Juno News - July 25, 2024


Poilievre says media should stop quoting ＂experts＂ who caused the drug crisis

Topics
polyev criticism of media patient suffering in healthcare system
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Colin Craig Adam Zivo Danielle Smith Andrew Lawton Show Andrew Lawton Pierre Polyette Justin Trudeau Sharon Koivu Bonnie Henry Tracy Gray Adam Zeebo John
Who is Canada’s new Chief of Defence Staff General Jennie Carignan？ Too many immigrants in Canada？

Episode Stats


Length

42 minutes

Words per minute

173.51

Word count

7,453

Sentence count

177

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, Andrew takes a deep dive into one of Canada's most galvanizing political issues: drug use and crime. He discusses the growing problem of drug use in Canada, and how the media and politicians are contributing to it.

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
00:01:15 this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true north
00:01:19 hello and welcome to you all this is the andrew lawton show canada's most irreverent
00:01:29 talk show on true north on this thursday july 25th just after one o'clock eastern 10 a.m on
00:01:35 the west coast a lovely 2 p.m in the afternoon for most of you in atlantic canada 2 30 for those of
00:01:42 you in the lovely province of newfoundland if you go to saint pierre a michelagh i don't know if
00:01:48 saint pierre and michelagh are hosting any olympic events now that paris is the official olympic host
00:01:53 but i the only thing that i have talked about on the show and will talk about as far as the olympics
00:01:58 are concerned i believe is those outfits and we did that earlier this week so you are olympic free
00:02:03 now although i i did know just on a complete aside there has been this brewing scandal where
00:02:09 apparently someone who was on the canadian soccer team in some capacity was filming the new zealand
00:02:15 soccer team as they were practicing which as i understand it is a bit of a no-no and then i was
00:02:20 also reading a story this morning about i forget the exact number but i i think it was like the
00:02:25 100,000 or something condoms that are going to be distributed to athletes in the Olympic village,
00:02:32 because apparently in the Olympic villages, there is always just copious amounts of sex going on. 0.94
00:02:38 And all that I could think of was the problem with having sex at the Olympics that you find 0.83
00:02:42 out after the Canadian soccer team was filming you. So take from that what you will. That's my
00:02:46 one Olympic joke. I can't do sports humor in any other context because I don't know it well enough.
00:02:50 But I do know a lot about politics. So we'll stick to my wheelhouse here this morning.
00:02:54 conservative Pierre Polyev, leader Pierre Polyev was in my neck of the woods, not for me. I just
00:03:00 happened to be like 15 minutes away from where he was holding a press conference. So I'll share
00:03:05 some details about that with you on this show, because I wanted to do a deeper dive into what
00:03:11 has increasingly become one of the most galvanizing political issues that we have in the country right
00:03:16 now, which is crime and related to that drugs. Now, these are technically two separate issues,
00:03:23 But you have to view them really as one in the same because the rise of hard drug use in communities across the country has coincided with the widespread proliferation of crime.
00:03:34 And while, yes, organized crime, extortion, things like that cannot necessarily be directly linked to drugs in every case, oftentimes organized crime is fueled by and also fuels the drug trade.
00:03:47 And more importantly, when you look at the property crime, theft, vandalism, so much of this is related to the rise in drugs.
00:03:54 And it's amazing that over the last decade, over the last decade, we have seen a massive, massive rise in all of these so-called harm reduction initiatives, the expansion of so-called safe supply.
00:04:06 I put a lot of so-calls in when I talk about drugs for obvious reasons.
00:04:10 Pierre Paulyad this morning called someone a so-called doctor.
00:04:13 So it's not just me.
00:04:14 but all of these things have happened and it's amazing the problem has gotten worse
00:04:18 so I think it's something that we need to unpack a little bit here now we can talk about the
00:04:23 problems with safe supply so-called safe supply we will discuss that in a little bit Adam Zivo
00:04:29 is going to be back on the show momentarily but I also want to talk about the discussion of this
00:04:33 the media narrative around this because Polyev this morning when he was delivering his remarks
00:04:38 talking about rising crime and there were further numbers from Statistic Canada which came out this
00:04:43 morning that violent crime is up 50% since 2015. There have been 572,572 incidents of violent
00:04:53 crime in 2023, which is massive compared to the 382,000 in 2015 back when Justin Trudeau took
00:05:01 office. But all of this is to say that we are looking at a problem that everyone in the country
00:05:08 is seeing. Everyone in Canada is seeing. People that live in communities across the country are
00:05:13 seeing the drug and crime issues but the so-called experts are the ones who aren't so polyev took aim
00:05:19 at the way that the media treats these so-called experts this is the so-called edition of the show
00:05:25 it's the so-called experts the so-called safe supply the so-called harm reduction all of this
00:05:29 but he looked at the media and said you are part of the problem here take a look
00:05:33 so uh the dev the evidence is in and it's final and uh you know i would also encourage the media
00:05:41 to be more responsible. It is just so irresponsible for you to go and quote people who profit from
00:05:49 the ongoing drug crisis as though they are experts. They are not experts. If they were
00:05:55 experts, their policies, which have been implemented over the last nine years, would not
00:06:00 have caused 40,000 deaths, would not have seen an over 100% increase in opioid overdoses.
