This is the text of a message i sent to CBC’s morning host, Andy Barrie. Barrie is a highly successful radio host who came to Canada as a draft dodger.
Dear Mr Barrie:
It’s probably strange to get email about something you said six months ago.
I’m referring to the remarks that you made at Christmas, about the war resisters living here in Canada. I have a minor disclosure to make: I know some of the resisters, and one in particular, Patrick Hart quite well. I urged Sgt Hart to seek you out and look for your support.
I heard what you said, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since. One thing you said, in effect, was that as a CBC journalist, you couldn’t be a partisan about the way this country has stopped giving the support to people today that they gave to people like you. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think you were wrong. In effect, i think that people who were in that situation are the only ones who have to say something, and something more than has been said.
I think a great deal of you. I’m always surprised that your gifts for interviewing are not more highly prized in the CBC. And the CBC is important to me. I despair of it, but when I do, you, and a few others are the reason I still value it. And so it pains me that the speech you made stopped short of what mattered. I think, Mr Barrie, that the mark of a journalist is not to always to obey the dictates of ‘objectivity’. I think that the only great journalists are the ones that are doing it for a reason, and allow those causes to be a passion that drives them. I think that in the end, editors and producers that are worth working for know that this matters more than editorial guidelines.
I see Patrick many nights, working at the bar that he busses tables at. He has a huge amount to lose. I don’t think that, even if you had said what I hope is in your heart, that you could have risked one half, one tenth of what he risked, deciding for himself that the world that he built his whole life around was wrong. I don’t really think that this awful, criminal war that your ex-countrymen have created will ever been seen as evil in the US until the men and women like Patrick get the support they deserve in saying that it’s wrong. What you said at Christmas went to the door, but didn’t go in.
Mr Barrie, I hope you find a way to say something more, sometime, and soon about this situation. Since your remarks, Canadian passivity has put us in a shooting war in Afghanistan, bomb makers are alleged to be in our suburbs, and soon it will be our children, perhaps, who will feel that they have to leave a country that would not stand up for what is right.
Our prime minister, Pierre Trudeau stood up for what you and 50.000 others like you did, and because of that, you have what you have today. I hope that you will consider this, and do something more to help others as you were helped.
dan donaldson,
toronto
