If you haven’t listened to the interview 92 CITI FM’s Dave Wheeler did with Maclean’s magazine writer Nancy Macdonald on her publication’s claim that Winnipeg is the most racist city in Canada, I highly recommend you do. It’s a hard-hitting, 14-minute interview conducted in-studio over the weekend. And it exposes how the writer tugged on the heart-strings of her readers by using high-profile stories unrelated to racism to try to paint Winnipeg as a cesspool of racist activity. The Maclean’s piece centres around the tragic death of Tina Fontaine, the 15-year-old aboriginal girl who was found murdered and wrapped in plastic along the banks of the Red River last year. Macdonald makes multiple references to the murder, holding it up as an example of the racism she says permeates Winnipeg. In fact, she claims in her article the murder is forcing Winnipeg to finally come to grips with its racism problem. Trouble is, we don’t know if Fontaine’s death has anything to do with racism at all because the killer(s) hasn’t been found. And when asked repeatedly by Wheeler about the Fontaine case, Macdonald admitted racism may not have played a part in the murder. “I just don’t think we know exactly what happened,” Macdonald said during the interview. “The police are still investigating, they won’t comment on what kind of progress they’ve made.” And then she added: “I don’t know, is it a racist crime? I mean, we’ll see.” So she doesn’t know if Tina Fontaine’s crime was a racist crime, yet she uses it as the chief narrative in her story to paint Winnipeg as the most racist city in Canada. Nice journalism. And what about Rinelle Harper, the aboriginal teen who was attacked and left for dead along the banks of the Assiniboine River in November? Macdonald cited that case, too, to characterize Winnipeg as a racist city. Yet she conveniently failed to mention Harper’s attackers were also aboriginal. “Can you explain to me how that was racist?” Wheeler asked. Macdonald didn’t answer directly because she didn’t have a real answer for it. She was caught. Cherry-picked data Wheeler also questioned Macdonald about some of the polling data the magazine used to supposedly show how racist people are in Winnipeg. The magazine cherry-picked data from some poll commissioned by the Canadian Institute for Identities and Migration, yet gave no date or any other specifics about the poll. In some cases, the magazine used polling results for the “prairies,” which includes Manitoba and Saskatchewan, even though the article targets Winnipeg specifically. “Yeah, like I said, it’s not just a Winnipeg thing,” Macdonald acknowledged in the interview. Not just a Winnipeg thing? Your whole piece is about Winnipeg and how racist the city is. “So Winnipeg gets the blame for all of the Prairies?” Wheeler asked. “No, Winnipeg certainly shares part of the blame,” Macdonald explained. “It’s not isolated to Winnipeg, this kind of sentiment is felt in Saskatchewan as well as Manitoba.” So now it’s a prairie thing, not just a Winnipeg thing. If Maclean’s had done its homework, it would have discovered it is, in fact, a Canada-wide thing. When asked point-blank whether Winnipeg truly is the most racist city in Canada, Macdonald — who grew up in St. Norbert and played hockey for the University of Manitoba — at first didn’t answer. I wonder why she hesitated. “In your opinion, is Winnipeg Canada’s most racist city?” Wheeler asked. “That’s not what the headline says,” said Macdonald. “Welcome to Winnipeg, where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst,” Wheeler said. “So, is that an accurate statement?” Macdonald, sounding like a politician, still wouldn’t answer the question directly. “When I met the mayor yesterday, he challenged me to come back in a year, and we will ...” That wasn’t the question. “So I’ll ask again, ‘Welcome to Winnipeg, where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst.’ Do you agree with that statement?” asked Wheeler. “Yes,” Macdonald said, because, you know, she kinda had to. Google it. Listen to it. It’s quite revealing.

• published: 28 Jan 2015
• views: 37