00:00:26.480We have a mariachi band ready to play us out into the credits.
00:00:29.720I don't want to get too excited about Cinco de Mayo because then I'll end up facing accusations that I'm culturally appropriating like Justin Trudeau does every time he goes to a party.
00:00:40.260But we will get to that when we get there.
00:00:42.780Speaking of Justin Trudeau and parties, this was a little bit of a clip from the Liberal Convention, which right now is underway in Ottawa.
00:00:53.640Because the city of Ottawa said, what's the one thing we could do to make the city more boring than it is normally?
00:00:58.900And they decided, let's host the Liberal Party of Canada convention.
00:01:03.340But apparently, after Justin Trudeau spoke yesterday, as is the nature of any convention,
00:01:08.960people go up to the hospitality suites, they start having a good time, they eat, they drink, they be merry and all that.
00:01:15.360And apparently, according to this woman, who is a black and indigenous Canadian woman, a liberal delegate,
00:01:23.320things did not go all convivially and congenially, as she might have expected anyway.
00:01:28.540take a look. My name is Dawn Upshaw. I'm from Nova Scotia. I'm African Canadian and the black
00:01:36.860loyalists. I'm also Miss Disney Cree from Bay James. I attended a reception last night. We're
00:01:45.240here from different time zones. People are tired. People are hungry. And there was liquor served at
00:01:50.280the event. So people were getting drunk and tired rather quickly. And that's when the racism come
00:01:56.500out so i was here last night listening and reacting to racism from liberals so when you
00:02:05.300respond to racism do not respond with food fun and fashion shows as you've done in the past
00:02:13.220do something and let us do something and let us be the people who guide you thank you thank you
00:02:21.300very much. I'm very, very sorry that that happened. And I think we all want to make sure that we
00:02:27.080condemn any type of racism of any type. And we need to understand that actions matter more than
00:02:32.180words. That is Anthony Housefather and Marcy Ian and Ahmed Hassen on the stage there. And the fourth
00:02:44.340one, I forgot, Mary Ng. And this woman, and again, I have no idea if she was actually a victim of
00:02:49.260racism. And who knows? Maybe she was, maybe she wasn't. But this woman is a black loyalist,
00:02:55.440an indigenous Canadian. She's there. She says people get tired, but then they start drinking.
00:02:59.880And when they get drunk and tired, all the liberals get racist. Well, maybe not all of them,
00:03:04.580but at least some of them. Now, this, again, I don't want to downplay if she was a victim of
00:03:11.580genuine racism or not. I certainly believe she felt aggrieved by it. But this is the problem,
00:03:33.160And you have the liberals going all woke all the time,
00:03:35.940saying we need to be the wokey, wokest, woke, woke, wokers.
00:03:39.680And Wokistan is apparently no longer as woke as Justin Trudeau wants it to be.
00:03:44.580So you get a woman who is black and indigenous who wants to go up and feel like she can party it up in a safe space and finds that all the other liberals there, in her view, are microaggressing her all day long and all the live long nights.
00:03:57.920So whether she was actually a victim of it, I don't know.
00:04:02.680In fact, like for all we know, that might have actually just been Justin Trudeau asking a question at the mic.
00:04:07.060In fact, I don't think his flight has left for King Charles's coronation this weekend.
00:04:11.420So you never know what goes down at the Liberal Convention.
00:04:14.760The Liberals don't accredit us to their convention,
00:04:17.900so I would like it noted that we had nothing to do with these allegations
00:04:21.920of microaggressing misconduct that were afoot,
00:04:25.000and the Liberals have to be held to account.
00:04:27.260Poor Anthony, how's father there on the stage, is like,
00:04:29.580I thought we were just talking about our tax plan.
00:04:32.320But instead, the Liberals will perhaps double down on the drink service tonight.
00:04:37.640But the Liberal Convention is underway,
00:04:40.380And there was one proposal that went forward that I think is a little bit noteworthy.
00:04:47.180Now, I want to make a couple of points here.
00:04:49.380The first is that liberal conventions like conservative conventions, like NDP conventions,
00:05:49.600Mainstream media no longer employs as many reporters with extensive knowledge of particular subject areas.
00:05:54.960This fills content with opinion programming rather than news.
