Keith McArthur was a colleague of mine at The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. While I was there, he did some top-notch work reporting on Air Canada and other transportation matters. Keith recently left the Globe to join the communications and government relations firm Veritas Communications Inc., where he’ll be working on that firm’s new social media division.
In Veritas weekly newsletter “Touchdowns and Fumbles”, Keith takes a look at Deputy Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s recent musings on how the puffin ought to the official bird of his party:
Every once in a while a story comes along that forces you to stop and check if you're reading a serious publication or a satirical one like The Onion. Millions of Canadians went through this last week when reports came out that Michael Ignatieff, the former-next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, suggested that the Atlantic Puffin should be his party's official bird. Why? Well, it has good family values, Ignatieff said. Puffin couples stay together for 30 years. Oh, and another thing: They “hide their excrement.” Really. He said it. Conservative bloggers, predictably, are having a field day with the comment, tying puffin poop to the sponsorship scandal, the human resources “boondoggle” and so on. Another take we're seeing is that the Chrétienites and the Martinites should have done a better job of hiding the fecal matter between them. At the risk of sounding obvious, this puffin business serves as a reminder of one of the most basic rules of talking to the media: Think about what you're going to say before you say it. Or as my colleague Janine Allen put it: “Note to self: do not include word “excrement” in any context when speaking to media.”