Clear differences

On CBC's always-excellent At Issue panel last night, former Liberal campaign chief David Herle said that his party had failed to articulate/communicate its clear differences with the ruling Conservatives. He also said that these differences had to be forged in the realm of economic matters. 

I'm very fond of Herle and think he's one of the smartest people I've ever met in politics, but I find myself disagreeing with this diagnosis.   First of all, I'm not sure that there are really any significant differences between the parties on large economic matters -- no one wants deficits or taxes. As Chretien liked to say: everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Moreover, most macro-economic matters are out of Canadians' control anyway; subject to the whims of the global economy.  I've never really understood for the past decade or so why politicians keep saying that their number-one issue is the economy. Of course it is; if you're not interested in the economy, you're probably not fit to govern. But what do you propose to *do* about it? 

As for the clear-differences thing, two of my favourite columnists remind us today that Liberals have spent the past year carving out some large social-policy distinctions with the Conservatives.  And Conservatives have been enormously helpful in the clear-differences thing too, staking out hard positions on the census, gun control  and overseas abortions, which are quite easy for the Liberals to oppose.

 

 Here's what Chantal Hebert writes today about the differences: 

In the House of Commons, the Liberal critique of the government has been refocused on policy rather than politics and the shadow cabinet has been overhauled.

No opposition party is ever totally free of the tyranny of the daily headlines but no longer is the Liberal question period strategy totally predicated on them.

One can disagree with the Liberal stances on the gun registry; the government’s anti-smuggling legislation; the desirability of a bilingual Supreme Court; the Afghan mission and the Saskatchewan PotashCorp. takeover but the fact remains that these are all politically difficult issues on which the party has taken clear positions.

 

 

And here's Susan Riley, in the Ottawa Citizen. 

 

But for many voters, Ignatieff is still the serious guy in the corner, frowning and taking notes.

Yet he has taken stands: defending the gun registry, opposing the sole-sourced contract for new fighter planes, denouncing a clumsy Tory bill intended to stop human smuggling, supporting a ban on tanker traffic in northern B.C. waters. He has offered a home-care program that is limited in scope, but addresses real, as opposed to invented, concerns. And recently, instead of being conveniently unavailable, he voted in favour of extending Charter protections to transgendered people.

 

 

I think the Liberals' main problem is that no one's paying attention -- even partisans. Liberals, in their endearingly self-immolating fashion, prefer to natter among themselves about leadership and who has the better talking points.  Again, see the Riley column and what Dr. Bennett diagnoses as the ailment: "leaderitis."

 I know there are some serious folks who would like to help the party get some more attention for its home-care plan, etc., and remind politicos that it was the Liberal party doing some hard slogging on policy this year through the Montreal conference, the summer tour, etc.  But the political fray in Ottawa is mostly about who's up, who's down, who's leaking out of caucus, and so on. (zzzzzzzzz)  In that climate, no one is even looking for clear policy differences, much less reporting on them in a sustained basis.  They're all wondering what Ignatieff is going to sing at the Christmas party to upstage Harper. Heck, the Prime Minister has even screwed up efforts to drive a partisan wedge in the old Beatles-Rolling Stones debate. He's performed both! What will Liberals stand for now? 

Spelling is for elites anyway

I guess it could be worse -- John Duncan is at least not the "minster" for literacy. (This is the plaque outside his Confederation Building office.)

Senators say the darndest things

Here, without   comment, we offer you a snippet of a Senate committee last night, at which the topic of discussion was Bill C-3: "An Act to promote gender equity in Indian registration by responding to the Court of Appeal for British Columbia decision in McIvor v. Canada (Registrar of Indian and Northern Affairs)"

Vim Kochhar, the first Indian-born person to be appointed to the Senate, seems to have some rather thought-provoking views on what identity means to aboriginal people, as well as some thoughts on where "pure" Indians come from.  (Senator Brazeau is an aboriginal Canadian.)  Let's let the transcript speak for itself.

 

 

The Chair:  I wanted a distinction made between inherent right to self‑government, citizenship and band issues and the McIvor case, which is about registration in the Indian Act.  If all the resources and engagement are going to solve every problem of discrimination, this little problem with the Indian Act, which we have passed on division, may get lost in the huge shuffle that will have to happen.

Senator Kochhar:  I do not want to sound ignorant, but it is really not about recognition; it is about getting money.  People who are registered get extra money.  It is about obtaining money.

Senator Jaffer:  No, senator.  It is about who you are.  It is your identity.  It is not about money.

Senator Kochhar:  If you take the money out, identity will disappear.

Senator Jaffer:  No, senator.  It is about having your identity, about who you are.

