The majority of voters have moved on from legacy media and legacy narratives

A Wake-Up Call for Political Strategists Across the Continent

For only the second time in US history, a president has lost, left office, and won re-election. For most Canadians watching the US election, the news of Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House comes with some degree of disappointment – and confusion.

Rather than getting caught up in doomsaying as there’s enough of that going around, I wanted to share some thoughts on what I would hope Canadians working in and around politics and policy come away with.

Speaking to the heart shouldn’t neglect speaking to the wallet

Biden probably should have resigned sooner, and Harris should have gone through a competitive primary race before carrying the flag. Hindsight is 20/20, and I doubt that the Democrats will make those same mistakes twice.

What I do suspect will be harder to shake is the commitment to running campaigns on social issues alone. The Democrats made the gamble that reproductive rights were a persuasive enough ballot box question to distract from Joe Biden’s lacklustre economic performance.

The clear majority of voters showed that they are more concerned with their job security, housing affordability, and tax bills.

The Democrats now have an opportunity to realign with the concerns of working Americans, recognizing that economic anxieties cannot be overlooked. A robust economic approach doesn’t preclude a moderate and fair social approach, but the latter can’t replace the former.

In Canada, this holds true for our discussions around energy and resources. I’m seeing a very similar disconnect play out on resource policy. Patently bad policies with horrible economic impacts are being advanced at all levels by governments more concerned with virtue signalling than ensuring robust economic performance – the federal Emissions Cap and the fantastical ambitions of David Eby’s CleanBC program among them.

Pre-pandemic, vibes-based economic policy seemed to work. In times of plenty, it is easy to persuade voters that taking economic hits is the right thing to do — after all, why worry about the price of something if you can afford it? Anyone still trying that in 2024 has lost the plot.

Affordability remains a paramount issue for many citizens, and the U.S. election highlighted how campaigns that overlook economic concerns and the declining quality of life risk alienating voters.

From groceries to gas prices, the rising cost of living is top of mind for Canadians, and resource policies must reflect this reality. For instance, a balanced approach to energy production can help keep costs reasonable while supporting Canadian jobs and industries.

It’s a reminder that beyond political credibility or mainstream appeal, policies that directly address financial challenges resonate most with the electorate.

For the resource sector, this means recognizing how affordable energy, resilient supply chains, and robust employment opportunities are interconnected with national policy priorities.

Truth and gatekeeping

The gamesmanship over who holds the authority to define “truth” continues in earnest, and engaging in it by discounting mass popular narratives is a risky gambit for any political movement that seeks to maintain widespread relevance.

We’re seeing a generational change, not just in the US but globally, on how people consume and produce media.

I would argue that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was the edge that Trump needed in this new era. Millions of Americans, and millions abroad, sought news and commentary from the platform. Political discourse on the 2024 election was shaped by the ideas generated and amplified online, faster than mainstream news could reliably pick up on.

Since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X, the editorial stance, algorithm, and tone of the platform have all shifted. Yes, it has gone ‘rightwards’, but rather than that serving to shrink the audience, it has instead grown, picking up swing voters and rallying the “persuadeds” more effectively.

Just look at the last debate between Trump and Harris: they weren’t even talking about the same political realities.

Research finds that as a main source of news, social media is still behind TV. Where we see the biggest difference is among younger voters.

46% of Americans 18-29 say social media is their top source of news, according to Pew Research. Beyond widespread appeal or readership, social media drives the political commentary of the chattering classes more than any one other platform. TikTok’s influence is likewise growing, with an even younger demographic relying on it almost entirely to help shape and articulate their views.

A similar dynamic around “truth” was plainly obvious in British Columbia’s provincial election last month. A good chunk of commentators couldn’t fathom that voters could accept a party that had refused to throw out candidates saying offensive or dubious things.

The BC Conservatives went from zero seats to just shy of government.

Enough ink has been spilled on this by other commentators, but let’s recap what many have said about the explanatory factors: BC United collapsed following its disastrous rebrand, the BC NDP was stuck with having to account with the inevitable baggage of incumbency in a struggling global economy, and the rise of Poilievre and the federal Conservatives lent some additional name-brand recognition to the BCCP.

The most important piece, in my estimation, was the Conservatives’ ability to tap into a growing demographic that didn’t feel their concerns were reflected in the mainstream political discourse. Twitter was far from the only forum for this, but I think it had a large part to play in cultivating the sense among many voters that consequential narratives were not even remotely being touched on in mainstream media. It gutted voters’ trust in the media, giving the BC Conservatives whose narratives were more effective on social media a decisive advantage.

Public safety is a great example of this. Anyone with eyes and ears who has spent time in Downtown Vancouver in recent years can attest to the visible decline, with visible drug use in public spaces, frequent run-ins with people with severe untreated mental illness yelling at phantoms, and unabashed property crime.

Yet, if we were to believe a great deal of commentators just up until the eve of the election, everything was just fine.

Willful blindness only works when people can’t comment on what they see. But comment they did, and the delayed response to it nearly cost the BC NDP the election.

In a purely practical sense, the increasing role of community-driven sources of information mean that gatekeepers can no longer control the flow of information. And let’s not mince words here: anyone concerned about misinformation is talking about gatekeeping.

Subjecting ideas out there in the commons to scrutiny is necessary. We just can’t take for granted that the outlets themselves will provide that editorial scrutiny directly, if it’s not baked in the platform by design and people are actively choosing to spend time on platforms that have a radical free speech mandate.

It’s time to accept that the train has left the station: persuasiveness needs to be redefined by the mainstream, rather than taking one loss after another and crying foul because the game has changed.

Canadian narratives for Canadian politics

Our closest neighbour and trading partner is the world’s largest economy, and Canadians can’t help but look south for news and ideas. Our own politics often mirror the messages we see in the US, and there’s no use trying to pretend that won’t keep happening.

If we want to avoid falling into the trap of inheriting the dysfunction and divisions that are increasingly defining the political system next door, we have a duty to develop compelling narratives that resonate with the unique needs of Canadians, across the political spectrum.

It’s the definition of insanity to keep trying the same things expecting a different result. Rather than directing anger at voters and political movements who have moved on from old media, if you’re not happy with the result, try meeting them where they are.

And no, this doesn’t mean ceding ground to conspiracy theorists or the fringe. They are only succeeding because a) they are speaking to issues that people decide they care about (like them or not) that are panned by the center and the left, and b) most crucially, there isn’t enough emotionally resonant, persuasive substance being put out to win hearts and minds.

These are not inevitable outcomes. Voter preferences and media technologies are constantly evolving. We need to evolve with them by subjecting our leaders to real scrutiny and demanding better.

Margareta Dovgal is Managing Director of Resource Works. Based in Vancouver, she holds a Master of Public Administration in Energy, Technology and Climate Policy from University College London. Beyond her regular advocacy on natural resources, environment, and economic policy, Margareta also leads our annual Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase. She can be found on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Related Topics:#LegacyMedia #MargaretaDovgal #USElection AlternativeMedia EnergyNow feature NewMedia PoliticalStrategists SocialMedia x

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Is the Price of Reconciliation that we Must Pretend to Believe a Lie?

Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Is the Price of Reconciliation that we Must Pretend to Believe a Lie?

Published on November 8, 2024

Todayville

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

Even the Kamloops band is backing away from its most extreme claim, that ‘bodies were found’

The price we are being told that we must pay to achieve “reconciliation” is becoming clear. We must pretend to believe a lie.

The lie is that 215, and then thousands, of indigenous students of residential schools were “disappeared” while at the schools — that they died under sinister circumstances while under the care of the priests, nuns and teachers running the schools, and were buried in secrecy.

To top it off, it is claimed that fellow students — “as young as six” — were forced by these evil priests to dig the graves. The fact that there is not one scintilla of good evidence to support this deeply anti-Catholic blood libel is not supposed to deter us from accepting it as fact. We are being told that we must pretend to believe this lie if we want to achieve “reconciliation”.

If there was any doubt that the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) was insisting that Canadians must pretend to believe the false claim, it was dispelled when they angrily rejected the funding cap that the federal government had placed on its ill-considered promise to provide a total of $320 million to indigenous communities that chose to go on their own “missing children/unmarked graves” search.

The chiefs showed who was boss, and the federal government meekly submitted, and cancelled the funding cap.

The government coffers were left wide open, and indigenous communities expanded existing searches for “missing children.” In reality these children were never missing. As Tom Flanagan explains in Grave Error (above), they were “forgotten children” who had been properly buried in marked graves that were subsequently left untended and forgotten by their families.

Be that as it may, as a result of AFN activism, and government and media incompetence, the Kamloops claim morphed into an officially sanctioned lie.

But where is the truth in all of this?

Most of us knew, even when this claim was first made in 2021, that these grisly tales of sinister deaths and secret burials could not possibly be true.

There is simply no historical record of any such thing occurring.

There are no records of parents frantically looking for children who suddenly went missing from residential schools, no police reports of missing children. Nothing.

