Shame on the media for the Punch and Judy Sgro show
After 16 years of jerking Canada around, Mr. Singh got what he deserved: a plane ticket back home

TORONTO, February 5, 2005
globeandmail

Want a good reason why so many people recoil at the thought of entering politics? Judy Sgro.

Ms. Sgro was Canada's immigration minister until a few weeks ago. She had been given a rough time in Question Period, and her political career had taken a pummelling. But that's not what ended her ministerial career.

Instead, a man named Harjit Singh, a schemer and someone who had spent 16 years making a fool of this country's refugee-determination and legal systems, made allegations against Ms. Sgro.

These allegations -- that he supplied her campaign with pizza in exchange for ministerial favours -- were splashed all over the front page and backed by censorious commentary in the Toronto Star, Ms. Sgro's hometown paper. Other media, in typical feeding frenzy mode, tore into the minister, who resigned to clear her name. (Honourable mention, though, to Marina Jimenez of this paper who never bought Mr. Singh's accusations and outed him as a liar and cheat.)

From the start, it was not Ms. Sgro who had to clear her name but rather her accuser, Mr. Singh, whose record of mendacity and gall had exposed the refugee-determination system's pathetic and debilitating inability to get things done in a timely fashion.

Finally, this week, after 16 years of jerking Canada around, Mr. Singh got what he deserved: a plane ticket back home. He had avoided deportation for years through various legal schemes and bogus claims for humanitarian assistance. He obviously tried one last Hail Mary play to remain in Canada by making the allegations that ended Ms. Sgro's ministerial career.

So the question now is: What's a minister to do when confronted with frenzied media that seize on a schemer's allegations? If Ms. Sgro had stood firm and fought from within cabinet, her accusers, led likely by the opposition parties and most certainly by the frenzied media, would have demanded her head.

Once she resigned, and once it became clear that her accuser had a history, did we hear demands from the media and the opposition for her reinstatement? Did we see front-page editorials from the papers that had ruined her subsequently apologizing for their horribly distorted coverage?

These are rhetorical questions, of course, for if there is one golden media rule (great newspapers excepted), it is: Never apologize and never retreat.

But here's one small voice that says Judy Sgro deserves to go right back into cabinet. There is an ethics investigation into how she handled another file, an embarrassing one to be sure, about strippers allowed into Canada. If that investigation -- which has been long delayed because of the death of the ethics commissioner's wife -- reveals she did nothing wrong, she should return to cabinet the next day.

Judy Sgro was no roaring hell as immigration minister. She got overwhelmed early on by the complexity of the file, the incessant demands of MPs, ethnic groups and claimants, and the huge and pressing weaknesses in both the immigration and refugee-determination systems.

She had neither the time nor the political clout to do much about these weaknesses, although in fairness, immigration is about the touchiest subject around for a party that depends so heavily on votes from multicultural communities. She fired her staff after the last election, a sign of ministerial desperation, and disgruntled staffers leaked against her.

So, okay, maybe Ms. Sgro can't go back into cabinet as immigration minister. Maybe she should be given a smaller portfolio. But if her ministerial career is finished because of the toxic combination of manic media coverage and the allegations of a guy who played the entire country for a song, then you tell me, dear reader, who of sane mind would ever want to enter the political arena if this sort of combination can knock you from the ring?

The Sgro affair ought to set off reflections in the Canadian media, and not just for how the file got covered, but because it illustrated how the media have become part of a dysfunctional political culture in which assumptions of wrongdoing are pervasive, cynicism abounds, negativity prevails, and few, if any breaks, are given anyone who serves in public life -- except, of course, those paid to be watchdogs on those we elect, such as auditors-general, judges, whistle-blowers, prosecutors, inquiry heads, Democracy Watchers, ethics "experts."

There ought to be, as in the United States, robust media criticism and analysis from the universities, newspaper ombudsmen, blogs and people in the industry. In the United States, schools of journalism and communications -- to say nothing of the great institutes about the media at Harvard, Penn., Columbia and elsewhere -- are seriously and steadily critiquing the media. In Canada, heaven only knows what goes on in the journalism schools, such as they are.

There isn't an industry in the country that hands out more criticism than the media industry, or that is more thin-skinned about criticism it receives and less eager to promote serious self-reflection about its own mores and practices.

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