Are These the Dumbest Protesters Ever Caught on Tape?

Back in January, when I wrote about Canada’s Sun News Network, its future was uncertain.

The TV station airs way up (or is it down?) on the “dial,” with other specialty cable channels you have to pay for as part of pricey “theme” packages.

This placement keeps millions of Canadians from seeing the only real competition ever mounted against the state broadcaster (the CBC) and the other de facto liberal news networks (Canadian and American), which are all available free.

As I wrote at the time, non-subscribers were missing a lot, as are Americans who can’t pull in Sun News, either.

Frankly, the Canadian liberal mean-girl nickname “Fox News North” is only an insult to Sun in the sense that it puts out far superior programming than Fox, while spending what amounts to the coins in Roger Ailes’ couch cushions.

Naturally, Sun News applied to the Canadian version of the FCC for a mandatory carriage license, so every Canadian household could receive it at no charge.

The CRTC ‘s decision recently came down. The answer was “no.”

The good news, however, is that that same governing body is now reviewing the status of every all-news channel, with an eye on possibly making them all freely available, including Sun News.

So take that, liberals: Sun News isn’t going anywhere for a while.

That’s great, because otherwise we wouldn’t get to watch stuff like last week’s depressingly hilarious report by the indefatigable Ezra Levant:

…[A]t a Hamilton protest last week, I tried something different.

I arrived at 11 a.m., and by 11:05 I had everything I needed to do a normal story. I had counted the 50 people there, taken pictures of the more entertaining ones and took a little flyer explaining their point. They were against the reversal of an oil pipeline called Line 9. (Right now that pipeline ships OPEC oil from east to west; the company wants to reverse it, to ship Alberta oil from the west to the east.)

But instead of leaving — as most busy journalists have to do in order to meet their deadlines — I stuck around for two more hours. I introduced myself to more than a dozen of the protesters. And I learned something that I’m sure I wouldn’t have learned had I followed the usual media formula.

The first thing I learned is these protesters were clueless about the pipeline they were protesting, and about oil and economics in general. (…)

How could people who were so clueless about what they were protesting also be so passionate, too? That’s the second thing I learned.

I did what many reporters simply don’t do — I Googled the names of a half dozen protesters there. (…)

They’re professional protesters, who go from town to town on whatever the cause of the day is. (…) That’s why they didn’t know anything about the pipeline. They didn’t care. They just like protesting.