Fake News Friday ｜ CTV News is LITERALLY fake news!
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of Fake News Friday, host Andrew Lawton and co-host Harrison Faulkner discuss an error at CTV News that could only be described as the worst in the history of fake news, and how the media covered it up.
Transcript
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Welcome everyone to another edition of Fake News Friday.
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Finding our way through the blizzard of lies that so often is heaped upon us by politicians and the mainstream media alike.
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I am Andrew Lawton. It is Friday, October 28th.
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And I'm joined, as always, by Harrison Faulkner, who you can normally catch on Ratioed.
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And Harrison has been dutifully and diligently watching the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings all week, as have I.
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And you're still awake. You've managed to survive to Friday.
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It's been difficult. I mean, I think you touched on it on your show yesterday, Wednesday, what day it was, that, you know, this has been, there are parts of it that are extremely exciting.
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And then there are parts of it that are just so dull, so difficult to get through.
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And I feel like they're kind of, at a lot of times, they're trying to muddy the waters and slow things down.
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But it's been, you know what, it's been really eye-opening.
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And I think we're going to, there's some, there's some reporting that we're going to talk about on the show today that just shows you where the different sides of the media are coming from this.
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And where the narratives are coming at and what, what people are trying to do.
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It's really, one side is trying to get to the bottom of the Emergencies Act.
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And then a bunch of other sides of this are trying to just cover for their clients, right?
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Trying to make sure that they can clean their hands of this mess and try and pin the blame on somebody else.
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But all that is to say that on the show, it's sometimes difficult, Andrew, to find great examples of fake news.
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And then sometimes, some weeks, we get literal fake news.
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Like actual, just fake reporting into our hands that just land to us.
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And we all of a sudden have a full show full of actual examples of fake news.
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Not that other shows aren't fully fake news, but this one, this one's pretty good.
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I've never seen actually this many examples of just straight up fake news, quite literally fake news.
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And first off, let me congratulate the new mayor-elect of Winnipeg, Mr. Glenn Murray.
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Glenn Murray had been elected mayor of Winnipeg in Wednesday night's election.
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And if you look at the results, it looked pretty close.
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Not something you'd want to necessarily be calling that early.
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Then CTV, of course, ends up deleting it and says,
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CTV News has deleted a previous tweet saying Glenn Murray was declared elected by the CTV News decision desk.
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As more polls come in, as of now, CTV News is not declaring a mayoral winner in Winnipeg.
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It wasn't just like the Jerry Lewis or the Jerry Lee Lewis obituary that they just like accidentally published before they should have.
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No, this was one where their decision desk, whatever that is at CTV Winnipeg, had decided that he had won and was very far off the mark there.
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No, well, and I have to say when I was watching this unfold, I had a little bit of sympathy because I didn't fully, I thought it might have been an error.
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Like I thought, you know, here's a little secret for people who don't know this.
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A lot of these articles are pre-written before the actual results are out so you can get stuff up when it happens.
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And so I thought at the moment, I thought, oh, you know, this is a bad mistake from some junior editor somewhere.
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Yeah, they just published like a few minutes too early or something.
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And then, but then, but then they put the tweet up, Andrew.
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So they published the article and then they put the tweet up as well, basically making it seem as though to the poor Glenn Murray camp who had their fleeting moment of Glenn Murray's mayoralty of Winnipeg was, was short.
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It ended quickly on that same night because he had won, but then he had lost because CTV just made a big error there.
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And I think there was, there was talk about how this had happened, I think, in Quebec City previously or another Quebec City where the, the news covering the event called the wrong winner and then had to pull it back and then, and then figure it all out.
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But I'm just trying to figure out where, how are these decision makers getting the, getting these stuff, getting this stuff wrong, Andrew?
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How, how are they making this point where they, they call a winner and then they have enough, it's, it's close enough for it to keep going and it goes to somebody else.
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And it's not just a, it's not just an error by a junior editor.
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They published the article, then they put the tweet up after just to, just to rub salt in their own wound, I guess.
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I'm not sure what was going on over there at CTV Winnipeg.
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Yeah, like the cable news outlets have people that are experts in statistics and mathematics and people that know the political histories and they're comparing county demographics to past election results.
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And when they make a decision that, you know, Joe Biden has won Iowa or something, they're, they're doing it with all of that.
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And it's not to say they don't get it wrong sometimes.
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I know in the last election, there was a lot of controversy about Fox calling Arizona for Biden, even though that ended up being right ultimately.
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And with all due respect to the people of Winnipeg and CTV Winnipeg, I don't know how sophisticated the decision desk is at Winnipeg.
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Like, I don't know if CTV Winnipeg's decision desk has all of the quants with their numbers or if it's just like a guy named Joe who just kind of looks and says, yeah, that, that, that looks like a Murray.
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I said that, I think that's the big challenge here.
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A lot was hinging, or her, a lot was hinging on that person at the decision desk.
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Maybe, Andrew, it was one of those things where the, the, the, the guy making the counting, the, doing the counting for CTV News had some plans later in the evening.
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And then turns out, well, they, they called the race wrong.
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And like I said, it doesn't come around that, that often.
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You have to say they're not, they're not this, this bad, right?
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But when it, when it does happen, it deserves mockery.
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That's, it's not just a, it's not just a little error by somebody, a junior, a junior
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So Scott Gillingham is the mayor of Winnipeg and Glenn Murray is desperately trying to put
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corks back in champagne bottles so he can get the refund at the local liquor store there.
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Uh, let's move one province east from Manitoba to Ontario, where some of you are looking at
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Uh, Doug Ford, as we know last week was issued a summons to testify before the public order
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emergency commission, as was his former solicitor general, Sylvia Jones.
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Now, Sylvia Jones has come down with COVID in the last day, which I presume is the same
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strain of COVID that Justin Trudeau got when the truckers came to Ottawa and wanted to meet
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So it's a very, very pervasive train right when your presence is needed somewhere, it hits
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Uh, but Doug Ford doesn't have the convenient excuse of COVID to not testify.
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He's just saying he doesn't want to and doesn't think he should have to.
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But here's where the fake news Friday material comes from, because when Doug Ford was previously
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discussing this, he was rather clear that the reason he wasn't testifying is because
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So he said that he had never been asked right at a press conference standing with Justin
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He said while standing side by side with Justin Trudeau, that he stood shoulder to shoulder
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with Justin Trudeau over his invocation of the emergencies act.
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And when asked by reporters why he wasn't testifying at the emergencies act commission,
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given that the Ottawa mayor and the entire senior federal cabinet pretty much is also
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testifying, including the prime minister, he was noticeably absent from the witness list
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So reporters started asking him, what are you, what are you, why are you not testifying
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And he plainly and flatly said to reporters, I have not been asked to testify.
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I don't think it's that, I don't think we need to get a transcript here and parse through
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Doug Ford saying, I have not been asked to testify at the emergencies act commission.
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Now, again, we're going to go through this because you'll realize that there's some,
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there's some, there's some games being played by the media here.
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Some who are trying to basically, I think, kind of sweep under the rug.
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The fact that Doug Ford is now, has now two different, completely different stories in
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Again, he's saying he was never asked to testify.
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So here's that clip that he was never asked to testify while standing beside Justin Trudeau.
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I'm going to ask this question to Premier Ford.
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Going back to my colleague, Kevin Gallagher's question, how come Premier Ford, you're not
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We have top officials from the OPP that were running the operation with conjunction with
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And I am so proud to stand here and back our police right across this country and right
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Then the emergencies act commission summoned Premier Ford and Sylvia Jones.
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So they said, we've tried to get you to come here twice now.
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So because of that, we're now summoning you to appear under oath.
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Again, that kind of flies in the face of what Doug Ford had been saying, which was he had
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The emergencies act commission now says he has, they sent him two invitations to testify and
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The story has all of a sudden changed from Doug Ford, but here's where CP24 and fake news
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Listen to this CP24 report on October 24th, talking about the summons that Doug Ford had
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received and listen, listen carefully at about 20 seconds in to what the journalist says regarding
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Doug Ford, having been told by the commission to testify.
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Lawyers for the Public Order Emergency Commission say they asked Ford and Jones to sit down last
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month, but both of them refused multiple requests.
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Last week, Ford told reporters he'd been asked to appear.
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A letter sent from the commission says it believes Ford and Jones have relevant evidence to the
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However, the attorney general's office says it plans to fight the summons.
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So the journalist there in the CP24 report says very clearly, Doug Ford told reporters
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Now we can go back to the other clip and we can listen to that, but one more time, I'm
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pretty sure the premier says, I was never asked to testify by the Emergencies Act Commission.
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I'm trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong here.
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How could CP24 tell the people, tell people in Toronto and their audience that Doug Ford
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I mean, again, this is another example of straight fake news and it's kind of gone under the
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radar because it's just one little slip of a word in a two-second clip on CP24, but these
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things matter to me and I think it deserves to be called out.
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It's the old Groucho Marx thing that CP24 is now appropriated as its slogan.
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Who are you going to believe, us or your lion eyes?
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So it doesn't matter what you saw and heard yourself from Doug Ford.
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We're telling you, no, no, no, he said he was invited.
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But I think in general, there's a bigger issue right now in the media not really holding
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And this is a guy who I think has been sucking up to Justin Trudeau, who's been sucking up
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And right now, maybe I'm just in my own little echo chamber here, but I've been looking and
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I'm not even seeing all of the, I'm not even seeing much of the questioning of him at those
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opportunities where the press can put questions to Doug Ford about it.
