Juno News - December 14, 2023Jordan Peterson offers to take over as Harvard president
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Summary
As we close out another week in irreverence, host Andrew Lawton is joined by Jordan Peterson and Professor Tom Flanagan to discuss a variety of topics, including Jordan Peterson's new book, "Grave Error" and Harvard University President, Claudine Gay, who has been accused of anti-Semitism.
Transcript
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welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
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north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here thursday december 14
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2023 as we close out another week in irreverence that is the goal to which we strive every now and
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then someone will come up and say i am insufficiently irreverent to claim the title
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of canada's most irreverent talk show but there are two answers to that number one irreverence
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is in the eye of the beholder. And number two, I have yet to encounter anyone else who has made
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a claim to be Canada's most irreverent talk show. So I am self-identifying like all those guys that
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want to use tampons in the men's washroom at the parliament buildings, which is apparently this
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great public service that we were in need of and didn't even know it. So I am self-identifying as
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irreverent unless someone wants to come along and challenge me for the title. We can have a
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a Hamiltonian-Burian duel on some battlefield if we need to sort things out there.
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Nevertheless, it is wonderful to have you aboard the show.
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We're going to be talking a little bit later on about online pornography,
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which will either tantalize you or turn you away in disgust.
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We are not going to be showing any of it, which will either disappoint you or delight you.
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So I'll let you decide for yourself on that one.
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Also going to be speaking later on with Professor Tom Flanagan about his new book, Grave Error,
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which is a phenomenally I would say controversial book and and subversive book on an issue that I
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know True North folks in True North Nation out there have been paying attention to but much of
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the mainstream media has not at least not in this way so that we'll chat about with Dr. Flanagan
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later on in the program but I want to begin by kind of exploding something that was meant as a
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bit of a joke but might actually have merit here Jordan Peterson who you may have heard of he's
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made a couple of headlines in the last couple of years he i interviewed i haven't had him on this
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show but i i had him on my former show for like a whole hour and we talked about anything and
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everything under the sun and i've met him a number of times he's always been a big supporter of true
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north and the work that we do here he's got some best-selling authors he has just announced that in
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february march and into april he's like touring basically every major and mid-level city in the
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united states jordan peterson is doing and if his previous tours are any indication these will all
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sell out but he is willing to give it all up jordan peterson is willing to give up the touring
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give up the aggressive media schedule maybe give up the podcast even to take one particular job
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that admittedly has not yet been offered to him but maybe we can start a bit of a campaign
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to draft jordan peterson that job is president of harvard university now harvard is the
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A school in the Ivy League that is synonymous with excellence to a lot of people, but has, as of late, become synonymous with anti-Semitism.
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And the thing that's interesting about this is that so far there's no vacancy.
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The president is not resigning, and that's Claudine Gay, that's her name, and so far the school is not prepared to get rid of her.
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Now, she's had a bit of a one-two punch of controversies as of late.
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First, there was her unwillingness to condemn in unequivocal terms that genocide and calls for genocide violate Harvard's anti-bullying policy.
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There was this rather awkward exchange between her and Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik you may have caught last week in the House of Representatives and one of its committees.
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the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?
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Targeted as an individual, targeted at an individual.
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It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals.
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Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?
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Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism?
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violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment?
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Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct
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anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct
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that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation,
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we do take action so the answer is yes that calling for the genocide of jews violates harvard
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code of conduct correct again it depends on the context it does not depend on the context
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the answer is yes and this is why you should resign these are unacceptable answers across the board
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i must say i don't love the showmanship of american congressional committees i think
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think it's oftentimes more powerful to let people sink themselves with their own words than to do
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this feigned outrage like congresswoman Stefanik was ask a question you don't need to cut her off
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and ask again because you know her answer is going to be more damning than your question is going to
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be in this case but what type of conduct is it that has become the norm at Harvard well here's
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us one example we plucked out for you. I forgot how short that clip was. I was looking at the
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other monitor. No word on if that violates Harvard's anti-bullying policy, but that was
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just the one of the one-two punch. A few days ago, some independent journalists, Christopher Rufo and
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And Chris Brunette found out that there are very serious plagiarism challenges that can
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be leveled against Claudine Gay's doctoral work, her dissertation, which eventually gave
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her a PhD, which eventually propelled her into her career in academia that led to her
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And they found that she has lifted a number of passages without attribution, which in
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a couple of cases, the authors of the plagiarized work have said, yeah, this pretty much looks
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But even so, she has not announced she's going to step down.
