Iggy on Campus

As Michael Ignatieff’s tall figure stepped up on to a make-shift stage in the Drake Centre atrium at the University of Manitoba, everyone was startled as a huge protest banner descended from two floors up. The banner was a little incomprehensible, but the predominant message was that Liberals had consistently and wrongly cut funding for social programs in the 1990s. The banner fell directly beside Ignatieff, who coolly proceeded with his talk until finally asking, a little too cordially (and to significant applause), “If you could just take that up, I don’t have a problem with it, but I’d like to see the people at this side of the room.”

I immediately assumed that the banner was a stunt by a couple fanatical neo-cons, and it seemed that Ignatieff assumed something similar because at one point he looked up and assured the two demonstrators that “they loved the country, too.” I managed to speak with the two guys responsible, who acted alone and with no organizational backing. They both claimed to be trying to raise awareness over barriers to post-secondary education access.

“We were trying to show all the barriers there are to education, and that all past governments have failed in this way,” said Kyle Mytruk, one of the demonstrators.

He assured me that it didn’t matter who the politician was, whether it was the Prime Minister or Michael Ignatieff, because these failures weren’t partisan in nature. Considering the open forum of the event, I asked him why they didn’t simply ask Ignatieff a question regarding access to post-secondary education. He responded by saying the forum was mostly open to people from Liberal organizations with questions prepared beforehand.

“The banner wasn’t meant to embarrass him, just to spur discussion,” he said. “Barriers to education need to be discussed.”

I found the banner to be grossly inappropriate and unnecessary. The separation between the leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister of Canada is often too broad in Canada. Both are equally deserving of respect, especially when they have opted to conduct an open town hall forum, where students can ask any questions they feel are pertinent.

The two demonstrators were a couple of guys starving for attention, who received it from at least one journalist (me) and a photo (above) in the Winnipeg Free Press, which gave readers the false impression that the banner was part of Ignatieff’s presentation.

People like this too often dominate the media. It is not our job to pay lip service to people that use open political forums to raise “awareness” to something that Ignatieff was there to address in the first place. It is, however, our job to accurately report on events and we are often obligated to talk to fanatical idiots simply because they’ve decided to cause a disruption.

Don’t get me wrong, these guys were admittedly benign and had good intentions. I don’t doubt that they are harmless, decent students but they didn’t show enough respect for Ignatieff or for the forum itself, and their “protest” came off as a cheap stunt to get noticed. But people who manipulate the media are often much more sinister, and The Uniter has singled them out more than once in an article by Andrew Tod and one that I wrote over a year ago.

Journalists cannot forgo their obligations to accurately report on events. All we can do is keep people like Kyle Mytruk and Brian Latour (the other demonstrator) on the sidelines rather than at center stage.

Photo from WinnipegFreePress.com.