00:01:00.000welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:20.420north hello and welcome to you all no i wasn't like playing angry birds over there i was checking
00:01:32.880trudeau's flight i was trying to see if i could like find where he is right now because you may
00:01:37.680recall justin trudeau was like grounded in india because there was some mechanical issue on the
00:01:43.400plane and somehow despite being in like the country that has more tech support than anywhere
00:01:47.040else in the world, they couldn't fix it. So they had to delay their return to Canada for basically
00:01:53.860two days. They only left this morning. Now that is Tuesday morning, India time. They're flying,
00:02:00.200I believe, to my own city right now of London, Ontario, where the plane will touch down and
00:02:06.340Justin Trudeau will address the Liberal caucus tomorrow. Now, here's the thing that's interesting.
00:02:11.540And you can tell that Trudeau really, really, really doesn't like the Indian government right
00:02:15.660now. India offered a plane. This was a story my producer, Sean, found from India where the Indian
00:02:23.800government had said to Trudeau, we will give you a plane. Like that's how eager they were to get
00:02:28.900the government of Canada out of India. They're like, just give, give him Modi's plane, just like
00:02:33.460fly him out of there. Uh, you know, maybe you just open the door over the Atlantic and just,
00:02:38.120you know, shove them. I think, I think it's, yeah, you go east to west, right? They wouldn't go over
00:02:41.920the Pacific. Anyway, I've never flown to Delhi. I think they go Atlantic. But that is basically
00:02:47.280what's happening. The India government, I mean, yes, it's a, you know, they're a charitable,
00:02:50.920hospitable people, but I don't think they were being charitable and hospitable. I just think
00:02:54.460they didn't want Justin Trudeau and, you know, the Canadian delegation hold up in some New Delhi
00:02:59.200hotel for an extra couple of days. But all of that is to say, Justin Trudeau will be returning
00:03:04.820to Canada any minute now, and he will be addressing the Liberal Caucus retreat, which is in my city.
00:03:11.620Now, here's the thing. I have applied for accreditation to cover the Liberal Caucus retreat.
00:03:17.140Now, whether or not I really want to spend days in my hometown hobnobbing with Liberal members of Parliament is a different discussion entirely.
00:03:24.820But I do think it would be good to have the opportunity to chat with a bunch of the ministers in particular who are part of the Liberal Caucus,
00:03:31.780especially after covering the Conservative Convention in Quebec City.
00:03:35.920I have asked the Liberal Party for accreditation, and they said, no, no, no, you've got to talk to the PMO.
00:03:40.920So I said, okay. I've emailed the PMO probably about four times. I've emailed Justin Trudeau's
00:03:46.260senior press secretary. I don't think she was stranded on the tarmac in India. I think she is
00:03:51.020in Canada and no one has responded. So actually right after I get off air today, I'm just going
00:03:58.300to go down there. I heard from another journalist that had gone to the caucus retreat today, which
00:04:03.140is when it officially starts. They said you can get accreditation on site. Now I may change my
00:04:08.300shirt. I realize I look like a Liberal campaign aide in this shirt. It's like a shiny blue
00:04:14.040golf shirt. So I don't want it to look like I'm trying too hard to fit in. So I'll put on
00:04:18.640something else. Maybe I'll wear orange. The NDP have to be pretty popular to the Liberals right
00:04:23.220now. But I'll head on down there and see if we can get accredited on site. And this is, I think,
00:04:28.240particularly interesting because the Liberals were very indignant when the Conservatives,
00:04:33.140wrongly, I would say, denied accreditation to several people to cover the conservative
00:04:38.520convention. Tasha Carradine, a columnist with the National Post, was denied. Nora Loretto,
00:04:44.000Loretto, I don't know her name, Laura, Laura Stalin, I don't know. She likes the communist
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00:04:50.140Nora, but nevertheless, she was there with a media outlet that did not get accreditation
00:04:55.360from the conservatives, and I thought that was short-sighted on the part of the conservatives.
00:04:59.320But the Liberals were very indignant. You may recall Pablo Rodriguez and Stephen Gilbeau sniping from outside the convention about how they didn't like that they were not allowed in.
00:05:09.940And this is where we have to look very, very carefully at whether there are just different rules in the Liberals' eyes for themselves than there are for others.
00:05:18.520And I think they pretty much are looking that way.
00:05:21.380But to go back to India for a moment, Justin Trudeau's being stranded in India is really just the feather in the cap on an already embarrassing, blundery trip.
00:05:32.800Now, you may have seen some of the headlines here.
00:05:36.700I don't like the analysis of handshakes, but he like pulled away, apparently, from Modi when they were doing the big greeting arriving for the G20 summit and made for a little awkward encounter.
00:05:47.240Do you remember when all the media was like going over and over and over about analyzing Justin Trudeau's handshake with Donald Trump and like, oh, he did, you know, he grabbed the shoulder and he stood firm and he held his own.
00:05:58.360And now it's with Modi. He's pulled away from the handshake.
00:06:01.280Well, Modi apparently didn't like this too much, nor did he like the positions that Justin Trudeau took in support or at least in sympathy to Kalistan separatists, which are a very real issue in India, as is in general some of the extremism you see from that.
00:06:18.300And more importantly, you also have memories of Justin Trudeau's last official visit to India when he decided that instead of representing Canada as the head of government abroad, he would instead audition for some low-rent Bollywood film, complete with supplying his own costumes.
00:06:37.240You can take a look at some of the highlights.
00:08:12.980This is bitterly because we want to be able to make a nature of everything else and ourselves.
00:08:40.420Now, I can't say I agree with everything he said there,
00:09:08.240mainly because I don't know anything he said,
00:09:10.220But I can tell you that even as the video went on for another 30 to 40 seconds, nowhere in the video did I see Justin Trudeau anywhere, not even like in the background, not even like clearing the tables after the important folks had a meeting, nowhere.
00:09:25.880And he actually greeted, Modi did, the Prime Minister of India, every single G20 leader present at this summit in that video, except for two.
00:09:36.540One was Justin Trudeau and one was Emmanuel Macron.
00:09:39.640Now, he was hugging a guy that I couldn't identify later that maybe was Macron.
00:10:07.080it. He put that one in there, but not Justin Trudeau. Now, is it just because he didn't like
00:10:11.960the caliber of the footage that Trudeau gave him when he like pulled away from the handshake? Or is
00:10:16.500it because India wants to say to the world in a very subtle diplomatic way that it does not see
00:10:23.220a relationship with Justin Trudeau as being either healthy or even present in the first place? And
00:10:29.380of course, the comments that Justin Trudeau have made have not escaped the Indian media who,
00:10:34.420I mean, Candace Malcolm, I recall the last time Trudeau was in India, was fielding requests like 24-7 from Indian media outlets that just wanted Canadians on to, you know, just make fun of Trudeau.
00:10:45.040In this particular case, let me show you one clip that we saw from one presenter in India.
00:10:53.600Obviously, Canada will always defend freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of peaceful protest.
00:11:01.200That's something that's extremely important to us.
00:11:03.380at the same time as we're always there to prevent violence, to push back against hatred.
00:11:10.300I think on the issue of the community, it's important to remember that the actions of the few
00:11:16.420do not represent the entire community or Canada.
00:11:20.120Okay, so I'm going to now shed the diplomaties because when something manifestly insane takes place
00:11:27.360in your face, there's no reason to be polite about it.
00:11:30.520Justin Trudeau has just shown you the finger when it comes to Khalistan.
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00:11:35.460This man has just come after imposing an emergency in his country
00:11:40.100to crack down on the freedom of expression and the right to peaceful protest
00:11:44.280and has just talked about the freedom of expression and the rule of law and the right to protest.
00:11:50.620Now the truth is Mr. Trudeau, like any good Punjabi, I have family in Canada
00:11:56.840And I promise you, the nonsense that you're talking is emanating from sheer hubris.
00:12:06.020A total disconnected view of the world where you think that we don't see what you're up to.
