Fake News Friday ｜ Poilievre takes on F＊＊＊ Trudeau flags
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
184.07152
Summary
It's the first Fake News Friday in 2023, and we're kicking things off with a bang. This week, we're looking at the return of some of the old ways of doing things at the CBC, including the controversial use of the F-Trudeaus flag, and why it's a bad idea to fly them. Plus, a story about a man who was out on bail and was supposed to be on bail but somehow managed to kill a police officer.
Transcript
00:00:02.720
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And let me just give you a bit of a teaser here.
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We are off to a ringing start for the new year.
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If you missed it, last week we had the Fake News Awards.
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And there were a lot of very strong competitors in 2022.
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And some of the early themes this year are popping up already that we kind of touched on with the Fake News Awards.
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So we've got a little Pierre Polyev action in here.
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We've got some CBC returning to their old ways.
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So I guess the saying is the more they change, the more things stay the same.
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And it looks like, especially with the CBC, Andrew, that's going to be the way it's going this year.
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Yeah, I was going to say, can they return to something they've never abandoned in the first place?
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One of the stories that came up just, again, we had already hit publish on the Fake News Awards, I believe.
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And this story came up, so we had to kick it into 2023.
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Pierre Polyev had a last-minute press conference to respond to, among other things, bail issues in Canada,
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and specifically that horrific slaying of an OPP officer by, allegedly, a man who was out on bail
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and was banned from having firearms but somehow managed to.
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And this was something that Pierre Polyev spoke about, and the media could ask, as they're allowed to,
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And one of them brought up a question about a blog post written by a former conservative leader, Aaron O'Toole,
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condemning those F. Trudeau flags I know you've seen.
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I've seen them every now and then on trucks and cars driving around.
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And I've said before, I'm not exactly a fan of incivility in politics or elsewhere.
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And Pierre Polyev was asked if he agreed with Aaron O'Toole's condemnation or issues with it.
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And Polyev gave what I thought was actually quite a measured and intelligent and thoughtful answer.
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Well, I don't like the flags, and I don't like rage.
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But I think we have to ask ourselves, why are people so angry?
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You know, it's easy for, you know, the political establishment to say, stop all your complaining.
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But when you're one of the 1.5 million people that went to a food bank in the month of March, it's not so easy.
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If you're one of the people that went to the Mississauga food bank and asked for help with medical assistance and dying,
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not because you're sick, but because you can't afford to live, it's not so easy.
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If you're one of the 38-year-olds living in your parents' basement because it now takes more of a monthly paycheck to own a house
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than at any time in recorded history, it's not so easy to be happy with the way things are going.
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If you're one of the people who was over-prescribed opioids and is now addicted to drugs as a result,
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it's not so easy to be happy with the way things are going.
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I have never seen so much hurt and so much pain and suffering in our population in my nearly two decades in politics.
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So yes, of course, we should tell people to be more civil and to reject offensive signs, flags, and language.
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But we should also ask ourselves, why are people hurting so badly?
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So he says right out of the gate, he doesn't like the flags.
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But he said that it would be incumbent on politicians to ask,
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why is that anger there to such a point that people are going to fly those flags and use that term?
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I don't think that diagnosing where anger in the electorate comes from is a bad thing.
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I think all politicians should be trying to understand that, even if they don't agree with people.
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Well, what did the media latch in on on this, Harrison?
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Well, the media, unsurprisingly, decided to say that, well, Pierre Pauliev's condemnation of the F. Trudeau flags wasn't enough, Andrew.
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Of course, who could have guessed that what they really wanted Pierre Pauliev to do was do what countless conservative leaders have done in the past,
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which is basically turn around and go back to their normal ways of kind of condemning and distancing their own base.
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Instead, as you pointed out and as we just watched, Pauliev gave a very measured response and said,
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of course, it's wrong to have profanity-laden flags and bumper stickers and kind of inject that into politics.
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But if you're not looking at where that's coming from, then you're not really doing your job as a politician.
