A political legacy is just eight votes away

The 2012 Calgary civic election is now just one week away, and it promises to be more interesting than anyone expected. Coming into campaign season, the prospect of an election without the catalyst of a seriously contested mayoralty had many people predicting a quiet fall, and a turnout on Oct. 21 below 25 per cent. The turnout could still be small, although solid totals at the advance polls so far seem to suggest the final participation total won’t be that bad. But the mayoralty race (how did we start calling it the mayoral race, by the way?) has basically been a fizzle, despite the best efforts of a certain newspaper columnist to draw the mayor onto the partisan battlefield. The result will be the re-election of Naheed Nenshi, as expected, although it wouldn’t be a surprise if his victory margin was surprisingly small. That’s what you get when you let your supporters conclude you are a cinch to be returned, and they can basically stay home and watch TV. Inviting so-called progressive voters to sit this one out may not have serious consequences for the mayor. But it is very likely to make things tough for some incumbent aldermen, who have formed the bedrock of his voting support on council over the past three years. Councillors Macleod, Farrell, Pootmans, Pincott and Carra have reliably supported Nenshi on what he clearly considers the key issues before the city: Planning, growth management and tax equity. The mayor’s real focus, however, has been on communications and representation, rather than governance. While his predecessor, David Bronconnier, made his reputation by getting things done in council (and carefully counting votes for his projects at every single meeting), Nenshi has more or less let council run free, and has concentrated instead on the more visible public assignments his position affords. One example of this is the life-size cardboard images of the mayor, grinning and holding up a borrowing card, which have adorned local branches of the public library for the past couple of years. Thanks to his high-profile approach to his job, Nenshi is widely known, generally appreciated, and considered by most Calgarians to be a symbol of what we want our city to be in the 21st Century. His outstanding work as a communicator during the flood crisis and its aftermath cemented his standing in this regard. In sum, Nenshi has successfully practiced representative politics while in office, and he is pretty much certain to be given the chance to continue in this role after Oct. 21. But his relative disinterest in the mechanics of decision-making on council have given his opponents a real chance to seize control of council in this election. Throughout this campaign, it has been hard to shake the feeling that the mayor and his supporters haven’t been doing enough to ensure that his voting bloc on council survives. His side has basically brought a knife to a gunfight throughout the campaign, a sign perhaps of his and their political inexperience, or their failure to understand the real political stakes at play. Nenshi has issued a general endorsement of Pincott/Farrell et al. But the energy that surrounded his first campaign has clearly been missing. The people who have missed it most are the very ones Nenshi needs to get anything meaningful done in the next four years. While the progressive camp has basically sat this election out, the other side (we’ll dub them the conservatives, for want of a more descriptive term), have been busy raising money, commissioning studies, marshaling the news media and building up the notion that the mayor’s priorities are out of line with those of the electorate, and that it is time for a change. Taking their cue from Bronconnier, who famously pointed out last winter that the real goal for an incumbent mayor in a civic election is to see enough friendly aldermen elected to control council votes, the conservatives have opted to ignore Nenshi and have been working instead to take over council. At this writing, they appear to be poised to achieve their goal. If they do, they will succeed in making Nenshi’s victory a hollow one, and condemn him to four years of presiding over a council that is committed to move in a radically different direction than he himself wants to go. It could even lead to the emergence of a leader on council who could seriously challenge the mayor in the 2017 civic election, assuming Nenshi wants to stay on. Should all this come to pass, Nenshi and his followers may wish they had paid more attention to that eight-vote idea in his first term in office, and during the 2013 campaign.

A change in the climate on climate change

Green is no longer the colour, at least in politics. That reality began to sink in late last year at the Copenhagen climate change summit, which turned into more of a media circus than a serious exercise in working out a new international treaty to curb carbon emissions. Other straws in the wind have also been showing up, all of which add up to the decline in public concern about this issue. One such straw arrived this week, in form of new survey of TV weathermen in the U.S. The study, done by the Centre for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, shows that only about a third of weather forecasters surveyed believe there is a scientific consensus that global warming is a reality. This, despite the fact that such a consensus has been in place for some time. Given the influence the forecasters, and other TV and radio types, have over public opinion, this finding says several things about the role of the media in shaping opinion on important issues. For example, it seems to suggest that it is time for advocates of action on emissions to go to an education strategy, instead of relying so much on confrontation and its close cousin, the politics of fear. People eventually get tired of being warned that the end of the world is near, even though that might be true. So, if the scientific and environmental communities are going to turn back the tide now running toward inaction on these issues, they are going to have to stop trying to frighten people and concentrate instead on making the case for government policy change by sharing information that ordinary people can understand. That, in turn, leads to step two, which would be to do what the energy industry has always done and focus on marketing its case through the media, in part by getting the media on side. That's where the weathermen come in. The scientific types may, and likely do, resent the influence the talking heads seem to have on this issue. But if they want to change the direction of public opinion, they are going too have to start informing, and persuading, these public spokesmen of the validity of the scientific evidence. In other words, they are going to have to get a coherent communications strategy to sell the case for action on climate change, to counter the impression many people have that there is no real climate problem and that the five-day forecast proves that is the case. The challenge to the scientists and environmentalists is large, in no small part because it will require them to start taking communication seriously, and stop assuming that mere expertise is enough to win the argument. It will also require them to get their act together, instead of speaking as individuals. It might even mean some of them will have to go on TV and look those weathermen, and their audience, in the eye. Can they do it? The jury is out.

