Juno News - November 24, 2021


Is Canada still a free and democratic society？


Episode Stats

Length

28 minutes

Words per Minute

180.17244

Word Count

5,099

Sentence Count

210

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Is Canada still Canada? Are we still a free and democratic society? I'm Candice Malcolm and this
00:00:04.720 is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, welcome to The Candice Malcolm Show. Thank you so much
00:00:12.900 for joining us and tuning in today. Now, if you're anything like me, you have watched the change that's
00:00:18.080 happened in our society, sort of like a slow motion train wreck has happened over the course
00:00:22.160 of roughly the past two years. And what we have seen is an unbelievable erosion of basic liberties
00:00:28.880 in this country, basic rights and freedoms, things that we took for granted. We took for granted so
00:00:32.700 much so that five years ago, so go back to the first time that Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015.
00:00:39.000 If at that time someone were to say in the Trudeau mandate, Trudeau will completely suspend your
00:00:45.360 rights and freedoms. He will use health quarantine rules to impose lockdowns, make everybody stay
00:00:50.580 home, close down businesses, lock people out of the country, prohibit people from leaving the country,
00:00:56.160 prohibit people from coming to the country, any of these things. If someone had said that was going
00:01:00.660 to happen, you'd shake your head and say, no, that's a conspiracy theory. That kind of stuff
00:01:04.280 doesn't happen in a country like Canada. If you were told that we would live in a country where
00:01:09.260 neighbors were snitching on neighbors, where there was derision and hatred, people pitted against each
00:01:15.220 other, a huge distrust of other components of society, different groups sort of pitted against each
00:01:20.900 other. Again, you would say, no, not in Canada. Canadians are good-hearted. There's a sense of
00:01:27.180 community. Canadians wouldn't do that. If you in any way were to describe the scenario of the past
00:01:33.200 two years to your previous self, to your 2015 self, you would have said, no way, not in Canada.
00:01:38.980 And yet here we are. Here we found ourselves in this situation where public health order after public
00:01:43.800 health order, we continue to see people complying, people saying, okay, I'm going to do what you say
00:01:49.140 because you're the expert. I trust you. And at the end of the day, I just want to be healthy. I just
00:01:53.440 want to live. I want my physical health above all else. We live in a society where people are placing
00:02:00.240 their health above their freedoms. And they're willfully doing that. They're willfully doing
00:02:04.160 that. If you were to think about the last election, the federal election in 2021, we had the prime
00:02:10.840 minister of this country, Justin Trudeau, willfully scapegoating an entire portion of the society,
00:02:15.580 blaming a portion of society for the lockdowns, for the fact that we're still in this pandemic
00:02:21.520 and openly showing his, his contempt towards people who are unvaccinated. We've never seen
00:02:27.960 anything like that in modern Canada to the point where it doesn't really feel so much like Canada
00:02:32.960 anymore. And I want to talk about this topic today with a brilliant Canadian scholar. My guest today
00:02:38.340 is Travis Smith, a professor at Concordia University. He's a scholar, professor, and writer. He's written
00:02:44.300 a series of thought-provoking essays critiquing our culture in the face of draconian COVID-19
00:02:49.880 restrictions. One essay I particularly enjoyed is called Have We Become Not Canada. It's really good.
00:02:55.480 It's worth the read. Smith warns that time is running out to free our country from its pandemic-induced
00:03:00.320 contagion of distrust, resentment, and contempt of our neighbors. Another essay, which is actually a
00:03:05.940 two-part series on the religiosity and the zeal of our society's reaction to COVID-19, as well as this
00:03:12.480 idea that we have put, we've elevated our bodies and our physical health above our minds and our
00:03:18.040 souls. And he talks about the fallout of the sort of thought experiment where we trade off our
00:03:23.440 liberties and our freedoms in exchange for good health, or at least the promise of good health,
00:03:27.700 because no one can guarantee good health. But regardless, very, very good essays worth reading.