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Jordan Peterson had this rather cheeky post on X this morning.
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Excuse me, Harvard, if you're looking for a new candidate for president with a proven academic track record,
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a now international reputation, and the ability to stand up to the bloody narcissist of the woke mob,
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I know someone who might be interested just saying and then to punctuate it he put a colon
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and a clothing parentheses which I believe is a smiley face emoticon as the kids say it's not an
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emoji this is a very important distinction an emoticon is like the original the emoji
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is the colorized versions of it so there's your history and the development of online
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shorthands for your emotions which maybe I should do a dissertation in that I can be like Claudine
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Gay, and I can just copy and paste it from other folks. But Jordan Peterson's having a bit of a
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lark here. I don't think he's pursuing this, although he has tried to, in the past, launch
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things like the Peterson Academy. And for a time, there was a Jordan Peterson-inspired MBA program
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at, I believe, the University of Austin. It was a university in Texas. But nevertheless,
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what's interesting here is that Jordan Peterson is exposing in his little joke that Harvard is
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not interested in pushing back against the mob. And this is the serious point underlying Harvard's
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defense of anti-Semitism on its campus, is that they're saying, well, yes, we have academic freedom,
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we have free speech, this is all important. And I say, absolutely, yes, I support their right to be
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like that. But Harvard is very inconsistent about this, as are most universities. If you want to go
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on campus and say, I believe that a male can be a female, they're going to say, well, I don't know
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if you have academic freedom to say that, but if you want to get up there and talk about genocide
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in this context, they want to shroud themselves in freedom. And I think this is where it gets
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to be very important about applying these rules consistently. So whether or not he is actually
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auditioning for the job, I don't know, but I thought it was a nice cheeky way to raise attention
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to the fact that currently the status quo there is not working. I wanted to pivot back into Canadian
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politics for a few moments here. There was this bill that was advanced by the House of Commons
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and sent off to committee yesterday that has not gotten a huge amount of coverage. And part of the
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reason is that this is a Senate private members bill. Now, these are not often pieces of legislation
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that get passed. But in this particular case, we see enough support in the House of Commons to at
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least move it so far. It's already passed the Senate, which is why it's in the House. If you
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are trying to keep track at home of the numbers. It is a bill. Oh, now I forget the bill. It's a
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Senate bill S210, I want to say. But basically what this bill does is strive to restrict access
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to minors, to young people, to online pornography. Now, let me first and foremost say I wholeheartedly
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agree with what the bill is trying to accomplish. I think that online porn is tremendously harmful
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when you're talking about the implications on young people.
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And there have been studies after studies after studies
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I mean, in some cases as young as like six, seven years old,
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are accessing just absolutely horrendous and vicious things
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and conceptualization of what sex and sexual expression are.
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who have been engaged in sex for much of their lives
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So the idea of preventing children from accessing that,
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proof of age. Now, does that mean like when you want to go to a website, oh, I just have to say
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my birth date is, you know, January 1st, 1901 and click okay. And that's that. Or does it mean
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something that is more comprehensive? They want something more comprehensive, like for example,
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uploading your identification. Now, this to me is where you get into the very glaring issue here
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with this. Now the conservatives, the NDP, the Bloc Québécois, they were all supporting this.
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It was most liberals that said no, and then the conservatives kind of just started being
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very outraged about, oh, how dare the liberals vote against this?
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Now, why the liberals vote against it, I don't know.
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But suffice it to say, I do not believe their approach is from the same place that mine
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I agree that harm needs to be dealt with, but I don't believe that this is going to
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So why this is so very important is because right now we have two aims that are kind of
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working against each other. One is that we should not have excessive government regulation on the
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internet. The other is that we should actually try to protect children from the harm of pornography.
