Month: May 2006

For those that follow the soap opera in Ottawa as a sideshow to the governance of Canada, this week has seen a couple of new developments in the war between the PMO and the PPG.

The Parliamentary Press Gallery refused to play to the tune of the Prime Minister’s Office by ordering themselves on a list for the purposes of order in press conferences. While PPG scribes insist that they desire order too (they’ve suggested using the National Press Theatre on Wellington), the issue of the list seems to be the impasse.

As I’ve noted before, the press gallery has evolved past its primary role of reporting the news to dictating how the Prime Minister should disseminate information via reporters to the electorate. The Prime Minister refuses to relinquish control over his communications strategy to an unelected and unaccountable body which he has now deemed biased and frankly, that’s his prerogative.

Since the PMO and PPG are battling over format and since the argument has extended beyond reportage and into a bitter he-said-she-said squabble with predicted (by Don Martin) ‘come-uppance’ during elections or when polls are low, the press gallery has arguably become politicized and a partisan group that stands opposed to the Prime Minister and his party in favour of its own agenda. The PM ostensibly has one too and thus we see two parties opposed.

Some talk about history and the attitudes of previous Prime Ministers regarding the Parliamentary Press Gallery. The relationship between the PMO and the PPG has been one that has evolved since Confederation. In fact, at one time, members of the PPG were overtly partisan and actually sat on opposing sides of the House of Commons according to the allegiance between a reporter’s paper and the broadsheet’s preferred party.

Broadcast journalists were admitted to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in 1959 and the evolution of the institution took a notable new direction according to then deputy Prime Minister Erik Nielson:

the ethical standards of journalists in 1958, when I first came into contact with the parliamentary press gallery, and the standards that prevail today in that same press gallery have, with rare exceptions, altered radically. Perhaps the main reason is the advent of technology, and the increasingly intense competition that the new technology creates between the electronic media and the written media. (Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics, Donald J. Savoie. p. 95)

In mulling over this latest fight between the PMO and the PPG, one begins to consider the original and now present purpose of the gallery.

Ostensibly, the gallery was originally established to more effectively disseminate the news to a widely dispersed population. As technology evolved, bringing closer our widely dispersed population, the need for an elite centralized class of Parliamentary reporters has arguably diminished.

With the advent of blogging, average people with varied backgrounds are uncovering fact, crafting opinion and reaching their fellow citizens on a truly international scale that extends beyond newsprint and the subscriber firewall. On an average day, Blogging Tories is read on six continents by thousands upon thousands of people (Antarctica requires more outreach).

The PPG is but one class of the press. The Prime Minister has declared that he will bypass the Ottawa gang in favour of local media outlets. Does the merit of the existence of the current Parliamentary Press Gallery in its present form extend much beyond its founding, and now former, traditions? In this modern world of the 24 hour news cycle, via satellite dissemination, and the ubiquitous bloggers, is the PPG as critical as it once was when it was the only link between the federal government and the electorate?

I’ve received word that the Parliamentary Press Gallery walked out of an announcement by the Prime Minister today regarding aid for Sudan. The PM was to announce $20 million in humanitarian aid for the country and $20 million for implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement.

I’ve heard that a handful of journalists snubbed the PM by walking out on him during the announcement because they are mad about the issue of the ‘media list’.

Before press conferences, the PMO invites journalists to order themselves on a list for the purposes of running a smooth Q&A. However, journalists are complaining that this deviates from the practice of yelling out questions over their colleagues on occasion and controlling the meetings themselves on the bulk of the other pressers. They also fear that they may not be called upon if they aren’t favoured by the PMO. However, I’ve heard that the PM has exhausted the media list every time there is one and no reporter has yet complained that they weren’t called upon when they’ve put themselves on the list. UPDATE: An email from a reporter in the PPG asserts that these last couple of points are untrue. According to my source, reporters have been passed over and the list hasn’t always been exhausted. According to another PPG source, this isn’t to punish reporters but it is likely done to focus the message to the appropriate media outlets (e.g. Vancouver or Quebec or to the multicultural press).

UPDATE: One of my PPG sources said that the list is likely going to be the make-or-break, do-or-die, die-on-this-hill issue between the PMO and the PPG. I’ve heard that the walkout wasn’t planned before-hand and that only a few reporters remained (including CTV’s Bob Fife and the Star’s Graham Fraser).

One of my PPG friends argued that what the PMO is doing is philosophically wrong by controlling access to the Prime Minister and that the walkout had nothing to do with the ease of doing one’s job. To that I responded that if the reporters were walking out on principle, the PPG has essentially become a political group and not an unbiased observer of events.

Further, the crux of the PPG argument seems to be based upon the fact that since the old method was used in the past, that it is the correct method for the present. Again, the PMO has a communications strategy and it seems that they have determined the fulcrum point of their relationship with the PPG. Now the PPG has adjusted the balance and we’ll see if the PMO responds.

However, it may only stay as the stuff of insider baseball as the Conservatives are now at 43% and the rest of Canada (those outside the PPG) don’t seem to care.

UPDATE: The reporters that stayed for the press conference shuffled off to the sides out of the view of the cameras so that they wouldn’t serve as “Harper props”. This is getting somewhat childish…

This week, MPs voted by a bitterly narrow margin on whether the government should extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan by two years. While NDP, BQ and some Liberal members opposed the extension (after supporting extension days earlier), Conservatives unanimously supported the motion and Canada will now continue in Afghanistan until at least February 2009.

During the national discussion on Afghanistan, a couple of terms keep coming up from both the media and members of the opposition. These terms are politically designed for maximum impact to dissuade Canadians from the mission.

Members of the media that would have Canada abandon its international obligations to our allies and to the people of Afghanistan have been using the term ‘body bags’ to describe the return of deceased Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan.

As the CBC’s special coverage of ‘ramp ceremonies’ (a term now part of our lexicon) has taught us, our fallen Canadian heroes do not return home in “body bags” but in proper coffins. Body bags are used in a disaster, in a chaotic and unorganized situation. Indeed, they are used as a temporary and efficient way of dealing with the deceased. In a massive third-world earthquake, body bags are used to collect the scores of dead, and in the context of Afghanistan, the term is used to paint an image of indiscriminate death and disorder (and quagmire). Canadians soldiers are not ‘returning home in body bags’ as the anti-war members of the media would have us believe. On the (thankfully) infrequent occasion when a Canadian soldier is tragically killed, however, he or she makes the sad flight home in a flag-adorned coffin. The term ‘body bag’ is pessimistic and not even honest.

In fact, Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi makes himself useful and illustrates my point:

“President Clinton stated, and it was his policy, that he could not stand to have any of the soldiers coming back in body bags the way that tens of thousands of body bags came back from Vietnam. It made it necessary that they could accept great losses on the ground but they could not accept significant losses of the military.” — Andrew Telegdi, Liberal MP

So, “body bags” = disastrous military quagmire

The media has been using the politically loaded and dishonest term to argue against the military mission in Afghanistan.

For an example of news stories that use the term, click here.

The other politically loaded term that is being used by the opponents of the Afghanistan mission is “exit strategy”.

“Exit strategy” is currently a widely used talking point in the US and it is used in the context of the increasingly unpopular American war in Iraq. Many in the American media and on the American left have compared the conflict to Vietnam and frame it as a military disaster. Regardless of the veracity of this comparison (perhaps a debate for another day), critics of the Iraq war want American troop withdrawal and an “exit strategy” before what they envision as a rooftop helicopter evacuation of Americans from the embassy in Baghdad akin to what happened in Saigon.

The term “exit strategy” is parlance for a war that is lost. What was the allied “exit strategy” against the Germans in World War II? It’s quite an absurd question if you think about it. The exit strategy then was nothing short of victory and the allies were in Europe until after the last shot was fired. Can one imagine a televised British parliamentary debate on troop withdrawal from France? The members of the opposition that decry the mission in Afghanistan likely don’t believe that we are losing this ‘war’, but they do want Canada out of Afghanistan. Therefore, when they use the term “exit strategy”, they are being somewhat dishonest as they conjure up images of the military’s worst case scenario for that central asian country.

When I was growing up trying to learn proper English grammar, I learned the literary technique of euphemism by example of the casket. Apparently, the term, as it is associated with death, became so unpleasant that the casket became re-termed euphemistically as the “coffin”. My teacher at the time mused that eventually we may have to re-invent the term again and call the wooden boxes “demise chests”. I’m not sure that there is an antonym for euphemism, but I believe that the left has done so for “coffin” and “casket” with “body bag” and have instead of finding the same for the word “victory” they have dishonestly labeled Afghanistan as a defeat and have termed it “exit strategy”.