Juno News - Crime is making Canadians feel less safe

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.080 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:15.840 Hello and welcome to you all, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here,

00:00:20.420 the Andrew Lawton Show on True North, 4.02 Eastern Time,

00:00:24.580 a point that is as meaningless as it comes if you're listening after the fact on podcast.

00:00:29.500 but know that that's what time it is right now if you want to get a big a big a little bit of

00:00:34.080 context in the show so if uh you know the whole world goes to hell in a handbasket at you know

00:00:38.820 i don't know 4 47 you'll know that i wasn't just not reporting the story it had not happened yet

00:00:44.400 by the time this show went to air but we are as we try to be more often than not live and we're

00:00:50.020 going to have lauren gunter the fantastic alberta institution the legend of a man the columnist

00:00:55.580 with us to talk about the column of his that the Trudeau government literally wanted censored

00:01:01.900 from social media. So that's something that will be coming up very shortly. And I also want to talk

00:01:07.900 a little bit later on about some other odds and ends, some bits and pieces, some potpourri, as

00:01:12.980 they say. But I have to start with a bit of a first world problem here, because I always like

00:01:17.640 to fancy myself a man of the people. And like all men of the people, I have an espresso machine in

00:01:22.860 my home, which I was cutting it very close and almost missed the beginning of the show

00:01:27.400 because I had an espresso extraction incident, which is to say the machine ran out of water

00:01:33.320 as I was trying to extract the espresso shot, which makes for a bit of a bitter, some might

00:01:39.480 even say, it's the proper word, astringent taste to the espresso, but I nonetheless am

00:01:46.280 plowing ahead and like most people in this country, I'm settling for crappy coffee right

00:01:50.920 now because that is what I ended up making for myself. But I think I have enough energy to get

00:01:56.080 through the next little while here. I want to talk about the crime wave that we're seeing in Canada.

00:02:02.820 And I want to just preface that by saying a lot of the times news coverage of crime does not

00:02:10.080 actually equate to bona fide crime statistics. So sometimes there are periods where we perceive that

00:02:17.340 crime is more rampant but it's actually that it's being covered more or we're noticing it more

00:02:21.440 the problem with a lot of official statistics is that they are very much lagging indicators by the

00:02:27.260 time we get the data to substantiate what we've seen it's years later so i i think in the meantime

00:02:33.900 we have to defer to people's experiences to some extent and we have to look around and see what it

00:02:40.120 is that's actually going on around us in the world here and i don't think few people well let me take

00:02:46.720 a step back. Most honest, real people, I'm not talking about dyed-in-the-wool partisans,

00:02:52.660 but real people are looking around and seeing crime, maybe not at record levels, but certainly

00:02:58.120 at significant levels and certainly higher than it's ever been in recent years. You talk to

00:03:02.920 in pretty much any city in this country, someone who owns a business in a downtown area or in an

00:03:10.180 area that is often replete with drug use or gang violence, and they're going to tell you exactly

00:03:16.940 what they're seeing. You've got businesses shuttering because they cannot deal with what's

00:03:22.160 happening there, either for public safety reasons or even just for insurance reasons.

00:03:27.420 And there was an interesting study that came out that, to be honest, the headline didn't really do

00:03:32.840 justice. The headline in a CTV story, polls suggest Canadians feel less safe than they did

00:03:39.380 before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Now, when I first saw that headline, I assumed it was a column

00:03:45.380 about the COVID worry warts. I assumed that it was about people that just believe they need their

00:03:50.880 17 N95 masks to walk down an outdoor street. And I was about to do a segment about just the

00:03:56.780 brokenness of humanity right now. And then I read the story, I read the study it was talking about

00:04:02.360 and realized, okay, this isn't actually about COVID safety, it's about crime and just people

00:04:07.160 sort of comparing where they are now and where they feel their communities are now with where

00:04:12.820 they were three years ago, which is when, you know, for the last time people were actually

00:04:17.480 able to walk out and about and see their communities and allowed to leave their homes

00:04:21.400 and all that.

00:04:22.880 And if you look at these numbers here, it's very stark.

00:04:25.680 So 32% of those surveyed, and it's a poll, so take it with a grain of salt, say that

00:04:31.460 crime has gotten much worse in the last three years.

00:04:35.260 32% say it's a little worse. So combined, I'm no math expert, that's 64%, which is just shy of two

00:04:42.460 thirds, who would say crime and violence have gotten worse than the last three years would

00:04:48.200 suggest it was at the beginning of that time. And that is quite significant. When you've got

00:04:53.220 two thirds of people saying that they think the country is significantly less safe, then, I mean,

00:05:00.120 three years is not a long period of time. We're not talking about people saying, yeah, when I was

00:05:05.200 a kid it was better we're talking about people saying you know three years ago life felt safer

00:05:10.760 the world felt safer the country felt safer than it does today and again just for context a quarter

00:05:16.300 of the people said it didn't change eight percent said they don't know two percent said things are

00:05:21.320 better so the two percent are probably the ones that are out on bail that think things are all

00:05:25.500 hunky-dory right now and just to give you some stories from the last week alone here's one from

00:05:33.680 Calgary. Man may seek bail after being accused of drugging and raping Calgary sex workers. 0.83

00:05:40.200 Here's another story from just this morning. 17-year-old dead after stabbing on bus in Surrey,

00:05:46.800 British Columbia. Here's one from yesterday. Woman brought back to Canada from ISIS camps

00:05:52.920 released on bail. Now, I believe in balance. I believe in telling the other side of the story.

00:06:00.120 Not everyone is getting out on bail. Some people are languishing behind bars indefinitely, like, for example, Pastor Derek Reimer.

00:06:09.320 He had the grave, vile offense of protesting a drag show. He wasn't in an ISIS camp. He was not killing someone on a bus.

00:06:19.200 He was not drugging and raping sex workers. He did something much worse. 0.99

00:06:22.700 He actually said, you should stay away from our children if you're trying to sexualize them.

00:06:27.300 And he remains behind bars while the lawyers are trying to get around to scheduling a bail hearing.

00:06:33.820 So like I said, not everyone is getting out on bail.

00:06:36.600 If you are a pastor that doesn't like drag shows, you are still behind bars.

00:06:40.680 But if you are a former ISIS alum, well, I guess alums are all former.

00:06:46.040 If you're an ISIS alum, you get out on bail.

00:06:48.340 You have a case for bail if you are going after sex workers.

00:06:52.360 And if you stab someone on a bus, you probably won't get bail there.

00:06:55.300 But it's interesting if you look at a lot of the other stories of that ilk in recent months

00:07:01.080 and find how frequent it is to see the line in the police press release

00:07:04.620 that said this was an offender that was released out on bail.

00:07:08.680 If you really want to have some fun, you should actually go and subscribe

00:07:11.340 to all the news releases from various police departments in this country.

00:07:16.200 And you'll see when they release these offenders, they'll actually send an alert

00:07:19.680 that says we are releasing a high-risk offender into the community.

00:07:23.460 here's what they look like, here's their name, what they do, and you say, well, that seems like

00:07:27.480 the type of person we shouldn't release, but alas, that is not the way the system is oriented.

00:07:32.680 Now, believe me when I say I am actually not one of these people that is the complete tough-on

00:07:40.020 crime to the point of just destroying people's lives for minor offenses they've made. No, I

00:07:46.860 believe that carceral punishment, so putting people behind bars, should not be taken lightly

00:07:53.240 at all. But we're talking about violent offenders here. We're not talking about drug offenders.

00:07:58.320 We're not even talking about people that have cheated on their taxes or whatever, which again,

00:08:02.520 probably get to a worse treatment than a lot of formerly capital offenses do in this day and age.

00:08:08.040 We're talking about people here who have done very heinous things, who will continue to do

00:08:14.120 heinous things, and who are part of this system, not because they are victims of the system,

00:08:19.240 but because people that interact with them in the real world become victims of them.

00:08:25.020 So I'm not all that surprised that Canadians are finding things just a little wee bit less safe.

00:08:30.440 And they're looking at governments, federal and provincial, and saying,

00:08:33.600 you guys are the problem. You guys solved this.

00:08:36.740 There was one, just a side of a story here to bring up,

00:08:40.440 that the surge in suicidal and threatening calls to CRA call centers during the pandemic was observed.

00:08:47.960 So people who work at the Canada Revenue Agency, again, not a department that I have much use for, but the people there are saying they've had more threatening calls in the pandemic, they've had more suicidal calls, and I don't know, maybe people think if they just threaten suicide, they'll get a break on their taxes or whatever, but the thing there that I take from this is that government has presided over a breaking of society in the last few years.

00:09:15.320 Government has pushed people to the brink, and I'm not saying it's Justin Trudeau's fault that someone wants to stab someone on a bus.

00:09:21.160 I'm not saying it's Justin Trudeau's fault that someone wants to kill themselves or tell a CRA worker they're wanting to kill themselves.

00:09:28.360 But I do think government policies in aggregate, on the whole, have made things worse for so many people in this country.

00:09:36.980 And government is not there to come up with the solutions to those problems.

00:09:40.840 Government's not there to say, okay, let's now help you through it.

00:09:43.900 So they have created a public health crisis far worse than the pandemic and are nowhere to be found when it comes to trying to solve it, which is probably just as well because I think this government has shown that it is incapable of providing solutions that don't exacerbate the problem and then create new ones.

00:10:01.840 And such is, here's for a subtle segue here, the case of the government's internet regulation, where again, they are creating solutions in search of a problem that doesn't exist.

00:10:12.060 And if you want to get a little bit of a glimpse of what the government-regulated internet space is going to look like, you needn't look further than what happened to a good friend of True North's and of basically anyone who's picked up a newspaper in Alberta over the last many years.

00:10:28.500 Lauren Gunter. This is a columnist who I actually have not had on this show. I had him on my old

00:10:34.580 radio show a couple of times. But Lauren Gunter dared to criticize the Canadian government's 1.00

00:10:41.240 approach to refugees and immigration more broadly. And this was something that I guess

00:10:46.540 the government didn't like. So what the government did is tried to get this thing pulled from social

00:10:54.000 media. There's a record of government trying to get this whole column taken off of Facebook and

00:11:00.880 Twitter. And we didn't learn in the initial stories what article they were talking about,

00:11:05.340 but thankfully, Lorne Gunter agreed to out himself here and he joins us now. Lorne, what have you

00:11:10.600 done? Well, you know, I've added some specifics to a non-specific item that the government

00:11:20.760 admitted to in a parliamentary question.

00:11:25.560 There was a Conservative MP asked the Liberals

00:11:28.540 to give some examples of efforts they'd made

00:11:32.240 to have Internet content controlled prior to their Bill C-11,

00:11:39.100 which still has not yet been proclaimed but will become law very soon.

00:11:44.100 And so there was a whole list came back, 180 pages,

00:11:47.640 some with one or two items on them.

00:11:49.280 And when it says an unspecified newspaper column about the Immigration and Refugee Board, Director of Communications asked Facebook and Twitter to remove links to this item from their platforms.

00:12:04.380 And so I knew who it was when I was shown it by editors. And it was a piece that I'd written in September of 2021. I'd come into possession of a confidential internal document that the IRB had, that the chairman had drafted and was circulating among staff and professionals that said, you know,

00:12:27.480 we are now going to try and make it much easier for refugees to stay in canada prior to

00:12:35.640 this policy that had not yet been introduced at that time was just being debated but but prior to

00:12:42.440 that you had to show that you were under threat of torture or death if you were sent back to your

00:12:46.920 home country you had to show that you were you know you're in in grave personal danger or you

00:12:52.360 had to prove that you met met the united nations criteria for what a legal refugee was and this

00:13:00.440 policy would have said anybody who was suffering from any two discriminations

00:13:08.040 and that would be poverty age sexual orientation race ideology religion any of those if you had

00:13:15.800 two of those then there was nothing that the irb could do or very little that the irb could do

00:13:21.960 unless you're a security threat uh to keep you out as long as you got here if you could say

00:13:27.560 you know i'm gay and poor i'm indigenous and i have views that my government doesn't like 0.72

00:13:33.880 you know i i'm old and and i'm whatever whatever the other criteria might be if you had any two of

00:13:42.360 these intersectionality uh criteria uh then there was very little that the adjudicators could do

00:13:49.720 to keep you out of Canada. Government didn't like that I had that. And so they then went

00:13:56.120 to my editors and said, you need to retract this, or you need to correct all of the following

00:14:02.440 factual errors. My editor said there are no factual errors that we can tell, and we're not

00:14:08.200 going to retract it. So then the director of communications at the time of the IRB,

00:14:12.920 and we're not entirely sure who that was, went to Facebook and Twitter in particular,

00:14:19.480 and said we want you to take these down because they contain dangerous misinformation and not

00:14:26.360 surprisingly that is the terminology that the liberals are using in their new bill to try and

00:14:33.400 justify handing over the power to the canadian radio television and telecommunications commission

00:14:39.960 the crtc or to an internet safety board to take down dangerous misinformation even if it's legal

00:14:47.960 under their new law so i i think what what we've seen with with their attempts to to take my piece

00:14:54.600 off the internet is a glimpse of of canada's future well i fear you're right and i just want

00:15:00.520 to drill into the the who for a moment do you know if this was someone that came from the minister's

00:15:06.040 office being someone who's a a partisan liberal staffer or from the departmental side which is

00:15:12.040 supposed to be uh staffed by non-partisan bureaucrats such as they are yeah i mean as

00:15:18.360 near as we can tell because there's very little information about who actually made the request

00:15:22.600 of the social media platform but as near as we can tell is a staffer from the immigration and

00:15:28.600 refugee board uh who who sought to have this done but you know so not someone who's supposed to be a

00:15:33.720 partisan no no so it was supposed to it was a person who was supposed to be uh an objective

00:15:40.840 bureaucrat who was supposed to be doing you know objective work not not a political operative who

00:15:47.880 was trying to shine the government's apple uh but you know from 2015 on the liberals had been

00:15:56.520 going out of their way to appoint people who are ideologically friendly to their view of increasing

00:16:02.280 immigration uh to places on the irb so uh the people the the permanent staffers at the irb

00:16:10.520 and the political appointees would have known on one side their bread was buttered uh but they

00:16:16.040 probably also would have ideologically agreed largely with with the liberals efforts to increase

00:16:21.480 at this point it seems funny now to to to consider this but you know i i said this is this is kind of

00:16:28.280 outrageous because the liberals are trying to in one fell swoop increase immigration to canada

00:16:34.680 newcomers to canada from 300 000 a year to 400 000 a year well now they've blown well past 400 000

00:16:42.280 a year but at the time they were trying to increase immigration by a third yeah by using these

00:16:49.400 tactics that were never going to be debated in parliament by by increasing the uh criteria by by

00:16:56.840 greatly expanding the ways you could claim refugee status in canada and i they didn't like that but

00:17:03.800 you know it's funny because they said well this this article is full of of uh mistakes and

00:17:09.800 misinformation but i quoted enough of this internal document that they must have known

00:17:16.280 i had the original and yeah and this was i mean i i remember the column it was it was reporting it

00:17:22.280 it wasn't just you sort of going on about some opinion or some theoretical thing you had the

00:17:26.880 document they would have known that document existed yeah they would have and it was you

00:17:31.900 know it was put out by the chairman of the board at the time richard wex and and so they were just

00:17:39.020 they were embarrassed that it had been found out before it could become policy and make a political

00:17:46.780 problem for the government. And that's, to me, that's the really troubling part, is that

00:17:51.740 because it was embarrassing to them, not because it was factually incorrect, not because I was

00:17:56.480 inciting riots, not because I had done something illegal, but because it was embarrassing to the

00:18:03.780 government. They got caught trying to sneak through a major change to immigration and refugee

00:18:10.200 policy they wanted it pulled out and they used the cover of dangerous misinformation to try and

00:18:17.760 make that happen now imagine so they they go to Facebook they go to Twitter both of whom said no

00:18:24.020 there's nothing wrong about this isn't misinformation necessarily it's it's fair comment but now imagine

00:18:32.120 if under Bill C-11 the government hands the power to take those things down to the CRTC which is

00:18:39.380 full of government appointees or even worse to a board of internet safety which is all government

00:18:46.580 appointees and they say you know it doesn't have to be illegal for you to take it down if you think

00:18:52.340 that this is dangerous misinformation you the safety board or the crtc have the power under

00:18:59.140 this new law to start deciding what can and cannot be posted on the internet and that just

00:19:05.140 that really frightens me. Well, it should. And I would point out to people here that in this case,

00:19:11.060 the social media companies didn't take what I would say is a particularly principled free speech

00:19:16.420 view. They didn't defend your reporting. They just said, listen, your fight's not with us.

00:19:20.280 It's with the Calgary Sun. It's not our original content was the line, which, you know, as far as

00:19:24.520 social media platforms go, I think that's a win. They just said to the government, you know, we're

00:19:28.540 not interested in playing this game. But you look at now, as you've alluded to, Lorne, the policies

00:19:33.760 that are coming down the pipeline, which would threaten social media companies with very steep

00:19:39.240 fines if they don't take down content that's identified as being wrong in one of the several

00:19:45.420 categories. And interestingly enough, I was just at a seminar about this. And if you look at the

00:19:50.520 categories, they include misinformation in the same bundle as hate speech and child pornography.

00:19:58.020 So they're using online harm laws that are intended for child pornography to go after, quote unquote, misinformation.

00:20:05.560 Well, and they have a very wide, very broad definition of what constitute hate speech.

00:20:11.980 When I first started covering hate speech, which would be back in the late 90s, you had to convince a court that under a very narrow definition that was set out by the Supreme Court, the speech that was published or broadcast had been hateful, according to some very narrow definitions.

00:20:34.600 Now, really, hate is in the ear of the hearer.

00:20:37.880 It's not in the mouth of the speaker.

00:20:40.260 So if you say something that the most sensitive activist in a ideological cause thinks is hateful, then it's hateful. And that's what I worry about, too, is that, you know, child pornography, fine.

00:20:59.960 We should keep children safe from pornographers.

00:21:05.480 But if the person in an activist organization who hears my microaggression feels that they're hated upon as a result of it, they can go to the upcoming Internet Safety Board and say, this is really bad.

00:21:22.340 You should take it down.

00:21:23.160 There's a good example of that, too. 0.67

00:21:25.460 The CRTC has been petitioned by EGAL, which is an LGBTQ rights group, to bar Fox News from being rebroadcast in Canada, from the cable stations or the satellite services, from carrying Fox News. 0.94

00:21:41.600 because Fox News has lots of people on it who don't believe that trans people have a right to all the same protections that non-trans people do,

00:21:56.660 or that LGBTQ communities, I'm actually not phrasing that properly.

00:22:02.600 No, but I get what you're saying, and as I was saying on the show yesterday,

00:22:05.880 imagine if that power were extended to Fox News clips on YouTube,

00:22:09.820 So it's not enough that you take Fox off the air, but Canadians shouldn't be able to access Tucker Carlson on YouTube or Rumble or anything.

00:22:17.200 Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I have my own problems with Tucker Carlson.

00:22:22.060 I remember when he was a bow tie wearing nerd about 25 years ago who wouldn't say butter if his mouth was full of it.

00:22:32.540 And now he's the fire breathing dragon of the alt right.

00:22:39.120 And so I have trouble with him.

00:22:40.880 But do I want to ban him?

00:22:42.540 No, but I have the same problem with all sorts of commentators on the left.

00:22:46.820 Do I want them banned because every time I listen to them, my blood pressure rises and my cardiologist tells me that I have to turn that off?

00:22:54.820 No, I don't.

00:22:56.440 That's what free speech is about.

00:22:58.200 I like often to use the example of newspapers in London.

00:23:02.520 There are eight daily newspapers in London, and none of them, except perhaps the Times of London, makes any claims to being balanced.

00:23:11.440 What they say is that among the eight of us, there is balance.

00:23:16.480 If you don't like what one of us is writing, you can read another one and you can find the opinions or the slant that you want.

00:23:23.800 And, you know, that's how you get to balance and freedom of expression.

00:23:28.680 But you don't do it through government regulators.

00:23:31.440 No. And to go back to your column, I mean, if the government felt so strongly that it had been misrepresented in your piece, why don't they do, you know, Katie Telford's favorite pastime of just planting some op-ed to rebut you in another paper? I mean, go down the street to the Calgary Herald and say, we'd like to denounce what Lauren Gunter said. And again, I think, you know, the reality of it here is they knew that the facts were on your side. But if you don't like a particular bit of expression, respond to it with better expression.

00:23:59.780 this is not a difficult concept and my editors did offer wex the the chairman of the uh of the

00:24:07.140 immigration refugee board did offer him equal space to explain what it was that i had gone

00:24:14.420 which is incredibly generous by the way of course of course it is but that's yeah i'm all for that

00:24:19.780 if you don't like what i've written and you you will take the time to to pen your own 600 words

00:24:25.620 have added that and now especially it's it's a little bit trickier when you have a printed

00:24:31.620 newspaper but now that we all have websites with sort of unlimited space that's exactly how it

00:24:37.940 should be handled but not going to the social media giants and saying this is dangerous misinformation

00:24:46.580 you should take it down that that is nothing but censorship lauren gunter calgary sun columnist

00:24:53.060 Glad you were not censored, and I'm glad to always continue to read your work.

00:24:57.160 Thanks so much for coming on today, Lorne.

00:24:59.040 You bet.

00:25:00.080 All right, thank you.

00:25:01.220 And let me just say, I mean, obviously what the government was trying to do to Lorne and his piece

00:25:07.140 was what Twitter did to the New York Post when they published their reporting about Hunter Biden's laptop.

00:25:13.640 And this was a big, big story that had waves and had momentum.

00:25:17.940 People knew about it.

00:25:18.960 People could go and read it for themselves.

00:25:21.000 Twitter ended up apologizing for it, but funnily enough, the damage had already been done by that

00:25:25.500 point. But people who did not know about the story, who weren't plugged into the ins and outs

00:25:30.400 of online regulation, actually never saw this thing. There was a mainstream media blackout,

00:25:35.240 there was a social media blackout, and as a result, no one is actually seeing this story

00:25:41.740 except for those who already knew about it. And I imagine if that were to happen, and this is not a

00:25:46.440 slight at Lorne or the Calgary Sun, but they're smaller than the New York Post.

00:25:50.380 Imagine if this were happening to smaller outlets that do not have the ability to as easily blast

00:25:57.240 out to people, hey, this article is being censored. Well, that would mean that all of a sudden

00:26:02.960 government bureaucrats are controlling the narrative. What if they're doing this in an

00:26:07.720 election? What if during an election campaign, you have the same government officials that are

00:26:13.220 going to Twitter and Facebook and saying, you have to take down this column. Actually, you know,

00:26:17.400 we think that's misinformation. Even though it's quoting a document of ours, we think it's

00:26:22.360 misinformation and has to go. So you can say in this case, yes, it all ended up as it was supposed

00:26:28.180 to. The article wasn't censored and the bureaucrat can just go back to, you know, just claiming

00:26:32.920 overtime and, you know, extended trips. And at the same time, we don't know how many cases they are

00:26:39.000 doing this with success. If they had a contact, again, if I wanted something taken down from

00:26:46.220 Twitter and Facebook, I could, you know, go and there's a little report button in there. You can

00:26:50.680 report. And when you report something, it asks you, is this because, you know, you're being

00:26:55.860 misgendered or is it because they're threatening self-harm? And you can say, no, it's because it's

00:27:00.020 misinformation. For all we know, they had existing relationships with Twitter and Facebook, or they

00:27:05.520 say, oh, if you want to get a column taken down, why don't you just call up Sarah? She works in

00:27:10.900 the account takedowns department. And the whole point is that we wouldn't even know. So when you

00:27:16.620 have this process taking place before the internet regulation bill is even there, imagine how bad

00:27:24.260 it's going to be when government cements this power and actually starts threatening social

00:27:28.500 media companies with fines if they do not comply. That is absolutely what's going to happen with

00:27:34.220 this, whether it's the Lauren Cunter case, whether it's the Agal Canada and Tucker Carlson case,

00:27:40.460 or many others that come up that are eerily similar to this. There are people in the government right

00:27:46.320 now and in civil society, activists, media types, politicians that fundamentally do not believe in

00:27:52.800 free speech. They do not agree with the premise of free speech. They do not agree with open debate

00:27:57.780 and they actually want dissent to be silenced. And they probably wouldn't even hide that as much

00:28:03.720 as you'd think. And these people, legitimately, I'm going to do probably next week, maybe in a

00:28:09.260 couple of weeks, a bigger deep dive into C11, because I know that a lot of people still do

00:28:14.560 not understand the ins and outs of it. They don't understand why it's so dangerous. And you have to

00:28:19.900 look at it in the context of all of these other internet regulations. But I mentioned to Lauren,

00:28:26.180 there are different categories of harm that are being dealt with under the auspices of what they

00:28:32.160 colloquially call an online harms bill or an online safety bill. And I can't remember the

00:28:37.540 whole list, but I do know that on that list is misinformation, disinformation. On that list is

00:28:44.520 hate speech. And on that list is child sexual exploitation. CSEM, they call it. Child sexual 0.65

00:28:52.380 exploitation materials, I believe. And the fact that they're taking the same tool and applying it

00:28:59.600 to all of this stuff simultaneously as though child porn is on the same moral and logistical

00:29:07.040 and legal plane as a column about immigration from Lorne Gunter is absolutely insane.

00:29:14.100 And the reason they're doing it is so that when people eventually criticize this, when people

00:29:19.580 like me stand up and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I do not support the government controlling free

00:29:23.960 speech like this, it's so that the government can turn around and say, are you saying you

00:29:28.000 support child pornography online, mark my words, that is going to be what happens. They're throwing

00:29:34.040 that in there just because it's the sacred cow that no one can criticize. Whereas I would fight

00:29:38.800 back to them and say, no, actually I care so much about child pornography. I want you to pluck that

00:29:43.380 out and pass it as its own law right now. Put huge penalties on platforms that do not take down child

00:29:50.100 pornography. Throw the book because it's already illegal. The material is already illegal. They

00:29:55.140 just need to talk about ways that they can better manage taking it down. Misinformation, disinformation,

00:30:01.480 that is a far more contentious category. You know, I don't like dishonesty. I don't like

00:30:07.100 dishonest reporting, but we already know that this government has a particular tendency to

00:30:12.400 label as misinformation news coverage that it does not like. Look at Jerry Butts right now.

00:30:19.660 I don't encourage following Jerry Butts on Twitter, and it's actually difficult to do because he's

00:30:23.700 blocked. I think like half of the people who listen to this show, but not me, oddly. Jerry

00:30:28.180 Butts, though, he's been like on this crusade at the Globe and Mail ever since the Globe and Mail

00:30:32.500 broke the SNC-Lavalin story. And he's upset that they took down We Charity. He's upset that now

00:30:38.280 they're taking down the Trudeau Foundation. The entire board of directors for the Trudeau

00:30:43.640 Foundation resigned this week. And Jerry Butts is basically saying it's the media's fault,

00:30:49.300 not the fault of those who decided they wanted to take a big fact check from the Chinese

00:30:53.480 Politburo via a prominent connected businessman of sorts.

00:30:58.640 But nevertheless, I want to thank you all for tuning in to the show today.

00:31:02.920 Just very briefly here, I'm not one of these huge AI junkies.

00:31:07.400 I've talked about it in the past on the show.

00:31:09.760 It was a bit of a novelty when it came out and you could actually type in and have these

00:31:13.520 like conversations with the AI chatbot.

00:31:17.100 And the reason I will have a conversation with the AI chatbot is because the AI chatbot

00:31:22.080 actually is interested in listening to me speak, which not everyone is for some reason. But the

00:31:27.160 thing about this is that it's actually not as crazy as some people think. When you're reading

00:31:33.840 it, for example, I told it to tell me a joke and I picked three very random things. I think I said,

00:31:40.900 tell me a joke about a Lynx, a MacBook, and a slipper or something stupid like that. 1.00

00:31:47.280 And the joke it gave me was so stupid, you'd think the prime minister said it at a press 1.00

00:31:52.520 conference. 1.00

00:31:52.880 It was just completely nonsensical and it wasn't particularly funny in any meaningful

00:31:57.140 way.

00:31:57.480 And I said, you know, if I were a comedian, I would be incredibly happy right now with

00:32:01.680 the fact that AI is not sufficiently funny to displace me from being able to perform.

00:32:07.820 Now, I should say a lot of modern comedians aren't particularly funny either.

00:32:11.500 So maybe AI is just going based off of what's already out there.

00:32:15.500 But the AI thing is not as ascendant as people would like to believe.

00:32:21.480 So I was actually very surprised to see that in the University of Toronto at St. Michael's

00:32:26.800 College, starting in the fall, there's going to be a class about AI, but the class is going

00:32:32.880 to be conducted by AI.

00:32:35.380 So it has like a professor who's designed it, but they're using research prompts and

00:32:40.720 assignments and materials that have been curated by artificial intelligence.

00:32:45.040 So again, I don't know if this is going to work out or not.

00:32:48.680 I mean, if the professor succeeds, then I guess he can just get fired because he'll

00:32:53.180 have proven that the AI could do his job better than he did.

00:32:56.100 So it's just like a very meta Inception-like thing.

00:32:59.860 The St. Mike's to offer an experimental course taught by AI.

00:33:04.320 So even your university degrees now are being taught by this computer that is supposed to

00:33:10.640 be smarter than you and will eventually take over from us.

00:33:13.600 but we're okay letting it happen.

00:33:15.320 So I think it's a bit of a novelty.

00:33:17.280 I'm not one of these people that like thinks,

00:33:19.040 oh, the cell phone, that's never going to catch on.

00:33:20.960 No, I like technology.

00:33:22.500 I like innovation.

00:33:23.380 I like development.

00:33:24.960 And I know this thing will continue to get better,

00:33:26.860 but I don't buy that the AI revolution is here just yet.

00:33:31.200 So there will always be people around

00:33:33.420 to screw everything up.

00:33:34.840 You don't need machines to help with that.

00:33:36.940 That's it for today.

00:33:38.080 We'll be back on Friday

00:33:39.580 with another edition of the Andrew Lawton Show

00:33:41.360 talking about the decline of civilization,

00:33:43.700 a big cheery topic to head into the weekend,

00:33:46.000 but we'll liven things up with Fake News Friday.

00:33:48.960 That's all coming up in two days here on True North.

00:33:52.100 Stay tuned.

00:33:52.640 Thank you.

00:33:53.060 God bless and good day to you all.

00:33:56.700 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:33:58.820 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - April 12, 2023

Crime is making Canadians feel less safe

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