Juno News - July 16, 2019


LAWTON： Recapping Canada's ＂media freedom＂ conference


Episode Stats

Length

28 minutes

Words per Minute

177.94763

Word Count

5,145

Sentence Count

314

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

Andrew Lawton returns from covering the first ever Global Conference for Media Freedom in the United Kingdom. In this episode, he talks about the challenges faced by journalists in the third world, and why freedom of speech is a fundamental right.


Transcript

00:00:00.960 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to another edition of the True North Report.
00:00:05.460 My name is Andrew Lawton, a fellow with True North, just returning a couple of days ago to Canadian soil
00:00:12.000 after covering the first ever Global Conference for Media Freedom in the United Kingdom.
00:00:17.200 And this was a coverage opportunity that ended up being a very significant one.
00:00:22.120 We were only able to, as an organization, cover it as effectively as we did because of your support.
00:00:27.300 So I want to begin, before I get into all the meat and the nitty-gritty of this topic,
00:00:31.620 with a thank you to all of those of you who donated to the crowdfunding campaign.
00:00:36.460 It was a very pricey endeavor, but an important one because in a lot of cases,
00:00:40.980 governments try to bring all of the things that they're going to be talking about
00:00:45.540 when it comes to how they're going to surrender regulation to these global interests.
00:00:49.880 They bring them to these corners of the world so that no one can really cover them and hold them accountable.
00:00:54.640 So it was important to be there. We raised all the money.
00:00:57.440 We exceeded the goal slightly, covered it, and I'm very glad we did.
00:01:01.260 And I'll talk about why in the next couple of moments.
00:01:03.860 But first, hello. Hope you're enjoying the heat of the summer, depending on where you are in Canada.
00:01:09.380 I'm pretty sure everywhere is getting at least a bit of heat,
00:01:11.320 maybe not as swelteringly so as we are here in southern Ontario.
00:01:15.840 But I can't complain. It was pretty bad in the UK as well.
00:01:18.200 The idea that we had gone for, I just want to preface this, was because free speech is an important issue in Canada.
00:01:26.360 Free speech is an important issue, media freedom, press freedom, freedom of expression.
00:01:30.580 All of these issues I really put under that one umbrella of freedom of speech.
00:01:35.920 And when the Canadian government announced some months ago it was going to be co-hosting a media freedom conference,
00:01:42.660 I think it took me all of about a day to really decide with our team, okay, are we going to do this?
00:01:48.240 And everyone said yes. It's just a matter of how do we raise the money to do it.
00:01:51.460 But the reason I think this is an important topic is because I've been discussing free speech issues for years, for years.
00:01:58.920 I mean, this has always been one of the biggest things that I've tried to bring up
00:02:02.720 because on the political battles that we see day to day,
00:02:07.100 freedom of speech is really the mother of all freedoms in so many regards.
00:02:10.820 If you don't have the right to speak out about issues, you lose the right to advance any solutions on these issues.
00:02:17.020 And press freedom, I've always said, is very much in alignment with the broader idea of free speech.
00:02:25.660 But what was fascinating about this conference is that no one actually wanted to talk about free speech.
00:02:31.560 No one at this conference actually wanted to have a discussion about freedom of opinion,
00:02:36.100 about freedom of expression, about freedom of speech.
00:02:38.600 They only wanted to talk about journalists in the third world.
00:02:42.600 Now, believe me when I say this is a legitimate discussion to have.
00:02:47.560 You look at a journalist in Malta not too long ago,
00:02:50.840 which is a developed relatively well-to-do tiny nation in Europe.
00:02:54.760 A journalist was killed by a car bomb,
00:02:56.780 and there's been virtually no investigation into it by the government,
00:03:00.500 a government that she was reporting on.
00:03:02.960 There was one gentleman who was at the Global Conference for Media Freedom from Ghana.
00:03:07.220 He was speaking, but he legitimately had to cover his face.
00:03:11.000 He looked like Cousin It.
00:03:12.240 He had to cover his face because he would be killed if his identity was known.
00:03:17.540 There was another woman there who has been a reporter in Venezuela.
00:03:21.380 She has stuck so much in the craw of the powers that be, the dictatorship in Venezuela,
00:03:28.040 that they won't even give her a new passport.
00:03:30.560 So she's in many respects exiled from her own country,
00:03:34.000 although she doesn't feel it would be safe to go back anyway.
00:03:36.440 So it's no harm, no foul in some respects.
00:03:39.400 So there are legitimate examples around the world where journalists are facing persecution
00:03:45.660 that simply doesn't exist in the West.
00:03:47.720 These are all important issues to discuss.
00:03:50.100 So I'm not trying to say they're not.
00:03:52.080 I'm not identifying a problem without saying we should talk about a solution,
00:03:56.620 we should talk about a solution.
00:03:58.100 But you have to look at media freedom in the broad spectrum.
00:04:02.340 You have on one end all of these cases I was just talking about.
00:04:06.160 And on the other end, you have situations in Western developed democratic countries like Canada in the UK,
00:04:11.660 where free speech rights are not protected by the government on the day to day.
00:04:17.640 And that was the reason I wanted to go to this.
00:04:19.980 But the Canadian government, the British government,
00:04:23.460 neither of them was interested in talking about the issues that exist in their own countries.
00:04:28.740 And these are the two countries that were hosting this conference in London, England.
00:04:33.300 And I want to go through a few of the examples of how this conference ended up being simply about window dressing
00:04:40.320 and how the discussions of free speech and media freedom didn't exactly transition at all into an embrace of those freedoms.
00:04:50.460 And a few of these things you may have seen by now, I was doing videos nonstop.
00:04:54.640 I was writing columns.
00:04:55.820 We were publishing a lot of content on this.
00:04:58.340 But I want to put it all into one narrative here so that people can understand exactly what's going down.
00:05:04.840 And this is a two-day conference.
00:05:06.740 It's a two-day conference.
00:05:07.820 It was a global affair.
00:05:10.100 All of the delegates were from either governments or from various NGOs.
00:05:16.000 You had NGOs that are doing fact-checking projects or NGOs that are doing work to try to give journalists legal defense
00:05:23.680 or other things like this.
00:05:26.740 But that in and of itself is, I think, one of the problems here.
00:05:32.020 All of these groups were effectively saying the same thing.
00:05:36.100 All of the groups were liberal in nature, it seemed.
00:05:40.520 And pretty much all of their contributions to this was about what can government do.
00:05:48.520 And you always have to be very concerned when that's the premise of a discussion.
00:05:52.960 What can government do?
00:05:54.060 For example, one of the panels was titled, What Can Government Do About Media Sustainability?
00:05:59.120 And if you listen to the panel, it was all about bailouts.
00:06:01.980 Everyone was saying the government needs to bail out the media industry.
00:06:05.140 There was one session about public media.
00:06:08.080 So public broadcasters like BBC or CBC.
00:06:11.020 That session was, again, based on the premise that government has to do more to protect and preserve and uphold public broadcasting.
00:06:22.120 So on the things that were focused on the business of journalism, there was this overwhelming sense from the panels and the discussion groups and the conference sessions that government needs to do more.
00:06:35.620 That was their answer.
00:06:36.940 And if you look a little bit beneath the surface, you realize that government's already doing plenty.
00:06:42.920 In fact, government giving money to the media is only going to diminish press freedom rather than enhance it.
00:06:49.700 And let's just take a look at what's happening in Canada right now.
00:06:52.340 You've got $1.3 billion a year that the federal government gives CBC.
00:06:56.320 You've also got just shy of $600 million as a bailout that the government has put to the media sector.
00:07:04.360 Now, of that $600 million, we don't yet know entirely how much is going to go to which outlet or what the checks and balances are going to be.
00:07:13.160 But the one thing we have seen in the last several months in Canada is that the existence of that money, the fact that that $600 million exists, has eradicated or at the very least eroded the trust that Canadians have in the media.
00:07:30.020 Because now the default response, if you see a story, is, oh, well, hang on, is this just bought and paid for media?
00:07:35.720 And I think a lot of that is a knee-jerk reaction.
00:07:38.760 I think in some cases you can write a news story that has a favorable position about the liberals without being bought and paid for.
00:07:47.940 You may disagree, but my position there is that a lot of the people in the media simply have a liberal bias.
00:07:55.320 They simply have a liberal bias.
00:07:57.440 So it's not entirely out of the ordinary that they may write a favorable story about the liberals.
00:08:03.480 But that money-changing hands has caused Canadians, and I'd say discerning Canadians, to question the motivation and background of every single story that comes out.
00:08:15.800 So if you want to say that public trust erosion with regard to the media is threatening the media,
00:08:24.520 government putting money into the media sector to prop up an industry that in an economic sense anyway is on its way down
00:08:31.700 is not going to be the solution.
00:08:34.380 It's going to only exacerbate these problems further.
00:08:37.260 So that's one of the key issues that comes up.
00:08:39.260 But this entire conference was based on what can government do?
00:08:44.180 But then we bring it to the actual free speech or press freedom questions.
00:08:48.380 And I mentioned earlier, and it was one of the most disappointing parts of this,
00:08:51.720 that no one at the conference actually wanted to talk about media freedom in Canada or in the UK.
00:09:00.760 Or in the UK.
00:09:03.760 So where do we go as Canadians from here?
00:09:07.980 Where do we go as Canadians from here?
00:09:09.960 My belief wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly, is that we are going to be moving towards an era where there are two types of journalism.
00:09:18.700 You've got the government-approved journalism, and you've got the renegades that are outside of the system.
00:09:25.380 And this is not an original thought on my part.
00:09:27.440 Ezra Levant has made this point in a different sense, but I agree with his conclusion on this.
00:09:32.940 But, you know, there was a bit of a selling point that things might not be as bad as I think.
00:09:38.600 And you may have seen this go around Twitter.
00:09:41.160 At the conference, and this is also an indication of how hypocritical Chrystia Freeland, the Foreign Affairs Minister of Canada, was.
00:09:49.540 So she was effectively inaccessible for the entirety of the conference.
00:09:54.180 She wasn't doing interviews.
00:09:58.140 She wasn't taking questions at her press conferences, with one exception that I'll get to in a moment.
00:10:03.520 And her office was very coy and cagey about when or if she would be doing what's known as a scrum, which is when, you know, all the journalists surround the minister and ask her questions, and she theoretically gives answers.
00:10:16.540 So at a certain point, we finally got an acknowledgement that, yes, Chrystia Freeland is going to do a media scrum at 1 p.m. on Friday or on Thursday.
00:10:26.380 And if anyone wants to cover Chrystia Freeland's media scrum, what you have to do is go and register and then show up.
00:10:33.960 So I did.
00:10:34.880 I registered.
00:10:35.440 Now, keep in mind, I'm an accredited journalist at that event, which means that I've submitted my passport.
00:10:40.520 I've had to get a passport photo taken.
00:10:43.020 I have done all of the processes required of me by the British Foreign Office.
00:10:47.280 And I've been given my – I should have brought it to use as a prop in the show today, but I was given a printed card that had my photo on it, that had my identification, my outlet, where I'm from, all of that.
00:10:57.680 So I have been accredited, and I have gone through security.
00:11:01.220 And by the time I'm at this conference, I have been vetted by two governments, conceivably.
00:11:07.120 So when I say register, I mean just say, hey, I'm going to be there, which is what I do.
00:11:11.520 I tell Chrystia Freeland's press secretary, yes, I'm going to be covering the press conference.
00:11:16.340 And then what happens is all of the journalists that are going to cover this scrum, mostly from Canada, a couple from the UK are there, and Minister Freeland starts to lay the groundwork that maybe, just maybe, things are not going to go too smoothly.
00:11:33.540 The press secretary starts talking about, oh, it's a small room.
00:11:36.740 You know, I've got to find out how many numbers there are.
00:11:38.640 And she comes, and she counts people, and says, oh, yeah, it's a small room.
00:11:41.820 We might need to lose one or two.
00:11:43.400 And what was interesting is she said we might need to lose one or two people.
00:11:47.360 There are maybe nine, I'll say nine of us, nine or ten of us total, with cameramen, producers, journalists, all of these other people.
00:11:55.580 And I'm thinking, all right, this is a little bit odd, but, you know, I don't want to put the cart before the horse.
00:12:00.700 And then what happened is two more people came.
00:12:03.880 Two more people from another outlet.
00:12:05.540 I believe it was CBC, don't quote me on that part, but two more people from another outlet came.
