Trudeau government wants to empower CBC to police journalists

Yesterday an advisory panel released a report entitled, “Canada’s Communications Future: Time To Act”, citing” a “crisis in news.” It recommends all media content services fall under the Act and regulation by the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission.”

These advisors are typically partisan hacks, never mind their claims of nonpartisan independence (e.g. Michael Wernick).

Given the fact that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spent $130,000 trying to bar conservative journalists from covering this past election, and has announced his intention to regulate and censor Canadians’ social media, this is both unsurprising and extremely dangerous for the future of democracy in Canada.

Just this week, conservative journalist Ezra Levant released a shocking recording of him being interrogated by the police for the high crime of writing a book that was critical of the prime minister, which was released during the election (of course the two authors Aaron Wherry and John Ivision who wrote flattering books on Trudeau are not being investigated). The cops would not show him the complaint or disclose where the complaint originated. It was a secret. They grilled him about the political beliefs of his staff at Rebel News and asked him why he didn’t register his book with the federal government. It’s truly Orwellian stuff that Levant caught on camera, and he did a remarkable job of browbeating the police stooges doing Trudeau’s bidding.

This little glimpse of a police state shows us how the federal government would like to treat all media that step out of line if they got their way.

There is indeed a crisis in news in Canada today. The thing is, the CBC is one of the major reasons why. Over the last few years, the CBC has shown Canadians that it can’t be trusted to deliver unbiased news coverage. Rather than issuing correctives to “fake news” and disinformation, CBC is often the outlet guilty of misleading the public. Also, many of CBC’s journalists are the lapdogs of Justin Trudeau’s Prime Minister’s Office.

Whether it’s their chief political correspondent failing to understand what an opinion is or their legal team and head anchor of their flagship show suing the Conservatives for copyright infringement while letting the Liberals and NDP get away with the same “transgression” during an election cycle, it’s clear that CBC journalists are not the gold standard they think they are. The CBC also often steals other journalists’ work. They are more likely to take selfies with Justin Trudeau than to grill him for possibly corrupting the justice system or giving kickbacks to Canada’s crony capitalist oligarchs.

It’s true that Trudeau needs the CBC. It’s also true that the CBC is failing spectacularly. Blacklock’s Reporter has noted that “CBC-TV English language ad revenues fell 37 percent last year, by official estimate, from $178 million to $112.5 million. A 2013 campaign to sell advertising on CBC Radio collapsed after it missed revenue targets by 94 percent.” When authoritarians begin to lose their power, they will always turn to increasingly desperate measures to try to seize it back.

The last thing we need in Canada is for our state-controlled media to have control over the last vestiges of free and independent media in this country.

It’s clear now that the more independent media emerges in Canada and tells the stories that the Trudeau government and the CBC don’t want told, the more they will try to crack down on us. The only solution to the “crisis in news” that currently plagues Canada is for the independent media to continue to speak truth to state-sanctioned power.