This week on This Week in Fake News, we look at the growing problem of fake news in Canada, and how Liberals and elitists are using the term "fake news" to describe what they see as a "one-sided" problem.
00:00:00.000Hi and welcome to another segment of This Week in Fake News. I'm your host Candice Malcolm,
00:00:15.000founder of True North and a columnist over at Post Media with the Toronto Sun. So once again,
00:00:20.940lots to get to this week. It's now the election period, the writ was drawn up this week, so we're
00:00:26.100full on in the middle of the political war that will be unfolding over the next few weeks before
00:00:32.100Canada chooses a new government and perhaps even a new Prime Minister. So let's jump right into it.
00:00:38.100I want to start with some amusing thing that happened just a couple of days ago. So my colleague
00:00:44.100Andrew Lawton went over to Ottawa to sit in on a conference held by Canada 2020. Canada 2020 is a
00:00:51.100kind of big L liberal group. A lot of the people involved kind of have the same sort of centrist
00:00:57.100worldview as the Liberal Party and they promote a lot of the same issues that the Liberals are
00:01:01.100promoting. So they held an event called Combating Misinformation, Protecting Democracy in the Public
00:01:07.100Sphere in 2019. And, you know, this is just a favorite topic these days from elites and Liberals
00:01:14.100in Canada. They're kind of obsessed with this idea that there is misinformation online, that there's
00:01:19.100fake news that's being put out that's sort of coming only from one side. So, you know, as we all know,
00:01:26.100there's a lot of fake news out there. This show focuses almost entirely on the fake news put out by the
00:01:32.100mainstream media. Journalists do it all the time. I try to catch them and expose it, but they come up with
00:01:37.100their own story. They have their own narrative, their own agenda, and they really do create stories
00:01:42.100that oftentimes come from nowhere or they really just exaggerate or emphasize or show their own bias.
00:01:48.100So this is super common. But according to elites and Liberals in this country, it's really a one-sided
00:01:54.100problem. They see it coming from conservatives. They basically consider any news that's coming from a
00:01:59.100conservative to be fake news. The other problem for them is that Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister, just
00:02:05.100happens to be a very memeable guy. He's kind of a person that's easy to poke fun at and to make fun at.
00:02:12.100He's very expressive, so you can always find him, you know, find pictures of him and then couple it with
00:02:19.100some of his sort of more outlandish, ridiculous comments or his policies. And there's a lot of people
00:02:25.100who spend time online making fun of the Prime Minister. And, you know, the thin-skinned Liberals,
00:02:30.100Trudeau himself is thin-skinned. They hate this. So they've come up with this whole initiative to kind of
00:02:35.100combat the disinformation online. They pretend it's like a one-sided problem when we know it's not.
00:02:41.100And, you know, I've caught them doing this many times. They truly believe that a conservative opinion
00:02:47.100and news coming from people who are conservatives is fake news. So the Environment Minister, Catherine McKenna,
00:02:53.100once called my opinion column an opinion column that I wrote in the Toronto Sun. She called it fake news
00:02:59.100because she disagreed with my opinion. So that pretty much sums it up. I mean, they clearly just say
00:03:05.100that something is fake news because they disagree with it. And, you know, now they're coming up with a
00:03:10.100whole initiative in government to combat fake news. And, you know, this is really what they want to talk
00:03:16.100about. They want to talk a lot about this issue and they want to pretend that somehow there's some kind of
00:03:20.100like a foreign interference. It's just like what happened in the States with Trump. They're trying to repeat
00:03:26.100it up here and claim that like any ground that conservatives gain or any, you know, success that
00:03:32.100conservatives have electorally, they're going to blame it on misinformation and foreign interference.
00:03:37.100We can see the writing on the wall right now. And so this conference was held in Ottawa.
00:03:43.100There's one particularly amusing thing that I wanted to point out. So, again, my colleague Andrew Lawton was
00:03:48.100live tweeting the event and there's lots of good stuff on there. So check out his page on Twitter.
00:03:53.100But so the very first panel that he attended, one of the panelists is a person called Katie Gibbs of Evidence
00:04:00.100for Democracies as an organization. And Gibbs says that her organization will no longer use the term fake news.
00:04:08.100And that's because she thinks that the term leads people to associate the news media with fakery.
00:04:14.100Stop using that word, she says, opting instead for misinformation. So, of course, that's the whole thing,
00:04:20.100that the mainstream media does put out fake news. There was just a study a couple weeks ago that found that the most
00:04:25.100misinformed Canadians were the Canadians that watched the most amount of mainstream media news.
00:04:30.100So it's true that the mainstream media is associated with fakery. She's on to that. So she no longer uses the term fake news,
00:04:38.100opting instead for misinformation. And, you know, this is just so typical of the politically correct liberal elites in this country.
00:04:45.100They're finding yet another term to ban. So sooner or later, it will just be completely unacceptable to use the term fake news.
00:04:53.100And they'll call out anyone who does as being like some kind of a conspiratorial person or something.
00:04:58.100They've done this over and over again. I pointed this out. The mainstream media and liberal politicians used to routinely use the term illegal immigration.
00:05:07.100They used the term illegal immigration to describe illegal immigration, which Canada has a problem with.
00:05:12.100There's a significant amount of illegal immigration happening in Canada. The Liberals deny that it's happening.
00:05:18.100And just, you know, one day, about two years ago, they woke up and decided that it was racist to use the term illegal immigration.
00:05:24.100And they started calling out the Ontario Ford government for doing this. And again, just saying that it was the immigration minister said that it was un-Canadian.
00:05:34.100And it was it was intolerant and it was racist to use the term illegal immigration.
00:05:40.100And so they decided instead that the term that they were going to use was irregular immigration, irregular immigration.
00:05:46.100It doesn't even really make sense in English. It doesn't sound right. It's just mumbo jumbo.
00:05:51.100It's it's a politically correct term that the Liberals invented. And as soon as they did, the mainstream media fell in line.
00:05:57.100And so almost immediately, you saw the CBC, Toronto Star, all these other publications that used to use the term illegal immigration,
00:06:04.100suddenly shifting and using the term irregular immigration. And then you even had journalists jumping in and correcting politicians and others for using the term illegal.
00:06:51.100One of the things that's kind of sad and unfortunate state of affairs in our country is just a really like the lack of free speech that we have,
00:06:58.100especially for people who want to run for public office.
00:07:03.100As soon as the new badge of candidates is announced, as soon as the writ starts, the writ's drawn up and the election period starts,
00:07:09.100we see a new list of candidates and almost immediately they all become like targets.
00:07:13.100All these research groups, opposition research groups, starts digging through their past, filing through any public comment they might have made when they were a teenager on Twitter or, you know, 15 years ago, a Facebook comment, whatever it is.
00:07:25.100So we're seeing lots and lots of that.
00:07:27.100And just in the first few days of the campaign, you know, I went on the news site, National News Watch, which is just a horribly left wing publication.
00:07:36.100But basically every single story on there was about a candidate basically getting pounded, some of them stepping down and getting disqualified for things that they had said years and years ago.
00:07:50.100So here right now as I'm recording this, the top story on National News Watch, conservative candidate apologizes unequivocally for alleged homophobic comments on Twitter.
00:08:00.100So, you know, this is something that the guy said years and years ago.
00:08:03.100And then it turns out that the liberal candidate that was accusing him of making these homophobic comments.
00:08:08.100Well, she in her past had also been associated with homophobic comments and comments that her husband had made were even far worse than what this guy said.
00:08:48.100Is it an abortion debate really closed, Andrew Scheer?
00:08:51.100You've chosen to launch your Toronto campaign in York Centre alongside your leading anti-choice, anti-choice, pro-life candidate and campaigner.
00:09:03.100So, again, the Liberals really want to talk about abortion.
00:09:06.100They really want to be, to have the Conservatives associated with abortion, even though Andrew Scheer has said that he's not going to talk about the issue.
00:09:15.100It really shows that there is no pro-life party in Canada.
00:09:18.100Like, the Conservatives are probably the most welcoming to pro-life people, but they're not a pro-life party.
00:09:23.100They are a pro-choice party, and Andrew Scheer is making that very clear that he will not push forward,
00:09:28.100if he's elected Prime Minister, he won't do anything to limit abortions in Canada.
00:09:33.100So, the Liberals are now condemning the Conservatives even just for having a candidate who herself, in her personal views, in her personal life, opposes abortion.
00:09:44.100So, again, the idea that you have all these different parties that represent different viewpoints and different people in society, that's no longer true.
00:09:54.100We're getting a narrower and narrower amount of things that are permissible to talk about in our society.
00:10:01.100Like, now you can't even be pro-life and run for public office.
00:10:05.100That's kind of what the Liberals are implying here.
00:10:08.100So, you know, there's a very narrow realm of what we can talk about when it comes to immigration.
00:10:12.100We can't really talk about a lot of things that people consider beyond the panel and you'll get accused of being racist if you criticize immigration too harshly or if you criticize diversity.
00:10:22.100And now they're really saying that you're only fit for public office if you happen to be pro-abortion.
00:10:29.100Well, and guess what? You know, there's lots and lots of Canadians.
00:10:32.100There's millions of Canadians out there who personally oppose abortion.
00:10:36.100And what the Liberals are saying is that those people don't deserve any representation in Parliament.
00:10:42.100And they're really forcing Andrew Scheer to denounce abortion.
00:10:47.100It's kind of sad, just the state of what we can talk about, what we can believe in public life.
00:11:56.100So this guy, you know, he posts a picture from a barbecue back in 2007.
00:12:01.100So we're now looking 12 years into the past.
00:12:04.100He posts this picture and he's at a pig roast.
00:12:07.100And he jokingly commented that they were going to send the leftovers to Denmark in support of the protesters over the Muhammad cartoon.
00:12:18.100So you remember back in 2007, there was a huge uproar because a Danish cartoonist published a picture depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad
00:12:26.100that created huge protests all over the sort of extremist, illiberal parts of the world that don't believe in any kind of free speech and want to impose their blasphemy laws.
00:12:37.100So, you know, the people who were protesting against that were like the most extreme people in society.
00:12:42.100But anyway, nonetheless, you know, that's a pretty, you know, again, 12 years ago and clearly it's a joke.
00:12:50.100But, you know, you probably shouldn't joke about mailing pig carcasses to Islamist extremists.
00:12:57.100And again, this kind of just shows that you can't really have a sense of humor if you're going to be talking about politically incorrect things.
00:13:06.100So that guy's gone, no longer a candidate over that.
00:13:11.100Now here's the far left news publication that typically like frequently lies and spins and is just very, very anti-conservative.
00:13:22.100They dug up a secret Facebook page from a candidate, a conservative candidate in Manitoba,
00:13:29.100who once posted a meme saying that he was proud to be white.
00:13:33.100So that guy's gone. That guy's gone. He resigned.
00:13:37.100Again, you know, just so many candidates, so many people.
00:13:40.100And it's kind of sad, you know, even if some of the individual instances,
00:13:44.100the person says something that is, you know, not great, dicey or not politically correct.
00:13:52.100It's kind of sad in our society that there's this mob mentality that as soon as you find someone who said something that was politically correct,
00:14:00.100even if it was 10, 15 years ago, there's a mob that attacks a person and then they get disqualified.
00:14:06.100Sooner or later, there won't be any Canadians left to run for public office, especially Canadians of my generation who kind of have had social media all along.
00:14:16.100And, you know, it shows that you don't we don't really have a lot of free speech in our society.
00:14:22.100If you say things that are politically correct or that are interpreted as being politically correct 10, 15 years later,
00:14:28.100then you are disqualified and you can't be part of, you know, parliament.
00:14:33.100You can't you can't be part of the democratic process or if you have views that the mainstream media and liberal elites deemed to be outside the realm of,
00:14:43.100you know, polite conversation or mainstream views.
00:14:46.100Like if you just happen to oppose abortion or you happen to believe that global warming is also associated with natural trends like the sun,
00:14:54.100then you're just disqualified and you can't be part of our democracy.
00:15:00.100I wish that during elections we had higher tolerance for past discretions, especially, you know, if someone apologizes,
00:15:09.100if someone says, look, I made a really bad joke 12 years ago and I am remorseful and I apologize.
00:15:15.100They shouldn't have to resign and get removed from their position.
00:15:20.100So, you know, this is it kind of shows a sad trend that we're heading towards with this sort of mob mentality,
00:15:26.100political correct police monitoring everything we say.
00:15:29.100It's very Orwellian in 1984 like that you can't say things freely out of fear that maybe 10 years from now they might be taken out of context.