On Friday before the election, the Globe and Mail came out for the Conservatives...without Harper! As if they could re-engineer the election -- to have their conservative cake while eating its leader.
Had millions of Canadians taken the bait, on Monday evening we could have heard the following from a victory stage in Calgary: "The Canadian people have spoken -- giving me four more years in the job I love, which allows me to make all the decisions. But the Globe and Mail has spoken too. So, to do the noble thing yet again. I hereby tender my resignation. Bye."
Mercifully, the Canadian people spoke too: they got rid of Harper in the only way possible. Whoever wrote that editorial reiterated all the usual put-downs of Trudeau, straight out of the Conservative playbook. Did they listen to him? I thought that journalism is about getting the facts, rather than mouthing the canon? The facts were straight in their face every day -- at the very least, in how he ran the campaign. And, rare for a politician, this is someone with ideas. Not with some dogma he once learned.
I attended a Q&A with Trudeau early in the campaign, being rather undecided about him. (I have never belonged to a political party.) I listened -- that's easy enough -- and was hugely impressed with his knowledge on the issues, his ability to think on his feet, his poise and decorum. So presumably were a great many other Canadians. But not the editorialists of the Globe and Mail, who seemed to have been deaf and blind, not to mention dumb. (As if to demonstrate its even-handedness, the Globe accompanied this editorial with a listing of all its endorsements in the 10 elections since 1984 -- it came out for the Conservatives, not all ten times, only seven.)
A camel has been defined as a horse designed by a committee. Ditto for this editorial. It reads like a desperate attempt to find some way to endorse the Conservative Party. Why? Read it and you have the answer: the government of Canada is portrayed as being all about the economy and finance, nothing more. Not health care, not global warming, not foreign policy. Nothing but...well, is it jobs for Canadians? Or the entitlements of their friends and their bosses? Bay St. over Main St?
Most of the other English-language daily newspapers, including those owned by Postmedia, came out for the Conservatives. That company alone controls 56 newspapers in this country. We don't have a free press in Canada. We have a corporate press.
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