Because You NEED Another Ann Coulter Post

...and its a slow news day and I'm feeling lazy:

The cancellation of controversial conservative commentator Ann Coulter’s Ottawa talk seemed to Capital Diary to be due less to protesters and more to incompetent organizers. Those in charge of the event kept allowing people into the foyer of the lecture hall until occupants were in danger of being crushed. The two sets of doors that opened into that foyer became difficult to open with all the bodies pushing through, creating a serious safety hazard. (At one point the fire alarm was pulled.) Ottawa police officers, who are certainly used to dealing with large crowds, seasoned protesters and dignitaries (like Barack Obama) rolling through town, were on hand but decided to allow the crowd to grow as more and more people from the long line outside pushed in. Ten minutes before the event was to start, two organizers started to slowly check off names from an email list and let people in. It soon became obvious many of the hundreds of people in line who had been waiting for hours would not get in, yet organizers chose not to inform them, fuelling anger in the crowd. “Will we even get in?” people started shouting. Fifteen to 20 minutes after the first people had been let in, entry to the hall was stopped (even though lots of VIPs continued to get in through side doors). Around 8 p.m., with the hall about half full, the event was cancelled.

Click through the link for a particularly dorky picture of Ezra.

Coulter at U-of-O: In The Aftermath Of The Aftermath

A minor mystery solved, and some background on the organizational bungling at the University of Ottawa.

Margaret Wente writes:

Many people suspect that Ms. Coulter was getting her tactical advice from Ezra Levant, the loud-mouthed scourge of left-leaning academics and human-rights commissions. Mr. Levant, in his characteristic style, referred to the protesting students as “brownshirts.” Although he is widely suspected of leaking the Houle letter to the National Post, where it wound up on the front page, this is not the case. The letter was leaked by Doug Pepper, the publisher of McClelland and Stewart. He is an old friend and editor of the stringy agitator. His brother-in-law is the Post's editor.

Now we know. Coulter's editor leaked the Houle letter--presumably to stir up interest in the event, and what transpired in the face of this increased interest? Shiva (not her real name)--one of Coulter's organizers--gives some information which Free Dominion which, while obviously biased, nevertheless helps fill in a few of the blanks:

1) For one thing, she admits that the U-of-O protesters were non-violent. Although I doubt her further assertion that the building was "surrounded" by protesters. But by all means, read her whole statement can be read through the links.

2) In a later post, Shiva expands in detail on what happens in the lead-up to the U-of-O Coulter non-appearance:

Second event in Ottawa, Room capacity was only 475 so only approx 440 people were registered by the organizers. We were told on Monday afternoon at approx. 5:00 that if we did not hire (and pay for) 4 more security guards to add to the number we had already arranged for, that the event would be cancelled. Even though it felt like bullying, we readily agreed since they said they had reason to believe the event could turn violent and they wanted to ensure that we had a safe event for attendees. I have the proof in the form of a telephone message left for me and the subsequent email I received with the revised contract adding the additional security personnel that we were TOLD we must have or risk having our event canceled. At approx. 3:00 in the afternoon on the day of the event, I called the campus security contact and found a very concerned and confused man who said that he had been told the event was open to the public was first come, first serve, and who also told me that protestors had already begun to assemble themselves outside the venue. I set him straight regarding this event being first come, first serve and asked him why he would take the word of people who had not been involved in organizing the event? I made it clear that we had only registered a certain number of people and that they were the only ones who should be showing up. I've already addressed the other issues with how and when things became ugly but I'll add one other fact: The media in Ottawa were brutal. They were like a pack of jackals who refused to move out of the way as we tried to process registered people. We, politely at first, asked them to move out of the way instead of crowding the already congested registration area, so that we could get the registered people in and then determine if there was enough room to let the media in. They absolutely refused to get out of the way and instead kept pressing in and trying to find ways to sneak into the venue. They also refused to abide by the conditions we set, unlike the media in London who were cooperative in that respect. Am I surprised to find that most of the lies about the event are coming from the media who were present at the Ottawa event? When I put it to a few of them that they were contributing to an unsafe situation for the people in that room, a few of them had the nerve to say it was due to poor organization. I reminded them that we had, using the same methodology, managed to register double the number of people in London the night before without incident, but apparently we can't let logic get in the way of a good spin. There was NO conversation with me or anyone else at IFPS, about moving to a larger venue. That is an absolute lie because if they had said anything like that I would have told them to stuff it and would have instead suggested that the campus security we PAID for, do their bloody jobs and get rid of the people who had no business being there.

