No talk of free speech in Canada or UK at press freedom conference
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Summary
Day 1 of the Global Conference for Media Freedom in London, a conference co-hosted by the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom, Andrew Lawton provides a quick update about the first day of the event and what he's looking forward to in the days to come.
Transcript
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hey Andrew Lawton here with true north just sending you a quick update about
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the first day of the global conference for media freedom a conference in London
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England co-hosted by the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom able to
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cover this because of your generous support as a true north supporter donor
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crowdfunded our way to do this and you know what it's been a very illuminating
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an eye-opening process already day one of the program was full of events but what
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was interesting is that this idea of defending media freedom you can see it
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on the marquee behind me here the very theme of this conference was somewhat
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narrower and focused than you might expect and the reason I say that is
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because you have a number of cases around the world third world countries
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dictatorships places where journalists are fundamentally not free and it's
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important to talk about these issues it's important to look at them in the
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broader context of where free speech rights are legitimately obliterated by
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autocratic governments but you also can't stop looking at issues in democratic
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countries including in the two countries that are co-hosting this conference Canada
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and the United Kingdom both of them admittedly they were owning up to this in
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some of their comments specifically from Chrystia Freeland and Jeremy Hunt the
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foreign ministers of the two countries they were talking about the
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imperfections of this but not in any sense specific and this is the challenge
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here I've spoken with a number of stakeholders from NGOs that say they want
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more than just a verbal commitment to free speech and free media expression they
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want concrete steps saying that countries like Canada and the UK already have
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commitments to media freedom they want again how are they going to get there but
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the problem I've had so far is that this is dealing in solely abstractions
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solely abstract concepts yeah of course everyone supports ending the jailing of
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reporters of course no one supports murdering reporters that are calling
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governments to account where I'm more interested in seeing the direction go is
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how our countries that are failing to get their own houses in order going to
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export media freedom to other parts of the world and haven't heard any of that from
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either the Canadian or British delegation so far again only day one of two here but
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again we look at a couple of weeks ago the Justice Committee in Canada
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recommended that Parliament regulate online speech we have Canada's
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democratic institutions minister Karina Gould saying that the government may
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shut down social media companies that don't comply with whatever the
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government regulations of them end up being we have the government in Britain
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just publishing an online harms white paper which calls for regulation of
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social media companies including what is termed in this report disrupting their
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operations if they don't comply with government so there are a number of
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examples here where Canada and Britain need to deal with free speech in their own
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borders and none of these things were discussed not at all and in fact even in
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the Q&A no one asked any questions at the press conference at the end of the day so
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these are the things I'm going to be looking out for on day to follow my
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updates on Twitter at Andrew Lawton and also at true north center or tnc.news for