Deny, deny, deny
Two weeks ago, Deborah Yedlin, a columnist with the Calgary Herald, wrote that “the time has come to find a credible individual to speak for the oilsands – to consistently counter the attacks levelled on the industry by the myriad environmental groups.” One can’t help but wonder if she’s auditioning for the job with her latest column.
According to a report released Monday by University of Alberta biologists Erin Kelly and David Schindler, the Athabasca River system – the one that feeds the area surrounding Fort McMurray – is suffering environmental damage that is directly related to the massive oilsands developments nearby. “In all, the researchers found that industry releases 13 elements considered priority pollutants under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act, via air and water, to the Athabasca River and its watershed,” the Edmonton Journal’s Hanneke Brooymans reported yesterday. “The scientists also examined the 2008 snowpack and found that all these pollutants, except selenium, were greater near oilsands developments than at more remote sites.”
For most people, this report might serve as a cause for sober reflection on the impact the oilsands is having on Alberta’s environment, and whether the profits being generated up there are worth the long-term ecological costs. Not Deborah Yedlin, though. Instead, she goes right on the offensive. First, she begins by trying to undermine the credibility of the report by noting that “the study was funded by the Walter and Duncan Gordon foundation — which also assists other non-governmental organizations focused on the environment.”
She returns to this unsavory front later in her piece, suggesting that Dr. Schindler’s decision not to participate in the independent peer review underway at RAMP (Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program) means he isn’t the independent and unbiased source of research that he claims to be. “It seems to raise the question whether he sees himself more as an activist with scientific credentials,” Yedlin says, “rather than an academic scientist.”
But while her attempt to paint Dr. Schindler, a researcher with impeccable academic credentials, as a biased source is predictable, her willingness to buy the industry’s position on the report whole-hog is downright pathetic. Nothing in Dr. Schindler’s report, it seems, is the fault of the oilsands industry. The elevated mercury levels he found? Coal-fired power plants, thank you very much. The toxic substances present in the Athabasca River, such as dioxins? Blame an upstream pulp mill or the sewage effluents discharged by municipalities, if you will. The rest of it can be safely accounted for by the “natural occurring substances in the oilsands” identified by Chris Fordham, the manager for sustainable energy strategy at Suncor.
Yedlin even takes issue with Dr. Schindler’s assertion that the industry is breaking the law under Fisheries and Oceans Canada regulations. “But to the best of anyone’s knowledge,” she says, “none of the companies have been charged with contravening any sort of law.” That’s right, folks – in Deborah Yedlin’s eyes, until someone’s been formally charged with committing a crime, it never took place. That’s a logical fallacy, of course, akin to saying that somebody can’t enter a race unless they’ve won it.
And even if a crime has taken place, she says, what of it? “It isn’t news that the Athabasca isn’t pristine,” she writes. “The study isn’t telling anyone the Athabasca is beyond redemption of that the water can’t be consumed or that the substances are exceeding regulatory limits.” It’s precisely this kind of thinking, of course, that has us on the brink of triggering the kind of climate change from which we won’t ever be able to turn back.
Deborah Yedlin can try to dissuade, dissemble and distract all she likes, but while playing to the Calgary crowd might be popular in the short-term it’s going to look awfully silly in the longer run. Like the Athabasca River itself, the oilsands industry and the province of Alberta are rapidly running out of time in which to abandon their current public relations strategy, which appears to be defined by childish petulance and an unwillingness to come to terms with the facts of the matter, and move on to the task of formulating a meaningful and honest response to the challenges presented by Dr. Schindler’s work.
There is merit in oil sands development, and a strong case for its continued exploration. The transition from an economy that depends on fossil fuels to one that relies upon renewable sources of energy won’t happen overnight, and the oilsands will play a critical role in that process. More to the point, I don’t think Dr. Schindler is suggesting that Albertans abandon the oilsands, and few would listen to him if he did. Alberta, as its more strident defenders never seem to tire of pointing out, is not Saudi Arabia, and in terms of the ethical and environmental consequences of oil production its impacts are lower than most other sources of fossil fuels.
But a strategy built around the idea that Alberta isn’t the worst offender in the world when it comes to oil production is no strategy at all. Instead, it has to have a plan for dealing with the environmental costs associated with their businesses, one that involves more than just spin and obfuscation. It has to become the best in the world at removing oil from the ground without destroying it and the surrounding environment in the process. The sooner industry stops wasting its time and energy fighting rearguard battles against its environmental critics and starts actually leading the push for a greener energy sector, the better off it will be.
WWTD (What Would Trudeau Do)?
The good people at The Commons have posted my quasi-rant about the impending takeover of Potash Corporation and what it means about the state of economic nationalism in this country. Go read it, all twelve of you.
