00:03:06.100He came in seventh out of the 13 or 14 candidates with 7.6-something percent of the points in the race.
00:03:13.440But nonetheless, a significant member of Stephen Harper's Conservative government, of the Conservative movement in Canada, and now persona non grata as a candidate.
00:03:28.500And the party is accurate to point to the rule that they were using to justify denying Pierre Lemieux the right to run.
00:03:35.820A spokesperson said to me in an email, in accordance with our nomination rules, an applicant must not have been an unsuccessful candidate in both of the two prior federal general elections.
00:03:47.000And if you look at the nomination rules, that's valid.
00:03:50.160You can't lose two times in a row and then run a third time.
00:04:04.900The rules also allow a candidate to get a waiver, which, at the risk of getting too in the weeds on this, basically allows the party to say, you know what, we're going to let you run again anyway.
00:04:17.000And the reasons they would do this would be, for example, in the case of someone like Pierre Lemieux, who's a former three-time MP, someone who has name recognition, who has an organization, and someone who could bring that riding back into play.
00:04:31.060Glengarry Prescott Russell had not been conservative for 60 years when he won with a margin of just over 200 votes in 2006.
00:04:40.700And then he increased that margin over the next two elections by the thousands.
00:04:45.000So for all the people saying, well, rules are rules, just take a look at Richmond Hill.
00:04:50.300When another former MP, Costas Menegakis, who lost in 2015, lost again in 2019, is somehow magically on the ballot in 2021.
00:05:02.560One can only assume that he received this waiver, which Pierre Lemieux was denied.
00:05:08.140So it's not even like the rule is being evenly enforced in the same election in the exact same circumstances.
00:05:15.960A candidate that was an MP in the Harper years, lost in 2015 and 2019, and wants to run again.
00:05:22.780They're saying yes to Costas Menegakis and no to Pierre Lemieux.
00:06:29.740Basically, he's against the coercive measures that a lot of people are pushing when it comes to vaccination.
00:06:36.520And the Conservative Party has said, yeah, your unwillingness to support public health measures means you don't get to be a candidate in the Conservative Party.
00:06:44.180Now, I haven't heard the Conservative Party side of the story here.
00:06:49.580But the reality is stuff like this does not reflect well on a party that wants to be viewed as a serious alternative to Justin Trudeau's government.
00:06:59.120And whenever I talk about stories like this, I always get response from, I mean, I get two camps.
00:07:04.840I get PPC people that say, well, are you surprised the Conservatives are corrupt?
00:07:09.020And then I get Conservatives who know it's wrong, who know it's wrong, who say, yeah, yeah.
00:07:13.980I mean, but again, do you want to give Trudeau a win?
00:07:40.000You alienate all of the people who go along with them, who've supported them, who now say, well, I guess if there's no place in the party for Derek Sloan or Jonas Smith or for Pierre Lemieux, I guess there's no place in the party for me.
00:07:55.360And eventually you start chipping away more and more at your coalition, and you don't have volunteers left, you don't have donors left, and at a certain point you don't even have voters left.
00:08:05.780So I know the mainstream media is certainly going to be covering Conservative infighting.
00:08:12.580But I'm not going to avoid pointing out these things, because I don't think the Conservative Party should be allowed to make these sorts of decisions with impunity.
00:08:21.000If we're going to play the well rules are rules card, and we don't allow people with two subsequent defeats to run again, great.
00:08:28.540But when you start picking and choosing who it is that rule applies to, it becomes very easy for people to start raising questions about whether you are only using it as an excuse to get rid of someone who you actually oppose for other reasons.
00:08:43.160These are not the issues that matter to Canadians.
00:08:46.180I don't think the average Canadian will care about what the Conservatives do to Pierre Lemieux or to Jonas Smith or whatnot.
00:09:48.040I don't know if she's going to get what she wants in terms of having that appointment overturned.
00:09:54.440But the reality is stuff like this is entirely avoidable if political parties stop behaving in the way they're behaving.
00:10:02.820These things are avoidable, but we shouldn't be feeling or coerced into not talking about them because of political tribalism, which is what a lot of people want.
00:10:11.820So I would say, yeah, let's get the Conservatives to quit with this nonsense and talk about China, talk about free speech, talk about debt, talk about all of these issues that should be the formative and decisive issues of the 2021 election campaign.
