Juno News - Danielle Smith takes a stand against vaccine discrimination

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

00:00:05.580 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:10.560 Coming up, it was Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's first day on the job,

00:00:13.900 and she was spinning fire taking aim at vaccine discrimination. 0.79

00:00:18.000 Plus, a look ahead at the Public Order Emergency Commission.

00:00:21.200 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.

00:00:24.640 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:00:26.740 This is another edition of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, Wednesday, October 12, 2022.

00:00:33.840 Hope you are all having a wonderful week.

00:00:36.360 Happy Hump Day to you all.

00:00:38.000 It is a bit of an exciting day in Canadian politics.

00:00:41.280 The release of Pierre Polyev's Shadow Cabinet.

00:00:44.620 Okay, I don't know if that's actually exciting to you.

00:00:47.020 Although, I will say that a lot of people are very chuffed by the fact that Leslyn Lewis has secured a seat.

00:00:54.280 She is going to be Pierre Polyev's infrastructure and communities critic, which shouldn't be all that surprising.

00:01:01.000 She's a relatively prominent member of the Conservative caucus.

00:01:04.300 She's a two-time Conservative leadership candidate.

00:01:07.200 But I think a lot of people are fairly pessimistic, or at least were, after Erin O'Toole shoved her to, like, the back of the back benches.

00:01:14.960 I mean, she was basically in Gatineau.

00:01:16.440 She was so far in the back benches.

00:01:18.760 But Pierre Polyev has acknowledged that she is a key member of the team.

00:01:22.080 She's going to be in Shadow Cabinet. 1.00

00:01:23.320 She'll actually be, if I am understanding correctly, squaring off in question period, largely against the infrastructure minister, who is Dominic LeBlanc.

00:01:34.060 She'll also have a few opportunities to perhaps question Justin Trudeau.

00:01:38.100 So I think this will be something to watch.

00:01:40.260 But we'll have lots more time for question period analysis in the weeks and months to come.

00:01:45.460 I want to start off by talking about the inaugural press conference by the new Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith.

00:01:51.940 Now, let me just say, I used to be on 770 CHQR in Calgary, Danielle Smith's guest host.

00:02:00.120 So anytime she was unable to discharge her duties as talk radio host, I was the fill-in.

00:02:06.300 So I have a long enough history with Danielle Smith.

00:02:09.340 But the real thing that I want to point out, I was thinking of this last night.

00:02:12.600 I couldn't sleep, so I started thinking of all these different things.

00:02:15.000 I wonder if, as Danielle Smith's guest host, which is technically an arrangement that I don't think has ever formally been severed,

00:02:22.380 if I am Acting Premier of Alberta any time Danielle Smith should find herself presently unable to discharge duties. 0.98

00:02:30.220 If called upon, I will serve.

00:02:32.640 Although I don't think the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta will be calling on me any time soon.

00:02:36.900 But technically, if I'm still going to be the guest host, I get to be Acting Premier.

00:02:40.500 I don't make the rules. I'm a little rusty on the protocol, though.

00:02:43.380 But the people of Alberta, buckle in and get ready.

00:02:47.520 But Danielle Smith was doing her debut press conference this week, 0.75

00:02:50.900 and she was taking questions on a number of issues.

00:02:54.100 She was talking about the Sovereignty Act, first and foremost,

00:02:56.640 which I don't think the media is really going to want to let her off on.

00:03:00.580 But it wasn't until the tail end of the press conference where she got a question about her plan,

00:03:05.580 which I think is a very good one, to put vaccine status in the Alberta Human Rights Code

00:03:11.680 so it would be illegal, illegal under Alberta law to discriminate against people based on their vaccine status.

00:03:21.160 Now, Danielle Smith has been a longtime libertarian.

00:03:24.620 She is an advocate for individual choice.

00:03:26.760 She has been, throughout the course of the pandemic, an incredibly strong voice.

00:03:32.580 Incredibly strong voice on vaccine choice.

00:03:35.420 She was when she was on the radio.

00:03:36.960 She has been in her work since.

00:03:38.860 And she was during the campaign.

00:03:41.040 She had a very clear position on this, a very clear proposal.

00:03:43.660 She wasn't just saying, I'm against mandates.

00:03:45.260 She was saying, I have a way that we can codify in law this opposition to mandates.

00:03:50.540 And that was to put this human rights protection in place,

00:03:53.160 which protects your right to be unvaccinated the same way as it protects your right to be free from discrimination

00:03:58.780 as a racial minority based on your religion, your gender identity, your sexual orientation,

00:04:03.980 and all of these other things.

00:04:05.920 And she gave a very good answer, which has gotten now millions of views online when asked about this.

00:04:14.600 I have a question about vaccine choice and how you want to protect that under the Human Rights Act.

00:04:20.220 I'm wondering how a vaccine choice, how you see that as equal to something like race, gender, sexuality,

00:04:28.520 which we protect because those are not about choices.

00:04:32.540 Well, I guess the way I look at it is that the community that faced the most restrictions on their freedoms

00:04:38.800 in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated.

00:04:43.360 I don't think I've ever experienced a situation in my lifetime where a person was fired from their job

00:04:50.740 or not allowed to watch their kids play hockey or not allowed to go visit a loved one in long-term care or hospital

00:04:57.840 or not allowed to go get on a plane to either go across the country to see family or even travel across the border.

00:05:04.900 So they have been the most discriminated against group that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime.

00:05:10.180 That's a pretty extreme level of discrimination that we have seen.

00:05:14.020 I don't take away any of the discrimination that I've seen in those other groups that you mentioned.

00:05:18.980 But this has been an extraordinary time in the last year in particular.

00:05:24.400 And I want people to know that I find that unacceptable, that we are not going to create a segregated society on the basis of a medical choice.

00:05:32.980 The part that has a lot of people on the left just exploding their own minds, spontaneously combusting,

00:05:39.700 is Danielle Smith saying that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated against group she's ever seen in her lifetime.

00:05:48.740 Now, she was born in the early 70s.

00:05:50.740 I don't know exactly how old she is.

00:05:52.540 But nevertheless, she says that the unvaccinated in her lifetime are the most discriminated against group.

00:05:57.200 And on the surface, this does not sound like an inherently illogical thing to say.

00:06:02.180 In the last two years, certainly, the unvaccinated have been not just as a matter of discrimination and bigotry they experience in society,

00:06:10.120 but as a matter of systemic government-imposed policy discrimination barred from working in the civil service.

00:06:17.720 They've lost their jobs.

00:06:18.920 They were banned from taking planes.

00:06:20.560 They were forced into quarantine, banned from trains.

00:06:23.260 The amount of discrimination that has been heaped on the unvaccinated, not just by bigoted individuals, but by the state, is monumental.

00:06:33.040 At the same time, I also don't want to get into this comparison game.

00:06:37.860 When you make a comment like no one else has ever had that discrimination, which is not what she said,

00:06:43.380 but when you make that comment that it's worse than anything else, people start throwing their own understandable grievances there.

00:06:51.860 For example, in Danielle Smith's lifetime, there were still residential schools.

00:06:55.920 In Danielle Smith's lifetime, gay marriage did not exist with the force of law for much of it and so on.

00:07:02.820 But I don't like the comparison for a number of reasons, because I think all discrimination is wrong on its surface, on an individual basis.

00:07:11.120 You don't need to compare and shouldn't need to compare one person's discrimination against another.

00:07:16.080 And it's doing that that always rubs me the wrong way, because people try to delegitimize or minimize other people struggling because they think theirs is worse.

00:07:26.540 Whereas I take an equal opportunity approach on this.

00:07:28.920 Let's say that, yes, racial discrimination is bad.

00:07:32.020 So is vaccine discrimination.

00:07:33.560 The whole point of intersectionality, what we were told we're all supposed to move towards, is that we can't just look at these things in isolation.

00:07:41.820 But I think we need to, in a lot of ways, call them out on individual terms and call them out individually when bad things are happening, when discrimination is taking place.

00:07:51.900 And Danielle Smith, in the full context, in the full comment, does, by the way, say that she is not diminishing other discrimination that was raised in the question, such as racial and sexual orientation and so on.

00:08:06.560 She's not talking about diminishing or downplaying that.

00:08:09.600 She's just saying that we need to call out the horrendous discrimination that has been taking place on the grounds of vaccination status.

00:08:18.660 And this is a discrimination for which the federal government in Canada has been unrepentant, for which provincial governments in this country have been unrepentant, and for which no one in Canada, in Canadian politics who holds elected office, has taken the view that Danielle Smith has just done, which is to say this is wrong and it will never happen, and to do so in a believable way.

00:08:42.900 When she came out and said segregation would not exist in her province, Doug Ford said that in Ontario, that he would not support a segregated society.

00:08:51.600 Danielle Smith's predecessor, Jason Kenney, had at one time taken it off the table.

00:08:57.040 But Danielle Smith knows that history.

00:09:00.000 And Premier Smith, I should say, is well aware of that.

00:09:03.820 When she makes that commitment, I think she understands the weight of what it is she's committing to and what it is that she's promising.

00:09:11.560 And that is that there will not be a lockdown, there will not be segregation, and there will be protection of vaccine choice in Alberta from here on out.

00:09:24.140 And there's a reason that that clip has gone so viral, not just across Alberta, not just across Canada, but around the world.

00:09:30.660 I've got American friends, Australian friends, British friends that are sending me this, being like, who is this woman?

00:09:35.700 Like one person's like, I don't know what Alberta is. 0.57

00:09:37.760 I think it's a Canadian thing, but I'm all for it.

00:09:39.840 And that, to me, is exceptional, because right now we are in the midst of a global trend where governments and countries can stand and look at the fork in the road and say we can choose freedom or we can choose not freedom.

00:09:54.780 And most have been choosing not freedom.

00:09:57.400 Most have been choosing to go so far away from this idea of individual freedom.

00:10:01.560 In Australia, as Alexander Marshall, who's a tremendous commentator and writer for The Spectator, pointed out, Australia, even still, we're approaching three years since COVID was discovered.

00:10:13.660 And nearly three years on, Australia is still, in some parts, committing to vaccine discrimination.

00:10:20.420 Insane.

00:10:20.940 And it's an island nation.

00:10:22.900 The unvaccinated were, actually, I mean, the entire country was basically an open-air prison in large terms because of their inability to travel, to leave. 1.00

00:10:31.500 But the unvaccinated are still, are still significantly discriminated against.

00:10:36.940 Not, again, not incidentally, not peripherally, but as a matter of public policy.

00:10:43.320 And this is unacceptable.

00:10:44.720 And I said some weeks ago that there needs to be a reckoning.

00:10:48.320 It's not just enough to lift or suspend restrictions.

00:10:51.860 Governments need to be held to account.

00:10:53.980 They need to be ousted.

00:10:55.260 They need courts to slap them down. 1.00

00:10:57.120 And we need politicians that are going to say on behalf of their provinces, their countries, their jurisdictions, that this is not something that we will stand for.

00:11:06.140 And that is precisely what Danielle Smith did. 0.81

00:11:09.240 But it isn't just theoretical here.

00:11:11.380 She's talking about changing the Human Rights Act.

00:11:13.780 Fine.

00:11:14.720 She's also talking about the why.

00:11:17.460 And this is where I have to look at a bit of a global context right now.

00:11:21.200 And you probably know the clip I'm going to in a few moments' time from the European Parliament.

00:11:27.120 But I want to set the stage because that clip from Danielle Smith, that initial minute I just played, there's another minute where she talks about more of the scientific basis of this.

00:11:36.920 And this is where we actually need to go down the road of explaining a little bit about what the premise was.

00:11:43.900 The premise of vaccine passports, the stated premise, the public one that the government acknowledged, was that it was unsafe for the unvaccinated to congregate in a restaurant, in a sports venue, in a music venue, etc.

00:11:58.640 It was unsafe to do that because the unvaccinated were going to transmit COVID. 1.00

00:12:03.920 And then they were going to get sick.

00:12:06.040 And then they were going to overwhelm the hospital system.

00:12:08.120 And then so and so and so and so would happen.

00:12:10.480 And we would just have this collapse of society.

00:12:13.400 So the premise of the vaccine passport was that you need to be vaccinated and ensure that all the people around you are vaccinated for certain spaces to be safe, whether they were airplanes or restaurants.

00:12:25.540 That was the premise.

00:12:27.320 Community spread needed to be stopped.

00:12:30.360 Vaccination was going to do that.

00:12:32.140 A lot of people got vaccinated, not because they personally felt at risk of COVID, but because they wanted to save grandma, the titular grandma, the center of all our COVID policy.

00:12:44.620 They got vaccinated to save her life, not their own.

00:12:47.820 And a lot of people bought into this idea.

00:12:53.140 And I totally understand it.

00:12:55.360 When everyone is saying that vaccines prevent transmission, that's typically been our understanding of a vaccine.

00:13:00.560 I totally get that.

00:13:02.420 So people get vaccinated because they want to stop transmission.

00:13:05.880 We know that has been an absolute farce, especially in the Omicron era, the booster era.

00:13:10.840 The vaccines are not stopping transmission.

00:13:13.180 The benefit of the vaccine that's stated and promoted now is reduced to limiting your personal risk of hospitalization or death, which means it is the epitome of an individual choice.

00:13:26.380 It affects no one else, whether you get vaccinated or you don't get vaccinated.

00:13:33.560 So let's go back to where this comes from.

00:13:36.600 So Danielle Smith says the following after that initial bit about the vaccine discrimination she wants to end.

00:13:43.620 I think that there was a lot of hope that the vaccine would offer a sterilizing immunity.

00:13:50.180 And as a result, I think everybody was working very hard to get to a high level of vaccination.

00:13:54.640 We've now seen that it mutates dramatically and we have to start treating it a lot more like influenza.

00:13:59.640 Now influenza has about a one third of the population and decides each year to protect themselves with vaccination.

00:14:07.240 I think we're right now at a level of booster shots of 39 percent of people deciding to protect themselves.

00:14:12.300 And I think that's the way we have to start talking once again about this particular type of vaccine is that vaccination really is for self-protection in this case,

00:14:22.200 because you have to make your own choice about what your own medical status is in conjunction with your own doctor and your own pre-existing medical conditions.

00:14:29.800 And we have to stop trying to victimize a particular group because they've made a different choice.

00:14:37.060 So I know that that's going to be a little challenging for some people who've been holding a different view for a long period of time.

00:14:44.940 But if I need to make the point that this kind of discrimination is unacceptable, the best way to do it is by changing the Human Rights Act.

00:14:52.500 She lays it out quite well. It's a personal choice.

00:14:55.920 Let's turn to Brussels in the European Parliament, where Dutch MEP, member of the European Parliament, Robert Roos,

00:15:02.760 was questioning an executive from Pfizer by the name Janine Small.

00:15:07.380 And he asked if Pfizer had ever done any study on that exact premise, the one that we were told by all our government officials,

00:15:16.080 that premise that vaccines prevent transmission.

00:15:19.360 Was the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?

00:15:30.360 If not, please say it clearly.

00:15:33.200 If yes, are you willing to share the data with this committee?

00:15:38.000 And I really want a straight answer, yes or no, and I'm looking forward to it.

00:15:42.480 Thank you very much.

00:15:45.320 Regarding the question around, did we know about stopping the humanization before it entered the market?

00:15:51.680 No.

00:15:52.880 These, you know, we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.

00:15:59.560 And from that point of view, we had to do everything at risk.

00:16:04.920 Well, interesting.

00:16:06.860 So no, they didn't.

00:16:08.240 Now, she uses the word immunization there, which is a misspeak, I believe.

00:16:12.380 The question was about transmission.

00:16:14.460 Her answer, we presume, is about transmission, unless this woman who lives in England doesn't actually understand English language very well, 0.52

00:16:21.380 which you never know.

00:16:22.500 But she says it was never tested because they had to move at the speed of science.

00:16:27.160 So the speed of science, I'm guessing that's very quick, so quick you can't study something.

00:16:32.480 Now, okay, fine.

00:16:34.900 Then why make that part of the pitch?

00:16:37.600 Why make that part of the promise?

00:16:40.780 Why tell people that it prevents transmission to make it a moral obligation and then a legal requirement

00:16:48.480 to get vaccinated to protect other people if the vaccine doesn't protect other people?

00:16:56.120 And this is as close to the smoking gun on this issue as we've gotten on transmission,

00:17:04.260 when even Pfizer itself is saying we didn't really have a basis for the claim that it prevents transmission.

00:17:12.240 That's the admission from Pfizer here, that we didn't really have a basis for that claim.

00:17:16.200 So anytime it's been said, anytime government has said it, that wasn't coming in scientific terms.

00:17:20.920 There was no following the science anytime someone was telling us that the vaccine prevented transmission.

00:17:26.480 So the vaccine passport then comes down to what people were called conspiracy theorists,

00:17:35.500 what I was called a conspiracy theorist for saying, in that it was about control and it was about coercion.

00:17:43.120 And the vaccine passport wasn't about reducing transmission by limiting the unvaccinated's presence. 0.53

00:17:48.940 It was about just keeping people home and making their life so miserable if they were unvaccinated 1.00

00:17:56.100 that they got vaccinated because it was their only way to enjoy the full right to citizenship.

00:18:04.300 Emmanuel Macron said the quiet part out loud about this when he said he wanted to emmerder,

00:18:10.580 to piss off the unvaccinated. 1.00

00:18:13.260 He wanted it to be unpleasant to be an unvaccinated Frenchman or Frenchwoman

00:18:16.760 so that you would get vaccinated because that was your way to enjoy life.

00:18:21.160 Justin Trudeau never thought that it would be safer to travel on an airplane

00:18:26.200 if only vaccinated people were on it.

00:18:28.840 He just didn't want the unvaccinated to be able to enjoy the full rights of Canadian citizenship. 0.98

00:18:35.620 Take a look at how he described this during the election.

00:18:38.900 You deserve a government that's going to continue to say, get vaccinated.

00:18:42.780 And you know what?

00:18:43.540 If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice.

00:18:47.700 But don't think you can get on a plane or a train besides vaccinated people and put them at risk.

00:18:54.040 Ah, yes, you technically have a right to be unvaccinated, but oh, you don't have a right to get on a plane.

00:19:00.500 You don't have a right to get on the train.

00:19:01.980 You don't have a right to work.

00:19:03.160 You don't have a right to be happy, to see your family members, to go on vacation.

00:19:07.360 But sure, it's a choice.

00:19:08.900 The vaccine passport was never a choice for people.

00:19:15.280 People got vaccinated because it was their only way to put food on the table.

00:19:18.600 That is not a choice.

00:19:20.380 Consent is not something that can come under duress or come from coercion.

00:19:24.440 We've been told that in sexual context for years.

00:19:28.320 But in a vaccine context, everyone's okay with coercion.

00:19:31.220 Everyone's okay with just saying that we are going to do this because we have to and say that's a choice.

00:19:37.660 And this should not depend, your perspective of this should not depend on your vaccination status.

00:19:44.180 You should be able to be outraged about what governments did, whether you're vaccinated or not.

00:19:51.260 You could have four, five, six, 17 doses right now, and you should be able to accept that if that was a choice, fine.

00:19:58.520 No one should be forced into that or coerced into that by the state.

00:20:02.580 Because even if you want to break this down into philosophical terms and ethical terms,

00:20:09.160 the only justification there ever could have been, and again, I do not believe that it justified vaccine mandates or vaccine passports,

00:20:17.280 but the only justification there could ever have been is if the decision came down to the life and safety and well-being of others and not just your own.

00:20:27.820 And that's so critical because, you know, even the most fire-breathing libertarians will say that your rights

00:20:34.280 only extend up until the point where they infringe on others.

00:20:37.620 That old line about how, you know, your right to extend your arm ends where your fist ends and someone else's face begins.

00:20:44.000 So if vaccination protected your fist from hitting someone's face, to use the metaphor,

00:20:53.460 then there would at least have been an ethical debate about it.

00:20:56.880 Again, I'm not saying that I would have landed on the mandate side, but that was the whole premise.

00:21:02.600 Pfizer's own executive has now taken that premise off the table.

00:21:07.300 Will there be any accountability from government?

00:21:10.380 Will there be any transparency on this?

00:21:12.500 I highly doubt it.

00:21:14.760 And if you look at the media, the reporting of this, the reporting of this exchange in the European Parliament

00:21:20.100 has been reduced only to these, you know, fringe minority alternative independent media outlets.

00:21:25.740 I've not seen the mainstream media pick up about it, but I know that any minute now there will be the usual self-righteous fact checks

00:21:31.800 on why anyone sharing this clip is, you know, just a knuckle-dragging troglodyte and doesn't understand it and so on.

00:21:38.200 Which is why I think so many people have been inspired and encouraged by what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said.

00:21:45.140 Which is that this is an individual choice, that we will not stand as a society for this level of discrimination,

00:21:53.380 especially when the discrimination has no basis in science,

00:21:59.740 which is the one thing that could have been used as a trump card,

00:22:03.240 which is, yes, we're discriminating, but the variants.

00:22:06.160 Yes, we're discriminating, but the science.

00:22:08.020 Yes, we're discriminating, but community spread and getting transmission down and all of that.

00:22:12.040 Well, that is not what is happening here, is not what is happening here.

00:22:18.700 We've got to take a quick break.

00:22:20.300 When we come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.

00:22:23.240 Stay tuned.

00:22:26.900 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:22:32.100 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:22:34.700 I spoke a little bit yesterday about the Emergencies Act commission hearings that are starting up tomorrow.

00:22:41.480 They commence Thursday and run for, I think it's like six and a half, seven weeks.

00:22:45.620 This is the Public Order Emergency Commission.

00:22:48.600 I wanted to talk a little bit more about that because yesterday morning,

00:22:52.680 and I didn't read it on the show because I had recorded the show a bit earlier yesterday,

00:22:56.320 the witness list was published by the Public Order Emergency Commission.

00:23:00.500 So this is the 65 anticipated witnesses that they're going to call to testify as to all the things that happened in the course of the convoy

00:23:10.600 and the Emergencies Act and invoking it and all of that.

00:23:14.440 And I wanted to talk a little bit about that list because I'm one of these people that's holding out a bit of romanticized,

00:23:20.300 perhaps idealized and, yeah, perhaps naive hope that we will find a semblance of truth in this commission and in the hearings.

00:23:29.720 And again, maybe not in the findings.

00:23:32.700 Maybe we don't get the definitive ruling that it was wrong to invoke the Emergencies Act.

00:23:37.520 But my hope is that we at least get through the testimony a level of truth that we haven't really been getting from government talking points.

00:23:45.280 And I wanted to talk again about who these 65 people are.

00:23:49.360 Blacklock's reported it had been a number crudging here, but effectively one-fifth, 20% of the federal cabinet appears on that witness list.

00:23:57.880 And if you look at it here, among those names are Christopher Freeland, the Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister,

00:24:04.940 Dominic LeBlanc, David Lemeny, the Justice Minister, Omar Al-Gabra, the Transport Minister,

00:24:10.420 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Bill Blair as the Emergency Preparedness Minister,

00:24:16.120 Marco Mendicino of Public Safety, Anita Anand of National Defence.

00:24:22.300 And then beyond that, you've got other bureaucrats from various departments.

00:24:26.360 You've got Finance Canada bureaucrats and Global Affairs and the Privy Council Office.

00:24:31.400 You've got RCMP, Ottawa Police, Canada Border Services Agency, Transport Canada, and all that jazz.

00:24:38.140 But then you look at some of the municipal officials that are on there, and I find this to be quite interesting.

00:24:44.400 Now, let me just say, a couple of Ontario government people, Doug Ford not on the list.

00:24:50.600 I find that interesting.

00:24:52.120 I don't know the why, because remember, Doug Ford was one of the ones that had actually come out

00:24:56.760 and was far more sympathetic to Trudeau than, say, Scott Moe and Francois Legault and Jason Kenney were

00:25:03.120 when it came to the Emergencies Act.

00:25:05.200 But then you've got beyond the Ontario people, you've got the Cootes mayor, Jim Ouellette.

00:25:11.100 You've got the mayor of Windsor, Drew Dilkins, and a lot of people from the convoy that have not been able to tell their stories

00:25:19.140 because of bail conditions, like Tamara Leach and Chris Barber.

00:25:22.720 And then you've got other people that we have had on the show before,

00:25:25.540 Benjamin Dichter and Tom Marazzo, Bridget Belton I've spoken to.

00:25:29.700 So here's the interesting one, Patrick King.

00:25:33.480 Now, this is where a lot of people's spidey senses started tingling,

00:25:37.420 because Pat King, as you may know, who also, again, has not been able to tell his story

00:25:42.140 because of bail conditions and whatnot, and he was incarcerated for just months and months.

00:25:47.080 But Pat King is on the list.

00:25:48.380 Now, he was not in any meaningful way a convoy organizer.

00:25:51.600 He was an early booster.

00:25:53.060 He was someone that obviously was invested in the convoy and ingrained in the convoy.

00:25:58.480 But why on earth is he one of 65 people that the Government of Canada's commission feels it can get a solid sense of the convoy from?

00:26:11.960 And I don't know what went into crafting this list.

00:26:15.840 I don't know who decided it.

00:26:17.040 I mean, ultimately, it's the commissioner that was responsible.

00:26:19.820 That's Justice Paul Rouleau for setting this out and sending out the invitations.

00:26:24.660 But it does look like his presence on this list, Pat King, is to muddy the waters.

00:26:30.900 And here's a guy that convoy organizers, and I talk about this in my book,

00:26:35.080 convoy organizers were perpetually annoyed by because he kept inserting himself into situations.

00:26:41.060 He kept trying to show up.

00:26:42.260 He kept trying to steal the thunder and steal the spotlight and all of that.

00:26:45.620 And I have no doubt that he'll do the same testifying before the Public Order Emergency Commission.

00:26:52.640 And moreover, he will be, and it sounds like the government may want him to be the guy in charge,

00:26:59.680 the scapegoat, because he's the weak link.

00:27:01.640 He's the one that they can use to, in their view, delegitimize the entire operation.

00:27:06.360 And I think the only reason he's there, because he had no authority, he had no real command,

00:27:12.120 he had a sway over his own audience when that was about it.

00:27:15.860 He wasn't connected to the money, he wasn't connected to the core group of leaders in any way

00:27:20.380 that involved him actually leading anything or controlling this thing.

00:27:24.700 But he's there.

00:27:26.840 And I think it's because the government wants to hold him up as being the ringleader behind this whole thing.

00:27:31.540 And I'm calling it now, before these hearings even start, that's going to be the narrative they try to put forward.

00:27:37.380 And the questions, they're just going to puff him up and elevate him and elevate him to such an extent

00:27:41.680 where they can say that he was really the guy that held this thing together.

00:27:46.520 And I don't know if that narrative is going to crumble under cross-examination,

00:27:50.220 simply because I don't know the format that they're going to have for these things.

00:27:54.740 And that's why we tried to get a little bit of a sense of that and a bit of a glimpse

00:27:58.400 with Keith Wilson last week when we were talking to him.

00:28:02.160 I'm also, just beyond packing, interested in seeing what's going to happen with Peter slowly.

00:28:07.400 Here's a guy who was, I'd say, defenestrated.

00:28:10.520 He was forced to resign in the midst of this all

00:28:13.700 and hasn't himself really been able to tell his story here.

00:28:17.420 So that's going to be one that I am keeping an eye out for.

00:28:21.160 Tom Marazzo pointed out, and I've had Tom on the show,

00:28:24.160 he was the army captain that did a lot of the logistical work behind the scenes of the convoy.

00:28:29.460 He found it interesting, and I did as well, that the OPP and Ottawa police liaisons

00:28:35.980 that were on the ground every day talking to convoy organizers,

00:28:40.520 that they haven't been called as witnesses.

00:28:43.160 So the people that are there representing the OPP and the Ottawa police and the RCMP,

00:28:48.820 they're the brass, they're the leaders, not the people that were actually on the ground.

00:28:53.120 Now, it's presumed, I suppose, if you want to take an optimistic view,

00:28:58.120 that the brass have been briefed by the people on the ground.

00:29:01.620 But if we're trying to get a full sense of what was happening,

00:29:04.940 shouldn't we be hearing from the people that were themselves on the ground?

00:29:09.280 And it genuinely looks like there is a filtering taking place,

00:29:14.680 where it's not about trying to get anyone and everyone that has facts to testify.

00:29:19.380 It's a curated list.

00:29:20.720 For example, Zexy Lee, who's the Ottawa public servant who's filed the class action lawsuit against the convoy,

00:29:29.080 she's there.

00:29:30.180 Okay, if we're going to have her, let's have lots of other people. 0.99

00:29:33.980 Let's have other individual truckers there. 0.99

00:29:36.060 So this is, to me, I find quite a fascinating turn.

00:29:40.840 And I'm not going to get conspiratorial just yet.

00:29:43.220 There are a lot of people that think this is just a whitewash through and through,

00:29:45.980 that there's not really going to be any sense of truth,

00:29:48.820 that it's all just about trying to gloss over it.

00:29:51.020 I'm going to withhold judgment on that,

00:29:52.700 because genuinely, I want to see the line of questioning.

00:29:54.960 I want to see how these testimonies actually start unfolding.

00:29:59.180 If you've got, and I just want to do some math here, which I should have done ahead of time,

00:30:04.300 but I'm not a math guy, so I don't do math often.

00:30:07.260 But let's say we've got seven weeks, seven weeks at five days, that's 35 days.

00:30:13.700 We've got 65 witnesses over 35 days.

00:30:17.860 I don't know how many hours they're going to do of testimony every day.

00:30:22.420 I imagine they'll do courtroom hours, and they'll take breaks and take lunch breaks and whatever.

00:30:26.900 But theoretically, they could do two witnesses a day,

00:30:30.340 which means they get a couple of hours with every witness.

00:30:33.540 Now, are they going to do 10 minutes with Pat King and four hours with Justin Trudeau,

00:30:38.420 or are they going to do three days with some Finance Canada bureaucrat

00:30:42.620 and five minutes with Justin Trudeau?

00:30:45.160 Don't know yet.

00:30:46.220 And again, I'm going to withhold judgment until this happens.

00:30:48.760 But what I will say is that True North is going to have daily updates on this.

00:30:53.020 We're going to be monitoring it all day, every day.

00:30:55.560 We're going to have daily recaps.

00:30:57.420 We're going to do video updates at various points as well.

00:31:00.600 I'm going to be in Ottawa for bits and pieces of it.

00:31:03.720 My colleague, Eli Kensington-Nantel, is going to be in Ottawa as well.

00:31:07.640 But they're supposed to be streaming the whole thing.

00:31:09.660 So if you want to just not get it filtered through our lens,

00:31:13.160 but want to see it for yourself, you'll be able to.

00:31:15.040 And that link will supposedly be available to you starting tomorrow.

00:31:20.280 Although the information from the commission has so far been a little bit scant and delayed.

00:31:27.920 And remember, these things were supposed to have started about four weeks ago,

00:31:32.420 but the commissioner had a medical emergency, so they were bumped back to now.

00:31:36.520 So they're starting tomorrow.

00:31:37.680 The Public Order Emergency Commission is upon us.

00:31:40.060 And True North is going to have you covered as we go through this process in the next little while.

00:31:46.100 So that's going to be something to keep an eye out for,

00:31:48.100 and we'll talk about that on the show next week as well.

00:31:50.560 And also, Fake News Friday is coming up in just a couple days.

00:31:54.120 So I'll be back with Harrison Faulkner on that.

00:31:57.160 You won't want to miss it.

00:31:58.000 If you do want to support the work that True North is doing,

00:32:00.240 please head on over to donate.tnc.news.

00:32:03.820 Donate.tnc.news.

00:32:05.500 And that does it for me for today.

00:32:07.920 We'll be back soon enough with more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:32:11.540 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:32:14.180 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:32:16.440 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:32:21.900 www.tnc.news.com

Juno News - October 12, 2022

Danielle Smith takes a stand against vaccine discrimination

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript