Politics and Media

While Ontario was poised to discover whether or not our provincial minority government would be converted to a majority in today’s By-Election, we looked at TV news to see what was happening. It’s been years since I’ve had television; normally I get me news online, but I was away from home so we tried it out.

CTV has a 24 hour news channel. Unfortunately it wasn’t running anything about the election.

Granted, By-elections usually don’t change the status quo, but this was different. One seat could make a huge difference to all Ontarians, by transforming a Liberal minority government into a majority.

With our winner-take-all electoral system, minority government is the closest we get to democracy.

The results of this By-Election will impact on the whole province. So there is a lot of interest in this one. So why wasn’t CTV’s news channel covering it? Maybe they think Canadians aren’t interested in politics?

Okay, there was one little factoid squib floating across the ticker along the bottom periodically, but the news they were covering? Well, they kept cutting back to Jo Biden droning on and on live from the American Democratic Convention. This wasn’t news, this was filler. Although the outcome of the American Democratic convention will likely have impact on the rest of the world, this wasn’t it.

Catherine Fife at Fair Vote WRC Politics in the Patio

And it certainly wasn’t more important than the actual breaking news of an important Ontario election in Ontario.

CBC has a news channel too. Although they had a piece on the Quebec provincial election, they weren’t actually covering the breaking news of the Ontario election results ~ they were cutting back to the American convention as well.

Maybe they think we aren’t interested in Canadian politics?

Poppycock.  Maybe the “news media” isn’t doing the job we think it is.

Breaking out my computer I popped into Twitter and lo and behold, breaking news.

Turns out that the Liberal Candidate Steven Del Duca won in Vaughan as expected.

But the Kitchener-Waterloo riding was a different story: NDP Candidate, Catherine Fife won big.  Here are the unofficial results

The television part of the mainstream media has certainly failed us; it is, at best, entertainment, not news. Real news lives online.

Just as our antiquated 18th Century electoral system fails us every time.

Although I am quite pleased with Catherine Fife’s win in Kitchener-Waterloo, the disturbing reality is that, although she won the vote handily, 59% of Kitchener-Waterloo voters did not vote for her.

In spite of all that, I’m sure she’ll do an excellent job, so I’d like to congratulate Catherine Fife, Kitchener-Waterloo’s new NDP MPP.

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