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‘Toronto Is In Canada’: Twitter Fires Back At Laura Ingraham Tweet

The Fox News host insinuated that Joe Biden has some control over Toronto city policy.
Laura Ingraham speaks during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 20, 2016.
Mark J. Terril, file/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Laura Ingraham speaks during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 20, 2016.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham might want to study up on her Canadian geography.

On Friday, the “Ingraham Angle” host took to Twitter to draw a bizarre connection between an online story that claimed Toronto had limited “religious freedom,” and U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden.

“Will Joe Biden do more to protect religious liberty than Donald Trump? Not a prayer,” Ingraham wrote, alongside a story from far-right website Big League Politics that said Toronto had “banned” Catholic communion.

First of all, Big League Politics was founded by former Brietbart employees and has frequently trafficked in conspiracy theories. It has been described by the New York Times as “an obscure right-wing news site [...] which has promoted conspiracy theories and written favorably about white nationalist candidates.”

The story Ingraham shared was inaccurate. In reality, the archbishop of Toronto modified the eucharist rite to observe safety protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s now a modified version of communion where a priest delivers the blessing from a safe distance, hands the congregant their wafer, and they then move more than two metres away from the priest before removing their mask to consume it.

So no, Toronto is not banning Catholic communion.

Beyond that, Canadians and Americans alike on Twitter were concerned with Ingraham’s seeming assertion that any policy in Toronto was under the jurisdiction of Biden or the U.S. in the first place.

And there were a lot of maps involved, because we love a good map.

Even the city itself weighed in.

For the record, there is a city named Toronto in the U.S., which boasts the slogan “the gem city” — a phrase that’s certainly never been used to describe Toronto, Ont.

The Ohio city of around 5,000 was actually named after the Canadian equivalent, because its founders thought Toronto was somewhere “worth emulating.”

Apparently Ingraham does not agree.

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