CTV provides ammo for anti-vaxxers with Stephan COVID story

Originally published at Political RnD

CTV Calgary came under justified criticism this week for running a story based on the social media postings of a uniquely infamous quack.

David Stephan, for those who might not recall, was charged alongside his wife Collet on Valentine’s Day 2013 for failing to provide the necessities of life for their 19-month-old child Ezekiel, who died of a hypoxic brain injury after his parents had treated his meningitis with herbal remedies.

They were convicted by a jury in 2016, but the Supreme Court ordered a new trial in May 2018, which lead to an acquittal by Justice Terry Blackson in September on the grounds that the parents didn’t know Ezekiel had meningitis and that, even if they did, he didn’t directly die from meningitis, a certain genre of ruling that only makes sense to lawyers.

So no, the Stephan’s aren’t murderers, nor were they charged with that, but suffice it to say David’s health advice ought not to be taken seriously.

The recent news story’s headline originally read: ‘Alberta natural health activist says COVID-19 is a hoax’, but was changed to the less inflammatory “‘Public health experts are just that, experts’: U of C professor rejects Stephan’s claim that COVID-19 is ‘a hoax.’”

(It’s important to note that reporters don’t necessarily write their own headlines and, at least in the newspaper business, generally don’t.)

While expertise from University of Calgary’s Dr. Juliet Guichon was included, the lede — the top of the news pyramid — remains focused on Stephan’s view that COVID is a hoax to promote “fancy new vaccines,” and links directly to Stephan’s Facebook post.

A trusted media outlet allowed a conspiracy theory, debunked by medical professionals, to shape the story’s narrative — which is precisely what he wants. Anyone inclined to agree with him isn’t going to be swayed by medical expertise.

One could argue in general, but particularly during a pandemic, there’s a crucial responsibility for news outlets to avoid sensationalism.

This is, admittedly, a difficult balance to strike while attempting to cover sensationalized news but the responsibility lies with the trusted organization — no one else.

“There could be many reasons for a news organization to publish such a story – they may have noticed it going viral on social media without rebuttal and have wanted to counter it; they may see significant interest in stories around Stephans and want to build on that; they may believe that it is crucial to fact-check hoax claims,” University of British Columbia media historian Heidi Tworek tells Political RnD.

“But there are dangers to amplifying these claims, even as we rebut them.”

Jeremy Klaszus of Calgary’s The Sprawl tweeted that this reflective of a certain tendency in mainstream journalism to seek out ‘both sides’ sides of an issue, even when one side hasn’t a clue what they’re talking about.

“This is what happens when you hold up neutrality, rather than truth, as the ideal for journalism,” he said. “They are not the same. People think they are, but they’re not.”

CTV Calgary managing editor Dawn Walton declined to comment on how the network decided to run the story.

“We appreciate your interest, but we will not be participating,” Walton wrote in an e-mail.

Tworek says the CTV story clearly rebutted Stephan’s claims, but at the same time clearly provided amplification to an anti-vaxxer.

While Stephan’s Facebook post was shared 192 times, the CTV article was shared more than 3,000 times on the same website, she observed.

This demonstrates the importance of guarding against “unintentionally granting greater notoriety to conspiracy theories by debunking them,” said Tworek.

“More broadly, though, this article raises the question of how we will deal with the anti-vaxxer movement if a vaccine really is the only long-term solution to the coronavirus. We are going to need clear communication that does not just frame stories around debunking anti-vaxxers.”

Broadcast council says it’s not their jurisdiction

Canada is sort of a Wild West for regulating broadcasters’ online presence.

There’s no regulation mechanism for online content in Canada, according to Canadian Broadcast Standards Council spokesperson  Kristen Smeltzer.

The CBSC is a complaint-driven organization, which forwards complaints to the broadcasters themselves, who provide an explanation. If the complainant is unsatisfied, the CBSC secretariat investigates whether there was a breach of their Code, Smeltzer explained.

