LAWTON： New passport ditches our heritage
Episode Stats
Words per minute
198.06642
Harmful content
Misogyny
3
sentences flagged
Hate speech
4
sentences flagged
Summary
Your passport has been given a facelake makeover, and it s going over pretty well... except for the artwork on the cover and the design on the inside. Also, the government removed Terry Fox from the passport, and replaced it with a man with a rake.
Transcript
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Let's talk a little bit about the gateway to the world from Canada, which is your passport.
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Actually, my passport is probably somewhere around.
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I could have held it up as a prop, and then all the spies out there can just write down
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the serial numbers that might happen to flash across the screen, but I assure you no one
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I don't even like being me most of the time, but the thing about the passports is that
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they are getting an overhaul, which the government has unveiled today, and it's going over pretty
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much as well as you'd expect from an announcement that involves artwork.
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The cover of the new passports is not like the old coat of arms design here, but this
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one, they've decided the coat of arms needed a modern silhouette outline of a maple leaf
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and what is that, Arial font of the word Canada in the top right, and then on the back you
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get this little like, you know, twing, is it Arial, Sean is the font expert.
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He says it's Arial thin, so not just Arial, Arial thin, so they just like went with the
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free fonts you get with Microsoft Word to design our passports, and then you have the little
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red sort of ivy-like, that's not how maple leaves grow, but I guess we're just rolling
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Now, I mean, I don't love the outside, but I also don't like change in general.
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I don't hate the outside as much as some people.
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I don't know if I want to critique everyone individually.
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So it's like this weird sort of sand art design of like painting by numbers.
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We've got someone doing a sort of long jump on the grass, which is a very Canadian activity,
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given that it snows for, you know, 360 days of the year.
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My little monitor that I had, I can't actually see this enough.
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So I'm like, I'm going back to the old monitor here to analyze this.
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That seems like a pretty reasonable Canadian symbol there.
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See, some of the stuff I can't even quite make out what it is.
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But the whole point of this is that this is like not Canadian.
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And if you look at what they removed, it's insane.
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People are like, people are tired of those four images now,
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because they're going to be seeing them for like the next 20 years.
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So I'm just the one that is forced to stare at it until the end of the show, I guess.
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But the thing about this is that they've like taken down things that were part of Canada's history.
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And again, I remember all the hand-wringing when someone dared put like a Canadian flag
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and they were saying it was desecrating Terry Fox.
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And now the Liberals have just like stripped Terry Fox off the passport altogether.
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Melissa Lantzman, who is the Conservative MP, tweeted out,
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a bunch of Liberal politicians got together to talk about how to fix their abysmal record
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of passport delivery and unacceptable wait times.
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And instead, they landed on kick Terry Fox out of the passport and cancel the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
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Let's replace them with a man holding a rake and pictures of a boy about to go swimming.
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So actually, the boy going swimming is about to go into the Atlantic to swim across the ocean
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So the Liberals aren't letting him get on a plane.
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The guy with the rake is representing all of the shredded passports of people
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that don't want to look at them anymore that are trying to just get rid of them
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to throw them in the big dumpster when the design changes.
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So now, I don't know if they're going to pre-order this stuff,
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like how long it's going to take if there's a change in government next year.
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It's going to be like the old Ontario license plates where the new guy comes in
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and just overhauls with a new design that he likes better,
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and then everyone gets mad about the change because they've just grown familiar with it.
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But I will say, I was buying a present for my nephew.
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It was his birthday recently, and I went to Toys R Us.
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And I don't often frequent toys stores, let alone this one.
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But what struck me is that in this little potted plant right in front of the toy store,
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there was a mother goose and her goslings, I think they're called, right?
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This is what happens when you don't commune with nature, as one should.
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Maybe I should spend more time with the Canadian passports.
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But, and there was like a father goose, I presume.
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He could have been gender non-binary, but I believe a father goose standing guard,
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which is a familiar sight because whenever there's a mother goose,
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you got to run because there's a father goose nearby and they will like dive bomb at you.
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I once had to kick one in Detroit because he was flying at me.
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But nevertheless, the thing about this is that they had like sort of just seeded this area to the geese.
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And instead, they had like set up all this caution tape and put signs so you couldn't actually go in the store the way you normally would.
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When a goose decides that they are going to camp out somewhere, we all just capitulate because the geese actually run the country.
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And sometimes when you look at, for example, what the liberals passed at their convention,
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you'd wonder if the geese would do a better job than some of the people involved.
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But all of that is to say, I'm actually prepared to say the goose should be on the passport, even if we don't like them.
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But then, yeah, like the guy raking and the guy swimming.
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And there's like a weird, so on, maybe we put the, put them back up there.
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Page 36 specifically, 36 and 37 on the passport.
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There's like a polar bear on the right, and on the left, there's like a, it's like a penguin, but it kind of looks like a ladybug.
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And if you tilt your head ever so, it looks like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
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But the whole point is, I actually wonder if AI could have done a better job at a fraction of the price to the federal government.
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And I, just to like play around, I tried to spit out a couple of AI generated images, and they all look like very weird, like Soviet passport designs, which, you know, maybe these days is more accurate.
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