Well before Canada's ambassador to the United States announced he was declaring war on the "Fox factor" and what he says is Fox News' anti-Canadian bias, a cold war between the news network and our neighbor to the north had been under way.
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And, as the feisty Canada Free Press has reported, Ambassador Frank McKenna is far from an impartial diplomat.
"McKenna also broadsided the American media in general somewhat hypocritical given that McKenna was a recent chairman of CanWest Global Communications with 11 major publications parroting liberalisms such as that [Canadian Prime Minister] Paul Martin knows nothing about kickbacks or Paul Martin knows everything about Kyoto," the news service reported.
The Free Press notes that McKenna is well aware of "a spate of opinion polls" about his ruling Liberal Party, caught up in the multimillion-dollar so-called Adscam scandal that includes an official agency, CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), forbidding radio stations from broadcasting and its general practice of forbidding other radio and television stations from broadcasting on such grounds that they happen to be American, or because they would compete with an existing broadcaster. The scandal may bring down his party.
The antagonism of his government toward Fox News became apparent in recent years when the CRTC readily approved broadcasts of the pro-terrorist Al-Jazeera network on its cable channels while banning Fox News.
Fox, perceived as strongly in support of the Bush administration policies in Iraq, had become anathema to Canada's ruling elite.
In the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, publicly rebuked Jean Chretien's government for refusing to join the war on Iraq and criticized the prime minister for allowing a stream of anti-American comments by Liberal MPs to go unpunished.
One Canadian paper reported at the time, "In an unusually frank diplomatic critique of Canadian foreign policy, Mr. Cellucci said the federal government had abandoned the United States in a time of need and warned the economic relationship between the U.S. and Canada will suffer as a result."
"There is no security threat to Canada that the United States would not be ready, willing and able to help with," Cellucci said in a speech to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto. "There would be no debate. There would be no hesitation. We would be there for Canada, part of our family. And that is why so many in the United States are disappointed and upset that Canada is not fully supporting us now."
Here are just some of the gems Canadian liberals had to say about the U.S. when we needed their help in 2003:
Herb Dhaliwal, March 19:
"I think the world expects someone who is the president of a superpower to be a statesman. I think he has let not only Americans but the world down by not being a statesman."
MP Carolyn Parrish, Feb. 26:
"Damn Americans. I hate those bastards."
Jean Chretien, Feb. 13:
"Great strength is not always perceived by others as benign. Not everyone around the world is prepared to take the word of the United States on faith."
MP Colleen Beaumier, Jan. 29:
"This is a war against children. No matter how you slice it, there is more to this war than the Bush regime and the Saddam Hussein regime. How many children are we going to kill to replace that regime?"
MP Benoit Serre, Jan. 29:
"George Bush is very trigger-happy."
Francoise Ducros, Nov. 20, 2002:
"What a moron." (referring to President Bush)
The Anti-Bush Agenda
Only last November did Canada's official censors give lukewarm approval for Fox News to be broadcast in Canada but limited it to digital cable subscribers only.
As NewsMax.com reported then, Canada's liberal press was irked by some of Fox's programming, which allows for a wide spectrum of political opinion no longer found in Canada.
For example, the Canadian Press (CP) newswire blasted Fox megastar Bill O'Reilly for having called former Prime Minister Jean Chretien a "bum" and for denouncing Canada's medicare program as 'socialist.'"
Among his other "crimes," according to the CP, O'Reilly had criticized Canada's liberal press, such as the Toronto-based newspaper The Globe and Mail.
"Hey, you pinheads up there, I may be pompous, but at least I'm honest," the CP quoted O'Reilly, citing a New York Times story.
As NewsMax.com reported, "Despite such incredible and outrageous examples of free speech and a free press not seen in modern Canada, CRTC said it found 'there is substantial demand in Canada for Fox News.'"
The CP reported that the agency claimed that 531 Canadians had filed statements in support of the network airing, while a mere 82 opposed such a move.
Writing in NewsMax.com earlier this year (Fox News Enters the Canadian Media Henhouse), Rachel Marsden, a public affairs and communications strategist, columnist and talk show host who has worked in politics and media in the United States and Canada,
gave these examples of the way Canada's leftist Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) portrays the U.S.:
CBC aired a rabidly anti-Bush documentary entitled "The World According to Bush" not once but three times during the 2004 presidential election campaign. It was described as "a two-hour documentary about the inner-workings of the Bush administration [which] will alarm even the most hardened Washington-watchers. Fans and critics of the acclaimed Fahrenheit 9/11 will want to see this thoughtful and damning investigation of the U.S. administration. Who are the Bushes? Apparently, they're the 'quiet dynasty' of modern America but in reality, their 'dynasty' is one of inconceivable family secrets, painstakingly concealed."
Another program also broadcast by the CBC right before the election was "The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney." The CBC Web site stated: "Cheney's remarkable life story involves the relentless accumulation of power in every form. ... [The CBC] will show how he accomplished this, what it involved in terms of costs for others and what history's judgement [sic] could be."
Finally, the CBC commissioned and aired a documentary titled "Stupidity," in which the message is that George W. Bush is officially a moron because, according to the press release issued by the producer, "a group of Canadian stupidity experts" says so.
"The CBC is freaking out with the arrival of Fox," Marsden wrote, adding that they were "frantically working on a documentary about the Fox News Canadian invasion, in which they will tell Canadians what to think. Given that Fox News is now in direct competition with the CBC for whatever remnants of an audience the CBC has left, this has about as much credibility as Ford doing a documentary about General Motors, telling you that GM cars suck."
The true state of U.S./Canadian relations was revealed when former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien – the man O'Reilly called a "bum" - refused to send Canadian troops to Iraq, and polls showed that as of last December more than 80 percent of Canadians still support that decision.
And when President Bush made his first official visit to Canada last December, The Associated Press reported that he went out of his way to thank Canada for what it did on the day after 9/11, when some 33,000 passengers on airplanes bound for U.S. airports were diverted to Canadian provinces, including Nova Scotia.
According to the AP, President Bush offered a belated thank-you and used the moment to seek a fresh start with Canadians.
"For days after Sept. 11, Canadians came to the aid of men and women and children who were worried and confused and had nowhere to sleep," the president said. "You opened your homes and your churches to strangers, you brought food, you set up clinics, you arranged for calls to their loved ones, and you asked for nothing in return."
"Thank you for your kindness to America in an hour of need."
Just outside, a couple hundred protesters chanted anti-Bush slogans and held signs that read "PM [Prime Minister] don't make deals with the devil," "Terrorists go home" and "Tanks for nothing."
Inside, Bush's audience sat mostly in silence as he called on Canadians and other allies to join him in "great goals," each of them relating to terrorism and each long ingrained in Bush policy.
Canada's idea of observing President Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy.
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