Mr. Harper, give us answers, not insults
There are three essential legs to electoral accountability: voter access to their leaders, media access to those same people, and debates. Traditionally, elections were used to test the pulse, in leaders’ “meet and greets” in small groups and in announcements and soaring speeches to large public audiences. Leaders tested messages, tweaking the ones that did not work. Voters got access to a leader, unscripted and often under pressure from hecklers and the media.
Debates have become more important. They allow voters an opportunity to judge character and competence. In this election, for the first time since 1980, it looks like we may not have an English language televised debate with all the leaders anywhere near election day. It is one less window for voters trying to make an informed political choice.
Until recently, there was no partisan divide over the media’s role in elections. Everyone agreed that an election without an intelligent, engaged media with full access to every campaign and candidate would be a farce. After all, the daily interplay between reporters and politicians has been the strongest third leg to democratic accountability for centuries. No more.
Sadly, each of these pillars of electoral accountability is under attack.
Stephen Harper was far from the first leader to raise campaign barriers to democratic access. Here, as elsewhere, he only polished borrowed American “innovations.” American campaigns have been squeezing reporters’ freedoms to move around freely and limiting their access to candidates for years. Harper took the device to new levels, allowing local reporters one question a day, with four to national media. As Vice Media correspondent Justin Ling discovered, however, you must buy the right to ask a question as a national reporter, $78,000 for the entire campaign, or $12,000 a week.
Australian hard-right campaign guru Lynton Crosby taught the Harper team how to limit debates, while claiming to be keen on more anytime, anywhere. Crosby used the technique with brutal effectiveness for David Cameron in the recent U.K. election.
Crosby also helped pioneer leaders’ speaking, briefly, to small groups of their own partisans . . . and to no one else. The Harperites went to the hilarious extreme of requiring their partisans to sign a “nondisclosure agreement.” You may not discuss with your spouse what you heard at an event your buddies will have seen on television?! In the face of widespread snickers they dropped that idea.
This ever-tighter cocoon is bad for democracy . . . and for the leader himself.
Every Leader’s Tour is a bubble. It creates its own narrative, even an alternate political reality. Michael Ignatieff’s tour team were convinced their leader’s performance had them sailing to victory. Ensuring a tour does not veer too far into fantasy means daily contact with real voters and outside reporters.
Stephen Harper may become Canada’s first political leader to have conducted a federal election without once meeting an unvetted, non-partisan ordinary voter; nor encountered a national reporter who had not paid for his seat and the promise of an occasional question. (And only if your question has been vetted and approved and you behave yourself, mind.)
He will not have delivered a campaign message to a single voter not instructed to react deliriously from his opening “hello” to his rictus grin at the end of his six-eight minute speech. This is not wise.
Worse, however, is his refusal to answer questions.
Yes, his stressed spokesperson, Kory Teneycke, pretends he answers more questions than any leader. But Kory knows this is a fib, because repeating “life means life” to a question about marijuana or gun control is not an answer, it’s an insult.
Harper makes statements daily that bear no relation to the five questions he permits. He is content to drone on once more through a short menu of partisan attacks.
This is not media scrutiny. This is a partisan stunt, aided by the selected poodles’ claps and boos. Sadly, it matches his approach to the rules and rituals of democracy, more broadly. You pretend to endorse them, insist you respect them, then make a parody of them.
Still, some are fooled. One naïve Harper-boosting pundit characterizes critics of this childish game as “closed liberal minds,” made “hysterical” by Harper’s success. Canadians may be tiring of being treated this way, but sneering “Hysteric!” at them is as insulting, and unbelievable as Harper’s claim to have “known nothing, seen nothing” about the brutal dispatch of his “P.E.I. senator.”
Justin Trudeau has promised to hold regular real press conferences if he is elected.
Thomas Mulcair has made a similar commitment to openness. In power they will be tempted to duck their pledge when they face their first bad news. They should resist the temptation. They will win confidence, credibility and support by standing up, even on the worst days. Indeed, why not offer White House-style daily press briefings.
When all the legs of democracy are being sawed away at, that political leaders must be responsible to their voters through the watchdog role of the media is surely beyond debate.