So, a couple of things here. The University had a full day previous to the event expressed concern at the size of the venue secured by its organizers. Shiva's response on Tuesday to the security guards worries re people already showing up outside the building is painfully naive given the fact that the Coulter camp has already leaked Houle's letter. How could they expect only those people who had pre-registered to show up, especially when they had done so much to attempt to draw wider attention to the event? We also know that many of the over-flow crowd consisted of people who had indeed registered, and who had not registered but were Coulter fans, as well as critics ad protesters. Just how campus security was supposed to separate these folks out and physically remove the rest is not explained. One assumes clubbing would be involved.

So, in the end, Coulter's organizers bungled the registration process in Ottawa, panicked, and then had Ezra go out and blame Canada for their screw-up. Too many of Canada's pundit class have, unfortunately followed this line of misinformation, probably because most of them can hack out a "Free Speech Under Attack" column in their sleep. Its presumably a little more difficult to crank out 500 words on the subject of how Conservative activists attempted to rent a room in Ottawa and failed miserably.

Hopefully, this will be my last post on Ms. Coulter.

More On Crap Planning At Coulter Event In Ottawa

I was front row centre at the Ann Coulter "protest" on Tuesday night so I want to clear up a few misconceptions about what happened.

[...]

The U of O Campus Conservatives who organized the event did a very poor job. They were close to an hour behind schedule before they announced to the large crowd of then-agitated students that if we weren't registered, we weren't getting in. It was chaos when frustrated fans and critics of Coulter were then penned inside the building, the organizers were blocking entry into Marion Hall and the large crowd outside made it to difficult to leave.

It's sad that Coulter and Ezra Levant will go around trumpeting this as some free speech disaster when the truth is that this event was cancelled due to extremely poor planning by the organizers, some idiotic decisions by the SFUO and some prankster pulling a fire alarm.

Alex Sellick,
Ottawa

Coulter: The Aftermath

The aftermath is that almost all the things Ezra and Coulter's organizers have said about the cancellation of her speaking event at the University of Ottawa on Tuesday night have proven bogus. Lets walk through a few of them.

1) The cops/U-of-O shut down the event. Nope. It was Coulter's own gang of organizers that pulled the plug, contrary to what Coulter said late Tuesday.

2) The cops advised Ezra and his gang of volunteer fuck-ups from the University of Ottawa Campus Conservatives (who rented a room several orders of magnitude too small) to shut down the event. Bullshit! Or at least, that isn't the cops' story:

Ottawa police also issued statements about the Coulter affair Wednesday. Spokesman Alain Boucher said the police did not shut down the event, but said a different venue was needed to hold the crowd of around 1,500 people.

"We strongly suggested that this venue was not large enough to accommodate all the people that had attended," he said. "We had safety concerns with the sheer number of people that were there . . . with different views on issues."

And here's Boucher speaking to another media outlet:

Ottawa Police Services spokesman Const. Alain Boucher said officers had safety concerns because there were about 1,500 people in the lobby outside a venue with just 175 seats and shared those concerns with campus security, event organizers and Coulter's bodyguard but left the decision to them.

Note the police reasoning here: basically, the organizers hadn't rented a large enough room for the number of people that showed up. This speaks not to the efforts of the literally dozens of demonstraters who showed up and protested non-violently, but to the inability of the U-of-O Conservative Campus Club to rent a hall for a crazy lady and her maybe 1,000 fans/critics without having the whole event descend into chaos. Nobody can blame "The Left" for this. Maybe, if anything, the conservatives on the U-of-O campus need a little bit in the way of Special Ed.

