It was a suck-the-breath-through-your-teeth moment–and not just for people who would never be caught dead reading the National Post. Most of the readers of the paper flipping through their Thursday morning edition would have cringed upon coming across the following, now-infamous ad: 
The ad was paid for by Charles McVety, of the inaptly named Institute for Canadian Values (slogan: “Where there is no vision, the people perish”), and appears to be an effort to influence education policy in the run-up to the Ontario election. The Post immediately scrambled its PR jets, with the ad director claiming he didn’t know how the placement slipped past the Post’s antihomophobia portcullis. I don’t know how the ad got printed. I am, however, inclined to believe the Post when they say this was more of an error than a deliberate policy. Because while much will be written about how disgusting the newspaper was for printing this nasty, predjudiced and (worse) ignorant ad, the real embarrassment for the Post here isn’t that the ad makes it look bigoted. It’s that it makes it look desperate. No doubt the paper has gotten more right wing and more fringe since Conrad Black bugled it into existence in what now seems that blissful pre-millenial year of 1998. I worked at the National Post in ’98 and ’99, when it was a brash, rude upstart that threw Conrad’s money around, gave political correctness a needed kick in the reproductive organs, and jolted the Globe into upping its game by sparking a newspaper war. (Can you imagine that now? A newspaper war?) It was always a right-of-centre paper when it came to business, but not to culture. Though its editors–at the time, Ken Whyte and his deputy Martin Newland–were generally considered around the office to be social conservatives, the paper also hired some pretty flaming transgressives, including leading chronicler of Toronto’s seamier underbelly Mitchel Raphael. It’s hard to push a particularly retrograde anti-queer agenda when your most successful cultural journalist is also the author of the Trucker magazine fashion column “Is This Too Gay?” Raphael was one of the many journalists who left the paper after Black’s indictment only to pop up again later under Whyte at Macleans, which borrowed more than a few pages from the Post’s kick-the-anthill playbook. The Black scandal took the heart out of the paper. What has happened inside its valves and aortae since then, I’m not qualified to write about. But from a distance, I’m inclined to blame most of its problems as symptoms not only of a wider right-wing backlash across North America since 9/11, but also of a chronic lack of money. No national daily stops printing a Monday edition for any other reason. Which is why the decision to run ICV’s anti-gay and transgender ad ought to make even the newspaper’s strictest defenders of “traditional definitions” shake their heads. Newspapers sell readers to advertisers, and advertisers are very concerned about image. They don’t want to be associated with homophobia because its tarnishes their brands. More than that, newspapers sell a certain prestige: the Post likes to hawk “a diverse audience of affluent, educated and powerful Canadians.” You couldn’t get much further from diverse, affluent, educated and powerful than this shoddily designed piece of crap. Cheaply produced ads by fringe groups (which, its supposed 52,000 strong membership notwithstanding, the ICV most certainly is) make the paper look as if it needs money so badly it’ll run anything. For supporters of a diverse media, that’s the real disaster here. __ Christopher Michael is a writer for The Guardian newspaper in London, and a regular contributor to Toronto Standard.
