00:17:01.980So if the definition is as it is, which I think has a huge amount of subjectivity in it, you're asking the public
00:17:10.440at large who can make use of this tribunal mechanism to understand the real nuanced difference between what is and
00:17:21.780isn't hate speech under this statutory definition.
00:17:24.300And if you and I are struggling with it, and we are pretty deep into this stuff, I think your average Canadian is really not going to know the difference.
00:17:33.240You're going to have a lot of frivolous and disruptive claims brought under this new civil remedy.
00:17:40.320Yes, and that was exactly what happened when the Section 13 1.0 was around prior to 2013.
00:17:50.180They were shopping complaints to the Canadian tribunal and to provincial ones.
00:17:54.520They were going after columnists they didn't like, bloggers and authors.
00:17:58.940And in seeing this, the one glaring issue here when you talk about the civil remedy is that the threshold for a civil wrong in the eyes of the law is lower than it is for a criminal wrong.
00:18:09.040So the hate speech definition that we have in criminal law, which is very high by design as a threshold, is necessarily lower in this, is it not?
00:18:22.220I haven't reviewed the bill in detail, but it is a civil remedy which would suggest a civil standard rather than a criminal standard.
00:18:30.940But, you know, that old remedy, this old civil remedy, Section 13 of the Canada Human Rights Act, was repealed for a reason.
00:18:39.040The reason was that the government of the day believed that that remedy was being abused.
00:18:45.000It had been highly politicized that the remedy was being used to target certain types of speech and not other types of speech based on sort of like a political correctness standard.
00:18:59.800And I think that there was a good reason to have removed that remedy.
00:19:02.960This government is bringing it back, proving once and again, and expanding its scope to now include all kinds of online content.
00:19:10.880So they're proving once and again that they are one of the most anti-speech, anti-expression, anti-technology governments we've ever seen in this country.
00:19:20.960And I think that this type of arrogance by this government on imposing their views about what Canadians should and should not be allowed to say and how they should communicate it and creating even more government overreach and how to monitor it, Canadians should be very concerned.
00:19:39.620I would agree, and we can talk about the subjectivity of fomenting detestation or vilification, but there's another word in there that was in the original Section 13 and is back, which is likely to foment detestation or vilification.
00:19:55.860And when you hear likely to do something, it brings up images of minority report to me and prosecuting people for things that haven't even taken place but might take place.
00:20:06.060Yeah, so I think that's another part of the problem is this vagueness standard in the law and the whole subjectivity.
00:20:16.620And there's also, there's another portion on this that has even more to do with this sort of minority report aspect, which is this conditional, I forget what it's, the word is slipping my mind now,
00:20:34.400but it relates to youth, but there are restrictions on conduct before they actually happen.
00:20:48.660Yeah, it's the peace bond aspect, which is really, really troubling for a lot of civil libertarians, this notion of peace bonds, which restrict conduct as a condition of release for,
00:21:05.960So, but this, this is something that a lot of civil liberties organizations have raised concerns over this new peace bond.
00:21:14.820And this is something that's also included in the legislation.
00:21:17.200Yeah, and just for context, so someone can go if they, they're concerned about someone's speech, theoretically, to a court and apply to have a peace bond applied.
00:21:26.640And if you have one of these applied to you, I was looking through this section, you could have lawfully owned firearms taken away, you could be forced to do drug tests, you could be as well subjected to wearing a monitoring bracelet.
00:21:39.480So, you have very real limitations of your freedom, and you're right, based on a crime or an offense for which you have not been convicted or perhaps even charged.
00:21:49.660Yeah, so this is why there are a lot of concerns with peace bonds, like sort of generally, but in this particular context where it relates to expressive activity, it's extreme, seems like extreme government overreach.
00:22:02.460I apologize, the word slipped my mind, I don't know how that happened.
00:22:05.940No, at least, I trust me, I try to get these things out of my mind as quickly as they can, so no judgment on that.
00:22:12.580I guess the question that I would ask you, and I know we're getting long ahead of ourselves here, because a bill like this will not even be debated in Parliament before summer, and if there's an election, it completely goes away and would need to be reintroduced.
00:22:25.560But are things like this, in your view, likely to be struck down as unconstitutional, or is there enough of a wiggle room from, you know, reasonable limits and other forms in the jurisprudence that suggest something like this could actually be upheld?
