Tamara Lich, Political Prisoners, And Compassion

Who Gets It

Tamara Lich broke her bail conditions last month.

That fact is not disputed by anyone, even her lawyer, whose defence was that her breach was not sufficiently important enough to justify further punishment because, well … basically because he had no defence because she did it. Because of that fact, she is in jail. She was out of jail on a set of conditions, and she failed to meet those conditions. Bail is a conditional release, and if you break the rules of a conditional release you go to jail. This isn’t hard. And yet, Stephen Maher called her a political prisoner this weekend, because of course he did.

Maher has since walked back the verbiage, but his central tenet – that she shouldn’t be jailed despite the fact that she broke her bail conditions – isn’t really changed, because his argument is that she is being charged in the first place for a political act. He even referred to the Convoy as civil disobedience, which would be its own column if I had the energy to write it. But this isn’t about Tamara Lich or the Convoy, it’s a lesson in who the commentariat thinks is worthy of their compassion. And that lesson is fucking terrifying.

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In 2016, Andrew Coyne said if he were an American voter his first vote would be for Marco Rubio. Not first choice in a GOP Primary, of every candidate. This is the same Marco Rubio who said in 2015 that he opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage in the US and who said he would appoint conservative justices to overturn it.

Why did Rubio get graded so highly? Because Coyne thought Clinton was a deeply unethical person and he hated Trump, so the top 3 became Rubio, Kasich, and Sanders, in that order, on the basis of morals and character mostly. Why didn’t Coyne consider those horrifically right wing views as disqualifying? Because they don’t affect him. Nothing is actually more immoral than the deprivation of liberty and freedom in the name of bigotry, but because Coyne’s focus was on other issues, he either didn’t know or didn’t care.

Why did Paul Wells give Skippy the benefit of the doubt when Pierre was flirting with his anti-Bank Of Canada language but hadn’t actually promised to fire the Governor yet? Because Wells could not conceive of a politician he’s always had more time for than most people proposing a policy so stupid and dangerous.

Why did Stephen Maher lambaste the RCMP Commissioner for yelling at the NS RCMP despite the fact that their incompetence led to people dying? Because he chose to have compassion for the cops and not the victims, who think of the NS RCMP as slightly better than Satan.

You should realize by now, if you’ve ever read my work, that one of my favourite recurring points is that this is all a function of choices. Every news story is the product of a fundamental choice about how to frame it. “Should we take the word of cops we know lied” is but the easiest example of this, but go down the list of every news story and you can see how there was a choice there. Why do so many Liberals disagree with me that SNC was bad? Because to them, the Liberals were protecting a national company and jobs, whereas to me it was an unconscionable incursion into the independence of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Whether or not you think I’m right or wrong is irrelevant to my broader point, which is that two people of similar intellect and even general political persuasion can come at the same set of facts and come out with two entirely different outlooks.

All of this is about choices, but we have mythologized the media to the point where to act like they are framing stories and issues in any way but the “true” way is to have committed treason to the concept of truth, but the problem is the people who decide what is the “true” way are usually straight white men who hire other straight white men. Even putting aside the still appalling levels of (non-)diversity, the main problem in the Canadian media is that of groupthink.

Why is it that I have the following I do? Simple – there’s nobody who talks like an average Canadian writing for any major news organization in this country. Like, at the end of the day, the reason I have the following I do is little to do with my talents of prediction, and mostly entirely about my talents as a writer – I’m very good at writing in a compelling way, whatever the substance of the argument I’m making at any given time.

The Canadian media is an insular group who are focused at all times about form and not substance, which is how they get to “Tamara Lich is a political prisoner” and not “our policing and justice system is fundamentally broken.” I have heard a case for Lich’s release from someone on the liberal left, which basically amounts to “plenty of worse people commit crimes and get bail”, but even that is an acceptance that what she did is wrong, and more importantly that the whole system is flawed. But within the mainstream media, the insularity is strong.

Look at the “crisis” of Canadian airports being a mess and the passport office meltdown, and you’ll see what I mean. Why is it when white Canadians need Government services to work properly there’s a multi-week scandal that is going to drag the government down, but the multi-generational crisis of a lack of clean water on reserve only comes up once in a blue moon?

I know it’s a cliché at this point, but the Canadian media continues to prove the very same point at all times, which is that they’re failing to accomplish the one goal for which they supposedly serve, which is a supposedly neutral arbiter of facts. They’re not – and maybe they never were, I don’t know – and they’re failing us because they are more than just umpires, they’re players in the game. It’s an absurdist fantasy to treat them otherwise.

“I'm deep inside myself/But I'll get out somehow” is playing as I think about all of this, because whenever I think about the role that the media has, I think about how limited the conversation about their role is. I think about this because media criticism is so often described as and conflated with the idea of not supporting journalistic freedom, which is dogshit. Criticism of the media isn’t about not supporting freedom, it’s about the fact that so much of the media is fucking failing at the very basic job they have to do.

Tamara Lich got bail and then broke her conditions. If you want to argue that worse people than her are also guilty, whatever. But the idea that she is the person worthy of our compassion is fucking absurd, but not surprising. Who gets painted as a compassionate person is entirely at the whims of the media, who get to frame choices in their actions, and then disassociate themselves with the consequences of their actions because they just call balls and strikes.

Tamara Lich is a selfish person who put her beliefs above the common good, and then terrorized a city to get what she wanted. She isn’t worthy of your compassion, and if she has it, then you’ve royally fucked up.