00:03:32.380 And to discuss these topics and break down these issues on a bit of a deeper level, I'm very pleased
00:03:36.620 to be joined in the program by Dr. Travis Smith. Travis Smith teaches political theory at Concordia
00:03:42.420 University, and he did his PhD on the politics of medicine he studied at Harvard University, where he
00:03:48.540 completed his doctorate. And so he's very well positioned to be discussing these topics today,
00:03:53.200 because he's been thinking and writing about them for a very, very long time. So, Travis, thank you so
00:03:58.000 much for joining the show, and welcome. Thanks for having me on the show today, Candice.
00:04:01.960 And so before we get into some of the themes and the topics that you've been writing about
00:04:05.500 in these essays, these essays about COVID, and the sort of overarching heavy handed response
00:04:11.000 from our political class, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, about your
00:04:15.420 background, and specifically your academic research, and the work that you've been doing
00:04:19.100 up to now, because it seems to me like you're perfectly positioned, perfectly prepared to be
00:04:23.560 commenting on the situation that we're that we're in right now, given that you have been
00:04:28.040 studying this exact topic of the sort of intersection of medicine and politics.
00:04:32.840 Well, I mainly stick to as an academic writing articles about things like early modern political
00:04:39.340 thought. Or I teach classical political science, write about thinkers in modern times like Hobbes
00:04:48.340 and Tocqueville. But I wrote my dissertation on the role of medicine and early modern thought
00:04:54.040 in thinkers like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and tried to understand, you know,
00:05:00.840 what role medicine would play in modern society, in shaping how we regard to the human condition,
00:05:09.400 how we should treat each other, and what kind of powers those, you know, those who rule should wield
00:05:14.440 over us, and for what purposes. And so medicine was something that in early modern times is right at the
00:05:20.200 very center of at the core of what they believe the modern political and technological world should look
00:05:28.120 like. And one of the ways it was expressed was that the things that in pre-modern times, people who
00:05:36.680 try to practice magic or alchemy, what they wanted but could not get through their means, we could we could
00:05:42.760 get the very same things that the magicians and the alchemists wanted, but through a new kind of
00:05:48.200 science, a new kind of technology. And so given that a lot of the goals of magic and alchemy were medical
00:05:55.080 goals, you know, the they were just looking for a new way to do the things that they had wanted to
00:06:00.120 accomplish or achieve before, indefinite prolongation of life and so forth, finding ways to change human
00:06:07.320 nature. And so it was also the case that you found that the language that was used was one where they
00:06:16.440 could take old words and give them new meanings. And so you could have, you know, instead of faith in
00:06:21.560 God, you would have faith in human reason, that would be applied in a scientific way instead of having
00:06:27.080 hope for an afterlife, you would have hope for the future where we would manufacture for ourselves a
00:06:34.360 better world. Instead of charity being about caring for people's souls, charity would be about caring
00:06:41.240 for people's bodies, and the greatest part of charity would be medicine. And another thing that
00:06:47.880 I looked at was how these ideas were not originally articulated in a fashion that was consistent with
00:06:53.160 liberal democracy, but rather the opposite. And so I became, you know, as I was doing this research,
00:06:59.800 concerned about whether or not medicine could be used in a way, advanced medicine could be used in
00:07:05.080 a way that would be damaging to liberal democracy. So, you know, we're blessed in Canada to live in a
00:07:10.600 society that has liberal and democratic credential. We are concerned about freedom and equality. Those are
00:07:16.680 our highest political goods. But we're also concerned about things like medicine a lot. It's one of the
00:07:21.320 things when you ask Canadians, what do we care about the most? Medicine has always been one of the things
00:07:25.000 that we say we care about the most. Maybe even before the pandemic, a lot of people would say they
00:07:29.480 care about medicine even more than freedom and equality. And so the thing is, when the justification
00:07:38.520 for modern medicine was even originally articulated even like 400 years ago, there was this double
00:07:45.000 justification. On the one hand, you offer a public justification that medicine is for what they call
00:07:51.240 the relief of man's estate. So it would be something that could reduce all human beings suffering.
00:07:57.480 And at the same time, there was an acknowledgement among the scientists, as it were, the people who
00:08:02.200 would be engaging in the development technologies, that all of technology, including medicine, was
00:08:07.160 really for the pursuit of unlimited power. And the moral argument was something that was offered,
00:08:12.840 as I said, for public consumption. But really, the scientists would and had to for the sake of the
00:08:19.800 goods that they were pursuing, the goals that they were pursuing, have to be willing to do anything,
00:08:24.040 try any experiment, you know, both human and non-human, in order to find out how we might,
00:08:35.080 the expression was, supersede human nature, or how we might impose new natures upon us. And so that was
00:08:46.760 always there at the beginning. And so the question of something like the role of consent in this has
00:08:50.840 always been ambiguous. The role of freedom in this, we think that medicine is good for freedom, because
00:08:56.200 if we have healthy bodies, you're more free to live your life, right? Medicine is something that speaks
00:09:01.560 to us as equals, because we all have bodies that get sick, we all have bodies that die, so we're equal in
00:09:06.440 those ways. But medicine, like all technologies, can be used in ways that could be negative with respect to our
00:09:14.360 freedoms. And also medicine is something that, or health is something that we see also speaks to the
00:09:20.360 ways in which we're unequal, because some people are healthy and some people are sick. And even at the
00:09:26.600 get-go of modern technology, they wondered whether or not it might be possible to use all technologies,
00:09:32.520 including medicine, in order to enhance the species, or to reduce the species to a condition of
00:09:40.200 a kind of herd contentment, and social control. These were all sort of thought about 400 years ago,
00:09:48.520 at the very beginning of modern political thought. So that's kind of what I investigated there. So when
00:09:52.920 I see today stories, I saw in the news a couple days ago, a story about some new technology that they
00:09:58.680 can use to read people's minds. Saw this on Smithsonian Magazine. And it's always the case that they say,
00:10:05.080 you know, we develop a technology that will read people's minds, because it's going to help the disabled.
00:10:10.760 Which of course, who could argue against helping the disabled, finding some way for them to have
00:10:15.560 greater freedom, finding some way for their conditions to be more equalized with those of us
00:10:20.200 who don't struggle in the ways they do. So that sounds like it's fully consistent with liberal democracy.
00:10:25.960 But for those of us, you know, who've watched any science fiction movie, we have to think twice about
00:10:32.440 whether or not, you know, technology that can read our minds is something that might not be badly abused by
00:10:38.040 the powerful should they decide to do so. We have to really trust that it doesn't get used
00:10:43.720 in ways that are harmful. You know, what goes on in our minds, almost looking right now to be the
00:10:49.240 last vestige of our privacy, right, where everything else is surveilled or everything else is watched.
00:10:55.960 You know, at least we've got our the privacy of our minds and they will not really, you know,
00:10:59.240 we can we can have a machine that will read your minds too. And so it goes with that, you know,
00:11:04.840 part of it is for the relief of suffering. But part of it is also for the indefinite acquisition
00:11:11.720 of power for whatever purpose the powerful might put it to. And so there's always this tension that
00:11:17.160 is both medicine is always both something that it makes perfectly good sense that we liberal
00:11:22.200 democratic people love it and want more of it, almost worship it, depend on it. And at the same
00:11:28.440 time, medicine is among the technologies that is potentially most threatening to most dangerous
00:11:35.960 to the very things that we people who love freedom and equality hold dear. Well, so let's let's bring
00:11:40.920 us all back into the context and Travis of COVID-19 and what we have seen go on in the last two years,
00:11:46.760 because, you know, what at first we were told was, you know, two weeks at home to flatten the curve
00:11:52.680 has turned into an evolving set of restrictions that there's a certain, you know, swath of the
00:11:58.680 population that's just completely happy to do whatever they're told from health authorities.
