Shaun Newman Podcast - #728 - Tom Korski

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

He is the managing editor for Blacklock’s Reporter in Ottawa and has 40+ years in the news industry. We discuss CBC ads down another 10%, tax on vacant lots, the housing crisis, foreign interference in government and Senator Lucy Moncion rewriting editorials in the newspaper. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Clothing Link: ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

This is Chris Sims. This is Tom Romago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Kraner. This is Daniel Smith. And welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday.

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you can get early bird tickets there so you want if you want to get the lowest price that the cornerstone ticket is going to be it's going to cover your lunch it's going to cover your supper it's going to cover all the entertainment and all these wonderful speakers right now you go down in the show notes we got early bird ticket prices on and you can get those currently right now down on the show notes the next thing i want to point your attention to is this saturday tuesday and i are going to have bc live election coverage happening you can follow on twitter on or x on youtube rumble facebook so if you're interested in a live stream that's going to be happening that's going to be me and twos also on the 28th we're

going to have sask election live coverage happening and then on the first and second, we're going to be in red deer for the UCPA-GM. And then finally, on November 5th, we're going to have U.S. live election coverage as well. We're going to be having some fun. So there's some things to pay attention to from the podcast, and I hope to see a lot of you, whether it's at the Cornerstone in Calgary, or maybe a little bit sooner at the UCPA AGM. We do have a hospitality room there and look forward to seeing all you fine folks.

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if you want to subscribe down the show notes, it's free, hope to see you there as well. Friday, November 29th, I got three tables left. That's all it's left. We're bringing in the dueling pianos to the Gold Horse Casino here in Lloyd Minster, and well, stop dragging your feet, folks,

buy a table, or talk to your boss about buying a table, and shoot me a text. Would love to pass along the All right, let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's the managing editor for Blacklocks reporter in Ottawa and has over 40 years experience in the news industry. I'm talking about Tom Korski. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today.

I'm joined by Tom Korski. Tom, thanks for hopping back on again. Thank you, Sean. I want to start out with the, you know, I guess our realm, you know, the entertainment or the news, world journalism. etc. And the big name in Canada is always been CBC ever since I was a kid. And, you know, one of the, you know, I think everybody can see it, Tom, that nobody's really paying attention anymore. And they've become, I think, irrelevant. But at the same time, they're funded by the government. So they get to hang on for a long time. One of the things that Blacklocks have put out recently was that their ads are down, not just 10%, another 10%. Indeed, you know, there was a crisis that happened. them and they will not acknowledge it. They'd like to blame, you know, vast right-wing conspiracies or, you know,

it's got to be Google's fault why no one watches CBC. Their audience numbers are terrible. Their television advertising revenues down by, as you mentioned, 10% annually, it's down by a third since they lost the National Hockey League, Hockey Night and Canada broadcast, which had been

a monopoly of theirs for 60 years, and it was worth a ton of money. And that subsidized their news operations was the hockey. And they lost that license to Rogers Communications under a 12-year contract expires, I believe, in 2026. It cost them, by their estimate in the Department of Canadian Heritage, a couple of billion dollars. And they've never made that up. And so they're down to, now we understand, they've made this appeal, that somehow Parliament should make up

their losses at infinitum. But you reach a point where you're bailing out a great lake with a teaspoon. As the audience shrinks and their revenues shrink and they keep paying themselves bonuses, there's just not enough money to make up for the fact that people don't want to watch what they're putting on television. So they have a lot of costs. They have a shrinking audience. They've lost the only programming that people really like, which was the monopoly.

Now, people say, well, you still get hockey broadcast. So, of course you do. But Rogers is doing that by license agreement. They have to pay Rogers for that privilege. It's a big problem. Do you think there's any, you know, like we stare at Pierre Pollyab's promise to defund the CBC? I guess, one, what is that, in your mind, what does that look like defund the CBC? You know, in my mind, it's like, oh, they're gone and there's no more.

Or is there a way the CBC could maybe have a rebirth, if you would? and actually start doing some journalism? Well, they've had 10 years to get ready since they lost a hockey license. This is their problem, Sean. And they've had, you know, 35 years with the Internet to get ready for the big day. I've always said, just my two cents,

if you gave the Department of Fisheries a television license, it would be the CBC, and that's what they are. They're just a big federal bureaucracy that happens to be in a television business. but they act just the same as all other federal bureaucracies. They're not accountable. They're adverse to consequences. They like to give themselves bonuses.

