Juno News - Liberals scapegoat Anthony Rota for honouring Nazi veteran

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

00:01:20.420 north hello and welcome to you all this is the andrew lawton show canada's most irreverent talk

00:01:31.000 show here on true north great to have you with us 1 p.m eastern 10 a.m pacific 11 a.m in the

00:01:38.420 wonderful province of alberta i always forget what time it is in saskatchewan because i know that

00:01:43.240 half the year it's in a different time zone than the other so i just choose i love saskatchewan

00:01:47.620 I've been there several times, but I choose to gloss over it in the time zones.

00:01:51.080 I want to say they're two hours behind, but they may actually be one hour behind.

00:01:57.240 To be honest, it may be like Saturday morning at 4 a.m. in Saskatchewan.

00:02:01.740 Who knows these days?

00:02:03.120 And then if we head over to our wonderful friends in Atlantic Canada,

00:02:06.840 it is just 2 p.m. in much of the Maritimes,

00:02:10.280 but of course 2.30 for all you crazy cats in Newfoundland.

00:02:13.880 So wherever you are in this great country or beyond,

00:02:16.460 I welcome you to the show.

00:02:17.620 You are probably having a better day, whoever you are and wherever you are, than Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the House of Commons.

00:02:26.320 We spoke about him yesterday. He was the chap who introduced and honored a Canadian hero who happened to be a Ukrainian Nazi veteran on Friday.

00:02:37.460 I mean, who among us has not made that mistake at work? You know, just the other day on the show.

00:02:41.780 Wait, no, I've never done anything like that. But that's what Anthony Rota did on Friday.

00:02:45.720 yesterday, he had a fair bit of support from the Liberals. They were doing the finger wagging thing,

00:02:51.300 the I'm disappointed in you thing. Just as a matter of protocol here, if you've ever watched

00:02:57.660 House of Commons proceedings, because perhaps like me, you have no life, you'll know that all

00:03:03.040 comments have to be directed to the Speaker. So if you're talking about someone on the other side

00:03:07.860 of the aisle, you don't actually get to say, Justin Trudeau, I think you're a big smelly jerk. 1.00

00:03:11.960 you have to say, Mr. Speaker, the right Honorable Prime Minister is a big, sticky jerk. 1.00

00:03:18.780 When you're complaining about the Speaker, you actually get to talk to the Speaker, 0.99

00:03:22.740 and he's just got to sit there and at the end of it go, thank you for your comment, and move on.

00:03:27.020 So he has had to be bearing the slings and arrows of members of Parliament, deservedly so.

00:03:32.840 But what was interesting is how the Conservatives were the ones trying to throw him a bone.

00:03:37.300 We saw one such example of this from Chris Warkington, a conservative MP from Alberta, who was like, I mean, the Speaker must have wanted to leap out of his chair and give him a big old hug for this.

00:03:48.340 Mr. Speaker, I know your desire to take this on, but I don't believe for a second that you went, verified each person who was invited to this place, verified that they were not a security risk, and then stood at the door and let them in.

00:04:07.820 And I know that wasn't the truth.

00:04:10.320 So this attempt by the government to state that this was your doing and your doing alone,

00:04:16.400 that you alone are responsible and that they have bare no responsibility, is to send a

00:04:21.880 signal to all Canadians and all of our allies that we're not serious about anything.

00:04:27.440 Well, I'm not going to take collective responsibility for what in fact is the government's responsibility.

00:04:34.420 And Mr. Speaker, I'd recommend you not do it either.

00:04:37.820 That was Chris Warkenton throwing Anthony Roda a bit of a bone there.

00:04:43.100 We also saw a similar comment from Michael Barrett, a conservative MP,

00:04:47.640 who you may recall Michael Barrett as the guy that led the charge on the Wee scandal

00:04:52.660 as the ethics critic, which is a very...

00:04:55.960 I mean, ethics critic used to be a very minor position,

00:04:59.000 but the ethics critic became a pretty important role

00:05:01.420 when you're the official opposition against the Trudeau government.

00:05:04.440 But I digress. Here was Michael Barrett.

00:05:06.160 Time and time again, this Prime Minister and his Liberal House Leader say,

00:05:11.160 I had no idea it didn't involve me.

00:05:14.000 Time and time again, this Liberal Prime Minister fails in his duties to Canadians

00:05:20.040 and has someone else take the fall.

00:05:22.900 This week, it looks like he's going to come to you, Speaker,

00:05:25.880 and ask you to leave and to take the garbage out with you on the way out.

00:05:29.500 Is that really what this government wants to show to Canadians?

00:05:32.380 Mr. Speaker, again, that Honourable colleague would have seen your statement yesterday,

00:05:43.380 heard your apology in the House today, where the Speaker confirmed that this was his decision

00:05:49.980 and his decision alone to invite this individual from his riding to acknowledge him in the gallery.

00:05:57.580 we were all caught off guard by this we all stood and applauded because we were led to believe that

00:06:05.340 this was an individual who he was not and that is something that hurts all of us and embarrasses all

00:06:12.240 of us but there was no prior knowledge from the government i i was going i it would have been in

00:06:20.600 poor form given the circumstances but i was kind of thinking of that old hogan's heroes bit i won't

00:06:26.200 do the voice because i i'm terrible at impressions but you know i know nothing i see nothing like

00:06:30.400 that's basically been the liberal government's approach on this which is that it had nothing

00:06:34.740 to do with it it doesn't know who is speaker what speaker what nazi what not we we were we just got

00:06:39.820 out of bed one morning and there's this whole controversy and it must have been anthony rhoda's

00:06:44.760 fault and all the liberals who realize they have a bit of egg in their egg on their faces here

00:06:48.780 are saying that well you know maybe people who are being partisan are the real problem so

00:06:54.860 Like I predicted yesterday, it becomes a learning opportunity for all of us.

00:06:59.960 Now, all of this is besides the point in some way.

00:07:03.120 There was a thing that happened on Friday that was very disgraceful and very embarrassing.

00:07:08.740 As True North has written about as recently as this morning, you can see it has been a headline around the world.

00:07:15.260 The Prime Minister who thumped his chest and said Canada's back when he was elected has presided over yet another global laughingstock that is a made-in-Canada export.

00:07:27.920 You know we're not exporting a lot of stuff, we're not exporting as much oil, but you better believe we are exporting national shame with abandon.

00:07:34.700 If you could invest in national shame, you'd actually be a very rich person because that stock is getting higher and higher in value with each passing day of this government.

00:07:43.940 Now, this is, for a lot of people, very challenging.

00:07:47.580 Jews who were trying to commemorate and honor Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar,

00:07:53.180 have instead been speaking around their dinner tables and lunch tables about this and about the shame they feel.

00:08:00.780 And I am not Jewish. I know many, many Jewish people, and I have a great many Jewish friends,

00:08:05.220 and I've loved my two times in Israel, and I think these people have been through a fair bit.

00:08:10.020 And the historic trauma they carry about the Holocaust is certainly emblazoned when acts

00:08:16.220 of Holocaust denial or Holocaust diminishment come up, or even ignorant things like this

00:08:22.620 that are re-traumatizing those who have a very deep history with the Nazis for understandable

00:08:29.400 reasons are upset about stuff like this.

00:08:32.980 And no one is defending it.

00:08:34.800 I mean, I shouldn't say no one.

00:08:36.000 I mean, you get some people that are saying, well, you know, maybe they're not that bad.

00:08:38.860 but no legitimate voice is defending this. The only question is who is responsible for it. And

00:08:45.960 you know, one thing that is problematic here is that when you have political staffers who have

00:08:51.540 never picked up a book in their lives, have never read anything about history, have apparently

00:08:56.420 never even watched an old war movie rerun on whatever the movie channels are, I don't know,

00:09:01.840 Turner Classic movies or whatever. These people, I don't even know if they get, I don't really

00:09:05.880 watched that myself, so I'm not judging there. But you get these people who know nothing about

00:09:09.680 history, where anyone could have just looked at this and said, hang on, fighting against the

00:09:17.900 Soviets in World War II. Okay, something, but maybe I'm just going to Google. 30 seconds of

00:09:23.180 Googling, this problem is solved. Unless, as Ezra Levant purported yesterday, this was not an

00:09:29.740 accident at all, but was perhaps something more intentional. Who knows? As I said on the show,

00:09:35.620 this is really taking the enemy of my enemy is my friend to new extremes here when someone is

00:09:41.680 honoring a Nazi just because they happen to be against the people who are today's bad guys in

00:09:47.580 Russia. Now one thing I'll point out from Karina Gould here that I think is particularly disgraceful

00:09:54.220 is that she as the liberal house leader decided the answer to what happened was to erase it from

00:10:02.620 history. You think I'm joking? Watch this. I'd like to ask for unanimous consent to adopt the

00:10:08.900 following motion, that notwithstanding any standing order, special order, or usual practice

00:10:14.740 of the House, the recognition made by the Speaker of the House of an individual present in the

00:10:19.140 galleries during the joint address to Parliament by His Excellency Vladimir Zelensky be struck

00:10:25.120 from the appendix of the House of Commons debates of Thursday, September 21st, 2023,

00:10:30.400 and from any House multimedia recording.

00:10:33.480 Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

00:10:36.100 Oh, yes, the Honourable.

00:10:39.180 I guess we have to go to the—we'll ask about unanimous consent, then go to it.

00:10:44.180 All those opposed to the Honourable Minister's moving the motion will please say nay.

00:10:49.040 We don't have unanimous consent.

00:10:52.660 This may seem like a bit of parliamentary theatrics, but what happened here is the

00:11:03.540 Liberal House leader introduced a motion to go back to the Hansards, which is the official record

00:11:09.300 of every word uttered in the House of Commons going back to Confederation in 1867, and she

00:11:15.800 wanted to have that edited out. Edit it out. So if you were to read through it, there would

00:11:22.000 basically be a gap and nothing would have happened. It was as though nothing, it was that it would

00:11:28.660 never, never took place. And even the official parliamentary video record, it would be edited

00:11:35.040 out. So you'd be scrolling through and there'd be like a 30 second jump there. And you'd wonder,

00:11:39.520 oh my goodness, what was that? Maybe there was a tech glitch, but that's what they wanted to do.

00:11:43.100 Talk about Orwellian censorship to go back and cover up this disgraceful episode

00:11:48.500 by pretending it never happened.

00:11:51.920 This is not the first time this has taken place.

00:11:55.100 You may recall a few years back,

00:11:56.760 I believe it was 2019 or it may have been 2018.

00:12:02.060 And what is 2018 actually?

00:12:03.680 There was a debate on Parliament Hill

00:12:05.700 in a committee on online hate

00:12:07.720 and I was there covering it.

00:12:09.000 Mark Stein, my colleague Lindsay Shepard

00:12:11.460 and John Robson were the witnesses.

00:12:14.740 And at the beginning of their session,

00:12:16.660 there was a motion introduced to rip, to literally rip out of the Hanserts, to rip out of the record

00:12:23.200 something that happened at the previous meeting, which was a conservative MP, Michael Cooper,

00:12:28.740 quoting from the New Zealand mosque killers manifesto to make a point. Now, I can't even

00:12:36.120 remember what the point was or what the excerpt was, but he did it. He was denounced and that was

00:12:41.080 that. And people could see what he said. They could see the denunciation and they could decide

00:12:45.800 for themselves in the full context what the appropriate response was. But what the committee

00:12:51.540 members did was expunge that from the record. So if you go back now, they've actually changed

00:12:59.700 history. They have changed the audio and video feed of that meeting. They've changed the written

00:13:05.540 transcript and have removed it. Now, fortunately, in this day and age, people like me have captured

00:13:11.900 and transcribed these things before they can do it.

00:13:14.820 We would have had a video clip that we could have shared.

00:13:17.000 But in the official record, if you are a historian 50 years ago

00:13:20.780 looking for a debate that took place in Parliament Hill,

00:13:23.560 you would have an amended version.

00:13:25.800 And I know I'm focusing a lot on this,

00:13:27.980 but you can actually not, in my view,

00:13:30.500 overstate the significance of a government

00:13:32.720 whose response to a shameful display like this

00:13:36.140 is to pretend it never happened,

00:13:39.180 that believes the antidote to a wrong is to rewrite history and make an erasure of this nature

00:13:46.160 rather than to own up to it and to be held to account for it,

00:13:50.440 which in some people's minds will be solved if Anthony Roda tenders his resignation,

00:13:55.520 as I'm hearing some sources say could be coming as quickly as at 2 o'clock Eastern today,

00:14:00.460 so in about 45 minutes.

00:14:02.440 Let's talk about this in a bit more detail here.

00:14:04.860 Aaron Woodrick joins me.

00:14:06.260 He is the Domestic Policy Director for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and it's always good to talk to him.

00:14:12.360 Aaron, Nazi on the floor of the House of Commons, or I guess in the gallery, not something either of us would have had on our bingo cards, was it? 0.53

00:14:19.580 No, I mean, this is just a colossal mess, and obviously the Trudeau government has no shortage of problems on its plate right now,

00:14:26.400 so this is really not something that they needed today.

00:14:29.520 Look, put me in the camp of saying that the Speaker needs to resign on this, right?

00:14:34.160 It's not a point of principle. And this is something that's been absent from this government, because let's I mean, the speaker does have a degree of independence, but he is still a liberal MP. And this government has continually dodged what's known as ministerial responsibility. You know, you know, it used to be, Andrew, that when you wanted to take responsibility, there had to be some consequence, right? You had to pay some price, you had to resign. Now, you just say the words, I take full responsibility, and it's supposed to go away. And I think a lot of people think that's very hollow.

00:15:01.540 And so the point here is, you know, I don't believe for a second that Anthony Rota deliberately, you know, found this guy or even had any idea really who he was.

00:15:11.380 But that's not the point. The point is that someone needs to be held responsible.

00:15:14.880 And in our system of government, whether it's the speaker, whether it's a minister, when your staff or someone below you screws up, you have to fall on your sword.

00:15:22.500 That's the price you pay. It doesn't matter that it wasn't your fault directly in the sense that you didn't do something deliberately wrong.

00:15:28.620 You have to pay the price. And I think, as you already mentioned, now even Liberals are coming out and saying they don't know how he can continue. So I think he will go. I don't know that's going to put an end to it because, of course, the Conservatives are going to assert that PMO knew. I don't know either way whether they did. But again, it's certainly in keeping with the pattern where this government wants to always throw someone else under the bus and say, we had nothing to do with it. It's not our fault. That's just the way they operate. And this situation is no different.

00:15:57.600 Yes, and we certainly see the Liberal government here being very convenient in its detachment of the Speaker as a Liberal member of Parliament from the Liberal Party and Liberal government.

00:16:09.560 I mean, yes, the Speaker of the House of Commons is an ostensibly nonpartisan role, and the Speaker is supposed to preside over debates fairly and even-handedly.

00:16:18.660 But at the end of the day, this is a man elected as a Liberal member of Parliament.

00:16:21.940 And when it was expedient for the Liberals to just throw him under the bus, their point was to stress the independence of the role, the independent Speaker of the House.

00:16:31.240 I think it was the Prime Minister's office had called or had referred to him as in its statement.

00:16:38.000 Yeah, it's very convenient now, right?

00:16:40.860 So, again, but that's par for the course for this government.

00:16:44.340 You know, I did want to play devil's advocate a bit on one thing, Andrew, and that is sort of people saying, how could people have missed this?

