Juno News - July 23, 2019


EXCLUSIVE： Government ＂monitoring＂ social media posts about immigration

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Maxime Bernier Michelle Rempel-Garner Andrew Scheer
Does this sound like ＂media freedom＂ to you？ ＂The Great Realignment＂

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

169.44

Word count

817

Sentence count

37

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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

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 When Maxime Bernier last year tweeted about extreme multiculturalism and the problem with
00:00:08.160 forced diversity in Canada, bureaucrats from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
00:00:13.600 Department were spending untold amounts of time tracking and monitoring what average
00:00:20.040 Canadians were saying on the internet about illegal immigration and about the refugee
00:00:25.140 crisis in Canada.
00:00:27.080 This is from documents obtained exclusively by True North under Access to Information.
00:00:31.400 The documents depict an email chain amongst IRCC bureaucrats in which they reveal they are
00:00:37.380 monitoring their words and will continue to monitor comments made on social media including
00:00:43.020 a particular Reddit thread about issues connected to Canada's immigration policy.
00:00:47.840 Here's the email.
00:00:49.100 Please see below a very negative thread on Reddit that has been locked due to bigotry.
00:00:54.140 We will continue to monitor.
00:00:55.920 The conversation provides some indication of public sentiment on housing asylum seekers.
00:01:01.280 As discussed earlier, this underscores our advice to focus on numbers on the storyline and gives
00:01:07.220 an indication of the types of misconceptions we might need to address going forward.
00:01:13.140 This email contains a couple of directives to various staffers that are on the chain.
00:01:18.140 One of which is to share it with the Privy Council Office which is, in effect, the department
00:01:22.460 that functions as the bureaucratic wing of the Prime Minister's office.
00:01:26.380 So this information was going right up to Trudeau's team conceivably.
00:01:30.600 And also to prepare notes on this for a call with the Deputy Minister, bringing it up to the
00:01:35.260 highest level of the bureaucracy in the Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Department.
00:01:40.280 Now there are a few issues with this.
00:01:42.060 First of all, the fact that it takes 12 people, that's how many are on the email thread, 12
00:01:46.740 people to monitor Tweets and Reddit threads for misconceptions and bigotry.
00:01:51.560 But more importantly, it's how they're categorizing the comments made by Canadians on these things.
00:01:57.060 Included in one section of the document is a chart that they've compiled of various Tweets
00:02:02.880 that they're flagging under this very same public environment scan.
00:02:07.060 Now some of the Tweets are no longer available, but I've pulled up a few here, such as this
00:02:11.880 one that the report flags for its commendation of Maxime Bernier for standing up against diversity
00:02:19.920 and irregular migration.
00:02:21.640 The Tweet is actually just a woman saying that she's so frustrated with the immigration system
00:02:25.680 in Canada, she hopes Andrew Scheer will win the next election.
00:02:28.980 The comments she raises are pretty similar to what a lot of Canadians have been raising about
00:02:33.500 the unsecured border that Justin Trudeau has allowed to thrive in Quebec.
00:02:39.240 Another Tweet made the list for, quote, its condemnation of the Trudeau government, unquote.
00:02:45.320 Again looked at the Tweet and it's just a Conservative presumably talking about how he doesn't like
00:02:50.820 what Justin Trudeau is doing and doesn't like the radical multiculturalism that Maxime Bernier
00:02:55.740 was describing has a foothold in Canada.
00:02:58.820 Another Tweet flagged for its reference to illegal migration.
00:03:02.380 All the woman in the Tweet said was asked about how many people that are deemed to have been illegal
00:03:08.740 are actually sent home, a question which, by the way, the department clearly saw but didn't chime in to answer.
00:03:16.340 So we have Canadians that are asking questions of the government, challenging the government,
00:03:20.400 criticizing the government that are ending up on a bureaucratic watch list, quite literally a watch list.
00:03:26.220 The department has said it's going to monitor for misconceptions and bigotry.
00:03:30.620 The reasoning they give in this internal email thread is that they want to amend the storyline.
00:03:36.620 So that's the narrative that the government is trying to sell you and I
00:03:40.940 to believe that Justin Trudeau is apparently doing something good.
00:03:45.100 That's this storyline, except Canadians are seeing through it, 0.53
00:03:48.340 which is why there's such a voluminous amount of these things in the first place
00:03:52.420 that the government needs to flag for review.
00:03:56.180 And it's not just random Twitter users either.
00:03:58.580 The government was also flagging Michelle Rempel's tweets on diversity
00:04:02.500 and Maxime Bernier's tweets on diversity,
00:04:05.380 the ones that ultimately galvanized such a national discussion in the first place.
00:04:09.860 So what it really looks like here is that the bureaucracy is running interference
00:04:14.180 against people saying mean things about the government online,
00:04:18.180 because you can't challenge that storyline, can you?
00:04:21.220 Though True North is challenging that storyline, we're trying.
00:04:23.940 We don't have the 1.3 billion dollars the CBC gets,
00:04:27.060 nor are we getting a piece of the 600 million dollar media bailout.
00:04:30.580 But the independent and transparent journalism that you're seeing in this very video
00:04:34.500 is something that you can support directly by chipping in a few dollars a month
00:04:38.260 or even a one-time donation if you'd like.
00:04:40.340 There's a link in the description box to join my heritage club
00:04:43.460 or to donate to True North in another way.
00:04:46.180 Thanks so much for your support.
00:04:47.460 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.