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Now, listen, I'm not making a judgment of people's personal tastes here. I think that
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people as adults can do what they want. This is where my inner libertarian comes out
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from a legal perspective. And if we want to pass all these moral judgments, that's something we
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get to do as individuals and as a society. Not that I'm encouraging being judgmental, but
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we can typify what is right and what is wrong on our own without government being the one to make
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that call. Now, why I think this is so important for us to understand here is that if the government
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is going to do this, force these companies, one of the biggest porn companies in the world is a
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Canadian company, MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and some related sites, one of the things that
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government will be doing is forcing them to do this age verification process. So on the surface,
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there are going to be people that say, well, hang on, I don't want to have to upload my driver's
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license to this, you know, porn company here and all the privacy implications that come along with
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that. Well, some folks in the computer science space say you can deal with this without having
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those privacy issues so i wanted to delve into that a little bit joining me on the line now is
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as far adib who is a doctoral candidate in electrical and computer engineering at concordia
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university uh it's good to have you as far thank you for joining me
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thank you so much andrew for the invitation it's great to be here so the obvious issue here is that
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people i think have a right to protect their privacy and if if you want to engage as an adult
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watching online pornography the idea of having to provide identification of having to prove who you
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are kind of erodes that fundamental relationship people think they have with the internet so
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how can this be done in a way that protects individual privacy if it can yeah that's a great
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question so right now what we usually do we use our id documents to verify our age for example
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here in Canada we have our driving license our passport or maybe our health card so the current
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way is if we need to prove that we are adults then we have to take a picture of the ID or we
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have to scan it and there are some third-party softwares which do the verification and then
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then they say this okay this guy is above 18 or maybe they are not so which is something that's
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being used all over the world now privacy concern is when we are sharing our it document we are
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sharing a lot of information about us so that's a big privacy concern so that's why we are proposing
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some alternatives which we call biometrics that means something from our body which tells our age
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for example uh some social media they have tested instagram uh i mean the egg checking on instagram
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using facial image so you just sit in front of a webcam you let them take a picture of yours
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and using artificial intelligence they can tell whether you're an adult or not so this is considered
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more privacy assuring because we don't need to share our id documents and consequently uh like
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i am doing my phd research at concorde in montreal we are working with hard signals which can tell
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our edge and also there are some other technologies so in summary id document is an option the other
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option is using biometrics which comes from our body and which is our page i i think this raises
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though another issue i i don't not to be too graphic here but someone who's about to access
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a pornography site i don't think the thing they want is for that website to be taking a picture
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of them in that moment yeah it is this is really a hard call so it's up to the user they have to
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decide do they want to share their id or they do do they want to allow to take their image in either
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way they have to tell something about themselves and that's why we know there are other opinions
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about this bill but as you rightly said andrew this bill is very important to protect our kids
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because in last 10 years child sexual abuse have increased over 800 percent here in canada
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and we still see this stories just two weeks ago we saw a story of a boy of 12 years committed
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suicide because he was a victim of sextortion we know about amanda 13 bc who took her life 10 years
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back and she was a victim of sextortion as well so we need to put it our case and that's why we
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have to make some compromise so we are working with different technological options and it's
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up to us whichever we take now i know there are options here i mean as it's worded now in this
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bill that's making its way through parliament government could force websites to do this now
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would the expectation be that each website has its own way of doing this or would there be a natural
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third party that would emerge that websites would use that kind of does this that people may
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trust like for example paypal is a an example where you know if you're a website instead of
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just taking the credit cards yourself you could just say well you know paypal you trust paypal
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you can use them and they'll pay us yeah exactly so ideally this is done by a third party there
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are different companies who offer this service we can have a look at what uk are doing uk has
