In this episode of The Ezra LeVant Show, Ezra talks with Andrew Lawton about the possible curfews in Ontario and Quebec, and gives us his battle plan for the year, and talks about why the world is glad Trump is gone.
00:19:08.780His comments come a day after Quebec announced it would introduce similar action
00:19:12.780starting this Saturday that could force residents to stay home from 8pm until 5am or risk a fine of up to $6,000.
00:19:20.780Hey, I got a question for you and a question for our next guest who's standing by.
00:19:25.780Do you really think that cheaters like Rod Phillips, the former finance minister of Ontario, who sneaked away to St. Bart's?
00:19:34.780Or Joe Hargrave, the highway minister in Saskatchewan, who sneaked away to the States?
00:19:39.780Or Tracy Allard, the cabinet minister in Alberta, who sneaked away to Hawaii?
00:19:43.780Do you really believe that these people who would bring in a curfew, that you can't go out after 8pm?
00:19:50.780Do you really think they'd follow up themselves?
00:19:53.780Joining us now via Skype is our friend Andrew Lawton, the boss of the Andrew Lawton Show,
00:19:58.780which you can find at AndrewLawtonShow.com.
00:20:00.780Andrew, do you really think that the fancy people, the hobnobbers, the elites, do you really think they're going to be nighty-night lights out at 8pm like the rest of us are going to have to be?
00:20:13.780Yeah, I believe it's lights out, but then it's crawling behind the hedges so that a glaring headlight of a police officer doesn't necessarily pick them up.
00:20:21.780It's funny you mentioned travel because I was looking at the Quebec restrictions and one of the exemptions to it is if you're headed to an airport or a train station.
00:20:30.780So if you get busted driving around the streets and you are breaking curfew and they say, where are you going?
00:20:36.780You can actually say, I'm going to St. Bart's and that actually gets you out of the curfew, which I find interesting.
00:20:42.780Yeah, you know, I've been thinking a lot about these trips to warm places.
00:20:47.780Warm places. And by the way, I used to love going to warm places over Christmas, too.
00:20:52.780I think a lot of Canadians did. It's a bit of a tradition.
00:20:54.780Folks in the West go to Hawaii, California, Phoenix.
00:20:57.780Folks in the East go to Florida, the Caribbean.
00:21:00.780Not everybody, but, you know, there were a lot of affordable deals.
00:21:03.780But you can't do it anymore unless you're part of the ruling lockdown elite.
00:21:08.780Because in addition to, say, like you were going to have a week in the Dominican Republic, let's say.
00:21:12.780OK, but now you have to be able to afford two weeks of quarantine upon your return.
00:21:17.780So who has three weeks that they can use to take one week in the sun?
00:21:23.780You've got to have one of those fancy lockdown jobs like a politician, a bureaucrat, a teacher's union member or something like that.
00:21:30.780This is I hate to sound like a Marxist, Andrew, but this is very classist, this lockdown.
00:22:25.780So you're at your store from open to close.
00:22:27.780Where are you supposed to go to get groceries after you're done work?
00:22:31.780These 24 hour grocery stores that have become the lifeblood of some communities.
00:22:35.780Well, those can't exist anymore because, oh, well, if you're out after 8 p.m.
00:22:39.780in Quebec or whatever time Ontario sets, if they go down this terrible road, that is going to be illegal.
00:22:45.780So the idea here that all of a sudden everyone's work schedules and work days have to be as flexible as they are for the rulers is the expectation.
00:22:54.780And there's a real point of privilege here.
00:22:57.780And again, I'm sounding like you as we talk about these terms that people on our side of things don't usually talk about.
00:23:03.780But very few people considerably, if you look at the population, have the privilege of being able to work remotely and work from home.
00:23:10.780I'm very fortunate that I get to I know you've got a studio, but if you really needed to, you might be able to do some of your work from home or remotely, at least for a time.
00:24:01.780The consensus that I've been reading out of Quebec is that it's not about a scientific finding that the virus strikes at night.
00:24:09.780It's just to bring home the seriousness of it, basically to show people how mad the government is.
00:24:16.780We're going to punish you to get your attention.
00:24:19.780I haven't seen any medical science either in Canada or in the UK where they've had curfews or in Australia where they've had curfews that shows there is any epidemiological science behind this.
00:24:34.780And I think it's just politicians flexing muscles because they can.
00:24:40.780I do agree that this is not something with a medical basis, but I actually think it does something a little bit worse than what you're describing about just there to put the fear of God into people.
00:24:52.780And that's that it allows enforcement in a way that we don't necessarily have under the current restrictions, because right now you're still allowed to drive down the street because you could be going to church.
00:25:03.780If you're one of the 10 people that are allowed in the building, you could be going to the grocery store, you could be doing something essential.
00:25:09.780Now police will have an opportunity to stop you and question you and force you to justify what's always been a right, which is to drive down the roads that your taxes pay for.
00:25:19.780Now law enforcement has a mechanism and a supposed justification to force you to justify your own actions as a supposedly free person.
00:25:29.780And that's the real danger of this curfew is that it's now making enforcement a lot easier by criminalizing a lot more things, benign activities.
00:25:38.780If I'm driving around in my car for an evening, people in the country grow up doing this.
00:25:43.780You're not actually near anyone, you're not within breathing distance of anyone, but this will no longer be allowed.
00:25:49.780And one of the things just from a pragmatic perspective, if you shrink the hours in the day that you're allowed to do something, you're actually congesting stores more.
00:26:00.780You're congesting grocery stores more because now, well, instead of having 12 opening hours that people can shop in, you have to cram those same number of customers into 10 hours or eight hours, which is just absurd.
00:26:11.780We are not actually doing anything other than theater, but it's not just about optics.
00:26:16.780There's a real enforcement challenge that comes about here.
00:26:22.780We know a little bit about this because our friend Avi Yamini in Melbourne, Australia, we've seen video of him going through these checkpoints and he's had to furnish written permits to let him on the roads.
00:26:38.780They literally have check stops like you're in a war zone.
00:26:42.780We took a case, a civil liberties case of a Christian pastor who was going to help a disabled person.
00:27:22.780If you're driving around because it's essential for your job, you actually have to have your employer complete this form that in fact verifies that you have to be out and about doing whatever it is you do.
00:27:33.780Which means that, you know, there's going to be some bureaucrat that's going to look and say, well, actually, you could be doing that by Zoom or you could be doing that from home.
00:27:40.780And of course, if you look on the Quebec government's website, it's only available in French.
00:27:44.780So we can add a bit of discrimination in the insult to injury category on this.
00:27:48.780You know, one more thing from Australia.
00:28:20.780It's about normalizing an intrusion in our life that has never been permitted in Canadian history.
00:28:25.780And what makes me especially scared is how the legacy media, the media party, as I sometimes call it, is so compliant, complicit, even supportive.
00:28:37.780We see abuses by police that would normally shock liberal journalists.
00:29:16.780And a lot of the official quote unquote civil liberties activists I found were very quiet in the early days of the lockdown or they were saying, well, you know, maybe it's not ideal.
00:29:25.780But and a lot of them, I think, will have to start coming around to what people in independent media have actually been beating the drum about since earlier on in the pandemic.
00:29:35.780Now that the curfew is being discussed, which is OK, well, this is a bridge too far.
00:29:39.780But unfortunately, they've already sort of justified that idea that it's governments and public health officials that get to make these decisions.
00:29:46.780And just one point, if I may, Ezra, and I hope I'm not taking too much of your ear and your viewers time here, is that doctors and public health officials are important.
00:29:54.780They have a role to play in the system, but they have a singular focus.
00:29:58.780It's the responsibility of politicians and other stakeholders like courts, like voters and citizens to say that, well, hang on, there are other considerations here like civil liberties.
00:30:09.780For example, if you say to a doctor, I need to reduce obesity and that's their only metric, they could say, all right, well, we'll ban sugar, we'll ban fat, we'll ban this.
00:30:17.780They don't care about all of the economic considerations, the freedom considerations.
00:30:21.780You've given them one focus and they'll do that. The same is true in this pandemic.
00:30:25.780Sure, we may be able to just put a padlock on everyone's front door for two weeks and we are all going to get down to zero cases.
00:30:32.780Except the reality is that's not feasible for all of these other reasons that they don't care about because it's not their job to.
00:30:39.780So the idea of complete deference, we're seeing the consequences of it when doctors are telling us that we'll be locked in our homes figuratively, but almost literally after 8 p.m.
00:30:49.780Yeah, you're right. Ontario's top doctor. Well, he's not my doctor.
00:30:52.780If I go to a doctor, first of all, he cares about me and he thinks about me as an entire person.
00:30:57.780And second of all, I can take it or leave it when he gives me advice. I can even get a second opinion.
00:31:02.780Don't tell me this guy's Ontario's top doctor. I never met him.
00:31:05.780And as far as I know, he hasn't had a patient in a decade.
00:31:09.780You know, Andrew, I want to tell you, you're getting my noggin jogging.
00:31:13.780And I'm thinking, I want to study what the law is in Quebec.
00:31:17.780And let me just tell you and really tell our viewers two things that are popping into my mind.
00:31:22.780The first is we know that there's going to be cheaters galore.
00:31:25.780And I swear on the altar of God that we will make it a high journalistic priority to catch the lockdown enforcers being lockdown cheaters.
00:31:37.780Because I know that the fancy people will never stay home after 8 p.m.
00:31:41.780But there's one more thing and I'm just thinking out loud here and I should probably think it to myself until I'm ready to roll.
00:31:48.780If there are exemptions to be handed out for certain industries, and I think journalism is typically one of them,
00:31:56.780then I'm going to inquire with our lawyers if there's some way where we can literally deputize hundreds or even thousands of people in Ontario
00:32:09.780or whatever other provinces there are curfews, to be official rebel news citizen journalists.