CBC's Assault on Canada
With a Special Emphasis on the Importance of the Freedom Convoy in Liberating Canada from Its Oppressors. Elizabeth Nickson Opens a Vital Debate.
In her very popular Substack entitled Absurdistan, Elizabeth Nickson has explained how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has “nearly destroyed the richest country in the world.” Nickson explains, “The public broadcaster, once loved to excess by every Canadian, is now widely hated.”
Nickson continues by observing that “the last time I looked, CBC’s news is watched by fewer than 2% of the population.” It seems the smaller the CBC’s audience becomes, the larger are the Trudeau government’s subsidies to enlarge this failing Crown Corporation.
Nickson describes what she means when she characterizes Canada as the richest country in the world. She writes
“We Canadians live in the second largest country in geographic terms, with a small, albeit highly educated population. We sit on the greatest natural riches in the world without parallel. No other country comes close. Per capita, every single Canadian could live like a Saudi prince, creating the most extraordinary culture the world has ever seen. Instead, we get by on 60% of the average American’s income, and we are, generally, depressed and fearful of the future. This is 100% the fault of our media, and to a lesser extent, government “art”.
As Nickson sees it, the fatal flaw of the clique running the CBC has been its deep and visceral hostility to conservatism and to the Progressive Conservative Party that existed from 1942 until 2003. Nickson believes that this obsession was channeled into the CBCs hostility to Brian Mulroney, Canada’s PCP Prime Minister from 1984 to 1997.
According to Nickson, the CBC finally “found a politician to love” in the person of Justin Trudeau. When Trudeau won the national election in 2015, he became “the ideal leftwing pretty boy willing to be puppeted for power.” A marriage of convenience ensued where the CBC “mirrored Trudeau’s campaign of conservative-hatred, oil-sands hatred, and full-throated promotion of the ‘climate change’ narrative.”
The narrative of the CBC and Trudeau merged in 2020 with the worldwide demise of the credibility and popularity of the legacy media in the course of the World Health Organization’s unjustified declaration of a “pandemic.” The MSM, including the public broadcasters in Britain, Australia and Canada, decided collectively to appoint themselves as joint arbiters of how to diagnose, interpret and treat the viral infection known as COVID-19.
A big part of this process involved promoting the administration of gene-modifying injections that were jabbed into the arms of well over half of the global population. The media came together with government-authorized “experts” to declare these injections to be completely “safe and effective.”
We are only now beginning to grapple with the fact that many authorities in society should have been much more cautious before embracing uncritically the dominant narrative. Authorities in governments, universities, corporations, unions, professional associations and the like pulled together with media moguls in an effort to impose a prescribed regime of universal vaccinations as basic requirement of sustainable public health.
The CBC was especially zealous in pushing this orthodoxy and declaring any variations on the plan as heretical, no matter how highly qualified and accomplished the source of alternative interpretations. In the name of “following the science” the CBC and most of the other large media conglomerates turned their back on many genuine experts and the vital insights they sought to share with colleagues and the public.
Early on many of the spurned experts began assembling, organizing, collaborating and reporting on crucial evidence indicating the experimental injection programs were not well conceived and that they were fraught with many kinds of danger. This blocking off of large sectors of the public from access to this crucial evidence has had, and continues to have, a direct bearing on many life-and-death decisions.
As a result, institutions like the CBC now bear a heavy burden of responsibility and possible liability for lives lost and lives harmed by coercively-mandated injections of an inadequately tested product not subject to sound quality control.
There are many legal ramifications for a Crown broadcaster like the CBC who should have understood that its content producers on COVID-19 matters had major responsibilities of public education. They were strategically placed to create the necessary conditions to generate informed consent for what we now can see were massive and and many-faceted medical experiments on human subjects.
Like the BBC and the ABC, the CBC should have understood that as a public broadcaster it had special duties to adhere to the terms of the Nuremberg Code requiring informed consent by human subjects for medical experiments. The extensions of the Covidian procedures imposed on much more than half of the entire global population, can now be seen as a primary basis for the most large-scale medical experiment ever.
The CBC Foments Hate and Division Among Canadians
Nickson pays close attention to two senior CBC journalists who resigned in horror and disgust once they learned the Crown’s public broadcaster in Canada had decided to play fast and loose with various professional codes of conduct. One of those journalists, Marianne Klowak, decided she could not continue at the CBC once she ascertained that, on Covidian reporting, “We betrayed our audience, we betrayed their trust.”
Rodney Palmer was astonished when some his colleagues at the CBC decided against allowing audiences to see all sides of the Covidian issues. He noticed his colleagues were prone to decide for members of the public how they should respond to the manufactured health crisis.
Quoting Palmer, Nickson writes,
“Who at the CBC was the arbiter of the truth, when Canadians prefer to determine truth for themselves? How dare the CBC promote a new identifiable group of Canadians and foment hate against them?”
Probably the identifiable group of individual Canadians that Palmer had in mind were the so-called “unvaxxed,” meaning those who decided not to be jabbed with the COVID shots. There is another group, however, that well fits Palmer’s idea of an identifiable group of Canadians against which the CBC was, and still is, attempting to foment hate.
The Truckers Freedom Convoy and their millions of supporters in Canada and throughout the world, constitutes a group against which the CBC and its political masters in the Trudeau government have consistently tried to foment hate. The Truckers and their expert advisers in law and various scientific fields converged in Ottawa in January and February of 2022.
In January the Freedom Convoys that moved across Canada’s huge arctic expanses during the height of winter attracted great interest and large groups of enthusiastic supporters. People were drawn from their warm homes onto the sides of highways with the happy expectation that a plan was being hatched to free Canadians from the restraints of forced masking, lockdowns, school closures, mandatory clot shots and many other repressive and harmful restrictions.
The organized protestors identifying with the mission of the Freedom Convoy formed the basis of an organized opposition that had become almost non-existent in the Parliament of Canada during Canada’s dramatic winter of well justified discontent. It was as if the national capital had become mezmorized in some sort of hypnotic spell cast by the robotic, dogmatic and xenophobic reporting of the CBC.
In the face of this parliamentary monoculture of conformism, along came the Truckers to do the job of opposition which Ottawa politicians and bureaucrats had neglected. There was no equivalent in the Canada Parliament of Senator Ron Johnson’s use of the US Congress as a vehicle of public education to expose genuine scientific debate in order to illuminate various perspectives on the manufactured COVID crisis.
The Freedom Convoy’s intrusion into the privileged zone of the laptop-equipped stay-at-home civil servants and politicians, was much resented in the blinkered and snow-bound national capital.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave voice to this resentment. Instead of meeting with the Convoy representatives he announced he was sick from COVID yet again. Before leaving town, however, the PM described the Truckers as racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, antisemites, Confederates and as an unacceptable fringe minority. This list of insults is far from complete.
Trudeau’s behaviour became part of the drama that was quickly translated into world news. The heart of the narrative was the inspirational nature of the innovative approach of the Freedom Convoy. This example proved to be empowering for those opposed to the transnational proliferation of Covidian infractions of public health, the scientific method, civil liberties, and the rule of law.
On Valentine Day Trudeau used the Truckers as justification to suspend the usual rules of governance in order to invoke the most recent iteration of the War Measures Act. A Federal Court subsequently declared this invocation was illegal. This decision injects question marks surrounding the legitimacy of the federal governments seizure of Truckers’ bank accounts and the creation of conditions meant to give widened license to police to rough up peaceful protesters.
In the process criminal prosecutions against Truckers were initiated in ways that continue yet. The CBC continues to do its part to discredit the Truckers movement and try to turn public opinion against its members, supporters and admirers. The CBC continues to serve Trudeau’s agenda of creating wedge issues to foment hatred and disunity among Canadians as illustrated by the following musical skit on the outgrowth of the show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes. The published video is stamped with the recent date of 27 August 2024.
The comedic genius, Rick Mercer, played a major role in building up the CBC’s 22 Minutes program into a national institution based on a rich and reliable supply of intelligent political satire. Much of this satire was developed in the fertile cultural milieu of Newfoundland.
Now the show features talent-challenged nobodies who seem to think they are funny when they aren’t. The current version of 22 Minutes has been demeaned by a mean-spirited effort to present to the Freedom Convoy as the subject of tawdry musical theatre.
Led by “Willy Tonka,” the performers sing about the Freedom Convoy as a “world of disinformation, fabrication and anti-vax lunacy.” One female character wearing a mustache steps forward in her nightgown boasting about her new truck and declaring herself to be an “emboldened bigot.” Those who sought alternatives to the jab in hydroxychloroquin are mocked in the words of a trite song delivered in the course of an awkward dance number.
Willy Tonka concludes the musical with a big wink aimed at those who picture themselves as being “free to hate the CBC.” By ending in this way, it seems that the CBC producer of this skit is well aware of the phenomenon that Elizabeth Nickson describes, namely that many in Canada have come to despise the failing CBC. How strange to see that understanding turned into an inside joke by a CBC performer.
Earlier in the musical the Willy Tonka character puts an ominous spin on the future as he sings that the Truckers’ world “of pure imagination will soon become a world of pure incarceration.”
A World of Pure Incarceration?
A representative sample of the Freedom Convoy Truckers continue to experience extended persecutions in the media including in the consistently-biased CBC coverage of court proceedings involving the Truckers. In the process the once-frivolous charge of “mischief” is being manipulated and expanded by a corrupt and malicious criminal justice system. This spectacle of thoroughly politicized jurisprudence is on full display in the legal proceedings underway in Lethbridge Alberta and in Ottawa Ontario.
Here in Lethbridge a two-year process of pre-trails, voir dires, jury trials and extended sentencing procedures are still unfolding. Among those being subjected to the array of byzantine procedures are four protestors who took part in the demonstrations that took place at Coutts on the border between Montana and Alberta. The four accused were arrested to face the strange charge of conspiracy to kill RCMP officers. In other words, a murder case was created without anyone being murdered.
The proceedings aiming charges at the Coutts 4, then reduced to the Coutts 2, amounted to an investigation of supposed thought crimes that some extremists argued were pointed towards very extravagant “neo-nazi” objectives. For instance some of the dubious contingent of “experts” assembled by the so-called Canadian Anti-Hate Network convinced irresponsible media outlets, including the CBC, that the plan of the Coutts 4 was to overthrow parts of the government in the United States and Canada in order to create the new polity of “Diagolon.”
It seems Steven Johnston, the Crown official who apparently acted as the RCMP’s “lawyer,” was put in a position in the Lethbridge trials to defend his own decisions in helping to direct police actions at Coutts . That sequence of events creates the appearance that Johnston may have had difficulty navigating his way through several conflicts of interest.
Sometimes Johnston got caught in the tensions between his police work and his courtroom work. When Johnston got trapped in various conflicts of interest, Judge Labrenz usually protected him by fishing him out of trouble. The complex interactions between the prosecutor and the judge sometimes seemed to enter the realm of collusion as in, for instance, the unusual circumstances of the sentencing procedures that took place after the jury had determined that Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert were not guilty of the primary charge.
In the provincial courts of Alberta, Johnston was entrusted as one of several Prosecutors representing first Queen Elizabeth and then King Charles after the death of the sovereign matriarch in September of 2022. Johnston’s role in developing and prosecuting some of the people who took part in the Coutts protests has unfolded under the auspices of the Specialized Prosecutions Branch of the Alberta Justice Branch. Johnston’s history of work that brought him to this branch puts him in an unusual position.
https://polcyb.org/Events/qm_bio/StevenJohnston.html
Was Johnston’s first priority in court to vindicate his own actions and decisions at Coutts where he acted as the RCMP’s lawyer? I think that’s a problem for him. Steven Johnston was not, and is still not, in a sound position to navigate between his responsibilities to represent both King Charles as well as to treat the accused fairly. Fair treatment is supposed to include due regard for the human rights of the accused, including their right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
Johnson’s prejudiced treatment of the Coutts 4 was reflected in his successful efforts to deny bail to all the accused men who were grouped together arbitrarily. Two of them spent two years in jail, convicted of nothing. They were released on the basis of plea bargaining.
The other two men were found by a jury of their peers to be NOT guilty of the main charge. Nevertheless, on the basis of the secondary charges the Coutts 2 were sentenced by Judge David Labrenz to 6.5 years in prison.
In July of 2023 an accidental release of a secret Crown document occurred. The four defence lawyers received the document that was not supposed to be released. The document was read by Tonii Roulston, the lawyer for the defendant, Tony Olienick.
The contents of the document in question caused Ms. Roulston during the court proceedings to accuse Johnston of a series of “crime frauds” in his relationship with the RCMP, presumably when they were in Coutts. Roulston was so surprised by the damning revelations she encountered that she was motivated enough to put the matter before the disciplinary body of the Law Society of Alberta.
In court Judge Labrenz commended Ms. Roulston for her astonishing allegations concerning the Crown Prosecutor’s series of alleged “crime frauds” in his interactions at Coutts with the RCMP.
Why should the public not demand complete disclosure of the contents of the sealed envelop to establish whether of not the Crown Prosecutor, Steven Johnston, committed criminal acts in his involvements with the RCMP at Coutts? Why should the public put their trust in this judicial process, but especially in the integrity of the presiding magistrate, when the proceedings of the Coutts 4/Coutts 2 case are under the cloud of a uncertainty concerning whether or not the Crown Prosecutor acted illegally.
To reiterate, the defence lawyer’s testimony in the trial was that the the Crown Prosecutor committed a sequence of “crime frauds” in ways integral to the genesis of this conspiracy-to-commit-murder case? The fact that the document in question still remains concealed from the public by court order, creates the basis of suspicion for members of the public.
People have every right to wonder why the Crown Prosecutor did not voluntarily recuse himself on the basis of Ms. Roulston’s testimony? They have every right to wonder why Judge Labrenz allowed Steven Johnston to continue as Chief Prosecutor given the dramatic nature of the question marks created by the testimony of one of the very few jurists to see the contents of the still-sealed envelop.
How was it that Tonii Roulston left the proceeding shortly following her allegations of crime fraud against Steven Johnston? How can this controversy remain unaddressed by the responsible authorities in such a consequential case involving the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergency Act on 14 February, 2014.
In its zeal to convict the Coutts 4 in the well-orchestrated trial by media, the CBC did not report on this aspect of the trial. Instead, the CBC participated in a nasty project along with other media venues. The CBC sought aggressively to prejudice public opinion against the accused prior to their jury trial. This bias in coverage was one aspect of the larger CBC project to bias public opinion against all facets of the vital messaging brought to world attention by the leadership of the Canadian Truckers’ Freedom Convoy.
Rachel Ward, the author of the CBC smear piece, conducted research for the Fifth Estates’ attack documentary on the Freedom Convoy. This Fifth Estate item is embedded at the end of this essay.
The Devastating Deployment of “Mischief” and “Common Nuisance” Charges in the Growing Arsenal of the Canadian Police State
The effort to criminalize the Freedom Convoy movement calls attention to the failure of Canadian institutions to address the criminality that is coming to dominate the upper echelons of the Canadian government including the Office of the Prime Minister. The machinations of the criminal justice system have failed to hold Justin Trudeau accountable for dozens of acts that would seem on their face indicative of the fact that many laws, major and minor, have been and are being violated by the holder of the top office in the land.
The prime ministerial crime spree started with Trudeau’s scandalous handling of the notorious SNC-Lavalin case involving the wholesale corruption in Libya of the Liberal Party’s favourite international engineering firm.
https://warrenkinsella.com/2019/02/shocker-why-jody-wilson-raybould-was-knifed-by-justin-trudeau/
Rather than deal with the scandal, Trudeau opted to thoroughly politicize law enforcement in Canada. Trudeau removed the federal Attorney General who was intent on doing her job by pressing criminal charges on SNC-Lavalin. Thereafter he chose compliant officials to lead the Ministry of Justice, much of the judiciary, the RCMP, the CBC and a wide array of regulatory Crown agencies. Trudeau installed weak people he surmised would look the other way, allowing various forms of racketeering to proliferate in and around the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada.
The criminal biases of the corrupted law enforcement system in Canada have been channeled into the effort to discredit the ongoing Freedom Convoy movement. While far from perfect, this genuine grass-roots network of activists presented one of the most well conceived and concerted critiques ever put before a national government in northern North America. To this day the persecution and prosecution of Truckers’ Convoy, including its Coutts contingent, continues.
While criminality at the top became rampant, there seems to be unlimited time and resources available to mire a number of Freedom Convoy figures in seemingly endless and extremely expensive legal wrangling. Much of this wrangling involves developing increasingly harsh and variegated methods of deploying mischief charges as useful weapons in the growth of the Canadian police state.
Those protestors who are still ensnared in the web of Crown prosecutions include Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, Marcos Van Huigenbos, Alex Van Herk, and Gerhard Janzen.
The effort to criminalize and stigmatize peaceful protest in Canada continues to find an important centre of gravity in the attacks on the Freedom Convoy movement. The assault on our basic freedoms, however, cuts deep and cuts broadly across many facets of Canadian society.
The elaborate nature of the Crown’s prosecution of Cullen McDonald for “common nuisance,” is telling example of the trajectory of authoritarianism on which the criminal justice system in Canada seems embarked.
In 2021 McDonald violated the lockdown orders to protest against the lockdown orders in Niagara Falls Ontario. The Crown’s deployment of “common nuisance” charges, like the extravagant deployment of mischief charges, forms part of an insidious agenda in the expanding reach of the Canadian police state.
https://x.com/canindependent/status/1837998216400208312
In its editorial decisions about what it chooses to cover and what it chooses to ignore, the CBC can be seen as an instrumental accomplice in the repeating cycles of government authoritarianism and wrongdoing.
Especially in late 2021 and early 2022, just as the Freedom Convoy was hitting its stride, statistics for all-cause mortality began to show that something was causing extremely inflated rates of death in many countries.
The evidence is overwhelming that the gene-modifying injections, which have been described with justification as military bioweapons, form the reason for the continuing debacle. Those unexplained deaths and injuries cast a shadow over the censorious CBC that withheld vital information that could have been applied in ways that would have saved many lives.
Let us now turn to Elizabeth Nickson’s essay
The CBC: From Crown Jewel to Jacobins
By Elizabeth Nickson
The Beast
Renegade governmental organizations are virtually impossible to rein in, especially if they have careened off the rails into destructive action. Take, for the sake of argument, the FBI or Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., or the World Health Organization and the United Nations internationally, or the plethora of sovereign and sub-sovereign health ministries that went AWOL during COVID-19. If threatened, a throng of defenders rise, vocal to the point of shrill, defending the original idea, refusing to look at the slavering beast all that public money hath wrought.
“Reform or die,” says prime minister after president after premier. Nodding subservience is followed by…nothing. Commissions are formed, recommendations are made. Cosmetic changes ensue. Like rogue elephants they continue to roam the heights of the culture, braying and stomping and breaking things. Power, once acquired, needs to be wrenched from bleeding hands.
In Canada, that raging elephant is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Founded in 1936, at last count, the CBC sprawls across the country in twenty-seven over-the-air TV stations, eighty-eight radio stations, a flotilla of websites, podcasts, streaming TV, and multiple satellite radio stations. Its mandate is high-flown, to connect the multiple city-states of the country, its frozen north and isolated rural communities via dozens of offices big and small. It broadcasts in English, French, and eight indigenous languages.
The CBC’s Toronto headquarters, finished in 1993, was a statement of extreme optimism at a time when the corporation was widely loved. Designed by Philip Johnson, its cost $381 million. It is de-constructivist in form, a symbol of the CBC’s purpose, which is to re-conceive Canada’s founding as racist and the country in need of radical reform led by itself. Its orthogonal grid is “interrupted by skewed elements,” its interior dominated by a green elevator shaft set at an angle to the building grid. Outside, a forbidding Soviet box, windows are outlined in CBC red. Inside, it’s confusing, echoing, and replete with empty studios. Despite effulgent funding, the aura of failure wears on those still employed. They don’t understand why they are no longer astride the culture.
A behemoth, it demands $1 billion and $240 million of direct subsidy from the government every year, and rakes in several hundred million more through licensing, advertising, and production subsidy. It eats up, say some analysts, half the media dollars spent in the country, yet is watched on its twenty-seven TV stations by fewer than 5 percent[RK1] of Canadians. Its news outlets perform worse. Only 1.75 percent watch CBC news on broadcast channels or cable. The National, its star suppertime news show in Toronto, is watched by fewer than half a million people, while private-sector competitors in the same city crest at 1 million or even 2 million.
