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The Definitive Guide to the Alberta NDP’s Latest Trainwreck

Rachel Notley (and her government's lawyers) have given the Rebel Commander, Ezra Levant, the greatest gift of all: legitimacy.

Ezra, being glum. Photo via The Canadian Press

On January 29, Sheila Gunn Reid and Holly Nicholas—two contributors to The Rebel, Ezra Levant's right-wing agitprop outlet—were unceremoniously evicted from a media lockup about the Alberta government's royalty review announcements. At the time, very few people seemed to notice or care.

But this week, The Rebel announced intentions to sue the province unless it stopped barring its reporters from accessing media events. The province's lawyers responded by claiming that Ezra Levant and the people writing for The Rebel are not real journalists and so they're not entitled to access media events—which is a polite (if condescending) way of legally telling them to fuck off.

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Suddenly, the NDP was in the business of determining who was and who wasn't a journalist—and therefore who could and could not get media access. Bloggers and "online news sources" were also apparently persona non grata at media functions. So much for the forthcoming BuzzFeed/VICE/Vox Alberta bureau collab on "17 Puggles Who are Totes Not Down with This Definitive Guide to the Alberta Government's Bullshit Fucking Reasons for Maintaining a Parallel, Publicly-Funded Catholic Education System (and Why This Matters)."

Anyway, it turns out that this was a really, really stupid idea by the NDP. The Rebel's entire business model is predicated on fabricating outrage against the Alberta NDP, so they were more than ready to go hog wild as soon as they actually got a legit thing to be mad about. And as far journalism-related outrages go, the State policing who gets media access is a pretty grave sin for an ostensibly liberal society.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, back when she was happy to let people visit the legislature. Photo via Facebook.

The backlash against the NDP was pretty swift and largely uniform. The general consensus among the Media Party (ie. mainstream shills who hate the Truth and work tirelessly to keep the Canadian sheeple asleep while radical French-Canadian Communist Muslims destroy this great country) is that an injury to one journalist—even an especially bad, obnoxious, and hateful one—is an injury to all. Loud assholes determined to bend the truth to the absolute edge of hate speech and libel are the price we pay for freedom of expression.

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The government's about-face was also pretty swift. I called the premier's office this morning about whether or not a piddly online news source like VICE was a credible enough media outlet in the eyes of the NDP, and Cheryl Oates, Director of Communications, told me the following:

"We've heard a lot of feedback from Albertans and media over the course of the last two days and it's clear we made a mistake. The government has appointed former Western Canadian Bureau Chief for Canadian Press, Heather Boyd to consult and give us recommendations on what the government's media policies should be. In the meantime, no one will be excluded from government media events."

Credit where it's due: the NDP are undoing the extremely dumb thing they did. In the span of 48 hours we have apparently moved from a socialist hellhole only a few degrees removed from arresting and murdering journalists to one of the most radically liberalized and alt-media friendly jurisdictions in North America. And, ironically, we owe it all to Ezra Levant successfully mobilizing the mainstream media apparatus he hates so much to come to his defense. Hell hath no fury like the Media Party scorned.

Make no mistake: Ezra Levant is a snake. He has (unsuccessfully) defended himself from libel charges by arguing that nothing he says should be taken seriously. He doesn't give a shit about media freedom and has kicked journalists he doesn't like out of his own "public events" before. He and his contributors will do and say almost anything to push their regressive agenda (and generate those sweet, sweet pageviews). They will never engage with the NDP in good faith and everything they write about politics in Canada is guaranteed to fall somewhere between hilariously biased and recklessly wrong. Or transphobic. Or whatever—if it will piss off anyone vaguely to the left of them, they'll publish it. They are aggressively terrible journalists that contribute almost nothing of value to public discourse.

It kills me that a national conversation about "what constitutes journalism in Canada in 2016" is decided by Ezra goddamn Levant, but for fuck's sake. If it's down to giving a sliver of recognition to a shitty and hateful cabal of hacks in order to protect the gains of non-traditional media from the capricious whims of government, then—so help me God—that's what we have to do.

At least this way, we can go back to ignoring their bullshit meltdowns with impunity.

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