DEFENDING MEDIA FREEDOM IN THE COMMONWEALTH
DEFENDING MEDIA FREEDOM IN THE COMMONWEALTH
Hon. Chrystia Freeland, MP
is the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs. From 2015 to 2017, she served as Canada’s Minister of International Trade, overseeing the successful negotiation of Canada’s free trade agreement with the European Union, CETA. She was first elected as a Member of Parliament in July 2013. An esteemed journalist and author, she was educated at Harvard University before continuing her studies on a Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford. She worked for the Financial Times, The Washington Post and The Economist, before serving as Deputy Editor of The Globe and Mail and then joining Canadian-owned Thomson Reuters.
This is the address by Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs at the Global Conference for Media Freedom in London. Thank you very much, Jeremy [Hunt, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs], for that extremely kind introduction. I do want to thank you, Jeremy, for having the very important idea of hosting this conference. I think all of us, as Amal Clooney was honest enough to admit, faced some skepticism in doing this. But it is incredibly important and I’m so grateful to you for having the idea and for following through, for inviting Canada to work with you, and I do want to thank the magnificent British team of public servants who have done a fantastic job in bringing this to life. You guys are a terrific model of public service. I do also want to thank Amal for her great comments and her great work. In every newsroom I worked in as a reporter, an adage was that “the better the journalist was, even better the lawyer needed to be.” This autumn we will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For those of us who lived through that time as I did - my kids can’t believe I’m that old - it was a euphoric moment and one where it was tempting to imagine that liberal democracy was both inevitable and eternal. That was such a seductive idea, but it has proven to be an illusory one. Instead, it is clear today that liberal democracy and the rulesbased international order are under greater threat than at any time since the Second World War. As Robert Kagan argues in his recent book, The Jungle Grows Back, “If the liberal order is like a garden, artificial and forever threatened by
230 | The Parliamentarian | 2019: Issue Three | 100th year of publishing
the forces of nature, preserving it requires a persistent unending struggle against the vines and weeds that are constantly working to undermine it from within and overwhelm it from without. Today there are signs all around us that the jungle is growing back.” I agree with that so profoundly. There is no part of our liberal democratic garden that is more threatened by the jungle’s resurgence than the free press. The danger is often specific and physical. Many of you have probably seen on the floor above us, the poignant wall of remembrance that bears the names of the many journalists who have lost their lives in recent years. Let us take a moment to remember them and salute their courage. The troubling reality, as we have been hearing yesterday and today, is that journalists and other members of the media are increasingly the target of abuse and attack. This must stop. Journalists must be able to do their work safely and without fear of reprisal. I’d like to pause and address the elephant in the room, the seeming paradox of elected politicians coming together to support a free press. We politicians may seem to be surprising champions for the media and that’s because of the inherent structural conflict between the press and the government. The job of journalists, after all, is to hold our feet to the fire—and as someone who is regularly on the receiving end of that treatment, I can assure you it is not a very pleasant experience. I’m sure all the politicians in this room are nodding in hearty agreement. But it would be a terrible mistake for any politician, smarting perhaps from that discomfort, to
conclude that journalists are the enemy; quite the contrary. A free and independent media in all of its disputatious, cantankerous glory is one of the cornerstones of liberal democracy. Reminding ourselves and each other of that fundamental reality is why it is so useful for us to come together today. The truth, to be sure, is that it is harder to be a politician, to be a government, in a country with a free and independent media. But that’s the point. By holding us - their governments - accountable, journalists make us better than we would otherwise be. Facts matter. Truth matters. Competence and
“A free and independent media in all of its disputatious, cantankerous glory is one of the cornerstones of liberal democracy. Reminding ourselves and each other of that fundamental reality is why it is so useful for us to come together today. The truth, to be sure, is that it is harder to be a politician, to be a government, in a country with a free and independent media.”