St. John’s-based Council of Canadians Board member Ken Kavanagh is speaking out against the Harper government’s cutting of the blue pages in our telephone directories.
The Canadian Press recently reported, “The government says it can’t justify spending $3.1 million a year to publish the phone numbers of 115 departments and agencies in the blue pages. Yellow Pages, which publishes the telephone directories, says the last phone books with full federal listings were sent out in March.” A government memo says, “With the rise of the Internet, such mass print publication of government contact information has become inefficient and unnecessary.” So now only the federal government’s main toll-free number (1-800-O-Canada) will be published in the blue pages.
But in a CBC Radio Central Morning Show interview, Kavanagh says, “It’s a case of not providing accessibility to many Canadians who don’t use the Internet. And for the small amount of money that this accessibility – the blue pages – created, it’s just not worth cutting it. It’s typical of this government to do this kind of thing.”
He adds, “I doubt very much this is going to have an impact on the Conservative base in this country, or the remainder of the one in three Canadians who tend to put this government into power in the first place, but I think it will have an impact on people who are poor, on seniors, on Aboriginal communities and on people who live in rural Newfoundland who don’t have in many cases access to the Internet. …I think there are lots of people who are going to lose out on this.”
Kavanagh also highlights, “People should call their Member of Parliament and make a complaint. …This is going to be a paltry $3 million saving, that’s such a lousy excuse to use to cut what I think is an important service to an important segment of the Canadian population. If you look at that $3 million in light of recent revelations that this government in the last nine years have spent somewhere in the vicinity of $750 million to spend on partisan advertising and promotion for their economic action plan. And just in the case of last year alone, I understand that from May 13 to June 30, so for sixty days, they spent a million dollars on advertising during the NHL playoffs last year. And yet they’re going to use the idea or the excuse that saving $3 million, and create this, what I think, is an unfair set of circumstances in terms of providing accessibility to our government by an important group of Canadian citizens.”
To listen to the full 7-minute interview, please click here.
Photo: Council of Canadians Board member Ken Kavanagh.