Juno News - Do Canadians want Trudeau's censorship bill？

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you

00:01:19.200 by true north you know i've referenced this on the program in the past is that old saw

00:01:28.480 of journalism. When a dog bites a man, that is not news. When a man bites a dog, that is in fact

00:01:34.560 news. But sometimes I think there's value in the dog bites man stories, if only to illustrate why

00:01:41.580 something is a pattern and isn't all that controversial, because it's just something

00:01:46.120 we're used to having happen. Such is the case today in Calgary, one of my favorite cities in

00:01:51.800 this lovely dominion of ours. But in Calgary today, Justin Trudeau is visiting the Prime

00:01:57.280 Minister of Canada. He met this morning with Premier Danielle Smith, and then he decided to,

00:02:02.240 just about 30 minutes ago, start taking questions from reporters. But there is, well, there are

00:02:08.080 actually two reporters who are conspicuously absent from this gaggle to mainstays in journalism

00:02:14.380 in Alberta. One is Kian Bextie of The Counter Signal. The other is Rachel Emanuel, who you may

00:02:21.960 know. She's been on this show. She has been a tremendous Alberta correspondent for True North,

00:02:27.100 host alberta roundup and has a very storied career despite her relatively young age i mean

00:02:33.100 compared to me anyway uh because she has worked in mainstream media newsrooms she was at ipolitics 0.97

00:02:38.300 she worked for the globe and mail she was educated in the hallowed halls of carlton university's

00:02:43.500 journalism program just a few minutes down the road from justin trudeau's office she is as

00:02:48.780 credible a journalist as you can get in this country probably more so and yet she has been

00:02:54.620 banned from covering Justin Trudeau's press conference. She sent me a picture of her out in

00:03:00.260 the parking lot, hoping that maybe she'll get the chance. I shouldn't even say what she's, well,

00:03:03.960 hopefully Trudeau is not listening. She's out in the parking lot. Well, Justin Trudeau is in there

00:03:08.820 and this is Calgary in March. I mean, presumably she's very cold. I don't know. Kian presumably is 1.00

00:03:14.160 cold as well, but he doesn't work for True North. So I'm more concerned about Rachel, but this is

00:03:18.380 what's going to happen. Justin Trudeau is going to take his questions. If he hasn't finished already,

00:03:22.920 I bet not a single legacy media reporter is going to challenge him on what's happened.

00:03:28.760 She just texted me.

00:03:30.400 Rachel just said they kicked us out. 1.00

00:03:32.940 So apparently she had made her way inside and then got kicked out. 0.99

00:03:37.520 And I probably shouldn't share this.

00:03:38.720 She said, I'm so puzzled.

00:03:40.920 But apparently puzzled was an autocorrect.

00:03:42.780 And she meant to say, I'm so pissed.

00:03:44.300 Well, you absolutely should be, Rachel.

00:03:46.380 Because Justin Trudeau, I've had this experience before.

00:03:49.360 So I can do that old meme thing where I say, oh, first time?

00:03:52.280 because I was banned from covering Justin Trudeau's caucus retreat

00:03:56.440 in my own city of London, Ontario, just a few months back.

00:04:00.380 And they never gave me a reason.

00:04:02.120 They just simply did not accredit me.

00:04:04.700 When I have attempted to cover statements and announcements

00:04:07.460 by Justin Trudeau in the past, what's happened has been...

00:04:12.420 Sean, see if you can get Rachel to dial in on the show, actually,

00:04:15.600 because I can't carry on this text conversation with her.

00:04:17.860 So see if we can get Rachel for a few minutes to connect here, 1.00

00:04:21.200 assuming she's not in handcuffs and being thrown into the back of an RCMP cruiser.

00:04:25.460 But if she wants to dial in from the back of an RCMP cruiser, she is more than welcome to.

00:04:29.780 But I wasn't even going to talk about this because, as I said earlier,

00:04:33.100 Justin Trudeau bans independent journalists from covering his press conference.

00:04:36.500 That is sadly a dog bites man story now because this is just par for the course

00:04:41.720 from a government and a prime minister that does not want to answer a single question

00:04:45.860 from a non-state approved media outlet.

00:04:49.560 And by the way, that's quite literally the case.

00:04:52.660 The federal government will oftentimes refer to their press conferences as only being available to members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

00:05:00.060 Now, that is a group set up under the auspices of the Speaker of the House of Commons.

00:05:04.800 It's self-regulating in the sense that journalists who are members are very cliquey often and decide who is going to join their ranks.

00:05:12.900 But it is a body that is given a mandate by Parliament, effectively by the government.

00:05:18.800 So when Justin Trudeau turns around and says, well, we'll only take questions from journalists

00:05:22.920 that are a member of this group, they're setting up an arbitrary standard.

00:05:27.340 They are setting up an arbitrary standard by which they get to decide who's in and who's

00:05:32.820 out because they kind of just know who the press gallery is not going to allow in, who

00:05:37.300 the press gallery is not going to admit as a member.

00:05:40.700 So this is quite disgraceful.

00:05:42.320 It 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.

00:05:57.900 Now, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, had a bit of a different approach.

00:06:02.420 She 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.

00:06:12.840 The Danielle Smith, without her phalanx of bodyguards that Justin Trudeau had, just took a stroll and stopped and answered some questions.

00:06:20.440 And 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.

00:06:35.180 They don't trust their candidate. They don't trust their prime minister to be able to answer these questions.

00:06:40.020 Now, 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.

00:06:58.780 Now, why this is relevant is because the federal government right now is trying to push Bill C-63.