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It seems like he took the right position and now he's getting a pass.
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It's very strange to me, again, and just in regards to the Sylvia Jones excuse, I'm just
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checking my calendar and it appears, Andrew, that I have COVID next week, which is going
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to be very convenient for me so I can take some much needed time off myself.
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But again, you said that Ford won't have that excuse.
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And like you said, the media are not calling him out for blatantly telling them something
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that isn't the case, for trying to go with a line that is just not true.
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It's strange to me that in a different day or in a different time, Doug Ford would be
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raked over the coals for trying to get away with this from the media.
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But we're in this strange time right now where Doug Ford seems to be getting a pass from the
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The NDP in the Ontario NDP and the legislature are trying to do their best to hold his feet
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But it seems they're the only people that are doing this right now.
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I do have to say, I saw on Wednesday night a great rant from Breakfast Television co-host
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Sid Cicero, who usually has some pretty good takes.
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I consider him to be pretty much down the line on a lot of this stuff.
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He's an equal opportunity slanderer, which I actually appreciate in politics.
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And he actually put Ford right in his place and made it very clear that you can't just
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get away with saying one thing one week and then the exact opposite the next.
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And he used that word, which I think is appropriate because it's time that Doug Ford gets called
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I don't understand what he's running for, what he's running from and why he's refusing
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It seems and looks very shady and it doesn't make him look like he's some total neutral
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This is a bit of a weird topic because it goes back to one we, I can't remember if we
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did it on this show a couple of weeks ago or if it was just on my show or if it was just
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But it'll be a story that's a couple of weeks old now, which is the somehow losing the ability
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to speak English under oath when you've been testifying under oath in English for several
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hours and using words like specificity and microaggression.
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That was Ottawa City Councillor Matthew Fleury.
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But sometimes the opinion columnists are a little bit late to the party here.
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And by the time I publish it, other people have moved on.
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In this particular case, the Toronto Star in a piece on the 26th, so that was Wednesday
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of this week, took aim at francophobia at the Emergencies Act inquiry.
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It was a piece contributed by Isabel Bourgot-Tasset, which I believe is an Irish Chinese name, if
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But Isabel Bourgot-Tasset says that francophony meets francophobia at the Emergencies Act inquiry.
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It's disquieting absence of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis languages, manifestations of
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Canada's troubling linguistic pecking order, emblematic of the country's colonial history.
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That one just like got a straight line, a box, the four corners, diagonal line, everything.
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And what I find interesting about this, the column just goes on to talk about, you know,
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Matthew Fleury's francophone, anglophone distinction and all of that.
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But it's like, of all the things you take from that, like we made fun of the language thing,
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but it wasn't actually like the central thesis of the Public Order Emergency Commission's work.
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It's like that, like you just have to be really looking for a grievance.
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If you've been watching the, what is it, 11, 12 days of testimony now, and that's the one
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thing you've taken from it is they're francophobes.
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I think sometimes if you're really plugged into the day-to-day news and it's your job to
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And I think all of us at certain points fall victim to that.
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Just analyze, overanalyzing things and reading too deep into them.
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The reality is, as we all know, Matthew Fleury just miraculously forgot how to speak English
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when he was put in his place and asked to define a word that he had accused truckers of,
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The second he was asked to define that, he breaks out the whole I'm francophone for the
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first time, I should say, in the, in the hearing.
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The only time he broke that out was when he was being cross-examined by Brendan Miller,
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So very, very, very creative excuse to just decide, actually, I'm not going to be able to
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And I'm going to go back to speaking English just fine without an accent.
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without a problem, right after, right after I'm done being questioned by someone I don't
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And that's really what, what this is all about.
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You talked about the, the woke bingo card, the fact that, you know, it will be an instant
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Those aren't even all, those aren't even all like the sort of fake words they're putting
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There's one here, Anglo normativity, which I haven't heard before.
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It's like this idea, I guess, I guess it's, it's becoming too normal, Andrew, to speak
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Last time I checked, I think English is, uh, is the dominant language spoken in Canada.
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So I guess in that, in that, in that instance, Canada is far too Anglo normative.
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And I guess the point of this whole article is to basically say that we are far, we, we,
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we speak too much English in this country and it's not right.
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At the beginning, this writer says that along with the fact that English is always first
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and French follows, it's in tandem with the curious disquieting absence of First Nations,
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And I'm just trying to figure this out, Andrew.
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Like, are we supposed, is this article trying to basically tell us that we need to have,
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um, Inuit, Métis and First Nations languages, um, in government documents, in more public
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Like, is that going to help us better understand things that are going on?
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And the reality is you don't always have to defend people for, you know, absurd things
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that they're doing that are, that are obviously absurd.
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I think it's very, it would be the average position for anyone who hears this will say,
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This guy sounds like he's just bitter and trying to avoid answering questions.
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We don't need to have some great big Francophone, Anglophone debate over this.
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It's clear that Matthew Fleur was obviously playing around, trying to mess around, and
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he got called out for it by Miller, who, who, who rightly said, if he was asked to speak
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French, he reintroduced himself as je m'appelle Brendan.
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The perfect response, in my opinion, Andrew, to such a ridiculous thing to try and try and
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pull like that, as if, as if no one was really paying attention.
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I mean, look, the grievances that, and I believe the writer is a Franco-Ontarian, and she's
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even more of a linguistic minority than being a Quebecois French speaker.
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But the reality is, we can say we're an officially bilingual country, but functionally, English
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You, it would be very difficult for you to get by by speaking only French.
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And even then, you can probably get away with it if you have certain jobs in Quebec where
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you can just pretend you don't speak English, which I'm convinced is what, like, all of the
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Quebec civil servants I've encountered are doing.
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But generally speaking, I mean, there are people that just, like, don't like that they
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lost in 1763, and that this is an English-dominant country.
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And it's not to say that if he were genuinely struggling, that he should have been given
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But the issue is, it was only at that precise moment that he lost the ability to speak in
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But nevertheless, this is from the Toronto Star.
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We all, I mean, I think that was a lighter note, but we always tend to end on lighter
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So we're talking about CP24 to end off the show this week.
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We had a great example of CP24 being, you know, pushing fake news, but we're not done
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And it's worth just reading the headline of this story so you guys, you can understand
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The headline reads, Mountie wears thin blue line patch while escorting man convicted of hate
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So again, the story could be about the man convicted of hate crime, what he did wrong
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and trying to understand that as that's usually the story, not usually the pants that the
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But nonetheless, this is CP24 coming in to give us the real hard hitting news, Andrew.
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The Mountie wearing a thin blue line patch while escorting the man convicted of hate crime.
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And this writes, the officer displayed a thin blue line patch on the left side of his hat
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Thursday as he transferred the Travis patron back to jail from courts, King Bench and Estivin.
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And then the story says the symbol has been associated with white nationalist movements
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was recently worn by a Saskatchewan Mountie while escorting an inmate who had just been
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You could almost know exactly where the story was headed, right?
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When it was talking about the patch that the officer was wearing.
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Oh, you just know it's actually going to be about some of the thin blue line being connected
00:22:58.500
And here's the thing, like the whole story is based on this idea that you're supposed to
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read this and assume that the thin blue line patch is problematic, as they say, that you're
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supposed to look at it and see that it must be hateful or white supremacist and hence the
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And the funny thing is even the expert they cite, who is this woman that will be cited in
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like any story about hate groups and radical groups in Canada, Barbara Perry, director of
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the so-called Center for Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University.
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She's like, well, the symbol is purposely ambiguous.
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And the RCMP, they're saying, yeah, we'll look and we'll re-educate everyone on the
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uniform and dress manual and the implications the thin blue line may have.
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The thin blue line has nothing to do with radicalism, nothing to do with hate.
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It refers to this idea of policing as being the line that keeps society from defending
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For police officers, it's generally something they just take as a point of pride, that they
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are part of this blue line that serves society.
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Oftentimes, people use the term blue line in a derisive way as far as like police only
00:24:15.340
supporting police and not wanting to criticize each other.
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But generally speaking, there's nothing hateful about that patch.
00:24:23.540
Maybe the officer is like a, you know, ethnic minority, racial minority, LGBT, woke, diverse
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I have no idea and I don't care, but the patch itself is irrelevant and redundant.
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And the CP24 article is trying to make it out to be at some smoking gun of hatred, which
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No, and God forbid the officers want to, you know, show some, show some solidarity with
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their fellow officers, have some pride in the job they do, which is one that we need them
00:24:58.680
I mean, we should never let them be proud of that, Andrew.
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The RCMP in this article basically write this groveling, you know, apology about the
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thin blue line patch worn by one of their officers.
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And in this, the RCMP are quoted as saying, the photos bring forth a good opportunity for
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senior management, including the Saskatchewan RCMP Sergeant Major, to re-educate individuals
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on the RCMP's uniform and dress manual and the implications the thin blue line may have
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We have to re-educate our officers because they dared, Andrew, to show some, to show some
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solidarity with their fellow officers and have some pride in the job they take to keep
00:25:37.520
I mean, what, what strange times you're living in and how could this be the story of the
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Yeah, Patch Politics, the newest product of CP24.
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We'll have lots more next week here on Fake News Friday, also on Ratioed, on the Andrew
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Lawton Show, the Rupa Subramania Show, Reality Check, Alberta Roundup, all sorts of programs.
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And I hope you will tune into them and check out TNC.news.
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Joined by Harrison Faulkner, I'm Andrew Lawton.