In The Weekly Wrap Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was.
The Weekly Wrap typically covers three issues or topics from the previous week. But this week there were two stories that stood out: the Afghanistan withdrawal scandal and News Media Canada’s hypocrisy.
Sajjan’s shocking dereliction of duty reflects a deeper cultural problem
The biggest Canadian political news this week was the fast-evolving Globe and Mail reporting on the Trudeau government’s mishandling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
In particular, veteran journalists Robert Fife and Steven Chase reported that then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan personally intervened during the real-time evacuation efforts to have Canadian troops prioritize a small group of Afghan Sikhs—even though anonymous military sources say that it distracted them from rescuing Canadian citizens and Afghan citizens who had courageously supported Canada’s military mission.
Sajjan’s initial response was to accuse these reports as racist, but military officials—including outgoing Chief of the Defence Staff Wayne Eyre—have since corroborated their reporting. It’s a shocking case of senior government officials failing the national interest.
New reports that Sajjan’s riding association received donations from people associated with the domestic Sikh groups who had been lobbying for his extraordinary intervention may make the story more salacious but in my mind it doesn’t fundamentally change things. He interfered in an on-the-ground rescue operation so that Canadian forces prioritized non-citizens over citizens. Full stop.
His motivation doesn’t really matter. Regardless of whether it was due to crass politics or a sense of compassion for his fellow co-religionists or whatever, the net effect is the same: Saijan’s intervention came at the expense of our own citizens.
I’m not a hardcore nationalist by instinct—I currently live in the United States for God’s sake—but it strikes me as a pretty reasonable expectation that Canadian governments ought to prioritize the interests of Canadians.
A quote from a former senior military official in the original news story really spoke to this point. Lieutenant-general Mike Day, a former head of Joint Task Force 2, told Fife and Chase: “The only way this gets onto the task list is if we are operating on behalf of another state or somebody inside government inserted this onto the task list and asked for it to be considered.”
Yet what does it mean if both are effectively true? That is to say, although Sajjan wasn’t actively operating on behalf of another state, his extraordinary actions on the inside were on behalf of the interests of citizens of another state.
I assumed that the standard oath for a cabinet minister would naturally conflict with such actions. But it actually doesn’t. Ministers currently commit to “truly and faithfully” and “to the best of my skill and knowledge…execute the powers and trusts associated with being a Minister.” It says nothing about Canada or Canadian citizens. A cursory review of the ministerial guidebook similarly doesn’t produce clear language about prioritizing Canadian citizens or the national interest in their decisions.
These oversights reflect a deeper cultural problem in Ottawa. We simply don’t take to these issues seriously enough. Our implicit security guarantee from the United States has not only permitted us to be complacent about defence and security matters but it’s enabled us to treat them as mere extensions of domestic politics.
We must therefore fix the culture first and foremost. David Frum has an interesting idea about establishing a norm that former senior defence and security officials are automatically appointed to the Senate so that there’s a critical mass of parliamentarians inclined towards these issues. Think of them as Canada’s own Vulcans.
But in an era of rising immigration and growing geopolitical tensions, we also ought to revise the oaths of allegiance for members of Parliaments and cabinet ministers such that they commit themselves to Canada and the interests of Canadians.
If they cannot live up to such a basic expectation, then they don’t deserve to represent us.
A security guard stands by the front reception desk at Postmedia’s Toronto headquarters on March 12, 2018. Chris Young/The Canadian Press.
News Media Canada’s manufactured controversy
This week, News Media Canada, the lobby group for legacy news media outlets, launched a sustained attack on the Canadian Journalism Collective, a group of mostly left-wing news sites that was selected by Google to distribute its $100 million contribution to journalism mandated by the Online News Act.
It wasn’t just the News Media Canada though. Outlets like the National Post and Toronto Star had their journalists write a series of news stories that leave readers with the impression that there’s a major controversy here. There isn’t.
For those who haven’t been following these issues, let me bring you up to speed. It’s a rather shocking story of rent-seeking and its attendant effect on the declining trust and transparency of Canadian journalism.
News Media Canada, on behalf of the legacy news media, successfully lobbied the Trudeau government to use its legislative powers to force Google and Meta to enter into financial arrangements with the sector. Meta refused and dropped Canadian news altogether. Google agreed to pay $100 million to the industry.
The legislation provided Google the option to decide how to distribute it among different outlets. News Media Canada and its partner organizations applied to be the granting body. The Canadian Journalism Collective put forward an alternative proposal. Google ultimately selected the latter in part because it was a more egalitarian group.
News Media Canada and its members are predictably ticked. This was supposed to be their money after all. They’ve therefore launched a broadside attack on the Canadian Journalism Collective that it’s too narrow and self-interested. They’ve accused the winning group of having a conflict of interest and insisted that it must add representatives from the legacy news media to its board.
Never mind that one can virtually guarantee that News Media Canada wouldn’t have had the same concerns if it and its partners had been awarded the money. The real issue here is that the series of stories on these issues published by the National Post and Toronto Star that have effectively turned their journalists and journalistic platforms into advocacy efforts with minimal disclosure.
The articles were written in the passive voice and talk about “controversy” and “dispute” as if these are broad-based issues that are gripping the nation. They are not. The only ones who care about them are them. It’s a manufactured controversy. It’s fake news. It’s empty advertorial content on behalf of the interests of the outlets themselves.
Here’s why that bugs me. As readers probably know, The Hub regularly publishes “sponsored content” in conjunction with companies, industry associations, and so on. These public policy campaigns help to pay our bills and finance our journalism. We have sought to partner with sponsors on issues that are interesting and important and conform to The Hub’s editorial perspective. So far, we haven’t received a single complaint from our audience that this content diverges from the ideas and arguments that people expect from us.
Our current campaign with the Canadian Health and Life Insurance Association on the inherent risks of single-payer pharmacare is a good example. I wrote my first anti-pharmacare article seven years ago because I thought it was a bad idea to nationalize drug insurance. Who looks at the failings of our public health-care system and thinks that we ought to nationalize the parts that are broadly working?
We are transparent about our sponsored content. It’s disclosed in the opinion commentaries or podcasts themselves. We also have standard disclaimers in social media posts. This by far exceeds the industry standard.
Yet recently Toronto Star sports columnist-turned-left wing pundit Bruce Arthur and National Post columnist Chris Selley posted snarky messages on X in response to The Hub’s sponsored content. Never mind that they only knew about it because of our proactive disclosure on social media, or that a considerable share of their own incomes are subsidized by taxpayers. The most offensive part is that both have been notably silent on the recent weaponization of their own newspapers for more subsidies.
As far as I’m concerned, as long as they keep quiet while their own outlets effectively run press releases on behalf of their publishers and the industry, they have zero credibility—zilch—to criticize anyone else. Especially those like The Hub who have rejected public subsidies and are working hard to support their journalism based on market forces rather than rent-seeking.
The news media subsidies debate has been clarifying. The past week has clarified that not only left-wing journalists like Arthur are bad on these issues but ostensibly right-wing ones like Selley and the National Post itself are pretty lousy too.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well as a think-tank scholar and columnist. He previously served as a senior economic adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper....