The virtue of volume
If there was any kind of proportional relationship between the number of articles about the future of journalism and its prospects for success, the business would be in fine shape right now. That there isn’t yet isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, because among all the self-involved wanks on the subject – I’ve written a few myself, in all honesty – there are still a few thoughtful and introspective pieces being written that offer new insights on the dilemma that those with an interest in the business of journalism are facing. These productive pieces serve as a kind of meta-classroom in which the lessons being learned might just lead to a future in which journalism isn’t synonymous with penury and failure.
One such piece is the one written by Salon’s Dan Gillmor that’s made its way around the twitterverse today. In it, he challenges the garrison mentality that many so-called professional journalists have adopted of late, noting that the contributions of non-professionals – be it a prolific blogger or just an interested member of the reading public – cannot be ignored. This is basic stuff, but what’s interesting is his supposition that their contributions might make the jobs of professionals more productive, if not more straightforward. “We are all creating media,” he writes. “Any one of us can, and many of us will, commit an act of journalism. We may contribute to the journalism ecosystem once, rarely, frequently or constantly. How we deal with these contributions — deciding to try one, what we do with what we’ve created, and how the rest of us use what’s been created — is going to be complex and evolving. But it’s the future.”
Indeed. As Mark Hamilton, a journalism instructor at Vancouver’s Kwantlen Polytechnic, wrote to me in a tweet today, “Every fair and accurate report of a matter of public interest/importance is a win for the public.” It’s also a win for those who are interested in making a living providing those same reports. Gatekeeping’s only a productive exercise if the thing you’re trying to keep on the other side of the gate is a destructive influence, and it’s clear that the influence of the de-monopolization of the media has been anything but.
But while the barriers to participation have been lowered, we all need to be careful not to allow the same thing to happen to the standards of professional practice that govern the collection and dissemination of news and information. This has nothing to do with media passes and press credentials, but instead the values of professional conduct that journalists are in theory supposed to uphold. That means a respect for objectivity and detail, a willingness to hear out all sides, a determination to remain open minded and an abiding loyalty to the truth and the public interest above all else. Anybody can possess those traits, and as the last ten years have shown, be it in the case of the war in Iraq or the more recent economic crisis, professional journalists often don’t. What matters is the maintenance of the standard, not the people who are doing it.
I remain optimistic about the prospects of journalism in a more democratic media universe. It could, in time, create a true culture of merit, one in which the best journalists – wherever they come from, and whatever their background – rise to the top, and those who systematically lie, dissemble or distort find their more natural home in the worlds of public relations and corporate communication. The empowerment of the audience, meanwhile, might bruise a few tender egos but it could also hold journalists to a higher standard than the traditional methods of oversight were capable of doing. For our part, we as journalists need to stop confusing form with function. What matters is what we do, not where and how we do it. Pieces like Gillmor’s get us all one step closer to embracing that reality.
Walk the line
Business journalists have to walk a very fine line. While they can’t be cheerleading shills for a given company or industry, they’re also speaking to an audience that, for the most part, shares a philosophical conviction in the virtues of the markets. They are, in essence, encouraged to support the team (the team, of course, being capitalism) without taking a personal interest in any of its individual players.
That can present a problem, though, when one of the players on the team is a complete and utter prick. Judging by the content of a piece she wrote yesterday, Chaya Cooperberg, a reporter with the Globe and Mail’s online business hub, appears to have found herself in precisely that situation. But in the course of explaining “How Rich People Think,” a new book by a fellow named Steve Siebold, Cooperberg failed her readers.
After all, while they aren’t supposed to root for individual players, that doesn’t mean that they can’t call them out when they drop a pop fly or boot a routine ground ball, and Siebold’s book sure looks like an error from here. Apparently, after conducting a series of interviews with “hundreds” of millionaires, Siebold has figured out 100 things that they do differently than the rest of us, the people that he refers to – seriously – as “the masses.”
That should have been Cooperberg’s first clue, but she remains on the sidelines of her piece while Siebold peddles his obnoxious and overtly classist nonsense. She quotes his first chapter he notes that “The masses are so focused on clipping coupons and living frugally, they miss major opportunities. Even in the midst of a cash flow crisis, the rich reject the nickel and dime thinking of the masses. They are masters at focusing their mental energy where it belongs: on the big money.” That’s right, folks – over the course of the last two years, when you lost your job, saw your salary cut or felt some other pressure from the global recession, you were really just experiencing a “cash flow crisis.” More to the point, it’s your own fault for not “mastering” your “mental energy” like the rich.