In fact the extensive records we do have say exactly the opposite — namely that the deaths of children who sadly died of the diseases of the day at residential schools were all properly recorded, and that almost all of the deceased children were buried by their parents on their home reserves.

The small minority who were buried in special school cemeteries, (because the transportation of the bodies back to remote reserves was impractical,) all received Christian burials. Their places of burial were made known to their parents. The fact is that record keeping of indigenous children at residential schools was far superior to record keeping of the children on reserves, where far greater numbers died of exactly the same diseases.

But for reasons best left to future historians to ponder the Trudeau government and its CBC media ally immediately accepted the crackpot Kamloops claim as true. CBC and other gullible media went into overdrive pumping out misinformation in support of the baseless claim, while the Trudeau government ordered all flags on federal buildings across Canada lowered, where they remained for six months!

Trudeau’s indigenous affairs minister, Marc Miller — perhaps the worst Indian Affairs minister in the history of this country — recklessly promised $320 million to indigenous communities that wanted to make similar claims. And, of course, others did almost immediately.

Down the road, Chief Willie Sellars, of the Williams Lake indigenous community, outdid the rhetoric of his colleague, Chief Casimir. According to Sellars, priests had not only killed countless indigenous children, but had thrown their bodies into “rivers, streams and lakes” as well as the usual old standards of throwing bodies into school furnaces and incinerators. Other communities wanting in on the money jumped onto the bandwagon with increasingly fantastical tales.

The result of this Trudeau government recklessness — aided by a gullible media that asked no questions — was predictable. These false stories became etched in stone as the truth within the indigenous community. A victim mentality that was already deeply imbedded became pathological, as indigenous communities became convinced — on evidence that was entirely false — that they were victims of a genocide committed by their neighbours.

The chiefs also silenced the many thoughtful members within their communities who knew that these stories of murderous priests were not true. As investigative reporter, Terry Glavin, explains, even among the Tk’emlups community there were always sensible voices who did not believe those claims:

“From the outset, even among Tk’emlúps people there was a great deal of skepticism and disbelief in stories about nuns waking children in the middle of the night to bury their murdered classmates under the light of the moon”

But instead of heeding those sensible indigenous voices, and even as it became increasingly clear to Canadians that these stories were just tall tales, there was so much money in it that the chiefs doubled down. They insisted that Canadians must pretend to believe that the claims were true.

That would be their price for “reconciliation”.

As noted above, the weak Liberal government gave into this blackmail by removing the funding cap on searches it had tried to impose. But other important institutions cravenly played along with what was now an officially sanctioned lie as well.

Jon Kay explains in his recent Quillette essay how the Law Society of British Columbia is now insisting that anyone who wants to be a lawyer in that province must pretend to believe the “evil priest” line of stories.

Other law schools and law societies across Canada are doing this as well. They are so focused on what they perceive as the holy grail of “reconciliation” that they are prepared to sacrifice a pursuit of truth as their goal, and force their own students — our future lawyers and judges — to do the same.

Our public schools — to bring about “reconciliation — are indoctrinating our children with lessons about the “215 Kamloops graves” and other misinformation, such as the “Charlie Wenjack” story.

Children are taught that Wenjack was abused by Catholic priests and nuns in his residential school, and ran away as a result.

In fact, as author and historian Robert MacBain explains in his important book, “The Lonely Death Of An Ojibway Boy” Charlie Wenjack lived at a Protestant hostel run by a kindly indigenous family, attended school by the day in Kenora, and probably never saw a residential school, or met a priest or nun, in his life.

But, in the interests of “reconciliation” our children are being misinformed by their teachers.

And when a teacher does dare to tell the truth, as when B.C. teacher, Jim McMurtry told his students that the children who died in residential schools died of the diseases of the day — and were not tortured to death, as was being reported — he was frogmarched from his classroom, and summarily fired.

Or Frances Widdowson, who was fired from her tenured university position largely for daring to dispute what was becoming an increasingly extreme residential school narrative.

All of this obvious unfairness, is happening in the name of “reconciliation.” The senior lawyers who oversee the Law Society, and the educators who select our children’s school curricula are doing a great disservice to this country. As are our MPs who foolishly labelled Canada as genocidal, based on the same false Kamloops claim.

As are our senior indigenous leaders, who know by know that the murderous, secret-burying priest story has always been just a silly ghost story that children tell to scare one another. Yet they insist that Canadians must pretend to believe it, or they will withhold the “reconciliation” that they wield like a sledge hammer over our heads.

It should have occurred to everyone by now that if the price of “reconciliation” is pretending to believe a lie, the price is far too high. That kind of “reconciliation” is worth nothing.

