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OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government wants mainstream media cash handouts to continue indefinitely.
According to a Blacklock’s Reporter article posted this past Friday, the Department of Canadian Heritage says it’s committed to providing funds to money-losing Canadian legacy media after 2024, the year a $595 million federal journalism bailout ends.
The funding will continue despite a 2021 briefing note from the heritage department showing that the millions in government bailout money never succeed in saving mismanaged media outlets, Blacklock’s reported.
According to David Larose, spokesperson for the Department of Canadian Heritage, “The government is committed to supporting the long term viability of the Canadian news sector including through various tax measures and programs.”
Larose claims that “departmental officials are not aware of any imminent closures” of legacy media outlets.
In 2019, newspapers that ceased print production included the Canadian Jewish News, Vancouver Courier, Ontario’s Paris Star, and Manitoba’s Stonewall Argus. The Paris Star and the Canadian Jewish News continue as online concerns.
Halifax’s Chronicle Herald fired 111 employees in 2020, despite getting $13,750 per worker in payroll rebates and tax credits.
This time last year, Justin Trudeau and his media allies were at the forefront of falsely accusing Catholic institutions of having buried Indigenous children in mass graves at various residential schools across Canada.
There was and is no credible evidence to support these wild accusations, but many Canadians are still unaware of the facts.
SIGN to demand an apology from Justin Trudeau for promoting the "mass grave" smear
The anger generated by the media at home and abroad saw over twenty Canadian churches burned, and extensive damage done to many more, but the record has never been set straight in what amounts to a disinformation campaign.
Terry Glavin at the National Post recently wrote a masterful piece that may go down in history as the definitive “debunking” of the assertions about the mass graves that never were.
Glavin points out that “nothing new was added to the public record” concerning the history of residential schools in Canada.
“The legacy of the schools had already been exhaustively explored in the testimony of hundreds of elders and a series of inquiries, public hearings, criminal cases, settlements and federal investigations going back decades. Most important of these efforts were the widely publicized undertakings of the 2008-2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), and the content of its voluminous findings,” Glavin wrote.
“…[N]ot a single mass grave was discovered in Canada last year,” he added.
“The several sites of unmarked graves that captured international headlines were either already-known cemeteries, or they remain sites of speculation even now, unverified as genuine grave sites.”
“Not a single child” accounted for during the extensively researched commission “was located in any of these places,” Glavin underscored.
“In none of these places were any human remains unearthed.”
SIGN and SHARE the petition calling on Justin Trudeau to set the record straight.
Even Trudeau's kneeling at what was reported upon as a just-discovered residential school burial ground was a lie - it was actually a well-known Catholic cemetery, but the media didn't let these details get in the way of reinforcing their narrative.
Trudeau also called on Pope Francis to come to Canada and apologize for what had happened, as outlets like Reuters, the New York Times and scores more told the world that “nearly 1000 bodies” had been found in two mass graves.
Those online articles were quietly edited from "mass graves" to "unmarked graves", but we still have the Twitter posts from major outlets like Reuters to prove the staggering level of misinformation.
SIGN: Justin Trudeau must tell Canadians the truth - there were no mass graves
According to an extensive investigation by Professor Emeritus Jacques Rouillard from the Université de Montréal: “The ‘discovery’ was first reported last May 27 (2021) by Tk’emlúps te secwépemc First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir after an anthropologist, Sarah Beaulieu, used ground-penetrating radar in a search for the remains of children alleged by some to be buried there.”
“Her preliminary report is actually based on depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school – not on exhumed remains.”
Professor Rouillard opined that the unverifiable narrative of what could have amounted to child-murder has led to the false assertion of genocide, an assertion without any supporting evidence.
“By never pointing out that it is only a matter of speculation or potentiality, and that no remains have yet been found, governments and the media are simply granting credence to what is really a thesis: the thesis of the ‘disappearance’ of children from residential schools,” Rouillard wrote.
“And all of this is based only on soil abnormalities that could easily be caused by root movements, as the anthropologist herself cautioned in the July 15 press conference.”
The vast majority of Canadians have been misled by the media and Mr. Trudeau, believing the most incredible smears imaginable, leading to scores of attacks on churches around the country.
It's time we heard the truth.
Please sign the petition today.
We are also cc'ing Canada's Catholic bishops on this petition - they must also demand the record be corrected, lest Canadians continue believing the mainstream media's disinformation.
For More Information:
How the world's media got it wrong on residential school graves - National Post
Trudeau lied about the bogus mass grave story - LifeSiteNews
Trudeau's narrative was a hoax - LifeSiteNews
**Photo: St. Jean Baptiste Church in Morinville burned to the ground on June 30, 2021**
For a long time, Canada’s legacy media were essentially on their own when it came to revenue.
That all changed in 2019 when Trudeau made an election promise that the Liberals would give legacy media $595 million in federal assistance over four years.
In 2021, the Trudeau Liberals gave the state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) $1.4 billion, which accounts for around 70 percent of its total revenue.
The current $595 bailout funds will expire on Mach 31, 2024.
News organizations must be given Qualified Canadian journalism organization (QCJO) status to receive special tax breaks and to receive government funding.
Canadians’ trust in legacy media is at an all-time low, as can be attested by a recent Oxford University study showing that faith in journalism has tumbled to record lows.
According to the study, only 42 percent of Canadians surveyed trust “most news,” which is a 13 percent decline from 2016.
Critics of Canadian legacy media have come out against these subsidies in recent months.
Dr. Leslyn Lewis, Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP and party leadership candidate, has said that she would “restore” Canada’s media “independence” and stop media bailouts by the federal government should she one day become prime minister.
In January of 2022, a producer and journalist exposed the “radical political agenda” and increasingly “woke” culture of Canada’s CBC in a scathing letter explaining why she quit working there.
“In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press. Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted,” Tara Henley wrote in a column dated January 3 and posted to Substack.
Canadian mainstream media, including the CBC, was caught spreading fake news stories about the trucker Freedom Convoy.
The CBC had to retract a story that falsely claimed most support for the Freedom Convoy came from foreigners. Trudeau himself used this narrative as a basis for triggering the Emergencies Act.
This came after the CBC had earlier retracted a story that falsely claimed Russia was behind the Freedom Convoy.
Under Trudeau, free speech online has come under attack in the form of Bill C-11 and Bill C-18, which seek to regulate the internet and force Big Tech companies to champion selected media outlets based on a special designation given by the federal government.
Bill C-11 was passed by Canada’s House of Commons in June and is currently before the Senate.
Lewis, who is unashamedly pro-life, has firmly criticized against government overreach, including COVID travel jab mandates and proposed digital IDs, during her campaign.