7 minute read
Publisher’s message
The Trudeau government’s attempts to regulate the media are anti-democratic.
In a democracy, a free press and freedom of expression mean it is the prerogative of an individual to read or say want they want and not be beholden to what the government wants us to read or think. During the Second World War, Canadians were told that sending Japanese Canadians to internment camps was a needed measure. There was no questioning this government narrative and no ability to read or access perspectives from other countries. That sort of control would be impossible in today’s open media society.
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The Trudeau government’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies are very troubling- whether it is their draconian use of the Emergencies Measures Act to suppress civil liberties or lying in Parliament about it afterwards when asked to produce the facts that to justify such an anti-democratic move. Their ongoing attempts to regulate the internet to counter disinformation whether its from Russia or anywhere else is problematic. Giving civil servants the power to censor the internet sets a troubling precedence that can never be pulled back.
Banning large conservative media organizations like Rebel News from the parliamentary press gallery is wrong. Andrew Lawton of the True North Centre for Public Policy was banned from covering Justin Trudeau during the 2019 federal election and at the 2019 Global Conference for Media Freedom in London. The principle of a free press is far more important than the ‘feelings of so-called progressives who themselves are just as guilty of bias. The CBC often posits things to feed their narrative. In February 2022, during an interview with the Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendicino, CBC reporter Nil Koksal suggested that Russia instigated the Ottawa trucker convoy without referencing an iota of evidence. During the interview, Koksal said to Minister Mendicino, “I do ask that because, you know, given Canada’s support of Ukraine in this current crisis with Russia, I don’t know if it’s farfetched to ask, but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows, or perhaps even instigating it from the outside. The CBC went along with the narrative that Canadian citizens were being manipulated by foreign influences without their reporter providing a shred of evidence to back the claim. More troubling is that in recent weeks Mendicino appears to have deliberately mislead Parliament about the police asking for the EMA to be imposed, and many government officials have stated that much of what drove the cabinet to implement the EMA were media reports-including those from the CBC.
Rebel News has 1.56 million subscribers on YouTube. Compare this to the nationally funded CBCs with three million subscribers, and it shows a substantial appetite for a different point of view.
It is not the government’s job to tell citizens what news they can or cannot read or watch. There is a clear danger to democracy when a government empowers itself to cut off access to foreign media in the name of politics, completely circumventing the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Should we cut off all Arabic or Israeli media in the name of public information security? What about the Indian press, which has been extremely critical of the Trudeau administration since his 2018 visit to India? With the proposed mandate, the government can simply label it disinformation and ban it.
The Trudeau government wants Canadians to use “trusted media” curated by the government itself and spearheaded by a national broadcasting corporation that has shown itself to be highly partisan. We know this to be a fact because in a recent canard, the CBC published a list of what the government deemed to be “acceptable media” in Canada. Tellingly, the CBC has disabled the ability to comment on most of its YouTube videos and all its Facebook posts. The broadcaster says that the public can instead comment on its webpage, which is moderated by a third party, a substantial overreach in free expression, especially given that hate speech, as defined by Canadian law, must be determined by a court, not a CBC employee. The CBC does this to eliminate perspectives that differ too widely from their reporting.
The risk of having a government that can push its cultivated narrative on the people through a powerful state-funded news establishment is troubling and dangerous.
By allowing the government the power to regulate what we see and read, we are creating a bigger monster than we can comprehend g
publisher/managing editor Dan Donovan art director & web editor Karen Temple social media manager Kat Walcott social media videographer Kayla Walcott cover illustration Food Fight by John Fraser Art & Illustration • https://johnfraserart.ca
photographers Jean-Marc Carisse, Chinook Productions, Thomas Faull, Carole Jobin, Richard Tardif Photographie, Karen Temple, Justin Van Leeuwen
fashion editor Alexandra Hunt
accounts Joe Colas C.G.A bookkeeper Joan MacLean
contributing writers Tatum Bergen, Michael Bussière, Sid Cratzbarg, Dan Donovan, Mckenzie Donovan, Alexandra Hunt, Paul Riley, Zhao Yong
web contributors Susan Alsembach, Luke Barry, Adele Blair, Sofia Donato, Haley Donovan, Mckenzie Donovan, Dave Gross, Jennifer Hartley, Ryan Lythall, Owen Maxwell, Kate More, Zarha Nafal, Aaron Nava, Rusel Olsen, Mona Staples, Kat Walcott, Keith Whittier corporate advisor J. Paul Harquail, Charles Franklin
corporate counsel Paul Champagne
editor in memoriam Harvey F. Chartrand
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