I did something old-timey with my hotel breakfast today: I read a newspaper, an actual newspaper, the Friday edition of the Calgary Sun.
For a guy who got his start in the newspaper business in 1972, and loved the things from the get-go, I’ve barely touched one for 20 years. So it was interesting to hold in my hands the Oct. 11, 2024, edition of the Sun, all 18 of its tiny, uninformative, and heavily biased tabloid pages.
“GREEN LIGHT,” screeched the Page 1 headline, “New life for LRT project >> Dreeshen: ‘They caved’ BELL. P.5”
Well, it’s not quite, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” the most famously incomprehensible example of what once upon a time was known as “headlinese,” but it was enough like it to make me chuckle audibly, startling nearby breakfasters, especially since it was obviously going to be about the same story covered by this blog the day before. (Just sayin’.)
I had written: “In what had to be a humiliating climbdown, Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen issued a joint statement this morning with Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek explaining that the Green Line LRT project is back on again, sort of.”
By contrast, according to the headline atop the morning screed by Sun political columnist Rick Bell: “Gondek and crew cave on Green Line, game of chicken is over.”
Mr. Bell, in addition to his role writing columns attacking Mayor Gondek with metronomic regularity, seems happy to pitch in nowadays as the opinionist of last resort when a United Conservative Party narrative has unraveled to the point it needs mending.
Mr. Dreeshen’s effort to undermine the popularity of former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, who is now the leader of the Opposition NDP, spectacularly backfired when it killed the largest infrastructure project in Calgary’s history. This obviously upset enough rich contractors to make it necessary for someone in the UCP to tell the youthful minister to find a way to bring it back to life again.
Mr. Bell, in turn, appears to have taken on the difficult challenge of making Calgarians forget that Mr. Dreeshen is responsible for this financial and political disaster.
Now, thanks to the minister’s shenanigans, the Green Line has turned into Schrödinger’s train* – alive and dead at the same time!
As told to Mr. Bell, Mr. Dreeshen explained: “To say I somehow backed down. I said the money is here if you guys choose our alignment. I don’t know what game of chicken they were playing, they 100 per cent caved. We didn’t flinch and they came on board.” (Not a typo. Too long for a mere “sic.” Sorry.)
Yeah, right. The intemperate Mr. Dreeshen’s self-serving yarn, delivered through the medium of Mr. Bell, completely undermines the narrative the government sensibly tried to establish the day before in its “joint statement,” supposedly from Mr. Dreeshen and Mayor Gondek.
That narrative tried to suggest the UCP Government is run by adults, Mr. Dreeshen among them, capable of getting along with the mayor for the good of the taxpayers of Alberta’s largest city, which is home to a lot of folks whose votes the UCP is going to need one of these days.
Mr. Dreeshen’s snarling printed riposte this morning suggests that the kid from Innisfail, a half hour south of Red Deer, isn’t even capable of acting like a grownup for 24 hours!
This got me thumbing through the rest of the Sun. Not much there. One story carried water for a right-wing candidate for mayor; a column by Toronto Sun drivelist Brian Lilley predictably attacked the prime minister; and an editorial reflexively went after the Liberals for the federal carbon tax.
Additional commentary was devoted to National Newspaper Week, which apparently comes to an end tomorrow. (National Newspaper Week was not a thing when I worked for newspapers. Why would it be? They made money hand over fist without celebratory calendar events.)
“News you can trust,” said the main headline on the page, in heavy black type, but sounding plaintive just the same. “Day after day, Canada’s journals publish content you can count on.”
Canadians, said the column beneath it – by former Edmonton Journal and Montreal Gazette editor Lucinda Chodan – “continue to look to newspapers for credible information they can trust.”
They do?
Ms. Chodan, who appears to have sensibly all but retired from the newspaper business, is a fine journalist and it’s not her fault where her column appeared. Just the same, the effect is ironic, to say the least.
Another column on the same page, also supposedly celebrating National Newspaper Week, complains about the CBC’s digital advertising revenues and Canada Post’s junk mail regulations.
But don’t blame the CBC or Canada Post for the state of Canada’s newspaper industry – which, increasingly is no longer an industry but a boutique sideline of the online clickbait machine.
Notwithstanding the nostalgic picture painted by Ms. Chodan, the current state of Canada’s newspapers is illuminated by the easy opinion columns and constant right-wing propaganda found in the pages of the Sun.
Readers, it would seem, aren’t buying what they’re selling.
And how does this moribund “industry” stay afloat? The occasional advertisement – “New Sex Pill Grows in Popularity With Recent Approval in Canada,” says the advertorial story on the back on Friday’s Calgary Sun – and federal subsidies from the very Liberals it attacks every day.
Go figure! I don’t get why they do that either. Hope you had a great National Newspaper Week, I guess.
*Credit where credit is due, this line was the inspiration of The Progress Report, which forever has my gratitude.
I once worked with someone who reminds me of Devin Dreeshen. We were riding on the same elevator when he declared, “I’m God”. I responded by saying, “I’m getting off before this elevator gets hit by lightning,” and did just that. He was full of overconfidence and ego. He also used to call his mother for a ride home from work. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah, he had Devin Dreeshen’s hair.
Abs: Do you know what became of him? As Time Magazine once asked on its cover, back in the day when Time covers were a thing: “Is God Dead?” DJC
Unsurprisingly, he married an older woman, several years went by and then he vanished from the internet. Cue scary Halloween music. Time predicted it all. Also, the other co-worker on that elevator has since died! It took decades, but there you go.
Dreeshen the younger learned his contempt for voters at his father’s knee and later from serving his father’s master, in PM Harper’s administration.
You lucky Albertans. “New Sex Pill Grows in Popularity With Recent Approval in Canada.” Today in my Postmedia print edition what do we easterners get? “People across Canada are now Improving Pain, Inflammation and Stress, and Sleeplessness with one natural fast acting pill.” Huh. You folks can up (so to speak) your lusts and carnalities while we’re stuck soothing our bodily aches, reducing ankle swelling and having a long snore. Sign me up for the Calgary Sun!
Tom: Now that’s interesting. I see potential for a theatrical production, something along the lines of, “No Sex Pills, Please! We’re Ontarian.” DJC
Demographics? Young(ish) guys in Alberta versus old folks in Ontario?
Journalistic standards are now basically non-existant in Alberta.
My newspaper of choice was the Edmonton Journal. Emphasis on the was. After Graham Thomson and Paula Simons left (I didn’t always agree with them, but they had integrity), I stopped reading the Urinal.
As for the Edmonton Dumb, well, Lorne Gunter says it all. Only good thing about it was they printed on made in Alberta newsprint. Not sure how good it was for lining bird cages and wrapping fish.
Gerald: Lorne Gunter, Licia Corbella, David Staples, and the others at Postmedia, are such bad columnists. They don’t hide their allegiance to the UCP, and their disdain for the Liberals and the NDP.
Anonymous, Everyone in my family who got the Sun dumped it because of them. They are so Pro- Reformer it is sickening. It didn’t surprise us to learn that Postmedia was forced to lay off 500 employees after these fools began helping the Reformers spread their lies.
I can understand the Post considering Bell a useful idiot but why on earth does the CBC have him on their panels? He’s a joke. Bell’s columns are deliberately short so that his loyal readers’ lips don’t get tired. Regarding Bell, to paraphrase Sir Leopold Amery, who paraphrased Oliver Cromwell, “in the name of God, go”.
Coincidentally
Yesterday looking to recycle local storage shack teardown and found 1984 Medicine Hat paper printed on tin as some kind of wall covering.
Most notably the grocery ads sale items were not that far off current prices altho a new mercury cougar was just over 13 K.
The Sun which already was mostly a hollow right wing echo chamber is becoming even more so. The whole thing doesn’t collapse mainly because it really doesn’t have direct competition, but still seems to be gradually shrinking itself out of existence. It may go out with a whimper, not a bang.
Most of the better people have already mostly left the ship, leaving those like Bell, who seems to be the equivalent of a doctor in the emergency room of spin for the UCP, despite his likely protestations he is just a journalist. No, he is the go to guy now when the UCP is in deep trouble in Calgary, which these days seems to be much of the time lately.
Perhaps it was further pride that spurred Dreeshan’s burst of revisionist history, but it is better to let some time pass for people to forget, before trying to revise things. Otherwise it may destroy one’s credibility even further.
Of course this is the point where Bell can again say he is just a journalist, but the UCP would be wise to keep Dreeshan more than a hundred miles away from the city for some time. So perhaps Dreeshan can go back to his old hobby for a while – day drinking in Edmonton.
Don’t know why you were in Calgary but perhaps you stumbled upon the opening of the reconstructed C-Train crossing and 17th avenue extension into Millionaires’ Row. Was it just a coincidence that this event happened on the same day that funding for the Green Line was reinstated? Perhaps Mr. Bell knows.
More importantly, why oh why did they name this dead end after American roper Flores LaDue? Yes, I know that the Stampede’s founders were mainly American carnies or locals using US money, but couldn’t the powers that be have recognized a community builder or First Nations leader?
Finally, solving the mystery of the Immaculate Re-Birth of the Green Line is simple: what developer is currently building its FOURTH 30-story apartment tower in Quarry Park, and has another 4 or 5 skeletal towers on 24st, also in Quarry Park? Hmmm.
Hiding: Alas, I never got anywhere close to 17th Ave. DJC
I had a great Newspaper Week. Got my review of the BC leaders’ debate printed in a new newspaper which, after a few faltering steps and missed issues, has finally attracted enough advertising and other help to resume printing for its barely several hundred household-readership on our little Gulf Island. It seems an odd thing as bigger, more veteran newspapers are sublimating into halite deposits of infomercials, but I must say, “The Barnacle” is one of the good things to come out of the pissy, anti-vax, F-Trudeau movement (yes, even here on a hippie Gulf Island, but with longtime“Granola Anti-vaxxers” joining the mini- “Freedom-Convoy” of several cars following a pickup truck, a white sheet of plywood braced on-edge in the box, “Take Back Canada” and other unmentionables scrawled on it in red paint, that got middle fingers instead of thumbs-up from my suburban neighbourhood as it passed through, honking). New management of the 32 year-old advertiser, delivered free to about 1200 mailboxes on Hornby and Denman Islands (which my daughter-in-law used to own, many years ago), decided to become an aggregator of anti-vax and generally contrarian and conspiracy-theory screed which titillated the less-than-ten-percent “freedom” faction on our Island. It also earned vocal opprobrium which the editor—whose policy is to print anything and everything “unedited and uncensored” in the name of “free speech”—took as bracing encouragement that inevitably spilled onto the local FB bulletin board where he threaten, among other things, to sue his critics, of which there were so many that an alternative publication, “The Barnacle”—which is still pretty out-there, as one might expect of an alternative lifestyle enclave—was born.
I’m happy to contribute to attracting more advertising to it—that is, to be honest, enticing advertising away from the radical, granola-right publication which the ever-vigilant contingency of raging-granny feminists here have branded an “old incel wank-fest” and “transphobic trash-rag.” Ouch!
The Barnacle’s secret? I dunno—maybe because there’s no online edition so when everybody wants to know all about the trash-rag editor attacking the alternative editor in the Canada post office where the latter works, they have to wait until the Barnacle is delivered to their mailboxes. Yet I don’t think most are very disappointed that the new paper exists as an alternative to MAGA-like nastiness and hasn’t reported how a certain somebody got busted by security cams and has been banned from the post office on which his trash-rag depends for delivering his and his contributors’ hateful bile. But was it Jan6, Denman style? “Maybe,” said one of my moles. In any case, many Islanders don’t bother reading it anymore but instead use it for fire-starter since the postman cannot discriminate for a paid, mass mail-out. Many copies are simply mailed back to the post office where, I’m told, it costs the few workers there precious time.
Times have sure changed since our daughter-in-law printed a one-and-a-half-inch-square submission she had second thoughts about, came over in the evening to ask our opinion, which was to not sweat it (it was fairly innocuous) and publish an editor’s note (the first ever in this otherwise pure advertiser) in the next week’s edition that anonymous submissions would no longer be published. She went home and stayed up all night reprinting the then-1000 copy edition without the irksome ad. I was amazed but proud of her integrity. Ah, so long ago …(now her two children, born since, are working on Masters and PhDs)…
I spent the rest of the week smoothing disgruntled former (?) Dipper feathers still steamed about Site-C dam on the Peace River where Christy Clark danced her last campaign for the now-defunct BC Liberals (she did indeed get it passed the point of no return by the time Green-Dipper alliance toppled her two month-old minority government: new NDP Premier John Horgan had to break the bad news that, after re-commissioning the independent BC Hydro watchdog to assess the Crown Corp’s financial situation, he could not shut down construction as he sort of promised. Site-C is just now, 8 years layer, flooding some of the world’s highest-latitude arable farmland and probably depriving aquatic habitat downstream in Alberta), or about the pipeline blockade in ‘unceded’ Wet’suwet’en traditional territory (the NDP and federal Liberals partners tested the 2014 SCoC William, or “Tsihlqot’in,” decision and got zapped), or, of course, fracking. Phew! Takin’ flame but staying civil in my new employment just the same.
My political preoccupation, before even Canada’s ever-fascinating psephology, is the condition of the partisan right and the Greens, both competitors to my own party in BC and of consequence to the nation, to my two favourite provinces, and even my tiny Island home where, if you want to start a donnybrook, just ask any two residences what colour the sky is. But it’s not often political events in Canada, UK, and the USA, or “Greater Anglo-Saxony,” the First-Past-the-Post dinosaurs of gold (as pro-reppers would call the longtime hegemony of wealth and power) actually supersedes Alberta’s spotlight on poop-cookies, &c, so I’m in my element, surrounded by tumult and hope on both the right and —uh—whatever the Greens are. But I could never look away from Alberta politics for very long: it’s the most interesting of all while living “in interesting times.”
In one week BC goes to the polls in a race that’s being called, in every permutation, ‘too close to call,’ ‘neck-and-neck,’ and a ‘nail-biter.’ That’s largely because the partisan right fell apart after the NDP was re-elected to a strong majority in 2020 (yes, despite Site-C, pipelines and fracking) and is scrambling to cobble together a new party, PDQ, that’s farther right than ever. The upstart BC Conservatives hadn’t any presence in the Assembly since the early 1950s until the BC Liberal Opposition leader kicked former cabinet minister, John Rustad, out of caucus for denying climate change, and he thence became the revived BCCon party leader to whom a handful of erstwhile BC Liberal (now called “BC United”) MLAs crossed the floor and, since the last session ended, is now the vessel to which many more erstwhile BCU MLAs have poured themselves—so many, the BCU leader suddenly folded his own party just two months ago to the outrage of many orphaned BCU incumbents who’d already begun organizing their campaigns. It’s always educative to watch parties of the right permutate, as Albertans surely know all too well.
Rookie leader Rustad has inadvisedly doubled down on some far-right tropes like banning books his religious faction doesn’t like in school libraries, axing the carbon tax, getting rid of vaccine “mandates” and other very controversial proposals like repealing the NDP-legislated UNDRIP (UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) which is sure to provoke a firestorm of litigation and injunctions against his plan to get rid of red tape in order to “open up” logging and mining. Rustad was the BC Liberal minster for Reconciliation but his careful choice of words nevertheless betrays some easily recognizable euphemisms for paternalistic and racist misunderstanding of indigenous nations’ demands and recent SCoC decisions about protocols required before developing resources on traditional indigenous territories. It reminds that it was his BC Liberal cabinet which shit-canned the two-decade old BC Treaty Commission in a Christy-snit the day after federal environmental review rejected the Taseko Mine application in Tsihlqot’in territory.
But by studying Alberta politics, as well as the federal Conservatives and, of course, US Republicans under Donald F tRump, I’ve learned that, for fascinatingly arcane reasons, the partisan right everywhere in the Western World is no longer wary of wholly impolitic policy proposals and rhetoric—in fact, it now seems de rigueur. So there’s that…
But whither the Greens? I’ve got my theories as to why an ostensible environmental party can’t avail voters’ increasing environmental concerns, but that’s a small pea under a mountain of mattresses that’s nearly as irrelevant in BC as the Greens always are in Alberta—until the BC Greens tripled their seats in 2017 and supported a very thin NDP minority. But, eerily similar to the neo-right, there’s been schism that diminishes Green standing in the public eye—for example, Andrew Weaver, who won BC’s first Green seat and initially dithered whether to support a BC Liberal or NDP minority in 2017, crossed the floor, as ‘t were, to sit as an Independent for the remainder of the session and did not run again. That he recently endorsed the BCC might explain why. Intestinal strife among federal Greens so dampened prospects that a weary Elizabeth May had to return from planned retirement to save the party.
BC Green leader, Sonia Furstenau, won praise, if not better prospects for her few candidates (Greens aren’t running a full slate), for her spritely TV debate performance. If BC politics weren’t so polarized, the Greens might fair better, but Furstenau directly said she’s content to win just enough seats to hold the balance of power again—and we don’t have to guess with which party she would. It could be a single seat, but that’s what passes for Green success—at least so far.
Yep, it sho is nice to see those two hard copies of the warring hawk and dove publications in my mailbox (we have a pretty good monthly with a full editorial board, too, also delivered free, to which I and many others donate refundable recycling). But I can’t imagine doing without online sources, especially from Alberta, where I’ve lived and worked, which I love, and which exemplifies perhaps better than even the USA how the partisan right struggles to hang onto dwindling privilege and relevance.
And special thanks to DJC.
As podcaster David Feldman says, stay strong and defend the weak. Good luck, my Alberta friends!
Since my Parakeet died, I have no use for newspapers.
Let them all perish.
Very sorry about you parakeet, Just. DJC
It’s all about Danielle Smith trying to save her butt, because she is very much walking on a very narrow tightrope. She has to make herself look good, just in time for her leadership review, while attempting to smear Naheed Nenshi, because his support is so much greater. The Sun is just a flat out mouthpiece for the UCP, the CPC, and any of these other pseudo Conservative and Reform type parties. Their letters from people, and their columnists reflect that in spades.