In actual fact, what this country and its indigenous population needs is not “reconciliation” at all. Too many indigenous people are stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. What they need is not “reconciliation” but integration into the economy, and the opportunity to participate in it. As for the opportunists who exploit a false claim to benefit themselves, they deserve only our contempt.

What nobody needs is a country where citizens must lie to each other in order to stay together.

And now, to add insult to injury, MP Leah Gazan wants to make it a law that we must all lie to each other by criminalizing what she calls “residential school denialism”. She specifically singles out the Kamloops claim as something Canadians must accept as true. As she sees it any Canadian who refuses to do so, or who dares to suggest that the positives, as well as the negatives of residential schooling should be recognized, should be made a criminal. Dostoevsky famously asked if there will come a time “when intelligent people will be banned from thinking, so as not to offend the imbeciles”. Has that time arrived?

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Alberta

Ottawa’s oil and gas emissions cap will hit Alberta with a wallop

Published on November 8, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

Even if Canada eliminated all its GHG emissions expected in 2030 due to the federal cap, the emission reduction would equal only four-tenths of one per cent of global emissions—a reduction unlikely to have any impact on the trajectory of the climate in any detectable manner or produce any related environmental, health or safety benefits.

After considerable waiting, the Trudeau government released on Monday draft regulations to cap greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Canada’s oil and gas producers.

The proposed regulations would set a cap on GHG emissions equivalent to 35 per cent of the emissions produced in 2019 and create a GHG emissions “cap and trade” system to enable oil and gas producers (who cannot reduce emissions enough to avoid the cap) to buy credits from other producers able to meet the cap. Producers unable to meet the cap will also be able to obtain emission credits (of up to 20 per cent of their needed emission reductions) by investing in decarbonization programs or by buying emission “offsets” in Canada’s carbon markets.

According to the government, the cap will “cap pollution, drive innovation, and create jobs in the oil and gas industry.” But in reality, while the cap may well cap pollution and drive some innovation, according to several recent analyses it won’t create jobs in the oil and gas industry and will in fact kill many jobs.

For example, the Conference Board of Canada think-tank estimates that the cap would reduce Canada’s GDP by up to $1 trillion between 2030 and 2040, kill up to 151,300 jobs across Canada by 2030, and national economic growth from 2023 to 2030 would slow from 15.3 per cent to 14.3 per cent.

Not surprisingly, Alberta would be hardest hit. According to the Board, from 2023 to 2030, the province’s economic growth would fall from an estimated 17.8 per cent to 13.3 per cent and employment growth would fall from 15.8 per cent to 13.6 per cent over the same period. Alberta government revenues from the sector would decline by 4.5 per cent in 2030 compared to a scenario without the cap. As a result, Alberta government revenues would be $4.5 billion lower in nominal terms in fiscal year 2030/31. And between 54,000 to 91,500 of Canada’s job losses would occur in Alberta.

Another study by Deloitte estimates that, due to the federal cap, Alberta will see 3.6 per cent less investment, almost 70,000 fewer jobs, and a 4.5 per cent decrease in the province’s economic output (i.e. GDP) by 2040. Ontario would lose more than 15,000 jobs and $2.3 billion from its economy by 2040. And Quebec would lose more than 3,000 jobs and $0.4 billion from its economy during the same period.

Overall, according to Deloitte, Canada would experience an economic loss equivalent to 1.0 per cent of GDP, translating into lower wages, the loss of nearly 113,000 jobs and a 1.3 per cent reduction in government tax revenues. (For context, Canada’s economic growth in 2023 was only 1.1 per cent.)

And what will Canadians get for all that economic pain?

In my study published last year by the Fraser Institute, I found that, even if Canada eliminated all its GHG emissions expected in 2030 due to the federal cap, the emission reduction would equal only four-tenths of one per cent of global emissions—a reduction unlikely to have any impact on the trajectory of the climate in any detectable manner or produce any related environmental, health or safety benefits.

Clearly, the Trudeau government’s new proposed emissions cap on the oil and gas sector will impose significant harms on Canada’s economy, Canadian workers and our quality of life—and hit Alberta with a wallop. And yet, as a measure intended to avert harmful climate change, it’s purely performative (like many of the government’s other GHG regulations) and will generate too little emission reductions to have any meaningful impact on the climate.

In a world of rational policy development, where the benefits of government regulations are supposed to exceed their costs, policymakers would never consider this proposed cap. The Trudeau government will submit the plan to Parliament, and if the cap becomes law, it will await some other future government to undo the damage inflicted on Canadians and their families.