To provide the witnesses with some context about a situation that unfolded over the last week, on September 22, CTV News aired a segment about a confidence vote that was going to come before the House, and in that segment CTV deliberately misrepresented the comments of the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition. This is incredibly serious. We're talking about CTV News: They're owned by Bell, a media giant in this country.
What happened is shocking. CTV News spliced together different parts of the Leader of the Opposition's comments to create a false impression. First of all, that created a false statement, something that he never said, but the intention was to create a narrative that the opposition day motion was not about having a carbon tax election—which it was about—but was instead about opposing the Liberals' dental care program, as opposed to being about the carbon tax.
This isn't a situation in which there was an error, a misunderstanding during the editing process or some kind of technical issue. This isn't something that can be communicated away. This was very clearly an effort by a media company, a news organization, to manipulate the statements of the Leader of the Opposition on the eve of a confidence vote in the House of Commons, in a minority parliament. We're talking about misinformation here, and the need to trust, and whom we can trust.
We worry about what we see online, but here we have CTV News. We all know what CTV News is. They created a statement and spliced together multiple sentences to say something that the leader of the opposition did not say. Conservatives were calling for a carbon tax election; they made it about something else. How damaging is this to Canadians' confidence in trusted sources if they can't trust that a major news outlet will just simply report on what's actually being said by the leader of the opposition, but instead deliberately edit a clip to have him say something that he never said?