Chris Selley explains why the fringe views of obscure Conservative riding associations get so much more juice in the legacy media than equivalent brain-farts from Liberal or NDP groups:
Whatever lands in your news hole from the Conservative Party of Canada convention, which kicks off Thursday night in Quebec City, it’s a safe bet you’ll hear the result of the vote on Policy Resolution 1258. Sponsored by the North Okanagan—Shuswap riding association, it reads, in part, as follows: “A Conservative government will protect children by prohibiting life-altering medicinal or surgical interventions on minors under 18 to treat gender confusion or dysphoria”.
Needless to say this hasn’t gone down very well at the Ottawa press club, where discussion generally confines itself to two countries. “The pitch is similar to ones found across the United States, including in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in May banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth,” the increasingly breathless Canadian Press reported. “(It’s) a move many health professionals, parents and advocates of LGBTQS+ youth says places them at greater risk for suicide and depression.”
This is a distraction that leader Pierre Poilievre really doesn’t need. As I wrote last week, on the question of how schools should treat children who wish to change name or gender at school even quite reasonable policies can receive extraordinarily negative press if they are perceived to have been drafted by intolerant people. It’s as if the policies, reasonable on paper, might have some kind of cooties that could harm the children they affect. (That said, in some cases journalists and commentators don’t even seem to have read the policies in question.)
Policy Resolution 1258, like New Brunswick’s and Saskatchewan’s supposedly extreme “social transitioning” policies, isn’t at all extreme by world standards. Gender issues have enflamed the American culture wars, true enough — at last count 19 states, including Florida, had implemented new rules on “gender-affirming care” for kids (and in some cases adults). Naturally Canadian conservatives are watching, some approvingly.
So the legacy media loves intramural disputes within parties on the right, both because it gives them interesting things to report and pontificate about, and also because as a class, journalists tend to skew very heavily progressive. This leads naturally to a difference between how Conservative fringe opinions and progressive fringe opinions are treated in the media.
Especially for a neutral like myself, and especially given how much power party leaders have amassed relative to everyone else, there is a certain pleasure in making a party leader squirm. In the often hidebound and unimaginative world of Canadian politics, that can have benefits. These resolutions often serve as a sort of conscience-check for the party in question: Why aren’t the Liberals liberal enough? Why aren’t the Conservatives conservative enough? Sometimes the party even listens.
That said, I have no idea why parties inflict this on themselves. Mostly these resolutions just stir up trouble. Opposition parties and media alike use these resolutions to craft the dastardly narratives of their choice. The Conservatives in particular suffer from this, and in particular from the Ottawa media.
When the Conservatives ran advertisements claiming the Liberal government wanted to legalize hard drugs — a 2018 policy resolution brought forward by the caucus itself — CTV News declared the ads objectively “false.” The Liberals routinely chuck overboard progressive-minded proposals that come from the party’s left — on legalizing prostitution, for example, or electoral reform — and they’re never heard about again.
The Conservatives’ more right-wing policy proposals seem to get chucked into a giant narrative cauldron and fished out by reporters whenever necessary to prove that there is, in fact, a narrative that needs propagating: on abortion, on climate change, on euthanasia, on gender dysphoria, you name it, and no matter what the leader of the day — the guy everyone knows is in charge — might say.