00:16:50.240 because you had, you know, you have the Speaker, the real problem is that he was recognized in

00:16:55.380 Parliament, right? The Speaker chose to recognize this person. And in a way, it's a really unfortunate

00:17:00.480 series of events. The only reason this person is there is because he happens to be a constituent

00:17:04.580 of the Speaker, right? The Speaker represents North Bay, Ontario riding. This guy lives in

00:17:09.660 North Bay. Apparently, his son asked the Speaker if he could come. So, you know, it is a little

00:17:15.200 bit unfortunate that nobody did their homework. But the thing is, people say, well, how could you,

00:17:19.300 you know, knowingly, you know, applaud a Nazi. Well, I would say this, Andrew, in 2023, if 0.90

00:17:25.480 someone said, you know, it's a, we have a veteran here who is in the Ukrainian First Division who

00:17:30.760 fought the Russians, you know, that sounds kind of, if you're, if you're a young person in 2023,

00:17:36.640 there's nothing offensive about that. Of course, if you say there, there were an SS member who

00:17:40.440 fought the Allies in the Second World War, that is obviously a problem, but that's, that's not

00:17:45.200 way it was phrased so i think the language played a big role here is that you know if if people had

00:17:49.840 used the right terminology and as you said earlier if people had just done a little bit of digging

00:17:54.080 saying okay ukrainian first division what is that right that that could mean something very different

00:17:58.720 in 1944 than it does in 2023 and i think that was the big mistake someone did just not connect the

00:18:04.720 dots and say this person was a literal you know nazi uh i i simply think that nobody bothered to

00:18:11.760 check yeah and i mean and if you look up the history of it the first ukrainian division was

00:18:17.000 a bit of a rebranding to as i've understood distance from the ss vafa name so yes i mean

00:18:22.620 that name is itself a euphemism and i i wanted to go back to that comment you made about you know

00:18:28.640 just saying you take responsibility doesn't actually amount to it uh pardon the pop culture

00:18:33.820 insertion here, but it reminded me of this moment. I declare bankruptcy.

00:18:56.340 Hey, I just wanted you to know that you can't just say the word bankruptcy and expect anything

00:19:01.800 to happen i didn't say it i declared it still so that's basically what the speaker has done here

00:19:09.960 isn't it it is but and you know i've mentioned other ministers in this government have done the

00:19:14.320 same thing where they if at first they deny or deflect eventually they say well you know what

00:19:18.340 i accept full responsibility and then as soon as a reporter says well what does that mean

00:19:22.040 the response is well it means i accept full responsibility that's that's that's all it is

00:19:26.280 and i i think that you know we talk a lot these days andrew about declining trust and cynicism

00:19:31.160 in public. And I think this contributes to it, right? Like in the real world, if you make a

00:19:35.080 mistake, there's usually some consequence or some punishment or something. It's not just,

00:19:39.320 you know, if you're a kid, you get grounded, you know, you lose your allowance or you get fired

00:19:43.480 or you get suspended, your pay dock. What is a minister in the Trudeau government or the speaker

00:19:49.240 in this case, what is the price they're paying? What is the consequence? There is none. And I

00:19:53.500 think that's why most people think it's a pretty hollow thing to just use the words.

00:19:57.520 well and i would also point out here that the these sorts of blunders on a rather epic scale

00:20:04.060 are not really out of character for this government now and i you know i mentioned when

00:20:08.780 we were talking about the india stuff which was you know the biggest story in the world for a

00:20:12.860 week before this thing came up there is something to this government i think about it having really

00:20:17.820 surrendered the right to get the benefit of the doubt and i really think because of its conduct

00:20:22.260 and its history of these sorts of things when something like this arises people are not really

00:20:27.140 willing to give them that benefit of the doubt anymore. Yeah, I agree. And look, there are people

00:20:32.880 that won't like this government because of the policy choices they make. I certainly have been

00:20:36.700 a big critic of most of the policy decisions of this government. But more fundamentally,

00:20:40.460 there's a competence issue, right? And I think, you know, and you've even heard liberals,

00:20:45.220 especially ones who've parted this government, say so out loud is that, you know, the prime

00:20:49.360 minister has a very small circle of people, in some cases, maybe even one person now in the form

00:20:54.120 of Katie Telford that are basically trying to run the whole country. And it's a bit of a bottleneck 1.00

00:20:59.420 to say the least when you have everything having to flow up this very narrow bottleneck. And that

00:21:03.860 leads to these kinds of things, all kinds of decisions that aren't getting treated very

00:21:07.880 seriously or in a timely way. So aside from your policy differences, if you don't like what this

00:21:13.220 government's doing, there's just a basic competence issue. They're just not able to deal with things

00:21:18.520 because of his bottleneck problem.

00:21:21.240 Just moving forward here, I mentioned a few moments ago,

00:21:24.240 I've heard reports that the Speaker could resign as quickly as at 2 p.m. today,

00:21:29.780 so coming up in about 40 minutes,

00:21:31.400 and the resignation, I've been told, will effectively come into force on Thursday.

00:21:36.920 So I guess then there's a bit of time to have an election for another Speaker.

00:21:41.380 He has a garden party tonight too, Andrew.

