The CRTC

The CRTC decision to launch a federal court reference in the value for signal dispute is dilatory and curious. The stated reason is ambiguity about its jurisdiction, particularly as it relates to copyright. But the CRTC presumably has a view about its own sphere of competence and it knows the courts are loathe to second-guess regulators. It could have proceeded and waited for the cable and satellite providers to challenge it in court – a more normal way to proceed. But these are not normal times and relations with government are not normal either. The current government has overturned CRTC decisions and issued policy directives to it. It has elevated consumer protection to a higher purpose than the CRTC’s normal preoccupation with industry promotion and cultural protection. The reference buys the CRTC time until after a probable election to reduce the likelihood of government overturning its decision. And if a court finds the policy intra vires, government will find it harder to overturn the decision.  It also gets to blame the courts and wash its hands of the whole dispute if its solution is found ultra vires.

 With regards to the CBC and its angry reaction. The Corp needed the cover and combined clout of the broadcasters to open a new stream of revenue. Now it stands alone. Whatever the CRTC decides about it in the next round (which could be two years away), that solution will have to get by a government that is hardly a strong supporter. With this decision, the CBC watched the best window of opportunity it had shut down.

The politics of maternal health

It’s not often that an opposition party launches an Opposition Day motion over which its own caucus splits. Actually, it’s rarer than rare. While there is no distracting from the curiously inept Liberal performance yesterday, it apparently did not go easily on the government side either. Initial instructions to the Conservative caucus were to not fall for the Liberal “trap” and to vote for the motion. One by one, apparently including from two ministers, the Centre heard demands from MP’s that they be allowed to vote against. A special caucus was called to air the issue but was pre-empted when a change of heart prevailed and instructions were issued for a vote against the Liberal motion.  

Government advertising

Has anyone not noticed the Government of Canada television ads for its budget, tax cuts and until last month, the home renovation program? Night after night, I’ve seen a half dozen or more and I don’t watch all that much TV. Today there were full page print ads. The ads, of course, are not about providing significant information to citizens. They are designed to show a government hard at work that cares and provides significant benefits. At a minimum, these ads push the boundaries of what the public should be paying for. Anecdotally, I’ve never seen this weight in a government advertising buy. I hear internal bureaucratic rumblings that the flight of ads is the largest government ad buy in history, by a significant factor. There are some in the ad business who think it may be approaching triple digit millions. An indirect subsidy to broadcasters? Another bit of stimulus? Or maybe that’s why government was so quick to agree to stop sending the ten percenters – these have wider reach and are paid for by the public purse as well.     

Elly Alboim is an Associate Professor of Journalism and former CBC TV News Parliamentary Burau Chief

The talk of a possible coalition government died last year under the weight of two enormous obstacles.

The first was that the proposed coalition was going to be led by Stéphane Dion. If Canadians thought that one thing had been decided in the 2008 election, it was that Dion was not going to be prime minister. By the time that Michael Ignatieff acceded to the Liberal leadership a few weeks after the coalition proposal, the idea had been thoroughly tarnished, and was quickly abandoned.

But that decision may have been influenced by the second great obstacle to the coalition idea: although the proposed government would have consisted of NDP and Liberal ministers only, it was crucially dependent on the Bloc Québécois to remain in office. Stephen Harper and the Conservatives made hay of the fact that the proposed coalition would be dependent on a separatist party to stay in office. That was a reasonable political concern, and possibly even a potential constitutional concern. It certainly became a public concern as well.

The Tories’ recent three-month slide in the polls and the Liberals recent bump up potentially create a new scenario, however.

Look at the seat projection below. It is based on today’s poll results released to the CBC by EKOS Research. (Conflict alert: I work for EKOS on the CBC surveys). What the seat projection suggests is that if an election were held today, the Liberals and NDP would be almost within reach of forming a majority without the votes of the Bloc Québécois. Just two seats short, in fact, at the moment, if the projection were correct.

Given the history of the coalition idea, neither opposition party is likely to resurrect it before an election. But if the results of the next election were anything like what you see below, it is hard to imagine that at least some people in each party would not be tempted to consider a coalition once again. And expect the Conservatives to raise exactly that spectre if the race stay this tight into the next election campaign — whenever that might be.

 More media-staff links have developed over time that have created sufficient trust to allow staffers to talk with some assurance they won’t be caught.