If there’s a potential Code violation, the matter gets sent to an adjudicating panel composed of members of the broadcasting industry and public.

Outlets found by the panel to have breached CBSC standards are required to air an announcement of the finding.

But this process doesn’t apply to online outlets.

“The Codes that the CBSC administers apply only to content broadcast on traditional radio or television relating to issues such as representation of identifiable groups, violence, sex, coarse language, accuracy and fairness of news, privacy, etc.,” Smeltzer wrote in an email.

“Thus, the CBSC cannot deal with complaints about internet content or social media, even if that content is related to a CBSC broadcaster associate’s station and posted on their website.”

Some online outlets are members of the National NewsMedia Council, which provides similar oversight to print publications, but no Canadian broadcaster’s online division is a member.

 

Hope in a time of unprecedented crisis

Originally published in the Medicine Hat News

There’s no question our world has changed immeasurably in less than a week.

Seemingly overnight, our daily lives have transformed into the beginning of every post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. But the choice of what happens next is in our hands.

Please, for the love of all that is sacred, listen to the advice of medical professionals. Wash your hands as much as physically possible. Limit your physical exposure to other people, particularly if you’re feeling ill. Better to err on the side of caution in the throes of a pandemic.

We in the media, who are fortunate enough to be one of the industries who can continue work from home with relative ease, have a particular responsibility to not understate the risk we’re in.

People will die. If you look to Italy – where hospitals are so overcrowded frontline healthcare workers must make the dreadful decision of who should receive treatment – this much is clear. The issue for us here in Canada is to minimize the number of deaths from this contagion.

The federal government must immediately take steps to close the border with our neighbour to the south, whose leadership tragically has no plan whatsoever to deal with the emergency at hand and is far more likely to contribute to the spread of the virus here than anyone else.

We have to be prepared for the worst, but we also have to look towards our future after the pandemic is settled, at the very least to avoid mass hysteria. It’s a delicate balance, undoubtedly.

Policy prescriptions that were seen as beyond the pale just five days ago, such as a universal pharmacare, guaranteed basic income, printing money and nationalization, are now necessities when so many are going to be out of work and in poor health for the foreseeable future.

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures.

The reality is we’re going to need a massive pooling together of public resources, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Second World War to ensure society doesn’t collapse under the weight of this pandemic.

The government is going to have to step in to offer massive bailouts to entire industries that will be affected. But we can learn from the mistakes of the 2008 bailout of the financial sector, where financial institutions were propped up while the rest were left to suffer.

There will be those who use this crisis, just as they used the financial crisis, to promote their corporate agenda.

While we’re all rightfully focused on COVID-19, the Alberta government is still, as of press time, preparing to auction off Crown land near Taber on March 31.

And Premier Jason Kenney is using the chaotic scene at airports to flex his Wexit “fair deal” muscle, lambasting “inadequate federal screening protocols for international travellers” and directing the province to step in.

Provinces should indeed play a salient role in addressing this crisis alongside the feds and municipalities, but now is not the time for superficial political theatrics between the different levels of government.

For the time being, the provincial government appears to have called off its wars on nurses, doctors and teachers.

But when there’s a return to a semblance of normalcy, be prepared for the hits to come even harder.

Those of us who are proponents of strong climate action and all the major, structural changes it entails need to make the case that if we can come together in a time of crisis to ensure everyone is taken care of, we can do so to avoid the next major crisis on the horizon.

In these trying times, it’s easy to fall into despair. But just remember, we’re all in this together and we can only get through this crisis collectively.

So reach out to your loved ones, particularly those who are elderly, immunocompromized or living with mental illness. Even though we’re going to be physically isolated from each other, we have the opportunity to put the “social” back in “social media” and, like Noah from the Bible, figure out what happens after the deluge.

This will all end eventually. The question is what sort of world we want to build afterwards.

Energy war room an expensive joke at best

Originally published in the Medicine Hat News

“You can’t fight in here, this is the war room,” Peter Sellers says in the classic 1964 apocalyptic political satire “Dr. Strangelove.”

