The occasion was a municipal debate at Toronto City Hall, that I witnessed some months ago. The issue arose over the purchase of a small, insignificant piece of land by the municipality for the expansion of a city service. And before the debate even began, the city clerk called for city councillors to declare. Then, several stood up and did.
“In accordance with the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act,” one councillor said, “I excuse myself from the debate.”
I’ve always been struck by such political devices – at least in this country – that attempt to remove the potential for corruption or inappropriate decision-making based on a conflict of interest. It looks as if the same may not be true south of the 49th in even larger forums than Canadian municipal council chamber.
It hasn’t taken long, but in the pre-inauguration days of a new political regime in the United States, Donald Trump’s administration may already be bending or breaking the rules of conflict of interest, fairness or transparent governance. On Monday, the president-elect announced he had appointed Reince Priebus, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff. Now there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about that.
However, Trump also selected Stephen Bannon to be his chief strategist and senior counsellor. The man took over the chief-executive-officer’s position of the Trump election campaign last August. But he also remains the executive chair of Breitbart News, a news, opinion and commentary website which overtly applauds the views of the so-called “Alt-Right.” Since taking over from the founder of the news agency, Andrew Breitbart (who died in 2012), Bannon has moved the website in a decidedly pointed direction.
“We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class,” Bannon told the Washington Post this year.
Which would be all right, if it ended there. But Bannon’s strong leadership at Breitbart has since been accused of supporting misogynist (anti-women), xenophobic and racist views. And while that appears to fit into president-elect Trump’s agenda, it also places a large supposedly neutral news-generating outlet at the disposal of the incoming American president. On CBC Radio’s “As It Happens” the other night a former Breitbart spokesman, Kurt Bardella, put it more bluntly.
“As we transition now into (a new) White House,” he said, “we have, for the first time in our country’s history, a media entity that’s positioned to be the propaganda vehicle for the president.”
And what does that mean? Bardella says quite bluntly that anytime someone in a position of authority feels perfectly comfortable promoting people taking matters into their own hands, or promoting the idea of investigating or incarcerating one’s political opponents or adversaries, “these are all signs of someone who has a dictatorial perspective in governing.”
When I think of those individuals who took on vital advisory roles in or near the Prime Minister’s Office in this country – people such as Keith Davey for the Liberals and Dalton Camp for the Conservatives – I recall that such men divested themselves of direct media connection while in the employ of the PMO.
Davey had come from managerial roles at the Toronto Star and CKFH Radio before masterminding Liberal campaigns in 1962, 1963 and 1965. He continued to fulfil advisory roles for former prime ministers Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and John Turner.
Meanwhile, Camp assisted the campaigns of John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney, including a senior consultative role in Mulroney’s campaign to bring in free trade during the 1988 election. But unlike Bannon’s continuing link to Breitbart’s editorial boardroom from the Oval Office, in the case of Davey and Camp, those connections were severed while they worked on Parliament Hill on the payroll of the leader of the country.
So why should advice dispensed to a U.S. president be free and clear of media links? Well, at the very least, prevents a conflict of interest. It’s odd enough that some of president-elect Trump’s family members will sit on his advisory team, giving any number of Trump businesses direct access to insider information on everything from taxation to bank interest rates to military decision-making, not to mention the nuclear codes.
But to position such an influential media outlet at the beck and call of a president suggests unethical alignment. And further, when that news service has published as fact such headlines as, “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy” or “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?” or “Hoist high and proud: the Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage,” one questions whether a Bannon-Trump alliance in the Oval Office is a healthy arrangement.
So, while in this country we remove a councillor from debate over a conflict of interest in a postage-sized land purchase, in the United States a force as powerful as a national news agency is given free access to the president and vice versa without so much as a second thought. We should all be doing that.
