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Shawn Buckley
I’d like to call our first witness to the stand. It’s Mr. Rodney Palmer. Mr. Palmer, can I have you state your full name for the record and then spell your first and last name?

Rodney Palmer
My name is Rodney James Palmer and its R-O-D-N-E-Y and the last name is P-A-L-M-E-R.

Shawn Buckley
Mr. Palmer, do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Rodney Palmer
I do.

Shawn Buckley
Now, my understanding is that you have worked as a journalist in Canada for 20 years.

Rodney Palmer
Yes, I’ve been retired for about as long, but yes, I did. I worked very intensely as a journalist here in the country for a number of media outlets.

Shawn Buckley
And that includes being a general assignment reporter for The Globe and Mail newspaper.

Rodney Palmer
Yes.

Shawn Buckley
And you worked as a daily news reporter at the Vancouver Sun.

Rodney Palmer
I did.

Shawn Buckley
You worked as a producer and investigative reporter at CBC Radio and Television.

Rodney Palmer
Yes.

Shawn Buckley
You were the foreign correspondent and bureau chief for CTV News based in India, then Israel and finally in China, based in Beijing.

Rodney Palmer
Yes.

Shawn Buckley
Can you tell us about your involvement in reporting on the SARS outbreak in China? Because my understanding is you were there at the time.

Rodney Palmer
I lived in Beijing and worked for CTV News every day, and that’s when the SARS epidemic broke out. I followed it extremely carefully. I went to weekly briefings with the World Health Organization. I went to weekly briefings with the China Foreign Ministry and we attempted to cover the story as best we could from there.

One of the significant stories that I worked on was the virus hunters. I thought this was a great phrase. What’s a virus hunter? And this is a group of academic experts that come into a situation like SARS when it starts. And China allowed them to get as far as Beijing but they wouldn’t let them come to Guangzhou, where it was believed that was the patient one. And what they were trying to find was patient one.

So I had a little bit of experience with epidemics, pandemics, when COVID started. And I started noticing that it was extremely different. I was watching it very carefully as the news was trickling out of China. It hadn’t come to Canada yet but, when they shut down Wuhan, I knew that it was very, very different. This was something that had not occurred before.

Shawn Buckley
Now, I’m going to skip over, unless we have time later on, about your involvement with reporting on biolabs in Canada. But you’ve been asked to testify about the standard process of newsgathering versus propaganda at the CBC, and I’m wondering if you can tell us about that this morning.

Rodney Palmer
So to begin my presentation?

Shawn Buckley
Yes, please.

Rodney Palmer
I started noticing that something very different was happening at the CBC because I’m familiar with the process. I wanted to talk today specifically about the CBC, although what I’m about to say goes for most media, news media, in Canada. But the CBC is very different. If you’re the Toronto Star or CTV News or any private entity, Global News, and you want to publish something that maybe isn’t true or you want to take the position of a pharmaceutical company, you can do that. If you want to trick your viewers into believing something that isn’t true, there’s really nothing to stop them from doing that. However, the CBC is a public entity. We pay for it. It broadcasts on the public airwaves, and we expect them to tell us the truth because they’ve done it for 50 or 60 years.

So what I started noticing was something very different. About a week, maybe two at the most, into the emergency, there was a story on “The National” by Adrienne Arsenault, one of the greatest broadcasters we have, a national treasure. Adrienne has a particular ability to appear to be discovering the facts in the moment, even if it’s take-20. She can do it every time. She’s a genius at what she does. But she turned this ability against us.

I saw a piece on the 4th of April where she opens up and she’s looking at her phone and she says, “What do you do if this happens? Somebody sends you a family text, say it’s your father, and he thinks that the virus was manufactured by China.” This is on April 4th, 2020. It says 2023 on the slide. That’s incorrect. It was 2020. And I thought, well, wait a minute. How do you know it wasn’t manufactured in a lab in China? What evidence does the CBC have 20 days into this, or 15 days into this, that this was not manufactured in a lab? There was an assumption that she put forth instantly. And then she went to an expert guest who said, “Well, don’t embarrass your father. You’ll just push him away.”

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You’ve got to bring him in and you’ve got to kind of convince him. And I thought, well, I’m a father. Who are you speaking to? You’re telling my children not to believe their father. I have some expertise and some experience in this particular field. And I thought it was shocking that the CBC was trying to get in between me and my children. And the expert witness was from an organization called First Draft. And she simply says, “I’m from First Draft. We’re a non-profit that helps people navigate misinformation on the media”. And I think of non-profits, I think of the Cancer Society, the Diabetes Society. I don’t think of a group of people who are attempting to change the minds of strangers from believing things that they don’t want them to believe. I thought that was all very odd.

So I looked into First Draft and I saw that this organization was developed, and is developing, “new techniques and methodologies for investigating online spaces. Our latest approach revolves around the concept of recipes. As with food recipes,” says their website, “these steps give directions to investigators” or to reporters. So they give samples of what you can do. They say, “here’s an Investigation: How anti-vaccination websites build audiences and monetize information.” This is two weeks into the emergency. “Here’s the Recipe: how are these anti-vaccination websites funded?” Investigate the ad trackers with Gephi and DMI tracker tool. Now these are tools that they provide to, apparently, the CBC.
Now there was a story that circulated later about anti-vaccination websites on Marketplace and how they make their money. So this First Draft group is now feeding the CBC their stories.

A second example: Pro-Russian networks are driving anti-Pfizer vaccine disinformation. Now, I don’t know why the CBC has to get behind Pfizer, which has paid out the largest criminal settlement in the history of American justice, but this is what this organization is saying: “Don’t be against Pfizer. The Russians are behind it.” The recipe was: “Track misinformation across platforms such as 4chan, 8kun and Reddit.” So they’re even telling them how to go after them, where to go after them. They’re directing the CBC. I was astonished that this organization was put forth as an expert on how to not believe your father, but not embarrass him at the same time. So this to me had nothing to do with newsgathering.

Ten days later, after the CBC did that story, the Washington Post did some real journalism. They pointed out that the State Department cables were sent from the US Embassy in Beijing to Washington in 2018, warning about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that it was unhygienic. And in particular, they said there was “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is January 2018. And there were two cables sent, and the reporter saw one of them. “The first cable, which I obtained,” he says, this is Josh Rogan from the Washington Post, “warns that the labs work on bat coronaviruses, and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”

So not only at the moment when Adrienne Arsenault was telling you, “Don’t believe your father if he thinks it came from a lab,” it was not only probable that COVID came from the lab, but it had been predicted that it would happen two years prior by the US government. So how does Adrienne Arsenault say it wasn’t and don’t believe anyone, including your family?

Flash forward a year: Vanity Fair magazine, which is known for its excellent investigative reporting, published an extremely long and exhaustive piece where all they did was go online and look at publicly available scientific papers going back about a decade.

