J.J. McCullough2013-05-24T16:13:29-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=jj-mcculloughCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for J.J. McCulloughGood old fashioned elbow grease.Media Bites: Are These Politicians Actually Journalists, or Vice Versa?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33240502013-05-23T08:24:17-04:002013-05-23T08:25:10-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/surrounding Senator Mike Duffy at the moment, it's a bit odd that one of the most critical underlying questions about the man seems to have largely escaped discussion.
Namely: what's a CTV talking-head even doing in politics in the first place?
The Canadian press, ostensibly, is a neutral instrument of public service that covers politics but does not covet it. On the contrary, if anything, we expect our reporters, editors, producers, and pundits to be turned off by the whole mess, since a mild distaste (or at least distrust) for their subject matter is what helps motivate coverage that's adversarial, skeptical, and suspicious towards the behaviour of folks known for, shall we say, a somewhat relaxed attitude towards truth and accountability.
In modern Canada, alas, that critical detachment between press and politics -- the notion that these two worlds are incurably hostile parties locked in existential opposition -- seems to be steadily eroding, as notables on both sides make peace in a cozy truce. Because political journalism and politics itself are professions broadly "about" the same things, the trades are increasingly assumed to be a great deal more interchangeable than they probably are. The result is a line separating present-day commentator from future commentee that's getting pretty darn blurry.
According to the Senate's online membership directory, there are currently over half a dozen senators listing their prior occupation as "journalist," "columnist," "reporter," or some such, a list that includes not only the embattled Mr. Duffy and his equally embattled CTV colleague Pamela Wallin, but also former Montreal Gazette editor Joan Fraser, ex-CBC VP Marie Charette-Poulin, and two-time National Post columnist Linda Frum (of those Frums, yes).
The House journalist caucus, meanwhile, is well over a dozen strong, and includes luminaries such as veteran CBC reporter Peter Kent, ex-National Postie John Williamson, and the recently-elected Alberta commentatress Joan Crockatt née, Calgary Hearald.
Political sinecures for journalists are no less abundant. The lieutenant governor of Ontario is a former broadcaster, so is the lt-gov of Prince Edward Island (he once worked with a certain M. Duffy, curiously enough). The last two governor generals of Canada were former CBC hosts, while Prime Minister Harper has routinely hired newspaper columnists to serve as spokesmen.
In my own dreary province, the former anchorwoman of the 6 o'clock news currently works as a full-time PR shill for the Premier, while the guy who used to tell us how to avoid scams at the supermarket enjoyed a brief stint as her press secretary. I imagine your province is no less ripe with examples of its own.
Now obviously some cross-pollination between the realms of media and government is natural, and easily justified. Both professions do require a host of similar talents -- language skills, poise, and whatnot -- and lazy men in small capitals will always have a bias towards hiring the nearby and familiar, which in Ottawa frequently means poaching from the press. It's also hardly unforgivable for a media guy who's spent decades dishing dirt on dopey politicos to make a mid-life career swap simply to prove that yes, I could do better.
But all that being said, conflicts of interests are still ultimately as much about appearance as action, and few appearances are more symbolically disheartening than the seemingly boundless supply of career curiosity members of our country's supposedly most objective profession routinely on display for its most shamelessly dishonest.
A Canadian journalism scene that's abandoned any taboo and withheld any judgement from contemporaries who use a career of fact-based reportage and analysis as a springboard to the world of ideological hackery and partisan spin is, by definition, one that's ceased to value the former. And the fruits reaped are well-known -- hyper partisan pundits, ideologically motivated reporting, philosophically segregated editorial pages, and dogmatically divided audiences. In an era where journalists see no problem sitting in Parliament, don't be surprised if the press comes to resemble Question Period.
It's a tragedy because, as usual, it's the public interest that suffers the most from the vanity of the elite. Our desire to hear the unvarnished truth from those we trust (and pay) to provide it should never be subordinate to a reporter's quest for a favourable letter of reference. Yet at a time when so many journalists are clearly pondering political futures, there's now little excuse for not harbouring conspiratorial suspicions as we read and watch them.
Has reporter so-and-so stopped pursuing the prime minister quite so vigorously because he's pining for a patronage plum? Is columnist X hesitant to speak ill of the opposition leader lest he not sign her nomination forms someday?
In an era of declining political participation, declining political literacy, declining political interest, and declining political... well, everything among the broader public, there's a related concern to be raised about a society in which more and more obligations of citizenship are getting delegated to a narrower and narrower clique of geeks who still care. That, in a sense, seems to have been at least one root of the Duffy downfall; his interest in politics was taken as qualification for actually practicing it, though it should now hopefully be abundantly clear that skill in the one realm does not correlate with talents in the other.
From the perspective of any political wannabes in the press, that might be the most chilling lesson of all.]]>Media Bites: Fordgate and Gawker Prove Canada Wants the Dirttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33049872013-05-20T12:54:13-04:002013-05-20T12:54:01-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/
So the President had an extramarital affair, so what, they scoffed -- such titillating irrelevancies wouldn't even make it to page R-35 in our papers. I mean, just imagine if our journalists wasted their time chronicling all the women bedded by old man Trudeau -- there'd be no space for mattress ads, let alone actual news.
But of course the American media made a big deal about Monica Lewinsky not because the United States is a nation of sour-mouthed puritans, but because, well, the President had an affair, and in a city as big and buzzing with reporters as Washington DC, it's hard to keep anything that hot under wraps. Indeed, I've recently been reading A Vast Conspiracy, Jeffrey Toobin's seminal account of Lewinskygate, and one of the most dramatic plot twists occurs when nervous, respectable Newsweek tries in vain to spike the Monica story, only to see it break on the blog of Matthew Drudge (whose sense of journalistic propriety was, let's say, a tad looser).
That was what made the Clinton scandal so uniquely American; not the sex, but the unapologetic refusal to keep anyone's secret, no matter how powerful. We Canadians never quite mastered that.
It would have been nice for a major Canuck gossip blog to have broken the news, but that would require the existence of such a thing in the first place. So instead Mayor Ford's dealers showed their recording to Gawker's Virginia-born editor, John Cook, whose ensuing movie review cracks jokes about not knowing what to call someone who lives in Toronto ("Torontonians? Torontites?"), and confusion over which member of the Trudeau family the Mayor thinks is a homosexual ("It's hard to keep all these Canadians apart").
Cook's story went up on 8:28 p.m. on Thursday, May 16. It was quickly followed by a Twitter announcement from the Toronto Star that a "U.S. website" was making dark allegations against the mayor. Just before midnight, the paper then uploaded a proper story byreporters Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan confirming that they too had watched the same crack-smoking video as Cook. Several weeks ago, in fact.
"[T]he Gawker piece put us in the following position," replied Kevin, only somewhat coherently. "Robyn and I had seen the video three times. We had information about something that was going to become a very important issue. We decided to write what we had seen."
We can have a healthy debate as to whether the public interest is better served by the cautious, guarded professionalism of the Star or the wild tabloid sensationalism of Cook and Gawker, but what can't be disputed is that in the age of the Internet a hell of a lot of Canadians are getting their news from the latter. The reason every major American news and gossip site from Politico to Slate seems unusually obsessed with this foreign scandal is the same reason there's so many Canadian in-jokes on American television these days -- U.S. producers are smart enough to realize that Canadians represent a major chunk of the North American consumer base, and there's very little commercial downside in giving them what they want. Especially when their own media won't.
The supposedly iconic, gentile restraint of the Canadian press -- something Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine credited with keeping our society so calm and kind -- was always artificial. It was a politeness more imposed than organic; a false consensus crafted by busybodies like the CRTC, scolds like the Broadcast Standards Council, and a handful of ideologically-motivated, self-censoring journalists, rather than any genuine outgrowth of the Canadian character - which, truth be told, has always been fairly voyeuristic and salacious (as a quick visit to any supermarket checkout will confirm).
In another age, one can imagine the Star editors sitting on Fordgate indefinitely, endlessly scratching their paternalistic heads as to whether a gossipy, anonymously-sourced story about a public figure's private demons was really the sort of thing the delicate people of Canada "needed to know." Now, however, with the Gawkers of the world happily pillaging their readers, revenue, and reputation, decency debates are a luxury Canada's old guard media establishment literally can't afford.
