When in doubt, blame the media. That’s long been a strategy deployed by unpopular politicians, and now some extremely online Liberals are using it to explain their party’s increasingly precarious predicament. Notwithstanding my obvious biases here — my faith in the value of good journalism is about as close to religious belief as I can get — I happen to think this is glaringly obvious nonsense.

It’s the same blend of desperation and self-deception that marks the death throes of almost every government in a liberal democracy, and it’s a particularly tough sell in a country where the largest newspaper chain has been calling for Justin Trudeau’s defeat from almost the moment he was first elected. Even the Toronto Star, once reliably (and maybe excessively) sympathetic to progressive governments, has shifted to the right in recent years after a change in ownership.

But while I’m not willing to entertain the notion that the media is driving the Trudeau Liberals down in the polls, I am open to the idea that they’re dumbing down the discourse in a way that favours populist politicians like Pierre Poilievre. Veteran reporter Glen McGregor’s recent story on the amount of so-called “personal” time Trudeau has taken since becoming prime minister is a case in point — and a worrying one.

McGregor’s piece calls out the 680 “personal” days Trudeau has taken over the course of nearly eight years in power, which is, as he notes, equivalent to 22 months or nearly two years. The Conservative Party of Canada weaponized it almost immediately, tweeting “while his deficit-fuelled inflationary spending and rising carbon taxes make your life more expensive, he's taking more personal time on your dime.”

Those 680 days probably sound like a lot — at least, until you realize it includes weekends, official holidays and other forms of down time. Put differently, it’s the same amount of time “off” as someone over the same period who had zero days of vacation, worked every single holiday, and worked 15 to 20 weekend days a year.

As McGregor notes further down in his piece, “the bulk of the days — 68 per cent — were taken on weekends, and spent mostly in the National Capital Region.” More importantly perhaps, his “personal day rate” of 24 per cent is “well below the 34 per cent of days in a year most Canadian workers are off, including statutory holidays and two weeks of paid vacation.” Oh, and those “personal days”? They almost always include taking phone calls from staff and stakeholders, getting briefed by officials, and reading reams of briefing notes and other forms of government business.

The most transparently absurd “revelation” in the piece relates to, of course, Alberta. “Since becoming prime minister, Trudeau has used a total of 88 personal days holidaying in Tofino, Whistler, Revelstoke and other locations in British Columbia,” McGregor writes. “That’s more time than his itineraries list him travelling to Alberta on official business, not including the six personals he booked in Lake Louise at the end of 2017.”

This is, remember, a prime minister whose mother’s family is from British Columbia, who taught high school in Vancouver, and whose youngest brother is still entombed in a glacier lake in the Kootenays. Notwithstanding the province’s obvious appeal as a tourist destination, is it any wonder that he wants to spend more time there than in Alberta, where public expressions of hatred towards him are as nearly commonplace as Calgary Flames paraphernalia?

For what it’s worth, we can’t compare his record here to his predecessors, since Stephen Harper didn’t keep or release any such records. What we do know is Trudeau has always been clear about the importance of maintaining a balance between his professional responsibilities and the time he spends with his family. “I need to be really ruthless to ensure I have time with family, time with Sophie and time to decompress,” he said back in 2015. As the son of a former prime minister, he probably understands that need better than almost anyone else in this country. In light of his recent separation from his wife, maybe he didn’t attend to it ruthlessly enough.

That’s a question for another day, though. The question for this one is whether this sort of coverage adds any value to the broader political discourse we all share. Given all the other pressing issues out there, from the alarming rise in anti-Semitism to our ongoing failure to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is the prime minister’s schedule really worthy of our collective attention as Canadians?

This is no trivial matter. As we saw in the United States, the media’s inability to properly frame the stakes of the 2016 and 2020 elections came at a considerable cost — and may yet come at an even higher one. As a recent analysis by the Columbia Journalism Review noted, America’s two biggest newspapers are still falling down on the job when it comes to helping their readers understand the substantive differences between their political parties. “We found that the Times and the Post shared significant overlap in their domestic politics coverage, offering little insight into policy,” the report’s authors said about the 2022 midterms. “Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than to educate them on essential differences between political parties.”

As the fictional media magnate Logan Roy might say, “You are not serious people.” Right now, given the existential threat to American democracy, it desperately needs more serious people doing serious journalism, the kind that trades clicks and controversy for deep reporting and analysis. As CNN legend Christiane Amanpour said: We have to be “truthful, not neutral.” And we have to remember those who fear the truth will do everything they can to distract or dissuade us from this essential task.

