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Mark Bourrie: This Election, Demand Your Politicians Represent You

Eight years of Harper's information iron grip has hobbled Canadian democracy, author argues.

Tomas Hachard 30 Jan 2015TheTyee.ca

Tomas Hachard is an assistant editor at Guernica Magazine and writes regularly about film for NPR and Slant Magazine. He has also written for The Atlantic, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Follow him on Twitter @thachard.

Last week, after declaring her intention to run for the Conservative candidacy in the Montreal riding of Mount-Royal, former journalist Pascale Déry told The Globe and Mail that she hoped to disabuse Quebecers of the notion that the Conservative Party of Canada is "hostile and non-transparent." It's a particularly appropriate ambition for Mount Royal, where Stephen Harper's crew has shown some of its more hostile tendencies.

In 2011, residents there got calls from a Tory-commissioned polling company falsely declaring that Liberal MP Irwin Cotler was planning to quit politics -- at a time when Cotler was actively fighting the Conservatives' crime bill. The Conservatives were also accused of hiring a shadow MP for the riding who helped municipal politicians work with the federal government.

Mark Bourrie recounts both these incidents in Kill the Messengers, an exhaustive account of a prime minister and Conservative party that have deployed increasingly ruthless attacks on political enemies, and steadily tightened their grip over information access in ways that benefit their policies.

Kill the Messengers doesn't reveal any new scandals, but as a compendium of the government's shadier actions it makes for a riveting, if somewhat soul-crushing, read. Bourrie details the most widely reported transgressions, like the robocall scandal and cancellation of the long form census, as well as more forgotten incidents like the government's plan to build a media centre from which it could best control journalists' access to information. He also focuses on Harper's ambition to reshape the history and identity of Canada.

"We never hear the word peacekeeper anymore," Bourrie said, reflecting on the last eight years. "Things that used to be taken for granted as being very Canadian aren't even part of our national discussion."

As much as he lambasts Harper, Bourrie's worries extend beyond the current government. Examining a Parliament now micromanaged by party whips, MPs who see no reason to attend the House of Commons to debate bills, and a media seemingly no longer able or willing to report on Parliament Hill in scrupulous detail or with a critical lens, Kill the Messengers paints a portrait of a democracy that's hobbled or, as Bourrie puts it, "on autopilot."

The result is a book that doesn't allow us to merely sit by and stew in outrage. Bourrie argues forcefully that without substantial pressure from the public demanding fundamental changes, Parliament is likely to retain its hostile and secretive qualities no matter which party is in power.

The Tyee spoke to Bourrie on the phone this week about the upcoming election, the Conservative government's information control, and why we need to put pressure on MPs to actually do their jobs.

Sadly, I think many people would say that facts and in-depth policies are no longer necessary in running a successful campaign in Canada. Would you say that's a legacy of the current Conservative government? Or does it reflect a broader problem?

"I think that a lot of what [the Conservatives] do they import directly from the States, especially from the Tea Party side of the Republican Party. They didn't invent it, but certainly they have brought it to the most extreme [level] that we've ever seen in Canada. The scary thing is that it's not just watching, it's bringing people in from the States to teach Harper's people how to do this stuff."

I think the NDP and the Liberals have brought in people from Obama's team for this election.

"Yes, they have. That's a bad trend in Canada. We have enough problems maintaining our independence without really setting up branch-plant political parties. We already imported the political strategists system -- which is really too bad for democracy -- where we have people who basically are paid to run campaigns, people who are professional marketers or strategists.

"These people have a lot more say than the people who join political parties. When I was a kid in the 1960s, my parents were members of political parties and were very active. I went to political party meetings. I went to see Pierre Trudeau when I was 10 years old. I saw politics in those years as something that Canadians were really involved in, if you wanted to be. Now I'm not quite sure what you get from joining a political party. Maybe you get to be used as a foot soldier, but you certainly don't get a lot of say in actually doing election work, like really interesting election planning. And that's really too bad."

In the book you briefly mention the "gotcha" culture of politics, but point out it isn't necessarily that new of a phenomenon. If you have these pseudo-scandals and they captivate so many people, how much can you blame politicians for trying to make sure they don't say anything wrong if it could completely derail their campaign?

"I don't think I could be a politician, because I shoot my mouth off all the time. It's a real skill to have the discipline that it takes to be a politician. The other side of the coin is that with most TV sound bites being down to seven or eight seconds, it's hard to make any kind of argument in the space that a politician is given. So it becomes a game of how you manipulate images and television footage, and also manipulate that little wee-bit of sound that you get.

"What we've seen the Harper people do is just make sure that everything is scripted, every image is planned out, every event planned to the nth degree to make sure there's no spontaneity, no real interaction with people other than people who are chosen. Even during election campaigns. They've shown that they're more than willing to muscle people out of rooms if they don't like what the audience is saying.

Did you read the op-ed that [Harper's former director of communications] Andrew MacDougall published in the CBC, where he tried to explain why politicians circumvent the media these days?

"Yeah, that was a beauty. Oh, would I ever love to talk about that. Talk about a piece of propaganda. The idea that Harper wants to set up his own media because Canadian media doesn't care enough about him to cover his every waking moment! That was one of the most absurd things ever written. I put it on Twitter. I just called it bullshit. This is not even worth analyzing more than that. It's just straight bullshit.

"It's just appalling that the CBC would run that on their webpage. It really makes you wonder. First of all, nobody watches 24 Seven [the government-produced web series about Harper], which is paid for by you and me. Nobody wants to watch it. The media in this town would do handstands to get a chance to film Harper doing stuff. I mean, one of the things that really drives the media's anger with Harper is the lack of ability to show this guy in any situation other than him standing with a lectern or a bunch of flags behind him. So the idea that the media doesn't care enough about Harper, so we have to have this propaganda, sort of like North Korean trash on the internet, is completely absurd."

But in your book you do seem to suggest that there's a double problem of the media not having enough money to cover Ottawa properly, and then Harper not presenting himself to journalists...

"Oh, but we certainly have enough TV camera people around who would love to have real chances to film Stephen Harper in his office, meeting people, talking with people, walking down the street, if he ever does. That's just a complete red herring. We're not that far gone. I mean, this is a guy who sneaks into the building through the back door and then has one of his flacks say that the media doesn't care enough about him to film him."

But MacDougall says the Conservatives are doing all this because the newspapers don't serve as intermediaries any more. He's able to use that as an excuse.

"That's the world they would like, where the newspapers aren't necessary anymore. It hasn't worked out that way for them because they haven't been able to get the viewership on 24 Seven -- partly because the product is so lame. But the upside of that MacDougall piece is that he actually does say what I say in the book, which is they would like to replace the media, they would like to delegitimize the media that exists, prevent it from doing its work physically, and replace it with propaganda. And it was really nice of him to prove that point."

Harper is obviously a huge part of your book. But you also argue that there's a problem with Canadian democracy that goes beyond him. So I wanted to ask you up front: How important do you think the upcoming election really is?

"I think it's really important, but not because of who will win and who will lose. I think it's one of the last chances, the way things are going, for voters to buttonhole their local candidates and say, why aren't you in Parliament debating bills? Why are you acting 24 hours a day as a PR person for your political party? I think that's a question every MP should be asked. There's almost no importance placed by MPs on actually being members of Parliament, which is what they're supposed to be.

"I think people should demand all candidates' meetings, which is something we've seen withering away. I think [this election] is a chance for civil society to get out to all the leaders and put them on the spot and say, what are you going to do about, for lack of a better term, the democratic deficit in this country? Because it's real, it exists. Our Parliament doesn't work, our political parties are becoming professionalized, and marketing is taking over. Our government doesn't tell people what it's doing. And this is something that's becoming engrained in the bureaucratic culture of Ottawa: the default setting for access to information is to say no. On the most trivial material.

"If people don't care about that, then basically the bad guys win. Because the press can't win that war. The scientific community can't win that war. The NGOs are getting their asses kicked. So it's a matter of people saying, do we really want to know what's going on? Or do we just want to hire somebody, once every four years, to put all their friends into power and do what they want with the country? And we'll hope that we don't go broke or that people don't steal too much or that taxes don't go too high."

Let's go back to the MP problem. There's the private member's bill that would at least give members a little bit more power in relation to their party, by giving members the power to initiate leadership reviews and removing a leader's ability to veto riding candidates...

"Oh, I would love it if Michael Chong's bill passed. That would be such a good start."

Is that enough? How much further would we have to go after that?

"It would sure be a good start. I doubt it will pass, but I think it's something that anybody who really wants to raise these questions can hook on to, to ask their local candidate, what did you think of Michael Chong's reform bill? And if they didn't vote for it, [ask] why didn't you vote for Michael Chong's reform bill? It's not the answer to all the problems, but it's the first time I've seen a real chance for this thing to start to roll back and start to be unwound."

You seem to have doubts about Trudeau and Mulcair as well...

"There's a lot of reasons why I think it's going to be really hard for them. One is that it's hard to beat an incumbent. There are also 30 new seats -- almost 10 per cent of the House of Commons in new seats. We're going from 308 to 338. And almost all those 30 seats are in suburban Toronto areas, suburban Vancouver, and Western Canada like Alberta and Saskatchewan. So that gives [the Conservatives] a sizeable advantage even compared to 2011.

"I also think that the strategy for both the NDP and the Conservatives is to grind Justin Trudeau between Tom Mulcair and Stephen Harper, both of whom come across as not very nice people, but at least they're smart and they know their file. I think you'll see Trudeau's handlers trying really hard to keep him out of debates and things, even to the point of refusing to be a part of a debate unless Elizabeth May is allowed or something -- some sort of pretext that they wouldn't have used last time around."

Given your criticisms of the Conservatives, Trudeau's strategy might also seem depressing. He doesn't want to lay out any policies because he's afraid of having anything that could be attacked. And that makes for elections that aren't based on anything substantial.

"The wild card in this election is that Trudeau is a celebrity, and this is the first time we've had a real celebrity run in a long time. You know a guy who could fill a hall even before he became a politician? Just because of who he is and how he talks? So that is a wild card: how much do you use his celebrity and his drawing power? And how much do you worry that he's going to say something stupid? I think that's the real challenge that [the Liberals] have right now."

At the beginning of the book, you lament how Canadians tend to tune out politics in between elections. But it seems like the counter to that is the constant electioneering of the U.S. system, the constant politics. How do we get to a political culture that isn't defined, constantly or every couple of years, by elections?

"Maybe if we look more at things in a very local way. That's why we need a strong local press. The difference between our system and the American system is that we have these members of Parliament who in theory are really quite important to the system. The prime minister's job depends on the support of members of Parliament. And I think if we really push them a lot harder on what they're doing as members of Parliament and for the constituency, that might help alleviate our national political discourse where it's all about polls and who's ahead.

"We have very little real discussion about what's happening in Ottawa for our cities or even our neighbourhoods. Everyone goes big picture in Ottawa simply because it's cheaper and it's easier to cover. So I think that we need to be a lot more demanding in what we know about our MP and our issues. And I think if we bust it up a little in that way, sort of like take a rock to the mirror and break it, it might be better."

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.  [Tyee]

Read more: Politics, Elections

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