gwynne dyer

Ben Mulroney has a big audition, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s in trouble, again, and Justin Bieber gets in the ring

Al Jazeera English TV’s Avi Lewis is the latest PromArt recipient to crawl out from under the PMO’s Panderbus and explain himself: he got some money to promote a Canadian independent film in Australia and New Zealand, and helped get it a distribution deal. “It was a no-brainer,” he writes in the Toronto Star. “The proceeds of the sale went straight to the National Film Board, defraying the public money that had helped to make the film in the first place.”

Another triumph for the government pandermeisters! (See vol. I, Tal Bachman.) It seems Gwynne Dyer, the pundit deemed too left-wing and too wealthy to receive funding to promulgate Canadian values in Cuba (a) asked for no funding, (b) had never heard of PromArt until his name cropped up in the government’s talking panderpoints and (c) was asked to go to Cuba, in 2007, by the Department of Foreign Affairs!

After what happened last weekend in Surrey, it’s not hard to see why the Conservatives would want to retreat to less perilous pandering grounds: taxpayer dollars and naughty words. A classic combination – all this story needs is a gloatbyte from Charles McVety, and it’s C-10 all over again: