Juno News - Is Justin Trudeau a dictator？

00:00:00.000 Legacy media journalists lose their mind after a conservative MP compares Justin Trudeau to a

00:00:06.400 dictator. We will do a comprehensive fact check on this claim to determine whether or not Justin

00:00:11.520 Trudeau is, in fact, a dictator. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:15.440 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. So I will admit when this story

00:00:31.040 first came out, it was so stupid that I didn't want to acknowledge it. And I didn't really want 0.99

00:00:34.760 to talk about it. There was an exchange in the House of Commons where a couple of MPs were sort

00:00:39.120 of speculating and talking about whether or not Canada was a dictatorship, whether or not our

00:00:44.240 Prime Minister was, in fact, a dictator. Now, the spirit of the debate that was going on in Parliament

00:00:49.060 was fairly lighthearted. It wasn't during question period. It was during the order paper updates after

00:00:54.340 question period. And you could tell by the sort of jovial attitude amongst the MPs that were talking

00:00:59.100 about it. They weren't making a serious claim. They were sort of talking tongue in cheek. However,

00:01:04.560 the legacy media blew it out of proportion, as they tend to do whenever there's a conservative who says

00:01:09.020 something that the media deems to be controversial. So that is what happened here. A whole bunch of

00:01:13.220 legacy media journalists lost their minds and accused the conservatives of calling Justin

00:01:18.360 Trudeau a dictator. So here is the headline over at CTV. It says, Rachel Thomas, MP for Lethbridge,

00:01:24.060 called Trudeau a dictator last week. And it quotes Rachel Thomas saying, a ruler with total power over

00:01:29.960 a country, especially one who has gained it using force, Thomas said. Now, you can tell that that quote

00:01:34.180 is taken out of context because she's not actually calling Trudeau a dictator in this claim. In fact,

00:01:38.880 if you look at the clip, she was just reading a dictionary definition of what a dictator means

00:01:43.120 and kind of saying, using that to say that many Canadians feel that their country is being run

00:01:48.500 by a dictator. So this was in response to a liberal question put to Thomas to get her to respond to a

00:01:55.900 comment made earlier by a conservative MP, another one from this one from Saskatchewan West, Brad Reddikop,

00:02:01.260 who blasted Justin Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act to clear peaceful protesters.

00:02:05.680 So Reddikop said this, to call in police forces to crush peaceful protesters under the jackboot

00:02:11.440 of the prime minister's basic dictatorship. And then the next thing he said was, and at the same

00:02:17.380 time, another dictator is currently using his war machine to crush our friends in Ukraine. So his use

00:02:22.160 of the term another dictator to describe Putin implies that he's calling Trudeau a dictator. And then that

00:02:28.720 use of the term, he crushed peaceful protesters under the jackboot of the prime minister's basic

00:02:33.980 dictatorship. That of course, was in reference to an idiotic comment the prime minister made 10 years 1.00

00:02:39.300 ago, talking about how he admired China the most and saying that he the thing he loved about China 0.99

00:02:44.720 was the fact that their basic dictatorship can be used to just kind of jig the economy around and

00:02:49.640 make it go green on a dime. A very stupid comment by the prime minister back then. And so the 1.00

00:02:55.120 conservative MP was kind of just like rubbing in how stupid of a comment that was by comparing 0.99

00:02:59.940 Justin Trudeau and calling him a basic dictatorship. Regardless of all this context, regardless of the 0.99

00:03:04.360 sort of tongue in cheek nature that the MPs were talking about, the media lose their minds. There

00:03:08.820 was a CTV story. We also had Steve Chase from the Globe and Mail tweeting this, worth noting,

00:03:13.460 conservative MP Rachel Thomas, and he harder, she used to be known as Rachel Harder. She got married

00:03:17.840 over the summer. So she's now Rachel Thomas. Rachel Thomas on Monday in the House of Commons said that

00:03:22.700 many Canadians hold the view that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fits the definition of a dictator.

00:03:27.100 She did not cite a poll. How dare her give an opinion without citing a poll, according to Steve

00:03:33.020 Chase over the Globe and Mail. He was not alone, of course. Rosemary Barton from the CBC reacted.

00:03:37.960 She said, criticize the liberal NDP deal all you want, but this is irresponsible rhetoric coming from

00:03:44.240 someone who was duly elected six months ago. So Rosemary Barton doing her best impression of a 1.00

00:03:49.700 hall monitor, scolding and lecturing politicians for the rhetoric. Interesting how that only goes one way.

00:03:55.160 I don't recall Rosemary Barton scolding and lecturing Justin Trudeau over his irresponsible

00:04:00.620 rhetoric when he said that unvaccinated people don't deserve to be in our society and that we

00:04:05.800 shouldn't tolerate them. But alas, that scrutiny only goes one way from the CBC. Next, we have Don

00:04:12.160 Martin from CTV commenting, saying, what a crazy thing to say makes the whole caucus looks bad.

00:04:18.800 Charles Adler from Chorus Radio wrote this, who among conservatives running for leadership will

00:04:23.100 renounce the irresponsible. Every Canadian school child is getting 100% clarity on what a dictator

00:04:29.040 is. Hashtag Vladimir Putin. When will the Conservative Party of Canada hold itself to the

00:04:33.620 intellectual standard expected of a 10-year-old? And there's Charles Adler just doing what he loves

00:04:38.820 best, which is just having really, really emotional over-the-top takes where he decries

00:04:45.900 conservatism and scolds conservatives just like the rest of the media. We also had liberal MPs jumping in.

00:04:52.240 So here is Mark Gerritsen, the MP for Kingston in the islands, saying, it's quite disturbing and

00:04:58.320 frankly, an insult to Ukrainian people. The Rachel Thomas MP and Brad Redikop would suggest the Prime

00:05:03.260 Minister of Canada is a dictator similar to Putin. Likewise, Catherine McKenna, former liberal cabinet

00:05:09.100 minister, said, we just had a free and fair election in Canada. Suggesting the opposite because

00:05:13.680 you dislike the prime minister is completely irresponsible and demeans the office that this

00:05:17.200 Conservative member is privileged to hold be better. And finally, this is quoted from the CTV

00:05:22.940 story. We have the University of Lethbridge Professor of Political Science Trevor Harrison

00:05:27.640 saying, and this is a quote, if Thomas was taking a course with me, I would have to give her an F

00:05:34.100 for the course. Well, sort of letting the cat out of the bag there that a university professor

00:05:38.300 would fail a student because he disagrees with her personally. So that is a standard apparently over

00:05:44.840 at the University of Lethbridge in political science. If you have a view that the teacher

00:05:48.680 doesn't agree with, you get an F for the course. Again, saying the quiet part out loud over there at

00:05:55.440 the University of Lethbridge. Okay, so here's the thing. We said we're going to do a fact check on

00:06:00.340 this claim. In order to do a fact check, rather than taking the rhetoric that the media and liberal

00:06:04.780 MPs and the whole sort of liberal media establishment on social media are drumming up, it's best to take a

00:06:12.100 look at the actual exchange and the actual claims that were made. Because like I said,

00:06:15.920 Brad Redekop, the MP, made the claim that Trudeau used a jackboot to crush peaceful protesters under

00:06:22.180 his basic dictatorship. That's obviously tongue-in-cheek in reference to an older claim that

00:06:26.020 Trudeau had made. And then the only part that you could say is that he was comparing Trudeau to Putin

00:06:31.820 because he said, and another dictator is doing this. And that word, another, implies that he is

00:06:36.240 making that comparison. However, it was Rachel Harder that was the sort of target of all the score. 0.72

00:06:40.460 So let's look at what she actually says in the House of Commons. This is a clip that is a little

00:06:44.880 longer than the one that was circulating on social media, but it's important because it provides all

00:06:49.080 of the context that we need in order to do a good fact check. So here is Rachel Thomas, used to be

00:06:53.100 Rachel Harder, in the House of Commons last Monday making this statement.

00:06:57.400 I'm wondering if this member can comment on whether or not she agrees that the Prime Minister of Canada

00:07:04.900 Canada is a dictator in a democratically-elected Parliament where we had an election not only

00:07:11.580 six months ago. Does she agree with the rhetoric that came from the previous member?

00:07:16.900 The Honourable Member for Lethbridge.

00:07:21.320 The Oscars were last night.

00:07:23.580 Mr. Speaker, thank you for the question.

