Ken Smith

What Carney promised to fix fast — and still hasn’t Carney promised free trade inside Canada by Canada Day, doubled housing starts toward 500k/year, fast major projects, US trade certainty, and a skilled workforce and 18 months later: * Interprovincial barriers & labour mobility still drag growth. Federal exceptions cleared and some goods mutual recognition done, but ~200 provincial ones remain. Workers still don’t move freely (easier in the EU). Hyder: “We’re still in our own way more than we need to be on provincial trade barriers… The fact that we still can’t move labour around in this country is really problematic. There’s easier movement in the European Union, 27 countries, than there is in Canada.” * Housing scale-up is nowhere near the promise. Build Canada Homes committed funding for ~19k affordable units; only ~2–2.3k under construction. Starts haven’t doubled; 500k target walked back. * Major projects and risk-averse bureaucracy. Special agencies (Major Projects Office, defence, housing) are short-term bypasses. Hyder: “We are just not a risk society. Our government is not a risk society. Our bureaucracies are punished for risk… Those [special agencies] are not sustainable in the long haul. At some point we need to have our full arsenal of government working.” * US trade certainty incomplete. No full deal. Focus on 232 tariffs with industry supports and diversification (e.g. UAE), but tariffs persist and USMCA review looms. Hyder: “If there were a mutually beneficial deal available, then there’s something that they can do… North America is putting the puck in its own net. We’ve got to get something done sooner rather than later.” * Workforce utilization and skills. Population growth near-flat. Credential recognition and deploying people already here remain slow—Hyder called this “job one” Announcements and money have moved; the structural fixes (true internal free trade, systemic speed, actual housing volume, stable trade rules) have not arrived at the “light speed” promised by Carney And the media continues to look the other way @goldyhyder

Full interview where CBC introduced Camosun instructor Daniel Reeve as a neutral political science expert to analyze BC’s new Conservative premier Lorne Doerkson. What they left out: Reeve is a former NDP candidate who worked as a ministerial aide under an NDP government Here’s the “non-partisan” analysis: He opens by calling Doerkson’s tone “humble” and “sincere,” then immediately undercuts the majority: more than half of voters didn’t support him, so the numbers “don’t quite back that up.” Classic framing of a Conservative win as less legitimate than the seat count On the campaign, he contrasts Eby’s Trump-focused pitch with the Conservatives actually talking about the deficit, emergency care, and the economy—implying the NDP missed the mark while the right read the room Then the money quote on Doerkson’s plan: they’ll walk through the budget, declare “it’s worse than we thought,” and impose “a whole bunch of cuts so that we don’t raise taxes and so that we don’t cut health care.” This, he says, is the message meant to “hold that center right to kind of far right coalition together and also kind of pin the problems of his government on the past.” He later describes Carney as closer to the NDP on fiscal questions, notes the provincial NDP had shifted toward the center, and flags energy/forestry expansion as creating problems with DRIPA and Indigenous consent. On the snap election, he relays an “NDP kind of leaning supporter” who refused to “walk across hot coals” to vote NDP, frames Eby’s call as “here’s the fire. Follow me,” and points to 200,000 previous NDP voters who stayed home All of it delivered as dispassionate academic insight from a former NDP candidate and government aide. Disclosure by CBC was apparently optional. This is not journalism @CBCOmbud

CBC quoted Lowan’s speech right up to the line that reveals the ideology—and then stopped In their election-night write-up, CBC reported: “We may have a small caucus, but tonight we have inherited an enormous responsibility, and that is to hold a majority Conservative government to account.” What she said next, according to the full transcript (and the video CBC itself posted):“We are the only party who is equipped to stand against the Conservatives and their existence.” That is not “holding a government to account.” That is declaring the victorious party’s existence illegitimate. It is the language of elimination, not opposition If a BC Conservative candidate had said the NDP or Greens needed to be opposed “and their existence,” it would have led every newscast, every panel, and every CBC segment for days. Instead, the line was edited out of the written coverage while the surrounding sentences were used to portray her as a responsible voice of accountability This is not an oversight. CBC has the full speech on their website. They chose which sentences to quote and which to bury. Meanwhile, hosts and panels continue to treat the BC Conservatives as uniquely dangerous while soft-pedaling a 26-year-old party leader who just framed an entire party’s existence as the problem to be solved Age is not a shield. “Movement building” is not a euphemism that erases the actual words. Selective quotation that stops one sentence before the most revealing line is not journalism—it is CBC narrative management The video is on CBC’s own site. The transcript is public. The CBC omission is the story @brodiefenlon

Bad media feedback loops turn ordinary protests into invented national threats. CBC and Justin Ling drove a clear example in 2022 CBC and Ling framed the Freedom Convoy as something darker from the start—organized extremism, foreign money, potential violence—often citing each other or unnamed sources. Ling’s reporting amplified claims of an arson plot (later cleared by police) and other threat narratives. CBC platformed this largely unchallenged. At the Public Order Emergency Commission, Justice Minister David Lametti testified that the government partly relied on CBC reports of foreign funding to help justify the Emergencies Act (“CBC reported… that there was foreign funding…”). Chrystia Freeland was also pressed on the early CBC donor claims. Those foreign-funding reports were debunked. The cycle closed: CBC and fellow media produced the alarm, officials treated it as intelligence, and media treated the official response as proof the alarm had been right This filtered down to the mundane. Empty or water-filled gas cans carried as protest after police seizures became evidence of a dangerous supply operation. A hot tub set up on a downtown street (alongside bouncy castles) was cast as the emblem of lawless occupation rather than a cold-weather gathering that remained non-violent. No guns were found in Ottawa. CSIS did not assess a threat to the security of Canada. Police testified to the absence of violence. Courts later ruled the legal threshold for the Act was not met The mechanism is simple. Once a group is treated as “other,” every gas can, hot tub, or anonymous tip is read as confirmation of the worst case. CBC and Ling supplied that framing at scale. The result was policy based on media imagination rather than evidence that met the law’s standard—and zero public reckoning from the outlets that built it If only the truckers had hired an official Ottawa lobbying firm staffed full of ex-CBC journos

