Roundup: O’Toole’s Rebel problem

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Tongues were wagging over the Twitter Machine yesterday as the Rebel boasted that they had an “exclusive interview” with Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, in which they discussed why the China People’s Daily was a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, while the Rebel and other similar outlets were not. Of course, even that premise was false, as the People’s Daily is not a member of the Gallery. Oops. It quickly surfaced that O’Toole didn’t actually give an interview – questions were emailed to his communications team, who responded with answers that could be attributed to O’Toole, but it wasn’t an interview per se.

Nevertheless, there are troubling questions to be raised, such as why they thought to respond to the Rebel in the first place – though afterward they said that they wouldn’t in the future. But that aside, something that O’Toole stated in the piece is also deeply problematic, because he is rooting for the so-called “Independent Press Gallery,” which is a start-up organization founded by True North Initiative’s Candice Malcolm, which is essentially Rebel Lite™, and said organization includes True North and the Rebel. So O’Toole is cheering for the Rebel to get accreditation (which, it needs to be made clear, party leaders have no say over. Accreditation is about access to the building for the purposes of reporting, and while the Press Gallery is self-governing, it goes through the Speaker and Sergeant-at-Arms to gain that accreditation).

What this stance O’Toole is making demonstrates is what I talked about in my weekend column – that his party is still happy to turn a blind eye to racists and white supremacists when they think they can use them to score goals against Trudeau. It also brings to mind Andrew Scheer’s farewell speech as leader, when he told party followers to trust outlets like True North and the Post Millennial for their news rather than mainstream sources, which is alarming because of the fact that much of their “reporting” is not actually that, and has been a driver of misinformation. Also of note is that the Post Millennial is in part controlled by the professional shitposters on O’Toole’s payroll – so that gives you an idea about what they are actually looking to promote and gain accreditation for. That O’Toole says they won’t respond to Rebel inquiries in the future is not comforting, because this demonstrates that they still considered this an audience worth engaging with until they got caught.

Good reads:

  • There will apparently be a Cabinet shuffle this morning, as Navdeep Bains apparently plans not to run again, and will step down as a minister.
  • Post-shuffle, Trudeau his holding a virtual Cabinet retreat later in the day.
  • Trudeau announced that the Canada will contribute $55 million to a UN initiative to curb land degradation and protect ecosystems.
  • The federal government awarded Deloitte with at $16 million contract to build a new IT system to manage the vaccine rollout.
  • The government says they will soon introduce a legislative change to fix the loophole around quarantine benefits for those who travelled abroad for recreation.
  • CRA will issue T4A slips to those who received pandemic benefits, given that they are taxable.
  • Here’s a deeper look into some of the issues facing the federal government’s UNDRIP legislation, and the objections from provinces and some Indigenous groups.
  • There are questions as to why some of the suggestions that federal bureaucrats came up with to help in the early days of the pandemic were not acted upon.
  • At a time where there are questions about how the government can help media survival, they gave increasing ad dollars to Google and Facebook.
  • The Speaker of the Alberta legislature slammed Kenney’s government – his own party – for their hypocrisy over the holiday travel scandal.
  • Adnan Khan offers a dose of perspective around last week’s Capitol Hill invasion.
  • Colby Cosh examines the history of recall legislation in Alberta, and the current government’s plans to introduce a weaksauce version of it (which is still bad).

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: O’Toole’s Rebel problem”

  1. M$M is creating their own irrelevance by myopically focusing on trivial minutiae and manufactured nontroversies about the governing party instead of doing a deep dive into who these “professional s**tposters” are. The bare minimum closest to a modicum of a flash of self-awareness was on yesterday’s P&P where the host sort of asked if “we” (the media, with their drive to create unnecessary conflict for ratings) were in part responsible for the chaos on Capitol Hill. Yet still no acknowledgment of the same forces in Canada or which party is to blame. The pundit panels talked a good game all summer about Trudeau’s alleged “blind spots,” but completely and utterly fail to recognize, let alone address, their own. Michael Wernick was prescient, and those same vultures hounded him out on a rail for it, acting as a herd pack with righteous indignation. Well, that “blind spot” of theirs — whether willful partisanship or just glaring ignorance in the name of false equivalence and “fairness” — is a lot more likely than Trudeau’s alleged ones, to get people killed.

  2. Pingback: Weeknote 2, 2021 – The city is here for you to use

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