Ultimately, Siebold writes, the reason why the middle class – the “masses,” remember – remain mired in penury is because of their narrow-minded thinking and fearful approach to money. The difference between the timid masses and Siebold’s ubermensch millionaires, in other words, isn’t one of social opportunity or pre-existing financial advantage, but mere courage. As Cooperberg writes, “People who become rich, he says, view money through a filter of opportunity, constantly looking for problems to solve and ways to financially benefit.” So, that’s it, then. Quit your day job, stop busting your ass to pay your bills, and start looking for problems to solve and ways to financially benefit. Presto, change-o.
It’s disappointing that Cooperberg doesn’t challenge this childish view of the world, but all the more so given the fact that Siebold gives her every reason to do so. His fantastical view of the way the world works, and his evident disdain for anyone without a diamond-encrusted Mercedes Benz convertible and a personal staff, are a function of some old-fashioned self-loathing. Mr. Siebold’s father, after all, was a bricklayer, and he clearly feels that those kinds of jobs and the work that they involve are beneath him. “My dad was a bricklayer and I learned that you should just be glad to have a job,” he says. “That will just get you by, which is fine. But you only have one life to live. Why not be rich?” Freud would have had a field day with this guy.
Worse still, in his effort to fart in the general direction of the middle class, Siebold condemns the very attitudes towards work and wealth that North American society desperately needs to embrace. North Americans, after all, are up to their eyebrows in personal debt and unjustifiable borrowing, and yet Siebold believes that they ought to focus less on saving and more on earning. Worse still, he argues that “Whereas the middle class believes hard work creates wealth, the world class believes leverage creates wealth. The middle class believes money is earned through labour, but the world class believes money is earned through thought.” Simplistic, classist, and arrogant, all at the same time.
Siebold is entitled to write his silly book, of course. But the Globe and Mail isn’t entitled to reproduce it and its absurd conclusions verbatim if it wants to be taken seriously by its readers. There are plenty of important issues in the world of business right now that are worthy of discussion, be it the growing possibility of a double-dip recession or the idea that we never actually exited the recession in the first place. This classist twaddle isn’t one of them, and it’s a shame that Cooperberg and her editors saw fit to endorse it.
The Tempest
Leave it to a national theatre critic to empty his tin of gasoline onto Edmonton’s smouldering cultural fire. In Saturday’s Globe and Mail, J. Kelly Nestruck took a poke at embattled local artist Jeff Haslam, whose intemperate outburst at local amateur blogger Sharon Yeo unwittingly unleashed the twitter equivalent of a witch hunt. But while it’s one thing for local blogger Mack Male’s unruly gang of technological theocrats to pile onto Haslam for his error in judgment, it’s quite another for a national critic to do the same.
Nestruck could have used his column to expand and inform, to engage the loftier concepts that underpinned the conflict between Haslam and Yeo and between the bloggers and the artist. Instead, he indulged in the intellectual equivalent of rubbernecking at the scene of a gory car accident. Worse still, he was right there at the front of the crowd, gawking at Haslam’s misfortune and even describing his tweet about the death threats that he’s received as “self-pitying.” In so doing, he passed on an opportunity to explain the implications of a conflict between a blogger and an artist.
Those implications begin, ironically, with the discussion around what it means to be a critic in the 21st century, and what value we ought to place on the opinions expressed by people like Nestruck. In the crossfire that broke out in the days after Male’s initial post, one of the most common pieces of ammunition fired in Haslam’s general direction was the notion that in 2010 criticism can, and should, come from anywhere, and that it ought to be assigned the same value regardless of its providence. Audiences didn’t need to be “told what to think” by critics, we heard, when opinions about a particular piece of art could be more effectively and efficiently crowd-sourced by a variety of interested participants.
But telling people what to think isn’t what a critic – a competent one, anyways – does. The reductivist Siskel and Ebertization of critical culture may now require critics to assign a rating or score of some kind to the work that they’re reviewing, but that’s a mere sideshow. Their real purpose – their job – is to provide context, to add nuance and to tell the story behind their subject. They expand the audience’s horizons, and move them past a narrow-minded binary view that regards culture in terms of winning and losing or good and bad. That’s to the good, and those are things that bloggers are rarely able or willing to do.
The conflict between bloggers and critics, between the culture of the amateur and the domain of the professional, is really just another front in the populist culture war that’s taking place across North America right now. Those who believe in the value of expertise, the importance of reliable information and the calming influence of a civilized and respectful political culture have been getting their asses whooped over the last year or so. And while Sarah Palin and the ridiculous Tea Partiers have taken the politicization of ignorance to appalling new heights, Stephen Harper’s decisions to meddle with the census, to scrap the long gun registry against the advice of Canada’s police chiefs and to interfere with the work being done on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by InSite are nearly as dangerous. At this pace, it won’t be long before the flat-earthers get their own television station. Oh, wait…
The scrap between Jeff Haslam and Sharon Yeo might seem like an inconsequential skirmish when compared with these bigger confrontations, but its stakes are nearly as significant. It is another dangerous step in the direction of a denial of American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notion that while people are entitled to their own opinions, they aren’t entitled to their own facts. The anti-Haslam crowd, and the arguments they have made, point the way to a future in which everyone really is entitled to their own facts, in which all opinions are created equal and in which stupid is as everyone does. One of the only bulwarks against that populist nightmare is the work of experts and the respect that we show it. It’s a shame that J. Kelly Nestruck couldn’t find a way to remind his readers of that.
