Juno News - August 01, 2018


HANDGUN BAN？! 08⧸01⧸2018 Facebook Live with Andrew Lawton


Episode Stats

Length

50 minutes

Words per Minute

173.95485

Word Count

8,806

Sentence Count

510

Misogynist Sentences

11

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary

In this episode of the True North Initiative, Andrew Lawton talks about the Danforth Ave. shooting, the Laurier University president's lack of understanding of free speech, and the lack of progress on gun control in Canada.


Transcript

00:00:00.440 Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Facebook Live. I am Andrew Lawton, True North Initiative Fellow, here on this wonderful Wednesday afternoon to chat about all the things that are happening this week.
00:00:11.640 I know that we started doing these at the beginning of July, and the one thing that I'm finding is that there's been no shortage of government nannying for us to unpack in the summer months, which is kind of rare.
00:00:24.500 Usually we have a little bit of a dearth in the summer. Now there's lots to talk about.
00:00:28.340 And I wanted to go over a few different things here, and I put a little bit of a primer, if you will, in the blurb on Facebook.
00:00:37.080 We're going to talk about Laurier University and why the school's president still doesn't understand the stakes of free speech.
00:00:43.560 Going to be talking about some other things as well, little stories here and there.
00:00:48.540 But a big one that I have to delve into further is the gun discussion in Canada.
00:00:55.800 Now, to be clear, there should not be a gun discussion in Canada right now for a couple of reasons.
00:01:02.260 Number one, you are never going to find a constructive solution to any problem when you tackle it from the heat of emotion.
00:01:08.900 You just won't.
00:01:09.940 You can't solve any problem.
00:01:11.660 You can't have a debate of passion and expect that you're going to yield good results.
00:01:15.680 The other side of it is that the Liberals already put forward a very comprehensive firearms package called C-71.
00:01:23.380 Now, there were a number of things in this that I didn't like, that I thought were missing the mark, were not actually going after the real sources of gun crime.
00:01:31.560 But the thing that's so important about this is that if the Liberals had more that they thought Canada needed on the firearms front, they would have put it in C-71.
00:01:43.940 If the Liberals thought there was more they wanted to do with guns, they would have actually put it in the comprehensive legislation they already put forward.
00:01:51.560 This is not a difficult concept to understand.
00:01:54.240 So when you now have Justin Trudeau and Ralph Goodale saying that they can't rule out and won't rule out a firearms ban, a handgun ban,
00:02:04.400 what they're actually saying here is that they're trying to push the gun control agenda even further because now they have the cover with which to do so.
00:02:16.340 The Danforth Aft shooting was many things.
00:02:19.500 An excuse to review Canada's gun laws, it wasn't.
00:02:22.820 Simply put, because this guy breaks all of the molds that could actually be dealt with through legal gun ownership.
00:02:30.940 Faisal Hussain, the attacker on Danforth Ave, who his family says is mentally ill, there are some questions and concerns about radical motivations.
00:02:40.400 Whatever the case may be, the gun was illegal.
00:02:42.560 He used an illegally obtained, an illegally acquired, and an illegally shot handgun.
00:02:48.480 Which means that none of the gun control measures that are being put forward by any of the stakeholders would actually have done anything to dissuade or stop Faisal Hussain from getting his hands on a handgun.
00:03:02.660 And this is incredibly, incredibly valuable information because if we had a guy who, despite having mental illness concerns, having been visited by police, managed to get his hands on a legal handgun and then took that handgun and shot some people,
00:03:19.180 there would be some very serious questions to be asked that government would have to answer about how someone like that fell through the cracks,
00:03:25.620 went through the system, went through all of the rules and guidelines and stipulations and all of that, and still managed to get a gun.
00:03:32.400 That did not happen.
00:03:34.280 He did not get his gun legally.
00:03:37.140 So there is no amount of gun control that would actually have stopped the Danforth Ave shooting.
00:03:42.540 And that is so heartbreaking because we are programmed to want to prevent tragedy.
00:03:48.800 We're programmed to want to find a way that we can actually avoid these things.
00:03:53.020 We don't like the idea of, well, you know, bad people are going to do bad things.
00:03:57.080 There is no antidote for evil in this context.
00:04:00.240 And that is immensely disturbing for the population.
00:04:03.600 But when you have now rhetoric pushing for a national handgun ban, a ban that would disarm me, a ban that would disarm any of you that have a handgun,
00:04:17.160 that would disarm the millions of sport shooters in Canada conceivably.
00:04:22.220 I think there are about a little over 1 million that have restricted licenses.
00:04:25.740 So if you were to have a ban, that would take my gun away, it would take my neighbor's gun away, it would take the guns of the people down the street away.
00:04:35.080 It wouldn't take the guns of the inner city gang members away.
00:04:38.420 It just wouldn't.
00:04:39.480 It wouldn't do it.
00:04:41.620 Not it might not, or it's not perfect, or no, it fundamentally would not do it.
00:04:47.220 A ban on legal handgun sales has absolutely zero bearing on the illegal gun trade.
00:04:55.740 And this is something that the government officials in Canada are so deliberately obfuscating on if they don't see that and they don't think that Canadians are seeing it.
00:05:08.400 So there was an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by a University of Toronto professor,
00:05:13.440 which as a general rule, I don't think that University of Toronto sociology professors should be the ones that dictate firearms policy in Canada.
00:05:20.700 Just a general rule, so U of T sociology prof writes in the New York Times that it's time for Canada to review whether handguns needed to be banned altogether.
00:05:32.100 And the people that support gun control cite a couple of key examples here,
00:05:37.140 and I spoke about these in a video I did yesterday for True North Initiative,
00:05:40.180 but Australia and the U.K., and I don't view Australia and the U.K. as success stories on firearms policy.
00:05:48.920 I just don't.
00:05:50.540 And there are a couple of reasons why.
00:05:51.960 Number one, in the U.K., if you look at cities which still have gang problems,
00:05:55.660 there is an immense challenge with knife stabbings.
00:05:58.200 So much so the police have actually tried to launch knife amnesty programs and restrict the type of knives.
00:06:04.660 Even Jamie Oliver, who has never met a government regulation he didn't like,
00:06:08.740 was trying to say that you should have cooking knives that are not pointy at the end.
