Journalists make lousy politicians because they think they always need to tell the truth.
—STEPHEN HARPER1
Don Braid, a newspaper columnist who spent a short time in Ottawa with the Montreal Gazette before moving to Alberta, once reflected on the Alberta/Reform view of the Parliamentary Press Gallery: “It’s now my firm belief that if we replaced the federal government with the Alberta government, and the Parliamentary Press Gallery with Alberta’s legislature gallery, we’d be better governed and better informed. Unfortunately, this won’t happen because Albertans are too sensible to allow it.”2
Braid may have lived to regret those words, not just because the Alberta legislative gallery is hardly a pack of tigers, but also in light of the near-death experience in 2014 of a Tory party that has ruled Alberta since Pierre Trudeau and Richard Nixon were enjoying their first terms. Canadian democracy needs a vibrant, strong, brave media covering lawmakers and public policy issues. Conservatives can argue the media is biased and back their claims with well-chosen quotes and anecdotes. And many Parliament Hill journalists aren’t particularly good at what they do. But the press gallery has about 250 reporters (with another 150 support staff like photographers, videographers, producers and researchers). Poke through any group that size and you’ll find honest and dishonest people, geniuses, none-too-bright people, and, of course, people with political opinions ranging from the far left to the extreme right. Many of these people don’t even like each other, let alone have any desire to conspire.
Preston Manning, writing just before Jean Chrétien took power, summed up the Albertans’ view of the media as reckless and hostile, and said they fed on strife and negativity. That, he said with some accuracy, works against meaningful debate and consensus-building:
The communications challenge faced by reform movements the world over … is this: in the modern communications business, particularly in the case of television, negative is more newsworthy than positive; short-term is more newsworthy than long-term; disagreement is more newsworthy than agreement; emotions-laden critiques are more newsworthy than well-reasoned proposals for constructive change; discord, threats to order, and bad government are much more newsworthy than peace, order and good government.3
He might have added that the typical sound bite in a TV report is just seven seconds long. Ignoring or sidelining the media, however, is not the way to fix its problems.
“Harper ran on a campaign of open and accountable government,” New Democrat MP Charlie Angus said. “And the first thing we see him doing is putting plywood up over all his windows and barring access across the doors. My question is why? What is Harper afraid of?” With a straight face, Sandra Buckler, Harper’s press secretary, told reporters: “I think this prime minister has been more accessible, gives greater media scrums and provides deeper content than any prime minister has in the last 10 to 12 years.” Like so many other conservatives, she appeared to believe Canadians didn’t care what was happening in Ottawa as long as the old age pension cheques were mailed and VIA Rail kept to its schedule (and few people really cared about those trains). “I don’t think the average Canadian cares as long as they know their government is being well-run,” she said.4
As Daniel Boorstin wrote in the days of Lester Pearson and John F. Kennedy, “news” is no longer mostly about real events and new facts. This became clear under Canada’s New Government. During his fight with the Hill media, Harper’s face was still on TV screens as the government rolled out its programs. There were shots of Harper walking down hallways, getting in and out of cars, meeting foreign leaders, and standing at his lectern in front of the House of Commons making announcements. Government press releases and statements were quoted in newspapers as news. Harper’s government was on the move, getting things done. At least that’s how people outside of the Ottawa bubble saw it, thanks to the fact that pages had to be filled, newscasts couldn’t show test patterns, and the Prime Minister’s Office was churning out pap and giving it away to anyone who would use it.
Harper picked a great time to take on the press gallery. People were curious and positive about the new government and many Canadians wanted to see a fresh start with an eager young team after the doldrums and indecisiveness of the Chrétien-Martin years. They also knew the Liberals had wallowed in entitlement. In the wake of the sponsorship scandal, Canadians wanted to see a tough, honest new government in action, hopefully applying the high moral tone of the Reform Party to the “mess” in Ottawa. They wanted to know what changes the Tories would bring, and the media, whether on Parliament Hill or across the country, would have to try to tell them. Reporters outside the Ottawa bubble were more than happy to help get the message out, especially if it meant having the prime minister visit their town and give them the chance to ask Harper a question in a press conference free of hollering press gallery reporters. Or, even better, in a once-in-a-lifetime picture-for-the-office-wall sit-down interview.
But Harper and his media advisers still fretted over press gallery’s coverage. They decided to create their own TV imagery on Parliament Hill. They’d replace the reporters and the press gallery’s control of the Hill’s main press theatre by doing their own filming in a government-controlled studio. Sure, it was an idea out of East Germany, but no one could, it seemed, stop them.
In October 2007, Toronto Star reporter Tonda MacCharles received plans for a $2 million media briefing room that would be controlled by the Prime Minister’s Office. The proposal, which was code-named the Shoe Store Project by the bureaucrats who worked on it, was for a Tory-controlled TV studio and press conference centre. The renovated shoe store would replace the National Press Theatre, which is run by Parliament Hill media. The government planned to convert the empty store on Ottawa’s Sparks Street Mall, just a few steps from the Prime Minister’s Office and a block from the National Press Theatre, on the public dime to control Stephen Harper’s image.
The government justified the plan by claiming the prime minister and members of the cabinet needed tighter security because of post-9/11 domestic terrorism threats. “In the past year, a number of projects have been identified by our [Privy Council Office] Security and Intelligence Secretariat, in order to mitigate the ongoing risks identified with the Threat and Risk Assessment Plan related to physical security provided by the RCMP,” according to one heavily censored document released under the Access to Information Act.
The Shoe Store Project would have given Harper’s political staff the power to determine which reporters would be allowed into the new centre and who would get to ask questions. They would even use built-in cameras to control the images of the prime minister and edit the film doled out to the major networks. Preliminary plans called for a stage or riser, comfortable seating for forty to eighty people, rooms for bodyguards at the front and the back doors, audiovisual equipment, space for a translator, office equipment and, of course, Canadian flags for a backdrop. The work on the project was so secret that the people involved in the planning decided to leave a For Lease sign in front of the building, which, like most on Sparks Street, is owned by the federal government.
Harper’s communications staff cancelled a visit by Public Works planners to the gallery-run National Press Theatre because they were afraid the Shoe Store Project would become public. Many of the details were blacked out in the documents given to MacCharles, with the justification that the censored material was a threat to “international affairs and defence,” “security” and cabinet confidentiality.5 The minority Harper government, which was trying to fend off an election and to generate some positive publicity from a speech from the throne that was read the day after MacCharles’s story broke, quickly cancelled the plan.6
The Conservative Party media staffers were given a new goal: find ways to get the Harper message out without dealing with the members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. The press secretaries and public relations people were told to give stories directly to individual radio stations, ethnic media in the larger cities, and reporters on small-town newspapers. This, said the insiders, who included former Reform communications experts like Geoff Norquay and Ezra Levant, Reform Party founder Preston Manning, and Tom Flanagan, was a “gamble” with high stakes. The prime minister’s goal was to eviscerate the press gallery. Although there was a large risk of failure, Harper wanted to put a muzzle on the Hill media that was as tight as the ones gagging the members of the cabinet and the Tory caucus.7
And what if you can’t earn the coverage you want? What if reporters ask annoying questions during photo ops and run embarrassing stories about things like vote-suppressing robocalls? And how do you do an end run around the mainstream media to get your version of the truth out, so that no one hears anything disturbing and troubling about cuts to scientific research, links you to the propaganda pushing the Keystone XL Pipeline, and all the rest of your problems with journalists? Why not have your own TV network?
ENTER THE SUN NEWS NETWORK, a broadcaster that treats Tory spin like gold, has no scruples about putting the gears to Harper’s enemies, and can, with a straight face, call the CBC the “state broadcaster.” In the early development of Sun News Network (which was quickly labelled Fox News North by its foes and critics), Sun News vice-president Kory Teneycke, a former communications director in Harper’s office, and the development team worked with Luc Lavoie, a long-time assistant and friend of Brian Mulroney. Lavoie had left his job as a Parliament Hill TV reporter in the 1980s to be Mulroney’s communications director and stayed with Mulroney after he left office. Lavoie was the former prime minister’s spokesperson during the years when Mulroney was investigated for supposed involvement in a kickback scheme involving Air Canada’s purchase of Airbus jets and strange dealings with German arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber. Mulroney was never charged with any offence, and Lavoie proved to be an able advocate. Lavoie is known as a tough man, one who does not enjoy being crossed.
