Kory Teneycke and Avaaz Was a Stephen Harper Rerun

During the 2008 election campaign, John Baird sent out a press release suggesting that a “Wall Street Billionaire” was bankrolling an anti-Harper campaign, in violation of the Canada Elections Act?

The group that Baird referred to as a 'Shadowy Foreign Organization', was Avaaz, who had launched a 'vote for the environment' blitz, urging Canadians to vote strategically.

Baird held a press conference and everything.

After the conference, staff members of Minister of the Environment John Baird distributed a press release accusing the Avaaz effort of being a shadowy foreign initiative, funded by foreign billionaire George Soros, which is violating Canadian election law. All of these allegations are false.

In fact, the Avaaz campaign is exclusively run and funded by Canadians, and has been fully reviewed and registered as a legitimate third party by Elections Canada and is listed on its website. Avaaz proactively initiated full consultations with Elections Canada lawyers, who approved the application. “Our campaign is of, by, and for Canadians, and strictly Canadian money is being used, that’s verified by an auditor registered with Elections Canada”, said Avaaz Executive Director Ricken Patel.

In other words, John Baird was full of it.

So when the Canadian organization Avaaz launched a campaign against Fox News North, despite the fact that it was determined that Avaaz was indeed not a 'Shadowy Foreign organization', Kory Teneycke, rehashed Baird's former lies, implying that the advocacy group is foreign and has no business meddling in Canadian affairs.

Unlike his foreign Fox News North, and their spin-off teabaggers, trying to make Canadian politics just as toxic as they are in the U.S. (Be sure to sign the petition if you haven't already).

Heather Mallick wrote an excellent column on the subject: Fox News North is a rancid idea. She has some experience with Fox News in the United States, and confirms that:

Fox celebrates ignorance and fosters hate, it’s your weasel heart, that chunk of you that spurts endorphins when a hated rival crashes his car on Ambien or is caught with a gerbil where a gerbil shouldn’t be. It’s a poison tree. Weirdly transfixing as Glenn Beck is, when you eat the Fox apple, it eats away at you. And it’s a news cartoon. When real journalists make a mistake, we feel a sickness in our soul. It’s humiliating, it should, and will be, publicly corrected and so-workers avert their eyes. Fox isn’t like that. They seemingly make up numbers, flying unburdened through their fenced-in no-fact zone.

Much like the way the Harper government operates, in a no-fact-zone.

Fox targets women. And racial groups. But most worryingly, it targets individuals in the same way the Harper government does. Tom Flanagan, who has helped guide Harper since he met him in 1990 at the University of Calgary, laid out his game plan for the conservative takeover in his book Harper’s Team. What matters is the cleansing of alleged liberals from the actual governance of the country. Once you get elected, Flanagan wrote, “you choose judges, appoint the senior civil service, fund or de-fund advocacy groups.” This is the Fox agenda and certainly the Harper agenda we see now.

We don't need this garbage and we shouldn't have to pay for something we don't want. It's that simple.