The election could drastically change the media landscape in Canada
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
164.69077
Summary
The election is here and it could drastically change the media landscape in Canada. In this special election edition of The Candice Malcolm Show, host Candice talks about the role of government funding Canadian media and why it s a bad thing.
Transcript
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,
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
00:03:47.760
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
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.