Juno News - MALCOLM： This week's fake news!

00:00:00.000 Hi and welcome to another segment of This Week in Fake News. I'm your host Candice Malcolm,

00:00:15.840 the founder of True North, as well as a columnist with Post Media and the Toronto Sun. So I've got

00:00:21.180 a lot to get to this week, so let's get right to it. The first story that I want to talk about was

00:00:25.920 actually from last week, but I didn't get to cover it. So I want to take you back to a story that first

00:00:32.000 came up through Reddit and then it was reported on by BlogTO and then from there it sort of trickled

00:00:37.100 to the rest of the mainstream media. And the story that I'm talking about is of a woman who was in

00:00:44.120 Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto with a sign that said, Vote Andrew Scheer. Now this woman

00:00:51.500 was screaming profanities, she was being a racist and shouting sort of despicable things at people

00:00:59.540 who walked by. Someone caught her on tape and that is how the story got to the news. So of course the

00:01:07.260 headlines were all about how an Andrew Scheer supporter was caught on camera shouting racial

00:01:15.620 slurs and everyone just ran with it. Nobody bothered to do any due diligence about the very basic facts

00:01:21.060 of the story. And so as soon as some independent journalists started digging into this story,

00:01:26.540 very quickly the whole thing just started to unravel. The very first point that no one in the media

00:01:31.900 bothered to report on was the fact that the person who filmed this video and uploaded it online and

00:01:38.300 then spread it to the mainstream media was actually a liberal staffer. This was a person who used to

00:01:43.360 work for Bill Morneau. So first things first, we have a liberal staffer meddling in the creation of

00:01:49.840 news. That should be a huge red flag to anyone in the newsroom. But instead they just ran with it.

00:01:54.600 Now instead of sort of reporting on who this woman was and maybe doing a bit of digging into her

00:01:59.420 background, they just assumed that while she's holding an Andrew Scheer sign so she must be a

00:02:03.920 conservative, right? I mean to any conservative or anyone who's just looking at this story with a sort

00:02:10.100 of balanced mind, we just assume it's a hoax. It doesn't really seem like something that a sane

00:02:15.000 person would do or that a normal conservative activist would do. It's sort of like a caricature

00:02:21.200 of what the far left believes the right to be like, but it's not actually what the conservative

00:02:25.900 right is like in Canada. So we do a bit of digging and of course it turns out to be an obvious hoax.

00:02:32.700 The woman herself is a left-wing activist. She is a writer in Toronto and up until very recently she

00:02:40.140 kind of held the very paint-by-numbers left-wing views about immigration, open borders, diversity,

00:02:47.420 blah blah blah blah blah blah. Even her own brother posted online saying that this was probably a hoax

00:02:54.140 because she's a liberal supporter and she just wanted to make conservatives look bad. The story goes even

00:02:59.660 deeper. We learned that the woman was actually taken into CAMH which is a mental health facility

00:03:08.620 in Toronto. So she's suffering from some kind of a mental health outbreak. She's out of her mind

00:03:14.060 and the media just ignored all that and ran to report with it. It's kind of funny when there's

00:03:19.420 a terrorist attack, especially when there is a Islamist terrorist attack, the media tell everyone

00:03:24.860 to be super cautious. They warn people not to jump to conclusions and they always play the, try to play

00:03:31.260 the mental health card. Except for when it's a conservative who is the center of the story. They

00:03:37.340 don't take any time to wait. They don't do any fact checking. They don't do any digging. They just jump

00:03:41.980 to embarrass conservatives. So that is the mainstream media in a nutshell. I've got three more stories I

00:03:48.220 want to get through in this episode. So let's move on to the next one. Everyone has been talking about

00:03:53.980 this video this week of Andrew Scheer. This is a video from 2005 when Andrew Scheer was giving a speech

00:04:01.900 in the House of Commons opposing gay marriage. Now a lot of conservatives have this story to me because

00:04:07.740 they think it's unfair that the media is kind of has unearthed this video and that liberal activists

00:04:14.460 are using it to discredit Andrew Scheer. And the point that they make, which is a fair valid point

00:04:21.180 I think, which was that back in 2005 a lot of liberal MPs themselves voted against the gay marriage

00:04:27.900 equality bill that was being presented in the House. A lot of mainstream liberals in both Canada and the

00:04:32.700 U.S. at the time opposed gay marriage including people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the

00:04:38.380 time. So Scheer was sort of I guess in line with like the mainstream thinking at the time.

