Juno News - Justin Trudeau thinks Canadians need more of him

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

00:01:19.720 north hello and welcome to you all happy hump day it is wednesday midway through the week it is

00:01:30.180 april 24 2024 uh what is that oh four 24 24 i don't know if there's any significance to that

00:01:36.600 but it seemed as i said it like it might be worth pointing out anyway better than 420 we don't uh

00:01:42.500 we don't do any of that funny 420 funny 420 business on the andrew lawton show although my

00:01:47.080 inability to say funny 420 business may lead you to suspect otherwise. But nevertheless,

00:01:52.640 we had a bit of a special delivery to the studio a few moments ago. I won't lift the whole box

00:01:59.760 because I will embarrass myself. But it was a box full of these bad boys that just showed up.

00:02:05.600 This is my new, well, you're getting the reflection of the light there. There we go.

00:02:09.620 This is my new book, forthcoming biography. Well, is it still forthcoming if I'm holding it in my

00:02:14.840 hands. I don't know. For the rest of you, it's forthcoming. The release date is May 28th and it

00:02:21.320 is called Pierre Polyev, A Political Life. It is a full-length bio. You don't need to put the cover

00:02:27.000 up when I'm holding it, Sean. That was just until we had this thing, although that actually looks

00:02:32.300 like a nicer image, but there you go. It's Pierre Polyev, A Political Life. A lot of fun, actually,

00:02:38.700 and people, when I wrote my book about the Freedom Convoy, complained that there weren't pictures in

00:02:43.980 it. So on this one, we have a photo. I shouldn't show you the photos because I can't give it away,

00:02:50.100 but I'll show you one photo. This is on the inside cover. We got some old

00:02:54.200 Polyev family photos there that are in the mix. So this is a book that I was really excited to

00:03:00.960 write and I hope you are excited to read if you're interested in it and have tolerated this

00:03:05.780 never-ending promo of it. I was very excited to get those a few moments ago. You can pre-order

00:03:10.680 it for yourself at Amazon, at Indigo, or through the publisher, which is Sutherland House. And

00:03:16.080 they're at SutherlandHouseBooks.com. But nevertheless, I'm sure there will be more

00:03:20.720 about that as the release date nears. I wanted to first and foremost talk about, actually,

00:03:25.840 Pierre Polyev factors into this story a little bit, because you may recall not that long ago,

00:03:31.080 Pierre Polyev launched an ad campaign in which he uttered the phrase that I don't think most

00:03:35.860 Canadians really disagreed with that Canada is broken and you see this on the micro level when

00:03:41.580 you have Canadians who at the time were unable to get passports because the passport offices were in

00:03:47.100 such disarray and then you also had the idea that we also see increasingly an economy that is pricing

00:03:55.840 out young people from the housing market where people are not able to get jobs you have everyone

00:04:01.260 relying on the gig economy, and so on and so forth. And Pierre Polyev made the comment that I

00:04:07.720 think in large ways explains why he has become such a popular vehicle in polling numbers, which

00:04:14.260 is that people are not satisfied with the status quo. Justin Trudeau is the status quo. Pierre

00:04:19.640 Polyev is the change candidate right now. And Justin Trudeau got so indignant about this. You

00:04:25.360 may recall this speech that he gave at the Liberal Party convention just a couple of months after

00:04:30.160 Pierre Polyev was named conservative leader.

00:05:00.160 I think Canada better is always possible, but I don't accept Canadians and politicians 1.00

00:05:14.160 that talk down our country.

00:05:17.160 Let me be very clear.

00:05:22.160 Let me be very clear for the record.

00:05:27.780 Canada is not broken.

00:05:32.120 Very offended at the assertion that anyone could say Canada is broken.

00:05:37.980 Yeah, we can always do better, but the country is not broken.

00:05:41.060 The country is not broken.

00:05:42.440 Canada's working.

00:05:43.600 Everything's hunky-dory.

00:05:44.700 We've been doing a fantastic job at it.

00:05:46.500 Well, don't I listen to, because I do this stuff so you don't have to,

00:05:50.800 a 30-minute podcast interview that Justin Trudeau did this week with Vox in the U.S.

00:05:56.700 And obviously, it was a fairly left-leaning interviewer, someone who was born in Canada

00:06:02.700 but now lives in the United States.

00:06:04.920 And most of the questions to Justin Trudeau were basically like that old Simpsons question

00:06:09.400 that Lisa asked Mr. Burns, which was, your campaign has all the momentum of a runaway

00:06:13.840 freight train.

00:06:14.440 Why are you so popular?

00:06:15.880 So there wasn't really anything challenging, but you still get some revealing insights

00:06:20.500 from justin trudeau's answers and in particular i enjoyed him talking about the trials of being

00:06:26.760 a young canadian this is in audio form only but take a listen people are facing an anxiety that

00:06:34.680 the economy doesn't work for them anymore that the principles that held true for us xers for boomers

00:06:40.520 of getting a good job being able to save up for why you rent to buy a house eventually and then

00:06:46.540 you get a Morgan, you build things forward like that.

00:06:48.880 That just doesn't work anymore,

00:06:50.380 that the deck is stacked against young people

00:06:52.700 in a way that is different from previous generations.

00:06:56.400 And that's a problem because it leads to a sense of uncertainty

00:07:00.380 about the future and a sense of,

00:07:02.900 okay, the institutions and society and government can't actually help.

00:07:06.660 And that sort of feeds into populism.

00:07:08.980 The challenge that we have is,

00:07:10.820 okay, what are the biggest challenges out there in Canada?