00:10:30.100Elections are often won or lost based on things that don't matter or based on things that barely scratch the surface of what it is that Canadians are dealing with.
00:10:40.580I don't know if I'm optimistic, but I'm still hopeful.
00:10:43.200I have hope that this election could be an election about things that matter, not the Seinfeld election, the election about nothing, but an election about key issues.
00:10:52.340And here's why I'm a little bit hopeful of this.
00:10:58.160Whatever you think about COVID, about lockdowns, about restrictions, it's raised the stakes.
00:11:03.000We had, what, $315 billion deficit posted in the last fiscal year.
00:11:09.500We have deficits up until 2070, according to the parliamentary budget officer, which means no party, no party, no matter how much they are filled with fiscal hawks, can come in and say, we're going to balance the budget in our next term.
00:11:26.640Now, this 2070 projection is terrifying for Canadians.
00:11:30.580We're talking about trillions of dollars of debt.
00:11:33.540And even if you are a socialist, even if you're like an NDPer and we'll talk about their platform momentarily, there should be an objection to this.
00:11:42.600I mean, I know they don't understand economic socialists, but there should be an objection because the more you have to spend on servicing and maintaining your debt, the less you can spend on all of these pie-in-the-sky nationalized programs that you're pushing forward.
00:11:55.520So left or right should be taking issue with no end in sight for this fiscal hardship that Canada is facing.
00:12:07.440I do not fault the Liberal government as much for spending a lot of money during the pandemic.
00:12:12.360Pretty much every country in the world, every OECD country, every G20 country was dealing with major deficits.
00:12:19.160I could take issue with individual programs and expenditures, but there were going to be tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in a deficit no matter what.
00:12:28.140That I think we cannot give a pass for, but we can understand.
00:12:44.060So they started putting billions into infrastructure, racking up deficits, and that little itty-bitty deficit, so small that you could barely see it, quickly became larger and larger.
00:12:55.280So we had eliminated any buffer we would have had for economic hardship, which was certainly delivered throughout the course of the pandemic.
00:13:03.880And you still have a Liberal government that's planning these major big-ticket items like universal pharmacare, a $30 billion childcare program, a gun buyback that's going to cost billions more than is being anticipated, and so on and so forth.
00:13:20.320And all of this is to say that we don't have a buffer.
00:13:25.420They're still wanting to spend more and more.
00:13:27.180So this 2070 projection from the PBO is not something you can just blame on COVID.
00:13:35.940He's going to say, well, this is all about the pandemic, and we had to look out for Canadians and give them money and let them do all this.
00:13:41.940But that is not an accurate representation of where that money is coming from.
00:13:47.420They've incorporated a lot of Liberal commitments to this.
00:13:51.180So everything the Liberal government says it's going to do for you or to you in its platform is another expenditure that's going to further and further even the faint hope of a balanced budget, which matters.
00:14:06.880And Canadians need to start caring more about debt and deficit, even though they may be boring issues, because we're getting to a point where it's beyond caricature.
00:14:14.720And the effect is going to be significant beyond what can be described.
00:14:21.120I mean, as much as the COVID crisis revealed a lot of economic woes, it also revealed the global policy woes that Canada has that I delved into on the show on Wednesday.
00:14:32.040I don't want to rehash all of that here, except to say that China matters.
00:14:37.400And even people that don't care about foreign policy as much need to understand China is a threat on economic grounds, on security grounds, on public health grounds.
00:14:47.920When, you know, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19 are being cooked up in the lab, that matters.
00:14:54.340And China's handling and negligence around these things matters.
00:14:58.440And just as an interesting aside, I've said that Aaron O'Toole, whatever my frustrations are with, you know, how he treats Pierre Lemieux, he's been solid on China.
00:15:07.040And just this week, the Conservatives have sought intervener status in the Winnipeg lab case.
00:15:15.160This is the case of the two scientists, Zhang Guqiu and Kading Chang, who worked at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, were escorted out by RCMP, then earlier this year fired, and the Liberal government's refusing to hand over any of the documents connected to this.
00:15:34.200This is something that the Speaker of the House has actually taken to court, and the Conservatives want intervener status.
