Juno News - Katie Telford testified for over two hours yet said nothing

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.720 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by TrueNord.

00:00:15.900 Oh, I'm sorry, I dozed off there.

00:00:19.540 I was watching Katie Telford's two and a half hour testimony

00:00:23.480 before a House of Commons committee.

00:00:26.540 I think I made my way through the first two hours, and then I just passed out.

00:00:32.440 I didn't even know I was on air right now.

00:00:34.100 What time is it?

00:00:35.020 Three, three?

00:00:35.540 Okay, so I've been out for a little over an hour.

00:00:37.340 Has anything happened?

00:00:38.200 No?

00:00:38.920 I didn't miss anything?

00:00:40.100 No?

00:00:40.500 She said nothing?

00:00:41.840 Oh, who could have seen that coming?

00:00:44.180 Well, if you would like that question answered, please check out today's daily brief in which

00:00:49.120 I said, you know, I bet Katie Telford is not going to say a darn thing.

00:00:53.360 Welcome, my friends, to Canada's most irreverent talk show, The Andrew Lawton Show here on True

00:00:58.500 North, closing out the week on this Friday, April 14th, 2023. And the aforementioned testimony by

00:01:07.420 Katie Telford, I don't even, like I shouldn't have even budgeted time in the show to talk about it

00:01:12.800 because there's nothing to talk about. She sat there and MPs asked her questions. She gave what

00:01:19.720 were theoretically in the broadest sense of the phrase characterized as answers although I think

00:01:26.680 responses is probably more actually I think even that's a bit generous and at the end of it I don't

00:01:32.880 think we know anything more about China's interference in Canadian elections or the

00:01:37.660 government's response or lack of response than we did a couple of hours ago so I think that the

00:01:43.740 conservatives made a bit of a tactical error in putting so much emphasis on getting Katie

00:01:50.940 Telford to testify, the chief of staff to Justin Trudeau, taking questions from parliamentarians.

00:01:57.080 They're all going to get to the bottom of it. They're asking what she knew, when she knew it,

00:02:00.800 what she was briefed on, when she was briefed, how much she told Justin Trudeau, how much was

00:02:05.620 passed along to the liberal campaign and all of that. And look, the questions are fair. The issue

00:02:10.820 is a reasonable one, but it's not something that the Liberals have any interest in being

00:02:16.440 transparent about. So I don't know why anyone thought that putting Katie Telford in the hot

00:02:22.260 seat on committee was going to reveal anything whatsoever. So I'm not exaggerating here. Believe

00:02:28.400 me when I say I have nothing to report to you from what happened. I can talk about what didn't

00:02:35.640 happen. And I can certainly talk about how she went around talking, but there's literally no

00:02:40.560 new information that came out of this. So what happened first and foremost was everything was

00:02:47.560 concealed by national security, anything that would have been substantive. It's like, well,

00:02:52.880 I can't talk about that. That's national security. Well, I can't talk about that. I had to undertake

00:02:57.480 to not disclose this, so I can't talk about it. And there are obviously very real things that are

00:03:03.080 protected under national security grounds. But here we're talking about an inquiry that is

00:03:08.000 supposed to be led by the people representing the Canadian people, representing those of us in the

00:03:14.200 country to whom the government is supposed to be accountable, not the other way around.

00:03:19.480 And when it came to things that Katie Telford would be legally authorized to say,

00:03:24.620 curiously, she didn't have any of the answers. Anytime she was asked a question that was even

00:03:28.820 potentially interesting, she would say, well, you know, I didn't, I wasn't in that meeting.

00:03:32.800 I don't know about a meeting like that.

00:03:34.580 Oh, you'd have to talk to so-and-so.

00:03:36.200 Oh, you'd have to talk to them.

00:03:37.300 Oh, that was on the campaign.

00:03:39.080 I mean, she couldn't even answer the one question that I thought was probably the easiest question.

00:03:44.860 A conservative MP, Michael Barrett, said to Katie Telfer,

00:03:48.300 I don't have a clip of it handy, but this is legitimately the question.

00:03:52.220 What role did you have on the campaign?

00:03:56.000 And her answer was, I was on the bus.

00:03:59.900 Like, were you driving the bus?

00:04:01.660 Were you catering on the bus? Were you doing push-ups on the bus?

00:04:05.440 Were you holding the camera for Justin Trudeau to do his video takes?

00:04:10.020 Like, what were you doing on the bus?

00:04:11.700 Were you advising? Were you consulting?

00:04:13.540 Were you just, like, sleeping like I was at the beginning of the show?

00:04:16.520 So who knows what she was doing? She was on the bus.

00:04:19.420 And conveniently, when anything came up of substance that had to do with, oh, I don't know,

00:04:23.900 Handong, the then-liberal candidate that it sounded like was getting a little bit of a push

00:04:28.640 from the Chinese Politburo.

00:04:30.460 She said, well, I wasn't in any conversation.

00:04:32.580 So did any conversations take place?

00:04:34.480 I don't know.

00:04:35.080 Maybe I wasn't in any conversations.

00:04:38.020 You'll have to talk to so-and-so.

00:04:39.500 So apparently, we're going to hear from someone on this committee

00:04:44.540 that's connected to the liberal campaign

00:04:46.480 at a meeting that will be scheduled in April.

00:04:48.820 And maybe when we hear from the campaign source,

00:04:51.400 we'll get a bit more information about what could have happened,

00:04:55.660 what might have happened, what didn't happen.

00:04:57.280 But I'm not optimistic, and here's why I go back to comments I made several weeks ago about why I'm not holding my breath that a public inquiry, even if we were to have one, would actually reveal as much as people think.

