Juno News - June 12, 2024


NDP thinks Poilievre is ＂courting incels＂

Topics
woke NDP vs blue-collar workers
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Sheila Gunn-Reed Justin Trudeau Andrew Lawton Show Dexter Taylor Jack Layton Peter Mansbridge Andrew Lawton Andrew Scheer Speaker Michelle Sterling Margaret Atwood Kathy Wagenthal Bonita Zarillo Arnold Beerson Stephen Harper Tommy Douglas Jagmeet Singh Kian Simone John Rustad and 7 more
Immigration agent tells Canadian kids to just ＂invest in Bitcoin＂ British Columbia Conservatives are surging in the polls

Episode Stats


Length

47 minutes

Words per minute

163.25

Word count

7,800

Sentence count

367

Harmful content

Misogyny

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

19

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, host Andrew Lawton is joined by his good friend and long-time supporter, Peter Mansbridge, to discuss the current state of the New Democratic Party of Canada.

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 Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30 Thank you.
00:01:00 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show
00:01:15 this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true north
00:01:19 hello and welcome to you all the andrew lawton show it is midway through the week just after
00:01:29 1 p.m eastern time on wednesday june 10th 12th 10th 12th 12th 10th 11th 14th who knows june 12th
00:01:37 i think it is but it is good to have you aboard the program regardless of wherever in this fine
00:01:43 country or world you are coming from whenever you're listening i i don't often do this but
00:01:47 we'll start off with a bit of a plug because i know that a lot of you like watching me inexplicably
00:01:53 some of you prefer to listen to me but you can subscribe to the podcast we generally focus more
00:01:58 on the video product, as evidenced by me saying, as you can see on your screen, which I realize if
00:02:04 you're tuning into the podcast, well, you're a long haul truck driver is a bit, I'll try to be
00:02:08 a bit more descriptive about it, but you can do subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts,
00:02:13 the Google store, anywhere you get your podcasts and leave it a good rating if you don't mind too,
00:02:17 because it's either like us or Peter Mansbridge's podcast. And you know, I don't know why that was
00:02:23 the one I came up with as a rival. He actually, Peter Mansbridge, to his credit, had me on his
00:02:27 show a couple of weeks back when my new book came out. So I'm grateful for that. But whatever it is
00:02:34 that you are doing today, we are going to hopefully not rile you up too, too much as
00:02:38 politics sometimes does. I figured we do a bit of a lighter one here because there's a lot of
00:02:44 serious stuff that's been going on. What is more amusing than listening to the NDP just spiral
00:02:50 into a rage, a sputtering, sputtering rage, because they simply do not get where Canadians 1.00
00:02:58 are. The NDP has always been a party, if you go back to its early years, that was a party of the
00:03:04 workers. It had perhaps a misguided, but evidently a morally pure approach. The NDP of Tommy Douglas,
00:03:12 the CCF before that, very different from the woke NDP that you have today, the anti-freedom,
00:03:19 pro-tax, pro-government, pro-big government NDP, which again, just does not stand up for the
00:03:27 working class, which is why you've seen in, not just in Canada, in general, a lot of these left-wing
00:03:32 parties have had labor, big labor, which they always used to rely on, break with them. The
00:03:38 conservatives in Ontario under Doug Ford have done very well picking up private sector unionized
00:03:43 workers, the demographic that Pierre Polyev is doing somewhat well with as well. Because again,
00:03:50 if you're like the average blue-collar unionized worker in Hamilton, Ontario, London, Ontario,
00:03:55 in British Columbia, wherever it is, you are probably not interested in the they, them, 1.00
00:04:02 ze, jim, jere wokeness. You're actually just interested in jobs. You're interested in building.
00:04:08 you're interested in construction. So why on earth would you as an NDPer go along with a party
00:04:14 that has just absolutely rejected that sense of purity? And even Jack Layton, you know,
00:04:22 I used to have a lot of stuff that I disagreed about with Jack Layton, but Jack Layton, I never
00:04:28 doubted his commitment to a cohesive set of principles. Jagmeet Singh is absolutely the
00:04:34 opposite of that. He has no real principles. He's managed to squander the opportunity of being one
00:04:39 of the most powerful men in Canadian politics and trade it for absolutely nothing. What has he
00:04:44 gotten from the Liberals but free birth control for some folks and free diabetes medications
00:04:50 and pretty much nothing else. So I wanted to talk about that as a bit of context here before getting
00:04:57 into a clip that I wanted to share with you. I understand the clip's not ready so I'll do a
00:05:02 lengthier one oh it's ready now okay so this is from a member of parliament who is a new democrat
00:05:09 and her name is she's not like one of the top ones she's not one of the top ones that we usually 1.00
00:05:14 talk about she's not one of the most prominent ones but uh her name is uh bonita and this i
00:05:20 forgot what's her last name again she's that irrelevant right now i've forgotten her last 0.99
00:05:24 name and i don't see it on my list bonita zarillo uh bonita zarillo and she has this very dystopian
00:05:30 view of what a conservative government led by Pierre Polyev would mean for Canadian women.
00:05:37 Take a look.
00:05:38 Mr. Speaker, the member and I went to the same high school and in grade 10, the required
00:05:43 reading was The Handmaid's Tale.
00:05:44 It was hard to read, Mr. Speaker.
00:05:47 And I'll tell you what else is difficult to read, to read what's happening down in the
00:05:50 United States and the fact that the United States is looking at taking away a woman's 0.95
00:05:55 right to choose.
00:05:55 and I think about the fact that the member is courting incels for months and months and months at a time
00:06:01 and that the last Conservative from Port Moody Coquitlam was an anti-abortionist.
00:06:06 I want to know for sure today, right now, does the member support a woman's right to choose
00:06:11 and is the member going to take away a woman's right to choose if they ever,
00:06:16 and I hope it never happens, becomes a government in this country?
00:06:20 Honourable Leader of the Official Opposition.
00:06:23 No.
00:06:25 that's that's quite the response there not even a mr speaker no just a no just to stand up say no
00:06:38 and sit back down what a way to neutralize and basically deflate this big lengthy sputtering
00:06:45 rage induced wind up that pierre polyev she implies if he gets in he's going to like turn
00:06:51 Canada into the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid's Tale. This is from the Margaret Atwood
00:06:57 novel, then the, I think it was a Hulu show in the US. It's now on Crave. Don't give me any
00:07:03 spoilers. My wife and I are still watching Handmaid's Tale, but I don't look at The Handmaid's
00:07:07 Tale and think like, you know, Pierre Polyev, this seems to be what he wants. Yeah, Pierre
00:07:15 Polyev, you know, I actually think this is what he wants. So the premise of it is that you have
00:07:19 these any fertile women in Gilead become or not any of them but most of them become handmaids 0.99
00:07:26 and these handmaids are assigned to you know people whose wives can't get pregnant and then 1.00
00:07:30 you know they do this weird ritual where every month the commander of the household does a
00:07:36 ceremony with the handmaid which you can probably glean what it is from and if the handmaid gets
00:07:42 pregnant everyone celebrates it but it's no longer the handmaid's child so you know again it's a 0.79
00:07:47 weird thing to have to describe. And I'm curious exactly what about that Benita Zerillo thinks 1.00
00:07:53 Pierre Polyev is doing to Canada. I'm not quite getting from like A to Z there like she is. And
00:08:03 by the way, I mean, her only bit of evidence is there are some Americans who are pro-life. Ergo,
00:08:09 Pierre Polyev wants to turn Canada into a religious fundamentalist cult-like country.
00:08:14 OK, yeah, I see how you got there. This is, I think, a bit of a bizarro world thing. But then again, you go to the more substantive point of this, which is that there is this fear, this terror, this fear that Pierre Polyev is going to roll back abortion in Canada.
00:08:31 Now, there are a great many pro-life Canadians, and I'm pro-life myself, who would probably
00:08:36 love a government that would do something like this.
00:08:38 But Polyev himself has been so unequivocally clear, he has no interest in doing this.
00:08:44 This came up last week or two weeks ago when Arnold Beerson, the Conservative Member of
00:08:48 Parliament, did a podcast interview, and he talked about his own view on social conservative
00:08:53 issues.
00:08:53 And Polyev came out not long after with a statement saying, listen, we're going nowhere
00:08:57 near, I've been clear, we are not going to reopen this matter.
00:09:01 But the Liberals are getting desperate. The New Democrats are getting desperate. We may recall
00:09:08 this one press conference where the Liberals just trotted out, again, inexplicably. It had no basis
00:09:14 in anything other than they were pointing to the United States and just trying to import this into
00:09:19 Canada. But they came out and had this massive press conference of Liberal MPs. Again, the same
00:09:25 sort of unhinged attacks on Pierre Polyev. Take a look. We've sent a letter to the leader of the
00:09:30 opposition, asking him to be very clear with Canadians, and in particular with Canadian women,
00:09:36 on what he would do to defend a woman's right to choose. We've seen that his caucus, there are many
00:09:43 anti-choice caucus members. We've seen some of their actions recently, including MP Kathy
00:09:49 Wagenthal, who at the pro-life rally held here last week, said that women who have abortions end
00:09:55 up needing redemption, forgiveness, and needing God. That caucus and that leader has made women
00:10:02 wonder about the risk that they're going to be taking with this leader. And I want him to come
00:10:08 out and unequivocally say that they do everything to defend a woman's right to choose, that they
00:10:12 will not allow their members to come forward with private members' bills and put forward bills that
00:10:17 suggest that a fetus is a person, which is a backdoor way of, again, addressing this issue.
00:10:21 The Harper government had 10 years. I know you weren't here. Many of us were. 10 years in power. They had four years as a majority, didn't move one bit. And they had private members who wanted to do things and do things. Gosh, you are all 30 points down the polls. I'm looking at some of you will not get reelected if there was an election this fall. How this is the most cynical play to just throw the abortion scare tactic. Would you like to respond to that observation?
00:10:44 Absolutely. It's not a scare tactic. We've seen what's happened in the States.
00:10:48 Do people really think Roe versus Wade would have been overturned? Do we think what was
00:10:51 happening there was going to happen? I've been in the women's movement for over 50 years. 1.00
00:10:55 It is not a scare tactic.
00:11:00 Very, very offended she got when she was called on this. It's not a scare tactic.
00:11:05 No, just look at what's happening in the United States. Yes, that is a different country,
00:11:10 believe it or not, with a different government, with different political parties,
00:11:14 with different priorities. And again, I'm one of these people who believes Canada should be able
00:11:20 to have a discussion about abortion. It should not be as the liberals have made it, as the media has
00:11:25 made it, this tremendous third rail issue where we're not allowed to talk about an issue that a
00:11:29 great many Canadians of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist faith, people of no faith at
00:11:35 all have a variety of opinions on. This idea that it should be instantly disqualifying in the
00:11:41 liberal's eyes or the NDP's eyes, if someone happens to, oh, shockingly believe that life is
00:11:46 important, I find to be a tragedy. But as we talk about this issue, and we need to, you have to look
00:11:54 at how the liberals are approaching this. And to them, it's not about, they don't even care about
00:11:59 supporting women. They do not care about supporting women. They love driving a wedge that makes 1.00
00:12:05 conservatives get all antsy because they don't know how to talk about these issues. That's what
00:12:10 liberals want to do it's why it's like the first thing they reach into in their bag of tricks
00:12:15 when they are down in the polls it's basically just this little sack that they carry around
00:12:20 and uh you've got oh abortion uh assault rifles uh they're like 19 cards that just have stephen
00:12:26 harper's name scrawled uh out in red ink uh and uh but what else do we have there uh trump trump
00:12:32 has a few as well so uh you know basically it's like mad libs they just you know take uh you know
00:12:37 insert name of country name of leader name of political issue and then they come up with this
00:12:42 ai generated line of attack in which they say pierre polyev is going to turn canada into
00:12:49 handmaid's tale because carrots oh no put the wrong word there uh because like and they do this every 1.00
00:12:56 single time now whatever you think of polyev's position on this and i i get like look i'm pro
00:13:02 life so people that don't like his position i i understand why they want to take aim at that but
00:13:08 he has a clarity about this he has a clarity about this that even aaron o'toole who was similarly
00:13:13 pro-choice and aaron o'toole who was pro-life did not have and that i think sets polyev up in a much
00:13:20 better way to deal with this and i think it's clear that all of these attacks just are not
00:13:25 landing which is why the rest like no one asked andrew sheer no one said andrew sheer was going
00:13:29 going to turn Canada into the handmaid's tale. So this is where you get into Polyev. They're just 1.00
00:13:36 so desperate to make something stick. They just keep on going with it, keep on ratcheting it up.
00:13:42 And we're going to see a heck of a lot more of this as the electioneers, especially if current
00:13:47 polling holds up. Now, as far as why I'm so aghast by, maybe that's a strong word, certainly why I'm
00:13:55 so frustrated by the inability of Canadian society to have this conversation is because
00:14:01 when you do have issues where social conservatives have been the ones leading the charge on very
00:14:07 significant issues, like for example, against the expansion of assisted suicide in Canada,
00:14:13 you get the same people who just completely do not want to engage in any question about life
00:14:18 that try to shut it down. This is an issue just to remind you of some context. I've talked about
00:14:24 this in the past, so I'm going to give the 45-second summary here. I have a belief in life
00:14:30 as a Christian, but I also, as someone who survived a very nearly successful suicide attempt more than
00:14:36 14 years ago, or almost 14 years ago, I have a hugely, hugely deep connection to this idea that
00:14:45 what the liberals are doing is atrocious and trying to expand access to assisted suicide,
00:14:50 to euthanasia, to MAID, whatever you want to call it, to people who are struggling only with a
00:14:55 mental illness. Not someone with MS whose life is coming to its natural end as it is, but people who
00:15:02 may get up one day and decide they don't want to end their life, and instead of them being treated
00:15:06 for that, they are met with the government helping them with it. This is my concern about someone with
00:15:12 a serious depression, for example, in a regime like what the Liberals are pushing Canada towards.
00:15:17 This has been, among other issues connected to assisted suicide, been put under the microscope by a new documentary produced by the Rebel News crew, specifically Kian Simone and Sheila Gunn-Reed.
00:15:30 Here's a little glimpse at this.
00:15:32 And I said, how did they come to the conclusion that I was going to die?
00:15:37 He said, because they didn't really know what to do with you.
00:15:39 The government of Canada is killing Canadians, and not just a few and not just the terminally ill.
00:15:45 Over 50,000. So, 50,000.
00:15:48 There is a startling new development in the ongoing controversy around veterans being offered medical assistance in dying.
00:15:56 Instead of help, are you familiar with their MAID program?
00:15:58 They said, well, it's better than blowing your brains out against the wall.
00:16:01 They essentially evicted us from our buildings because we would not participate in this government euthanasia program.
00:16:08 Canadians are expecting us to get the job done.
00:16:11 Fraser Health is refusing to give information, and because of that, the police investigation had to close.
00:16:20 Therefore, Fraser Health is covering information up.
00:16:22 And we know for a fact that our people in power do not take responsibility for anything.
00:16:28 So it's a financial save, a lack of responsibility, and then it's completely easy to just offer it to vulnerable individuals, and then they're going to take it.
00:16:38 that is a clip of the trailer for made the dark side of canadian compassion it came out a couple
00:16:46 of weeks ago the reason i didn't want to do an interview about it is because i wanted to see it
00:16:49 first and i had to wait to do that because i knew they were coming to elmer ontario a lovely little
00:16:55 town not far from me and i saw it last week at long last and i didn't make the trailer but i am
00:17:00 in the documentary i did an interview with sheila and kian which i was very grateful to do talking
00:17:06 about my own experience here. Sheila Gunn-Reed, the editor-in-chief of Rebel News, joins us now.
00:17:12 Sheila, I know you've done quite the tour on this, so congratulations and thanks for coming on.
00:17:17 Yeah, it's been a grueling tour, but I think the documentary has been well-received and sometimes
00:17:22 we're sort of met with shock because people who are fundamentally opposed to the government
00:17:28 helping you off this mortal coil are surprised at just how bad it is out there. When we decided
00:17:35 to make this documentary. And we put a call out for stories, but we also put a call out for
00:17:41 fundraising. We did this all entirely without any government help, unlike many documentaries made in
00:17:48 this country. But our emails were sort of inundated with people from two sides of the debate. We had
00:17:56 people saying, you guys, it's definitely not as bad as you say it is. This is just for people who
00:18:03 are in unbearable suffering at the end of their life? And who are we to say that they should
00:18:08 suffer more? And then the other 50% of our emails were saying, it's so bad, but it's much worse than
00:18:16 you think. And here's my outrageous story. And we thought, boy, we've got to use the 50% of these
00:18:22 people to inform the other 50%. And it was the reason the documentary sort of came to life the
00:18:28 way it did. You touch on this there. And I think documentary deals with this complexity to some
00:18:33 extent as well. There's more of a spectrum of opinions on this than a binary. I mean,
00:18:38 you certainly have your people that are against any made whatsoever, any assisted suicide
00:18:42 whatsoever. And then you get people on the other side that, you know, the quote unquote dying with
00:18:47 dignity people that basically think it should be no different than, you know, ordering a book off
00:18:51 Amazon. You just one day say, I want it. There are a lot of shades of gray in this. And, you know,
00:18:56 people that, for example, would have no issue or at least no legal issue with someone that fits how
00:19:03 was originally presented of someone who is terminally ill they're in a lot of pain people
00:19:09 know with near certainty they're going to die things will not improve and they voluntarily
00:19:14 and of sound mind make the decision versus what we're seeing now which is an expansion to minors
00:19:20 potentially an expansion to people who have a mental illness which is by definition a disease
00:19:25 of the mind so you've raised your hand there and acknowledge you know where you fit on this but
00:19:30 But how do you deal with that issue of where there are people that, you know, are fine with it to a point, but not the point that the government is taking it?
00:19:38 You know, we included their voices in the documentary.
00:19:41 We tried to make the documentary as accessible as possible.
00:19:47 Well, I should think your co-producer himself is not as black and white as you are on this. 0.96
00:19:51 That's exactly it.
00:19:52 And that's why I love working with Kian is because he comes to these documentaries with a very open mind.
00:19:56 He's there to learn.
00:19:58 He's there to listen.
00:19:58 And, you know, as I do with everything at Rebel News, I lead with my chin. I tell you exactly where I'm coming from. But we did include the voices of the people who would be OK with made under the first track that where death is imminent, people are suffering from a terminal illness and their suffering is, according to them, unbearable.
00:20:22 We included, for example, Michelle Sterling. People may know her as the communications director of Friends of Science.
00:20:30 And her story was so important because her brother was suffering from a terminal degenerative illness and he chose MAID.
00:20:38 And the family was very involved. They were not shut out of it.
00:20:42 There were interviews to make sure there were no evidence of coercion taking place.
00:20:48 It was a very holistic approach. Now, whether you agree with that or not,
00:20:52 that's up to the individual but even for michelle where her brother access made versus where it is
00:21:00 now she says in the documentary i'm mortified i'm horrified that this is where it's gotten and so
00:21:05 for you know religious pro-lifers like me we were always talking about the slippery slope
00:21:12 we have to show where it started and now we're showing where it's ending
00:21:16 yeah and i think that's one of the responses to this which is that the second category that we
00:21:22 described as an inevitability from the first. And I think you look at a lot of the activists
00:21:26 on this, you know, originally when this was coming up before the Supreme Court, I mean,
00:21:31 going back to the Rodriguez case, but more recently, the charter case, they kept it so
00:21:36 narrow. And then the second, the second they got that, it all of a sudden expanded. This is too
00:21:42 restrictive. It's too difficult. We need to bring it more. And at a certain point, I mean, what's
00:21:46 the next frontier? Because I actually don't believe we've hit rock bottom on this. Not even close.
00:21:51 Not even close. So the next frontier, I think, is probably mature minors. We've seen some precedent for that in recent Canadian history where we have activists saying, yes, it is completely up to a 16 year old to make all sorts of irreversible medical decisions about their body with regard to gender transition.
00:22:11 So that's already out there. We also know that during the pandemic, there was this push to say that kids can go behind their parents' backs and get vaccinated. And if you look at what's happening in some of the other extreme MAID regimes of the world, I hate even calling it MAID. I mean, it's euthanasia. It's government killing is what it really is. MAID is just a euphemism to hide exactly what this is.
00:22:35 But if we look at some of these other jurisdictions, we have followed in their footsteps almost directly. And so in Holland and Belgium, they're already euthanizing mature miners, and they're also euthanizing people who are just done with living. There's nothing wrong with them. They're not depressed. They're not anything. They're just over it.
00:22:56 And so they are euthanizing those people too. And what we've seen Belgium and Holland take 0.70
00:23:04 two decades to get to, we've accelerated into it in five, six years.
00:23:08 It's easy to look at Justin Trudeau and say all sorts of things about him and his government on
00:23:13 this. But do you get a sense from your research of the why? Of what is it about the fabric of
00:23:20 Canada that made us, you know, basically the leader in a category I don't think we want to
00:23:25 be leaders in on this issue, even surpassing in some cases, certainly catching up to these
00:23:30 European countries that always used to seem a world away when we did that comparison.
00:23:35 Yeah, I think, and I'm speculating here, I don't really know what's going on in the mind of Justin
00:23:42 Trudeau. I don't know if Justin Trudeau knows what's going on in the mind of Justin Trudeau
00:23:46 most days. But I think we've got a couple of different things at play here. So we've got a
00:23:51 socialized healthcare system where rationing is built in. And with rationing comes delays in care
00:23:56 and with delays in care comes suffering. And so there has to be a solution to that suffering.
00:24:02 And so a lot of people are opting to die rather than continue to wait and languish in the pain
00:24:11 and suffering that our socialized medical system is offering them. So that's the thing that this
00:24:18 tidies up some wait lines with access to care. But also we've got this extreme focus on equality
00:24:25 at all costs. And what I mean by that is the reason that MAID is being expanded to encompass
00:24:33 the mentally ill is this idea of recognizing the equality of suffering. So we've already said, 0.64
00:24:41 Look, if you're suffering from a physical, biological illness that is irremediable, then you should have access to government-assisted suicide.
00:24:51 And so the health minister has said, well, we recognize that your mental suffering is completely on par with this irremediable physical suffering.
00:25:02 And so thanks to this radical equality, we have to consider both illnesses to be the same.
00:25:08 And so that's where we are now.
00:25:11 there's also an aspect culturally in canada that i i would posit and solicit your feedback on which
00:25:18 is that the government control of health care the centralization of health care in canada has
00:25:23 in a lot of ways taken that moral ownership of health care away from canadians and some people
00:25:30 are willingly going along with this a lot of people will you know cling to the canadian health
00:25:34 care system with their dying breath ironically enough even if the health care system contributed
00:25:38 into the dying breath, but you have others that are frustrated with it. But regardless, we use,
00:25:45 I mean, how often is a policy in Canada sold to us because, oh, well, if we don't do this,
00:25:50 it's going to cost the healthcare system. If we don't do this, you know, it's the justification
00:25:54 for restrictions on junk food. It's the justification for everything. It's, well,
00:25:58 we have to pay for the healthcare. So I think there is a cynicism that is fairly well supported
00:26:04 in that, I believe. Yeah. I mean, we just went through three years of lockdowns and they said
00:26:09 our strained healthcare system that we all have to pay for would not survive unless we listened
00:26:15 to the guy in the white coat or in Alberta's case, the lady with the harsh bangs at the podium
00:26:23 every day, telling us exactly what we needed to do to protect the healthcare system. So we have
00:26:28 a society of, and there are still people doing those things, despite the fact that we are hearing
00:26:33 more and more every day that the restrictions by and large didn't work and were just pulled out of
00:26:39 the ether one day and then proliferated across society. And we were all following the lines on
00:26:44 the floor as though the COVID only traveled in one direction past the craft dinner. And so we've got
00:26:50 an entire society of people who are still doing those things, meaning they are completely
00:26:57 unskeptical about the guy in the white coat telling them what needs to happen with their health.
00:27:03 And that worries me.
00:27:05 That worries me because there's a sort of sinister, passive suggestion to some people
00:27:11 that we've heard about that, well, you know what?
00:27:15 You're going to be suffering.
00:27:17 You don't have long left.
00:27:19 Listen to me.
00:27:20 I'm a doctor.
00:27:22 Maybe you should consider MAID. 0.78
00:27:24 That worries me because we have a story in our documentary of a family who were complete
00:27:28 COVID skeptics.
00:27:29 And thanks to their skepticism of doctors on TV and doctors saying things to them that didn't
00:27:36 make sense, their grandma is alive today because she was sent to palliative care and she was
00:27:41 suggested made. And they said, no, no, no. And they kept going and going and going until they got
00:27:46 an opinion that they thought made sense. And thanks to that, she's alive today. But on the
00:27:52 flip side, we know now that there's a huge segment of the population that are just ready and willing
00:27:59 to go along with the doctor in the white coat, no matter what that doctor says.
00:28:03 That story you shared from the documentary was quite a gripping one where you had, you know,
00:28:07 multiple people in the healthcare system that had literally just, you know, sentenced this woman to 0.91
00:28:11 death by saying that, oh yeah, she's, she's going to die. Using that to then justify the idea that,
00:28:16 oh, well, death is imminent. So, and, and again, they, they just knew instinctively that something
00:28:22 about that didn't make sense. And, you know, there she was sitting down talking to you,
00:28:25 however long later.
00:28:27 One thing I'm just curious about,
00:28:28 because you, again,
00:28:29 raised your hand on that,
00:28:30 you know, absolutist position on MAID. 1.00
00:28:33 You've also been unequivocal
00:28:34 on, you know,
00:28:35 the issue of bodily autonomy
00:28:36 throughout COVID.
00:28:37 And I'm curious for you
00:28:39 how you draw a line between the two,
00:28:42 because this is where my libertarianism
00:28:44 butts up against my belief in life as well,
00:28:47 is that in the case with someone
00:28:48 completely of sound mind,
00:28:51 how do you say you shouldn't have
00:28:53 this tool available to you legally?
00:28:55 Okay, so for me, the issue of bodily autonomy is also the same issue for your natural life.
00:29:06 For me, it's that I believe in the dignity of human life, and I believe in the integrity of the human body.
00:29:16 And so I don't find my two positions indistinguishable.
00:29:20 I think they're the same position.
00:29:22 I don't think the government should be helping people die. It's terrible that we cannot prevent
00:29:28 people from taking their own life. I think in our documentary, we offer solutions. Instead of
00:29:34 waiting around for the government to change the culture around MAID, we can do that in our own
00:29:38 communities. But of course, I believe in bodily autonomy. I don't think the government should be
00:29:45 telling you what to do with your body. But I also believe in the dignity and the value of the human
00:29:50 being and so that's that's kind of how i get my head around these two issues and and even i the
00:29:57 dignity point is incredibly important because even if one were to accept as a premise that there
00:30:02 should be uh certain circumstances under which made is is legal and available how many people
00:30:07 of those who choose that would go that road if they were treated with dignity if they felt like
00:30:13 they had access to palliative care if they felt they had a support system around them if all of
00:30:18 the options available were shared to them shared with them and i think that's so key and you see
00:30:23 that same discussion with abortion which is that again even if you believe it should be there as a
00:30:28 as a point of last resort a lot of people will not choose that if they have access to information
00:30:34 along the way about alternatives yeah i completely agree with that i mean we don't discuss what
00:30:39 palliative care is it's a 50-year medical discipline and it is making advances all the
00:30:45 time in pain management and so we have a lot of people in canada who are scared about suffering
00:30:52 about the end of life and look i'll again lead with my chin i'm catholic we lean into the suffering
00:30:57 right so i i i i i'm not scared of that but i know a lot of people are scared of of the pain
00:31:04 of the end of life and that is changing rapidly and we're instead of putting money into palliative
00:31:10 care. We're taking money out of palliative care to fund MAID. And I think that is a great tragedy.
00:31:19 Sheila Gunn-Reed, one of the producers of the new-ish documentary. It's not as new,
00:31:24 but like I said, I wanted to see it first and then I learned I could see it in person. So
00:31:27 I wanted to do that, but it's called MAID, the Dark Side of Canadian Compassion. Thank you so
00:31:32 much for reaching out to me and allowing me to be a part of that in my own little way, Sheila.
00:31:36 Thank you. Thanks very much. And Andrew, just thank you so much for being so raw and honest
00:31:41 with us in that documentary. Your perspective was so vital to shed light on just, you know,
00:31:48 the other side of the mental health issue. Well, it's kind of you to say thank you very much. And
00:31:53 I will say I was mortified. Thanks again, Sheila. When I went to the screening in Elmer, it was
00:32:00 hosted by the, well, hosted at the Church of God in Elmer. And I was wearing the same shirt that I
00:32:07 was wearing when Sheila interviewed me for the documentary. And I, that was like the first thing
00:32:11 I thought of. I'm like, oh no, everyone will think I only have one shirt. So anyway, I won't tell you
00:32:15 which one. All right. That does it for that segment. I want to move on to another healthcare
00:32:21 adjacent piece. We have, you may recall in Canada, you may have forgotten by now, actually, there was
00:32:26 that big scandal a couple of years back when you had these two scientists affiliated with the
00:32:32 chinese military that were working at canada's level four lab the national microbiology lab
00:32:38 in winnipeg they were fired police escorted them out and the government was then so so so transparent
00:32:46 about all of the oh wait nope sorry i think they actually tried to cover it up and fought
00:32:51 their own Speaker of the House in court to prevent any information coming out. Does that
00:32:56 sound more right? Yeah, it's amazing how little we know, even years later, about what exactly
00:33:03 went down there. The RCMP claim they are still in the process of investigating it. This whole
00:33:09 saga was very adequately captured by a series over at the C2C Journal. Now, this piece, I think,
00:33:18 was quite fascinating. The Scandal at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory. It's called
00:33:24 The Scientist Who Came In From the Cold. Peter Sean Taylor, who wrote this over at C2C Journal,
00:33:29 joins me now. Peter, good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming on today.
00:33:33 Oh, it's always a pleasure to be here, Andrew.
00:33:35 This is one of these stories where, you know, front page news one day just seems to have become
00:33:41 a distant memory within a couple. And I mean, even when I read your piece, you know, I've had,
00:33:46 you know many many other news stories pop up on my radar since and it was like oh yeah we never
00:33:50 really did get to the bottom of that did we no well you've got a you need a program for all the
00:33:56 national security scandals going on and this one which I think in any other era would would consume
00:34:04 us for months and months as you're right it was a week or two and it was disappeared and now it's
00:34:10 been replaced with the Chinese government interference in the 2019-2021 election, and
00:34:17 then our MPs spying on Canada.
00:34:22 So we've had a huge cycle of these sorts of national security crises.
00:34:29 But I mean, the Winnipeg lab scandal to me is really quite concerning and speaks to many
00:34:37 disconcerting things going on in Canada right now. And it's a bit of a shame, perhaps, that
00:34:43 it's dropped so low on the attention span of the country. One of the things, not that I believe
00:34:49 Canada should ever aspire to be like China, the old line of Justin Trudeau's admiring their 0.96
00:34:54 basic dictatorship. But there is an incredible double standard there. And the way China deals
00:34:59 with, as you note in your piece, even minor security infractions. I mean, remember, the
00:35:03 whole two Michaels thing came about because China accused these men of spying. And then you contrast
00:35:09 that with the way that Chinese espionage attempts in Canada are treated. And it is an afterthought.
00:35:16 I mean, police are still investigating with no sign of whether they'll ever do anything resembling
00:35:20 a charge. And again, I'm not saying we should strive to be like China, but man, if the roles 0.99
00:35:25 were reversed, I would be praying nonstop for whatever Canadian was implicated in spying in a 0.60
00:35:33 Chinese lab? Well, I don't know that it's aspiring to be like China, but surely any country that's 0.92
00:35:40 concerned for its own well-being is going to want to crack down on spies, at least send a signal to
00:35:47 the rest of the world that this isn't behavior that we condone. But what did happen in the
00:35:53 example of these two scientists? Well, we found out in 2018 that there was something suspicious
00:36:01 going on. It took us a year and a half to take away their security clearance. It took two and
00:36:11 a half years to actually fire them. And then when we had what seems to me pretty clear proof that
00:36:17 they were spies in the conventional sense, that they were taking Canadian secrets and giving them
00:36:23 to another country, we didn't even bother to arrest them. And it appears that we just let 0.92
00:36:30 them go back to China, where they seem to be living quite comfortable lives, working in their 0.81
00:36:36 preferred occupations. The fact that they did leave during a COVID lockdown, when China had 0.91
00:36:43 claimed its borders were closed, actually suggests that there must have been,
00:36:49 there could have been some kind of deal between Canada and China to quietly let them
00:36:53 depart. So, I mean, that's really concerning. Any country, you know, spying should be unacceptable
00:37:03 to any country. You don't have to aspire to China to say that we should crack down on spies.
00:37:09 We're just sort of failing at the very basic level of protecting our own national security.
00:37:15 Well, and one thing we've seen in the past, and I'd say the government has become
00:37:20 reluctantly harsher on china in the last couple of years probably post to michael's but but going
00:37:25 back as early as you know basically the beginning of the trudeau government there so much was
00:37:30 overlooked because the government just wanted to get this trade deal with china and china was you
00:37:38 know not won over by this china exploited this as they do every other vulnerability in the world 1.00
00:37:42 Absolutely. And I think you could argue that deference is still ongoing today. When you look at the foreign interference inquiry, is it deliberate or is it inadvertent?
00:38:00 And just briefings, CSIS briefings seem to be just routinely ignored within the bureaucracy and the liberal government because they don't put very much interest in it.
00:38:15 So whether that's deferring to Chinese interests or it's simply dropping the ball, it's unclear.
00:38:23 But there is no real attention in Canada to take national security issues seriously.
00:38:29 And that's what really comes through strongly in this Winnipeg lab scandal.
00:38:34 I spoke to Sam Cooper, formerly of Global News, now with the Bureau about foreign interference last week.
00:38:40 And one of the points he raised is that we just don't have the legal mechanisms available to do what we need to do to protect Canada from foreign interference.
00:38:48 Now, that's looking at it in an election context, in a democracy context.
00:38:52 But if we apply that same thesis here, do we have here a breakdown of the system or do we have a system that is just not built to deal with this?
00:39:03 Well, I mean, the easiest way to answer that question is look what they do in the US and ask your counterfactual not what China would have done if they had discovered this breach at their highest security biohazard laboratory. 0.67
00:39:18 but ask what would have happened in the U.S. if it had been discovered that a couple of Chinese 0.82
00:39:23 researchers were sending secrets back to China. They would have been arrested. There would have
00:39:30 been DOJ and FBI news releases. There would have been all sorts of attention paid. It would have
00:39:38 properly been treated as a scandal. There's a long list of, you know, one of the background
00:39:45 issues in this was whether the two scientists were participants in the what's called the
00:39:50 Thousand Talents program in China, where Western researchers are paid quite handsomely to transfer
00:39:57 knowledge they gain back to China by whatever means. It's a thinly veiled form of industrial
00:40:03 espionage. The FBI has a very active campaign cracking down on anyone. And the former head of
00:40:14 Harvard's chemistry department was recently, last year, was sentenced for participating in a talents
00:40:21 program. So during the Trump era, they canceled the visas of a thousand Chinese researchers who
00:40:30 had connections back to Chinese military institutions, which was again the case in
00:40:36 the winnipeg scandal here um so look at uh our closest neighbor and they don't have any uh
00:40:45 time for this kind of business uh they deal with it very harshly and i think that's the example we
00:40:53 should should be following um there's no question that the americans wouldn't stand for this at all
00:40:59 so moving forward here are you an optimist or a pessimist on this because i know you're doing
00:41:05 your I think very important work in drawing attention to this but you know even from the
00:41:09 conservatives we just don't hear this issue discussed anymore as you mentioned there have
00:41:13 been a lot of sexier and fresher issues that have taken the oxygen out and you know do you think
00:41:19 this is possible to fix basically that's I mean I like to think of myself as an optimist in general
00:41:26 uh maybe my my work uh experience intrudes on that um uh well i guess you know the government
00:41:36 itself claims that they've fixed all the uh security lapses that have been identified by
00:41:41 this issue and that they're checking uh people's security clearance much more tightly so perhaps
00:41:47 there's been a within the bureaucracy itself because that's one of the parts of this scandal
00:41:52 is the bureaucracy basically let these two scientists, particularly Hsu, do whatever they
00:41:59 want because they valued the research and the international collaboration much more highly than
00:42:04 they did their role as a national security institution. So perhaps there's been some
00:42:09 salutary effect on the bureaucracy. I find it hard to believe that there's been a real change
00:42:17 of thinking at the federal liberal level. They're so wedded to this idea that China
00:42:23 is going to let them in, so to speak, at some point, and they're going to
00:42:29 reap all the benefits from all the deference for all this time. So at that broader level,
00:42:37 I think it's going to take a change in government to really elevate national security
00:42:42 it um matters in canada but but it is possible that at the micro level um security procedures
00:42:48 have been toughened up at not only the winnipeg lab but perhaps other uh sensitive federal
00:42:54 institutions around the country yeah and and i think people need to understand at the very least
00:43:00 the institutional vulnerabilities that do exist to china i mean academia is a tremendous example
00:43:05 of this the number of these so-called research partnerships that have uh put chinese researchers
00:43:11 and again, state-affiliated, military-affiliated researchers on key projects here.
00:43:16 And I noted that when the foreign registry was floated in politics,
00:43:21 you had universities in Canada last week saying,
00:43:23 well, we think this might jeopardize our research partnerships.
00:43:26 You're like, exactly, that's the point of it.
00:43:30 Yes, I mean, it's certainly not just government.
00:43:34 It's private sector, it's universities.
00:43:36 I mean, Xu and Chang were also jointly appointed at the University of Manitoba.
00:43:44 Interestingly enough, though, Manitoba University cut ties with them almost immediately after these revelations were made.
00:43:54 And they were escorted off the lab property, whereas it, you know, as we discussed, it took two and a half years to actually fire them from the federal government.
00:44:03 So, yeah, it's not just the federal government. It's all over Canada. I mean, it's all over all Western nations. There was a study out of Australia about the level of Chinese collaboration with universities.
00:44:21 universities and Canada ranked third in total after the U.S. and the U.K. So we are certainly
00:44:28 an object of interest from China at the university level. And yeah, as you say,
00:44:34 there's all sorts of things, not just access to Ebola virus, but all sorts of sensitive
00:44:39 and cutting edge technology that may be vulnerable. It is a fascinating read. It's a lengthy read,
00:44:47 but I think a very important one in C2C Journal
00:44:49 over different parts there.
00:44:51 That's how much content you had to work with here.
00:44:54 And I feel you probably still could have gone on
00:44:56 and turned this into a book as well.
00:44:58 The second part came out a couple of weeks back,
00:45:00 The Vials and the Damage Done,
00:45:01 Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal.
00:45:05 Peter Sean Taylor from C2C Journal.
00:45:07 Always good to talk to you.
00:45:08 Thanks for coming on today.
00:45:10 Yeah, thanks for having me, Andrew.
00:45:11 Anytime.
00:45:11 All right, cheers.
00:45:12 That does it for us for today.
00:45:14 We have a special edition of the program tomorrow,
00:45:16 a full-length interview with John Rustad,
00:45:19 the leader of the British Columbia Conservatives
00:45:22 who are finding great success in the polls in BC
00:45:24 and have become quite an unlikely success story
00:45:28 in BC politics.
00:45:29 If you talk to certain people, that's tomorrow.
00:45:32 And I'll also be at the Justice Centre
00:45:33 for Constitutional Freedoms
00:45:35 George Jonas Freedoms Award dinner
00:45:37 tomorrow night as well.
00:45:39 So I'll probably see some of you there.
00:45:40 But in the meantime, thank you.
00:45:41 God bless and good day to you all.
00:45:44 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:45:46 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:46:16 We'll be right back.
00:46:46 We'll be right back.
00:47:16 We'll be right back.