A year after CBC Radio-Canada reported allegations of police sexually and physically abusing Aboriginal women in Val-d’Or, Quebec, the broadcaster is getting sued for $2.3 million. As first reported by La Presse, forty police officers have filed the defamation lawsuit claiming their reputations have been tainted by the reporting.
According to the La Presse article, the police are arguing the CBC Radio-Canada reporting upset their relationship with the community and tainted the reputation of the officers who do not have sexual abuse allegations against them. They also call Radio-Canada’s reporting biased, inaccurate, and incomplete. The Provincial Police Association of Quebec, who’s funding the lawsuit, did not have an English-speaking spokesperson immediately available for comment. If they become available, this story will be updated.
For its part, Radio-Canada stands by the reporting. In a statement, the broadcaster says they reject the claims made by Val-d’Or police and intend to fight them in court.
“Winner of the Michener Award, the most prestigious award in Canadian journalism, and produced in accordance with CBC/Radio-Canada’s Journalistic Standards and Practices, the report Abus de la SQ: les femmes brisent le silence was of undeniable public interest and Radio-Canada committed no fault in airing it on its investigative news program Enquête. It therefore rejects all claims made by police at the Sûreté du Québec’s Val-d’Or detachment in the civil suit filed against the Corporation.” says the Radio-Canada statement.
The report uncovered two decades of alleged sexual abuse against Aboriginal women in the Quebec community. The women said police officers would trade drugs or alcohol for sex and paid the women to keep quiet. Other women said they were beaten and raped by the officers. After the revelations, the Montreal Police opened an investigation the allegations.
“The Sûreté du Québec has never officially denied the allegations made in the report,” says the Radio-Canada statement. 
***
jane@canadalandshow.com
Correction: A previous version of this story said Val-d’Or is a small community outside Montreal. It’s not. It’s a six-hour drive away from Montreal. We regret the error.  

Canadian newsrooms are taking advantage of the job drought to make young people work long hours, handle heavy responsibilities, but deny them benefits for years. Federal and provincial employment laws do little keep anyone safe. What gives?
“This is not slave labour,” Randy Lennox, Bell Media president of broadcasting and content, told me. He turned to a room full of media students to continue his address, but I stumbled on the metaphor. It was fitting.
At a September information session for Bell Media’s new leadership program, the room was full of media students who collectively leaned forward, salivating at the mention of jobs. After a few minutes of patting themselves on the back, Bell Media executives, Lennox among them, took questions. I was second to speak.
“So we talked about Workplace Health as part of Bell Let’s Talk, but reality is that a lot of Bell Media newsrooms hire young people under ‘As Needed’ or three- to six-month contracts and these people work full-time hours with no benefits and no security for years,” I said. “So as a company looking to hire young people, what are you doing to improve their actual working situation?”
A few people fidgeted in their seats. Lennox took a second to consider. “Great question,” he said. “So, you’re saying that in the news area of Bell Media, specifically? That work for Bell? Or just work in general?”
“Nope, work for Bell.”
“OK, so we would never hire anyone with the intent of being part-time and make them work 60 hours a week, that would never be our intent, so I’ll start with that, because this is not slave labour,” he said. “What this is is balance. We’re a balanced company, particularly in light of the fact that Let’s Talk and mental health is very very important to us. And not just because we work there, it actually means something.”
I clarified: “I am talking about people who are on contract, and they are working full-time hours … they’re basically permanent freelancers, and for years they work without benefits or security.”
“The nature of news itself is intermittent,” Lennox replied. “In other words, news requires a heavier staff at times of heavy news and a lighter staff at other times. If your question is, why don’t we hire everybody full-time, there’s not a business model there. To employ thousands of people is very challenging so we have to go the freelancer route.
“But where we can, we hire someone full-time because of the substance of the job — that’s why we’re here, by the way.”
He didn’t seem to understand I wasn’t talking about freelancers, but full-time workers who are contracted as if they are freelancers.
These people aren’t taking on brief gigs, but show up for regularly scheduled hours. Yet their often short, often shitty contracts list them as freelancers. Or maybe he did understand, but avoided the question. It’s one of the most tabooed conversations in modern journalism, after all.
With dozens of newsrooms using loopholes to keep some staff on freelance contracts without benefits, this reality has become standard. Though it’s not clear how many Canadians are on these contracts, Statistics Canada reports that in the last two decades temporary work is on the rise.
In the ever-shrinking news industry, which has been bleeding money for years, this has blurred the line between “freelancer” and “employee.”  Now, there’s a new class of employee: “permalancers.” As I learn more about this reality, I keep asking myself, ‘How is this legal?’
 

