Sun News Has an Art Attack

The new network takes on the money-grubbing evil that is internationally renowned interpretive dance.

Sun News finally did something remotely controversial: Host Krista Erickson broadsided interpretive dance icon Margie Gillis for 20 minutes over why she has received $1.2 million in government grants since 1998, in a thinly veiled attack on this country's supposed runaway spending on the arts. Marc Cassivi of Cyberpresse deduces that Erickson is a “journalist in need of a scandal,” summing up the entire ethos of her employer before dismantling Erickson's belief that no art deserves taxpayers' money. “Without public funding, there would not only be no modern dance, but no theatre, literature, music, television as we know them in Canada. Even private television, whose benefits include tax credits, would not be the same,” says Cassivi in a not-too-subtle jab at Quebecor's nascent news channel.

The Vancouver Straight's Charlie Smith recalls a Norman Spector column that raised questions about Erickson's time at the (taxpayer-funded) CBC. In 2007, she was accused of feeding questions to a Liberal MP to ask Brian Mulroney at a committee hearing if he lobbied on behalf of Quebecor. The Tories used that incident in a fundraising drive as proof that the CBC shilled for the Liberals. At the time, Erickson was dating Tory MP Lee Richardson, who had worked in Mulroney's office. That she was hired by Sun News “indicates that [CEO Pierre-Karl] Peladeau, Mulroney, and Stephen Harper's former press secretary who runs the station, Kory Teneycke, didn't have a problem with her,” says Smith. “Maybe the next artist who goes on Erickson's program can respond to her questions about cultural funding with inquiries about her dealings with Brian Mulroney and his friends.”

John Doyle, The Globe and Mail's television critic, thanks Erickson and the network “for the hilarity. And allowing me to use the word 'unbeknownst,' which is what you are,” as the network draws as little as 7,000 viewers during primetime hours. “Gillis’s art has for decades moved and awed vast numbers of people in halls around the world,” says Doyle. “Erickson is a perma-tanned poseur on TV, squawking away in an ill-fitting dress about subjects she seems to know nothing about.” The Gillis video has gone viral, and has probably now been viewed by more people in Canada than any other Sun News clip. The page views might look good for Sun News, but the content surely doesn't.