Climate change in the news ecosystem

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) last week produced a new study on how local news is shared in the changing media environment of the early 21st Century. This study can be found here, and is a good starting point to consider some trends that have been developing in Canada, as well as in the U.S. We plan to look more deeply into some of these trends on this site in coming days, but here are a couple of quick observations based on the study:

• People still seem to be getting a lot of their news from professional reporters, even though they access it using new media on the Internet. According to PEJ, stories containing new information carried by Baltimore, Md. media outlets in one-week period last summer were mostly produced by local newspaper or TV reporters. The new information was accessed by most readers online, sometimes through aggregators, or blog posts. But the information was developed the old-fashioned way, simply because it takes serious, purposeful inquiry to produce useful material. To quote the anchor-people, more on this later.

• What the Internet has done is speed up the delivery of hard news. Breaking developments in a community, which used to take hours to share via local radio and TV, now are disseminated in minutes via blogs and websites, many of which are maintained by mainstream media. The faster pace seems to agree with many readers, who frequently cite this as a reason to abandon newspapers and the evening newscasts. But it is having an impact on the contents of the reporting, and non-journalists are often oblivious to these effects, which include a tendency to exaggerate the significance of new developments, an absence of context and a heavy reliance on official sources. Once again, we will write more about this in a future post.

Facebook 'activism'

How much clout does Facebook have in Canadian politics, really?

We may be about to find out, thanks to the online group Canadians Against Proroguing Parlaiment. This group, founded by Edmontonian Chris White just before New Year's, was up to 150,000 members as of this morning (Jan. 11, 2010) and is now encouraging its members to organize local protest events to show the governing Conservatives just how angry they are at Stephen Harper's decision to shut down Parliament until after the Winter Olympics. Harper was dismissive of the complaints in comments last week, suggesting the Opposition parties would be really upset about the government's move when they got back from their Christmas holidays. The Liberals were out this past weekend with attack ads, slamming the government for being anti-democratic. The Facebook group, meanwhile, was drawing fire from talk radio conservatives, who questioned whether all the online anger really meant anything in political terms. This, in turn, prompted a Vancouver online politics expert to argue that Facebook is the new face of political action in Canada and is ignored by old-style politicians at their peril.

White and his supporters believe their campaign is having an effect but of course you would expect them to say that. Their efforts to get those who joined the Facebook group to get out and march betrays them a little, however. They seem to have grasped one basic truth about Internet activism, which is that online outrage is easy for politicians to ignore, as long as it doesn't translate into action in the actual arena, which is the street and, ultimately, the ballot box. Obama Nation, the best example we have of an online movement that ultimately turned an election, was only able to achieve its objectives by leaving cyberspace and entering the actual political marketplace. For many of these activists, this included joining a party, mobilizing others to do the same, campaigning in an election and getting out the vote on election day. Setting up a Facebook group pales in comparison to this list of assignments. That is why old style politicians like Harper and his supporters are, and will be able to dismiss groups like CAPP: Because they haven't shown their activism extends to the real world. But as the Obama campaisn demonstrates, such activism can make a huge difference, as soon as its practitioners engage in meaningful political action, on the politicians' turf. Or until we move the whole political process online.

A great year-end idea

The season of news media year-end lists has arrived again, just in time to fill space in all those late December editions when there is no real news around. Newsmaker of the year, athlete of the year, intriguing person of the year, and so on, and on, and on. Still, everybody loves lists, so here's our modest contribution: A nomination for non-news story of the year, a category whose time has truly come. A top-five list of candidates was posted earlier this month here, and all the picks make sense. In Canada, though, nothing can top the nearly endless reports on the likelihood of another federal election. By my count, there were at least three major rounds of speculation in the Canadian media this year about the Harper government falling, or pulling the plug, and sending us all to the polls again. Little, or nothing was reported on how voters felt about this possibility, but the politicians clearly sensed the public's unhappiness with this prospect because in each crisis, they ended up stepping back from the brink, for fear of being punished. This left all those national press gallery election-mongers looking pretty foolish. That's pretty much the definition of a non-story. So, to all you hawks in Ottawa, please accept the first Chicken Little Award, with egg yolk custer, for your all your fine work. Next time, try asking somebody outside Ottawa if an election actually makes sense before you jump to the conclusion that there is going to be one.

A media 'victory'

The national media this morning is carrying news of a media 'victory' in the Supreme Court of Canada. The 'Supremes,' as some wags have dubbed them, have ruled 9-0 to uphold an Ontario Court of Appeal decision throwing out libel awards against two Ontario papers. In effect, the high court said that if the reporter/news outlet could show it engaged in 'responsible journalism' in reporting an allegedly libelous article, that would be a defense against a claim. The Globe and CBC, among others, hit the decision story hard. For journalists, there is a lot of like about this decision. But as with any court ruling, the devil will be in the details and those will take awhile to work out. So we will withhold our high-fives for now. One aspect of the decision that does appear to be positive, however, is the inclusion by the court of bloggers under the new umbrella of protection from defamation actions. In effect, the high court recognized bloggers as journalists, for purposes of the decision. What is really interesting about this is, in order for the blogosphere to actually claim this protection, it must meet the same tests of responsible practice as regular journalists, including balance, and a serious effort to check information for accuracy. That's something many (most? all?) bloggers aren't currently doing. So what this decision may do, among other things, is force all those freelance opinion peddlars who have been merrily defaming their various pet targets to actually get some information for a change, check it out, talk to people they don't agree with and include those comments in their posts. In other words, they are going to have to start practicing real journalism. Or they can risk getting sued. Some of them may consider this decision a gag order. It is no such thing. It is simply a legal request that they do more than just call themselves journalists, but actually do what professional journalists do. If they can meet the test, great. We need more good journalism. If not, well, see you in court?

Back at it

Greetings to you who have checked this page periodically, looking for new posts. There haven't been any for about six months now, obviously. Life, and work, have gotten all my time in the interval. Consider this and the following a down payment on a more communicative new year, as well as a wish that you enjoy a very happy Christmas/holiday and a great new year.