Media, Politics and You

"Crisis" may be too strong a word, but Canada's democracy has seen more vital days.

When you’re holding a hammer, the old adage says, everything can look like a nail.

Over the past month, I’ve stumbled across more and more pieces centred on what some increasingly see as a game of mutual destruction played between media and parliaments and between parliaments and citizens across the country.

While my day job involves taking particular note of these matters (hence the hammer and nail caveat), I sense a cauldron bubbling over. Call it a demographic shift, a natural response to the ageing of a bunch of important institutions we took for granted in good times or a veiled cry for a Canadian Obama – whatever the reason, it’s getting time to pay attention.

Here’s what I mean:

CTV's Craig Oliver, while accepting the prestigious Hy Solomon award for over 50 years as a journalist, laments the growing inability of MPs to demonstrate independent thought and the corresponding failure of Parliament to be "a house of ideas" that better reflects the discussions Canadians want. In this moving and funny speech, he takes his fair share of shots at his profession and the "punditocracy" in ascribing blame.

Two days later, veteran Hill reporter Jim Travers pens an essay on the unravelling of Canadian democracy and encourages MPs and citizens to resist the temptation to go with the flow and instead advocate for better.

Later that week Jim Coyle’s column outlines the bad habit of politicians and journalists to demean Parliament and in doing so, de-legitimize their professions and themselves. It reminded me of a recent CBC At Issue discussion where the panellists discuss the national joke that is Question Period. While parties and politicians are to blame, they rightly point out that media don’t do much to make things better either.

Two weeks later, in an interview on CBC radio to promote her book on the crisis of Canadian democracy, Elizabeth May takes on partisan political parties, weak political journalism and the resulting culture of our democracy. My personal preference is to reserve words like crisis for countries like Thailand and Sri Lanka, but that aside, she said gutsy things that I don’t hear a lot of politicians talking about.

May is not alone is her use of the word crisis. Similar themes emerged a-plentyat McGill’s recent Public Policy in Crisis conference, and if that’s not enough, you can buy the recently published compendium of essays, called Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis.

So again, maybe it’s the hammer, but all this speaks to what I heard over the spring and summer of 2008, when, in the start-up phase of a new project, I undertook a fascinating set of over 200 interviews with Canadians who shared an interest in the country and came from most of our provinces and a wide variety of professional backgrounds.

These interviews examined a few things: how did they view the public policy landscape today? What was working? Where were the gaps? How could a small charitable initiative help fill those gaps?

The collective response surprised me. I'd expected a laundry list of the usual policy gripes (health care, immigration and the like). Instead, the identified gaps were broader than any one issue. They focused at the level of culture, attitude and institutional drift. They included things like: the ways our media frame and elucidate issues; the fact that many citizens are disillusioned, or worse, don't care; the dysfunction of our Parliament and political parties; the degradation of public service and politicians and a general sense that our “ways of working” weren’t nearly as evolved as were needed to address the public challenges we face.

There are lots of reasons for this. All of us and none of us are to blame. We all have good reasons to be expedient in the short term, but collectively it’s resulted in a situation that doesn't serve any of our long-term interests.

These are tricky things to tackle, and fortunately there are a lot of people that care about doing so. At Samara, we’re looking to help by planting a few seeds in the right places by launching projects that will strengthen the interconnected areas of political leadership, citizens' connections to ideas and the media's contribution to public affairs.

We’re just getting started, and we expect to learn a lot along the way. We’ll share as we go and invite your participation. It’s a collective situation and needs our collective attention.