Yay, the scheduler worked today and CAPRU will be back again. If you can read this, CAPRU is back on the air!
Lawrence Martin wants the Liberals to continue their fantastic strategy of "Backing down... and loving it." Apparently, he believes always backing down, never wanting an election, and basically letting the Conservatives run the country like they have a majority is a best way to show the quality of Iggy's leadership. (I agree.)
Shorter James Travers : I don't like the government bailing out large companies. So, we need to elect a Liberal or Conservative majority for the next election.
The National Post is pissing itself with joy over the possibility of the CBC being dismantled and Canwest's monopoly potentially growing some more.
Lorne Gunter
The CBC will never be able to exorcize [sic] its left-wing missionary zeal -- for global warming, for Islam, for big government, Barack Obama, multiculturalism, public health care, human rights commissions and so on. And it could never survive on private donations or ad revenues. So the only thing to do with Mother Corp is to pull down its office buildings and stations and pour salt in their foundations.
And I mean radio as well as television.
There is no moral or philosophical justification for using one billion of taxpayers' dollars to subsidize the viewing and listening tastes of a shrinking percentage of the population and the ideological hobby horses of CBC executives and editors.
Jonathan Kay is either disingenuous or he doesn't understand the extent of the media homogenization in Canada.
There are two -- and only two -- arguable justifications for public broadcasting in this country: cultural nationalism and intellectual elitism. Everything else is spin from the CBC's (highly energetic) PR department.
Of the two justifications, the nationalism one is the weakest. The idea that Canadians still need a publicly funded network to "tell each other our stories" (or whatever Sheila Copps-ian cliche now happens to be in circulation) is outdated. Canada is home to dozens of privately owned nationally broadcast television channels and hundreds of radio stations, most of which cater in some way to our various obsessions: Ottawa politics, fear and loathing of the United States, local human interest and, of course, hockey.
Don Martin
For a network seeking survival dollars up against a Conservative government refusing bailout cash, which has set the stage for a flood of pink slips, all that's missing to create a true crisis of Biblical downpour proportions would be a frog invasion.
The CBC is in unprecedented upheaval as its board of directors winds up a two-day salvage session today -- and the Conservatives couldn't be happier.
The way the government sees it, these dire times create the perfect financial conditions to starve the television and radio network, which receive more than $1-billion per year from the public purse, into a reinvention revolution.
Hopefully, the buzz that they are going to apply for bankruptcy will flesh out. It couldn't happen to a more fair and balanced group of people.
Greg Weston on the CBC
But the first thing he [Chairman of the CBC board] and his fellow board members likely would have heard from the minister is that Canadian taxpayers aren't shelling out over $1 billion a year so the CBC can buy American game-show pulp like Wheel of Fortune.
The second point Moore likely would have made is that taxpayers are not subsidizing the CBC so it can unfairly compete with private broadcasters for critically scarce advertising dollars.
The entire conventional broadcasting industry is in dire straits in this country, in part due to the collapse of advertising in the wake of the global economic crisis.
Jeffrey Simpson
Mr. Harper is, by his own admission, an anti-visionary politician. He doesn't like what former U.S. president George H. W. Bush called the "vision thing."
Visions get people all riled up. They set expectations that cannot be met. They demand the speaker reach into his own soul, and try to tap into those of his listeners. Visions can raise existential questions, always the most dangerous variety. They require public passion, again something potentially dangerous. They can lead to spontaneity, something Mr. Harper has trouble handling.
Great speeches speak to vision, and superior politicians use such speeches to summon fellow citizens to greater efforts, conceiving their society in certain ways, urging them in certain directions.
Michael Geist reminds Canadians how easily their privacy rights can be signed away.
These decisions place the spotlight on the fact that customer privacy on the Internet is not guaranteed by national privacy law. Rather, the law leaves the disclosure decision in the hands of the organization that has collected the data, which can choose whether to turn over personal information in certain circumstances without a warrant.
Moreover, most Internet-focused organizations such as ISPs have drafted user agreements in which their customers have consented to such disclosure policies.
These cases confirm that courts will typically enforce user agreements regardless of whether subscribers have taken the time to read them.