Source : Globe & Mail

So, the Conservatives have the whip hand in this election. How worried should they be over at the CBC?

The National is running a segment called "Your Turn," in which the public gets to pose questions to the party leaders in real time. Paul Martin appeared Thursday, Jack Layton is up next.

Night after night, Peter Mansbridge lets us know that Stephen Harper originally agreed to appear next Monday but cancelled four weeks ago. The CBC remains hopeful that Mr. Harper may yet be booked.

If he had bowed out 10 days ago, you could put it down to a front-runner not eager to expose himself unnecessarily. But he cancelled a month ago, which suggests that Mr. Harper's people decided at the outset there was no profit in handing their man over to the ministrations of the CBC.

It's no secret that a core constituency of Conservative supporters -- many of the old Reform/Alliance crowd -- are not fans of the CBC. They see it as an $800-million cash grab to propagandize the country with lefty-Liberal cant using taxpayers' own money. To them, it's Option Canada writ large.

Inadvertently, the CBC handed an I-told-you-so moment to its enemies this week.

The National invited the various parties to try their hands at doing a TV news story as they would cover the campaign, rather than the meddlesome media. A splendid idea and the results made for good viewing, but the Liberals chose Susan Murray to be the party operative who crafted their news story.

She certainly has the know-how. Not too long ago Ms. Murray was a parliamentary correspondent for CBC Radio and a panelist on programs such as TVOntario's Studio 2.

She has taken an unpaid leave from her new job in government communications (hired under the Liberal government) to work for the Liberal Party machine. Former CBC reporter, now Liberal Party talking head. Join the dots if you're that way inclined.

In the 2004 election campaign, Conservative musings about radical changes to the Canadian mediascape were briefly in the headlines. No such loose talk this time around and nothing to indicate Mr. Harper's thoughts on the CBC, beyond the fact that so far he's given the snub to Mr. Mansbridge.

No doubt the Conservatives resent the coverage they receive on the CBC, but so do all the parties. Tough cookies. Thus far the CBC's campaign coverage has been fair-minded, even-handed and occasionally inspired. It has taken a few risks and some of them haven't worked out, but others have worked like a charm.

The only brainstorm that wasn't worth trying in the first place was the cockamamie avowal not to pay undue attention to the horse race and not to report on opinion polls unless they showed significant change.

Some lunkhead in the executive suites of the CBC politburo came up with that one, presumably in an attempt to command-plan how the news division would cover the election. Fat chance.

The complaint that the media pay too much attention to party strategies and tactics, rather than substantive policy debate, may have been novel in a university seminar in the late 1970s but it's idiotic in a modern election. The strategy of the Harper campaign has been to tactically time-release centrist policy positions. You don't think strategy and policy are inseparable?

As for the CBC not paying attention to polls, that's just a fib. Right from the beginning of the campaign, every Sunday night the CBC's chief political correspondent, Keith Boag, has walked us through a "poll of polls," in which he reviews all the major opinion survey results of the week.

So the CBC promised us something at the outset of the campaign because it figured that's what we wanted to hear, then went ahead and did something else.

Who does that remind you of?

© The Globe and Mail