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A few things before I rumble down this road: first, I have loved, and love, the CBC. It’s been my employer and my megaphone. It helped give me my breath as an artist. Two years ago, Ron MacLean announced my name during a broadcast and everyone I was with — my parents, wife, sister, kids — cheered. I am affected by it because it is mine and yours and ours. It goes beyond media. It is the guts and bones of who we are.

But by weighing down programming with old and new Gong Shows (minus the vaudeville) like Dragons’ Den, or programs about giving convicts a bag of magic beans, or documentaries that focus on materialism and power — films about jeans, shoes and runway models — CBC has left little room for stories of real people, and even less room for the artists among them. The broadcaster is as drawn to the look and smell of money as the Tories are in depriving them of it. Some may bemoan the Harper government’s obsession with commerce over culture, but it’s also where the national broadcaster is at. The Lang scandal shines a light on her employer’s televisual Stockholm Syndrome.

When Ron MacLean announced my name during a CBC broadcast, everyone I was with cheered

If it isn’t the obnoxious feudalism of Dragons’ Den, it’s CBC Radio’s star fetishism — see the One-Who-Cannot-be-Named — that supports this condition. The rough, the real and the serrated aren’t welcome on the radio anymore and they’re not welcome on TV, where slickness implies power and money. Sounding and looking and seeming expensive is a big part of the CBC’s métier. In light of its budgeting issues and shortfall from the feds, they’re like your uncle in the dress shoes he only wears at funerals or your aunt after attacking her makeup trowel: unsightly and trying way too hard.