00:06:12.360 They're sharp, but they're not pointy.
00:06:13.980 And I actually have a couple of Jamie Oliver knives that are pointy at the end.
00:06:17.360 So he can't even lead by example on his own manufacturing.
00:06:20.280 But Jamie Oliver is saying, yeah, there's no need to have a pointy knife.
00:06:25.680 And the reason they're saying this is because people in the U.K. are stabbing each other.
00:06:30.900 Not to such an extent that I would call it an epidemic,
00:06:33.640 but in such numbers and such increasing numbers that people are actually seeing a problem with this,
00:06:41.260 that is demonstrable and that is diagnosed as such.
00:06:45.720 So this is what happens if people don't have access to guns.
00:06:49.800 They use something else.
00:06:51.220 It doesn't make the urge for violence to go away.
00:06:55.080 And someone could easily say, oh, well, you know, you're going to hurt fewer people with a knife than you will with a gun.
00:07:00.240 That may be so, but it proves the point that people will find the tool that fits the motivation.
00:07:06.580 And this is why rental bans have become such a problem in violence,
00:07:11.840 and specifically in jihadi violence, because anyone can just go.
00:07:14.880 You throw down your driver's license, you drop 50 bucks, you get your rental ban,
00:07:17.840 and you can actually kill more people with one of those than you can with a gun in some respects.
00:07:24.480 And Australia is an even more fascinating example,
00:07:27.260 because in Australia, which did a nationwide gun confiscation,
00:07:32.800 they called it a buyback, but it's not a buyback.
00:07:35.420 I mean, if you have no choice but to give your gun to the government, it's a confiscation.
00:07:39.600 And they did this in 1997, just over 21 years ago.
00:07:43.200 And what was fascinating in the case of Australia is that this came as very similar to what we're looking at in Canada,
00:07:52.240 a knee-jerk reaction, a knee-jerk reaction to something else that occurred,
00:07:58.900 a knee-jerk reaction to a mass shooting that occurred in Port Arthur.
00:08:03.820 And it was absolutely tragic.
00:08:06.500 Australia has since been touted in some places as having had zero mass shootings,
00:08:11.880 but that fundamentally isn't the case.
00:08:14.020 They don't have zero mass shootings.
00:08:15.580 They don't have zero gang violence.
00:08:17.500 They don't have zero violent crime.
00:08:19.180 And more specifically, they don't have zero gun crime.
00:08:22.820 No, there was a stat that I read in The Age in Australia,
00:08:26.900 the age.com.au, that looked at Melbourne specifically,
00:08:31.820 which is like the gang capital of Australia.
00:08:34.040 That was the sense that this article was putting forward.
00:08:37.400 And they have experts saying that, you know,
00:08:39.100 people are almost more armed now than they were before.
00:08:43.080 When guns were legal and regulated,
00:08:44.940 it was harder for criminals to get guns than it is now that guns are supposedly illegal.
00:08:49.860 And the only guns in Australia are owned by gangsters.
00:08:52.660 And they're getting unloaded in Australia by the shipping container
00:08:57.160 with, you know, electronics and other things that are being imported.
00:09:01.580 And they're getting AK-47s, Glocks, handguns, all of these types of things.
00:09:06.120 And I was looking at this and was very shocked, actually,
00:09:11.200 because Australia, I thought, might have a little bit more success with gun control,
00:09:15.860 given that Australia is literally an island.
00:09:18.140 It's an island, what, I think 9,000 miles from the United States.
00:09:23.640 Whereas Canada and the U.S. share the longest unprotected border in the world.
00:09:27.560 So even if Canada were to snap its fingers right now and say,
00:09:31.640 guns are banned.
00:09:33.160 Justin Trudeau gets his little fantasy scenario, August 1st, 2018,
00:09:37.200 guns are banned in Canada.
00:09:39.820 Well, that's not going to stop the flow of illegal firearms across the border.
00:09:45.360 And one of the biggest challenges is that we don't actually have an accurate representation
00:09:49.440 or understanding of where Canada's illegal guns are coming from.
00:09:55.500 There is a stat that's been circulating that I want to debunk right now that says 50%
00:10:00.620 of guns used in crime in Canada are from domestic sources.
00:10:07.980 50% are from domestic.
00:10:09.800 And this is not at all true in any stretch.
00:10:12.960 It's not true for a couple of reasons.
00:10:14.700 Number one, it's fallacious in the way they define it.
00:10:18.780 When they say guns used in crime, they don't mean just guns that are used in a robbery or a homicide.
00:10:24.320 They're actually referring to guns that are at all connected to anything illegal.
00:10:30.260 So a gun that might have had the serial number filed off it, which again is problematic.
00:10:35.320 Or a gun that, and this is my personal favorite, a gun that wasn't properly stored.
00:10:39.560 I've seen some reports that said that might have been counted in these numbers.
00:10:44.060 And the second and biggest concern is that this is not an overall stat.
00:10:48.240 It was one particular study of one particular jurisdiction, and it was only 50% of the 30% of guns whose origins they could trace.
00:10:59.120 50% of the 30%.
00:11:01.560 So in actuality, it could have been that 85% of the guns were sourced from the U.S. or from overseas,
00:11:09.700 but they could only identify 15% overall as being domestically sourced.
00:11:15.340 But now that somehow is reported as 50%.
00:11:18.940 So there is this belief that guns coming across the border illegally are not the problem when we actually know it is.
00:11:25.040 If you look back to 2005, the city of Toronto dubbed 2005 the year of the gun.
00:11:31.620 And that was because there were so many firearms-related shootings, almost all of them gang-related, in Toronto.
00:11:37.540 There were a couple of cases.
00:11:39.080 One in particular, I think a 15-year-old girl was killed in the streets.
00:11:42.380 And this was the year, in 2005, that everyone said, okay, we're going to rein in gun crime in Toronto.
00:11:48.680 And at that time, police were saying that guns were over 70% coming from outside the country.
00:11:55.180 More than 70%.
00:11:56.480 That's what they were saying at the time, in what they called the year of the gun, could be blamed on imports.
00:12:02.680 And CBSA, we know for a fact, over the last few years, has reported an increase in the number of illegal firearm seizures.
00:12:10.220 These are only the ones that they catch.
00:12:12.140 They're catching more, stands to reason that more are probably coming across.
00:12:17.380 So you can't say that there is, firstly, a simple solution to this, or a solution that exists only on one plane.
00:12:24.760 Because if we are going to attack the gun issue in Canada, if we're going to attack any firearms-related issue in Canada, we have to look at where the actual illegal guns are coming from, and who owns the illegal guns.
00:12:39.760 And my gun has never hurt anyone.
