FACE TO FACE: Is Canada ready for its very own right-wing TV network?
If Stephen Harper and the new Sun Media television channel (what some are calling Fox News North) have their way, Canadians may indeed soon be enjoying all the benefits of a media-driven Canadian Tea Party movement: monosyllabic hysteria, misspelled rally signs, perhaps a Michael Ignatieff "birther" cult and gatherings where extremists of all descriptions chant their three "G" mantra - "god, guns, and gays."
Never in Canada you say? Until recently, I would have agreed with you.
Even though there is an anti-Sun TV petition afoot and Canadian cultural icon Margaret Atwood is livid that Primer Minister Harper is putting undue pressure on the CRTC to allow his former communications director Kory Teneyke to head up the channel, we Canadians are still not alarmed.
After all, in Canada, we have always enjoyed comparatively sensible conservatives - civil, benign, and further left than most American Democrats.
But I'm afraid a perfect storm is developing that may, with the help of an hysterical right wing news channel, metamorphose our nice, Canadian right wingers into American-style zealots.
First, the recent tragic Arizona shootings have not caused the American media to pause in its vitriol, its throwing gas on the fire. Glock handgun (the alleged shooter's weapon) sales have spiked in Arizona and many other states since the attack. It's not just a single disturbed person, there are many more who have and will respond to the steady diet of the kind of screaming hate media we are now considering importing. It's getting scary.
Don Cherry is being lauded as a Palin-esque "straight talker" glorifying the Afghan war effort and decrying " left-wing pinkos" on publicly supported TV. Disturbingly, many Canadians have no problem accepting the extension of Cherry's somewhat beloved Canadian hockey jingoism into politics. It's getting scary.
Ominously, we in Canada are now suddenly required to genuflect to our military at every sports event and as a preface to any public discourse, just as our Fox-fed neighbours do. It's getting scary.
If this keeps up, and Fox News North stirs up my colleague and his friends, we too could soon have a good-looking, Conservative, Canadian airhead declaring, "I can see America from my back porch."
