Sun News Network tour!

That's right!   Lately, I've been religiously watching Sun News Network in various hotels rooms and I've been enjoying it.

I've been working in Mississauga for the last three weeks and have made some trips into Toronto on a couple weekends.  This past weekend, I hooked up with a friend of mine (I won't say who to protect his privacy) who gave me a tour of the Sun News Network studios on King St. East.  We started off with a peek see into Ezra Levant's "The Source" studio which is actually across the street at the Toronto Sun.  An impressive room with robot cameras controlled by joystick across the hall, with lots of books and trinkets on the back wall, and two books which I happened to help myself to a couple copies of were Ezra's "Ethical Oil" and "Shakedown".

Having been only on air for two months, Sun News Network is attracting radio hosts, journalists, and political pundits.  It recently hit 70,000 viewers on Brian Lilley's show "Byline".  Not tied to any other network, it is very independent and entertaining to watch.  It's amazing to me how many lefties in this country wanted to prevent this little network from reaching the airwaves.  Free speech for them obviously only goes so far for them, I guess.  But it's one of many battles and wars that Canadian conservatives are winning.

I'm watching it right now, and it's great to see them giving our dedicated troops currently in Kandahar a way to say hello to their family and friends.  I haven't seen that on other networks much.  They're also going to pump up Red Fridays more to support our brave soldiers.

I mentioned to my friend that I remember years ago when former Reform Party leader Preston Manning (then retired) wrote a newspaper opinion piece that for the conservative movement to succeed in Canada, it needed not just a political party to get behind, but other important institutions such as think-tanks, political training organizations, and also having a media class.

Since he wrote that, we now have a unified Conservative party which has had a five year minority government, and now at least a four year majority.  Behind that, Mr. Manning created the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, there were more newspaper party endorsements, and a plurality of the electorate that has become comfortable with Canadian conservatism.

So now in Canada, we appear to have a polarized political environment with the New Democrats (new?) on the centre-left and Conservatives (newer) on the centre-right.  The debate about senate reform has already become heated and interesting, but I was surprised when the NDP voted with the gov't to extend our mission in Libya.

Speaking of the NDP, I learned today that at their convention in Vancouver, they tabled whether to remove the postfix "ist" from their constitution and call themselves "social democrats" not "socialist" and replace "wealth distribution" with "economic equality". 

This is all good news for the Marxist-Leninist and Communist parties.  They like their "ist".

Anyway, whether you like SunTV or not, adding more voices to the national debate is simply good for our democracy and to deny it, well, you're being a ninny and stubborn. Canada has been subjected to liberal-friendly TV news for many, many years.  It's refreshing to have a new TV news network that opens the debate even wider.  I wish everyone at Sun News Network all the success into the future.

And yes, I also made time to call my dad back home in Edmonton and wish him a happy Father's Day, talk about Rory McIlroy at the U.S. Open and them tell him I got a tour of the Sun News Network studios--a channel he's been watching since it went on air.  He thought that was pretty neat.  And so did I.