Commonwealth Games Bid (Feb 25, 2007)
Questioning the answers
I support Halifax’s 2014 Commonwealth Games bid if
… If I know how much they’re going to cost. And if that cost seems to be reasonable, given all the other priorities I’d like my governments to focus their attention — and spend my money — on.
Those “ifs” are critical to my position on the bid, but they weren’t incorporated into the seemingly blandly generic Games question Corporate Research Associates asked 400 metro adults between Feb. 1and 7: “As you may know, Halifax is the Canadian entry in the bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games. All things considered, do you completely support, mostly support, mostly oppose or completely oppose Halifax hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2014?”
The phrasing of the question and its lack of important context probably explains why the pollsters were able to report — in the words of a clever Daily News headline writer — 72% Of Us Are Game For The Games, even though every water cooler poll and casual conversation I’ve ever had on the subject leads me to believe otherwise. (Intriguingly, nine of the 10 readers who took the time to comment about the positive poll story on the Daily News website offered negative comments about hosting the Games.)
The problem I have with the poll is the same problem I’ve had with the Games bid process itself. It’s all about selling me something rather than ever telling me what I want — and need — to know.
It’s worth noting that Don Mills, the president of Corporate Research Associates, the company that conducted the poll, is also co-chair of the Bring on the Games Committee, a primarily business lobby group whose avowed goal is to sell the rest of us on the benefits of hosting the Games.
CRA’s vice president of public affairs, Peter MacIntosh, insisted to Daily News reporter Rachel Boomer that Mills personally had had nothing to do with the poll. I accept that. But does it really matter?
When you ask a broad question like the one CRA asked, without any probing follow ups to explore what the answer actually means, you’re left with little but spin.
And MacIntosh was spinning for all he was worth. “People see [the Games] as a great opportunity,” he declared. “They see that, in the long run, it’s going to be a job creator; this is not going to be a money-losing event.”
Is that really what we
see? Or is that what MacIntosh wants us to believe everyone else sees?
I was intrigued, for example, by the fact that four of the 400 people questioned actually stepped outside of the completely/mostly-support/oppose boxes the pollsters had created for them, and answered that their answer “depends on cost.” How many more might have checked that box if it had been one of the listed responses in the survey? Or if poll had offered “maybe” as one of its responses instead of the either/or “completely” and “mostly”?
And would MacIntosh’s upbeat spin have had to be different if there’d been some concrete follow-up questions?
Like: Would you support the Games bid if you knew it was going to cost $500 million? $785 million? $1.3 billion? More?
Or how about: Would you support the Games bid if you knew Ottawa would not contribute more than $400 million to the Games, regardless of the final costs?
Or, and this is perhaps the key question: Do you think the Games bid committee has provided you with enough information about Halifax’s proposal to fairly judge whether you support or oppose the bid?
The problem is that the poll was never really intended to find out what we actually think about the Games bid. Its purpose was to help the Games promoters sell us on what we should think.
The spin games are well underway. It’s long since past time for them to stop.
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College, is an award-winning author of five nonfiction books and a novel, Reparations.
Scooter scandal meets Citizen smear (Feb 18, 2006)
When spin spirals into smear
On Tuesday in Washington, final arguments are scheduled to begin in the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide. Libby, you may recall, is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in connection a 2003 White House campaign to discredit former American ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson’s “crime” was to have publicly called the Bush administration on one key piece of its trumped-up evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Whatever the outcome of the court case, the trial itself has inadvertently illuminated one of journalism’s shadowy secrets — the strange, symbiotic relationship that exists between journalists and those who leak information to them. In the process, the case has raised a fundamental question about a reporter’s responsibility to readers when political spin spirals into smear.
It’s a question we in Canada should be asking too.
In the Libby case, a parade of Pulitzer prize-winning journalists was forced to testify under oath about which administration official told them Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent, and what they did with that information.
Bush’s then-press secretary Ari Fleischer leaked the information to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. Deputy State Department Secretary Richard Armitage spread the word to author Bob Woodward and syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who’d received the same tip from Bush operative Karl Rove. Libby himself passed on the tidbit to New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper.
What is fascinating about that is not just how far the Bush administration was prepared go to attack an Iraq war critic, but also that none of those reporters ever wrote about the smear campaign itself.
One could argue that they were trapped — or had trapped themselves — by accepting off-the-record information from Libby et al in the first place. Even after they discovered they were being played, the reporters had to continue to protect their sources in order to defend a larger principle — and to ensure they weren’t cut off from future leaks from their highly-placed sources. Even if that meant they missed out on the real story.
