Rebel visits the CBC: Why did they drop the Rosemary Barton lawsuit against the Conservatives?
While I may resent doing so, I pay Rosemary Barton's salary. If you are a Canadian taxpayer, so do you. The entirety of the CBC is funded by Canadians, operated for Canadians, for the benefit of Canadians.
That's why it is so peculiar that the CBC is suing the Conservative Party of Canada over their very limited use of the state broadcaster's (our) footage in an election campaign ad.
What's more peculiar is that Liberal candidate Nirmala Naidoo also used CBC footage in an election ad (which was live for four days on Twitter, getting 14.7k views). The CBC has not initiated an emergency lawsuit targeting their Liberal bosses, however.
Even more peculiar than that? We are in the middle of an election, an election that is a toss up, where the CBC loving Liberals face a shot at losing to the austere, cable cutting Conservatives. The CBC, and all of their employees have a financial stake in keeping the CPC out of the PMO.
Unfortunately for the CBC, this lawsuit backfired tremendously on the state broadcaster. #DefundTheCBC trended on Twitter nation-wide almost immediately. One of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, reporter Rosemary Barton, was quick to act as if it was not her fault. The damage control unit at the CBC kicked it in to high gear, saying they would remove Barton's name from the legal action. That was their first admission that they were in the wrong.
The second admission came when I stood in the lobby of the CBC headquarters in Toronto yesterday. After tweeting the CBC president, asking for an interview, they sent down their spokesman to defend the state broadcaster's actions. He revealed to me that the legal action has been put on hold until the end of the election. Why then, was it initiated during the writ at all?
When their funding was threatened, the CBC's instinct was to kneecap Trudeau's primary opponent with a SLAPP suit. How desperate.
