There’s only so much humiliation Canada can bear as Carney’s awkward French fails the historical Habitant test

For today’s journalists, it’s about maintaining the de rigueur requirement of not asking the cool kids tough questions

The Rewrite welcomes longtime journalist and former Montreal Gazette Editor-in-Chief Peter Stockland, who knows more than a thing or two about media and the craft of journalism.

My late great friend, former Toronto Star reporter and satiric genius Patrick Doyle, once conjured an entity called l’Office National de l’Humiliation du Quebec.

During innumerable crises fostered by la belle province’s perception that it was being perpetually insulted by “le reste du Canada,” Patrick would feign filling out interminable French-only bureaucratic forms, lick an imaginary envelope, and send the detailed, stinging complaint to l’ONHQ, as it became in acronym.

“Avec l’ONHQ, une autre humiliation battu,” he would declare, finger pointed to Heaven. Another humiliation beaten back.

Based on this week’s hubub over Liberal leader Mark Carney’s refusal to participate in a Quebec TV network’s pay-to-play televised election debate, it seems l’ONHQ is needed now more than never (since it never actually existed). How else to address the flood of outrage spilling from political lips decrying yet another nouvelle humiliation?

“Quebecers will pass judgment without appeal,” said Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, who obviously has no vested interest in sounding like prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner.

“Cancelling this debate is insulting to Quebecers,” judged NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who has long had his finger on the pulse of francophone minds given that he’s a native of Scarborough, ON, and the current MP for Burnaby, B.C.

“The Liberals want to be re-elected for a fourth term, but their leader is too afraid to debate me in French,” chipped in Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, sounding nothing like a politico who has never met a political knife he isn’t happy to twist.

Satirists might spoof all this as awkwardly obvious political showmanship, a pas de deux by the menage à trois of three opposition leaders hoping to improve their lot with Quebecers. The satirists would be right, which was exactly the point of Patrick Doyle’s social imaginary of the ONHQ.

When everything is politically humiliating all the time, the cost of politicians making knee jerk jackasses of themselves drops below zero. Cue this week’s run on the Bank of Buffoons selling Canadians short with a show of ersatz offence over the new Liberal mark not wanting to pony up $75K to a private TV network for the privilege of participating in a debate he can’t win.

In fact, at this early stage of the campaign, Carney is beginning to come across as a mark in yet another Liberal Party of Canada’s display of utter contempt for Canadian voters. Worst of all, it’s being aided and abetted by seemingly willing media shills.

Ironclad caveat: What follows is a reckoning of the federal Liberal Party’s recent conduct. Paradoxical as it might sound, that doesn’t make it a partisan attack on the federal Liberal Party. I don’t look at things on a party label basis, which, also paradoxically, doesn’t mean I think party labels are irrelevant. They’re not. They help busy people with little time to suss out political minutia while situating themselves in broad categories of policy, conduct and marketing appeal.

But journalists are precisely the people who get paid, or are willing to live on butterflies and love, to parse those particularities for consistency and, in rare cases, even common sense. In the immortal words of Daffy Duck: “It’s a living.”

Indeed, it’s what journalists are supposed to live for. But was there not even one journalist in this country, either during the leadership “contest” or the run up to the election call, who thought to ask the question at the core of Carney’s candidacy?

It is this: How did a man whose French seems too shaky to qualify him for a junior public facing clerical post in the federal civil service become leader of the party that introduced and entrenched bilingualism in federal public life? Here’s a subordinate question: Why didn’t anybody, either in the Liberal Party or the media, during the vetting process for the leadership race, ask Mark Carney to ad lib a few verses of “Frere Jacques,” if not “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” to determine just how good or bad his French might possibly be? A summary question: How were we, as voters, not considered entitled to know something so fundamental?

There’s at least a two-part potential answer to all three questions.

The first part is that the current iteration of the federal Liberal Party has grown so arrogantly self-satisfied, so solipsistically entranced by the conviction of its entitlement to office and power, that it thought it could simply blow past Canadians (including but not limited to Quebecers), a prime minister who apparently fails the most primary, 60-year-old, sans question requirement of the highest executive office in the land.

The second part is that the nation’s media writ large seems so in thrall to Liberal Party mythology about the über alles superiority of its leadership class that it actually sees no need to pose questions such as the first part above.

It’s beyond bias. It’s become a kind of willful blindness based less on ideology, which would actually be somewhat admirable, and more on what might be called fashionableism: the vanity of being able to keep socially beneficial distance from the nerds and the dweebs and instinctively align oneself with the he/she/they important figures of the moment. Although not codified in, say, the Canadian Association of Journalists ethics manual, it’s about maintaining the de rigueur requirement of not asking the cool kids tough questions.

One example, and in fairness it is but one of a number, popped up last week in a Globe and Mail column by that paper’s poster sophisticate Robyn Urback, who lauded Mark Carney for stealing, errr, “adopting” Conservative Party policies on the carbon tax, the capital gains tax and the GST on $1 million homes etc.

“Carney has adopted some of Mr. Poilievre’s best positions, but he offers them without the baggage, the smarm, the polarization that comes with the Conservative Leader. It’s the other guys ideas, without the other guy,” she wrote.

Perhaps this is meant to damn with faint praise? Hard to tell. What’s obvious is that it fails to ask the rather salient question in Canadian politics about how much Carney would labour to articulate, much less defend, his newly “adopted” policies in one of Canada’s two official languages. Nor does Urback acknowledge what should be a first order of business for any writer: isn’t using “the other guy’s ideas without the other guy” a textbook definition of plagiarism and has been known to get its practitioners fired on the spot?

What’s most compelling is that Urback doesn’t even bother to question correlation, much less causality, between, say, subjective “smarm,” and objective desirable tax policy. What difference does the former make to the latter? She fails to inquire. But then, why would she? I mean, like, who does that anymore? We’re talking fashion here, not fiscal probity or even basic journalistic probing.

If it weren’t so embarrassing, not to mention so corrosive of serious public debate, it truly would be the stuff of satire. Or perhaps, as my late great friend Patrick Doyle imagined years ago, it actually is. All we need is an office to house it and an address to which we can send our complaints.

(Peter Stockland is, among other things, a former editor in chief of the Montreal Gazette, editor of Readers Digest Canada, editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald and publisher of the Catholic Register.)