Fordgate is a classic example of new media leading the old, but also an uncomfortable reminder that muckraking online journalism still remains a decidedly American art -- even when its subjects are Canadian. John Cook might not be able to tell his Trudeaus apart, but he'll still dish the dirt our own press won't.
And make no mistake, dirt's what we want. Perhaps someday even sex.
]]>Media Bites: Why the Hippie Radicals - er, NDP - Lost in BCtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32774672013-05-15T08:08:06-04:002013-05-15T08:18:48-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/predicting an NDP landslide in last night's B.C. election. I can only suspect the same reason they were wrong about the recent Quebec and Albertan elections, too -- crappy sample sizes, outdated technology, stagnant polling firms that empathize data analysis over gathering, and so on.
As a resident of the province in question, what I do know, however, is that at least some of the NDP's inflated expectations were the result of B.C. voters who simply lied to pollsters that they weren't considering re-electing Premier Clark's Liberals when they secretly were. The public's perfectly justified shame in professing loyalty to a tired, scandal-tainted, three-term government with only the most lacklustre of achievements to its name may have been the B.C. Grits' secret weapon -- at least in the sense that embarrassed, hidden support for an unimpressive party everyone knows they're not supposed to like is still, well, support.
The media interprets B.C. politics through a false ideological narrative (right-versus-left) when the reality is far less glamorous. The NDP, though it possesses many perfectly intelligent people in its upper echelons, has a persistent image problem as -- and there's no way of putting this delicately -- the stupid people party. The party that can't manage an economy, can't keep its kooks in line, and can't be trusted to run a province. The Liberals are no saints, but on none of these issues does their party "read" as poorly.
The B.C. Liberal fringe, which is to say, the few genuinely conservative firebreathers the party fields in rural or interior communities in order to pander to federal Tory voters and suppress the emergence of a legitimate right-wing party to split the anti-NDP vote, is just that -- marginal and ostracized. Christy Clark's 2011 election as successor to Premier Campbell seemed to confirm that; of all the available choices, the party selected the woman who was the most (according to conventional wisdom, at least) moderate, pragmatic, and centrist. Her ascension rattled a few conservative cages at the time, but it certainly seems vindicated in retrospect.
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The B.C. NDP's far-left fringe, by contrast, always appears to be a lot closer to the party's -- and therefore the province's -- levers of power. When, in 2011, I asked NDP party boss Adrian Dix to name the U.S. politicians he most admired, he happily cited figures from furthest left of the American spectrum -- obscure characters like the ultra-liberal congressman Peter Defazio and the openly socialist senator Bernard Sanders. Only when pressed did he express some grudging respect for the current president of the United States, an admitted moderate by NDP standards, by also one who has, you know, been elected twice.
When seeking his party's leadership, Dix proposed to the faithful that "you can't score a goal from centre ice," and the base evidently agreed, installing the man once infamously described as a "dour Stalinist" over his more moderate opponent. When a leading Lib characterized a recently-leaked NDP memo full of lefty zaniness as a decree from the "NDP politburo" he was engaging in some ugly red-baiting, but not entirely without reason. Unlike the Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and now federal NDP, the B.C. branch still professes an explicit loyalty to "democratic socialism" in its constitution. There's a reason, presumably, for that.
Not to say the party itself necessarily believes any of its own decorative rhetoric, mind you. The actual lefty flavour of Dix's campaign promises was mostly limited to a call for slightly higher taxes on the wealthy and vague promises of union sympathy, countered by a carefully calculated call to privatize the B.C. Place stadium and some high-profile pre-campaign genuflections to the business community. "We are running on a deeply capitalist platform," a staffer once told me, though that qualification was itself revealing.
No one hates the idea of well-funded public schools or fair wages for workers. No one even necessarily opposes a large, debt-crippled provincial government running everything from car insurance to liquor stores through oppressive, state-managed monopolies. The B.C. Liberals certainly don't.
What does make many squeamish, however, is the idea of a party run by hippies and radicals who dogmatically cling to the 20th century's most discredited economic theory simply for reasons of pride or denial. It comes off as a little pathetic.
The Liberal Party of B.C. is not a brilliant outfit by any means. Much of its agenda is faddish and unscientific, and, if past performance is any indication, simply doesn't work. Yet it's also the party associated with business, capitalism, status, success, and wealth -- and now a four-term majority government to boot. Voters might sympathize with an underdog from time to time, but in general, they like backing winners. For better or worse, that's undeniably what the B.C. Liberals are.
The NDP doesn't necessarily have to moderate and it doesn't necessarily have to purge, but it does need to figure out a way to project an image of considerably more competence, modernity, and maturity than it's presently offering.
If not, then their greatest victories will only ever come through polling errors.]]>Media Bites: Five B.C. Myths You Can Blame on the Mediatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32650292013-05-13T11:33:26-04:002013-05-13T17:18:08-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/40th general election. Despite the historic milestone, the prevailing mood has been resignation, not celebration.
Savvy readers will probably have some vague sense that BC is a lovely place in the midst of a perilous decline, though appreciating its exact dysfunctions can be a bit tricky amid the barnacles of cliches and half-truths that tend to encrust political reporting about the province.
Here are five particularly unhelpful tropes just begging to be tossed in the nearest gluten-free organic compost heap:
Myth #1: BC politics is zany and fun!
A recent piece by Brian Hutchinson in the National Post summarizes British Columbia as a "province known for fruitcake politics." The CBC's Stephen Smart, meanwhile, jokes about the "often wacky world of B.C. politics." Mild variations on this theme inevitably appear within the first paragraph of basically all BC-themed editorials.
Well, I've been living in British Columbia for 28 years and I'm still waiting for the party to start. In fact, it baffles me entirely where this reputation for zaniness even originated.
Back in the 1950s, we used to have a premier named William Andrew Cecil Bennett. His initials spelled "WAC" and clever people sometimes called him "Wacky." That was pretty fun, I guess. Three of our last four elected premiers had to resign as a result of corruption scandals. Was that wacky? Or just sad?
With the exception of noted crazyperson Bill Vander Zalm (who left office 22 years ago) B.C.'s party scene has been more or less dominated by the same sort of moderate, focus-grouped technocrats who run the show everywhere else in this dull country. Our next premier will either be a career politician or a guy who made politics his career. Hold on to your hats!
At the very least, we can safely say that modern-day B.C. lacks a scandal as epic as the Charbonneau Commission, a leader as buffonish as Rob Ford, or a movement as radical and revolutionary as the Wildrose in Alberta. Yet somehow we wound up as Confederation's class clown.
Myth #2. British Columbians care a lot about politics.
In fairness, this is mostly something British Columbians tell themselves, though I've noticed our bragginess has a tendency to rub off on reporters -- particularly out-of-province ones -- who marvel with awe at this "very political" place, with activists and ideologues as majestic and plentiful as the mighty evergreens they're chaining themselves to. But it's easy to get romantic when you're as sheltered from civilization as B.C. is, and it's a testament to isolation that our intense political indifference is so frequently interpreted as the exact opposite.
According to this guy's study, the 2009 B.C. election saw the second-lowest voter turnout (51 per cent) of any Canadian provincial election of the last 40 years, surpassed only by the apathy of one-party Alberta. In the 2011 federal election, we tied with Manitoba for third-worst provincial turnout (55 per cent), and even though that contest actually saw turnout rise in every province, BC's hike was by far the lowest (+0.6 per cent). The 2008 long-form census similarly revealed that British Columbians sit several points below the western Canadian average when it comes to extracurricular involvement in "political organizations." But we didfound Greenpeace.
Myth #3. The BC Liberals are not like Canada's other Liberal Parties.
The idea that British Columbia's Liberals are actually "right-of-centre" (to quote the Globe and Mail), or "Liberals in name only," or otherwise aggressively disassociated with the flavor of big-L liberalism practiced elsewhere in Canada is a strategic truism that's more opportunistic than honest.
NDPers love saying it, because portraying the B.C. Liberals as phony baloney impostors makes it easier to pry progressive votes from that small cadre of Vancouverites who vote Liberal in federal elections. The BC Liberals, meanwhile, are perfectly cool playing along if it makes their party appealing to folks who vote Tory in federal races -- which is to say, about 45 per cent of the population.
In metrics beyond marketing, however, the B.C. Liberals' un-Liberalism has never been terribly obvious. Premier Campbell certainly shared Stephane Dion's enthusiasm for a carbon tax, Premier McGuinty's HST-love, Michael Ignatieff's fondness for safe injection sites, and Justin Trudeau's hard-line on abortion. On First Nations, natural resources, and multiculturalism, their approach is even samer.
Notions that the BC Liberals are some exotic homegrown flower, as opposed to a conventional Liberal coalition of progressive-yet-pro-business forces, really says more about the low regard in which federal Liberals are held in this province, and their mysterious profile in a place that rarely elects them.
Myth #4. Tomorrow's vote offers British Columbians a stark choice between two vastly different philosophies.
In his aforementioned CBC editorial, Stephen Smart quips that we BCers have "become used to wild left-right swings." Tim Harper in the Toronto Star sees the obligatory "polarized province."
This is the narrative both parties prefer; an epic clash of communism versus capitalism, or heartless neoliberalism versus compassionate social democracy (it depends who you ask).
In practice, however, the actual agendas of both parties vary more by degree than anything else. Premier Clark has hiked taxes on the wealthy and big business; NDP boss Adrian Dix promises to do the same. Dix says he'll do everything in his power to oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline, Clark vows to do almost everything she can to ensure it doesn't get built. Christy wants increased funding for education and healthcare; Adrian thinks they need more cash.
B.C'.s endured two decades of rule under supposed demagogues of right and left alike, yet the final results don't differ much: new taxes, ballooning debt, weak growth, job losses, and chronic mismanagement of crappy public services. The choice is the colour of the screw.
Myth #5. Tomorrow's vote matters.
Naw.
Last week, the National Postprofiled a deeply unsettling study by University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz concluding that British Columbia seems likely to "continue its trend toward economic irrelevance compared with the rest of the country" thanks to a chronically unwelcoming business climate perpetuated by both NDP and Liberal government alike.
Mintz' stats were chilling. During the darkest year of NDP nuclear winter, British Columbia's share of overall private sector investment in Canada bottomed out at 11 per cent. Today, a dozen years after a robustly pro-business Liberal administration it's skyrocketed to... 12 per cent.
It's not a hard phenomena to explain. Both of B.C.'s leading parties are basically owned by different factions of the yesterday's news lobby; sclerotic government bureaucrats in the case of the NDP, embattled corporations running declining industries (like forestry and mining, which together comprise a mighty 8 per cent of the provincial GDP) in the case of the Liberals. Reversing BC's eclipse by western Canada's dynamic duo -- Alberta and Saskatchewan -- is a task well beyond the limited imaginations of either the Dippers or Grits, yet come Wednesday morning one of them is going to wind up in charge anyway.
And that, sadly, is no myth.
]]>Justin Trudeau's Pecs Don't Win My Respecttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32434352013-05-09T12:51:08-04:002013-05-09T13:00:23-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. His sole function, near as I can tell, is to wear a frock coat and knock on the door of the House of Commons a couple times a year, as part of the elaborate dog-and-pony show that accompanies each speech from the throne. Salary starts at $96K. Apparently it's a hotly contested job.
There's an awful lot of this sort of thing in the Canadian government. There are florid preambles on every piece of legislation ("Her Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and House of Commons of Canada, enacts as follows...") and weird rituals dictating how we inaugurate a new Speaker of the House (it involves dragging). There are elaborate hierarchies of importance dictating who can and can't sit beside each other at galas, and bossy instruction manuals decreeing which hack gets to use what title (governor generals: "Your Excellency, " mayors: "Your Worship"). I once attended a lecture from some bigshot Ottawa journalist who noted smugly that while American reporters stand up when their president enters the room, we egalitarian Canucks do nothing of the sort for our prime minister. Which is true, but at least women aren't expected to curtsy in Obama's presence, which is less than we can say for Canada's head of state.
The excessive pomp and pageantry decorating Canada's political institutions usually comprise little more than a snobby sideshow, but they're becoming an increasing embarrassment as our larger political culture grows steadily cruder. Like so much cheap cologne, Canada's is a system where flowery fragrance seeks to vainly mask a deeper grossness.
Justin Trudeau's latest ad, in which the 41-year-old leader of one of the western world's leading political parties appears wearing the sort of outfit a fratboy might toss on to take out the trash, was offensive not for any sartorial prissiness (if you want some of that, by the way, check out this column by my HuffPo colleague Daniel Portoraro), but because it reflected an unsettling lack of dignity for a supposed prime minister-in-waiting. For a man who's already benefited enormously from exploiting sex appeal for electoral benefit, now that he's a parliamentary leader, the least the guy could do is at least pretend he's got more to offer voters than the suggestive outline of his pecs. But then again, the Tories already declared J-Tru's body fair game in ads of their own, didn't they?
Left or right, bad taste flows in both directions. At the moment, the net's most popular anti-Harper website compares the Prime Minister's deeds to human excrement and no one thinks much of it. And look, here's a charming video of Brigette Depape -- the so-called "rebel page" who interrupted the most dignified date of Canada's parliamentary calendar to stupidly brandish a cardboard sign bearing an even stupider message -- in which she drops the s-bomb cheerfully and constantly, happily oblivious to any notion that political activists should possibly hold themselves to a higher standard.
Even when politics get positive it's crude. We're probably one of the few democracies on earth, for instance, where the official send-off for a leading national statesmen entails projecting footage of his skinny-dipping bare behind before thousands of onlookers, or where one of the most heart-warming anecdotes of a late local leader involves him telling a truly hideous joke about the defence minister's penis.
But that's the vulgar world of 21st century Canadian politics for you; a place where physical insults, ugly photos, and sexual gossip are the currency of argument, and blue humor, profanity, and lust the indicators of passion. Polite Canadians indeed.
You don't have to be a prude to find all this unsettling. In a country where politicians long ago mastered the art of compromising their ethics, values, and ideals, it was never much of a stretch to assume they'd eventually find ways to compromise personal dignity too. A nation whose leaders happily reject forbearance in office -- twisting truth as it suits them, refusing to resign when scandal strikes, bending democratic rules for personal gain, and arguing with brazen hypocrisy -- will soon eschew it everywhere else. And the Brigette Depapes of the world shortly after.
I've never liked the excessive English folderol that clutters Canada's parliamentary system, not only because its European roots are so thoroughly foreign to the North American experience (the seats in the House of Commons are said to be stationed "two sword lengths apart." When did Canada ever have swords? For that matter, when did we have "commons?") but also because they impart an unpleasant imperial aftertaste on the governance of a supposedly sovereign nation. If Gentlemen Ushers didn't already exist, we'd never create them -- so why even bother?
These days, however, it all troubles in a different way. There's getting to be something downright creepy about "honorable members" who cling ever-tighter to rituals of virtue when there's so little to be actually found.
Empty trappings of dignity hardly become a system whose actors exercise everything but.
]]>Media Bites: Harper Bashing Is the New Reportingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32211732013-05-06T11:49:02-04:002013-05-06T14:42:07-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/
You don't hear Harper critics griping much about the state of the Canadian economy, for example. There are no viral Facebook campaigns demanding the PM get unemployment below 7 per cent, nor hashtags about the huge spike in the national debt he's presided over. The Tory government's fiscal record is hardly stellar, yet it's also the realm his bashers are most likely to ignore (or even concede) as they direct their most virulent criticisms towards scarier Harper initiatives they presume should exist but don't actually. Ratcheting back same-sex rights. Crushing the CBC. Corrupting scientific research. Politicizing patriotism. Unravelling parliamentary democracy. And so on. You've all heard the songs.
It's tempting to dismiss pushers of this kind of paranoia as simply hyper-ideological lefty kooks, comparable to America's equally hysterical far-right Obama-haters. What makes the Canadian situation unique, however, is the degree to which a sympathetic press has happily played along with many of the fringier anti-Harper narratives, thoughtfully contemplating leftist fantasies as plausible theories of informed critics, rather than reactionary ramblings of the ideologically obtuse.
Often, this manifests through what might be called the "what critics allege/many interpret" school of journalism, where any allegation, repeated enough, assumes a sort of truth-by-persistence.
"His selection to the seven-year term will raise questions about whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper is seeking greater influence over monetary policy by installing a governor from outside the institution," said Babad, before proceeding to offer no corroborating evidence whatsoever for that thesis.
Babad's piece quotes several economists reacting to the Poloz appointment, but most simply muse that the new bank boss is a safe -- if mysterious -- pick unlikely to alter the status quo. Mike's speculation about whether Harper is "seeking greater influence" over a non-partisan body makes sense only if one has already internalized the theory that Harper is naturally inclined to stick his fat fingers where they don't belong; a judgemental assumption through which much Globe reporting is filtered.
