Dear Editor
Many years ago, while on a student tour of the former USSR - sponsored and funded by the U.S. government - I had a chance to meet and converse with ordinary citizens there. One big news item at the time was the "Bay of Tonkin Incident," which the American government used as an excuse to ramp up the level of the Vietnam War. Soviet citizens would say to me, "This was in the news today. Do you think it's true?" It was an indication to me the citizens there had learned not to trust their state-sponsored news sources. Obviously, media controlled by the government can't be expected to be objective, or even honest.
When I came to live in Canada, one of the pleasant surprises was the very objective and honest reporting, commentary, and documentary programming I discovered on CBC. People on CBC called it as they saw it, and often the government of the day was not pleased with that, even though the CBC was funded by the government. The day-to-day operation of the CBC was - and still is, but to a lesser degree - kept at arms-length from the government, and formed a more objective news source than could be found in other media funded by particular business interests.
However, today, CBC's independence is at peril as never before. Since coming to power as a minority government in 2006, the Harper government has been slowly and inexorably choking CBC's independence by appointing its own political hacks to the CBC board and reducing its funding, little by little. Now, with a new act - Bill-60 - being introduced in Parliament as part of another omnibus budget, any chance of the CBC remaining a relatively unbiased source of information would be gone. That bill would make the prime minister the ultimate boss of all CBC employees and give him effective control of any collective bargaining.
Do Canadians want to have our own replica of Radio Moscow here in the land of "order and good government," with the loss of one more means of finding out what is really going on making our government a lot less accountable to us? Oh, we could become more cynical and just assume our source of information is totally biased, just as the good citizens of the USSR had to do during the days of the cold war, but this is Canada, or is it?
Russell Lahti
Battleford
