Warren Kinsella

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Shawinigate

The indispensable requirement for a good newspaper, Norman Mailer once noted, is to be as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

It is possible that the celebrated American novelist made his observation after he had been on the receiving end of a bad review: I cannot say. But his remark - while a classic Mailer-style overstatement - also has some echoes in the unending farce bearing the name “Shawinigate.”

I know, I know. You, like 81 per cent of all Canadians polled by Ipsos-Reid last week, have grown very weary of “Shawinigate.” You want, as the Ipsos-Reid survey made clear, the Opposition to drop the issue and “move on.” You feel, perchance, that there are some other public policy issues which merit scrutiny, but the Opposition is not listening.

If the Alliance and the Conservatives elect to continue with their perpetual Parliamentary inquisition, few Liberals will be upset. The Ipsos-Reid poll also found that, since the commencement of this absurd drama, Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s popularity - and that of his Liberal Party - has gone up, not down. Stockwell Day and Joe Clark may carry on, but they now do so at their peril.

Fine. But what of the media? Privately, some Alliance and Tory strategists will concede that “Shawinigate” would have been dropped long ago, had it not been for the right-wing media’s infantile fixation with the subject. Their attempts to raise other matters have been ignored, or greeted with hostility, they say. So the Tories and proto-Reformers continue to feign Question Period outrage, in order that they might be rewarded with a headline. As would a dog, perhaps, for a treat.

The dog’s master, to extend the metaphor (or the liar, to use Mailer’s word) has been the National Post. For two years, the journalistic invention of Conrad Black - the tycoon who openly expresses his detestation for Mr. Chretien - has been the pre-eminent “Shawinigate” inquisitor, publishing news stories that closely resemble anti-Chretien editorials. Slightly more than a year ago, I expressed my concern about this to someone at the Post, who responded by asking me to put my thoughts to paper. So I did.

Here is a little of what I wrote: “Shawinigan: The Post, as pretty much everyone should know by now, is determined to transform this inoffensive Quebec town into something synonymous with the Watergate apartment complex. For weeks - nay, months - Post reporter Andrew McIntosh (whose employer Mr. Black, by the way, is suing the Prime Minister for denying him a lifetime barony) has been a veritable journalistic St. George, charging out to slay the twin-headed dragon of prime ministerial perfidy and misdeeds. To Mr. McIntosh’s frustration, no doubt, neither the Canadian public nor competing newspapers give a sweet damn. But the Post is undeterred...”

After soliciting the opinion piece containing that paragraph, the Post refused to print it. I was not given a reason why, but the unexplained refusal merely proved my point, I think.

More than a year later, the Post abruptly reversed itself, and decided to publish another column I had written about “Shawinigate,” this time for the Ottawa Citizen. On the very day the Post did so, however, it responded to the opinion piece with an unsigned editorial containing a glaring factual error - and an Andrew Coyne effort containing a lot of (uncharacteristic) puerile name-calling. Journalists tell me the fact that Post chose to twice attack my opinion column, on the selfsame day it printed it, is akin to an “ambush.” I do not know if that is true or not.

What I do know is that the Post’s editorial contemptuously dismissed the Ipsos-Reid poll - referred to above - because, the Post declared, Ipsos-Reid is the pollster to the Liberal Party. That is factually incorrect: Pollara is the Liberal Party polling agency. I pointed out the error to the Post, as did Ipsos-Reid. No correction.

I also know that Mr. Coyne’s columns usually testify to the fact that he is a smart fellow. But he, like the newspaper that employs him, has now apparently lost all sense of balance and perspective in “Shawinigate.” Evidence of this is found in Mr. Coyne’s loathsome contention, a few days ago, that a book keeping error at the Grand Mere Golf Course is “the Prime Minister’s blue dress.”

That Lewinsky-era reference is not just patently ridiculous, it is obscene. As Norman Mailer might say, the relevant stain is now arguably found on Mr. Coyne, and his fellow partisans at the Post.

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