A Nothingburger Revealed: the WE "Scandal"

The WE Scandal (which many of us, partisan or not, noticed had a very strong air of nothingburger to it) was one of the biggest news items to hit the Canadian media landscape in a *long* time. All day every day, for months on end. Couldn't get away from it.

(It's the thing that made me give up cable tv for good so I suppose I should be grateful)

Did you know Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was cleared of all wrongdoing last week by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, who functions completely independent of the government of the day and reports directly to Parliament? Oh? You hadn't heard? Curious.

Now I know the inevitable response from Canada's *extremely* feckless national opposition party partisans'll be to allege baseless conspiracy theories. Who cares? I'm a climate guy. I've been effortlessly batting those down for over a decade. You're playing pretend. Weak sauce.

But those are Canada's opposition parties so that's, I guess, sadly, to be expected. So what then is our media telling us about this, the finale of the formerly all-encompassingly enormous story? Crickets. Nothing. The barest mention.

As little as they can get away with before desperately seeking out the next faux scandal to try to take down this otherwise, let's face it, mostly *very* successful & tested-by-the-largest-crisis-to ever-hit-our-country Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Look at this shameful shovel work. "Dodges." That's some manifestly greasy phrasing, David Akin, Chief Political Correspondent for Global News Canada. Shame on you. You're part of everything that's wrong about how Canada gets our news. Quit your job and wander the earth or something.

Look, my vote's *always* up for grabs. I'm no more a Liberal than I am anything else. What I am is a #ClimateVoter. I remain furious at Trudeau for backing down on his Election Reform promise. Every time I see him or his government or ANY government step out of line I call it out.

The reverse is also true: when I see an in-the-bag media promoting false narratives to manipulate Canadians for cynical political purposes, which is ABSOLUTELY what we saw with the #WE faux scandal, that gets called out too. Our national media failed us. Is *still* failing us.

The part that's NOT nothingburger is one of Canada's largest charities got burnt to the ground by our media, as did the program at the centre of it all, which, lest we forget, was supposed to quickly get help to Canadian students during an unprecedented global pandemic.

I'm not asking for a mea culpa from Canada's media (though it's richly deserved) I'm just identifying the exoneration coverage isn't remotely commensurate to the scandal raking on the front end & bemoaning there's not even a modicum of a pretense of honest journalism.

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