Quotulatiousness

April 25, 2024

“… good Lord, is [Chrystia Freeland] ever terrible at politics”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s terrible response to a topical question from a reporter:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.

In fairness, noting that Freeland, she of the infamous Disney+ flop, is bad at politics is not an original observation. I confess that. But, still. Yikes! What the hell was that?!

I’m referring to Monday’s unfortunate gaffe. Freeland was in Montreal doing post-budget stuff with the small business minister, and after touring a business, took questions from reporters. Sarah Leavitt from the CBC asked a question related to a particularly vile eruption of overt antisemitism at a protest in Ottawa last weekend. A man leading the crowd in chants said “Our resistance attacks are proof that we are almost free … Oct. 7 is proof that we are almost free. Long live Oct. 7, long live the resistance, long live the intifada, long live every form of resistance.”

Oct. 7, of course, means the Hamas rape-and-murder pogrom of Oct. 7.

By the time Leavitt quizzed Freeland, the comments in Ottawa had already been widely disseminated and, critically, condemned. Among the condemners: Freeland’s boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He’d commented via Twitter a day before Freeland faced Leavitt’s question. This ought to have been an extremely easy exchange for Freeland.

As it turns out, though, not so much, actually.

In the interests of transparency, let’s simply see in full both what Leavitt asked, and how Freeland replied.

The question was clear enough: “Over the weekend, protesters in Ottawa were heard chanting, among other things, ‘Long live October 7’ and ‘October 7 is proof that we are almost free’. Is this hate speech?”

[…]

Let’s walk through her answer, putting her reply into the discrete points she’s been trained to hit.

Phase One: Ass covering. “I wasn’t in Ottawa over the weekend. And I’m not aware of those specific reports. And so it would be just wrong of me to comment on something that I am not specifically aware of.”

Phase Two: Banal statement that favours no group in particular but mentions the key stakeholders. “What I will say is, today is a time in Canada, when antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise. When we have a lot … there are a lot of Canadians who are not feeling safe. In my own riding of University-Rosedale, the JCC, a really important centre for Jewish Canadians but also for all Canadians, has faced a lot of pressure. And I’ve been there to meet with people there. There’s also a mosque in my riding that faced pressure and attacks and I’ve met with the leaders there.”

Phase Three: Attempt to sound like you’re engaging with the actual question, even though you are not. “Hate speech is absolutely not acceptable. Glorifying … I mean, I can’t even say the word because it’s … you shouldn’t. It’s too terrible. And what happened on October 7 was a heinous terrorist attack. People were killed. People were raped. Women, men, children … totally unprovoked attack on civilians. That is not acceptable.”

Phase Four: Pivot back to approved talking points. “Canada recognizes Hamas as a terrorist entity and our government is very, very clear on that. We have also been really clear that there needs to be a ceasefire, that a humanitarian catastrophe is happening right now in Gaza, and Canada and Canadians are there to support the people, the suffering people, there, too.”

This is how the PM answers questions, too. It’s a pattern that, once seen, will never been unseen. The problem for Freeland is that the PM is better at it. He’s smoother and quicker on his feet. His evasive non-answers sound more natural, but have begun to get old in recent years, as foreign journalists are generally better at pointing out than Canadian ones. Freeland has never been comfortable doing talking-point politics, and has always sounded extremely unconvincing when she tries.

April 23, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s legacy may not be something he ever wanted (or imagined)

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper outlines some of the attitudinal changes among Canadian voters during Trudeau’s term in office, with opinions shifting away from things we used to consider settled once and for all. Canada’s Overton Window is moving (relatively) quickly:

Front view of Toronto General Hospital in 2005. The new wing, as shown in the photograph, was completed in 2002.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s been among the most volatile and untouchable third rails in Canadian politics: The adoption, at any level, of a private health-care system.

In the last federal election, a Conservative statement about “public-private synergies” was all it took for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to brand it as a right-wing assault on the “public, universal health-care system”.

But a new Ipsos report shows that “two tier health care” is not the threat it once was.

Among respondents, 52 per cent wanted “increased access to health care provided by independent health entrepreneurs”, against just 29 per cent who didn’t.

Perhaps most shocking of all, almost everyone agreed that private health care would be more efficient. Seven in 10 respondents agreed that “private entrepreneurs can deliver health care services faster than hospitals managed by the government” – against a mere 15 per cent who disagreed.

“People understand that the endless waiting lists that characterize our government-run health systems will not be solved by yet another bureaucratic reform”, was the conclusion of the Montreal Economic Institute, which commissioned the poll.

As Canada reels from simultaneous crises of crime, affordability, productivity, health-care access and others, it’s prompting a political realignment unlike anything seen in a generation. But it’s not just a trend that can be seen in the millions of disaffected voters stampeding to a new party. As Canadians shift rightwards, they are freely discarding sacred cows that have held for decades.

If Canadians are suddenly open to health-care reform, it helps that they’ve never been more dissatisfied with the status quo. The past calendar year even brought the once-unthinkable sight of the U.S. being officially called in to bail out failures in the Canadian system.

February 27, 2024

Thank goodness we don’t get all the CBC we pay for!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the dim, dark recesses of history … say twenty-five years ago … the CBC was what the government still seems to believe it is: a credible, trusted source of news and entertainment. In truth, it was never as loved as some might claim, as it had a deep bias in favour of Quebec and Ontario issues and tended to only occasionally remember the rest of the country. The federal government has been subsidizing the CBC, yet the network’s audience has shrunk to the point that it’s rare to encounter anyone who consumes very much of the programming on offer. Part of that is just the sheer variety of other options available to Canadians and part of it is the CBC’s sour, toxic, hectoring tone when lecturing about “the current thing”. Far from being a major player in upholding Canadian culture, the CBC is clearly one of the major factors that are destroying it:

… looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”. CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only 0.8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians. CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to by 10%, despite its vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. As to other mainstream media, propped up by government via hundred of millions, it is still shedding staff and readers in double digits.

Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic. In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.

Why? Because our media show us to ourselves as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent. That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us. Why? The only people who have thrived during the past twenty years in Canada when private and public wealth doubled then doubled again, are the ones who live off the government, whether through mandated consulting in the enviro and other business, or direct granting or though quasi-private-sector jobs that are heavily subsidized. Public Private Partnerships have to be the most fiendish way to flat out loot the public ever been invented. Or straight up public sector jobs which are among the most lushly funded and unionized in the known universe, the number of which have grown 400% in the last ten years. Do or did you get six weeks of paid holiday a year?

And do they hate us, in fact correcting us is how they get the grants, the jobs, the subsidy. Everything they do is meant to fix us deplorable Canadians.

Sit at a downtown Toronto dinner party as I have, with say, the head of CBC drama, as I have and listen to just how much they hate the rest of Canada. Why? They hate the rest of Canada because they feel guilty. They know they are cheating and they know they are stealing. I tell ya, I needed close protection security — this woman was terrifying. “Sit Down While I’m Talking to You“, she roared at me.

August 24, 2023

“Facebook has made a calculated business decision about the value of its fucks. These fucks are expensive. So they won’t give any.”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson fought the good fight as long as she could, but finally had to load up the old shotgun and share both barrels with the participants in the ongoing clusterfarce over the Online News Act (the artist formerly known as Bill C-18):

Look, I’ve largely said my piece on the Online News Act: it’s poorly conceived legislation that risked terrible outcomes. It’s pointless, now, with those terrible outcomes unfolding, to say “I told you so”.

But the response to the news that Meta has decided to continue blocking news — even in the face of devastating wildfires in B.C. and the Northwest Territories — has been such disingenuous dumbfuckery from every corner that I have failed to bestill my cursed fingertips.

Let’s start with this quote from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who at a recent press conference, said: “Right now in an emergency situation where up-to-date local information is more important than ever, Facebook’s putting corporate profits ahead of people’s safety, ahead of supporting quality local journalism … This is not the time for that”.