00:12:10.380 And Christopher Freeland's press secretary comes back, sees the group has expanded, and still says, I think we have one or two too many people.
00:12:19.820 So this shows that it's not actually about the number.
00:12:23.160 The number is irrelevant.
00:12:24.720 It's that they are trying to get rid of two specific people.
00:12:29.040 Two specific people.
00:12:30.320 And it will become very apparent in a moment who those were, because I was one of them.
00:12:35.140 So she goes again, comes back, and says, all right, the following outlets come with me.
00:12:39.600 And she lists the usual suspects.
00:12:41.760 CBC, CTV, Global, The National.
00:12:45.000 Now, this is not the Canadian National.
00:12:46.600 This is a British outlet called The National.
00:12:49.240 Al Jazeera English.
00:12:51.140 Follow me.
00:12:51.700 And in that moment, journalists took a stand for journalist freedom.
00:12:56.660 Mainstream media journalists took a stand for journalist freedom.
00:12:59.520 Because there were two outlets that had registered that were waiting patiently, accredited at the conference, that were not invited on that list to go to the scrum.
00:13:07.780 One of them was True North, and the other was The Rebel.
00:13:12.380 Sheila Gunn-Reed and Ezra Levant were there, although at this particular moment, it was just Sheila Gunn-Reed that was going to be covering the conference.
00:13:18.880 And Sheila and I were the only two journalists excluded from this list.
00:13:23.680 And the rest of them stood their ground.
00:13:26.460 Global, CTV, Al Jazeera English, Globe and Mail, CBC as well, and said, well, hang on, no, we are not going unless everyone goes.
00:13:36.060 And they stood firm.
00:13:38.740 And you could tell that the press secretary was baffled.
00:13:42.420 She did not expect it to go this way.
00:13:44.140 She expected that no one would complain because no one would stand up for conservative media.
00:13:49.200 Because that's the minister's position on this.
00:13:51.740 That's Christian Freeland's office's position on this, that conservative media is not real media.
00:13:57.240 And I bet you that if National Observer or Rabble had been there, this issue wouldn't have happened.
00:14:01.680 They would have been waltzed right in and given the red carpet treatment.
00:14:04.480 But the mainstream media stood up for, no, I don't even want to say they stood up for me.
00:14:09.240 They stood up for my right as a journalist, as an accredited journalist to cover it.
00:14:13.800 But they stood up for principles more than they stood up for me individually.
00:14:17.800 And I think that's so important because they recognize that at a media freedom conference,
00:14:23.100 the government does not have the right to pick and choose by hand who gets to cover a press scrum.
00:14:28.400 So, again, Freeland's office scurries away, comes back and says, oh, we found a bigger room.
00:14:36.000 Why don't you come with me?
00:14:37.760 Now, this was, I believe, entirely orchestrated in advance.
00:14:41.660 And there are two reasons for this.
00:14:43.400 Number one, the story I just told you about the one or two too many people,
00:14:47.300 but even when the group expanded, it was still one or two people too many.
00:14:51.580 The other is that this is a 16-acre facility.
00:14:55.780 I looked it up after.
00:14:56.700 I didn't measure by hand there.
00:14:58.140 This is a 16-acre facility that has concerts with an audience of over 5,000 people.
00:15:04.220 This conference had about 1,500.
00:15:07.160 So the idea that there was no room at what was a giant warehouse, a converted warehouse, is absolutely false.
00:15:14.620 There was room everywhere.
00:15:15.900 In fact, the place that we were all standing and waiting for her to come back and bring us to the scrum
00:15:21.200 was a room we could have done the scrum in.
00:15:23.700 Like, she could have just brought Chrystia Freeland to this area.
00:15:26.580 We could have done the scrum in, and that would have happened.
00:15:28.460 So what ended up going down is we all went there.
00:15:31.240 We set up.
00:15:32.120 We had the cameras poised.
00:15:33.880 Chrystia Freeland came out.
00:15:35.180 Everyone asked a question each, no follow-ups, and the world didn't end.
00:15:41.540 That's the thing about free speech.
00:15:43.280 The world does not end when you allow the free exchange of ideas.
00:15:47.860 The world does not end when you allow open discourse, when you allow free speech, when you allow free thought.
00:15:54.660 If anything, people only get smarter.
00:15:58.540 I got to ask my question, which was about a story I'll talk about in a moment.
00:16:02.260 Chrystia Freeland got to give her answer.
00:16:03.800 To her credit, she gave a clear answer.
00:16:06.260 I didn't agree with it.
00:16:07.540 I didn't like it.
00:16:08.440 I still think there's a hypocrisy.
00:16:10.500 But she answered it, and that is the free exchange of ideas.
00:16:13.660 And this was only made possible because the mainstream media, reporters in attendance, said no when they saw that the government was trying to block its critics from covering it.
00:16:25.000 And again, I do not compare the experiences of people in the media in Canada to those of the third world.
00:16:32.700 I'm not saying that I, as a member of the media, critical of the government, have to fear for my life in this country.
00:16:39.560 I don't.
00:16:40.060 But there is a common thread between what you see in dictatorships and what Chrystia Freeland tried to do, which is to say, you are critical of us.
00:16:50.560 You do not have the right to cover this government.
00:16:52.980 The Russian government legitimately does that.
00:16:55.680 The Russian government will say, you will not get credentials because we don't like your coverage.
00:17:00.280 And remember that I was approved.
00:17:03.180 I was accredited.
00:17:03.920 I didn't just walk in off the street as a blogger and say I'd like to cover this, although even then I think they should let me in unless I'm being disruptive.
00:17:11.380 I was approved, accredited, had gone through security, had no intention of causing a disruption.
00:17:16.480 And I then eventually had the right to ask a question of a minister who represents me, a minister who is representing Canada abroad at this summit.
00:17:26.820 But the question that I asked was another example of hypocrisy in this conference.
00:17:33.380 So, again, you have the tone of this that the Canadian and British governments are trying to tell the world about press freedom.
00:17:38.960 And it comes across as very gloaty because they're saying we've done all of this right and everyone else needs to follow along and fall in line on it.
00:17:48.520 But at the second day of the conference, Chrystia Freeland was on stage along with Jeremy Hunt, who's her counterpart in the United Kingdom and potentially the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.
00:17:59.040 Although I think Boris Johnson is going to take it.
00:18:01.940 But the two of them were up on stage and Jeremy Hunt decided to give accolades to a man by the name of Gobind Singh Dale.
00:18:11.440 Now, Gobind Singh Dale might not be a household name in Canada, but it's a name that you should know because he is the Malaysian Minister of Communications and Multimedia.
00:18:21.520 Now, you may not have realized there was a communications and multimedia ministry, let alone one in Malaysia, but there is.
00:18:28.100 And the man who occupies that post is Gobind Singh Dale.
00:18:32.700 He was held up, took the stage with Chrystia Freeland and Jeremy Hunt and held up by Jeremy Front as being something of a pioneer,
00:18:40.120 a man fighting on the front lines for press freedom and doing so in Malaysia from his post as a government minister.
00:18:47.280 Now, I do not associate typically Malaysia with being the bastion of free thought and free speech.
00:18:54.160 It's just not the first country that I think of.
00:18:56.500 So what I did is I decided to do some digging, not just into the Malaysia free speech issue, but into this particular minister himself.
00:19:06.640 And what I found was legitimately shocking.
00:19:08.760 This is a man who in September, so less than a year ago, so how long is that?
00:19:13.360 Nine months ago, called for the government of his country, Malaysia, to introduce legislation that would make it not just illegal to write something online that the Malaysian government disapproves of,
00:19:25.620 but they wanted to ensure what they called extraterritorial prosecutorial powers,
00:19:31.580 which means he wanted to be able to prosecute me in Canada or someone in England or someone in Norway
00:19:37.220 if they say something that Malaysia views as being hate speech.
00:19:41.540 And what the story that triggered this call for legislation was, is that a publisher in London, England,
00:19:50.280 a publisher in London, England decided to make an offensive crack about a Sikh police chief's turban in Malaysia.
00:19:59.100 And he said, I think his turban's on too tight.
00:20:01.640 And this was held up not just as hate speech by Gobind Singh Dale,
00:20:05.640 but hate speech that should be allowed to be prosecuted hemispheres away.
00:20:12.180 That the Malaysian government should prosecute this guy in England for making a comment about a Malaysian guy's turban.
00:20:20.780 This is something that was so significantly dangerous that this man, who is actually a state censor,
00:20:32.600 a guy who's actually a state censor, was sharing the stage with Canada and the UK,
00:20:39.480 their foreign ministers at a media freedom summit.
00:20:41.940 Or what was supposed to be a media freedom summit.
00:20:44.140 And it goes on beyond that.
00:20:45.280 He also in March, just a couple of months ago,
00:20:47.640 had called for legislation that would be allowing the prosecution of social media companies
00:20:52.840 or any digital media companies to hold them accountable for what people comment on.
00:20:58.780 And one of the examples given was that if someone were to comment on the True North news stories that we do,
00:21:06.260 and the government doesn't like the comments,
00:21:08.340 that True North could be prosecuted because we invited or incited these comments.
00:21:13.760 So here's a man who takes a restrictive dictatorial view about free speech and media freedom,
00:21:21.540 who is not just invited to attend and listen and maybe learn something,
00:21:25.920 but who is on stage being honored at what is again supposed to be the media freedom conference.
00:21:32.680 And this wasn't the only example of a state censor that's been elevated in this position.
00:21:37.660 Pakistan's foreign minister was also there,
00:21:39.840 and you may have seen the video of Ezra Levant heckling him,
00:21:42.980 a video that, by the way, was very well received in India,
00:21:45.380 where India, which is a freedom-loving nation and very quickly becoming a global superpower,
00:21:51.580 was baffled that Pakistan's foreign minister, a man with, I would say,
00:21:57.160 a man whose government has blood on its hands,
00:22:00.560 and he was given a speaking spot at the media freedom conference.
00:22:04.200 And when I put this to Chrystia Freeland, eventually, I was only able to,
00:22:08.080 because I finally got into that scrum,
00:22:09.820 her answer was that this is not a conference for angels.
00:22:12.400 Which, look, I mean, truer words have never been spoken.
00:22:16.120 This is certainly not a conference for angels.
00:22:18.440 But her belief is that, ah, well, you know,
00:22:20.620 we've just got to bring everyone to the table on this.
00:22:23.280 So what you have is a government in Canada
00:22:25.680 that's not prepared to look at free speech in its own country,
00:22:28.580 that is inviting people that are fundamentally against free speech
00:22:32.540 and holding them up as heroes,
00:22:34.600 a government that is not allowing critical media outlets,
00:22:38.260 but fair and respectful.
00:22:40.620 And I think that's important.
00:22:41.460 I've interviewed Justin Trudeau.
00:22:42.900 I've interviewed liberal cabinet ministers.
00:22:44.640 I've now asked Chrystia Freeland a question at a media scrum.
00:22:48.580 I am not the boogeyman.
00:22:49.820 I'm not scary.
00:22:51.200 You know, I'm a very fair and respectful person.
00:22:53.820 I respect the offices.
00:22:55.280 And in fact, when I interviewed Trudeau,
00:22:57.320 I was getting criticized because I wasn't yelling at him.
00:23:00.800 I was getting criticized because I was not, you know, shouting.
00:23:04.360 People thought that I needed to be angry at him.
00:23:05.960 I said, no, just let me ask the questions.
00:23:08.540 Let the words themselves illuminate.
00:23:11.280 And, you know, you're going to hear a couple of interviews that I did with people later on this week.
00:23:16.420 They're going to be coming out.
00:23:17.360 And in these interviews, I'm just trying to get a sense of what it is they believe.
00:23:22.780 And one of them is a Reporters Without Borders spokesperson.
00:23:25.820 And the other is someone who's a representative of an organization for public broadcasters.
00:23:30.540 And they're very convivial, congenial interviews.
00:23:32.960 Because I'm not looking to sink these people.
00:23:34.580 I know we're never going to agree.
00:23:36.080 What I want is for their ideas to be heard so that we can criticize them and have an honest debate about them.
00:23:43.380 And that is what media freedom is supposed to be about.
00:23:47.520 That's what media freedom is supposed to be about.
00:23:49.940 And the Canadian government either does not know that or does not care about that.
00:23:56.280 And, you know, I want to explain a little bit about the conference itself here.
00:23:59.580 But I want to read a comment from, well, the comment section here.
00:24:02.800 Nancy writes, keep going. It's so important to hear other sides.
00:24:06.280 Don't let them control media in their favor.
00:24:09.040 And thanks to the other media for being principled even when Freeland was not.
00:24:12.960 I think that's a great thought you share there, Nancy.
00:24:16.160 And it's so important because if the mainstream media hadn't spoken up, and they did, and I'm glad they did.
00:24:24.420 And I have a lot of respect for the individual people there.
