Trying to Manipulate News People Need

My, my, my. It didn’t take Kevin Crull long to become Canadianized. Got his Canadian citizenship just a couple of years ago and already has adopted the great Canadian trait: trying to suppress information he doesn’t think others should have.

Crull is an America salesman who took Canadian citizenship after becoming the big cheese at Bell Media, which owns CTV, Canada’s largest broadcaster. He and his associates have been in battle with the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) for months.

Kevin Crull

The Commission finally has ordered cable and satellite TV companies to offer a basic $25  month package, then allow customers to pick and pay for whatever other channels might interest them. Folks in the TV business don’t like this because it will allow subscribers more choice and likely will hurt the bottom lines of companies like Bell Media.

After the CRTC decision was announced, Crull called CTV News president Wendy Freeman and told her that CRTC Chair Jean-Pierre Blais was not to appear on CTV again that day. Ms. Freeman, according the sources, called CTV staff and told them of the directive and her fear that she could be fired if it was not followed.

Mr. Blais was booked to be on the CTV show Power Play that day, but his appearance was cancelled. Later, CTV anchor Lisa LaFlamme and Ottawa bureau chief Bob Fife  felt they could not air a major CRTC decision without showing Mr. Blais, and defied the order.

Then things got really interesting. The Toronto Globe and Mail, which is partly owned by Bell, broke a story telling how Crull had tried to bully the CTV journalistic group. Crull sits on the Globe’s board of directors.

Blais, seeing that story, then issued a statement warning Bell Media, and of course Crull, that it has a statutory duty not to interfere with the work of CTV journalists.

The punch of the Blais statement forced Crull to apologize to CTV for trying to influence their decisions.

Thank you Lisa LaFlamme, Bob Fife, and the Globe journalists and others who did the right things to ensure that the sales and marketing mentality did not dictate, in this case, what Canadians get to see and hear.

Reviving the Red Scare

Mr. Harper, please tear up those plans for Ottawa’s anti-Communism memorial.

That’s not likely to happen, but it’s worth asking. We all should be asking, in fact demanding.

The planned Memorial to Victims of Communism is a really bad idea, questioned by some very prominent people, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the mayor of Ottawa. It is destined to become a memorial to the current government’s stubbornness and an embarrassment to Canadians.

Jet Blast Baffles

It all began six years ago when a private group, championed by the Conservative government, received approval to build a memorial to victims of communism. The government then allocated a choice piece of vacant land between the National Library and Supreme Court of Canada, which are almost a part of Parliament Hill. The land is in what is known as the judicial precinct and it was assumed it would hold a new Federal Court building.

Work on the memorial is supposed to begin at winter’s end with the dedication in October, around the time of the expected federal election. The estimated cost is $5 million, with federal taxpayers paying $3 million while $2 million will be raised privately.

The design of the memorial is every bit as monstrous as the idea. It features six parallel concrete rows, each one higher the other and rising to a height of 14.5 metres. They look like those concrete jet blast baffles that you see at the end of some airport runways. These concrete chunks are to be covered with 100 million ‘memory squares’ each representing a life lost to Communist governments around the world.

So we assume that since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 someone has kept a count of the number of people killed by communism around the world. Makes you wonder if anyone has kept count of the people killed by capitalism. Or, the number of North American Indians who died, and continue to die, because of colonialism.

This memorial is not only ridiculous, it is un-Canadian. It diminishes the millions of people in China, Cuba, Vietnam and other countries that have the communist system of government. We Canadians care about people, not their system of government.

In 1959 when Cuba went communist, Canada maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba and provided it foreign aid. Most importantly, Canadians have supplied money and expertise to improve Cuban agriculture, which has improved the lives of tens of thousands of Cuban country people. We didn’t allow the label of their government to stop us from helping the people.

The planned Ottawa memorial follows the lead of the United States, which put up a memorial to victims of communism in 2007. It is a statue, a three-metre high bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy, far smaller and much less hideous than what is planned for Ottawa.

If this anti-communism memorial is supposed to be about human rights, it should be noted that we already have one. The Canadian Museum of Human Rights opened last fall in Winnipeg at a cost of $350 million. It is a spectacular reminder that we Canadians do our best to improve human rights without being preachy, and while remembering that our record in human rights is not without blemish.

Our memorials should reflect our pride in accomplishments and inspire us to be better people. They should not be designed to provoke conflicts with people who believe in systems different from ours. The anti-communism memorial points an angry finger at communist countries, accusing them of tyranny, brutality and murder.  

And speaking of tyranny, how is it that a $1-million piece of prime land next to Parliament Hill in Ottawa gets turned over to a private group without any public consultation?

Mr. Harper, tear down this bad idea. It makes Canadians look small, narrow minded and too judgmental. Canadians are bigger than that. Big enough to look forward for a better world, instead of backwards into the past.

Hijacked by the Policrats

There are thousands of worthwhile and needy causes on which to spend 65 million of Canadian taxpayer dollars. One of them definitely is not using all those tax dollars to tell us what wonderful work our governments are doing for us.

The federal government has added another $11 million to the $54 million already allocated this fiscal year to telling us how it is making our lives better. Of the $11 million in estimated new spending, $3.5 million will go to the finance department to explain the government’s economic initiatives. Advertising for armed forces recruiting, Canada’s 150^th birthday celebrations and promoting services for new Canadians get the rest. All those are tied to the government’s re-election platforms.

