ON POLITICAL DISCOURSE AND HUGH SEGAL

Bill Fox

Some years ago, during an extended academic walkabout, I had the good fortune on a few occasions to meet the media theorist Neil Postman.

His most studied work “Amusing Ourselves to Death” considered the impact of a particular technology – television – on political discourse.

Postman had a sight gag he used to illustrate his view of technology. At a certain point, he would hold up a Pilot Flatliner pen and bemusedly declare the pen was the only technology he needed to do his work.

The gesture always made me think of my friend, the late Hugh Segal.

Although in Hugh’s case, the technology of choice was a fountain pen as a companion piece to yellow foolscap paper.

Postman was preoccupied with the consequences of political or public policy exchanges couched in television’s language of entertainment, a language that favoured the interesting over the important, stripped of context, or of meaning.

Historian Daniel Boorstin had earlier warned there is a risk to society if our shared concept of reality is an artifice.

“Ignorance is always correctable, but what do we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” Postman wondered.

Hugh Segal’s singular contribution to public discourse in Canada was, in many ways, a substantive response to Postman’s question.

Theorist Peter Drucker insisted a knowledge society “demands for the first time in history that people with knowledge take responsibility for making themselves understood by people who do not have the same knowledge base.”

A responsibility Hugh Segal – as a senator, as a candidate for elected office, as a senior advisor to a premier, and Prime Minister – took on willingly and enthusiastically.

A Multi-Media Maven

Hugh may have been born with an inherent understanding of the power of communication.

A self-described “child of CBC Radio”, 12-year-old Hugh put pen to paper to write then prime minister John Diefenbaker to assure “The Chief” he could count on Hugh’s unwavering support in an upcoming federal election.

An undergraduate at the University of Ottawa, Hugh cold-called a young conservative MP and assured David MacDonald he and his party’s agenda could be advanced with speeches penned by Segal – free of charge.

Fresh off what would be his only electoral victory – to the student council at the U of O – Hugh was picked to be the party’s proverbial sacrificial lamb as the PC candidate in the 1972 federal election in the safe Liberal seat of Ottawa Centre.

If Hugh got the script, he didn’t read it very carefully. He damned near won the seat, in the election that reduced the Trudeau government to a minority, dependent on the support of New Democratic Party MPs – some things in Canadian politics don’t change.

The seat count settled at 109 Liberals, 107 Progressive Conservatives. Think how history might read differently had Hugh prevailed.

As his several careers unfolded – pundit, author, corporate director, business entrepreneur, academic, policy guru – Hugh was widely acknowledged to be an exceptionally skilled communicator.

Hugh was, as many will know, as quick with a quip as anyone you will ever meet.

He could summarize a situation in a single sentence – in politics you dig your grave with small shovels – being but one example. His reference to a Senate appointment as a “taskless thanks” another.

Yet Hugh also understood that in public discourse, simple declarative sentences had to be rooted in a substantive idea. “I think, therefore I am” does not take a lot of time to articulate.

Hugh had the curiosity of a journalist and the discipline of inquiry of a scholar.

Hugh was available if a reporter needed a quote, and could provide “good clip” to a broadcast journalist – in both of Canada’s official languages.

He’d reach for his fountain pen if you needed an op-ed piece, and could write – or deliver – in Churchillian cadence a key note address at a conference with equal ease.

Hugh – along with former Liberal senator Michael Kirby and NDP strategist Gerry Caplin – made Canada AM’s political panel must-see tv every Thursday morning.

And in sharp contrast to the partisan parrots that populate too many of today’s panels – regurgitating the same three talking points ad nauseum – Hugh, Michael and Gerry brought quick wits, quicker minds, and the courage of their convictions to an informed and informing discussion of the issues of the day.

Hugh’s books can fill a shelf in a good sized book case.

Hugh’s starting premise in any policy or political discussion was that there was a role for government in our lives – in his words “to provide the infrastructure” that ensures genuine opportunity of outcomes.

And he applied that philosophy to consideration of public policy issues as varied as housing, health care, and what Canada’s navy should look like going forward.

The breadth and depth of Hugh’s interests was/is astonishing – as a champion of a basic annual income, as his role as chair of the Senate committee on Foreign Policy and International Trade.

Hugh helped the world appreciate how Canadian conservatism was different than Conservatism in the U.K. or the U.S. – readily acknowledging the differences may be less apparent today.

The oft-repeated description of Hugh as the “happy warrior” is most appropriate, although his infectious good humour could cause some people to overlook the warrior part. And Hugh was a warrior, he understood you had to fight for the policy and political changes you wanted.

He believed in evidence based decision making. Hugh was genuinely angry when Premier Doug Ford’s government cancelled the pilot project in Ontario established by the previous Liberal government to examine the basic annual income issue – a trial that would have provided evidence that in turn would have been the basis for a spirited but better informed public policy debate.

For Hugh, a disagreement – whether he was calling out neo-conservative excess or making the point you can’t actually pull yourself up from the bootstraps if you have no boots – was where a conversation started, not where it ended.

Hugh’s was a life of purpose and principle.

As an advisor to Ontario Premier William Davis and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Hugh was a direct participant in the defining public policy issues of his time – the patriation of the constitution, NAFTA. And as Canada’s special Emissary to the Commonwealth, worked to redefine the institution’s role in the world.

Hugh had a deep understanding of the role legacy or mainstream media has played historically in shaping political discourse.

And he further understood the “source” relationship is at the centre of much of our political journalism.

Political journalists have few occasions to “bear witness” to the events they write about. A reporter on Parliament Hill doesn’t sit in on cabinet meetings, isn’t invited to weekly caucus meetings, is not allowed to wander the halls of the Prime Minister’s Office unattended, and has no access to the national campaign committee of the various parties. What political advisers consider “message discipline” is at once limiting and irritating for a political reporter. And “Access to Information” is an oxymoron, frustrating in the extreme for scribes seeking answers to questions put in the public interest.

Political journalists live in Leon Sigal’s “truth”: That news isn’t what happened, but more accurately is something someone says has happened or will happen.

We have all read news stories that contain facts attributed to “sources close to…”

“Close to” can be an exceedingly subjective description.

But in those instances where Hugh was the source, he certainly qualified as close to.

Hugh believed in the rule of law – and defended that principle whether the specifics were the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970, or more recently the treatment of three of his Senate colleagues by the government of the day.

Going along to get along has long been an element of public discourse.

The communications theorist Elisabeth Noelle Neumann wrote of the ”spiral of silence” where attempts to challenge a congenial truth are met with such hostility that the challengers of conventional wisdom simply stop intervening.

Martin Luther King Jr. perhaps put it best when he said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Nelson Mandela agreed, observing “Fools multiply when the wise are silent.”

Hugh never stopped intervening, even when it would have been politically wiser to do so.

In the Senate case, for example, Hugh stood alone and admonished his colleagues for their defiance of fundamental principles of justice. “We are in the process of, in my judgment, imposing a very arch, difficult, unfair judgment in a fashion that constitutes pre-trial sentencing.”

Public Discourse in a Social Media Age

The media theorist James Carey said society constructs reality through communications.

In any liberal democracy, media is a primary site of political discourse, the place where much of our “reality” begins to take shape.

The agenda-setting properties of legacy media have long been acknowledged. The media were deemed important not because the media tells us what to think, but more precisely because the media told us what to think about.

And while legacy journalism continues to provide much of the shorthand for political discourse, technologies have dramatically increased the number of sites where that conversation can occur.

Clay Shirky encouraged us to think of media today as an ecosystem: more roles, more voices, more paths, more opportunities.

Three of four of the world’s peoples have a mobile phone.

As a consequence, Facebook is like a utility, essential to disseminating information.

Postman said every technology is both a burden and a blessing, not either or but this and that.

But as Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan advised us “any new means of moving information will alter any power structure.” McLuhan was building on the seminal work of another University of Toronto scholar Harold Innis, that any change in the means of communication entails a change in the very makeup of civilization.

The internet, specifically social media, have most emphatically altered our power structures.

What Richard Lanham described as “the economics of attention” now prevails.

V.O. Key reminds us that “the output of any echo chamber bears an inevitable and invariable relation to the input.”

