Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2021

One Pretendian’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome”

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

In Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh updates us on the story of Carrie Bourassa, who had effortlessly surfed to high profile, well-remunerated positions at the University of Saskatchewan and with the federal government largely on the basis of her claimed First Nations background:

Carrie Bourassa with media.
Lead photo in Geoff Leo’s article for the CBC – https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/carrie-bourassa-indigenous

Newspapers have a slightly nasty characteristic: it’s easy for them to get pre-emptively mad when institutions are a little slow to do the right thing, and it’s also easy for them to forget to give credit when those institutions get around to it.

So let’s acknowledge that the federal government and the University of Saskatchewan are dealing — as best they can, almost certainly — with their shared Carrie Bourassa problem.

Two weeks ago, CBC News investigative reporter Geoff Leo published an astonishing tour de force. His feature article established, beyond almost any doubt, that Bourassa, a high-profile Indigenous scholar who told and published countless stories of racist treatment and childhood adversity, is actually a fabulist from a wealthy white family. The Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health soon put Bourassa, its scientific director, on unpaid leave. The U of S suspended her with pay, probably having no better immediate alternative.

[…]

Since Prof. Bourassa was put on ice in her lucrative Aboriginal-health jobs, Indigenous folk have been labouring to explain in the press what was wrong with her concoction and aggressive peddling of a fake Métis upbringing on the mean streets of Regina. Drew Hayden Taylor’s Globe and Mail op-ed about Bourassa’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome” is instructive and funny, but we hope it is all right to tell Aboriginal-Canadians that no white settler with a lick of sense would consider Bourassa’s tapestry of falsehoods to be harmless “fibs”. This may be a self-serving observation, but her confabulations about her personal history wouldn’t be consistent with the standards of a newspaper, let alone those of a university.

About a year ago, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation gave Bourassa an award (not her first) and published a capsule summary of her career. If you read it, you will notice how she was, from time to time, offered career advancement out of the blue by Indigenous supporters who had been taken in by her stories. Even a white grad student living on ramen in a basement apartment might be a little ticked about this. The University of Saskatchewan’s original claim that Prof. Bourassa hadn’t benefited from claiming Aboriginal ancestry is pathetic hokum: Bourassa tellingly accused her own sister of “looking for … a way to make some money” by accepting Indigenous scholarship funds during her PhD studies.

And it probably occurred to the USask brass sometime between the two press releases that an investigative reporter like Leo, in taking on a topic, always looks a couple articles ahead. Bourassa, for example, claims to have suffered from tuberculosis in her late 20s — a useful credential, unfortunately, for someone studying the field of Indigenous health. It’s useful because the disease has been nearly eliminated among non-Indigenous Canadians: the incidence rate for First Nations is 40 times higher, and the cases tend to be concentrated in remote northern Indigenous communities. Even if we overlook Bourassa’s propensity for creative autobiography … well, if she contracted TB, she was certainly very unlucky.

October 30, 2021

“Pretendians” … members of the Wannabe tribe … people who fake First Nations ancestry for personal gain

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

I missed Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter when it first came out, where Colby Cosh praised a CBC “longread” which dug into the oft-trumpeted heritage of a prominent Saskatchewan university official and did a thorough job of demolishing her claims to First Nations ancestry. This might have seemed unwarranted cruelty, except that those false claims had materially aided her rise to her current position with the university and the federal government:

Carrie Bourassa with media.
Lead photo in Geoff Leo’s article for the CBC – https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/carrie-bourassa-indigenous

The result is not only astonishingly well-written and funny — it’s unanswerable. Bourassa has been caught telling utterly insupportable stories about her own past, making lurid claims of racial abuse and colonial trauma in a fanciful Indigenous household bearing no resemblance to the wealthy white one in which she actually grew up. When she got wind that the CBC was working on a story, Bourassa used the resources of the institute to organize a PR defence and arrange for an “open letter”, whose signatories are surprised and offended to find their names attached.

And if the story’s soundness is doubted, one need only refer to the rebuttal that Bourassa published yesterday. Read it and hear the scratching of ticked-off boxes. “I refuse to be victimized by this man who calls himself a journalist. This entire smear campaign stems from lateral violence … nothing less than tabloid journalism … it is apparent that I must adhere to western ideologies.”

But Bourassa’s response, while slinging the jargon generously, does nothing to refute Leo’s reporting. The Saskatchewan scholar lashes herself to the mast of a late-life Métis adoption, which does nothing to explain her tales of making mukluks and beadwork with her “half-breed” “gramps” at age seven.

No prior news item about Aboriginal stolen identity has ever been as strong and complete as this one — and that is why it is worthy of our attention, and of the resources dedicated to it. Bourassa has earned fantastic sums as a researcher and administrator of public funds. Most of this would have been utterly unavailable to her as an ordinary white social worker from the vodka-drinking parts of Saskatchewan. She is in a paramount position of importance in a national bureaucracy dedicated to Indigenous well-being and cultural preservation: her endless nose-stretchers about Aboriginal identity make her position completely untenable.

So will anything be done about it? If the federal government and the University of Saskatchewan are willing to overlook the case made here by the CBC, they will overlook absolutely anything. Falsely claiming Aboriginal descent is one sinful thing; lying floridly and repeatedly to audiences about your personal history of suffering racist treatment is another. (Can one “adopt” experiences? We suppose one can, with a little imagination!) Bourassa seems determined to fight, and to exploit her position to do it. So the institutions to which she has attached herself may have to act — or suffer a disastrous blow to their credibility among First Nations and settlers alike.

May 1, 2021

The more we ask governments to do, the less well they do … everything

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

Matt Gurney’s latest Code 47 post reflects on the good and bad of Canadian governance right now (and yes, I agree with his basic take that despite buffoonery and incompetence at all levels of government, Canadians still generally have it good):

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

In some ways, absolutely. Canada’s relative awesomeness is not an accident. We rest on the accomplishments of prior generations and some of what we do today contributes directly to the common prosperity. A ton of stuff happens behind the scenes, every day, that contribute enormously to our way of life — really, make it possible. But in other ways, the pandemic has revealed just how incompetent and inept our governments have become meeting new challenges. It’s like every last bit of bandwidth our governments have is used up just keeping the status quo running along, and if we ask it to do anything new, it’s like hitting a computer with one process too many for its CPU. It just locks up.

Real-life example: I was watching today as the Ontario and federal governments continued bickering about the proper border controls we should have during what will probably be the last phase of this crisis. And what struck me was the sheer insanity of not having settled this a long time ago. I’m not even saying what I think the answer should have been. There’s a lot of genuinely competing interests there. I have my opinion, you can have yours. But can we at least agree that what to do about the goddamn borders ought not to still be under active decision 14 frickin’ months after this all began?

The federal government, in particular, seems to have fallen into a trap of its own making in that it corporately seems to believe that saying they’ll do something is exactly the same as actually doing something. Often enough, I’m pleased and relieved to find that Trudeau Jr.’s latest brain fart never got further than the press release and obligatory photo op, but it has become a constant in federal affairs. Optics matter far more than achievements, as long as the tame Canadian media play along — and they always played along with their boyfriend PM even before he bought them off with real money — nothing really changes. And everyone seems generally okay with this … except that real problems are not being addressed (ask any First Nations representative about how well the feds are helping with long-standing, known issues, for instance).

Certain provinces have done better than others. It’s tempting to point at them and go, ah ha, there’s what we should have done. And I think this is in large part fair and true. But it’s hard to make direct comparisons. Nova Scotia is not Ontario, and what worked in Nova Scotia wouldn’t necessarily have worked here. Believe me, if I could have swapped in their leaders for ours, I would have. It would have been an upgrade for sure. But the right solution, and personalities, for one crisis, in one time and place, aren’t necessarily the right solution for even that same crisis, at the same time, in a different place. I suspect we’ll spend a long time arguing about this once it’s all over, but I think that’s more or less where I’ve landed. Most of us would have been better off trying to be more like the Atlantic, but that doesn’t mean it would have recreated Atlantic-like successes everywhere.

But all that being said, there have been enormous basic failures, both in leadership and execution. You’ve all heard the joke about how someone new to government is shocked and dispirited to finally seize the levers of power, only to discover they’re not connected to anything. You can push and pull the levers all day long. But they don’t do anything. In Canada, both federally and in some of the provinces, we’ve been shockingly slow, again and again, to pull those levers. And sometimes, even after they’re pulled, nothing happens.

