Editorials - Dec. 23, 2022
Diverging paths
Year-end polls by Angus Reid are showing that while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has actually improved his popularity, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is struggling to find the same approval with only one-in-three (33 per cent) of Canadians viewing him favourably and 54 per cent holding a negative view. While it is early days in his campaign, the negative numbers are much higher than those previous party leaders Andrew Scheer, Erin O’Toole, and Stephen Harper were posting at a similar point in their leadership ventures.
After a year in which Trudeau shouldered much of the hostility around the so-called Freedom Convoy, high inflation and interest rates, a scarcity of children’s medications and a crumbling health care system, he rebounded by five points to end the year on a high note.
Notably, Poilievre’s largest hurdle will be gaining the trust and approval of women, demonstrated by this poll that showed around 15 per cent of Canadian women viewing him unfavourably and 40 per cent viewing him very unfavourably. This result is understandable, as he seems to think that a Trump-style appeal to angry, white men is his ticket to Sussex Drive. Not surprisingly this has resulted in his popularity being the highest in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the lowest in Quebec and Ontario, which happen to have the highest number of federal seats.
Whether he heeds the polls and works on delivering a platform that has a much more broad appeal remains to be seen, but it will be a story to watch in the upcoming year. – DS
Everyone loves a circus
As traditional news outlets like newspapers and television stations struggle to compete for curious eyeballs, social networks like Twitter seem to have no problem snatching them up, regardless of the importance (or lack thereof) of what’s being discussed.
Real journalists are out there doing important work (and getting banned from Twitter in some cases, for that matter, as a result), but it seems like the world is much more interested in watching the world burn. Since the world’s richest infant, Elon Musk, bought Twitter on what seems like some sort of billionaire’s lark, heads everywhere are left shaking every week. He has welcomed back Nazis, criminals and other unsavoury characters like Jordan Peterson, but has had his hands full banning journalists who have had the audacity to produce stories about Musk and the impact he’s having on the world (Twitter’s advertisers are leaving in droves and Tesla stock is in the toilet).
It seems that the king of free speech and power to the people is less interested in the idea when he’s the subject of criticism, earning him the nickname of “Space Karen” and that he gets his kicks by opening up just about everything to a Twitter poll. One such poll yielded a win for those voting for Musk to step down from Twitter. Meanwhile, rapper Snoop Dogg has held his own poll in the hopes of taking over.
So, while we know that nothing catches eyeballs like a car crash or a dumpster fire, it’s saddening to see the world captivated by a rich person having somewhat of a public breakdown, while honest, hard-working journalists and entertainment content creators struggle to keep their projects afloat. That, unfortunately, is today’s world. – SL
Lock him up
It’s easy, even for news junkies, to shrug off the day’s developments regarding former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 Committee when the world is so upside down and Trump himself dedicates himself daily anew to being more outrageous than he was the previous day. However, the final committee recommendations should not be shrugged off. They are historic for a world leader and the fact that they aren’t being treated that way and that many still support Trump’s absurd claims show just how far democracy south of the border has fallen.
In its final public meeting, the committee recommended to the Justice Department that Trump be prosecuted on at least four charges connected to the Jan. 6 attack on The Capitol. The recommended charges include obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, assisting an insurrection and conspiring to defraud the United States.
We’ve come a long way from the pesky task of fact-checking the former president on winning Michigan’s (non-existent) Man of the Year Award and his childish nicknames. These are real crimes that, many believe, have been committed by the former President of the United States, the world’s shining beacon of democracy and freedom (according to Americans) and a lot of Americans (both politicians and residents) would prefer to ignore them or actively question their accuracy.
It’s been a long time since that fateful November day in 2016 when what Hillary Clinton opined was a “basket of deplorables” turned out to be more like nearly 63 million Americans who steered Trump into office and there’s been a lot of chaos along the way. That shouldn’t numb us to the severity of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 and, it appears, the major role Trump played in one of the darkest days in American history. – SL