CanWest Media Corporation On The Election Trail In B.C.

Headline, National Post, January 17, 2005: “PM SOWS TERROR DEBATE.” Headline, Globe and Mail, the same day: “Martin to meet barred Tamils.” Paul Martin works to make sure, as much as he can, that tsunami assistance will get to all, equally, in Sri Lanka. Both sides there claim the other is obstructing delivery. But because Canada won’t follow the Bush/Blair Iraq-style jihad in Asia, naming everyone disapproved by the U.S. a “terrorist,” CanWest uses a shrieking headline to implicate Martin in terror. “…SOWS TERROR DEBATE” is just unclear enough and inflammatory enough to suit National Post yellow journalism. My friend in the corner convenience store on Commercial Drive, Vancouver – recently back from a visit to his homeland, Sri Lanka – is speaking heatedly into the telephone. He hangs up. He waves the National Post at me – and that headline. He has been on the phone to the National Post, asking them to send someone to Sri Lanka to find out what the long years of conflict in Sri Lanka really mean. What can a person say? Maybe the mouthpiece of Stockwell Day, Peter MacKay, and Stephen Harper – the National Post and CanWest media – is so offensive it will guarantee that those three and their Cretan Conservatism will never get power in Canada. The National Post is one thing. CanWest’s virtual monopoly in B.C. – owning the Vancouver Sun, the Province, the Victoria Times Colonist, and much more – is another thing, but marches to the same drummer. Campaign activity (though the campaign hasn’t been declared) on behalf of the Campbell Liberals keeps the CanWest publications in B.C. busy and in full spate. CanWest newspaper headlines are calling B.C. an economic Paradise. Minimum wage has been slashed. Wages of non-specialized people in the health trades have been brutalized. Qualified nurse replacement is being stymied. Union contracts with the B.C. government have been shamelessly trashed. Tuition fees which were frozen have leaped alarmingly in the Campbell regime. Appeals to the B.C. Labour Relations Board have been closed on behalf of people like the workers on B.C. Ferries. Seniors, the poor, and the vulnerable have been thrown to the dogs. Welcome to Paradise. CanWest headlines shout about B.C.’s explosion of good times. They shout that corporate building hopes are high, that “promised” construction projects (Sun, Jan 11, 05 D1) are in the billions of dollars. A smaller story just a day later reports growth in the “B.C. economic index” falling more than 200 per cent. Oops! And so it goes. “Tell the people of B.C. they live in Paradise, and they’ll vote for the Gordon Campbell Liberals.” The campaign strategy and activity of the CanWest monopoly in B.C. is insidious, tireless, and effective. Perhaps it may be best witnessed by looking at Vaughn Palmer’s columns – Vaughn Palmer, CanWest’s leading (Vancouver Sun) political columnist in B.C. Can his columns be summed up briefly, in a nutshell? Yes. Palmer may not have these six points pinned on his word processor, but they fit. Rule One: disguise the fact that the CanWest monopoly system is campaigning for the Campbell Liberals. Rule Two: attack the NDP’s past, and especially attack innocent Glen Clark, former NDP premier, as if he were somehow a borderline terrorist. Rule Three: say nothing good about the NDP; praise it only when it appears to be adopting Liberal policy. Rule Four: praise Gordon Campbell and the Liberals. Rule Five: work hard to make ugly Liberal policy and actions look good or, at least, okay. Rule Six: cover up the truth about the Campbell Liberals even while pretending to open up the truth. In a world in which debate was carried on in a healthy way, Vaughn Palmer’s writings would be shown for the tissues of bias they are: kill the NDP; make the Campbell Liberals look good. But in an almost complete monopoly scene, there is no healthy debate. CanWest sets up all the terms of debate and Vaughn Palmer, for instance, can present mock-reasonable argument and no one can reply. Reasonable? Vaughn Palmer’s columns aren’t. His funniest (Vaughn Palmer never intends humour, it seems) recent column may be the long-titled “Campbell closes the door on wriggle room for partisan advertising” (Sun, Jan 11 05 A3). Campbell, who (unrecorded by Palmer) has been shovelling money into “indoctrination advertising” for a government lurching from scandal to broken promise to insane policy action, has now declared that government advertising must end in the four months leading up to the election. “The Liberals figure,” Palmer writes, “the premier deserves credit for having made such a promise and then keeping it.” So, obviously, does Vaughn Palmer, who knows it’s a great day when Gordon Campbell makes any promise and keeps it. But the real humour is that the whole column is, in fact, a joke: because the CanWest monopoly in British Columbia will use all of its monopoly papers all of the time to monopolize all debate and news in favour of the Gordon Campbell Liberal forces. In that case (as Gordon Campbell well knows), who needs advertising? To prove the point, look at a few Vaughn Palmer columns. Two huge election issues face the Campbell government. The first is the stupid betrayal Campbell engaged in by selling (in spite of a solemn promise) B.C. Rail. Stupid, because it made him an out-front liar; stupid, because B.C. Rail has (as the takeover team at CN knows) huge