00:07:03.900 I've been talking about it for the last two weeks.

00:07:05.920 It's called the Online Harms Act.

00:07:07.880 It does a number of things.

00:07:09.040 Chief among them, in my view, it puts a new test for so-called hate speech into the Human Rights Code,

00:07:17.280 where the government will be able to, through the Human Rights Tribunal, prosecute people.

00:07:22.200 prosecute people for their speech, for so-called speech crimes, if they utter comments that are

00:07:28.720 likely to foment. I always get my lopsided quote. I don't know why I do it. Likely to foment,

00:07:34.340 probably because I'm seeing the mirror or I'm not seeing the mirror image. So when I try to move the

00:07:38.320 left up at the right, I don't know. Now I look like I'm just milking a cow. Anyway, the whole

00:07:43.160 point of this is they're going to go after speech that is likely to foment detestation and

00:07:48.600 vilification. And what that means is anyone's guess. Now, I put this question a couple of

00:07:54.180 weeks back, and I want to share the clip because I think it's highly relevant here. I put it to

00:07:57.640 Conservative leader Pierre Polyev. This was before we saw the text of the bill, but we had news that

00:08:02.460 it was coming down the pipeline. And he touched on why it is so dangerous for Justin Trudeau's

00:08:08.520 government to have this power. Take a look. Morning, Mr. Polyev, Andrew Lawton, True North.

00:08:13.260 The federal government has said that its online harms bill is imminent.

00:08:18.320 They've said this bill will include, among other things, a ban on so-called online hate speech.

00:08:23.420 As you know, the Conservatives a decade ago repealed Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act,

00:08:28.520 which the Liberals have talked about reintroducing and tried in the last parliamentary term.

00:08:33.680 Will the Conservatives oppose the reintroduction of these provisions and the Liberals' approach to so-called online hate speech?

00:08:41.900 Yes.

00:08:43.260 We will oppose Justin Trudeau's latest attack on freedom of expression.

00:08:50.120 And I want to ask, what does Justin Trudeau mean when he says the word hate speech?

00:08:59.780 He means speech he hates.

00:09:03.960 So, for example, let's go through some of the things he said is hate speech. 0.63

00:09:08.140 Jerry Butts, the PMO puppet master, said that it was hate speech to criticize Trudeau for using the ridiculous term people kind. 0.67

00:09:18.160 Right. The Justin Trudeau said anyone who criticized him during the pandemic was engaging in hate speech. 0.52

00:09:28.880 Basically, anybody who disagrees with his radical agenda when it comes to kids, he says his hate speech.

00:09:37.460 he attacked Muslim parents who were protesting against his agenda? Is he going to criminalize

00:09:43.600 those Muslim parents for protecting their children in schools? Go down the list of things that Justin

00:09:51.340 Trudeau disapproves of, and you can imagine all of the things that will be criminalized.

00:09:58.580 Then there becomes the question of who is going to be in charge of determining

00:10:02.300 what is hate speech recently a school board in Ontario banned Anne Frank's books

00:10:10.240 okay so would that be considered hate speech under Justin Trudeau's woke authoritarian agenda I

00:10:19.700 think it would so anyone who thinks that speech they don't like is going to be criminalized and

00:10:27.160 therefore the bill should be supported. Those people should go through the list of their own

00:10:32.860 thoughts that Justin Trudeau considers to be unacceptable views, and you can assume that he

00:10:39.580 will ban all of that as well. And finally, I point out the irony that someone who spent the first

00:10:48.900 half of his adult life as a practicing racist who dressed up in hideous racist costumes so many

00:10:57.840 times he says he can't remember them all should then be the arbiter on what constitutes hate

00:11:05.200 why doesn't he what he should actually do is look into his own heart and ask himself why he was such

00:11:12.720 a hateful racist for despite his enormous personal privileges of a multi-million dollar trust fund

00:11:19.460 being the son of a prime minister growing up in mansions traveling the world why he had so much 0.96

00:11:24.900 hate in his art that he was such an awful racist and what he should do is actually explain where

00:11:32.180 that ugliness came from and maybe in that way rather than through coercion he could help us all

00:11:39.620 in the fight against real hate. Thank you. So why I shared that is twofold. Number one, I think,

00:11:46.760 look, I think that anything that infringes on free speech is wrong inherently on its own,

00:11:52.440 because I believe free speech to be a good thing. I believe free speech to be a first principle,

00:11:57.260 which means that anything should really be assessed against it and other first principles,

00:12:01.780 by which I mean that if something is going to infringe free speech, well, therefore it's

00:12:06.420 inherently wrong but even if you accept that there are limitations that are required and and

00:12:12.500 uh the limitation is naturally built in in my view and sort of the framework that i take on this by

00:12:17.700 other people's freedoms when your speech is impeding other people's liberty that is when

00:12:22.260 it is uh there's an inherent check in that because you can't have rights that are in contradiction

00:12:27.540 but at the risk of getting too into the weeds on political theory here if you believe that free

00:12:32.420 speech is not perhaps the inherent good that I think it is. That you could still argue this bill

00:12:37.960 is bad because it gives government the power to very arbitrarily decide what speech is legitimate

00:12:44.300 and what speech is not. What speech is hateful and what speech is not. And I actually had an idea,

00:12:48.480 and we might do something on this, of just going around and surveying Canadians. And I don't even

00:12:53.240 know if you need to do it in a scientific way. And asking them, give them a list of statements and

00:12:57.500 say, is this hate speech? Is this hate speech? Is this hate speech? And I think you would actually

00:13:01.660 be quite shocked by how many say that speech expressions of speech which are in my view

00:13:06.840 legally legitimate maybe not morally or substantively legitimate but legally legitimate

00:13:12.220 would be by them by a pan a panel of canadians classed as hateful now i wanted to talk about

00:13:20.440 this poll here because there was a legé poll reported on by the canadian press which found

00:13:25.960 that just under half of Canadians believe the federal government's plan to regulate social

00:13:31.740 media sites will make them safer. A little over half find that they were agreed. They agreed

00:13:39.220 fundamentally with the idea, with the premise that government needs to beef up, to strengthen

00:13:44.860 sentences for people who have been found to have committed hate speech. This is what they're saying.