00:05:58.980And whereas this result has devalued mainstream media as a source of news and information,
00:06:04.580Be it resolved that the Liberal Party of Canada request the government provide additional public funds to support ad-free news and information reporting by Canadian media through an arm's-length non-partisan mechanism.
00:06:19.540So they want more money to the media bailout.
00:06:23.060And then also request the government explore options to hold online information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms.
00:06:34.580and to limit the publication only to material whose sources can be traced, unquote.
00:06:55.160But be it resolved that the government provide additional public funds
00:06:59.260to support ad-free news and information programs.
00:07:02.520So they want more money, and then also they want online info services, so I think they mean news platforms, to be held accountable for the veracity of material published.
00:07:14.620So they want state-mandated fact-checking.
00:07:18.420So if you say something that Justin Trudeau gets up to the podium and says is false, that should be removed from the platform, the government thinks.
00:07:26.640Phil, my colleague, is telling me that I have abandoned our ability to put the clean tag on the podcast
00:07:32.540after my little impromptu joke about the microphone.
00:07:35.320I didn't use a wordy-dird, a dirty word, a dirty-dirty-dird?
00:07:39.520Anyway, I didn't use one of those. I think we can keep the clean tag.
00:07:42.240The Liberals also want, according to this motion,
00:07:46.000to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.
00:07:50.140So what this would mean in practice, it's tough to say,
00:07:55.220But it sounds like they're trying to ban internet anonymity.
00:07:58.880Now, I may not like anonymity in online posting,
00:08:01.120but I think you have a right to be on the internet anonymously if you'd like.
00:08:05.520And also, I don't know how you trace foreign content,
00:08:08.100which is not all just evil Russian bots or whatever.
00:08:11.500Sometimes foreign content can be some random guy in India
00:08:14.680that wants to comment on your post or tweet something.
00:08:17.740So liberal members, regardless of whether the party itself
00:13:31.760And you have to click the raise hand button if you want to ask a question.
00:13:35.720And they never called on me, the only one on that press conference that has, I'd say, probably a larger share of conservatives in the audience that are the people Ms. Notley ostensibly wants to speak to.
00:13:48.480But they called on one reporter twice.
00:13:50.720So that was how much they really, really, really didn't want me to ask her a question.
00:13:55.060But when we talk about this election, I think we need to also take a look back into four years ago, the election that elected Jason Kenney as premier of the UCP government, the first ever UCP government, and one particular story that may not be politically relevant to a lot of people now, but is culturally relevant and is incredibly relevant to the individual at the center of that story.
00:14:19.740And that is Kaylin Ford, who I have interviewed in the past, and we'll talk a little bit about that in this show.
00:14:26.120She was a star candidate, called a unicorn by some people in the 2019 election.
00:14:32.680She was running for the UCP in a seat that wasn't a traditionally conservative seat, but they thought was within reach, incredibly well-educated, incredibly eloquent, and was the victim of a horrific smear campaign by someone who she once called a friend.
00:14:46.500And that smear campaign was very much enabled by mainstream media outlets and by some alternative media outlets.
00:14:54.680And Kaylin Ford has released a new documentary about this ordeal and also about the broader themes it touches on.
00:24:47.680One of the things that I found quite interesting is that I
00:24:51.640don't know if it was intentional on your part but there seems to be a bit of conflict even in the
00:24:55.700way you discuss it about whether you did anything wrong and i think generally speaking you you are
00:25:00.760of the mind or should be of the mind that you didn't but it's very easy when discussing it
00:25:04.720to fall into that trap of wanting to make amends still yeah so look when um from my vantage point
00:25:12.560it looked to me like the entire world was saying that i was a terrible person that i was morally
00:25:19.000abhorrent you know people if you if you read the tweets carefully that appear on the screen you'll
00:25:23.320see people saying you know your family should be so ashamed you deserve to be exiled it's great
00:25:27.880you'll never work again the person who outed you is full of courage we should have more people like
00:25:33.080him in politics things like this um and moreover like i said employers wouldn't wouldn't touch me
00:25:40.120wouldn't respond to me like media wouldn't engage with me so you start to really doubt your
00:25:45.960perception of reality and what happens when the outside world has seems to have one view and you
00:25:52.680hold an internal perception that's different this creates a deep dissonance that you're naturally
00:25:58.840going to try to want to resolve somehow and there's sort of three main ways that you can
00:26:03.400try to resolve that you can either try to persuade the world to see things as you do
00:26:08.200or you can adopt the world's view of you or you can go a kind of stoical approach where you
00:26:13.960separate the internal from the external and you no longer rely on any kind of external validation
00:26:19.000to tell you what's true just sort of guided by you know sort of faith in things unseen um and uh
00:26:25.320and i kind of oscillate between all three of those and so you'll you know you'll see me really
00:26:30.040grappling with well why are thousands of people demanding apologies from me why is a premier two
00:26:35.960premiers and a mayor of a city and all of these news you know sort of media figures why are they
00:26:40.760they all asking me to apologize for what and and I really grappled with this question and I would
00:26:47.240ask people in earnest you know what what have I done wrong because I don't understand and I never
00:26:53.260got an answer when you talk about the employer aspect of this I mean the one thing that that
00:27:00.200really is the most jarring about cancel culture defenders of it will often say well it's not
00:27:05.660about cancel culture it's consequence culture they say that you know it's the they almost
00:27:09.800appeal actually to conservative language where they say well no it's you know it's about justice
00:27:14.020it's about consequences it's about the idea of the marketplace of ideas and and the problem with that
00:27:20.780is that no one who fuels this is interested in proportionality they they don't say you know you
00:27:26.340sped so you should get a speeding ticket and pay it and move on with your life it's like everything's
00:27:30.760the death penalty basically to use uh an extreme well i'm actually to be honest it's it's not even
00:27:35.680all that extreme in some cases with how they view. And that's the problem here. So it's that even if
00:27:41.420people believed you were unfit to be a candidate, which I don't feel was the case, that's not what
00:27:46.020they wanted. They wanted you stripped of your party membership. They wanted you prevented from
00:27:49.680working again. There would be people that would have said, I'm sure her family should disown her
1.00
00:27:54.120and her friends should disown her. And if you were to get a job as a barista at Starbucks, that would
0.75
00:27:58.420be offensive to them. And I was wondering if you could, not if you could, but if you have come up
00:28:04.180with an explanation for why. Why is that the case? Why is it so extreme in a sense that I don't think
00:28:10.620anyone could, if you were to talk to them one-on-one, explain how saying this thing, even if it was what
00:28:16.920they claimed, warrants this outcome? So you've touched on one big aspect of what's wrong with
00:28:23.440cancel culture, which is that it's not actually an administration of justice. It's not justice
00:28:28.540because there's nothing resembling due process. There's no rules of evidence. There's no right to
00:28:33.360a defense or presumption of innocence or all of these things that we would associate with or to
00:28:38.480face your accuser right my i had you know an anonymous accuser and uh and i was um i was
00:28:44.420further publicly shamed for identifying him i now have a restraining order against him
00:28:48.780my case led to the recognition of a new tort of civil harassment in alberta
00:28:53.580that was the person accusing me who was trumpeted as a hero in the media
00:28:58.360So that's the deeper problem, is that cancel culture reflects a complete failure of clear moral reasoning. If you start to think that sort of quasi-criminal harassment is okay and defensible and good, if their target is someone who has an opinion you disagree with, then you are morally, like, you're, it's not that you're morally, you're morally and intellectually bankrupt if you think that.
00:29:24.540So it's that the crimes that they identify don't make any sense. You never see people being cancelled for actual criminal acts. You see people being cancelled for often extremely ambiguous violations of emergent social norms, or social norms that a small minority wants to see sort of in ascendancy.
00:29:45.680So I think that's the deeper problem, is that having an opinion or observing a fact or asking
00:29:54.800a question in good faith is just not really a transgression that merits this. But on the other
00:30:02.720side, the people who engage in cancel culture, I talked earlier about how it celebrates false
00:30:10.160virtues at the expense of the real ones what i mean is that cancel culture aims to snuff out
00:30:16.960loyalty charity forgiveness a commitment to truth a slowness to judge um you know friendship
00:30:25.520solidarity all of these kinds of virtues are are suffocated in the climate created by cancel culture
00:30:32.000and the fake sort of performative virtues are outrage you know a quickness to judge to believe
00:30:38.080the worst of other people to listen to slander to make sure that that person is injured permanently
00:30:44.320so that's i think the real problem with this phenomenon and it and it leads to a complete
00:30:49.680breakdown you were talking earlier on your show about the long effects of covid it destroys social
00:30:54.160trust and solidarity and sort of social comedy and cancel culture has the same effect there is
00:31:00.480obviously this cultural and social dimension to your story and there's also a media story and i
00:31:06.320I know there's a lawsuit underway that you've waged that touches on this.
00:31:10.680But to further the discussion of just the lack of proportionality, it wasn't enough that, you know, these allegations had you dethroned from your spot as a candidate in perspective MLA.
00:31:21.620But the deplatforming continued long after that.
00:31:24.940Anytime you popped up to tell your story, like on Danielle Smith's show with me, even that was seen as offensive to the mob for you to have the right, even after you've already paid the price, to discuss it.
00:31:36.900Yeah. So this is a plot point in the documentary, but the first public interview I did was on now Premier Daniel Smith's show. And the sort of NDP acolytes Progress Alberta, which was basically a sort of third party advertiser or PAC for the NDP, they put out a petition saying she should be driven off the air.
00:31:59.160she needs to apologize, you know, they're going to go after their advertisers. Former Calgary
00:32:04.140Mayor Nahid Nenshi was apparently was agreeing with the premise of this petition, telling
00:32:08.900reporters that they should boycott her show. And then the person who was behind the accusations
00:32:14.200against me also threatened legal action against them, Karim Devraj. And eventually they capitulated,
00:32:19.540Khorus took down the interview from all their platforms, and something very similar happened
00:32:23.060to you yep that's your cue to elaborate well it's i i don't to be honest i i don't know what more i
00:32:32.000i can say on that i i mean it was it was very difficult for me because when you and i did that
00:32:37.560interview i think it was almost an hour in in length uh it was very difficult to do for me as
00:32:43.260well because i had gone through my own uh experience not as national as yours was in in 2018
00:32:48.700And there was a bit of a catharsis in that conversation.
00:32:51.600And then to have that sort of interview and not just, you know, sort of threatened with
00:32:56.920legal action, but then even when you re-uploaded it on your own platform, that sort of continued
00:33:02.020of, you know, I was sort of asked, why are you letting her do it?
00:33:05.140I was like, I had nothing to do with it.
00:33:06.420But it's, it struck me as just so profound.
00:33:12.440It goes back to what you said about the lack of justice in this, that, you know, even someone
00:33:16.680being able to defend themselves or or even not even defend because the damage had been done but
00:33:21.720to put on record their side of the story was something that was continually taken away and
00:33:29.780it's no it it i don't have words for it it's terrible yes it is and i guess my question to
00:33:39.120you would be how much of that when you had people disowning you when you had media that kind of
00:33:45.100was doing what we just described how much of that was from people that in your view knew it was all
00:33:52.160nonsense and went along with it versus people that actually believed maybe there was a kernel of truth
00:33:57.040to it um yeah the the difference between the expression the the public versus the private
00:34:03.480opinions that people expressed was very stark um cancel culture is uh it's a preference falsification
00:34:09.980machine. Because when you see all these people on Twitter sort of saying terrible things about you,
00:34:16.020attack anyone who dares to defend you, or even sort of withhold judgment about you,
00:34:22.640it creates a climate of terror that leads people to believe, well, it's not safe to support this
00:34:27.560person. Now, that's a false appearance, because Twitter isn't representative of real life,
00:34:31.960media is not representative of real life. In real life, people were, for the most part,
00:34:37.580exceedingly generous kind I still get people to this day who will come up to me and say sorry
00:34:43.820that for what happened to me um and it was the complete opposite in the sort of online and and
00:34:49.860public realm people felt that they could not do this so uh you know the one one of the journalists
00:34:54.960who tried writing a kind of investigative feature story about what what had actually happened here
00:34:59.940he found it was very very challenging to get people willing to go on the record um that they
00:35:05.320would privately say, you know, what an injustice, this is so
00:35:08.320terrible. And they couldn't say so publicly. So, you know, you
00:35:13.360sort of, you know, and speaking of like, where's the kind of the
00:35:17.020moral that you know, the damage, I expect the NDP to behave the
00:35:22.500way they behave, right? In a way, and there's an I have legal
00:35:28.700recourse there. So I've, I've launched a $7 million defamation
00:35:31.840suit against the CBC, the Toronto Star, the NDP, Progress
00:35:34.460Alberta, all the others. Where there's no recourse and where there's no comprehension
00:35:39.740is the betrayal of friends. And I don't know if you've had analogous experiences, but betrayal
00:35:45.720is one of the strangest forms of suffering. It's one that can really turn into an internal
00:35:51.300affliction because it remains incomprehensible. You can never ask people, why did you abandon me
00:35:57.620in my hour of need, right? So that's actually the one that kind of cuts deeper.