Wait, a major global corporation that has been labelled as actually literally evil by both progressives and conservatives in recent years is putting its own profits and self-interest ahead of the priorities and values of politicians and pundits?

Sir, surely thou art in jest.

Is this government only now figuring out that major global corporations exist to extract profits; that whatever social corporate responsibility roles they may choose to enact, they aren’t a public service? Is Trudeau shocked — shocked, I say! — to just this very moment discover that Meta isn’t actually some combination of the Red Cross and Reuters?

I mean … welcome to the adult world, I guess, and please leave your copy of Adbusters near the coat check at the door.

But if Meta is as evil as all that, why did so few politicos or pundits anticipate that the company would follow through on its explicit threat to block news if C-18 were passed? This is like watching an Allied general who says: “I think these Nazi fellows are the baddies!” and then gets flustered when the guys with skulls on their caps pull out their guns and start shooting in the midst of afternoon trench tea. “Well, I never. That’s hardly sporting!” This is some Black Adder comedy, friends, and we may be on the side of the angels, but our angels also happen to be a little slow in the head.

Oh, but surely Meta wouldn’t block news to put their own self interest “ahead of people’s safety”, hmmmm?

With advance apologies, but is our antipathy toward Meta so intense that we’re going to straight-face pretend that AM radio, FM radio, emergency text alerts and broadcasts, municipal and provincial emergency websites, formal and informal social media networks and chat groups, and local news broadcasts with websites that can be accessed directly through web browsers all just ceased to exist, simultaneously, the very moment that CBC stopped being able to post news links to Instagram?

If Facebook is actually putting lives in danger, that’s an admission of impotence and incompetence from our entire communications infrastructure, including government, private and public media. It is an incredible and embarrassing self-own.

January 12, 2023

QotD: Describing the CBC to Americans

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    an audience of any size has yet to be found

So far so CBC, then.

I’m not sure how to describe the CBC to American viewers. The BBC routinely produces content that’s quite entertaining (deliberately, I mean) so it’s not a good analogy. I suppose the best analog would be if NPR and PBS merged and were run by the CPUSA with $20 billion dollars of taxpayer money, and still managed to produce nothing anyone wanted to watch.

Daniel Ream, commenting on David Thompson, “The Giant Testicles Told Me”, DavidThompson, 2022-10-10.

December 16, 2022

The Online News [Shakedown] Act passes the House of Commons

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist summarizes the farcical progress of Justin Trudeau’s legalized theft from the “tech giants”:

Later today, the House of Commons will vote to approve Bill C-18, the Online News Act, sending it to the Senate just prior to breaking for the holidays. While Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and media lobbyists will no doubt celebrate the milestone, it should not go unremarked that the legislative process for this bill has been an utter embarrassment with an already bad bill made far worse. The government cut off debate at second reading, actively excluded dozens of potential witnesses, expanded the bill to hundreds of broadcasters that may not even produce news, denigrated online news services as “not real news”, and shrugged off violations of international copyright law. All the while, it acknowledged that mandated payments for links are the foundation of the bill with officials stating that individual Facebook posts accompanied by a link to a news story would be caught by the law. As for the purported financial benefits, the government’s own estimates are less than half those of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who also concluded that more than 75% of the revenues will go to broadcasters such as Bell, Rogers, and the CBC. The end result is a bill that will undermine competition and pose a threat to freedom of expression, while potentially leading Facebook to block news sharing in Canada and Google to cancel dozens of existing agreements with Canadian news outlets.

As I’ve chronicled for months, Bill C-18 is the product of an intense lobbying campaign from some of Canada’s largest media companies. While the Globe and Mail broke from the pack at the last minute, years of one-sided editorials — even devoting full front pages to the issue — had its effect. Indeed, Canadian newspapers would be exhibit #1 for how government intervention in the media space has a direct impact on an independent press. From the moment of its introduction, the consequences were immediately obvious as payments for links serves as the foundation for a law that treats “facilitating access to news” as compensable. Canadians can be forgiven for thinking the bill is about compensating for reproduction of news stories. It is not, since the platforms don’t do that. Instead, it is about requiring payments for links, indexing or otherwise directing traffic to the news organizations who are often the source of the link itself. In most circumstances, recipients pay for the benefits that come from referral traffic. With Bill C-18, the entities providing the referrals pay for doing so.

Further, the bill is about far more than struggling Canadian newspapers as it expands eligibility into broadcasters such as the CBC, foreign news outlets such as the New York Times, and hundreds of broadcasters licensed by the CRTC that are not even required to produce news. The end goal is negotiated payments for links, backed by the threat of a one-sided arbitration process overseen by the CRTC in which the arbitration panel can simply reject offers if it believes it fails to meet the government’s policy objectives. That isn’t a commercial deal, it is a shakedown.

I’ve been operating on the assumption that the government is betting that the big internet companies won’t do the obvious and ban linking to any Canadian media outlet on their respective platforms, but the feds don’t have a great track record of predictions in recent years …

In a later post, Michael Geist illustrated the literal misinformation that was pushed by government MPs during Bill C-18’s path through to final reading by quoting some of Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner’s contributions:

Last month, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner shocked Canadian online news outlets by stating that “they’re not news. They’re not gathering news. They’re publishing opinion only.” The comments sparked instant criticism from news outlets across the country, leading Hepfner to issue a quick apology. In the aftermath of the comments, Hepfner said nothing for weeks at Heritage committee studying Bill C-18. That bill passed third reading yesterday – I posted on the embarrassing legislative review – and Hepfner was back at it. Rather than criticizing online news outlets, this time she targeted the Internet platforms, saying the bill would make it “harder for big digital platforms like Facebook and Google to steal local journalists’ articles and repost them without credit.” 

[…]

Hepfner’s comment not only provide a troubling example of an MP engaging in misinformation about links who has effectively labelled her own Facebook posts as theft, but strikes at the heart of the problem with Bill C-18. As government officials have acknowledged, the entire foundation of the bill is based on paying for links. In fact, when a proposal to remove links from the bill was raised at committee, government MPs described the change as a loophole and voted against it. In the case of the CBC links, the government confirmed that Hepfner could write about the availability of children’s medications (ie. “Great news! CBC reports a million bottles of pain medication are on the way”) but once she added a link to provide a source for the claim, Bill C-18 is triggered.

These examples highlight the absurdity of a law that treats links as compensable and MPs who equate those links to theft. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with Hepfner or anyone else providing a link to a story on greater availability of children’s medicine. In fact, the CBC story has effectively already been paid for by the public and should be shared widely without the government creating barriers to sharing that information. What is wrong that is ill-informed MPs have voted for Bill C-18, creating a framework in which the government is imposing a mandatory payment scheme for some platforms for hosting links. The bill is now headed to the Senate which will hopefully make the necessary amendments to set Hepfner’s mind at ease that her own Facebook posts do not make her an accomplice to theft.

December 12, 2022

“The reason that Canada’s arts do not resonate with 95% of Canadians is that they are products of socialist realism’

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the parasitic world of official “Canadian culture” with its gatekeepers, subsidies, and luxury beliefs:

When I say society, I don’t mean the upper reaches of the wealthy. While we do have the very rich in Canada, they are rigorous in their hiddenness because we have the worst lefties on the continent and that is saying something. The safe thing for any wealthy family is give $ to socialists, bow and scrape to the harpies at the CBC and hope they don’t notice your bank balance. Anyway, these dreadful people arrived post WW2 with their hideous Frankfurt School ideas and just preyed on the simplest most innocent well-meaning good white people you could ever imagine, and literally ate, ravenous and braying all the while, the country’s potential.

So the scandal took place among them, or rather the world they created, which is basically a clutch of 150,000 grifters located between Ottawa, Toronto and Quebec City, whose only mission is to divest the government of as much public money as possible. This is particularly true of their defensive line which consists of the arts and journalism. Theirs is a world where no stone is left unsubsidized by taxes on the hidden rich, waitresses at truck stops in Kamloops and anyone who dares to make money unapproved by the CBC. They are, as a former editor swore to me, the gatekeepers. That was before her circulation collapsed by 65%., but no doubt she still believes it.