Or take last week's other big surprise announcement -- Ottawa's decision to begin negotiating the pay of Crown Corporation employees with their unions directly, rather than letting the corporate bosses handle it.
This was basically a boring, bureaucratic efficiency move intended to ensure common standards of compensation will be applied to all federal government employees regardless of what agency they work for. But you'd never know it by reading the headlines.
What these quoted critics are claiming -- that shifting employer authority over CBC collective agreements represents a slippery slope towards turning the network into a North Korean-style "state broadcaster" of government propaganda -- is completely insane. Yet because some people, somewhere are saying it, they (and their dopey social media campaigns) get covered with a straight face. If the union says North Korea and Minister Moore says no, well, then that just proves there's a "controversy."
I've written before about the tired media cliché that the Harper government is attempting to "redefine" or "rebrand" Canadian nationalism in a more partisan direction by playing up supposed Tory tropes like the military, the monarchy, and, I dunno, the Olympics or whatever -- a thesis that looms large in the Canadian press despite the fact that this "agenda" has never been so much as implied, let alone acknowledged, planned, or promised by any Conservative politician at any time, in any context, ever.
And yet when Dipper MP Andrew Cash quips that Harper's "obsessed with reframing history and rebranding it in the image of the Conservative party" in Mike De Souza's much-circulated Postmedia piece on the story, the conspiracy theory lives on. Indeed, the only reason a boring non-event like this ("committee to research topic") even gets such breathless coverage (and 26,000 shares) in the first place is the same reason every random update to the citizenship manuals is treated as front page news -- they fit the narrative that Harper's up to something.
Honest reporting will always require surveying a wide swath of opinion, but with anti-Harper straw men and conspiracy theories playing such a large role in Canadian politics these days, the journalist's mandate as neutral arbitrator of fact and fiction has never been more needed. Those who peddle unsubstantiated caricatures of the Tory government as a gang of fundie-hugging, gay-bashing, science-hating, climate change-denying, royal-worshipping, wannabe banana-Republicans deserve to be put in their their place -- which is to say, the explicit fringe of our political debates and coverage.
Unfortunately, the Canadian press has instead chosen to be their leading enablers.
]]>Media Bites: Is B.C.'s Election a Race to Get Disqualified?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31986342013-05-02T12:22:18-04:002013-05-02T12:22:24-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/
Call it the gaffe-industrial complex. A politician says something controversial, the media repeats it endlessly, and a humiliated party boss eventually boots the gaffer from caucus. It's a vindictive cycle of oppression and censorship that's going to ruin Canadian democracy someday.
To date, three (perhaps soon four) candidates in the B.C. provincial election have been fired by their respective party bosses for the unconscionable sin of expressing inelegant, offensive, or politically incorrect opinions at some point in their lives. For good measure, they've all been publicly shamed by a ton of captious media coverage, too.
Now, I have to admit I'm not much predisposed to the idea -- so popular in modern Canadian political culture -- that there exists such things as "disqualifying statements" worth terminating someone's political career over. Personally, I think the only folks who should be disqualifying candidates are voters, or whatever bureaucrat's in charge of making sure the nomination papers got filled out. But even if you're inclined to think otherwise, it's still striking to observe just how drearily mild the thought crimes of the B.C. rouges' gallery actually are, and how grossly their supposed wickedness has been exaggerated by a press salivating for scandal.
Turfed candidate numero uno, NDP wannabee Dayleen Van Ryswyk, once stated in an online forum that she resented the modern aboriginal reparations regime, in which non-native taxpayers subsidize various perks and allowances granted by the federal government to status Indians.
"It's time our generation stopped paying for the mistakes of the past," read the damning excerpt on the B.C. Liberal Party website that forced her resignation, "let us all be one people...THE SAME.. race, creed colour or gender shouldn't matter anymore in this day and age...enough is enough already."
The Liberals also noted that Dayleen didn't care much for national bilingualism, or, as she put it, "having french stuffed down my throat" in a province where no one speaks it.
Turfed candidate number two, Tory Ian Tootill, once mused on Twitter, "Who's really to blame? Hitler or the people who acted on his words?" He also stated that he was partial to the Ron Paul philosophy that "all drugs" should be legalized.
Turfed candidate number three, meanwhile, Tory Mischa Popoff, once used his editorial column in the Kelowna Daily Courier to take issue with women who consciously elect to raise children without a partner. Look, he said, "unless they're very well off, the kids they bestow upon this world are headed for disaster. Why applaud, let alone condone this?"
While the above statements are undeniably crass and clumsy, is this really the sort of stuff a mature democracy disqualifies candidates over?
Ethnic slurs are always uncouth, but Ms. Shin made her offending comments when she was all of 21 years old, and, judging from the context, apparently some manner of immature gamer-person. As a Korean immigrant herself, the fact that she once went around calling Chinese people "chinkasauruses" offers little insight into anything significant about her worldview, beyond the fact that she once participated in the rude yet playful interracial chauvinism that's so common in Asian-Canadian youth culture.
The other three, meanwhile, are guilty only of engaging in conversations that would barely blink an eye at the average Canadian dinner table.
There are a lot of folks who don't like Canada's current aboriginal rights regime, particularly its guilt-tripping, segregationist undertones. There are lots of folks who think the German people get off the hook a bit too easily for World War II, considering Hitler didn't run the Third Reich all by his lonesome. There are lots of folks who think it's irresponsible and offensive for women to pump out babies when they lack the means to care for them -- especially when taxpayers are footing the welfare tab. There are lots of people who think the war on drugs is lost.
Control-freak party bosses and their journalistic enablers who feign shock at such exceedingly ordinary opinions are pushing unrealistic expectations of a sort unseen since Queen Victoria tried to stop everyone from saying "pants." There's a limit to how much honesty you can suppress.
When a nation's political and media establishments become so hysterically puritan, and when their standards of what sort of political speech is "not becoming" (to quote the Liberals' judgement of Ms. Van Ryswyk) become so impossibly high, the result is a neutered democracy in which only the most quiet, sheltered, and conformity-minded can ever aspire to high office. A gaffe-industrial complex that humiliates and destroys anyone who dares speak openly and candidly -- let alone controversially -- on difficult topics will invariably yield a society run by men and women whose smothering caution and fear of causing offence will, by definition, produce spineless non-leaders embarrassingly ill-equipped to confront the challenges of the future.
Which, incidentally, is exactly what the British Columbia election seems set to produce.
]]>Media Bites: The Sad State of B.C. Politicstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31767172013-04-29T11:57:22-04:002013-04-29T12:21:55-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/
The 40th British Columbia General Election is a dreary race between dreadful choices. That's an easy thing to say about any election, granted, but the sad state of B.C. politics is truly the stuff apathy was designed for. The final droplets of ideology, vision, principle, passion, and leadership having long since drained from this province's governing class, there's now nothing left but empty partisan squabbling. It brings to mind that famous quote by Kissinger (or whoever) that politics is "never more heated than when nothing's at stake."
Then there's the scandals. Premier Campbell's sale of B.C. Rail to one of his top political donors. Two ministerial aids found guilty of fraud, followed by a taxpayer bailout of their $6 million legal fees. Two massive tax grabs -- the carbon tax and HST -- imposed despite election promises to the contrary. Flip-flops on a vast array of issues from greater oversight of Native land claims to televised cabinet meetings. Out-of-control spending and salaries at practically every public utility and crown corporation -- from hydro to buses to ferries to hospitals -- at a time when user fees have never been higher, and services never worse.
It'd be nice if the B.C. NDP's inevitable ascension to power -- an outcome as preordained as Justin Trudeau's rise as Liberal boss, only more predictable -- held promise of a clean break with any of this. It'd also be nice if scabs were made of jelly beans.
The Liberals, lest we forget (and few B.C.ers do), only came to power on the back of a revolt against the equally -- hell, let's ditch the niceties, worse -- corruption and economic mismanagement of a decade-long New Democrat administration equally skilled at racking up debt, bleeding jobs, and ruling for the benefit of a privileged few. Despite a dozen years in the wilderness, there's not much evidence "today's NDP" has learned much from their exile.
