Dispatch from the Front Lines: While you were reading this, we privatized all the MRIs
On media hires, vanishing premiers, off-the-record chats, a doctor with more free time on his hands, and, oh, yeah, a new video feature.
Good Saturday morning, Line readers. We hope you are resting happily during this brief respite from the daily grind. Your Line editors are hopefully still snoozin’ as this is automatically blasted out, because boy, are we tired. We’ve normally run three to four pieces a week at The Line, plus a week-ending dispatch, but given the sheer, well, you know — *frantic hand gestures* — we’ve been publishing a lot more this week, just to keep up.
We want to first welcome our new readers. We’ve been adding them quite literally by the thousands since the campaign began. So, welcome to all of you, and a really heartfelt thank you to Justin Trudeau — we know you might be having second thoughts about this campaign so far, but good golly, is it ever working out amazing for us!
We won’t be meaningfully discussing the two big stories of the week — Afghanistan and the election — because Line editors Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson each had a column about those big stories here on Friday. (Bing and Bing!) This dispatch will instead mop up a bit of what’s left in the news, as will likely be our habit during the campaign.
One purely housekeeping item we need to remind you all of, or mention to our new readers: The Line just had its first birthday a few weeks ago, and we are now confident enough in our data and the loyalty of our subscribers to begin a slow move of some content behind the paywall. Our weekly dispatches have always been by far our biggest source of new paying members, so they’ll go first. That’s happening in two weeks. You have been warned. And you can avoid missing a word by simply subscribing today. We’re worth it. We promise.
Oh, and here’s something fun and new: we’re launching video content. Like, right now. We don’t know yet if these are pods or vlogs or what, but whatever you want to call it, it’s Gurney and Gerson chatting about what to put into these dispatches, and why. These will stay outside the paywall for now, mostly because we don’t know how to put them behind a paywall. We haven’t yet had to learn how to code, okay?! But check it out and enjoy. Share widely! And then subscribe so we can have money!
After we recorded that video, news broke — of course. We learned that the Liberal campaign suspended an event on Friday due to security concerns about a growing throng of anti-vaccine protesters.
Trudeau appeared before media shortly afterwards, and he seemed genuinely shaken.
Politicians and public figures are frequently subjected to genuine threats and harassment. They should take these threats seriously, where appropriate, and Trudeau should, of course, prioritize his own personal safety above a campaign rally. A lot of cheapskate Canadians and brain-addled partisans criticize leaders who follow the recommendations of the RCMP detachments that guard our VIPs, and criticize the spending that enables that protection. We don’t play that game here. Trudeau deserves protection, and we will not say a word against him for receiving it.
Further, he’s correct to note the deep sense of anger and frustration fuelling this campaign, some of it veering into the thoroughly nut-tacular — in fact, you’d have to be willfully oblivious to miss it. There is a lot of anger and craziness at the fringes of Canadian politics, and that is part of why we created the The Line — we are skeptical our traditional institutions will be as good at informing the lunatic fringe as they have been, but the need is as real as ever.
So let that be our first comment on the matter: the danger is real, it has been ignored, and it must be met. The NDP and Conservative leaders have both loudly condemned the incidents around Trudeau, and that’s correct and welcome.
The second point is uglier, but necessary: we must remember that this is a campaign, and that even unfortunate events will be exploited. We must all keep a keen eye peeled for when warranted and genuine condemnation of bad behaviour tips over into theatrics intended to drum up sympathy for a leader who is flailing in the polls and doesn’t know how to recover.
This is an unpleasant truth, but it is a truth: the idiots crashing Trudeau’s campaign are a gift to them, and the Liberals know that. (So do the opposition parties, for what it’s worth.) Indeed, this might all seem a bit familiar to some of you. Remember Michael Wernick, the former clerk of the Privy Council? When he was called to the Justice Committee to testify about the immensely damaging SNC-Lavalin scandal in 2019, the ostensibly non-partisan public servant prefaced his remarks with a spectacular non sequitur:
“I worry about the rising tides of incitements to violence when people use terms like 'treason' and 'traitor' in open discourse. Those are the words that lead to assassination. I'm worried that somebody is going to be shot in this country this year during the political campaign,” he said in a committee meeting.
Regardless of whether or not you share Wernick’s concerns about the “vomitorium” of social media and all its real and attendant radicalisms — and, hell, we do! — this was a painfully obvious attempt to divert the scandal at hand with an unrelated warning that ate the day’s headlines.
We can’t help but notice that many Liberal-affiliates were tweeting Wernick’s dire predictions again on Friday, although the context under which those prophecies were initially delivered was pointedly excised.
This is a hard issue precisely because it requires us to strike a nuanced position: there are Canadians out there crazy and angry enough to do Trudeau harm. Trudeau requires thorough protection, and all campaigns should disavow this behaviour. Finding ways to de-escalate the populist fury and hatred in this country is going to be a major challenge that we have only just begun to turn our attention to. And all that being said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Liberal campaign has already concluded that the optics of a empathetic Trudeau contrasted with a howling mob of dipshits is probably the first bit of good luck they’ve had thus far in this campaign of their own making. They’ll lean into it.
Some interesting news out of the Toronto Star this week, where editor-in-chief Anne-Marie Owens, universally known as AMO, announced a series of big hires this week.
As former full-time newspaper content miners ourselves, we are always delighted to see good people getting hired. And these are good people. And AMO is a good person (we say that in the professional sense, though we’re also personally fond of her — she’s hard not to like). It’s difficult to get any hires approved in cash-strapped newsrooms right now, to see four at once was … well, not literally unheard of, but rare enough to make your Line editors sit up and take note.
We are bearish on the long-term viability of most Canadian newspapers, for reasons we’ve gone into at some length before. We are really bearish on the long-term viability of any Canadian newspaper that doesn’t start with “Globe” and end with “and Mail.” But rolling over and dying ain’t going to serve anyone’s interest, which is why we remain cheerleaders of Canadian newspapers, even when they irritate us as they often do. Our newspapers remain, even in their current diminished form, repositories of professional and institutional know-how and continue to do incredible work despite relentlessly brutal conditions. So we can say, with total sincerity, that we’re thrilled for these four journalists, and wish them well.
We think it’s good news for the Star, as well. Some of your Line editors have worked there, we know of many others who have, and it does not have a reputation as a particularly happy newsroom. (Not that any newsroom is a particularly cheerful place these days, granted, but the Star is known to be particularly bad.) The Star had also been the site of one of those wokey workplace meltdowns that seemed to sweep North American media last year. These four editors will bulk up the Star’s editing abilities, ensure some adult supervision in the newsroom, and also, to be blunt, give AMO some reliable allies in her new job.
We have nothing bad to say about this move at all. Best wishes to all involved.
No, really. That’s it. What, you think we have to be snarky all the time?
As those four new editors settle into their jobs down at 1 Yonge St. (actually, we don’t think they’ve re-opened the newsroom yet, and we’re too tired to check), a few other people seem to be MIA from their job. Where are Canada’s premiers?
We were tempted to say “Conservative premiers,” because that’s the narrative, right? But there’s a fly in that ointment — John Horgan, the premier of British Columbia, has also been attacked for being away from his desk during not only a surge in COVID-19 cases, but also a series of wildfires. And Horgan is a Dipper. So that … kinda scuttles that.
But, have no fear, we’re proficient enough with weasel words to more or less stick to the original plan: “Hey, where are Canada’s premiers, including a bunch of Conservatives?”
Boom. Nailed it.
So, well, yeah. Where are they? Manitoba’s Brian Pallister is on the way out of office. Next door, Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe has been trading barbs with Liberal leader Justin Trudeau over the province’s use of privately-owned MRIs, which Trudeau is angry enough about to warn about clawing back federal health transfers to Saskatchewan. (We’d really, really love to see him slash health-care funding to a western province during a global public-health catastrophe, leaving comparable private services in Quebec intact — we mean that. Please, Mr. Trudeau. Do it!) With the exception of the surprise election result in Nova Scotia, the Atlantic provinces are quiet. François Legault seemingly remains more popular than God. So when we wonder where the premiers are, we’re really just wondering about Mssrs. Ford and Kenney, aren’t we?
