Juno News - July 29, 2024


Olympic committee sorry for offending Christians – but are they really？

Topics
gender-affirming care debate
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Justin Trudeau Chris Sims Danielle Smith Winston Churchill Mike Lindell Edmonton Roy Eepin Charlie Hebdo Jesus Christ Cass Pierre Poilievre Thomas Jolly Medel Deschamps Anna Deschamps Scrooge McDuck Andrew Lawton Barbara Bush James Cantor Celine Dion and 9 more
Trudeau can’t stop hiring federal employees The Liberals have bungled Canadian immigration

Episode Stats


Length

46 minutes

Words per minute

168.04

Word count

7,817

Sentence count

390

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In case you ve been in a slumber and are just awakening to it right now, it could have been 2020. In fact, if you fell asleep before 2020, around March, and just woke up now, you didn t miss anything. Nothing happened in the last few years. The world has been entirely normal.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 this is the andrew lawton show brought to you
00:01:19 by true north hello and welcome to you all this is canada's most irreverent talk show
00:01:28 The Andrew Lawton Show on True North on this Monday, July 29th, 2024, in case you've been in
00:01:35 a slumber and are just awakening to it right now. It could have been 2020. In fact, if you fell
00:01:40 asleep before 2020, around March, and just woke up now, you didn't miss anything. Nothing happened
00:01:47 in the last few years. The world has been entirely normal. Nothing to see here. Welcome back. We'll
00:01:51 get you back into normalcy. But if you have been with us every day, you will know things are in
00:01:55 pretty dire straits. We'll just be talking a little bit later in the show about exactly how
00:02:00 bad things are in cities across the country. One example of this is in downtown Edmonton where our
00:02:08 good friend Chris Sims chanced upon it while she was trying to just take a quick picture and found
00:02:13 herself having to navigate through what ended up being a dank and fetid swampy area around
00:02:18 the statue of Sir Winston Churchill that sits near City Hall. So that's going to be coming up
00:02:24 a little bit later on in the show.
00:02:26 Nothing like starting the show
00:02:27 with a talk of a dank feeded sewer.
00:02:30 What else do we have?
00:02:31 Our good friend, Dr. Roy Eapin,
00:02:32 will be back on the show
00:02:33 to talk about a new report
00:02:34 from the Aristotle Foundation
00:02:36 on why Canada has among
00:02:38 the most aggressive medical policies
00:02:40 in the Western world
00:02:41 when it comes to how to deal
00:02:43 with transgender identifying youth.
00:02:46 So that's an interesting report
00:02:47 and I suspect it will be
00:02:49 an interesting interview.
00:02:50 But I started talking last week
00:02:52 about how I wasn't going to talk
00:02:53 about the Olympics. I said I had a couple of you know quick things to say about it and then that
00:02:57 was that. Little did I know that this would end up taking such a huge life form over the course
00:03:04 of the weekend. The Olympic opening ceremonies which was otherwise going to be quite beautiful
00:03:09 and nice instead of just a parade around the track like they normally would with every country
00:03:14 dressed up in its national garb and all the athletes happy to be there. They took advantage
00:03:19 of the natural geography of France and they took these each country had its own boat and they just
00:03:24 paraded all the I don't know if it's a parade with their boats but uh each country paraded its
00:03:29 boats down the Seine and you had lots of fun to be had there but of course it's Paris and it's
00:03:35 the Olympics and it's 2024 so it would have just been too simple to keep it like that instead what
00:03:41 happened was they decided to go for broke and get really really arty with their opening ceremonies
00:03:47 Now, we're not going to play any video clips of this because the International Olympic Committee has among the most aggressive copyright protections in the world, which means that if I play like five seconds of the Olympic opening ceremonies, our whole YouTube will be vaporized, just like when I accidentally interviewed the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell.
00:04:05 In fact, I've said Mike Lindell's name, so we might get vaporized for that.
00:04:09 But we do, excuse me.
00:04:11 See, that's what YouTube does.
00:04:13 You say Mike Lindell's name and you just start choking.
00:04:15 That's how they get you.
00:04:16 But we do have some still images I can show you here.
00:04:21 Ah, yes, there's one.
00:04:22 That is a tableau.
00:04:24 Let's do the before and after.
00:04:26 Do Leonardo da Vinci's version there, Sean.
00:04:31 Yeah.
00:04:31 that is one of the most iconic images of christianity captured by leonardo da vinci
00:04:38 the renaissance painter from italy this is to go back to the paris 2024 version uh yes that is
00:04:45 a fat acceptance activist named dj barbara butch who is standing in for jesus the apostles
00:04:55 are being played by drag queens. 1.00
00:04:59 I don't know which one is supposed to be Peter.
00:05:02 I don't know which one.
00:05:03 I just don't know which one is supposed to be which.
00:05:05 There seems to be a child there inexplicably.
00:05:09 And then you have the man with a beard in blue
00:05:13 who is supposed to be on the menu.
00:05:17 He has dinner in some way.
00:05:20 Yeah, that wasn't actually Celine Dion's comeback performance,
00:05:23 believe it or not.
00:05:24 That came a bit later.
00:05:25 The Olympic Committee first said, no, no, no, it's not.
00:05:28 He was the Greek god Dionysus.
00:05:30 I think that's how you say it.
