Juno News - National Citizens Inquiry delivers scathing report on Covid measures

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

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

00:01:20.380 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here this is the

00:01:30.500 andrew lotten show on true north on this tuesday november 28th just after one o'clock eastern

00:01:36.320 time 10 a.m pacific time that makes it 11 a.m mountain time and noon central time i feel like

00:01:44.100 i have to do them all now so two o'clock atlantic and uh for you crazy newfoundlanders with the

00:01:48.760 half hour time zone hope you are enjoying 2 30 p.m but I think Labrador is on Atlantic time right

00:01:53.660 Labrador like is uh they're very time zone supremacist with the rest of Newfoundland but 0.87

00:01:58.340 it is good to have you aboard the program here we are going to be speaking in a little bit about

00:02:03.960 the National Citizens Inquiry a body that was quite monumental in Canada in terms of its size

00:02:10.980 and scope and this NCI has just released today its final report which came out I think it was

00:02:17.980 about 11 30 this morning and I thought oh well maybe I can take a quick skim through it before

00:02:21.480 I go on air and then I opened it up and it was uh five let me get the right uh answer here 5,324

00:02:28.900 pages now I can read pretty quickly but I won't tell you I've read the entire report I did read

00:02:35.500 the preamble I read through many of the recommendations and I have some preliminary

00:02:39.700 thoughts on the final report which I'll share very shortly and we'll also be talking to Ches

00:02:44.840 Crosby who is the administrator of the NCI now right now he's actually I have on my screen open

00:02:50.760 the National Citizens Inquiry press conference feed and I see Chez Crosby is still on it so

00:02:56.160 he may not be able to join us right away but we'll get to him in a couple of moments when he's able

00:03:00.400 to pop off that call and join us over here and we are very grateful this is the fun of doing things

00:03:05.840 live here on the Andrew Lawton show but before I get into that I have to share because everyone's

00:03:11.060 sharing this photo around now. This was snapped of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, I believe in Toronto.

00:03:17.740 I might be wrong about the city, but you can see him carrying around a bag there. And if you look

00:03:23.560 really, really closely, you see the bag says Versace on it. What's that? I'm told it's Versace.

00:03:34.480 Oh, the designer, Versace? This working man of the people, the leader of the

00:03:40.000 The leader of the Socialist New Democrat Party is walking around with an imported designer bag,

00:03:47.860 which kind of looks like the crappy bags you get at the grocery store for a dollar

00:03:51.620 because plastic bags have been outlawed.

00:03:53.560 That's what's happening here.

00:03:55.020 Oh, my goodness.

00:03:57.140 Now, I don't actually know the price of this Versace.

00:04:02.440 Sorry, Versace.

00:04:03.340 Versace.

00:04:04.240 Don't worry.

00:04:05.060 I know it.

00:04:05.420 I'm not that much of a bore.

00:04:06.580 I don't know the price of the Versace bag that Jagmeet Singh has.

00:04:10.560 There was an article about it in the Toronto Sun.

00:04:13.160 Oftentimes when, you know, the leaders are spotted with designer clothing or watches,

00:04:18.000 people will spot it out and be like, oh, well, that was this model,

00:04:20.420 which was in this catalog and it retailed for this price.

00:04:23.380 So I don't know what the bag goes for.

00:04:25.400 Sean, you're more stylish than I am.

00:04:26.940 If you know how much the bag is, let me know in the chat here that we have going on.

00:04:30.940 And by the way, I'm not one of these wealth shaming types.

00:04:33.700 I'm not one of these people that looks at someone and says,

00:04:35.200 oh, I don't like that they have a nice car.

00:04:36.960 I don't like that they dress nicely.

00:04:38.340 I don't like that they have a nice watch.

00:04:40.120 I say, absolutely, congratulations.

00:04:42.180 You've worked for it.

00:04:43.460 You've earned it.

00:04:44.420 I mean, in the case of Jagmeet Singh,

00:04:46.720 well, you bought it at least.

00:04:48.200 I don't know if you,

00:04:49.020 working is the appropriate way of looking at it.

00:04:51.520 But what's interesting here is that he's the guy

00:04:54.500 who is leading this crusade against the so-called rich.

00:04:58.340 The rich need to pay their fair share.

00:05:01.000 No one needs to be a billionaire.

00:05:02.420 it's all about evil profits and all of that stuff uh here we go sean to the rescue versace tote bags

00:05:09.320 start at around a thousand dollars and can go up to two thousand but his is not currently available

00:05:17.120 so uh he may have gotten it previously but that's the price of a versace tote bag one thousand to

00:05:22.700 two thousand dollars now i've got like a nice little laptop bag here which my my wife got me

00:05:27.480 and i don't think she paid no i don't think she paid a thousand dollars for it but the thing that

00:05:31.640 I will say about Jagmeet Singh is that if you're going to be the guy leading the crusade against

00:05:37.280 the so-called rich, maybe you just cool it on walking around with all of the designer swag.

00:05:43.660 That seems to be a little bit of free advice that I can give my gift to you courtesy of the Andrew

00:05:48.240 Law Hutton show. This is a fun one. We'll do all the parties today. Liberal MP Ken Hardy was

00:05:53.740 responding to the news. Now, yesterday on the show, I was talking about that horrific car crash

00:05:58.560 in Niagara Falls last week, which initially was reported as terrorism. And I understand why people

00:06:04.540 thought that. There was an explosion. It took place at a border crossing. I understand why

00:06:09.280 people went to that, but it ended up just being a tragedy that we don't quite understand the

00:06:15.020 motivation behind. Nevertheless, it is always important, as I said, to not let your politics

00:06:23.120 get in the way of a narrative or to not let a narrative get in the way of your politics. No,

00:06:29.040 do not let either get in the way of either, but you should not let yourself politicize tragedy.

00:06:34.060 That's the point that I've made. And when people get into trouble is when they start assuming that

00:06:38.280 something is going on and they want to believe that they want to say it's true, but it's really

00:06:43.040 not. And they try to shoehorn it into their narrative. Well, this is a bit of a setup to

00:06:46.880 what's happened in Winnipeg. Now, I don't know the details of it. I don't know Winnipeg all that well,

00:06:50.700 but there was a very tragic shooting that took place that claimed four lives and sent someone

00:06:57.220 to the hospital with serious injuries. Now, police say the victims were known to them.

00:07:02.880 It looks like this is the kind of thing that was probably targeted, but we don't know.

00:07:07.380 Nevertheless, it was a shooting. People died. It was tragic. Why can't we just say that?

00:07:14.440 Well, here's what Liberal MP Ken Hardy said.

00:07:16.700 beyond troubling to see another mass shooting in canada now in winnipeg and we've lost so many

00:07:25.220 police officers might it be the anti-social burn everything down far-right attitude we're seeing

00:07:33.300 creeping in from the u.s and the quote-unquote creep on the canadian side pierre pauliev i did

00:07:41.980 like the exaggerated question mark because ken hardy in his post on x there is making it a

00:07:46.980 question i i'm not saying it's pierre polyev i'm just saying it might be pierre polyev it might be

00:07:53.120 the far right so i don't know how you draw a line between conservative leader pierre polyev

00:08:00.120 and a shooting in winnipeg i'm trying to draw the line i like i'm trying it's like you do you go up

00:08:07.320 That's like a line that would be the most inconvenient expedition in the history of

00:08:12.600 travel and exploration to try to get from Pierre Polyev to shooting in Winnipeg.

00:08:18.680 But to a liberal MP so consumed by hatred of the conservatives, hatred of the right,

00:08:26.880 everything is far right. Everything is Pierre Polyev's.

00:08:30.160 is well ken hardy thinks he is a hammer and he thinks the far right is a nail and he's just

00:08:40.440 going to keep whacking away at it regardless of whether it's there or not and this is i think

00:08:46.000 something we're going to see more of from the liberals now to go back to the ndp for a moment

00:08:50.200 the reason the liberals are in power is because the ndp are propping them up they don't have a

00:08:55.020 majority government it's been the ndp not the bloc quebecois not the conservatives that have

00:08:59.420 giving the liberals their support the supply and confidence in the legislature or the coalition

00:09:05.500 excuse me sorry coalition i got to take something for that but it's the ndp support that's doing it

00:09:11.900 now take a look at this poll here i actually yeah i think we have the federal poll results

00:09:16.300 i don't normally do polling but this one's kind of interesting the conservatives have 41 now that's

00:09:22.460 clear-cut majority territory liberals in second with 22 tied with the liberals at 22 if the ndp

00:09:32.300 can go just a little bit higher there we're looking at an ndp that will be like in 2011

00:09:38.140 in official opposition status which for the canadian ndp is pretty much as good as it's gonna

00:09:44.380 get i kind of enjoyed this post from the anonymous house of commons staffer on x which i i want to

00:09:51.660 share with you i don't know if they're actually a house of common staffer but that's the name

00:09:54.860 storn away the official residence of the leader of the official opposition jagmeet singh this could

00:10:00.780 be yours you'd have matched jack layton your legacy will shine young socialists will chant

00:10:06.700 your name in reverence just pull the plug let's dance well jagmeet singh loves the dancing i can

00:10:12.860 actually picture him if we you know put that photo back up for a moment there sean because i can kind

00:10:17.180 of picture if i look over imagine him just strolling along in front of that house carrying

00:10:21.420 his Versace bag he turns right to go into the door and you just see that slight glint as the sun

00:10:28.300 reflects off his Rolex watch he turns around and smiles it's a sullen smile but a smile nonetheless

00:10:35.820 because he knows this is as good as it's going to get you can never hope to achieve better as

00:10:41.580 the NDP right now under Jagmeet Singh than being Canada's official opposition so you might as well

00:10:46.780 just roll with it you're not going to win just go along carry on and we could do it but as we've

00:10:52.380 heard time and time again in fact the ndp are bending over backwards to let the liberals violate

00:10:58.140 one of the only things they had to do to win the support and confidence the supply and confidence

00:11:03.180 from the ndp which was deliver a pharma care bill by the end of 2023 so even that they aren't going

00:11:09.100 to do so well with that out of the way i want to talk about this report from the national citizens

00:11:13.740 inquiry now i want to say a couple of things up front on this we were often criticized at true

00:11:20.060 north for not covering the nci enough we certainly reported on it we covered it i played clips from

00:11:26.460 some of the hearings but we didn't sit there in the meetings we didn't travel across the country

00:11:30.700 and attend the various hearings and there were two reasons for this if i speak just for my own

00:11:35.420 perspective on the andrew lawton show one is that it's a resource issue this was a long running

00:11:41.900 project it was a project that took place in multiple cities across the country and it was

00:11:46.940 also a project that was available online so a lot of the people that were really interested

00:11:50.940 were watching it directly and didn't need the intermediary of the news that's part of it

00:11:55.820 the bigger reason i think is the following why the nci was important why the national

00:12:01.260 citizens inquiry mattered to me was that it was giving a voice to people who in the official

00:12:06.620 discourse didn't have a voice and hadn't been listened to and had been ignored by the media,

00:12:13.300 by governments, by the establishment. I viewed True North as being outside of that. We had given

00:12:18.240 these people voices. We had spoken to these people. These were a lot of the experts we had

00:12:22.480 listened to. So by the time the NCI hearings came around, a lot of the people who were speaking

00:12:27.680 were folks who had already been on this show, who had already been written about in True North.

00:12:31.860 And it's not to say that there wasn't value in what they had to share.

00:12:36.300 It was that for us, it wasn't groundbreaking because we had been there and we had been

00:12:40.900 covering all these things.

00:12:41.900 I mean, I literally wrote the book about the Freedom Convoy, which was a response to a

00:12:45.640 lot of these very COVID measures.

00:12:47.040 So at the same time, I think it also is important.

00:12:49.500 And I think that it's impressive what they've pulled off here because this was not an inexpensive

00:12:53.300 undertaking.

00:12:54.280 They had to bring in a lot of money to do this.

00:12:56.400 They had staff.

00:12:57.300 They had legal counsel.

00:12:58.340 They had commissioners, people that have very impressive resumes.

00:13:01.460 And they've worked for the better part of nine, 10 months from hearings to inquiry, to writing, to now publication to publish this report, which came out this morning and has, as I mentioned, five, is it 5,234 pages? I think. Yeah. No, sorry. 5324. 5,324 pages. That's how many pages there are in this.

00:13:25.040 a lot of that is transcript from testimony, but even so, no one can say this is not thorough and

00:13:31.160 meticulously researched. And when you read through it, a lot of the recommendations are things that

00:13:37.440 are tremendously important. Things like the protection of civil liberties, not closing

00:13:43.000 schools. That's a very important one. The presumption of innocence, the rule of law,

00:13:49.320 things that are already supposed to be enshrined in law, but as we saw in practice, really do not

00:13:55.660 have major protections. So that's a big part of what this thing has done. One section here that

00:14:03.260 I'll read, which I think a lot of you will appreciate, churches do not require the permission

00:14:08.440 of governments to open or close. However, when churches decided to respond favorably to the

00:14:15.440 government's called two weeks to flatten the curve, those same churches must also have had 0.65

00:14:19.720 decision-making authority to reopen when projected COVID death and illness numbers don't come to

00:14:25.580 fruition. And I think that's a very important part of this discussion is that governments deferred

00:14:31.980 to individual organizations and individual people and their ability to make decisions

00:14:35.820 only when people made decisions that the government wanted. And when people didn't

00:14:40.360 make those decisions voluntarily, that's when the involuntary measures came in. Vaccination was a

00:14:45.920 great example of this. Everyone get vaccinated, get vaccinated. It's available to you. We'll promote

00:14:50.040 it. We'll educate you. We'll run ads. And then when not enough people get it, that's when the

00:14:56.140 mandates come in. That's when the vaccine passports come in. And that's when all these restrictions

00:15:01.620 come in. So basically you never really had a choice. At the beginning, it was the illusion of

00:15:08.300 choice, which is great for, you know, the people that make that choice and are happy with that

00:15:12.620 choice, but then it becomes no longer that. And that was, I think, one of the most fundamental

00:15:18.600 distinctions here. And when you read through this, there are other measures like schools

00:15:23.700 should not be closed for periods of time, exceeding one week in duration. You'll have to excuse me for

00:15:30.040 a moment. I have to cough and I don't want to blow out your eardrum. So I'm going to mute for a moment.

00:15:34.380 thank you i like choked on something before the show started and i think it would like it had

00:15:41.700 been working its way down and then must have started coming back up but uh nevertheless the

00:15:45.420 joys of being live on the air here so that was the the school should not be closed for a period

00:15:50.400 of time exceeding one week in duration that was a very important one and i will point out that that

00:15:55.520 was very similar to what preston manning in his alberta report had ultimately concluded which was

00:16:01.980 that people should view school closures as an absolute last resort and only for as narrowly a

00:16:11.060 time as possible. Now, they didn't put a time frame on it. The National Citizens Inquiry Report did.

00:16:17.040 They put a time frame as one week. What else do we have here? Enhanced mental health services. Yes,

00:16:23.860 there has not been, to my knowledge, any real recognition by government of the harms of lockdown

00:16:30.380 on mental health. Now, in many cases, the mental health harms people had as a result of COVID

00:16:35.620 lockdowns were far worse than the physical consequences they would have had from COVID

00:16:41.060 itself. I think this is well known to a lot of people, but has not been regarded well by people

00:16:46.520 in positions to do anything about it. So looking at some of the other measures that have been

00:16:50.760 recommended here, and again, I'd encourage you to read the report yourself, but they take a very

00:16:55.980 firm position that they don't embrace what's called pandemic amnesty, which is this idea

00:17:00.280 that we've heard championed often from people who were big fans of lockdowns that,

00:17:04.940 well, we should just all move on. We should just say, well, yeah, yeah, it sucks and things happened

00:17:09.720 and maybe we said or did some things we regret, but we should just move on and move forward and

00:17:14.060 never think of it again. And one, I'll read one passage from the report here. They say it is not

00:17:20.180 an option to take a business-as-usual posture and simply carry on as if nothing happened.

00:17:28.580 Institutions must recognize and publicly admit their culpability in what was perpetrated on

00:17:34.800 Canadians and, if appropriate, must face criminal and civil penalties for their actions. Now,

00:17:42.180 it does not explicitly call for jailing politicians and public health officials, but

00:17:47.840 that's a line I'm very curious about. Now, that's what the commissioners say, that they believe

00:17:52.480 there should be criminal and civil penalties. Now, that to me is almost like a separate line

00:17:57.840 from this idea that we shouldn't just have business as usual. But this is something I've

00:18:02.420 heard increasingly from folks, that they don't want to just move on from this. And I'd say it's

00:18:06.060 unhealthy to live in the past and dwell in the past and just never leave the COVID era.

00:18:10.520 but it's similarly unhealthy for a society for a society to just move on as though nothing had

00:18:18.880 happened and allow pretty egregious and heinous violations of civil liberties to stand without

00:18:25.080 challenge and one of the ways that courts have allowed this to happen is with what's called the

00:18:30.180 doctrine of mootness where when legal challenges are brought forward whether it's on the emergencies

00:18:34.380 act or the air travel vaccine mandate whatever the case is uh people will argue the government

00:18:38.720 will argue well it's moot now the vaccine mandate's gone and the court will say well yeah you know we

00:18:43.240 have a backlog of cases we don't have time to do it all there's no mandate so this is moot just

00:18:47.880 you know bring it up if it comes up again and we'll we'll go back to square one and the problem

00:18:52.400 with that is that mootness allows the government to avoid scrutiny it allows the government to

00:18:57.400 evade scrutiny so this is where i would be very very pleased to see one of these recommendations

00:19:04.620 embraced and adopted which is to limit the scope of mootness doctrine and to make it so that a lot

00:19:10.340 of these things cannot evade scrutiny by the courts although again i mean as we've seen when

00:19:16.160 the courts have scrutinized these cases their decisions have not generally been the most

00:19:20.980 favorable which is a big part of the problem also is that we need to take a look at the judiciary

00:19:26.220 and its role in all of this and how a lot of judges were uninterested in hearing all the evidence and

00:19:32.120 the testimony when it came to these measures and came to these restrictions so these are among the

00:19:37.720 things that have stood out to me you i'm going to take a closer look at it i'm actually flying out

00:19:41.800 to alberta so uh this week so i'll be able to you know dig into it a little bit more on the flight

00:19:46.600 get some nice reading there but the reason i think this is important is that it sets a standard for

00:19:53.000 a discussion that should exist in society and i heard from the lead counsel for the nci sean

00:19:59.640 Buckley, that they sent out summons and requests to a number of public officials. I forget how

00:20:04.780 many, but what they said is that not a single one answered with a favorable response. Most of them

00:20:13.980 didn't respond at all. So no one agreed to testify under oath before this commission who didn't want

00:20:21.020 to be there, who wasn't a voluntary figure, and obviously it didn't have subpoenaing power,

00:20:25.380 but no public officials were prepared to withstand that. Now you may say okay well why would they?

00:20:30.400 It doesn't have any official status. It's a citizen-led inquiry but I'd say putting the

00:20:34.920 voices of citizens front and center is exactly what Canada and much of the world was missing

00:20:40.520 over the last three years and hearing testimony that was very citizen focused and citizen oriented

00:20:48.880 was precisely what this discussion needed so yes the fact that alberta and danielle smith

00:20:56.160 had their inquiry is good but it was not meant to be as broad and holistic as this one ches

00:21:02.160 crosby is an institution in newfoundland politics and was the administrator for the national

00:21:07.460 citizens inquiry and is that i should say he joins me now ches good to talk to you thanks for coming

00:21:12.120 on today thank you andrew you and i met in an elevator in calgary just before the dinner

00:21:19.640 that's held annually to benefit the canadian center for constitutional freedoms i only had

00:21:26.840 time to introduce myself but not to give you an elevator speech so maybe i got that chance now

00:21:33.640 yes you certainly do and i know you were at that hearing and the press conference a few moments

00:21:38.440 ago i'm glad you were able to peel away and join us one of the things that jumped out at me in

00:21:43.560 the report and again i haven't read through the whole 5300 pages yet is a call to have criminal

00:21:49.960 and civil penalties for institutions that the commissioners say were culpable in perpetrating

00:21:57.400 these things on canadians now what are we talking about here i mean who are we talking about there

00:22:01.560 we're talking about people at various levels of responsibility as a lawyer won't surprise you that

00:22:11.160 my outlook is the more civil lawsuits the better but also eventually this country is going to have

00:22:19.240 to get to the stage where criminal proceedings are taken usually those proceedings begin with people

00:22:27.240 at lower levels of responsibility and then you you have people becoming whistleblowers you have

00:22:34.680 people doing plea bargainings and they give the receipts and people higher up the chain of command

00:22:43.320 and generally you work your way up that way but we very much do need criminal prosecutions

00:22:49.080 what sorts of crimes am i thinking of here this is not an exhaustive list but criminal negligence

00:22:55.960 causing death might be one uh hate crimes could be another and we have a very uh interesting and

00:23:03.880 powerful uh statute in this country called the war crimes and crimes against humanities act

00:23:11.640 it was borrowed from international law and uh it's sitting on the books of parliament since

00:23:19.880 since the year 2000. Now one little problem with that is that it requires the permission of the

00:23:27.860 Attorney General of Canada before a prosecution can be brought. I don't think you can expect to

00:23:34.620 get that permission as long as the people are in office who are in office right now at this moment

00:23:41.220 in Ottawa. That's the Trudeau Liberals. But eventually that permission will be granted

00:23:47.180 should somebody want to seek it and i happen to know of a group of retired detectives who are

00:23:52.380 hard at work on this now so do i take from your answer that you don't buy into the idea that this

00:23:58.180 was a political problem that has to be responded to in a political fashion as though basically

00:24:05.260 this was just bad policy and the antidote to bad policy is to vote out the politicians who imposed

00:24:10.100 it well that's certainly part of the antidote they got to be voted out the tipping point is

00:24:19.860 being reached not just in canada but elsewhere and that's you can visualize that's sort of like

00:24:25.900 a dump truck load of sand and at a certain point in the tilt of the dump truck load some of the

00:24:33.780 sand begins to run out and then there's a cascade of more sand and then the entire load comes out

00:24:40.000 all at once well we're coming up to that point where things that were unthinkable even months

00:24:45.160 ago are going to be very thinkable and in fact will be done and i'm talking about you know i'm

00:24:51.280 talking about holding people criminally accountable as we were just discussing

00:24:55.920 so let's talk about the relevance of this report because obviously it was quite monumental that you

00:25:02.740 had uh this citizen-led initiative with no public funding and no official status no royal charter

00:25:08.700 that existed and that carried on and that took obviously significant effort and financial

00:25:15.000 resources to have happen. At the end of it, you have this 5,000 page report, but the process was

00:25:20.180 boycotted by the people who were in positions to make these decisions that were ultimately rebuked

00:25:27.020 and rejected by this report. I think it stands to reason those people will not acknowledge or if

00:25:33.100 do will not heed the recommendations so at the risk of sounding kind of glib about this what's

00:25:38.940 the point of it all well you know these the whole process of accountability always takes time

00:25:49.660 we've been through a species of madness to uh there are various terms for it maybe it's mass

00:25:55.820 hypnosis, maybe it's mass formations, mass something, mass fear. The commissioners described

00:26:03.100 it as a terror. In other words, the authorities perpetrated a state of fear quite deliberately

00:26:09.900 and knowingly. And you could use the term a psychological operation, a psyops on the civilian

00:26:17.580 population of Canada. It takes a while to get over that and to begin to see life in a realistic way.

00:26:26.480 And you probably agree with me that topics that you couldn't have talked about even six months ago

00:26:32.420 in social situations now are no longer taboo. You can speak about them. This will continue to change

00:26:40.720 and change in a proper and right direction. There will be accountability and without accountability

00:26:46.880 there can't be reconciliation and god needs god knows that this country canada needs reconciliation

00:26:55.120 well that was i mean when whenever we've talked about this in the indigenous context we're always

00:27:00.780 told that you need truth before you can have reconciliation hence the name of the the truth

00:27:04.680 and reconciliation commission and and in this context you can't have an honest discussion

00:27:09.760 about what happened without dealing with the facts and even still some of the basic fundamental facts

00:27:15.700 are in dispute by some of the so-called experts on whom the government relied and a lot of the

00:27:21.780 other experts that the government rejected and you know i've often had this challenge as a

00:27:26.260 journalist you know how can i sort of adjudicate between two people wearing lab coats with letters

00:27:30.900 after their names but i think the government was very quick to shut down anyone with a heterodox

00:27:36.020 view and that's part of the reason we got into these problems and they really just entrenched

00:27:40.260 that the longer this went on rather than having any basic semblance of humility

00:27:47.540 well there's a famous doctor uh dr peter mccullough who you're probably familiar with

00:27:53.220 and he writes a substack he calls it courageous discourse and i like that term because there are

00:27:59.540 two things that all of us need we need courage but we also need the ability to engage in discourse

00:28:07.700 and to learn from people with different viewpoints and so what we've seen lacking in the authorities

00:28:18.180 who have instituted the measures that we're all so familiar with from the last several years the

00:28:25.140 repression repressive measures is they wouldn't turn up at the inquiry although they are invited

00:28:32.580 and explain themselves what are they afraid of they obviously they obviously have something to

00:28:40.820 be afraid of they know they've got things to defend that they can't defend very well

00:28:47.140 and they're not willing to engage in discourse and as long as people aren't willing to engage

00:28:52.260 in discourse and i'd actually include criminal proceedings as a form of discourse as well

00:28:58.660 then we're going to have problems and we're not going to have reconciliation

00:29:03.460 uh we we lost your video there for a moment uh you're frozen but we can still hear you so i'll

00:29:08.020 ask you one final question here chess what would you like canadians to do with this because there

00:29:13.300 is i think a call to action whenever something like this is published for canadians to read it

00:29:17.940 and understand and review what would you like if you can assign the country homework here and

00:29:22.340 certainly this audience what do you think canadians should take from this and do with this document

00:29:26.900 Well, thanks, Andrew. I think that people should have a look at it. They should turn

00:29:34.340 it over in their minds. There are going to be a spectrum of people, some who, you know,

00:29:38.580 accept everything that's being said and are totally on the same page with the commissioners.

00:29:43.220 there will be some who who are somewhere in between and there are others it would be more

00:29:50.900 are resistant

00:30:06.260 oh i feel we've uh now we we've lost the uh the audio here you you cut out there uh chess

00:30:11.140 i oh you seem to be moving again if you can uh try speaking i think we have you back

00:30:19.700 no unfortunately it's uh it's cutting off now we're having a connection issue here but i

00:30:24.180 i do appreciate that we had most of the interview uh with functional technology and we'll have to

00:30:28.500 get you back uh in a bit more detail uh chess crosby the administrator for the national citizens

00:30:34.980 inquiry and also i should say the son of the late john crosby who once told me a joke that

00:30:40.340 It was so hilarious, but I could never, ever repeat it on this platform,

00:30:44.840 which is, I think, very much anyone who's ever heard a joke from John Crosby

00:30:48.020 probably is not surprised by that.

00:30:50.360 But my thanks to Ches Crosby for coming on and to the NCI for its work on this.

00:30:55.420 I will take a closer look at the report, as I said,

00:30:58.540 and if there's anything more to report back to you, I will do so.

00:31:02.120 That does it for me for today.

00:31:03.980 We will be back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show

00:31:06.900 here on True North.

00:31:07.980 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:31:11.020 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:31:13.720 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:31:40.340 We'll be right back.

00:32:10.340 We'll be right back.

00:32:40.340 We'll be right back.

Juno News - November 28, 2023

National Citizens Inquiry delivers scathing report on Covid measures

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