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On Friday, September 4th, a judge declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case. Thirty-five hours of jury deliberation, more than one deadlock note, and in the end no verdict for a woman who killed her three children. She was not acquitted. The state can try her again. And while she sits in the hospital where she has spent three years, her legal fund has climbed past a million dollars.
A million dollars raised on the feeling that the woman who murdered three kids is somehow the person who was wronged. We spent the first half of the episode trying to name the emotional payoff behind that, because there is no logical one. The payoff is a precedent. If a mother can escape the weight of killing her own children by pointing at her hormones, then no woman can be held to account for anything. That is the furthest edge of the ledger, and wiping it clean is the point.
The same instinct runs through the CBC. Over one fortnight the broadcaster ran a piece explaining that Clancy would have fared better under Canada’s softer infanticide laws, and an internal memo told staff to stop calling the 9/11 attacks terrorism. The man who signed that memo holds the title of senior director of journalistic standards and public trust. Both moves came out of the same building, funded by the same $1.4 billion of public money, and both point the same direction. A country’s largest broadcaster should be the last institution ashamed to call an attack an attack.
Then there is OpenAI. Thirty new complaints allege the company flagged the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account for violent planning eight months before the February attack and recommended calling the RCMP, and that its own global affairs division overruled the call. Months later, when OpenAI believed its own offices were threatened, it locked the doors, warned staff, and phoned the police. One threshold for the public, another for itself. The hard part, as Jonathan put it through Thomas Sowell, is that there is no solution here, only trade-offs. Sue a company into hair-trigger safety and you build the machine that censors everyone and sells the leftovers. The Flock camera network already shows the shape of it: 28 devices in one Texas suburb, searched 1.6 million times in six months by 459 agencies that were never supposed to have access.
And through all of it sits Carney, walking away from a U.S. trade deal three days after Canada shed 42,000 jobs. The stated reason was protecting Canadian culture, which is hard to hear from the man who signs the CBC’s checks. The likelier reason runs through Brookfield, Qatar, the UAE, and the $70 billion already routed north. The through-line across every story is the same: the people trusted to hold the standard are the ones quietly moving it, and it is ordinary people who pay first.
Listen to The Blendr Report EP175 on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
