Rupa Subramanya, who has more than 128,000 Twitter followers and
writes columns for the National Post, a conservative Canadian newspaper, tweeted on Sunday: “I’ve heard from so many today that some Ottawa hotels have been instructed by the city/feds not to give out rooms to the protestors. The Marriott downtown apparently is empty but evidently all the rooms booked. Someone should really investigate if this is true.”
Facts First:
Regardless of what Subramanya may have been told, the claims she amplified were not true. The employees who took CNN’s calls at the downtown Marriott and five other Ottawa hotels on Monday said their establishments had not been given any anti-protester instruction by any government; Patrick Champagne, press secretary to Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, told CNN that the claim “is categorically false”; Alexander Cohen, spokesperson for Canadian Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, called the claim “ludicrous” and said that “no one from the federal government has done that”; Steve Bell, president of the Ottawa Gatineau Hotel Association, said that “to my knowledge there is no truth to this rumour.” As for the Marriott in particular, it had rooms available at the time of Subramanya’s tweet on Sunday evening and again on Monday evening.
When CNN told Subramanya that the claims in her tweet seemed to be false, she said she was glad we had looked into the matter. She insisted she had herself made “no claim” and had merely issued a “call for help” for journalists to look into what she had been hearing from protesters, since “frankly I’ve been working round the clock talking to people on the ground and so I haven’t had the time or the opportunity to vet this claim.”
The “mainstream Canadian media should be fact checking these and debunking them if they’re false,” Subramanya said, though she herself writes for a national Canadian newspaper.