Juno News - Elon Musk needs to stand up to Trudeau's internet censorship

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

00:00:05.140 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:13.300 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:00:16.100 This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.

00:00:19.700 Tuesday December 13th 2022 just after 4 p.m eastern standard time 5 30 in Newfoundland and

00:00:30.300 Labrador 1 o'clock in British Columbia and I'll let you sort out all of the times in between there

00:00:37.440 if time zone bingo is your bag it's great to have you aboard the program today as we near the holiday

00:00:44.460 season I mean I guess we're already in the holiday season but we near like the very thick of the

00:00:49.680 holiday season which I don't think is too insensitive to point out although it is less

00:00:54.520 than two weeks until Christmas so some of you may be listening in your ear pods or your car

00:01:00.220 as you go about your day with the Christmas shopping I hope it's going well and you are

00:01:04.640 surviving the mall chaos which I had to endure just the other day I went into a mall which I

00:01:10.880 don't think I had done since perhaps last year probably around this time last year yeah because

00:01:16.600 I don't even think I returned anything, and I certainly didn't do any Boxing Day shopping.

00:01:19.780 So it was probably like exactly a year ago that I did my last foray into the mall,

00:01:25.400 and I found it so unpleasant I didn't do it until just the other day.

00:01:28.880 But I survived.

00:01:29.640 I got through, and I made it through the line to see Santa Claus.

00:01:33.300 I sat on his lap, and unfortunately, he is in for a five-year wait for knee surgery

00:01:38.020 in the province of Ontario.

00:01:39.660 But you know what?

00:01:40.280 We got a good photo out of it.

00:01:41.800 So I don't know.

00:01:42.920 Why am I talking about Santa Claus's knee?

00:01:44.880 There are big things happening here. The muskification of Twitter continues. We'll talk about that in just a few moments. Also, a little bit about the Mississauga Lakeshore by-election last night. But before you hit the snooze button, I am assuring you that it is not, in fact, the case that the sky is falling, which is what the mainstream media would like you to believe as far as Pierre Polyev's leadership fortunes. 0.96

00:02:08.940 and also payroll taxes as a new year is upon us they're going to be getting a little bit worse

00:02:14.520 but the canadian federation of independent business is calling for a freeze on that which

00:02:19.620 they say would save canadians about 300 a year so we'll talk about that with dan kelly of the cfib

00:02:26.000 in just about i think 10 minutes or so dan will be on but let's start to start off by talking

00:02:31.580 about the muskification of twitter which is about the only verb i can think of to describe it here

00:02:37.100 And a thought that came across my mind as I was scrolling through my timeline, and I'm following Elon Musk, which all of you should if you're Twitter users, because you tend to get a sense of what's happening on the platform long before the mainstream media eventually writes a story based on what Elon Musk has tweeted.

00:02:53.620 so you can get it from the source directly and i'm kind of of the mind that donald trump

00:02:59.720 has now passed the torch at least in theory to elon musk as far as being the guy on twitter that

00:03:06.560 you have to follow because he's the one whose tweets everyone is talking about or soon will

00:03:12.340 but elon musk has done something tremendous here he has been a disruptor on a platform that very

00:03:19.480 much had succumbed to that big tech Silicon Valley groupthink that we see from Facebook and

00:03:25.700 that we see from Google or Alphabet as it's now called. And he has gotten in there and not only

00:03:31.320 has he taken over this platform and given it a very free speech focused mandate, but he has

00:03:38.740 decided that he is going to be unafraid of holding up a mirror and showcasing exactly what it was

00:03:45.160 that happened behind the scenes to make Twitter what it was up until the point at which he took

00:03:50.780 it over. And there have been some tremendous dumps of documents here that Elon Musk has orchestrated

00:03:57.600 through a number of independent-minded journalists such as Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss and Michael

00:04:04.060 Schellenberger. And I don't know Michael Schellenberger I don't know if I'd call him a

00:04:07.680 journalist but certainly a prolific Twitter user and influencer as much as I hate that term. And

00:04:14.040 these documents show us a lot of what we've kind of known was happening but they give us more in

00:04:21.320 the sense of a concrete roadmap of what happened as far as the shadow banning of conservative

00:04:26.780 accounts the banning of donald trump's twitter account the suppression of conservative thought

00:04:32.900 online and all of these things which again people sort of suspected were happening but we didn't

00:04:38.600 have the receipts as they say but the twitter files have given us those receipts and the

00:04:44.880 suppression of the hunter biden laptop story by the way which again we've absolutely known was a

00:04:50.520 big part of what twitter was doing to try to help the democrats effectively but we now know exactly

00:04:57.380 what went on behind that and there were some small unnamed forces behind the scenes that were pushing

00:05:03.640 back against some of this, but by and large, people fell in line. And the banning of Donald

00:05:08.600 Trump, very same idea. Some people said, well, hang on, I'm not exactly convinced about that.

00:05:13.540 One person in the documents published by Barry Weiss was saying, yeah, you know what, I come from

00:05:18.300 China, so censorship is not exactly something that I would enter into lightly. And the Twitter

00:05:24.520 safety team, or whatever it's called, did an assessment of Donald Trump's tweets and found

00:05:28.900 there was actually no violation, or vios as they call them, of their safety policies.

00:05:35.680 But Twitter decided after employees were pushing for it because they were triggered

00:05:40.140 and Donald Trump violated their safe space that they should ban Donald Trump in general.

00:05:45.660 And this was something that Twitter did in spite of an internal finding

00:05:49.700 that Donald Trump hadn't broken the Twitter rules.

00:05:54.140 And dictators from other countries, Ayatollah Khomeini,

00:05:57.200 their Twitter accounts all stayed. Donald Trump was the one that got permanently suspended on

00:06:02.900 Twitter. And it was only after Elon Musk took over the company that Donald Trump was unsuspended or

00:06:08.440 unbanned, although he has not tweeted since that happened. He's preferring to communicate on

00:06:13.400 Truth Social, which is the platform that he himself has started. Now, I would like to see

00:06:18.020 him come back to Twitter just for the entertainment value alone. And to kind of just push like the

00:06:22.440 last vestiges of the annoying triggered set off of Twitter because they won't really be able

00:06:27.440 to tolerate him being there all that well but I want to talk about this in a Canadian context here

00:06:33.700 because we have not seen any Canadian analog to the Twitter files just yet and to be fair we haven't

00:06:40.220 seen any big picture bans or suspensions apart from some of the ones that we've already gotten

00:06:45.540 some information about like the feminist writer Megan Murphy who has now been unbanned from Twitter

00:06:51.140 as part of the muskification thereof but a lot of Canadian conservative accounts I suspect were

00:06:57.540 also victims of this very same dynamic that was going after American accounts and Twitter

00:07:03.980 infamously said that shadow banning does not exist it was I think two years ago maybe three

00:07:09.980 years ago they said a lot of people are talking about shadow banning we do not do it well we saw

00:07:15.800 twitter evidence of the opposite we saw accounts that were tagged and we saw the screenshots of

00:07:21.640 this with do not amplify or exclude from searches or all of these other terms that show twitter was

00:07:28.840 making very deliberate decisions to limit the exposure of some accounts and curiously these

00:07:36.360 all tended to be conservative accounts dan bongino was one charlie kirk was another and so on so it

00:07:43.480 It wouldn't surprise me to know that I might have been on that list or Candace Malcolm might have been on that list, True North, Ezra Levant, a number of these people.

00:07:51.320 And as long as I know that it's not happening, I don't really care about what happened in the past.

00:07:56.960 And I think this is where people need to get very nervous about which levers of power, about our online identities we have given to people in a room in California that have an agenda that I think has been made abundantly clear right now.

00:08:14.480 And this was always the issue because I know some of you have been very annoyed by this, but I've always taken a very deliberately libertarian view on big tech.

00:08:22.760 I don't think it's the role of government to ensure that we have the constitutional right to free speech on Twitter or Facebook.

00:08:29.520 I think these are private companies.

00:08:31.120 I think people decide to use them.

00:08:33.120 And I think the companies have an obligation to, I think the companies have a moral obligation to be platforms for free speech, but not a legal obligation.

00:08:43.580 But at the very least, I think it's important that they be honest about what it is that they're doing.

00:08:48.380 and these companies are making billions of dollars off of user-generated content but they're

00:08:55.820 the ones deciding which content they think should be seen and which content shouldn't be seen and

00:09:00.640 the implications of this are vast especially when you're talking about democracy they can decide

00:09:05.360 which post by politicians get amplified which politician doesn't have a right to use the

00:09:10.100 platform and even if you think this is as i do legally sound you can think it is morally despicable

00:09:18.380 And I think that we all need to start talking about the moral value of free speech because

00:09:22.120 a society filled with people that don't fundamentally respect free speech is far worse in my view

00:09:27.980 or in a different sense bad than a society in which the government doesn't recognize

00:09:34.060 free speech.

00:09:34.620 Because if you have people that are yearning to be free and yearning to speak freely, there's

00:09:39.840 at least a force that will go up against the government.

00:09:42.820 A society in which people don't actually care about that freedom, government doesn't need

00:09:46.740 to censor because we all just censor ourselves and censor each other before the government needs

00:09:51.620 to get its hands dirty. And this brings me to the challenges that we have right now in Canada. And

00:09:59.260 Elon Musk is someone that perhaps doesn't care about Canadian public policy. I know he used to

00:10:05.480 be engaged to a Canadian singer, Grimes. He has a child that is therefore Canadian. I think he spent

00:10:11.840 like five minutes at Queen's University but he's not a Canadian so he may not actually care about

00:10:17.360 Canada. Canada represents a very small subset of Twitter's market because it is a country that is

00:10:23.220 very small in the world although his mother is Canadian I should point out. I don't know if he

00:10:28.060 has Canadian citizenship though I don't think he does but he may just as a matter of interest care

00:10:32.860 about Canada and I think he should because Canada is a country that is at least sharing the continent

00:10:38.540 with him and is integrated with the United States and can decide to make itself an enemy of social

00:10:45.600 media and social media free speech, which I think is going to be the case. And one of the reasons

00:10:50.640 this is so important is because the Trudeau government has been putting forward over the

00:10:55.660 last couple of years a package, a whole suite of bills that take aim at online free speech.

00:11:01.900 The one that everyone talks about is Bill C-11, which is the infamous internet regulation bill

00:11:07.040 that takes the CRTC approach to regulating TV and radio

00:11:11.360 and vastly expands it to the purview of online content.

00:11:16.340 And this bill is bad, and I've been tooth and nail fighting against it.

00:11:20.680 A lot of people have, but there are other bills as well

00:11:23.540 that the Liberals are putting forward that have gone under the radar.

00:11:26.720 One of them is, I think it's C-18,

00:11:29.160 which is the bill that the government will use

00:11:31.740 to force social media companies to pay news companies.

00:11:37.040 for the privilege of letting those news companies publish their content on social media.

00:11:42.900 It's a very convoluted bill.

00:11:44.280 So the Toronto Star voluntarily gets a Facebook page and a YouTube page

00:11:48.260 and posts links to their stuff on there.

00:11:50.100 And the government thinks that Facebook should have to pay the Toronto Star

00:11:54.240 for letting them use it to promote themselves.

00:11:57.120 And the rationale of this is that Facebook is making money off of Canadian news

00:12:01.140 that they should have to pay it back. 1.00

00:12:02.480 And it's a stupid bill. 0.98

00:12:04.120 It's what Australia tried to do, and Facebook had to acknowledge the fact that, listen, news content is a very insignificant part of what we do. 0.99

00:12:13.280 All of our users care more about cat gifs and memes than they do about your Heather Malick column, and I would rather see a million cat memes and gifs than a Heather Malick column.

00:12:23.700 In fact, if I never see a Heather Malick column until the day I die, it will be too soon. 0.71

00:12:27.580 but the thing is they're trying to basically integrate government regulation and big tech

00:12:35.500 and this is going to be an unholy alliance when you look at other things the government has tried

00:12:40.060 to do along this same vein one of the big ones is trying to make social media companies enforce

00:12:48.560 government's definition of hate speech and harmful speech now no one is going to get up and say well

00:12:55.000 well, actually, I like hate speech and, you know, by George, I think we need to defend hate speech.

00:12:59.420 But the problem always comes when you look at what the government's definition of it is.

00:13:04.980 And if the government censors you in some way, you have recourse, you have court, you have a way to fight that.

00:13:11.320 What if that censorship is happening because government has threatened social media companies with a penalty

00:13:17.720 if those social media companies don't censor your own content?

00:13:23.760 Well, then all of a sudden, Facebook or Twitter is making this decision about what you post.

00:13:28.660 They're doing it because of the government, but your issue is not with the government,

00:13:32.340 it's with them.

00:13:33.260 And you have this very murky territory here in which big tech companies have become the

00:13:38.860 government's enforcers based on a very itself murky definition of what you're allowed to say

00:13:46.580 online.

00:13:47.760 And the fact that more people aren't aware that this is happening and aware that the

00:13:51.800 government is pushing this the fact that more people aren't up in arms about that is i think

00:13:57.100 a tremendous shame there's been so much emphasis on bill c11 which don't get me wrong is a very

00:14:02.060 important bill and i think one that needs to be opposed but they're not talking about all these

00:14:07.120 other areas where government is trying to and i think largely succeeding at ingratiating itself

00:14:14.080 in just what happens on the internet and what these big tech companies do and you have to look

00:14:18.740 at all of these things in aggregate the government lowering the threshold for what hate speech is

00:14:23.940 the government doing all of this to then give itself the power to deputize social media companies

00:14:30.220 to enforce that definition and threatening them with fines if they don't and i think it's so

00:14:35.840 paramount to go back to the elon musk point that elon musk takes a stand against this i mean canada

00:14:42.480 may be a very insignificant player in the grand scheme of things and twitter i think shut down

00:14:47.520 its whole Canadian operation, which I think only had a handful of people. But the point is that

00:14:53.200 Canada is not a key market for Twitter. So this may not be on his radar. Canada Proud a few weeks

00:15:00.280 ago had actually tweeted Elon Musk and asked him if he was going to oppose Bill C-11, I think it

00:15:06.100 was. And he had said it was the first time he had heard of it. So I hope in that interceding time,

00:15:11.100 he has been informed of it by people on his team, or maybe Canada Proud has sent him the whole memo,

00:15:15.920 or maybe he's even been reading true north reports who knows but i think it's so important

00:15:20.720 that elon musk realizes if this commitment to free speech that he's espousing is something

