The surest sign a planned all-news TV channel will be a new and powerful voice for the political right — one of the biggest talking points in Ontario politics — is the way far-right journalists are rushing to defend it.

Eric Dowd The channel to be called Sun TV News will be provided by Quebecor Media, which includes the Toronto Sun and many other newspapers in Ontario and elsewhere.

It quickly has been dubbed Fox News North by critics who see it as a copy of Fox News in the United States, which attracts a large audience States, which attracts a large audience mainly through strident, far-right commentators.

The leading spokesman for the channel and its vice-president of business development, Kory Teneycke, until recently was director of communications for Stephen Harper, the most rightwing prime minister Canada has had, which suggests it will have Conservative leanings.

Teneycke claims the channel will express a diversity of opinions and be modelled particularly on the Toronto Sun. The Sun, founded in 1971 by enterprising journalists who lost their jobs when the Toronto Telegram closed, has unimpeachable Conservative antecedents.

The money to start it was raised by Toronto lawyer Eddie Goodman, a long-time behind-the-scenes adviser to William Davis, Conservative premier from 1971 to 1985.

Goodman laid down conditions that the Sun should never support any looney left-wing causes, which to him would have meant any party to the left of the Conservatives, and should always support the State of Israel, and it has never deviated from them.

The Sun proclaimed in a recent editorial it is “still true to its conservative roots.” Its news reports on the legislature increasingly have become non-partisan, but the vast majority of its editorials and most of its political columnists express Conservative views. If the new TV channel is like the Sun, it will be Conservative.

The right-wing columnists who have leaped to defend the new channel include Adam Daifallah in the even more conservative National Post, who complained much of the news media sneers at Harper and the Conservatives.

Conservatives are now starting to stand up for themselves, he said, and the new channel will give them a voice to fight back.

Terence Corcoran in the National Post wrote that someone has to set up a TV channel different from the

ingrown cabals of mostly Toronto-based, old-line liberal media celebrities and groupies.”

Chris Selley in the National Post claimed the “hyperventilating lefties” are worried and the new channel will give a much-needed jolt to TV debate in Canada.

Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail said she would love to see the new channel take on “the insufferably liberal CBC.”

Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun wrote that he has no idea what his organization plans, but Fox News provides a diverse, enlightened and

provides a diverse, enlightened and independent alternative view, while Canada is “inundated with lib-left orthodoxy.”

Worthington, who once ran federally for the Conservatives, added another knock at the CBC, saying it provides a slanted and selective view of the news of the day.

Michael Coren, a commentator on private radio, wrote in the Sun that news media in Canada are run by by traditional, consistently left-of-centre elitists, who have had an easy, soft and lucrative living for too long and resent change.

Monte Solberg, another Sun columnist and former Conservative MP, wrote that the new TV channel will need to focus on big government spending and challenge the wisdom of the nanny state, which Conservatives in the legislature accuse Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty of creating, and “really reflect Canadian conservatism.”

The Toronto Sun, which ought to have some idea what political stance the new channel will take, said in an editorial there is no room for right-of-centre views on TV in Canada today, but this is about to change.

Canadians are about to get a large new dose of rightwing views, but there are plenty of these already. All these writers licking their lips at the prospect prove it.