Bullshit Bulletin, Week 1: We've decided to spend a lot less time with our families
On Epstein. Canadian Ladas. And why you should check twice before retweeting.
Well, we’re back! It seems like just a few years ago — in fact, it was just a few years ago — that The Line last rolled out its much-loved election-time fact-checking feature. (Look at all those hyphens.) Yes, that’s right! The Bullshit Bulletin is back!
If you don’t remember it from last time, the Bullshit Bulletin is something we’ll be publishing once a week at ReadTheLine.ca. We’ll recap a bunch of things we heard during the campaign that week that were bullshit. We don’t mean partisan spin or things we just disagree with. We mean things that are either flatly untrue or torqued to the point where truth loses all meaning. We’ll also include room for conduct that may not fail a lie detector test but is, well, egregious bullshit.
We accept submissions! Send anything you think qualifies to lineeditor@protonmail.com.
We will also be partnering with our friends at Ipsos. Each week during the campaign, and for the week afterward, the polling and analysis team at Ipsos will be providing The Line with snapshots of their polling on the issues that are motivating the Canadian electorate.
First, from our friends at Ipsos, their weekly snapshot of key issues during this election.
Generations clash over Canada’s sovereignty
Ipsos's deep dive into generational challenges in Canada reveals stark contrasts and brewing tension and shines a light on how Canadians view success. For Gen Z, 30 per cent say it's all about factors beyond their control. In contrast, Baby Boomers believe in the power of personal effort, with 56 per cent crediting success to their own hard work. This is a key point of tension during the current election. But it's not just about success. Ipsos' Canadian Unity polling shows a decline in national commitment among the young. Almost half (46 per per cent) of GenZ are feeling less connected to Canada now compared to a few years ago. Meanwhile, only 20 per cent of Boomers share this sentiment, pointing to a growing generational chasm. There is anxiety brewing beneath the surface about socioeconomic issues. Older Canadians are sitting comfortably with assets and trust in institutions, while the younger crowd battles skepticism and uncertainty over whether the status quo serves them well. With such profound generational differences, the Canadian sociopolitical landscape is the underbelly of the affordability divide today. Trump and tariffs only add to the uncertainty.
Check back next week for more data and insights. Go here for more Ipsos research and analysis.
And now, on with the bulletin…
Our lead item this week on the bullshit front is in response to a story in The Globe and Mail that got a ton of attention. It was the event that really made the first splash of the campaign. The Globe story, which you can read here, reported that a Canadian official with a top-secret security clearance told the Globe that India interfered in the 2022 Conservative leadership race and was attempting to influence the outcome in favour of Pierre Poilievre. The article also noted that Poilievre was not told about this, as he lacked a top-secret security clearance.
You can all imagine how this went over.
Let’s be clear here. We’re not necessarily accusing our friends at the Globe of peddling in bullshit. Someone brought them a story. The story is interesting and newsworthy. It’s certainly topical. And as far as we can tell, it’s completely factual.
But we cannot help but roll our eyes at whoever chose this moment to step forward with a story that, if we’re being blunt, didn’t actually reveal anything new. Indian agents allegedly raised money and organized for Poilievre during the leadership race. There’s no evidence that this was done in a highly coordinated way; Poilievre didn’t know it was happening, and there’s no reason to think that any of this changed the outcome of the leadership vote.
There has already been a lot of reporting around the 2022 Conservative leadership race. Other reputable news outlets had already established the fact that Poilievre’s rival, Patrick Brown, was out of favour with the Indian government, and that Indian proxies in Canada were working against his selection as leader. The Hogue Commission report also established that India was known to have attempted to interfere in a Conservative leadership race. The Hogue report also noted that the targeted politicians were not believed to have been aware, let alone involved, in what India was doing. (Page 66 of the first volume of the final report, if you’re interested.) In other words, most of this has already been reported out.
So what is the story, here?
We don’t get to the torpedo until paragraph five: “CSIS did not share this information with Mr. Poilievre, the source said, because he does not have the necessary security clearance to access secret documents and receive classified briefings on foreign-interference activities in Canada. Mr. Poilievre is the only federal party leader who has declined an offer to obtain a security clearance.”
Ah, yes, there it is.
As we’ve noted here before at The Line, reasonable people can absolutely disagree about whether or not Poilievre ought to seek security clearance — Line editor Matt Gurney has criticized this decision in the past. By comparison, defenders of Poilievre include another former opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair of the, um, NDP. But legitimate criticism aside, it’s also true that Liberal attacks against Poilievre in this vein feed directly into an active conspiracy theory, namely that Poilievre — who previously held such clearance when he sat as a minister under Harper’s government — is now unable to get that clearance because of some dodgy connection or action that has been neither explicitly stated, nor proven. In other words, it’s disinformation.
