Juno News - December 19, 2019


Immigration officials wanted to “rethink the narrative” amid lack of confidence in government

Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Candace Malcolm Matthew Topic David Hickey Manny Ottawa
Justin Trudeau is no longer running the country Trudeau government wants to raise carbon tax and slash rebates

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

151.68

Word count

872

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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

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 As Canadians grew more frustrated and more critical of Justin Trudeau's mishandling of the
00:00:11.040 immigration file, bureaucrats in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada wanted to put
00:00:16.800 their heads together to figure out how to quote rethink the narrative unquote and they blamed
00:00:22.280 Canadians lack of knowledge for the problem for being critical of the government. This is something
00:00:28.220 I've unearthed in a more than 2,500 page batch of documents I obtained from the Immigration
00:00:33.840 Department in Canada exclusively under access to information. The bulk of the documents pertain
00:00:40.480 to the public environment scan that public officials in the bureaucracy do to gauge where
00:00:46.560 Canadians are talking about it, what they're saying and so on. I've talked about this program before
00:00:52.120 but specifically in this case there was a bad string of negative coverage where Canada's
00:00:58.340 immigration file and the government's handling of it or mishandling of it were being criticized.
00:01:03.840 In one email from Matthew Topic who's the team lead for the social care department in the
00:01:08.740 communications branch of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada pointed out in a report
00:01:14.660 that the conversation is 136% more negative than positive in 2018 compared to 2017. He acknowledged
00:01:24.460 that negative conversation increased by 35% from July of 2017 to July of 2018 and also that the volume
00:01:33.460 of conversation had increased. In response to that David Hickey who's the director general of the communications
00:01:40.340 department said that he was going to put communications on the agenda for his meeting
00:01:44.820 with the deputy minister and said quote I'm planning to chat public environment and rethinking the
00:01:51.380 narrative going forward. Yeah those are his words rethinking the narrative and he goes on to point out
00:01:57.860 some of the particular time frames when negative sentiment really increased. Now the PCO the privy council
00:02:04.060 office which is the bureaucratic arm of the prime minister's office had been tracking negative
00:02:09.660 sentiment towards the government's handling of immigration for quite some time. In fact one of
00:02:15.180 the things that I obtained in these documents was a report that hasn't been published previously
00:02:20.620 and this report showed a very steady decline in Canadians trust in the federal government's handling
00:02:26.940 of it and you can see this the government of Canada management of immigration from November 2016
00:02:32.940 down to May 2018 going from a high of 51% down to a low of 34% and most importantly you see that the
00:02:43.820 refugee and immigration issue as top of mind spikes whenever there are stories that are exposing the
00:02:50.300 government's mishandling of it such as for example the Olympic center in Montreal having to be turned into a
00:02:57.580 refugee housing facility. Now this negative reaction is important and the government instead of trying 1.00
00:03:03.660 to fix the problem is making it a communications problem rethinking the narrative. In fact at one point
00:03:10.060 they were even concerned that my colleague Candace Malcolm had a role in this. One communications
00:03:15.900 official said that she has quote contributed to negative sentiment conversations about border crossers
00:03:22.540 more broadly. So again the government is not doing any introspection here they're not saying that
00:03:27.820 they have actually mishandled the file they're simply saying that Canadians aren't smart enough
00:03:32.700 to realize it. This was one email saying there is a significant lack of knowledge when it comes to
00:03:38.780 policy on this issue the audience seems to believe all the government needs to do is flip a switch to
00:03:45.260 solve this problem. There is a perception that a majority government can do anything and is currently taking no
00:03:51.900 action at all. Now this was from a social media monitoring briefing except that was precisely the
00:03:57.660 problem. Justin Trudeau was not taking any substantive action instead he had tweeted out that famous welcome
00:04:03.740 to Canada tweet that ended up exacerbating the problem. At one point there was even a powerpoint
00:04:10.220 presentation delivered that suggested influencers might be something to consider for the immigration file
00:04:16.540 moving forward. Indeed there was another point where Manny Ottawa a famous conservative twitter
00:04:21.660 account in Canada was deemed to be an influencer working against the government's handling of
00:04:27.260 immigration. This was cited in a similar case study. So right now the government has determined that
00:04:33.180 its communications priority is to get Canadians more confident in the government's handling of things
00:04:39.900 not to actually get the government more confident in handling things. And this is tremendously problematic
00:04:45.820 because the government has branded critics of its immigration handling or mishandling to be
00:04:51.500 the problem here time and time again whether it's accusations of racism or being un-Canadian
00:04:56.700 and now we know that the bureaucracy basically is supporting this idea that it is simply a comms
00:05:02.380 problem and that if you in the director general of communications words rethink the narrative things
00:05:08.540 will apparently resolve themselves. This is why True North is standing up for Canadians on these issues,
00:05:14.860 standing up for truth, standing up for sensible immigration policy, and more importantly supporting the idea
00:05:21.020 that you can have a conversation around these issues without it devolving into name calling.
00:05:25.900 We can't do this alone. If you can support our efforts with a contribution head on over to tnc.news.
00:05:32.060 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:05:36.940 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.