Home invasion bandits use duct tape to silence their victims. Canada’s Mass Media might as well be using self-inflicted duct tape to shut their own mouths when it comes providing any truthful information about the Canadian establishment’s social engineering policies. Their disgraceful behaviour is nothing less than self-inflicted public information banditry. A case in point is the current media silence about the recent in-your-face fraud of the Bernard Lord report on the present status of Official Bilingualism.
From the establishment media mouthpiece, the Canadian Broadcasting Commission (CBC), one expects distortion, obfuscation, and suppression of vital public information. This $900,000,000 per annum tax-funded national broadcaster prides itself on its complete and trusted news service. The truth is that when they stray from their profitable hockey feed and comedic relief productions into “sensitive” national politics, they are a menace to the Canadian public’s perception of the truth. It appears they are struck dumb in respect to the Bernard Lord Report. Duct-tape again!
The other electronic broadcasters CTV, Global, City are scarcely better. Together with the CBC’s public persona they accept their Order of Canada honours and preferred government liaison positions while submissively making very sure they don’t rock the establishment boat. Shhhh guys, it’s a “sensitive national issue.” It is a sick system. The National Post and the Sun group are better but even they drop the issues when it gets a little too hot. Hit, duck and run, more than duct-taped.
When the term “sensitive national issues” is used, the writer means policies such as our disastrous immigration policies, Official Bilingualism favouritism, no-justice human rights tribunals, employment equity (preferred hiring) for designated groups, ethnocultural and anti-racism policies and all the establishment’s pet projects about which the entire Canadian public should receive a great deal of information and have substantial input, but don’t. This is every Canadian’s country, not the exclusive fiefdom of the government establishment, their civil servants or selectively chosen “stakeholders.”
In depth coverage of these sensitive issues is virtually taboo. The Mass Media keeps vital information from the public and only vested interest groups; the “stakeholders” have any significant input into policies that affect every one of us. The general public, the real stakeholders, has not had any substantial input into these issues for the last 40 years. As a former immigration Minister, Sergio Marchi once said, “We don’t care what the public think, we are going to do what’s right.”
Canada’s International Embarrassment
The current international embarrassment of the revelation of Canada’s disgusting anti-freedom, unjust and almost criminal Human Right Tribunal establishment has been a shameful experience for many Canadians. This thought and behavioural control tribunal system was ignored by the Mass Media for decades while the freedoms of many ordinary people were brutalized. Ignored that is, until their own media people recently got burned by the Ezra Levant and Maclean’s Magazine affairs.
The Bernard Lord Report on the progress of Official Bilingualism
How many people have read or heard much, if anything, of the massive fraud being perpetrated on the public by the recently completed Bernard Lord Report? The usual silence of the media is normal. No information, no guts! So what’s this major government fraud all about?
Monsieur Bernard Lord Appointed
Last December, Bernard Lord, the bilingual former Premier of officially bilingual New Brunswick, was commissioned by the Harper government to find out what Canadians thought about bilingualism. That is how the media dutifully told that public the purpose of Lord’s cross-Canada safari was all about.
In fact, the mandate given to Mr. Lord by the government had nothing to do with finding out what Canadians thought about bilingualism. The mandate was to find out how the previous five-year Action Plan for Official Languages had progressed and what the people who had spent $800,000,000 to implement the Plan thought should be done to improve its abysmal success rate. Monsieur Lord’s statement:
“It is my intention said Lord, to conduct broad consultations on the Government of Canada’s vision (one should always worry about government mandated visions) of official languages and linguistic duality. On December 3, 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Minister Verner tasked me with the responsibility of presiding over and facilitating regional consultations and to report back on the consultative process with recommendations for her consideration in the elaboration of a strategy for the next phase of the Action Plan for Official languages.”
Naturally, Monsieur Lord reported that the multitude of French and French-promoting organizations, the only people he had consulted, wanted more money; $1,000,000,000 (one billion) more for the next five years. Why? Because the previous $800,000,000 plan has not worked and naturally these 160 Francophone organizations across English-speaking Canada and another 33 vested interest groups engaged in teaching or translating French want their subsidies to continue.
Propaganda, the technique of the Big Lie is alive and well.
Monsieur Lord not only did what he was told, but he did more. As a proud establishment Canadian, he embellished and outright distorted the support he claimed Canadians have for the government’s bilingual polices. He specifically touted the Radio-Canada CROP poll’s skewed survey purporting that 80% of Canadians supported “bilingualism.” It is surprising that only 80% agreed, why not 100%? Who would argue against having facility in more than one language?
Half the telephoned interviewees CROP called were located in Quebec, an officially French-only province representing only 24% of the population of Canada but the location of 55.4% of French-English bilinguals. Therefore this statistically imbalanced poll was from the start a great way to obtain the results the pollster wished to achieve.
Don’t ask how they selected so few interviewees from the other 76% of Canada’s population where so few bilinguals per capita live, especially when the poll covered only .006% of the entire population in its sample. It is also questionable as to how or what specific questions were asked. Don’t bother inquiring of the pollster because they won’t tell you. It is obvious that the questions had nothing to do with “Official Bilingualism” (the very costly, mandatory, and job-exclusion kind). Yet once again chances are they asked whether the person interviewed agreed with bilingualism; that warm and fuzzy idea of knowing two languages.
Monsieur Lord then used Statistics Canada figures that he claimed showed substantial progress in making Canadians bilingual over the last 15 years. Unfortunately for him, any normal person reading his selected statistics would have to say, “Can’t see much progress there!” especially for an expenditure of $800,000,000 over just the last 5 years.
Statistics Canada figures over the last 20 years actually show a decline in the percentage of people who have “a knowledge of both languages” (Statscan’s terminology for bilingual ability) because Monsieur Lord cleverly dropped census year 1991 that reported a 18.09% dual language knowledge. Simple subtraction therefore shows a .65% decrease to the 2006 figure of 17.44% in so-called bilingual facility.
Even Lord admits that English-speaking kids in French immersion classes in elementary schools drop French when they enter high school. In our technical society, it takes everything a student has to keep up the pace and learn all that is required. Of course they drop French, unless they plan to go into a government career.
Lord’s suppression of a growing contempt for Official Bilingualism
In the entire report, Monsieur Lord makes no mention of the divisive effect of financing small groups of French speakers across Canada to spread French where no or little French is spoken. He reports that his “stakeholders,” the French-speaking groups he interviewed, believe that by enhancing Canada’s bilingual French/English face across Canada they will increase the pride of all Canadians in their country. Weird! Especially when these Francophones know that Quebec is a self-declared unilingual French Nation that aggressively suppresses English and refuses to encourage bilingual education. Quebec is still officially part of Canada isn’t it?
Exactly how Monsieur Lord and his Francophone clientele think that badgering English-speaking provincial and civic governments and irritating their English-speaking neighbours with constant demands for more and more French services, schools, hospitals, community centers, jobs, etc., encourages French-English harmony and pride in Canada is unfathomable. Monsieur Lord is spouting pure irresponsible propaganda. The truth is that as soon as English-speakers see through the ruse and have to stand by and watch government jobs increasingly go to preferred bilinguals, mostly Francophones, their anger grows by leaps and bounds.
Signs of serious civil unrest are brewing
Why would any red-blooded English-speaker allow his or her federal or provincial governments spend one single Loonie, let alone one billion (1,000,000,000) Loonies to renew such pathologically sick exclusionary forced-French Action Plan?
Westerners particularly, are beginning to rebel as they become more and more aware. English-speaking New Brunswick citizens are not pleased either. Many are furious. English speakers in the eastern Ontario border towns near Quebec and the City of Ottawa, already up in arms over pro-French “Quebec type” anti-English activism that results in their own exclusion from jobs in Canada’s federal infrastructure.
Recently, the City of Ottawa insultingly mandated that no unilingual English-speakers may apply if they are not prepared to learn French and has posted rules directing that senior positions in the City’s civil service must be fully bilingual. Quebecoise-type and exclusively French signs are being forced upon some of the nearby towns. French-only hospitals are being established in others. Have our governments gone mad?
To view the Lord report for your own information and to check out the veracity of the writer’s numbers and comments, go to the following
government web address:
Special Government Inquiries Needed
The massive fraud of Bernard Lord’s Report and the direct connection of the Mass Media’s ongoing conspiracy of silence about this report is cause to demand a major government inquiry into the links between these duct-taped supplicants of government largess and the Canadian political establishment. Canada will never recover from the social-political mess it is in unless something is done to free the media from their self inflicted news banditry and until they live up to their own professional ethics.
It is obvious that a special inquiry also needs to be made into the biases of the CBC and its incestuous relationships with the political establishment. A decision must be made, after all these past years of debate, to discontinue all funding of this in-house establishment mouthpiece. It must be sold off to the private sector. The “Corporation” has outlived its usefulness.
The writer apologizes to the very few brave Canadian media organizations that do live up to their professional information-gathering and reporting standards.
If after the reader has read the Lord Report and wishes to take action, Canadians for Language Fairness will keep you informed and suggest ways to do so. You can contact CLF by e-mailing Kim McConnell at: HYPERLINK "mailto:kimlian@sympatico.ca"
kimlian@sympatico.ca
Dick Field is the former founder and Chairman of the Voice of Canadian Committees and the Montgomery Tavern Society. He was editor and publisher of Voices, their newspaper. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and Queen’s University. Dick has a wide variety of life experiences and has traveled worldwide both as a businessman and the co-owner of a travel business. He retired as a marketing officer after a thirty year career with a major Toronto life insurance company. Dick also ran a TV sales business; was an industrial relations officer at a Hamilton steel company and a salesman and sales manager in the automobile business. Dick is proud to have served in combat during WW2 with the Royal Canadian Artillery in northwest Europe. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com
