Hugh Segal on the "paralytic and destructive haze of the Ottawa bubble"

From Conservative Senator Hugh Segal's The Right Balance: Canada's Conservative Tradition (published this summer but I've just had the chance to finish it):

When Ottawa is top of the news all the time, in part because the Ottawa media presence has no other choice (regardless of whether what is happening in Ottawa is newsworthy or not), and in part because the government of the day is pushing, advocating, changing, risking, reorganizing, negotiating and campaigning on one issue or another of high intensity or contrived controversy, voters tire and turn away. (p 164)…

In reflecting on my own disconnnection from any understanding of the Reform “The West Wants In” option and how much more positive that was than “The West Wants Out” alternative, the paralytic and destructive haze of the Ottawa bubble has emerged over the years as an important factor. Extreme partisanship on all sides produces its own distorting “fog of war” Intensive media coverage of trivial divisions or partisan excess combines with those excesses themselves and unites with the endless and often trivial (but no less intense) anxieties and micro-manoeuvres of the civil service to produce a deeply unreal world quite disconnected from life beyond the bubble, where people go about their day-to-day activities. The amount of time MPs now spend in Ottawa and the ever-increasing number of conflict-of-interest strictures cut them off even more from reali life on the ground. The days when citizen farmers, teachers, haberdashers, small business owners and the rest went to Ottawa for only a few weeks of the year to represent their communities are long gone. This focus on Ottawa always makes it easier for insurgent political movements to gain momentum, while those in the bubble fight their own internal pettifogging partisan engagements. Many political capital cities have this problem, and one of its impacts is that those near the centre of the fray do no see, sense or hear what matters in the ral world as they get consumed by the skirmishes that have no meaning outside of their own tiny universe of partisan to and fro. That the national media covers most of this activity in Ottawa as competitive news of objective value only magnifies the distortion. I have been no less susceptible than others caught in the bubble and no doubt I’ve done my share to contribute to the distortion on more than one occasion. Having, along with many others, passionately campagned for the “yes” side on the Charlottetown Accord, my focus on the Quebec threat had clearly dulled my understanding of the western dynamic around a similar axis of inclusion and exclusion. (pp 166-167)

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