Seventeen days ago the Federal Court ruled that CBC must hand over information, requested under the Access to Information Act, about the travel and entertainment expenses of Louise Lantagne, one of it’s television directors. The CBC, who had redacted 110 pages of Latagne’s expense reports, is appealing the ruling, on the grounds that “Lantagne’s activities and related expenses are most of the time deeply intertwined with our programming activities.”
Seriously, that’s not a joke: the CBC grants itself this seemingly all-encompassing exemption in its own Policies & Guidelines:
In addition to other relevant exemptions and exclusions, you should be aware that Section 68.1 of the (Access to Information Act) provides CBC/Radio-Canada with a specific exclusion for any information that is under the control of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that relates to its journalistic, creative, or programming activities.
That pretty much covers everything, doesn’t it?
It’s not hard to figure out why the CBC, a Crown Corporation that receives over a billion dollars a year from Canadian taxpayers, refuses to comply to the Federal Court’s ruling, or to respond to so many Access to information Requests: in recent years CBC execs have expensed – among other things – $800 per night hotel rooms (with their own personal butlers in some cases), $450 theatre tickets, and $1,400 in booze over two days.
In addition to refusing to release the 110 redacted pages from Louise Lantagne’s expense claims report, the CBC has also been steadfastly refusing to comply with numerous other Access to Information requests, including a simple, straightforward request to find out what Peter Mansbridge – one of the most prominent and almost certainly well-paid employees of this taxpayer-funded crown corporation – earns annually in salary and benefits.
The hypocrisy is sickening. In recent months the CBC’s reporters stood self-rightously on camera, for weeks on end — and we’re talking top-of-the-hour coverage, coast-to-coast — to relentlessly demand, in the name of the Access to Information Act, the release of classified military documents which, for all the CBC knows, may contain the names of Afghan informants whose lives could be at risk if the unredacted documents were released, yet the Mother Corp has the chutzpah to thumb its nose at straightforward Access to Information requests about its own wining and dining habits, on the grounds that the requested information pertains to the CBC’s “journalistic, creative, or programming activities.”
This certainly qualifies as news that the CBC won’t cover.
Considering that the CBC’s journalistic activities are pretty creative at times, I still fail to understand why those activities should be excluded from ATI requests. The CBC doesn’t compete with anyone else for advertising dollars as a main function of their “business” so that information should be fair game.
Personally, I think that if they won’t be accountable to the people that give them money (read: we the taxpayers) then we the taxpayers should be allowed to withhold their funding.
Hypocrites.
FIRE. THEM. ALL.
“The hypocrisy is nauseating. ”
The CBC is nauseating, all of it.
What an awful waste of taxpayer dollars.
News from Missouri via PET Cemetery: My lying eyes. Show us.
“After years of resistance”:
“Senate changes its tune on AG’s audit: gives it green light
After years of resistance, the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee says the AG can look at the Senate’s books.”
“Auditor General Sheila Fraser will finally be allowed to conduct performance audits of the Senate and House, after nearly 20 years of being shut out.”
But, wait. There’s more:
>>> “P.E.I. Liberal Senator Percy Downe pointed out, however that the fall 2011 tabling is actually past Ms. Fraser’s last day on the job. After 10 years, she will be stepping down in May.”
>>> “Starting in December, information on individual Senators’ travel, hospitality and personal expenses will also be made public.”
Here’s a howler:
“I think it’s important in the Senate that we always strive to be better,” said Liberal Nova Scotia Senator Jane Cordy, a committee member. “I think the Senate agrees that the audit will be a continuation of the steps that we’ve already taken to ensure that there are improvements.”
http://www.thehilltimes.ca/page/view/senate-10-11-2010
…-
No word on this Librano$ sta$h.
H/T Liberal Ad$Cam Chretien/MartinJr/Dion/Gagliano/Kinsella, et al.
Another joke/howler:
$$$> “with C$7.66 billion ($6.25 billion) at their disposal, were created to help further policy goals.”
More h…..> “were created to help further policy goals.”
From 2005:
“Canada’s Federal Foundations Lack Oversight, Auditor Finds
Canada’s government-funded foundations, charged with funding projects on issues ranging from college scholarships to sustainable development, aren’t sufficiently accountable to Parliament, Auditor General Sheila Fraser said.
The foundations, with C$7.66 billion ($6.25 billion) at their disposal, were created to help further policy goals.
“Given the magnitude of these transfers, the public policy purposes involved, and the reduced opportunities for parliament scrutiny, the existing provisions for audit and evaluation in funding agreements with foundations are not adequate,” according to the report released today.