In June 2023, the editorial board of Canada’s long-time national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, put its rather large bear paw down and suggested shuttering CBC TV entirely, and focusing on digital and radio, which are relatively successful. The editorial board (acting in its own institutional interest), pointed out that digital advertising for CBC should be halted because a subsidized CBC should not eat up ad dollars in a tight market. The editorial board also stated that more than 24 million CBC digital visitors a month is substantial. It is not. The media is undergoing explosive growth in every country; it is only legacy media that is not growing. Routinely in the U.S., popular digital sites host tens of millions of visitors a day, and more than a billion a year. Using that metric, the CBC reaches about 10 percent of the available digital audience.
Most Canadians agree with The Globe and Mail. In fact, in mid-2023, 62 percent of Canadians wanted it shut down, saying they would vote for conservatives if they promised to do so. Not reined in, not given less taxpayer money, not privatized, but shut down, its many buildings, its wealth of equipment sold, and its employees scattered to the winds. Among some 30 to 40 percent, the mother corporation (as it calls itself) is actively hated, loathed. When Pierre Poilievre, the popular conservative candidate leader, promised to shut down the CBC, his audience rose for a prolonged standing ovation.
How did this jewel of Canadian culture which, for sixty years was held in near reverence by every sentient Canadian, come to this?
The Original Purpose
Public broadcasters, in general, engage in state-building, in national and cultural integration. They “provide social cement,” they build bridges, “witness” and connect. Or are supposed to. They are meant to be free, in order to serve those without the funds for cable or streaming subscriptions. In Ireland, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE) provides an alternative to the deluge of British programming, those in Nordic countries promote “equality, solidarity and belonging,” and in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) sets itself against the dominance of wicked corporatist freebooter Rupert Murdoch.
In Canada, the CBC is meant to provide a Canadian voice in a country where, as the old saw goes, Canadian culture is in a distinct minority. This purpose has been served well in French Canada, where Radio Canada (best said with a French accent) is widely loved and has managed to act as a beacon for Quebecois culture, an impressive amount of it created to flout, humiliate, and laugh at the maudit Anglais to the south, east, and west.
The digital and streaming explosion of the early aughts[RK2] left the CBC flailing to catch up, and this is typically given as the reason its audience numbers are so poor. However, this is not the case for the CBC’s radio stations which are the only division of the corporation that truly service small-city and rural Canada and can compete in an admitted fever of ever-expanding competition. Their drive-time shows can reach as many as 20 percent of the audience, and are often in first place in the ratings.
There are other rather more convincing arguments for its decline. CBC hosts on radio and TV have historically been beloved figures. Today, few Canadians could name one of them; personalities seemingly are not wanted at the CBC anymore but Canadians still love them. Canadian YouTubers routinely attract hundreds of thousands of viewers and, in Jordan Peterson’s case, tens of millions, trouncing the “mother corporation” by orders of magnitude. Podcasts are popular, but half of those listened to in Canada are[RK3] [EN4] by rightwing Americans. Which indicates that, even given its radio successes, the corporation has lost touch with Canadians. It simply does not have news or entertainment product strong enough to compete in the new marketplace. And, as the proliferation of new media in Canada proves, its editorial policy is so backward, almost every single digital opportunity has been missed.
In contrast to received opinion—which is that the culprit is the explosion in digital and streaming outlets—the answer to the corporation’s distress is far simpler, and far more reparable. A series of bad political decisions have been made by policy chiefs who craft the corporation’s editorial policy every year. Reputedly that secretive department costs taxpayer $180 million annually, but it is as closeted as the Kremlin and few even admit it exists. But it does, and it is those policy setters who have created the wholesale repudiation of the CBC via a rough-shod political brinksmanship that was meant entirely to remake Canada in a fresh, socialist image. And to destroy the one political party standing in the way.
Political Headwinds and Terrible Decisions
The Canadian public’s loss of affection for the CBC began with” [RK5] [EN6] their twenty-seven-year-long attack on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, which started in the late 1980s with his election and ended only in 2011 with his exoneration by the Oliphant decision, a commission forced by [RK7] [EN8] the media after repeated failed attempts to destroy Mulroney. The goal, it appears in retrospect, was not only to ruin Mulroney, who saw Canada as a potential capitalist titan using its vast natural resources, but to salt the earth so that no such animal could rise again. Like the later “Russian collusion” hoax employed against Donald Trump in the U.S., the Mulroney attacks were based on hate via creating a storm of noise and accusations, falsified evidence, and an egregious waste of taxpayer money. Like the Russia hoax, nothing was found. That was not the point. The point was to ruin Mulroney, deflect criticism, and silence conservative voices.
Mulroney, a brash-to-the-point-of-vulgar Irishman from Montreal, rode in on Ronald Reagan’s coat tails with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1980s private-sector boom. Journalists in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle hated him, and as an exhaustive study done at the time demonstrated, more than 90 percent of journalists in Canada were liberal[RK9] [EN10] or, more likely, socialist. In fact, as Barry Cooper and Lydia Miljan found in their 1993 book Hidden Agendas: How Journalists Influence the News, it was almost impossible to work in Canada’s media as a conservative, unless you were tightly tied to the financial pages, and even then, if you had little to no profile as a columnist.
Immediately upon Mulroney’s election, the CBC and the national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, went on the attack. One investigative reporter, Stevie Cameron, who worked for both, grabbed the beat and did not let go. What happened was a thorough-going illustration of a political hit job disguised as journalism.
Mulroney, possessed, it was thought, of an egregiously ambitious wife, was accused of taking a $300,000 cash bribe for awarding a 1988 Airbus contract. He had over his ten years in office acquired a “friend,” Karlheinz Schreiber, a fixer/lobbyist who trolled capital cities for his clients. Schreiber, a native of Germany, was said to have promised Mulroney a job as a lobbyist when his ministership was over. In the end, this dubious choice in friends was the only charge that landed after twenty years of parallel investigations by the CBC and The Globe and Mail, a ten-year investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, several court cases, and finally a formal commission.
The CBC program The Fifth Estate produced nine documentaries trying to pin kickbacks on Mulroney, using as a principal source an accountant and friend of Schreiber who had spent time in Swiss, Italian, and American prisons. The newsmen were convinced by this man, Giorgio Pelossi, that Mulroney had a secret Swiss bank account in which he had allegedly stashed millions, and petitioned the Swiss government to release the evidence. Neither the millions nor the Swiss bank account were ever found.
Finally, Mulroney had had enough and sued the CBC for libel. He won and then won again on appeal. These two court cases and decades-long investigations cost the CBC $15 million. Publishers and editors—there were several books[RK11] [EN12] —allowed reporters to use dubious sources, contributing to the of one[RK13] of the publishers, Key Porter Books. Schreiber, who was under deportation orders, told a Fifth Estate host on air that he would do anything not to be deported. The CBC ran with his “evidence” anyway.
Despite losing twice in court, the CBC continued its crusade and in 2010, twenty-two years after the Airbus contract was awarded, conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was forced to empanel a commission that cost the Canadian taxpayer another $14 million. Justice Oliphant found that “nothing inappropriate occurred during the meetings that Mr. Schreiber had with Mr. Mulroney.”
The CBC even commissioned Mulroney: The Opera, a $3 million and $800,000 film supposed to be shown in theaters first and on the CBC second. According to columnist Brian Lilley, the film portrayed Mulroney as an “American wanna-be with no ethics and an unquenchable thirst for power.” It was so terrible that not only did it not air on CBC, the CBC took its name off the disaster. Naturally, it was praised by The Globe and Mail.
During Steven Harper’s prime ministership, the CBC led an attack on four nominally conservative senators who had claimed expenses in hometowns that they rarely visited. This was unfortunate, but a well-worn pattern. A few paid back those expenses—the largest bill was for $150,000—and three were criminally charged and acquitted, but not before their lives had been shredded. The “scandal” over relatively small sums was meant to counter the rising suspicion of Canadians that the CBC and the government had run amok with spending, and, in a masterful sleight of hand, proffered visible conservatives as punching bags. The “investigations” mirrored the attack on Mulroney and, as meant, affected the 2015 election, which was won by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.
By then, Canadians, particularly those right of center, were sharply aware that Liberal scandals, far more egregious in terms of money misallocated, were ignored or glossed over. By 2011, after the CBC again lost with the Oliphant Commission it had forced, the organization had lost 30 to 40 percent of the country along with it.
In 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper commissioned a report from the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications to come up with ways to rescue the CBC. More ads, the cessation of in-house cultural programs, playing recordings, and selling off all its studios and buildings were among the recommendations. In response, the CBC spent the next three election seasons—2015, 2019, and 2021—attacking conservatives with its every breath. In Justin Trudeau, the ideal leftwing pretty boy willing to be puppeted for power, the CBC had finally found a politician to love.
On the campaign trail, Trudeau and his team promised to increase the CBC’s funding. The CBC in return mirrored Trudeau’s campaign of conservative-hatred, oil-sands hatred, and full-throated promotion of the “climate change” narrative. Harper, a stolid man married to reason, was subjected to daily character assassination, his every move portrayed as evil. When the CBC ran out of attacks on Harper, evangelical Christians, George W. Bush, most Americans, and “the extreme Right,” an almost psychotic hatred of Donald Trump and his “deplorables” poured from all 127 stations and their satellites all day, every day. There was simply no opposing view allowed, except those of nominal conservatives, tamed submissives brought on to bleat and cower.
Since Trudeau’s victories in 2015, 2019, and 2021, the CBC has enjoyed bumps in its annual budget by hundreds of millions of dollars, despite its basement-level ratings. And most conservatives who are not politicians are intimidated into silence. Many will not answer the phone if the CBC calls and dodge on-air invitations, effectively cancelling themselves. It is simply too dangerous to counter the force and fury of the CBC. In this, the policy chiefs won their battle and very nearly destroyed conservatism in Canada. While also managing to destroy a beloved institution and arguably, their own futures.
Why Don’t They Love Us Anymore?