00:12:13.680We don't understand what you're up to.
00:12:15.740And you can continue behaving in a totally nonsensical fashion, talking nonsense.
00:12:21.840nonsense i will say that like purely from a design perspective i get dizzy watching like the style
00:12:30.240of the graphics there it's like everything and anything possible is on that screen but
00:12:34.080if you listen to the words giving the middle finger manifestly insane uh hypocrisy these are
00:12:41.080hubris these are the things that are being observed by at least one indian commentator that is on
00:12:46.400News X, but we know from history, this is not an unfamiliar position to a lot of the Indian media
00:12:52.540and by extension, the people of India. So what exactly is going on here? Why has this relationship,
00:12:58.700which when Harper was prime minister, was quite a strong one between Canada and India,
00:13:03.200soured and cooled so much? I want to bring into the show here, Professor Vivek Dehejia,
00:13:08.500who is a professor with Carleton University and joins me now. Professor, good to talk to you.
00:13:13.820thanks for coming on today. Hi, Andrew. Great to be on the show. So let's just first off talk
00:13:20.440about whether this is something that we can squarely lay at Trudeau, because it seems like
00:13:25.100there has been a night and day difference between the Canada-India relationship when Harper was there
00:13:30.020versus when Trudeau was there. But has there been some context that's not related to this
00:13:35.100change in power that I'm missing? Well, I think that is the crucial difference.
00:13:40.440You know, Canada-India relations really reached a high point when Stephen Harper and Mr. Modi were, you know, both in power in their respective countries.
00:13:50.360That was only about a year or so, I guess, of overlap.
00:13:54.120But for various reasons, you know, and I've written about this, Harper and Modi had a real rapport.
00:14:03.480You know, they're both sort of grassroots conservatives.
00:14:06.420They both had to sort of fight their way through the establishment to get to where they were.
00:14:11.600And Harper also courted Modi assiduously.
00:14:14.900Even when he was chief minister of Gujarat, he set up a trade office there.
00:14:19.840So he did everything to signal to India and to Modi that Canada took India seriously and wanted to partner with India in an important way.
00:14:28.700And we've gotten entirely the opposite signals from the current prime minister.
00:14:32.740You know, he's always playing to the domestic diaspora.
00:14:38.320Let's face it, Sikh Canadians have been loyal, liberal voters, and they are concentrated in key writings in greater Toronto and Vancouver.
00:14:47.000So even though their total numbers may not seem large, they are consequential.
00:14:51.920And I think it's just honestly, shamelessly playing to the diaspora votes back home, back here in Canada.
00:14:58.480I know it's a very complicated issue to distill down into a generalization here, but when Trudeau is talking about, you know, what that presenter I played the clip from is sort of denouncing as his comments on Calistan, is that something that would be applicable to all Sikhs or is there a division in Canada on where they stand on that issue?
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00:15:19.960Oh, no, certainly there is. You know, no one would suggest, and I'm not suggesting that all Sikh Canadians, you know, support Khalistan. We don't really have any accurate data on this. Obviously, no one is going to fess up that, hey, I support, you know, India being broken up and having a separate state for Sikhs.
00:15:38.960Sikhs. But we do know that there is at least a significant minority, a vocal minority of Sikh
00:15:45.720extremists who are strong supporters of Khalistan. They took out a float, a big parade a few months
00:15:50.820ago, which portrayed the killing of Mrs. Gandhi, the prime minister in 1984. She was assassinated
00:15:57.200by two of her Sikh bodyguards. And that float appeared to, you know, I did not see that float,
00:16:03.860but from all reports appeared to glorify that. It said revenge. There was a sign saying revenge
00:16:08.760behind it. And that, you know, India did not take kindly to that. So, you know, the summit really
00:16:17.960kind of summarized everything that's gone wrong, that Trudeau has prioritized domestic diaspora
00:16:24.600politics. And he's not taking the big picture view, Andrew, I mean, India, look at the fact
00:16:30.200that in the US, whatever, you know, Trump and Biden are different in 99% of the ways that,
00:16:36.680you know they could be different but in one important way uh the turn towards india biden
00:16:42.520has kept to the trump playbook uh biden uh although you know he's very much progressive
00:16:48.520on the left and so on different from trump different from modi uh had a big state visit
00:16:54.040for modi this past summer uh he spoke to congress for the second time sort of really you know gave
00:17:00.840him the red carpet treatment um and you know in return trudeau uh skipping the leaders dinner was
00:17:08.200was in very poor taste uh you know that honestly his presence there was so minuscule was so minor
00:17:16.440that he ought to have just zoomed in you know but had a zoom call would have saved us all some some
00:17:22.120some money as taxpayers and saved himself the grief of being stuck there on the ground you know
00:17:26.360for two nights on the ground when he talks about you know the right to freedom of protest and again
00:17:32.280that news x clip i found was quite interesting in bringing up the freedom convoy and just the
00:17:36.920you know the way that you know indian people would look at justin trudeau's uh treatment of canadian
00:17:41.880protesters in that and i i don't want to draw a false equivalence but but when he makes those
00:17:46.280comments it is very much like he's meddling in india's domestic politics is it not well that's
00:17:53.880how it was seen andrew in india the external affairs ministry was very stern saying look you
00:17:58.920know we don't comment on your internal politics in canada please don't meddle uh with what what
00:18:05.320they're doing and you know there is a certain irony so you know for the context uh there were
00:18:13.000uh protesters uh jamming up the highways leading to delhi for almost a year you know for months on
00:18:19.080and protesting farm reforms, which were, you know, would have been good for the economy.
00:18:25.640And the government in India did not crack down on them. And in fact, they finally caved into some
00:18:31.800of the farmers' demands. Now, these were mostly Sikh Punjabis. And so when, you know, India gets
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00:18:40.720this talking to from Trudeau, and then two years later, Trudeau cracks down hard using
00:18:47.900draconian emergency powers, never used, you know, except by his father, except in wartime,
00:18:53.000on peaceful protests after, what, two weeks or so, you know, in the nation's capital.
00:18:59.500That contrast was very striking, and people didn't fail to see that difference, that he
00:19:05.080was kind of preaching, you've got to reach out to the protesters, talk to them, something
00:19:11.600So that was very dissonant and very jarring for lots of people.
00:19:15.780I never want to, you know, let one person speak for an entire country. I mean, whenever Canadian
00:19:21.900conservatives have seen, you know, people in the Indian press comment on Trudeau, they all love the
00:19:27.060clips. And I mean, I don't know if that's an accurate representation of where Indian discourse
00:19:31.620is. You know, for example, like someone in India could take a clip of my show and say, look at what
00:19:35.840Canadians are saying. But, you know, as much as I would love to speak for the country, I don't. But
00:19:39.900I'm curious in this case, how much those comments that we hear are speaking for a pretty broad
00:19:45.980sentiment? Well, I think they are. And what's really sad here also, Andrew, is that Trudeau
00:19:53.000actually had a very popular image in India when he came to power. You know, he was young, he was
00:19:57.640charismatic. He seemed to really resonate with young people all over the world. He was in the
00:20:03.040news you know he was sort of uh the new exciting kid on the block and so people were willing to
00:20:08.940uh to embrace him you know as an interesting new canadian leader young and maybe bringing a fresh
00:20:14.720approach but all of that really evaporated in 2018 with that disastrous visit i saw the the
00:20:19.920package that you you started with which was really more like like a bollywood trunk show
00:20:24.360than it was a state visit uh nothing was accomplished um and there was gaffe after gaffe
00:20:31.220The last one that really put it off the rails was when a convicted Kalasani terrorist was invited to the official High Commissioner dinner, the private reception that Trudeau hosted and was photographed with Sophie and so on.
00:20:46.360It was all very, very embarrassing for Canada, and the Indians, you know, did not take kindly to that, that someone like that got on the official guest list for the prime minister's private reception to close that week there.
00:21:02.100It was really, really very embarrassing, and people did not, you know, fail to see that.
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00:21:09.640Yeah. And I would also add, I mean, it's impossible to live up to the level of incompetence and blundering on that particular trip. I mean, this one has been a cakewalk compared to that, although, you know, throwing in airplane malfunctions was, you know, a nice little feather in the cap here.
00:21:25.220But the one interesting aspect of this, and you mentioned the diaspora earlier, Canada and India are linked more than a lot of other countries in terms of population.
00:21:35.280And, you know, for example, like I've talked to so many people that literally just live their lives between the two countries because they've got families there, people that are going to weddings back and forth.
00:21:45.100If you've ever gotten on a plane at Pearson next to the flight that's going from Toronto to Delhi, you'll notice just how many people there are there that are very linked between these two countries.
00:21:54.420And, you know, the one thing I've gotten the sense of is that a lot of Indian Canadians keep very close ties to India because they have family there.
00:22:03.340Maybe they still have work commitments there. So these two countries should be getting along.
00:22:08.740And I'm wondering what it would take to salvage that, because at this point, if there's not even a basic respect for the Canadian prime minister in India,
00:22:17.320which it sounds like is the case, is this relationship literally on ice until there's a new government in Canada or a new government in India?
00:22:24.420I'm afraid so. In fact, I don't think that really there's any way at this point, you know, we've gone from a deep freeze to the Arctic tundra here, you know, in terms of where we're at. And really, you know, as you put it correctly, you know, if Modi loses next year or Trudeau loses, you know, whenever, and there's a new prime minister at either end, you know, there could be sort of a chance to jumpstart Canada to India.
00:22:51.160but really, it's completely stuck now. And again, it's really, really disappointing that
00:22:58.180Trudeau's own foreign policy manifesto, this Indo-Pacific strategy, called for reaching out
00:23:05.080to India. Now, you mentioned the diaspora, and I wanted to say one word about that, if I may,
00:23:08.720Andrew. Please. You know, both the US and Canada have large Indian diasporas,
00:23:14.380but there is a difference. This is something that people don't often always acknowledge.
00:23:19.520There are major fissures, you know, major cleavages in the diaspora here in Canada, because there is a large percentage who are Sikh Canadians, as I say, you know, a small minority, but a small but vocal minority still harbor hopes of Khalistan, this independent homeland for the Sikhs that led to a spate of terrorism in India in the 80s, the killing of the prime minister.
00:23:49.520And so unfortunately, that group of people is intrinsically going to be very, very negative towards India.
00:24:00.260And I think that colors the diaspora relationship.
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00:24:04.700I mean, they go back and forth, but I don't think that all of them, I'm not talking about all of them,
00:24:09.000but some of them don't like the Indian government for what they perceive as the crackdown on Sikhs in Punjab as they see it.
00:24:18.500Whereas the American diaspora, Indo-Americans, for the most part, are really gung ho about what's going on back where, you know, back, back where they came from.
00:24:28.760And so, for example, Biden or Trump or whoever doesn't have to play this game of, you know, I've got to say one thing to the Sikh diaspora back in Canada, say something else to Modi.
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00:31:43.900And, you know, the scandals have piled up.
00:31:48.340So just all the things that were there in 2019 are there again here in 2023, just times 10.
00:31:55.420And, of course, one of the big changes between 2019 and 2023 has been COVID.
00:31:59.220And if you look at a subset of that, the Freedom Convoy, which for Conservatives, I think, was a really big eye-opener.
00:32:06.120And I've seen shades of that at the convention.
00:32:08.240I mean, Anna Polyev in her remarks talked about truckers, which I think got a pretty big standing ovation.
00:32:14.080We've had Pierre Polyev talk about that.
00:32:16.500We've had also a resolution to amend the Constitution that was talking about freedom of association.
00:32:21.840And I'm wondering what you take of the fact that that seems to have really embedded itself in the Conservative consciousness, that moment in Canada.
00:32:28.520Yeah. Well, you know, Pierre spoke to this a little bit, too, where he talked about how past governments, whether they were liberal or conservative, would still stand up for fundamental freedoms.
00:32:38.940I mean, we might disagree on what government policy should do or how it should be implemented, but that those basic human rights that we as Canadians enjoy, they're under attack in a way that they never have been before.
00:32:50.720And, you know, what we saw when people came to Ottawa to stand up for their freedom,
00:32:53.940to protect their freedom of choice, there were people from all walks of life,
00:32:58.240from not just truckers, but there were a lot of small business owners.
00:33:02.020There were a lot of people who had been fired or lost their job
00:33:04.280because of a health care decision that they wanted to make for themselves.
00:33:08.280So, you know, there's a lot of areas we can look at to say that Justin True is eroding our freedom.
00:33:14.220We've got the Internet censorship bill, all kinds of things that he's doing to divide Canadians.
00:33:19.340But that was maybe a moment where it kind of hit a catalyst moment or had a breaking point
00:33:24.940and people decided to stand up and do something about it.
00:33:29.620So now we're looking at, okay, how will a conservative government stand up for those freedoms?
00:33:34.960So when I hear beer talk about things like repealing C-18, C-11,
00:33:40.060making sure that there's freedom of speech on campus,
00:33:42.640there's a lot of things that we could do on a go-forward basis
00:33:45.660to make sure that our fundamental liberties are protected.
00:33:48.680I know one of the things that you had proposed that I quite enjoyed in 2019 that I think conservatives should definitely make a point of is a law constraining governments to balance the budget.
00:33:59.660Now, you look at the books now. I mean, something like that, you would need to have such a long runway to implement that because of how bad things are.
00:34:06.160Is there a bit of concern on your part that if the Conservatives do win, and let's say there's a majority government or there's a four-year mandate, that it'll be so challenging to disentangle all that Trudeau has done over, by that time, eight or ten years in a four-year term, and that it'll be hard to meet those expectations that Canadians who are hurting may have?
00:34:25.480Well, it's a great question because every month that goes by that Trudeau doesn't bring in a plan to constrain that government spending to eliminate those deficits over time is another month where real pain hits Canadians and has long-lasting consequences.
00:34:42.180So there really is a sense of we're running out of time to fix this before it gets really bad.
00:34:48.200You know, when Trudeau was promising that interest rates would stay low for a long time, that debt was consequence free, you know, we were calling him out on that saying, no, eventually the chickens come home to roost.
00:34:59.920And now we're seeing that we're seeing that the terrible consequences of runaway inflation.
00:35:05.180You know, a lot of this was when we were being told it was transitory, by the way, it's just going to be, you know, shit passing in the night.
00:35:11.180And it's so frustrating to see these economists that work at banks or Bank of Canada officials themselves who are telling those false promises back then.
00:35:20.720And they'll say, well, it's all kinds of factors.
00:37:29.720So what is it that you would offer to Canadians that you would cut, that would save money, that wouldn't go after those things that they're kind of fear-mongered into thinking will go away, like the Liberals' prime of senior scare, for example?
00:37:42.780Yeah. Well, you know, when you look at Pierre's speech, he talked about exactly this.
00:37:47.060You know, we went through, there's something in Ottawa called the public accounts and the main estimates, and they happen in the parliamentary cycle, and the departments have to disclose all their spending.
00:37:56.260And when you go through there in a fine-tooth comb, you realize this Liberal government has exploded the amount of money that is spent on consultants.
00:38:05.700We have highly trained public service that have become experts in their areas of their portfolios.
00:38:12.140And the government goes along and hires companies like McKinsey to give them advice.
00:38:16.040Well, we believe that elected officials take advice from Canadians, and the highly trained professional public service should implement that.
00:38:22.840We don't need hundreds of millions of dollars on consultants.
00:40:56.320Because I know Pierre-Paul Yev has talked about saving a little bit for French language programming, for example.
00:41:01.000Yeah, French language programming, some issues in northern locations where, you know, there's just a completely different set of circumstances.
00:41:07.280When you look at CBC News in and of itself, it's a lot of money.
00:41:11.100Big, expensive real estate in major downtown centers.