Many factors explain soft treatment of Poilievre

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/06/2023 (1054 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A few days ago, I was in a meeting when another person asked me when the media would start holding Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre accountable. He wanted to know why the media isn’t doing more to expose the false and misleading things the Tory leader says on an almost-daily basis.

My immediate response was a bit defensive. I asked him if he had read any of my columns lately, because I have written several pieces over the past few months that discussed Poilievre’s nasty habit of stretching the truth.

The response I received was that he wasn’t talking about me — that I was an exception — but that he was talking about the Canadian media generally.

He may have had a point. Indeed, a number of prominent national journalists and opinion leaders have been oddly passive when it comes to challenging the accuracy of the assertions, allegations and accusations that Poilievre continues to hurl.

The more I think about it, I’ve seen this before. Back in 1983 and 1984, I remember how many leading members of the national media at the time seemed to have developed a bias against Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government. Their daily, slanted snark was obvious. They wanted Trudeau (senior) gone, and they gave his Conservative challenger, Brian Mulroney, a very soft ride.

Is history repeating itself? Has the current generation of Canadian journalists decided that it’s time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to go, even if it means electing Poilievre as prime minister? Maybe some have, but it’s reckless to paint all journalists with the same brush.

That said, there are at least two more issues at play here. First, the reality that the Trudeau government, and the vast Liberal Party infrastructure throughout the country, is doing a poor job of defending their leader and government.

In the lead-up to the 2019 and 2021 elections, attacks against Trudeau and his government colleagues were often met with an immediate, crushing response from Liberal partisans. The responses felt as if they were co-ordinated, and it was effective. If anybody threw a punch at Team Trudeau, they always got a harder punch back.

That’s not happening these days. Attacks by Poilievre and other Tories often receive a meek reply from the Liberals. In many instances, there is no response at all.

They aren’t punching back with anywhere close to the intensity they did in years past, which suggests to me that they are either tired of the daily cut-and-thrust of national politics, or the people who would normally be doing the counter-attacking are tired of defending Justin Trudeau and his government.

As in 1983, maybe today’s Liberal power brokers have decided that it’s time for Trudeau 2.0 to leave and make room for a new leader to guide their party into the next election.

We’ve seen this from the Liberals before, and not that long ago. Remember that former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien was nudged aside by supporters of his successor, Paul Martin. The process may be repeating itself in the party.

That may partially explain the widespread perception that Poilievre is getting a free ride from the media. The Liberals aren’t fighting back like they used to, and they can’t expect the media to do their job for them.

That is, if there still was a national media capable of doing the job. That leads to the second factor at play here.

On Wednesday, Bell Media (BCE Inc.) announced it is cutting 1,300 positions across the country, closing or selling several radio stations, closing foreign news bureaus, and radically changing the way it delivers news to Canadians.

That’s bad news for Canadian media, and for the millions of Canadians who rely on Bell media outlets for accurate, unbiased information. But the situation may get even worse. There have been multiple reports this week about the dire financial condition of Postmedia, which owns dozens of newspapers across the country, including the National Post and Winnipeg Sun.

According to reports, American-owned Postmedia is on the verge of bankruptcy after years of staffing cuts and closures, and could collapse if it doesn’t receive yet another bailout funded by Canadian taxpayers. Reports also reveal that the company posted operating income of just $13 million last year, despite receiving $9.9 million in government funding. That’s far less than the (more than) $30 million it must pay in debt payments each year.

As Marc Edge wrote in the Globe and Mail (owned by Bell) on Tuesday, “Ottawa will then have to choose between bailing Postmedia out again or letting it founder further. The latter could be the only way to help wean the country off the influence of U.S. hedge funds over the company.”

If you combine the Bell cuts with a Postmedia bankruptcy, and then add all the cuts that have happened throughout Canadian media over the past decade, it’s easy to understand why politicians like Poilievre appear to be getting the soft treatment. The reality is that there are far fewer journalists working today than 20 or 30 years ago — and it shows in the quality of coverage Canadians are getting.

That’s the way it is, and that’s why it is so important to support local journalism. A few years from now, it may be the only journalism left standing.

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