Juno News - Liberals not committing to Emergencies Act reforms – just ＂consultations＂

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

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

00:01:19.720 north hello and welcome to you all welcome back my friends to the show that never ends that is

00:01:30.480 an old i i wouldn't call it classic rock it's a song by emerson lake and palmer that palmer that

00:01:36.780 used to be on my old radio show a part of my theme song and when i moved the show over to

00:01:43.500 true north i was not able to get the rights to use the song so we got like you know generic

00:01:48.040 royalty-free intro music a but it's kind of grown on me so hope you enjoy it as well and if not well

00:01:53.640 it's short and then i come on and i'm i guess uh more pleasant to the ears less pleasant don't uh

00:01:58.600 interrogate that point too much but good to talk to you wherever in this lovely country or world

00:02:04.280 you are tuning in from whether you're listening or watching live or catching us on the podcast or

00:02:09.640 perhaps reading a transcript uh you know 973 years in the future i hope the weather is lovely and the

00:02:16.200 global warming hasn't destroyed you all. Going to talk about a few of the big picture issues of the

00:02:21.560 day in the program this afternoon. Going to talk about wokeness and why there might actually be

00:02:27.220 just a little bit of good news on the horizon. Perhaps Canadians are and Canada is not as woke

00:02:33.340 as you may think or fear. Also going to give the latest on Bill C-63. This is Justin Trudeau's

00:02:40.260 latest assault on free speech, trying to curb what you can say and see online under the guise

00:02:47.080 of online hate, of tackling online hate. My air quotes are always lopsided because I'm like trying

00:02:52.460 to avoid punching the, well, now I've just punched the bottom of the mic. So anyway, we're having fun

00:02:56.840 today. And what else do we have later on in the show? I will, well, actually let's get to this

00:03:02.240 right now because the Emergencies Act was one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation that

00:03:08.280 Justin Trudeau has ever decided to cozy up to. It's a bill that was put in place to deal

00:03:13.440 predominantly with the idea of war and strife and catastrophe. And Justin Trudeau decided to

00:03:19.580 invoke the Emergencies Act when he had bouncy castles in his front yard. That was, and not even

00:03:25.040 literally his front yard, on the street near his office. That was what Justin Trudeau saw

00:03:29.580 as being war, catastrophe, calamity, strife, unrest, and all of that. So it's been litigated now,

00:03:36.600 both literally and figuratively for quite some time, that the Emergencies Act was used by the

00:03:42.360 government because it just did not like the truckers. It didn't like the people that were

00:03:46.820 protesting vaccine mandates. It didn't like the people that were doing all of this stuff that was

00:03:52.080 embarrassing the government and trying to hold them to account for the COVID era policies that

00:03:57.160 I think very much caused divisions and strife in society, not the convoy. It was the policies that

00:04:02.620 the convoy came in response to that were causing division. So the government looks at this, realizes

00:04:08.340 its window is closing, says, okay, we're going to invoke the Emergencies Act. We're going to use

00:04:12.940 this unprecedented piece of legislation, this unprecedented tool. We're going to conscript

00:04:18.360 tow truck drivers. We're going to declare protests, no-go zones. We're going to criminalize

00:04:23.200 protests basically. And we're also to cap it all off, going to freeze the bank accounts of anyone

00:04:28.480 that we think is giving support. It doesn't matter if they've been charged or convicted

00:04:32.320 of anything. If we hand their name on a list to the banks, the banks are going to do our bidding

00:04:37.340 and they are going to freeze those people's accounts. That was what happened. And I'm putting

00:04:42.120 a glib 30-second summary on it, but we cannot overstate just how extreme and how severe

00:04:48.500 these measures that the Liberals championed were and remain in history as. So you fast forward a

00:04:56.740 little bit after and the Public Order Emergency Commission convened. Justice Paul Rouleau was

00:05:01.720 appointed as the commissioner, and he ultimately found, it was very narrow, but he ultimately found

00:05:06.760 that the government had made a reasonable or justified decision. He looked at the evidence,

00:05:11.900 he convened testimony, he had pages and pages, thousands of pages of evidence, ended up producing

00:05:17.580 what I think was a 5,000 page report, but he ultimately sided with the government. Now we'll

00:05:23.000 get to in a moment why that isn't quite the win that Justin Trudeau has tried to convince people

00:05:28.560 it is. But before I go there, I should point out that even with that, he listed several

00:05:33.460 recommendations. I think it was about 56 recommendations total, 22 that were specifically

00:05:39.080 pertaining to amendments that he thought, this is Commissioner Rouleau, the Emergencies Act

00:05:45.060 warranted. And I want to play a small clip here of Justice Rouleau announcing his findings.

00:05:51.180 after careful reflection i have concluded that the very high threshold required for the invocation

00:06:00.140 of the act was met in particular for reasons that i discuss in detail in the report i have

00:06:07.480 concluded that when the decision was made to invoke the act on february 14 2022 cabinet had

00:06:16.420 reasonable grounds to believe that there existed a national emergency arising from threats to the

00:06:25.180 security of Canada that necessitated the taking of special temporary measures. I do not come to

00:06:33.960 this conclusion easily, as I do not consider the factual basis for it to be overwhelming.

00:06:40.900 me reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion than the one I have arrived

00:06:48.140 at I determined that the measures taken by the federal government were for the most part

00:06:53.660 appropriate and effective and contributed to bringing a return to order without loss of life

00:06:59.440 or serious injury to people or property I also found however that in a number of respects these

00:07:08.100 measures were deficient. These included important aspects of the emergency economic

00:07:14.840 measures order, such as the absence of any discretion related to the freezing of accounts

00:07:21.420 or assets, and the failure to provide a clear way for individuals to have their assets unfrozen

00:07:29.340 once they were no longer engaged in legal conduct.

00:07:33.500 so that was a bit of the oversight and I think the key point there is when he says yes I found

00:07:40.860 that the government was justified however it was not overwhelming evidence and moreover he said

00:07:46.960 another reasonable person could look at this and come up with their own conclusion now I won't go

00:07:52.820 through the whole 5,000 page report which I'm ashamed to admit I have actually read most of

00:07:58.340 that's how little of a life I had that when this came out it took me quite a while and I kind of

00:08:02.880 jumped back and forth as I was going to and from the more interesting parts. I'm not going to read

00:08:08.380 all of the recommendations, but if you look at the recommendations that he made, a lot of it is

00:08:12.560 about communication between different branches of law enforcement. A lot of it is making sure that

00:08:17.120 there isn't this jurisdictional overlap or conversely that gaps are being created because

00:08:22.860 of jurisdictional fights between the federal government and provincial governments and all

00:08:27.120 of that. He's talked about the importance of beefing up police liaison teams, which ended

00:08:31.680 up becoming quite a crucial part of the discussion and debate around law enforcement. But he's also

00:08:37.880 mentioned in a number of points here, some specific recommendations for the Emergencies Act. Now,

00:08:43.920 the federal government is supposed to take that and issue a response. They're supposed to take

00:08:49.300 this to heart. They don't need to give him everything he's asking for. They don't need to

00:08:53.040 do it all, but they need to basically show that they're acknowledging it. Now, the government has

00:08:57.600 been slow walking this. They've waited until the very last day, I believe, or the very last week

00:09:02.100 of when they had to respond. And in doing so, they're kind of showing that this is an afterthought.

00:09:08.380 They're showing that this is not really something about which they care all that much. And I think

00:09:12.780 to understand that, you have to fast forward to the fact that the federal government had its rear

00:09:17.940 end handed to it a few weeks back when the federal court ruled that the use of the Emergencies Act

00:09:23.060 was unconstitutional. It did not meet the threshold. And more importantly, the things

00:09:27.500 they used the Emergencies Act to do violated unjustifiably the constitutional rights of

00:09:33.460 Canadians. Now, ever since that moment, my theory on this, and again, I could be wrong

00:09:38.380 to use the Commissioner Rouleau line, a reasonable person can come up with another

00:09:42.220 conclusion. But my theory on this is that the federal government has kind of been embarrassed

00:09:47.000 by this. They've actually, for the first time in the course of their handling of COVID and the

00:09:51.820 Convoy and the Emergencies Act, they've had to endorse, well, they've had to accept a bit of

00:09:57.340 shame when it's a shameless government normally, but in this case, they've had to really accept

00:10:01.380 that. And in doing so, what is abundantly clear, abundantly clear is that they do not want to talk

00:10:08.000 about the Emergencies Act anymore. They don't want to have a debate about amendments to it because

00:10:11.880 they don't want their record to be front and center once again, which brings us to this morning

00:10:17.800 and Dominic LeBlanc, who is the president of the Treasury Board,

00:10:21.580 saying that the government's not really going to amend the Emergencies Act at all.

00:10:25.220 They're kind of going to leave it as is, at least for now. Take a look.

00:10:28.640 Commission's final report found that the high threshold to invoke the Emergencies Act was met

00:10:34.680 and the decision was appropriate.

00:10:38.160 It also contained 56 recommendations to address gaps that were identified

00:10:42.660 and proposed changes that should be made if the Act were ever to be invoked again.

00:10:49.380 The government's response focuses on ongoing and next steps as they relate to each of those recommendations.

00:10:58.760 February 2022 marked the first time that the Emergencies Act was invoked since it became law in 1988.

00:11:07.100 The hindsight provided by the Commission's work, as well as the work undertaken by the Government of Canada and parliamentarians, offers us a critical outlook on potential changes that could be brought to the Emergencies Act.

00:11:22.560 As such, the government of Canada will engage directly provinces and territories, Indigenous partners, stakeholders and civil society on all 22 Emergencies Act related recommendations, including seeking views on potential legislative amendments as described in those recommendations.