Much ado about something
Generally speaking, a manufactured conflict that plays out on a blog is about as interesting to me as the bowel movements of my next door neighbour. But the escalating war of words between Edmonton bloggers Mack Male and Sharon Yeo and Jeff Haslam, the artistic director of local theatre company Teatro La Quindicina, raises a number of interesting issues that are worth exploring.
The conflict, such as it is, revolves around a nasty note that Haslam posted on Yeo’s blog in response to a post she had made about “The Ambassador’s Wives,” a play that wrapped up a run at the Varscona Theatre at the end of July. Haslam, apparently unhappy with the coverage he was getting, fired back at what he perceived as irresponsible criticism on Yeo’s part. “I wonder if she knows that her crappy 19 bucks goes to less than 40% of what it costs to pay all the artists she isn’t always smitten by?” he writes. “Do us all a favour lady. Write about food and take your entertainment dollar elsewhere.”
Yeo and Male were taken aback by Haslam’s vituperative comments, particularly since, as Male notes more than once, they regarded him as their “favourite local actor.” But, “confused and upset by his comments,” they retreated from the queue at one of the performances of Haslam’s Die-Nasty, and headed home to nurse their tender sensibilities. True to form, Male – who’s known around Edmonton for his prolific (some might say pathological) output – immediately blogged about it.
Male excoriates Haslam for his tone and manner, noting that his churlishness is not the best way to win over his “customers.” It’s a fair point, although it makes me wonder if Male has ever actually met anybody who’s trying to make a living in one of the marginal cultural industries. These aren’t people who went to business school or spent their summers in high school working at the local deli, and they don’t regard the value of an honest day’s work and the importance of treating the customer right as the universal articles of secular faith that Male appears to believe they are. Artists are mercurial, unpredictable, and socially unconventional – they don’t abide by the rulebook that governs the grey, protestant lives that the rest of us lead. In other words, asking him to treat his audience like customers and his artistic output like a product that he’s providing for them is akin to asking a dog to drive you to work and put the roast on at 4:30. It simply isn’t a reasonable request, and it’s one that won’t find an audience with the intended target.
More interesting, though, is Male’s view of the role of the critic in an increasingly crowd-sourced cultural universe. He takes issue with Haslam’s attack on their credibility as reviewers, noting that “If Jeff wrote what he did because he feels that Sharon’s reviews as a blogger are somehow less important or relevant than Liz’s reviews as a writer for the paper, he’s in for a rude awakening.” The internet, Male notes, has broken down the silos that once separated the artist from the audience and the critic from each. They’re all mucking around in the cultural water together, now, and in a world where people are increasingly turning to crowd-sourced reviews from sources like RottenTomatoes, TripAdvisor, Yelp and other similar sites, artists like Haslam have to take the opinions of their audience members as seriously as they might those of an “official” critic.
He’s right, in part. The internet has leveled the playing field, so to speak, and where they might have been one or two critics there are now potentially an entire audience full of them. But while the field might be level, the range of talent on it is anything but. Just being able to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re capable of doing it well, and it’s clear – to me, at least – that this is what Haslam is responding to most directly.
Male argues that “Theatre, like food, is subjective. You can come up with checklists and guidelines and look for techniques and planning and passion, but none of it really matters. The result will be interpreted differently by different people.” This is, of course, a derivative of the infamous “opinions are like assholes” school of thought. But while relativism of that sort might seem vaguely democratic, it’s also the mortal enemy of merit, of our unique ability as humans to express preference and determine that one thing is conclusively better than another. More to the point, it’s an incredibly dangerous way to think about our cultural lives, and the surest way to debauch them short of a Harper majority government.
Professional theatre critics spend much of their lives watching and thinking about theatre – more, in other words, than is probably healthy – and have developed a level of literacy that no amateur blogger, no matter how sincere their interest in it may be, could hope to match. Amateurs simply don’t have the same intellectual tools as a professional critic, and that’s as true for the world of theatre as it is for those of books, films, art, dance and other forms of serious culture.
Male hints at the idea that the democratizing effects of the internet will render the professional critic obsolete, but I think it will do precisely the opposite, rendering the professional critic more valuable than ever before. After all, in a cacophonous cultural universe in which everyone has an opinion and a forum on which to express it, trust and credibility become hugely important. People will turn to the voices that they trust, and that trust, more often than not, will be earned through experience rather than earnest enthusiasm.
In fact, Male’s dust up with Haslam offers an excellent example of the limitations of amateur criticism. Male notes that Haslam took particular issue with Yeo’s review of “Dial M,” a play that was most famously turned into a film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock. Yet in her own review, Yeo confesses to not having seen the Hitchcock version, a sin that’s nearly as grievous as a reviewer showing up to a Shakespeare play without bothering to read the original text. “As for the other half of the evening,” she writes, “I was a bit disappointed with the show, which follows a jealous husband as he blackmails an old college classmate into killing his wife. While I’ve never seen the Hitchcock version, I expected a lot more from this production and from the actors.” And they wonder why Haslam was upset?
Male and Yeo weren’t the only amateur theatre critics to register their disapproval of Haslam’s behaviour. Graham Batty, a local theatre blogger, builds on Male’s critique, noting that “I see the shows I want to see, I pay for my tickets almost every time, and I’m as entitled to say my piece about those shows as anyone else who does the same.” “What you’re telling everyone in your audience by lashing out like this,” he writes, “is that they are not entitled to their opinion because they’re not educated enough to ‘get it.’ These are the people who pay your bills.” This is fiction, of course. As Haslam pointed out in his comment on Yeo’s blog, the revenue generated by ticket sales barely covers half of the costs associated with an average show, with the rest coming from the ever-dwindling flow of government support.
But what’s more insidious is the Palin-esque populism that Batty invokes, a variant on the notion that the “customer is always right.” The customer isn’t always right, as anybody who’s ever spent more than five minutes working in a restaurant understands. More importantly, when it comes to the arts, they aren’t customers, no matter how much the good people at the Fraser Institute might want us to see it that way. They’re people who are bearing witness to the work of an artist, and paying for the privilege of doing so. To see our cultural experiences as purely commercial exchanges is to invite a dystopia in which Nickelback concerts and various Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals are the only games in town. I’d sooner get shouted at by every artist in Edmonton than have to experience that nightmare.
I hope Jeff Haslam ignores Male, Yeo, Batty and the rest of the rabble of internet theocrats that enable them. So long as he continues to produce great shows, he will continue to perform to sold-out houses. In the end, it’s his talent, and not his public relations skills, that matter. Let’s hope it stays that way.
My heartfelt apologies go out to Jeff Samsonow, to whom I mistakenly attributed the words of Graham Batty. Samsonow, a local journalist, actually makes some entirely reasonable observations about the kafuffle here. Mea culpa, sir.
Rafe relief
From his time as a Social Credit MLA to his years as a radio host on CKNW to his more recent reincarnation as a columnist at the Tyee, Rafe Mair has had a long and productive career. While he was always outspoken and occasionally intemperate, he almost never relied upon the kind of hysterical partisanship and ideologically-driven thinking that dominates the intellectual output of today’s talking heads. Instead, he took the issues as they came, and found himself as often on the side of the New Democrats, his former political enemies, as he did on that of his onetime colleagues. But judging by the content of his latest column, that remarkable career in public life might be nearing its natural end.
No, Mair isn’t sick – in fact, as best I can tell, he’s as healthy as one could hope to be at his age. But his recent column that defends the Prime Minister’s approach to scrapping the mandatory long-form portion of the census, and the unmistakable ribbons of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing that ran through it, is a marked departure from the cool-headed and rational crankiness that his readers have come to expect. And while one bad column is hardly reason enough to step aside – even the best hitters have an 0 for 5 day once in a while – the lazy and unthinking approach that Mair chose to take towards the census issue may be a sign that his intellectual tools are starting to get dangerously dull.
Mair begins with a series of questions about the census, ones that are so glaringly self-evident and, well, stupid, that you almost think the piece is satirizing the paltry arguments that the Harper government has made in recent weeks. “Why do you want this information?” he asks. “What specific purpose is it used for? Is this to get information at taxpayers’ expense for corporations who could get the same information on their own dime? Why do you need my telephone number unless someone is going to call me — like a telemarketing company?”
No, Rafe. The government needs that information because they, along with hundreds of non-governmental organizations, apolitical bodies and other participants in our increasingly un-civil society, conduct studies on the behaviour, attitudes and attributes of the Canadian public. They use the information in order to help us better understand ourselves, and to inform public policy decisions and discussions. More information is better than less, after all.
And no, they aren’t going to give, sell or disclose it to any corporations or telemarketing firms. The Privacy Act prohibits anyone from releasing that information to members of the public or interests in the private sector, and severely punishes those who would do so. So far, they’ve yet to punish anyone from Statistics Canada for such a breach. Meanwhile, even if they did release census information, telemarketers wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. The data, once collected, is scrubbed of all personal markers that might link the person with their responses. Good luck selling toothpaste to someone who doesn’t have a name or a phone number.
