Magna Carta Canada: some preliminary thoughts

Did you know that the Magna Carta is coming to Canada in 2015?  Yes, a non-profit organization known as Magna Carta Canada (not Canada’s Ministry of Heritage) is funding a tour (by donation!) of the Great Charter across Canada: Ottawa’s Parliament buildings, Toronto’s Fort York, Winnipeg’s Museum of Human Rights and Alberta’s Legislature in Edmonton. But not British Columbia.

The Magna Carta, signed June 15, 1215, when King John was forced by his English Barons, espouses clear notions of constitutional liberty and the idea that “no one is above the law”. The Great Charter is at the root of the origins of the English constitution, the Canadian constitution, 51 other member states of the Commonwealth, and the U.S. Constitution.  We are not talking about John Lennon’s tooth here. And it is a considerable failure of the “Harper government” that the Great Charter does not travel across more of Canada on the occasion of its 8^th centenary anniversary.

We can blame Harper’s chief lieutenant in B.C., former “Heritage” Minister, James Moore, who of course is also responsible for stabbing CBC in the back, commercializing Radio 2, and setting the network up for a series of massive cutbacks.  This is the same MP who now as Minister of Industry used public funds to pick fights with the Big Three cellphone companies only to concede defeat because he realized that he cannot brainwash all Canadians – or find another rival to the Canadian companies. Quite the legacy.

If so-called parliamentarians such as James Moore and Stephen Harper truly had the public interest at heart all Canadians would have a chance to see the Magna Carta.  However, one wonders what kind of spin the government would place on the reception of the Great Charter if the Ministry of Heritage were directly involved. As we all know, parliament ain’t what it used to be. Neither is Canada.  Cynical political calculation now reigns supreme, where everyone is considered an enemy (even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court). It’s Harper who needs King John's lessons from the Magna Carta, but our beloved Prime Minister is not only hiding from his responsibility to world heritage, he is hiding from us.

On the CBC and Civil Disobedience

Bill C-60 aims to give the “Harper Government” control of collective bargaining at CBC, Canada’s largest media organization and the nation’s public broadcaster, thereby undermining journalistic independence, or freedom of the press, simply put.  If the Bill goes through, then the CBC will no longer be operating at arm’s length from the government.  Pravda readily comes to mind, among other examples.

Here is what the American writer, thinker and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) would say to the folks at CBC, and to Canadians at large:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the last degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?  Why has every man a conscience then?  I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.  It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.  The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.  It is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.[1]

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[1][1] Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Joseph Wood Krutch (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 86.

Montesquieu on political liberty - and Harper

The French man of letters, Montesquieu, is best known for his famous work The Spirit of the Laws (1748), where he develops the idea that political liberty follows from the separation of powers – the legislative, executive and the judicial.  Montesquieu had studied and admired England’s mixed system of constitutional government – the Houses of Parliament, the Crown, the king’s minister (Walpole), and the respective checking of power.  His work had an enormous influence on the American founders of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, and he was referred to extensively in May 1789 at the Meeting of the Estates General, considered the start of the French Revolution.[1]  (His influence waned as the Revolution became more extreme). It is worth noting that Montesquieu dictated The Spirit of the Laws to any number of secretaries over 20 years as the author was becoming blind.  It was placed on the Pope’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1751

Here is an excerpt from Montesquieu’s text, and it has bearing on Harper’s Canada:

Democracy and aristocracy are not free states by their nature.  Political liberty is only found in moderate governments.  But it is not always in moderate states.  It is present only when power is not abused, but it has eternally been observed that any man who has power is led to abuse it; he continues until he finds limits.  Who would think of it!  Even virtue has need of limits.

     So that one cannot abuse power, power must check power by the arrangement of things. …[2]

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[1]Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu. Past Masters. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 111.

[2] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, eds.and trs. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 155 (Part 2, Book 11, Chapter 4).

CBC Freedom - or else

Once again the CBC is under attack.  This time it is worse than ever – and all Canadians should be concerned, regardless of (democratic) stripe.   Yet another omnibus bill has been introduced to the House of Commons, and in Budget Bill C-60 a sneaky provision has been added to give the Conservative government essential control of collective bargaining at the CBC.  In other words, Harper is converting our national “public” broadcaster into a “state” facility, adding to his ability to influence the news and its journalists. Our political ‘leader’ wants to be virtual ‘master’ of the CBC airwaves, bringing with him a heightened level of personal rule which is not often found in a modern Western democracy. The potential unity of thought will be profoundly debilitating to the nation.

In a nutshell, Canada is undergoing a revolution, one that is taking us back to the USSR.  The Puritan forefathers of Canada’s Conservative Party bear an uncanny historical resemblance to the Bolsheviks – both were radical ideologues and rather oppressive.  If the Canadian state takes control of the CBC it will fulfill Harper’s dream of ‘holy discipline’ familiar to Calvin’s Church.  Also of some inspiration to Harper are the Romans, and if only they had today’s broadcasting technology, for they too held to a ‘religion of order’.  Canadians cannot afford to be indifferent to the fate of the CBC, as Harper already controls the realm.

798 years ago, in the year 1215, King John signed the Magna Carta, and he was forced to do so, because English Barons challenged his centralization of power.  Essentially the document implied that the King was not above the law. Unfortunately, Harper does not see himself as a servant of the law (as represented by Parliament). And he has no sense of the people’s inherent rights, which is why he is tyrannical with the CBC. Borrowing from the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Harper can easily be described as having “perpetual and restless desire for power after power.”  And if we consider Plato, who says that “The measure of a man is what he does with power,” one finds ludicrous ‘leadership’ misguided by a puritanical sense of being ‘the elect’.  Certainly, we can all agree that the Prime Minister requires several degrees of restraint on the CBC, public or otherwise - and immediately so.

Joerge Dyrkton de silentio

Huguenot Resistance Theory in Sixteenth-Century France (continued)

The notion of a constitutional right of resistance first emerges from the French Religious Wars (1562-1598) but most notably after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 when perhaps 10,000 Protestants were chopped to pieces by Catholic mobs in as many as a dozen cities across France.[1]  The pope gave Mass in honour of the Catholic achievement, and France’s wily regent Catherine de’ Medici forever sealed her reputation. French Protestants (known as Huguenots) were forced to develop theories of resistance which can also be found in John Locke, a century later, leading some to think of his Two Treatises of Government as the “classic text” in this radical Calvinist tradition.[2]

Selected below are excerpts from two texts: François Hotman’s Francogallia (1573) and Theodore Beza’s Right of Magistrates (1574).  Looking to Francogallia we see the clear influence of Cicero (long the detractor of Julius Caesar) and of St. Augustine, with an appeal to moderation – and representative intermediaries – hidden in the concept of the Trinity: “three marks of tyranny”, “Assembly of the Three Estates”, “three simple types …”, “a third component”, “mixture of three elements”.  Resistance is not about popular revolution; rather it is guided by representative institutions, where a “triple form of commonwealth” is shared in the interest of “balance and fairness”.[3]

    

Looking to Beza’s Right of Magistrates, we see the emergence of a “political theory of revolution”[4] that recognizes popular sovereignty, only as guided by lower magistrates or legislators, while restricting any individual person or  the people considered as a whole from taking initiative.[5]   These notions are carried forward in Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579), (see my blog).   Huguenot resistance theory is also significant to today’s readers because it carves out notions of a “public space”, something which the Genevan tradition in Calvinism (which one finds in the Conservative Party of Canada) has great trouble recognizing (again, see my blog).  Needless to say, Huguenot resistance theory - and its historic context - has great relevance to the bloodbaths in today's Syria.

François Hotman, Francogallia (1573)

Chapter X: The form in which the kingdom of Francogallia was constituted.

Now that these matters have been briefly taken up, we should next explain the form in which the kingdom of Francogallia was constituted.  We have already shown that the people reserved to itself supreme power not only to make but also to remove a king.  This is clearly the form of rule that our Gauls had before they were subjected to the power of the Romans, since the people, as Caesar says, had no less dominion and power over the king than the king had over the people.  But it is likely that our Franks derived this form of constitution not from the Gauls but from their fellow Germans, of whom Tacitus, in his book on the customs of the Germans, writes: “The power of their kings was not unlimited and free.” …[6]

The constitution of this kingdom then is the one which the ancient philosophers – including Plato and Aristotle, whom Polybius followed – declared to be the best and most excellent, a constitution, namely, which is a blend and mixture of all three simple types: the royal, the aristocratic, and the popular; which is the form of commonwealth that that Cicero rated above all the others in his On the Commonwealth. For since royal and popular dominion are antithetical by nature, a third component should be introduced which is between them and common to them both, and this is the nobility, or leading men, who approach royal dignity by the antiquity and splendour of their race and yet, because of their vassalage or, more colloquially, subjection, are not too distant from the commoners.  For, together with the commoners, they acknowledge one and the same person as magistrate of the entire people.  This noble moderation in a commonwealth has been praised by Cicero in a striking passage based on Plato’s Republic, and because of its unusual elegance we shall repeat it here: “With lutes and pipes and with singing and voices a certain adjustment of distinct sounds is needed which, if altered or discordant, is unbearable to trained ears; and this attunement, achieved by moderation of very dissimilar voices, creates harmony and congruence.  Similarly, the highest, lowest and intermediate orders of a commonwealth join, like sounds, in a consensus of highly dissimilar elements, when the principle of moderation is applied.  And what musicians call harmony in singing is called concord in a commonwealth, and it is the best and strongest bond of safety, which, without justice, cannot possibly exist.” (On the Commonwealth, II, xlii, 69). …[7]

In view of all of this, and since this, I say, has always been the practice of all peoples and nations that have known royal and not tyrannical power, it is completely evident that this splendid liberty of holding public councils is part of the common law of peoples, and that kings who scheme to suppress this sacred liberty are violators of the law of peoples and enemies of human society, and are to be regarded not as kings but tyrants.[8]  ….

Appendix to the Third Edition of Francogallia, 1586

Chapter XXV: The king of France does not have unlimited dominion in his kingdom but is circumscribed by settled and specific law.

It has been sufficiently demonstrated, we believe, that the kings of France have not been granted unmeasured and unlimited power by their countrymen and cannot be considered absolute.  It has been shown, rather, that they our bound by definite laws and compacts, the first and most important of which is that they must hold the authority of the public council sacred and inviolate and call it into solemn session in their presence as often as the public interest demands.  But since the laws to which the king is bound are very numerous, we shall expound only those which none will question unless he has lost his reason or has become an enemy to his country, parents, and children.[9] …

Theodore Beza, Right of Magistrates (1574)

Chapter VII.  What remedies are available if a tyrant prevents the states from meeting?

This is my opinion, then, on the rights of subjects of various degrees against a sovereign who has become a notorious tyrant.  But there is still another question of no slight difficulty.  What is to be done if tyranny has become so entrenched that action by the Estates is difficult to obtain owing to the connivance, fear, or wickedness of the majority of the leaders? To private persons, who have not been authorized either by the lesser magistrates or by the more sober part of the Estates (about which I shall speak directly), my answer is that they have no other remedy but penitence and patience joined with prayers, which God will not disdain and without which any other remedy, no matter how lawful it may be, involves the danger of God’s curse.  But this does not prevent private persons from going to the lesser magistrates and asking them to do their duty.  And when the lesser magistrates, or the more sober part of them, enlist the aid of private persons, the duty of the latter to God and to their country is clear from what has gone before.  As for the lesser magistrates, it is for them to join together and press for a convocation of the Estates, while defending themselves against flagrant tyranny insofar as they can and to the extent they should.  Finally, it is the duty of each estate to seek a common and lawful assembly – one in which the wicked will not obstruct the good, nor the cowardly hold back the zealous, nor the majority restrain the men of better judgement.  Moreover, I say that, in an emergency like this, it is the obligation of private citizens to follow the lesser magistrates, which is the duty of the subject, and that it is even permissible for the more sober part of them to seek aid from foreigners, if need be, especially from friends and allies of the kingdom.[10]

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[1] Robert M. Kingdon “Calvinism and resistance theory” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, ed. J.H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 207.

