This is a true story: It is election night, May 2, 2011. In the cavernous hall of Calgary’s state-of-the-art Telus Convention Centre, hundreds of ecstatic, raucous Tories are in full tribal bloodlust. The only thing missing is war paint. As the giant television screens chronicle the ranks of Liberals going down to defeat, they cheer each toppled incumbent. The NDP surge in Quebec has them howling their derision at the Bloc Québécois. When the networks declare a Conservative majority government, they let out a primal roar. They know they don’t just govern in Ottawa now. They own the place.
At the back, in the dark, rows of reporters bend over their laptops, typing furiously. Most have prepared two stories: Tories Held to Minority; Tories Win Majority. The first story is more carefully written because most parliamentary journalists didn’t think Harper would win this big. The polls had the Conservatives on the brink of a majority government but not over that brink; the late surge of the NDP in Quebec had taken everyone by surprise, not least Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe. The Liberals had run a smooth, professional campaign in which Michael Ignatieff had conducted innumerable town halls, excoriating the Tories for their contempt of Parliament and their callous disregard for working families. And Stephen Harper’s message—that only he could be trusted to protect jobs and growth; that anything less than a majority and the Liberals and the NDP could combine in an unholy alliance—seemed to most reporters simplistic and vulgar. Besides, he wouldn’t grant interviews or take their questions.
But the Tories have their majority after all, and as editors yell over the phone about deadlines that have come and gone, the most senior and experienced political journalists in the country hastily update their copy to reflect the new political reality.
In the midst of it all, one reporter turns to another and says quietly: “I think I’m going to be sick.”
One reason that many people within the Laurentian elite aren’t aware of how utterly they have been eclipsed is that they haven’t read much about it in the newspapers. There’s a reason for that. Many journalists—at least, among those who ply their craft in Central Canada—are themselves card-carrying members of the Laurentian elites. These Laurentian reporters and editors are unable or unwilling to acknowledge the great shift in political power underway in Canada because that shift, if it is real and permanent, will weaken their own influence. This is one reason why some journalists, including some within the Parliamentary Press Gallery, strongly dislike the Harper government. (John Ibbitson created a minor storm during the election campaign when, writing in La Presse, he used the word detest to describe the way some members of the gallery felt about the prime minister. So we’ll use the word dislike instead, though detest is probably closer to the truth.) The feeling, it goes without saying, is mutual.
The lamestream media, as Sarah Palin likes to call them, operate as a sort of echo chamber for the Laurentian elites, comforting them in their decline, assuring them that the rumours of their demise are untrue. Of course, as anyone with Internet service knows, the media themselves are in eclipse. For many, their days are literally numbered. But the band plays on as the water laps over the deck. What else is there to do?
It is a truism among conservative partisans that most political reporters are small-l liberals. This isn’t true. It would be more accurate to say that most political reporters, especially those who work in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, are Laurentian. On economic policy they incline mildly toward equity over opportunity. On social policy they are unanimously progressive. (If there is a reporter on the Hill outside the Sun newspapers who is openly opposed to gay marriage, for example, the authors have yet to meet him or her.) In foreign policy they are for peace, unless the bad guys are really, really bad.
There are many reasons for this Laurentian attitude toward economic, social, and foreign policy. At university, most reporters took degrees in the humanities or social sciences, where Laurentian perspectives prevail. Those who took journalism degrees—Ryerson in Toronto and Carleton in Ottawa offer the two best-known programs—were taught by professors who live among and embrace the values of the downtown elites in both cities.
While not essential to a successful career on the Hill, command of both French and English is a valuable asset, and one most of its reporters possess to at least some degree. (Francophone media are universally bilingual.) As we observed earlier, bilingualism is a characteristic most prevalent in those who grew up near the Ontario/Quebec or the New Brunswick/Quebec border, predisposing the gallery to a Laurentian world view.
The large contingent of Québécois reporters and Ottawa’s location on the Ontario/Quebec border also influence the coverage, which skews heavily in favour of Quebec. Even though the province has had virtually no impact on the national political agenda for years, thanks to its resolute determination to vote only for opposition parties, some columnists on the Hill seem able to write about almost nothing else. This is why so many reporters and editors, when conversing among themselves, talk about Ontario, Quebec, and “the regions.”
Many parliamentary reporters also buy into the Laurentian notion that the federal government has the right and the obligation to strengthen the union by promoting “national” (read federal) standards and programs. In their eyes, provincial governments are, in every sense of the word, inferior; their concerns parochial and selfish; their bureaucracies second-tier. Ottawa must lead the way, especially in social policy, and if the Constitution insists social policy is the purview of the provinces, then the Constitution must be gotten around. National programs driven by the federal government not only make for a stronger country; in the eyes of Laurentian journalists, they give reporters something to write about other than the latest delay in purchasing new helicopters.
Using the federal spending power to convince or coerce provinces into adopting federal programs is the preferred method for such nation building. It is how public health care was forged, and national standards in delivering welfare. Most politically aware Canadians know that the Chrétien and Martin governments aspired to a national program of daycare delivery. Most Canadians don’t know that while the Liberals were in power, the bureaucracy was also quietly working away on a national education curriculum, to be overseen by a new federal minister of education.1 Pause, for a moment, to imagine the white papers, the First Ministers’ conferences, the protests (especially from Quebec)
and other forms of federal–provincial wrangling that such a scheme would have entailed. The press gallery would have eaten it up. Sadly for the editorial writers, the scheme died with the arrival of the Conservatives in 2006.
Laurentian attitudes are practically universal within the bureaucracy—those who are responsible for Atlantic Canada and the West are inclined to wear pith helmets to work—as well as within the gallery and among the academics that journalists most commonly cite. Journalists, academics, and public servants all reinforce each other in their shared convictions. Though reporters like to think of themselves as contrarians, they are in reality as reluctant to be seen as strange or different as high schoolers at a dance.
These shared Laurentian assumptions about what is good for society and what is good for the country lead to a certain uniformity of analysis among journalists on the Hill. The Sun tabloids are noticeably to the right of the Laurentian mainstream, though many of their reporters trend to the left of their own publications. (The same cannot be said of the columnists.) The National Post is equally conservative, though more thoughtfully so. The Globe and Mail, though it is the paper most read by Laurentian elites, is also the paper that devotes by far the most resources to covering the West, with a separate B.C. edition and with bureaus in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg. But a Laurentian mindset can be detected in the coverage of both national papers in at least some stories on most days. Power may have moved to the suburbs and to the West, but Laurentian assumptions in the media continue to identify downtown Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal (“and, you know, Vancouver is also quite lovely”) as civilizational centres and everything else as hinterland, some of it quite barbarous.
The Laurentian mindset is most pervasive at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The loathing for the Corp among many conservatives is unfortunate, because the network operates to very high standards. In quality of coverage, CBC News remains the yardstick by which all other broadcast news organizations are measured. But there is justification for conservative anger, because the CBC’s Laurentian assumptions are so deeply ingrained that most of its journalists can’t even grasp that what they share is simply a perspective, not an immutable reality. For all its claims of balance, the CBC is genetically incapable of expressing any vision of the country other than the Laurentian. When was the last time you watched a CBC news report dominated by criticism of the federal government for overreaching its constitutional mandate and interfering in provincial jurisdictions? Have you ever seen a documentary asking whether all this concern for the environment and global warming might be overblown? What about that investigative report on unemployment insurance and welfare fraud in Canada, or the abuse women suffer at the hands of male-dominated power structures on reserves?
If you’re still in doubt, just listen to one week of The Current on Radio One or a few back-to-back episodes of Power and Politics on the Corp’s cable news channel, or an evening or two of As It Happens, or a Saturday or two of The House.
In pursuit of balance, the Corp will invite conservative politicians or thinkers onto its programs. What it doesn’t accept—what its producers genuinely don’t seem to understand—is that these guests are questioned within the context of a set of Laurentian assumptions so universally embraced that any other perspective is treated as exotic.
No wonder Stephen Harper shows so little affection for the CBC. Or CTV or Global. Or the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star or the Ottawa Citizen or the Montreal Gazette. Early in their mandate, the Conservatives decided that the best way to overcome the Laurentian biases within the Parliamentary Press Gallery was simply to ignore the gallery. After three elections and with a majority government now firmly in place, they have been remarkably successful at cauterizing the gallery’s influence.
It began with the diktat that the date and time of Cabinet meetings would no longer be published, and ministers would not be available after those meetings for reporters’ questions. At a stroke, the decision negated one of the most important venues for reporters seeking to question ministers. The gallery protested. The protests were ignored.
The prime minister’s director of communications at the time—Harper goes through them like Murphy Brown went through secretaries—then decided that she would choose who got to ask questions at media availabilities with the prime minister. Absolutely not, the gallery retorted; reporters will decide amongst themselves who asks questions, as they always have. When the Prime Minister’s Office refused to back down, most media outlets began boycotting the “avails,” as they’re called in the trade. As the months passed, however, the boycott weakened and eventually collapsed.
Journalists treasure foreign travel with the PM, partly because it’s the closest thing to a vacation many of them get. But there is also news to be had, sometimes from the prime minister himself, when he ambles to the back of the plane to shoot the breeze with the boys and girls of the press. At least, that’s the way it used to be. Harper never ambles to the back of the plane. No breeze has ever been shot in his presence. Nor do his senior staff sidle up in hotel bars for an off-the-record talk that could land an astute (and relatively sober) journalist on page one with a scoop. Travelling with Stephen Harper is a very expensive way to send home a quote obtained after three days of waiting for a press conference at which only two questions may be asked, and which reporters in Ottawa see simultaneously because the prime minister’s press conferences are so rare they are almost always televised live.
While the networks hang in for the visuals, newspapers have begun abandoning foreign travel with the PM altogether. Lack of access is one reason. The other is that newspapers in Canada are swiftly going broke.
The death of newspapers was first predicted when television arrived. Like all other media, the dead-tree business adapted itself to the new reality, concentrating less on reporting yesterday’s news and more on explaining it. Nonetheless, the culture of newspapers is deeply conservative and resistant to change—a legacy, perhaps, of the days when most papers were family owned, and when unions were so powerful that some proprietors were even prohibited from venturing onto the floors of their own printing presses.
Whatever the reasons, newspapers failed to grasp that the Internet, for all its marvels, was a mortal threat to their existence. The first blows came around 2005, when sites like Craigslist, eBay and AutoTrader destroyed the classified advertising side of the business almost literally overnight. The 2009 recession was another shock, as readers and advertisers decided to save money by cancelling their subscriptions and pulling their ads. The third and potentially fatal stroke came in 2011, when national and retail advertisers—banks, car companies, local businesses—began to look elsewhere. Worst of all, online advertising revenue, which news organizations had hoped would ultimately replace disappearing revenue from print ads, began to decline. There are simply too many places on the Net, and too many different venues—including social media and direct contact with customers—for advertisers to be bothered spending the way they used to on old media.
By 2012, American newspapers were operating with half the advertising revenue they had had in 2000. Newspapers started folding entirely or abandoning daily delivery in major cities: San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans. The Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, a respected shop at the University of Southern California, predicted in the summer of 2012 that by 2017 only four daily newspapers would survive in the United States: the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. (We’re not that sure about the Post.)
Advertising revenues in Canadian papers haven’t gone into freefall quite as badly as in the United States, but the trend line is depressingly the same. The result has been a wave of layoffs and cutbacks. Most newspapers have closed their foreign bureaus; parliamentary bureaus are being gradually thinned, with reporters ordered to stay at their desks and work the phones rather than venture into the regions for a first-hand look at what voters are thinking and saying.
The result is a pool of reporters even more insulated from the country and its concerns, with analysis based on outdated Laurentian assumptions, even as the reality changes swiftly on the ground.
These false assumptions were never more on display than during the 2011 election campaign. The opposition parties had combined to defeat the Conservative government over the March budget and over its treatment of Parliament. In fact, the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc Québécois actually succeeded in finding the Conservatives in contempt of Parliament for refusing to divulge the full cost of the F-35 fighter program, and for other misdeeds. It was the first time a government had been convicted of contempt—it could happen only, of course, in a minority Parliament—and Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff was convinced that voters would punish the Conservatives for such undemocratic arrogance.
The press gallery seemed to agree. For the first week of the election campaign, stories on the front pages and on the nightly news obsessed over the Tories’ careful scripting of events: their pre-screening of people invited to rallies and Harper’s refusal to take more than a handful of questions from reporters. The election appeared to hinge on the indignation of CBC correspondent Terry Milewski at not having carte blanche to berate the Conservative leader at will.
The Conservatives ignored the carping from the media, focusing instead on their message that only they could be trusted to protect the economy. Harper largely bypassed the large media organizations, granting interviews instead to community and ethnic newspapers and talk radio, where he was happy to take as many questions as the grateful interviewer could think to ask. Meanwhile, a press gallery that is obsessed about the influence and importance of Quebec spectacularly misread voter discontent with the Bloc Québécois and the astonishing surge in popularity of le bon Jack Layton. Pundits speculated endlessly on whether the Liberals and the NDP would co-operate after the election to unseat the Conservatives and form a coalition government, without considering the possibility that the NDP, not the Liberals, might become the Official Opposition, making any such coalition unthinkable. The question was moot in any case: suburban middle-class voters in Ontario decided not to take any chances; they combined with their Western allies to deliver a majority to the Conservatives.
Some parliamentary correspondents were so chagrined by the election result that they simply refused to accept it. Early in 2012, Postmedia Network reporters Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor uncovered evidence that a rogue campaign official appeared to be behind automated calls to Liberal supporters in the Ontario riding of Guelph, directing voters to non-existent polling stations. Impersonating an Elections Canada official is a serious offence, and the story grew as complaints came in about similar shenanigans from other ridings. Stephen Harper declared unequivocally in the House that whatever had happened, campaign headquarters had neither authorized it nor known about it. But for some journalists, Robogate—as they inevitably dubbed the story—proved that the Conservatives were guilty of a massive conspiracy to obtain their majority government through fraud. These grassy-knoll types were further emboldened when a judge voided the result in Etobicoke Centre on the grounds that votes had been cast there that couldn’t be authenticated.
“Just how many other improperly registered votes got into the ballot box that night?” asked Michael Harris, at iPolitics.com. “How did they get there? Robogate has focused on subtraction or voter suppression—votes that never made it to the ballot box. But what if there was voter addition—votes that got there the same way that stuffing gets into a turkey?”
In the end, the Supreme Court upheld the election result. But for Harris, and for some of his colleagues, the allegations of voter fraud confirmed a deep conviction that the Harper government was illegitimate, that it didn’t deserve to govern, and that it could not possibly be in power through legitimate means.
This conviction of illegitimacy has long been a feature in the political coverage of conservative governments. “Lyin’ Brian” (as Mulroney was not-so-affectionately dubbed by his many critics) was reviled in a way no Liberal prime minister had ever been. Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution in Ontario was castigated by many of the same reporters and columnists who today loathe the Harper government. In their eyes Liberal governments may make mistakes—generally by not being sufficiently progressive on social policy—and reporters will expose corruption within any party with enthusiasm. But Conservative governments, in the eyes of Laurentian reporters, are different. Genuinely Conservative governments do not belong in Canada. They do not reflect real Canadian values. Real Canadians don’t vote Conservative.
Such visceral distaste for the Harper government from some journalists discredits their bylines. For one thing, it insults the intelligence of readers who vote Conservative. For another, it is a gross exaggeration of Tory crimes or misdemeanours. There is no question that the Conservatives play hardball during elections and in between them. More than once, the party has fallen afoul of Elections Canada and been punished for it (although it was the NDP that got slapped the hardest, for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from union “sponsors.” The Tories have perfected the art of the political attack ad, and practise that art against their foes with particular viciousness.
But it is ludicrous to suggest that they rigged the 2011 election. Polling data were in line with the election result. The riding of Guelph, ground zero for the robocalls affair, was actually won by the Liberals. And though the Conservatives have used their majority to muscle through a legislative agenda with little regard for parliamentary niceties—the omnibus Bill C-38 that enacted a raft of initiatives in one fell swoop was particularly egregious—it is above hyperbole to allege that omnibus bills or prorogations or closed-door committee hearings move Canada beyond the pale of democracy. The Constitution is still there, and so are the courts. The press, what is left of it, remains free, people still have the right to assemble, and the premiers continue to keep a watchful eye on Big Brother in Ottawa. There are too many countries in the world where brave people risk their lives in the fight for democratic freedoms to belittle that struggle by lumping the Harper government in with the many sordid juntas and dictatorships that litter the globe.
The truth is that even if the Conservative tactics were a model of parliamentary decorum—the notion is, we grant you, hard to conceive—these same commentators would be no less enraged. It is the agenda they abhor, not the means of implementing it. Cutting taxes, relaxing environmental controls, leaving social policy to the provinces, backing Israel, pursuing free trade, tightening unemployment benefits, turning back refugees, toughening sentencing: this is what makes them fume. It’s so unCanadian, as they see it. Or at least unLaurentian.
And then there is the ineffable. So many in the press gallery detest (there, we said it) the Conservatives because the Conservatives Aren’t Like Them. Conservatives cater to a suburban electorate, rather than to the enlightened elites in the downtowns, where most journalists live. They come from the West, an unknown and hostile land for many Laurentian reporters. Conservatives are not sufficiently concerned about Quebec’s delicate sensibilities; they are disrupting the compact between have and have-not provinces; they have turned immigrant voters into dupes—or so think many journalists—who vote against their own interests. They are dismantling generations of carefully wrought foreign policy in favour of their own blunderbuss approach. Worst of all, they never return calls.
For these journalists, it’s personal, and it always will be.
The media preserve and defend democracy by reporting political events, investigating accusations, and offering perspectives. So vital are they that in Australia the government has pondered bringing in a “public interest test” to prevent a possible hostile takeover of one newspaper chain by a mining magnate. In the United States, there are thoughts of converting great newspapers such as the New York Times into charities. European governments already subsidize some media and will be under pressure to increase those subsidies. The news is that important. As PBS concluded in a documentary on the future of newspapers: “Without newspapers, what will we know?”
The media are also businesses, and businesses are routinely created and destroyed by new inventions, changing tastes, and other market forces. “Creative destruction,” it’s called, and the centuries-old news business is in the grip of it. But we need not despair, however much current conditions tempt us. If information is as important as everyone thinks it is—and how could it not be?—then smart people will pay good money for it. There will always be a market for news.
It may be a much more open market than in the past. Journalists are likely to be less protected in sinecures, less sheltered by their proprietor’s profits and their union contracts. Each individual reporter or columnist, or whatever they come to be called, may have to sell their product—what they know that others don’t, what they’re thinking that others haven’t thought—in a forum where judgment is instant, rewards are substantial, and punishment is severe. For many, trying to survive in such a journalistic state of nature will be beyond distasteful. (John Ibbitson shudders at the thought of it.) But there may be no other way to sell the news.
That is down the road. But big changes are just around the corner. Some newspapers and magazines are going to go out of business in the next few years. Free-to-air television will also struggle. Newspapers will throw up online pay walls in an effort to replace lost advertising revenue with revenue from readers. As budgets shrink, parliamentary bureaus will grow smaller; some will disappear entirely. Younger readers already obtain their political news from a proliferation of sources, many of which do a better job of catering to prejudices than getting to the bottom of things. Older readers increasingly will join them, as many newspapers get thinner and less interesting, and stories on the evening news get shorter, fluffier, and cheaper to produce. The digital revolution might not improve either the quality of political discourse or the political literacy of voters. But it’s happening, and that’s all there is to it.
Meanwhile, as the Liberals and the NDP jockey to see who is really Number Two, the Conservatives will continue to dominate the agenda in Ottawa, ignoring or manipulating the gallery at will, while the Laurentian media grind their dentures.
As national politics polarizes between conservatives and progressives, especially on economic issues, political commentary is bound to polarize along with it. To some extent, this is already happening, with the rise of Sun TV and commentators such as Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley ranting from the right, just as Heather Mallick and Lawrence Martin rant from the left.
Some readers will despair that balanced, objective journalism will be sacrificed in this ideological warfare. But we’re betting that smart analysis will always have a market. It doesn’t take an informed reader long to realize that nobody’s opinion is worth anything. It’s what you know that counts.
And anyway, what is often considered balanced and objective is simply a Laurentian writer talking to a Laurentian reader. And that’s an ideology too.