Rebel News and The Western Standard join forces to fight the government for the right to be recognized as a qualified Canadian journalism organization. They discuss the government's attempts to block their access to information and what they can do about it.
00:00:00.000Well, welcome to a special presentation and alliance of independent media outlets.
00:00:06.360We have Sheila Gunn-Reed from Rebel News and Andrew Lawton from True North, along with me here with the Western Standard, all in one spot at the same time.
00:00:15.700So good to see you all together at the same time, guys.
00:00:18.740Yeah, the Competition Bureau will be busting this up any minute now.
00:00:22.940Yeah, thanks for having us on the show.
00:00:24.940Yeah, that might be the next thing is some sort of media antitrust.
00:00:27.320But of course, they'll start with the smaller players rather than come and get us.
00:00:30.640That's the, I believe, the rebel mantra and we'll take it on as well.
00:01:07.620We don't generally ask their permission to do, well, anything.
00:01:11.300But let me first thank the both of you for your interest in our struggles with the qualified Canadian journalism organization designation.
00:01:21.120Because in the before times, in the olden times, I don't know, seven years ago, maybe, all the media landscape would be up in arms defending the free press.
00:01:34.840Even when I was assaulted at the legislature back in 2017, there was nearly unanimous support that people should probably keep their hands off of journalists.
00:01:47.580But I don't think if I were assaulted now that that would happen, that they would rally around us.
00:01:53.660So with regard to our denial of being designated as a qualified Canadian journalism organization, we are suing the government.
00:02:03.120People can see our documents at wearesuing.ca.
00:02:07.760The government had a bit of a witch trial for us.
00:02:10.840It took them a year, wherein they went through 276 of our news stories, which I think is kind of funny because many of those stories, we were probably highly critical of the government censors.
00:02:23.720So they had to watch our criticism of them, which brings me a lot of joy.
00:02:28.420But 276 of our stories, which actually is quite a small number because we probably do that much journalism in a month, in a slow month even.
00:02:36.000And they decided that only 1% of what we do at Rebel News qualifies as journalism, which is odd to me because I primarily work in access to information, which is, you know, original source documents.
00:03:15.920I mean, we don't ask the government permission to do our work, but it will give them the ability to limit our attendance to press conferences.
00:03:24.140Now, that's not going to stop us from asking those same politicians questions.
00:03:29.560If our journalists have to jump out from behind a potted plant in the lobby of a hotel, fine.
00:03:34.940But the politicians are not going to skirt accountability by keeping us out.
00:03:40.000And it will also give social media giants and search engines the ability to downrank us, which makes it harder for people to find the work that we do.
00:03:53.200And since we are on the Internet, that's it could spell a death sentence for us.
00:03:59.520But it also and I think the one that is most atrocious to me is that our subscribers will not be treated equally and fairly under the Income Tax Act because it will not allow our subscribers, our paid subscribers at eight bucks a month.
00:04:17.640It won't give them the ability to write off their subscription to us because we don't have this designation, which I think is wholly unfair.
00:04:28.940It's punishing our paid subscribers for disagreeing with the government.
00:04:33.540And we live and breathe on our supporters.
00:04:36.280The only reason Rebel News exists is because time and time again, whenever we are faced with challenges like this, an army of people who sometimes disagree with us say, we need you to live on to provide a counterbalance to the mainstream media.
00:04:50.240Those people are now being punished because the government hates the work that we do at Rebel News.
00:04:56.500Yeah, it's it's and it's across the board.
00:04:59.040It's interesting that you brought up how the other media outlets.
00:05:01.540And again, I do remember them rallying back when you did get assaulted that time and the silence now.
00:05:06.520But you see, you've got mainstream outlets, legacy outlets that are beholden to this status.
00:05:10.620And they're a little less inclined to rock the boat, perhaps like Andrew, do you think there's a chilling effect?
00:05:16.380And has this impacted you guys at all at True North?
00:05:21.500And I know I've told this story to my own audience, but I'll share it with yours as well.
