Juno News - August 16, 2021


The election could drastically change the media landscape in Canada

Topics
media landscape change
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Lawton Erin O'Toole Andrew Coyne MPs Garnett Jenis Sue Ann Levy Hamish Marshall Anthony Fury Steven Guilbeault Danielle Smith Tom Kamich True North
How will Canada deal with the Chinese regime？ Trudeau prioritizes his vanity election over the crisis in Afghanistan

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

164.95

Word count

1,813

Sentence count

110

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The election is here and it could drastically change the media landscape here in Canada. There is a growing concern that the government is getting too much power and influence from one party and not enough power from the other. In this episode, we will be breaking down the facts about the government's relationship with Canadian media.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The election is here and it could drastically change the media landscape here in Canada.
00:00:04.120 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:11.320 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. So I have two quick announcements. The first
00:00:16.300 is that this podcast will be a daily podcast. I'm going to be doing this show every single day,
00:00:21.220 Monday to Friday, throughout the campaign for the duration of the election to keep you informed and
00:00:26.180 to let you know what's going on in Canada on election front. So make sure you tune in every
00:00:31.240 day for this podcast. Second, we did our first live election kickoff show last night. It was a great
00:00:37.900 success. We were live for about two and a half hours. We had Andrew Lawton in Ottawa. He was doing
00:00:43.580 reporting for us, breaking it all down. We had special guests, including Danielle Smith, MPs Garnett
00:00:50.080 Jenis, Tom Kmetch, True North has hired an in-house pollster, Hamish Marshall, to help us make sense
00:00:56.020 from an analytical perspective to break down the numbers. And I was in studio with True North
00:01:01.780 contributors, Sue Ann Levy and Anthony Furrier. It was a lot of fun. If you haven't had a chance
00:01:06.120 to watch it, I encourage you to go on over to YouTube or Facebook and check that out. We're
00:01:10.640 going to be doing more of these live podcasts on other big nights throughout the campaign. So
00:01:15.520 we'll be there the night of the English debate as well as on election day. So I hope that you can go
00:01:22.100 and check those out and I hope you enjoy that content. We're really looking forward to what
00:01:26.860 True North is going to be doing throughout this campaign. We've got a lot of scoops, a lot of
00:01:30.720 new reporters working for us, a lot of content that we are working hard to create for you. So very excited
00:01:36.360 about that. And thank you to everyone who has been supporting True North throughout. If you're
00:01:41.040 interested in supporting any of our shows, this podcast, our reporting, I encourage you to head on over
00:01:46.780 to donate.tnc.news where you can learn more about supporting independent journalism in Canada. Now,
00:01:53.580 I noticed a lot of people out there feel a little bit uninspired in this election. They worry that
00:01:58.780 Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole doesn't have what it takes to be Justin Trudeau and that even if he
00:02:04.100 did, perhaps he wouldn't be much better. There is one area, however, where the leaders drastically
00:02:10.480 disagree. And that's in regard to the government's involvement with the media. As you know,
00:02:16.540 journalism in Canada over the last half decade has lost so much of its independence and autonomy.
00:02:22.680 The separation between journalism and government in Canada, or lack thereof, is a serious threat to
00:02:28.600 our country. How on earth can you trust journalists who are being paid by the government? How can you
00:02:35.140 trust them to report the facts or tell the truth to Canadians when their jobs are literally reliant
00:02:40.820 upon funding by the government? That's their business model. They need that money to survive.
00:02:47.280 And it's not just the government that funds them. It's one party in particular, and that's Justin Trudeau's
00:02:52.400 liberals. Trudeau has drastically expanded the role of government in our media in Canada. First,
00:02:59.160 by increasing the budget of the CBC and bankrolling their new venture into online English news.
00:03:04.560 And then, after Trudeau tilted the playing field in favour of CBC, hurting the newspaper and their
00:03:10.620 business models, which were increasingly reliant on subscriptions and getting Canadians to pay for
00:03:15.620 their news, well, he had to turn around and subsidise the newspaper business to the tune of $595 million.
00:03:23.020 And it doesn't even end there. As reported by True North, a government program called the Local
00:03:29.220 Journalism Initiative gave $50 million to legacy media outlets, and the government refused to
00:03:35.200 disclose who they were giving the money to. The initiative was devised by Trudeau in 2018 as
00:03:40.980 basically just yet another bailout. The Department of Canadian Heritage told this to True North in an
00:03:46.600 email. They wrote,
00:03:47.720 So, the government claims they're not even keeping track
00:04:17.580 of who is getting this bailout cash. And that's not the only issue. As reported by Blackhawk's
00:04:23.380 reporter, the Trudeau government also spent $61 million on emergency relief to media companies
00:04:28.840 during the pandemic, and once again refused to disclose who got that cash. This is a quote from
00:04:34.640 the Canadian Minister of Heritage, Stephen Galbeau. He said,
00:04:38.880 These measures demonstrate the government's commitment to both a robust, diverse, and sustainable
00:04:43.500 news ecosystem, and ensuring Canadians can receive the timely information they require from their
00:04:50.060 government. I like how he threw in the word diverse, although I can guarantee that no centre-right or
00:04:56.640 right-wing news organisations were the recipient of any of that cash. Of course, the news outlets that
00:05:02.400 receive funding in these schemes range from centre-left all the way to the fringe far-left of our news
00:05:08.980 political spectrum. You're not going to see any conservative outlets on those lists, even if they
