StunTV *fakes the Oath*.

Last summer CBC producers started planning with communications staff at Citizenship and Immigration Canada an event that would be broadcast during the month of October.

The CBC broadcast an hour-long, full-fledged citizenship ceremony for 75 new Canadians that featured a studio audience, a bagpiper, a retired Mountie in his red serge and local dignitaries. That event, which was broadcast live a day after the Sun’s reaffirmation ceremony, had been planned with the department since the summer.

From here.

Quebecor's StunTV however, took a different tack with CONtempt Party hacks in Kenney's office.

Documents released to The Canadian Press under access-to-information legislation show that just a few weeks before Canada's Citizenship Week last October, Mr. Kenney's staff directed departmental officials to add a last-minute citizenship ceremony at the network to their list of scheduled events.

Bureaucrats scrambled to work out the logistics, suggesting to the minister's office that Sun News could cover one of the 13 scheduled ceremonies in Ontario — four of them in Toronto, including one at the Air Canada Centre.

One senior bureaucrat at the registrar of Canadian citizenship expressed concern to Mr. Kenney's office that Sun News seemed to want to feature “only” the oath, which might short-change new Canadians from the full ceremony experience. [...]

When a bureaucrat sent Sun News a list of possible citizenship ceremonies to cover in Ontario, a network employee suggested another scenario.

“Let's do it. We can fake the Oath,” reads an email from [name blacked out of the document] at sunmedia.ca email address [...]

So instead of sending out a camera crew and *real* journalists to cover an actual citizenship ceremony, StunTV insisted on staging a ridiculous, trumped-up cheap facsimile in their studio.

The kicker though, is this:

[Minister] Kenney has emphasized the solemnity of the act of citizenship, recently moving to force Muslim women who wear burkas or niqabs to reveal their faces.

“Finally we are ensuring that the citizenship oath itself is properly respected by all of those who take it so that they in taking a solemn commitment, being a witness publicly to the rest of their fellow citizens, demonstrate who they are and their commitment to Canada,” Mr. Kenney said last December.

One staff member from Mr. Kenney's office who appeared in the email chain about the event requested their name be blacked out before release under the Access to Information Act.

Grand merci to @a_picazo who tweeted this and this.

UPDATE: Quebec columnist Patrick Lagacé is no longer gobsmacked by StunTV fakery and calls it what it is: Con propaganda. As he points out, if StunTV only acknowledged that what it broadcasts is *infotainment* as their boss PK Péladeau freely admits, and not "Hard news, straight talk" as it's claimed.

He also directs a poke at Levant's brand of faux-journalism, which confuses staged *reality* with ethics.

Contemptuous Cuts

Funny priorities those Cons have.

Over at Jason Kenney's ministry For Keeping Heathens And Scary Dusky-Skinned Folks Out Of Canada, approximately 1,000,000 applications for residency are stuck in backlog limbo. But MinJKenney is queening around the country, claiming the backlog was caused by the Liberals - or implicitely, civil servants working inefficiently under Lib government, but who are now up to speed in spite of staff cuts because the Cons are better taskmasters.

Their lies never end, do they?

Thus Diane Finley follows suit, using her ministry to slash programs that benefit Dusky-Skinned Folks In Canada Who Aren't Dead Yet, also known as Aboriginal and First Nations citizens.

[...] Human Resources and Skills Development [has cut] $490,000 [in funding] to Wapikoni Mobile.

Over the past seven years, this non-profit organization has included the participation of over 2,000 aboriginal youth in 19 communities in Quebec and has helped them to produce over 600 films and musical productions. These productions have been seen all over the world and the producers have been awarded 40 national and international awards for their work.

From here.

So far nothing has appeared in the press or media in the rest of Canada. Le Devoir has been on the story and Radio-Canada has interviewed Manon Barbeau, the force behind this brilliant and successful program.

For the last eight years, an exceptional and pioneering media experience has given new means of expression and a sense of hope to aboriginal youth on reserves in Quebec.

The Wapikonimobile is a mobile video production unit – or rather three of them – travelling from community to community, providing video training and supervising the making of short films. For youngsters confronted with substance abuse, an epidemic of suicides and an almost complete lack of job prospects, this was an extraordinary opportunity, and they took advantage of it. Some 2000 of them learned production skills, and made some 450 films expressing their own realities. Some of those films had real cinematic qualities and were shown in festivals here and abroad.

But now, the federal Department of Human Resources has cancelled its half-million dollar grant, about half of the Wapikonimobile’s total budget– at a time when the production units should already have been on the road. Young people in numerous communities who have been looking forward to this experience for a whole year now find themselves without anything to do for the summer and without the means for expressing themselves. For what reason? Because, according to the minister, other projects offer better prospects for creating jobs and teaching skills.

Quebec’s excellent daily Le Devoir, which broke the Wapikonimobile story yesterday, has another story today (July 19th) revealing that the arts and the community and aboriginal sectors are hard hit by other little publicized Human Resources cutbacks as well. This is surely a sign of where things are going under the majority conservative government.

From here.

Write to Contempt Party Minister Diane Finley. Keep it polite. Be supportive of the program. Explain why you want your tax money to support Wapikoni Mobile and ^NOT the distribution of bibles to schools on reserves.

Oh. Wait. Perhaps you shouldn't mention that last bit. It may not be strategic.

Grand merci to Karyn who located source material in English.

Like Iago, whispering poisonous words ...

MinJKenney and his minions marched across the landscape, accepting every invitation and attending every event in a multitude of ethnic communities in the GTA and the lower mainland of Vancouver. From here: [...] Kenney told the Star. “There were 32 Liberal MPs from the GTA, and of the hundreds of ethnocultural events I attended in the past five years going from Scarborough to Mississauga, typically there were no Liberals there [...]

That's how the Cons cajoled, wheedled and convinced small *c* conservatives of various ancestries that Liberals and NDP were profligates who would: wreck the economy, bring their small businesses to ruin and encourage their sons - and particularly, their daughters - to defy paternal authority.

Quite the feat. MinJKenney calls their culture "barbaric" in the new immigration guide, lets his sycophants shrieeek themselves hoarse over so-called "honour killings", reels them into the fold of the Contempt Party and brags about winning the "ethnic" vote.

Do you imagine the smear job on Layton in the last minutes of the electoral campaign was a last-ditch, desperate move? Think of the ways this item planted at Sun Infotainment would resonate with new Canadians who feel threatened by a secular environment, and its impact upon their traditionalist values. It was bullshit but it fed the seeds of fear that Min JKenney had planted.

The insight about these Con tactics comes from Lise Bissonnette, who observed how the Contempt Party read the cultural markers of the communities they wanted to capture, and exploited their fears to gather their votes. Events that appeared authoritarian and repulsive to progressive Canadians were actually reassuring for those communities. For example, the event involving Awish Aslam was no doubt horrifying for many traditional parents. They likely blamed Awish Aslam for what occured and approved of the manner the Cons handled the incident. In their communities, young women should not "defy" authorities and speak out in public, as she did.

Courageously, from my perspective, but then my generation cast off, decades ago, the diktats of a specific religious and social oppression.

The photograph above is from here. Worth checking out, as it appears this young woman was not flim-flammed by MinJKenney and his Con job.

Jason *Easy Access* Kenney (update)

At the start of the election campaign, DAMMIT JANET! started a meme about Con candidates. Remember this one, where we questioned Parm Gill's claims about processing visas and immigration applications? It's particulary relevant, given some applicants move quickly through the system while others are plagued by incomprehensible delays.

Well that issue has come back to bite MinJKenney on his big white ass.

We've also cast a critical eye on Kenney, notably for the religious ideological dogwhistle that keeps blowing in his vicinity.

And while we're on the topic of catholic fundamentalism, here's a story about Gay ... err, happy Paree and French RWNJ (right wing nut jobs) that'll bring a twinkle to your eye.

Close to the Pompidou Centre and just across from Saint-Merri church, a stylish and discreet "Love shop" could go unnoticed. But it provokes some Catholics who have decided to go to court to remove its sex toys from the neighbourhood.

Founded in 2004 [...] the Paris and Marseille-based stores offer accessories to "spice up your sex life, feed your fantasies and explore new sensations in a friendly, sexy and delicious way." Led primarily by women, the shops are designed so that one can enter without embarrassment [...].

The National Confederation of Catholic Family Associations (CNAFC) and the association Love and Family have filed complaints against the company in court because the shop is located 90 meters from the Saint-Merri elementary school.

Full Google translation here.

If Contempt party leader SHithead and his Cons get the majority he demands, you can expect catholic zealots will lobby MinJKenney to shut down small businesses such as the one belonging to the married couple who created We-Vibe and successfully marketed it around the world.

Update: No response yet from Auditor General (it's not clear she is the appropriate Parliamentary authority to accept the charge) regarding Ruby Dhalla's public request.

Un grand merci to impolitical who first posted the Mesley interview at her blog.