Protecting sources is an important tenet of journalism. Journalists need to be able to talk candidly with people who possess public-interest information but can’t be identified for a variety of legitimate reasons. Those people won’t talk to reporters if they think they’ll be outed. And if they don’t talk, we all lose.
But does the argument apply when a source is deliberately lying, or trying to smear an opponent? Or both
Which brings us to Canada and the case of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill. In 2004, the RCMP searched her home looking for leaked documents she’d used to write a story about the suspicious activities of an Arab-Canadian named Maher Arar.
In what instantly became a journalistic cause celebre, she and her newspaper challenged the police warrant, and won. For which O’Neill was rightly feted in journalistic circles as a defender of the responsibility of journalists to protect their sources.
But what — and who — was she actually protecting? Her front-page story, which detailed Arar’s terrorist training in Afghanistan, his involvement with members of “an alleged al Qaeda logistical support group in Ottawa,” his clandestine meetings with al Qaeda sympathizers, was wrong.
No, more than wrong.
It was a lie.
O’Neill had been deliberately used by her source to spread misinformation about Arar just as the clamour for a public inquiry into his case was rising.
Surely, that’s the real story. O’Neill hasn’t written it, which is perhaps understandable.
But neither has any other journalist. None of the rest of us are bound by any confidentiality deal with whoever perpetrated the Arar smear. Why hasn’t the mighty Globe and Mail, or the Toronto Star, or the CBC unleashed their investigative forces to discover exactly who leaked the false information to O’Neill and at whose behest.
Are we reluctant because we think exposing how somebody else’s sausage gets made might make our own confidential sources more reluctant to come forward in the future? Or because the public might become even more skeptical of how we do our jobs?
Whatever the cause, we’re missing out on a fascinating — and illuminating — story.
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College, is an award-winning author of five nonfiction books and a novel, Reparations.
Rodney’s first year (Feb 11, 2007)
The Rodney question for the rest of us
The question isn’t whether Rodney MacDonald can recover from his first-year reputation free fall and still be the premier of all he surveys the next time Nova Scotians visit the polls. He can.
In the three-way, buzzer-beater game of percentage-points politics that our elections have become — with Darrell Dexter leading a mainstream New Democratic Party that has a lock on metro but conjures visions of galloping socialist hordes in rural reaches of the province, and with no one yet leading a Liberal party that is still rehab from (and paying penance for) its last bad leadership choice — almost anything is possible.
Which may explain why there were so few overt challenges to Rodney MacDonald’s abysmally failed first year as leader during this weekend’s Progressive Conservative annual meeting.
Getting rid of a sitting premier — as Nova Scotia Liberals discovered when they forced out reformist premier John Savage 10 year ago — is, at best, a messy business. And there is no guarantee — as the Liberals also discovered by choosing visionless backbench federal MP Russell MacLellan as his successor — that the leader’s replacement will be any better, or more successful.
Tories with long memories might also recall what happened to party dissidents after they staged a failed coup against John Buchanan when he was still just the opposition leader. After Buchanan won the 1978 election, his challengers paid the price.
So the real question on the first anniversary of Rodney MacDonald’s election as leader of the PCs and premier of the rest of us isn’t for the Tories. They are saddled with the devil they chose.
It’s for the rest of us.
Are we prepared for more of what Premier Rodney MacDonald really means to our province — which is to say a return to the bad old, highways-to-nowhere, electric-toilet-seats, secret-trust-funds days of John Buchanan? Minus Buchanan’s avuncular charm, of course, and the secret smile that seemed designed to let everyone know Buchanan was in on the joke too.
Rodney MacDonald doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. One on one, in fact, he can be charming, the kind of person you could imagine sharing a few beers with on a cold Friday afternoon after a long week’s work. His friends will tell you he’s energetic, determined, a hard worker — not to mention a lot more fun in real life than he is his earnest public persona.
The problem is that none of that adds up to political leadership.
Rodney MacDonald wanted to be premier for the same reason school kids want to be class president. Because...
The unfortunate reality is that — amid MacDonald’s moronically one-note message tracks and his empty catch phrases about “putting families first” and the “new Nova Scotia,” — there simply doesn’t seem to be any “there” there.
Which makes it all too easy for MacDonald to bend with whatever are the prevailing winds — on Sunday shopping, or gasoline regulation, or energy conservation, or whatever the next crisis turns out to be — rather that take a principled stand for or against.