00:15:25.760 he believes authentically and i believe it is i hope he looks at what the canadian government is

00:15:30.820 doing and what other governments around the world are also going to be doing the uk is doing its

00:15:36.140 own version of this and takes a stand against it and realizes that the only thing worse than

00:15:41.000 government censorship or big tech censorship is this weird hybrid where it's government empowered

00:15:47.360 but big tech enforced censorship and we'll obviously talk more about that but it's a

00:15:52.200 tremendous opportunity for Elon Musk and it doesn't take away from the fight we have as Canadians on

00:15:57.380 our hands but I think it is important for these companies to say no we are not devoting our

00:16:02.020 resources to complying with this Canadian law and if the Canadian government wants to go up against

00:16:07.460 Twitter I think Twitter's GDP is probably greater than that of Canada not exactly but certainly

00:16:12.580 greater than that of some smaller countries we'll talk about this a little bit more in the future I

00:16:17.480 want to turn to some cost of living issues which are very much affecting Canadians we spoke about

00:16:22.940 inflation a fair bit last week and I know we'll have a bit of a more in-depth look at this in a

00:16:28.480 couple of weeks with Franco Terrazano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation but I think one of

00:16:34.240 the big things that it's important to identify here is that for most Canadians who are grappling

00:16:40.700 with inflation, there isn't just one instant snap of the finger solution. There are a number of

00:16:47.080 inputs here. There's general inflation, supply chain issues. There are the increases to the

00:16:52.520 carbon tax. And one that doesn't often get discussed, but I think it's important here,

00:16:57.000 is the increases to payroll taxes, which if you're talking about thousands of dollars a year that

00:17:02.800 Canadians are spending more on groceries and taxes. A few hundred a year in payroll taxes is

00:17:08.440 quite significant. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business is calling on the federal

00:17:13.720 government to pause the planned increase of EI and CPP premiums, which will take about $305

00:17:22.740 away from the average Canadian worker next year. Dan Kelly, president of the CFIB, joins me now.

00:17:29.820 Dan, good to talk to you.

00:17:30.680 Thanks for coming on today.

00:17:32.480 Good to be here.

00:17:35.340 Do we have you there, Dan?

00:17:37.100 I can hear you.

00:17:38.440 Hope you can hear me.

00:17:39.300 Okay, perfect.

00:17:39.740 Sorry, we had a little bit of a technical issue there.

00:17:42.940 Let's talk about what this is first off.

00:17:45.380 These premiums go up every year, but we're also talking about a year that isn't exactly

00:17:50.260 business as usual economically for Canadian families.

00:17:54.220 No.

00:17:54.700 I mean, typically there is an increase in the maximum amount that we can pay CPP and EI on,

00:18:02.340 but the rate generally has not risen.

00:18:05.240 In fact, for two years, the federal government froze the employment insurance rates

00:18:09.000 because they recognized the economy was in rough shape.

00:18:11.880 Canadians were struggling through the pandemic, and so they kept those rates frozen.

00:18:15.900 Now they've removed that cap on EI,

00:18:18.700 and they're in the process of raising CPP rates significantly over a seven-year period.

00:18:23.900 Those two things combined are going to raise employees' payroll taxes by over 6% this year.

00:18:32.200 As you said, about a $305 increase, up to a $305 increase for the employee, $325 increase for the employer.

00:18:42.300 So your payroll on January 1 for most working Canadians will drop.

00:18:46.600 That's in the face of an environment where we're all dealing with the inflationary pressures on everything that we buy.

00:18:52.800 We're seeing EICPP premiums rise.

00:18:55.200 And then, as you noted, later in the spring, in most provinces, an increase in the carbon tax as well as an increase in liquor taxes.

00:19:04.880 Do you recall in the last couple of years when the government put this freeze in, when that decision was made?

00:19:11.080 What I mean by that, basically, is are we past that point where the government could easily do something about this?

00:19:16.520 look the government could could even now announce a freeze or retroactively take out the increase

00:19:24.080 there are ways to do that in fact in 2015 and 2016 the liberals just as they took power put

00:19:30.980 a two-year freeze on a two-year reduction plan for small businesses on their share of the ei bill

00:19:36.900 that could happen as soon as budget 2023 so it's not too late but you know we're a couple of weeks

00:19:43.720 away from January 1, and rates are expected to rise. They did increase them, the Liberals,

00:19:49.560 did increase EI, sorry, did increase Canada Pension Plan premiums in both COVID years,

00:19:55.120 in 2021 and 2022. They're doing it again this year, despite the fact we're all dealing with

00:20:01.280 wicked inflation levels. You know, when you take 300 bucks out of somebody's take-home income,

00:20:06.300 that's, you know, that's a round or two of groceries for many Canadian families at a time

00:20:12.660 when Canadians are really struggling.

00:20:14.860 The benefits for CPP, the future benefits,

00:20:17.700 that increase is going to be phased in over the next 40 years.

00:20:23.160 So putting a one-year pause in place, we don't think, is too tall in order.

00:20:27.940 Unfortunately, the government has ignored these calls and is moving ahead.

00:20:32.000 Now, if you're self-employed, you're getting hit on both ends of this, aren't you?

00:20:35.460 The employer and the employee side?

00:20:37.560 You're quite right.

00:20:38.360 You don't have to face EI premiums, but on Canada Pension Plan,

00:20:41.660 you pay the both the share as the employee and you pay the share as the employer on self-employment

00:20:47.580 income so you could have hundreds and hundreds of dollars of of increased canada pension plan

00:20:52.700 premiums and the self-employed really were huge losers out of covet for the business of course

00:20:58.220 this is adding additional pressure i mean you we talk about the inflationary pressures on average

00:21:03.420 canadians for business owners they're seeing that pressure on every line of their budget

00:21:08.400 And of course, with rising taxes, these payroll taxes, that obviously saps their ability to

00:21:15.000 provide raises for their employees to deal with the inflationary pressure that they're facing.

00:21:19.160 So it's a pretty vicious circle right now. I know that there's this vision that I don't even know

00:21:24.740 if it's an intentional one, but this approach of the business owner as being the miserly one that

00:21:29.560 doesn't want to give their employees benefits. And you know, any small business owner I've

00:21:33.260 ever spoken to would love to pay their employees a lot more, but sometimes they look at their

00:21:37.620 balance sheet and that money just isn't there. So when you're talking about, you know, a few

00:21:42.400 hundred dollars per employee, if you've got 10 employees, that $3,000 is not insignificant on

00:21:47.960 some small businesses, is it? It's not at all. And look, I mean, we have to also put the context

00:21:53.900 of what's happening right now. Sure, the COVID restrictions are behind us, but if you can

00:21:59.380 believe it, only half of small businesses say that they are back to 2019 levels of sales.

00:22:04.600 For many, they're not seeing customers return in the volume that they did pre-pandemic.

00:22:10.260 On top of that, just to get through the restrictions of the last two years,

00:22:13.920 the average small firm has taken on $110,000 in debt.

00:22:18.580 That's how much they now owe, exposed to higher interest rates that they're having to make good on.

00:22:25.100 And they're seeing these cost pressures.

00:22:27.280 So lower sales, more debt at higher interest rates, and huge cost increases.

00:22:32.980 This is not the boom times that people were predicting coming out of COVID that many of the articles were breathlessly talking about.

00:22:44.780 Sadly, for many small businesses, these remain pretty bleak times.

00:22:48.100 Small business optimism, if you can believe it, is actually fairly close to the low levels it was at the beginning of the pandemic.

00:22:56.240 That's how bad it is for small businesses.

00:22:58.260 And yet the federal government feels like this is a great time to jack up taxes.

00:23:01.500 is. Yeah, I mean, there's always been that divide that people have seen between the financial

00:23:07.000 economy and the real economy, between the picture of the economy that you might see looking at the

00:23:12.360 stock market, although not always, and what you see when you look on the ground. And again, a lot

00:23:17.080 of these, a lot of people have made billions in the pandemic, but for a lot of small business

00:23:22.400 owners, they haven't seen that. They haven't seen that, you know, incredible financial success story

00:23:26.720 that amazon has no well look restrictions really hit independent businesses particularly hard

00:23:33.440 especially in retail hospitality the service sector arts and entertainment travel and tourism

00:23:38.880 these were the sectors that were most directly affected by covet restrictions they took it on

00:23:42.960 the chin uh to try to get through yes there were government support programs in place but

00:23:48.320 our data shows that only about one-third of the cost to business was covered by covet subsidies

00:23:54.320 two-thirds was borne by the business itself. This is deeply unfair at this stage and business owners

00:24:00.800 are saying, look, give us a bit of a breather here before you start to return to raising taxes.

00:24:06.800 You add to that the carbon tax increase that we're expecting in April and for small businesses

00:24:12.800 that's especially deadly. Small firms don't qualify for any of the rebates that supposedly

00:24:17.760 are there for consumers. They basically are just payers of the carbon tax itself.

00:24:23.360 liquor tax increases affect hospitality and some in the retail sector. We need to make sure that

00:24:30.460 Canadians have dollars to spend in businesses. We're not doing a lot to help them. I know that

00:24:37.280 you have obviously called first and foremost for a freeze on these increases. Another idea is

00:24:43.520 putting forward a refundable tax credit, and you mentioned 2015-2016 on that. The freeze would be,

00:24:49.860 your view the ideal response correct yeah absolutely look if our first choice is to put

00:24:55.380 the brakes on the increase that is expected for january 1. uh i'm not optimistic that that's going

00:25:01.060 to happen only two weeks away from uh from the new year uh but but you know that would be the

00:25:06.740 the best course of action for the federal government to take but there are ways even after

00:25:11.220 that to to try to offset these costs even if they're not going to offset them for average

00:25:16.020 canadians trying to to remove some of the payroll burden on canadian employers would be helpful

00:25:21.620 and there are ways through through a mix of credits tax reductions in other ways that the

00:25:25.700 federal government can come to the aid of of small and medium-sized firms uh you know we've got we've

00:25:31.460 got all sorts of pressures right now and and we need to get a few of them taken off our our list

00:25:37.060 have you found that christia freeland the finance minister actually hears you out when

00:25:40.980 you've brought these concerns historically or do you find that the government is just

00:25:44.260 completely detached from the reality of what small business owners are facing well look i've been

00:25:50.000 doing this a long time uh and uh when the liberals took office uh there was no secret that uh that

00:25:56.160 the finance minister bill borneau did not listen one bit to the concerns of small business owners

00:26:02.440 and that's when the cpp increase plan was was first hatched uh it was negotiated and i will say

00:26:08.920 criticism of the federal government alone does not set cpp rates many provincial governments

00:26:14.940 including conservative provincial governments supported the increase in the canada pension

00:26:18.780 plan we're trying to convince some of those same governments to put pause of to press pause

00:26:23.560 when when when the deputy prime minister when christy friedland took the reins in finance she

00:26:28.560 did listen to many of our requests over the course of the pandemic some of the work that we did to

00:26:34.580 try to make sure that there were effective subsidy programs in place for small business

00:26:38.600 But that remains incomplete, and right now what businesses need is a little bit of relief.

00:26:43.860 There was in the fall economic statement a plan to reduce credit card processing fees.

00:26:48.740 That's good news.

00:26:50.040 I'm hoping to be speaking to her before the holidays in the next couple of days,

00:26:53.920 and we'll be putting this request to her once again to see if small firms can get at least some relief

00:27:00.380 from the massive pressures that Otto is imposing right now.

00:27:04.220 I wasn't going to go there, but since you mentioned credit card processing fees,

00:27:07.720 I don't know if a lot of consumers realize how disruptive those are to businesses.

00:27:13.860 Oh, gosh.

00:27:14.740 You know, the average consumer, of course, thinks that the credit card industry is funded through the annual fee that they might pay to get a premium card,

00:27:22.380 or is funded by the interest that they might pay if they carry a balance on their credit card.

00:27:27.120 What they don't know, for the most part, is that every time that card is swiped or chipped,

00:27:32.380 the merchant pays a fee somewhere in the range of one and a half to two and a half percent of the

00:27:37.060 sale for the courtesy of making that transaction happen. That's somewhere in the range of five to

00:27:42.120 ten billion dollars a year that Canadians pay that is embedded in the prices of everything

00:27:47.680 that we buy. So and those fees sadly in Canada are among the highest in the world. So it is good that

00:27:55.040 the government has talked about finding ways to lower the pressure of these fees on average

00:27:59.660 Canadians. We're working to make sure that that actually happens, putting some ideas forward

00:28:05.060 to government, to Visa, to MasterCard. But the pressures are there. The rewards that,

00:28:13.080 you know, your free trip to Florida that you may never get, that's funded by consumers that are

00:28:18.720 paying with cash, paying with debit. So it's actually in many ways a wealth transfer from

00:28:22.960 low-income Canadians that pay with cash and debit to wealthier Canadians that have one of

00:28:27.540 these premium credit cards. That's something that I think very few understand. Yeah, and I'm guilty

00:28:33.120 of it as well, because don't get me wrong, I've got credit cards that, you know, give me Aeroplan

00:28:36.900 points, and I use those things, but it's not coming out, like, you know it's not being conjured

00:28:42.500 out of thin air. Someone is paying for that. You got it. It's the merchant, ultimately, and then

00:28:48.240 that gets passed back to the consumer. So we think that a fair system would be to keep these fees low,

00:28:55.240 as is the case in many other countries in the world.

00:28:57.920 The reward schemes are still there,

00:28:59.960 but it's unfair that the merchant has to pay for the reward schemes,

00:29:04.880 the customer loyalty schemes that really do reward the banks

00:29:08.000 and the customers of the banks in the end.

00:29:11.440 That's not the way that this is supposed to work.

00:29:14.440 All right.

00:29:15.220 So here's, I guess, where we get down to the action item here.

00:29:17.900 We're looking at this increase going in January 1st,

00:29:21.140 and I think you mentioned earlier that technically there are options

00:29:24.380 after january 1st but this is really the crunch time if there's going to be a freeze most likely

00:29:29.580 on these increases in premiums correct you got it and we have a petition on our website right now

00:29:35.500 directed at the federal government and provinces uh to press pause on the ei and cpp premium

00:29:41.100 increases that are expected on that are planned for january 1st again i think you know one of my

00:29:46.860 observations about canadians is we actually don't mind paying higher taxes we actually don't mind

00:29:51.500 fees. We just don't want to know about it. And that's the problem with CPP and EI. Because it

00:29:57.180 comes off our paychecks, most people, it flies right under their radar. And then they realize

