Juno News - RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki is retiring

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.140 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:14.280 Hello and welcome to you all, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here,

00:00:18.880 the Andrew Lawton Show on True North.

00:00:21.540 On this Wednesday, February 15th, we are doing a little bit of a later start to the program.

00:00:27.240 I mean, if you're on the West Coast, you're used to Eastern Standard Time supremacy.

00:00:32.340 So this is still like the ripe afternoon hour of 4 o'clock for you.

00:00:36.180 But 7 o'clock in Ontario, 5 o'clock in Alberta, and really late, by Andrew Lawton Show standards anyway, 8.30 in Newfoundland.

00:00:45.320 So if you're watching from Goose Bay, if you're watching from Gander, if you're watching from St. John's, or what was the other place I went to in Newfoundland?

00:00:53.180 I was only there for like 12 hours once when I was covering the Aaron O'Toole campaign.

00:00:58.160 And my experience was apparently so lackluster that I have forgotten the name of the one place I went to in Newfoundland.

00:01:07.160 It has like a, it was on the west of Newfoundland.

00:01:10.180 I don't know, I'll figure it out later.

00:01:11.140 That'll be the next episode of the Andrew Lawton Show is where in Newfoundland is Andrew Lawton or was Andrew Lawton.

00:01:16.780 But in any event, I will say, by the way, I have been to all provinces in this country but one.

00:01:23.180 And that one is Manitoba.

00:01:25.640 And a friend of mine said, well, you got to go to Manitoba to complete the set.

00:01:29.080 And then I had another friend say, well, if you've gone this far without going to Manitoba,

00:01:32.800 you should just on principle go the rest of your life without going to Manitoba.

00:01:37.080 And I would think if I can go the rest of my life without having to go to Manitoba,

00:01:40.820 that would actually be a sign of some good decision making based on some of the things I hear about that province.

00:01:45.760 But other people, if you want to tell me all the great things about Manitoba, please do.

00:01:51.000 Although it may be a short segment.

00:01:53.180 So we will welcome you.

00:01:55.080 I don't like making fun of Manitoba.

00:01:56.720 I'm sure Manitoba is lovely.

00:01:58.340 So we'll get on to the real stuff because lots of things are happening in the wonderful world of Canadian politics and news this week.

00:02:05.960 Brenda, lucky resigning or retiring.

00:02:09.620 No, not resigning, retiring.

00:02:11.680 A personal decision.

00:02:13.460 We'll talk about that in just a moment. 0.78

00:02:15.720 Christine Anderson, the German member of the European Parliament who we had on the show a couple of weeks ago. 0.87

00:02:21.120 She is getting ready to board a plane to Canada tomorrow.

00:02:24.860 So I will be very much keeping an eye on that to make sure that when she lands at,

00:02:29.420 I don't know where it is, Pearson Airport or something, that she is allowed through customs.

00:02:34.680 I've talked to a couple of the people that are on the team that's putting this cross-country tour together.

00:02:40.120 And I say, let me know the second she's admitted to the country or denied entry,

00:02:44.060 because I think that's going to be an important thing to watch.

00:02:47.260 And what else is happening?

00:02:48.560 We've got, of course, Pierre Polyev celebrating World Agriculture Day.

00:02:54.200 And he did this video, which I thought was quite a well-done video.

00:02:57.880 He did it in the style of those, you know, God made a blank ads, you know, God made a

00:03:02.320 fighter, God made a farmer.

00:03:03.680 That was the one he did.

00:03:05.160 And I was watching and I was saying, wow, this is a really nice video.

00:03:07.960 And then I just sort of saw the ode to the dairy farmer and was reminded of the conservative's

00:03:13.160 uncomfortable fetish with supply management, which I think needs to end.

00:03:16.420 And that's going to be like on the wish list for a conservative leader and what Maxime Bernier would have done as a conservative leader had he won that leadership back in 2017.

00:03:26.640 But as it stands, conservatives still love supply management.

00:03:29.540 So we're going in every which direction here.

