Up until a few days ago, I had never heard of Stephen Kimber.

He seems like quite an accomplished gentleman: holding a named chair in journalism at the respected University of Kings College in Halifax, author of eight books (generally concerned with Nova Scotia) and a novel, Reparations, published by Harper Collins. Winner of a National Author's Award for best business business magazine article. His work has appeared in most of Canada's most popular English dailies and magazines.

The reason Mr. Kimber popped up my radar was this blog he posted on Saturday, discussing his involvement with the CBC and the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.

It relates to our own blog posting last week. For those who haven't been following this, Derek Fildebrandt, our national research director, filed an Access-to-Information (ATI) request in November 2010, relating to the Friends organization. Derek was sitting in the research cave one particular day in November, and he got it into his head that it would be funny to see of anybody in the steering committee of Friends had any kind of money-making business relationship with the CBC. Derek sends off hundreds of ATI requests every year, sometimes following the random impulses of his suspicious, and some would say twisted, inner guide, hunting down waste and skulduggery wherever they occur in government.

Only a handful of Derek's inquiries relate to the CBC, and only one of those involved the Friends. And when Mother Corp. finally coughed up the information, we did a 331-word blog posting about it, and put the source documents on our web site for those who are interested.

The documents showed that three of eight members of the Friends steering committee received what we described as "quite small sums of money," including Mr. Kimber, who got $675 over the course of a ten-year period. This was a little bit funny, but funnier still was the status of the other five members of the sterring committee. The CBC told us they had not received full consent from the other five to release any information about them. The Friends put out a statement on their web site stating that they indeed had consented. And 85 pages of the 162-page document were blanked out, reflecting some sort of business dealings with somebody that remain undisclosed to the public. We've urged the Friends and the CBC to sort this out, between friends.

Mr. Kimber and the Friends are missing the point of this exercise, and Mr. Kimber is missing it in a particularly nasty way. The Friends official blog post was entitled Taxpayers Federation statements false. If you read through it, they didn't address the fact that three of their eight steering committee members took money from the CBC, and that we have 85 pages of censored material relating to at least one of the other five members. They simply state that the organization itself has never taken money from the CBC, rendering our blog post somehow false. They also take issue with the CBC's statement we reported, that some steering members did not fully consent to releasing the information, labeling this fact as "false." And they provided a letter from one of the five, purporting to demonstrate that everyone involved gave the CBC the green light to release the information.

Funny thing is that Derek has been burning up the phone lines with the CBC and they confirm that, “no explicit consent was received” from several of the Friends to disclose any financial gain that may or may not have received from the CBC.

Another funny thing. Just today the CBC received consent from one of the undisclosed individuals at Friends who had not yet given it. “Today” is February 6, 2012. The Friends claim that, “All members of the Friends’ Steering Committee gave explicit written permission to the CBC to release the requested information.” That was February 2, as in 4 days ago. As of 3:30 pm EST, the CBC has not received consent from all Friends Steering Committee members.

Considering the Friends claimed that all its members gave explicit consent for disclosure in a release titled, “Taxpayers Federation statements false,” they may wish to reconsider their wording.

This is getting a little wordy for a blog post, but for the benefit of the six or eight Canadians who are following the issue, it's important to keep a few things in perspective. We didn't take any shots at the Friends or at the CBC. The Friends organization is very active - they put out at least ten policy briefs a year. We don't follow their work closely and we haven't done a checklist of issues where we agree and disagree. There's nothing false about the documentation showing the business dealings between the Friends steering committee members and the CBC, and it is good that it's now public. The 85 censored pages should be made public. We didn't draw any conclusions about the data on the pages, we simply put the information out there.

For those seeking to learn more about the long and nasty history between our two organizations, enjoy the research project. There isn't any.

That's why Mr. Kimber's response to all this is at once puzzling and troubling. He opens his blog posting by referring to the Canadian (sic) Taxpayers Federation, questioning, I suppose, whether we're Canadian, and by extension, whether my dad and Granddad really fought in the Second World War, whether my uncle Henry was really wounded in Koriea, and whether my uncle Harry really died on Vimy Ridge.

Mr. Kimber goes to characterize our staff as mostly run by "hacks and right-wing zealots" beholden to one of the federal political parties" - take a guess which one - and he tosses in a few more jabs, calling our disclosures "behind the hand" and our style "breathless." Fair enough, he doesn't like us, and fact-checking is a time-consuming task.

But the really troubling part of Mr. Kimber's remarks comes at the end. "Who else, he asks, "has a vested interest in getting rid of the CBC?"

Never mind that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has never said anything about getting rid of the CBC.

He answers his own question. "Can you say Quebecor? Sun Media? Surprise. Surprise."

"Do Quebecor, Sun Media, their executives or board members contribute to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation? If so, how much?"

"I'm guessing that those corporate interests would be far more generous in putting CTF on their payrolls that the CBC has been with me."

If one of Mr. Kimber's journalism school students presented me with such an argument, I would probably offer these comments: "your piece has nice flow to it, Stephen, but here's the problem. The CTF have documentary evidence of you taking money from the CBC. You have responded with an accusation, a serious accusation, bearing on the character of the CTF, but you have offered no proof, no evidence, nothing but your prejudice. There was an American Senator from Wisconsin who made a career of that. His name was Joe McCarthy."