We Are, You Aren’t
Source: Stephen LeDrew, CP24 part ways after suspension, Bell Media confirms | Toronto Star
Yet again, in the ‘you can’t make this up’ category, we have this little news item that appeared recently.
The background story is that Stephen LeDrew was a guest on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson show to talk about the adoption of a new policy on the part of the Canadian Federal government with regard to inclusiveness. As the article points out, LeDrew is not just some random person offering his own opinion. He was once the president of the Liberal Party of Canada, widely proclaimed as the font of political inclusiveness and correctness of all kinds. Some levity was made of the lengthy acronym for the community affected, which may as well have been entered by monkeys pressing a keyboard randomly.
When LeDrew was pressed to list the people represented by the string of letters, he could not identify them beyond the well known LGBT part, but insisted that it was all about inclusivity. Then, in the classic condescending Canadian fashion, he reminded his host that unlike Americans, Canadians were much more tolerant of differences of thought and opinion. Uh huh.
Despite this defense of Canada’s tolerant society, days later, LeDrew was dismissed from his position at Bell Media, not for his opinion, but for the fact that he dared to appear on FOX NEWS!
Even LeDrew was bemused by the experience. This would be like Oprah being denied access to a Weight Watchers meeting for being too heavy. Welcome to the world of Canadian news, where there may be 3 major news outlets, but they are comparable to ice cream stores that claim to offer all flavors…as long as it’s vanilla. It’s reminiscent of a scene from the 1983 film Yellowbeard in which a blind man begs for some chicken from a Pirate and is instead given a loaf of bread. The blind man is profusely joyful at receiving the ‘chicken’ and scurries away happily.
The Canadian media landscape is vastly different from the American one. Dissenting voices from mainstream thought are not only small, they are disparagingly marginalized by the large outlets, run essentially by a very small cabal of owners. We have yet to benefit from the renaissance in news dissemination that the Americans have experienced over the last 20 years. Stephen LeDrew can now crow about how inclusive Canadian society is…but not including him.