Paul Tuns:
A special interest group that condemns activities and statements it says promotes hate, issued a retraction after falsely claiming that Campaign Life Coalition was behind a recent poll showings the majority of Albertans support parental consent for minors to obtain an abortion.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a special interest group that supports abortion-on-demand and the LGBQT ideology, which the corporate media treats as experts in racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, claimed that two pro-life groups, CLC and Right Now, were behind polling data released by National Public Research Canada.
NPRC asked Albertans their views on whether minors should be required to get parental consent before obtaining an abortion.
It was initially unclear who NPRC was or what organization commissioned the poll. It was later revealed that NPRC was linked to Calgary-based Blue Direct, run by Richard Dur (an occasional contributor to the pages of The Interim), who is also the volunteer executive director of Prolife Alberta (an occasional advertiser in The Interim).
CLC has no connection to Prolife Alberta, and while it has used the services of Blue Direct, it had no ties to the Alberta poll on parental consent and abortion, yet CAHN falsely reported on Feb. 6, that CLC was likely behind the poll.
CLC director of communications, Pete Baklinski, issued a statement on X (formerly Twitter) criticizing CAHN after talking to representatives with CAHN denying any involvement in the poll. “As I already told the Network, CLC did not commission this poll and was not involved in creating it in any way,” said Baklinski. “We only learned about it after CTV broke the story about the poll on Feb. 5.”
Baklinski noted that, “CLC put out a press release that same day (Feb. 5) on our website praising the poll,” noting the release provided a “link to the PDF of the poll that we received in an email that same day that originated from the polling company National Public Research Canada.”
After an online conversation over X, CAHN’s executive director, Evan Balgord, apologized to Baklinski and promised that a retraction of the February 6 story would be coming. CAHN issued a correction on their website saying: “A previous version of this story suggested that Campaign Life Coalition posted a report based on the parental right’s poll on or around Feb. 1st, before it was public. We did research, but ultimately misinterpreted, how Google ascribes dates to its search results and made an error on that basis.”
CAHN further explained, “To be clear, we have no evidence to suggest that Campaign Life Coalition had any foreknowledge of the poll. This error appeared online for fewer than three hours” and “We genuinely apologize for the mistake.”
Baklinski said the CAHN article on the poll “deliberately spreads misinformation about the recent Alberta poll on abortion,” noting “The Network bizarrely implies that CLC was somehow behind the poll based on loopy Google cache information.”
In relation to the retraction, Baklinski tweeted “The organization has a big axe to grind against the pro-life movement and its bias blinded it to the facts. Facts matter!”
This is not the first time that CAHN has criticized CLC. Last year, the anti-hate network attacked CLC over the organization’s advocacy of parental rights which it claimed was “homophobic” and “transphobic.”
