Trudeau’s days off? The media needs to get serious

When in doubt, blame the media. That’s long been a strategy deployed by unpopular politicians, and now some extremely online Liberals are using it to explain their party’s increasingly precarious predicament. Notwithstanding my obvious biases here — my faith in the value of good journalism is about as close to religious belief as I can get — I happen to think this is glaringly obvious nonsense.

It’s the same blend of desperation and self-deception that marks the death throes of almost every government in a liberal democracy, and it’s a particularly tough sell in a country where the largest newspaper chain has been calling for Justin Trudeau’s defeat from almost the moment he was first elected. Even the Toronto Star, once reliably (and maybe excessively) sympathetic to progressive governments, has shifted to the right in recent years after a change in ownership.

But while I’m not willing to entertain the notion that the media is driving the Trudeau Liberals down in the polls, I am open to the idea that they’re dumbing down the discourse in a way that favours populist politicians like Pierre Poilievre. Veteran reporter Glen McGregor’s recent story on the amount of so-called “personal” time Trudeau has taken since becoming prime minister is a case in point — and a worrying one.

McGregor’s piece calls out the 680 “personal” days Trudeau has taken over the course of nearly eight years in power, which is, as he notes, equivalent to 22 months or nearly two years. The Conservative Party of Canada weaponized it almost immediately, tweeting, “While his deficit-fuelled inflationary spending and rising carbon taxes make your life more expensive, he's taking more personal time on your dime.”

Those 680 days probably sound like a lot — at least, until you realize it includes weekends, official holidays and other forms of downtime. Put differently, it’s the same amount of time “off” as someone over the same period who had zero days of vacation, worked every single holiday, and worked 15 to 20 weekend days a year.

As McGregor notes further down in his piece, “the bulk of the days — 68 per cent — were taken on weekends, and spent mostly in the National Capital Region.” More importantly, perhaps, his “personal day rate” of 24 per cent is “well below the 34 per cent of days in a year most Canadian workers are off, including statutory holidays and two weeks of paid vacation.” Oh, and those “personal days”? They almost always include taking phone calls from staff and stakeholders, getting briefed by officials, and reading reams of briefing notes and other forms of government business.

The most transparently absurd “revelation” in the piece relates to, of course, Alberta. “Since becoming prime minister, Trudeau has used a total of 88 personal days holidaying in Tofino, Whistler, Revelstoke and other locations in British Columbia,” McGregor writes. “That’s more time than his itineraries list him travelling to Alberta on official business, not including the six personals he booked in Lake Louise at the end of 2017.”

This is, remember, a prime minister whose mother’s family is from British Columbia, who taught high school in Vancouver, and whose youngest brother is still entombed in a glacier lake in the Kootenays. Notwithstanding the province’s obvious appeal as a tourist destination, is it any wonder that he wants to spend more time there than in Alberta, where public expressions of hatred towards him are nearly as commonplace as Calgary Flames paraphernalia?

For what it’s worth, we can’t compare his record here to his predecessors, since Stephen Harper didn’t keep or release any such records. What we do know is Trudeau has always been clear about the importance of maintaining a balance between his professional responsibilities and the time he spends with his family. “I need to be really ruthless to ensure I have time with family, time with Sophie and time to decompress,” he said back in 2015. As the son of a former prime minister, he probably understands that need better than almost anyone else in this country. In light of his recent separation from his wife, maybe he didn’t attend to it ruthlessly enough.

That’s a question for another day, though. The question for this one is whether this sort of coverage adds any value to the broader political discourse we all share. Given all the other pressing issues out there, from the alarming rise in anti-Semitism to our ongoing failure to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is the prime minister’s schedule really worthy of our collective attention as Canadians?

This is no trivial matter. As we saw in the United States, the media’s inability to properly frame the stakes of the 2016 and 2020 elections came at a considerable cost — and may yet come at an even higher one. As a recent analysis by the Columbia Journalism Review noted, America’s two biggest newspapers are still falling down on the job when it comes to helping their readers understand the substantive differences between their political parties. “We found that the Times and the Post shared significant overlap in their domestic politics coverage, offering little insight into policy,” the report’s authors said about the 2022 midterms. “Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than to educate them on essential differences between political parties.”

As the fictional media magnate Logan Roy might say, “You are not serious people.” Right now, given the existential threat to American democracy, it desperately needs more serious people doing serious journalism, the kind that trades clicks and controversy for deep reporting and analysis. As CNN legend Christiane Amanpour said: We have to be “truthful, not neutral.” And we have to remember those who fear the truth will do everything they can to distract or dissuade us from this essential task.

All of this applies to Canada as well. We’re in a much better place than the United States, and Poilievre presents a much different level of threat than Trump. But the underlying trends are strikingly similar: a political discourse that seems increasingly uninterested in context and nuance, and a media landscape that’s struggling to adapt to that reality and the way in which certain politicians are willing to exploit it.

Better journalism doesn’t guarantee any particular partisan outcome, nor should it. But it can ensure the public is better informed about its choices and the consequences that flow from them. Let’s get serious about that before it’s too late.