 More likely, it was a conscious media strategy. There’s no better way to manage reporters than to feed them “exclusively” on information they really need to impress their bosses. Cabinet shuffles are a “test” in many news organizations of whether a reporter is “plugged in.” It s a low cost tradeoff for any PMO that pays back in spades. And clearly current circumstances suggest that cultivating media more assiduously is something the government needs to do. 

Elly Alboim is an Associate Professor of Journalism and former CBC TV Parliamentary Bureau Chief who spent many cabinet shuffle eves trying to get the next day’s line up.

With the New Year comes continuing discussion of prorogation. Ironically, in the vacuum of a parliamentary shut down, political coverage focuses on the decision to create the vacuum.

The weight of editorial, columnist and expert commentary has been surprising. And it is being largely self-generated by media. Opposition parties have not been the key drivers. In fact, they are both powerless and complicit. Without a continuing platform, their reaction has been marginalized to a one day story and viewed as predictable and self interested. There is no “news” to their protest. They are complicit because they too are consumed by tactics and positioning and are unable to convincingly discuss this at a level of principle. They can’t separate their view of parliamentary institutions and appropriate behaviour from their political requirements. 

There has been a significant change in media analysis though. A near consensus has emerged that this is increasingly about the PM’s disregard or contempt for parliament, national institutions and the traditional constraints on executive power. Media commentators are moving from the issue of a hidden agenda (which they reject) to the issue of Mr. Harper’s character and his apparent willingness to test the limits of acceptable government behaviour. There are common lists of evidence including two prorogations in a calendar year, phoning the last request in to the Governor General, shutting down committees, reneging on previous positions, not expressing national leadership on things like climate change and swine flu, publicly criticizing and firing regulators, agency heads and government officials, and ignoring accountability mechanisms. Many then layer in Canada’s changing image internationally.  Increasingly, commentary links ruthlessness and hyper partisanship to a character constellation that justifies cynical and manipulative actions that are fundamentally undermining respect for the system of government. That analysis may make all this dangerous for Harper over time.

Despite a flurry of Face Book activity, most evidence is that the public has become more and more disengaged and cannot be made to care. But if the basic media framing of Mr. Harper is changing, becomes the media conventional wisdom and justifies more consistent and aggressive commentary, the public view may change with it.  

It s hard to get a handle on the swirling currents but the prorogation decision may have crossed a bridge of some sort.   

Elly Alboim is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Carleton University and a former CBC Television Parliamentary Bureau Chief 

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a welcome updating of laws regarding libel that should ensure more stories are pursued and published or broadcast as the media no longer will have to prove independently the accuracy of everything contained in those stories. Instead the Court has established the concept of responsible communication under which the media can obtain protection  from libel “if it can establish that it acted responsibly in attempting to verify the information in a matter of public interest.”

The media has never been keen on shining any light onto how it does its work, yet that’s what this decision seems likely to produce.

As Dean Jobb notes in today’s Globe and Mail, “In essence, the law is holding journalists to the standard expected of doctors, lawyers and other professionals. ” With those standards also come responsibilities.

While the decision will benefit the media and its readers listeners and viewers, it leaves open a lot of  questions that will likely be determined by lower court rulings and perhaps in future by the Supreme Court itself.

How many independent sources must a news organization have for a story to qualify under the protection of responsible communication? How much time should a news organization give someone to respond to a reporter’s questions about a story – an hour? Four hours? A day? Two days? How many calls must a reporter make before he or she can conclude there will be no call-backs? How should news organizations use anonymous and non-identified sources and quotes? What is and isn’t responsible here?

News organizations that have codes of conduct will have to ensure they are enforced and prove that point before the courts. Those that don’t may find judges dictating the rules of journalism for them and that could end up forcing changes on those codes of conduct too.

While the court decision also appears to apply to bloggers, will they be held to a different standard than news organizations and if not, why?

For a public that has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the standards and accuracy of reporting in mainstream media this could all be very good news. Light will shine where it has only rarely shone before.For news organizations though, it seems destined to compromise and even undercut the independent decision-making they have always protected in deciding what and when a story is a story.

About a month ago, I posted seat projections based on EKOS’ weekly survey of vote intention, which is released by the CBC.

At the time, the Conservatives were enjoying a sudden updraft in popularity, apparently driven by the Liberal threat to bring the government down and force an election. They hit 40.7%, which is several percentage points above the range in which they have been trading over the last year (with the exception of the period of the short-lived “coalition” scheme led by Stéphane Dion’s Liberals).

