Oliver's Twist (37 page)

No other political party in my lifetime has chosen a leader so inept and ill-prepared for the job as Stéphane Dion. In personality he was intensely serious and even sullen. Though intellectually bright—he was an architect of the Clarity Act and his dedication to action on the environmental front was sincere—he was unable to convey his ideas in an easy and informal conversational style in either official language. Once on the campaign trail, he disappointed audiences with flat addresses that were painful to endure and that failed utterly to deliver the necessary partisan attacks on the Harperites.

On October 8, 2008, even the Liberals stayed home and the party was reduced to seventy-seven seats, one of its worst showings in many decades. Within a week, Dion announced he would resign as soon as a new leader could be chosen. By December 10, 2008, Michael Ignatieff had been installed as acting leader until a formal convention vote could make it official the following spring.

In the fall of 2008, Canadians watched the American election campaign, pitting Barack Obama against John McCain, with perhaps as much interest as their own. The pace of those
political events, the aggressive tactics used in both arenas, and the increasing influence of new media raised obvious questions. What is truth in news coverage? Who is telling it to us? And where do we go to find it? With so much information blasted at us from so many different sources, the genuine article has never been harder to discern amid the cacophony.

For good or ill, the digital age has given rise to the never-ending news cycle and a need to feed the information machine. We have the gift of instant coverage of any event that can be recorded with a cellphone, and we have the curse of sophisticated campaigns of deception that can go viral in seconds. Anyone with access to the internet can set herself up as a reporter, columnist, or analyst and peddle what may or may not be accurate information via personal blogs, YouTube clips, or online forums. The unsuspecting consumer cannot know if the authors are legitimate journalists, or hired flacks in the pay of political parties or special interests, or simply mischief-makers out to perpetrate a hoax.

It will surprise no one that I believe in the veracity of the mainstream media, by which I mean the professional newsrooms, big and small, which have standards of fairness and balance that the public can trust. Their reporters are sent into the field to witness events for themselves, stories are supported by teams of editors and fact checkers, and the work of all is subject to scrutiny, not just by the bosses but by press councils, ombudsmen and, in the case of broadcasters, the CRTC, not to mention the civil and criminal courts.

But the mainstream media itself has in some ways opened the door to abuses in this brave new news world. In October 1997, CTV brought its twenty-four-hour News Channel to air. (The CBC had preceded us by a few years with its own
CBC Newsworld.) There were no more final editions: We were producing and broadcasting stories around the clock, piling fresh items on top of old with less time for context, analysis, and evaluation. In general, mass media managers were more interested in ratings, hence the demand for colour and drama, if not actual crisis, and a focus on celebrity, crime, and oddball trivia. In some respects, the enemy is us: The explosion of news programming time has created such a need for material that we have debased the coin of what constitutes news itself.

Media minders—the spin doctors, public relations consultants, and communications assistants who now inhabit every government department and minister's office—are delighted to help meet the insatiable appetites of the news channels by creating news events for us. Though billed as public gatherings, these usually involve a “public” of partisan loyalists, summoned to provide the necessary backdrop to a well-staged and professionally produced performance by the minister. Reporters need not even attend and frequently are not permitted. When these events are given airtime, the viewing public is rarely aware that the events have been packaged and produced by a political party.

Unmediated news coverage today is ubiquitous and
caveat emptor
the consumer's only protection. Those of us in the serious-news business can only hope that the public will learn to distinguish between the real thing and the offerings of talk-show barkers, internet snake-oil salesmen, and political hacks.

Stephen Harper won a second term in October 2008 but was denied the majority he coveted. He had promised open,
transparent, and accessible government, yet the perception was of an obsessively secretive administration. A few acts, such as the apology to Canada's Aboriginals for the abuses of the residential school system, were universally applauded, while others, like the record number of Senate appointments designed to ensure Conservative control of the upper chamber (including the naming of my former CTV colleague Mike Duffy), inspired only cynicism.

The former initiative, surely one of the most positive and uplifting in the history of the Canadian Parliament, struck a personal chord with me. Speaking on behalf of Canada and with genuine emotion, the prime minister apologized to native Canadians for the policy of assimilation that had done so much harm to their communities and to those students at the residential schools who had suffered cruel mistreatment in those institutions. After my story on the event had appeared on the national news that night, Carole Helin, the widow of my boyhood friend, Art, called to say that for the first time Aboriginal people could feel real self-respect.

