Muted Tories increasingly inaccessible to parliamentary media

After the May 2 election, some of my colleagues in the Parliamentary Press Gallery speculated that the majority victory will allow the Conservatives to finally loosen the screws on their notoriously controlled communications apparatus.

Maybe the media would get more chances to, you know, actually speak to cabinet ministers about matters of national importance and ask them questions on public policy. With a strong, stable majority government, surely a spirit of glasnost would overtake the Tories, some believed.

Recall that when Stephen Harper took office in 2006, one of the first orders of business was to end the long-standing practice of allowing the media to question ministers after cabinet meetings.

Instead, we’d have to rely on scrums after Question Period to hold ministers to account — but only if they wanted to play along. After Question Period, MPs leaving the House of Commons pass through the foyer, but most often, Tory cabinet ministers take the rear doors and leave through the north corridor, where media are not allowed.

Every so often during the minority years, a Conservatives cabinet minister would amble out to answer questions.

I was curious about whether this was happening more or less often since the election. My own anecdotal observation was that cabinet minister scrums were getting a lot scarcer.

I pulled together a database of transcripts of post-Question Period scrums that are sent out each day to press gallery members. I looked at about 44,000 individual responses given to reporters by MPs in front of open microphones, calculated word counts, and then broke these down by party affiliation.

The data confirms that Conservative MPs and cabinet ministers particularly are speaking to journalists on the Hill less now than they did before the election.

Between 2010 and the beginning of the election campaign, Conservatives accounted for 17 per cent of the 750,000 MPs’ words captured by press gallery microphones in the foyer after QP.

Since the election, that figure has fallen to 11 per cent, down sharply from the 20 per cent of air time Tories commanded in the month before the campaign began.

Before the election, cabinet ministers made up 14  per cent of the verbiage, but just 9 per cent since.

Since 2008, former Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe was the most verbose, uttering 235,000 words into press gallery microphones, followed by the late Jack Layton at 226,000 and interim Liberal leader Bob Rae.

The most chatty Conservative: Treasury Board President Tony Clement, way back of the pack at 52,000 words.

I’ll post more on methodology in a later post, but until then, some Tableau Public…

(Cabinet minister words indicated in blue, all others in grey.)

Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen 
Author: Glen McGregor