Liberals might let illegal immigrants stay in Canada
Episode Stats
Words per minute
173.99626
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
sentences flagged
Toxicity
1
sentences flagged
Hate speech
8
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show: Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, Andrew talks about his recent trip to Taiwan, and why he thinks Canada should take illegal migrants and let them stay in Canada.
Transcript
00:01:16.260
This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:01:28.660
Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.
00:01:32.680
The Andrew Lawton Show hosted once again by Andrew Lawton.
00:01:38.580
Thank you so much to the great Chris Sims for filling in in my absence.
00:01:49.660
You can't go cold turkey on quitting Chris Sims.
00:01:53.080
So she'll be back on for her regular Monday spot in just about, I don't know, 13 minutes or so.
00:01:58.240
as we enter Monday afternoon, at least Monday afternoon in Eastern Canada.
00:02:06.480
So I was in Taiwan last week, and I've never been to the country before.
00:02:11.580
I was supposed to go at the invitation of the Taiwanese government in 2020,
00:02:16.080
but you may recall there was a little, you know, just minor tiny disruption
00:02:23.680
I got postponed, postponed, postponed, and then I was supposed to go last year
00:02:29.980
And I had to cancel, there was something I had to cancel.
00:02:33.260
And Harrison Faulkner, my colleague at True North,
00:02:38.880
I was very grateful the Taiwanese government had me back.
00:02:42.540
I'll have some written coverage from my time there
00:02:47.840
in a part of the world where they live every day
00:02:57.360
that they talk about as flippantly as we talk about the carbon tax in Canada. Like, oh yeah,
00:03:02.120
just, you know, China could invade any day now is quite remarkable. And I met some amazing people
00:03:07.320
there. I learned a lot about semiconductors, about the Taiwan Strait, about defense, and a little bit
00:03:12.500
about stinky tofu, which I did not try. I didn't chicken out. It was just that I didn't have an
00:03:18.940
opportunity and I didn't create an opportunity. But anyway, if you've been to Taiwan or familiar
00:03:23.460
with stinky tofu you'll know i did smell stinky tofu and let me tell you it very much lives up to
00:03:28.980
its name but we'll have some more updates on that as over the course of the week i do want to talk
00:03:34.340
about this bonkers bonkers story that i came back to canada to where mark miller this is the
00:03:40.980
immigration minister that's like finally along with justin trudeau conceding that maybe just maybe
00:03:47.620
they've had too much in the way of immigration to this country to not strain the system and
0.96
00:03:56.100
mark miller is now talking about a very novel idea he is uh finding a weird way of making the
00:04:02.820
immigration system work so take undocumented migrants and let them stay in canada now uh this
0.97
00:04:10.580
is when we are seeing just put that headline up again there if you don't mind sean so i just want
00:04:15.860
want to point out, this is the Globe and Mail taking the Liberal government's framing on this.
00:04:25.540
You see how they say undocumented migrants. So undocumented, you hear this in the United States
00:04:30.860
as well, it actually means illegal. These are people who are in the country illegally. Maybe
00:04:35.680
they came in legally on a visitor visa, on a student visa, the visa expired, they never left.
00:04:41.060
they are without legal status. They are illegal, you might say, but the government euphemistically
00:04:47.180
calls them undocumented. So Mark Miller is putting a plan to cabinet, to the Trudeau government to
00:04:52.760
let illegal migrants in Canada stay in Canada legally. So all of a sudden people that maybe
00:04:59.460
cut the line, people that wouldn't have been eligible to come in through existing permanent
00:05:03.960
residence streams, didn't want to wait, people that just had no disregard for the law, we're
00:05:08.320
going to perhaps give them legal status. Now, it's not happening yet. It's still a potential
00:05:14.120
proposal. It's a thing the government is mulling doing, but I wouldn't put it past them. And in
00:05:19.700
fact, it would be very par for the course on this government, a government that has at every turn
00:05:23.880
just decided to crap all over the integrity of the immigration system and have no regard for the
0.99
00:05:30.920
many, many, many immigrants that did everything right, that played by the rules because they
0.54
00:05:36.260
believe in the rules and they believe in Canada and they don't want to, again, I don't want to
00:05:41.540
use a crass term here, but they don't want to just, I'm not coming up with anything that's not
00:05:48.540
crass. They don't want to piss all over the laws of this country when they come here. So this is,
00:05:54.860
I think, quite devastating. Again, not all that surprising and I wouldn't be surprised to see it
00:05:59.800
come to fruition in the next few months. And again, what better way to generate some new voters
00:06:05.320
then all of a sudden taking people who are in here illegally and saying ta-da you're going to
00:06:10.120
be legal you can be a citizen in just a couple of years and then hey you can vote liberal what
00:06:15.400
what do you know vote for the government that let you stay here when you were probably on track to
00:06:21.800
be deported not that canada is doing much in the way of deportations even among those who have had
00:06:26.920
deportation ordered now i this is a clip from a press conference this morning by a group called
00:06:32.520
the Migrant Rights Network, making this demand that Mark Miller is now seeking.
00:06:39.540
Speaking to you from the unceded and never surrendered territory of the Algonquin
00:06:43.580
Unisputed Peoples, and my pronouns are she, her, L. So I'm here today to show union solidarity
00:06:49.940
with undocumented workers and their families, women, 2SL, LGBTQI, plus migrants, all who have
00:06:57.440
living in fear of being detected and being deported. Undocumented people live here and
1.00
00:07:03.280
build our communities and our economy. But without status, they are vulnerable to abuse and
00:07:08.720
exploitation. And growing racism and xenophobia are making them even more vulnerable. Employers
00:07:16.480
can violate their rights of undocumented workers, stealing wages, forcing them into unsafe working
0.98
00:07:22.400
conditions stopping workers from asserting their rights under the threat of deportation.
00:07:28.800
This abuse results in an overall worsening of wages and working conditions for migrants
00:07:33.440
and citizens alike. Regularization will allow workers to leave bad jobs and punish bad actors.
00:07:40.720
It's leveling the playing field of improving working conditions for everyone. That is why in
00:07:46.080
in 2019, we as a CLC and our affiliated unions launched a small pilot to give permanent residency
00:07:52.860
to undocumented workers in the greater Toronto area. A broad regularization program means that
00:07:59.720
people can now contribute to the fullest potential to Canada's economic and social future. We,
00:08:05.740
the Canadian Labour Congress, call on the government to do what is right. Bring in regularization now.
00:08:12.140
i i love the term regularization not uh not legalization not amnesty regularization take
00:08:20.860
people who are remember when the liberal government was talking about irregular border
00:08:24.280
crossers no they they mean illegal border crossers undocumented immigrants irregular immigrants no
00:08:30.100
you mean people who are in the country illegally all of the fears that she just describes the fear
0.99
00:08:36.220
of being detected and deported well those are fears that could be allayed by wait hang on it's
00:08:44.780
just on the tip of my tongue there's there's there's got to be a solution by not being in the
00:08:50.100
country illegally look i i love canada i love this country and i love that so many people from around
00:08:55.760
the world love this country which is why we have one of the most generous generous approaches to
00:09:03.020
immigration in the world. We allow so many opportunities for people from all around the
00:09:08.540
world to come here on a temporary basis and even on a permanent basis. We have 500,000 new permanent
00:09:15.400
resident slots a year, a number the Liberal government has committed to increasing over the
00:09:21.080
last several years. And the next couple of years, we have pathways because we believe that we should,
00:09:26.940
as a country share in the bounty. So I have very little regard and respect. In fact, I'll say I
00:09:34.260
have no respect for people that simply do not want to follow the law. And by the way, when she talks
00:09:41.700
about the contributions of undocumented migrants to Canada, what she's missing here is that these
00:09:51.300
are people who their first order of business as potential Canadians is to disregard the laws of
00:09:56.920
the country. Their first order of business. How much can you build yourself up as a would-be
00:10:03.440
citizen of a country when your foray into Canadian-ness is built on a lie? It's built on you
0.86
00:10:10.520
violating the laws, not respecting the laws. Now, these are people, they have not sought asylum
00:10:17.220
necessarily. In some cases, maybe they've sought asylum and have had their requests rejected again
00:10:22.500
because we determined that that was not a way they were supposed to come into the country.
00:10:25.900
these are in many cases people who have had an international student visa then they just never
00:10:31.720
return home they just try to sort of hide and hope no one notices and she says they're vulnerable to
00:10:36.920
abuse yeah because they don't have status they're not legally able to work here so the fact that
00:10:42.140
the government's answer to that is all right well yeah you beat us you did it one way or another
00:10:47.420
we're gonna let you stay now like what motivation is there for other people to not do the same thing
00:10:54.280
you know there was a reason that joe biden's big giant like magic wand disappearance of federal
00:11:00.020
student loans was so concerning because all the people who had paid their student loans were
00:11:04.160
looking around and being like well hang on what why did i do it right where's my gift where's my
00:11:08.480
great privilege and and what a slap in the face this proposal is that the government is even
00:11:13.180
considering this to every single hard-working immigrant in this country who came here and did
0.99
00:11:19.440
everything right, who waited years to come to this country, who did everything right to start a
00:11:25.780
business, to get a job, to bring their family in here, to support their family, to contribute to
00:11:29.880
the Canadian economy. And now they realize, oh, well, all we had to do was just come here,
00:11:34.340
oversee our visa, hang out, lie low for a little bit. And then ta-da, the government would just
00:11:39.520
say, well, it doesn't really matter. That's what these activists are seeking. This is what the
00:11:44.500
Liberal government is entertaining. Now, I don't know if this was exactly the reason that some
00:11:50.280
Liberals have started to sour on their government. I suspect the timing is just coincidental there,
00:11:56.080
but I think it's interesting to note that Liberals are not exactly feeling the love when it comes to
00:12:01.800
Justin Trudeau. So, unrelated story, but I saw in the Hill Times this morning, this is the headline,
00:12:07.300
crappy polling numbers make some Liberal MPs uneasy about electoral prospects, but still consider
00:12:13.480
next election worth fighting oh that was a quote i'm glad liberal mps still think the next election
00:12:18.840
is worth fighting interesting but here is the interesting part for me sean casey who's a
00:12:26.440
liberal mp from atlantic canada he was doing an interview with the hill times and he's doing the
00:12:32.120
big rah-rah-rah we've got a year to turn it around the campaign's gonna matter we've got to get
00:12:36.520
people engaged canadians we owe it to canadians to keep plugging to keep working so he's really
00:12:41.480
trying to rally the troops and say the liberals can turn it around. And then we go to this
00:12:45.900
paragraph here. Well, a few paragraphs. When asked whether given low public support for the
00:12:51.140
Liberal Party and the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau is the right person to lead the party
00:12:55.560
in the election, Sean Casey declined to say. That's his decision, he said. My opinion doesn't
00:13:04.300
matter pressed again he said i'm not going to share my opinion with the public never have three
00:13:12.460
paragraphs said so much about the state of canadian politics so for starters we have a liberal mp
00:13:17.660
saying his opinion doesn't matter his opinion of his own party's leader does not matter he says
00:13:22.700
it's not not up for him as a caucus member as a liberal to decide no no it is up to justin trudeau
00:13:28.940
alone to decide so justin trudeau yeah maybe technically trudeau is the guy that has to
00:13:34.860
decide whether he's going to stay or go before the next election but it's hardly a ringing
00:13:40.380
endorsement of justin trudeau that liberal mps are not even able to utter the words i support
00:13:46.460
him or not able to utter the words i think he can do a good job sean casey is one of these guys
00:13:51.580
that's probably going to lose his seat probably going to lose his seat in large part due to
00:13:58.380
the liberal government's just horrendous approach right now it's horrendous track record
00:14:03.100
and it's horrendous campaign because justin trudeau is and this may come as a shock to
00:14:07.180
everyone well basically it may come as a shock to justin trudeau he is not that popular right
00:14:12.940
now people that have been liberals for years people that were inspired by him in 2015 are
00:14:17.820
now saying okay can we just get like just get rid of the guy for crying out loud and it's why pierre
00:14:22.860
Paulie have that guy behind me there is doing so well because he is now capturing into an energy
00:14:29.820
and a hope and an optimism that Trudeau by the way a decade ago had harnessed he did that when
00:14:35.420
he was up against Stephen Harper so this is where we talk about the declining fortunes of the
00:14:41.500
liberals but even the liberal so if you have a liberal MP ask them on the record film it what
00:14:47.100
they think of Justin Trudeau as leader and see if they're as equivocal as Sean Casey is there
00:14:52.860
Just since I mentioned the book, my book, Pierre Polyev, A Political Life,
00:14:57.060
technically comes out tomorrow, although like everyone's been reading it now.
00:15:05.640
So I was kind of when I was away last week in Taiwan, I was caught off guard because
00:15:09.900
I was expecting I'd have that week and not have to worry about it.
00:15:12.840
And then all of a sudden I'm fielding like interview requests every which way because
00:15:18.340
But several of you have already said you've gotten a copy and have started reading it.
00:15:22.180
thank you so much if that's the case. If not, you can grab your copy from Amazon, from Indigo,
00:15:28.040
from your local neighborhood bookstore. You can also grab it from, well, where else? From
00:15:33.120
Sutherland House, the publisher directly. And they, not that this is the reason you should do it,
00:15:37.500
but they have like the neatest packaging job they ever do that anyone could do if you order a book
00:15:42.080
from there. But anyway, all that out of the way, we will have a lot on this book. And I have an
00:15:47.920
excerpt in the line today, which is Jen Gerson's and Matt Gurney's publication about the story of
00:15:53.620
Pierre and Anna Polyev. So if you're interested on how that dynamic duo got coupled up in the
00:15:59.720
first place, read that excerpt and the full details are in that book there. But all of that
00:16:04.820
aside, we were very well looked after last week with Chris Sims, regularly our Monday guest,
00:16:11.020
but last week she took the reins in my Taiwanese absence. Chris, welcome back. Thank you so much
00:16:16.660
for uh holding down the fort last week well it was an honor to be asked andrew truly and thank
00:16:20.960
you so much to yourself and the team and all of your viewers and listeners they were very kind on
00:16:24.740
their youtube comments so thanks so much for that i i'm glad i i didn't get a chance to i didn't get
00:16:29.340
a chance to watch any whole shows because of the uh the time difference but i saw some clips you
00:16:32.740
did a bang up job as always and let me ask you about this cbc business so i woke up uh franco
00:16:39.080
terrazzano your colleague and our regular guest here uh from the ctf has decided to put the gears
00:16:45.920
to CBC for, shockingly, not being transparent about the money it's dishing out. What's going
00:16:51.620
on there? Yeah, for sure. Franco actually just went home because his mom famously lives around
00:16:55.660
the corner from me here in Lethbridge. So he actually did an interview from this chair like
00:17:00.520
last week. So that would have been a little bit funny for people to see. But yeah, Franco
00:17:04.700
Terrazzano and our team there at the Ottawa Bureau for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation,
00:17:09.560
we are quite often demanding transparency and accountability from the state broadcaster,
00:17:15.280
from the CBC because, of course, they take about $1.4 billion from us every year. That's a heck
00:17:21.680
of a ton of money. And quite often we find a lot of funny answers, right? They're playing fast and
00:17:28.880
loose with some numbers quite often, especially at the CEO and the managerial level. So we wanted
00:17:35.100
to know, Andrew, how much the seven top executives were paid out in bonuses. So we filed an access
00:17:43.640
to information request. Now they were due to release that information within a certain window
00:17:49.960
of time but what the CBC did is they filed a 30-day extension. That extension just so happened to kick
00:17:57.240
that information down past CEO Catherine Tate's appearance at committee. We wonder why. But it's
00:18:04.200
worse than that, Andrew, because when they did finally cough up some information about the
00:18:09.480
executive pay scale on May 10th, they didn't mention how much of this was bonuses, which is
00:18:16.520
exactly what we were asking for. All they gave us was this overall number. So out of the seven
00:18:22.840
executives at the CBC, we paid around $3.7 million with an M. That works out to about $540,000 per
00:18:33.800
person but we don't know how much of that is bonuses like we don't have the actual details
00:18:39.240
so we have launched a legal challenge with the office of the information commissioner
00:18:44.040
and we hope the cbc will be much more forthcoming now yeah i mean the problem with the the access
00:18:50.680
to information system in canada is that it's incredibly incredibly broken it's incredibly
00:18:55.240
backlogged and because so many government departments are terrible at managing their
00:18:59.960
a tip request the oic the office of the information commissioner is uh typically i mean i i more often
00:19:05.880
than not when i file complaints with them about uh these issues uh they'll respond like six months
00:19:10.920
later after the department i was complaining about has responded and said oh it seems like it's all
00:19:15.560
sorted out now okay great so are you gonna let them off the hook is what i'm asking no this is
00:19:21.080
one of those things that i think our supporters uh with the taxpayers federation and i'm guessing a
00:19:26.040
a lot of your viewers, we don't have patience for that.
00:19:32.480
If they were a private company, the Taxpayers Federation wouldn't care what the CEOs are
00:19:42.360
So again, taxpayers are handing over $1.4 billion.
00:19:46.620
That could build a state-of-the-art super fancy hospital.
00:19:50.180
could pay for 7,000 paramedics and 7,000 cops every year on our streets. But instead, we're
00:19:57.460
handing it to the CBC, which, by the way, of course, is tanking in its ratings. So a tiny
00:20:02.840
little fraction of Canadians are now watching their supper hour news. They won't even come
00:20:07.780
clean, frankly, about their ratings that way. Do you remember, Andrew, the last time that Tate was
00:20:12.300
at committee? She said something to the effect of, oh, yes, we know that the TV ratings are
00:20:17.460
are nosediving that we're really losing viewers there, but we're making up for it in GEM subscriptions,
00:20:23.620
which is their online app or something. And it's like, okay, how many GEM subscriptions do you have?
00:20:29.160
Oh, we don't share that information. Like it's so secretive and they have no right to be because
00:20:34.720
this is taxpayer's money. So that is again, why we are going kind of elbows up here. Like we asked
00:20:40.460
nicely, there was an extension. And even then when they coughed up some information, they didn't give
00:20:46.300
us the exact amount of the bonuses, which is what we want. And to be clear, this isn't just the CBC,
00:20:53.000
right? The CBC is the one that is not behaving properly here. When we asked Canada Mortgage
00:20:57.680
and Housing Corporation this kind of information, they told us. When we asked the Bank of Canada,
00:21:02.740
another crown, this sort of information, they told us. But it's the CBC that is playing funny
00:21:08.200
with these numbers. I remember years and years ago, you'd probably remember better than I am,
00:21:13.340
CBC had given, because they were really getting dragged for not being transparent about salaries.
00:21:18.340
And they had published this ridiculous, like fake list of salaries that had like their top people making like, you know, four and a half dollars a year.
00:21:26.080
It was not that bad, but it was like, they were basically saying that everyone was working for, I think it was like $80,000 a year.
00:21:35.020
Like he was making under $200,000 based on this scale.
00:21:39.280
I think that was just after Sun News Network was shut down or around that same time.
00:21:43.340
It was laughable because, of course, anyone who's worked in the news industry knows for a fact that that's not true.
00:21:50.760
OK, especially back in the day of when anchormen and I use that term affectionately when anchormen were paid the big bucks.
00:21:58.300
OK, that included in both private and in government funded news media.
00:22:03.980
If you anchored the evening news, you were pulling in the dough.
00:22:06.880
Now, that has changed dramatically, of course, especially in the private sector, as viewership has completely fallen off of a cliff.
00:22:14.380
From what I understand, anchors are now making a fraction of what they used to back in the day.
00:22:23.340
And interesting, I would love for, so I know that there's some people who watch your show for fun who probably still hold down jobs within the mother corp.
00:22:31.260
I really want to know, Andrew, how much their at-issue panel is paid.
00:22:35.480
because we've asked several different ways. And of course they try to say, oh,
00:22:39.040
that's commercially sensitive, blah, blah, blah. We can't let that out because it's kind of like
00:22:43.260
a talent fee. But back when I worked at CTV a billion years ago, the rumor was that those
00:22:49.460
ad issue panel hits were between 250 and 350 per hit. Meaning every time they opened their mouths
00:22:58.660
on like a weeknight show, they were getting paid that amount of money. I would love to know if
00:23:03.560
that's still the same or if it has declined no and i i recall that because i know someone that
00:23:08.780
went on that didn't want money and they literally didn't have a mechanism to let them do it for free
00:23:14.400
and it was because they're a union shop that was basically why so it's like guests are getting like
00:23:19.800
like i'm typically lucky like i'll like i've never paid to be a guest but you know getting paid to be
00:23:24.880
a guest is an incredible rarity i'm not even sure if it's ever uh come to think of it happened so
00:23:28.860
i'm getting paid what i'm worth i guess in that sense but uh it's it's brutal and i'll ask you
00:23:33.960
chris about this do you think it's time for a federal sunshine list oh yeah yeah big time so
00:23:40.020
here in alberta all of these issues would go away if the federal government did what say they're
00:23:44.000
doing in ontario every year yes exactly so ontario does it well alberta has a version of a sunshine
00:23:49.900
lift i list i think it's at 125 000 it used to be at 100 000 but you know inflation and so now i
00:23:57.760
believe it's 125,000. In fact, Andrew, it's funny you should mention that. The CTF just finished
00:24:02.920
presenting at committee a few weeks ago, where the NDP opposition here in Alberta was pushing
00:24:09.040
really hard to have unionized jobs within the government within the provincial government
00:24:14.960
exempt from the sunshine list. So you know, that's just basically all of them. Like you could just
00:24:20.640
imagine. Basically, they want managers only not these bureaucrats at the lower level that are
00:24:24.780
cashing $150,000 a year salaries. Exactly. You're working for AHS and just pulling in the dough,
00:24:30.580
you know, sitting at a desk and handing paper around to your other four friends all day. Yeah,
00:24:34.080
they want them exempt from the sunshine list as if, right? And normal people don't go after
00:24:39.620
like a super hardworking frontline paramedic. Like that just doesn't pass the taste or smell
00:24:44.860
test with most people. What people want to know is exactly to your point, are there, there's this
00:24:50.620
huge glut of middle management that is raking in the money. So yes, we definitely need a federal
00:24:56.800
sunshine list and it should cover all these sort of things. But again, we want the granular data
00:25:01.840
here, especially when it comes to the executive pay at the CBC. And again, it's really simple.
00:25:07.360
There's seven of them. How much of that was bonuses? To give you an idea, CEO Catherine
00:25:14.240
Tate of the CBC is listed as CEO level seven. In federal government talk, they have a grid.
00:25:22.000
You can find it on the Treasury Department website. She's number seven. As of right now,
00:25:27.280
2024 to 2025 budget year, she is now making between $468,000 and $551,000. She's also entitled
00:25:43.860
They call it performance pay, but it's a bonus.
00:25:49.020
And taxpayers want to know how much of that money is she paid
1.00
00:25:55.200
Especially because, again, their viewership is going downhill.
00:25:59.900
You usually just get a bonus when you're doing a good job.
00:26:05.100
And no one who's watched CBC can say that would at all be a term
00:26:38.720
me to return. The one little bit of baseball trivia I know is that I believe that's what
00:26:43.800
happened to Lou Gehrig, where he was like the fill-in for Wally Pip and then did better than
00:26:48.360
Wally Pip. And I don't know that because I follow sports. I know that because I heard it referenced
00:26:52.080
in a sitcom I like. So anyway, don't worry about that. Let's take a look at the bigger picture.
00:26:57.020
I always like doing that from time to time, especially in this country. And when it comes
00:27:01.580
to legal matters anyway, there are a few people, in fact, I'd say probably no one better to do it
00:27:07.080
with then Bruce Pardee, who is the executive director of Rights Probe and also a professor
00:27:13.200
that is probably worth anyone in law going to Queens just so they have a chance at getting
00:27:19.260
Bruce Pardee as a prof. Bruce, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:27:22.820
Great to see you, Andrew. Thank you. That's very kind of you.
00:27:25.200
You had this great piece in C2C Journal, Canada's constitutional mistake, how the rule of law gave
00:27:32.460
way to the managerial state and normally with these sorts of things i do like a bit of a wind
00:27:37.500
up before i bring the guest on but i actually thought it would be more prudent here to let you
00:27:42.140
describe what is your thesis here what is it you're saying okay here's here's the core of the idea
00:27:49.980
we we've gone through centuries of legal and political reform in starting in england to go back
00:27:58.540
to the original problem the original problem was these kings who ruled for centuries and
00:28:05.420
some of the kings were bad and some of the kings were better but essentially the kings
00:28:10.060
had absolute power whatever they said was the law and then slowly starting perhaps with the magna
00:28:17.660
carta in 20 in 1215 we started this long process of taking power away from the king and giving it
00:28:26.300
to legislatures and eventually we got to the stage in the british system of arriving at this
00:28:34.700
idea called legislative supremacy meaning the legislature is supreme not the king the
00:28:40.540
legislature can enact any laws that it wants because after all it has democratic legitimacy
00:28:47.500
but the problem was this that legislatures turned out that they could be tyrannical as well
00:28:54.060
as kings and then the americans came along and the newly independent americans said okay we're
00:29:00.300
going to fix this problem as well we're going to enact a bill of rights and they put that
00:29:04.380
in their constitution and then 200 years later we did the same thing in canada with the charter of
00:29:08.300
rights so what they did was take power away from legislatures and give it to courts
00:29:16.220
problem is that the courts now kind of abuse their power by doing policy and making decisions that
00:29:22.780
are not based upon the text and the living tree and all these kinds of things you'll hear people
00:29:27.340
complain about this all the time so here's the problem all we've done from the very beginning
00:29:34.060
is move power around from place to place to place to place from king to legislature to courts and
00:29:41.420
now from courts and legislatures back to if you like the king in the in the form of the administrative
00:29:48.060
state. And so we proceed with this idea that the final word has to rest somewhere, but nowhere
00:29:57.140
seems to work. And that's the mistake. The mistake is, instead of moving power around,
00:30:04.880
we should have taken power away, so that the power rests with us individually.
00:30:11.000
It's a fascinating thesis. And I'm glad I had you explain it, because you did it so eloquently
00:30:16.800
there. And what strikes me when you describe that there and also in your essay in C2C Journal is
00:30:22.860
that at every stage, we've been told that the shift is to give power to the people. When power
00:30:29.800
is taken from the king and given to legislatures, going back to running me to Magna Carta, it's
00:30:34.060
because, oh, well, the legislators are the representatives of the people. When it's taken
00:30:37.760
away and you have a constitution, I mean, the sales pitch from the founding fathers of the United
00:30:41.920
States. And I believe them to, with my knowledge of history, be authentic in this desire was that
00:30:46.860
we need to put a constraint on the state's power. But you cannot do that without an intermediary,
00:30:53.600
without an adjudicator. And that's where we go to the courts. Now, I'd say in the United States,
00:30:58.040
the courts have done a better job at keeping to the intent of the Constitution. But in Canada,
00:31:03.280
we have the opposite. I mean, the quote that I bring up from our former Chief Justice from time
00:31:08.280
to time, Beverly McLaughlin, is where she described in her memoir her job as being to take a step back
00:31:13.420
and hear the facts of the case and then decide what's best for society, which is actually more
00:31:18.820
dangerous than just letting the legislature have free reign, I think, is to have someone for whom
00:31:23.460
there is no accountability trying to really, by very definition, socially engineer. So we have
00:31:30.880
this libertarian utopia that we seek of wanting individuals to be sovereign. How is that possible?
00:31:38.280
Right. So if you start with the opposite premise, so the premise that we have now essentially is
00:31:46.000
that the state and the state comprised of these various institutions, legislatures, courts and
00:31:51.060
administration, that the state has the authority to govern. And these various branches of the state
00:31:59.760
are supposed to act as checks and balances on each other, but they're all basically on the same page
00:32:03.820
now. So they don't really act as checks and balances very effectively anymore. So the opposite
00:32:07.880
premise would be instead of authority of those who govern it would be the consent of those who
00:32:17.460
are governed and by that I mean not the will of the majority I don't mean consent as a group
00:32:23.300
I don't mean I don't mean by vote or referendum I mean every person gets to give their individual
00:32:30.700
consent to be subject to laws. Now, if we're going to premise the system on consent, you start with
00:32:39.200
that idea, which means by definition, if you like, that no one, whether your fellow citizen or the
00:32:46.840
state, can impose force against you. They can't coerce you. And that becomes the first rule of
00:32:54.720
the legal system. No force, no coercion, no threat of force. And then from that, we get all kinds of
00:33:00.320
rules about theft and battery and assault and all those lots of things that we already know and love
00:33:08.280
in our legal system. But then once you get beyond that rule, then for all the other rules that have
00:33:15.880
nothing to do with force, each of those laws requires the individual consent of each individual
00:33:22.700
citizen without which those citizens are not subject to those laws. Now, that's a radically
00:33:29.340
different system and people will obviously have lots of questions and and and understandably so
00:33:35.660
and those questions can be worked out but let's not throw away the idea just because it's strange
00:33:42.620
because it needs to be strange because the system we have right now isn't working very well
00:33:50.780
i think there might be some minor steps that have been i i don't want to say missed but really
00:33:56.700
sub steps that have taken place in this trajectory that you explain and one of them that i studied in
00:34:01.980
school and i should probably have ted morton on the show to talk about it uh is the establishment
00:34:06.860
of what i mean you're well aware of it he called the court party which was basically courts
00:34:10.940
becoming overly deferential to social justice groups and activists and this was like the 1990s
00:34:17.500
that he wrote this and i think the problem has gotten much worse since then so you even have
00:34:22.060
within that this subcategory of disproportionate weight being given to special interest groups
00:34:27.900
which has i guess fallen under the the banner of the judiciary and i i wonder if the next stage of
00:34:33.740
this the where we're heading is not necessarily ruled by the mob but but ruled to this this even
00:34:41.260
more obscure and malleable group that is really embedded in the courts embedded into the political
00:34:49.020
class embedded into the bureaucracy which i mean at its core is really dei
00:34:55.660
sure yes well what we would say we we have a we have a huge managerial state problem
00:35:03.180
the way i would put it and the bureaucracy and well frankly all three of them the bureaucracy
00:35:09.180
the courts and the legislatures uh are are working together essentially i don't mean that they don't
00:35:15.420
have their disputes and quarrels they do and i don't say i'm not saying that the courts never
00:35:20.060
overturned decisions of the legislature and or the bureaucracy that's not true either
00:35:25.100
but in a general sense in a broad sense they all fundamentally agree believe in the need
00:35:33.740
to manage society and they all work towards that end and so you're not going to have a genuine
00:35:41.420
check and balance from any of these outfits so you can you can see the way people react
00:35:47.100
to bad decisions when a court makes one of these creative decisions uh based upon the living tree
00:35:54.460
or uh you know a interpretation of the words that the words don't really seem to reflect
00:35:59.340
then they'll complain about the courts having power and fair enough but then you know when
00:36:04.700
legislatures say that they're going to invoke the notwithstanding clause they react kind of the same
00:36:10.060
way which is well the the legislature is abusing my charter rights and i want the court to have
00:36:16.140
the final say but you just finished saying that the court wasn't doing a very good job
00:36:19.900
and then when we have a bureaucracy bureaucracy making the final call like during covid you know
00:36:25.100
you'll wear a mask here and take a vaccine there and so on people complain that the that the
00:36:29.580
bureaucracy is making the calls and not the legislature okay well come on people make up
00:36:34.540
your mind the problem is there is no good answer to this they're all also it's it's it's word they
00:36:40.300
want the outcome and they don't really care how they get to the outcome so there's no desire
00:36:45.420
to be consistent on when they want legislative supremacy and when they want judicial supremacy
00:36:50.540
it's whatever gets them where they want to go see you you are getting now to the nub of the
00:36:56.460
difference between what the law actually is and what it actually does compared to what it's thought
00:37:02.460
to do so one could go so far as to say this the role of the law in society maybe maybe is not
00:37:12.300
reasoning to a result it's justifying a result that they want to reach and those two things are
00:37:19.660
quite different and where we may be giving the law too much credit for being you know objective and
00:37:26.140
solid and immovable and and and immune to the currents of cultural change it's an institution
00:37:34.460
it's none of those things it's this it's it's liable to be influenced by culture in the same
00:37:39.420
way that any other of our political institutions are and so we have to acknowledge the reality of
00:37:45.420
the way the thing works i think there are and you and i have spoken about this in the past
00:37:50.540
some structural issues in how canada's charter was created this idea of having the section one
00:37:56.620
which really nullifies much of the rest of the charter the notwithstanding clause itself is
00:38:01.660
problematic and and i say that to contrast it with the united states which has had a i i think their
00:38:07.180
bill of rights is a much stronger and more rigid document but but even so the problems between the
00:38:13.420
two are i think the same in that you know i used to look at the u.s constitution in a much more
00:38:18.940
favorable light than i do now not because the document itself is flawed but as my friend mark
00:38:23.900
stein says waving it around in the air doesn't really get you all that much and and that's when
00:38:28.940
we we go to the point that all of these things are not worth the paper they're printed on literally
00:38:34.060
if you don't have institutions that are upholding them and we've seen that the institutions are not
00:38:39.340
as rooted in what they need to be and i guess the question that i i fear asking about is can that
00:38:46.140
come back well the point that you made about the u.s constitution is quite right i think in many
00:38:51.820
respects i mean i think it has fared better as of right now than the canadian charter has but
00:38:56.460
it's not been a straight line i mean like the canadian charter the american bill of rights has
00:39:00.540
been subject to digital interpretation which is waxed and waned over time and some of the decisions
00:39:05.020
under the u.s bill of rights have not been decisions that you and i would like over time
00:39:09.980
so yes your point is quite right that it depends upon the institutions who are applying it
00:39:14.140
which makes the point that the document itself does not govern it's the people who are making
00:39:19.660
the decisions who govern and and that and you know it's a funny thing because people instinctively
00:39:26.380
understand that they make jokes about it you know it depends upon the judge i get
00:39:30.060
but there's actually more truth to that than they think and you can't language has inherent
00:39:37.260
ambiguities and so the idea that we're going to fix the charter or fix the bill of rights
00:39:42.540
by simply drafting it better you know more precisely now don't get me wrong there are
00:39:47.260
some really vague provisions in the cart in the charter that could have been done much better
00:39:51.020
but nevertheless it's it's unlikely that you can ever draft a document that compels every single
00:39:59.340
answer for every case under the sun it doesn't work that way so you're going to have to acknowledge
00:40:03.820
the fact of the ambiguity and and and acknowledge the idea that the way the system runs is in fact
00:40:10.700
going to depend upon the ideas and the heads of the people who run the institutions
00:40:16.860
so we have then two problems one of which is can the law be well i guess they're all really coming
00:40:23.020
under this one question which is can the law be safeguarded against people and it's ironic that
00:40:29.980
the law which at its core we want to be there to protect people is you know still being weaponized
00:40:36.460
by another group of people whether you want to call them the elites the state the institutions
00:40:40.380
the courts whatever the case is and it's a very strange dilemma because at its core we're back to
00:40:47.020
the original problem we have in a way which is that uh there is the need to save people from
00:40:54.620
other people and there isn't really the answer to how to do that well so it's funny you should put
00:41:00.620
it that way because if you if you like you can contrast the two competing ideas this way you can
00:41:06.460
say look if we stuck to the idea that the that the role of the law and the courts and so on
00:41:13.660
was to save people from other people from the interference of other people if we all agreed
00:41:18.060
about that then we might not have such a big problem but we don't agree about that the other
00:41:24.860
competing purpose that a lot of people think that the law should serve is to protect people from
00:41:31.500
themselves to put rules in place to prevent people from making their own decisions about
00:41:37.560
their own lives because other smarter people think oh that's not a very good idea you know
00:41:42.460
for my money that's a terrible thing but but a lot of people thoroughly believe that you know
00:41:48.520
i've said that those people who think they believe in liberty need to come to two epiphanies
00:41:54.140
not one but two and the first one is easy and the second one is not the first one is well i don't
00:42:00.980
want to be told what to do well that's that's easy anybody can come to that conclusion but the second
00:42:06.740
one is i don't want to tell other people what to do even though i think i'm more challenging yeah
00:42:15.620
until you get until you get there and until you get the people inside the system running our
00:42:19.780
governments to believe that as well then you're gonna have a problem and and that is where i
00:42:27.540
The one little bit of hope that I try to find in all of this is that there's always the hearts
00:42:32.240
and minds approach, is that what's on paper, what's in the institutions doesn't matter if people
00:42:38.300
are behaving the way we need people to, and that is embracing freedom, embracing free speech,
00:42:43.480
embracing the ability to self-govern in this sense. So it was a very, very thoughtful piece.
00:42:49.680
It's in C2C Journal. You can read it for yourself, and I would encourage you to do so.
00:43:13.020
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.