Party leader Adrian Dix is about as literal a yesterday's man as they come. As the ex-chief of staff to Glen Clark, easily British Columbia's worst premier, Dix's long been one of the NDP's least apologetic figures when it comes to the legacy of the 1990s -- even running ads mocking the idea of remorse. A recent exposé in the Vancouver Sun likewise revealed his party is still overwhelmingly funded by public sector unions -- including many that will be negotiating contracts in coming years. With the wages of bureaucrats among the largest line items in the provincial budget, it's hard to imagine a worse interest group for a premier to owe favours in this age of austerity.
More depressing, however, is the vast array of matters on which the NDP and Liberals agree. Both parties have similarly crass plans to raise revenue (hike taxes on corporations and the wealthy), both have an equally NIMBY attitude towards the Northern Gateway pipeline (opposed), both share a consensus on the size and role of government (big is beautiful!), and both have similar plans to stimulate the creation of jobs in industries beyond natural resources and government make-work (none).
In such a context, conditions should be ideal for the provincial Tories to swoop in and fill the province's leadership vacuum, but with John Cummins' ramshackle party hemorrhaging moron candidates at a rate of nearly one a day, it seems the Conservatives will defeat themselves before voters get the chance. Which leaves the Greens, I suppose, and their promises to "create thousands of new green-collar jobs," -- mostly by killing off the rest of the rainbow with 41 pages of bossy new regulations on everything and anything (dentists must "use dental fillings that do not contain mercury" decreeth page 13).
It's not cynical or spoiled to want better choices. If British Columbia's political parties all offer the same barely-discernible mix of high-taxing, high-spending, debt-growing, special-interest-marbled, economically illiterate, visionless management of a bloated, over-extended government that does way more than it should and does most of those things badly, there's no law obligating voters to reward one of them for merely being the cleanest dirty shirt.
Which isn't to deny the possibility that B.C.'s parties may get better with time. Their present failures stem mostly from deficiencies of talent and ambition, after all -- not any larger dysfunction with representative democracy itself. Abstaining from voting in this election (or any other) doesn't make you a nihilistic anarchist, just a temporarily disappointed citizen. And disappointment is a political opinion as valid as any other.
Good thing there's a remarkably low-effort way to express it.]]>The Root Cause of Terrorism: "I Want to Kill You"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31527732013-04-25T12:45:17-04:002013-04-25T12:45:57-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/
A few days ago, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne tweeted a couple of fine columns he wrote in the aftermath of 9/11, highlighting certain smug voices in Canada's left-wing punditsphere who were a little too eager to find sympathetic explanations for the rage of Bin Laden and friends as "bodies still smouldered."
Basically, said Andy, when it came to terrorism, it was mantra among these types that Americans "didn't deserve it, but they did create it" -- what with their wars and unfair trade deals and puppet dictators and 1973 coup against Chile's democratically-elected president Salvador Allende (that seemed to always come up, for some reason) -- which bred a lot of understandable anti-American resentment in third world. So the Yankees were perhaps "not morally blameworthy, as such, but causally responsible" for whatever murderous blowback they incurred.
This belief, the "chickens coming home to roost" thesis, was a predictable shibboleth of America's far-left, since it offered endless opportunities to rehash and rejudge the excesses of America's anti-socialist foreign policies during the Cold War. But its Canadian appeal was equally unsurprising.
After all, from the perspective of a progressive Canadian nationalist -- someone already predisposed to frame Canadian virtues though a compare-and-contrast with American flaws -- the idea that 9/11-style terrorism was a relatively justified response to American troublemaking offered yet another enlightening case study in Canadian moral superiority. You don't see al-Qaeda attacking us, the logic went, because our policies foreign and domestic, our kumbaya embrace of Pearsonian multilateralism and Trudeauvian multiculturalism, are just too durn nice to provoke even the bloodthirstiest foreigner to raise a hand against us.
Two Mideast migrants with ties to al-Qaeda proper, Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser, were supposedly in the midst of scheming to explode a Toronto-area passenger train when the Mounties swooped in on Monday. (Living in a country with over 200 mosques having previously failed to deter them.)
Such hate is hysterical. And yet even now, some in this country still cling to the theory of the rational choice terrorist. Mostly in the pages of the Toronto Star.
Take Wednesday's column by noted bigthink bigwig Saeed Selvam. Saeed wants Canada to combat terrorism using techniques that "work," and that means confronting Justin Trudeau's favorite catch phrase -- "the root causes."
"[T]argeting various ethnic communities, declaring war on other countries and conducting an oppressive foreign policy actually undermine peace and security," he warns, so instead let's use "Canadian values to thwart terror" by "enhancing social cohesion" and promoting "a foreign policy that conveys strength through its commitment to peace, and exercises power through its commitment to development."
Uh, no, let's not.
Even assuming America personifies the "oppressive foreign policy" alternative Selvam thinks we need to avoid, America's never actually targeted "ethnic communities" and "declared war on other countries." Even the hated Bush administration made great ostentatious efforts to suck up to Muslims, with Ramadan ceremonies at the White House and endless speeches about how Islam's "teachings are good and peaceful," and the two wars his government began -- whatever their flaws -- were quite objectively not waged "on" the affected countries themselves, but hated dictators and terrorists within them.
And anyway, how does that explain why Canada's in the crosshairs? We're not-doing even harder the things America's already not-doing!
Unless you ask Selvan's Star-buddy Heather Mallick, that is. She used her Wednesday column to vent what's basically a truther-style conspiracy theory regarding (in her mind) the "conveniently" timed arrest of the would-be Toronto bombers, plus a lot of weird nonsense about how our prime minister is the real holy warrior.
The evidence? The Harper government has openly used the phrase "muslim terrorists" to demonize Islam (which it hasn't, at least according to my Googling of the speech databanks of the prime minister, defense minister, and foreign minister) and is giving stimulus money to Christian schools (which is true, just as they also give money to Islamic charities, community centres, and women's groups). Analogies to evil things America does and denunciations of "hard-right ideology," meanwhile, are just prevalent as you'd expect. Moral equivalency lives on.
Admittedly (and thankfully) the views of folks like Heather and Saeed are becoming an increasingly endangered species in the ecosystem of Canadian commentary. Once fashionable notions that death-cult Bin Ladenism is somehow a coherent political movement based around a sensible critique of American ugliness, or one inclined to spare gentle Canada from its reactionary wrath (providing we behave), are nowhere near as ubiquitous as when Andrew Coyne was assembling his rouge's gallery.
It took 11 years and two attempted attacks but the message of terrorism, it seems, is finally getting through.
At some point, "I want to kill you" is simply too hard to misinterpret.
]]>Whatever Your Ideology, the Boston Bombing Proved Ittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31301832013-04-22T12:58:29-04:002013-04-22T12:08:36-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/2013 Boston bombing is at last approaching its dénouement.
The plot points and characters, which seemed so creepily mysterious on Monday, are now fairly clear: it was two young men responsible for the evils of last week, and said evils were almost certainly a byproduct of the older kid's late-life embrace of Islamic radicalism.
Though everyone's busily boning up on the Chechen civil war to find a bit of context for the Tsarnaev brothers' week of terror (their four murders being too stupid, pointless, and random to be dignified with any notions of "motive"), and the hateful swamp from which their nihilism emerged, this obsession with exoticism seems a bit off the mark. To extent the Tsarnaev terror provides any fresh insight into contemporary political feud's, the battles in question are domestic, not foreign.
Watching the web over the last six days, it's been breathtaking to observe how every single phase of the Boston bombing has been politicized by every single ideological faction. For such an incomprehensible act, it's sure proven a lot of things everyone already knew.
To lunatic conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, who already believe the American government brutalizes its citizens for fun and profit, Boston proved... well, that. If you're a paranoia alarmist who thinks that lunatic conspiracy theorists are taking over the internet, Boston surely proved that, too.
Far-left U.S.-bashers enjoy minimizing the importance of any tragedy featuring American victims, so, to these sorts, Boston demonstrated that the stupid Yankees (as usual) are a bunch of self-centred crybabies with no sense of perspective. This picture of Syrian peasants expressing passive-aggressive sympathy for Boston spread across many-a poli-sci undergrad's Facebook wall in the wake of the killings, usually accompanied by a BBC link about a bombing in Iraq, Yemen, or some other supposedly "ignored" corner of the American empire. To those who only express concern over third-world suffering as an excuse to ignore it in the first, Boston was a fine pretext.
