The Sixth Estate

The Sixth Estate Weekly Flack Awards are given to the Cabinet ministers whose communications staff make the most appalling and disrespectful spectacle of the week, taking the already low standards of government propaganda and sinking them even further. I really, really wanted to give this week’s award to Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and his team for sending out Joyce Bateman to deliver the following appalling line on honeybees:

Honey bees may be small in size, but there is no doubt that they have a big impact on the Canadian economy

I wanted to, but I have no choice but to defer on that one, because Jason Kenney and his communications team decided to sink the bar even lower than I thought it could possibly go when I started these Awards. Sun TV, it seems, wanted to film a citizenship ceremony. But there wasn’t one scheduled, and bureaucrats couldn’t find enough newly-sworn-in citizens to stage something called a “reaffirmation ceremony.” So instead, Kenney’s department sent out some of their own employees to pretend to be new citizens.

Kenney is unrepentant. He says that this event “in no way should undermine the importance and value of special reaffirmation ceremonies which we encourage all Candaians to participate in.” He’s right. I never believed anything I saw on Sun TV anyways, so half zero is still zero. But it doesn’t excuse him from his responsibility for an attempt to scam the Canadian public regarding the citizenship ceremonies he supposedly cares so deeply about. Let us not forget, this is a man who thinks the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is “stupid.”

The Sixth Estate Flack Awards are a regular series created last December to recognize ministers and their subhuman mouthpieces for going below and beyond the call of duty in crafting the very worst in government press releases. Communications incompetence is actually a specialty of the current regime. Since creating the awards, I have recognized ministers for incompetence in math, rambling conspiracy theories, and forgetting to write the press release altogether (but publishing the title anyways).

One of the most common problems is an inability to grasp basic concepts of time, like how long ago 1870 was or whether it’s entirely appropriate to get visibly excited about the fact that the government is providing emergency aid for a storm… that happened four years before the announcement. That’s the category into which this week’s winner fits:

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The Sixth Estate Weekly Flack Awards are a regular series dedicated to recognizing the silliest and the worst in the generally pathetic field of government communications. These awards recognize absurd errors, bizarre subjects, unnecessary excitement over trivial programs, and preposterous quote-mining.

This week  there were strong entrants in all categories. For instance, in the unnecessary excitement category, there was Pierre Poilievre and Rona Ambrose announcing to what they dreamed was an interested national audience that they would be attending the official renaming of one of the government’s many buildings in Ottawa. However, this week there could be only one winner: Minister Joe Oliver’s bizarre, paranoid “open letter” addressed, oddly, to nobody, in which he vents his spleen over the growing list of people who want to comment at the pipeline hearings.

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The first Flack Award of the New Year goes to Stephen Harper and the Prime Minister’s Office. There were no particular howlers among the usual dull propaganda sent out by News.gc.ca for the week, but I was quite stunned to see Stephen I issue the following announcement welcoming the promotion of Toronto archbishop Thomas Collins to the College of Cardinals:

Cardinal-designate Collins becomes the fourth Cardinal in the 110-year history of the Archdiocese of Toronto and the 16th Cardinal in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada.

Now, this wouldn’t matter overmuch, except that Stephen I considers himself (among other things) a qualified historian, and rumour has it he is even nearing publication of a book on the history of the professionalization of hockey. So it doesn’t really inspire confidence that such a “scholar” is unable to muster even the research skills necessary to perform a simple Google search:

1870 — March 18: Pope Pius IX raises Toronto to an Archdiocese during Vatican Council I, making Bishop Lynch an Archbishop.

Or perhaps it’s only basic arithmetic that Harper has trouble with, despite the fact that he also fancies himself a credentialed economist. (Our Dear Leader is a man of many talents.)

This is the fourth installment of the Sixth Estate Flack Awards, and the second won by the Prime Minister’s Office. Their first was awarded in early December for a bizarre series of press releases promoting the new border accord. Other recently honoured or nominated ministers include Vic Toews for breathlessly announcing emergency relief for a 2007 storm and Bernard Valcourt for his excessive celebration of the construction of new naval target hulls at an Atlantic Canadian shipyard.

The only reason the preposterous announcement that Santa’s sleigh will be receiving an armed escort by CF-18 fighters doesn’t win the Flack Award this week is because the same announcement has been made for several years now. Why does Santa need a military escort through Canadian airspace? Is the government worried he’ll veer off course and deliver the best presents to a Liberal child? Are they perhaps concerned about Muslim terrorists lurking in the barren lands with a surface-to-air missile launcher?

And of course, there’s the $30 billion question: are the CF-18s really enough to keep Santa safe, or will he only truly be safe once we get our new F-35s?

But that is not new. No, the most unnecessarily excited shill this week was surely Greg Rogers of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, whose boss is minister Bernard Valcourt. On Monday, Rogers announced breathlessly that

Boats are not normally made to be sunk, but manufacturing a vessel to do just that has propelled 70-year-old A.F. Theriault & Son Ltd. from traditional boat building into cutting edge innovation, and helping to train navies around the world in the process.

For those who don’t speak Propagandese or Newspeak, I’ll parse that into English for you: ACOA is subsidizing the Theriault shipyard to manufacture target ships which will be shot at by the navy for training purposes. I’ll bet no one has thought of that before! In an alternative version of the press release, Rogers also makes the following painfully unsuccessful attempt at sounding clever and cutesy:

All in all, it’s just another reason to believe this is one longstanding company that will continue to sail the waters of success for years to come.

Unlike the company’s boats, which will be sunk in short order.

One day has now passed since the dishon. Peter MacKay threatened to sue his critics for libel, and Sixth Estate has not received any requests to take down posts “attacking his credibility.”

The Sixth Estate Weekly Flack Awards are given to Cabinet ministers and their mouthpieces for going below and beyond the call of duty, demonstrating both contempt for the public and a disturbing lack of intelligence on their part, by issuing press releases so far below the already low standard of official communications that the mere act of reading them makes you feel as though you have lost several IQ points.

I was sorely tempted to give this week’s prize to veterans affairs minister Steven Blaney and his paid personal shill, Codie Taylor, for announcing the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Hong Kong on December 4 — even though the actual Battle of Hong Kong started on the 8th. In some weeks that would have been enough.

But he’s only first runner-up, because this week Steven the Minion was upstaged by his boss, Stephen I, and the intellectually defective gaggle of juvenile, incompetent stuffed shirts on the Prime Minister’s Office press team for their appallingly banal coverage of the new Canadian-American border accord:

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Government press releases have probably never been, shall we say, the go-to source for reasoned and well-informed commentary on the issues of the today. They are, rather, propaganda, pure and simple. But they have taken a definite turn for the worse under the Harper regime. This turn isn’t merely a decrease in critical commentary — that wasn’t there to begin with. Instead it’s the addition of an absurd, sneeringly juvenile tone which takes the already negligible value of the government press release and sinks it even further.

For instance, there’s Steven Blaney, who used an unnecessarily excited national press release to announce that he would be attending “a picnic, a beach landing, and a commemorative ceremony all at the same event!” (exclamation mark in the original, as if it was some sort of magic trick). Then there was John Baird’s official complaint that D comes after C in the alphabet. Until this week hit the trifecta, I wasn’t sure I needed to memorialize it at all. But then the following three arrived in rapid succession:

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