The Vancouver Scrum

The ol’ server log shows a handful of visitors coming in from that online den of ultra-conservatism, freedominion.ca. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the world of online extremism, Free Dominion is the Canadian analogue to freerepublic.com, the hang-out for mast every right-wing whack-job in America, and home of the notorious “Freepers.” How interesting, I thought. The ultra-right linking to me, a humble ol’ leftish liberal? I was intrigued. Turns out that they were looking for information on why there’s no Fox News Channel on Canadian cable or satellite. Seems that a Freeper stumbled upon an article I wrote last week (since published in Terminal City Weekly after a little editing) explaining that the market, not the CRTC, had decided that for now, Canadians would not be getting their O’Reilly Fix. Let’s see their reaction, shall we?

The usual denial and lies:

I have an source inside the cable industry that says yes the only reason that we do not have FOX new is because the CRTC does not feel that Canada has or will ever have such a need after all we CBC and CTV nes chanels and they would never steer us wrong. Apparently they always give us the truth with no bias, their words not mine.

Nice try, honeybucket, but an absolute, flat-out lie. Read CRTC Decision 2000-565 which awarded a licence for a Fox News Canada and get back to me, willya?

Seems some posters are barfing up the usual irrelevant crap and the rightist grievances, of course:

Wile, as a fellow Western conservative, I believe we all need to concentrate harder on running the lefties out of Western Canada too. I’m thinking of people like Hedy Fry, Svend Robinson, Anne McClellan, Ken Nichol, Lorne Calvert, David Orchard, Nettie Weibe, Gary Doer and Lorne Axworthy!

I do love those freedom-loving Freepers. Apparently, you’re quite free to live west of the Lakehead if you pass the ideological purity test. By the way, who the hell is Lorne Axworthy? I’m familiar with that Lloyd fellow (he lives out on the Wet Coast these days), and his brother Tom (mister muscular multilateralism), but is there a missing Axworthy?

Something, finally, that’s close to the truth here:

Right now they are predicting that we will have to wait over a year for FOX News because it takes awhile to develop more crappy Canadian content to meet their quota and I think they need to invest in another satelite to allow MORE ROOM for FOX News.

Well, that’s not quite so; all Global would have to do is replay some of their extant programming like Ottawa Inside/Out or Global Sunday. Rogers fulfilled the CanCon rules for MSNBC Canada by picking up some of CBC Newsworld’s programs like Health Matters and Hot Type and running the Canadian shows on weekends when most sane people have no good reason to sit around watching 24-hour cable news. Existing communications satellites also have the capacity to carry more channels, so there’s no real problem there; same goes with digital cable systems which are using a fraction of their potential capacity.

But the old rule still applies: You can lead a Freeper to knowledge but you can’t make him think.