Journalism a loser in Toronto mayoral race
Sun News lets campaign insider interview candidate Olivia Chow It may have been meant to be funny, the way that only something entirely absurd can be.
Or perhaps it’s that the network already operates so beyond the pale that one more breach wouldn’t count. Or maybe nobody watches and so this is one of those if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest questions.
But there on television last Friday evening, on Sun News, land of the barking mad, was the longtime Liberal operative Warren Kinsella, who bills himself as the Sun News Network’s “house leftie.”
He was sitting in for Brian Lilley, the regular host of Byline. Kinsella is president of Daisy Consulting Group, a former special assistant to prime minister Jean Chrétien, an author, prolific blogger and, by training, both a journalist and lawyer.
Central to this discussion, he’s a veteran of Liberal war rooms (he describes a war room as a quick response centre for a political campaign) and, at the moment, is the boss of the war room for the Olivia Chow Toronto mayoral campaign.
And, yet, there he was, touting the show’s top story as Chow’s candidacy and promising an exclusive interview.
“I’ll confront her on all the controversies,” he said in the tease up front. “You won’t see this exclusive interview anywhere else.”
As with many such Sun shows (of late, because I was covering Ezra Levant’s libel trial, and now writing about this, I’ve watched a few), Byline begins with a little rant from the host.
Kinsella’s was about the impending return of the left, or as he put it, “Are progressives on the march?”
Then the show cut to a clip from Chow’s launch. Kinsella declared, “Full disclosure: I’m involved with her campaign,” and then asked a series of questions.
A day later, on his blog, he said of this interview, “And, yes, I asked Olivia Chow six of the nastiest, meanest, rottenest questions I could come up with. If I’d done anything else, the whole segment would have been a waste of time.”
He actually asked five questions, all of which I would characterize the way a radio colleague did the other day, as variations on the theme of, “Were you always this awesome or did you become more awesome as time went on?”
In the first, Kinsella brought up the old saw about Chow and her late husband, Jack Layton, once living in subsidized Toronto city housing and receiving a special deal, and asked, “Did you?”
To this, Chow replied, “There’s not a shred of truth in that allegation. Jack and I paid full market rent, not a penny of subsidy,” and then launched into a lecture on the merits of mixed-income housing.
The truth, as has been reported hither and yon, is that back in 1990, Layton, who was then a city councillor, and Chow, then a trustee with the Toronto school board, respectively earned $61,000 and $47,000 a year, a third of each salary taxfree. They lived in a market rent apartment in a mixeduse co-op.
Such buildings are designed to encourage a mix of income earners and to avoid ghettoizing the poor, a noble goal.
But, as the Toronto Star’s Royson James wrote this past weekend, that these two lived there “didn’t pass the smell test,” two well-paid politicians paying $800 a month for a three-bedroom unit.
(A real question would have been: If there was nothing morally wrong with what you and Layton were doing, why did you begin paying an extra $325 a month before you moved out?)
The second question had to do with criticism that Chow had benefited from being an MP “while getting ready to run for mayor of Toronto. Is that true?”
She responded with patter about her immigrant family’s struggle, learning to save money for a rainy day and her constituents’ right to know, this an apparent reference to the newsletter her office sent out, happily just before she resigned her seat and declared her candidacy. She said she wouldn’t apologize for that.
The next question dealt with the accusation she was a “double dipper,” that by collecting her MP’s pension as well as potentially the mayor’s salary, she would be taking advantage.
“I quit my job,” Chow said in reply. “Right now, I don’t have a salary. I am receiving, as a widow, Jack Layton’s survivor benefits. Don’t apologize for that either. Once I’m the new mayor, I will give every penny of the MP or the city’s pension to charities.”
(A real question: Which one is it then that you’d give up and to which charities? And who benefits from the big charitable tax deduction?)
For his fourth question, Kinsella quoted incumbent Rob Ford as saying Chow couldn’t find Etobicoke or Scarborough without a map, in other words, that she was a downtowner.
“That’s really unfortunate,” Chow replied. “Let’s stop being divisive. Let’s come together ... ” before launching into her Toronto-is-a-city-of-neighbourhoods refrain.
His final question — the fifth — was that as a lifetime New Democrat, how could Chow reasonably be expected to work with Liberals and Conservatives?
This one Chow had practised better. She handled it more deftly, citing the private member’s bill she championed on behalf of shopkeeper David Chen and his Lucky Moose store, the so-called “citizen’s arrest law” Parliament passed last year.
Shortly afterward, Kinsella held up the front page of that day’s Toronto Sun, which featured a Chow column, and that was that: Six minutes of softball was over.
In an email exchange, Kinsella made it clear he still believes he asked her hard questions. “It would be boring and stupid to just ask her puffball questions,” he said. He also said, “I’m not a journalist anymore. I am a partisan commentator. I don’t pretend to be a reporter. However, I thought it was important to declare my bias off the top, and I did that.”
Kory Teneycke, vicepresident of Sun News, had no problem with the interview. This wasn’t a news show, Teneycke said, but “editorial programming, the equivalent of the comment section” of a newspaper.
He said “far more concerning to me are reporters with extremely strong opinions who pretend to be objective reporters. ... It’s much more mysterious when it’s a reporter than it is when it’s an editorialist.”
They may both be right that this is much ado about nothing, but I thought it another incursion upon the dwindling standards of the journalism business.