The first one in 2013 was by Shi Zhengli, who’s the director of emerging infectious disease at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She’s known as the bat lady, and this is not a derogatory term. Actually, her scientist friends started calling her that because there was an outbreak of a SARS-like respiratory virus in a mine, and the miners died very, very quickly. And she is documented to having gone to that mine, scraped the bat guano off the mine, and brought it to Wuhan to examine.

In 2014, she began publishing about the coronavirus from Chinese bats. In 2015, there was another paper that Vanity Fair found where Shi Zhengli discussed successfully inserting a protein from this Chinese horseshoe bat virus into the SARS virus of 2002, creating a brand-new infectious pathogen. In 2015, this scientific paper was published.
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Vanity Fair found it online. CBC could have found it, but they were too busy telling you don’t trust anyone who believes this.

In 2019, there was a paper actually published by one of the lab directors at Wuhan, outlining the safety deficiencies in the Wuhan lab where he worked. And in 2019, right around the time that the US government, the US embassy in Beijing was warning Washington about a potential SARS-like pandemic leaking out of this unhygienic lab, a number of the Wuhan lab scientists published a paper together describing genetically engineered rats that they had grown with humanized lungs and developed them in the Wuhan lab.

So this is a pretty hot smoking gun coming out of the Wuhan lab. There are three labs in the world working on coronavirus, according to the Vanity Fair investigation. Two of them in the United States, one of them is in Wuhan. If this thing started at a wet market outside the Wuhan lab, it was because one of the staff members of the Wuhan lab walked into the wet market and brought it there. That is the most likely scenario.

Now flash forward to this month, March 2023, US FBI Chief Christopher Wray says that China lab leak was most likely. The quote is, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.” So the CBC had no evidence that it wasn’t. They wanted you to believe that it wasn’t.

There’s a definition of newsgathering, and you’ll see interestingly that “newsgathering” is one word in the English language. It’s not two words as it appears that it should be. And that’s because it’s very specific. It’s the process of doing research on news items, especially ones that will be broadcast on television or printed in a newspaper.

Now, how much research was done by the CBC to determine, 10 days after the emergency, that it didn’t happen in a lab? Another definition here is propaganda: “Persuasive mass communication that filters and frames the issues of the day in a way that strongly favors particular interests, usually those of a government or a corporation. Also, the intentional manipulation of public opinion through lies and half truths and the selective retelling of history.” This is what was going on in that piece. That’s why it felt so wrong to me because there was no news involved. There was only propaganda.

What the Washington Post did with its lab leak theory story, 10 days after the CBC said it wasn’t from the lab, was newsgathering. It was investigative reporting. What the CBC did when it said, “don’t trust your family if they think it came from a lab,” that’s propaganda. That’s the difference in the definition of those two things.

The Vanity Fair piece: reviewing scientific publications for a decade, uncovering the fact that human lungs were engineered on rats in Wuhan lab in 2019 just before the outbreak, is newsgathering. Exceptional newsgathering, I’m jealous of how good that newsgathering was. What the BBC did reporting on the FBI, saying they’ve known for a long time that it came from the lab, was newsgathering. That’s kind of news of the day, daily news. They said it. We’re telling you they said it. What the CBC did by warning Canadians not to trust their fathers about a lab leak theory was propaganda.

March 4th, 2021, about a year after the emergency, the editor in chief of CBC News, Brodie Fenlon, wrote on his blog: “A recent survey found that about half of Canadians think journalists are purposely trying to mislead them.” Well, that’s because we’re on to you. At least half of us pay attention to our gut and we know that you are purposely trying to mislead us.

But Mr. Fenlon said that CBC is going to correct this. To promote trust in journalism, the CBC has joined four organizations. I didn’t know that they joined these organizations until I began to look into this a little bit. One of them is called the Trusted News Initiative, which is designed to filter news through its own “Trust Filter System.” Another one’s called the Journalism Trust Initiative. It’s basically the same name, but this one does more or less the same thing. Another one’s called the Trust Project, and then Project Origin. Notice that none of these organizations have the word ‘truth’ in them. If you tell the truth consistently, trust is automatic. If you don’t tell the truth consistently, you have to say things like, “please trust me.”

I’m just going to quickly outline what these things are, because they’re all basically the same thing. The Trusted News Initiative and the CBC announced together on the 27th, prior to the Adrienne Arsenault piece,

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that CBC and Radio Canada are “joining an industry collaboration of major media and technology organizations to rapidly identify and stop the spread of harmful coronavirus disinformation.”

I think the pandemic really started in China about four months prior to this, and four months prior to an unknown virus killing so many people, there is no disinformation.
The scientists among our commissioners will tell you there is only information, and all information is critical at the beginning—particularly at the beginning. So immediately, they were in a position of pushing one side of the story. Stopping misinformation means censoring, censorship, pure and simple.

The Journalism Trust Initiative, a second organization that they joined, is run by an outfit called Reporter Sans Frontières, Reporters Without Borders. And when I was working as a correspondent in the Middle East, Reporters Without Borders would take the side of, say, a Syrian journalist who was writing something against the dictator Hafez al-Assad and maybe had been imprisoned, and they were trying to bring the attention of the world to this imprisoned journalist. That’s the kind of excellent work this group did.

In 2020, it shifted completely to start something called the Journalism Trust Initiative, starting an algorithmic indexing based on their criteria to improve your revenues. Meaning if you run your news organization through their filter, they’ll make sure that it gets up to the top of the Google page, so you’ll get more clicks and more money will improve your revenue. There was an incentive there.

Project Origin is another one that is a collaboration between the CBC, the BBC, the New York Times, and Microsoft. And one of these organizations is not a news organization, it’s a tech organization. One of the things they talk about here is that the “technical provenance approach, in conjunction with media education and synthetic media detection techniques” to help “establish a foundation of trust.” Not truth, trust is what they’re looking for.

One of their tools is called “The power of the machine—harnessing AI to fight disinformation.” I can only surmise from this that Microsoft is using AI to identify anybody speaking words that they want to identify as to be censored or call misinformation, label misinformation, so you will agree with their censorship.
The next one is called the Trust Project. Now this one is largely tech. Craigslist, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are involved, again, “Helping tech support trustworthy news.” Helping tech. What do we care about tech and truth and news? How are they together all of a sudden? “We stand for integrity.” They say: “Look for our 8 Trust Indicators. We built the trust indicators.” So they have listed— All they have to do is tell the truth, they don’t need no eight trust indicators. And interestingly, Google, Facebook, and Bing all use the trust indicators in display and behind the scenes. So somehow, they are censoring it before it gets to you.

These are the members of the Trust Project. Now, this goes way beyond the CBC. The Globe and Mail is also in there. CTV is a member. The Walrus magazine in Canada is supposed to be an independent thought magazine; they’re part of this project. The Canadian Press. I put this up there to let you know that it is not just the CBC. The reason they all sound the same is because they’re all part of this trust campaign.

But the CBC is also part of something else, it’s something with just public broadcasters. It’s called the Global Task Force for Public Media. “The Global Task Force exists to defend the values and interests of Public Media.” Excellent. But it was formed to develop a consensus and a single strong voice among them. And that’s the CBC, BBC News, ABC Australia, Korean Broadcasting—they joined recently—France Television, Radio New Zealand, ZDF from Germany and SVT from Sweden. Now, I can’t imagine having worked at the CBC for almost a decade and being told every day, “Our job is to elevate the voices of Canadians on Canadian stories, to unite our vast country and make us all feel as one.”

What single issue do we have with Korean Broadcasting when that is our mandate? What issue does Radio New Zealand have with Swedish television when their mandate is the same, to elevate their own people. This is a bizarre conglomerate of public broadcasters. And I would put forth to the panel that the public broadcasters are the ones that are not easily bought because the advertisers don’t exist and therefore, they have no influence. So something else was done here.

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Now the public task force is headed by our CBC president, Catherine Tate. She is the current president. Three months ago, she gave a speech at Simon Fraser University. The first word out of her mouth was “trust.” “Trust seems to be in short supply.” The next phrase is “disinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” “YouTube rabbit hole.” This is the Trusted News Initiative mantra. This is what she was talking about at Simon Fraser University. She goes around, makes speeches and says, “Please trust us.”

So let’s get to what they do. In addition to the first piece that I saw on “The National” that rubbed me the wrong way, I listened to a piece one day in my car by Matt Galloway. Again, a national treasure. I love this guy. When I first heard him on CBC Toronto, I thought, “Oh my God, there’s a future. He might be the next Gzoski.” And then he turned on us.

He did a story on March 29th, 2021 where he interviewed a guy from something called the Center for Countering Digital Hate. And I thought this was going to be about anti-Semitism or something, digital hate. Instead, the guy said, “People who are recommending vitamin C intravenous and hydrogen peroxide nebulization are hate.” And I thought, well, how is recommending health treatments— Vitamin C intravenous has been going on for 50 years. It’s used in cancer treatment. It’s used in all kinds of treatment. Hydrogen peroxide nebulization is a simple drugstore, hydrogen peroxide 3 per cent mixed with water and vaporized into a mass so you clean out your nasal passage and stop viral replication and it’s common. You can buy them.

So how are these things dangerous? How are they hateful? It was particularly interesting to me. But the expert guest went on to say that these people will kill. And he said that the hydrogen peroxide nebulizers, which are benign, are literally inhaling bleach. This was his words, literally inhaling bleach. It’s actually not; it’s actually literally a hydrogen peroxide nebulizer. It’s literally nebulizing hydrogen peroxide. It’s not literally inhaling bleach. Inhaling bleach is literally inhaling bleach. He lied.

So why is he lying to Matt Galloway? Why is Matt Galloway letting him lie to me on the radio? And I know it’s a lie for a fact. The same guy from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who also went on to say anti-vaccine misinformation is hate. Which I believe diminishes the power of that word for all those who have experienced it. He went on Marketplace to say this, but then Marketplace took it to the next level. They became a censor.

Marketplace reported 800 pieces of information to social media giants attempting to have them censored, claiming they were misinformation. And then they complained that the media giants only took down 12 per cent of what CBC said was wrong on the internet.

My questions are: Since when is the CBC deciding what misinformation on other media platforms is? What is it their business? They’re the CBC. Do your job, pay attention to yourself. Why are you going out correcting, in your view, what’s wrong with other media? How is the CBC or Marketplace or this reporter qualified to comb the internet for 800 posts and declare them to be false? We never found out in the piece. And who at the CBC is the arbiter of truth and misinformation on behalf of us Canadians, who like to decide for ourselves?

So I wrote a letter to the head of journalistic standards at CBC, Paul Hambleton, who has since left the position. I asked him to do three things for me please. I told him who I was and that I’d worked there and I named some people that we would know in common. And I said, “Please supply me with the policy at the CBC that describes the mandate to correct what you deem to be misinformation by other organizations. Please include the process by which information is deemed to be incorrect, and therefore requires correction or censorship by the CBC.” And I asked to, “Please supply me with any other example outside of the COVID-19 story where CBC corrects what it deems to be misinformation on social media.” Now he did reply to me, but he didn’t answer any of those questions.

Another thing that the CBC has done very successfully is it’s promoted a new identifiable group of Canadians and fomented hate against them: the anti-vaxxer. What is an anti-vaxxer? Who is an anti-vaxxer? Does someone whose partner had a severe reaction to the vaccine and was told they must get a second one if they want to keep their job? And then they had a worse reaction and this happened. And I’ve talked to people, I know it exists.
Then maybe they don’t want their kid to get it. Are they an anti-vaxxer? Do they need to have mental correction, psychological retraining?

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What does an anti-vaxxer believe? We don’t really know, other than it’s bad and you should fear them, according to the CBC.

There was an interview with a Conservative member of Parliament named Marilyn Gladu from Sarnia, Ontario at a time when the House of Commons was about to reopen to parliamentarians and a number of the Conservative MPs had a very serious concern about the mandate against them. There was anywhere between 15 and 30 of them. They were starting a mini caucus of, I suppose, the unvaccinated. Now, Marilyn Gladu bravely took the interview with CBC about this because it was only going to go one way. And Katie Simpson, who— Again, an amazing journalist, I think Katie’s fantastic at what she does— Pardon my language but she beat the hell out of this woman on the air. Everything that Marilyn Gladu said, which was reasonable and thoughtful, Katie responded: “Aren’t you just giving air to the anti-vaxxers? Isn’t this giving support to the anti-vaxxers?” The anti-vaxxer became the boogeyman in this story and Marilyn Gladu held herself extremely well.

At one point, Katie said, “Are any of your unvaccinated colleagues going to try to get into the House of Commons?” I thought, wow, you’ve just framed them as like break-in artists or petty criminals here. Marilyn Gladu answered, “Probably not. They need a passport to get in and they’ll never get past the guard.” And then she said, “Will you go to the Parliament?” And Marilyn Gladu very coyly said, “Well, show up on the day and see if I come.” And she stopped the interview and repeated the question and said: “This is a matter of public safety. Are you going to come?” In that moment she framed every unvaccinated person, including her guest on the show, as a danger to public safety.

Katie Simpson had no evidence—and still has no evidence—that an unvaccinated person is any more likely to transmit COVID than a vaccinated person. And we now know that there’s really no difference. If anything, if you have natural immunity, you’re less likely to get it or spread it. She had no scientific evidence. She had no basis of it. That’s because this was not newsgathering. She was practising propaganda.

An excellent example of CBC propaganda was a piece they had, “Meet the unvaccinated.” Those people—who are these strange people? “Why some Canadians still haven’t had the shot.” The sub headline was: “Some suspect the science, some don’t think they’re vulnerable, and some just don’t trust the government.” There was no mention that the vaccines were not fully tested by the standards that vaccines have always been tested in Canada. No mention of that. People knew that but there was no mention that that’s maybe why they didn’t want to do it. There was no mention of the adverse reactions that were already at this point being reported on government websites, including deaths from the COVID-19 vaccines. They eliminated that side of the story. They suppressed one side. Because it wasn’t newsgathering, it was propaganda.

