Mansbridge on what’s at issue
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Thanks for reading Ottawa Playbook. I’m your host, Zi-Ann Lum with Joseph Gedeon in Washington. It’s a cloudy day for a picket line in the capital. PETER MANSBRIDGE and Sen. JULIE MIVILLE-DECHÊNE have thoughts on PIERRE POILIEVRE’s CBC gambit. Plus, we ask an artificial intelligence tech vet for their thoughts on at least one U.S. embassy using ChatGPT to write their cables.
DRIVING THE DAY
FIRST THING — Strike’s on for the Public Service Alliance of Canada’s 155,000 members.
— Big if true: NDP Leader JAGMEET SINGH says his party won’t support back-to-work legislation — even if it’s deemed a confidence vote. iPolitics’ MARCO VIGLIOTTI has the story and Singh’s lack of clarity on what it would mean for its supply-and-confidence deal.
HOT AIR — Sen. JULIE MIVILLE-DECHÊNE says while partisan attacks against the CBC “disgust” her, ultimately, the public broadcaster isn’t beyond reproach.
The narrative that the CBC is a propaganda tool of the federal government is simplistic and false, said the former veteran Radio-Canada journalist and ombudsman.
Miville-Dechêne tells Playbook the hubbub involving Conservative Leader PIERRE POILIEVRE and the controversy about Twitter’s “government-funded media” label reminds her of the political opportunity PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUDEAU saw when he went after Radio-Canada’s newsroom for being stacked with too many sovereigntists and not enough federalists.
“You have to watch Radio-Canada to see that it’s certainly not giving a blank check to the Liberals,” she said.
— ICYMI: Yesterday’s PMO headache — courtesy of DANIEL LEBLANC and LOUIS BLOUIN — about the prime minister’s luxury Jamaican getaway.
— Fury and fundraising: The people that care about this issue, care about it deeply, and are on the center right, said Summa Strategies vice chair KATE HARRISON. “Frankly, they’re willing to kind of put their money where their mouth is.” It’s a rallying point for the party’s grassroots.
Defunding the CBC is a legacy issue for Conservatives; the arguments aren’t unique to Poilievre. A turning point was the CBC’s lawsuit against the Conservative party during the 2019 election, which she said “left a very sour taste” for a lot of partisans. The broadcaster sued the party over the use of copyright-protected video clips in partisan ads.
Where the political strategy gets trickier is how it plays out in Quebec, a vote-rich region that supports publicly funded broadcasting — and where TVA is Rad-Can’s only real competitor because of its French-language programming.
Polievre likened the CBC to “state media” when he wrote to ELON MUSK to ask the Twitter owner to pin “government-funded media” to the outlet’s English handles.
Harrison believes a burn-it-to-the-down approach to the CBC debate is unlikely, given that the broadcaster’s radio programming connects remote citizens and communities.
— C$1.24-billion question: Though other media outlets have taken government funds, the CBC and its journalists are the biggest target because the broadcaster receives the most funding. Postmedia, for comparison, received C$64.9 million from the federal government’s Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy program.
The political reality is that sharp rhetoric drives headlines and fundraising — the details can be left for later. “It’s easier to start with the most firm position, and then a hardline position, and then figure out the nuance when you’re in government,” Harrison said.
— Outside Ottawa: PETER MANSBRIDGE’s advice for CBC journalists: Stay out of it.
Mansbridge stressed that he’s no longer a CBC employee. “I’m just a pensioner,” he said, calling Playbook from Scotland, where he journeyed to a spot overlooking the North Sea. His guidance reflects a dogma he’s followed in his work in news.
“It’s like any other story,” the former CBC News chief correspondent said. “If you’re covering the story, you lay out the facts, put them in context. You let the viewers decide for themselves how they want to feel about whatever the individual story is.”
Debate about the CBC is a good thing, he said, especially since more than a billion dollars of the public’s money funds its operations. It should be accountable for every dollar, he said. But the narrative that the public broadcaster is run by the state and that its journalists are government hacks is a “ridiculous” claim.
“Anybody who’s lived in a country or traveled to a country where there are state broadcasters knows the difference,” he said.
— American graffiti: Mansbridge, a history buff, wove in a reminder that the CBC was created under Conservative prime minister R.B. BENNETT in the 1930s in response to concerns American programming would influence the country through broadcasting signals.
“And many of those reasons to be concerned still exist today,” Mansbridge said before dropping some big-picture questions.
“If you’re gonna kill the CBC, what are you gonna do?” he asked. “What’s going to be in its place? Anything? Does the country need anything, in terms of a national broadcaster that is mandated to deliver Canadian content to Canadians in every part of the country? I think that discussion is important to have.”
This isn’t the first time the CBC is the story du jour, he said, adding it will blow over.
“It’s like everything else, it doesn’t last long.”
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For your radar
FOUR YEARS LATER — Former Privy Council clerk MICHAEL WERNICK suggests Canadian lawmakers “copy and paste” legislation now before the U.K. Parliament to improve Canada’s laws that tackle foreign interference.
Wernick arrived 15 minutes early to a mostly empty committee room in the basement of West Block. It didn’t fill up. He passed on opening remarks at committee on Tuesday evening, pulling MPs straight into questions. His appearance at PROC coincided with the four-year anniversary of when he stepped down from the Privy Council’s top job.
— Flashback: In late 2016 and early 2017, the crux of national security concerns focused on Russian interference in the French, German and U.S. elections, he said. There were also lingering worries from the 2014 Chinese cyberattack on the National Research Council.
— To-do list: He said a Canadian law would more or less follow the U.K. model in which a new offense would be created along with a set of penalties. There would be work to nail down what constitutes foreign interference and how it can be differentiated from espionage, treason, deception and disinformation.
Defining what constitutes a foreign actor is another task, Wernick said, musing if the foreign actor is always government. He asked where foreign activities laundered through law firms, companies and think tanks fit. “Is the Confucius Institute or the Alliance Française interference — or is it just cultural diplomacy?”
— The obvious question: Liberal MP RUBY SAHOTA asked Wernick how his warning to the House justice committee during the height of the SNC-Lavalin affair has aged.
— Wernick on Feb. 21, 2019: “I worry about my country right now. I’m deeply concerned about my country right now, its politics and where it’s headed. I worry about foreign interference in the upcoming election, and we’re working hard on that. I worry about the rising tide of incitements to violence when people use terms like ‘treason’ and ‘traitor’ in open discourse. ... I’m worried that somebody is going to be shot in this country this year during the political campaign.”
— Wernick on April 18, 2023: “Thank you for the flashback,” Wernick said. “No, they’ve evidently not improved. The political climate has deteriorated and the power of disinformation has only increased — and it’s something that we should all be worried about.”
TODAY'S HIGHLIGHTS
— It’s caucus day on the Hill.
— Prime Minister JUSTIN TRUDEAU is in Ottawa. He has caucus at 10 a.m., followed by question period at 2 p.m. and a 4 p.m. meeting with new U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO SUZANNE CLARK.
— Deputy Prime Minister CHRYSTIA FREELAND is in Ottawa with the Liberals’ 10 a.m. caucus meeting is the only public item on her schedule.
9 a.m. Canada 2020 hosts its net-zero leadership summit at Ottawa’s Shaw Centre, drawing speakers including Environment Minister STEVEN GUILBEAULT, NWT Premier CAROLINE COCHRANE, MARK CARNEY, Coalition for a Better Future’s ANNE MCLELLAN and LISA RAITT and former Vancouver mayor GREGOR ROBERTSON.
12:30 p.m. A ministerial SWAT team will hold a media availability to address strike-realted disruptions. Who’s taking reporters’ questions: Treasury Board President MONA FORTIER, Families Minister KARINA GOULD, National Revenue Minister DIANE LEBOUTHILLIER, and Immigration Minister SEAN FRASER.
