Juno News - July 04, 2024


Liberals to spend $200 million on online censorship office

Topics
minion tweets and memes CRA language and political communication
Mentioned
Peter Menzies Bill C-63 Michelle Rempel-Garner Andrew Lawton Show Pierre Poilievre Danny Hozak Justin Trudeau Kaylin Ford Laka Unana Patrick Moore Chrystia Freeland Margaret Atwood Stephen Hawking Danielle Smith Andrew Lawton Rachel Notley John Robson Tim Apple Doug Ford Anne Rand and 2 more
Chrystia Freeland tight-lipped on what she did in Davos John A Macdonald gets memory-holed

Episode Stats


Length

50 minutes

Words per minute

183.96

Word count

9,354

Sentence count

404

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Canada Revenue Agency has a new way to communicate with the public, and it's not by tweeting about it. It's called Bello, Banana, Bapple, Choppa, Mooka, Laka Unana.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30 Thank you.
00:01:00 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:19 north hello and welcome to you all this is canada's most irreverent talk show this is the
00:01:29 ed roulott and show on true north on this thursday july 4th happy independence day to the americans 0.90
00:01:35 in our midst you are uh dirty filthy traders who betrayed the crown but nevertheless we wish you 1.00
00:01:41 well happy uh whatever you know 2024 minus 1776 is if i get the number wrong you'll never forgive 0.99
00:01:47 me. So as it happens, I hope you're having a great day. I should probably greet you in the
00:01:53 official language of the government of Canada. Now I am not fluent in Minyan, but I believe
00:02:01 the proper term is Bello Banana Bapple Choppa Mooka Laka Unana. That's, am I reading that,
00:02:13 put the graphic up. Am I reading that right? Okay. Bello banana. I didn't do the long ah
00:02:20 on banana. Bapple choppa mukalaka unana. Unana. Unana. Okay. So that's the Canada Revenue Agency
00:02:30 there with its minion gif jumping up and down in celebration of what precisely I'm not clear.
00:02:38 Hashtag despicable me for. I guess there's a movie coming. I didn't even know despicable
00:02:43 me three had happened so i'm a little bit behind the times there but uh that is a minion jumping
00:02:48 and cra followed it up with another tweet uh and that second tweet uh is a kind of a bizarre one
00:02:56 as well i i lost it here let me see if i i have it handy uh the second tweet was oops the minions
00:03:02 were added again what they meant was the kids wearing you out at least applying for the canada
00:03:08 child benefit is easy and you can do it one-handed on your phone
00:03:13 So this is a bureaucrat trying to be clever and trendy and pop culture.
00:03:17 And I don't want to be a total curmudgeon who just can't see the joy in anything.
00:03:21 I realize that if you work in the bureaucracy for CRA, you're probably just desiring something that is going to liven things up.
00:03:30 So I get that minion tweets and memes are probably desirable there.
00:03:34 But if I'm a Canadian paying tax to CRA, which I am, and I file the ATIP, which I have, so in 30 days I'll report back on this,
00:03:42 I am willing to bet that there were at least six bureaucrats. My prediction is going to be eight.
00:03:48 I think there are eight bureaucrats involved in the crafting, reviewing, and approval of that tweet,
00:03:54 of those two tweets. And I'm guessing that we'll find out that this was a long process that spent
00:03:59 days and days, if not weeks, has been on the calendar for a while. And as a taxpayer, I'm like,
00:04:04 is this really, is this really the way that we want things to be? And this is, of course,
00:04:10 going all the way around the internet. The tweet just went up this morning. Pierre Polyev,
00:04:14 the conservative leader, has already come out and used what's become his favorite adjective
00:04:19 on this. He's called it wacko. He says, you're not hallucinating. This is the kind of wacko stuff 0.82
00:04:25 Trudeau's tax department is busy posting to make you forget they are taking more of your money than
00:04:30 ever. Sign here to ax the tax and the weird post. So when actually it's kind of useful when CRA
00:04:37 calls you and wonders why you haven't filed your taxes this year, you can just say to the tax
00:04:44 agent on the line, bello, banana, bapple, choppa, muka, laka, ooh, na, na. You can even improv a
00:04:49 little bit. Throw some of your own descriptions in there and say, oh, I'm sorry, I thought this
00:04:53 was the language of CRA, and then hang up on them. Asterisk that should not be construed as
00:04:59 legitimate tax advice. In fact, any advice I give should probably not be construed as tax advice.
00:05:03 But I found it kind of interesting because Pierre Polyev, he had, I think it was during the leadership race, during the conservative leadership race, he came out with this pledge, it would have been back in September of 2022, so I think just near the end of the race, in which he said that he was going to require use of plain language in government if elected prime minister.
00:05:24 He said, government was using complex wording that was not only hurting Canadians, but also
00:05:29 hurting businesses as they spend hours trying to navigate government regulations. So perhaps this
00:05:34 is CRA paying back Pierre Paulievre for that. He says, use plain language, don't use complex Latin
00:05:40 terms. And CRA responds with bello banana, bapple, choppa, mucca, laca, laca, una. I'm just, I'm not
00:05:47 even bothering reading it. I don't know why I was reading it, why I was like so cautious about
00:05:51 getting it right. I don't want to inadvertently swear and minion or something. Or, you know,
00:05:56 maybe my minion was sounding a little bit like Klingon. You never know. But this is the language
00:06:00 of the government of Canada. But to be honest, bello, banana, baffle, choppa, mooka, laka,
00:06:05 unana makes a heck of a lot more sense than most things Justin Trudeau has said in recent weeks
00:06:11 and recent months. So maybe we should actually just cede all political communications to the
00:06:16 minions and let the minions just have their way. To be honest, the more I think about this,
00:06:21 the more I think the minions might actually do a better job of running things. I don't think
00:06:26 the minions would ever push the capital gains tax the way they did it. And if so, they would
00:06:30 certainly communicate it in clearer terms than Deputy Prime Minister Christian Freeland managed
00:06:36 to. There's a serious point underlying all of this, though, which is that when the government
00:06:40 is spending your money to do silly things, you want to make sure you're getting things out of
00:06:45 Well, the government is, according to numbers released this week by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government is spending $200 million, $200 million to establish the so-called Digital Safety Commission.
00:06:59 Now, the Digital Safety Commission is the kind, bureaucratic way, again, bureaucratic language, it's the bureaucratic way of describing the censorship office.
00:07:09 It's the government office that's going to be set up if the so-called Online Harms Act passes.
00:07:15 And this is going to be the office responsible for enforcing the new suite of digital censorship
00:07:21 and online regulations that the Liberal government is putting forward and making those happen.
00:07:26 So this is going to have 330 staff.
00:07:29 It's going to cost $200 million on the low end.
00:07:31 You know that government spending on these things never ends up coming in on the budget that's been promised.
00:07:37 and at the end of it this is going to be this is going to be a massive massive bureaucracy and it's
00:07:45 Canadians that are going to be left paying for it and I say paying for it in more ways than one not
00:07:50 only is it the 200 million dollars that we're going to be spending on the office itself but
00:07:54 we're also going to be paying in terms of what this body does and I actually think this is a
00:07:59 little bit of an incomplete tabulation because there's also going to be a massive expansion of
00:08:04 the role of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which we know will require them to have even more
00:08:08 speech enforcers and adjudicators and advocates and all of that. So really what we're seeing here
00:08:14 is the Liberal government sticking us with a massive, massive bill for the privilege of
00:08:22 censoring and regulating what we do online. Now there's a little bit of good news here in the
00:08:27 sense that the Online Harms Act has not yet passed. The Online Harms Act is still in the House of
00:08:33 Commons. It has to go through a committee process, has to go through the Senate. There's a possibility
00:08:37 that an election comes between now and when this bill passes and we can get rid of it once and for
00:08:42 all. But if this goes ahead, $200 million for an office of bureaucrats to regulate what you say and
00:08:48 do online. I learned about this from Conservative MP Michelle Rempel-Garner's substack. She did a
00:08:55 great job of diving into what these numbers mean and she joins us now. Michelle, good to have you 0.92
00:09:00 back on the show. Thanks for coming on today. Thanks for having me. So it's great. We have
00:09:04 these two contrasting points today on what the government is spending money on. We have minion
00:09:08 tweets from CRA, and then we have the $200 million for what we can say online, which might even just
00:09:15 be minion tweets by the end of it, depending on how overzealous this is. But what is this office
00:09:21 going to do in your view? What's the scenario that you envision from this? It's a completely
00:09:25 unnecessary bureaucracy that will do little to protect Canadians. In fact, I don't think it's
00:09:30 going to do anything to protect Canadians from online harassment. And I'm not talking about mean
00:09:36 tweets when I talk about online harassment. I'm talking about the stuff that escalates into
00:09:40 physical violence. This bill does none of that. And, you know, for them to spend $200 million
00:09:47 to hire over 300 new bureaucrats, when we know that agencies like the RCMP are severely under
00:09:54 resourced, it just, you know, like that minion tweet, it just shows that nobody's in charge.
00:09:59 Nobody's making common sense decisions.
00:10:01 And it's something that, you know, Canadians should be deeply concerned about.
00:10:07 When we see this, like there are two aspects of this.
00:10:10 There's obviously the cost.
00:10:11 But even if the cost were $1, the cost were negligible, I still think the function of the office is in and of itself fraught.
00:10:18 But we also know that the Liberals have a terrible track record at predicting the cost of things.
00:10:22 Like the long gun registry is one notable example of, you know, it's supposed to just be pocket change.
00:10:27 then it ends up being a billion dollar boondoggle. I have no doubt that something like this would be
00:10:32 the same because they realize that from day one, oh, there's so much more to do. We need more people.
00:10:37 And then you also, as I understand it, have other aspects that would increase costs like the Canadian
00:10:42 Human Rights Commission, which also is tasked with enforcing parts of this, not under this office.
00:10:48 And they could find themselves needing a whole new annex to house all the new investigators they
00:10:53 need to hire. And that could be further millions, couldn't it? Well, I think your point is super
00:10:57 valid, which is regardless of the cost, this is an unnecessary bureaucracy. The PBO analysis today,
00:11:03 you know, sort of use a crude analogy, but it's the cherry on a crap sandwich, right? Like it's 0.98
00:11:09 really bad. But to your point, the bill doesn't protect Canadians from online harassment. It
00:11:16 doesn't amend the criminal code to do common sense things like include deepfake pornography
00:11:21 as part of Canada's intimate image laws.
00:11:24 It doesn't do the things that victims' rights groups
00:11:28 have been asking for to protect Canadians from crime.
00:11:32 But the fact that they're spending all this money on it,
00:11:36 essentially, and I mean, this bill has been called Orwellian,
00:11:40 an extreme attack on Canadians' freedom of speech
00:11:44 by people like Margaret Atwood, by magazines like The Atlantic.
00:11:49 Yeah, not hardcore right-wingers here.
00:11:51 Exactly. These are not bastions of conservative thought.
00:11:54 And everybody's raising the alarm bells on this.
00:11:56 And the fact that the government is so dogmatically attached to this, to your point, it just it shows nobody's in charge and nobody cares about protecting Canadians.
00:12:06 And that's where, you know, I'm really proud of our party's platform, our leaders, Pierre Polyev, talking about how we need to fix the crime with common sense solutions that don't cost Canadians hundreds of billions of dollars in new bureaucracy.
00:12:20 There are one point that you had in your sub stack on this that I found interesting is that the government has not really provided any estimate of how many complaints it thinks the Canadian Human Rights Commission is going to field on this.
00:12:32 So they don't even know how big a bureaucratic backlog this is going to cause.
00:12:37 And on one hand, you may say, OK, they can't predict the future.
00:12:40 I mean, this government can't even accurately assess the present.
00:12:42 But it also means that by their own admission, they've not given the PBO the information to really get a sense of how big this number could get.
00:12:49 Again, another great point. There's been a lot of articles that have been written and experts talking about how reestablishing section, essentially section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act in an age where, you know, you've got cancel culture, online platforms, there will be a deluge of vexatious complaints to try and get people to be silenced.
