As someone who worked as a journalist for 15 years and remains journalism “adjacent” vis-à-vis this column, I have always tried to be objective during elections. I always remind everyone to read all the platforms, attend the debates, ignore the negative ads, check in with their own core values, ask honest questions, and make educated decisions who to vote for.
For myself, the actual vote is always less important than being fully informed before making your choice. You should always be able to justify it with serious, well-thought-out reasons. Nothing is worse for democracy than people casting ballots based on biased information, misinformation, or a narrow-minded focus on a single issue.
This election, however, may be the exception.
Our country’s economy and sovereignty is actively under attack by the United States of America, by the same Americans who have vocally backed the Conservative Party of Canada in the past. The leader for that party has also used the same culture war playbook as the Republicans—i.e., “radical woke ideology, fake news, the country is broken, our cities are infested with crime”—right up until the point Canadians rediscovered their patriotism and that American support became toxic.
And yes, I know Trump said he would rather work with Liberals, but it was pretty obvious to me that he was trying out a little reverse psychology to help the Conservatives, who have shed a 24-point lead in the polls because of the underlying Conservative-Republican association. Forgive me for not taking a man who infamously told more than 20,000 documented lies in his first four years in office at his word on this.
If I’m being honest, I have to say I made up my mind a long time ago about this election, long before Justin Trudeau stepped down and Jagmeet Singh knuckled—pretty much since the Conservatives made Pierre Poilievre the party leader. He is all the reason I need to park my vote elsewhere.
Before you dismiss me as a radical Marxist loony leftist woke cuck, this is 100-per-cent a Poilievre thing for me. It’s not the party, it’s the man. If it were anyone else in his position, I’d be listening.
I’ve always been a proponent of proportional representation in Canada and I’m still angry Trudeau broke that promise back in 2015.
If he kept that promise then it’s likely the previous Conservative leader Erin O’Toole would be our prime minister at this moment. And I would be fine with that. I wouldn’t have agreed with all of his politics and policies, but he wasn’t out to defund and destroy the CBC and he didn’t sneer at journalists and call media fake news. He would have let reporters onto his campaign bus.
I could dedicate pages to Poilievre’s few policies, his voting history and legislative record, his lack of a security clearance or a believable reason not to get it, his career of negativity and bullying, and the fact that he’ll gladly accept the support of anyone—antivaxxers, anti-abortionists, religious extremists, climate-change denialists, misogynists, racists, fascists, and even pro-American Canadians—for a chance to get elected. Poilievre is also the most relentlessly bitter, angry and negative politician I’ve experienced in my lifetime.
But for me the biggest red flag has always been his naked contempt for media. On that topic it seems I can be a single-issue voter after all.
Whatever you might think of the media yourself, a free press is essential for democracy. The chief role of reporters and journalists is to champion the public interest by A) paying attention and B) asking tough questions of governments, corporations and others who have power over us—but only by our consent. It’s about speaking truth to power, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Sometimes there’s a Sudoku.
That important democratic role is precisely why journalism is under attack around the world and in Canada.
Outside of the Canadian bubble, there’s a global far-right movement that seems to be following the same anti-democratic playbook. One of the key plays in that book is to sideline the media—buy it, defund it, discredit it, staff it with feckless partisans, and/or intimidate anyone who won’t play along. As awesome as they believe their ideas are, they also don’t want people to question anything they’re doing or saying.
It’s not safe out there for the truth. There were 124 journalists killed on the job last year, the most in three decades.
In Argentina, the Javier Milei government shut down the country’s biggest news agency. In Hungary, private media monopolies are backing Viktor Orban. In the U.S., Trump’s administration is attacking media, threatening reporters with prison, and defunding both public broadcasting and National Public Radio—at the same time billionaires are buying up media and social media channels.
In Canada, we have a dire situation where about 90 per cent of our daily newspapers are owned by Postmedia, which in turn is owned by a Trump-supporting hedge fund. At the same time, the leader of the Conservative Party is calling for defunding our national broadcaster.
That should set off alarm bells for everyone, regardless of your political views. First of all, newspapers are not a profitable industry so the only reason why an American fund would buy so many of them is to control the narrative. They can make more money controlling the narrative than they lose by owning our newspapers.
Secondly, whatever you may feel about the CBC, it is an important cultural institution in this country. It gets criticized for being left-leaning, which has some merit in certain contexts, but most of the time it’s pretty balanced outside of panel shows and opinion pieces.
Most of the criticisms of CBC have to do with perceived bias rather than actual bias. Sometimes the facts do lean left or right.
Take an issue like climate change. Overwhelming scientific evidence shows it is happening and that human activities are accelerating the problem. This has become an established fact rather than an opinion that needs to be balanced against other opinions so everybody feels represented in every climate change story. People who still don’t believe in climate change, or are inconvenienced by it—many of whom tend to be on the political right—will look at that story as left-wing biased.
It also works the other way. For example, the recent well-meaning experiment to decriminalize and destigmatize hard drugs and provide a safe supply has objectively failed—people are still dying in insane numbers, and addiction-related crime and homelessness are happening. People who live in cities don’t feel safe. But some on the left feel it’s a right-wing take to say the experiment has failed and it’s time to try something else rather than a reasonable conclusion based on the facts.
There are a lot of other issues at stake in this election, aside from freedom and independence of the press. All parties make some good points. But only one party leader is taking a page from the authoritarian playbook and treating the free press as the enemy of the people.
We’ve seen where that road leads. I hope we don’t take it.
