When asked in the French debate about his failure to lift all boil water warnings in First Nations communities by 2021, as he promised in 2015, he blamed the pandemic for the delay, when in reality liberals were never there. on track to meet its deadline.
Another example came in speaking to reporters in Montreal, when Trudeau said his government had “made concrete progress on a universal national pharmacy agreement with Prince Edward Island.”
The national universal Pharmacare was one of the central promises of the liberal campaign in the last elections, but the government has finally made little progress.
The PEI agreement, signed last month, is not national (obviously) or universal, since although it reduces the costs of drugs for people who are already covered by the public plan, it does not expand to people who are not covered. . Therefore, it was misleading to describe the deal in these terms.
There were a few defensive denials, including two “that’s not true!” interjections responding to rivals in the English debate.
In the first case, responding to Singh’s claim that the government is “taking indigenous children to court”, Trudeau was the deceptive. In fact, the government is challenging in federal court a Canadian Human Rights Court decision requiring Ottawa to pay compensation to indigenous children who ended up in foster care as a result of systematically insufficient medical care. In the second, in response to an accusation by O’Toole that liberals are going to tax primary home sales, Trudeau was right. Liberals propose a tax on people who benefit from home remodeling; very few major residences are affected, so it is wrong to frame the plan that way.
A large part of the minutes of Trudeau’s speeches this week took place in both debates, which meant that he was asked to speak spontaneously more often than the leaders I verified in the previous weeks. At least one false claim – that Canada has evacuated “many” more people from Afghanistan than our European allies (the UK has evacuated more than 15,000; Canada 3,700) – seemed like an impromptu slip.
In total, I found five false claims in 248 minutes of public appearances. I also considered six separate statements to be exaggerated, meaning that the statement is generally true but misleading in the specific context in which Trudeau said it.
That results in a “density of dishonesty” of roughly one false statement every 50 minutes, with each repeated falsehood counting once for each time it was said. For reference, O’Toole’s dishonesty density was one false claim every 30 minutes, Singh’s was one every 46 minutes, and Paul’s was one every 47 minutes.
How do those rates compare to those of “post-truth” politicians like Trump? Either way you look at it, they are far less dishonest: In 2019, Star’s Daniel Dale counted 60 false claims in two hours of a single Trump speech.
With files from Alex Ballingall
See our other fact checks:
• Annamie Paul
• Jagmeet Singh
• Erin O’Toole
Reference-www.thestar.com