A few years ago Maclean's got rid of all its politics writers and plunged into seeming irrelevance. (It does still exist.) The Walrus, which long trailed in Maclean's shadow among general interest Canadian magazines (and always seemed pretty boring when I looked at it) gradually stepped into the limelight. Today it operates more like a website than a traditional magazine.
I'm a (recent) subscriber but I don't even seem to get the magazine itself. What comes instead is almost daily bulletins from all over, contributed by a wide range of name writers. Some of what the Walrus shares are reprints from the contributors' Substacks or other online commentary, making the Walrus a kind of all-Canadian aggregator site (not a bad idea). Online they seem to give away most of their material for free, so I'm not sure exactly what I subscribe for. A lot of the online pieces are very timely. Some of them are quite good.
So today for instance, The Walrus offers not only a poll (that it helped commission) on the state of play in Quebec's looming provincial election, but also an article on the collapse of the Quebec Liberal Party and the resignation of its recently-chosen leader, the former Trudeau cabinet minister Pablo Rodriguez.
It's more than you would find in most English-Canadian media, but it's not a very deep story -- mostly poll summaries and comments from pollsters, the kind of people who a year ago knew why a Poilievre majority in Ottawa was inevitable. It has almost nothing insightful to say about the scandal that brought down Pablo Rodriguez.
What brought down Rodriguez was his leadership race, which led to public exposure of alleged mass buying of votes (aka memberships) -- hundred dollar bills changing hands and the like. And of course mass buying of votes (aka memberships) has been the basis of every Canadian party leadership race in the last hundred years -- except usually the hundred dollar bills are kept out of sight. The Quebec Liberal Party has started a new vote-buying orgy to replace the leader elected by the last one. And the new leader of the NDP will come from whichever campaign buys up the most NDP party memberships. And so on, ad infinitum.
Is this not the real story? All party leadership races are based on this corruption. And even when the corruption is exposed (bringing down Rodriguez who may not have known about the details), the answer is to do the same over again but trying to keep the actual cash transfers out of sight this time.
The efforts journalists take to take these leadership contests seriously versus the effort they put into exploring how they really work -- it never fails to amaze.
