Juno News - October 11, 2022


PayPal's financial deplatforming should alarm everyone


Episode Stats


Length

31 minutes

Words per minute

117.25799

Word count

3,717

Sentence count

248

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

What do Justin Trudeau and PayPal have in common? They both want to freeze the finances of their political opponents. And they're both in love with the idea of taking away Canadian holidays. Today's episode of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show starts right now.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:10.440 Coming up, what do PayPal and Justin Trudeau have in common? They both want to freeze the finances of their political foes.
00:00:17.880 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:21.100 Hello, everyone, and welcome to you all. This is another edition of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, the Andrew Lawton Show, here on True North on this Tuesday, October 11th, 2022.
00:00:33.040 Hope you all had a wonderful, absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving weekend, or as I should say, if we're using the true politically correct lingo right now,
00:00:42.480 I learned this the other day. The Waterloo Region District School Board did not wish people initially a happy Thanksgiving.
00:00:49.420 Thanksgiving, they wish their students, teachers, and family a happy fall-long weekend holiday, which is about as benign and bureaucratic, politically correct corporate woke-speak as it gets.
00:01:03.240 Fall-long weekend holiday. This is like what they do in the UK, where a lot of their holidays don't even have names.
00:01:09.220 It's like the Summer Bank Holiday, the Fall Bank Holiday, the March Bank Holiday, or whenever they happen to fall. I can't remember offhand.
00:01:16.660 But just like Thanksgiving is supposedly too controversial a greeting to wish upon your students and school community.
00:01:26.240 And I was looking it up, and it's like in the US, I get why Thanksgiving is associated with colonialism and, you know, the pilgrims and all that.
00:01:33.360 And I understand. I don't agree with going down the woke PC road, but I understand it.
00:01:38.560 In a Canadian context, we don't have the pilgrims.
00:01:42.240 And Thanksgiving in Canada, as I understand it, and I did a little bit of research on this before starting the show today,
00:01:47.680 has nothing to do with colonialism. It's just about, you know, giving thanks,
00:01:52.600 which in and of itself, I guess, is just too controversial and too hairy a prospect for today's dark and dismal times.
00:01:59.820 So I'm not even like a Thanksgiving lover. I don't even like eating turkey.
00:02:05.240 But now I want to just wrap myself in Thanksgiving regalia and be Captain Thanksgiving
00:02:10.880 just because I don't like the Grinches who are trying to steal Thanksgiving. 0.96
00:02:13.880 So you can wish people a happy Thanksgiving. You can wish people a Merry Christmas.
00:02:17.560 You can do all of that. And coming up, I may even do an extra greeting for American Thanksgiving in November
00:02:22.740 just to, like, really drive home the point that I'm not going to let anyone take away holidays.
00:02:26.900 We all need a little holiday every now and then.
00:02:29.700 So that is out of the way now. I've wished you the greeting.
00:02:32.620 I've cancelled myself and rendered myself unemployable by the Waterloo Region District School Board.
00:02:38.900 The big story I wanted to talk about today was PayPal.
00:02:42.360 Now, this is not a distinctly Canadian story,
00:02:45.820 but it very much has a Canadian tie-in that I want to share with you here.
00:02:50.860 And if you missed it, what happened is a few days ago,
00:02:53.300 PayPal said it was going to impose a fine system where its users,
00:02:58.680 so people that sign up to use PayPal, which is this private payment transfer service,
00:03:04.200 it was going to fine them $2,500 if they engaged in what PayPal determined was misinformation.
00:03:13.520 Misinformation.
00:03:14.280 And they said also other things there like hate speech and hate and all of that.
00:03:17.580 And if you read the actual policy here,
00:03:20.160 it was an update to the user agreement that said
00:03:22.800 any violation would result in liquidated damages of $2,500 taken from your account
00:03:28.660 and offending behaviors triggering this would be anything that involves the sending, posting,
00:03:34.420 or publication of any messages, content, or materials
00:03:37.480 that in PayPal's sole discretion promote misinformation.
00:03:42.540 So if I post something on my Twitter account,
00:03:49.600 PayPal could say,
00:03:51.420 we're taking $2,500 from your PayPal account.
00:03:55.920 And that's even, by the way, saying that it is, in fact, misinformation,
00:03:59.180 which, as we know, is just absolutely fraught these days.
00:04:02.240 And it's one of the most loaded politicized terms.
00:04:04.980 To say something is misinformation.
00:04:06.780 And this is why it's so insidious.
00:04:08.480 And I'll talk about the Canadian political context here in a moment.
00:04:11.820 But PayPal did this, and instantly there's just this massive wave of people
00:04:15.880 canceling their PayPal accounts, closing their PayPal accounts.
00:04:19.680 I have a dormant PayPal account, which I suppose I should log on and close myself.
00:04:24.800 I don't have $2,500 in there for them to take away.
00:04:28.260 But now I'm wondering if I could, like, start incurring PayPal debt
00:04:31.280 if they just go around and say,
00:04:32.960 oh, yeah, this guy, yeah, he's been misinforming.
00:04:36.100 So I'm going to log in and find I have, like, you know, minus $12,500 in my PayPal account.
00:04:42.680 So they've backtracked on this.
00:04:44.140 And they've said, well, okay, yeah, no, this was misinformation.
00:04:47.640 We didn't mean to.
00:04:49.040 It was accidental.
00:04:50.720 It was, no, nothing to see here.
00:04:52.460 So they've actually said that the policy itself didn't exist.
00:04:56.520 They've said there was no policy.
00:04:58.220 It was an accident.
00:04:59.360 So they're not admitting that they got caught.
00:05:02.160 And I could only assume the reason they're not admitting that is because
00:05:06.280 then they would have to find themselves $2,500 for misinformation if that was it.
00:05:12.480 I guess, actually, no, they'll have to find themselves anyway.
00:05:14.780 Because no matter which way you slice it, this is misinformation on PayPal's part.
00:05:19.780 But it is an example of a company that's being shamed into doing the right thing.
00:05:24.300 But I also think there's a tremendous point here where no one should, at this stage, trust PayPal.
00:05:30.280 Because PayPal has already said it does not value free speech.
00:05:35.340 And one of the very founders of PayPal tweeted about this.
00:05:39.640 He said, you know, this is very difficult to see for a company that he helped build go down this road.
00:05:44.460 And, you know, I understand that wholeheartedly.
00:05:47.580 But I want to bring it into the Canadian political context here.
00:05:51.300 Because one thing that we saw earlier this year in the course of the truckers' convoy was how going after people's finances was seen as the silver bullet to going after people themselves.
00:06:03.100 It's called financial deplatforming.
00:06:05.080 And whatever my libertarian bona fides tell me about big tech censorship, which is that it's a terrible thing and something that we should resist in culture.
00:06:14.720 But I'm leery to find a government regulation that solves this problem.
00:06:19.520 Because, you know, you as an individual consumer make a decision to have a Facebook account, have a Twitter account, and so on.
00:06:26.140 And we can debate and discuss this.
00:06:28.200 But when we're talking about financial services, and PayPal is a financial service.
00:06:34.140 It's one that you engage with voluntarily.
00:06:35.900 But it's also voluntary in the sense that you may choose to have a TD account or choose to have a CIBC account.
00:06:42.120 But you can't choose to have no banking in this day and age.
00:06:45.120 You can't choose to have no bank account.
00:06:46.800 So financial services are one of those core, core things that you cannot function in this society without.
00:06:54.280 So when all of a sudden your financial service providers are telling you, you know what, we're going to go after you politically.
00:07:02.380 And if you don't believe they will, just take a look at what happened last week to Toby Young.
00:07:06.440 Now, Toby Young is a free speech champion in the United Kingdom.
00:07:09.920 He is the founder of the Daily Skeptic of the Free Speech Union.
00:07:13.780 And PayPal had suspended his account for basically no legitimate reason.
00:07:21.080 And again, they eventually backtracked on this.
00:07:23.000 But how can you ever return from that?
00:07:25.300 If once you know that PayPal has you in its crosshairs and that the very lifeblood of your business or perhaps even your personal finances could be in those crosshairs as well, how could you ever go back to normal?
00:07:39.540 And this is the problem I have when government gets into bed with big tech.
00:07:44.000 And this is precisely what's happening in Canada with Bill C-11.
00:07:48.340 It's what's happening with the attempts by the liberal government to regulate misinformation and hate speech and to force social media companies to basically be subservient to the whims of government on these things.
00:08:01.800 Remember, government wants to just put this malign alliance in place between itself and tech platforms so that if governments say something is hate speech, the tech companies have to delete it.