00:05:13.780 Because the government has all of these different tricks up its sleeve, all of these tools at its disposal to not give up information.

00:05:20.460 I mean, you look at the Freedom Convoy and then the resulting Public Order Emergency Commission,

00:05:25.480 the government made a point of saying it was the most transparent exercise in the history of governments anywhere or whatever it was.

00:05:32.940 You know, we've waived cabinet confidence, we've waived this, we've waived that.

00:05:36.720 And even with all of those waivers, there was information that the government wouldn't give.

00:05:42.400 The government wouldn't give, for example, information that it said was protected under solicitor-client privilege,

00:05:47.680 which ended up being a pretty critical piece of evidence in this whole discussion.

00:05:52.660 So you take a public inquiry that talks about something

00:05:55.280 that is directly related to national security,

00:05:57.360 and you know that there's not going to be transparency.

00:06:00.640 So instead, we're to be satisfied that David Johnston,

00:06:04.380 the uber-eminent special rapporteur on China's interference in Canada's elections,

00:06:10.060 a guy who takes these, like, you know, he goes on parades with Xi Jinping,

00:06:14.000 he buddy-buddies with Xi Jinping,

00:06:15.600 he made one comment i the exact quote i can't remember but i remember the critical word

00:06:20.920 which was that he was in china and said he felt at home there well i mean increasingly in justin

00:06:27.300 trudeau's canada it's probably not all that uncharacteristic to feel at home in china so

00:06:31.620 that's more of a reflection of justin trudeau's canada than of david johnson i guess but

00:06:36.420 here's a guy who doesn't actually engage with people that aren't like him he is uber eminent

00:06:43.280 He plays by different rules.

00:06:44.720 It doesn't matter that he goes on ski trips with the Trudeau family.

00:06:47.880 He is eminent enough to be his royal eminent eminence

00:06:51.440 and then be special enough to be the rapporteur,

00:06:55.120 irrespective of these connections.

00:06:56.920 So he may come out with a finding that suggests there should be a public inquiry,

00:07:01.440 which would be probably David Johnston's greatest ability to save face and say,

00:07:06.660 yeah, you know what?

00:07:07.360 I want to just say that I realize this is bigger than me.

00:07:10.000 I'm not going to sweep it under the rug.

00:07:11.400 Y'all have to have an inquiry.

00:07:13.280 because David Johnson will definitely use the word y'all you can mark my words but all of that

00:07:18.780 is besides the point in that I'm not saying we should ignore this thing because this is important

00:07:25.420 and where there's smoke there's fire and I don't actually agree fundamentally with what my colleague

00:07:31.240 Andrew Kirsch said on the show last week the former CSIS intelligence officer who basically

00:07:36.480 took the position that well we shouldn't be celebrating leaks I think at the same time

00:07:40.000 time, whether we could hand-ring about what should have happened, we do have this information now.

00:07:46.060 We know there was Chinese interference in Canada's elections. We know it was to benefit 0.78

00:07:51.260 the Liberals, and we know that Justin Trudeau's story of this has changed more times than I can

00:07:56.780 count. Remember when it was, well, I was never briefed on funding, and then it was, oh yes,

00:08:01.260 I was briefed, but I didn't know the extent of it, and then it was, yes, I've received many

00:08:05.420 briefings and then just this week he had like changed tack again and was talking about how

00:08:11.340 many times he was briefed on this and how seriously he took it and how they were working

00:08:15.240 around the clock to solve it so so which is it is that it was no big deal or is it that this was

00:08:21.400 something that you were actively engaged in and you were staying on top of and it's a learning

00:08:25.820 opportunity for us all and all that because uh the liberals now have been proven to be trying to get

00:08:32.460 very cute with their excuses. Even when Justin Trudeau said that he was never briefed, he didn't

00:08:38.020 say technically he was never briefed on Chinese interference. He said he was never briefed on

00:08:43.660 China funding candidates. And in the context, he was trying to get people off his back. He was

00:08:50.380 trying to make it sound like, oh, this is the first I'm learning of it when the media is bringing it

00:08:54.560 up. But what he was actually admitting to is that he did have conversations about the broader issue

00:09:01.860 of interference, but he wasn't going to cop to that one specific part of it. So maybe that part

00:09:06.640 wasn't brought up in a briefing at that time or something like that, or maybe it was. I mean,

00:09:11.300 one of the documents that we've seen in the last couple of days shows just the extent to which

00:09:17.320 there were meetings between the CSIS director and the National Security Advisor and the government.

00:09:24.080 I'm looking right now at a document, and I just want to get the name of the committee right here.

00:09:30.640 This is a document that was published in the committee's digital binder.

00:09:35.600 So these are documents that were provided to committee, and they show a list of meetings,

00:09:40.920 a list of meetings that are specifically about briefings on foreign election interference.

00:09:46.960 October 22nd, 2018, the National Security Advisor met with Justin Trudeau.

00:09:52.320 February 9th, 2021, the Director of CSIS briefed Justin Trudeau.

00:09:57.120 June 14th, 2022, the National Security Advisor briefed Justin Trudeau.

00:10:03.120 October of 2022, the CSIS Director did.

00:10:06.460 November 30th, the NSIA, the National Security Advisor did.

00:10:11.120 And on March 20th, just, what, three weeks ago,

00:10:14.620 the National Security Advisor and the CSIS Director both briefed Justin Trudeau on this.

00:10:20.340 You then take another look at this and talk about briefings to ministers.

00:10:25.140 And oh my goodness, we have here, I'm looking at the list, August 15th, 2018, October 5th, 2018, November 26th of that year, January of 2019, April 2019, May 2019, June, July, August, August.

