Lala has been jousting online with various kooky members of the God Squad about the new Ontario sex ed curriculum.  I got involved.

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TORONTO—The reasons why the Sun News Network failed are, by now, more or less well known. 

What’s less known is why it was allowed to fail. 

Full disclosure, as I join The Hill Times on a weekly basis: I was the House Bolshevik at the network. Alone among the conservatives, at the start, I endeavoured to provide a progressive point of view. It was never dull.  

I’d been ask to contribute to the fledgling venture in the summer of 2010 by Kory Tenecyke. Kory, with whom I’d worked on an environmental project a few years before, promised I would be allowed to say whatever I wanted to say, on-air and in the column I’d be writing for the Sun papers.  

He kept his word. From the start—and, later, when other progressives became regular contributors—Sun News Network was, indeed, a proponent of unfettered free speech.

But therein lay one of its problems. Some of the network’s regulars seemed to prefer shouting to debating, and their speech—while free—was not always smart. The network got into trouble, too often. And broadcast regulators—in particular the CRTC—started to see Sun News as more of an irritant than anything else. 

That was one of its big problems. Others: its ultimate owner, Pierre Karl Peladeau, jumped into politics after solemnly promising that he wouldn’t. Another problem: an unfair requirement that 80 per cent of its programming be original—something that neither CBC nor CTV had to do. Also, lousy terms dictated by cable providers. And—most of all—a distant perch on the TV dial, so that too many would say what my mother too often said: “Dear, I can’t watch you when I can’t find you.”

But all of that is ancient history. Sun News Network is gone, and it won’t be back. The reasons for its demise have been canvassed ad nauseum in the past 10 days. It died because it never had a chance. It died because not enough people could watch it, even if they wanted to. 

That’s what is known. What is less known is this: why would a Conservative Prime Minister let it die?

That, more than anything else, is what made me laugh the loudest, when conspiracy theorists would hiss that Sun News Network was an adjunct of the Prime Minister’s Office. “Oh, really? If Sun is so important to PMO, why would PMO let it die?”

And let it die it did. Canada’s Conservative (and conservative) government did nothing—zero, zippo, zilch—to help Sun News Network survive. 

That, to me, was puzzling. As a former special assistant to Jean Chrétien, I cannot tell you that my boss would have ever written a personal cheque to keep afloat The Toronto Star, were that Liberal-friendly newspaper ever to get into big financial trouble. But he (and Messrs. Pearson, Trudeau and Turner) would have done more—a lot more—than Stephen Harper and his colleagues ever did for Sun News Network. Which is, in sum, nothing. 

I would raise this with the conservative folks in the Sun News green room (which was really just a hallway). “Hey,” I’d say. “No Liberal politician would ever be dumb enough to let a pro-Liberal TV network fail just before an election campaign. Ever. What’s up with your Prime Minister?”

They’d shake their heads and gnash their teeth and rend their argyle garments. “You don’t understand Harper,” they’d say.

“You got that right,” I’d say.

It’s to the mutual credit of Sun News Network and Stephen Harper, I suppose: the former didn’t go, cap in hand, begging for help. And the latter didn’t ever provide any help.

But, as I say, it was weird. In political life, you don’t often get the chance to own your own printing press. But Stephen Harper did, and he didn’t care. Gave a Trudeau-esque shrug, and let Sun News die.

If Harper was ahead in successive polls by many percentage points, it might—might—be understandable. But he’s not. The polls show Harper and Justin Trudeau neck-and neck. In many circumstances, Ezra Levant may not be useful. But in a close election campaign, he probably could have been. 

Like I say: weird.  

It could be that Stephen Harper has some top-secret polls, showing him way, way ahead. Or his security/terror narrative is working really well (and it likely is), and he thinks he’s going to win big with it. 

But, when you are heading into the ring with an experienced boxer like Justin Trudeau, wouldn’t you want some extra help in your corner? I sure would. 

Stephen Harper didn’t. And, so, he let Sun News Network die. 

And the most-conservative Prime Minister—ironically enough—bears most of the blame for the failure of the most-conservative TV network. 

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…and he doesn’t get up off the mat, afterwards. Story here.

Her words here:

Don’t mess with this woman, little Con boys in short pants. She’ll make you regret it.

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Here is Bill C-51. Here is a bunch of commentary about it.

And here is your chance to pick the party with the position you like the best!

poll by twiigs.com

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You’ve read about this, I’m sure.

So, why didn’t the supposedly-expert authorities do this?

Question: why didn't cops keep tunnel intact and under surveillance, instead of filling it in and asking public for help? @metromorning

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 24, 2015

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42 for the Cons, 34 for the Grits. Hmm.

Looks like the CPC Quebec surge isn’t a myth, after all. Has happened.  Wow.

All weird, IMHO, when you look at “direction of the country” finding.

More here.

What’s your take, Dear Reader?

UPDATE: The impressive Dr. Coletto says this chart is the most interesting and, on reflection, he’s right: Harper has erased a 15-point Trudeau lead since August of last year. What’s even more interesting is this: it’s all happened before – ten years ago, when Paul Martin kicked off his Mad As Hell Tour. Even more, more interesting? Some of the folks from 2004-2005 are back running the show in 2015!

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If Sun News Network was still among the living, I’d have several chase producers asking me on today, to talk about the Ontario government’s new sexual education curriculum.

Lala and I had a vigorous debate about all of this yesterday morning, over espresso.  For your reading (dis)pleasure, I summarize my main points below.

• A qualifier, to acknowledge that what I experienced wasn’t what my peers experienced: I’m a doctor’s son.  Me and my brothers were having very open discussions about sex with our parents from an early age.  What they taught us, right from the start, was the importance of respect (for your partner) and knowledge (for yourself).
• Another qualifier: I don’t know what is in today’s announcement.  There were leaks to select media over the weekend, but we don’t know if those leaks are reliable, and if they represent the full picture.  I suspect they don’t.
• That all said, I offer the following.
• The debate has already started to follow the same bullshit trajectory that these things always follow – Left-Right, conservative-progressive, blab blah blah.  It’s a bunch of adults hollering at each other, while the kids sit largely on the sidelines, watching it all like it’s an ideological tennis match.  Or not watching at all.
• Personally, I favour the curriculum being very comprehensive, for the obvious reasons: teen pregnancies, STDs, sexual assaults, ignorance, discrimination.  All of those reasons, and more.
• But what I think doesn’t really matter.  What matters is what the kids think, because the curriculum is aimed at them.  And I am willing to bet that no shortage of adult experts, and adult educators, and adult academics, and adult parents were consulted.  But the kids, not so much.
• Thus, my point: the sex ed debate should be about technology, not ideology.  Because our kids aren’t waiting for us to have our little ideological debate.  They have been on the Internet for years, being exposed to notions about sex that are neither respectful nor knowledgeable.
• I almost don’t care, therefore, what is in the curriculum.  What I care about is that kids are able to access it, and explore it, in a way that works for them, ie., the Internet.  The Internet is private and modern; a teacher in the classroom is neither.
• Put the new curriculum all over the Internet.  Make it creative and interactive and relevant.  Make it ubiquitous enough to help overwhelm the harmful, hateful shit that is out there.
• And, yes, of course, teach it in the classroom, too.  But use Lala’s idea: have teams of impressive, energetic, smart young people go into classrooms to teach it.  Not Palaeolithic old farts who the kids already see as irrelevant.

Kids who aren’t even in school yet are regularly accessing sexually explicit stuff that old farts like me (and perhaps you) didn’t even see, or hear about, until we were adults.  The world has changed, duh.

The sex ed curriculum needs to change with it.  It needs to be for, and about, the intended audience.  Not a bunch of old people who haven’t had intercourse since Nixon was president.  Technology, not ideology: that’s the key.

In the Internet era, the notion that any kid waits to hear about sex ed from a teacher/parent is comical. #onpoli http://t.co/FF6NfjEkC6

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 22, 2015

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I tweeted this, so some guy tweeted back this.  I read it fast, so I tweeted this.

Someone tweeted I was a partisan apologist. When I first read it, I thought it said artisan proctologist.

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 21, 2015

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Here.

 

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It’s a Kerouac line, adapted for the circumstances. Fits.

Lately, I have been peering at this snapshot taken by Eric Grenier, like someone does when they are lost, and they are squinting at a map at the side of the road. Night falling, apprehension rising.

No single poll is reliable anymore. They get it wrong, a lot. This graph is probably different, however, because it is a rendering of a lot of polls, aggregated. It’s therefore harder to dismiss. Thus, I gaze at it, trying to unlock its mysteries.

 

You can divine its meaning as well as I can. You don’t have to be an expert. Among other things, it tells us:

• Trudeau has dropped, but not dramatically;
• Harper has risen, and inexorably; and
• Mulcair isn’t Jack Layton.

That’s pretty simplistic, but so is politics.  Harper’s wiggly line is good, Mulcair’s is bad, and Trudeau’s is so-so.  Ipso facto, the campaign matters.

That’s a cliché, but it’s also true.  That’s why Liberals – increasingly nervous about assorted things – have lately taken to repeating the mantra that the campaign matters, and the pre-season doesn’t.  (Maybe.)

To illustrate their point, they cite 1993.  Kim Campbell was the most popular Prime Minister in the history of polling, and Jean Chretien was being measured for a political pine box.  The campaign came, and everything changed.  (True.)

There’s a debate raging about this over on my Facebook page this morning.  In response to one commenter making the 1993-2015 comparison, an edited response from another commenter:

• Kim Campbell was untested, Stephen Harper is not;
• Jean Chretien had John Rae et al., Justin Trudeau has the folks who cooked up both Eve Adams and Sudbury;
• The issues mix favours Harper (security/economy) in a way it never favoured Campbell (jobs/change);
• The aggregate polling trend is presently slow and steady CPC upward growth, and slow and steady LPC erosion;
• Trudeau is decidedly not Chretien.

And that last one is the big one, as we attempt to divine the meaning of Grenier’s squiggles on a computer screen: if you were writing a book, a la Kerouac, and you were looking for someone to play Jean Chretien (Kerouac and Chretien were distantly related, by the way), who would you pick?

Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper?

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