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W.E. (Bill) Belliveau

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For years, I thought Mike Duffy, the infamous, national CTV newscaster from Prince Edward Island was a passive (small "l") liberal. On Thursday, he repositioned himself as a biased, anti-French, anti-Dion news-commentator.

Here's the situation. ATV (an affiliate of CTV) newscaster, Steve Murphy asked Stéphane Dion this week (in a pre-taped interview in Halifax) "If you were Prime Minister today, what would you have done that would be different from Stephen Harper in respect to your reaction to the current U.S. and global financial crisis?"

Dion started to reply and then asked for clarification of timing in respect to the question. Murphy repeated the question and Dion rightly asked if he was asking the question in context of having been prime minister for the last two years or in the context of being prime minister in the future.

Tapes were stopped and the question was asked a third time without clarification or modification in respect to timing. Mr. Dion responded in terms of what he will do when he becomes prime minister, not in terms of what he might have done if he had been prime minister for the last few years. CTV reporters and Conservative commentators pounced on Dion's language skills and attributed them to "hearing impairments", the implication being that he has a disability that makes him unfit to be Prime Minister i.e. his English language comprehension (in terms of tense) is less than their own.

Their message was that if Dion couldn't understand the question, he's not healthy enough to be prime minister. That's BS.

The question was both hypothetical and without context. It should have been "If you had been prime minister for the last few years, how would you have responded to the financial meltdown in the United States?" or "If you were elected prime minister today, how would you respond to the economic crisis?"

There is another issue and that relates to integrity. When an individual tapes an interview, there is an assumption that mistakes, interruptions or retakes remain in the studio. That did not happen. CTV broadcast and rebroadcast the re-takes and the questions for clarification. Who in their right mind will ever trust a CTV taped interview again?

Learning of the situation, Prime Minister Stephen Harper immediately characterized Dion's television stumble as proof that his pollution tax will destroy the country. How stupid and how revealing of Mr. Harper's vacuous attempt at policy formulation and leadership!

My guess is (without benefit of today's polls) that the Conservative response to CTV's violation of privacy and its attempt to paint Dion as English-language deficient will create significant reaction in Quebec and may indeed result in the wipe-out of Conservatives in that province.

All of this is set against a backdrop painted by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty who continues to insist that Canada is in good financial shape, even as the Bank of Canada announced it was making an extra $12 billion available to ensure credit does not dry up in the Canadian economy.

Flaherty says problems in the U.S. clearly need fixing but he argues that "the situation in Canada is quite different." He says "the U.S. government is running deficits while Canada has surpluses".

Hold on Mr. Flaherty, did you know that Canadian housing prices have begun to drop? Did you know that the value of our stock market investments (including mutual funds and pension plan savings) have diminished in value by upwards of 25 per cent in just a few weeks?

Did you know that 75 per cent of Canada's exports go to the United States? Did you know that most of our lumber and fish exports go to the United States? If the Americans feel pain, we will feel pain. Indeed, we could find ourselves in the emergency room, perhaps on the operating table.

Speaking to reporters on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday morning, Flaherty finally acknowledged that the "unprecedented" economic turmoil is "getting worse". He sought to reassure Canadians that the government understands their growing fears and that their financial system is "well-positioned" to weather the global turmoil.

The statement was a far cry from last week's leaders' debates, in which Harper refused to acknowledge that Canadians were worried about their job security and their homes, instead saying Canadians were focused on problems in the stock market.

The Conservative Party of Canada, a rag-tag collection of Progressive Conservatives and right-wing Reformers have spent the last few weeks attacking the character of Stéphane Dion. On Friday, they joined with CTV in harpooning the Opposition Leader on his language skills, not his policy offerings. On Friday, the Toronto Globe & Mail endorsed the Conservatives as their choice for the future. God help us if voters listen to them.

* W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. His column appears on this page every Saturday. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com