Legality seems like least of Lee Richardson’s concerns. Having cycled through the National Post, MSN, BNN and the Toronto Star (where he got health benefits for the first time, until the layoffs in August) since 2012, he’s familiar with the permalancer contracts, insecure employment, and dismissals that plague young journalists.
“I get why they’re doing it, but it’s like a whole industry is basically propped up on these people who are just interns — just paid interns,” Richardson told me.
Though he’s never had a contract shorter than 12 months, he also doesn’t usually comb through his agreements.
The eight young journalists I’ve spoken to for this piece said they feel grateful to have a job in the industry at all. They see questioning their contracts as being ungrateful. Most said they wouldn’t bring up issues with their employers for fear of burning bridges.
Richardson said a lot of people in journalism have to deal with the instability. “They’re all going through this, they’re all trying to get benefits because they haven’t been to the dentist in years, or they’re … thinking about buying a condo and they’re like, ‘Well, is my job going to be there in six months’ time?’”
To get to the bottom of how these contracts mesh with government regulations, I spoke to Don Genova, the Canadian Media Guild organizer for freelance workers.
In a unionized place like the CBC, Genova explained, temporary workers who replace absent employees are paid the same base rate as regular employees. Thanks to the collective agreement, if they are hired on a contract longer than 13 weeks, they are also automatically enrolled in the medical plan. These rules don’t apply in non-unionized newsrooms.
Genova said these contracts are “a way of keeping the workforce disposable.”
While the law doesn’t prevent short-term contracts, there are standard protections for employees. The rules differ between federally regulated employers like CBC and other TV channels, or provincially regulated workplaces like print and online outlets. The distinction defines which rules apply: the federal Canada Labour Code or provincial employment laws like Ontario’s Employment Standards Act.
“But they don’t provide any restriction from the contract itself,” explained Arleen Huggins, an expert in employment law and a partner at the Toronto-based law firm Koskie Minsky.
“Oftentimes in these types of contracts, the employer tries to say [workers] are not employees. That the individuals are contractors. But the Employment Standards Act takes a very wide view of who is an employee. For the most part if it looks like a duck, it’s a duck, no matter what you call it.”
Short-term contracts are most often used by employers to keep employees from “acquiring service,” Huggins said, “As though the employee’s being hired fresh each time.”
This would make it easier to bypass minimum standards like probationary periods, termination notices, statutory severance pay, or pay in lieu of termination notice.
“When you have four or five contracts that are continuing for three months each, it looks like a duck,” she said. If employers only take the last of several consecutive contracts into account (in calculating, for example, notice for termination) courts tend to side with the employee.
But the problem is that many workers don’t know or fight for their rights, Huggins said. “Many employees wouldn’t know anything about what I’ve just spoken to you about.”
I emailed Bell Media six detailed questions about freelancers and contract workers. I also wanted to know how these contacts mesh with their mental health initiative. This was their full response:

I spoke to a Bell Media employee, who asked to stay anonymous for fear of repercussion, about her current contract. Having started on a three-month agreement, she has worked for almost two years in one of the company’s many newsrooms as a permalancer. She’s not technically self-employed, given that both she and her employer pay EI and CPP.
She said she doesn’t know the details of her current contract.
“It might not be the fact that it’s my employer’s fault, it might be that I was just so excited to get a job, that I didn’t even care to look,” she said. “I honestly don’t ask questions … and I don’t want to piss anyone off. This is a massive, massive company that has so many different streams of television. You want to kind of make these people happy.”
She thinks the turnover rate at Bell is high enough to make her easily replaceable.
“It doesn’t matter how good of an employee you are … someone else is right behind you,” she said. “If someone came to my role and said, ‘I want benefits, I want health care, all these things,’ they would laugh and then give the job to someone like me.
“The most depressing part of it is that we think this is a great thing. I honestly don’t think they’re trying to be malicious,” she said. “I think it’s just been done for so long.”

***
@f_fekri

The ruling party in Saskatchewan has received more than $100,000 in donations from media companies and associations in the last 10 years. The $117,585 has come from television and radio, newspapers and industry journals and all of it has gone disproportionately to the Saskatchewan Party.
The bulk of the donations came from one source, Rawlco Radio. Since 2005, Rawlco has donated nearly $99,000 to the Saskatchewan Party, according to provincial elections records. Over the same period, it’s given the provincial NDP $1,456. The company owns six stations in the province, including the only two privately owned news talk stations, 650 CKOM and 980 CJME.
Executives at Rawlco did not respond to repeated requests for comment. They, therefore, couldn’t say why the company donated the amounts it did, or how it decided which party to donate to, or if some of those donations were in the form of event sponsorships or if they were all direct donations. Executives also didn’t say whether they’d made listeners aware of the donations. They also didn’t say whether a media company donating such a large amount to a political party might create a conflict in its political coverage.
Should Rawlco executives answer these questions, or say anything at all, we’ll update this story.
CANADALAND verified figures of Saskatchewan Party donation filings posted to Elections Saskatchewan’s website and independently looked at documents submitted by the NDP to the provincial elections agency*.
Rawlco was an outlier in the size of its donations, but it was not the only media company to donate to the Saskatchewan Party.
The Saskatchewan Weekly Newspaper Association, an industry group representing more than 80 newspapers throughout the region, has donated nearly $3,500 to the Saskatchewan party since 2006.
Margaret Hasein, the SWNA president, disputed that the figures constituted donations.
“SWNA does not ‘donate’ to political parties,” Hasein said in an email. “The president will attend events such as a golf tournament, or a premier’s dinner. There is a registration fee for this which the political party deems as a donation. We attend the events we are invited to attend. For the years in question, the NDP has not invited us to any of their events, neither has the Liberal Party nor the Green Party.”
But Elections Saskatchewan considers giving money to a party in the form of a registration for a political event — sometimes known as a fundraiser — to be a donation and requires parties disclose such intakes of cash.
“It is viewed as an opportunity to forge relationships and network,” Hasein said. 
The premier’s dinner is an annual event put on for some 2,000 grandees and schmoozers to have a nice meal in nicely lit hall and listen to a nice keynote speech from the very nice premier. Since 2007, that’s been Brad Wall, who heads the Saskatchewan Party.
Media don’t need to buy a ticket to get into the event. It’s open to reporters, who cover the dinner every year, usually focusing on the premier’s speech.
CTV, for example, typically sends a reporter, but in previous years CTV has also paid for tickets to the event.
From 2007 to 2015, it paid about $7,000 to the Saskatchewan Party. Over the same period, CTV also gave $1,878 to the NDP. A spokesman for Bell Media, which owns CTV, said in a statement the money was for tickets to events such as the premier’s dinner. “The CTV sales team purchases tickets to many local events to entertain clients and support the community.” Scott Henderson said in an email. “The amount spent on tickets totals a few hundred dollars per event.”
Henderson said no one from CTV News attended the events as a guest. “CTV News operates independently from the CTV sales team,” he said.
Sunrise Publishing, meanwhile, donated some $3,600 to the Saskatchewan Party over the 10-year period from 2005 to 2015. The company produces several industry magazines including Saskatchewan Business Magazine and the Saskatchewan Mining Journal. Several requests for comment to Sunrise’s publisher went unanswered, so we can’t say whether the money was for event tickets or something else.
The Western Producer, an agriculture-focused news outlet, made a one-time donation of $360 to the Sask. Party in 2010. Current publisher Shaun Jessome said since he took over in 2012 it has been his policy for the publication not to make any donations to political parties.
***
@robert_hiltz
*CANADALAND did not look at the filings for additional parties, as no party besides the NDP or Saskatchewan Party has won a seat in the provincial legislature since 2003. The earliest donations records posted for the province start in 2005. If another party claim seats, or even a seat, in Regina, CANADALAND will revisit fundraising documents filed by that party. In the meantime, we decided to keep it simple.

After a disastrous interview with the Globe and Mail’s Denise Balkissoon on race in Canada, Vancouver radio station CKNW host Ian Power has been fired, according to Balkissoon herself.

Hi everyone. Ian Power has been let go from CKNW. We’ll be doing an episode of #ColourCode about this incident in a few weeks. https://t.co/lxeu0TTGVv
— Denise Balkissoon (@balkissoon) October 13, 2016

It was last week that Power hosted Balkissoon on his show. The conversation quickly devolved into an argument, for which CKNW has apologized.
The interview in full:

I was on @CKNW Vancouver last night, discussing the CBC-Angus Reid survey on assimilation. Things got…intense https://t.co/vxkOpTiOej
— Denise Balkissoon (@balkissoon) October 4, 2016

Thank you. Program director Larry Gifford called me as well and he was very sincere. He said that Ian Power plans to call me too. https://t.co/oD8WE9Z4Ok
— Denise Balkissoon (@balkissoon) October 5, 2016

Now, it looks like Power was taken off the air. CANADALAND reached out to CKNW program director Larry Gifford and Ian Power, but has not immediately heard back. We will update the story if they get back to us.
Balkissoon said her information came from both the station and Power himself. Pudget Sound Radio also reported that Ian Power is gone, and his contact page on the CKNW website was shut down.

Balkissoon told CANADALAND she will save her thoughts on the ordeal for the next episode of the Globe and Mail podcast Colour Code, which she co-hosts with Hannah Sung. But she has also written a column after the interview, in which she examined the idea of “white fragility.”
***
editor@canadalandshow.com

Last week, The Georgia Straight fired Colin Thomas, a theatre critic with a 30-year career. He explained what happened to him in a blog post, which he allowed CANADALAND to republish:
I just got fired from The Georgia Straight. Thirty years. No warning. No compensation.
Last Tuesday, I emailed arts editor Janet Smith telling her what shows I thought I should review. Instead of the usual confirmation from Janet, I received an email from editor Charlie Smith saying that he and Janet would like to meet with me to discuss “some things that are happening here [at the paper].”
“Jesus,” I thought. “I’m getting the boot.”
As we sat at a table outside the Be Fresh market and café on West 1st Avenue, Janet and Charlie took pains to explain that letting me go was not their decision. The pressure came from unnamed “higher ups.” They had fought the decision to release me, they said, but lost. Charlie was particularly kind about saying how much he appreciates my work as a critic. He also told me that I could be public about anything that was said in that meeting.
“Was there a problem?” I asked. They said the reason I was being let go wasn’t clear to them, but there may have been a confluence of factors.
Charlie pointed out that the paper is experiencing financial challenges and that it was probably easier to get rid of me than a staff person.
Janet said that there’s a lot of pressure on editorial to find fresh ways to do things.
Janet also said that “there have been complaints from some companies.” “What complaints?” I asked. “You know: that you never like anything,” she answered with a laugh. I replied that it’s very hard to do good theatre and that I figure, if one show in three is worth recommending, that’s a good average. Then she added that some unnamed complainants feel that I am sometimes too hard on younger artists. (There is nothing I enjoy more than championing younger artists.) She gave an example. It was one of the worst shows of the year.
Janet said she thought that the door was only closed on reviewing, that I might still be able to write previews or other articles. Charlie said that he would gladly give me a recommendation or connect me with potential employers. I asked if I could have a couple of months before being laid off so that I could have some time to adjust to the loss of income. In the meeting, Charlie said he’d ask. Two days later, in response to an email inquiry, he wrote: “As Janet indicated, the company is not going to purchase reviews.” He confirmed that I would still be welcome to pitch previews and other articles. Writing previews for the Straight has become an increasingly minor part of my job there and is no longer significant in terms of income.
But I’m not going away. I love the theatre and I love writing about it. I’ll be launching a new initiative. Watch for it. Until then, I will continue to post reviews on this blog.
See you at the theatre.
ADDENDUM:
I have received a message from Charlie Smith. He remembers one part of the conversation differently than I do. Here’s what Charlie had to say: “Hi Colin, I believe I was the one who said you were sometimes harsh on younger artists. I know for a fact that I cited the play that you didn’t like. If you can adjust your post to reflect that I said this rather than Janet, I would appreciate it.”
AND FURTHERMORE: If you’d like to stay abreast of what’s happening with the new project, feel free to befriend me on Facebook. Lots of smart people started to do that before it crossed my mind that that might be a good idea.

University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson has been in the news this week for taking a stand on behalf of suffering pronouns everywhere. His claim that a proposed change to Canada’s criminal code and national anti-discrimination laws to protect “gender identity or expression” could result in charges for anyone who refuses to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns has been covered by CBC, CTV, Vice, the National Post and Yahoo News.
“All it will do is produce a huge tangle in the legal system and a lot of ill will, and I think most of that will eventually be directed against people who are visibly different,” the psychology professor said on “This Morning.”
One problem with Peterson’s theory: it’s flat-out wrong, according to lawyers and academics who spoke to CANADALAND.
Bill C-16, whose full text can be found by Googling “Bill C-16”, would add just four words — “gender identity or expression” — to the list of factors like race and sex that government agencies and businesses regulated by the national government can’t use to discriminate. The same words would also be added to a section of criminal law (which anyone can find online) that forbids advocating genocide.
In the same way that people aren’t routinely locked up for using racial slurs, it’s also extremely unlikely they’d be jailed for referring to a trans person who prefers to be called “they” as “he” or “she.” Richard Moon, a professor at the University of Windsor who studies freedom of speech issues, said remarks have got to “be really extreme in character” before they qualify as criminal hate speech.
Using a pronoun a transgender person doesn’t like, “as offensive and distasteful as it is, would likely not be something that could be prosecuted under the criminal code,” said Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, a lawyer with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association who runs the group’s equality project. “I would find it hard to believe” a prosecutor would file charges on that basis, she said.
Yet few journalists have challenged Peterson’s claims, which he also made in a YouTube video which has been viewed over 40,000 times. In a recent broadcast of the CBC’s “As It Happens,” interviewer Carol Off even stated outright that the bill would ban using the wrong pronouns to refer to trans people:
CO: What you are proposing, that you will not use pronouns, may become something that’s a criminal offense. Are you aware of that?
JP: Of course I’m aware of that — that’s exactly what I wrote the lecture about.
Peterson didn’t respond to interview requests via email, Facebook and Twitter, and Off declined to comment through a CBC spokesperson.
The bill does instruct judges to sentence people more harshly when gender identity-based hatred is a factor. That gives prosecutors more power if they press charges in a case like X v. Sugar Daddy’s Nightclub, where a transgender person who uses the men’s bathroom sought financial damages for being dragged out of a stall, called transphobic slurs, and beaten.
Bill C-16 would also give the Canadian Human Rights Commission new powers to impose civil penalties, or fines, on businesses for discriminating against transgender people. But Moon and Kyle Kirkup, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said several provinces banned gender discrimination by businesses years ago. Bill C-16 would just apply those same standards to federal agencies and federally regulated industries, Kirkup said, like banks and telecoms.
Even in provinces without those laws, human rights tribunals have interpreted bans on sex discrimination to protect trans people as well, said Andrea Zwack, an attorney who frequently represents businesses.
“There is not great concern on the part of employers on this point, as most progressive and aware employers already prohibit discrimination on this basis in their workplaces,” she said.
***

BREAKING: The Globe and Mail learns that refugee claimants fleeing from conflict zones have more complicated histories than those who have settled in one peaceful state for centuries.
Last week, the Globe reported that the Peterborough Member of Parliament, Maryam Monsef, was born in Iran, not  Afghanistan like  her mother led her to believe. This was promoted by some outlets as a sort of earth-shattering revelation, with undertones that maybe, just maybe, she knew about it all along and chose to say nothing for political gain. But the Globe’s report has a lot less of an impact on Monsef’s so-called “political narrative” than the tone of the coverage would lead you to believe.
While breaking the story, Robert Fife wrote, “This revelation contradicts a key narrative that Ms. Monsef has built ever since she entered public life as a local politician in Peterborough, Ont., and when she ran for Parliament in the 2015 election.”
The Toronto Star’s Tonda MacCharles wrote, “The dramatic life story and political narrative of the woman hailed as Canada’s first Afghanistan-born cabinet minister, Maryam Monsef, shifted dramatically,” later adding that Monsef’s attempt to clear up the confusion was instead a “process of incorporating the newly revealed details of her background into a revised political narrative.”
But Monsef’s “narrative” has hardly changed since the revelation. It’s still true that she:

lost her father to the war,
was never an Iranian citizen,
is an Afghan citizen,
spent two and a half years in Afghanistan directly before fleeing, and
left in 1996 after the Taliban captured Herat, her home at the time and where her parents married.

