Canadian Tax Dollars: David Wilkins

Northern Neighbour Dept: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CBC has long gone to great pains to highlight the distinction between Americans and Canadians in its programming, generally at our expense. However, the level of anti-American melodrama has been given a huge boost in the current television season as a number of programs offer Canadian viewers their fill of nefarious American officials carrying out equally nefarious deeds in Canada while Canadian officials either oppose them or fall trying. CIA rendition flights, schemes to steal Canada s water, the Guantanamo-Syria express, F-16s flying in for bombing runs in Quebec to eliminate escaped terrorists: in response to the onslaught, one media commentator concluded, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that apparently, our immigration department s real enemies aren t terrorists or smugglers they re Americans, according to The Star. While there is no single answer to this trend, it does serve to demonstrate the importance of constant creative and adequately funded public-diplomacy engagement with Canadians, at all levels and in virtually all parts of the country. We need to do everything we can to make it more difficult for Canadians to fall into the trap of seeing all U.S. policies as the result of nefarious faceless U.S. bureaucrats anxious to squeeze their northern neighbour and the following is excerpted from a cable sent by David Wilkins, U.S. ambassador to Canada, to Washington in 2008. The TV programs referred to are The Border, H2O, Intelligence and Little Mosque on the Prairie . While this situation hardly constitutes a public diplomacy crisis per se , the degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events to feed long-standing negative images of the U.S. and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada. . . . As reported in the news.
@t canadian broadcasting corporation, american melodrama