[2] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations  of Modern Political Thought, Vol. II: The Age of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 239.  See John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke. An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[3] Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws.  Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. James E.G. Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 46.

[4] Skinner, Foundations, p. 338.

[5] Ibid., pp. 338,339.  Emphasis in the original.

[6] Julian H. Franklin, ed. and tr. Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beta,& Mornay (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 65.

[7] Ibid., pp. 66,67.

[8] Ibid., p.  70.

[9] Ibid., p. 90.

[10] Ibid., pp. 129,130.

James Moore (Stephen Harper) and the CBC

Hon. James Moore
Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam, B.C.
House of Commons
Ottawa

Dear James Moore, MP[i]
Minister of Heritage

I am writing to express my dissent with your government’s decision to slash the CBC budget by $115 million, a reduction by 10% of its annual funding.  It is clear you have trouble keeping your word longer than six months after an election.  This is reminiscent of Maurice Barrès, the French novelist and rather right-wing political figure, who explained about a century ago: “The politician is an acrobat.  He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does.”

The other problem is that Conservative members of Parliament resemble public persons carrying out private aims.  We see this when, in the name of an earlier “economic stimulus,” $26 million were doled out to a dozen (private) evangelical colleges and universities.  Given their private interests, our “public” representatives anticipate exoneration from their “public” responsibilities and their “public” statements, and hence the CBC (where church and state are not in collusion) becomes victim to spurious calls for fiscal efficiency.

And do look out for the efficiency you want.  By turning it into a primary objective, you actually end up destroying efficiency, because you callously eliminate the processes of cooperation and agreement, essential “public” notions.  As goes the voter subsidy, so goes the CBC: they are both vital ingredients to a public life of inclusion, justice and fairness.  Our elected, “public” representatives are busying themselves with the elimination of things “public” (and quite possibly Canadian) in the name of a market mantra that is supposed to further competition.  As an active Minister of Disinheritage, you - along with the rest of the “Harper Government” - might get Canadians running on time (say, until they are 67), but what is an ideology of market efficiency becomes, in effect, a national deficiency.  What was considered effective becomes patently defective.

As Minister-who-is-supposed-to-know-something-about-heritage allow me to close with a rebuttal by the Huguenot thinker François Hotman, writing in 1573, who, in his historic resistance, establishes the idea of a “public” interest worth defending, including the likes of the CBC: “The royal patrimony, or domain, furnishes a clear example.  Kings have no right to alienate it except for great and necessary reasons, and those reasons have to be examined and approved by his council and by his Courts of Parliament and of Accounts.  This examination is conducted so carefully and with such tenacity and so much discussion that very few people request alienations of this sort.”

In other words, do you still want to be known as the Minister of Heritage – or as the ideologue helping to destroy the CBC?  Are you actually with the public – or against it?

Yours sincerely,
Joerge Dyrkton, D.Phil.

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[i] Variations of this letter have previously been published as a Letter to the Editor of the Coquitlam Now and/or emailed to MP Moore.

Puritanism on Culture and the CBC: Max Weber decodes James Moore and Stephen Harper in 1904

Its attitude [Puritanism] was thus suspicious and often hostile to the aspects of culture without any religious value. …

Although we cannot here enter upon a discussion of the influence of Puritanism in all … directions, we should call attention to the fact that the toleration of pleasure in cultural goods, which contributed to purely aesthetic or athletic enjoyment, certainly ran up against one characteristic limitation: they must not cost anything.[1]

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[1] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958), pp. 168, 170.  This work first appeared in German in 1904-05.

