Juno News - September 16, 2021


Maxime Bernier says election is referendum on vaccine mandates

Topics
freedom referendum
Mentioned
Derek Sloan Andrew Lawton Show Randy Hillier O'Toole Trudeau
Could the rise of Maxime Bernier and the PPC be the deciding factor in the election？ What does the election mean for the west？

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

176.88

Word count

2,193

Sentence count

173

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

On this episode of the Andrew Lawton Show, I speak with the founder of the People s Party of Canada, Candice Miller. Candice is running for the People's Party in the upcoming federal election. Candice and I talk about her campaign and why she decided to run for the PPC.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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.
00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:06.800 So how's the campaign going so far?
00:00:09.220 It's going well, you know.
00:00:10.940 I didn't expect that in the beginning.
00:00:13.520 Our goal was to maybe have 4% of the vote,
00:00:17.280 more than triple what we had at the last election.
00:00:19.780 I think it would be doable right now,
00:00:21.680 and we may have more than that.
00:00:23.460 So I can tell you, since the beginning of that campaign,
00:00:26.680 the momentum is bigger and bigger every day.
00:00:28.720 And when I'm saying that this campaign will be for us
00:00:35.120 a referendum on the COVID-19 hysteria and the vaccine passport,
00:00:39.400 I believe it would be that.
00:00:40.880 That's giving us a big momentum because people understand
00:00:44.200 that individual freedom and personal responsibility,
00:00:47.300 that's two of our main principles, funding principles of this party.
00:00:52.900 And we always fought for that.
00:00:55.300 I spoke against lockdowns in the beginning of that pandemic
00:00:58.360 with Randy Hillier in Ontario that is supporting us also and helping us.
00:01:03.460 It's going well.
00:01:04.760 And people want to have their life back, like before COVID.
00:01:09.220 When the People's Party was founded in 2019,
00:01:13.420 a lot of people certainly perceived it to be a very conservative party,
00:01:17.860 a more conservative version of the conservative party.
00:01:20.620 The support you have now doesn't seem to be coming only from traditional conservatives.
00:01:24.780 I've met a lot of people that would align with the left but are supporting the PPC.
00:01:29.380 And I'm curious if you could describe where this support is coming from right now.
00:01:33.900 Yeah, first of all, it's not scientific because we don't know any pollings about that.
00:01:39.900 But, you know, I can tell you that in Saskatoon, our organization there,
00:01:45.180 it's people that work and were volunteers for the NDP.
00:01:49.520 And they are coming on side with us and helping us and, you know, helping our candidates over there.
00:01:56.580 Because for them, the most important now is the violation of our freedoms in this country.
00:02:03.100 And they understand that we are there to fight for them.
00:02:06.040 And we are the only party that will fight for them.
00:02:08.500 That's why I said in New Brunswick, I was surprised when I did rallies over there.
00:02:12.220 But we had a lot of people that came.
00:02:15.440 And you're right.
00:02:16.240 I think we can unite this country and Canadians under the freedom umbrella.
00:02:22.440 And the mainstream political parties have the same position on COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine passport. 0.99
00:02:30.520 The conservative and O'Toole was very clear about that.
00:02:34.240 You know, he said to one of his candidates in Yukon that was against a vaccine passport.
00:02:38.980 He said, OK, you cannot be a candidate.
00:02:41.000 And now he wants to have a registry and doing tests every day and a vaccine passport.
00:02:47.520 He's like Trudeau.
00:02:48.560 So they understand that if they want to live in a free society, we are there.
00:02:53.840 So, yes, you're right by saying that it's not only former conservatives that are coming on board,
00:02:58.560 but also people who voted for the liberals or the NDP.
00:03:01.680 I cannot tell you if it's a big part of our supporters or not.
00:03:05.860 But when I'm traveling, I have people that came to me and are telling me that.
00:03:09.860 And also some people that didn't vote.
00:03:12.640 I met a guy yesterday that he said, you know, I'm 55 years old and that will be the first time that I will vote.
00:03:18.300 And I will vote for you.
00:03:19.880 And don't forget in Canada about, you know, 28 percent of the population didn't vote at the last election.
00:03:26.620 If only half of them are voting for the PPC, we'll be around more, we'll have a support that will grow.
00:03:34.020 And that can happen.
00:03:35.280 I believe that people who didn't vote, people who voted for other political parties, liberal or conservative, are coming with us.
00:03:44.000 But I believe that the majority of our support is coming from former conservatives.
00:03:49.180 It's not just about opposition to vaccine passports.
00:03:51.980 I'm hearing a lot of people that are against vaccines themselves.
00:03:55.020 You yourself have talked about not being vaccinated.
00:03:57.680 And because of that, you can't even campaign in certain provinces, especially in Atlantic Canada.
00:04:03.540 You have a party right now that's being defined as an anti-vaccine party by a lot of people.
00:04:07.880 Are you happy with that?
00:04:09.200 No, I'm not.
00:04:10.640 That's the mainstream media.
00:04:12.120 The mainstream media, every time that I'm doing an interview with them, they're saying, oh, this party is anti-mask and anti-vaccine.
00:04:18.420 No, if you believe in freedom, you believe in freedom of choice.
00:04:22.760 And everybody must be free to decide if they want to have the vaccine or not with the right information, informed consent.
00:04:29.320 And personally, I decided not to take the vaccine.
00:04:31.920 Like I said, I'm 58 years old and my chance of dying if I have COVID are only 0.5 percent.
00:04:37.520 So I have the data and the statistics on my side.
00:04:40.540 I have 99.5 percent chances of surviving.
00:04:43.240 So that's why I decided not to take the vaccine.
00:04:45.080 But my dad is 87 years old and diabetic and he has comorbidities.
00:04:51.020 So I encourage him to take the vaccine because he's at risk.
00:04:56.120 So everybody must be able to take that decision.
00:04:58.700 So we have people in our party, our supporters that decided, like me, not to take the vaccine.
00:05:05.240 But we have people also that took the two shots and are with us because they know that they don't want to show a vaccine passport for everything that they would do in civil society.
00:05:16.280 What is it that you see as being the future of the PPC?
00:05:20.280 Because you are polling right now at significantly higher numbers than you were in 2019.
00:05:24.620 But in the first past the post system, even if you have 10 percent nationally in individual ridings, that could still be zero seats.
00:05:31.500 I know you don't do internal polling and you talk about that regularly.
00:05:34.120 But are there individual ridings, are there your own in BOS or other ridings where you think that there could be a few PPC candidates elected this time?
00:05:41.840 I believe that, you know, in my riding, I'm doing my best to be elected to gain back that riding.
00:05:46.940 Like I said publicly, we started the campaign.
00:05:49.180 I was 10 points behind and now I'm about two or three points behind.
00:05:53.900 And we have the same momentum in BOS that we have all across the country.
00:05:58.300 So it would be a tough fight.
00:06:00.680 But I believe I can win back that riding.
00:06:02.480 And also in Ontario, Northern Ontario and the South near Niagara, we have great organization, good candidates there.
00:06:10.340 We may win maybe one or two seats.
00:06:12.280 I don't know.
00:06:12.940 And in Alberta also, as you may know, in Fort McMurray, we have a great candidate and we have all the support of the executive of the riding association for the Conservative Party of Canada that are working with our candidate.
00:06:30.300 So I really don't know where, but I believe that we can have some candidates in Alberta, in Ontario, and me in Quebec or in other provinces, maybe in BC also.
00:06:42.020 I was surprised of our support in BC.
00:06:44.560 So it's very difficult.
00:06:45.520 But because of that electoral system, it is harder for us, yes, to have people elected.
00:06:52.060 But I believe that we'll have that freedom voice in Ottawa after this election.
00:06:56.400 On one of my last trips to Alberta, I moderated a discussion between you and Derek Sloan, who at the time was still a member of Parliament and hadn't yet announced what he was going to do.
00:07:05.960 We fast forward to now.
00:07:07.100 He has not joined the People's Party.
00:07:08.640 He says he's founding his own party, but right now is running as an independent.
00:07:12.460 I know you had reached out to Derek and tried to get him to seek a PPC candidacy.
00:07:17.480 But when you are a party that has splintered off from a mainstream party and then other people that have very similar values are not joining the PPC, what are people to take from that?
00:07:27.420 That this movement that is this sort of independent alternative to the Conservative movement can't itself be unified?
00:07:33.600 But, you know, I told Derek that he's welcome in our party and we had a discussion.
00:07:38.880 That was his discussion, his decision.
00:07:40.920 I cannot force him to come.
00:07:43.140 And I was surprised that he decided to run as an independent.
00:07:46.820 But I told him it's very hard to create a new party.
00:07:49.560 And now he doesn't have a new party.
00:07:51.840 So he's running in a riding and we had a discussion.
