Policing the Police State
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Summary
Ontario Police say no to a police state, the perils of the government's COVID-19 strategy, and the media's war on social conservatives. The Andrew Lawton Show starts on April 20, 2021.
Transcript
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Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, Ontario police say no to a police state, the perils of the COVID-0 strategy, and the media's war on social conservatives.
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Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show. This is Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.
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Tuesday, April 20th, 2021. 420, as the kids say, or at least as the kids said when I was a kid.
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I think there was a distant version of me that would have been snickering at the idea of doing a 420 show.
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But alas, here we are. No snickers to be had, not in the province of Ontario at least, in which the police fought back against the police state.
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This is a very good narrative to emerge when police are finding that the enforcement powers that are being heaped upon them by the province are just too much and they don't want to play ball.
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It all started on Friday with this announcement.
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We have made the difficult but necessary decision to give police and by-law officers special authorities to enforce public health measures for the duration of the stay-at-home order.
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Special authorities, hmm? Well, what might those special authorities be, Premier?
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As a government, it is our responsibility to take action to address non-compliance and prevent further transmission of COVID-19.
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That is why, after consulting with public health experts, we have made the deliberate decision to temporarily enhance police officers' authority for the duration of the stay-at-home order.
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Moving forward, police will have the authority to require any individual who is not in a place of residence to, first, provide their purpose for not being at home and provide their home address.
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Police will also have the authority to stop a vehicle, to inquire about an individual's reason for leaving their residence.
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So the Ontario government's antidote to COVID-19, warrantless detention, baseless questions, fishing expeditions, demanding people tell the law enforcers why they dare to be outside their homes.
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Now, this adoption of a police state is not something that the police asked for, nor is it something the police wanted.
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And this was something on Friday I saw starting to break down.
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I think the very first was the Waterloo Regional Police, which is a large police agency across the region in southwestern Ontario, Waterloo, Kitchener area, etc.
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And they came out and said, we have no interest in doing random stops.
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And this started a cascade throughout multiple police agencies, big and small, in Ontario.
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The London Police Service, the York Regional Police Service, Halton Police Service, all of these other regional and municipal police departments.
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Whereas on Saturday morning, I woke up and I saw a few of these and I said, you know what, let me try to put these into a list.
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I actually got a list of every single one of the 44 municipal and regional police departments in Ontario, every one of them.
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And I started finding their tweets and when they didn't have a public statement, I went to their websites.
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And when they didn't have anything there, I reached out to the chiefs myself, emailed them and said, what are you going to do?
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And by Saturday evening, 42 of 44 had said, we are not going to do this.
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42 of 44, almost every single one said, we have no intention of doing random stops.
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A lot of them were saying that, listen, we respond to complaints.
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We are not going to be proactively questioning people.
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They said they were going to, quote, refocus, unquote.
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And under the amended regulation, which they put into effect Saturday evening, they said, OK, law enforcement will only be able to stop people
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if they have a reasonable grounds to suspect that someone has attended an illegal gathering.
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Now, I would say that's not great, but it's better than presumption of guilt if someone is outside their homes,
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which is what that initial enforcement mentality communicated and conveyed to people.
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And I should say, by Sunday morning, the remaining two, the Chatham-Kent Police Service and the Deep River Police Service,
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one in southwestern Ontario, the other in eastern Ontario, had put out their own statements saying that they weren't going to do it either.
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Now, they were kind of a day late and a dollar short, but small town police departments, I guess,
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didn't have people working on the weekend to respond to these sorts of queries.
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But when all was said and done, 44 of 44 municipal and regional police departments said to the government,
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no, we are not going to be your police state enforcers.
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Only one police, and by the way, there were also First Nations police on top of that that similarly said it,
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Only one police agency in the province said, we're going to go along with this.
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And that was the Ontario Provincial Police, the OPP.
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But even then, by Sunday, the OPP had backtracked and said, no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to do this.
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And what I've heard is that the OPP was actually dealing with concerns within its own ranks of frontline officers.
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I had a few email me that were saying, listen, this is not what we are going to do in our local detachments.
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So the OPP very quickly found itself with no legitimacy as the government found itself with no legitimacy.
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But even with this, the government has not acknowledged it was wrong.
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I don't know if you heard that clip closely from Sylvia Jones, the Solicitor General,
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but what she said is that this came about from public health advice.
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Did you get any input from a constitutional lawyer?
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Did you at all run it by a lawyer to think, hey, you know, maybe this might not be something that's legal or constitutional?
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And at the very least, did you think for a moment about the message this would send to people?
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The message this would send to people in Ontario that on one hand, you're saying, get out, go for a walk, get exercise.
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But on the other hand, police can stop anyone for no reason and say, why are you out of home?
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And they would have to prove that they are out of home for a state permitted reason.
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British Columbia, even after seeing this colossal screw up in Ontario, has done the same thing.
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British Columbia now has inter-provincial travel restrictions and also intra-provincial travel within British Columbia is now very much challenged.
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You cannot book a campsite in an area of BC that is different from the one in which you live.
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You cannot book a hotel room in an area of BC which is different than the one in which you live.
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If you're in Vancouver and you want to go to Victoria for the weekend, you are not allowed to do that.
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If you want to go camping, which in this day and age is actually one of the safest activities for someone to engage in,
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an outdoor activity in the wilderness, away from people, socially distanced.
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Unless the bears are giving you COVID, you're probably fine.
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But if the bear is close enough to give you COVID, you're probably...
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The bear speaking moistly is not your biggest problem.
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And no longer is camping allowed unless you're doing it, you know, in your backyard, basically.
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So hotels, campsites, they all have to refund anyone if they're not from that particular health authority.
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And also BC ferries will not allow bookings from campers and trailers.
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So they're trying to keep people indoors in their own homes.
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They're also restricting travel within the province.
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Now, Premier Horgan tried to make it out as though this is no big deal.
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That these roadside checkpoints challenging people as to why they're out of their homes.
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Ah, they're just like, you know, the ride programs for impaired driving at Christmas.
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There will be a fine if you're traveling outside of your area without a legitimate reason.
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So now driving around within your own province, in your own car, is something that will get you fined.
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It's just like, you know, these just like these impaired driving stops we do around the holidays.
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And now there are going to be border signs up along the BC Alberta border telling you that
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you're only allowed to go in if you have an essential reason.
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If you want to book a hotel in BC and you are from outside of British Columbia, good luck.
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You better find some PO box that you can use as your address.
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And this is what's happening in a country whose constitution, by the way, guarantees mobility
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So I hope that British Columbia will find a similar pseudo mutiny on its hands from police agencies
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saying that they have no interest in becoming police state enforcers.
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But in Ontario, there was no admission, even with this reversal of any sort of wrongdoing.
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Paul Calandra, who's the Ontario government's house leader, came out on Monday and said, no,
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no, no, this was just a communications problem.
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Yeah, you know, we made a mistake in the sense that we didn't communicate what we were doing
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She wanted police to be able to stop and harass people for no reason apart from them being
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And anyone who thinks that this was just a mistake of comms need only listen to the snitch
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culture that the Ontario government is similarly unleashing in this province.
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From the same press conference on Friday, here is Solicitor General Sylvia Jones responding
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to a reporter's question about whether people should snitch on their neighbours.
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In terms of people calling to snitch, to inform, look, we all have a personal responsibility.
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And I would hope that the vast majority of us would take that personal responsibility seriously.
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When we see the ICU numbers rise, I would hope that people would take a second thought and
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consider their neighbours, consider those health care workers who have been working
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I'm never going to encourage people to inundate the by-law enforcement or police departments
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But if it means saving lives, then I think we have to think about what your social
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responsibilities are as an individual to make sure that you don't empower other people
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and invite a whole bunch of individuals to your home.
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Her only concern is that it might overburden government phone lines.
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You know, if it can save a life, go wild, snitch on your mom, your dad, your sister, your
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That might just overburden the government's phone lines.
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This is the COVID zero idea we'll talk about very shortly with Anthony Fury.
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This idea that we need to do anything and everything we can, irrespective of the consequences
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on the economy, on civil liberties, on personal well-being, on police powers, on division of
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Do anything and everything if it can just help one person.
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I can assure you the restrictions that Ontario put in beyond the police powers involve shutting
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down playgrounds, shutting down outdoor recreation, which we know to be safe, ordering people in
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regions that are not causing any problems to stay at home and not have even a couple of
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friends over to their backyard, and shutting down Ontario's provincial border.
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Again, I mentioned mobility rights, a longstanding constitutional reality.
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And more importantly, a longstanding tradition in Canada of free movement within provinces.
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But now, border checkpoints up at the Ontario-Manitoba border, at the Ontario-Quebec border.
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The day this went into effect on Monday, we had backups, I read in one report, of 10 kilometers.
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Ottawa and Gatineau, which are essentially part of the same city in terms of people going back and
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forth living on both sides, office buildings on both sides, all of a sudden have police
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checkpoints on the bridge for people who are going to work to have to prove that they're
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And let me tell you, there's no reason to go into Gatineau at all, unless it's an essential
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I read one story that said at one of these checkpoints over the course of several hours,
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So everyone's needlessly inconvenienced, delayed for kilometers and kilometers, backups.
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I should be calling up the environment minister and saying, hey, you know what?
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All these people idling while they go through police checkpoints.
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Use the left's language against what are big government status policies here.
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And this is coming from Doug Ford's conservative government.
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The BC shutdown is coming from BC's NDP government.
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No longer is the shutdown mindset a left-right issue, if ever it was one.
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This is beyond politics and ideology and political identity.
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The fault lines here are basically about big government versus freedom for citizens.
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And that latter group is becoming more and more elusive in pretty much all areas of the
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government and public health apparatchiks response to this, which is why it's so important
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I want to talk about this a bit more with my colleague, True North contributor and Toronto
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Now, you made an observation that I thought was a very unique one.
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We're not hearing it from a lot of people in the media, which was that Ontarians didn't
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just rebuke this expanded law enforcement power, but more broadly, they pushed back against
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They didn't know they were doing that, but kind of implicitly through them rejecting all
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of these outdoor restrictions, playground closures, and this basic idea that you have
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to stay at home regardless of the activity you're doing, regardless of what you're getting
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We want to flatten the curve or, you know, all those buzzwords we've been hearing.
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These activities that we know have nothing to do with spread.
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And there's an important distinction, clarification to be made here, Andrew, in that a lot of
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people think that what the Ford government is trying to do now is combat locations and
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If you look at the latest Ontario Science Table PDF that was at the last presentation,
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there are multiple pages on that slide deck that talk about bringing down mobility data.
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So they are just obsessed with the idea, Andrew, that how we deal with coronavirus isn't micro-targeting
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the locations causing spread, but just to force everyone to stay at home, to give fewer
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reasons for the Google Analytics chart, which tells you how much people are driving around
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because they have anonymized cell phone data, and bringing that down.
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And there's even a table for recreation, meaning how much people are sort of going out and about
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in the parks and hanging out there, and they want to bring it all down.
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And that is consistent with this COVID zero ideology.
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We got to get to zero cases by any means possible.
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Places like New Zealand, Andrew, which have actually closed the parks multiple times as
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They thought coronavirus was gone in New Zealand.
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No, they still closed the parks, the playgrounds, last month.
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That's an important point because I've had even from people that I would say are ostensibly
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on the right pushback when I criticize lockdowns because they say, you know, if we just did
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an Australia or New Zealand style lockdown, a short but harsh one, we would beat it.
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But you're right to point out that those jurisdictions haven't beaten it.
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I mean, one of the things that I always say is I find it really, really bizarre.
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I mean, it flabbergasts me that we're in the 21st century.
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There's so many really credentialed, bright minds in Ontario that we're privileged to have here.
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We're told we live in the age of analytics, of big data.
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And you're telling me big data can't be used to actually deal with these problems here.
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We can micro-target, you know, ad buys for particular products, but we can't micro-target
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Instead, we have this, quite frankly, really, really, the basic approach to coronavirus right
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now from COVID zero is, well, this virus spreads from person to person.
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So let's make it illegal for people to be near people.
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Look, if someone had put that on their public health final exam, the very people, the professors
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advocating for this right now, they would have failed those students two years ago.
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This has never been a part of public health literature.
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Infectious diseases physicians who don't support lockdowns have made this very clear to me.
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It's not in any of the plans that Dr. Teresa Tam signed off on as late as 2018 about how
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I mean, lockdowns are actually not a traditional public health protocol.
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And it's interesting how of the many shifts, even this is one that we've seen from the World
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Health Organization, which has said, no, no, no, lockdowns are not something that we like.
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And that's the one area where the governments have decided they're not going to defer to this.
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But this COVID zero idea is also a complete inversion of that stated goal of just make
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it so that we if we do have harsh cases, we have hospital capacity, we can get our ducks
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in a row, the the flatten the curve line from what, 13 months ago.
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And now it's you're right, moving more and more towards this idea that we need to do everything
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and anything we can until there are zero cases.
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And what is so bizarre is at the same time, if you ask those very COVID zero advocates,
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hey, is coronavirus becoming an endemic illness, meaning it's just kind of here to stay for
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the rest of our natural lives, hopefully at a much sort of lower level and hopefully much
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Yes, except one of the latest COVID zero documents that a lot of these people were co-signatories
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on the very doctors who are on television saying shut her down.
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We didn't mean the outdoor sports, those very documents, not only do they call for the New
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Zealand model, which does involve playground shutdowns, they also call for continual suppression
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of the virus, meaning various restrictions and lockdown measures until Canada gets to
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That's actually in this Canadian shield document that COVID zero advocates they liked and they
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They came up with that because it's one case per million, 40 cases per day with a country
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with a border as long as ours, not an island nation like Taiwan and New Zealand, when it's
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an endemic illness that we're also admitting we will never get rid of in our natural lives.
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I mean, it's crazy talk is really what we can call COVID zero.
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Explain to me what's happening with Doug Ford's legitimacy as a leader right now, because one
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thing I saw on Friday was that a lot of the criticism that he was getting was from the
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I was not seeing any real defense of the Ontario police measures.
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Now, the province has since backtracked a little bit on that.
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But as you know, they've not admitted wrongdoing.
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And even the language they used was not, you know, we got it wrong.
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They were going to, quote, refocus, unquote, the powers.
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Paul Calandri yesterday gave a little bit more.
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Well, when you ask what's going on with Doug Ford's legitimacy, I mean, nothing's going
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A lot of people were immediately outraged, closed down the playgrounds, randomly stopped
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And then by the weekend, you had most police forces in Ontario saying, we ain't doing those
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I was bicycling around downtown and I saw all the new rules that are enacted.
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Yes, the playgrounds were shut down, but picnic tables are still banned.
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All you can do is walk through parks and so forth.
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I can tell you, traveling through the streets of Toronto, nobody was following those rules.
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Some of them because they probably said, I'm going to do civil disobedience.
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Others because they don't listen to this stuff anymore.
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And then you've had mayors like Patrick Brown and Brampton, the mayor of Aurora and others
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who have openly said these need to be repealed.
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They've got to get these laws off the books because you can't have a society in which these
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laws are just everybody's kind of mocking them.
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Because if they think they have a problem on their hands now, well, if we're asking what's
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the point of these laws, why should we follow them?
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I guarantee you more and more rule breaking is going to happen because of that.
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And the government's put themselves in a very dangerous situation where their legitimacy
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Yeah, and you're right that that then makes it very difficult for people to go along with
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advice or guidance that may actually be rooted in science if they're so used to stuff that
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And the playground ban, I think, is a very real thing.
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I don't want to make it just about the symbolism.
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But symbolically, it also, I think, does reveal the government has just completely abandoned
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that idea of linking science with the guidance.
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And when you mentioned it at the beginning of our discussion that it's not about targeting
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where transmission is occurring, parks, I'm not aware of any outbreaks there.
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And then for Minister Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier Christine Elliott, to say that people
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not wearing masks at parks is part of the reason for spread.
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Yeah, it's absolutely shocking that they would go out and say numerous factually incorrect things
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during that press conference, which I think really frustrated people.
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I mean, are there anomalous examples of outdoor spread in the literature?
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One of my favorite lines in one of those studies is that most examples of outdoor spread have
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And then, well, people decide to take it indoors to get some beer from the beer fridge,
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hang in inside in a close space for 20 minutes.
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It's basically not really a thing that's happening.
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And yet here we have all these restrictions on outdoor activities.
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It's if the people of Ontario want to say that's unacceptable, we got to get this rolled
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Well, they're already hearing from other mayors who are saying just that.
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Anthony Fury is an op-ed editor and columnist at the Toronto Sun and my colleague here at
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And if you're not following Anthony already, please do.
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He's doing lots of great work at True North at the Toronto Sun.
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And he has great observations on Twitter all the time.
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He mentioned briefly the mobility data that the government uses from Google.
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And it's not tracking people in the sense of, you know, oh, Andrew went to the convenience
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It does not distinguish between legitimate essential movement and non-essential movement.
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And this was something I learned a few months back.
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I think it was in January that I was working on this.
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Because in December, Doug Ford had made a comment about people that are coming in from
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And he was calling for harsher restrictions from the federal government.
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This was around the time that the province was for the first time trying to scapegoat the
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And I was desperately trying to get from the premier's office an acknowledgement of what this
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And where they were getting them from and what they were actually saying.
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And eventually they conceded that they were using anonymized Google mobility data.
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But the problem is these data do not show people who are exempt from quarantine because
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they are essential cross-border workers, truck drivers, versus people who have just skipped
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And have decided they're going to float their quarantine.
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If they're looking at mobility data as being the problem, people are moving around.
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Well, how do you know these people are not essential workers?
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How do you know these people are not, even in the government's eyes, having a reason for
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being out in the world that the government approves?
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Which, in and of itself, is a rather chilling and Orwellian statement.
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So anytime you hear talk about mobility as being the problem, know that it actually means
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But a lot of those people may have, even under the government's restricted approach,
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Although I would say, under the Constitution, everyone does.
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When we come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
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I want to talk about what Peter McKay called the stinking albatross around Andrew Scheer's
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neck, which is social conservatives in the Conservative Party of Canada.
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This rhetoric was echoed by Conrad Yakabuski in a Globe and Mail column in which he says
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that like clockwork, the Tory stalking species known as the stinking albatross returns to
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Canada each election season after wintering in warmer climes where the culture wars occur
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He is taking aim at Kathy Wagenthal, a Conservative MP, who introduced a private member's bill that
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would ban sex-selective abortion, which is basically abortion that is decided for the
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sole basis of someone not wanting to deliver a child of a particular gender, almost exclusively
00:26:48.360
because people do not want daughters for various cultural reasons, all of which are rooted in
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a very misogynistic view that females are less worthy of living than males.
00:26:59.300
And in doing so, she has, and by the way, Kathy Wagenthal has always been a very reliable
00:27:11.080
She's always been very transparent, and her voters in her riding have rewarded her by re-electing
00:27:17.720
And she's decided that she wants to take aim at this problem, which we know is happening.
00:27:21.800
There's not a lot of research on it, but it does very much occur.
00:27:25.220
And I am, as a pro-life person, slightly concerned with sex-selective abortion restrictions for
00:27:35.740
The chief among them is that it tends to mask the problem.
00:27:40.060
If you believe that abortion is wrong because it takes a life, it shouldn't matter what the
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The reason I say that is because a bill like this makes it seem as though the intent is the
00:27:54.220
The other part of it is that I feel that, and this one is something I'm of two minds on,
00:28:00.260
frankly, it almost is more of a political push towards pro-life policy than anything else.
00:28:07.840
And the reason for that is because it may well be effective.
00:28:10.280
There are lots of people in Canada who are pro-choice.
00:28:13.600
They would identify as pro-choice, but when it comes down to it, they would oppose sex-selective
00:28:19.000
So bills like this tend to appeal to those people.
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But in a lot of ways, I almost feel that they mask.
00:28:24.880
Again, if you feel abortion is wrong, they mask what is wrong for reasons that have nothing
0.83
00:28:31.660
So it ties into the reason I already mentioned.
00:28:34.520
But at the same time, I don't want to question Kathy Wagenthal's motive.
00:28:42.440
But it's interesting that now, the existence of a pro-life MP in Aaron O'Toole's conservative
00:28:50.420
party is all it takes for the mainstream media to say, oh, well, Aaron O'Toole's got that
00:29:03.020
The entire analysis is based on this idea that Kathy Wagenthal's bill is that stinking
1.00
00:29:09.680
And a lot of the critics of Andrew Scheer, of Aaron O'Toole, of Stephen Harper, they're
00:29:17.720
They don't actually care about whether the leader is pro-life, whether the party will
00:29:25.360
They don't want pro-lifers to exist in Canada at all.
00:29:29.180
And they don't, therefore, want any pro-life politicians to exist.
00:29:33.900
And Aaron O'Toole, who literally said in no uncertain terms, I'm pro-choice.
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Here's when and why I started believing in that.
00:29:47.960
Oh, well, you know, the stinking albatross is back because an MP from, I think, Saskatchewan
00:29:52.840
introduced a private member's bill, which, by the way, most Canadians, even those ardently
00:29:59.780
So this is why conservatives should never play by the left's rules, should never play
00:30:07.180
by the mainstream media's rules, should never play on their terrain.
00:30:11.160
And this is true whether you're talking about a carbon tax, as we were last week.
00:30:14.780
And it's certainly true when you're talking about social policy.
00:30:18.940
Eventually, a future conservative leader must understand that playing to the SOCONs is a
00:30:26.260
It might help you win a leadership race, but it will leave you with a stinking albatross
0.98
00:30:29.760
around your neck of which no amount of flowery perfume can disguise the stench.
00:30:35.940
This is the mainstream media's characterization of people who value life.
00:30:41.160
And one of the things that I found interesting is that pro-life candidates that seek the conservative
00:30:46.880
leadership, whether we're talking about Leslie Lewis or Derek Sloan, they didn't say they
00:30:54.660
They wanted a party that simply respects that social conservatives are in it.
00:30:59.100
And if the liberals were authentic about representing Canadians, they would recognize that they
00:31:04.320
preside over a country that has social conservatives in it.
00:31:08.460
So whatever the group is, and again, statistics tend to be a little bit tricky on this.
00:31:13.600
My friend Scott Hayward of RightNow has done tremendous work at trying to really look at
00:31:20.820
And he points out that 82% of Quebecers support restricting sex-selective abortion and 67% of
00:31:28.080
Quebecers support legally restricting late-term abortion.
00:31:33.860
84% of Canadians support legally restricting sex-selective abortion.
00:31:38.460
And 70% of Canadians support legally restricting late-term abortion.
00:31:43.400
This is very valid, up-to-date polling that suggests the mainstream media position, the liberal
00:31:49.240
government's position, the elite narrative is distinct from what ordinary Canadians think
00:31:56.860
And you may think, okay, well, the conservatives still have to win over people by getting their
00:32:04.300
But I do want to believe, and perhaps this is an overly romantic notion, that voters reward
00:32:12.180
And when Andrew Scheer couldn't give a very clear position on abortion, which was, well,
00:32:17.740
I'm, you know, yes, I'm pro-life, but, you know, I know I won't touch it.
00:32:21.160
And I mean, but my member, like, no one knew, even pro-lifers had no idea what he was saying.
00:32:25.920
Whereas Aaron O'Toole has given a tremendously clear position on it.
00:32:28.960
And the mainstream media coverage is identical.
00:32:31.700
He's clearly pro-choice and the media coverage is, oh, well, yeah, those stinking albatross,
00:32:35.880
stench pro-life people, they're dirty, smelly people, you know, no party wants them.
00:32:40.480
That's really what Conrad Yakubowski is saying.
00:32:42.740
By taking Peter McKay's metaphor and just extending it beyond which, beyond the point at which any
00:32:49.520
metaphor should be extended and still keep its original meaning.
00:32:52.700
So what we have happening here is the beginning of the age-old conservative dilemma of feeling
00:33:00.780
like their problem is not being conservative enough.
00:33:04.280
And I'm not trying to preach to anyone right now on social issues, whether you're watching
00:33:08.820
and you're pro-life, pro-choice, doesn't matter to me.
00:33:12.120
But understand that the conservative movement in Canada has people who believe this.
00:33:17.740
And as we see from party conventions and internal races like nominations and leaderships, there
00:33:22.820
may be more social conservatives than non-social conservatives in the conservative party.
00:33:27.360
But at the very least, it's not a fringe group.
00:33:30.600
And if you look at national polling, it's not even a fringe group in Canada itself.
00:33:34.820
It is just painted as fringe by the people that believe they have a monopoly on which ideas
00:33:45.300
Before I wrap things up on this show, I want to tell you about an event I am participating
00:33:55.080
A panel, Lockdown, Censorship, Big Tech, Free Speech, and Radical Gender Ideology.
00:34:03.420
And we've got fantastic panelists, Barbara Kay and Salim Ansour and, well, then just me.
00:34:09.720
And Serena Singh, who's been a tremendous advocate for free speech and open debate, is
00:34:17.440
And I interviewed her a couple of years back, and it was a great chat we had.
00:34:21.040
So this is going to be a great panel tomorrow night.
00:34:30.180
And the details are on the screen right there in front of you.
00:34:35.180
We will talk to you in a couple of days with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.
00:34:41.940
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:34:43.960
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.