00:13:49.900 So Canadians are split on this. We have effectively a coin toss. Half of Canadians are for it.

00:13:55.020 half of them are against it. Now, here's the thing. If you are the one hen in a colony of

00:14:03.240 99 foxes, democracy doesn't look that good. I mean, the majority will, of course, vote to eat

00:14:10.080 you. But in the end, we are going to look at some things that are matters of fundamental right and

00:14:15.340 wrong and not about democracy. And democracy is incredibly important, but you cannot

00:14:20.620 uh majoritarianize your way to make up a word here away from fundamental rights which means

00:14:27.400 the majority does not have the right to trample on the free speech rights of the minority whether

00:14:32.200 it's a religious minority a political minority a sexual minority whatever the case may be

00:14:37.960 but the problem is is that politics is inherently majoritarian and the question that i want to leave

00:14:45.240 you with is whether we will have a society in which Canadians will willingly go to the government

00:14:50.800 and say, I want you to take away my right to free speech. I want you to take away his right to free

00:14:54.860 speech and her right to free speech. Remember during 2021, during COVID, when Justin Trudeau

00:14:59.800 campaigned on violating the fundamental rights of people who weren't vaccinated, he campaigned,

00:15:05.580 literally had rallies during the election campaign in which he said, we are going to ban the

00:15:11.040 unvaccinated from planes and trains, not automobiles. He didn't go the full Monty there,

00:15:14.940 but we're going to ban them from planes and trains. They don't have a right to sit on a train 0.80

00:15:18.880 or plane next to a vaccinated person, he said, and got cheers and applause. And you know what?

00:15:24.180 He won re-election. He won re-election. And what do we take away from that? That there is a

00:15:30.600 constituency in this country for violating people's rights and freedoms. So don't think

00:15:36.720 that democracy will be the answer to this problem we need to have a significant cultural change

00:15:41.800 that a cultural change that supports and rallies behind free speech and that's what I'm doing on

00:15:47.200 this show it's certainly what I'm trying to do but I think there is a lot more work to be done and to

00:15:51.460 go back to the exclusion of my friend and colleague Rachel Emanuel from Justin Trudeau's press

00:15:56.180 conference there that just reinforces why government should not be able to make these

00:16:00.660 unilateral decisions about who is licit and who is illicit. As a journalist, as a speaker, as an

00:16:08.420 online poster, as a social media platform, as a podcast, whatever the case may be. Now, government

00:16:14.780 is not always the most reliable arbiter of many things. We've all had discussions on this program

00:16:19.940 and to those of you in the comment section on many occasions about the suite of policies the

00:16:24.980 government has brought in under the auspices of saving the planet. We have the ban on plastic

00:16:30.440 straws, single-use plastics, which the Supreme Court recently ruled on favorably. We have the

00:16:35.720 carbon tax, which the Supreme Court has been a little bit less favorable, at least from my

00:16:40.080 perspective, in its decisions on. But undergirding all of this has been a persistent claim, certainly

00:16:45.820 from the government and also from activists, especially from activists, that there is a climate

00:16:50.780 climate crisis underway. There is a climate emergency. Wildfires are happening. And despite

00:16:56.340 the fact that many of them are linked to arson, you get Stephen Gilbeau saying this is a product

00:17:00.300 of the climate emergency, the climate crisis. But does the evidence stand behind what is at its core

00:17:06.560 a very bold claim? Kenneth Green, who is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute, and I don't know

00:17:12.260 if we call him a regular, but certainly a semi-regular on this show, says there is simply

00:17:16.340 no evidence backing this up. So let's dig into that. Ken, it's good to talk to you again. Thanks

00:17:20.480 for coming back on. Good to be with you. So, I mean, we hear this fear mongering. I know even

00:17:25.920 in the legal sense, when the carbon tax fights were before the courts, you had some activists

00:17:30.760 that were saying that, you know, yes, the government can do whatever it wants because

00:17:33.540 this is a national emergency. But you've actually taken a more critical look at that core claim.

00:17:39.460 What did you find? Well, I'm still looking into this. The question is, we've had a lot of rhetoric,

00:17:43.420 as you said, the rhetoric on climate change, particularly the risk of climate change has

00:17:47.780 ratcheted up over the years from a concern, an imminent concern, a looming concern, to

00:17:54.160 it's happening now, to it's happening now extremely, to we're in a climate crisis, and

00:18:00.400 we have a climate emergency.

00:18:03.060 And the language has been getting stronger and stronger and stronger seemingly with every

00:18:06.640 electoral cycle or every political cycle.

00:18:10.500 But when you go to the underlying source materials, when you look at the United Nations IPCC hard

00:18:15.960 science work, the science volume of their omnibus IPCC reports on the state of climate

00:18:23.700 change, what you find is that the data is not there to back up the levels of certainty

00:18:28.600 that we're getting from our politicians, right?

