Juno News - April 18, 2023


CBC ＂pausing＂ Twitter use after Twitter outs them as ＂government-funded media＂


Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

165.687

Word count

5,816

Sentence count

280

Harmful content

Toxicity

16

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, host Andrew Lawton takes a deep dive into the controversial question of whether or not the CBC is a government-funded media organization. What does it mean and why does it matter?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:05.400 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:15.500 Hello everyone and welcome to you all.
00:00:18.760 It is Tuesday, April 18th, 2023.
00:00:21.720 You are tuned into Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show,
00:00:25.900 the Andrew Lawton Show on True North.
00:00:27.700 proudly not government funded media and if you don't believe me just look over on our twitter
00:00:34.720 page and at last check i just want to make absolutely sure here before i go down a road
00:00:41.560 that there is no coming back from twitter.com slash to true north center not government funded
00:00:48.060 media and we are absolutely proud and thrilled to be not government funded media that is why we are
00:00:56.120 independent media. We rely on the support of people who value the work we do and want to chip
00:01:02.560 in a couple of bucks or a couple hundred dollars or far more money because they support it. And
00:01:07.880 we are so grateful for that. CBC is a different animal. CBC, it doesn't matter if Canadians like
00:01:14.780 it. It doesn't matter if Canadians watch it. It doesn't matter if Canadians want it. It is around
00:01:20.000 because the government is artificially propping up this thing
00:01:24.580 that we all have to pay about $1.2, $1.3 billion a year in taxpayer money for.
00:01:31.280 Again, irrespective of whether we like it or not.
00:01:34.700 Now, some people will argue, well, this is a public broadcaster.
00:01:38.400 It's important to have a public broadcaster.
00:01:41.380 And I mention this just because there are various conceptions
00:01:45.500 of what public broadcasting is supposed to do.
00:01:49.340 And I had a bit of a discussion a couple of years back in London, England at the Global Conference for Media Freedom with a woman who I believe her name was Sally.
00:01:58.620 And she was with like the International Consortium of Public Broadcasters, which there's an entity that needs to exist.
00:02:04.680 Right. And I was chatting with her and we had a civil conversation.
00:02:08.560 And I said, you know, why is it that we should not just have public broadcasters doing what the private sector can't do?
00:02:15.160 And there was a name for that.
00:02:16.140 She says, ah, yes, the gap-filling approach, but she rejected the gap-filling approach and believed, as many public broadcasters do, that public broadcasters or state broadcasters need to be vibrant, they need to be loud, they need to be proud, they need to be in some ways competing with the private sector and be propped up by the government while they do it.
00:02:38.200 So whether you like CBC or not, it is not at all controversial to say that it is a government-funded media organization.
00:02:49.140 You can see the CBC for itself admit to being a government-funded media organization.
00:02:54.960 There was a tweet back in 2017 that was doing the rounds of them responding to someone saying,
00:03:00.440 Ah, yes, hi, Michael. Yes, we are government-funded.
00:03:03.380 And then they caveated it by saying, that's a verb now, to caveat something.
00:03:07.520 They applied the caveat to say that, but they also get some money from advertisers as well.
00:03:13.900 All of this, if you've been following the controversy on Twitter, you know is leading to Elon Musk and Twitter Inc.,
00:03:21.500 which I think they're now changing Twitter Inc. to something else.
00:03:24.600 But this organization, this company, this social media platform, putting on CBC the government-funded media label.
00:03:33.760 If you look at CBC on Twitter, that's what you see there, government-funded media.
00:03:38.760 Now, I could quibble a little bit about which account they've done it to.
00:03:42.560 They've done it to the main CBC account, which is really more about the general primetime programming,
00:03:48.940 daytime programming that CBC does, not the news channel, which is so far free of this label.
00:03:56.600 CBC News and CBC Politics and CBC Alerts, those don't have the label.
00:04:01.860 So CBC gets up in arms about this.
00:04:04.300 They announced that they are, as you see here on Twitter, pausing their Twitter activities.
00:04:09.300 So CBC is self-selecting out of Twitter.
00:04:13.640 And the rationale, our journalism is impartial and independent to suggest otherwise is untrue.
00:04:19.680 That's why we are pausing our activities on Twitter.
