Juno News - Conservatives need to take a bold stand for parental rights

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

00:00:14.560 and welcome to you all this is another edition of canada's most irreverent talk show you are tuned

00:00:20.000 in live well maybe you're not tuned in live i'm here live if you are watching right at this exact

00:00:24.880 second in the grand space-time continuum of sorts you are watching this live although we make it

00:00:30.960 available for anyone later on it is as of this moment wednesday june 28th here on the andrew

00:00:38.000 lawton show now i'm not going to give you a precise time because as i alluded to at the

00:00:42.240 tail end of the previous show i'm in a different time zone than all canadians right now it's

00:00:46.640 actually 10.02 p.m. and I flew overnight from Toronto to Paris yesterday. I'm here covering a

00:00:54.340 free Iran conference, which you may recall I covered the last couple of years and is a very,

00:01:00.120 very interesting place to be. It hasn't started yet, so I won't have too much to report on in

00:01:04.800 the show today, but you can keep your eyes peeled to True North and to the future editions of the

00:01:10.720 Andrew Lawton Show as we talk a little bit about this. But I do want to touch on a couple of the

00:01:15.060 big picture issues here, which affect really the culture war in a couple of different dimensions

00:01:20.580 today. I'm going to speak in just a few moments with Janice Fiamengo, who is a tremendous writer

00:01:26.560 and advocate, a former professor at the University of Ottawa, but has become a real truth teller,

00:01:32.080 not just on academic freedom, but on a number of other issues as well. And we're going to talk

00:01:37.200 about the ways that statistics can be used very dishonestly, and I would argue maliciously,

00:01:42.840 in a couple of contexts, but one in particular that we'll explain a little bit more about very

00:01:48.180 shortly. But I also want to just say, sometimes it's nice to look at a headline and just feel

00:01:54.220 so familiar. It feels like you've been transported back in time to 2021. Like, for example, this one

00:02:01.400 in Global News. Do you need a COVID booster for your summer vacation? Experts weigh in. Yes, well,

00:02:08.280 the experts are saying before you go on summer holiday in 2023, apparently you need to get a

00:02:13.680 booster. So if you've been diligently getting your boosters every four to six months, you're

00:02:18.640 probably up to now your 12th, 13th, 14th COVID shot. But you can never be too safe. So they now

00:02:25.200 say even though COVID is no longer a global health emergency, even the World Health Organization has

00:02:30.600 moved on to the pandemics of climate change and the pandemics of misinformation, even they're

00:02:35.960 not too concerned about COVID, but you can be. And a couple of the experts they speak to here

00:02:41.220 basically say, don't you dare go away for the summer without getting your COVID booster. So

00:02:45.760 I wouldn't exactly call that a PSA. But like I said, some people just do not want to move on

00:02:50.800 from this era. And I think they need to be called out when they go down that road.

00:02:56.560 Let's talk about parental rights, though, because this is something we touched on a couple of weeks

00:03:01.140 back on the show in the context of New Brunswick. And what the New Brunswick government has done,

00:03:06.500 I think is quite good. I spoke to Tanya Granik-Allen, who's a great parental rights

00:03:10.640 activist about this. And she said, yeah, it's good. But it's also in many ways, some low hanging

00:03:17.360 fruit. The New Brunswick government has amended an education policy to do a number of things,

00:03:22.780 but the crux of it and what people are really getting up in arms about is to say that if a

00:03:27.560 child under the age of 16. We're not even talking about 16, 17, 18 year olds who are in grade 10,

00:03:34.700 11, 12. We're talking about, generally speaking, elementary school students and some young high

00:03:39.780 school students. If one of them wishes to officially change their gender or name at school,

00:03:46.260 they need to have parental consent to do it. Now, the policy does not actually say,

00:03:51.680 contrary to what some critics online have said, that they will be outed to parents in any other

00:03:56.720 way. In fact, if a child does not want the parent spoken to about this, then they are actually

00:04:01.960 referred to a social worker to talk about this, to offer some tips and guidance. But we're basically

00:04:07.400 saying here, if you are under 16, you shouldn't be able to do something as drastic and radical

00:04:12.140 as changing your gender without your parents knowing about it and signing off on this. And

00:04:17.380 anyone who's ever had a child go through the school system and knows how you need to sign a

00:04:22.480 permission slip for anyone, for anything, this shouldn't seem all that surprising. But this has

00:04:29.200 become a very pivotal issue because you have the Justin Trudeau government taking aim at New

00:04:34.360 Brunswick. Seamus O'Regan, for example, who is one of the ministers in Trudeau's cabinet,

00:04:39.520 had tweeted out about how this is all essentially harmful. He was going off about how kids do not

00:04:45.860 have the freedom to be themselves because of what's happening in New Brunswick. And he was

00:04:49.880 basically saying, how dare Pierre Polyev, who talks a good game about freedom, take aim at

00:04:56.440 or support this policy in New Brunswick. Now, I should say, I don't actually think it's fair to

00:05:02.300 say Pierre Polyev has been supportive of this policy directive. A couple of weeks ago, he was

00:05:08.020 doing a press conference in Toronto, and my colleague at True North, Noah Jarvis, asked him

00:05:13.640 about the New Brunswick policy. Take a look. Recently, the New Brunswick premier has made

00:05:19.000 changes to their lgbtq protection policy requiring teachers to notify parents when before they change

00:05:28.440 the use of their pronouns or in their given name what is your position on the matter

00:05:33.320 i'll let provinces make decisions about the education system

00:05:40.280 that was a case where the answer was much shorter than the question itself the answer was as

00:05:46.440 about as close to a non-answer as you can get uh noah wasn't asking about provincial rights he was

00:05:52.360 asking about the policy in particular and what peer poly have thought about it and he defaulted to

00:05:57.240 well i'll let provinces do what they're going to do now polyev gave a little bit of a better

00:06:03.160 response about it when he was asked in new brunswick where he was campaigning a couple of

00:06:07.800 days ago in moncton specifically on axing the carbon tax but again at press conferences people

00:06:13.080 People can ask whatever they want to ask.

00:06:15.460 And he gave a slightly better answer.

00:06:17.520 Take a look.

00:06:18.540 Do you stand with Premier Blaine Higgs on policy 713?

00:06:22.280 Look, this is a provincial policy.

00:06:24.900 I know that Justin Trudeau has butted into that.

00:06:28.240 The prime minister has no business in decisions that should rest with provinces and parents.

00:06:35.620 so my message to Justin Trudeau is butt out and let provinces run schools and let parents raise kids

00:06:43.200 it's like I said a slightly better response than well it's up to the provinces to decide but not

00:06:52.800 much because really what Pierre Polyev is doing there is appealing not to the core idea of parental

00:06:58.500 rights but what he's doing is appealing to the idea of provincial rights and don't get me wrong

00:07:03.080 balance of power very important division of power is very important provincial rights federalism

00:07:08.060 all of this is entirely reasonable and i'm glad to see a federal leader and potential prime minister

00:07:13.920 who's going to respect the federalist project but there's something more fundamental than just the

00:07:19.240 education system here that i feel polyev and the conservatives are missing an opportunity to seize

00:07:25.100 and it's probably fear that is going into this because you can't talk about parental rights in

00:07:30.840 this context without wading into the culture war on gender ideology and on these battles that are 0.99

00:07:36.060 taking place across the country, across the Western world, when people are asking very

00:07:41.540 critical questions, very contentious questions about what children should be taught, about what

00:07:46.680 activity should be encouraged or discouraged, about what manifestations of gender identity

00:07:52.400 should be fostered and affirmed versus treated or treated in at least some other way. And this is a

00:07:59.420 very difficult thing to do. And yes, it is a political landmine. But leadership is about

00:08:04.420 stepping into the fire when that's where the fight is. And the reason that the New Brunswick

00:08:11.200 policy is so interesting here, and I said a couple of weeks ago, I did not have on my bingo card New

00:08:16.200 Brunswick leading the charge in the culture war in a way that's stronger than the Alberta UCP

00:08:21.320 government under Danielle Smith is, for example. But the thing about what's happening in New

00:08:25.260 Brunswick is that this is being treated by the media and by folks like Justin Trudeau and Blaine

00:08:30.200 Higgs as being this gross affront to equality, to liberty, to whatever. But parents across the

00:08:37.880 country think this is an entirely reasonable thing. Parents who, I should say, are not particularly

00:08:43.440 political or conservative. That polling that Second Street did before the New Brunswick policy

00:08:48.440 came in showed that parents were pretty clearly in a solid majority on believing that something

00:08:55.220 like this happening in the schools should involve them in some way. The parents are the first and

00:09:00.420 primary educators of their children, not teachers, not school boards, and certainly not the state.

00:09:07.340 So the reason I say all of that is to say that it isn't just the morally right thing to do to

00:09:13.300 stand up for parental rights, but it is the politically right thing to do. This is actually

00:09:18.220 a political win for conservatives if they were prepared to take this on. And I think it actually

00:09:23.840 is not a coincidence that his answer is a little bit more substantive this week than it was a

00:09:31.020 couple of weeks ago, that he's prepared to go a little bit more. I don't know. And I don't want

00:09:34.760 to be too cynical here. Maybe they just got some good polling in. Maybe he was just in New Brunswick

00:09:39.160 and realized he couldn't hide with the issue when he's literally in the province in which this issue

00:09:43.920 is a live one politically but the whole point is he can't just appeal to parental or to provincial

00:09:50.320 rights without appealing to parental rights and this is the problem i've had with a lot of

00:09:55.280 conservative strategy in the past for example when the trucker vaccine mandate came into place back

00:10:01.700 in the fall of 2021 the conservatives at the time led by erin o'toole didn't come out and say the

00:10:07.880 trucker vaccine mandate is wrong because vaccine mandates are wrong they came out and said well

00:10:13.020 we don't like this because the supply chains are bad and you know grocery store shelves are

00:10:18.120 already empty and we already have inflation so we can't do something that's further going to

00:10:21.920 challenge the transportation of fruits and vegetables and meat and bread and all this

00:10:25.960 stuff to your grocery store and sure that's an argument but it's an argument that deliberately

00:10:30.680 goes around what should be and is the core argument of this debate and i think the same

00:10:36.980 thing is true here i mean yeah you can say look new brunswick has the right to govern its own

00:10:41.040 affairs and Justin Trudeau should butt out. But that misses the mark on why this issue matters

00:10:46.140 so much. What's happening in New Brunswick is not a story of federalism. Federalism may be how New

00:10:52.540 Brunswick gets away with it when it angers Justin Trudeau so much. But the story here is a province

00:10:57.900 that's saying we need to first and foremost listen to parents. A province that says we believe parents

00:11:03.980 need to be respected and by the way is providing a policy that is very measured and very reasonable

00:11:10.620 and doesn't go nearly as far as the critics of the policy think it does. Now, whether it could

00:11:15.800 or should is a different story, but there have been cabinet ministers in New Brunswick that have

00:11:20.380 said, I don't want to be a part of this government anymore. And Blaine Higgs has to his credit stuck

00:11:25.180 to his guns and said, okay, see it, bye, peace out. I don't really care because he knows that

00:11:29.940 this is the right thing to do. And the conservatives, as I've often said, cannot just be

00:11:35.880 the auditors-in-chief. They have to be the commanders-in-chief. They have to be leaders.

00:11:40.840 They have to lead on all issues. They can't just be, as I think it was Scott Hayward from Right

00:11:45.560 Now said, Justin Trudeau with a slightly better accountant. That is not what the conservatives

00:11:51.400 need to be. They have to be prepared to lead on issues. And here you have one of these coalition

00:11:55.960 building issues where just ordinary moms and dads across the country are in line with social

00:12:02.800 conservatives are in line with fiscal conservatives are in line with this is one of those rare issues

00:12:09.200 that is naturally broader than the existing conservative political coalition and they'd

00:12:14.880 be foolish to not lead on it but i say politics aside they need to lead on it because it is the

00:12:20.000 right thing to do parents matter and we cannot ignore that and cannot respect any system that 0.97

00:12:26.000 does ignore that we'll certainly talk about this more in the days and weeks to come i suspect we

00:12:30.560 We haven't heard the end of this just yet.

00:12:32.820 I should just say, too, it's really rich from Justin Trudeau, who whenever Bill 21, which

00:12:38.260 is the secularism bill in Quebec, comes up, he clams up as, oh, well, you know, province,

00:12:43.080 Quebec, provincial rights, we can't do it.

00:12:45.400 But when it's a provincial rights issue in New Brunswick, it's all about this is unsafe

00:12:48.900 and this is terrible for the children.

00:12:50.260 So it's almost as if the appeal to federalism is inconsistent at best from Justin Trudeau,

00:12:56.720 just as much as from other leaders.

00:12:59.300 Let's move on to this other issue, which admittedly was one that completely stayed off my radar

00:13:04.940 until I read about it from Janice Fiamengo's great newsletter, the Fiamengo File.

00:13:10.620 And part of the reason it completely escaped me is because it involves someone who used

00:13:14.780 to play for the NHL, which I'm told is a cricket league.

00:13:18.820 No, maybe it's football.

00:13:19.820 Hockey?

00:13:20.180 Hockey.

00:13:20.500 NHL.

00:13:20.920 Hockey.

00:13:21.220 Yeah.

00:13:22.720 I get so many angry emails when I do that gag.

00:13:25.460 I know NHL is hockey.

00:13:26.760 That's about all I know.

00:13:27.640 But it was a rather moving PSA from a former NHL figure.

00:13:32.520 Let's roll this for you now.

00:13:35.360 Standing by.

00:13:39.560 I don't remember the hit.

00:13:41.740 I remember everything leading up to it, but nothing after.

00:13:46.340 He came from behind me.

00:13:48.040 I didn't see it coming.

00:13:49.580 I was hit in the side of the head.

00:13:52.020 I remember being confused.

00:13:53.660 My ears were ringing.

00:13:55.940 It's hard to talk about.

00:13:57.640 I still experience pain, mood swings, the headaches are debilitating.

00:14:04.660 But this isn't my story.

00:14:08.220 It's mine.

00:14:09.280 that was former Vancouver Canucks captain Trevor Linden in a PSA for the YWCA

00:14:34.480 talking about the disparity between concussions in hockey and concussions in women who have suffered from domestic violence.

00:14:43.440 Now, I should say, first and foremost, it's a very compelling, powerful ad.

00:14:48.460 It's very well produced. It's a well presented message.

00:14:52.840 It's a shocking message when they say 92% of women, girls and gender diverse people

00:14:58.840 who experience traumatic brain injury do so as a result of violence by an intimate partner.

00:15:05.440 And they also talk about the staggering statistics of what percentage of women

00:15:10.140 will encounter a brain injury from this.

00:15:13.140 And I'll talk about those numbers in a moment, but I just first want to say

00:15:16.640 it's often very odd when people try to link two disparate issues and two distinct issues

00:15:23.700 together. One kind of random one that just happened to come up yesterday is this tweet from

00:15:29.780 Neurodiversity Ireland. So neurodiversity is typically the world of autism. And they say

00:15:35.460 that there's no neurodiversity without LGBTQ plus. And we can't be neuroaffirming without being

00:15:41.020 LGBTQ plus affirming. And we can't respect people with autism unless we respect people with

00:15:46.220 LGBTQ plus identity. And you're looking at this and you're like, I don't know why these two things 0.50

00:15:51.760 matter. And this is where you get into territory where you're making comparisons that are leading

00:15:57.420 people to a particular conclusion that might not be the right one. But in this particular case,

00:16:02.300 we have numbers that are contributing to that. Janice Fiamengo is a retired professor from the

00:16:07.740 University of Ottawa and also writes the Fiamengo file on Substack and joins me now. Janice, good to

00:16:13.620 to you thanks for coming on today well thank you very much for having me on your show andrew i

00:16:19.140 i'm really pleased to be able to talk about this concussion campaign hoax the key paragraph here

00:16:27.380 just to to put into context that staggering number there is that four in ten women and girls in 1.00

00:16:33.700 canada will face violent from a current or former partner according to statisticians canada and

00:16:38.980 92 percent of those will suffer a traumatic brain injury due to blows to their head or

00:16:45.220 strangulation and you say in your newsletter here uh that is effectively saying that more

00:16:49.700 than 30 percent of canadian women more than and girls more than three and ten will get a brain

00:16:54.980 injury from battering so the numbers are pretty clear there what's what do they get wrong well

00:17:01.700 everything is wrong in it it's also mentioned that for every one professional hockey player

00:17:07.860 who experiences a concussion 7 000 girls and women in canada will experience traumatic brain injury

00:17:16.500 or a concussion so i looked that up it says that on average about 80 professional hockey players

00:17:23.300 suffer concussion a year so 80 times 7 000 that if my math is correct would be about 560

00:17:32.900 thousand Canadian girls and women suffering concussion from intimate partner violence

00:17:38.740 every year. That is a staggering number. Now how has that number arrived at? Well first of all

00:17:46.100 there's the reference to the StatsCan survey which found that more than four in ten Canadian women

00:17:54.260 reported suffering from intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. It also happened to mention that

00:18:00.500 about one-third of Canadian boys and men reported suffering from intimate partner violence as well,

00:18:07.220 but of course that's not mentioned. Then it gets to another study that makes this claim about 92%.

