Juno News - May 06, 2022


Liberals and legacy media use Roe v. Wade to virtue signal


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

211.16351

Word Count

4,000

Sentence Count

210

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We are recording from the fake news capital of Canada. I'm Candice Malcolm,
00:00:04.080 it's Fake News Friday, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:18.640 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. I'm very pleased to be joined by my colleague
00:00:22.000 journalist, Andrew Lawton, and we are on the floor of the Convention of the Canada Strong and Free
00:00:27.520 Conference, formerly known as the Manning Conference, and there is so much going on in
00:00:32.240 Ottawa. It's so interesting to be here, Andrew. I mean, is this your first time back since the
00:00:36.480 trucker convoy? Yeah, it is actually. This is the first time I've been in Ottawa since the convoy
00:00:41.760 ended, and that was the weekend when I was pepper sprayed. And don't, from my hotel room, I have a
00:00:47.680 lookout that is staring directly at where that happened, so it's bringing back all sorts of
00:00:52.560 painful, literally, memories. PTSD. Yeah, no, it's good to be back here. I've
00:00:56.960 always enjoyed Ottawa, so it's fun to be here. You know, Ottawa is a beautiful
00:01:00.240 city, and the architecture, the people, it's a great place to be, but it is also a painful
00:01:05.200 reminder. We are like deep in establishment, Ottawa establishment territory, home of all the
00:01:10.320 gatekeepers, home of the elites who don't want to hear from Canadians, they don't care what
00:01:14.880 Canadians think, they want to basically ram their opinions down your throat, and you really feel that
00:01:19.760 amidst all of the bureaucracy. And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about today,
00:01:23.840 Andrea, it is Fake News Friday, it was World Press Freedom Day this week, and so you'll hear
00:01:29.840 a lot of virtue signaling from liberal politicians who we all know don't care at all about press
00:01:35.360 freedom. They don't care about a truly independent press, they don't want the facts to get out to
00:01:39.520 Canadians, and yet they're more than happy to get onto Twitter, virtue signal, you know, whether it's
00:01:45.760 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Chrissy Freeland, I heard an anecdote, they had a, they had like a dinner,
00:01:50.480 like an awards dinner, basically congratulating themselves on their press freedom. And this is
00:01:54.880 what the Liberals do, this is what the media does, they focus on attacks on the press outside of
00:02:00.480 Canada, right? Like, oh, there's this like, there's this looming threat of lack of press freedom in
00:02:05.120 places like Hong Kong, look at these brave journalists in Ukraine, and they're completely blinded to their own
00:02:10.240 hypocrisy. And the focus, rather than being on actual press freedom and allowing journalists to do their
00:02:15.840 jobs, getting out of the way, stop the subsidies, stop funding journalists that you like, and punishing
00:02:20.400 journalists that you don't like. Instead, their focus, Andrew, is on disinformation and misinformation,
00:02:25.920 which is the latest buzzwords that call for them to basically censor, that they want censorship,
00:02:31.040 they want to censor the internet, they have these internet censorship bills, they don't like critical
00:02:34.880 journalists, they don't want journalists who are going to do a lot of digging and hold them
00:02:38.960 accounted in the way that journalists are supposed to do. And so the main focus of this kind of event
00:02:43.680 is one on look at these horrible countries around the world that don't acknowledge press freedom
00:02:47.760 like we do. And two, how can we censor the internet to scrub opinions that we don't like, including by
00:02:52.720 independent journalists? What's your take on all this? Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that
00:02:57.440 the look over there strategy is one that the liberals love doing on human rights. They love saying,
00:03:02.720 oh, you know, we got to look at Congo and Venezuela without looking in our own backyard and our own front yard.
00:03:08.160 And I mean, I mentioned earlier that the last time I was in Ottawa was covering the convoy.
00:03:12.640 The reality is that was a huge moment where Justin Trudeau's government authorized police to go and
00:03:18.880 arrest journalists for trying to do their jobs. It was only a handful of approved journalists,
00:03:24.640 mainly people in the parliamentary press gallery, that were given free reign to walk the streets of
00:03:29.360 Ottawa. And others, including myself, are threatened with arrest, even though the emergency order
00:03:34.080 specifically said anyone who was there for a lawful purpose, of which journalism is still,
00:03:39.040 at this time in Canada, could be there. But then you get into this idea of proving it. And you and
00:03:44.160 I talked about this in the past. You know, one police officer was convinced by my verified Twitter
00:03:48.640 profile. Another, I had a letter from True North. I had a phone number for one of our editors. And
00:03:54.880 still, they were saying, nope, unless you're in the parliamentary press gallery, you're not getting
00:03:58.240 through. And in fact, you'll be arrested if you don't turn around. So when the government does this,
00:04:03.200 it is not just against the idea of media freedom and the idea of free speech, but more fundamentally,
00:04:10.560 it is, as you note, something that has a chilling effect on specific types of free speech, because
00:04:14.640 it's never the CBC types that are targeted by this. It's always conservative, independent media.
00:04:20.720 And I did a panel here at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference that talked about this. And
00:04:25.360 the reality is independent media is kind of owned by the right right now. It's the right that does
00:04:30.080 really well on this. So when you go after independent media, you're targeting conservatives,
00:04:35.440 you're targeting people on the right. It's interesting, your anecdote about how one of
00:04:39.760 the police officers really wanted a government badge, that there's some mindset here in Ottawa,
00:04:43.520 like everyone works for the government. Well, because, yeah, everyone has a government badge.
00:04:46.640 I mean, the Starbucks employee has a government badge, I think, in Ottawa. Exactly. No, but I think
00:04:50.560 you're right. It's interesting because there is a lot of independent-ish journalists on the left
00:04:54.800 as well. Journalism, there's lots of interesting sites. The weird thing is a lot of them just kind
00:04:58.480 of end up becoming government-funded or government subsidies. I'm thinking of places like The Walrus
00:05:03.520 or just these kind of small- The National Observer, which has like government-funded reporters now.
00:05:07.520 Right, exactly. So they don't stay independent because they don't keep that. And right now,
00:05:11.440 I mean, with conservatives, it's like there's this whole growing movement of kind of grassroots,
00:05:16.560 independent shops. There's so many of them now. It's great to see, but it's like, you know,
00:05:21.680 it's a David Goliath situation because we're up against not just the behemoth of the CBC that gets
00:05:26.720 $1.4, $1.5 billion a year. And they really, really influence the press galleries because
00:05:32.160 they're so- They outnumber everyone else, right? But then you also have the corporate media,
00:05:36.080 the woke sort of capitalism that's seeping in. We heard from Jamil Javani, who was a former
00:05:41.840 radio host at Bell's Newstalk 1010 in Toronto. And he was basically talking about how even though
00:05:48.080 he is an independent-minded black man, he wasn't woke enough for the upper high ups at Bell. And he was
00:05:54.480 forced to do this. And then you have the newspapers who also helped shape the news front and they're
00:06:00.080 subsidized now. They have the media bailout. And so it's really, you know, we feel like we're doing
00:06:06.160 really well. It's fun to be at a conference like Canada Stronger Free because it's filled with
00:06:09.760 conservative activists and so many of them tune into True North. And we really appreciate it. We love
00:06:14.560 coming to these kinds of events and these conferences and getting to meet the people who,
00:06:18.400 you know, support True North, watch our programming. It's great to connect with the sort of grassroots
00:06:23.040 base in that way. But we're so small, Andrew, compared to these big giants and you really kind
00:06:29.760 of feel like you have your work cut out for you. What do you think?
00:06:33.440 Yeah, I would agree with that. And I would also say that the challenge is going to be,
00:06:38.240 I mean, just to illustrate it with an anecdote, one of the big things that we see as people on the
00:06:42.880 right is that obviously people on the right support independent media and they support it. But it goes down
00:06:48.320 that road of almost siloing it where you've got, you know, your mainstream, which is for the left
00:06:52.640 and your independent, which is for the right. And the problem with that is that we want to be able to
00:06:56.800 expand our audience. And I have no issues with watching CBC. And I mean, I do, but I generally,
00:07:01.440 in theory, I have no issues with it because I want to see and have a broader discussion and a broader
00:07:05.840 conversation. And it is challenging because we are in a space where we have, we don't have a level playing
00:07:11.520 field. We don't have the subsidy head start that a lot of these other groups on the left do. But I
00:07:17.760 also think that content is king in a way. And content eventually is what's eroding the trust in
00:07:23.360 the mainstream media. It's their content. And it's what's elevating trust in independent media. And
00:07:27.520 it's not just tooting our own horn. There are others that we are ostensibly competing with that
00:07:31.440 are in a very similar boat. But that takes time. It takes time to sort of release that stranglehold
00:07:37.120 that the mainstream media have on official media. And it's interesting too, because I mean,
00:07:40.880 this kind of goes back to like libertarian capitalist theory. It's like, you know,
00:07:45.120 that the bad companies keep getting subsidized. So they keep doubling down on their bad business.
