The Candice Malcolm Show - December 29, 2021


Candice Malcolm and Andrew Lawton discuss the biggest stories of the year


Episode Stats

Length

30 minutes

Words per Minute

205.02565

Word Count

6,288

Sentence Count

354

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary

Candice Malan and Andrew Lawton reflect on the year that was, look back at the biggest stories of the year, and the ones that the media completely ignored, and blew way out of context and out of proportion.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We'll look back at the biggest stories of 2021, both the ones that the legacy media completely
00:00:04.780 ignored and the ones that they blew way out of context and way out of proportion.
00:00:09.020 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:16.140 Everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the program. It's great to have you here. I'm really
00:00:19.880 happy that we're able to provide content throughout the holiday, throughout Christmas. I hope everyone
00:00:24.880 had a wonderful time with their families on Christmas and that you're looking ahead to
00:00:29.080 New Year's. Now, for me, I wanted to bring in my colleague and my friend, Andrew Lawton,
00:00:34.000 to join me to sort of reflect on the year that was, look back at 2021 and talk about the biggest
00:00:39.860 stories of the year. And like I said, the ones that the media ignored, the ones that the media got
00:00:43.200 wrong. So first, Andrew, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the program. Yes, it's happy to be here.
00:00:48.420 Do we still get to say Merry Christmas? I never know when the statute of limitations on Merry
00:00:53.040 Christmases ends. I feel that way with November 11th and Remembrance Day because I love where
00:00:59.000 a poppy. But then I know that the like protocol is that you have to take the poppy off as soon
00:01:03.060 as you go to the Remembrance Day ceremony. But yeah, it's December. You can still say Merry
00:01:06.780 Christmas. Okay. Well, Merry Christmas to you and all those watching.
00:01:10.340 Thank you. Okay. So for the show today, I thought we'd do something a little different,
00:01:13.800 a little fun. And so I asked you to come up with your own answers to these three questions.
00:01:19.400 And then I have my own. So we can sort of compare notes here. But I asked you to bring the what you
00:01:24.000 thought was the top story of the year, what you thought was the top story that the media just
00:01:27.540 didn't cover and completely ignored. And that what you thought was the biggest sort of media
00:01:32.000 narrative lie or the story that the legacy media just got completely wrong over proportion. So
00:01:36.560 so let's start with your your pick. What was your pick for the biggest story of the year in Canada
00:01:42.600 in 2021? So I almost did a cop out at first and just said, well, clearly the election. But to be
00:01:47.720 honest, I think the election was like the smallest story of the year because we all knew it was coming
00:01:52.100 and the result was kind of the same as it was before the election. So I then kind of went back
00:01:57.380 and I ended up on an unconventional choice. So bear with me here. I thought that the flags being at
00:02:02.700 half mass for as long as they were, was one of the bigger stories of the year. And the two reasons I
00:02:08.180 think that are firstly, because it really informs the platitudinal way that Justin Trudeau approaches
00:02:14.660 most policy. And the other side of that was also because it involves so many different dimensions to
00:02:21.160 it. Remember, there was no clear line on when the flags would go back up to full mass. There was no
00:02:26.520 metric. And Aaron O'Toole had spoken out about it and it ended up becoming quite a significant theme
00:02:31.560 in the election and for several months after. So my pick, unconventional, but the flags being at
00:02:37.320 half mass for basically five months. Well, excellent choice. I think I think that there's definitely a
00:02:43.180 narrative around that that that that goes to show where we are as a country, this idea that Canada is a
00:02:48.080 hateful, genocidal, you know, state that's been built on on genocide and slavery and all these
00:02:53.740 things that that's sort of the left's chosen narrative. I don't think very many Canadians buy
00:02:58.420 into it. But there was a study and I think it said that about half of Canadians believe that our
00:03:02.420 country is systemically racist. So clearly, that's something that something is a problem that so many
00:03:09.020 Canadians believe that. And of course, all the hectoring from the media, finding every little
00:03:14.240 example of anything and blowing it out of proportion as if that's a sort of defining feature of Canadian
00:03:19.160 life. But also, Andrew, you know, just to give you credit during the election, you were embedded
00:03:24.580 in the Conservative campaign, you followed them on the campaign trail for a week as a journalist.
