Tag Archives: federal politics

| Media

Big media mergers remind us of past mistakes

The CRTC has approved two big media ownership changes:

Astral Media, owners of The Movie Network, Teletoon, Astral Photo, and lots of radio stations in Quebec and Atlantic Canada including the Énergie (CKMF 94.3) and Rock Détente (CITE 107.3) networks, will take over Standard Broadcasting, which owns stations in Western Canada, but also three English Montreal stations — CHOM 97.7, CJAD-800 and CJFM Mix 96. Montreal is the only market where there’s any overlap, and even then they work in two different languages.

Rogers (telecom, Maclean’s, Rogers Sportsnet, OMNI and 51 radio stations) will buy Citytv (5 stations in Toronto and Western Canada) after CTVglobemedia (Globe and Mail, CTV, TSN/RDS, Discovery Channel Canada, Comedy Network, MuchMusic, Bravo! Canada, A-Channel, your first-born child) was ordered to divest itself of the competing TV network in its acquisition of CHUM Ltd.

More details in this Wikipedia article.

Neither decision is particularly bad for competition in Canada. The radio deal involves two companies that weren’t really competing, and the TV deal gives Rogers a foot in the door to network television.

Of course, it’s the deals that preceded these that are cause for concern. The fact that CHOM and Mix 96, which should be highly-competitive stations, are owned by the same company is troublesome. And CTV’s takeover of CHUM was ushered through without any apparent concern that their mega cable channel powerhouse has only gotten bigger. It now includes, for example, two all-news stations: CTV NewsNet and City’s CP24, which for some insane reason they were not required to sell off as part of Citytv.

| Montreal, TV

Congratulations, Mr. Mulcair

Thomas Mulcair

Thomas J. Mulcair, elected today in a by-election to represent the federal riding of Outremont for the New Democratic Party, only the second person to do so in the NDP’s history (Phil Edmonston was the first in a 1990 by-election). He replaces Liberal Jean Lapierre, who resigned from the House of Commons on January 28 to escape the shame return to broadcasting as a political analyst.

Local NDP supporters are naturally taking the news with mature, thoughtful self-congratulation.

Interesting media meta-side-story: CTV Newsnet is covering a speech by Liberal leader Stéphane Dion (in French), while RDI is covering a speech by NDP leader Jack Layton (in English), introducing the winner Thomas Mulcair. Considering Mulcair won the election, doesn’t that give him priority in TV time?

(In real elections, you wait for the losing candidate to finish his concession speech before starting your victory speech. But the NDP isn’t used to winning elections here, so we’ll give them a break.)

Now that CTV is getting Mike Duffy analyzing, I’m wondering if maybe the network doesn’t have a camera crew at Mulcair HQ. TVA/LCN isn’t any better, covering post-game analysis of a Canadiens pre-season exhibition game. Because that’s more important than a potentially historic by-election.

And while we’re on the topic of analysis, everyone seems to be saying that Outremont is a “Liberal stronghold” to underscore the significance of this victory. While it certainly used to be that way, and the riding has been won by the Liberals all but one time in its history, the most recent election was a slim victory, with Jean Lapierre only taking 35% of the vote. How is that considered a stronghold?

Meanwhile, the Tories have taken Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean from the Bloc Québécois, adding to their growing Quebec caucus.

The third riding up for grabs, in Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot, is a BQ hold.

| In the news, Radio

CBC needs lesson in Parliament 101

I’m listening to CBC Radio (I oblige myself to do so at least once a year — besides, it’s “So Montreal” according to the marketing bureaucrats in Toronto).

I’m listening to the news, which is mostly about the three by-elections going on today in Quebec, and the possibility that the NDP might win a seat in Outremont. At the end of the report came this line:

“The two other seats are currently held by the Bloc Québécois.”

While I’m sure everyone knows what that means (that they were previously held by BQ members), it’s still technically wrong. The seats are vacant after the resignations of Yvan Loubier (Feb. 21) and Michel Gauthier (July 29).

| Montreal, On the Net, Technology

Become part of the Google landscape

Google’s Street View is in the process of collecting pictures of Montreal streets. When complete, Google Maps will be able to show street-level photos of major cities in Canada like it does for New York and San Francisco.

Street View works by having someone in a car with lots of cameras on the roof drive through the city and take pictures. They’re then thrown into a giant database which creates a street view you can move around in.

Of course, if you happen to be walking along a street when the car passes by, you’ll become a permanent part of the view of that street. And that can lead to some embarrassing pictures.

Canada’s privacy commissioner has already raised concerns that, because Google doesn’t ask permission before taking photos, they might be violating Canada’s privacy laws.

| Blogosphere, In the news, Navel-gazing

Everything you clearly don’t know about the Islamic veil controversy

The Gazette today began its five-day series Identities about reasonable accomodation, and their timing couldn’t have been better. The Bouchard-Taylor commission is beginning its public consultation tour of the province (Montreal is the last stop on their trip at the end of November), and a pair of conflicting rulings have been issued concerning the rights of Muslim women to wear veils in upcoming provincial and federal by-elections.

Continue reading →

| In the news

For senators, working is optional

Two Liberal senators have had their pay docked for not showing up to work.

I mention this because of how the lead paragraph of the story is written:

Two Liberal senators have been fined for spotty attendance in the upper chamber during the last session of Parliament.

Fined. It implies punishment. When politicians or companies are fined, it’s supposed to be a big deal. To act as a deterrent, it’s supposed to result in a net negative for them. The whole point of fining is to make it less profitable for people to break the rules.

But let’s do a quick check of the math:

  • Annual salary: $122,700
  • Total meetings in the session: 113
  • Salary per meeting: $1,085.84
  • Fine, per sitting after 21 absences: $250

So let me get this straight: You get 21 freebies (not including sickness or “public business”), and after that you get fined $250 per sitting you miss, which is about a quarter of what you make for that sitting.

Quebec businessman Paul Massicotte was fined $2,750, or 2% of his salary, for missing 32 of 113 sittings, or 28%, without a valid excuse.  Had he not showed up to work for a single day this past session, he would still have earned $100,000 or about 80% of his salary.

That doesn’t sound like much of a “fine” to me. No wonder these people have no motivation to show up.

| In the news, Video

Protesters gone wild!

The protests in Montebello this week had one major difference from those in Quebec City in 2001: YouTube. Videotape evidence is the great truth-teller in a world where denials are cheap. It’s what turned Rodney King from just another crazy-talking black guy exaggerating a routine police matter into a media sensation and a giant black eye for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Militant protesters who see police brutality as the norm rather than the exception are increasingly using video cameras to safeguard their rights and prove the police are out to get them while they plant flowers peacefully.

One of the videos out of Montebello shows an interesting idea that seems to be gaining popularity: That those violent rock-throwing mask-wearing protesters are actually under-cover police officers and government agents ordered to provoke a violent altercation between police and protesters to give police an excuse to move in and start beating people up.

Today I received an email from a group which includes Jaggi Singh (who himself has been quietly accused by some paranoid crazy-thinking friends of mine of being an undercover cop), and it links to the video with some conjecture:

Is there a cover-up of the police agents that are revealed in the above video? Were the police trying to create divisions between protesters by provoking an incident?

The video itself shows three such protesters, one holding a rock, provoking the police. What’s interesting is that they’re being stopped by other protesters — some normal-looking suit-wearing Council of Canadians/union leftists, others peacenik hippie mask-wearing-but-not-rock-throwing chant-yellers — and both groups are accusing them of being police officers.

Some other Montebello videos:

| In the news, Media

Montebello, welcome to your 15 minutes

The press is all over the summit at Montebello, partly because George W. Bush seldom visits this country, and partly because the protest is expected to be on a scale similar to what happened at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001.

So far the protests have been peaceful. Things like a caravan starting here at 8:30 this morning are well-planned photo ops to get the media on-side. And left-wing papers like Hour have been supportive, writing about them in a good light. The Globe, meanwhile, has a piece from Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, denouncing the meeting’s lack of transparency. Le Devoir is also on their side, suggesting that three conservative leaders (even by their countries’ standards), combined with executives of the largest corporations in North America might not have everyone’s interests at heart.

And there’s always the NDP. And The Dominion.

Of course, not everyone’s a hippie or hippie ally. The Gazette has a long editorial accusing the left of being paranoid, and trusting that the three amigos are not made of pure evil. It (only half-fairly) paints the environmental and labour lobby as obstructionists who oppose all progress just for its own sake. While it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see that happening, I’m not one for believing that these corporate leaders wouldn’t similarly object strenuously if a policy being considered hurt their bottom line in even the most minute way.

The editorial then curiously uses the example of the harmonization of pesticide regulations to make the point that being screwed over by the U.S. is good because it raises awareness about how we’re being screwed over by the U.S.

Antagoniste also wonders what everyone’s complaining about.

Other Montebello-related tidbits from the papers this weekend:

Finally, La Presse’s André Noël gets the award for lamest story lead related to this issue:

Connaissez-vous le PSP? Oui, bien sûr, il y a la PlayStation Portable de Sony. Mais soyez francs: connaissez-vous le Partenariat nord-américain pour la sécurité et la prospérité?

| My articles

Hell no, we will go

This Week in Me is a Justify-Your-Existence interview with Mandeep Dhillon, a rabble-rouser with No One Is Illegal who’s among the busloads headed to Montebello (map) this weekend to protest the Three Amigos and their Security and Prosperity Partnership, an area Stephen Harper is gung-ho about.

I’ll remember it more as the first interview I conducted that my batteries in the voice recorder actually lasted through. I interviewed her just after Tuesday’s CN protest, after the cameras had left and everyone was about to head home.

I’m sympathetic to many of the arguments about public transparency and native rights and police brutality. Unfortunately I find the language used by Jaggi Singh and his ilk to be off-putting at best.

