00:04:04.700When I have attempted to cover statements and announcements
00:04:07.460by Justin Trudeau in the past, what's happened has been...
00:04:12.420Sean, see if you can get Rachel to dial in on the show, actually,
00:04:15.600because I can't carry on this text conversation with her.
00:04:17.860So see if we can get Rachel for a few minutes to connect here,
00:04:21.200assuming she's not in handcuffs and being thrown into the back of an RCMP cruiser.
00:04:25.460But if she wants to dial in from the back of an RCMP cruiser, she is more than welcome to.
00:04:29.780But I wasn't even going to talk about this because, as I said earlier,
00:04:33.100Justin Trudeau bans independent journalists from covering his press conference.
00:04:36.500That is sadly a dog bites man story now because this is just par for the course
00:04:41.720from a government and a prime minister that does not want to answer a single question
00:04:45.860from a non-state approved media outlet.
00:04:49.560And by the way, that's quite literally the case.
00:04:52.660The federal government will oftentimes refer to their press conferences as only being available to members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
00:05:00.060Now, that is a group set up under the auspices of the Speaker of the House of Commons.
00:05:04.800It's self-regulating in the sense that journalists who are members are very cliquey often and decide who is going to join their ranks.
00:05:12.900But it is a body that is given a mandate by Parliament, effectively by the government.
00:05:18.800So when Justin Trudeau turns around and says, well, we'll only take questions from journalists
00:05:22.920that are a member of this group, they're setting up an arbitrary standard.
00:05:27.340They are setting up an arbitrary standard by which they get to decide who's in and who's
00:05:32.820out because they kind of just know who the press gallery is not going to allow in, who
00:05:37.300the press gallery is not going to admit as a member.
00:05:42.320It might not be all that surprising, but here you have a storied, well-respected, credible journalist in Alberta that is banned from asking a single question of the Prime Minister when he is literally in her own turf, when he is in Alberta.
00:05:57.900Now, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, had a bit of a different approach.
00:06:02.420She met with Trudeau earlier today and on her way out, stopped to take several questions from Rachel Emanuel, from Kian Bexley, from all those who had been relegated to the parking lot.
00:06:12.840The Danielle Smith, without her phalanx of bodyguards that Justin Trudeau had, just took a stroll and stopped and answered some questions.
00:06:20.440And you know what? Nothing bad happened. Nothing catastrophic happened, because when people go to the lengths that Justin Trudeau's staff go through to prevent you from answering questions, what they're really saying is that they don't trust their guy.
00:06:35.180They don't trust their candidate. They don't trust their prime minister to be able to answer these questions.
00:06:40.020Now, why this is actually relevant to the topic I was planning on leading off about in my monologue today is because we're talking about what government can do when it has a level of power and authority, the way that government can exercise its whims in a very arbitrary way, and the rest of us just have to go along with it.
00:06:58.780Now, why this is relevant is because the federal government right now is trying to push Bill C-63.
00:07:03.900I've been talking about it for the last two weeks.
00:18:34.840And that's the kind of thing that is really not clear from the underlying data, where
00:18:39.060if you look at the trends for extreme weather events, for example, as I talk about in the
00:18:43.460column we're based on today. Yes, there seems to be globally, there has been an increase in warm
00:18:50.500weather events or in weather events where they're warmer in the summertime, warmer in the
00:18:57.320wintertime, right? Greater highs, less to low lows, things like that. But when you start moving
00:19:03.060into the other indicators like floods and like droughts and like tropical, like hurricanes or
00:19:08.700tropical cyclones, like wildfire season, which is, of course, something that's top of mind for
00:19:13.580Canadians still. What you find is that the data when you look there is highly fragmentary. There
00:19:19.680is data in some parts of the world, but many others are not even measured. The data is
00:19:24.200inconsistent. There are some trends that are going up, have gone up, and some have gone down
00:19:28.400over the same trend in droughts or cyclones and landfalling hurricanes and their intensities and
00:19:35.560things like that. Wildfire risk, as we showed in other papers that we've written, wildfire,
00:19:42.160in Canada, wildfires are down in number and extent. And also globally, there's no trend in wildfire
00:19:47.660area and extent or fire season expansion or worsening of fire seasons. So yeah, when you,
00:19:55.360the problem here is we're getting, we're being oversold on the confidence and the meaning of the
00:20:03.040limited amount of data available for the the changes in these trends but the underlying source
00:20:07.840like the ipcc again they're actually much more modest than our politicians are when you look at
00:20:11.600their data they say they have medium confidence they have some low con a lot of low confidence
00:20:16.480in some of these indicators having been seen to change even since 1950.
00:20:22.480yeah i mean the ipcc is an interesting part of this though because i i know that there have been
00:20:27.840criticisms level that the data in the IPCC report say one thing, but the executive summary
00:20:34.340says another. And you have a lot of what we would call in the media business editorializing
00:20:40.500on what the figures are actually saying there. And certainly politicians, as you note, are guilty of
00:20:45.840that. I mean, it used to be maybe a little over a decade ago before then that global warming was
00:20:51.260the threat. It was global warming. And that was easily understood because we all know what a
00:20:55.580temperature is you know 22 is warmer than 20 and then the the narrative change to climate change
00:21:01.600and all of a sudden everything is a symptom of that if it's really cold one day that's also the
00:21:06.800same problem as if it's really warm one day if it's windy and at a certain point what we used
00:21:10.980to just call weather is now indicative of a climate crisis yeah and I mean that's a that's
00:21:17.760a problem I mean that I don't have a big problem with the change in the terminology from global
00:21:22.060warming to climate change because um it's still called global warming at the heart it's the it's
00:21:27.180the changes that manifest because it's warming that is now the focus it has been in the last 15
00:21:32.220years um but back to the ipcc i mean it's it you're right which is when you look at the ipcc
00:21:37.740reports first of all there are these incredible three volume sets that come out around every five
00:21:41.740years they're what they call assessment reports thousands and thousands of contributors is
00:21:46.460dedicated to the science of climate change and it's it's quite rigorous and pretty much everybody on
00:21:51.180any side of the issue of climate issues tends to agree it does its best to be a genuine summation
00:21:57.100of the state of the physical basis and physical knowledge about climate change but that's not the
00:22:03.900part the politicians read or base their their views on they they read the summaries of those
00:22:09.820technical reports and then they read summaries of the summaries that are specifically for policy
00:22:14.220makers that are are written with with an eye toward answering policymaker questions about how
00:22:19.660they can get their policies implemented right the basis of their policies and so um you have to dig
00:22:25.820fairly deep to see that you're being told that something is highly certain when in fact it's
00:22:31.340highly uncertain and yet yet the solutions that are being proposed are so draconian that you would
00:22:37.420expect the government to actually be basing them on seriously hard rigorous data of and and knowledge
00:22:44.140of risk that can be averted. So there is a mismatch there between what the politicians
00:22:49.320read in their summaries and what they say from those summaries and the actual underlying data
00:22:54.720around the world. So explain to me when we hear the rhetoric of crisis, what are they citing?
00:23:02.520Is it that they're making a claim and they're using spurious evidence or are they kind of just
00:23:07.000making it without even providing an attempt at evidence? They're primarily making it without
00:23:11.520providing without attempting to provide a definition of what a crisis is or or the evidence
00:23:16.080they were going with tipping points for a long time i don't know if you noticed but tipping
00:23:19.600points was a big deal for the last seven or eight years it was tipping point tipping point tipping
00:23:23.680point which never which happened in the net so they dropped their tipping points and now they're
00:23:28.080we're going with a climate crisis but you know to me to me of course a crisis is a suddenness
00:23:33.760a crisis is something that happens um in the moment it's not a problem that's that is playing
00:23:39.840out over 100 years it's a problem that's going to start manifesting itself or significantly tomorrow
00:23:46.640that's a crisis you have a crisis right now when the sea level is rising so slowly that you could
00:23:51.520actually crawl away from it faster than uh than it's rising um over the next 100 years that's
00:23:58.080not a climate crisis um if you had you know a one-tenth of one percent increase in in uh
00:24:04.400hurricane wind speeds but they're not making landfall that's not a crisis so so they're
00:24:10.160evoking a crisis it's i think mostly it's a crisis of the fact that their governments are failing
00:24:14.240to get support for their policies um and and that the uh the policies are proving to be
00:24:19.680much more harmful than good so it's more of a climate crisis of government policy than it is
00:24:24.560of the actual climate yeah and i think that that is the the critical point here and and we've seen
00:24:30.400and i may be pulling you more into a political realm than you're comfortable being here so feel
00:24:34.160free to run the other direction if you need to but it does seem the government has really started
00:24:38.640adopting a lot of the language that we used to only have from a relatively small set of activists
00:24:42.800on this um yes and i'm not and i wouldn't limit it to canada's government either no it's governments
00:24:49.760around the world and and um uh but as i've said the governments have been ratcheting up this uh
00:24:55.600this rhetoric on climate change over the years um in proportion to how sort of extreme their
00:25:01.280policies are in the way that the policies would impact people's lives the economy um their standard
00:25:07.520of living and so knowing that these policies are more and more intrusive and more and more
00:25:13.680draconian in terms of their impact on people's lives it seems like the political world has
00:25:18.240brought the rhetoric up uh to to try to support that uh by by making the rhetoric more harsh and
00:25:24.800more uh more worrisome over time um that's that's not and i don't think that's political because
00:25:31.360all politicians do it um regardless of whether they're they're they're whatever their issue is
00:25:36.320of that they feel is important they pretty much all over over sell their confidence and and the
00:25:41.840importance of their issues so uh but yeah i mean it is it is a you wouldn't have seen people other
00:25:46.720Other than Greta Thunberg and Al Gore making these kind of full-throated, you know, exhortations of, my God, we're all going to die if we don't act immediately.
00:26:07.240To have them coming from environment ministers is somewhat new, but, you know, it's not unheard of either.
00:26:16.060so i the upshot here really is that you know the extreme weather narrative just itself
00:26:22.060lacks the underlying data is it not yes it does as i said there there is there is data here and
00:26:29.260there from around the world over certain periods of time and trends where there have been increases
00:26:34.700in observed extreme weather there's also increases or decreases in extreme weather events
00:26:43.020And of course, that's the norm for the Earth. The Earth is not a static system, right? So
00:26:48.140over any given period of time, the UN starts from 1950 for these indicators, because that's when the
00:26:53.820data started being measured well. But, you know, from between 1950 and now, you'll have lots of
00:27:02.22010 and 20 and 30 and 40 year periods where the one trend goes up before it turns down,
00:27:07.580another trend is going down before it turns up so so um it always has to be kept in mind it's a
00:27:13.340very big earth uh it's a very small pool of people able to measure the climate system on earth and
00:27:19.560the technology to measure it with is limited and so we have there really needs to be some more
00:27:24.940humility about when we're talking in blanket statements about what's happening with the
00:27:29.420climate it displays a distinct lack of humility all right well fascinating piece in the calgary
00:27:36.460son that you had Kenneth Green senior fellow with the Fraser Institute always a pleasure
00:27:40.540always a pleasure thank you all right thank you very much I want to just before we go to our next
00:27:45.780guest I want to talk about corporate Canada and lobbyists and lobbying and all of that we'll have
00:27:49.560Aaron Woodrick joining us in a few moments time but I want to circle back to the online harm stuff
00:27:54.280because I didn't get a chance to play this one clip which was actually quite a strong one that