I’m reminded of this joke by Premier Jason Kenney’s announcement this week, unveiling a kinder, gentler war room than the vitriolic inquisition against “foreign-funded” environmentalists he promised on the campaign trail.

The war room has been rebranded the Canadian Energy Centre in a clear effort to detoxify its brand, but the purpose remains the same – to facilitate the province’s transformation into a full-blown petrostate.

CEO Tom Olsen – a former Calgary Herald journalist and failed UCP candidate – promised Tuesday that his propaganda apparatus will operate with “respect, civility and professionalism,” yet its entire premise is based on the notion that anyone who opposes oilsands expansion is a liar with ulterior motives.

The idea that environmentalists believe Canada in general, and Alberta in particular, ought to take responsibility for its highly disproportionate carbon emissions per capita, and start envisioning a future free of fossil fuels for planet’s betterment, is out of the question.

The centre’s $30 million budget is roughly equivalent to the $30 million being cut from the Calgary Board of Education’s budget.

But, we’ve been told by Education Minister Adriana LaGrange, teachers are breeding the next generation of radical environmentalists by suggesting that critical thinking skills are also applicable to debates surrounding oilsands extraction.

Remember, we’re at war. There’s no room for nuance here.

Even National Geographic – not exactly renowned as a hotbed of radical environmentalism – is in on the plot, publishing an article that called Fort McMurray the “most destructive oil operation” on the planet.

Energy Minister Sonya Savage wrote them a letter to express the government’s disapproval in June.

Regardless of what one thinks of this frame of analysis – if there’s any value in labelling any one particular fossil fuel project the “most destructive” – it’s frightening when a government thinks they can determine what sorts of articles are fit for publication.

Those expecting a modicum of transparency from the Canadian Energy Centre, whose entire premise is allegedly to enhance transparency among environmentalist critics, will be sorely disappointed.

The Canadian Energy Centre is a private corporation, so its inner workings are exempt from freedom of information legislation.

One of the warriors appointed to the energy centre – Fraser Institute alumnus Mark Milke – wrote a book called the “Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations.”

Apparently, this frame of analysis doesn’t apply to Alberta, which is being victimized from all sides – the federal government, environmental NGOs, National Geographic magazine and even its own teachers.

Amnesty International said in September it was “deeply concerned” the war room would be used “to cast a chill” on oilsands critics.

If Kenney was trying to demonstrate otherwise, he did a very poor job in his response, engaging in the crudest form of whataboutism imaginable, pointing to severe human rights abuses in other oil producing nations, such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia and Iran.

Are Albertans supposed to pat themselves on the back because they don’t jail and execute dissidents, but merely dedicate public resources to their vilification and harassment without a shred of transparency?

Is “We’re not as bad as Saudi Arabia” the winning slogan that will attract investment to the oilsands?

At best, the war room is an expensive joke. At worst, it’s a grave threat to our right to dissent.

Scheer’s stance on migration pact a nod to Bernier supporters

Originally published in the Medicine Hat News

Conservative Party of Canada Lleader Andrew Scheer appears to be making a hard right pivot in the leadup to the 2019 election.

Scheer is practically shrieking about globalists with his fact-free attacks on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for signing the non-binding UN Pact on Global Migration.

He claims that signing the agreement will limit Canada’s ability to set its own migration policies, which he wants to tighten, but the agreement does nothing of that sort.

The pact has 23 wholly anodyne goals — mitigating the factors that led to people fleeing their country of origin, collecting data to assist signatories in creating evidence-based policies, fighting human trafficking, co-ordinating international efforts to search for missing migrants and eliminating discrimination against migrants, among others.

The notion that the UN, or “foreign entities” as Scheer put it, are conspiring to erode state sovereignty and establish a global government is a theory right out of the Infowars and Rebel Media playbook.

