Juno News - March 04, 2019


Can we trust Canada's top public servant Michael Wernick？


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

167.10214

Word Count

938

Sentence Count

48

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Two seemingly different issues the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the Liberal
00:00:10.240 government's attempts to restrict social media to police fake news and political
00:00:16.260 disinformation. That's something a lot of people have been really worried about
00:00:20.100 myself included. How do you define the terms? What do you mean by disinformation?
00:00:25.020 What do you mean by fake news? Are you just gonna be policing things that are
00:00:28.880 from Eastern European bot farms that are just a hundred percent nonsense? Or is
00:00:33.880 this gonna turn into pushing and suppressing away news that you don't
00:00:38.420 really like? News that criticizes the government. Valid questions that need to
00:00:43.440 be asked. So what do these two stories have in common? Well I want to bring up
00:00:47.660 one release that Charlie Angus, NDP MP, came out with this week. He called on
00:00:52.940 Michael Wernick to resign. The top bureaucrat in Canada, the chief clerk of
00:00:57.740 the Privy Council. The guy who gave that blistering testimony, warning about
00:01:02.060 political assassinations, talking about the rhetoric of calling people traitors, the
00:01:07.160 vomitorium of social media. And a lot of people scratching their heads going, what
00:01:12.320 on earth is going on? This should be the most non-partisan guy in the realm and he's
00:01:17.960 doing this. I worry about my country right now. I'm deeply concerned about my
00:01:23.280 country right now and its politics and where it's headed. I worry about foreign
00:01:29.460 interference in the upcoming election and we're working hard on that. I worry
00:01:33.920 about the rising tide of incitements to violence when people use terms like
00:01:38.840 treason and traitor in open discourse. Those are the words that lead to
00:01:42.920 assassination. I'm worried that somebody is going to be shot in this country this
00:01:46.280 year during the political campaign. Well, in his letter, Charlie Angus reminds us
00:01:51.440 that one of the things that's troubling about Michael Wernick's current position,
00:01:55.160 where he is the chief non-partisan bureaucrat but basically outed himself as
00:01:59.560 a massive partisan, one of the problems is that a job that he has coming up is to
00:02:05.620 serve as one of five people who are going to run this election critical
00:02:10.400 incident protocol panel. That is the thing that the feds have set up to police
00:02:15.140 political disinformation during the 2019 election. So if there's some attack that
00:02:20.960 happens, some cyber attack, whether it is through hacking or denial of service
00:02:26.120 attacks or just fake news being bombarded at us, they will make the call to
00:02:30.640 intervene, to make all political parties aware and to make some sort of
00:02:34.700 announcement to Canadians. Watch out, this is fake news. They're the five people who
00:02:39.740 will be policing fake news, policing social media as well. And wait a second,
00:02:46.360 Michael Wernick, that guy who talked, is going to be one of the five to do that?
00:02:51.580 And I think Charlie Angus is right to point out, not a good scene at all. This guy can't
00:02:56.580 be in this post at all. Now it may seem a little odd to say, is the Lavalin story a part of this
00:03:04.420 whole narrative. But go back and remember what Justin Trudeau first said when he
00:03:08.840 was asked about the Lavalin scandal when it first broke in the Globe and Mail.
00:03:11.980 He said, this is false. Not true.
00:03:18.060 The allegations reported in the story are false.
00:03:21.760 False? Well, another term for fake, for fake news. He basically used the phrase, said
00:03:26.940 there's nothing to see here, folks. And then when he was pressed further on it, it was
00:03:31.360 really comical, of course. He opened up more and more every time he talked about it. He said,
00:03:34.860 OK, fine. Well, yeah, we chatted about it. We chatted about the idea of political interference,
00:03:40.480 but I didn't actually interfere. In fact, we talked about the fact I wasn't influencing
00:03:44.900 her and pressuring her and so forth. Obviously, there have been many discussions around this
00:03:50.900 government, questions asked of me from two different Quebec premiers, questions asked of me
00:03:57.220 and representations made by the company, made by a broad range of individuals, of MPs. There
00:04:07.020 were many discussions going on, which is why Jody Wilson-Raybould asked me if I was directing
00:04:16.740 her or going to direct her to take a particular decision. And I, of course, said no, that it was
00:04:23.440 her decision to make and I expected her to make it. And now we're pretty much at the point where
00:04:27.560 Michael Wernick and others were basically saying, OK, fine, there was pressure, but it was not
00:04:31.640 undue pressure. It was lawful advocacy. So hold on a second. Justin Trudeau begins with saying false,
00:04:39.140 fake story, not correct. And then they basically admit that a large part of it is correct. They're
00:04:44.520 just fighting for their lives to justify what they did. Well, hang on. If this story had dropped in the
00:04:51.580 election, massive bombshell story, what would have happened? Would Michael Wernick, who serves on
00:04:58.640 that panel, step forward to denounce it? I don't know. It seems far-fetched that this panel would
00:05:05.380 be used for, say, a story in the Globe and Mail. But the bottom line is, can we trust the integrity
00:05:11.160 of any of these people now, Michael Wernick, to sit on this panel? Can we trust this panel in the first
00:05:17.160 place to go about and wade into what is and what isn't political misinformation and disinformation
00:05:22.900 and so forth? Or should we just trust the common sense and intelligence of regular Canadians to
00:05:28.780 figure out how they get their news and what news sources they trust and how they separate the wheat
00:05:33.920 from the chaff? My bet is on the latter.