00:06:08 they the last thing they want is for the crisis to end because they're doing they're making so
00:06:13 much money off of it we've got to stop feeding the activist class and start providing treatment
00:06:20 and recovery i would encourage you if you're going to be if you're going to cover this drug issue
00:06:24 stop talking to the people who caused the problem start talking to the recovery centers
00:06:29 i would ask why don't you ask the people when you when you interview them why don't you ask them
00:06:35 how many people have you got off drugs call them up the local public authority public health
00:06:41 authorities ask them how many people they've gotten off of drugs because it's interesting
00:06:47 the media rewards these people for the carnage that they're causing they call you call them
00:06:53 experts they're not experts they're expert only at one thing and that is perpetuating
00:06:58 the drug crisis their policies have been implemented for the last nine years and we
00:07:05 see the results the experts are the people at places like harvest house in ottawa or the oak
00:07:11 center in winnipeg where they bring people in and get them off of drugs let's start quoting
00:07:18 them as the experts thank you and of course the criticism of the media did not stop there
00:07:25 Pierre Polyev continued. And at one point, a reporter from CTV London asked him questions
00:07:31 about this. And it led to one of those quintessential Polyev v. reporter exchanges
00:07:37 with this particular journalist. And the whole thing we've posted, True North has posted it on
00:07:42 our X account and probably our YouTube page at some point today. But so the whole thing was like
00:07:47 over four minutes. But I'll share with you a snippet that shows the contrast here and shows
00:07:52 more importantly I think how significant the framing is on this issue and why the euphemisms
00:07:58 the terms including safe supply are inherently political and why using these things unquestioningly
00:08:05 actually contributes to some of the problems we're seeing in society right now where anyone
00:08:10 who criticizes these programs is deemed as being anti-science when the program has really just had
00:08:16 this delightfully euphemistic positive sounding name put on it that doesn't bear out with how
00:08:21 these programs are manifesting but this was that altercation in london this morning
00:08:25 compromise here you you've drawn quite a line this morning but is there any compromise opportunity
00:08:31 where you could work with some of these folks come up with a modified plan or is there strictly
00:08:35 one option here in your mind are you talking sorry on what what subject are we talking now
00:08:41 drugs or crimes i'm talking safe supplies well again you know how can you possibly report on
00:08:49 the story when you're already using government propaganda it's not safe yes that's the problem
00:08:57 you're using the term they're using how can you so you've decided you've already made up your mind
00:09:02 you're going to report their statements as though they're true well why are you using their language
00:09:08 oh yes there are of course so you're just being force-fed talking points by the authorities who
00:09:18 caused the problem in the first place this is exactly this is exactly this is exactly the
00:09:23 problem this is exactly the problem exactly the problem how is it working i'm just asking you to
00:09:32 answer the question whether or not there's any room to work with these other agencies or not
00:09:37 and whether you're going to stick to your your proposals which are your proposals that's all
00:09:41 i'm asking sir my proposal is recovery and treatment am i going to give more money to
00:09:47 these agencies that have caused the crisis no they're not going to get any more money
00:09:53 they've caused the mayhem have you been around have you seen the tent cities
00:09:58 lived in this very neighborhood for eight years have you seen the tent cities 0.98
00:10:01 okay and you think that these agencies are doing a good job
00:10:07 i think there's sir it's my job to debate a federal leader on this issue sir but i will
00:10:13 I'm asking you a question.
00:10:15 Are you think they're doing a good job when you go to see the 10 cities that are popping up everywhere in the country?
00:10:20 I agree with you on that, the community, but the agencies are different than the community.
00:10:24 And again, you're repeating their talking points.
00:10:27 I mean, there was a time when reporters believed their job was to hold government accountable, not regurgitate their talking points.
00:10:37 Who needs hard drugs when you can just watch those exchanges?
00:10:41 The only drug I need is a Pierre Poliev press conference.
00:10:45 That's the attitude.
00:10:47 Because these things, they are so infuriating when you see stories that unquestionably hold
00:10:53 up some people as quote-unquote experts, while denigrating anyone who has disdain for them
00:11:01 or anyone who has a different opinion.
