On full information

Michael Harris' latest is well worth a read in offering a guide to avoiding the worst consequences of election-year spin. But it's worth noting that his most important advice is only presented as an afterthought:

Final note on street-proofing your vote? Inform yourself. Look at what the people who want their power renewed have done with it so far, and at what those who seek power say they will do if they get it.

Above all, don’t cast your ballot out of fear.

While the warnings found earlier in Harris' piece may be helpful as examples of what candidates shouldn't do and what the public may want to avoid, any voter's election-year calculus should be based on one core question: which candidate and government will best represent the interests of one's self and one's fellow citizens?

The combination of horse-race talk, partisan spin and one-way messaging which we know all too well is then problematic precisely because it's designed to push voters down self-serving shortcuts in answering the core question. But by focusing more on avoiding the former than addressing the latter (as Harris seems to suggest as his order of priorities), voters may well leave themselves vulnerable to different forms of manipulation.

The inevitable end result of each elections is that somebody will be elected to represent each riding. While parties and candidates will have their own ideas as to how people should decide who that will be, it's the civic duty of each voter to decide what matters most, compare the parties' and candidates' positions, and cast a ballot accordingly. And shutting out the spin is only a small part of that process.

Part of the pattern

Don Martin's indignance at being lectured by Con MP Jim Abbott based on his "sanitized, censored exposure" to only the portions of Afghanistan cleaned up for visiting dignitaries is rightfully getting plenty of attention. But it's worth recognizing that the issue goes far beyond Afghanistan alone.

After all, one of the core problems with the Harper Cons is the fact that they so scrupulously avoid being exposed to anything which might disturb their bubble of hyperpartisanship, feeding into their constant message that nobody else's experience or opinion deserves to be taken into account. And if Martin's own experience has taught him that the world as the Cons perceive it - and fervently believe it should be presented in the media - has nothing at all to do with reality, maybe that should lead him and others in the media to start being far more critical of the Cons' spin in other contexts.

On antidotes

Susan Delacourt is absolutely right to note the danger when silence required as a matter of duty leaves the real story untold. And it's worth noting that Delacourt misses another obvious example - as the Afghanistan leaks that have made so much news lately would have been far less significant if their details hadn't previously been withheld for little apparent reason.

But I'd think there's another point worth raising as to who bears responsibility for filling the void with spin, and how the press can respond:

Dutiful silence is an honoured tradition in Canadian public service, but if it becomes a weapon in someone else's hands, that should make us all worried. And it might make public servants reconsider whether discretion is always the better part of valour. If Mr. Sheikh had another option -- specifically, refuting things said about him publicly -- maybe he didn't need to resign.

And we in the media, yes that means me too, should be careful about allowing mischievous spin to fill a duty-bound silence. Sheikh essentially said this morning that StatsCan was outgunned by a whisper campaign against it, much in the way that the GG was, and that cannot be right. In a larger sense, I think this tension between perception and reality is the biggest problem facing political journalism and politics in general. Perception shouldn't be a trump card against facts.

It's not as if it's much of a secret that the source of the whispers is the same government which is well known for fabricating details even when it knows that the truth will come out. So shouldn't some greater skepticism - both in handling spin when it comes in, and more importantly in conveying it through a story - be one of the most important defences against abuses of the power to withhold the facts?

Spin doctoring

Greg nicely dissects the willingness of mainstream pundits to spin every poll toward the "we're headed to a Con majority!" narrative even when there's no real evidence the Cons' position has improved at all.

But while the fairest interpretation of SES' data is probably that it tells us nothing we didn't know already, let's note that it would be equally accurate to read the poll as follows:

(T)he fact that a growing proportion of voters in every region except the West is "uncomfortable" with the idea of a Harper majority is terrible news for the Conservatives, and potentially good news for all other parties.

"Even though there's been no drop in the number of voters planning to vote Conservative, these numbers show that more and more voters from Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada see a Conservative majority as dangerous -- even with over a year in power Harper hasn't been able to shed the "boogeyman" label," (the pollster) notes.

Poor excuses

I'm amazed that the Cons' latest attempt to weasel out of a campaign promise even made it onto the party's well-worn Wheel of Excuses, as Jim Prentice tries to claim that a promise of compensation for students who attended the Île-à-la-Crosse residential school was merely a "mistake":

It's "extremely unlikely" Ottawa will keep a Conservative campaign promise to compensate students at a northern Saskatchewan residential school, the federal Indian Affairs minister says...

Prentice now says his party made a mistake and didn't have all the facts when it made the original commitment. That means the court-approved settlement deal that would pay some 80,000 former residential school students an average of about $25,000 each won't apply.

"The school doesn't qualify," Prentice said. "The ad, to the extent that it had a different assumption, was in error and that's unfortunate."

In fairness, Prentice's claim might be relatively plausible if the promise had been the result of an off-the-cuff response to a request to lump Île-à-la-Crosse in with other residential schools. But let's expand on the "ad" from his quote and take a look at where the promise actually came from:

During the campaign a year ago, Conservative leader Stephen Harper said in a radio commercial that if he were prime minister, former students from the school would be compensated.

"We'll provide full compensation for residential school survivors, including those attending the Île-à-la-Crosse school," Harper said in the advertisement.

Needless to say, Prentice's explanation can only suggest gross incompetence on the part of not only whoever wrote the commercial and decided that the promise should be made, but arguably Harper himself for failing to ask just why Île-à-la-Crosse should be singled out for specific treatment.

Meanwhile, the effect going forward is to offer just one more example of how the Cons' supposed commitments ultimately stand for nothing. After all, if "we didn't bother checking the facts" is supposed to be a valid excuse for breaking promises from the past campaign, there's no reason to think that PMS won't suddenly discover an entirely new set of "facts" to justify breaking a new set of promises. And the mounting evidence that the Cons' word isn't worth a thing should be one of the key facts which voters take into consideration in deciding whether to leave Harper in charge.

Proudly under investigation

Wajid Khan responds to the question of whether his car dealership's loans to his former Lib riding association violated the Canada Elections Act:

Khan said he's been cleared. "Why don't you talk to the authorities and find out yourself instead of me telling you. Let Elections Canada let you know," he told ctv.ca.

The only problem with such a statement is that it tends to lead an enterprising reporter to actually ask Elections Canada. And from them, the story is somewhat different:

Elections Canada said it is "in the process of reviewing" the case.

Granted, an ongoing review is far from a finding of guilt - but no further than it is from a final decision that's "cleared" Khan at the other end of the spectrum. And if Khan is as far out of touch with Elections Canada's actual rules as his new party-mates, the last thing he may want in the long run is for Election Canada to be the one "telling" Canadians whether what he's done was valid.