00:07:48.880 Yeah, it's not a free market. Yeah. And so it's like in a normal market,
00:07:52.080 those companies would be forced to make real decisions that might lead to innovation thinking
00:07:56.160 of like a group like the Winnipeg Free Press, right? This has been a newspaper forever,
00:08:00.320 more than half of their funding now comes from the government. And you go on their website,
00:08:03.680 and it's like really clunky and old. And they're not entering the 21st century,
00:08:08.080 they're not bringing it. And it's the same thing with these big, you know, post media,
00:08:11.680 these big unionized shops that don't know how to collect news anymore. I was talking earlier with
00:08:18.800 Holly Doan, who is its founder, and she runs Black Locks Reporter. And they just do tremendous
00:08:23.840 independent research and independent media. And she made the point you just did about content is king.
00:08:28.160 It's like, people want good journalism, and they're really increasingly not getting that from the
00:08:33.040 mainstream media anymore. So they're turning to independent people. I really do feel like we have our
00:08:37.840 work cut out for us. So I want to talk to you, you know, the big story of the week is something
00:08:42.320 that's spilling over from the United States, this decision that was leaked out from the Supreme Court
00:08:47.280 of the United States, overturning Roe versus Wade. People who are familiar with this court case,
00:08:52.000 like it's almost universally agreed that this case was really poorly argued, that it doesn't stand up
00:08:58.480 to scrutiny, that it's a very bad decision. And yet, you know, this question of abortion, the abortion
00:09:04.720 debate in the US is spilled out, and you know, they're having it, it's happening in the United
00:09:08.480 States, still into Canada, all of the politicians on the left, all the media have used it as an
00:09:12.320 opportunity to say, well, first a virtue signal about how glorious Canada is, because we don't
00:09:17.760 have abortion laws. But then also to try to turn it against the Conservatives. We know in 2019,
00:09:25.280 a large part of the reason why I think Andrew Scheer ultimately wasn't successful is because he didn't
00:09:29.840 have a good answer to this question about abortion, about gay marriage, and people were worried that
00:09:33.920 he was a religious zealot or something like that. I think that the Liberals right now are just so
00:09:38.320 excited that this issue is something that the media will talk about and use it to paint Conservatives
00:09:43.680 as being sort of anti-woman or whatever. Have you heard, you know, we're at this conference with all
00:09:49.920 these Conservative activists, have you heard a lot of people talking about it? What's your take on how
00:09:53.760 this will affect the Conservative leadership race and the Conservative movement more broadly in Canada?
00:09:58.800 Yeah, I haven't heard too much yet at the conference specifically, but just in the last few days,
00:10:02.640 the one point that I've raised, I think I raised this on my show the other day, is that
00:10:06.160 abortion is a wedge for Conservatives in a way that it isn't for the Liberals. And it used to be,
00:10:10.400 but the Liberals under Justin Trudeau have just purged anyone that doesn't go along with Justin
00:10:15.520 Trudeau's view on this from their caucus. So the Liberals are in lockstep with each other,
00:10:19.520 the NDP, the Bloc are in lockstep. So they know that it's not at all, there's no losing
00:10:25.520 when they bring it up. They just want to force Conservatives to have some stand up and say,
00:10:30.160 I'm pro-life and some stand up and say they're pro-choice, a divide that works within the
00:10:34.000 Conservative Party that has always allowed for people to approach these issues and
00:10:37.680 other issues of conscience from whichever perspective they'd like. But they know that
00:10:41.600 then the CBC is going to go into overdrive, the Toronto Star, and it's going to be all these
00:10:45.920 antiquated anti-woman dinosaurs. And it just goes into this whole thing. So what you need
00:10:51.920 is a Conservative that can, and you touched on this with the Andrew Scheer observation,
00:10:55.680 that can defend and sell their position, not necessarily to convert people, but to explain
00:11:02.000 it because defence isn't working. You get Conservatives that end up apologising for their
00:11:06.560 values, which is never the way you win anyone over. Lesley Lewis has done a great job on this.
00:11:10.960 She's put out her platform on abortion, which has no hidden agenda. And she said,
00:11:14.880 this is what I stand for. Boom, boom, boom. And as a result, there's not really that much criticism
00:11:19.040 that she faces from the media because they don't sense that weakness that they do.
00:11:23.360 The gotcha.
00:11:23.920 A lot of other times. Yeah. Where it's like someone feels like they've been caught
00:11:28.080 doing something they're not supposed to do. It's no, if you believe it, own it.
00:11:31.040 Right. Yeah. And I think you're right. There was a weird thing where, well, first of all,
00:11:35.520 I just want to say that the media is so dishonest on this issue. They treat it completely black and
00:11:39.440 white, right? You either believe that birth begins at conception, in which case all abortions under any
00:11:45.200 circumstances, no matter what, are going to be illegal. Which is a minority position among pro-lifers.
00:11:50.000 Right. Right. Well, and, and, and even maybe people who have that view might not want to
00:11:54.560 legislate that way. And then the other side is like, oh, hey, you know, the baby's born,
00:11:59.360 but I changed my mind. And, you know, it's like, it's like no, no laws on abortion whatsoever. You
00:12:03.840 can have late-term abortions. You can have a partial abortion abortion. We don't care.
00:12:06.880 All abortion. The reality, Andrew, is that most Canadians fall somewhere in the middle. They probably
00:12:12.160 do want protections against late-term abortions or sex-selective abortions. There's so much more
00:12:16.480 nuance in this, but I saw the Journal de Montréal front page. They had the faces of all the
00:12:22.000 Conservative MPs who they have called pro-life. And it's like, they're perpetuating this idea that,
00:12:28.480 you know, the people in the Conservative Party have like this really removed view that's so offside with
00:12:35.200 the rest of the Canadian public. When, of course, there is more noise. I will just say, I think that
00:12:38.880 by and large Canadians and even most Conservatives just don't really want to have this discussion. They
00:12:43.920 would prefer to just not talk about it and they want the issue to be put to rest. And so, to your
00:12:47.920 point that Leslyn Lewis has been able to, you know, very substantively explain her exact position, then
00:12:53.760 there's no reason to keep pushing it because there's no gotcha moment. Yeah. There's no opportunity to
00:12:59.200 embarrass her in the way that they, I think they were able to embarrass or at least catch Andrew
00:13:05.120 sheer flat-footed. What do you think? Yeah, I think the one area where I would slightly disagree with
00:13:10.640 that is that the status quo in Canada is unique in the world and not in a good way. Zero law, zero
00:13:17.200 restriction at all. Technically, if you found a doctor to do it, you could have an abortion up to a minute
00:13:21.360 before a child is delivered. That's rare. When Canadians learn about that, they're opposed to it. But
00:13:26.000 Canadians don't know it. Sex-selective abortion as well, aborting someone, a child for no reason other than
00:13:31.440 you don't want a daughter. It's one of the largest motivating factors in some cultures towards abortion.
00:13:36.640 Canadians don't know that's legal. When they do, they oppose it. So whatever you think of those
00:13:42.320 policies, there are nuances to it that are lost in, as you mentioned, that dichotomy of pro-life,
00:13:47.120 pro-choice or pro-life, anti-choice, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, like these semantics that people
00:13:53.360 bring into it. And I mean, Trudeau, it could backfire what he's done because he's now said that
00:13:58.320 we need to introduce legislation to ensure that this right to abortion in Canada is unshakable and no one
00:14:03.280 can ever take it away. And he says, we need to have a debate on it. It's okay. Well, if you want
00:14:07.520 to have a debate on it, that's what a lot of Conservatives have wanted. They said, let's just
00:14:10.640 have a discussion about this that allows us to talk about this. What about unborn victims of crime?
00:14:14.880 What about sex-selective abortion? What about late-term abortion? And I could see, I mean,
00:14:19.920 setting aside the makeup of the House of Commons right now, I could see if we did have a national
00:14:24.320 discussion about abortion, Canadians settling on, you know, maybe third trimester abortions are not a
00:14:29.520 thing we should have. So it could backfire. Yeah, it's interesting because I've been looking
00:14:33.120 into the US because a lot of Americans are misled about what Roe does and doesn't do. I mean,
00:14:37.200 the idea of legislating from the courts is not something that has a tradition in Canada or the
00:14:42.720 US. So this idea that Roe would be the ones who would determine the laws rather than the Senate,
00:14:47.600 you know, the state Senate, the lawmakers, the people who are elected to make these decisions,
00:14:51.840 to me, it's much better in the hands of people who have, you know, are represented by the public as
00:14:57.440 opposed to someone who's appointed for life that has, you know, very little scrutiny and accountability.