And when you ask them, why aren't you better? They will give you a speech about a cruel web of circumstance that stops them from being competitive or even good. That's enough. What does Polly have proposed? He said everyone knows the French language service they have has a bigger. audience is more valid, relevant in Quebec, because Quebec everyone knows has this sense that language is bound up in culture and surrounded by a sea of English, et cetera. Everyone gets that. They want to have French television and radio. Go ahead. Who cares? It's the English market.

Completely different market. It's highly competitive. And when Pollyette says defund, he's talking about the English, in particular the English television service, although the BBC radio doesn't have as many friends as they think they do. Everyone forgets this. They famously tried to sell radio advertising. CBC radio. This is not ancient history. This happened seven years ago.

They projected revenues of $24 million a year. They got a million a year. And then they just stopped it. They couldn't even sell radio advertising. In the English market, the CBC is just not a player. That's what they're talking about. That's where the money... Now, Sean, I should tell you.

Some of the CBC apologists. and there's quite a few in Parliament Hill, say, oh, well, you can't possibly cut the English service without affecting the French service, and oh, my heavens, now it's a constitutional crisis. Well, you know what? If they can develop insulin and put a robot on the Mars, I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to put this pig to death

and it's cost of a fortune, $1.4 billion in annual subsidies. Oh, man. Tom, did I mention I enjoy having you on put this, picked it. It was my pleasure, Sean. Well, I tell you, you know, like, I, I stare at it and I go, you know, but this is like being too common sense, because, you know, when I look through our news cycle, I'm just like, you know, if you just use some common sense, you could, you could change this around.

So I look at the CBC, and during the Freedom Convoy, it doesn't matter what side of the fence you sat on. If you just would have got out on the road and followed them, you probably would have had ratings like nobody's ever seen. Instead, they didn't do that. And so that's just another, you know, notch on them as. they keep going. I just keep waiting for, you know, like I use hockey as an analogy all the time, right? Emmington Oilers. They bring in one GM. He's awful. They bring in the next. Maybe he's got a

different mindset and all of a sudden they make the Stanley Cup finals. And now this, this year, we got a new GM and we're all in three to start and don't get me started on that. I look at the CBC almost the same way. I'm like, why don't they just hire, you know, someone who can walk in and change the direction, change the feel of the CBC because they have the 1.6 billion. They have, the time. There's so many people that could walk in and help the CBC, but that's not what's happening. Sure, sure, Sean. But at what point do we just accept reality for what it is? I agree that there are people who like the concept of public broadcasting and say, well, God, oh, God, why couldn't we have a really good public broadcaster? Like maybe a programmer that's as creative as Australian broadcasting

or as in-depth as the German broadcaster or has as many foreign bureaus as the British broadcaster or does really first-right documentaries like public broadcasting down in the States. But we don't. They can't do it. If they could do it, I assume they would. I don't think there's a secret cupboard of really excellent ideas that they've been waiting to open on the day that they get a funding cut. They've had ample opportunity.

And they've had very friendly treatment by cats. for the last nine years. They've gotten pretty much everything they asked for. I understand there are people who have a nostalgic feeling, but the CBC based on the past. Yeah, I remember when Don Messer's Jubilee, for you young people, this was square dancing, and old-timey fiddle music, got three million audience. Three million Canadians watched Don Messer. Do you know to this day on the CBC, their Olympic broadcasts don't get three million? The country has just about doubled in size over those years. Well, what happened?

They don't have the monopoly anymore. BBC had a function when they started. It was a response to a marketplace condition. When they started in the radio days, 1935, there was no national radio. What did people in Alberta at Saskatchewan listen to? They were listening to the big NBC stations broadcasting those AM blasts and those AM signals out of Chicago, and they'd bounce right across the prairies, and it started to upset regulators in Ottawa, that there were people in the prairies listening to NBC, Fibber McGee and Molly,

and they said they know nothing about Canadian program. So we're going to start empire, and it was, this was the days of British Empire, we're going to start Commonwealth broadcasting through the CBC network. Well, that doesn't exist anymore. The marketplace condition doesn't, there's never been more content online, in radio, in television, on YouTube, your show. We don't need the CBC. That's why they have a market failure. And there's nothing that anyone is going to do to change the marketplace because the market is never wrong.

