Why Canadian blogs haven’t broken any political scandals.

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.

Or this:

The reluctance to get dirty or to circumvent the “proper” channels of political recourse is as endemic of Canadian political blogs as it is ingrained in Canadian libel laws. Toronto lawyer Julien Porter says blogs that dare to hit below the belt can defend themselves against accusations of libel on the same grounds as the mainstream media—on the basis of truth—but that the cards are stacked against them in more ways than one.

“In Canada there’s an assumption that if you say something nasty, it’s false,” he said.

So why the Canadian blog lag?

“The reason the transformation may not be visible is that we’re seeing a withdrawal in general from political interest,” Jesse Hirsh, an expert in open source intelligence, said of the blog lag in Canada. “People are just saying ‘Fuck it.’ It’s the nature of the Canadian public. We don’t care.”

I think this is true of most countries.
It isn’t that we don’t ‘care,’ it may be less culturally acceptable.
And that isn’t a bad, lazy, incompetent or wrong thing.
It requires tremendous stamina to be on top of a story, let alone break one.
I have to question whether Canadian political blogs or Canadian blogs in general will follow the US.

Maisonneuve (reg required)
via Neale News
I think registration required on a blog story is a bit redundant, and rather drearily Canadian.:^)