00:27:59.500was on my colleague Harrison Faulkner show the Faulkner show I'm not going to besmirch someone
00:28:04.400for an unoriginal name on the Andrew Lawton Show. But the Faulkner Show, he had on it a fascinating
00:28:10.060interview with David Thomas, who's a lawyer and formerly the chair of the Canadian Human Rights
00:28:15.160Tribunal, which is the body that will ultimately be adjudicating all of these speech crimes that
00:28:20.360Bill C-63 brings into the Canadian Human Rights Act. And this is a guy who, no, he was literally
00:28:26.240at the helm of the body that would be adjudicating these. Now, he's no longer on it, which is why he
00:28:30.280can speak out about these things but his words i think are incredibly important here take a look
00:28:35.800people are going to be afraid to say what they want they're going to be afraid to post things
00:28:40.600online they're going to be afraid to say things uh at an all candidates debate or something like
00:28:46.040that they're going to be very mindful about uh what might uh by the consequences of this legislation
00:28:52.520i think this is the this is the really unfair thing about this right i mean if you really want
00:28:57.960uh to to do something to protect people you have to be clear and it's a cop-out for politicians
00:29:04.440to throw a vague uh lousy definition of hate speech out there and just say oh it'll take
00:29:09.880care of itself the damage that will be caused in the meantime will be immense and it will be a
00:29:15.560chilling effect for everybody in this country and and and there's some really interesting changes
00:29:21.080uh Harrison that want to talk about like in terms of what the penalties are right
00:29:25.160so right now if if the tribunal finds that somebody has uh breached the canadian rights act and
00:29:32.040they've done something that's discriminatory the tribunal member can award up to twenty thousand
00:29:37.880dollars for pain and suffering and they can award another twenty thousand dollars if the conduct of
00:29:43.080the respondent was willful and reckless now under these new proposed changes to the act for hate
00:29:49.640speech the tribunal can award up to twenty thousand dollars for any victim
00:29:56.120identified right so who who's that right is that the person that brought the
00:30:02.060complaint is it everybody on the tribe on the internet that saw a video or a
00:30:08.540post that was considered to be aid speech like who is that so that's that's
00:30:13.160the first question I have the second question the second point is that and
00:30:18.140And this is really kind of really unusual, is that the tribunal can then award, if somebody had willful intent to commit hate speech, they can impose a fine up to $50,000, which is payable to the government of Canada.
00:30:35.220it's unreal when you think of it to go back to the point i i started off on here about how
00:30:44.740canadians i think are overwhelmingly going to go along with something like this and i i hope that
00:30:51.480the conservatives is the only party that's really said it's going to stand opposed to this and
00:30:56.300certainly those of us in the civil society space that are opposing this i i hope we do
00:31:01.960a lot to turn around what Canadians think hate speech is. Because that's the linchpin of all of
00:31:09.760this. It's that, sure, we can all stand up and say, oh, yes, we think hate's bad and, you know,
00:31:14.260hate speech is bad and all that. But if we don't have a universal definition of what that is, I
00:31:18.520mean, I don't want to list a bunch of examples of things that may be hate speech and may not be
00:31:22.920hate speech. Because then I know that, you know, Press Progress is just going to like take all of
00:31:26.880the context away and just show a clip of Andrew saying something, saying something bad. I say
00:31:31.160enough bad things why you need to do this but that's going to be what ends up happening here
00:31:35.220and it really comes down to the fundamental point do you trust the government to make this
00:31:40.740determination uh just uh to bring in aaron woodrick on this he is the head of the domestic policy
00:31:45.820program at the mcdonald laurier institute it's always good to talk to him aaron i i want to talk
00:31:50.980to you about corporate canada and lobbying in a few moments but but just on this bill i mean
00:31:54.540what do you think the weakness is that's going to turn canadians against this because i'm not sure
00:31:59.400if the fundamental question of free speech is as galvanizing as perhaps I would like it to be
00:32:04.920in the general population. Yeah, I think, but I do think this idea of hate, right, as being
00:32:12.460something easily defined and being able to, I mean, if people who read the lawyers who read this
00:32:17.040bill, I mean, the government and the minister insist that it's a very clear line. Everyone
00:32:21.220knows the difference between, you know, mere disdain and sort of disgust. I mean, most people
00:32:26.440don't feel that way. And I think the nefarious thing about this bill is that it is going to
00:32:30.920achieve a chill on speech just out of an abundance of precaution, right? Like if you're a platform
00:32:34.980or you're an individual and you're not sure where the line is, you're probably going to stay really
00:32:38.740far back from the line. And the result of that is a chilling on speech. And that's a bad thing.
00:32:43.300That is a bad thing. We want to have maximum robust discussion on things, even if it's offensive,
00:32:48.420even if it's uncomfortable. And the idea that we're not going to worry about a fuzzy line and
00:32:53.200that the judges will figure it out later is very, very alarming language from this government.
00:32:57.580So I actually think this bill is, there's a bunch of things, it's a bunch of bills actually
00:33:01.600all joined together. They could be separate bills. You've seen the stuff about the, you know,
00:33:06.440the child protection and child abuse and sort of inducing child bullying. That stuff could be its
00:33:12.220own bill. And frankly, a lot of that stuff is perfectly fine. A lot of it's already illegal.
00:33:16.860And, you know, if they want to expand it, it should be its own bill. But rolling in this
00:33:21.460this nebulous idea of hate and and and tasking the tribunals of all bodies to identify it
00:33:28.020is it's just going to lead to a disaster it was a disaster in the past under the old rules
00:33:32.340for the tribunal and it is going to be a disaster um if they bring this bill back in yeah and i you
00:33:37.380know i i haven't i don't want to bring it up actually because i i haven't read too much into
00:33:40.820it so so i'll i'll revisit what i was about to say on on the show tomorrow but you know i could see
00:33:46.100very much this being weaponized against a politician, perhaps. I mean, let's say you have
00:33:50.880an upstart political party like we have in Europe that wants to take a particular approach on
00:33:55.680immigration, perhaps the People's Party in Canada with Maxime Bernier. You know, you get some
00:34:00.440overzealous complainant that wants to make a point and says this rhetoric is hateful. You all of a
00:34:05.740sudden have the political process potentially being brought in under this. And I think that's
00:34:10.740incredibly dangerous, especially when, as you note, as we've talked about on the show, there's
00:34:15.080such an unclear line as to when content becomes hateful.
00:34:53.840And part of the reason that they have to kick things like vague notions like hate to a tribunal is because under a court system, under court rules, none of these complaints would ever succeed.
00:35:03.540And so it's almost an admission that these things aren't quite illegal and aren't quite criminal.
00:35:08.120So we need to send them to this body where there's kind of loosey-goosey rules in order for them to get anywhere.
00:35:13.440And it all boils down to, you know, the government trying to, you know, I do believe at this point, the government's goal is to chill speech.
00:35:20.680They want to chill speech because they think it's a good thing, because it would be better if we had fewer people saying nasty things.
00:35:29.620I think they are discounting the value of robust free extremes, even if it's not always pleasant, even if we don't always like everything everyone says.
00:35:47.800He spoke before the Vancouver Board of Trade,
00:35:50.140so an assembled gathering of business leaders and lobbyists.
00:35:54.160And he gave, I would not exactly say the speech
00:35:57.520that you would expect him to give before that group.
00:36:00.460He gave something reminiscent of the gravy train is over speech
00:36:06.840that Rob Ford once gave, but he never did it in the room
00:36:09.480of people that are trying to ride the gravy train.
00:36:12.420I should point out, he was the leader, he became the leader in September 2022, and he has so far
00:36:18.220not done any speech of this nature to chambers of commerce, to trade groups, and all of that.
00:36:24.660So there's something noteworthy in there, but what he said is that, like, we're not going to be
00:36:28.580beholden to lobbyists, we're not going to be beholden to big business. If you want something
00:36:32.300for my government when I'm there, you've got to make the pitch to Canadians, and it has to be in
00:36:36.760their best interest now is this just political posturing or is this a bit of a different tack
00:36:42.060than we've seen from political leaders in Canada yeah look the proof's going to be in the pudding
00:36:46.520if and when he becomes prime minister whether or not he can stick to his guns on this we've
00:36:50.140certainly heard this story before I mean we heard Doug Ford in Ontario say that you know the gravy
00:36:54.600train was going to be stopped and that it was game over for corporate welfare that never happened so
00:36:58.940it's possible that these are just words but I think if you look a little bit closer and this
00:37:03.640is something that I've been banging on about since my days at the Taxpayers Federation. There is a
00:37:07.180really big difference between free enterprise, entrepreneurship, what I call pure capitalism,
00:37:12.680and what has really sort of infected business across most of the industrialized world,
00:37:18.320but in Canada in particular, is what I call cronyism or corporatism. It's this idea where,
00:37:23.200you know, business is basically leaning on government, not for the right to compete or
00:37:27.580the right to make money, but the right for favors, the right for restrictions to block
00:37:31.400competitors, the right for subsidies from taxpayers. I think a lot of Polyev's speech
00:37:35.920was aimed at drawing the distinction between these two groups, and they are completely different
00:37:40.140groups. Andrew, in the business community in this country, there are some people who all they want
00:37:44.860is the government to leave them alone so they can go out and win customers and just try and take
00:37:49.800over the world by having the best product at the best price. There are others that spend all day
00:37:54.480screaming about how they're under threat and that jobs will be lost and that we have to block
00:37:58.360competition and the government has to keep everybody out these are very different groups
00:38:02.160with very different interests and i think pauliev is saying i got no problem with the free enterprise
00:38:06.080group but if you're in the latter group when you're used to being able to come to government
00:38:09.680and scare governments into saying if you don't do this and protect me you know x y and z is going
00:38:14.900to happen he's saying i got a message for you that's not going to work with me so again we'll
00:38:19.600see if he can stick to his guns on that but it is certainly a different message than we've heard
00:38:23.420most politicians in the past what's the charitable if there is one what's the charitable defense
00:38:28.780of corporate lobbyists yeah well it's don't play as like i wrote in the piece it's don't hate the
00:38:33.660player hate the game right and i i truly do mean this a lot of these uh lobbyists and a lot of
00:38:38.300these businesses have no choice but to basically take some of the handouts because if they don't
00:38:42.700their competitor will so even businesses that start they don't even intend to lobby they don't
00:38:46.780want to spend any time lobbying or thinking about lobbying they kind of have to join the race
00:38:50.460Otherwise, they get left behind because you've got a competitor that's going and taking a subsidy or taking advantage of a loophole or a special privilege.
00:38:57.320So you create this sort of perverse incentives.
00:39:00.140And make no mistake, politicians cause this.
00:39:02.960If you had government, I mean, they're so used to businesses, so used to politicians offering goodies that they've become used to it.
00:39:26.880But if they can do that, I think that in the medium and long run, that'd be very good for Canadian business.
00:39:32.300Well, and you see it at the government level as well, where governments will defend their own handouts by appealing to globalization.
00:39:38.260They'll be like, oh, well, if we don't give Volkswagen billions of dollars in subsidies, some other country will, and then we don't get the plan.
00:39:45.020so it really is a race to the bottom across the board it is and you there's always this implicit
00:39:49.900argument that well we have to be in the business of doing x right if we're we're building x here
00:39:54.500now we can't not have that anymore well we actually can and guess what if x goes something
00:39:59.000else might come i mean the examples i give are australia used to build cars now they don't
00:40:03.600their economy did not suffer other other types of businesses started up they didn't experience
00:40:08.120a recession another example blackberry for my hometown and blackberry you know they they had
00:40:13.220to cut 90% of their workforce. They didn't ask for a handout like Bombardier to stay afloat.
00:40:17.700And guess what happened? All those people that were let go, a lot of them started new businesses
00:40:21.120and created a whole new ecosystem. So this is part of the whole creative destruction. This is part of
00:40:25.520the process of a market. Not everyone can win all the time. And when business leaders insist that,
00:40:29.980no, we have to freeze all the businesses we have here right now today, that is, I mean,
00:40:34.980they're kind of showing their hand that they don't have the confidence that they're able to compete
00:40:38.520in the marketplace. And I think if politicians are only listening to business people that are
00:40:43.560afraid and not the ones that are ambitious, that's a real problem. Yeah, you are right. There tends
00:40:48.580to be an ahistorical element to this where we forget that we didn't keep the horse and buggy
00:40:54.580industry on life support indefinitely. We forget that we didn't keep, I mean, maybe we are keeping
00:41:01.340the newspaper industry, but in general, we aren't clinging as much to an antiquated mode of that.
00:41:05.740And it is so weird because you're right, there tends to be this move towards stagnation in the political rhetoric that forgets all of the things we've moved beyond in the past.
00:41:14.300Like, I don't know if anyone's lamenting the lost typewriter manufacturers of our previous era.
00:41:19.900Yeah, but you can appreciate why politically, I mean, a bird in the hands were two in the bush, right?
00:41:24.100So if you're an MP and you're in a community that's got a factory that employs a thousand people, I mean, it's all fine and well to say, well, the factory goes, something else will pop up somewhere.
00:41:33.540Yeah, the Fennel and Paul typewriter manufacturer, if you're the MP there, is the backbone of the economy.
00:41:40.220And that's why I have some sympathy is that they're kind of in a box.
00:41:43.820But I think we need to take that big picture.
00:41:46.040And politicians who have to govern for the country as a whole, right, can't be captive of this.
00:41:49.760Now, I will say one thing, Andrew, is that there are certain sectors, if there's sort of national security issues.
00:41:55.380I mean, maybe we need different rules for those.
00:41:57.360There can be carve outs from this sort of general lean towards competition and free trade.
00:42:03.540So I'm not saying there should be no exceptions, but I'm saying that has to be the general rule.
00:42:06.720The more we drift away from that, the more, you know, sometimes it's Canadians that end up suffering for it.
00:42:12.020Yeah, and we might end up being on the precipice of turning a corner on this.
00:42:16.900I mean, not to draw a false parallel, but Pierre Polyev speaking at that Board of Trade meeting reminded me in a way of Javier Malay at the World Economic Forum a few weeks back of just going in there and making what you've just described, that unbridled defense of the free market and capitalism.
00:42:30.760And one of the points Javier Malay gave was that you should never feel guilty about making a profit.
00:42:37.120You should never feel guilty about being successful in business.
00:42:40.580And I think that's the spirit we need to inject into Canadian business, which I think Canadian business is different from corporate Canada.
00:43:33.640Thank you, Aaron. Yeah, it's funny. I had this conversation with, I forget who it was, actually. It was someone in my family. It might have actually been my wife.
00:43:41.480we were we're talking about cell phone plans and and just how infuriating it is that whenever you
00:43:47.880want to renew your cell phone contract you always have to go through this labyrinthian network
00:43:52.560of customer service advisors to get the best deal possible now some people uh you if you may if you
00:43:59.000if your time is worth more to you than my time evidently is to mine you may just go on the
00:44:03.560website and say okay this is the cost per month i'm gonna pay that but if you call you're gonna
00:44:07.780get another price. And if you call and ask to speak to the loyalty and retention department,
00:44:13.420you're going to get yet another price. And if you hold out, you're probably going to get yet
00:44:18.100another price from them. I mean, I have, I can't even remember now, I have an insane phone deal
00:44:23.260because I just waited them out. And, but, but it pained me and it bothered me that they don't just
00:44:29.480say, here's the price and that's it. And everyone pays the same thing. And I'm not one of these
00:44:34.300radical egalitarians that doesn't think there should be latitude or flexibility but the point
00:44:39.040is that when they do this this becomes what Aaron was talking about the rules of the game
00:44:43.480this becomes the way the game is played and then everyone does it because if no one does it then
00:44:48.280you're not going to be uh being treated as well as other people and it becomes a race to the bottom
00:44:52.820but I think everyone loses out so there is something to be said about a leader that's
00:44:56.900going to come in and say we're not going to play the lobbyist game this is our vision this is our
00:45:00.740pitch. If you want something, make it to Canadians and not to me because you're not going to win me
00:45:05.500over. So good to see that in the Vancouver Board of Trade speech that Pierre Pauliev gave last
00:45:10.640week. We will wrap things up here, but we'll be back in tomorrow. I'm just losing the ability
00:45:16.600to speak right now. We will be back tomorrow in 23 hours and 15 minutes. We will talk to you then.
00:45:21.700Thank you. God bless and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:45:26.720Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.