Trudeau is now in an Open Alliance with the Media

Over the last four years there has been a major split in the American public’s perception of the legacy media outlets. On one hand, they have presented themselves as an elite vanguard against Donald Trump’s entirely fictional assault on freedom of expression, after eight years of enabling president Obama’s actual curtailing of press freedom. The other side would claim that the mainstream media outlets are merely the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

Luckily in Canada there should be no cultural divide, since any reasonable Canadian should be able to conclude that our mainstream media is an extension of the Federal Liberal party.

First of all they are paid extremely well by the Federal Liberals, $595 million to be exact. To test the waters in Canada to see if the liberal Left was still capable of thinking critically about Liberal policy we were issued a classic Trudeauism on the matter.  The $595 was to “preserve the independence of the media”. That’s right in Canada we nationalize industry in order to preserve their independence.  After that lie was swallowed willingly by his base the writing was on the wall.

No one was really surprised when the “independent committee” he set up was not all that independent.  

I have written about this before, but I will say it again. The reason the media members can feel like they can work for a company that takes money from the very people they are supposed to be investigating and feel no ethical qualms is two-fold.  First, they probably don’t see that money first hand so it is easier for them to mentally divorce themselves from the payout their bosses received (that of course is used to pay them eventually). The other factor is that the environment inside these industries was Left-leaning to begin with so there was no massive jarring editorial shift, it is more like the slow boiling frog.

Over the last year Justin Trudeau has been able to experiment with his relationship with the media.  He correctly calculated that the media would help him get out of the WE scandal when he shut down parliament to stop the Conservative party’s questions knowing that the mainstream media would not pick up the slack.

This was a rather safe gamble for Trudeau as he has been able to rely on the media his entire tenure as Prime Minister.  I remember watching the CBC last year around the time when the election was called and there was a new development on the SNC-Lavalin scandal from the RCMP.  It got 30 seconds of coverage. By contrast that day the CBC did over 5 minutes on the debunked Russian Collusion scandal.

For those new to journalism, from 2016- October 2020 questioning the integrity of the US election even in the face of all exculpatory evidence was the peak of journalistic integrity.  Nowadays we all understand this behaviour is a dangerous threat to our entire democracy.

To any close observer of Canadian politics we can clearly see the Liberals working almost hand and hand with their “trusted media”. Just last week Justin Trudeau chose to announce an over 500% increase to the Carbon Tax, breaking an election promise. However, he knew the right time to do it, just as the first vaccines were rolling out.

Trudeau was right again.  It just happened that the vaccine was more important to cover than the tax hike that day, and by the second day… well the tax hike was old news by then, so just a brief mention was all they needed to inform the Canadian public and then not another word or opinion needed. 

Whatever the next few years of a Trudeau government may bring, it is clear that you will not get an honest assessment of it if you turn on your TV to any cable news network.