These are institutions with fascism hard-baked into them, so it's actually quite strange that they briefly turned against the Nazis and mobilized liberal language and moral outrage about Nazism. But their opposition was not truly ideological, it was geopolitical.

Keep in mind, Hitler openly admired Canadian colonialism ("we eat wheat from Canada and do not think of the despoiled Indians [sic]") and the British Empire was essentially a fascist machine turned upon its non-English subjects. The US, obviously, was built by slavery and genocide.

Yes absolutely - it was the second act of the inter-imperial conflict that was the First World War, but of course it still had some very anomalous characteristics (esp the alliance with the Soviet Union, which they fully expected would fall to Nazi Germany, but instead had to cooperate with.)

The west shared Hitler's anti-semitism, it shared his colonial view of Slavic people (and, obviously it had effectively invented the ideology of European colonialism that Nazism adopted).

Right up to the eve of war, the Anglo-American powers hoped to do a deal with Hitler, whom they admired. The Canadian PM visited him in 1937 in consultation with the British, to try to convince Hitler to "continue the great work" he was doing, without threatening the supremacy of the Anglo powers.

(Correction to the original post, they were F-86 fighters, not that it makes any fucking difference.)

I have a personal connection to this episode in Canadian colonial cruelty: my uncle was a cop who went to Kenya as security for a Canadian bank during this period. I don't have details about his activities (besides that he stole Kenyan ebony carvings) but it's safe to assume that he knew Timmerman.

Timmerman himself was a veteran of repression, having played a key (violent) role in suppressing the On-To-Ottawa trek of homeless men fighting for their rights in the 1930s.

The Winnipeg Free Press ran laudatory articles about Timmerman's work in Kenya, talking around his torture as "strict methods" but celebrating his commitment to "civilization." Canadian newspapers and politicians considered Kenyans to be beneath them, as some of the quotes in this section illustrate

I've been off the radar a bit lately but I am starting to form some plans to offer the public course based on this book again soon, sometime in 2026!

You're right about the Thomsons but - and this is my point - they ARE Canadian. As is the CBC. The problem is not foreign. The problem is Canada.

That is not accurate - most of the significant Canadian media is owned by Canadian companies, most notably Thomson-Reuters. You are right to say we should expect propaganda, but it's homegrown propaganda, which is my original point.

This is true, but it is also true that there is almost no light between the Postmedia coverage of Palestine and that of the CBC, which would be hailed by liberal Canadians as an example of Canada's more enlightened media landscape. (Eg. CBC repeated the claims that Israel wasn't bombing hospitals).