Juno News - March 04, 2019


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

Mentioned
Michael Wernick Charlie Angus Justin Trudeau Jody Wilson-Raybould
Trudeau's spin assault has begun Justin Trudeau has rigged political advertising rules

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

167.1

Word count

938

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Two seemingly unrelated issues: The SNC-Lavalin scandal, and the Liberal government's attempts to restrict social media to police fake news and political disinformation. What's the connection between them? And why should Michael Wernick, the Privy Council clerk, step down?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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 1.00
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. 0.99