Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney used to say that in politics it is important to have friends, but it was even more important to have enemies. So, when we hear Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre denounce the CBC, we must know that he is looking for an enemy.
And having a common enemy is still the best way to mobilize your base, the voters whose support you must have if you want to win.
Grassroots mobilization is important because of two phenomena in recent years. First, the fact that governments can be in the minority. Since the 2000 elections, four federal governments have had a minority and four have had a majority. The margins of victory are increasingly often very thin and therefore every vote counts.
The other is the declining participation rate. In federal elections held since 2000, turnout has averaged 63%. This means that more than one in three voters will not vote. This is a huge pool of voters who can be mobilized, if we find the right issues that are close enough to their hearts.
The objective is therefore twofold: to ensure that supporters will vote well and to try to convince those who do not like the public broadcaster that this is reason enough to vote Conservative.
It must be said that hating the public broadcaster is almost a national sport in the Conservative Party, at least in the rest of Canada. That said, it has long been considered a nest of leftists or, at least, liberal sympathies. We won’t lose many votes by promising to “defund” the CBC, but we could probably win some.
In Quebec, it’s quite different. Hence the fact that Mr. Poilievre’s promise would apply only to English Canada, which leads to a somewhat surreal situation where the Conservative leader talks about either RDI or ICI Première as an essential service for French speakers. That said, we are impatiently awaiting the first Conservative MP from Quebec who will take the floor to support his leader on this whole issue.
It will be a balancing act, among other things because it would cause a legal problem since CBC/Radio-Canada is, by law, a single entity with a single board of directors and a single president-director general. But Mr. Poilievre does not bother with such details at the moment.
But what is most disturbing in all of this is the clear shift of the Conservative Party away from the mainstream media and into more fringe media, which tell the conservative base exactly what it wants to hear.
In his farewell speech as Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer told his troops that they must “question the claims of the mainstream and left-wing media.” And he added that they should instead consult “intelligent, independent and objective organizations” like Post Millennial or True North.
The first is a website of the American right, the second was one of the voices of the truckers’ convoy and it indiscriminately fights the left, whether in the NDP or the Liberal Party.
But both are echo chambers. Places where the most conservative activists can be reinforced in their positions, however harsh they may be. These are sites that claim to be news, but have the effect of polarizing public debate.
Of course, there are somewhat similar sites on the other side of the political spectrum. But, if we are honest, it is difficult to claim that CBC/Radio-Canada is an echo chamber and that the public broadcaster knowingly works to polarize public debate in Canada.
This is why it would have been interesting to monitor with a look from north of the border the trial which was to take place in Delaware and which would have opposed Fox News and the manufacturer of voting machines Dominion Voting Systems.
The question is whether a media outlet can knowingly lie – about “stealing” the last presidential election – because that’s what its audience wants to hear. The two parties eventually settled out of court and with an apology from Fox News.
American laws protect the media enough if they can prove that there is no malice (“absence of malice”). Personal emails from Fox hosts were to be entered into evidence to show that they did not believe, among other things about President Trump, what they said on the air.
However, we have seen media outlets – over the past few days, US public radio and television PBS/NPR, Swedish public radio and CBC/Radio-Canada – who deliver their own verdict by withdrawing from Twitter, believing that they still don’t have to encourage a platform that denigrates them.
Twitter is dependent on the content producers who use it, not the other way around. Which should encourage him to be more restrained. Or, at least, a little politeness.