Lavoie would work hard to get the Sun News Network onto Canadian TV screens. So would many Tories in Ottawa.
It’s hard to know how much pressure the Tories put on the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to license Sun News and get it mandatory carriage, meaning every Canadian cable subscriber would get Sun News and be forced to pay for it. Senator Mike Duffy was among the Tories who wrote to the agency on behalf of Sun. The CRTC shot down mandatory carriage and the cable companies were allowed to decide whether or not they wanted to carry Sun. About half of the cable subscribers in Canada were offered the service, but, understandably, Sun wanted every Canadian cable subscriber to have the opportunity to get their station. They ran into trouble, though, when they pushed for the kind of lucrative deal that the other Canadian news networks receive.
Two years after Sun went live, Saskatchewan Conservative MP David Anderson tried to help Sun get a better deal from the CRTC by writing a letter saying: “Canadians deserve to be presented with a diversity of views when it comes to interpreting the news. Sadly, only specific Canadian newscasters are now being guaranteed a convenient spot on basic cable.” Anderson portrayed himself as a keen student of the media. He told the CRTC he had conducted a “media analysis” of the different news networks and was not happy with what he’d found. “We found that although all stations provided approaches to reporting that were useful, it was very evident that for a full variety of opinion and information to be available, all national news providers must be given an equal opportunity to reach Canadians with their coverage.”
The market, he said, should decide, even though the network, which was already offered to 40 per cent of the country’s cable and satellite subscribers, often drew fewer viewers across Canada than sit in the stands of a college football game. “I would urge you to move to a much more market driven approach to both news and entertainment options, but as that seems a distant possibility, I anticipate a decision that will be based on fairness and will allow Canadians to access a block of stations where all national news broadcasters such as the CBC, CTV news channel, SUN news and Global are all equally accessible on the dial and in cable packages.” When he wrote the letter, Anderson was parliamentary secretary to the minister of natural resources. Parliamentary secretaries are considered public office-holders under the federal conflict-of-interest law and aren’t supposed to lobby federal regulators. (Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and two parliamentary secretaries, Eve Adams and Colin Carrie, were warned by the federal ethics commissioner in 2013 for breaking the Conflict of Interest Act by writing letters to the CRTC to support radio licence applications unconnected to Sun.)8
Sun News Network began with almost 40,000 viewers on its first day. Ezra Levant, former flack for Reform Party leader Stockwell Day, was the most famous face in Sun’s stable. Levant spent part of his career on Parliament Hill banned by the Speaker, for one of his publicity stunts, from entering the Centre Block. He revived his career by publishing a collection of Danish cartoons portraying, and often mocking, the Muslim prophet Mohammed. When he was targeted for a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, Levant was able to turn the case into a best-selling book, with him cast as both victim and hero. As strategist and pundit Warren Kinsella wrote in a 2008 blog post, “Ezra Levant is the kind of guy who begs for crucifixion and complains about the view.”
Despite his name recognition as a controversialist, and his obvious entertainment value as a showman, Levant sometimes drew just 20,000 viewers across the country. (The major networks nightly newscasts usually drew between a half-million and a million viewers. During the day, when the Sun network’s shows were hosted by women, the network had as few as 4,000 viewers.