It gets weirder, though. Rafe moves to the core of his argument – one that I’ll get to in a moment – by asking “Why should I tell you how much income I made and how much tax I paid? Are you seriously asking me to believe that this information will not be sent to the tax department? Am I to trust you? Be prepared for a surprise — I don’t!” I can’t tell if Rafe Mair actually believes that Statistics Canada knows more about his income tax return than the Canada Revenue Agency – you know, the department that actually handles it – or if he’s just inhabiting the man-on-the-street role with particular vigour, but in either case it’s problematic. He’s not that stupid, and his readers aren’t nearly that gullible.
After assaulting his readers with a litany of stupid questions and uninformed complaints, Mair actually makes a reasonably cogent argument against the census. Given its past transgressions, he argues, the government is in no position to ask Canadians for a blanket declaration of unconditional trust. Perhaps. But while he has every right in the world to make that case, he has no right to play the fool and willfully misrepresent the nature of the census and the method in which the data is managed in order to do it. If he isn’t familiar with the technicalities, he can always look them up. More to the point, as a paid columnist serving an informed public, he has a duty to do so. There’s underplaying your hand, and then there’s showing the other people at the table your cards. In this case Rafe’s done the latter, and undermined his hard-earned credibility in the process.
Pot, kettle
When it comes to the enrichment of the political discourse in this country, there are few organizations that do better work than Samara Canada. Their latest blog post, though, misses the mark by quite some distance. In the awkwardly titled “The risk is a debate that erodes public confidence in the importance of our census,” Grant Burns criticizes the country’s fifth estate for what he argues is an overly simplistic approach to covering this year’s biggest botched political punt, the government’s current attempt to debauch the census. In short, Burns criticizes the media for failing to properly educate the public about the census, its merits, and the context surrounding the government’s attempt to change its purpose. But while his heart might be in the right place, his head is somewhere completely different.
He first criticizes the media for presenting the issue in partisan terms, noting that “the census debate has been reduced to a popularity contest. Who’s winning the census debate and will that sway votes?” There’s no doubt that such oversimplifications have been made, but partisanship – and yes, even those dreaded polls – is the heuristic that most Canadians use in order to understand politics. But it’s also unfair to imply that the media has traded solely in simplifications. As but one example, the Globe and Mail provided Munir Sheikh, the former head of Statistics Canada, a chance to explain his position, one that he reiterated on CBC Radio. Meanwhile, the major dailies have faithfully tracked the issue’s every permutation, and included a wider range of academic experts and outside voices than they usually do in coverage of other predominantly political topics.
His attack on this country’s columnists is equally wrongheaded. He highlights Jeffrey Simpson’s August 10th column, along with the recent work of the Star’s Haroon Siddiqui and Maclean’s’ John Geddes, and argues that their work feeds idle speculation that undermines the public’s trust in the political system. “The back-and-forth sniping by press outlets of opposing political persuasion does little explain the significance of the debate and, in fact, invites speculation,” he says. But that’s precisely their job, to speculate, particularly since the Harper government doesn’t appear interested in providing anyone with facts.
More to the point, it’s not clear that Burns even read Simpson’s column. After all, while he pulls out a single quote in which Simpson – a man whose experience in Ottawa affords him the luxury of speculation – guesses at the Prime Minister’s motives, he ignores the remainder of the piece in which Simpson writes about the damage that the elimination of the long form of the census is doing to democracy in this country, the very subject that Burns claims the media isn’t covering properly.
For example, Simpson writes: “The assault on reason, of course, has short-term, baleful consequences. The new, voluntary methodology will compromise not only the next sampling but ruin the long-term comparability of data, as every statistician in Canada has underscored.”
Or: “Such are the consequences of having people in government who live in a world of political spin and who prefer ideology over data – who claim, for example, that statistics showing a decline in crime rates are not reliable because they don’t fit the government’s “tough on crime” agenda, or who say the situation in Afghanistan is improving despite the fact that the past two months have been the most violent since the war began.”
Better yet: “The census debate, so provocative and so needless but for the exigencies of ideology, roused civic society as few decisions have done in recent decades…Canadian democracy, in this long-term sense, has triumphed by rejecting ideology over reason. Some day, the long-form census will return.”
He closes out this section by arguing that “While columnists are charged with contextualizing the debate, it seems a disservice is done to the citizens of this country if those opinions reinforce stereotypes of the politically-apathetic Canadian.” It is ironic, then, that just a few paragraphs earlier, Burns himself referred to “Canadians’ notorious summertime apathy.” Pot, kettle?
