Quebec’s striking students received some high-profile musical support last night when Montreal’s Arcade Fire appeared on “Saturday Night Live” wearing the symbol of the student movement, a red square.

The Grammy-winners, along with Nick Fraiture of The Strokes, accompanied host Mick Jagger on a version of the Rolling Stones’ 1965 single, “The Last Time.” They aren’t the first Quebec artists to offer the symbolic endorsement while on an international stage: earlier Saturday, filmmaker Xavier Dolan and the stars of his new movie Laurence Anyways wore the carré rouge on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival.

While Arcade Fire performed, protestors once again flooded the streets of Montreal, testing Quebec’s new Bill 78, intended to clamp down on the strike. Among other strictures, the law requires that police be given eight hours notice of any gatherings involving more than 50 people. They have reportedly been flooded with calls, including prank notices of children’s birthday parties.

A few days before The Avengers debuted I was asked why I was so excited about seeing what’s looking like the most successful comic book movie of all time. This was my answer.

I’m a lifelong comic book fan and the idea that it’s even possible to make The Avengers has my inner 16-year old doing cartwheels — which is seriously impressive because my outer 16-year old sure as hell couldn’t do cartwheels. The idea that The Avengers is doable is mind-boggling; the fact that they hired a lifelong comic book fan to bring the series to life . . . and that they handed the project to the guy who should have been doing The X-Men all along, is beyond cool.

Joss Whedon doesn’t just freely admit his comic book influences — he has actually written comics. He did a run of The X-Men that lived up to the title billing as “amazing.” What I love about the Marvel movies is that, whether they work or not — and even when they have inexplicably awful sequences like the Spider-dance — they all seem to have been written by someone who has actually read the comic books.

The Marvel movies also treat the inside nods to fans like Easter eggs in a DVD or video game, instead of slowing the plot with them and trying to hit various iconic moments as if they were compulsory figures in skating. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Mans featured several sequences that were literally lifted from famous Spider-Man covers.

But fan boy bliss aside . . two words: Joss Whedon. And again . . . not just ’cause he did Buffy, but because Buffy was so clearly inspired by the Marvel universe (especially The X-Men).

Personally, I’d love to see Marvel hand Whedon the keys to their universe, but until that happens here’s why I’m hoping Joss Whedon’s first sequel isn’t a new Avenger’s movie, but a solo story featuring the Black Widow.

1. Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.
2. Scarlett Johansson in the Black Widow costume.
3. Did you see Buffy? Did you see Dollhouse? Did you see how Whedon turned a tiny dancer into a lethal killing machine in Firefly and how he transformed the nerdly Fred into a lethal goddess on Angel? Did you see what he did with Black Widow in The Avengers?
4. Because Joss Whedon doesn’t just talk Fanboy, he’s the real deal. Kitty Pryde was his inspiration — and if you don’t know who Kitty Pryde is, you may have written or directed one of the earlier Marvel movies. The whole epic Dark Willow storyline on Buffy was dark Phoenix from The X-Men. Angel borrowed heavily from the Bat-world. Whedon even handicapped a fight between the Black Widow and Buffy.
5. Because somewhere the Mensa reject who pulled the plug on Whedon’s Wonder Woman movie is feeling like he’s just gone 15 rounds with the Hulk, so why not finish him off.
6. ‘Cause I can see it now . . . Black Widow returns to Russia to fight mob corruption. There’s probably a suitcase nuke, a dirty bomb and a love interest, maybe Hawkeye, who will die and need Avenging. (Hawkeye has a tendency to die in Marvel comics.) She’ll go rogue. It’ll be like the ultimate episode of Dollhouse. And, just maybe, the Widow’s sometime beau Daredevil will guest star and Whedon will be able to undue some of the damage done in one of the worst Marvel movies ever made.
7. If it fails, Scarlett Johansson can always come back for the next Avengers movie as the Scarlet Witch. Nuff said.

Mark Leiren-Young won the Leacock Medal for Humour for his memoir Never Shoot a Stampede Queen and was part of the team that adapted the Marvel hero Moon Knight — one of his all-time favourite members of the Marvel Universe — as a live action TV series.

A BoB short:

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has announced that all broadcasters, cable and satellite providers, and video-on-demand services must silence erratically loud ads by Sept. 1, 2012. The federal regulator had previously told the TV industry that it had one year to turn down the volume. Rogers Communication, Quebecor, and Shaw Communications have all started to install in-house equipment to deal with the problem.

The initiative stems from 304 complaints in 2011 about unnecessarily loud advertisements. Last year the CRTC invited the public to comment and received over 7000 submissions. “Please make sure the noise level of commercials is the same or less than that of the regular programming to preserve our hearing and that of our children,” wrote one respondent.

“This has been a perennial issue,” CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told The Globe and Mail. “People have been complaining to us . . . we said, it’s time to do something.”

Our American cousins have already passed laws to control loudness on TV. The CALM Act, or Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation, was passed in December 2010. The act requires the Federal Communications Commission to monitor TV networks standards and make sure that commercials don’t spike in volume.

Our bleeding ears thank you all.

- Emily Olesen

I see that Mike Wallace is being given a grand send off and is being called a journalistic hero.

The newspapers are full of glowing obituaries, and TV stations have been running clips of his most famous interviews and documentaries.

But funnily enough nobody mentioned the famous documentary LGBT activist Wayne Besen has described as the single most destructive hour of anti-gay propaganda in U.S. history.

The one where Wallace said this:

“The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of one–chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits. And even on the streets of the city — the pick-up, the one night stand, these are characteristics of the homosexual relationship.”

This horrible thing . . .

I can’t imagine what a young gay person would have felt watching that broadcast.

I can’t imagine what it must have been to live in a time like that one.

But the next time some old straight person waxes nostalgically about the good old days, I’m going to ask them what they did to stop gay people from being treated like subhumans?

And if they say they didn’t do anything, I’m going to ask them why not? And do they even feel the slightest bit guilty?

Mike Wallace may have been a good newsman.

But he was no hero . . .

A passel of Michael Coren supporters have arrived at backofthebook to defend his “interview” with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the SUN “News” Network. (I always keep a small pile of ironic quotation marks handy when I write about SUN TV.) You’ll find them milling in the comments section following Rabbi Boteach’s account of the hostilities, which we published as soon as it landed in our inbox. That was on Thursday, a few hours before the program had even aired. Rabbi Boteach has a very good PR apparatus.

One of the commenters takes us to task for not publishing “the response article by Michael Coren.” Presumably he means Coren’s blog in The Huffington Post, which we didn’t publish because HE WROTE IT FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST. See how that works? Our correspondent might better have taken us to task for publishing the Rabbi’s rebuttal before we’d even seen the buttal. But now that the program has aired, it seems obvious to me he was entirely right to call Coren on his obnoxious remarks and behaviour.

You can decide for yourself . . .

. . . but what I see is Coren tipping headlong into the old Jews control Hollywood thing, while adding a twist new to me: And hence, they use their power to make movies that parody Christians. One wonders what movies he means (and so does the Rabbi, who tries fruitlessly to get an example out of him). And then, like that Italian cruise ship captain, Coren looks up from his lifeboat and realizes it’s not where he’s supposed to be. The cruise ship captain’s response was to claim he fell in accidentally; Coren’s is to explain that he doesn’t mean that Jews actually control Hollywood, just that they’re very influential, and goodness, that’s all to their credit!

Oh please. If he wasn’t implying that they control the place, then how is it he figures they can get their malicious portrayals of good-hearted Jesus-lovers onto the screen? By talking others into slandering Christians for them?

Next day, Coren appeared fearlessly on another SUN News Network show to defend himself.

Hilariously, he makes two claims. One is that Boteach is only trying to sell his book. (By appearing on SUN TV in Canada? That’ll be good for two copies.) The other is that he “doesn’t realize my place in Canada. This will probably backfire.”

His place in Canada. Now, I expect Coren isn’t an anti-semite, but he’s obviously a big self-kidder. Outside of cities where the SUN Newspapers are sold, his profile is roughly that of, say, Adam and Morgan. (Who are Adam and Morgan? Exactly.) Or perhaps he means his place as a defender of Israel, but he isn’t exactly alone in that portfolio either. We’re looking at you, National Post.

Of course, being a defender of Israel doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re philo-semitic. It could just mean that you like heavily militarized, legs akimbo, right-wing governments. One wonders if these friends of Israel would be quite so friendly if a less belligerent administration, like the one Yitzhak Rabin led, and got assassinated for, was in power.

But let’s take Michael Coren’s word for it: he loves the Jews, and they, in turn, all over Canada, hold him in high esteem. Now, could he treat the ones who come on his show as guests, rather than test audiences for his truly strange notions of what they do and do not think?

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Today I had what was probably the most unpleasant TV interview of my life on Canada’s Sun News Network (national). Interviewed by host Michael Coren about my book Kosher Jesus, I expected to be asked about the book’s content. The interview started that way. But then Coren quickly got to a question that seemed to be bursting from within. You’ll have to see the exact show, airing tonight at 7pm, for complete accuracy, and I am writing this about an hour after.

Coren essentially asked me why Jews depict Christians so negatively. He went on about how much the Catholic Church and Christians in general have done for the Jews of late. Yet the Jews continue to be so unappreciative, always questioning Christian motivation, always finding fault with Christians no matter what.

I asked him to justify his claim that Jews depict Christians negatively. He said something like, “What do you mean? Just look at Hollywood.”

Hollywood? I was confused. Weren’t we just talking about Jewish-Christian relations? Where did Hollywood come in, unless, for Coren, Jews and Hollywood were synonymous.

What was the connection between Hollywood’s depiction of Christians and the Jews, I asked. The show went downhill from there, with the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jews controlling and influencing Hollywood dominating the interview. I defended my people against this disgusting slur, a tributary of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that the Jews control whole segments of society, in this case the motion picture industry, which they use to negatively depict Christians as a bunch of illiterate and primitive bumpkins.

From there Coren went on to speak about the negative Jewish depiction of Pope Pius XII, which I battled him on further. This was amazing. The Jews were defaming the saintly Pope Pius? For the record, I have written a great deal on Pius XII, the man John Cornwell, a non-Jewish British journalist, famously called Hitler’s Pope in his best-selling 1999 biography of the same name. Pius was the wartime Pope who never once condemned the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews through all the years of the Holocaust and who, after the war, allowed the mass kidnapping of Jewish children who had originally been given by their families to Christians in order to save their lives. Pius advised, in the form of a typewritten directive discovered in a French church archive and dated Oct. 23, 1946, that church authorities not return to their relatives Jewish children who had been baptized. They must remain Christian and should not be returned to Jewish families.

He was the Pope who famously refused, amid unmistakable evidence of thousands of Jews being shipped to slaughter in Nazi concentration camps, to ever speak out against the Holocaust. This followed Pius’ successful efforts to prevent the publication of an encyclical commissioned by his dying predecessor to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism. This is also the Pope who sent Hitler birthday greetings every single year and who refused to excommunicate Hitler or any other top Nazis who were on official Catholic rolls (to give this context, the singer Sinead O’Connor was excommunicated). He ignored the pleas of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to denounce the Nazis. He later refused to endorse a joint declaration by Britain, U.S and Russia condemning mass murder of Europe’s Jews, claiming that he simply could not condemn “particular” atrocities. The most he ever did was a single pronouncement during the war on the murder “of hundredsof thousands.” By then, of course, there were millions, and he did not mention Hitler, Nazi Germany, or the Jews in the statement. Most infamously, he was silent when the Germans rounded up Rome’s Jews in October 1944 for slaughter. They were being processed for extermination in a military school a few hundred yards from his window in St. Peter’s. An Italian princess, Enza Pignatelli, forced her way into the Pope’s study and warned him about the imminent assault on the city’s Jewish citizens. “You must act immediately,” she cried. “The Germans are arresting the Jews and taking them away. Only you can stop them.” The Pope assured her, “I will do all I can.” He made no protest and nearly all were later gassed in Auschwitz. Curiously, amid the Pope’s inability to find his voice to condemn the extermination of European Jewry, when the Catholic archbishop of Berlin issued a statement mourning Hitler’s death, the Pope did not reprimand him.

Those who have read my writings, and especially those who have read Kosher Jesus, will know that I have unbridled love for my Christian brothers and sisters, a deep respect and affection I have written and spoken about on countless occasions. They will also know that I was given the great pleasure and honor of being greeted by Pope Benedict in Rome in 2010. They will further know that I am invited to address Christian audiences the world over, including in Israel. And I wrote Kosher Jesus in response to the great Christian yearning to discover the Jewishness of Jesus.

But people like Coren who perpetuate the anti-Semitic canard that Jews both control Hollywood and have contempt for Christians are a serious obstruction to the new era of Jewish-Christian brotherhood and rapprochement. It is an absolute lie that Jews have contempt for Christians. It is likewise a lie that Christians are victims of Jewish hostility, as Coren implies. The truth, of course, is that Jews have suffered mightily at the hands of Christianity for nearly two millennium. But thankfully a succession of great Christian men and women in modern times, led by Pope John XXIII, the greatest of all popes, and then by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both outstanding friends of world Jewry, and joined especially by the 80 million born-again Christians in the United States, the vast majority of whom are phenomenal friends of Israel, have reversed this trend and made Catholicism and Christianity stalwart allies and friends of G-d’s chosenpeople.