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After all, what are they there for anyway, other than to represent the interests of the people?
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Now, there is a crisis of local news happening because a lot of these news outlets are failing to cover local stories.
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But I would say, Andrew, that an article about Pauliev not going far enough, not criticizing his base far enough, doesn't really fall under local news.
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In fact, when you only quote a political scientist who is obviously coming from the left side of this discussion,
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who's obviously coming from a place that is in opposition to Pierre Pauliev, again, that can't be local news.
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Why do these legacy media journalists always do this?
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They always say, well, here's a news piece, and all we're going to do is cover one side of the political spectrum,
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Yeah, it's what we call in journalism a single-source story,
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in that it relies on the comments of just one person.
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In this particular case, the person has no connection to the story whatsoever.
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It's a political science professor from Mount Royal University, Laurie Williams, who says,
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Pauliev is basically saying it's the fault of the prime minister and a better leader will unite Canadians.
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But it's not clear to me what Mr. Pauliev is doing is in any way uniting Canadians.
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It looks to me like it's stoking divisions, unquote.
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So what Professor Williams is saying is that, well, you know, Pierre Pauliev is not being a unifier.
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Well, that, again, veers in, not veers, it actually just completely Kool-Aid mans through the wall
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of the territory here of just general political commentary that has nothing to do with F. Trudeau flags,
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nothing to do with Pauliev's comments on the F. Trudeau flags.
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It's just the professor saying, yeah, you know what, Pierre Pauliev, I don't know what he's doing to unite Canadians.
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And, well, no, all he was saying, and you don't even need to like Pierre Pauliev to accept this and understand this,
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is that, hey, I don't like those things, but if we're seeing there's a problem with them,
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maybe it's helpful to understand why people are upset.
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Maybe it's helpful to understand what it is in this country that isn't working right now.
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And the idea that you can just find one person in Canada that doesn't like something and write a story about that,
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I mean, we could just say, you know, man on Dundas Street doesn't like what Justin Trudeau just said at that press conference.
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Yeah, and headline is, a headline is, Canadians can't stand what Justin Trudeau just said when it's just one man on Dundas Street.
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Yeah, we find two of them and boom, we've got ourselves a story.
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And this political science professor, just in case anyone was, you know,
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not exactly sure where this professor was coming from on the political spectrum here,
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she even says that the question needs to be asked, what is it that represents conservatism?
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Because, oh, well, if Pierre Polyev is not fully denouncing the F. Trudeau flags,
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then maybe that's what represents conservatism.
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Local news is like weather, you know, maybe some bad, maybe some bad criminal act that happened in a local area.
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But local news can't be a professor from Alberta commenting on a press conference made in Ottawa
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from basically just using one political side of the discussion.
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No wonder there's a crisis in local journalism and local news, because, goodness gracious,
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Yeah, and I think that there was a fair bit of, just to take a 30,000-foot view of this,
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a fair bit of trying to stoke some division between Aaron O'Toole and Pierre Polyev here.
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I think a lot of people, now that Aaron O'Toole is no longer the conservative leader,
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he becomes the elder statesman that is the benchmark against which all other conservative leaders
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Same as George Bush was once a war criminal, and then he was that guy, why can't all Republicans
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Stephen Harper was once the, you know, kitten eater of the conservatives, and now he's like,
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well, why couldn't, you know, why can't all conservatives just be like Stephen Harper?
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So now Aaron O'Toole is going to be the one that the media goes to for insightful analysis
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and what should be the conservative perspective, and I think this was a little bit of a glimpse
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Let's talk about our old favorite, I don't want to say punching bag on the show, because
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we punch and kick at the bag, but CBC, which ran the most lazy annual journalism that exists
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in North America, and it's every single year, like clockwork, by 9.43 a.m., Canada's richest
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CEOs have already earned the average worker's annual salary.
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It's a report that, again, literally comes out every year.
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I'm not going to go back, but it's the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which does this
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They calculate down to the minute based on the annual income of the average top earning
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CEOs versus the average income of the average workers, and they try to draw this point that
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there is tremendous wealth inequality and income inequality, which there is, but let's just
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You are comparing the top 100 paid CEOs, which is an elite group within an elite group within
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an elite group, against the general population, as though this is representative of anything
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other than the obvious point, which is that, hey, high earning CEOs make more than lower paid
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This is not groundbreaking journalism, but the media goes along with it every single year.
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It's exactly what we've come to expect from the CBC, and we've got many examples later
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on in the show of just this sort of thing coming from them.
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But you know that it's lazy because the same arguments get rolled out over and over and over
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again, and the article always results in the same conclusion.
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And I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but too bad, I'm going to anyway.
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At the end of the article, here it goes, right here.
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Most notably, it suggests imposing a small wealth tax on the rich.
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So all of this, Andrew, who could have guessed?
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It's just a, it's just a, it's not a, it's the boiled down argument is tax the rich.
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The rest of it's just fluff about all the top CEOs are making too much money, and we're
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going to get into the details of the compensation structure.
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But it, it takes straight out of the NDP talking points.
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Jagmeet Singh tweeted this a couple days ago, talking about how he's not for the big grocery
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And, and all of that, of course, here it comes just in time for the CBC annual article.
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All of the top CEOs are making way too much money after 43 minutes of working one day.
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Oh, and not to, just, just to add one more point to this, Andrew, the CBC, even though
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they write the same article every single year, they still managed to get something wrong.
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They still managed to get something that needed clarification.
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They put out the story yesterday and they had to update it to include, yes, to include
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So they included the Monday paid holiday, which of course they didn't lead within the headline
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because how better, what, what, what a way to grab clicks, make a juicy headline like
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Just a classic CBC, buy the book, playbook sort of, sort of thing.
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And again, lazy journalism, just embarrassing stuff.
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And look, I'm not going to deny that there is significant inequality.
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In fact, in the pandemic, the executives, the people running these companies got significant
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The stock market did very well, but the real economy for laborers was very difficult and
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And I don't want to deny that phenomenon here, but the people that raise this don't
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actually have solutions beyond tax the rich because they actually have an issue with capitalism
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more than they have an issue with the specific numbers that they're bringing up here.
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But if we want to be about the numbers here and stick to real news here, here are some numbers
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from CBC's senior management compensation summary.
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Now, the last one I found was from 2019, and you can see here, total cash compensation, the
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president and CEO's range between $430,000 and $563,374.
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The executive vice president's total cash compensation range is $302,000 to $648,000.
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And the vice president's range there is $274,000 to $603,990.
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Now, in the case of both the executive VP and the VP, the range, the top end of the range
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is more than double the bottom end of the range.
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So this is, I think, a fair bit illuminating about CBC's precision here on their numbers.
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But this is, again, what CBC executives are making, and the compensation for the average
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worker, the average private sector worker in 2021 was just under $58,500.
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So that means that CBC's executives are making more than 10 times what the average private
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sector worker is making, but they don't include that in their story.
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No, and Andrew, and they also don't include things such as inflation taking up a large chunk
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of people's earnings and making those earnings appear or actually feel a lot smaller than
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That would be a good, worthy piece to add to this article.
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But of course, no, no, it's just tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich.
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Not so much, hey, here's a solution, or here's what the central bank, here's what the government
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They can take it because they make $14 million on average and tax, tax, tax the rich.
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Maybe the CBC should be spending more money on their talent and their journalism than their
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CEOs, who I guess aren't doing very much these days, because like we just see, they're doing
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Well, we know that the public sector was not very much dealing with what the private sector
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was dealing with as far as the job-related issues.
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They are still complaining about being asked to go back to work in person.
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There was a column by Lynn Ward, who is a career public servant.
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She's worked for the federal government for over 10 years.
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She's taking aim at the, quote, one-size-fits-all hybrid work model that the government put in
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place to demand that employees come back even part-time to the office.
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And she says for knowledge workers, which is, I guess, what is supposed to describe people
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Well, there are a lot more pros than cons to working from home.
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And she says the pandemic gave us the opportunity to rethink our outdated workplace methods like
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And she says, does it really make sense to go back to our old way?
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She likens it to going back to the horse and carriage for a few days a week when you have
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So, you know, just to give one example here, I file in the course of my work a lot of access
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to information requests, which are requests that you can file to gain access to government
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documents, which are technically the public's documents.
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And access to information requests have never been slower than they have when employees have
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And they'll be they'll say, well, you know, we need an extension because that division is
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So they don't have access to these records and and these files.
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So the idea that it's somehow more efficient to have everyone working from home, just setting
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aside your arguments about whether that's preferable, it simply isn't true in a government
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And to be fair, this knowledge worker, what's your name again?
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If there was an award for putting everything you could possibly imagine, all these terms,
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all these all these words that the far left are using these days to try and bolster their
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arguments into one article, she would certainly be given that award.
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She talks about the danger of the triple demic, the flu, RSV and covid.
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I should note, RSV is basically hitting toddlers, right?
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So so these knowledge workers at the public service, they're very afraid of this triple
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So if you how could you have guessed that actually a return to work is bad for the
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climate because you have to take public transit.
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By being by working from home, she doesn't have to face microaggressions in the office.
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I face less harassment and microaggressions by working remotely.
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I no longer feel like I'm being judged for the clothes I wear or the way I style my hair.
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Less focus on my personal physical attributes means more focus on my actual work contributions.
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Flexible work arrangements and the ability to work from home has been a savior to reduce
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Well, I can't imagine how stressful it must be to be a knowledge worker with the public
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But my goodness, the prospect of going back to the office.
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Now, her bio says that she is a member of the LGBTQ plus community.
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So is she saying that there's like rampant homophobia in the public service that she?
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Because if that's the bigger story, if that's what she's experiencing when she has to work
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in the office is significant discrimination and microaggressions from her colleagues.
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But my point is like she's throwing absolutely everything at this just to see what's going
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There's a triple demic and the microaggressions and, you know, the Lindbergh baby.
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And it's like she's just throwing anything and everything and be like, surely one of these
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Now, full disclosure, I am in my home right now.
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But I also think that it's your employer that gets to be the one to make that call.
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If, you know, Candace Malcolm were to say, hey, everyone's got to come into the office
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today and that's the part of the job that we're all doing and there's a case for why
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it has to be done, then that is the prerogative of the employer.
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And, you know, I'm all for trying to find flexibility when flexibility works, but I don't
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think we can say that it's just a 100% superior thing to have everyone working from home.
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I know of a number of workplaces where the opposite has been the case.
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Well, Andrew, also, I'm just going back to the top of this article because I thought to
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myself, wait a minute, in my prep, I did read that this wasn't full-time back to the
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So they've gone with the opinion instead of the analysis.
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I think analysis is reserved for the journalists, right?
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But this opinion piece has been written because she has to go back to the office, her and her
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colleagues, hold on to your seats here, guys, two to three days of the week.
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So it's not even all the time, but yet because of this, it's going to increase costs
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Grandparents don't want to have to take on the burden of looking after children.
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Although all of these knowledge workers, all of these public servants, I'm just going
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to go and call them knowledge workers from now on because it's just too funny, but they
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all, they all had no problem working from home or working at the office before COVID.
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But now of course the triple demic, the equity, diversity, and inclusion targets, Andrew
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And maybe there'll be like a mutiny in the public sector.
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They'll just say, we're not going into the office.
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See, yeah, I think the government, I think the government made a mistake here because
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they're saying when they say come back part-time, the implication there is that, well, it's
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If that's, that's the most compelling argument for it, because now it's like when they're
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trying to push this idea of flexibility and hybrid, now people are going to say, well,
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if it doesn't matter to you, then maybe I should just be home five.
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We have to end things there, whether you're working from home, working in an office, or
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you are sunning in Jamaica like our prime minister.
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Hope you enjoyed this show and have a fantastic weekend.