In fact, the agreement explicitly “reaffirms the sovereign right of states to determine their national migration policy” and allows states to take measures to reduce irregular migration. This shouldn’t be controversial.

With competition to his right from Maxime Bernier, Scheer is clearly and shamelessly dogwhistling to potential Bernier supporters to stay in the Tory fold.

And with President Donald Trump south of the border being the first leader to pull out of the agreement, the Tories seem to be seeking an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with his Canadian apologists, rather than risk losing their votes to Bernier’s vanity project.

Former Conservative leadership candidate and Stephen Harper’s immigration minister Chris Alexander slammed his party’s fearmongering.

“Scheer’s statement is factually incorrect,” tweeted Alexander. “This compact is a political deceleration, not a legally binding treaty. It has no impact on our sovereignty.”

Alexander himself has had his dalliances with with hard right.

He stood idly by at a Rebel Media-sponsored rally against the carbon tax, where the audience chanted, “Lock her up” in reference to Premier Rachel Notley. He tried, to no avail, to change the chant to “Vote her out.”

And along with Kellie Leitch, another failed leadership candidate, Alexander spearheaded the ill-advised “barbaric cultural practices hotline” from the 2015 election. While both apologized for their role in blatantly xenophobic rhetoric, Alexander is the only one of the two who appears to have learned the lesson, given Leitch’s full-throated support in the leadership race for screening immigrants for ill-defined “Canadian values.”

Alexander is clearly no left winger, but he sees his party moving in an indefensible and dangerous direction. Is this a case of sour grapes after Alexander placed ninth in the leadership race? Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

We’ve seen demagogues across the world — from Trump to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to India’s Nerandra Modi to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — stoke fears in recent years of migrants, criminals, environmentalists, Muslims or all of the above.

Scheer, who clearly seeks to join their ranks, is playing with fire, feeding into conspiratorial fantasies in a bid to win votes off the backs of migrants and those who seek to help them.

Jason Kenney must take right-wing extremism more seriously

Originally published in the Medicine Hat News

A mere week after pledging to create a database to screen extremists out of the UCP, leader Jason Kenney has another headache on his hands.

John Carpay, leader of the right-wing Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and a UCP member in good standing, compared the rainbow LGBTQ flag to the Nazi swastika and Soviet hammer and sickel as totalitarian symbols at a conference for the far-right Rebel Media.

“How do we defeat today’s totalitarianism?” Carpay asked the audience. “You’ve got to think about the common characteristics. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hammer and sickle for communism, or whether it’s a swastika for Nazi Germany or whether it’s a rainbow flag, the underlying thing is a hostility to individual freedoms.”

Of course, the rainbow flag signifies the opposite of hostility to individual freedom. It’s a celebration of individuals’ ability to express their own sexuality.

To his credit, Kenney called Carpay’s remarks “vile,” but said it’s not his decision to kick members out of the party.

However, when an investigation from Ricochet outed Adam Strashok, who used to work for Kenney’s campaign, as being involved with an online store that sold white supremacist memorabilia, Kenney was quick to disavow him and boot him from the party.

So last week, it was his prerogative to kick members out of the party, but not so anymore, if Kenney is to be believed.

And Kenney had in the past referred to Carpay — whose organization has led the fight against mandatory gay-straight alliances in Alberta schools and who once referred to GSAs as “ideological sex clubs” — to Rosa Parks.

How does one go from comparing someone to a civil rights icon to distancing themselves from their “vile” remarks? It’s not as if Carpay’s view of the LGBTQ movement isn’t well known.

To make matters worse, Carpay issued a non-apology, in which he insisted the comparison wasn’t intentional, immediately before doubling down on it.

“In my presentation, I pointed out that civil liberties are fragile, and must be defended,” he wrote.

“Unfortunately, the slogans of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusion’ have been abused in ways that undermine our free society, and the fundamental freedoms of speech, conscience, religion, association and assembly. Fundamental freedoms need to be defended, regardless of where the attack is coming from.”

