OTTAWA—The details of a plan to launch a conservative television network will finally be revealed after much talk about what it could mean for political journalism in this country.

Pierre Karl Péladeau, the billionaire media tycoon who heads Quebecor Inc. and its subsidiaries, is expected to unveil his plans Tuesday for what the competition has already dubbed ‘Fox News North’, an English-language 24-hour all-news network modelled after the provocative ratings success below the border.

The press release for the announcement at the Toronto Sun building in Toronto Tuesday refers only to a “new investment in Canadian media,” but details of the reportedly $100 million venture by Quebecor Media Inc. and Sun Media Corporation have been leaking out in dribs and drabs for the past week.

Quebecor Media Inc. filed an application for a “must-carry” licence with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission earlier this month and the company has already announced some high-profile new hires, including Kory Teneycke, the former chief spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as vice-president of development.

Teneycke had been working on contract for Quebecor for several months after leaving his PMO job last July, simultaneously appearing as a conservative pundit on CBC television, where he went after EKOS pollster Frank Graves by accusing him of Liberal partisan bias.

Luc Lavoie, a former spokesman for Brian Mulroney, will be helping out.

There is plenty of speculation about who else might be poached away from their current posts, including controversial CBC television reporter Krista Erickson.

Teneycke has long talked about a television network that would cater to a conservative-minded audience, and has already come out swinging against naysayers in the established media.

When retired CBC personality Don Newman wrote a blog post calling the proposed network “the absolute last thing this country needs,” Teneycke shot back through his Twitter account by calling Newman “Canada’s answer to Helen Thomas”, the 89-year-old White House correspondent who recently resigned in the wake of controversial remarks about Israel.

Teneycke defended that online barb — and his vision for the “hard news and straight talk” network — in an interview Monday.

“It’s not surprising that incumbent players — competitors — are not that interested in seeing more people on the playing field and for those who think the media is only for . . . people they agree with,” Teneycke said. “I think they’re wrong. It is for a whole diversity of voices and the public is free to make up their own minds what they read and what they watch on TV.”

Jonathan Malloy, an associate professor of political science at Carleton University, said he is less concerned about the network giving voice to right-wing views (which he believes would create healthy competition) than the idea that it would adopt the polarizing tone Fox News has brought to political journalism.

“The Fox network is not a good model to replicate,” Malloy said Monday. “The Fox network is remarkably biased, I think, by any standard and helped make American politics even more combative and even less substantive than before and I don’t want to see that model replicated in Canada.”

The company also brought in David Akin, most recently a political reporter for Canwest News Service, to be Ottawa bureau chief and Brian Lilley from private broadcasting giant Astral Media Radio, is also officially on board.

Erickson, who has raised eyebrows for being the girlfriend of Conservative MP Lee Richardson (Calgary Centre) and got into trouble for feeding questions to a Liberal MP during committee hearings into the business relationship between Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber, is also rumoured to be joining the network.

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Erickson sent an email to her colleagues at CBC on Monday morning to announce her departure but declined to comment on her future and referred all questions to her Toronto-based lawyer, Chris Taylor.

“At this point we are not commenting on where Krista will land but should have an announcement in that regard shortly,” Taylor wrote in an email.

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