Juno News - NDP thinks Poilievre is ＂courting incels＂

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

00:01:15.480 this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true north

00:01:19.980 hello and welcome to you all the andrew lawton show it is midway through the week just after

00:01:29.900 1 p.m eastern time on wednesday june 10th 12th 10th 12th 12th 10th 11th 14th who knows june 12th

00:01:37.660 i think it is but it is good to have you aboard the program regardless of wherever in this fine

00:01:43.020 country or world you are coming from whenever you're listening i i don't often do this but

00:01:47.340 we'll start off with a bit of a plug because i know that a lot of you like watching me inexplicably

00:01:53.340 some of you prefer to listen to me but you can subscribe to the podcast we generally focus more

00:01:58.860 on the video product, as evidenced by me saying, as you can see on your screen, which I realize if

00:02:04.060 you're tuning into the podcast, well, you're a long haul truck driver is a bit, I'll try to be

00:02:08.400 a bit more descriptive about it, but you can do subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts,

00:02:13.460 the Google store, anywhere you get your podcasts and leave it a good rating if you don't mind too,

00:02:17.720 because it's either like us or Peter Mansbridge's podcast. And you know, I don't know why that was

00:02:23.000 the one I came up with as a rival. He actually, Peter Mansbridge, to his credit, had me on his

00:02:27.440 show a couple of weeks back when my new book came out. So I'm grateful for that. But whatever it is

00:02:34.180 that you are doing today, we are going to hopefully not rile you up too, too much as

00:02:38.660 politics sometimes does. I figured we do a bit of a lighter one here because there's a lot of

00:02:44.080 serious stuff that's been going on. What is more amusing than listening to the NDP just spiral

00:02:50.820 into a rage, a sputtering, sputtering rage, because they simply do not get where Canadians 1.00

00:02:58.600 are. The NDP has always been a party, if you go back to its early years, that was a party of the

00:03:04.880 workers. It had perhaps a misguided, but evidently a morally pure approach. The NDP of Tommy Douglas,

00:03:12.760 the CCF before that, very different from the woke NDP that you have today, the anti-freedom,

00:03:19.940 pro-tax, pro-government, pro-big government NDP, which again, just does not stand up for the

00:03:27.000 working class, which is why you've seen in, not just in Canada, in general, a lot of these left-wing

00:03:32.740 parties have had labor, big labor, which they always used to rely on, break with them. The

00:03:38.440 conservatives in Ontario under Doug Ford have done very well picking up private sector unionized

00:03:43.960 workers, the demographic that Pierre Polyev is doing somewhat well with as well. Because again,

00:03:50.140 if you're like the average blue-collar unionized worker in Hamilton, Ontario, London, Ontario,

00:03:55.980 in British Columbia, wherever it is, you are probably not interested in the they, them, 1.00

00:04:02.380 ze, jim, jere wokeness. You're actually just interested in jobs. You're interested in building.

00:04:08.100 you're interested in construction. So why on earth would you as an NDPer go along with a party

00:04:14.740 that has just absolutely rejected that sense of purity? And even Jack Layton, you know,

00:04:22.140 I used to have a lot of stuff that I disagreed about with Jack Layton, but Jack Layton, I never

00:04:28.140 doubted his commitment to a cohesive set of principles. Jagmeet Singh is absolutely the

00:04:34.520 opposite of that. He has no real principles. He's managed to squander the opportunity of being one

00:04:39.980 of the most powerful men in Canadian politics and trade it for absolutely nothing. What has he

00:04:44.800 gotten from the Liberals but free birth control for some folks and free diabetes medications

00:04:50.000 and pretty much nothing else. So I wanted to talk about that as a bit of context here before getting

00:04:57.440 into a clip that I wanted to share with you. I understand the clip's not ready so I'll do a

00:05:02.680 lengthier one oh it's ready now okay so this is from a member of parliament who is a new democrat

00:05:09.320 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

00:05:14.120 talk about she's not one of the most prominent ones but uh her name is uh bonita and this i

00:05:20.360 forgot what's her last name again she's that irrelevant right now i've forgotten her last 0.99

00:05:24.680 name and i don't see it on my list bonita zarillo uh bonita zarillo and she has this very dystopian

00:05:30.440 view of what a conservative government led by Pierre Polyev would mean for Canadian women.

00:05:37.000 Take a look.

00:05:38.160 Mr. Speaker, the member and I went to the same high school and in grade 10, the required

00:05:43.040 reading was The Handmaid's Tale.

00:05:44.940 It was hard to read, Mr. Speaker.

00:05:47.100 And I'll tell you what else is difficult to read, to read what's happening down in the

00:05:50.780 United States and the fact that the United States is looking at taking away a woman's 0.95

00:05:55.100 right to choose.

00:05:55.680 and I think about the fact that the member is courting incels for months and months and months at a time

00:06:01.080 and that the last Conservative from Port Moody Coquitlam was an anti-abortionist.