It was the betrayal of the coronavirus pandemic that took the CBC from a rough 35 percent wanting reform to 62 percent wanting it shuttered in its entirety. During the spring of 2023, the citizen-funded National Citizens Inquiry travelled the country taking testimony from doctors, nurses, scientists, the vaccine-injured, morticians, and public health officials. Two former employees of the CBC, both veteran journalists with sterling careers, reported what had happened. One, Marianne Klowak, anguished by the betrayal of her profession, told the story from the inside. The other, Rodney Palmer, who had reported from Beijing during the SARS epidemic, closely tracked the breakdown of the journalism profession via its accommodation made with governments and NGOs, compromised Canada Research Chairs (a government-funded chain of research fellowships), and the vaccine industry.
Who were we to withhold information that the public needed to know and had a right to know in order to make an informed decision? It tore me apart. We failed our audience, we let them down. It was a crushing burden.
—Marianne Klowak
“We betrayed our audience, we betrayed their trust.” Klowak, an award-winning thirty-four-year veteran at CBC Manitoba was used to having her stories turned around in a day, aired on TV, radio, and the web without question.
We depended on our reputation for excellence over the years and used that reputation to effectively shut down one side of the truth. How were we doing that? We branded the doctors and experts we used as competent and trustworthy and those who challenged the government narrative, despite their reputations, as dangerous and spreading disinformation. It changed so fast it left me spinning. The rules changed overnight. It was a collapse of journalism. We changed from newsgathering to pushing propaganda.
People called, emailed, and stopped her on the street, asking her what was going on, why wasn’t the CBC reflecting their concerns? A province-wide study showed that over 60 percent were worried about the safety of the vaccine, but any story she proposed about safety concerns was shut down. Every story—about people who had lost jobs because of vaccine hesitancy, the vaccine injured, families broken, family members [RK14] ostracized, depressed university students, suicides from lost businesses and incomes—that countered the government’s narrative was refused.
By early 2021, she found that the language in story meetings had changed as well. Despite only 4 percent refusing the vaccine for religious reasons, anti-vaxxers were labeled as religious nuts, uneducated, rural. “We were laughing at them, ridiculing them, it was pejorative…the opposite of journalistic practice.” Klowak’s breaking point came after Israel was starting to report evidence of inflamed heart muscles among vaccinated teenagers and people were calling her, worried about vaccinating their children. At the same time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had noted on its website that there had been rare cases of myocarditis among young people.
Her story about these side effects was sent to Toronto where it languished for several months in the CBC’s own freshly created “public health unit” before it was returned with the instruction to use instead a group of experts chosen by CBC management, who claimed there was no risk from the vaccine. She refused and the story was killed. In the meantime, many parents had been forced to vaccinate their children.
After another story was spiked, this one about a young woman runner with irreversible heart disease after vaccination, Klowak took early retirement, but not before requesting extensive exit interviews with local and national editorial types. Her concerns were dismissed. Brodie Fenlon, the corporation’s editor-in-chief, stated that he thought the CBC had performed well.
The CBC is a public entity, we pay for it, it broadcasts on the public airwaves and we expect them to tell us the truth because they’ve done it for fifty years.
—Rodney Palmer
Rodney James Palmer had been a TV presenter, producer, reporter, and a ten-year veteran of the CBC, working in Israel and India as a bureau chief, and notably in Beijing during the SARS outbreak. Palmer had noticed a distinct difference in the response of the Chinese to COVID-19, especially by their quarantining Wuhan, and, his suspicion triggered, bent[RK15] [EN16] to studying the rollout of the pandemic.
He observed that a week into the pandemic, the CBC’s star reporter, Adrienne Arsenault, had run a story speculating how to respond if “your father” thought that China had created the virus. She went on to lecture her audience on how to counter such “misinformation” and to use “trusted sources” from “legitimate organizations.” Palmer pointed out that in the beginnings of any pandemic, all information is necessary for correct analysis. “What evidence did she have?”
He discovered that Arsenault had used as her source an organization called First Draft, which emerged in March 2020 to counter “vaccine misinformation” and recommend the use of only “trusted sources.” First Draft supported a pro-vaccine narrative, but Arsenault didn’t mention that. Further, Palmer pointed out that in the same month, both The Washington Post and Vanity Fair had published deeply researched pieces raising suspicions about the Wuhan lab, but the CBC was already telling Canadians not to trust their own family members.
A few weeks later, Brodie Fenlon announced on his blog that the CBC had joined four organizations—First Draft, Project Origin, the Journalism Trust Initiative, and the Global Task Force—whose focus was to counter “misinformation.” One, the Trust Project, was joined by several dozen newspapers and broadcasters all over the world with the same mandate: to assert “trust” against “misinformation.” Their purpose: “to develop a consensus and a single strong voice around the issues facing public media worldwide.” In public media, The Trust Project was joined by the BBC, ABC (Australia) France-TV, KBS (Korea), ZDF (Germany), and SVT (Sweden). Palmer wondered what possible congruence the CBC would have with the Korean Broadcasting System (and why the word “truth” was no longer in use). He observed that developing “a single strong voice” was in direct opposition to actual journalism.
Palmer pointed out that the CBC’s Marketplace program had reported eight hundred social media posts that it judged to be “misinformation” to the Center for Digital Hate, and complained when only 12 percent were taken down. “Who at the CBC was the arbiter of the truth, when Canadians prefer to determine truth for themselves?” asked Palmer. How dare “the CBC promote a new identifiable group of Canadians and foment hate against them?”
