Circulating online over the weekend was a piece by Daniel Dale over on CNN about what it’s been like fact-checking Trump for ten years, and what this kind of industrial scale lying is doing to the landscape. He does correctly lay part of the blame on legacy media outlets who simply treat all of the lying as background noise, as they have few fact-checkers on staff, and they are overwhelmed by the volume of it. In this, Dale correctly surmises, the Steve Bannon tactic of “flooding the zone with shit” has proven affective, because there is so much that it goes unchallenged, so the lies fester, particularly among adherents who treat it like gospel. What he doesn’t do, however, is point out that 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.
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.
The other point that Dale made in his post was that the other side-effect of Trump’s constant lies is that because he “authentically speaks his mind” when he lies constantly, it has the effect of making him seem more “honest” than his opponents, which is utterly baffling, and yet populist and wannabe populist leaders, including Poilievre and his would-be challengers, have taken this lesson to heart. There are just so many compounding failures, and yet legacy media in this country refuses to learn any lessons, and most outlets have been even more timid when it comes to challenging any of this, and that’s a very worrying prospect.
My Latest:
My (belated) weekend column points to areas of arrogant presumption on the government’s part with their latest omnibus legislation and why it may yet backfire.
New episodes released early for C$7+ subscribers. This week I look at the study that says that 20 percent of MPs' speeches were assisted with digital asbestos, and why we need a major change in Parliament now more than ever. #cdnpoli
— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-27T22:34:15.933Z
Ukraine Dispatch:
Russia bombed a shopping centre on Sunday, the Kyiv Science Academy on Monday, and there was a fresh attack overnight. Ukrainian drones have been delivering food and medicine to occupied Oleshky, which is being starved by Russia. Ukraine has also reclaimed another 51 square kilometres in the Donetsk region. While it looks like North Korea is prepared to deploy another 10,000 troops to Russia, South Korea is very upset that President Zelenskyy said that North Korean POWs were sent to them.
Noteworthy:
- The Logic has a look inside what the government is trying to do in order to reduce the timelines for environmental assessments to one year.
- Justin Ling points to ways in which Europe is still slow to distance itself from the US, particularly around security, which means trusting Trump to keep his word.
- Ling also looks at recent focus group studies on Canadians’ attitudes to the moment we’re in, and charts the places where Carney is offside from public opinion.
- Jennifer Robson wonders how the government plans to reconcile their plans to fast-track assessments with their obligations to uphold free prior and informed consent.
My latest Danielle Smith collab with @forwardcanada.bsky.social is up! She explains the upcoming referendum's constitution questions to you, because apparently you fools think they're "confusing," "convoluted," and "why are you asking us questions about the constitution?"youtu.be/gI8dPomNkPI?…
— Clare Blackwood (@clareblackwood.bsky.social) 2026-09-27T14:35:47.763Z
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