00:12:43.100 My gun will never hurt anyone, as long as it's in my possession, when I'm storing it legally and lawfully.
00:12:48.320 And, you know, some Americans would look at Canada's gun laws and think that we were, you know, the Third Reich.
00:12:54.380 It was just this totalitarian and authoritative regime.
00:12:57.500 The fact that police can perform a warrantless home inspection, or that if I so much as deviate from my route when I'm driving home to the gun range and then going back home,
00:13:08.500 I could conceivably be arrested and charged, could have a criminal record, tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees, and have my firearms seized.
00:13:17.320 This is all within the gun laws in Canada, that my license to own a gun is a privilege from the government.
00:13:24.540 American Second Amendment advocates would look at this and be like, you know, what the hell is this country?
00:13:29.660 But I share that with you to share that no one can argue that we do not have one of the strictest gun control regimes in the world,
00:13:38.780 which means getting a gun in Canada is easy only if you've gone through all of the steps and the processes,
00:13:44.880 and you've demonstrated that you're not going to be a risk to, well, anyone, to yourself or anyone.
00:13:50.800 And that's why the illegal-owned guns are the problem and the ones least likely to be impacted by gun control regulations.
00:14:00.100 And I'll give you a couple of examples of this.
00:14:02.580 One of the changes that Stephen Harper put in on the firearms file was removing the requirement to have a paper ATT.
00:14:09.740 Now, an ATT is called an authorization to transport, and it's what you need to drive with your gun from home to the gun range or home to the gunsmith or home to a new home if you're moving.
00:14:21.640 And what was fascinating about this is that if you have a license, you're eligible for an ATT.
00:14:27.380 Why did the ATT need to be a separate piece of paper?
00:14:30.340 It didn't.
00:14:31.340 So Stephen Harper said, all right, well, we'll put the ATT as part of your license so you aren't going to get criminally charged if you just forget to have that little piece of paper with you.
00:14:39.880 Justin Trudeau and his liberals took that.
00:14:43.320 And do you remember the Eaton Center shooting a few years back?
00:14:45.760 They said under Stephen Harper's model, you would be able to take your gun to the shopping center.
00:14:50.600 You'd be able to take your gun to the school and shoot people up.
00:14:53.580 When no such thing.
00:14:54.700 He didn't change where you could take your gun.
00:14:56.720 He just changed what could happen to you if you didn't have a little piece of paper that you had, that was in your possession, that you owned, that was part of your gun.
00:15:06.260 And this is where the liberals get it wrong on guns.
00:15:10.520 They don't know guns.
00:15:11.980 The vast majority of them have probably never even held one.
00:15:15.080 You've got a few examples of people in the cabinet and in the government that obviously have a history of firearms.
00:15:22.740 I mean, the defense minister, Harjit Sajan, is one of these.
00:15:25.060 Andrew Leslie would be one of these.
00:15:26.860 Bill Blair.
00:15:27.360 I mean, these people know guns.
00:15:29.620 They've been around guns.
00:15:31.360 But when it comes to the actual liberal orthodoxy and the liberal policy, there is so much misinformation that circulates around these.
00:15:39.440 And unfortunately, that misinformation is potentially going to become the law.
00:15:46.140 And in my video yesterday, I mentioned the Australian numbers.
00:15:49.220 And this is hugely important, as are the UK numbers, because these are the examples that gun control advocates love to hold up and say, this is why a ban will work.
00:15:59.520 This is why we need to do a ban.
00:16:00.940 They're going to look at only two extremes.
00:16:02.480 They're going to say, here's gun control in the US, which is non-existent, and people are getting gunned down in the streets.
00:16:07.620 And here's gun control in Australia, which is so heavy, handguns are banned, and no one's dying at all.
00:16:13.800 And they don't realize that both systems are being wildly distorted.
00:16:17.660 Both of them are being wildly misrepresented.
00:16:19.880 And the outcomes of both of them are being distorted and twisted to fit a narrative.
00:16:24.700 But they don't care about that.
00:16:26.800 They don't care because they know that most people who are paying attention are not from Australia, are not from the US, or themselves don't understand how readily available guns are.
00:16:36.960 And when you get John Tory, and I know I talked about this a bit last week, saying asinine things like, oh, people are just carrying around their guns, and therefore we need to ban handguns, anyone carrying around a handgun has already shown a blatant and brazen disregard for the law.
00:16:54.260 It's that simple.
00:16:55.420 They've already proven that they are not going to follow the law.
00:16:59.360 But the reason a handgun ban is so important is because these are the types of things that a government can do to assert itself, that a government can do to exact control over the population, but people who aren't in that group won't speak up for that group.
00:17:16.980 There is very little sympathy for handgun owners.
00:17:21.200 There's very little sympathy for sport shooters.
00:17:23.580 And by the way, I'm not saying there needs to be sympathy.
00:17:25.720 I'm not saying people need to be sympathetic to sport shooters.
00:17:28.280 I'm saying that you need to say in your own mind, eh, if you're not a fan, just don't do it.
00:17:32.760 If you don't like the idea of handguns, don't get one.
00:17:35.500 Don't go out shooting.
00:17:36.260 But don't take away my right because of your discomfort, especially when I'm not the problem.
00:17:43.880 And that is going to be the hill that a lot of people are going to have to die on.
00:17:48.060 Because if Justin Trudeau's government does, in fact, go forward with a handgun ban or seriously looks into it, or perhaps a moratorium, no new handgun purchases.
00:17:58.440 That way, you know, anyone who has one now is going to do it.
00:18:01.760 By the way, handgun shares in Canada will go up so dramatically the second that policy is announced.
00:18:07.980 Because everyone, myself included, going to rush to the gun store and buy whatever they can if we get a whiff of that.
00:18:15.980 Now, conceivably, the justice minister, the public safety minister, with the stroke of the pen, ban handguns right now, classify them all as prohibited.
00:18:24.600 And there would be no legislative oversight.
00:18:26.620 There would be no committee hearing.
00:18:28.100 There would be nothing whatsoever.
00:18:29.620 This is within their purview.
00:18:31.760 I just want you to imagine that.
00:18:34.940 The government of Canada saying, one day, we've decided that all of these things that you legally own, that you paid money for, are not allowed.
00:18:43.100 You know, it's like Catherine McKenna's dream scenario.
00:18:45.400 You do that with every non-hybrid car one day.
00:18:48.480 You wake up and say, you know, any diesel or gas engine, no, we're going to ban it.
00:18:52.280 I mean, this is the stuff she dreams about at night.
00:18:54.400 This is what public safety minister Ralph Goodale could do about firearms.
00:18:58.220 And I'm not saying they'd go down that road because there would, in fact, be a political revolt.
00:19:03.120 But that is, in fact, a possibility.
00:19:05.660 And you've got advocates that are proposing very fervently to have an unequivocal handgun ban.
00:19:13.340 And one of the examples of this is Natalie Provo.
00:19:18.000 She is with one of the pro-gun control groups.
00:19:20.420 She is a survivor of the massacre at Lake Colpally Technique.
00:19:24.320 And my heart goes out to this woman who went through an absolute horror.
00:19:28.260 She saw her friends and classmates get gunned down.
00:19:30.980 But being the victim or survivor of a tragedy does not make you an expert on anything.
00:19:36.820 And she is the grown-up example of the kids from Parkland, Florida, from Marjorie, I think Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Hyatt.
00:19:45.740 And they are, in 30 years, going to be what Natalie Provo is now, which is someone who says, you know, I think we should ban guns because of what an evil person did with a gun to me 30 years ago.
00:19:57.620 And it's not to say that she shouldn't be listened to.
00:20:00.560 People should listen to her in the same way that they should listen to the gun owners that speak up.
00:20:04.640 It's that she was actually given special privilege and put on the Firearms Advisory Committee.
00:20:10.780 And basically, no one on that committee represented a group of gun owners.
00:20:16.240 And I wrote about this for Global News a few months back.
00:20:18.680 There was no representation on that committee of any of the major gun groups in Canada.
00:20:23.560 And I'm a member of two of those groups, by the way.
00:20:26.780 But because the government didn't actually care about listening to the people who know and understand guns, the people who are actually sport shooters.
00:20:35.420 So to go back to that point that I started on a moment ago, the reason that it's so important to pay attention to a handgun ban is because these types of things test what a government is willing to do.
00:20:49.460 Because it thinks it has the political cover to do it.
00:20:53.180 So if the federal government is not seeing a huge backlash on the idea of a handgun ban, or the federal government is able to say, you know what, we're entertaining a handgun ban, and the only people to get mad at them are handgun owners.
00:21:08.160 So let's face it, probably we weren't liberal voters in the first place, then government can move the boundaries and move the goalposts further and further until lawful ownership of something is subjected relentlessly to the whim of whatever government is in office there.
00:21:26.260 You don't need to like guns, you don't need to appreciate them, you don't need to want one, you don't need to buy one.
00:21:31.000 You just have to accept that the people that have gone through all of those steps that the government has laid out are not the problems.
00:21:37.120 They're not the source of gun crime.
00:21:39.380 So this issue is going to get worse before it gets better.
00:21:46.300 We're in the summer right now, Parliament is not sitting, they will be coming back soon.
00:21:50.160 But if they really want to strike while the iron is hot, strike while the crisis is still very much alive, then what they're going to actually find here, and this is going to be fascinating, is that emotion will be the only way legislation is determined.
00:22:06.680 Emotion is going to be the way that legislation is put forward.
00:22:10.000 The government looks and says, here is a crisis, here is this thing that's remotely connected to the crisis, it wouldn't really have done anything anyway, but, you know, they both involve things that go pow pow, therefore we're going to ban them.
00:22:22.180 It doesn't get more intellectually deep than that right now.
00:22:25.880 Oh, some guy used a gun, all right, well ban handguns.
00:22:28.860 But he used a handgun, right?
00:22:30.040 Yeah, but it wasn't legal, ah, it doesn't matter, we'll ban them anyway.
00:22:32.340 And then when the next shooting happens, and there will be another shooting, because this is life, this is human nature, when the next shooting happens, people like me will say, I told you so.
00:22:43.340 People like them will be like, all right, we didn't go far enough.
00:22:46.980 And before you know it, the entire country's guns have been taken away with no benefit whatsoever.
00:22:55.380 The only thing we see on the other side of it, the only outcome, is more control for the government.
00:23:04.000 This is the direction we're headed.
00:23:06.260 They're going to keep moving the envelope, because C-71, the firearms bill that already went forward, was, again, nowhere near a handgun ban.
00:23:14.700 It had issues, sure, but it wasn't talking about a handgun ban.
00:23:17.740 But then a shooting happens, and we see the discussion moving further.
00:23:23.320 And when another one happens, it will keep going down the line, which is why we have to stop now.
00:23:30.160 You know, I did an interview with Barbara Kay, which you can catch on the True North Initiative Facebook page or on YouTube.
00:23:36.180 And in that interview, one of the things that came up when it comes to free speech is that the little things are never the little things.
00:23:42.380 And I know it's been adapted and distorted and used in, like, every context under the sun.
00:23:47.780 That famous poem from Martin Niemöller.
00:23:50.120 First they came for the trade unionists, the communists, the Jews, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:23:55.320 And you can adapt that to so many environments, because the idea that Pastor Niemöller was putting forward was that you have to speak up when groups other than your own are under the microscope.
00:24:07.520 And I'm not at all comparing what happened in the generation in which that was written to what's happening on gun owners.
00:24:14.280 But I am invoking this idea that non-gun owners need to speak up and say, all right, even if I'm not a gun owner, I think this is dirty the way this is unfolding.
00:24:24.800 And I don't think that is at all unreasonable here.
00:24:28.380 And with that, I actually wanted to move to this discussion by Deborah McClatchy that was started.
00:24:35.360 Now, Deborah McClatchy, she was the president and vice chancellor, is actually, at Wilfrid Laurier University, which it seems like a lot longer ago.
00:24:44.200 It was less than a year ago that Wilfrid Laurier University was injected in this cultural battle about free speech on college and university campuses.
00:24:54.280 And Deborah McClatchy was the woman who initially was not stepping up to defend Lindsay Shepard.
00:25:01.860 She said, all right, well, we'll have a review. And then at the end of the review, she said, yes, you know, this shouldn't have happened.
00:25:08.160 But it's been a very lukewarm approach to free speech she's taken.
00:25:15.720 She wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail called, Not Merely Free Speech, But Better Speech Needs to be Protected on Campus.
00:25:24.580 Now, this is, when I saw the headline, I'm like, oh, man, I know exactly what I'm about to read.
00:25:31.460 And to be fair, she had a couple of good points.
00:25:34.280 She had a couple of points that I thought were valid here.
00:25:36.960 I pulled it up so I don't misquote it.
00:25:38.680 She says, I can see that universities, this is not one of the points that I agree with.
00:25:43.840 She says, I can see that universities have a greater responsibility than merely protecting free speech.
00:25:50.040 We must also promote better speech in an increasingly polarized and complex world.
00:25:56.400 Universities exist to create, preserve, apply, and pass on knowledge.
00:26:00.900 We have a responsibility to ensure our students recognize the importance of free speech in the pursuit of knowledge.
00:26:08.400 Speech is the path to learning what others think and believe so that we can learn from each other.
00:26:13.060 Universities are also beacons of opportunity and serve as springboards for intellectual, social, and economic mobility.
00:26:22.780 Our institutions must respect the dignity of those who come to our campuses to study, research, and teach.
00:26:29.740 To do so, we strive to create campus environments that support human rights for everyone.
00:26:36.620 So, she starts off there with a good point, which is that speech is the way you learn and think and grow and debate.
00:26:44.820 But when she talks about social and economic mobility and how universities need to serve as springboards for this,
00:26:51.800 she gets perilously close to where I feared she was going.
00:26:56.980 She writes this, which is good.
00:26:58.700 There are times when students will undoubtedly encounter views they find challenging and possibly offensive.
00:27:04.300 It is not the role of a university to shelter students from intellectual discomfort
00:27:09.360 or to censor speech that falls within the limits of Canada's laws on discrimination, harassment, and hate speech.
00:27:16.380 Doing so would set a dangerous precedent and be antithetical to the spirit of open inquiry.
00:27:20.680 In the face of language that threatens the humanity of our students, staff, or faculty,
00:27:26.360 we must continually promote better speech.
00:27:29.260 This means questioning and challenging opinions with sound arguments and evidence.
00:27:33.420 Students and faculty must be able to share views and experience
00:27:36.420 while simultaneously committing to high ethical and intellectual standards for open, constructive conversations.
00:27:45.220 Now, I believe that she's trying to walk a tightrope here.
00:27:48.140 I believe that she's trying to write something that makes it sound like she's not one of those,
00:27:52.980 you know, darn free speech absolutists like myself,
00:27:55.760 because those people are all Nazis and fascists and bigots and whatever.
00:27:59.980 She's not saying this, but a lot of the people on her campus are saying this.
00:28:03.900 So she's saying that, okay, yeah, free speech is fine, but we need to strive to have better speech.
00:28:08.860 The problem comes when university administrators and educrats try to be the arbiters
00:28:15.520 of what is intellectually honest and what those high standards are.
00:28:20.100 Because if you looked at the people that were in that inquisition on Lindsay Shepard,
00:28:25.400 the two professors in the school's sexual violence, you know, expert or whatever,
00:28:31.120 if you look at those three people,
00:28:32.540 they all thought that they were committing to high ethical and intellectual standards,
00:28:36.460 because there's no way playing a clip of a Jordan Peterson segment
00:28:39.980 is actually a high intellectual or ethical standard.
00:28:43.820 That's the whole point.
00:28:44.820 So Deborah McClatchy is speaking a language that the censors on campus would agree with,
00:28:50.840 because they think that they're the ones that get to set those standards.
00:28:55.200 McClatchy continues, this requires critical reflection.
00:28:58.560 Are our arguments based on evidence?
00:29:01.100 Have we listened to the knowledge and experience of others?
00:29:03.180 Have we tested our assumptions?
00:29:04.920 How can we continue to learn and pursue the truth?
00:29:07.580 This is how universities foster an environment for intellectual growth
00:29:11.140 and the development of new knowledge.
00:29:14.460 So what she's saying there is that it's what free speech advocates have been pushing for.
00:29:19.400 Yeah, you have to debate and discuss and analyze and all of this stuff,
00:29:22.340 but you can only do that when you start by allowing discussions.
00:29:27.860 But her concern is that over the past few years,
00:29:32.760 inflammatory debate and rhetoric have taken center stage.
00:29:37.020 She says speech that denigrates the dignity and humanity of members of society is challenged
00:29:41.620 because our communities fully engage in free expression.
00:29:46.800 So she's arguing that challenging and trying to shut someone down
00:29:51.600 is an engagement of free expression.
00:29:53.580 That's what she's tacitly endorsing,
00:29:55.640 because that's been what happened at Berkeley.
00:29:57.320 That was what happened at Laurier.
00:29:58.900 People with power, to use their language,
00:30:01.180 people with privilege shouted down those that had a markedly conservative viewpoint.
00:30:06.220 That does not mean they have a commitment to freedom of expression,
00:30:09.240 like what McClatchy is saying here.
00:30:11.960 So the fascinating thing is that this article,
00:30:17.000 which in many respects is saying a whole lot of nothing,
00:30:19.780 but in doing so says something big,
00:30:22.860 completely misses the mark on where the campus free speech discussion really is now.
00:30:30.380 And that is that no one gets to decide what their truth is.
00:30:35.720 No one gets to decide what truth is relative to their truth also.
00:30:40.720 So when you look at these debates that are happening on campus about whether certain groups should be allowed to assemble,
00:30:45.820 it's not the role nor the right of universities to determine which of these ideas are worthy of debate and discussion.
00:30:56.220 And it was fascinating because I had,
00:30:58.160 I can't remember if I mentioned this in a previous show.
00:30:59.980 If I did, bear with me.
00:31:01.060 During the election in which I was a candidate in Ontario,
00:31:05.100 I had comments that I made, I think like a year earlier,
00:31:08.080 thrown back at me about me saying that Holocaust deniers on campus shouldn't be shut down.
00:31:13.840 I said, yeah, if there's someone who's a Holocaust denier,
00:31:16.100 I think they're a deplorable, reprehensible person,
00:31:18.120 but let them have their little debate.
00:31:19.900 Let them have their little gang meeting of anti-Semites.
00:31:24.320 And that got torqued into Andrew Lawton is a Holocaust denier
00:31:28.120 because apparently under today's standards,
