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WHAT'S AT STAKE FOR POLITICIANS:
A MEDIUM WELL DONE
Rivers of printer's ink have
flowed onto newsprint and miles of mylar tape have passed through
videocameras in an effort to bring you, the media consumer, the
daily soap opera unfolding at Montreal city hall. All along, Mayor
Bourque maintained what was happening consisted of media-manufactured,
or media-magnified events. Is he right?
The media are so all-pervasive
today that, for some people - including me, when I'm not careful
- the word "media" has become a singular noun. Now,
the French have gone one step further, concocting a weird double
plural - medias. Oh well, we both say "agendas".
To what extent do the media
manipulate and manage the news, actually creating stories rather
than reporting on them? Ideally, the media should play the role
of a catalyst, whose presence, as any chemist knows, facilitates
a reaction but it does not become part of the end product.
And some editorialists find
it so easy to criticize and second-guess: they remind me of Brendan
Behan's observation: "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem;
they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're
unable to do it themselves". Yet a few media types manage
to masculate themselves - to coin a phrase - and try their luck
at politics. René Lesveque and Claude Ryan are two successful
examples.
In an interesting piece
in La Presse last Saturday, Claude Masson makes
the point that Bourque was well-treated by the press when he was
running the Botanical Gardens or creating the Biodome. What happened?
Did the press turn on him or did he bring it on himself?
Well, It doesn't matter.
All those damning editorials and blow-by-blow reporting of city
hall shenanigans in the print medium are not read by most voters.
They watch TV. And Bourque has not quite mastered the secrets
of a good TV persona. You have to talk to the TV camera as you
would talk to one individual. It is an extremely intimate medium.
Most politicians make the
mistake of not reviewing TV coverage of events they are involved
with: they don't watch TV news broadcasts because their schedules
don't permit it. It's much easier to scan press clippings whenever
they get the time. Tapes are so much more clumsy.
So even if the "elites"
do read newspapers, and even if the press is the solid alternative
to what passes for information in the severely sound-bitten world
of electronic media, it's on TV - and to a lesser extent - radio
where politicians have to worry about how their public image is
evolving.
Hmmm. I wonder if CBC TV
would give me a weekly time slot to talk about Westmount municipal
affairs. This little essay could be subtitled "everything you ever wanted to know about snow removal, but were too uninterested to ask". Your curiosity about the translocation of agglomerated crystalline frozen water is probably as piqued as it will ever be, thanks to three storms that dumped a total of 50 cm. of snow last week on our 62 km. of streets and lanes.
Getting rid of last week's accumulation cost us about $600,000, eating up a quarter of our total annual budget - which may now have to be boosted. We hauled away some 60,000 cubic metres of what the media like so wittily to call "the white stuff". That's the equivalent of one acre of snow piled 50 feet high.
And how do we get rid of this collected avalanche of snow? Unlike most cities we don't blow it all over your lawn. No. We truck it all away, except for the Summit Circle area. Now, sister cities like Outremont or Côte-St-Luc have enough dump sites within their own territories to handle all their driven snow. But Westmount has to take most of it to a pier near the Jacques Cartier bridge. By taking it all away, and by taking it to a place a long way away, the result is snow removal costs that are double those of similar cities. We are not helped by our hills, which require lots of salt; again, we use double what cities on the flat have to use. We try to get the salt down as quickly as possible. This is because ice bonds tenaciously to pavements, and, once formed, is difficult to remove. The salt stops this bond from forming. But salt (sodium chloride) doesn't really work below -10°C. Calcium chloride does, but it costs 10 times more. We take 8,000 tons of salt a year that's kept in hive-shaped dome in the City Yards. It's our salt cellar, so to speak.
We clear fire and bus routes, main arteries, school zones and hills first. We plough snow when it gets to be about 5 cm. We try to clean up after a storm of, say, 20 cm. in three days; we base our planning on weather forecasts that come in three times a day.
In a fit of misplaced zeal, Quebec's Environment ministry will require us next year to stop dumping our snow in the St Lawrence. We'll either have to dump it on land, or put it into the sewer system. This will cost us a fortune, and severely slow down snow removal. But even if we dump it in the sewer, the stuff winds up in the river, anyway - with many pollutants coming along for the ride. This is because the wastewater treatment plant was not really designed to remove them. Besides, because we remove it quickly, and because we're a residential community, our neige usée - while perhaps not "as chaste as unsunned snow", as Shakespeare put it - is still pretty clean. So what's the point, Mr Minister? We spend more on snow removal than in operating our library, and two-and-one-half times what we spend on garbage collection. It's 7.5% of all local expenditures. I hope you think you're getting your money's worth. Last Saturday night, I went to the Westmount Winter Carnival family dinner that was followed by a movie for the kids and a comedy show for the adults. (I really mean for adults: last year, the jokes were so blue, they would have even offended Bowser.) I usually go, not really to glad-hand -which I'm not good at doing, anyway - but because the comedy show is as professional as the dinner is, ah, familial. You don't go there for the food, certainly, but you do go there for great comedy and good fun.
