Juno News - Poilievre takes aim at Trudeau's ＂woke ideology＂ in Stampede speech

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:19.680 crime is over in canada there is no more crime no one is breaking into cars houses stealing cars

00:01:31.980 no one is vandalizing your property no one's shooting up on the streets no one is uh stealing

00:01:37.740 something to buy drugs no prostitution's gone murder is gone it's all gone it's all gone at

00:01:43.640 in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. This is what I can glean from a story I saw on the weekend,

00:01:50.320 a press release from the Moose Jaw Police Service. Now, I've been to Moose Jaw. It's a lovely little

00:01:55.040 community. It has the old Al Capone tunnels, has a beautiful thermal spa atop a hotel. I didn't

00:02:00.300 know it was so idyllic that crime is over there. This is the Moose Jaw Police Service news release.

00:02:06.960 In recent weeks, the Moose Jaw Police Service has seen an increase in adolescents playing

00:02:13.280 doorbell pranks on residents within the city. The prank, commonly known as Ding Dong Ditch or

00:02:20.520 Nicky Nicky Nine Doors, involves a person ringing the doorbell of a house and then running away

00:02:25.800 before the door can be answered. Reports of this prank have occurred in the late evening and in

00:02:30.140 some instances, this is my police blotter voice, and in some instances the early morning hours.

00:02:35.300 If adolescents are found committing this action, officers may give a warning, but serious

00:02:39.660 consequences could occur for repeat offenders such as being charged criminally the moose jaw

00:02:45.680 police service asked children and adolescents to refrain from performing this prank on residences

00:02:51.020 we are encouraging parents to talk with their children about the ramifications of performing

00:02:55.320 this type of prank and if you witness this prank being performed you have to report it to police

00:02:59.880 now i am not i don't think i'm really curmudgeonly i'm marginally curmudgeonly because i realized that

00:03:07.540 I crossed a certain threshold. And now when my nephews are over at my house, I'm the family

00:03:12.000 member that's like, don't touch that. Don't run over there. So I'm not, I'm not as fun as I used

00:03:15.560 to be. But of all the things that kids could be doing to get into trouble, I actually long for

00:03:22.100 the days when Nicky Nicky nine doors was all that kids were doing. I saw a video going viral. I don't

00:03:27.380 know where it was from. It was from somewhere in the States where this, like these two 12 year old

00:03:31.700 kids were fishing in a pond and some homeowner association Karen came out after them and this

00:03:38.780 guy just screamed at the kids got into their faces snapped one of their fishing rods in half

00:03:43.700 and you know was yelling at them about how they were trespassing and this and that and I'm thinking

00:03:48.060 my goodness with all the things that kids could get up to these days why are we making the things

00:03:53.360 that we're glad they're doing problematic like Nicky Nicky nine doors sure it's annoying if

00:03:58.680 they're targeting one house over and over again, maybe you have to deal with it. In fact, it's a

00:04:03.060 lot riskier. I never did. I don't want to say never. I may have done it once. I'm having a

00:04:08.720 vague flashback to this. Send the Moose Jaw police after me. It's a lot riskier now than it was when

00:04:13.620 I was a kid because you've got these ring cameras now that take pictures of people at the door. So

00:04:18.100 when you go to do the Nicky Nicky nine dooring and you see the ring camera, you should just move

00:04:22.500 along and pick another house. You have to use only the old analog doorbells or better yet,

00:04:28.000 one of those big brass knockers. But anyway, the thing, again, as far as things kids could be doing,

00:04:34.400 the big brass knockers could get a lot worse. But the one thing that I would say here, like Moose

00:04:39.560 Jaw, just get over it. Like this probably happened to four people. And this is probably like a dad

00:04:45.260 putting his kid up to it because the dad was all nostalgic about the pranks of yours. So

00:04:48.960 it could get a lot worse there. But if you disagree with me, let me know in the comments.

00:04:52.940 We'll read a couple of those comments later on. One of the other things, I mean, toilet papering

00:04:56.860 houses that one I don't know if kids still do that anymore I never I think my brother might

00:05:01.360 have done that I don't I should be careful my nephews I think sometimes listed the show nope

00:05:05.420 my brother never did anything of the sort but anyway that's uh that's today in moose jaw crime

00:05:11.280 I do want to talk a little bit about the Calgary stampede over the weekend now first I'll begin

00:05:16.260 with a confession I have never been to the Calgary stampede never I have never been I've always

00:05:23.440 wanted to go every time i've wanted to go something has come up and i haven't been able to this year

00:05:28.160 i was hoping to go and then i waited too long and then i looked in like hotels were going to be a

00:05:33.120 bajillion dollars a night to go there and i thought better of it but apparently everyone i knew was at

00:05:38.480 the stampede i was getting all these like pictures texted to me and emailed to me uh from people i'm

00:05:42.760 like you're at this even people that work for true north and i'm like hang on i you weren't you work

00:05:46.440 for me and now i just blink one day and you're at the calgary stampede but anyway i hope everyone

00:05:50.320 had a great time. Conservative leader Pierre Polyev gave what by all accounts was a barn

00:05:55.120 burner of a speech. I watched the speech on YouTube and one of the things that I found to

00:06:01.220 be remarkable about it was how consistent the message has been. How consistent the message has

00:06:07.500 been. And I wanted to take a bit of a bigger picture look at this because what Polyev is

00:06:12.500 doing right now is really thumbing his nose at the people who have said for the last 10 years

00:06:19.600 how conservatives are quote-unquote supposed to be and he's doing so in a way that I think makes

00:06:25.660 it worth a bit of a bigger picture analysis of what's going on and let me just first play this

00:06:30.380 is one of the clips from Pierre Polyev's speech at the Calgary Stampede this weekend in which he

00:06:35.640 talks about the so-called woke ideology he says is ruining Canada. People look around the country

00:06:41.840 and they don't recognize the place. Housing costs have doubled meaning three quarters of youth

00:06:47.920 believe they'll never be able to afford a home. No home means no family, means no kids.

00:06:56.480 When they go to the grocery store, they cry at the checkout because they can't afford

00:07:01.160 the price tag. We now have two million people lined up at food banks. The Food Bank Association

00:07:07.240 says 25% of Canadians now live below the poverty line, a record-smashing number. You think

00:07:14.420 it's bad out here? There are now 256 homeless encampments in Toronto, 50 opened in three

00:07:23.480 months alone. Scenes that we would only have imagined in a third world country before Trudeau

00:07:30.660 and the NDP took office and instituted a weird, woke ideology that not only seeks to take

00:07:41.060 our money punish our work tax our food and undermine our entrepreneurs but also destroys

00:07:52.420 our education dishonors our history and divides our people but the good news is

00:08:01.620 life was not like this before Justin Trudeau and it won't be like this after he's gone

00:08:06.340 he takes aim at so-called woke ideology that he puts at justin trudeau's feet i think probably

00:08:16.740 with good reason for that as destroying canada he talks about very real struggles and again it's

00:08:22.360 interesting because if you watch that and you're a conservative partisan you're a culture warrior

00:08:26.860 type you're going to hear woke ideology and go yeah but if you're an ordinary canadian that's

00:08:31.540 not tied to this thing that doesn't even know what wokeness is you're hearing him talk about

00:08:35.940 the struggle of being able to afford groceries, the struggle of being able to find a home.

00:08:40.860 And this is how he's bridging these two divides. He's bridging the divide between

00:08:45.380 the conservative base and people in the so-called center in Canada that are not necessarily tied to

00:08:52.640 a party or an ideology, but are accessible and available to conservative voters. This is why

00:08:57.460 he's doing so well in the polls, because he's communicating to these people. He's speaking

00:09:02.240 about these challenges in a way that people desperately need someone to be because they're

00:09:06.700 certainly not getting it from the government but he's talking about the issues that all of the

00:09:11.100 so-called elites and all of the pundits in the media class the media party as our friend Ezra

00:09:16.180 Levant says he talks about all these issues that you're not supposed to talk about like for example

00:09:20.860 him talking about guns take a look you know and then there's the guns right so Justin Trudeau

00:09:29.800 wants to ban Grandpa Joe's hunting rifle, but he only inspects, CBSA inspects 1% of shipping

00:09:36.720 containers that come into this country. No wonder that our cars are being stolen and shipped

00:09:41.880 overseas. So here's my common sense plan for that. We're going to have scanners that actually scan

00:09:50.620 what's inside the shipping containers. Right? Can you imagine that? Shocking, eh? So that if the

00:09:58.360 manifest says that inside the shipping containers is some widgets, but the scanner shows that it's

00:10:05.060 a beamer. Well, then you take the box, you put it aside, you remove the beamer, you open it up and

00:10:11.220 you look at the VIN, you call the name of the guy who's matched to the VIN, you say, hey, were you

00:10:15.300 planning to send your beamer off to Dubai? No, no, I wasn't. I just noticed it was missing from the

00:10:21.800 front of my house. Okay, great. Well, you can come get it because it's at the port. And we're going

00:10:25.820 to now call the guy who booked the shipping container. We're going to go to his house

00:10:30.020 and say, you're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Right? Pretty simple.

00:10:41.080 And you know how we're going to pay for that? You know we're going to pay for it. We're

00:10:45.360 going to forego spending $2 to $7 billion going after law-abiding licensed, trained

00:10:51.780 and tested firearms owners. Again, talking about gun owners, gun ownership, but doing it in a way

00:10:59.780 that resonates with that political center. He talks about crime. He talks about people's cars

00:11:05.320 that are getting stolen and put on shipping crates and right now not even getting detected. And

00:11:09.260 if it does, people are not able to get these vehicles back because you have a society and

00:11:14.480 an institutional structure that's just decided to throw up its hands and say, this is what life in

00:11:19.360 Canada is now about and there was one more clip I wanted to play this is tied to an issue we talked

00:11:25.400 about on the show last week and we'll be touching on a little bit with our friend Chris Sims in a

00:11:29.220 moment but he talks about how he's going to deal with Justin Trudeau's censorship regime and

00:11:34.780 there's also a little bit of an add-on to his view on firearms in this clip as well. NDP liberal

00:11:40.740 socialist hate hunting because it symbolizes independence and self-reliance they're at the

00:11:47.680 attack on our freedoms over the last nine years is unprecedented in Canadian history.