00:10:41.380 We had monthly meetings in August of 2019, an election year by the way, two back-to-back briefings for the Minister of Democratic Institutions by the CSIS Director, by the Chief of CSE, the Communications Security Establishment, and on and on these went into 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

00:11:06.840 So the government was painfully aware,

00:11:10.980 vividly so, that election interference was an issue.

00:11:14.560 They were getting ongoing briefings.

00:11:16.320 So if they were not briefed to the full extent of this,

00:11:20.340 that is an example of all of these briefers

00:11:23.180 being colossally bad at their job,

00:11:25.700 that they don't even bring up the details

00:11:27.380 on which they're supposed to be briefing.

00:11:29.360 But I actually suspect that wasn't the case.

00:11:31.900 And by the way, Katie Telford was briefed

00:11:34.500 as a representative of the office.

00:11:36.480 There were other briefings here

00:11:37.580 that weren't with Justin Trudeau,

00:11:39.400 but were with the prime minister's office

00:11:42.080 when that didn't happen,

00:11:43.500 as Katie Telford said today.

00:11:44.980 So she didn't say one thing.

00:11:46.320 It would generally be with her.

00:11:49.180 And then when you look at the list

00:11:50.400 of briefings that took place

00:11:52.500 with political party representatives,

00:11:54.640 so people that signed an agreement

00:11:56.240 to not talk about it,

00:11:57.740 they were being told these things as well.

00:11:59.680 And included in that would be liberal aides,

00:12:02.800 liberal campaign officials

00:12:03.960 that presumably were being told,

00:12:05.720 hey, we've got some concerns with some of your candidates

00:12:08.960 and their relationship with China, here you go.

00:12:12.640 So you'd think at some point there would have been a conversation,

00:12:15.640 to take Handong's name, because he's been accused and he's been named,

00:12:19.980 so he has a right to defend himself.

00:12:22.560 He has said that this is not an accurate allegation,

00:12:25.600 but he has been accused of being the beneficiary of Chinese interference in these documents.

00:12:31.600 So presumably there would have been a conversation at some point

00:12:34.100 among some pretty chief liberals. 0.51

00:12:35.920 Hey, do we cut this hand-on guy loose or do we keep him around?

00:12:41.220 Even if they sided with keeping him, which they did,

00:12:44.880 you'd think there would have at least been a conversation.

00:12:48.000 But Katie Telfer had no idea.

00:12:49.680 She says, well, I wasn't a part of that.

00:12:51.840 So what were you doing?

00:12:52.680 I know you were on the bus, but what were you doing if you were not there?

00:12:55.980 Because if you were on the bus with Justin Trudeau,

00:12:58.180 presumably you would have been around Justin Trudeau

00:13:00.360 if he were having this conversation.

00:13:02.420 So either we have these things

00:13:03.920 that have just not been taken seriously

00:13:05.820 by the liberals,

00:13:07.320 which is entirely possible,

00:13:08.760 or we have all of these people

00:13:10.860 just being blatantly and brazenly dishonest,

00:13:13.740 which I actually think

00:13:14.720 the truth might be somewhere

00:13:16.580 in the middle of here.

00:13:18.200 We are going to talk about this further

00:13:20.120 in the future,

00:13:21.300 because as I said,

00:13:22.240 I can't really base a show off of

00:13:23.700 comments that weren't made.

00:13:25.680 And even the questions,

00:13:27.080 I don't think were all that great

00:13:28.700 that Katie Telford was getting.

00:13:30.620 But if you really want to laugh,

00:13:32.260 look at the questions that were being asked of her

00:13:34.280 by Liberal MPs,

00:13:35.420 because they're all on the committee, 1.00

00:13:36.940 so the Liberals get to lob their softballs at her. 0.99

00:13:39.920 And they're basically like the equivalent

00:13:41.580 of if you're Simpsons fans,

00:13:43.840 of Lisa Simpson's interview with Mr. Burns.

00:13:46.500 And she says, you know,

00:13:47.200 your campaign has all the momentum

00:13:48.560 of a runaway freight train.

00:13:49.820 Why are you so popular?

00:13:51.380 It was basically that.

00:13:52.640 Like Jennifer O'Connell asked like some eight-minute question

00:13:56.000 about how terrible Pierre Polyev was.

00:13:57.720 And I'm like, well, Pierre Polyev wasn't the guy that Justin Trudeau,

00:14:01.260 or wasn't the guy, oh, there's a Freudian slip.

00:14:03.240 Pierre Polyev wasn't the guy that Xi Jinping wanted the candidates to win of.

00:14:07.640 So take from that what you will.

00:14:09.840 I do want to carry on with a bit of a sidestep

00:14:13.780 from the usual daily grind of politics, though.

00:14:16.740 Earlier today, I caught up with an author

00:14:19.040 whose book I think touches on a lot of the big themes of the era.

00:14:22.700 That's coming right up.

00:14:27.720 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:14:34.520 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:14:37.180 I have become a bit of a history nerd in recent years.

00:14:40.500 I never went to set out to study that in the first place,

00:14:44.300 but I've just become more and more enamored with history.

00:14:47.300 Frankly, the more people in this day and age try to take aim at history

00:14:51.920 or oftentimes just ignore it altogether.

00:14:54.760 so I was very very pleased when I saw a book that says the past is not something that we should run

00:15:00.920 from but arguably run towards Michael Bonner who I've met a couple of occasions and he's been a

00:15:07.040 quite a prolific figure for reasons that will become apparent very soon but he's written a

00:15:11.940 fantastic book in defense of civilization how our past can renew our present and he joins me now

00:15:19.060 Michael Bonner it's good to talk to you thanks for coming on today and congratulations on the book

00:15:23.440 Thanks for having me, Andrew.