Three days before the 2011 federal election, Sun News had its first major scoop: It shared a story broken by the Toronto Sun newspaper that NDP leader Jack Layton, the network said, “was found lying naked on a bed by Toronto Police at a suspected Chinatown bawdy house in 1996.” Sun described its story as a “stunning revelation about the current leader of the New Democratic Party” which “comes days before the federal election at a time when his popularity is soaring.” The story had been shopped around for years by Liberal political operatives, going back to the days when Layton was running for mayor of Toronto, but no media wanted it, believing it was too old or shabby.9 Layton, Sun reported, had been found on the second floor of the massage parlour with “an attractive five foot ten Asian woman who was in her mid-twenties.” Layton had told the police he didn’t know the place was a body rub joint. The NDP, tipped off to the story, quickly produced Olivia Chow, Layton’s wife, to deny her husband had done anything wrong. “Sixteen years ago, my husband went for a massage at a massage clinic that is registered with the City of Toronto,” Chow wrote. “He exercises regularly; he was and remains in great shape; and he needed a massage. I knew about this appointment, as I always do,” she said in an email.10
Many reporters covering the federal campaign trashed the story and denounced Sun for running it, though, in fairness, if Harper had been caught in the raid, their reaction would almost certainly have been different. The story should be a case study for media ethics courses for years because of its many nuances: it was old, there were no charges, and there was no real way of knowing what had happened. What is clear is that it was timed to torpedo the Layton campaign. It’s difficult to know whether the story and media commentary about it influenced the 2011 election. The NDP’s breakthrough in Quebec masked the party’s failure to recapture its old Prairie base or add much to its seat count in the rest of English Canada, and the story may well have killed NDP momentum in English Canada. Certainly, the NDP, many Liberals and most members of the media saw the story as a ninth-inning smear.11
The network has never had a bigger scoop. Instead, it has struggled on, running its rant journalism and showing ads for geriatric products. It’s had to make a few embarrassing climb-downs, especially when Levant worked himself into a lather about Roma people, whom he called “gypsies,” and said they were not a real ethnic minority with a separate language, culture and religion. (In fact, they have all three.) Levant urged the government to stop giving them refugee protection, suggesting they were persecuted in Europe because they were criminals. The Roma have “a culture synonymous with swindlers … one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging,” Levant told his audience. The head of Toronto’s Roma Community Centre called the rant “nearly nine minutes of on-air racist hate speech targeting our community.” The Ontario attorney general considered laying charges, then thought better of it. Months later, Levant and Teneycke apologized during one of Levant’s shows. “You crossed the line on this one, but I don’t think it was done for reasons of malice or any ill motivation,” Teneycke said to Levant, whom he called a happy warrior. “I think you were trying to be entertaining, but words matter in this business and I think you crossed the line.”
“There were some criticisms afterwards, but I dismissed them as coming from the usual soft-on-crime liberals and grievance groups,” Levant told his viewers. “But when I look at some of the words I used last summer—like ‘the gypsies have gypped us’—I must admit that I did more than just attack a crime or immigration fraud problem. I attacked a particular group, and painted them all with the same brush. And to those I hurt, I’m sorry.”12 Levant also got a scolding from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
SO SUN NEWS NETWORK was a bust. Surely there are other ways to reach over the heads of the national media and talk to people either directly or through friendly filters. Seven years after the Shoe Store Project, the plan for a government-run media centre on the Hill, was shut down, Harper’s team came up with a new idea. Why not create an entire TV network devoted to the leader’s life? Using public money, four staffers in the Privy Council Office began creating a video record of the prime minister’s life. Condensed into dreary three-minute segments, snippets of video—in both official languages—were loaded onto YouTube and several government and Conservative Party websites. Called 24 Seven, the channel started broadcasting early in 2014, giving the Tories plenty of time to get the bugs out before the 2015 election.13
24 Seven features martial music—its theme is a juiced up military band version of the now rarely heard The Maple Leaf Forever—videos and still photographs, almost all of them of Stephen Harper. The first installment, which went onto the Internet in early January 2014, showed Harper hard at work on the job, snacking blissfully after work, and enjoying time with his cute family. The show opened with the voice of an eager young woman saying, “Welcome to 24 Seven, a week in the life of the prime minister of Canada, and more.” Later videos showed Harper talking to the Vancouver Board of Trade (protesters who crashed the event were carefully edited out), Harper holding hands with his popular wife, Laureen (after those years of inaccurate and often cruel gossip saying the Harpers had split up), Laureen dedicating the Trans Canada Trail, the prime minister and his son, Ben, at a hockey game, and other candid moments. Or at least they might be candid and private if there weren’t a guy with a video camera around all the time. Harper was filmed working in his office, meeting foreign leaders on Parliament Hill, travelling to trade talks in various nations, and flying to Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s seizure of Crimea. There were also many, many shots of men in suits sitting in chairs at meetings, conferences, summits and other places where the powerful meet and smile to cameras before they get down to real business.
