To the attentive observer, this will hardly come as a big shock. Québec, after all, is a left-wing utopia where the left regularly produces the worst that ideology has to offer. The most recent exhibit: a Montréal professor of journalism, Dominique Payette, has come up with a plan to control the press and journalists. If brought to fruition, it would effectively kill the freedom of the press and impose a serious level of censorship on anyone who writes for a living.

For starters, all media outlets, on pain of ostracism and marginalization, would be required to join the Québec Press Council. Journalists would have to take language exams, but no one would be accredited as a journalist unless he or she belonged to a Press Council member organization. Anyone who refused to follow those rules would be shut out and silenced.

Beryl Wajsman, among other things a newspaper editor, has exposed this ridiculous idea in a recent op-ed for the National Post. I don’t agree with his opposition to language testing for journalists – former newspaper columnist Don Martin, for example, could never write a single sentence without messing up big time (he’s graduated to hosting a TV show now, which no one watches, because Martin is annoying as hell to watch). Most journalists in Canada can’t spell or write good English. The inability to tell the difference between “that” and “than” is a minor nuisance, but around 95 per cent of Canadian journalists really don’t know the difference – yet, they get paid a dollar or more for each of the words they put on paper or on a computer screen.

According to Wajsman, the language requirement would be an obstacle to ethnic journalists working for foreign-language newspapers, but I don’t think they’d be subjected to tests of English or French if they work for allophone publications.

But what is a cause for great concern is Payette’s attempt to somehow filter access to journalism based on political ideology and bias. Clearly, Payette wants to accept only died-in-the-wool socialists and pro-union writers as “genuine” journalists.

It actually wouldn’t change much, because that’s the profile of virtually every journalist in Québec today. But if implemented as dreamed up by Payette, it would cement and perpetuate the typical “Québec journalist” as the only acceptable mould from which all future “journalists” in that province would be produced.

A Payette “school of journalism” would prevent Quebeckers from ever reading or hearing even a morsel of truth in newspapers or in the news, and the rest of Canada would be fed an even bigger pack of lies than it’s already getting from la belle province today.