Juno News - December 03, 2021


Most Canadians don't want unvaccinated friends or family in their homes


Episode Stats

Length

43 minutes

Words per Minute

192.71237

Word Count

8,462

Sentence Count

450

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

13


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:06.240 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:11.020 Coming up, most vaccinated Canadians want their unvaccinated relatives to steer clear of Christmas dinner,
00:00:16.920 CBC tries to police your language, and lawyers take a stand for civil liberties.
00:00:22.960 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:34.000 It is Thursday, December 2nd, 2021.
00:00:37.680 Great to have you here on The Andrew Lawton Show on True North.
00:00:41.520 It is now 23 days until Christmas, and if you haven't been able to get a Christmas tree yet,
00:00:48.920 like a real Christmas tree, I don't mean like an artificial one, but an actual, I don't know,
00:00:53.240 Douglas fir or something like that Christmas tree, it may be because of climate change.
00:00:58.780 Well, it may be because you haven't tried, but if you've tried and you haven't found one,
00:01:02.700 it may be climate change responsible.
00:01:05.120 That's the story that CBC is sharing, that Christmas tree shortages could be annual
00:01:10.380 thanks to industry trends and climate change.
00:01:13.800 Now, this is kind of a fun one, because if you have an annual shortage of an annual product
00:01:19.100 that you only need once a year, you're kind of screwed and you just can't get a Christmas tree ever again.
00:01:24.540 But they're saying that climate change is responsible.
00:01:27.200 Now, this is, I think, kind of funny because, for starters, everything is something that we can
00:01:32.780 attribute to climate change now.
00:01:34.420 I actually did a segment a few months back where I just did like a list of things that
00:01:39.200 are caused by climate change, and it was like seasonal depression is caused by climate change,
00:01:44.120 the Christmas tree shortages caused by climate change, climate change is caused by climate change,
00:01:48.740 cold weather is climate change, warm weather is climate change, weather that's in between,
00:01:52.400 it's all climate change, it doesn't matter what it is.
00:01:54.880 And now the Christmas tree shortage, it's not a supply chain issue, it's not production issues,
00:02:00.660 it's not labor shortages, no, no, no, none of that matters, it's not inflated, no,
00:02:04.760 none of these things are real, it's all just climate change that is responsible for it.
00:02:09.280 Now, the irony here is that there's been a lot of a push, including, I mean, NASA has a website
00:02:15.240 for children talking about why you should always get a real Christmas tree because it's better
00:02:19.560 for the climate. There's lots of material out there saying that you can reduce climate change
00:02:24.020 by getting a real tree. So I have to wonder, well, if real Christmas trees are better for
00:02:30.680 the climate, how is the climate, and people want them so much, how is the demand not keeping the
00:02:36.140 Christmas tree business in full swing? Hey, I'm not a climatologist, I'm just saying that you think
00:02:40.940 that if these things that are in such demand, so much demand that people can't get as many of them
00:02:44.820 as they want, we're helping the climate change fight, then the climate change fight would not be
00:02:49.260 winning against Christmas trees. But now it's all just going to be terrible because now everyone's
00:02:53.900 got to get their artificial trees and it's going to make it worse. And then in, you know, seven years
00:02:58.840 or whenever Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Prince Charles say the world's ending, no Christmas tree
00:03:04.460 ever again. So whether you have a real or an artificial Christmas tree or you don't and you want to
00:03:10.780 blame climate change, whatever, I hope you are making your way through the Christmas season in a
00:03:15.440 safe, fun, and perhaps healthy way. And I hope this is a genuine point that your family is weathering
00:03:23.460 this because I saw this story and I want to mock it. My instinct is to mock it and I think I am going
00:03:28.860 to mock it a little bit. But there's a serious point here, which is that according to a new poll,
00:03:34.280 people are very much wanting their unvaccinated relatives to stay away from family dinner. So
00:03:41.760 the majority of Canadians, according to this poll, are unwilling to let an unvaccinated friend or
00:03:46.580 family member into their home. And this is a poll that comes from Leger ACS. 75% of the total
00:03:54.900 population vaccinated. Three quarters of Canadians say they know someone who's unvaccinated. Unsurprisingly,
00:04:01.320 if you look at the breakdown geographically, which province has the highest number? You don't even
00:04:07.100 need to tell you the story. Which one? British Columbia. Yeah, 70% of British Columbians say no
00:04:12.800 unvaccinated people allowed in their house. The lowest is Alberta, but even then it's relatively high,
00:04:18.000 58%. And it's interesting because the whole point of this is that if you are a vaccinated person,
00:04:23.740 you should feel confident that you are protected against unvaccinated people and whatever they may
00:04:29.500 bring into your home. And this is the big flaw in this. If you are so confident in the vaccine,
00:04:36.840 I'm not going to say you should be fearless going out into the world. Like I still wouldn't go around
00:04:40.880 and start licking doorknobs in Wuhan. Then again, I wouldn't do that pre-pandemic anyway. But if you
00:04:46.580 are confident in the vaccine, you think the vaccine is effective, why are you so afraid of people around
00:04:52.400 you? And why are you letting this and when vaccination status become the wedge that you
00:04:58.780 use to divide you from other people in the world? And when we talk about vaccine passports and the
00:05:05.360 segregation of society along the lines of vaccination status, there's a serious point there that legally
00:05:10.980 and constitutionally, we should not be separating society based on something like that. Your healthcare
00:05:16.560 choices should be choices, not coerced because the government took away your freedoms. But there's a
00:05:21.860 social aspect of this as well, which is why are we as individuals embracing this culture and
00:05:28.980 attitude that starts otherizing people based on their vaccination status? Now, again, there are
00:05:34.640 reasons if you have some compromised immune system, you've got people in the house that can't be
00:05:39.900 vaccinated, but are very nervous about COVID. These are very legitimate concerns where I would
00:05:44.240 understand you saying, you know what, I'm sorry, but I'm really not comfortable in the same way as you
00:05:49.120 wouldn't want the unvaccinated people going to a nursing home necessarily. But when we're talking
00:05:56.620 about a general healthy, fully vaccinated family and Uncle Bob's not vaccinated, who cares? Who cares?
00:06:04.440 Like, why are you not confident enough about your vaccination status? We know that even when
00:06:09.900 breakthrough cases do happen, the symptoms for vaccinated people are a lot more mild. We know that
00:06:16.480 there are some variants like Omicron that are supposedly, it seems like the early data are
00:06:21.860 saying, are not even giving many severe symptoms at all. It's just a very mild, albeit quickly
00:06:28.180 spreading variant. So if you buy that, and even the WHO is kind of hedging it here, there was a line
00:06:33.660 from one spokesperson saying, well, hope is not science. Well, right now, I don't even think science
00:06:39.740 is science, certainly not in the last two years. So hope may not be science, but hope seems about as
00:06:45.120 reliable as most of the other proclamations from public health officials. So you might as well
00:06:50.500 let hope guide you because science certainly hasn't been doing you any favors in some of the public
00:06:55.000 health proclamations. And again, I'm not saying I'm not denouncing science, I'm denouncing the
00:06:58.720 politicized interpretations of science that were to just accept at face value, even when they're proven
00:07:04.420 to be wrong, time and time again. But if you believe in vaccination, and you believe that your vaccine
00:07:11.100 protects you, perhaps you cannot use that as a divider with your family. Because when you start
00:07:16.320 to force people to the margins and fringes of society, it never ends well. It never ends well.
00:07:24.000 When you start to tell people that they're not welcome, that you're no longer going to be friends
00:07:27.780 with them, you're no longer... I've heard people that have legitimately lost friendships because
00:07:32.660 they're unvaccinated. They've had friends say, you know what, I don't want to talk to you anymore.
00:07:37.560 And that's sad. That is very sad. I mean, we saw glimpses of this in the Trump era,
00:07:43.000 where people were allowing whether someone voted for Trump to be the determining factor and
00:07:47.560 whether they would get to be friends and whether they would be invited to Thanksgiving dinner or
00:07:51.400 whatever. And I thought that was ridiculous. And there was common enough, but it was not as
00:07:56.340 widespread. On the vaccination thing, entirely different. This is an entirely normal event now
00:08:02.360 for people to say to a family member or a friend, uh, sorry, you're unvaccinated. Not in my life
00:08:08.860 anymore. Or you're in my life, but only remotely. We're relegated to a life of Zoom calls because I
00:08:15.160 never want to be in the same room with you. And again, when you have this pandemic, which is forcing
00:08:21.700 people to elevate their levels of fear. And there was a time for that. But the whole point is,
00:08:28.040 this is what I said the other day about Omicron. We can never allow anyone to plunge us back into
00:08:34.340 February, March, 2020, which is what a lot of these people are trying to do with Omicron. They're
00:08:39.440 trying to say, we don't know anything. It's like, it's a blank slate. We're starting from zero. We
00:08:43.420 don't know what we're dealing with. And as a result, they're justifying very strict and stringent
00:08:48.340 measures. And using as justification for that, the idea that, well, we don't know what we're
00:08:54.820 dealing with. So we need to go to the nth degree and then a couple of degrees beyond that. I don't
00:08:59.400 know what you find a couple of degrees beyond nth, but that's where they're going. Because what
00:09:04.740 they're saying is that we don't know. We don't know. And then once we get over the curve of the
00:09:11.440 Omicron variant, the next one will come along. I think it's pi that's right after. So the pi variant,
00:09:18.240 unless they skip over the pi variant, like they did the Xi variant. But I think the pi variant is
00:09:22.500 probably safe. So once the next, once we get over the, once we flatten the curve of Omicron and it's
00:09:27.260 time for the pi variant, all of a sudden it's, well, we don't know what we're dealing with. So
00:09:31.620 we've got to go back to lockdowns. We've got to go back to travel restrictions. And a lot of the
00:09:35.940 things, the very hard fought wins for reopening and getting back to normal start to be eroded.
00:09:43.080 Just one, one notable example of this is travel restrictions. So I've been one of the loudest voices
00:09:49.380 in Canada. And that's not to toot my own horn. It's just to say that very few people
00:09:53.620 were, especially in the earlier days, speaking up about this, calling for an erosion of a lot
00:09:59.240 of the travel measures that were not rooted in science, that were just rooted in theatrics,
00:10:03.720 but were nonetheless the backbone of the Canadian government's COVID response.
00:10:07.940 Things like hotel quarantine, which even the government's own expert panel said
00:10:11.740 is not doing anything good. Things like the pre-arrival PCR testing, which the government is still
00:10:18.160 buying as something that it needs to do. Now they've eased the measures a little bit and said,
00:10:23.320 well, if you're leaving the country for 72 hours, you don't need to get a test to come back in,
00:10:27.380 but, but that's it. So you're going to have people just like racing, just racing across the,
00:10:31.880 the border to Abbotsford, BC or Sarnia, just because they have to get back in time for the 72 hour window
00:10:38.300 and not have to do a PCR test, many of which costs like 250 us dollars. So there's a whole bunch of
00:10:45.480 crap, if I can say this, that is governing how we travel and how we enter our own country.
00:10:53.760 And we've just been getting past a lot of that. The U S borders now open to Canadians.
00:10:58.920 You don't need to quarantine. If you're vaccinated, there are people moving freely again. And then
00:11:03.820 of course, Omicron comes, the government throws up some travel restrictions, but none of it really
00:11:08.120 matters. Again, they put, they try to put a net over a few African countries and then we get it from
00:11:12.600 Nigeria, which wasn't one of them. And then we find out that the Netherlands actually had the
00:11:16.360 Omicron variant before South Africa and Botswana. Like, so none of it, as I said, you're always,
00:11:22.460 always, always going to be playing catch up with travel restrictions. And now we have the government
00:11:27.760 putting in yet another barrier to testing. So now when you enter the country, it used to be
00:11:32.360 Canadian or traveler doesn't matter. If you entered Canada by air and you were fully vaccinated,
00:11:37.960 you would have to do that PCR test before you arrived. And then you'd go. And a couple of people
00:11:44.080 at the airport would be randomly selected for an additional test, but otherwise you just leave.
00:11:49.280 Now, everyone who lands needs to do a PCR test and then you need to go to quarantine or isolate.
00:11:56.520 The wording is not quite clear yet. Well, you await the results. Now, I don't know what the backlog is.
00:12:03.320 I don't know if it's one, two, three days, but all of a sudden, if you're now a traveler and you say,
00:12:08.080 oh yeah, I want to go to Vancouver on vacation, you're going to be sitting in your hotel room,
00:12:11.520 technically not allowed to leave until that PCR test comes back. And again, I don't know what
00:12:17.380 their backlog is. I do know that Switch Health is a company that has managed to secure the monopoly
00:12:22.820 on this border testing, despite the fact that the company just didn't exist two years ago.
00:12:28.360 And all of a sudden, you will now have to go through this process again of getting a PCR test
00:12:34.020 and waiting for that result. So we've started to now add back a lot of the measures that we already
00:12:41.420 took away. Now, so far, there's no hotel quarantine. I'm holding my breath, but at the same time,
00:12:47.580 I'm not optimistic that some version of some measure like that couldn't come back if the government
00:12:54.280 is so panicked about this. Now, interestingly enough, I mentioned Switch Health. So I shared
00:13:00.180 my horror story with Switch Health a couple of months back, or no, it just feels like a couple
00:13:04.560 of months. Yeah, a few weeks in COVID times feels like a few months of normal time. It was the
00:13:09.680 beginning of November. I was in Austria and I did one of those do-it-yourself RT lamp tests,
00:13:16.020 which is like a PCR, except it's not in a lab, but the Canadian government accepts it at the border.
00:13:20.940 And I did this because I needed to get home from Europe. And I got a false positive as evidenced
00:13:27.260 by the fact that I did two rapid tests and a PCR and they were all negative after. And I wrote about
00:13:32.860 this and I had some very unkind words about Switch Health and about the test. And interestingly enough,
00:13:38.000 this week, I got proactively, I never reached out to them from Switch Health, an offer of a refund
00:13:43.600 on the test and compensation to reimburse me for the local test that I had to buy in Austria,
00:13:50.240 which I think was like $114 or whatever it was. And I was like, yeah, okay, they're off. So $150
00:13:56.780 for the test plus tax and then $114 some odd dollars for the test that I had to get in Austria. So
00:14:04.080 they've offered me and they didn't make it contingent on my silence. They didn't say like,
00:14:08.620 oh, you need to retract anything you've said. They just said, you know, we understand you had some
00:14:12.180 issues. We're offering you a refund. So at least something works. I've kind of become accustomed to
00:14:16.840 the idea that nothing is working in society now. So that's why I didn't even bother reaching out to
00:14:22.040 them because I just didn't have the energy or time to deal with navigating the bureaucracy of a company
00:14:27.440 that has a business model that I think needs to be looked at. That's all I'll say on that. But
00:14:33.440 the point is, is that all of the progress we feel like we've made is getting thrown back at us in the
00:14:40.420 form of roadblocks. And I'm going to be talking a little later on in the show with D. Jared Brown,
00:14:45.240 a lawyer who's very keenly aware of the attacks on civil liberties. And he's part of a movement of
00:14:50.180 lawyers specifically trying to return to the old normal. But it seems like for every one step
00:14:56.200 forward you take, you're also taking two steps back. We've got to take a quick break. When we
00:15:00.800 come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show. Stay tuned. You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:15:07.280 We are back. This is The Andrew Lawton Show on True North. And today we're going to talk about
00:15:18.020 all the words that we think you are an ableist, sexist, racist, misogynist for saying. Oh, wait,
00:15:24.340 sorry. What's that? Oh, no, sorry. This is now this is True North, not CBC. Okay, nevermind. No,
00:15:31.020 I'm not going to tell you how to speak. I'm not going to police your language. I'm not going to tell
00:15:34.240 you're a dirty, stinking, racist, misogynistic, transphobic, ableist, homophobe, classist,
00:15:39.180 first worldist. No, that's just what CBC does. I know it's been around for a couple of days now,
00:15:45.480 but I had to get my, you know, few swings at the pinata here because this, it's almost like at first
00:15:52.280 when I saw it, I thought some CBC intern accidentally tweeted from the CBC account instead of their own
00:15:58.420 account because they tweeted like this little stupid like word cloud and all the words that you're not
00:16:03.400 supposed to use. That was from the, I first saw it on the CBC auto account that you can see on the
00:16:08.340 screen there. And then know that lo and behold, this is actually a CBC story telling you the words
00:16:14.860 and phrases you may want to think twice about using. So they're saying you may want to think
00:16:20.520 about it. It's like the vaccine passports. They're making you think you have a choice, but when you
00:16:25.520 read the rest of it, you realize that, you know, by the end of the article, you're not supposed to be
00:16:29.980 talking about it. Now you can see what the words are. Savage, ghetto, gypped, blackmail, powwow,
00:16:36.000 crippled, blind spot, first world problem, lame, spirit animal, grandfathered in, tone deaf, black
00:16:39.580 sheep, blindsided, tribe spooky, savage brainstorm to sell someone down the river. I may have repeated
00:16:44.440 a couple, but you get the gist there. Now I've said them all. So it's, I've done like the anti-George
00:16:49.880 Carlin thing of just the words you can't say on a podcast I've all said, but I want to talk about
00:16:55.280 these. Some of them are obvious. Like gypped is one that a lot of people know by now is offensive
00:17:00.980 to a particular ethnic group. To have a powwow, again, I've heard challenged before, but some of
00:17:08.580 these are absolutely insane. I think the craziest is brainstorm. Now, if you look at the rationale
00:17:13.820 given by a disability advocate here, a brainstorm could be insensitive to those who have brain
00:17:22.060 injuries or are neuro diverse, and it could effectuate stigma about disorders like epilepsy
00:17:30.700 for people. So I knew an epileptic person once, and when they had a seizure, I didn't think,
00:17:37.360 huh, she's having a brainstorm. So people do not associate the word brainstorm with seizure.
