The Media

Stéphane Dion was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on December 2nd 2006. Few people expected his victory. He arrived at the Montreal leadership convention as the fourth placed candidate, holding only sixteen percent of elected delegates, and his campaign spent a million dollars less than Bob Rae’s. On top of that, his convention speech ran over time and his microphone was cut off before he reached the end.

Dion won by being everyone’s second choice. Front-runner Michael Ignatieff was polarizing while Bob Rae was considered dead in Ontario. Stéphane Dion was a candidate everyone could live with. He was also a candidate delegates could feel proud voting for because he was perceived as having more moral fibre than simply political horse sense. Choosing Dion was a slap in the face to all those like Jack Layton who had claimed a few months earlier that Dion was "a man of principle and conviction and therefore almost certain not to be elected leader of the Liberal party."

Stéphane Dion was not the first choice of his fellow Liberal MPs, most of whom supported Michael Ignatieff. His strongest supporters in the months leading up to the Montreal leadership convention were in the Press. Dion was officially endorsed by the Montreal Gazette and by the Globe and Mail, who described him in an editorial as “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation.” Other newspapers praised Dion’s courage and integrity. Even Le Devoir, a Québec paper with sovereignist leanings, wrote that “Dion is the candidate who, in the course of the leadership race, made among the strongest contribution of ideas.” Le Devoir only chose Michael Ignatieff because of his sympathy for Québec nationalism.

In late January 2007, less than two months after Stéphane Dion’s leadership victory, the Conservative Party rolled out a series of now infamous attack ads that sought to portray Dion as a weak leader. The ads featured clips of Michael Ignatieff and Ken Dryden criticizing their party’s environmental record in a leadership debate. Dion was then shown answering “This is unfair!” and “Do you think it’s easy to make priorities?”

The Conservative ads were unfavourably received by the Canadian public. A Harris-Decima poll published on February 7th at the end of the ad blitz showed that fifty-nine percent of Canadians who had seen the ads found them unfair, while only twenty-two percent found them fair. The media were also unanimous in their criticism. Even journalists at the right-wing National Post found the ads morally questionable.

Polling agencies detected a small shift in voting intentions from the Liberals to the Conservatives in the aftermath of the negative ad campaign. Nanos Research and Harris-Decima put the two parties in a statistical tie, while Strategic Counsel gave the Conservatives a slight lead. However, considering that the nearest confidence vote was at least a month away, and that the Liberal Party still enjoyed higher levels of support than in the previous election, it would have been difficult, at the time, to call the negative advertising campaign a success.

But that’s exactly what the media did. Soon after the ads started playing, journalists began to suggest that Stephane Dion was being “redefined in the eyes of Canadians”. Just as the Conservative ads had alleged, they explained Canadians were unsure about Dion’s leadership skills and that Dion needed to present an ‘alternative vision for the country.’ Public opinion polls, once again, did not back these claims up. But no matter. In a few short weeks, Stephane Dion went from being “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation” to a “weak leader unable to lead his party.

After the negative ads, everything Dion did was reported through the lens of ‘weakness’ and ‘lack of leadership’. His refusal to make personal attacks in Question Period became a sign of his inability to lead. When he presented, in November 2007, his ‘30-50’ plan to cut poverty which was meant to provide the alternative vision for Canada the media had been asking for, his plan was dismissed by journalists as ‘too intellectual’ and ‘difficult for Canadians to understand’. Journalists started finding problems that no one had ever noticed before. For instance, they decided that Canadians could no longer understand his English, even though they had managed fine during the leadership campaign and the ten years he spent previously as a cabinet minister. When Dion, to much applause from economists, published his ‘Green Shift’ – laying out his strategy for making individual and corporate tax burdens depend more on their carbon consumption and less on their income, , journalists decided that he would never be able to sell it. ‘Ah, they sighed mournfully, ‘in this age of 30 second sound bites Dion’s Green Shift doesn’t stand a chance against the well-oiled Tory machine.’

Stephen Harper, during the same period, was running into situations that seriously put his ethics into question. In Question Period he was routinely offensive, and he handpicked ministers to dodge questions aimed at him, which they often achieved by insulting Opposition members. During the ‘Statements by Members’ period, which immediately precedes Question Period and is in principle reserved for declarations by MPs about local issues affecting their ridings, Conservative backbenchers were instructed to read vicious statements about Dion to destabilise him. In May 2007 it was discovered that the Conservative Party had given all of its MP who were chairing House of Commons Committees a 200 page handbook providing them with guidance on obstructing and manipulating committee proceedings.

The Prime Minister’s media image was strangely resilient despite these repeated ethical transgressions. It almost seemed as if his viciousness in the House of Commons and his well-documented efforts to exert control over the media only contributed to his image of ‘competence’ and ‘strength’. Even when Conservative Party headquarters were raided by the RCMP at the request of Elections Canada, some journalists seemed to conclude that the any illegal scheme only highlighted the Prime Minister’s strategic brilliance and desire to win.

There are many legitimate reasons to criticize Stéphane Dion’s leadership of the Liberal Party. He was not a good communicator and even less of an inspirational figure. He seems to have been a terrible fundraiser and he also showed poor political judgment on many occasions. For example, he waited until the last possible minute to name Jocelyn Coulon, a dour although highly accomplished academic, as Liberal candidate for the 2007 Outremont by-election: Coulon was handed the task of defeating in a few short months the NDP’s charismatic Thomas Mulcair who had been campaigning all year. But Stéphane Dion is exactly the type of politician journalists claim to want. He is undeniably competent, principled, and, as the Globe and Mail wrote, courageous. He made the environment a priority and presented policies that, even if they were hard to sell, certainly had in mind the good of country.

The media is full of contradictions. Journalists lament the paucity of intelligent political debate but dismiss policies with the slightest trace of complexity as ‘too difficult to understand.’ It never occurs to them that they should be trying to make them understood. The media bemoans Canada’s pathetic environmental record, but goes on to criticize Stéphane Dion for being naïve enough to believe that he could sell a carbon tax in tough economic times. So-called pundits appeal for more decorum in the House of Commons, and then go on to say that Stéphane Dion looks weak in Question Period. Journalists deplore the lack of talent in Canadian politics, contrasting our leaders with Barack Obama and his team of highly accomplished cabinet ministers, but at the same time they call Stéphane Dion a ‘nerd’ and smear him with articles titled ‘Is Dion’s trouble his ear, or his head?’ (Greg Weston, London Free Press) and phrases like ‘If Mr. Dion were any weaker, he'd need a blood transfusion’ (Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail). Then they are surprised that talented people don’t go into politics. The media cries out for more integrity in politics, yet most newspapers endorse not the man whose integrity was never in question, but the one whose mind is often described, with a mix of respect and fascination, as Machiavellian.

The media covers politics like a sporting event. It covers the politics of politics, judging leaders not on their ability to govern, but on their ability to win. It’s well known just how much the media influences on our perception of politicians. Journalists, after all, are our eyes and ears: our main link to what is being said on Parliament Hill and of getting the information we need to make rational political choices. Journalists, therefore, have a responsibility to cover politics in a coherent manner. If they ask for integrity, they must support a politician who demonstrates it, even if that politician wears glasses and speaks English with an accent. If they ask for comprehensive policies and serious debate, they must find ways to make complex policies accessible to Canadians who don’t follow politics.

The fact is that there’s no one to cover the media like the media. If they lament the modern media culture, they must change it.