I am old enough to remember when the Great Snowbird Scandal was the top of the news in Alberta. For well over a week it burned white hot. You couldn’t turn on your radio, TV or read a publication without seeing headlines on the issue. The hypocrisy was unbearable. Albertans on all sides of the spectrum were furious as they saw jet-setting MLAs & staffers travelling to tropical just as the locked their constituents down over Christmas..The questions kept coming..“Did Premier Kenney do enough?”.“Should Kenney kick all of the offending MLAs out of caucus?”.“What did Kenney know, and when did he know it?”.“Did Kenney lie?”.“Should Kenney resign?”.A major publication even wrote an entire story on how the Twitter hashtag ‘#ResignKenney’ was trending. The social media mob was swarming and they wanted blood. They would not rest without more heads on more pikes. Kenney went underground, but with every day he was missing, the scandal only seemed to burn hotter..And then suddenly…. poof! It all disappeared.. space .It was as if a switch was tripped. The entire issue was suddenly something that was behind us. It was time to move on to other issues. The media was reporting on new stories and the mob – at least the mob on the left – was gone. Poof!.So what happened?.Naheed Nenshi is what happened..The Calgary mayor was found to have pulled off the same hypocritical stunt that Premier Jason Kenney had. Nenshi’s handpicked Chief of Staff had travelled to Hawaii over the holidays with the Mayor’s knowledge and blessing. Nenshi gave a short statement saying that civil servants should not be held responsible in the same way as elected officials and that he would not fire his chief of staff, as Premier Kenney had. Now that the scandal had touched one of their progressive darlings, the mainstream media decided that it was no longer a story worth covering and slinked away. No follow-up questions, no demands for blood. It was time to move on..Let’s be clear. A chief of staff is not a civil servant. We are not talking about a bus driver or administrative worker at city hall. A chief of staff is the right-hand man or woman of the elected official they were chosen by. They are political staff. A chief of staff works directly with their boss on the messaging and implementation of policy..Nenshi’s chief of staff was right in the thick of things when Nenshi demanded that the provincial government lock us all down. Nenshi’s chief of staff helped communicate all of Nenhi’s chiding “stay home, save lives” statements and the chief of staff is privy to meetings where it is decided that police should crack down on kids playing hockey. The chief of staff was surely right behind Mayor Nenshi when he called on Calgarians to snitch upon their neighbours. The chief of staff should be held accountable for his or her actions..There will be no accountability in Calgary over the hypocrisy. Nenshi is feeling no pressure from this and the media has given him a pass..For all Kenney’s hypocrisy in this during his government’s own lockdown, Nenshi was even more militant in demanding draconian closures with draconian punishments..The gross double-standard being practiced by the mainstream media should be noted and remembered. Have no doubt, Premier Jason Kenney has been the architect of much of his own misery. He deserves what he got, and the media should continue to ask questions about his truthfulness in the matter..But how are we supposed to trust a mainstream media that attacks Kenney with fury, while it gives a complete pass to Nenshi over the same issue?. source .Calgary is going into a municipal election year and we can be assured that Mayor Nenshi will yet again get an easy ride from the mainstream media. It is going to be tough for up and comers to challenge an incumbent with the government-funded press on his side..Thankfully, new media outlets like the Western Standard and others are allowing citizens to bypass the establishment media who feel that they are the gatekeepers of information. With each act of hypocrisy, the mainstream media loses a little more credibility and loses another part of their audience..While I will call the mainstream media out on it, I don’t want them to stop. They are dinosaurs of a dying and obsolete information medium. Let’s just keep giving them rope and let them finish the job themselves. Eventually, no government subsidies will matter as there will no longer be an audience.Cory Morgan is the Podcast Editor and a columnist for the Western Standard
