Justin Trudeau wants the government to hold the media to account, and the opposition says it s not going hard enough, fast enough. It s an outrage to civil liberties groups across the country, but no one has a peep about it. Is this censorship, or is it something else?
00:04:03.040Now that he's in, he wants to pull up the drawbridge.
00:04:06.460He doesn't want anyone else, with other points of view, to have access to the newspapers and TV stations of the 21st century.
00:04:12.260I mean, he'll grudgingly allow the Conservative Party and the NDP in on the action.
00:04:17.320But that's a pretty narrow bandwidth of ideas, isn't it?
00:04:19.600All the major parties in this country are afraid to talk about, I don't know, just for an example, open border immigration or about the Islamification of society.
00:04:28.700Anything that actually challenges mainstream opinion, establishment opinion.
00:04:38.160Which explains their willingness to go along with this.
00:04:41.020They want a monopoly on what you can even talk about.
00:04:43.960Let me show you some more from the story.
00:04:44.980Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould today called on a Commons Committee to look at the possibility of the Canadian government imposing new rules on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, in the lead-up to the next federal election.
00:05:02.360Now, as you know, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Google and the rest of them, they already tilt to the left.
00:05:07.560They already censor sites based on ideology.
00:05:10.140In the weeks before the French elections, just for an example, Facebook shut down 30,000 pages, all of which supported one of the candidates, Marine Le Pen.
00:07:33.920And even then, if a company requested to have an ad on our site, they put in their own machine censorship for any words like feminist or Trudeau.
00:08:13.700As we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javits Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City.
00:08:25.580Somebody had been working on the campaign.
00:08:27.040And I just sent them a note and said, you know, are you okay?
00:08:31.200It looks like it's going the wrong way.
00:08:34.220And I got back a very sad short text that read, people are leaving.
00:09:19.540Testifying before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee Tuesday, Gould suggested the committee take a closer look at the role of social media in elections.
00:09:29.020I would encourage this committee to do a study of the role of social media in democracy.
00:09:33.780If that's something you think is interesting, she said, to hold the social media companies to account.
00:09:41.860You know, one of the things we always say about the media, about journalism, about the free press, about freedom of speech, we say that holds government to account.
00:09:49.400Reporters hold governments to account.
00:09:51.160Free press, free media holds governments to account.
00:11:33.340Why does a Trudeau liberal think she can regulate someone's behavior in a campaign?
00:11:37.440Especially political behavior, media behavior, the right to ask questions, the right to challenge and criticize and doubt, the right to say things.
00:11:51.520It's no different than in the age of newspapers and leaflets or the age of radio or TV.
00:11:57.360Why would it be acceptable to demand, say, that talk radio be regulated to crack down on inappropriate behavior during elections?
00:12:05.460Isn't that inappropriate behavior as long as it's not a crime?
00:12:10.240Isn't that just a fancy way of saying people who are sick of the government and want to throw out the bums?
00:12:14.080I'm sure a lot of things were said about the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993 to choose a pre-internet date.
00:12:21.700That's just when the internet was really getting popular for the first time.
00:12:26.580Back in 1993, really the internet was not a factor in the campaign.
00:12:30.440But that mighty party was slaughtered down to just two seats.
00:12:38.080I'm sure a lot of things were said and done on talk radio that were regarded as inappropriate behavior by Kim Campbell and Brian Mulrooney, too, back then.
00:13:47.440Who gets to decide what's positive and what's negative?
00:13:50.300I guess my favorite line was, oh, if you guys choose to do that, as if Trudeau doesn't control the agenda of these parliamentary committees on which he has a majority.
00:14:00.660This is the CBC government broadcaster.
00:14:03.300We're reading the CBC broadcaster, reporting a speech by a government minister about a government committee, about a government proposal to censor the media.
00:14:13.940Imagine writing about this with any suspense of how this is going to end.
00:14:20.720If the committee heeds Gould's call, I wonder if they will, and looks at ways to rein in social media in the lead up to the next election, it'll have to move quickly.
00:14:30.500There are only 12 sitting weeks remaining in Parliament's calendar before it rises for the summer, and it may not resume sitting before the next election.
00:14:36.860Gee, I wonder what they're going to do.
00:14:40.420And the rush, don't think it'll be accidental.
00:14:44.700It means, well, I'm sorry, we can't have meaningful consultations.
00:14:48.580We really wanted to, but we've just got to ram this through, because we're in a rush.
00:14:52.900We didn't know this election was coming, this problem of negative impact.
00:14:56.860So you can't blame us for having to shorten the debate a little bit here.
00:15:00.280And anyways, look, the impacts are negative, people.
00:15:02.540Why don't you understand that Trudeau needs to hold the media to account, especially since they've been so negative in their impacts lately.