It also makes it easy for him be the captive of his advisors, who too often have agendas of their own. Which may explain the Ernie Fage debacle. And the Heather Foley Melvin fiasco.
When you don’t see any larger purpose to governing than to figure out how to get yourself re-elected next time around, it becomes way too easy to make the kind of indiscriminate, not carefully considered, chicken-in-every-pot-every-Thursday promises to pave this back road, or fund that Commonwealth Games, or whatever else seems easy this week. Such decisions almost inevitably lead to more troubles down the road. Remember John Buchanan’s economic legacy? Or the ethical backsliding that was the legacy of Russell MacLellan’s brief tenure?
Is that really what we want for Nova Scotia?
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College, is an award-winning author of five nonfiction books and a novel, Reparations.
Fumbling environment: Feb 4, 2007
Can Harper recover the environment ball?
Is this really what federal campaign finance reform legislation was intended to do? Give the Conservatives such a bulging war chest they can afford to buy time tonight on the year’s highest rated, most expensive TV spectacular in order to try and sack the new Liberal quarterback before his team breaks from the huddle? Before the real game of the next federal election campaign officially begins?
The three ads the Tories rolled out last week — tackling (not unreasonably) Stephane Dion’s failures to deliver more than promises when he was environment minister; attempting to link him (patently unfairly) to the sponsorship scandal; and dissing him (the jury’s still out) for his lack of leadership skills — would not have been out of place during an election campaign in which the Conservatives were attempting to unseat the governing Liberals.
But…
Earth to Stephen Harper. You won. You’ve been in government for a year now. What have you really done besides fumble the environment ball?
Can you say Rona Ambrose? Should you? Kyoto (the accord, not the dog)? How about a Clean Air Act that was so fatally flawed you had to ship it off to a parliamentary committee after first reading in hopes of getting it retrofitted it enough to somehow convince someone somewhere you take the environment seriously? Oh, yes, and speaking of retrofitting, how about the EnerGuide retrofitting program, which was designed to help Canadians make their homes more energy efficient and which your government killed last year to make more room in your next budget for tax cuts for the wealthy? Oh, that EnerGuide program.
As John Bennett, a senior policy adviser with the Sierra Club of Canada, told CTV News recently: “The Conservatives threw out the best of what the Liberals did [on the Clean Air Act] and kept the worst.”
To be fair, Stephen Harper’s Tories have recently sniffed the prevailing environmental winds — or at least read the polls that say Canadians now believe the environment is government’s job one — and begun to pretend that they care too.
Do they? Harper’s own track record on the environment isn’t mixed. It’s awful.
In Opposition, Harper doubted the “tentative and contradictory” science of climate change on ideological grounds. In a fund-raising letter he wrote in 2002, which the Liberals — in a letter-tit for a TV ad-tat — gleefully released this week, Harper called Kyoto a “a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.” His larger goal in trying to derail its implementation, however, was as pragmatic as it was political. He also wanted to help out his powerful friends in the Alberta oil and gas industry, who don’t want regulation to get in the way of opening up the oil-rich and profit-richer tar sands.
Oops. Wait a minute. Didn’t I just do what I accused the Tories of doing a few paragraphs earlier — trotting out yesterday’s news instead of responding to today’s concerns? I did. Sorry… Sort of.
So let’s accept that Stephen Harper’s sudden political environmental retrofit — “this government… accepts the science” — is about more than public opinion polls and bright green ties.
Will his government now reverse field and support an opposition motion that calls for the Kyoto treaty to be implemented? That vote is expected Monday. If not, will his government at least come up with its own aggressive emissions-cutting targets to replace what it has rightly dismissed as weightless Liberal promises?
Will Canada’s fresh-faced environment minister, John Baird, do more than genuflect at the altar of the “unequivocal evidence” climate change is real? Will he, for example, support French President Jacques Chirac’s call to set up a new United Nations agency to deal specifically with environmental issues?
And will Harper himself do more than simply agree to show up at an expected United Nations summit on climate change? Will he put pressure on what he has called the “major emitters,” including his friend in the White House, to rein in their greenhouse gases too?
There’s still time — to torture the football image once more — for Stephen Harper to recover the ball and run it, if not for a touchdown, at least for a first down. That would involve much more than trotting out yet another attack ad. It would mean doing what Canadians elected him to do. Govern. What a concept.
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College, is an award-winning author of five nonfiction books and a novel, Reparations.
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STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.