Denying the past is not going to increase our friendship just as being limited by it will not either. This is a new time for Jews and Christians. Let’s forgo the old animosities, the old prejudices, and especially the old and ugly stereotypes. Michael Coren owes Jewry an apology. If he’s man enough to give it I will overlook his foul treatment of me, both during the interview and after it was over.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whom Newsweek calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” was the host of TLC’s Shalomin the Home (which won the National Fatherhood Award), was the London Times Preacher of the Year at the Millennium, and received the American Jewish Press Association’s Highest Award for Excellence in Commentary. The international best-selling author of 27 books, he has just published Kosher Jesus. He is currently mulling a run for Congress from New Jersey’s Ninth Congressional District, running as a Republican. www.shmuleyforcongress.com

A last blog post by Joe Bodolai has gone viral today after the L.A. Police ruled the well-loved comedy writer’s death a suicide. Bodolai, who worked on both “Saturday Night Live” and the “Kids in the Hall” before helping to launch Canada’s Comedy Channel, apparently intended the post as a combination suicide note and impromptu memoir.

Titled “IF THIS WERE Y0UR LAST DAY ALIVE WHAT WOULD YOU DO?”, the long farewell includes Bodolai’s list of “Things I Regret”:

Later he writes: “I wanted a channel. I felt the huge failure of comedy, such as sitcoms, on Canadian television, could only be successful if showrunners were comedy writers, not Telefilm form fillers. This is one of the proudest accomplishments I have seen come true. Mark Farrell, Brent Butt, so many more of you….”

Butt confirmed as much on his twitter feed. (See The Globe‘s complete round-up of social media tributes to Bodolai here.)

Bodolai, who was US-born, had apparently lost a TV job recently and, according to his own Twitter feed, undergone surgery. Over Christmas he volunteered at an L.A. Homeless shelter. “[It] may be my new home,” he writes. “I call it ‘Shawshank Summer Camp.’ 65 men on cots in one big space where sleep is victimhood.”

Bodolai opens his post with a list of “Things I Think Will Happen Next Year,” in which he mixes gags (“Sales of Mayan Calendars up  for 2012, drop for 2013,” “World Supply of Band Names will run out”) with more serious prophecies: “Martial Law in the USA, first probably in Louisiana”; “Americans will go along with this, but resisters will be FEMA camped.”

Unfortunately we think a lot of his readers won’t realize he’s not joking about that last bit.

Joe Bodolai would probably like it if you visted his youtube channel.

- Zeff Davies

Remember all those episodes of the various Star Treks where characters were genetically altered, either willingly or unwillingly, by some means or other? It would happen within the course of a single episode and be neatly fixed at the end, with a hypo from the lovely Dr. Crusher.

In reality, of course, altering the DNA in every cell of a person’s body is a very tall order — let alone reverting them back to exactly what they were before, so that they might carry on as usual in next week’s episode.

Unless you happen to be a nemotode worm.

Researchers at Cambridge University have succeeded in genetically altering nemotode worms so that they glow in ultraviolet light. They have been given one additional amino acid in addition to the 20 provided by nature.

How did these boffins of biology do it? The article is weak on detail, but if this process could scale to humans (nemotode worms are only 1 mm long and have only about a thousand cells), it might put a twist on the ethical debate concerning genetic enhancement. No longer would the question be whether to enhance foetuses, but whether we should wait until an individuals are old enough to decide for themselves whether or not they want to be enhanced and how.

Expect also to see a new twist on spam: “In life’s genetic lottery, were you short changed in the john thomas department? Now you can say, ‘Screw you, Mother Nature’ and be sufficiently endowed to ensure she enjoys it.” Not that I have any insecurities in that regard, but if they were to come up with a genetic tweak for male pattern baldness . . .

Still, be careful of what you wish for. Don’t forget what happened to Tom Paris, when traveling at warp 10 somehow screwed with his genetics. He turned into a giant salamander. And so did Captain Janeway. Then they had giant salamander babies. Perhaps we shouldn’t play God.

We’ve been getting a lot of stories from our media lately (here, here, and here), assuring us that an equivalent to the Rupert Murdoch scandal couldn’t possibly happen in Canada.

Really? No cozy incestuous relationships? No dirty tricks?

On March 30, 2009, Stephen Harper, PMO staffer Kory Teneycke, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, and Roger Ailes, president of Murdoch-owned Fox News and former communications adviser to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr., all sat down to lunch.

We know this because it showed up in the mandatory disclosures made by media consultant and former White House flack Ari Fleischer to the U.S. Justice Department. Ari, you will recall, had a personal contract with Steve to grease US media wheels for him. Teneycke had a dream of a Canadian Fox news channel.

Four months later, Teneycke had left the PMO — barely a year into his job as Harper’s chief spokesman — only to pick up a contract with Quebecor to explore a project that Ottawa insiders almost immediately described as a fledgling “Fox News North.”

Three more PMO staffers followed Teneycke to SunMedia: an issues management adviser, an advertising manager, and an issues management researcher, described as “a guy who could dig up any dirt on the opposition in a jiffy.”

Teneycke himself had to take a brief three-and-a-half month leave from heading his new project, when conflict-of-interest embarrassments ramped up following his Sun op-ed and public admission to prior knowledge of the hacking of an Avaaz petition, hostile to his setting up Fox News North.

Teneycke was back in the Sun saddle during Steve’s re-election campaign in April this year when a fifth PMO ex, Harper’s former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart, sent him a photo of an Ignatieff look-alike posing in full combat gear in Kuwait in 2002.

“Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning” ran the SunMedia headline and story, sans photo, before Teneycke apparently tumbled to the ruse.

Patrick Muttart was working for the Con election war room at the time, while simultaneously heading the “Canada/US practice” at the US PR firm Mercury Public Affairs, where he works under Terry Nelson. Nelson, former political director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, and McCain-Palin campaign manager, now a Senior Advisor to teabagger and 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, is famous for the race-baiting campaign ads and phonejamming dirty tricks done under his GOP watch, and for employing the media advisor on the original Swiftboat Veterans For Truth ads, which used lies and doctored photos to smear John Kerry’s war record during his run for US president.

Amusingly, the CTV piece, Harper immune from Murdoch-style scandal, makes extensive use of analysis from Muttart to assure us a similar scandal could not happen here. We just don’t have the same “intense, quasi-incestuous” clique of political and media elites, Muttart says, without irony.

Besides, as another former Harper Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie, explains about Canadian papers: ”So few people actually read most of them.”

Yet somehow the rightwing National Post muddles on for 13 years losing $9-million a year, no one seems to know who owns CanWest/PostMedia now (besides it being some US hedge fund  — and so much for the rule limiting foreign ownership to a third), and 99% of the papers who endorsed a candidate in the last election all endorsed Steve.

We could have a Murdoch-style scandal here and it would be out of the news cycle again the same week, no damage done.

Update: More from David Climenhaga at Rabble.

Below we reprint our 2007 Western Standard obituary (the publication does still exist, barely, as a rump website), including a sampling of stiffed subscribers’ comments. As one of them notes: “To take someone’s money when you have no intention of providing that service is fraudulent and, in my opinon, immoral.”

Krista Erickson couldn’t have said it better (or, rather, have Kory Teneycke write it for her). By the way, Erickson’s public facebook page is currently home to its own set of pithy comments about her obnoxious behaviour in the now infamous interview with Margie Gillis, including a number that remark on her publically-subsidized tenure at the CBC, and her publically-funded travel with MP boyfriend Lee Richardson.

***

Standard Procedure
First published Oct. 19, 2007

By Frank Moher

I felt some sympathy for Ezra Levant around the shuttering of his Western Standard magazine, until I received this item of boilerplate e-mail:

Dear Western Standard reader,

I’m sorry to report that we’ve had to shut down the print edition of the Western Standard. Despite nearly four valiant years of trying, we were unable to make ends meet financially. I regret that means we will be unable to fulfill our oustanding subscription obligations, and for that I’m very sorry.

I wasn’t a Western Standard subscriber — I received its e-mails because I had registered for its website, in hopes it would provide grist for this blog. As it has. It is to laugh. All those loyal subscribers with their avaricious belief in the free-market, now invited to place their subscriptions where the liberal sun don’t shine. Perfect.

Levant didn’t help matters by telling The Globe and Mail that “the magazine wasn’t purely an economic mission to begin with, but also a moral one.” Apparently that morality doesn’t extend to meeting one’s financial commitments. It’s not easy to find the responses of aggrieved dumped subscribers on the website (which is, so far, still extant), so — as just another of the many public services we provide here at BoB — sans subscription fee, by the way — I’ve posted a few at the end of this message.