On January 15th, 2021, the CBC published a story where they talked about a scientific paper that was written by a number of esteemed Canadian scientists and academics that the COVID-19 booster shots didn’t work. They were only 37 per cent effective against Omicron. The story was then updated. Somehow. they shifted the data and it was a slight difference. The CBC story was: the original study was “seized on by anti-vaxxers—highlighting the dangers of early research in pandemic.” In other words, “Don’t trust the scientists. The anti-vaxxers will put their message out.” This study found that the boosters only worked 30 per cent. They were only 37 per cent effective. The story goes on to say that the study was revised. But not before being spread widely on social media by anti-vaxxers, academics and the Russians. So we got some boogeyman in there, the Russians, but they’re saying anti-vaxxers— This group they’re fomenting hate against is equated with academics now. Now they’re belittling the academics because they don’t like what they’re saying. Not because what the academics are saying isn’t true, but the CBC has a different message for us.

This is the most mind-blowing part of this particular story. Bear with me here for a minute. When the findings were updated with additional data, they showed very different results, say the CBC. The researchers found that vaccine effectiveness was 36 per cent, even less, against symptomatic Omicron seven to 59 days after two doses. So after your second dose, you got about a month. And then it’s only 36 per cent effective, with no protection after six months.

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So they were no good six months later. By any measure of vaccine, they don’t work, or our expectations of a vaccine, they don’t work. But after six months—or after the booster, it was 61 per cent effective one week after the booster. Now notice, so that’s the correction: instead of one week after the booster being 37 per cent effective, it was 61 per cent effective. This is a marginal difference. This is not a dramatic difference. It’s particularly because there’s a qualifying language. And I’m trained to recognize qualifying language because it’s redundant and it should always be removed before broadcast. It used to be called “not ready for air,” but now it’s broadcast regularly. So 61 per cent effective one week after the booster. What about two weeks after the booster? They’re not telling us. Maybe it went down to this 37, we don’t know. Because they are selectively telling. This is—and the definition of propaganda—this is a half truth. It’s not the whole truth.

This is a collection of headlines that were between May 2021 and September 2021. And I’ll take you back to— This is the big push for vaccine mandates. The university kids all had to get vaccinated if they wanted to go to school. Government workers had to get vaccinated by around mid-September. I’ll just read them quickly. A “psychologist explains vaccine hesitancy.” “Experts weigh in on the possible factors behind hesitancy.” “Black Canadians are more hesitant about COVID-19, survey says.” “Vaccine hesitancy can make for awkward talks,” like if you don’t believe your father, “mediator says.” “These people were vaccine hesitant. Here’s why they changed their mind.” May 12th, 2021. “CBC poll: Results give us an idea of who the vaccine hesitant in Alberta really are.” Who are these strange people? “University of Calgary vaccine hesitancy guide gives doctors facts for struggling patients,” who are struggling with whether to take the vaccine.

None of these offer a second perspective about why people might be vaccine hesitant. They strongly favoured one particular interest and that is defined as propaganda, not newsgathering.

The next thing that the CBC did in conjunction was the suppression of medicine. Ivermectin was shown worldwide to be effective, particularly in developing countries where they have it available because ivermectin is used there regularly. On September 2nd, 2021— again, right around the time when we needed to have no medicine because they wanted to force the mandate. This is from CBC broadcast, “Health Canada is warning people not to take a drug meant for horses and cows to combat COVID-19. Ivermectin is a dewormer in animals,” and “can cause serious illness, even death in humans.”

This is a lie that was told to Canada by the CBC on behalf of Health Canada. The fact is that ivermectin is human medicine. It’s a miracle medicine, and its inventor was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2015. It says—and this is from the Nobel Prize website—he “cultured a bacteria, which produce substances that inhibit the growth of other microorganisms.” Maybe, that’s how it works. In 1978, he succeeded in culturing a strain called avermectin, “which in a chemically modified form, ivermectin, proved effective against river blindness and elephantiasis”. In fact, it eliminated river blindness virtually in South America through millions and millions of doses, and nobody dying from it like the CBC says you might.

And this wasn’t just the CBC. This was a global push to suppress ivermectin. An attorney general in the state of Nebraska decided to do a legal opinion and sign his name to it, in which he said, “In the decade leading up to COVID-19 pandemic, studies began to show ivermectin’s surprising versatility,” which is why it’s used for things other than river blindness. “By 2017, ivermectin had demonstrated antiviral activity against several RNA viruses, including influenza, Zika, HIV, and Dengue.”

I covered a dengue epidemic in India in 1998, at which time the doctors told me the trouble with dengue versus malaria, where the symptoms are very similar, is there’s treatment for malaria; there’s none for dengue. And that was 1998. By 2017, they were realizing ivermectin was the miracle cure for dengue, or at least had been shown to have some positive results. Another review, says this state attorney general in Nebraska—and a review of course is a look at multiple, multiple studies. They review multiple studies and they come up with a final conclusion.

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It “summarized the antiviral effects of Ivermectin demonstrated through studies over the past 50 years.” It wasn’t new and it wasn’t deadly.

Shawn Buckley
Mr. Palmer I’ll just let you know, we’re about 10 minutes. Just to help time yourself. Thank you.

Rodney Palmer
Okay. So the Alberta Health Services on October 5th had published on their website that ivermectin is FDA- and Health Canada-approved for people. Not just cows and horses. It is used to treat parasitic infections, intestinal infections, and now even rosacea. The Indian Express wrote that the state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of about 250 million people, had dramatically reduced the COVID positivity rate and eventually—three months after this published article—reduced the COVID death rate to zero in Uttar Pradesh.

When a doctor named Daniel Nagase walked into an emergency room in Alberta and found three people dying of COVID—their charts showed that they were getting worse every day—he decided, based on the Alberta Health Services, based on these stories out of Uttar Pradesh, to ask them if they wanted to try ivermectin. It was their choice. They all said yes and they all got better. Then he was fired for doing that. He spoke out about that and somebody recorded it and put it on a social media and the CBC did this story: “Doctor who says he gave ivermectin to rural Alberta COVID-19 patients prompts a warning from the Health Authority for spreading misinformation.” In the same story, he says, “the drug worked quickly, allowing all three to leave the hospital.”

I called Daniel Nagase, Dr. Nagase. I interviewed him, and he said one of them was 90 and he went back to his nursing home. They almost got completely better within 18 hours. But another Alberta Health Services medical director barred the patients from getting any more of the drug.

Can you imagine? If you can’t breathe and somebody gives you a pill and you can breathe, and another doctor comes in and says you’re not getting any more? That happened. It’s in this CBC News story. And they went after the guy who cured them. Dr. Nagase was removed from the hospital and relieved of his medical duties the following day.