00:21:43.560 The liberals are banking on them being able to really contain this crisis

00:21:47.480 to this guy alone if he's no longer speaker he sits in the liberal caucus like all of a sudden

00:21:53.260 he's a colleague of theirs in a more literal and clear-cut way yeah so that's going to be another

00:21:58.740 question you say well he's independent now he's back in your caucus what uh what are you going

00:22:02.400 to do although i am interested to see you know how far the opposition parties will pursue that

00:22:07.240 you know i i you can argue the conservators are making the point on principle saying well don't

00:22:11.620 take all the blame it's also clear they want the prime minister's head on this right i mean at the

00:22:15.400 end of the day, if you're not a fan of the prime minister, you'll, any excuse will do to see the

00:22:19.140 back of them. And this would be as good as any. So I fully expect that the people that are, you

00:22:24.240 know, not fans of Trudeau are not going to let this drop. Yeah. And I think one of the big things

00:22:30.800 that we will have to say, I mean, for just for starters, we put up this poster, we can put up

00:22:35.560 this poster we have. This was the invitation that was sent out to that speaker's garden party

00:22:40.480 tonight 6 p.m to 9 p.m at 15 barnes road i'm only comfortable giving the address because it's

00:22:46.180 already publicly out there and there's a gate so don't try to crash that party but so far i was

00:22:51.360 looking as recently as uh this afternoon right before i went on air not been canceled i don't

00:22:56.160 know how many people are showing up though yeah talk about the worst garden party of all time i

00:23:01.360 mean that's going to be a real awkward one especially if the speaker who invited people

00:23:05.500 is no longer speaker by six o'clock tonight by which i think there's a there's decent odds that's

00:23:09.920 the case so uh look this is just uh this is this is a disaster all around um i i i mean i'm not

00:23:17.420 privy to the details about who actually knew what but there are definitely going to be consequences

00:23:21.620 uh that flow from this it's not going to be the sort of thing that the government can just turn

00:23:25.440 the page on aaron woodrick is the domestic policy program director at the mcdonald laureate institute

00:23:31.880 thanks so much aaron always a pleasure thanks a lot andrew that was aaron woodrick now let me

00:23:37.580 point out here that you know I think Anthony Roda does deserve a fair bit of the blame here. I don't

00:23:43.480 believe that he is just a puppet in some decision that was orchestrated by Justin Trudeau. I do

00:23:50.280 believe however that the Justin Trudeau government, the Liberal Party, has to take ownership over

00:23:57.040 Anthony Roda. He is one of their members of parliament and this was an event that was not

00:24:01.960 strictly a House of Commons event. This was an event that in actuality was being orchestrated

00:24:09.760 by the Protocol Office, by Global Affairs Canada. It was a visit by a foreign head of state, by

00:24:16.500 Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in the House of Commons, and as I mentioned yesterday, has now

00:24:21.260 given Vladimir Putin like the biggest propaganda win, because the Russians have been saying

00:24:25.940 since the invasion started in 2022 that Nazis are basically running rampant in Ukraine,

00:24:31.700 And now here we have the president of Ukraine in the House of Commons of Canada applauding a guy who was a Nazi veteran himself.

00:24:39.820 And this is not the kind of like when I first saw this, because I didn't get a chance to watch the whole thing on Friday live.

00:24:47.600 So when this first came up, I was seeing on Twitter on the weekend and I was like, surely there's some like people talk stuff.

00:24:55.780 And I was looking, surely this isn't as it's being described.

00:24:58.460 And then you look in and I saw Ezra Levant's Twitter thread.

00:25:02.040 And then I saw a piece in Forward, again, an American Jewish publication.

00:25:06.520 And then beyond that, I started to look into it myself and realize this is exactly as it's

00:25:11.840 being described here.

00:25:13.280 And this was not just a speaker's problem because, like I said, it is the whole government

00:25:20.840 that right now was involved in this.

00:25:22.980 And the government has been very conveniently trying to say, oh, well, the speaker's independent.

00:25:27.640 And okay, well, once he resigns, he's going to be one of your caucus members.

00:25:32.140 So what is the conduct that you expect of the people who are sitting in your caucus?

00:25:37.580 And maybe they'll just go to the next level and say, we have to kick Anthony Roda out

00:25:42.060 of caucus.

00:25:42.720 But again, they're doing everything in their power to draw a line between them and him.

00:25:50.480 They're trying everything to make it so that he is not the guy responsible.

00:25:55.720 and that is something that I don't think will necessarily hold and to be honest this is one

00:26:00.880 of these cross-partisan issues where it's breaking out into the mainstream discourse people that

00:26:06.360 aren't specifically partisans that are none too pleased with what the government has done here

00:26:11.520 turning to another issue you may recall last week we spoke to Rod Giltaka who is the head of the

00:26:18.240 Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights the backdrop of the discussion was the looming deadline for

00:26:25.480 the so-called amnesty period that the federal government has for newly banned guns coming to

00:26:31.420 an end in just about a month and a week so maybe five and a half weeks or so until about 1500

00:26:37.800 variants of firearms including ar-15s and mini-14s that were banned in may of 2020 by order and

00:26:45.060 council are going to be no more there right now if you owned one before that order and council

00:26:51.380 came in. You've had it locked in your safe. You've not been able to take it out. You've not been able

00:26:56.040 to take it to the range to sell it. And the government's so-called buyback, which let's be

00:27:01.180 real, is a confiscation scheme, hasn't happened. So I have an AR-15. I have not been able to ever

00:27:08.620 fire it. And the government says that it's so unsafe it should be in their hands. Well, I've

00:27:13.000 not been able to put it in their hands because this program does not exist. I wanted to shine

00:27:18.700 to light on another dimension of this, which I don't often do on this show, because when I talk

00:27:23.860 about gun issues, usually I'm talking about them from the perspective of gun owners. But just to

00:27:29.140 set the stage, gun businesses were also severely affected by this. And I wanted to play a clip

00:27:35.220 before we get into this segment too deeply from a documentary I produced in May. Well, it came out

00:27:41.600 in the summer of 2021. So just after the one year anniversary of the Order and Council, and it was

00:27:48.000 called Assaulted Justin Trudeau's War on Gun Owners and in this I took a look specifically

00:27:53.360 in one of the episodes at firearms businesses and this one in particular this clip that I'm

00:27:59.560 going to show spoke about two businesses that were at the time dealing with this for over a year

00:28:05.020 and are in the exact same position nearly two years later take a look how is a business like

00:28:11.620 You're supposed to operate when anything that you sell could one day be illegal.