00:05:33 They said, no, no, no, the interpretation of the Greek god Dionysus
00:05:36 makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.
00:05:40 So when you look at this, you're supposed to scream passivism.
00:05:45 That's the message you're supposed to get, passivism.
00:05:47 Well, this, of course, made huge, huge waves all around the world.
00:05:52 the Catholic Bishops' Conference was among those who condemned it, found it to be a horrendous and
00:05:57 blasphemous display. Christians around the world were mortified by this. What was supposed to be a
00:06:03 unifying display ended up becoming something that really just was a profound mockery of what it is
00:06:11 that they were all about. And that was where I found to be, as a Christian, I am also a free
00:06:18 speech activists. So I believe they have the right to do it. But I also believe we can talk about the
00:06:22 cultural implications of this and why this would never happen with another religious group. Now,
00:06:28 to be clear, I'm not suggesting the Olympics should be used as a platform to mock different
00:06:34 religions or mock different people of faith. I will say that the Olympic Committee finally
00:06:39 apologized for this, finally apologized. This was one of the organizers of the Olympics here.
00:06:45 Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.
00:06:55 On the contrary, I think that Imaginelli really tried to really intend to celebrate community
00:07:01 tolerance.
00:07:02 That was his word yesterday.
00:07:04 And looking at the result of the polls that we shared, we believe that this ambition was
00:07:10 achieved if people have taken any offense we are of course really really sorry
00:07:17 ma volonté n'est pas d'être subversif ni de me moquer ni de choquer ma volonté est
00:07:22 simplement de de dire que nous sommes ce grand nous et que hier soir c'était des
00:07:30 idées républicaines c'était des idées d'inclusion c'était les idées de bienveillance
00:07:37 of generosity, of solidarity, in short, of what I believe we need.
00:07:46 In France, we have the right to love as we want, with whom we want.
00:07:50 In France, we have the right to believe or not.
00:07:53 In France, we have a lot of rights.
00:07:56 And it was the idea to make these values transparent.
00:08:02 So that gentleman there, Thomas Jolly, is a French actor and he was the artistic director
00:08:11 of the performance, but I love the positive spin on it. No, yeah, Sean is saying I should
00:08:15 apologize to the podcast listeners who don't speak French. There were subtitles there,
00:08:19 but I'll paraphrase it. He was saying that, oh, no, no, no, it was all about inclusivity
00:08:24 and solidarity. And these were the values. These were great values. So she's saying,
00:08:28 the first woman there, Anna Deschamps, that, oh, yes, you know, this didn't really miss the mark.
00:08:34 He's saying, no, this was fine. What's your problem? This was all about inclusivity. It
00:08:38 was celebrating a positive value. Well, the IOC has now come out, and they've kind of lined up
00:08:43 with Medel Deschamps' position on this. They say, the IOC has taken note of and welcomes the
00:08:50 clarification given by the Paris 2024 Olympic Organizing Committee regarding the opening
00:08:57 ceremony. In the daily press briefing, the organizing committee said that there was never
00:09:00 any intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief. They reiterated that
00:09:05 their intention with the opening ceremony was always to celebrate community intolerance. The
00:09:10 organizing committee also said that if anyone was offended by certain scenes, this was completely
00:09:15 unintentional and they were sorry. Now, this is the old we're sorry you were offended by it thing.
00:09:23 it's no we're not sorry we did it we're not sorry we said it we're sorry you felt that way it's like 0.93
00:09:28 the real passive aggressive apology you do that basically means you're being a big old wimp and 0.91
00:09:33 look i i would say that some people should just let it roll off their shoulders i i think as a
00:09:38 christian i can say this was in poor taste and it was callous and i can point out the cultural 0.75
00:09:42 significance of it but it didn't hurt me it didn't destroy me i'm not losing sleep over it
00:09:48 it just revealed what i've always known and have talked about for years which is how important it
00:09:52 is to start turning culture around and start telling your stories in a positive light.
00:09:57 Because let's talk about the history of France here.
00:10:00 It wasn't that long ago that Charlie Hebdo, a newspaper which is a very far left newspaper,
00:10:06 says vile things about all sorts of people and all sorts of religions had most of its
00:10:11 team killed in cold blood by an Islamic terror attack because of all of their depictions
00:10:17 of Jews, of Christians, of Muslims, of politicians. It was one particular religious group that had
00:10:23 people motivated to commit violence against them. And in the case of Charlie Hebdo, it was Muslims. 0.79
00:10:29 Now, I do not extrapolate from that that Muslims are inherently violent, but I will say that it 1.00
00:10:33 proved safe for them to criticize other groups, and it did not prove safe for them to depict
00:10:39 in offensive ways that one particular group. And the takeaway from that is, again, not to talk
00:10:45 about any group. It's just to talk about why making fun of Christians is easy. You know that 0.92
00:10:51 you will ultimately find a lot of support from the late night comedy shows. You're not going to get
00:10:56 many politicians condemning you. You're certainly not going to get your offices shot up and killed. 0.76
00:11:01 It's the epitome of punching down. You're talking to people who are already mocked and maligned by
00:11:07 much of the culture. Being a Christian is an incredibly unpopular thing in 2024, even in a
00:11:12 country such as France, which is so traditionally Catholic as some of those beautiful churches in
00:11:17 the world. Its art was so beautiful at capturing religion throughout the ages, but it's a country
00:11:24 that has no interest in religion in any form. And obviously France takes its commitment to
00:11:30 secularism serious, and they apply that somewhat evenly across the board, but it was punching down.
00:11:36 Now, I'm not saying that there should have been some Olympic opening ceremony mockery of Islam
00:11:41 or some Olympic opening ceremony mockery of Judaism or Buddhism or Shintoism or Taoism.
00:11:47 No, I'm saying that why can we not leave people of faith alone? 0.99
00:11:50 Why is that not something that they felt able to do in that few moments?
00:11:55 And you could even see it in Thomas Jolie's comments when he's defending this.
00:11:58 And he says, no, no, no, we were celebrating Republican values and inclusivity.
00:12:02 I believe that he genuinely is of the mind that attacking Christianity is inclusive, 1.00
00:12:08 that Christians are the problem and they're the ones that need to be mocked in a display that 1.00
00:12:13 brings together people from all around the world, from Muslim countries, from countries with majority 0.98
00:12:17 Christian populations, from the Jewish state of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world.
00:12:23 And it's supposed to bring all of those people together in a unifying display. And that's always
00:12:27 been how the Olympics as a display and as a national or international experiment has been
00:12:33 sold. It's a way to put aside differences and grievances and conflict because sport itself
00:12:38 can be unifying. Now, I'm not a sporting person. I try to be a good sport, but I don't do the whole
00:12:43 sports thing. So I'm completely lost. Like my wife and I last night were just flipping through
00:12:49 the channels and we started watching Olympic surfing. And I didn't even know Olympics had
00:12:53 surfing until I read a news story this week about how the surfing challenges are taking place like
00:12:58 4,000 kilometers from Paris. They're in Tahiti and I was watching and I had no idea what was
00:13:03 happening. I could appreciate it and enjoy it and respect it. I just saw guys like sitting out in
00:13:07 the water for 25 minutes doing nothing and then they look out and I see nothing there but they
00:13:13 see something and they start swimming towards it and then ta-da there's a wave. So that to me was
00:13:18 exciting. That to me was fun to watch. Why do I need to see drag queens pretending to be the 1.00
00:13:24 apostles of Jesus Christ and a fat acceptance activist pretend to be Jesus Christ to appreciate
00:13:30 the guy surfing in Tahiti or the woman doing her flips and whatever on the uneven bars or the guy 0.77
00:13:37 the woman this morning the Canadian who got a gold medal in judo why do I need to see drag queens in 1.00
00:13:42 the last supper to appreciate these feats of human accomplishment and achievement and that's the
00:13:48 point of this it is gratuitous it is offensive and even if Christians can perhaps develop a 0.96
00:13:54 thicker skin about this, as I think they've had to in the past. That is not to say that there is 0.99
00:13:59 not a bigger picture that needs to be explained here, which is how we have a culture that sees
00:14:03 no problem with going after people of faith, no problem with going after Christians. And it 1.00
00:14:07 explains why some of the problems in society have gotten to where they have been. And that's
00:14:13 effectively the attitude on this. And I think that more people need to stand up against this. And this
00:14:18 is why I don't want to pit different groups against each other and say, oh, they should have
00:14:22 attacked this group or that group? No. I think in general, one of the things we saw, and we've seen
00:14:26 this in Canadian politics, is that people of faith oftentimes have more in common with each other,
00:14:31 despite their differences, than they do with a society that is increasingly hostile to them.
00:14:37 And that, to me, was quite a fascinating development. And it was why I think Muslims 1.00
00:14:42 and Jews and Christians should have all been lockstep together in opposing the lockdowns of
00:14:47 houses of worship during COVID. Because let's face it, the government declaring worship non-essential
00:14:53 was far more of a war on religion itself than it was a war on any individual religion. But when you
00:15:00 look down culturally, you see that governments are only interested in going after one particular
00:15:05 group. It's always the Catholics and Christians who are pro-life, Catholics and non-Catholic 0.78
00:15:11 Christians that are pro-life, who are subjected to the maligning from Justin Trudeau when he goes
00:15:17 on and brings up abortion. It's always the churches that we're seeing lockdowns, not other
00:15:21 houses of worship as well. And if you start denigrating people of faith, you're going to
00:15:26 very quickly find a race to the bottom from which society will not rebound in any good way. And I
00:15:33 think what's happening in Paris is just a reflection of how confident the people who hate
00:15:39 those of faith, the people who hate those who believe in God, how confident they are
00:15:44 that they occupy this, you know, culturally hegemonic position, this position of dominance
00:15:50 in society, that they feel they can do that with impunity and generally will be right. And the
00:15:55 Olympic apology, I actually don't buy as being all that genuine because they're not saying,
00:15:59 we're sorry, we missed the mark. They're saying, we're sorry if anyone was bothered by it. But
00:16:04 yeah, you're still defending it. You're still defending why you think this was some bizarrely
00:16:10 inclusive display. So I say that's all I'll have to say on the Olympics. That's what I said last
00:16:16 time, and then this came up. So I won't make a promise that I can't necessarily keep on this,
00:16:22 but I do want to move to another topic here. This was one. The Aristotle Foundation, we've had their
00:16:28 head, Mark Mielke, on the show a couple of times. They produced an interesting report today that
00:16:34 actually looked at Canada's place in the world on a very key issue, one that's been getting a lot
00:16:39 of coverage around the world, not just in here, this country, but in the UK, in many Western
00:16:44 European nations, in the United States, to some extent. And it's the way that countries choose
00:16:49 to deal with transgender children, transgender minors. And this is something so key. You may
00:16:55 recall there was not that long ago, a report by CBC's French language arm, which was quite good,
00:17:00 where they sent someone in undercover to a clinic that offered gender affirming care. 0.99
00:17:06 and they found that gender-affirming care,
00:17:09 hormone treatments were being offered
00:17:10 almost instantly to minors,
00:17:15 irreversible procedures being offered to minors
00:17:17 and this was something that was happening.
00:17:19 And again, CBC, I have a lot of criticisms for them.
00:17:22 They did real journalism here and exposed this.
00:17:24 It was something that the Quebec government came out
00:17:26 and I think they've promised to look into it
00:17:29 or make some changes or whatnot.
00:17:31 But the reason I bring this up
00:17:32 is because this new report has found
00:17:34 that Canada is actually the most liberal in the world
00:17:38 when it comes to the way it deals with this.
00:17:40 The report compares Canada against the United States,
00:17:44 against Europe and the United Kingdom
00:17:46 and finds that Canada is one of the countries,
00:17:50 in fact, alongside the United States
00:17:52 has the most permissive approach to this
00:17:54 when it comes to putting children,
00:17:56 putting minors through the gamut
00:17:58 of irreversible medical procedures,
00:18:01 hormone treatments and whatnot.
00:18:02 up. And I think this is an incredibly important study. And it's one that will, I believe, become
00:18:08 front and center in the debate and even the UK for how cautious it's been as a country and how
00:18:13 cautious the conservative government was there on a number of issues. Even the UK conservatives
00:18:18 under Rishi Sunak looked at this issue and said, okay, we have to do something. And they had a
00:18:23 major report there called the Cass Review, which looked at the so-called gender affirming care
00:18:29 situation. We've seen that review cited by Danielle Smith in Alberta, which has, I think,
00:18:35 as far as Canadian jurisdictions gone, been probably the most forceful in wanting to protect
00:18:41 children away from these sorts of, I don't even want to call them treatments, because a lot of
00:18:45 these things are quite, I mean, they're not treatments. They're not medical care at all.
00:18:51 And I remember years ago, I interviewed James Cantor, who's a gay man himself, a professor,
00:18:56 I believe at the University of Toronto, or he was at the time. And he said that when you look at the
00:19:00 data, most youth who identify, most minors who identify with a different gender than their
00:19:06 biological sex, especially in the case of boys, will outgrow it. It will literally be a phase
00:19:13 and they'll end up being gay men. And he said there's a profound risk in treating these people 0.97
00:19:17 as though they need to be made into a woman, made into a girl. And this is what we have, 0.89
00:19:24 an increasing number of activists pushing for. And it is about what is in the best interest of
00:19:29 children. It's not about religion. It's not about morality. This is about science and it's about
00:19:34 medicine. And when you look at how Canada stacks up against other countries, that's where I thought
00:19:41 this was an important topic to go into. And this is where, I mean, just to bring it into another
00:19:45 issue for a moment, we're seeing Canada do this with assisted dying as well. Canada has quickly
00:19:50 outpaced a lot of European jurisdictions in terms of permissibility, in terms of the expansion of
00:19:56 euthanasia. We have Canada right now looking at expanding this to people with mental illnesses as 0.68
00:20:01 well, an issue that is near and dear to my heart as someone who's dealt with mental illness and
00:20:06 someone who was dealing for a time in my life with the desire to end my life. And the fact that
00:20:12 government could have been assisting me in that is mortifying as it would be to those around me.
00:20:18 So why is Canada putting itself on the radar in all of these wrong ways?
00:20:26 So let's talk about this in the context of this report from the Aristotle Foundation.
00:20:30 One of the authors is Dr. Roy Eepin, who's an endocrinologist at a hospital in Montreal
00:20:35 and also a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation.
00:20:38 And I've known him for many, many years.
00:20:40 He's a great guy.
00:20:41 We're glad to have him back on the show.
00:20:43 Dr. Roy, good to talk to you.
00:20:44 Thanks for coming on today.
00:20:46 Hi.
00:20:46 so let me just ask you first off before we get into the report as a physician is your position
00:20:54 on this fairly common among doctors because i i often we hear the activists on this and we know
00:21:00 what the activists want but but is that reflective of where the medical community is or are they more
00:21:04 on your side here that this is not something we should be rushing minors into it's it's hard to
00:21:10 say um a couple last year i went to um the endocrine society which is a meeting of the american
00:21:20 endocrinologist group um six thousand endocrinologists and i i went with uh another
00:21:25 one of the places i'm a senior fellow with do no harm and we just talked to endocrinologists
00:21:32 and we we found that a lot of them uh did agree with what i was saying but a lot of them were
00:21:38 afraid to say it out loud so what is the year's report has found as far as the reality in canada
00:21:45 compared to elsewhere so the report basically has found that we are uh more permissive about
00:21:55 these kind of procedures than pretty much anywhere else um both the u.s and canada but particularly
00:22:03 canada um in the u.s many you know 22 of the states have uh um actually uh legislated on on
00:22:12 this while in canada we we we limit uh things like the surgeries are pretty limited everywhere
00:22:21 um though i sometimes think people get around these by you know some kind of trickery um but
00:22:28 But things like puberty blockers, only two provinces have some restrictions on when you can give them, which are Alberta and Nova Scotia.
