Juno News - Poilievre takes on F＊＊＊ Trudeau flags

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to you all. It is Friday, January 6th, 2023, the first edition of Fake

00:00:18.240 News Friday in 2023. And let me just give you a bit of a teaser here. We are off to a ringing

00:00:24.880 start for the new year. If you missed it, last week we had the Fake News Awards and there were

00:00:31.280 a lot of very strong competitors in 2022. Were they not, Harrison? No, there were, Andrew. And

00:00:36.940 some of the early themes this year are popping up already that we kind of touched on with the

00:00:42.980 Fake News Awards. So we've got a little Pierre Pauliev action in here, some PDS. We've got some

00:00:48.380 CBC returning to their old ways. So I guess the saying is the more they change, the more things

00:00:53.260 stay the same. And it looks like, especially with the CBC, Andrew, that's going to be the way it's

00:00:57.840 going this year. Yeah, I was going to say, can they return to something they've never abandoned

00:01:02.080 in the first place? That's a question for the audience to decide. I'm Andrew Lawton. That was

00:01:07.240 Harrison Faulkner. Let's get right down to business here. One of the stories that came up just, again,

00:01:13.800 we had already hit publish on the Fake News Awards, I believe. And this story came up, so we had to kick

00:01:20.580 it into 2023. Pierre Pauliev had a last minute press conference to respond to, among other things,

00:01:28.000 bail issues in Canada, and specifically that horrific slaying of an OPP officer by allegedly a man who was

00:01:35.240 out on bail and was banned from having firearms, but somehow managed to. And this was something that

00:01:41.260 Pierre Pauliev spoke about. And the media could ask, as they're allowed to, questions on anything and

00:01:47.600 everything. And one of them brought up a question about a blog post written by a former conservative

00:01:53.300 leader, Aaron O'Toole, condemning those F. Trudeau flags. I know you've seen. There were a few of them

00:01:58.540 at the convoy. I've seen them every now and then on trucks and cars driving around. And I've said

00:02:04.380 before, I'm not exactly a fan of incivility in politics or elsewhere. And Pierre Pauliev was asked

00:02:11.940 if he agreed with Aaron O'Toole's condemnation or issues with it. And Pauliev gave what I thought

00:02:18.100 was actually quite a measured and intelligent and thoughtful answer.

00:02:23.500 Well, I don't like the flags. And I don't like rage. But I think we have to ask ourselves,

00:02:30.860 why are people so angry? Like, why are people so angry? And the answer is that they're hurting.

00:02:41.040 You know, it's easy for, you know, the political establishment to say, stop all your complaining.

00:02:48.580 But when you're one of the 1.5 million people that went to a food bank in the month of March,

00:02:54.020 it's not so easy. If you're one of the people that went to the Mississauga food bank and asked

00:02:59.060 for help with medical assistance and dying, not because you're sick, but because you can't afford

00:03:03.000 to live, it's not so easy. If you're one of the 38-year-olds living in your parents' basement

00:03:10.580 because it now takes more of a monthly paycheck to own a house than at any time in recorded history,

00:03:16.900 it's not so easy to be happy with the way things are going. If you're one of the people who was

00:03:24.980 over-prescribed opioids and is now addicted to drugs as a result, it's not so easy to be happy

00:03:31.700 with the way things are going. I have never seen so much hurt and so much pain and suffering

00:03:37.720 in our population in my nearly two decades in politics. So yes, of course, we should tell people

00:03:44.120 to be more civil and to reject offensive signs, flags, and language. But we should also ask ourselves,

00:03:55.540 why are people hurting so badly? So he says right out of the gate, he doesn't like the flags.

00:04:01.520 But he said that it would be incumbent on politicians to ask, why is that anger there to such a point

00:04:07.740 that people are going to fly those flags and use that term? I don't think that diagnosing where anger

00:04:13.140 in the electorate comes from is a bad thing. I think all politicians should be trying to understand 0.99

00:04:17.720 that even if they don't agree with people. Well, what did the media latch in on on this, Harrison?