All of this applies to Canada as well. We’re in a much better place than the United States, and Poilievre presents a much different level of threat than Trump. But the underlying trends are strikingly similar: a political discourse that seems increasingly uninterested in context and nuance, and a media landscape that’s struggling to adapt to that reality and the way in which certain politicians are willing to exploit it.

Better journalism doesn’t guarantee any particular partisan outcome, nor should it. But it can ensure the public is better informed about its choices and the consequences that flow from them. Let’s get serious about that before it’s too late.

Canada’s conservative double standard

Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical world in which an NDP provincial government purchased $75 million worth of medicine from a Venezuelan company in order to address a health-care crisis affecting children. Imagine if that medicine turned out to be poorly formulated, improperly dosed, and arrived long past the point at which it could help with said crisis. Imagine if our hypothetical Conservative federal government had already procured supplies of medicine from more reliable suppliers before the NDP government announced its ill-fated deal. And imagine that, in the end, fewer than 5,000 of the 1.5 million bottles the government bought actually ended up in pharmacies.

Oh, and just for fun, imagine if the owner of the company that helped broker the deal was friends with the NDP government’s justice minister — and his son worked as a political staffer in their government.

How, exactly, do you imagine groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) would react? They’d be incandescent with righteous indignation over the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars, all in the service of an obvious political stunt. They’d be right, too.

Weirdly, that hasn’t been their reaction to the UCP government’s bungled purchase of Turkish children’s acetaminophen. In fact, a search of their website’s newsroom shows they haven’t had any reaction to it.

Here’s another hypothetical: imagine that same NDP government paid former leader Brian Mason $253,000 to produce a report on the pandemic, one that clearly reflected his own biases and beliefs — and mirrored a quasi-fictional report he’d already prepared and published elsewhere. Imagine Mason then sent an email to all NDP MPs in the country informing them of how they could weaponize his taxpayer-funded report against the federal Conservative government. Imagine.

Well, we don’t have to, because that’s exactly what Preston Manning did with the Alberta government’s Public Health Emergencies Governance Review that he was charged with leading. “It’s all quite shameless,” Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid wrote, “but not entirely different from the $7.5 million being spent to promote an Alberta pension plan, at the same time another $1.8 million is lavished on a panel that’s supposed to be studying whether people want it…..There used to be at least some reluctance to use public money for such nakedly political purposes. Those days appear to be gone.”

The CTF’s newsroom, of course, has been conspicuously silent about this as well. That’s because the CTF isn’t actually interested in protecting taxpayers, least of all from conservative politicians. It’s interested in prosecuting arguments against non-conservative governments and politicians, and it merely uses the taxpayer as its ventriloquist dummy. Sure, they’ll occasionally salt their mine with a mildly critical complaint about something that’s done by a conservative government, but the overwhelming majority of their attention is dedicated to finding fault with progressive policies and politicians.

That’s fine, by the way. They’re free to run a glorified training camp for future conservative leaders, just as progressives could easily do the same under the auspices of their own organizations. But the rest of us — and especially the media — don’t have to take either seriously or pretend that their contributions to the discourse are anything other than an attempt to tilt it in their favour.

More about that Manning report

Notwithstanding the circumstances around its funding, I can’t help but comment on the substance of Preston Manning’s pandemic post-mortem. It is exactly what you might expect from someone of his political background and orientation: a document that mixes American-style freedom-at-all-costs, a misunderstanding of how the rights enumerated in Canada’s Charter of Rights work (Section 1 is, as the title suggests, right there), and heaping doses of the hindsight bias and paradox of prevention.

In Manning’s Alberta, it seems, the freedom to die a preventable death is more important than the government’s capacity to save you from it. Manning suggests that all emergency orders ought to be thought of as inherently and immediately unconstitutional, and governments should therefore wait until they’re ruled upon by the courts before actually implementing them. But in a genuine public health crisis where time is one of your most important and least plentiful assets, this is a prescription for suicide. Yes, people’s rights would remain intact, but many of the people who theoretically hold them might not live to tell that tale.

It was perhaps best summed up by Peter McCaffrey, the head of his own one-man think tank and a former acolyte at the Manning Centre (now hilariously called the “Canada Strong and Free Network”). After political science professor Lisa Young noted that the word “death” only appears six times in the entire report, while “freedom” makes 262 appearances, McCaffrey decided to offer an unintentionally savage precis. “Death is inevitable,” he tweeted. “Freedom you have to fight for.”

Eric Adams, a constitutional law professor at the University of Alberta, artfully summarized the tradeoff between freedom and public health: “Governing responsibly during a public emergency will almost always involve interfering with rights and freedoms,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Edmonton Journal. “A raging wildfire, a spreading toxin, a deadly disease, a civil insurrection may require temporary orders to restrict or compel movement, to limit the normal activities important to us in order to protect lives and property. Our constitutional rights are not suspended during such emergencies, but what qualifies as a reasonable restriction of our rights varies with the circumstances. We would not want it otherwise.”

Like most people, I pray we never, ever have another public health emergency like the one we went through in 2020. But there’s no guarantee we won’t. We’d do well to learn the actual lessons taught by this last one, and not just the ones that libertarians seem to think matter most. They may be prepared to die for their freedom to attend church or eat chicken wings indoors. The rest of us have different priorities, I suspect.

Not surprisingly, I think the federal government has a role to play here. By convening a national inquiry into the pandemic, and the responses in and by the provinces, it can create a more complete record of what really happened — and what we really ought to take away from the experience.

Manning’s report, for example, talks an awful lot about the impact school closures had on children. This is undeniably true. But rather than requiring them to attend school in the future, as his report seems to suggest, why don’t we focus instead on ensuring their schools and other indoor public spaces have the best possible ventilation systems?

There are plenty of real lessons we can and should draw from our shared experience of the pandemic that properly account for things like hindsight bias. We ought to prepare for the next public health emergency, and ensure the most vulnerable among us — both economically and physically — are better protected. And if Conservatives want to have an election over that? Well, I suspect the Liberals would be more than happy to oblige.

The toxic politics around the Liberal government’s plastics ban

Last week, a Federal Court judge ruled the Liberal government’s decision to list all plastic items as toxic was “unreasonable and unconstitutional.” For Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault, this was another bitter legal pill he had to swallow. For his opponents, it was another reason to celebrate a court system they’ve grown accustomed to criticizing.

In a way, the ban on plastics was emblematic of the Trudeau government’s biggest weakness: its irresistible attraction to performative politics and policies. Reducing plastic waste is an important priority, and it aligns with this government’s overall commitment to the environment. But the decision to unilaterally ban all consumer plastic products like straws, utensils, and other conspicuous items (rather than, say, applying a price to them) also created a bunch of potential political enemies without really creating any new political allies.

The politics on the right aren’t any better, though. The weirdly joyous reaction in conservative circles to the decision overturning the government’s treatment of plastics was emblematic of their can’t-do attitude on climate change that views even the smallest sacrifices made in the name of future generations as an impossibly heavy burden. “Everyone send @s_guilbeault those masses of unused reusable bags that now clog our car trunks, basements, and closets,” conservative columnist Tasha Kheiriddin tweeted.

Nobody is going to vote for the Liberals because they banned plastic bags and straws, and I doubt many people are going to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada because it’s defending them. But the issue consumes energy and attention on both sides of the partisan aisle that could be more usefully applied to addressing the real environmental concerns of our time. Our inability to agree on something so basic, and so comparatively inconsequential, does not augur well.

Quick Hits

Because there’s just too much to get into this week, here are a few stories that caught my eye — and might catch yours.

Sorry, skeptics: Electric vehicle battery prices are still going down.

Why Alberta needs to check its methane math.

It’s time to dig in on geothermal energy.

How carbon removal could become an important growth industry — and a counterweight against regional tensions.

The Wrap

Last week, I chatted with Ontario callers about the federal government’s carbon tax carveout for home heating oil on Ontario Today.

On Monday, I wrote about why the Alberta NDP needs a new leader, not a new name. After two election defeats in a row, it’s time for Rachel Notley to step aside for someone who can grow the coalition of voters she’s built. A new name is just a distraction — and potentially opens the door to a split of the progressive vote. In Alberta, that’s the surest recipe for a UCP win you can find.

On Tuesday, I joined Charles Adler for a chat about all things politics in Alberta and Canada.

And over on Elon’s hellscape of a social media app, I tried — again — to bring some facts to bear on the conversation around carbon taxes and inflation in Canada. Feel free to share this with friends and relatives who still don’t understand how it all works.

As always, please share this newsletter with anyone who you think might enjoy it. As we stare down the barrel of a potential ban on the sharing of news links by Google (thanks, Justin Trudeau!) we need to build up the readership of our newsletters here as much as possible.

And remember: a subscription to Canada’s National Observer makes a great Christmas gift!