Just about everybody in Canada agrees with him, Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Culture Minister Lindsay Blackett. And that’s a scientific fact I report right here several times per month — and I’ll do it again today, below, with my latest Canadian 
TV viewership chart.
“I sit here as a government representative for film and television in the province of Alberta and I look at what we produce, and if we’re honest with ourselves.… I look at it and say ‘Why do I produce so much shit? Why do I fund so much crap?’”
So far so good. Truth is always good.
But then the Progressive part of the name of the party to which he belongs, the Progressive Conservative Party, creeps back in, as the article at the Edmonton Journal concludes:
Blackett also noted the provincial government is kicking more cash into script development in Alberta.
As normal, sensible people like conservatives (as opposed to “Tories” or Progressive Conservatives) all know, it is not a core function of government to fund “scripts”. For sitcoms and trash like Little Mosque on the Prairie, or all the other sh*t broadcast on the state-owned, $1.5 BILLION per year taxpayer funded CBC, including news and all their left-wing columnists’ and reporters’ opinion columns.
That CBC naturally also wrote the story up instantly because it speaks directly to their militants in the “artist” and “script-writer” platoons, whom they deploy every chance they get. (Progressives Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton naturally follow with their well-honed, finely scripted but terribly-acted albeit Gemini-Award-winning fake outrage.) The CBC story opened with this remark — a typical CBC half-truth:
Alberta Culture Minister Lindsay Blackett was back-pedaling Wednesday after his disparaging comments about the quality of Canadian television sparked an outcry.
The rest of that sentence about “an outcry”, which they inexplicably purposely left out, is “…only among the most left-wing, doctrinaire, ideological liberals and other progressives, who simply can’t face reality; while the rest of the country — representing 95% of the population — completely agreed with Blackett’s remarks.” Perhaps they can’t write long sentences at the CBC for lack of focus — or more likely “budget cuts” and “lack of funding” (wink!).
To the extent he was “back-pedaling”, as I understand it, he was backpedaling not because he wanted to dial-back the sentiment, but only because he worried his daughter shouldn’t hear him speak like that. To wit (again in the Journal —not the CBC):
Blackett said Wednesday he regrets his colourful language but not the sentiment he expressed…
… Blackett said he regretted using the “S word” because his children would be disappointed in him.
“I don’t usually swear in public, so that was wrong,” he said. “They’ll be chastising me when I get home tomorrow.”
And as I present the latest Canadian TV-watching chart, here’s another good — which is to say truthful, if massively understated — line from Blackett:
“Why do the broadcasters not pick up more Canadian content? Because the Canadian content isn’t what it should be.”
Canadian Viewing Habits
Once again, as always, the chart shows that Canadians vastly reject Canadian-made shows, even after countless tens or hundreds of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars have been wasted creating them with government funding and the ubiquitous and contemptible 
logo over the years. They choose instead American-made shows, all of them made by private enterprise, none made with taxpayer cash. And as always, almost without exception, the state-owned CBC figures in the chart only when they’re showing hockey games. In addition, to the extent there are any Canadian-made shows, Canadians almost exclusively choose news programs on the citizen-owned, private sector CTV or Global networks.
May 31 – June 6 2010, national viewership, ages 2+
Copyright BBM Canada
Graphically reconfigured by PTBC
…and the progressives want to increase Canadian taxpayer funding of “scripts”?
Progressives continue to imagine that they can manufacture or social-engineer a “Canadian Culture” to their liking, using government and government policies and programs and government central planning committees and groups, and of course vast amounts of taxpayer cash, to do it. And progressives believe that Canadians are incapable — too stupid perhaps — to create their own culture, organically, on their own. Or perhaps they also believe that we’ll do it wrong.
Well they’re wrong. They’re stupid.
Funding of entertainment and TV shows is not a core function of government. And in any case it has obviously and predictably failed miserably. And just as obviously, in a free and democratic country like Canada full of viable and desirable alternatives, state-owned or state-run media should be banned, and that limit on government should among the many others that should be enshrined in our constitution.
Hat tip to Randy B.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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