Yes, no and the pageantry of accountability
When your accountability makes no room for context, it's not accountability — it's a show

When Andrea Sereda joined the parliamentary health committee in Ottawa back in late February, alongside three other medical and public health professionals, the result was a caricature of accountability.
While the committee hearing had four speakers, Sereda, a doctor whose London, Ont. clinic prescribes safe supply, was clearly the focus of this show. And it was a show — one that continues months later to pay dividends to its actors, who have returned to the hearing to target Sereda and her clinic.
Because I can’t help but put things into spreadsheets, I know that, not including her five-minute opening remarks, Sereda spoke for more than 34 minutes in the hearing.
Dr. Rob Tanguay, who was present at least in part as a conservative foil to Sereda, took up 13-and-a-half minutes of the committee’s time. Louis Letellier de St-Just, who was largely called on by francophone members of parliament, spoke for eight-and-a-half minutes.
The fourth speaker, Maria Hudspith, executive director of Pain BC, was there to, uh… well, that’s not clear.
Outside her five-minute opening remarks, Hudspith was called on twice and spoke for a total of 87 seconds. She was given just 28 seconds to speak at the tail end of one Liberal MP’s allotted time, and she was cut off after 59 seconds by a Conservative MP, just as her comments turned to the issue of pain patients being deprescribed opioids.
Who gets to speak uninterrupted
The hearing was a case study of the pageantry of political accountability.
And it’s important to look through the showmanship, particularly in an issue where the stakes aren’t comparatively nebulous ideals like transparency or ethics violations, but the material conditions that have left thousands dead across the country each year for nearly a decade. (This isn’t to say that transparency and ethics violations aren’t vital issues to be concerned about.)
In the face of a crisis with a solution within reach that could save hundreds of lives each year, politicians took this time to show off their grilling skills, attempting to use Sereda as their prop.
Sereda was also interrupted by committee members far more than any other speaker, going an average of 82 seconds before being interrupted by a committee member for reasons other than time constraints. Tanguay, by comparison, was interrupted for non-time-constraint reasons once every 403 seconds. Letellier de St-Just, meanwhile, was interrupted only once and only because an MP’s allotted time was up. In one instance, a Bloc Quebecois MP let him speak for two-and-a-half minutes, taking up his entire allotted time in that round of questioning.
The bulk of interruptions to Sereda came from two people: Conservative MPs Laila Goodridge and Todd Doherty, each of whom Sereda spent five to six minutes responding to. In that time, Goodridge interrupted Sereda once every 39 seconds, and Doherty interrupted her once every 21 seconds.
By comparison, Goodridge interrupted Tanguay once in the entire five-plus minutes he spent responding to her. Doherty dedicated his entire allotted time to Sereda.
On its own, this dynamic isn’t necessarily wrong. Grilling an executive of a grocery chain that has profited off of inflation, for instance, would be justified, as would cutting the said executive off when they revert to pre-planned talking points.
Neither was the case in this hearing.
Context avoidance
In fact, rather than discouraging taking points, Doherty and Goodridge insisted on talking-point-length responses or yes/no answers to complicated questions, trawling for the 120-second exchange they can clip and post on media, quickly discarding any interaction that doesn’t promise to produce outraged retweets.
Responding to a question about alleged diversion in the area near her clinic, Sereda told Goodridge diversion is “complicated, and it requires more than a 60-second answer, if I can finish.”
She couldn’t.
“I have a very limited amount of time, so I ask quick, simple questions and wanted simple, quick answers,” Goodridge told her.
Asked about whether she believes youth should be prescribed “recreational” fentanyl, Sereda was cut off again as she explained that youth are dying from the illicit drug supply — the very context that safe supply comes out of.
After telling Doherty she couldn’t answer another question about alleged diversion around her clinic with a simple yes or no, he assumed she denied that diversion was happening. (She didn’t.)
When explaining that there isn’t any scientific data supporting claims children are getting hooked on diverted safe supply, Doherty cut her off to ask what the leading cause of death among youth in BC was. (The answer was illicit drug overdoses; not diverted drugs.)
When explaining how extensive tracking of safe supply drugs would drive patients who have been, for years, overpoliced by governments away from accessing safe supply, Doherty interrupted to ask if diversion is illegal. (It is.)
After asking about claims by Dr. Sharon Koivu about diversion, Doherty had little patience for Sereda’s response that Koivu has refused to share her methodology, as is done in scientific research.
