National Post (National Edition)
Trudeau slams scourge of `misinformation'
While spreading some of his own
Earlier this month, Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant said in the House of Commons that military “surveillance” flights had been conducted over Ottawa amid February's Freedom Convoy blockades.
Since the Canadian Armed Forces would not have been able to assist in enforcing the blockades without an invocation of the National Defence Act, Gallant's question to the government benches on May 4 was the following: “Was the surveillance conducted without lawful authority?”
In his response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thrice dismissed the accusations as coming “dangerously close to spreading misinformation and disinformation,” and said it was “entirely irresponsible” that the Conservatives seemed so ready to “stray so close to misinformation and disinformation.”
But a surveillance aircraft leased by the Canadian Armed Forces had indeed flown over Ottawa while the city's downtown was blockaded by anti-mandate protesters.
While there's no evidence that the flight was anything other than a training mission, its presence in the air was a direct contravention of a directive to keep military equipment (including aircraft) away from the capital throughout the blockades. In other words, may have been acting without “lawful authority.”
The exchange illustrates a notable contradiction in the Trudeau government. No peacetime Canadian government has ever been more obsessed by the supposed scourge of “misinformation.” At the same time, the Trudeau government has a recurring habit of spreading its own misinformation, or of attributing that title to things that turn out to be true.
This came up quite a few times during the Freedom Convoy blockades of downtown Ottawa.
At the time, Liberal MPs often repeated the claim that the demonstration was fuelled largely by foreign cash.
“The illegal occupation of our capital city by a group of centrally coordinated individuals who were terrorizing the citizens of Ottawa for three weeks with the stated intent of overthrowing the government ... in fact had the majority of their funding from foreign sources,” said Liberal MP Ryan Turnbull on Feb. 20.
Although it's possible that foreign money may have become a factor in the protests' latter stages, the initial raising of more than $10 million for the protest came almost entirely from Canadian sources.
In March testimony for a House of Commons committee, GoFundMe president Juan Benitez said that 88 per cent of the $10 million his site had collected for Freedom Convoy had derived from Canadian sources (GoFundMe ultimately suspended the fundraiser, prompting the protest to instead canvass funds on the U.S.-based Christian website GiveSendGo).
Liberals were also involved in repeating the inference that anti-mandate protesters had conspired to burn down an Ottawa apartment building.
In a Feb. 17 Commons statement justifying the need to invoke the Emergencies Act, Liberal MP Francesco Sorbara mentioned the “attempted arson of a downtown apartment building” in Ottawa.
When Ottawa police eventually charged two men they believed to be responsible for the Feb. 6 attempted arson, however, they wrote that there was no reason to believe the men were “involved in any way with the Convoy protest which was going on when this arson took place.”
On May 2, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino told the House of Commons that the idea for the Emergencies Act came by way of law enforcement. “At the recommendation of police, we invoked the Emergencies Act to protect Canadians,” he said.
During testimony to MPs last week, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki had praise for the government's decision to invoke the Emergencies Act, but poured cold water on the notion that police had requested it. Lucki said that it was ultimately the federal government's call to invoke the act, and the RCMP were merely “consulted.”
The House of Commons has long been a bastion for half-truths and exaggerations (the Conservatives were certainly no stranger to such during Freedom Convoy).
And nobody would ever accuse the Trudeau Liberals of being the first Canadian government to bend the truth in their own self-interest.
But the Trudeau government is one of the first to do so while simultaneously pursuing legislation designed to regulate whole swaths of the internet in the service of combating “misinformation.”
Bill C-11, currently before the House of Commons, would impose new controls over everything from podcasts to YouTube videos, and even empower a “Digital Safety Commissioner of Canada” to order 24-hour takedowns of “unauthorized” content, including content deemed to be a form of “disinformation” or “misinformation.”