00:06:06.700 I want to know for sure today, right now, does the member support a woman's right to choose

00:06:11.720 and is the member going to take away a woman's right to choose if they ever,

00:06:16.160 and I hope it never happens, becomes a government in this country?

00:06:20.540 Honourable Leader of the Official Opposition.

00:06:23.260 No.

00:06:25.680 that's that's quite the response there not even a mr speaker no just a no just to stand up say no

00:06:38.200 and sit back down what a way to neutralize and basically deflate this big lengthy sputtering

00:06:45.420 rage induced wind up that pierre polyev she implies if he gets in he's going to like turn

00:06:51.720 Canada into the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid's Tale. This is from the Margaret Atwood

00:06:57.460 novel, then the, I think it was a Hulu show in the US. It's now on Crave. Don't give me any

00:07:03.080 spoilers. My wife and I are still watching Handmaid's Tale, but I don't look at The Handmaid's

00:07:07.060 Tale and think like, you know, Pierre Polyev, this seems to be what he wants. Yeah, Pierre

00:07:15.160 Polyev, you know, I actually think this is what he wants. So the premise of it is that you have

00:07:19.160 these any fertile women in Gilead become or not any of them but most of them become handmaids 0.99

00:07:26.220 and these handmaids are assigned to you know people whose wives can't get pregnant and then 1.00

00:07:30.560 you know they do this weird ritual where every month the commander of the household does a

00:07:36.880 ceremony with the handmaid which you can probably glean what it is from and if the handmaid gets

00:07:42.720 pregnant everyone celebrates it but it's no longer the handmaid's child so you know again it's a 0.79

00:07:47.380 weird thing to have to describe. And I'm curious exactly what about that Benita Zerillo thinks 1.00

00:07:53.060 Pierre Polyev is doing to Canada. I'm not quite getting from like A to Z there like she is. And

00:08:03.740 by the way, I mean, her only bit of evidence is there are some Americans who are pro-life. Ergo,

00:08:09.900 Pierre Polyev wants to turn Canada into a religious fundamentalist cult-like country.

00:08:14.000 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.

00:08:31.820 Now, there are a great many pro-life Canadians, and I'm pro-life myself, who would probably

00:08:36.340 love a government that would do something like this.

00:08:38.760 But Polyev himself has been so unequivocally clear, he has no interest in doing this.

00:08:44.660 This came up last week or two weeks ago when Arnold Beerson, the Conservative Member of

00:08:48.620 Parliament, did a podcast interview, and he talked about his own view on social conservative

00:08:53.060 issues.

00:08:53.680 And Polyev came out not long after with a statement saying, listen, we're going nowhere

00:08:57.700 near, I've been clear, we are not going to reopen this matter.

00:09:01.820 But the Liberals are getting desperate. The New Democrats are getting desperate. We may recall

00:09:08.240 this one press conference where the Liberals just trotted out, again, inexplicably. It had no basis

00:09:14.300 in anything other than they were pointing to the United States and just trying to import this into

00:09:19.720 Canada. But they came out and had this massive press conference of Liberal MPs. Again, the same

00:09:25.260 sort of unhinged attacks on Pierre Polyev. Take a look. We've sent a letter to the leader of the

00:09:30.940 opposition, asking him to be very clear with Canadians, and in particular with Canadian women,

00:09:36.900 on what he would do to defend a woman's right to choose. We've seen that his caucus, there are many

00:09:43.340 anti-choice caucus members. We've seen some of their actions recently, including MP Kathy

00:09:49.580 Wagenthal, who at the pro-life rally held here last week, said that women who have abortions end

00:09:55.740 up needing redemption, forgiveness, and needing God. That caucus and that leader has made women

00:10:02.780 wonder about the risk that they're going to be taking with this leader. And I want him to come

00:10:08.260 out and unequivocally say that they do everything to defend a woman's right to choose, that they

00:10:12.740 will not allow their members to come forward with private members' bills and put forward bills that

00:10:17.220 suggest that a fetus is a person, which is a backdoor way of, again, addressing this issue.

00:10:21.460 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?

00:10:44.880 Absolutely. It's not a scare tactic. We've seen what's happened in the States.

00:10:48.760 Do people really think Roe versus Wade would have been overturned? Do we think what was

00:10:51.660 happening there was going to happen? I've been in the women's movement for over 50 years. 1.00

00:10:55.880 It is not a scare tactic.

00:11:00.780 Very, very offended she got when she was called on this. It's not a scare tactic.

