Chantal Hébert at Carleton University
[Welcome, National Newswatch readers!]
I covered national affairs columnist Chantal Hébert's lecture at Carleton University last week, the one Peter Mansbridge said he heard she was a "rock star" at, for the Hill Times, and a story appears there, which is reprinted here with kind permission.
However, readers may also be interested in the full transcript of her comments, and the Question and Answer period afterwards, in order to give context to some of her more controversial comments about such things as:
- the media's coverage of the Toronto municipal election campaign
- why the Liberals are "no longer a national party"
- why she opposed the long gun registry, and
- why she's finally become a support of proportional representation
There's a lot more as well.
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Voters angry, engaged, and ahead of conventional parties: Hébert
Conventional political parties are ‘slow to catch the wave,’ or simply being cast away by a populace looking for something else, says Chantal Hébert.
By ALICE FUNKE
The common thread between citizen backlashes over culture cuts, prorogation and the census, the HST in British Columbia, and new political forces in Calgary, Toronto and Quebec, is the emergence of an angry and therefore engaged electorate, Toronto Star syndicated national affairs columnist and leading political analyst Chantal Hébert told a packed audience of academics and students at Carleton University last Wednesday night.
Ms. Hébert also cited Canada’s “apparently open-ended minority cycle” as being perhaps ahead of the curve in the trend now seen internationally across the developed democracies, and she said it arose in part due to the presence of the Bloc Québécois but also from the fact that the Liberals “are no longer a national party.” Drawing a tentative line between the seven isolated political events in Canada, Ms. Hébert argued that no conventional politician was to be found leading those campaigns. Conventional political parties have been “slow to catch the wave,” she said, and if they’re lucky are able to join the parade on some of these issues, although in other cases they “are simply being cast away by a populace looking for something else.”
“Taken together though they suggest, I think, that faced with a non-responsive political system, voters are taking matters in their own hands, and they are finding ways to work right out of the box of the conventional politics to bring about change,” she said.
Where conventional parties cannot take up the charge, “wild cards” like the Wildrose Alliance, the mayoral campaigns of Naheed Nenshi in Calgary and Rob Ford in Toronto, and Force Québec, a “hypothetical party” whose existence is not even a certainty, are emerging as “real contenders for power.”
The conventional parties haven’t figured out how to respond effectively, Ms. Hébert claimed, citing the case of Toronto where Mr. Ford was subjected to two months of a “highly critical microscope of the probably the most powerful media in the country,” which only succeeded in communicating to his supporters “ ‘Oh boy, this guy, he’s a buffoon, people want to vote for him, let’s insult their intelligence and tell them how stupid they are to want to vote for him,” she said.
“When you have an outsider candidate, a maverick candidate, that’s coming in and on a populist platform, the last thing you want to throw at that candidate is insider support for the opposition.”
Unlike Calgary, where Mr. Nenshi’s campaign was “certainly able” to effectively use social media and garner new voters moving him from one per cent in vote intentions to a competitive position, many internet pollsters in the Toronto race completely missed the older voters who were not using Facebook but were supporting Mr. Ford.
“A disengaged electorate doesn’t do 700,000 hits over culture cuts, and it does not go on Facebook and decide it wants a mayor that one per cent of people wanted to support at the beginning of the campaign. And it does not elect Rob Ford because it’s disengaged or it’s not angry,” Ms. Hébert argued. “Angry is engagement.”
She said she believes that the social media are allowing citizens to connect with each other better than the conventional politicians are connecting with them, and believes that the political party that can awake this sleeping giant will be best positioned to succeed in the shifting political landscape.
Taking questions from the floor, Ms. Hébert also assessed the country’s prospects for electing a majority government, saying that while she was not opposed to minority governments and said she believes they can work well, any majority that would be elected now would be a “mathematical majority,” but not a national one, owing to the “regional silos we are now working ourselves into,” which she argued was a worse outcome than any minority government.
She pointed to the paucity of Liberal votes in Western Canada during the last election as a demonstration of “how weak the Liberals are, and that there is a lot of rebuilding to be done,” noting that within Quebec, the Liberals have lost four of the five campaigns they’ve fought against a united Conservative Party since the patriation of the constitution when they lost that province, and that they are now “the Toronto Party with some seats in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces.”
Answering a question on regional differences in attitudes towards justice issues, Ms. Hébert invoked the introduction of the gun registry, saying that some of the provinces like Saskatchewan and New Brunswick who asked the federal government to allow provinces to opt in to the Criminal Code provision at the time, were led by premiers who were hardly “hardcore Conservatives who want to have guns in their kitchen.” She said that at the time she had opposed the long gun registry, knowing people who had worked on the file who “thought that they had pushed the gun control file under Kim Campbell as far as it could be pushed, to be efficient for the money that we could put in it,” and she argued that perhaps an opportunity had been lost by insisting on a national application of that provision.
Ms. Hébert also admitted to becoming a supporter of proportional representation at the federal level after a recent trip to Europe, not for many of the panaceas its supporters now confer it with, but because it “would have some Liberals from Alberta in Michael Ignatieff’s caucus and some New Democrats from Montreal in Jack Layton’s caucus” and that would help prevent the dangers of regionalism. She said she doesn’t think there is any momentum towards it, however, and said that the NDP appear not to be pushing it very hard, perhaps since the growth of the Green Party on the federal scene.
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Alice Funke is editor of the Pundits' Guide to Canadian Federal Elections
Tags: Hill Times
I would disagree the culture cuts and anti-prorogue narrative were grassroots movement without support of media and local political actors. The youngest demographic does not engage in democracy in large enough numbers to warrant a shift in resources by the political parties. From cynical to not interested this group is seen as the least likely to show up and cast a ballot that will affect an outcome.
Not all experts in the media, pollsters were unable to measure the effectiveness of the strength of the support for change in Calgary-Toronto. I don’t believe we dedicate resources do the in-depth analysis and polling comparable to our neighbour in the south.
I agree with Chantal’s comments however I wish she would have addressed the issue of the current government’s active role in simply keeping its base motivated and and trying to dampen any growth in the electorate’s participation.
The answer to that possibly lies in her thoughts on PR but it would need a groundswell of public support before any current politicians jumped in on the issue.
Parnel, I think Hebert’s comments were directed at a different level of analyis than what the parties are doing. Which is the usual stuff of pundits. In this talk, she just wasnt on that track at all.
In a venue like that she can range out a bit more. Even a columnist like herself whose cachet is in provacative and different, would be more constrained trying to lay out something so inherently tentative and explorative in a column.
Conversely, with that audience, why serve up the same thing people read in your columns?
@CS:
For one thing, Facebook is not such a young venue any more. And it has the complete range of people on it. So even if you were talking about what young people are doing, a minority being engaged at all in politics on Facebook is still a hell of a critical mass.
And Hebert did not say the prorougue reaction was without any supporting role for the media. But its independence from what the media were saying was pretty pronounced- since the media narrative was that nobody was going to care about the prorogue. Leaving aside whether you think it was “real”. The outrage existed, and it surprised the punditry [myself included].
Thjats Hebert’s point.
Further to Hebert’s general point, and the specific example of reaction to the prorogue:
If the main commenting to the prorogue had been Layton and Ignatieff in full outrage; that would have been ignored by the media as predictable, and most likely would have been ignored by the public as well.
I would point out that Mr. Ignatieff’s caucus has one (high-ranking) member from the West, and in fact M. Chretien’s had two of them.
Neither Goodale nor Anne McLellan ever did much to minimize western alientation and were seen in the west as little more than tokens. I suspect PR would not make much difference.
Ken my thinking on prorogation was that the sea of orange at the protests kind of put to rest the notion that this was some kind of non-partisan revolt that cut across party lines.
If you were a Conservative it was no big deal, if you were a LPC/NDP/BQ/Green it was the worst thing ever.
Is that outrage real ?
Sure but 60-70% of the 60% of the population that votes is perpetually outraged at a lot of what Harper does.
I think the CBC in particular crossed the line from reporting to providing free advertising and logistical support.
Nobody said the prorogue peotests were non-partisan. Thats your measure.
The point Hebert was making, and the relevance of it that it was outside of party channels that got it going. And the parties couldnt have done it, even as puppeteers.
Now is the point that it achieved or did not, majority support.
Does it take majorities to be the balance win or lose elections- or is the tipping point that makes going into an election not appealing to a government?
Ken the entire mantra of the facebook group behind the prorogation protests what that it was a non-partisan movement.
They were just regular university students suddenly awoken by a threat to democracy and decided they needed to do something.
Its the same narrative the Tea Party in the US uses. Everyone wants to appear spontaneous and grass roots.
The thing is that facebook groups appear to protest EVERYTHING.
It was the media and party machines that amplified this particular group and turned out its own troops to the rallies.
To say it started outside party channels is just to perpetuate the myth of a non-partisan political movement. Its a contradiction in terms.
This thing was so quickly hijacked and co-opted that it may as well have been started by an NDP or Liberal campaign staffer.
I never characterised it as a non-partisan movement. Nor would I expect did most reporters. You are using the straw person standard of the maximum level of independence from parties [ie, 'non-partisan'].
But I would insist that it took place outside of party channels, and not at their bidding, whoever was involved. Not to mention that it is impossible for party centrals to instruct Liberals and New Democrats to go out there and work together.
And the media were the followers of the phenomena, not the instigators or even secondary instigators. Of course they are going to report on it.
To listen to you parties are behind everything. As Hebert argued, that is clearly not the case.
Ken you’re downplaying the role of the media far too much.
The media reports on an obscure facebook page set up by a university student.
An hour later they breathlessly report the tremendous growth in membership of the page.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
The thing is that free advertising was what led to the growth in the first place.
The more they report on this “movement”, the more they create it.
Its all just the media, eh?
The media created the illusion of an anti-prorogation “movement”, yes.
Polls show that 1/3 of Canadians didn’t know or care (people who probably don’t vote.) Of those who were informed, 2/3 opposed the move. That’s equal to opposition party support.
You could find 2/3 opposition to almost ANYTHING that the Harper tories do provided it was high profile enough.
The notion that this somehow took place outside of political channels or the party machines weren’t involved is ridiculous.
This was about undermining and attacking Harper, not caring all that much about three weeks of parliament not sitting during the Olympics.
If people cared that much about parliament not sitting they would be up in arms over summer break!
We’ve tapped that ping pong ball back and forth enough times.
Lets call that last word on the subject.
Fair enough Ken, agree to disagree.