Late last week, the federal government appointed three new members to the CBC Board of Directors. Two of the three have strong ties to the Conservative party:
- Mary McNeil is a fundraiser and charity executive by profession. Earlier this year, she was hand-picked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to compete for the candidacy in a wealthy Vancouver riding. (She said she’d never favoured any party, but acknowledged her whole family were Conservative party supporters.) She lost the bid to a business professor.
- Brian Mitchell, lawyer #1, sits on a number of other boards in Montreal. He is a former member of the Conservative National Council. He once ran against Joe Clark for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party, then ran unsuccessfully in for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Until the CBC appointment, he has served on the Conservative Party’s national council.
- Linda Black, lawyer #2, has been a senior executive in a variety of government roles — most recently in a provincial Labour Relations ministry. She’s currently a lawyer with a legal review board.
Opposition MPs claimed the appointments to the CBC Board were part of a larger strategy to fill vacancies on federal Boards in advance of a possible federal election. (Along with 15 judicial appointments, people were appointed to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, the CRTC, the Bank of Canada, the National Welfare Council, the Canada Race Relations Foundation and others.)
The appointments were made without the supervision of the federal appointments commission that Prime Minister Harper had promised during the last election campaign.
Also related to broadcasting, CTV reporter Marc Patrone, a former Conservative candidate, was named as a CRTC commissioner. The Globe and Mail says the job pays $126,200 to $148,500 a year.
However, respected Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor did a study in 2005 and discovered that 85% of political contributions from CBC board members went to the Liberal party.
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Comments below | See also: Board of Directors, Parliament, The CRTC |
| Email this | Posted at 12:17 pm (26 Feb 2008) |
Deceivin’ Stephen’s at it again. Now he wants to make the CBC a Conservative mouthpiece too.
Whatever happened to that promised appointments commission, where persons were supposed to be appointed based on merit, rather than based on being a political hack.
Ya, right Stevie. So much for open, honest, transparent and accountable government. That election platform "pledge" went out the window as soon as he took office.
This CON government lost the moral authority to govern as soon as it took power.
so, let me get this straight: their qualifications to sit on the cbc’s board is that they’ve sat on other boards? Surely we can meet a higher standard than that.
Hmmm. Fair concerns, all.
So donating to the Liberal Party is no longer a requirement for CBC Board members?
King Richard must be rubbing his hands with sheer joy. More lawyers and grey suits to entertain. More Horton’s to serve and, by the end of the week, his crowning achievement - the cancellation of "Intelligence". Finally, it’s goodbye Haddock. Stephen will be so proud.
No, but trying to stifle the CBC is still a requirement for Conservative membership.
Kev - I don’t think Conservatives want to stifle the CBC as much as want to see value for money. Self-centered naval gazing is not value for money. Picking a left wing position and trying to crowbar it into Canadian culture is not value for money. $1 Billion a year could be far better spent elsewhere to provide value. Conservatives would love the CBC to live long and spin left forever - just not on the citizenry’s tab.
Is J. McGuire a Conservative? She stifled CBC2 pretty darn good, in my humble opinion…..
Hoping that Intelligence cancellation doesn’t happen. No matter who’s on the Board.
So now the Radio 2 changes happened under her watch? Interesting.
It’s really bizarre how such a heavily unionized workplace has built an all-inclusive theology around its executives - from the whole second-coming-of-Hubert stuff on Teamakers to the Dick-as-Old-Nick stuff, with the rest of them subbed in as minor deities and demons as the situation demands. It’s ridiculous. Upper management types are the same everywhere, and the bizarre psychological traits they all share coupled with the fact that they speak exclusively in MBAnese means that we norms will never completely understand them, but that’s no reason to resort to haruspicy.
Haruspicy, my, aren’t you a clever dick! When the CBC2 changes were discussed here, I received an e-mail concerning a petition to restore the old programming. It said, and I quote, "New interim executive director in charge of English programming (Radio Two) is now Jennifer McGuire, jennifer_mcguire@cbc.ca, who was a member of the team who decided Radio Two needed a face lift. Apparently their "study" which supposedly surveyed audience opinion only tapped just over 2,000 people, totally at random, not targeting the real Radio Two audience at all! In a response to my correspondence, she seems to be hanging tough behind the "findings" of the team." Sounds like she was involved, and I think she still is in charge of Radio, isn’t she? Oh, and I’m just a mightily annoyed listener, banging his head against a brick wall, by the way, not a heavily unionized worker.
Whether you meant to make me (and other readers I’m sure) reach for ol’ Wikipedia or not, Kev, I was reading all the way up to "haruspicy" …
"In Roman practice inherited from the Etruscans, a haruspex (plural haruspices) was a man trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the interpretation of lightning strikes, of the flight of birds (augury), and of other natural omens."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
… so Kev, your point is … wait … who exactly are the sacrificial animals here?
… so Kev, your point is … wait … who exactly are the sacrificial animals here?
Take your pick, the audience, independent producers, workers who just get on with it, press releases, oracular Powerpoint slides….
My point is it’s a waste of time.
Take allycat’s points about R2. Even the quoted email points out the fact that the recent changes were not taken lightly, were not one person’s crusade, and an effort was made to test them (2k is a decent sample size given the prospective audience). So why just blame one exec, who wasn’t in fact the head of Radio when the changes went ahead? Could it be that he doesn’t want to address the potential reasons for the changes? (The email itself, especially "2,000 people, totally at random, not targeting the real Radio Two audience at all" is very telling in this regard. If it was any more elitist in tone it would be veering into nastier "-ist" territory.)
So now you’re a market research expert, Kev? How do you know what a decent sample size would be for CBC2’s huge audience? Sure, I named McGuire. She has a big title and took credit for the changes; she can take a little criticism. And I have consistently attacked the "reason" for the changes: I do not think age demographic studies should determine the course of publicly owned broadcasting. Am I a waste of time because I constantly careen off topic here, and vent my frustrations on the programming changes? Probably! That is between me and my moderator, and I’m sure he’s had just about enough! But surely your whining about my whining is a bigger waste of time? Oh well, you managed to use "haruspicy" in a sentence, even if you didn’t have a point to make….