So, yeah, publishing a story about stuff we already know that feeds a narrative about an unproven conspiracy theory meets our bar for bullshit. Bullshit that’s made worse by a few simple and unavoidable facts; namely, that Poilievre should not have needed security clearance to have been warned about foreign interference during his leadership bid in the first place. There is simply no reason why CSIS couldn’t have warned Poilievre about this at the time, at least in general terms, with or without said clearance. Nor is there any reason they couldn’t have taken this warning to any number of other senior CPC members who did have clearance if they felt the threat to the vote’s integrity was serious enough. The fact our intelligence apparatus apparently chose not to do this reflects on CSIS’s judgement, not on Poilievre’s.
We don’t necessarily fault the Globe for running the story they had. Although we think they could have done more to justify the hit — namely, asking their suddenly talkative highly placed source whether or not there actually is substantive evidence suggesting that Poilievre would fail to obtain the security clearance that said source deems so crucial. A clear answer to that point would have been useful to the reader in the current environment, no? Instead, the bulk of our scorn in this case is reserved for whomever inside the government decided to go to the Globe with this now. Years after the leadership vote took place, and days after the writ dropped.
Someone at a high level within our security apparatus clearly didn’t like the leaks that were targeting the Trudeau government in recent years, and decided to take the opportunity of the election to put a few points on the board.
That’s bullshit. First of all, the original Globe leaks, and other stories published by other outlets, revealed to Canadians things they did not know, and otherwise would never have found out, pertaining specifically to the actions and inactions of the current government. This latest leak, in contrast, simply confirms facts that were already well established, and can’t be construed as anything other than a motivated hit from a highly placed, ostensibly non-partisan government official in the middle of an election campaign. This ain’t no high minded whistleblower, here.
Further, the original leaks to the media were not about the political situation, but about the national security situation. Someone inside the Canadian security services was genuinely alarmed by what they believed to be a failure of Canada, as a state, to take its own defence seriously. Most Canadians would probably agree that that is something we need to get better at.
Nothing in the latest Globe report rises to nearly that level. The revelations, though real, are simply not comparable with the earlier leaks, and we call bullshit on whomever decided even the score.
Next up, we have an EXCLUSIVE story from the National Post alleging that Mark Carney plagiarized parts of his 1995 Oxford doctoral thesis — in a oppo drop that attempts to echo the hit on former Harvard President Claudine Gay.
The Post claims to have found ten instances of similarly worded sentences, presumably discovered via a first run at Turnitin.com. Only one professor is on the record accusing Carney of plagiarism. By comparison, Oxford stands by its man.
The examples:
Carney wrote: “First, government intervention can impede international competition and artificially support domestic profits.”
Later, he adds: “Second, in an industry or an economy where many firms are following harvesting strategies, firms may maintain profitability even though they are losing competitiveness.”
Those are virtually the exact sentences that can be found in Porter’s book on page 797 — except Carney added the extra determiner “an” and the adverb “even.” He did not use quotation marks or add a footnote to reference Porter’s work anywhere in the entire paragraph.
Ironclad. None of that could possibly be explained by the fact that there are only so many ways you can go about explaining basic economics concepts, now could it? This Carney fellow is obviously an intellectual imposter and a fraud!
Which is why, of course, he failed to get that tenure-track job in academia in the ‘90s, hit the wall on first contact with the real working world, and has spent the last 20 years managing a gas station in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Donald Trump threw another bomb into the middle of the election campaign this week by announcing a plan to impose a 25-per-cent tariff on all foreign-made cars and car parts, to come into effect on April 2 — although, with these guys, who knows what will be dinged, or when, or for how much. Assuming Trump does anything even remotely close to what he’s threatening here, though, the damage to the Canadian economy, especially in Ontario, would be massive.
The Liberals responded with a "$2 billion Strategic Response Fund" to, among other things "build a fortified Canadian supply chain — from raw materials to finished vehicles." The Liberals want to build an "all-in-Canada" network for auto-manufacturing component parts — which is starting to sound closer to just ordinary economic nationalism for cars. If this plan differs significantly from the Lada, we'd like to understand how.