What was interesting about the seat projection done at that time was that it suggested the Tories would likely win a clear majority of about 167 seats.  This would not be a huge majority, but it would be a comfortable one, unlikely to be dislodged by the occasional defection or byelection loss.

Since mid-October, there has been less attention paid to the polls because each week the story has been pretty similar to the week before: the Conservatives well in front, and the Liberals well behind, mired in fact at historic lows. (See the latest EKOS poll here or on the CBC’s website here.)

But crucially, as has often happened in the past when the Conservatives lunge into majority territory, their edge seems to erode over time. And that has happened again. The Liberals, interestingly have not recovered since last month, still stewing in the mid-twenties; but the Conservatives have slipped incrementally back to their normal range.

And what does that do to the seat projections? Hey! Presto! Back to minority:

EKOS seat projection November 12

And more than just a minority; the same minority as we got in 2008. In this scenario, the Conservatives and Liberals are within a seat of the 2008 results. The Bloc is up two seats. And the NDP has exactly what they had last year. (So much for the persistent media narrative that the NDP is heading rapidly to oblivion!)

What does it tell us? Maybe that Canadians were right when they expressed themselves so strongly this fall that instead of sending us all to the polls, the parties in parliament should get down to governing for a while.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton and is executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

 On the face of it, the barriers to consistent communication would seem to include the multiplicity of voices and the challenge of responding in real time to a changing circumstance where there is no premium put on gathering and centralizing information. By its very nature H1N1 is more locally variable than national reporting can do justice to. And the need for local information about impact and access to vaccines is more immediately relevant. There is no lack of interest or demand for information but the news media is focused, by definition, on what is news and that tends to emphasize dramatic outcomes rather than incremental information. What suffers from the rush to report the news is reasonable context and perspective. And no matter how reassuring those might be, the fear of the unknown and the random overwhelm. When you layer in exaggerated impulses to establish accountability (or blame in political arenas), you get systemic distortion. There may not be much way to resolve any of that.  

Public health authorities are trying to deal with uncertainty by providing regular briefings. However that is a two edge sword. By appearing regularly, they create a sense of urgency and moment no matter what their actual words try to portray. And, in the alternative, choosing not to appear would create an information vacuum to be filled with the less knowledgeable and a sense that the authorities are not in control. Further, as has become obvious, in their laudable efforts to educate and convince people to vaccinate, they created a sense of urgency and a level of demand that cannot be satisfied by relatively slow and systematic distribution of the vaccine. This, too, may be a dilemma without a solution.  

 AS to jurisdictional complications, we now have a situation where local authorities create rules, standards and procedures that vary dramatically because decision making is so decentralized. On one level, that makes perfect sense. Local circumstances and resources vary and are often best dealt with by people closest to them. On another level, they lead to confusing variability in a world where information instantly crosses boundaries and allows continual comparison. Standards that appear to be contradictory shake confidence in the underlying science and cause citizens to wonder whether their rights are somehow conditioned by where they live. Parents who see children portrayed as high risk categories in one area and not in another are understandably upset when they can’t get immediate access.  

In most national emergencies — economic (like prices and wage controls) or security (the war measures act) — Canadian law permits the imposition of national rules and standards. We have not had sufficient experience with health emergencies to apply principles like Peace Order and Good Government to justify national rules. Even if we cannot contemplate that sort of response, it is not clear why federal and provincial authorities could not have agreed to common definitions and standards for priorities and triage. There can be no doubt that the regional differences and the sorry spectacle of political leaders blaming each other for scarcity or the lack of appropriate distribution mechanisms is undermining confidence in the system as a whole. In that kind of circumstance, it is hard to blame people for queue jumping to ensure they and their families are protected.

 We probably need a federal-provincial agreement after this is over to determine thresholds for declaring health emergencies that can lead to quick national standard setting and the allocation of surge capacity to where it is most needed. Barring that, we need a way for the national government to seize leadership and through an expression of political will, impose consistent standards and procedures in order to shore up confidence. It might do that through asserting emergency powers or by imposing conditions on the funding and distribution of vaccine.  

Hopefully, this episode will not be dramatic and the death toll will be relatively light. But it seems that we would have escaped more through luck than careful and considered preparation. Should it become very severe, we will experience a level of anger and frustration that will shake the foundations of the system. 

