The Harper Conservative’s sleazy attempt to hold on to power demonstrated, in clear terms, that sections of Canadian media — The Globe and Mail, the Postmedia chain of newspapers, The Province and in the Filipino-Canadian ethnic community, The Philippine Asian News Today (PNT) – all losers in the digital readership game, can be used as instruments of deception in defense of a discredited Tory government.
Postmedia publishes the National Post, the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Regina Leader-Post, The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon), The Vancouver Sun (N.B.: not related to the tabloid Sun newspapers also owned by Postmedia), The Windsor Star. It also publishes daily tabloids such as Calgary Sun, Edmonton Sun, Ottawa Sun, The Province (Vancouver), Toronto Sun, Winnipeg Sun and free dailies in Toronto and Vancouver known as 24 Hours. It also has some 40 other publications that services smaller communities in Canada and four magazines including the Financial Post.
Harper with his “halo halo” — had Filipino relatives on his wife’s side — was PNT’s lame attempt at attention-getting.
PNT was in good company although severely handicapped in distribution, depth and editorial content. Harper with his “halo halo” — had Filipino relatives on his wife’s side — was PNT’s lame attempt at attention-getting. The paper was also well-known in the close-knit Filipino Canadian community as a rabid supporter of an erstwhile singer who suddenly wants to be a Conservative Member of Parliament in Ottawa. The Tories never won this riding although they again tried.
Today, they carry on the publishing business as if their credibility as an information source had remained unsullied. They remain unmindful that they had become instruments of Tory fascist propaganda and never to be trusted again on any public discourse.
Publishing a newspaper or running a broadcast facility is not akin to running a burger joint for profit. These are essential democratic institutions meant and organized for the public good.
In other dispensations worldwide, media is looked upon as the people’s defender, the fifth estate, a non-partisan establishment dedicated to unravelling the falsehoods that savvy spin doctors, corrupt officials, fascists and dictators manufacture for the consumption of an unsuspecting public. At the very least, media is about truth. It is also about principles.
One cannot simply advocate or editorialize a false idea that the Tories are good stewards of the economy without solid proof. Unifor economist Jim Stanford, who co-wrote an analysis of all the prime ministers dating back to 1945, using 16 separate economic indicators, showed Stephen Harper’s government had by far the worst economic record of any government in 70 years.
To add insult to injury, Harper spent hundreds of millions of tax money for propaganda on a non-existent program called Canada’s Economic Action Plan. This should be subject of a major inquiry. Are these media payments actually blind accounts that goes back to the Tories. Who benefited?
This was precisely an extension of that propaganda line these advocating newspapers took when they sided with the Tories on a non-existent economic performance, perpetrating a lie that most everyone knew except the editors who wrote the pro-Conservative political position.
Of course, there were attempts to blame the owners as Canada reportedly has the greatest concentration of newspaper ownership in a few individuals — greater than any other Western country.
Agreements between Postmedia – the country’s largest newspaper chain – and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), plus an equally disgraceful deal between the company’s Vancouver Province and the LNG industry have permanently stained the organization’s journalistic credibility, according to a blog post from Commonsensecanadian.
It added: Television can hardly be relied upon. Global TV is owned by Shaw Media. Due to their connection, they and Corus Entertainment are considered to be “related” by the CRTC.
Corus, also controlled by the Shaw family, owns radio station CKNW which, under them, abandoned its longstanding reputation for holding the “establishment’s” feet to the fire in favor of good manners and servility.
CTV is a division of Bell Media (BCE), Canada’s premier multimedia company, with leading assets in television, radio, and digital, and owns 15% of the Toronto’s Globe and Mail – which has already shown its loving attachment to the Conservative Party.
Now, to add to the media incest in Canada, Bell Media (BCE) is in partnership with, guess who – Corus Entertainment in HBO and other deals.
In effect, through third party relationships Global TV and CTV are actually first cousins. Fair journalism just died in this country.
As the last elections show, partisan editorial attempt to influence the public mind conjures visions of a smoke-filled, long-drawn, dark-lit backroom deals that must have cost millions for media to give up its — well — editorial virginity. After October 19, all we have are hoes.
The effect of seeing the end of the Harper era reveals just how traumatized millions of Canadians were – including hundreds of thousands of Chinese-Canadians, East Indian-Canadians and Filipino-Canadians and other hyphenated ethnic groups — who became second class citizens through Harper’s law.
Harper’s Conservatives declared citizenship is now only a privilege, not a right. Citizens are no longer protected by Canadian laws and the Charter of Rights. They have reduced citizenship into a mere driver’s license. After nearly 10 years of rule, Harper later turned out to be a dictator in situ. His disregard for the rule of law, and his constant enactment of laws that shatter basic civil rights, and attempts to destroy the iron-clad provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedom, is almost legendary.
He is the only sitting Prime Minister who dared to impute a wrongdoing on the Canadian Supreme Court’s Chief Justice when he failed to get what he wanted. Canada’s Supreme Court is the highest court of the land. If his efforts persisted, it would have triggered a crisis he cannot win.
In other dispensations worldwide, media is looked upon as the people’s defender, the fifth estate, a non-partisan establishment dedicated to unravelling the falsehoods that savvy spin doctors, corrupt officials, fascists and dictators manufacture for the consumption of an unsuspecting public. At the very least, media is about truth. It is also about principles.
On the Filipino labor front, since 1992, some 75,000 Filipinos have become permanent residents of Canada through the federal government’s caregiver program. The sales pitch was hard to resist: help raise our children for two years, and we’ll reunite you with yours and give everyone a shot at permanent residency. Last year alone, some 23,687 Filipinos came to Canada under the program. But it has become a victim of its own success, according to Christina Gonzales, a blogger with online news Toronto Life as she reported on the nanny diaries.
Gonzales adds: today, the backlog of applications for permanent residency is 17,600 names long. Citizenship and Immigration has promised swift action: it implemented an annual cap on the number of permanent residencies at 5,500, added educational and language components to the criteria, and announced plans to expedite the approvals process. But for many, the wait, which now averages 50 months—and that’s after two years of employment—is torture. This is clearly Jason Kenny’s legacy although Harper is suspected to be the mastermind.
Another Harper legacy that the incoming government has to address is the so-called four by four program the Conservatives enacted. It simply means overseas foreign workers can only work four years here and must return to their home country, wait for another four years before they can apply back to the program. But in reality, they are sent home by their employers early since the training cycle needed for a new batch of OFW must start early.
But let’s go back to our principal discourse. How do we fix the media problem that accidentally became a Harper legacy?
The Tyee suggested we go back to two periods in history when there was an appetite for reform — the 1970 Davey Report and the 1981 Kent Royal Commission on Newspapers — both publicly established federal examinations of media concentration and its impact on Canada.
It added: while there are many factors in a newspapers’ decline, the fall in readership suggests a growing disconnect with Canadian values. Newspapers that continue to ignore the wave of contempt that swept Harper out of power and into ignominy will deserve their fate.
And indeed, they are dying a slow and painful death. Postmedia, the owner of the National Post and 45 other dailies recently reported out on their steady decline: “Canada’s largest newspaper chain saw advertising and circulation revenues tumble at a faster pace. The owner of the National Post and numerous major city dailies reported a loss of $140.8 million… in the three months ending May 31.”
We now know where a media’s bread is buttered. Stay on social media and let them (regular newspapers, TV, radio) suffer for their sins.
