00:00:00.000Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:10.500Coming up, Anthony Fury and I talk about all the big picture issues, media, politics, what's coming up for True North in the year ahead. Stay tuned.
00:00:19.600The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:23.000Welcome to The Andrew Lawton Show, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.
00:00:28.500We're still in the midst, I think, of the holiday season more broadly.
00:00:33.000So we're taking advantage of it and taking a look at some of the bigger picture discussions that we don't often get time to do when we're chasing the horse race story of the day, the breaking news, whatever else is happening.
00:00:45.780And this episode, I've actually been trying to put together for a couple of months now.
00:00:50.180And just for whatever reason, we haven't been able to do it.
00:00:52.500And a big part of it was because when this guy joined the True North team, we were in the midst of the Public Order Emergency Commission, and obviously that was dominating our coverage.
00:01:02.900But Anthony Fury, who I don't even think I can say new now, but for the last few months has been True North's VP of Editorial and Content, is with me.
00:01:12.540Anthony, an absolute pleasure to have you back on. Thanks for coming on today.
00:01:16.980Yeah, thanks, Andrew. It's great to be here with you on the show, and it's great to be here at True North. It's been a great couple of months.
00:01:21.460Yeah, it has. And I mean, obviously, you bring a wealth of experience. You and I go way back. We've had each other on each other's shows.
00:01:29.380I've written columns that you've been kind enough to publish when you were with the Toronto Sun.
00:01:34.220And I think it's actually really great that you're at True North now for a number of reasons.
00:01:39.220But I was wondering if you could just first explain, I know you've talked about it a little bit in the past, why you took the plunge to new media, to independent media.
00:01:48.180Yeah, look, it was a great privilege to be at Post Media for, well, 12 years. And I think that's a long time.
00:01:54.720You know, you hear all these reports that say people aren't in jobs for life anymore.
00:01:57.900Young people jump around three or four different jobs within a decade or what have you.
00:02:03.380And I thought, oh, man, you know, I want to go out and do a little bit of that. I hope I can still count as a young person.
00:02:08.520So it really was about exploring different opportunities out there.
00:02:12.940And look, I think True North's growth is really impressive.
00:02:15.740I mean, I've been friends with Candice Malcolm for many years before she created True North.
00:02:19.460And I was always impressed with how every year I'd be speaking with Candice or other people at True North.
00:02:26.000And just the growth is so impressive in terms of growing the audience and the reach.
00:02:29.740And it's exciting to be something that has that energy behind it, for sure.
00:02:33.340And it's no surprise that the media industry in general is moving away from more traditional models,
00:02:39.660whether it's printing physical newspapers or whether it's creating a broadcast news package exclusively to go to air on a TV station or on a radio station.
00:02:49.660I mean, increasingly, we're all sort of YouTube content creators.
00:02:52.440We find that major television stations, after they record the broadcast, have to repackage it so it can go on Instagram or go on Facebook
00:02:59.900or some other video model up to YouTube and newspaper companies are doing that as well.
00:03:06.440So things are really converging to the point where the core product is actually the same.
00:03:11.860I can't imagine I'm the first person to bring this up.
00:03:14.400But in some ways, I think COVID was really the great equalizer because you had all of these media companies with their big, fancy, expensive studios.
00:03:21.560And they were forced to figure out, you know, how to get guests in by Zoom and they were doing everything remotely.
00:03:27.720And they were doing a lot of what independent media outlets and certainly what I've been doing on this show for quite a while.
00:03:33.620And I think the audience sort of had adapted to that already.
00:03:39.660I mean, in past years, when I would be asked to appear on CTV or CBC, of course, you say, and please show up at this studio and you spend time with the technicians and you spend time in getting some basic makeup on to go on television.
00:03:52.220And it's an elaborate professional production and that's fine.
00:03:55.440And they would not have allowed anything else.
00:03:57.020I guess if you'd said, no, I don't want to leave my house.
00:04:39.320I know True North has a fantastic new book about it as well.
00:04:43.120But it was a really important moment, not just in Canadian politics and, dare I say, Canadian history.
