Juno News - Justin Trudeau's ＂hate speech＂ ban is coming

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:20.460 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here the andrew lawton show

00:01:30.860 on true north midway through the week although it's like the first day of the week i've been

00:01:35.140 doing a show so uh you'll understand why tomorrow yesterday we were it was a combination of things

00:01:41.560 but i was recording an interview which we're using for the show tomorrow and we just weren't

00:01:47.660 able to make it work with being able to be in a studio in one place and one time and we were

00:01:51.780 coming off a long weekend and I'm making excuses here but we'll try to make up for it in what time

00:01:56.500 we have left in the abbreviated post family day week I hope you had a good long weekend

00:02:02.920 I had a busy morning I was in Kitchener Ontario for a press conference that conservative leader

00:02:08.700 Pierre Polyev was holding and man oh man did a lot of well personal person you can't say man oh

00:02:15.280 man anymore it's a hate crime uh personal person did a lot of news come out of this press conference

00:02:20.400 we got uh pierre polyev saying that we need to protect women's only spaces we had pierre polyev

00:02:26.660 saying we need to mandate age for people viewing online porn we had pierre polyev talking about

00:02:32.500 what i am going to be spending the first bit of the show talking about which is the importance

00:02:36.660 of resisting the liberal government's uh incoming ban on online so-called hate speech now you'll

00:02:44.260 know why I do the air quotes there because oftentimes when you talk about this topic you'll

00:02:48.560 say you'll hear people say well hate speech isn't free speech and I'd say well free speech is free

00:02:52.900 speech and the issue is always in how you define these things because what the liberals often want

00:02:59.100 to call hate speech is speech that may be unpleasant or unkind but is still part of what

00:03:05.060 you should be allowed to say and think in a free society but the liberals don't believe that they

00:03:10.380 are not actually minded to embrace a free society, certainly when you're discussing the idea of

00:03:16.400 speech and of controversial or contentious opinions, which is why they've been so eager,

00:03:22.300 enthusiastic to regulate what you can say online. This has always been for me the hill to die on.

00:03:29.700 It has to be. Free speech is so important. It is the speech that you need to defend and uphold and

00:03:35.100 protect all other rights and freedoms. That is what free speech is. And the thing about it is

00:03:40.780 that the Liberals tried this in 2021. They introduced a bill that would have regulated and

00:03:45.040 banned so-called online hate speech. It would have lowered the threshold that exists under the

00:03:49.880 current criminal law for hate speech, which has a very, very high bar and needs to have a high bar.

00:03:55.140 And they have promised this omnibus online harms bill. This bill is going to do a number of things.

00:04:01.280 The bill is going to talk about pornography, it's going to talk about terrorism content,

00:04:06.000 it's going to talk about hate speech, and they do this all in one place.

00:04:10.780 So that if you criticize the bill because you don't like the implications on censorship,

00:04:15.780 they can turn around and say, you must be comfortable with terrorist content,

00:04:19.100 or you must be comfortable with child porn.

00:04:21.500 This is what they do.

00:04:22.480 So I think we need to unpack this bill when we see it.

00:04:25.480 It's going to be coming in the next few weeks, but there were some media reports,

00:04:29.240 some leaks from the Liberals that share some details that are likely to be in that bill and

00:04:34.200 there has been all but confirmation on this that the bill is going to go after that online hate

00:04:39.800 speech issue now to give you a brief history on this there used to be in the Canadian Human Rights

00:04:45.880 Code or the Canadian Human Rights Act rather a prohibition on communicating hate speech online

00:04:52.280 it was called section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act it was used to prosecute

00:04:56.840 Under the human rights regime, bloggers, people like my late friend Kathy Shadle,

00:05:01.500 faced complaints under this, and it had very direct implications on free speech

00:05:06.000 because it was a bill that licensed government censorship.

00:05:08.960 It licensed sanctioned by the state if you say unpopular or unkind things online.

00:05:14.720 So the liberals in their previous attempts to bring this back had a supercharged version of this

00:05:20.120 where not only did they reinstate Section 13 and have this ban on online, again, hate speech,

00:05:26.840 but they also included mechanisms to force social media companies to take action against this. So

00:05:33.680 all of a sudden, the government is deputizing Facebook and Twitter to be the censors of what

00:05:39.640 it believes is, again, so-called hate speech. So with this news that came out this morning,

00:05:45.840 I asked Conservative leader Pierre Pauliev at the press conference if the Conservatives

00:05:50.320 would stand opposed to this ban when it comes in.

00:05:54.640 And he gave a long, long answer, which is good

00:05:58.180 because I think it had a lot of material in there

00:05:59.920 that we can work with.

00:06:01.100 But I just wanted to warn you in advance,

00:06:02.760 this is like a three and a half minute clip

00:06:04.340 because once you've asked the question,

00:06:05.620 he basically can do what he wants.

00:06:07.400 But this was what Pierre Polyev said.

00:06:09.300 Well, I think you get to hear my question as well.

00:06:11.140 But this was my question

00:06:12.340 and Pierre Polyev's response from this morning.

00:06:15.840 Morning, Mr. Polyev, Andrew Lawton, True North.

00:06:18.020 The federal government has said that its online harms bill is imminent.

00:06:23.080 They've said this bill will include, among other things, a ban on so-called online hate speech.

00:06:28.300 As you know, the Conservatives a decade ago repealed Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act,

00:06:33.260 which the Liberals have talked about reintroducing and tried in the last parliamentary term.

00:06:38.420 Will the Conservatives oppose the reintroduction of these provisions

00:06:42.500 and the Liberals' approach to so-called online hate speech?

00:06:46.660 Yes.

00:06:48.020 We will oppose Justin Trudeau's latest attack on freedom of expression.

00:06:54.860 And I want to ask, what does Justin Trudeau mean when he says the word hate speech?

00:07:04.540 He means speech he hates.

00:07:08.400 So, for example, let's go through some of the things he said is hate speech. 0.54

00:07:12.220 Jerry Butts, the PMO puppet master, said that it was hate speech to criticize Trudeau for using the ridiculous term people kind, right?

00:07:25.380 Justin Trudeau said anyone who criticized him during the pandemic was engaging in hate speech.

00:07:33.600 Basically, anybody who disagrees with his radical agenda when it comes to kids, he says it's hate speech.

00:07:42.220 He attacked Muslim parents who were protesting against his agenda.

00:07:46.960 Is he going to criminalize those Muslim parents for protecting their children in schools?

00:07:53.720 Go down the list of things that Justin Trudeau disapproves of,

00:07:58.280 and you can imagine all of the things that will be criminalized.

00:08:03.340 Then there becomes the question of who is going to be in charge of determining what is hate speech.

00:08:09.120 recently a school board in Ontario banned Anne Frank's books okay so would that be considered

00:08:18.500 hate speech under Justin Trudeau's woke authoritarian agenda I think it would

00:08:24.980 so anyone who thinks that speech they don't like is going to be criminalized and therefore

00:08:32.260 the bill should be supported go through that those people should go through the list of their

00:08:37.320 own thoughts that Justin Trudeau considers to be unacceptable views, and you can assume that he

00:08:44.340 will ban all of that as well. And finally, I point out the irony that someone who spent the first

00:08:53.660 half of his adult life as a practicing racist who dressed up in hideous racist costumes so many

00:09:02.580 times he says he can't remember them all should then be the arbiter on what constitutes hate

00:09:09.960 why doesn't he what he should actually do is look into his own heart and ask himself why he was such

00:09:17.480 a hateful racist for despite his enormous personal privileges of a multi-million dollar trust fund

00:09:24.220 being the son of a prime minister growing up in mansions traveling the world why he had so much 0.96

00:09:29.660 hate in his art that he was such an awful racist and what he should do is actually explain where

00:09:36.920 that ugliness came from and maybe in that way rather than through coercion he could help us

00:09:44.060 all in the fight against real hate thank you man where where do you even start on an answer like

00:09:52.000 that he talks about justin trudeau being a racist he says justin trudeau is a woke authoritarian he

00:09:58.400 says Justin Trudeau cannot be the arbiter of what you can say or do online. We even got a Jerry

00:10:04.380 Butts reference there because Jerry Butts likes to take aim at opinions and expressions he doesn't

00:10:09.420 like online. So there was a lot there. I mean, the core policy was an unequivocal one that the

00:10:13.860 Conservatives will oppose this bill. The Conservatives will oppose the reinstitution

00:10:19.460 of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act and in general, the Liberal government's efforts

00:10:24.520 to rein in online speech. Now, this is crucial. I mentioned at the outset of this show, and I've

00:10:31.700 mentioned time and time again, that free speech is my hill to die on. And, you know, it's been said,

00:10:37.360 and it's not an original thought on my part, that the reason free speech is so important is because

00:10:41.500 if every other freedom were stripped away and you were left with only that one, you could then use

00:10:47.180 that freedom to argue and fight for your other freedoms. It's the one that if you don't have,

00:10:51.940 you have nothing. What is democratic freedom if you don't have the right to speak

00:10:55.540 about politics and about the political process? What right is, I mean, basically, what good are

00:11:01.960 a lot of the rights and freedoms if you don't have the right to have your own expressions and

00:11:06.420 by extension, your own thoughts? Because when you regulate speech, you are regulating thinking.

00:11:11.900 And again, you have to pull yourself out of the mindset here of, well, I don't like hate speech.

00:11:17.260 No one likes hate speech. No one likes the idea of it. But I bet if I were to grab five of you

00:11:23.480 and say, what is hate speech? You're going to have wildly different beliefs on what it is.

00:11:29.020 I'll give you an example. Twitter, before Elon Musk purchased it, used to say that dead naming

00:11:36.020 someone fell under its hate speech policy, which is to say that if I one day say I'm actually

00:11:42.060 transgender, you must call me Andrea Lawton. Don't picture it. It's not going to be pretty. 1.00

00:11:46.820 If you call me Andrew, that could be under Twitter's terms of service as hate speech.

00:11:52.040 Now, that was not the law.

00:11:53.480 Twitter can decide for itself how it wants to govern its affairs.

00:11:56.380 But at the time, that was one interpretation of what hate speech was.

00:12:00.140 Using someone's former name, the name by which you may have known them for many, many years,

00:12:04.880 that would be a form of hate speech.

00:12:07.140 The Ontario Human Rights Act says that misgendering someone is a violation of your Ontario human

00:12:16.060 right to gender identity.

00:12:19.020 So it stands to reason that if the Ontario Human Rights Code had a hate speech provision

00:12:23.640 like Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, if that's brought back, their view would

00:12:28.340 be that misgendering someone was hate speech.

00:12:31.680 They already view it as being discrimination.

00:12:33.320 If you are misgendered in the waiting room of your doctor's office, that could be a legal 1.00

00:12:38.400 discrimination claim that you have against your family physician's kind receptionist.

00:12:44.260 So for starters, we have a major problem here of who gets to decide.

00:12:50.560 The other aspect is who is responsible for enforcing.

00:12:55.100 Because we have a body, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which would be the one

00:12:58.520 that had to adjudicate if you had a complaint under the Human Rights Act.

00:13:02.900 Now, when you talk about social media companies, now all of a sudden the government is looking to Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and saying, you guys are the ones, sorry, you people, you people out there, you people kinders, you are the ones that have to enforce this edict.

00:13:18.780 So all of a sudden, Facebook is going to be on the hook for some bajillion dollar fine if Facebook is found to have not sufficiently acted to take your hate speech off the internet.

00:13:29.800 Now Facebook, as we've learned, doesn't really want to deal with the pesky regulatory environment of the Canadian government

00:13:37.320 It's a lot easier for Facebook just to say, you know what, we're pulling out of Canada

00:13:40.200 Or, you know, it might be more expedient for Facebook to say, fine

00:13:43.540 We don't want to just argue with Canadian speech bureaucrats

00:13:46.600 We'll just take the content down because that's so much easier

00:13:49.320 Now if Facebook makes a decision to do that, who is your complaint with?

00:13:53.500 Is your complaint against Facebook, a private company that has no real standing before the Human Rights Commission, or is your complaint against the government who can turn around and say, well, we didn't censor you, Facebook did. We didn't punish you for what you said, the social media company did.

00:14:08.380 so right here you have just off the top of my head a couple of the big problems with the scheme

00:14:15.660 that the government has proposed in the past and is likely to propose under this bill to regulate

00:14:20.140 speech and then you have the fundamental free speech aspect which is that the government is

00:14:24.320 going after speech it's drawing a line for what is legal and illegal speech that is lower than

00:14:29.840 the very high criminal threshold that already exists and as Bruce Party who's a phenomenal

00:14:34.700 lawyer and law professor has said time and time again, if something is illegal offline, it's

00:14:39.320 illegal online, which means we already have hate speech in the criminal code. So why do you need

00:14:44.580 a new law? If you cannot legally say something on the street, you can't legally say it on Facebook

00:14:49.840 or Twitter. The only reason the government has to put a new definition here is because they are

00:14:55.580 putting a sub-criminal threshold in. They're lowering the bar, which means more things are

00:15:00.100 going to be caught by what hate speech is. And as the government has said, they've taken

00:15:04.660 their inspiration for defining hate speech from a former Supreme Court decision, which is called

00:15:10.440 the Watcott decision, which has a number of very concerning things in it. Number one, something

00:15:15.760 was something could be true and still hateful. So that decision actually says, if you read it,

00:15:21.760 truth is no defense. So how are we supposed to believe that this is not going to be abused

00:15:27.140 if and when this becomes law.

00:15:30.180 I want to welcome into the show Josh DeHaz,

00:15:31.700 who is a lawyer with the Canadian Constitution Foundation,

00:15:34.580 where he is also a preeminent podcast host, a competitor,

00:15:37.980 but he does great work over there alongside Christine Van Gein and Joanna Barron.

00:15:42.020 Josh, good to have you back on the show. Thanks for coming on.

00:15:45.080 Good to be here.

00:15:46.280 So I want to talk about this free speech fight in Prince Edward Island in a few moments,

00:15:50.440 but just on the online harm stuff,

00:15:52.700 obviously we have to wait for the text of the bill to come out,

00:15:55.580 But we know from the first version of it and what the government has said in public messaging, what it's likely to look like here.

00:16:02.800 This is going to be just a feeding frenzy for civil liberties lawyers based on like any interpretation of what they're coming out with.

00:16:10.100 Right. Yeah.

00:16:11.560 Well, if if they come if they come out with a bill that brings back something like Section 13, you know, if anything that looks like what they proposed under Bill C-36,

00:16:21.680 They're going to have all kinds of challenges because, you know, it's just would not be constitutional to do something that extreme to have, you know, $20,000 fines for things that you say on the Internet that somebody finds offensive.

00:16:36.940 And so we really hope that that's not what they come up with.

00:16:41.700 But I guess we'll have to wait and see for the details in terms of this idea of an ombudsman or I think we're supposed to say ombudsperson.

00:16:48.940 ombudsperson. Yeah, it's actually hate speech if you say ombudsman. It could be under this new

00:16:54.860 bill. So I'll just go with the ombudsperson to be careful here. That raises all kinds of other

00:17:00.500 potential free speech issues here. If they go with 24-hour takedowns, that is just going to lead

00:17:07.340 Facebook and other internet service providers to take down anything that could put them at risk

00:17:15.840 or make them liable so that would be a huge free speech issue too that we would have to to try and

00:17:21.120 attack yeah and i and i maybe i'm again i'm not a lawyer i i play one on tv sometimes but the the

00:17:27.200 one thing that comes out here is that under c18 the liberal government put this uh regulation risk

00:17:33.280 requirement on on companies like facebook and google and said you guys have to pay news companies

00:17:38.480 if you're going to have news on your platform so facebook says all right it's not worth the

00:17:41.920 the hassle. We're just going to ban news. We looked into it. We got a legal opinion because

00:17:46.160 we were wondering if we could sue the government. And every lawyer we talked to said, well, no,

00:17:50.020 because Facebook made the decision. I mean, they may have done it in response to legislation,

00:17:54.040 but your issues with Facebook, which has, I would concede, no legal obligation to allow anyone to

00:17:59.920 use its platform. You apply that here. And I worry that the same thing applies where Facebook

00:18:05.020 will just develop a broad terms of service to encompass the law. But if Facebook's zapping

00:18:11.700 your content where's your recourse if you've been censored do you even have any yeah that would be

00:18:17.940 that that's that's the issue here so i think you could still mount some sort of challenge but it

00:18:22.980 would be very difficult to do if facebook itself wasn't uh getting involved in in that sort of

00:18:28.260 charter challenge um the other the other concern i would have is that companies like facebook might

00:18:34.820 just leave canada and you know people laugh at that but right now you have similar sorts of

00:18:39.860 legislation in the european union and uh they're they're they're telling twitter all the time look

00:18:45.940 if you don't comply with the with our uh requirements and uh you know get rid of more

00:18:51.860 of what we consider misinformation then we might kick twitter out of europe and it canada's a lot

00:18:58.500 smaller twitter probably cares a lot less about us but there's a possibility that if twitter is

00:19:03.780 faced with some sort of legislation that says they have a duty of care to take down information that

00:19:08.980 is so-called you know misinformation or discriminatory that they might just pull out at some point

00:19:15.780 let me ask you about that that arbitrator aspect here because a lot's changed in the internet in

00:19:22.420 the time that section 13 was there originally it was repealed in 2013 to now social media companies

00:19:28.900 are much more powerful we also have a government that i think has been much more emboldened on

00:19:33.940 on this idea of reining in online hate,

00:19:36.360 whereas Section 13 was really created

00:19:38.860 in response to fax machines,

00:19:40.780 if you go back to the origin of it.

00:19:43.200 So this idea of supercharging it,

00:19:45.280 by putting all these requirements on tech companies,

00:19:47.600 I see as being quite problematic,

00:19:49.420 but they also seem to think that they had kind of

00:19:51.520 charter-proofed the language with Bill C-36

00:19:55.260 by drawing from the Watcott decision.

00:19:57.460 I was wondering if you could just give a brief primer

00:19:59.740 on how that decision framed what free speech

00:20:03.660 and hate speech in this context are.

00:20:06.500 Yeah, so Watkot attempted to say that there is a line

00:20:11.440 over which you cannot cross between speech that's acceptable

00:20:15.720 and speech that is hateful

00:20:17.540 and can be constitutionally limited by the criminal laws.

00:20:21.700 And what ends up happening when you try to draw those lines

00:20:25.640 is you just end up using a lot of synonyms.

00:20:28.080 so walk lot says you know basically if your speech is inciting you know detestation against a group

00:20:35.920 that's illegal but if you're just offending a group or uh being hurtful towards a group that's

00:20:41.600 not okay so i i don't know how any reasonable person can tell the difference between words

00:20:46.720 like you know detestation or you know extreme dislike which is another one that's apparently

00:20:52.240 okay. And so all that Walcott really clarifies is that there is some line and it's really hard to

00:20:58.460 know where that is. It's going to be like the old I know it when I see it interpretation on

00:21:04.800 pornography, right? Right, right, exactly. And if there's that much subjectivity involved,

00:21:11.240 then you're really at the mercy of whoever the decision maker is. And let's say there's some

00:21:16.080 know digital safety czar or ombudsperson as i guess they're now called in the legislation it's

00:21:22.320 going to be up to you know their their tastes and their view about what is um what is hateful and

00:21:28.800 what isn't that's where the problem comes in because these are you know government appointees

00:21:33.200 and uh what they're offended by might be perfectly legitimate speech yeah and obviously you know

00:21:40.320 people when they have this debate i mean the big problem we run up against is that people have

00:21:45.120 trouble separating their emotional valuation of a particular expression from whether it has merit

00:21:51.760 as a legal form of expression and again we do not have a right to be comfortable we do not have a

00:21:57.040 right to not be offended or bothered or perturbed now i'm the one using all the synonyms and i think

00:22:01.760 this case in pei is a great example of this you have a counselor there in in murray harbor a very

00:22:07.040 very small community i don't even think it's at town level i think it's an even lower threshold

00:22:12.000 than town. And my colleague, Lindsay Shepard, wrote about John Robertson a while ago. He put

00:22:17.960 up a sign on his own property. And the sign, we have a picture there, truth, mass grave hoax,

00:22:24.940 reconciliation, redeem Sir John A's integrity. I think it's pretty clear what he's referring to

00:22:30.320 on both counts. And you may drive by that and say, I agree, I disagree, doesn't really matter.

00:22:35.100 He's now facing potential removal as a councillor over this. Explain what's going on here.

00:22:42.000 Yeah, so John put up this sign back in September. And this is a sign, it's one of those signs where you can, you know, change the plastic letters, I think you just showed it, that you see outside of, you know, churches or sometimes, you know, town halls. And he uses this just to spread his messages. Often it's things like, you know, happy, congratulations to the newlywed couple or, you know, there's some festival coming up and he wants to advertise it.

00:23:09.780 But occasionally he uses it for more political speech.

00:23:13.700 And in this case, he put up this sign because he's angry about the idea that in 2021, everybody was sort of led to believe that these mass graves had been located at Indian residential schools when, in fact, what was most likely found were cemeteries with unmarked graves.

00:23:33.900 Obviously very sad what happened at residential schools.

00:23:36.620 but he he's he's he's annoyed that this narrative sort of persists so um obviously this is his

00:23:44.380 private speech on his private property but his fellow village councillors didn't like this

00:23:48.620 message so they went after him using their code of conduct bylaw and you know municipalities across

00:23:56.060 canada have these codes of conduct they're they're they're meant to you know prevent city councillors

00:24:01.660 town counselors from doing things like harassing staff members or embezzling money or you know

00:24:08.940 having things that look like conflicts of interest but in recent years we've seen them start going

00:24:14.540 after fellow counselors for their political speech and that's what happened to john here

00:24:19.580 you know they did a big investigation they found that he breached sections of the code of conduct

00:24:25.100 related to ethical behavior that related to you know discrimination and harassment and arranging

00:24:31.900 your private affairs in a way that inspires public trust all of which is irrelevant to the sign

00:24:38.460 because it was not nothing to do with his actual job as a village counselor it was just a sign on

00:24:44.300 his property and it's political speech which is the most protected type of speech so you would

00:24:49.500 think that they would not be able to sanction him for for his sign and were pretty confident

00:24:55.020 that they violated the the constitutional guarantee for free speech by by uh sanctioning

00:25:00.860 for him they gave him a 500 fine uh suspended him for six months and demanded this forced apology

00:25:07.900 to to them and to the indigenous peoples and uh he refused to do that so now the minister

00:25:13.980 has launched an inquiry where one of the possibilities at the end of that is his removal.

00:25:20.620 So just, you know, an official on town council being removed for his political speech.

00:25:28.460 And they haven't really flinched or blinked in this since he's, you know,

00:25:33.200 secured legal representation through you in the CCF?

00:25:36.740 So we haven't heard anything from the town. They haven't flinched. What I can say is,

00:25:42.680 uh well the town very very obviously messed up this investigation and this whole process in many ways

00:25:50.200 but the minister uh in in a sense may have flinched because he issued an order in december that said

00:25:58.120 you know you have two days to accept these sanctions including the apology or resign

00:26:04.280 and uh john robertson he didn't he didn't do that at the time you know he was sort of looking for

00:26:09.880 legal counsel and he was uh on vacation so he he but he didn't do that at the time in any event

00:26:16.280 and the minister i think subsequently realized that um there may have been some problems with

00:26:21.560 this investigation and the the sanctions uh the way that things went about so he rescinded that

00:26:27.320 order and he uh issued a new order for an inquiry so now he's going to sort of redo all of the

00:26:33.240 this investigation about whether john's sign somehow breaches this code of conduct which i

00:26:39.080 i think it pretty clearly does not the thing that i find so incredibly incredibly concerning about

00:26:46.120 that i found a lot of it concerning but he's expressing a political opinion he is an elected

00:26:50.760 politician now in this particular case i don't think it's a position that murray harbor pei

00:26:55.720 necessarily has to deal with at the local level it may conceivably i again i don't know if it's near

00:27:01.960 any indigenous communities but the fact of the matter is that when you have a colleagues that

00:27:06.440 are weaponizing this code of conduct process for people expressing political opinions they're

00:27:11.560 effectively overriding the democratic process they're overriding the fact that constituents

00:27:16.200 have the opportunity to vote politicians in or out based in part on their political beliefs

00:27:21.960 yeah that's that's exactly right so uh it's it's it's very crazy here that the minister could

00:27:28.280 remove this person for for his speech i mean that's up to the voters and you know there's

00:27:33.960 there's this idea that uh his speech was very controversial and unpopular and that seems to

00:27:40.760 be the case in public you know that the town did get a lot of emails and things like that that's

00:27:45.480 were from people that said he's a residential school denialist which is absolutely not the case

00:27:50.920 um or that he's he's uh you know harming reconciliation but there is also a silent

00:27:56.920 majority out there that thinks you know what we were misled by the media in uh 2021 or at least

00:28:03.800 by by some parts of the media and uh they might they're they're on john's team you know they're

00:28:10.000 sending donations to the ccf they're signing the petition on our website and they're emailing john

00:28:15.000 to say you know we're with you just because you don't hear them publicly all that much doesn't

00:28:19.940 mean that they're not out there so um we we should at the end of the day we need to wait till

00:28:25.540 the next election and then it will be up to the voters if john runs whether to re-elect him

00:28:31.820 All right.