And the input for social media has a distinct look and feel to it. As Andrew MacDougall, former communications director to Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “what sells online is salacious fiction delivered with a side of snark. The new laws of digital politics are disgraceful, but they’re effective.”

Journalist Justin Ling says “we started giving people angry content and they got angry in response.”

Lest anyone think even our most distinguished journalistic enterprises are free of these pressures. Consider this headline in a piece carried in the Press Gazette: “How a robot called Sophi helped Canada’s Globe and Mail hit 170,000 digital subscribers.

There is still a lot of good journalism today, but it can be hard to find, sometimes submerged in the trivial and the inconsequential.

Hugh, to understate the case, was technologically challenged.

He may have been the last person on the planet still using a BlackBerry.

And his call for civility in public discourse is more difficult to heed in an online world where algorithms reward aggressive speech.

Misinformation, and disinformation predate the Internet to be sure. Edgar Allan Poe was making up stories for the New York Sun in 1844. And a 1947 study concluded a “rumour public” exists wherever there is a community of interest.

But social media platforms do allow increasing numbers of us to construct our own reality, making agenda setting and consensus building on the local, regional and national, or international level even more difficult.

A recent piece in the Economist considered the impact Artificial Intelligence would have on the 2024 presidential election in the United States in making voters more mistrustful, cynical and intransigent.

Hugh and I spent a lot of time in recent years talking through where journalism has to go. We shared the view that wedge politics makes news. And that wedge politics produce wedge public policies. The health care system may face threatening funding challenges and area hospitals facing closures because of a shortage of medical staff – particularly nurses – but in Ontario licence plates are free.

That the business model for legacy media has collapsed is no surprise – Marshall McLuhan spelled out the how and why 60 years ago. And the media should have paid more attention to Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s 1988 warning that political journalists were busy fashioning the very coverage that would lead to their demise.

We reflected on Sutherland House publisher and long-time media executive Kenneth Whyte’s point that foreigners aren’t supposed to own our media, yet many of our largest newspapers have fallen into the hands of American bond holders.

Talked about news deserts, and how the largest newspaper in our nation’s capital doesn’t even have a newsroom.

And that political leaders no longer rely on the legacy media to connect with voters.

As Paul Wells put it in a recent SubStack piece: “Pierre Poilievre, who I have talked to for 20 years, doesn’t talk to me anymore because he doesn’t have to.”

We shared Walter Lippmann’s view that there can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.

We were convinced public discourse in Canada required a media that offered less stenography and more journalism. No more stories with ledes that finished with the words “said yesterday.”

A journalism, as described by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Alex Jones, that accepted that its first obligation is to the truth, its first loyalty is to citizens, and its essence is the discipline of verification, a journalism guided by former Toronto Star editor Borden Spears’ assertion that truth is cumulative.

A journalism that would not only benefit from our collective engagement but requires it – a Hugh Segal level of engagement. More echo chambers, more echoes.

. . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bill Fox - Bill Fox has spent his professional life working each point of the press, politics, public policy triangle. Fox is the author of Trump, Trudeau, Tweets, Truth: A Conversation, published by McGill-Queen's University Press in the spring, 2022. His previous work, Spinwars, Politics and New Media was published by Key Porter Books in 1999. Most recently a public affairs consultant with Stikeman Elliott LLP, Fox has served as Executive Vice-President, Communications and Corporate Development, at Bell Canada Enterprises, as Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs, at Bombardier Inc. and CN. Fox is a former Ottawa and Washington Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star and appeared frequently on radio and television as a commentator on public affairs, including a stint as a member of CTV’s Pundits Panel. He has served as press secretary and director of communications to the Prime Minister of Canada. Fox holds a Doctorate in Communication, with a specialty in media effects theory, from Carleton University in Ottawa and a Master’s degree in journalism. He has also studied at l’Université de Paris (Sorbonne). In the spring of 2015, Fox was elected Senior Fellow, Massey College, at the University of Toronto. He was subsequently named Practitioner-in-Residence at the Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management at Carleton University. Previously, Fox has been a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Senior Fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Centre at Columbia. Fox has served as a director on the boards of a number of business, cultural and communications organizations including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) and la Place de la francophonie, the organization responsible for the French language cultural program at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC. In 2020, Fox was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.

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