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These dangerous developments, and the pathetic report by the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications (which should have offered Canadians blueprints for some real democratic media reforms, but instead let Big Media off the Hook) leave Canadians out in the cold, wondering “who will tell the people?”

Robert W. McChesney, one of North America’s foremost media critics, writes in his book Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy that, among other factors, “democracy requires that there be an effective system of political communication, broadly construed, that informs and engages the citizenry, drawing people meaningfully into the polity.” McChesney says democracies, “by definition must respect individual freedoms,” but that “these freedoms can only be exercised in a meaningful sense when the citizenry is informed, engaged, and participating. Moreover, without this, political debate can scarcely address the central issues of power and resource allocation that must be at the heart of public deliberation in a democracy.”

Canadians must demand increased regulation from the CRTC and, most importantly, the foundation of citizen controlled media. If we continue to let super-sized corporations control our pathways of information, Canadian democracy will be the cost.

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