00:30:02.020 in January, hey, I'm a little bit poorer, not drawing the connection, sadly, between the policies

00:30:07.980 that the government's putting in place and their bottom line. All right. And yeah, certainly, I know

00:30:13.400 a lot of, I get a lot of emails from people who are self-employed. You'll certainly see both ends

00:30:17.720 of that as well. Dan Kelly, President of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

00:30:22.140 Thanks very much. And that petition is on the CFIB website. So have a good one, Dan. Merry

00:30:27.220 Christmas to you. To you too. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. I said earlier in the show,

00:30:32.800 I want to talk a little bit about Mississauga Lakeshore. And I assure you, if you do not live

00:30:38.180 in Mississauga Lakeshore, you're like, why on earth do we have to talk about a by-election in

00:30:41.640 a riding in which I do not live? And there is a good reason for it because by-elections tend to

00:30:46.360 be presented as though they have a national character to them and there's some reason why

00:30:52.520 this is probably accurate to some extent you saw in the course of the by-election MPs from all over

00:30:58.440 the country from as far away as BC and Alberta were knocking on doors in this riding in the

00:31:04.200 greater Toronto area for the Liberal or for the Conservative or for the NDP and the thing that

00:31:10.420 was happening here is that the media was trying to present this narrative as though this was going

00:31:16.280 to be the real test of Pierre Polyev's leadership. If the Conservatives failed to win in Mississauga

00:31:21.880 Lakeshore then Pierre Polyev was a failure as a leader and it's done and he's going to lose the

00:31:25.960 next election and I was never quite convinced of that and it was certainly his first electoral

00:31:31.820 test. I mean it's by definition the first election that has taken place since Pierre Polyev became

00:31:38.260 the Conservative leader but it's also a riding that has elected a Conservative member of Parliament

00:31:44.720 in recent history once and that was Stella Ambler in 2011 when the Conservatives had a national

00:31:52.740 majority and did very well in writings that they have only done well in in that same election that

00:31:59.640 very election in recent memory so I think expectations were low and the Conservatives

00:32:05.600 knew it and the Conservatives acted that way I think the Conservatives saw the writing was on

00:32:10.220 the wall. They knew they weren't going to win. They were up against a star liberal. Now, how on

00:32:15.580 earth the finance minister for Kathleen Wynne in Ontario is not in and of itself something that

00:32:22.560 makes you a pariah, I don't know. But he was a star candidate. And the Conservatives ran a guy

00:32:27.940 who, by all accounts, is a nice enough guy, a police officer named Ron Chinzer. But the fact

00:32:33.400 that I had to look down on my screen before I said Ron Chinzer, I think, is probably an example

00:32:37.440 of the fact that he didn't have the star power that Charles Sousa did, such as it is. And all of

00:32:44.020 that was, I think, why the Conservatives were like, we're just going to run and we're going to send

00:32:49.080 some MPs there to knock on doors. But Pierre Polyev was not knocking on doors. He wasn't

00:32:54.020 thumping his chest saying, this is our guy, we're going to win. He was getting attacked yesterday

00:32:58.560 for not having tweeted about the by-election. And then eventually in the afternoon, like got

00:33:03.560 around to tweeting that there was a by-election going on. He sent out a blast email to conservative

00:33:08.780 members or donors, I don't know which one it was, yesterday, fundraising for Peter McKay's

00:33:14.400 leadership debt. So I think it's safe to say that when Peter McKay's leadership debt is more of a

00:33:20.440 priority than the by-election that the conservatives don't actually care. Maybe Peter McKay should have

00:33:25.720 run for the by-election in Mississauga-Lakeshore and he could have lost the election and paid off

00:33:29.760 his leadership debt all in one fell swoop but the conservatives were not expecting to win now

00:33:35.920 i still think that there is a bit of a problem here if you look at the numbers this was a low

00:33:41.760 turnout election as by elections often are but charles souza won with 51 of the vote 51 of the

00:33:50.620 vote the conservatives should at least be in the wheelhouse but only got 37 of the vote the ndp

00:33:57.000 just completely collapsed. They were under 5%. The Green Party was an afterthought. The PPC got

00:34:03.160 1.2%, which is not at all anything to be proud about. So the only people that really showed up

00:34:09.580 were people that were saying, yeah, I guess I'm okay just voting for the Liberals. So the makeup

00:34:13.760 in the House of Commons stays the same as it was before Sven Spengerman resigned the seat to go

00:34:19.280 work at the UN, which is, I think, like the number one off-ramp for a Liberal member of Parliament

00:34:24.140 in Trudeau's government.

00:34:25.300 So does it mean anything?

00:34:27.720 I think it means something in the sense

00:34:30.380 of what the Conservatives need to do.

00:34:32.900 Because as Stephen Harper showed in 2011,

00:34:36.220 it is possible to win a majority without Quebec,

00:34:39.860 but you need to then have

00:34:41.340 the so-called Greater Toronto Area in your corner.

