00:00:00.000The Toronto Star recently published an article claiming that Elon Musk is spreading misinformation.
00:00:05.660What did Elon Musk do? Well, he said that Canada doesn't protect freedom of speech.
00:00:09.480Now, at the same time, the CBC released a smear campaign against the same man, Elon Musk,
00:00:14.160accusing him of hate speech and encouraging more censorship on his platform X.
00:00:19.480So which one is it, Legacy Media? Does Canada support free speech?
00:00:23.080Or does Canada support censorship because you can't have it both ways?
00:00:26.280It's Fake News Friday. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
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00:01:04.500So I have been waiting all week to tell you about this op-ed.
00:01:06.940I love Fake News Friday. It's my favorite show of the week because I want to talk to you about this op-ed that was published over in the Toronto Star earlier this week.
00:01:33.520It is from a summit with The New York Times when Elon Musk just sort of has a throwaway line where he talks about Canada.
00:01:38.920He says two quick things about Canada. This is what that looked like.
00:01:41.980And, you know, a lot of these, a lot of things that we take for granted here in the United States that don't even exist in Canada.
00:01:48.740There's not enough constitutional rights to freedom of speech in Canada.
00:01:53.800So, you know, and there's no Miranda rights in Canada. People like think like, you know, you have the right to remain silent. You don't actually in Canada.
00:02:02.360Like I said, it's a throwaway line. He was clearly talking about something else.
00:02:05.640He's talking about freedom of expression in the United States and protecting that.
00:02:09.120And then he just sort of decides to compare it with Canada.
00:02:12.220So if you're looking at it from a Canadian perspective, you have to know the context that he is talking about Canada in comparison to the United States.
00:02:19.260The United States has the most robust constitutionally protected free speech.
00:02:22.920They have a culture that really, really takes seriously their First Amendment, which is the right to freedom of expression.
00:02:28.520And that is encoded in their law. It's something that the Supreme Court takes seriously.
00:02:32.760So in comparison to the United States, Elon Musk is saying that Canada is not a country that protects free speech.
00:02:39.820Now, as you could see in that clip, it was just two quick lines in an interview.
00:02:43.020He doesn't really elaborate. He doesn't provide further explanation.
00:02:45.940So all we really have are the two statements to work off of claim number one, that there's no constitutionally protected right to free speech in Canada.
00:02:52.220And claim number two, that there are no Miranda rights in Canada, like the whole idea that you have the right to remain silent.
00:02:57.360He says, no, you actually don't in Canada.
00:02:59.800OK, so those two quick claims led to the writing and publishing of this entire article.
00:03:04.640Let's go through that article to see how the author and how the Toronto Star justify the claims that what Elon Musk said is dangerous and misinformation.
00:03:12.420So my colleague Harrison Faulkner went through this article or mentioned this article on a show ratio the other day.
00:03:18.120Go check that out because he did a great job of just pointing out the absurdity of this article.
00:03:22.900But basically the premise is this individual, I suppose, is from Afghanistan.
00:03:27.240He's talking about how life under the Taliban was really scary and horrible and they came to Canada and they felt so relieved.
00:03:32.920And now hearing this statement from Elon Musk left them feeling, quote, uneasy about the possibility of another collapse due to misinformation.
00:03:41.940And so what does he have to say specifically about Musk's claims?
00:03:45.160Well, he says, let's set the record straight.
00:03:46.940Section two of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms unequivocally protects fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression.
00:03:54.820So, again, there's not really a lot of substance to this article other than that one claim that he just says that Canada unequivocally protects fundamental freedoms.
00:04:05.220Now, I don't want to get too deep into constitutional theory, but look, every country in the world has a written constitution.
00:04:11.280Every country in the world can write things down in a constitution.
00:04:14.320But that doesn't necessarily mean that those are embedded values.
00:04:17.000Those are values that are upheld at every level of government, every level in society and by the court.
00:04:22.480And so the main difference between the country like the United States, as I mentioned, is that they have this commitment, this cultural commitment, this government commitment to freedom of expression that is unlike any other country.
00:04:32.360So, yes, sure, Canada does have a charter.
00:04:35.200And right there it says that we have the right to freedom of expression.
00:04:38.800But just because it's written down doesn't mean that it is an absolute right.
00:04:42.420So I'm going to read from the Government of Canada's own guide to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
00:04:47.720This is what the Government of Canada has to say about our rights and freedoms in the charter.
00:04:52.820However, the rights and freedoms in the charter are not absolute.
00:04:56.780They can be limited to protect other rights or important national values.
00:05:00.900For example, freedom of expression may be limited by laws against hate propaganda or child pornography.
00:05:06.860Section 1 of the charter says the charter rights can be limited by law so long as those limits can be shown to be reasonable in a free and democratic society.
00:05:15.280So this is just one example, but it shows that Canada's commitment is not to absolute fundamentalist freedom of speech.
00:05:24.100We've seen example after example of the government abending freedom of speech.
00:05:28.400I mean, just look at the Trudeau government's censorship regime.
00:05:30.620Look at the way that they interfere in the free press.
00:05:33.340They're obviously not committed to freedom of expression in a real way.
00:05:36.840And I will continue to demonstrate that throughout this episode that Canada doesn't have the same fundamental commitment to freedom of speech.
00:05:44.880If you're going to make a claim, if you're going to make the headline of your story saying that a public figure is spreading misinformation, you better be right.
00:05:53.620You better have receipts and you better be able to defend yourself with facts.
00:05:58.120They just had that one line that says that Canada unequivocally respects freedom of speech.
00:06:03.680They don't provide that context that Elon Musk was comparing Canada with the United States.
00:06:07.860Remember, the United States is a country with the best constitutionally protected freedom of speech on planet Earth.
00:06:13.700In fact, interestingly, and a little ironically, I will say, the United States is frequently criticized by the likes of the Toronto Star and others for being too militantly pro-speech.
00:06:25.780This is an article from the Toronto Star, it's about a decade old, but it is when then Prime Minister Stephen Harper repealed Section 13 of the Human Rights Act.
00:06:34.040So those of you who remember, those of you who are paying attention to politics 10 years ago, know that this Section 13 was a real thorn in the side for free speech activists.
00:06:44.060It allowed basically the creation of these kangaroo courts, which were designed to punish people for things that they said that other people did not like.
00:06:52.340It basically turned hate speech into a weapon that you could use in Canadian courts or sort of fake Canadian courts to punish people who said things that were offensive or said things that other people didn't like.
00:07:02.820Stephen Harper repealing Section 13 was a huge victory for freedom loving Canadians, especially for people in my field, in the journalism and commentary field.
00:07:11.000It was a huge victory. And so, of course, the Toronto Star at the time hated it.
00:07:16.000So here in this article, the Toronto Star is telling us how much that they loathed Stephen Harper for repealing this section.
00:07:22.080And the author calls those who support free speech members of the far right.
00:07:26.000He calls them hateful. He calls them bigots and so on and so forth.
00:07:29.580And so here I'll just read you a few examples from the story.
00:07:31.900He's talking about the philosophy behind Section 13, why it was created and what it did for Canada.
00:07:36.940He said, in Canada, there was to be freedom of speech, but also freedom from hate.
00:07:42.060That was going to be the Canadian way.
00:07:44.060So the Canadian way was going to be to balance freedom of speech with freedom from hate.
00:07:48.980If you're balancing a person's right to freely express themselves, balancing that with another person's right not to be offended,
00:07:55.540well, you can't really have both. Those two things don't really coexist.
00:07:59.180And the emphasis in Canada is always on the latter, always on the person not wanting to be offended.
00:08:03.800And therefore, the former, the freedom of speech, doesn't really exist in a meaningful way.
00:08:07.500Continue to read here from the article.
00:08:09.200It says, this was challenged by advocates of American-style free speech,
00:08:12.820an unholy alliance of media that wanted as few restrictions on content as possible,
00:08:17.920and anti-Semites and others who wanted to be free to spread their bigotry.
00:09:51.460It is also about Elon Musk, but this time it is criticizing him for the exact opposite thing that the Toronto Star is criticizing him for it.
00:09:59.500So CBC calls this investigative journalism, but they're really just employing the exact same tactics that Media Matters employed recently against Elon Musk and X to try to get advertisers to flee X, to flee that platform.
00:10:11.160So Media Matters, for those who aren't familiar, is a U.S. highly partisan, far-left organization whose job is simply to take conservatives out of context.
00:10:19.580They clip conservatives or they find things that conservatives said.
00:10:22.960They take it out of context and they use that to try to get advertisers to leave conservative platforms to stop advertising for conservatives.
00:10:31.040Recently, they decided to take aim at Elon Musk, and Elon Musk, good for him, to his credit, he decided that he had had enough of their loathsome routine.
00:10:40.120He called it an evil propaganda campaign, and he is suing them in what he calls a thermonuclear lawsuit.
00:10:45.840This is what he had to say on the topic after Media Matters published a smear campaign against them.
00:10:49.740He writes, the split second courts open on Monday.
00:10:52.540X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and all those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.
00:11:18.120Bell Media, Angus Reid, and other Canadian brands halt ads on X amid extremism concerns.
00:11:24.240Advertisers increasingly reticent since Elon Musk took over a platform a year ago.
00:11:29.020So the whole premise of the CBC article is that they refreshed ads over and over and over again until they saw an ad from one of those companies next to a post that they don't like, and then they screenshotted that and pressured those companies to stop advertising on the platform.
00:12:05.360I really wish that Elon Musk would notice this and deploy the same thermonuclear lawsuit against the CBC for more or less doing the exact same thing as Media Matters.
00:12:14.760We have two legacy media outlets, two of the leading pro-Trudeau leftist publications in Canada, saying at the same time that Elon Musk is guilty of misinformation for saying that Canada doesn't protect free speech,
00:12:26.740but then also saying that Musk's platform doesn't do enough to crack down on free speech, saying that there is an unchecked rise in hateful content.
00:12:36.360The CBC in this piece is proving Musk right and showing that the Toronto Star is flat out wrong.
00:12:41.760Canada, under the Trudeau government, values censorship.
00:12:46.040The CBC is working very hard to shut down voices it disagrees with.
00:12:50.180Well, in that same interview where Musk said that Canada doesn't really value free speech, he also had a message for advertisers, a message for those woke and dying companies like Disney who followed the censorship recommendations by Media Matters and pulled their ads off of X.
00:13:03.700This is what Elon Musk had to say to them.
00:13:06.020If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go yourself.
00:13:22.120Seriously, Elon Musk should say the exact same thing to the CBC, to the Toronto Star and the Trudeau government and the entire fake news censorship regime in Canada.