You can’t even check the local weather without getting messages from the federal government. Environment Canada weather web sites now are Government of Canada sites with a topline banner of clickable federal services such as jobs, benefits and health. The search box at the top of the weather pages has nothing to do with searching weather: it’s yet another link to federal information and services.

Meanwhile, resources to give us real live weather observations are being cut back to save money.

Spending public money to advertise government services that will help draw votes is no longer seen as shameful by our political-bureaucrat government leaders. The current government is shameless about it, but you can be sure that any of the other parties will follow the same line if elected.

This is another example of how our growing political-bureaucrat class is hijacking our democracy. The policrats make more and more decisions based not on what is best for the people, but on retaining power. They do this because most of us never raise our voices.

Most of us are too busy with other things to take time to speak out. And, that is a growing tumour in our democracy.  

Check out my Minden Times column at: http://mindentimes.ca/?p=6262

Miffed, Unapologetic and Hopefully Gone

A last word, hopefully, on the disappointing, if not scandalous, happenings inside the CBC's news operations.

Business reporter Amanda Lang is still there, miffed and unapologetic, even after the CBC finally has banned its reporters from taking money for speaking engagements. Lang and chief news reader Peter Mansbridge have been getting big outside bucks for speaking at events sponsored by associations and companies they report on.

CBC had refused to admit that reporters taking outside money is unethical. However, last week it finally folded that hand and ordered the ban. As columnist John Doyle wrote in the Globe and Mail: “Barn door closed after the horse left.”

Lang wrote a supercilious and embarrassing 1,600-word defence of herself in the Globe. Interestingly, more than 300 Globe online readers so far have commented on her defensive piece, almost all of them deriding her and indicating that she should resign.

Her resignation might just be in the works. Her bosses did not approve the Globe piece. Also, her defence has not appeared on any CBC news site.

There are rumours that the CBC bosses are discussing how to cut her loose. If they are, there are others whose ties should be snipped. These should include Mansbridge and CBC President Hubert Lacroix who has had to pay back $30,000 in expense money he was not entitled to receive and who has dozed through all the CBC news crises.

The shame of the Lang and other CBC scandals is the hurt laid on its many other dedicated reporters, editors and other news workers. They don't deserve any of this and CBC needs to clean house to restore their pride and the confidence of Canadians, most of whom do not want to see the CBC rot and die.

Personality Journalism Fails Again

   Canadian journalism received another body blow to its credibility this week. Leslie Roberts, anchor and executive editor of Global News Hour in Toronto, was suspended indefinitely for trying to be a journalist and a public relations flack at the same time.
   The Toronto Star revealed that Roberts, who presents the day's news to 118,000 Toronto-area television viewers each evening, is a part owner of a public relations firm whose clients often appear on Global. Some have been interviewed by Roberts.
   The Roberts affair is yet another example of journalistic integrity being run over by personality journalism promoted in the desperate efforts to garner more viewers, listeners, or readers. The personalities become bigger than the news operation itself. Bigger than the decades-old rules designed to protect integrity, accuracy, and fairness in the news.
   Last year the CBC was forced to change policies that allowed on-air personalities to make paid speeches to groups that they report on. For example, millionaire news reader Peter Mansbridge took big bucks for speaking to lobby groups that often are in the news.
   Too often journalists these days forget their purpose: to watch, listen and to report as fairly as possible what they see and hear. Those who want more than that - power, prestige, adulation, and an expensive suit with an Order of Canada pin in the lapel should be pursuing other lines of work.

O Night Divine

   Fresh-fallen snow protested beneath the crush of my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk cruelly scrapped against too clean a blackboard.

   Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.

   The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle deep snow. From each side of the trail, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient blizzard just passed through. Their crests were indistinguishable against the white stucco walls but nearly reached tufted piles of fluffy snow clinging nervously to windowsills and eaves trough lips.

   The squeaks flew through the still night air, dodging fat flakes that fell heavy and straight onto my cap bill, but occasionally splashing into my face flushed warm from the walk. I could have rode back home from Christmas Eve Mass with the family, but the teenage mind always prefers independence, and it was a chance to visit friends along the way.

   Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys.   Notes and smoke rose together into an icy sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars and the frosty moon the Ojibwe called Minidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon that appears small and cold early in winter.

   I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was “O Holy Night,” and the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then and at gatherings cracked a window to thin the smoke. They sang the first verse, and, when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

   “Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii ... iiight Diii...vine! ...” That’s the part where the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome note.

   The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, and I knew she was hitting that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that crippling rheumatoid arthritis had made her prison for sixteen years. She was unable to walk without assistance and had trouble holding a cigarette between her gnarled fingers.

   The others had stopped singing to listen to her. The second time she hit the high notes at the words “O Night Divine,” a shiver danced on my spine.

When she finished singing “O Holy Night,” the other voices started up again, this time with “Silent Night” and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants — my mom, dad, and some neighbours — crowded into the ten-by-ten bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and my mother.

   After the singing ended my mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts. I have long forgotten what I got, and it doesn’t matter, because my real gift came many years later: the gift of realization that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were driven by something stronger than flesh — an unbreakable spirit. They came from strength far beyond anything that a mere body can produce.

(This column was adapted from my book Waking Nanabijou: Uncovering a Secret Past – Dundurn Group 2007)