Lawrence Martin scoops the CBC

The expression “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” is apt in describing the lame and incompetent nature of the CBC, except the expression would be more like “You can provide damning revelations about the sitting government to the CBC on a silver platter, but you can’t get them to report the truth.”

The CBC’s coverage of Stephen Harper’s income trust policy has been almost as fraudulent as the policy itself. During Harper’s second prorogation of Parliament, the CBC found itself with a potential void in political news reporting and so came up with the idea of “Ask a politician a question” in which viewers were given the opportunity to do what was being advertised, namely “Ask a politician a question”. The questions that were submitted by viewers that received the most votes from viewers was the premise upon which this segment was to be conducted. When the CBC found itself with overwhelming viewer response to the question concerning what was Stephen Harper’s proof of tax leakage (apart from 18 pages of blacked out documents) for his income trust policy flip flop that caused Canadians to lose $35 billion of their retirement life savings, the CBC attempted to renege on its promise to ask the most popular question in the minds of viewers and instead opted for a question (basically) of their own.

When confronted with this clear attempt to avoid asking this embarrassing question of the government, the CBC reverted to an equally contemptible action, by going through the motions of asking the question, while doing nothing of the sort. Instead reverting to repeating the government’s original patent lies about tax leakage by dredging up some sycophant professor from the U of T.

Now that the CBC has relinquished its responsibilities for uncovering the truth and exposing the patent lies of government, despite the vast resources that are provided to it at the expense of taxpayers, it is left up to journalists like Lawrence Martin to provide these revelations in books such as Harperland. All that Lawrence Martin is now revealing about Stephen Harper’s income trust policy and the lies and deceptions upon which it was based, was previously provided to the CBC by myself and others back in February 2010. I am speaking about the entire news organization of the CBC who was made aware of these patent lies and deceptions about Harper’s income trust policy ranging from the lowly reporter on the file, Havard Gould, all the way to the Head of the CBC News, Jennifer McGuire, and everybody in between, including the CBC’s supposed Ombudsman, Vince Carlin, whose job it seems is to run cover for the unseemly practices of the CBC.

What Lawrence Martin has chosen to inform Canadians about in his book “Harperland: The politics of control”, and that the CBC went out of its way to suppress, is:

(1) “In fact, the government's rationale for the flip-flop-the lost tax revenues was not the real reason for it.”

(2) “Tom Flanagan, still in Harper's good graces at the time, asked him the reason for the reversal. "Well, when I was in opposition," Harper replied, "no one told me that all the big corporations were about to convert to the income trust form of organization." He wasn't as worried about tax leakage, he explained to Flanagan, as he was about corporate governance.”

(3) “ But it was not the case Harper and Flaherty put to the public because corporate governance was too complex an issue.”

(4) Harper's cabinet was not informed of the decision until after the fact. It was taken with only four people in the room-Harper, Kevin Lynch, Jim Flaherty, and Flaherty's deputy minister. Owing to the sensitivity of the issue, Harper opted for even tighter secrecy than usual.

(5) “Before long, however, the evidence began to mount that the tax implications were significantly overstated. Revenue calculations by federal officials, it appeared, had been distorted to make the loss appear far more serious than it was.”

6) “Then, because of the controversy the policy switch engendered, the Harper team went into information-denial mode." The government, said Stanbury, interpreted the Access to Information Act in the most restrictive way possible. Many documents released under the act were completely blacked out.


How much of this have you ever learned by watching the CBC? All of these damning revelations, and then some, were provided by me to the CBC”s The National, when they came to my home to conduct was was ostensibly a segment entitled “Ask a politician a question”, which the CBC went out of its way to avoid doing, thereby compromising their journalistic integrity. Lawrence Martin has proven that the CBC had no journalistic integrity to speak of.