The audience is always right. Yeah, I agree with you. I just think, you know, Tom, if I gave you $1.6 billion, but I hear Chris Sims in my back ear going, journalism should never be funded by the government. I hear that, but I go like, if I was given $1.6 billion to create something for Canadians that put the finger back on the pulse, and all of a sudden, holy dinah, look at this,

I probably would be deep. I'd probably be defunded soon after I took over the helm of it. But I think then, you know, your ads and everything would increase. That's my own thought process on it. I just look at the structure there. You know, I think of it as, you know, obviously not a building, but, you know, that's the bricks and mortar part of it, but that's kind of the way my brain looks at it.

You know, you can walk into the structure of what the CBC is and the nostalgia that is there and take what they have and put it to good use. Although, once again, that probably wouldn't last long with the government funding it because certainly everybody on this show knows where my brain goes, Tom with different things, and that's going to leave me to my next thing. You know, this tax on vacant lots, can you explain this to me? This is just another one of these brilliant ideas from our fearless leaders.

Well, Cabinet has proposed, and they did in their budget, and they haven't legislated. There's been no bill, and they're doing consultation right now, that they want to have a tax on vacant of town property. These are typically vacant laws. Presumably, we don't know because there's no legal text of any regulation. Tax on laws that are serviced and zoned for residential construction that do not have any residential construction. Cabinet is mused about an Irish tax. Ireland, public of Ireland, has a tax 3% that they will start collecting in February.

And they thought that was a neat idea. problem. Ireland is not a federation and it does not have 10 provinces that regulate local zoning and taxation of property true municipalities. That's a problem, but there's a larger issue. Cabinet has accepted that there's a housing crisis. They use the phrase, what are their numbers? They say we need about 3.9 million. Let's round it off. We'll say four million. million new homes in addition to regular construction by 2031 to restore affordability. And everyone knows in the major cities in particular, Vancouver, Toronto, but Calgary's pretty hot now.

And in micro markets right across the country, Charlottetown has seen an explosion in housing prices and it prices young families right out of the market. Huge housing crisis. How much housing would we have to build to hit the Fed's target? if you take regular construction, that's about a quarter million a year. And you add the four million fantasy homes they want to build by 2031. It comes in at about about 740,000 homes. They would have to build every single year, this year and next year,

every single year for the rest of the decade, to reach their affordability target. 740,000. Problem, the most construction Canada has ever had in any year was in 1976. was about 280,000. Think about this. The Fed's target is that they're going to triple the historic housing structure level every single year for the rest of the decade to reach affordability. Who thinks that they can do that?

These guys couldn't run a passport off. There is literally zero chance. And we tell this to people all the time. And I feel badly for anyone who takes the government of Canada that's word when they say they're going to get you an affordable home. There is literally zero chance. It's like asking them to suspend the law of gravity. It will never happen in a million years. But they go around having these piecemeal announcements to perpetuate the fantasy, but they're going to get something done.

I think it's almost cruel. The housing tax is somehow supposed to spur construction of housing. How many houses? Ask them. When will these be built? And to what level? They don't have any answers. They already have a vacancy tax on foreign-owned, a residential property, typically apartments and condominiums, that are unoccupied. They grossly inflated the revenue they would get from that. In fact, true, true, true fact, they spend more money administering that tax than they collect in it. So cabinet is thrashing around, created a problem. Housing crisis is a man-made problem. We have two billion acres in this country. We have, what, 350 billion trees? It's inconceivable that we could have a housing shortage.

But we do. It's man-made. And they think these announcements are going to save them. They won't, but no one listens. Where do you, you know, it's, you bring up the housing shortage. And I just did a blue-collar roundtable on this, Tom, about basically, you know, because they've been talking about this housing accelerator fund, right? And so I asked, you know, these people in the industry from different provinces, oh, it's your thoughts. And they, both of them, immediately, unequivocally, we're like, it needs to be destroyed as soon, like, it can't get destroyed as fast, you know, like they're just, they're just making issues.

They're talking about, you know, the shortage. This $4 million will be $8 million. And, you know, the one lady said, by the time she's done, she'll see people living in CCANS because they just can't, with the laws and everything in place, with the cost of doing business,

with the regulatory in there, and just all these different things going on. There's just no way they can ever get any close. And then you bring up the number, and forgive me, Tom, it was in the 70s of $280,000 in one year, and they got to build $700. It's like, where does this go?

Like, where does this go, Tom? Yeah, it's ridiculous. And, you know, they have the answer. This is the irony. The government of Canada doesn't have to do anything to solve the housing crisis. My two cents. They really don't have to do anything. They have the structure in place.

Their only job is Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, created in 1946, to solve a housing crisis for returning veterans. And their only job is to insure mortgages, so ordinary working people can get financing. That's it. And what happened? You know, the housing ministers, and we've had quite a few of them, a succession of housing ministers,

just pointed to the post-World War II building boom as evidence of what they aim for and what they create. Completely wrong. Believe it or not, I know it's obscure. I've done a lot of reading about the post-war housing boom and did a lot of research years ago. You know what happened? they had a stated policy where there were literally this was documented in cases where developers walked into zoning commissions municipal city halls with plans for subdivisions that were approved in the same day and they said go to it lads and boy did they build houses and if you recreated that today you would have what they used to curse the climate

changes as urban sprawl. I'm not making this up. Today's CMHC president has testified in Parliamentary Committee about the problem of climate change. How we have to get densification. We need people to live in high rises like they do in Japan or Manhattan. Two islands, by the way, not three billion acres, not 300 billion trees, two little islands. This is the model they were after. That's why costs went up and construction went down. If you want to solve the housing crisis, you start rubber stamping subdivision permit applications, and you are going to have construction from Regina to Saskatoon. They are going to gobble up all those farm acres, and they will build, they will make sure everybody gets a home

and a yard and a decent school. They did it before, but that's the marketplace, because the marketplace place is never wrong. Instead, what did they do? That housing accelerator fund, my hometown, Brandon, Manitoba. To qualify for the housing accelerator subsidies, they are now zoning fourplexes on the standard municipal law. I've explained this to some of my auto associate. They call Brandon the Wheat City because it's surrounded by wheat fields for 100 miles in every direction. The junior hockey team, I tell them, are called the wheat kings. Lots of wheat lands. It's insane to mandate construction of a fourplex on a standard municipal law in Brandon Mantel. Why wouldn't you just build them all the way to the North Dakota border? Everyone gets a house.

Everyone gets a yard. Everybody's happy. And made problems, Sean, and they're not finding a solution. Well, then my obvious question is, okay, you vote in the next guy. Is that get changed? Well, he said that he will adopt what the post-war plan was and say to municipalities, you're going to start stamping those permit applications, and if you don't, you're going to lose your federal subsidies. That's the Pierre Folle plan. We can only go by what he said. I mean, of course, performance is based on once you get into office.

everyone is going to find out. But you know what's going on right now is not working. I'll tell you, if you're under 30 and you're looking, your young family, especially if you have kids, everyone knows you have kids, you don't have any money, and get the financing on the property alone. And I mean, this even applies to cities. You know, Regina, Edmonton, these are not the highest-priced cities.

But it is more complicated than it ought to be. So whatever is working now isn't working, and that's Pauliev's plan, and no one has pointed out any problem with the plan, except it has nothing to do with climate change, to which I'm paraphrasing, and he has said, that's right. This is a housing construction plan. It's not a climate plan, exactly. Well, I think, and maybe you can poke some holes in the way my brain grab that, because what I see Trudeau doing is, he created the housing accelerator fund to get municipalities to do what he wants, right? He's trying to lure them, okay, you, but in order to qualify for this money, you got to do this and this and this and this and this and this.

Okay, well, that's what municipalities we're starting to see. And as you point out with Brandon, it makes zero sense because you just look at where they are and you look at Canada as a whole and none of it makes any sense. And so Pierre has taken a very similar approach just in a different way. Am I right in thinking this? Well, you're correct in saying that his approach, for instance, on the housing is to say that we're going to do one thing at a time. And the problem with housing is there's a shortage of housing. So let's solve the shortage of housing.

You know, the man who invented the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is a liberal cabinet minister, P.D. Howe. Howe. Clarence Howe, and he said, a shortage is impossible in a capitalist society. How is that even possible? He was quite, you know, he was quite motivated, quite enthusiastic on this topic. How can you have a shortage in a capitalist society with that self-sufficient in food, self-sufficient energy, has more trees and more land than we could use in a thousand years in a place like Canada? How is that even? And he's correct. And so what you hear from Pollyam is, be exactly that approach, that there must be some sort of man-made difficulty that is stopping this problem from solving itself in the marketplace. And this is, I agree with you, Sean. When governments, I don't care who you are, when you tell the market how it's going to be, you will drive an electric car, you will live in a four-plex, your children will learn about diversity.

That's when you start to get into the problems. because you know what? People don't like taking orders. That's the thing about people. You know, with a few minutes left, I was just thinking, you know, like, A, we're going to get Tom on again. We're just going to put out an outstanding invite

to Blacklocks reporter, because, I mean, it's always enjoyable to have you on this side. I'm going to give you the option here. I haven't done this with you. Because I got two things, and I'm like, I don't know if I got time. So I'm curious your thoughts on this. on parliament or government in general

and its relationship with foreign entities because that seems to have not gone quiet, but I'm like, over on the West, I'm like, you know, like it just seems like everyone,

oh man, we're infiltrated and it's bad. And then what are we going to do about it? And the other one was, you know, just this rewriting editorials, having a senator, I'm just like,

I can't even, you know, I'm trying to put these things together. So I'm like, you know, forgive me, Tom, for putting you on the spot on two different things,

but whatever you think is more important for Canadians to hear. Well, let's cover both, and I'll just keep it moving. On foreign interference, this is a very serious issue. There's a federal judge is going to be, well, Quebec's fairer court judge, but a federal commission of inquiry, commission on foreign interference, final report due by the end of the year, I think it's going to be a box of fireworks. What do we know for a fact?

Not speculative, not jib-jib, what do we know for a fact? There was foreign interference by Chinese Communist Party agents and the 2019 and 2021 general elections. We know for a fact they typically targeted conservative candidates to the aid of liberal candidates. We know for a fact that cabinet, there's no way to make this pretty, I don't want to use rough language, cabinet lied. They said we didn't know. What? How could we know? But we know they did know. as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the federal police agency, responsible for keeping an eye on this, pulled them over and over and over in black and white security memos.

Gabonet has some explaining to do. Elections Canada has been useless, the Commissioner of Elections, the RCMP. I'm sorry, they have not been on the forefront of this. But the Security Intelligence Service has. Why does this matter? These are crimes, Sean. People have gone to jail for less. these are breaches on their best day of the Canada Elections Act those are felonies

I'm serious cabinet was told of felonies and they did nothing watch for that report by the end of the year the senator who's the busy body this is the chair of the Senate Committee on Internal Economy it's a typical city senator Lucy Monsian she's from Thunder North Bay Ontario. And she saw a commentary published in the subsidized newspaper. It's a weekly called the Hill Times. And it was a commentary written by an opposition, by a conservative senator. And she didn't like it. It was an opinion piece. She didn't like it. She wanted to correct the thinking, air quotes, correct the thinking, disinformation, air quotes. I need to correct this opinion by a political opponent. Senator Montchion's a liberal party. She didn't like that.

what the conservative senator had to say. By the way, what did the conservative senator say that was so outrageous? Well, I hope you're sitting down for this. He used an accounting reference that she didn't approve of. Senator said that there's overspending in the Senate, and he referred to budgeted spending instead of actual expenditures. It was literally a difference over interpretation of accounting. So we're not talking hate speech. The liberal senator went mile, ma'amau. She just went berserk. And she called up this editor of this subsidized newspaper. And she said, I want you to change that. And they said, great idea, boss. Unfortunately for them, everyone found out. What's the takeaway from this? Well, the takeaways, this is why we've opposed press subsidies.

We think it's impossible for press anybody, anywhere, to be independent of government control and dependent on government subsidies at the same time. I don't think it's possible. And in this case, there's yet more proof. There's other many, many myriad examples that subsidies have been used to co-opt weak, foolish editors into writing for the ratification of their pay masters. I'm sorry, I have very harsh terms about media subsidies. It's cost millions.

Those are health care dollars. Complete waste of money. we discussed John the marketplace is never wrong if you can't get by in our business without relying on a corporate welfare check from the Department of Canadian Heritage

that's too bad people have asked me has come up well what's going to happen to these subsidized publishers if Pollyup wins and does what he says and withdraws the corporate welfare what wither Canada

what's going to happen and I say well, I guess they're going to have to die because that's how it works for every farmer, rancher, small business, minor hockey club, I don't care. If the market doesn't want you, it's not the market's fault. It's your fault, and you can bear the consequence.

Oh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of cynicism going on these days, Sean. Well, I appreciate you coming on, Tom, and doing this. Look forward to the next time we chat, but once again, Thanks for hopping on and talking with us today. My pleasure. Thank you, Sean.