The Candice Malcolm Show - The election could drastically change the media landscape in Canada

00:00:00.000 The election is here and it could drastically change the media landscape here in Canada.

00:00:04.140 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:11.360 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. So I have two quick announcements. The first

00:00:16.340 is that this podcast will be a daily podcast. I'm going to be doing this show every single day,

00:00:21.260 Monday to Friday, throughout the campaign for the duration of the election to keep you informed and

00:00:26.240 to let you know what's going on in Canada on election front. So make sure you tune in every

00:00:31.280 day for this podcast. Second, we did our first live election kickoff show last night. It was a

00:00:37.760 great success. We were live for about two and a half hours. We had Andrew Lawton in Ottawa. He was

00:00:43.360 doing reporting for us, breaking it all down. We had special guests including Danielle Smith, MPs Garnett

00:00:50.120 Jenis, Tom Kmetch, True North has hired an in-house pollster, Hamish Marshall, to help us make sense

00:00:56.060 from an analytical perspective to break down the numbers. And I was in studio with True North

00:01:01.820 contributors Sue Ann Levy and Anthony Furrier. It was a lot of fun. If you haven't had a chance to

00:01:06.340 watch it, I encourage you to go on over to YouTube or Facebook and check that out. We're going to be

00:01:11.060 doing more of these live podcasts on other big nights throughout the campaign. So we'll be there

00:01:16.380 the night of the English debate as well as on election day. So I hope that you can go and check

00:01:22.580 those out and I hope you enjoy that content. We're really looking forward to what True North is going

00:01:27.820 to be doing throughout this campaign. We've got a lot of scoops, a lot of new reporters working for

00:01:32.240 us, a lot of content that we are working hard to create for you. So very excited about that. And

00:01:37.500 thank you to everyone who has been supporting True North throughout. If you're interested in supporting

00:01:42.160 any of our shows, this podcast, our reporting, I encourage you to head on over to donate.tnc.news

00:01:49.420 where you can learn more about supporting independent journalism in Canada. Now, I know that a lot of

00:01:54.460 people out there feel a little bit uninspired in this election. They worry that Conservative leader

00:01:59.560 Aaron O'Toole doesn't have what it takes to beat Justin Trudeau and that even if he did, perhaps he

00:02:05.220 wouldn't be much better. There is one area, however, where the leaders drastically disagree and that's in

00:02:12.120 regard to the government's involvement with the media. As you know, journalism in Canada over the last

00:02:18.100 half decade has lost so much of its independence and autonomy. The separation between journalism and

00:02:24.760 government in Canada, or lack thereof, is a serious threat to our country. How on earth can you trust

00:02:31.120 journalists who are being paid by the government? How can you trust them to report the facts or tell

00:02:36.900 the truth to Canadians when their jobs are literally reliant upon funding by the government? That's their

00:02:44.100 business model. They need that money to survive. And it's not just the government that funds them, 0.78

00:02:49.080 it's one party in particular, and that's Justin Trudeau's liberals. Trudeau has drastically expanded

00:02:55.500 the role of government in our media in Canada. First, by increasing the budget of the CBC and bankrolling

00:03:02.120 their new venture into online English news. And then, after Trudeau tilted the playing field in favor of CBC,

00:03:08.980 hurting the newspaper and their business models, which were increasingly reliant on subscriptions

00:03:13.720 and getting Canadians to pay for their news, well, he had to turn around and subsidize the newspaper

00:03:18.940 business to the tune of $595 million. And it doesn't even end there. As reported by True North,

00:03:27.640 a government program called the Local Journalism Initiative gave $50 million to legacy media outlets,

00:03:33.820 and the government refused to disclose who they were giving the money to. The initiative was devised by

00:03:38.960 Trudeau in 2018 as basically just yet another bailout. The Department of Canadian Heritage told this to

00:03:46.040 True North in an email. They wrote,

00:03:47.760 To protect the arm's length relationship between the government and supported news organizations,

00:03:53.220 the program is administered by seven not-for-profit organizations that represent different segments of

00:03:59.280 the news sector. Therefore, the Department of Canadian Heritage is not directly involved in application

00:04:04.160 processes nor funding decisions and does not collect third-party personally inidentifiable information

00:04:10.940 during the course of the administration of the program. So, the government claims they're not

00:04:16.580 even keeping track of who is getting this bailout cash. And that's not the only issue. As reported by

00:04:22.940 Blackhawk's reporter, the Trudeau government also spent $61 million on emergency relief to media companies

00:04:28.880 during the pandemic and once again refused to disclose who got that cash. This is a quote from

00:04:34.680 the Canadian Minister of Heritage, Stephen Galbeau. He said,

00:04:38.960 These measures demonstrate the government's commitment to both a robust, diverse, and sustainable

00:04:43.540 news ecosystem and ensuring Canadians can receive the timely information they require from their

00:04:50.100 government. I like how he threw in the word diverse, although I can guarantee that no center-right or

00:04:56.680 right-wing news organizations were the recipient of any of that cash. Of course, the news outlets that

00:05:02.440 receive funding in these schemes range from the center-left all the way to the fringe far-left of

00:05:08.660 our news political spectrum. You're not going to see any conservative outlets on those lists,

00:05:13.020 even if they were to disclose them, which they are not going to. So, we know what we will get if

00:05:17.680 Trudeau wins. If he gets his majority, he'll be emboldened to impose even more restrictions on online

00:05:23.500 speech, like his draconian bills, C36 and C10, and he'll probably create lots of additional funding,

00:05:31.140 a lot of more sources, more cash, not just to the CBC, but to the entire legacy media. We know what

00:05:36.840 we're going to get with Trudeau. Aaron O'Toole, by contrast, released his own proposed platform on

00:05:42.300 Monday, and it gives conservatives and free speech activists something to be hopeful for. As reported by

00:05:48.720 Andrew Lawton at True North, O'Toole's platform includes a review of the CBC's budget, and it also

00:05:54.760 plans to scrap those controversial internet censorship bills proposed by the Liberals. This is from Andrew

00:06:01.660 Lawton's report. Let me read from it. A conservative government under Aaron O'Toole will evaluate CBC's

00:06:07.360 place in the Canadian media landscape. The Conservative Party of Canada's 2021 platform, Canada's Recovery Plan,

00:06:13.280 lays out a three-pronged plan for CBC. One, giving Radio Canada a distinct legal and administrative

00:06:20.720 structure. Two, to protect CBC Radio and CBC North. And three, to review the mandate of CBC's English

00:06:28.440 television, news, and online services. So as Lawton is reporting, basically O'Toole wants to turn

00:06:35.780 CBC more into something like a public interest model, like that of PBS in the United States.

00:06:42.560 So Lawton notes that this doesn't go quite as far as O'Toole pledged during his leadership

00:06:47.740 campaign, but it's still stepped in the right direction. This is more from Lawton's report. The

00:06:51.760 pledge is more modest than what O'Toole promised last year during his leadership campaign. O'Toole's

00:06:56.980 leadership platform promised to privatize both CBC News Network and CBC's English television within a

00:07:03.160 first mandate, as well as roll back and ultimately end funding for CBC Digital. Asked Monday morning

00:07:08.860 whether he'd be fulfilling his leadership CBC commitments, O'Toole restated the platform pledge

00:07:14.320 to review the state broadcaster's mandate. I think it's unfair for private sector media outlets that

00:07:21.540 are struggling to transition to digital, that are struggling to gain advertising revenue, to see the

00:07:28.160 state competing against them, particularly in areas of digital where the CBC increases have actually made

00:07:36.180 it harder for the private sector. And then Mr. Trudeau creates a media bailout fund to deal with some of

00:07:42.860 the challenges he's crossed. So it is the time to modernize. It is the time to respect the public interest

00:07:48.920 mandate done by CBC in terms of radio being non-commercial, the service to rural communities,

00:07:56.180 French language services are critical, and Indigenous languages are critical as well. But we are going to

00:08:02.640 review where there is competition with the private sector. We need a high, a competitive and successful

00:08:09.020 private sector in all media. And we need to balance the playing field with the American web giants,

00:08:15.260 but without attacking Canadians' liberties on social media. Well, it is no wonder the media are quietly

00:08:22.280 cheering for Trudeau and disingenuously skewing their coverage. This is why they picked up on

00:08:28.580 Trudeau's deliberate election wedge issue, the issue of mandatory vaccines for federally regulated

00:08:34.040 industries and vaccine passports for interprovincial travel. And they spent the entire election kickoff news

00:08:40.600 conferences on Sunday with Erin O'Toole repeating the same question and trying to push that wedge and

00:08:47.180 push Trudeau's agenda. These journalists want Justin Trudeau to win, clearly. And they're clearly

00:08:52.980 threatened by independent news agencies and journalists who are not on the taxpayer dole and

00:08:58.420 therefore get to retain a certain level of credibility, authenticity, and independence.

00:09:04.220 Just look at the reaction, for instance, to True North's Andrew Lawton getting the first question

00:09:09.020 at Erin O'Toole's Sunday afternoon press conference. First, we see Andrew Coyne, the celebrated

00:09:14.940 journalist who's on CBC and also has a column in the Globe and Mail. He writes,

00:09:20.780 Andrew Lawton gets first question? Seriously? He's so openly bothered by the fact that an independent 0.99

00:09:25.980 journalist gets to go to a press conference and ask a question. Why does that even concern

00:09:30.680 Andrew Coyne? What difference does it make? Who cares who gets the first question? Why is he

00:09:34.880 tweeting about that? Why does that bother him so much? It doesn't really even make sense. He's just

00:09:39.000 openly sort of insecure and dislikes the fact that an independent journalist gets to ask a

00:09:43.640 question. Likewise, this CBC podcaster writes the same thing. He goes, True North gets the first

00:09:48.640 question at the O'Toole presser, as if somehow that's news. Look, Andrew Lawton got the first

00:09:54.020 question because he hustled. He worked harder and he was there first. The way that these press

00:09:58.980 conferences work is that the first journalist to go up to the microphone gets the first question.

00:10:03.940 It's based on who's there first. It's not some kind of a hidden agenda to allow an independent

00:10:09.640 reporter to ask the first question. But the mere fact that the legacy media reporters are complaining

00:10:15.500 and reporting on this as news is telling, they're threatened by True North. They treat us like we're

00:10:21.200 the opposition, like there's something scandalous about independent media. The reality is that these

00:10:26.800 journalists clearly see the writing on the wall. CBC's numbers are in free fall because increasingly

00:10:31.900 Canadians simply aren't interested in what they have to hear and they're not interested in hearing

00:10:36.300 the propaganda from the CBC. And if Justin Trudeau loses his COVID election wager and the

00:10:42.060 Conservatives win this election, the media landscape in Canada will forever change and it won't be in

00:10:47.880 favor of the boring, stuck-up liberal status quo. It will be in favor of independent and authentic

00:10:54.960 journalists like the ones here at True North. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

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The Candice Malcolm Show - August 16, 2021

The election could drastically change the media landscape in Canada

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