The report, released today, focused on 11 of the 15 foundations and comes amid criticism that Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party government is lax in its oversight of public money. Last week Martin and his Liberal predecessor, Jean Chretien, were forced to testify before a panel probing what happened to money doled out to a sponsorship program established to shore up Canada’s popularity in Quebec.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=al1DXGuhlRD8&refer=canada
1 billion dollars and the surgical waite list will be no more. Come on taxpayers of Canada, stand up and demand change.
Call me cynical, but this must have been set up as a way of making all those cozy ties to the Liberals more difficult to detect and trace.
All of their salaries, or at least their salary ranges, should be publicly available. I’ve worked in tax supported institutions, and there is no way on God’s green earth that public employees do not have to reveal this sort of info.
Juicy, juicy, juicy.
In the coming election campaign, let’s make this an issue and demand complete transparency from Mother Corpse, or, better yet, complete defunding.
I think the current tab is a billon 300 million
and with 7% of Canadians watching it , it tallies several grand per viewer. add that on your cable bill and see how fast the “elite viewership” vanishes.
CBCpravda ” All Grifters All the Time”
So, what exactly is it about the CBC’s “journalistic, creative, or programming activities” that exempt its employees from the kind of scrutiny other groups are subject to — especially when the CBC receives over $one-billion from Canadian taxpayers?
I don’t get it.
And, I’d like to know — and think I and all Canadians have a right to know — what Peter Mansbridge’s yearly salary is. Why should he be immune from scrutiny, I mean aside from his thinking I’m Peter Mansbridge and you’re not?
One billion taxpayer dollars annually to CBC, eh. That’s exactly the same amount as MI’s brand new home care plan. I’m not too keen on the home care plan but, in this case, robbing Peter M. to please Paul W. would be worth it. Most old people have at least done something positive and productive for the country – the CBC, not so much.
Hey Everyone! You can participate in the CBC’s annual public meeting! You can submit your questions regarding the CBC’s governance, and they’ll answer them! Oct 20th ; be there or be square!!
http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/apm/index.shtml
Post this on the main page! Ya’ll know what to do!
http://cgi.ebay.ca/Privatize-CBC-Canada-Vinyl-Bumper-Sticker-10-/170551673171?pt=Motors_Car_Truck_Parts_Accessories&hash=item27b5ac0153
For the past year CBC has spear headed the witch hunt against our Military Members via the detainee transfer issue, they demanded access to classified documents regarding secret military precedures alst the while denying the taxpayer access to how CBC spends our money. Jesus CBC really is an out of control thugacracy who refuses to answer to the people who fund Mother Corp, I wish there was something I could do to help destroy Mothercorp.
What I would like to see is the total dollars spent on travel to Quantanamo Bay, Cuba, by CBC staff in the last few years.
Who’s going to put in a FOI request?
How great it would be to get Hockey Night in Canada fully funded? That is the only thing worth watching on the Ceeb.
Don & Ron deserve a raise!!!
The support they give and receive from the troops must really grate the nerves of the pinko-leftists, would love to see the looks on the faces of the editors every time they salute the troops, those fallen and those serving. That picture would be worth a thousand pay cheques!!
batb @ 7:24PM
Not only do we not know how much Mansbridge’s welfare cheques total every year but for anyone who has noticed he also works only a 4-day work week, never anchoring the Friday edition of The National. It’s always some fill-in saying, “Peter is away tonight”. Thing is, he’s away every Friday so collectively these fill-ins are Friday’s regular hosts, with long-weekend-every-weekend Mansbridge being the fill-in on those rare occasions — perhaps 2 or 3 times a year — that he actually hosts the show that night.
A 4-day work week for Peter. He’s got a helluva gig going there. Membership has its privileges it seems.
I’m guessing that Peter Mansbridge makes at least twice as much as the Prime Minister, whose salary is $318,000/year.
Hopefully, the CBC will comply with David Staham’s Access to Information request, and we can find out.
Asa “Friend of Canadian Broadcasting”,which means an advocacy group for the CBC, I’m appalled by their attempted sleight of hand!
Publicly funded corporation, NO secrecy!
I’d bet Mansbridge and quite a few others are paid way more than they would be with their market share on a privately owned network.
Hm, come to think of it, a private corporation would probably fire the lot of them for their substandard performance.
