Fake News Friday ｜ The demonization of the Freedom Convoy won’t stop
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
200.48053
Summary
In this episode of Fake News Friday, host Andrew Lawton Lawton is joined by guest host Harrison Faulkner to discuss the recent desecration of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa, Canada, and the reaction to it.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
welcome one and all to another edition of fake news friday here on true north it is friday july
00:00:20.140
29th i am andrew lawton guest hosting for candace malcolm over the summer months and joined as
00:00:26.760
always by harrison faulkner host of the great new show ratioed on true north and also true north
00:00:32.560
producer does a lot behind the scenes in front of the scenes beside the scenes around the scenes
00:00:36.720
between the scenes you never know harrison good to talk to you as always thanks for joining me
00:00:40.680
yeah thanks uh thanks for having me andrew i think we're getting the hang of it you and i on the uh
00:00:45.200
on the sub in sub in fake news friday hosting yeah i don't know why i thank you for joining me though
00:00:50.920
i guess i'm getting awfully comfortable in the guest uh host role that i've now just said you know
00:00:56.320
basically like i've been here the whole time and you're the guest host but uh now that would be
00:00:59.680
some fake news so keeping with the theme of the program we have a lot on the agenda for today i'm
00:01:06.600
lying we don't actually have an agenda we just kind of wing it but certainly a lot that's happened in
00:01:10.580
the week that i want to get to and one of them is near and dear to my heart because it's an example
00:01:15.760
that brings me back to the nostalgia of the freedom convoy in ottawa in january and february the media
00:01:22.720
the political class the elites really just losing their minds about things that might be unpleasant
00:01:28.780
but in the grander scheme of things really aren't how they're being reported and we're not talking
00:01:34.300
about dismissing things here we're just talking about what should be the thing we all strive for
00:01:38.940
fair and honest coverage anita anand the defense minister has called out the quote desecration
00:01:45.440
of the tomb of the unknown soldier now no mistake about it this is a very important site this is an
00:01:52.500
important site in honoring the memories of those who have lost their lives in war while wearing the
00:01:57.540
canadian uniform it's important i think to recognize and respect all veterans it is legally protected as
00:02:04.100
well it's actually a criminal offense to desecrate a war monument but let's also be clear with our
00:02:10.380
language here the desecration the so-called desecration is that someone draped flags on the tomb of
00:02:17.820
the unknown soldier there were pictures and videos of an event over the weekend where there was an american
00:02:23.780
flag and a canadian flag on it and someone was bowing their head at the tomb now this does not strike me as
00:02:31.900
desecration maybe it's misguided i think laying an american flag on top of and it was a large flag on top of a
00:02:37.780
tomb of an unknown canadian soldier is in poor taste but i did this is not vandalism this is not trying to
00:02:45.720
disrespect it this is someone that doesn't really know the proper way to respect it and regardless
00:02:51.460
of what it was this has now been elevated to how dare the freedom convoy do this not just how dare
00:02:56.540
this one guy do this and again it's not all that surprising but every time the same messaging comes
00:03:03.520
out and the media just laps it up well what what i just what i just find bizarre andrew is that
00:03:10.060
the pictures we saw from the freedom convoy were were of veterans of very proud canadians probably
00:03:17.800
far prouder canadians than many of the canadians in ottawa they were standing by this the war memorial
00:03:25.180
singing oh canada by the war memorial i remember that very famous video of those veterans saying uh
00:03:31.340
saying the lord's prayer and saying oh canada outside the war memorial shoveling the snow around it
00:03:36.200
yeah well well exactly and then of course when there were uh people i i would say desecrating
00:03:42.200
the war memorial when there were people who i don't even know if this was found out to be true
00:03:46.220
but there were videos of people urinating or so-called urinings close to the con close to the uh statue
00:03:52.340
or other people they were unable to actually link it to the convoy to begin with so ottawa seems to be
00:03:58.400
running with this message that anybody who is i guess disrespecting the war monument in ottawa
00:04:04.560
the uh the tomb of the unknown soldier must be a part of the freedom convoy it's just very classic
00:04:09.640
ottawa to me that they choose to get outraged over this and i will agree with you andrew that i think
00:04:14.480
draping the american flag over the canadian tomb of the unknown soldier is also in poor taste it's it
00:04:20.400
is not it's not something i would accept and if i were around i'd probably tell that person to
00:04:24.800
uh take that flag off and go somewhere else but it was very quiet when we saw egerton ryerson statue
00:04:32.820
in outside ryerson university toppled when we saw johnny mcdonald statues toppled whether they were
00:04:38.880
in montreal or whether it was the johnny mcdonald statue removed in kingston you don't hear much
00:04:44.960
about that you also don't hear about other statues that get torn down like queen victoria statue on
00:04:50.820
canada day or queen elizabeth just beside it uh on canada day a few years ago well when you do hear
00:04:55.980
about it it's celebrating it exactly you actually have mps saying wow this is i think it was nikki
00:05:02.040
ashton andrew who said this is uh decolonization in action or something like that about the queen
00:05:07.780
victoria statue being torn down it's classic ottawa to me you know make fake outrage about this rather
00:05:13.920
non-event uh in ottawa because it's right in their backyard uh and they're allowed to stir up the
00:05:19.380
memories of the freedom convoy but then say nothing when the founder of our country and influential
00:05:24.660
figures in this country who are by far in my opinion uh forces for good in our history when
00:05:31.260
those statues get not desecrated torn down and ripped off their pedestals it's very silent
00:05:37.560
yeah and i think i mean the word desecration and i don't want to get too bogged down by semantics
00:05:43.480
here but this is i think an important term because desecration refers first off to places that are sacred
00:05:49.060
so i would argue that yes the warman tomb of the unknown soldier may not be technically sacred but
00:05:54.600
it's a level of reverence there i think sacred normally refers to sites of saints and martyrs
00:06:00.860
and religious and holy sites but nevertheless i'm not going to say it's not desecration if you do
00:06:06.000
engage in a violent disrespect as desecration requires at the tomb of the unknown soldier but
00:06:11.600
i remember when the convoy was in ottawa we heard of desecration of the terry fox statue which was also
00:06:17.920
a removable flag and a removable sign and i'm like you know i like terry fox i have a great deal of
00:06:22.900
respect for terry fox it's not a sacred site and they didn't do any vandalism they didn't actually
00:06:28.260
do anything that you would argue is desecration unless you are a fake news reporter and this is
00:06:34.480
the thing you're right anytime something happens in ottawa now it's well it must have been convoy so
00:06:38.720
you know you drive your tesla down the road and you hit a pothole it's like a freaking convoy like
00:06:44.680
so now anytime something happens they're blaming the convoy and when you do have a situation here that
00:06:49.860
someone who probably was affiliated with the convoy protest has done it it loses all context
00:06:55.700
and nuance instead of just saying hey bro you shouldn't have done that it becomes this federal
00:07:00.260
case in a literal and figurative sense yeah and and we found out about this i touched on this earlier
00:07:05.100
but it's important to bring up that that video it was a it was a video during the convoy protest of a
00:07:11.140
woman standing on the tomb of the unknown soldier uh true north reported that that woman was not
00:07:17.280
affiliated with the convoy at all so again yes it's possible that this person was affiliated with
00:07:21.400
the convoy but it's just this fake outrage that i find to be just so i don't really have a word for
00:07:27.920
it but when when there's nothing to be said about the queen queen elizabeth statue our technical head
00:07:34.160
of state being torn down on canada day when there's absolutely nothing at all said about that and then
00:07:40.560
there's this fake outrage about flags draped over the tomb of the unknown soldier it completely loses all
00:07:45.400
its meaning and yeah of course even with the terry fox statue they called that desecration there was
00:07:49.980
a hat a sign and a flag on him and it turns out that actually university students and other protest
00:07:56.180
movements have you know adorned the terry fox statue with their own messaging and their own uh
00:08:02.900
their own sort of garb or whatever they would have at their protest so again it's just this idea it's
00:08:07.720
it's an easy demonization of people that a lot of a lot of these figures in ottawa whether they're in
00:08:12.760
the government or whether they're in media don't like it's a quick easy easy thing to just say well
00:08:18.320
we know these people are you know the these awful nasty truckers well we're just going to pin all
00:08:23.420
the things we don't like on them or things that we don't even really care about that much we're
00:08:27.540
