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)

Propaganda Posing As Journalism

   Canada’s federal government continues to pour millions of taxpayer dollars into one of its most notable successes: blurring the line between journalism and propaganda.

   Public Works Canada is paying $1.25 million for a publicity outfit, which looks like a real news operation, to write and distribute powder puff stories that “inform and educate” Canadians. This is nothing new or unusual. Governments for decades have used our taxes to buy distorted stories that make them look good.

   Usually government departments have staff publicity people to do this. Now there is a trend to contract out flacking to private companies that try to look like genuine news operations.

   One of those companies is News Canada Ltd., which is writing and distributing “news” for Public Works Canada. The company name is part of the illusion that this is a real news agency, which it is not.

   The company president, Shelley Middlebrook, aids the illusion by referencing her company’s work to The Canadian Press (CP), a genuine news service that has been providing professional journalism to print and broadcast media for 100 years.

   Ms. Middlebrook told Blacklock’s Reporter recently that News Canada gives media outlets free stories, paid for and vetted by the federal government, bearing a “News Canada” credit – “just like Canadian Press. . . . We follow Canadian Press-style rules of writing, and articles have to be marked as ‘News Canada’ just like CP.”

   I’m sure Ms. Middlebrook was not trying to indicate that her company is the same type of professional journalism agency as The Canadian Press. No doubt she was just trying to show that her company follows high standards of writing style.

   The government, however, wants the public to think that its bought stories are balanced just like the real journalism produced by real journalists working for real news operations like The Canadian Press. Regrettably, the government is becoming successful at blurring that line between propaganda and journalism because more and more people no longer see the difference.

   Here is the difference:

   A recent government-paid-for “news story” on Aboriginal land claims extolls how “Canada has made a commitment to reconciling relationships with First Nations people . . . . The future looks bright. More win-win solutions are in the works to bring closure and justice for all.”

   At about the same time, the Toronto Globe and Mail produced a major piece of journalism on the suicide of Eddie Snowshoe in a federal prison. The story noted that the suicide rate in federal prisons is seven times higher than in the public at large. This was one of a number of news stories produced by real news operations this year telling how federal government policies and practices are harming, even killing, Canada’s native people.         

   Canadians are doing little to stop the government from using their tax dollars to distribute information that is not balanced and not completely accurate. The more we accept the use of government propaganda, the more we lessen our democracy.

Read My Minden News column @ http://mindentimes.ca/?p=5759

Wake Up and Cut the Taxes

   Ontario has a new plan to help it avoid bankruptcy. It is going to crack down on contraband cigarettes.

   The folks who run the province have announced their hope to bring in an additional $700 million in taxes by going after the underground economy, which includes the huge untaxed cigarette trade. In some parts of the province almost 50 per cent of cigarettes smoked are contraband.

   So the government plans to pour more money into enforcement to collect more taxes which will presumably help reduce the $12.5 billion budget deficit projected for fiscal 2014-15. Good luck with that, folks!

   Governments have been fighting contraband, with poor success,  since the first tax schemes were invented. Contraband trade develops when taxes are increased to the point that people can’t afford to pay them. 

   Governments and stop smoking groups insist that constantly upping tobacco taxes forces people to stop smoking. They are wrong and they refuse to accept their own statistics that show they are wrong.

   Ontario has more layers of contraband tobacco enforcement than Mama Rosa’s Mile High Lasagna. It keeps adding to them, at more and more cost. Yet the only significant reduction in contraband tobacco in the last 25 years has been through cutting tobacco taxes.

   In the early 1990s the contraband tobacco trade grew so large and so violent along the St. Lawrence River that the federal government and some provinces were forced to slash tobacco taxes. Ontario cut its cigarette excise tax by 67 per cent, Quebec by 71 per cent.

   With those cuts, legal cigarette sales increased by 50 per cent. Seizures of untaxed cigarettes plunged by more than 90 per cent. 

   So how much did cutting taxes increase the smoking rate as predicted by politicians and anti-smoking groups?

   In 1985, roughly 35 per cent of Canadians smoked. By the early 1990s when contraband flooded the country, only 30 per cent smoked. The smoking rate declined even more after the 1990s tax cut. In fact the decline was greater than in the years following 2002 when taxes were raised to previous levels and beyond.

   Today, the smoking rate among Canadians is well below 20 per cent.

   Ontario should not spend more tax dollars on police and revenue agents to stop addicted senior citizens driving away from a smoke shack with a carton of untaxed cigarettes. Higher taxes and more enforcement don’t significantly lower smoking rates. People kick the habit through education and programs designed to fight addiction.

   Ontario is two-faced when it comes to cigarettes. It is addicted to tobacco taxation. No matter how much politicians talk about a Smoke-Free Ontario, they can’t live without cigarette taxes.

   In 2011, Ontario took in $1.16 billion in tobacco taxes. The same year governments across Canada raked in $7.5 billion in tobacco taxation.

   Slowly reducing tobacco taxes will help wean governments from their addiction and prepare them for the day when no one smokes and all that tobacco revenue is gone.

   More on this subject is available in Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry @ http://www.amazon.ca/Smoke-Signals-Takeback-Americas-Industry/dp/1459706404

See My Minden Times column - http://mindentimes.ca/?p=5649