CTV: Thanks For Everything, Lisa. Not Really. Just Leave

Sign up today for Not The Public Broadcaster newsletters. Hot takes/ cool slants on sports and current affairs. Have the latest columns delivered to your mail box. Tell your friends to join, too. Always provocative, always independent. 

In 2015, actress Amy Schumer did a skit that lampooned women aging in Hollywood. In it Schumer comes upon Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patricia Arquette and Tina Fey having a picnic in the woods. Schumer discovers that they’re celebrating Louis-Dreyfus’ last day as a “f-able” actress in Hollywood.

It’s that momentous occasion when Hollywood decides “you’re not believably f–kable anymore,” explains Louis-Dreyfus. “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks‘ love interest in Punchline, and then, like 20 minutes later, she was his mom in Forrest Gump?” Fey says. Signs of being “un-f-able” any longer are arriving on-set to find that your wardrobe is just a bunch of long sweaters. Or — the clincher — auditioning for Mrs. Claus.

Lisa LaFlamme knows that feeling. She got the long sweaters six weeks ago. The award-winning 58-year-old went from the top news reader at CTV News to “the woman who preceded Omar Sachedina” in about 20 minutes. Worse, the CTV heavy thinkers informed her to keep it under her hat for about six weeks. 

No Lloyd Robertson adios. No Craig Oliver long goodbye. Just, don’t let the studio door hit you on the way out. Nice. As double standards go this was a brutal. 

Rumours abound as to why the CTV News chiefs and their Bell bosses made the move against the highly rated bingo caller. Likely they looked at demographics. Saw Lisa was boffo with Boomers, but Gen X and Millennials didn’t know her from Sally Field. Then, to the consternation of higher ups, she let her hair go grey. Worse, she was an unrepentantly white birthing person. 

Bell is headed more in the direction of black TSN sportscaster Kayla Grey, who turns to social media to confess she’s “fearful” reporting stories about this week’s World Men’s Junior Hockey Championships. Kayla’s worried doing her job objectively will bring her scorn . “I feel icky and gross,” she laments, her heart breaking with each “he shoots, he scores” she’s forced to utter. You can’t make this stuff up.

So hellllo, Omar. Who may not be well known beyond family and friends, but at least he’s not white, icky or gross. And so CTV went ESG to fix a problem they don’t have. The Globe & Mail reported that “CTV National News ratings have fallen slightly this year on a month-over-month basis, from numbers consistently over one million viewers from January through March, to average minute audiences above 900,000 throughout April, and above 800,000 from May through early August.” But they crush CBC. 

Cruel firings are not unknown in broadcasting. Anyone in the business long enough has a horror story about a frog-march with the box of possessions at 9:30 A.M.— escorted by security. It was just thought that someone with LaFlamme’s pedigree would at least get a consolation prize and a lunch. Guess not.

It was also believed that, being a good liberal woman, LaFlamme had also built up enough Woke credits to avoid the Paths of Glory ending. But as we wrote after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September of 2020, white liberal women are discovering that all their loyalty to Justin Trudeau and Hillary Clinton has only bought them a bitter cup of regret and dissatisfaction. 

“How did this dissatisfaction occur? The second wave of feminists made common cause with the diversity left-wing, meaning victimhood first, last and always. So the movement went from the joys of bra-burning, sexual freedom and a hedonistic script to the tedious chore of finding oppression in every corner of their personal and professional lives. (See: Anita Hill)

They found disappointment in men’s cavalier response to their new sexual liberation— epitomized by Donald Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” and Bill Clinton’s libertine hooks-ups. Available women found themselves disposable women in the free-for-all of sexual freedom. In changing the standard sexual permission from No to Yes, it told men that a woman now had to explain why she was not obliging when sex was in the offing.

Free abortion meant no lingering responsibility for men. If you believe Christine Blasey Ford, it left women broken 30 years later. As Erica Jong defined it— the zipless fuck.

Author Heather Mac Donald describes in her book The Diversity Delusion how women have now, in response, retreated from the hedonistic Sex In The City of the 1970s and 80s to Victorian standards for ceding sexual permission to men. “Liberated” feminists are now assigning men all the responsibility— and hence blame—  for any sexual encounters gone wrong. “So get drunk, spend the night with a stranger, have a relationship end badly— none of it is the fault of the“modern”woman.,” writes Mac Donald.

That abdication of women’s responsibility, says author Camille Paglia, extends to the politics of the office. “What troubles me about the ‘hostile workplace’ category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their former status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers.” writes Paglia. “Women infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters to men or after-the-fact grievance committees”.  

Worse, having joined Team Victim, women have discovered that while they may gain equality with men, they have been placed miles behind other grievance groups in the Woke hit parade. While a women must, in Hillary Clinton’s words, always be believed in any “he said/ she said”, this blanket exemption does not apply when a white women is in conflict with many other political flavours of the day. In the wrong equation even devoted feminists can find themselves accused of white privilege or cultural appropriation. 

And, if you’re a conservative woman, you’re placed at the back on virtually every pecking order in the political sphere. So, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s accomplishments are lionized it will be measured against the impact on women who’ve allowed the radical wing of feminism to make them more like Margaret Atwood’s  Handmaid’s Tale than Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman.”

So far, 4.3 million people watched LaFlamme’s online goodbye. Maybe that will bring her comfort— even if it doesn’t bring back her job.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft YearsIn NHL History, , his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx