Over Christmas and without much ado, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), our guardian of the airwaves, approved nine Chinese state-run television networks to broadcast their shows in Canada.
 
The networks called the “Great Wall package” are wholly-owned by China Central Television, the main state-run television network in China.

The nine channels will carry news, sports, and entertainment programming in several Chinese dialects to capitalize on Canada’s rapidly growing Chinese-speaking market.

The networks’ journalists and producers are overseen in China by the China Radio Film and Television Group, which describes itself as “an important mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee, an important cultural battlefield for the CCP and our country.”

As such these channels give voice to Beijing’s defamation of the Dalai Lama, why China should rule democratic Taiwan, attack Falun Gong practitioners as members of an evil cult and promote the defiance of the Vatican in the middle kingdom.

China-state run media is also infamous for its reality-deficient reports laden with political prejudice.

Remember how China suppressed the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in the summer of 2003, which killed 800 people around the world, including 44 in Toronto.

In June 2005, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party told China Central Television, which owns the nine stations given the green light by CRTC, that national press must “communicate” with officials in the area being investigated and inform them of the content of the critical reporting before publishing the article or airing the programme.

Chinese television news producers were also instructed to highlight the positive. Even in exposés on corruption, they must emphasise that the sleaze was an exception while the overwhelming majority of officials had high moral standards.

This simply means there will be no coverage by these channels on China’s lack of accountability or the destruction of its environment.

Don’t expect news on the air pollution that kills 400,000 people a year, chemical spills that contaminate rivers or that 660 Chinese cities face extreme water shortages.

What you will get is the Communist party’s version that will paint the internationally acclaimed human rights advocate as corrupt or the whistleblower as being an agent for a foreign government.

You will be force fed views that the individual being detained without trial for years in a Chinese labour camp is a terrorist.

You will be told that nothing untoward happened in Tiananmen Square, there is no cultural genocide in Tibet, Taiwan is a rebel province and there is no widespread torture and killing of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

The core mandate of CRTC is to ensure that what is broadcast in Canada reflects Canadian identity, attitudes and opinions.

Maybe the CRTC can tell us when the suppression and distortion of news became a Canadian value.

The Chinese ambassador to Canada, Shumin Lu says the nine new channels would “help diversify the cultural life of the Canadian people.”

We say thanks but no thanks.