00:13:13 I mean, again, the Toronto Star, again, not a bastion of conservative thought over 10 years ago, said that this particular part of Canadian legislation needed to be cancelled, which is what the previous conservative government did.
00:13:28 The Liberal government want to reestablish it now.
00:13:31 There's nothing in the legislation to prevent vexatious complaints.
00:13:34 So, again, what we have here with the PBO report is evidence that the Liberal government is willing to make Canadians pay hundreds of millions of dollars for thought police instead of keeping Canadians safe with common sense measures that we've been proposing from the Conservative Party for months now.
00:13:55 You know, I think about my colleague, Tim Uppel.
00:13:57 He had a really common sense bill to prevent extortion.
00:14:00 The Liberals voted against that.
00:14:02 And so, you know, it's just so frustrating.
00:14:03 And Canadians should be outraged when they see the cost of these things and also see the results of the lack of commitment from the federal level of government to protecting their safety.
00:14:13 It's just, I was shocked.
00:14:15 And it takes a lot to shock me, Andrew, as you are well aware.
00:14:18 When I saw those numbers, I was like, you have to be kidding me.
00:14:21 I can't believe it.
00:14:23 Yeah, the bill itself, and you alluded to this earlier, Michelle, it lumps in things that few people would take issue with cracking down on,
00:14:30 like child sexual exploitation, terror content, with things that are a lot more contentious and
00:14:35 a lot more fraught, such as hate speech, where there's not a universal definition of what that
00:14:39 is that people can go alongside. Have you gotten any of the sense from your colleagues in the House
00:14:44 of Commons that they'd be willing to separate these out when you get to the committee stage?
00:14:48 The opposite. So in fact, this was asked in the first round of debate and the minister said, no,
00:14:53 not absolutely not. No go. It's right on the record of the House of Commons. I think overall,
00:14:58 the bill's approach is flawed like everything that you talked about there um some of the duty
00:15:03 of care aspects that social media platforms should have like to protect minors from exposure
00:15:08 to really harmful types of content you know like pornographic images or um you know types of
00:15:14 material that could induce self-harm the social media companies do have a duty of care to do that
00:15:19 but what this bill does is it relegates that responsibility to this new bureaucracy that
00:15:25 won't be done for years into the future whereas you know why doesn't it do something like actually
00:15:31 legislate that duty of care right into the bill like if they're so concerned about this why aren't
00:15:36 they doing that and it's because you know they have an obese government to use the words of pierre
00:15:42 right like that's that's really what they're focused on here they're not thinking about
00:15:45 protecting canadians and uh you know it it takes away the responsibility from accountable legislators
00:15:53 and puts it in a back room behind closed doors where social media companies, big tech companies
00:15:58 can lobby whatever they want. And that's not how we should be proceeding here. It's just ridiculous.
00:16:04 I know that the Conservatives have obviously come out against Bill C-63 for the reasons you've
00:16:09 mentioned. But if this bill does pass before the next election and the Conservatives' foreign
00:16:14 government, would this Digital Safety Commission be gone? Would you scrap it? Absolutely. We would
00:16:18 absolutely scrap this and replace it with common sense legislation that actually protects Canadians,
00:16:24 you know, without impinging Canadians' rights and freedoms. We don't believe as Conservatives that
00:16:29 Canadians should have to give up their rights and freedoms to things like speech in order to be 1.00
00:16:34 protected from, you know, legitimate online harassment or legitimate online harm. And, you
00:16:42 know, like, why the Liberal government thinks that they have to do this? Well, I know why they do,
00:16:46 because this is their agenda, right?
00:16:48 They have a radical agenda to police speech, to control speech.
00:16:51 It's why you have Bill C-11, Bill C-18, why you have news bans in Canada.
00:16:56 So, of course, this is something the Conservatives would not support.
00:16:59 We will block this bill at every step of the way
00:17:00 while proposing common sense alternatives that will actually keep Canadians safe.
00:17:05 Is your view that existing government agencies and departments
00:17:08 can deal with these challenges and that there's no need for any additional department at all?
00:17:14 Absolutely, 100%.
00:17:15 Absolutely. Like the fact that the government didn't start from that premise of how do we use existing agencies? How do we use the criminal code? How do we resource things adequately? It is preposterous. Like, like, that's, you should be thinking about that. That's just basic management. It's something that anybody who owns a small business would be thinking about, right?
00:17:38 um and not just for cost but also for ease of use for simplicity um so so so these are the
00:17:46 things that government should be thinking about it's what we will be encourage continuing to
00:17:50 encourage them to do uh but also developing our own plans and announcing those in in due in due
00:17:56 course and uh if you get into government any more minion tweets from cra you know when i just have
00:18:02 a like five second rant on this yeah go for it constituents like one of the top pieces of case
00:18:09 work i get in my office is people not being able to get through to the cra um you know the rules
00:18:14 are so crazy and then to see that like i i just like my case worker just she she saw this and
00:18:22 she was like you have got to be kidding me and rightly so you know the government can't afford
00:18:26 to be cute right now they have to get their jobs done and uh you know this is just you know some
00:18:31 people will be like, oh, you know, it's cute. No, it's indicative of a government with nobody in
00:18:35 charge. And I cannot wait to see the communications decision chain on who approved that. I'm sure it
00:18:41 was approved by 400 bureaucrats over three weeks. Yeah, I was about to respond to your tweet,
00:18:46 but I had to go on air. I'm filing an ATIP right after the show. I am too. Okay, well, we'll see
00:18:51 who gets the response back more quickly. But anytime I ATIP a tweet, like the stupidest tweet 0.99
00:18:56 will have like a chain of 12 people on it, 0.99
00:18:58 different departments,
00:19:00 third-party consultations for like one tweet.
00:19:02 It's insane.
00:19:03 This one I know will be in that category.
00:19:06 All right.
00:19:07 Giddy up.
00:19:08 I've got to go to the Stampede.
00:19:09 Conservative MP Michelle Remble-Garner,
00:19:11 enjoy the Calgary Stampede.
00:19:13 I think it's coming up.
00:19:14 You should have a good time there.
00:19:15 Take care.
00:19:16 All right.
00:19:16 Thanks a lot, Michelle.
00:19:18 I want to pivot to Peter Menzies on this,
00:19:20 who is a former CRTC vice chair,
00:19:22 knows the internet regulation file inside and out.
00:19:25 and also has done tremendous work covering a lot of this at the rewrite on Substack.
00:19:31 And I wanted to get a sense of just the bigger picture there.
00:19:35 And what we had from Michelle Rempel-Garner was the political dimension of this.
00:19:39 The Conservatives coming out and saying unequivocally,
00:19:42 we are going to scrap the Digital Safety Commission
00:19:44 if it exists by the time the Conservatives may form government.
00:19:47 Now, as it happens, even if the bill passes,
00:19:50 the idea that they would set up a 330 person bureaucracy quickly is very unlikely. But
00:19:57 nevertheless, I think this is a low ball. Peter Menzies joins us once again. Good to talk to you,
00:20:02 Peter. Thanks for coming on today. Good to talk to you too. Now, there's nothing governments love
00:20:07 more than just creating more departments, is there? Yes, there's no turf that cannot be claimed
00:20:12 or department that can't be expanded in a certain worldview. Before getting into the cost aspect,
00:20:20 What's your view on the idea that a digital safety commission is even a necessary entity in Canada?
00:20:26 Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I think the issues that it's intended to address are genuine issues.
00:20:31 I just don't think that's the solution.
00:20:33 You could look to, I was listening to Ms. Rempel-Gardner there, and if you're looking for a solution, look to New Zealand.
00:20:42 New Zealand came up with a recently, within the last several months, a code of conduct that it had all the social media companies sign on to, which basically it's the same purpose to address all these child safety and make sure that social media is as safe a space as you can make it and that there aren't predators on there or limit that as much as you can.
00:21:05 I mean, the world can be a tough place.
00:21:07 And once you get into it, I mean, danger lurks.
00:21:10 But there's different ways to do it.
00:21:12 British Columbia, just last month, signed a deal with Snapchat, X, Google, Meta, TikTok,
00:21:21 I think that's it, all again to address child safety concerns and that sort of stuff.
00:21:28 So you can do this through agreements.
00:21:31 Some people obviously would like to have more power and enforcement, but these agreements
00:21:37 can also contain penalties if you don't live up to them.
00:21:40 so yeah look to new zealand i think is probably the most sensible um least bureaucratic um effective
00:21:47 solution that i've seen of late and it seems as though and i wouldn't say i'm an expert on it so
00:21:53 you can correct me if i'm wrong here it seems as though they're looking more to australia which has
00:21:57 this e-safety commission and this e-safety commissioner is that a fair analog from what
00:22:01 they've proposed in canada yeah i guess so um but i think you know i mean this this bill the online
00:22:06 harms act is is is such a like it's sort of a three-headed monster there's this digital safety
00:22:13 commission and 330 people is an awful lot of people well you know it's never going to end
00:22:18 there like you know that on you know month three they're going to realize oh there's so much more
00:22:22 work than we anticipated we need to expand well it doesn't even seem to address the extra workload
00:22:27 that's going to happen at the canadian human rights commission because that's where tons of
00:22:31 it's going to happen because it empowers people there's the digital safety commission on the one
00:22:36 side and on the other side with the amendment to the criminal code people will be able to to
00:22:41 complain directly that speech is racism without it being explicitly racist etc etc to the human
00:22:48 rights commission and seek justice of some kind there now recently i mean i mean that's just going
00:22:55 to get flooded every time somebody says something that bothers somebody on on x or tick tock or
00:23:02 something like that they can go ahead and and file a complaint with the canadian human rights
00:23:06 commission where you know as often said the process is the punishment it can drag out for
00:23:12 years and they usually end up shaking you down for some money no matter how innocent you feel
00:23:17 you might be um just the process just wears you down now i can't imagine that there that wouldn't
00:23:24 even be more active than the digital safety commission and the costs there aren't included
00:23:30 in the estimates that uh the pbo estimates that uh michelle was talking about yeah and the one
00:23:38 thing that i find interesting and it's not a perfect comparison for a number of reasons but
00:23:42 when the government launched the i forget the the acronym but the air passenger rights bill and then
00:23:48 the commission that you could go and file your complaint against air canada or west jet with
00:23:52 it ended up where instantly you just had like a two-year-long backlog because there was this
00:23:57 deluge of complaints. And I think on the Human Rights Commission side, you're right to point out,
00:24:01 Peter, it's going to be even worse because you're going to have people that are abusing the process
00:24:06 because they don't respect its legitimacy. You're going to have people like a kind of a civil
00:24:09 disobedience of sorts. You're going to have people that genuinely believe everything is an affront to
00:24:14 their human rights and are filing complaints. And then, you know, buried in there, you might have
00:24:18 the one or two legitimate complaints, but you're going to have to have some system to adjudicate
00:24:23 these. And even if they decide that, you know, they're only going to champion or advance, you
00:24:28 know, 0.01% of them, a human will have to lay eyes and respond and categorize this. I mean,
00:24:34 it's a massive, massive undertaking. And the government has not even really acknowledged
00:24:38 how many complaints it expects will be there. Yeah, and that is a huge problem. And one of
00:24:43 the sad outcomes too is that the legitimate complaints will get in the same queue as the
00:24:48 illegitimate. There's no way to triage that at the front end. I mean, look at Scotland recently.
00:24:53 Scotland brought in a very draconian piece of speech legislation, and it used its criminal
00:24:59 code to do it. As soon as it came into effect, the police were flooded with thousands upon
00:25:06 thousands upon thousands of complaints, many of which were against the first minister who'd brought
00:25:12 the law into place. It took them a couple of days to decide that, no, they wouldn't be pursuing
00:25:17 charges against him but everybody was complaining i mean the the system just got flooded probably
00:25:24 through a certain amount of you know protest and the irony on it but within two or three weeks
00:25:31 that first minister who brought in that law in scotland was gone so there is some pushback to
00:25:37 this and and i i go back to the conversation i don't know if you caught this part of my discussion
00:25:42 with michelle rempel garner but you know the government has so far been unwilling to to parcel
00:25:46 out the different parts of the Online Harms Act, the things that are a lot less contentious from
00:25:52 the things that are more. And I think that's pretty deliberate. But are you optimistic that
00:25:57 at the committee stage, there will be any ability to affect change and make this less of a dangerous
00:26:03 piece of legislation? No, I'm afraid I'm not. I mean, I'd like to be, but the way I've seen the
00:26:08 process work through, and I've been at some of the House of Commons committee meetings and Senate
00:26:15 and Senate committee meetings for Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, and Bill C-18, the Online
00:26:21 News Act. And there hasn't been much openness. It's kind of like if the really, the Senate's
00:26:27 better, to be fair to the senators. There's some genuine questions, people genuinely curious,
00:26:33 not that they did anything about it, but they were genuinely curious and receptive
00:26:37 to critiques. The House of Commons was just, it's just kind of a battlefield, right, where you go
00:26:44 in there and people are trying to get their YouTube clips and that sort of stuff. There's
00:26:50 nothing serious about the process that makes you think that intelligence suggestions for amendments
00:26:58 would be accepted. And I think we've already seen with Bill C-11, we've now got two decisions and
00:27:05 two, or I hear maybe even three, court appeals coming. And the same with C-18, which turned out
00:27:12 to be, you know, a very predictable disaster. So yeah, they're not going to listen. I wish they
00:27:20 will. You know, I don't like talking about, you know, the next election as though it's a fait
00:27:25 accompli, because obviously things change. But as it stands now, the conservatives are on track to
00:27:29 have a pretty significant majority government if things hold. How easy would it be to roll back,
00:27:35 you know, the C-18 and the C-11? And C-63, I don't think will be too much of an issue,
00:27:40 because if it does pass, it won't be that long before the election. But the other things,
00:27:44 because government has a tendency of just entrenching itself. So dismantling becomes
00:27:48 very difficult. Well, it depends how complicated they want to make it. I mean, you could just
00:27:52 introduce one bill that repeals all three acts. It's pretty straightforward if you have a big...
00:27:58 And go back to life circa 2022 or something. Yeah, you just reset. But what you should be doing,
00:28:04 and I would encourage those in seeking to form government to be doing that is to have a plan in
00:28:11 place. Like if you're going to get rid of C-18, right now the media has like a $260 million 1.00
00:28:18 rug that they're sitting on that's been provided by the government. And yesterday, Doug Ford gave
00:28:23 them some more, right? So they've been very successful in the legacy media in getting all
00:28:30 these government subsidies. If you have the courage to go and rip that rug out from underneath
00:28:34 them right away rip the band-aid off whatever analogy you want to use um you can do it right
00:28:39 away if you want to have another plan for what you know a public policy might look like for the
00:28:48 industry you know improved things like improved tax deductibility of my newspaper subscriptions
00:28:55 or other online subscriptions um so that you subsidize my behavior but not but not the newspaper
00:29:02 you should have those things but if you don't want them just you know you can just rip the
00:29:05 band-aid off and go from there there'd be a lot of squawking but you would have to do it fast and
00:29:10 you would have to do it efficiently if uh you know if we get to that point there is the change in
00:29:15 government can we uh you know put the government up to making you head of the crtc would you would
00:29:19 you accept that if called upon i think they're smarter than that oh i think i think we could do
00:29:25 a lot worse than uh having you at the helm there but either way i'm glad you're able to to do what
00:29:30 what you're doing now. Peter Menzies, check him out at the rewrite on Substack. Thank you so much,
00:29:35 Peter. Thanks a lot, Andrew. All right. Good to chat with Peter Menzies as always. I want to turn
00:29:40 from the regulation of the internet to education. It's been a recurring theme for so many people in
00:29:46 this country, frustrations with what their kids are learning in the classroom. But these issues
00:29:51 go beyond just curriculum concerns. It's also about the caliber and quality of education. And
00:29:57 a lot of that comes down to the caliber and qualities of quality of teachers. But Kaylin
00:30:01 Ford has done her part in Alberta to push back against a lot of the problems in the education
00:30:07 system, founding the Alberta Classical Academy. And she also had a great piece in the hub.
00:30:12 Universities have a monopoly on teacher training. They don't deserve to keep it. This was an
00:30:18 argument I hadn't really entertained before. Actually, a conversation I had with you not that
00:30:23 long ago, Kaylin, because I had always just sort of accepted the status quo as being necessary,
00:30:28 that, you know, a teacher's college at a university is the way you train and certify teachers. But
00:30:33 there's a better way, you say. Tell me about it. Sure. Well, I guess to give a little bit of
00:30:40 background here, in Canada, this is different in some other international jurisdictions,
00:30:44 but in Canada, you basically need a Bachelor of Education or a B.Ed. if you want to teach
00:30:48 in a classroom and be certified by a teacher's college. You can also do a post-degree BED. So
00:30:56 after you've already obtained a bachelor's degree, you can then go back and do what is in most
00:31:00 provinces a two-year post-degree bachelor of education. And I think that the reason why this
00:31:06 has been implemented is precisely for the reason that you alluded to. We think people, you know,
00:31:11 teaching is an incredibly important vocation. It's one of the most important jobs for sort of
00:31:16 perpetuating and preserving your civilization is the education of the next generation and you want 1.00
00:31:20 to make sure that your teachers are well qualified to do that and um i need to sort of preface this
00:31:27 by saying of course there are tons of really brilliant teachers there are also some great
00:31:30 people in education faculties and not all education faculties are the same so forgive
00:31:36 the generalization but typically these programs are not producing the kind of training that we
00:31:42 would expect, given the importance of the job. And a lot of teachers will admit this themselves.
