Pity the poor CBC.

It gives pride of place to Kevin O'Leary, Don Cherry and Rex Murphy, all of whom get to freely express their generally right-of-centre views with alacrity. And yet, a good many Conservatives still think of the Corporation as some kind of left-wing conspiracy.

"One-sided caricature of itself"

CBC has been the subject of much chatter on Parliament Hill of late.

They have been talking about it at the Commons ethics committee (considering the controversy over CBC's resistance to Access to Information requests from Sun Media), at the Canadian Heritage committee, and in the House.

And that chatter has not been very friendly.

The fight is on for Canadian identity in communications and culture, even if it does seem that only one side has shown up.

The Conservative government's calculated, but decisive, plan to remove foreign ownership rules from Canada's telecom and broadcast sectors will begin with satellite telecommunications -- in short, Telesat Canada.

When Harper overturned the CRTC to allow the Egyptian owned Globalive into the mobile phone market, he did it by changing the definition of being foreign owned, without changing the law as such. The sleight of hand in the Globalive decision may be tested in the courts -- but now the government is proposing to go further and address ownership outright.