00:11:05.780 No, just look at what's happening in the United States. Yes, that is a different country,

00:11:10.620 believe it or not, with a different government, with different political parties,

00:11:14.560 with different priorities. And again, I'm one of these people who believes Canada should be able

00:11:20.600 to have a discussion about abortion. It should not be as the liberals have made it, as the media has

00:11:25.480 made it, this tremendous third rail issue where we're not allowed to talk about an issue that a

00:11:29.600 great many Canadians of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist faith, people of no faith at

00:11:35.200 all have a variety of opinions on. This idea that it should be instantly disqualifying in the

00:11:41.240 liberal's eyes or the NDP's eyes, if someone happens to, oh, shockingly believe that life is

00:11:46.760 important, I find to be a tragedy. But as we talk about this issue, and we need to, you have to look

00:11:54.680 at how the liberals are approaching this. And to them, it's not about, they don't even care about

00:11:59.840 supporting women. They do not care about supporting women. They love driving a wedge that makes 1.00

00:12:05.640 conservatives get all antsy because they don't know how to talk about these issues. That's what

00:12:10.280 liberals want to do it's why it's like the first thing they reach into in their bag of tricks

00:12:15.800 when they are down in the polls it's basically just this little sack that they carry around

00:12:20.360 and uh you've got oh abortion uh assault rifles uh they're like 19 cards that just have stephen

00:12:26.600 harper's name scrawled uh out in red ink uh and uh but what else do we have there uh trump trump

00:12:32.600 has a few as well so uh you know basically it's like mad libs they just you know take uh you know

00:12:37.480 insert name of country name of leader name of political issue and then they come up with this

00:12:42.840 ai generated line of attack in which they say pierre polyev is going to turn canada into

00:12:49.400 handmaid's tale because carrots oh no put the wrong word there uh because like and they do this every 1.00

00:12:56.280 single time now whatever you think of polyev's position on this and i i get like look i'm pro

00:13:02.760 life so people that don't like his position i i understand why they want to take aim at that but

00:13:08.680 he has a clarity about this he has a clarity about this that even aaron o'toole who was similarly

00:13:13.960 pro-choice and aaron o'toole who was pro-life did not have and that i think sets polyev up in a much

00:13:20.920 better way to deal with this and i think it's clear that all of these attacks just are not

00:13:25.640 landing which is why the rest like no one asked andrew sheer no one said andrew sheer was going

00:13:29.880 going to turn Canada into the handmaid's tale. So this is where you get into Polyev. They're just 1.00

00:13:36.660 so desperate to make something stick. They just keep on going with it, keep on ratcheting it up.

00:13:42.480 And we're going to see a heck of a lot more of this as the electioneers, especially if current

00:13:47.360 polling holds up. Now, as far as why I'm so aghast by, maybe that's a strong word, certainly why I'm

00:13:55.300 so frustrated by the inability of Canadian society to have this conversation is because

00:14:01.800 when you do have issues where social conservatives have been the ones leading the charge on very

00:14:07.960 significant issues, like for example, against the expansion of assisted suicide in Canada,

00:14:13.200 you get the same people who just completely do not want to engage in any question about life

00:14:18.840 that try to shut it down. This is an issue just to remind you of some context. I've talked about

00:14:24.640 this in the past, so I'm going to give the 45-second summary here. I have a belief in life

00:14:30.720 as a Christian, but I also, as someone who survived a very nearly successful suicide attempt more than

00:14:36.820 14 years ago, or almost 14 years ago, I have a hugely, hugely deep connection to this idea that

00:14:45.120 what the liberals are doing is atrocious and trying to expand access to assisted suicide,

00:14:50.560 to euthanasia, to MAID, whatever you want to call it, to people who are struggling only with a

00:14:55.740 mental illness. Not someone with MS whose life is coming to its natural end as it is, but people who

00:15:02.400 may get up one day and decide they don't want to end their life, and instead of them being treated

00:15:06.380 for that, they are met with the government helping them with it. This is my concern about someone with

00:15:12.140 a serious depression, for example, in a regime like what the Liberals are pushing Canada towards.

00:15:17.260 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.

00:15:30.020 Here's a little glimpse at this.

00:15:32.320 And I said, how did they come to the conclusion that I was going to die?

00:15:37.040 He said, because they didn't really know what to do with you.

00:15:39.600 The government of Canada is killing Canadians, and not just a few and not just the terminally ill.

00:15:45.000 Over 50,000. So, 50,000.

00:15:48.160 There is a startling new development in the ongoing controversy around veterans being offered medical assistance in dying.

00:15:56.080 Instead of help, are you familiar with their MAID program?

00:15:58.840 They said, well, it's better than blowing your brains out against the wall.

00:16:01.860 They essentially evicted us from our buildings because we would not participate in this government euthanasia program.

00:16:08.860 Canadians are expecting us to get the job done.

00:16:11.160 Fraser Health is refusing to give information, and because of that, the police investigation had to close.

00:16:20.300 Therefore, Fraser Health is covering information up.

00:16:22.960 And we know for a fact that our people in power do not take responsibility for anything.

00:16:28.980 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.

00:16:38.620 that is a clip of the trailer for made the dark side of canadian compassion it came out a couple

00:16:46.120 of weeks ago the reason i didn't want to do an interview about it is because i wanted to see it

00:16:49.900 first and i had to wait to do that because i knew they were coming to elmer ontario a lovely little

00:16:55.200 town not far from me and i saw it last week at long last and i didn't make the trailer but i am

00:17:00.000 in the documentary i did an interview with sheila and kian which i was very grateful to do talking

00:17:06.000 about my own experience here. Sheila Gunn-Reed, the editor-in-chief of Rebel News, joins us now.

00:17:12.220 Sheila, I know you've done quite the tour on this, so congratulations and thanks for coming on.

00:17:17.340 Yeah, it's been a grueling tour, but I think the documentary has been well-received and sometimes

00:17:22.960 we're sort of met with shock because people who are fundamentally opposed to the government

00:17:28.180 helping you off this mortal coil are surprised at just how bad it is out there. When we decided

00:17:35.880 to make this documentary. And we put a call out for stories, but we also put a call out for

00:17:41.240 fundraising. We did this all entirely without any government help, unlike many documentaries made in

00:17:48.540 this country. But our emails were sort of inundated with people from two sides of the debate. We had

00:17:56.120 people saying, you guys, it's definitely not as bad as you say it is. This is just for people who

00:18:03.660 are in unbearable suffering at the end of their life? And who are we to say that they should

00:18:08.740 suffer more? And then the other 50% of our emails were saying, it's so bad, but it's much worse than

00:18:16.420 you think. And here's my outrageous story. And we thought, boy, we've got to use the 50% of these

00:18:22.540 people to inform the other 50%. And it was the reason the documentary sort of came to life the

00:18:28.060 way it did. You touch on this there. And I think documentary deals with this complexity to some

00:18:33.460 extent as well. There's more of a spectrum of opinions on this than a binary. I mean,

00:18:38.300 you certainly have your people that are against any made whatsoever, any assisted suicide

00:18:42.940 whatsoever. And then you get people on the other side that, you know, the quote unquote dying with

00:18:47.580 dignity people that basically think it should be no different than, you know, ordering a book off

00:18:51.380 Amazon. You just one day say, I want it. There are a lot of shades of gray in this. And, you know,

00:18:56.660 people that, for example, would have no issue or at least no legal issue with someone that fits how

00:19:03.320 was originally presented of someone who is terminally ill they're in a lot of pain people

00:19:09.000 know with near certainty they're going to die things will not improve and they voluntarily

00:19:14.840 and of sound mind make the decision versus what we're seeing now which is an expansion to minors

00:19:20.520 potentially an expansion to people who have a mental illness which is by definition a disease

00:19:25.320 of the mind so you've raised your hand there and acknowledge you know where you fit on this but

00:19:30.280 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?

00:19:38.980 You know, we included their voices in the documentary.

00:19:41.440 We tried to make the documentary as accessible as possible.

00:19:47.640 Well, I should think your co-producer himself is not as black and white as you are on this. 0.96

00:19:51.320 That's exactly it.

00:19:52.040 And that's why I love working with Kian is because he comes to these documentaries with a very open mind.

00:19:56.820 He's there to learn.

00:19:58.100 He's there to listen.

00:19:58.940 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.

00:20:22.980 We included, for example, Michelle Sterling. People may know her as the communications director of Friends of Science.

00:20:30.520 And her story was so important because her brother was suffering from a terminal degenerative illness and he chose MAID.

00:20:38.680 And the family was very involved. They were not shut out of it.

00:20:42.400 There were interviews to make sure there were no evidence of coercion taking place.

00:20:48.380 It was a very holistic approach. Now, whether you agree with that or not,

00:20:52.980 that's up to the individual but even for michelle where her brother access made versus where it is

00:21:00.240 now she says in the documentary i'm mortified i'm horrified that this is where it's gotten and so

00:21:05.520 for you know religious pro-lifers like me we were always talking about the slippery slope

00:21:12.140 we have to show where it started and now we're showing where it's ending

00:21:16.120 yeah and i think that's one of the responses to this which is that the second category that we

00:21:22.640 described as an inevitability from the first. And I think you look at a lot of the activists

00:21:26.880 on this, you know, originally when this was coming up before the Supreme Court, I mean,

00:21:31.300 going back to the Rodriguez case, but more recently, the charter case, they kept it so

00:21:36.460 narrow. And then the second, the second they got that, it all of a sudden expanded. This is too

00:21:42.240 restrictive. It's too difficult. We need to bring it more. And at a certain point, I mean, what's

00:21:46.600 the next frontier? Because I actually don't believe we've hit rock bottom on this. Not even close.

00:21:51.140 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.

00:22:11.720 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.

00:22:35.160 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.

00:22:56.920 And so they are euthanizing those people too. And what we've seen Belgium and Holland take 0.70

00:23:04.020 two decades to get to, we've accelerated into it in five, six years.

00:23:08.820 It's easy to look at Justin Trudeau and say all sorts of things about him and his government on

00:23:13.480 this. But do you get a sense from your research of the why? Of what is it about the fabric of

00:23:20.220 Canada that made us, you know, basically the leader in a category I don't think we want to

00:23:25.900 be leaders in on this issue, even surpassing in some cases, certainly catching up to these

00:23:30.780 European countries that always used to seem a world away when we did that comparison.