00:31:48 So one of the things that strikes me as so bizarre is you could have, you know, Stephen
00:31:53 Hawking, for example, when he was alive, one of the most brilliant physicists in the world,
00:31:57 would be unqualified to teach a high school science class for lack of a Bachelor of Education. I mean,
00:32:03 and that's the extreme example. You could have a former Prime Minister of Canada who decides in
00:32:09 retirement, he or she wants to teach a civics class at high school and wouldn't be able to.
00:32:13 And there are little ways around that, are there not? Well, it's very limited. But yeah,
00:32:20 you've hit on one of the absurdities of this B.Ed. requirement. And we've encountered this
00:32:24 with our charter schools, of which we now have three. We're a specialized program. So we do
00:32:29 things that are a little different than what a standard public school might do. We offer Latin
00:32:34 and in high school, ancient Greek, for example. We focus very heavily on history. And it's almost
00:32:42 impossible in our experience to find a certificated teacher, that is someone with a B.Ed., who can
00:32:47 teach Latin, let alone ancient Greek. So there are a couple of provinces have devised some
00:32:53 workarounds, some of them quite rarely used, whereby in Alberta, for example, the minister
00:32:58 can offer an exemption for an individual to become a teacher. That's not really a scalable solution,
00:33:03 though so it's not just limited to us i mean there are stem focused charter schools it's very hard
00:33:08 to find people who can teach high level science and technology or engineering courses or there's
00:33:16 arts academies similarly that encounter this problem it's also experienced for vocational
00:33:21 traits um you know if you've got someone who's like a master welder or something or a woodworker
00:33:26 but they don't also have a bachelor of education then it's very difficult to offer those courses in
00:33:31 high schools now the the argument i i suppose if i give the the government and sort of the status
00:33:37 quo the benefit of the doubt here is that teaching is itself a skill that needs to be taught above
00:33:43 and beyond the knowledge you have and anyone who's taken you know university classes can probably
00:33:48 attest to this they're brilliant people that are absolutely atrocious teachers so why does the b
00:33:53 ed not do that in your view or not do it well enough to justify its continued existence or
00:33:58 requirement so yeah very good point i don't want to imply that just because you have a doctorate
00:34:03 in literature that you are qualified to teach uh teenagers right um a phd doesn't qualify you to be
00:34:10 a primary or secondary school teacher but neither does it be ed it takes a special kind of person
00:34:16 who has the aptitude and the passion to do that and teaching is um you know teaching in the sort
00:34:23 sort of modern context is very much, it's an art and it's a craft. And what I would argue is that
00:34:29 in addition to having sort of possessing subject matter content knowledge, which all teachers
00:34:34 should have, the other dimension is learning the art and the craft of teaching. It takes a lot of
00:34:39 special skills. There's a real art to classroom management, to assessments, to explicit and to
00:34:44 providing effective instruction, what we would call explicit instruction. And the best way to
00:34:50 learn that is in the practicum. So we surveyed 26 of the teachers in our school system and asked
00:34:55 them what they learned and what they didn't learn in their B-Ed. And the really devastating thing
00:34:59 was a lot of them were saying that the practicum was really valuable, being in a classroom with an
00:35:04 experienced mentor teacher guiding them. But very often the mentor teacher was telling them,
00:35:10 ignore what you've learned in the classroom, in your university, it's bunk, it's not going to
00:35:14 work in practice. So I recall one teacher actually saying, you know, the damage of my coursework,
00:35:20 the damage of my B.Ed. was mitigated by having great teachers in the practicum. But the actual
00:35:26 coursework was of, according to our teachers, it was typically of little to negative value.
00:35:31 It sometimes actively maleducated them as to what effective teaching and effective pedagogy
00:35:36 looked like. Interesting. One point that I don't know if it's the same in other provinces, but in
00:35:41 Ontario, they've, especially in the last several years, changed the length of time it takes to do
00:35:46 a BED, not based on the material you need, but based on, you know, the availability of teaching
00:35:53 jobs. You know, at one point, they made it two years because they had too many teachers and
00:35:57 wanted to slow it down, and then they had too few, so they expedited it, which proves that in a lot
00:36:01 of ways, it is an arbitrary, an arbitrary degree for people, for some people. Yeah, and to that
00:36:07 point, you know, there was during COVID era, there were some US states that on an emergency basis
00:36:13 hired teachers without sort of certification. By the way, a number of US states don't require it
00:36:18 at all. But they found that in the aftermath of COVID, there was no real difference in the
00:36:25 academic gains if depending on whether students had a certificated teacher or one of these
00:36:30 emergency hires without a teaching background or teacher training. So there was no real difference
00:36:35 there. And again, I don't mean to discount the difficulty of teaching in a classroom.
00:36:39 It is a really, really difficult job to do it well. But it doesn't seem to be correlated with
00:36:45 whether you have a B.Ed. or the length that that B.Ed. program took you to obtain.
