...the continued insistence by legacy media to both-sides everything led to this situation. Conservatives in the US and Canada have long-since figured out that they can lie with impunity because the most that will happen is that it will be both-sidesed, and thus not actually challenged.Smith references an excellent piece about Trump's lies, by CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, and notes the commonalities between Trump and Poilievre now, including how their supporters praise their authenticity and like how they "speak their minds".
In amidst these recollections, I wanted to note that this problem is not confined to the US, but it’s present here on a smaller scale, particularly with Pierre Poilievre and his constant stream of out-of-context, cherry-picked statistics, or his outright bald-faced assertions that are not only incorrect, but hysterical lies that virtual nobody (David Cochrane excepted) has any appetite to challenge. This is especially true for any economic data, which Poilievre spouts unchallenged even though it’s almost all wrong. But because it goes unchallenged, you have a lot of people who think that he knows what he’s talking about so they believe that he’s some kinds of economic genius. He’s not—he learned what he knows from crypto bros on YouTube, and if you actually have an inkling of what the actual data is, then you would see that he is hilariously wrong, but nobody will call him on it, least of all the government.
Its easy to speak your mind, of course, when you don't care about the truth - you can draw sharpies on maps all over the place. Liars can say whatever makes them look good and someone else look bad.
Daniel Dale continues:
...Trump has concocted hundreds of lies for his own advantage. But many of the laughable conspiracy theories he has promoted were borrowed from other people, and he often appears to truly believe them. That might be worse, not better. The most powerful person in the world, with access to endless expertise upon request, is not only a fabulist but a frequent dupe for other fabulists....Poilievre is like this too -- he has surrounded himself with the CPC Boys In Short Pants staff, just like Harper did, who comb through social media and the gutter press to construct anti-government narratives and feed them to Poilievre - like last week's MAID Grandma story. I expect we will see more of these as Carney's projects roll out and as the Canada-US Trade War continues.
... official spokespeople regularly declare him “right” about things he is demonstrably wrong about. In a Republican ecosystem currently dominated by Trump loyalists, it’s far from career-ending to shred your credibility with the mainstream media in service of the boss...
I was today years old when I found out that back in August, when Poilievre was losing MPs (and BTW, he's losing another one), Conservative strategist Kory Teneycke was on a Curse of Politics podcast where he described Poilievre as a "semi-professional asshole". Enjoy!
Speaking of lies, the Alberta Separatist movement is riddled with them. In The Walrus, Edmonton writer Patrick Lennox says Alberta Separatism Is Built on a Big Lie Danielle Smith has turned western grievance into a national unity crisis
...On its face, Premier Danielle Smith’s big lie that Albertans are aggrieved enough with Ottawa to justify a vote on whether to start down the road to becoming an independent nation may seem relatively innocuous. What’s wrong with a little exercise in direct democracy, goes the thinking. Let’s just test the temperature and let the separatists blow off a bit of steam.On Tuesday, Poilievre was in Edmonton trying to have it both ways - to "support" federalism while telling Albertans that their grievances are justified. The Edmonton Journal reports that about 200 people attended Poilievre's speech
... Much like Trump’s Make America Great Again fabrication, Smith’s big lie began with a slogan to encapsulate her vision: “A sovereign Alberta, within a united Canada.” She continues to repeat this bogus phrase at every opportunity, and with each unchecked repetition, it inches closer to becoming accepted reality. But you do not need to be a scholar of international public law to understand that if Alberta is sovereign, then Canada cannot be united. And if Canada is united, then Alberta, as a province of Canada, cannot be sovereign. No assertion to the contrary should be allowed to stand without swift retort from the highest levels of the federal government.
This is how Smith’s big lie continues: “We had ten years of a hostile federal government attacking our industry, trying to shut us in, continuing to over-equalize the rest of the country, and also make laws that went against our foundational values,” she said in a Global News interview that is a fair representation of many similar ones. “And so when that looked like it was going to continue with another election of the Liberal government, there’s a lot of people who lost hope that Canada could be fixed.”
Except Canada is far from broken, and blithely asserting that it is does not make it so. Over the ten years Smith claims Alberta faced a hostile federal government, Alberta’s oil and gas production doubled, and the federal government invested $34.2 billion in the TMX pipeline from Edmonton to tidewater in Burnaby, British Columbia. Since 2020, the federal government has provided at least $85.2 billion to the fossil fuel industry. The election of a fourth Liberal government might have been a disappointment to some in Alberta, but Prime Minister Mark Carney now has higher approval ratings in the province than Premier Smith, with 48 percent of respondents to a recent Angus Reid poll approving Carney’s leadership and 46 percent strongly disapproving of Smith’s performance....
...“We’re a national family,” said Poilievre. “Families have problems. They all have problems. Now, what do you do with those problems? Do you sweep them under the rug? Do you pretend they’re not there, or do you have honest conversations to fix them in order to stay united? I believe you need honest conversations.Here's another comment about Poilievre's speech, from Dale Smith:
“So, just as we must not break up our country over our disagreements and grievances, we must not accept the Orwellian idea that criticizing our government is unpatriotic, or that acknowledging the grievances of Albertans is disloyal. If we want to unite this country, we need to give people who have lost hope in it a reason to renew their faith. You do not do that by telling them that their complaints are illegitimate or that the problems will never be fixed.”
...“What Albertans are complaining about is not Canada,” said Poilievre. “It is the government policies that are actually inconsistent with how Canada was meant to work in the first place. Many Albertans are legitimately frustrated that a costly and controlling, big and bossy government has gone far beyond its jurisdictional boundaries in Ottawa. It’s blocked our provinces and people from enjoying Canadian prosperity.
“Separation will not solve those problems. Becoming even more Canadian will. The solution is to double down on the way the country was always meant to work, as per the British North America Act and vision: a federal government that is smaller or affordable would not only bring down inflation, debt and taxes. It would not only save you money. It would restore the traditional role of the federal government — a federal government that focuses on national defence, on tearing down interprovincial barriers to move our goods, that safeguards our sea, sky, soil, and citizenry with a military that can do its job and has the resources to do it, and borders that keep bad guys out and let the free flow of our citizens to travel around the world.”...
Poilievre’s speech got a slow motion standing ovation at the end — that is, it took a while for all in the crowd to get out of their seats. But, he had two pregnant pauses in his speech for ovations, and at those points only about half in attendance clapped for the national unity talking points.
Finally, in contrast, some truth-telling I saw today:Oh fuck off. It was not a "neutral takedown." This is just pandering to Danielle Smith's Big Lie, and is inventing whole cloth a history of federalism that never existed, and which provinces don't actually want. Stop pretending that this is actually helping combat separatism. It's really not.
— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) September 29, 2026 at 8:38 PM
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First, former prosecutor Jack Smith testified to the US Senate. Most of the coverage was dominated by a ridiculous smear attempt by a Republican senator who didn't know the difference between the Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, but the real story of the hearing was Jack Smith's conclusion that Trump had engaged in serious crimes - which is why Trump hates him: Next, at a Vancouver press conference, Carney is laughing at Trump's lies:
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