The CBC’s 9/11 terrorism scandal reveals they operate in a separate reality

0:00Welcome to Hub Headlines. Today's program features the best commentary and analysis published in the Hub for September 4. Up first is Harrison Lohman, writing on how a leaked CBC memo about 9-11 revealed the public broadcaster is operating in a separate reality. Endless ink has been spilled in the last week over a leaked CBC memo, reminding its journalists before the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks that murdered 3,000, including at least 24 Canadians, to refrain from calling them terrorist attacks. Do not refer to the September 11th attacks as terrorist attacks, the internal directive read, referencing a decade's old language guide. The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes. According to their rules, naming terrorists should be solely left to experts and politicians. Even far left extremist social media influencer Hassan Piker, a man who said America deserved

1:039-11 thought the CBC memo was wild. But beyond the resulting furor from the leak and the walk back, the controversy gave the Canadian public a rare peek behind the CBC curtain, revealing how the broadcaster sees the world. It told us about the ideas the institution believes should be allowed to be heard and discussed on its airwaves and what it thinks doesn't deserve a platform. The topics they consider to be settled versus those they consider to be in question. While what constitutes terrorism is apparently up for debate, other major issues this country faces are not. If you look close enough at their language guide, you will realize the CBC did not follow its own advice, scroll past the strict wording recommendations, and hidden at the bottom you'll find the words use common sense. This is the core of the issue. Many CBC journalists appear to lack common sense, operating in a separate reality from the public they are meant to serve. Many have lost touch with the majority, the gap between what most Canadians accept as

2:07fact in social norms and what the CBC accepts is less of a gap and more of a canyon. One of the people who helped pull back the CBC curtain intentionally or not was retired 36 year CBC veteran reporter Keith Boag. Raising his head above the parapet last week to defend the CBC castle, Boag tweeted, if you want to make judgments about 9-11, then prepare to make judgments about Israel, Gaza, the ANC, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and on and on, all are attacks on civilians for political purposes. Placing these subjects in the same sentence is moral equivalency, what aboutism, and laughable. Raised in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were state military campaigns during a declared war between armies, debated for decades over their horrific scale, but never seriously over whether they were terrorism. Hamas is a listed terrorist group in Canada, the US, the UK, and the EU.

3:08Israel is a nation state engaged in a devastating military conflict that has resulted in many civilian deaths. Nelson Mandela's African National Congress took part in an armed insurgency where civilians were killed against a repressive apartheid state, a case that does deserve its own scrutiny. But Osama bin Laden was more than happy to call himself a terrorist. Apparently at the CBC because one man's terrorist can sometimes be another man's freedom fighter, it's best to lump them all together and let others pass judgment. There's objectivity, which I have advocated repeatedly for in journalism. But then there's moral abdication. In 2008, then public editor of the New York Times Clark Hoyt wrote about the struggles journalists have with assigning the terrorist label. If it looks as if it was intended to sew terror and it shocks the conscience, whether it is planes flying into the World Trade Center, gunmen shooting up Mumbai, or a political killer in a little girl's bedroom, I'd call it terrorism by terrorists, he said.

4:12He quoted his colleague James Bennett, who felt that never describing an act as terrorism felt so morally neutral as to be a little sickening. The calculated bombing of students in a university cafeteria, or a family's gathered in an ice cream parlor, cries out to be called what it is. Hoyt concluded that when we call someone a terrorist, we are ultimately calling them an enemy of all civilized people. Journalists should be able to discern who these enemies to mankind are and what requires more nuance. Western society, the society attacked on September 11th, and the society our media operates in, agrees that day was terrorism. While there may have been the odd fringe debate in a newsroom or faculty lounge, there is and was never a serious public debate about what that day was. Other major news outlets understand this objective truth, and that we should take our cues from the citizenry we serve. The Associated Press tells its journalists to use terrorism when talking about historical

5:12events widely acknowledged as terrorist actions. The Canadian Press says, after the September 11th, 2001 attacks, almost everyone accepted that slamming hijacked passenger jets into office towers was terrorism. What has been equally revealing is what the CBC considers to be settled or not up for discussion, even when large portions of the public believe something different or are willing to debate the issues. In their explanation, the public broadcaster claimed that allowing staff to call acts terrorism could be seen as injecting bias or emotion into their work, acting as impediments to their journalism. Boag reiterated this point, demanding the rules were there to ensure CBC journalists do not make judgments about contentious issues. The trouble is, CBC journalists are constantly making sweeping judgments about contentious issues through their editorial framing and the voices they regularly leave out. They passed judgment during a recent radio segment, featuring two guests advocating for

6:16the criminalization of residential school denialism without challenge. They passed judgment when they quoted critics of the Saskatchewan government's pronoun policy five times more than supporters. They passed judgment when they advocated for supervised smuggled drug use in prisons. Never mind that only 24% of Canadians support residential school denialism criminalization and only 14% were against the pronoun policy. Why is terrorism up for debate but these contentious issues aren't? CBC News finds itself once again in a swirl of confusion, admitted senior director of journalistic standards and public trust bossam Bolshra before rolling back the CBC's 9-11 terrorism policy last week. But the confusion is moral confusion and it is CBC's alone. The majority of Canadians believe the heinous attack on the World Trade Center 25 years ago that claimed 24 Canadian lives was in fact a terrorist attack.

7:16They also believe they should have a public broadcaster that allows the country to debate the issues that are actually in question. That was a commentary by Harrison Lomon. He is the hubs managing editor. You can read the full text of his article on our website the hub.ca. Our second essay is by Charles Lamam writing on what's really driving Canada's surprisingly strong GDP growth in the second quarter. Every time a new GDP number lands, someone in government reaches for it before the ink dries. Last week it was finance minister Francois Philippe Champagne boasting on ex that the second quarter numbers show our plan is working. Three months from now, if the number disappoints, the same government will tell you not to read too much into one quarter of data and the opposition will take a critical view. That's the nature of politics, but a single quarter of GDP or a single month of jobs numbers doesn't establish a trend.

8:17These numbers are often revised, sometimes by enough to completely change the story. So what's the right way to treat any particular release of economic data? Don't crown it and don't bury it. Look at what's behind the numbers, ask what's driving them, and be transparent about how much of that has anything to do with government policy at all. Spoiler alert, this is largely being driven by factors unrelated to recent federal policy, and Canada still needs a serious game plan to kickstart sustained economic growth. With that in mind, let's dig in. The headline is real. Canada's economy grew 0.8% in the second quarter, which works out to about 3.3% at an annual pace, a strong number by recent standards. The release also erases what some had been calling a technical recession. Back in May, statistics Canada's initial estimate for the first quarter of 2026 was so close to zero that the agency itself called the economy unchanged on the heels of a

9:18confirmed 0.2% decline in the fourth quarter of last year. Once you annualize that razor-thin first quarter number, it works out to a small decline rather than a flat line, which combined with the fourth quarter, gave commentators two negative quarters in a row, and with it, the technical definition of a recession. Arnie got pressed on it, at one point telling reporters the economy was going through a settling in period. Based on the latest data, Canada didn't have two straight quarters of decline since the first quarter number has been revised to a small positive number. This should be a lesson about how unreliable these early data releases are, and that they are not a verdict on anyone's economic plan. A number that can flip from a rounding error decline to a positive number isn't durable enough to build a recession story on. More frankly, take a victory lap either. Now to the question at hand, what's behind the 0.8%? Statistics Canada's own summary says growth was led by higher exports, household spending,

10:22and business capital investment, with residential construction also rebounding after two soft quarters. Taken at face value, that reads like an economy firing on several cylinders. When we look at each of those cylinders individually though, the picture is more nuanced. Exports clearly did a lot of the heavy lifting, adding over a full percentage point to growth on their own, because goods and services sold abroad count directly toward what Canada produced. But inventories tell a different story. Businesses withdrew $17 billion from inventories in the quarter, which statistics Canada says stripped 1.3% of points off growth on its own, after businesses had built inventories up by $10 billion the quarter before. Inventory investment only counts what businesses add to or take out of stock during the quarter, and that number flipped from a $10 billion edition to a $17 billion subtraction. Since growth compares this quarter to last, that flip alone drags the total down.

11:23Even though selling down your shelves can mean strong demand just as easily as weak demand. Meanwhile, household spending and business investment did find this quarter. Final domestic demand, which adds up consumption, business investment, and government spending while stripping out trade and inventories, grew 0.95% quarter over quarter, annualizing to about 3.9% above the 3.3% headline. The reason the total economy came in at 3.3% rather than something higher is almost entirely down to how the trade and inventory data happened to swing this particular quarter. Where did the strength and exports and investment come from? A handful of places, but it's hard to trace anything back to what Ottawa is doing. The first is machinery and equipment investment, which rose to its highest level since the second quarter of 2024. Computer and equipment spending jumped because companies imported more processing units, the kind used in data centers. That's Canada catching a piece of the global AI boom.