The arts and media in Canada are constructed entirely for the 5%, consumed by those who live the lush subsidized life — or those who want to — whether in government or in semi-independent corporations or businesses who require government help and “seed” money etc. (There are a hundred terms for the grift.)

Books, if you look at their sales, are tragic. There have been a handful of impressive films, despite the literal billions thrown at filmmakers over the past 20 years. Most of them are catastrophically depressing, the books make you want to cut out your heart with a grapefruit spoon. Painters paint, if you subtract all the hectoring from minor artists, from forced inclusion, some of them are very good. We can create good art. But not with our current curators.

The reason that Canada’s arts do not resonate with 95% of Canadians is that they are products of socialist realism. They describe humans and human life as they either believe it to have been (dark and in need of enlightened beings like themselves) or as they feel it must be in the future (filled with people expressing their oppression and being paid for it). It’s basically fantasy, and no one likes it, watches it, reads it.

The rest of Canada is a centre-right country, a gut-it-out-and-build-it-kind of place. I know that is the exact opposite of the propaganda, but Conservatives win a majority of the votes in every election, yet still only amount to 40%. We have five parties, and four of them are leftie — their platforms are all “more money for us” — but the big party, the one that receives about 30% of the vote is so crafty, so embedded in our vast vast bureaucracy that fixing the game is child’s play. Informed by their Frankfurt School gurus, they have been in power 100 years, with brief Conservative interludes.

We take in about half a million immigrants a year, and most of them are from desperate places. Vote harvesting in those neighborhoods is done by leaders in each immigrant community. These men and women are the strongest, most educated and frankly from the ones I’ve met, thuggish, and through them comes all access to government programs, housing and education. Therefore, when they collect your vote, you know for whom your vote is meant. The thing about immigrants though is that they were coming for the old Canada, not the new Commie police state.

But for now? Easy. No one investigates this. Why not? Our media is subsidized. ALL of it.

December 6, 2022

The outcome of the latest Munk Debates

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Donna Laframboise summarizes what happened last week in the Munk Debates as Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray spoke in favour of the proposition “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media” while Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg argued against:

Last week, an old fashioned public debate took place here in Canada. The topic:

Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media.

Journalists Douglas Murray (UK) and Matt Taibbi (US) argued the pro/agree side.

Journalists Malcolm Gladwell (Canada) and Michelle Goldberg (US) argued the con/disagree side.

The event was sponsored by Munk Debates, which has been holding these events since 2008. Before the debate commences, audience members vote. Two hours later, they vote again.

On this occasion, the opinion swing was dramatic. The “don’t trust” side grew by 39% — apparently the largest swing ever in a Munk debate. At the beginning, slightly less than half of the in-house audience held this opinion (48%). Afterward, it was two-thirds (67%).

(When two-thirds of a population agrees on anything, you’re in supermajority territory — a number large enough to change constitutions.)

Here’s the key point: the winning side of the debate placed great emphasis on the scandalous manner in which Canada’s mainstream media covered the Freedom Convoy. Residing as he does in Britain, Douglas Murray had no trouble cutting through the nonsense. In the 3-minute video clip at the top of this post, he says our Prime Minister started by calling protesters names, and ended by invoking the Emergencies Act. Here’s what he says next:

    At such a time, what would the mainstream media do? It would question it. It would question it. The Canadian mainstream media did not.

    The Canadian mainstream media acted as an Amen chorus of the Canadian government. I will give you a couple of examples, but ladies and gentlemen I could go on for hours with examples of this. You had a CBC host describing the Freedom Convoy as a quote feral mob …

    Why is this so rancid? Utterly, utterly rancid and corrupt. Because in this country, your media, your mainstream media is funded by the government. A totally corrupted system.

