Tag Archive: Andrew Scheer

CBC vs. CPC: when bias isn’t just perceived anymore

— 10.13.2019 07:44 AM

A reasonable apprehension of bias — that’s what we learned to call it in law school.

It’s the legal standard, in Canadian law, for disqualifying a judge or decision-maker in an administrative tribunal.

Bias is prejudice, mostly. It’s an unreasonably hostile feeling or opinion about a person or group. In law, we learned, it can be “real” or “perceived.” That is, it doesn’t have to actually happen right out in the open — the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled it can even happen when a decision-maker “might have” acted unfairly.

That’s when a judge or a decision-maker can be disqualified, and kicked off a case. But is a reporter a decision-maker, in the legal sense?

It’s not a question reserved for legal scholars, hidden away behind stacks of musty old volumes in a law library somewhere. On Friday, it became a question for the rest of us, too.

On Friday, the CBC — along with their newsreader Rosemary Barton, and Parliamentary Bureau reporter Jean-Paul Tasker — sued the Conservative Party of Canada. For real.

Their complaint: on the Internet, the Tories used 17 seconds of CBC video. About the Tories.

As the Conservative Party wrote in a release: “The 17 seconds of CBC clips in the video included (Postmedia columnist) Andrew Coyne highlighting how Justin Trudeau broke the law, Justin Trudeau telling a Canadian war veteran that he is ‘asking for more than we can give right now,’ and one CBC reporter questioning why the Liberals provided Loblaws with $12 million in tax dollars to install new refrigerators.”

When this writer heard about the lawsuit, it sounded like a joke, or an Internet meme. It was farcical.

Now, Conservatives have had a long (and sometimes also unreasonable) dislike for the CBC. Voters who identify themselves as conservative are acutely focused on media bias, particularly as it exists at progressive media organizations like CBC.

A number of Rasmussen polls conducted in the U.S. during the 2012 and 2016 presidential races found that two out of three conservative voters — and sometimes as many as three out of four — felt the media give progressive politicians a much easier time. They believe media bias is real.

So, when Justin Trudeau confidante Gerald Butts was recently photographed alone at an intimate dinner with Huffington Post Ottawa bureau chief Althia Raj — an English leaders’ debate moderator — Conservatives were apoplectic. It showed an inappropriate bias, they said.

Maybe so. Butts, for his part, was doing what politicos always do — he was trying to influence the media. Fine.

Raj, however, was doing something undeniably foolish. She was meeting privately with the most powerful unelected Liberal just before a critical debate, and thereby creating a perception that she would treat the Liberal leader differently.

Because Raj’s commentary has always been characterized by a pro-Trudeau tilt, a perception of bias was not unreasonable. At all.

In the case of the CBC lawsuit against the Conservative Party, however, the bias is not merely perceived. It is real. And it inarguably disqualifies Barton, Tasker and the CBC — all important decision-makers about the information millions of Canadians receive during this election — from broadcasting anything about the Conservative Party.

Truly: how can Andrew Scheer, or any of his candidates, now believe that the CBC will treat them fairly in news coverage? More importantly, how can the CBC’s viewers and listeners now believe that what they are seeing and hearing is free of bias?

After all, how the CBC handles a news story — how it writes it, how it edits it, how it headlines and promotes it — can destroy a political career in short order.

The CBC has said it was the “driver” behind the lawsuit, not the journalists. And it plans to remove the journalists from the lawsuit.

Whether they intended it or not, the CBC and Barton and Tasker have provided clear evidence of an appalling bias. They have shown they are utterly disinterested in being fair.

That lawsuit wasn’t a legal action. Given that the Tories now may win the election, it was a political suicide note.


Comments (53)

The rumours about Justin Trudeau

— 10.09.2019 12:22 PM

Rumours. It’s more than a Fleetwood Mac album.

Rumours about Justin Trudeau have littered Canadian newsrooms like confetti since the start of this election. Rumours about Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada.

As we now know, some of the rumours about the Liberal leader turned out to be true.

So, in 2014, this writer was told there were affidavits detailing inappropriate conduct between Trudeau and various young people. I simply did not believe it, but I raised the allegation directly with Trudeau’s most-senior adviser.

To my surprise, he acknowledged the allegations had been made in affidavits, but said that Trudeau’s insular inner circle were not worried. They had rebutting affidavits of their own to respond.

Subsequently, a female parliamentarian sent me an editorial written by a B.C. reporter in which she alleged that Trudeau had groped her, quote unquote, at a beer festival. While Trudeau said he did not act inappropriately, he apologized, saying “people can experience interactions differently.”

In 2016 and again in 2017, this writer was told by a senior Liberal that photos existed of Trudeau wearing blackface, dating back to his time as a teacher at a private school in Vancouver. The Liberal war room knew about the photos, he said.

Efforts to find any proof, however, were unsuccessful. It did not occur to us to simply check the private school’s year books. I — and others, as it turned out — did not believe Trudeau could be that stupid. To pose for photographers wearing blackface.

But it was true: At the age of 29, while a teacher and in a position of responsibility with children, Trudeau had indeed partied in racist blackface. Turned out he had done it several times, too.

Did the blackface rumour — now the blackface fact — mean that Trudeau was a racist? In no time, several non-white Liberal MPs hustled to microphones to say that, sure, the blackface incidents had happened. But Trudeau wasn’t a closeted drawing-room bigot, they insisted.

And then Omer Aziz, a former Trudeau government aide, authored a scalding op-ed in the Globe and Mail. He wrote about Trudeau and his inner circle, and their attitudes towards minorities: “Condescending attitudes were regularly revealed. Minorities were undermined, ghettoized. The casual disregard of the privileged was systemic. I felt like I could not breathe.” Aziz quit.

Those are just some of the rumours. Some turned out to be true, others are just false, or without a shred of proof. One is presently making the rounds on a fake-news website that has fooled many in the past, this writer included. It should not be taken seriously, in any way.

But those of us privileged to hold positions in the news media, whether we admire Trudeau or not, have an obligation to investigate and report. When the subject-matter is the prime minister of Canada — a man who has repeatedly held himself out as a feminist and anti-racist and a family man — we in the media owe our readers and our listeners the truth.

On a segment on a Toronto radio program this week, and in an opinion piece on Canadaland, this writer was criticized for wondering, in a single tweet, why a Globe and Mail reporter asked Trudeau about why he abruptly left the aforementioned Vancouver private school. My answer: Because it is relevant. Because it is newsworthy. Because it is important.

When the media start acting as an extension of any political party’s war room — when we proactively self-censor — we do our readers and listeners a grave disservice. We work for them, after all.

Rumours may be just rumours. But with Justin Trudeau, as we have seen, oftentimes the rumours turn out to be the truth.


Comments (29)

My latest: debate? What debate?

— 10.07.2019 12:33 PM

Here’s the thing about Monday’s leader’s debate, Canada.

You won’t be watching it.

Well, let’s amend that. Sun readers are a scrappy, elbows-up lot, who dig politics and a good scrap. Sun readers are likelier to be watching the debate. They like debates.

But most everyone else? They won’t be.

Everyone else will be watching Shark Tank (which this election kind of is) or Wheel of Fortune (which this election isn’t). Or, they’ll be binge-watching old episodes of Arrested Development (which neatly describes most of our federal political leaders).

Increasingly, voters simply don’t watch leader’s debates in Canada. For example, Maclean’s magazine put together a debate in 2015, but it had fewer than 40% of the viewers who took in the 2011 English-language debate. And Maclean’s actually counted people who only watched part of that debate, not all of it.

Master Chef got way more viewers.

Last time around, there was a Globe and Mail debate, too, and it was absolutely awful to watch. YouTube later found only about 400,000 Canadians did so. That’s in a country, in 2015, with 36 million people in it. Ipsos later did a poll and found only about 20% of Canadians watched the first couple debates in 2015.

There’s been one debate in 2019 that Justin Trudeau has deigned to attend. It was entirely in French.

Around 1.2 million Quebecers allegedly took in the TVA leader’s debate, in which Andrew Scheer, Jagmeet Singh and the separatist leader, Yves-Francois Blanchet, also participated. In a province with more than six million eligible voters, 1.2 million viewers isn’t anything to brag about, although TVA did.

Oh, and in English Canada — in English — nobody got to watch the French debate when it was happening. Because it was entirely in French. To get a sense of what happened, the vast majority of Canadians needed to check out the media after the fact (Widely-held consensus: the separatist guy won, hands down).

As someone who owns a public opinion firm — Daisy Data, at your service! — I can relate one empirical statistical fact: a dwindling number of voters watch debates from gavel to gavel. They may in take part of a debate, sure. But not all of it.

What voters do, instead, is watch the news media’s coverage of a debate. They’ll see a clip of a fiery exchange on TV, or they’ll hear a so-called defining moment on the radio heading into work, or they’ll read expert commentary in the pages of the Sun and hopefully nowhere else.

But they don’t watch all of the debate.

I’ve prepared prime ministers and premiers for debates, and I now know I did it all wrong. I assumed, as did my debate-prep colleagues, that everyone else watched the debates as closely as we did. That was a flawed assumption.

It also explains how Justin Trudeau was seen as a winner in the 2015 debates, even against two superior debaters — Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair. Trudeau’s strategy in 2015 was a lot like what he did in his celebrated boxing match with Patrick Brazeau: he waited in his corner for an opening, then he’d go in with a flurry of punches.

He didn’t try to dominate all of the matches — he just did what he needed to do to get clipped on TV, then he’d sprinkle the results all over social media.

It worked, because he knew that Canadians were more likely to see clips of a debate than all of a debate.

That’s what he’s going to do on Monday night, too. In an era of shrinking debate audiences, it works. Will the other leaders let him get away with it in 2019 like they did in 2015? Tune in and see.

Or, join everyone else, and go watch Shark Tank.

— Sun columnist Warren Kinsella will be providing debate commentary on Bell Media radio on Monday night


Comments (25)

My latest: why isn’t Andrew Scheer way ahead?

— 10.04.2019 09:48 AM

So, Andrew.

You don’t mind if I call you Andrew, do you? It’s better than what I sometimes used to call you, which was Blandy Andy.

I stopped calling you that because you figured out a way to make the bland thing work, like Brampton Bill Davis did. You embraced your inner ordinariness.

You starting hanging out in hockey rinks and you commenced rubbing Timbits all over your torso – which, unlike Prime Minister Blackface, you have never exposed to a grateful nation. You became the Canadian Everyman, and you made it work for you.

The pocketbook stuff, too. That was good, too. You and Hamish concluded, rightly, that voters regard everyone in politics as an unindicted co-conspirators, so you stopped hollering all the time that Justin is a crook. You just kept talking about how hard it is for regular folks to get by, and left the scandalmongering to the media. That was smart.

And the polls bore fruit, sort of. Ipsos says you’re ahead, and you have been for the entirety of the campaign. Nanos says you’re tied with Trudeau for best choice for Prime Minister, which is way better than you’ve been in the past.

But. But, Andrew, seriously?

Why haven’t 110 per cent of respondents declared you their favoured choice for Prime Minister? Why isn’t your party a kabillion points ahead of the Liberals? Why, Andrew, why?

Because that’s the question everyone is asking themselves, Andrew. Hell, that’s the question members of the Liberal caucus are asking themselves – many of whom had purchased political funeral insurance, and now they’re wondering if they can convert it to another kind of policy at the insurance brokerage where you used to fetch coffee and answer the phone.