00:05:25.240Back in 2019, Sheila and I were covering for our respective outlets, the Global Conference for Media Freedom, which Canada was co-hosting in London, England with the United Kingdom government.
00:05:36.380And this is a media freedom conference.
00:05:38.240Chrystia Freeland, the foreign minister at the time, was making this a bit of a pet project for her.
00:05:43.560And she was having this press conference after having made herself available in no fora to answer media questions.
00:05:50.980And Sheila and I both showed up dutifully for the press conference, along with reporters from CTV and CBC and the Globe and Mail and Al Jazeera.
00:05:59.440And oddly, the room must have been a very weird one because it had room for all but two journalists.
00:06:06.240And the two, it wasn't CBC that they didn't have room for.
00:06:11.380I mean, I'm a big guy, so maybe they didn't have room for me, but Sheila's not, and they didn't have room for her either.
00:06:16.200So I take from that that there's a very clear judgment that the government is executing as far as you are not a journalist if we don't like your coverage.
00:06:25.340And it has nothing to do with the inputs that Sheila described earlier of filing access to information requests, attending press conferences, asking questions, writing stories.
00:06:40.000And the media freedom conference incident was remarkable because of how brazen it was.
00:06:46.380And because it was so brazen, the great part of the story was that all of the other reporters threatened to boycott the press conference unless we were allowed in.
00:06:54.300And I don't know if that would have happened in Canada or even in the years since that happened.
00:06:58.900But it was a very, very marked display of solidarity.
00:07:02.760But you fast forward, and in the 2019 election, Justin Trudeau would not let me cover his campaign.
00:07:09.400The Leaders Debates Commission banned Rebel and True North from attending the debate.
00:07:15.100Things got a little bit better last year when True North was allowed to cover the debate, but Rebel was still denied and had to sue and won and ultimately got to be there.
00:07:24.080So all of these things are showing that the government is not prepared to recognize what journalism is unless they happen to like the specific products of it.
00:07:34.340And I think that's the challenge here is that there is no license to be a journalist in Canada.
00:07:39.820In the UK, they have not a license, but they have this National Journalist Association card that is effectively serving as a license where if you can't produce one of those, you won't be allowed into a lot of events.
00:07:51.800And in Canada, press freedom has been benefited by not having anything like that in the past.
00:07:57.440Like, we're seeing the problems, though, because with the convoy, especially on the last day, the Sunday, whatever it was, after the protests had been broken up, walking down the street, police were threatening to arrest people, except if you were a journalist, you were allowed to stay there.
00:08:13.340But then they'd say, well, prove you're a journalist. And it's like, well, I mean, what do you want me to do? Like, how can I prove it? I don't have a license. I don't have a permit.
00:08:20.560One cop let me go through when he saw my verified Twitter profile. Another required a letter from my editor that I had to show him on my phone. Another just didn't let me pass at all.
00:08:31.220But this is the problem in Canada is that press freedom is so subjective and independent journalists in particular who don't have the approved opinions are the ones that bear the brunt of this.
00:08:41.640Well, yeah, and I'm glad Sheila brought up like we focused a lot of the standard on pointing out, you know, that is the subsidies in the bailouts and a lot of programs that a status would qualify for.
00:08:52.860And, you know, we like to rub their noses in it and take pride and say we're not taking them even if we qualify.
00:08:57.120But there's much, much more to it that people don't typically see.
00:09:00.380I mean, this is their ways that they could throttle your access to events, to government functions, to areas where news is breaking, as Andrew said, you know, such as the protests.
00:09:10.020And that really undercuts a media organization or write offs for subscribers. People don't see that.
00:09:15.600And most of all, as you mentioned, we're all beholden to the social media giants. It's just the reality of the new media.
00:09:21.240I mean, we we never would have been able to have the capital to make freestanding broadcast units like the past and things like that.
00:09:28.180So this new social media is great that way. But if you get delisted or run afoul of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, that that can impact us very heavily.
00:09:37.000And if they start making their ratings based on Canada's qualified journalists, they can really make you live or die.
00:09:46.340Yeah. And I would add that, you know, I've had issues in the past where I've been looking for my own stories, things that I know I've written.
