This is a most curious article, and I think it merits discussion. In brief (though seriously guys, read it, this article is about that article) the premise is that CBC is advancing a system that ensures and promotes poverty by facilitating food banks at Christmas time.

Now the article as it is written, (as are the vast majority of the articles in the independent) is deep, thorough, and highly intriguing. It hits on issues that are important to your average Canadian and provides an alternative dialog to the main stream commentary on an issue. The holiday season is most certainly a time to talk about poverty in a serious and deeply critical manner. In that respect, the author has hit the nail on the head.

But in this generally positive engagement there has been a couple major mistakes made.

The first thing to be noted is that there are much, much, much more important things to boycott rather than the CBC. I’m not about to say that the CBC is the biggest and best option for media in the country, but they do provide an analysis of the news that is generally without editorial bias, and often includes areas of corporate criticism that is lacking from other major news stations.

The second big problem with this means of achieving change is that it ignores the reality of the situation at hand, namely, that people are hungry right now and will be over the Holiday season. Food banks will often run dry over Christmas, because the demand on them is so amazingly high. So if this brand of activism works, in discouraging a food bank, the end result is more hungry people. There will be no guaranteed minimum income established in this next month. There will be no changes to the minimum wage. There will no be change in food pricing. There is no positive change to be made before Christmas comes, other than the short term solution of feeding those that are hungry.

A Better Kind of Boycott

All of that being said, I actually really, really like he idea of a boycott. It’s a form of continuous activism and politics that we can do with our pocketbook, and allows us many chances every day to make that vote with our money to see what kind of future we want. A boycott where money is actually involved, rather than just ratings for the CBC, is doubly effective too.

In that respect, I think there is some specific cash activism we can and should be doing in order to reduce the need for food banks. I’d single out one major company that we should boycott in order to correct some of the fundamental problems in our society: Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is one of the largest employers in the world, and one of the wealthiest companies. They drive down prices for producers, have bottom-of-the-barrel wages for their own employees, fight unionization in extreme manners, and basically try and control the fundamental nature of our economy with their massive size. Wal-Mart services many tens of thousands of people in the province, and in essence, we cannibalize our own society when we shop there. We tell the world its okay to exploit your employees and your supply chains all in the pursuit of massive profits for a single family, and marginal savings for the individual.

Contrast Wal-Mart to Costco where wages are almost twice as high for your average employee, and a slightly more humane version of mass consumerism starts to emerge.

The nice thing about this boycott is that it can be year round too. The idea that there is some how this specific impact the CBC will feel from a month of boycotts isn’t very likely. And to stop the boycott when the holiday season is over still encourages their behavior anyways, because they do it every year.

So, I thank the author for starting a worth while conversation, but the means that are proposed are simply in the realm of the absurd. It is a temporary form of activism that should barely count as action, and exacerbates a substantial problem of local hunger without facilitating a clear solution. If you are going to take action, do it year round, and against real corporate overlords like Wal-Mart or McDonalds, not the CBC.