00:31:31.120 if you support the right for a specific person,
00:31:34.680 you then support that person.
00:31:36.420 And then eventually it's a hop, skip and a jump to you are that person.
00:31:40.720 And this is one of the biggest failings of the campus ethos now,
00:31:44.000 this idea that allowing something means endorsing it.
00:31:47.940 No, allowing it just means that you are endorsing that higher order belief
00:31:52.060 that freedom of speech is an important value and an important concept.
00:31:56.200 And at universities, again, I'll use this cliche, especially at universities,
00:32:02.800 that should be a goal.
00:32:04.860 But it was funny because McClatchy is trying to walk this tightrope here
00:32:08.500 and she's trying to say, well, you know, it's free speech is fine, but, but.
00:32:12.900 There's always the but.
00:32:14.140 And when you start qualifying free speech, you're actually not believing in free speech.
00:32:18.820 And then you compare that with, there was a, actually he was the dean of the university,
00:32:24.700 I think two or three years ago, Everett Piper was his name.
00:32:27.140 And I interviewed him once.
00:32:28.500 He was the head of Oklahoma Wesleyan University of memory search.
00:32:33.300 And he wrote a famous blog post that says this is a university, not a daycare.
00:32:37.780 And he ended up expanding that into a book called Not a Daycare.
00:32:41.320 And he was saying, look, if you're in university because you think that, you know,
00:32:45.920 your worldview is the one that should be protected and coddled with bubble wrap,
00:32:50.160 I'm sorry, I don't want you going here.
00:32:52.300 And he said that after that post of his went viral,
00:32:55.840 he actually had enrollment spike at his school
00:32:58.640 because there was enough of a yearning from students and prospective students
00:33:02.580 to break out of that bubble,
00:33:04.840 that bubble that allowed the Lindsay Shepard phenomenon to exist in the first place.
00:33:09.940 And that bubble that's allowed Jordan Peterson's rise to be as meteoric as it has.
00:33:14.880 And that bubble that we start seeing now, I mean, they call it the intellectual dark web.
00:33:19.700 It's this belief system that, you know, the Dave Rubens and the Sam Harris's
00:33:24.460 and the Lindsay Shepard's and the Mark Stein's and maybe the Andrew Lawton's, who know,
00:33:28.540 that all of us are on this sort of this subcutaneous level in the world right now.
00:33:35.880 And it's fascinating that that's the way it's needed to be.
00:33:41.120 And when I look at the McClatchy article, and I want to quote one final paragraph here,
00:33:46.940 she writes,
00:33:47.340 What does inclusive freedom mean?
00:34:17.960 If freedom is a right for all, it doesn't need to be qualified as inclusive.
00:34:24.660 If freedom is a right, if freedom is freedom, of course it is for all.
00:34:31.140 No, when you start hearing that qualification, inclusive freedom,
00:34:35.460 they're saying freedom with a but.
00:34:38.400 Freedom with a but, freedom with an if, freedom with a maybe.
00:34:41.580 That isn't freedom.
00:34:42.660 That certainly isn't free speech.
00:34:44.740 And to be fair, I'm not against inclusion.
00:34:46.440 I'm not against all of these things that she describes.
00:34:48.540 If you want to have a nonviolent protest, go.
00:34:50.720 If you want to have an alternate speaker, go.
00:34:53.320 But there was something very sneaky in that.
00:34:56.800 And it was buried at the bottom of the story that the ideal of debate can sometimes not happen in real time.
00:35:03.960 So what she's referring to there is that if, you know, such and such a speaker believes this,
00:35:10.740 and such and such a professor believes this, and I want to put them on the stage at the same time,
00:35:14.640 she's saying, you know, sometimes that doesn't happen.
00:35:16.540 Maybe you could just have them separately or have a protest for the one speaker,
00:35:21.740 as though, you know, X speaking and Y protesting is somehow a better way to contrast ideas
00:35:28.080 than the two of them on the stage at the same time.
00:35:31.200 You know, there's an entirely new glossary that's emerging when it comes to these issues.
00:35:36.380 And in that glossary, we have terms like problematic.
00:35:40.320 Lindsay Shepard showing the Jordan Peterson clip was problematic.
00:35:43.420 Or debating someone with an objectionable viewpoint.
00:35:46.980 You can't do that because then you're normalizing them.
00:35:50.120 Or if I say something to you that you don't like and I meant it entirely nicely
00:35:54.920 and you took it in a different way, that's a microaggression.
00:35:57.920 But these words are very much becoming anything but fringe terms.
00:36:03.420 These words are actually becoming concepts that have a very significant force on campuses.
00:36:10.220 And this does not move us closer to inclusive freedom.
00:36:16.280 No, it moves us closer to what it is that this whole free speech exercise
00:36:20.620 that Laurier was supposed to be a response to,
00:36:23.020 which is a grad student and TA getting hauled before a kangaroo court
00:36:28.140 because she dared to normalize Jordan Peterson,
00:36:31.880 because she dared to actually show a clip of a debate.
00:36:35.220 Debate itself was the problem because debate is based on equal footing.
00:36:38.980 And you can actually look at this.
00:36:41.180 There was a book that I read and I interviewed the author.
00:36:44.520 And I can't remember his name and I'm very grateful for that
00:36:47.020 because I've kind of blocked him from my memory.
00:36:48.920 But the book was called Antifa.
00:36:50.700 And it was a book by an Antifa professor from, if memory serves,
00:36:54.360 Dartmouth College in the U.S.
00:36:55.860 And what he was saying was that, you know, Antifa is not a group.
00:37:01.820 It's a separate series of groups and all of that.
00:37:04.240 And he was actually talking about no platforming.
00:37:07.080 And he said, well, it's reasonable if you're combating fascism.
00:37:10.840 And he said, even violence, violence, even violence can be a tool to defeat fascism.
00:37:17.080 And when you ask him for his definition of fascism,
00:37:21.780 it's basically anyone and everyone under the sun.
00:37:24.000 Oh, Ann Coulter is a fascist.
00:37:25.360 Oh, you know, this person is a fascist.
00:37:26.940 And basically by the end of it, I think he's the only one left who's not a fascist.
00:37:30.200 And this is the problem with the definitions is that they will play these verbal gymnastics
00:37:36.440 to justify what are fundamentally anti-freedom tactics.
00:37:42.880 Or, for example, you talk about free speech and you say to an Antifa member at a campus,
00:37:47.260 well, you know, just so you know, when you're trying to silence this person,
00:37:50.440 that's opposing their free speech.
00:37:52.300 And they say, well, this is my personal favorite.
00:37:55.020 Free speech is an oppressive concept.
00:37:57.120 Or free speech is a concept that is skewed towards those with privilege.
00:38:01.600 So they don't even exist on that same plane that normal human beings exist on.
