An article for Maissoneuve magazine by a National Post writer attempts to answer why Canuck bloggers haven't generated a shockwave of a scoop yet that rattles the Canadian political or media establishments.

The short answer is, because they're bloggers, not journalists. Duh!

The story by Siri Agrell interviewed a whopping five people: Catherine McMillan of Small Dead Animals, Andrew Coyne of the National Post and Stephen Janke of Angry in the Great White North, along with Toronto lawyer Julian Porter and Jesse Hirsh, described as an expert in open-source intelligence.

Apparently no one from the liberal or non-partisan sectors of the blogosphere were available for comment during the research phase of Agrell's article.

As an fyi, Coyne, Porter and Hirsh were speakers at a Canadian Journalism Foundation event in late September on blogging (I was there and posted about it). The article mentions the session in passing.

Antonia Zerbisias of the Toronto Star (I saw this article there first), opines on this issue:

... One major problem is that most bloggers who are against the current government are based out west, far from the action and the political contacts and connections. Second, no bloggers in Canada, at least none to my knowledge, are supported by think tanks or philanthropists with political agendas. Third, and not least, despite all their puffery to the contrary, the blogosphere in the U.S. has not really accomplished as much as it likes to believe it has in terms of breaking scandals, or doing original journalism. It has mostly amplified under-reported stories, sending them bouncing through the blogosphere until the echo gets heard in the mainstream.

One point Zerby missed is the synergy between the U.S. right-wing political blogs and their soulmates in talk radio and at Fox News who can amplify issues.

In the CBC-less world I lived in here in T.O. for the past seven weeks, I listened to CFRB for a fair bit. I would say it has a bit of a right-wing edge to what it chooses to be outraged about -- one example is the federal government's decision to quietly raise the mileage allowance for public servants and politicos.

But I didn't hear CFRB's commentators cite the blogosphere even once on the subject.

Despite that, Coyne said -- both in the article and at the CJF event -- that he worries the blogosphere simply functions as an "echo chamber," where peoples' opinions are shouted back at them.

At the CJF event, Coyne pressed the issue of how civil disagreement is important, noting he shut comments off on his blog because they were getting so poisonous (check out the comments on SDA's posting on the Maissoneuve article. Some very high-level debate! :) ).

In the article and his presentation, Coyne did say some bloggers were doing a better job of digging stuff up than MSM journos -- without giving an example.

The one example in the story is Janke:

... Janke ... believes he is one of those bloggers. Last spring, testimony in the Gomery inquiry suggested the Liberals had been rewarding lawyers friendly to the party with judicial nominations. Janke spent a lunch-hour poring over government press releases dating back to 1995 and inputting the names of Quebec judicial appointments into a spreadsheet. He then fed their names through a (now defunct) feature of the Elections Canada home page, which allowed him to see what political contributions that individual had made and to whom.

His findings were revelatory: 60 percent of recently appointed Quebec justices had contributed to a political party and almost all of them had favoured the Liberal Party. He posted his findings on his site and two weeks later the numbers were repeated in the mainstream media.

Janke can’t be sure that he was the source for their story, but says he doubts “anyone else would spend hours feeding the names into the computer.”

Actually, computer-assisted reporting techniques have been around for a while (although I can't speak specifically on how Janke's story made it into the MSM),  and patronage has been a major target. When I was in Quebec last weekend, the Montreal Gazette did a story on how contributors to Mayor Gerald Tremblay's political campaign had a way of winning contracts with the city of Montreal.

Another story talked about was the posting of Gomery Inquiry testimony by Jean Brault on the U.S. blog Captain's Quarters:

Captain Ed received more than 1.5 million visitors the week Brault's testimony appeared on his site. Small Dead Animals is one of Canada's more successful political blogs, and receives about 5,000 visitors a day. McMillan claims she was offered the Brault testimony before it was given to Captain Ed and says she was looking for a way to post it under a pseudonym when he went public.

But the fact remains that, in a year when American bloggers led major stories on both sides of the border and Canadian politics reached new levels of intrigue and animosity, political blogs in this country made little -- if any -- impact. McMillan places part of the blame on a disinterested public and a media that largely ignores the sites as a source of information or ideas. There is no equivalent audience in Canada, she says, for US sites like Instapundit—a blog run by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds which acts as an informal liaison between blogs and working journalists, and receives more than 200,000 hits a day.

The Canadian equivalent would be 20,000 page views per day, which is quite a lot.

Actually, "Captain Ed" (Ed Morrissey) had some kind words for Canadian bloggers:

While I appreciate the recognition from Agrell, I have to disagree with the thrust of the headline ("Are Canadian Bloggers Pussies?"). The Canadian blogosphere may not have the saturation of its American cousin, but that does take time to develop. Political wars don't play as much of a role in Canadian lives as it does with Americans, and plenty of both will argue that likely indicates better mental health north of the border.

More than that, though, the article tends to downplay courageous Canadian bloggers. Kate MacMillan actually played a role in my publication of the Gomery testimony, which she appears in this article too modest to acknowledge; she wanted the story to come out and sacrificed the scoop to make sure it did. Stephen Janke defied the publication ban and linked me during the Gomery testimony, as did Neale News, despite the threat of prosecution for doing so -- showing a bit more bravery than most of the Canadian press at the time. John at Newsbeat1 has already built a following doing the kind of reporting that Agrell wants, and he does so with some risk, if readers pay attention to the nature of his prolific links.

Canadian bloggers work hard to position themselves for the inevitable day when their fellow countrymen decide that their diversity-challenged media have not served them well and begin to demand the answers to questions Americans learned to ask after Watergate. If they're not quite reaching the traffic levels of American blogs now, they will soon enough. I've met them and know their mettle -- and they will be ready when the time comes.

One problem Canadian right-wing bloggers might face is this statement by National Post editorial page editor Jonathan Kay at a post-screening discussion of Outfoxed, in which he averred that Canada was a "left-wing country."

It's not like the Canadian MSM has ignored Liberal corruption stories, but corruption apparently isn't the primary issue driving voter behaviour.

An interesting study along these lines is Alberta, which has had a right-wing government of one type or another for more than 70 years.

When the media there has reported incompetence or corruption scandals in the past 20 years, the inevitable result is the return of another Tory government.

Oddly, I don't hear much complaining about this from the right-wing side of the Canadian blogosphere.