00:00:17.920The balance of probabilities would suggest that I am in fact Candace Malcolm,
00:00:21.880but all evidence, I believe and hope truly points to the contrary.
00:00:25.660It is my great privilege, Andrew Lawton, to be here for a guest-hosted edition of Fake News Friday.
00:00:32.020The fakest news of them all is that this is the Candace Malcolm Show today.
00:00:35.120But you know what, nay, even in Candace's absence, it's always the Candace Malcolm Show,
00:00:39.020but I'm happy to be a bit of a seat warmer here.
00:00:41.940We try to strive for some semblance of consistency, though,
00:00:45.080so it's my great pleasure to have with us True North, producer and journalist and host of the new show,
00:00:50.000Ratioed, Harrison Faulkner, joining us on the line here.
00:00:54.000Harrison, how was the week? I know it's Friday, so we do a bit of a retrospective on fake news,
00:00:58.360but I'm looking back at your life this week. How's it been so far? Well, it's been a bit of
00:01:02.420a wild week, Andrew. We've got the travel mandate suspended, not dropped, suspended,
00:01:07.280which is an important difference. And of course, we've got Bill C-11, which was quietly shuffled
00:01:14.060in through the back door by Justin Trudeau. So there's quite a lot to get into and looking
00:01:19.060forward to it and yeah you couldn't shake me this week i i i'm also here for uh for fake news
00:01:24.020friday yeah believe me i tried but uh you came with the package apparently i kid of course and
00:01:29.160i will say that that is you mentioned the air travel vaccine mandate that might be like the
00:01:33.420honorary fake news mention because everyone was reporting initially that it was scrapped and then
00:01:37.860you look at the fine print as always and it's oh no no it's suspended pending the emergence of you
00:01:43.080know the omega omicron delta hybrid indian double variant or whatever else is being cooked up in
00:01:49.120wuhan as we speak right now but let's get to the official fake news friday stories the first one
00:01:54.700is about the convoy and specifically about the federal government's invocation of the emergencies
00:02:00.900act which i would say has been the gift that keeps on giving in the last couple of weeks because
00:02:07.100every time the committee looking into the Emergencies Act meets, someone else undermines
00:02:13.100the government's narrative that this was police that had requested it. But in this particular
00:02:17.720case, it was Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Finance Minister who was in the
00:02:23.060hot seat. And she was grilled about using a debunked CBC story as the basis for the Emergencies Act.
00:02:32.060We know government and police relied heavily on media coverage of this, which oftentimes was very incorrect, either because they were missing things or, in fact, they just blatantly misrepresented it.
00:02:43.220Let's throw to a clip here to set the stage for what we're talking about.
00:02:48.700March 21st, 2002, the CBC, without any explanation, without apology, without any clarity, retracted their story regarding the funding of the protest.
00:03:51.700My principal concern when it comes to the illegal occupation and the illegal blockades...
00:04:02.120Let me be very clear, Minister Freeland.
00:04:04.520Your words several times in the House referred to terrorism funding and money laundering.
00:04:11.320Are you saying you didn't use those words?
00:04:13.540i am speaking here today and i am talking about the central motivation of our very serious and
00:04:23.920i'm here to ask you questions and i expect unlike question period i expect a response
00:04:29.780my core concern as minister of finance and my central justification for these very serious
00:04:39.100measures that we put in place you're not answering the question i'm going to move on the deputy
00:04:43.740director of fin track mr mckellup confirmed at committee that the convoy funding did not come
00:04:49.980from terrorism funding or money laundering and the typical person who donated hundreds
00:04:56.460and thousands of dollars to the convoy came from their own resources and posed no security threat
00:05:03.340What I accept, Mr. Brock, is that the core threat was to the Canadian economy.
00:05:09.980I made that clear in my opening remarks, and that is my view.
00:05:13.520Thank you for the non-response, Minister. Very helpful.
00:05:20.520I should, I apologize for not putting a trigger warning at the beginning of it,
00:05:24.400because that was two minutes of Chrystia Freeland doing whatever that was.
00:05:27.580But conservative MP Larry Brock not letting go, not relenting, not taking his foot off the gas, talking about the CBC funding, the Fintrack stuff, all of that.
00:05:38.160And at its core, she says that, you know what, we're not in the business of answering for CBC.
00:05:43.260And why this is a Fake News Friday inclusion is because CBC decided it would start providing cover for the government.
00:05:51.440That's my only interpretation that I can come up with for this.
00:05:54.360a CBC editorial from Brody Fenlon, who is one of the editorial muckety mucks there. And he said,
00:06:00.560no, CBC News did not retract its stories on convoy protest donations. And he says they stand
00:06:06.920by their reporting. They go through the list and say, no, no, no, we didn't retract anything
00:06:10.600at all. We'll get into why that's not true. But Harrison, I want to hear your thoughts first off
00:06:15.720on that evisceration in committee. Oh, well, it was quite entertaining, I have to say. I mean,
00:06:23.140I've been trying to watch as much as I can of the inquiry process, trying to keep up with what's going on.
00:06:28.740And we've seen some high profile testimonies.
00:06:31.940We've seen the attorney general, David Lometti.
00:23:53.520One in five Canadians believe it is definitely or probably true that the World Economic Forum is a group of global elites with a secretive strategy to impose their ideas on the world.
00:24:06.080I think that's their mission statement.
00:24:08.600Like, I literally, that is exactly what the World Economic Forum is.
00:24:12.240Now, that doesn't mean they're, you know, microchipping us and pulling the strings on everyone like marionettes, but they literally are a small secretive group that meets in the Swiss mountains.
00:24:20.820I covered them a few weeks ago, and they have all these ideas that they want to impose on the world.
00:24:25.800So that's, I mean, that's not a conspiracy theory.
00:24:42.240Well, it means nothing, Andrew, because you can be a conspiracy theorist and then you can be a prophet five months later, basically.
00:24:48.740I mean, that's the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth it feels like these days.
00:24:53.920And of course, well, of course, what they'll do is they'll basically they'll lump in the most absurd claims with the people that that believe, for example, like the World Economic Forum is a small group, as you said, that want to push their ideas into people.
00:25:07.780So they'll take legitimate issues, legitimate problems that people have and concerns that people have, and then lump them in with the most absurd and most crazy far-fetched ideas and then put them all together.
00:25:20.920And really, if you go through this article, this National Post article, what you quickly realize is that this is just a Canada bashing article.
00:25:28.560They were looking for an attention-grabbing headline to talk about, of course, the white replacement theory.
00:25:34.680they put in, as you said, Andrew, a, you know, there's lots of talk about the methodology of
00:25:41.360this poll. But of course, what they were looking for was the big attention grabbing headline that
00:25:46.640said millions of Canadians believe in the white replacement theory. And the truth is, it was 1500
00:25:51.320people, of which 500 of those 1500 randomly selected people agreed with a sloppily worded
00:25:59.080question. Now, Andrew, as well, the thing that we all know about polls these days and what I've
00:26:04.700come to realize over the past five or six years is that pollsters, legacy media pollsters and
00:26:10.380pollsters that have been around for a long time have consistently failed to accurately poll
00:26:15.000people who are traditionally on the right. That's why we've seen some crazy polling that indicates
00:26:20.560something that is not actually going to end up happening or come true. We saw it in 2016. We
00:26:24.740saw with brexit we see it all the time that that poll pollsters seem to be just unable to pull a
00:26:30.880good number of the population of our country so i wouldn't put much stock in polls you see that that
00:26:36.140have crazy headlines like this but again it's all it's all part of this this idea that we need to
00:26:42.260play up the mistrust in institutions or at least demonize people who rightly i think have specific
00:26:49.500concerns that uh end up being labeled as conspiracy theorists like i said i mean
00:26:54.620a conspiracy theorist may end up being a prophet in a few years you just never know at this rate
00:26:59.180yeah and again i mean you are right about the sloppy wording of this thing and polls that tend
00:27:03.660to under represent people on the right and a lot of the time that isn't deliberate to the pollsters
00:27:08.540there's a natural selection bias in how polls are accessed i mean any poll that's done online
00:27:14.700is going to carve out certain people that are not on the internet that are not as adept at
00:27:19.340it. So there's an age bias in there. You also have people that don't have cell phones sometimes
00:27:24.240are excluded from how they get access to the numbers because they'll get a laundry list of
00:27:28.600mobile numbers. And it used to be that they were only pulling landlines. So you'd miss people that
00:27:33.460had cell phones only like, so there are a lot of areas where even if there's not malicious intent,
00:27:38.100they're not capturing a whole sample, which is why extrapolating from a sample of a thousand to
00:27:43.480a country of 36 million is difficult. And I just want to pull up one just before we close things
00:27:48.500out here. Because I got an online poll months ago that I screenshotted and tweeted about
00:27:53.780from ECOS conducted for the World Health Organization and the Canadian government.
00:27:58.620So have fun with that one. And they were gauging conspiracy theories as well. And one of them was
00:28:04.460to use a scale to indicate how likely it is that each statement is true. One of the statements was
00:28:10.080I think that government agencies closely monitor citizens. Well, I do think that. And I don't think
00:28:16.640that makes you a conspiracy theorist but if i were to put yes i'm 100 certain of that they're going
00:28:21.840to use that to say oh yes this many canadians are conspiracy theorists i believe there are
00:28:26.860important things that happen in the world which the public is never informed about
00:28:30.220yeah that seems reasonable i think there are secret organizations that influence political
00:28:34.920decisions yeah i mean that you you can believe these things in broad strokes and not be a
00:28:40.880conspiracy theorist. But now we're in this era where as anyone who says something even remotely
00:28:47.220critical of this narrative is seen as a conspiracy theorist. And all it's doing is trying to
00:28:54.320marginalize people and say, well, we shouldn't listen to them. They're stupid. They're troglodytes.
00:28:58.660We don't need to represent them. Politicians don't need to speak for them. And in the end,
00:29:03.120you have a society that is increasingly polarized. So we've rambled on a little bit here. And I say
00:29:07.980We, I have rambled on a little bit here, but thank you for indulging.
00:29:11.700Harrison Volkner, thank you very much.
00:29:13.280How can people learn about your new show?
00:29:15.280Well, you can go to, you can find it on our website, tnc.news, and you can also find it