00:18:15.220 However, when you look into both of these studies, you realize that the social science behind the

00:18:22.100 claims is simply not it's it doesn't support those particular claims and i really looked into this

00:18:30.420 very carefully for one the claim about 44 percent of girls and women suffering intimate partner

00:18:38.180 violence it is a large survey conducted by stats can over 43 000 people but they measure violence

00:18:48.820 so extremely elastically that it clearly has nothing to do with concussions but they count

00:18:55.060 violence to include psychological violence that means being called a bad name they count a wide

00:19:01.460 range of so-called physical violence including someone punching a wall having an object thrown

00:19:08.180 at you that may or may not have hit you that you know might have caused damage if it had

00:19:13.380 they count um being forced or someone trying to force you to perform a sex act that you didn't

00:19:21.140 want to perform uh shoving all sorts of things so and and while i would agree that some of these

00:19:28.180 things are certainly abusive and some of them are violence i don't think the psychological violence

00:19:34.420 is quite at the same level being called a bad name um but but certainly it is hard to see how

00:19:40.340 those types of violence could possibly lead to traumatic brain injury so there's a big problem

00:19:47.540 with the total number there when we go to the 92 it gets even stranger but just to jump in on on

00:19:55.940 those figures first because i i i want to just preempt the obvious criticism here that you and

00:20:01.460 i are downplaying this when i i certainly am not and i i know you're not and i believe that abuse

00:20:06.260 is wrong but abuse and violence have never in my understanding been synonyms i mean i'll defer to

00:20:11.540 you as the english professor those words have very different meanings so they're including things that

00:20:16.660 are non that are abusive and non-physical as violence yes and that's a huge problem for

00:20:24.820 understanding what it means when people start talking about the numbers of women and girls

00:20:30.660 who suffer from supposed violence and violence that's not directed at the woman or girl but at

00:20:36.580 a wall or throwing a plate or something which again could be very threatening it could be very

00:20:40.740 traumatizing could be a stepping stone to violence but it is not directed at a person right and it

00:20:47.060 has absolutely nothing to do with traumatic brain injury clearly and uh you know they it's impossible

00:20:53.300 to tell from the survey how severe the violence was that was reported so they lump in everything

00:20:59.780 if you remember that 20 years ago you had a jealous partner that will be counted as your

00:21:06.580 having experienced violence along with everything else there isn't even a category in the stats can

00:21:12.980 survey and the report that was based on it for the types of violence that lead to traumatic brain

00:21:20.100 injury which are choking until you pass out or violence to your head they don't even have a

00:21:27.060 category for blows to the head so they're talking about a whole range of issues they they lumped

00:21:32.980 together for example being shoved pushed or thrown down well even right there it's impossible to know

00:21:41.940 how severe to be shoved yes that might be quite severe or might not be very severe at all

00:21:47.300 and uh and and there is no way of telling from the survey whether that violence led to the person

00:21:53.700 having to go to the hospital you know whether it led to an actual injury or not it is simply a

00:21:59.700 a way of measuring self-reports we don't really know what those numbers mean at all and the

00:22:06.180 range of types of acts or verbal acts that are measured there is simply far too elastic to draw

00:22:13.300 any clear conclusions about numbers so with that how do they get to that 92 percent so 92 is even

00:22:21.380 stranger and I find more shocking. It refers to a study, which then refers to another study.

00:22:29.860 It's so it isn't even the study that's referred to. That study is an American study of Black women

00:22:35.580 who experienced severe violence, both in childhood and in their adult life, specifically being

00:22:44.780 choked or being knocked unconscious out of those it was only 95 women that's a fairly small survey 0.51

00:22:52.460 out of those women about 33 experienced uh assumed not even clarified but assumed

00:23:02.060 traumatic brain injury now within that study it referred in a background section of the report to

00:23:07.980 another study that found up to 92%, listen to this, of women who experienced traumatic brain

00:23:18.380 injury, 92% of those women had received the traumatic brain injury as a result of intimate

00:23:27.600 partner violence. So then they flipped the numbers around and said that of women who experience

00:23:34.080 intimate partner violence, up to 92% will have traumatic brain injury. I think that's called

00:23:41.300 a faulty syllogism. I think I learned that in my first week of research methods in university,

00:23:49.400 which was like a mandatory course that everyone had to do of like one of the things that you are

00:23:53.320 never supposed to do when analyzing data is reverse your cause and your effect. Yes. I find

00:24:00.420 that shocking it either indicates i mean i don't know what what to conclude about that except that

00:24:05.460 either the researchers who come up with these claims are not able to read the studies that

00:24:13.860 they're basing their claims on or it means that they are deliberately misinforming us misrepresenting

00:24:22.100 the studies that they're relying on but either way it is a shocking misrepresentation of the

00:24:28.500 reality of intimate partner violence your your point on this is something i i'm curious about

00:24:36.180 because obviously i think facts matter and i think regardless this is not uh in my view a moral

00:24:41.940 judgment on on the substance of this it's it's saying that these are the numbers and the numbers

00:24:46.980 don't lie unless we interpret them the way they do and then we can twist them but but ultimately

00:24:53.140 this is still a real issue and and we know that intimate partner violence exists and we know that

00:24:57.140 it can have very serious mental and physical consequences so why why is this something that's

00:25:02.660 so important to you well for one thing although we know that intimate partner violence exists i

00:25:09.300 don't think we really have any clear understanding of how prevalent it is and how serious it is

00:25:16.980 and i don't think we have any understanding from these kinds of studies which inflame the situation

00:25:24.420 notice of course again uh male victims of violence are never mentioned here so no and there have been

00:25:31.860 some statistics canada surveys that have found males are 50 of victims of intimate partner violence

00:25:37.620 this particular one found that males report violence at a rate of 36 in their lifetimes

00:25:46.100 boys and men will experience some form of intimate partner violence compared to that 44

00:25:50.900 percent so that is not a massive discrepancy there and we're talking about mostly boys and

00:25:58.020 men who are victimized by girls and women so um when we're talking about violence i think it's

00:26:04.420 very important to understand that violence is a human problem it is not a problem in which males

00:26:11.060 are solely perpetrators and girls and women are solely victims it tends to be caused not as the

00:26:18.340 feminists will tell us because men are exerting their power over women and girls and you know 1.00

00:26:23.940 through violence which is what this campaign specifically says but no actually most people

00:26:29.860 who are not feminist ideologues who study this problem will tell us that violence occurs because 1.00

00:26:36.340 of a variety of circumstances they're the same for both males and females and they have to do with

00:26:43.140 substance abuse they have to have to do with mental illness and they have to do with

00:26:47.940 childhood abuse people who are abused as children tend to become abusers so that is a much more

00:26:56.340 human way of understanding the problem i would say a much more useful way and what a campaign

00:27:01.940 like this does with these really staggering numbers is it demonizes boys and men and it

00:27:11.140 terrorizes girls and women and it misinforms girls and women about the realities of the world that

00:27:18.420 we live in and i think it it it makes it seem justified to treat boys and men as a category 1.00

00:27:26.820 of human being who are deserving of contempt disgust and harsh punishment and i think it

00:27:34.340 also means that when boys and men are accused of violence or sexual violence that we tend to think

00:27:40.740 yeah they're probably guilty because i heard that horrific statistic about 560 000 girls and women 0.90

00:27:47.780 a year being the victim of intimate partner violence so this is probably a case where this

00:27:52.820 guy did what he's being accused of doing and i think that's just terrible it really uh miss

00:27:59.220 miseducates all of us about the realities of men and women's lives i i mentioned before i brought

00:28:06.820 you in that rather absurd tweet trying to link you know autism awareness with pride and i i think

00:28:12.660 that we're seeing to maybe not as dramatic a way of doing that but but something very similar here

00:28:18.260 of taking this issue that people know that there's been a lot of advocacy on and research in which

00:28:22.580 is concussions and brain injuries traumatic brain injuries and trying to like push it into this other

00:28:27.220 narrative and and in a way that maybe it just doesn't quite fit at all and it's not to say

00:28:32.420 there can't be traumatic brain injury from this but it's like if there is that's not the core

00:28:37.220 issue the core issue is the intimate partner violence yes and i find that often when you

00:28:42.900 read these studies there was a study a few years ago that's been well some years ago now but it's

00:28:47.940 been repeatedly cited about the relationship between violence against women and uh natural

00:28:56.180 disasters. There was a huge kerfuffle years ago about the Australian wildfires and claims made

00:29:03.000 that men who came home from fighting those fires were taking out their stress on the women and

00:29:08.240 girls in their lives. And the study that was cited to prove this was a study about Hurricane Katrina

00:29:14.000 that claimed that violence against women had doubled following Hurricane Katrina. And when 0.87

00:29:20.860 When I looked into that study, it was unbelievable how weak the research was on which that claim

00:29:27.620 was based.

00:29:28.620 It was a tiny study.

00:29:30.260 It showed that yes, violence had allegedly doubled, but it had gone from a tiny, tiny

00:29:35.260 number in this small study to double that number, which is essentially meaningless when

00:29:39.780 the numbers are so low.

00:29:40.780 And it found that violence against boys and men, what they had reported anyway, had been

00:29:46.360 higher both before and after Hurricane Katrina.

00:29:49.780 So boys and men were reporting higher levels of psychological violence and higher levels of physical violence, both before and after.

00:29:56.200 And that was never mentioned in any of the discussions about the meaning of the connection between disaster and violence against women.

00:30:03.080 So, so, so often there are attempts to, as they say, raise awareness and call for greater resources to be put into protecting girls and women.

00:30:14.460 and it's based on extremely shaky statistics and it seems designed really just to support a

00:30:22.360 particular worldview in this case in which men are always guilty and women are always innocent

00:30:28.120 victims and it's a shame. Yeah and I'm glad you mentioned the percentage issue because that's

00:30:33.560 always been this point that I've tried to take issue with because I think it's one of the most

00:30:37.840 insidious ways in which something is overblown in terms of its effect. I know with hate crimes we

00:30:43.700 see it all the time where uh there'll be a report that says oh you know hate crimes against this

00:30:47.780 group have increased by 60 percent and you look at the numbers and they've gone up by 14 you know 14

00:30:53.620 individual cases and that's a an increase in in 60 and i remember i wrote a column about this years

00:30:59.540 ago when i was with global news and the editor actually would not publish uh large parts of it

00:31:05.220 because they say well no percentages don't lie and i said well actually they do uh you know if

00:31:09.780 they don't lie in the sense that yes 60 percent of you know 100 is 60 but they they do lie when

00:31:15.620 you're trying to make a point that something has had this dramatic increase you know there's a

00:31:19.860 difference between something going up from a thousand to sixteen hundred say and something

00:31:24.100 going up from ten to sixteen indeed yes and that is the thing and you know and it's so frustrating

00:31:30.580 when you see that people are people with an agenda are quite willing to obfuscate by using the

00:31:38.100 percentage rather than giving us the actual numbers and so many of us don't have time you

00:31:43.700 know to look this took me a couple hours you know to read through that huge stats can report and to

00:31:50.180 actually figure out what they meant by violence and then to look through the various studies that

00:31:55.700 were cited to prove this 92 percent number most people don't have time to do that kind of research

00:32:01.700 So that's why it's so important that the people who are doing the reporting are scrupulous about explaining to us what those numbers actually mean.

00:32:12.160 And when you mix in advocacy, you know, political agendas with reporting, you get this kind of, you know, phantasmatic scaremongering.

00:32:25.820 And it's, yeah, it's really concerning.

00:32:28.220 Janice Fiamengo, you can read her takedown of this PSA and lots of other great work over at

00:32:34.840 the Fiamengo file on Substack. Janice, thank you so much for coming on today. Great to talk to you

00:32:39.520 as always. Great to talk to you, Andrew. All right. Thanks very much. And yeah, and again,

00:32:44.020 I don't want to at all dismiss or diminish the importance and significance of this issue. I think

00:32:50.040 violence is wrong. I certainly think domestic violence is wrong, but I think we need to have

00:32:54.200 a very honest discussion about it. And I don't like when people are trying to just link all

00:32:58.100 these different things together in a way that doesn't quite align with reality. We are going

00:33:07.120 to wind down for this program. I had a burning question from one viewer who writes, how beautiful

00:33:12.800 are the women over there in France? That's the question we need an answer to. Well, I would say 1.00

00:33:18.580 never nearly as beautiful as one particular woman back in Canada. That is my answer and I am sticking 1.00

00:33:26.920 to it. But it is good to be over here. I actually haven't had a chance to see much of France yet. I

00:33:32.780 got in this morning. I got to the hotel. I'm in like the generic nondescript hotel room here to

00:33:38.160 do the show. So I haven't actually enjoyed too, too much of it. But hopefully we'll have some

00:33:41.900 pictures and stories and footage from the road in the days to come. One thing that I am going

00:33:48.440 to point out though, just very briefly, I saw this ad on the plane. I was watching a movie before I

00:33:55.940 fell asleep, but I can't, I'm not, no, I remember the movie. I'm not telling you the movie because

00:33:59.120 it was embarrassing. But I was watching a movie and you have to watch before the movie starts a

00:34:04.080 bunch of ads because it's not enough that you've paid Air Canada however much to ride the, to take

00:34:08.540 the plane. You also have to watch advertising. And I saw this particular ad, which I was like,

00:34:13.860 I have to talk about this on the show tonight.

00:34:15.360 So I went and found it online

00:34:17.060 and I can play this 15 second ad for you.

00:34:20.360 Now I'm not trying to give these a free advertising

00:34:22.240 because I'm going to mock the whole thing

00:34:23.660 and you'll understand why the second you see it.

00:34:26.060 Roll that.

00:34:43.860 okay so the whole point is you're trying to get your ice cream and the seagull comes and steals

00:34:50.260 the ice cream and then the steel seagull comes and steals your cash and then you can pay visa because

00:34:55.620 this seagull that has managed to steal your ice cream and your cash where you're with it with

00:35:01.540 immense surgical precision and speed is not also going to take your credit card that's the premise

00:35:08.740 we're supposed to rely on here. But then the tagline, all of the ad was fine. CGI seagulls

00:35:15.540 are great. That's good. All of it comes to an end when they say that Visa is safer than cash.

00:35:23.300 This ties in well with the push we've been talking about in the last few weeks toward

00:35:27.480 digital ID and digital currency. This idea that cash is king is one that is increasingly under

00:35:33.840 threat from government and from people that have a significant financial stake in the digitization

00:35:38.460 of the economy, places like Visa and MasterCard. And the interesting thing is, let's just go with

00:35:45.300 the narrative here. If someone steals $20 out of your hand, be it a Siegel or someone else,

00:35:49.920 you've lost $20. If someone steals your Visa card, you could be out thousands of dollars.

00:35:54.560 And even if you manage to get the charges returned, you still have to deal with the

00:35:59.600 hassle of doing that. And sometimes you aren't able to do it. So the idea that cash is less

00:36:04.660 safe than a credit card misses the mark entirely. And more importantly, it is a lot more reliable

00:36:11.440 to have cash. We live in a country in which the government froze the bank accounts and credit

00:36:16.060 cards of its political critics, which you cannot freeze cash is the one message that people need

00:36:22.120 to realize here. So anyway, I've gotten like a 60 second rant out of a 15 second ad that I saw on a

00:36:26.940 plane, but I had to get it off my chest. Sean, the producer here says he likes the ad because

00:36:32.640 seagulls deserve more media representation. So Sean's going to go all intersectional and say

00:36:37.780 that we need more diversity in film to encompass the seagulls. So we'll have seagulls lives matter

00:36:44.280 posters on the show before long, but that does it for us for today. We will talk to you on Friday

00:36:49.780 with a special Canada day edition of the show, which we already have recorded. So if you wonder

00:36:55.600 why I'm all of a sudden back home and not in Paris covering the free Iran conference, that's why.

00:37:00.320 and we'll have footage from this when we are able to get it to you, probably on Monday's show,

00:37:06.060 but we'll have some online between now and then. And just by way of context, I know that this is

00:37:11.240 not necessarily the biggest burning issue for a lot of Canadians. So I'll write about this a

00:37:16.720 little bit, but the question of why Iran matters, it's not just because I believe in meddling in

00:37:22.240 other countries' affairs, quite the contrary, in fact. It's that Iran is a country that is a 0.93

00:37:26.940 powerful force in supporting terrorism and actually perpetrating acts of terrorism around

00:37:32.460 the world. And it is the Iranian regime, backed by China in large ways, that allows it to do this. 0.89

00:37:39.460 And it is interesting that this conference two years ago in Paris, no, it was more than that,

00:37:44.160 a few years ago in Paris, was the target of a bombing plot by an Iranian diplomat. And hopefully 1.00

00:37:52.220 I will survive this week. Thankfully, they managed to thwart that attack and the guy is serving a

00:37:57.780 prolonged prison sentence now. But that is what happens if you take a stand for freedom. You end

00:38:02.980 up in the crosshairs of the regimes who deplore freedom. So that's what we're doing. Hopefully

00:38:07.220 we'll live to tell the tale and I look forward to being back in the studio with you before long.

00:38:12.140 But do tune in to the Friday Canada Day special and have a great rest of the week. Thank you,

00:38:16.880 God bless, and good day to you all.

00:38:22.220 the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - June 28, 2023

Conservatives need to take a bold stand for parental rights

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