A typewriter is seen in this 2018 photo.
A typewriter is seen in this 2018 photo. Credit: Jules A. / Unsplash Credit: Jules A. / Unsplash

This may surprise some readers, but back in the early 1970s, yours truly was a callow youth working as a cub reporter for the Calgary Herald, when newspapers did their own fact-checking.

This important task was done by a special category of editorial employees known as copy editors.

Some younger readers may have trouble believing this was so, and some may even have never heard the term. 

That is because copy editors – like linotype operators and paperboys crying, “Read all about it!” – are now memories from the distant past.

And yet, I can assure readers that such creatures existed. As for newspaper copy editors, I even earned my paycheque for a spell doing that job for two large, profitable and perfectly respectable daily newspapers, one of which was the very Herald mentioned above. 

In the 1970s, the Calgary Herald considered itself “the newspaper of record of Southern Alberta (a bit of a self-conscious riff on how the New York Times then described itself) and, accordingly, took errors of fact seriously. 

A cub reporter could lose his or her job for making more than a couple mistakes that found their way into print. Having a correction published about your story, and noted in the files, was considered a grave humiliation. And those copy editors – God-like entities in the hierarchy of the newsroom – were charged with ensuring it never happened, or at least with vanishingly infrequency. 

I mention all this ancient history because of a column published by the same Calgary Herald as well as other newspapers owned by the Postmedia newspaper (and identical website) chain on May 18, which contained errors, and which therefore became a topic of heated discussion on social media. 

You see, it has come to pass – and this is not a good thing – that members of the public, for example, University of Alberta professors, have to take on the role of the copy editor without reward, except for the abuse of other social media users, of course. (This falls under the general heading of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Especially in Alberta.)

So when Andrew Leach, professor of environmental and energy economics at the University of Alberta, pointed out some serious errors in a column by Licia Corbella that ran under the headline, “Rachel Notley can’t run on her record as premier because it’s a disaster,” he was subjected to the usual abuse from the usual suspects, no doubt as he expected. 

In her column, Corbella wrote that when the NDP came to power in 2015, the province’s debt was $11.9 billion, but that when the United Conservative Party was elected in 2019, it had grown to $85.9 billion. “Thankfully,” she continued, “the UCP brought in surplus budgets and whittled away at Notley’s reckless debt.”

Leach took issue with that on social media, writing: “Reality: total taxpayer supported debt in 2019 was $62.7B. Total in 2023 was $79.4B.” In the same tweet, he added rhetorically: “Does whittled not mean what I think it means?”

“She is, unquestionably, living in a world of her own imagination,” Leach said of the columnist in another tweet, pointing to an Aug. 27, 2020, story in the Calgary Herald, headlined, “Alberta $24-billion budget deficit largest in Canada in percentage terms in three decades.” The subhead added, “Deficit will be $16.8 billion higher than forecast this year.”

Corbella’s column also said, of Notley’s time as premier, “Every economic indicator went down except … the debt.” This phrase also made it into the sub-head on the National Post’s version of the story. 

This too prompted a riposte from Leach: “Reality: Employment? Up. GDP? Up. Population? Up. Labour productivity? Up.”

A certain amount of inevitable palaver followed, wherein apologists for the UCP government argued for the consideration of various factors in defence of the government’s performance.

Fair enough, said Leach, but, “That there was a good reason for deficit budgets doesn’t mean there weren’t deficit budgets. That there was good reason to take on more debt doesn’t mean that more debt wasn’t taken on. This holds for NDP and UCP governments.”

In other words, the facts are the facts, and Postmedia did not report them accurately. 

There was a day when reasonable efforts would have been made at the Calgary Herald to avoid misinformation of this sort being published. 

In the event some was and someone pointed it out, an appropriately humble correction would have promptly appeared – something I doubt we are likely to see in this case. 

Be that is it may, I should add that a regular reader points out that the oft-quoted $11.9 billion starting point for Alberta’s debt when the NDP came to power also appears to be a misrepresentation of the facts as reported in the historical tables of the Government of Alberta’s 2021-22 annual report.

Or, as my interlocutor put it, “more than a stretch.” 

Add debt from government business enterprises to “total debt” as shown in the historical tables, and the total debt for the last year of the Progressive Conservative government of Jim Prentice would appear to be $32.8 billion, not $11.9 billion. 

“The difference in ‘total debt outstanding’ between the last PC year (2014-15) and the last NDP year (2018-19) is not $74 billion, but $53 billion,” my informant wrote. “Still a significant sum,” but Postmedia then neglects to say that “‘total debt’ increased by a further $30.6 billion under the UCP to $111.4 billion over the next two years by the end of fiscal year 2020-21.”

“Over four years, the NDP added an annual average of $13.3 B in debt,” he said. “In its first two years, the UCP added an annual average of $15.8 B in debt. But according to (Postmedia), it’s the NDP who drove the economy into the ditch.”

Well, this is murky stuff, possibly too deep for even for the copy editors of the Herald’s Golden Age (so known because Bill Gold, a conservative but an honourable one, was the editor). 

The Herald – knowingly or otherwise – mischaracterizes the economic management of the NDP government and omits facts to spruce up the image of the UCP, which fared even worse in its first two years. 

And that’s before we consider the potential future impacts of Premier Smith’s R-Star scam, which could easily turn out to be the biggest boondoggle in Canadian history if it’s allowed to proceed. 

On debate night, Notley mostly told the truth, Smith not so much 

Speaking of fact checking, Brett McKay and David Slater of MacEwan University and well-known Edmonton-based investigative journalist Charles Rusnell fact checked the statements made by Premier Danielle Smith and Opposition Leader Rachel Notley in their May 18 debate. 

Their conclusion, published in The Tyee: “Notley was the more truthful. Smith made numerous misleading statements in which figures were cherry-picked or taken out of context and in some cases her statements were flat out false.”

Since past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, all Alberta voters are advised read this story. 

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...