00:23:35.840 Yeah, I think, and I'm speculating here, I don't really know what's going on in the mind of Justin

00:23:42.460 Trudeau. I don't know if Justin Trudeau knows what's going on in the mind of Justin Trudeau

00:23:46.180 most days. But I think we've got a couple of different things at play here. So we've got a

00:23:51.220 socialized healthcare system where rationing is built in. And with rationing comes delays in care

00:23:56.960 and with delays in care comes suffering. And so there has to be a solution to that suffering.

00:24:02.340 And so a lot of people are opting to die rather than continue to wait and languish in the pain

00:24:11.360 and suffering that our socialized medical system is offering them. So that's the thing that this

00:24:18.320 tidies up some wait lines with access to care. But also we've got this extreme focus on equality

00:24:25.780 at all costs. And what I mean by that is the reason that MAID is being expanded to encompass

00:24:33.080 the mentally ill is this idea of recognizing the equality of suffering. So we've already said, 0.64

00:24:41.380 Look, if you're suffering from a physical, biological illness that is irremediable, then you should have access to government-assisted suicide.

00:24:51.960 And so the health minister has said, well, we recognize that your mental suffering is completely on par with this irremediable physical suffering.

00:25:02.100 And so thanks to this radical equality, we have to consider both illnesses to be the same.

00:25:08.900 And so that's where we are now.

00:25:11.380 there's also an aspect culturally in canada that i i would posit and solicit your feedback on which

00:25:18.340 is that the government control of health care the centralization of health care in canada has

00:25:23.700 in a lot of ways taken that moral ownership of health care away from canadians and some people

00:25:30.320 are willingly going along with this a lot of people will you know cling to the canadian health

00:25:34.840 care system with their dying breath ironically enough even if the health care system contributed

00:25:38.780 into the dying breath, but you have others that are frustrated with it. But regardless, we use,

00:25:45.540 I mean, how often is a policy in Canada sold to us because, oh, well, if we don't do this,

00:25:50.680 it's going to cost the healthcare system. If we don't do this, you know, it's the justification

00:25:54.280 for restrictions on junk food. It's the justification for everything. It's, well,

00:25:58.700 we have to pay for the healthcare. So I think there is a cynicism that is fairly well supported

00:26:04.540 in that, I believe. Yeah. I mean, we just went through three years of lockdowns and they said

00:26:09.520 our strained healthcare system that we all have to pay for would not survive unless we listened

00:26:15.560 to the guy in the white coat or in Alberta's case, the lady with the harsh bangs at the podium

00:26:23.380 every day, telling us exactly what we needed to do to protect the healthcare system. So we have

00:26:28.800 a society of, and there are still people doing those things, despite the fact that we are hearing

00:26:33.660 more and more every day that the restrictions by and large didn't work and were just pulled out of

00:26:39.100 the ether one day and then proliferated across society. And we were all following the lines on

00:26:44.640 the floor as though the COVID only traveled in one direction past the craft dinner. And so we've got

00:26:50.020 an entire society of people who are still doing those things, meaning they are completely

00:26:57.120 unskeptical about the guy in the white coat telling them what needs to happen with their health.

00:27:03.300 And that worries me.

00:27:05.540 That worries me because there's a sort of sinister, passive suggestion to some people

00:27:11.700 that we've heard about that, well, you know what?

00:27:15.460 You're going to be suffering.

00:27:17.260 You don't have long left.

00:27:19.760 Listen to me.

00:27:20.360 I'm a doctor.

00:27:22.140 Maybe you should consider MAID. 0.78

00:27:24.120 That worries me because we have a story in our documentary of a family who were complete

00:27:28.280 COVID skeptics.

00:27:29.180 And thanks to their skepticism of doctors on TV and doctors saying things to them that didn't

00:27:36.040 make sense, their grandma is alive today because she was sent to palliative care and she was

00:27:41.660 suggested made. And they said, no, no, no. And they kept going and going and going until they got

00:27:46.120 an opinion that they thought made sense. And thanks to that, she's alive today. But on the

00:27:52.180 flip side, we know now that there's a huge segment of the population that are just ready and willing

00:27:59.000 to go along with the doctor in the white coat, no matter what that doctor says.

00:28:03.340 That story you shared from the documentary was quite a gripping one where you had, you know,

00:28:07.500 multiple people in the healthcare system that had literally just, you know, sentenced this woman to 0.91

00:28:11.120 death by saying that, oh yeah, she's, she's going to die. Using that to then justify the idea that,

00:28:16.400 oh, well, death is imminent. So, and, and again, they, they just knew instinctively that something

00:28:22.060 about that didn't make sense. And, you know, there she was sitting down talking to you,

00:28:25.660 however long later.

00:28:27.060 One thing I'm just curious about,

00:28:28.720 because you, again,

00:28:29.580 raised your hand on that,

00:28:30.840 you know, absolutist position on MAID. 1.00

00:28:33.020 You've also been unequivocal

00:28:34.340 on, you know,

00:28:35.600 the issue of bodily autonomy

00:28:36.880 throughout COVID.

