The village of Bryant Pond, Maine, is situated in a rural enclave that shares its border with Quebec. It's where a man living in a log cabin tells stories. He also sells Pro-Freedom t-shirts for $35 USD to support truckers and promote his name.
The man is Tucker Carlson, the political commentator whose highly-rated cable show on FOX News is popular among the MAGA crowd. The old garage he converted to serve as a broadcasting studio was described by Megan Garber in The Atlantic as a “Foxified version of Frontierland”.
Mr. Carlson cares a great deal about what happens in Canada. He was a vocal supporter of the truckers' protests, joining former US President Donald Trump and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. He is deeply concerned that Canada has become a dictatorship under Justin Trudeau. He told a guest on his show last week that he is “completely in favour of a Bay of Pigs operation to liberate that country”, forgetting to mention how that invasion attempt turned out.
“Why should we stand back and let our biggest trading partner, the country with which we share the longest border, and actually, I'll just say, a great country, I love Canada, I've always loved Canada because of its natural beauty, why should we let it become Cuba?” he asked. “Like, why don't we liberate it? We're spending all this money to liberate Ukraine from the Russians, why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau? And, I mean it.”
Then he suggested he was just joking, saying: “I'm just talking myself into a frenzy here.”
His nonsense easily crosses the border online and on cable, and his inflammatory rhetoric adds to the toxic brew of anger-generating disinformation online in Canada.
It's hard to say how many Canadians actually tune in to Mr. Carlson's shows on FOX but the more Mr. Carlson calls Canada a “sick society” that “hates itself”, the more Canadians pay attention to the right-wing philosopher from Maine.
While the CRTC has regulations prohibiting the broadcasting of “false or misleading news” by television licensees, for the Commission to “take action on a complaint relating to the broadcast of false or misleading news, the breach of the false or misleading news provisions must be flagrant.” Mr. Carlson delivers opinions, not news. But the line between the two has long ago been erased on FOX News.
When Canada removed Russia Today from Canadian television last year, the CRTC said in a statement it was “concerned with programming from a foreign country that seeks to undermine the sovereignty of another country, demean Canadians of a particular ethnic background and undermine democratic institutions within Canada”.
Ian Scott, the head of CRTC then, added: "Freedom of speech and a range of perspectives are a necessary part of our democracy. However, it is a privilege and not a right to be broadcast in Canada."
Some might argue that muzzling Mr. Carlson would be contrary to the freedom of speech Canadians cherish. But this is a man who jokes about invading Canada on a media platform the CRTC licenses to reach Canadian viewers.
As a regulator, the CRTC wasn't shy about requesting that CBC/Radio-Canada issue a written apology last year for having used the N-word on a radio show. Host Annie Desrochers and commentator Simon Jodoin had used the word in the context of an on-air discussion about a petition that demanded the dismissal of a Concordia University professor who had quoted the title of a well-known book by Pierre Vallières that includes the N-word. CBC/Radio Canada apologized but appealed the CRTC decision. The office of the attorney general of Canada later concluded that the CRTC overstepped its authority.
I doubt the CRTC would be overstepping its authority if it reminded Mr. Carlson that it's a privilege – one that can be withdrawn - to muse about invading Canada to remove a dictator.