We’re into that part of summer where the news is so thin that we’ve turned to cheap outrage to get to some headlines. Combing through expense reports, many a reporter is simply putting a big number up on a headline and clutching their pearls about it, never mind that there’s no context around those figures, and that in most cases they’re actually reasonable. And lo, we look small town cheap, like backwater rubes as we continue to insist that our politicians subsist on stale bread and shaving water lest they look like they’re too good for the rest of us.

https://twitter.com/lazin_ryder/status/767957004820242432

What is possibly worse is the fact that there is constant apology rather than defending any of the spending. Was the cost of Jane Philpott’s car service unreasonable? That’s debatable, and I’m dubious that the fact that the owner of the service was a campaign volunteer will gain much traction with the Ethics Commissioner. Catherine McKenna at least defended the use of a photographer at COP21 (and no, it’s not the media’s job to take photos that the government can later use for their own promotional need), but instead of media questioning the return that they got for them (Jen Gerson noted on Power & Politics that the quality of the photos she’d seen were questionable and the photographer hired had credentials that may not have been suitable for the task), we just get performed outrage at the dollar value.

https://twitter.com/will__murray/status/768206012113416198

https://twitter.com/will__murray/status/768207303455768580

In this he’s exactly right – this is made worse by politicians essentially cannibalizing one another to score points rather than saying “Whoa there, let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Maybe these are reasonable expenses.” No. Instead it’s this game of tit-for-tat, Conservatives getting back at the Liberals for pointing out their own spending excesses when they were in government, and the NDP simply being sanctimonious and smug. The Globe and Mail’s editorial on the subject is right – we are spending too much time on the nickel-and-diming and the cheap theatre of performed outrage rather than on the actual scrutiny of government spending, and this may be related to the absolute dysfunction of the Estimates process in parliament (noting that parliamentarians themselves let it get this bad rather than push back on successive governments that caused this problem, and performing cheap outrage is easier). On the other hand, we’ve reached the point where we are living out that Oscar Wilde quote about a cynic being “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Reporters rushing to put up that headline number with no context attached have done the system a disservice. Insisting that everyone post receipts will only make things worse, and will only hasten the race to the bottom where MPs will be fighting for re-election on the backs of what brand of toilet paper they bought for the constituency office and whether it was on sale that week or not. We need to draw a line somewhere, before we both paralyze the discourse and make politics so unattractive to anyone who wants to serve the public that they won’t bother. We’re our own worst enemies, and we help nobody in feeding this populist noise.

Good reads:

• Here’s Kady O’Malley’s recap of yesterday’s electoral reform committee hearing with special guest star Emmett Macfarlane (presentation brief here).
• Rumour has it that MaryAnn Mihychuk got responsibilities taken away for behaviour, not workload.
• Apparently it would cost us $300 million to pull out of the F-35 programme on short notice.
• That Canadian arms manufacturer whose vehicles have been sold to Libya and South Sudan insist they vetted their sales and they were above board.
• There are questions about the effectiveness of inspections of the employers of temporary foreign workers.
• Two of our top national security experts look at the Aaron Driver case and the issue of how to respond to terror threats effectively.
• Toronto communications consultant Adrienne Snow is fundraising to make an outsider bid for the Conservative leadership.
• Susan Delacourt wonders if “safe” seats are becoming a thing of the past, given how much upheaval we’ve seen in recent elections.
• My Loonie Politics column looks at Maxime Bernier’s interprovincial trade proposal, and why it’s a gift for lawyers but not much else.

Odds and ends:

Former PC MP Elsie Wayne died yesterday, and most outlets are brushing past her history of homophobic remarks as being “controversial.” (CBC did call it out).