00:07:14.360 Housing.

00:07:14.740 People can't imagine working as a nurse or a carpenter or an electrician or a police officer and living in the city that they serve.

00:07:23.900 Well, that's something that we should be able to fix, and we're working on fixing that.

00:07:28.180 We need to make sure things like people who are paying $2,000 a month on rent, besides someone else who's paying $2,000 a month for a mortgage,

00:07:37.500 well, that rent should be counted towards their credit score so they can eventually get a mortgage.

00:07:42.900 That's something that nobody thought of before because rent was never such a huge part of people's expenditures.

00:07:49.800 Making that change gives people hope, again, that you can see a better future in which you're going to be able to succeed.

00:07:57.860 So on one hand, he's saying that in his old speech that, oh, it's terribly offensive.

00:08:04.140 You can't look down on Canadians by saying Canada's broken.

00:08:06.520 And now in this interview, he's literally saying that the economy doesn't work for young Canadians,

00:08:11.560 that institutions aren't serving them, that the deck is stacked against them, and that things

00:08:17.560 aren't working for them. Now, I am no linguist, but I would say that things are not working

00:08:23.400 and things are broken are pretty semantically similar. I don't think you can be all offended

00:08:31.140 and high and mighty and get on your tall, high hybrid horse because, well, the horse has been

00:08:39.060 phased out with the carbon tax. You can't get on your high horse and be so offended and mortified

00:08:43.580 that someone says Canada is broken while turning around and saying, well, you know what, things

00:08:46.620 aren't broken. So for starters, there is some brazen hypocrisy here that Justin Trudeau is 0.91

00:08:51.200 exhibiting when he makes on one hand the comment that the brokenness of Canada is non-existent,

00:08:57.480 and on the other hand concedes that. And then there's the other side of this, which is how on

00:09:01.660 earth he can convincingly say that he has the answers when he has been the guy on whose watch

00:09:07.320 things have gotten exactly where they have gotten for the last eight years, pushing 10 by the time

00:09:13.040 the next election is likely to roll around. So all of a sudden, Justin Trudeau, just as we heard

00:09:18.360 from his government on immigration, they've just been this hapless bystander. Well, everything in

00:09:23.820 Canada has happened and it doesn't matter that it's been on their watch. It's somehow not their

00:09:28.240 fault. It's Stephen Harper's fault. In this Vox interview that he did, which I won't share the

00:09:33.180 whole half hour of with you. He was asked about populism. And, you know, Pierre Paliyev is the

00:09:38.380 angry, meanie populist. And Justin Trudeau, he's got the guy. He's the guy with all the answers.

00:09:43.980 But what's fascinating here is that Trudeau has said, oh, well, I mean, it's global. And there's

00:09:50.240 none of this stuff is just in Canada. This is happening everywhere. So he is basically trying

00:09:54.840 to make it out to be that anything bad in the country is not his fault. Anything good was his

00:10:00.500 doing and we're all supposed to just not see the glaring inconsistencies in that so you've either 0.99

00:10:06.580 been the most inept incompetent prime minister or you have been just an incredibly malicious force 0.96

00:10:11.860 and malignant force in canada those are the two options none of this oh well it's a global trend 0.97

00:10:17.140 and we've just been i mean his defense is basically that we've done nothing and we couldn't stop it

00:10:22.660 but trust us because we're going to stop it moving forward that has been justin trudeau's line on

00:10:27.380 this now that interview he did with vox i don't know how many votes it's going to get him in

00:10:31.700 canada but it's part of a new fandangled strategy the liberals are rolling out which i saw in a

00:10:38.420 toronto star piece written by susan delacorte now susan delacorte is an absolutely lovely woman

00:10:43.540 uh she's always been very good to me and has never been as rude as many of the others in

00:10:48.260 legacy media towards independent media but she's also not a particularly critical voice when it

00:10:53.860 comes to Justin Trudeau. And that's, you know, perhaps why she has a home in the Toronto Star

00:10:58.460 there. But she says, you're about to hear, this is the headline, you're about to hear Justin Trudeau

00:11:03.000 on a lot more popular podcast. Here's what's behind it. And this is apparently part of a

00:11:09.120 strategy where Justin Trudeau thinks that people need to hear more from him. So all of these

00:11:14.320 terrible liberal polling numbers that put, you know, the desirability of him as Canada's prime

00:11:19.400 Minister at like 18% among Canadians who have been surveyed. All of that is just because they 1.00

00:11:24.820 haven't heard enough from him. No, no, no. Over the last eight years, Canada and Canadians have

00:11:30.380 not heard enough from Justin Trudeau. And if only they knew the guy more, if only they heard from

00:11:35.100 him more, then they would be more inclined to support the Liberals. Maybe they're just not that

00:11:41.280 into you, Prime Minister. Maybe Canadians know full well who you are and what you're about. And

00:11:45.260 they know full well that you're the guy who's been at the helm for the last eight years. And

00:11:49.420 that is precisely why they are turning at you and turning on you and your government in such

00:11:55.720 a dramatic way. Now, I talked a bit, this was going back like 24 days ago now, when this big

00:12:02.540 giant carbon tax protest started up. And again, for a lot of people, it was just a protest on

00:12:07.980 April 1st against the carbon tax. For some people, specifically in Alberta and also in

00:12:12.740 Atlantic Canada, as I just learned, the carbon tax protest has continued. People have continued

00:12:19.160 to protest the carbon tax. They've continued to log their discontent about what's been happening

00:12:26.580 in this world with the Spike the Hike campaign from Pierre Polyev, the tax campaign, and all

00:12:32.940 of that. But what's been interesting here is that Pierre Polyev was doing a little swing through

00:12:37.520 Atlantic Canada. I don't know what day it was exactly. It was probably on the weekend, but

00:12:41.680 I'm not sure. And he decided to stop. He saw some of these carbon tax protesters near the

00:12:47.560 New Brunswick-Nova Scotia border. He decided to pull over and have a little chat with them. Now,

00:12:54.160 what was interesting about this little chat is that they were, of course, filming and streaming,

00:13:00.140 as you do when you get a heavyweight VIP that drops by your protest site. I was going to share

00:13:05.120 some of the clips, but the volume is really, really low, so it would have been difficult.

00:13:08.980 But you can hear him say at one point that everything that Justin Trudeau says is BS.

00:13:14.480 At another point, you can see him walking by their F. Trudeau flag, which they have on the back of one of their trucks.

00:13:21.240 And then he tours this little camper trailer type thing that they have set up.

00:13:25.680 And one of the things on that, like if you really, really zoom in and zoom in and zoom in on that trailer, there's what's called the Diagalon flag.

00:13:34.960 And I thought I could have gone through the rest of my life without ever having to mention Diagalon, but here we are.

00:13:40.020 It was a group that, like Marco Mendicino, basically held up as being some, you know, terror group when the Emergencies Act was coming in.

00:13:47.620 It started off as this weird internet subculture meme and joke and has since ballooned into a larger community.

00:13:54.820 I don't believe Diagalon is an organized group in any meaningful way.

00:13:59.640 I also will fully say that many of the people associated with Diagalon, including its founder, Jeremy McKenzie, have said some absolutely vile things.

00:14:08.700 These are the folks who were sitting around on a webcast joking about Anna Polyev, Pierre Polyev's wife, being raped.

00:14:15.240 So I've got no time for them.

00:14:17.140 But I also would fairly confidently say that there are probably some people out there that just thought it was a funny joke and aren't part of any of that.

00:14:24.960 But nevertheless, there was a Diagalon flag on the side of this camper.

00:14:28.500 And then the media lost their minds on this, and it set up Justin Trudeau to smack down Pierre Polyev's comments about him as a peddler of BS at a press conference this morning.

00:14:40.020 Hi, I'm Michelle Song with CBC News.

00:14:42.720 Your opponent was photographed posing with anti-carbon tax protesters flying F. Trudeau flags. 1.00

00:14:49.200 In the video, Pierre Polyev is heard saying that you are a liar and everything you say is, quote, bullshit. 0.99

00:14:55.640 Can we get your response, please? 0.99

00:14:59.460 Every politician has to make choices about what kind of leader they want to be.

00:15:06.820 Are they the kind of leader that is going to exacerbate divisions, fears and polarization

00:15:14.420 in our country, make personal attacks and welcome the support of conspiracy theorists

00:15:23.460 and extremists because that's exactly what Pierre Polyev continues to do not just when he you see

00:15:30.900 him engaging with members of Diagalon but also when he refuses to condemn and reject the endorsement

00:15:42.880 of Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a proven liar and conspiracy theorist who you know had to pay has to 0.90

00:15:52.320 pay millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, because he lied about the Sandy Hook killing 0.98

00:16:00.840 that killed 20 little kids.

00:16:04.620 This is the kind of man who's saying, Pierre Polyev has the right ideas to bring the country

00:16:11.500 towards the right, towards conspiracy theories, towards extremism, towards polarization, towards

00:16:18.540 kind of lies that Alex Jones is peddling still. So the fact that Pierre Poliev hasn't stood

00:16:28.780 up to condemn that endorsement, the fact that he continues to encourage the kind of divisive

00:16:36.780 approaches to Canada that I don't think Canadians want to see really shows that he will do anything

00:16:44.700 to win anything to torque up negativity and fear and it only emphasizes that he has

00:16:54.000 nothing to say to actually solve the problems that he's busy amplifying

00:16:59.020 it's a bit of a good omen well not good omen but it's a bit of a an illustrative omen about what

00:17:06.880 the next federal election is going to look like the liberals are trailing in the polls

00:17:11.340 Canadians have grown increasingly frustrated with the carbon tax,

00:17:14.680 so much so that they've been protesting for literally 24 days straight,

00:17:19.100 more than three weeks, longer than the Freedom Convoy,

00:17:21.960 protesting the carbon tax and the subsequent increases to the carbon tax.

00:17:26.880 The leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition is driving through town,

00:17:30.280 decides to pull over and say hello,

00:17:32.560 and Justin Trudeau focuses on this little tiny little itsy-bitsy flag on a trailer

00:17:36.760 and then pivots to Alex Jones and the far right.

00:17:39.980 This was a tweet from the Liberals a couple of days ago.

00:17:42.960 They've been doing this like every other day.

00:17:45.860 Friendly reminder that Pierre Paulyev still has not denounced his endorsement

00:17:49.900 from far-right American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

00:17:53.180 So in the election, when the conservative candidates are going to people's doors and saying,

00:17:58.400 well, you know what, we're going to axe the tax and get rid of Justin Trudeau,

00:18:01.840 and the Liberals are going to be going to the door saying,

00:18:04.140 yeah, I know everything's gotten worse for you in the last eight years,

00:18:06.860 but did you see that Alex Jones tweet?

00:18:08.760 and that's going to be the election.

00:18:11.380 So it's funny that Justin Trudeau

00:18:12.940 likes to go on American podcasts

00:18:14.680 and rail against the angry solution-free populism

00:18:19.060 that he puts at conservative leader Pierre Paulyev's feet

00:18:22.120 while he's the one that is blathering on about Alex Jones

00:18:25.500 when his opponent dares to meet with a couple of people

00:18:29.600 that are fed up with the federal carbon tax.

00:18:31.740 Quite revealing, you might say.

00:18:33.980 Well, let's pivot to this.

00:18:35.360 I mentioned the Freedom Convoy.

00:18:36.520 this is a relic in some ways of an era that many people would rather move on from an era in which

00:18:42.180 Canadians were segregated along the lines of their vaccine status. And we saw people that

00:18:47.620 were forced out of jobs they had had for years, careers they had for years, and people who bravely

00:18:53.220 put on a uniform for this country that were told they were no longer fit to serve Canada in the

00:18:58.700 Canadian Armed Forces because they would not get vaccinated against COVID-19. Well, a story from

00:19:04.920 the Epoch Times this week says that at least some Canadian Armed Forces members have been given

00:19:09.860 waivers that allow them to serve once again if they were previously sanctioned for not getting

00:19:15.900 the COVID vaccine. I wanted to talk about this with Catherine Christensen, a lawyer

00:19:19.680 with Valor Law. Good to talk to you again, Catherine. Thanks so much for coming on today.

00:19:24.920 Good afternoon, Andreas. Good to be back. So let's first off start with what's actually

00:19:30.140 changed here? What has the Canadian Armed Forces done? Well, first of all, the mandate still exists

00:19:35.880 for Canadian Armed Forces members. Certainly anyone who isn't vaccinated, isn't getting deployed,

00:19:42.940 isn't eligible for promotion. Although I can tell you that some of the people who stood up

00:19:48.360 and managed to stay serving have been promoted, have been on deployments without vaccination.

00:19:53.520 So there's some confusion there.

00:19:55.760 But apparently last fall, they quietly brought in a policy that anyone who would receive a 5F, which is unfit for service release category, strictly because of the COVID mandate, would be allowed to re-enroll and that their applications were welcome.

00:20:17.140 and with the caveat that all 5F reapplications have to be approved by the chief of defense staff.

00:20:24.500 So if you get past the recruiting application piece, the chief of defense staff has final say.

00:20:30.260 Now, I have had clients of mine who were 5F'd approach recruiting centers, certainly since

00:20:36.420 last fall, even as early as last month here in March, and the recruiting centers won't

00:20:41.940 even take their application. But then I got news directly from a recruiting source that indeed this

00:20:51.860 policy is now back, that they are allowed to apply. Now in Noah Chartier's article, he points out that

00:21:00.260 they say they've only had one person apply under this relaxed policy. I'm going to question that

00:21:08.500 because I know that for sure that there has been a lot more than one person try to apply and been

00:21:13.920 turned down at the recruiting centers. Well and I would also point out here I mean while this might

00:21:19.060 be on the surface something that looks quite positive it doesn't really get to the crux of

00:21:24.140 the issue here which is that they still have as you note the mandate they've never really apologized

00:21:29.100 for it they've never done anything to say hey we want you back it seems like they're just dealing

00:21:35.140 with the fact that uh very few people are wanting to go into the canadian armed forces right now

00:21:39.700 they've got a recruitment crisis and i think they're trying a little they're trying to really

00:21:42.980 dance around the the real root of the issue here yeah well the real root of the issue is two years

00:21:48.660 ago these same people were told they were unfit for service that the they were not uh any type

00:21:55.460 of person that the canadian armed forces wanted and now uh all of a sudden they're quietly saying

00:22:00.420 oh no come back but come back without return necessarily return to your same trade what

00:22:08.660 about compensation for the time you were off if you were that qualified that they want you back

00:22:16.740 i'm thinking that there's a bit of a conundrum they've got because if they allow them back 1.00

00:22:22.180 they're defeating their own defense because we've got lawsuits against them in the courts right now

00:22:28.260 I'm being able to stand up and say to the court, well, these people were supposedly unfit for

00:22:36.240 service and needed to be permanently released, but now they're okay to come back. That's a bit

00:22:42.280 of a dilemma. And the mandate itself is particularly absurd now because if you had

00:22:48.820 had two doses of the COVID vaccine in 2021, your protection is zero at this point. You have no

00:22:57.920 benefit over someone who did not get vaccinated at this point. I mean, so let's even assume there

00:23:03.260 was a benefit in 2021. There isn't now. So the idea of clinging to this mandate just defies

00:23:08.520 any sense of science. And really, I had spoken to one veteran about this a couple of years ago,

00:23:14.900 And he had said that basically it was a compliance issue more than it was a medicine issue.

00:23:19.600 They wanted to weed out the type of person that didn't want it more than there was any, you know, strategic or operational reason that it needed to be there.

00:23:28.560 Exactly. Because let's face it, going into this mandate of General Ayers, they'd already gone through working in the nursing homes.

00:23:38.660 So ground zero, where a lot of the deaths took place, we had armed force members there, and not one of them died of COVID from that exposure. So that's pre-vaccine. So then they bring in this vaccination and decimated the Canadian Armed Forces because they've lost so many people over it, as well as the woke agenda is also to blame.

00:24:01.280 But they lost a lot of very capable people with exemplary military records just because of the people standing up and saying, no, I'm not going to take it, whether it's against my religion, whether I don't have informed consent, or I want my bodily autonomy, or I have medical reasons that I can't take it.

00:24:21.960 And now that they're desperate, they seem to want them back.

00:24:26.920 We had you on the show back in June when you had launched, I think it was like a $500 million lawsuit representing hundreds of soldiers at the time about this.

00:24:36.860 And I just wanted to ask, I know these things can take years, but what's the status on that one now?

00:24:42.540 Well, it's been interesting because we ended up launching a second mass tort after the first one came out and people approached our office.

00:24:49.940 So we're up to about 458, and the two lawsuits, they were only a few months apart from filing,

00:24:55.760 but they've caught up to each other because it's the same Crown lawyer, and they've been playing

00:25:00.780 some games. We sent them our affidavit of documents, which is basically a list of our

00:25:07.420 evidence, and they didn't reply back. So I went into the court to force them to give me a list

00:25:14.700 their evidence. We've now ended up in case management and we are before the case management

00:25:19.980 justice next week and I'm looking forward to hearing the Crown lawyer defend why he can't

00:25:27.100 give me a list of his evidence to defend because at this point they've got no evidence and the

00:25:32.860 longer they delay the better it is for me because now we're well over 300,000 pages of evidence of

00:25:39.980 wrongdoing in the Canadian armed forces. So they keep delaying, it's just going to get worse.

00:25:46.380 I seem to recall, and I might be mixing up the case, but when there was the lawsuit against the

00:25:51.580 federal air travel vaccine mandate, I think the applicants had a similar issue in that it was like

00:25:57.580 pulling teeth to get the government to provide the evidentiary basis it had for this policy, which,

00:26:03.580 I mean, maybe in politics you can get away with fudging on the evidence, but in a court there is

00:26:07.500 still a process and if you don't provide evidence for your side of it you don't actually have a

00:26:11.820 case do you right yeah so this is exactly what my motion in january when i filed it was saying well

00:26:17.580 if they don't want to provide me with any evidence to defend then i want uh leave of the court to

00:26:24.220 bring a summary judgment give us what we ask for because you can't defend against what we've claimed

00:26:28.940 um they're in a bit of a situation here because uh cap is well known for blocking any access

00:26:37.420 information requests but we spent two years very quietly asking for information through access to

00:26:44.380 information requests and we collected hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence before they

00:26:50.060 even knew we were bringing a lawsuit because not one of those requests came out of my office they

00:26:54.220 were all done by private individuals um so we've kind of gone around done an end run around them

00:27:01.500 and we have a lot more evidence i think than they realized that we have we would have going

00:27:05.420 into the lawsuit. In my opinion, I think they're also trying to delay moving into depositions

00:27:17.180 where I'm going to be calling General Eyre, General Cadu, General Fortan, Admiral McDonald,

00:27:25.340 all of those are going to be called to testify under oath. And when General Whalen's court

00:27:31.580 marshal was coming along the day before they wanted to have air testify at that they dropped

00:27:38.220 the charges to keep him from having to testify under oath so interesting well they're terrible

00:27:43.900 they're terrible with access to information requests i filed one in january about tampons

00:27:49.020 in washrooms on army bases because you know there was they were they were all getting removed by

00:27:54.140 soldiers that thought it was nonsense when there's a tampon dispenser in the men's washroom and that's

00:27:58.860 still taken over three months and i don't have the records yet so i feel like i have to buckle

00:28:02.780 in for a long wait i'm i'm amazed you got all you did in two years given how dnd has been on these

00:28:07.980 requests in the past well the information commissioner has actually been very helpful

00:28:12.060 she has actually brought lawsuits against the calf to get documents that we have asked for 0.80

00:28:16.540 um the longest uh access to information requests i thought uh it was a long time but there's some

00:28:23.660 that have been years and years and years and they still don't have that information uh even though

00:28:29.340 they're entitled to it so uh we we did it we kind of outmaneuvered the system which is what my

00:28:37.100 clients hired me to do because after we tried the injunction i said okay we're gonna go deep we're

00:28:42.380 gonna go dark and i've got all military people who are really good at keeping secrets if they have to

00:28:48.460 and very smart and very motivated and they did fantastic work for me yeah it shows what happens

00:28:54.540 when you alienate a very skilled dedicated group of people and they have an axe to grind time on

00:29:00.220 their hands and those skills that were previously being deployed for the country and now are being

00:29:04.220 deployed against the bureaucrats in the department keep in mind that these are people who know that

00:29:10.140 the documents exist because they wrote the documents yeah so they know what to ask for

00:29:15.100 which is so key it's not just a fishing expedition right yeah yeah they're like well here's my chain

00:29:20.940 of command and i know i had emails with all of these people and in some cases they still had the

00:29:26.060 email they they you know they brought it with them so we knew to send in the action uh information

00:29:32.380 requests to get it legitimately through the process and then they'd say well though that

00:29:36.700 that doesn't exist and we'd go yes it does well good stuff we'll uh wish you well on this catherine

00:29:44.380 please do keep us posted as you work your way through the system here i sure will and we're

00:29:48.540 also bringing a vaccine injury one we've got lots of members of the canadian forces who were injured

00:29:55.100 from the moderna vaccine so that's coming up too all right well appreciate that very much

00:30:00.060 katherine christensen from valor law out in alberta thank you so much katherine take care andrew all

00:30:05.580 right well one issue that we have been covering all week has been the united nations ongoing

00:30:11.820 efforts to push a plastics treaty we have the big confab in ottawa this week thousands of delegates

00:30:17.500 from around the world we had the federal government on monday announce the formation of a plastics

00:30:23.020 registry which will be coming around 2025 i believe and we've talked about some of the details on

00:30:29.420 that but i think at its core we have to really go back to first principles here because what

00:30:33.740 the federal government has done is really designated plastic as a toxin and once you've

00:30:39.340 done that once you say plastic is toxic you're actually able to justify a lot which was why the

00:30:44.940 federal government was slapped down in the way that it was when it had that single-use plastics

00:30:49.980 ban the conservative party of canada now has decided to launch a campaign to bring back the

00:30:54.620 plastic straws which uh you know isn't we don't have the photo handy but that's an issue near and

00:30:59.180 dear to my heart the the plastic straw crusade by the government but let's actually talk about

00:31:03.660 the science here we have always been told we have to follow the science what does the science say

00:31:09.180 on plastics. I wanted to bring into the show Dr. Chris D'Armond. He's the president of Phantom

00:31:14.700 Plastics. Now, he actually is an expert on this. He's not just a guy who is in the industry and

00:31:20.380 represents a commercial interest. He actually knows the science in and out on this and has

00:31:25.020 spoken about it around the world. Chris, it's good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming

00:31:28.780 on the show today. Yeah, thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

00:31:31.900 so let's talk first and foremost about that idea of plastic being a toxin what's the argument that

00:31:39.640 they advanced to justify this and and why would you say they're getting it wrong or what are they

00:31:43.820 missing yeah that's a great point so you can't just make up things and say this is that or that's

00:31:48.880 the other i mean there are scientific ways of telling what's toxic and what isn't toxic

00:31:52.080 so when that was that accusation was made i went and looked up the science and that's the problem

00:31:57.500 in general people say um you know this person's for plastic against plastic we shouldn't be for

00:32:02.780 or against anything we should be for finding what's true right and then once we found the

00:32:07.100 evidence once we found what's true then we move on from there and make sensible choices and people

00:32:11.340 have forgotten that they're so busy taking sides no one's checking the facts so i'm looking at a

00:32:15.980 table right here which i've posted online which is you know the epa's definition of what's toxic

00:32:20.780 and what's less toxic and if we look at um plastics we like polyethylene polypropylene pet

00:32:27.020 and so forth we find that they're the safest things so there are four categories of toxicity

00:32:31.980 they're in the safest category that there is so they're as safe as things we have on our table

00:32:37.500 they're they're safer than table salt for example um and i'm looking at a list of there are safest

00:32:42.700 alcohol which we drink every day that's the category that these plastics are in they're

00:32:46.460 literally so safe you could eat them every day and nothing would happen to you so it's whereas

00:32:50.860 if you look at things like copper metal which drinking water pipes are made of they're in the

00:32:54.540 most toxic category so there are ways of telling what's toxic what isn't toxic there are literally

00:32:59.740 numbers that define how much of this you can ingest and have a problem or not have a problem

00:33:04.140 and plastics are simply non-toxic so for somebody to just make up in his bathtub one day this is

00:33:10.220 toxic and i decree it so he's not julius caesar right i mean there are actual ways and scientists

00:33:15.020 have been studying this for 50 years right this and it's it's all documented and available to the

00:33:19.660 public so it's um beyond absurd that somebody should make such a proper proclamation well and

00:33:24.940 i find that in this argument and certainly when you look at the policy response to it they conflate

00:33:29.500 two issues because you could say plastic is non-toxic but there is a pollution issue and

00:33:33.980 you could say we don't like plastic that's being dumped in the oceans and parts of the world but

00:33:38.060 but you're right that when they use the toxic label to justify policy which is what the federal

00:33:44.060 government in canada did it just doesn't have a basis at all so how do they argue that it is

00:33:49.500 when the evidence is so clear on this that it isn't that's strange i haven't looked into their

00:33:53.420 argument actually i haven't so i'm a scientist i said i don't think there's much there they just

00:33:57.100 made it up i i do know that i looked the same guy and it's so funny that they call him right

00:34:01.100 honorable because it appears to be any anything but honorable as far as i can tell because whenever

00:34:05.660 i compare what he says to what science says they're the exact opposite he tried to ban a

00:34:10.140 flame retardant called dbdpe and i wrote a report i was so outraged that i wrote a report and read 0.90

00:34:15.900 all the science on that he proposed banning one of the safest flame retardants that prevents 0.98

00:34:20.300 canadians from dying in their bed in flames uh based on zero evidence he had not one piece of

00:34:26.140 experimental evidence upon which to declare this stuff is dangerous and there is science on that

00:34:31.660 substance it's been thoroughly tested for years and years and years and found to be completely

00:34:35.340 safe it's so safe that if you eat it like not a molecule of it dissolves because it's completely

00:34:39.420 insoluble so they say that they're banning this flame retardant on the precautionary principle

00:34:45.020 which means better safe than sorry. Whereas what they're actually doing is the opposite. It's

00:34:48.860 better sorry than safe. You're saying, okay, I'd rather that hundreds of Canadians potentially die

00:34:52.620 in flames on the one hand versus zero evidence of toxicity on the other. And that's what happens

00:34:57.480 when you let ideology get out of control and forget to check the data. Just as a complete

00:35:03.140 non-scientist here, I'll ask you, are all plastics, when it comes to the toxicity question,

00:35:08.040 are all plastics created equally? Or is there a distinction between the plastic that's in a

00:35:12.920 plastic straw and the plastic that's in an industrial PVC pipe? Yeah, well, in general,

00:35:17.800 plastics are made of really big molecules. And so the FDA has declared them basically safe. So

00:35:22.460 plastics are assumed to be safe because they don't migrate around. The molecules can't move.