I don’t know if I have this thought through yet in a meaningful, useful way. This is a big, big idea that I’m starting at from different angles, trying to even conceive of its dimensions and scope. But if there is one problem we have — we have more, but if there is a meta-problem — I think it is that Canadian governments have lost the ability to execute new policy agendas. What we already have will generally work, more or less. But new things, or updates to old things? We routinely accept that failure is an option, or that even our successes will be late and overbudget — beyond acceptable real-world margins. (Life is always more complicated than theory.) There are things in my life that I just take for granted will work. If I get into my car and it doesn’t start, that surprises me, even though I am intellectually aware that that’s a possibility every time I try. But too often, with government, there is an entirely justified skepticism that it’ll succeed at all, let alone as intended, and yet, we shrug, because, hey. It’s Canada. Things are still good. How upset can I get about another program failure when I can just go fire up the barbecue and watch some hockey or something.

Governments are generally not very good at solving problems, especially novel problems that don’t already have a template to follow for success in similar circumstances. Set up a bureaucracy, establish processes and procedures, and set it in motion and it’ll carry on until the final Trump, but don’t ask it to cope with a crisis or even just an unexpected event or six. That’s not what they’re good at and they generally lack the organizational flexibility to adapt on the fly. Or at all.

March 9, 2021

QotD: Canadian culture

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

Everywhere one turns one sees a tendency toward mimesis — we tend to copy rather than invent — qualified by intellectual emptiness. In other words, it may be that the vacancy of the Canadian mind reflects the vacancy of the Canadian landscape. Of course, much of the land is variegated — lakes, rivers, forests, the impressive mountain ranges running down the length of “beautiful British Columbia” — in the same way, metaphorically speaking, that we can boast a number of resonating exceptions to the staple of tepid cultural and intellectual sameness.

One thinks of novelist Mordecai Richler, poet Irving Layton, critical minds Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, musicians Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot. Our founding father, Sir John A. Macdonald, was the ne plus ultra of our political class; there has been none like him since, which may explain why he is now on posthumous trial for war crimes and a hue and cry has gone up to remove his statues and rename eponymous schools.

The constitutive factor, however, exceptions aside, is the “howling emptiness” of a vast landmass that may partially account for the emptiness of our intellectual topography — if, as Jared Diamond had argued in Guns, Germs and Steel, geography governs the development of culture and spirit.

Any nation the preponderance of whose citizens regularly elects left-wing political parties; accepts single-payer healthcare; believes in the efficacy of the welfare state; endorses the hoax of global warming; accommodates swarms of third-world immigrants and refugees who have no love for or understanding of a country becoming an open-to-all multicultural tombola with the highest proportionate rate of immigrants in the Western world; has allowed its educational industry, from pre-school to graduate school, to be corrupted possibly beyond retrieval by lockstep Leftism, “diversity and inclusion,” and “social justice” claptrap; has caved to the feminist and campus-rape fable; dutifully takes CBC Leftist propaganda as gospel; has fallen for the 16th Century meme of the “Noble Savage” in its dealings with the aboriginal peoples; extravagantly celebrates a second-rate rock band like The Tragically Hip and names a street after it; reads (when it does read) tedious scribblers like the acclaimed Joseph Boyden and Ann-Marie MacDonald; and gives a complete ignoramus like Justin Trudeau a majority government on the strength of name and coiffure, cannot be regarded as informed, well-educated or in any way distinguished. Unlike the U.S., there are no cracks, to quote Leonard Cohen, where the light gets in. The Canadian political, cultural and academic spectrum has gone dark from end to end.

David Solway, “The Canadian Mind: A Culture So Open, Its ‘Brains Fall Out'”, PJ Media, 2018-10-10.

October 29, 2020

How to fix the CBC

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

… aside from cutting off the massive subsidies from the federal government, which would be my preferred solution if “nuke it from orbit” isn’t a viable choice. Let it sink or swim as a purely private media entity — I’d be betting on the “sink”, personally because they don’t currently have to compete thanks to their funding from the feds and are not noted for their quick adaptation skills. However, Peter Menzies isn’t quite as anti-CBC as I am:

In a recent piece here at The Line, I lamented the current status of the CBC. That’s easy enough to do, but it’s fair to ask what can actually be done to fix it. These ideas don’t provide all the answers but, implemented with conviction and speed, here’s where to start. Because there are some things that can be done, and relatively quickly, to revitalize the institution: the CBC may well be hell-bent on its own destructive dualism but clarifying its role and purifying its soul are still possible by getting it out of the advertising business and turning it into a proper public media.