00:15:10.420From that trip to India, to this whole SNC-Lavalin thing, the media is so negative these days.
00:15:15.960And social media is the worst, because you know how citizens can be.
00:15:26.480All right, so what did Andrew Scheer's Conservatives say in reply?
00:15:29.200Let me read to you the totality of it, as reported in the CBC.
00:15:34.740Gould's comments came after Conservative MP Stephanie Cousy accused her of not doing enough to protect the next election.
00:15:41.800She said she was concerned that Gould has simply asked social media companies to do more to keep the next Canadian election safe from foreign interference and to apply lessons learned in other countries.
00:15:51.960This is very disturbing to me that you are asking corporations, out of their own goodwill, to try to protect Canadians and our electoral processes again, rather than taking responsibility yourself, both as the minister and the government, said Cousy.
00:16:05.360Cousy described the elections law, C-76, as weak, saying it relies on lame registries and wrist slaps to guard against foreign interference.
00:16:14.220Okay, and she's talking about Bill C-76, and we'll have to go through that bill properly one day soon.
00:16:19.880It's the Liberal Changes to the Elections Act.
00:16:21.760I have my concerns about it, like the Democrats in the U.S., Canada's liberals hate, for example, voter ID requirements at the polls.
00:16:28.340They want people to be able to vote without any proof of citizenship or any proof of ID at all, actually.
00:16:35.120And the liberals actually love third-party campaign groups, because that's what helped elect Trudeau in the first place.
00:16:40.540It's over 100 different groups, many of them unions.
00:16:43.700Some of these groups registering their offices, telling the Elections of Canada that, yeah, we're headquartered in the U.S., but we're going to campaign against Stephen Harper in Elections Canada, saying no problem.
00:16:54.020So there's a lot to talk about there, but mainly that's about elections campaigning.
00:16:58.380That's about political parties and political ads and political finance and stuff like that.
00:17:02.300It's not so much regulating campaign content as regulating campaign disclosure in finances.
00:17:08.480Now, there's lots to talk about there.
00:17:10.540But what Karina Gould was talking about isn't campaign groups or third parties or even foreign meddling.
00:17:58.320That's why we have more than one political party.
00:17:59.960That's why we have more than one newspaper.
00:18:01.600And that's why you get to choose which one you vote for, and you get to choose which one you buy if you buy a newspaper.
00:18:06.800Because we all have different points of view, and we're all allowed to.
00:18:09.860We want at least some of the media to have a different point of view than the government, to hold them to account, to have negative impacts.
00:18:30.200The Star ran it and then forgot about it.
00:18:32.440Trudeau said Facebook had better start censoring things on Facebook that Trudeau didn't like, or he would force them to do that.
00:18:39.560And I guess this is the forcing part now.
00:18:42.440But Andrew Schultz conservatives didn't seem to have anything to say about that.
00:18:47.660They want more, harder, stronger rules against foreign medallers.
00:18:50.360Okay, let's talk about keeping foreigners out, but I'm not really worried about the free speech rights of foreign nationals in our elections.
00:19:23.020Here's the news feed of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
00:19:27.480Not a word about journalism under this proposal, but quite a bit about how they can get their hands on that $595 million in Justin Trudeau's media bailout.
00:19:37.820And here's the news feed from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
00:19:42.560Not a peep about this, but lots about rights of accused terrorists and criminals.
00:19:49.080Not a word about government censorship.
00:19:50.660Not a word about the government holding the media to account.
00:19:53.520Say, do you think they'd all be this silent if it were Stephen Harper demanding this censorship?
00:19:59.440By the way, the head of policy at Facebook is this guy, Kevin Chan, former staff member at the Liberal Party's leader's office.
00:20:06.260Imagine if Stephen Harper were Prime Minister and he was telling a former Conservative Party staffer who just happens to be a senior executive at Facebook that he wants to shut down negative stories.
00:20:43.140They're scared to talk about Islam, scared to talk about immigration, because these things are embarrassing to them, because the CBC says don't talk about it, so they don't want to talk about it.
00:20:56.480Is that why Andrew Scheer is fine with all this?
00:20:58.100Because, frankly, he'd be fine if all the conversations in the country were kept to a little cartel of the few official parties, and that's it.
00:21:06.620Just the polite people, you know, all those lobbyists' panels on the CBC where they're all think-alikes.
00:22:42.240The whole thing started to come undone a couple of weeks ago when the Globe and Mail had a bombshell front page story
00:22:48.640alleging that Wilson-Raybould came under tremendous pressure to let a Quebec company called SNC-Lavalin off the hook in a criminal prosecution.
00:22:59.520They, of course, had been found to pay $48 million worth of bribes to get contracts in Libya.