00:28:37.820 And I'm curious for you

00:28:39.880 how you draw a line between the two,

00:28:42.520 because this is where my libertarianism

00:28:44.640 butts up against my belief in life as well,

00:28:47.080 is that in the case with someone

00:28:48.800 completely of sound mind,

00:28:51.700 how do you say you shouldn't have

00:28:53.600 this tool available to you legally?

00:28:55.660 Okay, so for me, the issue of bodily autonomy is also the same issue for your natural life.

00:29:06.840 For me, it's that I believe in the dignity of human life, and I believe in the integrity of the human body.

00:29:16.600 And so I don't find my two positions indistinguishable.

00:29:20.640 I think they're the same position.

00:29:22.060 I don't think the government should be helping people die. It's terrible that we cannot prevent

00:29:28.720 people from taking their own life. I think in our documentary, we offer solutions. Instead of

00:29:34.900 waiting around for the government to change the culture around MAID, we can do that in our own

00:29:38.800 communities. But of course, I believe in bodily autonomy. I don't think the government should be

00:29:45.040 telling you what to do with your body. But I also believe in the dignity and the value of the human

00:29:50.920 being and so that's that's kind of how i get my head around these two issues and and even i the

00:29:57.480 dignity point is incredibly important because even if one were to accept as a premise that there

00:30:02.280 should be uh certain circumstances under which made is is legal and available how many people

00:30:07.800 of those who choose that would go that road if they were treated with dignity if they felt like

00:30:13.720 they had access to palliative care if they felt they had a support system around them if all of

00:30:18.840 the options available were shared to them shared with them and i think that's so key and you see

00:30:23.960 that same discussion with abortion which is that again even if you believe it should be there as a

00:30:28.680 as a point of last resort a lot of people will not choose that if they have access to information

00:30:34.440 along the way about alternatives yeah i completely agree with that i mean we don't discuss what

00:30:39.640 palliative care is it's a 50-year medical discipline and it is making advances all the

00:30:45.560 time in pain management and so we have a lot of people in canada who are scared about suffering

00:30:52.440 about the end of life and look i'll again lead with my chin i'm catholic we lean into the suffering

00:30:57.720 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

00:31:04.680 of the end of life and that is changing rapidly and we're instead of putting money into palliative

00:31:10.520 care. We're taking money out of palliative care to fund MAID. And I think that is a great tragedy.

00:31:19.220 Sheila Gunn-Reed, one of the producers of the new-ish documentary. It's not as new,

00:31:24.660 but like I said, I wanted to see it first and then I learned I could see it in person. So

00:31:27.840 I wanted to do that, but it's called MAID, the Dark Side of Canadian Compassion. Thank you so

00:31:32.320 much for reaching out to me and allowing me to be a part of that in my own little way, Sheila.

00:31:36.600 Thank you. Thanks very much. And Andrew, just thank you so much for being so raw and honest

00:31:41.400 with us in that documentary. Your perspective was so vital to shed light on just, you know,

00:31:48.600 the other side of the mental health issue. Well, it's kind of you to say thank you very much. And

00:31:53.660 I will say I was mortified. Thanks again, Sheila. When I went to the screening in Elmer, it was

00:32:00.680 hosted by the, well, hosted at the Church of God in Elmer. And I was wearing the same shirt that I

00:32:07.020 was wearing when Sheila interviewed me for the documentary. And I, that was like the first thing

00:32:11.940 I thought of. I'm like, oh no, everyone will think I only have one shirt. So anyway, I won't tell you

00:32:15.800 which one. All right. That does it for that segment. I want to move on to another healthcare

00:32:21.140 adjacent piece. We have, you may recall in Canada, you may have forgotten by now, actually, there was

00:32:26.940 that big scandal a couple of years back when you had these two scientists affiliated with the

00:32:32.060 chinese military that were working at canada's level four lab the national microbiology lab

00:32:38.960 in winnipeg they were fired police escorted them out and the government was then so so so transparent

00:32:46.000 about all of the oh wait nope sorry i think they actually tried to cover it up and fought

00:32:51.440 their own Speaker of the House in court to prevent any information coming out. Does that

00:32:56.780 sound more right? Yeah, it's amazing how little we know, even years later, about what exactly

00:33:03.800 went down there. The RCMP claim they are still in the process of investigating it. This whole

00:33:09.780 saga was very adequately captured by a series over at the C2C Journal. Now, this piece, I think,

00:33:18.560 was quite fascinating. The Scandal at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory. It's called

00:33:24.640 The Scientist Who Came In From the Cold. Peter Sean Taylor, who wrote this over at C2C Journal,

00:33:29.620 joins me now. Peter, good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming on today.

00:33:33.400 Oh, it's always a pleasure to be here, Andrew.