The story here is that a doctor cured COVID with a pill that cost a nickel, that’s already been working all around the world. We can all go back to our hockey rinks. We can all go back to our jobs. We don’t need the experimental vaccine. There’s a pill. All we have to do is put a good supply in every hospital in Canada. And if anybody gets sick enough that they can’t breathe, they go into the hospital, they’re administered ivermectin and 18 to 36 hours later, they’re breathing and they go home. End. Of. Pandemic.

Dr. Nagase should be on a stamp. Twenty years from now, there should be a little vignette about that moment when he decided, “I’m going to try this drug and end COVID-19 in Canada.” Instead, the CBC went after his throat. Because it’s propaganda, it’s not newsgathering. This is the photograph on the slide here of the ivermectin from the CBC website, under which the cut line says: “Ivermectin is used primarily to rid livestock of parasites.” I’ll draw your attention to the box in the photograph’s hands and the yellow on the right-hand corner, where there is a picture of three human beings. This is international and multilingual. There’s an adult and an adolescent and a baby. And the baby has an X through it because you give babies ivermectin in a liquid suspension so they don’t choke on the pill. This is human ivermectin, photograph on the CBC website and they’re saying it’s for livestock. This is a lie, a half-truth, disinformation—propaganda brought to you by the CBC.

What the Indian Express did by telling what the Chief Minister said about ivermectin’s success was newsgathering. What the CBC did saying ivermectin is for horses and cows and can cause death was a lie and it was only propaganda. There’s no other way to describe it.

Quickly going, because I’m running out of time here, to the Freedom Convoy. I happened to be in Ottawa visiting friends. I had been doing some volunteer work with the Canadian COVID Care Alliance, which is an excellent group of scientists. I encourage everyone to look at their website if they’re looking for truth instead of trust.

There’s a photograph here of your witness standing in front of the Peace Tower in Ottawa looking down on all the Canadian flags, the Quebec flags, the Freedom Convoy. These are the photographs I took. Families, somebody holding the Charter of Rights. Freedom, lest we forget from the vets, and God Bless. This is what I saw and the very first report on the CBC was by an excellent reporter named David Common. And he’s walking—you can look this up—he’s walking through the crowd and he’s feeling that positive energy and he can’t even contain himself. He says, “It’s a party, there’s jubilance, thousands of Canadians protesting the mandates.” That was day one.

[00:40:00]

On day two, these pictures emerged. Nazi flag, Confederate flag. The Confederate flag is largely meaningless in Canada because it doesn’t have any history in our country, but it is a symbol of hate and it’s used as a symbol of hate. When these photographs emerged, our Prime Minister came out and condemned the hateful rhetoric. He said he will not meet people who promote hate. So that was it.

If that’s 100,000 Nazis out there, I don’t know where we were hiding them before this day. But we had 100,000 Nazis according to the Prime Minister, who are promoting hate. End of story. No meeting, not going to discuss your issue.

So I did what any journalist would do and I looked for a reaction story. “The Prime Minister says this about you. What’s your reaction?” I went up and I knocked on the very first truck that was very close to the CBC building, maybe about 200 meters from the CBC. I knocked on the very first truck and I interviewed the very first trucker.

[First video clip is played of Rodney Palmer interviewing truckers in Ottawa]

[Video clip] Rodney Palmer
What would you say to the politicians like Trudeau, Singh, the Mayor of Ottawa who say this is organized by the far-right extremists and the racists?

[Video clip] Trucker 1
I’d say you’re all lying. You know you’re lying. Look at me. Look right around in Ottawa. We are from every nation, every country, every background. Every colour that you can possibly find, you can find in Ottawa in the last couple of days. You know you’re lying. And that’s false.

Rodney Palmer
And like a good journalist, I went to the next truck. I didn’t just take his word for it that he wasn’t a white supremacist. I asked this man at the very next truck:

[Second video clip is played of Rodney Palmer interviewing truckers in Ottawa]

[Video Clip] Rodney Palmer
Is this a group of far-right extremists and racists?

[Video Clip] Trucker 2
That’s just garbage. That’s hogwash. Because they are people from all walks of life out here. I’m a man of colour. And I have every few trucks that go down, there’s someone of colour here. There are people in the street that are coloured. I’m not too sure where they’re getting that from or who they’re looking at or who they’re talking to, because this is nothing like that. Right? There might be a few folks here who want to spread a different agenda and try to tarnish what we stand for. But that’s them seeing a far-right movement, that could not be further from the truth.

[Video Clip] Rodney Palmer
Why are you really here?

[Vide Clip] Trucker 2
I’m here to stand up for fellow truckers and push back. Because the government keeps pushing us, pushing us, and it’s not democratic anymore. If the government will try to control the people and force you to do things against your will.

Rodney Palmer
Why weren’t these guys on the CBC? It’s their job to go out and do a live. It’s not even hard, they just had to walk. It was right outside their door. I asked, I went out and I found another guy. Look at this guy. “Do I look like a white supremacist to you?” says this man of colour. He is a very interesting guy. When he heard about the Trucker Convoy, he was living in Calgary. He got in the car with his wife and his very young child, I think his son was about four, and they drove all the way to Ottawa to support. But these three pictures were defining that movement: the Nazi flags and the Confederate flags. And I didn’t see them. I was there those first five days. I didn’t see any of these flags.

Rebel News, which is an alternative news, which was marginal because it’s largely a conservative mouthpiece, I guess you would call it, trying to get rid of Trudeau and put a conservative government and that’s kind of their position. But during the last three years, there’s been more truth on Rebel News than I’ve seen on any other media in all of Canada. And I say that as an experienced journalist. Their intrepid reporter, Alexa Lavoie, who I think is one of the greatest investigative reporters in Canada today, noticed that these three pictures were taken by three different people. One of them by David Chan, a long-time liberal photographer. One of them by Andrew Mead, a known Trudeau photographer. And another by Randy Boswell, who’s a reporter, a writer, I guess. But he writes a lot, oh, about misinformation, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, this is his—

So how did they all get in the exact same place? She noticed that the Peace Tower is in the same aspect ratio, the same distance, depth, as in all of the three pictures. All three of these people were in the exact same spot when that guy unfurled that flag. She was curious about that. These two pictures were the only ones seen of the Nazi flag. And the reason they’re still pictures is because it wasn’t unfurled long enough for any of the 10,000 cameras in the place to see it and film it. She went to the first one on the left, and she found that it’s a little parkette setting. She found the setting and she noticed that it was nowhere near the protest. It was down on a little walkway. So this entire thing with all these flags was staged, according to the report.

The second one on the right is very interesting because the camera angle is from down below. And she tried to reproduce that camera angle, but she had to go down to the Rideau Canal, which was locked and closed because they do that every winter because of the snow, and it’s for safety reasons.

[00:45:00]

So she wondered: How did someone get down to that spot in a locked and closed area at the moment that that flag was unfurled? And she pointed out that it was on the west wall of the Chateau Laurier Hotel next to the Parliament buildings, and that angled staircase only exists in one spot. And as soon as he’s up to the pillar, he’s on Wellington Street, and nobody saw the flag on Wellington Street, or filmed the flag on Wellington Street. So that was the moment that that flag was unfurled, and there was a photographer there at the moment to take the picture. So how did that get out so far?

She discovered— Alexa Lavoie of Rebel News discovered that the first person to tweet that picture of that nasty flag—it is a nasty flag, the Nazi flag—was Justin Ling, the CBC reporter. CBC website says Justin “is an award-winning investigative journalist who specializes in stories that are misunderstood.” Justin said he didn’t want to reveal his source. Who sent him that photo? I’ve seen several of Justin’s pieces and he almost never reveals his source. You have to trust.

Shawn Buckley
And Mr. Palmer, I’m going to have to cut you short.

Rodney Palmer
Do you want me to stop now?

Shawn Buckley
Yeah, and allow the commissioners— They might have a couple of questions for you and then we have to take a break.

Rodney Palmer
Okay.

Commissioner Drysdale
I have a couple of questions. And by the way, thank you for your testimony. I don’t particularly understand how a newsroom works, particularly at the CBC, and you talked about a number of people. At the beginning, you talked about Adrienne Arsenault coming up with this particular piece. In your experience in a newsroom, would Adrienne Arsenault herself or any of those other people just come up with a story and go on air? Or was this directed?

Rodney Palmer
Every story at the CBC National is a collaboration by many people, and there’s a hierarchy of decision-making. But a journalist— If I was in Adrienne’s position, the buck stops there. “You want me to say this? Show me the evidence that it didn’t come from a lab before I go on the air.”

I was in a situation a couple of times at CTV where I was asked to match a story by a competitor and when I investigated it, I found it to be untrue by the people that were in that story. And I had to report back that “I can’t go on the air with this story tonight because it’s untrue.” And they said, “Well, the CBC, or whoever, put it on.” I said, “Well, that’s their error and not mine. And let’s move on to the next thing.” The reporter is responsible for the words they speak.

Commissioner Drysdale
Another question. You know, you showed us these organizations, whatever they were called, Trust Initiative, et cetera. And there was one slide that you had multiple different broadcasters on it. I don’t know how many of them there were but there were many, many of them. If I also understood what you were saying, a lot of these broadcasters worldwide were saying the same things at the same time. When does an organization go from an association to a monopoly? And did you do any investigation into commonality and ownership across these different media platforms?

Rodney Palmer
I didn’t, no. But when they all follow the Trusted News Initiative, then you have a single point of information coming down. So now there’s only a single point. It’s kind of like when the World Health Organization is feeding its member nations protocols on what to do: If you wanted to corrupt all those nations, you would only have a single target. That would be the World Health Organization and then all information would feed down from there. So by joining this trusted news initiative, they’re all collaborating on this single idea.
Commissioner Drysdale
Another question. Given the current, or the recent, rewrite of the Canadian Broadcast Act, do you think that this rewrite will promote independent journalism in Canada, or will it have some other kind of effect?

Rodney Palmer
I have to confess, I’m not familiar with the rewrite of the Broadcast Act. But independent journalism is not being promoted currently in Canada. In fact, all the money that’s flowing to the various journalism organizations is not flowing to Rebel News, oddly enough. And they are the ones that I see telling the truth.

Commissioner Drysdale
You mostly spoke about the CBC. But the other private broadcasters in Canada: Were they promoting these same kinds of stories?

Rodney Palmer
All of them, virtually all of them—all of the mainstream media are. They’re all hooked onto this same IV drip of trust over truth. I cut a lot of it out for time, apparently not enough.

[00:50:00]

But the Toronto Star did a number of particularly horrific stories, one of which was putting a nine-month pregnant woman in profile or photograph saying— The headline was “Pregnant and hesitant.” And the story was about her journey to decide to vaccinate herself with this unproven vaccine that was never tested on pregnant women. And it was to encourage readers to vaccinate themselves if they’re pregnant.

Another one they did was they falsified their identity in order to get an appointment with a doctor that didn’t want to do an interview with them. And then they got a prescription for ivermectin under a false name and then went and fulfilled the prescription under a false name. And then reported the doctor to the College of Physicians & Surgeons and then went front page with the story. It’s atrocious, absolutely atrocious.

Commissioner Drysdale
My last question is: In the hearings in Truro, we had a number of witnesses—extraordinary witnesses actually, extraordinary Canadians—who came forward from different areas, different employment areas. We had nurses, we had doctors, we had construction workers, I believe, who were fired from their jobs for either resisting the mandates or not getting the vaccinations. Are you aware of this happening with reporters and journalists in this area as well?

Rodney Palmer
I met one who approached me and said that they worked for a major media organization, and I think they said they had to take the time off. They basically had to go home and not be paid and then they were eventually let back in when the mandate dropped. But I don’t know how many. That was one person who approached me and I don’t know how many others there may be.

Commissioner Drysdale
Thank you very much. That’s all I have. Anyone else?

Shawn Buckley
Mr. Palmer, thank you very much for your testimony.

Commissioner Drysdale
There’s another, one more question.

Commissioner Massie
Okay, thank you very much for your testimony. I’m wondering: I mean, propaganda has been around for a long, long time, everywhere. But I think in my youth it was not, at least I was not aware of it as much as I am. You’ve been working in the news industry for a long time. When did you start seeing that we were going in that slippery slope of propaganda? And I guess the question I’m wondering about is, what’s the exit out of it?

Rodney Palmer
When I first started noticing it, I showed you, was within days of the emergency. The exit out of it is a big, big question. Because the CBC has not missed the story. The CBC has betrayed Canada and betrayed Canadians by resting on the laurels of decades of hard-fought journalists who did their work and entire careers of investigative journalism. And they’re using that to trick us. They morphed into propaganda in a moment of exception.

The beginning of COVID, we were all on board with, “Let’s all go hide and stay home because we’re afraid.” But the period of exception is over. You could forgive them for allowing themselves to be an apparatus of the public health because it existed. It was a broadcast system that we could send messages to on a daily basis. And in a moment of exception, you could say, “Okay, we’re going to let the CBC be the public health system right now.” But the emergency is over, and the exception still exists. So how we get out of this I’m not sure. But there would have to be a wholesale redesign of the CBC because I think that it would be extremely difficult for the number of people in that organization to admit to themselves as they go to sleep at night, that they caused deaths by misinforming people and disinforming people. It’s a very tough thing to get out of.

Shawn Buckley
And if I can just break in, Commissioners, we have Dr. Robert Malone coming on in five minutes and 24 seconds, and we should take a break before then.

And I mean no disrespect, Mr. Palmer, your evidence has just been fantastic. But if the commissioners agree, I think we should stand down for five minutes.

[00:54:35]

PART II

[00:00:00]

Shawn Buckley
And I’d like to recall to the stand Mr. Rodney Palmer. We didn’t have time to finish him this morning because of another witness being scheduled in.

Mr. Palmer, I’ll just remind you that you promised to tell us the truth this morning. And you still promise to tell us the truth?

Rodney Palmer
Yes.

Shawn Buckley
Okay, so I’ll just ask you to pick up where you left off.

Rodney Palmer
Yeah, just to refresh: if we can get the PowerPoint going, I was discussing the CBC specifically as my role as a journalist there previously, and the difference between newsgathering and propaganda. And I’ll just try to get control over this and then go down to the slide that I was at, which was talking about the truckers’ convoy and the nature of the photographs. These three photographs that had offensive racist flags and those were the basis on which the Prime Minister said he would not speak to anyone at the truckers’ convoy protest.

And Rebel News had done an investigation showing that the flags were there very briefly, if not for split seconds, and they were taken by photographers that had associations with the Prime Minister’s office. And we got to the point where the Rebel News reporter identified that the first tweet of the Nazi flag was by a man named Justin Ling, who works for the CBC. And the second tweet was by Amneet Singh, who works with Jagmeet Singh. And this was very curious, because the source of who took that photograph was never given. And so, Rebel News had done this amazing report, and I encourage anyone to look at it. It’s about 17 minutes long; it’s by an excellent reporter named Alexa Lavoie. And they plausibly connected these racist flag photos to Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and a CBC reporter who’s known for broadcasting propaganda against people who question the government’s COVID response.

So where is the CBC on this story? Why aren’t they telling this story? And I would say that they’re too busy practising propaganda, while Rebel News conducted the most important investigative journalism in Canada. I have not seen a piece that’s better than this in the last three years. And the reason this is important is because this was the Prime Minister’s founding myth on which he declared the truckers’ convoy to be racist. And this is what people across Canada heard. And I’ve had dinner with good old friends who say: “Damn those truckers, those racists, those Nazis.” And I think, “Well, I was there and you weren’t.” But, you know, I like to keep my friends so I don’t say much.

But this was a founding myth, it was a false myth and it set the tone going forward for the Prime Minister to refuse to listen, to speak, to hear what those thousands of people wanted to say and instead to invoke the Emergencies Act and have them cleared out violently.

Another thing that was really significant was that in December of 2021, a CBC reporter quit at CBC Winnipeg. And I had heard this interview on a podcast, where this reporter, Marianne Klowak, who had 35 years of experience— I don’t have 35 years of experience. This is a senior reporter, a senior journalist at CBC Winnipeg. And when you’re at a smaller city like Winnipeg and you’ve been 35 years in the CBC, you’re a celebrity in your town. And people were coming up to her and saying, “Look at the vaccine injury, and I know somebody,” and we’re hearing these people, and these stories were coming forth to her. So she did an interview with a couple of them. And then she found the Canadian COVID Care Alliance, which is an independent group of scientists who are publishing the truth about the—for example, analyzing the Pfizer data that was put forth to promote the vaccines. And she put two of them into the story and it was about to go to air. And somebody said, “Well wait a minute, this isn’t what we’re saying, we’re not saying the vaccines cause injury, we’re saying they’re safe so, we better send this down to the Toronto Health Department for approval.”

And so somehow, the Toronto Health Department had editorial control over COVID stories at CBC Winnipeg. And it came back with, “Yeah, you can put that story up but you can’t use those two doctors with the COVID Care Alliance, you have to use these other two doctors who will say the vaccines are actually safe and effective.” Things like this were happening so much to this reporter that she took an early retirement and left the job that she had loved her whole life and the people who become your family and your employer. This happened. She’s spoken about it publicly.

[00:05:00]

At the same period, CBC Manitoba published a story that said any claims that COVID-19 vaccines may have long-term side effects are completely untrue. They had a reporter with people on camera, on tape, recorded saying they were injured by the vaccines. They had two university professors, and these were top people. This was one at UBC named Stephen Pelech who—as I understand, he teaches pharmaceutical regulation and development. And another professor of virology at the University of Guelph who would actually receive money from the Government of Ontario to develop a COVID vaccine. These weren’t just people talking through their hat; they were the top authorities that any journalist would go to for expert opinion. And at the same time, CBC Manitoba says that it’s completely untrue. That’s what they put on air. This is a lie. This is disinformation and this is propaganda by the CBC.

One of the ways that they do this is they have their regular experts. And these are just a couple of them: Tim Caulfield and Maya Goldenberg. You can hear them regularly on CBC reports. Tim Caulfield isn’t even a scientist; he’s a law professor at the University of Calgary. In April 2020, just when the emergency had been declared, he received $381,000 in federal and provincial grants to combat COVID misinformation: $381,000 and he gets to be interviewed on the CBC a lot. A year later, in April 2021, he received $1.75 million from the federal health minister directly to counter COVID vaccine misinformation. I’ve seen public conferences that are sponsored and led by him about how do you trust the media, who do you trust in COVID. And it’s all this propaganda about vaccine hesitancy, pushing vaccines.

And the other one: for example, Maya Goldenberg is a vaccine hesitancy expert. Who knew there was a psychological condition called “vaccine hesitancy?” I didn’t know this. In April 2022, she received Government of Canada funding to study the politics of health and the root causes of medical distrust.

We distrust them because we’re being lied to. It’s that simple, I could save the money for them.

This is strongly favouring particular interests, which fits the definition of propaganda. Where they’re not seeking other opinions to counter it, they’re using the same people over and over, who are actually funded by the federal government to deliver a particular message. And they put them on as neutral experts and they don’t tell the unsuspecting listeners to their dinner newscast that these people are actually paid to tell you what they’re telling, they disguise it as news. They’re disguising propaganda as news and this is happening daily on your CBC—even today.

By some miracle, at the end of January, three months ago, the CBC published a story that said that New Brunswickers, of all provinces, have reported more than a thousand adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines. Three hundred of them were serious. In the same story—this is called “burying your lead,” by the way, in journalism—in the same story, across Canada, 10,565 adverse events were considered serious in nature. I can imagine what serious is, but I actually looked up what their definition of serious is: It’s death, life-threatening, hospitalization or permanent significant disability/incapacity or birth defect. Ten thousand, five hundred and sixty-five Canadians.

About a month later, 200 of them went to the CBC building in Toronto and plastered the front of that building with pictures of their faces, their names, and what went wrong because of the vaccine. This is an act of mild vandalism, where these people are saying, “Enough, CBC. Here we are, we exist, we’re Canadians, we’re injured and all along you’re saying it’s safe and effective and we’re suffering because of it.” Ten days later, they still didn’t publish a single story about all those people who went and plastered their faces on the front of the building.

On March 10th, I heard a very prominent show on a Saturday on CBC radio—called “Day Six” by, again, one of the most excellent broadcasters we have in Canada, Brent Bambury.
Brent was doing a story on Saturday morning about a documentary called, “Died Suddenly.” This is by an independent journalist who’s actually trying to figure out all of these sudden-adult-death syndrome, what’s going on, and linking it to the vaccines. But instead of having the documentary maker on, he said the documentary maker who made that is a right-wing extremist and connected to conspiracy theorists. And he had a second journalist on from Mother Jones magazine. Together, they just disparaged him and defamed him and said he has links on social media to some untoward people and he’s a conspiracy theorist.