We understand that there are significant chunks of Ontario that depend on a car manufacturing supply chain that has become interdependent with the Americans and, well, that's a problem. But the answer to that problem probably isn't going to lie in full 1970s-style Juche state manufacturing of vehicles. Let us get this straight: we needed to bribe existing auto companies $13 billion to build EV batteries here, but we're going to create our own cars, tip to tail, for $2 billion? Who is going to make these cars, the U.S. companies that currently own our plants? What cars will these plants make? EV scooters?
And, most importantly, who would we sell our maple-mobiles to?
The problem isn't that we can't make Canadian cars; the problem is that without the American market, we don't have enough of a customer base to sell those cars domestically — unless Carney's got some plan to increase demand for Be-Maple-Leafed Ford F-150s in Belgium and Portugal. We understand the need for retaliation; hell, we'd even entertain the idea that Canada simply buy controlling interests in America's Big Three auto makers. For the lulz.
We're also pro building more resilience into the Canadian economy broadly, but without U.S. interdependence, and access to a market 10 times our size, automobile manufacturing is just not one of those areas where Canada is likely to be competitive. A guy who lauds his economic credentials as loudly as Mark Carney does knows this. If the Americans insist on going down this route, car parts are probably one of those industries in which we may have to cut our losses, reinvest, and retrain — ensuring workers in these industries have an offramp to industries with a greater global competitive advantage. That's a plan that wouldn't make our bullshit bulletin.
Next on our list: Sean Fraser, step on up!
You might remember the now-former member of the Trudeau cabinet announcing some months ago that he was leaving politics to spend more time with his young family. “Today is a decision I’ve made for personal reasons,” he said, “because my kids aren’t getting any younger and deserve to have their dad around.” You might also remember the number of Liberals who rushed to his defence, insisting that he was totally sincere and that the then-grim fortunes pollsters were forecasting for the Liberals had nothing to do with Fraser deciding to tap out. He’s a family man, we were told. That’s all this is. Leaving politics to spend more time with the family.
Well, anyway, he’s decided to run again.
It’s all about public service, you see. It’s about standing up for Canada.
Sure. Just like bowing out was all about his kids.
Fraser insists he and Carney had a talk and he’s been assured he’ll be able to spend more time with his family, which is a weird thing for someone who’s experienced to pretend to believe — elected political office is an intensely consuming job, and the only people who succeed in it, as Fraser has, are the kind of people prone to being consumed. So we call bullshit on that. But, to be honest, we probably wouldn’t have even mentioned this if the circumstances weren’t so blatantly egregious. It’s low-level bullshit. Other Liberals changed their minds, too. As Liberal polling fortunes have improved, we saw Anita Anand, for example, reverse her earlier decision to bow out and decide to run again. And we didn’t really comment on that, because, well, it’s her choice.
What’s different about Fraser’s decision, though, is that clearing the way for him to run again meant dumping the man who had stepped forward to run in his place. Graham Murray had been declared to be the Liberal candidate in the Central Nova riding just a few days ago, and had even begun to campaign. He had signs and an office. The announcement of his candidacy is now a dead link on the Liberal party’s website.
Now you see it:
Now you don’t:
So yeah. Murray was the guy. He’d probably told his family and friends and everything. I’m sure they’d said nice things about him. And then Fraser — apparently tired of hanging out with his family after a solid few months, and having duly concluded his kids did not in fact deserve having their dad around — glanced at the latest polls and had the poor son of a bitch who stepped forward to run in his seat shoved into a disintegration chamber so that Fraser could come back.
Look, we’re not here to shed any crocodile tears for a political candidate being roughly handled by their party. But in this case, we still can’t help but feel some human sympathy for Murray. The poor guy. This is like campaigning to get a job, being told you’ve got the gig, and then showing up on your second day of work and being told you’re fired because the last guy wants his job back.
Next up, the Brookfield stuff. Look, we understand that the Conservatives are in dire straits, and as such absolutely need to attack Carney. We will save a conversation about whether or not any of their attacks have been effective for our next The Line Podcast.
We will just generally note that some of the drops against Carney for the actions of Brookfield when he was chair are fair — Carney was in a leading role when the company chose to relocate its HQ out of Canada. Further, Carney appears to have lied about this, and minimized his role in advocating for it.
We think it’s fair to criticize Brookfield for using tax havens in places like Bermuda. Carney doesn’t bear much specific culpability for this because, frankly, he was operating with a fiduciary duty to Brookfield and the shareholders who invest in it, and in that role, made the same kinds of decisions that anyone else in his position would have made. That’s said, it’s fair to note that Carney comes from a class of people who treat tax havens as normal and okay. It’s fair to question the guy on his potential economic conflicts and the efficacy of his blind trust. And it’s fair to contrast the hypocrisy of all this against the economic nationalism of his campaign.