00:28:17.200 On eggshells, take it a day at a time.

00:28:19.760 I visited Jeff's store one year after the Liberals' order in council,

00:28:23.920 and there in his warehouse were tens of thousands of dollars of now-prohibited firearms.

00:28:28.620 They're illegal to sell or to use, and cannot even be sold back to the government

00:28:32.220 despite the promise of a buyback.

00:28:34.860 It's a rule of retail. If you're not moving inventory, you're losing money.

00:28:38.640 something felt by a lot of the gun store owners I heard from is that this is a feature not a bug of

00:28:44.340 the Liberals gun measures you know we're we're sitting on inventory right now that we can't sell

00:28:48.760 and that's tying up a lot of dollars which in retail is is a cardinal sin the the biggest sin

00:28:54.660 in retail is not to turn your inventory over um so you know it it's created some financial hardship

00:29:00.780 and uh but I try not to complain about it too much because I know I'm not alone I know that

00:29:06.520 every other business, whether you're a wholesaler or distributor in the country has been affected.

00:29:11.300 I liken it to the automotive industry. And imagine you own a car lot and Environment Canada walks

00:29:17.120 onto your lot one day and says, we're banning V8s. And by the way, you can't sell them. They

00:29:22.500 have to sit on your lot. And maybe someday, two or three, maybe four years down the road,

00:29:27.020 we might pay you costs, we might pay you retail, or we just might be a flat amount we're going to

00:29:31.580 give you. But in the meantime, all the parts that you have for them and your vehicles are tied up.

00:29:36.520 So as retailers and wholesalers, that's where we're at right now.

00:29:39.520 Our inventory is tied up.

00:29:41.460 We can't sell it.

00:29:42.660 Your entire business model has been destroyed.

00:29:44.340 And there's a lot of people out there, unfortunately, in this country

00:29:46.680 who are in that situation right now because of the OIC.

00:29:51.680 The first gentleman was Jeff Toombs, who has a store near Peterborough, Ontario.

00:29:57.220 I haven't chatted with him too recently, but Scott Carpenter, who has a store in Surrey.

00:30:02.620 I ran into him at an event not that long ago.

00:30:05.380 And he said that the inventory that he was talking about when I spoke to him there is still in his warehouse.

00:30:11.080 This is an issue that has saddled gun stores with, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory that they cannot move.

00:30:18.200 And even outside of those specific prohibitions, it is an uncertainty that has now affected this,

00:30:24.520 where why would you run a business when the government could ban the things that you are trying to sell?

00:30:30.800 I wanted to talk about this issue a little bit more from the perspective of the industry itself,

00:30:36.440 which, by the way, is not dominated by these big multinational billion-dollar corporations.

00:30:41.320 It's often small mom-and-pop shops across this country.

00:30:44.680 Wes Winkle is here.

00:30:45.700 He's the president of the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association.

00:30:50.100 Wes, it's good to talk to you.

00:30:51.480 Thanks for coming on today.

00:30:53.180 Thank you very much for having me.

00:30:55.080 Just set the stage here first off.

00:30:57.320 I alluded to it there, but what is the profile of a firearms business owner in Canada?

00:31:04.220 Typically, you hit the nail right on the head.

00:31:06.180 It's one of those things where most of them are mom-and-pop shops.

00:31:09.600 Typically, you're looking at an employee base of 5 to 12 employees.

00:31:15.000 In many cases, a rural business or in a non-urban area is where most of our businesses are located.

00:31:21.980 one of the things i should point out when i was filming uh that documentary in which your

00:31:27.580 your predecessor in your position was a featured guest one of the challenges whenever we were

00:31:32.540 interviewing owners of gun stores is that every five minutes someone's walking in and they were

00:31:37.580 old friends they knew each other i mean these things have actually become somewhat of community

00:31:42.460 hubs as well your neighborhood gun store for people that are in sport shooting and in hunting

00:31:46.860 and and that's not something that a lot of businesses in this day and age get to do

00:31:50.460 No, it's a very unique situation. We always like that old hot stove league mentality where you have a lot of folks coming in on a regular basis to go ahead and chew the fat about their event and their sport, and they like to come in and talk about it.

00:32:10.640 And it's a very small, close-knit community for sure.

00:32:13.940 And it crosses a lot of different realms of employment.

00:32:17.360 You know, there's people that are farmers and rural shooters and hunters.

00:32:22.020 But then you have lots of urban gentlemen and ladies that participate in law enforcement and the military

00:32:27.800 that like to practice their craft outside of their work.

00:32:30.860 So there's a lot of different aspects at play.

