FILDEBRANDT: Support our reporters covering BC and Saskatchewan elections

BC and Saskatchewan are having elections this October. Both will have a profound impact on the broader West.

Saskatchewan is facing a competitive election, with the NDP emerging as a real threat for the first time in about two decades. BC’s situation is quite the opposite where the insurgent Conservative Party is threatening the NDP’s hold on power and offering the first genuine alternative in nearly two decades.

But here’s the problem. From Flin Flon to Victoria, nearly the entire media apparatus is centrally controlled by Toronto, owned by New York and funded by Ottawa. They have an agenda, and you already know what it is.

However, the Western Standard can make a huge difference in balancing the media coverage of these election campaigns. That’s why we’ve brought Chris Oldcorn back to Regina as our Saskatchewan Bureau Chief and hired Jarryd Jäger as our BC Reporter based in Vancouver.

But hiring full-time, old-fashioned news reporters isn’t cheap. We have to pay them. And during the elections, we have to feed and transport them around the campaign trail.

I want to keep these new reporters in BC and Saskatchewan on the job and on the campaign trail. They will do the work, and ask the questions that the mainstream-legacy media won’t and can’t.

Remember the last Alberta election? Nearly the entire mainstream-legacy media was implacably hostile to the UCP and tilted strongly toward the NDP. This includes the New York-owned PostMedia papers like the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Sun, and Edmonton Sun.

During the Alberta election, our opinion section was solidly conservative (no shocker there,) but we did our very best to ensure that our news pages were as fair and balanced as possible. The kind of news people used to expect from their local newspapers.

We want to do the same this fall for BC and Saskatchewan. But the Western Standard is still relatively new in BC and Saskatchewan. The media ecosystem there does not yet enjoy the balance we have been able to bring to Alberta in sufficient measure.

That’s why it’s so important that you support our efforts to keep full-time hard-news reporters on the ground in BC and Saskatchewan.

You can do that by donating or becoming a WS member.

So that’s what we’re asking you to do:

Please donate what you can to support our new reporters in BC and Saskatchewan.

And if you’re not yet a WS member, please sign up now.

Remember, even if you don’t live in BC or Saskatchewan, what happens there affects you wherever you do live. Help us do the job that needs to be done, that the government-funded mainstream media does not do.