CBC: “Voters in BC are confused by two elections a week apart. Whose responsibility is what? Very mysterious.” Meanwhile David Eby, who ignored municipal leaders begging him not to drop a snap election on top of fixed Oct 17 local voting, isn't named once in the piece Protective journalism is a hell of a drug at CBC @brodiefenlon

CBC’s selective Pope Leo coverage is textbook bias This morning they ran Pope Leo XIV’s Oct 10 tweet declaring the death penalty “inadmissible” because it attacks the dignity of the person. Fair enough — World Day Against the Death Penalty, and it fits the preferred CBC narrative What they never amplify with the same urgency: His repeated statements that every human life is sacred “from the moment of conception until natural death” and that the right to life is the foundation of every other right His direct rebuke when he was in Lourdes of euthanasia and assisted dying as “false compassion,” his insistence that “what is legal is not necessarily moral,” and his warning that medicine must never become “the servant of programmed death” or decide the life of an embryo or an elderly person. Canada has the fastest-growing euthanasia regime in the Western world (MAiD now ~5% of all deaths) and one of the lowest fertility rates (1.26). A Pope who consistently defends life from conception to natural death is politically inconvenient for outlets that treat abortion as settled and MAiD as progressive healthcare CBC will quote Pope Leo when he opposes capital punishment and how it relates to Trump. They go quiet when he opposes euthanasia and abortion. That’s not journalism. That’s agenda-driven curation The pattern holds: statements that align with progressive Canadian consensus (opposition to capital punishment) get airtime and framing

CBC’s institutional amnesia, Truth & Reconciliation morning The CBC archives exist. CBC once filmed residential schools as Education Week, “a new future,” integration, a free and equal chance. CBC were the house organ when the policy was respectable. Those tapes do not lead the broadcast today Then May 2021. A GPR survey at Kamloops was sold as 215 graves. Flags down. “Remains.” Anyone asking for a shovel became a denialist April 2025: Rosemary Barton said remains had been “found across the country.” CBC’s own correction: no — “potential burial sites or unmarked graves.” Prime time claim. Fine-print walk-back Today the piano is back. “Believed to hold.” “Potential grave sites.” Then the line they wanted: People who deny the attempted cultural genocide try to say, show me the graves. Here are the graves What they actually have in Brandon is a documented cemetery — obituaries, church and vital records, deaths listed 1896–1911, markers later stripped for a park, then a campground. That is not Kamloops. A paper-trail burial ground is not an unexcavated soil anomaly. CBC is using one to close the argument about the other. That is misdirection Cheerleader. Then prosecutor. Then liturgist. Never the archives first. Never the distinction on air. Never the correction in the same hour as the hymn Open the archives. CBC needs to say it was part of the propaganda at the time. It needs to say cemetery when it’s a cemetery. Say anomaly when it’s an anomaly. Stop laundering radar into sacrament The first step at CBC is admitting that they are a big part of the problem @brodiefenlon

CBC's Hanomansing just devoted two interviews to a US sports-trading ad that does not run on Canadian TV and belongs to an app that isn’t even available in Canada Sydney Sweeney holds some footballs. The American internet does what the American internet does. And the Mother Corp springs into action like someone just threatened public broadcasting itself First they bring on a "fomer" (sic) culture reporter to walk Canadians through last year’s US talking points: jeans, genes, eugenics dog whistles, MAGA hats, voter files, possible white supremacy. Then they book a Canadian Olympian to explain that a one-minute online promo for a company Canadians cannot use is actually about dropout rates, Olympic coaching ratios, and the shortage of female photographers in Milan The ad’s slogan is “just sports.” CBC heard “please import yesterday’s American culture war and air it twice.” You can dislike the commercial. Plenty of people do. What you cannot do is pretend this is Canadian news. Novig doesn’t operate here. The spot isn’t a broadcast buy here. The controversy was already fully assembled by left leaning US media. CBC’s contribution was to put a maple leaf on it, add a second solemn interview, and hope viewers wouldn’t notice the product doesn’t even exist in Canada This is the programming model now: wait for a US left pile-on, find a Canadian angle that is mostly “an athlete posted on Instagram,” and treat it as public-service journalism. Less “what’s happening in Canada.” More “what Twitter was angry about on Thursday, localized.” If CBC's mandate is still to inform Canadians about Canada, maybe start with stories that require a Canadian product, a Canadian broadcaster, or at least a Canadian viewer who can actually download the app. Until then, CBC is just running the US discourse to feed its left outrage machine @ianhanomansing

Nothing like “independent polling” when the pollster who paused his podcast to elect Mark Carney is now a special guest at the Banff cabinet retreat. Spark Advocacy’s Bruce Anderson helped get the guy the job, then spent a year delivering friendly numbers that rarely mention the campaign work. Today Politico Playbook puts him in the mountains with cabinet. Coincidence? Sure. Just a guy who used to run Abacus, now cashing in the favour and the conflict gets buried in the fine print. The Rockies look great when the data cooperates Oh look, Ian Bremmer is coming too...