But such moments of harmony were all too few. In their first two mandates, the Conservatives endeavoured to govern not like the minority they were, but like a majority. As long as they were able to retain the loyalty of their hard-core base of about 30 percent of the Canadian electorate, they had nothing to fear from the other four parties who split the remainder among them.

Throughout his second term, Harper showed no hesitation in breaking the furniture of the hallowed conventions of the past. Twice the combined Opposition parties threatened his government with defeat, and twice Harper shut down Parliament through prorogation. No other Canadian government had had
the audacity to use such heavy-handed tactics so frequently, yet Harper did not flinch.

Another significant innovation of Harper's government was the perpetual election campaign. The Conservatives' election machine and its stokers never shut down between campaigns; fundraising and polling continued apace. Hence the appearance of television attack ads even before the writs were dropped. These messages, paid for by the party and advertised as such, were pure propaganda and sometimes contained outright falsehoods. More than once, the ads had to be withdrawn on grounds of poor taste or objections to gross inaccuracies. The other parties reciprocated with between-election ads of their own, but their spots leaned far less on the personal and more on the issues.

Viewers might claim these ads don't affect them, but surveys indicate that voters go to the polls believing the arguments they have heard in negative advertising. Most people regard themselves as wisely skeptical of any kind of advertising; in fact, they are not. Citizens hardly believe they can be lied to. Radio and TV ads for political ideas are just like those for any other product, and their messages have a way of settling into the public mindset, either by subtly persuading the undecided or reinforcing the biases of the converted.

Much of the government's positive approval rating in its second term was due to the perception that it was a competent and prudent manager of the economy. Faced with the global economic crisis in 2008, the Conservatives' first instinct was to stick with their no-deficit and balanced-budget promises. Only when the Opposition parties threatened to defeat a stand-pat budget did the Conservatives wake up to the political benefits of big spending. Their 2009 stimulus budget outlined a two-year
spending program of nearly fifty billion dollars. There was not a city in the country that did not receive a degree of federal largesse, and to the government's credit, the money was disbursed without any financial scandals.

At the height of the international financial crisis in March 2009, the prime minister gave
Question Period
an exclusive interview in advance of a G20 summit in London. In the midst of what appeared to be a global economic meltdown, Harper was cool and on top of every issue facing the summit. Undoubtedly, his steadiness helped to calm the nerves of a jittery nation. Two years later, heading into a third election, Harper told me in one of our private conversations that he believed his unruffled performance during those tense months was responsible for the credibility his government continued to enjoy on the issue of financial management. Harper made clear that if an election came, the economy would be the crux of it, an issue on which he believed he could win. The deficits his government had racked up were not mentioned.

Under Harper, the Conservatives mastered the technique of absolute deniability, the flat assertion of supposed fact about which no doubt could be expressed. Before he became prime minister, Stephen Harper said he would not appoint senators or allow any but balanced budgets. He promised to institute fixed election dates. And he attempted to strike a coalition of opposition parties to defeat Paul Martin's minority government. The reversal of these and other positions was never spoken of or acknowledged by Harper or his ministers. When the media raised inconsistencies or outright hypocrisies, they were simply dismissed.

In his first two years as party leader, Michael Ignatieff endured a steep climb. His critics, including many in his own caucus, worried that he was all resumé and no charisma. The remnants of Dion's team harboured resentment that Ignatieff had played a role in ousting their man, thereby repeating the Liberals' self-destructive practice of tribal warfare between succeeding factions.

Ignatieff pulled together a staff of long-time friends led by Ian Davey, a savvy if politically inexperienced lone wolf who established himself as the sole conduit to the leader. Complaints about access and lack of communication came to a head in mid-2009 at a summer caucus meeting in Sudbury. Ignatieff made a blustery speech in which he boasted, “Your time is up, Mr. Harper.” It was an empty and embarrassing display of bravado that utterly failed to rally his parliamentary colleagues.

Ignatieff continued to drift, talking in high-table platitudes while his support in the polls dropped to near-unprecedented lows. The Conservative attack ads that accused him of “just visiting” with no good reason for coming back to Canada took their toll. The central question was why he was in the fray, and he had no answer.

Finally in the fall, Ignatieff gathered the courage to do what leaders must when things are going badly. He fired his old friend Ian, along with an assistant who was Ian's girlfriend and some others. Rocked by the experience, Ignatieff told a visitor to Stornoway at Halloween that “there was blood on the walls” and “he had learned the hard lesson that one should not hire close friends as subordinates.” The party's old guard persuaded him to bring in the smoothly Machiavellian Peter Donolo, a veteran of the Chrétien years who wasted no time in putting a sharp edge on the operation.