Next, he appears to criticize the media for not giving the census the kind of ground-up treatment that the New York Times devoted to it down south. He even draws a comparison with India, and a story in Outlook in which “a columnist described his encounter with a census enumerator, detailing an awkward exchange about his family’s caste.” There’s no question that the media ought to be telling the most immediate, local and organic stories they can. There’s just one problem: the census isn’t until NEXT YEAR in Canada. There’s no data being collected, no forms being sent out and so no quaint small-town stories of that reverberate with local humility and the existential importance of the census to tell.
Finally, he closes the piece by arguing that the media ought to be focused on expanding the scope of the discussion around the census rather than narrowing it. Fair enough. But it’s odd, then, that he chooses to buttress that argument with the words of open government activist and census militant David Eaves – words that were published in the Globe and Mail.
Look, it’s not as though I don’t think the media falls down on the job from time to time, and that they tend to do so more often than not when they get within 100 metres of an elected official. But in that spirit, it’s also important to give them their due when they do a good job, and I’ve yet to see a compelling argument that they’ve done anything but in covering the census. From CBC Radio’s relentless on-air inquisitions of Tony Clement to the Globe and Mail’s big-picture perspective to Kady O’Malley’s willingness to pore through arcane government documents in the search for a shell casing or two from the proverbial smoking gun – ones she found, too, in the form of an email track between government officials and Statistics Canada bureaucrats – Canada’s community of journalists have made the census issue comprehensible for millions of Canadians, and have largely avoided reducing it to partisanship and polls. They have embraced complexity, and invited Canadians to do the same.
Ironically, by trying to sneak the changes to the long-form of the census past Canadians – who are, as Burns himself says, most apathetic during the summer time – the Harper government may have managed to raise its profile among Canadians and remind them of its importance. The media, for its part, has played a central role in this unintended educational experience, providing a forum for voices like Munir Sheikh, David Eaves, and other literate census advocates and holding the government to account for its revolving-door approach to trying to justify the change. Ultimately, in arraigning the media for what he perceives as their failure to serve the better interests of democracy and the public, Grant Burns perpetrates the very crime that he is busy accusing others of committing.
Spin city
Even in their wildest dreams, it’s unlikely that the architects of Rethink Alberta’s recent attack on the oil sands imagined they’d have this much success. But a recent poll, conducted online by Angus Reid that surveyed approximately 4,000 people in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, reveals that their suggestion that people “rethink Alberta” has many of them doing exactly that.
According to a piece in the Globe and Mail, the campaign has been an qualified success. “Before watching the ad, 54 per cent of Britons and 49 per cent of Americans said they would consider visiting the province,” it reported. “After viewing the ad, those numbers plunged to 24 per cent and 26 per cent, respectively.” Mario Canseco, the vice-president of public affairs for Angus Reid, describes the effect of the advertisements as “devastating.” “We thought they’d take a hit,” he said, “but we didn’t think they’d lose half the people.”
Not surprisingly, Alberta’s oil sands industry has begun to take notice. The government of Alberta, on their behalf, has embarked on an advertising campaign of its own that seeks to remind people about the good things that the industry is doing, both economically and environmentally. Its supporters in the mainstream media, like the Calgary Herald’s Deborah Yedlin, have also begun to fight back. In a recent column, she argued that the distortions in the Rethink Alberta campaign, from exaggerating the size of the oil sands to the impact they have on wildlife and water supplies, constitute little more than a smear campaign against a legitimate industry that provides jobs and wealth for Albertans.
Perhaps. But her decision to lash out, against the campaign, Angus Reid’s decision to conduct a poll about it, and even the British public’s lack of outrage over BP’s behaviour in the last few months, reveals the fact that she doesn’t understand the nature of the challenge that the industry now faces. Industry, after all, sat around for years while their opponents, be it non-governmental organizations, environmental watchdogs, or outspoken critics like Andrew Nikiforuk, the author of “Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent,” framed the oil sands issue and the terms under which it was to be understood. Politics – and this is a political issue – is a world in which you either define yourself or find yourself defined by others. To do nothing, to fail to define yourself in the way you want to be seen, is reputational suicide.
The answer, though, isn’t to go negative, as Yedlin does in her recent column. She trots out the standard ecological quietism – the oil sands aren’t really that bad, the tailings ponds aren’t really that big, and the aboriginal people who live downstream in Fort Chipewyan aren’t getting that much sicker – but it’s her decision to stray into the realms of petty nastiness and outright irrationality that makes the piece worth parsing.
First, she goes after the British participants in the poll, whose lack of outrage over the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico apparently disqualifies them from having an opinion about the oil sands. Equally strange is Yedlin’s suggestion that the video’s presence on YouTube undermines its credibility. That’s an idea that might have held up in the late 1990s when the Internet was still in its early days, but it’s dangerously close to ludicrous in an age when governments and corporations alike use technologies like YouTube all the time to promote their causes and spread their messages.