00:05:13.460 were to disclose them, which they are not going to. So we know what we will get if Trudeau wins.
00:05:18.660 If he gets his majority, he'll be emboldened to impose even more restrictions on online speech,
00:05:23.880 like his draconian bills, C-36 and C-10, and he'll probably create lots of additional funding,
00:05:31.080 a lot of more sources, more cash, not just to the CBC, but to the entire legacy media. We know what
00:05:36.800 we're going to get with Trudeau. Aaron O'Toole, by contrast, released his own proposed platform on
00:05:42.260 Monday, and it gives Conservatives and free speech activists something to be hopeful for. As reported
00:05:48.420 by Andrew Lawton at True North, O'Toole's platform includes a review of the CBC's budget, and it also
00:05:54.720 plans to scrap those controversial internet censorship bills proposed by the Liberals. This is from Andrew
00:06:01.620 Lawton's report. Let me read from it. A Conservative government under Aaron O'Toole will evaluate
00:06:06.780 CBC's place in the Canadian media landscape. The Conservative Party of Canada's 2021 platform,
00:06:12.180 Canada's Recovery Plan, lays out a three-pronged plan for CBC. One, giving Radio Canada a distinct
00:06:19.540 legal and administrative structure. Two, to protect CBC Radio and CBC North. And three, to review the
00:06:26.920 mandate of CBC's English, television, news, and online services. So as Lawton is reporting,
00:06:33.380 basically, O'Toole wants to turn CBC more into something like a public interest model like that
00:06:40.040 of PBS in the United States. So Lawton notes that this doesn't go quite as far as O'Toole pledged
00:06:46.980 during his leadership campaign, but it's still stuck in the right direction. This is more from
00:06:51.000 Lawton's report. The pledge is more modest than what O'Toole promised last year during his leadership
00:06:55.620 campaign. O'Toole's leadership platform promised to privatize both CBC News Network and CBC's English
00:07:01.520 television within a first mandate, as well as rollback and ultimately end funding for CBC
00:07:06.860 Digital. Asked Monday morning whether he'd be fulfilling his leadership CBC commitments,
00:07:12.500 O'Toole restated the platform pledge to review the state broadcaster's mandate.
00:07:17.240 I think it's unfair for private sector media outlets that are struggling to transition
00:07:22.820 to digital, that are struggling to gain advertising revenue, to see the state competing against them,
00:07:29.460 particularly in areas of digital where the CBC increases have actually made it harder for the
00:07:36.760 private sector. And then Mr. Trudeau creates a media bailout fund to deal with some of the challenges
00:07:43.280 he's crossed. So it is the time to modernize. It is the time to respect the public interest mandate
00:07:49.300 done by CBC in terms of radio being non-commercial, the service to rural communities, French language
00:07:57.120 services are critical and Indigenous languages are critical as well. But we are going to review
00:08:02.920 where there is competition with the private sector. We need a competitive and successful private sector
00:08:09.800 in all media. And we need to balance the playing field with the American web giants, but without
00:08:15.760 attacking Canadians' liberties on social media. Well, it is no wonder the media are quietly cheering
00:08:22.540 for Trudeau and disingenuously skewing their coverage. This is why they picked up on Trudeau's
00:08:29.000 deliberate election wedge issue, the issue of mandatory vaccines for federally regulated industries
00:08:34.540 and vaccine passports for interprovincial travel. And they spent the entire election kickoff news
00:08:40.560 conferences on Sunday with Erin O'Toole repeating the same question and trying to push that wedge 0.98
00:08:46.740 and push Trudeau's agenda. These journalists want Justin Trudeau to win, clearly. And they're
00:08:52.580 clearly threatened by independent news agencies and journalists who are not on the taxpayer dole
00:08:57.960 and therefore get to retain a certain level of credibility, authenticity, and independence.
00:09:04.200 Just look at the reaction, for instance, to True North's Andrew Lawton getting the first question
00:09:08.980 at Erin O'Toole's Sunday afternoon press conference. First, we see Andrew Coyne, the celebrated
00:09:14.920 journalist who's on CBC and also has a column in the Globe and Mail. He writes,
00:09:20.760 Andrew Lawton gets first question? Seriously? He's so openly bothered by the fact that an independent 0.99
00:09:25.940 journalist gets to go to a press conference and ask a question. Why does that even concern
00:09:30.640 Andrew Coyne? What difference does it make? Who cares who gets the first question? Why is he
00:09:34.840 tweeting about that? Why does that bother him so much? It doesn't really even make sense. He's just
00:09:38.960 openly sort of insecure and dislikes the fact that an independent journalist gets to ask a question.
00:09:43.860 Likewise, this CBC podcaster writes the same thing. He goes, True North gets the first question at the
00:09:49.280 O'Toole presser as if somehow that's news. Look, Andrew Lawton got the first question because he
00:09:55.340 hustled. He worked harder and he was there first. The way that these press conferences work is that
00:10:00.240 the first journalist to go up to the microphone gets the first question. It's based on who's there
00:10:05.520 first. It's not some kind of a hidden agenda to allow an independent reporter to ask the first
00:10:10.860 question. But the mere fact that the legacy media reporters are complaining and reporting on this
00:10:16.980 as news is telling. They're threatened by True North. They treat us like we're the opposition,
00:10:22.200 like there's something scandalous about independent media. The reality is that these journalists clearly
00:10:27.460 see the writing on the wall. CBC's numbers are in free fall because increasingly Canadians simply 1.00
00:10:32.680 aren't interested in what they have to hear and they're not interested in hearing the propaganda
00:10:37.180 from the CBC. And if Justin Trudeau loses his COVID election wager and the Conservatives win this
00:10:42.860 election, the media landscape in Canada will forever change. And it won't be in favor of the boring,
00:10:49.680 stuck-up liberal status quo. It will be in favor of independent and authentic journalists like the
00:10:55.960 ones here at True North. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.