LP_468x60
ontario news watch
on-the-record-468x60-white
and-another-thing-468x60

This content is restricted to subscribers

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


It's not a surprise, really, that Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer briefly planned to fight at least part of the next election against the media.

The media, that dastardly pack of liberal shills, is out to sink the good common sense of regular people!  How dare they — okay, okay, we — try and subvert democracy with, uh, meanness and hard questions?

"We [Conservatives] don't always get the same kind of coverage that [Trudeau] gets in the mainstream media.  Have you noticed that?"  Scheer said recently, according to a Toronto Star report. "[Trudeau's] got the media on his side, he's got the pundits, he's got the academics and think-tanks, everyone who wants to lecture you on how to spend your own money and how to live your own life."

After this quote was in the wild for a bit, and after some of his caucus members and staff spent some online time field testing a new, more pointed, anti-media strategy, Scheer backed off.

"I believe that it's essential in a vibrant democracy that the media plays its role to hold politicians of all parties to account, that does fact-checking, that makes sure you hold our feet to the fire and hold us responsible for what we say," he told reporters in Toronto on Wednesday.

Finding perhaps the whole thing a little too much like actual combat, the leader found himself in quick retreat.  Then again, perhaps he was just too cowed by all of us media libs.  Hard to say, given how mean and powerful we are.

Anyway, this falls into something of a pattern for Scheer.  I can never quite take the man at face value.  Part of it is his ever-present smirk.  It's more than aesthetics, though.  My dislike of his grin is one thing, but there's always a feeling I get that the party takes me, and anyone else on the receiving end of their rhetoric, to be a rube.

A lot of this has to do with the nature of Scheer's, and the party's, approach to politics.  Everything, absolutely everything, turns into a shitpost.  There has to be some shareable meme to blast around twitter.  Everything is an outrage, and you always get the sense that every fact he's putting out there is torqued to the point of deformation.

Big bold yellow fonts, tabloid-style, blaring out some awful thing the government is doing.  Maybe about red tape, maybe some revved up invective about the carbon tax.  Never edifying stuff, but politics isn't about edification now.  So the thinking goes, at least.

But extends further than rhetoric, too.  Every couple weeks there's some sort of stunt in the Commons.  Recently it was the decision to hold a recorded vote â€” a non-binding one, granted — on where a specific inmate should be imprisoned*.

Reaching back a bit further, there was the time the party held a vote ostensibly condemning ISIS, but also condemned the government's payout to Omar Khadr.

None of these things are designed to actually get things done.  They're designed to give a political outcome, some electoral ammunition.  Liberals are soft on ISIS, or too hard on victims.

On, for example, the carbon tax Scheer and his meme machine never actually lay out what their replacement plan would be.  It's going to be detailed, and cost-effective, and maybe even give everyone their very own rainbow.  But he can't show us what it is.  It'll be ready soon.  But know the carbon tax is bad!  A cash grab!

And that gives me the feeling he's trying to take me for a ride.

So you can see why the party maybe looked to media-bashing as a way to campaign.  Why bother putting together a plan when you can just wail about the CBC for a while.  There's plenty of recent evidence to the south of us that it's a plausible way to win.

But running against the media doesn't have anything tangible to it.  You don't have to balance any line items in your platform by running against the media.  It gets people fired up, and feels right, man.  It also erodes public trust and cheapens democracy, but no matter.  What's that matter when power is at stake?

There's one last thing it does for a political leader.  It reveals their weakness.  It's whining about how unfair the world is, how everyone is out to get them, how they can't hack it.

It's a big flashing sign that says, "We have nothing of substance to offer you, instead here's some simplistic BS.  Vote for me!"  What this gambit revealed, however briefly, is at Andrew Scheer's core, there is no ideas to sell.

When that's what you've got going for you, why wouldn't you try taking the easy route to success?

***

* Yes, this was Terri-Lynne McClintic.  Yes, what she did was heinous.  And no, a healing lodge does not seem like the best place for a child killer.  But Parliament is not the place to debate where individuals are locked up.  It might seem reasonable in this exceptionally awful case, but it starts us down a road where debating individual sentences for different people seems easier each time.  Leave those decisions to the judges, away from politics.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.