Meet Postmedia’s favourite right-wing think tank

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute's senior fellows and policy analysts are getting a lot of space in Postmedia opinion pages.

Postmedia opinion editors are way too willing to let people affiliated with conservative think-tanks write nonsense in their papers, allowing private interests to shape public opinion. 

In fact, people affiliated with the conservative think tank the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) published over 80 columns in Postmedia papers this year alone. I’m going to tell you why that’s bad in a second, but first here’s a bit of context.

If you listen to the podcast Big Shiny Takes, I don’t think I have to tell you that legacy Canadian print media is in rough shape.

If you don’t listen to the podcast Big Shiny Takes, you should. First of all, that’s my podcast and I’d appreciate it if you listened to it. Second of all, Canada really only has two national newspapers: the Globe and Mail and the National Post. 

The National Post is the national paper run by Postmedia, the largest newspaper chain in the country. They own over 80 papers, including the Toronto Sun, the Calgary Herald, and the Montreal Gazette. These papers, while still responsible for some good local reporting (less every year it seems), also print some of the most atrocious opinion columns to ever desecrate a newspaper layout.

Postmedia has a mandate to push conservative ideas into Canadian discourse, as reported by Canadaland in 2019.

Their board is full of the exact type of tax cut-loving, free market-worshipping vampires you would expect, including a member of the infamous New Brunswick oligarch family, the Irvings. The Irvings have an interesting history with the press in New Brunswick, but that’s a story for another time.

The primary issue I take with Postmedia owning the lion’s share of newspapers in this country is it allows them to shovel laughably bad columns into opinion pages across the country with little to no consequence. There is rarely a competing paper in the markets where it operates, and despite the news industry more or less imploding over the past decade, people still read newspapers.

So what goes into an opinion column at a Postmedia paper? Their columnists tend towards deep concern about the carbon tax, critical race theory, the appropriate time to go to war with China, “gender critical” transphobia, or how the woke mob is destroying everything.

These topics are also points of interest for the MLI.

The MLI is a conservative think-tank that claims to want to “make poor public policy choices unacceptable in the nation’s capital”. Its managing director was the founder of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, which recently merged with another notable pro-oil and gas conservative think-tank, the Fraser Institute.

The MLI isn’t just another libertarian-conservative think-tank that loves oil and gas. Its affiliates also spend an inordinate amount of time on tired culture war topics. They’ll publish a column defending statues or streets named after an old racist as some sort of misguided attempt to protect a discredited narrative of Canada’s origins. 

Through its publications, the MLI has proven it exists to promote the interests of capital to the public and policy makers. The stances they take always act to reinforce economic interests or the moral superiority of Canada in the world.

The MLI came under scrutiny this past summer when an investigation by Geoff Dembicki in The Narwhal revealed that they had partnered with the Atlas Network (a massive conservative American special interest organization) to organize an astroturf campaign to pressure the Canadian government to limit Indigenous communities’ abilities to push back on fossil fuel development . According to Dembicki, the MLI “enlisted pro-industry Indigenous representatives in its campaign to provide ‘a shield against opponents’.”

The MLI responded with an article on their website, accusing the Narwhal piece of being “eco-colonialist,” going so far as saying it “undermines Indigenous rights” after Dembicki’s investigation was published.

I have no doubt these authors believe what they write. The issue is their affiliation with an organization attempting to shape public policy in favour of private interests which are destroying the planet. 

This is precisely why their content is so appealing to Postmedia bosses. 

In 2022, there were at least 82 columns published in Postmedia papers by people affiliated with the MLI. That’s about two columns a week. The Globe and Mail published around six. 

The majority of the columns I found were written by MLI Senior Fellow Jamil Jivani, but Ken Coates, Aaron Wudrick, Heather Exner-Pirot, Patrice Dutil, Balkan Devlen and Raheel Raza all published columns in Postmedia papers this year.

Jivani, for those not aware, is currently suing Bell Media for cancelling his radio show. According to Jivani, he was fired for being too conservative. You can read about it in his newsletter sponsored by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. It’s very funny. Jivani is also the President of the Canada Strong and Free Network (formerly the Manning Centre).

In a particularly egregious piece of writing, Jivani wrote a column equating “the war on climate change” (not a thing) to the “war on drugs” (real thing and very bad). He argues that despite both wars being fought with good intentions, they have both caused collateral damage. The war on drugs was innately racist and disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated black people. 

So who are the victims of the war on climate change? To Jivani, the direct comparable here is farmers who will not be able to use as much nitrogen in their fertilizer. This action was taken in order to curb the environmental devastation human beings have caused, excess nitrogen gets into water and promotes the creation of algae blooms that suffocate and kill ecosystems. What makes it worse is that Jivani manages to quote two of his colleagues from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute while failing to mention his connection to the think tank.

This column was published in the wake of the Dutch farmer protests. Thankfully our local reactionary idiots didn’t really rally behind this incredibly weak cause.

Conservative think-tank fellows getting free real estate in national newspapers for their stupid ideas is bad. The idea that these people are being paid for these columns, and that Postmedia is receiving money from the government through tax subsidies is worse.

See my spreadsheet of MLI columnists here.

Thanks for reading my first piece for Culture War By the Numbers. I’m going to write a couple of free entries a month, but I’m also going to put a few behind a paywall. You can get access to those newsletters by supporting my podcast at patreon.com/bigshinytakes and selecting the second tier. You get a bunch of other benefits too, like occasional sticker drops and bonus podcast episodes.