Daily Archives: June 17, 2010

Sun News: Canada’s Cluster-Fox

mulroney-and-schrieber

Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the Prime Minister’s office with convicted international influence-peddler Karlheinz Schreiber.  The inscription reads, “Karlheinz with best personal regards Brian Mulroney”.

Sun News, which is looking to launch a Fox-style “news” channel in Canada, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Quebecor of Montreal, whose board of directors includes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.  So you know it’s on the up and up.  No envelopes stuffed with cash and left undeclared as income for more than a decade.  No using his position and stature to enrich himself or his company.  And Quebec of course is celebrated world-wide for its scandal-free culture in business and politics alike.  Scandal is a stranger (l’etranger) in Quebec.  So graft, bribes, kickbacks and favor-trading during the upcoming CRTC hearings are an outside chance at best.  If Brian Mulroney can do for Sun News what he did for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (1942-2003), we have nothing to worry about.

Video of the Day / Quote of the Day

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrTooDqY9pY

Sun News wants to be “Canada’s Fox.”  This is not a joke.  But it is very very funny.

“Now that they have their own Fox news, Canadians will soon be demanding that their border be sealed, to protect them from the violent and economically unstable nation to the south.”  Alex Pareen in Salon today.

Gosh, this “Canada” sure looks an awful lot like Alberta — like almost exclusively.  (It’s the descendants of East European immigrants dressed up as cowboys that’s a big part of the giveaway.)  Love the martial rat-a-tat-tat of the snaredrum in the fadeout.  What says Canada better than sublimated crypto-fascist militarism?  I’m sure this project will thrive.  It’s what Trois Rivieres, Sydney and St. John’s have all been waiting for.

New Democratic Party

TOMMY DOUGLAS

Tommy Douglas (former CCF Premier of Saskatchewan and father of Medicare) becomes the NDP’s first leader, holding the post until 1971

On this date in 1961 the New Democratic Party was formed with the merger of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress.

Frye on Canadian Socialism in his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington,” September 14, 1989:

….Canada has had, for the last fifty years, a Socialist (or more accurately Social Democratic) party which is normally supported by twenty-five to thirty percent of the electorate, and has been widely respected through most of its history, for its devotion to principle.  Nothing of proportional size or influence has emerged among socialists in the United States.  When the CCF, the first form of this party, was founded in the 1930s, its most obvious feature went largely unnoticed.  That feature was that it was following a British rather than an American tendency, trying to assimilate the Canadian political structure to the British Conservative-Labour pattern.  The present New Democratic Party, however, never seems to get beyond a certain percentage of support, not enough to come to federal power.  Principles make voters nervous, and yet any departure from them towards expediency makes them suspicious.  (CW 12, 643-4)

CBC Radio archives on Tommy Douglas and the NDP here.

CBC Television memorial for Tommy Douglas here.