Trump's Influence Creeps North

If you thought that Donald Trump's war on the media couldn't happen here, think again. Alex Boutilier writes in The Toronto Star:

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s office has revamped its communications team to provide a more rapid response, war room-style operation. And they have not been shy about calling out reporting they don’t like.

At a rally in downtown Ottawa last Sunday, Scheer said he would stand up to “the media” and accused journalists of siding with the Liberals in the carbon tax debate.

“We don’t always get the same kind of coverage that (Trudeau) gets in the mainstream media. Have you noticed that?” Scheer asked supporters.

“(Trudeau has) got the media on his side, he’s got the pundits, he’s got the academics and think-tanks, everyone who wants to lecture you on how to spend your own money and how to live your own life.”

Members of Scheer’s caucus, too, have joined in. On Thursday, finance critic Pierre Poilievre called a journalist for the Bloomberg business wire a “Liberal reporter.” The same day, Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos accused Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells of being a “liberal” masquerading as an independent journalist. Earlier this year Michelle Rempel, the party’s immigration critic, suggested the Canadian Press newswire took marching orders from the Prime Minister’s Office.

I suppose it was bound to happen. We seem to ape everything that gets its start south of the border. That means, of course, that journalists are going to be attacked. And the wingnuts of the right will be vociferous:

Andrew MacDougall, who served as director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper and who now writes columns for Canadian newspapers, said these attacks on the media are a deliberate strategy to energize the Conservative base.

“(The 2019 election) really will be an elite, or an establishment, or an opinion-forming establishment against the Conservatives (and that’s) what they’re trying to gin up,” MacDougall told the Star.

The relationship between Harper and the national press was notoriously chilly. And Scheer appears to be taking the feud a step further as he approaches his first election as Conservative leader.

The issue which is driving all of this is the carbon tax:

“The carbon tax being the ultimate issue, where this is kind of a policy that’s almost universally supported by academics, economists, pundits … the Conservatives are betting that there’s more of a common-sense crowd who still have to gas up their car, who will be open to a message that this is elitism ignoring your concerns,” MacDougall said.

Former Conservative strategist Jason Lietaer also referenced the carbon tax debate, saying it’s a sore point for Conservatives that most of the reporting on the issue puts the Liberals’ plan in a positive light.

But the Conservatives have no plan. Given that fact, their strategy is simply the best defence is a strong offence. It's yet another sign that the Conservative Party of Canada is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Headpieces Filled With Straw

                                                https://www.learningpod.com/

For the second year in a row, Andrew Coyne was underwhelmed by the Manning Conference. It used to be, he writes, the home of the Conservative Party in exile:

It was the place where Conservatives, starved for talk about ideas by a leadership that long ago declared its contempt, not just for ideas, but even for the idea of ideas, mingled with conservatives, the broader movement outside the party, and recalled a time when it was still permissible to think that governments are elected to change things, not just to perpetuate themselves in power; that elections are opportunities to win a broad mandate from the public, not to dangle a few precisely crafted baubles of nonsense in front of the right micro-demographics; that governing is something done openly and through Parliament, not secretly and by any means at hand; and all the rest of what we have been educated, after these many years of misrule, not to expect.

But just as Harperism has seeped into the press, the military and the civil service, it has now firmly entrenched itself in what masquerades as a serious event:

The more open the conflict between what conservatives are supposed to believe and what the Conservatives have tended to produce, the more it has been resolved in favour of the party. As late as last year, when the party was at its lowest point in the polls, there was still a useful tension in the air, the odd veiled suggestion that the Conservatives had lost their way. But this is an election year, and the party is back in contention, and so this year’s conference has thus far broadly favoured politics over ideas, discretion over debate.

Conservatives have drunk the Harper Kool-Aide. Now the lust for power tramples everything and everyone in its path. Like the hollow man who heads Canada's Conservative government, it appears that the movers and shakers at the Manning Conference have "headpieces filled with straw."