00:04:24.100 Well, the media, unsurprisingly, decided to say that, well, Pierre Polyev's condemnation

00:04:29.900 of the F. Trudeau flags wasn't enough, Andrew. It just wasn't enough to satisfy the media. Of course,

00:04:38.020 who could have guessed that what they really wanted Pierre Polyev to do was do what countless

00:04:42.360 conservative leaders have done in the past, which is basically, uh, turn around and do and go back

00:04:47.620 to their normal ways of kind of condemning and distancing their own base. Instead, as you pointed

00:04:51.840 out, and as we just watched, Polyev gave a very measured response and said, of course, it's wrong

00:04:56.840 to, you know, have profanity laden flags and bumper stickers and, and kind of inject that into

00:05:02.020 politics. But if you're not, if you're not looking at where that's coming from, then you're not really

00:05:06.300 doing your job as a politician. After all, what are they there for anyway, other than to represent

00:05:10.740 the interests of the people? So classic, this is so classic of city news. They classified this story

00:05:16.520 as local news. Now there's a crisis of local news happening because a lot of these news outlets

00:05:21.340 are failing to cover local stories. But I would, I would say, Andrew, that an article about Polyev

00:05:26.960 not going far enough, not criticizing his base far enough doesn't really fall under local news. In fact,

00:05:32.900 when you only quote a political scientist who is obviously coming from the left side of this

00:05:37.860 discussion, who's obviously coming from a, from a place that is in opposition to Pierre Polyev,

00:05:44.060 again, that can't be local news. Why did that? Why do these legacy media journalists always do this?

00:05:48.320 They always say, well, here's a news piece and all we're going to do is cover one side of the political

00:05:53.020 spectrum, make conservatives look bad. And there you go. That's some local news for you. It's just

00:05:57.520 ridiculous. Yeah. It's what we call in journalism, a single source story and that it relies on the 0.87

00:06:03.720 comments of just one person. In this particular case, the person has no connection to the story

00:06:09.020 whatsoever. It's a political science professor from Mount Royal University, Laurie Williams, who says,

00:06:15.560 quote, Polyev is basically saying it's the fault of the prime minister and a better leader will unite

00:06:21.700 Canadians. But it's not clear to me what Mr. Polyev is doing is in any way uniting Canadians. It looks

00:06:28.060 to me like it's stoking divisions, unquote. So what Professor Williams is saying is that, well, you know,

00:06:34.120 Pierre Polyev is not being a unifier. Well, that again veers in, not veers, it actually just completely

00:06:40.380 Kool-Aid mans through the wall of the territory here of just general political commentary that has

00:06:46.880 nothing to do with F. Trudeau flags, nothing to do with Polyev's comments on the F. Trudeau flags.

00:06:52.400 It's just the professor saying, yeah, you know what, Pierre Polyev, I don't know what he's doing to

00:06:56.560 unite Canadians. And well, no, that all he was saying, and you don't even need to like Pierre

00:07:01.820 Polyev to accept this and understand this is that, hey, I don't like those things. But if we're seeing

00:07:07.660 there's a problem with them, maybe it's helpful to understand why people are upset. Maybe it's

00:07:12.120 helpful to understand what it is in this country that isn't working right now. And the idea that

00:07:16.920 you can just find one person in Canada that doesn't like something and write a story about that.

00:07:22.560 I mean, we've been doing it all wrong. I mean, we could just say, you know, man on Dundas

00:07:26.540 Street doesn't like what Justin Trudeau just said at that press conference.

00:07:30.020 Yeah. And headline is a headline is Canadians can't stand what Justin Trudeau just said when

00:07:34.660 it's just one man on Dundas Street. Yeah, we find two of them and boom, we've got ourselves

00:07:38.220 a story. Canadians, plural. Overwhelming, booming majority. No, exactly. And this political science

00:07:42.800 professor, just in case anyone was, you know, not exactly sure where this professor was coming

00:07:47.520 from on the political spectrum here. She even says that the question needs to be asked,

00:07:53.440 what is it that represents conservatism? Because, oh, well, if Pierre Polyev is not fully denouncing

00:07:58.600 the F Trudeau flags, then maybe that's what represents conservatism. And, and it's just a

00:08:03.380 bizarre, bizarre take. Again, you can't classify this as local news. I'm sorry. Local news is like

00:08:08.600 weather, you know, maybe some bad, maybe some bad criminal act that happened in a local area,

00:08:13.700 but local news can't be a professor from Alberta commenting on a press conference made in Ottawa

00:08:20.100 from basically just using one, one political side of the discussion. It's completely ridiculous. 0.95

00:08:24.800 No wonder there's a crisis in local journalism and local news because goodness gracious, this is 0.90

00:08:29.900 not local news. Yeah. And I think that there was a fair bit of just to take a 30,000 foot view of

00:08:36.340 this, a fair bit of trying to stoke some division between Aaron O'Toole and Pierre Polyev here. I think

00:08:42.780 a lot of people, now that Aaron O'Toole is no longer the conservative leader, he becomes the elder

00:08:47.540 statesman that is the benchmark against which all other conservative leaders should be measured.

00:08:52.420 Same as George Bush was once a war criminal. And then he was that guy, why can't all Republicans

00:08:57.360 be like Stephen Harper was once the, you know, kitten eater of the conservatives. And now he's like,

00:09:03.420 well, why couldn't, you know, why can't all conservatives just be like Stephen Harper? So

00:09:07.140 now Aaron O'Toole is going to be the one that the media goes to for insightful analysis and that what

00:09:13.380 should be the conservative perspective. And I think this was a little bit of a glimpse of that.

00:09:19.140 Let's talk about our old favorite, I don't want to say punching bag on the show because we punch and

00:09:24.620 kick at the bag, but CBC, which ran the most lazy annual journalism that exists in North America. And

00:09:34.800 it's every single year, light clockwork. By 9.43 AM, Canada's richest CEOs have already earned the average

00:09:42.580 workers' annual salary. This is January 3rd. It's a report that again, literally comes out every

00:09:50.540 year. Here's the one in 2022. Here's the one in 2021. Here's the one in 2020. I'm not going to go

00:09:59.640 back, but it's the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which does this every year. They

00:10:04.160 calculate down to the minute based on the annual income of the average top earning CEOs versus the

00:10:11.260 average income of the average workers. And they try to draw this point that there is tremendous

00:10:16.960 wealth inequality and income inequality, which there is. But let's just point out the problem with this

00:10:24.160 report. You are comparing the top 100 paid CEOs, which is an elite group within an elite group within an elite

00:10:32.880 group, against the general population, as though this is representative of anything other than the

00:10:39.220 obvious point, which is that, hey, high earning CEOs make more than lower paid entry level workers.

00:10:45.700 This is not groundbreaking journalism, but the media goes along with it every single year.

00:10:52.780 It's like you just said, it's super lazy. It takes talking points from the NDP. It's exactly what

00:10:58.400 we've come to expect from the CBC. And we've got many examples later on in the show of just this sort of

00:11:03.420 thing coming from them. But you know that it's, you know, that it's lazy because the same arguments get

00:11:08.000 rolled out over and over and over again. And the article always results in the same conclusion.

00:11:12.740 And I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but too bad. I'm going to anyway, at the end of the article,

00:11:17.200 here it goes right here. Most notably, it suggests imposing a small wealth tax on the rich. So all of

00:11:23.540 this, Andrew, who could have guessed? It's just a boy. It's just a, it's not a, it's the boiled down

00:11:27.880 argument is tax the rich. The rest of it's just fluff about all the top CEOs are making too much money.

00:11:33.420 We're going to get into the details of the compensation structure, but it, it takes straight

00:11:37.640 out of the NDP talking points. Jagmeet Singh tweeted this a couple of days ago, talking about how he's

00:11:43.980 not for the big grocery CEOs. He's not for big oil, not for the super rich and all of that. Of course,

00:11:49.640 here it comes just in time for the CBC annual article. Oh, the top CEOs are making way too much

00:11:55.120 money after 43 minutes of working one day. Oh, it's just ridiculous. Oh, and not to just, 0.92

00:12:00.400 just to add one more point to this, Andrew, the CBC, even though they write the same article every

00:12:05.600 single year, they still managed to get something wrong. They still managed to get something that

00:12:09.100 needed clarification. They put out the story yesterday and they had to update it to include,

00:12:14.220 yes, to include Monday. So they included the Monday paid holiday, which of course they didn't

00:12:19.820 lead within the headline because how better, what, what, what a way to grab clicks, make a juicy

00:12:24.540 headline like that. That isn't even really accurate. So there you go. Just a classic CBC by the book,

00:12:29.480 playbook sort of, sort of thing. And again, lazy journalism, just embarrassing stuff.