00:24:26.960 But if the mainstream media reporters present hadn't spoken up,
00:24:29.900 they would have been tacitly endorsing the government doing the same thing down the line to them.
00:24:36.820 Look at the Globe and Mail.
00:24:37.800 The Globe and Mail had a gentleman there, a very nice guy.
00:24:40.520 The Globe and Mail was the outlet that wrote the story about SNC-Lavalin,
00:24:43.740 that initial story of Jody Wilson-Raybould having been pressured on the SNC-Lavalin file.
00:24:49.880 What would happen if Justin Trudeau were to say,
00:24:53.860 every reporter who's here, come on in.
00:24:56.780 I'm going to do questions for the media except the Globe and Mail.
00:25:01.780 What if he said that?
00:25:03.140 Then all of a sudden, Justin Trudeau would be saying,
00:25:05.200 I only allow access to outlets whose coverage I personally like.
00:25:11.860 And that is the death knell for a free press when access is contingent on the favorability or lack thereof of your coverage.
00:25:23.160 But what was interesting is that access was literally the last priority.
00:25:27.440 It was the lowest priority at this conference.
00:25:29.800 And I'll explain why.
00:25:30.620 Because it was one giant 16-acre facility.
00:25:33.880 But within the facility, there were two sides.
00:25:36.280 There was the general conference area and all the event rooms and the session rooms and all of that.
00:25:41.920 And then there was this parallel, this parallel space.
00:25:46.500 And what was so fascinating about this space is that it was an entire charade.
00:25:52.640 Everything about the Global Media Freedom Conference was choreographed.
00:25:59.760 It was orchestrated.
00:26:01.260 Everything about the Global Conference for Media Freedom was orchestrated.
00:26:05.440 Even the arrival of people to the venue.
00:26:10.360 The way that everyone came in was different from the place that the VIPs came in.
00:26:15.760 And if you look on the Flickr page of the Foreign Office in Britain,
00:26:19.300 they actually show pictures of people arriving to the venue.
00:26:23.220 And these are all staged.
00:26:25.440 Because where they're coming was not actually a publicly accessible area.
00:26:29.360 They're showing up and doing this great greeting, even though they're literally a building apart.
00:26:37.200 They're on the other side of the building from the media that were there to cover it.
00:26:42.400 The rooms where the government leaders and the delegations were doing their meetings in were closed off to the press.
00:26:48.780 I was actually kicked out of a conference room where one of the most consequential events of the conference was taking place because it was closed off to the press.
00:26:58.120 And this conference room was where government delegations were going to be discussing how they're going to implement the things that are discussed during the course of the conference.
00:27:06.780 There were delegate lunch rooms, delegate waiting rooms, delegate hallways, delegate boardrooms, delegate meeting rooms.
00:27:15.940 All of these things that were to keep a literal wall and security between government, politicians, and the media.
00:27:25.540 This is at a media freedom conference.
00:27:28.500 This is Stalinistic and this is entirely North Korea-like to see fake photos of fake media availabilities, of fake mingling sessions,
00:27:41.500 all because you don't want to actually allow the press that you're supposed to be standing up for the freedoms of
00:27:47.300 to be near the politicians that are making the determinations
00:27:51.160 and supposedly going to be enforcing and bolstering freedom when they go back home after this conference.
00:27:58.500 And it was seeing that that I would not have been able to have gleaned
00:28:03.380 had I just watched what was happening in the official session through the official camera from the comfort of my own home.
00:28:10.380 So it was important to be there.
00:28:12.020 It was important to be there to witness firsthand the government hypocrisy.
00:28:15.680 It was important to be there to put that question to Chrystia Freeland.
00:28:19.160 It was important to be there to call the governments hosting this thing to account for making such an unfree event
00:28:26.940 even though they're trying to pretend that they have this sort of moral high ground.
00:28:33.600 So I was glad to have been there and I want to thank you very much for your support in making this happen.
00:28:39.560 True North donors or True North Nation made this happen.
00:28:42.440 If you want to donate to further the efforts that we're doing to stand up for free speech,
00:28:46.540 you can do so by heading on over to tnc.news, clicking on donate.
00:28:50.400 We'll have more as the week progresses though, folks.
00:28:52.540 Thank you, God bless, and good day, Canada.