Ken Smith

CBC’s coverage of the 2026 U.S. midterms has gone far beyond standard or even in-depth foreign reporting and into outright distraction. Katie Simpson, Willy Lowry and Paul Hunter have turned their Two Blocks from the White House podcast into a near-weekly seminar on midterm maps, Senate math and “what a Democratic sweep means for Canada.” Cross Country Checkup has handed entire national call-in hours to the same topic. Matt Galloway flew The Current to Texas, and Kris Reyes has been on the ground in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley treating a single House race as a Canadian domestic story. This volume crowds out the issues that actually matter to Canadians right now The irony is thick. The U.S. midterms themselves are being driven by the economy, affordability and cost-of-living anger. CBC is covering that American economic discontent in exhaustive detail while ignoring or burying the parallel failures at home. Auditor General Karen Hogan’s recent reports slammed the Carney government on military ammunition stockpiles, public health emergency supplies, a dental-care program that blew past its budget by roughly $1.1 billion, and ongoing weaknesses in tracking money laundering. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has undercut Carney’s claims on balancing the operating budget, projecting the target will be missed and questioning the government’s shifting definitions of capital versus operating spending. These are concrete, documented failures of the current government. CBC’s airtime is instead consumed by American swing-district voters and Trump’s approval ratings The pattern looks coordinated. The PMO’s chief operating officer and senior adviser on Canada-U.S. relations is Maia Johnson, an American Democratic operative with prior roles on Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and Michael Bloomberg’s Hawkfish firm. She is the person charged with managing the day-to-day political and stakeholder operation around U.S. relations. CBC has never doe a serious story on this, shown her picture or asked about her security clearance. The sustained CBC emphasis on a potential Democratic “check” on Trump, the framing of every poll as a referendum, and the near-total displacement of domestic fiscal and accountability stories fit a playbook designed to keep older progressive Carney Boomer audiences fixated on Washington rather than on the AG and PBO findings landing with Canadians CBC can cover consequential U.S. elections. They do not need to airlift hosts, dedicate podcasts and open the national phone lines for weeks while soft-pedalling reports that show their preferred government failing on the exact economic and competence issues voters care about on both sides of the border. The result is not journalism. It is a sustained CBC distraction from domestic failures that serves the PMO

CBC’s Karina Roman is still running cover for Carney’s accounting trick She notes he “announced the government’s operational budget will be balanced a year early” (no plan for the capital side), flags that the PBO says interest on the debt is the government’s fastest-growing expense, then ends with the government’s preferred closer: “Still, the government says now is the time for ambition and that it will pay off in the end.” The “operating budget” is a new Carney invention. It lets Ottawa reclassify large amounts of spending, tax credits, and subsidies as “capital” (broader than other advanced countries or standard public accounting, per the PBO) so they can claim the day-to-day books are balancing while overall deficits stay huge and debt interest keeps climbing CBC treats the new vocabulary fiction as natural framing and gives the government’s spin the last word. That’s not reporting. That’s CBC stenography @karinaroman1 @brodiefenlon

At Issue buried this on YouTube because it undercuts the Carney narrative Coyne admits the obvious: “We’ve been down this road with regional development where we bribe companies to locate in particular locations and the jobs in the industry only stays for as long as the bribes keep coming. So it’s ultimately a no win type of industrial strategy.” Althia: governments hand money to companies for jobs, “and we’ve seen time and time again that the companies don’t actually live up to their obligations.” Canada’s industrial policy is bribery + lawsuits when the bribes fail. None of them mention the obvious: this Stelco spectacle might be whipping up the Carney Boomers, but it is scaring off actual investment that doesn’t need to be paid to stay Armchair panelists who’ve never signed a payroll or run a company, confidently explaining why the jobs left. Clownshow @carter_c @acoyne @althiaraj