Pundits said the television show, aired on the prime minister’s website and on YouTube, was meant to soften his image. It might have been edited to make Harper look more human, but the program itself was part of the plan by Harper to replace the mainstream media with words and images that are under the complete control of the prime minister and his staff. When Joe Oliver was appointed finance minister in March 2014, to replace Jim Flaherty, media was barred from the swearing-in. (In a rare flash of humour, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said it looked like Oliver was being initiated into a cult). 24 Seven, however, got an exclusive interview with the new finance minister, creating a form of TV show that would be familiar to people who live in countries where “state broadcaster” means exactly that.
The Huffington Post said 24 Seven has a “North Korea” vibe. In fact, Pyongyang does put out a similar video. So, to be fair, does the Obama administration, which issues West Wing Week, a program that should not be confused with a now-defunct TV show that actually had some entertainment value. The Obama production, which was launched in 2010, is upbeat and sometimes has slightly interesting programs. In one episode, Obama’s science adviser talked about the arctic air vortex that made the winter of 2014 so cold.14 24 Seven has never found the time to tackle this kind of issue.
While those four government-paid camera operators and editors toiled away on the weekly video clips that celebrated the prime minister’s accomplishments, no one was watching. In an answer to a written parliamentary question submitted by an opposition MP in the spring of 2014, the government wouldn’t say how much it was spending. But it did release YouTube and Internet viewer numbers, and they were dismal. From January 2 to January 8, 2014, 10,172 people watched the English version of 24 Seven on YouTube and 14,342 saw clips on a government website. French viewership was laughable, with just 21 people tuning in. And after that, the ratings tumbled. From January 23 to 29, just 100 people watched the 24 Seven clips on YouTube. French numbers remained fairly constant at 19. Even the exclusive “interview” with the newly sworn-in finance minister, Joe Oliver, drew just a few hundred viewers.15
A CAMPAIGN STRATEGY paper leaked in early February 2014, just after 24 Seven was launched, showed the Tories were working hard on plans to thwart the professional media during the 2015 election campaign, tightening their access even more and using the techniques they developed with 24 Seven to create more fake media coverage on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google and other online sites. News would be “broken” by the party on these websites, and real reporters travelling with Harper would have to follow his campaign’s news agenda and be reduced to asking follow-up questions.
Like other Western leaders, Harper has tried to entice publications to use handout pictures. The classic case was the now-famous picture of Barack Obama and his top advisers watching video in the White House of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The picture was taken by President Obama’s personal photographer and was photo-shopped, but was still used by major mainstream newspapers and TV networks. Harper’s public relations people send out far less dramatic photographs that are often used by small-town newspapers, often along with press releases that are often printed verbatim. The Prime Minister’s Office’s pictures also appear on the prime minister’s website and Facebook page. (An analysis of the nuances of the photo handout issue can be found in Chapter 11.)
Harper’s Tories, like most politicians, see social media as a cheap, effective way to reach some of their constituents and supporters. At first, the Tories used it to parrot the government’s platitudes, but fairly quickly some of the ministers whom Harper trusted started to use social media to give people real news. In 2011, then Industry Minister Tony Clement used Twitter to announce that he was going to overturn a CRTC decision on usage-based Internet billing. John Baird, the foreign minister, told the world in 2013 that Qatar had dropped its campaign to move the International Civil Aviation Organization from Montreal to Doha. A few weeks later, Harper’s Twitter account was used to announce the new lineup of his cabinet before the ministers were sworn in at Rideau Hall. And, while some of the prime minister’s staff were making sure no reporters got into the Conservative pep rally on the day before a speech from the throne, another staffer using Harper’s account was tweeting the speech that journalists were barred from hearing to Harper’s 340,000 Twitter followers.16
Some journalists welcomed Harper’s ministers and staffers to social media, especially to Twitter. Sometimes, ministers or their employees actually used it to answer journalists’ questions. Perhaps the responses were short and superficial, but they were still an improvement over the government’s usual communication strategy of saying nothing and treating journalists like bacteria. Mostly, though, Twitter was a means of sidetracking the media and keeping questions to a minimum. Harper hadn’t invented the tactic. Barack Obama had made social media, including Twitter, an important part of his 2012 re-election strategy. Even Buckingham Palace has a Twitter account, but Her Majesty’s public relations people don’t pretend that the beloved, elderly monarch is familiar with hashtags or struggles to focus her thoughts into 140-character microblog posts.
Clement’s old department, Industry Canada, now headed by James Moore, takes an approach to Twitter that is almost pathological. Teams of bureaucrats sometimes work for weeks to craft and polish an official tweet. The department has a twelve-step protocol. Once the basic concept of the tweet is approved, the department seeks out people in other departments to retweet the now-perfected 140-character message. It’s a reciprocal thing. Industry Canada retweets the carefully crafted wisdom of the Business Development Bank of Canada. Dean Beeby, then a reporter with The Canadian Press, who found out about the twelve-step system, illustrated his story with this committee-crafted gem: “Browse the Mobile Protection Toolbox to learn facts & find #tips to protect yourself. #GetCyberSafe,” with a link to the department’s website. Another one, grabbed at random in January 2014, said: “Are you keeping your cellphone and tablet safe? Share the Mobile Protection Toolbox for the latest tips to stay safe.” When short of riveting material like that, staff in Moore’s office shake the bushes for other positive tweetables, but, of course, they have to go through the ministerial mill. Insiders told Beeby that spontaneity and humour are smothered at birth by the various clusters of bureaucrats who check Industry Canada’s tweets before they’re floated out to the 1,500 or so people who wait patiently for the department’s little tidbits.17
The Harper team has learned that some “ethnic” media tend to be even more deferential to the prime minister than small-town newspapers and TV stations. Like many reporters in rural Canada and in small cities, journalists in the ethnic media see an interview with the prime minister of Canada as the opportunity of a lifetime. They’ll lob softball questions and let the prime minister’s staff edit scripts, if that’s what it takes to get the interview and keep Harper happy. Most small-market publications and stations, including much of the ethnic media, rarely get involved in controversies, and reporters working for them are often used to deferring to authority. Even if they’re the kind of journalists who are willing to ask tough questions, they rarely know federal issues well enough to grill the prime minister in ways that Harper’s team wouldn’t have anticipated. While many ethnic publications are not that well known outside their communities, they’re very important to the people who read them: new Canadians whose issues don’t get much intelligent coverage in the mainstream media. Conservatives were smart to realize the importance of this media and the voters who depend on them, and to court groups of people whose votes were taken for granted by the Liberals.
The Tory media team doesn’t rely on instinct to determine what targeted groups want to hear. The online news publication Blacklock’s Reporter obtained documents under Access to Information showing the federal government spends millions of dollars to monitor mainstream newsrooms, including Blacklock’s. It tracks coverage in Canadian Business and Maclean’s magazines; the wire services The Canadian Press, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Bloomberg financial news; and forty-four Canadian daily newspapers. A Treasury Board study, Broadcast Monitoring by the Government of Canada, which was launched to find ways of saving money on media monitoring, estimated just twelve federal agencies spent more than $3 million in 2012 on transcripts and recordings of newscasts. The Prime Minister’s Office spends $276,280 just on its annual Rogers Cable subscription. (That service does not include the Sun News Network, according to a call for tenders released by the government at the end of 2013). Blacklock’s said the paper trail shows every federal department, agency and Crown corporation, more than a hundred entities, employs an average of seven staff assigned to media monitoring.18
From March 2009 to May 2012, the government paid $750,000 to monitor ethnic media, with the public’s money being used to pay consultants to assess election events and determine whether people liked Citizen and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. The contractors looked through the ethnic press “monitoring key words and issues related to the department’s mandate,” but documents obtained by Canadian Press reporter Bruce Cheadle showed the work was also very political. “A series of interviews and appearances by minister Kenney and his representatives were strong contributors to the upswing in the ministerial image,” said one report from May 5, 2010 that was included in the 7,000 pages of documents that Cheadle received from the Immigration Department. That report also had a handy pie chart that showed “Minister Overall Perception.”