00:04:43.500 I disagree. I don't like this video. I kind of cringe when I watch it and I think Scheer is wrong.

00:04:49.660 I don't think he takes the right position. As a conservative, conservatives should believe that

00:04:54.460 marriage is like the central institution of society, that marriage and family are the most important

00:04:59.580 thing and that should be inclusive. It should expand and include to everyone. This is what I believed

00:05:04.220 back in 2005 and obviously still believe it now. So trying to exclude people from marriage isn't the

00:05:09.740 right way to look at things like liberals believe that the government is the central institution in

00:05:14.700 society. So if there's ever a problem it's the government that should solve it. Whereas conservatives

00:05:19.660 should and do believe that it's families that are the central institution in society and that when there's

00:05:24.540 a problem it should be first and foremost solved by individuals, families and communities. So we should

00:05:29.740 support that institution and promote it and include everyone. So when I see Scheer's comments I cringe. I think

00:05:35.740 he was wrong. I think it's totally fair game to criticize Scheer and the conservatives on this video.

00:05:41.740 Just like I believe it's fair game to criticize Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, for old videos that

00:05:47.260 surface of him saying horrible anti-Canadian things like that he would want to separate from Canada if

00:05:53.820 Albertans were in charge or that he thinks that he admires China because it's a absolute dictatorship.

00:05:59.900 I don't think that there's a statute of limitation on videos and saying stupid things. So

00:06:04.780 that's not what I'm going to cover. I think it is fair game. Although I think it's also important

00:06:09.500 to point out that people like Ralph Goodale who's spreading this video and trying to make the

00:06:13.820 conservatives look bad. Just remember that in 2005 Ralph Goodale also voted against the gay marriage

00:06:21.100 equality act. Now let's move on. This one I found to be absolutely hilarious and kind of just a whole

00:06:29.820 in a nutshell the problem with the Canadian media. So right now everyone's interested in fact checking.

00:06:35.660 The CBC and the liberals are all over the idea that there's fake news and disinformation online and

00:06:41.820 they want to be the ones that are jumping out in front and stopping that and exposing it and dispelling

00:06:48.540 these myths and blah blah blah. We all know that what they're talking about though is not so-called fake

00:06:53.500 news it's just conservative opinions conservative ideas and even conservative news. So a good example

00:06:59.660 of this was that Adam Vaughn the Liberal MP from downtown Toronto posted a couple of tweets that were

00:07:06.380 just absolutely abhorrent. He said that on the day our government restores funding for refugee legal

00:07:13.420 services cut by conservatives the Ontario PCs come out after the children of refugees absolutely shameful.

00:07:21.100 We all know where radical conservative agendas lead and then he has this picture of children behind

00:07:27.900 fences at what is clearly a U.S. detention center in on the southern U.S. Mexico border. So how does it

00:07:37.500 possibly have anything to do with conservatives in Canada to show Central American families being detained

00:07:44.780 for illegally entering the United States? Like there's no connection there and it's pretty obvious. So he sent

00:07:50.300 out this tweet he sent out another tweet sort of implying that the conservatives were going to put

00:07:55.020 children in cages and everyone was all over him for these basically just completely false statements

00:08:02.780 and kind of fear-mongering like like saying that somehow conservatives in Canada were going to put

00:08:08.060 children into cages and then all of a sudden this woman who is a verified account from the CBC

00:08:15.980 she chimes in and she says this looks pretty clear to me that he's talking about the U.S.

00:08:21.820 What about this tweet makes you think he's trying to say the image is from Canada? And so you click on

00:08:29.180 this lady's account and her title is senior reporter covering disinformation online at CBC news. So her job

00:08:39.420 is to be a disinformation officer and go online and be sort of be the self-appointed arbiter of what

00:08:47.100 is true and what is not true on the internet and she chooses to jump in and defend a liberal MP who's

00:08:55.100 clearly misleading the public. He's clearly being facetious and exaggerating and lying. Here's the

00:09:02.140 here's the other tweet. The conservatives tried to take away health care for the children of refugees.

00:09:07.820 Now they're trying to blame school cuts on these children. All children need to need care and all

00:09:13.340 should be in school. We all know where right-wing scapegoating leads us. Our government won't cage

00:09:19.500 children. Okay so she's saying that that's clearly about the U.S. but the whole tweet is about Canada.

00:09:25.980 First of all Republicans in the U.S. don't call themselves conservatives, big C conservatives,

00:09:30.220 that's a Canadian thing. And he says right there the conservatives tried to take away health care for

00:09:35.260 the children of refugees he's talking about in Canada. That is a false claim by the way. The

00:09:40.540 conservatives tried to take away health care coverage for people who had been rejected. So

00:09:45.900 people who had tried to become refugees and been rejected. So they were bogus. They were bogus asylum

00:09:51.020 seekers and not refugees. So saying that they try to take away health care for refugees is patently false.

00:09:57.100 Where's the disinformation officer on that point? But anyway the point is that the whole context of this

00:10:02.620 tweet is Canada. He's talking about Canadians. And then this CBC disinformation officer is saying

00:10:10.060 looks pretty clear that he's talking about the U.S. What about this tweet makes you think he's saying

00:10:15.020 the images from Canada? Well how about that the whole tweet is about Canada and that he is a liberal MP

00:10:21.500 in Canada. So presumably he's talking about Canada. Good job CBC. Your tax dollars at work. And you know

00:10:30.220 this is the funniest thing about the CBC and their so-called fact checking. There's another story

00:10:37.260 that I want to get to. I'll just go through it super quickly. Basically there was a so Maxime Bernier,

00:10:45.260 the leader of the People's Party, made a claim that let's just see if I can find his claim here. He made a

00:10:51.180 claim that immigrants cost the Canadian taxpayer, the fiscal burden of having immigration to Canada

00:11:02.940 is in the neighborhood of 30 billion dollars. So there's an annual fiscal burden for immigrants,

00:11:10.140 all immigrants to Canada that they spend 30 billion more in services than they pay in taxes. And he

00:11:15.340 quotes a Fraser Institute study. So the CBC jumps all over that claim and they say that he is wrong

00:11:23.580 and they do a whole fact check. So Maxime Bernier's false claim about Canada's subsidizing immigrants.

00:11:30.300 And he goes through the claim, Canadians are compassionate people but at what cost are Canadians

00:11:35.420 happy to subsidize 74 percent of our current immigrants? And so he goes through how Bernier gets

00:11:43.180 that number. And it's actually pretty logical. So the People's Party founder went on to crunch some

00:11:49.180 numbers of his own, noting that 55 percent of immigrants to Canada are economic class. And

00:11:54.540 according to the latest government figure, but almost half of the people in that category were

00:12:00.220 spouses and dependents. So if just over half the people coming to Canada are in the economic class,

00:12:06.060 the other part are either family reunification or refugees. And then of that economic class, it's not

00:12:11.420 just the breadwinner. It's not just the person getting the visa, it's also their family. So wives

00:12:16.220 or spouses and children. So he said that it's only 26 percent of the total number that are the economic

00:12:26.380 class. And so that would lead 74 percent that were somehow not, that were not contributing economically,

00:12:32.460 but that were part of the kind of subsidized. And so then the CBC goes on this long, long ramp,