00:11:03 This was the same attitude we saw during the COVID pandemic, where the government would
00:11:07 put up certain experts who oftentimes had financial skin in the game on whatever the discussion was
00:11:13 or were themselves quite ideological and all of these so-called harm reduction activists and I'm
00:11:18 talking when I say all I don't actually mean all let me let me distinguish between uh the few that
00:11:23 tend to dominate the discussion these ones are very heavily invested in this they run programs
00:11:30 that get a ton of money for doing this they are ideologically motivated they don't seem to be too
00:11:35 motivated by the science and the data and they don't actually have room for compromise so even
00:11:40 then the question to conservative leader pierre polyev will you work with these folks i don't
00:11:44 think they want to work with him any more than he wants to work with them which seems to be not that
00:11:49 much because they have two drastically different visions the vision that you've seen championed by
00:11:54 the polyev conservatives by alberta's government with danielle smith and dan williams who's the
00:12:00 addictions minister there is one that says we need to get people off of drugs and that's been
00:12:05 what's so frustrating when you talk to or watch interviews with some people in again the so-called
00:12:10 harm reduction space they don't actually discuss getting people off of drugs it's really about
00:12:16 accepting that people are going to be on drugs and not being bothered by that it's giving up on
00:12:23 people it is actually giving up on people which is the least compassionate thing that you can do
00:12:29 to those who are in a crisis,
00:12:30 whether it's those with mental illness,
00:12:32 whether it's those with drug addiction.
00:12:33 It's the same mentality.
00:12:35 I know there are different issues,
00:12:36 but it's the same mentality
00:12:37 as people that think assisted suicide
00:12:39 for those with mental illness is appropriate.
00:12:41 You are giving up on people instead of offering help.
00:12:45 And I have never,
00:12:46 I have spoken to people
00:12:47 who have recovered from drug addiction.
00:12:48 I have never once spoken to someone who regretted it.
00:12:52 And I have spoken to people,
00:12:53 and even this morning,
00:12:54 I saw in my Twitter mentions or my ex mentions,
00:12:56 people who said the only reason they went to treatment was because they felt forced into it
00:13:01 in a couple of cases people just told me online and i don't know who these people are
00:13:05 that they had treatment that was court ordered and that was the only reason they did it so it
00:13:10 actually led me to ask polyev a question that i had not heard him speak on which is whether he
00:13:15 would take the alberta approach which has been proposed there and admittedly i think the details
00:13:19 still need to be ironed out and look at a national version of that this was my question and his
00:13:25 response good morning andrew lawton true north i know you're familiar with alberta's approach to
00:13:30 drugs which similarly to you is very much against so-called safe supply but they have proposed a
00:13:37 forced intervention and in some cases really using the mechanisms of law to push drug users
00:13:42 into treatment under certain conditions would you support something like that nationally i don't know
00:13:48 i need to study it more i need to understand how it would work
00:13:53 i would i want everybody who's on drugs to be in treatment and rehab to get off drugs
00:14:00 what i haven't been able to figure out is if someone doesn't want to be rehabilitated can you
00:14:08 require them to be i don't know i'd like to see some evidence for and against before i make a
00:14:14 a judgment. Tracy Gray from BC is an MP in our caucus, a common sense conservative, who's proposed
00:14:24 that we have treatment in the prisons and that judges have the ability to make it part of a
00:14:31 sentence that drug-related offenses have drug treatment as part of the sentence so that the
00:14:41 offender who perhaps they were involved in theft we know the theft was linked to their addiction
00:14:45 the judge the judge could say while you're in prison you're required to be drug free and we're
00:14:51 going to provide you with high quality treatment behind bars that makes sense to me because they're
00:14:56 already going to be in prison anyway they might as well be cleaning up their body and their souls and 0.79
00:15:00 and their addictions um but i don't know if you can take someone off the street who has not
00:15:08 committed a prison offense and successfully rehabilitate them. If we can, I'm open to it,
00:15:18 but I need to see more evidence at this point. By the way, I would just say, I don't know
00:15:25 is an answer you don't hear often from politicians. And I actually respect that he was willing to
00:15:31 work through his thought process, at least in some way publicly, which, look, I wrote a book
00:15:36 on the guy. That's not normally how he is on these things. He likes to deliberate internally
00:15:40 and speak out when he has an answer. But I appreciated that. He's saying, listen, I'm open
00:15:45 to it. I want to see the evidence. And maybe Alberta is a bit of a test case for the rest of 0.99
00:15:49 the country in that case. But I can tell you one thing, that this is an issue that really goes
00:15:55 across political lines. I can't remember if I mentioned it on the show before or if it was in
00:15:59 another interview, but I was at a social gathering in some way and I was talking to someone that was
00:16:05 very not conservative, didn't like Danielle Smith, did not like Pierre Polyev, did not like the
00:16:09 conservatives on anything. And I was like, oh, this is going to be a terribly painful dinner.