00:15:41.580They want to be able to make a filing. It's unclear whether this is going to happen in the course of the election, but as leader of the official opposition, which he still is for the next couple of days, Aaron O'Toole is basically saying,
00:15:54.660I want to be able to go before this, because there is a role that Parliament is meant to play in the oversight of documents, and the contempt, literal and legal, the contempt in which the Liberal government is holding Parliament, is actually an illegal matter.
00:16:12.380So I think Aaron O'Toole has every right to intervene. But again, why can he not be the tough guy on other issues? And that's the whole point. Still, the Conservatives are claiming they don't want an election.
00:16:22.720The NDP claiming they don't want an election, but all of a sudden they release a full platform. Not a good platform, but a full platform for this election.
00:16:31.860They say, oh, no one's ready for, we can't have, we don't want. And I want to look at this in a little bit of detail, because some of it is just the usual stuff from the NDP.
00:16:40.300But there's some very weird things here. For starters, it's not costed. It's not costed. So when I mentioned that people on the left should be concerned about rising debt and rising deficits, the NDP is not.
00:16:53.700So all of these expenditures, all of these line items, they have no way of paying for. And they've got to know that. I just don't think they want Canadians to know it.
00:17:03.000But then they resort to like the only thing they know how to do, which is talk about the super rich.
00:17:10.360And this is from one page calling for a new deal for tax fairness.
00:17:14.960The COVID-19 pandemic has driven inequalities even deeper. While millions of families and small businesses have been pushed to the brink during the pandemic, the super rich are doing better than ever.
00:17:25.960Canadian billionaires are $78 billion richer since the first lockdown in 2020 and counting.
00:17:31.920They're making big money while people suffer. The NDP platform says that those who have profited off of the pandemic should pay for the recovery.
00:17:41.240They want the wealthiest to pay their share. So if you've already started a drinking game, I believe you need to take a shot every time you hear pay their share.
00:17:49.280So I hope you're not listening to this too early because I feel you're going to be taking a lot of shots.
00:17:53.600They want new, fair, and progressive taxation.
00:17:59.080They're going to put a 15% tax on large corporate windfall profits during the pandemic.
00:18:04.400They're going to go after large corporations that took publicly funded wage subsidies and gave executive bonuses.
00:18:10.500That's actually, I think, a reasonable enough policy.
00:18:13.020And then they're going to also boost the top tax rate, put a luxury goods tax on yachts and private jets.
00:18:21.240That's another take a drink moment there.
00:18:23.900And ask that the multimillionaires pay a bit more towards shared services with a wealth tax.
00:18:32.400But tax the rich, tax the rich, make them pay their fair share, yachts and private jets.
00:18:36.680This is standard NDP fare for a lot of it, but it's devoid of economic knowledge.
00:18:44.240The NDP's platform is blaming the so-called super rich for the economic harm that was unleashed on average families and businesses during the pandemic.
00:19:01.560Because all of these lockdowns were telling the mom and pop shops they had to close down.
00:19:06.760Meanwhile, Amazon became the primary grocery vendor supplier for all of these goods and services that were declared non-essential by lockdown-happy governments.
00:19:17.280By including a lot of NDP voices that were calling for more and more lockdowns.
00:19:23.660So, yeah, it's unfair that all of these people got wealthy because their businesses were the only ones allowed to stay open.
00:19:31.120But that's not a reflection of any sort of government economic situation.
00:19:36.000That's a reflection of how much lockdowns harmed small and medium-sized businesses.
00:19:44.700And the platform even concedes that, yes, there was an effect in the lockdown of these people getting richer.
00:19:51.660But it doesn't make that leap that is so necessary, which is to put the blame for that gap on government intervention and put that blame on lockdowns themselves.
00:20:04.220And, yeah, I mean, when you look at, like, you see this all the time.
00:20:07.760If you look at some NDP Twitter accounts, they'll say, outlaw billionaires.
00:20:10.660They say these words that I don't even think they know what they mean.
00:20:44.720But I just don't like the moral judgment in that term.
00:20:48.020But governments and politicians and people like Jagmeet Singh and the NDP here are blaming the wealthy for what it's actually politicians that have to shoulder.
00:20:57.000And even though the NDP has not been in power, the NDP has basically endorsed the Justin Trudeau permanent emergency mentality in Parliament.
00:21:06.100And provincial NDP in Ontario and Alberta and elsewhere have also pushed for more and more of these restrictions that have allowed this gap that they take such aim with in this platform to get as large as it has over the last 16 months.
00:21:20.760Before we take a break here, I want to talk about a great new book from our friends over at SecondStreet.org, Life After COVID.
00:21:29.820Yes, elections give lots of news on the day to day, but we can't lose sight of the bigger picture and the longer term questions like what can be done about rising government debt, about long health care waiting lists, about unemployment,
00:21:42.000about all of these things that have to be confronted by the country in the life after COVID, hence the name of the book.
00:21:48.500You can get this free e-book by heading over to SecondStreet.org.
00:21:52.960That's lifeafterCOVID at SecondStreet.org.
00:22:00.600You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:22:06.500Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:22:09.300The cultural battle on mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports is ramping up significantly.
00:22:16.960And I actually wanted to address a couple of key parts of this that I feel were causing some confusion.
00:22:23.940Because on one hand, we had Justin Trudeau a few months back saying that vaccine passports are divisive and he wouldn't go anywhere near them.
00:22:32.620And then on the other hand, you had just last week, Justin Trudeau talking about mandating mandatory vaccines for federally regulated workers.
00:22:40.540And now you have the immigration minister, Marco Mendicino, announcing that the federal government is putting the finishing touches on its vaccine passport for international travel.
00:22:53.400Now, there are two parts of this discussion.
00:22:55.980There's the domestic vaccine passport and then there's the international vaccine passport.
00:23:01.000And while the two are different, I think they're part of the same overarching discussion here.
00:23:05.740But I want to do a little bit of I told you so first.
00:23:08.240Because months ago, I got a lot of backlash from people when I said vaccine passports are inevitable.
00:23:50.180So if India says we need proof of vaccination or Italy says we need proof of vaccination or the Maldives, I pluck these countries out pretty randomly, then Canadians should not be excluded, which they would be if their government doesn't play ball.
00:24:04.880So in that way, the government has to respond to this because otherwise Canadians are going to have parts of the world closed off to them.
00:24:11.480The issue is that a federal vaccine passport will no doubt be used at a local or provincial level, even if provinces are not pursuing them.
00:24:23.720Jason Kenney has said heck no to issuing Alberta vaccine passports.
00:24:28.620He's also said that he doesn't want to even recognize them in a domestic context, although he's saying that obviously Albertans can use them for international travel.
00:24:37.800What this means is that the existence of a federal vaccine passport could very easily be used by some business in Alberta that says, yeah, you know what?
00:24:48.880I want proof of vaccination if you want to come here, if you want to dine at this restaurant, go to this gym.
00:24:53.620And now that there exists a government issued card, it's basically an end run around the provinces.
00:25:00.840So now we can have a national vaccine passport rather than simply a federal vaccine passport.
00:25:09.060Now, if you believe, as I do, that businesses should have the right to make these determinations for themselves, just as individuals have the right to go elsewhere, you may say, what's the big deal?
00:25:16.960The point is, Justin Trudeau has to own this because he said a few months back that no, this is a provincial responsibility, not the federal government's job.
00:25:25.960And now he's facilitating what I think is fair to call that end run around provinces to have a national vaccine passport, even if on the surface, the point of it is simply to facilitate international travel.
00:25:40.520It's downright creepy the direction that some of the activists are taking this.
00:25:44.840Let's just look at Quebec for a moment.
00:25:46.960Quebec will ban unvaccinated people from non-essential public places.
00:25:51.840So Quebec's doing the France thing, where if you want to go to a gym, if you want to go to a restaurant, you will have to be vaccinated.
00:25:58.800And that means that you're going to have to scan that code, a digital vaccine passport on a smartphone app for validation,
00:26:06.740which means that if you want to do anything that comes along with living in a supposedly free society, you have to disclose your vaccination status to the barista, to the bartender, to the host at the restaurant, to the concert ticket taker.
00:26:21.860This stratification of society along the lines of vaccination.
00:26:25.680This was imposed without any debate whatsoever.
00:26:30.700And the reason for it, Francois Legault said, is that if you have debate on vaccine passports, it would expose Quebecers to conspiracy theories.
00:26:42.680This is, you can't even make this stuff up.
00:26:45.740So what Francois Legault said is that debate's not needed.