00:03:32.300 Let's talk about Brenda Luckey, because this is the woman who has for the last nearly five years been the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

00:03:41.500 According to her statement, she was brought aboard to deal with a few things specifically.

00:03:49.460 Now, she writes here that as commissioner, I was asked to modernize and address the RCMP's internal challenges.

00:03:58.480 And I know, sorry, and then she says this was a significant mandate.

00:04:01.980 And with the support of my senior executive team and the commitment of all employees of the RCMP, we've accomplished quite a lot.

00:04:10.640 She says, I'm so proud of the steps we've taken to modernize, to increase accountability,

00:04:16.140 address systemic racism, ensure a safe and equitable workplace, and advance reconciliation

00:04:23.680 with Indigenous peoples. Our progress can be found on our website. More on that statement

00:04:29.500 in just a moment. Let's talk about the circumstances. Her term was coming to an end.

00:04:34.780 it could have been renewed. It probably wasn't going to be. So Lucky says here that she has made

00:04:41.340 a personal decision to retire. Now this is the first line of the statement. Today I announced

00:04:47.940 that I have made a personal decision to retire. Does that not sound like the kind of thing you

00:04:52.820 say when someone is standing behind you and they've got like a gun pointed to your head and

00:04:57.560 they're saying look into the camera and tell them that you're being treated nicely. I'm not saying

00:05:02.900 that's what's happening as dramatically. But when she throws it out there, it makes it sound like

00:05:07.580 it wasn't exactly a personal decision. And I have no inside knowledge of this. Maybe it is personal,

00:05:13.740 maybe it's not. What I do know is that Brenda Luckey has been an unmitigated disaster for

00:05:19.820 policing for the RCMP and for the country. And far from presiding over modernization, she's presided

00:05:27.320 over more scandals than I can count in the RCMP, not the least of which is this systemic racism

00:05:33.520 boogeyman, which I think at first she said didn't exist and then did exist. And it was tough to keep

00:05:38.280 track and you got a little bit of whiplash. She was the one who was running political interference 1.00

00:05:43.400 for the Liberals when it came to the Nova Scotia shooting, demanding the release of details about

00:05:49.760 the specific firearms that were used so that the Liberal government in Ottawa could make a

00:05:54.760 politically charged plea to ban certain guns. So this was, again, a political objective rather

00:06:02.120 than a law enforcement objective from the commissioner of the RCMP. And she also was

00:06:08.020 curiously unable to answer pretty key questions when she was publishing her comments and when she

00:06:14.300 was appearing and testifying before the Public Order Emergency Commission. And she was asked

00:06:19.480 about, oh, well, were you at this meeting? Oh, I don't know. Meetings all blend together. It's

00:06:23.440 tough to say who uh what is a meeting really like she again she couldn't answer anything

00:06:27.940 that was relevant to it and really she came across as the one that i realized was going to be the

00:06:34.640 patsy of this all and i don't think it is all that surprising that she and again i'm reading between

00:06:41.980 the lines here i i am speculating and i don't want you to think i'm speaking authoritatively here i'm

00:06:47.560 talking about just the questions that I would be asking. She's leaving five days before the public

00:06:54.060 order emergency commission report comes out. Now, is it because if she leaves after it will look like

00:07:00.920 she's being punished and she wants to make it look like she's going out on her own terms? Or is it 0.94

00:07:05.640 that she actually is going out on her own terms before she gets fired? Because if the public order 0.99

00:07:10.540 emergency commission report comes out with some sort of an indictment, there will be a call for

00:07:16.920 some accountability. Someone will have to be served up on the platter to some people in this

00:07:22.840 country. Now, yesterday I talked about my prediction for how Justin Trudeau is going to

00:07:26.700 take a potentially scathing report and spin it around as being some collective failing that

00:07:32.000 really has nothing to do with him. But I think that there are people who are going to want a

00:07:36.440 fall person. I can't say a fall guy. That would be too cisgendered of me. So a fall person and