00:15:25.060 Now, I know you've obviously gone through academia.

00:15:28.300 You have a PhD.

00:15:29.520 You're tremendously accomplished.

00:15:30.720 This is not written just for the academic in mind.

00:15:34.260 I mean, this was a very readable read, as they say.

00:15:37.560 Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to get into academic fights or controversies or anything like that.

00:15:43.400 I wanted just to tell the story or to make the argument.

00:15:49.380 And, you know, I'm very relieved that you think I succeeded.

00:15:54.520 Well, let me hear in your words what you think that argument is.

00:15:59.440 What is it that you set out to do with this?

00:16:01.800 Well, I mean, I can sum it up with, you know,

00:16:05.640 there are a couple of quotations that I include at the end of the book.

00:16:09.500 You know, there's that saying from, you know, T.S. Eliot.

00:16:14.840 He says, history is now, which is seemingly a paradox.

00:16:18.620 history is now. And then there's the other one, history is ourselves, from Kenneth Clark. And

00:16:24.980 the point is that we need to find meaning and purpose, every generation needs to find meaning

00:16:32.880 and purpose in the past. And that doesn't mean that the past is, you know, uniformly to be,

00:16:39.420 you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't be uncritical, we shouldn't be, you know, partisan or blind to

00:16:46.400 our past failures, but we have to come to terms with it, wrestle with it, make sense of it,

00:16:53.640 and find meaning and purpose in it. One of the challenges politically, and I know this book is

00:17:01.680 not an artifact of the culture war, I think you take a much more nuanced and much bigger picture

00:17:06.500 view of things, but I'd say one of the challenges that we do see today is that there are a lot of

00:17:11.440 people who view the past as irreconcilable with the president. They think, as I alluded to a

00:17:16.600 moment ago, that it's something we should run away from, that we should denounce, that we should

00:17:20.280 condemn. And I'd say often that's coming from people that have not undertaken to understand

00:17:25.080 the past entirely. But what is it precisely that you think makes it so that these things are not

00:17:30.120 just reconcilable, but actually that we need to look to the past as we move forward? Well,

00:17:34.840 Well, I mean, the fundamental problem is that there is no break in history, there is no break with the past, it's impossible. And attempts have been made, notably in the 20th century, but it doesn't work.

00:17:52.840 And sort of disconnecting people from the past is extraordinarily disruptive.

00:18:02.580 You can find examples of this from this sort of accidental in the form of the Industrial Revolution,

00:18:12.240 people being herded into factories instead of working on their farms and so forth.

00:18:17.260 extraordinarily disruptive um or much more sinister in the case of the soviet and nazi

00:18:25.820 tyrannies sort of insisting that you know everything that came before is sort of to

00:18:30.860 be repudiated and looking far into the future uh toward a sort of utopia um

00:18:38.140 it look basically making trying to make that break has not had a good track record and you

00:18:43.820 know we we shouldn't try we should try to find as i say meaning we should try to make our peace

00:18:50.620 uh with the the evils or the failures of the past rather than trying to um obliterate them

00:18:59.020 does the view that western nations have the western world has to civilization align in your

00:19:06.700 view with how other cultures are dealing with this and other cultures are doing this because

00:19:11.660 I mean, even if you take a strictly Canadian context on this, whatever people think of Quebec politics, Quebec as a society is much more emphatic about protecting its culture and asserting its culture.

00:19:22.040 And I think in a lot of the Western world, we see really this idea that we're not allowed to have a culture.

00:19:27.520 We're not allowed to celebrate our civilization.

00:19:29.600 I know you've studied Iran extensively.

00:19:32.660 I know you talk about China extensively in the book.

00:19:34.880 And it strikes me that a lot of these other parts of the world, for whatever their faults politically, have actually done a better job of trying to preserve their civilization.

00:19:45.260 Yeah, I mean, I think that what I would say is that the Western view of history as a story of progress, that is extremely unusual.

00:19:58.500 And I don't think that it's correct.

00:20:00.980 um first of all that that's that's simply an assumption it seems to be borne out by you know

00:20:09.920 the facts of the sort of mid 20th century onward if you lived in most of North America life looked

00:20:16.860 like it was getting better and better and better and that it you know you might have concluded

00:20:22.420 that nothing would get in the way of continuous improvement um but that that's a very unusual

00:20:30.900 view historically and i think now we're beginning to understand or realize that that is not um

00:20:39.780 correct uh it can't be taken for granted you know the the um continuous evolution of technology is

00:20:48.980 not um a reliable measure of you know uh of a civilization or of this the success of a of a

00:20:58.100 culture and um an older view which i think is borne out by um human experience is something

00:21:07.620 more like a cycle of of um uh the the rise and then the eventual uh collapse of societies or

00:21:17.300 or of civilizations and um we should take this to heart um i think no no civilization is immune

00:21:27.220 from collapse however long a view you take you know it's sometimes tempting to think of like

00:21:32.100 like constant evolution and change and so forth.

00:21:34.100 But the longer a view you take,

00:21:36.640 the more you are forced to admit that eventually,

00:21:39.680 you know, human societies do die out.

00:21:42.740 Where do you think we are at in that cycle now?

00:21:45.960 Well, I can't say for sure.

00:21:47.080 I mean, this is, I mean, it depends who you ask.

00:21:53.580 I mean, there are people who might say

00:21:54.860 that with the Continental Reformation,

00:21:56.820 everything went to pot in, you know, 1517,

00:21:59.260 and it's been, you know...

00:22:01.360 It's all been downhill since then.