00:09:52.860And I'll Google the story and I remember the headline. I remember the keywords. I'll even Google with TNC dot news, which is true north domain name.
00:10:00.780And the story doesn't come up or it comes up, but it's buried beneath a bunch of a bunch of unrelated things.
00:10:07.160And then I say, OK, well, is am I the problem? Is the algorithm the problem? Is the outlet the problem?
00:10:12.380But but we know there's manipulation taking place and we know that the big tech companies are, in fact, operating in a way that is not transparent and oftentimes at the expense of of conservative leaning outlets.
00:10:24.060Yeah, there's I've got a really great example of this. People can do this for themselves, go on to YouTube, open up the YouTube search and type rebel news and you won't get a hit on a story that has millions of views that we've done.
00:10:38.900You'll get criticism of us first that has tens of thousands of views. That's how they tweak these algorithms to downlist us.
00:10:49.280And what this QCJO designation does is it basically codifies the requirement to downlist us and to hide us from people who want to see us.
00:11:01.660And, you know, you couple this sort of downlisting that's going to be codified in in the designation along with Bill C-18, which is the Online News Act, which is really the Online Shakedown Act that, you know, will require payments from these social media giants to creators for linking to the content.
00:11:27.620And people just aren't going to link to you. That's what's going to happen. I mean, it's just censorship by another way.
00:11:36.980It's really troublesome. I'm going to ask you to start with Andrew. It brought something to mind just as we were talking, but it chafes on me as a libertarian.
00:11:45.240I kind of like the Wild West of how it is out there. But could this be solved by some sort of balanced actual licensing scheme?
00:11:53.840I mean, something where maybe the applications, I don't like more licenses or regulations for anything.
00:11:58.440So this is hard for me to say. But, you know, where it was just based on having a registered company and having a formal location and just a couple of things, content aside, but just a basis to say that you are media.
00:12:09.600Because, I mean, I do understand the police are clearing a scene. They do need to know.
00:12:12.720Are you just another protester or even instigator who's pretending to media or are you real?
00:12:18.960There could be some value in this. We just don't want the government to be the ones determining it.
00:12:22.420Yeah, and I understand it, but I would caution people going down that road, partially on my libertarian grounds as well, but also because we just don't see this space being as crowded as people like to think.
00:12:35.840And to go back to the example I gave earlier of the liberals barring me in the 2019 campaign, I was actually flying around where the liberals were going, trying to cover Justin Trudeau's press conferences.
00:12:47.660And one of the excuses that was given to me by Justin Trudeau's press secretary was, well, we can't just allow anyone who says their media to come in because then everyone's going to come.
00:12:57.960And I said, look around. I'm the only one you're turning down.
00:13:01.180You don't have, you know, Bobby Joe, the blogger flying to Vancouver to cover this campaign.
00:13:06.300You don't have random people that are showing up in droves.
00:13:09.080The people that are here are people that are journalists.
00:13:11.660The only difference is you're deciding based on not liking my coverage that I don't fit that bill when at other events they were letting in student journalists, for example.
00:13:20.580So I think generally speaking, people tend to overstate how much there is at the floodgates waiting if you were to open the floodgates.
00:13:28.120I don't think it is huge because doing good journalism, as Sheila knows, is costly.
00:13:32.980I mean, theoretically, you can do it sitting from your computer, but to do the bootstraps journalism on the ground, to take the time to do the investigative journalism, it comes with a cost.
00:13:42.420And a lot of companies and a lot of individuals aren't doing that.
00:13:45.500So I think that any effort to define or regulate in any way is really a solution in search of a problem.
00:13:53.660And I think that when you talk about the implications of it, government censorship and regulation are bad.
00:14:01.720Big tech problems are very much a force.
00:14:05.080It's government empowering big tech that creates a new category of problem that removes the government accountability, but has still the force of law.
00:14:16.680I mean, the only thing worse than Facebook or Twitter censoring is doing it because they've been deputized by the government.
00:14:21.820And I think that's the inevitable byproduct of any sort of licensing regime is it basically makes all these tech companies, web hosts, domain registrars, state enforcers.
00:14:31.260You know, I just want to add to Andrew's comment because, you know, I really think the answer to this, like both of you are pointing out, it's not more government.
00:14:58.460If you are not a journalist in Alberta that is working for either Rebel News or Western Standard or True North, then you work for Post Media.
00:15:11.580And when we applied for access to the Alberta Legislature Press Gallery, the competitors, our competitors at Post Media basically held a witch trial for myself and Kian Bextie.
00:15:25.220They got together and without us presenting arguments or saying, hey, we're not we're not as bad as you have cooked up in your mind that we are.
00:15:34.000They did a secret vote and wouldn't let us in.
00:15:37.400So, you know, the answer is not giving the power to censor to the government and it's not giving the power to censor also to a guild of your competitors, which is what happened to us at the legislature in Alberta.
00:15:54.460But it also was how the government passed the buck off to blocking us from the debates.
00:16:00.060They said, oh, you know, it's put together by the Debates Commission.
00:16:02.980You can't get access to the parliament because the PPG is in charge of that.
00:16:07.780Well, the PPG is a bunch of bailout journalists reliant on the government for their survival.
00:16:11.660So they're naturally they're going to do whatever the government wants them to do.
00:16:15.200So I'm with you when you say it must be the wild, wild west and competition will weed out those who cannot survive by doing good journalism.
00:17:43.260I said it's a miracle, but I thought the same way.
00:17:45.940The enemy of my enemy of my enemy of my enemy is eventually a loose acquaintance, I think.
00:17:50.560But what happens is the companies, the tech companies will need to pay, as Sheila mentioned earlier, these media companies that are government approved if they link to them.
00:18:01.520And by link to, I don't even mean they had to do it.
00:18:05.420Like, if the Toronto Star sets up a Facebook page and links to itself on Facebook, Facebook needs to pay the Toronto Star somehow.
00:18:13.820And we've decided that the Toronto Star is not making a decision.
00:18:17.240The Toronto Star is somehow being exploited by Facebook.
00:18:20.640Google, which is a search results index that lets people search for things, will now have to pay for the privilege of including something in its search.
00:18:36.100Why has the government decided that these companies, which, by the way, do not need news sites?
00:18:41.800I forget the exact number, but I think, like, news makes up less than 10% of Facebook's business, if I recall, from the Australia case where this happened.
00:18:50.720Like, they need memes and cat videos and influencers and people saying what they had for dinner that day.
00:19:01.080So the fact that these companies owe anything to the news industry in Canada is absolutely laughable.
00:19:08.540Yeah, and I had Peter Menzies on a little while back talking about that, and he was with the CRTC, and he was a publisher, and he's just horrified with where it's going.
00:19:19.500They're shaking down the social media giants with this.
00:19:22.860I mean, you're forced providers in a sense, and that's not going to make the environment any more healthy.
00:19:27.680I listened to an interesting podcast on Canada land, which ideologically is quite different than myself, but I respect them as another independent outlet, and they're certainly never afraid of being critical of the government either.
00:19:37.420And they spoke to one of the people on that committee for it, and it was just so clear on how arbitrary the closed-door decisions were on who is going to qualify and who isn't as well.
00:19:48.000So, I mean, there are independent media outlets that understand this on any side of the political spectrum, but how do you think we can push back against this?
00:19:55.460I mean, we saw that a conservative government, I hate to say it, would be just as happy to shut down critical media as a liberal one if given the chance.
00:20:09.340Are there other ways we can push back?
00:20:10.900Well, I think for us, the most important thing is to get this in front of a judge again.
00:20:15.240Every time that we drag the liberals in front of a judge, particularly on free press issues, we continue to win.
00:20:22.860So this will be, I'm predicting, our third victory.
00:20:25.980Because as you rightly point out, it's so arbitrary.
00:20:28.540How do we meet requirements when we don't know truly what the requirements are?
00:20:33.920I mean, the idea that some government censor was making, you know, $120,000 a year plus benefits to go through 276 of our stories, which is just a light smattering of the work we do, to decide that none of it was news, only 1% of it was news?
00:20:51.380I'd probably get 10% of my stories stolen by the mainstream media.
00:21:07.200But we are taking on the government with the deepest pockets in the land.
00:21:12.760They have all the money in the world to fight our little independent news agency.
00:21:16.740They just keep rounding up lawyers and lawyers.
00:21:19.880But, you know, like I said off the top of the show, we live and breathe on our supporters.
00:21:25.720And we have this army of people out there who just come through time and time again who want us to live on and want us to fight the government another day and tell the other side of the story.
00:22:41.460And we ended up being accredited in 2021.
00:22:44.380And while Rebel wasn't, I think perhaps at the next election, maybe they'll have learned their lesson.
00:22:48.580But I think that there are two aspects of this.
00:22:51.480One is that individual people who are hearing this need to support independent media with not just your clicks and your shares and your views, which are important,
00:24:08.160And that's going to be the great equalizer.
00:24:10.220But we're going to be up against more and more resistance through policies like the ones we've been talking about.
00:24:15.420Well, and sorry to drag this on a little bit, but we must remember that our audiences are experiencing much the same censorship that we as conservative news outlets are too.
00:24:25.060They are also being deplatformed, kicked off social media, having their posts hidden from others, being told that they are harmful or harassing.
00:24:36.300So they really do understand what we're going through.
00:24:40.020And for us at Rebel News, it's so often because we advocate for those normal people out there.
00:24:47.340But another way that people can fight back is, I don't know if you guys have heard, but there's this conservative leadership campaign happening right now.
00:24:56.160I think it's important to put the leadership candidates to the test.
00:25:00.920It's not enough to do the popular, easy, conservative thing of saying, oh, I'm going to defund the CBC.
00:25:30.780What are you going to do about the media bailout, the CBC-ification of the rest of the media?
00:25:36.220What are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about the Online Streaming Act, where they have left the door wide open for regulation of video games?
00:25:46.560Because the government said they play on the same screen. That is literally the logic they used.
00:27:52.800Yeah, well, that puts, you know, a good way to close off because it puts some of the onus on ourselves.
00:27:56.440As long as we make ourselves too big to fail, we give, you know, too much.
00:28:00.980If we're drawing too much audience, as far as it's concerned for the others, they can't shut us out.
00:28:05.780They can't avoid us. And, you know, we have to, if we're putting a good product, we're going to keep getting those subscribers.
00:28:11.460And we've got to keep reminding people that self-serving plug, sign up for all of them.
00:28:15.240So maybe we'll close up just to remind everybody where your shows are, guys.
00:28:19.260Starting with you, Sheila, so people know where to go to find good independent media.
00:28:22.800Sure. Majority of our content is available for free.
00:28:26.020If you want to see the uncensored version, might I suggest not going anywhere near YouTube and on over to Rumble because there are many things that we cannot publish on YouTube.
00:28:35.120But if you want to support our independent journalism, you can do that at rebelnewsplus.com.
00:28:44.920And we've added two new shows there and we didn't up the price.
00:28:47.800So that's us helping your family fight inflation.
00:28:50.700And if you'd like to help in our legal battle against Trudeau for denying us our journalism license, ostensibly, you can go to wearesuing.ca because we are in for truly the fight of our lives.
00:29:07.340So True North coverage is all at tnc.news.
00:29:10.860You can subscribe on Facebook and Twitter and Rumble and all of these other platforms.
00:29:15.340And then I also do my newsletter, which is over at andrewlotton.substack.com.
00:29:20.700Right on. And we are, of course, at the westernstandardonline.com.
00:29:24.920And we're on all those social media majors as well.
00:29:27.700So I appreciate you guys, you know, responding and us getting together.
00:29:31.220I'm sure our viewers appreciate seeing the independent media outlets, you know, again, showing some that term that Sheila used earlier that I still mixed on is solidarity.
00:29:39.820Camaraderie. Let's call it camaraderie.
00:29:42.280That's how we can make sure we just keep that unfettered information getting out there.