Ted Byfield and his son Link are two of the best writers in Canada, and for 30 years attempted to present some balance in a liberal society (canada) that has become more structured on welfare handouts and government corruption than pride in accomplishment....it's too bad they don't get the exposure they deserve. But then, not many Conservatives do north of the border. Thanks for posting that :-)
What follows is Link's reply to a centrist liberal's gloating over the failure of the Byfield publication after some 30 years. If you have not read it, I hope you find it of interest:
LINK BYFIELD REPLIES TO WORTHINGTON - 1/1 pages
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TO PETER WORTHINGTON, WITH THE GREATEST RESPECT
The Toronto Sun
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Page: 16
Section: Editorial/Opinion
Byline: BY LINK BYFIELD
Column: Guest Column
Dateline: CALGARY
It was uncomfortable, but an honour to be singled out for personal attack by Peter Worthington in this newspaper recently.
Peter is one of the great men of Canadian journalism. It's like being criticized by the dean of the faculty.
He was lamenting that I closed the Report magazine last month, 30 years after my father, Ted Byfield, started it.
I couldn't pay either the printer or the staff. Thus ended what Worthington accurately describes as "Canada's only conservative magazine."
He discerns "a failure of those in charge." I plead guilty. I ran the operation for the latter half of its existence as editor and publisher. The ship ran aground on my watch.
Peter says I failed to break through into eastern Canada. True. He says I failed to get national advertising. That's true too. He says I shifted the editorial emphasis from general news to politics and "quasi-religious themes."
True again, I suppose. All true.
Worthington was the editor of the Toronto magazine Influence in the early Mulroney years, which published for about three years before it collapsed.
Based on that experience he says the country would support a conservative magazine that is "tough, sensible, and balanced," as long as it "focuses fearlessly on the issues."
Now, as someone who has only edited about 750 editions of the paltry 1,500 or so our family has published, I'd say Peter's onto a good idea here. He should show us western rubes how it's done.
We await with interest the pilot edition of the Fearless But Sensible Report. I'll give him 40,000 subscribers to get started.
But he may discover it's impossible to be "sensible" and "fearless" at the same time.
"Sensible" publishers go with the flow. They don't tell Ottawa to stuff its publishing subsidies.
They don't challenge gay rights, nutball feminism, the Charter establishment, the academic establishment, the medical establishment and the political establishment. They do not blaspheme the Spirit of the Age.
If they do, they lose their national agency advertising (as we did after 1985), and they lose credibility in "sensible" eastern Canada.
The Report proved the old rule that subscribers alone will not pay enough to keep a magazine going. But our survival for almost two decades without consumer advertising testifies to how much people actually will pay to support the right message - "political" and "quasi-religious" though it may be.
To the many thousands of readers and industrial advertisers who kept us going these many years I will be grateful all my life. And to those who were caught at the end with unfulfilled subscriptions, I can only say I'm sorry.
We did the best we could.
Looking back, I'd say the Report magazine served a purpose we were not aware of at the time.
We documented, week by week and decade by decade, the destruction of freedom and democracy in the institutional life of our country - in the government, the political parties, the media, the courts, the schools, the professions and business.
It began with Trudeau in 1973 and ended with Chretien in 2003.
That was our achievement. Anyone who wants a complete record of how Canada went from a free nation to a servile banana republic - from a world leader to a backwater - from an ordered society to a chaos of institutionalized self-indulgence, ignorance and social distrust - can find the whole thing summarized in 30 volumes.
Freedom and democracy survive only in the hearts and minds of individual Canadians, not in our institutions.
That's why we've started the Citizens Centre. What was destroyed must now be rebuilt, from the ground up. And what is most needed for that is not a magazine but a movement.
The goals of the Citizens Centre are to democratize the way Canada is governed and to change what we Canadians expect of our judges and politicians. If you think this is worth doing, visit us at citizenscentre.com |