00:07:42.060 perhaps Brenda Luckey would have been the fall person. I think she should have been forced to 1.00

00:07:46.300 resign over the Portapique Nova Scotia killing and her role in that which was absolutely shameful

00:07:53.860 and the lack of accountability at the RCMP which is similarly shameful so if you look at what

00:08:01.380 Brenda Luckey has actually done she has become the commissioner that has been tied to a period

00:08:09.040 of the RCMP in which I think the esteem in which Canadians hold the RCMP has only gone down but I

00:08:16.040 want to return for just a moment to her statement she writes she made a personal decision to retire

00:08:22.600 yada yada yada this was not an easy decision as i love the rcmp okay yada yada yada historic

00:08:28.460 organization tremendous work we've made great progress to meet what canadians expect of us

00:08:33.620 she was asked to modernize i'll read the final line again or the second to the final line

00:08:38.560 i'm so proud of the steps we've taken to modernize to increase accountability address systemic racism

00:08:45.360 ensure a safe and equitable workplace

00:08:48.080 and advance reconciliation with indigenous peoples.

00:08:51.240 She's proud of the work she did fighting crime.

00:08:54.360 Nowhere does she say she's proud of making the country a safer place.

00:08:58.220 Nowhere does she say she's proud of taking criminals off the streets,

00:09:02.180 of being an advocate for justice.

00:09:05.140 So all the things that I think of when I think of policing

00:09:08.760 or what policing is supposed to be,

00:09:10.960 certainly to Sir Robert Peel, the former prime minister of Britain,

00:09:13.900 the founder of modern policing, I think of actual policing. I think of taking criminals

00:09:19.560 off the street. I think of making communities safer. I think of that idea of serving and

00:09:24.440 protecting, which just seems to be so absent from the RCMP, which is now the armed enforcement wing

00:09:31.620 of the liberal government effectively. And Brenda Luckey is leaving and has nothing to say about

00:09:37.560 actually fighting crime. So maybe it's because that wasn't actually a priority for her time as 0.96

00:09:43.340 rcmp commissioner we'll have more thoughts on this in the days and weeks ahead the liberal

00:09:48.900 government has said she deserves to be thanked for her service this was justice minister david

00:09:54.260 lametti's parting comments just after hearing of commissioner lucky's resignation

00:09:59.020 look i'm not the minister in charge and and it's it's minister mendicino the minister of public

00:10:07.760 security certainly it was a historic appointment and um and i know that that uh she made efforts

00:10:14.100 to reform the rcmp and uh and to even address some of the issues that we're talking about today

00:10:20.880 so uh a historic first step and uh and and again she deserves to be thanked for her service

00:10:27.280 it's all about historic it's not about being effective so take from that what you will no

00:10:35.220 and talks about what she actually accomplished, what she did. The RCMP is right now facing a big

00:10:41.420 crunch from people of Alberta about whether they want to continue allowing the RCMP to be their

00:10:46.700 provincial law enforcement agency. And if Danielle Smith wins re-election in the spring, I think it's

00:10:52.900 probably a safe bet that Alberta will push towards an Alberta police force. And I think that right

00:10:59.240 now the RCMP, which is the provincial police force in most provinces in Canada, I think Ontario and

00:11:04.440 Quebec are the only two exceptions to that. It's going to start being, I think, a big question

00:11:10.500 people are asking, do we trust this organization for all of the issues it's had to be the authority

00:11:17.280 on our local law enforcement? And, you know, again, we've heard from premiers in places like

00:11:22.640 New Brunswick, Alberta, Saskatchewan, where they want the RCMP as their provincial law enforcement

00:11:29.440 body to not enforce the federal government's gun grab and and i think the rcmp itself has been a

00:11:35.140 little uncomfortable with that but i say power to those provinces and i think they should be

00:11:39.320 encouraged to do that but i don't trust the rcmp to be the one that doesn't take the federal

00:11:45.640 government's side when push comes to shove on that still uh that's a bigger issue than we have time

00:11:49.900 to get into to the show today but i think we need to have a big question about the rcmp's role in

