People who set a trap for Pierre Poilievre may find themselves falling into it..In Prince Edward Island days ago, the Conservative leader had a media event at a Petro Canada gas station advertising gas for $1.85/litre..With prices like that, we probably can’t call it advertising. Let’s just call it honesty. And it was a good backdrop for the kinds of economic, taxation and energy production issues he wants to champion..However, reporter Teresa Wright wanted to talk about other things. “A number of your own comments and actions have been characterized as dog-whistling," she said..To whom? The far right, allegedly..By whom? “Experts.”.Oh.."I'm sorry that your question seems to be based on a false premise,” Poilievre said. “You can't even tell me who these experts are. It sounds like it's just a CBC smear job.".It was a great answer to a left-leaning question, not unlike the one he offered to Global News’ David Akins, who alleged in his question that doing time did not solve crime. Poilievre pointed out how 40 offenders in BC amassed 6,000 negative police interactions in a single year..“Isn’t this a failure of the system to not support the people who have committed crimes, gone to jail, served their sentence and then they’re committing another crime. So is this not a failure of things like social services and support for people who have committed crimes?” replied the journalist..Poilievre asked, “Are you serious?...Why are they criminals? Because they do crime.”.“Are you honestly saying that it’s society’s fault if a repeat violent offender commits 60 or 70 offences?”.Maybe he was, or maybe he was playing devil’s advocate..Either way, Poilievre told the plain truth that incarceration does stop crime because prisoners can’t do any more of it while they’re locked up..Once again the 'experts' were on one side and Poilievre was on the other. Some criminology “experts” told similar things to parliament in 2018, prompting the Liberals light-on-crime Bill C-75. By now all 13 Canadian premiers urgently want the bail system reformed..The well-established leftist bent in academia has been trickling down to reporting for decades..Unfortunately, over the past ten years, it’s become more acceptable to leftists to cancel people and views that oppose them. Debate in the public square has given way to shouts of “heresy!”.People as diverse as Calgary’s mayor and city council to young rabbles of social justice warriors don’t want the woke religion challenged..This is partly why, at their worst, reporters resemble the Pharisees of old, trying to catch Jesus in a misstep. They don’t like his contrary beliefs and how he calls them out, so they are trying to catch him in something he might say..Many CBC and mainstream media reporters are more aligned with the Liberals than the Poilievre Conservatives, partly because of their worldview and partly for their personal interest. Shameless subsidies and tax breaks from the Trudeau government have seen to that..The CBC sees Poilievre as a literal billion-dollar threat to their media empire. Destroying his legitimacy is necessary for their survival–and guess what, they want to survive..When you lean left already, it’s not hard to convince yourself such coverage is the moral thing to do..Some people have already begun to notice. A Spark advocacy poll found 40% of people believe the network is 'propaganda,' a view more likely to be held by those who aren’t seniors..Last June, former CBC journalist Tara Henley told a MacDonald-Laurier forum the network had a big blind spot it could neither recognize nor rectify.. Henley, TaraTired of “clickbait” news, Tara Henley left the CBC to work south of the border. .“There's some merit to the criticism that CBC has a left-leaning bias. I think this dynamic, in my opinion, is both top down from leadership and bottom up from a workforce,” she said..“And my concern is if you have a workforce that generally comes from the same kind of background, urban, university-educated, secular and holds the same set of progressive political opinions, that newsrooms and other parts of the broadcaster can become echo chambers and can fail to be aware of, let alone reflect, the vast diversity of viewpoints across the country.”.Well, here we are..What’s important to Wright?.On Aug 13., she lamented on X (formerly Twitter), “We are experiencing ‘once in a 100-year’ + even 1,000 year events like floods, hurricanes & wildfires almost every season in our 🇨🇦. [...] People in large parts of the 🌍 are suffering from drought & famine due to the warming climate.”.An unusual number of the Canadian fires were set by people, but never mind that..Newsrooms can become echo chambers and they have — and far beyond the public broadcaster. According to Wright’s X profile, she is an alumni of Global News, the Canadian Press, and the PEI Guardian. And, as she pointed out in a one-sentence X post, she is “not a CBC journalist.”.Same, same, different only in name..When CBC reporter Kate McKenna complained on X that Poilievre was botching PEI’s French name, calling it “Île de Saint Édouard” instead of “Île-du-Prince-Édouard,” Wright was paying attention and thinking similarly..“I was also going to ask him about this, but I wasn’t having much luck with my attempts to ask Qs,” Wright said..The question, “Why should Francophone islanders vote for you when you can’t even say their name right?” was dying to be asked..Then again, Poilievre would have likely responded, “Because I will get rid of the carbon tax that is making everything more expensive and take the shackles off our energy industry to give them better jobs and more prosperity.”.These questions, both asked and unasked, both served the same purpose, to make Poilievre look bad..It’s a good thing he is ready for it. These days, Canadians have to see past the medium to get the message.