Many journalists, some former, some having resigned during the pandemic, have gone on record to protest the corporation’s extreme bias. Others have left because the editorial policy has shifted from news gathering to promotion of the other-sexed and marginalized people of color and disability, whereby every story has to include some element reflecting the persecution of the less-abled by white supremacists. And while this is yet another reason for the CBC’s audience shifting away, it does not explain the active dislike and distrust exhibited by the public at present. The betrayal of trust, ironically, was everything. Klowak, before she retired, called around to journalists in the CBC and at other newsrooms, asking if her experience was typical. It was, but many were, unlike her, in mid-career and afraid to lose their positions.
Then came the trucker protest.
During the trucker protest, Justin Trudeau’s behavior mirrored his father’s punitive actions against violent French-Canadian separatists in 1970. The FLQ (the Quebec Liberation Front) had kidnapped two public officials and killed one of them. Trudeau on the CBC and in other media, drew an equivalence. He was able to do this because on the second day of the massive protest in Ottawa, three photographs appeared of a Nazi flag, the American Tea Party flag, and the Confederate flag. These three photos were subsequently tracked down to timing, photographer, location, and lighting and are believed today to have come from the Prime Minister’s Office. Two photos were by photographers who had taken official portraits of Trudeau. A CBC journalist was the first to tweet the photos, refusing to reveal his source. Trudeau used these photographs as a pretext to refuse to meet with the protestors. The CBC aired the photographs repeatedly, skewing public opinion against the truckers. During the protest, the CBC aired one blatantly critical piece after another and at no time interviewed a protestor, despite the protestors being right outside the broadcaster’s Ottawa studios.
According to reporters on the ground and subsequent investigations, it took the government two weeks to bring in the numbers of police deemed necessary to shutter the protest. The morning the shut-down happened, the protesters were faced by a phalanx of black-clad, Kevlar-coated men in battle order. None of the uniforms carried insignia. What looked like a winter carnival of people who had been cruelly separated and isolated for two years, was swiftly shut down in a few brutal days, during which police rode a horse over an elderly woman, and organizers were jailed without charge for weeks. The CBC characterized protestors as rednecks, and as American-sympathizers, ignorant and anti-science, and claimed that money was coming in from American Republicans who wanted to take over Canada. Twenty million dollars were confiscated by Go Fund Me and Give Send Go[RK17] [EN18] , the money returned to the donors, on the order of Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland. Freeland then froze the bank accounts of ordinary people, waitresses and clerks, who had donated as little as $50 to the truckers. Despite the fact that the protestors were, by all accounts, 20 percent people of color, all were dubbed racist. So much for knitting the country together.
The CBC has flagrantly betrayed the public trust and that fact is now reflected in its rampant unpopularity. Founded to “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences,” it has become a bully, a hysteric sowing division between every conceivable cohort, black against white, indigenous against settler, the other-sexed against “normals,” and especially creating hatred against conservatives. By every conceivable metric the CBC has failed.
Moreover, it has almost destroyed the country’s fiscal integrity by becoming a shrill advocate for destructive public policies such as aggressive “climate change” mitigation in the coldest, most treed country in the world, thereby gutting tehe one industry—oil and gas—upon which one-third of the nation’s economy depends. Canadians now rank first among the G7 for debt-to-income ratio, and it is the public broadcaster’s prejudice and ignorance, above any other cultural institution, that is responsible.
Welcome to Absurdistan is entirely reader supported. Frankly, I think the above demonstrates you can only trust independent media, based on your own judgment on the integrity and experience of the journalist. You can’t trust anything else. Please consider an inexpensive annual subscription. Below you will find citations and further reading.
ihttps://www.westernstandard.news/alberta/cbc-slammed-for-misleading-funding-sources-graphic/article_cded1ac8-dec5-11ed-b921-23fbff72063b.html
iihttps://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-move-to-modernize-cbc-making-public-broadcaster-less-reliant-on-advertising
iiiThe Canadian Television Fund and Local Programming Fund are also sources of income mounting to hundreds of millions annually, disproportionately claimed by the CBC, according to industry chiefs, one of whom, Jim Shaw of Shaw Communications said “he was tired of subsidizing the CBC and programs that no one watched. CBC Exposed, Brian Lilley, 2012
ivhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-cbc-english-tv-has-lost-its-relevance-its-time-to-talk-about-that/
vhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-cbc-english-tv-has-lost-its-relevance-its-time-to-talk-about-that/
viibid
viiCitizens Free Press, The Drudge Report, Rantingly, etc
viiihttps://tnc.news/2022/03/23/majority-of-canadians-support-defunding-the-cbc-poll/
CBC Hatchet Job on Freedom Convoy
Good overview of the drift of the CBC from a once reputable (many decades ago) media source, to an unapologetic partisan shill for the government in power. And as key CBC staff meet with staff with the PMO (as recently as a week or two ago) the ability of the nations public broadcaster to report in a fair and balanced way has gone the way of the dodo. The slanted, biased, coverage of the Coutts Four - as you so painstakingly detail - is a case in point.
EXCELLENT article. From the US, I read it wishing someone down here had the courage to write a similar piece about American "NPR" (National Propaganda Radio).