Media, O'Toole, And The Road To Ruin

On A Speech Divorced From Reality

Erin O’Toole gave his last speech in the House Of Commons this week, about the toxicity of modern politics and how both sides need to do better. It’s one of those statements that is facially correct – there are excesses on both left and right, and there are toxic partisans of all parties – but falls apart under any scrutiny. O’Toole, the guy who once did a photo op for social media of a port a potty outside the PMO and Privy Council building in Ottawa, decrying that politics don’t lead but chase algorithms down silos, should be a bridge too fucking far, but here we are.

O’Toole views himself as the perpetual victim – a victim of his caucus’ wrong decision to boot him, of his internal polling allegedly having him in a potential winning position right before the election, but most importantly a victim of the electorate. He’s never taken responsibility for not giving people a message worth voting for, for losing seats. His tone when he does speak about the 2021 campaign suggests that the voters were wrong, not him.

From Politico: ”After six to eight months of self-reflection, I kind of said, no, I would not do anything differently, in terms of trying to present a modern, responsible Conservative option to Justin Trudeau.” Cool, well, you lost, and you lost seats, and this is not something that happened to you, you did it to yourself. You know why Harper 2011 - Trudeau 2019 (or even Harper 2015 voters, like in Milton) didn’t vote for you? Because just calling your party modern and responsible doesn’t make it so when you’re engaging in the exact algorithmic silo-ing you now decry.

My problem with O’Toole’s sudden about face back to what appear to be his true values is that it’s naked cynical. “I wanted to be PM so I lied, they took that chance from me so now I’m leaving to go back to Toronto and I want to rehab my image” is actually what’s going on, but there’s going to be a parade of bullshit Op-Eds about his glory from people who have entirely memory-holed the lived experience of the O’Toole leadership. Hell, we’re already seeing it from John Ivison on the Post’s website right now.

Why does it matter? In a sense, it doesn’t – he’s about to go away and make much more money doing whatever he wants in business. He’ll get to add Former to all his titles, which makes him a Serious Person that people need to Take Seriously, so when he gives interviews now we’ll have to Pay Attention, but beyond that, he’s an irrelevance. But it matters, because O’Toole’s exit – not his speech, but his exit – proves what also exacerbates division, which is a media that is not equipped to do the job.

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Look at the way O’Toole is being written about, and then cast an eye to the way lots of the media is covering the foreign interference stuff, and you see why I’m intensely cynical about the state of the media. Some of it – namely the marked increase in actual reporting and expertise on Power and Politics these days – gives me hope, but the vast majority of it makes clear why there is so much institutional rot in this country. Our attention spans are falling apart at the seams, and therefore important stories that aren’t politically sexy fall to the side.

Later this week I’ll dust off the Canadian model and run it, and write about the current state of the federal polling. I’m quite sure that that will have the Conservatives leading, and then I will be inundated with “does this mean Poilievre will be PM?” and the column will do immensely well in terms of Twitter traffic and clicks. I know how this works, and I know that at the end of the day the draw of constant political coverage is better than hard reporting. But the fact that we let our institutions off the hook is why we’re in this spot we’re in.

In 2010 Dick Fadden, then head of CSIS, was grilled by a House committee for claiming that some BC municipal politicians were under influence from China. The idea that that story just died – that a House committee the next year condemned CSIS and called for Fadden’s job for making an incendiary claim he refused to back up – is part of why we’re here now. Had Fadden been put under media scrutiny, maybe there would have been pressure to, you know, look into why CSIS felt so emboldened to accuse these people of treason without any proof being made public.

The media has singularly failed in their coverage of the RCMP for decades now, treating every failure by the RCMP as a localized story and then proceeding to entirely fail to hold the powerful to any account on actually doing the things they always promise to do on reform. It’s a mess, and blaming the media for their failures does not absolve governments with oversight ability over these institutions from their failures, but if the point of a free press is to hold the powerful to account they can hardly be said to have succeeded.

O’Toole gets a free ride now as an esteemed Conservative of stature and not a transparent fraud of a man who sold his soul because much of the political press in this country are blinded by the idea that they want the right to be like the O’Toole they know him to be, or because they’ve genuinely forgotten what he actually said and actually did when he was leader.

Apply that same frame across any story, and you see the problems. Why has nobody dug in on what other potentially interesting or valuable intelligence got lost in the 3 National Security Advisors in a month shuffle of 2021? Why has nobody tried to dig into what the RCMP has been given of all of this CSIS intelligence if anything? Why does the focus instantly snap back to the politics whenever legitimate governance issues arise? Simple – governance issues are complicated and parties putting out statements about who they want to lead whatever the next step of the process is is easy.

If we want the politics that O’Toole and his defenders in the media class are claiming is slipping away, one of the ways we get it is an honest appraisal of how we got here and an improved media class. O’Toole pretending he isn’t responsible for exactly what he now decries is shameful, but expected. But for media members to do his PR instead of looking inwards at what has done a lot of the damage, well, I’m shocked, but I can’t exactly pretend to be surprised.