The “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” group has been hanging around the periphery of social media notice for a few years now.

Despite their best efforts, few have really taken this bunch very seriously. When one looks at what is at the top of a list of items in their statement of purpose, it is not hard to see why they languish on the fringe.

Read that out loud to yourself. It sounds like a cult chant for the State Broadcaster. One can’t help but envision a circle of these loons standing in a circle around the CBC logo and starting their day by reciting this mantra ten times.

Sacred?

Nothing builds and extreme and closed point of view more effectively than declaring something as being sacred.

This little gang blundered into wider social media notice a month ago when they put out the absurd tweet below.

For those not familiar with twitter, there is a term for reaction to a tweet called “getting ratioed”.

This happens when a tweet is either so idiotic or so offensive that reactions from people decrying it far outweigh the positive responses. In this case there were over 1,100 responses in comparison to 56 likes. That is nothing less than a brutal ratio.

People have happily embraced alternative sources of entertainment such as Netflix and happily pay for it. CBC on the other hand is down to single digit viewing support and the funding for it is mandatory. Over 1000 people made a point of expressing that to these “friends”.

Despite being something of a fringe group, somebody has clearly dumped some significant money upon these people.

Formal polls are expensive to run yet the “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” managed to commission a poll through Nanos with a number of questions.

The results really make one question the integrity of pollsters.

With 1000 people polled, apparently 70% of Canadians want more funding for the CBC?

A majority want tax dollars to fund mainstream media outlets?

As can be seen, the National Post and many other media outlets happily jumped on this and gave this little group some oxygen. They understandably want money.

I am forced however to call bullshit here. It beggars belief that in such a time of crisis with a looming depression that may last years, that people would want their scarce tax dollars going towards producing more shitty content with the CBC.

I held a twitter poll of my own. I understand that this will reflect bias of my following but all the same, with 5,300 individual voters at the time of this writing the results can’t be dismissed out of hand. Particularly when the outcome is so strongly on one side.

Of 5,301 people, 96 percent do not want more tax funding going to mainstream media outlets.

Even when the bias of my following is taken into account, where does this land? 85 percent? 75 percent?

It is pretty clear that the numbers that the “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” gathered are utter hogwash.

Where did Nanos do their sampling anyway? The lobby of the CBC building?

Look, I know that conventional media members are hurting. Those are people like anybody else in that industry and they have bills to pay. They are stressed just as we all are while their industry collapses. That said, it doesn’t justify pumping more tax dollars into it. Just as the restaurant industry I am in has collapsed, so has conventional media. We need aid for the workers but the industries will need to settle on their own into whatever a sustainable model may be in the future.

Hard times are only beginning for us all. Many people will be coming with hands out seeking tax dollars to ease their burden.

The “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting” can take their ask for further handouts and stuff it deeply up their collective asses.

Canadians have no appetite for the government getting further into the media business. They are in too deep already.

Its almost as if they don’t even know that the worst economic crisis we have seen since the 1930s is looming.

The Mayor and council with their six figure salaries and multiple pensions feel that they can carry on with business as usual in city hall and continue to tax and spend as if times were good.

Jeromy Farkas and Sean Chu were the only voices of reason and as usual, they were insulted, belittled and shouted down by Mayor and the rest of council for their daring to propose to liquidate a city slush fund in order to halt the tax hike.

Ward Sutherland for example mused about Farkas having a “limited skill set”. When one considers that Ward’s claim to fame is his having spouted on about “Johnny Jew” while in the middle of an election campaign, he is hardly in a position to question the skill sets of others.

Along with Ward Sutherland, Naheed Nenshi, Druh Farrell, Evan Woolley, Shane Keating, Ray Jones, Peter Demong, Jeff Davison, Jyoti Gondek, George Chahal, Joe Maglioca, Diane Colley-Urquhart and Gian-Carlo Carra all voted in favor of a 7.5% property tax increase.

This makes for a very handy list of who should not be re-elected in the 2021, Calgary municipal election.

How utterly disconnected from reality does one have to be to not understand just how economically screwed the city of Calgary is right now?

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of Calgary was in a terrible fiscal position. Years of revenue from downtown energy companies had spoiled the city to the point that they hadn’t a clue how to stop overspending when the revenue collapsed. With a prolonged downtown office vacancy of 30 percent, the imbeciles in city hall tried to compensate for the lost tax revenue by increasing business taxes on remaining businesses by as much as 300 percent. Spending restraint simply won’t enter their minds.

We will be lucky if even three quarters of businesses in the hospitality industry reopen after the pandemic. Property values are going to be dropping dramatically and tax revenues will plummet.

How many businesses which had adapted to having their staff working from home will stick with that model after the pandemic? Many companies have just discovered that they no longer need brick and mortar locations or at least not nearly as much as they used to. Office space vacancy in Calgary is likely to spike to 50 percent soon. Who the hell needs it anymore?

Spending cuts aren’t a theoretical measure. They are a hard reality.

With the Mayor and council refusing to even accept that they need to get spending under control today, the economic catastrophe is going to be twice as bad tomorrow.

I don’t think there is any hope of bringing common sense into a group of people as disconnected from reality as the Mayor, most of council and the bulk of senior bureaucrats in Calgary city hall.

These people need to be fired en masse next year in the municipal election and replaced by people with a grip on economic reality.

The mushrooms in city hall have thrived on apathy and low voter turnouts. They count in an indifferent populace in order to maintain their perches and perks.

People are going to be galvanized and pissed off in the next municipal election. Calgarians will finally be ready for change.

We need to get to work right now in order to ensure that we replace the current crop of council mushrooms with decent people though. Fake conservatives such as Sutherland always manage to slither through the cracks and we need to vet these types out before they get near a council seat.

Calgary can’t afford another four years of the incompetence that Nenshi and gang have offered for the last decade.

After five years in the business, I just sold my pub and cafe.

It has been quite the adventure and with the Coronavirus crisis hitting us in our last few weeks of ownership, the business made sure to stress us out right to the bitter end.

The stress for the new owners is unimaginable right now. What a time to make the leap.

Thankfully, the pub has a solid and loyal customer base in a bedroom community with limited competition. Despite only being allowed to do takeout service during this crisis, the pub has been doing relatively OK. Sales are a fraction of what they were during fully open times but with virtually no staff to pay, they should be able to squeak by until the lockdown ends and locals have really been stepping up to support their local watering hole. They will be back in full as soon as they can.

One of the measures the province put in place to mitigate the horrific damage being done to the hospitality industry was to back off on the regulation of takeout liquor sales. For now anyway, we are allowed to sell wine, bottled beer and draft beer with takeout orders from the pub.

Allowing us (I still work there for another week) to see draft beer in growlers (large takeout bottles) has been a saving grace. When the shutdown came, we had thousands of dollars in draft beer in the cooler and feared we would have no way to save it. I have always stubbornly only carried local craft beer on tap. Unfortunately, most craft beers don’t have preservatives and that stuff in the cooler has to be sold or dumped. We thankfully were given the means to sell it.

Many restaurants and bars will never open again after this crisis. In such a narrow-margin industry, owners simply won’t have the means to come back after the shutdown. People won’t have the funds to go out as much as they used to for years to come.

For those restaurants and bars that do remain in business, I see no reason why we can’t or shouldn’t allow them to continue to sell takeout liquor.

The world hasn’t ended since it has been allowed. Roving gangs of drunks haven’t been wandering the streets with their growlers. It really has done utterly no harm.

Draft beer is in right now. Craft breweries can use the boost in sales from bar taps for takeout service. Those breweries are facing a tough future as well.

We will be entering quite period of hindsight and introspection in the post-pandemic world. We need to look at every possible way to ease the burden on floundering businesses. I am sure there are many other areas where deregulation can aid many different industries.

Right now though there is one regulation that can easily be dumped permanently.

Let licensed facilities continue to sell their liquor products to go. It was always ridiculous preventing such sales in the first place.

Free the beer!

Its hardly a secret that Calgary has been overtaxing its citizens for over a decade in order to feed the wanton spending of Nenshi and most of city council.

Businesses crushed by city tax increases last year were forced to revolt and rally at city hall in order to try and make city council understand that they couldn’t keep taxing and spending local enterprise to death in order to fund petty, pet projects.

Now with the world reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic decimating the economy, it becomes more important than ever for governments at all levels to get spending in line. Calgary stands out with its pattern of grotesque, wasteful spending on hideous, foreign public “art” projects and having a city workforce which apparently requires ten people in order to paint a green box on a road.

The areas where the City of Calgary has spent wastefully are myriad and all are worth auditing and cutting deeply.

One of the most odious uses of tax dollars in Calgary has been the $100 million slush fund given to the Calgary Economic Development Corporation.

Nenshi and gang overtaxed Calgarians so much that they managed to build up a surplus of $100 million dollars. Rather than apply that surplus to tax relief for struggling businesses in the city, Nenshi and company decided to give it to Mary Moran and CED in order to have them piss it away in chasing pie in the sky, unicorn business investments.

Moran’s name may sound most familiar for her inept management of the Calgary Olympic Bidco which pissed away millions of dollars in a failed bid to convince Calgarians to spend billions of dollars on a vanity project for Nenshi.

Mary Moran has applied all the skills she demonstrated with Bidco to the Calgary Economic Development Corporation slush fund and predictably, she has garnered the same empty results.

With vapid initiatives from flying Calgarians to Seattle in order to have them do cute chalk drawings in a bizarre and predictably failed bid to draw Amazon to Calgary to the CED wasting years touting Rocketspace as a victory though it never actually set up shop in Calgary, Mary Moran and her cadre at CED have proven themselves as being utterly inept.

Calgary Economic Development Corporation in itself is little more than a patronage pit for favored city council insiders. That was demonstrated rather clearly when a plum appointment was given to Jason Ribeiro shortly after his “volunteer” efforts in chasing the Olympic dream for Nenshi and Moran. The whole organization should be dissolved.

While it may (though it shouldn’t) take awhile to get rid of an organization which has a mandate to draw foreign competitors into the city at the expense of existing businesses, it shouldn’t take long at all to liquidate the slush fund under CED management and give tax relief to what few businesses still remain in the city of Calgary.

We can’t afford to looks the other way any more as vain civic politicians and their chosen senior bureaucrats drain existing businesses in order to piss those funds away in the pursuit of other businesses. It is nothing less than vulgar.

There is still well over $70 million dollars sitting in the Calgary Economic Development Corporation slush fund right now and there is no excuse for them holding on to it any longer. That money must be dedicated to Calgarian businesses in the form of tax relief and it must be done right now.

That would do more for Calgary’s economy than a million hand picked kids being sent to Seattle to party and make cute chalk drawings.