Who’s the “state broadcaster” now?
Unable to pull enough new Canadians away from their gainful employment to take a citizenship oath for a video clip, the folks at SunTV enlisted the help of their good friend Jason Kenney. Some hand-picked, suitably brown-skinned bureaucrats were duly sent over to the studios to play Mr. Dressup:
Six federal bureaucrats were drafted to pose as new Canadians for a citizenship reaffirmation ceremony broadcast on the Sun News network, an event requested by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s office.
The bureaucrats smiled and held Canadian flags as the TV hosts referred to a group of 10 people as “new Canadians” that had “finally” received their citizenship.
After the story broke, the program’s hosts said they were shocked, shocked, to hear that the folks sent over from Citizenship and Immigration were stand-ins. Here’s co-host Alex Pierson:
“Pat [Bolland] and I had nothing to do with putting the ceremony together, other than hosting the formalities in the last few minutes of our show,” Pierson said.
“As I understand, the people in attendance were brought by Citizenship and Immigration Canada.”
But Jason Kenney’s office claims it was all news to them as well:
A spokesman for the minister’s office said it wasn’t aware of the presence of the bureaucrats at the ceremony until The Canadian Press asked about the issue.
“The civil servants made some decisions without informing us or Sun News Network,” said Kenney spokeswoman Candice Malcolm.
In fairness, the public service employees tasked by the Minister with helping out SunTV faced some formidable obstacles. They may have had little choice as they hastened to carry out Kenney’s commands:
Four days before the ceremony, a bureaucrat in downtown Toronto again pleaded whether Sun News could instead go to an already planned event.
“Please advise if the alternative would be acceptable since we do not have the resources to call over 3,000 clients to hopefully get 10 clients for this proposed event.”
In the end, only three of the 10 people the department had lined up to appear at the Sun’s studios actually showed up.
We taxpayers paid for the rest of them.
Meanwhile, on a network not run by angry, incompetent brats:
The CBC broadcast an hour-long, full-fledged citizenship ceremony for 75 new Canadians that featured a studio audience, a bagpiper, a retired Mountie in his red serge and local dignitaries. That event, which was broadcast live a day after the Sun’s reaffirmation ceremony, had been planned with the department since the summer.
Good to see we still have a few grownups left in the broadcasting business.