00:12:03.880 They're happy to, you know, go along with this idea that we can scapegoat people who choose
00:12:08.680 not to get vaccinated. We saw in the news last week that Austria, a country in Europe,
00:12:13.960 is choosing to impose health restrictions and and quarantine onto people who are not vaccinated.
00:12:20.360 We see in Australia as well, sort of extreme uses of public health rules to sort of quarantine
00:12:27.480 people who get COVID or quarantine people who aren't getting vaccinated. And so we see people
00:12:32.440 going along with very extreme measures that I don't think that Canadians, in theory, would agree to. But
00:12:39.400 just given the circumstances, given the stress that we're under, you know, two, almost two years into
00:12:44.360 this pandemic, so many people are choosing willfully to sort of give away certain aspects of their
00:12:50.760 freedom. Like you said, their cherished, beloved freedom in exchange for greater safety, greater security,
00:12:57.240 health. Can you sort of walk us through your perspective on this as someone who sort of studied
00:13:02.520 it from a political theory perspective? Is this predictable? What could be made of it? And how can
00:13:08.760 we sort of start to push back those of us who still cherish the idea of Canada as a country of free
00:13:16.120 individuals? That's a lot, Candace. I'll try my best. Okay. Look, let's give Canadians credit at first,
00:13:26.520 right? I mean, first, when we were told that there was this pandemic, and we were told two weeks to
00:13:32.680 flatten the curve, Canadians came together and said to themselves, yeah, that's the kind of thing we do.
00:13:36.680 We look out for each other. Canadians are compassionate. Canadians do have a sense that we're not just,
00:13:43.640 you know, selfish, you know, look out for number one types, but that we care for our communities.
00:13:49.720 We care for the vulnerable. And so appealing to us on that basis was something that Canadians across
00:13:57.480 the political spectrum in a lot of ways would say, yeah, sure, that makes sense. We want to protect
00:14:01.880 ourselves. We want to protect the people we care about, our neighbors, our family members, our fellow
00:14:07.080 Canadians, right? And as we're recording, I'm waiting to find out whether or not the Ontario
00:14:12.680 government is going to extend the emergency order through to the end of March next year, which I think
00:14:17.960 some of us have been anticipating they would do anyways, we just didn't know how long they would
00:14:21.160 extend it for. And we've come to wonder whether or not the emergency will ever end. And if there isn't
00:14:28.840 any number of, you know, reasons that they might continue to extend it. You know, we have had a campaign
00:14:39.640 to fight this virus for a long time, and somehow our numbers keep getting worse and worse again,
00:14:45.800 despite all the efforts. Or at least that's, you know, that's the information we're given.
00:14:53.080 And so we were stuck now wondering, do we ever get our lives back? And there's a sort of, I mean,
00:15:00.760 you're, you're a mother, right, Candace? You have children, you know, you know what, what you have to
00:15:04.680 do in order to habituate your children to good behavior, or what kind of behavior you want out of
00:15:09.880 them. And, you know, I've seen people compare the way in which Canadians have been treated for the
00:15:16.840 last year and a half, not so much to good parents, but how children are treated by abusive parents,
00:15:24.920 or how people are treated by abusive spouses, or how prisoners have their will broken down by various
00:15:32.280 tactics. And this is like, you know, the, you know, bad child rearing, in a sense, that we're being
00:15:39.880 trained to see what we'll comply with next. I had a conversation with somebody very recently where they
00:15:45.960 just said, boy, I wish we'd be rewarded for doing what we're told. But sort of once you've already
00:15:52.600 embraced that mindset, if, you know, you run the risk that, you know, you're not ever going to be
00:16:01.800 rewarded, you're just going to keep being told, because you keep hoping for the reward that may
00:16:08.200 never come. Or if they give you a little bit of reward, they take it away again, very shortly.
00:16:12.600 And this is where this is where I'm concerned is that, you know, especially, for example, what really
00:16:17.720 got me consumer than anything else this summer, I mean, I sat on the fence about a lot of this for a long
00:16:21.560 time and just observed had lots of conversations with people just looked at the information my public
00:16:27.560 health unit was giving me and tried to sort of scrutinize their charts and make sense of their
00:16:32.520 interpretations. You know, watch the news. And, you know, talk to talk to people in my community,
00:16:42.120 outside of academic circles, it was very important for me to talk to lots of people outside of my
00:16:46.120 academic circle. So a lot of academics get stuck and only talking to other academics, like people in
00:16:51.240 the profession had stuck mainly talking to people in their own profession. And things stopped making
00:16:56.520 sense at a certain point. And more than anything else, it was the introduction of the passports
00:17:04.920 and the certificates, especially the way they were introduced in Ontario, where the public health unit
00:17:09.800 said they would do it if the government didn't. And that struck me as a kind of usurpation of authority
00:17:15.480 of the sort that we've seen from public health. You know, the kind of thing that really should
00:17:21.000 belong to our elected representatives being something that was being, you know, imposed upon
00:17:26.440 them or threatened if they didn't do it themselves. That sort of got me upset. I got concerned about the
00:17:33.240 certificates. I got really upset about the mandates. And part of it was I'd always been the kind of person
00:17:39.480 who was aware of what, you know, the kooky, crazy people said, you know, when when this all started.
00:17:47.240 But these kinds of measures were the kinds of things that they had predicted from the get go.
00:17:51.560 And so when I started seeing that being implemented, my attitude was, you know, gosh, I really hope
00:17:57.000 they stop making, you know, the conspiracy theorists look good. Please stop making them look good.
00:18:04.440 Please stop making it look like they were right about anything. I don't want them to be right about
00:18:07.720 anything. But once they were introduced and people embraced them, people were excited for them. People
00:18:13.960 couldn't wait to use them and brag about using them. And I got very disturbed when I when I teach
00:18:19.400 the concept of liberty to my undergraduates, Candace, one of the examples I like to use
00:18:26.120 is the way in which we see no left turn signs when we're driving in traffic. And I grew up in Ontario and
00:18:33.400 I got used to the no left turn sign. That's the one that has the left arrow and the red no don't do
00:18:39.560 that. Right. And then I work in Montreal and in Montreal, they like the other sign, the one that's
00:18:46.520 got the green circle with the up arrow and the right turn arrow. And I explained to my students,
00:18:52.120 these are not the same. They say technically they're the same, but they're not the same because
00:18:56.600 what's the principle behind them. The principle behind the red no right turn sign is that you
00:19:03.640 should be, you should assume you could turn in any direction at any given intersection. That's,
00:19:09.000 you know, generally it's your right. It's everybody's right to turn in any direction,
00:19:14.920 any given intersection. But for some very specific reason here, you're not allowed to turn left.
00:19:20.120 Um, sorry, this one, no. Um, but the green go straight or go right sign. I mean, the naked green,
00:19:29.480 so it sounds nicer. Red, it sounds mean. Um, but the green sign, the premise behind it,
00:19:35.000 the principle behind that is unless we tell you what you're permitted to do, you don't know what
00:19:41.160 you're allowed to do. You have to wait for explicit instructions from the authorities to give you
00:19:46.920 permission to do what you might, may be allowed to do here or there. So when you come to an intersection,
00:19:54.040 you're like, Oh, I get to go right. Or I get to go straight here because they're letting me.
00:20:01.000 Uh, and the psychology behind those two is quite different. And when I saw the certificates get
00:20:06.920 introduced, it struck me as sort of a massive sort of implementation of the transformation from the
00:20:13.480 first mindset in Ontario to the other that says your freedoms are the things that the authorities give
00:20:19.080 you. You're only free to do the things that we allow you to do. And, and unlike rules of the road,
00:20:25.160 uh, these certificates will now apply to individuals, one person at a time. And with respect to particular
00:20:31.400 compliance, with respect to one particular, uh, requirement presently, but who knows down the road
00:20:37.880 whether or not any number of other factors might be added into them to gear and to give you the
00:20:44.600 requisite permissions to do, uh, what you want in life to meet with who you want to meet with,
00:20:50.520 to go where you want to go, to enjoy what you want to enjoy. Um, and, and in a world in which we're sort
00:20:57.320 of trained ever more to always have to make sure we're checking all the boxes so that we can get the
00:21:04.120 requisite permissions. And then we're supposed to call that getting our freedoms back when it's
00:21:09.240 actually having our freedoms taken from us, you know, government no longer being the authority that
00:21:16.520 tries to arrange things so that everybody can exercise their natural rights and freedoms, but
00:21:22.280 instead only getting to exercise what particular permissions are granted by those who deign to make
00:21:29.320 the rules to decide what, uh, you're allowed to do on what criteria, um, that's concerning to me. And
00:21:35.400 so there's a sort of, you know, training of us to embrace and to accept, not even to notice the change.
00:21:40.520 I was saying before earlier about how words get changed without us necessarily seeing the ways in
00:21:44.600 which words get changed. And so here's a way in which freedom has been radically changed in the way in
00:21:51.160 which it's being understood and, uh, practiced and in which sort of, you know, the fact that people don't
00:21:57.160 notice it or even that they're thrilled to see it. Uh, and part of that thrill is because they get,
00:22:03.560 some people get to see that they get freedoms that other people don't get, uh, and that they're being
00:22:08.280 as a reward it. You know, you're, I said, your mother, it's like, you know, you've been a good boy
00:22:12.280 or girl, you get a cookie, but they've been bad. So no cookie for them. Um, and it's just, you know,
00:22:19.560 I understand the, the, the, the public health justification that's offered for it. We could
00:22:25.400 get into that if you wanted to, but, but it's, it's something, it's something, it suggests something
00:22:33.080 much greater or something more. Right. Well, I, I, I mean, one of the, one of the things that I sort
00:22:39.160 of picked up on in reading some of your essays and, and some of the things you're talking about now
00:22:43.160 is how this pandemic in so many ways has brought out the worst in people that, um, the, you know,
00:22:47.960 the whole idea at first was that we're all in it together. And I remember people would go out onto
00:22:51.960 their, uh, stoop, you know, the front door in Toronto and people would applaud and bang pats and
00:22:56.760 pans, thanking, um, nurses for, and, and hospital workers for their sort of bravery at the very
00:23:01.400 beginning of the pandemic. And there was this sort of sense of community that, that we started to feel.
00:23:05.720 And, you know, that has been completely torn apart to the point now where, you know, you see this
00:23:12.040 sort of, uh, you know, that, that, that, that infamous Toronto star headline that ran in the,
00:23:17.000 in the front page that ran in the summer, um, about, you know, let them die. People who are
00:23:20.920 unvaccinated. Uh, we saw Justin Trudeau. Yeah. And, and, and Justin Trudeau during the last election,
00:23:28.440 um, just willfully, you know, scapegoating and demonizing people who weren't vaccinated and,
00:23:34.200 and sort of running his campaign against them. Um, and, and, and we've seen this sort of ugliness,
00:23:39.400 nastiness come out because I, I mean, to me, I think it's because people are just frustrated with the,
00:23:44.120 with the scenario that we've been put in and they just want it to end. And, and they're told,
00:23:48.360 you know, by their political betters that if you just follow these guidelines, it'll be over. And
00:23:52.200 to your point, we keep following the guidelines and nothing's changing. So just final question
00:23:56.920 for you, Travis, what do you think, what do you think we can do as Canadians, as freedom loving
00:24:00.760 Canadians who, who want to restore, you know, the, the, the, the, the basic rights of individuals,
00:24:06.600 putting freedom ahead of all these other things, but also, you know, appreciating the community that we
00:24:12.280 live in and that, you know, Canadians are free so we can have different choices. What, what do you
00:24:15.960 think the best thing that we can do, um, at this juncture in time, uh, to, to, to prevent the sort
00:24:21.240 of medical tyranny from continuing to stand up and say enough is enough? Uh, what, what would you,
00:24:26.360 uh, what would you advise in that regard? Um, that's, that's a, that's, that's not an easy question,
00:24:35.000 Candace. Um, what can ordinary Canadians do other than, that are upset about this?