00:32:33.880 Okay. So I know that the handgun ban, when I believe we lost you, so we'll have to get Wes 0.98

00:32:41.940 back there. I'm speaking to half of my, there we go. I was speaking to half of my logo there.

00:32:46.000 I know that the handgun ban was actually quite a boon for gun stores. I know gun stores all of a

00:32:51.280 sudden couldn't like sell handguns quickly enough because there was a bit of a phase in period. But

00:32:56.280 for the order and council, this effectively locked up huge amounts of inventory that,

00:33:02.180 I mean, certainly in the cases of businesses I've spoken to, they've not been able to do anything with for effectively three years now.

00:33:11.120 Like, what are the effects of that if you're a gun retailer?

00:33:14.640 They're immense.

00:33:15.920 Just like you had mentioned in your previous segment about stale inventory and stale inventory is the death of retail as a whole.

00:33:22.640 But on top of that, you have costs associated with it, not just warehousing costs and holding costs, but insurance costs.

00:33:29.340 You know, for a lot of us that are holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory,

00:33:32.720 it costs you $10,000 a year to insure that inventory,

00:33:35.900 especially when the government puts a prohibited tag name on it.

00:33:39.020 So it's a very expensive thing to keep in our inventory.

00:33:41.940 And we've had no ability to have a lawfully or legal aspect to dispose of this inventory.

00:33:49.100 And it's got a great deal of expense, as well as taking up very valuable warehouse and retail space.

00:33:54.060 has there been in the members that you've spoken to a sense that it's just not worth it anymore

00:34:00.820 like why would i spend so much of my time effort and money in this industry that the government

00:34:06.020 could basically outlaw overnight absolutely there's been a fatigue we've seen a lot of

00:34:11.880 businesses in the last six months across our great country close and it's it's a combination of

00:34:16.920 financial viability but just overall fatigue of over regulation it's not just on the firearm side

00:34:23.260 it on the ammunition side the regulations when it comes to importing and exporting i mean we're just

00:34:28.060 so heavily regulated that it yeah there's a level of fatigue and and you're in a situation where uh

00:34:33.980 you know it's it's a lot of these owners are a little older and therefore it's uh you know it's

00:34:39.660 a little bit harder for them to maintain uh keeping up with all these online regulations

00:34:44.380 and constantly being on the internet and logging into the rcmp website and giving permission to

00:34:48.220 to sell stuff, it just gets difficult and they just get worn down and retire from our industry.

00:34:54.740 In terms of representing the industry side, your group is pretty much unparalleled, I would go so

00:35:01.200 far as to say. So has there been at the very least consultation or adequate consultation

00:35:06.700 from the government on what a resolution would look like? Yes, we've had some consultation.

00:35:12.740 We didn't have any consultation before the OIC.

00:35:15.940 Which is ideally when you consult, before you do something.

00:35:19.060 Absolutely.

00:35:19.540 And to be honest, the OIC is so poorly written, which is why we've had this long delay and why there's so much, you know, it's so difficult to bring this program forward.

00:35:29.220 Because we're really at a spot yet where we still haven't quite determined what actually was prohibited.

00:35:35.000 You know, you mentioned at the start of your segment at 1,500 makes and models.

00:35:38.220 And that was what was originally listed by the government.

00:35:40.420 But then they've added on 300, 354 mixing models that they found out were caught under the same net as the original prohibition.

00:35:49.020 So we're still trying to determine what exactly was prohibited because it was so poorly written by the Minister Blair in his office at the time.

00:35:55.820 And again, if there had been consultation back before this, there may not have been quite such a mess.

00:36:00.340 But now, of course, we're stuck trying to figure out how to deal with this regulation.

00:36:05.860 And we're currently going through that.

00:36:07.920 now there is some consultation but uh you know the slow turning wheels of the government are

00:36:13.960 very difficult to fight through especially when you have such a convoluted program one thing a

00:36:18.440 lot of people don't understand about these firearms is they're so modular in nature and

00:36:22.340 there's so many different moving pieces and they're kind of like a mr potato head of guns

00:36:27.160 type of thing where you're putting different snapping different pieces on and some of those

00:36:30.480 pieces are prohibited some of them are not but some of them can be used in other firearms some

00:36:33.740 of them can't and therefore they're trying to figure out how to how to properly gather all the

00:36:38.840 information that is required there yeah and i was actually going to ask about that because you know

00:36:45.500 there certainly is a huge huge market for accessories for firearms and i've not been told

00:36:51.540 and you may have a different perspective this but i've not been told that a gun buyback would extend

00:36:56.460 to accessories so there may be a no real way to recoup that money well so again we only get to

00:37:03.620 deal with the business aspect we have no interest or no communication on the uh on the individual

00:37:08.620 buyback uh i mean from a business perspective if you have a bunch of accessories in your warehouse

00:37:13.480 which maybe you can return to the distributor but maybe you can't i mean there may be no compensation

00:37:18.300 for that and no retail market for it now yeah no there and there has been extensive consultation

00:37:23.400 on the on the um on all the parts and the different components of the firearms uh there has been an

00:37:29.740 extensive discussion going on about that uh obviously um uh from our dealer's perspective

00:37:35.300 because so many of these things are modular nature we wouldn't be a part of anything if the parts and

00:37:40.520 accessories were not included so uh we've been a large discussion on how those parts will be

00:37:45.280 compensated for especially from those of uh our members that are manufacturers you know they don't