00:11:55.320 Canadian policing in general. And for all that Brenda Luckey wants to laud her success at

00:12:00.060 modernizing, public trust in the RCMP is down. None of these key issues have been dealt with in

00:12:06.460 the least. We are going to switch to a topic near and dear to my heart, which is the moral panic

00:12:12.260 surrounding the COVID era any moment now. But first, I want to just share this trailer for a

00:12:18.220 documentary produced by our friends at secondstreet.org called Defund Putin. Basically, the

00:12:24.000 question is, how can Canada cut Vladimir Putin's military budget? And I had an email from someone

00:12:29.840 just a few moments ago that didn't like that I was being all pro-Ukraine with this. And I would

00:12:34.020 just say, the ad doesn't even mention Ukraine. I think regardless of your perspective on the war,

00:12:39.360 you should surely believe that energy policy in energy-rich nations should not be enriching

00:12:45.140 places like Russia, and similarly to Saudi Arabia. So I view this as being a significant

00:12:50.820 energy discussion more than anything else. But nevertheless, I will let the trailer do the

00:12:55.620 talking. This is Colin Craig.

00:13:20.820 competitors. Putin and his cronies helped fund the anti-shale gas propaganda that led seven

00:13:26.580 European countries to ban fracking. Do we stand up and help the world wean itself off of Russian 0.74

00:13:33.620 oil and natural gas? Or do we keep our resources in the ground and let the world stay dependent 0.97

00:13:39.380 on tyrants like Vladimir Putin?

00:13:50.820 now getting right back into the thick of things yesterday we did the retrospective on

00:13:58.060 one year since the emergencies act and it's impossible to talk about the emergencies act

00:14:02.660 and the freedom convoy without the broader question of what context gave birth to those

00:14:08.960 things and that was at the time two years and a little bit of covid policy in canada which has

00:14:14.260 been analyzed in a newly expanded book by barry cooper and marco navarro genie called canada's

00:14:21.780 covid the story of a pandemic moral panic now we are supposed to be talking to marco and barry

00:14:28.880 although marco seems to have drifted off into the ether so uh barry the floor is yours uh solo for

00:14:34.440 the first little while here it's uh good to talk to you thanks for coming on today yeah you're

00:14:39.360 welcome Andrew yeah the first edition came out in November of 2020 and it

00:14:47.460 dealt with events up to about the beginning of the fall we discovered that

00:14:52.980 it didn't end in November 2020 and there was so much more interesting stuff that

00:14:58.740 came along over the next 18 20 months that we decided we would you know keep

00:15:04.800 notes as things were going on and pull this new expanded version together the

00:15:11.460 main purpose of it is to document the I don't know how to characterize it

00:15:20.040 politely but there's let's say the mendacious acts of governments and

00:15:24.480 government bureaucrats the media academics particularly guys in the in

00:15:30.120 the medical schools that otherwise it'll be forgotten ten years from now because

00:15:38.820 there won't be any record you know there'll be a remembrance maybe that

00:15:42.480 some people didn't like the government responses but we basically provided an

00:15:47.160 analysis about why people didn't like it because of the lies that were told by

00:15:52.920 bureaucrats by docs and especially by politicians in the mainstream media that

00:15:58.980 was the purpose of it one of the things just to go back to january 2020 here that i i think is

00:16:05.400 important to note is that you know we were looking at the people in the lab coats and the people in

00:16:10.280 the suits on television as being authorities on what was happening but they were largely getting

00:16:15.820 their information from the same place as we were they didn't know what was going on they didn't know

00:16:20.300 what was happening they were looking at the news footage out of china eventually italy and iran

00:16:25.080 And I think that was a big problem, is that they seem to be a lot more confident than they should have been.

00:16:31.940 And I think that was where a lot of that public trust was eroded quite early on.

00:16:36.640 Yeah, I agree. That's exactly what happened, because the rest of us could read the sources that,

00:16:42.360 not that very many people did, mind you, but it was certainly available. It wasn't hidden.

