From rising to fallen star, Travis Dhanraj’s shocking allegations rattle CBC, delight its critics and put diversity initiatives in the spotlight
Plus! Why have media failed to “follow the money” when it comes to the NDP’s behaviour and self-destruction?
It is impossible to launch this week’s post without digging into how Travis Dhanraj’s high-profile and extremely juicy “resignation” last week rocked the CBC (which covered the story online professionally) and inflamed the nation’s journalism and political communities.
I’ll have plenty to say about the once rising star and host of CBCNN’s Canada Tonight and his allegations of bias, tokenism, gas-lighting and you-name-it in my regular media column for The Hub tomorrow. They have a free, three-month trial subscription on offer. Me? I bought a founding membership a couple of years ago because I like organizations that refuse to take government money and The Hub is among a handful of holdouts remaining.
Now, as for the matter at hand: Dhanraj terminated his employment - unwillingly, he says - with the Mother Corp last week while on suspension. As he did so he posted a letter detailing how he believed he had been pushed out for insisting on greater balance in the CBC’s coverage, particularly in terms of its willingness to present alternative and Conservative voices. He accuses CBC of “tokenism” and it’s easy to conclude that when it comes to “diversity” in media, some people running the shows may have a preference for one genre of BIPOC voice over others. In other words, their version of diversity is only skin deep and is more likely a ruse to curry political and social favour than it is a way to better represent the close to one in three Canadians whose heritage is African, Caribbean, South Asian, East Asian, Middle-Eastern, Latino or Indigenous and who - guess what? - hold a variety of opinions about everything. Just like white people! Imagine.
While by week’s end the Conservative party was demanding a Parliamentary committee hearing be held this summer, Dhanraj’s case will probably wind up in the courts where it could take close to a decade before the matter is settled. While human rights commissions sometimes move more swiftly, decisions there can also be appealed to a Court of King’s bench. And, salacious as the accusations are, one has to be open to the idea that CBC will present what it believes will be a compelling defence and will fight this one to the death.
We shall see. But in the meantime, one is reminded of the now quietly settled case made by former broadcaster Jamil Jivani, now the Conservative Member of Parliament for Bowmanville-Oshawa North. He filed suit in 2022 against Bellmedia for terminating his Jamil Jovani Show on Toronto’s Newstalk 1010 CFRB-AM.
As Jovani’s lawyer, Kathryn Marshall (who now also represents Dhanraj), put it at the time “in Bell’s mind he was checking this token box, and when they realized they weren’t getting the kind of Black man they wanted, that’s when he was out the door,”
Should Dhanraj’s argument of a similar nature be upheld and a pattern of management exposed within Canada’s media that involves the mostly white people deciding that it is they who approve what Black, brown, Indigenous and other racial minorities should believe or that they only hold opinions at their pleasure … oof! It would be clear then that too many of the people running Canada’s newsrooms know nothing of and have no respect for non-white people as anything other than a box to tick in signalling their claim to progressive virtues while keeping their vanilla grip on the reins of power.
Hopefully, that’s not the case. The irony would be epic.
We will have more, much more, in the weeks and months ahead on this unless the CBC decides to write a very large cheque and make it all go away quickly. In the meantime, enjoy this thread put together by cbcwatcher on X from Marshall’s interview with Candice Malcolm.
One of the great under-reported stories of the past five, if not 10 years, has been the NDP’s financial situation.
Conceived in the hey day of the social gospel movement as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and once the party of the nation’s working men and women, the NDP inexplicably became the party of the faculty lounge and Hamas. Plus, the farther former prime minister Justin Trudeau moved the Liberals to the left, the less room there was for the NDP. But the big issue in my mind in recent years was that following the 2019 and then the 2021 election the party was essentially broke.
So if you “follow the money” the way journalists are supposed to, it leads one to conclude that the NDP’s supply and confidence agreement propping up the minority Liberals had a lot more to do with the fact the party was $22 million in debt and was financially incapable of campaigning than it did any desire on the part of their former leader, Jagmeet Singh, to qualify for a pension. The guy, after all, wears a Rolex and drives a Maserati.
Now that the party has been reduced to seven MPs and no longer qualifies for the financial benefits that go with official party status. The Globe and Mail’s Konrad Yakabuski casually noted that the NDP is teetering on the brink of insolvency. It was left to Substacker Fred DeLorey to really get into it.
“The NDP appears to be millions of dollars short on paying back its national campaign loan and there may be no obvious way out,” he wrote. Here’s the link; I recommend reading it and remain puzzled as to why the Parliamentary Press Gallery has rarely shown interest in a story that has had huge influence on the nation’s politics and will likely continue to do so. After all, now that Prime Minister Mark Carney has done or promised to do 80 per cent of the horrible things people who voted for him feared the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre would do, where do Canadians who lean to the left - and there are a lot of them - find a home? Seems like a story to me. And thank God for the internet where stories the popular kids refuse to cover, get covered.
There is concern within the Jewish community that CBC is preparing what its critics fear will be “another hit piece” by the Fifth Estate as a result of a planned trip to Israel by Ioanna Roumeliotis. The word is out that the report will work to “out” Canadian organizations and communities that back business and other organizations in Israel. I don’t know if that is the case. I only know that is the concern.
People of the Book are also warning each other that, if interviewed by the CBC, they should make sure they make their own recordings of the conversation, which is always good advice.
Last week’s posts are now open to comments from everyone.
(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)
One of the best suggestions on what to do with the CBC (other than shuttering it, which still tops my list) was to move its Toronto headquarters to Winnipeg (or, better yet, Regina or Saskatoon), far away from the Hogtown influences that have seen its drift into the despotic world of cultural and political Marxism.
Having lived much of my life in many mid-sized cities and towns throughout Western Canada and the Arctic, the one common thread they share is the steady decline or outright absence of news media within them, its inhabitants in need of information on events that could use the discerning eye of a journalist to report events and distribute them. Instead, we are left relying on word of mouth, gossip, and rumors, much of it inaccurate or skewed - just like, well, as what continues to come out the CBC these days.
The very organization originally created to fill the rural void, its latest mandate to "provide radio and television services incorporating a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains," is so far from what it is actually supposed to do as it continues its slide into irrelevance, propped up by the billions that it takes from the millions looking elsewhere for information, enlightenment, and entertainment.
The bigger cities have plenty of media sources to choose from, all doing very well on their own, without the state broadcaster trying to inject itself into that highly competitive mix. Perhaps a return to its original roots might be the antidote it needs, filling a void that, like them,vhas far too long continued to drift.
Wishful thing, I suppose. Life, after all, is pretty comfortable in Toronto for the CBC's bureaucratic elite. No point in charting a new course that would allow them to find a sense of relevance in parts of the country where the audiences can't even be bothered to tune into see or hear what they produce...
“ now that Prime Minister Mark Carney has done or promised to do 80 per cent of the horrible things people who voted for him feared the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre would do, where do Canadians who lean to the left - and there are a lot of them - find a home?”.
Which things has Carney done?
The carbon tax still sits there, today it’s zero but with a wave of his kingly staff it can be $200.
I see no project approvals, I see bill C-5 that once again leaves it to a wave of Carney’s kingly staff as to which projects he will over ride the law to allow to proceed. Is that democracy?
He has said he wouldn’t repeal all the awful investment killing laws the Liberals enacted in the last decade, all he has done is given himself the power to bypass them when HE chooses to do so.
Any pipeline company would be insane to go along with that as their approval is based on one man.
And the liberals are as full of batshit crazy climate/insane nonsense as they always were.
I’d rather you weren’t fooled as well Peter.
If he was serious he would repeal all the destructive laws and allow companies to decide what makes sense.
It might be one pipeline, it might be 3, it might be none.
Maybe the execrable Guillbeault is correct after all?