potential for growth, expansion, service, and profitability; and stupid, because the Campbell government still hasn’t revealed all the terms of sale to British Columbians, and has openly deceived the legislature about them. And stupid again, because the sale has been handled so badly it is rife with accusations of wrong-doing and faces “almost two dozen criminal charges.” What does Vaughn Palmer’s column offer on that incendiary matter? Whitewash. It tries (Sun, Jan 8 05 A3) to whitewash. The people charged with “several allegations of bribe-taking,” Palmer writes, weren’t necessarily bribed. (Because no one has been charged with bribery.) Pardon? Well … you see …. Palmer compares the receivers of information during the sale process of B.C. Rail (who could use the information for financial advantage and more) to “reporters who sometimes find themselves in receipt of official leaks.” Come, come. Your inside track, Vaughn Palmer, to Campbell Liberal cabinet “goodies” or “official leaks” declares clearly what team you’re on, but it can hardly be compared to allegations of wrong-doing in passing privileged information to others for pay in a deal like the B.C. Rail deal. And I suspect you know that. Smoke and mirrors. Then, in a tortuous piece of sleight-of-hand, his column tries to deal away the fact that people accused of receiving “rewards, advantages, benefits,” etc., must have gotten them from someone. As a political columnist, Palmer should be tirelessly diligent in demanding we know who was at the other end of those events. Remember, the search warrants in the B.C. Rail case were issued on December 24, 2003 – a long time ago. Only after very hard pressure did (stubbornly unhelpful) Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm release the warrant material on September 10, 2004. Claiming Criminal Code observance, Justice Dohm excised huge portions of the document. If what he has excised prevents us from knowing who was at the other end of the events, then the law needs changing. Soon. Whatever happens, Dohm’s “papal” air of infallibility and superiority serves only to deal another blow to the confidence the public has in judges. The January 4 Vaughn Palmer column, moreover, dismisses with wonderful confidence the whole federal Liberal involvement in raids on the legislature offices. No charges have surfaced in that respect. But we know that allegations of Liberal fake membership-buying were frequent and public at the time of the last federal election. We know that the “Basi boys” – people involved in the present court actions and the raids on the legislature offices - were mentioned frequently . We know that when I – with about twenty others – asked the Chief Electoral Officer for investigation, he and his office fumbled, delayed, and finally told me if WE could get evidence of wrong-doing, then Elections Canada might do something. (?) Reasonable and prudent observers might believe Elections Canada and others don’t want to connect the Martin/Campbell/Dosanjh forces with the raids on legislature offices. Vaughn Palmer should be the last to accept their refusal to make the connections. Of the links of the legislature raids with the federal Liberal party, Martin’s B.C. Team, his leadership campaign, and the Campbell Liberals, there is not a trace in any of the court actions. What should one conclude? Vaughn Palmer’s column concludes - very simply - that there was no connection. “It didn’t mean much,” writes Palmer. “The investigation touched only peripherally on the Martin organization. None of the charges refer to a federal Liberal connection.” (Sun Jan 4 05 A3) No serious political commentator could be satisfied with those facts and that situation. Vaughn Palmer is perfectly satisfied. That, my fellow Canadians, is Vaughn Palmer doing his job as chief political columnist for CanWest in B.C. Because CanWest owns a monopoly of almost all print newspapers in British Columbia, and because it exercises that monopoly in favour of corporate and reactionary government, there can be no serious debate about the issues and the prejudiced analyses that appear in the columns of Vaughn Palmer. That’s whitewash number one. Whitewash number two (they go on and on; we’re looking at two) relates to another huge election issue – the Campbell Liberal government’s needless destruction of the ownership of B.C. Ferries by the people of B.C., removing its activities from Access to Information scrutiny, from inquiry by the ombudsman, and from reference to the B.C. Labour Relations Board. The Campbell clones (one being David Emerson, now federal Liberal Industry Minister) brought in a U.S. CEO from a bankrupt U.S. corporation who set about attacking and insulting B.C. Ferry employees. Prices, moreover, have risen steeply since his arrival, for all B.C. Ferry services not explicitly exempted. Then, to show the confidence B.C. Liberals have in B.C. expertise and skill, contracts for new ferries were given to a German shipyard. Played up as “efficient,” the German shipyards have large government subsidy, and workers on the ferries for Canada have agreed to give “free time” to making the ferries. Apparently, every shipyard worker will “give” about eight weeks of labour for nothing. Doing that is simply another name for what we usually call union-busting and scab labour. Of course, the German workers can do that because the government subsidy permits their wages to be high enough for them to “give” free time. Apparently, Vaughn Palmer can’t see – or refuses to see - the role of subsidy. Ironically, National Post writer Terence Corcoran sees that kind of “competition” clearly. Commenting about the new Airbus 380 (Financial Post, Thurs Jan 20 05 11), Corcoran writes about “deliberate destruction of competition via state aid.” Both of those conditions would make a self-respecting B.C. government uneasy about the deal. Clearly, the German shipyard is NOT more efficient. It works by having a large government subsidy, and it has to hide hours of work necessary by getting a lot of them for free so they don’t have to be figured in to “efficiency.” In very simple terms, that is planned discrimination against the Canadian operation, fully accepted by the B.C. Liberal government and its U.S. hireling Ferry CEO. The decision by the Campbell government and this U.S. hireling robs B.C. of (1) growing expertise; (2) jobs; (3) maintenance of ship-building continuity; and (4) millions of dollars fed into the economy of B.C. and into tax gathering. Rumour has it that the B.C. government is preparing to contract more ferry building in a foreign country. To push the deal offshore, the Campbell Liberal government is claiming the ferries have to be semi-cruise ships – which the B.C. shipyards haven’t built (and so, of course, in Campbell Liberal eyes, B.C. shipyard workers are too stupid to build them). The arguments that B.C. shipyards can build such vessels will be laughed and sneered aside. Vaughn Palmer’s column (Sun Jan 14 05 A3) has already begun the sneering part, saying local shipyards could be given some of the dumb work (which Palmer won’t name). The column says two other things that are remarkable. B.C. Ferries had to go to Cabinet to make the proposal to buy new ships offshore. But why is that, Palmer asks? The answer – which he gives very badly – is that B.C. Ferries, which is privatized, isn’t really privatized. Rather, it has been placed in a fake corporation and “secretized.” No buyer in his or her right mind would buy hunks of the B.C. Ferries operation right now – with the exception of a few major runs. So why the “privatization” and “secretization”? The Campbell Liberal government wanted to take the boots to the Ferry workers, to privatize anything in the system that was profitable, and to prepare the fleet, in parts, using disguised taxpayers’ money, to make them attractive to private (foreign) buyers. B.C. Ferries had to be “secretized” to allow for the on-going destruction, in pieces - and insanely - of the system as a public service owned by the people of B.C. Vaughn Palmer, leaping on the CanWest “hate Canada” bandwagon, suggests B.C. shipyards have always been on the inside on ferry building and aren’t competitive. (We have just seen that the German shipyard is not competitive but is “faked” into being competitive.) In the new round of contracts looming, a Polish shipyard is alleged to have offered “a fixed-price contract and iron-clad delivery dates.” Okay. How much Polish government subsidy is involved? Will the workers be “offering” free work? Is this another “hate Canada” scam of the Campbell Liberal government? “It remains to be seen,” Vaughn Palmer writes, “if the B.C. industry can rise to the challenge of foreign competition….” Then, in true CanWest/Vaughn Palmer fashion, he insults Canadian workers by taking a comment of George McPherson out of context. McPherson, of B.C. Shipyard Workers, doesn’t like what Palmer chooses to call “competition” - that is, giving worker-time free and using large government subsidy to falsify real costs. The whole thing stinks, as does Vaughn Palmer’s column on the situation. Considering the true situation with the German shipyard (which Vaughn Palmer doesn’t explain), McPherson’s comment that it is “totally ridiculous … (I’m) actually quite disgusted by it,” is a perfectly reasonable statement, especially by a union member who believes union members shouldn’t knife each other in the back, even from country to country. But for Vaughn Palmer, McPherson’s statement is the statement of someone who isn’t prepared to sell out to corporations and isn’t willing to treat his fellow members as cannon fodder for the Gordon Campbell attack on working people in B.C. For Vaughn Palmer, then, McPherson is the kind of person who has made the B.C. shipyard industry fail. Or as the Palmer column puts it, McPherson has “the spirit that helped make the B.C. industry what it is today.” If Vaughn Palmer had any insight into his own columns, into the reactionary corporation he works for, and into the reactionary government he supports, he might see that, in fact, it is their “spirit” that is breaking the B.C. shipbuilding industry. But before Palmer could see that truth he would have to work in an atmosphere of genuine democratic debate on questions of government and public policy where ideas freely circulate and are freely considered. But he is in a province with a reactionary, highly politicized, cut-throat monopoly of communications which is operated to prevent free and serious democratic debate and which, in fact, works to destroy democracy in anything but name. Corporate concentration in the press and media poisons public debate; it especially poisons the pens of the people hired to pretend to be working for “a free press in a free society.” [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on January 24, 2005]