00:37:50.520 want to have to take the time to assemble these firearms to be turned in it makes no sense

00:37:55.400 whatsoever to put that extra expense on there. So, you know, they have bins and bins apart to

00:38:00.280 these manufacturers and they need to be compensated for as well. Just in closing here, I'll ask you

00:38:06.320 about what the dollar value would be. Not an individual dollar value, but in general, the

00:38:11.860 approach to a dollar value would be that would take the sting out a little bit. Because if the

00:38:16.180 government were to say, we'll reimburse you for the cost you purchased this at to businesses,

00:38:21.000 that doesn't really take into account the warehousing the opportunity cost you know if

00:38:25.840 they had to you know take out debt for example to buy the inventory in the first place but i also

00:38:30.980 don't think government really wants to be enriching or in its view enriching business owners by paying

00:38:36.340 a premium like what would the reasonable middle ground be well there's probably uh you know what

00:38:43.200 is the current retail value of that item is probably where the current middle ground is

00:38:47.340 You know, it absolutely does not compensate us for our losses. You know, whenever you have inventory tied up for three years, there should be six to 12 turns on that on that inventory. And we're not going to get compensated for that. And we're well aware of that. But at the same time, storage and insurance costs aren't being compensated either. So our losses are still going to be immense.

00:39:06.860 but uh you know the middle ground that uh i am assuming we're going to hopefully end up at is

00:39:11.600 is the retail value for the items um and uh you know that's um remains to be seen if that's where

00:39:17.820 they go but it still won't take the sting out of it and uh especially the the biggest cost that

00:39:23.720 our businesses have is the is the training of staff it's the marketing that's

00:39:29.880 oh uh we i think we you muted yourself there wes oh i apologize there we go we got you now

00:39:39.520 sorry about that uh some technical stuff there uh but yes we have uh so much invested in the

00:39:45.320 marketing and and the training of our staff and the sting of that will never go away uh it's it's

00:39:50.060 something that uh you know business has had tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of

00:39:54.520 dollars invested in and that's all out the window and it's an absolute collapse of that part of the

00:39:58.780 industry. Wes Winkle is the president of the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association.

00:40:04.460 I thank you for making your way through the tech issues there, right? You solved the better than

00:40:09.260 anyone else we have on the show is usually able to. So thanks very much, Wes. Good to talk to you.

00:40:15.180 All right. And of course, we end with you on mute. I jinxed it there, but in any event,

00:40:18.960 it was good to talk to Wes. And let me say that, you know, I remember there was one interview.

00:40:24.200 you should go back and watch Assaulted. I'm very proud of that. It's at assaulted.ca. And there

00:40:29.240 was one couple I spoke to, Wyatt and Shana Singer, this, again, husband and wife couple with a

00:40:35.100 beautiful, beautiful young son that lives on this great property out in rural Alberta.

00:40:39.400 And they just started in their shop, a firearms manufacturing business, because they wanted to

00:40:45.140 design a non-restricted firearm that would suit their needs. And it was entirely modular. They

00:40:51.820 designed it to the letter of the regulation to be non-restricted and they invested their life

00:40:57.680 savings in this they learned machining they bought a bunch of equipment they did so much

00:41:02.000 and they made this to follow the letter of the law and the letter of the regulations and then

00:41:08.540 the government just flips the switch and prohibits it it basically eliminated the only product this

00:41:14.880 couple sold and I showed this to a couple of people I know that are not fans of firearms

00:41:20.200 and one of them in particular had said well I don't like guns but I can't believe what they've

00:41:27.540 done to that couple and that to me is a win and I think it's important for gun owners to accept

00:41:33.540 that as I said in my keynote speech at the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights AGM which

00:41:38.660 you can watch online a couple of months back you know people that don't like guns are not going to

00:41:43.060 be wooed over by arguments about how owning guns should be a right they're going to be wooed over

00:41:47.960 though by human stories. And when people see what the government's approach to this has done

00:41:52.440 to ordinary people, to ordinary business owners that could own a bookstore or a gourmet food store

00:41:58.440 or a firearm store or a lawnmower store, it doesn't matter, people start to realize at the

00:42:04.220 very least the injustice in how it's being done and how the government has just kicked people in

00:42:10.620 this industry because it's decided that it can paint for political points gun owners as villains.

00:42:15.820 So we'll leave it there. My thanks to all of you for tuning in. We'll be back with more of the Andrew Lawton Show and perhaps a new Speaker of the House tomorrow. Well, we probably won't get a new Speaker until Thursday, but I will tell you also the event of the century, I'm going to be overly ambitious there, is True North Nation. It is coming to Calgary October 21st, which is a Saturday. It's going to be a full day event. I'll be there. Rupa Subramania will be there.

00:42:41.300 Harrison Faulkner, Rachel Emanuel, and a very, very, very special guest that we will be announcing

00:42:48.000 this week. So you might want to book your ticket now by trusting me that it's going to be a good

00:42:52.900 guest before things sell out, because I think they may sell out once we announce this person. So

00:42:57.800 that is coming up, and I do hope to see you all there. We will talk to you tomorrow, though.

00:43:01.800 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:43:05.040 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North

00:43:09.620 at www.tnc.news.

00:43:39.620 We'll be right back.

00:44:09.620 We'll be right back.

Juno News - September 26, 2023

Liberals scapegoat Anthony Rota for honouring Nazi veteran

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript