This just in… handful of journalists confirm my focus-group findings
Acting on a pollster’s tip, I conducted a focus group of preschoolers to determine the outcome of the next election. You might try this at home, too. Respondents aged five and three were shown flash-card photographs of the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition, and asked their impressions. I threw in a photo of […]
Vancouver to play host to 2010 Olympics
There is a little social worker in all of us: Very little, as we’re about to discover–and all because of TV. In what is a soon-to-be national embarrassment, hosts of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics have concluded the city is unfit to be seen by world media. “The problem, in a nutshell,” wrote the Vancouver Sun, […]
Media typecasting is more subtle than a partisan harangue, eh?
A lot of journalists really seem to like the leader of the Green Party. She is a mother and an environmentalist. Her name is Elizabeth May, but many think of her as Earth Mother. She is skillful at winning friends and influencing people. Born in the U.S., May has the American habit of self-deprecating chattiness […]
Nobody expects elegant discourse, but come on people
The year 2007 may determine whether Canadians sweep the dirt out of our campaigns. In this, journalists will play a major role. Nobody expects elegant discourse; ‘My-opponent-makes-me-sick’ has been a staple of politics since 1867. Yet recent elections have seen the rise of partisanship that goes beyond old-time brawling. I refer to the war rooms. […]
The best and worst of the rich political news pageant of 2006
It was a year of wonders that saw fish return to the Rhine, and a giant octopus attack a submarine off Vancouver Island. It was a year of troubles in which Iran decreed Danish pastries must be called “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad” and the Associated Press published the unnerving headline, “Rat-Squirrel Not Extinct After […]
Great lemming trek is back once again: the Quebec nation
Jump in, the water’s great! Fourteen years ago, politicians and media pundits waded into the St. Lawrence, half-crazed by “appeasement unity politics,” as Stephen Harper put it, and were swept out to sea. Now the great lemming trek is back once again. Then, it was the Charlottetown Accord. Bob Rae, one of its last survivors, […]
If media were any less animated they’d put us in a House of Wax
A federal agency recently published a crime study packed with disturbing facts. It was ignored by newsrooms nationwide. Any Canadian who complains of “gotcha journalism” doesn’t get out much. Italian media produced the paparazzi. Americans invented the tabloid. Canada gave the world tea-and-biscuit features like Glimpses of a Governor-General’s Childhood. If our media were any […]
Parliamentary Press Gallery’s celebrity journalists do have a knack for misreading public mood on Quebec, eh?
Is there a word that captures the enormity of it? In one stroke Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada and Quebec, betrayed himself as secretive and cynical, played to his greatest weakness–communications–and set his minority government on a fixed course to stir up 15 million voters. Had Harper swallowed strychnine and rolled around the Commons […]
We’ve been officially bilingual since 1969 but only 10 per cent of the population speak English and French, less bilingual than Poland
An interesting thing happened in Ottawa, the purportedly bilingual capital of a supposedly bilingual nation. A dot-com millionaire, Larry O’Brien, was elected mayor with 141,000 votes though he speaks no French. O’Brien needed a translator to answer questions at one campaign debate. He uttered a single French word in his victory speech, “merci,” but it […]
Think of it: An entire nation stampeded to fear by misinformation
The Dr. Strangelove of global warming, British scientist James Lovelock, predicts Canada will soon be the only inhabitable place on earth. Lovelock has written a book in which he prophesies within our children’s lifetime “the Amazon will become a desert,” Bangladesh will sink beneath the ocean, much of earth will resemble a treeless Martian plain […]
