By Colin Kenny
You’ve all heard of gotcha journalism. Welcome to cartoon journalism. Or, more accurately, welcome to a combination of gotcha and cartoon journalism.
As a primer, you might want to read the editorial that ran in the National Post on Tuesday, October 17th, headlined “a Senatorial junket.” The editorial was based on a CTV story that appeared the previous evening and was picked up by The Canadian Press, the national newswire.
The National Post editorial led off by paying tribute to the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, acknowledging that the committee has “done much in recent years to highlight the security threats confronting Canada in the war against terrorism. With reports on airport security and the underfunding of the Canadian Forces, among other important topics . . . the committee (has) provided Canadians with value for money, pushing forward efforts to strengthen domestic security and rebuild our military’s capability.”
So far, we look good. We’re the folks who have worked long hours and visited soldiers, their officers and others with insights into Canada’s security needs – listening to them in the most remote locations in Canada and in endless hours of testimony in Ottawa so as to shed some light on the country’s security problems and offer solutions.
We’re the ones who have produced 15 reports over the past five and a half years, reports that are rigorously non-partisan in criticizing Liberal and Conservative governments alike for failing to respond to holes in the Canadian security blanket that don’t need to be there – that can be fixed if governments would treat them with the seriousness they deserve.
Whoops! That’s us in the first paragraph of the editorial, but then things go askew. Turns out we tried to visit Canadian troops in Afghanistan to check on their well being and assess whether the way their mission is being run makes sense.
Turns out that even though four committee members and staff received a last-minute warning that we might well not be admitted to Kandahar because of security problems (a warning that came after some members of the mission had already left), the mission proceeded anyway.
First the mission went to London to look at lessons learned from the tube bombing incident and problems with home-grown terrorists. We met with MI5, Special Branch, Railway Police and the Cabinet Office.
Then our committee went to Rotterdam – arguably one of the best-policed ports in the world – to examine port conditions there (there remain profound gaps in security at Canadian ports that other international ports are addressing).
The Committee then went to Dubai, the fourth-largest port in the world, which was important to us because Dubai interests tried to buy six port terminals in the United States last March and were turned down. They bought the Vancouver port terminal, and have talked about expanding into Halifax. We queried them on their argument that they run safe and secure terminals, which Canada badly needs.
This is the point at which some members of the media decided we would make good cartoon characters. The Post editorial says that “we whiled away a week in Dubai” even though “the Canadian Forces warned the group of senators beforehand that there wasn’t much chance of reaching Kandahar.”
Never mind that the warning had come late, that the London, Rotterdam and Dubai meetings had already been booked. Never mind that – rather than “whiling away” our time while trying to get out of Dubai – we met eight times for 42 hours to edit the draft of our report Managing Turmoil, which was tabled in the Senate on October 5 and received widespread media attention for its hard-hitting recommendations.
Never mind that anyone paying attention knew that we were the furthest thing from tourists. The committee has such a reputation for hard work that some senators have shied away from sitting on it.
Never mind all that. Suddenly we were just a bunch of bored senators who had nothing much to do and decided to take a wing at an Afghan adventure – with the giddy fallback of a Dubai holiday.
CTV said we stayed in $US500 rooms in Dubai (the rooms were $311CDN in a mid-range hotel, and they were no better than ordinary rooms in a mid-range Canadian hotel). The network also said that we had rented a “Presidential Suite” for meetings (we rented an ordinary meeting room that cost $500 CDN a day – about the same as it would in Canada – with food included so we could work through lunch breaks).
CTV took a shot off the hotel’s website that showed an opulent room that must be occupied by princes who lose their way or can’t get accommodation at high-end Dubai hotels. Never mind that it looked nothing like our rather ordinary rooms.
So that’s the committee’s image for this week: cartoon Senators frolic in Dubai on taxpayers’ dime. Last week we were fearless, independent analysts uncovering stupid cracks in Canadian security. Now we’re high-spending buffoons.
When Kandahar fell through, our team got out of Dubai as soon as air tickets could be arranged that weren’t prohibitively priced.
We are genuinely sorry that we didn’t get into Kandahar. But we don’t apologize for trying – we think we could have provided Canadians some insights on what’s happening there. Those kinds of insights are in short supply.
But perhaps this government – like the last government – doesn’t want insights into how well or poorly it is handling Canadian security.
Perhaps it wants to make Senate reform an election issue. And perhaps making a cartoon out of one of the Senate’s most active and critical committees seems like a great way of advancing that issue.
Colin Kenny is Chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence – kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca