Juno News - December 02, 2022


Pierre Poilievre on Tamara Lich and the Freedom Convoy

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau John A. Macdonald Joel Lightbound Jagmeet Singh Tamara Leach
The Fight for Freedom in China (ft. Tiffany Meier) Does this look like a country where protesting is allowed？

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

157.56

Word count

1,087

Sentence count

68


Summary

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

The Public Order Emergency Commission is investigating Justin Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act in response to the truckers' protest on Parliament Hill in late February of 2018. In this episode, we speak with Commissioner Jagmeet Singh, who is leading the investigation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Over the last seven weeks, we've heard scores of witnesses, hours and hours of testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission investigating Justin Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act.
00:00:11.820 Now, I know that the Conservatives and you were against that act, but looking back on this, we're now coming up on 10 months, almost a year since the convoy protests and since the Emergencies Act.
00:00:23.440 Where is your perspective on this now after the commission hearings have commenced?
00:00:27.340 It's the same place that it was before the protesters even arrived in Ottawa.
00:00:33.500 I was out there, actually out that way.
00:00:37.020 I was on the steps of the John A. Macdonald building across from the Parliament buildings and they asked me,
00:00:43.520 what do you think about all the terrible people that are coming for this protest?
00:00:47.460 And I said, well, you know, you're talking about, you know, they pick one or two examples of bad actors.
00:00:54.860 And I said, look, there are in any protest going to be good people and bad people.
00:01:01.560 You have thousands of people attending a protest.
00:01:04.060 You can pick a group that are not behaving properly.
00:01:08.980 But on the whole, I supported the peaceful and law abiding protesters who wanted their liberty and livelihoods back while simultaneously condemning anyone who broke laws, behaved badly or blockaded critical infrastructure.
00:01:26.180 And that's what I feel today.
00:01:27.640 I also think Justin Trudeau provoked this entire crisis with an entirely unnecessary and unscientific vaccine mandate on truckers.
00:01:36.700 It was imposed as the rest of the world was beginning to lift mandates.
00:01:41.240 And it was imposed on the very people least likely to spread a virus because they're in a truck by themselves all day long.
00:01:50.900 And so I said, I thought this is unfair and unjust.
00:01:55.160 And if he had not done that, there would have been no trucker protest on Parliament Hill.
00:02:00.400 We wouldn't even be having this conversation.
00:02:01.300 And he has, to this date, not provided any scientific evidence that there was a medical reason for doing it.
00:02:09.140 So I think it was part of a deliberate strategy to divide and conquer.
00:02:14.040 One that his own Liberal MP, Joel Lightbound, called out during the convoy protests.
00:02:20.920 And we're dealing with all of these costs, all of this division, all of this distraction because he deliberately provoked it at the outset.
00:02:28.080 Let me return to that comment you gave, which I've heard you say before about condemning lawbreakers and supporting law-abiding peaceful protesters.
00:02:36.860 Because one of the big questions about this protest is at what point did it become in the government's eyes unlawful?
00:02:43.120 So when you talk about someone like Tamara Leach, for example, is she an example of the one you support who is peaceful and law-abiding?
00:02:48.780 Or is she an example of one of the law-breaking ones you condemn?
00:02:51.580 Well, I'm not going to talk about any particular individual because I think she has a case for the courts and I'll let the courts just determine.
00:02:59.920 Because I haven't studied every single person's conduct over that two or three week period.
00:03:04.300 I wasn't on the ground surveilling people.
00:03:08.200 So I can't say what people did and what they didn't do.
00:03:10.400 But I can say that from the vast majority of people that I witnessed who participated in it seemed to be just doing the normal Canadian peaceful protest.
00:03:22.940 Now, again, there were people who behaved badly or blockaded critical infrastructure.
00:03:28.280 I don't support blocking borders or shutting down highways.
00:03:32.420 What about Wellington Street?
00:03:33.380 Is a trucker on Wellington Street a peaceful law-abiding protester?
00:03:36.840 Well, look, I think it depends if they're on foot.
00:03:39.340 I think my preference would have been for them to be on foot and to park their trucks off-site.
00:03:46.380 I think that would have been better.
00:03:48.640 But that said, I think overall the reason we had these protests and all of this disruption was because of an unnecessary and very disruptive vaccine mandate that deprived all of these truckers of their livelihoods.
00:04:06.720 And that's why they felt like they had nowhere to go.
00:04:09.340 You know, it was the middle of February, I think, and cold.
00:04:14.320 And I don't think it was a luxury for them to be sleeping in their trucks.
00:04:18.180 They did it because they had nowhere to go.
00:04:20.200 They had no job to return to because their job required them to seamlessly pass through the border with their goods.
00:04:27.860 And the Prime Minister took away that livelihood from them.
00:04:31.840 And that's why this thing went on for so long.
00:04:33.600 If he had not done that, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.
00:04:37.080 If the Commissioner finds that the Emergencies Act was not justified, one of the concerns that's been raised is that Parliament can take it, review it, perhaps propose amendments.
00:04:46.720 But there really isn't a sanction or a penalty attached to the government on that.
00:04:51.200 And Jagmeet Singh, as I understand it, has said that even if that happens, he's going to continue supporting the Liberals.
00:04:56.200 So how are you in a position, if you are at all, to really demand accountability if this was an overreach?
00:05:02.340 Well, I think we need to look at...
00:05:05.200 I've consulted with some legal scholars on ideas to protect Canadians against abuses of power under the Emergencies Act.
00:05:13.800 And I think we need to do, we need to have some review of that because obviously the Prime Minister used it when it was unnecessary.
00:05:23.660 You know, the border blockades were already lifted, as you know, when the Emergency Act came.
00:05:30.720 And it's hard for the Prime Minister to explain what the emergency was.
00:05:34.320 There's obviously some disruption in downtown Ottawa on several blocks, but, you know, that doesn't constitute a national emergency, like a, you know, catastrophic earthquake or a foreign invasion or some sort of terrorist attack that takes down a large building.
00:05:56.680 That's what you think of when you say national emergency.
00:05:59.940 And we didn't have a national emergency.
00:06:02.700 Obviously what we had was, you know, a large protest and some roads blocked in a downtown setting, while the borders were completely open to commerce.
00:06:14.480 So I think we need to have another look at the Emergency Act powers to make sure that no Prime Minister is able to abuse the power in the Act like that again.
00:06:25.040 And there may be some more checks and balances required to do it.
00:06:32.700 Thank you.
00:06:34.280 I think we had a good review of that.
00:06:34.880 Thank you.
00:06:36.500 All right.
00:06:52.520 Thank you.