00:22:43 And cross-sex hormones, three provinces have some limitations.
00:22:48 Well, in many European countries, most notably the United Kingdom, which has a system of health care very similar to our own, puberty blockers are basically banned except in research purposes.
00:23:04 And in fact, that temporary ban, which was put in by the Tory government, which was defeated recently and replaced by a Labour government, is being continued by the Labour government, also in Scotland, also in Finland and Sweden.
00:23:21 and today the High Court ruled on a complaint saying that this was wrong and the law was reviewed
00:23:36 and the High Court ruled in favor of the government saying that the puberty ban was correct legislation
00:23:45 And the evidence for that is the Cass review, which was a four-year review of the literature and a series of systematic reviews by Dr. Cass, who was the former head of the Royal College of Pediatricians.
00:24:03 And I think that's pretty much a game changer in many ways.
00:24:08 It found very little evidence for using the puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
00:24:19 And actually, it particularly said we should probably ban the puberty blockers, and we have, in the United Kingdom at least.
00:24:27 Looking at Europe, though, Europe always has had this reputation of being this bastion of social progressivism.
00:24:34 And I think in a lot of issues, certainly in Scandinavia, it is that way.
00:24:37 So why are they so much more cautious than you'd expect on these issues?
00:24:44 Because I think they're looking at the science.
00:24:47 Many of these countries actually did their own systematic reviews.
00:24:50 A systematic review is basically looking at the literature on the subject and seeing if there is evidence to go ahead with these kind of things.
00:24:57 Because if you're going to treat someone, you have to show that there must be overwhelming benefit when there, in this case, can be terrible harm.
00:25:07 And I think from that, they've all become quite a lot more cautious.
00:25:14 This is true in Sweden. This is true in Finland.
00:25:18 The Danes, to some extent, even the medical associations in places like Germany have said that, you know, caution is very much warranted.
00:25:29 Because we're doing things that probably can't be reversed.
00:25:35 If you give a puberty blocker, so what a puberty blocker is, is basically stops the process of puberty from happening until it's stopped.
00:25:47 And what that can do is, in some cases, it will lead to infertility.
00:25:53 It can lead to problems with bone density.
00:25:55 You know, one of the members of WPATH, the organization that pretends to be a scientific organization but is really an activist organization, their president actually said that, you know, giving a boy a puberty blocker to under stage two will probably lead to never having an orgasm in their lives.
00:26:19 these are fundamental things to human nature and you know that we can so easily do away with them
00:26:30 is somewhat troubling. I want to talk about those and get your medical input on this Roy because
00:26:37 there are a lot of these activists and including physicians I'll say it's not just you know
00:26:41 screaming activists on the street but people with many letters behind their name have said that
00:26:45 these are not in fact irreversible, that the effects of these things can be reversed later
00:26:50 on. What's the position you take on that? You know, some of the things can be reversed,
00:26:56 but puberty is an extremely complex process with many, many reactions that we were not even sure
00:27:04 what all the reactions are going on. And, you know, even the people who did the original studies,
00:27:14 the Dutch group, said that they were quite concerned about mental development in these
00:27:19 children and said they were going to do a study about it, but they never did.
00:27:23 Dr. Baxendale, a professor at the University College London, tried to publish a paper saying
00:27:30 that she had concerns about this. And, you know, she was literally blocked from publishing the
00:27:36 paper. She finally did. But, you know, I think we need to do a lot more studies before we can say
00:27:42 that these are safe and reversible.
00:27:46 I think the opposite is probably the case.
00:27:49 And the stakes are obviously quite high
00:27:51 if we get it wrong.
00:27:53 We're talking about children here.
00:27:54 And when you talked about the systematic reviews
00:27:57 that have been done elsewhere,
00:27:58 the inference I take from that
00:27:59 is that Canada has not done any such thing.
00:28:01 Is there any effort to?
00:28:04 No.
00:28:06 You know, the person who wrote our guide
00:28:12 You see, the problem is this organization WPATH, which has had quite a lot written about it recently, because a lot of what they've said is they have done their own systematic reviews, and they've kind of hidden the systematic reviews because they also have found no evidence.
00:28:32 And many other countries have done systematically, the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, the United States, and none of them have found good evidence.
00:28:43 So shouldn't we use the evidence that the others have found?
00:28:47 Because we're not going to find, if we do our own, and there have been some done at McMaster, which haven't been released as published as of yet.
00:28:57 But presumably a Danish teen is not going to present differently from a Canadian teen.
00:29:02 in this context. No. Interesting. Well, I think you've either fallen asleep or your image has
00:29:11 frozen at the worst possible time, Roy. So we'll let you go there as we are at a time anyway, but
00:29:15 people can read this report for themselves. And I certainly hope they do over at the Aristotle
00:29:21 Foundation. It's a new study, Teenagers, Children, and Gender Transition Policy, a comparison of
00:29:26 transgender medical policy for minors in Canada, the United States, and Europe. One of the authors,
00:29:31 Dr. Roy Eapin. Always good to talk to you. And I thank you so much for your time and insight here.
