Juno News - Conservative byelection win is bad news for Justin Trudeau

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:19.620 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here the andrew lawton show

00:01:30.100 on true north i i don't feel sick but the second i started speaking right there i felt like my

00:01:38.260 throat is not functioning the way it is supposed to be so i don't know i was on a cruise last week

00:01:42.680 the idea that i got something on that cruise is i'd say about 117 so i could be sick and i hopefully

00:01:51.500 will be able to get through the show i mean i'm trying to wonder why i didn't realize before uh

00:01:56.480 one o'clock eastern time that i was sick and then i realized i have like gone the whole day without

00:02:00.020 really speaking i think my because my wife uh left she didn't leave that sounded dramatic

00:02:04.620 she she left our abode and i maybe had like you know five words with her then and i hadn't spoken

00:02:11.420 until now so now I realize I might not actually have much of a voice but we'll do what we can

00:02:15.940 great to have you tuned in we'll try to ratchet up the irreverence to make up for the volume but

00:02:21.100 all that aside it is good to talk to you thanks so much I announced yesterday on the show

00:02:25.700 the forthcoming book that I have penned I've penned it already that part's not forthcoming

00:02:31.360 but the publication is forthcoming it's called Pierre Polyev a political life the first I've

00:02:37.460 learned biography of the Conservative Party of Canada leader. It's a fair and journalistic

00:02:43.660 portrayal, not a piece of political propaganda, although I suspect that there's a bit of a

00:02:48.900 Rorschach inkblot effect on stuff like this, where many people will take out of it whatever

00:02:53.800 they went into it with. But thank you all of you who have sent along your kind words on that,

00:02:59.400 people who have said they've pre-ordered it. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope we'll be able

00:03:03.320 to get those shipped out to you as soon as it's released in May. The reason I lead off with that

00:03:09.100 shameless bit of self-promotion is because we had an election yesterday. Did you know that? It was

00:03:13.880 election day. Not the big grand general election, but there was a by-election in Durham. Now,

00:03:20.500 by-election does not mean it swings both ways. By-election means it is taking place in between

00:03:25.740 the regular election periods. And not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say,

00:03:32.600 But it was a bit interesting.

00:03:33.820 You had Jamil Javani, who's been on this show a number of times.

00:03:36.280 He was a very capable radio broadcaster with Bell, News Talk 1010 in Toronto,

00:03:42.220 before he was summarily fired for not being the token black guy, basically.

00:03:48.120 That was what he said when he sued Bell,

00:03:49.720 that they expected him to say all these things as their diversity hire

00:03:54.080 that he didn't want to say because he's an independent-minded guy.

00:03:57.200 So he sued Bell, and I believe that is still working its way through the process.

00:04:02.680 Then he went on to be the president of the Canada Strong and Free Network.

00:04:06.020 He was not there for too, too long before he ultimately jumped into politics, replacing

00:04:11.180 now we know Aaron O'Toole, the former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who had

00:04:16.560 been the member of parliament in Durham for a couple of, well, he wanted it a by-election

00:04:20.660 too, and now he will be replaced by Jameel Javani.

00:04:24.500 Now, let me first and foremost say, yes, Durham is a, well, yes, it's a greater Toronto area riding.

00:04:32.840 It's a riding that is in the GTA largely.

00:04:36.960 It encompasses Oshawa, Clarington, Cordes, all these communities.

00:04:40.780 Yes, it's in the GTA, but it's not Toronto.

00:04:44.000 Like no one in Durham would say that they identify as a Torontonian.

00:04:47.840 In fact, they would probably shoot you because Durham residents own firearms, which is wonderful.

00:04:52.780 One of the things I love about them.

00:04:53.940 They would not identify as Toronto. So when you say that it's a GTA seat, you have to put a big,

00:05:01.180 big asterisk beside that. Take it with a big giant grain of salt. It is a conservative riding. The

00:05:08.260 riding used to be called Clarington Scugog Uxbridge, I learned this morning. So it is a conservative

00:05:15.200 stronghold through and through. So I'm not going to do this grand thing where I say, oh, wow,

00:05:19.600 the Conservatives won the election. I mean, they've won at every election for the last 20

00:05:24.140 years, but it sends a message to Trudeau. That part was expected. We knew the Liberals were

00:05:29.000 going to win. But the margin of victory does send a message to Justin Trudeau. And I don't want to

00:05:36.420 bombard you with numbers, but I am going to give you some numbers here because this was the riding.

00:05:41.540 The Conservatives have had it since 2004 when Bev Oda won it. She won it again 2006, 2008,

00:05:47.660 2011, Aaron O'Toole won it in a by-election in 2012, 2015, 2019. So it has been a conservative

00:05:54.280 stronghold going right back to when the Kretzian-Martin dynasty ended in 2004. Now, when you look at

00:06:02.420 the numbers though, Jamil Javani won with a larger margin of victory than any conservative had in

00:06:10.000 those elections. Then Bev, $16 orange juice Oda, and then Aaron, too bland to come up with a

00:06:17.080 nickname O'Toole, and Jameel Javani. So he won with 57.44% of the vote. That is a pretty

00:06:26.220 significant margin in an Ontario riding, 57.44%. Aaron O'Toole, he had 46% when he won it in 2021.

00:06:35.440 That was when he was the leader of the Conservatives. In 2019, he had 42% of the vote.

00:06:41.420 Aaron O'Toole in his by-election, 45% of the vote.

00:06:45.360 Bev Oda, she was the last one who did particularly well there. 0.76

00:06:49.940 She, or sorry, no, when Aaron O'Toole first won in the by-election, he got 50% of the vote.

00:06:54.700 Bev Oda, she had gotten 54.55%. 0.76

00:06:59.140 So certainly getting up there into the Giovanni territory, but not really that close.

00:07:04.760 54% in 2008 47% in 2006 and 40% in 2004 so all of those numbers say that Jamil Javani did very

00:07:16.440 very well and the big thing though is not just his margin of victory but it's where that came from

00:07:23.080 so he got 57% the liberals got 22% what did the liberals get last time 29.9% the NDP got 10%

00:07:33.040 What did they get last time? 17.5%. The PPC, Patricia Conlon, she got 4.43%. What did the

00:07:41.920 PPC get last time? 5.5%. So every single party went down except for the conservatives.

00:07:52.880 The conservatives, that means, were drawing support from everywhere else imaginable. They

00:07:58.240 were drawing support. Now, one caveat you have to put in with by-elections is that they have

00:08:04.000 notoriously low voter turnout. This by-election was no exception. So you have to, I mean, you

00:08:09.220 don't want the percentages to be deceptive there because, you know, yes, Jamil Javani won 57 point

00:08:14.540 some odd percent, but turnout was a lot lower. He had 32,000 votes cast and that was 27% turnout,

00:08:25.180 whereas in 2021 turnout was 61 percent. In 2019 turnout was 68 percent. So by election turnout

00:08:34.280 is a lot lower but at the same time elections are won by those who show up. So at the end of the day

00:08:39.480 it still means that the conservatives were getting their voters out to the polls. They were getting

00:08:43.800 their voters to the ballot box and they were getting ballots that were drawing support from

00:08:48.520 the liberals. So even though there is low turnout which a lot of the true anons, the shamrock brigade 0.83

00:08:54.700 on Twitter that are just completely loyal to Justin Trudeau until the end of time, until

00:08:59.480 their dying breath, they're all saying, oh, well, you know, low turnout, it's not really,

00:09:03.560 they're trying to say a win is not really a win.

00:09:06.200 But what they're missing in all of that is that if Liberal voters don't want to go to

00:09:10.820 the polls, that is not at all a line of support for Justin Trudeau.

00:09:16.360 If the only candidate that can get people motivated to vote for them is the Conservative,

00:09:21.100 that's something that the Liberals need to be worried about.

00:09:24.700 So 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.

00:09:48.260 So she had profile in that riding from having run in 2021, and Patricia Conlon was not even

00:09:54.600 able to match the percentage that she and the PPC got in 2021 when they ran in the by-election.

00:10:02.120 So all of this means that right now the Liberals should be very nervous, not because they lost

00:10:07.700 a seat that they were never going to win in the first place, but because none of their

00:10:11.300 voters care.

00:10:12.900 None of their past voters care to show up and vote Liberal right now, which is going

00:10:17.040 to spell disaster in 2025 now there as it happened was a poll that came out from nanos that i wanted

00:10:24.600 to share with you now obviously i don't do polling coverage on this show i was like getting the i was

00:10:30.260 getting the the baton there uh sean was about to kick me off the show he just put up the closing

00:10:34.220 graphic no no we're gonna do the poll so i don't normally do polling and horse race stuff but

00:10:39.000 every now and then one is pretty illuminating so we can put it up now and hopefully not the

00:10:43.740 closing graphics. There we go. So this was from March 1st, sample size of 1,000, phone poll,

00:10:49.900 margin of error, plus or minus 3.1%. Conservatives at 43%. That is super majority territory.

00:10:58.040 That's a nine point gain over what they had in the last election, the federal election.

00:11:03.420 23% for the Liberals, that's a drop of 10%. NDP is almost surpassing the Liberals. So the NDP

00:11:11.580 right now is at 21%. If you take that margin of error into account, the NDP could be over

00:11:17.400 the Liberals. They could be at 24 and the Liberals could actually be at 20 conceivably.

00:11:22.940 And the Bloc Québécois, not that they're all that relevant, they're at 6%. The Greens at 4%.

00:11:27.960 Now, this one I find really interesting. The PPC at 1% in this poll. Now, I suspect that is a

00:11:35.360 statistical outlier. I suspect the PPC probably is actually hovering at around four or five percent.

00:11:41.560 This is, again, one of the dangers of statistics. So within the margin of error, the PPC could be

00:11:47.360 at four percent still. But nevertheless, it looks bad for them on that. But 43 percent for the

00:11:53.580 conservatives, even with the margin of error taken into account, that could be 40 percent.

00:11:57.940 We are not just majority territory. We are super majority territory. Like we're talking

00:12:02.500 Brian Mulroney numbers, John Diefenbaker numbers. And this is why all of the Liberals' attacks on

00:12:09.160 Pierre Polyev are simply not landing. Now, Justin Trudeau did the gracious thing. He

00:12:15.720 congratulated Jamil Giovanni on his by-election win. You can see this tweet that Trudeau put out

00:12:21.480 yesterday. Congratulations, Jamil Giovanni, on winning yesterday's by-election. Let's work

00:12:27.260 together. Oh, this was this morning. Oh no, sorry. Yeah. Thank you, Sean. This was at 1159 AM.

00:12:33.620 He was in denial last night, so he didn't do the congratulation until today. Let's work together

00:12:39.580 on issues that matter. Thank you to everyone who ran, including our own Robert Rock, who was the

00:12:44.560 liberal. He tried to be the conservative candidate, lost the conservative nomination, then ran for the

00:12:48.420 liberals. And then it goes on from there. And let me then talk, let's throw up Jamil's tweet because

00:12:55.220 Jamil was a bit spicier and sassier on Twitter with Justin Trudeau. He said, he posted last

00:13:01.880 night, Durham sent you a message today. Did you receive it? Best, Jamil Javani. I am not entirely

00:13:09.880 convinced that Justin Trudeau did receive the message, but nevertheless, Jamil Javani took his

00:13:14.620 win as being a sign. And we've asked him, by the way, to come on the show. He wasn't available

00:13:19.080 today. We're hoping to get him tomorrow or Thursday. So if you know Jamil and want to give

00:13:23.220 him a nudge to get him to come on, please do. But he said that his win was a rebuke of the

00:13:28.980 liberal elites. Now, that may sound like some low-hanging fruit. Who is he talking about? Well,

00:13:34.740 it's a broader category than you might think. Talk about what's happening in the country right now.

00:13:41.860 I do think it is the liberal elites betraying the working people of this country, betraying the

00:13:47.900 middle class, betraying the working class. And when I say liberal elites, I am talking 1.00

00:13:53.160 about Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party, but not just them. I'm also talking about

00:13:57.660 the liberal elites who run big banks and big telecommunications companies, driving up the

00:14:02.900 cost of everything. I am also talking about the liberal elites who run the Ontario Ministry

00:14:08.220 of Education in this province. I'm also talking about the liberal elites who are activists

00:14:13.940 and academics, and trying to consistently undermine law enforcement and public safety,

00:14:19.540 leaving the most vulnerable Canadians with fewer protections from our justice system.

00:14:30.700 When you want to spot them, it's pretty easy, and it's bigger than partisan politics.

00:14:36.060 They're the people pushing DEI and ESG initiatives while hiking up the cost of living for hard-working people.

00:14:43.940 They are the people who virtue signal and engage in performance theater while your life gets harder.

00:14:50.620 And they are the people who serve the interests of a privileged few

00:14:54.360 and make you feel like a bad person for expecting our country to work for you.

00:15:00.860 And they are wrong.

00:15:02.380 The liberal elites in this country are wrong.

00:15:04.120 Absolutely.

00:15:04.640 you you are not a bad person for believing that Canada should work for those who do the work

00:15:15.720 that was the MP elect for Durham Jamil Javani taking aim at liberal elites but what I found

00:15:24.320 so interesting there was he referred to the liberal elites who run the Ontario Ministry

00:15:30.920 of education. Now, I don't think he's just talking about bureaucrats. I think he's talking about

00:15:37.160 Stephen Lecce, the Ontario education minister, nominally a progressive conservative. He's

00:15:42.060 previously called him incompetent because Jamil used to actually have a position with the Ontario

00:15:47.960 government. He was a, I forget the name of it. It was like a community opportunities advocate or

00:15:52.180 something. And then he ended up having to, well, not having to, he ended up choosing to resign

00:15:58.120 from that position when he just said, listen, I can't get on board with this government's

00:16:04.020 incompetent handling of the COVID file. So very principled guy in that sense. He was principled

00:16:09.200 when he took aim at Bell Media, when again, it's very subtle, but when he talks about the big

00:16:13.500 telecommunications platforms, I'm pretty sure that's where he is directing his ire. And I just

00:16:20.160 have to say something. I know that not everyone who listens to this show is, well, certainly not

00:16:24.860 everyone's conservative. And I welcome all of you. Not everyone is partisan conservative with a

00:16:29.480 capital C. And I am, to be fair, I'm sympathetic to a lot of what Pierre Polyev is talking about.

00:16:36.420 And I know that people accused me of being some, you know, partisan sellout shill or whatever,

00:16:40.780 to which I say, I have not yet received the checks that everyone on Twitter thinks I'm

00:16:44.440 collecting. So maybe we'll talk, well, I mean, I do have checks over here on my desk, but they're

00:16:48.300 it's like a $3 book royalty check. So it's not a conservative party of Canada check.

00:16:52.600 But 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.

00:17:06.640 You look at people like Aaron Gunn, a YouTuber and filmmaker, has talked about very hot-button issues.

00:17:12.780 Jamil Javani, a broadcaster.

00:17:14.680 Dr. Matt Strauss, the anti-lockdown doctor in Kitchener.

00:17:18.000 Roman Babber, the anti-lockdown advocate who was kicked out of the Ontario PC Caucus for this.

00:17:24.280 Sean points out they're all the Andrew Lawton Show regulars.

00:17:26.760 Yeah, anytime you let an Andrew Lawton Show guest appear on your slate as a candidate, you're throwing caution to the wind.

00:17:33.620 Sabrina Maddow, she's been on the show as well.

00:17:35.500 she's vying to be a conservative candidate. So this is actually quite relevant. This is quite

00:17:41.740 relevant because it means that Pierre Polyev is unafraid to be around people who have done and

00:17:47.940 said things that the media are going to pounce for. And that in and of itself suggests there's

00:17:53.060 going to be a different type of campaign in 2025. Now, Jamil Javani, he's got a bit of a runway

00:17:58.940 ahead of him. Now, I realized when I just mentioned that like all of my guests end up running as

00:18:03.380 conservative candidates that's like an awfully big uh an awfully big setup to my next guest

00:18:07.660 franco terrazzano who is the federal director for the canadian taxpayers federation franco

00:18:12.280 any announcements from you today uh absolutely not other than the fact that canadians are furious

00:18:19.120 with the government raising carbon taxes that's the only announcement today andrew well and that's

00:18:24.860 a big one and i will say uh pierre pauliev yesterday in his endorsement of jamil and his

00:18:30.060 congratulations today said, I think it was the first thing he mentioned that Jamil is going to

00:18:34.500 help him ax the tax. So you don't want to extrapolate too much from by-elections, but when

00:18:40.060 you look at how much the Liberals have been doubling down and tripling down on the carbon

00:18:43.960 tax and you look at where they are in their polls, it's clear that Canadians are not happy with this.

00:18:49.520 Yeah, Canadians are sick and tired of the federal government in Ottawa making our lives more

00:18:54.720 expensive. And that's exactly what the carbon tax does. Not only does it make our lives more

00:18:59.080 expensive, it makes the necessities of life more expensive. It makes it more expensive for you to

00:19:04.200 fuel up your car, to get to work, to go to see the in-laws. It makes it more expensive for you to

00:19:09.800 heat your home during the cold winter months. And it makes it more expensive for you to put food

00:19:13.680 on your family's table because the carbon tax taxes, the farmer taxes, the trucker,

00:19:19.180 and therefore you pay higher bills. And look at these poll numbers that the CTF just released

00:19:23.880 about seven in 10 Canadians are against the Trudeau government's upcoming carbon tax hike.

00:19:30.020 And no matter how you slice the numbers, every single demographic, age, gender, income level,

00:19:35.460 education level, they're all vast majority of Canadians against the carbon tax hike.

00:19:40.200 And no matter which province they're in, again, the vast majority of Canadians are against the

00:19:44.880 carbon tax hike. So Canadians are united in the fact that we're furious about the government

00:19:49.620 making our lives more expensive. The only question now is, are Trudeau and his Liberal

00:19:54.380 MPs going to listen to Canadians, or are they going to keep cranking up their carbon tax?

00:19:59.920 You know, to force you into a bit of a pundit role for a moment here, Franco, one of the things

00:20:04.120 that I find the Liberals did that was incredibly short-sighted was offer that exemption on home

00:20:09.980 heating oil that carve out to Atlantic Canada. Now, I think it's the right thing to give Canadians

00:20:14.800 relief on the carbon tax. And I think they should have done it to every single region,

00:20:17.860 every type of home heating, not just home heating oil. But when they did that, it was a strategic

00:20:23.680 blunder because all of a sudden every government in the country, including the NDP in Manitoba,

00:20:29.900 conservatives elsewhere, were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up here. Like on one hand, you're

00:20:33.880 positioning this as being this panacea for the climate woes. And then on the other hand, you're

00:20:37.820 saying, okay, yeah, we can give a little exemption here and there. Well, it was a strategic blunder,

00:20:43.660 right not just for the reason that you bring up but for the reason that it proves that the carbon

00:20:48.520 tax does make life more expensive right otherwise why would trudeau take the carbon tax off of

00:20:54.760 furnace oil for three years right so there the trudeau government their talking point is oh

00:21:00.440 don't worry the rebates make you better off don't worry folks somehow the government will magically

00:21:05.140 put more money in your pocket than it takes now canadians never bought that idea right and the

00:21:11.000 reason Canadians saw through that talking point is because it's impossible to bring in a carbon tax,

00:21:17.340 charge the sales tax on top of the carbon tax, skim hundreds of millions of dollars off the top

00:21:22.960 to pay for bureaucrats to administer the carbon tax, and then somehow make everyone better off

00:21:28.500 with rebates. That's impossible. Canadians, all Canadians outside of the Ottawa bubble 1.00

00:21:32.900 understand that. But the strategic blunder on that is that Trudeau essentially made it obvious

00:21:41.880 himself when he announced that they're providing relief by taking the carbon tax off of one form

00:21:46.640 of heating energy, right? Because if the carbon tax didn't make that heating energy more expensive,

00:21:51.960 then why would Trudeau provide that relief in the first place? Now, to your point earlier,

00:21:57.180 it's good that some Canadians are getting relief, but he's leaving 97% of Canadians out in the cold.

00:22:02.520 So the only fair thing to do would have been to just provide that relief to every Canadian.

00:22:07.400 And of course, we'd like to see him go a step further and just completely scrap the carbon tax altogether.

00:22:13.320 Yeah, 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.

00:22:24.420 But 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.

00:22:31.440 And this has become a flagship issue for the conservatives.

00:22:35.760 I mean, even some new Democrats, I think, are getting a little bit stronger on this

00:22:39.860 issue, certainly provincially in Alberta and Manitoba, and I believe Saskatchewan.

00:22:44.960 I might be wrong on that.

00:22:47.400 But at a certain point, do you think that's going to be a mobilizing issue for voters

00:22:51.160 when we are dealing with a cost of living crisis?

00:22:54.060 Yes, of course.

00:22:55.460 I mean, dude, it's like the price of a jug of milk of hamburger meat has gone.

00:23:00.820 i'm in ontario we do bags bag of milk right i saw that the bag of milk era is coming to an end maybe

00:23:06.320 i maybe i misread that but i saw that come across my twitter feed but you know the point right i mean

00:23:11.220 just the basic necessities of living in canada are getting more expensive and one of the reasons for

00:23:16.860 that is the carbon tax and i and and another thing too is when people are seeing their grocery bills

00:23:21.960 rise their gas bills rise uh their heating bills rise it's pretty easy to just look south of the

00:23:27.200 border where even a new Democrat run White House doesn't have a national carbon tax, right? Pretty

00:23:34.300 easy to look south of the border. Also, the vast majority of countries don't have a national carbon

00:23:39.420 tax. Canada now has two national carbon taxes, right? So Canadians, not only are they seeing

00:23:45.760 the cost of living going up, but they're saying, hey, hold on a second. How does making it more

00:23:49.520 expensive for me to fuel up my sedan or to heat my home or to buy groceries, how does that reduce

00:23:55.000 submissions in places like china india russia or the united states i mean it obviously doesn't so

00:24:00.960 you know not that i'm a political pundit but i think it's pretty clear that the key economic

00:24:05.320 issue facing canadians right now is the cost of living and the carbon tax makes all of the

00:24:09.860 necessities of living more expensive here in canada did you follow this morality accusation

00:24:16.520 in saskatchewan so saskatchewan has been like you know alberta protesting the carbon tax uh they've

00:24:22.980 said they're just not going to submit the carbon tax money which is like a great trump card because

00:24:26.680 the federal government really can't do anything with it if the money's not being submitted but

00:24:31.460 then you had steven gilbeau say that it's immoral to do this well what about making people's lives

00:24:38.020 more expensive when they're already lining up at food banks you know how about that or or just

00:24:43.380 canadians who are stressing out about getting their natural gas bill right or what about the

00:24:49.740 farmers who work so hard to feed us and the carbon taxes on natural gas and propane is going to cost

00:24:55.400 them a billion dollars by 2030. Well, what about that? You know, I think that's wrong. But on the

00:25:01.220 point about Saskatchewan, look, Scott Moe's heart is in the right place, right? It's good to see a

00:25:05.560 premier come off the bench and actually stick up for his constituents. Now, I'm not going to talk

00:25:10.080 about the legal issue here. I'll leave that for the legal beagles, the people who are smarter than

00:25:13.500 I am. But what I do know is that it's good to see premiers pushing back against this federal tax.

00:25:19.420 and you know Trudeau he's in the wrong here like what did what did Trudeau think was going to

00:25:24.520 happen when he did that political ploy clearly political ploy when he had a press conference

00:25:29.620 with his Atlantic caucus announcing that he would take the carbon tax off of furnace oil

00:25:34.660 while leaving 97 percent of Canadians out in the cold like what did you think was going to happen

00:25:38.900 of course this was going to happen but let me just illustrate the point that outside of Ottawa

00:25:44.300 fuel tax relief is a nonpartisan issue, right?

00:25:47.120 Everyone knows Alberta, Ontario,

00:25:49.300 the conservative governments there provided fuel tax relief,

00:25:51.860 but also the NDP government in Manitoba

00:25:55.040 completely suspended its fuel tax.

00:25:58.040 The liberal government in Newfoundland and Labrador

00:26:00.380 has also provided significant income tax

00:26:02.840 or significant fuel tax relief, sorry.

00:26:05.220 So while Ottawa has been cranking up our gas taxes,

00:26:08.560 you have a bunch of governments across Canada,

00:26:11.420 regardless of party stripes,

00:26:13.560 doing the right thing and providing fuel tax relief so one question i'll ask you in closing

00:26:20.120 here on on this franco is where you see this going because i know that i think you and i it

00:26:24.360 might have been chris and i or all i mean not that you i i don't i don't view you and chris

00:26:27.880 sims interchangeably but uh you're both so witty and intelligent i i sometimes get your insights

00:26:32.840 crossed so i can't remember who it was i was talking about this with but the rebrand the

00:26:37.000 lipstick on a pig of the carbon tax here do you take from all of this that that isn't sinking in

00:26:42.600 with Canadians that they're not falling for it? Well, you know, Trudeau's big problem with his

00:26:48.320 rebrand is that Canadians aren't dumb. Canadians know generally how much they spend for the 0.96

00:26:54.560 necessities and they know generally how much money is in their bank account, right? This whole

00:27:00.820 rebrand, this whole lipstick on the carbon tax pig is really just an insult to our intelligence,

00:27:06.460 right? The Trudeau government appears to seem like, oh, the problem with Canadians is that

00:27:11.820 us Canadians just don't understand their infinite wisdom in the federal government. But the problem

00:27:18.240 for them is that we do understand that the carbon tax makes our lives more expensive. We do understand

00:27:23.520 that the carbon tax is not an environmental solution. We do understand that the vast majority

00:27:29.300 of countries do not have a national carbon tax. We do understand that Canada's economy

00:27:35.080 is heavily reliant on natural resources and that these energy taxes are particularly damaging

00:27:41.720 in a big, cold, vast country that depends on these natural resources.

00:27:46.960 So, look, Trudeau seems to think, or at least this is the narrative in the media,

00:27:51.520 that Trudeau has a communications problem.

00:27:54.120 Look, the PMO's communications, it's been sloppy.

00:27:57.220 But Trudeau's real problem isn't a communications problem.

00:28:00.880 Trudeau has a carbon tax is making people's lives more expensive problem.

00:28:06.900 Franco Terrazano, Federal Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

00:28:10.840 Always a pleasure, good sir. Thanks for coming on.

00:28:13.380 Hey, thanks for having me on today, Andrew.

00:28:15.180 All right, thank you.

00:28:16.160 Well, one thing we are going to be doing this week

00:28:19.120 and in the weeks and months that follow, I suspect,

00:28:21.780 is continuing our coverage of Bill C-63.

00:28:24.640 Now, make no mistake, I did a deep dive into the Online Harms Act yesterday.

00:28:30.340 This is, without a doubt, and I do not say this with hyperbole,

00:28:34.240 one of the most, if not the most dangerous pieces of legislation,

00:28:38.140 in my view, the Liberals have presented.

00:28:40.160 It is, I believe, flawed in its premise and certainly flawed in its application, and it's

00:28:46.020 going to have an absolutely terrible effect on free speech, not just as an incidental

00:28:52.020 effect, but by the very design of the bill.

00:28:54.860 But I want to talk about this from a number of angles, because it's one thing to say free

00:29:00.920 speech, good, censorship, bad, which, by the way, I agree with, and sadly probably summarizes

00:29:05.440 my show more than I'd like, but it also is important to look at how it is bad.

00:29:09.900 and why it's bad and why this bill will have, in many cases, adverse effects even on the people

00:29:15.780 it purports to be serving. And there was a fantastic op-ed in the Western Standard that

00:29:21.580 was written by the, well, courtesy of the Fraser Institute and University of Saskatchewan law

00:29:27.060 professor Dwight Newman that talks about this. It's that Ottawa's online harms bill actually

00:29:32.440 threatens marginalized communities. I wanted to have Professor Newman on the show to unpack this 1.00

00:29:38.420 bit further and i'm very pleased that he took us up on the offer uh dwight good to talk to you

00:29:42.500 thanks for coming on today well thanks i'm glad to to be with you here so let's first and foremost

00:29:48.900 talk about why it is that it does i mean what's your premise here on how marginalized communities

00:29:53.780 may actually be harmed by this bill which the government is claiming is there to serve them and

00:29:58.420 protect them well my focus uh in my comment is on particular parts of the bill and one of the

00:30:05.060 challenges in talking about the bill is there are so many different things going on at the same time

00:30:10.420 because there is the piece about online harms and that warrants its own analysis those parts of the

00:30:16.500 bill but there are parts of the bill that aren't about anything online at all and they're either

00:30:23.380 sneaking through provisions on hate related matters generally or those matters are there

00:30:30.500 to distract from the online part. I don't know what the story is, but they somehow don't fit

00:30:37.300 together. But the piece on hate is what I focused on, that isn't necessarily in the online context,

00:30:44.500 and there the creation of a freestanding offence that goes along with any other criminal code

00:30:51.700 offence where there's a motivation by hate and that creates an offence subject to life imprisonment

00:31:00.260 is actually a very dangerous offense to create in this bill and one that puts at risk even people

00:31:07.460 from marginalized communities. Now there's another step to get there but that's quite simply that if

00:31:12.900 you create offenses in the criminal code where there's vast discretion on what the sentence is

00:31:20.260 going to be, people are going to get caught up in that that don't have representation or as much

00:31:27.460 representation by lawyers and be at more risk from those uh sentences or the threat of those

00:31:33.940 sentences in the context of plea bargain negotiations and those will be marginalized

00:31:38.980 people that are the very people that uh the government claims to be protecting i i wanted

00:31:43.700 to go back to the the bill itself here for a moment and just explain this because i mean in

00:31:48.660 the criminal code again i'm not a lawyer but in the criminal code uh you know all of the offenses

00:31:53.140 that are criminal in Canada have an associated sentence with them. And these sentences are

00:31:57.800 created based on the severity of the act itself, which is why, you know, a mischief charge will

00:32:04.480 have a different potential sentence from a murder charge. So I'm correct in my understanding that

00:32:10.020 what this bill would do is add a separate, basically an add-on component where if you've

00:32:17.040 done anything else that has its own sentencing guideline, and it is motivated by hate, that

00:32:22.740 could be a life sentence. So am I construing that correctly? That's right. And so the example you

00:32:29.420 gave is graffiti. So someone who commits vandalism, which would never have a life sentence if it was

00:32:35.000 motivated by hate, could conceivably have a life sentence for the motivation. That's right. So we

00:32:41.540 normally draw a line between what are called summary offenses and indictable offenses. That's

00:32:47.600 just one line we could draw. The summary offenses tend to have very much lighter punishment

00:32:53.340 associated with them. Well, this new section of the criminal code will say if you commit any other

00:32:59.620 offense in the criminal code or under another federal statute, I believe, that you've committed

00:33:05.440 also a separate indictable offense if your motivation was one of hatred. And I mean, I don't

00:33:12.920 encourage, I mean, hatred is a terrible thing that we should all be fighting against,

00:33:20.360 but creating a separate offence here that attaches on to even very relatively minor offences but now

00:33:27.960 adds the prospect of a life sentence with an attached offence creates a lot of risks and a

00:33:34.040 lot of problems. And the example I gave is sort of some young person that's old enough to be an

00:33:39.880 adult for criminal law purposes, but still not really mature. They go and write graffiti,

00:33:47.880 they're caught up in some bad ideas as a youth, and they're accused of being motivated by hatred.

00:33:54.520 Well, they're now subject to a life sentence potentially that has no relationship to the

00:33:59.800 severity of writing or painting graffiti somewhere. There's a total mismatch that's created there.

00:34:07.800 it's awful and again i i don't want to whitewash what are our very serious acts i mean we've seen

00:34:16.400 in in the last uh you know few months alone we've seen some horrific uh acts of vandalism that have

00:34:21.620 taken place against churches uh there was the church that's been burned in in your province

00:34:25.880 we have also instances of targeting mosques and jewish community centers and i think those should 1.00

00:34:31.740 be prosecuted. Well, they should be prosecuted. But at the same time, I also have a very

00:34:38.480 significant issue fundamentally with adjudicating motivation in this way. And this idea that

00:34:45.220 the motivation fundamentally changes the crime in that disproportionate way you just described

00:34:51.120 here. Is this really the only area of the law where we have this with the motivation having

00:34:57.160 such a significant distinction in how an offense is viewed?

00:35:02.080 Well, I mean, other than the willful promotion of hatred offense itself, but that isn't really

00:35:10.260 even about the motivation still. That ends up being about what it is that's been done.

00:35:17.700 And I mean, normally we're looking at intention and the type of intention. And so first degree

00:35:22.900 murder is more serious than second-degree murder because of the intention, the pre-planning,

00:35:29.900 the premeditation. It's not exactly the same thing as motivation. This is an example where

00:35:35.220 motivation, which is a vague thing to get at, is going to have a huge effect. And I think that's

00:35:42.700 quite different than what happens anywhere else I can think of in the criminal law offhand.

00:35:47.680 But 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.

00:36:07.020 The church burnings, arson, is a serious offence, and this government has sort of laughed that off in some ways.

00:36:17.340 And it's really disappointing to a lot of Canadians of faith that their religious places of worship can't be protected.

00:36:26.400 But when you are going to protect them, which I think should be done, the prosecution should be arson if it's arson.

00:36:35.060 That'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.

00:36:44.780 And that's a very realistic scenario.

00:36:47.000 Some 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.

00:36:57.260 That's where we get into the complexities of how do you judge and describe motivation and say whether it's actually hateful.

00:37:05.260 So that's a real example where this could come into play.

00:37:10.260 And even there, with a more serious offence, I don't think one should be adding on this additional offence with a life sentence.

00:37:18.260 And 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.

00:37:38.540 Well, 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.

00:37:54.320 But now you have the opposite problem where you have this just insane range that you could find yourself having applied to you.

00:38:04.620 And that leaves so much to just how good your lawyer is and how good your judge is. 0.83

00:38:11.300 And 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. 0.89

00:38:21.580 Yeah. Well, the legal system will try to provide guidance on that through the case law that builds

00:38:27.420 up, but it comes down to if you don't have access to enough legal counsel, you may not know that as

00:38:34.460 someone who gets caught up in things. And I mean, I do worry on sort of the, as I say, the wayward

00:38:40.540 youth that is involved in the graffiti offense. I mean, if someone's a long-term criminal and

00:38:47.820 I'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.

00:39:01.560 And 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.

00:39:18.480 And 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.

00:39:33.340 And 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.

00:39:49.860 Well, they're going to have their liberty restricted in a lot of different ways.

00:39:53.780 Yeah, well, you can't really blame them in that context.

00:39:56.740 It's a great piece over at the Western Standard, also available at the Fraser Institute website by Dwight Newman.

00:40:03.340 professor of law at the university of saskatchewan dwight thank you so much for your

00:40:08.080 insights really good to talk to you well thank you good to talk with you thank you all right we'll

00:40:12.820 have more on bill c63 in the days and weeks to come like i said it cannot be understated

00:40:19.300 how dangerous this bill is i will sound like a broken record or for the uh gen zers in our

00:40:25.560 audience a broken mp3 player which i'm not sure has the same uh metaphoric ring but hopefully

00:40:30.260 you'll get my drift there. But that does it for us. We'll be back tomorrow in due course with more

00:40:35.120 of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North. Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:40:40.380 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:40:42.900 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:41:00.260 We'll be right back.

00:41:30.260 Thank you.

00:42:00.260 We'll be right back.

Juno News - March 05, 2024

Conservative byelection win is bad news for Justin Trudeau

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