The Invisible Hand of Amanda Lang

More woes for Amanda Lang.

Fresh from reports that the CBC senior business spokesmodel has been flouting a Corpse ban on journos taking paid speaking gigs for companies that lobby or otherwise influence public policy, now comes news that Lang tried to spin a CBC news story that reflected badly on her buddies at the Royal Bank.

As revealed by Canadaland last month, Lang twice took lucrative speaking fees from Manulife Asset Management in 2014–July 10 and Aug. 7. Then she invited Manulife supremo Donald Guloien on her show Sept. 5, to promote his company.

The five-minute fluffer included Lang’s claim that: “[O]ne of the things that Manulife has done is grown its asset management business in a big way in the last few years.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time the well-connected Lang has shamelessly plumped for her Bay Street buddies.

Flashback to April 6, 2013. CBC reporter Kathy Tomlinson breaks what will be an award-winning story about how hundreds of IT sluggos for the Royal Bank were losing their jobs to replacement foreign workers. The foreign workers were brought from India by outsourcing firm iGATE. The Royal Bank of Canada employees trained their replacements before they themselves waddled the plank.
Corpse insiders claim that Lang defended the RBC and pushed to have the story spiked.

When that didn’t fly, she took to the pages of the Globe and Mail to spin the mess for her RBC chums:

“Information technology workers displaced in Canada are being replaced not by cheap Indian workers but by better ones,” she wrote in the April 12 Globe.

According to Lang’s pretzel logic, the Royal in-and-outsourcing to iGATE in India was merely “the natural forces of capitalism…a job moved from Canada to India creates a new kind of prosperity. It creates a job in a country we sell goods and services to, increasing the opportunity for our businesses to flourish even more.”
(Lang also invited RBC supremo Gord Nixon on The Lang and O’Leary Exchange to give his side of the story.)

Alas, no mention by the Globe or CBC that Amanda would be the keynote speaker at an April 23, 2013 outsourcing conference sponsored by, among others, iGATE.

This was all too much, even for the chinless wonders in CBC management, and faster than you can say conflict-of interest, Lang was ordered to cancel her gum-flapper.

But there’s always another lucrative speaking gig, such as last year’s sit-down with then-finmin Jim Flaherty, the day after he presented the federal budget.

Her former colleagues at Business News Network had refused to host the Feb. 12 knee-bender at the Westin Hotel because it had the distinct whiff of government braunnosing.

But Amanda’s fee for the appearance helped assuage any nagging ethical doubts. The telegenic Ms. Lang seldom graces a lectern for less than $15,000, which meant that her 20-minute coffee-klatch with O’Booze worked out to $750 per minute. (She earned an estimated $300,000 in speaking fees last year.)

Flaherty’s communications sluggos were well-pleased to have Amanda presenting the live budget infomercial.

After all, they had selected her the previous August as the only member of the fourth estate deemed discreet enough to be invited to Jimbo’s annual private policy clambake for CEOs, lobbyists and other reptiles to advise the great man on the budget.

Whang, bang, thank you Lang!