Misinfo, Astro-Turfing, & Media Bias Abound Early In Canada's Election Cycle

Misinfo, Astro-Turfing, & Media Bias Abound Early In
Canada's Election Cycle 1

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Misinfo, astro-turfing and media bias are out in full force

We’re barely a week into the Canadian federal election cycle and the misinfo and narrative warfare is in full swing.

On Monday Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland got her wrist slapped by Twitter when she posted a video of Erin O’Toole edited to make it sound like the Conservative leader was campaigning to kill one of Canada’s sacred cows: universal healthcare.

No sane politician in Canada would ever do that.

What O’Toole actually said in the video (but was cut from the one Freeland posted) was that “universal access remains paramount.” Under the Conservative plan, private health care providers would also be allowed to operate. While I personally won’t be voting Conservative, that is something I’ve been in favour of for a long time. Not only would it give Canadians freedom of choice in how they direct their own healthcare, but it would also alleviate pressure on the public system.

Today a picture of a door hanger ostensibly delivered to households in Guelph, Ontario began circulating on social media. It appears to have originated in a post on the /r/Ontario reddit (it has since been removed because election material of any kind is against sub-reddit rules). BlogTO picked up the story.

Personally I think it smells like astroturf, I’ve yet to see anybody else saying they too received one of these, although somebody on Twitter did post a door hanger they received which contained no spelling errors.

Next we look at the corporate media who is going to great lengths to pretend the right-of-center populist People’s Party of Canada (PPC) led my Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier doesn’t exist.

In 2019 Bernier had to fight some legal battles to get into the debates and this time the deal is he doesn’t qualify because PPC as yet has no members in parliament and didn’t get 4% of the vote last time out. The newspapers don’t even list Bernier as a candidate when they run their election galleries.

But what is interesting is that PPC seems to be picking up steam regardless of what the media or anybody else has to say about it.

In prior elections, the “other” category typically polls pretty low. In 2019 it was less than 1%. A couple days ago I noticed it was at something like 3.5% which was already elevated from what I’m used to seeing. Meanwhile, no mention of PPC anywhere in the CBC poll results.

My assumption is that “other” is just CBC’s euphemism for the PPC, which at today’s 5% looks to be pulling ahead of the Greens at 4.2%.

Various other pollsters are tracking PPC, with ranges from 2% to 6% but at least they aren’t relegating them to “other”

In Alberta the PPCs are polling at 11.9% which is actually in the same ballpark as the NDP and Liberals.

While I have no idea who will win the election, the larger story is why I have no idea who will win the election. Because for some time now, the corporate media has been disingenuous, untrustworthy, biased, duplicitous, inaccurate, farcical, toxic and generally unreliable. The main street pollsters have blown every important call since 2016. Everybody is astroturfing and b/s-ing everybody else and it’s basically impossible to get a reliable bead on anything. There’s no signal, it’s all noise.

If ever there was an election to tune out the talking heads and the pundits and for once vote your conscience based on what the parties actually stand for, instead of some banal lesser-of-tyrants theme, this is the one.

If I had to pick a preferred outcome for the election it wouldn’t be for one candidate to become PM over the other as much as it would be that the so-called “fringe” parties like Greens and PPC make enormous gains while the big three incumbents eat each other. With rare exceptions, all Canadians, regardless of their political leanings have been let down by their elected officials. Unless you’re a fervent establishment shill and authority craving bootlicker, you most certainly feel  disappointed and profoundly betrayed regardless of whether you’re left-wing liberal or a right-wing conservative.

This is because what is happening in the world today isn’t about left vs right, it’s about the complete breakdown of the old order and a reorganization along a decentralized, network topography. I’m not talking about this Great Reset nonsense, which is just platitudes and branding to rationalize that a broken system should continue to be run by the same crew who broke it. I’m talking about the continuation of a theme that started with Brexit, and then Trump and was stalled, momentarily by the pandemic. I’m talking about The Great Reject. Given this prospect, these federal elections seem an almost antiquated re-arranging of the deck chairs.

The electoral response to the abject failure of the policy response to COVID should be a gigantic collective NO and to vote out every incumbent politician in every office, from all parties at every level of government across the entire land. All of them. Gone.

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