00:36:49 What would your ideal model be? If you were the education minister in Alberta and you could just
00:36:54 start from scratch, what would you make the requirement? Well, I tend to err on the side of
00:36:59 sort of local authority. So, you know, the sort of the extreme recommendation would be to say,
00:37:05 give superintendents, the people who are actually in charge of school authorities and who are
00:37:08 closest to the level of practice and to being able to observe and assess teachers, give them
00:37:13 the authority to decide who to hire. I know that this would not fly with a lot of, with the
00:37:19 bureaucracy and it would probably, it would get some people's backs up. So I think another
00:37:25 solution that we have proposed would be an alternative pathway to teacher certification
00:37:30 especially for people who already have a degree that is expedited over the two years we've
00:37:35 suggested a paid practicum centered model so maybe one year rather than two years which is what it
00:37:40 currently is for a post degree b ed in alberta one year where you're sponsored by a school authority
00:37:46 you're being evaluated by them they're paying you at least something maybe not a full teacher salary
00:37:50 but something to minimize the opportunity costs that are associated with for many people a mid
00:37:56 career uh change in their profession um so make it practicum focused have some coursework but not
00:38:03 nearly the degree of credits that are currently required because there's very little value it
00:38:06 seems in that coursework and really focusing on on that practicum experience um and shortening
00:38:12 the timeline so one of the things we encountered was we have all these people that we've wanted to
00:38:17 hire but they have a doctorate in classics or philosophy or physics or something they have
00:38:22 families they have mortgages they can't drop out of the workforce for two years to go get a b-ed
00:38:27 and so it's about figuring out how you can improve this sort of labor mobility
00:38:31 and bring exceptional individuals who do have a passion and an aptitude for teaching
00:38:36 into the profession interestingly i don't believe it exists in canada but in several united states
00:38:42 states you can do that with law where you can actually practice law without a law degree
00:38:46 if you apprentice your way in by working under a lawyer and you know again something like that
00:38:51 would sound so shocking to people but this is not without precedent and the law i'd say is
00:38:55 again no offense to teachers but a lot more of a complicated thing than uh than teaching is
00:39:02 yeah and and like teaching though i mean the idea that law is an academic discipline is sort of
00:39:07 bizarre i mean there are sort of legal scholars but legal practitioners are not academics so
00:39:13 focusing on coursework doesn't make sense right um actual like articling type experience is where
00:39:18 the value is if you intend to be a legal practitioner of course you also need to know
00:39:22 things right so i would hope that people in these both of these professions would come at this with
00:39:27 a lot of background knowledge that they can contribute um but yeah it's not it's not really
00:39:32 an academic discipline and faculties of education again i'll qualify this there are some great
00:39:37 people in these faculties but in general they're not known for their academic rigor
00:39:42 A lot of the teachers are disconnected both from classroom practice as well as from the serious research when it does occur.
00:39:49 They're sort of political monocultures. They're heavily influenced by social reconstructivism and critical theory.
00:39:55 So, you know, I think I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but all the more reason to say this might not be the best approach to training teachers.
00:40:04 Well, if you want to learn a little bit more about this vision, Kaylin Ford's piece,
00:40:08 in the hub universities have a monopoly on teacher training they don't deserve to keep it
00:40:13 uh came out a couple of weeks back but uh very timely now kaylin thanks for coming on today and
00:40:17 also if you want your kids to get a classical education the alberta classical academy has you
00:40:22 covered there kaylin always good to talk to you thanks for coming on thanks andrew all right thank
00:40:26 you uh keeping with the alberta theme this weekend uh one conference that i have had the great
00:40:31 privilege of speaking out for the last five years is coming back the alberta economic or sorry the
00:40:37 The Economic Association of Alberta's Freedom Talk taking place in Red Deer once again.
00:40:42 I first went there in 2019 and then COVID came and everything got all crazy.
00:40:48 But I was glad they've kept inviting me back.
00:40:50 Danny Hozak is the chairman there and joins me on the line now.
00:40:54 Danny, always good to talk to you.
00:40:55 Thanks for coming on today.
00:40:57 Thanks for having me on.
00:40:58 Nice to see you.
00:40:59 Now, I should say I'm so sorry.
00:41:01 I've made a point of going in person every year.
00:41:03 This year, I'm not able to make it out.
00:41:05 So I'll be presenting virtually, but you've got a great list of speakers there.
00:41:09 The theme is not the cheeriest of themes, the decline and fall of Western civilization.
00:41:16 So you're hitting people on their summer weekend with why everything in the West is doomed.
00:41:20 But why is that an important topic?
00:41:23 Well, I mean, the second part of that is our fate or our choice.
00:41:30 And of course, our choice is for it not to be our fate.
00:41:32 and so we're trying to come up with some reasonable solutions to keep us from going over this cliff
00:41:38 that you know various governments seem to be intent on taking us over and of course we are
00:41:43 going to miss you but we're looking forward to hearing from you virtually which as you know
00:41:48 your topic is getting the media back on site and we certainly haven't had a lot of a lot of help
00:41:54 trying to stop society from going over the cliff from the mainstream media and we certainly thank
00:41:58 you and your colleagues for the work you do to try and get the message out.
00:42:03 Well, I appreciate that. And yeah, I remember, I think it was, I don't know, two years ago or
00:42:06 whatever. I didn't actually know what my speech was about. And I was going, I was in the elevator
00:42:11 down to the ballroom and someone said, oh, Andrew, I can't wait to hear what you're going to speak
00:42:15 about. I said, neither can I. So this year I do know, and I am going to speak about the media and
00:42:20 how it fits into that general question of Western civilization. You have John Robson and Patrick
00:42:25 more and mark morano stockwell day a former alliance leader will will be speaking as well
00:42:31 among others but i wanted to ask you about that because your first sort of session is why does
00:42:35 the west hate itself and that's such a unique thing for the west because every other regime
00:42:41 in the world every other civilization in the world is very proud of who it is the west is the only
00:42:46 part that tends to focus on why it's so terrible well and i mean and i think uh you know you just
00:42:54 We're talking to a lady about the education system, and a lot of the reason that the West hates itself is actually some of our institutions of higher learning have absolutely betrayed us.
00:43:06 One of the books that I read years ago was Anne Rand's.
00:43:09 It was for the new intellectuals, and she said we need a new group of intellectuals, and to a certain extent, that's what we're trying to do.
00:43:17 it's actually called the Economic Education Association and we're trying to get a whole
00:43:23 lot of ordinary people that understand these issues that government hasn't been our best
00:43:29 friend and they certainly aren't. And it's going to take a lot of work to get us back to where we
00:43:34 were. So where would you like to see this discussion go? Because one thing I've always
00:43:39 enjoyed about your conferences is you always try for there to be takeaways. So it isn't just a
00:43:44 A weekend of navel-gazing, basically.
00:43:46 Well, where I'd like this to go is, if you're familiar with the Regina Manifesto,
00:43:52 it was created, I think, in the late 30s.
00:43:54 I've seen several versions of it, but it was basically a group of socialists
00:43:58 that were planning to make a socialist utopia on the prairies.
00:44:02 And they were planning this in the 30s, and they were going to get control of the school system.
00:44:06 They were going to get control of the county councils.
00:44:09 They were going to get control of the school boards.
00:44:11 They were going to get control of the legislatures.
00:44:13 they were going to get control of the bureaucracy and if you read it today you just go check check
00:44:18 check check they've done it all and so uh they really they we've really we really have a left
00:44:24 wing ideology at the leadership level of most of the organizations that we have in our government
00:44:30 these days and what i'm looking to do is i'd like to i'd like to call this you know for the lack of
00:44:35 a better word the wild rose manifesto or the western manifesto where we make a list of things
00:44:41 that we're going to do to start taking control back for individual people we all we all claim
00:44:47 to believe in individual freedom but we've let so much of it slip away so i think our i think our
00:44:52 goal at the end of this will be to have come to a consensus of some of the steps we have to take
00:44:59 to try and get control back which again it's a lot of it has to do with taking control of government
00:45:05 but having said that we get the government we vote for so some of this is a responsibility that
00:45:10 comes back to individual voters and we're trying to have a you know a better educated group of
00:45:16 voters. Just to go back a couple of years my first time out at your conference was 2019 I think it
00:45:23 was just after the Alberta election so you know Rachel Notley had you know just been defeated so
00:45:29 there was a bit of change there. Justin Trudeau was on track to win another election he's won
00:45:34 another since then and I know that there has been and you've entertained these discussions about
00:45:39 you know western sovereignty and now you have uh premier danielle smith you have the alberta
00:45:43 sovereignty act you have a federal change in government looking to be somewhat imminent here
00:45:48 are you more or less optimistic than you were five years ago i i think i i think i'm more often
00:45:55 optimistic because things have got so much more worse that more people are which is probably a
00:46:01 poor reason for being optimistic but things have got so much more worse that there's a lot more
00:46:06 people waking up to it and you actually met you mentioned patrick moore and uh he's actually not
00:46:12 going to be able to make it he said he feels like he's vaccine injured and he said danny i'm just
00:46:17 not well enough to travel so i mean that that's what we're up and so one of the things that i
00:46:22 want to talk about uh you know that you start about where do we start on all of this we
00:46:27 oh we uh we lost uh lost danny there unfortunately but uh fortunately it was the the last question
00:46:35 anyway so we were we were going to be winding things up there but um my thanks to danny hozak
00:46:39 for coming on and to those of you in red deer on the weekend i'm sorry i won't be able to be there
00:46:43 in person but i'll try to make it up to you with a banger of a speech and uh some of the thoughts
00:46:47 i'll uh go oh we do have danny back all right i i was just about to cut you loose anyway danny 0.83
00:46:52 but finish your uh finish your thought there well well well you you're on you're on at 12 30 but
00:46:57 one of the main things i want to talk about is you know the alberta government is still insisting on
00:47:03 you know vaccinate vaccinating our children and you know we talk about patrick moore being he
00:47:07 believes he's vaccine injured there i mean if adults want to get vaccinated or drink too much
00:47:13 or eat too much or smoke too much that's their business but i i i would like our group to come
00:47:18 out of there with an absolute determination to get our government to stop vaccinating our children
00:47:22 until we've done more studies on some of the effects of the the vaccine and then once we've
00:47:27 got them stopped doing that then we're going to start looking at all these other things at the
00:47:31 municipal level like we've got we've got uh you know tom harris talking about how we can take
00:47:36 control at the municipal level tanya gaw is going to be here talking about some of the things they've
00:47:41 done at municipal councils on one thing and another so uh i think we're going to have the
00:47:45 only way we could possibly be going to have a better weekend is if you were actually going to
00:47:49 be there in person with us but we'll i think that may i think that makes it worse but you're uh
00:47:53 you're very kind there danny look i i believe uh wholeheartedly in society we need to be able to
00:47:57 have conversations, have controversial conversations even.
00:48:00 It's why free speech is so important.
00:48:01 So you've done that and you're set to do it this weekend.
00:48:04 Danny, thanks so much for coming on today.
00:48:05 Good luck this weekend.
00:48:07 Thank you very much.
00:48:08 Could I just say, like, we try to bring both sides of the conversation in and have a,
00:48:13 we call it an intelligent, respectful discussion, but we like to hear from both sides.
00:48:16 And it's a way of bringing people together.
00:48:19 So thank you very much.
00:48:20 We'll look forward to hearing you speak at noon tomorrow.
00:48:23 And if anybody wants to watch it on live stream,
00:48:25 they can go to our website at freedomtalk.ca
00:48:27 and they can sign up to watch the live stream.
00:48:30 Of course, we still have room at the meeting room
00:48:33 if anybody wants to come and join us.
00:48:34 So thank you very much.
00:48:35 You said tomorrow.
00:48:35 I'm on Saturday, aren't I?
00:48:37 You're on Saturday, yes.
00:48:38 You're on Saturday.
00:48:39 It starts tomorrow morning at nine.
00:48:41 You speak at noon on Saturday, yes.
00:48:42 All right, good.
00:48:43 Just wanted to make sure.
00:48:44 Danny, thanks very much.
00:48:45 We'll have a good one there.
00:48:47 All right, that does it for us for today.
00:48:49 My thanks to all of you for tuning into the program today.
00:48:52 I'll give you just a bit of a plug, if I may.
00:48:54 I'm still the author of a best-selling book
00:48:57 on Pierre Polyev that has now just hit six weeks
00:49:01 on the bestseller list.
00:49:03 And I don't say that because I like bragging.
00:49:04 Actually, bragging does not come naturally to me. 0.95
00:49:06 I say it just because the leftist trolls are like,
00:49:09 oh, no one's buying your book. 0.98
00:49:10 And I'm like, hell,
00:49:10 all the Toronto Star bestsellers list begs to differ.
00:49:12 But with that out of the way,
00:49:14 thanks to those of you who have read it,
00:49:15 who have sent in all sorts of kind feedback about it.
00:49:18 And even the unkind feedback, I, well, I disregard it,
00:49:20 but it's, you know, free speech and all that.
00:49:22 All right, we will have Off the Record tomorrow
00:49:24 back with The Andrew Lawton Show on Monday.
00:49:26 Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.
00:49:27 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.
00:49:30 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:49:33 Support the program by donating to True North
00:49:35 at www.tnc.news.
00:49:50 We'll be right back.
00:50:20 We'll be right back.