00:03:30.980 And one of the probably the highlight for us at True North was you asking this question to Aaron O'Toole
00:03:38.200 and him giving kind of a surprising answer because we know that Aaron O'Toole took a very sort of
00:03:42.980 timid approach. He didn't want to talk about any cultural issues. He didn't want to be seen as
00:03:47.820 defending Canada. He didn't he didn't really take very many Conservative positions at all, to be frank.
00:03:51.820 This was one of the moments of the campaign where he actually did carve out a pretty decent
00:03:55.900 Conservative position because you asked him this very question about about the flags and him saying
00:04:00.340 that, you know, it's time to bring them up. So so so there's a true north element to the story as well.
00:04:04.540 Yeah. And one interesting behind the scenes aspect of that, you know, because I got very friendly with
00:04:10.080 a lot of the reporters that were on the campaign trail and we were all sort of chatting and there
00:04:14.560 was a collective frustration with how many non answers Aaron O'Toole was giving most days when
00:04:20.200 he was asked questions. So it was sort of this this running joke of, oh, well, no news today because he
00:04:24.480 didn't say anything. And this question, he started out as though he was not going to give an answer
00:04:29.960 because he just went through the whole, yes, reconciliation is important. And then it was at the tail end of
00:04:34.460 the answer when everyone has sort of assumed that, OK, it's done. He's not going there.
00:04:38.280 He said, but yeah, it's time for the flags to come up. And there was just this jolt among the press
00:04:43.380 there that were saying, wow, whoa, he's he's making news. He's going for it. So it was a bit surprising,
00:04:49.060 but it ended up becoming the story of the day. And then over the next couple of days, because
00:04:53.080 then the media tried to get Justin Trudeau's response. And eventually, I think it got back where
00:04:57.880 most people, even a lot of people on the left were saying to Trudeau, like, what's the end game here?
00:05:02.700 Right. Like, what is the point other than just doing what Justin Trudeau does best, which is
00:05:06.780 sending empty virtue signals that don't really mean anything, that don't really do anything,
00:05:10.980 but can make him and his liberal followers feel good about something. I don't know. And meanwhile,
00:05:16.640 you know, make make conservatives angry and just say enough is enough. Let's celebrate our country
00:05:20.740 with all its faults. It's not like we're blind to those. We are aware that we're not perfect.
00:05:25.380 All right. Well, for my for my biggest story of the year, I mean, this is sort of two years in a row where
00:05:30.100 COVID is, is everything. COVID is everywhere we look, everything we talk about. There's an element
00:05:35.980 of that. So for me, the biggest story of the year, Andrew, is the enduring presence of COVID in our
00:05:41.100 lives. And not just that, the moving goalposts when it comes to compliance and how we're dealing with
00:05:46.140 it, the sort of, especially in Canada, the media uniformity in the way that these issues are
00:05:50.840 discussed. There's no dissenting opinion allowed whatsoever. And even if you raise some questions,
00:05:57.340 what I found with True North is that the other legacy media journalists sort of turn on you and
00:06:02.160 try to bully you and try to discredit you on social media. We've seen that so much. And interestingly,
00:06:06.600 Andrew, one of the things that COVID has done is it's made conspiracy theorists, made their points
00:06:13.020 validated. We've seen this so many times, like I was looking at an old Justin Ling tweet, right? This is
00:06:17.840 from August 2020. And, you know, he hates us. He hates True North, whatever. And so this particular piece,
00:06:24.020 he is furious at the Toronto Sun column by our colleague, Anthony Fury. And the issue that he's
00:06:31.620 angry about is that he thinks that Andrew, or sorry, he thinks that Anthony is spreading a dangerous
00:06:36.820 conspiracy theory, hinting at the idea that we're going to have a vaccine mandate. And this is my
00:06:41.720 favorite quote here. It says, Anthony Fury, the Toronto Sun and True North crew are actively pushing
00:06:46.920 really, really dangerous misinformation about the pandemic. And they don't really seem to care.
00:06:51.480 So Ling was calling us conspiracy theorists because we were hinting that there might be vaccine
00:06:55.920 passports and vaccine mandates. Of course, that's become true. That's not a conspiracy. That was
00:07:00.680 just us sort of reading the writing on the wall. But, you know, if someone were to stop you, Andrew,
00:07:04.700 in April of 2020, when this thing was first started, when we first started doing our daily shows,
00:07:09.480 a True North update to give updates, if someone would have described what life is like in December
00:07:14.400 of 2021, you wouldn't believe them. You would say, no, that's conspiratorial.
00:07:18.520 They're not going to, you know, have these huge campaigns to force mandate vaccines, fire people
00:07:24.680 who refuse and, you know, then turn around and say, oh, well, these vaccines aren't really working
00:07:30.360 the way that we want them to. So now you're going to have to continue with a booster. Like
00:07:33.220 all of this stuff has happened over the last year. It's really just been dystopian to watch. So
00:07:38.660 and now, of course, we're seeing vaccines rolled out for kids. We're seeing the idea of a forced
00:07:45.200 booster, the revolving door goalposts, moving goalposts with regards to what it means to be
00:07:51.560 fully vaccinated. So the fact that COVID is still such a big deal in our lives, Andrew, to me is
00:07:56.020 the top news story of the year. Yeah. And it's not just the presence of COVID, but as you indicated
00:08:01.380 there, the presence of all these government responses to COVID, which oftentimes are worse
00:08:06.840 than the COVID itself in the sense of what they achieve and what they seek to do. And I think that's
00:08:12.200 that's very poignant. And I wish we could say that we were going to leave this behind us in 2021. But
00:08:16.900 with all the discourse around Omicron and, you know, whatever the next six or seven variants
00:08:20.980 that are being cooked up in Wuhan now are, like, it's going to get worse in 2022, I fear. And I do
00:08:26.840 think that's why it's been so important to have independent media actually talking about some of
00:08:31.180 these stories. And like, I remember at the very beginning when you and I were talking, again, this is
00:08:35.440 2020 now, but we were talking almost in a, like a novelty when you get these stories about, oh, you know,
00:08:41.220 someone ticketed for playing in a public park and they were wrong. But I mean, that was just so
00:08:46.400 small potatoes compared to some of the bigger battles we've seen in 2021 with churches being
00:08:51.180 shut down, pastors being arrested. So no, I would definitely agree that still is the preeminent
00:08:55.860 story of our time. Yeah. So, so I was talking to, I was talking to a scientist friend of mine about
00:09:02.760 COVID the other day, and he said that the trajectory of COVID is exactly what you would want, that every
00:09:07.080 variant spreads more quickly, that it reaches more people, but that it is less impactful. So it's
00:09:12.240 having less of a deadly effect each time. It seems like that's what Omicron is looking like. So
00:09:16.680 instead of saying, okay, this thing is probably run its course. We don't need all of these over
00:09:21.020 heavy handed, overreaching regulations. We can start to just, you know, live with COVID. It seems like
00:09:27.740 our government officials and the sort of expert classes evolved from this whole pandemic. It's like
00:09:33.680 they're just clenching onto control. They don't want to let go of that glory of that power. And
00:09:38.260 it's like, you know, there's no such thing as a temporary government program, right? Now that we've
00:09:41.940 lived with this kind of overreaching government presence in our lives, it's going to be a fight.
00:09:46.820 It's going to be a fight to, to win back our freedoms and to go back to the way that things
00:09:51.840 should be in a free and liberal society. Andrew, so again, just more reasons why this is the biggest
00:09:56.660 story of the year. Okay, let's move on and talk about the biggest stories that the media did not cover.
00:10:02.880 So I'll let you go first with this one, Andrew. What was it? What was your biggest story that the media
00:10:06.620 did not cover? For me, and this is a huge one, Bill C-36. And if that number doesn't ring a bell
00:10:13.160 to you, that's because the media was not giving it much attention. This is the bill that the liberals
00:10:17.700 put forward just before, like literally the day before parliament rose for the summer with the liberals
00:10:23.460 knowing parliament wouldn't go back because they were going to call an election. It's the bill that would
00:10:28.920 put a hate speech in the criminal code or sorry, put a hate speech in the Canadian Human Rights Act
00:10:34.660 and also amend the criminal code to genuinely allow for the prosecution of thought crimes. So this was
00:10:41.020 restoring a formerly repealed section of the Canadian Human Rights Act and actually doing more with it.
00:10:47.120 And this is again, a tremendously dangerous bill, significant implications against free speech on face
00:10:53.680 value. It's in the text of the bill. And the media coverage on it was virtually non-existent.
00:10:59.320 And part of that was because the political opposition was virtually non-existent. Darren O'Toole did not
00:11:04.560 utter a word about this when it was released. He did in the campaign come out in the platform and say
00:11:10.400 that he would oppose such measures, but did not utter a word at all. There was talk about Bill C-10,
00:11:15.500 sure. But Bill C-36, which was much worse, was ignored by the conservative establishment
00:11:20.720 and completely ignored by the legacy media as well.
00:11:25.260 Which is pretty wild because, you know, you'd think that the purpose of a free press is to defend
00:11:30.040 sort of the basic freedoms associated with freedom of speech, freedom of the press. And yet
00:11:34.220 they didn't want anything to do with it. I think there's been this weird narrative built up,
00:11:37.940 Andrew, that somehow there's these dangerous right-wing forces that exist online that somehow pose a threat
00:11:44.200 to society or that it could lead to political violence or something like that, even though
00:11:48.540 there's not really any evidence, any evidence that I can see that these shadow groups really exist in
00:11:53.660 the way that the media and the liberal government describe them. What do you think is behind this?
00:11:58.660 Why is Justin Trudeau doing this? He's a liberal. He's supposed to care about the charter. The very
00:12:03.160 first thing listed in the charter is freedom of speech and freedom of press. So why is he doing this,
00:12:11.240 do you think? Well, I think there are two things there. Number one, the government knows that when
00:12:17.960 it uses words like hate speech, they're kind of like assault rifle, which is that people hear them
00:12:22.460 and they conjure an image of what they are that isn't inherently accurate. And most people would
00:12:27.340 say, well, yeah, of course I'm against hate speech. Okay. Ergo, if you're going after hate speech,
00:12:30.980 that's fine. But the reality is those terms lack meaning and they're very political because the
00:12:36.760 government can use them to apply them to whatever they want. So I'm all, I'm against hate speech as
00:12:41.660 well. I think hate speech is deplorable, but you and I may have different definitions of what hate
00:12:46.180 speech is. Certainly Justin Trudeau and I are going to have different definitions of what hate speech is.
00:12:51.080 And I would take the view that even if speech is hateful and deplorable, that doesn't mean it is not
00:12:55.660 protected by free speech. So I think that one of the big explanations to address your question there of
00:13:02.040 the why is because they can. It's wild. It's almost like everything the liberals do. I just
00:13:08.360 cynically think the purpose is to try to trap the conservatives. So they presume that a principled
00:13:13.480 conservative opposition will say, no, no, no, we believe in free speech. We believe in these
00:13:17.900 principles and, and sort of make the case as to why you don't really want to just outright ban this
00:13:23.320 stuff. Because if you take an idea, you ban it, it's just going to push it underground. It's going to
00:13:27.700 make it seem more appealing. And that idea will spread that the best way to combat real hate speech
00:13:32.480 is through daylight, right? The daylight is the best disinfectant they say. And so a principled
00:13:37.540 opposition would make this case. Whereas we don't have that in this country. We don't have that with
00:13:42.460 Erin O'Toole. And so instead, Erin O'Toole just says, okay, whatever you want. And we've seen that
00:13:47.720 with multiple bills. And we saw that earlier in December with the quote unquote, so called conversion
00:13:54.860 therapy bill, which really just banned conversations that people might have with, even with a registered
00:14:01.180 therapist, if they're confused about their gender or their sexual orientation, that's now illegal.
00:14:05.600 And all the conservatives were jumping up and down for joy that this bill got unanimous consent. So
00:14:09.880 the problem is that we don't have a real opposition in this country because the conservatives are so
00:14:15.080 desperate to be loved by the media and sort of fancy people like the liberals, that they're not
00:14:21.060 doing the job they're supposed to be doing, which is opposing the government.
00:14:25.580 Yeah. And I think you're right to point out the conservative default position of being timid. I
00:14:30.500 think that's so huge. And also I think related to that is that in order to take a principled stand
00:14:35.680 for free speech, you need to defend some very unpopular and unpalatable things. Now I have no issue
00:14:41.120 doing that, not because I defend the merit of the comments, but because I defend the right for people
00:14:46.120 to say unpalatable things. That's the whole point of free speech. But there are a lot of people,
00:14:50.660 certainly in the political class that are not comfortable standing up for things that on their
00:14:55.080 surface are bad because they don't want to have to own that. And I think it's actually more important
00:14:59.660 to then return to the principled stand, because if you're consistent in supporting free speech as a
00:15:05.680 general concept, as a general ethos, then you don't need to get into the details of, oh, what about this
00:15:10.700 comment and what I have said that you don't need to because you're consistent. So I don't even engage
00:15:15.000 on the specific merit. Same as when we were talking about individuals that have been
00:15:19.240 deplatformed. And someone would say, well, do you agree with them saying X? And I say,
00:15:23.120 I don't care. I don't care what they say. It could be, you know, Mahatma Gandhi speaking. It could be
00:15:28.180 Mother Teresa. It could be Milo Yiannopoulos. There's a trio that is one for the ages. It doesn't
00:15:33.580 matter if you're consistent about it and you focus on the importance of freedom. You don't need to get
00:15:38.020 dragged into that. But the conservatives have never quite been on sure enough footing to do that.
00:15:42.860 Well, these conservatives, no. But I think the broader issue, of course, is the media narrative
00:15:48.240 that they don't want. They know that the media will frame it exactly how the liberals have asked,
00:15:52.640 exactly what the liberals say. And so exactly to your point, rather than, you know, the headline
00:15:57.420 being Aaron O'Toole defends free speech, it will be Aaron O'Toole defends this horrible, horrible Nazi
00:16:03.080 who said this deplorable thing, which, you know, Aaron O'Toole might not be sophisticated enough to fight
00:16:08.160 back against that. He wants to avoid any mention of that. But in the process, he is completely
00:16:13.000 selling out conservative principles and putting us in a dangerous position as a country where we
00:16:17.500 don't have anyone to fight back against these horrific assaults on our freedom, Andrew. So good choice.
00:16:23.800 I tend to agree. My biggest story of the year, to me, has to be the assault on Christians in this
00:16:29.240 country. And we've alluded to it a little bit. This is pretty wild, Andrew, because it's particularly
00:16:33.540 happening in Western Canada. You would think the Western Canada of the whole country would be
00:16:38.080 the sort of least likely place where we would see these sort of sustained attacks on Christians.
00:16:42.420 But I'm talking about two stories in particular. The first is the arrest and prosecution of a
00:16:47.500 handful of pastors, mostly in Alberta. We had Artur Poloski, we had Tim Stevens, and then another
00:16:53.020 fellow pastor in Manitoba named Tobias Thyssen, who was arrested, all of whom, there are probably
00:16:59.560 others as well. I don't know if you can think of any others, Andrew, but there were so many that were
00:17:03.480 arrested for the crime of holding church services. And a lot of times this was, you know, at the same
00:17:08.700 point where something else was open. You could go to a restaurant, you could go to a sports arena,
00:17:13.140 you could do all kinds of things. We're starting to open up again. And yet, for some reason, we are
00:17:16.820 still going after a religious sacred ceremony for people in a time where we need hope, where we need
00:17:24.780 community. And the fact that they were arresting and making examples out of these pastors was
00:17:29.560 despicable, Andrew. In fact, you know, if this was happening in another country, you would see
00:17:33.860 conservative leaders, people like Jason Kenney, I hope people like Aaron O'Toole, speaking out
00:17:37.860 against it, if we're seeing this happen in China or, you know, in somewhere in the Middle East.
00:17:42.420 Yeah, it's happening in Canada, and no one bats an eye at it. And of course, the media doesn't cover it.
00:17:48.400 And then the sort of other story that had to do with Christians was the burning and desecration
00:17:54.640 of dozens and dozens of churches across Canada in the summer. And, you know, sometimes it was
00:18:00.300 barely reported. It was reported as a local story. And none of it was ever tied together. We at True
00:18:05.180 North, of course, took the opposite approach. We had a story called a map of the churches that had
00:18:10.820 been vandalized or burned since residential school story announcement. We kept updating this piece
00:18:16.220 as it came. At this point, there were 68 churches across the country that were either burnt to the
00:18:22.340 ground or desecrated. And again, this was one of our biggest news stories on our website this year
00:18:28.040 because no one else was doing this. No other media outlet was keeping track of them or giving you a
00:18:32.280 tally or giving you maps and filling Canadians in in the way that they clearly wanted because this
00:18:37.360 was such a big story for us. Andrew, but again, this sustained assault on Christianity and its
00:18:42.880 institutions and its house of worship and the fact that the media was just nowhere to be found.
00:18:47.980 Yeah, it's the last acceptable prejudice. I mean, there have been stories in the last few years
00:18:51.980 when someone has vandalized a mosque or a synagogue, which is also deplorable. And Justin
00:18:58.260 Trudeau will put out a statement. He'll condemn it. He'll call an address. He might even go and visit
00:19:03.640 the site of it and have a meeting and talk about the importance of fighting against Islamophobia and
00:19:08.100 in some cases, anti-Semitism. But when dozens of churches had been burned, had been vandalized,
00:19:13.540 had been threatened, he was literally completely silent. I don't just mean he didn't say a lot. I mean,
00:19:18.920 for the longest time, for weeks, he was completely and utterly silent, had no condemnation,
00:19:24.740 finally gave a half-hearted one when it became such a bigger story. I think thanks in large part
00:19:30.500 to the reporting of True North and other independent media outlets. And then as well,
00:19:35.440 you had that lawyer or the head of the BC Civil Liberties Union saying that, you know,
00:19:41.460 we should burn it all down. And that was something that, again, was met with a lot of defense and support
00:19:46.100 from several of the elites in the civil liberties world or so-called civil liberties world and
00:19:51.860 government. So this is a very real problem. And, you know, in Ontario, we had two churches,
00:19:57.920 notably, actually three. There was Harvest in Windsor. There was Trinity Bible Chapel in the
00:20:02.960 Kitchener-Waterloo area. Church of God in Elmer down in Elgin County. Churches that had their doors
00:20:08.740 locked on them because they were refusing to comply with measures that were restricting them but not
00:20:15.140 restricting the grocery store and the liquor store. It's so wild. Such a double standard,
00:20:20.680 Andrew. And you say it's the last acceptable prejudice. I agree, except for now there's an
00:20:26.180 even newer and more acceptable prejudice, and that is against unvaccinated people. That's like the only
00:20:31.320 group that we're allowed to. Yeah, that puts you at the very, very bottom of the totem pole.
00:20:36.320 Okay, let's move on to the last question I had for you, Andrew, which is, so we talked about the
00:20:43.340 stories that the media did not cover, but we know that the media is mostly just guilty of creating
00:20:47.980 these total fake narratives that just have no connection to real life. And they're so easy to
00:20:54.360 pick apart that it's sort of self-explanatory. But I wanted you to pick out what you thought was the
00:20:59.540 biggest story of the year that the media either got completely wrong or they completely blew out of
00:21:03.560 proportion. I think the, for me, this was a slam dunk, the People's Party of Canada. Now, at first,
00:21:09.620 this was one that the media didn't cover. When Maxie Bernier launched his campaign, I was at the
00:21:14.880 press conference he did in Ottawa, and there were a bunch of reporters there. He took like 40 minutes
00:21:19.680 of questions. And then at the end of it, no one really ran any stories. No one actually ran any of
00:21:25.600 the coverage. And for the longest time, we were seeing polls that had Bernier up at 9%, 10%, 12%
00:21:31.820 in Alberta and parts of Ontario. It was up even higher than that. And the media was just completely
00:21:37.960 doing a blackout. We know he wasn't in the debate. And it was only near the end of the campaign when
00:21:43.900 people realized this wasn't a blip, that the media started to pay attention, but even then didn't
00:21:48.660 really understand or seek to understand where it was coming from. They didn't understand that a big
00:21:53.660 part of the PPC support was not coming from disgruntled conservatives, but was coming from
00:21:58.240 people that had been traditional non-voters, people that had voted green or NDP. In past elections,
00:22:04.320 a lot of natural living types that were against vaccine mandates because of their own personal
00:22:10.020 ethos that are not politically conservative. So there was a very diverse support base there. And we
00:22:16.740 covered not just the conservative campaign, but also the PPC campaign. I was on the road with Maxine
00:22:22.140 Bernier for a few days in Alberta and saw this coalition that the media just simply wasn't
00:22:27.600 covering. Well, no, it's so true. And then even to add another element onto that, when the media
00:22:34.640 finally did start covering Bernier and the PPC, they did it in such a condescending, mean-spirited,
00:22:42.060 disauthentic, unauthentic way because they painted these people as if they were anti-vaxxers or anti-science
00:22:51.200 or quacks, like fringe far right. We saw a lot of stories that had that undertone that really,
00:22:56.780 instead of trying to understand and respect Canadian voters who are part of a political
00:23:01.740 trend, even if it's a political trend that you don't have respect for, instead of doing that,
00:23:06.780 the media just completely took the worst of the worst and held that up as an example of who these
00:23:12.580 voters were. I can't imagine them treating Green Party voters or NDP parties with party voters
00:23:18.660 with such disdain the way that they showed towards the PPC.
00:23:23.100 No, not at all. And I mean, just the imbalance there of the Greens versus the PPC, I think is
00:23:27.880 interesting because the Green Party was just in a perpetual state of turmoil that involved the
00:23:33.040 resignation. And well, it was going to be an expulsion, but I think she resigned before they
00:23:37.280 got to her of Anna Mae Paul. But the Green Party was still being treated as though it was just this
00:23:42.240 entirely normal, happy, peaceable alternative to the mainstream party is when the Green Party
00:23:48.120 paled in comparison to the PPC. And again, this is not an endorsement of PPC. I don't have a stand,
00:23:54.620 I don't endorse any party, but I'm all about endorsing the idea of covering the PPC and covering
00:24:01.120 the narratives. And the mainstream media certainly was ignoring what was happening there, which we know
00:24:05.820 from the numbers was not as significant as those 12%, 13%, 14% polls were suggesting, but was still
00:24:12.060 a pretty significant trend in the election. Absolutely. And the fact that Bernier wasn't
00:24:17.220 allowed into the debate. So you had this ridiculous spectacle where you had Anna Mae Paul, who doesn't
00:24:22.420 really have any political background. You could tell that she was really out of her depth when asked
00:24:26.400 about any issue that wasn't related to the environment. And then they wouldn't let Maxine Bernier,
00:24:30.540 who's a former cabinet minister, almost the leader of the Conservative Party, he lost by a hair.
00:24:35.000 Could you imagine, Andrew, if someone came that close to winning the liberal leadership and then
00:24:40.080 ended up splitting off and forming their own sort of liberal adjacent party? The media would be all
00:24:44.740 over it. That person would be a star. But of course, because it's a conservative on the right,
00:24:47.960 they had to come up with the worst accusations and really, really just malign him with character
00:24:54.920 assassinations that didn't suit, didn't actually have any living connection to Bernier and what he
00:25:02.600 actually was about and what he actually stood for. So I tend to agree with your choice. Well,
00:25:06.920 for my choice, Andrew, I'm sort of going to bring this whole episode full circle because I think
00:25:10.760 that the biggest story that the media got wrong and blew out of proportion was the story of the
00:25:15.700 mass graves at residential schools. And I say that tongue in cheek because there were, of course,
00:25:19.680 no mass graves found at residential schools. The story, you know, when it first came out,
00:25:24.760 it was really vague and unclear. And I think that the way that the uncertainty sort of compounded
00:25:31.620 with reporters filling in their own words. So, you know, the original news release from the
00:25:36.820 T'Kem Loops Band was, we have discovered graves at our school, basically at this former site of
00:25:44.220 residential school. We use ground penetrating radar. Nobody really knew what that meant. So the
00:25:48.660 headlines were saying bodies were discovered, graves were dug up, you know, children's remains
00:25:54.120 were found. They were found in mass graves. There was just a huge disconnect from what the media was
00:26:00.080 writing. Well, it wasn't just Canadian media. It was a global media. It was BBC, New York Times,
00:26:04.840 Washington Post, all of these big outfits, as well as the CBC and Globe and Mail and Post Media in
00:26:10.420 Canada, completely botching the story. And then it kind of took on a life of its own where, you know,
00:26:17.220 everyone had to agree that Canada had committed genocide. Everyone had to agree that this was a crime
00:26:22.360 against humanity. And everyone had to agree that Canada was awful. We're going to cancel Canada
00:26:26.160 today. And to bring it back to the first story we talked about, that we were going to lower that flag
00:26:31.000 and basically just hang our heads and shave. Of course, none of that was wrong. When they finally
00:26:35.040 got around to the presentation by the scientists about the ground penetrating radar, we learned that
00:26:41.540 the science is really unclear, that the researchers themselves said that there was no way to know how many
00:26:45.960 people were buried, whether they were children or adults, whether they had anything to do with the
00:26:49.900 residential school. Their estimate wasn't 215, as every media outlet had reported. It was probably
00:26:56.120 more like 200. And then, you know, all of the other stories that came out of it, other reserves making
