Harper prepares to attack public broadcasting – fight back!

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Harper prepares to attack public broadcasting – fight back!

22 Jul

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

The attack on the CBC that we all expected from the Harper government is starting.

I want to alert you to two sinister and hostile acts by the Harper government towards the CBC and enlist your help so that FRIENDS can fight back vigorously in the coming weeks.

On May 3rd, the morning following the recent federal election, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore said:

“We believe in the national public broadcaster. We have said that we will maintain or increase support for the CBC. That is our platform and we have said that before and we will commit to that.”

But on July 12 – just nine weeks later – Moore contradicted himself in an interview with Jian Ghomeshi broadcast nationally on CBC Radio One’s ‘Q’, suggesting that CBC’s budget would be cut by 5%:

“The idea that CBC can’t find five per cent efficiencies… to give back to the broader economic framework is silly”.

He also asserted falsely and out-of-the-blue on the same Q program that FRIENDS “lie to the public about what the government has done” in funding the CBC.

Can we trust anything Harper’s Heritage Minister says?

Then, as you may have heard, on July 8 the CRTC announced that it was going to postpone for nine months CBC’s network licence renewals, scheduled for a public hearing on September 12 – to June 2012 because “the federal government has not yet established its (CBC’s) future operating budget”.

This CRTC statement makes NO sense because never in CBC’s 75-year history has it ever had a commitment from the government for its future operating budget.

FRIENDS has learned from reliable sources in Ottawa that the Prime Minister’s Office asked the CRTC to postpone the CBC’s public hearings until the completion of the government’s expenditure reduction program next year. CRTC’s spokesperson as much as acknowledged this when he told a journalist that the postponement was “a delicate issue”.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to put two and two together. As we have suspected all along, Prime Minister Harper has his sights set on the CBC!

We need to push back because only you and I working together stand in his way.

A wise person once told me that “strategy is something you do, not something you say”. And we are rolling out a well-planned and creative strategy to hold the Harper government to account in the coming weeks and months.

We will keep you tuned and call on you to be part of the action, drawing on the popularity of public broadcasting with the vast majority of Canadians – including a majority of those Canadians who support the Conservative government!

To make all this happen, I urge you in the strongest terms to join me in making an emergency investment to fuel this campaign today. The future of public broadcasting in Canada depends on our success in the coming months.

Sincerely,

Ian Morrison
Spokesperson
FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting