For all you doubters who think no one reads newspapers anymore, consider the following. Two weeks ago Lawrence Martin wrote this column in the Globe and Mail, floating the possibility that Stephen Harper was going to fire the head of the CRTC in order to get his right wing buddies at Sun Media a TV licence. Granted, anti-Tory civil servants were dropping like flies at the time, but there was scant evidence for the plot. That didn’t stop Margaret Atwood from running with the column and joining a campaign to stop the Foxification of Canadian airwaves.

Then today comes this letter from CRTC head Konrad Von Finkelstein (VF to his friends), asking, essentially, what the hell is everyone talking about. Harper’s never even talked to him about Sun TV.

Cue the pundit reaction.

“How does Margaret Atwood feel now, having carefully specified that her opposition to the new channel had nothing to do with censorship but was aimed entirely at political interference?” asks Kelly McParland in the National Post. “No doubt Harper forced VF to write the letter… It’s all part of the plot. We’ll let you know which plot soon as we figure it out.”

The Globe’s Norman Spector blames the country’s mailmen for not sorting this all out sooner. “Maybe Canada Post is to blame for the delay. Or perhaps the chairman of the CRTC has been on vacation. How else can one explain” the delay in VF’s response, he writes. “Think of all the ink that’s been spilled based on the premise of Mr. Martin’s column.”

If Sun TV ever does appear on boob tubes across the country, what will it deliver to viewers? According to Kate Chappell in The Mark, “a trumped up, and thus false, presentation of a polarized Canada.” She says Sun TV is banking on the Americans’ culture war theory of broadcasting, in which journalists “seek (ideological) conflict because it makes for better copy.”

If that doesn’t sound like a channel Canadians would watch, it appears Sun Media isn’t leaving its success up to market forces. It’s asking the CRTC to make it a mandatory part of cable packages.

The government has launched a two-pronged immigration offensive in the wake of last month’s arrival of a ship carrying 492 Tamil migrants. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is touring Asia to rally support for international efforts to fight human smuggling, and next week Public Safety Minister Vic Toews will announce ways to toughen immigration laws.

“What’s to toughen?” asks the Toronto Star. “Canadian law is far from weak” and provides for a $1 million fine and/or life imprisonment for convicted smugglers. The Star editors accuse the government of “generating more spin than substance as they try to impress the public by striking a ‘tough’ stance.” The Tories are taking their domestic ‘tough on crime stance’ to the big leagues, you might say.

Kenney’s mission is important, according to a Globe and Mail editorial, because human smuggling is an international issue that will “take a government-wide strategy, domestically and internationally, to combat.” Asian countries and Canada should recognize they have a common interest in tackling smuggling because human traffickers are linked to domestic organized crime and defraud Asian citizens, and for Canada “that often means the entry of the wrong people into the country.”

In the National Post, Chris Selley tries to reconcile the government’s determination to stop Tamil migrant ships with their claim that they don’t want to deter legitimate refugees. “(H)ow does one square the casual shooing away of Sri Lankans afloat with the fact that the Immigration and Refugee Board continues to buy their claims of persecution at an 85% clip?” Either the real problem here is that the refugee board is accepting a high number of illegitimate Tamil refugee claims, or the government is setting up a policy to keep out real refugees.

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant reports that things are mostly fine in Sri Lanka now “because the 30-year civil war with the Tamil Tigers terrorist group is over. The terrorists lost. ... Everyone can go home. Including the 492 gatecrashers.” Unfortunately immigration lawyers, liberal politicians, and leftist journalists in Canada all have something to gain from migrant ships arriving here, so they’ll probably keep coming.

This week public hearings on euthanasia began in Québec, reigniting the debate over assisted suicide that will only become more important as our population ages. Several countries in Europe have already decriminalized euthanasia, but what are the implications for Canada?

If euthanasia does become decriminalized, writes Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star, it will be only the latest progressive social cause that Québec has been at the forefront of, following its role in the legalization of abortion and gay marriage. The current hearings won’t change euthanasia laws (that’s Ottawa’s job), but it’s precisely because the hearings are “mandated to explore territory that is outside the legislative purview of a provincial government” that they have a chance to make progress, and “by embracing an emotionally divisive issue that most other Canadian legislators would not touch with a ten-foot pole, Quebec’s elected officials” are showing real leadership.

Despite a growing consensus in Québec that supports euthanasia, the Montreal Gazette says it’s the “wrong solution.” An editorial in today's paper states, “we suspect that lurking behind this debate, perhaps even below the conscious level, is awareness of the steadily-growing cost of end-of-life medical care.” But is cutting costs as the baby boomer generation ages “a reason to authorize MDs to become … ‘society's executioners’?” There are “real alternatives to euthanasia” that include better pain management and improving the health care system to ensure all patients live their final days with dignity.

Part of that solution could involve moving many of the ailing patients currently crowding our hospital beds into long-term care facilities or allowing them to live at home, as advocated in an Ottawa Citizen editorial. “Using hospitals as human warehouses is good neither for the hospitals” nor ageing patients, and while “home care is indeed not without its problems,” which include major stress for families and caregivers, Ottawa should look into it as a way to give dignity to the final days of elderly patients as well as free up desperately needed hospital beds for younger patients.