COLUMN: Levant – Moore must be booted from Heritage

Moore can’t face Hard questions: Heritage minister should resign after vicious, personal attack on Sun Media and its president

by Ezra Levant
Should the Canadian government use your tax dollars to get into the online pornography business?
There really is only one way to answer that question. Which is why the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation never asked permission — they just went ahead and did it.
With your money.
CBC has a French website called tou.tv. They paid French pornographers for a series, called Hard, that they are streaming over the Internet on overnight service.
Anyone born of a mother cannot object to people having sex. And being a French porn star is a more reputable occupation than many other jobs in France, such as being the ambassador to the United Nations.
And those who believe in personal freedom generally shouldn’t censor pornography on the Internet. Legend has it, that’s what motivated Al Gore to invent the Internet in the first place.
But there are millions of porn websites on the Internet already, according to a good friend of mine. Why is the government of Canada spending tax money to add one more?
We don’t even know how much it costs, because the CBC says that’s a “journalistic secret.”
That’s the CBC for you. It’s like the Lord of the Flies over there — no grown-up supervision. They’re a bunch of unionized, overpaid civil servants who like porn and don’t want to tell the rest of us how much we’re paying for it.
But what about James Moore? He’s the heritage minister, who is supposed to be responsible for the CBC.
Sun Media’s Kris Sims asked him about the porn series. But instead of taking responsibility for the CBC and the
$1.1 billion a year in tax money he gives them, Moore turned on Sims for daring to ask him such a question, saying she was trying to drive up public anger against the CBC.
But it’s the job of independent journalists to hold the government to account for spending — and that includes the black hole called the CBC.
If Internet porn is really what the state broadcaster has descended to then, yeah, it’s an excellent question to ask the minister who’s funding it.
Moore could have said, “I don’t interfere with CBC decisions.”
Which would respect their independence but fail to give taxpayers accountability. Or he could have said, “That’s outrageous, I’ll stop it.” In which case he’d be accused of meddling.
That’s the problem with having a government broadcaster, it doesn’t really work.
So it’s no wonder that Moore lashed out at Sims.
But then he went further — implying that the CBC pornography is no worse than bikini-clad SUNshine girls. That’s nuts. SUNshine girls wear swimsuits.
They aren’t photographed having X-rated sex. And even if they were, the Sun isn’t propped up with tax dollars.
But then Moore really blew his stack. According to Sims, Moore implied the entire Sun News Network was not a real broadcaster, but a sham — just a tool used by our owner, Pierre Karl Peladeau, to attack his rivals.
That’s not just a baseless personal attack on a great media entrepreneur like Peladeau. It’s also a slap in the face of the 100 people who work at Sun News, and have made it the most successful TV news start-up in Canada in more than a decade. It’s also a slap in the face to our countless viewers and supporters across Canada.
Not to mention our advertisers and other business partners.
If Moore was some nobody, his conspiracy theories and insults wouldn’t matter. But he’s the minister in charge of TV stations — for example, he appoints the government regulators, called the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. And he decides how much tax money will be lavished on the CBC. He controls the fate of TV stations, including Quebecor’s.
Moore’s defence of the CBC porn shows bad judgment. But his vicious, personal attack on the Sun and our president mean he must immediately resign — or at the very least, recuse himself from any decisions affecting Quebecor and the Sun News Network that he so passionately hates.