With poppies appearing on lapels everywhere at this time of year, it's customary to pay tribute to the veterans who fought and died in the name of democracy and freedom.

One of the characteristics of a democracy, of course, is what we call freedom of the press. We tend to look down on political regimes where the media are throttled.

Yet there's been an encroachment in Canada on this fundamental and vitally important characteristic of a democracy: media consolidation.

Welcome to New Brunswick, where media consolidation is more pervasive - according to a co-author of the Senate's 2006 report on the issue - than anywhere else in the developed world.

Three years ago, the province's francophone journalists association hosted a series of workshops on the topic from a global, regional, national and provincial perspective.

At the last workshop, two senior staff members of the Irving media empire (Jonathan Franklin and Lisa Hrabluk) publicly proclaimed that they were given unfettered freedom to report as they saw fit and that they'd never had so much as a hint of interference from their bosses.

Yet as I pointed out to the gathering, their newspaper - The Telegraph Journal - had obviously self-censored the agenda of the very workshop they led.

In the paper that day, the event was portrayed as a series of four workshops: Media Consolidation Around the World, Media Consolidation in North America, Media Consolidation in Canada and The New Brunswick Experience. As you might have guessed, that wasn't the title of the fourth workshop, despite what the TJ would have you believe. And I didn't believe a word of what they said about their freedom to report.

But that's small potatoes to what the Irving media empire is trying to do in Woodstock, from the brutish application of a rare private search warrant that allowed the Irving contractors to paw through a woman's lingerie, to the choir-like rants in their company newspapers that a tiny new publication in a small town threatens their corporate existence.

It's not like some third world country where they'll shoot you or toss you in jail - we frown on that stuff in a democracy like Canada. They'll just starve you out, threaten you with their legion of lawyers, or use their newspapers to try to destroy your reputation. Take a look at what they tried to do to the late Louis J. Robichaud.

So this November 11th when I'm standing with the rest of the beneficiaries of those brave souls who put their lives on the line so we could live in a democracy like Canada, I'm going to be thinking about the importance of a free press and how, maybe, it's high time we started fighting to keep it.

And yes, Senator Fraser, it's also high time our federal government took a very good look at the media consolidation we have in New Brunswick and did something about it. It's hardly new, but it is getting progressively worse and it's just plain bad for democracy, something a lot of Canadians died to preserve.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca