00:00:36.980So it was a really fun evening on Wednesday.
00:00:40.640It was a crazy debate, and I went through it in some detail with my sort of deep criticisms at every level of the way that the official conservative debate was organized.
00:00:53.500It was hosted by Tom Clark, who was a lobbyist who was once a journalist.
00:00:56.500And just everything about this debate was totally cringy and awful.
00:01:00.440The format, the questions, the way it was all staged, the lack of audience participation.
00:01:06.380My thesis, my theory on it, Harrison, is that it was all planned by the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:01:11.040I'm usually one to defend the Conservative Party against media criticism.
00:01:15.260But I think in this case, what happened was that the Conservatives just caved so much to some of the negative voices that came out from the first debate, which was organized by the independent conservative group Canada Strong and Free.
00:01:26.840I moderated it alongside Jamil Javani, and we allowed for a very free-flowing discussion.
00:01:32.900We really hit on issues that I think matter to Conservatives and to Canadians.
00:01:37.600And apparently the brass at the Conservative Party didn't like it at all.
00:01:40.880They thought that there was too many opportunities for potential liberal hit pieces because the Conservative candidates were able to speak their minds too much.
00:01:56.800That seems to be the format that was placed onto Tom Clark.
00:02:02.160And he ran from there and also did a terrible job of just the questions, the topics, the way that he was shushing the media, all the gimmicks.
00:02:10.960It was just layers upon layers of bad, and I did go through it in some detail on my show, so I don't want to rehash too much of it.
00:02:18.040But there was another element that I think was also very, very important, and it became very obvious during the scrum.
00:02:24.680So first of all, if you just compare the debate that was organized by an independent group and independent media, myself moderating it, you know, it was fun.
00:02:31.620It was entertaining, and we heard a lot of disagreement, lots of discussion on substantive issues.
00:02:35.980The one that was organized by the sort of establishment people, the party, bringing in this old hand, moderator, not good at all.
00:02:43.680That was basically the consensus, and not just from us, from everybody, including the legacy media journalists.
00:02:49.160But then the next layer was the scrums that happened after the debates, Harrison, because there was a huge presence of independent media.
00:02:57.040It wasn't just True North, our own Andrew Lawton was there, but it was also, you know, you had the rebel asking some great questions, Western Standards, Rachel Emanuel.
00:03:04.440We heard from just lots and lots of people, an individual from the National Telegraph, which is an independent organization, and the questions were interesting.
00:03:16.940They were asking about a variety of important issues that do matter to conservatives and not framed in a sort of gotchu kind of way, asked in a way that really resonates with how Canadians, I believe, feel.
00:03:28.260And then you kind of just suppose that with the legacy media.
00:03:31.840I don't think they had nearly as many journalists who were asking questions in the scrums, and the questions that they asked were just stale and falling flat.
00:03:39.460So, Harrison, I'll bring you in on this.
00:03:41.760What was your overall opinion of the debate?
00:03:43.920And specifically, did you see what I saw with the scrums in terms of the legacy media just being sort of caught flat-footed, and the independent media being the ones who were sort of the young, ambitious, insightful, excited journalists that were there asking the punchiest questions?
00:04:03.760And again, it just made the legacy media look so bad.
00:04:07.400So, I mean, just to start off with the debate, I touched on this in our live broadcast on Wednesday, but the format was so bad, and it was not at all conducive to anything that you could consider to be a legitimate debate.
00:04:22.500They were asking candidates to summarize the greatest threat to Canada and Canadians in 15 seconds, and I think it was really bad when the moderator couldn't even keep up with the rules that he was supposed to follow.
00:04:34.160So, I think largely because it was totally, it made no sense at all.
00:04:39.620But yeah, Candace, you're right about the way, really the difference between the independent media, independent journalists, and legacy media based on, one, how prepared journalists are for these events, and also what kind of questions they come with, and really they know what their audience wants.
00:04:57.340So, I mean, in the scrums, what we saw were, you know, legacy media journalists asking the same question, because I guess they're not creative enough to come up with anything substantive to ask people who want to become prime minister.
00:05:10.200We saw the French-language Alberta CBC reporter ask both Roman Babber and Scott Aitchison how conservatives can win on climate when the members don't actually recognize climate, which actually isn't accurate.
00:05:27.580It shouldn't take a genius to know that that's a classic liberal media talking point, but nonetheless, they couldn't come up with anything unique, so they asked the same question twice.
00:05:39.920A CTV reporter, Bill Fortier, he asked both Jean Charest and Patrick Brown about their thoughts on the format, which everyone agrees was a horrible format.
00:05:48.380But they couldn't come up with anything legitimate to ask these candidates, Candace.
00:05:52.800I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who attends conservative events that independent journalists are full of energy, full of creativity.
00:06:00.960They bring a new level to the work that they do, and the legacy media journalists are being caught flat-footed.
00:06:09.960They bring absolutely nothing to the table.
00:06:13.940I did hear those CBC questions about climate.
00:06:16.920It reminded me of how Catherine McKenna, the former environment minister, the liberal politician from Ottawa, she was critical of the debate that I moderated online because she was like, apparently they didn't talk about climate change.
00:06:30.000And, you know, there you have the loyal, dutiful CBC journalist jumping in to say, like, let's all fearmonger about climate change.
00:06:37.900And I did appreciate how Scott Aitchison kind of smacked that question down because he's like, you know, you're misrepresenting what actually happened.
00:06:46.380So let's play that so you can see this question, the way that it's framed by the journalist.
00:06:51.260And then you can see Scott Aitchison, who is by no means like, you know, a grassroots conservative or someone who's like really into cultural battles and anti-media.
00:07:01.480But even he was pretty firm in just saying what you're peddling isn't true.
00:07:05.900And I think your point, Harrison, about how it's just liberal talking points, he sort of embarrassed the CBC journalist.
00:07:53.800And I think you heard tonight some great ideas about how we can move forward with a credible climate change plan that doesn't actually punish the most vulnerable in our society.
00:08:01.440And just one final point, Harrison, on the climate change issue.
00:08:05.440I would say I talked to a lot of conservatives.
00:08:07.160I talked to a lot of sort of both party insiders and what I would classify as just sort of the general conservative base.
00:08:13.680And I think most people do agree with climate change.
00:08:17.720And most people believe that there's human causes.
00:08:20.440Well, I think when they vote for something like this and the message or the motion from the convention, which was from a couple of years ago,
00:08:29.320what they don't like is the drumming up of fear, the alarmism, the media narrative that if you don't have the exact kind of policies like Trudeau and the liberals when it comes to the Paris Accord and shutting down oil and gas and bringing in new punitive taxes on the middle class and on people, on consumers, then you're an out-of-touch picket.
00:08:48.340Like the thing that conservatives resent is like the entire narrative being pushed by the CBC.
00:08:52.880And here is the CBC once again, like not giving up on it and pushing it once again.
00:08:57.860Yeah, it's this idea, Candice, that the only way that Canada can play a role in trying to advance, I guess you could call them climate goals,
00:09:06.680is if we basically shoot ourselves in the foot and destroy all of our natural resource production while continuing to import oil and gas from the rest of the world.
00:09:16.740There was very few people who, well, obviously in the legacy media, no one wants to talk about that, but even still a few people talk about the fact that, you know,
00:09:26.000that's the liberal way to approach climate change and conservatives have an understandable frustration with that approach.
00:09:33.660It really is an anti-Canada perspective and no wonder conservatives don't want to engage in that kind of dialogue, really.
00:09:41.800Anytime a liberal journalist or a legacy media journalist is peddling those liberal talking points, you know exactly what they're trying to do,
00:09:49.140which is just to try to embarrass conservatives or put them on the back foot and make them dance to the liberal tune.
00:09:54.600Yeah, it's eye-roll inducing and we see it every election that they say, like, if you don't have a specific plan to reduce emissions,
00:10:02.660therefore you don't care about the environment.
00:10:04.620And I think that it's time for conservatives to really grab this narrative and say, no, no, the dichotomy you're proposing is wrong.
00:10:11.000You can care deeply about protecting the natural environment.
00:10:13.240And we can do that by, you know, preserving our lakes and rivers and our forests and making sure we plant more trees
00:10:18.520and making sure we don't dump sewage into riverways and things along those lines,
00:10:23.460while also promoting very low emission Canadian oil and gas, which is, you know, innovative and clean and all these things.
00:10:30.200And I did think that the debate itself got into that a little bit.
00:10:34.180And there was some kind of good conversations around Canada's role in producing oil and gas.
00:10:38.860But this lazy question from the CBC, essentially just repeating the same question to the candidates,
00:11:17.740And again, just, you know, these sort of young, energetic, independent media, really, really outshining the legacy media.
00:11:27.000And I know very few people watch these scrums at the end of debates.
00:11:30.080But for those of us that did, it was quite illuminating.
00:11:33.400Well, Harrison, I wanted to keep on this topic of energy and oil and gas, because there was a big decision that came out this week,
00:11:39.440which was that a superior court in Alberta, an Alberta appeal court, sorry, voted that the punitive harmful Bill C-69,
00:11:48.760which was the law that required all kinds of really intensive assessments, including like gendered assessments,
00:11:55.300that would, you know, impact whether or not projects would be allowed to go through in Alberta.
00:12:01.280Basically, this idea like, you know, I think it was dubbed the No More Pipeline Bill by critics in Alberta,
00:12:06.540because it was just this really punitive environmental bureaucracy that was placed,
00:12:11.160this onus placed on oil and gas companies, pumping companies before getting anything approved.
00:12:16.480So the Alberta government pushed back and said, this is this is against the Constitution, they challenged it.
00:12:23.320And a court in Alberta found that that was right, that that that that they agreed with a true to what they agreed with the Kenny government in Alberta,
00:12:30.980that this environmental impact law was unconstitutional.
00:12:35.140And I want to I just want to talk because you know, the the the theme of the show, and we call it fake news Friday,
00:12:40.840because the idea that the media, they pretend to be straight news journalists, they pretend to be neutral.
00:12:47.380But really, what they're doing is activism. And it's just a charade, like they pretend to be neutral, but they're not.
00:12:53.140And this is one of the stories that you might not see it the first time you read it, or most people might not catch all the nuances.
00:12:58.740But when you read through a piece like this, which it was written by the Canadian press, of course,
00:13:03.260it means that it appears in newspapers and websites all across the country, this this one here we have, it was it was placed in global news,
00:13:11.180but but typically CP runs and everything, including, you know, sites that people think of as conservative, like the National Post or the Toronto Sun,
00:13:17.780they run CP stories, as well, CP stands for the Canadian press.
00:13:21.680I'm just going to go through this basically line by line, because it is incredibly biased.
00:13:26.360And this is this is in a nutshell, is what we mean when we're talking about fake news, and the biased landscape.
00:13:32.820In Canada. Okay, so here's a piece, the headline says, Alberta appeal court says federal environmental impact law, not okay.
00:13:41.200So so here we see right off the bat, it kind of gives us a little explanation of what just happened says Alberta's top court said Tuesday,
00:13:48.600that the federal government's environmental impact law is unconstitutional, and Ottawa almost immediately announced its plan to appeal.
00:13:56.120So so in the first paragraph, we don't even get the news, and we get the reaction from Ottawa.
00:14:01.240So it's not about how this law is unconstitutional, it goes right to Dustin Trudeau plans to fight back, then we paragraph to it says the Alberta Court of Appeals strongly worded opinion.
00:14:11.180So the Impact Assessment Act is an existential threat, notice the scare quotes there around existential threat,
00:14:18.780to the division of powers guaranteed by the Constitution, and has taken a, square quote again, wrecking ball to the constitutional rights of the citizens of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
00:14:28.140The majority of judges sided with Alberta, arguing that the legislation allowed Ottawa to put provinces in an economic chokehold,
00:14:35.240and give it the means to choose winners and losers.
00:14:38.140Okay, so so we have three paragraphs there, Harrison, that sort of establish the story, and in it, it's already torqued, right?
00:14:43.940Rather than providing a quote from the judge that wrote the decision that the one that won, right, that there was a vote, and that decision won,
00:14:53.660they just pulled scare quotes to kind of like, make a mockery of it, basically.
00:14:58.500But again, stressing the fact that we're not done with this, and that Ottawa is going to appeal.
00:15:04.400Okay, so so that's the first three paragraphs, fourth paragraphs, it goes straight to Justin Trudeau, right?
00:15:09.180It doesn't go to the judge who wrote the decision, it doesn't go to anyone in Alberta, the Kenney government in Alberta,
00:15:14.260who are the ones pushing this review, it goes straight to Justin Trudeau basically defending himself,
00:15:20.080saying the justification behind putting the bill in place in the first place.
00:15:24.660Then we have four paragraphs in a row of Justin Trudeau quotes, okay?
00:15:28.260So we're not getting a fair idea of what is going on, why this case was determined.
00:15:34.160We are just hearing Justin Trudeau's justification.
00:15:37.460I just want to pause right here, Harrison, because if you go back to any of the laws that Stephen Harper wrote
00:15:42.660in the former conservative government that were struck down by a court, the emphasis was exactly flipped, right?
00:15:48.620It would be like, this judge, this heroic judge wrote this decision,
00:15:52.340scrapping this horrible law that Harper tried to introduce,
00:15:55.360and it would be all about quotes like bashing the government, whereas here it's flipped.
00:15:59.140They don't quote the decision, they quote the prime minister explaining himself
00:16:03.480and saying why he is right, right off the top, okay?
00:16:05.700This is incredibly biased, this is the origin of a fake news story,
00:16:11.260and then it kind of goes on and on and on to provide a bit of background.
00:16:14.820There's a couple paragraphs here about, again, why the Alberta government challenged it,
00:16:19.020and then the first quote that we hear from a judge, Harrison,
00:16:22.200is not from the judge who, again, wrote the decision and determined that this was unconstitutional,