Those charts arrived at the department every week in the spring of 2010, when the Tories feared the Liberals would withdraw their support of Harper’s minority government and force an election. That kind of political monitoring continued through the spring 2011 election campaign. In those weeks, consultants examined ethnic news reports and graded their coverage of Kenney’s and Harper’s campaign events, and of their political opponents, from “very positive” to “very negative.” Just before that election was called, a staffer in Kenney’s office used his ministerial letterhead to solicit $200,000 from Conservative MPs for an ad campaign targeting opposition ridings that had large ethnic communities. Reports on that controversy were collected and analyzed by the department’s ethnic media monitors.19
In January 2014, Harper toured the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. While he was there, he wouldn’t take questions from local English-language media or from the Hill reporters who travelled with him, but he did hold a secret press conference on January 6 for ethnic media reporters, or, more accurately, for a few of them. Chinese-language newspaper Sing Tao, which is owned by the Toronto Star, and Rogers-owned Omni TV, which broadcasts in Chinese, were not told about the session. Of the South Asian newspapers published in the Vancouver area, the Asian Star and the Indo-Canadian Voice were invited but the Asian Journal was not. Harper was accompanied by Tory MPs Wai Young, Nina Grewal and Alice Wong. The “ethnic roundtable” wasn’t listed on Harper’s trip itinerary and the three local Tory MPs never mentioned it on their websites. Reporters invited to the session lobbed softball questions and took Harper up on his offer to pose with them for pictures after the so-called news conference.
It was during this visit that two left-wing activists were able to sneak into a different event simply by donning aprons they bought at Value Village. While the protesters were able to easily breach security, reporters who arrived late to the Vancouver Board of Trade were turned away by the same staffers who let the protesters slip through.20
Harper, who had cancelled his annual Christmas cocktail party for Parliament Hill journalists, held a secret party for ethnic managers in Toronto during the 2013 holiday season. Madeline Zinick, vice-president of Omni, said the Toronto party was described by Harper’s media staff as an “intimate family event.” The “media leaders” who were invited were allowed to bring their families, but the session was not to be reported on. “No cameras, no photos, no audio … you can’t report it in any way. Everyone had to wait in the holding area until Harper and his wife appeared, and there were no questions, just individual photos.” And, until Zinick snitched, everyone who accepted the invitation kept the secret. She said it’s admirable that Harper finds time for the ethnic media, but she also realized that many reporters and editors of ethnic publications aren’t used to dealing with the prime minister and his staff, and are overly deferential, often for cultural reasons and also because the federal government buys a lot of advertising. They should not “humbly accept these photo ops,” said Zinick.
“One could say, ‘Hey, it’s great that they’re paying attention to diversity, and having sessions with smaller newspapers and media entities that can have a hard time in a large scrum with traditional or larger ethnic media entities, so you’re giving them that opportunity,’ but what is that opportunity? It’s a very controlled environment where some questions aren’t answered … They know the ones who ask the hard questions, and sometimes, those reporters aren’t invited,” Zinick said.21
A few days after Harper’s visit, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark used the same tactic to try to curry favour with the Chinese-Canadian media, calling an “ethnic press only” news conference to share her insights on the Lunar New Year. (Mainstream Vancouver reporters found out about it and crashed the session.) Bill Chu, chair of the Canadians for Reconciliation Society, wasn’t thrilled. He said this soft ghettoization of the ethnic media and the pandering by politicians was a new twist on the old idea that new Canadians and those from non-European cultures were separate from Canada’s mainstream. “In the old days they [politicians] treated each particular ethnic community as if they [were] somewhat of second-class citizens. So they would selectively tailor the messages to each community,” he said. “So we are talking about remnants from the past. And this is something we should try to get rid of. There shouldn’t be a divisive way of somehow saying the Chinese would get one message, the Indo-Canadians would get another message and then other Canadians would get another message. So that’s not conducive to country-building. Because in a democracy what I hear should be exactly what you hear.”22
THERE ARE SOME IDEAS and policies that the Harper team doesn’t want to be seen touching. These are trial balloons, ugly little political slurs, anti-Muslim articles and other dirty little stories. From the beginning of his days as leader of the Conservatives, Harper has made use of the Blogging Tories, a collection of dozens of bloggers of varying degrees of integrity, intelligence and skill (see Chapter 11 for more discussion). Tom Flanagan was one of the advisers who spotted blogs as a good way to engage in low-road messaging, and hand-picked bloggers have “broken” several stories that were planted by the Prime Minister’s Office. The blogs were used to spread the embarrassing news that the government was paying for Wiccan priests to conduct services in federal penitentiaries and to generate the campaign to get rid of them. When the news broke in 2009 that Diane Ablonczy, then minister of state for tourism, had been smacked down for approving a $400,000 tourism grant to the Toronto Pride Parade, Saskatchewan Tory MP Brad Trost was dispatched to get the message out through supportive blogs like the anti–abortion LifeSiteNews that Ablonczy had lost control of the fund as punishment.23 The episode marked the end of Ablonczy’s career as an important minister.
During the 2006 federal election campaign, Paul Martin’s communications director Scott Reid yammered on live TV that Harper’s promise of $100 a month for daycare was a bad idea. “Don’t give people twenty-five bucks a week to blow on beer and popcorn,” Reid said while speaking on a news panel. Predictably, Reid was torn apart by Harper and by Rona Ambrose, the Tory critic in charge of the child care file. At the same time, people working in the Conservative campaign floated Reid’s expense claims to the conservative bloggers. The expenses were actually quite normal: claims for lunches at pubs with reporters, a New Year’s dinner meeting at D’Arcy McGee’s pub a short walk from the Prime Minister’s Office worth just $22.71. No mainstream media outlet would have bothered with the claims, but once they were posted on Tory blogs, they were somehow deemed newsworthy and found their way into the newspapers and TV broadcasts.24
Some members of the Blogging Tories shill for oil, gas and pipeline companies. All of them are skeptical of the link between environmental degradation and climate change. They want human rights commissions shut down (and Saskatchewan, with one of the country’s most conservative governments, has obliged). They want the CBC killed off. They want the Parliamentary Press Gallery stifled. And they’d really be happy if the unions were run out of the country. So, if you want to know where the Harper government is going, or would love to go if voters and informed critics weren’t in the way, read the Tory blogs. Many people do: the conservative blog Small Dead Animals, run by Saskatchewan dog breeder Kate McMillan, is not only one of the most-read blogs in the country, it’s one of the most influential and is consistently picked as the country’s best blog in reader’s choice surveys.
Smacking around the more problematic media, feeding the sycophants and buying glossy coverage is the Harper way of dealing with the media. Creating media of your own is even better. Will Sun News and 24 Seven catch on? Probably not. But the media is in the middle of a revolution. People who are born a few decades from now may never see a newspaper, except for a few family souvenirs that might be kicking around. It’s not clear what media will exist, and anyone who guesses correctly will make an awful lot of money if they invest in winners. This government is determined to be on the forefront of this revolution and control as much as it can of whatever comes out of it. But it’s not just a matter of controlling the means of delivery. This government also wants to control content, whether it writes the shows itself on outfits like 24 Seven, creates its own media studio, or has proxies at Sun News do the work. It also wants to keep a very tight rein on the vast amount of data collected and created by the federal government. That means sorting through the bureaucracy, tracking down potential trouble, and troublemakers, and making sure they stick to the script. From their first days in office, they’ve gone after the message as well as the messenger, whether in the media or in the public service.