What Carney promised to fix fast — and still hasn’t Carney promised free trade inside Canada by Canada Day, doubled housing starts toward 500k/year, fast major projects, US trade certainty, and a skilled workforce and 18 months later: * Interprovincial barriers & labour mobility still drag growth. Federal exceptions cleared and some goods mutual recognition done, but ~200 provincial ones remain. Workers still don’t move freely (easier in the EU). Hyder: “We’re still in our own way more than we need to be on provincial trade barriers… The fact that we still can’t move labour around in this country is really problematic. There’s easier movement in the European Union, 27 countries, than there is in Canada.” * Housing scale-up is nowhere near the promise. Build Canada Homes committed funding for ~19k affordable units; only ~2–2.3k under construction. Starts haven’t doubled; 500k target walked back. * Major projects and risk-averse bureaucracy. Special agencies (Major Projects Office, defence, housing) are short-term bypasses. Hyder: “We are just not a risk society. Our government is not a risk society. Our bureaucracies are punished for risk… Those [special agencies] are not sustainable in the long haul. At some point we need to have our full arsenal of government working.” * US trade certainty incomplete. No full deal. Focus on 232 tariffs with industry supports and diversification (e.g. UAE), but tariffs persist and USMCA review looms. Hyder: “If there were a mutually beneficial deal available, then there’s something that they can do… North America is putting the puck in its own net. We’ve got to get something done sooner rather than later.” * Workforce utilization and skills. Population growth near-flat. Credential recognition and deploying people already here remain slow—Hyder called this “job one” Announcements and money have moved; the structural fixes (true internal free trade, systemic speed, actual housing volume, stable trade rules) have not arrived at the “light speed” promised by Carney And the media continues to look the other way @goldyhyder

Full interview where CBC introduced Camosun instructor Daniel Reeve as a neutral political science expert to analyze BC’s new Conservative premier Lorne Doerkson. What they left out: Reeve is a former NDP candidate who worked as a ministerial aide under an NDP government Here’s the “non-partisan” analysis: He opens by calling Doerkson’s tone “humble” and “sincere,” then immediately undercuts the majority: more than half of voters didn’t support him, so the numbers “don’t quite back that up.” Classic framing of a Conservative win as less legitimate than the seat count On the campaign, he contrasts Eby’s Trump-focused pitch with the Conservatives actually talking about the deficit, emergency care, and the economy—implying the NDP missed the mark while the right read the room Then the money quote on Doerkson’s plan: they’ll walk through the budget, declare “it’s worse than we thought,” and impose “a whole bunch of cuts so that we don’t raise taxes and so that we don’t cut health care.” This, he says, is the message meant to “hold that center right to kind of far right coalition together and also kind of pin the problems of his government on the past.” He later describes Carney as closer to the NDP on fiscal questions, notes the provincial NDP had shifted toward the center, and flags energy/forestry expansion as creating problems with DRIPA and Indigenous consent. On the snap election, he relays an “NDP kind of leaning supporter” who refused to “walk across hot coals” to vote NDP, frames Eby’s call as “here’s the fire. Follow me,” and points to 200,000 previous NDP voters who stayed home All of it delivered as dispassionate academic insight from a former NDP candidate and government aide. Disclosure by CBC was apparently optional. This is not journalism @CBCOmbud

CBC quoted Lowan’s speech right up to the line that reveals the ideology—and then stopped In their election-night write-up, CBC reported: “We may have a small caucus, but tonight we have inherited an enormous responsibility, and that is to hold a majority Conservative government to account.” What she said next, according to the full transcript (and the video CBC itself posted):“We are the only party who is equipped to stand against the Conservatives and their existence.” That is not “holding a government to account.” That is declaring the victorious party’s existence illegitimate. It is the language of elimination, not opposition If a BC Conservative candidate had said the NDP or Greens needed to be opposed “and their existence,” it would have led every newscast, every panel, and every CBC segment for days. Instead, the line was edited out of the written coverage while the surrounding sentences were used to portray her as a responsible voice of accountability This is not an oversight. CBC has the full speech on their website. They chose which sentences to quote and which to bury. Meanwhile, hosts and panels continue to treat the BC Conservatives as uniquely dangerous while soft-pedaling a 26-year-old party leader who just framed an entire party’s existence as the problem to be solved Age is not a shield. “Movement building” is not a euphemism that erases the actual words. Selective quotation that stops one sentence before the most revealing line is not journalism—it is CBC narrative management The video is on CBC’s own site. The transcript is public. The CBC omission is the story @brodiefenlon

Bad media feedback loops turn ordinary protests into invented national threats. CBC and Justin Ling drove a clear example in 2022 CBC and Ling framed the Freedom Convoy as something darker from the start—organized extremism, foreign money, potential violence—often citing each other or unnamed sources. Ling’s reporting amplified claims of an arson plot (later cleared by police) and other threat narratives. CBC platformed this largely unchallenged. At the Public Order Emergency Commission, Justice Minister David Lametti testified that the government partly relied on CBC reports of foreign funding to help justify the Emergencies Act (“CBC reported… that there was foreign funding…”). Chrystia Freeland was also pressed on the early CBC donor claims. Those foreign-funding reports were debunked. The cycle closed: CBC and fellow media produced the alarm, officials treated it as intelligence, and media treated the official response as proof the alarm had been right This filtered down to the mundane. Empty or water-filled gas cans carried as protest after police seizures became evidence of a dangerous supply operation. A hot tub set up on a downtown street (alongside bouncy castles) was cast as the emblem of lawless occupation rather than a cold-weather gathering that remained non-violent. No guns were found in Ottawa. CSIS did not assess a threat to the security of Canada. Police testified to the absence of violence. Courts later ruled the legal threshold for the Act was not met The mechanism is simple. Once a group is treated as “other,” every gas can, hot tub, or anonymous tip is read as confirmation of the worst case. CBC and Ling supplied that framing at scale. The result was policy based on media imagination rather than evidence that met the law’s standard—and zero public reckoning from the outlets that built it If only the truckers had hired an official Ottawa lobbying firm staffed full of ex-CBC journos

CBC: “Voters in BC are confused by two elections a week apart. Whose responsibility is what? Very mysterious.” Meanwhile David Eby, who ignored municipal leaders begging him not to drop a snap election on top of fixed Oct 17 local voting, isn't named once in the piece Protective journalism is a hell of a drug at CBC @brodiefenlon

CBC’s selective Pope Leo coverage is textbook bias This morning they ran Pope Leo XIV’s Oct 10 tweet declaring the death penalty “inadmissible” because it attacks the dignity of the person. Fair enough — World Day Against the Death Penalty, and it fits the preferred CBC narrative What they never amplify with the same urgency: His repeated statements that every human life is sacred “from the moment of conception until natural death” and that the right to life is the foundation of every other right His direct rebuke when he was in Lourdes of euthanasia and assisted dying as “false compassion,” his insistence that “what is legal is not necessarily moral,” and his warning that medicine must never become “the servant of programmed death” or decide the life of an embryo or an elderly person. Canada has the fastest-growing euthanasia regime in the Western world (MAiD now ~5% of all deaths) and one of the lowest fertility rates (1.26). A Pope who consistently defends life from conception to natural death is politically inconvenient for outlets that treat abortion as settled and MAiD as progressive healthcare CBC will quote Pope Leo when he opposes capital punishment and how it relates to Trump. They go quiet when he opposes euthanasia and abortion. That’s not journalism. That’s agenda-driven curation The pattern holds: statements that align with progressive Canadian consensus (opposition to capital punishment) get airtime and framing

CBC’s institutional amnesia, Truth & Reconciliation morning The CBC archives exist. CBC once filmed residential schools as Education Week, “a new future,” integration, a free and equal chance. CBC were the house organ when the policy was respectable. Those tapes do not lead the broadcast today Then May 2021. A GPR survey at Kamloops was sold as 215 graves. Flags down. “Remains.” Anyone asking for a shovel became a denialist April 2025: Rosemary Barton said remains had been “found across the country.” CBC’s own correction: no — “potential burial sites or unmarked graves.” Prime time claim. Fine-print walk-back Today the piano is back. “Believed to hold.” “Potential grave sites.” Then the line they wanted: People who deny the attempted cultural genocide try to say, show me the graves. Here are the graves What they actually have in Brandon is a documented cemetery — obituaries, church and vital records, deaths listed 1896–1911, markers later stripped for a park, then a campground. That is not Kamloops. A paper-trail burial ground is not an unexcavated soil anomaly. CBC is using one to close the argument about the other. That is misdirection Cheerleader. Then prosecutor. Then liturgist. Never the archives first. Never the distinction on air. Never the correction in the same hour as the hymn Open the archives. CBC needs to say it was part of the propaganda at the time. It needs to say cemetery when it’s a cemetery. Say anomaly when it’s an anomaly. Stop laundering radar into sacrament The first step at CBC is admitting that they are a big part of the problem @brodiefenlon