00:11:45.060 so he's saying oh yes we're we're going to have some consultations we're going to talk about it

00:11:52.320 we won't do anything unless we talk about it we're going to have some some more chit chat we'll talk

00:11:56.440 to indigenous groups i don't know why you need to talk to indigenous groups about the emergencies

00:12:00.040 act we're going to talk to other stakeholders didn't really specify who those were i presume

00:12:04.940 all people that will just rubber stamp what the government did will he talk to protesters will he

00:12:10.280 talk to people in the Freedom Convoy? Will he talk to other people that the government might

00:12:14.980 want to use the Emergencies Act to seize the civil liberties of? I'm not sure we didn't get 0.99

00:12:20.740 that level of specificity from Dominic LeBlanc. Now, if you look at what the commissioner's

00:12:26.980 report called for here, a lot of these things are very reasonable. One of them is they should

00:12:31.800 eliminate from the Emergencies Act the section that refers to the CSIS Act definition of threats

00:12:38.700 to the security of Canada. This ended up becoming really the linchpin of the government's argument,

00:12:43.600 which was, what is the definition of a threat to the security of Canada? And the Emergencies Act

00:12:48.440 outsources that definition to another piece of legislation, to the CSIS Act. And interestingly,

00:12:53.960 it was the CSIS head who said, yeah, he didn't think that the threshold was met.

00:13:00.060 So now the Emergencies Act is basically in the position that the government wants it in,

00:13:05.380 which is there's a source of confusion around it, which the government can kind of leverage

00:13:09.860 for its own political gain. A commissioner also called for a review to ensure that the definition

00:13:16.600 of a public order emergency is exactly what it should be and what it needs to be. What else did

00:13:21.900 he recommend here? That there should be a consultation requirement with the territories,

00:13:26.180 not just the province. So that's more of a technicality. This one I find is quite interesting.

00:13:31.240 the federal government should engage in discussions with indigenous communities

00:13:35.280 to establish the appropriate parameters for consultations regarding possible recourse

00:13:40.660 to the act. So they're trying to put in this race-based litmus test to how the act and how

00:13:46.440 consultations are dealt with. That is, the government's only going to screw up. They

00:13:50.240 never do anything on the indigenous file particularly well. That's certainly been 1.00

00:13:54.100 true of this liberal government, as a great many indigenous advocates and activists have said.

00:13:58.180 and they also say that the provinces and feds need to mitigate infringement on provincial

00:14:04.880 jurisdiction. Well, mitigate is a bit of a weird one because you had all the provinces but Ontario

00:14:10.040 saying, we didn't ask for this act. Why are you doing this act that basically lets you storm

00:14:15.320 into our province and our provincial jurisdiction? So all of these questions, and more by the way,

00:14:22.360 I just read a sampling, are questions that the commissioner put to the government that said,

00:14:26.540 okay, yes, I'm siding with you in part, but here are all these things that you've got to deal with.

00:14:32.880 And the federal government has now just said, we're taking our marbles and going home. We liked

00:14:37.540 that you said we won. We wanted you to just end it there. We didn't really want all these

00:14:41.040 recommendations. We don't want to deal with those. When the federal court came and smacked down the

00:14:45.920 federal government by saying it was unconstitutional, the government just completely lost

00:14:50.260 all interest in dealing with the Emergencies Act. The government turned around and basically said,

00:14:55.420 all right. Yeah, we're kind of done with this now. We only liked this when it looked like it was a

00:14:59.860 win for us. But now that people are starting to turn on that, we want you to pretend it never

00:15:04.320 happened. So this is the Liberals in denial through and through. It's the Liberals not

00:15:09.140 wanting to deal with what will become, maybe not in the next election, but certainly in the history

00:15:14.340 books, one of the most profound failings of the Justin Trudeau government, because this was

00:15:19.980 literally invoking the closest Canadian legal equivalent of martial law. I realize it wasn't

00:15:26.860 military control, which is why I'm couching my language there. The closest Canadian equivalent 0.71

00:15:31.460 to martial law and invoking that to deal with, again, bouncy castles and horns. And the horns

00:15:37.660 weren't even that bad near the end of the protest, as police officials attested to in their testimony

00:15:43.640 before the Public Order Emergency Commission. But everything else, it's the government was just

00:15:47.560 embarrassed. And humiliation on a grand national scale is not, I guarantee you, a national

00:15:53.100 emergency, not in any interpretation of the law. But again, the assaults of civil liberties do not

00:15:58.920 end with Justin Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act. Bill C-63, the so-called

00:16:04.280 Online Harms Act, is the government's very direct way of reining in what it says is hate speech.

00:16:11.340 And again, every time I talk about this issue, I have to put this caveat in. Hate speech is

00:16:16.840 something that has a very specific meaning. It has a very specific definition. Hate speech is not

00:16:22.580 just speech you don't like, except a lot of these measures are applied to that. This is what we see

00:16:28.780 in social media speech codes from platforms like, not as much Twitter anymore, but historically

00:16:33.780 platforms like Twitter and Facebook. So hate speech is supposed to be something that has a

00:16:39.720 very significant, very strict meaning, but the government is muddying that and they're using

00:16:44.680 the apparatus of the state. They're using the Canadian Human Rights Commission under

00:16:48.300 Bill C-63 to go after it. The result is going to be online discourse, which is throttled and

00:16:54.000 managed by the liberal government in this malign alliance between big tech platforms who are

00:16:59.160 forced to basically uphold the government's so-called hate speech edict. So I want to talk

00:17:04.980 about this, as I've said, continuously. I want to hit this issue from all angles because this is,

00:17:09.720 for me, the big battle here. This is the hill to die on. Free speech, it always has been.

00:17:14.380 John Carpe is the president of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.

00:17:18.420 And just as a matter of disclosure, I will remind you that I am on the board of the JCCF,

00:17:22.800 but this is not, for your sake, John, a performance evaluation by any stretch.

00:17:27.120 Always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.

00:17:29.620 Glad to be with you, Andrew.

00:17:31.180 So you and I have spoken in the past about this.

00:17:33.800 The government has done us the courtesy of being very transparent about what it wants to do for quite some time.

00:17:39.540 And we've seen in the course of the last couple of years that this trio of Internet regulations from Bill C-11, which puts a podcast registry and brings the regulatory control of the CRTC to government and or to the Internet.

00:17:54.740 And then you have C-18, which throttles online news.

00:17:57.800 And now you've got this finishing move on online discourse here.

00:18:02.320 And let me just ask first and foremost, when the government comes out and says, we are duty bound to protect the charter.

00:18:09.540 does that pacify your concerns? Oh, no. Governments always claim to be, pretend to be

00:18:18.880 in favor of charter rights and freedoms. It's almost unheard of that a politician's going to

00:18:26.680 up front say, oh yeah, we're violating your charter freedom of expression. No, no, no. They

00:18:32.320 insist that this is not going to have any adverse impact on free speech. And that's outrageous to

00:18:42.080 assert that. That's false. We're going to have new powers given to the Canadian Human Rights

00:18:48.400 Commission. We're going to have regulations passed by Prime Minister Trudeau and his cabinet

00:18:54.240 colleagues, censorship regulations without input from parliament enforced by the online

00:19:00.320 offline digital safety commission. We've got, you know, preemptive punishment for people where

00:19:08.660 a judge can order you to wear an ankle bracelet and be under house arrest because you might

00:19:13.940 commit a speech crime. It is just to suggest that this is, you know, has no impact on free

00:19:21.900 expression is just ridiculous. It's outrageous to assert that. I wanted to ask you about that 0.81

00:19:27.360 thought crime aspect? Because I remember when that Tom Cruise movie some years back, Minority

00:19:31.740 Report, came out. It was literally a dystopian thriller. The premise of the movie was that

00:19:38.200 police could see the future and they'd go around arresting people for crimes they were about to

00:19:42.520 commit. And in this particular case, you literally have government taking the thing that was like

00:19:48.680 the conspiracy theorist warning about what this dystopian futuristic government could do

00:19:53.200 and enshrining it in legislation?

00:19:55.860 Well, if the online harms bill passes in its current form

00:19:59.560 and the Justice Centre is actively mobilizing to stop that,

00:20:04.660 we've already had over 26,000 people sign our online petition.

00:20:08.460 I hope to be delivering hard copies of that to Parliament in April.

00:20:15.360 But if it passes in its current form,

00:20:18.520 indeed there's a provision there where you can go before provincial court,

00:20:22.520 a judge. You can say, well, I think my next door neighbor, let's call him Mark Smith. Apologies to

00:20:28.520 any Mark Smiths out there. I think Mark Smith is going to commit a speech crime. He's going to

00:20:34.900 promote anti-Semitism or he's going to advocate for genocide. I think he's going to do that. 0.95

00:20:40.260 Mark Smith has to appear in court. Now, the judge does need a reasonable basis that the fear is

00:20:49.880 is well-founded, that there's a reasonable basis for the fear. So it's not automatic. However,

00:20:55.160 just the specter of that, that you could be hauled before a court where a judge, if a judge believes

00:21:02.440 this complainant that you might commit a speech crime, already the judge can say,

00:21:08.520 okay, it's an ankle bracelet, house arrest. We're telling you there's certain people you cannot

00:21:14.360 contact or communicate with. There's places where you can't go. You have to turn in your legally 0.89

00:21:19.880 owned legally acquired firearms you get all these conditions placed upon you without having

00:21:26.440 committed any crime that's in the bill if it passes in its current form when we talk about

00:21:33.000 the the speech aspect of this one of the things that has changed between section 13

00:21:38.760 in its original uh form this is the the provision of the human rights act that

00:21:42.920 uh was repealed by the previous conservative government the provision allowing the prosecution

00:21:46.840 of online so-called hate speech and and now is that we have a bit more clarity from the supreme

00:21:52.520 court of canada on what that uh what hate speech is and that came through a decision called the

00:21:58.120 watcott decision which uh the government kind of copied and pasted in defining what hate speech is

00:22:04.360 here and i wanted to ask you first off if you could just explain you're smirking so why don't

00:22:09.080 you just go with whatever's on your mind right now about this decision well the supreme court

00:22:14.840 devoted no fewer than 4,000 words trying to explain what hate is outside of the criminal

00:22:23.280 code context. So what does hate mean when human rights legislation bars hate speech?

00:22:30.280 And it is the most meandering, muddled, confusing 4,000 words you could read. There is zero clarity.

