Roundup: Conditions and fact-check reflections

Posted on by

After 36 days, we are at the finish line of this interminable election, and I am so very tired. On the final day, with the potential for another hung parliament in the works, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh says that he plans to make his cooperation in said parliament contingent on the implementation of his wealth tax – you know, the one that is going to be extraordinarily difficult to implement because it is foreign to how our tax system operates currently, and would require an inordinate amount of work to even start defining the basic concepts at the heart of it. Or as Jennifer Robson puts it, the one item that is so difficult to achieve that any party could agree to it and spend the next two years saying that they’re “working on it,” while Singh has surrendered his leverage. Such smart politics! (Reminder, you can watch Robson explain why this will be extraordinarily difficult to implement here).

Meanwhile, the Star’s election fact-checker has written up her reflections on the work she did, and I can honestly say that I’m underwhelmed. I don’t doubt that she worked hard, and that she dealt with an enormous amount of information…but her format sucked, and she’s a newsletter producer in Toronto and doesn’t have any federal politics experience. The format – checking one leader’s statements per week – isn’t really providing a useful fact-checking exercise, because it’s letting them get away with saying blatantly untrue things, and it might show up in her report a week later, if it was that leader’s week. As for her inexperience on the federal scene, there is a boatload of context to some of these statements that she was unable to qualify as true or false, and that comes with experience and exposure. There are things that she was fact-checking that I’ve had to do entire stories about because of the way it was being both-sidesed by media and came to different conclusions because of the complexity of the file (the court challenge around First Nations children in care) and because the both-sidesing didn’t address the actual issue at hand – just competing talking points, with a lot of time being given to one side in the case with none to the other. But her read on it was facile, and so she marked it as such, which doesn’t help anyone.

Most of all, this was largely an exercise in comparing our leaders to Trump, which is the most dismaying part of all because it serves no useful purpose to Canadian politics (“Hey, our leaders don’t lie as much!” is quite the takeaway), and is just more of the kind of comparative political bullshit that lets our leaders get away with so much (“Hey, I’m not as bad as Trump!”) because it’s divorced from our reality. It’s failing the Canadian public by trying to put us in an American frame of reference when we’re not America. We need our outlets to do a better job.

On the campaign trail:

  • Justin Trudeau did a blitz of campaign events in person and virtually across the country.
  • Erin O’Toole had a couple of events in the Toronto area, and refused to take media questions.
  • Jagmeet Singh held a number of rally events in the Greater Vancouver area.
  • Muslim groups are calling for a Conservative candidate in Nova Scotia to step down after he refused to engage with them after apologising for Islamophobic posts.
  • Climate scientist Simon Donner offers his evaluation of the parties’ climate platforms, and lo, the Liberals come out on top again.
  • Althia Raj points out that while O’Toole wants people to trust him, he has steadfastly refused to clarify any of his shifting positions on a number of different files.
  • Heather Scoffield notes that the existing pace will do much of the heavy lifting on the million jobs/homes promises, but the remaining work will require coordination.
  • Susan Delacourt enumerates five things she hopes don’t happen again in any future elections.
  • Delacourt is also dismayed by the ways in which the various leaders seem to have forgotten lessons learned during the pandemic – especially the value of candour.

Odds and ends:

My Loonie Politics Quick Take recaps the final week of the campaign.

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.

2 thoughts on “Roundup: Conditions and fact-check reflections”

  2. I think this may be basically Singh’s declaration of surrender.
    The level of personal vitriol that Singh apparently feels toward Trudeau has reached such a point that Singh simply can’t just turn around now and support a Liberal government. A wealth tax promise could be Singh’s face-saving way out.

Comments are closed.