IF ONLY WE HAD EQUAL TIME IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

It is amazing how decades of growthist propaganda have been entrenched as conventional wisdom. (eg. "without immigration, where are are all the workers going to come from to pay for the services needed by our aging population.") If only we had equal time. If only we had mainstream media that would print such articles and or give a podium for our views. I believe that if we had that, we could rally a majority of people behind us to force the politicians to take heed of our concerns.

The CBC must take a large measure of the blame. Private media feed off commercial advertising, but the CBC should be accountable to the taxpayers who fund it. All taxpayers, not just the ones with PC views. Yet just two hours ago, CBC led off the noonday newscast with the "good" news that for the third consecutive month, they could report "positive" numbers about our economy. An economist was then offered a soundbite to say that our GDP was up by so many percentage points. For the CBC, this sufficed as a yardstick of reality. No mention was made of the per capita GDP, or whether the GDP measured everything that was important in life. There was no Toronto Stock Exchange index of lost biodiversity in the past fiscal quarter due to the continued paving of farmland or the clearcutting and strip mining of boreal forest. No quoted stat on the number of endangered species. No Happiness Index to record our personal well-being in this period. No, of course there wouldn't be, because the CBC sees the world through the lens of the Growth Lobby, and calls that world progressive, tolerant, diverse, vibrant, inclusive and positive. And it all must be true, because we heard it on the CBC, our trusted information source.