November 8, 2022

The inevitable next act of the media subsidy game – “Before long we will be back for more”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Peter Menzies outlines the state of play in the continued efforts of the federal government to pass C-18, a bill that will massively benefit certain media outlets … or convince the “tech giants” to pull out of the Canadian market altogether rather than pay the blackmail:

News Media Canada’s persistent campaigning finally produced its Holy Grail — Bill C-18. All might have been well for Torstar, Postmedia and Le Devoir except that once the flesh was thrown on the bones of the Act, broadcasters that aren’t facing economic peril heard the dinner bell and came running.

The result, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is that Bill C-18 is expected to produce $329 million in annual revenue for Canadian media (for context, that’s less than the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun and Calgary Sun were bringing in between them 20 years ago). Of that, $249 million will go to broadcasters, few of whom are on a fiscal ledge and a good many of whom have contributed to the demise of local newspapers. Remarkably, the CBC, already receiving $1 billion in taxpayer funding, will get the most of that cash, followed by CTV (Bell), Rogers, Videotron and others. The newspapers and start ups will have $80 million (a little more than what the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun used to make in combined annual profit) to fight over.

And very few of those previously mentioned startups — run by mostly young and often female innovators — trying to find a sustainable business model for good journalism can expect anything more than a token pay off. No. They will have to go to the little kids table and see what they can find on the children’s menu of subsidies.

It is distressingly obvious that while so many were tricked into believing this was the most progressive Canadian government ever, it is in fact, a slave to the status quo; as staunch a defender of the corporate establishment as the Toronto Club could wish for. With the 21st century and all its opportunities staring it in the face, Justin Trudeau’s government has not only turned its back on innovation, it has put its thumb on the scale in favour of failed business models that long ago ran out of ideas.

Yet there may be a final twist in this tale.

Bill C-18’s particulars are, as Meta/Facebook’s Kevin Chan put it to a Parliamentary committee last week “globally unprecedented”. For all its sins — and for all we know there are a few more skeletons rattling around in its closet — Meta is unlikely to pay up. Sure, it can cover the Canadian shakedown; what it can’t afford though is to pay every other country in the world that makes the same demand. So Meta says it may simply stop serving up news links which, when you think about it, is a better idea in the long run than permanently entrenching its dominant market position

So while the publishers of those blank pages appear to have bullied even the Conservatives into supporting this travesty, they are still left to ponder:

“Imagine if Facebook wasn’t there.”

July 1, 2022

QotD: The CBC doesn’t want to do economic journalism

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[The] CBC’s attitude towards economics journalism is the same as a teenager’s attitude towards household chores: If they do it badly enough, they won’t be asked to do it again.

Stephen F. Gordon, Twitter, 2019-05-06.

June 15, 2022

“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.

February 15, 2022

“Freedom”. You proles keep using that word. The CBC doesn’t think it means what you think it means

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh considers what this mysterious and esoteric word “freedom” seems to mean to the CBC:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

You may have heard that truck-driving protesters have taken over downtown Ottawa and several important border crossings here in Canada. These festive but obstructive people often claim, it is said, to be seeking some esoteric substance known as “freedom”. NP Platformed, unable to locate this “freedom” in the conventional periodic table, consulted a range of chemists in search of expert advice.

One suggested that the word was plainly a misspelling of “friedium”, implying the existence of an element or other matter known only to the Germans. Several hypothesized a molecular relationship with the abolished industrial refrigerant “freon”, raising questions about whether the Montreal Protocol has been subverted. Firm conclusions eluded our quest, but we are sure that a royal commission of inquiry will eventually be convened to get to the bottom of it all.

CBC News, confronted with the same information, did not appeal to the good old exact sciences for help. Instead, its reporters rang up every “hate” expert in their Rolodex of left-wing academics. This yielded tidbits of wisdom, such as this one: freedom “is a term that has resonated … You can define it and understand it and sort of manipulate it in a way that makes sense to you and is useful to you, depending on your perspective.” We’re pretty sure our chemical theories are less stupid than whatever this is supposed to be, but it does bear the imprimatur of Ontario Tech University, the renowned (checks notes) Oshawa-based home of the (checks notes again) Ridgebacks.