00:38:09.140 And when you look at what's happening, not just at Laurier, but at other schools,
00:38:13.200 I had the chance a couple of weeks back to speak at the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry.
00:38:17.760 And this is the group that was actually founded by Lindsay Shepard at Laurier.
00:38:22.880 And I was speaking about a number of terms.
00:38:25.740 And one of them that came up was this idea of – I was talking – it had nothing to do with Laurier,
00:38:34.700 but it was a guy out east who had watched an Amnesty presentation.
00:38:40.720 Amnesty had hosted this presentation where a U of T prof was speaking about female genital mutilation.
00:38:46.280 And at the end of this, this guy got up, and he was an African immigrant, and he got up and he said,
00:38:55.240 well, you know, I'm not talking about the process,
00:38:57.600 but I'm concerned that some of the language that we use is oppressive or colonial,
00:39:04.060 that we frame the discussions of female genital mutilation through a colonial lens,
00:39:09.060 and I'm concerned about that.
00:39:10.440 So he just witnesses this presentation about, you know, little girls who are having these irreparable
00:39:17.940 things done to their bodies.
00:39:19.760 And he's like, we're kind of framing this in a colonial way.
00:39:22.760 And that was such a – it was such a terrible moment because this is an idea that would only exist
00:39:31.660 on university campuses.
00:39:33.220 And I mentioned in my remarks, I said, you know, I couldn't believe that we were actually debating
00:39:37.080 female – or that they at this event were actually debating the merits of female genital mutilation.
00:39:42.520 And the professor said as much.
00:39:43.840 He's like, I didn't come here to – like, I didn't think we were going to be debating.
00:39:47.060 I thought everyone would accept that it was bad.
00:39:49.220 And there was a legitimate challenge.
00:39:52.220 Someone – I didn't learn about it until after the fact.
00:39:54.760 But someone had said to the person they were sitting behind, well, hang on,
00:39:56.860 isn't this hypocritical for Andrew to say this because he was just saying that, you know,
00:40:00.500 we should be able to debate everything.
00:40:02.400 And that's a fair point.
00:40:03.940 But to be clear, I wasn't saying that you shouldn't be allowed to have that debate.
00:40:07.500 But I was going to say that only on university campuses would that debate be a justifiable.
00:40:14.180 Only on a university campus would someone think, you know,
00:40:17.080 the merits of female genital mutilation are in some way up for debate, up for discussion.
00:40:27.200 And my goodness, this is something that we're going to see a lot more of.
00:40:31.500 And a group of professors at Laurier actually banded together and tried to get the school
00:40:37.580 to put a statement of principles forward.
00:40:39.460 They were inspired by the Chicago principles, an unequivocal commitment to free speech,
00:40:44.700 something that is so important, not just for a campus, any environment.
00:40:49.120 Any environment needs one, any workplace, any academic institution, any political party,
00:40:53.760 heck, even a group of friends.
00:40:54.840 A group of friends should have a tacit understanding that we can speak our minds
00:40:58.180 and do whatever we want because it's all in the spirit of something bigger than us as individuals.
00:41:05.400 But that doesn't happen now.
00:41:07.540 That doesn't happen at all.
00:41:08.560 And really what we are seeing at campuses is the opposite of that,
00:41:13.700 where to mention the term free speech is to invoke this antiquated and oppressive notion
00:41:19.480 that doesn't jive with whatever the cause of the day is on campus.
00:41:25.760 So again, female genital mutilation, something that everyone should be able to rally behind
00:41:29.700 as being a negative, is now held up as something that has to be avoided to be framed through a colonial lens
00:41:38.340 because you can't sound oppressive or Western-minded when you're talking about something that people are doing
00:41:44.420 in the third world and in the developing world.
00:41:48.680 And I find that to be a really dangerous, dangerous trend.
00:41:54.500 And one that we do need to stop, and someone reached out to me yesterday,
00:41:59.300 or it might have been two days ago, a woman, a very heartfelt message.
00:42:01.940 She's like, well, how do we fight this?
00:42:03.860 And for starters, you've got to actually speak up against it in the moment.
00:42:08.780 And that age-old quote from Jordan Peterson, he said,
00:42:10.920 you get punished for sitting, for speaking up.
00:42:13.820 You get punished for not speaking up.
00:42:15.480 You don't get to choose no punishment at all.
00:42:17.300 He said, the best you get to do is pick your punishment.
00:42:19.440 And that's really stuck with me.
00:42:21.060 Because if we accept that the world is going to hell in a handbasket,
00:42:24.400 and you're going to be screwed no matter what,
00:42:26.440 the question is, okay, do you want to be screwed for doing something or screwed for not doing something?
00:42:32.560 And that, in all honesty, is a very myopic way of viewing things.
00:42:38.040 It's horrifying that that's actually where it has to be, but that is where we are right now.
00:42:43.900 And to confront controversial ideas on campus and the media and politics,
00:42:49.860 to confront controversial ideas can't be done without free speech.
00:42:54.100 The same free speech that allows for those controversial ideas to be expressed in the first place.
00:43:00.800 And that's what we need to see happening.
00:43:02.480 Now, I wanted to get to one other topic here.
00:43:06.740 To move away from, you know, the decline of Western civilization and onto the carbon tax.
00:43:11.700 I saw a little flurry of excitement earlier about the idea that Justin Trudeau is trying to walk back in some way carbon tax in Canada.
00:43:24.860 And I want to tell people to not actually get excited.
00:43:28.900 There is very little good about what we're seeing Justin Trudeau's government put forward now.
00:43:35.060 The headline, liberals plan to soften carbon tax plan.
00:43:39.780 What it actually means, and actually, I want to read the CTV one,
00:43:43.100 because the CTV one I thought was really giving the wrong impression here.
00:43:46.740 Do I still have it?
00:43:48.800 Oh, yes, breaking news.
00:43:50.040 Federal government easing proposed carbon tax.
00:43:52.520 And I heard this, and I was like, oh, my goodness.
00:43:54.720 What are we doing here?
00:43:56.020 Are we walking it back?
00:43:56.800 Because there was actually an op-ed in the National Post written by Scott Moe, the Premier of Saskatchewan,
00:44:02.940 saying that the federal government, quote,
00:44:04.820 would be well advised to consider the withdrawal of their one-size-fits-all tax
00:44:11.100 and adopt a more collegial approach to addressing climate change.
00:44:15.340 And Premier Moe was talking about why Canadians generally support Saskatchewan's fight
00:44:20.740 against the Trudeau carbon tax, which is now Doug Ford's fight, which is now PEI's fight, which is now,
