Juno News - April 16, 2023


Feds’ caught attempting to suppress article on refugee policy (ft. Lorne Gunter)


Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

152.54456

Word count

2,365

Sentence count

130

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Lauren Gunter's piece on the government's attempt to take control of the internet space by removing a piece she wrote about the immigration and refugee board from social media is a perfect example of what can happen when the government tries to control the internet.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 If you want to get a little bit of a glimpse of what the government-regulated internet space
00:00:13.500 is going to look like, you needn't look further than what happened to a good friend of True
00:00:19.300 North's and of basically anyone who's picked up a newspaper in Alberta over the last many
00:00:24.100 years, Lauren Gunter.
00:00:25.500 This is a columnist who I actually have not had on this show.
00:00:29.540 I had them on my old radio show a couple of times.
00:00:32.360 But Lauren Gunter dared to criticize the Canadian government's approach to refugees and immigration
00:00:40.240 more broadly.
00:00:41.280 And this was something that I guess the government didn't like.
00:00:43.780 So what the government did is tried to get this thing pulled from social media.
00:00:50.360 There's a record of government trying to get this whole column taken off of Facebook and
00:00:56.700 Twitter.
00:00:57.080 And we didn't learn in the initial stories what article they were talking about.
00:01:01.160 But thankfully, Lauren Gunter agreed to out himself here.
00:01:04.160 And he joins us now.
00:01:05.460 Lauren, what have you done?
00:01:07.180 You know, I've added some specifics to a nonspecific item that the government admitted to in a freedom
00:01:17.300 of, well, in a parliamentary question.
00:01:19.220 There was a conservative MP asked the liberals to give some examples of efforts they'd made
00:01:26.060 to have internet content controlled prior to their bill C-11, which still has not yet been
00:01:34.700 proclaimed, but will become law very soon.
00:01:37.120 And so there was a whole list came back, 180 pages, some with one or two items on them.
00:01:43.340 And one, it says an unspecified newspaper column about the Immigration and Refugee Board.
00:01:49.600 Director of Communications asked Facebook and Twitter to remove links to this item from their
00:01:57.480 platforms.
00:01:58.140 And so I knew who it was when I was shown it by editors, and it was a piece that I'd written
00:02:06.360 in September of 2021.
00:02:08.200 I'd come into possession of a confidential internal document that the IRB had, that the chairman
00:02:15.360 had drafted and was circulating among staff and professionals, that said, you know, we are now
00:02:21.940 going to try and make it much easier for refugees to stay in Canada prior to this policy that had
00:02:31.300 not yet been introduced at that time, was just being debated.
00:02:35.380 But prior to that, you had to show that you were under threat of torture or death if you were sent
00:02:40.360 back to your home country. 0.99
00:02:41.420 You had to show that you were, you know, you're in grave personal danger, or you had to prove
00:02:46.840 that you met the United Nations criteria for what a legal refugee was.
00:02:53.160 And this policy would have said anybody who was suffering from any two discriminations, and
00:03:02.140 that would be poverty, age, sexual orientation, race, ideology, religion, any of those.
00:03:09.200 If you had two of those, then there was nothing that the IRB could do, or very little that the
00:03:15.000 IRB could do, unless you were a security threat, to keep you out.
00:03:19.340 As long as you got here, if you could say, you know, I'm gay and poor, I'm indigenous, and
00:03:24.580 I have views that my government doesn't like, you know, I'm old, and I'm whatever, whatever
00:03:33.480 the other criteria might be, if you had any two of these intersectionality criteria, then
00:03:40.740 there was very little that the adjudicators could do to keep you out of Canada.
00:03:46.080 Government didn't like that I had that.
00:03:48.080 And so they then went to my editors and said, you need to retract this, or you need to correct
00:03:55.100 all of the following factual errors.
00:03:57.780 My editor said, there are no factual errors that we can tell, and we're not going to retract
00:04:02.900 it.
00:04:03.160 So then the director of communications at the time of the IRB, and we're not entirely sure
00:04:07.940 who that was, went to Facebook and Twitter in particular, and said, we want you to take
00:04:15.340 these down because they contain dangerous misinformation.
00:04:20.000 And not surprisingly, that is the terminology that the liberals are using in their new bill
00:04:25.800 to try and justify handing over the power to the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications
00:04:33.500 Commission, the CRTC, or to an internet safety board, to take down dangerous misinformation,
00:04:40.460 even if it's legal, under their new law.
00:04:42.900 So I think what we've seen with their attempts to take my piece off the internet is a glimpse
00:04:50.160 of Canada's future.
00:04:52.240 Well, I fear you're right, and I just want to drill into the who for a moment.