Right now, the CBC is neither fish nor fowl. Sometimes, as with radio, it is a popular public broadcaster. At others, with its television channels, it fancies itself a commercial broadcaster, albeit a publicly-funded and relatively unpopular one. It plows both of those personalities into its commercial online operations and supplements them with reportage of the kind traditionally associated with newspapers. Like a creature of mythology, it shape-shifts through all of these roles as best suits its needs and moods.

On top of that, its OMG obsession with Trump’s America has drawn it far away from its content mandate to ensure Canadians learn about each other wherever they live in this vast and beautiful country. While its performance indicates otherwise, CBC’s purpose is not to secure a large audience share in the GTA or, in French, in Montreal, in order to earn more revenue. Nor is CBC News Network’s mandate to compete with CNN. The Corp’s raison d’etre, as defined in legislation, is to tell Canadians each other’s stories — even if the GTA and Montreal don’t care.

The only way to purify the CBC then, is to ban it — once and for all — from collecting advertising revenue from domestic consumption of its product. As its radio operations are already advertising-free this means no more ads on its TV or websites. Done. Finished.

October 7, 2020

Canada’s new documentary monoculture – many now “skew the truth by reinforcing the viewpoint du jour“

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

In The Line, Christina Clark explains why she’s no longer in the business of making documentaries in Canada:

Many of the stories now told through documentary skew the truth by reinforcing the viewpoint du jour. Interviews and scenes that break with the chosen narrative, that offer something other than a black-and-white approach to society and the complexities of humanity, happen off camera or end up on the editing room floor. This is all in an effort to promote diverse voices and the political opinions that allegedly support them. But when we lay claim to a singular viewpoint or dismiss a perspective because the creator’s or the subject’s skin tone or gender does not fit the narrative of inclusion, we are actually removing diversity from the storytelling equation. And what we’re left with are one-sided storylines that reinforce an echo chamber of virtue signalling.

I can no longer deny the dysfunctional approach to telling half-truths and undermining alternate viewpoints in my industry in the name of securing public funding for programming that fails to resonate with the public that is paying for it. Over the last year, I’ve been turning down contracts and finding an exit strategy. I’m pre-emptively cancelling myself.

Documentary was once considered Canada’s national art form. Part of our country’s success with the medium can be attributed to the creation of our National Film Board (NFB), established to “make and distribute films designed to help Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts.” The NFB was founded to provide public funding to storytellers to show us who we are, as a country, as citizens.

To secure public funding for a documentary film or program in Canada, producers typically need to have a broadcaster already signed on to the project. Then, they can apply to funds like the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm or Rogers. Without a broadcaster licence, you cannot apply for public funding. The criteria for licencing a film or television series has narrowed in recent years — not unlike the audiences these programs are targeting.

Take, for example, the Creative Relief Fund that the CBC put together during the early months of COVID to award $2 million in development and production funding for new projects, ranging from fiction and non-fiction television to documentary shorts to plays and podcasts. This was an enticing invitation for creators in lockdown. During this time, friends and colleagues of mine in the industry were messaging each other back and forth, offering feedback on each other’s ideas, as we were all intending to apply. These are some questions we all wondered aloud, in the safety of our private chats: “Do you think this story is diverse enough?” “This story might be too white …” “I don’t think the language is woke enough, do you think they’ll see the bigger story here?” That’s because many broadcasters have “Inclusion and Diversity Plans” that you have to fill out for your project, that track the racial and gender makeup of your crew and your interviewees. While it is not explicitly mandatory to accommodate broadcasters’ criteria for diversity, a lot of filmmakers already know before they even pitch an idea that their chances of getting greenlit are greater if they do.

October 5, 2020

QotD: Language changes to accord with critical studies theory

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

A Canadian Broadcasting [Corporation] program also debuted a new term this past week: “non-straight cisgender people.” This is the newly approved newspeak for gay people, parsed through the language of critical queer studies. The proponents of this new language seem eager to retire familiar terms like “gay men” or “lesbians” — perhaps because they suggest that the homosexual experience is rooted in basic human nature and can exist outside the parameters of structural oppression. So they find ways to define us in terms of queer theory, insisting there are only oppressed LGBTQ+ people. That’s also why, for example, so many on the left insist that gay white men had very little to do with Stonewall, which was led, we’re told, by trans women of color, subsequently betrayed by white men, who stole the movement from them. That this is untrue is irrelevant. It’s a narrative which serves to dismantle structures of oppression. And that’s all that matters.