00:44:26.880 I forget, yeah, there was another province there.
00:44:29.580 Manitoba is fighting on dollar value, not on the existence of the tax.
00:44:34.680 But here is the actual change.
00:44:36.820 So the Liberal government is actually just changing the specific price.
00:44:45.160 They're going to raise the cutoff point for carbon taxes.
00:44:49.560 And this will have the biggest impact on companies that are operating with a little bit more efficiency than the industry average.
00:44:55.520 So they're trying to say that companies that are doing a better job should be penalized a bit less.
00:45:02.160 The worst polluters whose emissions exceed their average will see their liability shrink.
00:45:08.180 But they're not actually going to – it's not going to be an elimination of the carbon tax.
00:45:14.240 And I'm trying to get the number here because back in January,
00:45:17.160 Catherine McKenna said the benchmark was 70% of an industry's average emissions.
00:45:22.740 So if your industry's average emissions performance was at a certain level,
00:45:27.400 you would get taxed on anything over 70% of that.
00:45:31.680 So even average was somehow being penalized.
00:45:34.960 Even below average was being penalized.
00:45:37.480 Now they've adjusted it to 80%.
00:45:39.520 And for some industries, 90%.
00:45:42.220 So if you are at any more than 80% of your industry's average emissions,
00:45:47.980 then you're still going to be subject to the tax.
00:45:50.480 So we haven't actually seen a change here that is all that substantive.
00:45:55.780 They're fiddling around with the numbers, but it doesn't change the actual flaw,
00:46:00.400 which is that the federal government is trying to impose a carbon tax on provinces that don't want one,
00:46:05.420 on promises that don't need one, and on companies that can't afford one.
00:46:10.580 And there was a survey that was actually done.
00:46:13.480 Two out of three Canadians say provinces should have the final say on carbon tax.
00:46:18.700 And I find this to be really fascinating.
00:46:22.020 So right now there's a push.
00:46:24.040 Now Toronto had a column that was arguing that the federal government should get in and crack skulls
00:46:30.460 and start taking away provincial rights when it comes to municipalities.
00:46:35.180 So you had Doug Ford shrinking the size of Toronto City Council.
00:46:38.800 You had no one really outraged by that.
00:46:41.100 The only people outraged were Toronto City Councilors, which generally speaking suggests that he was probably on to something.
00:46:47.860 But it was actually quite amusing because I saw this issue unfold where people were saying that,
00:46:55.840 okay, the federal government needs to respect, you know, certain rules and regulations,
00:47:01.300 and the federal government needs to respect lower levels of government.
00:47:04.560 And when it comes to carbon tax, the federal government's like, nope, we're doing it.
00:47:08.820 This is our choice.
00:47:10.300 Whereas you could argue that the climate is a national issue, not a provincial issue.
00:47:16.120 But I'd say, well, it's an international issue by that standard.
00:47:19.440 The climate is not limited to Canada's borders.
00:47:22.320 It's international.
00:47:23.140 So why shouldn't provinces get to deal with the economic impact of any policy that is going to be targeted towards environmental initiatives?
00:47:31.880 And that's why when Jason Kenney wins Alberta, which I'm pretty sure he's going to,
00:47:38.380 when Jason Kenney wins the Alberta election, we will have the vast majority of the country's governments
00:47:44.140 and the vast majority of the population's representatives in government saying to the federal authorities,
00:47:51.440 nope, this is not happening.
00:47:52.480 And I honestly hope that the next election is, in fact, a catalyst for us having the debate about carbon tax,
00:48:03.600 having the debate about it, and basically making Justin Trudeau go to the people and say,
00:48:08.080 I want to get another term so I can impose a tax on your provincial governments and a tax on you.
00:48:15.420 And if he can say that with a straight face and win re-election in 2019, he deserves it.
00:48:19.840 But I don't think Canadians will reward that.
00:48:23.480 But I just wanted to make very clear that you understand that this easing that the federal government's doing is pretty much inconsequential.
00:48:31.560 It's very, very lackluster for those of us, including myself, including Scott Moe, including Doug Ford,
00:48:39.100 that are saying, no, the problem is not the specific number, the specific formula.
00:48:43.880 The problem is this idea of a federally imposed carbon tax in the first place.
00:48:49.720 That does it for me for today.
00:48:51.520 I want to say thank you very much for tuning in.
00:48:53.660 If you'd like to reach out, my email address is andrew at andrewlaughton.ca.
00:48:58.880 And if you have any suggestions, by the way, this is something we'll kind of do and have a little bit of fun with.
00:49:03.560 If you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to see me cover, send me a note or send me a Facebook message.
00:49:11.460 There, I pointed the right direction this time.
00:49:13.120 My Facebook link is up there.
00:49:15.720 And just a little bit of a public service announcement before we go.
00:49:19.580 If you are in Alberta, be very careful.
00:49:22.900 A pregnant mom was served a glass of cleaning solution instead of a latte at her neighborhood McDonald's.
00:49:31.180 And I won't say what city it was in.
00:49:32.940 Actually, maybe I will.
00:49:35.320 No, I won't say what city it was in.
00:49:36.860 But it rhymes with Schmethbridge.
00:49:39.000 And she was served a cleaning agent.
00:49:42.060 And McDonald's has apologized.
00:49:43.340 And they've said they forgot to disconnect the cleaning lines from the latte machine.
00:49:47.360 So, you know, say what you will about Starbucks.
00:49:49.600 But I've never been served a cleaning solution at Starbucks, like, apparently there.
00:49:53.680 I want to see what she's getting in return.
00:49:55.780 That's what I wanted to know.
00:49:57.100 Like, if she got, like, a $10 gift card or something.
00:50:01.520 I don't know.
00:50:01.840 They've apologized profusely.
00:50:03.220 Accidents do happen.
00:50:04.560 But I saw that story going around.
00:50:06.820 This is the problem.
00:50:08.380 So every now and then when you talk about minimum wage hikes, there's always the debate about, okay, well, companies are more likely to now just replace cashiers and employees with machines.
00:50:19.220 This is why you can't really trust machines all that much.
00:50:21.800 There's a human element.
00:50:22.780 I mean, I may have had bad service at a restaurant before, but they've never poured a, you know, Javex into my cup and given it to me.
00:50:28.720 That's a mistake that only a machine would make.
00:50:31.260 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:50:33.100 I hope you all have a great rest of the week and a great weekend.
00:50:35.980 Thank you.
00:50:36.360 God bless and good day.