The turnout this year was a bit disappointing. Maybe we could have sprung for more promotional dollars, and maybe Saturday night a lot of Westmounters are in the country. But also I think it reflects the temper of our times: we are turning inwards. I bet a lot of citizens just decided to watch TV that night. It's a shame.
The other day I read that we watch TV 26 hours a week, and listen to radio 24 hours a week. Since few do both simultaneously, that's a whopping 50 hours a week devoted to such passive media. These numbers are, of course, average. For each person such as I who never listens to radio and rarely watches TV (except for Masterpiece Theatre, 60 Minutes, and sometimes Austin City Limits), there has to be someone out there who is listening and watching nearly 100 hours a week. It boggles the mind. I then made a few calculations. A week has 168 hours. Assuming we sleep 56 hours, work 35 hours, and listen and watch 50 hours, that leaves only 27 hours - just enough time to eat, shop, shower, and perhaps talk on the telephone.
So, according to my calculations, the average Quebecer has no time to read, see films, socialize, play sports, listen to records, or travel.
What's wrong with this picture? I can't figure it out, can you? Maybe each of us has a doppelganger who's busy doing all these other things.
One thing is for sure. We emancipated ourselves from the slavery of working 60 hours a week in the last century, only to occupy the time gained in chaining ourselves to the TV. In fact, in the U.S., people are now working on average 1609 hours a year...and watching TV 1636 hours a year. Job sharing just frees up time for people to watch more television. This is progress?
Ernie Kovacs defined television as "a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done". Frank Lloyd Wright called it "chewing gum for the eyes". It's really just a vehicle for commercial messages. And with viewers watching the news 24% of the time, the rest devoted to sports, game shows, comedy, and drama, TV's become a homogenizing cultural Waring blender producing a pretty thin gruel.
So as we continue our search in Westmount for a Community Events Co-ordinator, whoever we hire will have his or her work cut out: getting more people to participate in Winter Carnival family night for starters. Warning: the separation of Quebec has already occurred. In the minds of the apparatchiks in Quebec City, separation is more than just a working hypothesis; for them, Quebec is, for all intents and purposes, an independent country - it just needs the formality of another referendum to give it the weight of law.
The strategy is cunning; de jure independence will be so much less painless if the government structures are already in place to manage the new country of Quebec. And that's just what's happening. Under the guise of "decentralization" and "regionalization" - policies that have not even been covered by the Anglo media - the 16 administrative regions of Quebec are being slowly turned into 16 "provinces".
While a significant number of responsibilities (and not necessarily powers) are being transferred to the regional level, and while this is going on under our very noses, most of us are on snooze control. Very soon, we will wake up and see a very different Quebec.
The architect behind this Quiet Regionalization is Guy Chevrette, the minister responsible for regional development. He, along with a number of other cabinet heavyweights, has a dyed-in-the-wool union background. So it is not surprising that they have based their governmental structures on the union model: the "centrale" being the province - which is now being referred to as "L'État". Their communiques are liberally sprinkled with union cant about "solidarité" and "concertation".
These people actually believe that strong government control is necessary and desirable. They are married to the belief that the government creates jobs. (The only jobs the government creates are government jobs.)
The homogeneity of Quebec's government apparatus, the fact that 82% of the electorate is francophone, the Quebec tradition of trust in the state - all conspire to create a high level of tolerance for state-controlled activities, something that Anglos intuitively regard with suspicion.
Another concept dear to the hearts of the PQ ideological movers and shakers is the involvement of socio-economic groups in decision-making. Not, mind you, to help in their decision making in the National Assembly. But to meddle in regional government. So the common pattern is to dilute local elected officials with a goodly dollop of union types, business people, social workers, and leaders in the educational and health sectors. Sometimes, we elected people get only one-third of the votes in these Byzantine structures. But we are the only ones answerable to the public.
In a few weeks, Chevrette will make public a white paper on regionalization, followed by a road show in the regions. He will table a law in May. This law will create a hundred "local development centres" and "local employment centres". As if we don't have enough structures already.
More on this next week.
January 23, 1997
La Presse,
for example, has had it in for the mayor of Laval, Gilles Vaillancourt,
for some time now - subjecting him to hard-hitting articles and
editorials. Yet so far, he has weathered anything La Presse
can throw at him, because he is a great communicator on TV.
THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS February 6, 1997
COMPETING WITH CHEWING GUM FOR THE EYES February 13, 1997
PROVINCES WITHIN A PROVINCE
Febuary 27,1997
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