______________________________________________________

Senator Kochhar:  Thank you, Chair and panel.  Ms. McIvor, I admire your courage and passion to continue your fight, but there is absolutely no bill that is a perfect bill.  I have not seen one yet.  Most bills get compromised to please the many sides for whom the bill is drafted.

In the very beginning, you said Bill C‑3 is a piece of garbage.  In your opinion, how far do you think you can go?  I do not mean the gender equality here.  How far do you think your status can go?

Senator Brazeau is my mentor when it comes to Indian affairs, although I am more pure Indian than he is.  Having said all that, I want to know how far you think the status should go.  If a pure Indian marries a non‑Indian; then that non‑Indian marries another non‑Indian; and that non‑Indian marries another non‑Indian, how far do you think you can take the status?

Attention shoppers

At this time of year, a lot of folks are thinking about shopping. As regular readers will know, I've been thinking about shopping for a couple of years now, ever since I took a class in "material culture" at the University of Toronto. 

I've been particularly interested in where politics meets the study of material culture -- specifically, how much our political world has been affected by consumerism. Once you realize how much we've been influenced by the idea that we need to buy stuff, it's a little bit addictive (like shopping, I guess). You see it everywhere.

Don't get me wrong: I like stuff. Especially pretty stuff. Consumerism is with us; our economies are built around it and the Western world is particularly attached to the notion, since it probably helped win the Cold War.

I'm just not entirely sure that our whole world has to be organized around the idea that we are consumers all the time.

At any rate, I'm turning this into a book (fingers crossed) in the not too distant future. In the meantime, though, I continue to poke away at the idea whenever I can in daily or other journalism. This month, it's in the year-end issue of Policy Options (where I've explored this idea before). You can find a pdf version of  the article by clicking here.

Who is that other byline on there? Don Lenihan is my spouse and a vice-president at the Public Policy Forum. He works in the field of public engagement with government; doing very interesting things in the realm of keeping citizens involved with the state. To do that work, he starts from the conviction that people have a different relationship with their governments than they do from merchants or industry. Not better, not worse -- just different. 

The Policy Options piece, then, is a combination of both our long-term projects. If you're interested in separating out which parts we did, I can say that I did most of the description, he did most of the prescription. But we traded drafts back and forth, and did edit each other's words.  So it really is a collaborative exercise, which is sort of Don's area of expertise. If we had tried to do this using the techniques  I'd gained from politics, I guess we'd have just ended up yelling at each other or calling each other names.  I'm relieved to report that we did the story Don's way. 

 

The rule of the unelected

Last month, retiring MP Keith Martin gave a heck of an interview to CBC's The Current, in which he listed all the ways in which a member of Parliament's job has been diminished.  Martin singled out for special scorn the way in which MPs have become servants to unelected, partisan staffers. Do listen to the full interview if you have a chance. 

This morning, a story in The Globe and Mail should remind us of what Martin is  lamenting. John Ibbitson is reporting that the government and opposition parties have reached a deal to scrap C-12, the bill that would have added 30 more seats to the Commons to address the under-representation of urban areas -- particularly Ontario. 

I take nothing away from Ibbitson's story -- if that deal has been reached, it's definitely worth reporting. But note how the elected folks, or their spokespersons, seem to be unaware of any deal, so much so that they actually contradict what the story asserts. The minister's office, Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, NDP MP David Christopherson -- all of them say that the bill is still alive. But the unelected, anonymous sources seem to know better. Look at this part of the story (emphasis mine): 

Minister of State for Democratic Reform Steven Fletcher’s office said the minister was not available to be interviewed. However “our government is moving forward with the Democratic Representation Act,” said spokesperson Jessica Georgakopoulos. She added that “it is anticipated” that the bill will be brought forward for debate next year.

That supposition, however, is contradicted by higher officials within the government.

Again, taking nothing away from Ibbitson and his story, it's interesting that on the matter of a bill on democratic reform, there are "higher" people in government, who know  more than the elected people about what's going on. If that's not an argument for reform, I don't know what is. 

 

What women think

Tom Flanagan, former adviser and mentor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has been embroiled in controversy this week  for saying that the head of Wikileaks should be killed. (Did I just really write that here?) And yes, he's publicly issued regret for his words.  But that's not what this post is about. 

In  the clip from CBC's Power and Politics,  Flanagan explains the remark by saying he was feeling "manly."(Did I just write that too?) Let's assume it's preposterous. Still, I find it interesting that he reached for that defence. 

Being "manly," it seems, is exactly what will vault your opinion into the mainstream media. It is "manly" to be provocative and, in the parlance of the TV producers, "edgy." Everybody wants to be edgy and manly. If you're not, you're, well, feminine and kind of boring. Not edgy at all.

