Ingmar Lee couldn't have picked a better set of targets. Giving Gordon Campbell any sort of "good for the environment" recognition is ridiculous, and shame on Tzeporah Berman for having anything to do with this.
1. It is none of the Canada Border Services Agency's business whether Amy Goodman or anybody else wants to talk about the 2010 Olympics or not. From the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association."
2. "The Canada Border Services Agency didn't respond to our request for an interview." Let's see if they will respond to a subpoena instead.
Story by Petti Fong of the Toronto Star: What Olympics? Baffled U.S. radio host interrogated at border "Canada Border Services Agency spokeswoman Faith St. John said she could not speak specifically about Goodman's detention. But she said anyone entering the country may be subject to a more in-depth examination.
"It should not be viewed as an accusation of wrongdoing." Wrong, Ms. St. John. If there was no accusation of wrongdoing, why was Goodman told that she had to be out of Canada within 48 hours?
Video story (with transcript) from Democracy Now. Includes quotes from Chris Chaw, David Eby.
Vancouver radio listeners suddenly discovered on November 6 that they had one less talk radio station, and Simi Sara, Dave Brindle, and Nikki Renshaw learned the previous afternoon that they no longer had jobs. Instead, the Vancouver market now has two all-sports radio stations. Most of the content on Team 1410 will be national sports talk hosts such as Jim Rome.
I can't find anything good about this development. There are a lot of things going on in British Columbia that could stand more attention from the citizens: the Virk/Basi trial, disappearance of salmon runs, privatization of rivers and electric power, loss of civil liberties related to the 2010 Olympics, government unwillingness to prosecute polygamists, to give a few examples. Consider this: the takeover of Burlington Northern Santa Fe by Warren Buffett last week could have a significant impact on transportation and employment in the Lower Mainland, but local press coverage consisted of a wire service story in the back pages of the business section of the Vancouver Sun.
We now have fewer sources of information about what's going on than we had a week ago.
What brought this on? The latest ratings for the Vancouver market gave Talk 1410 AM a 1.8% market share. To put this in perspective, CBC AM got 11.6% and CKNW got 11.5%. (CKNW's share was in the 17-20% range in their heyday.) The 1.8% even compares unfavorably with Jim Pattison's geriatric "all time favourites" CISL (650 AM), with a 3.4% share. Low ratings mean low ad revenue, which means less money to pay Sara, Brindle, Renshaw, and the rest of the hired help.
There's another side to this, however. That 1.8% is the highest share that Talk 1410 AM had in over a year. And what short of listenership do they expect to get with reruns of Vancouver Canucks games and (this isn't a joke) radio coverage of golf. They also lose ad revenue for Coast to Coast and (ugh) Laura Schlessinger, syndicated programs carried at low cost.
The owners of CTVglobemedia, who also own Team 1040, The Beat 94.5 FM, and 103.5 QM/FM, had other options available to them. The nearby Air America Radio affiliates, KBAI-AM 930 in Bellingham and KPTK AM 1090 in Seattle, both carry some live sports programming to bring in some additional ad revenue. There was nothing obvious to stop CTVglobemedia from carrying BC Lions games and other live sports coverage, continuing with Coast to Coast, and keeping Sara and Brindle, whose programs were growing in popularity, on the air.
Was there something else going on here? Did somebody in CTVglobemedia's management get a phone call from Gordon Campbell or Stephen Harper's office, expressing displeasure with the subject matter under discussion on Sara's and Brindle's programs? One thing's for sure; if nobody asks this question, we're not going to hear any answers.
It wasn't easy, but pro-health activists managed to end the association of the healthy sport of tennis with the unhealthy habit of tobacco in Canada nine years ago.
The use of professional tennis to promote tobacco use has not come to a complete end, however. There is a "Davidoff Swiss Indoors" tournament happening in Basel, Switzerland. Pictures of Roger Federer, who is currently ranked #1 in men's singles, are being used in the promotion of this event, and it features ballboys and ballgirls wearing t-shirts with Davidoff logos.
Where is that 2010 Olympics financial windfall we heard about?
Written by Administrator
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 19:21
When Vancouver landed the bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games,
you may have been one of the people rubbing your hands with glee, and
saying, “there's money to be made here”. Well, yes, there is, but
the trend seems to be, not very much money is being made in the
Vancouver area, unless you've made plans to rent out your house or
condo for a lot of money, and use the money to spend the winter in
the south of Spain.
It's no secret that the big guys in this are NBC and their owner
General Electric, Visa, Coca-Cola, and MacDonald's will do well for
themselves, and if you want to get arrested during the Olympic
fortnight, a good way to make this happen is, take a cooler full of
Pepsi cans to a Vancouver street corner, and start selling them to
passers by.
OK, so you don't own a TV network or a fast food chain, so you're
not in competition with the companies mentioned above. You're not out
of the woods yet. Say, for example, you own a charter bus company.
With buses running from Vancouver to Whistler every minute or two,
and thousands of people being transported from everywhere to
everywhere else, you could expect your services to be in very strong
demand.
Not so fast. It seems that it isn't just the big guys like Visa
and Samsung who have an inside track. The “exclusive rights”
arrangement includes some not-so-big guys, too. One of them is
Gameday
Management Group, of Orlando, FL, and their claim to fame is providing a large
number of buses for the Super Bowl every year; they also provided
buses for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. They have cut a
deal with VANOC to provide charter buses for the Olympics, so your
expectation of high demand for those buses of yours may have to be
revised downward.
This is not a hypothetical situation for the owners of two bus
charter companies I've talked to, Brendan McCullough of McCullough
Coach Lines in Victoria, and K.D. Dadashzadeh of Seawest
Coach Lines in Coquitlam. McCullough says, “Why is VANOC
excluding local carriers, and bringing in bus carriers from so far
away? It's our tax money that's paying for the games, so why is it
being spent outside the country?”
Dadashzadeh put it this way: “We are living in this country, and
we are dealing with an organization who is telling us who can work
and not work, and that organization is a foreign company. That
organization sees itself as above the Canadian government. Are we
living in a new age of colonialism?”
And, if you want to make some bucks, and play a role in welcoming
visitors to Vancouver for the Olympics, by driving a bus, Gameday Management,
under the alias "Edison Transportation", finally got around to
advertising for drivers on the Vancouver
Craig's List on September 25, after advertising in the US at
least a month earlier.
CBC News ran a good story by Kirk Williams about this on September
29, and it includes an interview with McCulloch. It reveals that
signed contracts were cancelled to
pave the way for Gameday Management. There's also an interview
with a VANOC official who says that they might relent and give some
Canadian bus owners and drivers “another chance”. Click here
to view an MP4 video, or here
to view a QuickTime movie.
Text story on CBC web site: Pro-U.S. bias alleged in Olympic bus contracts. Lots of Good comments, including this one: "They said the Olympics would create jobs. They just didn't say where."
1. The provincial government funded an invitation-only party for the opening of the Richmond speed skating oval with a half million dollars, and the government came of with this money on two days' notice.
VANOC should be ashamed of themselves for requesting this money, and they should return it.
2. Three Crown corporations, B.C. Hydro, ICBC, and the B.C. Lottery Corporation, have spent more than $1.4 million on Olympic tickets.
This money could be recovered by simply re-selling the tickets. eBay will work.
I've been running this blog for four years now. I also maintain several other blogs, including vancouver2010insider.ca and tbirdbaseball.net. I have never asked for any financial support for doing this. Until now.
And actually, I'm not really asking for this money for myself (although it's possible that I could profit from it; see below). It's for a cause.
Here's the deal: because of the way that Canwest Global has run its business into the ground (for example, throwing away money on the National Post and turning their Vancouver newspapers into Fraser Institute shills), the value of their common stock has dropped from $3.07 per share last September to $0.13 as of August 13, the day I'm writing this.
This is a disaster for people who invested in Canwest Global, but it's an opportunity for myself and like-minded bloggers who are concerned about the concentration of media ownership in Canada.
The way I want this to work is, if I can raise $1,300 from the PayPal donations I'm asking for, I could, at today's price, buy 10,000 shares of Canwest Global. Canwest Global has 99 million shares outstanding, so I would own 0.0013% of the company. If 50 other bloggers do the same thing, that would be .06% of the company. That may not sound like much, but keep in mind that a lot of shares are held by nervous institutional investors (pension funds, for example) and mutual fund managers. Me and my fellow concerned shareholders could put shareholder proposals on the ballot, put up another slate of corporate directors, and attend shareholder meetings to ask embarrassing questions about, for example, why CEO Leonard Asper deserves to be paid $1,053,780 per year for the job that he's doing.
Now, about the "personal profit" issue; Yes, I could sell my shares and take the money any time I wanted to, but I'm not going to do that. The commitment I'm making, in return for your financial support, is that I will remain invested in Canwest Global until the objectives stated above are achieved, or a point is reached where there is no longer any chance of success. If Canwest goes under, I won't make a cent out of this. Frankly, it's because of this possibility that I'm unwilling to invest very much of my own money in this. If Canwest is bought out, the shareholders might end up with some cash; if this happens, I'll re-invest the proceeds in a similar "shareholder activism" project. And one other thing; if Canwest should pay a dividend at some time in the future, the dividend will be used to buy more Canwest shares.
So, that's the pitch. And if you don't like the idea of giving me money so I can invest it, you can always buy shares in Canwest Global yourself. Or, follow my example and take up your own collection.
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