Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives keep finding dirt on the Liberals. They can thank their favourite punching bag
Nov. 26, 2024
By Julian Sher
Does Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre have a secret team of intrepid researchers digging away in the backrooms of Parliament Hill?
After all, just look at how relentlessly the Tories have been going after the foibles and follies of Justin Trudeau’s government.
Most recently it was the controversies over Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault’s conflicting claims about his family’s Indigenous background that eventually forced his resignation.
Earlier this month the opposition grilled the government in Parliament over revelations that the Canada Revenue Agency repeatedly paid out millions in bogus refunds as thousands of taxpayer accounts were hacked.
And for the past year or more, the Tories have been relentless in hammering the government for not doing enough to stop Chinese interference in Canadian politics.
Where is Poilievre getting all this powerful ammunition to fire at the ruling Liberals?
From his own research staff? Not at all.
What all these scandals and so many more have in common is that they come from the very Canadian journalists Poilievre loves to demonize.
It was the CBC — which Poilievre has vowed to “defund” — that exposed the CRA scandal that, to the Tories’ delight, brought them days of attacks in the House of Commons.
It was Global TV, which Poilievre once decried as a “Liberal mouthpiece,”which played a part in investigating the Chinese political interference that gave the Tories so much grist for their attack mill.
But to hear Poilievre tell it, so much of the Canadian media are not democracy’s lifeline, they are lapdogs.
The CBC, of course, has long been his favourite target.
But it was the CBC’s “The Fifth Estate” that exposed the latest CRA scandal, just as back in 2017 “The Fifth Estate” and Radio-Canada, working together with the Toronto Star brought out the “Paradise Papers” which exposed the offshore business dealings of Trudeau’s chief fundraiser, Stephen Bronfman. That controversy dominated the Tories’ attacks in Question Period for three days. So much for the CBC being in Trudeau’s pocket!
The Tory leader is at least an equal opportunity attacker. He claims the CTV network is “so biased” because “they’re owned by Bell, Justin Trudeau’s favourite phone company.”
He once refused to answer a question from the fervently neutral Canadian Press news agency because it was a “tax-funded mouthpiece” for the Liberals.
To score political points, what Mr. Poilievre is ignoring is that investigative journalists have exposed scandals and wrongdoing regardless of the political leanings of their newspapers, from the Toronto Star to the more conservative National Post, and from the publicly-funded CBC to the private networks of CTV and Global.
Poilievre has the right to blast any news coverage he does not like. After all, journalists do sometimes make mistakes; we can have a powerful influence and should not be exempt from criticism
Poilievre should call out any bias, misrepresentations or lies as he sees fit.
Yet, though hyperbole may be a politician’s right, hypocrisy is not.
Poilievre should stop attacking the very media he relies upon.
To denigrate an independent and free media for purely political gain at a time when we need it most is a disservice to democracy and the people.
Whether it is his intention or not, Poilievre is edging dangerously close to painting a picture of journalists he doesn’t like as “enemies of the people.”
There have always been repressive countries where it is an all-too common practice to “shoot the messenger” — sometimes literally. But now journalists are under attack in democracies for simply doing their job.
South of the border, Republicans attacked journalists for even daring to fact-check during the presidential debates, despite fact-checking being the very guts of what journalists do.
It is not too late for Poilievre to scale back his dangerous rhetoric. But as we head into a federal election perhaps sooner rather than later one fears that he will find it all too tempting to continue making the media a convenient scapegoat.
And what if, as the polls currently indicate, Mr. Poilievre sweeps to power?
The media will investigate his government and any possible wrongdoing, just as we did with Justin Trudeau (and his father Pierre), Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney and several provincial NDP governments.
It’s what we do.
We are nobody’s lapdog.
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Julian Sher has been an investigative journalist for the CBC and the Toronto Star. He is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University.