3) The event was shut down by protesters. Again, bullshit! There were maybe 100 of these people, and the one report of anything resembling violence at the event is 3rd party. People say they heard a table got thrown over, for example, but nobody saw it, not even Deb Gyonpang who first reported it. On the other hand, there are a multititude of stories about the incompetence of the wevent organizers:

7:00: Doors still not open, people getting really antsy given poor logistics (more on this later)

And:

It was a disaster in terms of just organization, which is probably one of the reasons why it was cancelled.

Finally, 4) Ann Coulter was subject to death threats prior to the event. Double bullshit! Triple! Here's the document Ezra sent CBC to make the case: in the twelve pages taken from an Ottawa-area Facebook page, there is one reference to hurling rotten tomatoes, one to tarring and feathering, and one suggestion that Coulter should be dipped in gravy and locked in a room with a wolverine high on angel-dust. Now, two things about this last: 1) it would have been extremely difficult to smuggle both a wolverine and the requisite amount of gravy into the U-of-O auditorium, and 2) if it was Coulter that was supposed to be high on angel dust, I doubt one wolverine would do the trick. In any case, if that's what Ezra and Ann were afraid of, they are bigger chicken-shits than I ever imagined.

PS. And I was a little wrong yesterday in noting that nobody important was planning to show up at the Coulter speech; she did manage to snag back-bencher Brent Rathgeber.

PPS. Here's a photo-stream from one of the kids that "infiltrated" the event. Terrence thinks they (the kids) are scary.

Coulter Cancellation: An Alternative Theory

CTV's Daniele Hamamdjian said "a combination of overcapacity and utter disorganization" contributed to the collapse of the event.

Prior to the cancellation, Hamamdjian said only a small number of students were tasked with verifying the names of the people who had signed up to attend Coulter's talk.

"It was a disaster in terms of just organization, which is probably one of the reasons why it was cancelled," Hamamdjian told CTV News Channel from Ottawa on Wednesday morning.

Police eventually showed up to the scene and blocked the door to the building, but Hamamdjian said she doubted whether the combination of protesters and disorganization actually constituted "a physical risk to Ann Coulter."

By the way, all reports of tables being "thrown aside" emanate from Deb Gyapong's twitter feed, as far as I can tell. She now says she was not actually witness to these events.

deBeauxOs notes in the comments that it's the Ottawa Campus Conservatives that organized this event, as confirmed by D. Akins' original post.

Coulter In Context

You can get some idea of Coulter's real position within the political firmament by noting all the federal Conservative big-wheels her Ottawa appearance brought out:

One of those helping to facilitate and organize this event is Ashley Scorpio, who is listed in the government's electronic directory, as a staffer working in the office of Conservative MP Gerald Keddy. (She has also worked for Ontario Conservative MP Patrick Brown and was once an administrative assistant in the Harper PMO.) Ms. Scorpio, it should be noted, did not use her Parliamentary contact info. Instead she invited those who wanted to tickets or information to contact her via a Hotmail address.

And, oh yeah, a fistful of nerdlingers from the U-of-O Conservative Campus Club. Which is to say that nobody of any stature was willing to appear in the same room as Ms. Coulter. As CC notes, she and her gang have become entirely irrelevant to political discourse in this country.

Indeed, the Levant/Coulter tour can be viewed as the after-life of Ezra's free speech/anti-HRC (human rights commision) crusade, as it shuffles from university to university not even knowing that its dead. Dead federally, dead in Alberta, and Hudak's not saying a word about it these days. Even Jason Kenney seems to have accepted his constraints (emphasis below is mine):

Kenney: Mr. Speaker, this government supports free speech within the Canadian law.

PS. Some interesting observations from SDA. That's the "mob" below:

Mobs seemed alot bigger when I was young, and I think "unruly" must have meant something a bit different.

Also, Coulter was playing to an audience of around 400. Not very big. And remember it was Coulter's organizers that called off the event, not the police or campus security.

Note: Here Coulter seems to be claiming it was the police that shut down the event.

PS. this story suggests it was Coulter's bodyguard made the call.