True North reporter Andrew Lutton is banned from covering Liberal Party events for three days straight, on the grounds that he and True North have not been accredited as journalists by the Liberal Party of Canada. What is the difference between accredited and unaccredited journalists?
00:00:00.000hey Andrew Lawton here with true north right now I am outside an industrial park in Burnaby British
00:00:15.640Columbia where as you can see behind me the Liberal campaigns media bus is literally stuck
00:00:21.840it's not doing it right now but when the bus driver was trying to get the bus unstuck the
00:00:26.320wheels were spinning and it wasn't going anywhere now if that's not karma for how the Liberal campaign
00:00:31.080has been treating me as a member of the media for the last three days I don't know what is now you
00:00:37.120may know by this point I've been banned now three days straight from covering Liberal Party campaign
00:00:43.080events on the grounds that I and true north are not accredited and as I've noted the Liberals have
00:00:48.360not actually acknowledged what accredited means or how to get accredited but this morning I learned
00:00:54.420that the sanctity of that accreditation process is not how it's been described to me by Liberal
00:00:59.140officials take a look at this video in which I confront one of the tour staff of the Liberals
00:01:04.560who had just accredited two women on the spot who get this weren't even from a media outlet
00:01:10.860I've been told unfortunately you're not an accredited okay but you just asked her to show you articles so I can show you articles I've written I've just been told so unfortunately I know but why was the benchmark for her just you know pull up on her phone things she's written I can show you things I've written under my name my understanding is that accreditation wasn't provided so I'm so sorry but you just provided accreditation
00:01:29.580accreditation they had already been provided they were provided the news release and everything and so I was provided the news release that's how you were to come
00:01:36.580instructions are uh that's how I knew where to come
00:01:41.580now I have nothing against the two women good on them for wanting to cover this they were both at the DC Institute of Technology one of them was in fact an exchange student by her own admission not a journalist and what happened was all the other one had to do was show on a smartphone something she had written under her name and that was enough for on the spot the gentleman in the video to grant her
00:02:11.560accreditation so what we know here is that the liberals are legitimately making this up as they go they're making up the rules on the spot and so far in the last 36 hours I am the only one who's been excluded from them everyone else has gone Der Spiegel was accredited on the spot the South Asian press was accredited on the spot foreign journalists are getting access that me as a lifelong Canadian a Canadian citizen representing a journalism outlet published by a Canadian charity and that's not good at all
00:02:41.540enough for accreditation I have been accredited by the Canadian government I've been accredited by the British government I've been accredited by courts in Britain and courts in Canada but that's not good enough for the Liberal Party of Canada from Burnaby British Columbia for True North I'm Andrew Lutton