The CBC’s obtuse explanation of how the word “freedom” has been used in the past by fascist nasties, and absolutely nobody else in the annals of history, is rightly coming in for plenty of heckling. NP Platformed couldn’t resist joining in, but we would observe that this news copy bears signs of an actual journalistic crisis. If you are paying attention, you have heard about, or even seen video of, the torrents of abuse received by CTV and Global news reporters visiting the “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa. One can only imagine the fear and frustration of CBC News employees, who know that they are much more attractive targets for misbehaviour — being a recognized part of the Ottawa blob that hinterland protesters are in town specifically to torment and terrorize.

Most of them are no doubt staying well clear of the protests, and for the public broadcaster to develop good sources within an amorphous CBC-hating right-wing movement is a plain impossibility. What’s left is Rolodex journalism. We did a lot of it back in the day, at the late, legendary Alberta Report — which, in our time, was vigorously hated by somewhere between half and two-thirds of the population of Alberta.

January 21, 2022

Boris is in trouble, threaten the BBC to take the heat off him!

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Gareth Roberts wonders why Britons should continue to pay an annual license fee to support a media conglomerate that demonstrably hates them and their country:

Culture secretary Nadine Dorries, the most ardent of Boris Johnson stans, obligingly threw the deadest of cats on to the table at the weekend to distract from the woes of her beleaguered boss. She announced a two-year freeze on the BBC licence fee and dangled the prospect of scrapping it entirely.

Dorries must be well aware that any threat to the BBC always results in a Furies’ chorus of anger, horror and prophecies of woe, coming from precisely those people the Tory grassroots are likely to detest. And up they obligingly popped – Polly Toynbee, Nish Kumar, Gary Lineker, all present and correct. This wasn’t so much political theatre as a pantomime with stock phrases and responses. She’s behind you!

Behind all this repetitive call and response, there is something different this time around, on both sides. Dorries was noticeably blatant and direct when she tweeted that this licence-fee consultation “will be the last” (though she seemed less so in the Commons a couple of days later). And her detractors seemed more at a loss, struggling to find the counter examples of BBC excellence that used to come quickly and easily to hand. Citizen Khan creator Adil Ray tweeted a BBC promotional video asking “What has the BBC ever done for us?” that was made 36 years ago. Comedian Simon Day provided a list of great BBC comedies going back to the 1950s, which contained only one show commissioned in the last 15 years.

Canada’s CBC has a similar attitude toward Canadian culture and (ugh!) Canadians that the BBC displays, but the CBC gets direct government subsidies rather than a formal TV license required of all British TV owners. It’s quite reasonable to wonder what benefit Canadian taxpayers and British license-holders derive from all this financial support of increasingly unwatched TV and online propaganda that mocks and belittles them:

What this seems to show is that the BBC is now in a fix. In a way, the BBC hasn’t changed all that much. It is doing now what it has always done, reflecting and embodying a certain section of the middle class. When that section was sane, or at least fairly sane, that could be irritating on occasion, but we all forgave it because it had its heart in the right place. But in the past decade, the nominally “liberal” middle class has, to put it politely, gone both doolally and totalitarian.

To consume the BBC since about 2012 is to be never more than 10 minutes away from being scolded or berated, usually based on some spurious identity-politics talking point imported from the sick vortex of American academia. (On Radio 4 this happens much more frequently, about every 35 seconds.) It is unbearable, like paying £159 a year, on pain of imprisonment, to be told off by a particularly irritating polytechnic lecturer.

BBC News gets a lot of stick for this, understandably, but the Beeb’s drama, comedy and documentary output is now infested with it, too. It’s the same crushingly banal suite of opinions across everything.

