The First Alberta university enacts a free speech pledge, and the province s journalists complain. Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer, and you won't give them a yes or no to a question?
00:19:35.260But I find it concerning, as I know you do, too, that nonpartisan civil servants would be
00:19:43.620phoning professors and pundits and saying, hey, come on, you're saying the wrong thing.
00:19:48.240It's going to be hard for Trudeau to get re-elected.
00:19:50.700That doesn't sound like the Canadian way.
00:19:52.360No, I would call this interference laundering.
00:19:58.980The government is trying to interfere in people's freedom of expression, but they don't want it to appear as though Trudeau or one of his direct minions is doing it themselves.
00:20:11.200They want it to appear as though Global Affairs Canada, the old Foreign Affairs Department, is doing it.
00:20:18.540So they have an assistant deputy minister in global affairs phone David Mulroney, who is our – no relation to Brian Mulroney.
00:20:29.060David Mulroney, who's our former ambassador to China.
00:20:32.760And Guy Saint-Jacques, who is another former ambassador to China, and say, you know, given the – these are direct quotes – election environment, we would be happier if you wouldn't say anything negative – that would come back negatively on the government.
00:20:49.220Well, there's so many things wrong with this.
00:20:51.920First of all, both men are academics now, so you're sort of meddling with academic independence.
00:21:29.580The other thing that's wrong about this, and you may – you probably remember vividly, right after Trudeau was sworn in, I think it was two days after he was sworn in in 2015, he went to the Pearson Block, which is the home of Canada's Foreign Affairs Department, now called Global Affairs.
00:21:46.160And there was a rock star reception for him.
00:21:49.480There's an atrium in the middle of the building, and people lined the outside of the balconies all the way up to the top of the building to cheer and yell and, oh, it's Justin Trudeau here.
00:22:03.620Oh, the bad Stephen Harper days are gone.
00:22:06.500And I think ever since that time, a large chunk of people in global affairs, not by any means all of the people in global affairs, but a large chunk of them have been quite happy to be the diplomatic arm of the Liberal Party of Canada, not of the government of Canada.
00:22:25.380And you'll remember too that David – that John McCallum, the minister that the Liberals had to lean on to leave, they had to pressure him to leave, even though I don't think they really wanted him to leave.
00:22:38.880He was advising the Chinese government on things it could do to help the Liberals get re-elected in Canada.
00:22:50.640It's a snake pit of counter-influences and influences and meddling, and that's just the latest of the Liberal efforts to limit free speech.
00:23:24.360I find it implausible that he wouldn't have been preparing for that while he was still PM.
00:23:30.080You mentioned John McCallum giving advice to the Chinese government.
00:23:33.360Just a few months ago, he was supposed to be our ambassador, giving advice to our government.
00:23:39.140These guys are playing both sides of the table.
00:23:41.200Now, what I like – you mentioned David Mulroney, and when people hear Mulroney, they think Brian Mulroney, but as you point out, no relation.
00:24:17.560I mean, John McCallum boasted about the fact that he has a Chinese wife and that he was given a Chinese name.
00:24:26.200And he would refer to himself sometimes by his Chinese name.
00:24:31.120And he was given that name by Chinese officials.
00:24:34.060So what we're looking at here – and this kind of gets off the free speech topic – but what we're looking here at global affairs now is that the people who are running things, who are liberal sycophants, are also amateurs at this.
00:24:51.080It's like David Mulroney didn't always give Stephen Harper the advice Harper wanted to hear.
00:24:56.260He didn't work to try and get the conservatives reelected.
00:25:00.620He understood that we are a small fish.
00:25:05.180We're a real underdog when you're taking on China.
00:25:08.420But there are things you can do that the Chinese don't like that make them think twice about leaning on you.
00:25:15.660And there is a pragmatic debate to be had within the federal government, in the Justice Department, Global Affairs, Prime Minister's Office about what we do with the Huawei executive that we are keeping under house arrest in Vancouver until she gets an extradition hearing to the United States.
00:25:51.000There's lots of people who are very, very smart, who work at foreign affairs in Ottawa, who have dealt with this problem that we have, being a country of 36 million, up against giant economies and giant countries.
00:26:14.860They tweet, and that's going to make everything go away.
00:26:17.640And it's funny because, you know, they cringe when you compare them to Donald Trump.
00:26:22.720But they conduct an awful lot of foreign policy with no more forethought, nor any more depth of awareness and PR than Trump does.
00:26:32.980Well, and just look at the effectiveness.
00:26:34.680I mean, generally in foreign affairs, Trump gets what Trump wants, whether it's getting NATO countries to spend more on the military or – I mean, we don't know how the story is going to end with North Korea, but he's certainly made more progress than Obama has.
00:27:17.220OK, so you say, well, you know, who cares?
00:27:20.100So what about – the Saudis are now being run by a man who looks to the West like he might be more westernized and more liberal but clearly is not.
00:27:33.720Well, because you have to deal with countries on a long-term basis, not a gotcha basis, not a ha-ha-ha, see what we did to you.
00:27:42.680And I just think we're dealing now with people who are so smug, who have such high impressions of themselves, such high opinions of themselves, that they think the world is waiting.
00:28:08.500You know, I'm glad you mentioned Brazil, their president, Jair Bolsonaro, very interesting guy, powerful, very Trumpy, very pro-Trump.
00:28:18.300Reminds me a little bit of that Italian interior minister, Matteo Salvini.
00:28:22.920Bolsonaro, you can like him or not, but he won a majority of the votes in Brazil, and he's making things happen.
00:28:30.200When he was elected, the press release by the Canadian government was so snippy, it didn't even mention him by name, let alone congratulate him.
00:28:43.940And then remember when Trudeau was sitting between the Chinese president and the Brazilian president, and Trudeau was so desperate, he reached over to shake Bolsonaro's head.
00:28:55.400Bolsonaro has no idea who Trudeau was, but if he bothered to know, he would see, oh, there's the snippy guy.
00:29:02.500He knew enough to turn his back on him.
00:29:05.340And that's the point, because for the purpose of one snippy press release, if we would have showed some professional restraint then, maybe we could have had Bolsonaro's help getting our Canadian hostages back, but we just couldn't restrain ourselves.
00:29:18.260Or we'd have smoothed over some of our other trade problems that we're having with Brazil right now.
00:29:22.120You know, I think the only people who can probably help us get our hostages out of China are the Americans.
00:29:28.260And I'm not convinced that they're fully behind us, and they should be because we did the arrest that they requested of us for the extradition of Maine.
00:29:43.120But, you know, there have been two or three or four times where Trudeau or Chrystia Freeland have been rude in public about Trump, dismissive, sneering, snide.
00:29:54.260And he's saying probably to his justice and state to people, just ignore the Canadians.
00:30:10.020I mean, Harper didn't get dismissed by Obama, even though the two of them were miles apart on policy, because they dealt with each other professionally.
00:30:18.700They dealt with each other courteously and intelligently.
00:30:21.540This group in the liberal government does not do that.
00:30:25.780It doesn't think through the response it would have if it was on the receiving end of the same virtue signaling that it seems to think the rest of the world needs.
00:30:35.940Yeah. Let me come back to one last thing, and I appreciate you being so generous with your time.
00:30:40.840We've been talking. I mean, there's so much to talk about here, and I'm really enjoying it.
00:30:45.420I want to come back to the headline of your piece, The Latest Liberal Affront to Free Speech.
00:30:49.480Let me zero in on one thing, and you mentioned it in passing, but I'd like to go back there again.
00:30:53.320You mentioned that the senior civil servant, the assistant deputy minister, so that's pretty high up the food chain.
00:30:59.760Again, this is a civil servant. This is the permanent bureaucracy.
00:31:05.080The politicians come and go, and their political staff come and go, but these guys are supposed to stick around, conservative, liberal, whatever.
00:31:12.400But this guy was running an errand for Trudeau, and he wasn't saying, hey, don't say this in public because it could jeopardize the lives of the hostages.
00:31:23.960You could dispute that, but that could be a legitimate reason for an assistant deputy minister to call someone up and say, look, we have information that what you've done is put them in jeopardy.
00:31:35.700Okay, I mean, I might be irritated by that, but that's your objective.
00:31:39.460But when you say it's for, as you point out in your article, quote, election environment, you have transformed the permanent bureaucracy of this country into an election team, mate.
00:31:54.600Take a look at Michael Wernick, the retired former clerk of the Privy Council, who was spearheading a lot of the pressure being put on Jody Wilson-Raybould last fall to cut SNC-Lavalin a deal.
00:32:09.300That's not the role of the clerk of the Privy Council.
00:32:11.860I worked with two clerks when I was in Ottawa in the 80s.
00:32:14.840Both of them would have said to the prime minister if the prime minister had said, look, I want you to phone the justice minister and put pressure on her to make this deal.
00:32:23.360Both of them would have said, Mr. Prime Minister, she's your minister, not mine.
00:32:28.120I will deal with the deputies if that's what needs to be done.
00:32:31.080But ministers are the responsibility of the prime minister.
00:32:33.640And second, sir, there is a law in the country that prevents us from making – putting this kind of pressure on the attorney general when it comes to an independent prosecution.
00:32:43.400And I would recommend strongly, sir, that you not put pressure on her either.
00:32:50.500And then the liberals want to appoint him as one of the five guardians of our election when it comes to looking for interference from foreign countries.
00:32:59.600They just have no concept of what freedom of expression means or what independence of thought means.
00:33:08.540And I did a little show on this a few months ago.
00:33:11.000I was watching Karina Gould, the Democratic Institutions Minister in Parliamentary Committee, answering some questions about this five-man Internet censorship panel that Michael Wernick was going to chair, which is terrifying.
00:33:25.300And she was asked several times for examples of when they would weigh in.
00:34:38.720She was saying if there was some embarrassing leak that was truthful, relevant to the public interest, important to the election, they would step in to protect Trudeau.
00:34:58.500But you know what's going to happen if this sort of thing gets some traction, you know, regulating social media or having election watchdogs.
00:35:11.400Someone's going to say, look, I don't believe much in the positive side of multiculturalism, or I think that illegal immigration is leading to all sorts of problems in Canada, or I'm skeptical about the science behind climate change alarmism.
00:35:28.600I mean, there are all sorts of issues about which the progressives feel so strongly that their side is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
00:35:40.220And they will try and eliminate those messages from the public square.
00:38:28.900In June 2019, a Toronto man was arrested and held in jail overnight for preaching on the street in a gay village.
00:38:34.620This in a country that supposedly values free speech.
00:38:37.460A month or so later, a Muslim woman in London is screaming at gay people on the street, calling them shameful, and nothing at all will happen to her.
00:38:44.140I think you're talking about Reverend David Lynn at the Gay Pride Parade.