00:04:22.880And if you look at these numbers here, it's very stark.
00:04:25.680So 32% of those surveyed, and it's a poll, so take it with a grain of salt, say that
00:04:31.460crime has gotten much worse in the last three years.
00:04:35.26032% say it's a little worse. So combined, I'm no math expert, that's 64%, which is just shy of two
00:04:42.460thirds, who would say crime and violence have gotten worse than the last three years would
00:04:48.200suggest it was at the beginning of that time. And that is quite significant. When you've got
00:04:53.220two thirds of people saying that they think the country is significantly less safe, then, I mean,
00:05:00.120three years is not a long period of time. We're not talking about people saying, yeah, when I was
00:05:05.200a kid it was better we're talking about people saying you know three years ago life felt safer
00:05:10.760the world felt safer the country felt safer than it does today and again just for context a quarter
00:05:16.300of the people said it didn't change eight percent said they don't know two percent said things are
00:05:21.320better so the two percent are probably the ones that are out on bail that think things are all
00:05:25.500hunky-dory right now and just to give you some stories from the last week alone here's one from
00:05:33.680Calgary. Man may seek bail after being accused of drugging and raping Calgary sex workers.
00:05:40.200Here's another story from just this morning. 17-year-old dead after stabbing on bus in Surrey,
00:05:46.800British Columbia. Here's one from yesterday. Woman brought back to Canada from ISIS camps
00:05:52.920released on bail. Now, I believe in balance. I believe in telling the other side of the story.
00:06:00.120Not everyone is getting out on bail. Some people are languishing behind bars indefinitely, like, for example, Pastor Derek Reimer.
00:06:09.320He 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.
00:06:19.200He was not drugging and raping sex workers. He did something much worse.
00:06:22.700He actually said, you should stay away from our children if you're trying to sexualize them.
00:06:27.300And he remains behind bars while the lawyers are trying to get around to scheduling a bail hearing.
00:06:33.820So like I said, not everyone is getting out on bail.
00:06:36.600If you are a pastor that doesn't like drag shows, you are still behind bars.
00:06:40.680But if you are a former ISIS alum, well, I guess alums are all former.
00:06:46.040If you're an ISIS alum, you get out on bail.
00:06:48.340You have a case for bail if you are going after sex workers.
00:06:52.360And if you stab someone on a bus, you probably won't get bail there.
00:06:55.300But it's interesting if you look at a lot of the other stories of that ilk in recent months
00:07:01.080and find how frequent it is to see the line in the police press release
00:07:04.620that said this was an offender that was released out on bail.
00:07:08.680If you really want to have some fun, you should actually go and subscribe
00:07:11.340to all the news releases from various police departments in this country.
00:07:16.200And you'll see when they release these offenders, they'll actually send an alert
00:07:19.680that says we are releasing a high-risk offender into the community.
00:07:23.460here's what they look like, here's their name, what they do, and you say, well, that seems like
00:07:27.480the type of person we shouldn't release, but alas, that is not the way the system is oriented.
00:07:32.680Now, believe me when I say I am actually not one of these people that is the complete tough-on
00:07:40.020crime to the point of just destroying people's lives for minor offenses they've made. No, I
00:07:46.860believe that carceral punishment, so putting people behind bars, should not be taken lightly
00:07:53.240at all. But we're talking about violent offenders here. We're not talking about drug offenders.
00:07:58.320We're not even talking about people that have cheated on their taxes or whatever, which again,
00:08:02.520probably get to a worse treatment than a lot of formerly capital offenses do in this day and age.
00:08:08.040We're talking about people here who have done very heinous things, who will continue to do
00:08:14.120heinous things, and who are part of this system, not because they are victims of the system,
00:08:19.240but because people that interact with them in the real world become victims of them.
00:08:25.020So I'm not all that surprised that Canadians are finding things just a little wee bit less safe.
00:08:30.440And they're looking at governments, federal and provincial, and saying,
00:08:33.600you guys are the problem. You guys solved this.
00:08:36.740There was one, just a side of a story here to bring up,
00:08:40.440that the surge in suicidal and threatening calls to CRA call centers during the pandemic was observed.
00:08:47.960So 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.
00:09:15.320Government 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.
00:09:21.160I'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.
00:09:28.360But I do think government policies in aggregate, on the whole, have made things worse for so many people in this country.
00:09:36.980And government is not there to come up with the solutions to those problems.
00:09:40.840Government's not there to say, okay, let's now help you through it.
00:09:43.900So 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.
00:10:01.840And 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.
00:10:12.060And 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.
00:10:28.500Lauren Gunter. This is a columnist who I actually have not had on this show. I had him on my old
00:10:34.580radio show a couple of times. But Lauren Gunter dared to criticize the Canadian government's1.00
00:10:41.240approach to refugees and immigration more broadly. And this was something that I guess
00:10:46.540the government didn't like. So what the government did is tried to get this thing pulled from social
00:10:54.000media. There's a record of government trying to get this whole column taken off of Facebook and
00:11:00.880Twitter. And we didn't learn in the initial stories what article they were talking about,
00:11:05.340but thankfully, Lorne Gunter agreed to out himself here and he joins us now. Lorne, what have you
00:11:10.600done? Well, you know, I've added some specifics to a non-specific item that the government
00:11:20.760admitted to in a parliamentary question.
00:11:25.560There was a Conservative MP asked the Liberals
00:11:28.540to give some examples of efforts they'd made
00:11:32.240to have Internet content controlled prior to their Bill C-11,
00:11:39.100which still has not yet been proclaimed but will become law very soon.
00:11:44.100And so there was a whole list came back, 180 pages,
00:11:49.280And 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.
00:12:04.380And 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,
00:12:27.480we are now going to try and make it much easier for refugees to stay in canada prior to
00:12:35.640this policy that had not yet been introduced at that time was just being debated but but prior to
00:12:42.440that you had to show that you were under threat of torture or death if you were sent back to your
00:12:46.920home country you had to show that you were you know you're in in grave personal danger or you
00:12:52.360had to prove that you met met the united nations criteria for what a legal refugee was and this
00:13:00.440policy would have said anybody who was suffering from any two discriminations
00:13:08.040and that would be poverty age sexual orientation race ideology religion any of those if you had
00:13:15.800two of those then there was nothing that the irb could do or very little that the irb could do
00:13:21.960unless you're a security threat uh to keep you out as long as you got here if you could say
00:13:27.560you know i'm gay and poor i'm indigenous and i have views that my government doesn't like
00:13:33.880you know i i'm old and and i'm whatever whatever the other criteria might be if you had any two of
00:13:42.360these intersectionality uh criteria uh then there was very little that the adjudicators could do
00:13:49.720to keep you out of Canada. Government didn't like that I had that. And so they then went
00:13:56.120to my editors and said, you need to retract this, or you need to correct all of the following
00:14:02.440factual errors. My editor said there are no factual errors that we can tell, and we're not
00:14:08.200going to retract it. So then the director of communications at the time of the IRB,
00:14:12.920and we're not entirely sure who that was, went to Facebook and Twitter in particular,
00:14:19.480and said we want you to take these down because they contain dangerous misinformation and not
00:14:26.360surprisingly that is the terminology that the liberals are using in their new bill to try and
00:14:33.400justify handing over the power to the canadian radio television and telecommunications commission
00:14:39.960the crtc or to an internet safety board to take down dangerous misinformation even if it's legal
00:14:47.960under their new law so i i think what what we've seen with with their attempts to to take my piece
00:14:54.600off the internet is a glimpse of of canada's future well i fear you're right and i just want
00:15:00.520to drill into the the who for a moment do you know if this was someone that came from the minister's
00:15:06.040office being someone who's a a partisan liberal staffer or from the departmental side which is
00:15:12.040supposed to be uh staffed by non-partisan bureaucrats such as they are yeah i mean as
00:15:18.360near as we can tell because there's very little information about who actually made the request
00:15:22.600of the social media platform but as near as we can tell is a staffer from the immigration and
00:15:28.600refugee board uh who who sought to have this done but you know so not someone who's supposed to be a
00:15:33.720partisan no no so it was supposed to it was a person who was supposed to be uh an objective
00:15:40.840bureaucrat who was supposed to be doing you know objective work not not a political operative who
00:15:47.880was trying to shine the government's apple uh but you know from 2015 on the liberals had been
00:15:56.520going out of their way to appoint people who are ideologically friendly to their view of increasing
00:16:02.280immigration uh to places on the irb so uh the people the the permanent staffers at the irb
00:16:10.520and the political appointees would have known on one side their bread was buttered uh but they
00:16:16.040probably also would have ideologically agreed largely with with the liberals efforts to increase
00:16:21.480at this point it seems funny now to to to consider this but you know i i said this is this is kind of
00:16:28.280outrageous because the liberals are trying to in one fell swoop increase immigration to canada
00:16:34.680newcomers to canada from 300 000 a year to 400 000 a year well now they've blown well past 400 000
00:16:42.280a year but at the time they were trying to increase immigration by a third yeah by using these
00:16:49.400tactics that were never going to be debated in parliament by by increasing the uh criteria by by
00:16:56.840greatly expanding the ways you could claim refugee status in canada and i they didn't like that but
00:17:03.800you know it's funny because they said well this this article is full of of uh mistakes and
00:17:09.800misinformation but i quoted enough of this internal document that they must have known
00:17:16.280i had the original and yeah and this was i mean i i remember the column it was it was reporting it
00:17:22.280it wasn't just you sort of going on about some opinion or some theoretical thing you had the
00:17:26.880document they would have known that document existed yeah they would have and it was you
00:17:31.900know it was put out by the chairman of the board at the time richard wex and and so they were just
00:17:39.020they were embarrassed that it had been found out before it could become policy and make a political
00:17:46.780problem for the government. And that's, to me, that's the really troubling part, is that
00:17:51.740because it was embarrassing to them, not because it was factually incorrect, not because I was
00:17:56.480inciting riots, not because I had done something illegal, but because it was embarrassing to the
00:18:03.780government. They got caught trying to sneak through a major change to immigration and refugee
00:18:10.200policy they wanted it pulled out and they used the cover of dangerous misinformation to try and
00:18:17.760make that happen now imagine so they they go to Facebook they go to Twitter both of whom said no
00:18:24.020there's nothing wrong about this isn't misinformation necessarily it's it's fair comment but now imagine
00:18:32.120if under Bill C-11 the government hands the power to take those things down to the CRTC which is
00:18:39.380full of government appointees or even worse to a board of internet safety which is all government
00:18:46.580appointees and they say you know it doesn't have to be illegal for you to take it down if you think
00:18:52.340that this is dangerous misinformation you the safety board or the crtc have the power under
00:18:59.140this new law to start deciding what can and cannot be posted on the internet and that just
00:19:05.140that really frightens me. Well, it should. And I would point out to people here that in this case,
00:19:11.060the social media companies didn't take what I would say is a particularly principled free speech
00:19:16.420view. They didn't defend your reporting. They just said, listen, your fight's not with us.
00:19:20.280It's with the Calgary Sun. It's not our original content was the line, which, you know, as far as
00:19:24.520social media platforms go, I think that's a win. They just said to the government, you know, we're
00:19:28.540not interested in playing this game. But you look at now, as you've alluded to, Lorne, the policies
00:19:33.760that are coming down the pipeline, which would threaten social media companies with very steep
00:19:39.240fines if they don't take down content that's identified as being wrong in one of the several
00:19:45.420categories. And interestingly enough, I was just at a seminar about this. And if you look at the
00:19:50.520categories, they include misinformation in the same bundle as hate speech and child pornography.
00:19:58.020So they're using online harm laws that are intended for child pornography to go after, quote unquote, misinformation.
00:20:05.560Well, and they have a very wide, very broad definition of what constitute hate speech.
00:20:11.980When 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.
00:20:34.600Now, really, hate is in the ear of the hearer.
00:20:40.260So 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.
00:20:59.960We should keep children safe from pornographers.
00:21:05.480But 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.
00:21:23.160There's a good example of that, too.0.67
00:21:25.460The 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
00:21:41.600because 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,
00:21:56.660or that LGBTQ communities, I'm actually not phrasing that properly.
00:22:02.600No, but I get what you're saying, and as I was saying on the show yesterday,
00:22:05.880imagine if that power were extended to Fox News clips on YouTube,
00:22:09.820So 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.
00:22:17.200Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I have my own problems with Tucker Carlson.
00:22:22.060I 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.
00:22:32.540And now he's the fire breathing dragon of the alt right.
00:22:42.540No, but I have the same problem with all sorts of commentators on the left.
00:22:46.820Do 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?
00:22:58.200I like often to use the example of newspapers in London.
00:23:02.520There are eight daily newspapers in London, and none of them, except perhaps the Times of London, makes any claims to being balanced.
00:23:11.440What they say is that among the eight of us, there is balance.
00:23:16.480If 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.
00:23:23.800And, you know, that's how you get to balance and freedom of expression.
00:23:28.680But you don't do it through government regulators.
00:23:31.440No. 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.
00:23:59.780this is not a difficult concept and my editors did offer wex the the chairman of the uh of the
00:24:07.140immigration refugee board did offer him equal space to explain what it was that i had gone
00:24:14.420which is incredibly generous by the way of course of course it is but that's yeah i'm all for that
00:24:19.780if you don't like what i've written and you you will take the time to to pen your own 600 words
00:24:25.620have added that and now especially it's it's a little bit trickier when you have a printed
00:24:31.620newspaper but now that we all have websites with sort of unlimited space that's exactly how it
00:24:37.940should be handled but not going to the social media giants and saying this is dangerous misinformation
00:24:46.580you should take it down that that is nothing but censorship lauren gunter calgary sun columnist
00:24:53.060Glad you were not censored, and I'm glad to always continue to read your work.
00:24:57.160Thanks so much for coming on today, Lorne.