00:00:00.000Welcome to the Candace Malcolm show. The balance of probabilities would suggest that I am in fact
00:00:17.620Candace Malcolm, but all evidence I believe and hope truly points to the contrary. It is my great
00:00:23.620privilege, Andrew Lawton, to be here for a guest-hosted edition of Fake News Friday, the fakest
00:00:29.140news of them all is that this is the Candace Malcolm show today, but you know what, nay, even in
00:00:33.020Candace's absence, it's always the Candace Malcolm show, but I'm happy to be a bit of a seat warmer
00:00:37.800here. We try to strive for some semblance of consistency though, so it's my great pleasure
00:00:42.660to have with us True North, producer and journalist and host of the new show Ratioed, Harrison Faulkner
00:00:48.620joining us on the line here. Harrison, how was the week? I know it's Friday, so we do a bit of a
00:00:53.540retrospective on Fake News, but I'm looking back at your life this week. How's it been so far?
00:00:57.780Well, it's been a bit of a wild week, Andrew. We've got the travel mandate suspended, not
00:01:02.820dropped, suspended, which is an important difference. And of course, we've got Bill C-11, which was
00:01:08.840quietly shuffled in through the back door by Justin Trudeau, so there's quite a lot to get
00:01:14.740into and looking forward to it. And yeah, you couldn't shake me this week. I'm also here for
00:01:19.880Fake News Friday. Yeah, believe me, I tried, but you came with a package apparently. I kid,
00:01:25.120of course, and I will say that that is, you mentioned the air travel vaccine mandate. That
00:01:29.320might be like the honorary fake news mention because everyone was reporting initially that
00:01:33.380it was scrapped and then you look at the fine print as always and it's, oh no, no, no, it's
00:01:37.280suspended pending the emergence of, you know, the Omega, Omicron, Delta, hybrid, Indian, double
00:01:42.940variant or whatever else is being cooked up in Wuhan as we speak right now. But let's get to the
00:01:48.300official Fake News Friday stories. The first one is about the convoy and specifically about the
00:01:54.400federal government's invocation of the Emergencies Act, which I would say has been the gift that keeps
00:02:01.200on giving in the last couple of weeks because every time the committee looking into the Emergencies Act
00:02:07.140meets, someone else undermines the government's narrative that this was police that had requested
00:02:12.680it. But in this particular case, it was Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Finance
00:02:18.600Minister who was in the hot seat. And she was grilled about using a debunked CBC story as the
00:02:26.840basis for the Emergencies Act. We know government and police relied heavily on media coverage of this,
00:02:32.580which oftentimes was very incorrect, either because they were missing things or in fact,
00:02:37.720they just blatantly misrepresented it. Let's throw to a clip here to set the stage for what we're
00:02:42.360talking about. March 21st, 2002, the CBC, without any explanation, without apology, without any
00:02:53.560clarity, retracted their story regarding the funding of the protest. You were aware of that?
00:03:00.760Again, I'm not speaking for the CBC. I'm speaking for the Ministry of Finance. I'm not asking you to speak for the CBC.
00:03:05.980I'm asking, were you informed that the CBC retracted the story, the false story, about foreign funding
00:03:14.380donations to the convoy? I don't believe that the CBC is being interrogated here. I believe it's the
00:03:21.360government of Canada. Just answer the question, Minister Freeland. Were you aware, yes or no? It's a simple
00:03:26.860question. I don't have the article before me and I'm not here to answer questions about the CBC.
00:03:31.400You, as the most senior cabinet minister and the deputy prime minister, relied upon that initial
00:03:37.220story from the CBC and shared your concerns with Canadians regarding terrorism funding and money
00:03:43.980laundering. Your words, correct? Let me be very clear. My principal concern when it comes to the illegal
00:03:55.500occupation and the illegal blockades. Let me be very clear, Minister Freeland. Your words several times in the
00:04:03.320House referred to terrorism funding and money laundering. Are you saying you didn't use those words?
00:04:12.900I'm speaking here today and I am talking about the central motivation of our very serious actions. And I'm here to ask you
00:04:21.560questions. And I expect, unlike question period, I expect a response. My core concern as Minister of Finance and my central justification for these very serious measures that we put in place.
00:04:36.560You're not asking the question. I'm going to move on. The Deputy Director of FinTrack, Mr. McKillop, confirmed at committee that the convoy funding did not come from terrorism funding or money laundering and the typical person who
00:04:50.560donated hundreds and thousands of dollars to the convoy came from their own resources and posed no security threat.
00:04:59.560What I accept, Mr. Brock, is that the core threat was to the Canadian economy. I made that clear in my opening remarks and that is my view.
00:05:09.560Thank you for the non-response minister. Very helpful.
00:05:12.560I should. I apologize for not putting a trigger warning at the beginning of it because that was two minutes of Chrystia Freeland doing whatever that was. But conservative MP Larry Brock not letting go, not relenting, not taking his foot off the gas, talking about the CBC funding, the FinTrack stuff, all of that. And at its core, she says that, you know what, we're not in the business of answering for CBC.
00:05:39.460And why this is a Fake News Friday inclusion is because CBC decided it would start providing cover for the government. That's my only interpretation that I can come up with for this.
00:05:51.200A CBC editorial from Brody Fenlon, who is one of the editorial muckety-mucks there, and he said, no, CBC News did not retract its stories on convoy protest donations.
00:06:01.960And he says they stand by their reporting. They go through the list and say, no, no, no, we didn't retract anything at all.
00:06:08.280We'll get into why that's not true. But Harrison, I want to hear your thoughts first off on that evisceration in committee.
00:06:16.120Oh, well, it was quite entertaining, I have to say. I mean, I've been trying to watch as much as I can of the inquiry process, trying to keep up with what's going on.
00:06:25.240And we've seen some high-profile testimonies. We've seen the Attorney General, David Lometti. We've seen Marco Mendicino testify.
00:06:32.520But on Tuesday, it was Freeland went up first, and then she was followed by Bill Blair.
00:06:37.640So on Tuesday, it really was one of those special nights on the inquiry.
00:06:42.540And watching this, it's no surprise, Andrew, that the clip itself, and we put it up on True North, it has, I think it has over 500,000 views.
00:06:50.120And I think it's really just because most people who are tuned in to this.
00:06:53.540In fairness, like 210,000 of those are me just refreshing and watching it again.
00:07:43.980As she said, she wasn't there to answer questions about the CBC.
00:07:47.600But it was just a great clip to watch.
00:07:49.800I have to say that it was a long time coming, too, that someone had to field some heat for the fact that they didn't have police to rely on for this.
00:07:59.180They didn't have intelligence to rely on for this.
00:08:01.180All they had was the CBC, which Fake News Friday viewers know very well.
00:08:05.620We routinely mock and make fun of on the show for being fake.
00:08:09.260So just another example, Andrew, of them doing what they usually do, which is twist the facts and put out fake stories.
00:08:33.100They say that, oh, it's misinformation that CBC walked back certain bits of coverage.
00:08:38.480They say especially it's referring to stories about foreign donations to the convoy protests that were being made by GoFundMe and Gifts and Go,
00:08:46.800even though we've had a number of financial experts and GoFundMe people and Gifts and Go people that have testified before that parliamentary committee and others to say,
00:08:55.780no, no, no, no, it was the vast majority was Canadian.
00:08:59.980And there was also, though, this report in Blacklock's reporter, CBC pulls false convoy story.
00:09:07.320And specifically this section on February 10th in a report about the protest convoy, CBC radios, the world this hour incorrectly said,
00:09:17.520GoFundMe ended a fundraiser for the protesters over questionable donations to the group.
00:09:31.900And they're still claiming, no, no, no, we haven't.
00:09:33.660Just because we haven't hit the delete button on the story, we haven't admitted that we got the facts fundamentally wrong.
00:09:39.940And one of them in particular that I think is interesting to point out here, and CBC stood by this one and shouldn't have,
00:09:46.760was it's reporting on that guy, Martin Joseph Engelhardt, who was this grifter that said that his life savings were drained because of the convoy,
00:09:55.080when in actuality he was the one cashing out on it and he was making money.
00:09:59.180And then when he went to the media, people sent him more money.
00:10:01.760And we presented CBC with hard and fast evidence that what they reported was wrong.
00:10:07.860And they said, no, no, no, we stand by it.
00:10:19.820And just to go back, Andrew, to the statement by Brody Phelan, the editor-in-chief of CBC News.
00:10:25.880I mean, you can not issue a retraction and the story can still be false.
00:10:29.960CBC even admitted to Blacklocks that their radio program detailing these accusations of foreign donations and dangerous donations from around the world was false.
00:10:51.300Well, fair enough, but you did admit to Blacklocks that your radio program parroting the exact same lines that they had been talking about throughout the convoy protest to give the government some ammunition to basically attack these protesters.
00:11:34.680But then let's talk about our next story here, Andrew, because as we talked about at the beginning of the show, this week has been a little bit crazy.
00:11:43.600Along with dropping the or suspending the vaccine mandate, Trudeau very quietly ended debate, ended any sort of parliamentary scrutiny over Bill C-11, a sweeping Internet regulation bill, which will basically force streamers or social media content providers to put forward what the CRTC determines to be Canadian content.
00:12:05.340And basically, the Heritage Minister, the person overseeing this bill, of course, took out the usual liberal line these days of accusing anyone who disagrees with him of misinformation.
00:12:17.440So if conservatives disagree or if conservatives not disagree but take issue with a specific bill, no, no, that's not legitimate.
00:12:28.000Well, we have a clip from Tim Uppel, who's the conservative MP in the House, and grilled the liberals for this exact thing, for stopping debate on a major piece of Internet censorship legislation.
00:13:40.380Now, if they read the bill, they would know that it's about online platforms contributing to our culture, and they have a problem with that.
00:13:58.200But something tells me that the CRTC isn't going to give us as fair a shake as they may give to someone like the CBC or the Globe and Mail.
00:14:05.080Yeah, I'm just more offended by the fact that he failed to land a very easy joke.
00:14:11.140I mean, this is Canadian comedy, though, because you don't actually get the punchline.
00:14:16.000You get something that vaguely resembles a joke, and we're going to be seeing more Pablo Rodriguez-approved humour, which is to say not humour at all.
00:14:25.160And, you know, again, you know, as a Canadian media outlet, some people might say, well, yeah, you should be liking this.
00:14:29.220You should be liking the idea that you're going to have more Canadian content profiled, except what people fail to realise is that it's liberal-approved Canadian content, Canadian government-approved Canadian content.
00:14:42.080And so much of this is really dependent on regulations that aren't even in the bill, what CRTC will ultimately come up with down the road.
00:14:50.780And there is something very insidious about literally a bill that people think is going to regulate speech having debate suspended, so you can't have the robust debate and discussion you need on that.
00:15:03.780And I think you were right to point out, Harrison, that it is this double standard of, yeah, we're the only ones that are the authorities on truth.
00:15:13.920And the real problem with this bill, Andrew, is that what we know is the Liberals have told us many times, Pablo Rodriguez has told us many times, that this bill, Bill C-11, won't regulate user-generated content.
00:15:29.580It won't impact what you, the viewer, might be posting on social media, might be putting out there.
00:15:35.520However, the people in charge of overseeing the regulation, the CRTC, have admitted the exact opposite.
00:15:42.120We wrote in True North that the CRTC confirmed in the committee that, in fact, yes, user-generated content, that means what you watching this show right now, what you post on social media will be regulated under Bill C-11.
00:15:56.600And the government doesn't want to allow MPs, the people you vote for, to represent your interests in the House of Commons to vote or, well, to debate this issue at all.
00:16:05.520I mean, it's just frankly shocking stuff.
00:16:07.960And really, I think it's just one more drop in the bucket of Trudeau's larger plan, which is to increase the size of government all the way through social media, through what we see on the Internet, which was never the intention of the Internet.
00:16:22.900And frankly, it's just all going a little bit sideways these days when the size of government is expanding so far and so rapidly that now the government is telling us what is and what isn't Canadian content.
00:16:36.080Yeah, and I think this ties in very well with our next story, which we've covered at True North, the fact that trust in legacy media has reached an all-time low.
00:16:45.900And this is from a report by the Reuters Institute and Oxford University.
00:16:50.760They found in their 2022 digital news report that only 39% of Anglophone Canadians say they trust most news.
00:17:03.260A little bit more in the French media, 47% of Francophones trust more news, which is an 8% drop.
00:17:08.840Now, whether Francophones are more gullible or French media is better, I'll let you be the judge of that.
00:17:14.800I'm not going to get that or will definitely not be approved media if the Liberals have their way.
00:17:19.800But the combined rating for Canada-wide is that most news has 42% trust, and that's a drop of 13% in a period of about six years.
00:17:28.540And I would suspect, and I don't know this for a fact, that that drop has mostly been in the last two years because I think COVID has been the real game changer in plummeting trust.
00:17:40.080And the reason I bring this up and tie it into the story we were just talking about, Harrison, is that we are right now seeing that Canadians are less willing to go along with things just because they're put in front of them.
00:17:52.160And I think we know Canadians are being more eager to pursue independent media because they aren't trusting what they're getting.
00:17:59.160And this leads into a lot of people saying, well, that's just misinformation.
00:18:04.060No one's looking in the mirror and saying, wait, maybe we are the problem for putting information out that people don't find trustworthy.
00:18:11.880Right. And I think this is a broader trend across the board.
00:18:15.120As you said, this is definitely a factor of the last two years.
00:18:17.920People are starting to realize that the sources they used to be able to trust are no longer serving their needs.
00:18:36.840But like you said, you don't we're not really seeing the media, the legacy media take these criticisms on board.
00:18:44.300We're not really seeing them change their their reporting or their style at all to try and regain trust.
00:18:49.780What we're seeing, in fact, like we said, like we talked about at the top of the show, is the CBC digging their heels in to back up a government which they know had no justification to invoke the Emergencies Act.
00:19:00.360And I want to go through some more of this, some more of this article because it highlights the outlets that Canadians or that, yeah, that Canadians distrust the most.
00:19:09.880I was I was wondering if it was an Anglophone or Francophone thing.
00:19:13.460And it says and Andrew, I'm totally surprised to see this.
00:19:17.420But apparently it says CBC News, the Toronto Star and CP24 are some of the most distrusted or have the highest levels of distrust.
00:19:27.580CBC has the highest level of distrust. Not possible.
00:19:32.360I find it hilarious. I mean, you mentioned something before we started.
00:19:35.540I was about to steal your joke, but I figure I'll give you credit for it because you said that CP24 is like 90 percent weather, which I think is right.
00:19:42.100And then and I was thinking the other 10 percent is traffic.
00:19:44.320So it's like if even people don't trust the traffic and weather reports on CP24, I think there's a big problem in Canadian media.
00:19:50.900But you're right. CBC News, we're told that we need to put more money, more money into this.
00:19:55.220That's the problem. We need more investment.
00:19:57.000And Canadians love it. They love Schitt's Creek and they love.
00:20:00.500I mean, I can't. Oh, there's a joke there that I don't think I'm allowed to say.
00:20:03.680They love Schitt's Creek, but they don't like CBC content on news because they don't trust it.
00:20:08.400And this is very Trudeopian in a way, because Trudeau will always say that, well, you know, anytime he gets caught, it's all a learning opportunity for all of us.
00:20:17.460And this is the media's approach, too.
00:20:19.200When we don't trust them, it's because, well, we need to we need to be better.
00:20:24.880No, exactly. And I mean, the CBC, the Toronto Star and CP24 are pretty much I mean, at this point, what we see from the Toronto Star is not that different from what we see from the Globe and Mail.
00:20:36.560And sometimes, although we do have we do have lots of friends in the National Post, we do see sometimes they'll pick up Canadian press articles and they'll be in a way kind of parroting the exact same reporting as what you'll see from the Toronto Star.
00:20:49.060And I just think that really what we're seeing is is across the board, a huge lack of trust in our institutions.
00:20:58.240And I think that'll have significant issues down the road the more we go with this until until things until things change and until these outlets actually start to take responsibility for the situation that they find themselves in.
00:21:10.320Now, we we wrote this up at True North last week, and this is this is not really a surprising headline, but I think one that just reinforces what we're talking about here, which says leftists approve of legacy media coverage.
00:21:23.240Conservatives believe they are mistreated. And that was a poll that basically showed that 67 percent said that media coverage of their political views.
00:21:31.04067 percent of conservatives said that media coverage of their political views was unfair, while only 22 percent said that the coverage was fair.
00:21:41.200And those on that 61 percent of the respondents identified themselves as being on the political left, said that the coverage that of their political views was fair.
00:21:50.100What a surprise, Andrew, that all of the liberals that are in these legacy media outlets represent the left of the political spectrum fairly.
00:21:58.220And the people on the right don't feel well represented. I mean, I think that I think this statistic just shows to people why they should be watching coverage like like like what we have at True North, because clearly what's going on is is not in the Canadians best interest.
00:22:14.860Yeah, I mean, anytime you see an outlet that tends to be hit by both sides, it's probably an indication that outlet is doing something good because no side is thinking they're great.
00:22:23.800I mean, right now you get the left that says, oh, why can't all media be like CBC and the Toronto Star and, you know, people on the right saying, oh, why can't it all be like, I don't know, the Toronto Sun or Fox News or whatever.
00:22:32.820But it's like in reality, you need someone that's going to call a spade a spade or you need to, as a consumer, gather your news from different perspectives here.
00:22:41.080I want to see if we can squeeze in one more here, because I think this is related to all of this.
00:22:45.600And it's this idea that if people don't trust institutions, if people don't trust the mainstream media, it's because they're the problem.
00:22:52.720They're the ones that aren't enlightened enough.
00:22:54.540Now, this story has been making the rounds, an abacus poll that found 40% of Canadians are conspiracy theorists.
00:23:04.320Gasp! Shock! Horror! Who knew? 40% of Canadians are conspiracy theorists.
00:23:09.460Well, I don't want to do a full point-by-point breakdown of the poll, because I think there are some methodological errors here that do need to be addressed.
00:23:17.460But generally speaking, they polled 1,500 people.
00:23:20.520They found that, oh, 44% of Canadians believe big events like wars, recessions, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people working in secret against us.
00:23:32.060I mean, that's just a sloppily worded question.
00:23:35.020Like, governments are small groups of people working, often in secret.
00:23:39.160One-third of Canadians believe in the so-called white replacement theory.
00:23:42.400And again, this one, there are a lot of problems with the question that we should delve into.
00:23:49.900One in five Canadians believe it is definitely or probably true that the World Economic Forum is a group of global elites with a secretive strategy to impose their ideas on the world.
00:24:02.620I think that's their mission statement.
00:24:05.140Like, I literally, that is exactly what the World Economic Forum is.
00:24:08.800Now, that doesn't mean they're, you know, microchipping us and pulling the strings on everyone like marionettes, but they literally are a small secretive group that meets in the Swiss mountains.
00:24:51.200Well, of course, what they'll do is they'll basically, they'll lump in the most absurd claims with the people that believe, for example, like the World Economic Forum is a small group, as you said, that want to push their ideas into people.
00:25:04.460So they'll take legitimate issues, legitimate problems that people have and concerns that people have, and then lump them in with the most absurd and most crazy far-fetched ideas and then put them all together.
00:25:16.860And really, if you go through this article, this National Post article, what you quickly realize is that this is just a Canada-bashing article.
00:25:25.140They were looking for an attention-grabbing headline to talk about, of course, the white replacement theory.
00:25:31.780They put in, as you said, Andrew, a, you know, there's lots of talk about the methodology of this poll.
00:25:39.200But of course, what they were looking for was the big attention-grabbing headline that said millions of Canadians believe in the white replacement theory.
