Alistair Horne, history and narrative

It’s a shame I only discovered Alistair Horne’s work only a few weeks before he died. There’s much I would have liked to tell him, had I the chance.

My wife was a few pages into his history of the Battle of Verdun,The Price of Glory,when she turned to me, “I see why you liked this book.” It wasn't a straight-head retelling of the battle, it was something more, she said.

She was right, of course. Horne’s 1962 book on the French experience in the First World War is so much more than an accounting of Verdun. What makes it so special, is how uncommon the approach seems in the stacks of military history.

At the heart of the book is the idea this battle, or any battle, is more than just troop movements and bayonet charges.

Military history is an odd thing. In the popular mind, it's a summation of battles on the march to victory, or defeat. Tales of gaudy heroism and noble sacrifice, maps filled with arrows, marking the way across some far-away battlefield. The type of history read, perhaps, by the type of guys who might do some light reenactment on the weekends. War porn, if you will.

So, I’m a bit embarrassed to say on a recent rip to Europe, my wife and I drove down a large part of the Western Front, visiting shell-pocked fields, ruined forts, and war graves too numerous to count. Travelling like that, to all those old and quiet battlefields, gives off a certain signal, a flashing neon sign screaming “WAR BUFF, COMING THROUGH.”

If you've watched any of the few remaining history programs on the History channel, you probably have an image of the type of history buff—why is it always “buff”?—I’m not.

One of the observation domes on Fort du Douaumont near Verdun.

The type of history I’m talking about is best exemplified, in my experience, by war historian John Keegan. Over the winter I picked up his single-volume pass at the First World War, the aptly titled The First World War. It took me a couple tries to finally plow though, for a variety of reasons. Most of those being it was an overly dense book, packed with minute details about manoeuvres, but light on, even disdainful of, political analysis. And what is war, if not a political act?

Perhaps I’ve not read enough military history to appreciate the genre. But my foray into Keegan’s work left me rather dissatisfied. The First World War is an unending dirge of tactical analysis, at the expense of a readable narrative.* So often, sentences would fold in on themselves with endless lists of which division of which army was where commanded by who on what stretch of trench, my brain would stop registering pages at a time. Kegan’s book overloads you with facts figures and details that seem important, but add little to your understanding.

But Horne's history of Verdun doesn’t fall into this same mould. The Price of Glory is a book about one of the most consequential and bloody battles of the First World War. But to start the book, he sets the scene in the 1870s during the Franco-Prussian War. Showing how and why the French army was defeated then, made clear why the French fought the way they did 40 years later. The French penchant for headlong attacks and their unwillingness to cede ground, or even dig in any permanent sense, is traced by Horne back to the earlier war where their reliance on stoic defence, and stout fortresses seemed to this later generation of French warriors to spell their doom.

(That this would all circle around once more in the next conflict, in the form of the infamous Maginot Line, would be one of the tragic consequences of Verdun. But, I’m getting ahead of things here.)

Now, this isn’t to say that Horne’s book is without references to battalions and pincer movements and so on. But these things have a sense of place within a narrative. The story isn’t that X Corps marched three miles before encountering pockets of machine-gun resistance and being forced to retreat. It’s about why X Corps might have marched those miles, and what it meant that they were turned back.

Perhaps I'm being unfair to Keegan. Horne is in many ways trying to explain the whys and hows of Verdun, Keegan seems instead to describe the war in its totality. But the contrast is I think useful in illustrating what made Horne’s book so special, so much more worth your time.

One of the blasted outer walls of Fort du Douaumont.

The Price of Glory sees the battle, and by extension the war, as so much more than suffering and slaughter, infantry tactics and artillery barrages. 

Horne captures how Verdun shaped a generation of the French. Maginot, Pétain, De Gaulle; all these men passed through the battle. But more than the names of historic importance, something like four-fifths of the army would pass through Verdun through the 10 months of the battle. The blasted hills and hammered forts would mark an entire generation of young men in an indelible and lasting way.

Horne is able to illustrate the weight of that—of the relentless shelling, the back-and-forth bar brawls over miles of blasted mud, the endless misery of nights in the trenches—and how so many men carried that weight forever.

Fifty years after Glory was published, you can still sense the weight. When you go to Verdun today, it’s there all around. In the smashed villages never resettled, little more than monuments nestled in pockmarked corners of forest. In the forts open for tours, where the steps of other visitors make a ghostly echo through the damp corridors.

I would have liked to write to Horne, to tell him how half a century later how moving his book was. How it changed my view of the First World War, and how it inspired my own pilgrimage to Verdun. I’d have written on how essential his book still felt, in style and in substance. And how his approach to Glory has inspired in me a new way of looking at narrative and historical context, and how I want it informs everything I hope to write.

I won’t get that chance, but it’s true all the same.

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*I will say, however, Keegan’s dissection of the Schlieffen Plan, and the logistical analysis of armies marching on limited roadworks and train timetables, was a fascinating and lucid read. On the other hand, Keegan devotes but a single paragraph to the Armenian Genocide, of which half of the passage is to suggest the Armenians had it coming. So. 

**When in Verdun, we visited the newly opened museum of the battle. One of the most interesting things about it was the near-total absence of Pétain, or any commander on either side, from the museum. His central role in the battle was presumably easier to ignore than deal with his later turn as leader of Vichy France, collaborating under the thumb of the Nazis.

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All photos copyright me, Robert Hiltz, because I took them, and I have the negatives.

Canada, Newfoundland, and how we remember the Great War

There’s something to be said for the ability of a simple monument to deeply move you.

So it is with the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial. Atop a stone cairn, up a small hill, a bronze caribou sits facing the old German lines, howling at the sky.

In that caribou the agony of a generation of Newfoundlanders who were cut down in the first day of the Battle of the Somme, of one of the most senseless slaughters—in a conflict best known for senseless slaughter—of the First World War.

It’s the contrast, though, between the epic grandeur of Vimy and the raw pain of the caribou that make such a deep impression. The Vimy monument’s twin spires loom over the former battlefield. It has a number of carved marble statues, all deep with symbolism and metaphor. The names of the entire war’s dead are carved into its base. But it’s hard to separate the solemnity with the underlying fact that comes up, again and again: Canadians won the battle of Vimy Ridge. As much as it’s a memorial to the dead, it’s also a memorial to victory.

By contrast, nobody won at the Somme. Almost 20,000 men died in the first day of fighting. Waves of Allies went over the top, marching shoulder to shoulder, before being caught up in intact lines of barbed wire and being cut to shreds by still-alive German machine gunners. 

Scenes like this one played out up and down the lines:

“I could see, away to my left and right, long lines of men. Then I heard the ‘patter, patter’ of machine-guns in the distance. By the time I’d gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone twenty yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself.” — A sergeant of the 3rd Tyneside Irish, as told in John Keegan’s 'The Face of Battle'

When you travel to Beaumont-Hamel today, you can still see what were once trenches. The tour through the memorial park starts on the Newfoundland lines, and makes its way into what was then the bloody-maw of the German Imperial Army. A petrified tree stands at the spot called “Danger Tree” out in what was once No Man’s Land where several Newfoundlanders sought cover as they, and their attack, fell to pieces. Of the 800 men of the Newfoundland regiment that left their trenches that morning, fewer than 70 would report in the next day.

But the full scale of the tragedy of the Somme is hard to get a handle on. Before we arrived at Beaumont, after a morning at Vimy, we found ourselves standing on a slight ridge in the middle of farmers field, at the gate of a cemetery with the graves of a few hundred men. My wife and I were on the Redan Ridge, cemetery No. 1, another part of the sprawling Somme battlefield. 

There on that hill, surrounded by blooming rapeseed fields, you could look off in the distance, left and right, and see cemeteries just like the one we were standing next to, dotting the fields into the distance. One hundred and fifty-four Britons were buried beneath us, another 67 just down the small farm road. At each white cluster along to the horizon, it’s hard to guess at how many more were buried within view. Thousands, surely. The weight of that really settled into my gut.

So when we arrived not long after at the Beaumont-Hamel memorial, there was something about that place, so much pain bottled up there, that came through. 

History is a funny thing, especially history about your own country. In the case of Canada, we’re taught a broad, shallow narrative. I could rattle off all the familiar strokes, but you’ve no doubt heard enough of them this year.

This problem—and it is a problem—extends to how we talk about, and think about, the Canadian experience in the First World War. So while the glorious Canadian victory* at Vimy Ridge takes centre stage in our national memory, Beaumont-Hamel is at best a footnote.

One of the side effects of Newfoundland and Labrador joining Canada so recently, is much of our national narrative had already been set out by 1949. By then, the Second World War had been over for several years, and the stories we told ourselves about the First had long been decided.

As VICE writer Drew Brown put it last year, in a remarkable piece to mark the battle’s centennial:

Memorial Day exists in a strange space where a dead nation bleeds into a living one. It is the site where you can feel most acutely how pre-Confederation Newfoundland history has been papered over with the Canadian story. Canada Day retroactively draws us into Ottawa's vision of manifest destiny after Newfoundland's Year Zero in 1949.

So we don’t often hear of how practically the whole Royal Newfoundland Regiment was wiped out that July. Their names can be read in a book of remembrance in a small chapel off the site’s museum.

The Somme offensive was a failure. After atrocious losses to both sides, Field Marshall Douglas Haig** called a halt to the battle in November of 1916, four and a half months later. In that time more than a million men were wounded or killed. This gives another striking contrast with Vimy. There, in the three days of fighting, there were some 10,000 casualties, about 3,600 of those were deaths.

Vimy was a part of my pilgrimage. I wanted to see the same ground my great-grandfather had seen a century before. But it was important we made time to go to Beaumont. Brown’s piece stuck with me the last year, and had I not visited, I think would have been denying witness to one of the most painful parts of our history in the Great War.

It ties back to something in my neighbourhood. I live just around the corner from Montreal West’s war memorial. On it are inscribed the words:

Dedicated to the memory of the sons of Montreal West, who gloriously laid down their lives in the Great War and in honour forevermore of all those who served therein. This tribute is erected with full hearts by their fellow-citizens.

That last part always sticks with me. “Erected with full hearts by their fellow-citizens” is a phrase that manages to evoke a feeling of gratitude and an understanding of sacrifice, without being maudlin about it. It’s atypically Canadian in its dignity and grace.

That’s part of what I saw in that caribou at Beaumont-Hamel last month. The full but ragged hearts of a hollowed-out country, howling with rage.

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*There’s plenty of debate over whether Vimy was as important as our national mythos would make it seem. That the Allies took the ridge, and stopped there is perhaps telling.

**Fear not, Haig did okay for himself. He’s got a noble and glorious statue riding his horse down Whitehall Street in London, following just behind the British Cenotaph.

Angle on Canada: What does Donald Trump mean for angles in Canada?

I’ve been searching for about a week now, trying to find just the right way to make my return to the Angle on Canada. It’s been months since I’ve done one of these—I was busy, okay?—and in that time things have certainly taken a turn for the weird and the awful.

When we last gathered around this little collection of pixels, it was July. The sun stayed up for more than a few hours, wearing socks was unnecessary, and the wretched disease of Donald Trump was little more than a fever set to break any day. 

The fever never did break, of course. So now we’re confronted with the question: What does President Donald Trump mean for Canada? But unlike so much of the sad-sack laziness found in plenty of Canadian angle content, some of these questions matter. 

It can be tough to separate the important from the frivolous. Whether the Trump administration’s ban on Muslims applies to Canadians with dual citizenship is an important question. It has direct effect on the lives of Canadians. So too does looking at what the approval of Keystone XL will mean for Canada and the oilsands. 

But there’s a nagging, useless question that comes up again and again and again and again: Can Donald Trump happen in Canada?

It’s a question with a veneer of importance about it. We look to our southern neighbour and see their world turned upside down, and wonder whether such a thing could happen here. It’s natural to wonder these things. But like every other Canadian angle, we’re trying too hard to wedge what’s happening here into a frame created elsewhere.

So we end up asking is Kellie Leitch the Donald Trump of Canada? Or is it Kevin O’Leary? But neither of those people are Donald Trump. One of them is a mealy-mouthed populist stoking the idea that immigrants, especially the brown ones, are not to be trusted. The other is a brash businessman and ignoramus who made his name on television by being a huge cockwhistle.

Which does sound familiar, yeah? Running down a list of Trump’s attributes, you’d find yourself ticking off a bunch of boxes between Leitch and O’Leary. But it doesn’t get to the heart of the thing. It doesn’t reveal anything about us, or our neighbours, but it does obscure the real question: Whether there’s a home for cruelty, racism, and obvious bullshit in Canadian politics.

One of the central features of Trump’s popularity wasn’t he was rich and famous—though, he was—or that he was a racist demagogue—again, yep—but that he was willing to say whatever it was people wanted to hear.

Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, he’ll bring them back. Coal mines have shut down, he’ll open them again. Health care is expensive, he’ll make it cheaper. Mexicans are coming across the border, he’ll build a wall the Mexicans will pay for. Black people live in inner-city warzones, they’ve got nothing to lose. Muslims are the root of terrorism, he’ll stop them from coming in. America is losing, he’ll bring back winning. And so on.

That these are based in lies wicked and benign didn’t matter. That there’s little explanation of how these things would be accomplished is irrelevant. His voters didn’t care about that stuff. Here was a man finally cutting through what they saw as the bullshit, promising to do the things they’ve always wanted done. 

They didn’t care what the real source of terrorism isn’t a refugee fleeing war, they just wanted to hear someone say “radical Islamic terrorism” and bar the door to Syrians. Trump offered his voters the chance to stick it to people they were afraid of, and promised that doing so would make their lives better.

His message was so attractive because it wasn’t restrained by reality. Telling people everything will be great if you just give them your vote is the easiest thing in the world if they buy it. And plenty of people bought it.

So, the question isn’t whether Donald Trump could happen here, it’s whether there’s a gullible constituency willing to be had. Are there enough people in this country interested in being cruel to someone else just to feel good about themselves?

There’s plenty of reason to believe there are voters out there looking for a baser form of governance. Whether it’s enough of a foundation to elect a government on remains an open question.

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Editor’s Note: I’m going to try not to focus too much on the endless firehose of Trump and Canada content for future Angles on Canada. I’ll try to pick out the goofiest Trump examples, but we can’t be doing this same schtick—well, meta-schtick—every time. We'll see how well this promise holds up. Fingers crossed!

As always, send me some of your favourites, Trump and not-Trump. I’m always looking for them by email or twitter.

Angle on Canada: Ol’ Pumpkin Head has some more to teach us

That large orange orb with the tiny hands just over the horizon isn’t here to bring us raisins, friends. For he is Donald Trump, and all he’s got are two scoops of doom. Now that he’s the officially the nominee of the grand old party of folks who don’t much care for non-whites, Trump has a new raft of lessons for the Canadian electorate.

Famous for being rich, and rich to show all the beta males of the world how fucking great he is, Trump’s unique mix of infamy, shamelessness, and revolting hair maintenance gives us a chance to look upon our democracy and weep, just a little bit.

You see, Canada too is vulnerable to the sort of grim hucksterism that Trump is pitching to the American public. Or at least, we could be if we lose sight of our “pleasant reasonableness,” according to CBC’s Aaron Wherry.

Our most world-class city was led not so long ago by a tottering buffoon of its own, you might remember. Wherry argues we maybe shouldn’t be so quick to look down our crack pipes at our southern neighbours, given we spawned Rob Ford.

The main lesson Wherry pulls from Trump's ascension is that cynicism and frivolity have come to the fore of American politics, something we should be wary of here in Canada. But it's hard for me to see the unserious making a real go of it in Canadian politics.

Perhaps this country’s best shot at matching Trump’s billionaire credentials and off-kilter lunacy was Pierre Karl Peladeau, and he’s gone now. The head of Québec’s separatist Parti Québécois for a just shy of a year, Peladeau was an instant political star upon his introduction, raising his fist in the air and declaring his support for separation from Canada. This threw a wrench of sorts into the PQ’s plan to fight the election on the firmer ground of fear of brown people with religious beliefs.

After the party lost the election, after only a few short years in power, PKP was quickly crowned party leader. From there he bumbled around from gaffe to gaffe for some months, never really finding his feet as a politician. Then he quit, hoping to save his family life.

That leaves us with the endless threat of Kevin O’Leary jumping into the race for Conservative Party leader. But the obnoxious O’Leary doesn’t seem to have the ability Trump does for taking the pulse of the everyman. Sure, they both play rich jerks on TV, but Kev doesn’t possess the deftness to both be rude and charming at the same time. He’s just loud and wealthy.

So even when we’re talking ultra-rich politicians, it’s hard to draw any real parallels between what happened in the Republican primaries and how things might play out in our own country. There’s very little connective tissue there, other than our shared border.

I’d suggest another lesson to be learned. As our media inches toward oblivion, and the never-stop nature of the internet reveals that all news is not local, but global, the temptation will grow to shoehorn international political lessons into the framework of our own politics.

It gives the illusion of urgency and meaning to explain why the big event that just happened there applies here. But what if it doesn’t? What if it’s just a bit too convenient that broad sweeping lessons from another country, with another system of government, with it’s own history, geography, and population, might be easily applied here.

Maybe the real lesson is we should be looking inward at our own problems to find our own solutions.

(This week’s topic c/o @scott_rennie)

Anyway, here’s this week’s roundup:

• CBC made hash this week of Hillary Clinton’s slogan “Love trumps hate” this week, writing it instead as “Love Trump’s hate.” They aren’t the first to do it, though. Last December, the Globe and Mail made the same mistake, forcing them to run a correction in their print edition.

• Meanwhile, over at the Globe, notorious floor-shitter and all around loon Chuck Johnson got a chance to explain why it’s tough out there for dudes on the alt-right who get banned from social media. It’s good to see the downtrodden thirst-mongers of the world can find new avenues to be heard, once they’re deemed too awful for the cesspool of twitter. (C/o @moebius_strip)

• A Canadian was gored right in the cajones during the famed Running of the Bulls. For more, we go live to the scene:

• Bob Marley’s Redemption Song has a Canadian connection, of course. Some of the lines are inspired by a speech given Jamaican politician and intellectual Marcus Garvey in Sydney, N.S. in the 1930s, according to a post on CBC Radio 2.

Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

Angle on Canada: We’re on TV! But, why do we want to be?

There’s nothing quite so exciting as to find out you might be on television.

I remember in my first week on Parliament Hill, covering a committee meeting and texting my dad that I might be on television, and he should turn on CPAC*. For the next week or so I’d wonder, as I wandered around the foyer of the House of Commons, whether one of the cameras was going to feature me, prancing by in the background.

Thankfully, I wasn’t a noodle brain for long. Within a week or two I’d figured out being on TV like that was, well dumb. I avoided spaces where cameras were pointed like a sailor might avoid a brothel well known for its crabs.

I get it. Being on TV seems awesome. Until you end up on it, a slack-jawed narf, idly putzing about the background. Which is why I can’t quite square why here in Canada we’re so happy to find ourselves on American television as a bizarre sideshow.

Take the MLB all-star game on Tuesday. (I’m sorry for this, really.) An obvious half-wit with an affinity new-age aphorisms decided a verse from O Canada** was a good spot to go on record that he thought All Lives Matter. And so Remigio Pereira made the transformation from a guy in a suit with a decent set of pipes to the “Rogue Tenor.”

You could practically hear the country’s web infrastructure straining under the volume of content—news stories, hot takes, slow takes, radio segments, panel discussions, fart compliations—as finally, the summer news machine had something thrown into its maw that didn’t involve some sort of senseless slaughter.

And every time this sort of thing happens and we freak right out, I can’t help but wonder why? Why did this nitwit warrant days of coverage? A feverish swamp of takes and counter takes that was only quelled when a military coup—a fucking coup—was launched and then failed in Turkey.

Remember, this happened at the opening anthems for a game played for the benefit of children. It’s a terrible game, and probably only garners the attention it does because it is played in a notoriously barren stretch of the sports schedule. It’s bad baseball played for dumb stakes.

At best, Canada is a weird footnote to the story, but more often we’re the wry punchline. The butt of the joke. Because [snicker] Canada. See how cute they are in the background, jumping around, getting all that attention on the margins?

Someday, we’ll tire of being the jackass in the back. Until then, we’ll have to settle for being rogue tenors.

Elsewhere in Canadiananana:

• Canada’s electro-spies were “very excited” about being part of a plot on The Good Wife. Or at least, one of them was. Hooooooray.

• Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth May was at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, according to a Canadian Press report. Things went famously poorly. She still remembers the smell of tear gas. And so, an interesting tale of a troubled time in America is seen through the eyes of a teenaged Canadian, and much was learned. 

• What’s keeping a sniper from killing police in Canada’s most world-class city? The Toronto Star is glad you asked. (C/o @stephen_taylor)

• Meanwhile, the Western Producer wonders what the attempted coup in Turkey might mean for lentil prices. (C/o @NBSAlbert)

Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

*Sorry, pops. Advising someone to watch CPAC, for any reason, is cruel. Especially when you don’t actually end up on TV.

**(Lucky for him he didn’t change the words to the Star-Spangled Banner. The poor bastard wouldn’t have made it halfway through a political statement—any political statement—before being run though with a bayonet by the Marine honour guard.)

Angle on Canada: Brexit, Brexit everywhere and not a drop to drink

Ah, but where to begin?

Britons had the chance last week to vote to leave or remain in the European Union. You may have come across something on this subject. But that’s the United Kingdom, what does that have to do with Canada? I’m glad you’ve asked, rhetorical device, because hoooit has plenty to do with us.

So let us try, as with all things referenda, to start things off in Québec. The day of the UK vote was the day before La Fête Nationale. Québec’s totally-not-Canada-Day happens the week before Canada Day, where the streets are filled with blue-clad families and partiers and everyone waves the blue Fleurdelisé and celebrates the nation-within-a-united-Canada that is Québec. Which is much different than Canada Day, where everyone is in red.

In any case, the British vote to separate from a larger political body so close—on the eve of!—anything so fundamentally Québec is, well, too damned perfect to pass up. The connection is right there, so connect it we shall. The parallels are so obvious, can’t you see? (That Fête Nationale is the hyper-secularized evolution of the Catholic Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day is of no interest here, because it does not neatly fit into this narrative. MOVING ON.)

But maybe there is something interesting to be learned from the post-referendum political collapse in London. As Chantal Hébert writes, there’s a pretty good chance that in 1995 things would have gone similarly to shit if the Yes side had won. Perhaps most interestingly, Hébert posits the federal Clarity Act, with its stipulation for pre-set winning thresholds and clear questions, might not inoculate the country from a disastrous post-vote omnishambles. “But in the Brexit referendum, the question was direct and all sides signed off on the simple majority rule. What we are witnessing in the U.K. is as orderly an adjustment to a game-changing referendum result as Canada and Quebec could ever hope for,” she writes. 

Ah well.

When pressed on this very point, Trudeau was less keen on acknowledging the similarities, when he was asked about it Tuesday. 

But this isn’t just about Québec. No matter what the outcome, there were bound to be grave lessons in the wake of Britain’s referendum on its European Union membership. Lessons for Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of this adorable little backwater we call Canada.

There are lessons about climate change, lessons about electoral reform, lessons about regular people, lessons about the threat of big government, lessons about the temperature of the housing market, lessons about jobs, lessons about Shakespeare metaphors, lessons about lists. And those are just the lessons found in the Toronto Sun.

Maybe a Brexit means a free trade deal with Europe will be finalized, if the trade minister is to be believed, maybe it means a quick bilateral deal between the UK and Canada. Then again, maybe it doesn’t. 

Maybe Brexit is the counterpoint to Justin Trudeau’s vision for the world.

Maybe, Brexit means that Canada is the world’s last sane place. And maybe that means it’s about to get more crowded here. (Maybe, though, Google Trends is not to be trusted.)

Maybe this is all about Thomas Mulcair.

Then again, maybe there won’t be a Brexit, and all of this will be for naught.

Maybe there isn’t a lesson.

And now for a shorter-than-usual smattering of the Canadian angle:

• A woman born in Ashton, near Ottawa, is now the First Lady of Iceland. Which, I guess means Canada has a First Lady after all.

• Ontario Priemer Kathleen Wynne declares that Donald Trump is a danger to the world. Surely this will be what finally derails him.

Editor’s note: Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

Angle on Canada: [long sigh]

Some people on the internet seem to have very strong opinions on whether or not the prime minister’s wife should have staff for her public activities.

Sophie Grégoire Trudeau mentioned in an interview with the French-language Le Soleil that she has trouble keeping up with all the public things she’s invited to and would like a staffer to help. Some people think that’s a waste of resources, other people do not.

Canada doesn’t have a first lady, and semantics are really important in cases like this, some say, as I briefly nod off. She already has two nannies, why does she need more help, some say, making me wonder whether those two things are actually related. Public money shouldn’t be used for unofficial whatevers, the party should pay, some say, forcing me to shrug my shoulders. You’re cutting down her down because she’s a special flower, a tall poppy, some say, while I casually slip under the bathwater. 

I could go on, but I’d rather not.

Suffice to say, the country’s twitter fart got caught not just of several rounds of national coverage—people said a thing on the thing they say things!—but has exited our little provincial backwater and made it’s way to such august content farms as The Washington Post and The Guardian. A columnist for the Independent went so far as to opine, at length, on how mean conservatives are for being upset about the whole thing.

And a solid five drafts into whatever this is, I still don’t care. One way or another. Pay for the person, don’t pay for the person. Do whatever. 

We did it! The world noticed us. We won. Now let’s move on.

Anyhow, the rest:

• CBS Sports ran an online poll asking readers who they thought would win the NBA title this year: The Golden State Warriors, Oklahoma City Thunder, Cleveland Cavaliers, and "Other." In this case, the only "other" team remaining in the playoffs are the Toronto Raptors. Proving it is totally cool and world-class, Toronto mayor John Tory drafted a letter on behalf of the city chiding CBS for forgetting about them. (C/o @moebuis_strip)

• Vox dot com helpfully explained that Canada is a desolate, unliveable hellscape, with the help of a long-dead historian and a photo from reddit. It seems half of our population settled south of a line that includes Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Halifax. According to this voxsplanation, half of us live there because the land was good for growing. Not mentioned: whether these cities’ suspicious proximity to major waterways might also have something to do with it. (C/o @tylerdawson)

• This happened: 

@JJ_McCullough/Twitter

@JJ_McCullough/Twitter

• The government’s joke-by-committee twitter account might be trolling me. (C/o @keithjs)

• NDP MP Don Davies does not appreciate the Canadian angle either.

