It’s a brand new year and the brand old "It Happened Today" is back. Thanks for your patience during the December respite. I do hope to continue the feature through 2017 and beyond with your help. As a crowd-funded commentator, I respond to your priorities. But I also do need your help. As I explained in a video last fall, I’m privileged to have a number of outlets for my work. But despite the fancy title my position with the U of O is sessional. I get paid a fixed fee per course, with no benefits or pension and no guarantee of teaching in any given year. Likewise my newspaper and radio work is freelance. And while I’m grateful to all those employers, the core of my livelihood is your crowd-funding of the documentaries and your general support through Patreon and other platforms.

So here’s the thing. My daily "Wish I’d said that" and "It Happened Today" features currently earn me about 57 cents each, assuming all the money pledged via Patreon is for them alone. Mind you, they’re U.S. half-dollars. But still, much as I enjoy creating the quotations and historical vignettes, I simply can’t afford to do it indefinitely at that rate. I have to put my time and effort where people really value them, meaning reward them, so my work pays the bills and feeds my family.

A lot of people are dismayed by the way things are going in Canada and want to fix it. And I’m doing my best to reclaim true Canadian values, to change the culture so we can change the politics. But one thing Canadians need to get better at if they want to remain True, Strong and Free is to give more. A new Fraser Institute study confirms that we still lag far behind our American neighbours in voluntary giving. Only in one American state, West Virginia, do people give a smaller share of total income to charity than in any Canadian province, and only Manitoba is above West Virginia. But it’s voluntary giving that really helps people in need, and sustains voices like mine that don’t parrot the CBC vision of Canada.

I’m not asking for a million dollars. I’m asking for three bucks a month from anyone willing to pay a dime, or $7.50 from anyone good for an entire quarter, per "It Happened Today" and "Wish I’d Said That" daily combo. So if you enjoy them and want them to continue, and you’re not already a backer of the documentaries or a patron, please visit www.johnrobson.ca and follow the links to make a monthly pledge. I quite literally can’t do it without you.

Thanks.

Wrapping up 2016 and looking forward to 2017, a word of thanks to all those who made our documentary work possible in the past year.

Great news, especially for US and international shoppers: Our True, Strong and Free documentary is now available on Amazon.com.

In my National Post column that appeared in print today, I draw on a new Fraser Institute study to underline that unless we put firm restraints on it, government will indulge its ever-growing appetite including for pay and perks far larger than those left to us in the private sector. For more on how to restrain government, see our documentary True, Strong and Free on fixing Canada's Constitution.

The idea for our latest project, our True, Strong and Free documentary on how to fix the Constitution, originally came from an article I wrote for C2C Journal two years ago. You can read the original article here.

Great news! Our latest documentary, on how to fix our Constitution, is now available to the public and is free to watch on YouTube. The high-resolution digital version is also available for purchase, for only $5. DVDs (standard) are available for pre-order and we will have a blu-ray version in the next little while. For more information about the project, and to help us make the changes we propose, please visit www.fixtheconstitution.ca. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQHH_KIjTsc

Here's the kind of story that inspires a mixture of rage and bewilderment. NBC reports that while Hillary Clinton has been lambasting "for-profit schools" including Trump University, "Over five years, former president Bill Clinton earned $17.6 million from the world's largest for-profit education company, Laureate Education, Inc. In his role as "honorary chancellor," Clinton has traveled the world on Laureate's behalf, extolling the virtues of the school." And doing very well indeed. We should be so, uh, lucky. Now look. I know a lot of people like Bill Clinton, focusing more on the charming than the rogue in his makeup. I am not among them. But a lot of people do.

I also realize that Bill Clinton is a champion schmoozer and makes good connections. He pulls in huge sums for the Clinton Foundation and by no means all of them were people hoping for favours from one H. Clinton when she was Secretary of State. But $17.6 million over five years is over $3.5 million a year. That's over $9,600 a day, even in a leap year. And it wasn't the only thing he was doing nor, indeed, the only thing he was doing that brought in vast sums. (For instance The Washington Post says he made $104.9 million giving 542 speeches between 2001 and 2013, an average of $193,542.44 per. And that he was paid $3.13 million in "consulting fees" in 2009 and 2010 by an investment firm whose boss's charity has given the Clinton Foundation millions more and who did at least try to contact Hillary Clinton for a favor when she was Secretary of State.)

What can anyone do for you on a part-time basis that's worth nearly $10,000 a day? Per customer? And what has he got to say that's worth 200 grand a pop, 45 times a year, for over a decade? I mean, we're out there asking people to support our documentaries and commentaries and other work like the "Ask the Professor" feature with, say, $5 a month, which is about 17 cents a day. That's less than one fifty-six-thousandth of Clinton's haul from Laureate Education alone. I'd need 3,226 people to answer that call to make as much in a year as Clinton does for an average speech of the sort he was giving nearly once a week.

I'm not saying I'm in the wrong business. But I am saying if this news bugs you as much as it bugs me, and if you think it's important to keep the voices that matter to you audible, please do try to find that 17 cents a day for us, and for other groups like Ezra Levant's The Rebel, Dave Reesor's Let's Do It Ourselves, Danny Hozack's Economic Education Association of Alberta (and yes, I'm professionally involved with two of them) and other similar outfits like the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (who helped us enormously with our Fix the Constitution documentary project).

Unlike the Clintons, we're never going to get rich doing what we do. But that's kind of the point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNJ6LIjbu3Y