CBC HELPED TO CREATE THE POVERTY IT SAYS IT WANTS TO RELIEVE
CBC Radio in Vancouver has announced that on its annual Foodbank Day, December 4, it raised over $500,000. These donations came from residents all over the province and will be allotted to foodbanks all over the province. Under ordinary circumstances, this and similar CBC efforts all across Canada would be commendable.
The problem is that on the other 364 days of the year, the CBC abandons its fourth or fifth estate role as an observer of what is occurring in Canada. And although it does good work on many issues, it takes sides on the immigration issue. It joins forces with other groups such as employers, ethnic organizations and vote-seeking politicians. With them, it actually helps to create the problems it tries to cure on its annual Foodbank Day.
The principal mistake that the CBC has made is a common one. It has believed politicians' statements that current immigration numbers are no different from those in Canada's past. Also, it has accepted politicians' claim that new workers have been brought to Canada for a good reason and that these people should be integrated into Canada's economy. The truth is that current immigration numbers differ significantly from those of previous years in the sense that Canada has never had 20 years of uninterrupted high immigration. The truth is also that no sensible reason has ever been provided for bringing in the high numbers Canada has been bringing in.
As a result of ignoring reality, the CBC's biased reporting has contributed to a host of problems. One is competition between Canadian-born and newly-arrived workers for a decreasing amount of employment. Another is wage stagnation for many Canadian workers, particularly those with lower incomes. A third is a rise in the numbers of low income workers and intransigence in the country's child poverty rate. A fourth is enormous pressure on the country's social assistance programmes and already besieged health care services. A fifth is large increases in the cost of housing, especially in Canada's urban areas. Finally, there is very serious environmental damage.
In other words, the misery the CBC has helped to create on the 364 non-Foodbank days of the year makes the $500,000 raised on its one Food Bank day seem insignificant.
Here are details on some of the connections the CBC has failed to make.
A few days before this year's CBC Foodbank Day, CBC News announced that child poverty in British Columbia was the highest in Canada. According to CBC News, 18.8 per cent of all children in B.C. were living in poverty. The national child poverty rate was 15 per cent. In actual numbers, about 156,000 British Columbia children were living in poverty in 2007, a year of economic good times. Obviously, the CBC should have asked what effect an uninterrupted high immigrant inflow was having on child poverty.
On the same day as the CBC Foodbank Day, CBC announced the newest Statistics Canada figures on job gains or losses. In November, Canada's economy had created almost 80,000 new jobs. This was a bright sign. However, when all the figures are put together, they reveal that Canada has had a 324,000 net job loss since October 2008. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Canadian-born and immigrants cannot find any work. Also, Canada's official unemployment rate hovers around 8.5%, although experts generally concede that Canada's real unemployment level is much higher. Unshaken by reality, however, Ottawa blithely continues to allow over 250,000 regular immigrants into Canada each year. In addition, it allows well over 200,000 Temporary Foreign Workers to work here each year. Clearly, the CBC should have demanded that Canada's immigration gatekeepers explain why Canada was bringing in so many people. Also, it should have asked whether this constant inflow was compounding the unemployment problem.
With Ottawa, it hasn't always been this way.
Connecting unemployment with immigration had been a tradition in Canada from the 1920's to 1990. Officially, Canada had what is described as a “Tap On—Tap Off” immigration policy. This meant that in times of very low unemployment, Canada raised immigration levels and in times of high unemployment, it lowered them. Evidence of this is clear on a graph of Canada's immigration levels. Clearly, the CBC should have been asking why Canada does not have this policy now.
As some Canadians know, the “Tap On—Tap Off” tradition ended in 1990 when Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall convinced her Progressive Conservative colleagues to make immigration serve her party's ambitions. When her party took power in 1984, Canada's immigration levels were around 85,000 per year. This was because former Prime Minister Trudeau's government had turned the immigration tap down in the recession of the early 1980's. In speaking to her colleagues, Ms. McDougall argued that the Liberal Party had been capturing the immigrant vote. According to her, if the Progressive Conservatives were to increase immigration to 240,000, they could get new immigrants' votes. How many CBC reporters or those in the private media are even aware of these facts?