Conservative neo-cons who see a jihadist lurking under every bed, meanwhile, were quick to brand the Tsarnaevs as America's latest enemy combatant in their global war on Islamo-fascism -- often before we even knew the Tsarnaevs existed. The Republican right's political agenda requires all acts of terror to flow from a single source in order to be strategically useful, so blaming Muslims is the gun they rarely wait to jump. War on Terror critics -- including, as I noted last week, several pundits in this country -- were no less hopeful that an angry white guy would get the blame, lest the Dick Cheney set find any rhetorical ammo for their upcoming invasion of Kyrgyzstan, or whatever.
Will the arrest of an Islamist provoke a fresh wave of anti-Muslim bigotry to sweep the land? That was the dogmatic prediction (hope?) of the political-correctness brigade, for whom "Islamophobia" is always a more heinous crime than whatever violence provoked it. There was much indignant tweeting about the overzealous arrest and interrogation of some suspicious-looking Saudi kid -- of course they would think the Saudi kid was suspicious-looking -- hanging near the bomb site. Elsewhere, civil libertarians are eagerly churning out long editorials about how denying Miranda Rights to young Dzhokhar is equally outrageous (mostly, I assume, by changing a few lines in their old Guantanamo Bay articles).
As more than one observer has noted, all this opportunistic hijacking of a national tragedy in the service of middling political agendas has been uncomfortably reminiscent of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which a similarly incomprehensible act provoked a similarly tasteless outpouring of I-told-you-sos and now-you-sees on a similarly lame assortment of barely-related topics.
That's not to say, of course, that it's universally impossible to raise valid political concerns at times of national trauma. Tragedies do beget chaos, and history has proven that chaos tends to be when authorities overstep, public opinion radicalizes, and threats to liberty, tolerance, and restraint are ignored by distracted eyes. Considered in a vacuum, most of the above critiques probably raise a decent point or two.
By problems arise when we cease being objective observers of the actual tragedy, its actual causes, actual impact, and actual aftermath, and instead conjure up some stereotypical concept of the thing in our minds -- a satisfying caricature that reinforces all of our pre-existing biases and hang-ups -- and react to that.
That was basically the lesson of 9-11; events that "change everything" rarely wind up changing very much. Partisans get a wee bit shriller with a couple new pieces of selectively-plucked evidence in their hands, but the basic tone and focus of our bitter, polarized political discourse remains more the same than ever.
This is why, when terror strikes, it's best to simply follow the news, mourn the dead, and move on.
Politicizing carnage may be bad taste, but it's truly awful politics.
]]>On Boston, the Press Is No Less Ignorant Than Trudeautag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31040812013-04-17T17:57:54-04:002013-04-17T18:19:34-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/
On the one hand, there's little in life that isn't political and contentious, no matter how tragic or gruesome. September 11, 2001, was an act of psychotic mass-murder by members of a fundamentalist death cult, but it was also a deeply political act, and various contentious interpretations of it have been animating discussions of American foreign policy ever since. The slaughter of students at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, and elsewhere was the result of insane sociopathic fantasies, but also served as case studies in ongoing policy debates over gun control, school security, and mental illness.
Even the Holocaust is controversial -- not in the loony "did it happen or not" sense, but in terms of what lessons contemporary humanity is supposed to draw from the mass-slaughter of European Jewry seven decades ago. A prominent ex-Israeli politician recently released a book of reflections entitled Defeating Hitler; his thesis was we're still debating how to appropriately respond to the Nazi genocide.
On the other hand, such intellectual reflections on senseless death are discussions born from retrospect and time. In our fanatically frantic modern media climate, today's columnist rarely possesses much of either. The bombs explode on Monday and something has to be said on Tuesday, regardless of the number of facts available to provide context or narrative.
Less patient pundits rush down the road of "what-if?" and wind up nowhere.
At a time when so much misinformation is already circulating, it's probably bad form to float culprits even as a thought exercise, but that's exactly what Ronald Crelinsten did in this morning's Toronto Star, where ominous signifiers of far-right provocateurs are seen in the Marathon attack's timing, technique, and tactics. The far-right is a fashionable whipping boy at the moment, but real life doesn't always conform to fashion -- as the many red-faced liberals who initially saw whiffs of a Tea Party conspiracy in the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords were quick to learn.
The Globe published a similarly problematic piece by Kevin Patterson on its website earlier today (the link no longer works -- apparently it's been taken down) in which it's hard avoid the impression he too would prefer this crime indict certain suspects over others. If it was an "infiltrator from a faraway madrasah," he snarks sarcastically, then "the long, improbably delayed, coda to 9/11 would have arrived." And wouldn't the warmongers just love that. It's curious to get so pre-emptively defensive about a theoretical response to a theoretical victim, but I suppose the man has a column to fill. Most people only have one thing to say, anyway.
When in doubt, there's always Justin Trudeau. On Monday, the new Liberal boss gave one of those unfortunate interviews he seems chronically prone to, and opined that whatever the monstrous nature of the Boston attacks, "over the coming days we have to look at the root causes" that inspired it.
"There's no question that this happened because there's someone who feels completely excluded, completely at war with innocents, at war with a society," he said. "And our approach has to be, where do those tensions come from?" It was a spectacularly tone-deaf statement born from an embarrassingly forced attempt to sound relevant on a topic about which he knew nothing.
The Sun News people, as you might imagine, have had a lot of fun with this, though their motive is as cynically professional as it is opportunistically partisan. Unlike the Boston mystery, Justin's tendency to say dopey things is an established narrative with solid foundations and facts that aren't in dispute. So his latest bit of ill-timed apologism provides reporters with a comfortable retreat into the familiar at a time when uncertainly dominates the rest of the headlines. Drama will always be easier than detective work.
Like most gaffes, one imagines the prominence of this latest Justin-flub will probably be fleeting, but in many ways it's a fitting metaphor for the grasping culture of space-filling commentary that defines this desperately uncomfortable historic moment.
When it comes to offering useful insight about Boston, the press is no less ignorant than Trudeau. They just hide it better.
]]>Media Bites: Choosing a Party Leader Should Be "Un-Conventional"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30832452013-04-15T12:12:55-04:002013-04-15T12:30:15-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/officially ditched socialism this weekend (or at least stopped denouncing "the making of profit") one imagines future Dipper gatherings will continue to entertain Minister Flaherty with Marxian demands for the immediate transfer of energy, banking, and auto firms from private hands to "workers' control." If we learned anything from yesterday's convention, it's that it's a lot easier to take socialism out of the NDP than the NDP out of socialists.
But if Canada's political parties can still muster a vigorous debate on the pros and cons of making Chrysler a public good, no one contests that political parties themselves should remain anything but private.
Amid all the cliched outrage about "corporate politics," it's worth remembering that Canadian political parties are, in fact, literal corporations. They have hierarchical management structures, slick Bay Street offices, vast vaults of money, and armies of employees. And open memberships notwithstanding, publicly traded they ain't.
As countless partisan sinners have learned -- Senator Brazeau most recently -- membership in a Canadian party is a privilege, not a right. You pay a fee and get a card, but unlike a share of stock, the party boss reserves the right to yank it back for any misdeed, real or imagined. Decisions supposedly delegated to the membership, such as nominating parliamentary candidates, can be (and often are) vetoed by head office. There are Dairy Queens with more independence.
In this oppressive context, it's unsurprising Canadian party membership as a percentage of the population languishes around 1 per cent. The Liberals made much fuss yesterday about how Justin was elected Grit leader by the "largest turnout of any party race in Canadian history," but with only 104,552 casting a ballot, that's still a depressingly lower figure than say, the 416,000 Canadians who are fans of Doritos on Facebook.
If there's any Canadian industry crying out for nationalization, in short, it's this one. Unlike General Motors or CIBC, political parties have literally no reason to exist beyond serving the public interest. We need parties to form governments in our parliamentary system, and they provide the lifeblood of choice in elections. Joining a political party is the only way a citizen can directly elect a prime minister following an incumbent's resignation -- as Liberals did in 2003 -- and for that matter, it's the only way to elect a prime ministerial candidate. Surely these are powers too crucial to be outsourced to the private sector.
Imagine how much healthier our democracy would be after we forcibly seize the assets of the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP and place them in the hands of a well-suited government manager -- Elections Canada. Under their neutral administration, any Canadian could join any publicly-owned party they want and stay a member as long as they desire, without having to pay any fees, demonstrate any loyalty, or pass any ideological litmus test.
