Robert Fife: Why Canadians Are Vulnerable To TDS

"The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.--Christopher Lasch

To those working in the sordid tar pits of Canadian journalism the news that Robert Fife was retiring at 71 hit many hard. To the ranks of patronage press Fife has been a reminder of the golden ages of political journalism captured in my friend Bob Lewis’ book “Power, Prime Ministers & The Press”. 

Put simply they were hard-drinking iconoclasts whose greatest joy in life was tweaking the tail of the powerful in politics and business. They took as good as they gave, but none spent days lamenting the mental torments of the job they had chosen. There was no “assault on reporters”. Few were products of classic education or journalism schools. But they knew to get their facts correct

For most of his career Fife was a continuation of that tradition. In stints with CTV, Sun Media and the Globe & Mail he led the market for dramatic scoops. Among them were Nigel Wright's payment in the 2013 Senate scandal under Harper and Justin Trudeau’s pressure and firing of Indigenous justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould in the 2019 SNC-Lavalin affair. Plus reporting on Chinese election interference that led to a public inquiry.

To those aspiring to traditional muckraking, he was a role model, unafraid and unexcitable. For some with lesser resumés, Fife’s sheet would have occasioned bragging and drawing attention to themselves. But in the best tradition of Grattan O’Leary, Bruce Hutchison and Jefferey Simpson, Fife kept a low profile and high batting average. 

But then the corrosive effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome finally took hold of Fife. Even as he was picking up awards for his even-handed previous work in Ottawa, he suddenly came down with a rabid case of partisanship. To the delight of the Elbows Up crowd Fife began to give warm tongue baths to the arriviste PM Mark Carney. At the same time he was acidly destroying CPC leader Pierre Poilievre and Alberta premier Danielle Smith. 

For many this late-season pivot was jarring. If ever a gimlet-eyed perspective were demanded it was the epidemic launched by Trump’s acid assessment of post-Justin Canada— a Chinese money-laundering backwater unable to defend itself or balance a budget. As Carney and Mike Myers launched the faux-patriotic Elbows Up meme to hide the truth, a strong hand on the facts was needed to prevent a Covid-like surrender of civil rights and common sense. To examine the hysteria of booze bans and boycotting travel to the U.S. might be seen as the most responsible action a reporter could take.

But sadly, Fife did little of this. His description of Poilievre as a “dickhead” seems more characteristic of Canada’s social-media Liberaces, not an esteemed reporter. He sneered, “Where's the Margaret Thatcher in Premier Danielle Smith? We don't see it. She says she's an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, well the Iron Lady would have just told these people, 'Get lost.'" He also labelled Northern Perspective as a “crazy right-wing YouTube channel”? He eagerly reported harmful gossip from inside the Conservative camp.

The following comments on the G&M website reflect lamentations for a reputation sullied. One former fan @dkreative1 comment,ed “If you’d asked me back in 2019 after Fife had broken the SNC Lavalin scandal, I would have sung his praises and asked him if he worried about being pushed out of Ottawa as a journalist. But after his dismal performances of late? I say, close the door behind you.”

 And this from @AndrewJWHaynes “Why did he throw away a reputation for integrity to actively install and defend a profoundly undemocratic and corrupt Mark Carney? “ There were plenty more in this vein.

Some are suggesting that Fife might now become the journalistic equivalent of the floor crossers Carney used to gain a majority in the Commons— this time to monopolize the press. It would be a death knell for Canadian journalism that the lure of Elbows Up patronage might be added to subsidized journalism and new censorship laws as cause of death. 

To play the devil’s advocate maybe Fife has simply had enough of the sorry state of his incurious craft in Canada. The FWK (Fife We Knew) would be dismayed by the increasing subsidization of news operations in Canada— on top of the $1.5B supporting CBC. That added to the millions that hapless Culture minister and longtime Trudeau pal Mark Miller distributed to grease the wheels for public journalism via the Canada Periodical Fund and Local Journalism Initiative. 

Now, Miller is talking about giving grants to the Liberals’ big corporate pals to keep afloat a product few Canadians require anymore. It’s bad enough when government-sponsored media outlets and unions representing journalists are left to move public opinion in elections. But that was Canada in the 2025 federal election. 

The FWK would also be looking into the link to the Liberals' Bill C-9, to create a censorship stasi to weed out messages that insult their PM or their donors. Officially known as the Combatting Hate Act, it will be the responsibility another of Justin’s cabinet tongue bathers, Sean Fraser. Ostensibly a bill to protect the young from contentious online content it will quickly morph— as it has in Britain— into a catch-all for “hate”—now defined as subversive speech against the government. 

As @CBCwatcher suggests “Heck, why not permanently fuse 20th Century journalism with the Mark Carney government - or regime, as Althia Raj of the Toronto Star recently called it - and diminish public trust in both.”

The thought of mediocracies like Fraser and Miller determining what constitutes hate or free speech should a target for any Fife disciple. That scenario is what controversial lawyer Douglas Christie foresaw in the 1980s when zealous prosecutors of his Nazi-apologist clients proposed hate speech as a new crime.  Said Ezra Levant, “Almost alone in Canada, Doug Christie knew that it's better to defend free speech in the first ditch — when the censors come for unlikeable people — than to defend it in the last ditch, when those emboldened censors come for the rest of us.”

It’s hard to see where today’s inculcated young journalists emerging from liberal universities would defend those sentiments. But the disappearance of the Fife we knew is not an encouraging sign.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his 2023 book Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, was voted a Top 20 greatest professional hockey books of all time by bookauthority.org . https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1770415300?linkCode=gs2&tag=uuid0a1-20 His previous book with his son Evan, Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/106980270