The Candice Malcolm Show - Liberals and legacy media use Roe v. Wade to virtue signal

00:00:00.000 We are recording from the fake news capital of Canada. I'm Candice Malcolm,

00:00:04.240 it's Fake News Friday, and this is the Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:18.540 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. I'm very pleased to be joined by my colleague

00:00:22.040 journalist, Andrew Lawton, and we are on the floor of the Convention of the Canada Strong

00:00:26.720 and Free Conference, formerly known as the Manning Conference, and there is so much going

00:00:32.080 on in Ottawa. It's so interesting to be here, Andrew. I mean, is this your first time back

00:00:36.180 since the trucker convoy? Yeah, it is actually. This is the first time I've been in Ottawa since

00:00:40.940 the convoy ended, and that was the weekend when I was pepper sprayed. And don't, from my hotel room,

00:00:46.260 I have a lookout that is staring directly at where that happened. So it's bringing back all sorts of

00:00:52.520 painful, literally, memories. PTSD. Yeah, no, it's good to be back here. I've always enjoyed Ottawa,

00:00:58.000 so it's fun to be here. You know, Ottawa is a beautiful city, and the architecture, the people,

00:01:03.000 it's a great place to be, but it is also a painful reminder. We are, like, deep in establishment,

00:01:08.280 Ottawa establishment territory, home of all the gatekeepers, home of the elites who don't want 0.92

00:01:13.220 to hear from Canadians. They don't care what Canadians think. They want to basically ram their 1.00

00:01:17.020 opinions down your throat, and you really feel that amidst all of the bureaucracy. And one of

00:01:22.280 the things that I wanted to talk to you about today, Andrew, it is Fake News Friday. It was World

00:01:26.280 Press Freedom Day this week, and so you'll hear a lot of virtue signaling from liberal politicians

00:01:32.900 who we all know don't care at all about press freedom. They don't care about a truly independent

00:01:37.680 press. They don't want the facts to get out to Canadians, and yet they're more than happy to get

00:01:42.120 onto Twitter, Virtue Signal. You know, whether it's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Christy Freeland,

00:01:48.000 I heard an anecdote. They had a, they had, like, a dinner, like an awards dinner, basically

00:01:52.160 congratulating themselves on their press freedom. And this is what the liberals do. This is what the

00:01:56.840 media does. They focus on attacks on the press outside of Canada, right? Like, oh, there's this,

00:02:02.200 like, there's this looming threat of lack of press freedom in places like Hong Kong. Look at these

00:02:06.460 brave journalists in Ukraine. And they're completely blinded to their own hypocrisy. And the 0.98

00:02:12.100 focus, rather than being on actual press freedom and allowing journalists to do their jobs,

00:02:16.520 getting out of the way, stop the subsidies, stop funding journalists that you like,

00:02:19.980 and punishing journalists that you don't like. Instead, their focus, Andrew, is on disinformation

00:02:25.120 and misinformation, which is the latest buzzwords that call for them to basically censor. They want

00:02:30.680 censorship. They want to censor the internet. They have these internet censorship bills. They don't

00:02:34.360 like critical journalists. They don't want journalists who are going to do a lot of digging and hold them

00:02:39.120 account in the way that journalists are supposed to do. And so the main focus of this kind of event

00:02:43.480 is one, on look at these horrible countries around the world that don't acknowledge press freedom like

00:02:48.040 we do. And two, how can we censor the internet to scrub opinions that we don't like, including by

00:02:52.860 independent journalists? What's your take on all this? Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that

00:02:57.400 the look over their strategy is one that the liberals love doing on human rights. They love saying,

00:03:02.960 oh, you know, we got to look at Congo and Venezuela without looking in our own backyard and our own 0.95

00:03:07.440 front yard. And I mean, I mentioned earlier that the last time I was in Ottawa was covering the

00:03:11.560 convoy. The reality is that was a huge moment where Justin Trudeau's government authorized police to go

00:03:18.880 and arrest journalists for trying to do their jobs. It was only a handful of approved journalists,

00:03:24.800 mainly people in the parliamentary press gallery, that were given free reign to walk the streets of

00:03:29.500 Ottawa. And others, including myself, are threatened with arrest, even though the emergency order

00:03:34.020 specifically said anyone who was there for a lawful purpose, of which journalism is still

00:03:39.220 at this time in Canada, could be there. But then you get into this idea of proving it. And you and I

00:03:44.400 talked about this in the past. You know, one police officer was convinced by my verified Twitter

00:03:48.660 profile. Another, I had a letter from True North. I had a phone number for one of our editors. And still,

00:03:55.380 they were saying, nope, unless you're in the parliamentary press gallery, you're not getting through.

00:03:58.560 And in fact, you'll be arrested if you don't turn around. So when the government does this,

00:04:04.440 it is not just against the idea of media freedom and the idea of free speech. But more fundamentally,

00:04:10.520 it is, as you note, something that has a chilling effect on specific types of free speech, because

00:04:14.740 it's never the CBC types that are targeted by this. It's always conservative, independent media.

00:04:20.940 And I did a panel here at the Canada Strong and Free Network Conference that talked about this. And

00:04:25.300 the reality is, independent media is kind of owned by the right right now. It's the right that does

00:04:30.140 really well on this. So when you go after independent media, you're targeting conservatives,

00:04:35.620 you're targeting people on the right. It's interesting, your anecdote about how one of

00:04:39.900 the police officers really wanted a government badge. That's a mindset here in Ottawa, like everyone

00:04:44.100 works for the government. Well, because yeah, everyone has a government badge. I mean,

00:04:46.900 the Starbucks employee has a government badge, I think, in Ottawa. Exactly. No, but I think you're

00:04:50.920 right. It's interesting because there is a lot of independent-ish journalists on the left as well,

00:04:55.300 journalism. There's lots of interesting sites. The weird thing is a lot of them just kind of end up

00:04:59.060 becoming government-funded or government subsidies. I'm thinking of places like the Walrus or just

00:05:03.920 these kind of small- The National Observer, which has like government-funded reporters now.

00:05:07.600 Right, exactly. So they don't stay independent because they don't keep that. And right now,

00:05:11.600 I mean, with conservatives, it's like there's this whole growing movement of kind of grassroots,

00:05:16.800 independent shops. There's so many of them now. It's great to see, but it's like,

00:05:20.060 you know, it's a David Goliath situation because we're up against not just the behemoth of the CBC

00:05:26.460 that gets $1.4, $1.5 billion a year. And they really, really influence the press galleries because

00:05:32.260 they're so, they outnumber everyone else, right? But then you also have the corporate media,

00:05:36.320 the woke sort of capitalism that's seeping in. We heard from Jamil Javani, who was a former radio host

00:05:42.720 at Bell's News Talk 1010 in Toronto. And he was basically talking about how, even though he is

00:05:48.800 an independent-minded black man, he wasn't woke enough for the upper high ups at Bell and he was 0.96

00:05:54.620 forced to do this. And then you have the newspapers who also helped shape the news front and they're

00:06:00.100 subsidized now. They have the media bailout. And so it's really, you know, we feel like we're doing

00:06:06.260 really well. It's fun to be at a conference like Canada Stronger Free because it's filled with

00:06:09.900 conservative activists and so many of them tune into True North. And we really appreciate it. We

00:06:13.860 love you coming to these kinds of events and these conferences and getting to meet the people who,

00:06:18.440 you know, support True North, watch our programming. It's great to connect with the sort of grassroots

00:06:23.000 base in that way. But we're so small, Andrew, compared to these big giants and you really kind of

00:06:30.100 feel like you have your work cut out for you. What do you think?

00:06:33.640 Yeah, I would agree with that. And I would also say that the challenge is going to be, I mean,

00:06:38.580 just to illustrate it with an anecdote, one of the big things that we see as people on the right is

00:06:43.440 that obviously people on the right support independent media and they support it. But

00:06:47.240 it goes down that road of almost siloing it where you've got, you know, your mainstream,

00:06:51.700 which is for the left and your independent, which is for the right. And the problem with that is that

00:06:55.760 we want to be able to expand our audience. And I have no issues with watching CBC. And I mean,

00:07:00.560 I do, but I generally, in theory, I have no issues with it because I want to see and have a broader

00:07:04.960 discussion and a broader conversation. And it is challenging because we are in a space where we

00:07:09.800 have, we don't have a level playing field. We don't have the subsidy head start that a lot of

00:07:15.020 these other groups on the left do. But I also think that content is king in a way. And content

00:07:20.560 eventually is what's eroding the trust in the mainstream media. It's their content. And it's

00:07:25.720 what's elevating trust in independent media. And it's not just tooting our own horn. There are others

00:07:29.260 that we are ostensibly competing with that are in a very similar boat. But that takes time. It takes

00:07:34.800 time to sort of release that stranglehold that the mainstream media have on official media.