00:04:49.880But I think in terms of exposing the problems with some of the legacy media outlets in this country.
00:04:55.600And I think that was just the number one thing that we heard from people throughout those few months at the beginning of this year.
00:05:01.240That they just didn't trust CBC to tell the story.
00:05:04.800They just didn't trust the Toronto Star to tell the story.
00:05:07.940And I think that as far as the convoy is concerned, True North did a tremendous job with that.
00:05:13.920And continuing along with all of these different stories that have come up, like the Public Order Emergency Commission, where do we go from here?
00:05:21.760I mean, it's not every year you're going to get that gift as far as news value is concerned.
00:05:27.040No, but to your point, what was the underlying tension or challenge with the storytelling and the narrative that happened this past years with the convoy, with the inquiry?
00:05:37.780I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that there were so many news outlets that wanted to play gatekeeper.
00:05:43.600That wanted to say, okay, we've got these people on social media.
00:05:47.660We've got the great unwashed who are trying to set the narrative one way.
00:05:51.600And we're going to tell them how they're wrong.
00:05:53.180But part of the challenge with that is the great unwashed was on the ground, seeing these things happen in real time.
00:05:59.340And you've got traditional media trying to either misdirect, misinform, or just focus on things that weren't really the true narrative there.
00:06:08.400But because there was so much live streaming and so much firsthand experience going on, people said, this is not accurate.
00:06:15.100And I think one of the big crises we've seen and why we see all these surveys put on by international organizations about declining trust in traditional institutions, whatever they may be, and media lumped in there as well.
00:06:27.300Back in the 60s and the 70s, you would have that one person on the nightly news broadcast, you know, Knowlton Nash in Canada, obviously a little bit later on.
00:06:35.480It's Lloyd Robertson and Peter Mansbridge.
00:06:37.220There's a general sense that most people felt they could trust those people to tell them what is happening.
00:06:43.140And at a certain point, that trust really started to decline when people thought, can I actually rely on these sort of nightly newscast figures to tell me unvarnished what's going on?
00:06:54.180Or are they filtering it with a narrative?
00:06:55.880And I feel like people want to really hold on now to their ability as gatekeepers.
00:07:01.140But one of the things that both social media in general and then just this whole sort of variety of other news options has shown is that the narrative that they're actually safeguarding isn't necessarily true.
00:07:16.340If you're saying things that aren't accurate or things that are obviously pushing an agenda, that's going to see people ghost away from you.
00:07:23.540And the numbers show that that's happening.
00:07:25.620When you talk about that institutional trust, the one thing that bothers me whenever this comes up is that the legacy media types will often bring out a lot.
00:07:34.200They'll just go right into navel gazing on this and talk about why that decline in trust is everyone else's fault.
00:07:39.980Donald Trump, I think, was probably blamed for more of the distrust in media than there was any self-blame.
00:07:46.820And obviously, when institutional trust across the board is being harmed, there isn't just one factor.
00:07:52.560But I don't think there's been, and you may have a different perspective on this, a lot of recognition by the mainstream media as far as its role in that declining trust.
00:08:19.160But soon after they had that conversation, they also had something called the Trump bump where the Washington Post, New York Times, they did really well with bringing on new subscribers.
00:08:28.420Which you go, oh, really, that was happening because we heard subscribers were tanking in recent years.
00:08:32.960And they did get a lot because they really sort of obsessively covered the Trump White House and really kind of grilled him on absolutely everything that he did rigorously.
00:08:42.680And I don't have a problem with that per se, because I think it's important to absolutely grill our politicians, whatever their background.
00:08:49.300Now, obviously, they're not doing that with the Biden White House.
00:08:52.060There's a lot of, oh, let's not talk about this.
00:08:54.640So they've lost that energy, that energy only applied to Trump and the subscriptions are going down again.
00:08:59.160That Trump bump is gone and they're kind of trying to deal with what all of that means for their revenues.
00:09:04.480And that's this interesting situation they find themselves in right now.
00:09:08.860Yeah, I must say, I think my absolute favorite was the CNN chyron of Donald Trump gets two scoops of ice cream when everyone else around the table gets one scoop of ice cream.
