As Israel continues to hold back food to starving Palestinians trapped in Gaza, resulting in famine and death, as its prime minister tells the United Nations he will not yield to its peace resolutions, as Israeli forces order Palestinians to vacate their homes and mosques and schools and hospitals so it can bomb them into the stone age, a small Canadian charity is working overtime.

Honest Reporting Canada, as it calls itself, is busy targeting news organizations and journalists who report any of this is actually happening. As an officially registered charity, it is allowed to give income tax deductions to anyone who contributes to its $2 million a year budget.

Almost every day recently, its website has issued multiple “action alerts,” directing its 70,000 subscribers to bombard journalists and their organizations with emails accusing them of anti-Israel bias, antisemitism, blood libels and disinformation. It even provides them with accusatory email templates to which they can simply attach their names. There is evidence that these intimidation tactics have forced some news organizations to pull back on publishing news and opinion that HRC might object to. Indeed, I and other observers are hard-pressed to find news people who are even willing to attach their names to criticism of HRC.   

Honest Reporting Canada describes itself as an “independent, grass-roots organization promoting fairness and accuracy in Canadian media coverage of Israel, the Middle East and matters affecting the Jewish community in Canada, and which  works to challenge anti-Jewish rhetoric, particularly when antisemitism hides behind a mask of anti-Israel criticism.”

Fact check: Honest Reporting Canada is not independent. It is not grass-roots. It does not subscribe to journalism’s commonly accepted standards for fairness and accuracy. And, critics argue, it does not act as a charity; rather, it is usually a mouthpiece for whatever Israel says it is doing, namely: There is no famine in Gaza; Israel is not targeting civilians; there is no genocide; any criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitism.

All of which begs the question: Why is the government, and Canadian taxpayers, helping this group influence reporting of what a blue-ribbon United Nations independent investigation recently called a genocide?

Last year, a freedom of expression monitoring project sponsored by two of Canada’s leading journalism organizations—the Canadian Association of Journalists and the National NewsMedia Council—called out the menace of HRC. “The nature of these accusations against named journalists and the volume of complaints and harassment which often follow can create a chill on reporting,” said the Canada Press Freedom Project. “Media workers report that they contribute to a climate of fear and self-censorship, and can exacerbate worries about job precarity and editorial freedom.”

Now, two small human rights organizations are circulating a petition to ask Ottawa to review HRC’s charitable status. In 2023, it gave out more than $1 million in tax deductions to donors, mostly other pro-Israel charities. Rules for charities in Canada are seemingly strict: They must not engage in political activities; 80 percent of their budget must be spent on charitable activities that serve the public’s benefit like poverty relief, education, religion or health; and they must file a T3101 form annually with the Canada Revenue Agency.

Journalist and author Linda McQuaig, one of HRC’s frequent targets, is one of the few to speak out. “I did not realize that Honest Reporting was a charitable organization,” she said in an interview. “I’m puzzled by why Canadian authorities would consider attacking journalists to be a charitable activity worthy of a tax credit.”

Here’s where the story gets interesting.

The charity is registered as HR Canada Charitable Organization. It is directed by three well-heeled Toronto businessmen, Ken Rotman, Jonas Prince and Dan Greenglass, who control companies worth billions of dollars. Its donors, listed by name on the Canada Revenue Agency filings, include the powerhouse United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto and a who’s who of other Jewish charities, including The Azrieli Foundation and the Ronald S Roadburg Foundation, named after the late Vancouver real estate baron, which has  donated $250,000 to HRC since 2022. The charitable foundations of former senator Linda Frum and former gold magnate Peter Munk are also supporters.

HRC has grown quickly since it registered as a charity in 2019. Its war chest in 2020 was just $186,650 ($117,743 from donations, and the rest from other charities). In 2023, the last year CRA processed T3101 forms, HRC issued tax receipts for $1,061,099, and $984,900 of that came from other registered charities.

Using that money to lobby news organizations has been disturbingly effective. HRC’s latest report on its successes includes a pledge to be a “pit bull” against what it claimed is “a well-organized attempt by anti-Israel groups to solidify their monopoly over news media coverage of the Middle East.” Its website highlights corrections its pressure caused in more than 80 Canadian news organizations, including CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, and smaller outlets coast to coast like Saltwire and the Victoria Times Colonist.

(Continued in ALERT. Part two: Is this legitimate criticism or harassment?)

So is Honest Reporting Canada engaging in legitimate media criticism, or is it a well-funded pressure group harassing Canadian journalists? Are the stories it targets all substantially incorrect, or do they merely cast Israel in a negative light? I reached out to HRC to address this and other questions but they have not replied.

The United Jewish Appeal, which raises $60 million a year, recommends HRC to its donors, endorsing its methodology. HRC, it says, “subject(s) news reporting to rigorous and methodical investigation in order to prevent distorted coverage.”

It’s hard to take this claim seriously. The person who directs HRC’s media analysis and writes most of its alerts is Mike Fegelman, who has never worked as a professional journalist despite his misleading on-line bio which says he is “a twenty-one-year veteran of the Canadian journalism industry.” Although journalism’s codes of ethics require reporting without fear or favour, Fegelman once said that he wants HRC to be “a digital army for Israel.” He doubled down on this in a Nov. 28, 2023, email: “In the war against Hamas, there are two battlefronts: the fighting on the ground and the battle for public opinion. In many respects, the war of persuasion is no less important, helping to shape an entire generation.”

Just Peace Advocates, one of the two pro-Palestinian human rights groups petitioning Canada Revenue Agency to audit HRC, says the charity exhibits an extreme pro-Israel bias and is acting contrary to Canadian law.

“Petitions and articles written by HRC leadership deny reports of famine in Gaza, dispute official death tolls, spread false reports of ‘[an] unborn child ripped from the womb’ and ‘tunnels under cribs’, stoke fear and hatred toward Gazan refugees, endorse and repeat Netanyahu’s notorious ‘children of darkness’ remarks, argue that Gazans are deserving of or responsible for their own bombardment, and claim that murdered Palestinians under the age of 18 should not be called children.”

If you read how HRC describes itself to justify its tax-deductible donations, you’d think it was a broadly based anti-racism organization with a focus on education. Its stated charitable purpose is “to advance education by: Developing and delivering courses, lectures and workshops to the general public that address the issues of religious, racial, ethnic and/or cultural and linguistic intolerances, discrimination and prejudices; Conducting and compiling data, as well as short and long term media analysis surveys about antisemitism and discrimination to increase understanding and awareness about the importance of unbiased representation of religious, ethnic, and racial minorities in Canada, and publicly disseminate the results thereof.”

In fact, almost all its activities are directed at defending Israel.

Also controversial is the status of Robert Walker, listed as assistant director of HRC. His bio on the website says “he is actively involved in helping to organize and conduct community antisemitism education workshops for all audiences, so that the public at large can become empowered to challenge anti-Jewish media bias and misinformation." Late last year Walker was arrested and charged with 17 counts of mischief for spray-painting anti-Palestinian graffiti in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood. Some of it said “F**k Gaza.”

Although the graffiti was described as hate-motivated by Toronto Police Services, all charges were withdrawn in return for Walker and two accomplices  contributing $1,000 each to SickKids Foundation to offset the costs of graffiti removal.

Such actions would get any journalist fired. But Walker, who is not a journalist, remains listed as assistant director of HRC. In fact, he wrote a recent action alert accusing Linda McQuaig of “demonizing Israel.”

The column in question, published in the Toronto Star on Sept. 4, did not focus on Israeli atrocities in Gaza. McQuaig made no new accusations but, as background, linked to international authorities like Amnesty International who have blamed Israel for starving and committing genocide against Palestinians. McQuaig’s column examined alternatives for the United Nations to take action for peace in the region. She quoted a former UN lawyer as saying the General Assembly could override the Security Council veto by the United States using the same resolution put forward by Canada’s Lester Pearson in 1957, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Her column urged Prime Minister  Mark Carney’s government to do more to push for peace. In my opinion, it met all the tests for a good piece of opinion journalism.

Walker’s criticism, on the other hand, said the writer is “engaging in breathtakingly low-calibre journalism and deeply misleading readers of The Toronto Star” and “directly providing rhetorical cover for a banned terrorist entity in Canada” (presumably meaning Hamas}.

Without any independent verification he said Palestinian mothers and children being killed in Gaza are neither defenceless nor starving, and that “inside Gaza, restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries and food markets are busy.”

That sounds to me like political propaganda, not “rigorous and methodical investigation.” It’s not the kind of education that charitable status was meant to support.

I’ll give McQuaig the last word.

“From what I have noticed … the group does not appear to be concerned about accuracy in media. Rather, my impression is that they seem interested in attacking those (like me) who attempt to hold Israel to the same standards of international law that apply to all nations.” 

Call it news intimidation.

Canadians should take notice because Pierre Poilievre, leader of the federal Conservatives, has more or less been following Trump’s playbook, threatening to defund the CBC and describing The Canadian Press, which supplies most of the country’s news to print and broadcast outlets, as “a tax-funded mouthpiece for the Prime Minister’s office.” Poilievre is odds-on favourite to lead his party to power in the next federal election. He often refuses to let journalists ask questions at his press conferences and prefers to talk policy on podcasts where he cannot be fact-checked.

This week, south of the border, Trump’s pick to be new chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, announced he is launching an investigation into NPR and PBS, two popular government-funded news and public affairs networks that serve millions of Americans, much like the services that CBC provides for Canadians. National Public Radio (NPR) feeds 20 local stations that reach 8 million listeners in local communities. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is even bigger, delivering news to 65 million viewers.

In a letter addressed to the chief executives of the public broadcasters that was published by The New York Times, Carr wrote that Congress is "actively" looking into whether to stop requiring Americans to fund NPR and PBS programming, noting that he personally sees "no reason" this should continue. His investigation, he said, will look into whether NPR and PBS are  broadcasting “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements."

What’s notable about Carr is that, besides being in charge of the agency that licenses all U.S. broadcasters, he wrote a large section of Project 2025, the contentious document that supporters of Trump wrote before the election and which Trump seems to be following to the letter in the weeks since his inauguration. Among other things, Carr advocated getting rid of outdated regulations and cited Trump henchman Elon Musk's satellite internet product Starlink as a technology the FCC should promote.

"To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars," Carr said.

Both CEOs have disputed Carr's allegations. But on other fronts, the new Trump administration has peeled back the ability of traditional media to cover what’s going on. Example: The New York Times, NBC News, NPR and Politico will be evicted from their offices at the Pentagon next week and replaced by smaller right-wing sites including Breitbart News and One America News. A Pentagon spokesman called it a “new annual media rotation” but the Times and NBC News have had news bureaus at the Pentagon for decades and one of the replacements, HuffPost, does not even employ a Pentagon correspondent.

Seeing the writing on the wall, many billionaire media owners have paid Trump millions of dollars to settle winnable lawsuits he filed on questionable grounds even before the election. One critic called their actions “preemptive servitude.”

Example: Trump sued CBS for $10 billion, accusing the company of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the election campaign. Many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish a critical outlet.

Now that Trump is back in the White House, many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration will approve their planned multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance. Settlement discussions are now under way. Throwing in the towel would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation.

During the “60 Minutes” interview at the center of the lawsuit, which aired in October, the CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Harris a question about the conflict in the Middle East. In a preview of the interview that aired on “Face the Nation,” CBS’s Sunday morning show,  Harris was shown giving a different answer than the one she gave in the version of the interview that was broadcast the next evening on “60 Minutes.”

Trump accused “60 Minutes” of selecting a more coherent quote from Harris for the prime-time telecast in order to boost her candidacy. CBS News said that Harris had given one lengthy answer to Whitaker’s question, and that the network followed standard journalistic practice by airing a different portion of her answer in prime-time because of time constraints.

Regardless of the lawsuit’s merit, Trump’s administration wields leverage. Because Paramount owns broadcasting licenses, it needs the blessing of the FCC to complete its planned merger with Skydance. Carr, Trump’s new FCC chief, says his commission would probably look into the “60 Minutes” interview as part of its review of the Paramount merger.

If Paramount settles with Trump, it would be the third major company in recent weeks to settle a lawsuit brought by the new president.

Last month, ABC News paid $15 million to resolve Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who had imprecisely said that the president was found “liable for rape” in a civil trial in New York. (In fact, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse.)

And Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, paid $25 million to resolve a lawsuit that Trump filed after the social networks suspended his accounts in 2021. Meta is headed by Mark Zuckerburg, a billionaire supporter of Trump.