00:07:39.820 And it's interesting, too, because I mean, this this kind of goes back to like libertarian

00:07:43.260 capitalist theory. It's like, you know, that the bad companies keep getting subsidized. So they keep

00:07:47.700 doubling down on their bad business. Yeah, it's not a free market. Yeah. And so it's like in a normal

00:07:51.640 market, those companies would be forced to make real decisions that might lead to innovation.

00:07:55.920 I'm thinking of like a group like the Winnipeg Free Press, right? This has been a newspaper

00:07:59.800 forever. More than half of their funding now comes from the government. And you go on their

00:08:03.380 website and it's like really clunky and old. And they're not entering the 21st century.

00:08:08.300 They're not bringing it. And it's the same thing with these big, you know, post media, these big

00:08:12.260 unionized shops that don't know how to collect news anymore. I was talking earlier with Holly Doan,

00:08:19.640 who is its founder, and she runs Black Locks Reporter. And they just do tremendous independent

00:08:24.400 research and independent media. And she made the point you just did about content is king. It's

00:08:28.480 like people want good journalism. And they're really increasingly not getting that from the

00:08:33.220 mainstream media anymore. So they're turning to independent people. I really do feel like we

00:08:37.680 have our work cut out for us. So I want to talk to you, you know, the big story of the week is

00:08:41.920 something that's spilling over from the United States, this decision that was leaked out from the

00:08:46.880 Supreme Court of the United States, overturning Roe versus Wade. People who are familiar with this

00:08:51.520 court case, like it's almost universally agreed that this case was really poorly argued, that it

00:08:57.980 doesn't stand up to scrutiny, that it's a very bad decision. And yet, you know, this question of

00:09:03.500 abortion, the abortion debate in the U.S. is spilled out. You know, they're having it. It's

00:09:07.880 happening in the United States, still into Canada. All of the politicians on the left, all of the media

00:09:11.780 have used it as an opportunity to say, well, first a virtue signal about how glorious Canada is,

00:09:17.400 because we don't have abortion laws. But then also to try to, you know, turn it against the 0.94

00:09:23.300 conservatives. We know in 2019, a large part of the reason why I think Andrew Scheer ultimately

00:09:28.140 wasn't successful is because he didn't have a good answer to this question about abortion,

00:09:32.300 about gay marriage, and people were worried that he was a religious zealot or something like that.

00:09:36.220 I think that the liberals right now are just so excited that this issue is something that the

00:09:40.660 media will talk about and use it to paint conservatives as being sort of anti-woman or whatever.

00:09:46.180 Have you heard, you know, we're at this conference with all these conservative activists. Have you

00:09:51.300 heard a lot of people talking about it? What's your take on how this will affect the conservative

00:09:55.300 leadership race and the conservative movement more broadly in Canada?

00:09:58.860 Yeah, I haven't heard too, too much yet at the conference specifically. But just in the last few

00:10:02.360 days, the one point that I've raised, I think I raised this on my show the other day, is that

00:10:05.600 abortion is a wedge for conservatives in a way that it isn't for the liberals. And it used to be. But

00:10:10.700 the liberals under Justin Trudeau have just purged anyone that doesn't go along with Justin

00:10:15.600 Trudeau's view on this from their caucus. So the liberals are in lockstep with each other,

00:10:19.740 the NDP, the bloc are in lockstep. So they know that it's not at all, there's no losing

00:10:25.080 when they bring it up. They just want to force conservatives to have some stand up and say,

00:10:30.440 I'm pro-life and some stand up and say they're pro-choice. A divide that works within the

00:10:34.240 conservative party that has always allowed for people to approach these issues and other issues

00:10:38.380 of conscience from whichever perspective they'd like. But they know that then the CBC is going to go

00:10:43.140 into overdrive the Toronto Star and it's going to be, oh, these antiquated anti-woman dinosaurs. And

00:10:48.320 it just goes into this whole thing. So what you need is a conservative that can, and you touched on

00:10:54.060 this with the Andrew Scheer observation, that can defend and sell their position, not necessarily to

00:11:00.660 convert people, but to explain it. Because defense isn't working. You get conservatives that end up

00:11:05.640 apologizing for their values, which is never the way you win anyone over. Leslie Lewis has done a great

00:11:10.620 job on this. She's put out her platform on abortion, which has no hidden agenda. And she said,

00:11:15.080 this is what I stand for. Boom, boom, boom. And as a result, there's not really that much criticism

00:11:19.060 that she faces from the media because they don't sense that weakness that they do a lot of other

00:11:24.500 times. Yeah. Of like where it's like someone feels like they've been caught doing something

00:11:28.700 they're not supposed to do. It's no, if you believe it, own it. Right. Yeah. And I think, I think

00:11:32.900 you're right. Like there was a weird thing where, well, first of all, I just want to say that the

00:11:36.400 media is so dishonest on this issue. They treat it completely black and white, right? Yeah. You're

00:11:40.360 either, you either believe that birth begins at conception, in which case all abortions under

00:11:45.040 any circumstances, no matter what, are going to be illegal. Which is a minority position among pro-lifers.

