In politics it’s important to have the right political enemies.
New Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has clearly decided one of the right political enemies for him to have in terms of running against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa.
“The political media in the Parliamentary Press Gallery are part of the establishment that finds me threatening because I’m upsetting the apple cart,” Poilievre told Jordan Peterson in an interview viewed more than two million times on YouTube since May.
“They are part of the ecosystem of big government. When it comes to the CBC they are big government. Their entire budget comes from government …
“And that’s the irony about the Canadian media today. They think their job is to hold the people accountable to the government, rather than the government accountable to the people.”
While Poilievre also attacked Global News and CTV owners Bell Media for biased coverage against him during the campaign as part of the elite establishment that wants to keep Trudeau in power, his main target has been the CBC, the state-funded national broadcaster which receives about $1.2 billion annually from the federal government.
Poilievre, who describes CBC news content as “far-left Liberal propaganda that makes up most of CBC’s coverage,” says he will defund it if he becomes prime minister and, unlike past Conservative leaders, he means it.
The CBC, he says, has a “very small audience and produce almost no original content that you couldn’t find somewhere else. But what this does is create a massive, state-funded ecosystem and even the journalists who don’t work for CBC, they get these contracts to comment on CBC.
“They go on these panels and they get paid, I’m told, $300, $400, $500 a pop to go and offer their opinion, so as a result they all want to regurgitate the acceptable state-generated opinion … so it basically creates a monolithic ideology and political narrative that comes from the centre of the government and is designed to uphold the Trudeau government, to keep them in power for as long as possible. So yeah, I’m running against that and is that going to be hard? Absolutely, they’re going to do everything they can to tear me apart. I have no doubt about that.”
Poilievre said while some Conservatives have cautioned him against his promise to defund the CBC, Conservatives have “nothing left to lose” because “at the end of the day they’re not going to be fair, anyway. That’s the thing. People say ‘well you’re picking a fight with the CBC, they’re going to come after you in the next election.’ Well, they went after Harper, they went after Scheer, they went after O’Toole. We found that by not proposing to defund them, they’re just as vicious as they would otherwise be. They campaigned full-time to get Justin Trudeau elected prime minister, even though Harper had run a 10-year government without defunding them. So, yeah, they’re going to come at me guns blazing. I know that. But they would do that even if I weren’t taking the principled stand on defunding them.”
Commenting on the $595 million in taxpayer support to the newspaper industry over five years from the Trudeau government that the industry lobbied for (Postmedia, which owns the Toronto Sun, received funding under this program), Poilievre said:
“The Trudeau policies are definitely designed to basically make the entire media apparatus dependent on the goodwill of the state. They have a government bureaucracy that determines what is considered to be a qualified journalistic company and they pick and choose based on their own political views, who then qualifies and therefore gets the subsidy. I think this is designed to, again, create more dependency on the government and curry more favour with the state. I haven’t made an announcement on exactly how I’m going to fix that problem, yet, but I guess I would say stay tuned on that. I want to depoliticize that and basically restore the freedom of the press in this country again by getting the state out of it.”
Poilivere’s attack on the media ignores the fact the Parliamentary Press Gallery, including CBC, CTV and Global, break numerous stories critical of the Trudeau government. Ditto newspapers, for example, the Globe and Mail, which, among many other examples, broke the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
The largest newspaper chain in Canada — Postmedia — is philosophically conservative and most major newspapers in last year’s federal election endorsed the Conservatives, consistent with elections going back to Stephen Harper’s victory in 2006.
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