00:15:03.120 But also the idea that it would just like immediately ban abortion all over the United
00:15:07.760 States. Obviously it's going to be a state's rights issue. So states like California and New York are
00:15:11.440 never going to, you know, change the laws to ban abortion, whereas other states would. But the
00:15:17.360 interesting thing is you look at the European Union, you look at countries in Europe that have laws
00:15:22.720 already banning abortion at 15 weeks, 12 weeks, and you sit back and say, oh, wow, Canada really is
00:15:29.520 an outlier because we don't have any laws whatsoever. So maybe you're right that there is
00:15:33.360 more of an appetite to have this discussion. And if so, I think Trudeau might be a little bit
00:15:38.320 surprised with where the Canadian public is, because again, we're so misled. I'll just give
00:15:42.400 another example for Fake News Friday. ECOS, which is run by Frank Graves, who is a sort of
00:15:48.080 interesting character and a pollster that's not always very reliable. He put something out that
00:15:52.320 said it's something like 80% of Canadians are pro-choice and only 12% are pro-life or something
00:15:58.640 like that. Again, these euphemisms that don't really, you know, people might not have really
00:16:02.880 thought through what they mean. But, you know, if you think that you have 80% of the Canadian public
00:16:08.240 on your side, you might be much more brazen to go forth to try to legislate something, but then you
00:16:13.200 might not realize all this nuance that's within and all the views that Canadians have that are actually
00:16:17.520 not black and white and have, you know, a lot of room for discussion. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:16:23.520 And, you know, that's the role of Canadian politicians is to take on these sort of important
00:16:29.280 moral and cultural issues and help navigate through it. And so Trudeau's style of, you know, divide,
00:16:35.760 wedge, demonize, I could see that all playing out. I don't know that that's really the direction that
00:16:41.440 we want to go in our country. I don't know that that's the direction that we want to go in the
00:16:44.960 conservative movement, but we might be headed there again from external factors. What else is
00:16:50.000 on your mind at this convention? I know there's a lot of exciting speakers. Do you have any
00:16:54.160 interesting interviews lined up? What do you have planned in Ottawa? Well, I mean, obviously,
00:16:57.600 you're the main event, which you play a role in the leadership debate has been a big part of what a
00:17:02.720 lot of people want to get out of this. And my hope is in general that whenever you have a forum like
00:17:08.560 this where conservatives are coming together, and I use that with a small c that people are talking
00:17:12.800 about the movement itself, not just the day to day electoral politics and the horse racing,
00:17:17.760 but the movement itself and the values, because, you know, victory without values is meaningless.
00:17:22.160 Values without victory is also in its own way meaningless. I mean, you can die on a hill, but,
00:17:26.480 you know, and die for something. But if you're at the end of the day, not doing anything with it,
00:17:30.320 it's understandably challenging. So I think that, yeah, you need to start talking about the tactical
00:17:34.640 things of how you win, but you also need to talk about what it is that you stand for. And I think
00:17:38.720 that principles matter. And oftentimes we assume that principles are antithetical to victory,
00:17:43.200 which I think is a big failing in the conservative party.
00:17:46.000 Well, and that's why it's great to be around conservative activists and people who,
00:17:50.640 you know, have really strong convictions in certain areas, areas of expertise, areas of activism,
00:17:56.080 because getting everybody in the space together provides an opportunity to have those discussions,
00:18:01.280 have those debates, flesh them out, figure out exactly where we think, where we stand on different
00:18:06.400 issues and kind of get the ball rolling to, to a point you made earlier, conservatives are often
00:18:11.120 playing defense. It's like, why not we, why don't we take a step forward and start to push forth our
00:18:16.240 own agenda? Well, it's great to be at an event in person. It's been a long time. It's great to just
00:18:22.080 be around people without having to wear a mask and socially distance and all that kind of stuff.
00:18:25.440 And your own coworker, someone who you've like never met in person until this weekend.
00:18:28.560 Yeah, we have that with a couple of our producers here. We've got Sean right there. I would never
00:18:32.800 met him in person and finally get to meet him in 3D instead of 2D. So it's, it's great to be here.
00:18:38.320 Thank you so much for tuning in. It's Fake News Friday. I'm Candice Malcolm joined by Andrew Lawton.
00:18:43.040 We are on the floor of the Convention Centre in Ottawa. Thank you so much for tuning in.