00:22:03.300 Yeah, well, I mean, from one perspective, that would be true.

00:22:07.180 From the perspective of the sort of closely knit, tightly integrated society of the Western European Middle Ages, that society is no more.

00:22:22.960 It's gone.

00:22:24.360 I mean, you might find sort of relics of it in sort of agricultural areas of Europe.

00:22:30.860 but that's sort of that's sort of mostly uh mostly gone um and you know if you think of

00:22:38.860 if you think of how much has um how should i put this you think of as useful as the internet is

00:22:46.300 and so forth you think how how um different life is uh you know people are somewhat less likely to

00:22:55.340 gather in the so-called third place or the you know there's the famous there's the famous study

00:23:01.260 uh called bowling alone the study of sort of um fraternal and volunteer organizations in america

00:23:08.980 you know that that sort of lifestyle where you know a whole sort of town gets together to you

00:23:17.460 know join in a musical performance or you know there are various sort of layers of clubs and

00:23:23.140 church organizations or volunteer groups you know that has some it's not totally gone but

00:23:29.380 it has somewhat faded away and i think that the the spread of um you know internet technology

00:23:35.780 and so forth has somewhat accelerated that um depending on who you ask you know i'm i'm i think

00:23:43.380 i'm more on the side of that represents a decline rather than an evolution but the the point for me

00:23:52.020 is not necessarily to pinpoint exactly where we might be on some sort of trajectory but rather

00:23:58.580 to remind people that what i'm calling civilization is fragile that it needs to be protected and

00:24:06.980 nurtured and that we do that or historically we have always done that as a species by looking

00:24:13.540 to the past finding meaning there and and imitating what uh what worked uh before

00:24:23.300 one of the things that you touch on in the book that i i find very interesting is how contentment

00:24:30.340 or satisfaction do not correlate with what a lot of people characterize as progress i mean we have

00:24:36.980 as you've noted in our discussion now and in the book we have technological innovations that you

00:24:41.380 You know, we're just completely unimaginable.

00:24:44.040 Even a generation ago, let alone countless generations ago, you have medical innovations, you have longer lifespans.

00:24:51.320 Now, that is a little bit more dubious now, but all of this has, for a lot of people, not made the world a better place and it's not made their life better.

00:25:02.220 And I'm curious where you think that comes from.

00:25:05.220 Is it a decline in faith?

00:25:07.000 Is it a decline in moral grounding or is it something else entirely?

00:25:10.680 Well, yeah, that's a very important question. I think that the first thing we should observe, I mean, I'm not a Luddite, I'm not opposed to technologies.

00:25:21.360 No, you don't view modernity as the enemy as exclusively as some of your contemporaries might.

00:25:26.100 Yeah, and of course, again, there's no break in history going either forward or back, right? So, you know, we are where we are, and we're not going to change that.

00:25:40.020 But the fundamental point is that I think in a society in which you would not have had the comforts that you describe or the benefits of science and especially medicine and so forth, that it would have been easier to maintain a view whereby the world requires much more

00:26:10.020 input from you, much more work from, you know, you and your family to sort of hold it together to keep the forces of chaos at bay or to sort of, you know, reverse decline and so forth.

00:26:24.540 Now it's easier to coast. And I think that a better approach would be to say, well, let's keep our technology, let's improve it, but let's use it to connect ourselves better, to provide more leisure for ourselves, to work at our culture, to form societies, to form families,

00:26:54.540 to, you know, ensure that the conditions under which we ourselves grew up and flourished are still there for, you know, for our children and that sort of thing. And I think, I think we've lost sight of that. I think that there was a sense at the end of the 20th century that sort of, you know, triumphant Western liberal order had no enemies left.

00:27:21.540 left and it was just time to you know relax and take it easy and so on you know a sort of

00:27:28.680 caricature of the of the of the Fukuyama end of history sort of thing but I think we now realize

00:27:35.200 that that was mistaken and that you know our institutions and our our civilization need

00:27:42.700 significantly more work than we've put into them well one of the challenges too is that we often

00:27:50.100 pretend that some things are a lot more enduring than they are and I mean I know you've worked in

00:27:55.760 politics I've been immersed in that world unfortunately as well and the reality is

00:28:01.100 people put so much emphasis on things that will not last and we know will not last and

00:28:05.880 you see that in manufacturing we build things that do not last and there is this I don't know

00:28:13.380 if it's an indifference to history or if it's just not understanding what will withstand the test of

00:28:19.580 time i'm curious your take on that yeah well i mean i i do think that you're right but what has

00:28:25.500 stood the test of time i think is actually so obvious that it's easy to miss i mean if you think

00:28:32.700 about it um like civilization or you know what i'm calling civilization is only really about

00:28:41.580 um 5 000 years old if you if you consider the the say the old kingdom egypt or you know mesopotamia

00:28:53.180 it's it's about that it has it has some earlier origins which i talk about um in the book but you

00:28:59.260 know it's fully formed about 5 000 years ago that is a blip in the history of the human species

00:29:07.820 that's like a nanosecond in our full existence right and if you think about how many of these

00:29:15.820 societies and empires and you know city-states whatever that have come and gone over time some

00:29:23.900 of them we didn't even know about until they were dug out of the ground and in the in the 19th

00:29:28.540 century that's how um thorough the uh collapse and obliteration uh can be and for all we know i mean

00:29:38.860 it's it's it's not impossible but uh i don't know how likely it is but it's it's possible that um

00:29:47.020 you know the the very very sort of earliest stirrings of settled life and so forth that they

00:29:54.780 they represent um the rebirth from a time when there had already been a decline that's possible

00:30:01.660 you know i don't know for sure but what has worked in the past i think is is is very is

00:30:08.460 very obvious i mean the earliest states for example or the the earliest societies they

00:30:13.260 were not states they were basically agglomerations of households um the earliest states were sort of

00:30:20.380 households scaled up. The household seems to scale well. What does not scale up well,

00:30:28.700 in my opinion, is the contemporary emphasis on the sort of radical and extreme individualism.

