Tobias Enverga's Campaign for Acceptance
Volume 1, Issue No. 6 OPINION/COMMENTARY
The News UpFront: (TOP STORY) as of Friday, November 10, 2017
~ A 12-page newsletter is the latest in Tobias Enverga's arsenal of gimmicks to raise his profile in the Filipino community. It came out as an insert in a tabloid known for its leftist sympathies and fake news. But it's all optics. Filipino Canadians know how to discern now. A member of the Senate or a celebrity? To be or not to be? At this juncture, we're saddled with both - one satiating himself with perks courtesy of taxpayers, and one taking advantage of those perks to make himself a celebrity that he can not be.
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FIVE YEARS PAST AND HE'S STILL AT IT
Tobias Enverga's Campaign for Acceptance
By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ
Editor, The Filipino Web Channel
TORONTO - Five years as a member of the unelected Senate, Tobias Enverga is still pursuing a campaign for acceptance by the Filipino community in Ontario, the province he represents in the Red Chamber.
The latest is this glossy, full-colour, 12-page handout called "5th Year Newsletter" which came out as an insert in one of his favourite tabloids, the left-leaning, fake news advocate named Philippine Supporter, oops, I mean Philippine Reporter.
The contents are essentially re-publication of pictures and press releases that have been printed in the friendly tabloids in the last five years. Nothing earth-shaking, nothing new - all a rehash of the recycled garbage that, in journalism, is called stale news.
Though guaranteed a tenure of up to age 75, or sooner if he misbehaves, Enverga's hold on his office looks tenuous, thus the drive to high visibility in community events and socials by local associations and individuals. He must look relevant!
This is the reason, I believe, he could not dissociate himself from the organization he founded, the Philippine Canadian Charitable Foundation (PCCF), and be the knowledgeable and reputable senator his constituents expect him to be.
PCCF gives him the legitimacy platform to engage in activities he seems to have been born into - giving out awards and certificates of recognition, putting false crowns on heads of beauty queens, making shallow and repetitious speeches, cajoling people to be thankful for the gift of being in Canada.
In the five years of my coverage of him, Enverga still sounds like the carnival barker I thought he was at some events where he was a guest or allowed to speak. Then as now, he fails to impress - and that is my personal assessment.
I still have to hear him in a serious discussion of issues, for example, on why he believes the Filipino community deserves representation in the Senate by somebody like him, instead of telling us that his appointment was for all of us. "Para ho sa ating lahat ito," he repeatedly stated in his speeches. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx_euoquzQ).
Have you ever seen him holding a town hall meeting? But he's very active where the optics are good, showing up in events for the photo ops and promptly gone once his driver-photographer had snapped the shots.
I wonder what it is for us to find him in the Senate one late summer day in September 2012, like we're suddenly jolted from a night of fantasy only to see that a bad dream, him, had become reality.
Obviously, he was trying to talk-share his good fortune being the recipient of a lifetime job, earning handsomely from taxpayers, and having a status he flouted with total disregard for niceties befitting a member of the Red Chamber. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlhUO-VXrOo).
When he got into the Senate two weeks after his appointment, Julie Faux, secretary of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, characterized him as "an excellent representative of his local community in Toronto and the Filipino community in Canada". (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwNdIkXF7s).
How Faux reached that conclusion is unclear, for there appeared to be no consultation at all with the Filipino community on why he, outside of his Conservative stripe, was being chosen to represent one of the most dynamic ethnic groups in Ontario.
Faux stated at that time that Enverga's "talents and experience will bring a positive voice to our Upper Chamber," which makes me wonder what those were when the community knew all along that he was a fund-raiser made highly visible by a friendly "lamestream" press. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNkHG36opmI).
But a friend opined that it was exactly for that reason Harper had chosen him. Even then, he hardly typifies the Filipino-Canadian in the shape and mold he cast him - that of the "best at karaoke". We're higher than the most mundane characterizations of us, unless one succumbs to the marginalization many of us are experiencing in Canada.
Enverga's appointment, to put it bluntly, does not help us, but it does help him, his family, and some close friends. And the community? No, no, no, no . . . except if you belong to his extended family named Philippine Canadian Charitable Foundation (PCCF).
Five years have passed and all we're shown is the usual dog and pony show by the PCCF and how it amasses thousands of dollars from its nonsensical beauty pageants bordering on child exploitation. Just look at its website and one finds contest categories for boys and girls age 5 to 10 years. Why do parents allow this?
If only Harper, Faux and the Conservatives had checked, they would have found out that Enverga was committing something that might not sit well with Faux's pronouncement.
For in April 2012, a full five months before his appointment was announced, Enverga and a friend, Ace Alvarez, were engaged in subverting a community organization Enverga had twice headed, the Philippine Independence Day Council (PIDC).
Enverga and Alvarez had conspired in creating the fictitious Tony Tarungan who initially had disseminated confidential information known only to a few PIDC officials disclosing the mass resignation of its ranking officials. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNhl-SRW--0).
Those officials, including Enverga's wife Rosemer Albovias Enverga who had managed PIDC's money-making beauty contests, soon joined the Philippine Canadian Charitable Foundation (PCCF) that Enverga had founded in 2010. (The PCCF logo carries the year 2008, presumably its birth year. Enverga claims in his Senate bio sketch that he founded PCCF in 2010).
Sources interviewed for this story said the assumption then was that Enverga didn't know he was being groomed by Harper for the Senate, for if he had known it, he would not have engaged in the underground activity with Alvarez, a former publisher of a defunct tabloid.
While Enverga has been quite intense in running after Balita for its reportage of a story that had brought the defamation suit, he stays silent on the story about Tony Tarungan, the online troll he fathered with Alvarez to sabotage PIDC.
Alvarez, who sometimes doubled as Enverga's propagandist, appears to have taken a vow of omerta too. Alvarez's Russell International, "a print and broadcast production house", was the biggest cash recipient of all local media entities that had a hand in the 2010 PIDC beauty pageants handled by Mrs. Enverga.
But back to Balita. Like any other newspaper doing investigative reporting, the paper believes and practices its self-decreed mandate to hold public officials accountable. Enverga is no exception. His transparency leaves much to be desired, i.e. if he meaningfully practices it at all.
Balita had slugged it out with Enverga at great personal and financial costs if only to arrive at the truth of what he had done, what he's been doing, what has transpired in his political life from the time he became active in the community, became PIDC president, left it and founded PCCF.
How I wish he would stand up for all of us. How I wish he's the one who truly represents Filipino-Canadians and not the one who persecutes those who seek the truth. I wish he would stop his selfish attempts to be a celebrity knowing the glamor world is hard to resist. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFNAMLr-qgc).
But then again, it's all wishful thinking.
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