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doing done a very good job in terms of online protection just recently they had their online
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safety bill so they have their own regulator who is looking after these things so similarly here
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in canada we need someone it can be crt someone else to take up that responsibility to make a
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common platform where this edge verification will take place and as you rightly said andrew
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whatever technology we bring people will be concerned about their data and we need to assure
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them that this data remain protected it is not being used for any other purpose that's why we
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need a centralized server which takes the data which ensures that this data is not used by anyone
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else except for edge verification and we can integrate some third-party software to do the job
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for us now so that obviously people the best systems out there are vulnerable i mean just
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today in my city for example the the library's website has been subject to a massive cyber
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attack and is inaccessible so one idea that you mentioned in an op-ed i read from you is that
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there's a system in which the data can never be saved at all like it could basically be assessed
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and deleted immediately but is that as as transparent as it sounds or does it live in
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some way in a way that theoretically some hacker could access yeah ijd the law requires you to just
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to check the age and maybe keep the data for a certain time it can be for one minute or two minutes
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and then the data has to be deleted that's what the law requires but as you again rightly said
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uh yes there are always duples in the technology and there are ways to bridge the data so we need
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to give our best try so i was again i can mention about the uk example or about the european example
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they have the gpdr there which is the privacy protection law which is pretty strong and
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whenever there is a breach the consequences are very harsh so we have to work in both ways in
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technically we have to make sure that yes we have this technology which can do the verification and
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delete the data in one or two minutes or in a very new time frame and on the legal side if there is
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any kind of breach we need to make sure that the companies are accountable it might be a hard call
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because not everything is hosted here in canada obviously we have the big social media companies
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a lot of websites who are not legally accountable here but still we have to put our best try to make
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them accountable so that's what we need to keep trying well it's certainly an interesting topic
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and i i think there are there are a lot of questions that people can have and should have
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about uh the regulatory side about privacy rights but understanding the technology i think is crucial
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to that so your uh insights have been very helpful on this as far adib from concordia university
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Thank you very much. And I hope you'll be able to testify before a committee when this gets
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further through. Yeah, I hope, son. Thank you so much for having me. Have a very good day.
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All right. Thank you very much, Asfar. And look, I mean, I think his points there that he's raised
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are useful. And I know that some of the words will trip the radars of the privacy minded when
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he talks about central server and biometrics and all of that. But I think that's important,
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because if you are supporting this legislation, I think you need to realize what it is that is
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involved in this process. And look, I'm so sympathetic to the problem. And I cannot stress
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that enough. I'm so sympathetic to wanting to keep children, vulnerable people away from materials
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that they are not supposed to be accessing. But again, I also am very aware of the fact that
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conservatives have spent the last few years railing against the CRTC expanding its regulatory control
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over the internet so to all of a sudden wake up and say well we want the CRTC to regulate online
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porn not just for Canadian content which we know is going to be coming so people are going to be
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doing unspeakable things to their poutine once C11 is implemented on these websites but not just
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regulating Canadian content but regulating access and making these websites collect information
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about users, not just minors, but information about people who are, you know, 30, 40, 50,
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that for whatever reason, they want to kick back and enjoy the latest. And the thing that I find
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so fascinating about this conversation is that we're assuming that kids who are seeking this
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out will not find ways around it. And this is, I think, where we go to any parent who's tried to
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set up some you know parental controls on their internet surely has a false sense of security
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about that kids are smart kids outsmart technology kids will find ways to work around it they'll go
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to websites that are unregulated they'll uh send stuff around in whatsapp groups i mean it'll be
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like the equivalent of i guess passing around that same magazine that you know your older brother
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picked up or something like that in school but they will find a way to do it now does that result
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in a net benefit if it's still harder to come across. Maybe, maybe it does. But I think the
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problem that we run into here is that we are looking to government to be the answer. Whereas
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on this issue and so many others, I want to look at parents and say parents should be very forthright
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in having conversations with their children. Parents should be very aware of what their
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children are doing. We should be focusing on the education here. And I don't trust right now the
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public schools to, uh, do this. I don't trust the public schools for reasons we've talked about in
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the last few months. Uh, one person in, in the chat says that biometrics is more invasive than
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ID. Yeah. I mean, that was the thing. Like originally when age verification came up,
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I'm thinking of like some poor guy that has to lay, or, or woman, you know, it's an equal
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opportunity that has to go and like scan their driver's license and, you know, upload it to
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Pornhub. And, uh, all of a sudden there's now some database of, Oh, uh, you know, John Smith
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of 123 Maple Street loves, well, use your imagination of what John Smith of 123 Maple
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Street loves, but that's the thing. And then, yeah, biometrics is even worse. So now John Smith
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just has to like stare at his webcam while he's waiting for the video to load. And this is exactly,
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I mean, if it's an awkward, uncomfortable topic, it should be. We're talking about people's very
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intimate desires and practices and habits here and government trying to regulate those and force
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companies that, let's be real, I do not trust. I do not trust your average purveyor of pornography
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online to be the diligent protectors of your privacy, because these are companies that have
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turned a blind eye to the sharing of non-consensual sexual images. These are companies that have
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turned a blind eye to child pornography on their platforms, companies that have no sense of the
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harm they are causing to society and childhood development. So no, I do not look at them and
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trust them to make these decisions. So we'll follow this as it proceeds. This is where the
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libertarian in me and the social conservative in me kind of have a fight about this. I'm hoping to
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get my friend Jonathan Van Maron, with whom I have had many fights about this subject and related
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ones on in the future, although he wasn't available today. We're going to be talking in a few moments
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time with Dr. Tom Flanagan. But before we get there, I learned recently, and by recently I mean
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like two and a half hours ago, it was like vaguely in my subconscious, so maybe I like saw it at one
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point before, that they're making a Law & Order Toronto. Like this is not a joke. They're making,
00:25:24.100
put up the poster there. It's going to be coming to City TV in 2024. There we go. Law & Order
00:25:29.360
Toronto criminal intent. And what kind of refreshed this was I saw this morning, a friend of mine in
00:25:36.440
Toronto had stumbled upon a set where they were filming Law and Order Toronto. And it was, you
00:25:40.860
know, we're filming here, everyone be quiet, yada, yada, yada. And I was just thinking of what that
00:25:45.040
would look like. And I realized just how it would be such a horrendously boring show, because someone
00:25:49.700
would get stabbed on the subway in the first scene. And then for the rest of the episode, people would
00:25:54.260
just be waiting for police to show up and they never do. And then at the end, it would just be
00:25:58.040
to be continued. And the episode is just, you know, will the police come or are they going to
00:26:02.060
be too busy doing other things? And then I was sort of thinking about Law and Order Toronto a
00:26:06.480
little bit more and what that would look like. And I realized that we could do this as the most
00:26:12.540
inexpensive production possible, because in Canada, you don't actually need to cast multiple
00:26:17.900
actors to be different criminals. You could run the whole series on just one criminal who commits
00:26:23.340
a crime and then is released on bail at the end of the episode. And then he commits another crime
00:26:27.340
at the beginning of the next episode and is released on bail.
00:26:29.680
So you can actually just get by with just having one single offender
00:26:33.100
and that would make it more like a documentary than a scripted drama.
00:26:37.440
So I don't know if that's what the producers are doing,
00:26:46.920
The show is just going to be about police going around
00:26:49.140
banging on people's doors because their tweet was a little bit racist.
00:26:52.480
So as soon as I heard that, I felt like, oh my goodness,
00:26:55.420
that's probably going to be the more accurate account of what's been happening here. So let
00:27:00.720
me know what you think Law & Order Toronto is going to... Oh no, I did the Toronto. You're
00:27:07.480
supposed to say Toronto. I never pronounced the second T. I apologize to the people of Toronto
00:27:12.980
for mispronouncing your name. Although lately, now they've changed Dundas. So Dundas, who is this
00:27:22.500
a very positive figure in history that you may be familiar with he's the the guy i mean there's
00:27:26.740
a town in ontario named dundas we have uh dundas young dundas square we have the dundas subway
00:27:32.180
station there the city of toronto did this massive inquiry over like the last three years
00:27:38.340
to effectively rename anything with dundas in it and they realized it was going to cost a
00:27:43.620
bajillion dollars and be so disruptive and all of that and now what they've done
00:27:48.740
is they've decided to okay we won't change everything we'll just change some of the main
00:27:55.500
things so what they what they're agreeing on now is that they're going to change young dundas square
00:27:59.880
and they're going to change any ttc station that has dundas in it which i think is like two or
00:28:05.020
three of them uh they're renaming uh young dundas square sankofa sankofa square now the hilarious
00:28:14.500
thing is, this is a word, I don't know the language of Ghana. I don't know if it's Ghanese
00:28:19.640
or Ghanaian. I apologize for not being an expert on African linguistics, but it's apparently a word
00:28:25.260
that originates in Ghana. And what the word means is the act of reflecting on and reclaiming
00:28:33.120
teachings from the past, which enable us to move forward together. So they're saying that this word
00:28:40.480
is about reclaiming teachings from the past while purging the name of this historic figure,
00:28:47.640
who, by the way, has not even done the things that he's been accused of, of just being some,
0.86
00:28:51.440
you know, racist, Haiti, Haiti, hate monger. But they're trying to like put a heritage spin on
00:28:56.520
this. And it's like, if you've ever been to Edmonton, Edmonton used to have municipal ward
00:28:59.740
councils that were numbered one, two, three, four, five, six, and all that, like in every other city.
00:29:05.000
and a couple of years back they changed all the municipal wards to indigenous words and you'd look
00:29:13.240
at them now and you have people that are being elected in wards that they cannot pronounce like
00:29:17.640
i you know i could run in dene because i can say dene but you've got others that are like
00:29:21.940
i i'll get canceled if i try to pronounce them but i look at them and it's like you know 17
00:29:26.480
letters and no vowels in it and i'm all for people you know being able to pronounce foreign
00:29:31.820
languages and learn foreign languages and all of that. But this is when we just take the
00:29:36.480
reconciliation narrative a little bit too far that it starts getting in the way of practicality. And
00:29:42.600
that's effectively where we have gone to with this. And I think it's why the discussion about
00:29:48.640
the residential schools narrative is such an important one, because this is an issue in which
00:29:54.860
the, it all started with to Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia, they come out
00:29:59.000
with a very damning allegation, the discovery of unmarked graves of hundreds of children on
00:30:06.840
the site of the former residential school. Now, you compound this with a media that loves the
00:30:11.900
spicy narrative, with a country that generally speaking does not know its own history all that
00:30:17.080
well, and you had this narrative that took hold that was pushed by the New York Times, by CBC,
00:30:21.840
by CTV, that there had been mass graves discovered, that hundreds and hundreds of children
00:30:49.620
that no one really knew like ground penetrating radar,
00:30:54.880
but in reality just detects abnormalities in the ground that could be remains of a human that could
00:31:00.480
be nothing of the sort there have been excavations that have been done at some of these schools
00:31:06.240
and they have not turned up anything resembling bodies where there was a site that did have
00:31:11.200
bodies it was an established graveyard that was used to bury both indigenous and non-indigenous
00:31:17.040
people so this is not to say that nothing bad has happened at residential schools is to say
00:31:22.160
that we need to have a level of historic context and understanding when we engage in a very hot
00:31:28.400
button issue but this became an incredibly potent one politically it's why the flag of canada the
00:31:35.200
national flag was at half mast on public buildings for i think it was well over six months and it
00:31:39.760
became literally a news story midway through the campaign when conservative leader erin o'toole in
00:31:46.240
in 2021 says, yes, we should fly the Canadian flag at full mass. And that, I mean, again,
00:31:52.640
the idea that someone wanting to be prime minister says, yes, we should fly the Canadian flag and not
00:31:56.880
keep it at half mass indefinitely. That doesn't sound like it's supposed to be newsworthy,
00:32:01.580
but it was because that was the context in 2020 and 2021 that Justin Trudeau had set up,
00:32:08.720
that Canada was a country we should be ashamed of, not proud of, that Canada's history was something
00:32:24.020
I don't know if I have the book in my stack back there.
00:32:28.460
have to just look at my back for some prolonged time
00:32:35.860
which was published by the Aristotle Foundation,
00:32:37.820
did a great job at bringing in a range of people,
00:32:52.620
that we need to celebrate and honor and respect.
00:32:57.180
And that to me is what we should be striving towards.
00:33:06.720
but he's also the co-editor alongside CP Champion
00:33:09.880
of a new book, which True North actually co-published
00:33:13.420
along with the Dorchester Review called Grave Error.
00:33:18.000
that does some of these very things that we're discussing.
00:33:27.180
And there's a forward in there by Conrad Black,
00:33:29.300
who, by the way, if you have not read Conrad's book,
00:33:33.480
The Canadian Manifesto, I would encourage you to do it.
00:33:39.880
But it was a book that gave just this condensed and really accurate and compelling account of Canadian history.
00:33:49.580
And it was published by my publisher, Sutherland House, and it came out a couple of years ago.
00:33:54.280
And it was definitely one that I would encourage you to take a look at.
00:33:57.640
So if you're looking for a last minute stalking stuffer for someone who hates Canada, you can give them both Grave Error and Canadian Manifesto and hopefully bring them back on board here.
00:34:06.300
But why I think this is an interesting story is because it's not just a story of a country that does not know or care about or like its history, but it's also about a media that has that same approach and that same attitude, but also a bit more of an arrogance in how it tells these stories.
00:34:24.260
And I mean, there were a lot of journalists that I think were very afraid because of the political sensibilities around this to ask any questions.
00:34:32.340
And, you know, there were some very awkward encounters between some journalists and some indigenous people that were involved in making these announcements.
00:34:40.760
And you'd see it. And journalists were very, very nervous and very apprehensive about getting involved because they didn't want to be seen as racist.
00:34:50.380
They didn't want to be seen as not respecting their truth because we live in an era now in
00:34:55.860
which truth is subjective. And I've grappled with the residential school issue because you can't
00:35:02.080
have a nuanced conversation about it. I will not defend the residential schools program. I think
00:35:07.000
it's a tremendous shame that we forced assimilation on people that did not want it. But that's also
00:35:13.940
a small subset of the complexities around this issue. One is that the attitudes of time periods
00:35:21.080
evolve and change. There are many things we do even, I mean, look, I'm convinced that in five
00:35:25.420
years we'll be in a country in which people will look at vaccine mandates differently than they did
00:35:29.480
in 2021. We, with history, evolve and grow and we realize, okay, maybe we were well-intentioned at
00:35:35.620
the time, but didn't do the thing that we should have. But the other part that people often forget
00:35:41.720
is how many indigenous families saw this as being a positive for their children. Yes, there were
0.99
00:35:47.660
children that were snatched away from their families, but there were also families that
00:35:51.020
very much wanted their children to have a British education, to be steeped in the religious values
00:35:56.980
of the day, the English language and all of that. And the other part that's often very confused is
00:36:02.900
that the residential schools of the 19th century were not the same as the residential schools of
00:36:08.060
the 1990s. These things evolved as schools did in general. So when people say, and these residential
00:36:13.560
schools were around until 1990, yes, they were. But we're not talking about the same dynamics that
00:36:19.020
were happening and the same trends that were happening in the 19th century, the very heinous
00:36:24.080
aspects of this that carried through up until just effectively 30 some odd years ago. And it was
00:36:30.600
interesting. I was reading back on a bit of more recent political history on this because you
00:36:34.800
recall in 2008, Stephen Harper gave his very infamous apology in the House of Commons to
00:36:41.940
victims and survivors of residential schools. And one of the things that came about through this
00:36:47.540
was that there was also a payout program. It was called the Common Experience Payout. And it was
00:36:53.600
a program that had been agreed to by the Liberal government previously, and the Conservatives
00:36:58.300
decided not to rock the boat on, which gave every single victim and survivor of the residential
0.91
00:37:06.360
schools a payout for having gone through that, irrespective of what their experience was. And it
00:37:12.980
was deemed simpler to do that than to adjudicate. Now, there were additions where if you had
00:37:18.320
been sexually abused, you'd get more money. And if you'd been physically abused, you'd get more.
00:37:22.620
But there was basically a baseline there where everyone was getting access to this. And
00:37:27.960
it was very contentious. And even among conservative members of parliament, there were
00:37:31.940
some that are saying, well, hang on, I don't want to accept this premise here that everything was
00:37:36.260
this one way. Anytime a conservative politician has spoken up about this, like that Senator Lynn
00:37:42.640
Bayak, for example, it has proven to be very controversial. She was kicked out of caucus
00:37:48.900
with that. So I think we might be having some technical issues with Tom Flanagan. So we'll
00:37:54.660
have to reschedule that. But it is a book that has been very well reviewed so far. And I think
00:37:59.420
you can still get it on Amazon in time for Christmas. It's called Grave Error. So hopefully
00:38:04.980
you'll be able to take a look at that, how the media misled us and the truth about residential
00:38:09.560
schools. Thankfully, I had like a ready-made rant on this subject anyway. So it wasn't hopefully
00:38:13.680
too, too bad to, to fill the time there, but that does it for me for today. We will be back
00:38:18.100
next week with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show as the countdown to Christmas continues
00:38:23.600
here on true north thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to
00:38:28.840
the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news