00:17:44.820 They don't associate brainstorm with anything but a storm of ideas going around in your brain,
00:17:50.160 which it sounds like the people of CBC have never actually had in their brain. So that way may be
00:17:54.840 why the word is foreign to them. But this is, I once heard about this in like the heyday of PC
00:18:01.140 language policing, which was the early nineties when this was becoming a big thing. I heard a story.
00:18:06.320 There was some office that had decided it would replace brainstorming in its corporate strategy
00:18:11.380 meetings with thought showers, which just sounds bizarre and thankfully never caught on.
00:18:16.480 And a blind spot as well. You know, heaven forbid you say that you can't see something because it's
00:18:22.100 in your blind spot. People may associate that with blindness, which is the inability to see.
00:18:28.280 So that, yeah, I could see how that one would be something you wouldn't want to do.
00:18:31.940 What else are you not allowed to use? Tone deaf because you can't hear tone. So people might
00:18:39.500 confuse that with the inability to hear. Okay, fair enough. And what else do we have on the list here?
00:18:45.260 It just goes on and on and on and you're not supposed to use tribe. Now, what they fail to
00:18:52.060 realize in policing the word tribe is that tribe was a word before it was a term used specifically
00:19:00.400 for indigenous people. So there can be a tribal mentality. We got to just cancel survivor.
00:19:05.960 That's the whole thing. Like this is all leading to Jeff Probst being canceled because he has,
00:19:09.720 he presides over tribal councils. So that's like a cultural appropriation thing going on there.
00:19:14.200 But if you were to say, ah, yes, my tribe or it's a tribal attitude, apparently that is
00:19:18.960 no longer allowed. And sold down the river. Yeah, that's a negative connotation. Harkens back,
00:19:25.560 they say, to a time when enslaved African people would literally be sold down the Mississippi River
00:19:30.680 for profit, seen as chattel objects that could be used or disposed of at the whims of their slave
00:19:37.420 owners. And this one I find hilarious. Spooky. So if something is spooky, well, that's not allowed because
00:19:43.160 it's actually an anti-black slur from when white soldiers began calling fellow black soldiers
00:19:49.200 spooks during World War II. What they're saying here, the serious aspect of this is that intent
00:19:56.300 does not matter. If someone can draw a line between something they don't like and something historically
00:20:01.480 wrong, it doesn't matter whether no sensible thinking person would see that line. It exists and
00:20:07.980 everyone has to shy away from it. The problem is that if you allow people to cede language,
00:20:12.580 it is never innocuous and it's never benign. And I've had to stress this point because a lot of
00:20:18.580 people would say, well, no big deal. If it makes one or two people feel better for you to not use
00:20:22.120 this word or that word, then what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is that language matters.
00:20:27.200 Language matters and the words we use matter. And more importantly, the ability to use language.
00:20:32.400 language. The ability to just freely choose our words and not have to censor everything and stack
00:20:36.920 it up against whatever someone else might claim is a microaggression. This is a phenomenon that
00:20:41.500 matters. One notable example of this, and a part of me doesn't even want to bring it up, but I will.
00:20:47.500 Not because I think this is the word you should use, but because it's an example of how intent has
00:20:54.240 been proven to be irrelevant. The word niggardly, which has no etymological connection at all
00:21:01.140 to anything racial means cheap and stingy. But most people do not know that word. So if you were
00:21:08.080 to use that word, you'd probably be sent to the office, the principal's office. You'd probably be
00:21:13.080 summoned to HR. You'd probably be canceled. You might even have your post taken down by big tech,
00:21:17.460 whatever. And there was a big thing. I think it was in the New York Times a while ago. They ran like
00:21:20.880 this massive multi-part series about whether they could or should still use this word. It was actually
00:21:26.920 like a big thing where they had points and counterpoints and they had black people on both
00:21:30.820 sides. They had linguists on both sides. And there was a certain concession that I think was made
00:21:35.800 there, which is, okay, could you defend the use of that word? Yes. But should you? Is it the hill to
00:21:42.760 die on? No. The difference between that word and these is that that word is problematic to a lot of
00:21:49.920 people because when they hear it, they think of something else. The list of words that CBC is trying
00:21:56.040 to cancel, no one would hear and think there's anything wrong with, with the exception of a
00:22:01.580 couple. They throw a couple in there that I think are fairly agreeable to cancel or to at least refrain
00:22:07.380 from using, like Gypt is the notable one. But to sell down the river, to say something spooky, even to
00:22:13.680 say something's grandfathered in. Now I've learned the history of that. I know it has to do with slavery,
00:22:17.700 but that is not what that term means. And I find it interesting for all the talk we hear about
00:22:24.900 reclaiming language. This was the thrust behind, you may remember, Slut Walk a few years ago. A bunch
00:22:30.500 of feminist activists were saying, you know what, we're not going to let the word slut be used in a
00:22:33.980 derisive way about women. We're going to reclaim it. We're going to proudly march as sluts. And I think
00:22:38.560 a lot of people mocked that, but the point that I took away from that was, okay, so we're saying that we
00:22:44.140 are not going to allow other people to change what language means. And we are going to reclaim a word
00:22:49.660 if we don't like it. So why are we not reclaiming these words to use the left's language? Why are we
00:22:54.540 allowing these words to be taken away? And again, most people, the good news is most people saw the
00:23:00.820 CBC story and just mocked it and just rolled the rise at it as I think they should have. But the problem
00:23:06.740 with doing that is that there are some schools that are putting up posters that are saying these are
00:23:12.940 the words you can't use. There are going to be some offices that are going to start putting out
00:23:17.480 guidelines saying these are words you can't use. And this was the whole thing of the PC craze in
00:23:22.260 the 90s. Most people just laughed at this and thought it was all insane and absurd, which it was.
00:23:28.500 The notable example that stands out from the era was, I forget the town, I think it might have been
00:23:33.540 San Francisco where they changed manholes to maintenance covers or maintenance holes or something
00:23:39.100 like that. And no one was ever offended. No one could point to a woman being offended because,
00:23:45.360 I mean, women don't want to be known as sewage covers. If you called it a womanhole, they wouldn't
00:23:50.800 like it. So a manhole, I don't think, is offensive to women. This is an area where I think women are
00:23:56.980 probably happy being excluded from the discourse. But no, someone said, someone might be offended by
00:24:02.020 this, so we've got to change it. You look at Atlantic Canada. There was a craze in the late 90s,
00:24:07.660 early 2000s about the term fisherman and whether fisherman was allowed because, oh, well, it's not
00:24:15.240 gender inclusive. And CBC ran, it was like a 2000 word letter from the editor, not a letter to the
00:24:23.300 editor, a letter from the editor about the debates and the challenges and why they were going to call
00:24:29.360 themselves fishers. The Globe and Mail, to its credit, said, you know, we actually talked to women
00:24:34.640 fishermen and they said they liked being called fishermen. It was the women fishermen. The ones
00:24:39.160 actually affected by this were saying, no, don't, we're fishermen. That's who we are.
00:24:44.140 So all of the time with these language battles, you get a couple of activists, like in the CBC
00:24:48.400 article, like this disability rights activist. But these are people from the grievance industry
00:24:53.020 whose job is to find fault in anything and everything. So do not cede your language. That's
00:24:58.840 the one takeaway here. When we come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show talking about going back to
00:25:03.440 the old normal with lawyer D. Jared Brown. That's up next. Stay tuned.
00:25:10.720 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:25:16.540 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show. If you haven't detected it, there's been a bit of a civil
00:25:21.020 liberties theme on this show for the last, oh, I don't know, maybe 18, 19 months. Part of it's become,
00:25:26.640 part of it has been because that has been the biggest issue facing not just Canadians in provinces
00:25:32.620 all across this country, but even people around the world. We've covered a lot of the court cases
00:25:37.200 that have been taken up against some of these very significant and severe measures we've seen.
00:25:42.640 Obviously, there have been some wins, but a lot of losses on that. But I think we all agree it's
00:25:47.040 probably going to be a years-long process as a lot of these challenges work their way up through all
00:25:51.880 the various courts and perhaps may have a favorable outcome at the Supreme Court. Who knows?
00:25:56.640 Well, a number of lawyers from all across this country have signed a declaration
00:26:00.800 acknowledging that civil liberties are under what the declaration says is unprecedented attack.
00:26:06.940 This is the Free North Declaration, founded by our friend Bruce Party, who's been on the show
00:26:11.880 on a number of occasions. And one of the signatories is D. Jared Brown, a lawyer with Brown Law
00:26:17.640 in Toronto, also a bencher with the Law Society of Ontario. He joins me now. Jared, good to have
00:26:23.760 you back on. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.
00:26:27.440 This has just taken off like wildfire. I mean, all sorts of lawyers and not just the usual suspects
00:26:32.560 that we hear in the media on civil liberties, but people with family law practices, real estate
00:26:37.860 practices. There does seem to be a significant contingent of the legal community that's not happy
00:26:43.520 with what's happening right now.
00:26:44.820 Yeah, I think absolutely. There's a growing opposition to the new normal, if you will.
00:26:52.680 I think that people are, everybody's feeling it. It's taken some people longer than others to
00:26:57.620 sense that change, what the new normal looks like, and to develop the opposition to it, if you will.
00:27:05.200 So yeah, there's a lot more people in this space now, especially in the legal world than there were
00:27:11.020 18 months ago. And certainly, putting some attention on it from some of its opponents
00:27:18.860 has certainly galvanized some of the lawyers to take a look at what the Free North Declaration is all
00:27:26.320 about, and to decide whether or not they want to affirm their belief in that proposition.
00:27:31.980 I know at the bottom of it, there's an option that allows people to sign it anonymously if they'd
00:27:37.960 like. And the petition says, or the declaration rather says, if they fear negative repercussions
00:27:42.560 from disclosing their name publicly. Now, I know you've never shied away from putting your name to
00:27:47.200 what you think. Neither has Bruce Party, Lisa Bildy, all of these folks that have been involved in
00:27:51.660 this. But for a lot of lawyers, the idea of standing up for civil liberties, there could be
00:27:56.180 negative repercussions, or at least they fear there could be. Why is that?
00:27:59.660 Oh, absolutely. And it's part of the new normal. In the before times, you were considered a champion
00:28:05.240 of the bar and a hero of the law, if you were to champion human rights and basic civil rights. Well,
00:28:13.220 in the new normal, that's not the case at all. It depends on which rights and freedoms that you are
00:28:17.700 supporting or defending. And one need look no further than the opposition to the Free North
00:28:24.300 Declaration, which is building, to see why people are legitimately afraid to stand up to put their
00:28:31.880 names to things like the Free North Declaration. I mean, by way of example, I just read a piece
00:28:37.220 calling for myself and some of my colleagues who are governors at the Law Society of Ontario to
00:28:43.260 somehow be reprimanded or to have our elected positions on that board somehow put in jeopardy
00:28:49.300 because we decided to affirm our belief in fundamental human rights, fundamental charter
00:28:53.940 rights and freedoms. There's also another individual who a lawyer who was calling for
00:28:58.660 the any articles that published the Free North Declaration uncritically, that those should be
00:29:04.180 censored, those articles should be pulled down. I mean, it's the typical mob reaction that typically
00:29:10.940 comes from the left on these things. And it's been mobilized and it's been mobilized quickly.
00:29:15.100 But when you talk to your legal colleagues that are seeing a lot of concerns here,
00:29:19.980 are they all politically conservative? Because it used to be a lot of the biggest civil libertarians
00:29:24.460 came from the left. No, absolutely. This is in the new normal, if you will. The coalitions and
00:29:31.840 alliances are not the ones of old. And so we've got, you've got traditional sort of socialist lefties
00:29:37.820 who recognize that there are some fundamental rights and freedoms, freedom of speech, things like
00:29:43.240 that, that they actually care about, that they, that matter to them. And then there's also liberals,
00:29:47.800 small L liberals, classical liberals, and then conservatives. And then of course,
00:29:50.920 there's the libertarians themselves. There is an alliance of people who recognize that society,
00:29:56.680 our society was organized on the basis of some pretty good ideas, you know, the rights and freedoms
00:30:02.520 of individuals, for instance. And they don't like seeing how this new normal under the COVID era
00:30:09.640 has pushed those aside. And so if you value individual rights and freedoms on any level,
00:30:16.360 then you will find a home amongst this new coalition, if you will, from across the political spectrum.
00:30:24.680 Now, I know it's obviously not something that judges would sign and could sign, nor do I want
00:30:29.720 judges that are signing what are political or political adjacent declarations. But I would certainly
00:30:35.480 like them to be taking heed of this current and a lot of the legal arguments that have been put
00:30:40.440 forward in favor of that. And I know, as I said in the preamble there, there are going to be a lot of
00:30:44.920 cases that I think are going to be litigated for years into the future. But when it's coming down to
00:30:49.960 it, the challenges that have been going towards courts fighting for civil liberties, courts seem to
00:30:55.800 be generally taking a very, very broad view and giving government a lot of latitude.
00:31:01.080 Let's be clear. I mean, judges and those that sit on administrative tribunals, they're just
00:31:06.440 members of society like you and I. They live within the same society that we live in. They get their
00:31:12.680 media and information from the same sources as us. And they're scared. They are scared. I've said to
00:31:20.680 people that there is a mania that has descended upon society and judges and tribunal members are not
00:31:28.680 immune from that mania. And so absolutely, there has been no bold decision making, if you will,
00:31:38.120 on the side of fundamental rights and freedoms on anything COVID related or the public health response
00:31:43.240 to it. And I'm not surprised and I'm not surprised only because, like I said, the mania does not stop at
00:31:50.920 the steps of the courthouse. It's at all levels of society. And so in the midst and the grips of
00:31:57.560 something that you think is this existential threat to the entirety of society, then maybe you're going
00:32:02.120 to look over some rights and freedoms getting stomped upon by the government. So yeah, I'm not surprised.
00:32:10.920 I've told anybody who wants to know that I think the only solution to these problems are going to be
00:32:15.640 political. I do not believe that you'll find any refuge in the court system or the tribunal system
00:32:20.440 on anything COVID public health related. I fear you're right about that. One point
00:32:26.360 that the declaration makes, which I think is interesting about the process aspect of courts,
00:32:31.080 is that one example, which I hadn't actually come across, come across that unvaccinated people are
00:32:36.440 being denied the participation in juries. Now, some people who don't like doing jury duty might say,
00:32:41.480 okay, that's great. You know, it gets me out of it. But that actually is in a way something that
00:32:46.200 would buy us a jury if you're excluding a segment of the population. So even just the way that courts
00:32:52.440 are operating as institutions, forgetting about the decisions that judges are being made, are not immune
00:32:58.120 from a lot of these things that are being challenged in courts. Well, that example that you just
00:33:02.360 mentioned about juries was what looked like a simple and minor decision by a single judge, I believe
00:33:07.720 was out west in BC, saying that they didn't want to convene a jury pool during COVID times. At that
00:33:15.000 point, I think it was in the spring when vaccinations were a relatively new thing. We didn't know much
00:33:20.040 about them in terms of their efficacy, long term or otherwise, or about transmissibility, things like
00:33:24.680 that. And so that judge made a decision, he was going to exclude the non vaccinating. Now my understanding
00:33:29.640 is that that decision is now being rolled out everywhere. And what you're effectively doing
00:33:34.120 is you're denying an accused in a jury trial or the defendant, if you will, in a civil trial,
00:33:41.400 the jury of their peers. And I think that's something we need to take seriously. We need to
00:33:46.760 understand what the implications may be. I mean, it is conceivable that at some point a jury may be
00:33:51.640 deciding issues related to vaccination status, possibly. And if you're going to exclude a what,
00:33:59.320 I don't know what the size of the population is, but a cohort, if you will, of the population from
00:34:04.120 sitting on a jury, you're really meddling amongst some fundamental tenets of western judicial systems.