By any reasonable standard, Andrew, Justin Trudeau leads the most corrupt – the most casually evil – government in Canadian history. It is shiftless; it is reckless; it is soulless. It is a mess.

And they could still win, Andrew. They could still beat you. How can this be?

A scan of Trudeau’s press clippings reads like a grand jury indictment.

• In LavScam, he obstructed justice when he tried, repeatedly, to stop the criminal corruption trial of a Québec-based donor to his party.
• He violated conflict of interest laws when he accepted freebies during a junket to the Aga Khan’s private island.
• He lied about electoral reform, and balancing the budget, and improving relations with the provinces and the world.
• He made us an international laughingstock with his Griswolds Vacation India trip, and enraged the world’s largest democracy – our ally and Commonwealth partner.
• And, most recently, he admitted he repeatedly mocked black people by wearing blackface and jumping around like an ape – and he admitted that there’s more of it out there in the ether, but he doesn’t know how much, because he was wasted a lot of the time.

After all that, Andrew – after all that scandal, more of which this newspaper has been investigating for weeks, stay tuned to this bat-channel, everyone – why aren’t you way ahead? Why aren’t you creaming Chewbacca Socks?

Why, to cite just two examples from the past 24 hours, did you attract fewer people at a Brampton rally than Justin Trudeau’s Portuguese Water Dog, Kenzie, gets during a stroll through the park?

Why can’t you put an end to the interminable questions about your CV, and simply joke that you’re so boring, you’re the only guy in Canada who brags about being an insurance broker?

None of it makes sense, Andrew. None of it. You should be playing Fortnite with Hamish about now, getting ready to move into wherever we put Prime Ministers these days.

Instead, you’re fighting to get a decent lead. Instead, your caucus are whispering about the next leader.

It’s crazy, Andrew. But one thing isn’t crazy at all:

You’ve got three weeks left to win this thing.

And if you don’t, you’ll forever be remembered as the guy who couldn’t beat Prime Minister Blackface.


Comments (63)

Random, contextless links about #elxn43 and #cdnpoli and punk rock

— 10.01.2019 06:53 AM

So.  First day of October.  Here’s bits and pieces, this and that:




Comments (33)

My latest: the speech Justin Trudeau should have given, but won’t

— 09.24.2019 07:17 AM

My fellow Liberals, my fellow Canadians.

Last week, I spoke about the scandal that has hit my campaign. I didn’t do it right, so I’m now going to try again.

First things first: over and over, I used the wrong pronoun. I talked about how “we,” as a country, need to do better. How “we” need to be less racist.

I got that wrong. I shouldn’t have said “we.” I should have said “I.” Because I – not we – was the one who smeared stuff all over my face and my body and mocked black people.

It was I – not we – who was racist. Me. Repeatedly – as a high school student in Montreal, and then as a teacher of high school students in Vancouver.

When I was thirty years old. When I was a man, not a boy. When I was supposed to know better.

In the video that came out, everyone focussed on the blackface-style racism, and they should have. But they missed something, maybe because the video was grainy.

In it, I’m wearing a T-shirt with bananas on the front. I’ve stuffed something down the front of my jeans. And I jump around like an ape.

I did all of that to communicate something that I’m amazed so many of you missed. I did it to suggest that blacks are apes. Which was the worst kind of racism.

Oh, in case you are wondering if I did blackface more than those three times, the answer is yes: I did. I repeatedly, and gleefully, acted like a racist. I can’t remember every detail because I was wasted.

The people who work for me have all forgiven me, of course. What do you expect? When the boss asks people for forgiveness, they will always give it.

But I must say that Liberal MPs of colour – Navdeep Bains, Omar Alghabra, Greg Fergus – surprised even me with how speedily they pronounced me without sin. I think we all know that if Andrew Scheer had done blackface on Halloween at the age of five, Navdeep, Omar and Greg would be convening a Human Rights Tribunal right now to have Scheer thrown in a gulag in Nunavut for the rest his life.

Because black face is racist. What I did was racist. I wanted to communicate that black people are worthy of mockery. That they are apes. That they belong in cages. That’s as racist as it gets.

Now, last week, I tried to excuse away my racism by saying I was a child of privilege. That I had grown up with a “blind spot” about such things. But we all know that’s a lie.

Growing up rich, and going to the best schools – being a child of privilege – doesn’t excuse my racism. In fact, it’s the reverse: it makes my racism all the more wrong. I, growing up in the house of the man who gave Canada a Charter of Rights, should have known better.

Anyway, words are cheap. I apologize for stuff all the time, to the point where the apologies have no meaning anymore. All that matters is actions, not words.

So, I will now do what I should’ve done last week. I intend to resign the office of the Prime Minister soon after the election, win or lose. And, by the way, I’m amazed I could still win it. That says a lot more about Canadians that it does about me, frankly.

So, there you go. I need time to get away and learn to be a better Dad, a better husband, a better man. I can’t do that as Prime Minister of Canada.

Because words can’t excuse what I did.

Because what I did was racist.

Thank you.


Comments (24)

My latest: in a campaign about nothing positive, don’t give them something negative

— 09.23.2019 09:18 AM

The land is strong.

Sound familiar? Remember that?

The old-timers do. It was an actual slogan that was deployed in the 1972 federal election campaign. Didn’t work out too well.

In yesterday walks tomorrow, they say, and that is certainly true when one compares 1972 to 2019. The similarities are striking.

• In 1972, a Trudeau led the Liberal Party, as in 2019.
• It was a Liberal majority government seeking another majority, as now.
• Back in 1972, as in 2019, the Conservatives were led by a kind of boring, bland guy who everyone underestimated.
• The Liberals’ 1972 slogan, “the land is strong,” sucked. So does the Liberals’ 2019 slogan, “Choose Forward.” It’s ungrammatical and uninspiring.

But the Justin Trudeau folks are wedded to their crummy slogan, just like Justin’s Dad was to his. Everywhere Trudeau the Younger goes, he robotically repeats the “choose forward” mantra, and no one knows exactly what it means.

That’s never a good idea, politically but it’s potential lethal when a scandal hits – like the blackface scandal. When you have no positive message, it makes it easier for a negative message to take its place. And blackface has.

Is an election won or lost on a slogan? Of course not. But a good one should give voters a pithy idea about what is on offer. Like, you know, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.” Or: “Just Do It.” Or: “The Quicker Picker Upper.”

The big problem with “choose forward” is that it actually reminds voters about Justin Trudeau’s biggest problem. Which isn’t LavScam, or the Aga Khan, or Gropegate.

It’s that he hasn’t done what he said he was going to do. And he hasn’t done much at all, really.

Let’s crack open the history book again.

From 1968 to 1972, when his Dad was Prime Minister and enjoying a strong parliamentary majority, lots of things were done: the Just Society, universal health care, regional development, parliamentary reform, bilingualism, multiculturalism, pro-NATOism, multilateralism, staring down separatism and terrorism.

When you examine the elder Trudeau’s first majority term – and whether you respected him or not, and this writer really did – it is remarkable how much was accomplished in a relatively short period of time.
But, despite all that, Pierre Trudeau was still reduced to a minority in 1972.

His son, meanwhile, doesn’t have much to brag about, legislatively. Legalization of cannabis, and … that’s it.

History will not remember Justin Trudeau for lots of important legislative achievements, because there haven’t been any. It’s been a lot of social media sizzle, but not much policy steak.

Broken promises and voter disappointments: they’re not predicaments unknown to incumbent governments, true.
But, if there’s enough of them, they’re why those governments get defeated.

And, at this point, Justin Trudeau isn’t known for any achievements at all. He’s known for being a racist, and wearing blackface.

Pierre Trudeau wasn’t defeated in 1972. But, despite a lot of legislative achievements, he almost was. He, the Northern Magus, lost his Parliamentary majority to the efforts of Bob Stanfield – who, like Andrew Scheer, was regularly mocked and maligned.

“Choose Forward” strongly implies that what preceded it wasn’t all that great. In Justin Trudeau’s case, he wants us to think of mean old Stephen Harper when we think about that past.

But what if voters start thinking about the more-recent past – and what, if anything, Justin Trudeau has achieved?

He hasn’t achieved much. There’s a reason why Justin Trudeau is less popular than Donald Trump, you know.

The land is strong? When compared to something like “choose forward,” the 1972 Liberal campaign slogan is practically a detailed 100-page policy platform.

Canadians are going to “choose,” alright.

Based upon his paltry, puny legislative record – based on his racist blackface stunts – Justin Trudeau may deeply regret asking Canadians to do so.


Comments (43)

My latest: Justin Trudeau likens black people to apes. Don’t let him get away with that.

— 09.19.2019 09:30 AM

An ape?

The video is grainy. It’s blurry, and it’s hard to make out who is in it.

But we don’t have to guess. The Liberal Party of Canada has confirmed to Global News – which released the video on Thursday morning – that it depicts Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party and the Prime Minister of Canada.

Acting like an ape.

In the video, he’s covered (again) in blackface. He really worked at it, too: he made certain to smear dark make-up on his face, neck, ears, arms. Even his legs. We can see through the holes in his jeans that he did that.

There are three photographs, now, of Trudeau in blackface. One from his high school days in Montreal, and two from a party at the high school he taught at in Vancouver. With his hand on an unidentified young woman’s chest.

He was about thirty in that last photo. He was someone who taught kids – who was supposed to be setting an example for kids.

But we digress. Back to the video.

In the video, Justin Trudeau is seen for only a few fleeting seconds. There’s no sound. But it is unmistakable what the future Prime Minister of Canada and his pals are doing.

Trudeau’s acting like an ape. Sticking out his tongue, waving around his arms, shuffling around like a simian would, in a zoo or a jungle or something.

I showed the video to my shocked colleagues when they came into the office. Two of them are card-carrying Liberals. They agree with me: Justin Trudeau was in blackface, acting like an ape.

Now, why would he do that?

Brent Staples is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times. Around the time Roseanne Barr called an advisor to Barack Obama the progeny of an ape, Staples wrote an extensive study about that. About how racists like to depict black people as apes.

Like Justin Trudeau did.

Here’s Staples: “[It’s] one of the oldest and most profoundly racist slanders in American history…This depiction — promoted by slave traders, historians and practitioners of “scientific” racism — was used to justify slavery, lynching and the creation of the Jim Crow state…[It’s] the ape caricature.”

Throwing bananas at black public figures. Making noises like apes at public events. Calling Michelle Obama “an ape in heels.” It’s all aimed at one simple, incontrovertible message: that black people are animals. That they are less than whites. That they belong in cages.

At this point – and with the Trudeau in blackface leading newscasts around the planet – the evidence cannot be rebutted: the Prime Minister of Canada, as man and not just a boy, traded in the foulest racist stereotypes. He thought it was funny. He thought he could get away with it.

So, that’s him: he’s the scum of the Earth. He doesn’t deserve to be elected dogcatcher, let alone a Prime Minister of a G7 country.

Oddly, the issue isn’t him. It’s now the members of the Liberal Party. It’s us.

Will Liberal MPs now publicly condemn their “leader,” as I counselled two distressed Grit MPs to do this morning? They must.

And, Canadians, too, have a decision to make. Will we let him get away with it? Trudeau and his loathsome coterie are laying low, clearly believing this all will blow over in time. And it might, you know.

It is up to us – Canadians – to say: not good enough. Not on. Not this time.

Justin Trudeau – the goddamned Prime Minister of Canada – is on a video, this morning, joking that black people are, you know, apes.

This man is unfit. We, Canadians, must line up on October 21 and reject him and his ways.

We must.


Comments (102)