00:24:41.960 Uh, and, and, and, uh, what, what can they do to express that, uh, is, um, uh, you know,
00:24:52.600 there, there are those who are making an effort to express it through, uh, communicating to their MPPs,
00:25:00.440 through, uh, showing up at, uh, demonstrations where they're vilified for being at a demonstration,
00:25:08.120 um, or if, you know, if the media covers it, right? Um, and, uh, you know, trying to talk,
00:25:16.760 you know, I make a big point in one of my articles about just trying to talk again. One of the things
00:25:21.640 that the lockdowns have done in isolating us, individuating us, making us feel alone and powerless
00:25:28.120 and weak, um, is that we've stopped talking to each other. Uh, and I think that it's important
00:25:34.760 for people to actually have conversations with each other again and have conversations
00:25:38.680 with people who don't agree with you about everything. I think that's important too.
00:25:42.200 Um, and, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know where else to, to place my hopes in terms of, uh, ordinary
00:25:52.840 Canadians. Um, uh, I'm, I'm sort of more concerned about what might come down the road. I mean, as I
00:26:02.600 said, we've been sort of trained to go along with one thing or another with the understanding that if
00:26:06.520 only we comply here, then maybe next time, uh, we'll get rewarded for our compliance, um, only to
00:26:13.480 find out that we have to comply with something else and something more. Uh, and I'm also concerned about
00:26:18.680 the way in which on the other side of things, uh, the people who enforce the rules are being trained
00:26:24.120 to get used to enforcing rules that, you know, challenge if not, uh, violate people's rights. Uh,
00:26:32.360 and what are they getting used to, uh, going along with? And, uh, the, the, to me, the most,
00:26:39.400 the biggest moment of hope in the last year or so was when, uh, Ontario police declared they would
00:26:44.200 refuse to do spot checks when the government told the police to do spot checks and they said,
00:26:48.120 no, we won't do them. That was the greatest sigh of relief to me. It says to me that people in
00:26:55.720 positions of law enforcement know that there are things that they should not do. Uh, know that
00:27:02.200 there, there are jobs that are not appropriate for them to, or orders are not appropriate for them
00:27:08.280 to follow. There are, it's not their job to do that. Um, and, and so I have to continue to, uh, have faith
00:27:17.480 and trust that, you know, should, you know, they be given further instructions that look like they
00:27:25.480 go further in challenging or violating ordinary Canadians rights that they will, you know,
00:27:35.400 say, no, that's not what we do. And so I, I have to have a lot of hope in that.
00:27:40.840 Well, great. I, I really appreciate the, the essays that you wrote. And I think even just,
00:27:46.280 you know, by writing them and articulating some of the problems, uh, that we're having,
00:27:50.040 it gave me hope that, you know, some of the fears and concerns I'm having about our country and the
00:27:54.840 way things are going, I'm not alone. And so I, I appreciate, uh, your contributions and, uh,
00:28:00.040 it's great to have you on the show, Travis. Thank you so much for joining us.
00:28:03.240 Thank you, Candice. Thanks for having me on the program. Thanks for everything you do at TrueNorth.
00:28:06.840 All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.