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 […]
Political Reporting The China lobby remains active in Canadian media coverage, no?
It was a small, harmless-looking news item–a lion disguised as a lamb. It drew the briefest mention on TV newscasts. The Vancouver Province ran the story on page 35. At 3:09 p.m. on Thursday, June 22, after debating amendments to the Bridges and Tunnels Act, a half-empty House of Commons granted honourary Canadian citizenship to […]
Turner’s tortured relationship with media
Witness the spectacle of media combustion, where too-talkative MPs are drawn to hot TV lights and burned to a crisp. Ex-Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish got into hot water by yammering to reporters. Ex-Conservative MP Garth Turner did it by yammering to himself, in a web log. Turner is a former business columnist. He has a […]
When media cover ‘deeply alienating’ Muslim veil issue
“Canadian” is not a race. It defines citizenship and a delicious cut of bacon, but it implies no recognizable characteristic. We are the only people on earth to write this fact into our Constitution. It was a Liberal prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who said in 1971, “There is no official culture.” It was a Conservative, […]