00:09:18.500And it's like that that was basically CNN saying we've got nothing else to cover right now, but we know that Trump is good for ratings.
00:09:25.460And I saw Biden actually had two scoops the other day when he was having lunch with Emmanuel Macron.
00:09:39.560The interesting thing in a Canadian context is that we have our own now, I think there are a lot more muted than they are in the US, but we have our own sort of blank derangement syndrome phenomena that happen in the media.
00:09:52.980And right now, Polyev derangement syndrome is the flavor of the day.
00:09:57.040He had that one infamous press conference when David Akin just decided to, like, use up two of the five questions he was going to take, asking why he wasn't taking more than five questions.
00:10:07.120And I think that these sorts of things are probably going to happen a little bit more.
00:10:12.060And I guess my question is, do you think Canada could withstand a Ron DeSantis type politician that actually actively tries to flip the script on the media?
00:10:22.060Or do you think that our political culture is just a little bit too cautious for that?
00:10:28.140I think increasingly people are aware of, to our point about crafting narratives by certain mainstream voices, that the power that they harness is smaller and smaller when your audience is both decreasing and the people who are getting news from a plurality of sources through a variety of sources is really kind of increasing.
00:10:47.500We're seeing that happen where there are people who just don't at all access their news from traditional outlets at all.
00:10:54.640That original idea of Donald Trump basically doing and run around the media.
00:10:58.300So, yeah, I certainly think it's possible.
00:11:00.660I mean, I will note, I think you're right to say things are much more tepid here.
00:11:03.460I look back to what was happening during COVID and you had Doug Ford, who we were told was like a Trump-like figure and he's like a right-wing politician.
00:11:10.980And there was a time, of course, just this past January, it's hard to believe this was this calendar year, where he was bragging about a fourth hard lockdown.
00:11:18.300And he was actually making fun of Ron DeSantos at one press conference and making fun of Florida.
00:11:23.200So, supposedly, Canada's leading right-wing politician.
00:11:26.980Meanwhile, just across the border in Michigan and New York, you had Democratic politicians who weren't having it.
00:11:31.600You had the Democratic mayor of Boston, a Black lady who had said that Kim Haney was her name, to say that she doesn't believe in vaccine passports because her people had already endured slavery.
00:11:42.580That was controversial and she sort of half-apologized for that remark.
00:11:45.180But that's a remark that if a conservative politician had said it in Canada during COVID, they would be out of a job.
00:11:51.840They wouldn't even consider saying it.
00:11:53.220But you had Democratic politicians who were pushing back so much more.
00:11:56.040We were told that Maxime Bernier was some sort of extremist in his views on COVID, but when you looked at mainstream Republicans like Rand Paul, who is an MD, a medical doctor, he was always saying things much more aggressively than Maxime Bernier was.
00:12:09.400So, it's interesting and I would say lamentable that the confines in Canada are still extremely narrow.
00:12:16.500Yeah, and it's tough because I think that there are some aspects of the American political system that I would not want to adopt.
00:12:22.840For example, I think that the two-party system, while it has its benefits, I think generally speaking, it takes away a lot of voter choice.
00:12:31.440Now, the practical side of that is that it really hinders the chance of a conservative success in Canada in a way that it doesn't in the United States.
00:12:40.200But I think your point is incredibly well taken, which is that we in Canada have an Overton window that is in a much different place than it is for the United States as far as what the bounds of acceptable discourse are here.
00:12:53.500I mean, one of the things, just from a simple analytic point that I always found really interesting about Trump 2016, was he created the ballot box questions, the referendum questions, out of thin air.
00:13:22.820And yet Trump made those the questions that everybody in America had a strong opinion on and people passionately fought for them.
00:13:28.980And he really just, it was like magic conjuring of them all.
00:13:32.140And I do think there's an opportunity.
00:13:33.760I mean, the question of, are you a leader or are you a follower, whether or not you're a left-wing figure or right-wing figure, I would say both Barack Obama and Donald Trump are leaders.
