Davies: Misinformed

As soon as this weekend, we might be heading in to our second election of 2025, and the year isn’t even three months old yet.

The signs are all there, although at the time of this writing, one hasn’t been called yet. Lots of political pundits are pulling dates out of their hats, with sentences beginning with ‘it could happen as early as…’ but nobody knows for sure. Not yet. The biggest sign for West Carleton Online, the one that makes us believe it is fact one is coming real soon, is Kanata-Carleton MP Jenna Sudds has pulled her advertising. The Elections Act makes it illegal for sitting members of parliament to run constituency advertising during a campaign period. So, there you go.

Political ads have been on television for weeks now, they’re easy to recognize. They are the ones that focus on the other candidate, show that candidate through a red filter (the most evil colour) and say a bunch of negative things that may or may not be true. The commercials rarely even mention the candidate who is funding the ad.

Misinformation, fake news, call it what you will, it’s rampant. Some fake news source puts out some fake information with some very real goals. That information is seized on by the public through social media like Facebook or Twitter and shared through the echo chamber by those who know better and those who have no idea at all, amplifying it around the world in minutes. Just like the old saying goes – a lie travels around the city, while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

And absolutely everyone, without a doubt, is opposed to misinformation. Until they use it.

It’s not just foreign actors trying to drum up support for their preferred candidate, it’s the Canadian political parties themselves. And it travels right through the partisan members of the party, the agenda driven media outlets’ so-called editorialists, right through to the voters themselves. Intentionally and unintentionally, it’s rampant. I don’t know who to trust. I sometimes wonder if what I’m writing is true. Especially for this column.

It’s an evil tool for many and a lack of historical understanding and even logic for others.

Just Google Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney with convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate, and you will come up with tons of stories on photos of the two together. The photos circulated around social media early in January, as it began to be evident Carney would win the Liberal leadership race and become the country’s new prime minister. They are fake.

Organizations like Canada Proud, a very right-wing media outlet (but most certainly not a news outlet), launched attack ads based on the photos as if they were real. They spread like wildfire across Facebook, X, and even Reddit.

A Google search’s top hits don’t even frame the photos as fake, and some of those hits allege they are real, two months after the photo hit the Internet. You’ve got to scroll down to the ninth link (again, at the time of this writing) to find the AFP Fact Check link, the first headline that has the word ‘fake’ in it. And it’s the only headline link on the first page with the word ‘fake’ in it.

The more ridiculous the claim, the more likely there is a group that will absolutely believe it. I wrote about this before, but two summers ago, Renfrew County’s public and Catholic school boards had to release a statement saying they did not have litter boxes in their schools. With all the problems with our school boards, this is what they have to spend resources on fixing. There are adults out there, who can’t use logic in a functional way, that believe there are Ottawa Valley children between the ages of five and 14, who demand the opportunity to go to the bathroom in a really unconventional way, in front of their peers. And almost every time I tell this story, there is invariably some person who tells me, they know for a fact, there’s one at…and then they name some school they have zero connection to. And in all this time, going on three years now, with all the cell phones in kids and teachers’ hands, I have never, not once, seen a photo of said litter box. All these people who are so incensed by these so-called gender issues harming our children, somehow have not bothered to collect one shred of evidence confirming this fact. I don’t know about you, but between my daughter’s school, my daughter’s club basketball and my job, I’m at a school 30 to 40 times a year – and that ranges between 10 to 15 different schools between Stittsville and Renfrew, and while I’m not looking, have never once come across one of these board-sanctioned litter boxes.

But misinformation isn’t always extreme either. Sometimes it is very subtle. In West Carleton, one of the top issues of the community is the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) facility proposed for South March. Those who read our letters section know there are a number people both in favour and opposed to the project. I have spoken to many on the BESS issue, and I would say, of that group, it is almost equally divided between those for and against.

Carleton Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy (the new riding we find ourselves in for the federal election) made his first visit to West Carleton recently. It was his first time. At the small gathering at the Constance Bay community centre, the topic of BESS came up, and the topic put to someone who was hearing about the issue for the very first time was asked, “if the whole community is opposed to the project, would you also be opposed to it?”

Immediately, two others spoke up and said the whole community was not against it. The BESS topic took over the conversation for the next 20 minutes and at least two more times the person reiterated the whole community was against it.

Top 10 stories for the first three months of 2025

Between Jan. 1 and March 22, we’ve had 118,945 pageviews. So far this year, BESS has dominated the conversation, and it all started with Evolugen’s announcement it was moving BESS to South March.

1. Op-ed: Evolugen moving BESS to South March. (Jan. 20, 3,700 pageviews). The story that started it all. There were rumours in the community it was coming, but on Jan. 20, the company officially announced a new location for their BESS project.
2. Letter: Reader’s thoughts on Evolugen’s open house (Feb. 24, 1,223 pageviews). There were lots of thoughts on the BESS public meeting format before it happened. In this letter, a reader discusses his thoughts after the meeting.
3. Letter: South March landowner excited for BESS project (Jan. 20, 1,145 pageviews). The owner of the property shares his opinion on the project proposed for it.
4. Family, friends fundraise for Kinburn senior who lost everything in fire (Feb. 25, 1,055 pageviews). A well-known community volunteer loses her home to fire. We will miss her Christmas lights.
5. Emergency briefs: Kinburn home destroyed by fire, Tow truck blitz, Renfrew woman faces 13 mischief charges (Feb. 20, 721 pageviews). We much prefer it when the fundraising story (above) outperforms the incident story as it did in this case.
6. ARAc BESS talk led by Ward 5 (Jan. 23, 648 pageviews). While the South March BESS wasn’t on the agenda, it dominated the conversation anyways.
7. Dunrobin plaza sold, expected to be busy soon (March 18, 631 pageviews). This story is only five days old, including two weekend days, which shows you just how important this longstanding issue is to the community.
8. BESS petition signing draws a crowd (Jan. 27, 567 pageviews). It was only a matter of time before an anti-BESS story emerged, and we’re kind of surprised it took until Number 8.
9. A South March BESS site tour (Feb. 4, 556 pageviews). We took the tour.
10. BESS open house packed with opinion. (Feb. 25, 474 pageviews). Did we miss any BESS stories?