I still maintain that the only programs worth watching on CBC are 1] Hockey and 2] Coronation Street but if they didn’t carry these,other networks would
I also believe that the Ceeb is a cesspool of inefficiency and mediocrity….how else to explain the output of programming when compared to what is produced even by independent french and english networks….CBC progremming=crap…Withhold funds or…fire them all
CBC’s done,how much life does the old skank have left in her? 5,10 years maybe?
Lie, deny, evade, escape. The bureaucratic two step. 100% expected of the CBC, 100% unacceptable.
This is why I’m a small government, big private sector guy. It isn’t that corporations never do bad things. Its that when they do bad things eventually they go bankrupt.
Governments don’t go bankrupt. Ever. They just raise taxes to pay the CBC’s bar tab.
Any private TV company run like the CBC would have gone bust by 1965, at the latest. But the Ceeb totters forward like a zombie on crack, pieces falling off, the stench of corruption dense enough enough to blind a dung beetle. A rotting corpse jazzed into motion by the bottomless pool of government cash.
Fire. Them. All. And jail whatever pr1ck thought himself so elevated above the common herd to redact 110 pages from an EXPENSE ACCOUNT for a government employee. Sons of bee-atches need to learn their place.
Why is Sun Media the one going after this information redacted by CBC?
Where are our lazy members of Parliament on this?
Its bad enough we have to pay the CBC and we are paying these useless CINO MP’s to do nothing as well?
Where is the Minister on this file?
GET YOUR EFFING ACT TOGETHER!
CBC will not disclose how much they spent wining and dining KHS in an attempt to pin some dirt on Harper et al,for the same reasons.They did 9 f’en shows on the crook Schrieber,Mulroney,and the Airbus fiasco,yet failed to once ask KHS if he ever gave any money to a Liberal politician,who were in power from 1993 till 2006.
No bias at this network,move along people,nothing to see here.
Skip at 11:16 PM, you know damn@d well that the Libs and Dips will never question CBC’s operations. For the Cons, it would be pretty risky, given the propensity of the Lib/Dip/CBC/MSM alliance to complain about Harper’s “hidden agenda” and related slurs. I suspect that unless there is a big hew and cry from the tax paying public, nothing much will happen. I think John and Jane Q public have to exercise their rights to get documentation under the relevant FOI Acts and start exposing the scam with solid, irrefutable evidence. In the meantime, we can encourage our elected representatives to slowly starve the beast.
I should add, that when Sun TV gets off the ground, at least we’ll see a pack of journalists who actually report on CBC shenanigans. With enough pressure, surely the government in Ottawa will one day do a thorough review of both the CRTC and CBC and repeal or amend the relevant legislation.
“…at least we’ll see a pack of journalists who actually report on CBC shenanigans.”
More likely we’ll see a pack of journalists who get taken off the air by the CRTC. Big Brother is watching.
Maybe they’ll have to broadcast over the Internet from the US. Remember the old ham radio operators inside the USSR? Communications technology is waaaaaay better now than then. There is no way the CRTC or the Liberal Party of Margaret Atwood can prevent Canadians from viewing and listening to whatever they want to view and hear.
CBC employees, and propagandists of the Liberal/Separatist party are just a pack of crooks and cockroaches. They are allowed to say whatever they want and do whatever they want without any outside scrutiny or oversight. You can bet they have a lot of excrement to hide from their employers. How many lawyers are they paying with our tax dollars to keep their nefarious agenda hidden. The CBC is an enemy of Canada, and the enemy of Canadians. The fact that the other creeps in the MSM are so predictably silent on the CBC’s determined, unaccountability, illustrates the pack mentality that permeates around these ideological maggots. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the thought police of the odious CRTC finding any excuse possible to thwart the license application of SunTV News. Clearly the CBC is an organization that is corrupt to the core, or they wouldn’t be behaving like they have something to hide.
Sean M – you’re most likely correct, but as far as the left is concerned the corruptness is a necessary, albeit a painful sacrifice that must be made for the sake of peace and security. Surely you realize that we are safe here in Canada as long the CBC continue’s to appease and entertain adherents of Islam every week with “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”
I hear the Sun TV thing is dead. Anyone hear anything different?
All I’ve heard is they’ve decided not to pursue a Category 1 license, the definition of which is something that still has me confused. I don’t think that will stop them, though. It could very well produce a groundswell of public opinion against the whole CRTC licensing thing and the Liberal machine that created it. (In my humble opinion.)
Sun TV’s opening broadcast better be an expose on Peter Mansbridge’s indiscretions with Cynthia Dale whilst married to Wendy Mesley with the subtitle:
Peter’s Hidden Agenda.