Leading progressive maternity and doula organizations now deploy and encourage a whole array of “gender-neutral language” with respect to sex, birth, labor, and parenting. And so we now have the terms “chest-feeding,” “persons who menstruate,” “persons who produce sperm,” and “birthing person” for breastfeeding, women, men, and mothers, respectively. And instead of a butthole, we have a “back-hole”; instead of a vagina, we have a “front hole.” “Ovaries” and “uterus” are now rendered as “internal organs,” which may strike you as somewhat vague. These may sound completely absurd now, but given the choke hold critical gender theory has on almost all elite organizations, you can be sure you’ll hear them soon enough. They’ll likely be mandatory if you want to prove you’re not a transphobe. It was an objection to one of these terms — “people who menstruate” — that got J.K. Rowling tarred again as a bigot.

Those of us who oppose this abuse of the English language, who try to abide by Orwell’s dictum to use the simplest, clearest Anglo-Saxon words to describe reality, are now instantly suspect. Given the fear of losing your job for resisting this madness, most people will submit to this linguistic distortion. As you can see everywhere, the stigma of being called a bigot sweeps away all objects before it. But the further this goes — and there is no limiting principle in critical theory at all — the less able we are to describe reality. Which is, of course, the point. Narratives, only narratives, exist. And power, only power, matters.

Andrew Sullivan, “China Is a Genocidal Menace”, New York, 2020-07-03.

September 20, 2020

The CBC’s latest bit of “mission creep”

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

At The Line, Jen Gerson wonders what the hell the CBC thinks it’s doing with this move:

Let us take a moment to leverage a little credibility under the CBC’s ass.

What the fuck is the CBC playing at, here? The corporation receives a cool $1 billion in public funding per year and it’s using taxpayer funds to, yet again, horn into the revenue streams of private communications outlets. No one — literally not a single Canadian taxpayer who isn’t already employed by the CBC — wants to throw money at a public broadcaster so that it can: “Help Canada’s strongest brands shape and share inspiring stories across our platforms and across the country.” Vomit.

No one asked for a taxpayer-funded advertising firm, you goddamn loons.

This is yet another classic example of one of the most dysfunctional habits of the MotherCorp: mission creep. A massive and rudderless operation unfettered from the practical limitations of profit-seeking has proven itself unable to restrain its own boneheaded impulses.

We, at The Line, can hear the pitiable defences already: “Oh, but they’re already underfunded. Of course they need to, uh, use their incredible taxpayer-funded competitive advantage to eat into the dwindling revenue streams of failing private media outlets just to survive!”

No. No. No they do not.

When faced with a dysfunctional hydra-headed cultural behemoth that is demonstrably incapable of keeping its mandate in its pants, the first impulse should not be to shovel ever-more taxpayer funds into the ever-widening maw. The CBC could respond to *cough* “inadequate funding” by narrowing its scope and focus to the things that make it most necessary to the Canadian public that it serves — radio, news, documentary, serving regions and topics that the private sector cannot adequately penetrate. Instead it goes off and does weird shit like this, and CBC Comedy, and CBC Music.

CBC. Guys.

You cannot be everything to everyone. You shouldn’t be everything to everyone. Canadians are not well served by a monopolistic government-funded one-stop #content communications shop. Figure out what you do best and stick to it. Focus on supplementing — rather than crushing — private-sector journalism. Maybe even consider ways to support private-sector start ups and independents, especially in local markets. “Revenue generation” is not the place where a public broadcaster should demonstrate self-defeating, industry-following innovation.

August 19, 2020

QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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

The CBC was conceived 90 years ago to give the country a national broadcaster and to help Canadian regions understand each other better. It has often lived up to that mandate and in places still does.

But it is an infestation of leftist biases, and is often grossly unprofessional. For decades, despite being almost entirely funded by Canadian taxpayers, it was the principal house organ of the Quebec separatist movement, to the point that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, shortly before the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, threatened to shut the French network down; when asked what he would replace it with, he responded with his customary vivacity of wit: “Still pictures of Chinese and Japanese vases, at least they have some cultural value.” It is compulsively misanthropic and nasty, and almost always takes a snide leftist view of everything, including foreign affairs. Brexiters were cavemen, U.S. President Donald Trump is a racist, sexist crook and moron, and it is racism and xenophobia to assert that the coronavirus originated in China. Can’t we have better and more original insights than this?

