Journalists as enemy

Poilievre, Musk, and a marked lack of deference

Poilievre and Global’s David Akin, debating. Photo: Andrew Meade, Hill Times

Why do politicians waste time picking fights over symbols? Because that’s where the culture is. The feud between the CBC and the Pierre Poilievre/ Elon Musk tag team has received substantially more coverage than did $80 billion worth of tax credits to goose clean tech in the recent budget. By one estimate Canada has committed $5.5 billion to the war in Ukraine. Was it well or poorly spent? Pierre Poilievre has no theory. But on the future of the CBC, he has generated more outrage with a few tweets than in the previous seven months of “triple-triple-triple” and “everything feels broken.” If nothing else, his efficiency is improving.

To me the outrage seems out of proportion to the offense. This often happens when everybody is arguing over something else besides the immediate issue at hand. On the narrow substance of the CBC and Twitter, a few preliminary thoughts.

1. The CBC is largely funded by government. This is nearly the first thing any school child learns about the CBC.

2. Nobody should be upset if anybody points this out.

3. In particular, any journalist who is upset that somebody is saying a true thing of wide public notoriety should give his or her head a shake.

4. More broadly, if the thing that is upsetting to you is on Twitter, it really is all right to leave Twitter. Even when I was active on Twitter, I thought it was weird when people tried to treat it as a public utility, like school boards or Medicare. Twitter is best viewed as a sophisticated toy, a kind of social pun like hula hoops or citizen’s band radio. Although come to think of it, people used to get overly upset about hula hoops and CB too.

5. I should acknowledge that I earn income from my weekly pundit gigs on CBC Power and Politics and on Radio-Canada’s Thursday-night Point de vue panel on Le Téléjournal, a rough equivalent to the anglos’ At Issue. (Ours is better.) To borrow the vernacular of the week, I’m currently about 15% government-funded. I’m proud of this work. But I’ve had to be flexible in the last year about how I earn a living, and if a future government ever shut the CBC down, I’d adjust again.

If this were only about saying obvious things on a terrible social-media platform, nobody would be upset. Poilievre’s response to the CBC’s new Twitter designation made explicit what was already obvious: that there was more going on.