Juno News - October 02, 2023Justin Trudeau is coming for your podcasts
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Summary
The CRTC, the regulator of telecommunications in Canada, decided to drop its little bombshell of regulatory expansion on the Friday before what is, to the government, a long weekend. The CRTC wants online streaming services to register with the government.
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 happy monday it is according to the government of canada the day on which
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the national day for truth and reconciliation is observed now i don't get the day off for this is
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not a statutory holiday i realized that a lot of government bureaucrats are which is why it was all
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the more noteworthy that the CRTC, the regulator of telecommunications in Canada, decided to drop
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its little bombshell of regulatory expansion on the Friday before what is to the government a
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long weekend. Welcome to The Andrew Lawton Show, Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True
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North. The CRTC, which is the one that makes sure you get more Justin Bieber and Celine Dion in your
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diets, the one that thinks you need more Little Mosque on the Prairie and less of whatever you
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want to be watching, has decided to take its stab at regulating online discourse. We knew this was
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coming. This is a great series of powers that were bestowed upon the CRTC by the Liberal government
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under Bill C-11. It nominally takes all of the Canadian content requirements that exist for
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radio and TV and dumps them onto the internet. So we get more Indigenous content on Netflix,
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more French content on Netflix, more French Indigenous content on Netflix, more of that
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CBC show where a gender non-binary tomato was explaining pronouns or colonialism. I think I'm
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mixing up two shows. There was one of those CBC shows where we were like lectured about colonialism
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by a tomato. I think the non-binary one might have been something. Maybe it was like a non-binary
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host that was helping the tomato lecture us but this is like i shouldn't even have to know this
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i only know this exists because cbc has decided this is important so this is what we need to see
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more of once the government takes hold of your algorithm i've often joked on this that i don't
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believe for a second that justin trudeau would pass a law that would give you more true north
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content but we are as canadian as it comes we are rock ribbed true blue canadian content we bleed
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red and white i don't think that true north is ending up on the winning side of bill c11 you
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never know we will judge it when we get there but let me let you in on a little secret we don't want
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to be we want to be able to compete for views the same way anyone else does in a free market
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environment which the world of internet content was supposed to be so i'm telling you now the era
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of the open internet has come to an end we are seeing at the very least the beginning of the
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end of it with this announcement it starts with the crtc uh saying it is helping modernize that's
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the term they use modernizing the broadcast system i don't know if we have a screen grab of the
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website here but crtc has set its threshold for online streaming services and they have a little
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checklist registration for online streaming services they say the criteria are the three
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following things. If you operate in Canada, if you offer broadcasting content, by which they mean
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any content, and if you earn 10 million dollars or more in annual broadcasting revenue. So those
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three things must mean you have to, in the CRTC's view, register with the government. Now what are
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you registering for? Oh well, it's just so that you can provide information about your activities
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in Canada. If you say it with a menacing German accent, it sounds a little bit different, but
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you will provide information about your activities in Canada. That is what the CRTC wants. They want
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to see all of these organizations' documents. They want them to register, their address, and
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eventually this is going to be the pool from which they draw their inspiration for how to slap down
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regulations for non-compliance. Operating in Canada just means you are visible and accessible
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to Canadians. So YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, these are not Canadian companies, but they operate in
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Canada. Operating broadcasting content, offering broadcasting content, I should say, that simply
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means is content available? And you earn $10 million or more in annual broadcasting revenue.
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So this is the big players. Now, let me say firsthand, I wish to the high heavens for
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monetary reasons that True North and the Andrew Lawton Show were going to be caught up on this.
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But I also am less convinced that this is as exculpatory as the government wants us to believe.
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$10 million is really the budget of a relatively small media organization
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by the standards of what these multinationals can rake in.
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The Daily Wire, which I'll hold up as a useful example in a couple of moments for a number of reasons,
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I believe I last saw brings in about $100 million a year.
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Now, it's a streaming service that is predominantly American in nature.
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Well, it has an audience of people around the world.
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Now, I tried to get Ben Shapiro to weigh in on this.
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I'm curious how Daily Wire is going to deal with this
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because it is an organization that checks all the boxes off.
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It offers broadcast content, and it earns $10 million or more in annual broadcasting revenues.
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Now, maybe there's a technicality there about how their money comes in,
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but Daily Wire Plus, which is a streaming service that I know is very popular,
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even among a lot of True North audience members,
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Daily Wire Plus would have to, under this, register with the Canadian government.
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They would have to register with the Canadian government because,
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I was looking at Michael Geis' commentary on this.
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He's one of the preeminent internet lawyers in Canada, a very vocal critic of Bill C-11.
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Michael Geist just pointed out that the CRTC has not excluded from its definition
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individual content creators on self-hosted websites.
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So we think of streaming services as being places that basically offer a catalog of other people's content.
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Like on Spotify, I can go if I'm so inclined and listen to the latest Celine Dion tracks.
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and then round it all off with the Andrew Lawton show.
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You can even take a break as I stop through the segments
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You can even do it perhaps in both official languages
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when the government is forcing these companies to manipulate their algorithms.
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When I mentioned that catalog, YouTube is a vehicle by which you can access content from
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around the world. On Netflix, you can watch a Canadian show, a Spanish show, a Norwegian show,
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a Danish show. You get that choice. But what if you are self-hosting content?
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Rebel News, for example, has a paywall. Much of its content is self-hosted. That,
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based on my reading of Bill C-11, makes it a streaming service. Daily Wire Plus is a streaming
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service. True North, we at this point post most of our content on Facebook and YouTube. Well,
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Facebook to a lesser degree now, but this maybe will immunize us from it. But we know two things.
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The government has not excluded self-hosting publishers. The government has not excluded
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individuals despite their claims to the contrary. And the government has not excluded online
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news services. So we have a massive expansion here. This $10 million threshold may be the
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threshold the government uses right now for deciding which news outlets it wants or which
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media providers or streaming services it wants to register now. But we're talking from this point on
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about a matter of degrees. They could very easily lower that threshold. What if they get everyone to
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register, and they only apply really restrictive measures or expectations on ones over 10 million.
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So let me go back to the Daily Wire. Daily Wire is a company that could probably survive and
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thrive without needing to worry about the Canadian market. Daily Wire, and I am completely speculating
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here, I have no inside knowledge of what decisions they'll make, if any, is probably, as an American
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focused entity, relatively unconcerned with foreign regulations. It would be easier for them
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to just not operating Canada than it would be to bend over backwards to put some Indigenous
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non-binary show on there. Although boy, would I love to see Ben Shapiro try that one. To put some
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Indigenous non-binary show on just to comply with this weird Canadian content regulation. Maybe
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they're fine. Maybe Jordan Peterson's show, which is on Daily Wire, constitutes enough Canadian
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content and we can all just head for the hills and not need to worry about this. But what's
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happening here is the government is, despite its claim that this is all just about bolstering
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Canadian content, making values judgments. The upside of this, the upshot, I should say,
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definitely not upside, the upshot of this is that if they deem an outlet, even a foreign outlet,
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to be in non-compliance, there will have to be some sanctioning that takes place or some blocking
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where all of a sudden a Canadian cannot access certain types of content
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that the government has deemed to be unapproved.
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So we are going to see unequivocally, unequivocally,
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we are going to see if this bill follows to its logical conclusion
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And whoever came up with the modernizing catchphrase in the CRTC
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is attempting to put more lipstick on a giant pig-shaped turd than I have ever seen anyone
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try to do. This is not modernizing. When was state control ever something that we called
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modernity? How did state control, how did nationalizing internet content become something
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that we can just spruce up and call modern? This is absolutely an attempt for the federal
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government of Canada, the bureaucracy, Justin Trudeau, you name it, to seize control of what
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you see and access on the internet. And there are some players like Netflix, which are large enough
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that they can navigate these global regulatory environments and will, because for the most part,
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it's not that big a deal. But there are a lot of other people that will not be able to. I mentioned
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Daily Wire as one obvious example. What about Rumble? Rumble is a video platform that has made
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a name for itself as a pro-free speech platform. Now, it's not the Wild West. Rumble will still,
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in compliance with American regulations, take down copyright infringing content under the DMCA,
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the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Rumble will comply with basic regulations. Chris Pavlosky,
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who is the head of Rumble, who is himself Canadian, has tweeted about this saying it is basically a
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disaster he has expressed a view on this that i think is an incredibly reasonable one for someone
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who is in the online publishing business and he writes canada is no longer part of the free world
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as a canadian i've never been more embarrassed than i have been in the past few weeks elon musk
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himself has also jumped in on this he has said of the crtc's threshold announcement that trudeau
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is trying to crush free speech in canada calling it shameful uh twitter another great example of
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this is a streaming service by a lot of metrics because it offers video content will x i should
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say not twitter will x go along with these regulations will it have to so the government
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could be bluffing i have a very hard time believing that they have even the capacity let alone the
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interest in banning canadians from visiting x websites from watching rumble videos from
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watching daily wire from doing all of this other stuff but who knows
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the whole point of this the underlying point of this is that the government feels
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it should control internet content everything else is a matter of degrees and everything else
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is a matter of good graces and just hoping the government won't use this power on which
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it's bestowed itself for evil. Well, let me just say I do not trust it in the least. Every Monday,
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we like to check in with our friend Chris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. This is not a
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simsulation. She is here in the flesh, well, virtually anyway. Chris, always good to talk to
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you. Thanks for coming on today. Hey, Andrew. Thanks for covering this. You know, we cannot
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understate the importance of this. And you know, the CRDC can spruce it up as much as they want.
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They can talk about modernizing. They can talk about holstering Canadian content. But at its core, not even incidentally, at its core, Bill C-11 and the regulations that follow are about government manipulating what Canadians can see online and by extension, what people can publish online.
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Yes. And I think sometimes because you've been in both, you know, mainstream media for a long time, alternative media, and now what this is, I think those of us who've been in the game for this long, sometimes don't realize that normal people don't realize how powerful the CRTC is.
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Okay. The CRTC regulates broadcasting. So think of your mainstream networks, things like CTV or CBC in some cases, global. That includes radio as well, by the way.
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And through doing that, if you run afoul of CRTC regulations, as they interpret it, keep in mind, there's always an argument.
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If you run afoul of CRTC regulations and they get mad enough at you, they will pull your broadcasting license.
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And the sentence that concerned me most in this release that, as you rightly point out, was put out on a Friday before a government long weekend was online services that offer podcasts must register.
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So to your point, YouTube, Spotify, any of the others, Apple, any of the other online services that host a podcast like this one must now register.
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Well, what does that mean? What does that look like? Do they need to give the CRTC a list of
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all of the podcasts that are going to be there? And then after that, are all those podcasts
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monitored to see if they run afoul of any CRTC regulations? This is where we're getting to the
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crux of free expression. And this is why the Canadian Taxpayers Federation was fighting tooth
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nail against c11 because if you can't express yourself freely and air ideas that might be
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controversial or not in line with government narrative it's impossible to hold your government
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to account you have no voice so this is why people outside of media really need to take this
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seriously they gotta phone their mp just to build off of your point chris on the crtc you worked for
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Sun News Network, as I know a lot of our viewers will be well familiar with. And, you know, in the
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end, Sun News Network lives on in spirit through independent online media. We had Ezra Levant found
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the rebel in the wake of it. We've had True North, which was founded by Candace Malcolm, who I know
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was also very involved in Sun. A lot of the personalities have popped up in all of these
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other fora. Sun News died in large part because of the CRTC, because the CRTC would not issue the
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same treatment that Sun News wanted that everyone else in media got in Canada. That was the issue.
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It wasn't that Sun wanted special treatment. It was that Sun wanted equal treatment. And just
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imagine the CRTC exercising that same level of judgment and latitude on online media services,
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where CBC Gem is going to get one treatment from CRTC in a way. And I don't know Rebel News's
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financials, but let's say Rebel makes $10 million a year or fits the criteria, the criteria change,
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whatever. Is CBC Gem going to get the same shake from the CRTC as Rebel News? Absolutely not,
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because we know how CRTC has treated CBC versus Sun News. Yes, exactly. And to give you an example,
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to your point, we were asking for what was called a mandatory carriage, which wouldn't have incurred
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any cost to taxpayers, but it was a carriage service that the CRTC had given to all the other
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news networks. It had given it to CBC News World, as it was called back in the day, CTV News Channel,
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BNN, which is the business news network. All sorts of Canadian networks had been given mandatory
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carriage for years on end. Sun News Network had said, hey, we literally had our desks made in
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Calgary. All of our reporters are reporting from Canada. We even cover local elections in Canada.
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we are Canadian, as you said before, as maple syrup. And they still said no. And we got shut
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down. And you run into this problem when you're dealing with government control of broadcasting.
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And I can hear some of the folks right now, especially in government, saying, oh, well,
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safety, alluding to those things. I'm going to hit stop on that right now because it is already
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illegal to distribute or talk about or promote horrific things like terrorism or keep the kids
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out of the room images of child sex abuse okay you cannot do that those are against the criminal
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code of canada for a good reason we are not talking about that that would be an issue to
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take up with the minister of justice no c11 is the minister of heritage this is about
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content and judgment of Canadian content. The issue here is a human being is judging what is
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and is not worthy Canadian content. And this is not a right or left issue. If I could just reach
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out to, as the late President Ronald Reagan used to say, our friends on the left. Imagine you're
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back in the early 2000s. Imagine that the United States is gearing up to invade Iraq. Remember
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then, back in Canada, a lot of the protests, Andrew, you might recall, were organized online.
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They were internet chat groups and blogs. It was before the days of podcasting. And they were all
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open. Everybody could read them. This was part of the open internet. And they formed massive protests
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against Canada's participation in that war. They had a huge protest on Parliament Hill,
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all organized online through communications. A few days later, then Prime Minister Chrétien
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stood up and said, you know what? We're sitting this one out. No thanks. Imagine if the government
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of the day found that to be problematic and didn't want that content promoted. What would have
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happened? So if you're fine with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's judgment of everything and
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you're one of those voters, okay, put your shoe on the other foot. Imagine if Pierre Polyev were
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prime minister would you want his government dictating what you can and can't see online
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you shouldn't i think you're right about that and i would also talk about the unintended
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consequences here or maybe intended i this actually came up in a housing context recently
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so italy as a country for whatever reason i i don't know has a policy of reciprocity where if
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an italian citizen would be prohibited from buying property in a foreign country someone from that
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country will be prohibited from buying property in Italy. And you take what's a very reasonable
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approach on its face. Italy is fine letting foreign investment run rampant in the country,
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but if your country is going to ban Italy, Italians from doing it, they're going to ban
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Canadians. And how I learned about this was because Canada has put in restrictions on
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foreign home ownership, and Italy is now looking at how to respond to that, I'm told. But just take
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that and put it into a content lens. Canada believes that we need to start basically restricting
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the inflow of foreign media content to Canada. That's their stated purpose. So that's not even
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like a conspiratorial thing. That's their deliberate reason. If I were a country that is
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wanting to export its media productions, why on earth would I ever want to import Canadian
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content in this? If Canada is banning, you know, Money Heist, which is a Spanish show,
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or Borgen, which is Denmark, and by banning, I mean restricting it and throttling it,
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why would those countries want to import Canadian content? So we're really taking this form of
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entertainment protectionism here, which Canada would never settle for if another country were
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to do it to us. That's a great point. We could easily get in to that sort of tit for tat war
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just on the cultural entertainment level. We're talking about, you know, sitting back and chilling
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with Netflix for a little bit, as they say. When you talk about news content and information
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sharing, again, things get pretty twisted pretty fast. I'll give you a perfect example. And it's
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right within the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. We call the carbon tax a carbon tax. We don't
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call it a fee. We don't call it a price on pollution or whatever else the government calls
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it. The government gets super mad at us for that. They get really ornery over it. And especially
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when we point out that it's not reducing emissions and that people on average are paying out more
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than they get back. That's in direct contradiction to what the government message is. They've gone
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so far as to call it, I think they've called that misinformation. Don't think it's been
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disinformation so far. Do a thought process. Imagine then that they decide that misinformation
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is no longer allowed under CRTC content rules. Guess what? We can't have conversations about
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the carbon tax anymore then like folks this is really important and if you don't care about the
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carbon tax pick whatever issue is most important to you and apply that lens this is why we need
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free expression in Canada we need to be able to air out our issues and we need to be able to talk
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to each other so we can organize and push back on government based on our topics this is a major
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major threat to that well I'm glad you bring up the misinformation aspect here Chris because I
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I feel one of the most important aspects of this is that we can't look at all of the liberal
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government's internet regulations in isolation. There's a whole suite of them that are being
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pushed through right now. We have C-11 and C-18, which have passed. We also have
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the Online Hate Act, which is going to be reintroduced at some point. And then there's
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going to be another online safety component, which may or may not be part of it that I've
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been talking about. And we see examples of this in the UK and EU. So we know how the Canadian
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government is being informed and influenced. And as I've talked about on the show in the past,
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the most dangerous thing about this is that they're lumping all of these so-called online
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harms under one regulatory banner, which is just harm. And within that, they're having hate speech,
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misinformation, child pornography. And if you stand up and say, ah, you know, I don't like this,
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they're going to say, well, you're an apologist for child pornography. Like that's going to be
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the debate when we already have laws on that. And if we need to strengthen those, let's absolutely
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do it. But all of this is incredibly important. And I'm glad you brought it up, Chris, because
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the government is basically trying to extend its net to capture all of these outlets. The forced
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registration is not benign. It means that all of a sudden there's a designated contact person
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so that when all of these other things pass, they know who they have to talk to at each company
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to get content taken down. Correct. And to your point, this could affect, based on what you were
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reading this could affect the standalones as you've described if you're self-hosting but also
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keep in mind how much of a headache do you think these big guys these big tech companies that do
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platform these podcasts how much of a headache do you think they want like you really think that
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they want to put up with constant phone calls from the crtc because they're giving like a relatively
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tiny canadian voice a tiny canadian podcast no they just won't bother look at what's happened
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with c18 this is why when you go to facebook you can no longer post or paste a news link anymore
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because before it was a fight between the government of prime minister justin trudeau
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and big tech and big tech said no we are not going to pay media organizations based on links
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that are posted on our sharing platforms well they called their bluff and now they no longer allow
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those links to be posted because they don't want to pay that fee extrapolate this down the road
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and apply this new element that's coming out here with C11. And keep in mind, to your point,
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that this is not happening in isolation. So we've got all of this happening with online content,
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whether it's podcasts or whatever this would be called, an online show, whatever you want to call
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it, typically called alternative media. Okay, they're doing that. At the same time, the government
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is funding mainstream media now. And it's not just the CBC. Yes, the CBC gets more than $1.2
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billion from taxpayers every year. So it is government funded media. They're also paying
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mainstream media. And the last report we saw out of our great good journalists out of Blacklock's
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reporter who do excellent work and have their own independent website is that the mainstream media
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is looking to double its payment coming from the government. This is why journalists mustn't be
00:27:22.420
paid by the government, because you can't hold somebody to account if you're counting on them
00:27:26.720
for your paycheck. So this is happening on one side, they're going on to government payroll,
00:27:32.080
and on the other side, in what we would call independent media, we're getting more and more
00:27:37.300
severe restrictions let's take that c18 comparison a step further if we can chris because i i agree
00:27:46.100
entirely predictable i don't blame meta for making the decision it made i blame the government for
00:27:50.580
you know forcing it and not listening to them be honest about what they were going to do the the
00:27:55.380
one silver lining for an independent media outlet like true north is that when meta says we're going
00:28:00.820
to ban links to your website we still have our website and we spend a lot of time and effort
00:28:04.900
building up our own mailing list telling our audience please go to our website directly join
00:28:09.940
our email list so we can communicate with you directly when we talk about what crtc is doing
00:28:15.460
so those companies were offering a way to promote our content the companies that the crtc is going
00:28:21.700
after under c11 are the companies that actually hold the content in some ways so they're actually
00:28:28.500
talking about websites where the podcast is hosted which means there is no direct way for
00:28:34.580
the consumer to circumvent that once they're gone they're gone and if some of these companies like
00:28:39.540
rumble is a great example rumble has an ideological commitment to this so i could understand them not
00:28:44.900
wanting to play by canada's rules and saying we are effectively blocking access to our platform
00:28:50.100
in canada and if you're a russell brand or a stephen crowder whose show lives on rumble
00:28:55.300
boom that show's gone yes exactly and then what happens next right i've noticed that they keep
00:29:02.340
pushing more and more like the goalposts keep moving farther down the field so do a little
00:29:08.100
thought experiment and this is speculation but it's based on observation of the government's
00:29:13.940
behavior and you know i don't care what color jersey they're wearing this is not a liberal
00:29:18.540
conservative thing i'm talking about the federal government that happens to be in charge right now
00:29:22.620
i'd be saying the exact same thing if this were a conservative government pulling this nonsense
00:29:26.380
so take that thought experiment an extra step what happens then if they decide to go after
00:29:32.140
self-generated, self-hosted content in a way that, hey, your server should no longer be hosting you
00:29:38.680
because your server now needs to comply as a broadcaster under the CRTC. That is not that
00:29:46.680
much of a jump away from a big podcast hosting website like Apple or YouTube.
00:29:54.240
Well, and that was the thing that happened with Parler. Now, I used Parler when it first launched
00:30:01.500
But that was an outlet that ultimately was taken offline by its web host.
00:30:09.180
I'm told there are only a handful of companies that even provide the service.
00:30:12.460
So if all of them are playing ball with these government regulations,
00:30:15.440
the government would have access to the kill switch.
00:30:21.000
So, for example, if you want lower taxes, less waste,
00:30:25.280
the way we do here at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation,
00:30:29.120
We put our podcasts out on all sorts of these platforms.
00:30:35.500
It's come directly from the federal government.
00:30:37.380
If the federal government decides that calling it a carbon tax and telling people the truth,
00:30:42.920
saying on average, you're paying more than you get back from the government,
00:30:46.580
if they decide that is now misinformation and no longer allowed, what then, folks?
00:30:53.240
And if the CTF isn't your cup of tea, pick whatever issue is important to you.
00:30:59.440
If, for example, you're opposed to the gun grab, right, the seizure of lawfully owned firearms by law-abiding people, and they have their own podcast, but the government decides for whatever reason that they don't like it and it violates this certain list of rules.
00:31:15.820
Again, this is where it becomes really problematic.
00:31:18.780
and 100% if you actually violate the criminal code in Canada it doesn't matter if you're on a podcast
00:31:24.940
you're going to get in deep trouble right you're going to have to face a jury of your peers or a
00:31:29.160
judge etc you wind up in the justice system this is not we're talking about we're talking about
00:31:34.300
expression through the Canadian Heritage Ministry and through the CRTC which is again why I strongly
00:31:41.020
recommend people read uh Professor Michael Geist on this he's a brilliant academic he does deep
00:31:46.720
dives and a lot of thinking on this. He's been in the room, apparently, when they've tried to
00:31:51.800
discuss these topics, when they're drafting this legislation, so he can see where the puck is
00:31:56.080
going. And all earnestly, all honestly, contact like left-wing podcasts too. Say, folks, do you
00:32:04.160
want to live under this kind of regulation coming from the federal government? Probably not. And
00:32:09.960
link arms and defeat this stuff. Yeah. And there have been some left of center groups that have
00:32:16.360
been sounding the alarm on this and I'm very glad for, but I think we need a lot more. And
00:32:20.660
basically this is, I mean, I hate that old Niemöller quote that's like adapted to every stupid
00:32:25.260
context, but at first they came for the podcasters does seem appropriate here. Chris Sims, Alberta
00:32:30.820
director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. And I don't, I don't know if we've announced it,
00:32:35.500
so maybe we can announce it now. You're going to be, are you coming to our event?
00:32:40.540
Okay. Well, we hope to, to see you there. Either way, anyone should come to that event,
00:33:04.600
But I'm very concerned about what non-Canadian outlets,
00:33:08.080
which let's be real, if you are global in nature,
00:33:13.420
in the media industry, especially if you're in the US market, the UK market, the EU. I mean,
00:33:18.820
you pick any one or two of those and that's going to be incredibly dangerous. I keep going back to
00:33:24.320
the Daily Wire because they're an example of one that really wouldn't by any reasonable measure
00:33:29.900
care about what Justin Trudeau wants them to do. But I got to say, there's a part of me that would
00:33:34.420
love to see Ben Shapiro do like the woke Justin Trudeau approved content just to like check the
00:33:40.140
box on the CRTC regulations. So let's all start a petition and get Daily Wire Plus to register with
00:33:47.520
the CRTC just for the laughs. But nevertheless, we will carry on with this as the week progresses
00:33:52.760
and try to get a bit more clarity about what this is going to look like. This is obviously the death
00:33:58.140
of free speech is incredibly important, but it is an issue that pales in comparison to some of the
00:34:03.920
very real and very mounting deaths that are taking place across the country because of MAID,
00:34:09.500
the euphemistic name for doctor-assisted suicide, which is quickly making Canada a very unlikely,
00:34:17.320
and I would say unpleasant, capital around the world, even more than many places in Europe.
00:34:22.260
And when you compare the Canadian story to that of, say, California, it is particularly egregious
00:34:27.960
that this has been something that Canadians have embraced, except maybe not. The Canadian
00:34:32.580
government seems to be putting forward an approach on this that is incredibly liberal and incredibly
00:34:37.620
open but Canadians are even generally socially progressive Canadians finding themselves a little
00:34:43.540
bit uncomfortable with the status quo certainly as we move to further this liberalization by
00:34:49.620
expanding assisted dying to those who have solely mental illness as we have stories of people whose
00:34:55.380
issues are not even medical in nature but to do with housing or inequality or poverty
00:35:01.300
this was put under the microscope in a fantastic but i i will also say chilling piece in the
00:35:07.800
national review by alexander rakin how death care pushed out health care alexander joins me on the
00:35:15.400
line now it's good to talk to you thanks so much for coming on today it's a pleasure to be on so
00:35:21.120
i mean you've written about this in the past and this is one of these issues i mean the freedom
00:35:26.480
convoy was one these internet regulations we were talking about are one but this issue is one that
00:35:31.080
I'm getting people that I know from around the world coming to me and saying, what's going on
00:35:35.700
in your country? Is that similar to reaction you've seen from National Review readers?
00:35:41.720
Oh, 100%. I mean, the earlier speakers said that if you violate the criminal code,
00:35:47.740
you'll face repercussions. There's an exemption to it. If you're a physician in Canada who provides
00:35:52.820
medical assistance in dying, you don't face any repercussions for talking or even violating the
00:36:00.640
criminal code. So one of the cases that I talk about is a patient who was, it's a group of
00:36:07.740
physicians flippantly discussing sedating a patient into MAID. This would be unthinkable
00:36:14.400
just a couple of years ago. And yet, no repercussions, no investigations, no apologies.
00:36:21.440
And this is part of the course for how MAID functions in Canada.
00:36:26.140
one of the things and you touched on this and i'm glad you did because it's often missing from the
00:36:31.980
story is that there is the letter of the law and the letter of the regulations and then there's
00:36:36.780
the actual practice on the ground and it's long been established even when maid restrictions were
00:36:42.140
fairly stringent in nature that there were situations where these rules were being bended
00:36:48.220
where capacity rules eligibility rules were and if you keep that pattern in place and you expand
00:36:54.620
the regulations it stands to reason that it will become even more permissive as time goes on
00:37:01.340
exactly every day in 2021 and i'm saying 2021 because we're still waiting on the 2022 data
00:37:08.460
but every day in 2021 more than 29 canadians died by the hands of their physicians or nurses
00:37:14.380
that's double the official suicide rate if we were talking about any other group of people
00:37:19.340
if we were talking about any other people besides people with disabilities who were being impacted
00:37:25.580
by this, this would be a national tragedy. And yet, I don't really see this being recorded in
00:37:31.260
mainstream media in Canada. No, and I'm kind of curious about this,
00:37:36.460
and I'm not second guessing your approach to publish it in an American outlet, but I'm
00:37:40.700
wondering why you think Canadian media has not been as interested to do this deep dive?
00:37:45.260
that's a good question i mean we definitely know that there is an element of bias in all of this
00:37:52.380
uh cbc uh they had a pretty good investigative report on the fifth estate uh that looked into
00:37:59.660
all the ways that made was falling short in canada and yet unlike other fifth estate investigations
00:38:05.900
it was never pushed on cbc's website it was only on cable which is pretty jarring now like they
00:38:12.060
have other reports that are pushed to their uh uh to their online newspaper and yet with made
00:38:20.700
for some reason editors decided not to do that um and you can see this throughout the whole gamut
00:38:25.740
of conversations around made one of the things that that i found interesting was situating
00:38:31.660
canada in the global context because i used to when this issue came up look to the netherlands
00:38:37.260
and switzerland i think and be like oh although like we're we're never gonna i don't know if i
00:38:41.340
would have ever said we're never going to be like that, but I certainly would have said we're far
00:38:44.920
off from that. Whereas, how would you actually, having done the research and the legwork, rank
00:38:50.000
Canada against some of those really permissive approaches to this in Europe? Oh, I mean, we
00:38:55.920
already have the largest and most permissive assisted suicide program in the world. In the
00:39:02.060
Netherlands and Belgium, they have additional safeguards where if a patient wants to apply
00:39:06.500
for euthanasia-assisted suicide. They have to at least try some acceptable level of medical
00:39:13.460
treatment first, right? This is a very commonsensical safeguard. In the Netherlands,
00:39:18.560
physicians would not push MAID onto patients. And yet we have stories of exactly that.
00:39:25.200
In the Netherlands, there were review processes. There are no such review processes in Canada.
00:39:30.080
So it's, I mean, we're already far ahead. I mean, just look at the numbers, right? Between,
00:39:34.080
you know, over a span of seven years, we're on track to have a 13 fold increase in the number
00:39:39.720
of euthanasia and the number of deaths from euthanasia. We have never seen that anywhere
00:39:44.460
in the world. Amanda Act, actually, Sean, if you could get that picture that I sent you from Amanda
00:39:52.300
Actman in the queue, I want to show that in a couple of moments here, because I'll ask you about
00:39:58.280
where you think this goes from here, because I do feel like the government, when it loosened
00:40:03.460
the restrictions and put that change in place on the mental illness aspect, that was a turning
00:40:10.320
point. And that was what moved this into a territory where a lot of people were very
00:40:17.200
uncomfortable with this. And even people that you wouldn't call social conservatives or pro-life
00:40:21.560
activists. Do you see that continuing? Or do you think like anything else, people will talk about
00:40:26.120
it for a couple of moments and then kind of forget about it and move on? I don't think people are
00:40:30.700
going to be able to forget about this or move on i mean just look at the just look at the disability
00:40:35.660
community you have over 140 over 140 disability organizations nationwide saying that the latest
00:40:43.340
expansion to made was a direct threat to their lives over 140. you have the united nations uh
00:40:50.700
several human rights experts at the united nations condemning canada for expanding made to
00:40:56.060
those who are not terminally ill and even those who are terminally ill are dying at a later stage
00:41:01.260
than in other jurisdictions so it's it's pretty fascinating to think about this right we had over
00:41:09.100
again over 140 disability organizations pretty much every single major disability organization
00:41:13.820
in canada made a firm statement against made you had another letter that came out of earlier this
00:41:21.100
year and yet the reaction from canadian media has been pretty abysmal and the reaction from the
00:41:28.220
government has been even less so i i don't think that people are going to be able to forget this
00:41:33.100
or move on um when we're talking about the massive normalization that certain lives are not worth
00:41:38.860
living amanda actman who's a pro-life uh advocate and speaker i forget where she's based now she's
00:41:46.700
moved around she shared this image that i i wanted to uh show you in the audience this is an 88 year
00:41:52.620
old woman from calgary named christine nagel who if you can make that out had tad never had a tattoo
00:41:59.260
in her life but at 88 got tattooed in her arm don't euthanize me and you can say it's a bit
00:42:05.180
cheeky and uh feisty sorry she's 81 not 88 my apologies you can say it's a bit cheeky and feisty
00:42:10.940
but you know at a certain point there must be some people that genuinely live with a sense of fear
00:42:16.700
that their life will be ended when they're no longer in a position to say, I don't want this.
00:42:24.220
Right. I mean, the impact is not just on physicians who are being censored, and we can
00:42:28.560
discuss that, or hospitals that are effectively being defunded because they're choosing health
00:42:34.040
care over deaf care. The largest impact is on patients. Patients like Rachel, who I spoke to,
00:42:41.060
and I talk about in my piece. She's someone who is someone with disabilities. She has chronic
00:42:46.660
disability. She has a chronic pain condition. She has depression. And yet when she tried to get help
00:42:52.600
for her depression by calling suicide hotlines, she was instead being advised to look up Dying
00:42:59.360
with Dignity Canada. Like think about what that means. You call it a suicide prevention hotline
00:43:04.280
and instead you're getting recommended ways for you to die from assisted suicide. And she said,
00:43:11.180
and I'll read this quote, I've been afraid, you know, over those last couple of years to go to
00:43:15.760
just my local hospital because I was afraid that if any doctor either brought up MAID
00:43:19.960
themselves or met my kind of ambivalent desire for MAID, all I needed was a push and I'll be dead
00:43:25.360
right now. What she ended up needing to do was to purchase a bus ticket for an hour, like for an
00:43:32.000
hour and a half away. She had to go all the way to Toronto to CAMAGE, which is a mental health
00:43:36.280
hospital, the largest mental health hospital in Canada that does not allow MAID on site in order
00:43:42.660
for her to attempt to get healthcare. And we know how broken the healthcare system is. So it doesn't
00:43:48.400
seem to be kind of a coincidence that you have the largest expansion of euthanasia ever seen in the
00:43:54.500
world in a voluntary euthanasia system happening at the same time that Canada's healthcare system
00:43:59.920
is disintegrating. Well, it's a very important story. And you've touched on Rachel's story and
00:44:05.800
many others in the feature you wrote for the National Review, which is in this month's issue
00:44:10.440
and also online, how death care pushed out health care.
00:44:20.520
Thank you, and I will also point out to people,
00:44:25.480
I believe, debate on a private member's bill from Ed Fast,
00:44:32.880
which is attempting to roll back at the very least
00:44:38.040
which as you know, if you are familiar with my story
00:44:40.680
as a suicide survivor is very near and dear to my heart.
00:44:43.840
And I'll perhaps talk about that a little bit more
00:44:46.160
in detail for those who haven't heard the story.
00:44:51.860
of like a kitten riding a unicycle or something
00:44:58.380
but we only fight through that in joy and laughter.
00:45:07.640
would have loved it if Maid were around when I was going through my troubles. There, I can make
00:45:11.780
a joke about my own suicide. Take that. We will wrap things up there. My thanks to you all for
00:45:17.220
tuning in. I will return in 23 hours and 15 minutes here on Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. Thank
00:45:23.800
you, God bless, and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support
00:45:29.620
the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.