00:07:28.460 Dictator. I just did a quick review in the dictionary.

00:07:33.660 According to the Oxford Dictionary, a dictator is a ruler with total power over a country,

00:07:38.580 typically one who has obtained control by force. There are many Canadians that would believe, that would

00:07:45.960 hold the view, that this does apply to Mr. Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada.

00:07:50.760 And it is up to, I apologize for using his name, to the Prime Minister of Canada.

00:07:56.680 And it's actually up to the Canadian people to determine that. And they'll be determining that at the next election.

00:08:03.760 Now, here's the problem with liberal logic, is that liberals, they like to make other people responsible for a problem that actually isn't their own.

00:08:14.940 I'm not the one that made the statement in this House. Why am I being forced to answer for it?

00:08:19.440 But the Canadian people will answer in the next election.

00:08:22.440 So you can see the sort of liberal, over-the-top theatrics, like how dare they call our Prime Minister a dictator?

00:08:28.160 After all, we are in this Parliament, this democratically-elected Parliament.

00:08:31.500 Well, here's the thing about democracy. Just because you vote in an election doesn't make you, doesn't guarantee that your society is built on the values of a Western liberal democracy.

00:08:42.520 Things like freedom and openness and tolerance. Just because you have an election doesn't mean any of that.

00:08:47.380 There are fake elections all over the world. There are elections in almost every country.

00:08:51.080 So just being a democracy isn't really enough. You need the sort of small L liberalism as well, which is what many would argue that Justin Trudeau is lacking.

00:08:59.400 And then you can see that Rachel Thomas is sort of taking a light-hearted approach to all of this.

00:09:03.740 They're holding her accountable for something that someone else said, which is also incredibly worth noting.

00:09:08.980 So the claims being made in and of itself are disingenuous because it wasn't Thomas that made the original claim.

00:09:15.380 It was a different MP and yet she is being asked to defend it and speak to it.

00:09:19.880 And then we have the second broader issue, which is that every Canadian prime minister is inevitably, invariably compared to a dictator.

00:09:26.220 Why? Well, because of the structure of our democracy. We don't have the same checks and balances.

00:09:30.960 We don't have the same separations of power as other Western liberal democracies.

00:09:35.500 For instance, in the United States, they have a very separate distinct branches of government.

00:09:40.260 The executive is very distinct from the legislature. The executive is the office of the president.

00:09:44.140 The legislator is the Senate and the House and then the judicial branch, which are all separate, right?

00:09:49.520 In Canada, those are all sort of merged together. You have the prime minister who leads the executive.

00:09:53.520 When you have a majority government, they also lead the legislature, the legislative branch in the House of Commons.

00:09:58.860 And they appoint those judges to the Supreme Court. So you don't have the same kinds of separation of power.

00:10:03.720 So prime ministers can amass a great deal of power.

00:10:06.420 Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in an interview last year with Joe Lonsdale of the American Optimist, said this exact same thing.

00:10:12.600 He said that even when he commanded a minority government in Canada, he had more ability to get things done than U.S.

00:10:17.900 President Barack Obama, despite the fact that Obama controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives at the time.

00:10:22.980 That is correct, because in Canada we don't have those same separations of power.

00:10:26.880 And that is why, time and time again, the media and politicians have called former prime ministers,

00:10:32.420 including Prime Minister Harper, on many occasions, as we'll go through, they've called him a dictator.

00:10:37.520 So here at True North, we had our researchers come up with all of the instances that members of parliament called Prime Minister Stephen Harper a dictator during Harper's time in office.

00:10:47.900 So here we go. We had Ron McKinnon, who is the Liberal MP, still the sitting MP for Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam.

00:10:54.100 He tweeted this on March 5th, 2014. He said,

00:10:56.980 Harper's dictatorship for democracy coming to an end, question mark.

00:11:00.780 And then he linked to a far left blog.

00:11:03.720 We had Olivia Chow, former MP for the NDP party in Toronto's downtown riding of Trinity Spadina, according to a tweet from Chris Fox.

00:11:13.660 He wrote, Chow going after Harper hard.

00:11:16.960 Parliament is about democracy, she says.

00:11:19.400 Are we living in a dictatorship, question mark.

00:11:22.580 Next, we have Elizabeth May, who's a former leader of the Green Party, and she is the MP for Saanich Gulf Islands out on Vancouver Island.

00:11:30.960 Here's a piece in the tie from October 2013.

00:11:33.800 Elizabeth May, how to stop Harper's elected dictatorship, the Green MP on the PM's dangerous decision, opposition tactics and rustlings of hope in the Tory bench.

00:11:44.880 Elizabeth May is quoted as saying we are living under an elected dictatorship.

00:11:48.820 This is a very frequent, reoccurring theme, this term, an elected dictatorship.

00:11:53.880 Next, we have Wayne Easter, a former Liberal MP.

00:11:56.660 Back in 2010, he said straight out, this is a quote from the House of Commons.

00:11:59.920 We got it from Hansard.

00:12:00.900 He said straight out, he's a dictator, referring to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

00:12:05.640 We had a Conservative MP in response say he just called the Prime Minister a dictator, Mr. Chair.

00:12:10.300 Is that parliamentary language?

00:12:11.800 Do you allow that?

00:12:12.660 So, again, this whole debate back and forth of the opposition calling the Prime Minister a dictator is nothing new.

00:12:19.900 Hedy Fry, who's a former Liberal MP for Vancouver Centre, likewise said the Prime Minister behaves as if he is a dictator.

00:12:26.700 This, likewise, is from Hansard.

00:12:28.200 So, this is something that she said in the House of Commons in the official transcript of a debate in the House of Commons.

00:12:34.540 Likewise, also in the House of Commons, Carolyn Bennett, who is Liberal Minister of Mental Health and Addiction,

00:12:40.260 she said, leaders who want to make the rules are called dictators. 0.99

00:12:44.460 This is a test.

00:12:45.320 Will the Prime Minister accept the Canadians and their parliament make the rules and restore the long-form census now?

00:12:51.720 So, again, there was a whole hullabaloo over Harper changing the census.

00:12:56.820 And, yes, many, many people at the time called him a dictator for changing the census,

00:13:01.660 including, it looks like, Liberal MP and now Cabinet Minister Caroline Bennett.

00:13:06.140 So, again, this tradition of calling the Prime Minister a dictator is nothing new.

00:13:11.200 And aside from Liberal MPs saying it, there are also many examples of commentators, people in the media, calling Stephen Harper a dictator.

00:13:18.140 So, here, Stephen Taylor, a conservative analyst, points this out that there is a little bit of a media bias

00:13:23.340 because Rosemary Barton, who was clutching her pearls over the idea that a conservative MP would call Justin Trudeau a dictator,

00:13:30.740 well, lo and behold, a couple of years ago, back when Harper was in charge, Rosemary Barton had a very different tone.

00:13:37.200 She tweeted in a sort of jovial way, uh-oh, Bob Ray just basically said this government is a dictator.

00:13:42.640 So, it was totally okay for Bob Ray to do it back then.

00:13:45.260 He got a pass, whereas now when a conservative MP is doing it, it is a threat to democracy and the worst thing ever.

00:13:51.120 Likewise, the Globe and Mail had a tweet saying,

00:13:53.920 Introducing Canada's minority dictatorship, Stephen Harper's opportunity to use prorogation. 0.50

00:13:58.780 So, again, lots of accusations.

00:14:00.660 We have Pam Palmiter, who is an Indigenous activist and a professor over at Ryerson University.

00:14:06.720 She tweeted this,

00:14:07.860 Women against Stephen Harper, time to remove the dictator and restore legitimate government. 0.83

00:14:12.940 Likewise, Michael Harris, who is a columnist over at the Hill Times,

00:14:15.720 who had a very severe, severe case of Harper derangement syndrome.

00:14:19.700 He hated Harper so much.

00:14:21.040 He wrote a book called Party of One, Stephen Harper and Canada's Radical Makeover.

00:14:25.920 Again, this accusation that Stephen Harper was autocratic, that he was a dictator.

00:14:29.960 We heard it time and time and time again.

00:14:32.260 Farley Mowat, a celebrated Canadian author and poet,

00:14:35.260 he wrote that Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elected to power in Canada.

00:14:42.060 That was an excerpt from a book.

00:14:43.780 So, again, and here's another piece from Michael Harris writing over in the Narwhal.