going to take every opportunity we can to again go back to that demonization of those people and i
00:08:32.020
just think it's going to keep happening um for quite a while unfortunately yeah and all you need to
00:08:38.280
do is look at it basically any coverage and the media is already starting to go down this road
00:08:42.020
if anything bad has to have a freedom convoy angle or a freedom convoy connection and i must say i did
00:08:48.000
not see on my bingo card the i shouldn't you know keep such a small bingo card because evidently we
00:08:53.520
find lots of things are on it that i wouldn't have expected the papal visit ended up becoming a freedom
00:08:58.840
convoy story in a way what happened here so what we found out or what we were told by the legacy media
00:09:04.940
was that for some reason the freedom convoy was going to show up outside of a first nation
00:09:11.640
and protest the pope's apology which anyone who was a part of the freedom convoy or involved in
00:09:17.820
the freedom convoy in any way like yourself or even like myself who was there just for about a week's
00:09:22.920
time knows that that just doesn't make any sense at all most of the people or a lot of the flags you
00:09:29.600
saw at the freedom convoy were there there were a lot of every child matters flags there were a lot
00:09:34.300
of first nations people involved in the protest yeah so the idea that the people that were in
00:09:40.240
ottawa would all of a sudden show up at a papal apology on a first nation uh just didn't didn't make
00:09:47.380
any sense to most people but nonetheless the national post actually ran with a story and the headline of
00:09:52.520
the story was a freedom convoy to protest pope's apology in maskewix alberta so i don't even i don't
00:09:59.940
know if i said that right excuse me if i didn't get that right but that's yeah now now they're gonna
00:10:04.340
say you're a part of the freedom convoy mispronouncing maskewix alberta now now we're gonna find out that
00:10:09.280
if you uh if you mispronounce parts of the country then you must be a trucker too so there we go you
00:10:14.780
have to do with you have to do with this town's name what we did with that cbc feminizing masculinizing
00:10:20.160
thing you you have to say it in like you know the the maskewix and the maskewix yeah i have to do i have to do
00:10:25.320
more practice and remember my my keys and o's when it comes to that but so of course andrew like you
00:10:31.400
and i what most people who saw this immediately said that's well that's bs there's no possible
00:10:36.400
way that's even true it's just a classic line a classic thing to demonize people who are part of
00:10:42.380
the freedom convoy and unsuspecting canadians or canadians who are perhaps take the national post
00:10:47.100
still um with a lot of credibility i think they still have some canadians will read that and not
00:10:52.580
question it they'll just immediately realize and take the headline for what it is it turns out
00:10:56.860
however that even the national post recognized that what they wrote was wrong because andrew like
00:11:01.780
we've done before like we've seen before the legacy media quietly changes the headline to completely
00:11:07.920
change the story so again the headline originally from the national post was freedom convoy to protest
00:11:14.080
pope's apology in maskewix alberta now the headline reads pope arrives in canada for penitential
00:11:21.660
visit aimed at indigenous reconciliation no mention of the first nation in alberta no mention of the
00:11:27.840
protest and of course no mention of the freedom convoy i wonder where it went andrew yeah well
00:11:33.360
it's it's there with the actual freedom convoy protesters in the sense that they they don't
00:11:37.240
exist and it's weird and i should say i mean the national post i don't think made it up it sounds like
00:11:42.400
the uh chiefs of this band had sent a note out and they said we ask that the freedom convoy
00:11:49.080
protesters planning to attend stay home or find a place to protest elsewhere but it still was never
00:11:54.920
made clear who are these protesters how do you know they're going to be there and i don't like was
00:12:00.000
this a publicity stunt was it's a band that was just being really really cautious they didn't want
00:12:04.120
to be protested or did they expect that if trudeau were there that would trigger protesters which i i
00:12:09.280
could understand but it was like condemning a protest that never existed in the first place
00:12:14.880
and it was like you're right i mean the quiet little headline edit that undermines the entire
00:12:20.700
story but people don't forget that people remember the headline and especially the people didn't click
00:12:25.220
through to read the story are probably still convinced that oh those evil freedom convoy people
00:12:29.280
were harassing the pope and indigenous people on their own territory so we have to give credit to
00:12:33.760
the national post here because unlike global news who also ran the same story they did clean up the
00:12:40.120
headline to be more accurate in fact to be accurate to begin with because clearly there was no protest
00:12:45.100
at all well global news ran the story uh and they their their headline was maskawix to freedom convoy
00:12:52.920
protest during pope visit your agendas do not have a place so global news runs with the story they don't
00:12:58.540
have any interest at all i guess in changing up their headlines so again it's it's this tricky game that
00:13:04.720
i think legacy media plays on canadians which is this they know that a lot of readers will either
00:13:11.100
only read the headline or only read the headline plus the first two paragraphs of a story so they
00:13:16.600
can actually bury a lot of the factual information or information that provides context to a rather
00:13:23.060
inflammatory headline and they can bury that at the bottom of the story get their get their message
00:13:27.860
across and canadians will be none the wiser and i think that's something that really needs to be
00:13:32.400
called out by a lot more people this idea that you can you can play with headlines and you can play
00:13:36.860
with the first couple paragraphs of a story to basically and you can almost convince something
00:13:41.040
someone of a totally different line uh when the end of the story tells you the opposite side so that's
00:13:47.700
really what i think is going on here um they they tried to make it out as though this was a guaranteed
00:13:52.800
protest when in reality it was a press release of this of this first nation preemptively saying
00:13:58.560
two freedom convoy protesters don't come and i can tell you one thing's for sure if the if the
00:14:04.100
freedom convoy protesters or we keep saying that because that's really the line that the journalists
00:14:08.380
are taking here if protesters showed up at this event we would have seen it that's for sure it would
00:14:13.700
have come across our headlines because legacy media would have taken it interestingly enough i didn't
00:14:18.040
see any footage of this event i'm not sure if you did andrew not not no footage of protests and
00:14:23.120
again the people that would be most likely to protest would be indigenous people that have feel
00:14:27.060
that that have and i mean the catholic church has acknowledged this the pope acknowledged this on
00:14:31.760
thursday that have grievances with the catholic church and with the pope's presence so the people
00:14:36.740
protesting would be indigenous people and in a weird way the media then should be happy the media
00:14:41.860
should be happy that the freedom convoy protesters were going so woke they were protesting on behalf of
00:14:46.960
indigenous people against the pope but my goodness not a not a shining day of light for the media in
00:14:54.000
canada no and it's it's always good when you get when you get a real softball on fake news friday when
00:14:59.540
you get a real easy one whether it's a head yeah we don't even need to work for it the story spins
00:15:03.580
itself yeah well yeah by changing the headline they're they're outing themselves as having gotten
00:15:08.520
something exactly they made it they made it really easy on us andrew it's just you know what i got to
00:15:12.620
say to national post thank you that's a we got to give them thanks for making our life easy on this
00:15:17.220
on this program uh let's talk about a load of bull bleep uh quite literally because we're going to
00:15:23.940
talk about fertilizer here and we're not that's not when it's not a stand-in for the outlets we're
00:15:27.500
covering we're talking about literal farm grade fertilizer here uh which we know is becoming a big
00:15:33.320
challenge globally you look at farmers protests in the netherlands in particular and in canada we see
00:15:38.800
farmers also getting very uptight about the same things and i don't mean that in a negative way
00:15:43.280
because the governments are going after nitrogen the governments are going after all aspects of
00:15:48.080
farming which is already in in some respects for some types of farming a very difficult economically
00:15:54.200
challenging industry and the media is whitewashing this entirely in one particular story from cbc where
00:16:01.680
they're talking about young farmers the growing crop of young farmers i bet they're very proud of that
00:16:07.200
one as well they should be i like a pun as much as the next guy but they're talking about all the
00:16:12.100
young farmers and they want to get these hopes for the future and all of that but what they have
00:16:16.540
not done is acknowledge the big giant elephant in the room right now plaguing canadian farmers
00:16:23.240
it's incredible this is bias uh bias of omission this is yeah is it bias or is it i mean do you
00:16:29.340
think it's just incompetence or do you think it's like a reporter that just has no i this is the first
00:16:33.560
time they've ever written about something rural well i i i refuse to believe andrew that the cbc are not
00:16:39.820
aware of this in fact i think actually they even wrote a story which makes it even worse for them
00:16:44.620
they wrote a story before that about ontario farmers raising issue with this emissions reduction
00:16:49.960
scheme from the government so it makes it much worse when the cbc acknowledges what's going on
00:16:55.780
to farmers probably the biggest story to affect farmers in years clearly it's a worldwide global story
00:17:02.180
as well so the cbc acknowledges that this is happening to canada's farmers in one story and then they
00:17:08.120
basically try and spin the narrative at least that's my that's my take on it they spin the
00:17:12.860
narrative to try and convince canadians actually that no a lot of young people are optimistic about
00:17:17.660
farming and young people are going into farming and the best part about this one which really makes
00:17:22.720
me laugh and makes me think it's totally bias of omission and not pure incompetence is that the
00:17:27.900
first woman they highlight in this story they highlight a series of young manichoban uh farmers who
00:17:34.140
have got into farming recently again it's only four so it's not really it's not really symbolic of
00:17:38.300
anything great but the first woman they highlight talks about how she got into farming for climate
00:17:43.980
change purposes you know so again it it's totally in line with what i believe the government is trying
00:17:50.620
to push which is you know we need to use we need to alter our agriculture practices to fix the climate
00:17:57.360
i'm not a farming expert i'm not i'm not you know fully up to all the details on what's going on but
00:18:03.080
what i do know is that canadian farmers are extremely concerned about this and this is obviously
00:18:08.380
a huge huge story and just like any other climate scheme from justin trudeau that we've seen whether
00:18:14.820
it's in out whether it's focused on the natural resource sector or it's here in farming it's having
00:18:20.140
adverse effects for canadians it's actually making canadian lives more expensive and more uh more
00:18:25.520
difficult so again it's unbelievable to me that the cbc would write this story to try and convince
00:18:31.740
canadians actually know a bunch of young people are getting into farming and not mention the biggest
00:18:35.920
story that has hit the agricultural sector in years i tweeted this story and i just wrote no mention at
00:18:42.060
all about the fertilizer reduction scheme that will cripple canadian farmers perfect timing to ship the
00:18:46.340
narrative away from trudeau's self-destructive agriculture policies imagine working for the cbc and calling
00:18:52.020
yourself a journalist because frankly to me this is this is just ridiculous andrew i mean you can't
00:18:57.400
really call yourself a journalist if you fail to mention the biggest story that is affecting canadian
00:19:02.820
farmers i guess my big issue on this is that they're trying to avoid as you i think quite
00:19:10.040
accurately put they're trying to avoid the big elephant in the room on this but the one thing that
00:19:15.200
i find so laughable about it is that on one hand they're trying to put this fancy little nice
00:19:20.180
human interest story on farming which okay fair enough but the whole thing that's happening right
00:19:25.240
now is you have governments around the world that are basically trying to outlaw farming and i i know
00:19:29.680
that's an exaggeration by design but i mean just look in the uk they have a lump sum payment that
00:19:34.420
they're giving people who agree to retire from farming you have farmers in the netherlands that are
00:19:38.420
basically being pushed out of the industry you have farmers in canada that are being pushed out of
00:19:42.540
the industry either indirectly or directly and we're supposed to be like oh no no none of this is
00:19:47.400
happening government doesn't have anything to bear no no there's no cricket sandwiches for you beef is
00:19:51.460
fine corn is fine snow peas are fine but uh yeah you know it's young people young crop of farmers oh
00:19:57.140
got to use that pun okay uh we're going to drop the fertilizer uh charge a cap and just do the pun
00:20:02.900
about crops and that'll be enough right yeah that's journalism for you when i tweeted this story
00:20:08.840
uh i got a there were some hilarious reactions to what uh the article and it's funny because it's worth
00:20:16.340
mentioning this just to highlight again how journalistic this article is the person they
00:20:21.900
put as the feature image of the article is this guy wearing a perfectly clean shirt with really long
00:20:28.660
hair and one of the people commented that they were making jokes about how you know this guy clearly
00:20:34.120
probably well maybe he has but he doesn't really look like he's spent that much time on a farm and uh he
00:20:39.920
doesn't really portray the image of the classic farmer so it just kind of goes along with this
00:20:43.800
narrative of uh of the cbc being either totally totally disconnected from average regular canadians
00:20:51.340
and the and the problems that canadians face every day or just being horribly bad journalists and
00:20:57.200
totally incompetent it's really a toss-up these days one or the other will will probably uh answer
00:21:03.100
what's going on depending on the article you read from them but again like we always say on fake news
00:21:08.600
friday if we're ever in doubt or forever short on content it's just one quick one quick trip away
00:21:15.400
from the cbc website and we will easily solve our problem with uh with content now i kind of like i
00:21:22.240
mean that could actually be a new lifestyle brand the hipster farmer by cbc so it's it's no longer
00:21:27.320
farmer bill it's now like farmer caden or something so uh no offense to the cadens out there nothing
00:21:32.120
against cadens i just it's the the guy could have well have been a caden anyway uh uh so you you i think
00:21:38.100
touched off on there on a natural segue about cbc being disconnected why don't you take the lead on
00:21:42.880
this next story well yeah so of course like we talked about talk like the cbc just couldn't be
00:21:48.420
more disconnected from the average canadian and in an attempt i guess to connect with canadians
00:21:53.140
they offered canadians some parental guidance so they actually published this article earlier this
00:21:59.180
week under this under the i guess you call that a sub headline of parental guidance well the headline
00:22:04.760
of this story reads as more kids question their gender identity we need to support and accept them
00:22:10.940
so this is what the cbc wants parents this is the guidance i guess you could say the cbc is trying to
00:22:17.500
give parents uh as to how to deal with their children's sexuality as if the cbc thinks that they
00:22:24.300
have anything to say in regards to that well the cbc ran this op-ed i guess you could call it well it's
00:22:29.840
not even actually excuse me it's not even labeled an op-ed this is just labeled as parental guidance i think
00:22:34.400
this is the first time i've even seen an article like this from them anyway this woman amy bell
00:22:38.460
starts off the article in a very bizarre way in a way that i would say probably doesn't set set the
00:22:44.460
rest of the article up for success she starts off by saying andrew i'm a big fan of kids these days
00:22:50.360
they constantly amaze me and like a lot of other parents i think the way they so openly approach and
00:22:56.220
accept gender identity gender fluidity and sexuality is pretty cool well just on that note i will say
00:23:03.400
i don't really think kids are accepting this all of a sudden kids will just i believe naturally
00:23:10.700
parrot the lines or what they're being told whether it's from a parent or a teacher clearly as we know
00:23:16.500
from other reports that we've done at true north and from reporting that we know has been has been
00:23:20.640
has been taking place across the country younger and younger students are being exposed to gender
00:23:27.440
ideology in classrooms so i don't think this cbc article has it exactly right uh when they say
00:23:33.640
kids are talking about gender fluidity i think the reality is kids are now being talked to about this
00:23:39.900
stuff and tried i guess you could say convinced to think it is the new thing well it's the cbc so
00:23:45.840
i mean this is just i guess par for the course with them andrew yeah and again i mean first off i don't
00:23:51.100
think anyone should be looking to cbc for lifestyle guidance in of any way i wouldn't even take a
00:23:56.140
recipe from cbc based on some stories let alone how to raise my non-existent children but if they
00:24:02.420
did exist i you know even even though they don't exist i still think it would be dangerous to take
00:24:06.000
cues from from cbc on this but also what i i don't like here is that she's advocating a position
00:24:12.200
that is unchallenged when there is a lot of legitimate debate that's coming from experts not just from
00:24:19.920
people like us that are dismissed as you know right-wingy haiti haters or whatever but from
00:24:24.520
experts from doctors psychologists psychiatrists who are saying you know maybe we should not be
00:24:29.080
going through the road that she's proposing which is complete unquestioning gender affirmation on
00:24:34.140
children at a very young age and the challenges in this position again i mean we talked about this
00:24:39.960
with cbc kids promoting similar messages to a child audience at least this piece is directed
00:24:45.680
at parents but i i want to read one of the lines because she's talking about how
00:24:50.820
kids are supposedly more progressive and more woke than their parents so she's saying all you parents
00:24:56.440
that don't like the whole non-binary thing well your kids your kids get it so you should just butt
00:25:00.520
out and let your child identify as a girl let your child identify as a boy let your child identify as
00:25:06.380
neither if that's what you'd like and it's very prescriptive and it's very harmful i think you have a lot
00:25:12.740
of parents that have no idea how to navigate this world and now cbc is using its platform to basically
00:25:19.420
tell parents that it's hateful because they use that term in the article it's hateful if you don't
00:25:24.280
go down the road of unquestionably saying that yes your child can get up and say i'm a boy i'm a girl
00:25:28.980
i'm neither i'm one of the examples in the article a demi girl like i've heard of a demi glass when
00:25:33.820
you're cooking i've never heard of a demi girl before but it's now one of the options that we're just
00:25:38.260
supposed to say is completely a-okay and it's not about being anti-trans it's not about being
00:25:43.420
anti-gay rights it's about understanding that children are complex and we don't let me when i
00:25:48.660
was a kid there were lots of things where my parents had to tell me uh no you probably shouldn't choose
00:25:52.400
that at four years old and there's a reason that i didn't decide to you know jump off a building with
00:25:57.040
a cape because i thought i could fly or something like that because parents tell kids what certain
00:26:03.360
things are that they can't do that aren't rooted in reality and there are huge problems that come
00:26:08.780
with this mindset that cbc is putting without question without debate exactly you touch on this
00:26:14.340
point that's super important in my opinion which is where is the where is the other side of this
00:26:19.040
when it's a taxpayer funded parental guidance article i mean this is what canadians are paying
00:26:25.080
for and this is the guidance we're getting from the cbc that we all pay for again and you also
00:26:29.600
touched on this point about grounding grounding the grounding the cbc in reality this article
00:26:35.500
at the beginning again it's at the top of the article this this woman writes both of my children
00:26:40.380
have close friends who have chosen to explore and live openly with a gender that feels true to them
00:26:45.120
even if it's not what they were assigned at birth so andrew we're we're assigning genders at birth now
00:26:52.540
and we're just writing that as though it's completely uh as the way that's that's really what's going on
00:26:58.220
here as though doctors are just picking as they you know choosing when a baby is born oh this is a boy
00:27:03.760
and this is a girl when you're assigned to a birth i mean it's just it's obviously not grounded in
00:27:08.100
reality i think a lot of us are at this point where we want to say that some of this stuff is obviously
00:27:13.720
not grounded in reality but there's this pressure that says well we can't say that or we want to
00:27:18.100
again we're concerned about offending the wrong people like you said it's not about being anti-gay
00:27:23.380
rights it's not about being anti-trans it's just trying to make sure that when the cbc gives parents
00:27:28.120
guidance again unsolicited guidance i don't think anyone was asking for this piece but it's when the
00:27:32.840
cbc gives guidance to parents can it can it at least be grounded in some semblance of reality
00:27:38.560
please cbc just just put some reality around this and let's not just continue to live in this weird
00:27:44.680
fantasy land of gender assigned to them uh rather than you know actual reality of the sexes at birth
00:27:52.220
i mean that's just i think a conversation that needs to be had yeah and i don't like the inherent
00:27:57.880
reductivism in this debate where anyone who criticizes this for you know some of the reasons
00:28:03.420
you and i have articulated or other reasons gets dismissed as oh it's transphobic it's not
00:28:07.960
progressive no i'm not even saying don't adopt these sorts of views or values i'm saying that we
00:28:14.080
shouldn't have the media pushing them without question and i'm not against columns this is a
00:28:18.220
column it's opinionated that's fine i don't even have an issue with that but i have a very very hard
00:28:23.400
time believing that the cbc would take someone who was a parenting columnist that had a different view
00:28:28.560
try to write the opposite side of this so if you are a parenting columnist out there and you have the
00:28:32.960
other side pitch it to cbc and let us know what they say that does it for us for today harrison
00:28:38.500
faulkner on the other side of the virtual table here the host of the ratioed podcast and my temporary
00:28:45.160
co-host i mean he's the permanent i'm the temporary but uh the arrangement is temporary well candace is
00:28:50.800
away here uh but my thanks to you all i'm andrew lawton we will talk to you soon and this is another
00:28:55.380
fake news friday in the bag have a good weekend