Conrad Black, “Canada needs a much better CBC”, New English Review, 2020-05-02.

April 1, 2020

Getting the federal government out of the media business

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

Far from subsidizing the faltering mainstream media, the Canadian government should follow Ted Campbell’s advice here:

Direct subsidies will make many Canadians suspicious that the media has been bought and paid for and is little better than a government PR agency. Government advertising will bring charges of taxpayers’ money being used to publish propaganda. I wonder if tax breaks might help … maybe, as long as they are available, equally, to The Star and Rebel Media, and the North Renfrew Times, too I suppose. But where does it stop? Is my blog a news source? No, quite clearly not, it is almost 100% opinion, but what about blogs like Vivian Krause’s Fair Questions? It looks a lot more like reporting than what I do. In fact, some of her reporting looks a lot better than what the CBC does, doesn’t it? So where would the bureaucrats who draft the laws and regulations and then implement them draw the lines? Let’s assume that the traditional, mainstream media ~ the Globe and Mail and Global TV and so on ~ get tax breaks, and let’s assume that I don’t qualify. Who else does? Who makes that decision? Is it a politician, someone like the current Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault? Is it another the so-called “arm’s-length” boards that act as surrogates for the ministers? Or is it a team of bureaucrats? Who do we trust? None of the above?

The better answer, it seems to me, is to do pretty much exactly the opposite of what Daniel Bernhard recommends:

  • First: defund most of the CBC. Make it a national (and international) radio network (actually, two networks: one English and one French). Sell off ALL of the CBC’s TV broadcast licences and ALL of its TV production facilities and many of its major radio production facilities, too. Keep a fair number of local studios, especially in rural and remote regions, and a handful (five or six?) larger regional news centres and two (one English, one French) national and international newsrooms that will provide both voice and text reports ~ over the air and on the internet, free for all Canadians and totally free of copyright so that any news agency can use them;
  • Second, provide no, zero, nada, zilch funding to any news organization. Watch and see how they shake out in this rapidly changing environment. Remove or reduce most foreign ownership restrictions. Encourage “bundling” ~ allow e.g. telecom companies like Bell and Rogers to own and to integrate newspapers and TV stations and radio stations and internet platforms and entertainment sources, too; and
  • Third, get the CRTC out of the business of the internet and cable. There is a legitimate role for an independent regulator to manage scarcity. Over-the-air radio and TV channels are always in limited (and often in short) supply and they need to be allocated (licensed) to individual broadcasters; that’s a useful job for the CRTC. There is no scarcity of capacity on the landlines, cables and even satellite links in Canada. The market does a first-rate job of regulating them; the CRTC does, at best, a third-rate job.

I am certain that there are useful, profitable business models for media out there. The fact that we don’t seem to have one in Canada is, in my opinion, because of the existence of the CBC, which distorts the market too much, and the constant efforts of governments (national, provincial and even local) to try to “support” commercial favourites. The right move is to stand back and remove the heavy hand of bureaucracy and let the media find its own, profitable business model. There is a very limited role for government but Canada does not need a Ministry of Truth.

March 22, 2020

“Basically, CBC ended itself. It almost beggars belief”

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

Chris Selley notes the abject failure of Canada’s “national broadcaster” to rise to the occasion during the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

I scuttled into National Post headquarters Wednesday night to liberate some things from my desk before Postmedia’s meatspace newsrooms officially locked their doors “until further notice.” (I and my housebound colleagues remain at your service in the meantime.) Among my correspondence was a copy of David Taras’ and Christopher Waddell’s new book, The End of the CBC? It argues that Canada’s public broadcaster must rapidly and quite savagely reinvent itself or risk “oblivion.” And it is nothing if not timely reading.

On Wednesday, in a moment history may well note as Mother Corp’s rock bottom, CBC announced it was scuppering all its local television newscasts. Instead it would feed us all Canadians a mixture of national and local news from the same Toronto-based spigot.

Basically, CBC ended itself. It almost beggars belief.