00:28:32.240 Well, and he has to watch

00:28:33.500 if he promotes himself on his sign.

00:28:35.300 He may get slapped down again there.

00:28:37.500 Josh, to has with the Canadian Constitution Foundation,

00:28:39.920 also one of the hosts of Not Reserving Judgment.

00:28:42.520 I think you have a new episode today, right?

00:28:43.940 It's Wednesdays?

00:28:45.340 We do.

00:28:46.060 We do.

00:28:46.420 And we're talking about this online harm stuff.

00:28:48.440 So you can hear more of what we have to think about that

00:28:50.720 and some of the rumors we've heard.

00:28:52.660 So all right.

00:28:53.780 Perfect.

00:28:55.120 Lawyers peddling in rumors.

00:28:56.380 That's very edgy in your world.

00:28:58.800 All right, Josh, thanks very much.

00:28:59.960 really good to talk to you again great thanks andrew all right we're doing all the hot button

00:29:04.120 issues today we're doing free speech we're doing hate speech and we will also do assisted dying 0.55

00:29:09.240 maid assisted suicide it goes by a number of names but none of which mask what is actually

00:29:14.820 at stake which some people try to obscure let me share this clip of an exchange between conservative

00:29:20.600 mp garnett jenis and a liberal parliamentary secretary on what made really is questions

00:29:28.520 ...and comments of the Honourable Member for Sherwood Park for Saskatchewan.

00:29:32.620 Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

00:29:33.480 I have a question for the government about their so-called MAID policy. 0.95

00:29:37.980 Now, they've said repeatedly that especially as it relates to mental health challenges,

00:29:42.640 their MAID policy would aim to exclude those who are suicidal.

00:29:48.480 But I want to understand from the government,

00:29:50.340 isn't any person who requests MAID suicidal simply by definition,

00:29:55.440 since they're requesting MAID?

00:29:57.220 I think it's irresponsible and untrue, honestly, to claim that MAID has anything

00:30:08.500 to do with suicide.

00:30:10.400 The Government of Canada recognizes the importance of all Canadians to have access to critical

00:30:15.400 mental health resources and suicide prevention services.

00:30:19.100 I am a member of the special MAID committee and not one witness that I heard when I was

00:30:26.760 there said that this is suicidal. So assisted suicide has nothing to do with what's that

00:30:36.940 suicide okay a little bit of wordplay going on from the Liberal government a Liberal government

00:30:42.120 that has committed to a massive expansion of medically assisted dying including to people

00:30:49.200 who are grappling only with mental illness. I've shared on a number of occasions my own

00:30:53.820 struggles with depression, my past attempt at suicide, attempts at suicide, in fact,

00:30:59.180 one of which was very, very successful almost and nearly ended my life. I'd say it was truly

00:31:05.740 successful that I failed. But at the time, my endeavor was to end my life and had MAID been

00:31:12.120 available to me as someone with mental illness, I very likely would have tried to go that road.

00:31:17.500 Now, MAID is increasingly used by people who have run out of options because of the healthcare

00:31:22.680 system, not because they are dealing with a terminal and irremediable condition, as the

00:31:27.200 legislation is supposed to restrict it to, but because they have run out of options, they have

00:31:31.400 had troubles accessing adequate care. And for all that we hear talk about healthcare equity and

00:31:37.280 people who are unable to access healthcare for a number of reasons, why are we seeing such an

00:31:43.540 expansion of MAID? This is something that was put in a very, very important piece in the

00:31:49.940 McDonnell Laurier Institute by a doctor in my neck of the woods in London, Dr. Ramona Coelho.

00:31:55.320 Barriers to care persist, but access to MAID keeps expanding. She joins me now. It's been many

00:32:00.360 years since we've spoken, Dr. Coelho, but it's good to speak to you again. Thanks for coming on today.

00:32:05.100 My pleasure.

00:32:06.300 So explain to me, first off, this apparent double standard here. On one hand, we hear people say

00:32:11.720 that there are these health equity challenges. People in marginalized communities, people with

00:32:16.420 disabilities, they all have issues navigating the system, but many of those people are the ones that 1.00

00:32:20.760 are being directed by practitioners at many points towards MAID. Yeah, it's very disturbing. Right now

00:32:28.880 in Canada, the laws for medical assistance in dying are so permissive, aiming and considering

00:32:36.940 only the narrow lens of accessibility when we are in fact talking about suicide. And so actually we

00:32:44.760 need to protect Canadians by having many safeguards and we need to have strict eligibility 1.00

00:32:51.260 criteria, which we do not have. And so although MAID is supposed to be a compassionate service,

00:33:00.220 apparently for people who have nothing, we have nothing left to offer, it can easily be offered

00:33:06.000 or be used when people have no other options. I was recently interviewed for an Al Jazeera

00:33:13.060 documentary on the life of Rosina Camas and you can see she had her own recordings and writings

00:33:20.740 near the end of her life you can even see part of her maid assessments and and how callous that whole 0.97

00:33:28.740 experience was you know the maid assessor offering to kill her on the weekend if she had time 1.00

00:33:34.100 and the real poverty and loneliness that she experienced that led to her desperation

00:33:41.060 So the potential for abuse of people being taken advantage of by a government system is real.

00:33:53.580 As the stats currently stand, you know, you have main assessors and providers that are speaking out in Health Canada saying that,

00:34:02.320 no, this is actually mostly like wealthy, privileged people who are choosing this.

00:34:06.920 don't have to worry. Most of our cases are for people who are near death. My article talks about

00:34:13.720 how the Canadian Association of Maid Assessors and Providers actually has created policies to

00:34:22.200 seemingly circumvent those safeguards so that even if you have just a disability, you're not dying,

00:34:28.440 if you state your intention to refuse care, they can treat you as if you have a terminal

00:34:34.520 illness and end your life immediately. And so you have even less time to recover, even less time for

00:34:39.840 sober second thought. And really that changes how we can interpret the Health Canada reports and

00:34:45.380 stats, because people with disabilities who are marginalized can be hidden under track one as if

00:34:50.740 they had a terminal illness just because they were refusing to eat and drink. I mean, a lot of

00:34:55.420 Canadians have heard, if not, they certainly should, that the famous case of the woman who

00:34:59.340 needed a chairlift in her home and was offered assisted suicide instead but there are a number

00:35:05.320 of examples of this and you allude to this in your piece where people in the disability community

00:35:09.480 are sounding the alarm about this and the tragic reality is when you have made being pushed on

00:35:15.460 people that have disabilities that aren't in a terminal illness it's because their life is being 1.00

00:35:20.680 valued at less than that of someone without the disability by many of these practitioners is it

00:35:27.080 night absolutely um so basically you're making my my friend and excellent author gabrielle peters

00:35:35.800 always talks about how our government has created a killable class a class of people that are seen

00:35:42.440 as having lives less worthy um maybe not even less worthy but that is merciful to help them end

00:35:48.680 their lives and really that's based on bias and stigma the ideas the false ideas that somehow

00:35:56.200 they don't, first of all, they don't enjoy their lives. Most studies show that

00:36:00.200 our society and physicians rate people's quality of lives with disabilities as quite low when they

00:36:06.440 do not. And also so that you have this kind of idea that we're offering them a mercy and a way

00:36:14.520 out because really, wouldn't they rather just be dead, which couldn't be farther from the truth.

00:36:19.400 But when you have a program that targets people like that, basically when they're suicidal,

00:36:24.280 like andrew you shared that you were suicidal at some point in your life i have also been but if

00:36:29.880 we appear able-bodied then all of a sudden we develop we deserve suicide prevention services

00:36:35.480 although it looks like made will potentially expand even for people like us but for now if

00:36:40.040 you have a physical disability if you are suicidal and it's a little bit more long-standing

00:36:45.960 you might get made one thing that i i've always struggled with on this is that it seems like a lot

00:36:51.880 of maid providers are already operating well outside the legislation as it's spelled out i

00:36:58.840 i mean we we've heard number a number of cases about this and i'm i'm wondering how that was

00:37:03.480 allowed to happen is is this coming from regulators that aren't really caring or checking up or is it

00:37:09.240 just uh you know like these these maid assessors and maid providers are just knowing that no one

00:37:14.840 is going to prosecute them because i i've personally been aware of cases where someone

00:37:18.840 who would not have been eligible in one province was eligible in another and this is not supposed

00:37:25.000 to be the case because it's a federal law so i'm wondering what's gone so wrong here already even

00:37:29.960 before this liberal government expansion kicks in i have like 10 answers to that but uh just

00:37:37.640 i'll say like first of all very concerning there is geographic variation across canada which shows

00:37:43.240 that there are different cultural practices quebec has the highest rate in the whole world 0.99

00:37:47.880 right now um as they mentioned in the article bc i think also uh certain areas of bc and even

00:37:54.760 certain areas of ontario so the the geographic changes should alarm us it means that there's a

00:38:01.160 lack of standardization two the legislation is meant to protect protect mate assessors and

00:38:08.040 providers it hasn't thought enough about patient protection like i said they've talked about

00:38:13.000 accessibility and protecting the meat assessors and providers, but not enough thought has been

00:38:18.040 given about patient protections. Three, you have a government that has allowed Health Canada

00:38:24.760 to kind of use our most ideologically, I would say, out there leaders on this issue to

00:38:35.720 guide our policy. That's not usually how we develop policy. We usually try to find a balance.

00:38:41.160 But you have people like Jocelyn Downey, Mona Gupta, people who have basically expressed that

00:38:47.160 they want the kind of widest open maid regime who are leading our Canadian policies, which is 1.00

00:38:52.740 dangerous for everybody. And then fourth, I would say that, you know, a lot of maid assessors and 0.99

00:38:58.020 providers that I know are actually very concerned about maid outside the end of life context,

00:39:02.860 and they do refuse cases. But all you need to have is a few people who are willing to kill

00:39:09.280 or end the lives of many people,

00:39:12.740 and you have a big problem

00:39:14.020 given the way our system is set up.

00:39:16.920 That is itself jarring

00:39:18.780 because I think that for the current time anyway,

00:39:21.740 and I fear that this could be under threat

00:39:23.320 with a different government,

00:39:24.260 physicians have the right to object.

00:39:26.820 And you talk about this in your piece,

00:39:28.260 they're conscientious objectors,

00:39:29.600 but even that you have an issue with

00:39:31.680 and how that's applied.

00:39:33.040 I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

00:39:35.440 Yeah, I have a big issue with,

00:39:37.200 And actually, this is what you interviewed with me for a few years ago, is that initially in Ontario, the CPSO came up with this wacky policy, and I'll call it that, called effective referral, where a physician needs to, again, considering accessibility and timeliness, needs to make an effective referral to another provider who will do the service.

00:40:02.240 um and and that basically puts patients on a very dangerous path if everyone has to

00:40:08.160 funnel people onto a death regime pathway you that partly i think explains why we have

00:40:15.360 such high numbers in canada 16 000 estimated for 2023 13 000 this is the problem of having

00:40:22.720 only a few people to do it right because now if everyone has to everyone has to direct them to

00:40:27.620 those people so even actually if you're a maid provider who is not comfortable with the case

00:40:34.360 and that's what i highlight in my policy uh piece for mcdonald laureate so even if you're a maid

00:40:39.460 provider who is uncomfortable so one of the people the trainee said they were uncomfortable with made

00:40:44.640 for poverty and the experts said well okay fine your conscience says you can't do this but you

00:40:49.480 need to make a referral and hopefully hopefully someone else will do it so if you keep putting

00:40:54.560 someone on a pathway, they're going to find a maid provider who, if they continue on that 1.00

00:41:01.020 path, which technically, if every physician keeps putting them on that path, they're going

00:41:04.460 to find somebody who will eventually do it. And there was a story, I think it came out

00:41:08.100 in the Ottawa Citizen, but an Ottawa paper about a woman who basically was referred on

00:41:13.560 six or seven times until she finally found someone in Brampton who would complete her

00:41:18.440 maid case. And they were talking about how sad it was that she had to go through seven

00:41:23.060 seven providers and I guess the real question is like why were those six providers who are okay

00:41:29.760 with MAID not okay with giving her MAID like could it be that this should have been stopped

00:41:34.540 yeah that's tragic if at first you don't succeed try try again at its at its macabre end Dr. Ramona

00:41:42.920 Coelho fantastic piece very grim but I think important in the McDonnell Laurier Institute

00:41:47.580 barriers to care persist but access to MAID keeps expanding thank you so much for coming on today

00:41:53.420 Thank you for having me.

00:41:54.540 Have a great day.

00:41:55.540 All right, yourself as well.

00:41:57.240 It's always difficult getting family physicians on

00:41:59.320 because they are just like worked morning tonight.

00:42:01.380 So we're so glad she could fit us in on short notice.

00:42:05.380 We are out of time for today,

00:42:07.000 but I wanted to give you a bit of a heads up

00:42:08.820 on what's coming on the show tomorrow.

00:42:11.480 I sat down yesterday with Kevin Vong,

00:42:14.700 who is an independent Liberal member of Parliament,

00:42:17.420 elected as a, that's me on the left there.

00:42:20.060 No, sorry, I'm on the right.

00:42:21.120 Kevin Vong's on the left.

00:42:22.280 I got us mixed up.

00:42:24.400 No, I was actually, my screen was reversed.

00:42:26.680 But this is going to be a fascinating interview.

00:42:29.160 It's about what you can do, or in some cases, what you can't do as an independent Member

00:42:34.100 of Parliament.

00:42:35.360 And that is coming out tomorrow.

00:42:37.100 We'll have a full, I think, 45 minute or so wide ranging chat and a very interesting

00:42:42.960 news story that I think is going to emerge from that interview.

00:42:46.820 So keep an eye out.

00:42:48.100 That's going to be tomorrow at the usual time, 1 o'clock Eastern, 11 a.m.

00:42:51.380 Mountain.

00:42:52.280 I am off next week, so you will be able to keep up to date on the regular old True North content.

00:42:57.780 But on Thursday, I will be on off the record once again.

00:43:00.780 So we'll hopefully have enough to keep you tied it over until I return in a week and a half's time.

00:43:06.740 Canada's most reverent talk show, The Andrew Lawton Show, True North.

00:43:09.980 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:43:13.280 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:43:15.840 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:43:22.280 We'll be right back.

00:43:52.280 We'll be right back.

Juno News - February 21, 2024

Justin Trudeau's ＂hate speech＂ ban is coming

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