00:11:53.900 We've seen it through censorship laws, both C11 and now C63, a law that creates a three-headed

00:12:01.360 bureaucracy that can actually put you under house arrest, not for something you've said,

00:12:06.960 but under suspicion of something you might say in the future that would cause harm to someone

00:12:13.840 else's feelings meanwhile we see this woke censorship play out on our university campuses

00:12:22.560 common sense conservatives will stand up for the freedom of expression i will repeal c11 c63

00:12:31.520 and require universities that get federal funding to respect freedom of expression

00:12:36.300 so we have him decrying censorship decrying woke ideology defending law-abiding firearms owners

00:12:44.880 there was lots more in the speech i didn't want to just play the whole thing because then it

00:12:47.960 wouldn't be the andrew lotten show anymore it'd be the pierre paulieff power hour which again if

00:12:52.400 you want you could just go and watch the speech he gave after the show but he talks about all

00:12:56.440 these things that again the media elites tell you you're not supposed to and it's interesting

00:13:01.340 because the liberals love talking about abortion they love talking about guns they love talking

00:13:05.500 about the conservative link with hate speech and radicalism and all of that.

00:13:09.580 Polyev is not avoiding these issues.

00:13:11.460 He's not doing this instinct that conservative strategists have historically said and that

00:13:15.740 Aaron O'Toole was known for, which is just shrinking the debate to just one or two issues.

00:13:20.720 Oh, we can say more money in your pocket.

00:13:23.300 We can say lower taxes.

00:13:24.620 And you can say that and everyone is supposed to just forget about all these other issues.

00:13:28.980 You don't.

00:13:29.380 What do you think about free speech?

00:13:30.760 No, no, no.

00:13:31.080 It doesn't matter.

00:13:31.580 We're going to put more money in your pocket.

00:13:33.400 But what about my gun rights?

00:13:35.240 the liberals want to take them away. What are you going to do? Well, more money in your pocket.

00:13:41.020 And it becomes laughable. It becomes laughable. I can't remember if I came up with it or if it

00:13:45.300 was someone else. So I'm prepared to say it might not have been my idea. But you have a conservative

00:13:51.240 party that has historically wanted to be Justin Trudeau with a slightly better accountant. The

00:13:55.600 one that I did come up with is a prime minister that wants to be an auditor in chief instead of

00:14:01.100 a Prime Minister. And it's very dangerous to adopt that thinking. And Conservatives,

00:14:08.080 generally speaking, do not look upon the O'Toole years in a particularly favorable light. In fact,

00:14:13.220 the period in which O'Toole was the leader in my book about Pierre Paulyab, the title of the

00:14:17.640 chapter is The Troubles, with all due respect to our Northern Irish and Irish listeners and viewers.

00:14:23.900 But I call it The Troubles because that's really historically in the Conservative Party's history,

00:14:28.120 this tumultuous period that, in recent memory anyway, has left a bad taste in a lot of people's

00:14:34.100 mouths. And why I bring that up is because the O'Toole years are useful in the sense that they

00:14:40.000 show us what happens when we do it the way the left wants us to. They show us what happens

00:14:47.040 when we give the left everything they want. We give the media everything they want. We put up

00:14:51.200 a moderate conservative leader that has no particular view on social issues that is favorable

00:14:56.660 to social conservatives, that doesn't want to talk about things that the conservative base wants to

00:15:01.420 talk about, that offers his own conservative alternative to the carbon tax instead of rejecting

00:15:06.000 it. And what happens? He gets exactly the same level of support as Andrew Scheer got. And that's

00:15:12.520 that. So there's a reason the conservatives showed Aaron O'Toole the door. And there's a reason that

00:15:19.660 Pierre Polyev won such a resounding margin in the leadership race. And you fast forward now,

00:15:25.180 he has not done this pivot that you often see from conservative leaders when they're in the

00:15:29.980 leadership race to afterwards. Remember, Andrew Scheer during his leadership race in 2017 had

00:15:35.000 mused about possibly getting rid of CBC's news division, but it was nowhere to be found in his

00:15:39.760 platform. Aaron O'Toole came out right out of the gate on his leadership platform and said,

00:15:44.520 we need to defund the CBC. And I was like, yes, defund the CBC. And then he was the leader and

00:15:50.660 he says, okay, we need to possibly look at striking a committee that will analyze ways

00:15:58.700 that maybe could modernize the CBC business model.

00:16:02.820 I'm like, that's a heck of a lot longer than defund the CBC.

00:16:06.680 And at the end of reading it, I'm more confused about what you believe.

00:16:10.600 So here we have a conservative leader.

00:16:12.880 And again, whether you vote conservative or not is up to you.

00:16:15.780 I'm not pushing you to vote one way or another, but I'm making a point as someone who has

00:16:19.540 followed conservative politics for many, many years in this country, who's been involved in it

00:16:23.520 at various points, that we're seeing something dramatically different from the norm right now

00:16:28.080 in that there is a conservative leader who is unprepared to capitulate and do what every other

00:16:34.880 conservative advisor and strategist over the last decade has, not every, but what many of them have

00:16:39.700 advised. He's not willing to do that. Instead, he is saying, this is what I believe, this is who we

00:16:44.520 are. And my message is the same. And what was interesting is that I did a bunch of interviews

00:16:50.180 when my book came out. And whenever you were speaking to like a local host in Halifax or

00:16:55.000 Quebec or something, there would always be a question about what's, what is, what is his win

00:16:59.500 going to mean for people here? And it's a fair question. And what I found most interesting is

00:17:04.060 that I couldn't actually find when I looked that much variation between the message that Polyev

00:17:09.760 gives in this city to this city, in this country, or this part of the country to that part of the

00:17:14.260 country. The message is pretty consistent in English and in French and Atlantic Canada and

00:17:18.620 Alberta. And that's why these things are unifying, because Canadians want authenticity. Canadians want

00:17:24.220 a leader they can peg, they want a leader they can understand their perspectives on issues on,

00:17:29.280 and you get that with him. And it's a reason he's doing so well. So obviously, the next election is

00:17:34.640 still over a year away, most likely. But the Polyev leadership experiment so far, if you want

00:17:39.780 to call it that, tells us that everything the elites told you about conservative politics was

00:17:44.820 wrong. Not a big surprise, but it's worth making a point of. Let's talk about that censorship

00:17:50.320 aspect of this. We spoke last week on the show about how the government is going to spend $200

00:17:54.360 million, the parliamentary budget officer says, on establishing this so-called digital safety

00:18:00.020 commission. We need a bureaucracy with 330 people to regulate what you do and say online. And as we

00:18:06.480 noted with Michelle Remble-Garner, that does not even count the increased workload to the Canadian

00:18:11.880 Human Rights Commission and other organs that are going to be involved in this operation.

00:18:17.200 I believe this is wrong even if it costs nothing. I believe it's wrong even if somehow government

00:18:21.580 were to make it profitable. But we'd be remiss to not point out the taxpayer issues here and why

00:18:25.980 200 million never means 200 million when government starts spending. Our good friend Chris Sims is

00:18:31.200 back. She is the Alberta director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Chris, I hope you

00:18:36.820 had a good weekend. Welcome back. Yes, I did. We had some family in from out of town, and so I was

00:18:41.680 a little bit unplugged, so I haven't even watched Pierre's speech yet. I've got to catch up on that.

00:18:46.080 Well, you know, you buried the lead. You were partying with Donnie Wahlberg on the weekend.

00:18:50.760 Yeah, I was, actually. Just this past, before the last weekend, don't get me started. I'll take up

00:18:55.820 your whole show. We went to Salt Lake City and partied with New Kids on the Block. They're

00:19:00.040 really fun uh but i did do a little bit of work was it ever interesting driving through montana

00:19:05.400 because their state there is in helena their state legislature and i think they only meet

00:19:09.720 like a handful of times per year so this has got me thinking now what are taxpayers saving there

00:19:15.480 and they pay really low taxes it's open carry to your point with firearms rights so it was quite

00:19:21.320 something i couldn't turn my work brain off but yeah i'm trying to get plugged back in and caught

00:19:25.560 back up but what really blew my mind was exactly what you just raised was this censorship industrial

00:19:31.320 complex that the trudeau government is helping to build here in canada the creepy thing is is that

00:19:37.400 this is happening if you look carefully at a lot of what we would consider western english-speaking

00:19:43.480 countries in fact in in uk andrew i think they even called it the online harms bill in the same

00:19:50.120 way we're calling it this so basically in a nutshell they're going to they're paying off

00:19:55.960 the mainstream media they're paying for the cbc we've got bill c11 and we've got bill c63 so it

00:20:02.600 creates this censorship vice on free expression here in canada this vice grip and on top of that

00:20:10.040 you get to pay for it so you know an army of censors doesn't come cheap right taxpayers have 0.97

00:20:15.800 to pay for everything and they're now estimating at the parliamentary budget office that it's going

00:20:20.120 going to cost minimum 200 million and to your point exactly that's not even touching the massive

00:20:26.080 amount of workload that these human rights tribunals are going to be suddenly flooded with

00:20:30.300 can you imagine the snitch culture this is going to encourage because you can anonymously call in

00:20:36.400 someone that you think is in the future going to maybe hurt your feelings on the internet like

00:20:40.560 saying it out loud is crazy if we had been warning about this back in 2015 people would have said

00:20:46.620 that you're out to lunch, but here we're, we are, we're this close from it. So the Taxpayers

00:20:51.340 Federation, we are fighting it on the cost. Absolutely. Cause it's going to cost people a

00:20:55.420 ton of money and we're fighting it on the free expression angle, because if you can't express

00:21:00.660 yourself freely, guess what? You can't criticize the government and groups like us would be labeled

00:21:05.380 misinformation like that. Yeah. Just, just to go back for a second to what you said about the

00:21:10.900 legislatures in the U S I ran, as many people may know for the provincial legislature in Ontario

00:21:15.820 many years ago. And I was chatting with an American friend of mine from New Hampshire,

00:21:19.580 who was like baffled to learn they make money because in New Hampshire, a state rep makes $200

00:21:24.540 a term. And so $100 a year is the salary of a New Hampshire state rep. And they meet like,

00:21:30.320 you know, I don't know, maybe twice a year or something like that. And my goodness,

00:21:33.420 I would love it if our politicians only had a couple of hours to make it. Because this happened

00:21:37.140 in Texas not long ago, where there was a filibuster, which means something in the US,

00:21:41.680 Because if you don't pass your bill by the closing of business on a particular day, then you don't get another chance for like several months.

00:21:50.080 So when it comes to taxing, like I would love that the Digital Safety Commission wouldn't stand a chance if the government was only there one day a year.

00:21:56.820 No, exactly. It's funny. Some mainstream media organizations contact us sometimes and ask us like, oh, don't you wish they were still hard at work and still having more sitting days and blah, blah.

00:22:05.560 No, no, don't give them more days to mess things up. You add more government, you mess it up.