00:13:42.400And then you find people like both Mitt Romney and Joe Biden are not leaders, for instance, in terms of whether or not they can sort of bring these issues to the fore, take the bull by the horns, almost single-handedly, great feats of individual strength.
00:13:53.700And I think Canada can make that happen.
00:13:56.180I think Pierre Polyev, during his leadership race, he really, he didn't create things out of thin air, but he saw things that were bubbling on the surface and articulated that stuff that people were feeling in terms of one of his big refrains about, I'm going to put you back in control of your life.
00:14:11.680Almost in a nonpartisan way, Andrew, because I think there's a lot of, I think it applies to so many issues.
00:14:18.820This idea that too many different government bodies or even just gatekeeper elite type people, maybe not government figures, but in other industries, are just trying to tell us how we should live, what choices we should make more.
00:14:31.120So I think a lot of people are feeling that right now, even if they're not card-carrying conservatives.
00:14:37.040I don't know if that's still going to be the case whenever this election is and whenever Jagmeet pulls the strings on the coalition in 2055 or what have you.
00:14:44.360But, you know, for now, that's how it is.
00:14:47.620Okay, since you bring up Jagmeet Singh, not that I find him to be usually the most useful kind of person to talk about in Canadian politics,
00:14:56.040but I do just find this running gag that I and some others are doing on Twitter to be quite amusing,
00:15:02.420which is any time he tweets about how unconscionable something the Liberals have done is to point out, like, the fact that this is the guy who has given the Liberals a blank check and really not gotten anything in return here.
00:15:24.060And I think what's really going on is that the NDP just doesn't have the money to fight an election.
00:15:29.080The NDP knows that they can't win an election.
00:15:31.500The NDP has moved back to where it was under leaders like Alexa McDonough, where they are just happy to be the third party or the fourth party.
00:15:38.900They call themselves the moral conscious of parliament, basically, that when there's legislation that isn't considering the issues they care about,
00:15:46.120they're going to get a couple amendments in committee and a couple tweaks, and then they're going to score victory for that.
00:15:50.180Jack Layton used to basically own a number of bills that passed and said, I actually made this bill what it is.
00:15:55.440And there's, I think, some case to that being true in some legislation.
00:15:58.760But then also Jack Layton realized, I'm actually sick of all of this being this, like, always third wheel.
00:16:17.560Well, let's be honest, if you leave being federal liberal leader, conservative leader, there are a lot of interesting job opportunities, corporate positions.
00:16:24.660That doesn't exist when you're an NDPer.
00:16:27.140Rachel Notley has just gone back to being opposition leader because there's no other, you know, she's a person who has to pay bills.
00:17:00.960I mean, I don't support most of what the NDP stands for.
00:17:04.020But I just, putting on my strategist hat here, I wonder why they gave away so much for so little.
00:17:10.180Because if I were Jagmeet Singh, I would have held out for one of these big ticket items.
00:17:14.300Like, they still, even their dental plan that they supposedly exacted from the liberals, even though Justin Trudeau had already promised it, isn't the dental plan that the NDP really wants, which is basically to extend Medicare to dental care.
00:17:26.920They didn't do anything to get universal pharmacare, which was another long-time liberal plan.
00:17:32.380And, again, I don't support these policies, but it's like the worst negotiator in history has to have been Jagmeet Singh.
00:17:55.320And I know Jagmeet Singh says, and we can withdraw any time.
00:17:58.860But as you pointed out, Andrew, well, okay, if you think Canada is, like, currently complicit in ongoing genocide or whatever these, like, really over-the-top remarks he's making, I mean, if you're just in it for the memoirs, okay, well, that tells us what you're all about here.
00:18:12.620You just want to tweet for the sake of the RTs.
00:18:14.760If you're genuine about all of this, well, then you're going to have to do something about it.
00:18:18.240And you have to do something by getting on the phone to the prime minister and saying, look, I'm going to collapse this thing unless I get X, Y, Z.
00:18:24.400Instead, and to your point, Andrew, with the details of the dental plan, he's not actually doing that.
00:18:30.480I mean, if he wants to play that game of being the moral conscious of parliament, I'm just going to, like, tweet my indignation once a week.
00:18:59.840I think Justin Trudeau wants to run out the clock.
00:19:01.940It's very interesting that with the interest rate hikes, we're told by some of the major banks that people have hit their trigger points.
00:19:09.880Now, there's a certain period where when you have a variable rate mortgage, when the rates go up, your actual raw payment is not going up.
00:19:18.080It's just that the amount of interest in principle skews against you, and you almost get to the point where you're paying 100% interest.
00:19:24.720But your payment still hasn't gone up, so your daily living is not affected.
00:19:27.840The trigger rate means, sorry, we're actually going to have to push this rate up, and you're going to be paying more a month.
00:19:33.780And you could be paying $200, $500, over $1,000 more a month, depending on when you took out your mortgage.
00:19:39.500There was years like 2019 when Vancouver, Toronto, just crazy bidding wars.
00:19:44.160And I think a lot of people were overleveraged.
00:19:46.320And some people, I hope it's not a lot, I don't like saying this, but some people will lose their homes, and they're not going to be happy about it.
00:19:52.880And I think a lot of this is going to be in swing ridings as well.
00:19:55.800So why would you, if you're Justin Trudeau, want to roll the dice on all of that?
00:20:00.480Why would you want to go to the polls when suddenly, almost four weeks after you've started the election, the economy gets really problematic, and there's a good argument to be made that you have partial blame for it?
00:20:14.060Yeah, and you had people that were talking about the possibility of a fall election, which I never thought was really likely, like one in 2022.
00:20:23.340But I thought that the only justification for it would have been, if Justin Trudeau was seeing that, you know, we're heading into a recession, we're heading into really bad economic terrain, let me see if I can just like squeak out a win before things get really bad.
00:20:36.980Because at a certain point, there's going to have to be accountability.
00:20:39.680And even the most Teflon, scandal-proof government will have to pay the piper.
00:20:44.600I mean, voters will not injure a government forever.
00:20:47.540And I think there's still that prevailing question of whether voters turf Justin Trudeau or Liberal MPs turf Justin Trudeau.
00:20:57.020I go back to what happened before Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister, when he abolished the Liberal Senate.
00:21:04.880And back then, that was held up as this brilliant thing to create independent senators or something.
00:21:10.200No, what he was doing, it was a really kind of Maoist thing, because all of the Liberal senators back in 2014 would have been appointed by Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, or even a few before then.
00:21:20.740And these are kind of old guard liberals who I think we've really seen from former cabinet ministers from that era, they're not happy with the direction of this weird, woke, leftist Liberal Party.
00:21:32.900So when we talk about backroom machinations, and look, I'm not this, I don't like playing the Ottawa bubble game.
00:21:39.260So I get a lot of my backroom calculus wrong because I'm just not interested in keeping score and all of that.
00:21:44.780But I think the idea of elder statesmen in the Liberal Party coming in to make things happen doesn't really exist with the federal liberals in the same way it necessarily does with other parties.
00:21:56.600So this idea that someone's going to force them out and there's factions, that's not to the same degree it was during the Chrétien-Martin fighting years.
00:22:05.480Trudeau has really, really isolated himself, which has some benefits for him and I think some negatives for all of this.
00:22:11.480You know, there's this talking point for years that Jerry Butts is the puppet master and he's running things and he's been out for actually a couple of years.
00:22:18.600And Andrew, I've got some very bad news for you, actually.
00:22:48.220I mean, with the World Economic Forum stuff, I think the big problem with it is it's a bunch of like-minded people who are getting together in a room and they hear these kind of rather elitist ideas disconnected from regular folks.
00:22:59.560And they're more connected to each other, to the global elite cocktail circuit, than they are to the regular folks on the ground, which is why they get really interested in these bizarre, newfangled ideas that they're doing.
00:23:12.620The idea that, you know, to your point, it's not like Klaus Schwab has his compromising intel and all these figures.
00:24:42.180So something's going to come to a head on that issue.
