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Day: December 21, 2018

You know, sometimes I think I'm being too hard on Canadian journalists.  Oppressed so hard they can barely stand by ancient media bosses who treat them like indentured servants, or forced to barely eke out a freelance living like a band of Dickensian orphans, they are naturally more prone than most to make oopsy-doodles or leave some stones unturned, and they are thus deserving of sympathy, not contempt.

But then you have a story, or lack thereof, like Jagmeet Singh's leadership, or lack thereof, of the NDP.

Details are scant- despite, or because of, the efforts of our heroic Journalists  but we are expected to believe the following:

That after absolutely annihilating three other longtime MP's in the October 2017 leadership race, Singh has managed to accomplish absolutely nothing of note since then.

That despite being a marquee name in Andrea Horwath's then-third party for years, Singh's political acumen is actually so low that after waiting on the sidelines for what seems like forever, he would rather run what looks to be an uphill battle against the other two parties in a completely different province instead of the city in which he made his bones.

That the NDP is not OK with this state of affairs as shown by the large number of ex-elected members from that party who have run off all but screaming but nobody's really calling for any serious challenge to Singh's leadership.

And that's it.  Nobody is able to produce any more details that might explain the ridiculous situation the NDP finds itself in.  Singh turned out to be all flash and no substance, which is nobody's fault but possibly his own, and that's the whole story, and everyone's sticking to it.

Now, even if it were not part of Received Canadian Political Wisdom that the Conservatives Need The NDP To Do Well and they can't do that if they have the Wrong Leader, the fact remains that there are serious red flags here that are worthy of investigation.  Does Singh really have the political instincts of a turnip, or is he being undermined somehow?  If he does have the political instincts of a turnip, then what does that say about the 53.8% of the voting members of the NDP that elected him?  Does the Russian mafia have nothing on the NDP when it comes to making sure that there are no loose lips that could sink the ship, or is everybody this dumb and easily fooled?

If I didn't know any better, I'd say that the NDP thought they could capture the imaginations of Canadians by making a brown guy their leader, and when that didn't work out because everyone was and is still obsessed with Trudeau and his socks (to say nothing of whatever their real feelings about having a brown guy as party leader or even PM may be), they threw up their hands and said "Welp, we tried" and are now just standing around looking sheepish because they don't want to appear racist by complaining.  That may not be true.  There may be a much more reasonable explanation.  But we don't know BECAUSE OUR POLITICAL JOURNALISTS WHO GET PAID TO WRITE ABOUT THIS SORT OF THING AREN'T TELLING US.

I can abide dumb and cowardly behaviour from a political party that's what they do.  Taking virtue signalling to a new level by electing a man leader of your party just because his name is Jagmeet Singh is within the realm of possibility, just as is electing a man leader, and Prime Minister to boot, just because his name is Justin Trudeau.  But if the media are the ones who are saying, "Yep, nothing more to see here", then we are absolutely justified in proclaiming them to be biased and unworthy of trust.

I mean, if they can all but ignore the oncoming train wreck that is the NDP's performance in next year's election, then there's absolutely no reason why they should be as microscope-focused as they currently are on how Trump-adjacent and Rebel-Media-compromised Andrew Scheer is.  I mean, there's no way Scheer is ever going to be PM, any more than Singh is, right?

Written by Josh Lieblein

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.

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Let's face it 2018 was a tough slog if you follow Canadian politics.  On the federal scene, we saw the solidification of trends that began in 2016 in the United States and have slowly been infiltrating our own discourse.  On the provincial scene, we saw populism win out while the hung legislature in New Brunswick saw damage to the Crown happening before our very eyes.  We saw white nationalism making a concerted return, and certain politicians trading in their dog whistles for tubas.  And because 2019 is a federal election, it's only going to get worse.  So much worse.

In many ways, 2018 was the year in which the Conservatives abandoned all sense of shame and started lying outright to Canadians.  It's no longer just spin or torque it's outright falsehood designed to anger voters, because the calculation is that angry voters will turn to simple populist messages that they feel they can deliver.  It wasn't just the federal conservatives doing it either Doug Ford's relationship with the truth is dubious at best, and Jason Kenney's is virtually non-existent.  It's nigh-impossible to debate policy or even ideas if one side is bringing a constant stream of mistruth to the table because the energy of the debate simply goes to combatting the falsehoods, while a pliant enough audience for those mistruths, who won't question them, and reality is no longer part of the equation.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have virtually abandoned the side of the debate that would ordinarily be concerned with combatting those mistruths.  Instead, they have decided that a steady diet of platitudes and pabulum talking points are what voters are really after, because they're "positive."  And if you point out that they can't communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, the Liberals will simply blame the media for not getting their message across because that's helpful.  And this is only going to get worse now that they've decided on this $600 million bailout package for legacy media, and anytime journalists like myself go to call out the lies the Conservatives put on the record, we are derided as having been bought off.  So that's going well for the state of democracy, and will only get worse next year.

