Juno News - December 19, 2019


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


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

151.67856

Word Count

872

Sentence Count

29

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

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
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.