Grisly body-parts story crowds out Quebec, environment, human rights.
by Geoffrey Stevens
There's a familiar adage in television that states, "If it bleeds, it leads."
A story that offers some combination of blood, gore, violence, depravity, murder and mayhem will command top spot on TV news lineups while other more important and more complicated stories will drop down the list, and perhaps fall right off it.
We had a classic example this past week with the gruesome body-parts story, which dominated newscasts and front pages. If it were merely a routine tale of murder and dismemberment, it would have received fleeting attention from the media in Canada and none outside. What made it a global sensation was the political angle: the mailing of body parts to political parties in Ottawa.
For once, Canada was in the world news, big-time. Fleet Street, predictably, went overboard. The London Mail, in its online edition, played the Canadian saga this way:
"Revealed: Gay porn star 'cannibal' suspected of killing and eating parts of former lover threatened Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper."
Although that headline seemed to cover most of the requisite ghastly bases, the Mail (not given to half-measures) offered several sub-heads, starting with this: "Arrest warrant states Luka Magnotta caused Prime Minister Harper to fear for his safety."
Really? Harper didn't look unduly terrified to me in the news clips from the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, but what do I know? All I know is the Canadian gay cannibal/porn star/ political overtones story held its own for eyeballs in The Mail Online with the Jubilee festivities and with one of those bizarre stories of human misery that British tabloids are so proficient at unearthing or inventing. This one featured a Welsh teenager, who ordered junk food online while her oblivious parents watched the telly downstairs, until she became so obese (she topped out at 52 stone or 728 pounds) that crews had to knock out the front wall of her home to get her to hospital.
This sort of sensationalism would be relatively harmless, I suppose, if it did not push some serious news out of sight and out of the public debate. Not many Canadians outside Quebec are playing close attention to the protests there, which have morphed from a student campaign against tuition-fee increases into — what? — a broader public challenge to the civil authority, as represented by the shell-shocked Liberal government of Jean Charest?
No one seems to know where the protests are leading. The situation in Quebec reminds me of the riots staged by students and workers in France when I was living there in 1968-69, an uprising that ultimately forced the resignation of Charles de Gaulle as president of the Fifth Republic. The Quebec protests are much more restrained (as befits the polite Canadian way), but the underlying causes do need to be understood and addressed.
On another note, not enough attention is being paid to the Harper government's pathetic performance on the environment file. Its insistence on pushing resource development and economic growth at the expense of the integrity of the environment has been reviewed with greater concern abroad than in Canada.
Not enough attention is being paid to the Harper government’s pathetic performance on the environment file.
The protests of four former fisheries ministers, two Conservatives and two Liberals, about the damage that they believe impending changes to the Fisheries Act will cause to fish habitats are not taken seriously in Harper's Ottawa, although they should be.
Not least, Canada's human rights record is under attack at the United Nations. A new report at the weekend from the UN Committee Against Torture accuses the Canadian government of being "complicit" in the torture of three Arab-Canadian men held in Syria in the wake of 9/11.
"The committee is seriously concerned at the apparent reluctance on (the) part of the (government) to protect rights of all Canadians detained in other countries," the report states.
The report will be ignored by Ottawa. The Harper government doesn't give a tinker's damn what the UN thinks. They are making it harder for Canadians to hold their heads high when venturing abroad.
About Geoffrey Stevens
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He welcomes comments at the address below. This article appeared in the Waterloo Region Record and the Guelph Mercury.
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