Canada, Meet Your Newsmedia

So, this happened: "Justice Minister Peter MacKay defends suggestion women are too busy with their kids to be judges."

Except that, as it turns out, MacKay never actually made that remark. Apparently, someone who attended a closed-door meeting between MacKay and the Ontario Bar Association either misqupted MacKay, twisted his words, or just outright lied. And because the story reinforces the preferred political narrative of the newsmedia in Canada, they have run with it rather gleefully.

And apparently this never happened: "people have lost complete confidence in the Harper Government, because when there's a spill, or there's an explosion, the last place Stephen Harper visits...he still hasn't gone to Lac Mégantic. And that's a shame."

That was Adam Vaughan, the Liberal Party's candidate the Trinity-Spadina byelection trying to make political fodder out of the victims of the Lag Megantic tragedy. Something he did while Liberal leader Justin Trudeau was in the room with him.

Based on the coverage of these remarks -- or lack thereof -- you'd insist this never happened. Yet it did. The only place where Vaughan's ridiculous comments -- indicative of an irredeemable personality -- appear in the newsmedia is buried in an article entitled "Vaughan offside with Trudeau on pipelines."

Not even Sun News is reporting this story properly.

If it had been a Conservative stooping to such a horrendous low, the headline would be blaring on the front page of every newspaper in the country. But because it's a Liberal, the story is very clearly being suppressed.

It's almost as if the citizens of Trinity-Spadina don't deserve to know that one of the candidates trying to get elected to be their MP is a nasty little creep. Somehow the story about him missing a candidates' debate on climate change policy was bigger than this one. And this certainly pales in comparison to the attention paid to the made-up MacKay story. Hell, the Toronto Star even dug up some lawyer who admitted, in the course of the story, that she only applied to become a judge out of political hostility to the sitting government.

As it turns out, this government has appointed to the bench practically every qualified female or "ethnic" applicant it could find. And it's still looking for more.

And yet Adam Vaughan dances on the graves of Lac Megantic's victims and... nothing. Barely a blurb.

It's almost enough to make you think that the newsmedia in this country has nuzzled itself into a certain party's pocket.

But that would be crazy, right?