I found out what really happened between Pierre Poilievre and CTV. The real story was even more depressing than the lie

The facts in the brief and dispiriting feud between CTV and the Conservative Party of Canada over a mangled clip of Pierre Poilievre will eventually be litigated, and I would not like to write anything here that prevents diligent workers from winning their rightful severance, but it is, I think, necessary to lay out some facts so that Canadians will not get the wrong idea about an important matter.
I have spent the last week talking to sources who know many of the details of what happened in the one-sided war of words between the likely next prime minister of Canada and Bell, Canada’s largest communications company. The events in question will almost certainly be subject to a union grievance, a wrongful dismissal suit and a Canadian Broadcast Standards Council investigation, at least. And none of the parties directly involved — BCE, CTV, the Tories, or the two journalists who ended up fired — would comment on the record.
Still, there is a large and growing pile of documents — scripts, emails, text messages — associated with this mess — enough to keep the lawyers busy for months. And Canadians should know that all the evidence I have been able to gather so far, through dozens of off the record interviews with people familiar with the details, suggests this is a story of bungling brought on by Bell cost-cutting, not the one Poilievre is peddling, of systematic bias against the Conservatives.
The narrative starts on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 22, when CTV reporter Cristina Tenaglia, in Toronto, and Derek Thacker, a video editor in Ottawa, started working together on an item for that night’s CTV National News broadcast. The piece was based partly on an interview that Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos did on CTV’s Question Period, which aired that day, in which he warned that if the NDP did not vote with the government, it would jeopardize a plan to provide dental care to low-income Canadians.
At 11:30 a.m., Tenaglia, who is known to be a stickler for details, sent Thacker an “elements list” that included a clip from Poilievre, in which he said: “That’s why it’s time to put forward a motion for a carbon tax election.” But there was a problem — a 1.5-second blank spot — in the video clip on CTV’s server. Thacker, a 37-year veteran, widely regarded as a talented and resourceful editor, found a way to save the clip, by cutting out “it’s time,” and inserting a phrase from a similar sentence later in the same scrum, “we need.” The new clip was therefore: “That’s why we need to put forward a motion for a carbon tax election.”
That seemed fine. The sense of the sentence was the same. Later in the editing process, though, the last few words, where Poilievre mentioned the carbon tax election, were trimmed, apparently to save time.
On their own, either of those two edits would be defensible. But taken together they created a problem. The final piece left viewers with the false impression that Poilievre was bringing a motion aimed at blocking a dental program.
Again, nothing in my reporting suggests there was anything partisan at play here. It was a weak story. The focus was wrong. The Conservative view was given short shrift. The Tories were perfectly within their rights to cry foul. But what the party did next went way beyond what was necessary or appropriate for a bad but not malicious journalistic mistake.
The day after the story aired, the Conservatives publicly complained, claiming the clip was proof of a “deliberate attempt to mischaracterize the position of the leader of the opposition.” CTV quickly recognized the mistake. The network apologized for a “misunderstanding in the editing process.” But that wasn’t enough for the Conservatives. The party demanded that CTV “explicitly acknowledge their malicious editing and omission” and vowed to boycott all interviews with CTV journalists until they did. 
It’s important to note that days before this story ran, Poilievre had tweeted an attack on BCE, seemingly out of the blue. “No wonder their network CTV pushes such pro-Liberal news: they need lots of federal regulatory assistance,” he wrote. That meant the story was dropping into an already charged atmosphere. The leader of the opposition had primed his base to be suspicious of CTV, so when the mistake happened, his partisans were more than ready to see it as proof of something it wasn’t, an anti-Conservative conspiracy.
None of that would not have been fun for the brass at Bell, who enjoy making money on cell phones and NFL games, but do not enjoy losing money on CTV News. (BCE is required to run news as a condition of its broadcasting licence, a requirement that has become increasingly onerous as both viewership and ad revenues have fallen over the past 20-plus years.)
Nobody I’ve spoken to at CTV thinks Bell wants the network to attack the Tories, or that Bell directs news coverage. Bell CEO Mirko Bibic has donated thousands of dollars to the Conservatives over the years, including, recently, to Jean Charest, Poilievre’s former leadership rival. Bibic also has every incentive to want the Conservatives, currently the overwhelming favourites to form the next government, on his side and no financial reason at all to push his people to attack them.
After the Conservatives threw down the gauntlet, CTV launched an internal investigation “to determine whether a breach of our editorial standards and practices had occurred,” according to an email CTV vice-president Richard Gray wrote to the national newsroom on September 26.
“The investigation found that two members of the CTV News team are responsible for altering a video clip, manipulating it for a particular story,” Gray wrote in the email, a copy of which I obtained. “Their actions violate our editorial standards and are unacceptable. As a result, those individuals are no longer members of the CTV News team.”
There are a few problems with this. The first is that two people lost their jobs. Their colleagues believe this is unfair, that they are diligent and hard-working. Nobody thinks they were acting to pursue a partisan agenda. They were working on the weekend, without support from veteran producers or journalists, because most of those people are gone. Long-time current and former employees told me this is the kind of thing that would have been caught when Wendy Freeman, Lisa LaFlamme, Rosa Hwang, Joyce Napier and Glen McGregor were at CTV, but Bell got rid of most of their most experienced journalists to save money, and behind the scenes the remaining staff are struggling to fill all the news slots the network requires.
The fight between Bell and its own employees will ultimately be sorted out by lawyers. Tenaglia is said to have found representation, and Unifor, which represents Thacker, “is investigating the CTV incident and will use the tools available under the collective agreement on behalf of our member,” Unifor National President Lana Payne said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.
No matter how the lawsuits and grievances end, it was a deeply depressing incident, a failure in a once-mighty network — now struggling because of cost-cutting — that casts an entire industry in a bad light, further eroding public trust in the journalism we need to keep our democracy afloat. 
The Conservative attack on CTV made me think of kayfabe — the code word professional wrestlers use for the made-up storylines they present to fans as real. Poilievre complains bitterly about the Canadian media establishment, claiming the many outlets that receive federal money (including the Star) are in the tank for the Liberals. I don’t fault him for being skeptical. The federal media subsidy regime is far from ideal. But his attacks are overblown. If he really thinks Bell executives are out to get him, he is being paranoid. If he knows the truth and is pretending otherwise, he’s as fake as a professional wrestler.
Poilievre’s over-the-top denunciations are working for him with voters, but Bell should not have played along. By caving to his kayfabe demands, Bell execs have done the news industry a real disservice. They’ve given the public reason to believe the world is actually as Poilievre describes it, full of partisan conspiracies and elaborate media plots, which it is not. They’ve also let down their own people, in Ottawa and beyond, who have to continue to report the news without fear or favour, knowing now they might be tossed aside like Dixie cups the next time a politician kicks up a fuss.