Why Aren't We Talking About _______?

On the topics nobody wants to discuss during this election campaign.

In the Regina Leader-Post, John Gormley laments that the media have moved away from covering real election issues. “While the media is fundamental to democracy,” he writes, “its role in Canadian elections has changed from reporting and fact checking to becoming actual combatants in the campaign, trying to trip or bring down the players.” In theory, the media doing their best to trip up a candidate is not a problem, in The Mark Newsroom’s opinion, because any candidate should be put through rigorous scrutiny. A problem only arises when the media begin to enjoy destroying candidates’ campaigns, or do so selectively. Which happens all the time, of course.

Sun Media’s Brian Lilley says that the overblown coverage of the Conservatives barring non-Tories from their rallies is proof that the Canadian media are biased and not interested in reporting comparable scandals perpetrated by the Liberals. This has become a running theme in Sun columns of late, and presumably things will change for the better once the Sun News Network comes riding into town aboard the Straight Talk Express, or whichever honesty-based conveyance it will be using.

The Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein says evidence that real issues are being avoided in this campaign is the oversimplified debate over corporate tax cuts. The Liberals don’t want to lower them and the Conservatives do, but both parties obscure the reality. Higher corporate taxes will force Canadians to pay higher prices, but at the same time lower corporate taxes provide no guarantee that corporations simply won’t pocket the money they save, with no benefit to the country. “The simple truth is corporate taxation policies are complicated,” Goldstein observes. “They can’t be accurately explained to voters in the 10-second sound-bite environment of political campaigns.”

It’s pretty astonishing that health care has not been a major issue so far, write The Globe and Mail's editors, considering that even the most optimistic projections show the costs of the health system will continue to grow at unsupportable rates. “Canada needs to do its best in so many ways even to have a merely poor prognosis for its health-care system,” says the Globe. “Talking about it would be a start.”