Once they stop being the political equivalent of the Best Western Loyalty Club, joining a political party would be like registering to vote in a federal election -- a one-time form mailed to Ottawa without any dollar bills attached (voting without paying? Wild, I know). Harper, Justin, and Tom wouldn't judge your fitness to be a Tory, Liberal or New Democrat -- you would. After parties become public utilities, a right to party membership would become as sacred as the right to vote itself -- a right the Supreme Court says we can't even strip from convicts serving life sentences.
Sticking Elections Canada in charge would similarly ensure all future party leaders are chosen through open and accessible national elections -- not cliquey party conventions -- using the standard paper-ballot-and-church-basement system we use to elect MPs and provincial legislators. Party bosses would be picked by millions instead of thousands; MP candidates by thousands instead of dozens.
Is there a downside to nationalization? American political parties are basically run this way already, and they seem robust enough. We could still have some sort of Liberal Largess Council or Tory Trust to help fundraise and distribute cash to candidates -- but they wouldn't "run" the parties any more than the Republican and Democratic National Committees run theirs. The people would.
Naturally, some hard-core partisans might worry that allowing every yahoo to vote and run for every partisan office could lead to a breakdown of ideological consistency and message control. What if a rabid right-winger registers as an NDPer just to vote in their nomination elections and elect the worst guy? Hell, what if he runs for leader?
My guess? No one cares enough to be that psychopathic. Some US states allow anyone -- even members of the opposite party -- to vote in Democrat or Republican primaries, and there's little evidence this has affected anything. No less a psycho than Rush Limbaugh tried to get Republicans to vote for Hillary over Obama in 2008 as part of some would-be sabotage. It didn't take.
As it stands, Canada's political parties are a textbook example of the sort of crooked corporate cartel socialists originally arose to oppose: enormously rich, conspiratorially unaccountable, and corrosively corrupting of the democratic process. The era of peoples' republics and peoples' corporations may be over (even in the NDP) but people's parties? Why not?
If the track record of nationalization is any indication, the absolute worst-case scenario is incompetent state-administration drives Canada's parties into economic collapse, forcing us to start afresh.
What a shame that'd be.
]]>Media Bites: the Trudeau Media Bias Is Not What it Seemstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30589822013-04-11T08:05:39-04:002013-04-11T08:28:09-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/and the press didn't care!
Ezra Levant devoted a full 10-minute segment to this monstrous gaffe Tuesday night, grinning with smug self-satisfaction that he'd discovered one more symptom of a "media culture that covers up for liberal politicians that they love." I mean, you'd expect a shocker like this to get a lot of attention from the mainstream media, yet barely any of their reporters noticed. Unless you count all of them.
If decibel-gate was symptomatic of anything, in fact, it's how embarrassingly difficult it's proving for this country's conservative commentariat to compile a convincing case that the Canadian press is unduly forgiving of young Justin. It's a great shibboleth of the right at present, but as my old pal Elizabeth May might say, also one with a firmer grounding in "truthiness" -- ie; worldview-affirming plausibility -- than factual evidence. I don't much care for the man myself, but speaking as someone who's taken a pretty close look at what leading media voices have been saying and writing about Justin over the last seven months, I gotta say this has been the chilliest love-in since the Clintons' last date night.
As we await formal notice of Trudeau II's coronation, take a quick survey our nation's top papers. You'll find (at best) mostly cautious statements of conditional interest in a mildly competent politician whose greatest talent is exceeding low expectations. This may or not be better than what Harper and Mulcair are getting at the moment, but it's certainly a long way from the "thrill-up-my-leg" affection the American press slavered over a certain Illinois senator back in the day.
"Trudeau will either bring the Liberals back through the increasingly Liberal middle, or one of the party's most famous names will preside over the party's demise," summarizes Tim Harper.
"For all of his months on the trail, Trudeau has yet to dispel the not-ready-for-prime-time aura that has been a constant feature of his political persona," concludes Chantal Hebert.
"What is his vision? What are his values? What are his big ideas? We need to know if he has conviction -- not just musing, but genuine conviction," adds Martin Goldfarb.
And those are just the lefties at the Toronto Star.
To be sure, the press does have a pro-Trudeau bias, but it's a bias of interest more than affinity. As the passing of Maggie Thatcher has proven, most countries only produce a truly great (in the historical sense) leader once every three or four generations, amid decades of duds. As the hereditary successor of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada's last (hell, probably first) prime minister of truly epic ambition, achievement, and profile, few politicians in Canadian history have ever borne a burden of history, legacy, and expectation as heavy as Justin's. His pedigree made him destined to be over-discussed, over-analyzed, over-loved, and over-hated -- and here we are.
Further exacerbating all this interestingness is the historical quirk that Justin's political party is in such shambles no comparably compelling character could be cajoled to command it. Sucking up all the air in the room is hardly a great feat when you're in there alone; contemplate an alternative universe where the 2013 Liberal race featured the likes of Bob Rae, Mark Carney, and Dalton McGuinty rather than five nobodies, and it's easy to view Trudeaumania 2.0 as a byproduct of media boredom as much as anything else.
The Canadian press isn't stupid, and even its most obnoxiously liberal segments possess enough awareness to grasp the undercurrent of silliness that defines the whole Justin Trudeau fairy tale. JT has never been a dream candidate in the eyes of anyone beyond the most shallow and superficial, and his deficiencies in the experience and message-control department have always been blazingly obvious, even to those who know they must eventually support him. Grit partisans like Warren Kinsella are openly starting to fret that Trudeau's over-coverage could easily lead to under-performance, though that critique is hardly new. Kinsella himself admitted that "the jury's still out" on J-Tru's sizzle-to-steak ratio back in September.
The most common adjectives tacked to Trudeau's name have been "untested" and "uncertain." If anyone's ever called him a messiah or saviour, it's been with sarcasm or scorn. Even Justin's recent interview with Global -- the one that got Ezra in such a fluster -- was skeptically headlined "Justin Trudeau's mysterious connection with Canadians," as if his coast to victory still lacked a common-sense explanation.
Tories need to know their enemy, and in their battle against the new Liberal boss it would be a mistake to view the press as anything other than a strategic partner.
Conservative strategist Gerry Nicholls wrote a fine piece in the Hill Timesthe other day arguing that the most effective partisan attacks against Justin will be ones that mock his gaffes, rather than denounce his ideas.
"Indeed, I guarantee both the Conservative and NDP war rooms have filing cabinets bulging with newspaper clippings containing every comment or statement Trudeau has made for the past ten years," says Gerry.
Those clippings, presumably, came from somewhere.
]]>Liberal Leadership Showcase: A Spectacle Without Substancetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30303402013-04-07T00:34:40-04:002013-04-06T23:32:31-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/ var src_url="https://spshared.5min.com/Scripts/PlayerSeed.js?playList=517736075%2C517736062%2C517736045%2C517735969%2C517735965%2C517735967%2C517735953&height=411&width=570&sid=577&origin=undefined&relatedMode=2&relatedBottomHeight=60&companionPos=&hasCompanion=false&autoStart=false&colorPallet=%23FFEB00&videoControlDisplayColor=%23191919&shuffle=0&isAP=1"; src_url += "&onVideoDataLoaded=HPTrack.Vid.DL&onTimeUpdate=HPTrack.Vid.TC"; if (typeof(commercial_video) == "object") { src_url += "&siteSection="+commercial_video.site_and_category; if (commercial_video.package) { src_url += "&sponsorship="+commercial_video.package; } } document.write('');
Like most Canadians, my previous experience with showcases was limited to the "showdown" variety seen on ThePrice is Right, the popular game show where poor people guess the price of furniture. Those showcases involved an announcer telling some random dude to come on down while a giddy audience shrieked with excited delight.
The Liberal showcase wasn't like that.
I mean, yeah, there was an audience, but it was mostly empty seats. Stories in the lead-up noted that Liberal organizers were having such a hard time getting people to come on down to their thing they had to start handing out tickets for free. The original price tag was between $150 and $499. I don't think many Price is Right people would have guessed that.
As the Liberals are picking their next boss with a needlessly protracted, week-long online voting fiesta, Saturday's showcase was really little more than the boring first half of a standard Canadian political party leadership convention gussied up with a sexier name. The six "candidates" who are technically "running" in this "election" all gave "pitches" and attempted to "close" a sale that hasn't been open for about seven months.