00:12:34.940 Yeah. And look, I'm not going to deny that there is significant inequality. In fact, in the pandemic,

00:12:41.120 the executives, the people running these companies got significant bonuses. The stock market did very

00:12:47.480 well, but the real economy for laborers was very difficult and people did lose their jobs. People did

00:12:53.280 lose income. And I don't want to deny that phenomenon here, but the people that raised this

00:12:58.560 don't actually have solutions beyond tax the rich because they actually have an issue with capitalism

00:13:04.680 more than they have an issue with the specific numbers that they're bringing up here. But if we

00:13:09.400 want to be about the numbers here and stick to real news here, here are some numbers from CBC's

00:13:14.360 senior management compensation summary. Now, the last one I found was from 2019 and you can see here,

00:13:20.940 total cash compensation, the president and CEO's range between $430,000 and $563,374. The executive

00:13:33.400 vice president's total cash compensation range is $302,000 to $648,000. And the vice president's range

00:13:43.640 there is $274,000 to $603,990. Now, in the case of both the executive VP and the VP, the range,

00:13:55.480 the top end of the range is more than double the bottom end of the range. So this is, I think,

00:13:59.880 a fair bit illuminating about CBC's precision here on their numbers. But this is, again, what CBC executives

00:14:07.080 are making and the compensation for the average worker, the average private sector worker in 2021

00:14:14.500 was just under $58,500. So that means that CBC's executives are making more than 10 times what the

00:14:23.860 average private sector worker is making, but they don't include that in their story. No, and Andrew,

00:14:29.020 and they also don't include things such as inflation taking up a large chunk of people's earnings and

00:14:35.080 making those earnings appear or actually feel a lot smaller than they appear. That would be a good,

00:14:41.460 worthy piece to add to this article. But of course, no, no, it's just tax the rich, tax the rich,

00:14:45.980 tax the rich. Not so much, hey, here's a solution or here's what the central bank, here's what the

00:14:51.320 government is doing to cause this problem. None of that, of course. It's just, let's go after the big

00:14:55.740 CEOs. They can take it because they make $14 million on average and tax, tax, tax the rich. Lazy,

00:15:01.960 embarrassing stuff. Maybe the CBC should be spending more money on their talent and their

00:15:06.340 journalism than their CEOs, who I guess aren't doing very much these days because like we just

00:15:11.820 see, they're doing the same stuff every year. Well, we know that the public sector was not

00:15:17.940 very much dealing with what the private sector was dealing with as far as the job-related issues.

00:15:23.880 They are still complaining about being asked to go back to work in person. There was a column by

00:15:31.160 Lynn Ward, who is a career public servant. She's worked for the federal government for over 10

00:15:35.700 years. She's taking aim at the quote, one size fits all hybrid work model that the government put in

00:15:43.460 place to demand that employees come back even part-time to the office. And she says for knowledge

00:15:49.740 workers, which is, I guess what is supposed to describe people in the public sector, take from

00:15:54.640 that what you will, there are a lot more pros than cons to working from home. And she says the pandemic

00:15:59.620 gave us the opportunity to rethink our outdated workplace methods like having an office. And she 0.93

00:16:05.740 says, does it really make sense to go back to our old way? She likens it to going back to the horse and

00:16:11.560 carriage for a few days a week when you have the opportunity of the automobile. So, you know, just to give

00:16:19.020 one example here, I file in the course of my work, a lot of access to information requests, which are

00:16:23.620 requests that you can file to gain access to government documents, which are technically the public's

00:16:29.280 documents. And access to information requests have never been slower than they have when employees

00:16:35.640 have been working from home. And they'll be, they'll say, well, you know, we need an extension

00:16:39.660 because that division is not yet in the office. So they don't have access to these records and

00:16:44.060 these files. So the idea that it's somehow more efficient to have everyone working from home,

00:16:50.260 just setting aside your arguments about whether that's preferable, it simply isn't true in a

00:16:55.340 government context. No. And to be fair, this knowledge worker, what's your name again? Lynn

00:17:00.040 Ward. If there was an award for putting everything you could possibly imagine, all these terms, all

00:17:06.940 these, all these words that the far left are using these days to try and bolster their arguments into

00:17:12.100 one article, she would certainly be given that award. I mean, let's just, where do you even start?

00:17:16.980 You've got this triple Demick. She talks about the danger of the triple Demick, 0.70

00:17:21.620 the flu, RSV and COVID. I should note RSV is basically hitting toddlers, right? So, so these

00:17:28.840 knowledge workers at the public service, they're very afraid of this triple Demick of flu, RSV and

00:17:33.280 COVID. Uh, pretty embarrassing. Then she goes to climate change, Andrew. So if you, how could you

00:17:39.220 have guessed that actually a return to work is bad for the climate because you have to take public

00:17:43.240 transit. You have to take a car to work. Oh my goodness. We're not done there though. Take a look

00:17:47.580 at this. She brings in microaggressions as well by being, by working from home. She doesn't have 1.00

00:17:52.060 to face microaggressions in the office. I've faced less harassment and microaggressions by working

00:17:57.160 remotely. I no longer feel like I'm being judged for the clothes I wear or the way I style my hair

00:18:02.540 less focused on my personal physical attributes means more focused on my actual work contributions.