00:36:02.880yeah and and it also i mean for in my case it i i was fortunate that it didn't happen hugely the
00:36:09.500bigger issue was people that were the quiet friends but you know they're only quiet friends
00:36:14.000and and the challenge that i experienced was that the way that i could sort of reconcile
00:36:19.440what was happening was that well everyone who knows me knows it's nonsense so so when someone
00:36:24.780who does know you doesn't behave the way most of the people who know you are it does force you to
00:36:29.560sort of question, wait, maybe, and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, and you start
00:36:33.620to internalize some of what other people are saying. And just to be more precise on the media
00:36:38.040side of things, I'll say, and I'm not proud of this by any stretch, but litigation and the threat
00:36:43.340of litigation are very powerful forces. I mean, when a company, be it True North or Chorus, is
00:36:48.620served with a legal notice, I mean, it very much triggers that political impulse of, well,
00:36:54.380you know, making it go away, because not everyone has the capacity or the bandwidth or the funds to
00:36:59.400make everything the hill to die on. So you've actually turned around and have used this process
00:37:05.920to seek justice. And I'm wondering if you were optimistic that that would work.
00:37:11.760With the litigation? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, for context, you and Chorus and one other podcast
00:37:20.480were served with legal notice from Jivraj. Other podcasters were threatened with legal action. He
00:37:24.840never pursued any of that. It's a bluff because everything that I've said was true. And he knows
00:37:29.100that um but uh but you know it's if you're a small outlet that's a potent threat and um but i'm uh
00:37:38.060now two years into discovery uh against some of the nation's biggest media outlets and um obviously i
00:37:45.100can't say too much about that i don't want to breach the implied undertaking rule but um
00:37:51.420i am more optimistic now having learned what i've learned than i was when i started this process
00:37:56.060but it is a long process and it's very costly and you know that's kind of one of the perverse
00:37:59.660ironies of being cancelled is if you're defamed in such a way that makes it difficult to earn a
00:38:04.060livelihood it may take a decade and a half million dollars to use litigation to try to seek redress
00:38:12.060for that so um so that's challenging but like i said i'm optimistic that it's a meritorious case
00:38:19.260we have a clip from the documentary i want to show people and then we'll uh we'll wrap things
00:38:23.820up in a moment but people can take a look at that right now she's surrounding a united
00:38:27.420conservative party candidate has caused her to step down yes uh kaylin ford has resigned as a
00:38:33.100ucp candidate in the riding of calgary mountain view after report claiming she echoed white
00:38:38.460nationalist rhetoric what was shared was her private messages she was engaged in a facebook
00:38:43.980chat with somebody the accusation was that she had said something in a private conversation that
00:38:50.780had echoed the words of white supremacists.
00:38:54.460Kaelin Ford says those Facebook messages were taken out of context.
00:38:58.440The statement did not have one word of contrition, apology, or backing down from those statements.
00:39:04.060The NDP has now started running attack ads, framing the United Conservative Party as intolerant.
00:39:09.840I was utterly shocked to hear of the comments that that candidate, who was of course a star candidate for the UCP, made.
00:39:18.820that is a bit of when the mob came featuring and produced by kaylin ford it comes out tonight
00:39:27.020uh congratulations on this i know this has obviously been four years of your life now and
00:39:32.260as we've discussed the story is still unfolding in in some ways but i'm glad you're standing up
00:39:37.600and talking about this kaylin thanks for coming on today thank you adrew all right that is kaylin
00:39:42.460forward we are just about out of time for today but it is friday so let's go to fake news friday