Our public health leader in this province – our public health leader, for heaven’s sake – requires a security detachment.
In the environment I’ve occupied for four decades, it has never been this unstable and unsafe, this disabled and distrusted.
We have long had political “war rooms” to discredit opponents during campaigns, but we have lately entered a stage in which it does not seem outrageous to endanger those in public life. Some of this we hear about, so much of it I suspect we don’t. A couple of weeks earlier it was a visceral in-your-face rant to the federal Liberal finance minister.Last election for the first time in memory, the prime minister’s campaign stops were cancelled out of public safety concerns.
After all, phony wars and make-believe menaces work because manufacturing fear is the ultimate short-term weapon in politics and media. Long-term, though, it disgraces them. The larger question is whether our leadership will honour its duty to defend even flawed institutions like the press as an integral element of a functioning democracy.
The letter was long due. The presence of fake news and the casual vilification of responsible media have primed the pump for a broadened ignorance and subsequent cynicism about the reliable press. The prime minister’s response to the letter was heartening in its commitment to deal with the most serious of the problems, and of course he faces his own regular threats that we seem to have accustomed ourselves to and even accepted as a price of leadership.
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