00:33:35.900 This is one of these stories where, you know, front page news one day just seems to have become

00:33:41.160 a distant memory within a couple. And I mean, even when I read your piece, you know, I've had,

00:33:46.260 you know many many other news stories pop up on my radar since and it was like oh yeah we never

00:33:50.620 really did get to the bottom of that did we no well you've got a you need a program for all the

00:33:56.120 national security scandals going on and this one which I think in any other era would would consume

00:34:04.600 us for months and months as you're right it was a week or two and it was disappeared and now it's

00:34:10.800 been replaced with the Chinese government interference in the 2019-2021 election, and

00:34:17.920 then our MPs spying on Canada.

00:34:22.400 So we've had a huge cycle of these sorts of national security crises.

00:34:29.020 But I mean, the Winnipeg lab scandal to me is really quite concerning and speaks to many

00:34:37.900 disconcerting things going on in Canada right now. And it's a bit of a shame, perhaps, that

00:34:43.060 it's dropped so low on the attention span of the country. One of the things, not that I believe

00:34:49.840 Canada should ever aspire to be like China, the old line of Justin Trudeau's admiring their 0.96

00:34:54.980 basic dictatorship. But there is an incredible double standard there. And the way China deals

00:34:59.720 with, as you note in your piece, even minor security infractions. I mean, remember, the

00:35:03.840 whole two Michaels thing came about because China accused these men of spying. And then you contrast

00:35:09.640 that with the way that Chinese espionage attempts in Canada are treated. And it is an afterthought.

00:35:16.540 I mean, police are still investigating with no sign of whether they'll ever do anything resembling

00:35:20.860 a charge. And again, I'm not saying we should strive to be like China, but man, if the roles 0.99

00:35:25.500 were reversed, I would be praying nonstop for whatever Canadian was implicated in spying in a 0.60

00:35:33.240 Chinese lab? Well, I don't know that it's aspiring to be like China, but surely any country that's 0.92

00:35:40.340 concerned for its own well-being is going to want to crack down on spies, at least send a signal to

00:35:47.980 the rest of the world that this isn't behavior that we condone. But what did happen in the

00:35:53.240 example of these two scientists? Well, we found out in 2018 that there was something suspicious

00:36:01.920 going on. It took us a year and a half to take away their security clearance. It took two and

00:36:11.020 a half years to actually fire them. And then when we had what seems to me pretty clear proof that

00:36:17.940 they were spies in the conventional sense, that they were taking Canadian secrets and giving them

00:36:23.500 to another country, we didn't even bother to arrest them. And it appears that we just let 0.92

00:36:30.880 them go back to China, where they seem to be living quite comfortable lives, working in their 0.81

00:36:36.000 preferred occupations. The fact that they did leave during a COVID lockdown, when China had 0.91

00:36:43.660 claimed its borders were closed, actually suggests that there must have been,

00:36:49.080 there could have been some kind of deal between Canada and China to quietly let them

00:36:53.520 depart. So, I mean, that's really concerning. Any country, you know, spying should be unacceptable

00:37:03.760 to any country. You don't have to aspire to China to say that we should crack down on spies.

00:37:09.660 We're just sort of failing at the very basic level of protecting our own national security.

00:37:15.160 Well, and one thing we've seen in the past, and I'd say the government has become

00:37:20.080 reluctantly harsher on china in the last couple of years probably post to michael's but but going

00:37:25.360 back as early as you know basically the beginning of the trudeau government there so much was

00:37:30.720 overlooked because the government just wanted to get this trade deal with china and china was you

00:37:38.080 know not won over by this china exploited this as they do every other vulnerability in the world 1.00

00:37:42.560 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?

00:38:00.840 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.

00:38:15.180 So whether that's deferring to Chinese interests or it's simply dropping the ball, it's unclear.

00:38:23.720 But there is no real attention in Canada to take national security issues seriously.

00:38:29.680 And that's what really comes through strongly in this Winnipeg lab scandal.

00:38:34.420 I spoke to Sam Cooper, formerly of Global News, now with the Bureau about foreign interference last week.

00:38:40.380 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.

00:38:48.920 Now, that's looking at it in an election context, in a democracy context.

00:38:52.920 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?

00:39:03.460 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

00:39:18.300 but ask what would have happened in the U.S. if it had been discovered that a couple of Chinese 0.82

00:39:23.940 researchers were sending secrets back to China. They would have been arrested. There would have

00:39:30.460 been DOJ and FBI news releases. There would have been all sorts of attention paid. It would have

00:39:38.380 properly been treated as a scandal. There's a long list of, you know, one of the background

00:39:45.480 issues in this was whether the two scientists were participants in the what's called the

00:39:50.540 Thousand Talents program in China, where Western researchers are paid quite handsomely to transfer

00:39:57.820 knowledge they gain back to China by whatever means. It's a thinly veiled form of industrial

00:40:03.980 espionage. The FBI has a very active campaign cracking down on anyone. And the former head of

00:40:14.120 Harvard's chemistry department was recently, last year, was sentenced for participating in a talents

00:40:21.920 program. So during the Trump era, they canceled the visas of a thousand Chinese researchers who

00:40:30.520 had connections back to Chinese military institutions, which was again the case in