Since McDougall's policy was implemented in 1990, Canada's yearly immigration intake has averaged over 240,000, despite the fact that Canada has experienced three serious economic downturns. It is a fact that all of Canada's political parties now compete with one another for the immigrant vote. Why have no CBC reporters ever questioned our political leaders about this clear perversion of immigration policy and the approval all political parties now give to this perversion?
Prime Minister Harper clearly demonstrated his own party's approval of abnormal current immigration in his recent visit to India. Although the intent of his trip was to promote new economic contacts with India, Mr. Harper devoted a significant part of his visit to India's Punjab and to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Most Canadians will ask : If economic benefits to Canada exist, what are they? Why haven't the CBC and other media asked the same thing?
These questions lead to a tale of intrigue. As many Canadians know, the Punjab is the birthplace of many of Canada's Sikhs, a group which has succeeded in asserting its political influence far beyond its numbers. Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien acknowledged Sikh influence by opening a Canadian consulate in the Punjab city of Chandigarh in 1997. This was generally regarded as a measure to make Sikh immigration easier. Since then, it is a fact that a Canadian consular official in Chandigarh has stated that the Chandigarh office is a hotbed of immigration fraud and that very little has been done to stop the fraud.
It is also a fact that many honest Sikhs have been genuinely embarrassed by the shameless abuse of Canada's immigration laws in the Punjab. They have reported the rampant fraud in Chandigarh, but have been systematically ignored by not just all political parties but also by the media. Why have the CBC and all but a few exceptions in the other media paid so little attention to the fraud? Why have they seen nothing but good coming to Canada because of mass immigration from India and other areas?
Most logical humans would conclude that if large numbers of people are being brought into a country and many of them cannot find jobs, then one should consider the possibility that the country's economy cannot absorb the new workers. However, in its typical partisan way, the CBC does not ask this question to Canada's politicians. Instead, it merely repeats the politicians' claims that provincial certification agencies are to blame. This is outrageous for two reasons. One is that only a small percentage of immigrants have verifiable qualifications. The other is that politicians who have approved the high immigrant intake could easily solve the “credentials” problem by dramatically cutting immigration, yet they divert attention from their own blunders. And the CBC and other media follow the red herrings.
Going even further into absurdity, the CBC has tried to present itself as a model employer and has convinced itself that it must respond to the immigration tsunami by going out of its way to hire visible minorities. As a result, the entire staff at the CBC has undergone a major racial transformation. Like McDougall's perversion of Canada's traditional immigration policy, this hiring is a significant and unjustified change of the CBC. The probable result will be that these new employees will join their current colleagues in making the CBC an even more insidious fifth column within Canada.
Hard as it may be to believe, it is a fact that one of CBC Vancouver's Monday to Friday radio programmes, The Early Edition, has taken CBC fifth column activity to the level of evangelization. It has a policy of broadcasting at least one immigration item every day. Without exception, these items portray immigration in an unrealistic, positive light. It is possible that the producer, the host and the reporters who appear on this programme are incorrigibly incompetent and unaware. It is also possible that CBC personnel who appear on other programmes in Vancouver and across the country and who do the same have similar faults. But it is more likely that a significant number are so ideologically committed to broadcasting outright deceit about the immigration issue that they suffer from self-inflicted blindness.
It seems that this has rendered them unaware that their advocacy of high immigration on 364 days of the year has helped to cause the high unemployment, child poverty and misery that they think are so shameful. By revealing that high immigration in a recession causes even higher unemployment, the CBC, as well as journalists in the private media, could have put pressure on Canada's politicians at all levels to reduce immigration.
Instead, the CBC and others have allowed these corrupt individuals to go unchallenged on all of the absurd claims they have made about immigration.
CBC Vancouver is now congratulating itself on raising over $500,000 for Foodbanks to serve the province's poor. But the fact is that the CBC's immigration policies will clearly perpetuate the conditions it says it wants to relieve.
It doesn't have to be this way.