00:30:39.340 Obviously, in Western society, there's always been a kind of trend, or some people claim to

00:30:47.660 to have discerned this sort of like inevitable trend toward the growth of individualism and

00:30:54.380 so forth. And for all the good that that has done, it can be pushed to an extreme. And I think in

00:30:59.900 contemporary society, it has been. That is an innovation. That is a new thing that I think

00:31:04.900 has not worked well for us. Looking back to the past, we can find things that have worked simply

00:31:16.640 because they have been passed down and imitated. And that would be, you know, my recommendation

00:31:23.160 would be that's where we should start. Someone recently reviewed the book and she said, well,

00:31:29.640 you know, if I understand it right, what we should do is, you know, we should read our

00:31:34.640 grandmother's recipes and bake cakes with our children. And I think, yeah, that's great.

00:31:42.660 that's where let's let's start there one of the big challenges in being canadian is how distorted

00:31:50.940 your view of time can be and of history can be i mean you mentioned 5 000 years being a blip in

00:31:57.740 canada if you know an outhouse was constructed in 1920 municipalities will declare it a heritage

00:32:03.100 landmark and not allow anything to develop it and you go to you know even the united states which

00:32:08.020 has about a century head start on canada and there is this one on the freedom trail in boston i

00:32:13.360 remember there's this old 1700s building that was a quintessential part of the american revolution

00:32:17.960 and it's now a chipotle um and then you go to europe i remember being in malta and i went to

00:32:23.840 this little museum that was in a church and they had something that was uh 3 000 years old and the

00:32:29.100 museum director was like here touch it uh here hold it like and i was like i'm terrified of this

00:32:34.200 And there is something to this that oftentimes we sort of view through our own society's lens where history begins.

00:32:43.680 And in Canada, whether it's, you know, 1867 or whether you go back to 1763 or 1534, wherever it is, we're still talking about such a narrow, narrow slice of what has been in the world.

00:32:55.460 And you translate that to architecture to talk about heritage landmarks, and buildings have become, I think, such an interesting case study in how people view history and how people view the past and how people view what is or isn't fashionable.

00:33:11.100 And I know you talk about architecture significantly in the book, and I was wondering if you'd explain why you believe buildings are so important in this discussion.

00:33:18.980 Ah, okay, yes, I'll get to the buildings in a second, but I just, I cannot resist taking over one.

00:33:23.920 So the part of the problem, and, you know, I love history the same way you do, and I think that Canadian history also should be taught and so forth.

00:33:33.460 But I think that we have to be wary of this idea that you can hive off something called Canadian history from some other kind of human history.

00:33:44.640 Because if you do that, then you're left with an ever-diminishing amount of time that sort of very quickly becomes current events or some form of journalism, potentially.

00:34:00.840 Well, and history is a measure of time and also space. You're quite right.

00:34:04.300 time and space and that's that's the architectural connection too but i mean people have lived in

00:34:10.380 canada or what we call canada you know um for what is it like 40 000 years i mean

00:34:20.060 there is there is a history of settlement here which we should not ignore right and obviously

00:34:25.500 this is a fraught you know this is a politically fraught question which is very sad to me i don't

00:34:32.300 i wish it were not but um all of human history is our collective patrimony and that there we should

00:34:43.020 be very wary of sort of hiving it all off into these different things as though there's no

00:34:48.220 there's no continuity i mean i'm very big on on continuity obviously there are moments where

00:34:53.660 continuity is broken, but the whole point of the civilized attitude is to try to maintain

00:35:03.300 that continuity, which means that I'm very, very opposed, or I guess I dislike the sort

00:35:16.360 of capital L liberal approach to Canadian history whereby there's this sort of break

00:35:22.140 with the past in in in 1867 and then there's another one in 1982 with pierre trudeau and so

00:35:28.780 you know i i you know let's just let's just look where you know let's look as far back into the

00:35:36.220 past as we possibly can to you know um the ancestors of everybody who's here um to our

00:35:44.220 you know our uh our aboriginal past and let's bring it all together into into the most expansive

00:35:52.780 and capacious story that we can i mean that's that's my view as for our no it's very well said

00:35:58.700 and i i know you do have to go but i i do want to get in a question about buildings here because i

00:36:03.100 did tease it and i'm personally interested in it so explain why that's so central well buildings

00:36:08.780 Buildings fundamentally symbolize, I argue, what I call the civilized attitude, that you have a place in space and time.

00:36:21.340 It is symbolized by building a building, by putting up a structure that is an extension of your, you know, it's basically an extension of your own body, which protects you from the elements and marks out a particular space as a significant one, either because you live there or you work there or it's some kind of official building or it's a monument or something like that.

00:36:50.040 The so-called, the anthropology of architecture, I think, is an extremely important notion. Architecture, if it is to be civilized, it should be built on a human scale.

00:37:02.560 I don't like the gigantism of modern skyscrapers, which can only be appreciated from a huge distance away, or the sort of distortions of modernist or postmodernist architecture where you don't know where the door is or you can't get in.

00:37:22.760 And when you find it, you don't know if it's a push or a pull.

00:37:24.820 Yeah, I mean, there's all that kind of stuff, too. But I mean, fundamentally, ancient people had what I would consider to be a different attitude, which is that you've marked out a place where, you know, some particular activity, business occurs, and that it is structured in a way to meet your needs, not to challenge them.