Perhaps this experience will help right-wingers get over their fantasy that an endeavour like Western Standard is possible in Canada without government grants. Even $63,366 in postal subsidies from the feds in 2005-06 wasn’t enough to keep it going; what it probably needed to have a shot at survival was assistance from the Canada Magazine Fund. Let me be a bit conciliatory: I’d gladly have had my tax dollars directed to Western Standard in order to be able to continue to read it; it had some good writers, and its comic value was incalculable.

My schadenfreude spent, let me be even more conciliatory. It’s hard to celebrate the loss of a western Canadian magazine that, its title notwithstanding, aimed to have a national circulation and the sway that goes with it. We do still have among us The Report, a monthly out of Edmonton that is the true heir of the old Alberta Report, but it is largely unknown elsewhere. That leaves those of us west of Mississauga to the ministrations of Maclean’s and various other central Canadian colissi. Maclean’s has made some strides in becoming genuinely national since Ken Whyte took over, but Whyte, for all his talents, is too much now a creature of downtown Toronto to really do the job.

There is one ray of hope, digitally-generated, in all this, and that’s the emergence of a handful of online magazines like thetyee.ca, orato.com, and, dare I say? — backofthebook.ca in and around Vancouver. The Tyee is BC-oriented, orato is determinedly internationalist, but they, like we, are at least coming from someplace other than walking distance of Yonge Street.

Wait, there’s one other. Perhaps the death of Western Standard will spell the end of the absurd conflation of conservative and western Canadian interests that began with Bible Bill Aberhart and picked up speed at Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report back in the days when both Whyte and I were working there. Believe it or not, being right wing and, say, Albertan, aren’t necessarily one and the same. As Ezra Levant is currently discovering, the hard way.

Just some of the happy Western Standard subscribers! . . .

“We too have lost out on most of the remainder of our subscription and while I supported this magazine, I understand people complaining about the loss of their money (especially those poor people who renewed in the past month when magazine leadership should have known that this was going to happen).

“I do not perceive their complaining as being selfish or cheap but I view what has happened regarding subscriptions as an ethical issue.

“By accepting someone’s money for a subscription you are entering into a legal agreement to provide a service for that money. To take someone’s money when you have no intention of providing that service is fraudulent and, in my opinon, immoral.”

***

“Three times I have supported getting out the Conservative message; the first time it was buying $1000.00 in Ted Byfield’s enterprise (last I heard the share was worth 1 cent); the second time it was Link Byfield’s BC/Alberta Report magazine (A two year subscription lost when the Magazine went into bankruptcy); now another two year subscription lost as the Western Report folds. I wonder how much those two “Conservative Cruises” contributed to the bankruptcy and were the two Byfields guests or paying passengers?”

***

“One thing, Ezra. I sent $50 to your magazine to help fight the Human Rights case. After that, I subscribed when you sent me an email promising me your book, “The War On Fun”, if I should subscribe. I never received the book after a year, and stalled re-subscribing until I did. I looked at it like a campaign promise broken, which it really was. Since I stalled on re-subscribing until this book promise was resolved, and your magazine folded in the meantime, I saved my money. This was the only blight on an otherwise politically fresh red apple.”

***

“Great magazine, sad to see it go. However, I am a full time student, and unlike most subscribers, I don’t have money to throw around, and I just renewed last month (after a phone call asking me to renew, no less, which makes me wonder if it was a cash grab).”

***

“If the WS still has an Internet presence, then there is still a company carrying on business. It hasn’t gone bankrupt. It is presumably making money off its advertising on the Internet. So why shouldn’t it pay its print subscribers?”

***

And one mildly peeved former columnist, Colby Cosh:

“It has to be admitted that the shutdown was poorly handled from the standpoint of the editorial employees and contributors. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I got the news the same way the public did, from Ezra’s announcement on the Shotgun. I was mere hours away from leaving town for Thanksgiving, and those who depended more heavily on the Standard for their income must have been in the same rather awkward situation. (Cook a bigger turkey, Grandma, I’m out of work!)

“. . . I personally am in arrears for only one issue, and if I never see the final payment that makes me even-steven with the magazine (no one has officially told me it is not in the mail), I will still have been treated more fairly than I was by my longtime employers at Alberta Report, who owed me thousands of dollars in back pay and statutory severance and failed to follow up on repeated verbal promises to send at least some meagre crust. (I’m grateful that the Standard did not attempt some preposterous strategy like converting the magazine to a non-profit while everyone was still employed and then claiming that the old obligations of the for-profit company had been mystically liquidated by the changeover.)”