• Horrific reverberations are still being felt from the G20 protests in Toronto all those years ago. This time, it’s a burning Toronto police cruiser being used in a Saturday Night Live skit. The horror. (C/o someone, but I can’t remember who, I didn’t save the link. Let me know if it’s you.)

• It’s been a while since we last met, but in the interim, U.S. President Barack Obama made a Justin Trudeau joke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It was an okay joke. It also highlighted one of my favourite journalism tropes: explaining how jokes work. To wit, via The Canadian Press (emphasis mine): 

“Somebody recently said to me, ‘Mr. President, you are so yesterday. Justin Trudeau has completely replaced you. He’s so handsome, he’s so charming. He’s the future,’” Obama said. Obama then delivered the presidential punch-line, waving dismissively: “I said, ‘Justin, just give it a rest.“’ The annual correspondents’ dinner features a brief monologue where presidents get to try their hand at stand-up comedy. 

If that wasn’t explanatory enough, there is plenty of analysis to be found. (C/o @moebuis_strip and @mikelondoncan)

Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

Angle on Canada: Vermont Edition

I spent the week in Stowe, Vt., which you may know as the place where Canadian actor Christopher Plummer’s family opens a skiing lodge after singing their way out of the clutches of the Nazis in the film The Sound of Music. (Or something like that, I haven’t actually seen the film.) It’s also only about 90 minutes south of the Canadian border. As a Canadian, these are the only facts I needed to know about the place.

Anyhow, it’s a lovely area and I can’t recommend visiting in the spring off-season enough. You get to miss both the ski crowds and the wedding hordes. If you’re lucky, you might even get an entire hotel to yourself. (I don’t recommend bringing a copy of The Shining along with you, however.)

While there I learned our rather twee national self-identity as polite do-gooders may be nothing more than wishful myth. It turns out, according to more than a couple locals we ended up chatting with, Canadian tourists are smug jerks.

Our bartender at one point said it wasn’t uncommon for Canadians to spend time telling him, at length, how much better Canada is. Our friend was from New York, so he had some handle on rudeness, and I was inclined to take him at his word. To add insult to injury, he said he actually found tourists from Boston—Boston, for fuck sakes—were more pleasant to be around.

I also found the Canadian angle was inescapable, even dozens of miles outside the country. Ruffles is selling their all dressed chips to Americans as a limited time offer. They’re billing it as the “#1 flavor in Canada.” No word on what the #1 flavour might be, though.

Anyhow, onto your submissions:

• In what is an obvious troll job by CBC reporter Andrew Kurjata, we’re told one of the richest dudes in hip-hop has a “secret Canadian connection.” To ruin the secret: Birdman lived in Prince George, B.C. for a couple years when he was a kid. (C/o @moebius_strip, among others)

• Two world-class Toronto celebrities made cameo appearances in Beyoncé’s Lemonade “concept film,” the CBC helpfully analyzes for us. Here’s a lengthy quote, to really whet your appetite (emphasis mine): “And that’s where we find the beauty behind the madness. Not just in appearances by Toronto’s The Weeknd and Canadian model Winnie Harlow, but by a rare display of desperately raw emotion from a woman who everyone thinks is so far beyond reach.” “Not just.” Fuck me dead. (C/o @randi_beers)

• It’s fashionable in this stage of a U.S. Presidential contest for certain Americans to start making noise that they'll leave the country for Canada if the election doesn't go their way. Most recently, it's Lena Dunham to announce she's a big baby. There’s a long tradition of flinty celebrities declaring they could never live in their country if the Republican flavour-of-the-cycle wins the election. But we’ve got enough smarmy windbags of our own, thank you very much. You don’t have to go home, but you sure as hell can’t stay here. (C/o @1236) 

• Hillary Clinton says if she wins the presidential election, her cabinet will have a 50-50 gender split. Which is so last year. (Also c /o @1236)

• Canada Post is issuing a bunch of Star Trek stamps to mark the 50th anniversary of the show’s first series. The latest is of Dr. Leonard McCoy. If that doesn't interest you, fear not. The next one will have some double-secret “little known” Canadian connection, according to the CBC. Thank goodness, not sure how else you’d drum up support for something Star Trek. (C/o @Lazin_Ryder)

• Prince died, you've probably heard. Did you also know he lived in Toronto for a while? And that some of his last shows were in Toronto? Not sure how you missed that. (C/o many of you, but @keithjs was first by about two minutes)

Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

Angle on Canada: SPECIAL BRAZIL BULLETIN

If you’re one to believe the Jesus-types, God put us on this Earth to be tested. And friends, today might be His great test.

You see, a columnist in another country wrote some things about our prime minister that were, shall we say, less than kind. This is worthy of mention of because this is Canada and we are a small and silly people. Thankfully, the venerable Globe and Mail—the Canadian New York Times—is on it.

“Prominent Brazilian magazine publishes scathing critique of Justin Trudeau,” the headline reads. If that doesn’t get your blood up enough—how dare they!—it gets worse. The Brazilian column is written by Vilma Gryzinski, the foreign columnist for the apparently right-wing Veja, and she should maybe have other priorities.

“[Gryzinski] has found time to look beyond Brazil’s borders and pen a takedown of Mr. Trudeau even though Brazil is in the throes of a massive political crisis,” the Globe report says. Yes, where might a foreign affairs columnist find the time to write about things in another country?

Anyhow, in her column, Gryzinski says Trudeau will “support any insanity, including terrorism, when committed in the name of the Muslim religion. He frequently visits mosques, dressing in typical outfits from countries such as Pakistan, and praying in the Islamic fashion,” according to the Globe report.

Now, conflating attending mosques to supporting terrorism is undeniably shitty. Not to mention wrong. (Incidentally, my fiancée literally sent Trudeau to some mosques.) But it’s not like it’s a novel line of rhetoric for someone on the right to make.

But let’s back up for a second here. Who gives a fuck what a columnist in another country may or may not think about our prime minister? It would certainly not be news if a columnist in this country said something negative about Trudeau. Columnists all over the place have opinions about all sorts of things, all the time. What does it matter that a right-wing journalist in another country is seemingly anti-muslim and anti-Trudeau?

It is not news.

And, you know, I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to bother with this one. But our good friends at the CBC decided today was the day to do their own story on this, forcing me to hemorrhage my amygdala right out my ear. Not to be left out, the National Post had to jump in on this a little later, because golly, there sure is a lot of buzz on this one today. 

That’s just what we need, a bandwagon of reporting and aggregation on a foreign column. And in typical Canadian-media fashion, as first pointed out by Scott Gilmore, they didn’t even bother to mention where this was first reported. As Gilmore says, are we really to believe these folks just happened to read Veja today, some time after the Globe reported on it. Mhmmm, sure.

Then, to top things all of, there’s the implication these stories are some left-wing media cover from conservative attacks on our Dear Leader. I’m not sure how it happened, but here we all are, heads seven bends into the small intestine, subsisting only on farts.

Imagine for a second living a country where it was deemed newsworthy for multiple Serious National News Organizations to write about a column from some other place that’s negative toward the prime minster. Then imagine some asshole with a blog venting his spleen over the whole thing.

Sounds a lot like that “Hell” place I’ve heard so much about.

Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

Angle on Canada: The super classy Donald Trump edition

Donald Trump attracts attention everywhere he goes, and everywhere he isn’t. The billionaire blowhard is trundling toward his party’s presidential nomination and everybody’s pet hamster has an opinion about this.

Take, for example, the embattled NDP Leader Tom Mulcair. Canada’s answer to the question of whether you can be cool wearing only brown ties—no, it turns out—Mulcair has found himself in a bit of a pickle. He and his party decided to fight the last federal election by Stephen Harper’s rules, while some guy named Trudeau decided people were less concerned about deficits than maybe we’d all pretended to be.

Whoops. Anyhow, Captain Tom and the Dippers found themselves cut down to a third-place rump. (Which is still the party’s second-best-ever showing, but no matter.) Now some of the more traditional Dippers are out for blood. Mulcair faces a leadership review vote this week and if enough NDP party partisans want his generalship reviewed, he’s basically toast. What percentage “enough” might constitute of the party is an open question, but you’ll know it when you see it.

So, naturally, now is the perfect time to gin up support among those progressive types by calling out the Trumpster Fire for being a big bad meanie. Which is why it’s not a huge surprise NDP staffers were passing a video around of Mulcair giving a speech and taking questions from party faithful to various news outlets. In the party-edited video, Mulcair calls the America’s foremost windbag a proper fascist.

