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Canadian billionaire set to launch a conservative network being dubbed ‘Fox News North.’

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ex-communications director Kory Teneycke has teamed up with media company Quebecor — which is run by billionaire media tycoon Karl Pierre Peladeau — to start a new “24-hour conservative news and comment channel,” Sun TV News, that many media insiders are dubbing “Fox News North.” Interestingly, Teneycke met with Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and president Roger Ailes just four months before leaving his position to join Quebecor:

On March 30, 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat down for lunch in New York with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. The meeting was not on any public itinerary released by the Prime Minister’s Office and only came to light when The Canadian Press searched media consultant Ari Fleischer’s mandatory disclosures with the U.S. Justice Department. Ailes is the longtime Republican communications guru who is the president of Fox News Channel, which is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp.

Harper’s soon-to-be-ex-communications director Kory Teneycke was also present. Four months later, Teneycke had left the PMO — barely a year into his job as Harper’s chief spokesman — only to pick up a contract with Quebecor to explore a project that Ottawa insiders almost immediately described as a fledgling “Fox News North.”

Teneycke, now the Vice President of Quebecor, has told the press that he imagines Sun TV News being an alternative to the “lame-stream media,” a phrase also used by former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He maintains that “the Quebecor venture was not discussed at Harper’s New York meeting with the Fox News leadership last spring.” Peladeau plans to “invest $100 million over five years to tear up Canadian TV’s rule book with [the] conservative all-news channel in a mostly liberal Canuck TV landscape.”

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