00:27:03.000 similar accusations. You know, we heard from people in their community saying, well, you know, these
00:27:08.520 graves were found in a graveyard. They used to be marked, but the gravestones eroded over time. And we
00:27:14.920 don't know whose graves these belonged to. This was also a community cemetery. And one of the cases
00:27:20.640 in Lower Kootenay, the cemetery predated the residential school by about 30 years. And it was
00:27:25.080 actually associated with a hospital and not with a residential school. So there's just so many holes
00:27:29.560 in the story, Andrew, that the narrative just bared no similarity whatsoever to the facts on the
00:27:35.740 ground. At times, I felt like I was one of the only reporters in the entire country that was even
00:27:39.400 bothering to look into this stuff. And again, because of that, this was a huge story for us at True
00:27:44.500 North. My report, Six Things of Legacy Media Got Wrong, also became one of the biggest sites
00:27:50.040 in the history of our website. So I think that Canadians started to sort of see through the myth
00:27:54.980 and realize that there's more to the story than the ridiculous narrative headlines that were being
00:28:00.020 pushed by legacy media. Yeah. And I think you did absolutely tremendous work on that. And I'm still
00:28:05.780 very proud to have been not on those projects because you were taking the lead on it, but to have been
00:28:09.960 working with you in general as you worked on this. Because one of the big challenges, and you
00:28:14.100 mentioned the word narrative there is important, is that you can't let facts get in the way of a
00:28:18.640 narrative to a lot of the people that are pushing narratives. That's the attitude they take. And I
00:28:23.200 would say it's entirely possible to deplore residential schools and Canada's past treatment
00:28:28.000 of Indigenous people, while also raising questions in a journalistic fashion about any allegation that's
00:28:33.500 made about anything. And I do think that the deference that we are expected to take on the Indigenous
00:28:40.200 file is something that very much clouded the mainstream media's willingness to ask questions
00:28:46.240 that would be asked about any other group making a claim. If you say, you know, so-and-so murdered my
00:28:51.240 daughter. Asking for details about that has nothing to do with not believing or challenging. It's doing
00:28:56.760 your job. It's doing your due diligence. And there was, I think, a lot of fear, a lot of fear that
00:29:02.580 anything you do to poke around and ask questions and try to demand proof was going to be stepping on
00:29:09.360 the toes of the Indigenous communities, which media did not want to do.
00:29:14.020 And it's sort of a sad state where we would rather just take these terrible accusations against our
00:29:19.220 country at face value than bother doing a little bit of journalism. Because, of course, I agree.
00:29:23.840 Like, I'm the last person to defend a residential school program. It was a big government-centralized
00:29:28.440 program that sought to break up families. That's complete opposite of what conservatives believe
00:29:35.420 in and want. But at the same time, it's like, I care about the truth and I care about facts. And I
00:29:39.900 think that that is sort of what led, you're right, that's what should lead all journalists. And the
00:29:44.240 fact that it was just True North, maybe a few other L's, but hardly, not even. I didn't even really see
00:29:49.820 post-media pick up this issue other than my own reports in post-media. So really, a chill over the
00:29:56.560 legacy media out there because no one really wanted to be seen poking around on this issue
00:30:01.840 and raising questions. Well, again, Andrew, I think that all of these stories we talked about
00:30:06.940 just confirmed the reason why True North exists, the reason why True North is doing so well,
00:30:11.500 the reason why True North is growing, and we have a bigger audience than ever. And, you know,
00:30:14.940 you've been with us pretty much since the very beginning. And it's so great to watch our team
00:30:19.020 expand and continue to grow and, you know, the reports that you and I do continue to have the reach.
00:30:25.040 So I just want to say, yeah, it's great to have you on the team. It's great to have you
00:30:28.380 part of True North, the leading force here. And thank you so much for joining the show today.
00:30:33.500 Hey, it's my pleasure. Thanks for all your work.
00:30:36.440 All right. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Candice Belcom, and this is The Candice Belcom Show.