00:16:14 And then the person volunteered, although I will say about Danielle Smith, I love what she's doing
00:16:18 on drugs, because they realize that drugs are ravaging their communities. And you have so many
00:16:24 people in quote unquote officialdom who are doing nothing but furthering this problem. And the news
00:16:31 that has come out including in London from the London police the diversion is happening is really
00:16:35 just reaffirming what people paying close attention to this that aren't bound to their
00:16:40 ideological support for these programs had have known for a while and one of those is Adam Zivo
00:16:45 who again was probably the least surprised by the London police announcement because he was
00:16:50 reporting on it before I don't even know if it's cool now but he was certainly reporting on it
00:16:54 before anyone in officialdom was acknowledging the problem he joins us on the line now columnist for
00:17:01 the National Post and founder and director for the Center for Responsible Drug Policies. Adam,
00:17:05 always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming back on here. I don't know if you saw those
00:17:10 two clips I played from Pierre Polyev, but the one in particular I found interesting was
00:17:14 he put aim on the media here and said the media has to stop elevating this certain class of
00:17:20 experts while really ignoring that these people are so heavily invested in the status quo. I was
00:17:26 wondering what your thought on that was. Well, I think that's a very fair criticism. We have to
00:17:30 it's pretty obvious that many journalists within Canada are not doing their job responsibly when
00:17:36 it comes to addiction policy. So they only consult with a very small number of quote-unquote experts
00:17:41 who often don't even have a background in addiction medicine. Oftentimes they're public
00:17:46 health experts who come from a different educational background, which is much less
00:17:51 rigorous than addiction medicine. And they don't have a lot of clinical experience treating people
00:17:55 who are struggling with addiction um and so this this small group of ideologically minded activist
00:18:01 scholars are cited again and again and again in most canadian media while addiction physicians
00:18:08 who are actually on the ground are largely ignored on top of that many journalists uh don't really
00:18:15 analyze their data really carefully so what happens is that you often have them citing studies
00:18:20 which are very low quality. And the journalists will just go and parrot the conclusion of the
00:18:26 study, but they'll pay zero attention to the methodology. There's a great study that came out
00:18:31 in January in the British Medical Journal that actually showed that safer supply didn't work,
00:18:37 but that the data was reframed to imply that it did work. And there was a lot of missed media
00:18:41 management there, which was an excellent case study of this. I'd love to talk about that later
00:18:45 if we have the time. Yeah. And I would say in general,
00:18:48 there's a shortcoming in a lot of science and health journalism and that you have people that
00:18:52 are not science and health experts. And again, one of the things that's great about journalism is
00:18:57 that you can develop a proficiency and a knowledge of something without having gone to 12 years of
00:19:01 school. But it means in a lot of ways, you're beholden to the data you take in. And if you're
00:19:06 getting in bad data or bad insights, or you're getting expert opinions that themselves are
00:19:12 co-opted in some way or very heavily biased, the output is going to be that way as well.
00:19:16 and the reporter may not even know that. Well, that's the thing. And then the problem here is
00:19:20 that also many journalists don't have enough time or resources to properly evaluate these studies
00:19:25 that are presented to them. So I'm going to use the BMJ article that I mentioned earlier as a case
00:19:30 study. So that study followed around 4,800 drug users in British Columbia over 18 months. And
00:19:38 they claimed that safer supply patients had a 55 to 91% reduction in mortality the week after
00:19:45 accessing safer supplies so they claimed that safe supply was remarkably effective at saving lives
00:19:52 but then i contacted seven physicians and a statistician and we spent about a three weeks
00:19:57 analyzing this this study and we realized that it was junk science that the underlying data actually
00:20:02 showed no statistically significant reduction mortality but that the researchers have relied on
00:20:08 you know one week outcomes instead of one year outcomes and it failed to fully filter out
00:20:12 confounding variables to inflate the positive effects of safer supply and you know that kind
00:20:19 of work takes a lot of time uh but many journalists they don't want to do that so all they'll do is
00:20:25 just you know parrot what's in the conclusions which is unfortunate and even though you know my
00:20:30 analysis has come out uh many journalists just continue to cite that study uncritically which
00:20:36 suggests that they're not even interested in understanding the methodological flaws of harm
00:20:40 reduction. It's concerning, the amount of laziness and willful blindness we see in this space.
00:20:47 I think that people like Sharon Koivu, who I know you and I, well, you were alongside her on a panel
00:20:53 I had on the show a while ago. She's probably one of the most effective commentators because she
00:20:58 does not have skin in the game in any other sense than she is a healthcare practitioner. And I think
00:21:03 her testimony has always been valuable because she was a big supporter of these policies and
00:21:08 just did what scientists and researchers are supposed to do, which is realize this isn't
00:21:12 working, it's making problems worse, and then she's backed away. Because I do think Polyev's 1.00
00:21:16 criticism of experts that have skin in the game is incredibly valid. I mean, people don't realize,
00:21:22 and I was hoping you could shine some light on this, how much money there is being made
00:21:26 by the status quo. Well, I mean, we have to keep in mind that safer supply is very profitable for
00:21:32 certain doctors and certain pharmacies. If you're coming in to get your safer supply drugs every
00:21:36 single day then the pharmacy is charging the government a dispensing fee every single day
00:21:42 and i've spoken to a few physicians who have crunched the numbers and they've discovered that
00:21:46 uh one pharmacy with 100 or more safer supply patients can make a million to 1.5 million dollars
00:21:53 off of that right off of that alone so that's nothing to do with you know giving people viagra
00:21:58 or beta blockers or anything else that's just on the safe supply yeah and this of course creates
00:22:02 pernicious financial incentives to keep people on safer supply rather than to get them on addiction
00:22:07 medications that stabilize them and lead them to visit pharmacies less often for example
00:22:13 supplicate is a monthly injectable quasi vaccine essentially for drug use uh it's essentially like
00:22:21 it's like a like a methadone it was like suboxone but then it just dissolves in your body over the
00:22:25 course of a month so you know if you're on supplicate you're there for you know you come
00:22:29 to your doctor once a month you come to your pharmacy once a month there's much less money
00:22:33 to be made off of you and of course many pharmacies are reluctant to support it because they can't
00:22:38 profit off of it um it is concerning that some pharmaceutical interests are very invested in
00:22:46 propagating safer supply i know that shoppers drug mart provided about two million dollars if
00:22:51 if I recall correctly, to the British Columbia Center
00:22:56 on Substance Use to help fund training on safer supply.
00:23:00 So you have this big corporate interest
00:23:03 providing financing to an ostensibly independent research
00:23:06 body to support safer supply that happens to be profitable
00:23:09 for that corporation.
00:23:11 Yeah, and I think that when we look at this,
00:23:14 I mean, to be honest, that should
00:23:16 be treated with the same level of skepticism
00:23:18 that people should treat harm reduction research done
00:23:21 tobacco companies on on vaping i mean you have to look at where this research is being funded and
00:23:26 i i would ask you about the other side of this which is that no one seems to be talking now in
00:23:32 these halls of officialdom which is the term i've been using on this episode about getting people
00:23:36 off of drugs and you know i remember about a decade ago when when i first started to see
00:23:41 the harm reduction discussion in london and even elsewhere ramp up there was always that
00:23:46 that promise that, okay, and once we get people into the system, we can then look at getting
00:23:51 them off of drugs. I just don't hear that conversation at all taking place. And I
00:23:55 certainly don't see any data to support that any of these mechanisms are getting people off of
00:24:00 drugs. Do you? No. And here's the underlying problem. So many of the policymakers and public
00:24:06 health experts who are in control of addiction policymaking in Canada are beholden to radical
00:24:12 drug activists who are often in active addiction so in vancouver the vancouver area network of drug
00:24:18 users van do is highly influential and has close relationships with a number of really prominent
00:24:24 policy makers so if you as a policy maker are listening to people who are actively using drugs
00:24:29 under the auspices of you know listening to people with lived experience or living experience
00:24:33 then maybe you're not going to prioritize getting people off of drugs because the people you are
00:24:37 listening to uh are using they want to keep on using they conceptualize their drug use as a
00:24:43 human right uh it's interesting i was talking to a british reporter or rather photojournalist who
00:24:49 did that big piece in the telegraph recently about vancouver and he was expressing shock to me
00:24:53 because when he spoke with van du and when he spoke with harm reduction activists about a month or two
00:24:57 ago they told him that they didn't feel like there was any problem with addiction they said it was
00:25:02 oppressive to expect people to live uh fulfilling lives or at least that's what he told me
00:25:07 So how do we reorient this? Because obviously some of the proposals on the table from the
00:25:14 Conservatives are ending funding for so-called safe supply programs. That doesn't outlaw these
00:25:20 programs. Provinces could still step up. I mean, theoretically, community organizations could.
00:25:24 I don't know if they will, because I think there really does need to be a government gravy train
00:25:28 keeping this alive. But one attitude that we've seen in Alberta is really even putting forced
00:25:35 intervention on the table. And I think we need to see a little bit more about what that would
00:25:38 look like. And Polyev this morning said he'd be open to that nationally, but hasn't yet committed
00:25:43 to it. But what other resources are available to deal with this? Well, I think on the surface level,
00:25:48 we should be investing far more heavily into recovery. If someone wants rehab, if they want
00:25:54 detox, that should be available to them right away. And it should be free. And it takes several
00:26:00 tries for someone to get off of drugs, right? So like, if it's expensive, if it takes forever,
00:26:07 if it takes a month to get into a program, that's not going to happen. So at the surface level,
00:26:10 that's what needs to be fixed. But on the more foundational level, we need to think about
00:26:14 reforms for education and reforms in our bureaucracy. Our public health bureaucracy
00:26:19 is a cesspool of radical ideology. In Ontario, I know that public health bureaucrats are very much
00:26:27 pushing for these radical policies against the will of the provincial governments. And if you
00:26:31 change government, that's not going to be fixed. And those policymakers are coming from schools
00:26:37 that are once again highly ideological. So if you have graduate programs that aren't committed
00:26:44 to evidence-based policymaking, that think that drug prohibition is just structural racism,
00:26:50 and then that filters into the bureaucracy, we have a problem. So it's going to take a long time
00:26:55 to shift our underlying political or I guess governmental understructure, which leads to
00:27:03 these disastrous addiction policies. Yeah, I just before I let you go, I wanted to ask you about
00:27:08 that because you had a piece in the hub to that effect that to Bonnie Henry, who's the chief
00:27:12 public health czar in British Columbia, criminalizing drugs is white supremacy. 1.00
00:27:18 Yeah, I mean, that is the most profoundly stupid thing I've ever heard. So look, you can argue that 1.00
00:27:23 individual laws in certain contexts may have racist intentions or outcomes that's fair
00:27:28 laws are just a tool that we use to order society and any tool can be abused but they were arguing
00:27:33 that drug prohibition in general is rooted in white supremacy and anyone with even a cursory 0.94
00:27:39 understanding of history let alone like the current global landscape can see that that's ridiculous
00:27:45 i mean we have sharia law which is uh banned the consumption of mind-altering substances since the
00:27:51 seventh century so you know if islamic scholars and lawmakers from the very beginning supported
00:27:57 prohibition how do you attribute that to white supremacy uh china in the 19th century advocated
00:28:03 strongly for prohibition because opium was destroying its citizens and then of course
00:28:08 the british came in and forced china to end prohibition with its warships so by by by the um
00:28:15 the harm reduction anti-racist framework you can basically argue that you know the british
00:28:20 sent their anti-racist warships to decolonize china's drug policies it's absurd and even today
00:28:28 racial like minority communities tend to hate this kind of stuff they hate drug liberalization
00:28:33 uh in vancouver and in san francisco asian like communities are the ones that want change that 0.99
00:28:40 want prohibition in across the world today east eastern and middle eastern countries are the ones 0.58
00:28:46 that most strongly ban drugs and now we have some you know let's be honest upper middle class
00:28:50 white progressive bureaucrats saying actually this is racist you should probably listen to
00:28:55 racialized communities if you're going to claim to be an anti-racist yeah i remember when that 0.59
00:28:59 one white protester was yelling at a guy from hong kong to go home at a city council meeting
00:29:04 and i think it was vancouver or whatever a couple of weeks back but uh it was exactly the point here
00:29:08 adam zeebo always good to talk to you sir thanks for coming on today well thanks for having me on
00:29:12 again all right thank you you're welcome anytime and i will say also that you you can't unpack
00:29:18 this from the crime issue so when you're seeing rising crime rising drug uses this is absolutely
00:29:24 related and i will talk about health care too in a broader sense in this episode and actually timed
00:29:30 in quite well because our good friends at secondstreet.org have a new documentary out
00:29:35 saying we need to have a wholesale national conversation about health care reform the
00:29:40 documentary is called health reform now let's take a look at the trailer here if we can
00:29:46 poured out very recently citing the Canada's the second best healthcare system in the world.
00:29:51 We begin tonight with the agonizing pain patients are facing. I've seen wait times
00:29:56 lead directly to people dying including children. She has lost two daughters due to long wait times
00:30:04 in the healthcare system. When you have elective surgery they elect to stall you off as long as
00:30:15 possibly can. What kind of a healthcare system is that? I already waited seven years. Can you
00:30:21 imagine two more just to see the specialist? So the last thing the chief financial officer
00:30:28 of a hospital wants is patients. Is it normal to see so much patient suffering in a developed
00:30:35 country like Canada.
00:30:46 The documentary just out, available at healthreformnow.ca, produced by secondstreet.org, whose president
00:30:54 Colin Craig joins us now.
00:30:56 Good to talk to you, Colin.
00:30:57 Thanks for coming back on.
00:30:58 Congratulations on the launch.
00:31:00 Well, thank you, Andrew.
00:31:01 It's always, always enjoy chatting with you.