The settlements have come even though it is notoriously difficult for public figures like  Trump to win defamation lawsuits. Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent — which Trump and some of his allies want to see weakened or overturned — plaintiffs must prove that a publisher knew a defamatory statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for its accuracy.

Trump’s aggressive lawsuits are the latest sign that his administration is prepared to crack down on unfavorable media coverage. Before and after the election, Trump and his allies have discussed subpoenaing news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television.

The strategy to punish factual reporting can pay other dividends as well. CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros., recently reassigned prominent Trump critic Jim Acosta to a midnight shift in what was widely seen as a move to mute critical coverage of the new administration. Warner has lucrative broadcasting interests that are subject to FCC licensing, including Discovery Network, the Food Channel and the Oprah Winfrey Network. Acosta quit in protest, saying “don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth, and to hope.”.

In Canada, Conservative leader Poilievre has also resorted to questionable attacks  against the media, including the country’s most popular news network CTV News. After an editing error took one of his statements out of context, Poilievre ordered his MPs and senators to “refrain from engaging with CTV News, including participating in interviews, providing statements or offering any form of commentary,”

He has also questioned government subsidies to the news media which have kept many newspapers afloat while they shrink their coverage due to unprecedented loss of advertising revenue and subscribers. Last year Poilievre said subsidies paid to local newspapers by the Trudeau government have produced “regurgitated propaganda paid for by taxpayers.” Instead, he says Canadians enjoy an abundance of news available for free on the Internet. That, of course, is not true, since popular online sites like Facebook and Instagram refuse to carry news produced by professional media and Facebook has dropped its token fact-checking function.

Canadians would do well to watch what Trump is doing to cripple the news media south of the border. Poilievre shows every indication he may use those tactics here if his party wins election later this year.

Mark Twain once said “a lie can spread half way around the world while truth is still putting on its shoes.” That’s even truer today than it was in Twain’s time because social media can spread lies and so-called “fake news” far and wide with lightning speed, and we’ve seen how this can have devastating impacts on our democracy.

One of the most chilling proofs of this came out the other day. In his blog Media Policy, Howard Law revealed the results of a public opinion poll conducted last summer by the Department of Canadian Heritage but for some reason never released. He said it turned up unexpectedly in an access to information request filed by Global TV journalist David Akin.

According to that poll, 60 to 70 percent of Canadians said they no longer believe many of the country’s public institutions are capable of making decisions that benefit the public. Those institutions include local, provincial and national governments and financial institutions. Perhaps most significantly they also include the only institution dedicated to dismantling lies and reporting truth. Canada’s legacy news media—our newspapers, television and radio stations—are only trusted by 32.5 percent of Canadians, according to the poll.

Why should we be concerned about this?

First, declining trust in the news media is not new. I documented its beginning 26 years ago in my book Yesterday’s News, which I intended as a warning for Canadian news leaders to change or perish. Readers and viewers needed to be educated about what journalists do and why they are worthy of our trust, I wrote. Our democracy, and the information Canadians need to vote knowledgeably, were at risk. The results of the Canadian Heritage poll show that battle may be irretrievably lost.

Second, those who say that social media makes information more widely available than ever before, thus strengthening democracy, are plain wrong. Reporting the news is more than just saying something happened and what people think about it. Verifying what happened, fact-checking what people say about it, putting it in context and striving to make sure it is the best available version of the truth is the core job of journalism.

The danger of this misconception was illustrated a few months ago when Elon Musk tweeted that legacy news media were dead, usurped by social media giants like X (which he owns). “What’s the point of reading 1,000 words about something that was already posted on X several days ago?” he asked. Within a few days, his post had been viewed 15.5 million times, and most of the replies agreed with him.

That’s the mentality that encourages people to skip the hard job of determining what’s true and glom on to conspiracy theories or believe outright lies or elect presidents like Donald Trump. Or worse, decide not to vote at all because you’ve lost trust in governments and don’t see the point. Going back to that Canadian Heritage poll, here are the percentage of Canadians who still say they have trust in democracy’s key institutions:

Question: To what extent do you trust the following to make decisions in the best interests of the public?

Local municipal government         41.7%
Financial institutions                    35.9%
Government of Canada                35.7%
Canadian news outlets                 32.5%
Provincial governments                31.0%
Social media companies               10.4%

This is simply shocking. Obviously an important arm of government felt it was in the public interest to commission and pay for such a poll. My question is: Why did Canadian Heritage keep it from us?

The surest reason for keeping something secret is that it casts you in a bad light. If there is evidence that 64.3 percent of Canadians distrust you, why would the federal government want us to know about it? But there’s another reason I can think of—it’s an indictment of the Liberal government’s controversial strategy, since 2019, of directly subsidizing journalism.Its argument at the time was that this was necessary to sustain factual journalism in the public interest and to strengthen democracy. Legacy media were shedding jobs and losing subscribers and advertisers to faster, more nimble digital platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter (now X). So the government decided to throw $595 million at the problem, in the form of subsidizing 25 percent of journalists’ salaries, and giving tax incentives to private companies that qualified as “registered journalism organizations.”

So the government got in the business of defining what journalism is, who qualifies as a journalist, and which organizations it will support or not, all the while claiming it is supporting “independent” journalism. It sounded sort of like Pete Rose claiming he really belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame because even though he bet on games he managed, he never bet on his team to lose.

In the five years since, there has been little reporting in the subsidized media about what that federal support has achieved (surprise, surprise). But by all accounts the news media have not stepped up to take full advantage of the funding by hiring journalists or transforming their businesses into charities. To date, only 11 news organizations have jumped through the hoops to qualify as “registered journalism organizations” eligible to issue tax receipts to donors under the Income Tax Act. Only one of them is a reputable legacy newspaper, La Presse of Montreal.

Given the lack of uptake, the group that lobbied hardest for federal bailouts, News Media Canada, showed its mojo by coming back to the trough for more. In November, the feds gave news media a big cherry on top by agreeing to more than double the tax credit for eligible new reporters. This subsidy now covers 35 percent of reporters’ salaries up to a maximum of $85,000 a year.

The 570 news media outlets eligible for these subsidies have responded by shuttering scores of century-old newspapers serving small towns, cutting coverage and laying off journalists in larger newsrooms, and asking relief from guarantees to cover local news that they gave when they were licensed to broadcast by the CRTC.

Furthermore, they pressured Ottawa to enact Bill C-18, which tried to force online news giants to compensate Canadian news media for sharing their stories. Google and Meta responded by blocking all links to news, an act that damaged hundreds of small digital start-ups that are trying to cover the ground that legacy media abandoned. Google recently settled but the $100 million it pledged to a new Canadian Journalism Fund will do little to prolong the life of existing newsrooms.

These policy failures suggest that Canada needs another federal royal commission on news, the first since the dawn of the digital age. Interesting new ideas for sustaining journalism have recently been advanced, first by respected conservative voices Konrad Von Finckenstein and Peter Menzies, and more recently by the aforementioned Howard Law and my old journalism school colleague Ivor Shapiro.

The only questions are, does this government have the courage, and do we believe it is capable of coming up with a workable solution?

The same thing—no more news in print—happened without warning the same day across a wide swath of Ontario, in Brampton, Caledon, Cambridge, Guelph, Oshawa, Orillia, Barrie, Whitby, Port Perry, Oakville, Carleton Place, Perth, Huntsville. Orangeville, Stratford, Collingwood, Markham and larger suburban areas like Scarborough and Etobicoke.

Metroland Media Group, Ontario’s biggest community newspaper publisher, suddenly filed for bankruptcy protection and said it will no longer print any of its 71 community newspapers. It’s also abandoning its once-lucrative flyer advertising business. Six hundred and five people were thrown out of work, including 68 journalists. The Canadian Association of Journalists tweeted: “This news, delivered on International Democracy Day, is a total gut punch to Canadian journalism and the public’s right to know. We know how this story goes: Less local journalism = less accountability = weaker democracy.”

According to Metroland’s website, its papers reached 4.2 million customers. The only ones to survive in printed form are six regional dailies.

News of the closures is the latest in a series of devastating blows to the Canadian newspaper industry, caused by a flight of readers and advertisers and competition for both with international social media giants like Meta and Facebook. Publishers, including Jordan Bitove of Metroland’s parent company Nordstar Capital, argue they are so vital to democracy that the federal government should increasingly subsidize them. Yet they hypocritically go about shutting newspapers and robbing their communities of news.

Nordstar says all its cancelled papers will continue to publish news online but that remains to be seen. Only 20 of the 70 papers appear to have websites. There’s also local competition—the most detailed reporting of the closures came in Orillia Matters, a very good online news site owned by Village Media. In any event, online news seldom attracts a large audience, particularly in communities that have been starved of journalistic resources for years by chain owners. Readers are not used to paying for news online and advertisers have more sophisticated ways of reaching their audience.

The mayor of Barrie, which is losing its Advance, was one of the few public officials to speak out.  Alex Nuttall called the newspaper "a staple in Barrie for over 35 years ... bringing local news to citizens' doorsteps. Not having access to a print newspaper will have a very significant impact on getting essential information to residents who can't use or may not have access to digital channels ... For many, this is their only means to stay connected."

The 605 Metroland employees who lost their jobs found out by email or a hurried online conference call on Friday morning. There was no warning. Indeed, Unifor Local 87-M, which represents 102 unionized employees, had just reached agreement to merge with other unions to relieve the company’s financial situation. In exchange, the company promised in June not to lay anyone off this year.

Besides breaking that promise, the company will also not be paying its fired employees their collectively bargained severance pay or post-retirement benefits like free drugs. According to the company’s receiver, Grant Thornton LLP, Metroland has “insufficient funds.”

In other words, its owners ran Metroland into the ground.

"The gloves are off," said Carleen Finch, president of Local 87-M. "We will use every and all legal actions at our disposal to fight this inhumane treatment of our members, many of whom spent their whole careers at their paper serving their communities."

"I can hardly express the level of betrayal we feel today," Finch said. "After months of bargaining in good faith and reaching agreements, Metroland is throwing so many of us out of work without a word of notice.”

Most of those fired are not represented by a union. Non-unionized employees in Canada are supposed to receive severance pay—usually for 24 months—when they lose their job due to downsizing or corporate restructuring, so long as the company doesn’t declare bankruptcy. If there is a bankruptcy, the company’s creditors are paid first and employees get whatever scraps are left.

Metroland’s CEO Neil Oliver said the notice of intention his company filed under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act "is not a bankruptcy." It is intended to give "financially distressed businesses like Metroland protection from creditors so that they have time to restructure their affairs and maintain at least some operations."

According to an internal Metroland memo from Oliver, the announcement was precipitated by "unsustainable financial losses stemming from the changing preferences of consumers and the continued financial impact of the pandemic."

Critics, however, say Metroland was terribly managed, clinging too long to an unsustainable business model, relying on expensive advertising flyers, giving away display advertising to block out local online rivals, and being late to mount digital platforms for their news.

Indeed, some of their community newspapers certainly appeared to be robust. The last edition of the Barrie Advance, as an example, ran to 36 pages and was packed with local advertising.

By clinging to its titles and soldiering on, Metroland is preventing more ambitious and entrepreneurial local buyers from serving their community with news.

Don't care about the news? If you’re one of an alarming number of Canadians who have lost interest, think this way: What are you going to use to light your fireplace or mulch your garden now?

It was an explosive story: A Canadian Liberal member of Parliament was accused of being a willing pawn of Chinese foreign influence, so much so that he supposedly advocated for the continued detention of two Canadian businessmen held for two years in Beijing.

In the wake of the story by Global News, Han Dong resigned from the Liberal caucus and launched a $15 million libel suit for defamation against the network and some of its employees, including reporter Sam Cooper.

The story was quickly criticized for relying solely on anonymous sources. Dong, the elected member for Don Mills North, strongly denied it and the Prime Minister’s office said it had reviewed the transcript of a telephone call Dong had made with the Chinese consul-general in Toronto and concluded that there was no "actionable evidence” that Dong asked the Chinese government to keep the two Canadians in prison for political reasons. 

Even more troublesome for Global News, David Johnston, the former governor-general who was tasked by the Prime Minister to report on foreign influence in Canada’s elections, said he had determined that the allegations against Dong were false. 

Global News’ reaction?  Its editor-in-chief, Sonia Verma, stood by the original story and said that “Global News is governed by a rigorous set  of journalistic principles and practices, and we are very mindful of the public interest and legal responsibility of this important accountability reporting." It reported Johnston's finding but did not retract orcorrect its story or apologize to Dong. 

If this case proceeds to trial, the television network will find itself challenged to either prove the truth of the allegations it published—an almost impossible task—or else argue that it was “diligent” in checking out its sources and what they were saying, presumably following its “rigorous” set of journalistic principles. 

That’s when Global News might find it has a serious problem.

Cooper’s March 22, 2023, story attributed all its information about Dong to “two separate national security sources” who were not named. That is a vague description that most ethical guidelines discourage news organizations from using.

Global’s Ethical Code of Professional Conduct is silent about how its reporters should describe such sources. It merely states that it will “use confidential sources only when there is an overriding public interest and when sources legitimately require their identities be concealed When we do grant anonymity, we will disclose to the audience why we have done so.” 

That is indeed what it did. Global News said in Cooper’s story that it “has granted anonymity to sources on the Dong investigation because they face possible prosecution for sharing information on China’s allegedly vast subversion of Canada’s democracy, including clandestine interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.” 

But that leaves a lot of questions. Were those sources working for the country’s official spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) or were they private security experts? Did they have first-hand access to the Dong file, or was their information second- or third-hand? Were they junior officials or senior officials? Was any attempt made to get them to speak on the record or provide documentation for their allegations? Why were they not questioned about obvious contradictions in the information they provided?

Compare Global’s ethical guidelines on using anonymous sources with the widely used Canadian Association of Journalists ethical guidelines: “When we do use unnamed sources, we identify them as accurately as possible by affiliation or status. (For example, a “senior military source” must be both senior and in the military.) Any vested interest or potential bias on the part of a source must be revealed. We independently corroborate facts if we get them from a source we do not name. We do not allow anonymous sources to take cheap shots at individuals or organizations.” 

So Gobal’s claim that it follows “a rigorous set of journalistic principles and practices” is certainly open to challenge.

Cooper’s story did not say whether he had independently checked out the allegations against Dong or the credibility of his two anonymous sources—claims Global News made in its statement of defence filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice more than three months later. That omission might have led some readers of the original story to believe that the allegations were fact and not subject to independent verification.

The statement of defence further muddied waters by saying that Cooper had a third anonymous source, one not mentioned in the story, and that each anonymous source’s allegation was checked with another anonymous source. That is a far cry from saying something like “Global News has not verified the allegation and it's not immediately clear how the Conservative Party specifically would have benefited from the detainees' release.” 

The anonymous allegations against Dong should have raised red flags or at least required further examination. The accounts of the two or three anonymous sources did not add up. One alleged that Dong, in his February 2021 conversation with Han Tao, the Chinese consul general in Toronto, said the release of “the two Michaels” would benefit the opposition Conservatives. Another suggested the opposite, that progress in easing the plight of the two detained Canadian businessmen would benefit the Liberal government.

The government at the time was pushing for the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who had been arrested in Beijing in 2018 in apparent retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. They were not released until September, 2021, ending a 1,020-day nightmare imprisonment. 

Any defamation trial will scrutinize Global’s ethical code for other steps its newsroom should take when handling a potentially defamatory story. As an expert in journalism standards who has offered testimony at the request of both plaintiffs and news organizations in libel cases, I have studied dozens of other journalistic codes and have cited them in evidence in more than 15 cases. I was also author of the first newsroom standards used by the Toronto Star and was instrumental in saving and rewriting the statement of principles still used by the Canadian newspaper industry. In my opinion, Global’s is one of the weaker and less comprehensive codes. It is silent on such things as the obligation to give people under attack a fair chance to respond before publication; it lacks cautions about when to publish damaging allegations that have been credibly challenged; and it does not stress the importance of documentary evidence.

It turned out that Global wasn’t the first news organization to hear about anonymous security concerns about Dong. Globe and Mail reporters Robert Fife and Steven Chase received the same anonymous tips weeks before but decided not to publish them because they were not able to verify them by obtaining a transcript of the call. 

Their inquiries prompted the Prime Minister’s office to ask CSIS for that transcript, and undoubtedly it would have been translated when Global News made its inquiries, but Global either did not ask for it or else decided to go ahead with the story without documented proof. It’s a crucial point because Dong said his conversation with consul-general Han Tao was conducted in Mandarin and might be open to misinterpretation. 

The Globe and Mail’s reporting also included a fact Global News did not have in its story: The Prime Minister’s Office had reviewed the transcript and concluded that there was no "actionable evidence" of impropriety. Global’s story quoted the Prime Minister’s office but only to deny a question about whether Dong was calling the Chinese consul-general at the request of the government.

Global’s statement of defence claimed that its story was the result of an eight-month investigation. Information from the confidential sources, it said, was "tested," "scrutinized" and "critically evaluated." Yet it did not report Dong’s previous harsh criticism of China’s human rights record or its response to COVID—facts which might call into question just how much under the influence of the Chinese government he was.

To its credit, Global’s March 22 story did include Dong’s vigorous denial of the anonymous allegations although they appeared six paragraphs deep in the story. Global says its journalists “provided the plaintiff with ample opportunity to provide his views and information,” although it did not say how much time it gave him to do that or whether it considered holding off on the story until it could determine who was telling the truth. 

The story of foreign influence in Canada’s affairs was undoubtedly newsworthy and in the public interest but there seemed to be no urgency to publish that particular day. Holding a contentious story for more details is common in most newsrooms. Other codes of newsroom ethics even include cautions to do so if facts are in doubt. So is contacting the subject of a damaging investigative story early in the reporting process. The Toronto Star, for instance, says “The essence of fairness demands that before publication every effort must be made to present subjects with all allegations — the sooner the better, and the more detailed the better.” That means if it actually was an eight-month investigation, a judge would be interested if Dong was only offered a chance to comment at the last moment.

Finally, the first promise in the Global News Ethical Code of Professional Conduct says this: “To be right before being first.” 

It looks like it will be up to a judge to determine whether that promise was kept.

Someone should tell Pierre Poilievre to take off his tin foil hat: The government does not actually control the news that the CBC broadcasts.

As part of his campaign to limit the reach of government, the Conservative leader went public with an April 11 letter he sent to Twitter asking the social media giant to label all CBC news shared on its platform as “government-funded media.” He wrote that “We must protect Canadians against disinformation and manipulation by state media.”

Shortly thereafter, Twitter indeed applied that tag to CBC material, and Poilievre crowed that Canada’s public broadcaster had been “officially exposed” as “Trudeau propaganda, not news.”

If that wasn’t cynical and ridiculous, Twitter made things even sillier. Initially, it put the level of CBC’s government support at 70 percent of its budget, according to a screenshot shared by Twitter owner Elon Musk. It was later reduced to 69 per cent, in what some observers took to be one of Musk’s typical sexual jokes. Musk tweeted on Tuesday that "Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they're 'less than 70% government-funded', so we corrected the label."

CBC archly announced that it would not post any more news on Twitter. Earlier, U.S. broadcaster National Public Radio made the same move to protest against a “government-funded media” label on Twitter that it said implies government involvement in its news content.

It’s telling that Poilievre’s right-wing base ate up his political stunt. Columnist Brian Lilley, writing in the Toronto Sun, said “yes, CBC is a government funded media outlet and Musk’s 69 per cent label is accurate.” He went on to say that CBC claims to be neutral on political matters but is not. “People can point to this newspaper and my writing and say that I’m not neutral, but I don’t claim to be and neither does the Sun. Like every newspaper, we have an editorial stance, and unlike CBC, we don’t take more than $1 billion of government funding.”

Lilley is wrong not only in his math but in his holier-than-thou claim of being free of government funding. His newspaper is owned by Postmedia, and Canada’s largest publisher claims a healthy share of the $600 million the federal government has set aside over the next five years for tax credits and other incentives aimed at propping up struggling news outlets. I imagine he would be the first to squawk if Twitter put its “government-supported” tag on his columns.

He and Twitter also exaggerated the federal support CBC actually receives. It is not funded by the government, in fact, but through Canadian Parliament appropriations. According to CBC’s annual financial report, the media outlet received $1.24 billion from Ottawa in 2021-2022. That accounts for 65.6 per cent of that year's revenue, not 69.

This tempest in a teapot began when Poilievre asked Twitter to follow its policy for a “government-supported” label simply because he argued the CBC received federal money. But Twitter’s policy actually states that the label should only apply to “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” 

Surely we Canadians know enough about the CBC to know that if the federal government tried anything like that, the CBC president, its board of directors, and its entire newsroom of journalists would go to the mat to fight it.

At Poilievre’s rallies these days, the Conservative leader is often greeted by chants of “defund the CBC,” reflecting his promise to gut the network if he wins power. But even that promise is tailored to politics. He has not made the same threat about Radio-Canada, the broadcaster’s French-language arm.

While CBC’s national audience share has fallen to just 3.9 per cent of the Canadian viewing audience, Radio-Canada retains a massive following in Quebec, a province where the Conservatives hope for a breakthrough in the next federal election.

It’s worth remembering that as a university student, Poilievre won $10,000 for an essay explaining how, as prime minister, he would build his government on a platform of freedom. During his campaign for the leadership, he promised to make Canada “the freest country on Earth” by limiting the reach of the government, a theme taken right out of his 2,500-word essay.  

In his reach to attack the CBC as a propaganda arm of government, Poilievre should perhaps revisit his 20s and go back to his alma mater, the University of Calgary. I hear they offer good courses in ethics.

The jury in the libel trial of the century had already been sworn in: Five Black men, two Black women, three white women, a white man, and a Latino woman. Considering that the defendant was Fox News Network, the powerhouse right-wing cable TV king, it was hardly shaping up to be its sort of audience.

Sure enough, just before opening arguments began in Delaware Superior Court this week, Fox settled a lawsuit brought by a Canadian voting machine company, Dominion Voting Systems. The cost? A whopping $787.5 million, which is the largest amount of money ever paid to settle an American media libel case.

Oh, and perhaps another, bigger cost to Fox: Two months of pre-trial publicity that shredded the network’s credibility. CNN’s Jake Tapper correctly described it as “one of the ugliest and most embarrassing moments in the history of journalism.”

The issue at the heart of the case was whether Fox, for business reasons, knowingly promoted lies about the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Dominion sued Fox for $1.6 billion, claiming the network and its all-star commentators deliberately accused it of siphoning votes for Donald Trump to votes for Joseph Biden, robbing Trump of the presidency. Fox hosts invited a parade of Trump’s lawyers to repeat this lie, feeding a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fueled Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and attempted to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.

 The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920 and founded in Toronto by John Poulos and James Hoover. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of U.S. election technology, serving voters in 28 states.

 Among the more laughable and bizarre theories endorsed by Fox News was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez. Even before the trial began, Judge Eric Davis ruled that this and other claims about Dominion were inaccurate.

 The groundbreaking settlement “represents vindication and accountability,” Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson said. “The truth matters". He added: "Lies have consequences … For our democracy to endure for another 250 years, and hopefully much longer, we must share a commitment to facts.”

Fox News escaped without having to apologize for any of its lies. It issued a statement admitting that the court found that “certain claims” about Dominion were false, but did not identify them. It added: “This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitments to the highest journalist standards.”

Take a wee moment here to choke on that. No mention of  "we lied," or "sorry," or "we'll do better next time."

(Disclosure: Earlier in the case, I was interviewed by lawyers from Winston and Strawn LLP, the law firm representing Fox News, about being a possible expert witness on journalism at this trial. I have given testimony at the request of both plaintiffs and defendants in many previous defamation cases in Canada and the U.S. They said their defence would be freedom of the press, that what Trump and his minions claimed was newsworthy and they had a duty to report it. I asked if Fox News had a code of journalism standards that spelled out how its reporters are supposed to go about verifying information. The conversation abruptly changed and they made clear they did not want to go there. Needless to say, my involvement was neither offered nor sought.)

Tuesday's settlement spared Fox the peril of having some of its best-known figures called to the witness stand and subjected to withering questioning, including executives such as Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old who serves as Fox Corp chairman, as well as on-air hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro. These people never had to acknowledge in public that they knowingly pushed lies.

Rupert Murdoch got to stay home and avoid the glare of the courtroom. His son, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, was able to kick back on his $150 million yacht instead of making the trek to Wilmington, Delaware. Fox has cash on hand to pay for the settlement. The company is valued at more than $17.6 billion.

