Canadian Media’s Early Election Hype Is Bad Journalism

On Failures Of The Fourth Estate

I don’t get the press in this country.

I have a love hate relationship with much of the press gallery - I think many of them are doing good work and are advancing public information. I also think that some of the titans of it - namely Fife - are not nearly the heroes of their narratives as they pretend, but that’s not a crime. But our press, and our broader political environment, is sometimes very fucking stupid about obvious things.

Opinion polling between elections asks how you would vote if an election was held tomorrow. This distinction rarely matters, but that question - and how people respond to polling generally - is ambivalent to who triggered the hypothetical election and why it’s happening. Normally, that’s a good thing - we want a non-leading question! - but in early election speculation, the trigger is quite important.

If Mark Carney were to call an early election today, he’d be hounded for weeks about why he needs an election when there’s so much work to be done and so many deals he’s allegedly so close to landing that are now delayed. An early election called by Carney now would be a slap in the face of Carney’s whole message of being a serious guy in serious times who just needs to get on with his work. It would absolutely backfire, because the groundwork hasn’t been laid properly by the government.

The government can create a narrative that will work, but that narrative will require prioritizing mentions, and therefore creating widespread coverage, of the CPC and the Bloc’s intransigence at committee and the fact that they’re delaying important bills. It’s something that the Liberals have shied away from understandably, wanting to focus on what they’re achieving and not what they’re being stopped from, but that intransigence means that people will see a snap election and go “why do you need a majority other than greed”.

On the other side, if Pierre, the Bloc, and Avi Lewis conspired to bring the government down in March over the Estimates, these polls would be low on how big a majority the Liberals would get. An unnecessary election in an uncertain economy caused by the Opposition’s anger that the country supports Carney and not them? That’s how the Liberals gain a dozen seats in Ontario, get to 50+ in Quebec, and an Atlantic sweep starts being an only slightly insane proposition as opposed to a completely insane one currently. The country wants Carney to be allowed to govern right now, and if the opposition conflate the ability to call an election with it being a good idea, they’ll be consigning themselves to irrelevance.

It’s also worth noting again that the Bloc have two very real structural incentives to not give Carney a trigger for an election. The first is provincial politics, where the BQ are currently prioritizing most of their key activists and organizers. The BQ and PQ machines are incredibly overlapping, and the efforts to rebuild the PQ’s ground game so they can convert ~30% of the vote into a seats majority are underway. Pulling those resources back to the BQ would be a huge relief to the Quebec Liberals and the CAQ and could be the difference in seats where the PQ currently project slightly ahead, but where the local PQ machine atrophied in the Legault era.

The second is committees. Despite the fact that the NDP have a sufficient number of votes to be a balance of power on the floor of the House, the Liberals need one of the CPC and Bloc to pass any bill. The reason? The NDP aren’t a party, and so the Bloc are the only crossbench on committees. This means that even if something would easily pass on the House floor, it can be difficult to get it out of committee. In a world where the Liberals are pegged back a bit, the Bloc might gain 6 seats or whatever, but if the NDP get back to 12 and keep the balance of power, then the Bloc could be less powerful despite holding more seats.

But this column isn’t really about whether there will be a snap election, it’s about our press. Doug Ford telling Mark Carney to call an election is news, sure, but it’s not evidence of a snap election imminently coming. Elections Canada ordering some ballot papers, when in all likelihood they’re for the 2 byelections being announced probably this weekend is not fueling speculation unless you’re describing your own actions. Parts of the press want an early election because covering the horse race is easier and more fun than covering policy. Most people who go into political journalism are captivated by the narratives and the numbers and the campaigning, not the boring bits of innovation policy and the nuances of just how to craft tax incentives. Journalists love personal intrigue because it’s fun to talk about whether Jenni and Pierre are still talking and whether Mark might need to ask Jamil for help to woo Donald, and because it’s easier. But easier doesn’t make it news.

As with the last round of election talk in November around the budget, it is the case that either the political press in this country (with some exceptions) are either wilfully ignorant of the actual situation and why it’s not actually likely, or they can do the same logical thinking I’m doing and are just running the speculation anyways. Bluntly, neither is acceptable. There are good people trying to do good journalism in the Ottawa press gallery, but their profession is let down by hacks and pundits who aren’t very good at their jobs.

The decline of Macleans in the mid 2010s was instructive, because even before they entirely gave up on covering politics, they were bleeding their credibility. They called a Canadian housing market bubble every few months as if it was their break glass in case of emergency. It’s like their mentality was “Slow news week? Fuck it, run another housing bubble piece that completely ignores we’ve been wrong about this for 5 years.” And then they wondered why their legitimately very good talents got buried.

The crisis for much of the political journalism ecosystem is the same. What I do is not journalism, it’s commentary - but at a time when TV blocks and newspaper column inches are increasingly held by columnists and pundits, the difference is being blurred. And in a world where parts of the established media are unable to put together a coherent answer to why there will be an early election, but are dead set on hyping one anyways, you get people looking for outsider voices.

Maybe I’ll be wrong, and Carney will be stupid enough to go to an early election without a trigger. Or maybe the Bloc and CPC will give him one - though they agreed to fast track the grocery rebate, so clearly they don’t want to give the government one. Maybe. But readers of this site were much better informed about the actual chance of a Fall 2025 election than those who focused on what the big names with fancy titles were saying. And in a world where the public can choose to listen to me (I hope cogently) lay out why an early election makes little sense instead of the Globe’s nonsense that Ford telling Carney to call an election represents Carney discussing an early election, this is a problem for the legacy media.

It’s the clearest threat to their business model, the only question is whether they know that or not. For my sake, keep the bad takes flowing - always nice to have something to write about.