Juno News - October 07, 2019


We're taking the federal leaders' debate commission to court


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

188.46194

Word count

600

Sentence count

44


Summary

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

A brief update from Candice Malcolm at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Toronto on the case of True North Media's application to be accredited to cover the 2019 Canadian leaders debate. We are in court today, waiting to have our case heard by a judge.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Candace Malcolm here from True North. I am at the federal courthouse in downtown Toronto
00:00:14.880 and we are now waiting to have our case heard before the judge. We've been given a time it's
00:00:19.600 happening at 3 p.m. today so I'm just going to provide a really quick update and overview to
00:00:24.760 what is going on with this case. So to take you back to last week, my journalists at True North,
00:00:32.000 we submitted an application so that we could cover the national leaders debate. The leaders
00:00:36.820 debate is happening tonight, Monday, and we applied two weeks ago on September 24th, almost as soon as
00:00:42.320 the application became open. There wasn't a lot of criteria. They didn't say exactly what it is that
00:00:48.120 you had to be in order to be a journalist. So my journalist Andrew Lawton submitted an application
00:00:52.140 and then on Friday, Friday morning, just a few days before the debate, we got a two-line email
00:00:58.700 from the Debates Commission telling us that we had been rejected, that we were not going to be given
00:01:03.440 accreditation because they deemed that we were an advocacy organization. So they didn't give us any
00:01:08.540 option of appeal. They didn't ask us for any evidence as to why we were a journalist organization.
00:01:13.700 They just made their decision behind closed doors and we felt that that decision was arbitrary and
00:01:18.620 partisan, that because we are a center-right news organization with a conservative perspective,
00:01:23.660 we are being excluded. So we decided to hire a lawyer and to fight to take this to court and to
00:01:29.660 let a judge decide. So that brings us here today. Monday, we came in first thing this morning with my
00:01:35.260 lawyer in order to file the claim in front of the court. We were waiting to hear a judge. We weren't
00:01:39.900 even sure if there was going to be a judge available. They let us know that they are going to be hearing our
00:01:44.860 case today at 3 p.m. So I'll keep you informed as to what's going on. But fundamentally, this is a case
00:01:52.140 of an organization, a news organization, and journalists fighting for their freedom of press,
00:01:57.420 for the right to report. The establishment media in Canada, the mainstream media, have all been
00:02:02.300 accredited. They're all part of the in-crowd. And the government, the Debate Commission, the
00:02:06.460 Parliamentary Press Gallery, and the Trudeau government are trying to exclude up-and-coming,
00:02:10.940 absurd digital organizations like True North. They're trying to exclude people with a conservative
00:02:15.900 worldview and persuasion and opinion from attending the debate. It's not fair. We are journalists.
00:02:21.500 We don't care what the government says. The government in Canada doesn't get to determine
00:02:25.580 who is and who isn't a journalist. Between all of my journalists at True North, we have about eight
00:02:30.780 decades of experience as journalists. Andrew Lawton, who is the journalist in question, who wants to
00:02:37.500 report on the debate tonight. He's been working as a professional journalist for his entire adult life,
00:02:44.300 just about. So anyway, we're going to keep fighting. It's been expensive. Having a lawyer
00:02:50.780 work around the clock all weekend is really expensive. But thankfully, we have a lot of
00:02:55.660 support from across the country. A lot of people have opened up their wallets. So thank you. Thank you
00:02:59.980 so much for everyone who has donated. We're going to continue to fight. Even if we don't get the exact
00:03:04.060 decision that we want today, we're not going to let this die. We're going to continue to fight for freedom in Canada.
00:03:09.020 So thank you so much.