Life before Blair was a grey, damp horror, a cultural wasteland of prejudice where Oswald Mosley had huge amounts of support (strangely enough, insinuating that people’s grandparents were all fascists doesn’t endear them to you). Working-class whites are bigots who can’t be trusted with basic information in case they start a race war. Fiona Bruce has kittens live on air when a doctor states the simple fact that it’s impossible to change sex. The BBC’s younger journalists have to be told that people have different opinions. If upper-class or working-class people can’t be shamed or blamed for something, the BBC just isn’t interested. It is stultifyingly bourgeois.

The BBC is often valued, and often trumpets itself, as a thing that brings the nation together. I think it has transmogrified into doing the opposite, with a superior sneer that treats Britain like something it’s found on its shoe.

December 6, 2021

QotD: Modern “Canadian culture” is a vast vanity press operation funded with lots of government money

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

From a distance, it is beginning to look as if Canada does not have a specific culture. No one is buying books, no one is watching television, no one is watching or listening to the CBC. People trail through galleries sometimes, and at the top of the investment tree, people buy art. But not because they love it, they buy it because it lends them status.

CanCon is a heavy lift at the best of times, being close neighbors to that hulking great monster south of us which is the most creative culture on earth. That is why we spend billions every year to prop up our creators, our artists, who we love.

Except we don’t.

Film salaries are funded up to 50%, books, 30%, news media 60%, and yet … no one is watching, reading, or listening. It is like a giant vanity project which various foreign appointees can brandish in foreign capitals.

Last month I traced the sales of this year’s Canadian literary award winners and I suppose “best-sellers”. Their sales on Amazon, hardcover, soft cover and digital ranged from 4 books to 33 books per month, incomes hovering in the three figures. (Amazon accounts for roughly 70% of sales.) This during summer reading months where Canadians are at their lake shacks from coast to coast reading one would hope about themselves, the world they live in, and well … just curiosity.

Equally looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”.

CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only .8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians.

CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to despite the almost vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic.

In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.

Why?

Because our media show us Canadians as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent.

That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us.

Elizabeth Nickson, “Canadian Culture on the Ropes”, Elizabeth Nickson, 2021-09-01.

December 4, 2021

Things I never expected to read on the CBC website — “…frantically firing up the gaslights and moving the goalposts on COVID restrictions and vaccinations”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canada’s state broadcaster has been — as you would expect — a staunch supporter of every government initiative to limit free speech and the rights of Canadians in tackling the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic. They’ve consistently portrayed any concerns or doubts about draconian government action as irrational, anti-science conspiracy theories and the people raising such concern as effectively “enemies of the people”. As such, I never expected to see anything like this CBC Opinion piece by Allan Richarz:

Listen closely and one might be able to discern the unmistakable sounds of our elected and unelected officials frantically firing up the gaslights and moving the goalposts on COVID restrictions and vaccinations.

It was a precipitous but inevitable shift from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to get the jab or lose your job, and unsurprisingly, there is still more to come.

Met the provincial vaccination targets? Great; but now it’s time for a booster. Ready for the “temporary” vaccine passport system to expire? Sorry, we need to extend it through spring; proving once again that if you give the government an inch on your rights, they will go for the mile every time.

Less than a year ago, government and public health officials touted vaccination as a panacea to end the pandemic. It’s safe, effective and will allow the country to put COVID behind us, we were told. To that end, citizens were encouraged, prodded and eventually threatened to get their shots, with holdouts demonized by politicians at all levels. Yet, in Ontario, even as the province exceeded by weeks its vaccination and case number targets of the government’s phased reopening plan, citizens were offered only breadcrumbs in return: moving up Phase 3 reopening by just a few days, with no plans at the time for a complete reopening.

And now, with new case numbers in Ontario essentially split evenly between the unvaccinated and fully vaccinated and questions about waning vaccine efficacy, the goalposts shift again with the rollout of booster shots elsewhere in the country and calls for expanded eligibility.

One does not need to look hard to guess what the next step will be across Canada. In Israel and France, the definition of fully vaccinated was changed to include boosters; those six months out from their second dose, or first booster, are now considered unvaccinated, and their vaccine passport privileges suspended.

H/T to SDA for the link.

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