Brodie Fenlon, editor-in-chief of CBC News, took to his blog to explain the decision — but didn’t, really. He talked of “staffing challenges” stemming from employees self-isolating and working from home. “Television is especially resource-intensive, and many jobs are difficult to do at home,” Fenlon wrote. “Our systems are overtaxed.”

[…]

This coronavirus has turned a harsh, bright light on several defects in Canadian society that we’ve been happy enough to ignore. We should be keeping a list of those things, and vowing to address them comprehensively once we’ve beaten COVID-19 back. A full-on top-to-bottom mandate review for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, especially its English TV operations, ought to be on that list — and the status quo must not be an option.

February 11, 2020

“… loveable Nickelodeon show Paw Patrol is an insidious tool of capitalism”

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

I’ve only heard of the show because my grand-niece is a huge fan, so I can’t say anything one way or another about these heresy allegations:

Six adorable, daring puppies and their whiz kid leader, ten-year-old Ryder, rescue people in the community of Adventure Bay. You would have to be a fool to not love Paw Patrol. And that’s where the Canadian state broadcaster CBC comes in!

A new article by Rebecca Zandbergen explores the groundbreaking new theory by Canadian university professor Liam Kennedy that loveable Nickelodeon show Paw Patrol is an insidious tool of capitalism. Kennedy, from King’s University College, has penned a vital new piece of research called “Whenever there’s trouble. Just yelp for help”: Crime, Conservation and Corporatization in Paw Patrol” in the peer-reviewed journal Crime Media Culture. His child isn’t allowed to watch the show, but Kennedy spent countless hours watching it in his office.

In the show, Ryder is the ring-leader of the pups, each of whom has a job to do as part of their team. There’s Chase, the police dog, Marshall, the fire chief dog who can never quite get control of his hose, Rubble, the builder, Skye, who flies a plane for some reason and is the girl pup, Everest, the extreme outdoor adventuring pup, Rocky, the rescue dog, and Zuma, the pup who drives a boat.

Together, they are the Paw Patrol, and they even have a headquarters, because all kids love a home base. Inexplicably, the grown-ups in town depend on Ryder and the pups to help them when they’re in a jam. Probably because it’s a show for kids, so it’s kid-centric. Kids like that.

Kennedy posits that “Paw Patrol, as a private corporation, is used to help provide basic social services in the Adventure Bay community. That’s problematic in that the Paw Patrol creators are sending this message that we can’t depend on the state to provide these services.”

Kennedy was angry that elected officials are not portrayed as heroes: “Mayor Humdinger and Mayor Goodway — kind of the representatives of the state or the government — are portrayed negatively,” Kennedy argued.

Kennedy also pointed out that, at the age of ten, Ryder should be in school, not saving the world. CBC did not bother to ask Kennedy how he feels about real-life school-skipper and saviour Greta Thunberg. We guess some do-gooders are more equal than others.

January 17, 2020

The crying need for “regime change” … in Canadian newsrooms

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

Chris Selley discusses the amazingly tone-deaf “corrections” issued by CBC and CTV over their malicious misquoting of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments on the Iranian government:

Harper did not advocate military intervention in Iran, or indeed any particular intervention whatsoever. Despite describing Iran (accurately) as an “anti-Semitic state” premised on “religious fanaticism and regional imperialism” that is standing resolutely in the way of cooperation between other Middle Eastern nations, Harper didn’t even advocate “a complete change of government.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.
World Economic Forum photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“I do believe we need to see a change in Iran if we are going to see peace in the Middle East,” he said.

“Without a change in the nature of the government of Tehran,” he said, “the Middle East will continue to be in turmoil.”

He said he hoped the furious protests in Iran might nudge the country toward “a better trajectory.”

These are perfectly anodyne statements. Who doesn’t want the Iranian regime to alter its behaviour?

Clarification or correction? I would say this calls for something more like “colossal embarrassment necessitating deep introspection.”

The root problem, I think, is that so much of Canadian politics is purely for show. We are a sparsely populated, not very powerful nation where the differences between the two major federal parties are remarkably small — and thus so are the stakes. It requires special measures to keep people interested, as much for the media as for politicians.