00:11:49.980 Right. Right. Well, and, and, and even maybe people who have that view might not want to

00:11:54.500 legislate that way. And then the other side is like, oh, hey, you know, the baby's born, but I changed

00:11:59.920 my mind. And, you know, it's like, it's like no, no laws on abortion whatsoever. You can have

00:12:04.200 late-term abortions. You can have partial abortion abortion. We don't care. All abortion 0.99

00:12:07.400 everyone. The reality, Andrew, is that most Canadians fall somewhere in the middle. They

00:12:11.520 probably do want protections against late-term abortions or sex-selective abortions. There's 0.98

00:12:16.080 so much more nuance in this, but I saw the Journal de Montreal front page. They had the faces of all

00:12:22.020 the conservative MPs who they have called pro-life. And it's like, they're perpetuating this idea

00:12:27.420 that, you know, the people in the conservative party have like this really removed view that

00:12:34.160 that's so offside with the rest of the Canadian public when, of course, there is more nuance.

00:12:37.800 I will just say, I think that by and large, Canadians and even most conservatives just

00:12:42.400 don't really want to have this discussion. They would prefer to just not talk about it

00:12:45.660 and they want the issue to be put to rest. And so to your point that Leslie Lewis has been

00:12:49.580 able to, you know, very substantively explain her exact position, then there's, there's no

00:12:54.780 reason to keep pushing it because there's no gotcha moment. Yeah. There's no, there's no

00:12:58.620 opportunity to embarrass her in the way that they, I think they, they were able to embarrass

00:13:02.940 or at least catch Andrew Scheer flat footed. What do you think?

00:13:07.220 Yeah. I think the one area where I would slightly disagree with that is that the status quo in

00:13:13.180 Canada is unique in the world and not in a good way of a zero laws, zero restriction at all.

00:13:18.740 Technically, if you found a doctor to do it, you could have an abortion up to a minute before 1.00

00:13:21.720 a child is delivered. That's rare. When Canadians learn about that, they're opposed to it, but

00:13:26.220 Canadians don't know it. Sex, selective abortion as well, aborting someone, a child for no reason

00:13:31.160 other than you don't want a daughter. It's one of the largest motivating factors in some cultures

00:13:36.280 towards abortion. Canadians don't know that's legal. When they do, they oppose it. So whatever

00:13:41.600 you think of those policies, there are nuances to it that are lost in, as you mentioned, that

00:13:45.800 dichotomy of pro-life, pro-choice or pro-life, anti-choice, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, like

00:13:51.780 these semantics that people bring into it. And I mean, Trudeau, it could backfire what he's done

00:13:56.940 because he's now said that we need to introduce legislation to ensure that this right to abortion

00:14:01.800 in Canada is unshakable and no one can ever take it away. And he says we need to have a debate on

00:14:06.820 it. It's okay. Well, if you want to have a debate on it, that's what a lot of conservatives have

00:14:09.540 wanted. They said, let's just have a discussion about this that allows us to talk about this.

00:14:13.680 What about unborn victims of crime? What about sex, selective abortion? What about late-term abortion?

00:14:18.460 And I could see, I mean, setting aside the makeup of the House of Commons right now,

00:14:22.300 I could see if we did have a national discussion about abortion, Canadians settling on, you know,

00:14:27.640 maybe third trimester abortions are not a thing we should have. So it could backfire. 0.98

00:14:32.020 Yeah, it's interesting because I've been looking into the U.S. because a lot of Americans are

00:14:35.160 misled about what Roe does and doesn't do. I mean, the idea of legislating from the courts is not

00:14:40.260 something that has a tradition in Canada or the U.S. So this idea that Roe would be the ones who

00:14:45.340 determine the laws rather than the Senate, you know, the state Senate, the lawmakers, the people who are

00:14:50.360 elected to make these decisions. To me, it's much better in the hands of people who have, you know,

00:14:55.620 are represented by the public as opposed to someone who's appointed for life that has, you know,

00:15:00.960 very little scrutiny and accountability. But also the idea that it would just like immediately ban

00:15:06.880 abortion all over the United States. Obviously, it's going to be a state's rights issue. So states 1.00

00:15:10.560 like California and New York are never going to, you know, change the laws to ban abortion, whereas other

00:15:15.360 states would. But the interesting thing is you look at the European Union, you look at countries

00:15:21.200 in Europe that have laws already banning abortion of 15 weeks, 12 weeks, and you step back and say,

00:15:27.960 oh, wow, Canada really is an outlier because we don't have any laws whatsoever. So maybe you're

00:15:32.900 right that there is more of an appetite to have this discussion. And if so, I think Trudeau might be

00:15:38.060 a little bit surprised with where the Canadian public is because, again, we're so misled. I'll just give

00:15:42.560 another example for Fake News Friday. ECOS, which is run by Frank Graves, who is a sort of

00:15:48.120 interesting character and a pollster that's not always very reliable. He put something out that

00:15:52.440 said something like 80 percent of Canadians are pro-choice and only 12 percent are pro-life or

00:15:58.520 something like that. Again, these euphemisms that don't really, you know, people might not have really

00:16:02.700 thought through what they mean. But, you know, if you think that you have 80 percent of the Canadian

00:16:08.140 public on your side, you might be much more brazen to go forth to try to legislate something,

00:16:12.980 but then you might not realize all this nuance that's built in and all the views that Canadians

00:16:16.440 have that are actually not black and white and have, you know, a lot of room for discussion.

00:16:22.280 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

00:16:23.700 And, you know, that's the role of Canadian politicians is to take on these sort of important

00:16:29.380 moral and cultural issues and help navigate through it. And so Trudeau's style of, you know,

00:16:34.980 divide, wedge, demonize. I could see that all playing out. I don't know that that's really

00:16:40.880 the direction that we want to go in our country. I don't know that that's the direction that we want

00:16:44.120 to go in the conservative movement, but we might be headed there again from external factors.

00:16:49.360 What else is on your mind at this convention? I know there's a lot of exciting speakers. Do you

00:16:53.740 have any interesting interviews lined up? What do you have planned in Ottawa?

00:16:56.940 Well, I mean, obviously, the main event, which you play a role in, the leadership debate,

00:17:01.300 has been a big part of what a lot of people want to get out of this. And my hope is in general that

00:17:06.580 whenever you have a forum like this where conservatives are coming together, and I use

00:17:10.920 that with a small C, that people are talking about the movement itself, not just the day-to-day

00:17:15.740 electoral politics and the horse racing, but the movement itself and the values. Because,

00:17:20.460 you know, victory without values is meaningless. Values without victory is also in its own way

00:17:24.660 meaningless. I mean, you can die on a hill and die for something, but if you're at the end of the day

00:17:29.280 not doing anything with it, it's understandably challenging. So I think that, yeah, you need to

00:17:33.640 start talking about the tactical things of how you win, but you also need to talk about what it

00:17:37.560 is that you stand for. And I think that principles matter. And oftentimes we assume that principles

00:17:41.820 are antithetical to victory, which I think is a big failing in the conservative party.

00:17:46.320 Well, and that's why it's great to be around conservative activists and people who, you know,

00:17:51.100 have really strong convictions in certain areas, areas of expertise, areas of activism,

00:17:55.540 activism, because you're getting everybody in the space together, provides an opportunity to have

00:18:00.840 those discussions, have those debates, flesh them out, figure out exactly where we think,

00:18:04.960 where we stand on different issues and kind of get the ball rolling to, to what you made earlier,

00:18:10.480 conservatives are often playing defense. It's like, why don't we, why don't we take a step forward

00:18:14.440 and start to push forth our own agenda? Well, it's great to be at an event in person. It's been a long

00:18:19.920 time. It's great to just be around people without having to wear a mask and socially distanced and

00:18:24.900 all that kind of stuff. And your own co-worker, some of whom you've like never met in person

00:18:27.720 until this weekend. Yeah, we have that with a couple of our producers here. We've got Sean

00:18:31.940 right there. I've never met him in person, finally get to meet him in 3D instead of 2D. So

00:18:36.860 it's, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's Fake News Friday. I'm Candice Malcolm

00:18:41.620 joined by Andrew Lawton. We are on the floor of the Convention Centre in Ottawa. Thank you so much for tuning in.

00:18:49.920 Thank you.

The Candice Malcolm Show - May 06, 2022

Liberals and legacy media use Roe v. Wade to virtue signal

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