00:29:36 That is an interesting topic. And again, I always defer to the people on this that are interested
00:29:43 in protecting children. And it's amazing when you see how many activists have really co-opted
00:29:49 a lot of these spaces. And again, Roy was saying there, made people that otherwise are on the side
00:29:54 of science just fearful of speaking out. And you look at Ken Zucker, who's one of the cautionary
00:29:59 tales here. He was with, I believe, Cam H. And he ran a clinic that treated youth that were
00:30:04 identifying with gender dysphoria. And he believed, yes, we should at some points facilitate
00:30:09 them, but let's use that as a last resort. Let's use that as a last resort. And that was the
00:30:16 interesting thing about it is that he was the most progressive minded person in that role. He wasn't
00:30:22 some you know dirty stinking scary transphobe that was saying okay if we don't actually uh you 1.00
00:30:29 know help them then we'll get we'll get our way no he was saying let's actually help them extra 0.99
00:30:35 let's make sure that what we're doing is in their best interest and then he gets maligned as a
00:30:39 transphobe by activists that have not done with what he has done for patients that have not done
00:30:45 what he has done ends up losing the funding for his clinic gets shut down and he becomes
00:30:49 a pariah and i think james canter who i mentioned a few moments ago has also similarly been in a
00:30:55 situation where he's faced like calls for his cancellation and people calling for his grants
00:31:00 to be taken away because he takes the view that okay a lot of these people are not actually
00:31:03 transgender so let's not treat them like they are and do something that we can't take back 1.00
00:31:08 that sounds like an entirely reasonable point and to be fair we are not talking here about adults
00:31:14 we're not talking about making any legal restrictions on one's ability to live their
00:31:18 own life we are talking about making sure that children are getting adequate care they need and
00:31:24 this is why what danielle smith proposed in alberta scott moen saskatchewan blaine higgs in new
00:31:30 brunswick what people in some other provinces have as well have become such tremendously popular
00:31:34 policies because a lot of people don't want to force kids into irreversible situations under
00:31:40 the offices of science which fundamentally just does not exist we are going to turn from this
00:31:47 issue to one that's a little bit less hot button here which is what's happening in canadian cities
00:31:51 so last week a conservative leader pierre polyev was in london ontario i went to that press conference
00:31:57 and he was standing in a park as he talked about rising drug and crime issues and much as it was
00:32:03 very specific to london in some ways people watching that press conference from around the
00:32:07 world well around the country certainly but even around the world to some extent we're saying yep
00:32:12 i see that in vancouver i see it in regina i see it in winnipeg i see it in halifax i see it in
00:32:17 in this, I see it in that, because this is just now a fact of life. This is now the world we live
00:32:22 in. And our good friend, Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, she learned this
00:32:27 the hard way. She took a stroll through Edmonton. She was trying to take a picture, a stock photo
00:32:33 of Edmonton City Hall. And I don't know Edmonton too, too well. I usually, when I'm out West,
00:32:38 I'm more in Calgary, but I've been to Edmonton. I know it a little bit. There's a statue of Sir
00:32:42 Winston Churchill one of many across the country that she was near and she took this picture and
00:32:48 the garbage around it might not surprise you that liquid that is on the front of it she didn't think
00:32:54 that was water she didn't think it was someone who had just dumped out the extra coffee she didn't
00:33:00 think it was anything of the sort no it smelled a lot like urine so this was what was one of the
00:33:07 most or should have been one of the most preserved spots in the city you'd think after all if City
00:33:11 hall can't use its tax dollars to keep its own front yard clean or maybe it's a backyard how on 0.55
00:33:17 earth can they do that in any other city so this is why i think it's important to have these
00:33:22 conversations chris managed to make it out hopefully she was able to get and have a shower
00:33:26 after that uh she joins us once again canadian taxpayers federation alberta director chris how'd
00:33:32 you manage yeah it was actually pretty depressing because uh we had just finished this kind of quick
00:33:38 debt clock tour of most places in Alberta. We hit a few spots. We hit Lethbridge, Calgary,
00:33:43 Red Deer, and Edmonton. Had huge turnout, basically sounding the alarm over Prime
00:33:48 Minister Justin Trudeau's doubling of the federal debt later on this year and his addiction to money
00:33:53 printing. And so trying to do all things at once, I wanted an updated photo just of Edmonton City
00:33:59 Hall because we often will put out a report about property taxes, for example. So I went down there
00:34:04 and i was pretty shocked andrew um it actually not to be gross i'm just going to be honest
00:34:11 um there's a big planter there that's right next to city hall if you're facing the fountains
00:34:16 looking at city hall with like kind of the big pyramid thing over to your right is this big
00:34:20 planter that's full of trees and wood chips um that smelled like feces like i'm sorry to be 0.98
00:34:27 gross but it did and i was like wow that's exceptionally gross and then so i walked
00:34:32 around a little bit just trying to get my bearings because I'd never been right out in front of City
00:34:36 Hall before and I went and saw the statue of Sir Winston Churchill because I'm a big fan and so
00:34:41 wanted to go look and yeah there was garbage all around it and it smelled really strongly of urine
00:34:46 it actually reminded me a lot of the state of the Byward Market in downtown Ottawa which as you know
00:34:53 is like a tennis balls hit away from Parliament Hill and yet there's garbage everywhere there's
00:34:59 human excrement on the sidewalk. It's disgusting. And I say this as someone who loved living in 0.99
00:35:04 Ottawa for the most part and was a taxpayer there in Ottawa. And so if I were a taxpayer in the city
00:35:10 of Edmonton, I would have been pretty appalled. Now, I live here in Lethbridge. Nothing is perfect,
00:35:17 but it's a darn sight better than downtown Edmonton was. Again, they have increased property
00:35:23 taxes there. I think it's by more than 8% now. And get this, Andrew, there's actually some survey
00:35:30 that the city has put out, basically pushing for the mayor to get a pay increase. The mayor of
00:35:38 Edmonton is already paid more than $200,000 per year. He makes more than Premier Daniel Smith,
00:35:44 Andrew. So if I don't know, man, I'd be livid if I were a rate payer there.
