Editor’s Note: Covering the Federal Elections at The Rover

In case you didn’t notice, The Rover went pretty hard this election. 

It was the second federal election that The Rover’s covered since its founding, but back then “The Rover” equalled “Chris in his kitchen,” not “Chris and Savannah in Chris’ basement supported by a rag-tag group of the city’s finest young journalists.” Naturally, we got a lot more done this time, and I hope you appreciated the work we put into it. 

Montrealers will head to the polls again for municipal elections later this year, and next year we’ve got provincial elections planned in Quebec. That’s got me wondering: what lessons from this election can we identify and apply to the ones coming up? This way, we can figure out how best to serve our communities as they prepare to participate in our democracy. 

The question we asked ourselves at the beginning of the campaign was: what can we do with our current resources that will bring something new and helpful to our audiences? This felt especially important at a time when you deserve as much information as possible about the people promising to represent you in the Parliament and on the world stage. 

We can’t out-CBC the CBC from a basement in NDG. We can’t cover all the issues or all the controversies, and we’d get drowned out by all the other outlets with much larger platforms if we tried. But we can fill the gaps, and that was our aim throughout this campaign. 

Here’s how we tried to do that. 

Covering Canada: Elections 2025 grant 

We were awarded a $12,000 grant from the Rideau Hall Foundation, the Michener Awards Foundation and the Public Policy Forum — three non-partisan organizations unaffiliated with the federal government, I feel the need to specify. 

This was an opportunity for small organizations like ours to get timely funding to cover the federal election: it was directed at outlets with less than 20 editorial staff, and the grant was in our account about a week after the application was filed, with 10 per cent withheld until we file a report detailing how we spent the money. Isaac Peltz, a freelancer you might know from Instagram, actually applied on behalf of The Rover when they were out on assignment with Chris for the Chalk River nuclear dump story. Thanks, Isaac! 

Support Independent Journalism.

That money went to three places: into in-depth coverage of issues that were cast aside as this election campaign focused on Canada’s trade war with the US, into a special election podcast produced by Isaac, and into coverage meant to engage young people. 

We got to work with two bright young student journalists, Iness Rifay and Matt Daldalian, on some video and written content from the English debate night. We got a great piece from Neha Chollangi about asylum seekers at the border, plus the Chalk River story, and some election-themed op-eds like Dave Kaufman’s powerful piece, The Battle for Mount Royal. 

Issue-focused coverage — just in time for voting day 

From the start of the campaign, we knew we wanted to take an issue-focused approach. Ignore the horse race, what are the policies put forward by the candidates, and what impact could they have on average people like us? A video I posted on our Instagram asking our audience what kind of election coverage they want from us confirmed that that was the right posture to take. 

But it’s hard to do that kind of coverage when the parties release their costed platforms mere days before the election. By debate nights, only the Bloc Québécois had released its full platform. Millions of Canadians voted on advance polling days, and we still couldn’t publish anything comparing the platforms because we didn’t have all the information yet. 

At the start of the election campaign, we met with Lela Savic at La Converse to discuss our plans for the election and explore ways to partner up. A lot of what we talked about doing ended up falling through, just because we’re two small teams with a vision that often exceeds our capacity. 

We did agree to avoid doing the same things by deciding ahead of time that The Rover would focus on issues around social programs, housing and the toxic drugs crisis. While La Converse would focus on immigration, Indigenous issues and systemic racism. These are all important issues, but they were not the focal point of most of the coverage of this election cycle, as President Donald Trump and his threats to our economy and our sovereignty sucked out all the airtime for anything else. 

Even though it seemed like a good idea at the start of the campaign to proceed in the way we did, the fact that these articles could only come out in the final week of the campaign, after millions had already voted, leaves me wondering if it really was helpful.

Debate-night fiasco

Chris and Isaac were on location for both leaders’ debates in French and English in Montreal on April 16 and 17, which ended up being a lot more eventful than anyone expected — and not because of the debates. 

On the night of April 16, Chris and Isaac were in the media room at the debate, listening with all the other journalists. About halfway through, Chris noticed that the “journalists” from Rebel News, Counter Signal and True North, far-right organizations that portray themselves as news media, were already standing in line beyond the two microphones set up at the front of the room for the post-debate question period with the party leaders. This is not the standard approach journalists take — usually, when the debate is happening, they sit and listen, formulating questions that have something to do with the debate that just occurred. 

And so the first questions asked once the leaders came into the media room for the question period were not so much questions as they were long-winded statements with a question mark tacked on the end. In the end, half of the time allotted to journalists was eaten up by Rebel News and their friends with questions that did not pertain to any of the issues Canadians were concerned about in this election — only questions about how many genders there are and why Rebel News is being censored.

But the kerfuffle after the French debate paled in comparison to what happened the next day, when the question period was cancelled because the debate commission couldn’t ensure a “propitious environment” because of fights breaking out between Rebel News and the other journalists present. 

Journalist R. Pratka has already written for The Rover about how this question-period trainwreck was a disservice to local media and the communities they serve. Chris posted two videos on Instagram about the situation, one of them detailing the blatant conflict of interest that Rebel News is in as a third-party advertiser in the election campaign — a video that was found by Rebel fans who left many comments accusing us and other “mainstream media” of suppressing free speech and the like. 

The only thing I’ll add to what my colleagues have already said is that as journalists, we’re taught that the last thing you want to do is make yourself part of the story. At The Rover, we sometimes bend that rule a little bit, because we like to bend the rules but mostly because we’ve realized that audiences have grown to distrust legacy media precisely because of the habit of erasing any traces of the person doing the work and the biases they carry with them, taking on a “view from nowhere” that is anything but.

I think Rebel News, for all the negative things I can say about them, has also identified that distrust. They do not take a view from nowhere, and that’s precisely what their audience likes about them — and I know that because of the hundreds of Instagram notifications I had to sift through that week.

Some prominent legacy journalists seized on the moment of journalistic self-reflection spurred by this situation to call out any form of journalism that doesn’t take on the appearance of neutrality, like the kind of journalism we do. In doing so, these journalists have shown why legacy media is losing relevance and readership. 

What makes a journalist isn’t their commitment to neutrality or objectivity; what makes a journalist is their commitment to the facts. Rebel News demonstrates no commitment to the facts, therefore, they are not journalists. I disagree with much of the framing of the journalism we see in the National Post, but I can still recognize that the National Post does uphold basic standards of factual accuracy (though I wouldn’t extend that statement to their opinion section). 

I could go on about the myth of journalistic neutrality for pages and pages. But to summarize: it’s bullshit. It doesn’t exist. All it does is serve to uphold the status quo, and any journalist who is serious about their work knows that the status quo deserves to be questioned, like anything else. 

It is in assuming our biases, in making sure you understand the filter through which our journalism is produced, that we serve our community. The situation with Rebel News only strengthens my conviction that this is the way to go.

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