00:07:55.380 He called me a couple of days after when the election was launched and he told me that he wants to run in that riding.
00:08:02.400 And at that time, we had a great candidate, Nadine.
00:08:05.580 She was our candidate in 2019.
00:08:07.460 She's our candidate now. 0.98
00:08:08.880 And I told him, you know, I will support my candidate.
00:08:11.600 You took your decision not to come with us.
00:08:15.000 I will support our candidates.
00:08:17.340 It's too bad.
00:08:18.900 But it was his decision.
00:08:20.920 And so just to confirm, so he didn't want to run for the PPC, but he wanted you to not run a candidate.
00:08:26.100 Yes, absolutely.
00:08:27.700 And I said, you know, first of all, we have a candidate.
00:08:30.100 And our candidate, Nadine, was the first one approved by Election Canada for a party all across the country.
00:08:36.300 So when he called me, she was an approved candidate.
00:08:38.920 So, you know, I will support my candidate.
00:08:41.320 We'll see.
00:08:42.200 We'll see what will happen.
00:08:43.380 But, yeah, it's too bad.
00:08:45.660 But also, you know, I was working with the End the Lockdown Caucus and Randy Hillier is with us.
00:08:52.620 And actually, his daughter, she's running also with us.
00:08:56.520 So we have the support of a lot of people in the Lockdown Caucus, police on guard and nurses, because they know.
00:09:06.960 They know that we are the only option.
00:09:09.140 So it's too bad the director took that decision.
00:09:11.580 And I respect that.
00:09:13.480 You've said that you don't expect to be prime minister after this coming election.
00:09:17.160 So you do have a level of realistic, a realistic approach to this.
00:09:20.780 But I want to know about what the party will look like.
00:09:23.580 Will you, for example, subject yourself to a leadership review?
00:09:27.340 Why not?
00:09:28.120 Maybe.
00:09:28.800 I don't know.
00:09:30.160 But I'm open to that.
00:09:31.780 Absolutely.
00:09:32.880 After the election, I think, you know, our platform was approved by 49% of the conservative because, as you know, the People's Party platform is the platform that I run on during the leadership of the conservative party in 2017.
00:09:48.360 So that was, it was easier for us to build a party with ideas.
00:09:52.400 I took that platform.
00:09:53.780 So that platform was very well received by conservative members at that time.
00:10:00.200 And now it's well received with a lot of Canadians.
00:10:03.060 But yes, my leadership, I believe that after the election, I'm ready to ask a question to our members if they want me as a leader or not.
00:10:12.100 I think you're right.
00:10:13.880 It would be a good time to do that.
00:10:15.460 What is it that you think is the real driving force of your support this election?
00:10:21.680 Because you weren't in the debates.
00:10:22.960 And as you know, this is something where millions and millions of Canadians tune in.
00:10:26.520 You were in 2019 and still managed to get 1.6% of the vote nationally.
00:10:31.140 This time around, how is your message getting out to people when you haven't, for the most part, been given the attention by the mainstream media?
00:10:37.580 It's very difficult.
00:10:39.120 It's very difficult.
00:10:40.700 Actually, the mainstream media in your us in the beginning of that campaign.
00:10:46.540 And now they are doing, they try to give us more visibility or coverage, but it's not fair.
00:10:54.480 It's not a fair coverage.
00:10:55.980 They are covering the Green Party of Canada that right now they're around 4% in the polls.
00:11:02.020 They have 240 candidates.
00:11:04.180 We have 312 candidates all across this country.
00:11:07.160 And the Green Party and all the other establishment political parties share the same views on the most important issues for this country.
00:11:16.940 So it's an unfair coverage.
00:11:19.440 It's very difficult for us.
00:11:20.780 But we are using social media.
00:11:22.780 I'm speaking to you, with you right now, and I try to be present with the alternative and independent media.
00:11:30.860 And I believe that every media must be independent.
00:11:33.820 And that's part of our proposal to cut the fundings to these media.
00:11:38.020 They must be independent and not dependent on the government.
00:11:41.560 It's more difficult.
00:11:42.500 That's why I'm doing rally.
00:11:44.240 And that's why I'm doing rallies in little town, because I can have coverage from the local newspaper,
00:11:51.900 the local traditional media, or the local radio station.
00:11:56.240 So for me, the way to bypass the mainstream media is to travel and do interviews with local traditional mainstream media,
00:12:04.560 or local radio station, and with also independent media like your media.
00:12:09.900 Thank you for your time.
00:12:10.840 Thank you.
00:12:11.260 I appreciate that.
00:12:12.000 Have a nice day.
00:12:12.920 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:12:15.000 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:12:21.900 www.tnc.news.com