TORONTO: Columnist Doug Cuthand expected controversy when he sat down to write a piece comparing Palestinians seeking a sovereign state to native Canadian Indians such as himself.

But readers did not even have a chance to read this column. Editors at Cuthand’s hometown Star-Phoenix newspaper “spiked,” or killed, the piece, the only time he could recall such a thing happening in about 500 columns.

Editors told Cuthand the column was “historically inaccurate.” Others in the newsroom suggested it was too “anti-Israel” for a paper owned by CanWest, which is controlled by Winnipeg’s Asper family, a strong supporter of Israel.

CanWest strenuously denies this. “The guy (Cuthand) was hired to write about aboriginal affairs, not international affairs or the Middle East, and frankly he doesn’t have much expertise in that latter area,” Murdoch Davis, editor-in-chief of CanWest’s Southam News, said.

“If people want to construe that local decision as having some big corporate ghost behind it, at some point these things get pretty hard to rebut because they’re such flights of fancy.”

The controversy heated up further in January when columnist Stephen Kimber resigned from CanWest’s Halifax Daily News after the paper refused to run a piece he wrote suggesting the Asper family viewed their papers as personal pulpits.

“For me it is the question of Israel, and what you could say and not say there,” Kimber said. “Almost anything that you wrote that might be construed as not supportive of the Israeli government position was a nonstarter, and that I found frightening.”

CanWest Chief Executive Leonard Asper recently told the Canadian Jewish News that while the newspaper chain’s “editorial position may be pro-Israel, that does not mean that good, sound opposing material can’t appear.” The Aspers are Jewish.

But some commentators say the Aspers are little different to predecessors whose papers often reflected his own conservative views.—Reuters