Like most reporters I thought I had seen every form of jaw-dropping political disingenuousness there can be. While my job demands a certain level of repressed righteous indignation, I must admit most of the political blunders that have occurred under my watch have been the kind of falsehoods, hair-splitting and messy accounting that inspired more yawning than gasps.
As an Alberta-based journalist, I have watched Rob Ford's oafish trajectory out in sunny Ontario with a strain of envy. I did initially moan with embarrassment over Ford's antics, but I recently switched from loathing to appreciation after watching his "I have more than enough to eat at home" speech. The defining moment for me was after the Mayor walked away from the press. There was a brief horrified silence, then some reporters started to laugh, and then someone in the press burst out with: "I LOVE that guy..." which was when the tape went back to the anchor's desk. It was at that moment that I realized I love Rob Ford too.
I think it is a journalist's dirty secret that personalities like Ford's are God's gift to any of our society's watchdogs--be they reporters or comedians. The nation is obsessed with Toronto's illustrious mayor not just because he broke the law, but because on his way to city hall he dropped Roberts Rules of Order into the crack house toilet. He should have dropped more truisms about the "good folks at the Toronto Star," and the "bang-up job of our friends in the media," and news hounds across Canada would have been lulled into a slightly more soporific mood. Instead he made the mistake of become interesting, a foil for our collective horror at the impulsive, self-pitying, hot-headed, greedy toddler in us all.
One of the corollaries of our governing WASP culture is a loathing of animal appetites, an emphasis on self-control at the expense of, well, everything. Stephen Harper is the ultimate representative of this kind of zombie sang-froid. Which is why it's great to see Ford pour beer, crack cocaine and oral sex all over this carefully built myth of false gentility that means "Canada" to the outside world. Like any good performance artist, Ford has a way of providing people with an object lesson on how wrong some much quieter people are about women, immigration, and urban policy by stimulating our sense of shame. His shtick is pure comic genius: he is the Tony Clifton of politics.
In the fall of 2010, I was a reporter for APTN when former Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner announced the creation of a "world class" water monitoring system for the province's oil sands industry. Renner talked a lot about oversight, scrutiny and self- reporting of an industry which, then as now, was under heavy fire. Minister Renner said he would appoint six people to a water monitoring environmental review committee to reassure the public's environmental concerns. Renner talked a lot about "co-ordinated efforts from all stakeholders," "independent experts" taking the time to look at the "cumulative environmental effects" of bitumen development. But then he stocked the panel with his friends: mostly heads of industry, energy company executives, a former VP of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Bruce Carson. Not a single First Nations person, not even a token honorary feathered head ornament, was appointed to the panel, despite years of lobbying for inclusion by First Nations people. Renner's response to my questions about whether this panel of industry execs constituted "all interested stakeholders" was so mind-numbing I can't remember what he said. Most importantly: two years later nobody else can remember Renner, or his panel, or the indignation we all failed to generate. The oilsands industry, however, bubbles on, and that was the point. As political theatre went, it worked. It is a darkly hilarious ending to a tragi-comic tale--if you can laugh at a growing environmental disaster and the dwindling lives of First Nations people.
I could use words like callous cynicism and genocide to describe what's going on there, but we Canadians like to think of ourselves as sweet, impotent and polite people. It's hard to run quotes about the need for more study, how industry can be part of the solution and the vital role of First Nations as building blocks of our great country day after day without wanting to smash something. There are many ways to promote a "chill effect" among journalists; boring us to death is one of the most effective. Most politicians have an ability to answer a direct question with 1) meaningless tributes, 2) non sequiturs and 3) mind-numbing bureaucratic verbiage. Getting a straight answer to a complex question often requires asking that same question multiple times until it is, frankly, embarrassing. Generally the reward is a blunt truculence, and possibly getting banned from the press room. In my days at the Alberta legislature I would have given a few teeth and then died a happy death to hear the minister of Environment talk about his proclivities during one of his "drunken stupors."
Over the years I have found politicians to be experts in making racism, greed, stupidity and incompetence so dull it is difficult to call a spade a spade. Former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach was an absolute artist in this kind of evasiveness. Notoriously shy, he could be relied on to rattle off a tribute to the "good working folks" out there, to Alberta's "entrepreneurial spirit" and the "courage of the first settlers" in answer to just about any question, until eyes rolled. Rob Ford lacks the basic vocabulary to build a wall of meaningless verbiage to stultify people with. But, with an easy swipe of his meaty fist, Ford has managed to make conservatism embarrassing to conservatives, and made honesty in politics the biggest joke of all. As far as I am concerned, that alone makes him the best thing to happen to Canadian politics in a long, long time.
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