00:35:50 Yeah, and that's, I guess, the point that I've raised.
00:35:53 I think you and I raised it actually not that long ago
00:35:55 when we were talking about MPs getting a hike in their pay.
00:35:58 It's like, okay, sure, what have you done for us?
00:36:01 What have you done to earn it?
00:36:03 What have you done to earn the increase?
00:36:04 And the thing with Edmonton is that
00:36:06 if they were doing such a great job,
00:36:08 this wouldn't be an issue.
00:36:08 If they were doing such a great job,
00:36:10 parks would be cleaned up.
00:36:11 You wouldn't have tent cities and encampments,
00:36:12 but they're not doing that.
00:36:14 So yeah, what's their argument
00:36:15 for why they deserve more money?
00:36:16 There isn't an argument.
00:36:17 The initial preamble basically says something fluffy like, oh, the mayor is an internationally known person and he has to go through all sorts of meetings and sit on all sorts of boards and blah, blah, blah.
00:36:29 Basically saying the role of the mayor, not him personally, the role of the mayor is super duper important for Edmonton.
00:36:36 And so you should be paying a big salary.
00:36:38 What I found fascinating is the opening question on this survey, which I encourage everybody in Edmonton to partake in, is basically like how much more should they be paid?
00:36:47 Not should they be paid less. The options are like, you know, $230,000, $260,000. And it just
00:36:54 goes up from there. Even more than $300,000 is actually an answer you can click on that survey,
00:37:00 which is absurd for them to be pushing for. Another element of this, Andrew, and again,
00:37:05 I was trying to be fair because over where it smelled like excrement near the planter,
00:37:11 I was wondering, like, is there a problem with the sewer just today? Are they trying to fix
00:37:16 something maybe my heart really went out to the folks though because there is actually some sort
00:37:21 of street food festival getting set up that day this was on sunday morning and there's tents and
00:37:26 tents and rows of actual business people who are getting ready to like you know sell their specialty
00:37:33 foods sell their shawarma shell sell their ribs a bit of art like they were trying to have a festival
00:37:39 getting rolling there on Sunday morning and the air was gross. And so again, if Edmonton City Hall
00:37:47 thinks they deserve a raise, they better bloody well prove it. I just did a deep dive into their
00:37:52 spending actually over the last 15 to 20 years or so. And what was really remarkable is that
00:37:59 their full-time equivalent, their full-time jobs that they've added to Edmonton police
00:38:04 has generally sort of kind of kept up
00:38:06 with the rate of population growth, if you squint.
00:38:09 But the increase in their communication staff
00:38:12 was something like 300% increase.
00:38:18 So the comms people, the narrative whittlers,
00:38:20 all of those folks, they're seeing big pay increases
00:38:24 and they're seeing a lot more bodies on their team.
00:38:27 But the state of the city downtown,
00:38:29 there's litter on the streets,
00:38:31 the streets aren't in great repair,
00:38:32 and the smell was atrocious.
00:38:34 If I, again, were a business owner
00:38:36 or a property taxpayer in Edmonton,
00:38:38 I'd be pretty fit to be tied.
00:38:40 Yeah, and I'm surprised
00:38:42 you didn't have people in that shot,
00:38:44 just given how a lot of these areas have become.
00:38:46 And look, we can all point to our own city
00:38:48 and say it's happening here, it's happening here.
00:38:50 And in which part of me says,
00:38:51 okay, we can't entirely put the blame
00:38:53 just on municipal governments
00:38:55 because there's something bigger than that.
00:38:57 But I do think that governments are right now
00:38:59 enjoying that a little bit too much.
00:39:01 that municipalities can say it's happening everywhere.
00:39:04 The feds can say, oh, it's a municipal problem.
00:39:06 Provinces can say, oh, yes, well,
00:39:08 the municipalities have to deal with it
00:39:09 and the fed are like,
00:39:10 everyone wants to blame another level for this, it seems.
00:39:13 Yeah, it's really easy to pass the buck,
00:39:15 to turn around and say, oh, well, you know,
00:39:16 it's not my problem, it's the province's problem
00:39:18 or, oh, it's not my problem, it's Ottawa's problem.
00:39:21 Now, we have some sympathy for things like that.
00:39:24 Like, for example, you know,
00:39:25 causing inflation by printing $300 billion out of thin air.
00:39:29 Yeah, that's a big problem.
00:39:31 uh, imposing a federal carbon tax on everybody in Alberta. Also a big problem, doubling the debt.
00:39:36 We get you, but you're literally on the front lawn of Edmonton city hall in the middle of what is
00:39:43 apparently supposed to be a big food festival. And it stinks like human sewage. There's garbage 0.98
00:39:51 everywhere in front of your city hall while you're turning around and asking for a pay raise
00:39:58 while you're increasing property taxes so andrew i find the big city mayors and big city councils
00:40:05 almost all of them are now getting way out of their lane they're getting too big for their
00:40:10 britches they think that it's their job to solve global issues instead of doing three main things 0.98
00:40:17 that taxpayers want them to do keep the streets safe keep them clean and keep them in good repair
00:40:24 that's usually the end of the list but they're so full of these you know ideas of grandeur for
00:40:31 themselves that they want to blow taxpayers money while traveling all over the world
00:40:35 and we just can't afford it the average taxpayer in Edmonton cannot afford these things
00:40:40 while they're getting terrible public service just on a slightly less icky note I know you've
00:40:47 been traveling around with the Alberta debt clock which is relevant because a lot of the debt is
00:40:51 coming from governments spending more and more money,
00:40:54 but things have not been getting better.
00:40:55 Services have not been getting better.
00:40:57 What's the big story of Alberta's debt right now?
00:41:00 Yeah, so federally, we're doing very poorly.
00:41:04 Federally, later on this year,
00:41:05 the Trudeau government will have doubled
00:41:07 the national debt since it took power.
00:41:10 And that kind of soundbite can kind of slip past you,
00:41:13 but just kind of picture all of the prime ministers
00:41:15 through history down like a long hallway,
00:41:18 add them all up for their debt, now double it.
00:41:21 That's what the Trudeau government will have done in less than a decade. It's astonishing. So now
00:41:25 we're roughly at about $1.2 trillion. It's going up $1,200 a second. And to get an idea of how big
00:41:33 a trillion is, Andrew, if you started right now, like Scrooge McDuck counting up your loonies,
00:41:37 it would take you 30,000 years to count to $1 trillion. Provincially, it's not perfect,
00:41:44 but we're doing better. So provincially, the Daniel Smith government, the UCP government now
00:41:50 has a law that they have to put 50% of their cash surpluses down to pay down the debt. They also
00:41:56 have to keep their spending increases restrained below the rate of inflation plus population
00:42:01 growth, and they have to balance the budget. So they've added a lot of their own kind of bearing
00:42:05 reins to this budget chariot on themselves, which is a great thing. And it's showing results. We've
00:42:11 recently gotten two credit upgrades from international lending agencies and rating
00:42:16 agencies. So that's a good thing. But the debt is still going up because the amount of interest
00:42:22 that we have to pay and some capital spending. So we do still need to be really vigilant about
00:42:27 the provincial debt here in Alberta, but compared to Ottawa, doing much, much better.
00:42:32 How long until someone can do the Ralph Klein move and hold up the paid in full banner?
00:42:37 That's a great question. So as of right now, knock wood, I'm a pretty hopeful person when
00:42:42 comes to Alberta, things are looking pretty good. They currently have a surplus in the billions of
00:42:47 dollars. They're doing smart things like not trying to strangle the energy industry. They are for now
00:42:53 keeping their spending in check. So I think it's entirely possible to have that happen within the
00:42:59 next decade. So we've got a debt. It depends on how you look at it. It's roughly around 70-ish
00:43:05 billion dollars. That sounds like a crazy amount of money. But when you consider our surplus this
00:43:11 year, I think is around $4 billion right now, maybe a little bit more based on the last quarterly
00:43:16 update. This is doable. And I'll put it this way. So if the Alberta government had had this
00:43:23 spending restraint that we'd been pushing for since the mid-90s, which is keep your spending
00:43:28 increases below the rate of your inflation plus your population growth every year. So we've been
00:43:34 pushing for this since the mid-90s. Spice Girls topping the charts, Taxpayers Federation telling
00:43:39 the government do this one rule. If they had done that, we would have $300 billion in the bank
00:43:47 saved right now. That's not investment. That's not with interest. That's like stuffed under the
00:43:52 mattress. So that's within a generation. So I think it's entirely possible for her to be able
00:43:57 to hold up that sign paid in full. We would love to see it. All right. Well, we'll keep our eyes
00:44:02 peeled. It would be a great point of contrast there. And again, shows the damage of electing
00:44:06 an NDP government when you exacerbate that, you know, zero dollar debt to what we have now.
00:44:13 Chris Sims, Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Alberta director. Always a pleasure. We will see you next
00:44:17 time. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much, Chris. That does it for us for today. One more little
00:44:23 shameless plug here. My book is Pierre Polyev, A Political Life, nine weeks now on the bestseller
00:44:28 list. But if you want to get that and see for yourself what all the fuss is about with this guy
00:44:33 riding high in the polls, you'll learn a great deal in that book. I've had a few kind people on
00:44:37 social media share pictures of them on their vacations reading it. So particularly ambitious
00:44:41 if you consider it as a hardcover. So if you decide to bring that with you, you're showing
00:44:45 true dedication. So thanks very much. You can get that on Amazon and Indigo or at Sutherland House
00:44:50 Books. But we will talk to you tomorrow, 23 hours and 15 minutes from now. Thank you. God bless and
00:44:55 good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by
00:45:01 donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:45:31 We'll be right back.
00:46:01 We'll be right back.