00:22:41.260Well, I certainly think it will be challenged, but I will say that the hate speech, the criminal hate speech laws have been upheld in this decision called What Caught,
00:22:50.440and then there was a challenge to the previous Section 13 of civil remedy, which was also upheld.
00:22:57.220So I do think that this bill is different, it's more expansive, and I also think in the revised version of the bill, we're likely to see something related to takedown orders for platforms that makes it different as well.
00:23:11.000That doesn't appear to be included in this bill, but I do think that that is likely to come in perhaps a revised version of it that we may see later.
00:23:18.600But I think that there's going to be a big interest in challenging this legislation.
00:23:25.240And I will say that, you know, I view hate speech as abhorrent.
00:23:29.840I view racism, homophobia, these things are abhorrent.
00:23:33.980And these are ideas that are nasty ideas that we should explain why they're nasty ideas.
00:23:41.940And if you have people just lurking on the internet, secretly sharing terrible ideas and concepts without confronting them and explaining why those notions are wrong, you'll never end up with a better society.
00:23:57.160Instead, you'll have a society that criminalizes teenagers for burning pride flags.
00:24:02.440And that's not a good direction for society.
00:24:05.220Very well said, Christine Van Gein, Litigation Director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
00:24:15.760That, you know, whenever I bring on the expert, because I'm not a lawyer, I just play one when I cover legal challenges and cases and bills and court decisions and all of that.
00:24:25.480And I always hope when I have an interview with her or one of her colleagues that I'm going to, at the end of it, feel better because they've explained, well, no, it's not actually as bad as it thinks.
00:24:35.600Unfortunately, this one is exactly as bad as it looks, which is why I spent so much time talking about the cultural implications of this at the beginning, because it really is two-pronged.
00:24:47.260On one hand, you have the cultural dimension of this, the thrust behind this, that makes the liberals think they can successfully campaign on this.
00:24:55.740That means the liberals know Canadians, by and large, do not support free speech.
00:24:59.980And then the legal side, which is that it doesn't matter that our Constitution protects freedom of expression.
00:25:05.320It doesn't matter that you are supposed to be protected against all of these arbitrary things that the law can throw at you.
00:25:13.000However, this is going to be most likely upheld, even though it is a bill that very literally and very directly will censor online content.
00:25:22.640We will have lots more to say on this in the shows ahead, but let's take a quick break here with more of The Andrew Lawton Show coming up next here on True North.
00:25:32.420You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:25:36.020Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:25:38.180You wouldn't think countries around the world would be racing to get to zero,
00:25:41.520but that's exactly what they are doing when it comes to net zero.
00:25:45.760The magic words are the fuel for the global climate change discourse.
00:25:50.700By 2050, the world has to be at net zero in terms of emissions.
00:26:34.260And then what are the implications of that for Canada?
00:26:36.780Yeah, great question, because it can be cryptic.
00:26:40.720Net zero means that our human activities contribute as much greenhouse gases as we remove from the air.
00:26:54.640So in other words, we don't increase the quantity of greenhouse gases in the air relative to what they were previously.
00:27:02.700Now, that's obviously a very difficult task because we cannot we simply cannot get our greenhouse gas production down to zero.
00:27:13.460That means there have to be some forms of offsets, which means literally removing greenhouse gases from the air or capturing them before they get in the air.
00:27:40.580Obviously, that is a loaded term to begin with.
00:27:42.860And it depends how much you believe human.
00:27:48.000Activities are heating the earth, right?
00:27:50.840Because greenhouse implies that our gas production release is heating the earth.
00:27:58.820The term term is self-defining, basically, or it's it's it's affirming a point.
00:28:03.880Now, of course, the major challenge is that this comes into direct conflict with Canada's energy sector.
00:28:16.400Now, of course, Canada only produces about one percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.
00:28:22.780But on a per capita basis, it's actually higher than average, naturally, because Canadians use a lot of energy.
00:28:28.780And so this is a particularly vulnerable issue or problematic issue for Canada.
00:28:35.620Not only is it problematic because of energy consumption, it's problematic because you have a.
00:28:44.000Incumbent government that is more inclined towards the virtue signaling or to the posturing as opposed to sound economics, then politicians normally are,
00:28:55.920which is not which is not which is not a high bar to how can I put it?
