This Week on GR
September 10, 2020
Welcome back to Gorilla Radio’s continuing efforts, NOT broadcast live from CFUV Radio in the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but emanating live-to-tape via Skype from our home-based … "studios".
We all grew up with those infomercial-lengthed Canadian history bites, Heritage Minutes. With production values just hoakey enough to appear made by the Ministry of Education for your Grade 6 Socials class, the upbeat and nationhood-affirming vignettes have become, like the TransCanada and some other stuff one of the things that makes us Canadians Canadian.
And, like some of the best-loved stories we like to tell ourselves about ourselves, Heritage Minutes is just a pile of crap. Or so contends my first guest, (in not so many words).
Tyler Shipley is Professor of Culture, Society and Commerce at Humber College’s Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, and founding member of Canadian poliprog band, Consumer Goods.
Listen. Hear.
Shipely's first book, ‘Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras’ taught us more about ourselves than we hoped to learn, and the same is promised of his second title, ‘Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination.’ His recent article, ‘The stunning misinformation and whitewashing of racism behind Canada’s Heritage Minutes’ currently challenges our childhood indoctrination from the pages of The Canada Files website.
Tyler Shipley in the first half.
And; way back near the turn of the century, when the unbridled power of transnational capital and its enabling mechanism the modern corporation threatened to destroy democracy, Vancouver-based legal scholar and filmmaker, Joel Bakan released the now classic documentary film, ‘THE CORPORATION’.
Now, more than fifteen years later, Bakan has revisited the topic with his newly released book, ‘The New Corporation: How “Good” Corporations Are Bad for Democracy’, and he’s teamed up again with fellow CORPORATION director, Jennifer Abbott on the new film, ‘The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel’.
Joel Bakan and revisiting The Corporation fifteen years later in the second half.
And; CFUV Radio broadcaster and host of Plant Powered Radio, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with the Left Coast Events Bulletin, bringing us up to speed with some of what’s good going on in and around our town in the coming week. But first, Tyler Shipley and catching up on Canada’s pretend history, even as the real one catches up with us.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/