00:40:36.940 the winnipeg scandal here um so look at uh our closest neighbor and they don't have any uh

00:40:45.020 time for this kind of business uh they deal with it very harshly and i think that's the example we

00:40:53.020 should should be following um there's no question that the americans wouldn't stand for this at all

00:40:59.100 so moving forward here are you an optimist or a pessimist on this because i know you're doing

00:41:05.660 your I think very important work in drawing attention to this but you know even from the

00:41:09.800 conservatives we just don't hear this issue discussed anymore as you mentioned there have

00:41:13.880 been a lot of sexier and fresher issues that have taken the oxygen out and you know do you think

00:41:19.180 this is possible to fix basically that's I mean I like to think of myself as an optimist in general

00:41:26.340 uh maybe my my work uh experience intrudes on that um uh well i guess you know the government

00:41:36.480 itself claims that they've fixed all the uh security lapses that have been identified by

00:41:41.820 this issue and that they're checking uh people's security clearance much more tightly so perhaps

00:41:47.820 there's been a within the bureaucracy itself because that's one of the parts of this scandal

00:41:52.540 is the bureaucracy basically let these two scientists, particularly Hsu, do whatever they

00:41:59.100 want because they valued the research and the international collaboration much more highly than

00:42:04.260 they did their role as a national security institution. So perhaps there's been some

00:42:09.860 salutary effect on the bureaucracy. I find it hard to believe that there's been a real change

00:42:17.360 of thinking at the federal liberal level. They're so wedded to this idea that China

00:42:23.400 is going to let them in, so to speak, at some point, and they're going to

00:42:29.060 reap all the benefits from all the deference for all this time. So at that broader level,

00:42:37.720 I think it's going to take a change in government to really elevate national security

00:42:42.360 it um matters in canada but but it is possible that at the micro level um security procedures

00:42:48.840 have been toughened up at not only the winnipeg lab but perhaps other uh sensitive federal

00:42:54.200 institutions around the country yeah and and i think people need to understand at the very least

00:43:00.120 the institutional vulnerabilities that do exist to china i mean academia is a tremendous example

00:43:05.240 of this the number of these so-called research partnerships that have uh put chinese researchers

00:43:11.400 and again, state-affiliated, military-affiliated researchers on key projects here.

00:43:16.780 And I noted that when the foreign registry was floated in politics,

00:43:21.580 you had universities in Canada last week saying,

00:43:23.860 well, we think this might jeopardize our research partnerships.

00:43:26.940 You're like, exactly, that's the point of it.

00:43:30.340 Yes, I mean, it's certainly not just government.

00:43:34.340 It's private sector, it's universities.

00:43:36.560 I mean, Xu and Chang were also jointly appointed at the University of Manitoba.

00:43:44.560 Interestingly enough, though, Manitoba University cut ties with them almost immediately after these revelations were made.

00:43:54.280 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.

00:44:03.340 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.

00:44:21.340 universities and Canada ranked third in total after the U.S. and the U.K. So we are certainly

00:44:28.220 an object of interest from China at the university level. And yeah, as you say,

00:44:34.060 there's all sorts of things, not just access to Ebola virus, but all sorts of sensitive

00:44:39.680 and cutting edge technology that may be vulnerable. It is a fascinating read. It's a lengthy read,

00:44:47.280 but I think a very important one in C2C Journal

00:44:49.980 over different parts there.

00:44:51.500 That's how much content you had to work with here.

00:44:54.260 And I feel you probably still could have gone on

00:44:56.340 and turned this into a book as well.

00:44:58.300 The second part came out a couple of weeks back,

00:45:00.240 The Vials and the Damage Done,

00:45:01.940 Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal.

00:45:05.500 Peter Sean Taylor from C2C Journal.

00:45:07.800 Always good to talk to you.

00:45:08.760 Thanks for coming on today.

00:45:10.040 Yeah, thanks for having me, Andrew.

00:45:11.040 Anytime.

00:45:11.920 All right, cheers.

00:45:12.860 That does it for us for today.

00:45:14.420 We have a special edition of the program tomorrow,

00:45:16.760 a full-length interview with John Rustad,

00:45:19.540 the leader of the British Columbia Conservatives

00:45:22.160 who are finding great success in the polls in BC

00:45:24.620 and have become quite an unlikely success story

00:45:28.280 in BC politics.

00:45:29.880 If you talk to certain people, that's tomorrow.

00:45:32.180 And I'll also be at the Justice Centre

00:45:33.880 for Constitutional Freedoms

00:45:35.580 George Jonas Freedoms Award dinner

00:45:37.800 tomorrow night as well.

00:45:39.020 So I'll probably see some of you there.

00:45:40.660 But in the meantime, thank you.

00:45:41.900 God bless and good day to you all.

00:45:44.360 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:45:46.760 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:46:16.760 We'll be right back.

00:46:46.760 We'll be right back.

00:47:16.760 We'll be right back.

Juno News - June 12, 2024

NDP thinks Poilievre is ＂courting incels＂

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