4:30 p.m. Sen. MARILOU MCPHEDRAN will be on the hot seat at the House citizenship and immigration committee as part of a probe instigated months ago by Conservative MP MICHELLE REMPEL GARNER. The Globe has background here.
HALLWAY CONVERSATION
Canada’s privacy commissioner has joined a slew of other countries in investigating ChatGPT, a rapidly developing artificial intelligence chatbot that privacy regulators believe may be collecting and using personal data without consent.
AI is constantly changing, and no one knows that more than 30-year industry vet OREN ETZIONI, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and the founding CEO of the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence. We caught up with Etzioni as he was getting on a plane to the Ted2023 in Vancouver this week.
Has ChatGPT and AI in general crossed into territory in which our personal data is in danger? Are these countries
The issue is a bit nuanced. Let’s start with the fact I’m not aware of AI looking at text or data that Google hasn’t already indexed. So the fact that a lot of data is out there, and it’s being “ingested by machines” is a long-standing fact. Now, there’s still concerns about what the machine does with that information. And our friends, certainly in Europe, have worried about that maybe more than I do. But fundamentally there is a question here: If AI models are trained using your content, what rights or constraints do you impose on the output on what they’ve learned?
We’ve heard about at least one
I don’t think anybody would be aghast if they heard the government was using word- processing software to draft emails, and spell-checking and grammar-checking capabilities.
If ChatGPT is not subject to human review, or the review is very cursory, then I do think that’s problematic.
The next level is it being used as a tool in drafting policies: You can ask it what policies it would suggest. You can ask it to model different figures back and forth, and again, that’s just using a very valuable tool. That strikes me as great. We want to use the best technology to formulate things. If there is a sort of human rubber stamp using it to actually make policy decisions, that would scare me — that would terrify me.
All the podcasts are talking about it, so … do you think AI can one day become sentient?
We need to talk about what one day is. If you say one day, and that’s 1,000 years or more, sure. But if you’re talking about in the foreseeable future, is this something that we ought to be worrying about, that we need to put in safeguards now, to avoid this?
It’s really a distraction from the more imminent problems we have.
We ought to be researching what’s right now science fiction, or a far-flung possibility. We still need to be thinking about it. But from a policy point of view, what we need to think about is the impact on the market, the impact on misinformation, the effect of jobs. We have many unsolved, imminent problems, and those are the ones that merit a lot more attention.
MEDIA ROOM
— Fox News has opted to settle a defamation lawsuit with Toronto-founded Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over false elections claims, reports POLITICO’s MATT TAYLOR.
— MICHAEL WERNICK blogs a thought on strike optics: “Both sides know that any serious inconveniencing of Canadians through strike action is likely to generate swift backlash, egged on by the conservative media. So they are both motivated to settle.”
— The Hill Times’ LAURA RYCKEWAERT has details about the Senate’s fresh telework policy that comes into effect May 1.
— On The Decibel, Globe and Mail reporter TAVIA GRANT flew to Peru to report on the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise and how it has yet to finish a review.
— The Canadian Press reports: Alberta premier rolls back part of government’s media question restriction policy.
PROZONE
Our latest policy newsletter for Pro subscribers by MAURA FORREST: A soft landing in sight.
In other news for Pros:
— Biden’s EV bet is a gamble on critical minerals.
— ‘Horrible': Manchin rips new EV tax credit guidance.
— U.S. ready to lend Poland $4B for nuclear energy plan.
— Red and blue states are seeing green in forestry offsets.
— Replacing lead pipes with PVC poses new risks, report says.
PLAYBOOKERS
Birthdays: HBD to EMMA GODMERE from CBC’s The House. Best wishes to former MPs PAUL MANLY and JOHN WESTON. Crestview consultant CAMERON DOHERTY also celebrates.
+ Happy anniversary to PAUL WELLS’s blog, which turns one today.
Spotted: Former PM STEPHEN HARPER making a cameo on Alberta Premier DANIELLE SMITH’s Twitter feed.
Heritage Minister PABLO RODRIGUEZ telling reporters in Ottawa he hopes Bill C-11 will receive royal assent this week.
At the Canadian Dental Association reception at the Rideau Club: Revenue Minister DIANNE LEBOUTHILLIER; Liberal MPs ROB OLIPHANT, RECHIE VALDEZ, YVAN BAKER, and BRYAN MAY; Conservative MP STEPHEN ELLIS; NDP MP DON DAVIES; and Sen. COLIN DEACON.
Movers and shakers: Loblaw grocery baron GALEN WESTON is out as president and CEO. The company announced that he will be replaced by Danish retail executive PER BANK.
Maple Leaf Strategies brought on AMANDA MURRAY as a senior consultant. Murray spent eight years on the Hill as a Conservative staffer.
Farewells: The Government of Canada Wikipedia edits Twitter account said “Goodbye” but continued to post.
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On the Hill
→ Find upcoming House committees here
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— It’s caucus day on the Hill.
8:30 a.m. The American Chamber of Commerce in Canada, Business Council of Canada and Canadian Chamber of Commerce host a breakfast at the Westin Hotel to mark SUZANNE CLARK’s first visit to Ottawa as president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
12 p.m. The Senate veterans affairs committee meets to study emerging treatments to address occupational stress injuries.
4 p.m. A study of Global Affairs Canada’s foreign policy machinery continues at the Senate foreign affairs committee with Assistant Deputy Minister SANDRA MCCARDELL and Chief of Protocol STEWART WHEELER on the witness list.
4 p.m. The Senate social affairs, science and technology committee meets to study Bill C-22.
4:15 p.m. Intellectual property lawyers JAMES HINTON and NATALIE RAFFOUL are at the Senate banking committee’s study of business investment in Canada.
4:15 p.m. The Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee meets to study Bill C-9, with testimony from the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers.
4:30 p.m. Sen. MARILOU MCPHEDRAN will be on the hot seat at the House citizenship and immigration committee as part of a probe instigated months ago by Conservative MP MICHELLE REMPEL GARNER. The Globe has background here.
4:30 p.m. National security and defense experts JESSICA DAVIS and LEAH WEST will be witnesses at the House justice committee where Bill C-41 is up for study.
4:30 p.m. MP JEAN-DENIS GARON will be at the House operations committee to discuss Bill C-290. PAMELA FORWARD of the Whistleblowing Canada Research Society will also appear.
4:30 p.m. The House industry committee picks up its study of the electronics, metals and plastics recycling industry.
4:30 p.m. The House agriculture committee continues its study of food price inflation.
6:45 p.m. Thirteen department officials from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, public safety and national defense will be at the Senate national finance committee’s review of the main estimates. Interim RCMP Commissioner MICHAEL DUHEME’s name was dropped from the witness list.
6:45 p.m. Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Chair JENNIFER KHURANA takes the first set of questions from senators about the country’s human rights framework at the Senate Indigenous peoples committee.
— Behind closed doors: The House Indigenous and northern affairs committee will discuss two reports; one is focused on Indigenous languages and the other deals with Arctic sovereignty, security and emergency preparedness.
TRIVIA
Tuesday’s answer: Maya Price is the great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Sir CHARLES TUPPER.
Props to RANDALL PARK, ROBERT SPURRIER, GERMAINE MALABRE, GEORGE SCHOENHOFER, ROBERT MCDOUGALL, STACEY NORONHA, BOB GORDON and ALLAN FABRYKANT.
Wednesday’s question: What is the highest mountain entirely within the boundary of British Columbia?
Think you have a harder trivia question? Send us your best.
Want to grab the attention of movers and shakers on Parliament Hill? Want your brand in front of a key audience of Ottawa influencers? Playbook can help. Contact Jesse Shapiro to find out how: [email protected].
Playbook wouldn’t happen: Without Luiza Ch. Savage and Sue Allan.
Correction: A previous version of this newsletter misstated Michael Wernick’s advice to Canadian lawmakers, which is to follow the U.K.’s lead and introduce new penalties.
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