Shoe-store project

My daughter, in her fourth year of studies at the University of Guelph, tells me of a recent online forum held by her class on political scandal and corruption, something along the lines of media: "watch-dog or lap-dog" to government.  I was struck by the very clear images these two terms evoked.  Either the German shepherd of the people, or the chihuahua of elected officials.  Noble investigator of wrongs and vital component to democracy, or servile sell-out and disgrace to the name of true journalism.  Not hard to figure out which side one-time journalist and Pulitzer-prize winning American writer Ernest Hemingway would have chosen, or his admirable Canadian friend Morley Callaghan, journalist and short-story writer extraordinaire.

Which brings me to the latest piece of information unearthed by the Toronto Star through the Access to Information Act.  It has discovered that Stephen Harper has been planning for a year to create a special outlet to replace the National Press Gallery, one that would provide "'robust physical and information security measures to protect the prime minister and cabinet'"(CBC), one that could allow government to choose which journalists were present to ask questions of the government and to film its own footage of events.  It would basically control the media on all things related to government releases of information, and it would operate out of a former shoe-store on Sparks Street.

Okay, what country are we living in? What era?  Things are starting to sound more and more like the McCarthy era in the 1950's in the United States.  How long before the Access to Information Act itself is scrapped?

It's not just a difference of opinion we're talking about here, or a change in policy direction.  Those things are healthy for a democracy, the back-and-forth along the political spectrum, a corrective flow of  checks and balances.  No, this is different.  It's an out-and-out attack on the very foundations of who we are as a political society and what we know.

Forget about lap-dog; our media could soon become nothing more than a puppet on a shoe-string.