00:18:30.300 So the politicians are saying, we know this, it's proven, it's happening now, we've seen

00:18:34.180 it.

00:18:34.840 And that's the kind of thing that is really not clear from the underlying data, where

00:18:39.060 if you look at the trends for extreme weather events, for example, as I talk about in the

00:18:43.460 column we're based on today. Yes, there seems to be globally, there has been an increase in warm

00:18:50.500 weather events or in weather events where they're warmer in the summertime, warmer in the

00:18:57.320 wintertime, right? Greater highs, less to low lows, things like that. But when you start moving

00:19:03.060 into the other indicators like floods and like droughts and like tropical, like hurricanes or

00:19:08.700 tropical cyclones, like wildfire season, which is, of course, something that's top of mind for

00:19:13.580 Canadians still. What you find is that the data when you look there is highly fragmentary. There

00:19:19.680 is data in some parts of the world, but many others are not even measured. The data is

00:19:24.200 inconsistent. There are some trends that are going up, have gone up, and some have gone down

00:19:28.400 over the same trend in droughts or cyclones and landfalling hurricanes and their intensities and

00:19:35.560 things like that. Wildfire risk, as we showed in other papers that we've written, wildfire,

00:19:42.160 in Canada, wildfires are down in number and extent. And also globally, there's no trend in wildfire

00:19:47.660 area and extent or fire season expansion or worsening of fire seasons. So yeah, when you,

00:19:55.360 the problem here is we're getting, we're being oversold on the confidence and the meaning of the

00:20:03.040 limited amount of data available for the the changes in these trends but the underlying source

00:20:07.840 like the ipcc again they're actually much more modest than our politicians are when you look at

00:20:11.600 their data they say they have medium confidence they have some low con a lot of low confidence

00:20:16.480 in some of these indicators having been seen to change even since 1950.

00:20:22.480 yeah i mean the ipcc is an interesting part of this though because i i know that there have been

00:20:27.840 criticisms level that the data in the IPCC report say one thing, but the executive summary

00:20:34.340 says another. And you have a lot of what we would call in the media business editorializing

00:20:40.500 on what the figures are actually saying there. And certainly politicians, as you note, are guilty of

00:20:45.840 that. I mean, it used to be maybe a little over a decade ago before then that global warming was

00:20:51.260 the threat. It was global warming. And that was easily understood because we all know what a

00:20:55.580 temperature is you know 22 is warmer than 20 and then the the narrative change to climate change

00:21:01.600 and all of a sudden everything is a symptom of that if it's really cold one day that's also the

00:21:06.800 same problem as if it's really warm one day if it's windy and at a certain point what we used

00:21:10.980 to just call weather is now indicative of a climate crisis yeah and I mean that's a that's

00:21:17.760 a problem I mean that I don't have a big problem with the change in the terminology from global

00:21:22.060 warming to climate change because um it's still called global warming at the heart it's the it's

00:21:27.180 the changes that manifest because it's warming that is now the focus it has been in the last 15

00:21:32.220 years um but back to the ipcc i mean it's it you're right which is when you look at the ipcc

00:21:37.740 reports first of all there are these incredible three volume sets that come out around every five

00:21:41.740 years they're what they call assessment reports thousands and thousands of contributors is

00:21:46.460 dedicated to the science of climate change and it's it's quite rigorous and pretty much everybody on

00:21:51.180 any side of the issue of climate issues tends to agree it does its best to be a genuine summation

00:21:57.100 of the state of the physical basis and physical knowledge about climate change but that's not the

00:22:03.900 part the politicians read or base their their views on they they read the summaries of those

00:22:09.820 technical reports and then they read summaries of the summaries that are specifically for policy

00:22:14.220 makers that are are written with with an eye toward answering policymaker questions about how

00:22:19.660 they can get their policies implemented right the basis of their policies and so um you have to dig

00:22:25.820 fairly deep to see that you're being told that something is highly certain when in fact it's

00:22:31.340 highly uncertain and yet yet the solutions that are being proposed are so draconian that you would

00:22:37.420 expect the government to actually be basing them on seriously hard rigorous data of and and knowledge

00:22:44.140 of risk that can be averted. So there is a mismatch there between what the politicians

00:22:49.320 read in their summaries and what they say from those summaries and the actual underlying data

00:22:54.720 around the world. So explain to me when we hear the rhetoric of crisis, what are they citing?

00:23:02.520 Is it that they're making a claim and they're using spurious evidence or are they kind of just

00:23:07.000 making it without even providing an attempt at evidence? They're primarily making it without

00:23:11.520 providing without attempting to provide a definition of what a crisis is or or the evidence

00:23:16.080 they were going with tipping points for a long time i don't know if you noticed but tipping

00:23:19.600 points was a big deal for the last seven or eight years it was tipping point tipping point tipping

00:23:23.680 point which never which happened in the net so they dropped their tipping points and now they're

00:23:28.080 we're going with a climate crisis but you know to me to me of course a crisis is a suddenness

00:23:33.760 a crisis is something that happens um in the moment it's not a problem that's that is playing

00:23:39.840 out over 100 years it's a problem that's going to start manifesting itself or significantly tomorrow

00:23:46.640 that's a crisis you have a crisis right now when the sea level is rising so slowly that you could

00:23:51.520 actually crawl away from it faster than uh than it's rising um over the next 100 years that's

00:23:58.080 not a climate crisis um if you had you know a one-tenth of one percent increase in in uh

00:24:04.400 hurricane wind speeds but they're not making landfall that's not a crisis so so they're

00:24:10.160 evoking a crisis it's i think mostly it's a crisis of the fact that their governments are failing

00:24:14.240 to get support for their policies um and and that the uh the policies are proving to be

00:24:19.680 much more harmful than good so it's more of a climate crisis of government policy than it is

00:24:24.560 of the actual climate yeah and i think that that is the the critical point here and and we've seen

00:24:30.400 and i may be pulling you more into a political realm than you're comfortable being here so feel

00:24:34.160 free to run the other direction if you need to but it does seem the government has really started

00:24:38.640 adopting a lot of the language that we used to only have from a relatively small set of activists

00:24:42.800 on this um yes and i'm not and i wouldn't limit it to canada's government either no it's governments

00:24:49.760 around the world and and um uh but as i've said the governments have been ratcheting up this uh

00:24:55.600 this rhetoric on climate change over the years um in proportion to how sort of extreme their

00:25:01.280 policies are in the way that the policies would impact people's lives the economy um their standard

00:25:07.520 of living and so knowing that these policies are more and more intrusive and more and more

00:25:13.680 draconian in terms of their impact on people's lives it seems like the political world has

00:25:18.240 brought the rhetoric up uh to to try to support that uh by by making the rhetoric more harsh and

00:25:24.800 more uh more worrisome over time um that's that's not and i don't think that's political because

00:25:31.360 all politicians do it um regardless of whether they're they're they're whatever their issue is

00:25:36.320 of that they feel is important they pretty much all over over sell their confidence and and the

00:25:41.840 importance of their issues so uh but yeah i mean it is it is a you wouldn't have seen people other

00:25:46.720 Other 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.

00:26:02.240 These things were Kerry, John Kerry.

00:26:03.580 They were, like I said, Al Gore.

00:26:07.240 To have them coming from environment ministers is somewhat new, but, you know, it's not unheard of either.

00:26:16.060 so i the upshot here really is that you know the extreme weather narrative just itself

00:26:22.060 lacks the underlying data is it not yes it does as i said there there is there is data here and

00:26:29.260 there from around the world over certain periods of time and trends where there have been increases

00:26:34.700 in observed extreme weather there's also increases or decreases in extreme weather events

00:26:43.020 And of course, that's the norm for the Earth. The Earth is not a static system, right? So

00:26:48.140 over any given period of time, the UN starts from 1950 for these indicators, because that's when the

00:26:53.820 data started being measured well. But, you know, from between 1950 and now, you'll have lots of

00:27:02.220 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 year periods where the one trend goes up before it turns down,

00:27:07.580 another trend is going down before it turns up so so um it always has to be kept in mind it's a

00:27:13.340 very big earth uh it's a very small pool of people able to measure the climate system on earth and

00:27:19.560 the technology to measure it with is limited and so we have there really needs to be some more

00:27:24.940 humility about when we're talking in blanket statements about what's happening with the

00:27:29.420 climate it displays a distinct lack of humility all right well fascinating piece in the calgary

00:27:36.460 son that you had Kenneth Green senior fellow with the Fraser Institute always a pleasure

00:27:40.540 always a pleasure thank you all right thank you very much I want to just before we go to our next

00:27:45.780 guest I want to talk about corporate Canada and lobbyists and lobbying and all of that we'll have

00:27:49.560 Aaron Woodrick joining us in a few moments time but I want to circle back to the online harm stuff

00:27:54.280 because I didn't get a chance to play this one clip which was actually quite a strong one that

00:27:59.500 was on my colleague Harrison Faulkner show the Faulkner show I'm not going to besmirch someone

00:28:04.400 for an unoriginal name on the Andrew Lawton Show. But the Faulkner Show, he had on it a fascinating

00:28:10.060 interview with David Thomas, who's a lawyer and formerly the chair of the Canadian Human Rights

00:28:15.160 Tribunal, which is the body that will ultimately be adjudicating all of these speech crimes that

00:28:20.360 Bill C-63 brings into the Canadian Human Rights Act. And this is a guy who, no, he was literally

00:28:26.240 at the helm of the body that would be adjudicating these. Now, he's no longer on it, which is why he

00:28:30.280 can speak out about these things but his words i think are incredibly important here take a look

00:28:35.800 people are going to be afraid to say what they want they're going to be afraid to post things

00:28:40.600 online they're going to be afraid to say things uh at an all candidates debate or something like

00:28:46.040 that they're going to be very mindful about uh what might uh by the consequences of this legislation

00:28:52.520 i think this is the this is the really unfair thing about this right i mean if you really want

00:28:57.960 uh to to do something to protect people you have to be clear and it's a cop-out for politicians

00:29:04.440 to throw a vague uh lousy definition of hate speech out there and just say oh it'll take

00:29:09.880 care of itself the damage that will be caused in the meantime will be immense and it will be a

00:29:15.560 chilling effect for everybody in this country and and and there's some really interesting changes

00:29:21.080 uh Harrison that want to talk about like in terms of what the penalties are right

00:29:25.160 so right now if if the tribunal finds that somebody has uh breached the canadian rights act and

00:29:32.040 they've done something that's discriminatory the tribunal member can award up to twenty thousand

00:29:37.880 dollars for pain and suffering and they can award another twenty thousand dollars if the conduct of

00:29:43.080 the respondent was willful and reckless now under these new proposed changes to the act for hate

00:29:49.640 speech the tribunal can award up to twenty thousand dollars for any victim

00:29:56.120 identified right so who who's that right is that the person that brought the

00:30:02.060 complaint is it everybody on the tribe on the internet that saw a video or a

00:30:08.540 post that was considered to be aid speech like who is that so that's that's

00:30:13.160 the first question I have the second question the second point is that and

00:30:18.140 And 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.

00:30:35.220 it's unreal when you think of it to go back to the point i i started off on here about how

00:30:44.740 canadians i think are overwhelmingly going to go along with something like this and i i hope that

00:30:51.480 the conservatives is the only party that's really said it's going to stand opposed to this and

00:30:56.300 certainly those of us in the civil society space that are opposing this i i hope we do

00:31:01.960 a lot to turn around what Canadians think hate speech is. Because that's the linchpin of all of

00:31:09.760 this. It's that, sure, we can all stand up and say, oh, yes, we think hate's bad and, you know,

00:31:14.260 hate speech is bad and all that. But if we don't have a universal definition of what that is, I

00:31:18.520 mean, I don't want to list a bunch of examples of things that may be hate speech and may not be

00:31:22.920 hate speech. Because then I know that, you know, Press Progress is just going to like take all of

00:31:26.880 the context away and just show a clip of Andrew saying something, saying something bad. I say

00:31:31.160 enough bad things why you need to do this but that's going to be what ends up happening here

00:31:35.220 and it really comes down to the fundamental point do you trust the government to make this

00:31:40.740 determination uh just uh to bring in aaron woodrick on this he is the head of the domestic policy

00:31:45.820 program at the mcdonald laurier institute it's always good to talk to him aaron i i want to talk

00:31:50.980 to you about corporate canada and lobbying in a few moments but but just on this bill i mean

00:31:54.540 what do you think the weakness is that's going to turn canadians against this because i'm not sure

00:31:59.400 if the fundamental question of free speech is as galvanizing as perhaps I would like it to be

00:32:04.920 in the general population. Yeah, I think, but I do think this idea of hate, right, as being

00:32:12.460 something easily defined and being able to, I mean, if people who read the lawyers who read this

00:32:17.040 bill, I mean, the government and the minister insist that it's a very clear line. Everyone

00:32:21.220 knows the difference between, you know, mere disdain and sort of disgust. I mean, most people

00:32:26.440 don't feel that way. And I think the nefarious thing about this bill is that it is going to

00:32:30.920 achieve a chill on speech just out of an abundance of precaution, right? Like if you're a platform

00:32:34.980 or you're an individual and you're not sure where the line is, you're probably going to stay really

00:32:38.740 far back from the line. And the result of that is a chilling on speech. And that's a bad thing.

00:32:43.300 That is a bad thing. We want to have maximum robust discussion on things, even if it's offensive,

00:32:48.420 even if it's uncomfortable. And the idea that we're not going to worry about a fuzzy line and

00:32:53.200 that the judges will figure it out later is very, very alarming language from this government.

00:32:57.580 So I actually think this bill is, there's a bunch of things, it's a bunch of bills actually

00:33:01.600 all joined together. They could be separate bills. You've seen the stuff about the, you know,

00:33:06.440 the child protection and child abuse and sort of inducing child bullying. That stuff could be its

00:33:12.220 own bill. And frankly, a lot of that stuff is perfectly fine. A lot of it's already illegal.

00:33:16.860 And, you know, if they want to expand it, it should be its own bill. But rolling in this

00:33:21.460 this nebulous idea of hate and and and tasking the tribunals of all bodies to identify it

00:33:28.020 is it's just going to lead to a disaster it was a disaster in the past under the old rules

00:33:32.340 for the tribunal and it is going to be a disaster um if they bring this bill back in yeah and i you

00:33:37.380 know i i haven't i don't want to bring it up actually because i i haven't read too much into

00:33:40.820 it so so i'll i'll revisit what i was about to say on on the show tomorrow but you know i could see

00:33:46.100 very much this being weaponized against a politician, perhaps. I mean, let's say you have

00:33:50.880 an upstart political party like we have in Europe that wants to take a particular approach on

00:33:55.680 immigration, perhaps the People's Party in Canada with Maxime Bernier. You know, you get some

00:34:00.440 overzealous complainant that wants to make a point and says this rhetoric is hateful. You all of a

00:34:05.740 sudden have the political process potentially being brought in under this. And I think that's

00:34:10.740 incredibly dangerous, especially when, as you note, as we've talked about on the show, there's

00:34:15.080 such an unclear line as to when content becomes hateful.

00:34:19.700 Yeah.

00:34:20.220 And let's not forget the bodies that are adjudicating this, right?

00:34:23.700 Some of the folks, the people on the tribunal are not lawyers or they're very junior lawyers.

00:34:29.240 Tribunals are not courts.

00:34:30.340 They don't have the same rules as courts.

00:34:32.880 For example, one of the varying examples under this bill would be the right to bring complaints

00:34:36.860 anonymously, right?

00:34:38.180 I mean, part of the whole process under the rule of law and through the court system is

00:34:43.440 You have the right to know who your accuser is and what you're being accused of.

00:34:47.400 A lot of these rules go out the window.

00:34:48.940 It's a bit of a funhouse mirror court system in tribunals.

00:34:52.000 People need to realize this.

00:34:53.840 And 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.

00:35:03.540 And so it's almost an admission that these things aren't quite illegal and aren't quite criminal.

00:35:08.120 So we need to send them to this body where there's kind of loosey-goosey rules in order for them to get anywhere.

00:35:13.440 And 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.

00:35:20.680 They 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.

00:35:27.500 I think that's a very pinched view.

00:35:29.620 I 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.

00:35:37.920 We have to protect free speech.

00:35:39.620 And I just don't think this government is that committed to it.

00:35:42.480 Yeah, fair enough.

00:35:43.460 Let's turn to this speech that Pierre Polyev gave.

00:35:45.960 I think it was Friday of last week.

00:35:47.800 He spoke before the Vancouver Board of Trade,

00:35:50.140 so an assembled gathering of business leaders and lobbyists.

00:35:54.160 And he gave, I would not exactly say the speech

00:35:57.520 that you would expect him to give before that group.

00:36:00.460 He gave something reminiscent of the gravy train is over speech

00:36:06.840 that Rob Ford once gave, but he never did it in the room

00:36:09.480 of people that are trying to ride the gravy train.

00:36:12.420 I should point out, he was the leader, he became the leader in September 2022, and he has so far

00:36:18.220 not done any speech of this nature to chambers of commerce, to trade groups, and all of that.

00:36:24.660 So there's something noteworthy in there, but what he said is that, like, we're not going to be

00:36:28.580 beholden to lobbyists, we're not going to be beholden to big business. If you want something

00:36:32.300 for my government when I'm there, you've got to make the pitch to Canadians, and it has to be in

00:36:36.760 their best interest now is this just political posturing or is this a bit of a different tack

00:36:42.060 than we've seen from political leaders in Canada yeah look the proof's going to be in the pudding

00:36:46.520 if and when he becomes prime minister whether or not he can stick to his guns on this we've

00:36:50.140 certainly heard this story before I mean we heard Doug Ford in Ontario say that you know the gravy

00:36:54.600 train was going to be stopped and that it was game over for corporate welfare that never happened so

00:36:58.940 it's possible that these are just words but I think if you look a little bit closer and this

00:37:03.640 is something that I've been banging on about since my days at the Taxpayers Federation. There is a

00:37:07.180 really big difference between free enterprise, entrepreneurship, what I call pure capitalism,

00:37:12.680 and what has really sort of infected business across most of the industrialized world,

00:37:18.320 but in Canada in particular, is what I call cronyism or corporatism. It's this idea where,

00:37:23.200 you know, business is basically leaning on government, not for the right to compete or

00:37:27.580 the right to make money, but the right for favors, the right for restrictions to block

00:37:31.400 competitors, the right for subsidies from taxpayers. I think a lot of Polyev's speech

00:37:35.920 was aimed at drawing the distinction between these two groups, and they are completely different

00:37:40.140 groups. Andrew, in the business community in this country, there are some people who all they want

00:37:44.860 is the government to leave them alone so they can go out and win customers and just try and take

00:37:49.800 over the world by having the best product at the best price. There are others that spend all day

00:37:54.480 screaming about how they're under threat and that jobs will be lost and that we have to block

00:37:58.360 competition and the government has to keep everybody out these are very different groups

00:38:02.160 with very different interests and i think pauliev is saying i got no problem with the free enterprise

00:38:06.080 group but if you're in the latter group when you're used to being able to come to government

00:38:09.680 and scare governments into saying if you don't do this and protect me you know x y and z is going

00:38:14.900 to happen he's saying i got a message for you that's not going to work with me so again we'll

00:38:19.600 see if he can stick to his guns on that but it is certainly a different message than we've heard

00:38:23.420 most politicians in the past what's the charitable if there is one what's the charitable defense

00:38:28.780 of corporate lobbyists yeah well it's don't play as like i wrote in the piece it's don't hate the

00:38:33.660 player hate the game right and i i truly do mean this a lot of these uh lobbyists and a lot of

00:38:38.300 these businesses have no choice but to basically take some of the handouts because if they don't

00:38:42.700 their competitor will so even businesses that start they don't even intend to lobby they don't

00:38:46.780 want to spend any time lobbying or thinking about lobbying they kind of have to join the race

00:38:50.460 Otherwise, 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.

00:38:57.320 So you create this sort of perverse incentives.

00:39:00.140 And make no mistake, politicians cause this.

00:39:02.960 If you had government, I mean, they're so used to businesses, so used to politicians offering goodies that they've become used to it.

00:39:09.300 It's like the ducks at the park.

00:39:10.540 If you start feeding them bread all the time, they don't fly south anymore, right?

00:39:14.140 They just stick around and expect you to feed them bread.

00:39:16.280 And governments have been giving businesses the free bread for so long that they just sort of expect it as a matter, of course.

00:39:22.300 So they have to stop doing that.

00:39:24.280 It will be a painful process.

00:39:25.900 I'm not going to lie.

00:39:26.880 But if they can do that, I think that in the medium and long run, that'd be very good for Canadian business.

00:39:32.300 Well, and you see it at the government level as well, where governments will defend their own handouts by appealing to globalization.

00:39:38.260 They'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.

00:39:45.020 so it really is a race to the bottom across the board it is and you there's always this implicit

00:39:49.900 argument that well we have to be in the business of doing x right if we're we're building x here

00:39:54.500 now we can't not have that anymore well we actually can and guess what if x goes something

00:39:59.000 else might come i mean the examples i give are australia used to build cars now they don't

00:40:03.600 their economy did not suffer other other types of businesses started up they didn't experience

00:40:08.120 a recession another example blackberry for my hometown and blackberry you know they they had

00:40:13.220 to cut 90% of their workforce. They didn't ask for a handout like Bombardier to stay afloat.

00:40:17.700 And guess what happened? All those people that were let go, a lot of them started new businesses

00:40:21.120 and created a whole new ecosystem. So this is part of the whole creative destruction. This is part of

00:40:25.520 the process of a market. Not everyone can win all the time. And when business leaders insist that,

00:40:29.980 no, we have to freeze all the businesses we have here right now today, that is, I mean,

00:40:34.980 they're kind of showing their hand that they don't have the confidence that they're able to compete

00:40:38.520 in the marketplace. And I think if politicians are only listening to business people that are

00:40:43.560 afraid and not the ones that are ambitious, that's a real problem. Yeah, you are right. There tends

00:40:48.580 to be an ahistorical element to this where we forget that we didn't keep the horse and buggy

00:40:54.580 industry on life support indefinitely. We forget that we didn't keep, I mean, maybe we are keeping

00:41:01.340 the newspaper industry, but in general, we aren't clinging as much to an antiquated mode of that.

00:41:05.740 And 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.

00:41:14.300 Like, I don't know if anyone's lamenting the lost typewriter manufacturers of our previous era.

00:41:19.900 Yeah, but you can appreciate why politically, I mean, a bird in the hands were two in the bush, right?

00:41:24.100 So 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.

00:41:33.540 Yeah, the Fennel and Paul typewriter manufacturer, if you're the MP there, is the backbone of the economy.

00:41:38.740 You know, and I understand that.

00:41:40.220 And that's why I have some sympathy is that they're kind of in a box.

00:41:43.820 But I think we need to take that big picture.

00:41:46.040 And politicians who have to govern for the country as a whole, right, can't be captive of this.

00:41:49.760 Now, I will say one thing, Andrew, is that there are certain sectors, if there's sort of national security issues.

00:41:55.380 I mean, maybe we need different rules for those.

00:41:57.360 There can be carve outs from this sort of general lean towards competition and free trade.

00:42:03.540 So I'm not saying there should be no exceptions, but I'm saying that has to be the general rule.

00:42:06.720 The more we drift away from that, the more, you know, sometimes it's Canadians that end up suffering for it.

00:42:12.020 Yeah, and we might end up being on the precipice of turning a corner on this.

00:42:16.900 I 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.

00:42:30.760 And one of the points Javier Malay gave was that you should never feel guilty about making a profit.

00:42:37.120 You should never feel guilty about being successful in business.

00:42:40.580 And I think that's the spirit we need to inject into Canadian business, which I think Canadian business is different from corporate Canada.

00:42:47.260 They are two separate entities.

00:42:48.920 And some of that's already there.

00:42:50.020 And I bet you in that room at the Vancouver Board of Trade, you know, half the room was terrified by what Paulie was saying.

00:42:55.540 But the other half loved it, right?

00:42:57.480 And it even varies within companies and within sectors.

00:43:01.120 You have people that take these different views, you know, to be, again, charitable, the corpus view.

00:43:05.180 It's more of a practical view.

00:43:06.480 I think a lot of those people, you know, in private would acknowledge, you know, what I'm saying is correct.

00:43:10.800 But they just sort of say, look, I got to I got to operate in the real world.

00:43:13.940 And so that's why I have to do what I do.

00:43:15.400 But I'm saying, listen, if we change the game, maybe we won't have to hate the players anymore either.

00:43:20.060 And hopefully Polyev can stick to his word and and help sort of usher in that change in our business culture.

00:43:25.860 Yeah, very well said. Aaron Woodrick, McDonnell Laurier Institute, domestic policy director. Good to talk to you as always, sir.

00:43:32.740 Thanks a lot, Andrew.

00:43:33.640 Thank 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.

00:43:41.480 we were we're talking about cell phone plans and and just how infuriating it is that whenever you

00:43:47.880 want to renew your cell phone contract you always have to go through this labyrinthian network

00:43:52.560 of customer service advisors to get the best deal possible now some people uh you if you may if you

00:43:59.000 if your time is worth more to you than my time evidently is to mine you may just go on the

00:44:03.560 website and say okay this is the cost per month i'm gonna pay that but if you call you're gonna

00:44:07.780 get another price. And if you call and ask to speak to the loyalty and retention department,

00:44:13.420 you're going to get yet another price. And if you hold out, you're probably going to get yet

00:44:18.100 another price from them. I mean, I have, I can't even remember now, I have an insane phone deal

00:44:23.260 because I just waited them out. And, but, but it pained me and it bothered me that they don't just

00:44:29.480 say, here's the price and that's it. And everyone pays the same thing. And I'm not one of these

00:44:34.300 radical egalitarians that doesn't think there should be latitude or flexibility but the point

00:44:39.040 is that when they do this this becomes what Aaron was talking about the rules of the game

00:44:43.480 this becomes the way the game is played and then everyone does it because if no one does it then

00:44:48.280 you're not going to be uh being treated as well as other people and it becomes a race to the bottom

00:44:52.820 but I think everyone loses out so there is something to be said about a leader that's

00:44:56.900 going to come in and say we're not going to play the lobbyist game this is our vision this is our

00:45:00.740 pitch. If you want something, make it to Canadians and not to me because you're not going to win me 1.00

00:45:05.500 over. So good to see that in the Vancouver Board of Trade speech that Pierre Pauliev gave last

00:45:10.640 week. We will wrap things up here, but we'll be back in tomorrow. I'm just losing the ability

00:45:16.600 to speak right now. We will be back tomorrow in 23 hours and 15 minutes. We will talk to you then.

00:45:21.700 Thank you. God bless and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:45:26.720 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:45:56.720 We'll be right back.

00:46:26.720 We'll be right back.

Juno News - March 13, 2024

Do Canadians want Trudeau's censorship bill？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript