The addling of the Canadian mind
The Damascene revelation that the public broadcaster in Canada is outright misleading people on a routine basis is a shock. Coincidence, incompetence, or merely intentional bias? You decide.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt published their groundbreaking book in 2018, The Coddling of the American Mind. In a very rare case of a treatise in the social sciences making the bestseller lists and being deemed worthy of media attention, it has even prompted a recent documentary film of the same name. The book, which has been demonstrably influential among contemporary thinkers wrestling with the change in behaviours among young people and the rise of adolescent mental illness and fragility, was itself riffing on another significant work, Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which warned against the dangers of relativism on American campuses and the threat it poses to critical thinking.
An amusing literary conceit, then, is that there could well be a parallel phenomenon in the Great White North, what I am calling in homage to Lukianoff and Haidt ‘The Addling of the Canadian Mind.’ In this uniquely Canuck spin-off, we uncover the deranged and compulsive propensity of the public broadcaster to trumpet spurious facts and biased opinions, with flagrant disregard for impartiality. The motive is straightforward and existential. It is to assuage the institution’s need to appease its financial master, the incumbent Canadian government.
For the benefit of those outside our borders, in Canada the public broadcaster is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—the CBC—a crown corporation that receives in excess of $1.4 billion in funding annually from the government. Despite its unquestioned and unquestionable reputation for excellence and reliability in the past, I have become aware in recent years of any number of online pundits and commentators highlighting the CBC’s apparent and deeply ingrained bias. This criticism parallels the situation in Britain, where the BBC is routinely pilloried for its transparently left-leaning stance and, in the present climate, its bilious pro-Labour government sycophancy.
To paraphrase the views of one outspoken and articulate academic, Matt Goodwin, who has very quickly become one of the most influential voices on Substack, these state-sponsored organs of the public airwaves parrot the prevailing attitudes of an educated elite class, a class that nonchalantly trades in widespread and infectious condescension and distaste for the unwashed masses, one remarkable for a level of disdain reminiscent of a long-gone Dickensian era.
It is easy to disregard such an assessment as the collective fever dream of conspiracy theorists confined to basement apartments, where X and Substack are the internet dietary staples of incels. In fact, that’s exactly what, at first, I concluded. This is Canada, after all, where a tradition of honesty, friendliness and stoicism are the character traits for an entire nation.
But I have been set straight in recent days. Like any hallucinatory landscape, it takes but a single brief peek behind the wizard’s curtain to dispel the illusion, and reveal the truth it conceals. Unlike returning to Kansas, there is no going back. The spell is broken.
The revelation in my case came as an immediate consequence of my ongoing awareness of British politics, something that would be reasonably overlooked by the majority of Canadian citizens watching the CBC.
Listening to these two dim-witted journalists, then, engaged in a farcical and misleading exchange about the recent appointment of the winning candidate for the British Conservative party leadership, Kemi Badenoch, instantly laid bare the stark reality. And yet, it is the endless refrain of the left to accuse Elon Musk and his platform X of what they unilaterally insist is ‘misinformation.’
The whole tenor of this misjudged news segment was to convey the demonstrably incorrect impression that Kemi Badenoch will have an uphill battle ahead of her to recover the support of the British electorate. Remarks such as “Now she has to appeal to the wider electorate, and that is certainly an uphill battle” and “It will be quite a struggle to restore the reputation of the Conservative party,” as well as “All while support for the conservatives is dwindling” are simply misleading and, in the last case, a plain lie.
Reporter Julia Chapman and news anchor Marianne Dimain should be professionally embarrassed. If there were any longer codes of conduct for accurate reportage in the news business, they would be called into the editor’s office for a prompt dressing down.
Even a moderately incapable journalist—though, admittedly, one with the merest scintilla of commitment to due diligence—would quickly uncover precisely how counterfactual these statements are. Recent polling trends published online by Politico clearly show the current popularity of the various UK political parties.
The glaringly obvious realisation from this graph is that Labour support under Kier Starmer has collapsed since his landslide victory in the July General Election, where he won a resounding 412-seat parliamentary majority.
Current polls show the Tories and the incumbent government now neck and neck at 27% and 28% respectively, the latter a full six points down from election day. There are a number of interleaved reasons for this disastrous showing over recent months, but a simplified summation would be to cite the operational incompetence of Labour ministers who have fumbled a series of political incidents.
Kier Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, appear to have conspired to repress critical details about the assailant in the appalling Stockport murders this July, where three young girls were stabbed to death by a man now known to have downloaded Al-Qaeda terrorist materials. At the same time, in response to the inevitable riots that followed, they warned the general public of far-right incitement and jailed anyone they considered among the deplorables, including an angry pensioner for simply shouting at police and calling them “corrupt”, and who died in prison in October.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves has passed a budget bristling with punitive taxation measures buoyed up by a fantasy that the Labour government inherited a £22 billion black hole in the UK’s finances from Rishi Sunak and the outgoing Conservatives. Reeves attempted to sweeten the pill by promising a new £500 million spend on repairing English potholes.
Meanwhile, David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, with all the intelligence, grace and comedic timing of Peter Sellers’ Jacques Clouseau, has made the simple but repeated mistake of opening his mouth.
In 2018 this political clown-in-waiting said on record “Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of western progress for so long.”
Awkward.
The curtain is torn, then. The CBC News team is making specious claims that paint a dire prospect for Badenoch’s political future as she fights to unite a divided party and regain the respect of voters, whereas their strenuous assertions could not be further from the truth. Do they all live in Narnia?
Astonishingly, no comment whatsoever is made about the fact that Badenoch is the first Black woman to lead the Tory party, when, indubitably, this would have been a source of a good deal of attention had Kemi been elected to replace, say, Kier Starmer as Labour leader.
Shocked as I am, I continue to grope in the dark seeking an explanation for all of this myopic behaviour. So, is the CBC simply incompetent, or, as I now realise is far more likely, rather a chartered vessel for biased left-leaning opinion-mongering across this vast country, guided by the whims of a Trudeau government?
You decide. No doubt you already have.
There is a simple tonic, of course, for the addling of Canadian minds by the deceptive framing that this incident exemplifies by our legacy media outlets. It is to draw on diverse sources, and to that end, I’m now an advocate for Ground News, a website that curates the legacy media’s storytelling across the political divide. It also helpfully reveals blindspots on both sides of the ledger. Very helpful.
Because, though I might not be a Canadian, I don’t want to be misled.
Good. I did read the Closing of the American Mind in about 1989, I could sense something bad was starting. As for the CBC your diagnosis is correct, and you can can see it very accurately given your knowledge of UK politics and the CBC reporting. Most Canadians have simply given up on it.