Reasons to protect the CBC - the case as put in 1579

Here is a look at the text of Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, a French Calvinist work written in 1579 during the period of that nation’s Wars of Religion.  It was published pseudonymously, and the authorship is still something of a mystery. The work was translated fully into English from the original Latin and French in 1648 a year before King Charles I lost his head, and it reappeared again in 1689 on the occasion of the Glorious Revolution, when absolutism apparently ended.  Generally it can be considered a work of “reform”.  The following section asks whether the “king” is the “proprietary lord ... of the public domain”, and it explains why we should keep the modern-day CBC:

So what? Just because someone has made you a shepherd for the sake of the flock, did he hand over that flock to be skinned, sold off piecemeal, driven, and plundered at your pleasure?  And because the people has constituted you as duke or judge of some city or region, has it empowered you to alienate, sell, or ruin that city or region?  Since the people would be alienated together with the region, did it therefore give you authority in order for you to pull it apart, prostitute it, and to dispose of it to whomsoever you wished?  Then again, is the royal dignity a possession, or is it rather a function?  If it is a function, what does it have in common with property?  But if it is a possession, is it not at least of the type whereby the people – by whom it is handed over – retains the property to itself in perpetuity.  And finally, if the patrimony of the fisc – that is, the domain – is truly called the dowry of the commonwealth, and, indeed, a dowry at the piecemeal dismantling and ruination of which the commonwealth itself, the kingdom, and eventually the king himself perish, then by what law will it be licit to alienate that dowry?[1] ...

Consequently, if an owner who is squandering his own resources is consigned to agnates or other relatives by public authority and forced to keep his hands off his own things, it is clearly much more equitable that a curator of the commonwealth who diverts public resources to the public ruin, or who completely overturns them, could be deprived of all administration by those whose concern and office this is, if he failed to desist after a reproof.

It is easily shown that in all legitimate realms the king is not the proprietary lord of the royal patrimony.[2]

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[1]Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince, ed. and tr. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 113,114.

[2] Ibid., p. 119.

I

"The Culture of Fear" and Related Thoughts: Excerpts, Questions and Answers

QUESTION: How bad is crime in Canada?

“Half of Toronto’s population now consists of those born outside of Canada; notably, the city’s crime rate has dropped by 50 percent since 1991, and is significantly lower than that of the country as a whole.”[1]

QUESTION: Given that newspapers offer "scarelines" instead of "headlines", are newscasts also to blame for our “culture of fear”?

“... between 1990 and 1998, when the nation’s  murder rate [U.S.A.] declined by 20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600 percent (not counting stories about O.J. Simpson).”[2]

“... people who watch a lot of TV are more likely than others to believe their neighbourhood are unsafe, to assume that crime rates are rising, and to overestimate their own odds of becoming a victim.  They also buy more locks, alarms, and – you guessed it – guns, in hopes of protecting themselves.”[3]

According to George Gerbner, Dean-emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, “They [people who watch a lot of TV]  may accept and even welcome repressive measures such as more jails, capital punishment, harsher sentences – measures that have never reduced crime but never fail to get votes – if that promises to relieve their anxieties.  That is the deeper dilemma of violence-laden television.”[4]

“In the nation’s largest cities, murder accounted for only.2 percent of all crimes, and in the suburbs of those cities, murder accounted for just .01 percent.  Yet not only are murder stories a staple of the coverage in those cities, accounting for 36 percent of the crimes reported on the TV news, the newscasts warned suburban viewers that crime was moving to their areas.[5]

QUESTION: What is the relationship between broadcasting competition and the “culture of fear”?