00:12:37.580 their fact checker. And he just really starts talking about a bunch of irrelevant facts. Like

00:12:43.980 he's talking about how immigrant wages are rising, that they're higher than they were a few years ago,

00:12:50.140 that a lot of times people who come to the country as children eventually end up working, getting a job,

00:13:00.220 so they shouldn't be considered to just be collecting and not contributing, blah, blah, blah. He comes up

00:13:08.540 with the idea that the verdict is false. And then interestingly, the people from the Fraser Institute

00:13:13.340 who wrote the original report that Bernier was quoting, did their own report and just completely

00:13:21.180 obliterated this CBC fact check by basically saying that, you know, the guy makes some points, but they're

00:13:28.460 not relevant. If you're going to fact check the politician, just stick to the claim that he made

00:13:32.860 instead of writing about all this other stuff that immigrants contribute to the economy, which

00:13:38.220 obviously it's true. Obviously immigrants do contribute, but this is on a net basis. So we're

00:13:43.100 looking at all the immigrants in society. So here from the Fraser Institute authors in the Financial Post

00:13:50.860 today said, according to government statistics in 2010, the number of recent immigrants since 1985 was

00:13:57.420 about 3.7 million. Now multiply this number by 5,300 and that is the number that they found that

00:14:06.700 immigrants outnumbered in the benefits they received minus the taxes that they paid, and you get the

00:14:12.940 fiscal burden to be 20 billion. Since then, the stock of immigrants has been increased by 250 a year, so

00:14:20.460 since from 2010 to 2018, there's another 10 billion, so that's how they get over 30 billion. So really,

00:14:29.100 you know, if you're going to fact check a politician, you might want to get your numbers straight, but

00:14:35.580 there's this whole, you know, there's this whole, journalists are in the business of promoting the liberal

00:14:43.100 talking points, especially over at the CBC. You see this time and time again. It reminded me of a story

00:14:50.140 from last summer where a former liberal cabinet minister, Seamus O'Regan, tweeted that

00:14:57.820 that immigrants are better at creating new businesses and new jobs than Canadian-born people, period,

00:15:04.380 simple, period, stated matter-of-factly. And then he posted a link to a story from the CBC with this

00:15:11.900 very misleading headline that said, at creating new businesses, immigrants outpace Canadian-born people,

00:15:17.660 stats can fines. And so O'Regan just clearly read that headline and he came to the conclusion that

00:15:25.180 immigrants are better at creating new businesses than Canadian-born people. The problem is that if you

00:15:30.300 look at the report that the CBC is quoting, the finding was actually the exact opposite. The headline

00:15:37.100 was exactly the opposite of what the finding from the paper. So the study looked at data from immigrants

00:15:42.940 who came to Canada between 1980 and 2010, and they chose to measure immigrant job creation based on

00:15:52.860 the number of jobs they had created after nine years in Canada. So just before I go any further,

00:15:57.660 there's a lot of compelling data, there's lots of contradictory data. The Canadian government

00:16:01.900 doesn't just simply track, like, an immigrant comes to Canada, how much do they spend, how much

00:16:06.700 do they receive, how much do they pay in taxes? They don't make it that clearly. So you have to kind

00:16:11.260 of go out and find your own data, and there's so many different ways that you can look at it,

00:16:14.060 there's so many different ways you can analyze it, that it's easy to come up with contradicting points.

00:16:19.260 So it really just depends on what you look at. But here, the way that they chose was after nine years,

00:16:24.700 how many jobs they created. So that's like a very small snapshot that doesn't really cover the whole

00:16:29.260 picture, but that's what they chose to look at. And so what they found was that 5.3 percent of

00:16:34.220 immigrants owned a business, and they compared that to just 4.8 percent of all Canadians.

00:16:40.540 So they found that almost 20 percent of immigrants were self-employed, whereas 16 percent of Canadian-born

00:16:47.980 Canadians were self-employed. And that was the conclusion. But if you just look one step deeper than

00:16:52.780 that, what it finds is that the small, only a small percentage of the immigrant-owned businesses

00:17:00.460 had any employees. So even though 20 percent of immigrants were self-employed compared to 16 percent

00:17:06.540 of Canadian-borns, the Canadian-born businesses tended to employ a lot more people, whereas the

00:17:11.820 immigrant-owned companies tended to just be like a sole proprietorship, one worker self-employed. And so then,

00:17:19.100 if you just look a little deeper, the authors found that Canadian-born businesses employed more people,

00:17:25.020 on average nearly double as many as the foreign-born business owners. So in other words, the study found

00:17:31.020 the exact opposite of what the CBC's own headline said, and the exact opposite of what O'Regan claimed,

00:17:37.100 which is that the finding actually was that Canadian-born businesses created more jobs,

00:17:42.060 both on a per capita and in total numbers. So it was just a flat-out mischaracterization. But the CBC

00:17:50.620 and Liberals are in the business of promoting myths and pretending that immigration overall has this huge

00:17:57.260 net benefit for Canada. Now, I'm not saying that there isn't benefits to immigration. Surely there is,

00:18:03.820 but we shouldn't lie. We shouldn't exaggerate. We should have the facts in front of us and be able

00:18:09.180 to have a real conversation. And the problem, when you have so-called disinformation officers

00:18:15.100 ruling on the side of a Liberal MP, Adam Vaughn, even though he was clearly misleading Canadians,

00:18:21.180 and he actually apologized later and deleted the tweets, so he admitted that he was wrong. But the

00:18:27.100 CBC still sided with him. And then you have the CBC creating a false headline and misinterpreting the

00:18:32.700 data when it's pretty clear that that study showed that Canadian businesses created more jobs,

00:18:37.660 and both per capita and a real number. So really, this is just an example of the CBC misleading

00:18:44.700 Canadians. And the final thing I just found was really interesting, the individual who is so-called

00:18:51.820 fact-checking, Maxine Bernier, they do this political fact check on the CBC. I just kind of did like a very

00:18:57.980 quick overview and search, and I couldn't find anything that showed a fact check on Justin Trudeau. The

00:19:05.340 fact checking looked at claims made by Andrew Scheer, by Maxine Bernier, by Jagmeet Singh, the leader of

00:19:12.700 the NDP party. But they never fact checked Justin Trudeau. The only two fact checking articles that I could

00:19:19.260 find that even mentioned Justin Trudeau were both articles that defended Justin Trudeau against what

00:19:25.420 the CBC determined to be false right-wing claims. So if anyone ever sees the CBC fact-checking Justin Trudeau,

00:19:33.820 which you'd think that would be their job, fact-checking the most powerful politician in the country,

00:19:38.940 fact-checking the actual leader, not the opposition leaders who are trying to become prime minister,

00:19:44.140 but fact-check the actual prime minister. If anyone finds an article of the CBC actually doing this, which

00:19:49.260 should be their job, please let me know. Send it on over, because I would be very interested

00:19:54.140 to read it. So I'm going to leave it there for this week. Thanks so much for tuning in. Guys,

00:19:58.700 there's so much fake news out there. There's so much disinformation, and there's so many examples

00:20:03.100 of biased Canadian journalists. You know that they get funded and they get taxpayer money from the

00:20:08.220 government, so they're always going to side with the Liberals. They're always going to side with Trudeau.

00:20:12.940 There's tons of examples. If you see any, please send them my way so I can cover them

00:20:16.700 in next week's episode. And if you like the show, if you like this channel, don't forget to subscribe,

00:20:21.980 like the page, like the channel. And if you're so inclined, feel free to send a couple dollars our

00:20:28.700 way. We're always trying to raise money for True North to continue providing our independent

00:20:34.300 journalism. So thanks so much for tuning in, and have a great weekend.

Juno News - August 24, 2019

MALCOLM： This week's fake news!

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