Fact-checking the leaders,
O’Toole was largely truthful, but Tory leader made very confusing statement about his platform
It’s just under two weeks until election day, and I’m three-quarters of the way through my fact-checking project.
This week, the Liberal, Conservative, Bloc and NDP leaders faced off in the first French-language debate hosted by Montreal network TVA. On top of the debate, I listened to all of Erin O’Toole’s press conferences and a virtual town hall to see just how honest the Conservative leader is.
O’Toole’s campaign was largely truthful, which bolsters the finding that Canadian politicians are much more honest than not. While O’Toole made slightly more claims I judged false than Annamie Paul and Jagmeet Singh, he didn’t stretch the truth with misleading wording nearly as often as Singh did.
The economy was the big topic this week, with O’Toole making frequent knocks against Trudeau’s pandemic spending (despite the fact that Conservatives helped pass the Liberals’ pandemic aid bills). Inflation, unemployment, a rising cost of living and public debt were also on the agenda. O’Toole dropped a lot of numbers, and the vast majority checked out, save one claim that the federal debt is on track to reach 90 per cent of GDP by 2025 — I’m not sure where he got that number from, and his campaign never got back to me when I asked — and an exaggeration about the size of the deficit.
Some of O’Toole’s statements on Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s record didn’t quite pass the truth test: he made a couple of unsubstantiated accusations of Liberal “cover-ups,” mischaracterized policies like the $10-a-day child-care agreements and falsely stated that Trudeau has reduced penalties for firearm offences, when, in fact, the Liberals’ bill to eliminate some mandatory minimum sentences for drug and firearms charges has only gone as far as a second reading in the House.
One statement he made about the sunny environmental and social record of Canada’s oil producers — so vaguely worded that it was almost impossible to check — omitted the crucial reality that Canada’s oil is some of the most carbonintensive to produce in the world. I wrote a longer fact check unpacking that one at the end of last week.
But the claim that most hurt O’Toole’s credibility this week was one I couldn’t fact-check, since it had to do with a promise in the Conservative platform. O’Toole turned heads at Thursday’s TVA debate when he said he’d “maintain the ban on assault weapons,” seemingly contradicting a Conservative platform promise to repeal the Liberals’ recent ban on “assault-style” firearms.
In the following days, O’Toole dodged questions from reporters about whether he was referring to the Liberals’ executive order from May 2020 that banned 1,500 “military-style assault rifles” or a 1977 law that prohibited fully automatic firearms. As recently as Friday, the Conservative campaign maintained it would reverse the 2020 ban, until O’Toole said Sunday that he’d keep Trudeau’s ban in place — a claim at odds with pledges in his own platform and promises made to gun advocates during the Conservative leadership race.
We’ll never know if Mr. O’Toole intentionally misled one way or the other on the Conservative plan, or if he simply changed his mind mid-campaign, but the lack of transparency around his party’s position on guns and his failure to correct the record for days came across as dishonest.
In total, I found seven false claims in 213 minutes of public appearances. I also deemed six separate claims to be a stretch, meaning the claim is broadly true but was misleading in the specific context in which O’Toole said it.
That works out to a “dishonesty density” of about one false claim every 30 minutes, with every repeated falsehood counting once for each time it was said. For reference, Singh’s dishonesty density was one false claim every 46 minutes, and Paul’s was one every 47 minutes.
As I turn to fact-checking Trudeau this week, this is the measure I’m using to compare the leaders.
Here’s a selection of O’Toole’s claims this week:
> “Mr. Trudeau has never made a climate target, he’s never made a deficit target, he’s never made a target on clean drinking water.” — Aug. 30, in King City
True: Canada has missed every climate target it’s ever set, predating and during the Trudeau era. Despite promising to limit deficits to less than $10 billion a year and balance the budget by 2019 during his 2015 campaign, Trudeau ran three years of deficits totalling $50.8 billion. In 2019-2020, the government posted a deficit of $39.4 billion, reflecting increased spending during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, Trudeau promised in 2015 to lift all drinking-water advisories by March 2021, but in December 2020, Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller announced the deadline would be missed. There are still 38 First Nations communities where water isn’t safe to drink.
> “You’ll see in our plan we want to see solidarity in communities, which is why I’m reaching out, why I’m very proud that we have the most diverse slate of candidates running for the Conservative party.” — Aug. 30, in King City
True: The Conservatives have more women and racialized candidates running this election than it ever has before. Seventy-four, or 22 per cent of the party’s 337 candidates, are racialized, up from 17 per cent in 2019. A hundred and fourteen, or 34 per cent of the party’s candidates, identify as women, a significant boost from 20 per cent in 2019.
> “None of (Trudeau or Singh) are concerned that after 40 years, inflation is actually a problem in Canada again.” —
Aug. 30, in Markham
A stretch: Inflation “stopped being a problem” in the early 1990s upon the introduction of the Bank of Canada’s price stability initiative, said Walid Hejazi, associate professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. Ever since, Canada’s inflation-control target has been two per cent, within a range of one and three per cent, similar to many other advanced economies.
It’s impossible for me to fact-check O’Toole’s personal judgment that inflation is a “problem” in Canada right now, but it’s a stretch for him to say inflation is in any way comparable to 40 years ago, when the inflation rate was above 10 per cent. The Star spoke to two economists who said Canada’s inflation rate — 3.7 per cent in July, the biggest jump in a decade — isn’t a problem at all. “Since the pandemic, lots of prices have come way down because the economy took a big negative shock,” said Hejazi. “Now what we’re seeing is prices are coming back to a normal level.”
When people get back to work, many pandemic-related supply shocks will go away, added Laurence Booth, professor of finance at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management.
> “Canada’s unemployment rate sits at 7.5 per cent, that’s dramatically higher than the United Kingdom and Germany.” — Aug. 31, in Ottawa
True: Canada’s unemployment rate was 7.5 per cent in July 2021. The United Kingdom and Germany’s unemployment rates are 4.7 per cent and 5.6 per cent, respectively.
> “Over the next four years, if Mr. Trudeau keeps spending at the same rate he did in 2016-2019, he will triple Canada’s total debt to $1.8 trillion, almost 90 per cent of GDP, by 2025.” — Aug. 31, in Ottawa.
False: If government spending continues at the 2016-2019 level of about 6.5 per cent per year, then projecting the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s baseline estimates forward does indeed result in debt of over 1.8 trillion by 2025-26, said Trevor Tombe, economist at the University of Calgary. However, $1.8 trillion would be just below 63 per cent of the projected GDP for that year ($2.869 trillion), not 90 per cent as O’Toole states. Even if comparing to this year’s GDP — $2.5 trillion, as per the latest projection by the Parliamentary Budget officer — $1.8 trillion would be 72 per cent of GDP.
> “(Trudeau is) borrowing over $400 million dollars each and every day.” — Aug. 31, in Ottawa
False: This year’s deficit will be $138.2 billion, according to the latest projection from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which works out to about $378.6 million per day. It could be justifiable to round that figure up to about $400 million a day, but saying it’s more than that amount is false.
> “Mr. Trudeau reduced penalties for criminals who use firearms.” — Sept. 2, the TVA debate (translated from French)
False: Trudeau does not have unilateral authority over penalties for firearms charges, since sentencing is the responsibility of the judicial system, but he is trying to repeal mandatory minimum sentences for some firearm and drug offences. Bill C-22, introduced by the Liberal government in February, proposes eliminating mandatory minimums for all drug and some firearm charges, while keeping them on some serious offences like murder and sexual offences.
Critics of mandatory minimum sentences say they disproportionately target Black, Indigenous and marginalized Canadians. The bill has only gone as far as a second reading in the House, but if passed, it doesn’t mean sentences for firearm crimes would be inherently lower or higher. Rather, it would leave penalties up to the discretion of the judge. I classified a similar iteration of this claim as a stretch, since O’Toole said Trudeau was “lowering penalties” which implies that it hasn’t been done yet, but framing it in this way — as something Trudeau has already passed — is clearly false.
> “Gang violence has increased dramatically since the Liberals took office. In fact, since they took office, homicides have risen by 20 per cent, driven in part by an increase in gang violence across the country.” — Sept. 3, in Montreal
True: According to Statistics Canada, there were 743 homicide victims in Canada in 2020, compared to 611 in 2015 — just over a 20 per cent increase. About 20 per cent of victims of homicides in 2020 were linked to organized crime or a street gang, compared to 16 per cent in 2015.