The Sixth Estate

Under policy set by the Chretien government and supposedly faithfully followed by all departments and agencies under the Harper regime, every group within the Government of Canada must supply, every three months, a list of contracts over $10,000, a list of grants and contributions over $25,000, and a list of travel and hospitality expenses by the minister and senior staff. They come out on the last day of the month, and they are staggered, so that every month, one of the lists gets published.

These lists are important for a variety of reasons. They let the media check up on which jet-setting ministers are expensing the largest number of flights, five-star hotels, and $16 glasses of orange juice to the public purse. They let Sixth Estate produce the Pork Barrel report — which tracks whether groups in Conservative ridings or specific regions (like Quebec) receive a disproportionate amount of federal money.

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Two weeks have now passed since my favourite reader, “rory,” announced that he was drawing up a list that would prove that my Media Bias project is full of holes. The Media Bias project looks at the op-ed pages of major English newspapers across the country. It started up last year, and it has consistently found that Conservatives and business groups get far more privileged access to the papers than progressives, liberals, or, for that matter, even social and neo-conservatives.

Rory still hasn’t supplied his report to me, but in the meantime, the Media Bias project continues to gather data. Here’s how April 2012 looked, from the perspective of the op-ed pages of 20 leading newspapers:

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The right in this country is becoming unhinged over something. Harper called the NDP pro-Hitler, which would be passing strange even in American politics. Last week an Ontario business leader denounced the new Liberal-NDP tax on the rich in that province as “ethnic cleasing.”

But surely the best crackpot moment so far can be found from Cardus writer Peter Stockland in today’s Calgary Herald:

Redford seems to have no taste for anything like proper balance or, for that matter, the charter itself. From the beginning of the campaign, she seemed partial to fiat rather than full democratic discussion. If I understood well, she declared issues such as abortion and gay rights off the agenda not because they are beyond provincial jurisdiction, but because they are not permitted in political conversation.

The phrase “Stalinist instinct” must be used very sparingly, but still.

Yes, Joseph Stalin and his well-known radical stance on the subject of gay rights.

I hear a network of incredibly harsh prison camps are already being built in the wilds of northern Alberta, and that the Alberta government will soon be stocking them with Jewish bankers, kulak farmers, and other enemies of the state like Stockland.

So, as you may have heard by now, the new line from the Harper regime is that we can’t trust the NDP because they voted against World War II. Even though they didn’t exist in 1939. And even though the left-wing party that did exist at the time voted for the war. Facts? Facts? Eww! We have no need of those in Canada!

Since we’re talking about absurd historical fictions here, it’s worth pointing out that the Conservative Party of Canada didn’t vote in favour of fighting Hitler either, and much the same reason: they didn’t exist then. Social Credit existed, though. At the time they were very busy spreading the word about a Jewish banking elite controlling world politics. You know, just like Hitler.

Otherwise, though, Harper makes complete sense. Continuing the occupation of Afghanistan is exactly like stopping Hitler. My advice to the government is not to appease the Taliban by ceding the Sudetenland to them. If that happens, the Taliban will invade Poland. And we know what happens after that.

You wouldn’t think the victory of a Progressive Conservative government in Alberta, of all places, would be able to send the media into such a tizzy. A few months from now, most people in the prattling classes will have forgotten this incident ever happened, but it’s still worth marking the moment. The media uniformly predicted a victory for a hard-right Wildrose team supported by a corps of crack advisors sent out from the Harper team in Ottawa. They were wrong. And now, they are compounding their incompetence.

The pundits are offering no shortage of “explanations” for why they were wrong: vote-splitting, fear of change, strategic voting, undecided voters, Wildrose gaffes, and on and on. Some pundits are now even pretending that Wildrose wasn’t really Harper’s brainchild in the first place, and that actually he’s better off without them. Andrew Steele, an Ontario Liberal insider turned Globe & Mail pundit who probably needs to take a logical reasoning class as well as a math class, uses some funny math to conclude that “it’s not surprising that so many pundits were wrong” because changes in government in Alberta are extremely rare.

It’s gotten so bad that one former Harper speechwriter pulled a Jacques Parizeau and blamed immigrants for skewing the voting results. That man, Michael Taube, has promised to stop quoting polling firms, predicting election results, or doing what he calls “political cheerleading.” We’ll see how long it takes him to break his promise.

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Six months ago, I would have said the future of Canada was looking pretty grim. Universal healthcare is a dead letter: the federal government has openly declared that the provinces should feel free to violate the Canada Health Act with impunity, and sooner or later one of them will. We have deliberately and systematically moved from the middle of the pack, climate change-wise, to somewhere near the bottom. The media has become a cesspool of conservative partisans and business association propagandists. Parliament is a meaningless talk shop — with more and more of that talk happening in secret. There are many worrying problems.

And above all, these changes were being put into place by a new neo-conservative political movement sweeping the country, sort of Reform on steroids. The Harper Conservatives — the sort of “states’ rights” clowns even the Americans normally won’t give the time of day to — already had a majority government. They were lending both considerable resources and highly trained personnel to allied parties from Victoria to Montreal. Several of these were expected to seize power very shortly. Some already did. A blue wave was  sweeping the nation, and one could only guess what devastation would be left in its wake.

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One week has past since a challenger accused my Media Bias project, which clearly demonstrates that the notion of the Canadian media being “leftist” or even “centrist” is a myth, of itself being biased. Said challenger, as you can see in the comments section, declared his intention to supply me with a list of major Canadian columnists, grouped by political affiliation, proving that Canadian newspapers were left-wing after all.

So far the promised list of columnists hasn’t arrived. I’m not holding my breath, but “rory,” whomever he is, is still welcome to come forward and surprise the hell out of me. In the meantime, here’s how the restarted and much expanded bias project statistics stand over the past week.

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British Columbia is in the process of setting one record, and in the next few months it may set another. I can’t think of another occasion in Canadian history when a sitting majority government was openly deciding whether it should oust a leader before she even gets a chance to lead her party into an election, or whether to change its name in a bid to stem off the New Democratic Party.

Personally, I find the second option to be the smarter one. Residents of British Columbia are intellectually defective, even more so than most Canadians. By the time we get around to next spring’s election, those who haven’t simply forgotten the changeover happened at all will still be fooled into thinking that the newly renamed party is actually a different party. With the same leader. And the same MLAs. And the same policies. But never mind that. It’s all in the name, right?

Even the other politicians in B.C. are stupid. Today Ken Boessenkool, who’s been sent out to the hinterlands by the federal Conservatives to rescue their “Liberal” ally Christy Clark, phoned up the BC Conservative Party (a sort of Wildrose clone currently tied with the Liberals in the polls) and offered them one heck of a good deal: they could all join the Liberals, accept the Liberal leader as their leader, and in exchange the Liberals would change their name. The power-hungry Conservatives naturally rejected this generous offer.

I’m entirely on board with the Boessenkool Plan, and to that end, I’m asking my readers to contribute names for the new party. The best candidates will of course be forwarded to the appropriate persons for consideration.

As I trawled through the nation’s op-ed pages for my ongoing Media Bias project, I came across a true gem that’s making the rounds of its smaller community papers, a column so inane that apparently the big boys at the Toronto Sun wouldn’t touch it:

Science has Death Knell for Skeptics

by Tom Harpur

This article is an astonishing piece of hokey, superstitious claptrap. Let’s start with Harpur himself: paradoxically, an Anglican priest who believes that Jesus Christ was a myth cooked up by the early church. But apparently that doesn’t stop him from believing all manner of other nonsense, and dressing it up as “science,” for whatever good that will do him.

The gist of the article is that science has proved the existence of a soul. By “science,” Harpur doesn’t actually mean scientists. He musters all of two supposed scientists to support his position. The first is a Montreal psychologist (Harpur says “neurosurgeon”) named Mario Beauregard, whose work on the subject is technically philosophy of science, not science, and in any case amounts to a creationist-style tantrum that because science can’t currently explain every aspect of the functioning of the brain, therefore the parts science doesn’t understand — conveniently labelled with the magic word “quantum,” which is a synonym for God — must be spiritual.

And the second… well, the second is Ervin Laszlo, whom he introduces as a “Nobel Prize nominee.” Nobel Peace Prize, he should have said, and Laszlo isn’t a scientist either. Apparently he has a degree from the Sorbonne, but most of his collection of letters, if not all of them, are honourary degrees. The fact that Laszlo claims consciousness “persists” after death in the form of a “hologram” which goes on to possess “autonomous existence” after death apparently appeals to Harpur. I’m not clear what makes it “science” or why, as a skeptic, I should be persuaded to believe in this sort of preposterous hocus-pocus.

After all, everyone knows that souls don’t exist in the form of holograms. They exist in the form of avatars, which levitate from the body after death and go on to enjoy immortality in a quantum field. And that, dear readers, is pure science.

Last year, in the wake of the 2011 election, I ran a project to measure whose voices got amplified in the major newspapers’ op-ed pages, called the Media Bias Project. The result was a conclusion that Conservative voices outnumbered Liberal and NDP ones (but only by 11% to 8%), and more importantly, that business groups (32%) dominated over progressive and union groups (3%) and social conservative ones (4%), even in so-called leftist bastions like the Toronto Star.

Recently a commentor has challenged me to redo the project, accusing me of bias because I excluded the Sun chain and because of various other reasons. As part of the challenge between him and I, I’m opening up the Media Bias project again to see how things have changed over the last year as well as to make a couple of changes to the approach. So here we go again.

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