00:08:12.620 And it's not a big leap to get from there to misinformation where, again, if the government says something is misinformation, a social media company will have to take it off its platform.
00:08:22.920 And all of this is part and parcel of a trend we're seeing, which is just completely wholesale deplatforming, completely trying to purge people's digital existence and doing this in a way that makes it so that the government has the sole authority on whether you get to have a voice or not.
00:08:46.300 And when you talk about these things, it sounds inherently conspiratorial.
00:08:50.380 It sounds like I'm talking about Justin Trudeau sitting in a room saying, well, you know, I don't like that Andrew guy.
00:08:56.040 I'm going to press the button.
00:08:56.860 And then it's like, you know, the old Austin Powers movies where just the floor opens up behind him and just I fall through into the pit of water where the sharks are swirling around and stuff like that.
00:09:06.360 Again, I mean, that's not exactly the power we're talking about here.
00:09:10.040 But we are talking about a government that's trying to make itself all powerful when it comes to who can publish things online.
00:09:18.080 And they can try, as they're doing with C11, to couch it in terms that sound nice.
00:09:22.440 No, no, no.
00:09:22.840 It's not about censorship.
00:09:23.860 It's about Canadian content.
00:09:25.620 We want more Canadian content.
00:09:27.260 We want more Canadian YouTubers. 1.00
00:09:29.260 We want more Canadian films on Netflix.
00:09:31.300 Okay, fine.
00:09:32.920 Let's focus on getting the market to provide that.
00:09:36.220 And let's accept that we cannot trust government to really be controlling any of the levers of content.
00:09:43.500 Because if government controls any of the levers of content, it's inherently going to go down that road of censorship.
00:09:49.480 And that is a road from which there is no going back.
00:09:53.240 Now, when we've been talking about the measures that the government is putting in on internet regulation in Canada,
00:09:58.780 my focus has been on content because that's typically been where we've seen these things going after.
00:10:05.100 And I totally must admit that I did not imagine the financial connection to these specific bills.
00:10:13.420 But yes, PayPal is a technology company.
00:10:15.860 So what if all of a sudden the federal government is deciding to put its hate and misinformation policies towards PayPal
00:10:22.880 or towards, I don't know, Interac e-transfers for all I know.
00:10:26.280 And this is the sort of thing that would sound conspiratorial if we hadn't lived through what we lived through in January and February,
00:10:36.240 culminating in the Emergencies Act in which the federal government did give itself the power
00:10:40.980 to freeze the bank accounts of its political enemies.
00:10:44.400 And that is a point, I mean, that is like a threshold that once you've crossed,
00:10:50.560 you've really surrendered the ability to have anyone give you the benefit of the doubt.
00:10:56.280 No one can give the liberal government the benefit of the doubt that they're not going to use and abuse powers that they give themselves,
00:11:04.120 or even powers they haven't yet given themselves but may in the future,
00:11:07.100 to do some things that we would find unfathomable even a year ago.
00:11:14.120 And that's where we are at now.
00:11:16.120 So what we're seeing with PayPal has nothing to do with the liberal government.
00:11:19.940 This is PayPal stepping in it.
00:11:22.280 And incidentally, I should say, everyone was closing their accounts so much
00:11:26.260 that they started to make it more difficult for people to close their accounts.
00:11:31.240 And I've seen a number of folks that have shared screenshots about this
00:11:34.360 where they've gone through that process of closing and they forced them to call.
00:11:38.560 So they're doing like the thing that the phone companies do when you want to cancel your plan
00:11:41.780 and making you talk to a person because they're just like so terrified
00:11:46.080 that they're going to lose a huge chunk of their consumer base.
00:11:49.380 Or perhaps they think that all of these people are just rubes that can be talked back into it
00:11:53.520 when PayPal apologizes and says, no, no, no, we didn't really mean it.
00:11:56.720 That wasn't actually the policy.
00:11:58.240 Nothing to see here.
00:11:59.080 And so on.
00:12:00.180 So PayPal and Trudeau are not connected insofar as I can tell.
00:12:05.860 But what is relevant right now is the fact that there is this cultural push
00:12:11.240 not just to live and let live and say, yeah, you know what?
00:12:14.440 I believe my stuff.
00:12:15.400 I'm going to do my thing.
00:12:16.220 You do your thing.
00:12:17.100 And, you know, I don't need to agree with you to sell you a product.
00:12:21.120 That's gone.
00:12:22.000 That's dead.
00:12:22.600 If you've decided that someone is the enemy, you are expected to just shut them down however you can.
00:12:32.300 PayPal is not allowed in this woke climate to be a company that has a politically neutral set of values
00:12:39.520 in which they say, yeah, if conservatives want to use our platform, liberals want to use our platform,
00:12:44.620 it's, you know, we just are a service provider.
00:12:46.320 It doesn't really matter.
00:12:47.740 That's no longer allowed.
00:12:49.020 And interestingly enough, I spoke a couple of weeks ago, you may recall, with Tom Kamich
00:12:54.940 at the Canada Strong and Free Regional Networking Conference in Red Deer.
00:12:59.200 And he is putting forward a bill, which, to be honest, is quite relevant to the PayPal situation.
00:13:04.900 A bill that would, if companies go down this road of wokeness, if companies go down the road of being political,
00:13:12.400 of doing something that deviates from their stated purpose, they have to consult their shareholders first.
00:13:18.800 And I want to play a clip of that exchange for you here, just to refresh your memory.
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00:21:24.240 Thank you.
00:21:54.240 Thank you.
00:22:24.620 And all of this is to say that, you know, right now, there still has never been any real accountability for the government in Canada freezing those bank accounts.
00:22:34.720 And we have the public order.
00:23:04.720 I have not been called to testify.
00:23:34.720 And whether the commissioner.
00:24:34.720 overly cynical. But I have to hope that the truth will eventually come out and that the truth will
00:24:42.140 make its way into the hearts and minds of Canadians who are not dyed-in-the-wool convoy haters, but
00:24:48.140 Canadians who are open-minded, who are not convoy adjacent, they're not convoy contemptful, but they
00:24:54.460 are Canadians that are willing to listen to the facts and willing to listen to reason. And that
00:25:00.000 was, by the way, that demographic was one of the reasons I wrote my book, The Freedom Convoy,
00:25:04.940 because I felt there were people out there that might be the quiet majority that maybe had some
00:25:11.820 misgivings, maybe had some skepticism, but they were prepared to engage and they were prepared to
00:25:17.040 listen. And these were the people that I was trying to go after. I was not trying to convince Justin
00:25:20.980 Trudeau. I wasn't trying to, you know, convince anyone like that. I was trying, I mean, it would
00:25:24.640 be nice, but I was trying to talk to people that could genuinely engage on this issue with an open
00:25:30.360 mind. And there were a lot of very reductive binaries in the convoy that didn't serve anyone
00:25:37.820 well. That, you know, if you lived in Ottawa, you couldn't like this thing. That if you were a member
00:25:42.960 of the convoy protest, you were just this, like, complete anti-science, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal, 0.75
00:25:48.460 all of that. And these things that just served no one except for the government. The government
00:25:54.560 was the only beneficiary of these claims. Because what it did is make it so that anything the
00:26:01.220 government did to respond to this was going to be justified because there was so much anger and
00:26:06.380 contempt. And yes, to use this word again, real misinformation whipped up about the convoy
00:26:12.920 protesters, whipped up about the people who were making up this movement, who were just ordinary
00:26:17.780 Canadians. Ordinary Canadians trying to tell the government we've had enough with vaccine mandates. 0.62
00:26:24.560 And this is, to be honest, still something that bothers me to no end. The level of classism
00:26:32.580 that we saw in the media coverage of this convoy protest and by a lot of the Ottawa elites,
00:26:39.740 people that honestly didn't realize how this group of blue-collar yokels from Western Canada,
00:26:45.840 and I don't say that as a judgment. I'm trying to sort of channel their perception of this,
00:26:49.780 of how these blue-collar yokels managed to bring a G7 capital to its knees.
00:26:57.240 And these people didn't want to admit that they had been defeated. The government didn't want to
00:27:04.140 admit that these people outsmarted them, outfoxed them, outnumbered them, and that they were more
00:27:10.800 passionate than them. And, you know, one of the enduring things that I learned about when I was
00:27:16.400 writing my book, and I think this will come out in the course of the hearings, is that all of the
00:27:22.900 people that were really taking on these core leadership positions, most of them, not all of
00:27:27.120 them, they were people that had lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates. People that had been
00:27:33.520 ex-soldiers, ex-police officers, ex-nurses, ex-firefighters. And they take their skill sets
00:27:40.660 that they had devoted for years to the public good, that the government has said, we no longer
00:27:46.720 want, we no longer care about because you're not vaccinated. And they say, I'm going to devote this
00:27:50.880 same skill set and the time I now have on my hands because of you, Justin Trudeau,
00:27:55.760 and I'm going to devote it to this protest. And that's why you had people like Tom Marazzo,
00:28:01.560 a former army captain that took on such a key logistical role. And you had Tamara Leach. Now,
00:28:08.060 she wasn't someone who had lost her job because of vaccine mandates. But again,
00:28:12.140 very passionate woman that really wanted to make this happen. Chris Barber, who didn't lose his job
00:28:18.560 to vaccine mandates, he was vaccinated himself. But a trucker who said, I'm going to do what I can,
00:28:23.060 I'm going to take my truck and take my friends and go to Ottawa. Benjamin Dichter. I'm naming all the
00:28:28.980 people that weren't affected by the vaccine mandate thing, I realized. But I also still think that when you
00:28:34.480 go out one level, a lot of the people that were there were in that category, the firefighters that
00:28:40.540 were volunteering, the former police officer, Daniel Bulford, who was volunteering, Bethan
00:28:45.480 Nodwell. I mean, these names of people, many of them are not even the most prominent figures
00:28:51.020 of this movement. But these names of people that all played a part of this thing that embarrassed the
00:28:58.180 government. And the government does not like to be embarrassed. The government does not want to be
00:29:02.760 embarrassed. The government does not want to admit that it was wrong. The government doesn't want to
00:29:07.700 admit, I mean, even the PayPal, PayPal responded to the controversy by effectively blaming the intern.
00:29:14.100 So PayPal was saying, well, yeah, you know, it's, we didn't really mean it. It wasn't accurate. It
00:29:18.020 wasn't our policy. They didn't want to admit that they actually got it wrong. And the federal government
00:29:23.580 isn't going to admit that either. The federal government is never going to come out and say, you know
00:29:27.800 what, we stepped in it. And we're sorry. And we shouldn't have done this. And even if they did,
00:29:33.000 I would say too little too late. What are you going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again?
00:29:38.480 We've seen courts side with the government throughout most of the pandemic. And while these
00:29:43.160 pandemic related challenges have not yet made their way up to the Supreme Court, I am not an optimistic
00:29:48.820 person when it comes to the Canadian judiciary. I'm just not. I don't think the federal government is
00:29:54.520 going to find itself slapped on the wrist or slapped anywhere by the Supreme Court because
00:30:01.840 the courts have just been so deferential. They said, well, yeah, yeah, you trampled on civil
00:30:05.700 liberties, but it's a pandemic. So whoopsie. But with the commission, there's an opportunity for
00:30:13.220 Canadians to see the raw data, to see the evidence, to hear the testimony, to hear from Justin Trudeau
00:30:19.220 themselves. I mean, we already know that the government's core narratives about the convoy
00:30:23.060 have continued to crumble. The government's narratives have absolutely crumbled on this,
00:30:28.620 such as, for example, it was police who asked us for this. It was police who wanted this.
00:30:34.320 Whoop, didn't happen. Anything Marco Mendicino has said has effectively crumbled. And I don't think
00:30:40.060 that's all that difficult because I think Marco Mendicino generally just wakes up in the morning
00:30:44.420 and just sort of says the first thing that comes to his mind. But nevertheless, I do think that we are
00:30:50.280 moving towards an era in which truth will eventually come out. And we're going to be watching
00:30:56.800 this on Thursday. True North is going to be covering it. We are going to be watching it every
00:31:01.340 day and we are going to be having daily recaps. So do head on over to tnc.news if you want to catch
00:31:07.160 those. And I should also say, if you value the work that we're doing and our contribution to
00:31:11.620 the broader stories like these, please do head on over to donate.tnc.news. Donate.tnc.news.
00:31:19.460 That does it for me for today. We'll be back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent 0.97
00:31:24.260 talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show on True North. Thank you. God bless and good day to you all.
00:31:29.600 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North
00:31:33.860 at www.tnc.news.