There was Maxime Bernier and the white nationalists becoming much more emboldened in the discourse, both in the kinds of xenophobic messages Bernier decided to start pushing (while insisting they weren't xenophobic and while insisting that he doesn't want any xenophobes and white nationalists in his party, while they keep flocking to him), and in the ways he and others started buying into the tinfoil hattery of the worst parts of the Internet.  That Andrew Scheer joined him in pandering to conspiracy theorists with both the Statistics Canada data collection project and the UN Compact on Global Migration is another reason why this year has been a trash fire for politics, because it's further undermining the ability of the press to use facts in debate.  And if they happen to mouth some of the same xenophobic talking points along the way?  Well, anything to move poll numbers, right?

Provincially, Ontario's change of government went from inept to openly corrupt, where the premier has lurched from interfering in Toronto's municipal election to the point of threatening to use the Notwithstanding clause to settle a grudge, and he's been firing watchdogs and trying to put his friends into key roles like the head of the Ontario Provincial Police, all while quietly cutting services that people rely on.  In Alberta, Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney are both pandering to an angry population who wants a magic wand to solve intractable problems, neither of them really letting the truth of the situation being a guide for how to respond to things.  And with their own election coming up, that will start getting really nasty quickly.  Won't that be fun?  Oh, and given the minority situations in both British Columbia and New Brunswick, we could easily see another election in either of those provinces as well before the year is out, so brace yourselves for that.

So what else can we look forward to in 2019?  Those court challenges to the federal carbon tax will certainly be fun once the courts respond by saying that it's perfectly within federal jurisdiction to impose, and the opponents line up to denounce the judiciary.  It'll be like the good old days of when conservatives around the country denounced the Supreme Court of Canada for ruling in favour of LGBT rights.  As those prices go into effect in January in provinces where there isn't a provincial system already in place, the caterwauling about how much more expensive life was for everyday people will contrast with the reality of how little is actually being charged more, plus the rebates passed along through the federal tax system, and we'll be back to courting the cognitive dissonance of having people believe things that aren't true because it doesn't fit their narrative.

And Parliament?  The winter and spring sittings are going to be a gong show.  Beyond just ironing out the logistics of the new chambers after the closure of Centre Block (and when does anything ever go smoothly just look at the emergency additional renovations they need to make to the new Senate after Public Works ignored their concerns about acoustics for two years), the Order Paper is going to be a battlefield, as the government starts getting aggressive to push its remaining bills through to completion.  That means time allocation motions, filibusters, and procedural games as far as the eye can see and that's even before we get to the Senate, whose Order Paper crisis will worsen thanks to their late return, lack of leadership, and lack of self-awareness as to what's heading toward them.  And all of this doesn't even contemplate the electioneering that will go on, thanks to the fixed election date.  2019 is going to be one relentless slog of bullshit.  Buckle up.

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.

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Premier Doug Ford has decided to snub the press once again, showing any lack of Christmas spirit (and breaking from tradition) according to his enemies, even though he brought "Merry Christmas" back to the holiday cards.  As members of the press gallery rabidly chase after him and obsess over the patronage appointment — now stalled — of his personal friend Brad Blair to OPP commissioner, they expect Ford to suddenly declare peace at Queen's Park and allow these journalists to roast him by a blazing fire.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in the lead-up to next year's election, is all of the sudden readily accessible to particular journalists in Canada after spending the last few years by and large opting for photo-op only events and snubbing Canadian journalists for American entertainment hosts and sympathetic American left-wing journalists who don't know the first thing about what a mess Trudeau is making of things domestically.  But a retired Stephen Harper opting to do the same, but instead with Republicans, for his book tour was an absolute outrage.

Ford, in true Ford fashion, has opted to bypass the whole process, instead having his former PC leadership campaign press secretary turned pseudo journalist Lyndsey Vanstone interview him for Ontario News Now, a slick name for a PC-caucus-funded propaganda arm of the premier's government.

But in a country where the CBC went out of its way to make sure the fireplace next to Harper was cut out of his end-of-year interview but that Trudeau should get to stroll with Rosemary Barton as she asks him asinine personal questions who can really blame Ford for giving the press a big ole lump of coal?

As for Trudeau, he knew he could count on selfie-taking fangirl Barton and old pal Evan Solomon to swing some punches to make the fight look somewhat believable, but to not repeatedly jab and push at his many weak spots.  Admittedly the thirty-minute interview with Solomon had some hard-hitting questions, but it was pretty clear Trudeau's people knew the questions ahead of time because Trudeau had remembered lines for every question thrown at him.  Typically, Trudeau "ums" and "ahs" his way through his answers when asked questions, but in the interview with Solomon he never was at a loss for words.

When Trudeau defended his massive deficit spending by citing the rating agencies that failed to properly regulate financial institutes back during the 2008 financial meltdown Solomon failed to push back.  And most notably, there was one lone question on illegal migration at the tail-end of the interview where Solomon didn't push back to Trudeau's false claim that migrants illegally crossing into Canada will be promptly sent back to their countries of origin if they aren't legitimate refugees.

Sure, Ford being interviewed by Ontario News Now won't give us any hard-hitting questions, but at least there's less of the false pretense real journalism is being done with Barton and Solomon's interview with the PM.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

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.

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