00:16:46.500 And the behavior, particularly of, let's say, senior people in the interface between government policy and the rest of us, chief medical officers of health in this country, people like Tony Fauci in the States,

00:17:06.660 what they said was being contradicted by other people who are just as well credentialed as they

00:17:14.800 are in many cases much better they actually knew what they were talking about and and the result

00:17:22.360 was since the rest of the world could read this stuff people just just didn't believe them anymore

00:17:28.500 it took a while anybody who believes anything that comes out say of bonnie henry's mouth

00:17:34.540 right now, you know, is just gullible as, you know, as a frog.

00:17:41.000 I mean, I don't know why anyone would after she's been criticized on the basis of facts for so long.

00:17:50.740 I believe we might have Marco back on the line now.

00:17:55.140 So if so, hopefully he'll magically appear in front of us and we will be able to carry on.

00:18:00.160 If not, we'll put you on the hot seat for a couple more minutes and get him on.

00:18:04.540 momentarily all right it sounds if there's an issue where he is not appearing so Marco if you

00:18:10.140 are there perhaps you can try reconnecting and we'll we'll get you in here and I apologize for

00:18:15.020 the technical issues this is the nature of live broadcasting Barry your background is obviously

00:18:20.740 in political science and I think one of the interesting things that a lot of people pointed

00:18:25.520 out and government officials didn't really acknowledge ever and still to this day have not

00:18:30.060 is that their actions seem to be largely driven by political science rather than health science

00:18:35.840 and not the good astute political science that you are a purveyor of,

00:18:39.840 but oftentimes a more cynical and less freedom-oriented variety.

00:18:44.360 And I think this is the big problem that I had with it, is that health policy was,

00:18:49.240 and by that I mean the stuff that was being put out by public health officials

00:18:52.340 like Theresa Tam or Dina Hinshaw, Bonnie Henry, and so on.

00:18:56.440 These people have a singular focus.

00:18:59.340 They're not constitutional scholars. They're not holistic health officials that are looking at the broader implications of their policy. They were looking at largely the single metric of cases and nothing else.

00:19:13.100 So if their input was being treated as one of many inputs throughout COVID and politicians were also taking in inputs from other places, I think there might have been different results.

00:19:23.500 But instead, what we seem to see was a complete delegation of all decision making to these unelected people.

00:19:31.640 Yeah, that's right. I mean, if if this was, in fact, an emergency, there are people around who prepare their their work environment to deal with emergencies.

00:19:41.720 The first thing that happened in Edmonton was the Alberta emergency plan was tossed out the window.

00:19:48.960 Nobody paid any attention to it at all, like zero.

00:19:53.480 Yeah, but why have an emergency plan if you're not going to use it when there's an emergency, right?

00:19:58.520 That's exactly right.

00:19:59.720 And this was almost unique because when you have, say, an earthquake in, say, the lower mainland and, you know, Chilliwack is rocked to its roots, you don't call upon geographers or volcanologists, you talk upon emergency people and ask them to, you know, take charge and presumably BC still has an emergency plan in place.

00:20:25.740 They just didn't use it for this emergency.

00:20:28.580 We certainly have it, and we didn't use it.

00:20:31.400 Every other province in the country probably had one, and none of them used it.

00:20:38.600 I would say it brings up issues that have nothing to do with either emergencies or health policy.

00:20:44.540 It has to do with the anxieties that were clearly present in the politicians.