What remains to be seen is whether Fox, founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1996 and now the most influential media operation in American political history, will continue to hold sway over the Republican party or whether its damaged reputation as a news organization will weaken that. My guess is that Murdoch’s business model—give the people what they want—will endure.

His business is facing further damage though. A second voting machine company, Smartmatic, has already filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former business anchor Lou Dobbs and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Earlier this month the New York state supreme court allowed it to proceed.

It's an even more aggressive lawsuit than Dominion filed, and it has the advantage of using some of the same email disclosures Dominion’s lawyers extracted from Fox, including that Murdoch thought the election denialism was “really crazy,” even as Fox personalities peddled those same claims to millions of viewers. Tucker Carlson’s email to a colleague said he "passionately hates" Donald Trump, whose presidency was a “disaster.” Fox hosts, producers, fact-checkers, and senior executives privately said in the on-air claims of a stolen election were “kooky,” “dangerously reckless” and “mind-blowingly nuts.” Yet hosts repeatedly invited Trump acolytes on air to spread these views.

If the Dominion lawsuit accomplished anything, it was to demonstrate that facts are bad for business at Fox News. When a Fox News reporter dared to fact-check a Trump tweet and said there was no evidence of fraud on Dominion’s part, Tucker Carlson texted “Please get her fired” to his prime-time colleagues Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

When another Fox News reporter fact-checked a press conference by Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott complained in an email that “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories.”

The irony of Fox News standing as a beacon for freedom of the press should rankle us to the core. Journalism’s job is seeking the truth and going through the process of verifying it. Fox, its email disclosures show, is in the business of pandering to its right-wing audience, sometimes by suppressing or misrepresenting the truth.

And a news organization that is so afraid of losing its audience and its profits that it gives them only the news it thinks they will agree with … that is no news organization at all, but just another cheerleader on a soapbox barking for attention and totally lacking in credibility.

Let’s hope the Smartmatic case will force Fox to actually admit it.

I repeat: For the duration of the election campaign.

Why is questioning politicians, and in particular being able to ask them follow-up questions, important to democracy? They enable reporters to clarify or pin down what politicians really mean and what they really stand for. Without the ability to be questioned freely, politicians can—and will—obfuscate, minimize, misdirect, mislead and evade accountability, denying voters a full understanding of their policies and actions. A favourite tactic is to ignore the thrust of the original question and pivot to give a partial answer or mount an attack on political opponents.

Smith gave a good example of why this is important just the other day. She was asked what role Take Back Alberta, a controversial populist group, will play in her election campaign. She replied only that her party, the United Conservatives, is a “one member, one vote” party where everyone has a say. Not only did she not answer the question, she did not allow a follow-up.

That certainly did not address the rising alarm of some Albertans that the group, which grew out of last year’s violent anti-vax truck protest at Coutts, Alberta, is wielding too much influence. Take Back Alberta is a coalition of Christian nationalists, separatists and disgruntled rural Albertans. They were instrumental in the United Conservative Party’s leadership review which unseated former premier Jason Kenney, they championed Danielle Smith as his replacement, and by all accounts they have taken effective control of the party.

Voters have a very real interest in knowing more. Take Back Alberta is headed by longtime Conservative organizer David Parker, who has said “My creed is very simple. I have one rule. Don’t mess with my friends.” The group also has a connection to the trucker protest that paralyzed Ottawa and led to the imposition of the National Emergency Act. Roy Beyer, an organizer of that rally, sits in the inner circle of Take Back Alberta. He sees the Alberta election as a religious crusade—about “faith, family and freedom.”

The election campaign in Alberta doesn’t officially begin until May 1 but the political manoeuvring is already under way. For Smith, it’s her first election as leader. She says her limit on questioning is designed to allow more questions from different news outlets. But it can only be seen as an attempt to limit questions from larger and better resourced media outlets like the CBC, Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald, which still have the capacity to follow government closely and do investigative work. Her rules open the way to more questions from marginal outlets like the right-wing Western Standard, which has a record of printing erroneous or misleading stories and generated headlines in 2006 when it published unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. In the same tweet he announced the limits, Smith’s executive assistant Rob Anderson more or less confirmed this pivot by adding: “Albertans should prepare themselves for continuous mainstream media bias for the next six weeks.”

It will be interesting to see how Alberta’s media respond to Smith’s clampdown. Let’s hope they refrain from disrupting press conferences by rudely shouting out follow-up questions that won’t be answered, behaviour that will convince some people they are a rabble deserving of being kept on a leash. My suggestion is for Alberta’s news media to start recording for voters, on a daily basis, all the questions Smith refuses to answer or that she answers unsatisfactorily.

Smith is clearly taking a page out of Stephen Harper’s handbook. The former Conservative prime minister used to travel with the national press but once stipulated that he would answer only four questions at his press conferences—and one had to come from whatever local media outlet existed there. In other words he was more comfortable answering questions about local interests than he was about questions of national substance. Tory fundraising efforts usually complained about a “media elite” that Harper’s spokespeople said was trying to undo everything his government stood for.

Smith’s main opponent, the NDP’s Rachel Notley, has put no limits on questions from journalists and says if Smith doesn’t wish to answer questions she shouldn’t be premier.

Guess we’ll have to wait until May 29 to find out the answer to that one.

Millions of Americans still believe him, despite dozens of court rulings that said there was no evidence for such a claim. Indeed, the judge in this case, Eric Davis of Delaware Superior Court, has already ruled the claims were false and are not to be argued at trial.

The central issue is whether the largest American cable news network, Fox News, deliberately misled its viewers with Trump’s Big Lie, knowing full well that it was, in fact, a lie. That’s the standard for defamation in the United States. To win, the plaintiff, Dominion Voting Systems, must prove that Fox was guilty of actual malice; in other words, that it knew what it was broadcasting was false, or else that it was guilty of “reckless disregard for the truth.”

That is normally a very high bar to jump over—deliberately so, since it was meant to free the media to report on the activities of important public figures like Trump. But freedom comes with responsibility and, so far at least, the case has turned into an ethical and journalistic disaster for Fox News.

Many legal experts are questioning why the network didn’t settle out of court before its reputation was left in tatters by Dominion’s strategic pre-trial disclosure of scores of damaging emails that it forced Fox News to give over, showing its celebrities privately mocking guests that they repeatedly interviewed uncritically on air.   

On the eve of trial, it got worse. Dominion’s lawyers demonstrated that Fox had deliberately held back damaging information, and misrepresented other facts, forcing the judge to rebuke its lawyers. Not a good way to into trial, knowing the judge thinks you have “a credibility problem.” Said Davis to Fox’s lead counsel: “I need to feel comfortable that when you present something to me, it’s the truth. I’m not very happy right now. I don’t know why this is such a difficult thing.”

There’s a lot at stake. Dominion is suing for $1.6 billion, claiming its reputation and business were savaged by Fox News inviting guests like Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell to repeat on air false  conspiracy theories about its voting machines.     

(Disclosure: Earlier in the case, I was interviewed by lawyers from Winston and Strawn LLP, the law firm representing Fox News, about being a possible expert witness on journalism at this trial. I have given testimony at the request of both plaintiffs and defendants in many previous defamation cases in Canada and the U.S. They said their defence would be freedom of the press, that what Trump and his minions claimed was newsworthy and they had a duty to report it. I asked if Fox News had a code of journalism standards that spelled out how its reporters are supposed to go about verifying information. The conversation abruptly changed and they made clear they did not want to go there. Needless to say, my involvement was neither offered nor sought.)

The Fox case is important. Its celebrity commentators like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have enormous influence and huge audiences. They often pose as journalists even though they aren’t. Fox claims a loss in this case will make it harder for all journalists to do what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects –pursuit of the truth. I do not agree with that rationale, but the case will certainly test how elastic that right really is.

The irony of Fox News standing as a beacon for freedom of the press should rankle us to the core. Journalism’s job is seeking the truth and going through the process of verifying it. Fox, its email disclosures show, is in the business of pandering to its right-wing audience, sometimes by suppressing or misrepresenting the truth.

Journalism is supposed to answer six questions: Who, what, when, where, why and how. It’s the “why?” that often goes missing in action and it certainly did in these cases.

The most significant breach involved a Toronto Star story Friday that revealed that John Tory, 68, the three-term mayor of Toronto, had an inappropriate affair with a 31-year-old junior staffer in his office. The relationship, begun during the COVID pandemic, ended sometime this year. The staffer in question, who was not identified, voluntarily left for another job and no longer works for Tory or the City of Toronto.

The story was true. Tory’s lawyer confirmed the relationship to the paper, the paper published its story an hour later, and an hour after that Tory called a press conference and stunningly resigned, apologizing to the city and his family for “a serious error in judgment on my part.”

His announcement, and the reason behind it, was certainly an important news story. But left unanswered was what led the Toronto Star to publish the details in the first place. How did it justify revealing what many people would say was unwise and perhaps inappropriate but certainly not illegal or a matter of immediate public interest?

The paper’s role in ending Tory’s political career ignited a debate across social media all weekend, most of it motivated by what people felt about Tory the man and not about the ethics of publishing the story. It left David Rider, the Star’s city hall bureau chief, somewhat baffled. He tweeted that “most of the hate mail I am receiving for breaking the Tory story appears to be from women. Not quite sure how to process that.” One of the comments he shared called it “a cheap lowlife piece of reporting.” 

The Star chose to be completely silent about the ethics of what it did for three days. On Monday it published a podcast that answered some of the public’s questions but said nothing about any debate that went on at the paper’s senior levels before it went with the explosive story, which left the city it serves in political chaos. What made it decide that its reporting crossed the line that exists in most newsrooms between privacy and public interest? Was its decision justifiable?

The Star happens to be one of the few newspapers to still employ a public editor, who is supposed to act as the reader’s representative in the newsroom. A previous editor in that job, Kathy English, explained in 2018 why the paper has an ethical obligation to explain what it does to its readers: “Transparency means showing our readers that we are honest and principled in what we do, how we do it, and how we share it.”

I know this because 37 years ago I drafted the original version of the Toronto Star’s ethical guidelines that all reporters and editors are supposed to follow. A key paragraph in what is now called the paper’s Journalistic Standards Guide says: “Torstar news organizations should respect the rights of people involved in the news, be transparent and stand accountable to the public for the fairness and reliability of everything it publishes. Fair news reports provide relevant context, do not omit relevant facts and aim to be honest with readers about what we know and what we do not know.”

You could argue that a personal relationship between a powerful boss and someone he employs can blur the line between a consensual affair and sexual harassment. But the Star uncovered no suggestion of any lack of consent nor did it gather evidence that the affair interfered with Tory’s performance. Furthermore, Ontario has no rule against office affairs by public officials. The city of Toronto ethical rule cited in the Tory story is vague, and it’s possible to argue that Tory did not violate it. It says only that “members should perform their duties and arrange their private affairs in a manner that promotes public confidence and bears close public scrutiny.”

Without knowing the debate that went on behind closed doors at the Star, I would guess that its decision to publish rested on the rather thin argument that Tory’s bad judgment was the issue  and that made it a matter of public interest. Certainly he has exhibited that in the past, starting with his disastrous campaign advice that cost Conservative Kim Campbell her prime minister’s job to his own decision to run for election as Ontario Conservative leader in an unwinnable seat. But many other politicians—the most notable being the very married former British prime minister Boris Johnson who moved into 10 Downing Street with his mistress—have survived sexual affairs.

The Star’s reluctance to explain itself to readers is a serious lapse, and mainstream journalism’s habit of not drawing back the curtain on important editorial decisions is a prime reason why it is losing trust and audience. Jordan Bitove, a neophyte to journalism, recently took over as the Star’s new owner and publisher. I am certain that the decision to publish must have been made at his desk. His lack of accountability to readers is a bad sign for the future of his paper.

But at least he chose to publish. It was a different story for his former partner, Paul Rivett, who seems to have made the opposite decision on another significant Ontario political story last week. It cost him the services of his editorial staff, who resigned to protest what they called editorial interference. “I can’t work for an organization where the owners interfere with the journalism,” Jessica Smith Cross, the editor-in-chief of Queen’s Park Briefing and iPolitics, wrote in her resignation letter last Wednesday.

She and reporter Charlie Pinkerton left when their publisher held up a story that lifted the veil on Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s cozy relationship to land developers. The story came out the next day on Global News—that Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner had cleared Ford of wrongdoing after developers attended a stag and doe party for his daughter’s wedding. Smith Cross said on Twitter that questions from Pinkerton about the party had prompted the premier’s office to bring the matter to the integrity commissioner.

Smith Cross said that her publisher, Laura Pennell, told her that “the ownership had read Charlie’s story and wouldn’t allow it to be published in its current form.” The information in question about the developers, some of whom are affected by the Ford government’s controversial decision to open up parts of the Greenbelt for housing development, was accurate, fair and in the public interest, Smith Cross said.

The reaction from her bosses? Nothing from Rivett and vague boilerplate from publisher Pennell that the story did not meet the publication's standards.

Most of us would agree that Ford sharing a table with developers who stand to benefit from his government’s actions is in the public interest, particularly when they were urged in writing to donate up to $1,000 each if they attended.

Smith Cross put her finger on the essential point. “People already assume too easily that they’re being lied to because of their perception of news owners’ and news outlets’ biases and interests,” she wrote. “I don’t want iPolitics to prove that cynicism right.” Quitting, she said, is the only tool ethical journalists have to fight against that.

What’s interesting in the two cases is the connection between the men who made the ultimate decisions to publish or not to publish. QP Briefing, which covers the Ontario government, is a publication of iPolitics. Until recently, iPolitics was owned by Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star.

Bitove and Rivett, neither of whom had any background in journalism, originally came together to buy Torstar and take the company private in 2020, in a deal worth $60 million. But their relationship eventually soured. Rivett sought a court order last year to dissolve their investment partnership, citing “irreparable” damage to his relationship with Bitove. The deal to divide up assets was finalized just last Wednesday. Bitove got ownership of the Toronto Star and Rivett got control of other assets, including iPolitics and Queen’s Park Briefing.

So the decisions each man made late last week about journalism were the first tests of their integrity and accountability as owners.

All I can say is that journalism deserves better. This is no time for amateurs.

Just over two years ago, two businessmen with no experience in the newspaper business took over control of the Toronto Star. It was Canada’s biggest daily at the time, and its parent company Torstar was a distressed asset. They managed to buy it debt-free for the bargain-basement price of $60 million.

One of the new owners, Jordan Bitove, said at the time: “What this company really needs is a lot of love, a more patient approach, and a longer timeline of someone that can look after it for maybe three to five years.” 

Bitove’s partner, Paul Rivett, apparently didn’t get the memo. He is now seeking a court order to wind up their joint ownership of Nordstar Capital LP, which they formed to buy Torstar, citing “irreparable” damage to the relationship with Bitove. “Rivett and Bitove have fundamentally different and irreconcilable views,” the lawsuit alleges. “Bitove has ignored Nordstar’s agreed-to prime objective that Nordstar’s business be carried out in common with a view to profit.”

From all accounts, there wasn’t a lot of love in the Bitove-Rivett partnership, very little patience, and the big machine they were hoping to fly to paydirt ran out of gas half way down the runway. 

At this point we don’t know much more than what you can read in Rivett’s extraordinary request to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, filed on Sept. 1, that says immediately dissolving Nordstar and selling its assets, including the Star, is the only way to create a clear path forward for the companies under its umbrella. Torstar owns four daily newspapers besides the Star and more than 70 community papers, plus digital properties like iPolitics.

But we do know this: The future of the Star is a contest between two very different men, both children of immigrants: Bitove, an emotional and passionate marketer and promoter who helped bring the Raptors to Toronto, and Rivett, a lifelong “numbers guy” who likes to lurk in the background poring over the balance sheet.Their dispute is really a battle for the soul of a newspaper that once sent Ernest Hemingway to cover war, Nathan Cohen to cover the arts, Milt Dunnell to cover sports, Gordon Sinclair to cover life and cartoonist Duncan Macpherson to lampoon the powerful. 

The court document delves into the erosion of Rivett and Bitove’s relationship, or at least Rivett’s side of it. He claims Bitove changed his mind about previously agreed upon plans and failed to provide a budget for the Star, which he oversees as publisher. Bitove apparently resigned from Nordstar’s board of directors on Aug. 13. Rivett, according to the National Post, turned heads in the Star’s downtown newsroom one day recently, setting up a stand-up work station near the fashion and beauty section. Some thought it a power play, because Rivett rarely ever set foot in the newsroom. 

Rivett has asked the court to appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers to manage an asset sale to resolve the “impasse” between the two parties.

There’s an adage in the newspaper business: You’re either in it for the money, or you’re in it for the mission. Nordstar’s fatal flaw was that they never agreed on which one: one partner wanted the money and the other wanted the mission.

It could have been so much more. Masterminded by Rivett, Nordstar began selling off parts of Torstar almost as soon as they acquired it, building up a healthy financial war chest. The company came with $69-million in cash on its balance sheet – more than Nordstar’s purchase price. First to go was a digital marketing service it sold to grocery chain Loblaw Companies Ltd. Then Nordstar split off a digital publishing company called VerticalScope. It went public in 2021 and Rivett kept a 40 percent interest for Nordstar, a stake worth about $180 million based on where the new shares were trading. That alone was enough to pay for Nordstar’s investment in Torstar three times over.

Whatever has happened since is shielded from the public because Rivett and Bitove bought out all of Torstar’s other shareholders and took the corporation private.

Given the sorry state of the newspaper publishing business, the carving up of Torstar can be likened to harvesting a corpse for body parts. You get someone to pay a few million for the kidneys, someone else buys up the lungs, the liver goes for a song, and now’s the time to see how much someone will pay for the heart.

The Star, run for more than 60 years by five families last headed by late publisher John Honderich, tried to keep the lights on by investing in every possible solution, from television ventures, free newspapers, digital platforms and tablet apps. But Torstar continued to sink in red ink, until it no longer had enough cash to pay quarterly dividends. It’s a familiar story. Most media companies lose money because their information competitor, the internet, can deliver news faster, and their advertising competitors, like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, suck up all the ad revenue.

For the past decade, hedge funds and private equity firms — so-called “vulture funds” — have  snapped up legacy media companies. They buy newspapers at low prices, cut costs, offer loans at high interest rates and feast off the cash flow. Canada’s largest newspaper group, Postmedia Network Inc., is slowly being bled dry by Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund based in New Jersey.

Lost in the wilderness are mission statements like Bitove issued in 2020: “We believe in the news. With this transaction we can ensure a future for world-class journalists and world-class journalism befitting the paper’s storied history. We are committed to investing in the news business…”

Whatever happens to the Toronto Star—perhaps a coin toss between Bitove and Rivett or, failing that, a public auction—some will think back to the summer of 2020 when Nordstar’s offer for Torstar was about to be put before a meeting of shareholders for approval.

Out of the blue, a lone competitor surfaced with a better offer. Canadian Modern Media Holdings, a group of Durham County businessmen, announced it would offer 80 cents a share, more than Nordstar’s offer of 74 cents, and promised contingency payments to shareholders from future asset sales, which were potentially worth at least another 50 cents. The rival bid would need to gain the support of the controlling shareholders, namely Fairfax Financial—Rivett’s old company—and the Honderich, Hindmarsh, Campbell and Thall and Atkinson families.

The Torstar board said no. The Durham investors went to court to force an auction for Torstar but the court ruled against them.

Now we may finally have that auction, but will there be any buyers? The newspaper that once marched to Holy Joe Atkinson’s dictum of “get it first” suffered the indignity of getting scooped on its own story. The Globe and Mail reported details of the Rivett-Bitove falling-out a full day before the Star’s reporters caught wind of it.

That enemy is not inflation or the national debt or young people getting squeezed out of the housing market or the cost of groceries. Those things he can blame on Justin Trudeau because he’s the prime minister and Poilievre isn’t. That’s politics.

The bigger enemy out there—the one he’s calling on all freedom loving Canadians to help him conquer—is reporters asking questions. And that leads us down a very dangerous road.

Poilievre last Tuesday invited reporters to be stenographers as he bashed Trudeau over Canada’s high inflation rate. There was only one condition—that he would not answer any questions.

As Poilievre was beginning his statement, Global chief political correspondent David Akin interrupted him several times, asking if he’d take questions and asking some — like if Poilievre was still planning on firing the governor of the Bank of Canada.

“We have a Liberal heckler who snuck in here today,” Poilievre said mockingly, because of course he knows very well who Akin is

Akin, who has built a solid reputation as a tough but fair reporter, evidently chose to speak up because he objects to politicians like Poilievre who want a free ride to use the media for their own purposes. But no other reporters joined his protest and Akin, after being trolled on Twitter for his rudeness, realized he’d gone too far. His apology said: “Many (of you) said I was rude and disrespectful. I agree. I’m sorry for that. We all want politicians to answer questions—but there are better ways of making that point.”

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

Poilievre sent out an email to his followers that attacked Akin personally and said his Conservatives are not fighting against just the Liberals but against the media as well.

“It’s the media, who are no longer interested in even pretending to be unbiased. They want us to lose,” his email said. Poilievre urged supporters to donate money to “go around the biased media. We can’t count on the media to communicate our messages to Canadians. We have to go around them and their biased coverage. We need to do it directly with ads, mail, phone calls and knocking on millions of doors. And to do all that we need your help.”

A bright red button linked to the Conservative website’s donation page.

We’ve seen this script before. Donald Trump took aim at the media through out his presidency, calling journalists “the enemies of the people” and branding critical stories as “fake news.” That resulted in an erosion of trust in the U.S. media and a proliferation of conspiracy theories that ran unchecked on right-wing networks like Fox News. It also enabled Trump to carry off the Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election, even though the facts said otherwise.

It's too easy to say this phenomenon is unique to the United States. In Canada, a recent public opinion poll by Abacus Data showed that 44 percent of Canadians—or 13 million of us—believe in conspiracy theories such as “big events like wars, recessions and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people working in secret against us.” More than one-third of Canadian adults, or 11 million, believe that there are powers trying to replace native born Canadians with immigrants—the so-called “Great Replacement theory.”

The poll, done during the Conservative leadership contest, said that supporters of Poilievre are more likely to believe these things than supporters of other candidates. In other words, that’s his base. And it’s not the first time he has tried to turn the public against the news media and their professional obligations of fairness and verification.

In July, Global reporter Rachel Gilmore drew his wrath when she sent out a Twitter message containing questions she had posed to Poilievre and that he refused to answer, and even called her “unprofessional” for sharing them.

“Canadians' trust in the news media has reached an all-time low,” the Poilievre campaign said in a public message to Global News. “And when we look at your coverage of these issues, it's easy to understand why. Instead of just covering news, unprofessional journalists like you try to set disingenuous traps to attack your opponents.

“Since you insist on demonizing Canadians who dare to speak up against the Trudeau government, we can only assume that Global News is content to be a Liberal mouthpiece.

Some of Gilmore’s questions were in the public interest and had to do with Poilievre’s support of James Topp, a Canadian Forces warrant officer who’s facing court martial for leading a protest march while in uniform against Ottawa’s COVID 19 vaccine mandates.

Same with the questions that Poilievre was trying to duck when he called his press conference last week to respond to Justin Trudeau’s announcement doubling the GST tax credit for six months and offering $500 for 1.8 million Canadian renters with low incomes

Akin’s interruptions at least persuaded Poilievre to relent and answer two questions. One reporter asked him why the federal government couldn’t use tax dollars to help struggling Canadians—a perfectly good journalistic question to respond to Poilievre’s criticism.  Poilievre said the problem is the top-up won’t be enough to help cover inflation.

“In many of our big cities, per month, that money will go up in smoke for the average family,” he said. “What we need are more apartments for people to live in, more houses for them to buy and lower taxes so that their paycheques go further. That is what Conservatives are fighting for.”

Someone might also have asked him if he gives the government any credit for the easing of Canada’s annual inflationary rate, now 7.6 per cent after peaking at 8.1 percent in June. Prices have been slowly trending downward since the Bank of Canada began raising interest rates in March.

Although I agree that Akin’s protest was ill-advised and may have played into Poilievre’s hands, I believe that politicians need to be held accountable by journalists.

Whenever a politician fails to answer a question that is in the public interest, that to me is news that should be reported. Whenever a politician gives an evasive answer or resorts to a talking point to sidestep an important question, that to me should be on the record, including the exact question they wouldn’t answer. Whenever a political leader shuts down any scrutiny at all, as Poilievre did, journalists should refuse to show up.

And if Twitter and the front page are documenting all the questions politicians are afraid to answer, readers might demand change. They might demand real answers. 

These, to me, would be better journalistic tactics than rudeness.  

She was at the top of her game. The most recognized broadcaster in the country after 11 years at the helm, chosen as Canada’s best news anchor multiple times, doing her job each night proudly wearing her Order of Canada pin on her lapel. Yet she was told that CTV was going to take the news in a “new direction” and she didn’t fit.

By some harebrained management directive, she was told to pretend nothing was amiss until they could work out the details of her departure, identify her successor and pick a date to take her off the air. Night after night since late June, LaFlamme calmly and compassionately brought Canadians news of the war in Ukraine and the historic visit of atonement of Pope Francis without letting on to viewers—or her own staff—that it was all coming to an end.

That’s class.

That’s professionalism.

As for CTV management, from Bell Media president Wade Oosterman on down, it’s a pubic relations disaster, one of the worst corporate blunders in the history of Canadian television. Viewers are outraged, and petitions calling for her reinstatement have been signed by hundreds of thousands of people. Morale in the CTV newsroom has cratered. Management has clammed up, opening the door to wild speculation that LaFlamme’s departure had something to do with her gray hair, or her age, or the fact that she’s a woman, or that she clashed with higher-ups about the news budget.

They even got scooped on their own news story.

Last Monday, LaFlamme took to Twitter from her cottage to announce “I have news.” She said she’d been fired on June 29 and felt totally “blindsided” and “shocked and saddened” by Bell Media’s decision to terminate her contract two years early.

More or less caught with its pants down, CTV issued a tepid press release confirming her departure, attributing it to “changing audience patterns” and a “business decision,” and naming a chosen successor, who inconveniently happened to be out of the country on vacation. Lost in the fog was the fact that she was being replaced by Omar Sachedina, a veteran and respected journalist who happens to be Muslim

It got worse. Forced to respond to speculation that LaFlamme was a victim of sexism or ageism, Bell Media complained it was the victim of “false narratives” in media coverage, expressed “regret” for the way LaFlamme’s departure was handled, and announced it would conduct “an independent third-party internal review” of newsroom culture.

On Thursday, Bell Media executives tried to regain control of a furious newsroom by holding a town hall meeting with staff that raised more questions than it answered.

Michael Melling, the company’s head of news, and Karine Moses, senior vice-president of content development and news, admitted that LaFlamme’s exit had damaged the CTV brand.

“I know the team is hurting right now … I am sorry for anyone who has been dragged into this,” said Melling, the relatively new executive who apparently pushed for LaFlamme’s exit.

Moses, who is Melling's boss, said the company decided to “move on” from LaFlamme to pursue its “vision” based on factors including audience trends.

But neither executive was able to explain what the new vision is or what it is based on, and Moses went to lengths to avoid even saying LaFlamme was fired. LaFlamme’s former executive producer, Rosa Hwang, pressed the two executives to clarify whether the decision to end the anchor’s contract had to do with age or gender, asking: “What factors made you think she wouldn’t align with the vision?”

“Was it her age?”

Moses replied: “No. Seriously, I’m a woman. ... I’ve been here 25 years. And do you really think I would fire a woman because she’s a woman?”

“So she was fired then?” Hwang asked.

“That’s not what I’m saying, but you know what I mean,” Moses said. The Toronto Star reported that a moderator cut off Hwang’s line of questioning to move to another topic and the meeting ended in half an hour with many other journalists lined up to speak.

The public silence and lack of accountability of Bell Media executives has made a bad situation worse. To say there are too many “false narratives” and then refuse to speak to media about them is hypocritical.

To say in a press release that LaFlamme is “leaving her job” instead of being fired is dishonest.

To toss the problem to “an independent third-party internal review” is nonsensical. What does that even mean? That it will be conducted by someone independent? From outside the company? Or someone currently employed at Bell Media? If so, how are they independent?

The issue should be the incompetence of the people who chose to fire LaFlamme, and how they mishandled that. CTV’s national newscast audience dwarfs that of rivals Global and CBC. Its public face was an outstanding journalist of 35 years standing who exuded credibility and humanity. Why meddle with success? She’s only 58, far younger than the legend she replaced, Lloyd Robertson, far younger than the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge was when he stepped down. Both of them were given graceful exits with a proper on-air celebration of their achievements.

Lisa LaFlamme was frog-marched out of her chair without a proper chance to even say goodbye.

Her class, professionalism and news sense will be missed—certainly by all her viewers and, I suspect, by anyone who thinks some new “vision” can replace a seasoned journalist just telling the news as it is.

One of the articles, by Mark Stein, claimed that Muslims in the West were poised to take over entire societies and “the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.” Without documenting his claims, Steyn wrote that enough Muslims are terrorists to make the religion a global threat, and they will subject us all to rigid Muslim laws when the takeover is achieved.

Critics took the magazine to the Ontario, B.C. and federal Human Rights Commissions after the magazine refused a request for a more balanced article about Islam. The legacy media, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, leapt to the defence of the magazine. Freedom of expression and the press must be defended at all costs, they said.

I said they were wrong. The issue wasn’t freedom of expression or the press at all. The issue was inaccurate stereotyping based on race and religion. In other words, bad journalism. 

But that’s me: The fly in the ointment. The  gadfly who stands up for responsible reporting, calls out its sloppier failures and takes pleasure in puncturing the pinata of self-righteousness that is driving legacy media to its grave.

In the 15 years since then, my blog has called out plagiarists, unpacked management decisions that deviate from commonly accepted journalistic norms, shone the light on irresponsible reporting on race and gender, identified white privilege and systemic racism in news organizations and schools of journalism, and drawn attention to many other blind spots in journalism.

I have relied heavily on my 55 years of experience as a front-line newsroom manager, chair of a journalism school, academic researcher and expert witness in libel cases. My book Yesterday’s News, published in 1998, warned of the public’s growing lack of trust in Canadian newspapers and what journalists needed to do about it. I have watched with sadness ever since as those lessons have gone unaddressed.

Being a media critic is a lonely job. Old colleagues, of course, resent being called out for their journalistic shortcomings, and I have lost many friends in journalism that I wish I still had. More than a few news organizations refused to publish my critiques of their performance. So I turned to the blog as the best way to make the pubic aware that journalism, a noble craft, is not perfect.

Therefore, it’s gratifying to see The Journalism Doctor listed as No. 9 on a list of the 25 best blogs on journalism in Canada. My blog posts are also published by Rabble, which ranked No. 2 on the list.

Keepers of the list say sites are ranked by “traffic, social media followers, domain authority and freshness.” I am not sure how my site came to their attention but Feedspot, the organizing agency, said its team of 50 experts has curated over 250,000 popular blogs and categorized them in more than 5,000 niche categories and industries. With millions of blogs on the web, they say their aim is to find influential, authoritative and trustworthy bloggers that the public can rely on.

So perhaps I should reiterate exactly what I do and why.

The only purpose of my blog is to educate the public about the important role played by journalism in our democratic society, a reality that has been worn down by Trump-like attacks on “fake news” and opinion-disguised-as-news dispensed by outlets like Fox News and Rebel Media. Contributors to those sites are merely polemicists posing as journalists.

In the course of establishing my blog and the time I spent teaching students how to take their first steps as journalists, I’ve realized how little the general public really knows about the profession I have spent my life working at. The blame for that rests with most news organizations, which cynically claim they act in the public interest but hardly ever explain themselves to us.

Good journalists do not, as critics on the right claim, make things up. The news is usually based on meticulous and time-consuming research on all sides of an issue, reporters operating much as scientists do, seeking evidence to prove or disprove an hypothesis.

When journalism falls short, it is usually a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. A key source who could not be found or who refused to be interviewed, for example. A cultural or attitudinal blind spot that makes the reporter overlook context. Or facts not verified in the rush to deadline.

Good journalism is fearless. It races to the scene of the action, presses for credible answers, holds those in authority to account, tells human stories of achievement and grief. But the conditions for its success are vulnerable, to economic pressures that have stripped newsrooms of resources and deprived too many small communities of a home-town newspaper to put their stories before the world.

The shortcomings of journalism are taken up by aggrieved readers and viewers, editors and publishers, press councils and courts of law. I am there to do my part, since I believe good journalism encourages democracy, while bad journalism leads us astray.

One of my favourite tributes to journalism was delivered by Henry Grunwald, the legendary chief editor of Time magazine. The recent tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where reporters questioned the original version of how police responded to a school shooting, brought it back to mind. “Journalism can never be silent. That is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.”

May we always have a healthy news media. And may we always learn from its mistakes.

Serbian woman in her 20s leaves the chaos of Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, completes a masters degree in organizational change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, slides into media sales with an alternative entertainment weekly in Toronto, then climbs the corporate ladder to head a national dating site and a major charity.

Then came the golden slipper.

When her appointment as head of Canada’s most left-leaning daily newspaper was announced, she said, very modestly: “When I started my career in Canada at NOW weekly, it seemed a distant dream to be one day be named CEO of the Toronto Star."

But even before she starts her new job on June 1, questions are being raised about her qualifications and judgment. It seems she has the bad habit of using Twitter like a personal megaphone, spreading controversial opinions about Canadian democracy, COVID precautions and tying her wagon to the coat-tails of right-wing politicians.

Glogovac’s dream has turned into a bit of a nightmare—and now the Toronto Star’s new owners are faced with a difficult choice. They have pledged to uphold the very liberal Atkinson Principles, which for more than 100 years have guided the paper’s crusade to uphold democracy, promote social justice and offer readers verifiable facts and fearless journalism. But what to do about a leader they hand-picked who thinks COVID is a hoax, that vaccine mandates are useless, that the federal government is acting like communists and who praised the so-called Freedom Convoy that openly vowed to overthrow it?

As one Twitter user wrote this week, “This is where we pretend the Star isn’t starting its inevitable slide to the right after being bought by two conservative donors. 

Furthermore, the paper and its new leader are being accused of a cover-up. Canadaland discovered that several of Glogovac’s more controversial tweets from 2021were erased. One said: “Vaccinated + had Covid, but, I will not step into any establishment that requires passports, on principle. Did the living in a Communist country thing, thank you. … It’s not about safety.”

Also erased were two tweets she wrote responding to anti-vax messages from Roman Baber, MPP for York Centre who was booted from the Conservative caucus by Premier Doug Ford for drafting a letter arguing against his government’s Covid-19 health measures. In one, Glogovac wrote: “It matters what Pfizer executives think and want—we are witnessing a policy and government captured by a massive corrupt drone corporation.” 

Well, well, I say good luck attracting advertising to the Star from one of the world’s largest drug companies. 

Needless to say, the angry reaction on Twitter hit the red zone.

One said, “The progressive agenda includes embracing science, Marina. Your views are radically wrong.” Several others said they were cancelling their Star subscriptions. One person tweeted: “When the new CEO of one of the largest media outlets in Canada is scrubbing her social media accounts, it doesn’t bode well for openness and transparency in the media outlet.”

Glogovac took to Twitter to clarify her views, but stopped well short of an apology. She wrote: “Again, sorry if my personal views offended anyone. I observe all official public health rules. As for the Star—been a reader and admirer for decades, as someone committed to the progressive agenda and with a track record of fiercely defending editorial independence and freedom.”

Whether CEOs should be disciplined or fired for their personal views is a good discussion point. Noted employment lawyer Howard Levitt says the law is clear. “Outside of the unionized context and federally regulated industries, Canadian employers are free to terminate employees for any non-human rights code reasons so long as it provides adequate notice or dismissal damages. This includes … a questionable social media presence.”

As an example, he cited the police officers who contributed money to support the trucker convoy that shut down Ottawa for weeks to protest vaccine mandates. “If your job is to uphold the law, breaching it is antithetical to your position. And, for that matter, any employee who acts in a manner to damage the corporate ‘brand’ or image of their employer faces dismissal, potentially for cause.”

In a column written for Postmedia newspapers. Levitt wrote: “I anticipate many more cases of employees being fired for acting inconsistently with their jobs or in a manner damaging their employer’s image. Notably, the more senior the executive, the more associated they are with the employer and the more rectitude expected. …And for financial executives and CEOs, it will be easier yet.”

As for Glogovac, the Star clearly has a decision to make. Stand up for her right to express personal views and carry on, or decide that her personal views are anathema to the paper’s brand and rescind her appointment. Beyond that, the Star’s new owners, Jordan Bitove and Paul Rivett, should re-examine the way they screen senior hires. Did they engage a professional search firm to find Glogovac, or did they hire her because they knew her? A professional search firm would have surely vetted Twitter and other social media for a candidate’s embarrassing personal views.  Either that was not done, or else they decided to hire Glogovac knowing she had expressed views that many Star readers surely would object to. If that’s the way it went down, it seems to be careless and ill-advised.

There’s evidence, however, that Bitove and Rivett hired her because they already knew her – or thought they did. That seems to be a more serious matter that perhaps the directors of the Toronto Star should look into. Glogovac holds positions on several corporate boards of directors. One of them is VerticalScope Inc., a firm acquired when Rivett and Bitove’s NordStar bought Torstar, the Star newspaper’s parent company. The chair of VerticleScope’s board happens to be Paul Rivett. Still listed as one of his directors is … Marina Glogovac. VerticalScope, by the way,  recently went public, making NordStar’s stake worth about $180 million—or enough to pay for the company’s original investment in the Star three times over. 

Lots of inside baseball and people tripping over their corporate connections to go around here, I say. Wink Wink.

Or as Cheri DoNovo, a minister and respected former MPP, tweeted this week amid the outcry over Glogovac’s views: “This is why most folk I know don’t get their real news from mainstream media anymore. Time for another voice at the Toronto Star to speak up?”

Let’s hope so.

On the evening of January 24, 2018, four months before an Ontario provincial election, Patrick Brown’s world came crashing down.

Canada’s largest television network, CTV, was about to publish a story quoting two anonymous women as saying that the man who was now leader of the Progressive Conservative party of Ontario had plied them with alcohol and preyed on them sexually—one of them when she was an underage high school student. The allegations dated back 10 years to when Brown was a federal member of Parliament.

Instead of responding to a late call by CTV to give his side of the story, Brown summoned reporters to an impromptu press conference at which he denied the allegations, attacked the reporting and vowed to stay on as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party. Polls, after all, were saying the party had a good chance of winning the election and making him premier.

The move backfired. Within a few hours, four senior advisers quit his office and Brown was forced out as leader by his fellow caucus members and told he wasn’t welcome to run as even a PC candidate in the June election. Doug Ford, who replaced him as leader, became premier instead.

After licking his wounds, Brown responded by suing CTV for defamation, seeking $8 million for damage to his reputation. This week, more than four years later, the two sides reached a settlement, but it is a curious one that raises more questions than it answers.

The network announced that it “regrets” what it called “errors” in its reporting. “Key details provided to CTV … were factually incorrect and required correction,” it said. There was no further explanation. We have no idea what the errors were. There has been no correction either. All that happened was that the online versions of CTV’s original stories have now been tagged with a general statement of regret—not a correction—over those unspecified errors (plural). The main allegations of the two women still remain in every detail for anyone to read.

So what does CTV regret? “Any harm this may have caused to Mr. Brown,” CTV’s terse statement said. It’s a rather large understatement. Because of that story, Brown lost the chance to lead his party to an election win and become premier of Ontario. As concern over sexual harassment rose with the “Me Too” movement, he became one of the more prominent alleged perpetrators. He later won election as mayor of Brampton but he clearly is looking for a much bigger stage.

It's assumed that one of CTV’s “errors” was something its reporters found out and reported three weeks after the original story. One of Brown’s accusers admitted she was older than she first claimed, not a high school student and 19 instead of 18. However, she and CTV stood by the rest of her story—that Brown, who doesn’t drink, plied her with alcohol and offered her a tour of his home. According to her statements to CTV, Brown closed the door to his bedroom and dropped his pants and asked her to perform oral sex.

But if CTV found this out nearly four years ago, why is it only now expressing regret? 

The second alleged victim, a one-time employee of Brown’s, told CTV that she was very drunk on the night in 2013 when she, Brown, who was then 35, and a friend went to Brown’s bedroom to look at pictures of his trip to Asia during an after-party for a charity event. She alleged the friend then left and that shortly thereafter Brown forced himself onto her.

You can still read her description of it on CTV’s website: “I could feel his erection on my legs when he was on top of me so I felt that it would have gone to sexual intercourse if I had not done anything,” she said. “I would characterize that as sexual assault.”

So what was the point of CTV and Brown settling this lawsuit, beyond avoiding a very expensive and very public libel trial that may have exposed weaknesses in both their cases? Both sides are keeping quiet about whether any money changed hands and I’m guessing not. Most likely, Brown felt he got enough to claim that the settlement exonerates him, even though we’re not clear about what facts CTV got wrong. Brown looks like he has designs on running for leadership of the federal Tories and doesn’t want to be encumbered with a messy court case.

CTV, on the other hand, gets to keep its stories in the public eye, full of the original details even though some of the stories carry the note of regret for errors. We are left to guess what those errors are, and CTV’s version of what it claims is a correction leaves me despairing for the erosion of journalistic standards of transparency and accountability. 

I am often asked to give expert witness testimony in libel cases. Judges often want to learn what practices journalists follow to be “diligent” in their reporting of controversial stories that run the risk of damaging reputations. Unlike others who do such work in Canada, I am open to testifying at the request of either media outlets or plaintiffs because my interest is in defending good journalism and exposing the bad. I was not consulted in this case so I can comment independently.

 From what I know of CTV’s reporting, it rightly felt that reporting the allegations of the two women was a matter of public interest—the leader of a political party has been accused of sexual assault on the eve of an election. Whether it was “diligent” in pursuing that story is another matter, and would have been the key issue argued at trial. How carefully did they verify the women’s stories? Did they give Brown, the person they accused, a fair chance to give his side of the story? In other words, did they try to interview him once at the last minute, on the eve of publication, or did they make repeated attempts? When he did not get back to them, did they consider holding off on publication until they managed to reach him? When he called a press conference instead, did their story fairly represent his side? Did the CTV reporters have any conflicts of interest? Did their follow-up reporting cast doubt on any facts and how did CTV respond?

I’m sorry there was a settlement out of court. I’m sorry CTV’s reporting methods were not put under a microscope, because its allegations about Patrick Brown were serious and should have been pursued with the highest degree of diligence. I’m sorry we don’t know if Brown’s accusers are telling the truth or, if they are not, what their motive might be.

Too many things are swept under the rug for the sake of expediency these days.

That surprised me, especially since my survey was endorsed by what was then the Canadian Association of Newspaper Editors, whose mission was to uphold journalistic standards like accountability, and to fight for press freedom. That organization never carried out what I recommended—an annual survey of newsrooms to measure racial diversity.

My survey of 2,119 journalists working at 37 papers showed that the typical Canadian newspaper in 2004 was staffed by journalists who were almost as white as the paper they were printed on. And no one appeared to be concerned about that.

Until this week, I was the last researcher to provide a picture of how diverse (or non-diverse) the people who write and produce the news for Canadians actually are. In 2004, non-whites made up only 3.4 percent of newspaper staffs—far short of the 16.7 percent of the populations they served. Besides being more than six times under-represented industry-wide, minorities were entirely absent from 22 of the 37 newsrooms. Fifty-nine percent of newspapers, in other words, employed only white journalists. These numbers were worse than a similar survey I did in 1994, and hiring editors admitted their commitment to diverse newsrooms had dropped in those 10 years.

So imagine how gratified I was to learn that, 17 years later, another newsroom diversity survey was in the works and that it would be repeated every year. This was mounted not by an industry association but by the Canadian Association of Journalists, a volunteer organization of individual journalists. To its credit, NewsMedia Canada—representing print, broadcast and online news organizations—endorsed the CAJ survey.

Guess what? Little seems to have changed.

Nothing should take away from the fact that the CAJ has performed a valuable and selfless public service, giving Canadians free access to the demographics of the people who cover us in our communities. You can check it out here.

Sadly, it’s not a very representative picture since a majority of newsrooms—including the most popular broadcaster and most of the largest newspapers—either refused to participate or turned in statistics that the CAJ deemed unreliable or could not categorize. Amazingly, CBC News and the Postmedia newspaper empire said they did not know the racial identities of 965 journalists in their employ. They were simply listed as “Unknown.”

What the CAJ did measure were 3,873 news people at 209 media outlets, making it the largest-ever survey of the demographics of television and radio broadcasters, online news operations, and daily and community newspapers.

“The data we’ve currently collected does make certain things clear,” the CAJ survey says. “For one, the typical Canadian newsroom is not representative of the Canadian population.”  Among the findings:

• Almost half of the newsrooms surveyed employ only white journalists.
• Industry-wide, of the journalists whose race data is known, 74.9 per cent identify as white compared to 18.6 per cent who identify as a visible minority, and 6.4 per cent who identify as Indigenous. While on the surface this compares favourably to the latest population data, most of the diversity is concentrated in a few larger newsrooms, and 400 newsrooms did not fill out the survey at all.

• Newsroom managers tend to overestimate the diversity of their newsrooms. Seventy per cent of respondents indicated that their newsroom is somewhat or very representative of its audience. In fact, when compared to the latest census, less than a third actually were.

• Some newsrooms are wildly at odds with the diversity in their communities. Managers at Metroland’s community newspapers (serving the Greater Toronto Area) reported that 93.3 percent of its journalists are white. But only 48.3 per cent of Torontonians identify as such.
• Ninety percent of newsrooms across Canada have no Latin, Middle Eastern or Mixed Race journalists on staff. Eight in 10 newsrooms have no Black or Indigenous journalists.
• A large majority of the 638 news outlets surveyed either refused to participate or were unable to provide information that fit. Only 147 of those questionnaires were returned, representing 209 newsrooms. Fifteen others refused to participate, and 379 simply did not reply.
• On the hopeful side, women outnumbered men overall in the newsrooms—the first time that has been recorded in Canada (52.7 per cent women compared to 46.7 per cent men and 0.7 per cent who identify as non-binary).
• According to the CAJ, many newsrooms said this was the first time they had surveyed their staffs about racial identities. That is ironic, since many news outlets have done stories pointing out diversity gaps in businesses and governments they cover.

Clearly, Canadian newsrooms are very far from “getting it” about representing the diversity of their local populations. Let’s hope they step up their game in next year’s CAJ survey and honour the journalistic core value of accountability. “The truth is,” the CAJ’s report said, “Canada is late in collecting data on race and gender in our newsrooms—data which has been collected in the United States since 1978.”

It's also significant—and shameful—that some of the largest news organizations did not participate in the survey. CTV, Canada’s most popular television network, refused—not giving a reason—and Postmedia, despite being asked to provide data for each of the 120 newspapers it owns, decided instead to give company-wide figures, meaning readers were left in the dark about how reflective journalists are of the populations of some of the most diverse cities in the country. No data was available for papers like the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen or Toronto Sun. 

Without more co-operation from newsrooms, the CAJ said it is in no position to answer questions like “Are Canadian newsrooms becoming more or less representative of the populations they serve? Are some newsrooms improving? Are others regressing?”

These are questions that we should be addressing now. Who’s being left out of the Canadian conversation? Does it matter that Indigenous and non-white journalists are not present to offer their perspective on important stories involving race and the increasing multiculturalism of Canada.

We also need to ask why some news organizations do not think it’s in their interest to have newsrooms that look and sound like the communities they serve. The CAJ pulls no punches in identifying which ones. In Metroland’s Peel Division, which serves cities like Brampton, white journalists outnumber whites in the population by 72 percent to 38, while Asians are underrepresented by 9 percent to 44.6.

Other news outlets keep unreliable statistics on who they employ. Example: The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, serves a region where people identify as a rainbow of different racial identities. White people years ago became a minority in the GTA. The paper has undertaken several diversity initiatives over the years, yet it still does not collect accurate numbers to show how many journalists it employs who belong to those groups. It only collects ranges—and responded to the CAJ survey by saying that it estimates its newsroom has only between one and four journalists who are either Middle Eastern, Black or Latin. 

We also need to ask why Indigenous and visible minority journalists only find work in a handful of newsrooms. For example, 40 per cent of all Middle Eastern journalists, 47.3 per cent of all Black journalists and 50 per cent of all Latin journalists surveyed work at the CBC. Eighty-four per cent of newsrooms employ no Indigenous journalists.

For those looking to make the media industry more diverse, there is at least one reason for optimism. Newsrooms with more diverse leadership tend to have more diverse workforces. At the present time, however, more than 80 percent of supervisory roles are held by white journalists.

In the conclusion of Who’s Telling the News, my 2004 survey of newspaper newsrooms, I wrote: “Most troubling is the lower commitment editors in all papers seem to have to hiring diversity now, as compared to 10 years before. As newspaper circulation declines, as newspaper staffs fall further out of touch with the demographics of the population, and as news about immigration, religion, anti-terrorism issues, and racial profiling proliferate, one would expect editors to put a higher premium than ever before on making their news gatherers more diverse. But the opposite attitude is reflected in this survey, and we do not know why.”

I’m afraid we still don’t.

(Disclosure: I am credited in the CAJ survey report as contributing advice on methodology.)

Here’s the scoop: Hardly anyone who reads journalism believes that anymore.

It all boils down to who do you trust.

Trust is the currency that sustains most journalistic endeavours. Trust between reporters and their sources. Trust between reporters and their editors. Trust between readers and their chosen media. Trust that the facts have been verified and presented in context. Trust that reporters have no hidden agendas but operate in the public interest. Trust that all sides will be covered fairly.

If trust is lost, the public turns off or turns elsewhere, and that is happening to an alarming degree around the world, including in this country. The latest Ipsos poll of the public’s trust in professions shows only 26 percent of Canadians trust journalists.

Now a major public opinion study in the United States has measured how little support journalism’s core values have among the people who still care.  It’s not a pretty picture. Perhaps that’s why you haven’t seen a story about it in your daily newspaper.

The study was done as part of the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It found that only 11 percent of Americans fully support all five of the journalism values tested.

Those values are the same ones I tried to follow during my 55-year career in journalism. They are values still taught in journalism schools.

1. Oversight. Be a watchdog. Hold people in power to account. Make them keep promises. Make sure politicians and business people operate in the public interest, not for personal gain.
2. Transparency. Lift the veil on secrecy. Make sure the public’s business is done in pubic, not behind closed doors. Society works better if the public knows what is happening that affects our lives.
3. Factualism. Verify information. The more facts people have, the closer they will get to the truth. Keep things in context.
4. Give voice to the less powerful. Amplify the voices of people who are affected by events or are not often heard. Cover inequality. Pay attention to who and what are left out.
5. Social criticism. Cast a spotlight on a community’s problems in order to solve them. Don’t just focus on what is working or what people are saying and doing.

Only one of those values had the support of a majority of Americans: factualism, the idea that more facts get us closer to the truth. Sixty-seven percent of adults supported that.

You would think the findings would spur a widespread re-evaluation of the methods of journalism in newsrooms and journalism schools, especially basic notions of what kinds of stories are important to cover, and the way they are presented. But that has not happened in the six months since the study was released. The report of the Media Insight Project concludes, rather alarmingly: “When journalists say they are just doing their jobs, the problem is many people harbor doubts about what the job should be.”

This loss of trust has been identified by many media critics over the years, and some of the reasons for it were highlighted in a critical book I wrote about Canadian newspapers in 1998, when they were beginning to see sharp declines in readership and advertising. Yesterday’s News (Fernwood) put the blame squarely on journalists who I said had fallen out of touch with the needs of society and, in some cases, were contributing to society’s problems by focusing so much on what’s wrong. In fact, the U.S. study of trust found only 29 percent of Americans support that kind of journalism today. The study’s authors suggested journalists should experiment with different story frames focusing on solutions instead of problems and broadening their moral appeal.

I do not know any Canadian news organization that is doing that or, for that matter, is even aware of this U.S. research. It’s as if journalists and journalism leaders here have a death wish.

Luckily, more is happening in the United States and Europe.

No one argues that the core values of journalism should be abandoned. It’s just that news organizations need to be more transparent with readers and viewers, and explain and show what those standards really mean.

Readers do not believe journalists when they say they are detached and objective and operate in the public interest. When you think about it, few people can pretend to be, particularly those who work for institutions like newspapers and television stations that are either heavily regulated by government or who benefit from substantial subsidies—in the case of newspapers, subsidies that journalism’s leaders have actively lobbied the federal government for because their paying customers have evaporated.

Jay Rosen, a prominent U.S. news consultant and critic, suggests journalists adopt a different approach, one he calls “showing your story.”

Instead of pretending you are neutral, “disclose what you think. Not everything you think but the part that readers, viewers and listeners should know about when they decide whether to trust your account of things.”

Rosen is the author of What Are Journalists For and professor of journalism at New York State University. He says, “Instead of ‘We have no agenda other than bringing you the news as fairly and accurately as possible’ … you disclose your intent: To spur reform using the moral force of investigative journalism.

“Yes, it’s having an agenda but it’s an agenda that’s true to the principles of good journalism.”

In some cases “showing your story” might mean reporters abandon the third-person voice in their stories and tell them personally. Here’s how I covered this story and why and here’s how I reached the conclusions I did. It may mean linking the reader to documents you discovered and relied on, and verbatim interviews with key sources. It may mean suggesting solutions and keeping a story going until results are obtained.

Example: In the mid-1990s I approached the Toronto Star with an idea to engage my journalism students with reporters for a major investigative project. I was interested in unlocking the potential of the internet to tell stories more comprehensively. What would journalism look like if it was tailored first to the internet and only later adapted to print, instead of the other way around, which was the way things were done back then? The project was a good one—a deep dive into the secretive way doctors are disciplined for wrongdoing in Ontario. The chief reporter was the amazing Rob Cribb, then the Star’s principal investigative journalist who has gone on to found the innovative Investigative Journalism Bureau at U of T’s Dalla Lama School of Public Health. I got money from my dean at Ryerson to pay a handpicked team of students to do the dog work of research, scouring files at the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, searching court records of doctors who had been charged, and tracking what happened to them.

But Cribb’s editors at the Star wimped out. The story ran tailored exclusively for print one Saturday and Sunday, summing up months of research in one chunk, documenting egregious cases of doctors literally getting away with murder or serious misdemeanors and getting off with the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Either that or they simply moved to another province undetected. I estimated the project uncovered more than a dozen cases worthy of public concern and I pleaded with a senior editor to keep telling them until some action was taken. But I was dismissed as an out-of-touch critic and journalism school administrator. The Star moved on to other stories.

Imagine what impact the story would have had if all the data assembled by Cribb and my students had been available online—a list of doctors so people could check if their doctor had been disciplined and for what; an explanation of the extensive research that went into the story and the roadblocks encountered that prevented public access to important information; a list of “must-do’s” to fix the system; transcribed interviews with key sources so readers could make up their own minds.

The good news is that journalists in Europe have actively begun to explore what the lack of trust has cost journalism and what it might do differently. One example is the innovative Constructive Institute, launched in 2017 in Aarhus, Denmark, by Ulrik Haagerup, a former senior executive at Danish newspapers and broadcast outlets. Its goal is to transform journalism. It believes journalism took a wrong turn to negativity and sensationalism. It believes journalism is part of the problem in the lack of trust in democratic institutions. It believes journalism should learn to focus on solutions. It believes journalism is more than telling the who, what, when, where, why and how of things—it should ask “what’s next?”

The institute is well funded, it has reached out to a broad network of journalism’s leaders, it has led experiments in constructive journalism in newsrooms and it has taken in interns to experiment with new and more hopeful forms of journalism. So far at least, no Canadian media outlet or journalist has made contact.

Haagerup believes journalism has produced a world in which people believe crime is going up when it’s actually going down, where the fear of terrorism is rising but the actual risk of it is low, where people have lost trust in institutions and so elect leaders with simple answers and ones who stoke fear.

Does that sound familiar?

Says Haagerup: “We don’t believe in the in churches , we don’t believe in banks, in insurance companies, in politicians and all of it for many good reasons. But if people do not believe in journalism then who should they lean on? We need to re-establish journalism as an authority in democracy.”

Good luck to him, I say. And perhaps some day soon one of the leaders of Canadian journalism will pay attention.

The most influential question of the federal election campaign was hardly noticed in the rest of Canada, but it certainly was in Quebec.

The question, asked by moderator Shachi Kurl at last Thursday’s English language election debate, was tough but fair. It reflected concerns of some racialized groups and others over controversial legislation passed by the Quebec National Assembly to reassert the rights of French culture and language in the province.

The exchange between her and Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet quickly inspired outrage across Quebec. Premier François Legault demanded an apology from the media consortium that organized the debate. A cartoon was published showing a crude caricature of Kurl tarring Francophone Quebecers as racists (the only non-racists are Anglophones, the cartoon suggests). And the National Assembly, in a rare moment of accord, unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the “hostile trial launched against the Quebec nation during the anglophone televised debate of Sept. 9, 2021.”

The question, in my opinion, focused on a legitimate election issue and was fairly expressed. But the heated reaction arguably made it one of the hottest of hot button issues in the province in the run-up to next Monday’s federal vote. Perhaps that’s why Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau leapt to the defence of Quebec immediately after the debate. Trudeau called Kurl’s question “offensive,” O’Toole called it “unfair,” and both leaders issued statements asserting that Quebecers are not racist.

Kurl, a former award-winning journalist who is president of the Angus Reid Institute, touched off the storm by asking Blanchet: “You denied that Quebec has problems with racism yet you defend legislation such as Bills 96 and 21 which marginalize religious minorities, anglophones and allophones. Quebec is recognized as a distinct society but for those outside the province, please help them understand why your party also supports these discriminatory laws.”

"The question seems to imply the answer you want," Blanchet replied. "Those laws are not about discrimination. They are about the values of Quebec."

Kurl asked Blanchet more than once why he supports what she called "discriminatory laws."

"You may repeat as many times as you like that those are discriminatory laws," Blanchet said. "We are saying that those are legitimate laws that apply on Quebec territory and there seems to be people around here which share this point of view."

Both pieces of legislation certainly are controversial and have not been debated openly by federal party leaders until now. Quebec’s Bill 21 bans some civil servants, including teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols at work. This has been most controversial among Sikh and Muslim Quebecers, who face expulsion from government work if they wear turbans or hijabs.

Bill 96 significantly toughens Quebec’s French-language laws, and includes strict provisions to enforce the speaking of French in the private sector.

Quebec’s highest court ruled earlier this year that Bill 21 violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but any legal challenge on those grounds has been blocked by Quebec’s invocation of the notwithstanding clause.

Amazingly, Kurl’s question immediately had an effect on the federal election campaign in Quebec. Over the weekend, Polly’s projections for the Bloc Québécois seat count jumped from 22 to 38. After languishing behind the Liberals in Quebec for much of election campaign, the Bloc was suddenly leading the province’s popular vote and had an outside shot at becoming the third-largest party in the 44^th Parliament.

Kurl declined to answer questions I put to her by email, saying “I cannot say anything until after the election.” In her only interview after the debate, with BNN Bloomberg, she was questioned about issues in Quebec but not at all about her question.

It’s clear federal leaders who condemned Kurl for her question did so with an eye on their electoral chances in Quebec. Trudeau said: “As a Quebecer, I found that question really offensive. I think, yes, there is lots of work to do to continue to fight systemic racism across the country and in every part of this country. But I don't think that question was acceptable or appropriate ... I had a hard time processing [it] even last night."

He said he was taken aback by the question. While he said he opposes the Quebec legislation, “it is wrong to suggest that Quebecers are racist.”

Kurl’s question, however, did not do that.

Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole, meanwhile, said: "Quebecers are not racist and it's unfair to make that sweeping categorization. They've made decisions and laws passed by their national assembly," which he said he would respect.

Both NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Green party leader Annamie Paul stopped short of criticizing Kurl’s question and said it's a mistake to think systemic racism is isolated to one province or territory. Paul went so far as to agree with the premise of the question.

"With respect to Bill 21, I've always been clear in saying that I believe it to be discriminatory legislation,” Paul said. This is a law that is a violation of fundamental rights and freedom of expression, as well as freedom of religion, and it's not because I'm saying that I don't like Quebec."

Quebec Premier François Legault, who not so long ago declared that his province did not suffer from systemic discrimination, demanded an apology from the broadcast consortium that organized the debate, saying Kurl’s question was an "attack for sure against Quebec."

In a statement Friday evening, the Debate Broadcast Group said Kurl's question on the bills "was asked to give Mr. Blanchet an opportunity to explain his party's view of these bills, both of which have been widely reported on and discussed since they were introduced in the Quebec National Assembly.

"The question addressed these bills explicitly; it did not state that Quebecers are racist," said the group's spokesman, Leon Mar. 

That is my view exactly. The only offence anyone should reasonably take from Kurl’s question is that Blanchet, quite demonstrably, failed to answer the gist of it—why does his party support two laws that have been ruled discriminatory?

Disclosure: The writer, John Miller, serves on New Canadian Media’s advisory council with Shachi Kurl.