With July nearing its end, thoughts turn
ever so lightly to the offerings of Fall. It won’t be too long till those Back
to School commercials start filling the airwaves, and stacks of spiral
notebooks and printer paper start taking up the real estate once held by lawn
chairs and barbeques (can you tell I once worked in retail?). But when
September hits, it won’t just be school some of us are heading back to, but the
polls as well.
The Ontario Provincial
Election will unfurl over the six weeks leading up to the October 6th
polling date. Locally, Liberal Liz Sandals will attempt to defend her seat from
the NDP’s James Gordon, the Green’s Steven Dyck and either Robert Demille, Greg
Schirk and Bob Senechal for the Progressive Conservative Party. (NOTE: My Echo
deadline was before this past Monday’s PC nomination meeting, so to find out
which of the three is the one, head over to my blog at http://guelphpolitico.blogspot.com/)
You’ll notice that ‘P’ word in front of the
Conservative. That’s important because the leaders and organizers of the
Guelph-branch of the Ontario PCs want you to know they’re different. “One piece
of information that’s important to know is that the PC Party of Ontario and the
federal Conservative Party are not the same thing,” wrote Guelph PC President Allan
Boynton to the Guelph Mercury’s managing editor Phil Andrews. Andrews posted
the letter from Boynton on the “From the Editors” blog on the Mercury website.
Boynton’s sentiments were echoed in an
e-mail we exchanged the week before. “I want you to know that this process is
important to the City of Guelph, and it is our job as the local riding association to not guard our
candidates but to make them available to you, and the people that vote here,”
he wrote. Perhaps it should go without saying, but Boynton, who has some
experience putting his name on a ballot after running for city council last
year, knows that one can’t get elected in a vacuum of silence.
What’s strange is that Boynton has to make
such assurances to begin with. It should be a foregone conclusion that a
political candidate of any party should be available to reporters looking to
talk to them. At some point a certain segment of the political discourse
decided that the press was the enemy, and while some members of the press
sometimes behave in a manner unbefitting of our noble profession (*cough*News
of the World*cough*), the truth is that “gotcha journalism” is something
made up by Sarah Palin to explain why she didn’t know stuff. We’re just asking
questions.
That’s a shame because no matter the
division that separates us in our politics, there’s always stuff we can come
together and celebrate. For instance, I salute Prime Minister Stephen Harper
and his appearance this week as a day player on the turn-of-the-20th-century
crime procedural Murdoch Mysteries. The Prime Minister is a big fan, and
says he’s never missed an episode of the show. After a nudge from his daughter,
he reached out to the show’s producers, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Like a number of Canadian politicians,
Harper has, in the past, shown no qualms about appearing on sketch comedy shows
like The Rick Mercer Report, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and The
Royal Canadian Air Farce. It always amuses me when American politicians
laud their own humorousness by appearing on Saturday Night Live or The
Daily Show, while in Canada the interim leader of one of our major
political parties once dived into a lake naked with a CBC TV host.
I’ve ranted and raved a lot in recent
months about the cone of silence that the Conservative Party perpetuated during
the last election, and I don’t just mean locally with a certain candidate that
will remain nameless. To be clear, elections are about engagement, and included
in that are press interviews and debate appearances. But even if there’s
something not self-evident in that, Can’t we at least believe that we all mean
well, and that we probably have a lot in common once we get past our political
alignments.
You see, I, like the Prime Minister, also
enjoy the intrepid Inspector Murdoch, who uses up-to-the-date scientific
techniques, the then ever burgeoning field of forensics, to solve crimes in
Victorian Toronto. It’s like a steampunk CSI. Now do you think that the
stars and producers of Murdoch Mysteries were vetted for their politics
before Harper arrived on set to play the bit part of a desk sergeant? I hardly
think so. Why can’t the same be said for average citizens and journalists?