00:20:50.260 They had no clue what to do, and so they basically freaked out and said,

00:20:55.740 okay, it's about health. What do you say, Dina? Why should she know anything? She's an MD. She's

00:21:03.980 not an emergency person. She's not even a real med scientist. She's not an epidemiologist. She's 1.00

00:21:11.400 just an MD from U of A. Why should she do it? Or Bonnie Henry, the same thing. It's a political, 0.73

00:21:21.580 that's why we call it a panic it was a political panic that caused all of the incredible amount of

00:21:28.140 suffering that canadians have put up with for the last you know now getting going on to three years

00:21:33.740 and it's completely unjustifiable on medical or any other grounds is your belief that they

00:21:41.380 i'll ask this in a different way because one theory that i've had is that they were pot

00:21:46.920 committed at a certain point and they had invested so much in their narrative that they didn't

00:21:50.860 actually have the ability to walk it back without just completely undermining anything they'd been

00:21:55.760 telling us for the last two and eventually three years. But the flip side of that is that they're

00:22:00.500 true believers and that even now the people that have been championing the policies that you're

00:22:04.960 poking holes in, rightfully so, they still believe and will to their dying day that they were the

00:22:11.200 right calls. And I'm curious if you have a sense of which camp they're in. Do you think that they

00:22:15.820 got so far into it that they couldn't walk it back anymore? Or do you think they're still true

00:22:20.000 believers? They could be both, quite frankly. Most, I came from a medical family, and one of the

00:22:29.200 things, my dad was a surgeon, my sister was a doc. One of the things that you learn pretty clearly

00:22:35.700 is that doctors, particularly when they have responsibility for life and death,

00:22:43.300 don't generally take much second thoughts. They, you know, they have a job to do, they do it.

00:22:49.420 uh they're not really good at reflecting on whether or not they've done the right thing

00:22:54.220 and that's certainly true for uh these sort of uh you know i would i it's not even fair to call

00:23:00.380 them second-rate docs but but the the bureaucratic docs uh keep the same attitude without the same

00:23:08.380 confidence uh and so that when when you have people who are who are genuinely expert in some

00:23:14.380 of these matters, like the people who signed the Great Barrington Declaration that said you've got

00:23:20.860 to look after the people who are vulnerable, not everybody. These were the three big universities

00:23:26.220 in the world, Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford. That's where these guys were from. Dina Henshaw

00:23:32.380 said, oh, we disagree. Like, that was it. She probably didn't even understand what these guys

00:23:38.620 were saying and because at the time she had the year of the premier nothing happened they just

00:23:45.260 continued the same kind of of uh let's say misguided to be polite about it uh policies

00:23:51.820 that they had already put in place i i know to get to the bigger picture and i i'd say the more

00:23:57.900 philosophical underpinning of this i i know that the uh the book's blurb draws a reference to hannah

00:24:03.180 Arendt, who, you know, the author of the famous book, The Banality of Evil, and her thoughts

00:24:08.500 on bureaucratic tyranny, and I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on that.

00:24:12.960 Yeah, that's one of my, I've memorized this, and I've mentioned it in class, I don't know

00:24:19.280 how many times, it was not actually in the Eichmann book, but it was in another place

00:24:24.100 that, that she says the great problem with bureaucratic tyranny, unlike any other kind

00:24:29.680 tyranny is that the desperate remedy of tyrannicide is unavailable if you if you get rid of one

00:24:36.000 bureaucrat they will be replaced by another one who will behave the other one will behave in

00:24:40.320 exactly the same way uh so it really is a problem i mean you can get rid of bureaucrats uh which is 1.00

00:24:46.400 fine i mean that's one of the first thing that danielle smith did uh was to fire uh fire dina 0.98

00:24:51.760 handshaw she should have been fired by jason kenny he'd probably still be premier if he you know if 0.90

00:24:57.680 he'd had the the imagination to do that unfortunately he didn't well

00:25:02.360 unfortunately for him I'd say you know it's obviously good for Danielle but it

00:25:06.180 was that the amount of of consistent errors that bureaucrats are capable of

00:25:15.680 you actually have to know something about how public policy is made in order

00:25:19.940 even to believe it and it's it's was in this particular instance was really

00:25:24.980 remarkable. They just kept doing the same stupid thing time and time again. Yes, and I think, I 1.00

00:25:32.200 mean, your point about Jason Kenney, I think, is an important dimension here, because there was very

00:25:37.280 little, I mean, some might even say no, pushback to the overarching narrative, regardless of which