00:22:11.140 Same sort of thing goes with these ridiculous salaries that are now being paid at city hall

00:22:15.460 levels in most places across Canada. They're like, oh, boo-hoo, you know, the mayor is only making

00:22:20.680 $200,000 a year. Boo-hoo, the city councilor is only making $120,000. And it's like, no,

00:22:26.680 you realize in New Hampshire, exactly to your point, I think they get like gas and sandwich

00:22:31.180 money. It's very similar in Montana. And a lot of states, a lot of provinces could be running

00:22:36.680 their shops this way. The most direct analog that I can come up with on costs, not for the

00:22:42.800 Digital Safety Commission itself, but just in general with government, is the long gun registry,

00:22:47.360 which I forget the initial pledge. You might recall better than me, but it was a very paltry

00:22:51.340 sum they said this thing was going to cost, and it ends up being well over a billion dollars.

00:22:55.800 Yes. What's startling is they initially said it'll cost two million.

00:23:00.580 That was it. Yeah, I knew it was something like a rounding error almost.

00:23:03.680 little tiny bit and it almost once all the smoke cleared and you start adding lawsuits and fights

00:23:09.120 and stuff it was close to two billion with a b so remember folks back when this is way back with

00:23:17.900 the chretchen and martin liberals when they had the so-called long gun registry remember you

00:23:22.160 probably remember some reform party members as a lark were registering their soldering guns

00:23:26.480 successfully silly things like that happening but it was in order to point out what a mockery this

00:23:31.520 really was, it ballooned in cost. It wasn't quite $2 billion, but it was closing in on that.

00:23:37.040 And to Andrew's point exactly, they'll come out and say, oh, this massive group of censorship

00:23:42.860 police that are, you know, run by a bunch of bureaucrats in Ottawa and Gatineau, it'll cost

00:23:47.580 you $200 million. Well, look at what happened with ArriveCan. Like that little app should have

00:23:52.500 cost around $250,000. It wind up costing us around $60 million. Just imagine how this thing

00:24:01.340 going to balloon out of hand for a cost like the censorship elements one thing and then there's a

00:24:06.300 huge waste of money on the other yeah and the weaponization of complaints is i think key here

00:24:11.740 we're going to be talking in just a few minutes with david clement on the lcbo strike and the

00:24:16.540 reason i bring that up is because opsu on its website has a little form where you put in your

00:24:21.340 information and you click a button and it automatically sends an email to doug ford's

00:24:25.420 office and these sorts of tools are very common when people are trying to gin up public support

00:24:29.660 you basically make it so that there's a ready-made form and you can file it and push it and it sends

00:24:35.320 it off to maybe the prime minister's office maybe the premier's office maybe every mp in the country

00:24:40.060 because people will do this and this was this is the exact kind of thing that i know someone will

00:24:45.220 do with the canadian human rights commission complaint process where they'll say you know

00:24:48.880 paste the someone will make some tool and they'll say paste the link of the tweet you want to report

00:24:53.740 and it'll auto populate a form and send it right to the human rights commission and all of a sudden

00:24:59.020 you have people that are running these campaigns because you actually profit. You can make some

00:25:02.820 money if you file a complaint under Bill C-63, assuming it passes, and your complaint is deemed

00:25:08.660 to have standing, even if you were not harmed in any way from it. So no one at the CHRC has said

00:25:15.480 how they're going to prevent against this. And I know being government, their answer is going to be,

00:25:19.500 we need to hire a legion of investigators to sift through all these things.

00:25:23.560 Yeah, just imagine. And that's exactly to your point. You know, the censorship police and the amount of online gagging that is going on here from the government or it's going to happen if this passes is hard enough to swallow. But the people forget there's a financial incentive to anonymously complaining to a human rights tribunal about your feelings being hurt.

00:25:46.480 so just imagine if people are long in the tooth enough like me remember back when Ezra Levant

00:25:52.280 was fighting against the human rights tribunal I forget for what he had published western standard

00:25:57.340 yeah that was the uh the Muhammad cartoons yeah it was the cartoons right and I do remember to 1.00

00:26:01.960 their credit I do remember mainstream McLean's magazine getting into similar sort of hot water

00:26:07.100 and like you know all about that of course through Mark Stein and so imagine that but now fast

00:26:13.660 forward today's culture of, you know, getting offended by things and make it anonymous and

00:26:19.940 give people the opportunity to make thousands of dollars. Boy, oh boy. Like they did not.

00:26:25.980 I hope I'm saying this right. I hope they didn't think this through. I hope it's this much of a

00:26:31.780 disaster because they're doing this by accident. I'm not so sure sometimes, but folks, we really

00:26:36.780 need to focus on this. And to your point of, I liked what you played there with Pierre Polyev

00:26:41.280 And your point about no longer being holding back so much and worrying about, you know, don't be offensive, don't be gross, but worrying about talking about things like gun rights, right? Worrying about talking about things like, you know, blowing money during the lockdown.

00:26:57.780 down. People should be confident enough to speak with their relatives and their friends about this

00:27:02.380 sort of stuff now. And that would be my one little nugget of advice I would give people. And it gives

00:27:07.600 you a little bit of hope and a little bit of agency of just have that confidence and that

00:27:12.320 courage to actually broach some of these topics with people who aren't really that political.

00:27:16.860 And it might help them decide what they want to do over the next few years when it comes to just

00:27:21.740 being in so much debt, the lineups at the food banks, getting rid of something like the carbon

00:27:26.100 tax. I think a lot of us need to realize that we don't need to hold back as much as perhaps we

00:27:31.100 thought we used to. Censorship doesn't come cheap. Neither does fighting to save the planet. As you

00:27:37.780 pointed out here to us, Chris, the ambassador for climate change, which is not a role that existed

00:27:43.260 and should exist because, you know, climate change is not a country, believe it or not.

00:27:47.380 But our Canadian ambassador to climate change, Catherine Stewart, has spent in the last

00:27:50.960 less than two years $254,000 in travel expenses this includes stays at luxury hotels price tag

00:27:59.340 up to $623 a night but that's a lot of air travel for someone who is saying we all need to reduce

00:28:05.680 our carbon footprint yes exactly it's so so well summed up in that famous cartoon I don't know the

00:28:11.300 artist who made it but it shows what looks kind of like a farmer with like a trucker hat standing

00:28:15.720 next to what I think is his son and he's looking up in the sky and it's just black with all these

00:28:20.820 you know uh airplane smoke trails and they said what's that dad oh politicians flying to the next

00:28:26.040 climate summit exactly and this lady i didn't even i to your point i forgot she existed i pay 1.00

00:28:33.140 her salary and so do you and so do all of your canadian listeners and viewers but i forgot she

00:28:37.880 existed number one and now she's racking up these massive costs nothing says save the planet and do 1.00

00:28:44.220 your part, like sleeping in a $600 a night hotel. And again, it just, it really cheapens the

00:28:50.840 efforts that people earnestly make, you know, things like making sure a fish habitat is clean

00:28:55.840 or trying to, you know, protect an endangered species. When you let bureaucrats, permanent

00:29:01.020 government, this lady was not elected to this job, below your money like this, under this green 1.00

00:29:06.720 washing auspices of, oh, you know, climate change, it does two things. One, it wastes your money

00:29:12.200 completely. Two, it weakens your argument. So the next time you're earnestly trying to say,

00:29:17.600 you know what, maybe we should plant a few more trees. Let's make sure we have clean drinking 0.87

00:29:21.400 water here. It sours people on helping the environment because they see what a scam this

00:29:27.520 stuff is. Yeah. And I was reading through her job description because I genuinely was curious what

00:29:33.340 it was. And there were a number of points listed, so I don't want to oversimplify. But the first one,

00:29:38.100 The first one that the government lists is coordinating with Canadian mission.

00:29:42.060 So that's, you know, embassies and permanent offices, coordinating with Canadian missions to put the government of Canada's environmental policies into practice, particularly as those policies relate to climate change.

00:29:52.440 So I'm just imagining her flying around to our embassies to make sure they're using LED light bulbs, basically.

00:29:57.820 So, you know, she flies to the embassy in I don't know what the capital of Mozambique is.

00:30:01.920 I apologize. You know, she flies to our embassy there and says, oh, well, yeah, you know, you're you got rid of the coal furnace.

00:30:07.880 great and then she flies to our un mission in new york and says oh yeah you got the leds in

00:30:12.760 all right i've saved the planet here let's go inspect your low flush toilet let's make sure 0.96

00:30:17.880 oh yeah i guess you can see her with like a we should oh that would be a good stunt we should 1.00

00:30:23.020 send her spools of weather stripping so the next time she's visiting she's at some embassy just

00:30:28.720 like yeah with the tape measure there it is they're really easy basically like those door-to-door

00:30:35.080 energy efficiency audit salespeople now but she's getting you know 234 000 in travel expenses every

00:30:40.680 two years to do it yes exactly and again it's one of those things right where you know you imagine

00:30:45.960 250 grand like think of the down payment on a house that people could make with that sort of

00:30:51.240 stuff like every single nickel is coming out of taxpayers money like imagine your elderly aunt

00:30:57.240 imagine you know your cousin who's just trying to get his trade school going like every nickel

00:31:01.800 comes from their pockets. And what do you have to show for it? And that's the crucial point here.

00:31:07.180 Emissions have gone up in Canada. All of this government's environmental policy has not amounted

00:31:11.420 to a hill of beans. All right, Chris Sims, we will talk to you next Monday. Thanks so much for coming

00:31:15.240 on as always. You bet. All right. We'll do the rare focus on Ontario here. It's a big province.

00:31:21.860 It happens to be the province I live in here. And it is a province in which you are in a bit of a

00:31:26.940 disadvantaged state if you want to buy alcohol right now. The LCBO, the State-Controlled Liquor

00:31:33.680 Control Board of Ontario, literally it has control in the name, LCBO. The workers of that, unionized

00:31:40.160 public servants under OPSU, have gone on strike. And what's interesting is the level of propaganda

00:31:46.420 you're getting from the union on this. This is a video that they put forward defending the LCBO

00:31:53.180 monopoly take a look hello pores i'm callum i may be rich but i'm drowning in profits

00:32:02.300 that's why i want a big slice of the lcbo sure they invest 2.5 billion dollars in your community

00:32:10.160 that's basically nothing to me just like you i struggle to have enough yachts just like you

00:32:20.020 I'm sad inside my mansion.

00:32:22.840 I worked really hard to be born into money.

00:32:26.780 Don't I deserve more of yours?

00:32:29.360 What's a billionaire got to do to get some extra zeros around here?

00:32:33.980 Stop funding public services.

00:32:36.420 Start funding me.

00:32:37.860 No, I get it.

00:32:39.000 I just don't see why we need schools and hospitals.

00:32:42.100 Pick one.

00:32:42.800 Who's going to both?

00:32:43.740 the core argument from Opsu here is that the LCBO is putting 2.5 billion dollars a year

00:32:52.820 into roads and hospitals and schools now this is based on a few assumptions that

00:33:00.240 changing this monopoly would disrupt this and there are a lot of flaws in that but my goodness

00:33:07.020 the argument is just so incredibly disingenuous now the PC government under Doug Ford has so far

00:33:13.000 not wanted to bend the knee in fact Doug Ford put out this own video in that folksy Doug Ford way

00:33:18.440 talking about all the other places you can buy alcohol in this province more time in Ontario

00:33:23.600 that means more time outside with family and friends at a neighborhood barbecue or a camping

00:33:29.760 trip even though LCBO workers are on strike there's still plenty of options for you to buy

00:33:36.300 beer wine cider coolers and even spirits including products made right here in Ontario we've created

00:33:44.380 this handy new map that shows what stores are open and what they sell say you want to buy some local

00:33:51.420 Ontario craft beer just zoom in on where you are click the filter for beer and look at all the

00:33:58.700 fantastic options that pop up and look at all those yellow dots which show Ontario made products

00:34:05.100 click on one and you'll see the store's name and address as well as what they sell

00:34:11.280 so that's good political comms from the ontario government put a map forward to tell ontarians

00:34:17.420 you don't need no stinking lcbo but it's not doing anything about the structure of the problem here 1.00

00:34:22.480 which is that the lcbo is not a necessary entity in this province i actually have a photo of

00:34:30.240 Ontarians lining up outside an LCBO I wanted to share with you here. Oh, sorry. No, that's the

00:34:35.360 that's the Soviet bread line. Never mind. Scratch that. Thought I thought I had the LCBO photo

00:34:39.340 there. They're very similar sometimes. David Clement joins us. He is the North American

00:34:43.960 Affairs Manager for the Consumer Choice Center. And I would say probably one of the LCBO's biggest

00:34:48.760 critics, just as it's a fundamental structure here. David, good to talk to you again. Thanks

00:34:53.080 for coming on today. Thank you very much for having me. Let's start off with this $2.5 billion

00:34:58.360 dollar because what opsu is trying to pretend here is that it's providing this great service

00:35:03.720 to the people of ontario and we would just not have a functioning society we wouldn't have a

00:35:09.160 functioning welfare state if it weren't for the lcbo and that is just patently untrue

00:35:16.280 yeah it is untrue most people don't realize apparently neither does the union um that the

00:35:23.240 dividend the lcbo pays is primarily as the wholesaler um so all alcohol sold in the province

00:35:32.280 whether it's at a restaurant whether it's at a grocery store whether it's at an actual winery

00:35:37.720 that produces the wine the lcbo tax on their markup and so if you're at a winery and most

00:35:45.400 people don't know this and kind of the light bulb goes off when i explain this so if you're at a

00:35:50.520 winery in niagara you buy a bottle of wine from that winery you may often wonder why is the price

00:35:57.320 not better than at the lcbo yeah it was made six feet from here right yeah it was made six feet

00:36:04.040 from here it never went into an lcbo warehouse well this doesn't make any sense it's because the

00:36:08.280 lcbo includes their markup on all alcohol that's where the revenue to the province comes from

00:36:14.840 it doesn't matter who sells it in fact if alcohol sales were to remain the same during the strike

00:36:23.080 so ontarians bought the same amount of alcohol the revenue to the province would go up not down

00:36:30.520 it would go up because when you buy from a grocery store you're not paying to keep the lights on at

00:36:38.360 the 680 plus retail stores that the lcbo operates and so the lcbo doesn't have to operate a single

00:36:46.840 retail store in order to generate money and we already know that this is true because the

00:36:52.680 government had the choice to do exactly that for cannabis and they opted not to why because it's

00:36:59.000 cheaper and more efficient not to and it's more responsible for taxpayers in in the province as a

00:37:05.160 result and so we have ops who behaving as if those who want to get rid of the retail side of the lcbo

00:37:13.640 are talking about some alternative reality that doesn't exist and they're forgetting that ontario

00:37:20.040 doesn't have a single storefront retail for alcohol the province doesn't physically sell a single

00:37:26.680 tobacco product or vape generate hundreds of millions of dollars off of that um alberta

00:37:32.920 has exactly the model that i'm talking about in terms of the province has a monopoly on wholesale

00:37:39.480 but allows for private retailers to sell the alcohol bc has a mixed model which is probably

00:37:47.000 what ontario would look like in transition um where you have government stores as well as

00:37:52.200 private retailers existing and so the idea that we need opsu to generate the revenue for the

00:37:57.720 province is just completely false well and i'll also make the point here that no one i mean you

00:38:02.200 and i are proposing it but no one in the ontario government is even proposing abandoning the lcbo

00:38:06.520 retail right now the issue is allowing convenience stores to sell uh you know some ready-made

00:38:12.280 beverages here like it actually will not jeopardize the opsu workers deal at all except

00:38:18.760 in the sense that it makes consumers aware that oh yeah maybe i prefer this maybe i prefer to go

00:38:23.160 to this store that i'm already at buying a two liter bottle of coke and also pick up my white

00:38:27.320 clause there yeah exactly it's about convenience and it it may sound trivial to a certain extent

00:38:34.840 but it actually means quite a bit to be able to go grocery shopping and then pick up whatever

00:38:42.120 whatever else you might need on the beverage side now i wish that the rollout in in grocery stores

00:38:48.280 and convenience stores was even larger it should have included spirits as well it doesn't the lcbo

00:38:54.600 under the new framework would maintain a monopoly on that. I don't think that they

00:38:59.040 should have that. But yeah, they're holding drinkers in the province ransom now over ready

00:39:06.420 to drink cocktails. And I think most people just see how ridiculous and silly that is. 0.99

00:39:12.080 And the arguments are always, anytime there's been a labor dispute, the arguments have always 0.99

00:39:17.260 been ridiculous. Like I know in the past, Opsu was really making it seem like they were the

00:39:21.600 answer to drunk driving, that there would be drunk drivers on the streets in large numbers if LCBO

00:39:27.200 unionized employees were not the ones that got to be the gatekeepers on alcohol purchases. And

00:39:32.700 there's been no evidence to suggest that. And as evidenced by the fact that convenience store

00:39:37.360 owners have tremendous penalties if they are caught selling tobacco to minors. And LCBO does

00:39:43.560 not that. The liquor store is not losing its liquor license. Correct. Yeah. The opposite is

00:39:48.620 actually true and i remember when they ran the campaigns when this uh corner store plan was first

00:39:54.860 thought of when doug ford won um and there were these really nasty ads that in my opinion touched

00:40:01.580 on some very uncomfortable stereotypes about who runs convenience stores that were really gross

00:40:08.780 um very mega-esque in the stereotypical way of like really going after ethnic communities who

00:40:16.540 often operate these, these stores, um, on the, on the premise that they weren't going to be

00:40:21.980 responsible retailers and ID, but all of the secret shopper data actually suggests the opposite

00:40:28.540 is true because they have skin in the game. If they don't ID for age restricted goods, they get

00:40:33.040 fined. Um, if they get caught several times, they lose their ability to sell age restricted goods

00:40:39.360 completely. And that's, I mean, then your business model fails. So they have skin in the game. If an

00:40:44.440 lcbo employee bails to id i don't know there are any ramifications at all no and i i used to work

00:40:53.360 for the lcbo and i wrote a column about this and and you know well there were you could kind of

00:40:57.520 get a slap on the wrist if you got caught at the end of the day there was no penalty for it and

00:41:02.260 certainly the store itself had no penalty or liability for it and i i wanted to ask you about

00:41:07.640 where this is going to go because ontario consumers are now getting this you know propaganda from the

00:41:13.760 union. And I love that they try to make billionaires out to be the bad guys here and not like some

00:41:18.580 small business that wants to open up a wine and liquor store, some independent wine or liquor

00:41:23.920 shop, some independent convenience store owner. Like that to me is also an incredibly disingenuous

00:41:28.580 part of this is that, you know, yeah, there are some corporate profits that are going to do well

00:41:32.800 if Loblaws can sell vodka and whiskey and whatever. But there are a whole bunch of independent small

00:41:38.000 businesses that could open up as well if we were to have a freer alcohol retail environment in this

00:41:42.780 province yeah it would democratize commerce while generating the same if not more revenue for the

00:41:49.500 province who would be against that that that is that is the most baffling thing is like well why

00:41:56.300 would we want to keep small bit predominantly small businesses out of the game just so that

00:42:03.600 opsu can maintain its retail monopoly for its lcbo cashiers that's a bad deal it's a bad deal

00:42:12.520 for taxpayers and it's a bad deal for consumers because again this really only matters because

00:42:17.620 they have that monopoly if they didn't have that monopoly they would go on strike and the options

00:42:23.580 for consumers the alternatives for consumers would be endless rather than being very limited now the

00:42:30.660 ford government did release that map which is certainly helpful but it is significantly limited

00:42:36.020 in terms of where you can buy specifically spirits,

00:42:39.320 but I would also say most wines.

00:42:42.120 You're not going to be able to buy most wines

00:42:44.980 at the alternative stores

00:42:47.320 because the LCBO still has the monopoly

00:42:49.900 on where those are sold.

00:42:52.460 David Clement is the North American Affairs Manager

00:42:55.140 over at the Consumer Choice Center.

00:42:56.940 Great to talk to you, David.

00:42:57.760 Thanks for coming on today.

00:42:59.040 Appreciate it. Thank you.

00:43:00.120 All right, all the best.

00:43:01.220 That does it for us for today.

00:43:02.820 We'll be back tomorrow, 23 hours and 15 minutes from now

00:43:05.620 with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.

00:43:08.520 If you're in Ontario,

00:43:09.600 hopefully the dry July will end somewhat soon

00:43:12.100 or you can just use that Ontario government map.

00:43:14.140 See, I actually have a very unique problem

00:43:16.840 in that I don't really drink alcohol that much.

00:43:19.500 I'm not a tea joler.

00:43:20.260 I just don't drink a lot, but I buy it a lot.

00:43:22.640 So I have this huge inventory.

00:43:24.160 So maybe I'll just open up my own, you know,

00:43:26.380 bootleg rum running type of operation here.

00:43:28.940 And we'll just be like the Bronfman circa,

00:43:31.280 you know, 1890 or whatever.

00:43:32.740 And we'll just start like shoving stuff

00:43:34.160 out the driveway at the back door

00:43:35.400 in the middle of the night.

00:43:36.100 Anyway, that does it for us for today.

00:43:38.840 We'll talk to you all tomorrow.

00:43:40.100 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:43:43.040 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:43:45.540 Support the program by donating to True North

00:43:47.600 at www.tnc.news.

00:44:05.400 We'll be right back.

00:44:35.400 We'll be right back.

Juno News - July 08, 2024

Poilievre takes aim at Trudeau's ＂woke ideology＂ in Stampede speech

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