Warren Kinsella

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The Beltway

In Washington, D.C., route 495 is called The Beltway. On a map, The Beltway runs more or less in a circle around the U.S. capital, and captures places where political hacks and flaks abound - Alexandria, Va., Arlington, Va. and so on. When something happens in Official Washington that excites reporters and politicos, but is of little or no consequence to real people - i.e., those who live outside Route 495 - it is said to be “inside the Beltway.”

In Canada, some of my friends and I have used a similar phrase. If a development has folks on Parliament Hill atwitter - but Joe and Jane Frontporch don’t give two hoots about it - it is a “North of the Queensway” story.

In the federal election just past, there were many North of the Queensway stories printed and broadcast - too many. I speak from experience: for much of October and all of November, I was one of the people helping out in the Liberal Party’s national election campaign effort. For 36 days, I had the privilege of working shoulder-to-shoulder with a lot of very bright, and very dedicated people.

In all of that time, I can count on one the hand the number of times a reporter called up to discuss actual bona fide policy issues. It did not particularly matter, it seems, that more than 60 per cent of Canadians were saying that they considered health care to be their biggest concern. It did not matter a sizeable number also wanted to discuss taxation. No: what interested reporters were trivialities like what Alexa McDonough was wearing that day, or what Stockwell Day listened to on his CD player, or what was going on inside the Liberal Party’s so-called “war room.”

You probably heard a lot about the Liberal, Tory, Alliance and NDP “war rooms” over the past month or so, and - to be blunt - you can be forgiven for wondering why. Reporters, however, were transfixed by the subject of war rooms. Utterly transfixed. I am not exaggerating when I say that, virtually every day, a reporter or a producer of a program would dial up, to request a tour of the Liberal Party’s “war room.” We would always say no, because we naively believed elections should be about actual issues, and not about a bunch of young people and computers crammed into a room, churning out press releases and whatnot. But they kept on calling. (One CTV television crew even filmed the outside of the Liberal Party’s headquarters, ostensibly hoping to spot something war roomish through the mirrored windows.)

Occasionally, I would get irritated with a reporter making such a request, and ask them whether “real Canadians” - i.e., those who do not reside North of the Queensway - really gave a sweet damn about these so-called war rooms. Last week, an equally-irritated CBC television producer said the subject was “important.” I asked him why, given what the polls said about what Canadian themselves considered important - things like the future of health care, and taxation, and social programs. His answer was simply to repeat that war rooms were “important.”

With the greatest of respect to some of those in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, that is codswallop. Everywhere Prime Minister Jean Chretien went in this election, he spoke about the issues that count to Canadians. But the news coverage did not reflect that nearly enough. In recent days, I spoke to enough members of the Alliance, Tory and NDP to know that they all feel similarly. For too many reporters, they told me, writing about political process is a lot easier than actually writing about policy.

Jaime Watt, a Tory friend of mine who produced the devastatingly effective ads which helped elect Mike Harris, put it this way: “Reporters love talking about process, because they are constant outsiders. They love anything that lets them be players, that lets them be in on the process. I think readers don’t care about [political process], but reporters are obsessed.”

Why should you care? Isn’t this opinion column just another process piece - something that interests only the folks who live and work North of the Queensway?

You should care because, in the past week or so, segments of the media have largely abandoned their interest in war rooms, and taken up a new theme: the 2000 federal election was too full of negativity, and not full enough of policy. From one editorial page to the next, all of the political parties have been admonished for being “too negative.” The media, meanwhile, suggests with a straight face that it is not in the least bit complicit in any of this.

I am one of those partisans who believes that elections are about choices, and that political parties are permitted - nay, required! - to sometimes be critical about the choices offered by a political opponent. But, to be uncharacteristically less-than-partisan for a moment, I would argue that - if the news media has essentially absolved itself of the role of writing intelligently about policy - then it is inevitable that coverage of an election will be less-than-relevant to real people.

You know: the ones who live south of the Queensway.

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