It's not fun being played, or being forced to indulge in other people's self-indulgent fantasies. So it's very hard to write about the speeches of Justin Trudeau's five hopeless opponents without feeling like a captive guest at a particularly bratty five-year-old's tea party. Mmm, yes, what a tasty mud pie.
Professor Coyne delivered a wonky lecture that reminded why wonks are rarely elected. Her agenda is one of old-fashioned lefty central planning repackaged as "national solutions," where the exercise of power by any authority other than Ottawa is a an ominous stray thread in the beautifully crocheted sweater of confederation.
We need to reduce the "bloated power of the prime minister's office," she said, shortly after making a pitch for a "Council of Canadian Governments" to coordinate lesser politicians... under the chairmanship of the prime minister.
Karen McCrimmon was awful awful awful. I could probably be a bit more nuanced, but if the passing of Roger Ebert has taught us nothing else, it's that life's too short for gentle words about terrible things.
Akwardly gesticulating in a white pantsuit as she nervously paced the stage, the former colonel looked like the world's saddest motivational speaker and sounded about the same, offering an incoherent ramble of feel-good bromides that made Sarah Palin look like Socrates. She also offered an unsettling window into the strange inner spirits that compelled her to this quixotic quest in the first place.
"My head said, 'are you crazy,' but my heart said 'you have to do this," she bragged. So if you want a candidate who doesn't trust her own brain, well, here you go.
Joyce Murray probably had the most to lose, and did. As the press's designed successor to the dearly departed Marc Garneau, hopes have been high that the former Gordon Campbell understudy could ride her ramshackle scheme for tri-party electoral cooperation to a respectable second-place, but her on-stage pitch landed with a thud. The idea may be strategically wise, but the weirdly defensive, overly apologetic way in which she presented it ("it's not a merger, it's not a coalition!") didn't exactly fill the crowd with confidence. Elections are rarely won under the slogan "it won't be as bad as you think."
Martha Hall Findlay, in fairness, was not bad. Unlike her competitors, she actually offered an explanation for her party's steady stream of losses that wasn't just a lazy call for "improved
communication" ("Canadians have lost sense of what we stand for and what we offer" -- Coyne), a Murray-style blame-the-system whine, or a condescending dismissal of Tory talents (many made much of the fact that Stephen Harper "plays Canadians against each other," as if elections had ever been won any other way).
Look, said Martha, the fact is, Harper "focused on the economy, he proposed clear and specific plans" and made a pitch that "resonated with Canadians." Walking her audience through an imaginary series of coast-to-cast door-knockings, she recited a sequence of reasonably plausible counter-pitches Liberals could make to win back lost voters. She then quipped that in her experience, "the really grumpy people are always Conservatives." So close.
Martin Cauchon, the long forgotten Chretien-era cabinet minister, gave a speech as archaic and quaint as the candidate himself. Since one imagines he'll be battling with Colonel McCrimmon for last place, it's probably only worth noting that his self-promotion included not one, but two applause-bait lines about his opposition to the American invasion of Iraq. It would have made for a more winning pitch in 2003, which was coincidentally the last time he held political office.
The man of the evening was obviously Justin. Though the CBC commentators insisted this will likely be "one of the most important speeches of his career," in reality, I imagine time will probably forget it just as quickly as the pointless event in which it was said.
Perfunctory and safe, his only rhetorical novelties were a couple attempted smackdowns of a few anti-Justin tropes, one sassy (expressing classist outrage at critics of his modest career, he snarled "this is one teacher who fully intends to fight back!"), the other sloppy (embracing his identity as his father's son, he encouraged pride for "all of our parents and the legacy they left us" -- a statement which may not play particularly well with his underemployed, debt-straddled youth base).
In all, the Liberal showcase actually showed the world very little, beyond the party's ongoing inability to bring interest to its internal affairs, clarity to its beliefs, or talent to its ranks. If you're going to have spectacle you better have substance, but the Lib's lack of the latter in favor of the former has resulted in a consistently cringeworthy contest that's short on grassroots but high on game show.
Personally, I prefer Bob Barker.
]]>Media Bites: The Original Sin of Canadian Politicstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30122922013-04-04T08:27:15-04:002013-04-04T08:06:21-04:00J.J. McCulloughhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jj-mccullough/
A thousand years ago, in medieval England or whatever, there was once a sharp separation of power between the crown and the legislature. The king would appoint parliament's most compliant members to be his ministers, but the rest of the chamber had to play along, too. If the sycophanty of the king's cabinet got too pronounced -- that is, if their government placed the interests of the monarchy above those of the citizenry -- the legislature could vote that they had "no confidence" in the king's advisors, and force them to resign in shame.
None of this bears even the slightest resemblance to 21st century Canadian governance. King-rule was phased out centuries ago, and with it any visible space between the legislature and executive. That critical prerogative once exercised solely by the monarch, namely the power to form a government, is now held by the prime minister, who, of course, is not some dude separate from parliament, but rather the boss of its largest faction.
And yet the archaic artifact of confidence voting remains. The House can still vote to declare it's lost confidence in the king's (er, Queen's) government, and order fresh elections to pick a new one. Without a meddling monarch to punish, however, modern confidence voting has become little more than a shallow exercise in partisan opportunism. During a minority government administration -- the only time when it's mathematically possible for "parliament,"(which is to say, the opposition), to out-vote "the government" (which is to say, the plurality party) -- non-confidence votes occur for one reason only: the PM's critics have calculated they could win an emergency election.
A stirring exercise in democratic accountability this ain't. No one seriously believes, for instance, that the first five years of the Harper government had "the confidence" of Gilles Duceppe, Jack Layton, et al, though a rigidly literal interpretation of their parliamentary behaviour (on most days) would hold that. What they lacked was confidence in their poll numbers.
The survival of confidence voting has exerted negative effect on majority governments, too. Since (big breath here) it's theoretically possible a party with a majority of seats in the House of Commons could vote non-confidence in itself, majority prime ministers can cite this least likely of scenarios as a paranoid pretext to impose tyrannical control over their caucuses in the name of "stability."
The recent media hubbub over Prime Minister Harper's efforts to stonewall MP Mark Warawa's efforts to introduce a vaguely pro-life motion in the House of Commons is a fine example. As historian Allan Levine notes in yesterday's National Post, Harper's dictatorial actions are really more representative of the "the nature of the parliamentary beast" than anything the PM thinks or feels about fetal rights per se. Harps declared the abortion debate "closed," therefore any attempt by any Conservative MP to pry it open it represents a threat to his parliamentary confidence -- even if it doesn't take the form of a literal no-confidence motion (which, Warawa's thing doesn't). As Allan chronicles, pretty much every Canadian prime minister has made a big show of demanding caucus unanimity on some issue or another, more often for reasons of power than principle.
And it's worked. Today even parliament's most rebellious MP, Conservative James Bezan, still "votes with his party nearly 99 per cent of the time" according to a recent Globe and Mail survey.
The media's willingness to play along and make such a fuss about exceedingly mild "backbench revolts" like Warawa's has caused a lot of bad unto itself, adds William Watson in the Ottawa Citizen. It's created a political culture where few Canadians "can process the notion that parties can, indeed should, include people who publicly disagree with some of what the party stands for." Instead, we're taught to expect ideological hegemony and punish leaders who fail to deliver. At election time, every party fearmongers about the opposition's craziest kooks and raise stone-faced concerns that, barring prompt exile, obscure candidate such-and-such may soon be "setting the agenda" for the nation.
But in a proper parliamentary democracy the agenda is not "set" by individual MPs, or even the ruling party caucus. It's set by majority votes in parliament, which, by definition ignore unpopular minority opinions. Kooks don't matter if they're too marginal to impact legislation, yet the press and pundits constantly berate party leaders who can't "control" their caucus, in a manner not dissimilar to the sexist tut-tutting you once heard about a husband who couldn't "control" his outspoken wife.
There was some outrage in the U.S. a while ago following a survey that revealed "the most conservative Democrat is now more liberal than the least conservative Republican." It was a uniquely American description of a uniquely American problem, taking for granted, as it did, the idea that Congressmen have a right (if not obligation) to vote in a manner that's unpredictable and non-conformist.
In other words, in America, legislators who occasionally buck party orthodoxy -- a practice which doesn't trigger pointless elections or caucus expulsions, by the way -- are highly valued by voters. Through their more honest style of legislating, in fact, they even help maintain something the public all-too-frequency lacks when viewing their government: confidence.