[…]

That’s how the big outlets like CBC and CTV make the sausage of the day, and it’s understandable. They do great investigative work, but the beast needs feeding not just every day, but all day every day. During the campaign I would watch colleagues set up for live hits in various parking lots and back yards and sometimes even on the campaign bus, and imagine them speaking the truth: “I’m here in Delta, B.C. and there’s f–k-all to report. Back to you, Kent.” But the viewers must never know. They need drama, as weak as it might be. I can easily imagine how that principle transformed “a changed regime” into “regime change.”

The real problem with this reporting regime is when it’s applied to things that actually do matter. There are serious potential consequences to telling the world that Stephen Harper thinks, in essence, that we should declare war on Iran with an eye to bouncing the ayatollahs. Harper’s successor and his government are in the midst of an extremely delicate and frankly improbable operation to find out precisely what happened the morning of Jan. 8 in the skies above Tehran and seek justice for the victims and their families. Those families don’t deserve fake news about a warmongering former PM, and I’m sure our diplomats would prefer members of the unchanged Iranian regime didn’t come across it either.

This isn’t a Canadian federal election. It’s real life, and needs to be covered as such.

December 31, 2019

QotD: Canadian journalism

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

… a Canadian Journalist’s main job is to smooth over any rough spots and shush away worries as the Liberal government plunders the public purse to pay for technocratic solutions to problems we didn’t know we had while adopting a laissez-faire attitude to the problems we do have. If the Opposition has a point, it falls to a Canadian Journalist to correct the record and say that, well, actually, no they don’t.

Josh Lieblein, “Hack or Flack: Aaron Wherry Edition”, Raving Canuck, 2017-11-29.

October 3, 2019

QotD: Media coverage of Liberal and Conservative scandals, respectively

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

In the Canadian election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has unveiled the centrepiece of its platform:

    A re-elected Liberal government [will] expand the Learn To Camp program.

Under the Learn To Camp program, every Canadian will be provided with a tub of boot polish, a novelty turban, a jewel to stick in your belly button, and genie slippers with curly toes, and trained how to swish across a Vancouver ballroom while asking other guests to tally your banana.

Oh, wait, sorry, that was last week’s Justin story. In America a ten-minute phone call to some fellow in Kiev is all the pretext you need for two years of multi-million-dollar investigation. But in Canada the news that the Prime Minister has spent half his adult life as the world’s wokest mammy singer is just a blip in the day’s news cycle, soon to be supplanted by a genuinely eye-catching scandal such as whether or not the Tory leader had a valid license from the Insurance Councils of Saskatchewan or the Canadian Association of Insurance Brokers back in 1997, or 1978, or whenever. You can understand why the Canadian media would rather stampede after the Andrew Scheer scandal: what journalist with a nose for a great red-meat story wouldn’t prefer chasing down the officially approved accreditation from the Department of Paperwork’s archives than, say, the fruiterer who supplies the Prime Minstrel with his trouser bananas. Was Justin accredited by the Minstrelsy Council of Quebec or the Canadian Association of Burnt Cork Fetishists? Would that make the story more interesting for the CBC et al?

The Toronto Star, like all good government-subsidized Canadian media, has been doing its best to neutralize the mammy songs. The most potentially damaging of the three (so far) blackface incidents is the middle one – a grainy video from the 1990s showing Boy Justin capering about like an ape. So the Star set its crack investigators on the story and tracked down a much better version of the video, and conclusively proved that Tories were misleading the public when they claimed that the Prime Ministrel in blackface, blackarms, blacklegs and blackwhatever-other-appendage was wearing a T-shirt with a banana on it. After all, the banana would imply Justin is a racist who likens black people to monkeys. Whereas prancing around in full-body blackface waving your arms and sticking your tongue out implies no such monkey-like slur.

So the Star‘s new HD minstrel video is of sufficient quality to show that the banana on the T-shirt is, in fact, the beak of a toucan. Unfortunately, the new video is also of sufficient quality to show that the banana is instead stuffed down Justin’s trousers. That risks suggesting the Prime Minstrel is exploiting old white neuroses about the black man’s sexual prowess. But don’t worry – The Toronto Star is only a day or two away from a full-page exclusive asserting that the Negro, impressive though his endowments be, pales in comparison to the average Quebec high-school drama teacher: When Rastus makes the mistake of appearing on stage next to Justin, he’s the one who needs the banana. Not for nothing is Quebec’s provincial dialect called joual, derived from cheval, as in horse.

Mark Steyn, “Blackface Narcissus”, Steyn Online, 2019-09-30.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress