Andrew Baldwin
Google
TVO used to have excellent programs like Saturday Night at the Movies and James Laxer’s The Real Story. These are long gone now, and its resources are being directed to The Agenda with Steve Paikin. The basic premise of the show is untenable. Steve is supposed to be the ultimate Renaissance man, able to interview guests for half an hour or a full hour on any topic in the world in a knowledgeable way. This is, of course, preposterous. He is really only expert on the minutae of Ontario politics. So-and-so had the third longest term in office of any Opposition House Leader since the First World War and so on and so forth. Worse than that, he, and the network he represents, is a Liberal Party propaganda machine at both the provincial and the federal level. I had harsh experience of this myself, at the time of the 2015 federal election, when TVO, in its zeal to elect a Trudeau government, published disinformation about the federal budget estimates to make the Harper government’s performance seem much worse than it was. TVO only issued the most pro forma of corrections long after the election was over and the damage was done. Again, going into the 2021 federal election, the same year as the 2021 renewal of the inflation control agreement, Steve had a sycophantic interview with Mark Carney on his book “Value(s)”, at a time when he was still considered likely to be a Liberal candidate in an Ottawa riding. He did not ask Carney about his full-throated support for the US Fed’s new average-inflation-targeting framework, which could, and did, lead to skyrocketing inflation in America. Given that Carney was an advisor to PM Trudeau on the economic recovery, any semi-competent interviewer would be expected to ask if he had recommended the same policies for the Bank of Canada. He didn’t. I was not allowed to comment on that interview, The Agenda’s censorship of comments acting like an Orwellian Ministry of Truth to prevent any comments being posted that would suggest Big Brother Justin had plans to unleash a massive inflation on Canadians. (He did and we are still living with it now.) The Agenda has been equally biased on the provincial level. Steve is a bogus accounting denier whose guests are often the few people who remain bogus accounting deniers and still believe, against all the evidence, that Kathryn Wynne succeeded in returning the province to a surplus in her penultimate year in office. No space to mention all the other sins of this terrible show, except to mention that even in the rabidly Russopohobe climate that prevails in Canada since the start of the tragic and catastrophic Russo-Ukrainian War, The Agenda manages to distinguish itself from the rest. It promotes the so-called decolonization of Russia, i.e., its breakup along the lines of Yugoslavia, with ethnic cleansing of Russophones in the successor states. TVO is a menace to world peace.
