Of all the things that aren’t quite right about Canada and Canadians that we should really work to improve, the CBC has never loomed very large in my mind. Like every media organization in the history of media everywhere, there are things it does incomparably well, things it could really improve, and a whole bunch of stuff in the middle. In the first category we should definitely include “providing a connection to Canada for those not physically in Canada.”
I’m in Huntsville, Alabama, this week. I was looking for a way to watch the English debate last night in my temporary condo and fussing with my GEM app and Apple play and my teenager decided to look through the regular television channels and sure enough she found CBC. No need to beam anything from an app — it’s right there on whatever bundle of news channels my Vrbo host subscribes to. CTV and Global ain’t. Because there’s very little profit to be made providing this service. That’s not a knock on private broadcasters. Just an argument for a publicly-funded one.
So, debates. I wrote my reaction to the French one here, and my reaction to the English one there. Also? This bullshit needs to stop. There are reasons why certain media organizations are taken more seriously than others. Fight me.
One point I want to make about something Mark Carney said Thursday night, that the Charter of rights and freedoms exists to protect the rights of Canadians against “people like us on the stage.”
As a constitutional scholar, this melted my legal heart. That is indeed the fundamental purpose of any human rights legislation. To protect the rights of everyone against anyone who might gain enough power to take those rights away. I’m sure if you squint hard enough you’ll see what I mean.
But I want to say something positive about Pierre Poilievre.
The man has campaigned for over two years on anti-Trudeau sentiment and found himself without the opponent against whom he couldn’t lose and instead faced with Donald Trump, an opponent against whom he can’t win. Yes, he and his team should have seen this coming. But at the same time, finding a way to pivot mid-flight is not a very easy thing to do.
Only very recently has he begun to talk about issues previously neglected, topics on which he excels — regardless of what you think of his arguments. If you take the time to listen or watch his interview with Shane Parrish (below), you’ll find many examples of this. For instance, on the carbon tax, Poilievre used the example of Manotick-based SunTech Tomatoes and how the carbon tax makes their tomatoes more expensive than ones shipped from Mexico. I can’t vouch for the veracity of this statement, but let’s assume for the hell of it that it’s true. Wouldn’t that be a great thing to discuss, how to make sure measures we take as a country to fight climate change don’t inadvertently create worse outcomes?
I submit to you that if he’d campaigned by talking seriously about issues instead of using crude nicknames and incomplete sentences except when bragging about the size of his crowds, he wouldn’t be staring at the abyss right now.
A few other things
In the YouTube world, this ad with Andrew Scheer had people talking, which I guess means the ad worked. But did it?
Personally, I did not think he had enough acting skills to pull this off. That was my biggest surprise. Also, it’s reasonably clever, certainly by modern CPC standards. Subtle, too. Not that the bar is especially high.
But people — by which I mean a bunch of men in my circles — are wondering how women are reacting, given that the whole premise hinges on comparing the Liberals to a mildly toxic ex-girlfriend.
Me, I didn’t find it especially offensive. There are toxic ex-girlfriends in this world. And the ad treatment is, as I said, fairly subtle for this crew. I’m not feeling offended-by-proxy, but I suppose I could see how others might feel differently.
I’ll just note, in passing, that Scheer is referring to the ex as “they/them” which made me chuckle more than a little. I mean, aren’t these guys scared of pronouns like that? Do we need to call someone to check on them?
Et pour terminer, j’ai aussi un article dans Participe présent sur le sport extrême qu’est la création littéraire en français en Ontario.
