Now 100% adulterous golfer free
Ian Kaufman
Features Editor
Beginning around Christmas, year-in-review lists begin to clog newspaper pages like so much errant cholesterol in the media’s veins, choking off any hope of real news and aggravating readers to no end with their self-referential faux nostalgia. If 2009 has taught us anything, though, nobody reads the newspaper anymore – so we can probably get away with running one or two more of these infernal recaps.
Not that many of us will likely want to remember last year. Against the background noise of economies and ecosystems seemingly collapsing around us, corporate media was content to be, more than ever, a 24-hour echo-chamber of celebrity deaths and misbehaviour (“newsak,” as Jon Stewart dubbed it). Granted, we also heard a lot about H1N1, U.S. health insurance, and the Copenhagen climate summit. Unfortunately, coverage of these issues fell victim to the media’s increasingly surreal interpretation of political journalism. Television news completed its transition to slick sideshow, relying on sound bytes from party strategists, incestuous interview tactics (scripting conversations with other journalists rather than grilling politicians or experts) and tacky gimmicks - not that interviewing Will.i.am via hologram isn’t pretty neat.
The European media was more efficient, managing to combine paparazzi-style journalism and political coverage into one convenient package. Most of this fodder was provided by British MPs’ profligate use of taxpayer money, and the antics of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi, although Nicolas Sarkozy remains a fixture for gossipmongers.
Considering the events of the year, though, perhaps the public was just as happy to go without substantive news coverage. Serious coverage would necessarily involve facing up to emerging uncertainties about the future. Such issues were mostly avoided, relegated to the crannies of public discourse.
Michael Moore’s new film, for example, which would see capitalism condemned to the dust bin of history, received only tentative coverage and fared worse than his previous work at the box office. At the G20 meeting in London and the climate change summit in Copenhagen, reporters seemed far more interested in securing footage of confrontations between police and protestors than they in questioning the motivation behind the protests that now perennially greet international meetings. All in all, a dreary news year was mostly papered over with inconsequential celebrity gossip, while people crossed their fingers for an economic recovery.
Didn’t anything good happen in 2009? I asked a couple of friends.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” mumbled one.
“2009 was shit,” another baldly stated.
Well, there’s always next year.
An article in the Vancouver Sun pronounced 2009 a “pretty dull” year for Canadian politics. Most of us would agree. But could the stultifying torpor of our nation’s politics be some sort of insidious “vote-suppression strategy” by the Conservatives? Funny you should ask, says Michael Ignatieff: “The less people that participate, the more people that are cynical and disengaged from politics, the better from [Stephen Harper’s] point of view,” the opposition leader suggested in an interview with the Toronto Star.
While it seems like a believable enough theory, Ignatieff didn’t exactly pose much of a challenge to Harper’s scheme to bore the public away from politics. The internationally acclaimed author and academic had trouble stringing together a well-formed sentence (see above), let alone a compelling narrative for his party. The publication of his book “True Patriot Love,” which mixes stories of his intriguing family history with trite sloganeering clearly written with the next election in mind, did little to clarify his positions.
Obama’s first year in office was bound to be anticlimactic as cheering masses hopped up on Hope© came to the sobering realization that, no matter the man’s poise and gravitas, a change in leaders and ruling parties would not make America’s problems go away.
The nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package passed in February was divided about evenly between tax cuts, government spending (on roads, education, health care, and unemployment insurance) and contracts, grants, and loans to companies. About $250 billion of that had been paid out by the end of the 2009, according to recovery.org, the U.S. government site in charge of monitoring the stimulus.
The decision to award Obama the Nobel peace prize was met largely with confusion and condemnation - probably “more burden than glory” for the president, said the New York Times. The award was bestowed not for any particular accomplishment, but as a reflection of international hope that he would reverse, or at least temper, the unpopular foreign policy decisions of his predecessor.
On this front, Obama committed to send 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan in early 2010. He hopes to start a military withdrawal from the country a year later, telling Afghanis “we have no interest in occupying your country.” 2009 was a particularly deadly year: the UN estimates that there were 1500 Afghani civilian casualties just by August, while about 520 coalition troops were killed (most from the U.S. and UK) – more than half by roadside bombs.
Alberta posted its first deficit in 15 years in 2009 thanks to falling gas prices and U.S. hesitancy to buy the province’s “dirty oil”. As Chinese car sales surpassed those of the U.S. and the States cooled on Alberta oil, the Conservatives talked of opening the oil sands to China. “We need transportation mechanisms to ship it to the West Coast,” said federal Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice, who was possibly never informed of his reassignment from the Ministry of Industry in 2008.
PetroChina, the world’s largest oil company, has been interested in such a project for some time, signing an agreement with Enbridge to build a pipeline from Edmonton to the B.C. coast in 2005. The project has so far lain dormant, but with this year’s investment of almost $2 billion (U.S.) in oil sands projects by PetroChina, it may soon pick up steam once again.
B.C.’s Fraser River made headlines when about %90 of its projected salmon run failed to return to the river from the Pacific Ocean. While many scientists familiar with the area attributed the die-off to fish farms along the salmon’s migratory path, the government staunchly denied the possibility. Combined with other factors such as increasing water temperatures and overfishing, many fish populations in the province are facing precipitous declines.
B.C.’s excellent online magazine The Tyee reports that Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Gail Shea, was in Norway for an aquaculture conference while the collapse of the Fraser salmon occurred. Norwegian companies own the majority of B.C’s fish farms.
Fishing in British Columbia is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the same department that “managed” the East-coast fishery into oblivion in the 20th century. The province has faced ominously similar symptoms to those of that other ecological collapse. It is feared that other species, such as eagles and bears, will also be affected by the lack of salmon.
One of the most heavily covered stories of the year was December’s climate conference in Copenhagen, attended by leaders and policy-makers (not to mention protestors) from around the world. This summit included all 192 United Nations member states, where the previous Kyoto negotiations had been limited to 47. The resulting Copenhagen Accord has been widely panned as a disappointment, although there was little hope for any ambitious, legally-binding agreement in the first place.
Says John Prescott, the EU’s negotiator at Kyoto: “Copenhagen’s achievements are an acceptance of the science (contested at Kyoto), an admission there will be global emission cuts, and an acceptance that there will have to be verification [of national emissions levels].”
While these may be encouraging baby steps, if the predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change (endorsed by the UN and the major national governments), are realistic, Copenhagen’s resolutions will almost certainly prove to be impotent.