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

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 0.92

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. 0.93

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. 1.00

00:12:06.880 All abortion. The reality, Andrew, is that most Canadians fall somewhere in the middle. They probably 0.81

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 0.96

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. 1.00

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.

Juno News - May 06, 2022

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

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