EXCLUSIVE: Government "monitoring" social media posts about immigration
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Summary
When Maxime Bernier last year tweeted about extreme multiculturalism and the problem with forced diversity in Canada, bureaucrats from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Department were spending untold amounts of time tracking and monitoring what average Canadians were saying on the internet about illegal immigration and about the refugee crisis in Canada.
Transcript
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When Maxime Bernier last year tweeted about extreme multiculturalism and the problem with
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forced diversity in Canada, bureaucrats from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
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Department were spending untold amounts of time tracking and monitoring what average
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Canadians were saying on the internet about illegal immigration and about the refugee
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This is from documents obtained exclusively by True North under Access to Information.
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The documents depict an email chain amongst IRCC bureaucrats in which they reveal they are
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monitoring their words and will continue to monitor comments made on social media including
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a particular Reddit thread about issues connected to Canada's immigration policy.
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Please see below a very negative thread on Reddit that has been locked due to bigotry.
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The conversation provides some indication of public sentiment on housing asylum seekers.
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As discussed earlier, this underscores our advice to focus on numbers on the storyline and gives
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an indication of the types of misconceptions we might need to address going forward.
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This email contains a couple of directives to various staffers that are on the chain.
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One of which is to share it with the Privy Council Office which is, in effect, the department
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that functions as the bureaucratic wing of the Prime Minister's office.
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So this information was going right up to Trudeau's team conceivably.
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And also to prepare notes on this for a call with the Deputy Minister, bringing it up to the
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highest level of the bureaucracy in the Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Department.
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First of all, the fact that it takes 12 people, that's how many are on the email thread, 12
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people to monitor Tweets and Reddit threads for misconceptions and bigotry.
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But more importantly, it's how they're categorizing the comments made by Canadians on these things.
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Included in one section of the document is a chart that they've compiled of various Tweets
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that they're flagging under this very same public environment scan.
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Now some of the Tweets are no longer available, but I've pulled up a few here, such as this
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one that the report flags for its commendation of Maxime Bernier for standing up against diversity
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The Tweet is actually just a woman saying that she's so frustrated with the immigration system
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in Canada, she hopes Andrew Scheer will win the next election.
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The comments she raises are pretty similar to what a lot of Canadians have been raising about
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the unsecured border that Justin Trudeau has allowed to thrive in Quebec.
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Another Tweet made the list for, quote, its condemnation of the Trudeau government, unquote.
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Again looked at the Tweet and it's just a Conservative presumably talking about how he doesn't like
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what Justin Trudeau is doing and doesn't like the radical multiculturalism that Maxime Bernier
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Another Tweet flagged for its reference to illegal migration.
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All the woman in the Tweet said was asked about how many people that are deemed to have been illegal
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are actually sent home, a question which, by the way, the department clearly saw but didn't chime in to answer.
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So we have Canadians that are asking questions of the government, challenging the government,
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criticizing the government that are ending up on a bureaucratic watch list, quite literally a watch list.
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The department has said it's going to monitor for misconceptions and bigotry.
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The reasoning they give in this internal email thread is that they want to amend the storyline.
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So that's the narrative that the government is trying to sell you and I
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to believe that Justin Trudeau is apparently doing something good.
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That's this storyline, except Canadians are seeing through it,
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which is why there's such a voluminous amount of these things in the first place
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The government was also flagging Michelle Rempel's tweets on diversity
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the ones that ultimately galvanized such a national discussion in the first place.
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So what it really looks like here is that the bureaucracy is running interference
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against people saying mean things about the government online,
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because you can't challenge that storyline, can you?
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Though True North is challenging that storyline, we're trying.
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We don't have the 1.3 billion dollars the CBC gets,
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nor are we getting a piece of the 600 million dollar media bailout.
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But the independent and transparent journalism that you're seeing in this very video
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is something that you can support directly by chipping in a few dollars a month
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There's a link in the description box to join my heritage club