LAWTON: CBC misses the bigger picture
Episode Stats
Words per minute
173.3843
Harmful content
Misogyny
2
sentences flagged
Toxicity
5
sentences flagged
Hate speech
1
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Summary
It's Fake News Friday, where we debunk a bunch of Alberta politics-related news. This week, the Ethics Commissioner exonerates Premier Danielle Smith on the chief accusation that she or someone in her office sent an email to Crown prosecutors trying to interfere in the Artur Pawlowski case. And a piece in The Conversation explores the complicated roots of colonialism in botany and gardening.
Transcript
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It is Friday. We always try to end things with a little bit of routine here.
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Yes, Fake News Friday, going through the whirlpools of wackiness,
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the hurricanes of hilarity, and all the other weird stuff that we can debunk and try to make sense of.
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This one is an Alberta politics-themed Fake News Friday
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because yesterday the Ethics Commissioner in Alberta exonerated Danielle Smith
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which is that she or someone in her office had sent an email to Crown prosecutors
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trying to interfere in the prosecution of Artur Pawlowski.
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Now, Premier Danielle Smith in her office did an investigation.
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Previously, they said, listen, there was no email.
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CBC doubled down, and now we have the Ethics Commissioner coming out and saying,
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The Ethics Commissioner found no evidence of this.
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Now, if you look, interestingly enough, at the headlines on this,
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there's a lot of support for the idea that Danielle Smith was exonerated on the chief accusation.
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But the CBC headline, Danielle Smith breached Conflicts of Interest Act, says Ethics Commissioner.
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So they go way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way down to the report
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and find that a conversation that Danielle Smith had with her justice minister was inappropriate,
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So talk about when two people can look at the same thing and draw wildly different conclusions.
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The reality is that she was cleared on the most significant counts.
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They did find her to have run afoul of a minor aspect of this.
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But odd, the media focuses more on that one than the bigger picture here.
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And Danielle Smith has taken it on the chin.
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She said, look, I'd actually welcome more direction and clarity on that so this doesn't happen.
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Because what she was found guilty of doing was asking her justice minister if something was legally possible.
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Like, isn't that what you're supposed to lean on your justice minister for when you are not a lawyer
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and they are a lawyer and you have a legal opinion that's been given to you that you want to say,
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hey, just let me know what you think about that.
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So I found it baffling that the commissioner found that.
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But ultimately, CBC has been the one who really has to be held accountable here
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and so far has not recanted or retracted anything.
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And just because we like to end things on a bit of a lighter note as well,
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Now, okay, let me just, before we put it up on the screen here, preface this by saying,
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I kind of, like, if it were me, I would look out and see the dandelions and be like,
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Let's plant more of them, even though you don't want to plant dandelions and don't even need to.
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Like, I had this with my wife the other day where I saw something.
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And I said, oh, okay, well, they're nice looking weeds.
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In the fall, you can blow them and spread these spores everywhere so there are more dandelions.
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So I hope you're not listening to that part anyway.
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I might actually be woke because I do not garden.
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This weekend, dig into the complicated roots of gardening.
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This is a piece by Atika Kaki and Vinita Srivastava who say the May long weekend is the unofficial
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And for those of you with home gardens or access to community space, it's time to dust off the
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However, the practice of gardening is deeply tied to colonialism from the formation of botany
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as a scientist science to the spread of seeds, species and knowledge.
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So the fact that tulips have been the subject of colonial conquest, the fact that they were
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hybridized and commodified and have coveted status, this is all just colonialism.
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The fact that botanical gardens were laboratories and scientific, this is an exact line, scientific
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objectivity asserted a Eurocentric point of view, disrupting and displacing indigenous knowledge
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So if you learn something scientifically, you're colonial because you're not just learning
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If you haven't familiarized yourself with tulip mania, there was a bit of a bubble in the
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But the Bitcoin active, I think Bitcoin has actually held its staying power a little bit
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Like Pierre Polyev didn't come out and say that Canada will become the tulip capital
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So Pierre Polyev needs to come out with his tulip platform.
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There were no tulip vending machines and tulip ATMs and all that.
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So get out of here with your bitcoins or tulips or the OG Bitcoin.
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In any way, you are all colonial white supremacist racist if you have gardens.
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