This week, an organization called Informed Opinions released some revealing stats into the gender balance of the commentariat in Canada. Here's what it found, after an exhaustive, day-by-day analysis of the major media over a period of a couple of weeks:

In the six papers published during the period surveyed, only 16% of the op eds 18/113) and 15% of the regular columns (12/81) were written by women. The results varied by newspaper, with the Toronto Star publishing the highest ratio of female columnists (44%), but zero op eds by women. The National Post, in contrast, featured entirely male columnists and only 12% women-penned commentary, all of which was reprinted from American publications. Women wrote 8% of the op eds on The Globe and Mail’s comment page and 18% of the columns during the week studied, during which Margaret Wente was off). Women writers in the Ottawa Citizen made up 20% of the columnists and 27% of op ed contributors.

 On the electronic front, both the public broadcaster did a better job of including women’s voices than the private station. CBC Radio’s The Current featured 31% female guests (11/35), but CTV’s Power Play, focusing exclusively on federal politics, included only one woman out of 27 guests.

 

I'm happy that my newspaper triumphs in female-column representation. That's a true achievement -- nearly 50 per cent.  Meanwhile, as a consumer, and some-time participant on the TV end of things, I find the television numbers startling, but funnily enough, not surprising.

First, some full disclosure. Shari Graydon, head of Informed Opinions, recently recruited me to be one of the "mentor journalists" to help other women get their points of view published (I've yet to actually *do* any of that advising, but I'm supportive in principle so far.)

As well, most regular readers of this blog know that I also turn up from time to time on those political TV shows that were analyzed in the study. (It used to be mainly CBC, but now I'm mostly on CTV, where it was announced this week that Don Martin will be the new host of Power Play. Why did I drift to the other network after a two-decade-long commitment? That's another story.)

The producers and hosts of these shows will tell you that they're not discriminating against women -- that women journalists and politicos don't generally say 'yes' when they're asked. I think they're right about that. 

Everyone has a theory: women are juggling more things, at home and at work, and getting an opinion out there takes time. (Unless of course you want to go on TV and advocate that someone be killed, in which case, you can probably toss that off while you're making dinner plans.) There's also the simple numbers issue, in that there are fewer of us here on the Hill, so it's easier to find men to opine on air. 

But here, from someone who's in this world, let me offer just a couple more thoughts. First of all, I've noticed that there is a real status difference in Ottawa between veteran women and men in the political-reporting world. Most of the women I know who've been in Ottawa a couple of decades, like yours truly, are still reporters -- meaning that we still are required to go to the scrums, file the news stories, feed the insatiable beast of breaking news. In the print world, that means filing stories for a roughly 6 p.m. deadline.

 Most of the men who have been here that long usually are columnists, meaning that they don't cover the news: they analyze or opine on events from a distance and they're not filing at the whim of news events. There is only one woman columnist for the mainstream media among the parliamentary press gallery  -- the formidable Chantal Hebert, my colleague. Yes, I did say one. There are at least half a dozen men, scattered among the Ottawa print bureaus.

** Update: David Akin reminds me that we're about to get one new, Ottawa-based female columnist at SunMedia, Mercedes Stephenson, and that Manon Cornellier also columnizes for Le Devoir. ***

The other female columnists, at my own and other papers,  work out of Toronto or other major cities. (Susan Riley, retired, has one column in the Citizen a week, I should say, which I look forward to every week, but she's not employed as a columnist.) The rest of us are reporters, meaning that we don't have the luxury of  promising to down tools at 5 p.m. on a regular basis to be on TV. Usually, there are stories to file at that hour.  This is a logistics problem, first and foremost. 

But let's go back to the "manly" thing too and why Flanagan thought that was a good argument for spouting nonsense on TV.

I don't believe that politics is sports or war. That may make me too feminine.  Those metaphors leave me cold, frankly, as do all the barking dogs and bells and staged arguments of the TV panels.  When Sun TV started up in its early days this year, the motto was "join the fight." I loved it when one of my female colleagues in the press gallery put on Twitter: "I ain't fighting anybody." Well, I ain't either, and when I watch these efforts to turn politics into a battle to kill someone, metaphorically, or literally, as is the case with Flanagan's ill-considered remarks, I just tune out.

 I like TV political panels that have give-and-take -- the At Issue panel on CBC's The National being the best of the lot. I don't like seeing a conversation that amounts to the host asking for provocative or "manly" talking points, and the guests obliging. If I wanted to watch people barking at each other in my living room, I'd put on All in the Family reruns, and watch Archie call his son-in-law names. 

This very lengthy post (I realize now) is really just an attempt to start conversation. Those numbers from Informed Opinions are worth some real thought. It's not a coincidence that women's representation in the media is as bleak as it is in the elected world, or in the backrooms. I'd be curious to hear other explanations -- and if you offer them, I promise I won't say I'm going to kill you.