CORPORATE/BUSINESS PROPAGANDA

Corporate/Business Propaganda



Corporate/Business Propaganda

The Fraser Institute launched propaganda in 1988 that would have far-reaching impact on advancing the corporate agenda. This propaganda, aimed at students, is actually a half-dozen initiatives through which the institute "is cultivating a network of thousands of young people who are informed and passionate about free-market ideas and who are actively engaging in the country's policy debate," as the organization's publication Frontline puts it. The plans are individually funded but work together as a comprehensive bundle of recruitment and thoughtful grooming. These propagandas outgun in magnitude, scope and longevity anything that the progressive left has mounted through unions and social justice organizations.

Over 17,000 students have come in contact with at least one of the student propagandas, the institute claims. "Developing talented students sympathetic to competitive markets and limited government" through these propagandas "is one important way that the Fraser Institute is working towards changing the climate of opinion in Canada." Graduates have spread into politics, academia, other think-tanks and the media.

They're particularly proud of Ezra Levant, who was a student of the Calgary School's Tom Flanagan and came to his first scholar seminar in 1992. He was asked to connect the student managers' colloquium in Vancouver and became an intern, where he composed the book Youthquake, which was circulated and publicized by the institute. Levant tapped into the American conservative movement as a Koch Foundation Summer Fellow in Washington, D.C., and attended various Institutes for Humane Studies and Liberty Fund events. After graduating from regulation school and articling, he worked for several years as a parliamentary aide to Preston Manning and Stockwell Day. From there he did a two-year stint on the editorial board of Conrad Black's nationwide Post, which was dominated by cautious ideologues. Next, he went into electoral government and was nominated for ...