As Sereda explained that her clinic has “robust” protocols for preventing and stopping diversion, Goodridge interrupted with: “But diversion is illegal.” It’s not clear what point she thought she was countering with that input.
Context challenges narratives
The list goes on, but the point is that the interruptions weren’t to some corporate executive who workshopped mealy-mouthed talking points that ultimately mean nothing with a team of crisis PR suits. Their objections were to context.
If you only look at the fact that people are dying from overdoses, it does look like drugs are a problem, particularly in a political environment whose drug policy is the outgrowth of DARE-style fear-mongering of drugs and drug users.
Context challenges those narratives, and it challenges the idea that the only way to address this is through policing and the recovery industry. Context like the reason for so many people dying being that the drug supply is so unregulated that people have no clue how much of any particular adulterant is in a given dose of the drugs they’re consuming. Or that studies overwhelmingly show how effective safe supply is at not only saving but stabilizing people’s lives.
Gotcha journalism
I started writing this in early March, shortly after the hearing, but after a while the timeliness was lost and this piece fell by the wayside. I’ve been thinking of it again, recently, however, as this performance has come up again in the news cycle, thanks to Adam Zivo’s Big Scoop that people said things in a public meeting.
Sereda recently spoke to the annual general meeting of Moms Stop the Harm, in a video conference that was publicly available, and recorded and posted publicly to the group’s public YouTube channel. Zivo wrote about Sereda’s comments there, claiming she felt the meeting was private.
In the meeting, Sereda acknowledged — as harm reduction advocates have all along — that it’s likely some youth are accessing diverted safe supply, just as youth access the illicit drug market and diverted hydromorphone that was prescribed for pain patients.
In the health committee meeting, Sereda responded to allegations of diversion to youth by saying there was no evidence of this diversion. Zivo and the Conservative Party have painted this as Sereda lying to the committee.
But one can acknowledge at the same time that there’s no evidence of it and that it does likely happen. You can understand that something likely happens, but it’s impossible to take action without evidence. Scratch that. It’s impossible, without evidence, to take action in a way that’s productive and actually addresses the issue without punishing everyone else.
But the work of Zivo in the National Post and of Goodridge and Doherty in committee isn’t to produce evidence — it’s to perform. Zivo can perform the role of investigative journalist, and Goodridge and Doherty can perform the role of dogged parliamentarians seeking accountability.
But accountability demands more than yes/no answers or quick responses you can fit into a two-minute Twitter video. Accountability requires understanding, and understanding requires context.
Broken Canada, broken politics
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre often uses the line that “everything feels broken in Canada.” He’s not entirely wrong about that — but he’s often wrong about why it’s broken. And he’s failed to see his own party’s role in breaking things.
Austere governments operating on neoliberal thinking over the last half-century have let infrastructure crumble and committed us to a deep housing and homelessness crisis.
And politicians that are more interested in clips they can advertise on social media than in hearing evidence only contribute to a deepening cynicism of politics — a cynicism that Poilievre feeds on.
I want people like Sereda to answer hard, even uncomfortable questions about their programs. Tough questions, when done in good faith, bring us closer to the truth and hone in on truly adequate solutions.
Zivo’s work isn’t based on tough questions made in good faith. The list of questions he sent to Sereda regarding her comments at the Moms Stop the Harm AGM, which he linked to in his National Post piece, twist the meaning of Sereda’s words to fit his narrative.
Much of it revolves around an anecdote Sereda gave to the London Free Press and to the House of Commons, where she relates her experience with a father whose child died while on the waitlist for her safe supply program. The father said his child was accessing diverted safe supply before they died — gotcha! She said child! Safe supply! Diversion!
Zivo takes for granted that the man’s child was a youth. (Zivo, for instance, is somebody’s child, but he is no youth.)
This is among the worst tendencies of “gotcha” journalism — it makes an assumption and works backwards to support it.
The conduct of the Goodridge and Doherty in the committee hearing follow this same pattern. Rather than letting experts speak to the issue, they’ve made up their mind, and they’re working backwards to back up their conclusions, mining Sereda’s testimony for bite-sized clips they can post on social media that will outrage their base.
This isn’t accountability; it’s entertainment. And as people see politicians turning governance into entertainment, it becomes clear why “everything feels broken in Canada” — because politics is broken.