00:34:12.040 Yeah. And when you look at a lot of these, and again, I'm not going to just go through and give
00:34:15.880 the entire list of civil liberties violations because, well, I think you have things to do this
00:34:20.520 afternoon, as do I. But there is a point at which if you don't focus on the big picture and realize
00:34:27.720 that they are under attack, the little stuff doesn't really matter anymore. Like I remember
00:34:31.960 at the very beginning of the pandemic, it was almost a novelty when you'd see these little
00:34:35.320 stories about, oh, you know, this kid was given a fine for playing basketball in a park and
00:34:40.440 these were very manageable. And, you know, at a certain point it became dozens and then it
00:34:44.600 became hundreds. And now you've got millions, tens of millions of dollars of fines that have been
00:34:49.400 leveled against churches, individuals, people that have just gone to work without being,
00:34:54.680 like, it's just, it's endless now. And at a certain point, how do you chip away at this?
00:34:59.800 Well, it's been incremental, but there are some who saw early on that this was incredible. I mean,
00:35:06.120 this is absolutely amazing that the government would think that it could put the entire society
00:35:11.960 under house arrest, that it could shut down the economy, that the economy is a switch that they can
00:35:16.520 play with and turn on and off. Some of us thought, no, no, no, that's not how society is organized.
00:35:21.560 You know, rights and freedoms are not privileges granted by government, but they are something we
00:35:27.880 are born with, something that comes from a higher source, if you will. And for the government to then
00:35:33.480 start treating our rights and freedoms as if they are privileges, which is what they've done,
00:35:38.200 to some of us, we knew right away where this was going. Of course, we were called the conspiracy
00:35:41.880 theorists early on, but the conspiracy theories 18 months later are looking pretty credible at this
00:35:47.000 point. And so what's happened though, is from that initial shock that some of us saw, there's been
00:35:52.360 this incremental push. And, you know, basically what's happened is you find yourself at a battle
00:35:59.320 line 18 months later, that is further back from where you started without realizing the amount of
00:36:05.080 ground that you've been pushed. And so, like I said, people are beginning to realize those who may not
00:36:11.000 have been as shocked as someone like I was back in March 2020 that the government thought it had this
00:36:16.360 right. They're there now. They now see that the forward position that they were in 18 months ago
00:36:23.560 is miles off in the distance. And we, as I call it, the new normal is a very different place.
00:36:29.000 I think that's a brilliant way of putting it because when this was all just about two weeks to flatten the
00:36:34.120 curve, people were willing to put up with a lot for two weeks. And if government had made
00:36:39.320 the appeal to civic duty and said, we're asking you to do X, Y, Z, it would have been a lot different.
00:36:45.640 But the problem is, and you're right, not that many people spoke out against this
00:36:49.560 at the point, even when we didn't know what COVID was, we didn't know how transmissible it was,
00:36:53.720 we didn't know what we were dealing with. I remember when people were wiping down doorknobs
00:36:57.560 before going into buildings and stuff like that, or even their own home. But that two-week
00:37:02.920 license that we gave the government got extended. It got extended two weeks longer, and then in
00:37:07.560 months. And now we are about to enter the third year of COVID. And you are right that the people
00:37:12.520 that kind of gave the benefit of the doubt to government are the ones now that, you know,
00:37:18.040 well, the joke's on them. Well, public health is traditionally, and if you talk to public health
00:37:22.440 experts, and I have because I had to cross-examine some at trials, and I've had to dive into peer-reviewed
00:37:27.880 literature on this stuff in the context of my court proceedings. But if you talk to them,
00:37:32.200 traditionally, public health is something where you avoid coercion. In other words,
00:37:35.720 you try and enlist the populace and you give them information and equip them so that they
00:37:41.400 voluntarily want to, in this case, fight COVID. And so, for instance, their initial two weeks
00:37:46.280 to flatten the curve, it came across to many as a voluntary suggestion, you know,
00:37:50.280 this is the thing to do. And so I think on that basis, you could justify, like give everyone the
00:37:55.080 information, let them make their decision, if they're going to stay home, shutter their business,
00:37:58.120 whatever it is. But that's not what happened. Laws were passed, kids were sent home from school,
00:38:02.840 they were, it was, it was backed up by the power of the state, and it was coerced. Now, we, you know,
00:38:07.800 we're all in this together was the mantra at that time. But the reality is, no, if you weren't in it,
00:38:12.520 you were going to find out very quickly from, from the, from the police, from our, from our health
00:38:16.920 authorities, and from the courts. And that, that's traditionally not what public health has been.
00:38:21.240 And we've completely annihilated that conception of public health. And I think much to the detriment
00:38:25.640 of the institution that it is. So let's, let's go back to the declaration here for a moment. This
00:38:30.920 is obviously a declaration by lawyers. Who's the target audience? Are you trying to convince other
00:38:36.120 lawyers? Or is it a message to society itself? It's the society itself. I mean, the, the, the,
00:38:42.840 a joint letter is something is not something new. I mean, traditionally, they come from the left.
00:38:47.560 Traditionally, you'll see academics, legal scholars on the left will sign these joint petitions.
00:38:53.320 Typically, they're criticizing conservative governments and the things that conservative
00:38:56.520 governments have tried to do. You know, I'm thinking right now of, of the Ford government,
00:39:00.520 when it tried to restrict the size of Toronto City Council, we saw a big joint letter signed by a
00:39:05.400 bunch of lawyers and law profs saying, this is a bad thing. This is essentially in that vein, it's,
00:39:11.880 it's a, it's a bunch of lawyers who are, who, and legal types, as well as among society at large,
00:39:17.080 to say, we don't like this. There, there's certain principles that we hold dear and, and they're set
00:39:22.840 out in the declaration. And, and you know, you're not alone if you share these, these ideas, these
00:39:29.400 notions, or just this discomfort with where we are now 18 months later. So no, it's for society at large
00:39:35.480 to, I guess, to provide some comfort because you're not seeing any of this stuff in mainstream media.
00:39:41.400 No, the corporate media basically has put the cone of silence on, on what I call the science around
00:39:46.600 COVID. The science around COVID is not what you're getting on your nightly news at 6pm, unfortunately.
00:39:51.400 And that's why we are where we are. So it's about getting a message out. It's about showing people
00:39:55.720 that there are numbers that, that, that share your opinions and your feelings. And then obviously having
00:40:00.760 lawyers involved tells you, guess what? You're not insane. This stuff is not normal in the law.
00:40:05.000 Yeah. And I think that's a very valid point because for a lot of people, I mean, going back
00:40:10.840 to Doug Ford, calling those protesting lockdowns, a bunch of yahoos some time ago and, and similar
00:40:15.880 rhetoric about, Oh, just these, you know, absolute lunatics that are out protesting against vaccine
00:40:20.600 mandates. It is good to see here's an educated, regulated profession full of thousands of people,
00:40:26.440 of which a large chunk are saying, ah, you know what? We're not comfortable with this. Including as I
00:40:30.760 pointed out a lot of fully vaccinated people who like myself can be very pro vaccination
00:40:35.800 and anti mandate. And that in and of itself is a position that's just completely absent from the
00:40:41.080 mainstream media discourse. I mean, people need to understand that as a lawyer, I go to court,
00:40:45.720 I go before the human rights tribunal, I go before all manner of sort of adjudicated bodies.
00:40:50.200 And I'm having to give advice to clients right now that says this in the before times,
00:40:54.920 this is the way it would have been, but we're now in the mania times, the new normal.
00:40:59.480 And I can't give you an assurance on the outcome on this case that I would have been able to give
00:41:03.240 you 19 months ago and said, no way in hell can they do what they're doing. Now I'm sitting there
00:41:07.880 in a situation where I'm saying, Hmm, who knows, who knows in the new normal. And, and that's what
00:41:12.840 people need to understand is that as lawyers and this on looking at the vaccine debate, for instance,
00:41:17.720 the mandatory backs to be, you know, I represent employers, I represent individuals as well. And on both
00:41:23.400 sides, my opinion that I have to give is, I'm not sure if this would be enforceable at the end of the
00:41:30.920 day, in the old times, it should not be, it would never have been to have to disclose your private
00:41:36.200 health status to your employer, to submit to a medical treatment in order to continue employment.
00:41:41.960 But in the new normal, you know, with the mania that I that I say is out there, and what I've seen
00:41:47.400 from the courts, you know, like I said, I think the only solution is going to be political to these
00:41:52.680 things. And, and so that's why the declaration is important that it's signed by lawyers and as
00:41:56.360 the backing of lawyers, because people need to understand, even we as lawyers are uncomfortable
00:41:59.960 with this. Well, trying to return to the old normal has been an uphill battle, but that doesn't
00:42:05.720 mean it is not an important one, the Free North declaration, one significant weapon in that fight,
00:42:11.640 Jared Brown, D. Jared Brown, lawyer with Brown Law in Toronto, one of the signatories,
00:42:15.480 also a bencher with the Law Society of Ontario. Thanks so much, Jared. Always a pleasure.
00:42:21.800 Us has been the running joke on the show. We tend to talk about these issues and they depress me
00:42:25.720 greatly, but I actually felt kind of hopeful there. I felt kind of hopeful because a lot of the time,
00:42:30.840 and I don't know if any of you feel this way, I feel somewhat alone in this fight. And I don't mean
00:42:36.120 that I don't hear all the time from those of you listening in the show who agree and in some cases
00:42:40.440 disagree, but do it in a civil and respectful way. But in society itself,
00:42:45.080 in society itself, there are lots of different groups where I could go. And if I were to mention
00:42:49.400 what I think is a completely uncontroversial point, like, hey, I don't think you should be fired for
00:42:54.120 not being vaccinated. It's as though you had said something radical, because that is radical in
00:43:00.200 today's society. And Jared kept going back to the new normal, the new normal. And I'm uncomfortable
00:43:05.240 with that because I don't want to recognize that it is in fact the new normal. I don't want to recognize
00:43:10.120 that all of these things that I deplore, coercion, force, compromising liberty, have become normalized
00:43:16.440 and accepted in society. But you know what? I'm never going to give up the fight to bring that back.
00:43:21.480 So glad Jared is as dedicated as I am, more so within his profession, of course, at getting rid of
00:43:27.400 the new normal and going back to the way things were. Free society via the free north and the free
00:43:32.680 north declaration. That is at freenorthdeclaration.ca. That does it for us for today. We've got to wrap
00:43:38.520 things up there. My thanks to all of you for tuning into the show. We'll be back soon with
00:43:42.440 more of Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North. Thank you, God bless, and good day.
00:43:47.160 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.