CBC CHAIR QUITS OVER FUROR Bestiality, defecation remarks at issue Bizarre end to rocky one-year tenure Murray Whyte – Toronto Star
Guy Fournier, the chair of CBC's board of directors, resigned yesterday amid a growing furor over his remarks about the joys of defecation and the legality of bestiality in Lebanon.
Bev Oda, the federal Heritage Minister, announced Fournier's resignation in the House of Commons yesterday. Fournier's "voluntary resignation" would be effective immediately, she said.
Fournier, appointed to a five-year term in the dying days of the previous Liberal regime, "has increasingly lost the confidence of Canada's new government," she said.
Fournier, a prominent journalist and playwright, has long been a thorn in the side of CBC management. He was known for his criticisms of CBC president Robert Rabinovitch during last fall's lockout. He has also said that the CBC's French-language service was too Quebec-centric, and its reporting not as objective as it should be.
But last week, Fournier may have pushed a little too far when he published a column for 7 Jours claiming Lebanese law allows men to have sex with female animals, but "(to) do the same thing with male animals can involve the death penalty!"
The column, a collection of jokes, statistics and oddities presented as fact, is intended as a humour piece. But it was met with outrage in the Lebanese community. Joseph Doura, a lawyer with the Montreal firm Ferland, Marois, Lanctôt said no such law existed, and that he would demand a retraction from publisher TVA.
Initially, Fournier wasn't contrite. He told the daily La Presse shortly after his column appeared that he couldn't see how it could be taken as insulting. In any case, he said, "it's rather funny." He went on to say it might not be current Lebanese law, and if it wasn't then he would issue a correction.
But he did apologize on Sunday on Tout le monde en parle, a popular TV show on CBC's French service, saying he had meant it as a joke, but "it has shocked many people in the Lebanese diaspora, so I apologize to them."
On the same show, listeners heard an excerpt from a May interview that was replayed, in which Fournier compared the physical pleasures of sex to moving his bowels.
As an older man, sex happens less often, but "we can defecate once a day," he said, making "the pleasure ... more durable and more frequent."
CBC officials immediately distanced themselves from Fournier. "We have no comment," CBC's communications director told La Presse. "He said it in his own name and not in the name of Radio-Canada."
Though he apologized for the comments, many saw this as the first step in his slide towards dismissal.
Fournier headed a board at odds with the CBC president. He was also the appointee of a previous regime. He could ill afford any more missteps, said Ian Morrison, spokesman for the public broadcasting watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
"It's not so much about Fournier, it's about Rabinovitch," Morrison said. According to CBC policy, the vacancy on the board — a position the president answers to, in theory — will be filled by Rabinovitch himself until a replacement is found.
The arrangement could be prickly given Rabinovitch's chafing with the board over such issues as the lockout, which lasted nearly two months last fall.
Morrison said the void presented a delicate political issue for the Conservative government. As a Chrétien government appointee, Rabinovitch would have few allies in the current regime.
Still, Morrison said, the Tories will have to strike a balance with the appointment.
"I think it's dangerous to have a somewhat-discredited president holding all the power," he said. "They have a real interest in developing this into something positive for them." |