“Donald Trump is a fascist. Let’s not beat around the bush,” Mulcair says in the video, filmed at some kind of campaign-style town hall. He’s playing a sort of bizarro version to the right-wing, “call ISIS islamic extremism” fetish game. Mulcair then takes a chippy shot at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for not having the same intestinal fortitude to call Trumpenstein’s monster* a fascist. But, Americans are for some reason cranky about Her Majesty’s representatives sticking their nose in U.S. affairs, so maybe it’s best if Trudeau continues to dance around that one.

(See also why Finance Minister Bill Morneau wouldn’t even think of playing footsie with a straight answer on the British referendum to stay in the European Union. Do not touch the red button, minister.)

It’s not just our politicians taking on the Trump question. Everyone has to take their shot:

• A Canadian businessman was an owner of a team in the now-defunct United States Football League alongside Trump in the 1980s. One time he wrote him a really, really mean letter! Even promised to punch him in the mouth! But, he was polite about it—how Canadian!—by signing off “kindest personal regards,” according to a Toronto Star report.

• In Vancouver, a man climbed to the top of that city’s soon-to-open Trump Tower to fly a Mexican flag. That’ll show Trump what a bad idea his border wall with Mexico is.

• Speaking of Trump Tower, the owners of the world-class Toronto edition want to see the man’s name dropped from building. Hopefully, they don’t mean that too literally. 

• A Cape Breton professor is a very distant cousin to Trump. So much for the island’s embrace of its status as a island oasis for ex-pat anti-Trumpers.

• One Canadian tech firm—and therefore “Canada”—is buying Twitter ads trying to woo Trump-hating Canadians back from Silicon Valley. Sure. Yeah.

Donald Trump, Making Canada Wank Around Again!

And now, some submissions:

• In 1962 the dastardly Soviets tried to put nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba—which you may have heard is only 90 miles from Florida—and the civilization came very, very close to evaporating in a fit of radioactive annihilation. Thankfully, John Diefenbaker was our prime minister and he could suggest a line change to John F. Kennedy’s famous presidential address. (C/o @romeoinottawa)

• In the New York Times—squee!—an analysis that Rob Ford’s mayoralty was a sign Toronto was built on a stable political foundation. It’s an interesting look at how cities like Toronto avoided the white flight and subsequent urban decay found in, say, Detroit by keeping the suburbs in the municipal fold. Which, I mean, maybe? Hog Town avoided absolute destruction, sure, but the piece does tend to ignore what an unwieldy mess Toronto actually is.

• A “world famous” man bun model says Canada owns the hairstyle. So noted.

Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

* Editor’s note: Or is it just Trumpenstein?

Angle on Canada: I’ll take sucking the fun out of everything for $1,200, Alex

It’s not often real magic happens on Jeopardy!

Usually, the drama is expected, built into the very structure of the gameshow. The famous music has just played, and the allotted 30 seconds have passed. Now, the predictable period of drama will unfold. The camera will turn to the contestant with the lowest score, and the answer they've written down for Final Jeopardy will appear at the bottom of the screen, and a pregnant pause while Alex congratulates them for getting it right, or disappointedly tells them they’re wrong. Then, the big reveal of their bet.*

Down the line this continues, until we have a winner. That’s a wrap, Johnny. Thanks for playing, tonight’s broadcast has been brought to you by Aleve.

It’s a comfortable, and reasonably satisfying conclusion to the show.

Occasionally, though, something truly spontaneous will happen that blows your dick clean off its moorings.

Take last week, when Philip Tiu, for no apparent reason other than to let everyone know his bowels do not water, decided to bet $19,000 of his game-leading $19,600 on the final Daily Double of the game. “Oh, hello,” Trebek says, in that way of his. Then there are groans and chuckles from the audience. Did he really just do that? Oh yes, friends. Yes he did.

Then the question—answer, whatever—in the Country & Town category: “The country’s busiest port, this southwestern Canadian city is about 15 miles from the U.S. border.”

A pause from Tiu. His mouth hangs slightly open. His hand slowly migrates upward to cover it. He works his jaw left, then right. His hand drops. He’s not sure.

“Philip?” Trebek says.

Finally, shaking his head, Tiu says, “What is…Vancouver?” It’s a true question, not just a Jeopardy one. He’s just made a $19,000-guess, a shot in the dark.

Trebek let’s him hang just a bit. Let’s the moment open up in front of Tiu so he can think about what he’s just done. At last, Trebek says, “Yeeeesss.” He'd done it. Kristen, the contestant to his left, laughs despite watching the game slip entirely out of her reach. The audience starts cheering and clapping. Tiu has the look of a man who just stepped off a street, realizing he was a fraction of a second from being turned fine red mist by a passing bus.

It was magic. I think I might have actually started jumping around in my living room when it happened.

Watch for yourself:

Philip lands on a Daily Double that gave him a big lead. Check out his $19,000 wager:https://t.co/kjvIsl0FYs

— Jeopardy! (@Jeopardy) March 16, 2016

CBC had a different interpretation of the events, of course.

“Vancouver's newest super fan might just be an Atlanta, Georgia math professor who has only set foot in Canada once in his lifetime, and has never been to the West Coast. But Dr. Philip Tiu says he will visit the biggest city in B.C. soon, after doubling a $19,000 wager on Jeopardy! by saying ‘What is Vancouver?’”

(For those of you wondering at home, Tiu’s one visit to Canada was to Toronto. Which makes sense, because it’s so world class.)

Ah, yeah. That’s it right there. Mainline that Canadian content.

There’s nothing quite so enjoyable and uplifting as a reckless bit of gameshow theatre reduced down to the fact somebody named a Canadian city on U.S. television.

That's just the kind of country we are, I guess. 

Thanks to @moebius_strip for being the first of several to send this one my way, and briefly—ahem—turning me into a ranting lunatic.

Many other thanks to the lot of you who sent in your favourites. Here's a selection:

• Courtesy of Global News, we have this lovely little ditty on how Pizza Pops are made in—can you believe it!—Canada! Which seems like some kind of revelation, until it’s revealed Pizza Pops are only sold in Canada. (C/o my patient and understanding fiancée. Hi, sweetie!)

• What’s the Canadian connection to the Brussels terrorist bombings, you might be wondering. Wonder no further. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has a 39 per cent stake in the place. And, don’t worry, while the city was still reeling from multiple detonations in its airport and metro, CBC reported flights were still moving out of the Vancouver airport. And, fear not Vancouverinians, your trains are unthreatened! (C/o @fischerville and @sproudfoot)

• Donald Trump is, you may have heard, a combswidth from the Republican nomination in the U.S. Did you know he had a building bearing his name in Toronto? Here’s a reminder from BNN, in the event you did not.

• Finally, no news cycle on the death of an infamous Canadian would be complete without a glance around the globe to see how many people are talking about it. It’s the lamest form of the Canadian Angle, which also means it's the easiest. So, when Rob Ford died, everyone wrote this story.

Editor’s note: Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

*Correction: A previous version of this had the order of the answer and the bet reveal confused. This regular viewer regrets the error, and feels great shame.

Angle on Canada: Mr. Haircut goes to Washington

Well, we did it everyone. The people of the United States might actually know we exist. At least, the members of their media would seem to. This, all thanks to our prime minister giving a loving embrace of our southern neighbours. 

Not only did His Unassailableness, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, make a splash with a chummy tête-à-tête with the U.S. President last week, but he’s also managed to get the stamp of approval from billionaire technocrat Michael Bloomberg during a trip to New York this week. Hell, some people even want him to run for president. Canada is back, motherfuckers. No longer are we the forgotten hinterland. (Excluding of course Toronto, which is world class.)

God, it feels great, doesn’t it? I mean, to think we wallowed along for so long as just, well, nothing. No one knew we existed until Trudeau admonished Americans on network television for not paying enough attention to us. Why can’t these bastard Yanks learn a bit about our country? We know everything about theirs, after all. It’s only fair. No matter, the 60 Minutes interview got the Canadian news-about-news treatment and the news-about-social-media-reaction treatment and the nearly-maybe-funny-and-yet… 22 Minutes treatment. 

That was all before the prime minister even set foot in Washington. 

From there the coverage of our dearest leader went from plentiful to orgastic. We could revisit the whole bit here, but I’m sure you remember it. If you did manage to avoid it, I’m curious what sort of lead-lined box you’ve been living in. How are the amenities? Can you get a decent shower, maybe catch the odd episode of Jeopardy in there?

Anyhow, this brings us back to our old friend the Canadian Angle. And, as the saying goes, there’s no better time to flog a horse than when it’s dead. 

So, with that, some of your submissions.

• Remember the Super Bowl from a couple years ago? You know, the one with all the roman numerals? Yeah, that’s the one. Well, did you know Canada played a central role? Literally! During the half-time show with Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers thousands of people in the crowd and on the field a bunch of wore hats, little-bitty hats, with lights on them. Lights! Well, those lights were Canadian. Made by a company from Montreal! I mean, would you believe it? Canadian stuff at the Super Bowl? Hooooleeee!

