Anybody With A Grievance

It was July of 1985 when the The Canadian Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as a final act of subversion by the soon to be retired, mostly male, old guard, decided to put women in charge of the whole organisation. The Head of Programming was given his golden handshake and promptly replaced by Sheila Bittewart, an up-until-then totally inexper­ienced graduate from the Ryerson School of Journalism, later to be re-envisioned as the Social Justice School of Resentment. Her first act was to purchase a Venti Latte (she had always wanted to order a Venti Latte but had never felt empowered enough) at Starbucks and settled into the somewhat tedious task of replacing all the aging commies with shiny bright young women from the aforementioned incubator of social unrest. Not surprisingly, things went south in a hurry. The title of the morn­ing show was changed from Good Morning Canada to Anybody With A Grievance. No kidding. That's what they actually called it. Breast cancer survivors and their heroic struggles became the cause-de-jour. Gay men were encouraged to go into great detail about the pain they felt at not being able to tell their parents about their sexual preferences. Immigrant women were allotted entire hours to tell the nation about their journeys from male-dominated chattel to Assistant Manager at the Lethbridge Credit Union. Canadian folk music was replaced with World Music (i.e. watery drivel that only a vegan could love). Food recipes were still acceptable as long as the food in question was esoteric and the recipes had originated in the third world hundreds of years before the invention of electricity. Kale and arugula became mandatory bases for salads, and the health-giving benefits of grains that no self-respecting farmer would feed his cattle were touted as miraculous. Native angst was featured regularly and the unbearable pain of women re-living their first periods became a suitable background to consume one’s cornflakes by. Added to this mix were writers, poets and painters no-one had ever heard of, female inventors and people with diseases of every variety, abused cats and just generally, as the show’s title stated, anybody with a grievance.

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