Terry Glavin

Terry Glavin (born 1955) is a Canadian author and journalist. He is a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen.

Quotes

Canada harbours its own disgraceful legacy. Down through the decades, scores of federal and provincial laws isolated, dispossessed and ghettoized one racial or ethnic minority after another. Asians weren't allowed to vote in Canada until the late 1940s; federally-registered Indians had to wait until 1960... For Canada’s young Aboriginal people, it’s not clear that the arc of the moral universe is even bending in their direction at all.
- "Canadians have no reason to be smug about race" (November 2014), The Ottawa Citizen

Chinese people have no recourse to anything like an independent judiciary. The Communist Party decides if you’re guilty or innocent. The conviction rate stands in excess of 98 per cent. Torture and forced confessions are commonplace. Xi has lately embarked on a vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of workers’ rights activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and feminists. Scores of human rights lawyers have been rounded up and jailed.
- Speaking about the judicial system of China, "China is no Friend to Canada" (2017), MacLeans

In these impoverished conditions, it's much easier for journalists to construe events in such a way as to uphold an ideologically rigid "narrative" than to go about the hard work of building true stories from the construction material of hard facts.
- Terry Glavin. "The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves", National Post, 26 May 2022

There is something very strange and new and different that is occupying all the places where the left used to be and so these stories, it didn't really matter that they weren't true but they were weaponized, if you like, in this narrative about Canada as an irredeemably racist white colonial apartheid settler state.
- "The Great Canadian Mass Graves Hoax" (at 37m50s), Honestly with Bari Weiss, 22 September 2022.

What I worry about is that the truth doesn't matter, and I think this is something that has changed from 20 years ago, it's not just that the truth doesn't matter anymore, it's that it doesn't matter that the truth doesn't matter anymore. [...] I also think that people really do want some kind of an honest assessment of things that are important. Of something grounded in fact. I think that is something that is actually necessary for a liberal democracy to function.
- "The Great Canadian Mass Graves Hoax" (at 53m3s), Honestly with Bari Weiss, 22 September 2022.

I think we have to make a very important distinction between belief and knowledge. And this is something that I think is lost these days, particularly in the news media. There's actually a difference between (and we should draw attention to it when it's transgressed) [...] what we know [and] what we're expected to believe, or told to believe.
- "The Great Canadian Mass Graves Hoax" (at 54m19s), Honestly with Bari Weiss, 22 September 2022.