Self Importance at the CBC

I'm not surprised at all to find out that the CBC has been blowing tax payer funded money on luxuries.

CBC's ritzy retreats

CBC's top executives spent more than $60,000 over six months holding meetings in luxury hotels and resorts and expensing such items as sparkling wine and limousine rides.

Documents released under Access to Information show the CBC spent at least $61,500 on nine meetings between January and June 2006.

The meetings were held according to CBC/Radio-Canada guidelines, CBC spokesman Marco Dube wrote in an e-mail. When face-to-face meetings are required, "off-site meetings are usually better to avoid disruptions."

Stays in expensive resorts topped the bill. More than $21,600 was spent sending 21 CBC and Radio-Canada human resources managers and senior executives to the ritzy Chateau Beauvallon in Mont-Tremblant, Que., for two days. The limo costs alone for one vice-president amounted to $1,009.94.

The sense of entitlement is ingrained in these people. They need a wake up call.

Hat tip: Pat who says: Another reason to hate the CBC.

Iggy Not Reading the Liberal Playbook

Whoops, Michael Ignatieff thinks we ought to raise taxes:

Federal taxes will have to rise to pay off Canada's burgeoning deficit, but not at the expense of economic recovery, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said Tuesday.

The Conservative Party quickly jumped on Mr. Ignatieff's comments, highlighting them at the top of their website.

“We will have to raise taxes,” but not at the expense of hurting the recovery from this recession, Mr. Ignatieff, on a four-day tour of Southwestern Ontario, told a meeting of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce.

“An honest politician” cannot exclude a tax hike as an option, Mr. Ignatieff said in response to a question from Cambridge, Ont., business leader John Bell, who wanted to known when the federal debt will be paid back.

The Liberal playbook says you promise to lower taxes, then wait until after you are elected to raise them. Silly boy.

The back peddling started pretty quickly though:

Michael O'Shaughnessy, Mr. Ignatieff's press secretary, said later that the party has “no plan and no desire to raise taxes” in a recession.

Hat tip: Pat

Here's the Deal: Pay Even More Money for Something You Don't Watch

York University professor Wayne Rowland thinks CBC should forget about running revenue generating commercials and popular shows. What's the catch?

If the CBC is to survive the shock-doctrine opportunism of federal Conservatives bent on either privatization or elimination of the public broadcaster, it needs to once and for all come to terms with the festering albatross that is commercial sponsorship on its television network.

(...)

Crunching the numbers in the most recent CBC annual report, it looks as though roughly a third of television's operating expenses are covered by ad revenue of just over $300 million. So, if CBC TV were to go advertising-free cold turkey, as it were, it would have to find internal savings of something like 30 per cent.

Without access to the corporate accounts one can only speculate on where that might come from, but a shortened broadcast schedule would lower plant costs, and dropping professional sports would take a big bite out of production costs.

Yeah, that's right. Drop hockey, the only thing anybody watches the CBC for.

But maybe cold turkey is not the only answer. Why should it be assumed that Canadians, who take such pride in that other defining institution, medicare, would not be willing to ante up a few more dollars a year to support an ad-free CBC TV service?

A few months ago French President Nicolas Sarkozy did away with prime-time advertising on the country's public television network: the annual cost per capita went from $65 to $77. In Britain, taxpayers fork out $124 a year for the cultural cornucopia that is the BBC. Canadians pay a measly $34 each for the CBC. Raise that by about $5 and we've covered the advertising shortfall.

If we can salvage CBC TV as a centre for innovative, uniquely Canadian programs of exceptional quality, then CBC Radio will have a secure future as well.

Sure, make it completely unwatchable and expect taxpayers to fork over more. This professor is so out of touch he doesn't want any regular people to have a say, not even as ratings. (Without commercials, who cares how many people are watching?)

It's even more outrageous from a political point of view, as the CBC has been the propaganda arm of the Liberal Party my entire life. Why should I be forced to pay for its upkeep? It's like the TASS News Agency from the old Soviet Union.

Also, it annoys me that they keep talking about CBC quality programming, as if it's a given. What quality programing have we seen so far? Perhaps on the radio, which I don't listen to, because I can't find any clear online outlet or podcasts. I do listen to NPR in that capacity everyday.

Hat tip: Pat

Is China Home for a Free Market, Libertarian American?

I enjoy this website from American "Lee" who has been living in China for a few years. He's a skilled tech guy who took a job in Beijing a few years ago for the hell of it. He's been blogging about it, and has had some hilarious posts. Today he notes that his contract is expiring in Beijing. He weighs his options at Lee in China:

Wow, it’s been a shitload of time since I wrote anything. It’s not that I’ve lost the passion for writing an online journal or anything, it’s just that everything I’ve been doing lately are things I’ve done in the past. I go to Russian clubs. I stay out until eight in the morning. I go to a doctor who will write me a prescription for anything I want. I get solicited by both hookers and Nigerian drug dealers in bars. Same old same old, life in Beijing.

(...)

Other than that I have some friends going with me to Hong Kong, so we’re going to party our balls off on Friday and Saturday nights down in Wanchai. Wish me luck. With California $42 billion in debt and our current president spending like there’s no fucking tomorrow the LAST country on the planet I want to move to right now is the United States.

Great place to visit but I sure as fuck don’t want to live there [America], at least not right now.

If you check out other posts, he lives well in China. He's a free market, libertarian guy and feels more comfortable over there.