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Sunday, June 26, 2016

Denying the facts

Explaining how the right-wing echo chamber operates: The Strange Case of the CPP


Editor's note: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Premiers reached a deal late yesterday to modestly increase the Canadian pension plan. Quebec continued with its own parallel plan while Manitoba did not sign on to the deal.
With Canada's premiers talking pensions on the West Coast, the Canadian right-wing echo chamber is in full cry trying to scare the beejeepers out of us ordinary folk about the hideous damage that will be wrought if anyone improves the Canada Pension Plan.
It's all baloney, of course, designed to serve the interests of a very small group -- probably amounting about 1 per cent of the population, you might say.
Still it's interesting to observe how the often noted but seldom examined right wing echo chamber actually operates. To illustrate this process -- with apologies to Frank Magazine’s"Cliché-o-matic" feature -- I have assembled for the edification of the masses a short list of recent quotations from several of the Usual Suspects on the right on the topic of the CPP.
The real question of course, is this: Do the Fraser Institute, its many regional clones, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and their journalistic auxiliaries actually get together to cook up this stuff, do they just organize a conference call? Does it all just somehow filter down from one central bureau, or is some other process at work?
There's a PhD thesis in in political science in this for someone, I think, although not one that would likely be approved by the University of Calgary.

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