Dear Mr Poilievre,
I wanted to write you a note. About my father. He is dead.
Don’t be too hasty in sending me your condolences. This would mean that you have not read the rest of this letter. And I wouldn’t want you to seem any more out of touch with reality than you already are.
My father died a long time ago. But I was thinking, Mr. Poilievre, that his death is explained, perhaps in part, by CBC and Radio-Canada. He was depressed, his last years, listening to them.
Note that my friend Pierre Falardeau, also dead unfortunately, was even more depressed than my father in front of this media structure. “Radio-Cadenas”, as Falardeau said, depressed him “to the bone”. In his eyes, there was a media barrage erected almost systematically against independence ideas, or even against ideas altogether.
Note also that in his time Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the father of this Justin whom you see even in your soup, was also distressed in front of the same media edifice. He was so for reasons diametrically opposed to those of Falardeau. For him, the French sector of CBC was a dangerous nest of separatists. To the point that he threatened to put the key under the door. He found this sign appalling, having nevertheless strutted around there for years. How different perspectives sometimes lead to the same silly conclusions.
I come back to my father, Mr. Poilievre. He was discouraged to see the drop in cultural broadcasts. He didn’t understand the point of mixing everything up, as if mixed salad was always a good idea. How to explain to you? You can enjoy the shepherd’s pie and the duck à l’orange. But why combine these two foods into a puree? Everything seemed to him to have been turned upside down, ass over head, on the side of simple entertainment, spectacle, favorites announced by loose reflections, delivered at the speed of lightning, in increasingly shriveled formats. and indigestible. So he had decided, reluctantly, to listen elsewhere. And that’s where I wanted to go, Mr. Poilievre: somewhere else.
My father willingly turned his attention to National Public Radio (NPR), an American station. For my part, I cursed her. At regular intervals, this rich program stopped to make way for an unbearable ramdam like a telethon. The animators suddenly became professional beggars. They turned away from what they did best to pass the hat.
How could a country as powerful as the United States, I wondered, not be damned to support the work of journalists whose rigor ensures quality information to its population?
It’s quite unusual, don’t you think, to see Twitter, Elon Musk’s latest toy, allow itself to decree, from the height of the sole authority conferred on it by its owner’s money, that NPR is a subsidized media by the state, implying that he should be held suspect in this? NPR more dubious than Fox News, which has just agreed to pay nearly a billion dollars to avoid explaining why it knowingly lied to its listeners for so long? What is Twitter’s ridiculous criterion for judging the quality of information?
As long as we have to judge the tree by its fruits, it seems to me that investigations conducted by professionals are worth more than the opinions launched in the ether of the Web by strangers who present themselves as Jambon81 and Trump4ever.
Was it your appetite for fact denial that encouraged you, Mr. Poilievre, to ask Twitter to administer its hallucinatory medicine to CBC? For an aspiring prime minister, it seems surprising to see you constantly hitting on your state, denying its importance to the point of reducing its dimensions to its current government alone.
A French newspaper, The echoes, wrote to Twitter. He wanted to understand his new media policy. Twitter, reports The echoes, responded to his request with a message that takes the form of a poop emoticon. For CBC, the same response was received from the American tweeting giant. The bird flies low.
The decline of information, Mr. Poilievre, appears to really worry you less than the advance at all costs of your ideas.
The Canadian state, under various governments, has given millions of dollars of public funds over the years to arguably socially essential magazines, such as Summon, 7 days, The week, Star Systemand others in the genre… Should we also reproach them for being financed by the State and, in doing so, for distilling a dangerous ideology?
How do we live today in denial of reality? For years, the government of Quebec, the one that calls to vote for the Conservatives in Ottawa, has denied the need for studies before committing to spending billions of dollars to build an underwater link between Quebec and Lévis. . You yourself reiterated your support for this aberrant project a few times. All this, based on wind, has come to disappear in a current of air.
Thinking seems to be exploding these days, like an Elon Musk rocket. The general atmosphere is breaking down. It seems to me, some days, that my father must be turning in his grave.
Someone somewhere must have put intelligence on hold, don’t you think, Mr. Poilievre?
Between a short plane ride to the four corners of the world and his eye resting on a rocket doomed to crash in a large cloud of smoke, Mr. Elon Musk pleads, these days, for humanity to take a time halt on the side of the development of artificial intelligence. A sector where, coincidentally, its financial interests are rather poorly represented.
You, Mr. Poilievre, do you think that intelligence, even artificial intelligence, could finally find a use, at least on the side of politics?