00:24:44.420On a related issue when it comes to kids and woke stuff, here at True North, we've been doing so much coverage on school board issues because people are really concerned about what's going on in public schools and the agendas that are being pushed, the politicization that's happening.
00:24:58.600And we saw in elections in Vancouver and throughout Ontario, anti-woke school board slate trustees.
00:25:06.380And they did not win for the most part.
00:25:09.240But I think that's just the beginning.
00:25:11.260I think it was basically like a beachhead moment.
00:25:16.320Well, and I think it was actually a very important battle for people to get in on because I find oftentimes conservatives in particular tend to ignore local government.
00:25:27.300I don't know if it's because they think it's beneath them or because, you know, a lot of people on the right tend to be more policy minded.
00:25:33.220And the bigger policies that mostly come across our radar are provincial and federal.
00:25:37.760But local government is very important.
00:26:21.720She was a parent and she was involved in the school system.
00:26:23.820So I think she was much more, it made much more sense for her to run for trustee rather than some of these other individuals.
00:26:29.940But, yeah, the left-leaning people, they see it as a pipeline.
00:26:33.620And you're right, conservatives don't as much, but looks like they are now.
00:26:38.520So let's talk a little bit about where True North goes from here.
00:26:42.020And I know we've touched on it a little bit.
00:26:43.600Obviously, we've got a team that just keeps growing and growing.
00:26:46.620Like, I can't remember if I've said it on the show before, but I remember when I joined True North in 2018, we didn't really have a team call because our team was, you know, four people.
00:26:56.440So we would just, you know, message each other once a week about what we're working on.
00:27:00.240And then the calls kept getting longer and longer and longer because we kept having more and more people and more and more stuff that we're doing, which is a very good problem to have.
00:27:10.340And, I mean, at this point, people ask me, how many do you have?
00:27:12.800And I'm like, I don't even know how many people work for us anymore, which, again, is a very good problem to have.
00:27:31.720And it's really exciting because that's certainly happening.
00:27:34.160And, you know, Andrew, you've got a lot of fans up there for a good reason.
00:27:37.980I mean, you're just doing amazing stuff.
00:27:39.720You've been really killing it with so much of what you're doing and being on the ground to cover things like the convoy, where whether people support them or oppose them, it's still important to just get the basic facts right.
00:27:53.480And that's what True North's been doing.
00:27:55.200So moving forward, I think the team will be growing.
00:27:57.620You know, as you know, I've been aware of the metrics of most media companies in Canada in terms of the web traffic they get, the audience they command.
00:28:05.720And to your point of, you know, why did I want to be involved in True North?
00:28:10.260One of the reasons is, wow, you got a good thing going on here in terms of a growing audience, what those numbers are and the space True North fills in the Canadian media landscape, a big space and an increasingly growing one.
00:28:22.340So we're going to see people doing more things.
00:28:23.740The shows are just gaining in popularity, which is great.
00:28:28.860And we're going to be doing more news gathering, more exclusive information.
00:28:32.140To our point about the school board issue, there are many issues that traditional media companies just aren't interested in exploring as much.
00:28:42.740Blacklock's reporter, I think one of the reasons that they've had some success is because they cover House of Commons committees and Senate committees.
00:28:48.920And you go, well, doesn't everybody cover them?
00:28:56.860And it used to be the case that all the wire agencies and the major outlets would have a person sitting in a committee and watching the whole thing.
00:29:08.160I think one reason, because they've ceded the floor to these issues and they're not reporting on the nuts and bolts of what matters to Canadians.
00:29:14.100And another issue is business metrics.
00:29:15.620They just don't have the people to do it anymore.
00:29:17.560So True North is going to be really telling the full story in a way that a lot of media outlets just aren't doing anymore.
00:29:26.280School board reporting was a traditional thing throughout the 80s and 90s.
00:29:31.780So we're going to be bringing Canadians, both getting the scoops, the exclusives, the voices they need to hear, but also getting on the basic news that it is out there.
00:29:41.620But a lot of media just aren't telling people about it anymore, either for agenda crafting reasons or for lack of resource reasons.