00:00:00.000Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appoints a partisan liberal to lead the national inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, and the media don't bat an eye.
00:00:08.340Meanwhile, the Trudeau government confirms that it relied on a CBC report to justify the use of this act, a CBC report that was later retracted.
00:00:17.200It's Fake News Friday. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:30.000Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the program.
00:00:34.460So the big story of the week was that Justin Trudeau has called a national inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act to quash the peaceful trucker's convoy.
00:00:43.940This wasn't out of the goodness of Justin Trudeau's heart. He was compelled by law to call this national inquiry.
00:00:49.780He waited until the last possible moment, and then news came out that the individual that he appointed to oversee this inquiry,
00:00:56.680the judge that was appointed to oversee it was none other than a longtime partisan liberal political staffer who was later appointed to the bench by a liberal prime minister, Paul Martin.
00:01:10.040You really can't make this stuff up. Brian Lilly, reporting over at the Toronto Sun, breaks it all down, talks about how this individual worked for John Turner back in the 80s.
00:01:19.640He was part of the government's sort of inner circle, the prime minister's inner circle, advising him on who to appoint to the cabinet.
00:01:27.680So we're talking about a consummate insider, a liberal loyalist, a liberal staffer.
00:01:32.880And yet you won't see this anywhere in the media other than the Toronto Sun, other than here at True North.
00:01:37.500The media just don't really think this is a big deal.
00:01:39.420They don't think it is important to tell you that this entire inquiry is cooked from the beginning.
00:01:45.160It is being overseen by a liberal partisan appointee.
00:01:50.140I want to bring in my producer and True North journalist, Harrison Faulkner, to the show.
00:01:55.480Harrison, thanks for joining us. Welcome to the show.
00:01:58.600What do you think of this big story that we have a national inquiry and it's being led by someone who is very, could very easily just be described as a liberal insider?
00:02:08.500Well, I wish I could say that I was surprised, Candace, about this.
00:02:11.820But, of course, I think we chatted about this a couple weeks ago.
00:02:15.100Things were really quiet and the kind of atmosphere around our team was that the liberals must be doing something.
00:03:05.700So, again, it's, it's, it's par for the course.
00:03:08.160It's not a surprise, and frankly, I think every Canadian knows this, this inquiry, this review into the Emergencies Act was really never going to be about holding the government to account.
00:03:17.120It was always going to be about trying to find a way, whatever way possible, to shine the best light on Trudeau and his government.
00:03:23.860Well, you could see that even just from the framing and the way that they announced, like what they were specifically looking into.
00:03:30.240So, so, you know, they weren't looking into Justin Trudeau's unprecedented use of basically wartime measures, right?
00:03:37.080The War Measures Act turned into the Emergencies Act.
00:03:39.480This is something that was like designed to be used if Canada was ever invaded or if there was ever like a real insurrection.
00:03:46.780The media drummed that storyline up and pretended that we were, you know, had some kind of an insurrection happening.
00:03:52.860That was never the case, and we'll talk a little bit about this next story with the CBC drumming up fear and basically pushing misinformation.
00:04:00.840But, but I just want to go back to the justification and, and what the national inquiry is called to investigate.
00:04:07.080So it says that the, the goals are to look at the evolution and the goals of the convoy and blockades, their leadership organization participants, which we know it will be a witch hunt into looking up, pulling the worst dirt and, and demonizing anyone at the trucker convoy, you know, evolution of their goals and convoy.
00:04:25.600We know that's just going to be a smear job against the individuals who organize the convoy.
00:04:29.580Next, they want to look at the impact of domestic and foreign funding, including crowdsources, platforms.
00:04:35.660That's the story we're going to get to next.
00:04:37.500Third, the impact and role of misinformation and disinformation, including the use of social media.
00:04:43.220We know that misinformation, disinformation are the favorite buzzwords of the left and the Trader liberals.
00:04:47.400They basically just use those words to describe stories that they don't like, stories that are inconvenient to the government.
00:04:53.560We saw last week the government called a report from Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation on a trucker tax, that, a pickup truck tax, that was in a government report.
00:05:03.360And they called that disinformation, even though it was in a government report.
00:05:06.680And then next, the impact of the blockades, including the economic impact, which, as we covered very extensively on the show, Harrison, the blockades were, were removed.
00:05:15.600The border blockades, the Windsor Bridge, the one in Surbush, Columbia, they were all gone.
00:05:20.080They were removed by the time Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on February 15th.
00:05:24.340So that is, that's fake news right there.
00:05:27.060And then the efforts of police and other responders prior to the declaration, that will be a witch hunt into police inaction and why the police didn't do the dirty work for Trudeau from day one.
00:05:39.080And, and the thing that, that really troubles me about this, Harrison, is just a lack of curiosity in the media.
00:05:44.360Like, you don't, you don't see this story about, hey, you know, the guy that's, that's, that could be holding Justin Trudeau account, the guy that could be looking into the unprecedented power grab and use of force, disproportionate force against peaceful protesters, rather than having a neutral person come in.
00:06:00.320No, no, he appointed a liberal sufferer.
00:06:02.580Imagine for a split second that this was a conservative.
00:06:07.680This is, like you said, it would be a story about a conflict of interest and perhaps corruption and, you know, those, those, those evil conservatives, you know, creating some kind of a, a fake inquiry here that won't lead to anything.
00:06:20.880There would be so much scrutiny if it was the other way around.
00:06:30.080It's not even of interest, which, which is, is just so sad and pathetic.
00:06:35.540The, the, the media in Canada does a disservice to every single Canadian when they give Trudeau a pass for this kind of thing.
00:06:41.200I want to get to the latest news, though.
00:06:43.040So there was a special joint committee on the declaration of the Emergencies Act that took place in Ottawa earlier this week on Tuesday evening.
00:06:50.140We saw the justice committee, David Lamedi, give a testimony.
00:06:54.820He testified that the Emergencies Act was invoked in part because the government was relying on a CBC News report.
00:07:03.060The CBC News report about foreigners bankrolling the protests.
00:07:07.220Here is a clip of David Lamedi, the Justice Minister, the Attorney General of Canada, speaking on this committee.
00:07:16.100And so it would also be interesting for me, going back to the point you made in your opening comments on the issue of part of your restrictions around coming, for people coming to Canada for the purpose of, of the protests or such like.
00:07:34.740I assume, then, that there is some evidence that suggested that we may have had people who were interested in coming across the border from, I would assume, the United States, to participate in the protests, and that would be why you would put that in, specifically?
00:07:52.500That's in the public domain, that people were, there were reports of people crossing the border.
00:07:58.260There were reports, CBC reported, I believe on the 14th of February, or the 13th of February, that, that there was also foreign funding through a variety of different sites.
00:08:09.160So that, the, the various pieces of information that we had explained the various measures that we took.
00:08:15.080So, David Mehdi here is just confirming, Harrison, something that we already knew, which is something that our colleague, Anthony Fury, and our friend over at the Toronto Sun, he reported on this back in February.
00:08:25.200So, on February 17th, he had a report saying that the Liberals cite a CBC analysis to justify the freezing of the bank accounts.
00:08:33.080So, this is what Fury wrote back in February.
00:08:34.980He said, the incredible powers that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has given his government to freeze people's bank accounts is based on their reliance on an analysis from the CBC, according to a 14-page document that the government tabled on Wednesday, detailing the supposed rationale for invoking the Emergencies Act in the first place.
00:08:53.940So, the most controversial measure they've brought in, not, relied on nothing but a CBC report.
00:09:00.320So, as Fury points out, no RCMP intel, no national security briefings, nothing but a story put together by a handful of CBC reporters.
00:09:11.240It's one thing for the Liberal government to rely on CBC for their own opinions, their own opposition research.
00:09:16.020Fury writes, now it looks like they're framing national security briefings from these CBC stories.
