Media, Convoys, And Being Active Participants

On The Media's Great Failing

When a CBC reporter covering the Convoy says he has ensured he has credibility with those people, because “reporters need credibility with the communities we cover”, I nearly barfed. First off, Convoy Protesters are not a community in the way that that sentence usually conveys - they are not a marginalized group in need of equal protection, in the way that the LGBTQ community or racialized minorities are. The statement in and of itself isn’t wrong, but framing the Convoy like that is absurdist, and dangerously so, nonsense. But what really bugs me is the idea, not just from this reporter but from everyone, is that the fact of this group is more important than whether or not what they’re fighting for is in any way sensible.

Let’s start with some facts - almost every, if not absolutely every, journalist at CBC, CTV, Global, the Star, the Globe, and Postmedia is vaccinated. Certainly every big name, blue check is. Let’s start with the fact that almost every one has a post-secondary degree, let’s continue into the fact that most of them live in two cities, and let’s emphasize the fact that they’re all fundamentally institutionalists for whom the quiet Canadian consensus centrism has been very good, as a baseline for how these journalists and their institutions cover these protests. Nobody covering them would be caught dead with a Convoyer in real life, because the people covering the Convoy were the people looking for first access to vaccines in any way they could. Their views - on everything from vaccine policy to gender equality to gay rights - are fundamentally different, and this is even true of the conservative press.

Take your least favourite conservative writer at Postmedia, and they don’t believe in any of the shit the Convoy does - they don’t think Justin Trudeau is a dictator or that these health restrictions were tantamount to fascism. They might think some of the restrictions were theatre and have wanted them removed earlier, but you can find plenty of those views from people across the political spectrum. The protesters are fundamentally at odds with the vision of conservatism that the Laurentian elite conservatives want, which is why they all want a new PC Party while the Convoyers view the PPC as a potential home depending on who the Cons pick any given leadership election. And this is the fundamental problem with the media - they’re covering people they fundamentally don’t understand.

Stephen Maher, who I genuinely used to respect and am having a bit of a complicated intellectual time with in recent weeks, tweeted over the weekend that Poilievre is tapping into a group of Canadians who don’t see themselves in Trudeau’s Canada, as if this is some brilliant analysis. The same thing applied to the Reform Party - what the fuck do you think The West Wants In was? - so as a means of saying “because he’s tapping into these voters, he’ll win”, it’s meaningless. But what it also is is an intentionally neutral statement. People who don’t see themselves in Trudeau’s Canada could mean anything from fiscal conservatives to homophobes, but by applying bland neutrality to it, it whitewashes why those people don’t see themselves in Trudeau’s Canada.

I’m sorry to have to be this blunt, but no, not all views are equal here, and this is the problem. If you’re opposed to Trudeau’s Canada because of some vague sense it’s too urban, too diverse, and it’s not the Canada that they remember from their youth - if they’re unhappy at the social progress of the last 50 years, more bluntly - then that needs to be reported as such. It is a failure to just whitewash this fact and talk about how people don’t see themselves in this country without talking about what it actually represents - mostly because they don’t actually realize what this is actually about.

There’s a lot of really interesting, fascinating journalism that can be done once you properly understand that the Convoy is, at its core, a movement to bring this country back in time. It is a movement of and for people who wish that the social advances of the last 50 years weren’t the case. It’s why racists and homophobes and sexists are amongst the crowds, it’s why female journalists get more vitriolic inboxes, more death threats, the occasional (or not even that occasional) rape threat that men just don’t see. It’s why Convoy protestors always claim to invoke veterans and our soldiers, even though actual veterans and actual soldiers tell them to shut the fuck up. It’s why some Convoy members who post on social media are so rampantly homophobic, because anyone who doesn’t meet their narrow minded idea of masculinity is therefore gay. It’s a movement that appeals to the sense of lost common sense in the last half century, because the world of 1972 made a whole lot more sense to these people than the world today.

I don’t even say this derogatorily - I genuinely get why so many people are freaked out by the rapid social changes that have occurred - but that’s just what this is. It’s about a vague sense that something is missing, that there’s something off about Trudeau’s Canada. Of course, these people blamed Trudeau for decisions made by (mostly Conservative) Premiers, because to them, the metropolitan elite PM is actually to blame because it’s easier to blame him than Doug Ford, who “feels” like an Everyman.

The last time I had the displeasure of seeing my homophobic Albertan Uncle was the five days before the NBA shut down and Tom Hanks got COVID. He was flying through Ottawa before heading somewhere for work, and so I was forced to see him. He doesn’t know I’m gay for reasons which will become obvious if they aren’t already, but the second day he was here, I was roped into going to Starbucks with him, and on the way, he regaled me with the actors he doesn’t like because he’s convinced they’re gay - unprompted, of course. He did a whole rant about Daniel Craig being a horrible Bond because he’s gay, about how it wasn’t “real” Bond, all that. It was boring as hell, but the point’s instructive, because what he was ranting about wasn’t just Craig’s Bond, but the general change in society. His preferred Bond was much more viscerally masculine, and he doesn’t like that the character is a bit softer, a bit more intellectual and a bit less visceral, that it’s changed.

If I had access to the Convoy I’d probe into this way deeper, because the idea of what motivates the right is this desire for a world that makes more sense to them is fascinating to me. A family member of mine exhibits this cultural paralysis, of not realizing that it isn’t 1955 anymore, that understands that just because something used to be done a certain way doesn’t make it inherently good. It’s a fascinating topic, and the single one that will define the rest of the decade. As the Liberals have moved this country to the left on social issues - as the left keeps trying to move the Overton Window left on these issues - the right is increasingly isolated, and increasingly belligerent. All of this is the understandable reaction to continuously losing the cultural war for five decades in this country.

From the legalization of homosexuality in 1969 to the Charter’s broad interpretations of equal protection to Morgentaler creating the loosest abortion framework in the western world to gay marriage sooner than most countries, Canadian social conservatives keep fucking losing. On vaccine policy, Doug Ford and Francois Legault were some of the earliest adopters of vaccine passports, the thing so often claimed as a form of “separate but equal” treatment, leaving the unvaccinated and those sympathetic to them looking anywhere for leaders or sympathetic people, and this Convoy was the outpouring of it. I don’t agree with the notion that these people are all irredeemable fascists, but they’re certainly people with complicated and frankly fascinating views. But those views need to be properly articulated.

It is inarguably true that a lot of the people who are supportive of the Convoy and of Pierre Poilievre hold views on race, gay rights, and the role of women that I, and most readers of this site, would find reprehensible. It is also the case that they’ve been manipulated by actual fascists who want to overthrow the government. Conflating those two things to claim that the Convoy is supported by no fascists or that everyone is one is absurd. Whitewashing the nature of Poilievre’s movement is a journalistic disgrace, because it’s a sign that you’re uninterested in the questions of the time.

The media aren’t passive observers in all of this - their choices have real influence which is so often ignored, because they want to see themselves not as active participants in all of this, but mere stenographers of truth. They’re not. What you cover, how you cover it, whether you view Convoyers as a community who needs to trust you or a group of people misled by the far right has active consequences to this country’s outcomes. And the media is utterly failing to understand these protestors or cover them accurately.