THE POWER OF PROTEST
Why Harper and Trudeau both deserve criticism.
Around this time every year, Canadians learn to live with the fact that warm and sunny days don’t last forever. The same is true for sunny-ways government.
A year after being sworn into office, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is weathering some storms this fall: expense and fundraising controversies, fights with the provinces, even some heckling directed at the prime minister in the past week.
None of this should be unexpected — running a country is hard. Politicians are going to get criticized. What separates good governments from bad ones is how they react to it.
This weekend, Carleton University’s School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies is holding a conference about this whole business of criticizing the government. It’s called “After the Deluge: Reframing/Sustaining Critique in Post-Harper Canada.”
Conservatives might well see this conference as evidence that they did indeed have lots of enemies in the ivory tower over the past decade. Or at least, many of them saw it that way.
Several years ago, for instance, one of Stephen Harper’s former communications directors publicly advised a student: “If you have a teacher or examples of teachers who are trying to jam lefty philosophy down your throat, please send me an email . . . I’d love to make them famous.”
But these were years in which many Conservatives saw enemies everywhere, including academia.
In its call for papers to be presented at the event, organizers wrote:
“The loss of the Harper government for Canadian academics is not unlike the loss of George W. Bush for American comedians: The question in this moment of optimism (which may well have passed by the time this conference comes around) is . . . What do we do now?”
I’ve done some courses in this school at Carleton along the way to a degree (still incomplete), so I was asked to open the gathering with a few words — presumably about how the media has adjusted its critical lens in the post-Harper era.
What I plan to say is that while the government has changed, the media’s job hasn’t — and criticism is as important today as it was in the past decade and the decades before that.
First of all, Canada now has an activist government, determined to make itself relevant in people’s lives again. The ways in which it is inserting itself into the economy (slowing down the housing markets, for instance) need scrutiny to see whether results match the intent. It’s also a government that has invited criticism and measurement, and for the first time in history, publicly released the marching orders for every cabinet minister.
Now, we don’t have to guess or opine on whether a minister is doing his or her job — we have a published to-do list for every one of them. Those lists could well be stamped with the same words politicians put on their prepared texts for speeches: “Check against delivery.”
Checking against delivery isn’t just for media and academics. Armed with the multitude of Liberal promises in the platform and mandate letters, citizens can also keep a critical eye on this government.
One of the most extensive such efforts is an online initiative called trudeaumetre.ca, a running progress report on 219 promises of the Liberal government. When I checked it this week, it was reporting 34 promises kept, 64 in progress, 26 broken and 95 not yet started.
When it comes to numbers, meanwhile, we should also remember that we now have a government in Ottawa with an avowed, fierce embrace of data and evidence. The prime minister’s own chief of staff, Katie Telford, asks people to come to meetings with a number — any number that tells the story of what the Liberals are doing right or wrong. Anyone wanting to criticize the government would be wise to do the same — it’s easier to argue with numbers than it is with anecdotes.
The answer to the question posed by this conference — “What do we now?” — is actually pretty simple: Carry on, as usual. The best criticism, whether directed at Conservative or Liberal governments, is constructive and corrective. Not every critic is an enemy of the state.
Politicians and their supporters can be thinskinned (almost as thin-skinned as journalists) and it would be a surprise if this government was an exception.
So far, however, for the most part, the current government doesn’t seem to be overtly hostile to criticism. No one is threatening journalists’ jobs, as far as I’ve heard, and no one is promising to make political critics famous or infamous. When we want to see that kind of thing, all we need to do is look southward, in Donald Trump’s direction.
That’s maybe the best reason to keep up the critical heat in post-Harper Canada: not just because we should, but simply because we can. sdelacourt@bell.net