Trudeau's deputy PM faces investigation over social media post deemed fake news

The Commissioner of Elections said Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland faces an investigation over a social media post tagged by Twitter as fake news. The Canada Elections Act prohibits any person from knowingly making a false statement to influence voters.

According to the National Post, the Conservative Party moved forward with asking Elections Canada, via lawyer letters, to force the Liberals to remove the manipulated video.

Freeland posted a deceptively edited interview clip of Conservative leader Erin O’Toole that Twitter called a case of video manipulation.

"They’re importing American-style misleading politics," said O’Toole Monday. "I think Canadians deserve better than that."

"Let me be clear," he said, "I, 100 percent, support our public and universal healthcare system... It's been the backbone we've relied on in the pandemic... In Canada's Recovery Plan, we're giving an additional 60 billion dollars to secure that public healthcare system."

The Conservative platform pledged to bolster provincial health transfers to provinces, which would cost the federal treasury about $60 billion over the next decade.

"I trust the premiers to do what is best for patients in their province," said O’Toole. "If Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Ontario or Quebec want to innovate to provide better healthcare, I support that. The more choices Canadians have in healthcare, the better."

"What is Mr. Trudeau talking about? Division, misleading people, importing American-style media manipulation to our campaign within the first ten days," he added. The Conservative Party yesterday filed a formal protest with the Commissioner of Elections. The Elections Act forbids any person from "knowingly…making or publishing false statements to affect election results."

The finance minister in a Twitter post said O’Toole appeared to support the privatization of health care. The message featured a July 15, 2020 interview with O’Toole by Kate Harrison, a director with the Ottawa polling firm Abacus Data.

In the 35-second segment, Harrison asked: "Would you be prepared to allow provinces to experiment with real healthcare reform, including the provision of private, for-profit and nonprofit health care options inside of universal coverage?"

O’Toole responded: "Yes! Now I’ll elaborate a little bit more. We can’t have just one old model that is increasingly becoming inefficient. We have to find public-private synergies, and that capital will come in to drive efficiencies. I’ve run on this for several years now."

Harrison on Monday also said the clip was misleading. "As the person who asked the question, I’m disappointed to see the video was manipulated to exclude important context."

In the full exchange running more than two minutes, Harrison asked: "Would you be prepared to allow provinces to experiment with real healthcare reform, including the provision of private, for-profit and nonprofit health care options inside of universal coverage?"

O’Toole responded: "Yes! Now I’ll elaborate a bit more. I refer to my previous leadership quite regularly. Our team now calls that the warm-up because we’re going to win this one. Still, I also ran on this principle, Kate, because if we are expecting innovation and more choice and better performance, we can’t have just one old model that is increasingly becoming inefficient because of the amazing new drugs that are dragging some of the funds into other areas in our healthcare system, especially biologics which the Trudeau government also messed up in terms of the NAFTA negotiations.

He added: "If we want to see that innovation, we have to find public-private synergies and make sure that universal access remains paramount. And I actually praised what Brad Wall did with respect to diagnostic imaging because he’s actually making sure that wait times for everyone go down as a result of the investment by the private sector to make sure there are more diagnostic imaging machines.

"I thought that was a brilliant move to show the public that there will be an overall benefit because everyone’s wait times will go down. Still, people will be able to access services, and capital will come in to drive efficiencies, drive innovation."

Freeland and Trudeau both defended the manipulated video on Monday.

"We tweeted out some video of Erin O’Toole during the Conservative leadership campaign where he talks about privatizing Medicare," said Freeland. "Can you believe that?"

"What's really important here is that in the middle of a pandemic, Erin O'Toole came out unequivocally in support of private healthcare, in terms of for-profit healthcare. We posted the entire interview," said Trudeau, who fumbled his words.

"We posted the entire interview in its entirety and encourage all Canadians to take a look, to see what Erin O'Toole has to say about what he sees on the future of healthcare," he added.

New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh yesterday called the misleading video "really disconcerting" and said the practice was unacceptable. "It’s really troubling," said Singh.

"We’ve got the Liberal Party putting out misinformation, spreading it online, to the point that Twitter had to flag it," he added: "We have long called for an end to misinformation. The government needs to be very vigilant."

Singh concluded: "This is the wrong thing to do. This is completely wrong."