00:29:01.260I'm not saying that governments in general are inclined towards sound economics, but the Canadian government is particularly uninclined towards sound economics.
00:29:10.300And that is why we have a profound problem of achieving this target.
00:30:23.880Someone who lives in rural Alberta, you can't say, well, just get a Tesla and, you know, find all those charging spots, you know, on your way to Lloydminster or something.
00:30:31.400And the reality is you get this goal that we have to, as a country, work back from to meet because our government has committed us to it without really realizing how radical the requirements to meet that goal are.
00:30:47.880So it's not just the climate, but also Canada's vast geography, right?
00:30:52.580The sparsely populated country, which just means that the energy needs are not going to go away.
00:30:58.560Not only that, but Canada is an energy producer, right?
00:31:03.760So if we were Singapore trying to cut down, it wouldn't hurt us so much because we're not an energy producer.
00:31:10.300But if a fundamental producer in our economy, value adder in our economy, is energy, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
00:31:21.340If we think we can just make radical changes and cut energy production and not have a serious dampening effect on our economic prosperity.
00:31:31.820Now, yeah, there's so much to say about this.
00:31:34.620Anyone who thinks that just switching to electric vehicles is a smart idea, I encourage you to watch the documentary, documentary Planet of the Humans.
00:31:49.000Now, ironically, this comes from, I forgot his name right now, but this is a documentary which just goes through a lifetime environmentalist exploring how to make renewable energy and its cost effectiveness.
00:32:04.280And it's just a very sobering review of the case that a lot of these touted saviors just are false gods.
00:32:14.380So biofuels, for example, or many of these solar projects, the energy required to create them often is greater than their lifetime energy they will create.
00:32:27.300And biomass, where you basically cut down trees and burn them in such a way as to capture their energy, is obviously tremendously destructive to the environment.
00:32:39.300So a lot of these alternatives are just false gods.
00:32:42.200And what I've found in this discussion is that the people who promote Net Zero 2050, and not just Net Zero 2050, but I'm calling in from Utah in the United States, the whole, you know, green agenda or the broader plans,
00:33:07.680the people advocating for them don't want to get into debates about economics or the precise details, cost and benefit.
00:33:19.880They want to promote the likes of the Green New Deal with fear, fear mongering, hyperbole.
00:33:28.260And the antidote to that is a great book, Apocalypse Never, and it just goes through one by one and basically debunks a lot of these outlandish claims.
00:33:39.800The most notorious is of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying that the world is going to end in 12 years.
00:33:51.260Yeah, so, and he just goes through where that number came from.
00:33:55.680And it just shows you, unfortunately, that these silly claims, you know, fear sells, fear works.
00:34:06.300And so claims about the world coming to an end are causing people to go for any solution, no matter how radical, no matter how detrimental, without thinking it through first.
00:34:17.120It causes this gut or knee-jerk reaction that goes around our logic.
00:34:22.280Let's just be honest about engaging in such endeavours.
00:34:27.280The arguments that you read on the Government of Canada website or the proponents' website are basically that this, these net zero 2020 plans, 2050 plans are win-wins.
00:34:40.220That doing this is going to revolution our economy and make it so much more profitable and we're going to be so cutting edge.
00:34:46.340Which, come on now, just admit the fact that this is going to cost.
00:34:53.400And in Canada, there are numbers here.
00:34:56.680Now, I always forget the right ones, but basically, between 312,000 and 450,000 energy sector workers are at risk of displacement.
00:35:08.340That is a tremendous number of people to just to push out of their jobs.
00:35:15.320Not only that, let's just remember that energy is basically an ingredient in almost anything.
00:35:21.400So if we push up the price of energy, we're basically creating inflationary pressure across the whole economy.
00:35:26.100And you're in Ontario, you know that you've seen the rising energy prices and not only rising energy prices, but basically taxpayer funds going to subsidize energy to basically camouflage the fact that energy has become so expensive.
00:35:41.940So Ontario is actually a good test case of where these crazy plans are being implemented and having damage.
00:35:48.540And there's actually research to show that Ontario is poorer, for example, than all of the Great Lakes states.
00:35:56.200It's poorer than Michigan, comfortably so.
00:35:58.500So the prosperity of Ontario has been hit over the past few years, especially by energy constraints.
00:36:08.540Well, that competitive aspect is quite important here at a national level as well.
00:36:12.500And you mentioned this in your op-ed that Canada is basically at a competitive disadvantage because of this environmental virtue signaling, because it's going and doing these drastic measures that end up hurting the Canadian economy when other countries are just posturing on this.
00:36:29.200So this whole thing about all the world leaders from Canada to the United States to China linking arms and dealing with the climate crisis together is just not happening.
00:36:38.020And I was remembering, I was looking at, and I'll have to pull up the number here because of all of the countries that had pledged to drop their emissions from the Paris climate agreement, the UN report found that since 2016, the combined impacts have cut emissions by 1%.
00:36:58.900So Canada is doing all this stuff, signing the death warrant on Canadian jobs, as you just indicated,
00:37:04.260and it's going to amount to a minuscule, minuscule effect because the other countries that say they're doing this aren't even doing this.
00:37:12.720Yeah, that's one thing I finished with.
00:37:14.640In some ways, hollow virtue signaling would almost be better, right?
00:37:19.380Because then we wouldn't be hurting ourselves.
00:37:20.860Yeah, if ours were as hollow as the rest of the world's, yeah.
00:37:25.120Yeah, so, and this, I must admit, Andrew, this really saddens me because I'm a Canadian citizen.
00:37:31.140My mother's family are in Calgary, and I have a great affection for Canada, especially the West.
00:37:40.580And it is true that the long-term prosperity and competitiveness of Canada is really struggling, really struggling.
00:37:51.360Programs like equalization and the Nessera 2050 are just suffocating the Canadian economy.
00:37:59.640And in the long run, there's actually good evidence to show, too, that Canada is attracting weaker immigrants relative to the United States,
00:38:08.700that Canadian immigrants are much more likely to go on welfare and much more likely to earn below the average of the Canadian wage relative to immigrants coming to the United States.
00:38:18.600Canada is attracting the wrong type of immigrants.
00:38:20.700But in terms of the, yes, the competitiveness is a problem.
00:38:28.180The, although those in government right now may think that they are garnering respect and admiration around the world,
00:38:38.060the fact is other countries are laughing at Canada, that Canada is the sucker in this situation.
00:38:43.680They are the one, Canada is really just being played a fool, and it's embarrassing.
00:38:53.080And I just, I hope, mate, that Canadians really push back against this.
00:38:59.380Now, whether that will happen, I'm not sure.
00:39:03.160This is why I'm an advocate for independence, to be frank, which is another discussion.
00:39:06.140But the, I just fear that the areas of the country, Newfoundland and Labrador, Saskatchewan, Alberta,
00:39:14.600are not politically influential enough to really fight back.
00:39:18.900And ironically, one way this might, one of the breaks on this insanity, this net zero 2050 insanity,
00:39:29.560may be the fact that no one's, no one's there to pay for equalization.
00:39:36.360Because for basically, well, for decades, Albertans have sent about 5% of their economy to pay for equalization year after year.
00:39:49.000And people in places like Nova Scotia and Quebec have been getting about 10% of their economy.
00:39:54.480Well, not Quebec, in Nova Scotia, it's about that.
00:39:57.380But they'll be getting a tremendous portion of their economy simply in equalization payments.
00:40:01.980Now, when that gravy train dries up, I suspect the other provinces might get a wake-up call that
00:40:11.560we've been living high on the hog on the wealth of Alberta for so long, and we've killed the golden goose.
00:40:19.480But whether it's going to be too late, I'm not sure.
00:41:01.180Fergus Hodgson is the director of Econ Americas and the author of this great piece in the Epoch Times,
00:41:06.320Why Net Zero is a Suicide Mission for Canada.
00:41:09.420Definitely a message that needs to be heard.
00:41:11.540Fergus, thanks so much for coming on. It was a pleasure.
00:41:13.920Thank you, Andrew. Best of luck with this show. Cheers.
00:41:16.040Absolutely brutal. And I was actually on a press conference, believe it or not, for the United Nations,
00:41:22.860maybe it was a week or so ago, and we were talking about the upcoming UN Glasgow Summit.
00:41:29.980And I had asked about it because one of the goals here is they want to keep the temperature increase
00:41:34.180to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
00:41:39.400And why this is so important is because they could not, all of the countries in the world that were thumping their chests about climate in 2015 at Paris
00:41:48.000could not agree to meet the 1.5 degree target.