The Elections of 2000: Politics, Culture, and Economics in North America

CHAPTER 4: Distracted Voters: Media Coverage of the 2000 Canadian Federal Election Campaign

CHAPTER 4 Distracted Voters: Media Coverage of the 2000 Canadian Federal Election Campaign Lydia Miljan THE 2000 CANADIAN CAMPAIGN appears at first glance to have had little impact on voter choice. The Liberal Party returned with its third consecutive majority government. The only major upset was that the governing Liberals gained ground in Quebec. The official opposition, the Canadian Alliance Party, finished the election with the same popular support it had when the campaign started: 26 percent. The New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Progressive Conservatives each showed small gains, with the NDP moving up from 6 percent to 9 percent popular support. The Conservatives had similar movement, going from 7 percent to 10 percent popular support. These small advances, one could argue, illustrate how little campaign or media influences formed and changed public opinion in English Canada in 2000. That is not to say that the campaign or the media did not matter; they simply did not change opinions during the election period. In fact, this chapter will argue that the media mattered in two important ways: first, it reinforced already 76 held views on the opposition parties with seemingly secondary issues ; and second, its emphasis on another important election diffused interest and coverage on the Canadian contest. There are many assessments of the 2000 Canadian federal election . Most notably, the Canadian Election Study (CES) provides excellent statistical detail of voter dynamics, and in particular, the Liberal victory.1 This discussion differs in that it concentrates on how media reports of issues outside the Canadian election also impacted the vote, and how the controversies of the campaign and influenced the official opposition’s performance. MEDIA AND ELECTIONS The democracy literature argues that elections matter because they provide citizens with a direct say in the direction and tone of government. Media attention to elections makes a difference because the news media are the primary way in which citizens receive political and campaign information. As a consequence, what the news media say about candidates, campaigns, and parties can have a profound impact on the outcome of elections. Or so we are led to believe. But what if there were an election and no one paid attention? In a sense that is exactly what happened in the 2000 Canadian federal election campaign. By several accounts, the 2000 election was unexciting. The CES addressed this issue when it examined the voter turnout. “A key question here is whether the low turnout simply reflected the fact that it was a ‘boring’ election or whether the low level turnout was attributable to deeper, structural factors.”2 Editorial writers discussed this view at some length at the time of the election. “Canadians showed their disgust,” wrote Mordecai Richler in the National Post, “with a boring and ill-mannered campaign, and the inadequate choices available to them, only 63 percent of them going to the polls, a modern-day low.”3 Newspaper baron Conrad Distracted Voters 77 Black lamented the Canadian political scene in the Wall Street Journal: “Americans who are concerned by their prolonged electoral controversy can take comfort from the fact we have just had one of the dreariest elections in the history of serious democratic countries. Five unbelievably unexciting political leaders, most of them heading parties that have no real reason to exist, avoided most serious issues and waged a campaign consisting largely of defamation.”4 Not only was the campaign considered lackluster, the election itself was deemed unnecessary by many. The election was called three years and four months into the Liberal government ’s mandate—a mandate that technically did not have to end for nearly two more years. Peter Gzowski complained in the Globe and Mail, “If health care is, as everyone keeps telling us, the defining issue of this unnecessary and frustrating election campaign, you’d think that four hours of debate among the leaders—counting the stilted session in French—would at least leave us clear about what each party is proposing.”5 To understand media dynamics and coverage of the three elections held on the North American continent in 2000, we conducted a content analysis of national media news. The study is based on stories appearing in the two national Canadian newspapers , the Globe and Mail and the National Post. We also examine stories appearing on the flagship national television news programs of the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as well as the privately owned CTV...