00:31:03 well reform is one of these tricky words because it can mean anything and nothing depending on who
00:31:09 says it and you know there are many ways you could reform the system some for the better some for the
00:31:13 worse what is it that this film is trying to tell people well anyone who follows health care debate
00:31:20 in this country knows that canadians love the idea of having a universal health care system
00:31:26 the problem of course is that it's not working we spend a lot of money we're one of the highest
00:31:30 spenders in the world we have a lot of good people working in the system too uh the problem is the
00:31:35 structure of the system is broken it's not conducive to getting uh good results for patients
00:31:41 on a consistent basis and you know certainly some people have good experiences with the
00:31:45 healthcare system that's wonderful but the problem is too many patients are falling between the
00:31:50 cracks and so really what we do in the documentary is we look at other better performing universal
00:31:58 health care systems particularly in europe and we examine five policies that are in place in those
00:32:04 types of countries so that you ultimately would see better policies here in canada so basically
00:32:10 we can copy what people are doing much better than us and then we can bring those good results to
00:32:14 canada one of the big challenges we see in this country is that people cling to this idea of
00:32:22 health care the health care system being something that it really isn't and and i'll say perfectly
00:32:28 candidly that the utopian version of the health care system is fantastic it's something that's
00:32:32 free anyone can access it no matter where you are in the country you can go and get it but
00:32:36 if you scratch even just a tiny little bit below the surface that's not the experience that canadians
00:32:42 have with the system and look i've had many run-ins with the health care system uh whenever i have
00:32:48 needed emergency treatment i have zero complaints whatsoever i i've been able to get it the issue
00:32:54 is not with emergencies the issue is with these things that are very pressing for people but
00:32:59 might not rise to the level of you know your organs are falling out all over the floor and
00:33:03 that category the stats are just horrendous yeah and jerry alluded to this as you would have seen
00:33:10 in the the trailer just now when you have elective cases in particular they elect to make you wait
00:33:16 because they can't um and it's not right there's so many people that are suffering because of this
00:33:23 people that are literally stuck in their apartments dealing with chronic chronic pain
00:33:29 it's brutal you know grandmas and grandpas they can't pick up their grandkids or babysit them or
00:33:35 be part of their lives because they can't keep up with them and and uh you know if the grandkids
00:33:40 crawl on them then it causes too much pain you know just the horrible stories like that
00:33:45 people walking around with cloudy vision while they wait for cataract surgery um and you know
00:33:50 we've actually heard um you know some bad cases in emergency rooms too where you know in one case
00:33:55 in winnipeg they reported that the situation was so bad earlier this year that they had to double
00:34:01 bunk two patients on a single stretcher um in the hospital like it's just it's gotten to a point
00:34:09 where it's really really unacceptable in this country and i think some people have become
00:34:14 a little bit numb to just assuming well this is how it is or we have the u.s system and and what
00:34:21 we talk about in the documentaries that no it that doesn't have to be the choice let's look
00:34:26 to europe let's look to australia and other developed nations that have better performing
00:34:31 universal health care systems because if we copy what they do we can ease patient suffering so
00:34:36 that people aren't measuring their wait times in years and maybe get back to weeks you know which
00:34:41 is where it should be in a developed country such as ours in the shioli case in quebec which was one
00:34:47 of the most frustrating examples of our legal system at work because this was the case where
00:34:53 the supreme court basically ruled that access to a waiting list is not access to health care which
00:34:58 is a crucial ruling but they basically found the exact opposite in another case that has basically
00:35:04 found that you only have a right to alternatives in quebec and nowhere else in the country so
00:35:09 we can talk about the legal aspect there but but that fundamental point there that came out of that
00:35:13 case that access to a waiting list is not access to health care that seems to be the missing
00:35:17 recognition by the government across the country is it not yeah it is um you're not providing
00:35:26 health care if someone's on a waiting list for a year or two they're dealing with chronic pain
00:35:30 and they're getting addicted to painkillers and all the horrible side effects that i just talked
00:35:34 about it's not ethical but for some reason we've just allowed that to continue and you know i think
00:35:40 political parties of all stripes have largely been guilty for 30 years of throwing money at
00:35:47 the problem and hoping it would go away because they haven't been prepared to have that conversation
00:35:51 with canadians about reform uh it is a delicate issue but public opinion is in favor of reform
00:35:59 people i think have watched this story play out they're saying it's not working this approach
00:36:03 where we throw money in the system it's not working we spend a lot we're not getting the
00:36:06 results we need so the public is actually on side with reform we haven't seen enough
00:36:12 political parties and politicians sort of run with it now and say okay here's what we're going
00:36:17 to do we're going to try out some new things like that have been effective in other countries in
00:36:21 europe and australia and other other countries uh and that's i think the stage where we need to be
00:36:27 we're seeing a bit of that there's some positive signs in this country where we're seeing some
00:36:30 reform measures happen but it's not quick enough and until we start to see a greater push in that
00:36:36 direction we're going to continue to see people suffering in health care so when you say colin
00:36:41 that the public is on board with reform that in a lot of ways flies in the face of what the
00:36:46 conventional understanding is which is that this is a political third rail and i think we see bits
00:36:51 of this anecdotally anytime a politician is even so much as hinted at the idea of private delivery
00:36:58 you get this just absolute you know holy hellfire from liberal and new democrat parties and some
00:37:03 activist groups talking about switching to some you know pay-to-play healthcare system and so are
00:37:09 you saying that those attacks are not representative of where canadians are because i would have
00:37:13 actually thought it would go the other way the canadians really are uncomfortable with the idea
00:37:17 of a change even if they don't love how things are yeah so we've done a lot of pulling on this
00:37:22 it's all on our website if anyone wants to see it secondstreet.org. I think the public overwhelmingly
00:37:28 supports what we're seeing in different parts of the country where the government
00:37:33 will contract with a non-profit clinic or a private clinic and pay them to provide care
00:37:39 to treatment to patients in the public system. The public supports that. John or Joe patient
00:37:46 doesn't care who is like flicking the switch of the x-ray machine they don't care if it's a
00:37:53 government employee or a private sector employee or if they're unionized or non-unionized or if
00:37:58 they have black hair or brown hair or whatever they don't care about any of that they just care
00:38:02 that they get the quality treatment they also don't want to pay for um directly with the bill
00:38:07 when they when they walk out of course everything is paid for with uh their taxes and and so that's
00:38:13 what we're seeing in provinces like Ontario where the government is now partnering more with private
00:38:18 clinics and non-profit clinics to provide those services to the public and the public overwhelmingly
00:38:23 is supportive of doing that if it can be done in a cost-effective way and help more patients.
00:38:29 The public is on side with that. You mentioned the Chow Lee decision. The public is overwhelmingly
00:38:34 on side. It's in the 60s, 70s percent range. When you ask the question, should we keep the public
00:38:40 healthcare system, but allow people to pay for private options if they don't want to use the
00:38:45 public system. The public overwhelmingly supports that. There's other policies that we talked about
00:38:52 in the documentary that the public is on board with. What you see in Europe, where a patient in
00:38:57 one EU country can go to another EU country, pay for treatment, and then get reimbursed by their
00:39:03 home country. This is how you can avoid long wait times at home. If you happen to be facing one in
00:39:09 Europe, you can go to all these other countries in the EU, suddenly you've got hundreds if not
00:39:14 thousands of options for care instead of just relying on what is available locally. The public
00:39:19 loves this idea of bringing that policy to Canada. So you could maybe go to another province and pay
00:39:25 for treatment to south of the border or to maybe you go over to Europe, whatever. So the public is
00:39:31 definitely there and ready for health reform, but we're not seeing the political class move quickly
00:39:37 enough to uh to recognize that with promises yeah i mean i'll be the first to say the united states
00:39:43 healthcare system has a lot of flaws and and most people that have the discussion you and i are
00:39:47 having right now are not saying we should replace our system with the us when there are so many
00:39:51 better examples around the world but when i cross the border you know at port here on an hour from
00:39:56 where i live in michigan and you see the billboards on the interstate uh advertising you know mris and
00:40:02 x-rays to canadians you know that something is not working in canada otherwise there would not be
00:40:08 this booming marketing industry in border communities to provide health care services
00:40:13 to canadians yeah exactly yeah hundreds of thousands of canadians every year get into
00:40:19 their cars drive to the us they get into airplanes and they go to the us or other countries for
00:40:24 healthcare i mean we've talked to patients that have gone over to i think it was lithuania germany
00:40:31 mexico the united states china um thailand you name it canadians are going all over the world
00:40:39 to get the treatment all right well people can check out this issue in far more detail at
00:40:45 healthreformnow.ca uh the documentary produced by our friends at secondstreet.org is health reform
00:40:52 now colin craig always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today thanks for the chat today
00:40:57 All right. Appreciate it. Best of luck with that. We will talk to you all next week with more of
00:41:02 Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. I will be back in the driver's seat for Off the Record,
00:41:07 though, which comes out tomorrow on True North. If you want to go even just a slight notch more
00:41:11 irreverent than we are on this show, depending on who's on. Actually, I don't even know who I'm on
00:41:15 with this week, so it may or may not be. It'll be more irreverent. I'll make sure to bring something
00:41:19 to you. But anyway, that does it for us for today. We will talk to you on Monday, folks. Thank you.
00:41:24 God bless and good day to you all.
00:41:27 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:41:29 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:41:57 We'll be right back.
00:42:27 We'll be right back.