18/01/2012

It Makes you Wonder

If Harper says it. It must be true.
It is amazing how quickly the threat of budget cuts can erode the CBC’s journalistic ethics.

Just as Canada’s Premiers were meeting in Victoria to decide how to deal with the shafting they just got from the Harper Conservatives, Smilin’ Stevie turns up on the National to answer a few slow pitched questions from Peter Mansbridge. Harper could say, even the most outrageous things, to Mansbridge without the risk of being challenged. Harper looked good and unruffled by the easy ride Peter gave him.

What a great way to take the risk of having a bunch of grumpy provincial leaders trash your agendaand Harper can guarantee that whatever he says will be featured on CBC newscasts as the “honest to God truth.” Harper may be rethinking his dislike for the public broadcaster. Who knew they were so easy to manipulate?

The premiers meanwhile are being characterized on the CBC as being a disorganized, unruly bunch as Harper deftly plays one off against the other.

Even Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall is a bit embarrassed this week or at the very least he should be.

At the beginning of the Premiers’ Victoria meeting Wall was playing down the health care funding issues blathering on about the possibility of a new Health Care Innovation Fund. Wall loves the word innovation. It is tough to find any statement by him that doesn’t use the word although I am not sure he really knows what the word means.

By the end of the conference even Wall, who has a reputation as a Harper toadie, had come to the realization that the innovation fund was a ruse, there was no extra money and that he had been, once again, hung out to dry by his buddies in Ottawa.