Well, according to reports in the Star and the Globe and Mail, Ford has struck up an uncanny truce with the federal Liberal party. He doesn’t want to be a punching bag during this election, and Trudeau would prefer to avoid mobilizing the Ontario PC’s considerable ground game. If such a truce exists, we’ll note, Trudeau hasn’t really stuck to it.
And now, we seamlessly return to the original planned narrative — they are undoubtedly laying low during the election so as to spare O’Toole any collateral damage from their current low popularity — damaged even further courtesy of rising COVID case rates. Kenney momentarily emerged from his digital bunker to praise the Taber corn festival, but that’s about it.
Ford, for his part, is probably up at his cottage making a cheesecake or something.
Other than this both premiers seem happy to sit this one out. And O’Toole is probably happiest of all. As recently as a few weeks ago, it seemed likely that the best bet for Trudeau was to ignore O’Toole and campaign against Kenney and Ford. That plan has gone pear-shaped on the Liberal leader, though, with the surprisingly popular O’Toole now leading in most polls and Ford and Kenney out of sight.
We’ll see what the next few weeks bring, but put this down as a prediction: if the Liberal polls continue to suck, they’ll attack Ford and Kenney anyway. Nothing they’ve thrown at O’Toole yet has stuck. If it doesn’t start sticking soon, they’ll need a new plan.
This blurb may be a little too insidery, but that’s largely what you come to the dispatches to read. We at The Line have been following the burgeoning media career of David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology and a former member of Ontario’s Science Table, an independent collection of volunteer experts tasked with providing the province with modelling and COVID advice.
In the early COVID era, when all reporters were rapidly scouring their iPhone contact lists for disease experts, Fisman rapidly grew to public prominence, becoming one of the go-to sources on what the hell was going on. Fisman even picked up the phone for The Line, looking over one of one of our earliest columns on keeping schools open, and we’ve found him to be helpful, knowledgeable, and communicative.
His Twitter takes on the disease — which were soon intermixed with popular partisan attacks excoriating Doug Ford — have made him something only a little short of a folk hero among hyper-connected political COVID lurkers. Maclean’s even listed him on their annual power ranking. However in recent months, it’s been hard to ignore that his interpretation of data has seemed to grow more alarming in tandem with his increasing focus on trashing Ontario’s disastrous political leadership. And, hey, fair enough.
Things got weird this week, though. After alleging that the government was withholding modelling predicting a “grim” fall, Fisman resigned from the Science Table, alleging political interference. For its part, his former colleagues at the table strongly refuted that any such data was being withheld — and those denials seem to be in line with our own poking on the subject.
Further, it takes some hot stones to accuse everyone else at the table of being political hacks when Fisman himself has been called out for taking money from a teachers’ union to speak against schools reopening.
Despite resigning, Fisman doesn’t seem to have given up the modelling habit. On Twitter, again, he released this terrifying graph showing literal off-the-growth COVID case growth in Ontario:
More than 750 likes is pretty good, eh? Problem is, it’s not really clear what he’s predicting here, or what assumptions went into it. Worse, he’s caveating the model with a statement “No, it won’t be that bad” which makes it totally unfalsifiable. What, exactly, is the purpose of releasing a terrifying prediction if you don’t think it’s actually going to happen — except to scare the shit out of everybody and drum up Twitter likes doing it?
We understand that there is short-term value in using fear as a behaviour modifier, or to influence public opinion in positive directions. But parents are about to send their unvaccinated kids back to school, and the the population is already terrified of a disease that is now unavoidable and endemic. We’re 18 months into Pandemic of Fear: whatever gains there are to be made by further frightening people have been maxed out at this point. Now we need to mitigate the risk the disease presents in a sustainable and rational way.
Lastly, we’ll note that Fisman once put in his Twitter profile that he would delete his account once the vaccination rate hit 70 per cent. That promise seems to be gone now. But then, that’s Twitter for you. Just when you think you’re out…
Oooh, and one more little quickie: there was an interesting debate this week over “off the record” chats between media and politicians/staffers. We won’t belabour the point, as this dispatch is long enough already, but a few days ago, the Globe and Mail and Global News publicly shot down a private invite to join Trudeau for an off-the-record chat, saying that they wouldn’t be taking part in such chats during the campaign.
This stuff is complicated. Campaigns are isolated and confined environments. You have to spend a lot of time with people you’d normally be reporting on, or with the people who’d report on you. At the end of a long day, there might only be one place in town to get a beer and a burger, and agreeing that the meal time is off the record is entirely fair. People need a chance to unwind, to laugh and to just shoot the shit. That can include the party leaders themselves. That’s fine.
Where it gets dicier is when the politician or staffer wants to use the anonymity offered by going off-record as an opportunity to skew or torque coverage of the campaign. One of the Global reporters who was asked to go off record was Mercedes Stephenson, who largely covers military and defence matters. Mere hours after the invite was rejected, the Canadian Armed Forces wrapped up the effort in Kabul. We honestly don’t know what Trudeau wanted to talk with her about, but we feel pretty safe in suggesting that it just might have had something to do with that, and that the Liberals wanted to prep the ground for what was going to be (and was) a bad news story for them.
Laughing about kids, the weather and baseball while grabbing a bite and getting a briefing on an ongoing military mission aren’t the same. They shouldn’t be treated as such. Hat tip to our colleagues for knowing that, and saying so. We suspect the Liberal campaign got the message.
Oh, and as an aside, purely as an FYI, we found this exchange interesting. Bryan’s right, ya’ll. Off the record requires mutual consent. It’s not a magic spell that someone can invoke at will on a reporter, thus binding their tongues forever. Unless you have a mutual and clear understanding that you’re off the record, you’re on the record. A friendly reminder to all of our non-media friends.
Round up:
That was a busy week. We started off this Monday with our first She-lection Bullshit Bulletin. This was a big hit, although critics felt that it did skew a little too hard on the Liberals. We’ll do our best to keep as much balance as possible — and in an election nobody is free of bullshit — but, man oh, the Liberals sure are dumping it hard and heavy.
Next up, on Wednesday a PPC supporter made the case for his preferred party to get a chance to perform at the official debates. Indeed, the PPC is polling better than the Greens, and it’s an argument that deserves to be heard. Some of our readers would have liked us to identify the writer as PPC supporter up top, and we think that was a fair request.
On Thursday morning, Lauren Dobson-Hughes slayed with this detailed look at everything that is wrong about our slow, ineffective bureaucracy — especially where anything to do with international work is concerned. If you want a clear-headed look at why Canada can’t seem to get anything done in a timely matter, this is a good place to start.
On Thursday afternoon, the remarkable Kevin Newman came through with another nearly impossible to get file showing conditions on the ground in Afghanistan. He laid out the canal in front of the Kabul airport crowded with Afghans desperate to flee to the western countries they had once worked for before it was bombed this week. Without Newman’s work, Canadians would be much more poorly informed about the hard realities of our evacuation efforts in Afghanistan. We continue to salute you, sir.
Matt Gurney weighed in on the Afghanistan file on Friday morning. No, of course we could not have evacuated all of our former interpreters and staffers, he concedes. But we could have done much more than we did — and our failure ought to reflect a national shame.
Lastly, Jen Gerson continued with her Friday election re-caps. Although, she’s not entirely sure what to call them. They’re not columns, exactly. Nor are they minute overviews of all the things that happened on the campaign. She’s really just offering a smattering of observations and ideas about the election that have occurred to her over the previous week, and it may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But there’s no way to find out until you read it.
Alright, that’s it, fam. We’re off to enjoy the rest of the weekend. We hope you have a wonderful break from reality, and that you’re looking forward to our second Bullshit Bulletin — expect that in your inbox Monday morning.
Until then, take care. And oh, yeah. Subscribe today. Or else. Two-tiered health care for you.
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com
So angry mobs interfering with a Liberal event is cause for concern, when angry mobs storming Energy East hearings or blocming railway crossings wasn't? (comment directed at the government, not The Line)
I keep thinking that Trudeau is going after private MRIs in Saskatchewan and not Ontario and Quebec is because Saskatchewan is a CPC stronghold but there are two other parties in Saskatchewan that express distaste towards the current PM.
If Trudeau can piss off enough CPC voters and turn them into Maverick or PPC voters he may be able to get a couple of NDP, or, God forbid!, Liberals in the province, that is a win for him. |
IOW, a vote for the Maverick party could be a vote for Justin Trudeau....