An unhinged Elizabeth May
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
192.03842
Summary
In this week's episode of Off The Record, we discuss the halal chicken craze in Ontario, and the controversy surrounding halal-friendly fast food chicken restaurants in the province. We also discuss the KFC halal Chicken craze and its impact on the local Muslim community.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
you're uh dressing down today isaac yeah like uh i i i i mean it's it's almost unbearable in my
00:00:08.000
house heat wise so i thought that a suit would be a bit too hot even right now uh without the
00:00:15.360
fan on even with the fan on i'm barely surviving here and i think you're wearing the same thing
00:00:20.880
you were last time william so i have no comments about your apparel i think so i was going to say
00:00:24.720
it was 35 degrees here in calgary yesterday but of course we are in the middle of stampede and the
00:00:30.720
best weather for stampede is hot and sunny that's what you want it to be for the whole 10 days so
00:00:35.360
i'm not complaining because this is a beautiful time to be in stampede all right let's get this
00:00:41.520
thing on the road hello and welcome everyone to another exciting or at least i hope exciting
00:00:54.160
edition of off the record this is our friday kickback show we cycle through a rotating cast
00:01:00.000
of the true north characters and we chit chat about the stories we have covered through the
00:01:04.320
week some of the ones we didn't get to we try to find the lighter side in this turbulent chaotic
00:01:09.280
and crazy world as much as we can as i've joked with a couple of people the worst things are for
00:01:13.600
the country the better they are for our shows and off the record is no exception i'm andrew lawton with
00:01:18.880
you for the next however long this takes joined by true north chief operations officer or is the chief
00:01:24.560
operating officer i don't know i just call you coo usually william mcbeth and our alberta correspondent
00:01:29.920
isaac lamaru uh good to have you both with us how's the alberta summer treating you it's great here in
00:01:37.200
calgary as i said stampede season everybody's happy it's hot it's sunny we have water again everything's
00:01:43.760
coming up calgary yeah it's uh it's okay here i guess really hot i'm dying in my house uh and all
00:01:50.720
my friends are at the stampede i guess they don't have to work uh nine to five jobs so they can just
00:01:54.960
go whenever they'd like uh but i'm obviously in my uh office working so yes and don't you forget it
00:02:02.080
i you're also in edmonton so it's not like it's not like we're the reason keep it's not like i'm
00:02:05.840
keeping you from stampede geography is keeping you from stampede uh now what we did do is force isaac to
00:02:11.520
turn off his fan before the show began because it was like coming through to the microphone so if
00:02:15.920
he's like just like melting into a puddle by the end of it that will uh be wise so uh this is the
00:02:21.040
the benefit of live to tape anyway i must say despite how people may make an assumption based
00:02:26.960
on my appearance i'm not a huge fast food person certainly i could not tell you the last time i was
00:02:32.640
at a kfc but kfc has been in the news this week isaac what's going on yeah i actually can't tell you
00:02:40.080
the last time i've been to kfc either but i definitely don't plan on going anytime soon
00:02:46.080
given the recent news which is that uh ontario kfc restaurants sorry ontario kfc restaurants
00:02:53.760
are going halal friendly or muslim friendly with halal chicken and the removal of pork products
00:02:59.680
from their menu so all of the restaurants in ontario except those in thunder bay and in ottawa
00:03:06.240
have switched to halal chicken and removed pork products like bacon from their menu except for
00:03:12.880
the joint uh kfc and taco bell locations do you still get your bacon if the kfc is sharing a roof
00:03:19.840
with a taco bell that's right so if you really want your bacon uh you're gonna have to go to a
00:03:24.800
shared location uh and when we were discussing this on monday uh when we weren't even sure if it
00:03:29.920
were true or not i i thought for sure that it would be the case that it was just one radical
00:03:36.240
owner at one kfc location but all across the province i mean this is very surprising for me
00:03:41.760
especially considering uh i like to think that western culture sees bacon as one of their favorite
00:03:48.080
foods whereas uh when i was looking at the data there's the the muslim population in ontario is about
00:03:54.240
five to six percent so you're really alienating a lot more people than you're catering to i'd say
00:03:59.840
what do you guys think yeah and and also i i would say everyone's focusing on the ontario bit but if you
00:04:05.120
can put that letter back up this is a letter that kfc sent out to community leaders so i believe it was
00:04:10.880
sent out to like the heads of various muslim organizations and mosques back in may it says this
00:04:16.960
will be followed by the rest of canada by year end so by the end of the year they'll have taken this
00:04:23.360
ontario project and made it national so this is causing a bit of a moral panic of sorts on twitter
00:04:28.560
you've got some people that are saying you know boycott kfc i don't want to eat that halal chicken
00:04:32.640
i actually am of the mindset that i don't really care i've had halal chicken one of my
00:04:37.120
favorite go-to things if i am out in the world is shawarma and shawarma restaurants are almost all halal
00:04:42.880
i do think that whenever a company makes a decision like this you always have to wonder
00:04:48.000
why is it because they're looking at a decision that's being made for commercial reasons
00:04:53.200
or is it that they're doing something to try to pander and apparently i didn't realize this
00:04:58.000
until i was looking into this story almost all the chicken chains in canada are halal like mary
00:05:03.600
brown's is halal popeyes is halal so kfc in that way is a bit of a laggard i'm more intrigued by the
00:05:09.680
