Terry Milewski

1998 Asian Pacific Economic Conference protest coverage

In 1998, the office of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien complained that Milewski had been "biassed (sic)" in his coverage of protests at the 1997 Asian Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) summit in Vancouver, and Milewski was suspended for three days from the CBC.^[5] Milewski's investigations of Chretien's possible connections to the RCMP attack on peaceful protestors at the summit were persistent, and the controversy eventually compelled Solicitor General Andy Scott to resign his cabinet post. The alleged bias was found in some remarks in e-mails between Milewski and arrested protestor Craig Jones, as well as in providing coverage of protestors' points of view.

The CBC reported that its Ombudsman, Marcel Pepin, over a five-month period, reviewed all of Milewski's TV reporting and communications with sources concerning APEC. He concluded that Milewski's reports "cannot be faulted from the point of view of accuracy and fairness." Pepin found that "...concerns that Milewski was one-sided were not justified." At the time of the finding, the CBC also reported that Milewski was serving an 18-day suspension, but that "...Milewski was not suspended because of his journalism but for other undisclosed reasons." It emerged that these "other" reasons were Milewski's public insistence that his conduct and his reporting were sound. Pepin further credited Milewski with "aggressive and critical journalism" which was valuable both to the journalism community and to the public at large.^[6]

2006 Sikh documentary

In 2006, Milewski reported in a documentary for the CBC that a minority within Canada's Sikh community was gaining political influence even while publicly supporting terrorist acts in support of the struggle for an independent Sikh state. The World Sikh Organization (WSO) sued the CBC for "defamation, slander and libel", alleging that Milewski linked it to terrorism and damaged the reputation of the WSO within the Sikh community. ^[7][8]. The documentary remains unaltered on the CBC website and, in 2015, the WSO unconditionally abandoned "any and all claims" made in its lawsuit.

2011 Canadian federal election

After the motion of non-confidence had passed by the House of Commons, at the press conference Milewski accused Michael Ignatieff of not being forthcoming about forming a coalition with the other opposition parties should the ruling Conservatives not win a majority, saying “Surely this coalition monkey is going to stay on your back every day of the campaign? Because people will assume that if you don’t rule it out, that’s because you’ve got something to hide.” Ignatieff maintained "if you want to replace the Harper government, you’ve got to vote Liberal. It can’t be clearer than that".^[9]

2014 Opposition to reporting on global surveillance revelations

In a speech by Glenn Greenwald in Ottawa on October 25, 2014, which was broadcast by C-SPAN, Greenwald and journalist Jesse Brown alleged that Terry Milewski, as a CBC News senior correspondent was responsible for a major CBC resistance into reporting the facts about global surveillance, object of the documents provided by Edward Snowden. Brown claimed that Milewski was ideologically opposed to reporting those facts, regardless the fact that they were being reported widely by all major newspapers all over the world.^[10]

In response, Milewski challenged Brown and Greenwald to square their allegations with his actual published critiques of government policy on mass surveillance. One called those plans "Orwellian." Another criticised the lack of parliamentary oversight of Canada's spy agency. A third contradicted then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper's claim that Canada did not use metadata as a surveillance tool. Brown and Greenwald did not respond to Milewski's challenge.

Jagmeet Singh interview

On September 29th, 2017, Milewski, acting as a fill-in host for Power and Politics on CBC news Network, asked new NDP leader Jagmeet Singh whether it was appropriate for posters honouring Talwinder Singh Parmar, the leader of the 1985 Air India bomb plot, to be displayed at Sikh temples. Singh repeatedly declined to answer. Finally, he claimed that he did not know who was responsible for the bombing and called for an investigation to find whoever was "actually responsible." The question was criticized as being problematic in that it presumed that Singh would somehow support a convicted terrorist. However, five months later, on March 15th, 2018, Singh himself revised his position and called it "a very fair question." He added that he now accepted that Parmar was responsible for the bombing and that "I don't think it's appropriate" to glorify him as a martyr.