00:04:56.980 Do you know if this was someone that came from the minister's office, being someone who's
00:05:01.260 a partisan liberal staffer, or from the departmental side, which is supposed to be staffed by non-partisan
00:05:08.660 bureaucrats, such as they are? 0.99
00:05:10.460 Yeah, I mean, as near as we can tell, because there's very little information about who actually
00:05:15.620 made the request of the social media platform.
00:05:18.140 But as near as we can tell is a staffer from the Immigration and Refugee Board, who sought
00:05:24.900 to have this done.
00:05:26.060 So not someone who's supposed to be a partisan?
00:05:27.920 No, no.
00:05:29.700 So it was a person who was supposed to be an objective bureaucrat, who was supposed to be
00:05:36.780 doing objective work, not a political operative who was trying to shine the government's apple.
00:05:45.640 But from 2015 on, the Liberals had been going out of their way to appoint people who are
00:05:53.120 ideologically friendly to their view of increasing immigration to places on the IRB.
00:05:59.480 So the people, the permanent staffers at the IRB and the political appointees would have
00:06:06.120 known on what side their bread was buttered.
00:06:09.500 But they probably also would have ideologically agreed largely with the Liberals' efforts to
00:06:14.760 increase at this point.
00:06:15.960 And it seems funny now to consider this.
00:06:19.000 But, you know, I said this is kind of outrageous because the Liberals are trying to, in one fell
00:06:25.660 swoop, increase immigration to Canada, newcomers to Canada from 300,000 a year to 400,000 a 0.57
00:06:32.740 year.
00:06:32.900 Well, now they've blown well past 400,000 a year.
00:06:36.500 But at the time, they were trying to increase immigration by a third, by using these tactics
00:06:43.760 that were never going to be debated in Parliament, by increasing the criteria, by greatly expanding
00:06:51.880 the ways you could claim refugee status in Canada.
00:06:55.600 And they didn't like that.
00:06:57.580 But, you know, it's funny because they said, well, this article is full of mistakes and
00:07:03.800 misinformation, but I quoted enough of this internal document that they must have known
00:07:09.620 I had the original.
00:07:12.180 And yeah, and this was, I mean, I remember the column.
00:07:15.100 It was, it was reporting.
00:07:16.220 It wasn't just you sort of going on about some opinion or some theoretical thing.
00:07:20.140 You had the document.
00:07:21.420 They would have known that document existed.
00:07:24.340 Yeah, they would have.
00:07:24.960 And it was, you know, it was put out by the chairman of the board at the time, Richard
00:07:29.380 Wex, and, and so they were just, they were embarrassed that it had been found out before
00:07:37.060 it could become policy and make a political problem for the government.
00:07:42.520 And, and that's, to me, that's the really troubling part, is it because it was embarrassing
00:07:47.120 to them, not because it was factually incorrect, not because I was inciting riots, not because
00:07:52.400 I had done something illegal, but because it was embarrassing to the government, they got
00:07:59.540 caught trying to sneak through a major change to immigration and refugee policy.
00:08:04.960 They wanted it pulled out and they used the cover of dangerous misinformation to try and
00:08:11.620 make that happen.
00:08:12.700 Now imagine, so they, they go to Facebook, they go to Twitter, both of whom said, no, there's
00:08:18.660 nothing wrong about, this isn't misinformation necessarily.
00:08:22.880 It's, it's fair comment.
00:08:25.020 But now imagine if under Bill C-11, the government hands the power to take those things down to
00:08:31.880 the CRTC, which is full of government appointees, or even worse to a board of internet safety,
00:08:39.040 which is all government appointees.
00:08:41.360 And they say, you know, it doesn't have to be illegal for you to take it down.
00:08:45.580 And if you think that this is dangerous misinformation, you, the safety board or the CRTC, have the
00:08:52.480 power under this new law to start deciding what can and cannot be posted on the internet.
00:08:58.140 And that just, that really frightens me.
00:09:00.880 Well, it should.
00:09:01.900 And I would point out to people here that in this case, the social media companies didn't
00:09:06.740 take a, what I would say is a particularly principled free speech view.
00:09:10.640 They didn't defend your reporting.
00:09:11.940 They just said, listen, your fight's not with us.
00:09:14.100 It's with the Calgary Sun.
00:09:15.200 It's not our original content was the line, which, you know, as far as social media platforms
00:09:19.360 go, I think that's a win.
00:09:20.860 They just said to the government, you know, we're not interested in playing this game.
00:09:23.840 But you look at now, as you've alluded to, Lorne, the policies that are coming down the
00:09:28.480 pipeline, which would threaten social media companies with very steep fines if they don't
00:09:34.460 take down content that's identified as being wrong in one of the several categories.
00:09:39.820 And interestingly enough, I was just at a seminar about this.
00:09:43.460 And if you look at the categories, they include misinformation in the same bundle as hate
00:09:49.860 speech and child pornography.
00:09:51.880 So they're using online harm laws that are intended for child pornography to go after quote unquote
00:09:58.120 misinformation.
00:09:58.760 Well, and they have a very wide, very broad definition of what constitute hate speech.
00:10:06.180 When I first started covering hate speech, which would be back in the late 90s, you had
00:10:12.000 to convince a court that under a very narrow definition that was set out by the Supreme Court,
00:10:18.600 the speech that was published or broadcast had been hateful, according to some very narrow
00:10:27.340 definitions.
00:10:28.480 Now, really, hate is in the ear of the hearer.
00:10:31.840 It's not in the mouth of the speaker.
00:10:34.340 So if you say something that the most sensitive activist in an ideological cause thinks is hateful,
00:10:45.840 then it's hateful.
00:10:47.300 And that's what I worry about, too, is that, you know, child pornography, fine.
00:10:53.980 We, you know, we should keep children safe from pornographers. 1.00
00:10:59.360 But if the person in an activist organization who hears my microaggression feels that they're
00:11:07.500 hated upon as a result of it, they can go to the Internet or to the upcoming Internet
00:11:12.660 safety board and say, this is really bad, you should take it down.
00:11:17.240 There's a good example of that, too.
00:11:19.420 The CRTC has been petitioned by EGAL, which is an LGBTQ rights group, to bar Fox News from
00:11:29.800 being rebroadcast in Canada, from the cable stations or the satellite services, from carrying
00:11:34.740 Fox News, because Fox News has lots of people on it who don't believe that trans people have
00:11:43.840 a right to all the same protections that non-trans people do or that LGBTQ communities. 0.92
00:11:54.380 I'm actually not phrasing that properly.
00:11:56.480 No, but I get what you're saying.
00:11:58.060 And as I was saying on the show yesterday, you know, imagine if that power were extended
00:12:01.640 to Fox News clips on YouTube.
00:12:03.980 So it's not enough that you take Fox off the air, but Canadians shouldn't be able to access 0.60
00:12:07.980 Tucker Carlson on YouTube or Rumble or anything.
00:12:11.080 Yeah, exactly.
00:12:11.860 And, you know, I have my own problems with Tucker Carlson.
00:12:15.940 I remember when he was a bow tie wearing nerd about 25 years ago who wouldn't say butter
00:12:24.000 if his mouth was full of it.
00:12:25.460 And now, I mean, he's the fire-breathing dragon of the alt-right.
00:12:33.040 And so I have trouble with him.
00:12:34.740 But do I want to ban him?
00:12:36.420 No.
00:12:36.680 But I have the same problem with all sorts of commentators on the left.
00:12:41.000 Do I want them banned?
00:12:42.420 Because every time I listen to them, my blood pressure rises and my cardiologist tells me
00:12:47.020 that I have to turn that off.
00:12:48.680 No, I don't.
00:12:50.220 That's what free speech is about.
00:12:51.940 I like often to use the example of newspapers in London.
00:12:56.580 There are eight daily newspapers in London, and none of them, except perhaps the Times
00:13:01.580 of London, makes any claims to being balanced.
00:13:05.400 What they say is that among the eight of us, there is balance.
00:13:10.360 If you don't like what one of us is writing, you can read another one, and you can find the
00:13:14.940 opinions or the slant that you want.
00:13:17.200 And, you know, that's how you get to balance and freedom of expression.
00:13:22.720 But you don't do it through government regulators.
00:13:25.660 No, and to go back to your column, I mean, if the government felt so strongly that it had
00:13:29.780 been misrepresented in your piece, why don't they do, you know, Katie Telford's favorite
00:13:34.000 pastime of just planting some op-ed to rebut you in another paper?
00:13:37.980 I mean, go down the street to the Calgary Herald and say, we'd like to denounce what Lauren
00:13:42.860 Gunter said.
00:13:43.560 And again, I think, you know, the reality of it here is they knew that the facts were
00:13:47.320 on your side.
00:13:48.180 But if you don't like a particular bit of expression, respond to it with better expression.
00:13:53.880 This is not a difficult concept.
00:13:55.260 And my editors did offer, WEX, the chairman of the Immigration Refugee Board, did offer
00:14:03.440 him equal space to explain what it was that I had got wrong.
00:14:08.560 Which is incredibly generous, by the way.
00:14:10.260 Of course, of course it is, but that's, I'm all for that.
00:14:13.920 If you don't like what I've written and you will take the time to pen your own 600 words,
00:14:19.580 have at it.
00:14:20.660 And now especially, it's a little bit trickier when you have a printed newspaper.
00:14:26.700 But now that we all have websites with sort of unlimited space, that's exactly how it should
00:14:32.060 be handled, but not going to the social media giants and saying, this is dangerous misinformation.
00:14:40.600 You should take it down.
00:14:42.240 That is nothing but censorship.
00:14:44.960 Lauren Gunter, Calgary Sun columnist.
00:14:47.060 Glad you were not censored.
00:14:48.760 And I'm glad to always continue to read your work.
00:14:51.020 Thanks so much for coming on today, Lauren.
00:14:52.880 You bet.
00:14:53.220 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
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