00:25:46.180And the truth is, it was 1,500 people, of which 500 of those 1,500 randomly selected people agreed with a sloppily worded question.
00:25:56.760Now, Andrew, as well, the thing that we all know about polls these days and what I've come to realize over the past five or six years is that pollsters, legacy media pollsters and pollsters that have been around for a long time, have consistently failed to accurately poll people who are traditionally on the right.
00:26:13.820That's why we've seen some crazy polling that indicates something that is not actually going to end up happening or come true.
00:26:19.860We saw it in 2016. We saw it with Brexit. We see it all the time that pollsters seem to be just unable to poll a good number of the population of our country.
00:26:29.180So I wouldn't put much stock in polls you see that have crazy headlines like this.
00:26:34.480But again, it's all part of this idea that we need to play up the mistrust in institutions or at least demonize people who rightly, I think, have specific concerns that end up being labeled as conspiracy theorists.
00:26:50.040Like I said, I mean, a conspiracy theorist may end up being a prophet in a few years. You just never know at this rate.
00:26:55.020Yeah. And again, I mean, you are right about the sloppy wording of this thing and polls that tend to underrepresent people on the right.
00:27:02.600And a lot of the time that isn't deliberate to the pollsters. There's a natural selection bias in how polls are accessed.
00:27:09.320I mean, any poll that's done online is going to carve out certain people that are not on the Internet, that are not as adept at it.
00:27:16.040So there's an age bias in there. You also have people that don't have cell phones, sometimes are excluded from how they get access to the numbers
00:27:23.820because they'll get a laundry list of mobile numbers. And it used to be that they were only polling landlines.
00:27:28.720So you'd miss people that had cell phones only like. So there are a lot of areas where even if there's not malicious intent,
00:27:34.660they're not capturing a whole sample, which is why extrapolating from a sample of a thousand to a country of 36 million is difficult.
00:27:42.480And I just want to pull up one just before we close things out here, because I got an online poll months ago that I screenshotted and tweeted about from ECOS,
00:27:51.860conducted for the World Health Organization and the Canadian government. So have fun with that one.
00:27:57.000And they were gauging conspiracy theories as well. And one of them was to use a scale to indicate how likely it is that each statement is true.
00:28:04.320One of the statements was, I think that government agencies closely monitor citizens.
00:28:11.000Well, I do think that. And I don't think that makes you a conspiracy theorist.
00:28:14.860But if I were to put, yes, I'm 100 percent certain of that, they're going to use that to say, oh, yes, this many Canadians are conspiracy theorists.
00:28:22.600I believe there are important things that happen in the world which the public is never informed about.
00:28:27.360Yeah, that seems reasonable. I think there are secret organizations that influence political decisions.
00:28:31.940Yeah. I mean, you can believe these things in broad strokes and not be a conspiracy theorist.
00:28:38.460But now we're in this era where as anyone who says something even remotely critical of this narrative is seen as a conspiracy theorist.
00:28:49.220And all it's doing is trying to marginalize people and say, oh, we shouldn't listen to them.
00:28:53.700They're stupid. They're troglodytes. We don't need to represent them. Politicians don't need to speak for them.
00:28:58.720And in the end, you have a society that is increasingly polarized.
00:29:02.140So we've rambled on a little bit here. And I say we I have rambled on a little bit here.
00:29:06.720But thank you for indulging. Harrison Faulkner, thank you very much.
00:29:09.840How can people learn about your new show? Well, you can go to you can find it on on our website, TNC.news.
00:29:15.460And you can also find it on YouTube, Rumble and Facebook.
00:29:19.100So where you find Andrew's show or you find Candace's show, you'll see my show as well.
00:29:23.700And we've got new shows that are that are coming out at True North.
00:29:26.780We also have Rupa Subramanian, who recently joined us, who launched a podcast.
00:29:31.180And at this rate, like I said on my show last yesterday, it was, you know, at this rate, who knows?
00:29:37.340You may be having new shows pretty much every month.
00:29:39.360So you can find my show at the same place you'll find Andrew's and Candace's on YouTube, on Rumble, on Facebook and on our website.