12:24It's real, and it should be welcome as long as the economics are justified. But because much of the equipment involved is imported, a good chunk of the investment number washes out against the import side of the ledger, since imports subtract from GDP by roughly the same amount the equipment adds. The timing and scale of this investment are likely being driven primarily by the capital budgets of large technology companies rather than by a particular federal policy change. The second is autos. Warren Truck exports jumped 27% in the quarter. The single biggest reason exports had their best quarter in three years. Statistics. Canada ties this directly to a rebound in domestic auto production, which had been depressed for two straight quarters by a global semiconductor shortage in late 2025 and shutdowns in early 2026 for model changes, retooling, and maintenance. Production picked back up once those problems eased, and even after the rebound, it remains below 2023 levels.

13:25My own sense is that, in addition to supply chain unclogging, some of the export surge may reflect firms bringing shipments forward ahead of the scheduled July 1st Cosma joint review, given the uncertainty surrounding the future of the deal. But I can't prove that. The third is gold. Statistics Canada says businesses pulled gold and other precious metals out of storage this quarter and shipped more of it abroad, while imports of gold fell. Having bullion out of a vault and onto a boat isn't a factory running harder or a mine producing more. Here's the catch. That same gold shows up as a plus when it leaves as an export and a minus when it leaves inventory, so the two largely offset each other. Part of this quarter's export surge and part of its inventory drag are just the same gold, showing up on both sides of the ledger. The one uncanceled effect is the drop in gold imports, which genuinely helped growth a little, since a smaller import bill subtracts less from GDP. The fourth is energy.

14:26Oil prices have been elevated and volatile since the Israel-Iran War broke out earlier this year, and especially once fighting spread to threaten the straight of Hormuz. Export prices rose 6.5% this quarter, which statistics Canada ties directly to the jump in international oil prices. Corporate profits rose 9.6%. The largest gain since the start of 2021, with the energy sector the top contributor. That same price spike squeezed manufacturers, whose profits fell as their energy costs rose, so a higher oil price isn't a win for the economy generally. It just moves income from one sector to another. But this isn't only a price story. Statistics Canada's own monthly energy figures for May show crude oil production up 9% from a year earlier. The highest may level in a decade, with part of that gain coming from lighter scheduled maintenance shutdowns at oil sands-up graders, and Canada's new LNG export terminal at Kidamaat BC, which only started shipping last summer, still building toward its full output.

15:30June's numbers weren't out at the time of writing, so it's too soon to say exactly how much of this quarter's strength is higher prices versus more barrels and more cubic meters shipped. It doesn't change the conclusion either way. A price spike driven by a war on the other side of the world isn't a Canadian policy achievement, and neither is the tail end of a pipeline and LNG build out approved and financed years before this government took office, or a lighter maintenance schedule this spring. Notably, the government's own capital spending fell in the quarter, so public investment isn't driving the GDP growth. Residential investment did pick up after two straight quarterly declines, which is a genuine bright spot, with new construction rising a modest 0.8 percent, well below the overall pace, while resale-related activity like ownership transfer costs grew faster. Though statistics Canada's release doesn't break out the dollar-weighted contribution of each, either way, it's more plausibly tied to lower interest rates and improved financing conditions than to federal policy.

16:33Household spending was led by higher outlays on investment services, vehicles, and rent, even as spending on gas and groceries fell, which lines up with the same quarter's stronger stock market-lifting investment dealer profits. Another story with nothing to do with Ottawa. An exception is a one-time GST-HST credit top-up the government issued in June, ahead of the new Canada groceries and essentials benefit. That landed alongside a broader shift toward saving. The household saving rate rose to 3.7 percent as disposable income grew faster than household spending. Though statistics Canada attributes the income gain to both wages and government transfers, so it's not possible to isolate how much of the saving increase traces to the top-up specifically versus wage growth. One possible interpretation is that, because the top-up is deficit-financed, households may have saved some of it in anticipation of future tax adjustments. Nonetheless, even the one item in the GDP release that turns on a government decision

17:33didn't do much to move the growth number. Finally, part of why growth per person looks decent is that the population is still shrinking. Its third straight quarterly decline, the direct result of the government's own changes to immigration targets, which is a strange thing to celebrate as a growth story since it's really just a smaller denominator. Put it all together, and you get a quarter that looks good on the surface and is mostly explained by a global tech investment wave. A supply chain unclogging in the auto sector, gold moving through a vault, and an energy sector writing both a war-driven price spike and mega-projects built long before this government came to office. It's hard to credibly make the case, it's the result of a domestic plan to make Canada's economy more competitive. The country needs a real pro-growth plan, fundamental tax reform, major regulatory overhaul, and significantly more competitive markets, to drive long-term prosperity. That was a commentary by Charles Lemom. He is an economic and policy professional.

18:35You can read the full text of his article on our website, the hub.ca. That's it for today's edition of Hub Headlines. We hope you enjoyed the program. Hub Headlines is produced by Alicia Rao. This program was narrated by automated voices. Thanks for listening.