The sweet smell of vindication

When the Federal Court of Appeal gave the CBC a slap upside the head Wednesday for sabotaging our information requests, it also served as a vindication of Sun Media in its quest for accountability from the taxpayer-funded broadcaster. This cannot be denied. After all, it was Sun Media, and the Sun News Network, that brought this story to the fore, and who demanded CBC accountability ‹ all while the rest of the media ignored it, or attacked us for even daring to dig in. Indeed, we were the only ones in Canada’s media to stand up for transparency within the state broadcaster, and for it to give an honest account about how it spends our tax dollars. The CBC knew this, of course. They knew that it was us against “all of them,” and so they fought us as if its life depended upon it. And maybe it does. What the Federal Court of Appeal said in its ruling was that the CBC, with $1.1 billion of its budget coming from the taxpayer, is legally required to cough up requested documents for review by Suzanne Legault, Canada’s information commissioner. Despite what our critics on the left love to offer up, we are not seeking inside information regarding the CBC’s modus operandi in order to pick up a competitive edge, and nor do we give a damn about its journalistic sources. But why shouldn’t the public know what Peter Mansbridge earns, for example, or how much of our money the CBC forked over to get the rights to televise Ottawa’s Canada Day celebrations? And, just as importantly, why shouldn’t the public know how much money the CBC has already spent on legal fees to fight our information requests ‹ even to the point of refusing to allow Canada’s information commissioner to examine the documents without having them heavily blacked out? We suspect the CBC will now take its dog-and-pony show all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. As the CBC’s president Hubert Lacroix famously said, “only a judge” can tell CBC what to release. Well, one federal court judge, and three federal court of appeal judges, have now told him he is wrong. And that we are right.