Blacklock's Reporter

The secret author of an unsigned federal directive asking that journalists submit stories for fact-checking has been named. Maryse Durette, a former CBC employee and spokesperson for the Department of Health, was identified through Access To Information. She did not respond to questions.

Durette emailed the directive to five journalists regarding a Blacklock’s story published January 19 concerning drug decriminalization. The January 24 directive complained journalists were “talking about Health Canada and never contacted us.”

“Readers deserve accurate reporting,” it said. “A respectable reporter goes to the source for reporting.”

News stories concerning the health department should first be checked by staff to ensure publishers were not “purposefully reproducing inaccuracies and misleading your readership,” said the directive. “Standards, I am sure, rely on more sound principles than quoting inaccuracies from fringe media, like going to the source of what you are talking about.”

Journalists must ensure “your coverage comes from real journalism work,” it said. The directive did not identify any author and was issued in the name of the Department of Health. Durette, one of ten communications staff working at the department’s Ottawa office, was identified as the author through Access To Information records.

Health Canada leads all other federal departments and agencies in demanding “corrections” from media. The department since 2018 issued 269 notices according to a 2023 Inquiry Of Ministry tabled in the Commons. The health department claimed factual errors at the Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator, Winnipeg Free Press, Whitehorse Daily Star, Medicine Hat News and others.

‘Fact-Checking Things They Don’t Like’

“Fact-checking” is mandatory for media that accept federal subsidies. Newsrooms must prove “a consistent practice of providing rebuttal opportunity for those being criticized” including the Government Of Canada, according to a 2019 Canada Revenue Agency document Guidance On The Income Tax Measures To Support Journalism.

Delegates to a national Liberal Party convention last May 6 went further in adopting a resolution that “the government explore options to hold online information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication to material whose sources can be traced.” No such regulations have been tabled to date.

Compulsory government “fact-checking” is unconstitutional under a Depression-era Supreme Court of Canada ruling. The Court in 1938 struck an Alberta law that mandated all newspapers publish official “corrections” and provide a right of rebuttal to critical articles under threat of $20,000 fines.

Senator Paula Simons (Alta.), a former Edmonton Journal columnist, last May 9 told the Senate transport and communications committee that government had no business “fact-checking” newsrooms. “I come from Alberta,” said Simons. “In the 1930s the government of the day passed what it called the Accurate News And Information Act which gave the government the power of rebuttal and the power to basically fact-check and correct anything the government believed was inaccurate. The courts properly struck that down as unconstitutional.”

“I am always concerned about what happens if someone you don’t like or whose opinions you don’t share suddenly has the power to regulate, even at arm’s length, what is said in the press,” said Senator Simons. “Having been a journalist, lots of people think there are factual errors in the newspaper that are just things they don’t like,” she added.

By Staff

A beggar

approaches.

I offer more than he asks.

Odds are

he’ll spend it on drugs,

alcohol.

True help

would have been food,

shelter,

a respectful place in

society.

Put money

in his pocket

and watch him walk away,

drifting

from bad

to worse.

Yet again

I preach one thing

and practice another.

Because he was there.

It’s only hypocrisy

when you don’t admit it.

By Shai Ben-Shalom

Nouns are revealing. We call English homesteaders “settlers” but Ukrainian ones “immigrants,” writes Professor Margery Fee. Similarly business reporters describe monthly StatsCan unemployment figures as “job creation numbers,” cabinets rename programs “action plans” and the heritage department selected as its monosyllabic themes for Canada’s 150th anniversary: “Strong. Free.” They might have chosen “Big. Snowy.” You get the picture.

Fee is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her intriguing book Literary Land Claims examines the nouns and adjectives we use in describing Indigenous people. Note they are never described as Indigenous-Canadians. “The French in Canada called themselves Canadiens; this name was appropriated from them along with transfer of the territory called Canada,” Fee writes. “They became hyphenated French-Canadians. However, the label Canadian was applied grudgingly or not at all to other racialized groups.”

Fee even challenges the presumptive title of her book, “land claims.” How did people who occupied all of Canada for thousands of years end up “claiming” territory that was theirs to begin with, as if ownership was an allegation?

The author recounts a 1968 meeting with Tony Antoine, then-spokesperson for the Native Alliance for Red Power: “Chatting nervously with him later, I asked him where his land was. When he said, ‘Vancouver,’ I replied inanely, ‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll give you that back, not with all the buildings.’ He looked right at me: ‘We don’t want the buildings.’ This abrupt comment has shaped my thinking”.

Literary Land Claims is a thoughtful analysis of revisionist Canadian history legitimized by the language of officialdom. Many Canadians have very definite opinions on Indigenous “welfare” and “grievances.” Few know Parliament passed restrictive laws.

In 1911 they amended the Indian Act to expel First Nations from any reserve located within the incorporated limits of any town of more than 8,000 residents, and in 1927 restricted Indigenous people from hiring their own lawyers.

“Canada is filled with people who firmly believe that Canadians are among the most tolerant and most civil in the world and that ‘their’ government treats Indigenous people well – even too well,” Fee writes. “Little is taught in Canadian schools and universities that might fill the huge gap between what ‘ordinary’ citizens believe and what many white scholars and judges, not to mention Indigenous activists and intellectuals, are now saying.”

Literary Land Claims argues one of the first barriers to public understanding is language. An example: When Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence carried out a self-described hunger strike near Parliament Hill in 2013, National Post columnist Christie Blatchford described the protest as “an act of intimidation if not terrorism.” Professor Fee explains, “Tolerant ordinary Canadians were once again seriously inconvenienced by ungrateful, dishonest and potentially violent Indigenous people.”

Words matter. Literary Land Claims is blunt, fresh, good.

By Holly Doan

Literary Land Claims: The ‘Indian Land Question’ from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat, by Margery Fee; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 326 pages; ISBN 9781-77112-1194; $29.24