What’s missing, here, is some context. Brookfield is an absolutely massive multinational company overseeing almost a trillion dollars in assets. It wasn’t Carney’s personal mom-and-pop hedge fund; and as chair of their board, he could not possibly be some kind of micromanaging puppet master, pulling the strings on every dastardly capitalist exploitation. There’s no evidence that Carney’s behaviour was in any way abnormal for the role he was serving. It’s entirely normal, for example, for a company like Brookfield to secure a big loan from a Chinese bank. Maybe it shouldn’t be; maybe that’s something a future government ought to question. But the insinuation that Carney is personally culpable for every mean thing Brookfield as a whole ever did, or that a loan proves he’s in the tank for the Chinese — yeah, that’s all bullshit.
Further to the evil insinuations file, we at The Line sadly cannot escape the the more conspiratorial side of the Internet, and this week we also couldn't help but avoid pictures showing Mark Carney standing next to Ghislaine Maxwell, the notorious socialite and sex offender convicted of helping to supply minors to the late Jeffrey Epstein for the purpose of sexual abuse and trafficking.
What does the fact that Carney appears in pictures with Maxwell tell us?
Absolutely nothing — aside from the fact that the two people existed in the same place at the same time.
Maxwell and Epstein operated their racket by schmoozing with the wealthy and famous across the globe. Some of those elites were creepy and amoral — obviously (!) — but this pair functioned by successfully ingratiating itself in circles chock full of high social capital people, many of whom must operate with a high degree of moral integrity to attain and maintain that social capital.
That was literally Epstein and Maxwell’s cover for their crimes, whether they were financial, sexual, or extortionate in nature. They consciously infiltrated powerful networks in order to suss out and exploit the weak links. To date, there is no evidence that Carney has ever visited Epstein's island, nor partaken in any of the sex crimes that Epstein and Maxwell orchestrated. Insinuating otherwise without any kind of evidence is gross and it's bullshit.
Here is a different kind of bullshit — more of a “Beware of Bullshit” to everyone running, and frankly, anyone who operates online at all these days. Evan Solomon, former journalist and now Liberal candidate in a Toronto riding, had a bit of a whoopsie this week. We like Evan — we really do — so this isn’t a dunk. Like we said. It’s a warning to everyone.
Look before you retweet! Because Evan or someone operating his account for him didn’t. And they retweeted a parody account of Mark Carney, including an image with some, ahem, unfortunate language.
Ooof. Obviously a mistake, but be careful out there, folks. Parody accounts are fine — we enjoy a few of them. But there are worse actors out there generating outright fake content. Be careful. Don’t fall for bullshit.
One final note to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who dominated the federal election campaign’s first days with her comments on Breitbart, in which she said she advised Donald Trump to ease off on tariffs to favour Pierre Poilievre, and then said she told the Trump administration that Poilievre and Trump would be more in sync. Of course Smith then argued that any insinuation that she did the things she said she did were incorrect and “offensive.”
Smith is not backing down.
"I will not be silent. Alberta will not be silent. We will not be pushed around and called traitors for merely having the courage to actually do something about our nation's and province's predicament, other than merely indulging in self-righteous tantrums," Smith said.
"Until this danger to Alberta and our economy is past, they're going to have to roll me off in a stretcher before I will stop fighting for this province and our people."
Ma’am, this is an Arby’s.
No one is “silencing” Danielle Smith. She’s a premier of a province. She can say whatever she want. She is the establishment now, quite literally. People are criticizing her for saying daft things in daft places and further noting that her attempts to demonstrate the “courage to actually do something about our nation’s and province’s predicament” have yet to, you know, work. But it’s good to know that she, and she alone, is immune from “indulging in self-righteous tantrums.”
Obviously.
On that note, maybe it’s time to let the people actually running to lead the country have the mic for a bit now, eh?
Clarification: We at The Line noted that only one professor was on the record in the Post story suggesting Carney committed plagiarism. In our attempts to be sardonic, we called the prof an ideologue, which was clumsy and, frankly, a bit dickish on our part. We have no ill will toward said prof, and we at The Line like to live by the standard: “A gentleman never insults anyone unintentionally.” This was unintentional and we apologize!
Thanks for reading, friends. We’ll be back next week with more bullshit.
The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com
On Brookfield the better question for Carney would be what tax or other policies he would enact such that companies like Brookfield don’t offshore their assets. He’s a smart guy - let him tell us how he will make Canada more competitive.
400,000 members. 160,000 voters. 85% win. BS meter at max.