This blog is my forum for venting, for congratulating, for questioning and for suggesting, especially on subjects of spirituality, the news, and whatever strikes me from day to day. I am also on Twitter at @epp_g
I don’t know all the details, but I do know that the CBC is suffering a deficit as a result of a loss of advertising revenue. The main reason—I’m told—is the recession and businesses’ need to cut costs. A request for a loan from the Canadian Government was turned down because—so a government spokesperson said—the CBC would then have loan payments to make on top of normal operating expenses and would therefore be hard-pressed to remain viable.
Chrysler and GM are suffering deficits because of lost sales resulting from their inability or unwillingness to compete with car manufacturers that produce better, more efficient and greener vehicles, plus the general malaise of the market. The government stands ready to extend money to them amounting to 21 times what the CBC was asking for—each.
If the car companies have to pay back the loans in future, does it stand to reason that these loan payments on top of their general expenses may make it difficult for them to remain viable?
Or is it that our government cares about the success of private corporations and does not care about the survival of a public corporation like the CBC? This would fit Conservative Party objectives, seems to me, except that the bailout of car companies falls so far short of another objective that it’s hard to see what conservative philosophy in this country is all about anymore. I think they used to call it “free enterprise,” a politic where government frees up entrepreneurship to act as the economic engine of the country, not interfering with the right to be profitable; not subsidizing it if it begins to fail.
I appreciate the CBC. For my money, it provides the best news and documentary coverage in the country and has the capability to act is a distinct national asset in many ways. It also provides commercial-free, informative radio, and I am one of those who will not listen to a radio station that bombards me with loud commercials, phone-in rant shows and country music. I appreciate intelligent radio: As it Happens, Ideas, Tapestry, etc. for which CBC is known.
Let your MP know that you want our government to support the continuation of a strong CBC.
A couple of anecdotes arrived almost simultaneously in the inbox of my consciousness this weekend. I was teaching an adult Sunday school lesson on the book of Esther, and I had the radio on as I drove the 30 Km. to church.
First: Xerxes I as portrayed in the book of Esther is a drunken sot of a king who—although powerful—is swayed this way and that by his advisers. When his wife Vashti defies him one day, he asks his advisers what he should do to respond to this impertinence. Basically, their advice is that he divorce her, replace her with a new queen and make sure this action is noised abroad, so that “each man might be master in his own house and control all his own womenfolk (Esther 1: 22, NEB). Now we need to remember that Xerxes’ chief adviser at the time was Haman, portrayed as an egotistical, self-serving tyrant who would later connive to initiate a pogrom against all the Jews in Persia. We need to remember also that these events were reported by Jewish storytellers, not Persian.
As I was driving to church with these thoughts roiling around in my head, the dialogue on CBC 1 was about gender equality in corporate board rooms and government. By some measure—and I didn’t quite get by whom and how the measuring was being done—Canada was ranked 85th of 160 or so countries on the matter of working toward gender equality, i.e. ensuring that the halls of power had equitable female representation. Haman would probably have been appalled at the suggestion that men folk should even consider giving up any authority to their womenfolk.
(Typing this just now, WORD informs me that there’s no such word as menfolk, but that womenfolk is quite all right. Now what do you make of that?!)
For the sake of modern readers of the Christian Bible, I wish that a part of Mordecai’s objection to Haman’s and Xerxes’ behaviour had been directed toward their suppression of women. Unfortunately, no such objection is noted there.
We still have a lot of Hamans in positions of power, men who see it not only easier, but also scripturally sanctioned, that “each man might be master in his own house and control all his own womenfolk.”