removal of bacon because it's one thing to add something to the menu that doesn't really change
00:05:14.480
anything for anyone else like you're not you don't become a muslim when you have halal chicken
00:05:18.720
but taking away something that consumers wanted that to me is a bit more that that that to me i
00:05:25.360
find a bit more interesting here what do you think william yeah i was thinking about the bacon thing
00:05:30.400
and uh i i don't recall the last time i was at a kfc and i'm not sure if anything they sell
00:05:36.960
has bacon on it but then they said they were removing pork from the menu so it must have been
00:05:42.000
on the menu in some form i guess so you that i mean logically yes that would make sense i i guess
00:05:46.960
now i was thinking though that if you think about big fast food chains like big donald's or burger
00:05:52.160
king or even subway and i mean starbucks has breakfast sandwiches all of these places have bacon
00:05:58.320
and it it can't be that muslim people don't go to any of those fast food restaurants right like i i
00:06:06.160
can't imagine that that precludes people from going there and ordering like if you're at mcdonald's i
00:06:11.600
don't know the filet-o-fish which probably has very little bacon on it altogether so i'm not
00:06:16.880
to that led me to think this was more about virtue signaling than it was about specifically
00:06:22.800
addressing the religious dietary requirements of a segment of the canadian population and
00:06:28.400
virtue signaling of course is something that companies love to do without always thinking
00:06:32.880
through well it cuts both ways it signals good things but then what other signal does it
00:06:37.040
set maybe to the rest of canada so something to think yeah yeah and when it comes to like kosher
00:06:42.720
food and kosher restaurants some orthodox jews do have very strict requirements on the facilities
00:06:48.720
and even on the plates like they can't even eat off of a plate that at one point had non-kosher
00:06:53.760
meat or meat and dairy mixed or something like that i'm not aware of islam being so strict and again
00:06:59.680
that's just like orthodox jews so i don't even think there is a facility rule where if bacon was served
00:07:05.280
on something else they can't have even the halal chicken on the menu i don't know about that but
00:07:10.240
what was the reaction like to this that you saw isaac uh yeah well firstly i was actually looking
00:07:16.800
at the stock price uh this is from yum yum food or yum brands which is the yeah that's the
00:07:21.840
pfc and i was like oh maybe because obviously legacy media has picked up this story now so i thought
00:07:28.720
okay the story is getting around we'll see if their stock price has dropped and
00:07:32.640
to my surprise it hasn't really although it did drop over the last month but not in relation to
00:07:36.080
this news from what i can tell just based on the timeline there but of course people on x are always
00:07:41.360
more critical than any other public sphere so yeah there was definitely some backlash on x but it
00:07:47.280
hasn't really reflected their stock price so i don't know that that's obviously where what they're
00:07:51.760
going to care about most as a company uh in regard to public backlash so if their stock hasn't taken
00:07:57.600
a hit i don't think they're going to see a fault in their action personally yeah and and it's also
00:08:03.600
like one of these things that seems very online like the average consumer would have no idea going
00:08:09.280
into a kfc on one day that oh this chicken tastes halal versus the time before now i don't know i don't
00:08:15.520
know if the restaurants are now like in some areas putting up big signs that say you know now now
00:08:19.360
now halal like i don't know how much attention they're drawing to what i found interesting in the re one
00:08:23.280
of the reasons i found this to be suspect originally because what happened was this
00:08:27.840
letter that we put up on the screen earlier we're circulating online the letter is dated may we're
00:08:32.960
now july 11 so anytime you see something that you're like okay why now and i had wondered if
00:08:37.840
it was photoshopped or if it was faked or something like that so the fact that it's taken this long
00:08:42.800
means that kfc it seemed like in may when they made this change was really just quietly announcing it
00:08:47.520
to members of the muslim community they weren't trying to draw a lot of attention to it and when we
00:08:52.320
wrote the story i don't even think kfc responded did they i know from from what i read in the story
00:08:58.880
it said that they didn't yeah yeah and so so that i found quite interesting so again i like it's the
00:09:04.640
at the end of the day who cares it's a company they can do what they want but i i'm always just so
00:09:09.280
skeptical of any corporate decisions now that they're not rooted in in you know anything resembling
00:09:15.360
what they're supposed to be and the great example i give about that is that i uh you know i live not
00:09:20.240
too far from general dynamics land systems which in my city of london ontario is known for exporting
00:09:26.720
armored vehicles to saudi arabia so it's amusing when you drive by and you see like the trans uh
00:09:32.480
friendly pride flag up in front of the uh facility manufacturing saudi tanks and you're like why don't
00:09:38.640
you just put one of those on every one to saudi arabia what why don't you just slap that on the
00:09:42.560
the vehicles there oh because you don't actually believe this when it's about your business
00:09:46.560
that uh you're pandering to yeah and i had to laugh that if if i guess if ksc really wanted to
00:09:52.640
drive home the point we every location would have a cutout of the prophet muhammad eating a chicken
00:09:57.840
sandwich or something which i doubt is uh is what they're going to do uh i don't think we're going
00:10:03.200
to see that in kfc anytime soon but yeah you know every time you see a company try to virtue signal or put
00:10:08.800
out something that seems to be more about about style than substance you have to wonder if uh you
00:10:14.880
know is there uh an a an ulterior motive or is this simply a business decision as usual and everybody
00:10:22.400
should go about their lives i mean personally i'm waiting for chick-fil-a to open up here again in
00:10:26.480
calgary and uh solves all my problems so yeah we we have a chick-fil-a in london now and the problem
00:10:32.880
is it's like clean on the other end of town so i've never actually been to it although there was a time i
00:10:36.800
i would have killed for it and i don't know if chick-fil-a is halal i don't think so
00:10:41.360
i couldn't tell you don't know uh probably i'm not going to do the homework on it either if i'm
00:10:45.600
honest i so one one thing i will say when you mentioned earlier william other restaurants that
00:10:50.000
have bacon and pork the thing that's interesting i i've actually been to the middle east i've been to
00:10:55.120
well egypt is not middle east but it's a muslim country and i've been to the united arab emirates
00:10:59.200
and you don't realize how important pork is until you go to a breakfast buffet in a muslim country
00:11:06.960
and you realize that pork sausages are better than any other sausages and pork bacon is better than any
00:11:12.960
other bacon like they all have the alternatives but they're they really really pale in comparison
00:11:18.480
to the real thing well and let's be clear it's not bacon if it's not made from pork no matter what
00:11:23.840
the soy lobby tells you soy bacon is not bacon or turkey bacon beef bacon i mean turkey bacon which is
00:11:30.400
better than soy bacon is still not actual bacon it's a poor imitation at best yeah if you gave me
00:11:37.920
uh turkey bacon let's say and said it was sausage or something i i'd be less disappointed because once
00:11:42.640
you hear the word bacon you know you think of what bacon is the taste the smell everything that makes
00:11:47.200
it so wonderful and then you taste turkey bacon for example and it's like oh you're just going to be
00:11:52.160
disappointed because it's it's not comparable in any way all right well we can all agree on the
00:11:58.000
importance of bacon anyway uh let's move to the next topic which i've very much forgotten so excuse
00:12:03.760
me while i desperately try to find where we are in our rundown here oh i'm not even doing it it's you
00:12:08.720
uh william speaking of the middle east what has canada been exporting there yeah well you know if you
00:12:13.920
watch international news you usually see the uh prime minister embarrassing canada on the international
00:12:19.600
stage he's uh i believe down in the united states right now at a nato summit pledging that canada will
00:12:26.560
finally meet its uh its uh two percent gdp goal although he's providing precious few details on how
00:12:32.560
that'll achieve but one area where apparently canada is just thundering forward and leading the way
00:12:40.080
is in intersectional feminism according to our uh representative in lebanon she attended a
00:12:46.400
conference and she was proud to say that uh good news people of lebanon canada's intersectional
00:12:54.480
feminist approach to uh foreign policy is going great now uh let's roll the clip before we unpack this
00:13:04.320
as for canada it has been implementing a feminist foreign policy since 2016.
00:13:10.080
canada's feminist foreign policy seeks to be inclusive intersectional transformative and grounded
00:13:16.320
in human rights it takes into account the diverse experiences of women men and non-binary people
00:13:24.160
facing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and exclusion
00:13:29.360
like income race religion sexual orientation gender expression language ability and age this allows
00:13:38.080
us to be more responsive to systemic inequalities specific needs and circumstances and to avoid
00:13:44.400
unintentional harm our feminist foreign policy is also cross-cutting it applies across all of our
00:13:51.520
our international efforts including diplomacy trade security development and consular services
00:14:01.600
that uh was uh sylvie michaud who is a diplomat at the embassy for canada in lebanon speaking uh in
00:14:09.120
beirut at the asfari institute for civil society and citizenship uh okay
00:14:19.600
i'm a little bit just our colleague cosmon georgia wrote about this and he's noted that uh perhaps the
00:14:26.640
intersectional feminist foreign policy has not necessarily been well received in lebanon which
00:14:32.720
has a child marriage and uh basically takes a very anti-woman view on anything to do with family law
00:14:42.080
so it's not really working is it isaac yeah no uh what came to mind actually was i saw a clip earlier
00:14:48.560
of uh trudeau speaking at the nato summit where where he they questioned him on on the gdp spending
00:14:53.360
and he said canada was punching above its weight class which obviously isn't true in regard to defense
00:14:58.400
spending we have no plan to get to two percent uh of our gdp requirement as required by nato allies but
00:15:05.200
where canada might be punching above its weight class actually is foreign investments in um anything
00:15:12.480
to do with gender diversity any dei terms that come to mind like uh intersectional intersectional
00:15:19.920
feminism so i mean i i don't know i i kind of laughed even watching this i was like i i don't
00:15:26.560
really even understand what's happening here it's like the uh the the flags at the uh on the gdls
00:15:33.120
vehicles you know you can send them there but probably not william you worked for the harper
00:15:38.160
government previously and that was a time when canadian foreign policy looked vastly different
00:15:42.960
than it does now i mean would you ever have imagined there that even under a liberal
00:15:46.400
government this would be the way that we're portraying ourselves abroad yeah i mean uh you
00:15:52.720
know i this isn't to say by the way that advancing equality and human rights for women isn't important
00:15:58.400
it's absolutely the important thing the problem is the woke speech that so many of our diplomats now
00:16:06.400
seem to employ at the behest of our current government does tend to make countries like
00:16:12.320
say example lebanon who is um possibly going to go to war with israel at some point in the near future
00:16:19.360
possibly it seems out of step with the everyday concerns of people who are living in that country
00:16:25.600
that maybe focusing on intersectional feminism is a luxury compared to say fundamental human rights
00:16:33.840
the abolishment of religious courts which tend to persecute minorities women and people of different
00:16:39.520
sexual orientations or the fact that large swaths of the country still don't have um the infrastructure
00:16:46.000
and quality of life that you would expect so you know it when we show up in these places and preach
00:16:52.880
about woke nonsense it diminishes canada's standing in the world and certainly say what you will about
00:16:59.680
prime minister harper he was taken far more seriously and treated with far more respect
00:17:05.840
than the current incumbent is uh right now i i think there's something to the idea of leading by example
00:17:12.800
rather than preaching and you know one one of the things that the stephen harper government did
00:17:17.120
was uh ensure there was a path for gay people who were being persecuted in their home countries this
00:17:23.280
was something they've done and the liberals have continued and uh showing that you respect gay rights
00:17:27.680
that projects a positive image to the world the problem when you go into countries that have vastly
00:17:32.720
different world views and you start telling them how they're supposed to do things it just doesn't
00:17:38.000
work and i mean saudi arabia is an interesting example of it i saw this week there's a nike ad that
00:17:43.680
has been made that's in saudi arabia that is all about basically women's empowerment it shows
00:17:49.120
you know younger females that aren't wearing hijabs that are doing sports that are swimming running
00:17:53.840
around playing and again the idea that an ad like that in saudi arabia which again a country that i will
00:17:58.800
not say is at all a bastion of of liberalism for for women's rights or any other minority rights but
00:18:04.400
that that ad could be made there would have been unheard of but you don't get there by finger
00:18:09.360
wagging and that's i think what the canadian government is doing on a lot of these things
00:18:14.320
yeah that's another thing that came to mind here was uh i i mean why would lebanon listen to what
00:18:19.680
we have to say why why would they care you know we can tell them oh you have to do this you have to do
00:18:23.360
that but as you alluded to william if trudeau and canada as a whole don't really have international
00:18:29.440
respect they're not going to listen to us that's that's something people always brought up about former
00:18:33.920
president donald trump was like he he said things sure but he he also commanded leaders respect uh so i
00:18:41.520
don't know and another thing that i i i wanted to mention was call me a nationalist i guess but
00:18:48.080
i just think of all the issues happening here in canada and and maybe maybe i i don't agree with
00:18:55.360
investing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars abroad when we have so many problems to
00:19:00.160
fix uh in our own country well i know you're right about that i mean the entire foreign aid discussion is
00:19:06.240
one that i think desperately needs a reset because i've seen little to no evidence that the canadian
00:19:11.600
approach to foreign aid even works and is is yielding dividends i mean the problem is that the
00:19:17.280
countries that need the help the most are countries that typically have rampant corruption and money ends
00:19:22.640
up just in the pockets of dictators far more than it helps any people yeah no it's a sad reality that
00:19:29.040
uh so much of foreign aid well-intentioned foreign aid is simply going to make thugs and criminals
00:19:35.680
wealthy in these countries that desperately need help but it requires i think some really new thinking
00:19:40.880
and uh using the new technology that we have available to us you know there are examples of where
00:19:46.320
governments are bypassing ngos and governments entirely and simply loading money onto the cell
00:19:53.040
phones of individual people living in in very desperate circumstances because it's the only way
00:19:58.960
that they can get around the pickpocketing that happens for so many foreign aid budgets but you're
00:20:03.760
absolutely right and of course foreign aid is it comes at a cost you know money we spend on foreign aid
00:20:08.800
is money we can't spend on canadian health care is money we can't spend on our armed forces is money we
00:20:14.640
can't spend on any other of the thousand priorities that exist so uh you know when you see canadian
00:20:21.040
diplomats traveling the world and uh and talking about things like intersectional feminism it does
00:20:27.360
make you wonder really how much bang for our bucks we're getting on this dog and pony show that we call
00:20:33.200
foreign affairs what we really need when it comes to projecting an image of canada to the world is the
00:20:40.000
austere reverence of elizabeth may roll it i've got another grand baby coming at the end of october
00:20:48.480
and i feel very very committed as i think everybody my age should baby boomers have this planet and we
00:20:58.720
can't walk away and leave it for our kids to fix it and i'm sorry i just used the f word out loud but i
00:21:03.920
think kids understand what i'm saying i'm a very i'm a 70 year old angry cranky version of glitta thunberg
00:21:11.440
and am i ready you bet i feel like you could photoshop in like a giant overflowing wine glass
00:21:17.840
there in the shot and it would just it would be probably even more believable now this is a woman
00:21:23.600
who in the past i would remind you all has kind of become the civility tone checker in the house of
00:21:31.920
commons this was her taking aim at michelle remble garner back when she was uh just michelle remble
00:21:37.200
for using a different f word in the parliamentary precinct why does this government treat alberta
00:21:44.320
like a fart in the room that nobody wants to talk about or acknowledge that is where my constituents
00:21:50.560
have been at with this government for over a year the honorable member for uh sanich gulf islands
00:21:56.480
i interrupt my friend in her speech but i heard her to say a word that i know is distinctly on
00:22:03.120
parliamentary and i think she may want to withdraw it the word was f-a-r-t are we are you serious mr
00:22:10.560
speaker like is my colleague actually serious i just gave an impassioned speech about supporting alberta
00:22:16.320
jobs and that's what the leader of a political party stands up and has to say no i don't withdraw it
00:22:21.440
decorum is important and respect is important to this place i remind those who are now heckling me
00:22:28.320
that you are breaking the rules of this place when you do so
00:22:32.720
okay just just again let's go back to the other elizabeth may clip elizabeth may this week i i just
00:22:37.200
want to get that sense of decorum baby boomers have this planet and we can't walk away and leave it for
00:22:44.400
our kids to fix it i i'm not one of these profanity pearl clutchers i i keep profanity out of my show
00:22:52.400
and we generally keep it out of true north if you want to get elizabeth may uncensored you can you know
00:22:57.040
do that on twitter um so i again i'm not so i don't really care but it's a little rich for her to
00:23:01.680
you know take aim at michelle remple using a four letter f word for flatulence while dropping the
00:23:07.120
mother of all f-bombs uh herself again i am i am i reading am i paying too much attention to elizabeth
00:23:13.760
may isaac this is i'm totally prepared to accept that uh i don't think so and look a lot of the
00:23:21.600
chatter online let's say has has has uh alleged i guess that she was drunk or whatever and i don't
00:23:27.840
want i don't want to speak to that because i don't know whether she was or not but i i am slightly
00:23:32.880
i will say concerned about elizabeth may like is she okay on numerous occasions now we've seen
00:23:38.480
very odd things most recently from when she had a completely different interpretation of the uh
00:23:44.800
nsop report than jagmeet singh did because of course he said he said there were treacherous mps and she
00:23:49.840
said oh no there's no there's no treacherous mps uh the media blew it out of proportion which are two
00:23:54.160
very very very different things to say about very different so i i'm i'm very concerned uh about
00:24:01.360
elizabeth may also her co-leader uh or whatever jonathan had no just resigned and he said it was
00:24:08.560
family issues but of course there could be something deeper to that story as well i'm not i'm not really
00:24:13.440
sure i don't know and elizabeth may is kind of all over the place she also uh just said that it was
00:24:19.360
quote obvious that it was time for justin trudeau to step down which i i wouldn't say i disagree with
00:24:24.160
but i mean she's really putting herself out there more than we may have been used to in the past
00:24:28.000
past she's basically made herself out to be the permanent leader of the green party there was that
00:24:32.880
brief break from her with anime paul who was probably one of the more credible sensible people
00:24:38.080
that party has and now we're like right back into elizabeth may being just the the permanent
00:24:43.760
the permanent party leader for the greens yeah you know i mean i maybe i have a soft spot i enjoy
00:24:49.840
an elizabeth may press conference because they're rarely dull you never quite know what you're going
00:24:54.000
to get and she opens her mouth and starts sharing her things and on this where was it she did like
00:24:59.680
she played the welcome back cotter theme song and lisa rate had to pull her off stage was that the
00:25:04.560
parliamentary press gallery dinner i yeah i think you're talking about omar cotter and called him
00:25:09.840
like that it was weird yeah you know in um in classical times we would refer to politicians who uh maybe had
00:25:16.720
a glass or too much to drink as tired and emotional looking tired and emotional but uh just on the whole
00:25:24.240
use of foul language perhaps elizabeth may was more upset about the word fart because of course that
00:25:30.240
involves the release of greenhouse gas emissions which we know she's quite passionate about so
00:25:36.000
maybe that's what drove her to the the double standard as soon as you started that sentence i'm
00:25:41.600
like is he going is he yeah he's going there she she's offended by methane not uh not profanity uh it's
00:25:49.280
so you know it's a big part of the greenhouse gas cocktail but i think methane contributes more to
00:25:56.400
parliamentary decorum than anything elizabeth that's come out of elizabeth may's mouth
00:26:01.680
uh quite possibly but i'd say look you know at least she isn't dull at least we are getting just
00:26:07.040
another boring talking point filled speech oh so i just looked it up the the elizabeth may uh thing on
00:26:12.720
omar cotter it was 2015 it was during the parliamentary press gallery dinner and she used
00:26:17.280
the f word there too she said omar cotter had more class than the whole effing cabinet so it really and
00:26:23.040
this was before she tone policed michelle rempel uh now michelle rempel garner so my goodness okay
00:26:29.760
oh elizabeth may there we go uh we'll move on to our uh next topic today uh i keep i keep going away
00:26:36.560
from the screen that has the topics on it oh this one is also yours william this is uh speaking of
00:26:41.440
emissions some uh one of our favorite things to talk about here climate hypocrisy yeah and uh and
00:26:47.680
how to get yourself a government travel agent because i can tell you i'm pretty jealous about
00:26:52.800
where some of these people get to jet off with in this case are um and believe it or not we have one
00:26:58.880
our climate change ambassador who's been on the job for just about two years spending
00:27:04.800
a quarter of a million dollars on travel expenses which in you got to admit in two years that's an
00:27:11.680
pretty impressive level of spending you have to i think you really have to quite work at spending that
00:27:16.240
much money in such a short period of time but of course what so infuriates ordinary canadians like us
00:27:22.000
you know what what it was just a few weeks ago where mark um holland chastised anybody who was
00:27:28.320
thinking of taking a summer road trip as being a climate killer that's going to let the planet
00:27:33.840
burn and then meanwhile you've got the ambassador for climate change crisscrossing the country on
00:27:40.640
flights and staying in these very expensive hotels and achieving no one knows exactly what certainly
00:27:46.800
not a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions i i would imagine hers are vastly higher than the
00:27:52.480
average canadian so uh yeah just another example of climate hypocrisy uh a government that says do as i
00:28:00.320
say not as i do yeah and i remember john carrey was the one criticized in the u.s because he's
00:28:07.440
their climate envoy and he was taking private jets and he was asked about this at one point and he very
00:28:11.840
glibly said well he's too busy he can't always fly commercial and and i had actually asked john
00:28:17.520
carrey about that when i saw him in davos where he is a bit of a mainstay and it's the same sort of
00:28:22.320
glibness you get from these people because they believe that they're more important than you so they
00:28:27.760
need to fly around the world because they have a really really important job to do the rest of us
00:28:32.320
plebs no no we don't get to yeah this is a nice uh transition i suppose considering we just went
00:28:38.800
from seeing the hypocrisy of elizabeth may now to the hypocrisy of these high flying elites let's
00:28:44.960
call them and we've seen this with many canadian ministers like guibo trudeau criticizing uh normal
00:28:52.160
canadians for i mean simply trying to live their everyday life as they fly their private jets around
00:28:58.640
the country uh on a daily basis what it seems like so i i don't know what it would take for this
00:29:04.880
hypocrisy to end but you know it's it just it's interesting to me whenever these ministers uh let's
00:29:10.960
say propose uh some sort of guideline for i don't know carbon emissions let's say uh a carbon footprint a
00:29:20.160
personal carbon footprint let's say it's like well could you live within that i i highly doubt that
00:29:24.720
the answer would be yes yeah and i i kind of take the view i mean france for example uh within the
00:29:32.240
last year i think it was banned domestic air travel and you know it seemed ridiculous on the surface and
00:29:37.920
then you think okay well at least in france you have a way to get around quite easily they've got a rail
00:29:42.080
system that's quite good but a lot of the eco radicals would not hesitate to push something like
00:29:47.760
that in canada as well and you know david suzuki famously would fly all around the world with a
00:29:53.200
huge carbon footprint i think always in business class telling canadians that oh no one should be
00:29:58.080
able that you know politicians who don't act on climate change should be put in jail it's okay well
00:30:02.800
why are you so different than them your carbon footprint is better uh is is higher than the average
00:30:07.920
canadian that you're trying to force to pay this insane carbon tax yeah i absolutely think it's the
00:30:13.840
hypocrisy that's that turns so many canadians off the whole uh preachiness of government you know we
00:30:19.520
talked about how preachy this government's been in foreign affairs and and on other things that's one
00:30:24.000
of the things the government likes to do most is to preach it likes to say you know you dear canadian
00:30:29.760
are not living up to our our vast and and high standards and the problem is you it's not how any of
00:30:36.880
us are living our lives and now correct me if i'm wrong i did read the article but uh i want to make
00:30:42.640
sure i get this right did it say she took a flight from ottawa to toronto and it cost ten thousand
00:30:48.320
dollars is that uh is that somewhere in there now i apologize if i read that part wrong but uh part of
00:30:55.360
me wonders what part of the world could you even fly to that's going to cost ten thousand dollars like
00:31:00.960
you can get from toronto to sydney australia which i would argue is pretty well the most the furthest
00:31:07.280
uh uh you could go uh from canada and uh i i think that even wouldn't cost you i think it was the
00:31:13.440
the conference attendance uh cost that i think oh oh yeah the whole trip yeah but i think she was
00:31:19.040
putting on a little thing still still quite insane and by the way why didn't she take the train from
00:31:22.960
ottawa to toronto that's one where you have a lower carbon alternative and you know why doesn't she
00:31:27.600
look for some cheaper options when staying in hotels or when taking flights you know oftentimes if i
00:31:32.720
you know as a true north employees can attest when they submit proposals for travel my first
00:31:38.400
reaction is often to see if there's a cheaper way of being able to do the trip can we send you
00:31:43.360
in a day before can we put you in a nearby town as opposed to right next to where the event is
00:31:49.520
happening that's almost in a different country that is dangerous poor uh for having a deal with uh my
00:31:55.600
cause i was but again i was being far more cost efficient than mark carney and our climate ambassador
00:32:00.240
are when they go to davos but it's almost like they purposely choose the most expensive option
00:32:05.840
whenever they travel and that really grates on canadians who are having to be so careful with
00:32:11.600
how they spend their money these days you know i don't think a lot of people object to the fact that
00:32:15.600
sometimes our politicians and government people are going to have to travel for their work you know
00:32:20.160
we're not going to ask justin trudeau to zoom in to the nato meeting we think maybe there's value
00:32:25.280
in him being there but do we absolutely have to choose the single most expensive way of getting
00:32:29.520
politicians from point a to point b having them stay in the nicest hotels uh i think that's what
00:32:34.560
really bugs canadians when they see their hard-earned tax dollars being just squandered on luxury for
00:32:40.320
politicians and the elite there was one time i think it was in washington dc actually where i was
00:32:46.080
booking a hotel room and it was you could choose the rate and it was you know the triple a member caa
00:32:53.440
member rate the regular rate whatever and i recall i looked at the government rate and just because i
00:32:59.760
was going through them and it was higher than the regular rate now it might have just been a fluke but
00:33:04.000
it might not have been because you know you have cities where they know that governments are going
00:33:09.200
to come in that don't care about the price of things and they'll just get mad mad cash from
00:33:14.640
governments and i think travel is is no different there these people are are not price shopping and why
00:33:19.360
would they and so there was the climate hypocrisy angle and there's also just the the government
00:33:23.280
waste angle of this um this is uh one that is related we don't trust government we also don't
00:33:28.560
trust media but you have government and media getting into bed together and what's the answer
00:33:33.440
what comes out of that isaac yeah so this comes from a new poll which was conducted by public square
00:33:40.320
research and they were trying to gauge the public's trust in different types of canadian news media
00:33:46.480
and then also the views on um media that received government subsidies so how do canadians feel
00:33:53.600
about government funded media versus obviously media like true north that receives no government
00:33:58.320
funding and interestingly yes 70 of canadians were not supportive of government subsidies for the
00:34:04.800
salaries of private news organizations so private news organization would be like the global mail toronto
00:34:10.320
star toronto sun national post those kind of things oh yeah only four percent of canadians said
00:34:15.520
they were very supportive of this while it was 26 that were somewhat supportive leaving yes seven
00:34:20.560
and ten canadians either not very supportive or not supportive at all well it's just insane that no
00:34:26.960
one sees this because you know we trust journalists to hold government to account so if government is the
00:34:32.400
lifeline for journalists and government is the lifeline for journalism how are you at all going to expect it to be
00:34:39.040
doing what you needed to do so yeah i mean the trust issues in media are outweighing just this aspect of
00:34:46.560
it but it certainly is going is only going to exacerbate the problem and william i mean it's just
00:34:51.200
fundamental and some journalists have criticized it because they see this but many have just demanded
00:34:55.760
more and more money from the government yeah i mean every journalist swears up and down that the fact that
00:35:02.320
some or even most of their salary that is being paid for by the government has no impact on how they
00:35:08.880
choose to uh to report on things but the fact is is that taken as a whole if you look at the legacy media
00:35:16.400
they often obsess about the the pet issues of this current government you know how many stories in a
00:35:24.400
typical edition of the globe of mail talk about climate change or talk about you know some example of a
00:35:31.040
of a of a of a someone who's dealing with a gender issue and and isn't it terrible that they couldn't
00:35:38.080
transition at three and a half years old and you know that's just the worst and if you and these are
00:35:43.840
not issues that canadians want to endlessly read about what are canadians concerned about they're
00:35:48.800
concerned about housing costs they're concerned about grocery prices they're concerned about you know
00:35:53.520
the fact that uh they can't pay their bills every month those are things that are really of concern and
00:35:59.520
yet legacy media doesn't pay them nearly as much attention as they should i would say one of the
00:36:03.680
reasons why true north has been so successful is we've actually looked at what ordinary canadians
00:36:10.240
from one end of the country to the other are concerned about and we tried to make that the
00:36:14.800
central focus of our news and reporting and as a result i think canadians in increasing numbers are
00:36:22.160
tuning in to us as they tune out from the legacy media so if that trend continues i think you are
00:36:29.600
going to see the legacy media either becoming you know solely dependent on government funding to stay
00:36:35.360
in power or we will simply see the end of canada's legacy media as a whole yeah yeah oh go ahead isaac
00:36:43.360
yeah just something interesting the the the study brought up which was that it said that most canadians
00:36:48.560
were completely unaware on how much funding these legacy media journalists were receiving they
00:36:54.400
estimated that there was up to 50 subsidy on those journalists salaries of up to 85 000 a year and then
00:37:00.480
just speaking quickly on on trust and legacy media they they cited a 2023 study in this research that
00:37:06.240
showed that the decline in legacy media was 50 or sorry the trust of legacy media was 55 in 2016 declining to
00:37:13.600
40 40 percent in 2023 which trudeau was speaking on um an alberta talk show in february where he said
00:37:20.640
that quote conspiracy theorists and social media drivers were the ones undermining mainstream media
00:37:27.120
to prevent people from uh essentially believing a common truth which is why the legacy media was failing
00:37:32.960
however the recent polling showed that only 12 12 of canadians felt that they were getting the
00:37:40.160
truth for mainstream news i mean what a low number and then uh another 20 said that they believed news
00:37:46.640
coverage in canada was fair and transparent yeah and you know the one thing and i've talked about
00:37:52.480
this on my own show anytime the institutions talk about trust and the trust deficit they always point
00:37:58.560
the blame at everyone else it's when we don't trust the media oh it's because of disinformation and we
00:38:02.560
don't trust the government oh it's because of the far right it's like no it's because you are morons a lot of the time
00:38:07.520
uh absolutely or you've covered something with such a biased slant or ignored such an incredible part
00:38:15.840
of it that you know reasonable people watching it simply say that is a lousy lousy job you've done
00:38:23.840
and if you're lying to us about this what else are you are you lying to us yeah yeah and i've always been
00:38:31.840
i guess prideful in in the work that true north puts out because obviously i'm very skeptical when i
00:38:37.680
when i read anything legacy media okay what in here is actually true because i i often find faults in
00:38:42.480
their work whether that's intentional or not but even in in other independent medias when i'm reading
00:38:46.640
their stories i often find errors so i i like to think that that we we produce uh uh uh stories that
00:38:55.360
generally contain very little uh errors uh in comparison to to to the rest of the industry so
00:39:01.200
yeah i just wanted to say that well what no you're right and one point and i mean i'm the
00:39:06.320
managing editor of true north so i i've insisted on this but i think a lot of our team does it anyway
00:39:11.040
is primary sources like don't just report on someone else's report on a report find the report
00:39:16.720
itself find the documents yourself and i know isaac you've had me tell i mean actually isaac is really
00:39:21.280
good at that because isaac loves reading the report and then you'll end up with like oh sorry
00:39:24.880
i am late because i have to write you know read this 179 pages to do and i was like well i technically
00:39:29.920
asked you to so i can't really complain but uh but it's so key because oftentimes especially with
00:39:33.920
academic studies like i used to do this all the time on my old radio show you'd get like a news story
00:39:37.680
about an academic study that would have this fantastic headline you're like wow that's great and then
00:39:42.080
you're just like looking at the study and you're like but it doesn't doesn't say that at all and it's so
00:39:47.520
you've got like a journalist that either is putting sensationalism first or a journalist
00:39:51.600
that doesn't understand what they're writing about but give your primary source and the one thing also
00:39:55.760
that we're good at in true north is linking to the primary source like we don't want to be
00:39:59.600
information gatekeepers we want you to have access to the same thing we did a lot of media will
00:40:05.440
reference something but not actually direct you to the original they'll say oh and these documents
00:40:10.640
we've obtained but they don't show the documents whereas we embed them because yeah we want you to
00:40:14.880
check our work that keeps us accountable my favorite example on this is there's a claim that
00:40:20.640
is recited ad nauseam by legacy media and it's that there are 300 far-right hate groups or white
00:40:27.920
nationalist groups active in canada and they just state that as a fact now when we've dug into that
00:40:34.400
we know that it comes from a single professor at one university who's done a well not even a
00:40:40.480
particularly top-tier university it's like the ontario tech university it's not a not a slight
00:40:45.360
against them but it's not harvard or something i would well i'm not convinced the harvard fair enough
00:40:51.440
it once was but it comes to this one person and this person despite multiple requests has never
00:40:56.400
released their work they have never released the list they have never released the methodology on how
00:41:00.880
this list was put together when we pushed on it the university turned down our a tips turned down our
00:41:06.400
requests and so and yet if you read any news story that the legacy media publishes about so you know
00:41:12.800
quote-unquote hate groups you will see that 300 hate group number quoted as if it is a stone-cold
00:41:19.440
fact and the truth is it's not as near as we can tell it's something that one professor may or may not
00:41:25.040
have just made up one day because she absolutely refuses to publish anything about it that supports it
00:41:31.200
far from even putting out a list of them oh yeah for all we know it's you know she was going by
00:41:36.240
facebook groups or something you know there's a facebook group that posted something she didn't
00:41:39.440
like so oh let's put it up on the list of 300 anyway uh so barbara perry it's not too late to show
00:41:44.640
your work we'll take it we'll take it we'll publish it in full you should be happy as a researcher
00:41:49.040
drawing more attention to your work unless that is you don't stand behind it but anyway uh that does it
00:41:54.960
for us for today my thanks to isaac lamoureux and william mcbeth for coming on the show as always and all
00:42:00.000
of you for tuning in we'll talk to you next week but have a great weekend everyone
00:42:11.440
and cosmon's been fighting over that barbara perry list for like two years now or something isn't it
00:42:16.720
yeah i think it's a personal sort of uh campaign for him now we should be yeah it's like before the
00:42:21.600
ontario privacy commissioner now it so yeah when we when cosmon ate tipped it uh the university came
00:42:27.680
back and basically said oh it's research in progress therefore we can't release it except
00:42:33.200
it's been research in progress for years and years and she's still releasing the claim which
00:42:38.320
suggests that that part's not in progress absolutely she's still making this claim this
00:42:42.480
without a shred of evidence and uh as a result uh you know i think uh if you read any of those
00:42:49.040
legacy media stories they provide none of that context none of them are saying oh and by the way this
00:42:53.280
is just this one person's thing from a report she won't produce from a list she didn't cite how she
00:42:59.040
compiled oh and we can't see the list like you know uh it was it it's just infuriating for those of
00:43:04.880
us who actually like to click on those links and read source documents to try and figure out what the real