We’ll see on Monday whether the fears of Montebello’s residents — that protesters who can’t get near the fortress of doom resort where leaders are staying will instead just smash windows of local businesses — are justified.

| In the news, Montreal

Off the rails

I was at a protest today. It had two purposes mainly: to denounce a CN lawsuit against a protester who blocked their tracks, and as a run-up to this weekend’s massive protest in Montebello, where leaders of the three North American countries are meeting to discuss trade and security.

I’ve been to a lot of protests as a reporter (I worked at Concordia during the first half of this decade, after all), and at some point they all kind of blend in together. There’s Jaggi Singh, being vague about whether he supports rampant property destruction in protests. There’s the references to Palestinian occupation, whether or not Palestine has anything to do with the protest at hand. There’s the demonization of the local police, who are standing quietly to help clear traffic out of their way as they march. And there’s the fact that half the time the media covering the event outnumber the protesters.

The protest, organized as always by a loose coalition of left-wing activist groups (No One Is Illegal, People’s Global Action Network, etc.), started off at Central Station, which for about an hour today became the safest place in the world. A media scrum quickly built up around blowhard Jaggi Singh and someone else the media couldn’t care less about. After a press conference that lasted way too long, they marched to CN’s headquarters down the hall, demanding to be able to deliver a letter to CN CEO E. Hunter Harrisson.

Naturally, that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, they promised to send their director of public relations. Except they couldn’t find her, apparently. So then they promised to send a representative from that department, who would accept the letter but not answer questions. Then they pulled a little bait-and-switch and sent a member of the security department to pick up the letter. The protesters wouldn’t bite, and that ended that. A slow march to Dorchester Square, some more megaphone chanting and everyone dispersed.

Afterward, I spoke with one of the people behind the megaphones (I wanted to speak to someone other than Jaggi Singh). You’ll get some insight from her in Saturday’s paper.

The protesters’ cause isn’t crazy. They want CN to drop a lawsuit against a protester, and they want international negotiations to happen with public input. But when they start chanting “no justice no peace”, it’s hard to imagine too many passers-by thinking “yeah, I agree with that.”

It makes me wonder: Should we separate moderate-left causes which can gain popular support (like, say, the 2003 anti-war protests) from the radical-crazy-left anarchist/communist everything-is-about-Palestine-and-native-rights window-smashing “fuck la police” riots, so that the message of the former isn’t dragged down by the public’s repulsion to the latter?

UPDATE: Video of the protest has been posted to YouTube.

| TV

Just because it’s a rerun doesn’t make it historic

The CRTC has ordered Alliance Atlantis-owned History Television to stop running CSI: New York on its cable channel because, well, CSI: New York has nothing to do with history.

The company’s argument — and I’ll try not to laugh as I write this — is that CSI: New York deals with a “post-9/11 environment” and since 9/11 is history, this makes sense somehow.

The CRTC saw right through that, noting that just because an episode or two might have had something to do with 9/11 doesn’t make this a history program. They’ve given the network until Jan. 1 to pull the show.

This isn’t the first time a stretch of the rules has irked the CRTC. Ten years ago, CBC Newsworld began airing episodes of sketch-comedy shows This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Royal Canadian Air Farce, arguing that because the shows dealt with topical, newsworthy topics, they fall within Newsworld’s license. The CRTC disagreed, ordering Newsworld to pull the shows. The CBC then asked nicely for the CRTC to amend Newsworld’s license “slightly” to allow for them, but were rejected.

If Newsworld can’t air fake news, History can’t air cheap CSI reruns. Instead, we’ll just have to settle for watching them on the 17 other cable channels that air them ten times a day.

| In the news, Media

Grow up and stop repeating yourself

Stop me if you’ve seen this one before:

  1. Party A makes a scathing criticism of something, overblowing a legitimate but minor disagreement to turn it into some national crisis.
  2. Party B criticizes Party A for crying wolf and comes to the defence of the person or action being criticized. Uses a history of similar wolf-crying as evidence to bolster the case.
  3. Party A accuses Party B of trying to silence them and take away their right to free expression, repeats arguments of Step 1 in different words.
  4. Party C comes to the defence of Party B, makes the same criticisms of Party A from Step 2, only in different words.
  5. Party D issues an ad hominem attack on Party B for completely personal reasons, and doesn’t deal with the dispute at hand.
  6. The general public gets bored of everyone accusing everyone else of trying to silence them and moves on, while letters to the editor stack up to the ceiling on both sides as everyone wants a chance to repeat arguments already laid out, in their own words.

Everyone needs to just take a deep breath. B’nai Brith criticized Liberal candidate Jocelyn Coulon. Josée Legault came to his defence. It should have ended there.

I was exposed to this same routine many times at Concordia when I ran the student paper there (naturally, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was usually the subject there too). I though that I wouldn’t see that kind of childish back-and-forth when I stepped out into the real world.

I guess I was wrong.