Rather than criticize the content of the letter, you attack Harper's for not paying interns, which is unrelated to the content. Classic tactic for silencing disagreement is to attack the source.
What do you disagree with in the Harper's letter itself (the content, not the publication or the signatories), and why?
They silenced Truth so they could push lies in order to maintain a war that was literally Criminal. They did the same to prop up the oil industry in the province Harper held history with and from which he personally profited and continues to profit.
They said "You're either with Us or with the Pedos" when people criticized an over reaching "justice" bill.
Again, those who oppose Trudeau now are almost exclusively those who were willfully ignorant and silent during the Harper years, mostly because they profited from the injustices which far exceeded those of Trudeau's government.
> “I lost a couple of people that I had been very good to on an interpersonal level because of the Harper’s letter — people who unfollowed me and blocked me with no explanation. They actually know me. That’s crazy,” says Williams, clearly upset by this. “The details of what’s right or wrong don’t matter, it’s that ‘you’re not with us’. I never thought ideas or writing were about signalling allegiance.”
The article quoted the official response to the paper. Canadian government officials are routinely muzzled, the official response is all you get these days.
> Thats a very dishonest history of the rights of Canadians derived as subjects to her Majesty.
I assure you, it's not dishonest, it might be ill informed. I'm not a Canadian legal history scholar...
What, pray tell, constitutional rights did Canadians derive as subjects to her Majesty prior to 1982? Also how was the Canadian parliament able to bypass those rights when they didn't have authority over the constitution? Sources would be appreciated.
> And a very dishonest portrayal of the October Crisis
It's not a portrayal of that at all, it's a simple statement that an act and was invoked and a point of law without discussing the events that caused it to be invoked.
> That... weird. Having government approved journalists on government payroll sure sounds like something out of China, Russia or Cuba.
The government doesn't actively handle the hiring, CBC has journalistic independence from the government. They in fact handle all of their internal systems (email, data, phone) independently from the government.
> I mean let's face it, will they really critisize and investigate the hands that signs their check?
They do all the time in fact, and they report on themselves even if it shines a negative light.
> Is there a market for it? Right now this content is dumped by a single player that's subsidized. No reason to enter this space.
When the majority of the private content available is from the US, it's also hard to compete with the torrents of culture they push on us. At least CBC is actively pushing content that is culturally significant.
This is less about free speech, and more along the lines of an NDA. We're talking about researchers employed directly by the federal government. Canada has a public service whose role is to advise the current government and provide input into policy decisions, and then to implement whatever policy decisions came down from above.
By and large, though, it seemed like Harper's government didn't seem to really want input from the public service unless it agreed with whatever policy decisions had already been made. If you think this is just about the environment, you'd be very wrong, too; I live in Ottawa and know people in Health Canada, in Transport Canada, in Statistics Canada - I don't know anyone who wasn't complaining to me about how the advice they were giving was being ignored in one way or another.
But the source you cited seems to only include newspapers? Media companies tend to pander to their readers, and newspapers attracts... a certain type of readers. It's not surprising that most newspapers are conservative.
Yes, a fair point. This person is a former reporter for CBC. For me I think it's fair to say that this is coming from CBC as the general tone of the article appears to endorse their former employee's viewpoint. Employees who are hired on, and then later brought back to discuss their views, to me at least, do shed light into the views of the organization.
>Those organizations, being Canadian news organizations, employing Canadians, and making content for Canadian consumers. Aren't those the sort of organizations that should be able to work with the Canadian government and influence Canadian laws?
You can make the same argument about local companies lobbying the government to enact tariffs to protect them from foreign competitors. The people being harmed are the same: consumers who end up with a worse product. How about nobody tries to influence the Canadian government to enact laws that distort the marketplace to their advantage?
The cause of the controversy is that there are multiple interpretations of the charter, only one of which is "well it's not in the NYT or my pet journal, delete it before it costs us millionths of a cent".
> We do have top-tier universities (UBC, University of Toronto, UWaterloo)
I agree. I didn't deny that. Now compare how many top universities we have in the US? If the US has hundreds of top universities and Canada has a handful, how does that make canada an education superpower? If canada is an education superpower, then is north korea a nuclear superpower? Isn't the word superpower supposed to mean something?
> We're home to top-tier companies like Shopify.
Shopify is top-tier? It has revenues of $151 million/year.
>Yes, it says "may have" and not "has" but the implication is there, which is what the CBC & others are pushing back on.
And that pushback is a lie (I think the word these days is "misinformation"), because the Canadian government absolutely does influence what the CBC publishes.
Journalists (as a class) have begged for these rules and powers, and are now whining because they're now finding themselves at the pointy end. What's wrong with having to play by their own rules (which they claimed were good for everyone else)?
What do you disagree with in the Harper's letter itself (the content, not the publication or the signatories), and why?
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