CBC's Great Canadian Wish List results made me feel like an alien in my own country. Amongst Facebook members top thirty wishes for Canada:
1) Abolish Abortion
3) A Christian revival
4) Restore the traditional definition of marriage
Why not abolish women (with their pesky reproductive issues), non-Christians and homosexuals (except during PRIDE season when they boost tourism maybe) outright?
However, it turns out that the CBC didn't report the whole story along with the results. That would be the story of a pro-life Facebook group suddenly filling up with "faceless, nameless people," including instructions on "How to cheat wish list," while pro-choice voices were often silenced by Facebook administrators. Numerous pro-choice supporters had their "privileges dramatically limited...without adequate explanation." In some cases accounts were entirely disabled.
Judy MacDonald, founding Rabble editor and former CBC employee, sums up the contest's outcome nicely: “The country's national broadcaster and its fun contest to engage youth has become a platform to wish for revoking the rights of women and homosexuals, and to impose one religion on the country.”
Thanks to Unpopular Culture for her posts and research on this. Like her, I wonder why the CBC hasn't acknowledged the faulty results and why right-wingers were permitted to ride roughshod over Facebook while pro-choicers were blocked at so many turns.
C. K. Kelly Martin
likes to write things down and is a firm believer in the John Lennon quote, "If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliché that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal." She's written a middle grade sci-fi and multiple young adult books including I KNOW IT'S OVER, YESTERDAY, and DELICATE. Her most recent novel, released under the name Cara Martin, is a sci-fi centring around a young Canadian woman cryogenically frozen during a global pandemic and then reanimated to find herself and the rest of the world drastically changed, and Canada under threat.
