Weekly Round-up, and a note on why you —yes, you, personally — can't have nice things
I mean, good Lord, it's not like I didn't warn you all
Happy Sunday. This is my first weekly recap blast, following yesterday’s inaugural post here at Code 47 (and yes, one of you has figured out already what that’s a reference to — you know who you are). In the inaugural post, I made extremely clear that this newsletter is largely an experiment, and not to expect much from it. All I can really guarantee is that I’ll include a weekly recap of what I published the week before.
And for some twisted reason, many dozens of you signed up. I went out of my way to warn you that the content here is going to be bad, and a small commercial jet’s worth of folks responded to that by thinking, wow, that sounds great. I’m in!
The next time you ever wonder why you can’t have nice things, or ponder the frightening possibility that maybe yo
u settle for less than you deserve, I want you to remember this moment. I promised you virtually nothing, and you accepted.
OK, well, here’s the round-up.
In the National Post this week, most of my bylined output was on federal politics. The back half of August is usually a very slow period in Canadian politics, and it’s definitely a slow period in journalism in general and certainly at the Post in particular — anyone who was flaky about taking their vacation days has to use them all up by the end of the month. These final few weeks are basically the worst possible time for there to be a lot of breaking news. So guess what we got a ton of this week.
One of the big stories was the resignation of Bill Morneau from his job as federal finance minister. That happened Monday evening. The next morning, I woke up and thought, well, OK, I wasn’t able to write up an on-the-fly newsy column to the resignation itself in time for the next edition, so what’s the smart column to write the day after? I figured most of the political writers would be speculating about who the next finance minister would be, whether the prime minister wanted an early election, and musings about possible unrest in the Liberal caucus. So I decided that the smart, safe move was writing a bit more of a reflective column on Morneau’s time in office — wondering what he’d be remembered for, and taking a guess at what he wouldn’t be remembered for.
This wasn’t the smart move, as it turned out, because tons more news broke that day, including Chrystia Freeland’s appointment as Morneau’s successor and the prime minister’s decision to prorogue parliament. The column I thought would add real news value was basically obsolete hours before press time. Super. Luckily, I was able to prevail upon Sean Speer to write a smart piece that actually did respond to the breaking news, which was far more useful than what I wrote. Thanks, Sean!
In any event, here’s my column:
Matt Gurney: Morneau’s legacy will be the deficits he ran, not because he had to, but because it was easy — National Post
But actually, just read Sean’s instead:
Sean Speer: Trudeau prorogues Parliament — and another Liberal promise is broken — National Post
Later in the bonkers week of constant news, I wrote another column — one that didn’t go instantly obsolete, thankfully — about the thousands of pages of documents pertaining to the WE controversy that were released. They were an interesting mix, I noted: they confirm some of what the prime minister had said about his own personal involvement in the matter, but they also exploded the critical plank of his government’s defence. The Liberal claim that they simply stumbled over their own feet in their haste to do good while responding to a neutral recommendation from the public service simply doesn’t stand up in light of these documents, which show that political staff (including a cabinet minister!) were actively working with WE to develop the program … the program that the public service later approved. While the PM’s claim about his own personal conduct was confirmed, overall, the documents were bad news for the government. Here’s that column:
Matt Gurney: Finally, the truth behind the WE scandal. It doesn’t look good for the Liberals — National Post
And then later in the week, to placate the video advertising gods, I did a video version of the column, which is basically the same thesis, but if you want to see how my pandemic beard is coming, this video has the content you’re looking for. It also has my hockey stick over my left shoulder, because I forgot to put it away before we taped.
That was it for the Post this week.
Over at TVO, I completed my latest deep-dive series on a current news issue. I typically do one of these a month, on whatever is currently hot in the news. Sometimes they’re narrative articles, sometimes they’re straight-up Q&A-style interviews with relevant people or experts. This month’s instalment was something I’d really wanted to do. In late April and early May, when the pandemic was burning much hotter in Ontario and provincial and local leaders were urging — sometimes demanding — that residents avoid any unnecessary travel, I had interviewed four people who either owned businesses or were otherwise involved in Ontario’s tourism sector, particularly in cottage country. What was going to happen in those communities, I wondered, if they lost an entire summer season, as then looked likely?
Now, with August drawing to a close, I went back to those same communities and repeated the interviews. The overall verdict was honestly surprising to me — overall, the communities and businesses did much better than they were expecting. In fact, some actually had a banner year — not just better than expected, but better than normal. But there was a real geographic divide here. Communities and businesses within a relatively easy drive of Toronto thrived. In more remote areas, it’s a disaster. The interviews are below.
Summer of COVID, Part 2: How Bobcaygeon businesses are getting back on track — TVO.org
Summer of COVID, Part 4: The pandemic and Ontario’s north-south tourism divide — TVO.org
That was it for TVO this week.
I’m still trying to figure out how to link to segments from my radio show. I need to talk to my producer about that but I don’t want to bother him on a weekend. So consider radio segments a work-in-progress for Code 47.
The only other thing I’d want to mention is that some of you might enjoy this Twitter thread, in which I partially agree with some criticisms Andrew Scheer made of the CBC (and the media more generally), but also note that perhaps his media experience would have been better if his media-handling strategy hadn’t been so spectacularly pathetic.
Two little notes before I go:
I’m starting a two-week vacation tomorrow, so the output over the next little while might be a bit … odd. I may have more time to do that personal writing I was threatening you all with, and there won’t be much to recap in my weekly roundups. Just a heads-up.
I’m attaching a gif I made below, basically just to see if Substack can handle gifs. If you see the starships fighting, yes, it can. If you don’t, no, it can’t.
Thanks for reading. Take care.
