I'll probably never forget the time that Sun News Network commentator Ezra Levant devoted one of his editorials to attacking the Georgia Straight for one of its covers.

Levant accused the paper of trying to move the "Overton window" with an illustration of someone lighting sticks of dynamite beside a pipeline.

The article explored how far environmental protesters were prepared to go in their campaigns against new pipelines.

The Overton window was a term devised by a right winger named Joseph Overton to describe what constitutes acceptable boundaries of discourse about public policies.

Of course, Levant is no stranger to trying to move the Overton window. By crafting the term "ethical oil", he tried to make the Alberta oilsands more acceptable than "unethical oil" that comes from countries ruled by dictators. That's despite the fact that his ethical oil requires much more water and energy to extract a barrel from the oilsands compared to, say, the Saudi desert.

Levant also tried to move the Overton window in a book about Omar Khadr, who was detained at Guantanamo Bay after killing a U.S. medic in Afghanistan. Khadr was a teenager at the time.

Similarly, Levant attempted to shift the Overton window with his more recent book praising hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. fracking, to extract oil and gas.

He frequently condemned the Idle No More movement, trashed David Suzuki, and tried to make human rights tribunals seem like star chambers.

Today, CBC News reported that Sun News Network, which employs Levant, is going off the air tomorrow.

We don't know if this is true because the public broadcaster only cited one anonymous source. The Globe and Mail cited two anonymous sources in also saying Sun News Network will go kaput.

This comes after Postmedia Network struck a deal with Quebecor to buy its Sun English-language newspaper chain. The takeover has turned Sun's cable channel into what we in the media refer to as an orphan because Postmedia didn't want it.

The right-wing station, nicknamed Fox News North by its critics, never found a huge audience because it wasn't offered with the basic cable package. That's because the federal broadcast regulator denied its application to become what's known as a Category 1 channel.

If the CBC and Globe and Mail reports are true, it means about 200 people will lose their jobs. While some progressives would cheer the demise of Sun News Network, I'm not going to rejoice over the prospect of staff having to go out and find new jobs.

The political implications are intriguing. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are going to face voters this year.

The station's vice president, Kory Teneycke, is one of Harper's former directors of communications. Teneycke has become Harper's closest ally in the media, now that even National Post columnists seem to have soured on some Conservative policies (notably, the new prostitution law).

Teneycke ensured that Levant was given an opportunity to regularly tee off on Harper's critics, including those who questioned his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Levant often makes the case that CBC was a den of pinkos, which played well to the Conservative base.

So if Sun News Network disappears, it will deprive Levant of a high-profile platform to help Harper in an election year.

On very rare occasions, I would be invited to appear on Sun News Network. I always turned it down because I never sensed that I would be treated fairly.

Nevertheless, there are a few things I would miss about the station.

First off, there are the names of the shows: The Source with Ezra Levant, Byline with Brian Lilley, and The Arena with Michael Coren. They're kind of creepy and fun in a Fox News sort of way when you consider how right wing Levant, Lilley, and Coren can be.

I would also miss seeing Sun TV reporters asking aggressive questions of environmental protesters.

And yes, I confess that YouTube will be a little less entertaining without new and imaginative attempts by Levant to move the Overton Window much further to the right.