00:09:22.620Well, it gets even worse, Harrison, because the specific story that the CBC cited had to do, as David Lamedy confirmed in committee, had to do with foreign funding of the Freedom Convoy.
00:09:33.600We know that was a huge part of the left's and the Liberals' narrative, which is that these truckers were funded by Trump supporters and mega-loving people in the United States and that it was a foreign insurrection and it wasn't Canadian and it was all foreign-funded.
00:09:48.440Well, the CBC retracted that story because it wasn't true.
00:09:54.420It says that the CBC admits running fake news about the Freedom Convoy.
00:09:58.920The CBC has publicly retracted a news story about the trucker Freedom Convoy that erroneously claimed that support of the protests had come largely from foreigners.
00:10:08.160On February 10th, in a report about the protest convoy, CBC's radio, The World This Hour, incorrectly said GoFundMe,
00:10:14.640ended a fundraiser for the protesters over questionable donations to the group.
00:10:18.160A statement from the broadcaster wrote, February 10th article titled,
00:10:22.760Convoy protests received hundreds of donations that appear to be from abroad, claim that donations identified by the CBC are likely only a fraction of all donations made by people outside of Canada.
00:10:33.560Another story by CBC claimed that at least a third of donations were from anonymous donors.
00:10:38.780So, we know that they drummed up the storyline about foreign funders and about how this was, again, like a Trump insurrection, January 6th, that whole nonsense storyline.
00:10:49.420However, Harrison, on March 3rd, when GoFundMe executives came to testify at a committee in Ottawa, they said the exact opposite.
00:10:58.220They confirmed that a very small portion of donors from the original GoFundMe campaign were from foreigners.
00:11:05.020This is a quote from GoFundMe president.
00:11:07.580He said that our records show that 88% of donated funds originated in Canada.
00:11:16.320So, the overwhelming majority of those original donors were Canadian.
00:11:21.160Once that GoFundMe campaign got shut down, there was a new campaign, and by that time, there was more publication, and it became an international story, and there were more foreign donors to that second campaign.
00:11:32.360But the original campaign and the original storyline about foreign donors was fake news from the CBC, so much so, Harrison, that they retracted that story.
00:11:39.860And yet, the government still relied on that report from the CBC to justify the use of the Emergencies Act.
00:12:11.640And like you said at the beginning of this, if this were any other government, even if it were a previous liberal government, perhaps a liberal government that hasn't stuffed the news organizations with subsidies and with money to keep them quiet and keep them supportive, this would be a huge story, I think.
00:12:27.460And it's worse than just the RCMP not having any intelligence to back up the claims.
00:12:33.400If you recall, Candace, the FinTrack, which is the financial oversight board, the regulator of transactions in the country, FinTrack, when the FinTrack director came to testify to the Public Security Committee, he also said the same thing, that they did not have reports that this was a foreign-funded or there was ideological-motivated extremism in the funding of this convoy.
00:13:01.920So each time the government looked for legitimate intelligence to back up their insane plans to basically freeze bank accounts to take the unprecedented measures, they couldn't find it.
00:13:16.660So all they could do was end up going to the CBC.
00:13:22.280So you'd almost think that's kind of an embarrassing thing for a government to do, right?
00:13:26.040To have to go to the CBC, the same CBC that we make fun of on a weekly basis on this Fake News Friday program.
00:13:33.120They have to go there, but they admit that they go there.
00:13:35.460Instead of actually getting legitimate intelligence from our intelligence services, from the RCMP, and from FinTrack, it's incredible stuff.
00:13:43.440And really, it's the kind of thing that in any other time, in any other government, it would be a huge, huge scandal.
00:13:51.640But of course, Candace, it's to be expected, like everything with this government, like this whole national inquiry.
00:13:58.580Canadians should not expect a real honest assessment of the actions.
00:14:03.460What they should expect is a twisted, purely positive, the outlook is purely positive for the government.
00:14:12.580They're not going to get accountability.
00:14:14.360I think that's just the sad state of affairs that we're currently living in.
00:14:18.160Well, and you always have to go back to, I know you were probably a little too young to be following the news during the Harper years.
00:14:23.720But to go back to the way that the media constantly, relentlessly treated the Harper government as adversarial, and they were suspicious of every little thing that Harper did.
00:14:34.860Stories would be dragged out through the news cycle day after day after day.
00:14:38.760And no matter what, Harper was always painted in a negative light.
00:14:42.780And you kind of wonder, okay, how's the media going to cover Trudeau?
00:14:46.320Obviously, they're not going to be as harsh against him.
00:14:48.140But the difference is just by omission.
00:14:50.620Like, they don't even cover the stuff.
00:14:51.980They don't even acknowledge it as a problem.
00:14:55.540They agree so much with Justin Trudeau, and they believe in him, and they have his interests at heart, that they don't even bother covering it.
00:15:02.560So it's not even like, oh, you know, the difference in the way they cover scandals.
00:15:21.200So, Candace, another story came across my desk that I thought was something we had to discuss on the program.
00:15:28.340And it was Liberal MP Julie DeZwerik from Toronto, from a Toronto riding.
00:15:32.820She accused, incredibly, she accused the Ontario Premier of crimes against humanity.
00:15:40.380Now, the crime that the Premier has supposedly committed was to basically stick to the original targets that the federal government and the provincial government both agreed to, a climate reduction target, 30% carbon reduction below 2005 levels.
00:15:58.400So the crime that Julie DeZwerik, the Liberal MP, is accusing the Premier of committing, is reassessing the way in which they're going to reach the targets.
00:16:08.020Not for anything serious, not for perhaps what other crimes against humanity you may be thinking of.
00:16:15.860No, simply just rearranging the way in which the Ontario government is going to reach those climate reduction targets.
00:16:23.700This is the insanity of the far left, this is the climate left that I know you've talked about before, Candace, where any little deviance off of the mainstream path of total climate alarmism, total climate, I kind of consider it to be climate craziness, really.
00:16:46.740If you try to take any sort of reasonable approach to that, apparently now you're committing the worst crimes possible, crimes against humanity.
00:16:56.180And so she said this in the House, and I want to play the clip because really, it's incredible.
00:17:00.340She's very confident in this statement.
00:17:04.100I will say something as an aside, Madam Speaker.
00:17:07.540You know, last week, at the beginning of the week, you know, my heart was in the pit of my stomach when I read that the provincial Ford government was quietly,
00:17:16.740altering their plan to hit their climate change targets.
00:17:19.860And I'll say to you that no matter how aggressive the federal government gets with $100 billion and 100 actions,
00:17:26.020there's no way Candace is going to be able to reach its climate targets if our largest province does not do its part.
00:17:32.160As our climate is changing more quickly than we had thought, these inactions to me are irresponsible, unconscionable, and to me a crime against humanity.
00:17:41.320So, the actions are irresponsible, unconscionable, and a crime against humanity, Candace.
00:17:48.320It's a crime against humanity to commit to reducing your carbon emissions by 30%.
00:17:54.020So apparently that's a crime against humanity.
00:17:56.860I don't know how you possibly justify such a thing.
00:18:00.660She was even asked to apologize by a conservative about saying those words,
00:18:04.780especially in light of what's been happening around the world.
00:18:06.960And she took the opportunity to double down.
00:18:09.560So I'd like to get your take on this, Candace.
00:18:11.540But I guess this is, what else can this be other than just a cheap political hit at the premier before an election?
00:18:19.780Well, I'm one of those people who don't see much of a distinction between the liberal and the conservative climate plans.
00:18:25.920It's like a difference without a distinction because the liberals make big audacious plans
00:18:30.440and then don't keep to them and climate emissions go up, even though they're supposed to go down.
00:18:36.220Even with all the heavy-headed schemes that Trudeau has introduced,
00:18:39.540our greenhouse gas emissions and our CO2 emissions are still going up.
00:18:43.240So the liberals' plan is based on nonsense.
00:18:45.720The conservatives, especially conservatives like the Ford government in Ontario,