Juno News - December 19, 2019Immigration officials wanted to “rethink the narrative” amid lack of confidence in government
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Summary
As Canadians grew more frustrated and more critical of Justin Trudeau's mishandling of the immigration file, bureaucrats in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada came together to figure out how to rethink the narrative . And they blamed Canadians lack of knowledge for the problem.
Transcript
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As Canadians grew more frustrated and more critical of Justin Trudeau's mishandling of the
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immigration file, bureaucrats in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada wanted to put
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their heads together to figure out how to quote rethink the narrative unquote and they blamed
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Canadians lack of knowledge for the problem for being critical of the government. This is something
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I've unearthed in a more than 2,500 page batch of documents I obtained from the Immigration
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Department in Canada exclusively under access to information. The bulk of the documents pertain
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to the public environment scan that public officials in the bureaucracy do to gauge where
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Canadians are talking about it, what they're saying and so on. I've talked about this program before
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but specifically in this case there was a bad string of negative coverage where Canada's
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immigration file and the government's handling of it or mishandling of it were being criticized.
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In one email from Matthew Topic who's the team lead for the social care department in the
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communications branch of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada pointed out in a report
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that the conversation is 136% more negative than positive in 2018 compared to 2017. He acknowledged
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that negative conversation increased by 35% from July of 2017 to July of 2018 and also that the volume
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of conversation had increased. In response to that David Hickey who's the director general of the communications
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department said that he was going to put communications on the agenda for his meeting
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with the deputy minister and said quote I'm planning to chat public environment and rethinking the
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narrative going forward. Yeah those are his words rethinking the narrative and he goes on to point out
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some of the particular time frames when negative sentiment really increased. Now the PCO the privy council
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office which is the bureaucratic arm of the prime minister's office had been tracking negative
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sentiment towards the government's handling of immigration for quite some time. In fact one of
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the things that I obtained in these documents was a report that hasn't been published previously
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and this report showed a very steady decline in Canadians trust in the federal government's handling
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of it and you can see this the government of Canada management of immigration from November 2016
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down to May 2018 going from a high of 51% down to a low of 34% and most importantly you see that the
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refugee and immigration issue as top of mind spikes whenever there are stories that are exposing the
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government's mishandling of it such as for example the Olympic center in Montreal having to be turned into a
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refugee housing facility. Now this negative reaction is important and the government instead of trying
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to fix the problem is making it a communications problem rethinking the narrative. In fact at one point
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they were even concerned that my colleague Candace Malcolm had a role in this. One communications
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official said that she has quote contributed to negative sentiment conversations about border crossers
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more broadly. So again the government is not doing any introspection here they're not saying that
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they have actually mishandled the file they're simply saying that Canadians aren't smart enough
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to realize it. This was one email saying there is a significant lack of knowledge when it comes to
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policy on this issue the audience seems to believe all the government needs to do is flip a switch to
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solve this problem. There is a perception that a majority government can do anything and is currently taking no
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action at all. Now this was from a social media monitoring briefing except that was precisely the
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problem. Justin Trudeau was not taking any substantive action instead he had tweeted out that famous welcome
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to Canada tweet that ended up exacerbating the problem. At one point there was even a powerpoint
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presentation delivered that suggested influencers might be something to consider for the immigration file
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moving forward. Indeed there was another point where Manny Ottawa a famous conservative twitter
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account in Canada was deemed to be an influencer working against the government's handling of
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immigration. This was cited in a similar case study. So right now the government has determined that
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its communications priority is to get Canadians more confident in the government's handling of things
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not to actually get the government more confident in handling things. And this is tremendously problematic
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because the government has branded critics of its immigration handling or mishandling to be
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the problem here time and time again whether it's accusations of racism or being un-Canadian
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and now we know that the bureaucracy basically is supporting this idea that it is simply a comms
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problem and that if you in the director general of communications words rethink the narrative things
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will apparently resolve themselves. This is why True North is standing up for Canadians on these issues,
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standing up for truth, standing up for sensible immigration policy, and more importantly supporting the idea
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that you can have a conversation around these issues without it devolving into name calling.
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