00:22:37.980 The reason I'm smiling is because it's hilarious in a way, and it's also sad and twisted and sick,

00:22:43.640 but it's hilarious that the government very proudly proclaims that they're going to bring

00:22:48.760 laws into compliance with the great clarity that the Supreme Court provided in the Whatcott

00:22:57.600 decision. Look, if you can't say what hate is in less than 4,000 words, there's a reason for that.

00:23:03.240 It's because hate is an emotion and it is subjective. You and I could hear or see the

00:23:08.380 exact same, listen to the same podcast, see the same YouTube video. You could say it's hateful.

00:23:13.320 I could say, no, it's not. Or I could say it's hateful. You would say it's not. So the Supreme

00:23:18.060 Court actually said that it is okay to ridicule and belittle and hurt the feelings of people

00:23:24.620 and to promote dislike and disdain. However, do not cross the line into detestation and

00:23:31.340 vilification. So you tell me, Andrew, what's the difference between detestation, which you cannot

00:23:38.000 promote detestation that's hate speech but you can promote disdain which is not hate speech

00:23:44.720 yeah i i read i've re i read this every time i talk about the issue and i'll read it again

00:23:49.440 because i think it underlines the absurdity you're describing here john which is um that

00:23:53.680 this is from the online harms act hate speech means the content of a communication that expresses

00:23:59.040 detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited

00:24:04.160 ground of discrimination for greater certainty. So we're supposed to be more certain at the end

00:24:08.800 of this paragraph, the content of a communication does not express detestation or vilification

00:24:13.820 solely because it expresses disdain or dislike, or it discredits, humiliates, hurts, or offends.

00:24:20.560 So you can hurt, but you can't vilify. You can dislike, but you can't detest. You can disdain,

00:24:27.880 but you can't vilify or detail. I mean, look, this is going to come down to that old, I think

00:24:34.240 it was Oliver Wendell Holmes on pornography in the US Supreme Court. I know it when I see it,

00:24:39.400 which is not exactly instilling a big dose of confidence in very rigorous, clear lines on free

00:24:46.100 speech. No, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, if the bill passes, will once again have the power

00:24:53.540 to prosecute Canadians, even based on anonymous complaints. So you could have like an atheist in 0.99

00:24:59.680 Vancouver follows a complaint against a Christian lady in Halifax over having made disparaging

00:25:06.740 remarks about a mosque in Toronto. Okay. And that could be anonymous. And even if the members of

00:25:14.820 that mosque are not offended by it, it doesn't matter. And then you get these unelected,

00:25:21.380 unaccountable bureaucrats, most of them progressive, woke, they're going to look at your speech and

00:25:27.080 decide whether it's hateful or not, regardless of whether anybody was damaged by it. You don't

00:25:32.140 even need a victim. You could just have the Human Rights Commission bureaucrat prosecute you because

00:25:37.820 she thinks that what you said is hateful. It will go before the tribunal. And if you are found guilty

00:25:45.040 of violating the new regulations through the Online Harms Act, then penalties could be

00:25:53.720 paying up to $50,000 to the federal government, plus on top of that, up to $20,000 paid to the

00:26:01.680 victim of your hateful speech. $70,000, you could be out of pocket, and that doesn't even cover

00:26:08.680 a penny of your legal bills. So that's a new reality that we're going to be into if this

00:26:15.240 legislation passes. I should point out it was not Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was Justice Potter

00:26:21.280 Stewart who used that line. So with all due apology to Potter Stewart for attributing his

00:26:27.340 quote to someone else. But I think he had lifted it from like Arthur Conan Doyle or something. But

00:26:31.140 anyway, let me ask you about that fine. Because, you know, one of the things that strikes me from

00:26:36.260 reading this is that you don't even really have to have suffered a loss or a harm to be eligible to

00:26:41.980 be a victim and a complainant. Someone could make an inappropriate comment about some group that

00:26:46.680 you're a member of, it wasn't applied to you individually, and you could be the one who found

00:26:50.840 it and reported it and, you know, be the one who complains to the Human Rights Commission.

00:26:55.920 And, you know, again, I don't want to be too, I don't even think it's a conspiracy at this point.

00:26:59.860 I could see a bunch of people that check off all of these diversity boxes sitting on their computer

00:27:04.960 all day and just mining Twitter to try to find something. And you could end up, you know,

00:27:10.480 amassing like, you know, $2 million in the span of a few weeks of work, just trying to find these

00:27:15.340 things that you can complain about. And again, that's not to say that the tribunal will go along

00:27:19.820 with that, but it doesn't seem like the law itself would do anything to stop that because

00:27:25.280 there is nothing saying that you couldn't just weaponize the complaints process or just profit

00:27:29.920 from it. Well, that's what happened before when you have Mark Stein and Ezra Levant were

00:27:34.280 prosecuted under Section 13 for Islamophobic or anti-Islam or whatever statements, whatever it

00:27:45.600 was, but they were huge legal bills, and it's very stressful. The women that the Justice Center 0.99

00:27:54.180 represented in British Columbia that were getting targeted by this person by the name of Yaniv,

00:27:59.460 who identified as a woman and had the male body parts and wanted a Brazilian bikini wax and would 1.00

00:28:08.480 phone these women, many of them working out of their own home with children. And the women would 0.99

00:28:16.020 say, well, sorry, we only provide this to women. And then Yaniv would file a human rights complaint.

00:28:22.360 And it was hugely stressful for these women that you get this letter from the BC Human Rights

00:28:26.980 commission saying a complaint has been filed against you. Legal proceedings have been commenced

00:28:32.120 and it's horrifically stressful. It's very time consuming. And if you don't have

00:28:38.220 the justice center or another group that's providing a lawyer for you, it can be

00:28:44.140 extremely expensive as well. Yeah. And I guess as we look forward here, obviously this is going to

00:28:51.480 go before committee testimony. I hope that you're called as a witness to testify. I don't think it

00:28:56.780 will be Justin Trudeau that calls you up for your counsel or or input on this but you know I hope

00:29:01.300 they at least hear it but what are what recourse is even available right now obviously you've got

00:29:06.160 a petition it's really politicians that have to be the one at this stage to stand up against this

00:29:11.540 is it not well people should also contact senators uh senators are far less under the control of

00:29:19.200 Prime Minister Trudeau than the Liberal Party members of Parliament. But people should contact

00:29:27.460 their MP, regardless of what party affiliation, and particularly if your MP is a Liberal or New

00:29:35.920 Democrat, if they're hearing from a lot of constituents that there's opposition to this

00:29:41.360 bill, they care about their re-election, they're nervous, and you could contribute to their being

00:29:48.340 internal opposition, you know, the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people

00:29:53.680 to do nothing. So let's not do nothing. Let's phone and email our MPs and let's, you know,

00:30:00.500 sign petitions. Let's spread the word to our neighbors and let's foment, let's exercise our

00:30:07.860 responsibilities as citizens in a democracy. John Carpe, Justice Center for Constitutional

00:30:14.180 freedoms. Thank you very much, John. Thank you, Andrew. All right. Well, let's take a bit of a

00:30:19.020 turn to the bigger picture here. With laws like this getting onto the books in Canada, it's easy

00:30:23.760 to take a rather pessimistic view at the state of things. And I warn you that I oftentimes am

00:30:29.960 guilty of being the source of pessimism. I try to be smiling about it, but then I read what I've

00:30:34.500 said and I'm like, oh man, we really, as a country, went down that road, didn't we? But

00:30:38.280 there is a little bit of a reason to be optimistic. And that is that spending time talking to real

00:30:42.960 people, as I try to do as much as possible, real people will often give you more confidence in the

00:30:49.220 country than reading headlines will. And it was interesting, this jumped up on my radar the other

00:30:54.140 day. Eric Kaufman, who's been on the show a couple of times in the past, he's a Canadian, but he's

00:30:59.720 living in the UK and he's a professor at the University of Buckingham, did a piece that was

00:31:05.860 quite fascinating with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute that found, there you see it right

00:31:11.120 there, the politics of culture wars in contemporary Canada. It found that Canadians are actually not 0.58

00:31:17.180 as woke as you might be led to believe by many of those in positions of power in the media and in

00:31:23.800 the political elites. I wanted to bring on Eric to talk about that a bit further. Good to talk to

00:31:28.780 you again, Eric. Thanks for coming back on the show today. It's good to be here, Andrew. Excuse

00:31:33.220 me, I've got a slight cold, but hopefully not. That's quite all right. Hopefully we won't strain

00:31:37.280 you too much in the next few minutes here. You and I spoke about your desire to bring a bit of

00:31:42.120 an academic focus to wokeness in the past. So it was interesting for this to come up here.

00:31:46.900 What did you set out to question first off? Well, yeah, this was, I've done surveys on the

00:31:53.200 culture war opinion in the US and Britain in 2021 and 2022. I was just interested as a Canadian to

00:32:01.000 see what the Canadian public opinion looks like in relation to Britain and the US. Clearly in

00:32:06.700 public policy terms, Canada has charted the kind of most what you might call woke or cultural

00:32:12.480 socialist path compared to the other countries. And so I was wondering if we could pick up that

00:32:18.600 trace in public opinion. And what really surprised me was that the Canadian public was basically a

00:32:25.200 carbon copy of the British and American publics. There was really no consistent difference in

00:32:30.900 their level of support for the woke position on whether that be um gender ideology critical race

00:32:37.680 and history um it seems like there's no real difference what i find fascinating about that

00:32:44.380 is that the institutional approach to these issues is vastly different in these countries i mean you

00:32:50.380 live in the united kingdom i follow uk news quite a bit you have issues of police departments that

00:32:55.740 are knocking on your door if you tweet the wrong pronoun there. And you have this non-crime hate

00:33:01.080 incident thing that is incredibly chilling. Whereas in the US, you have kind of the opposite,

00:33:06.160 which is, sure, you've got infiltration of school boards, but you've got strong First Amendment

00:33:10.160 protections. You've got a very strong culture of debate and discussion. Canada is probably

00:33:15.040 somewhere in between. So how does that happen? Where on one hand, you have just these institutions

00:33:19.780 in these three countries that have wildly different approaches to these issues, but the people

00:33:23.940 are the same in all three. Well, I mean, I would say that I, you know, I think in Canada,

00:33:30.500 certainly on the gender issue, they were the latest to push back in the three societies,

00:33:36.220 especially if you consider the red states. But certainly in Britain, on gender affirmation,

00:33:41.200 there has been a very much more robust, you know, the Cass Review, they closed down

00:33:45.940 a major, the Tavistock Clinic. So it's just been a lot more responsive to public opinion. And

00:33:52.900 likewise on statues and history and there's now a review of sex education in schools in a way we

00:33:59.080 don't see that level of policy responsiveness in Canada. I mean one of the reasons one of the

00:34:06.000 things that jumped out in the data was that Canadians were more trusting of the media than

00:34:10.540 say British people and Americans and so one possible explanation is that the greater sort

00:34:18.400 of trust and leeway given to political elites by Canadians allows them to depart from public

00:34:24.020 opinion more than might be allowed in other countries. Well, and I would also say in the

00:34:30.220 UK, certainly you have a much more diverse media landscape. I mean, the British tabloids are all

00:34:36.320 the stuff of legend, but you also have in general, I think in the UK, there's much more of a presence

00:34:42.140 in mainstream media for conservative opinions. You've got the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and

00:34:47.180 GB News and Talk TV and all of these. Whereas in Canada, the independent media landscape has been

00:34:54.880 a more recent, it's a bit more nascent, I'd say. Yeah, I mean, you're right about that. I mean,

00:35:00.860 I think there are some, you notice in Britain, the politicians like in Canada, the conservative

00:35:05.640 politicians are quite timid on cultural issues and have been more focused on just that liberal

00:35:11.640 conservative fiscal conservatism um but i think have felt pressure more from the press perhaps

00:35:18.740 you're right i mean they've still been reluctant to move on a lot of these things but not as

00:35:22.940 reluctant as the canadian conservatives um now of course canadian conservatives we're starting to

00:35:28.000 see some movement uh starting in new brunswick with with premier higgs but but now pauliev has

00:35:33.340 said some things what we haven't seen however is any challenging of the critical race and historical

00:35:39.720 narrative so for whether that be the residential schools the genocide narrative and that approach

00:35:46.860 to Canadian history whereas in Britain in France in the U.S. that's been much more robustly

00:35:51.760 challenged and again what the survey data shows is Canadian two to one they're against removal

00:35:56.600 of statues of Sir John A. Macdonald 70 to 30 they say Canada is not a racist country I mean

00:36:02.160 more than Americans and Brits Canadians are reluctant to say their country is racist that

00:36:07.140 that just isn't being reflected at provincial or federal level, even if the gender debate is 0.99

00:36:13.900 starting to happen a little more. Yeah. And I was going to ask, because obviously the relative

00:36:18.520 value of Canada compared to the US and UK is interesting, but I'm also fascinated by the

00:36:23.200 absolute values in just Canada alone. And it is a clear majority that on all of these different

00:36:28.860 questions, and I was wondering if you just give a few more examples of which questions you've

00:36:32.180 probed here, but Canadians are overwhelmingly, if you can distill the binary into the woke option

00:36:37.800 and the non-woke option, it's the non-woke option winning every time, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, not

00:36:42.820 100% of the time, but on average, it's two to one against the woke option in public opinion. That's

00:36:48.520 a good rule to use. Now, there are certain questions. Should kids be separated by race

00:36:53.540 in school into oppressors and oppressed? 92 to eight against. Should school children be taught

00:37:00.100 there is is no such thing as biological sex only gender it's like 85 15 again you know massive or 0.83

00:37:06.180 which is quite massive because just to jump in on that eric if you because if you put that poll

00:37:10.680 question to your average uh teacher i think you're going to see a huge mismatch there exactly yeah i

00:37:17.300 mean the the i don't think a lot of canadians realize just how much these particularly the

00:37:22.680 radical end of things is is running against public opinion i mean set by a 70 to 30 margin for

00:37:28.880 Canadians to say they don't want teachers telling kids that Canada's a racist country.

00:37:33.560 You know, that is a that's a pretty massive opposition to to a policy which is kind of

00:37:38.580 running through a lot of schools, like the removal of Sir John A.

00:37:41.880 MacDonald. Again, public policy, the elite institutions are completely out of phase with

00:37:47.580 public opinion. And I think that really offers a lot of opportunities for the braver of the

00:37:54.000 Canadian politicians. So just to circle back to the trans issue, and you mentioned that the timidness 0.88

00:38:00.600 of Canadians, and I'd say Canadian Conservatives, this is one interesting one, because the UK Tories,

00:38:06.260 I would say, have never been a particularly culture warrior party. But in the last couple

00:38:11.320 of years, you've seen some movement on this issue. And I think there are probably some domestic

00:38:15.640 political realities there that aren't necessarily of interest to delve into for people. But I think,

00:38:21.680 You know, J.K. Rowling, I wonder if she plays a role in this in a lot of ways, because I think she has really given in Britain and I'd say around the world a face to the, you know, the right wing position, despite not actually fitting the mold of what people expect the right wing Haiti hate monger to be.

00:38:39.720 Yeah, I mean, you have a sort of vocal left-wing, often lesbian, gender-critical feminist group. 1.00

00:38:46.860 And, you know, it's interesting to watch because in The Guardian, they've been frozen out, which is the left-wing newspaper.

00:38:52.860 But they have found a voice even to some degree in The Independent, which is also somewhat left.

00:38:58.260 And so there is a kind of left-wing, gender-critical voice, which has been important, I would say, in Britain.

00:39:06.040 Rowling symbolizes that as well.

00:39:08.500 My sense in Canada, that's there, but they don't seem to have the public profile and they don't

00:39:13.020 seem to be moving the debate as much as they have in Britain. So yeah, I think on that question,

00:39:19.060 you definitely see the prominence of Britain, this joke about turf island. I think the turfs, 1.00

00:39:25.020 if you like, have had actually an impact in that particular policy area. It's quite noticeable.

00:39:30.580 And I don't know whether that's going to happen in Canada or not.

00:39:33.920 Now, I mean, obviously you're a scientist, so you don't necessarily like the prediction game,

00:39:39.180 but I'm curious if you were to just redo your UK and US surveys, do you think you'd see some

00:39:45.600 movement and which direction would that be going? And conversely, if you did the same in Canada,

00:39:50.440 say in two years, we might see some movement. I mean, there's been quite a bit of survey work on

00:39:55.780 attitudes on the sort of trans issue where just in the last three years, we've seen about a 20

00:40:01.940 point shift away from the woke position in Britain and the U.S. And in a way, given that a lot of

00:40:08.580 attitudes have kind of, if you think about gay marriage or interracial marriage, they've been

00:40:12.740 getting more and more progressive over time. This really sort of stands out. The British

00:40:17.620 Social Attitude Survey, I think, was the most recent one. And so it does appear like attitudes

00:40:23.780 on these questions are moving in the opposite direction that progressives would like, at least

00:40:29.460 in the U.S. and U.K. I suspect in Canada something similar is occurring, but again it just goes to

00:40:34.820 show that the momentum is moving away from the trans activist position. Now how do the

00:40:40.500 Conservatives in Canada handle that? You know clearly they're doing very well in the polls,

00:40:45.060 they probably don't want to rock the boat, but on the other hand they have to be at least somewhat

00:40:49.700 aware of what their grassroots are saying. And unlike an issue like abortion for example,

00:40:53.940 And these issues are, you know, two to one in the population.

00:40:56.960 So there's very little risk to go after them, I would say.

00:41:01.520 Now, I mentioned at the beginning, you and I spoke on this show when you had launched this class you were going to do on wokeness.

00:41:08.920 And I just wanted to get a bit of an update on that now that we're a couple of years into the term.

00:41:13.560 Well, the course on woke is well underway.

00:41:16.440 And, you know, people can definitely sign up, go to my Twitter and look at the pinned tweet.

00:41:20.840 yeah we've got probably four or five hundred expressed interests and the classes are the

00:41:26.940 seminar options I mean they're some of the most fun I've had no need to call on any students

00:41:32.160 everybody's got an opinion so yeah I think it's it's been a big success and I think it just shows

00:41:38.400 there's kind of a pent-up demand and people are coming at this I just did a little bit of a survey

00:41:43.460 you know because I'm such a survey wonk but it seems like the class splits roughly between left

00:41:48.740 and right in terms of their ideological affiliations. Some are more interested in the

00:41:54.240 gender side. Some are more interested in the critical race side. But yeah, I think it's been

00:41:59.020 very interesting. And it just strikes me, the outpouring of books on this. I mean, it seems

00:42:03.240 like every week there's another book. I've got one in May. So it's a crowded field, but somebody

00:42:07.640 has to sort of make sense of it all. And that would be Taboo, right?

00:42:12.180 Yeah. Yeah.

00:42:13.060 All right. The book is Taboo, How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution. So that

00:42:18.720 That is coming out in May.

00:42:20.580 We look forward to that.

00:42:21.280 We'll have to have you back on then.

00:42:23.020 Thanks, Andrew.

00:42:23.500 Thanks very much.

00:42:24.500 All right.

00:42:24.860 Thank you, Professor Eric Coffman.

00:42:26.300 Always a pleasure.

00:42:27.440 We will wrap things up there back tomorrow to close out the week of the Andrew Lawton

00:42:31.660 Show.

00:42:31.900 But as always, don't forget off the record on Fridays, I'll be back in the saddle this

00:42:36.320 week on in the saddle.

00:42:37.500 How are you in a saddle?

00:42:38.720 I've never actually questioned that term before because you should be on the saddle.

00:42:42.120 I mean, the horse is in the saddle, but that's not anyway.

00:42:45.000 Try not to picture it too much.

00:42:46.280 I'm already regretting it.

00:42:47.420 All right.

00:42:48.040 We'll be back tomorrow.

00:42:48.980 This is Canada's most irreverent talk show.

00:42:51.100 Thank you.

00:42:51.520 God bless.

00:42:52.080 And good day to you all.

00:42:53.960 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:42:56.480 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:43:18.040 We'll be right back.

00:43:48.040 We'll be right back.

Juno News - March 06, 2024

Liberals not committing to Emergencies Act reforms – just ＂consultations＂

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