“Crime stories are a cost-effective way to capture an audience.  The more vulnerable the viewing public is made to feel, the more essential the role of the local newscaster as a neighbour who ‘sounds the alarm for collective defense.’”[6]

QUESTION: If the Harper Government hacks away at public funding for the CBC, will that mean we have even more crime stories in the news, more public anxieties and less public reasoning (even though actual crime continues to decrease) ... and more jails again?

QUESTIONS : Does not the increase  in the number of jails, punishments and “crime bills“ represent  an increase in the violence of the State?  Is this not comparable to the violence of the State during the G20 Summit in Toronto?

“In its most elementary and at the same time indomitable form, the violence of the State is the violence of a penal character.”[7]

QUESTION:  Have we as a society returned to nineteenth-century, Darwinian notions of “survival of the fittest”?

“War is and must remain for us a cataclysm, the outbreak of chaos, the return, in the external relations between States, to the struggle for life.”[8]

QUESTION:  Since 9/11 do we have repeated  ‘failures of the sovereign’ as Michael Ignatieff recently suggested in a Globe and Mail article?[9]

We have seen the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and now War in Libya.  In all of these instances men (and women) surrendered themselves to a leader, a sovereign.  We have also seen gross incompetence, but they were not failures of the sovereign; rather, we see how violent the sovereign can get, especially when aided by public intellectuals.

QUESTION (and another corrective to Michael Ignatieff):  Is Texas Governor and Tea Party presidential hopeful Rick Perry, who wants to see “Washington irrelevant,” not a Marxist dictator of the proletariat who actually wants the “withering away of the State”?

QUESTION: As an Economist, Mr. Harper’s training is supra-national in perspective (economics is considered a human science): Does Mr. Harper really have Canada’s interests at heart? Is Mr. Harper a prime minister without a country?

ANSWER:  Look to Mr. Harper’s Australian ghost writers (sending our lads to war), and a rotten case of indigestion.

ANSWER:  Look to the newly-minted “Royal” Canadian Forces.  Is the Queen not head of many Commonwealth Countries?

 ANSWER:  Look to the “Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement” (CETA), where negotiations are held outside of the purview of the public.  Does not democracy involve open discussion, Mr Harper?

ANSWER: Look to British prime minister David Cameron addressing Canada’s Parliament, fresh from the war in Libya – the only coalition leader ever to be honoured by Stephen Harper.

QUESTION: What is Canada’s problem?

ANSWER: “...the central problem of politics is freedom: whether the State founds freedom by means of its rationality, or whether freedom limits the passions of power through its resistance.”[10]

QUESTION: How are Canadians best able to express freedom and resistance to excessive “State” power?

ANSWER:  “I am free in so far as I am political.”[11]

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[1] Rachel Giese, “Arrival of the Fittest: Canada’s crime rate is dropping as immigration increases.  Is there a connection?” The Walrus, Vol. 8, No. 5 (June 2011), p. 30.

[2] Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 2009),  p. xxix..

[3] Glassner, Culture of Fear, pp. 44,45

[4] Glassner, Culture of Fear, p. 45

[5] Glassner, Culture of Fear, p. 230

[6] Glassner, Culture of Fear, pp. 230,231.

[7] Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, tr. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 234.

[8] Ricoeur, History and Truth, 243. Emphasis added.

[9] Michael Ignatieff, “The Wrong Lessons,” The Globe and Mail, Focus Section, Saturday September 10, 2011, pp.1,2.

[10] Ricoeur, History and Truth, p. 270. Emphasis added.

[11] Ricoeur, History and Truth, p. 258.

"I Love CBC" Petition - Let's Keep Our Public Broadcaster Public (Please Sign Below)

On November 23, 2010, Dean Del Mastro, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, publicly mused about cutting all funding to the CBC. His exact words were: "Maybe it's time we get out of the broadcasting business ... The $1.1 billion, plus a whole bunch of other stuff that we're investing into the public broadcaster, should we look at reorganizing that in some fashion?"

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting provides this petition with help from The Walrus, Canada's pre-eminent magazine.

Thank you for your attention.