At no point—I didn’t even hear about this documentary until then. And I went and looked it up, and I found out they interviewed morticians about why people are dying suddenly.

[00:10:00]

At this same time, on March 3rd—so seven days before—the Canadian government updated its info-base to point out that a total of 427 reports with an outcome of death have been reported in Canada following vaccination. This is from a Canadian government website. While the Canadian government is reporting 427 dead Canadians, and somebody did a documentary about this, instead of having the documentary-maker on, Brent Banbury simply ignored that there’s 427 dead Canadians from the COVID vaccine and called this guy a conspiracy theorist. That was his item. It was ridiculous, it wasn’t journalism. It was intentional manipulation of public opinion, which is propaganda.

Here’s one little story. Carol Pierce—this is in SaskToday. Carol Pierce on the right died during the 15-minute waiting period after she got her booster. At minute seven, she keeled over on the chair and died. Did Carol believe the vaccines were safe and effective? She must have, because she took three of them.

Part of the sea change that’s happening now is happening in the United States, with the Children’s Health Defense that’s led by Robert Kennedy Jr. And he has launched a lawsuit. This lawsuit was filed on January 10th and it is a lawsuit against the Trusted News Initiative members: Associated Press, the Washington Post, BBC and Reuters are named in this lawsuit. And specifically, the antitrust laws in the United States have to do with the monopolization. And what they’re saying is, by shutting out voices like the Children’s Health Defense and other people who are legitimate alternative news organizations, you’re making it so they can’t make money. So they’re not getting them on the lie or censorship; they’re getting them on their inability to make money, which is against the law in America. And we’ll see how this lawsuit plays out. Remember that the CBC is an active member of the Trusted News Initiative, and whatever is said about these four organizations in this lawsuit can go for the CBC as well.

One thing that we have in Canada, curiously, under our Criminal Code, is that it is a crime for the willful promotion of hatred. To identify a group as anti-vaxxers simply because they choose, for whatever reason they have, or they’ve been asked by their doctor not to take a vaccine, the CBC has actively promoted fear and hatred against these people. Specifically, the Code says anyone who “willfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty.” One of the defences is that if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, which could be COVID, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, which they could argue, and if on reasonable grounds they believe them to be true. I hate to single out Brent Bambury because I think he’s awesome; but seven days after the Canadian government published that 427 Canadians are dead from this vaccine, there are no reasonable grounds for him to disparage somebody who’s pointing that out. They are actively, knowingly, intentionally, and maliciously promoting hatred against people who are unvaccinated in this country.

In my summation: Between March 2020 and the present, CBC is suppressing critics of government policy on COVID-19 response. They are misleading Canadians that COVID-19 vaccines are 100 per cent safe. They are falsely broadcasting that ivermectin is deadly to humans, when in fact it is a life-saving medicine, and has been proven so in their own stories, for COVID-19. And they’re promoting an identifiable group that they call anti-vaxxers, fomenting fear and hatred against them, in order to get more of these deeply flawed vaccines into the bodies of more Canadians.

None of this is newsgathering, which we all expect them to do.

They are standing on the shoulders of decades of excellent journalism to trick us into believing they’re telling us the truth, and this is happening on the very next newscast you’ll listen to an hour from now. They’re collaborating with the Canadian government, which is causing confusion. Because we believe the CBC to be telling the truth, it creates confusion. Canadians are not informed that the vaccines have caused permanent side effects in tens of thousands of people and the death of hundreds of people at least. And if we can go by what other people have testified, maybe one per cent of these have been reported, and the government is admitting to 427 dead Canadians. They don’t say that at the beginning. The vaccines are safe and effective, although the government does report that 427 Canadians have died. What if they said that? What if they said every newscast, “the government admits that 427 Canadians have died of COVID” and it’s on their website?
[00:15:00]

How would that change the notion of who’s right or who’s wrong when they let it go in their arm?

I would put forth that this confusion was made possible because of the CBC. In fact, the government rollout of the vaccines was impossible without the collaboration of the CBC. They took an exceptional moment to decide that they would not be journalists, that they would instead be public health messengers. But the emergency is over and the exception continues. An exceptional time could be allowed for forgiveness, but the temporary suspension of journalism at the CBC starting in March 2020 and the adoption of its new position of government public health messenger has failed to expire with the end of the emergency. And the result is that Canada’s national broadcaster has morphed into a state broadcaster. I worked in countries where there were state broadcasters: China, Syria, Malawi, North Korea. It’s promoting government policy without question, while censoring, belittling, and shaming learned Canadians who dare to object and attempt to inform us of the truth.

Bad journalism is incompetence, but propaganda is a betrayal. And that’s what CBC has done. It’s betrayed us all.

Thank you.

Shawn Buckley
I’ll just ask if the commissioners have any questions before I dismiss Mr. Palmer.

Mr. Palmer, thank you so much for coming both times, both this morning and this afternoon. The NCI is very grateful for your testimony and the insights you’ve shared.

Rodney Palmer
And I’m very grateful for all of you for doing this. Thank you.

[00:17:09]

Final Review and Approval: Jodi Bruhn, August 16, 2023.

The evidence offered in this transcript is a true and faithful record of witness testimony given during the National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) hearings. The transcript was prepared by members of a team of volunteers using an “intelligent verbatim” transcription method.

For further information on the transcription process, method, and team, see the NCI website: https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/about-these-transcripts/

Credentials

• General reporter for the Globe and Mail
• Daily reporter for the Vancouver Sun
• Producer and reporter for CBC radio
• The foreign correspondent and Bureau Chief for CTV News based in India, Israel and also China (participated in reporting about the SARS outbreak in China)

Summary

Mr. Rodney Palmer reports of how he was in Beijing when SARS broke out and how COVID was dealt with very differently.

In chronological order, the systematic propaganda inflicted on Canadians by the CBC, regarding the safety of vaccines. He tells of many instances of the CBC journalists and newscasters lying to the public on their various broadcasts of news and other shows. Sometimes the lie is outright and sometimes it is the error of omission to confuse and mislead the listener.

Rodney states that the CBC is abusing its long tradition of truth journalism. “They are standing on the shoulders of decades of excellent journalism to trick us into believing they are telling the truth”. He points to the message being the same as the government message and says the CBC has become a state broadcaster working for the federal government and they are promoting hatred of the unvaccinated. It is intentional manipulation of public opinion.

The Criminal Code notes that a “willful promotion of hatred” of “any identifiable group” is a crime – this should pertain to “anti-vaxxers”. The CBC has been suppressing information, misleading citizens and promoting fear. They

TWEET BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. ON NCI TESTIMONY HAS GONE VIRAL

Rodney Palmer – May 18, 2023 – Ottawa, Ontario