00:35:26.880 They can't go through your skin, for example. The molecules can't go through your skin. They're so

00:35:30.120 large. So they're considered, due to their very nature, safer than almost all chemicals. Is there

00:35:35.520 a plastic that's toxic? I don't know of one. I've looked at all the major thermoplastics and I don't

00:35:40.640 think um i can think of a toxic plastic right now that's toxic and if another question that

00:35:47.040 people ask is okay well maybe the plastic's not toxic but what about the additives in them

00:35:50.720 and that tape table i just mentioned i looked up the toxicity of the standard additives in

00:35:54.800 these plastics like polyethylene polypropylene and don't forget these are things fda approved

00:35:59.280 that you can put them in your mouth and store food in them so they've already been tested and

00:36:02.640 found to be safe we know what migrates out of them the additives if they come out and how much

00:36:07.360 but these even the additives themselves when you check their toxicity they're the same as plastics

00:36:11.200 they're so safe you can eat teaspoons of them and nothing happens to you might not be delicious

00:36:16.480 though that uh but flavor flavor is not the uh the metric here so so let's take a look at what's

00:36:22.480 happening in in ottawa this week we have uh the world leaders on this trying to convene to create

00:36:27.760 a plastic treaty and you have the federal government in canada saying we need a plastic

00:36:32.640 registry companies need to account for all that they're doing and creating i know you've actually

00:36:37.120 consulted with a lot of these companies in the past. And as I've understood it, a lot of them

00:36:41.660 are well aware of what they're producing and where it's going. I mean, this is just a basic part of

00:36:46.160 what they're doing from an industrial perspective. And I don't see why the hand of government is

00:36:50.780 what's needed here. Yeah. So let me give some perspective on that. My job is to be a plastic

00:36:56.520 scientist, and I've done it for decades, right? The thing that I'm discussing with you today is

00:37:00.380 not what I get paid to do. I'm not paid to be a plastic environmentalist. The reason I got into

00:37:04.280 this is that my own daughters were taught lies at school and that made me angry so as a hobby i read

00:37:08.920 four thousand scientific studies and i found that nobody's checking the facts the media aren't

00:37:13.160 checking the facts apart from people like you who crusade for truth like i do and the green groups

00:37:17.960 are making hundreds of millions of dollars from telling lies because every time you compare what

00:37:21.800 they say to the facts you find that they're the exact opposite as i mentioned so have you ever

00:37:26.120 heard that um we eat a credit card of plastics a week for example the latest scientific peer-reviewed

00:37:31.320 study said it would take 20 000 years to eat a credit card of plastic but guess what these green

00:37:36.280 groups have got that up on their websites right next to a big juicy donate now button right and

00:37:40.840 if you want to understand something follow the money so i'm not here to defend plastics i'm not

00:37:45.000 here to do anything other than take the evidence which was really tedious i didn't have these

00:37:49.480 reading glasses before i started reading these thousands of studies so i take the evidence and

00:37:53.560 present it fairly so if you look on my website or in my free book you'll see that everything

00:37:57.640 that i quote is cited verbatim where i literally copy and paste from the study with zero spin

00:38:01.960 and cite the study so you can click a link and go and check it yourself and that's where we should

00:38:05.800 start let's not start with pro-plastic or against plastic let's start with what's true and what

00:38:10.120 isn't true and um to your point probably the single most disappointing thing for me is that

00:38:17.000 this thing with plastics is a big distraction if you look at what's actually harming the environment

00:38:21.400 plastic is half a percent of the materials we use so in our obsession to talk about plastic

00:38:26.760 all day and all night which is half a percent of the materials we use it's the greenest option

00:38:31.800 in 90 percent of cases according to life cycle studies so we're obsessing over half a percent

00:38:36.520 of all of our materials that's almost always the least harmful option and completely ignoring the

00:38:41.480 99 of material which is almost always the the most harmful option so the issue isn't that

00:38:46.520 plastics have an impact they certainly do and there is litter but it's not just plastic that's

00:38:50.840 litter and it litter isn't caused by materials either it's caused by people so pretty much

00:38:55.720 everything is off track here we're not making any impact and we're in fact doomed to failure if we

00:39:00.040 keep obsessing over plastic and not talking about the 99 of problematic materials well and also a

00:39:06.280 lot of these objectives from the green industry tend to butt up against each other i was skimming

00:39:11.560 through your book uh the plastics paradox and one of the headlines you you cite is about coca-cola

00:39:17.640 in that coca-cola was so committed to reducing its carbon footprint they uh got rid of aluminum

00:39:23.320 and switch to plastic bottle collection so here you have again a company saying oh wow we have

00:39:27.720 to do the right thing for the environment plastic is the environmental the environmentally superior

00:39:32.680 alternative yes the only way to know what's more harmful and less harmful is something called a

00:39:37.080 life cycle analysis and that's accepted by governments and ngos and companies all around

00:39:41.320 the world and it's scientifically proven for 50 years and homes to become better and better

00:39:45.320 and it's peer-reviewed so it's hard to cheat right there are five such studies on drink containers

00:39:50.200 that you just mentioned and they all say that the plastic bottle causes least harm so why would you

00:39:55.160 ever go to metal or glass which is scientifically proven to cause vastly more harm and i'm not just

00:40:00.520 talking about co2 vastly more fossil fuel burned because you need a lot of energy to make to melt

00:40:05.640 glass and metal and more of the other things as well like eutrophication and acid rain and so

00:40:10.680 forth it's when you switch to an alternative you end up with more waste more and more harm in almost

00:40:15.480 every parameter you can measure. Yeah. And the thing is that we have to look at what we are

00:40:21.240 creating plastic to replace and what those alternatives are. I mean, people would love

00:40:26.860 to say, all right, let's take the plastic bottle away. And sure, you know, maybe we could all use

00:40:30.900 a reusable water bottle that somehow is better than a plastic water bottle. But for the most

00:40:36.320 part, I don't think it works out. And anyone who's ever had reusable grocery bags knows you

00:40:40.400 basically buy as many of them as you would use plastic bags because you forget them at home.

00:40:44.340 And I somehow I feel that it's more intensive here. But plastic is replacing something. And, you know, I'll read the list that you have here. Paper, cotton, glass and metal.

00:40:55.700 You have to pick one material of those. And plastic is generally the best of them.

00:41:01.120 If you look at 100 lifecycle studies, plastic beats those materials in every study I've seen. The only things that are consistently greener than plastic are wood and wool.

00:41:09.320 and unfortunately we can't run the internet based on you know based on a knitted computer and a

00:41:14.560 and a wooden wooden wire is coming to our house and my wool straw hasn't taken off yet i need to

00:41:20.160 go back and rework the prototype so yeah there are things that are greener than plastic in

00:41:25.440 certain applications and i say that in my book because i am genuinely just trying to be honest

00:41:29.120 here and show show people the facts so they can make smart choices so what we have is a bunch of

00:41:33.240 green groups who as dr patrick moore said and i have his book in front of me here's two of his

00:41:37.320 books this is a guy who was the president of greenpeace and he left in disgust and said they

00:41:41.860 just make up lies for donations they abandoned the environment decades ago according to him

00:41:46.000 and the other big green groups did the same thing they're making hundreds of millions from just

00:41:50.300 saying things that aren't true when you check the science and that's the problem because government's

00:41:53.820 listening to these people i was just in ottawa with a bunch of these people all around telling

00:41:58.440 you know just telling whoppers all day long and whereas the plastics people are in there

00:42:02.080 spending hundreds of millions of their own money losing money sometimes doing things which are the

00:42:06.620 right thing to do, even though they might not be profitable. It's exactly the wrong way around.

00:42:10.520 When we're kids, we're taught that it's the big bad industry. And then there are these crusaders

00:42:14.340 for truth. But this has been distorted and turned the other way around where the people that we

00:42:18.340 think crusade for truth are just telling us lies all the time. So let me ask you, and I fear I know

00:42:24.780 the answer to this, but perhaps you can set me at ease. Do governments call you up? Do politicians

00:42:29.240 call you up when they're putting these policies in place? Or is it done completely in the absence

00:42:34.020 of all this evidence you've collected over the years?

00:42:37.200 Yeah, so as I said, this is a hobby.

00:42:38.500 And for the first three years,

00:42:39.440 so I've done it all unpaid, not a single penny, right?

00:42:42.180 And in the beginning,

00:42:43.260 people were really like shocked at the message

00:42:45.100 because they had never heard,

00:42:46.100 they'd never seen the truth before.

00:42:47.100 So they were rightfully amazed.

00:42:48.900 And I said, well, please look,

00:42:49.800 because there are two sides

00:42:50.780 and one side has the evidence on it.

00:42:52.500 So now we're a few years later

00:42:53.800 and I'm being asked to give speeches

00:42:55.120 and governments are asking me.

00:42:57.100 So the Canadian shadow government

00:42:58.920 has asked me to testify and show the facts.

00:43:01.040 And the United Arab Emirates said,

00:43:02.680 hey, we don't want to make the same mistakes

00:43:03.960 that they made in europe and in america and canada we want to start afresh look at the evidence and

00:43:08.360 then make policies because you mentioned bags a second ago there was a bag ban in new jersey and

00:43:13.400 they looked afterwards to see what happened and what happened after the ban was just what you said

00:43:17.240 would happen they had vastly higher sales of plastic because these very thin plastic bags

00:43:22.440 had to be replaced with much thicker bags so you go and buy an actual garbage can liner which is

00:43:27.400 five times thicker than a transparent polyethylene grocery bag and they had what they said was

00:43:32.680 exponentially more greenhouse gas. And that's exactly what we would have predicted by the 30

00:43:37.100 studies which are published that said that that would happen. And instead, they just implement

00:43:41.020 these policies. And it literally takes you 10 seconds to do a Google search. You can go into

00:43:45.420 Google now and type in LCABAG, and you will find peer-reviewed lifecycle studies. Why has no

00:43:51.660 politician ever done that? Why hasn't Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund or Ellen MacArthur

00:43:55.640 Foundation in the last years and years and years ever occurred to them to do a Google search on

00:44:00.740 the very topic that they claim to care about. That is shocking. And that really shows what

00:44:04.620 their true motives are. Well, I'm glad you've made your book available for free. They have

00:44:08.920 no excuse to not read it. The Plastics Paradox. I dug into it this week and I hope to finish it

00:44:15.640 on the weekend. But Dr. Chris de Armit, thank you so much, sir. Really great to talk to you.

00:44:20.140 Thanks for caring about evidence. I really respect that. Cheers. Thanks. All right. I appreciate

00:44:23.460 your appreciation of it. Thank you, Chris. Well, since we're plugging books here, let me do this

00:44:28.020 one again. Pierre Polyev, A Political Life, hot off the press. It's available for pre-order at

00:44:33.480 Amazon, Indigo, and Sutherland House. That's it for me for today. We will be back tomorrow with

00:44:38.820 more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North. Thank you, God bless, and good day to

00:44:43.840 you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North

00:44:49.640 at www.tnc.news.

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Juno News - April 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau thinks Canadians need more of him

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