• Meanwhile, seems that some Canadians are super influential on this internet thing, according to Time Magazine. Naturally, since an article in an American publication mentioned some Canadians, that was enough to merit being more news. This is just another news-about-news, my favourite subgenre of the Canadian Angle. Moving on. (C/o resident jerk @scott_rennie)

• This just in from the Canadian Press: Canadian actor of Canadian films and Canadian television programs says Donald Trump, who has buildings named after him in Canadian cities, will not be the president of the country bordering Canada. (C/o @iD4RO)

• Did you see the Oscar-winning journalism film Spotlight? If you’re from Toronto you might have got really excited when you recognized some places from the movie. (If you’re a Hamiltonian of somewhat ill repute you may be rather familiar with one of the scenes in particular.) (C/o @themiw)

Editor’s note: Angle on Canada is a semi-irregular feature of news stories made more about Canada than they should be. Particularly strained news examples can be sent via email or twitter.

The Night of the Living Canadian Angle

The Canadian angle lives on.

It’s been several months since I took to CBC’s The 180 to make that case that news organizations should quit making the smallest Canadian contribution to any given event to be the fulcrum upon which the news turns. And still, despite my best effort—in the form of three minutes of public-radio airtime—it has refused to die.

What am I prattling on about? What is this Canadian angle? Ah, glad you asked, mysterious other. Presuming you’ve simply just forgotten the pithy description from that radio spot, let me refresh your memory.

The Canadian angle is this unique look at the news you can find in our media where instead of the news being the y’know news, it is instead about whatever role Canada or a Canadian has played in the news. It’s the sort of thing you see in your community—Local Man Survives Indonesian Plane Crash—applied to the country as a whole—Canadian Actress Presents Oscar For Best Cinematography. (I shit you not.*)

I think it’s dumb, and distorts our view of the world. Any international story with Canada somehow at the centre of it belies more than a little self-delusion in our delicate national psyche.

But beyond that, I think it’s hilarious. The lengths we will go to twist and torque a story to make it about lil’ ol’ Canada are incredible, and perhaps a little sad. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the Canadarm isn’t that important.

So anyway, in the time since I did that short bit for The 180, many of you have taken it upon yourselves to send me examples of Canadian angle stories. For the sole purpose, I assume, of upsetting me.

It worked. Hoo boy, did it work.

But, rather than getting mad about it—well, more mad about it—I figured I should finally do something with all these Canadian angle stories. Because, holy shit, there are a lot of them.

So, I’m going to start collecting them on a semi-regular basis and maybe cracking a little wise about it, which is where you come in.

Send your favourite examples of the Canadian angle my way. Send me an email with “Canadian Angle” in the subject. Hit me up on Twitter, either with a reply or a message, my DMs are open! Or, I dunno, shove news printouts with your ominous scrawls under my door.

* Thanks to Nicki Doyle for pointing this one out.

Wood bears and other terrible metaphors

If a tree falls on a grizzly bear shitting in the woods, known exclusively to CBC, but later it turns out it was a black bear shitting in a tree that never did fall, does anyone bother to correct the record?

This may seem like* a tortured metaphor in search of a problem, but here we are after several arduous revolutions of the galactic temporal gears and there is still a CBC report online stating:

“The federal government's much-anticipated Syrian refugee plan will limit those accepted into Canada to women, children and families only, CBC News has learned. Sources tell CBC News that to deal with some ongoing concerns around security, unaccompanied men seeking asylum will not be part of the program.”

Which seems all well and good. A few days before the government is set to announce the details of their plan, CBC’s star political journalist and host of the political chat show Power & Politics, Rosemary Barton, has a scoop! Sound the klaxxons! Warm up the graphxinator! “CBC News has learned”** something!

Well, nuts to that. Turns out this story is, shall we say, no longer with merit. And it was revealed as bullshit just days a few days after the CBC report came out—poof!—actual details about the plan. And, bingo-bango, wouldn’t you know it, unaccompanied men will be accepted! If they fear persecution because of their sexual identity, or if they are sponsored privately, or if they are with their parents, the government will accept them into Canada, assuming of course they meet all the other required criteria of being a refugee.

So, what’s all the fuss then? Well, this was all first picked up on by BuzzFeed Canada, and they asked the reporter, Rosemary Barton, about it. She told BuzzFeed, “I just don’t happen to think what I reported was wrong.” Which is interesting, because the facts have since gone counter to what she reported.

There are a number of other details in the initial CBC report, including the overall cost, that don’t match up with how things played out.

And BuzzFeed reported this more than a week ago. After writing the story, political editor Paul McLeod then went on Canadaland to talk about it there.

Yet still, the CBC story sits online, two weeks later. Uncorrected and without any link or notation to otherwise suggest that, following the actual announcement of the actual plan, the facts are different than what was first reported.

This is part of a trend in media, particularly old-stock media, to hem and haw and avoid at almost-all-costs issuing a correction.

Now, I don’t think all that many people—if anyone—are finding this particular file as their only source of information. It’s not on the CBC homepage, you have to search to find it. But it’s still live and it’s still incorrect.

Besides, this is about something more fundamental. CBC, an erstwhile purveyor of facts, which is to say news, has not acknowledged that the information they were given by unknown, un-named “officials” is wrong. Nominally their reputation is intact, as they did not have to issue a correction, therefore, the newsroom logic goes, they were not incorrect. They reported what they were told. That the facts changed from what they were told to what actually happened is the cost of doing business, and enough of a cover for most news organizations to duck around issuing a correction.

But, there’s more to it than CBC issuing a correction or not. The really pernicious thing about this story is that it sets the narrative.

You see, CBC was the only one that had these details out of the gate, so other outlets have to follow up with something, so in their stories for refugees on this or that day, so in sneaks a paragraph talking about the government planning to exclude “unaccompanied males.” Then, the day*** the government said it will be taking certain lone men, you can read in the National Post this line as part of a story detailing the difficulties of confirming the sexual orientation of refugees:

“Under Canada’s just-released plan to accept 25,000 refugees as ‘quickly as possible,’ single adult men are disqualified unless they are accompanying their parents or can prove ‘membership in an LGBTI community.’ ”

It’s worth saying this explicitly: Single men are not excluded from coming to Canada as refugees. They are not going to be a priority, and won’t be getting government sponsorship unless they are particularly vulnerable, but that a fair leap from saying they are “disqualified” from being accepted.

In this Post report, we’re no longer talking about “unaccompanied males” instead, we’re talking about “single adult men” and whether they are “accompanying” their parents. But, we’re still talking about the issue on the same terms from the initial CBC story. A report the journalist stands by, that has little relation to what is actually going to happen. A post that is still online that set a narrative we’re still somewhat hewing to.

This wouldn’t be a problem if modern news organizations were less reluctant to issue corrections. It’s by now been long obvious the news can often wrong. This is especially true of breaking news, but, as we’ve seen here can just as easily apply to scoops. For all kinds of reasons, news is susceptible to, for lack of a better term, wrongness.

Being right all the time is no longer possible, not when we’ve decided—not explicitly, but by convention—to focus so heavily on being first, to signal we have unique content.

It’s time we we found a way to accept that, and to err more frequently on the side of correcting ourselves. If we’re more open about when we were wrong, and how we were wrong, maybe the public would trust us all just a little bit more.

Editor’s notes: *Is.

**Phrases like “[NEWS ORGANIZATION] has learned” are so prevalent because they’re a signal, primarily I think to other journalists, to say, “See! We got the scoop! We’re number one! The rest of you layabouts can pound sand!”

***Correction: Well, this is awkward. I previously said the National Post story was from a “few days” after the government’s announcement. That was wrong, the story is from the day of the announcement. I regret the error, and the ephemeral irony it adds to this post.

---

Unrelated Post Script: Many thanks to those of you who message me on occasion wondering when I’ll be writing again or what I’ll be writing about next. I have a long-running internal battle over whether this is a useful exercise for me or for the mythical reader, and it’s nice to hear now and then that it is. I very much appreciate your pokes and prods. (Though, I prefer prods to pokes, if you catch my drift.) Anyhow, if you feel like sending a note of your own, feel free to tweet at me or send me an email.

The trouble with endorsements

Updated all over the place!

Well, we’ve all learned so much, haven’t we? After making bad, wishy-washy calls in recent elections, newspapers in this country still thought it would be a good idea to throw their weight behind particular parties. When I say “parties,” I don’t really mean parties, plural. Because the endorsements that dropped just days before the election all name the Conservatives as their favourite.

Which isn’t, in itself, a bad thing. There are plenty of good reasons to vote for the Tories. But, rather, it’s the delivery and manufacture of the endorsements where the problem lies.

So, today, Oct. 17, and yesterday Oct. 16, in the Year of our Godfrey two-thousand and fifteen, Postmedia papers all across the land put out a series of editorials that rang together in a lovely chorus. Which is to say, all of the papers happily endorsed the incumbent Conservatives. Which is weird, right? I mean, the editorial boards of each paper all came to the same conclusion. Hunh. 

One might think the corporate head office in Toronto was dictating to the papers who to endorse. One would be right.

So before you ask...Yes. Yes we did. And no, I'm not part of our editorial board. As a columnist, I have my own, quite differing opinions.

— Paula Simons (@Paulatics) October 16, 2015

And yes. Before you ask, this was a decision made by the owners of the paper. As is their traditional prerogative.

— Paula Simons (@Paulatics) October 16, 2015

That said, I have every faith in the independent thinking citizens of #yeg to make up their own minds. As they always do.

— Paula Simons (@Paulatics) October 16, 2015

The Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Windsor Star, Leader-Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Vancouver Sun, and Vancouver Province have all said your vote should go to a Conservative. And that’s just from Postmedia’s pre-Sun merger dailies.

UPDATE: It would seem the dailies I listed yesterday that had not endorsed a party were just waiting for Saturday to do it. Which is fun. But, I suggested you extrapolate the reasons why they might not post endorsements, hopefully I didn't give you any sinister thoughts. 

The reasons in the various papers for why you should vote for the Tories can be boiled down to their “economic goodness.” Some of them are sincere in their endorsements, some of them might be considered reliably inclined to endorse the Tories, some of them less so. Fine, sure. Anyhow, back to the endorsements. There’s a line or two in there about Justin Trudeau not having the experience, and maybe a mention of Tom Mulcair being too bearded or something. But it’s mostly just the Tories have been good on the economy and so they should get another-nother shot at governing.

But there are plenty of internal contradictions to these arguments. I’ll quote the Citizen here at length, because they do it so nicely:

“Which brings us to Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. There is a lot to be unhappy about, after nine years of Harper rule. He has picked political fights with major pillars of our democratic system — Elections Canada, the judiciary, officers of parliament — for no obvious reason apart from the fact that they appear to stand in his way. Under his watch there were unreasonably high levels of moral and even criminal corruption among some of those closest to him. He has indulged his MPs in their quest to make a mockery of Question Period.

Nevertheless, […]”

Tee hee.

It’s almost as if the entire exercise of endorsements is pointless.

Anyhow, Postmedia obviously learned nothing of why this looks terrible, even if it does jibe with the history of newspaper ownership. We’ve been here before. You may remember back in the hazy days of summer—or was it spring?—when the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald both endorsed the Progressive Conservatives, even though it was clear the electorate was in no way looking to hand Jim Prentice and the Long Times another mandate.

So, the endorsement fell flat, and then CANADALAND posted a story that it wasn’t the paper’s idea anyhow, those crumb bums—I’m paraphrasing—in Toronto had dictated who the paper would endorse. Well, shit. Now the poor folks in Edmonton are having their opinions dictated to them by Toronto.

The history goes back even further, to the pre-Postmedia CanWest days. Back then, the Winnipeg-based newspaper company wanted its individual papers to run national editorials, dictated from the centre. It did not go well. Journalists at the Gazette revolted, going so far as to withhold their bylines for several days from stories printed in the paper and publish an open letter denouncing the plan.

They said at the time:

"More important, each editorial will set the policy for that topic in such a way as to constrain the editorial boards of each newspaper to follow this policy. Essentially, CanWest will be imposing editorial policy on its papers on all issues of national significance. Without question, this decision will undermine the independence and diversity of each newspaper's editorial board and thereby give Canadians a greatly reduced variety of opinion, debate and editorial discussion."

My, how times have changed. Anyhow, CanWest eventually backed down.

But, you might say, there’s plenty of precedent for newspaper endorsements to be at the whims of the owner and publisher. Things have changed since the days of ink and paper and barons with waistcoats and pocket watches. And that baron guy probably lived on the hill overlooking town in the spooky-but-impressive house.

Now, Postmedia is a Toronto-based corporation with dozens of dailies and even more dozens of weekly newspapers all over the country. It owns two major dailies in Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa, and owns three dailies in Vancouver and Toronto. It owns papers in communities big and small, and many of them are shamelessly spouting a similar editorial line.

In doing so, Postmedia is openly saying to the communities in which the company owns papers, they don’t give a shit for the people living there. No matter how many times Postmedia says what they are doing is in the best interest of the local paper, how with each cut to staff or service they are improving the product by streamlining it and putting more focus on making local news, they can’t hide the fact it’s all bullshit.

By telling you who to vote for, they’ve also told you what they think of you.

*Editor’s note: Holy shit, this doesn’t even include talk of the Globe and Mail’s clustersmash of an endorsement for Negative Zone Conservatives. I probably don’t need to go over such well-trod social media ground again, but if you’re really interested in my thoughts, go check out this storify of my twittering. Also there’s some Andrew Coyne stuff over at CANADALAND if you really haven’t had your fill of endorsement talk.

The world we live in

This is what dying looks like. This is what dying sounds like.

Face down in the sand, a little boy lies alone. Washed up on shore, he drowned with much of his family, sailing to find a better life.

On a Virginia morning show, the cheery banality of local tourism turns to horror in an instant, as a reporting crew is gunned down on the air.

Aylan Kurdi only lived to be three years old. After escaping the vicious bloodbath of the Syrian civil war, he and his family fled to Turkey. From there, they hoped to eventually make their way to Canada. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, the small boat they were using to try and make it to Greece capsized. Aylan’s brother Galip and mother Rehan drowned along with him. His father Abdullah made it back to shore, left to face his grief alone.

The image of Aylan laying in the sand is indelible. It’s on front pages all over the world. It filters through Facebook and Twitter seemingly every few minutes. The sight of a little boy in his red shirt and his little velcro shoes, lying dead on a beach is an indelible image. The kind of thing that you cannot unsee. There, in the sand, is what we’ve been ignoring all this time.

The sights and sounds on August morning on Virginia television are just as searing. Alison Parker was shot dead. Adam Ward, her cameraman, was shot dead too. The two were filming a segment for the local CBS affiliate WDBJ in Virginia when the gunman, Vester Flanagan, approached Ward from behind before opening fire.

It happens so fast and it comes entirely without warning. At one moment, they’re talking about tourism at the Bridgewater Plaza, then come the shots, and then the screaming. After the first two, maybe three shots, the screaming starts. It’s hard to say, I can’t go back and watch. It’s too hard, too sad, to watch again. Once was enough. But the shots aren’t important. One, two, three, it doesn’t make much difference, once you hear the scream. She’d been shot, live on television. A murder for all of us to see.

This is the world we live in.

Refugees dying at sea is not new. It happens every week, nearly every day. So too are people shot and killed daily. Murder is not new, nor is the horrible despair of refugees.

What is uncommon is the visceral nature of these images. Most days, when these kinds of stories are covered, photos will be of a distraught family, or maybe a body under a sheet, the photo taken at a distance. We are shielded from the worst of the violence, of the death, of the destruction of human lives.

We often avoid publishing these photos out of respect for their families, or out of common decency. But the world is not a respectful or decent place. It is full of people dying in horrible and unnecessary ways each and every day. These images are but a small sliver of the human suffering that goes on around us all the time, unseen and unheard.

So look at the photos. Look at Alison’s face the moment she’s been shot. Look at poor Aylan, no longer drawing breath. Look at the world for what it really is.

In Mulcair’s debate performance, an echo of Ignatieff

When you’ve got a reputation as a brawler, there’s an advantage in softening your image. This is especially true in politics.

Stephen Harper has never really been anyone’s idea of a teddy bear. So it’s easy to forgive the Conservative brain trust for putting him in a sweater vest lo those many years ago for a series of television spots introducing his softer side to the country.

It’s in this vein that NDP Leader Tom Mulcair seems to be have taping for his debate performance this week. Labelled, perhaps unfairly, “Angry Tom” from his days in the Quebec legislature, Mulcair has a bit of a reputation for using his rhetoric as a bludgeon.

So, there he was Thursday night, behind the podium. Asked a question by the moderator, he’d start answering while still looking away from the camera now zooming in on his face. Then, his head would swivel toward the camera, angling slightly as he turned. His eyes opened wider. His mouth opened to Standard Reassuring Grin 34-B, before finishing his answer. 

There was something in the eyes that just wasn’t right.

Screenshot via YouTube

Mulcair seemed to have been given the advice to give his best “smize.” That is, his smile was to start with the mouth, but it wasn’t to stop there. It would have to stretch all the way to the eyes, those vaunted smiling eyes, where it would really sell his inner bon vivant.

I say advice, because he didn’t quite pull it off. It didn’t look like a facial expression that came without a great deal of coaching and practice. Sure, his eyes were smiling. But it wasn’t the Irish-eyed twinkle you’d get from a guy like Brian Mulroney. It seemed more appropriate for the Cabbage Patch Doll Horrorshow Factory & Assembly Line™. 

But, the NDP leader isn’t the first to fall prey to such weirdness.

Four years ago Michael Ignatieff and several of his Liberal MPs set a similar tone.

It was a cold March day and Stephen Harper has just announced, from a podium set up outside the governor general’s residence, that David Johnston had agreed to dissolve Parliament. It was election time.

Ignatieff and his team decided to launch the Liberal campaign in front of Parliament, in front of the Peace Tower. Outside a handful of scribes and a few TV cameras waited for the leader to make his speech and then shout a few questions at him.

I was sent there, green as hell, to hold a video camera, and generally just soak it all in. I’d just started an internship as a parliamentary reporter a week or two before, my editor wanted me to get my feet wet, but I wasn’t yet to be trusted gathering actual news.

When Ignatieff arrived at the lectern, draped in an too-big overcoat, with a bright red scarf framing a blue shirt, open at the collar, he launched into a statement explaining how the election was the start of something big, the start of Canadians’ chance to show the Tories how upset they were that “this place,” Parliament, was disrespected by the government.

The really big focus of his statement was that if he became prime minister, it would be at the head of a “Liberal government.” He repeated the phrase several times, putting extra emphasis on the Liberal. Coalition talk was a big thing at that point and Ignatieff made it very clear—he said “clear” again and again to hammer home how clear he was being—that he had no interest leading a coalition government.

Not that it was going to do him any good. The first reporter’s question was about whether he would form a coalition. He gave a pretty good answer to that, but then he couldn’t help himself and he kept talking and talking. Five sentences too late, he finished his answer and waited for the next question.

The next reporter asks the Liberal leader if all the coalition talk has taken root, and if all this very clear talk “is it too little, too late?” Ignatieff tried a different tack this time, he decide to laugh. Not a gentle chuckle, but a real, deep belly laugh, one which would come from nowhere.

It became entirely surreal when all the Liberals around him joined him in full-gale laughter in the next instant. Somehow stifling his new-found giggles, Ignatieff says, “That’s a genuinely funny question.”

The answer to the question never really registered. Even now, watching the video again, I can’t focus on what he’s trying to say. I’m still too caught up in the weirdness of this group of people all gamely playing along with the farce that the question was genuinely funny and they were all genuinely laughing. 

(You can watch the whole thing for yourself, the fun starts at about the 8:00 mark.)

It wasn’t clear that would be the case then, but the Liberal leader never really did manage to connect with voters the 2011 campaign. His faults as a politician didn’t start or end on the steps of Centre Block that day. But that moment was telling. 

Mulcair is a reasonably gifted politician, but when the softie act fell flat Thursday, it took a fair bit of momentum from him. Nobody won the debate, but Mulcair came away diminished, in part because he didn’t come off as terribly sincere.

It’s a small thing, something at the margins of the broader issues, but this election has so far played out around the margins. If he’s going to win this thing, Mulcair can’t be ceding that ground.

Enough about Ashley Madison, please?

Okay, have we all got that out of our system now? Have we had enough fun with the poor, boring people of Ottawa?

Look, I get it. Ashley Madison, the fucking-around website for married people, was hacked last week. The hackers are threatening to put the site’s subscriber data out into the wild. But where’s the Canadian angle? Sure, the site is based in Toronto, but there must be something more.

Ah, here it is! Back in February, a story appeared in the National Post that quoted internal Ashley Madison data showing some 190,000 people with Ottawa addresses used the service.

Now, we’re on to something. In steps the Canadian news machine to take this Post report, strip it for parts, and toss this five-month-old story back on the lot with a fresh coat of wax.

Except for one thing, the numbers are obviously bullshit. Parliament Hill, where a large number of users claimed they lived, is not a residence.* Beyond that, if the numbers were real, it would mean something like half of the capital’s married population had joined a website for some dickery-pokery.

Might there be some other, more plausible explanation for the absurdly high number of Ottawa subscribers? Say, people were using Parliament’s postal code—K1A 0A6—because it’s an easy fake to look up?

Anyhow, the Post’s initial story alludes to how obviously fake that data is, without saying it outright. The story also mentions how the company wouldn’t confirm how many of those accounts were active.

But that was then. Now, Ashley Madison is up to its neck in trouble. Now is the time for everyone else to jump on this thing. Canadian news was awash these past few days with stories about the “alleged cheating capital” of Canada. The “number” of cheaters in the capital seemed to have overshadowed the actual news of the data breach. It spread so far, so fast, and with so little nuance—or god forbid, fun—the obviously hinkey nature of the company’s data seems to have been totally ignored.

If the more recent news reports were to be believed, practically everyone in Ottawa was stepping out on their spouse, probably with your spouse. You got the impression you couldn’t walk through an Ottawa park at night without stumbling across an internet-arranged swingers orgy.

The story was picked up by so many places, the Post’s reporter, Ashley Csanady, re-wrote her initial story so they could have something fresh.

Jesus Christ, even British clapter-factory John Oliver got in on the game, making jokes about Ottawa and the fact it’s a city in Canada. So now, of course, half the news outlets in this country are jumping on that because an American TV host acknowledged we exist.

It’s a predictable cycle in our news culture that puts so much emphasis on matching stories. It’s more important to have the stories everyone else has than to actually do interesting work. Like a herd of demented lemmings, we’re endlessly chasing our butts, too lost to find a cliff to throw ourselves from.

News outlets no longer have the staff, the time, or the money to cover everything that happens in a city, or province, or country. Eventually, we’re going to have to accept that sometimes other places are going to have stories we don’t. 

*The Speaker of the House does actually have an apartment in Centre Block, but let's assume he's not the dim sort to have actually used this website with an actual address.

It's not them, it's us

A tweetstorm, in thirteen parts, that I may expand on later. For now, enjoy.

The media mandate

In the long-ago days of 2011, Canadians were asked to cast their ballots in a federal election. At stake was the topic top-of-mind to voters, whether the media strategy of Stephen Harper’s government was acceptable.

Never mind “Jets, jails, and corporate tax cuts” or, if you prefer, “a sea of (economic) troubles lapping at our shores.” Never mind the contempt the executive had for Parliament. Never mind what sort of attendance in Parliament is appropriate for a federal party leader.

The question put to voters was whether ignoring the media was acceptable. According to one Ottawa reporter, the answer, from nearly six million Canadians, was the media strategy was eh-okay.

This was an interesting assertion coming from the Sun’s Ottawa bureau chief, David Akin. He dropped this idea in the middle of a conversation about a skull-cracking good piece by VICE’s Justin Ling on the absurd lengths the Prime Minister’s Office will go to not answer questions. 

Ling details how media are corralled and generally not allowed to participate at any event involving the prime minister. No questions are to be asked, and no answers should ever be expected. It’s bullshit, Ling says, and he’s right. It is bullshit.

Anyhow, in steps Akin with the idea voters were asked, basically, whether it was okay for the prime minister to go on ignoring reporters. “Don’t forget…5.8 (million) Canadians voted in 2011 for (Harper’s) way of doing things,” he said. “All (the prime minister) got asked in week one was why we couldn’t ask more questions. So, yeah, you could argue he won the mandate!”

He went on: “I just think if media wants change, we have to demonstrate to voters why.”

(Click through any of those links to see the full back-and-forth between various parties.)

It’s quite fairly said in pundit circles the public generally doesn’t care about spats between reporters and government PR weenies. But, to suggest voters actually cast a ballot with this in mind is b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

His further assertion journalists need to make the case to the public that we should be able to ask questions is just—I’m not even sure how to be nice about this. It’s simply dumb. 

The job of the press isn’t to shill for votes, or to make the case for the most basic access to politicians. The job of the press is to report on those in power, not make the case for a slice of their strawberry-power pie.

The media shouldn’t be convincing the public that their government needs to be reported on. The media’s job is to hold politicians accountable. If politicians aren’t willing to play along with that principle out of divine benevolence, they need to be shown that not being accountable has a price. 

How do you do that? You make the people denying you access look vindictive and small. A government department avoids answering your questions, and instead feeds you a meaningless word salad? Write a line like: “The department wouldn’t answer simple, direct questions.” Then leave out the talking points.

And there’s the idea of a photo-op boycott. It’s been tried before, but it didn’t hold. The press has been beaten back repeatedly by this government and has never been able to regain any ground. The reasons are numerous, but it mostly comes down to the culture of news outlets. 

A sustained boycott could turn the tables on the PMO, but that will never be possible because many outlets would never agree to a boycott for fear of getting scooped by someone who wasn’t playing along. (This idea was well covered in a discussion between Paul McLeod, of BuzzFeed, and Jesse Brown on an episode of CANADALAND.)

The ability of the press to push back against the pols has been destroyed by the short-sightedness of that night’s news or the next morning’s paper. The problem isn’t that the citizenry support the government’s media blockade, the problem is the media are too cowed to demand better. 

This mystical thinking by Akin, that the media needs a mandate from the people, is part of the problem. 

The press has the power, we just choose not to use it.