Balanced Reporting On Law & Order Initiatives

There has been a lot of press from the left about Harper stacking the judicial system with conservatives......

We get letters!
March 08, 2007

The other day, I got an email from Dr. Tom Flanagan, political science professor and close adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Dr. Flanagan writes:

This afternoon (March 6, 2007) I got a call from CBC TV news reporter Krista Erickson. She said she was desperately seeking someone to provide balance for a story she was doing on Christine Tell and the Saskatchewan Judicial Appointments Committee. Ms. Tell is the law enforcement representative on the JAC. The Liberals are calling for her to resign because she has also decided to run for the Saskatchewan Party in the next provincial election. I said that I didn't really want to comment on Ms. Tell because I didn't know her and didn't have first-hand knowledge of the facts of her case, but that I would be glad to defend the government policy on JACs.

Ms. Erickson said a crew would be there in 20 minutes to interview me. Then she called back and said that the story had been scrubbed, so they wouldn't need an interview after all.

When I watched the National at 10 PM, I saw that they ran the story after all, and without balance. They had law professor Lorraine Weinrib to call for Ms. Tell's resignation, but no one to give a view from the other side. I've watched the CBC for too many years to be surprised at the lack of balance, but I am genuinely surprised at the lack of professionalism. I've been cut out of stories before, and I can't complain about it; no one has a right to appear on the CBC. But why didn't Ms. Erickson just tell me, we don't want your interview after all because it doesn't fit into the one-sided story line we are planning to construct? Or, we can't interview you because you don't have the right expertise? Why did she have to make up a story abut canceling the story?

I'd like to know where the CBC was from 1993 to 2005, when Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were filling the bench with Liberal donors, failed Liberal candidates, and spouses of Liberal advisers. Our national network has its collective knickers in a knot because a JAC member is associated with a provincial party, but it never found it worthwhile to report on twelve years of appointing Liberal partisans to the federal courts.

Tom Flanagan