OTTAWA—Radio-Canada, the French-language service for television and radio, has finally made it completely unclear who they are and where they are broadcasting from.
In recent decades the federally-funded network has often broadcast the phrase “Ici Radio-Canada” (translation: “Radio-Canada here”) in its station identification. However, the Crown corporation has announced that effective immediately they will be dropping both ‘Radio’ and ‘Canada’ and will be known only as ‘Ici’.
“From now on we’re just ‘here’, at least for now,” said Louis Lalande, executive vice-president of the entity formally known as Radio-Canada. “Here is not necessarily where we want to be, but it’s certainly better than where we were before.”
Asked for comment, Stéphane Dion, former leader of the federal Liberal Party and current Montreal MP, said “Merde!” (translation: “Are you joking?”). Not this time, Monsieur Dion.
“It’s taxpayer-funded separatism, pure and simple,” said Elmer Gluesniffer, who likes to provide snappy quotes on short notice to anyone claiming to be a reporter. “They can’t get the radio station out of Canada, so they took Canada out of the radio station.”
Canadian taxpayers did, in fact, fund the re-branding in the amount of $400,000, a CBC spokesman confirmed.
Mooseclean’s tried to reach Daniel Paillé, leader of the Bloc Québécois, for his thoughts on this development. However, Monsieur Paillé refused to return our messages because we left all our voicemails for him in English. He did however email Mooseclean’s a picture of himself giving the ‘thumbs up’ sign. Minutes later, he sent a second one of himself displaying a different digit.