At times it feels like the pandemic has given too many people too much time on their hands.
Rather than acquire a new skill or language or hobby, some are using their spare hours to perpetrate outrageous conspiracy theories, others are letting loose anxieties best kept to themselves, plenty have learned that social media is a licence to hate and many are shaming people for averting the expert advice on the coronavirus.
And then there is the case of the premier who has heard people holler in recent days for daring to take a holiday – for, in their view, fleeing the scene, putting himself first, abandoning the ship in the storm.
Give me – or I should say, give him – a break.
There is nothing new in this public clarion call for political infallibility. A politician is on the clock and under scrutiny 24/7, owned more than elected, having to listen to everyone for hours they never get back. And perceptions about them from every angle prevail over realities about them.
In the dog days of summer, the flow of information historically either buries big news because people are in a backyard or a beach – or, as is the case here, makes the Grouse Grind out of a flight of stairs to feed the goat on days journalism is short on staged news to avert actual investigation.
True, this traditional information flow has been bent by the pandemic’s year-round gallop, the climate episodes that clobber us amid the crisis any old time and the tragic economic and health consequences of our annually burning forests. But sooner or later, mock outrage emerges in summer over next to nothing, and here we go again for two or three news cycles until another shiny object surfaces.
The pandemic has changed many things, one being the onset of virtual technology for business and government operations. (Be honest: Had you heard of Zoom pre-March 2020?) It is part of a transformation that each month feels more like evolution than experiment.
It is this technology, and even older ones like a device from yesteryear called the telephone, that John Horgan has used to stay abreast and make decisions for large chunks of the pandemic, including the recent weeks in which he chose to travel into Atlantic Canada.
For this bold move called “seeing your country,” he was chastised by a gaggle of opposition politicians, a clutch of political scientists – many of them taking a few minutes from their summer breaks wherever they were – and a few in communities hard-struck by the fires who worried Horgan didn’t care.
Well, of course he cares – enough, in fact, not to say he wanted to be left alone, not to get off the grid when he could have likely used a stiff encounter with Screech while he was in the vicinity, but to spend some holidays with a bit of work that in his position had not only been earned but are likely needed.
A disclaimer before this feels like fan mail: if the premier were assembling his most accommodating and approving journalists, I suspect my Inbox would be without an invite.
I don’t think his government has figured how to generate growth to finance the broadened social program ambitions. Its class-conscious policies breed class clashes. He lost the plot telling young people not to “blow it” by partying in the pandemic and telling all of us that heat dome deaths were “a part of life.” He has tightened access to information amid the coronavirus. His infrastructure prejudice against non-unionized contractors is an expensive featherbed.
I could go on. There, see: I don’t have a patronage appointment in my future.
An old boss of mine told me that as a journalist you can’t be too impolite to a politician, and it has a nice ring to it at first. After all, the barefaced self-promotion and miserly treatment of truth by the elected is at times nauseous.
But there is much confusion about our leaders between their entitlement to a little privacy and the public right to their professional transparency.
Yes, there is at times hypocrisy in the public pronouncements and private practices by our political figures – and we come and get them – just as there are journalists who know of marital breakdown and second lives lived who restrain from reporting it.
But when it comes to “optics” – how something might look problematic to someone – a highly subjective sanctimony strangely but surely rears its head. The Horgan holiday was an optics issue, not a real one.
Unless, heaven forbid, his team was lying, Horgan was briefed on the dreadful fires and the enervating coronavirus daily. He could do nothing different from his locale than from his desk. There is a time and place to visit devastation and minister sympathy and support, but it is not while it is raging. Horgan would have consumed an absurd portion of professional resources by touring the Interior. And for what? Video, talking points, a concerned frown?
Horgan does not fit into central casting. He thinks aloud, at times off-script, but applies his ideology ethically. He gives as good as he gets in debate and enjoys making friends and regrets making foes in equal measure.
His perceived transgression was not in the same league as, say, former Ontario finance minister Rod Phillips, whose staff recorded and posted his Christmas fireside message while he was in the Caribbean in COVID. It is also a lesser version of former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson’s 2017 Mexican vacation, mainly because Vancouver was ineptly handling the snow.
Horgan was on the case and experienced professionals were on the frontline.
If that isn’t good enough, then the public gets what it deserves when people decide standing for office is to submit to unreasonable expectation. •
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