00:14:47.740 Well, Harper's dictatorship for democracy coming to an end.

00:14:51.060 That was one that the Liberal MP linked to before.

00:14:53.940 So, again, very common.

00:14:55.880 And it wasn't just Harper.

00:14:56.620 It wasn't just Harper.

00:14:57.360 I remember back in the years of Jean Chrétien,

00:15:00.480 Geoffrey Simpson, who is a former columnist for Globe and Mail, very blue chip thinker,

00:15:04.800 he had a book out that said exactly this.

00:15:06.940 He called Jean Chrétien the friendly dictator.

00:15:09.420 His book was called The Friendly Dictatorship.

00:15:11.260 And this is a synopsis of the book.

00:15:12.800 Is Canada a dictatorship, albeit a friendly dictatorship?

00:15:15.940 In this thoughtful book, Geoffrey Simpson argues that Liberal Party's re-election to a third majority government

00:15:20.100 must raise the question.

00:15:22.200 Is Canada in danger of becoming a de facto one-party state ruled by an all-powerful leader?

00:15:27.480 And again, he's alluding to this idea that we don't have the same separations of power.

00:15:31.700 And in times like the time that Jean Chrétien was elected,

00:15:34.220 when there wasn't really a strong opposition party because the right was fractured,

00:15:37.500 there wasn't really a government in waiting.

00:15:39.160 There wasn't a strong opposition and therefore you could take away that we lived in something

00:15:44.800 that resembled a dictatorship.

00:15:46.920 So despite all of the hand-wringing and all of the pearl clutching by the Liberals,

00:15:50.880 by the legacy media, there's actually a lot of discussion and thought around this idea

00:15:54.960 that the Prime Minister of Canada has too much power,

00:15:58.120 that we don't have the correct and the proper separations to protect ourselves

00:16:02.180 from a Prime Minister that goes rogue, a Prime Minister that wants to amass power,

00:16:06.320 that is power-hungry, that wants to punish people in his country.

00:16:09.980 And to Rachel Thomas's point, many people in Canada feel that we are at that place right now.

00:16:14.200 So here at True North, we also came up with a list of eight times

00:16:17.080 that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ruled Canada by decree.

00:16:20.520 So this idea that someone abuses power, that someone takes advantage of the fact

00:16:24.100 that we don't have the same separations of power,

00:16:26.680 Justin Trudeau has done this time and time again.

00:16:29.100 Here are some examples.

00:16:30.120 So here we go.

00:16:31.660 Back in 2019, it was real the Prime Minister and senior members of his staff and cabinet

00:16:36.280 worked to pressure the former Justice Minister, the former Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould,

00:16:41.800 to interfere in a criminal proceeding against SNC-Lavalin.

00:16:45.860 Of course, SNC-Lavalin is a big donor and a big supporter of Justin Trudeau.

00:16:50.720 And the Liberals, the ethics commissioner at the time, Mario Dion,

00:16:53.900 found that the Prime Minister had broken conflict of interest laws by attempting to interfere.

00:16:58.120 It doesn't exactly sound like a liberal democracy, does it?

00:17:02.340 Next, using an order in council to evade debate on the gun debate.

00:17:06.660 Likewise, Trudeau was able to bypass debate in the House of Commons

00:17:10.220 through an order in council that effectively made 1,500 types of guns illegal.

00:17:15.060 He just banned guns without going through the proper parliamentary procedures.

00:17:18.900 He likes to evade parliament, this guy, Justin Trudeau.

00:17:21.260 So he also prorogued parliament back in 2020.

00:17:24.300 There was an investigation in the committees dealing with the WE Charity scandal.

00:17:28.900 Remember that.

00:17:29.660 They were investigating the Prime Minister.

00:17:31.220 They were investigating the fact that members of his family received half a million dollars

00:17:34.660 for speaking engagements, whilst the Liberals also awarded a multi, multi-hundred million

00:17:40.340 dollar sole source contract from the federal government to the WE Charity.

00:17:44.680 They were investigating whether or not that was a conflict.

00:17:47.120 What did Trudeau do?

00:17:48.120 He prorogued parliament.

00:17:49.140 He ended it all.

00:17:49.840 He decided that he didn't want the scrutiny, and so he killed those committees, proroguing

00:17:54.580 parliament.

00:17:55.160 Again, remember when Stephen Harper did it, everyone screamed foul and called him a dictator.

00:17:59.120 When Trudeau did it, the media just sort of shrugged their shoulders.

00:18:02.660 Now we're getting into COVID-19.

00:18:04.660 So many of Trudeau's COVID measures were seen as draconian, authoritarian, and yes, something

00:18:10.600 that a dictator would introduce. 0.97

00:18:12.080 So he refused to offer a timeline for lifting federal mandates.

00:18:15.700 He spent a debate on government spending for two years during COVID.

00:18:18.580 He barred unvaccinated Canadians from boarding planes and trains domestically and international.

00:18:23.320 Canada is the only country in the world with such strict and drastic steps.

00:18:28.520 And he used public health orders to fire unvaccinated public sector workers employed by the federal

00:18:33.000 government or working in federally regulated industries, including the Canadian Armed Forces.

00:18:37.580 So I alluded to one of these, but I want to go into it in a little bit more detail, because

00:18:41.900 in March of 2020, Justin Trudeau tried and failed to introduce sweeping COVID measures

00:18:46.520 to give himself unlimited access to spending without parliamentary approval.

00:18:51.840 So Trudeau said at the time that the proposed sweeping new powers to let the government spend

00:18:56.300 money without parliamentary approval were needed because the coronavirus presented an exceptional

00:19:00.900 situation.

00:19:01.600 Those include broad new powers who authorize the cabinet to spend money until the end of

00:19:06.280 December, 2021.

00:19:07.420 Remember, this is in March, 2020, and the Trudeau government tried to slip through a bill that

00:19:12.120 would allow them to spend money without oversight until the end of 2021.

00:19:16.640 So we're talking about nearly 18 months.

00:19:18.660 And in some cases, without any limits at all, without having to put their proposals to a vote

00:19:22.560 in the House of Commons.

00:19:23.620 This is quoting from Global.

00:19:24.740 It says this, the proposals are highly unusual because the power to tax and spend are powers

00:19:29.380 that belong to the Parliament of Canada.

00:19:31.500 By removing the need for parliamentary approval, the proposed measures would eliminate the ability

00:19:35.660 of MPs in a minority government to vote for or against him.

00:19:39.640 So again, eliminating the entire idea of Parliament.

00:19:42.580 So all those liberals who were so outraged over the accusation that Trudeau, that you could

00:19:47.480 even suggest that this guy's a dictator in a democratically elected House, it was a democratically

00:19:52.280 elected House of Parliament that Trudeau was trying to bypass to just push through his

00:19:56.360 spending as much as he wanted.

00:19:59.400 Moving on, Justin Trudeau's hateful rhetoric.

00:20:01.880 He has an open intolerance towards unvaccinated Canadians.

00:20:05.320 We all know the quotes.

00:20:06.260 We all know.

00:20:06.920 We've all heard Justin Trudeau talking about the unvaccinated.

00:20:10.020 He called them extremists.

00:20:11.220 He said they don't believe in science.

00:20:12.440 They're often misogynistic. 0.98

00:20:13.720 They're racist. 0.61

00:20:14.680 And he then posed the question as to whether or not we should tolerate these kind of people,

00:20:20.220 whether or not we tolerate living in a society like that.

00:20:23.020 Who talks like that?

00:20:23.940 Who talks like that?

00:20:24.780 Does he sound like a dictator to you?

00:20:26.580 Well, you be the judge.

00:20:27.860 Don't take it from me.

00:20:28.740 This is what Bill Nahr, the American comedian, had to say about Justin Trudeau and the rhetoric

00:20:33.560 that he is using.

00:20:34.560 I started to read what he said.

00:20:37.120 This is a couple of weeks ago.

00:20:38.540 He was or maybe this is September.

00:20:40.220 But he was talking about people who are not vaccinated.

00:20:44.180 He said they don't believe in science. 0.78

00:20:46.040 They're often misogynistic, often racist.

00:20:48.380 No, they're not. 0.53

00:20:49.060 That was not smart of him at all.

00:20:50.840 Right.

00:20:51.220 He said, but they take up space.

00:20:54.240 And with that, we have to make a choice in terms of a leader as a country.

00:20:58.520 Do we tolerate these people?

00:21:00.260 It's like, tolerate these?

00:21:01.420 Now you do sound like Hitler.

00:21:03.560 And recently, he talked about them holding unacceptable views.

00:21:08.760 Wow.

00:21:09.740 I'm surprised to hear that Trudeau said those things.

00:21:13.380 You didn't see the black face?

00:21:14.420 I mean, he's, no, I'm kidding.

00:21:18.340 I'm not, I mean, I was not a good look for him.

00:21:22.480 But I mean, come on.

00:21:25.120 I mean, that's, I think, what gets under people's skin.

00:21:28.140 So yes, Justin Trudeau, in a democracy, you have to tolerate people.

00:21:32.160 You have to tolerate people that you disagree with.

00:21:34.320 And I'm glad that Bill Maher was there to point out the fact that, yeah, he does sound

00:21:38.200 a little bit like a dictator in that regard.

00:21:40.840 And now, finally, we get to the major issue that made so many Canadians come around to

00:21:44.840 this idea that Justin Trudeau is not a Western liberal democratic leader.

00:21:49.480 And that was, of course, invoking the Emergencies Act to clear peaceful protesters.

00:21:53.420 He did this on February 14th, 2022.

00:21:55.860 And of course, he famously did not get parliamentary approval to use police force to move peaceful

00:22:01.360 demonstrators until the police had already removed the protesters, at which point he got

00:22:06.080 his parliamentary approval.

00:22:07.560 And then he rescinded it a couple of days later.

00:22:10.160 So not only did he use excessive police powers that are usually reserved for wartime in order

00:22:14.300 to crush a peaceful protest, he also assumed new powers to freeze bank accounts, to have

00:22:19.340 the bank accounts of protesters as well as donors arbitrarily frozen, lock their bank

00:22:24.700 accounts, essentially just destroy their life to punish them for being on the opposite

00:22:29.260 political side.

00:22:30.960 And final example here is this NDP coalition.

00:22:34.580 So as you know, Justin Trudeau was just elected with the smallest minority government, the smallest

00:22:38.560 share of the vote in Canadian history.

00:22:40.740 And counter to the democratic will of the Canadian people, he essentially turned it into a majority

00:22:45.760 government by forming a coalition pact with the NDP, allowing himself to push through his

00:22:51.380 own legislation without the fear of going into another election.

00:22:54.840 So Justin Trudeau is using every single bit of power that he can, mustering it all together

00:23:00.260 to assert more and more power in a country that already has a relatively weak system of checks

00:23:06.040 and balances.

00:23:06.920 So is Justin Trudeau a dictator?

00:23:09.120 Let's get to our final verdict here on the show of this fact check, whether or not it

00:23:13.580 is a fair claim to say that Justin Trudeau is a dictator.

00:23:16.080 Well, of course, everything is relative.

00:23:18.040 So is Canada a repressive authoritarian dictatorship?

00:23:20.920 Not compared to, say, China or Iran, no.

00:23:24.280 But compared to Canada 100 years ago, compared to Canada 50 years ago, 25 years ago, maybe

00:23:29.180 even five years ago, well, yes, we are heading in that direction.

00:23:33.220 We're experiencing the decay of our democratic institutions and our systems.

00:23:37.200 We are experiencing increasingly authoritarian culture that punishes dissenting views and

00:23:42.500 excommunicates those who do not comply with increasingly draconian police orders.

00:23:48.540 Trudeau is overseeing a series of significant crises in our country, and his handling of

00:23:53.880 these crises is dividing us and making us weaker.

00:23:57.600 Canada is not invincible.

00:23:59.100 It's not impossible for us to slide further and further away from freedom, away from our

00:24:03.700 birthright, away from the things that our country was founded upon, and towards more undemocratic, 0.76

00:24:09.820 autocratic policies and towards a dictatorship.

00:24:12.920 So to Rachel Thomas's suggestion, which was really Brad Redekop's suggestion, that to many

00:24:17.820 Canadians, they feel that Justin Trudeau is a dictator.

00:24:21.620 Well, our fact checkers here at True North say that that claim is true.

00:24:26.040 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:24:33.700 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is the Candace Malcolm.

Juno News - April 05, 2022

Is Justin Trudeau a dictator？

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