Friends, foes and Liberals among us

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/09/2014 (4059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Political parties have always sent operatives to each other’s events. It’s bascially spying but it’s not exactly covert. Often times opposing party MPs will even get accredited for another party’s convention so they can get inside and be easily prepared to criticize whatever it is they see.

It makes everyone’s life easier I suppose than to try and have your own people sneaking around to glean what the other parties are doing on a particular day. 

But the Liberals this week are accusing the Conservatives of taking it to the next level and planting young Conservative staffers in the audience to ask questions of Liberal MPs and candidates, hoping to get them to say something that contradicts what Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has said. 

It happened earlier this year with MP John McKay when he was asked about Trudeau’s plan to not let anyone run for the Liberals who didn’t support a woman’s right to choose. It happened earlier this week when retired General Andrew Leslie, who is running for the Liberals in an Ottawa riding and is one of Trudeau’s key policy advisors, was asked about the Israel-Hamas conflict. In both cases recordings of the responses were handed over to the media.

Both McKay and Leslie have to be responsible for their words, no matter who asked them the question. In McKay’s case he clearly criticized Trudeau’s policy and even referred to it as a “bozo eruption”. Maybe the Conservatives planted the question to a known pro-life LIberal MP hoping to find ammunition against Trudeau. But McKay still said what he said and likely would have said no matter who asked the question.

This was not an example of what I refer to as “beat your wife journalism.” You know the kind of story where a journalist asks a politician “hey do you beat your wife” and when the politician says no they then run a story saying “Politician X denies beating his wife.” Which of course means a lot of people will think there must be a reason he had to deny it and therefore it might be true. 

The Conservative staffer did not say “hey John McKay do you think Trudeau’s policy on anti-aborition candidates makes him a bozo?” McKay came up with that response all on his own and he and Trudeau need to explain and come to terms with what that means for both of them and the party.

Leslie was a little less obvious about his criticism, as he expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but he was critical of what he called Israel “firing indiscriminately” on Palestinian women and children. But the headlines on the stories screamed that a top Trudeau advisor was off side with Trudeau on support for Israel. He surely was more critical of Israel than Trudeau has generally been but there is a lot more grey area on this one than on McKay’s response.

No matter, the Conservatives are trying to spin it as Trudeau surrpetitiously having one of his candidates say one thing to one set of people while publicly trying to woo pro-Israeli voters himself. (Which of course no political party would ever do, including the Conservatives, wink wink, nudge nudge).

The Liberals are up in arms about these planted questions, and say it is going to ruin any chance Canadians have to hear real answers from politicians.

The latter is already almost true. The vast majority of the time all you get from politicians is pre-approved talking points. Sometimes it’s almost comical when you ask a question and get a talking point sent back that doesn’t go anywhere near answering the actual subject at hand.

All this tactic may serve to do is make parties a lot more careful about who they let into their events. The Conservatives already got into a lot of hot water in the last election for screening attendees at campaign events with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In at least one case two young voters were asked to leave an event by the RCMP after a search by Conservative staffers on Facebook found one of the students had posed for a photo with then Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff at a Liberal rally.

But at the end of the day, politicians have to be prepared to answer questions, no matter who they are from, and own their answers.  

*****************

One of the favoured strategies for Conservative politicians is to blame a Liberal-bias in the media for any bad press they get. The other parties will occasionally make similar accusations – I have in the past been accused of being a Conservative, Liberal and NDP sympathizer all based on the same story – but the Conservatives have made this criticism an art form and lately a fundraising drive.

This week, after Colin Horgan, a former reporter for iPolitics and producer at CTV, announced he had taken a job as a speech writer for the Trudeau Liberals, you could almost feel the glee erupting at Conservative headquarters. Sure enough, within hours, out went the letter to Conservative supporters of the “see we told you they’re all Liberals” ilk, and we need your money to help us fight not just the Liberals and the NDP but also the media.

Members of the national press quickly took to Twitter to point out just how wrong that assumption is, since the list of Conservative MPs, senators and staffers who have come from journalism is long. Just for starters, Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, both well-known Canadian broadcast journalists who were appointed as Conservative senators by Harper. Not to mention Linda Frum, who was a contributing editor at Macleans and a columnist for the National Post, among her other jobs before being appointed by Harper to the Senate in 2009.

At least five or six Conservative MPs list journalist as a previous occupation including health minister Rona Ambrose and former environment minister Peter Kent, who was a news anchor for CBC and Global among his decades long journalism career before he was elected to Parliament in 2008.

Manitoba MP Robert Sopuck used to write a hunting and angling column for this very newspaper, although he does not list journalist as a former career.

A glance at current and former staff lists of Conservative MPs, ministers and the prime minister’s office produces a long list of former journalists, such as Dan Dugas, a former Hill reporter who took a job as director of communications for Kent. Or Scott Anderson and Derek Shelly, the former editors in chief of the Ottawa Citizen and Kingston Whig Standard respectively, who both have been or are speech writers for Harper.

The list goes on but hopefully you see the point.