As is almost mandatory in this genre of apology, Carpay claims he was taken out of context, apologizing “to anyone who may have interpreted my remarks in such a fashion.”

So what is the difference between Carpay and Strashok? Carpay is an influential member of the conservative movement, who has reportedly donated funds to the UCP.

If Kenney gives him the boot, he risks supporters of the JCCF moving to Derek Fildebrandt’s Freedom Conservative Party or the Alberta Advantage Party.

In a bizarre display of “whataboutism,” Kenney pointed to Paige Gorsak, the federal NDP nomination candidate for Edmonton-Strathcona, where incumbent Linda Duncan has announced her impending retirement.

Gorsak strongly opposes oilsands expansion, favouring instead a rapid transition to renewable energy.

Firstly, she isn’t running for the Alberta NDP, nor has she received the nomination yet.

Secondly, wanting to eventually shut down the oilsands is in no way morally equivalent to comparing LGBTQ activists to Nazis and Stalinists, even if the candidate supports a more rapid transition to renewables than many Albertans are comfortable with.

One can disagree with Gorsak — as Kenney and Premier Rachel Notley, who represents that riding provincially, do — without demonizing her, as the UCP have done with other environmental activists, such as Tzeporah Berman and David Suzuki.

By equating homophobes like Carpay to environmentalists, Kenney is demonstrating that he doesn’t take the issue of right-wing extremism seriously.

Canada’s imaginary migrant crisis

Originally published in Medicine Hat News

You may have read recently about Canada’s alleged “crisis” of “illegal immigration.”

Calgary Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel, the shadow minister for citizenship and immigration, has been tweeting non-stop about the current government’s supposed “inability to manage Canada (sic) borders.”

The problem is that the Tories are deliberately conflating “asylum seekers” with “illegal immigrants,” which are by no means synonymous.

The Conservatives this past week deleted a tweet showing a picture of a black man with a suitcase over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tweet after Trump’s Muslim ban that “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.”

It seems more likely that asylum seekers are crossing from the U.S. as a result of Trump’s hardline anti-immigration policies and fear of what may happen to them if they return to their country of origin, rather than a tweet by the prime minister.

People have a right under both Canadian and international law to seek asylum from persecution. This is not the same as illegal immigration, since it’s not illegal, although asylum seekers may not have gone through official border crossings. The Tories have seized upon this technicality to make it appear as if we’re being invaded by criminals.

The migrants showing up on our side of the border are a result President Donald Trump’s demonization of foreigners, as well as Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s barbaric policy of separating migrant children from their parents.

Still, the amount of monthly asylum claims has decreased to 1,263 claims in June 2018 from 1,869 the month prior, according to Immigration Canada, which doesn’t appear to be a crisis.

Although the Tories aren’t advocating the creation of an ICE-style deportation force to separate migrant families as a deterrent, they’re still drumming up Trump-style race-based immigration fears.

Many of these claimants come originally from impoverished countries, such as Haiti and Nigeria, which critics say are not at war and therefore not valid for asylum claims.

No doubt some of these claims will turn out to be bogus, but these people have a right to be heard. We can’t just assume these migrants are all cheating the system.

Trudeau took the Conservative opposition’s bait with his cabinet shuffle last week, placing former Toronto chief of police Bill Blair in charge of a new cabinet position as minister of border security and organized crime reduction.

It’s worth noting that Blair was in charge of Toronto police during the 2010 G20 summit, when 1,000 protesters were arrested, mostly without charges.

This is clearly an effort by Trudeau to signal that he’s going to take a tougher approach to the border in the lead-up to the 2019 election.

Rempel took to Twitter to congratulate Trudeau on having finally seen the light, which shows that the Conservative tail is wagging the Liberal dog on this issue, which doesn’t bode well for the Liberals’ electoral prospects.

Ultimately, Trudeau must show leadership and pick a side.

Either Canada’s doors are open to people fleeing persecution in the U.S. and elsewhere, or they’re not.

He’s in a position to provide a stark contrast with the darkness of Trump’s U.S., an opportunity he appears to have squandered to score electoral points with people who are unlikely to vote for him anyway

Drug addiction should be a health, not criminal issue

Originally published in the Medicine Hat News

Canada is currently in the midst of an opioid overdose crisis.

The two most western provinces and territories — British Columbia, Alberta, Yukon and the Northwest Territories — have been hit especially hard, likely due to their relative proximity to China, where much of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl is produced.

According to Government of Canada statistics from 2016, B.C. and Yukon each had more than 15 opioid overdoses per 100,000 people, while Alberta and N.W.T. each had between 10 and 14.9 overdoses per 100,000 people.

This epidemic had led to a recognition in some quarters that the current approach of criminalizing drug use hasn’t been remotely effective in preventing deaths.

Safe injection sites, which will soon be coming to Edmonton, Calgary and Lethbridge are a positive development in handling opioid addiction as a health, rather than criminal, matter, but if we want to address the root cause of drug overdoses, we ought to take the bold step of decriminalizing drug use full stop.

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh acknowledged this bitter reality when he said that personal drug use should be treated as a “social justice” rather than “criminal justice” matter.

Critics will say that decriminalizing drugs normalizes their use, but this objection misses the mark.

Decriminalizing drugs, as opposed to legalizing them, simply shifts the burden of dealing with them from police officers and lawyers to public health officials.

When people are physically addicted to substances like heroin or fentanyl, illegality is not going to stop them from using.

The question is whether they’re going to share needles, and risk contracting HIV, buy impure drugs off the streets to get their fix, risking a fentanyl overdose, or engage in other criminal activities to get money for their addiction.

Decriminalization allows public health officials — people who actually study drugs and their effects — the latitude to deal with the opioid crisis in the most effective way possible.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, arguably the epicentre of Canada’s opioid crisis, has taken this approach.

Vancouver’s Crosstown Clinic not only provides opioid users with a place to do their drugs safely, but also prescribes them free medical doses to avoid overdoses and allow addicts to spend their money on necessities.

Naturally, there are many people uncomfortable with giving addicts their fix, but once one thinks about drug abuse as a health issue, it’s a perfectly sensible approach.

It’s not as if anyone can walk into the Crosstown Clinic and receive free heroin. They must demonstrate a need.

These are people who tried heroin alternatives like suboxone and methadone and still couldn’t get clean.

Not only does this program prevent needless deaths, but it allows the most severe addicts to function as members of society, rather than outcasting them as criminals and junkies.

Drug policy is in the federal government’s jurisdiction, so the provinces are somewhat constrained, but the Crosstown Clinic shows that municipal governments, with the province’s blessing, can do more to address the opioid crisis.

The Alberta Government acknowledges the need for harm reduction in its opioid crisis response, which includes safe consumption sites, peer support and drug substitution therapy.

This is a solid first step in the right direction, but the Alberta NDP should take the bold next step and do what it can as a provincial government to stop treating addicts as criminals.

If enough provinces take B.C.’s approach, then the federal government, which already supports supervised consumption sites, will take note and hopefully take steps towards reducing the bloated Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Rights of LGBTQ students should be non-negotiable

Originally published in the Medicine Hat News

U.S.-style culture wars are coming to Alberta.

United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney recently announced that he will oppose the NDP government’s new bill codifying support for gay-straight alliances in the province’s schools.

Bill 24, an expansion on Bill 10 from earlier this year, forbids teachers from divulging a student’s membership in a GSA to parents without the student’s consent, which will have the impact of blocking educators from potentially outing LGBTQ kids to their parents.

Kenney’s opposition to this common-sense measure is a blow to those moderates who hoped Kenney would pivot away from the social conservatism that has defined much of his political career after winning his party’s leadership.

Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown did just that after winning his party’s leadership with support from social conservative elements. He even marched in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade.

Kenney has decided not to take this route, instead launching a full-scale assault against GSAs under the guise of parental rights.

The UCP weren’t allowed to participate in Calgary Pride until they demonstrate their commitment to LGBTQ rights. Kenney’s level of commitment is now on full display.

Kudos to Education Minister David Eggen for standing up for Alberta’s LGBTQ students. Is Bill 24 a political move designed to paint the Conservatives as stodgy social conservatives in the runup to the 2019 election?

Absolutely. But Kenney has so far done everything in his power to promote this view.

Politics aside, it is of the utmost importance that any potential future government has a difficult time reversing the progress the NDP has made for LGBTQ rights in the province.

It doesn’t matter what one thinks of the NDP’s fiscal record. The rights of the province’s LGBTQ students to join a GSA should not be subject to debate.

Kenney is a shrewd political actor. He wouldn’t have taken this position if there weren’t electoral gains to be made from it.

The Alberta Teachers Association, which Kenney accused of encouraging its members to join the nowdefunct Wildrose party en masse to block the merger with the PC party that brought about the UCP, wants to speak with the UCP leader to clarify his misconceptions about GSAs.

Kenney won’t bite, saying only that he’s spoken to “hundreds” of teachers who expressed their concerns, but the ATA represents 46,000 members across the province.

Kenney has been peddling blatant misinformation about GSAs. In a recent news conference, he suggested that they’ll be teaching sex ed.

GSAs are a social club, not a classroom. The only thing they’ll be teaching is that there’s nothing wrong with being LGBTQ, something that every party leader should support.

Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes, who supported Kenney during the UCP leadership race, said that although he supports GSAs, he’s also in favour of notifying parents when their child joins one, barring extenuating circumstances.

Bill 24 does the opposite, prohibiting educators from notifying parents except in circumstances where the child is at risk. That’s as it should be.

Barnes and Kenney can’t have it both ways. Either they support GSAs, which allow LGBTQ students and their allies a space to gather away from any homophobia that is all too real in schools, or they don’t.

Notifying parents of a student’s GSA membership defeats this purpose, by possibly exposing them to homophobia at home.

There’s no justification to willfully run that risk, with all the progress with LGBTQ rights that have been made in recent years.

UCP leadership race has some Seinfeldian overtones

Originally published in the Medicine Hat News

The United Conservative Party leadership race is shaping up to be the Seinfeld of Alberta electoral politics. That is, a race about nothing.

Instead of concrete policy proposals, the contest thus far has been more about broader themes than specific policies.

It doesn’t help that one frontrunner, former PC party leader Jason Kenney, is openly refusing to release specific planks unless he wins.

His competitors — former Wildrose leader Brian Jean, Calgary-based attorney Doug Schweitzer and former Wildrose president Jeff Callaway — have each released a smattering of policy proposals here and there, but are mostly sticking to UCP talking points.

They all want to cut taxes and balance the budget (though how they plan to do both concurrently remains a mystery), tame a purportedly out of control public sector and punish British Columbia for opposing the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion.

Each candidate agrees on these themes, but has different means of addressing them, with the exception of Kenney.

Like George Costanza in the series of Seinfeld episodes when he and Jerry are pitching a sitcom to NBC, Kenney insists that the leadership show must be about nothing.

As the most recent Leader of Opposition, Brian Jean would be the show’s titular character. He’s also the most popular of the four candidates amongst Albertans, with 51 per cent saying he’s the most suitable to be leader, according to a ThinkHQ poll reported by Global News.

He and Kenney initiated the merger of their two conservative parties that sparked this race, just as Seinfeld and Larry David, on whom George is based, conceived of the sitcom.

Jean vows $2.6 billion in budget cuts, referendums on photo radar and equalization payments, and a full repeal of Notley’s carbon tax.

His wacky neighbour, the Kramer of the leadership race, is Callaway, whose signature proposal is to purchase Manitoba’s Port of Hope to get Alberta’s oil to foreign markets, given the B.C. NDP’s reluctance to allow more pipelines through its territory.

This harebrained scheme to purchase another province’s port is one the likes of which only Kramer could conceive.

Given his outspoken social progressivism, Doug Schweitzer is the Elaine of the race.

Elaine, portrayed by the now-legendary Julia Louis-Dreyfus, won’t date someone who’s anti-abortion and Schweitzer doesn’t want to lead a party that rejects a woman’s right to choose.

But Schweitzer is no Dipper. He wants to kick B.C. out of the New West Partnership if they don’t accept Kinder Morgan and radically alter the province’s income taxation to create two flat brackets — nine per cent for those who make less than $100,000 per year and 10 per cent for those who make more than $100,000 annually.

After the first leadership debate, Jean, Kenney and Callaway rushed to social media to declare themselves the winner, as if it were a boxing match.

Schweitzer was the only one not to unilaterally declare victory, which shows good character.

In a race about nothing, that goes a long way.

Beware of those who cry ‘fake news’

Originally published in the Whitecourt Star

Since last year’s U.S. Election, the term ‘fake news’ has entered our political discourse like a ton of bricks.

Although intended to signal an actual phenomenon — web articles that appear to be actual news but are entirely fabricated to serve a political agenda — the term has taken on a life of its own.

It seems that those who are most quick to label reporting they dislike “fake news” are its truest purveyors.

As George Orwell wrote in his masterful 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.” What he said then of the ‘fascist’ label could be said of the ‘fake news’ epithet today.

The most prominent practitioner of calling undesirable news fake is, of course, U.S. President Donald Trump, who refused to allow CNN reporter Jim Acosta to ask a question at one of his first presidential press briefings, because, “You’re fake news.”

The question of whether fake news — like an article that baselessly claimed that Pope Francis had endorsed The Donald — helped propel Trump to victory in the U.S. Electoral College is entirely debatable.

That Trump himself used blatant falsehoods to stir up emotion amongst his supporters, however, both on the campaign trail and in office, is beyond dispute.

Some of his most egregious claims, for those in need of a refresher, include the allegation that three million people voted illegally in the election where he lost the popular vote by three million, that he personally witnessed thousands of Muslims celebrating on the streets of New Jersey after the September 11 terrorist attacks and, my personal favourite, his insinuation that “Lyin’” Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination.

Clearly, when Trump cries “fake news,” he’s projecting his insecurities onto the American news media, which although not without its flaws and frailties, is largely in the business of reporting facts.

This psychological projection is by no means exclusive to the pro-Trump crowd, or even the U.S.

Here in Canada, there are those who criticize “the media” for its apparent coziness with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, citing the soft news surrounding our media savvy prime minister, such as his Star Wars socks that inexplicably got international media coverage.

It’s rather disingenuous to claim that the Canadian media hasn’t covered Trudeau’s ethical lapses, such as his cash-for-access fundraisers that are increasingly being outlawed provincially.

Sure, the media as a whole could do better reporting hard news rather than fluff, but this has little to do with ideological bent.

It’s more about how revenues are generated in the digital world. Traditional newspapers and news media outlets need content that generates clicks, which generate advertising revenue, which allows them to chase important stories.

There is no such singular entity as the media — different media organizations have distinct ideological bents, and that’s as it should be.

With that said, there’s certainly a credibility gap in news reporting.

The New York Times, which in many ways is the gold standard of news reporting, has yet to fully recover its credibility after it presented allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, based on the claims of anonymous sources within the Bush administration, as objective fact.

This significantly weakens the paper’s clout when it goes after fake news sources, whether it’s the president of the United States or Russian bots.

Skeptics can point to its role in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion and ask how the Times is any different.

This is a misguided criticism, as most newspapers, though they all have an ideological slant, don’t generally fabricate news for ideological purposes.

When we lump the news media, for all its flaws, together with the malicious intentions of fake news, we do a disservice to the journalists who put all they’ve got into holding the powerful to account, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.