The only difference is that Monsef was actually born about 200 kilometres from where she thought she was, and only because her family was fleeing violence.   
Monsef wrote in a statement that her mom didn’t tell her the truth because “she did not think it mattered. We were Afghan citizens, as we were born to Afghan parents, and under Iranian law, we would not be considered Iranian citizens despite being born in that country.” The plight of Afghan refugees in Iran is well-documented, and the conditions they endure make Monsef’s story a far cry from some elaborate hoax.
Going beyond the specifics, though, Monsef’s case is not unique. Much has been written about the lost personal histories of Afghan refugees in particular. The executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, Janet Dench, told The Canadian Press, “Constantly you hear stories of how people, as they’re growing up, the veil is lifted on certain things and they realize that certain parts of what they’d been told may have been to protect them.” She added, “Seems to me that’s part of the refugee experience.”
Yet the Globe article — and many others — failed to make this clear. There were no interviews with scholars, experts, or even refugee organizations which could have contextualized Monsef’s story. The result was that Monsef’s case was inaccurately portrayed as a unique form of deception, instead of an unfortunate but overwhelmingly common by-product of migration.
This failure to contextualize is especially troubling given that xenophobic fear-mongering is becoming the norm. Monsef has already faced a vitriolic response with critics, connecting the dots the Globe report put in place, calling her a professional victim, and former Peterborough MP, Dean Del Mastro, claiming she “scape goated [sic] her mother.”
Politicians have also jumped in, with Michelle Rempel, a Conservative MP, using the opportunity to criticize Canada’s immigration system, and giving credibility to journalists who promote bizarre conspiracy theories that undesirable Muslims are getting into the country and slowly taking it over.   
Journalists can’t control the reaction their story garners but they also aren’t oblivious to the backlash stories will create. The Globe article was irresponsible journalism, which has served as a cheap political point for xenophobes across the country.   
***
@DavideMastracci

The most famous editorial cartoon in Canadian history is pretty basic. It was printed in the Montreal Gazette in the fall of 1976 and depicts the two leaders of Quebec politics of the time, Liberal leader Robert Bourassa and Parti Quebecois leader René Lévesque, the latter of whom had just been elected the country’s first separatist premier.
“Okay everyone, take a Valium,” says the Lévesque caricature, stubby finger pointing at the reader.
The cartoonist was Terry Mosher, who uses the name of his daughter Aislin as his preferred nom-de-plume. “Everybody take a Valium” became an instant meme of Canadian politics in the 1970s and helped cement the 34-year-old Mosher’s rising reputation as one of the great chroniclers of the Canadian story. As the decades went on, and he stayed at the Gazette, Aislin slowly became one of those guys a certain sort of person in the eastern provinces would effortlessly dub a national treasure.
Good old Aislin, they’d say, right up there with Pierre Berton and Peter Gzowski. They showered him with awards and prizes, including a spot in the Canadian News Hall of Fame and an Order of Canada in 2002. They made a documentary about him that won a Gemini. His 47th book came out recently.
The career of Terry Mosher is a wonderful case study of how far mediocracy can take you in Canada. Strip away all of Aislin awards, praise, and reputation, and you’re confronted with an inescapable reality: his cartoons aren’t very good.
Nearly 40 years after the Valium cartoon, the 73-year-old Mosher is still at the Montreal Gazette. To say he is still “drawing,” however, would be charitable, given these days his cartoons often consist of little more than a jumbled assortment of Google image search results with some crude text slapped on top (possibly in MS Paint).
But don’t take my word for it. Feast your eyeballs on some recent Aislin classics:

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Editorial cartoons don’t always have to be funny, but, as one of my friends put it, Aislin’s comics always contain a joke: “this got published.”
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Canadian editorial cartoons and spent hours at the library poring through old collections. I was impressed by some of Mosher’s work in the 1970s, not for the humor, which was often uninspired and obtuse, but his beautifully grotesque caricatures and the elaborate fountain pen cross-hatching in which they were rendered.
But as I gradually waded my way through his collections, which he seemed to churn out at a rate of at least once a year, it became obvious that as he aged his talents were either starting to fade or he was just getting lazy. His drawings became cruder and sloppier, and eventually hand-drawn art was rarely seen at all. His commentary drifted away from offering any pretense of political insight, and instead descended into sub-Andy Rooney hot takes on the weather, sports, and (of course) These Damn Kids. Today Mosher is, by any objective standard, producing some real garbage, but insulated by endless nostalgia and praise, he seems to suffer no professional consequence for it.
I’ll cheerfully confess to sour grapes. I tried for many years to make a go at being an editorial cartoonist myself, only to find that there is virtually no market demand for what is now, increasingly, regarded as a dead art. Newspapers are hemorrhaging cash and have zero interest investing in something no one cares about. Cartoonists are being fired, not hired.
But it’s important to realize the ignoble death of Canadian editorial cartooning was not natural or inevitable. Millennials tend to regard editorial cartoons as stiff, unfunny, and clichéd, and they’re usually correct in doing so. For decades, a Canadian editor’s preferred approach to editorial cartooning was to hire a single white guy and let him draw until he died, senility be damned. This was the same model used by newspaper strips, and it certainly appeased a certain segment of the boomer readership who feared change above all else, but had the simultaneous counter-effect of informing the generations beneath that Canadian newspaper cartooning was not a remotely meritocratic enterprise. Seeking competent satire, they learned to look elsewhere.
Old cartoonists like Mosher are endlessly feted with praise about their bravery and savagery, “cutting the powerful down to size with their acidic pens” and so on. It went into particularly high gear in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. But the sad reality is that most of the editorial cartoonists employed in Canada today are neither heroic nor clever. Increasingly, they’re barely even coherent. What they are is merely one more culpable party in the decline of traditional media, whose leading players have done their best to ensure their absence will not be noticed, let alone mourned.
***
@JJ_McCullough

The Liberal government has contracted a think tank called the Public Policy Group to research the possibility of providing subsidies or other considerations to the collapsing news industry.
CANADALAND accepted an invitation to participate in the research project by attending a roundtable discussion between media owners. We were also asked to provide a written statement articulating our position on the proposals discussed. Here’s what we sent them:
Dear Public Policy Forum,
At the request of Taylor Owen, the following is a statement of our position on the possibility of public policy intervention in the Canadian news industry.
I am the publisher of CANADALAND, a small digital news organization that specializes in podcasts. Podcasts drive our revenue. We sell advertising on our podcasts, and we direct listeners to our crowdfunding page largely through our podcasts.
We produce the most popular Canadian podcasts for Canadian listeners. Our shows are focused exclusively on Canadian topics, with an emphasis on media, policy, culture, and public life. We do original and investigative reporting and have broken many national news stories in the few years we’ve been around.
Increasingly, we have competition: the Globe and Mail just launched a podcast. The CBC has many and sells ads to the same companies we do. Maclean’s, The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Walrus: all of them have dabbled in podcasts or are currently publishing competing podcasts.
We welcome the competition. Canadian advertisers are still largely in the dark about the medium and there are plenty of listeners to go around. New entrants could evolve the medium and help establish podcasts as an industry in Canada, as it is now in the US and abroad. Many legacy media podcasts, most notably the CBC’s, pre-date our launch, and we rose above them by virtue of our content. On an even playing field, we are winning.
What we do not welcome is government subsidies for our competitors. Too often in Canada, tax breaks, funding and other programs intended to help small startups and innovators like ourselves get hijacked by legacy players. It’s a trivial matter for a newspaper to launch a digital lab or project for the sole purpose of tapping these funds, leveraging their brand and status to take the lion’s share of the subsidies. At this point, with their efforts underwritten by the government, our competitors could conceivably undercut us on advertising rates and push our revenues down to the point where we would no longer be profitable. We run our organization on a budget lower than the annual salary of one top Postmedia or CBC executive. As sustainable as we are, we are also vulnerable to market interference.
In short, we are asking that no subsidies or considerations of any kind be made available to Canada’s legacy news organizations.
We support the removal of obstacles preventing philanthropic organizations from practicing journalism.
We support a review of the CBC’s mandate and support a prohibition of advertising on CBC’s podcasts and other digital content.
We take no position on the creation of subsidies directed exclusively to benefit legitimately independent small digital media companies.
I will point out that we do not ask for or expect subsidies for CANADALAND.
Sincerely,
Jesse Brown
Publisher
CANADALAND.news
***
jesse@canadalandshow.com

He gets over $1.1 million per year and a pension of over $500,000 from the CBC for the rest of his life