Elly Alboim is an associate professor at the Carleton School of Journalism and Mass Communications         

Paul Adams

There has been a dramatic shift in the Canadian political landscape in recent months. During the summer, the Liberals gradually gave up the advantage they had enjoyed over the Conservatives during most of the spring; but even as recently as the first weekly poll in September from EKOS (where I participate in the political research), the two leading parties were in an exact tie, at 32.6% each.

That seems like a long time ago. The Liberals have now dipped to historic lows two weeks in a row.

In an EKOS poll released to the CBC today, the Conservatives had 40.7% of the vote, followed by the Liberals at 25.5%, with the NDP at 14.3%, the Greens at 10.5% and the BQ at 9.1%.

Whenever you see this kind of dramatic shift, you hear pollsters talk about the leading party “approaching majority territory” or “in majority territory”. Sometimes, these are just educated guesses, but at EKOS, we have been running our numbers through a seat projection model — one that proved extremely accurate in the last election.

So here’s where we appear to be now. The Tories are now trading in comfortable majority territory. If an election were held today, and the results mirrored EKOS latest poll down to the regional level, this would be the likely result as translated into seats:

Conservatives 167

Liberals 68

BQ 50

NDP 23

Greens 0

Since a bare majority would be 155 seats, a result like this would constitute a “comfortable majority”: that is, not one that would be shaken by the odd defection or by-election reverse. There’s a good chance a parliament like this would last a full four-year term.

In terms of regional strength, the Conservatives would be able to claim that they were a national party, representing every region with a significant number of seats, including Quebec, where the EKOS projection suggests they would hold 10 seats.

The Liberals, in contrast, would hold just 10 seats west of Ontario, almost all of them in British Columbia. They would trail the Conservatives in every region in the country except Quebec, where, despite having similar popular support to the Conservatives, they would win a few more seats due to a more efficient distribution of votes. (The BQ, naturally, would be far away of the other two parties in the province.)

In Ontario – a province that the Liberals were able to sweep in the last decade, winning virtually every seat – the Conservatives would win 68 seats to the Liberals’ 28, and the NDP’s 10.

Of course, as Harold Wilson famously remarked, “a week is a long time in politics”. A lot can change between now and the election in terms of popular support and the distribution of seats.

But if the Conservatives seem to have a special spring in their step these days, while the Liberals seem to slouch a little, this is why.

– adapted from a blog posting on the www.ekospolitics.com website

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton and is executive director of EKOS Research Associates

The announcement that the cbc,ca will provide sports content to the National Post while the Financial Post will provide business news content to the CBC, while making for curious bedfellows, is part of a cost-cutting trend of contracting out parts of newspaper/TV news operations to those with more expertise or specialists on staff. In theory the result is fewer reporters and voices but in reality both CBC’s business coverage and the Post’s sports section are anemic at best, so it is hard to see that the outcome will be fewer reporters covering stories. Those cuts were made a long time ago.

In some ways this arrangement is similar to the deal announced earlier this week for additional foreign correspondents and coverage between CBS News and GlobalPost, a Boston web-based international news outlet staffed larger by former foreign correspondents for U.S. news organizations who lost their jobs as their employers retrenched.

It’s a time of uncertainty in the media, so innovation and different approaches are welcome. Some will work and turn out to be great ideas while others will be disasters but that will only be determined by trying them.

The interesting question is whether the deal will moderate the Post’s frequent attacks on the CBC and/or the CBC’s status as PR machine for the National Hockey League.

Christopher Waddell is acting director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He is a former reporter, Ottawa bureau chief, national editor and associate editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.

A seat in the Senate has long been a reward for those who pitched the Conservative and Liberal parties to corporate donors. With laws now severely restricting corporate funding of political parties, the Conservatives have a new innovation – making Senator Mike Duffy into a pitchman with personally-addressed emailed video messages soliciting not money (so far), but advice on policy priorities. Watch one here.

It is an interesting concept but at three minutes the video is far too long. As polling firms working on the Internet have discovered, people have a limited attention span on the web.

Filling out the list of priorities gets you a brief closing thank you from Mike and a promise he’ll be back in touch soon – frequently he says. Then you get the chance to forward it to your friends, cleverly structured in a way so that the recipient believes it is coming from you, not the Conservative party.

With a large enough response distributed across the country and beyond just partisans, it could become a way to circumvent pollsters by going directly to the public much more cheaply than paying for polling as well as a way to spread the Conservative message by completely ignoring the mainstream media.

Christopher Waddell is acting director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He is a former reporter, Ottawa bureau chief, national editor and associate editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.