00:37:44.420 And I think that that has been, I think that's been lost from urban planning, although there are some, there are some signs that it might be changing. The new king, former Prince Charles, is a big architecture buff. He's written a lot of books that people used to laugh at. But I think that, I think that his position on these things is fundamentally sound, and we might, we might see some change there. We'll see.

00:38:12.160 Well, it might be a little bit of a low reach for you, 0.63

00:38:14.380 but I think we should get you on some zoning boards.

00:38:16.480 I would love to see what you came up with there.

00:38:18.940 Michael Bonner, the book is In Defense of Civilization,

00:38:22.560 How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.

00:38:24.620 And I don't recommend books often

00:38:27.180 just because I don't read as many books as I'd like.

00:38:30.040 There are far more out there than I have time to read.

00:38:31.760 But this one definitely grabbed me

00:38:33.320 and I think you would enjoy it as well.

00:38:35.240 Michael, thank you so much for coming on

00:38:37.040 and for writing this.

00:38:37.720 It was great talking to you.

00:38:38.460 Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

00:38:41.360 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show

00:38:45.360 that was michael bonner and that book is uh in defense of civilization the uh that was

00:38:56.200 pre-recorded uh thankfully uh we were able to turn it around pretty quickly the reason it was

00:39:01.320 pre-recorded was because of katie telford's extended uh testimony and we had a set time but in any case

00:39:11.360 We'll have to delve down into the nitty-gritty and talk about the really uber-specific stories.

00:39:23.700 One in particular jumps out from Vancouver.

00:39:26.700 We've talked about housing, which is a very big issue.

00:39:29.560 It is rising in cost.

00:39:31.640 It is forcing people out of the market entirely.

00:39:34.560 And in Vancouver, things are so bad that you might find yourself not able to afford a home,

00:39:42.040 not able to afford perhaps a condo, not able to afford an apartment,

00:39:46.440 not even able to afford a room in an apartment.

00:39:49.080 But how about a bed in a room in an apartment?

00:39:52.700 A Vancouver rental ad was offering a lower bunk for $620, a lower bunk.

00:40:02.580 Now, this was an ad put on Craigslist, and in the advertisement, it is someone who says they are a University of British Columbia alumni.

00:40:12.640 Now, I believe it should be alumnus or alumna, but I won't get too particular on the Latin plurals.

00:40:19.620 They say they're offering this a secure and family-oriented home to live in, and you can go.

00:40:28.140 I don't know Vancouver very well.

00:40:29.760 It's actually in a house.

00:40:31.140 The house features 10 bedrooms and nine bathrooms, and they're just like cramming students into this, I guess, to such an extent that you can, for $600 in this house, get the lower bunk.

00:40:42.160 Now, so each of the rooms is $1,101 plus utilities and internet, and for two people, there's a $350 charge, and this leads us to the one shared room that is like the hostel equivalent of housing.

00:40:58.600 Now, I don't want to begrudge people that need to make tough calls, but I think when we are renting out lower bunks and people think this is an acceptable housing option, perhaps we are not exactly looking at the right way of doing things in society.

00:41:13.900 Now, the ad ended up being removed, as I understand it. So I don't know if this is because someone snatched it up or maybe because it got a little bit of negative attention. It got pulled for that reason. But the bizarre thing is, if you look at that, the house is actually lovely.

00:41:27.440 I mean, the house actually looks like a lot of fun.

00:41:29.860 The kitchen is nice and spacious, has a beautiful island.

00:41:32.640 They've even got a French press on the kitchen counter in the listing.

00:41:36.260 So clearly some classy coffee taste.

00:41:38.360 But when you are cramming so many people into the house, I don't know, maybe that's a way to make your university experience sore.

00:41:45.220 But I think it is an example of perhaps a less than adequate situation here.

00:41:50.840 Other weird news today that I have to point out.

00:41:54.240 This one brought me back because years ago in Ontario, when the Liberal government was in power,

00:41:59.960 I remember there was this big controversy.

00:42:01.660 It was all the rage and talk radio in the columns of government subsidizing a giant duck.

00:42:08.760 Now, this was a real story.

00:42:11.000 There was a giant duck.

00:42:12.280 It was supposed to be the world's largest duck.

00:42:14.120 You can see it for yourself on the screen right now.

00:42:17.320 The world's largest duck was to be a magnificent display,

00:42:21.820 so much so that the Ontario government was subsidizing this.

00:42:27.360 And, you know, oddly, as far as things that the Kathleen Wynne government in Ontario spent money on,

00:42:31.100 the duck wasn't even the worst.

00:42:33.440 But this rubber duck is coming back.

00:42:35.520 It has now been six years since Ontarians were first graced with its presence, 0.91

00:42:40.240 and now the Toronto Waterfront Festival is returning,

00:42:43.080 and the duck will be coming back in September.

00:42:46.020 So if you missed your shot at looking at this giant floating bath toy in 2017,

00:42:52.640 you can come back and I may actually take a quack at doing a segment about it in September.

00:43:00.800 Never mind. I won't do that anymore.

00:43:03.720 I apologize. That was not fair for you to have to listen to that.

00:43:09.040 What else do we have going on here?

00:43:11.340 You think inflation is bad?

00:43:12.840 Even the price of Girl Guide cookies is going up.

00:43:16.400 I got a bulletin, a business bulletin this morning.

00:43:19.920 I'm not going to make a pun on this one.

00:43:21.520 So if you're all nervous now and you're ready to get pun triggered, that won't happen.

00:43:27.000 But the Girl Guides have raised their cookie prices for the first time in a decade by 20%.

00:43:33.200 So the classic chocolate and vanilla sandwich cookies, which are not as good as the mint ones, by the way.

00:43:38.760 And where do the mint ones go?

00:43:41.100 Because it seems like anytime they're selling cookies,

00:43:43.200 it's these like weird vanilla chocolate ones.

00:43:45.780 Anyway, they're going up from $5 to $6 a box

00:43:49.400 due to increased costs of baking and shipping.

00:43:52.760 So first it's the eggs and then it's the Girl Guide cookies.

00:43:56.220 And now you have to choose between the lower bunk in a Vancouver apartment

00:44:00.400 or the extra box of Girl Guide cookies.

00:44:03.200 These are the tough choices that people need to make now.

00:44:05.780 It is Friday, so keeping with the True North tradition, we like to end things on a bit of a lighter note.

00:44:12.420 And I'm trying to like wash the taste of the, you know, take a quack at it pun out of your ears because tastes are in your ears now.

00:44:19.120 It's a very, we're going very postmodern on the show today.

00:44:22.200 But let's have a little round of Fake News Friday.

00:44:25.840 yes fake news friday scouring every corner of the globe finding our way through the

00:44:40.880 blizzard of lies the depths of deception the caves of confabulations i don't know

00:44:47.480 fabrications we'll uh we'll come up with some new alliteration there uh but this one actually

00:44:51.960 we have to give honourable mention to Conservative leader Pierre Polyev for trying to push back

00:44:57.620 against this in real time when faced with a question in Edmonton from a Canadian press

00:45:03.460 reporter. Take a look. When it comes to defunding the CBC, you've signaled the intention to maintain

00:45:11.100 a level of support for Radio Canada and French language programming. To do that, the corporation

00:45:16.380 says the Broadcasting Act would need to be amended. So are you prepared to change the law and create

00:45:21.880 public broadcaster that only serves one group in canada are you you work for cp yes i do so

00:45:28.840 your biggest client is cbc right yes but yes that's right i just don't want i just want to

00:45:34.280 be careful that we don't get you into a conflict of interest here have you checked with the ethics

00:45:38.360 commissioner on whether you're in a conflict of interest in asking about cbc funding given that

00:45:42.920 it's the principal source of money for cp uh i would check that with my editors but again are

00:45:48.040 Are you still prepared to change the law and create a public broadcaster that only serves one language in Canada?

00:45:53.160 The CBC, frankly, is a biased propaganda arm of the Liberal Party and, frankly, negatively affects all media.

00:46:05.120 For example, CP is negatively affected by the fact that you have to report favorably on the CBC

00:46:12.480 if you want to keep your number one taxpayer-funded client happy.

00:46:15.740 we need a neutral and free media but not a propaganda arm for the liberal party and when

00:46:23.900 i'm prime minister we're going to have a free press where everyday canadians decide what they

00:46:28.800 think rather than having liberal propaganda jammed down their throats next question thank you

00:46:34.160 well that was uh i think quite the display and look i think that in some cases uh it is fair to

00:46:50.120 say that we don't want to see a totally antagonistic relationship between politicians

00:46:54.720 and the media but i think both of them have a job to do and i think it's fine to fight fire with

00:46:59.520 fire. And in that case, if you have Pierre Polyev getting needled with questions about CBC defunding

00:47:04.920 and he wants to point out that, hey, you guys are cashing big checks from CBC, that's a fair

00:47:10.480 question to put to journalists. And one thing I'll say about the media in general is that oftentimes

00:47:16.420 journalists try to sort of hide behind objectivity and in the sense that they don't believe that they

00:47:23.340 are agents of the stories they cover and the issues they cover and all of that. And I don't

00:47:28.500 know the reporter who asked the question. This isn't a slight of them by any stretch, but I'm

00:47:32.180 saying in general, the I'm just asking questions defense doesn't really fly when you're going after

00:47:38.520 one particular party or one particular candidate in a different way than you go after others. So

00:47:43.740 I think in this particular case, yes, it's fair to talk to Pierre Polyev about CBC funding,

00:47:48.860 given that is a campaign issue that he's chosen to take up. Completely fair. I also think it's

00:47:55.120 fair for the media to have to play defense every now and then because we know the other way hasn't

00:47:59.800 exactly worked well for conservatives of just groveling and hoping that eventually you'll make

00:48:04.560 them like you so that hasn't worked so try the Ron DeSantis approach as I've said in the past

00:48:10.060 that does it for us for today I want to just give you a huge thank you for tuning in to this show

00:48:16.620 as you've noted we've only added the Friday show relatively recently so we're playing around with

00:48:21.520 it. Last time I just did like, you know, a round of standup comedy. This time you got the crappy

00:48:27.480 duck joke. So not always am I going to land it, but we are going to have a lot of fun sometimes

00:48:32.980 when we can, because it's the only way to suffer through the aforementioned decline of civilization

00:48:37.640 to at least laugh on the way out. So I always try to take somewhat of a cheery disposition on these

00:48:43.480 things, not because I don't realize how serious things are, but because if we're crying and

00:48:48.360 screaming we are not going to get through it the way we can if we can find something to laugh at

00:48:52.700 and we get lots of material for that so that's my little plug for a bit of joy as you head into the

00:48:58.380 weekend hopefully the weather is nice where you are and if you are inclined to support independent

00:49:04.100 media you can head over to donate.tnc.news and we thank you so much for your support that does

00:49:10.040 it for us back next week with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show thank you god bless

00:49:14.940 and good day to you all

00:49:18.360 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:49:21.340 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - April 14, 2023

Katie Telford testified for over two hours yet said nothing

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