00:18:08.220 And then she writes, we're exhausted. Flexible work arrangements and the ability to work from home

00:18:12.760 has been a savior to reduce daily stressors. Well, I can't imagine how stressful it must

00:18:17.540 be to be a knowledge worker with the public service. What a tough, tough gig they have.

00:18:22.180 But my goodness, the, the prospect of going back to the office, it's just horrifying, Andrew.

00:18:27.760 Now her bio says that she is a member of the LGBTQ plus community. So is she saying that there's

00:18:34.900 like rampant homophobia in the public service that she, well, I serious point if she, cause if that's 0.96

00:18:39.880 the bigger story, if that's what she's experiencing when she has to work in the office is a significant

00:18:45.440 discrimination and microaggressions from her colleagues. But my, my point is like, she's

00:18:50.720 throwing absolutely everything at this just to see what's going to stick. It's like, uh, it's

00:18:55.520 antiquated. It's inconvenient. It's bad for climate change. There's a triple demic and the microaggressions

00:19:01.100 and, uh, you know, the, the Lindbergh baby. And it's like, she's just throwing anything and everything

00:19:05.560 and be like, surely one of these arguments is going to make its way through. Now, full disclosure,

00:19:10.680 I am in my home right now. I work from home. True North doesn't have an office. I am not against

00:19:16.300 work from home. I love it. But I also think that it's your employer that gets to be the one to make

00:19:22.520 that call. If, you know, Candace Malcolm were to say, Hey, everyone's got to come into the office

00:19:26.320 today. And that's the part of the job that we're all doing. And there's a case for why it has to be

00:19:32.300 done. Then that is the prerogative of the employer. And, and, you know, I'm all for trying to find

00:19:38.800 flexibility when flexibility works, but I don't think we can say that it's just a 100% superior

00:19:44.640 thing to have everyone working from home. I know of a number of workplaces where the opposite has

00:19:49.760 been the case. Well, Andrew, also, I'm just going back to the top of this article because I thought

00:19:53.760 to myself, wait a minute in my prep, I did read that this wasn't full-time back to the office.

00:19:58.860 No, it's not. It's like, it's a hybrid. It's a couple of days. It's a couple of days a week.

00:20:04.080 She wrote this entire CBC. What is it? This is an opinion section. So they've gone with the opinion

00:20:08.400 instead of the analysis. I think analysis is reserved for the journalists, right? That's,

00:20:13.340 that's their way of getting around it. But this opinion piece has been written because she has

00:20:18.000 to go back to the office, her and her colleagues. Hold on to your seats here, guys. Two to three days

00:20:23.400 of the week. Hold on. What is it? Yeah. Two to three days a week. So it's not, it's not even all the

00:20:28.880 time, but yet because of this, it's going to increase costs for childcare. Grandparents don't want to have

00:20:33.680 to take on the burden of looking after children. Although all of these knowledge workers, all of these

00:20:38.240 public servants, I'm just going to go and call them knowledge workers from now on because it's

00:20:42.060 just too funny. But they all, they all had no problem working from home or working at the office

00:20:45.920 before COVID. But now of course, the triple demic, the equity, diversity, and inclusion targets,

00:20:51.600 Andrew, climate change. It just can't be done. It just can't be done. So I guess work from home it

00:20:57.200 is. And maybe there'll be like a mutiny in the public sector. They'll just say, we're not going into

00:21:01.300 the office. This hybrid model is not working for us. Just unbelievable.

00:21:04.680 See, yeah, I think the government, I think the government made a mistake here because they're

00:21:09.080 saying when they say come back part-time, the implication there is that, well, it's not really

00:21:14.340 that important. We want you to just phase you back in. They should have said, you know what? Five

00:21:18.060 days a week, come back in. Uh, if that's, that's the most compelling argument for it, because now it's

00:21:22.840 like when they're trying to push this idea of flexibility and hybrid, now people are going to

00:21:26.960 say, well, if it doesn't matter to you, then maybe I should just be home five. Oh gosh. Anyway.

00:21:31.320 All right. We have to end things there, whether you're working from home, working in an office,

00:21:35.720 or you are sunning in Jamaica, like our prime minister. Hope you enjoyed this show and have

00:21:41.540 a fantastic weekend. We will see you next week.

Juno News - January 06, 2023

Poilievre takes on F＊＊＊ Trudeau flags

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