00:34:45.320 If you don't have the Greater Toronto Area,

00:34:46.880 you've got to get Quebec.

00:34:47.880 But this is just a basic numbers game.

00:34:50.140 You cannot win a majority government

00:34:51.820 without getting one or the other.

00:34:55.200 So what's your plan, Pierre Polyev?

00:34:57.660 If you want to be the guy that's going to command a conservative majority,

00:35:01.940 which is the only real way to have a conservative government at this point,

00:35:06.560 you've got to be able to show that you're at least in the ballpark.

00:35:09.160 And I do think the conservatives need to answer for why they didn't contest it.

00:35:13.460 Was it just to save face?

00:35:15.300 Did they not campaign aggressively because they didn't want it to be able to blow up?

00:35:19.700 And if he lost when Pierre Polyev had been really invested, that would have looked worse than losing when Pierre Polyev just forgot there was a by-election.

00:35:27.480 I don't know. I don't know what the strategy was.

00:35:29.920 Maybe it was just that they're all getting their ducks in a row and he's still just finding out where the furniture is going to go in his office on Parliament Hill.

00:35:37.560 But it's not exactly a ringing vote of confidence for conservatives that know that's the area where they need to do well.

00:35:47.360 So I'm not going to say that it is a failure in the sense of what Andrew Coyne and Robert

00:35:53.780 Benzie and all of these other mainstream media types are saying, but I am going to say that

00:35:58.160 it raises some questions, some questions that the Conservatives need to have answers for

00:36:02.420 because it is just a numbers game.

00:36:04.220 And you can talk about how Aaron O'Toole just completely hinged all of his ambitions

00:36:09.120 on the idea of winning Quebec and the GTA and didn't.

00:36:12.220 but he ultimately did better in this riding in 2021 than Pierre Polyev did in the by-election

00:36:18.880 and sure recognize the by-elections are different low voter turnout fine but if there was not enough

00:36:25.480 of an incentive for people to come out and vote for someone other than Trudeau's candidate

00:36:30.080 why was that what is it the conservatives need to do better to do well there and I mean the

00:36:36.040 liberals just think this is like a complete win across the board just take a look at this clip

00:36:41.200 from today in question period now i haven't actually seen the clip i've only seen a little

00:36:46.640 bit of a preview of it that was circulating in the transcript so we get to enjoy this together

00:36:52.680 but this is justin trudeau using the by-election win as like the trump card on criticism for his

00:36:59.520 minister violating ethics rules and confidence to bad ethics we have another liberal minister

00:37:07.040 found guilty of violating the Ethics Act, this time for giving a $23,000 contract

00:37:13.780 to one of her best friends at a company called Pomp and Circumstances.

00:37:19.960 It reminds us of the Prime Minister giving a half billion dollars to an organization

00:37:24.060 called the We Charity that gave his family a half million dollars.

00:37:28.480 So, Mr. Speaker, will this minister be held accountable,

00:37:30.660 and will she be required to pay back the $23,000 in improper contracting that she gave out?

00:37:37.040 Mr. Speaker, in this House there's a lot of debate and back and forth,

00:37:43.600 but every now and then there's an opportunity for Canadians to weigh in directly

00:37:47.420 on what's going on in federal politics.

00:37:49.500 And yesterday, the residents of Mississauga Lakeshore had a choice.

00:37:54.100 They could choose between the Conservative Party's politics of division

00:37:58.240 and reckless proposals that included recommending you opt out of inflation

00:38:02.720 by investing in crypto or our government's approach

00:38:06.100 of being there for Canadians every step of the way

00:38:08.960 and putting more money back in their pockets.

00:38:11.180 Well, Mr. Speaker, the people of Mississauga-Lakeshore

00:38:13.960 have spoken and elected a Liberal Member of Parliament.

00:38:17.580 Take on God of it.

00:38:25.580 Okay.

00:38:27.020 I just want to try to recapture or recap this for you.

00:38:32.720 Mr. Speaker, a liberal minister was paying her friend tens of thousands of dollars.

00:38:39.840 The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner has found this to be wrong.

00:38:43.580 How do you answer for this?

00:38:45.820 Well, how about those Mississauga Lakeshore results?

00:38:49.520 And that gets applause.

00:38:52.300 Okay, this is what we're doing.

00:38:55.560 So you win a by-election in Mississauga Lakeshore, and it actually doesn't matter if you break

00:38:59.840 federal ethics laws, which is good.

00:39:01.740 That must be the secret. 0.99

00:39:02.820 Justin Trudeau can have all the vacations with the Agacon he wants

00:39:06.020 as long as he keeps winning in Mississauga Lakeshore. 0.98

00:39:09.680 We've got to end things there.

00:39:11.280 My thanks to all of you for tuning in.

00:39:13.020 We will be back tomorrow with more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:39:17.340 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:39:20.720 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:39:22.920 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:39:31.740 Amen.

Juno News - December 13, 2022

Elon Musk needs to stand up to Trudeau's internet censorship

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