00:06:59.140So certainly getting up there into the Giovanni territory, but not really that close.
00:07:04.76054% in 2008 47% in 2006 and 40% in 2004 so all of those numbers say that Jamil Javani did very
00:07:16.440very well and the big thing though is not just his margin of victory but it's where that came from
00:07:23.080so he got 57% the liberals got 22% what did the liberals get last time 29.9% the NDP got 10%
00:07:33.040What did they get last time? 17.5%. The PPC, Patricia Conlon, she got 4.43%. What did the
00:07:41.920PPC get last time? 5.5%. So every single party went down except for the conservatives.
00:07:52.880The conservatives, that means, were drawing support from everywhere else imaginable. They
00:07:58.240were drawing support. Now, one caveat you have to put in with by-elections is that they have
00:08:04.000notoriously low voter turnout. This by-election was no exception. So you have to, I mean, you
00:08:09.220don't want the percentages to be deceptive there because, you know, yes, Jamil Javani won 57 point
00:08:14.540some odd percent, but turnout was a lot lower. He had 32,000 votes cast and that was 27% turnout,
00:08:25.180whereas in 2021 turnout was 61 percent. In 2019 turnout was 68 percent. So by election turnout
00:08:34.280is a lot lower but at the same time elections are won by those who show up. So at the end of the day
00:08:39.480it still means that the conservatives were getting their voters out to the polls. They were getting
00:08:43.800their voters to the ballot box and they were getting ballots that were drawing support from
00:08:48.520the liberals. So even though there is low turnout which a lot of the true anons, the shamrock brigade
00:08:54.700on Twitter that are just completely loyal to Justin Trudeau until the end of time, until
00:08:59.480their dying breath, they're all saying, oh, well, you know, low turnout, it's not really,
00:09:03.560they're trying to say a win is not really a win.
00:09:06.200But what they're missing in all of that is that if Liberal voters don't want to go to
00:09:10.820the polls, that is not at all a line of support for Justin Trudeau.
00:09:16.360If the only candidate that can get people motivated to vote for them is the Conservative,
00:09:21.100that's something that the Liberals need to be worried about.
00:09:24.700So where is the NDP? Where are the Liberals? Where are the Greens? Where are the People's Party of Canada voters? Maxime Bernier practically moved to Durham. He practically moved to the riding. He was there more times than anyone could count. They had a candidate who I've spoken to before. I've met her. She's a very nice woman, Patricia Conlon, a very, very passionate woman. She was a second time candidate.
00:09:48.260So she had profile in that riding from having run in 2021, and Patricia Conlon was not even
00:09:54.600able to match the percentage that she and the PPC got in 2021 when they ran in the by-election.
00:10:02.120So all of this means that right now the Liberals should be very nervous, not because they lost
00:10:07.700a seat that they were never going to win in the first place, but because none of their
00:15:04.640you you are not a bad person for believing that Canada should work for those who do the work
00:15:15.720that was the MP elect for Durham Jamil Javani taking aim at liberal elites but what I found
00:15:24.320so interesting there was he referred to the liberal elites who run the Ontario Ministry
00:15:30.920of education. Now, I don't think he's just talking about bureaucrats. I think he's talking about
00:15:37.160Stephen Lecce, the Ontario education minister, nominally a progressive conservative. He's
00:15:42.060previously called him incompetent because Jamil used to actually have a position with the Ontario
00:15:47.960government. He was a, I forget the name of it. It was like a community opportunities advocate or
00:15:52.180something. And then he ended up having to, well, not having to, he ended up choosing to resign
00:15:58.120from that position when he just said, listen, I can't get on board with this government's
00:16:04.020incompetent handling of the COVID file. So very principled guy in that sense. He was principled
00:16:09.200when he took aim at Bell Media, when again, it's very subtle, but when he talks about the big
00:16:13.500telecommunications platforms, I'm pretty sure that's where he is directing his ire. And I just
00:16:20.160have to say something. I know that not everyone who listens to this show is, well, certainly not
00:16:24.860everyone's conservative. And I welcome all of you. Not everyone is partisan conservative with a
00:16:29.480capital C. And I am, to be fair, I'm sympathetic to a lot of what Pierre Polyev is talking about.
00:16:36.420And I know that people accused me of being some, you know, partisan sellout shill or whatever,
00:16:40.780to which I say, I have not yet received the checks that everyone on Twitter thinks I'm
00:16:44.440collecting. So maybe we'll talk, well, I mean, I do have checks over here on my desk, but they're
00:16:48.300it's like a $3 book royalty check. So it's not a conservative party of Canada check.
00:16:52.600But the one thing I'll point out about this is that Pierre Polyev has done something which his predecessors have not done, which has surrounded himself with people who are so-called controversial candidates.
00:17:06.640You look at people like Aaron Gunn, a YouTuber and filmmaker, has talked about very hot-button issues.
00:17:14.680Dr. Matt Strauss, the anti-lockdown doctor in Kitchener.
00:17:18.000Roman Babber, the anti-lockdown advocate who was kicked out of the Ontario PC Caucus for this.
00:17:24.280Sean points out they're all the Andrew Lawton Show regulars.
00:17:26.760Yeah, anytime you let an Andrew Lawton Show guest appear on your slate as a candidate, you're throwing caution to the wind.
00:17:33.620Sabrina Maddow, she's been on the show as well.
00:17:35.500she's vying to be a conservative candidate. So this is actually quite relevant. This is quite
00:17:41.740relevant because it means that Pierre Polyev is unafraid to be around people who have done and
00:17:47.940said things that the media are going to pounce for. And that in and of itself suggests there's
00:17:53.060going to be a different type of campaign in 2025. Now, Jamil Javani, he's got a bit of a runway
00:17:58.940ahead of him. Now, I realized when I just mentioned that like all of my guests end up running as
00:18:03.380conservative candidates that's like an awfully big uh an awfully big setup to my next guest
00:18:07.660franco terrazzano who is the federal director for the canadian taxpayers federation franco
00:18:12.280any announcements from you today uh absolutely not other than the fact that canadians are furious
00:18:19.120with the government raising carbon taxes that's the only announcement today andrew well and that's
00:18:24.860a big one and i will say uh pierre pauliev yesterday in his endorsement of jamil and his
00:18:30.060congratulations today said, I think it was the first thing he mentioned that Jamil is going to
00:18:34.500help him ax the tax. So you don't want to extrapolate too much from by-elections, but when
00:18:40.060you look at how much the Liberals have been doubling down and tripling down on the carbon
00:18:43.960tax and you look at where they are in their polls, it's clear that Canadians are not happy with this.
00:18:49.520Yeah, Canadians are sick and tired of the federal government in Ottawa making our lives more
00:18:54.720expensive. And that's exactly what the carbon tax does. Not only does it make our lives more
00:18:59.080expensive, it makes the necessities of life more expensive. It makes it more expensive for you to
00:19:04.200fuel up your car, to get to work, to go to see the in-laws. It makes it more expensive for you to
00:19:09.800heat your home during the cold winter months. And it makes it more expensive for you to put food
00:19:13.680on your family's table because the carbon tax taxes, the farmer taxes, the trucker,
00:19:19.180and therefore you pay higher bills. And look at these poll numbers that the CTF just released
00:19:23.880about seven in 10 Canadians are against the Trudeau government's upcoming carbon tax hike.
00:19:30.020And no matter how you slice the numbers, every single demographic, age, gender, income level,
00:19:35.460education level, they're all vast majority of Canadians against the carbon tax hike.
00:19:40.200And no matter which province they're in, again, the vast majority of Canadians are against the
00:19:44.880carbon tax hike. So Canadians are united in the fact that we're furious about the government
00:19:49.620making our lives more expensive. The only question now is, are Trudeau and his Liberal
00:19:54.380MPs going to listen to Canadians, or are they going to keep cranking up their carbon tax?
00:19:59.920You know, to force you into a bit of a pundit role for a moment here, Franco, one of the things
00:20:04.120that I find the Liberals did that was incredibly short-sighted was offer that exemption on home
00:20:09.980heating oil that carve out to Atlantic Canada. Now, I think it's the right thing to give Canadians
00:20:14.800relief on the carbon tax. And I think they should have done it to every single region,
00:20:17.860every type of home heating, not just home heating oil. But when they did that, it was a strategic
00:20:23.680blunder because all of a sudden every government in the country, including the NDP in Manitoba,
00:20:29.900conservatives elsewhere, were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up here. Like on one hand, you're
00:20:33.880positioning this as being this panacea for the climate woes. And then on the other hand, you're
00:20:37.820saying, okay, yeah, we can give a little exemption here and there. Well, it was a strategic blunder,
00:20:43.660right not just for the reason that you bring up but for the reason that it proves that the carbon
00:20:48.520tax does make life more expensive right otherwise why would trudeau take the carbon tax off of
00:20:54.760furnace oil for three years right so there the trudeau government their talking point is oh
00:21:00.440don't worry the rebates make you better off don't worry folks somehow the government will magically
00:21:05.140put more money in your pocket than it takes now canadians never bought that idea right and the
00:21:11.000reason Canadians saw through that talking point is because it's impossible to bring in a carbon tax,
00:21:17.340charge the sales tax on top of the carbon tax, skim hundreds of millions of dollars off the top
00:21:22.960to pay for bureaucrats to administer the carbon tax, and then somehow make everyone better off
00:21:28.500with rebates. That's impossible. Canadians, all Canadians outside of the Ottawa bubble
00:21:32.900understand that. But the strategic blunder on that is that Trudeau essentially made it obvious
00:21:41.880himself when he announced that they're providing relief by taking the carbon tax off of one form
00:21:46.640of heating energy, right? Because if the carbon tax didn't make that heating energy more expensive,
00:21:51.960then why would Trudeau provide that relief in the first place? Now, to your point earlier,
00:21:57.180it's good that some Canadians are getting relief, but he's leaving 97% of Canadians out in the cold.
00:22:02.520So the only fair thing to do would have been to just provide that relief to every Canadian.
00:22:07.400And of course, we'd like to see him go a step further and just completely scrap the carbon tax altogether.
00:22:13.320Yeah, and that's the one thing I've always pointed out on this is that the Supreme Court, I think, made the wrong decision on this when it adjudicated a few years back whether the federal government had the jurisdiction to do this.
00:22:24.420But even with that, there's always the political option, which is a government coming in and saying we are going to get rid of the carbon tax.
00:22:31.440And this has become a flagship issue for the conservatives.
00:22:35.760I mean, even some new Democrats, I think, are getting a little bit stronger on this
00:22:39.860issue, certainly provincially in Alberta and Manitoba, and I believe Saskatchewan.
00:28:16.160Well, one thing we are going to be doing this week
00:28:19.120and in the weeks and months that follow, I suspect,
00:28:21.780is continuing our coverage of Bill C-63.
00:28:24.640Now, make no mistake, I did a deep dive into the Online Harms Act yesterday.
00:28:30.340This is, without a doubt, and I do not say this with hyperbole,
00:28:34.240one of the most, if not the most dangerous pieces of legislation,
00:28:38.140in my view, the Liberals have presented.
00:28:40.160It is, I believe, flawed in its premise and certainly flawed in its application, and it's
00:28:46.020going to have an absolutely terrible effect on free speech, not just as an incidental
00:28:52.020effect, but by the very design of the bill.
00:28:54.860But I want to talk about this from a number of angles, because it's one thing to say free
00:29:00.920speech, good, censorship, bad, which, by the way, I agree with, and sadly probably summarizes
00:29:05.440my show more than I'd like, but it also is important to look at how it is bad.
00:29:09.900and why it's bad and why this bill will have, in many cases, adverse effects even on the people
00:29:15.780it purports to be serving. And there was a fantastic op-ed in the Western Standard that
00:29:21.580was written by the, well, courtesy of the Fraser Institute and University of Saskatchewan law
00:29:27.060professor Dwight Newman that talks about this. It's that Ottawa's online harms bill actually
00:29:32.440threatens marginalized communities. I wanted to have Professor Newman on the show to unpack this
00:29:38.420bit further and i'm very pleased that he took us up on the offer uh dwight good to talk to you
00:29:42.500thanks for coming on today well thanks i'm glad to to be with you here so let's first and foremost
00:29:48.900talk about why it is that it does i mean what's your premise here on how marginalized communities
00:29:53.780may actually be harmed by this bill which the government is claiming is there to serve them and
00:29:58.420protect them well my focus uh in my comment is on particular parts of the bill and one of the
00:30:05.060challenges in talking about the bill is there are so many different things going on at the same time
00:30:10.420because there is the piece about online harms and that warrants its own analysis those parts of the
00:30:16.500bill but there are parts of the bill that aren't about anything online at all and they're either
00:30:23.380sneaking through provisions on hate related matters generally or those matters are there
00:30:30.500to distract from the online part. I don't know what the story is, but they somehow don't fit
00:30:37.300together. But the piece on hate is what I focused on, that isn't necessarily in the online context,
00:30:44.500and there the creation of a freestanding offence that goes along with any other criminal code
00:30:51.700offence where there's a motivation by hate and that creates an offence subject to life imprisonment
00:31:00.260is actually a very dangerous offense to create in this bill and one that puts at risk even people
00:31:07.460from marginalized communities. Now there's another step to get there but that's quite simply that if
00:31:12.900you create offenses in the criminal code where there's vast discretion on what the sentence is
00:31:20.260going to be, people are going to get caught up in that that don't have representation or as much
00:31:27.460representation by lawyers and be at more risk from those uh sentences or the threat of those
00:31:33.940sentences in the context of plea bargain negotiations and those will be marginalized
00:31:38.980people that are the very people that uh the government claims to be protecting i i wanted
00:31:43.700to go back to the the bill itself here for a moment and just explain this because i mean in
00:31:48.660the criminal code again i'm not a lawyer but in the criminal code uh you know all of the offenses
00:31:53.140that are criminal in Canada have an associated sentence with them. And these sentences are
00:31:57.800created based on the severity of the act itself, which is why, you know, a mischief charge will
00:32:04.480have a different potential sentence from a murder charge. So I'm correct in my understanding that
00:32:10.020what this bill would do is add a separate, basically an add-on component where if you've
00:32:17.040done anything else that has its own sentencing guideline, and it is motivated by hate, that
00:32:22.740could be a life sentence. So am I construing that correctly? That's right. And so the example you
00:32:29.420gave is graffiti. So someone who commits vandalism, which would never have a life sentence if it was
00:32:35.000motivated by hate, could conceivably have a life sentence for the motivation. That's right. So we
00:32:41.540normally draw a line between what are called summary offenses and indictable offenses. That's
00:32:47.600just one line we could draw. The summary offenses tend to have very much lighter punishment
00:32:53.340associated with them. Well, this new section of the criminal code will say if you commit any other
00:32:59.620offense in the criminal code or under another federal statute, I believe, that you've committed
00:33:05.440also a separate indictable offense if your motivation was one of hatred. And I mean, I don't
00:33:12.920encourage, I mean, hatred is a terrible thing that we should all be fighting against,
00:33:20.360but creating a separate offence here that attaches on to even very relatively minor offences but now
00:33:27.960adds the prospect of a life sentence with an attached offence creates a lot of risks and a
00:33:34.040lot of problems. And the example I gave is sort of some young person that's old enough to be an
00:33:39.880adult for criminal law purposes, but still not really mature. They go and write graffiti,
00:33:47.880they're caught up in some bad ideas as a youth, and they're accused of being motivated by hatred.
00:33:54.520Well, they're now subject to a life sentence potentially that has no relationship to the
00:33:59.800severity of writing or painting graffiti somewhere. There's a total mismatch that's created there.
00:34:07.800it's awful and again i i don't want to whitewash what are our very serious acts i mean we've seen
00:34:16.400in in the last uh you know few months alone we've seen some horrific uh acts of vandalism that have
00:34:21.620taken place against churches uh there was the church that's been burned in in your province
00:34:25.880we have also instances of targeting mosques and jewish community centers and i think those should
00:34:31.740be prosecuted. Well, they should be prosecuted. But at the same time, I also have a very
00:34:38.480significant issue fundamentally with adjudicating motivation in this way. And this idea that
00:34:45.220the motivation fundamentally changes the crime in that disproportionate way you just described
00:34:51.120here. Is this really the only area of the law where we have this with the motivation having
00:34:57.160such a significant distinction in how an offense is viewed?
00:35:02.080Well, I mean, other than the willful promotion of hatred offense itself, but that isn't really
00:35:10.260even about the motivation still. That ends up being about what it is that's been done.
00:35:17.700And I mean, normally we're looking at intention and the type of intention. And so first degree
00:35:22.900murder is more serious than second-degree murder because of the intention, the pre-planning,
00:35:29.900the premeditation. It's not exactly the same thing as motivation. This is an example where
00:35:35.220motivation, which is a vague thing to get at, is going to have a huge effect. And I think that's
00:35:42.700quite different than what happens anywhere else I can think of in the criminal law offhand.
00:35:47.680But it is something that's challenging to judge. What is somebody's motivation? And it's transforming the nature of these. And I gave the graffiti example, because it's actually one that's a genuinely lighter offence. I mean, it's still something that should be prosecuted. I don't want to make light of it.
00:36:07.020The church burnings, arson, is a serious offence, and this government has sort of laughed that off in some ways.
00:36:17.340And it's really disappointing to a lot of Canadians of faith that their religious places of worship can't be protected.
00:36:26.400But when you are going to protect them, which I think should be done, the prosecution should be arson if it's arson.
00:36:35.060That's a serious offense because it puts lives at risk, but it still shouldn't necessarily be something that has a life sentence because of the motivation.
00:36:47.000Some of the church burnings, probably there's a motivation there of a form of hatred for the religious institution involved, or at least the argument could be made.
00:36:57.260That's where we get into the complexities of how do you judge and describe motivation and say whether it's actually hateful.
00:37:05.260So that's a real example where this could come into play.
00:37:10.260And even there, with a more serious offence, I don't think one should be adding on this additional offence with a life sentence.
00:37:18.260And again, even if it's not something that someone would be convicted over, it puts immense pressure on them then to plead guilty to another offense and give up their defense rights if they don't have the means to fight this looming offense of life imprisonment successfully.
00:37:38.540Well, and that is the crucial point I wanted to circle back to here, which is, I mean, the Supreme Court did, I think, a lot to really dismantle reforms on sentencing that the previous conservative government tried to put in, especially when it comes to mandatory minimums.
00:37:54.320But now you have the opposite problem where you have this just insane range that you could find yourself having applied to you.
00:38:04.620And that leaves so much to just how good your lawyer is and how good your judge is.
00:38:11.300And if you have a judge that wants to make an example of you because of these hate motivations or you don't have, as you've said, access to particularly good counsel, you're kind of screwed.
00:38:21.580Yeah. Well, the legal system will try to provide guidance on that through the case law that builds
00:38:27.420up, but it comes down to if you don't have access to enough legal counsel, you may not know that as
00:38:34.460someone who gets caught up in things. And I mean, I do worry on sort of the, as I say, the wayward
00:38:40.540youth that is involved in the graffiti offense. I mean, if someone's a long-term criminal and
00:38:47.820I'm less concerned that they might be under pressure to plead out, but someone who really shouldn't be caught up in things could get caught up in things in problematic ways because of this offense.
00:39:01.560And it just all of these things also with the whole bill, the chill effects on people in various ways permutate out and restrict freedom more than things first appear.
00:39:18.480And that's something that needs to be thought about in every part of the bill that one's looking at is it's not just what's on the paper, but it's how people are affected in their behavior in their day-to-day lives by what's on the paper.
00:39:33.340And it probably chills a lot of things that are actually legal and legitimate that people worry that they're going to be caught up in because a lot of people are law abiding Canadians and don't want to be caught up in a criminal prosecution.
00:39:49.860Well, they're going to have their liberty restricted in a lot of different ways.
00:39:53.780Yeah, well, you can't really blame them in that context.
00:39:56.740It's a great piece over at the Western Standard, also available at the Fraser Institute website by Dwight Newman.
00:40:03.340professor of law at the university of saskatchewan dwight thank you so much for your
00:40:08.080insights really good to talk to you well thank you good to talk with you thank you all right we'll
00:40:12.820have more on bill c63 in the days and weeks to come like i said it cannot be understated
00:40:19.300how dangerous this bill is i will sound like a broken record or for the uh gen zers in our
00:40:25.560audience a broken mp3 player which i'm not sure has the same uh metaphoric ring but hopefully
00:40:30.260you'll get my drift there. But that does it for us. We'll be back tomorrow in due course with more
00:40:35.120of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North. Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.
00:40:40.380Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:40:42.900Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.