieve exercise soreness and denied knowing it was prostitution site. The anonymous officer also claimed to have seen "wet Kleenex" dumped into a garbage can.

Upon realizing that the man was the "controversial" Toronto counselor, the officer decided to keep his notes (and their blackmail potential) when he realized that there was no evidence to lay any charges. "To have arrested him and charged him would have served our egos a lot more. Layton was a thorn in the side of the police, siding with the anti-poverty movement in '96 or '97 ... Jack was anti-police," the anonymous ex-cop told the TO Sun. Without seeing any irony, the same cop says he "lectured" Layton that Asian triads might videotape him to use for extortion.

How these notes left the police and became public in the intervening 16 years is unknown. The officer who took the notes seemed surprized it took that long, commenting, "I thought this would have come out. This thing within the circle was so well known." When questions about the leaked info grew a right-wing columnist came forward to say that the photocopies of those notes had been offered to him 2 days before the 2008 federal election by Liberal insiders but he had refused to run it. This might indicate that those notes were shopped around for years before their final use or it also may have been a post-operation cover story to deflect attention away from the Conservatives as the smear had their fingerprints all over it. The 'weekend election smear' is a classic tactic that has been used by Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals, so who knows? All you need is a 24/7 news-cycle, a friendly reporter, some innuendo and a lack of morals.

On Friday April 29, the non-story finally broke in the vociferously conservative Toronto Sun, and once it was published it spread through the media-sphere as all the other news media repeated it least they found themselves not covering the major story of that weekend.  The titles of news articles from that weekend tell everything: " Layton found in bawdy house: Ex-cop"; "NDP leader defends himself in campaign's final hours"; " Layton camp in damage control over massage parlour allegations";" Layton slams ‘smear campaign’ over massage-parlour allegations"

Olivia Chow, Layton's wife and fellow Toronto Councillor, was brought out to spin the damage with her narrative, “Sixteen years ago, my husband went for a massage at a massage clinic that is registered with the City of Toronto. He exercises regularly; he was and remains in great shape; and he needed a massage. No one was more surprised than my husband when the police informed him of allegations of potential wrongdoing at this establishment.” Chow was far more "anti-police" than Layton who tilted the NDP right on criminal justice issues, her time on Toronto's Police Service Board brought her into direct conflict with the aggressive police union who hired ex-cop private investigators to tap her phone and shadow her. The Toronto Police seemed caught off guard by the purlioning of their notes, their spokesman dryly commenting, “Someone’s going to have to do some research on that incident before the organization is going to speak on it.”


The smear was weak, it was a glancing cheap-shot throw at the very end of a fight, but the ugly intent behind was clear. This was journalism at it's worst, anonymous sources leaking old info to taint election voters with crass appeals to salacious minds. Last weekend leaking should be illegal because the media is too supine to stop it themselves. The smear did not stop the NDP  who went on their highest seat count ever with 103, the so-called "Orange Crush".  If anything the smear seemed to boost Layton with one poll find a large jump in his numbers as the public sensed the unfairness of the tactic.

Like the smear job in Sudbury, the Layton smear depended on a leak of confidential information by an anonymous public employee though a SunMedia outlet, and in both cases the OPP racket unit was eventually called in to see if criminal acts had taken place. There were palpable clouds of stink left by those smears and there was enough public/online indignation (and theft of confidential documents...) to force the police into action. In both cases the OPP declined to press charges because police don't like to -openly- interfere with elections. The OPP's true role was sit on everything for the better part of year until all the public anger resided.

The question of what went in that parlor is likely lost to history. No one complained about the Velvet Touch parlour but it was said to be on the police radar as a potential 'rub and tug' bawdy house and it closed soon after the police visit. The real question is how such information can be weaponized and deployed through a series of anonymous leaks, political operatives and SunMedia outlets collaborate to effect Canadian elections. In other words how do media intelligence operations manipulate democracies.

This was a low-rent, crudely emotional, operation - but most intelligence ops are, 'intelligence' refers to the control of information and public opinion not the IQ of those running it. As long as most people think such operations are the realm of elite spies and hackers and not political fixers, corrupt columnists and bent vice cops they then are especially vulnerable to such ops. The current US election has stirred up a confusing hornet's nests of leaks, counter-spins, and accusations of omnipresent "Russian hackers", releasing smears before the election is just the tip of this iceberg.

[I notice that a recent Counterpunch podcast tackles straight-up CIA manipulation of the media: http://store.counterpunch.org/nicholas-schou-episode-52/]