00:04:22.600 And then they repeat the same thing in French because it is CBC after all.
00:04:26.720 I'm amazed they didn't work in some indigenous languages and pronouns in there as well.
00:04:30.700 but they do this and then there was a bit of hand-wringing about well we're not entirely
00:04:37.100 government funded we get some advertising money and if you look at cbc's filings you can find
00:04:42.420 that they do in fact get somewhere in the range of 30 plus percent of their funding from
00:04:49.180 non-government sources so elon musk was feeling benevolent he was feeling charitable he decided
00:04:55.860 to offer a bit of an amendment. First, he changed the label from government-funded media to 70%
00:05:02.300 government-funded media. And then he said in the interest of being generous, he would change it
00:05:07.680 further. And how it sits now is, as you see on your screen or will in a moment, CBC, 69%
00:05:15.860 government-funded media. So be careful what you wish for, CBC. You want to assert that you only
00:05:22.060 get 69 to 70 percent of your funding from government great we will be abundantly clear
00:05:26.880 and abundantly precise that you are getting 69 percent of your government funding now
00:05:33.100 it wasn't just cbc uh that got this rtz in new zealand uh got it or rnz i think it's rnz
00:05:41.720 and in australia the state broadcaster abc got this as well last week bbc npr pbs they all got
00:05:49.840 it. They're distinct from what is applied to Russia Today or Press TV in Iran or Xinhua in
00:05:57.480 China. Those are called state-affiliated media. Now, state-affiliated media is different than
00:06:03.300 government-funded media, and Twitter is actually making that distinction. Now, some people, like
00:06:09.220 one of the guys who works on this show, just titters at the 69, thinking it's Elon Musk making
00:06:14.440 a sex joke. But no, that is actually the benevolent interpretation of CBC's government
00:06:20.400 funding if you decide to round down. It's not, at least insofar as I can tell, a sex joke from
00:06:26.180 Elon Musk. Now, if it was like 420%, I would assume it was Elon making a drug joke. He does
00:06:31.620 love the 420 thing. But the thing that I find fascinating about all of this is that no one can
00:06:37.880 dispute the facts. No one can dispute the facts. Now, CBC tries to muddle this a little bit.
00:06:43.920 But Tristan Hopper, who is a writer with the National Post,
00:06:47.020 he found this gem that was a couple of years old from one of CBC's annual reports.
00:06:52.460 And this is a graph that CBC itself published.
00:06:56.020 And I don't normally do data viz stuff here,
00:06:59.760 but I want to actually break this down a little bit.
00:07:02.200 And I'm going to ask you to look at it very closely.
00:07:05.840 So if you see the fuchsia or the purple, whatever you want to call it there,
00:07:10.780 that is the government funding that cbc gets so that's actually an important figure there the
00:07:17.020 government funding cbc gets is that pinkish fuchsia hue 1.213.7 million so 1.2 billion
00:07:25.640 now the blue is revenue revenue that is not from government funding and that blue is broken down
00:07:34.120 into three categories there financing and other income subscriber fees and advertising and then
00:07:39.700 advertising broken down into two categories, digital and television. But we only need to
00:07:44.120 look at the bar on the left right now. So they say 2018 to 2019, $1.2 billion is government funding.
00:07:53.300 Now I want you to look at the y-axis. Now the y-axis, for those of you like me who are not good
00:07:58.200 at math, is the vertical one on the left-hand side. And I want you to count up with me and you
00:08:03.880 could even point to it with your finger as we do this it's a fun little math game zero 100 million
00:08:09.800 200 million 300 million 400 million 500 million 600 million 700 million 1.7 billion okay they've
00:08:23.660 cut out the two little uh they've cut out and they've replaced it with tildes there
00:08:28.600 $1 billion on that graph, which actually distorts quite significantly the amount of government funding that CBC is getting.
00:08:37.800 There was another gentleman on Twitter who pointed out what the graph should actually have been.
00:08:45.160 And I don't know if I gave Sean that graph, but it just shoots off the top if you're being honest about the numbers
00:08:51.380 and not just eliminating $1 billion from the visualization, which reveals how much government funding CBC actually gets.
00:08:58.600 And interestingly enough, Sean just pointed this out, that if you look at their advertising
00:09:03.460 revenue, you're likely to find in that a lot of money that's government advertising.
00:09:08.220 So a government subsidy through another means there.
00:09:11.320 But ZBC tries to hide the fact that it is bankrolled entirely by the state.
00:09:18.400 So how can they take issue with the assertion that they are government-funded media?
00:09:22.900 Just take a look at your bank account if you don't believe that you're government-funded
00:09:26.180 media.
00:09:26.540 Now, the political dimension of this is that Pierre Polyev, what was it, last week, had sent the letter to Twitter saying,
00:09:33.680 hey, you've been putting this label on BBC and NPR, maybe you should apply it to CBC as well.
00:09:39.120 And when Pierre Polyev saw Elon Musk do this, he was nonetheless quite delighted about it.
00:09:44.920 Justin Trudeau then does the one thing that the Liberals love doing, which is either blaming Stephen Harper or blaming American billionaires.
00:09:53.860 Take a look.
00:09:56.540 I think it says a lot about the Conservative Party of Canada, that they're choosing to
00:10:06.020 constantly attack independent media organizations, journalists who are working hard to keep Canadians
00:10:14.580 informed and support our democracy.
00:10:18.020 CBC Radio-Canada serves right across the country, delivers local news and local content in many
00:10:29.060 regions of the country that, yes, has been challenged over the past years, but the idea
00:10:36.460 of adding to that challenge is, and laying on by attacking this Canadian institution,
00:10:45.460 tracking the culture and local content that is so important to so many Canadians, really
00:10:51.220 indicates the values and the approach that Mr. Polyev is putting forward.
00:10:57.540 And I think it is telling that in order to attack this institution that is important
00:11:04.140 for many, many Canadians, he runs to American billionaires, the tech giants that they continue
00:11:13.260 to defend in committee and in their approach on our legislation to make tech giants pay
00:11:21.020 their fair share. Conservatives are always there to defend them. So when they're trying
00:11:24.880 to attack a foundational Canadian institution, the fact that he has to run to American billionaires
00:11:31.840 for support to attack Canadians, says a lot about Mr. Polyev and his values.
00:11:39.260 I just love that. 0.56
00:11:45.200 So it all becomes about American billionaires
00:11:47.740 cozying up with American billionaires
00:11:49.780 to attack the beloved cultural institution that is CBC.
00:11:54.800 I mean, you take Hockey Night in Canada out of the equation,
00:11:57.400 which the market did several years ago, I'm told.
00:12:00.940 And what's left?
00:12:02.680 I mean, Schitt's Creek is, by all accounts,
00:12:05.100 quite a good show that people enjoy.
00:12:06.940 And it's a show that has a great cast
00:12:09.220 and has won many awards and has received accolades outside of Canada,
00:12:13.320 there's no reason that CBC had to be the delivery system for Schitt's Creek.
00:12:20.060 There is no reason that CBC had to be the one to fund that,
00:12:23.660 especially when any production company making Canadian content now
00:12:27.060 can get scads and scads of money, scores of money, scads and scores of money,
00:12:31.560 you might say, from the government through grants to produce Canadian content anyway.
00:12:36.340 So why does CBC need to be the thing?
00:12:38.600 Now, a lot of people take issue with CBC's bias.
00:12:41.280 I mean, that's the line of attack that Pierre Polyev takes,
00:12:44.340 that this is just a liberal propaganda operation.
00:12:47.160 I don't actually care about CBC's bias.
00:12:50.100 I don't care about its editorial bent.
00:12:52.280 I don't care about the quality of its programming.
00:12:54.660 I care about the government funding.
00:12:57.300 You force CBC to do what it's doing in the private sector with private market forces.
00:13:02.420 And sure, I may criticize what they're doing,
00:13:05.240 just in the sense that I would be a critic of other media outlets
00:13:08.400 if I think they deserve it.
00:13:09.460 But I don't care because I'm not bankrolling it. 1.00
00:13:13.080 Some idiot on Twitter, I shouldn't say he was an idiot. 1.00
00:13:15.560 He could have just been a garden variety moron. 1.00
00:13:18.040 But some idiot and or moron on Twitter the other day 1.00
00:13:20.780 was responding to my tweets about the CBC business 1.00
00:13:24.280 and he was saying that I am trying to silence media voices.
00:13:29.140 No, I'm not actually trying to silence media voices.
00:13:32.000 I am trying to silence the voices that say government, actually, I'm not silencing them.
00:13:37.700 I'm trying to cut off the flow of cash, of taxpayer money to these outlets.
00:13:42.540 If CBC has a market and is such a beloved institution, like Justin Trudeau says, then
00:13:47.940 Canadians will pay for it.
00:13:50.240 Why are they so threatened by something they believe is a thing to be proud of?
00:13:55.420 That it's a government institution, it's a public property.
00:13:58.580 Why is this something that is so triggering to them?
00:14:02.000 It's because they know that if Canadians are aware of how much they're paying for this thing
00:14:07.280 that isn't meaningful to them, they will be upset about it.
00:14:10.740 And there's a reason that Pierre Polyev gets standing ovations when he walks into a room
00:14:14.240 and says, defund the CBC.
00:14:16.200 And he talks about turning the CBC's lavish Front Street headquarters in Toronto
00:14:21.820 into government housing.
00:14:24.380 I was chatting after an interview I did with Pierre Polyev once,
00:14:28.620 and I think it was during the leadership race.
00:14:30.380 and I just because we had talked about the CBC funding and I just mentioned to him as we were
00:14:34.700 walking out of the room that it was astonishing just to see how much people on his campaign
00:14:39.140 really resonated with that message and he had looked to me and I don't think he'd care about
00:14:44.200 me sharing this even though we weren't technically on the record but he looked at me and he said
00:14:47.560 you know Andrew part of me thinks I could just do my entire campaign about that one thing
00:14:51.980 and he's probably not wrong even though he was joking that if he were to just walk into the
00:14:57.120 room and say, ladies and gentlemen, defund the CBC. Thank you very much. I'm Pierre Polyev. Vote
00:15:01.420 for me. The conservative base would be quite pleased with it. So also interesting, incidentally,
00:15:07.860 that he talks about cozying up with wealthy Americans when we find out this week that
00:15:14.400 Justin Trudeau was cozying up on his Jamaican holiday with a giant donor to the Pierre Elliott
00:15:22.240 Trudeau Foundation. Now, I don't know if Peter Green is a billionaire. I don't know if Peter
00:15:28.160 Green is American. I don't think he is, but he is a giant donor to the Trudeau Foundation and was
00:15:33.400 palling it up at a luxurious Jamaican estate with Justin Trudeau. And in this case, he apparently
00:15:39.920 cleared it with the ethics commissioner. So it's quite all right. But Justin Trudeau cannot seem
00:15:46.240 to stop vacationing with his wealthy friends in the Caribbean. Now, this is not a lifestyle that
00:15:52.960 you or I have, but it's one that seems to work for Justin Trudeau, but he dares to talk about
00:15:57.420 Pierre Polyev writing a letter to Elon Musk. My goodness. I want to talk about something else
00:16:03.180 entirely here, which oddly I didn't see covered by CBC, and that is the Al-Quds Day protest that
00:16:09.500 took place in Toronto on the weekend. Now, I'll explain Al-Quds Day in a couple of minutes,
00:16:16.540 but I sometimes feel that the footage itself can describe what this annual thing is. I'm going to 0.99
00:16:23.820 play one clip for you here. This is one of the chants that is one of the most common anti-Israel
00:16:30.560 chants you'll ever hear. It is from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Take a look.
00:16:39.500 From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
00:16:56.280 Now, that is just one of the chants.
00:16:59.120 And if you look at a map, and I don't want to just totally go into teacher mode here,
00:17:03.320 because I'm not a teacher, that would actually be worse for kids than drag story times.
00:17:07.300 But if you look at a map of Israel and you see where the West Bank is,
00:17:11.380 which is the territory proclaimed for Palestinians,
00:17:14.660 and you kind of draw a line from the Jordan River to the sea,
00:17:20.120 you'll notice that it goes through Israel.
00:17:22.980 So if you extend Palestine, as they call it, from the river to the sea, 0.60
00:17:26.840 there is no Israel.
00:17:28.460 Now, this is a design and this is a feature, not a bug,
00:17:33.740 of the belief system of many of these people.
00:17:36.300 And I also want to point out this other chant that we saw from them at the same rally. 0.64
00:18:06.300 Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has got to fall. 0.78
00:18:12.300 Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has got to fall.
00:18:20.300 One, two, three, four, occupation no more.
00:18:28.300 Five, six, seven, eight. Israel is a terror state. 0.99
00:18:32.900 Five, six, seven, eight. Israel is a terror state. 0.99
00:18:37.080 One, two, three, four. 0.83
00:18:43.140 So just in case you thought from the river to the sea was a little too subtle,
00:18:48.280 we'll go with this one, two, three, four, occupation no more, five, six, seven, eight. 0.97
00:18:55.260 Israel is a terror state. 0.87
00:18:57.000 Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has got to fall. 0.98
00:18:59.820 Throw subtlety out the window there entirely.
00:19:02.440 And this is all very explicit, very anti-Israel.
00:19:05.660 And before you jump on and say,
00:19:07.340 oh, but criticism of Israel isn't always anti-Semitism,
00:19:11.680 I would implore you to go around and ask those people what they think about Jews.
00:19:17.480 Go up to them and ask them what they think about Jews.
00:19:19.660 And I bet that distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
00:19:23.720 is going to be a lot less pronounced than you think it is.
00:19:28.040 Those clips that I just shared were from Beth Baisha,
00:19:31.380 an independent photographer who has done what no one else
00:19:35.260 that I've seen in Canadian media has done,
00:19:37.400 which is cover this thing that can be readily described as a hate fest.
00:19:41.680 Sue Ann Levy, my colleague at True North,
00:19:43.740 has covered it a number of times in years past herself and joins me now.
00:19:48.680 Sue Ann, this is the same old rhetoric year after year.
00:19:52.200 nothing new and nothing anomalous about this is it not at all and i in fact i guess you might say
00:19:58.700 i embedded myself in the protest for several years the last one i i covered was in 2019
00:20:05.400 because then covet hit of course and don't don't uh fool yourself because they did
00:20:10.860 hold a online virtual hate fest in 2020 but having said that i was right there in the midst of things 0.65
00:20:18.420 And they actually singled me out as being there, the Jewess, God forbid she'd be there. 0.52
00:20:25.000 And there were some really awful people there. 0.98
00:20:28.040 The thing that got me was that they bussed in, they bussed in like hordes of people from north of Toronto.
00:20:35.040 They're all in the GTA. 0.88
00:20:36.540 And they had like little girls, little girls dressed in niqab, standing there holding professionally made signs with Israel has blood on its hands. 0.65
00:20:45.760 like really awful pictures of dead babies things like that what are you teaching your kids these
00:20:52.300 kids were no more than eight nine ten years old terrible and I saw one sign that Beth had tweeted
00:21:00.320 a picture of and the person who had it was like proudly posing with it that had a star of David 0.90
00:21:05.720 and then equals a swastika so we're calling Jews Nazis we're calling Israelis Nazis no matter which 0.85
00:21:13.680 way you slice it. And none of the outrage when people said Justin Trudeau was a Nazi at the 0.81
00:21:18.640 Freedom Convoy, a comparison, by the way, that I deplore, but one that was widely condemned in one
00:21:24.540 case and completely ignored in this other case. There's a tremendous double standard, Andrew,
00:21:30.740 as we probably well know from a number of things. I followed it for years and played a sort of
00:21:37.240 journalist, investigative, in some ways activist role, to try and bring attention to this hateful
00:21:44.000 group of people on the streets of Toronto. And, you know, the thing that just struck me
00:21:49.420 when I saw it again, yet again, and I have a column online on True North, was that the council and
00:21:57.800 the mayor at the time had the tools to get rid of these people. They were marching illegally,
00:22:02.700 and Queen's Park had already said get off our grass because they had occupied
00:22:07.460 Queen's Park for a while the speaker had spoken up and said we don't want you
00:22:12.520 here so then they gravitated down University Avenue the main thoroughfare
00:22:16.740 fair in Toronto to in front of Osgoode Hall and City Hall and were occupying
00:22:22.440 that square illegally nobody at City Hall had the balls or the gumption to
00:22:28.000 actually find them and get rid of them and there was a lot of hand-wringing
00:22:31.780 there were motions made that they should be fined for trespassing. The police were supposed to act
00:22:36.580 and charge them if they were spewing hate. But none of that ever happened in 2019. And I have
00:22:43.260 to say it's very, very frustrating. Now, I perhaps take a bit of a different view from you on that
00:22:49.560 issue alone. And I don't deny the pervasiveness and insidiousness of anti-Semitism. My friend 0.72
00:22:54.340 Laura Rosen-Cohen has often said that everyone meets at Jew hate junction, is that anti-Semitism
00:22:59.380 seems to be the point for extremists of any direction.
00:23:02.680 They all can meet there and be friends there.
00:23:05.020 And I don't want to diminish that.
00:23:06.660 I take a very, very broad view of free speech. 0.87
00:23:09.880 So I say let these hateful bigots protest. 0.55
00:23:12.940 Let the anti-Semites protest and call them out for what it is. 0.95
00:23:16.300 Now, I do take your point, though, about the permitting.
00:23:19.060 I mean, if we're going to have this permitting protocol in place
00:23:22.020 that is meant to limit how protests can be, what they can be,
00:23:25.620 I don't think the equivalent of an anti-Islamism event would get a permit, but I think they would be shut down very quickly if they tried to do this.
00:23:34.180 Well, that's the point, and that's exactly the point, and I agree with you about free speech, but not hate speech, and this crosses the line into hate speech.
00:23:41.680 The other thing is that you're right. The double standard is such that if I decided to march down the street and say I hate niqabed, donned young ladies who carry signs with pictures of dead Palestinians, bloody dead Palestinians, I hate them, and that kind of thing, and I wanted to start a protest, they would never ever give me a permit. 0.91
00:24:04.340 They would never, ever give me police protection, and they had police protection. 0.99
00:24:08.780 They had a permit.
00:24:09.820 They occupied University Avenue and some of the other main streets for hours on end.
00:24:14.980 The same thing happened that year at Young and Bloor, which is a major thoroughfare.
00:24:21.520 They shut down that thoroughfare for three hours, set up a stage, unpermitted, allowed to do it, huge police presence, and nobody ever said anything.
00:24:30.960 And it was an anti-Israel protest.
00:24:32.460 So, you know, the problem is that if you set that precedent and you don't stand up to the hate and you don't deal with the tools you've got, then it just gets enforced and emboldened and enabled and it continues like it did last Saturday.
00:24:48.360 So I'm curious in your years of covering this where the politicians are on this.
00:24:55.660 Let's be real.
00:24:56.600 We'd be looking at the NDP.
00:24:58.020 The NDP has a large anti-Israel streak in a lot of its MPPs.
00:25:01.560 Is this too extreme for even them, or do some of them actually align historically with this and show up there?
00:25:08.080 They don't dare show up there.
00:25:10.060 They haven't dared, at least in my time, dared show up there.
00:25:14.180 But their silence is very telling.
00:25:17.760 And, you know, for instance, you heard all the fur, the sturm und drang, as we want to say, about protests at drag queen story hours.
00:25:27.760 the NDP have made people who appear there who are concerned about the age appropriateness of that
00:25:33.080 turned them into transphobics, hateful people, this that and the other thing. Not a word is said
00:25:39.280 and the silence speaks volumes as far as I'm concerned and then there are those who like
00:25:45.640 certain mayoralcy candidates have come out and said this hate fest should not be allowed in the
00:25:50.720 streets of downtown Toronto yet they sat on their hands over the years they were on council doing
00:25:56.380 nothing. So talk is cheap. Some of them say the right things, some say nothing, and nothing ever
00:26:03.740 changes. Yeah, I actually want to talk about that NDP protest ban for a moment, because you and I
00:26:10.540 spoke about this a couple of weeks ago on Fake News Friday. The NDP and one of its members of
00:26:15.960 the provincial parliament, Kristen Wong Tam, has proposed legislation which won't pass with a PC
00:26:21.600 majority, I think. I mean, to be honest, I don't know with Doug Ford, but they've proposed this
00:26:27.800 ban on protesting drag shows. That's essentially what the ban is. They couch it in language about
00:26:34.040 keeping the 2SLGBTQI plus community safe act. That's what they call it, but it prohibits people 0.98
00:26:41.640 from performing an act of intimidation, which they call a protest, within 100 meters of a property
00:26:47.200 this designated as a community safety zone for this particular group. And when they were pushing
00:26:52.100 this forward, they were talking about the importance of protecting against hate. And
00:26:57.200 they were talking about transphobic hate and homophobic hate and all of that. If you look at
00:27:02.240 the Statistics Canada reported hate offenses, hate-related offenses, anti-Semitism is, I believe,
00:27:10.300 every year for which data is available, the top one on the list, the top form of hate.
00:27:16.820 It is indeed, and the B'nai B'rith has statistics every year that shows not only is it the top form, but it has increased, and it's coming from the far left and the far right.
00:27:29.020 Not just the far right, as our leftist friends would have us believe, but from the far left, the fringe left.
00:27:36.120 Kristen Wong-Tam is an interesting character, so she was on City Council for a number of years, and I mean, voters' memories are short.
00:27:44.500 activist memories are short, but she was the one who was responsible for the rise
00:27:50.260 of a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, who marched in the gay pride
00:27:56.080 parade for five years, doing the exact same thing as the Al-Quds people with
00:28:00.700 very hateful signs, very hateful banners, and I fought as a journalist and, you
00:28:06.160 know, part-time activist but pro-Israel and made it very clear to get them out
00:28:11.680 of the parade they finally did get out of the parade but again she she allowed that to happen
00:28:16.820 she actually helped nurture that group uh in a gay pride parade where israel is the only place
00:28:23.480 in the middle east that uh welcomes homosexuality and gay marriage and all that jazz
00:28:29.600 yeah and bernie farber who i know you and i could do a whole show on i think we have actually done
00:28:35.040 a whole show on bernie farber but he's the uh the guy behind the the canadian anti-hate network which
00:28:39.960 receives a whole bunch of government funding to tell us that we're all racist so bernie farber
00:28:44.460 who his job is to call out hate and he calls out hate where it doesn't exist he occasionally calls
00:28:50.120 it out where it does exist i just did a search on his twitter for the words al coulds and i tried
00:28:56.000 both spellings al hyphen coulds and al space coulds and i found two references going back to 2012 one
00:29:03.120 in 2018 and one in 2012 uh so here we have you know bona fide anti-jewish anti-israel hate and
00:29:12.300 the canadian anti-hate network is uh nowhere to be found well that shouldn't be surprising to you
00:29:18.220 should it andrew i mean that bernie farber has deviated so much from you know he he actually
00:29:25.200 was once uh head of the canadian jewish congress and fought against anti-semitism well yeah the
00:29:30.980 CJC wouldn't have stood for this, and I think actually the one tweet from 2012 was when he was with the CJC, and now that he's no longer there, there's no firm stand on this.
00:29:38.560 Yeah. Well, he gets his grants from the Trudeau government. His anti-hate network thrives from, you know, the Trudeau. He's propped up by the Trudeau liberals and, you know, they turn a blind eye to this kind of anti-Semitism.
00:29:53.980 Okay, they make a few token comments like the councillors did.
00:30:00.200 They pay lip service to it, but, you know, otherwise they don't act on it at all.
00:30:06.100 I mean, there's not that, and I have to blame the legacy media as well,
00:30:09.340 because all those years that I was covering Al-Quds, as with many things in Toronto,
00:30:14.940 I would show up to this event as, you know, proud Jew wearing my Jewish star
00:30:19.200 and cover the event and be attacked.
00:30:21.800 and you would never see the legacy media there.
00:30:24.560 Never. 1.00
00:30:26.500 No, there was, and I don't even think with Al-Quds, 0.95
00:30:29.620 because as I mentioned when I was playing those clips earlier, 0.99
00:30:31.860 they completely throw subtlety out the window.
00:30:34.960 And the media, no one is supporting this in mainstream media,
00:30:39.620 maybe a couple of radicals,
00:30:40.980 but they look the other way because it goes against their narrative.
00:30:44.920 You know, we've decided to elevate Muslims and the Palestinian cause
00:30:48.540 to a certain level where it is above criticism,
00:30:51.400 It is above reproach.
00:30:52.720 And I want to show one more.
00:30:54.120 And this one should actually be outrageous to people.
00:30:57.320 This is a post or a flag that was visible at the Al-Quds Day event.
00:31:02.520 And again, we give credit to Beth Bass for this one.
00:31:05.320 But let's put that up on the screen.
00:31:08.640 We're just waiting for that.
00:31:09.720 There we go.
00:31:10.420 So I want you to look at that yellow flag with the green on it.
00:31:14.040 And if you don't recognize it, that is the flag of Hezbollah, which is funded.
00:31:19.780 it is literally in Canadian law a terrorist organization so that is in the eyes of the law
00:31:26.800 no different than waving an ISIS flag on the streets of Canada and this is again a kind of
00:31:32.920 thing that I'm not even talking about arresting them because I do not like thought crimes I do
00:31:37.860 not like policing expression but at the very least let's have an honest discussion about the
00:31:42.520 kind of thing that is welcome there when someone brought a swastika or a confederate flag to the
00:31:47.620 Freedom Convoy, they were denounced by everyone around them. And it's not clear exactly what the
00:31:51.620 motivation was behind it. Someone holds a Hezbollah flag there, no one around has any issues.
00:31:58.080 The interesting thing, Andrew, the interesting thing was that I remember when the convoy came 0.90
00:32:04.560 to Toronto, and there were a lot of, well, I call them leftist Jews, because they're not really 0.86
00:32:09.800 concerned about anti-Semitism, or they say they are, but they just use it to attack the far right, 0.75
00:32:14.940 the conservatives but uh they talked about all these the appearance of this nazi person and that
00:32:20.700 nazi person you never hear a word from them when it comes to al-quds which is far more hateful
00:32:25.900 far more heinous uh you know and far more dangerous i might add uh because this is just a
00:32:33.340 sort of piece of nuance that people would not would understand if you told them they always
00:32:38.140 hold this event on the saturday which is the jewish sabbath so a lot of the well they call
00:32:43.740 the jewish lobby it's not the jewish lobby it's jewish um activist groups or you know the the
00:32:49.740 traditional groups they can't attend because uh it is the jewish sabbath and if they keep sabbath
00:32:56.140 they're not there and this would happen repeatedly and repeatedly so they would take footage but they
00:33:01.100 wouldn't be there to provide a presence at all and i think that's done deliberately yeah i i
00:33:08.620 I would certainly agree. And it's just thumbing their nose in the faces of everyone else as a
00:33:14.480 result of it. And again, if you parse that flag, I mean, the flag, and again, it's not one that
00:33:19.260 you see often. So you might look at it and think, oh, that's probably the flag of some country
00:33:23.160 somewhere. But it is actually the word Allah and a hand reaching up to grab an assault rifle. So
00:33:31.800 this is not like, you know, an olive branch and, you know, cedar tree and peace and love and all
00:33:37.420 of that this is literally a militant organization's flag an organization that is a terror group in
00:33:42.780 canada and i'm not even talking about the censorship free speech hate speech angle i'm just
00:33:48.520 talking about the type of thing that is nowhere to be found but at true north and on beth basha's
00:33:55.460 twitter feed so sue ann i'm glad you were uh covering this and writing about this as always
00:33:59.780 but just absolutely shameful that this level of uh hate gets a pass so thank you so much
00:34:04.760 you're welcome, Andrew. All right. Uh, that does it for us for today. We got lots of great stuff
00:34:10.320 planned for tomorrow. Uh, I say that because I'll just come up with some great stuff, but I think,
00:34:14.900 you know, we do have some, we do have some great stuff planned already. It's half great so far.
00:34:18.460 We've just got to stretch it out to full greatness. Uh, if you want to support the
00:34:22.240 work we're doing here on this show and at True North, please head on over to donate.tnc.news,
00:34:28.180 donate.tnc.news. It is my wife's birthday tonight. So I have to take off that hat and
00:34:34.140 put on a very different hat tonight and hopefully we'll live up to expectations, which is very easy
00:34:40.040 for me because expectations are typically quite low. But we will hopefully have a great evening
00:34:44.980 and I'll be back to see you tomorrow, everyone. This is Canada's most irreverent talk show. Thank
00:34:50.380 you. God bless and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:34:56.540 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:35:04.140 You