But it’s Yedlin’s criticism of Angus Reid for conducting the poll in the first place, and her implication that the company somehow betrayed a duty of public service, that’s truly silly. “When people are invited to participate in a survey, they make the reasonable assumption the information being presented for them to evaluate has been checked to ensure it is correct,” she writes. “By putting forward data that has not been vetted for accuracy, not only does the polling firm waste the time of the respondents, the results produced are nothing but spurious.”
Well, no. The results may not be *desirable* but they’re certainly not spurious (I suspect she means superfluous – spuriousness refers to the nature of causal relationships between variables). It’s clear, in other words, that the video has a direct and measurable effect on the opinions that people have about Alberta. Meanwhile, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t want to measure this effect, as Yedlin seems to imply. Angus Reid’s job is to collect statistically reliable information about topics of interest to its clients, and there are few topics more interesting than this one right now. The poll, after all, wasn’t about the video, or the facts – some of which were incorrect – presented in it. The poll was about its effect on people’s perceptions about Alberta, and that’s the information that Angus Reid was seeking to capture.
Those who speak on behalf or in defence of the oil sands industry in Alberta, like Yedlin, need to realize that spending time, money, and energy questioning the credibility of their critics or rebutting the factual errors that they might make will be about as effective (and exhausting) as bailing water out of a rapidly sinking ship. They need to focus instead on patching the leak, and they need to get it done quickly. The only way to do that is by showing the world that they’re genuinely making a difference, that the extraction of the oil sands won’t cause the kind of environmental damage that so many people believe that it will, or that it already has. That demands substance, not spin, and the sooner industry figures that out the better off it – and we – will be.
Lost at sea
Editorial boards, in theory, are supposed to be the reasoned voices of accumulated wisdom, the steady hand that keeps the collective ship from veering too hard to port or to starboard. But the Winnipeg Sun abandoned its post last weekend, preferring instead to play the role of Gilligan to Stephen Harper’s skipper by defending his decision to scrap the long-form portion of the census.
“It’s our bet,” they wrote, “that the same people who are angered by the federal government’s decision to drop the mandatory long form of the Canadian census would be even more incensed if Canadian citizens were forced to cast a mandatory vote in the next federal election. Because that’s essentially why the Harper government has made changes to the census. It’s trying to maintain a balance between the rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizens. We have a responsibility to cast a ballot in elections, but it’s our decision alone if we choose to exercise that responsibility. Shouldn’t it also be our decision alone when asked to contribute personal information to a federal census?”
For them to portray Harper’s decision as a victory for those who love freedom of choice is a move so cynically tactical (or tactically cynical) that it would do the Prime Minister’s own political staff proud. After all, who could argue with more choice – that is, of course, unless it involves a woman’s right to decide the fate of her unborn fetus, in which case the primacy of choice tends to take a back seat to religious privilege for Harper and his crew. But, I digress.
There are two problems – well, two major ones, anyways – with the Sun editorial board’s argument. First, the notion that those who oppose the Harper government’s decision to drop the long-form portion of the census would “be even more incensed if Canadian citizens were forced to cast a mandatory vote in the next federal election” is logically inconsistent. If they – we, even – support the supposed intrusion of the federal government into our personal business in the name of good governance, why wouldn’t we support a measure like mandatory voting that would share that objective?
But the second flaw in their argument, the notion that an end to the mandatory long-form is an extension of the franchise of democratic choice and freedom, is much more insidious. While the notion of choice is an attractive one, it’s also dangerously hollow – after all, what if people choose to make bad decisions? Choice is a process, after all, not an outcome, and we should be careful not to bestow it with that kind of value. Human beings can choose to be stupid, after all, and that’s essentially what they’re offering us here.
Moreover, even if you believe fervently in the virtues of choice, that isn’t what the Harper government is providing by eliminating the long-form portion of the census. Instead – and ironically – they’re actually depriving Canadians of their choice, because by debauching the census and the information that it provides to both government (federal, provincial, and local) and the hundreds of non-governmental organizations and institutions that depend on it, they’re making the entire exercise meaningless, or at the very least less meaningful. As Jeffrey Simpson wrote in his most recent Globe and Mail column, “The new, voluntary methodology will compromise not only the next sampling but ruin the long-term comparability of data, as every statistician in Canada has underscored.”
What Harper and his government are really offering Canadians is a Hobson’s choice, one in which the most important option – to keep the long-form – isn’t even available. It’s a cunning smokescreen by a terminally cynical government, but it’s one that the editorial board of a newspaper ought to be smart enough to see right through.