00:25:43.960 province you were in, whether you had a conservative or a liberal or a new democratic

00:25:48.780 premier. And Jason Kenney, again, I mean, at the time, a lion of the conservative movement

00:25:54.360 going into COVID. Doug Ford, again, a recent conservative electee in Ontario,

00:26:00.520 they ended up doing the same as the NDP did elsewhere in British Columbia, as Francois Legault

00:26:07.480 did in Quebec. To some extent, they went even further than that in Ontario. But there really

00:26:13.140 was no escape from this across the country. And I'm wondering if when you were analyzing this,

00:26:17.740 you saw any major regional variants, or if it was really that everyone was singing from the

00:26:22.860 same songbook? It was a remarkable deference of elected politicians, whatever side of the spectrum

00:26:29.660 they were on, to the alleged expertise of self-proclaimed experts. And toward the end of

00:26:38.120 the book, we started reflecting on Tocqueville, the great 19th century democratic theorist. And he

00:26:47.520 makes the point that that fear is inherent in democracies and that

00:26:52.040 politicians can see this and because they are not immune from the attractions

00:26:58.620 of increasing their power are quite willing to use fear to do so and

00:27:04.800 particularly when it's when it's fed up to them by alleged medical experts it's

00:27:11.340 a it's a dish that they could not refuse sampling and they certainly did

00:27:15.920 And it had nothing to do with their previous ideological predispositions.

00:27:20.700 One of the challenges of a book like this coming out now is that there obviously has been now three years of material to analyze.

00:27:30.940 But I also wonder, and this is an issue I grapple with even on this show when I decide what I'm talking about,

00:27:36.800 if people are less willing or less, I mean, mentally capable of dwelling in this period.

00:27:43.600 So I guess my question would be, do you and Marco hope that this book sort of closes the book on COVID in Canada to move forward?

00:27:51.020 Or do you really think there still needs to be the beginning of a reckoning?

00:27:56.280 I'm sure that I can speak for Marco on this.

00:27:59.120 We'd like it to be the beginning of a reckoning.

00:28:01.580 I mean, it is a record of what happened.

00:28:05.220 But it is also a kind of, not exactly a prediction,

00:28:08.660 But nothing that we have seen, particularly from the government of Canada, shows any sense of how they've completely screwed up.

00:28:18.260 That has never, I'm sure, entered the tiny mind of the Prime Minister that he has anything to apologize for.

00:28:26.000 And in fact, he seems to be doubling down on the kinds of errors that were implicit in the, say, in the lockdowns.

00:28:35.560 Well, and just to interrupt you there, Barry, today, I believe it was Laurier University in Ontario announced that it was ending its mask mandate, which, again, a lot of people are saying too little too late.

00:28:46.760 But there's no recognition when they do this that they got it wrong.

00:28:50.180 It's, well, now the science supports us doing this is basically their answer.

00:28:55.020 So even when they lift these things, there's never any contrition that comes along with it.

00:28:59.900 No, no, that's right.

00:29:00.660 And the experts, experts are never wrong.

00:29:03.420 This is the thing we have to remember.

00:29:05.280 That could have been the title of the book right there, I think.

00:29:08.260 One of the things that I wrote this particular chapter,

00:29:12.380 so I remember it, about masks,

00:29:14.340 and it was somebody in the States

00:29:16.500 who actually did a big meta-analysis of, I don't know,

00:29:20.200 70 or 80 studies of masks,

00:29:22.000 and he came to the conclusion that masks are as useful against COVID

00:29:27.560 as chain-link fences are against mosquitoes.

00:29:32.120 And I thought, yeah.

00:29:33.420 Yeah, and people who had looked at the evidence, had looked at the actual research, would know that.

00:29:39.660 And if you hadn't looked at the research, if you were a medical officer of health in this province or in this country,

00:29:46.200 and you didn't know what the research was, you just weren't doing your job.

00:29:50.500 And I don't know which it was.

00:29:51.920 I've never talked to any of the three graces that you mentioned earlier,

00:29:56.540 whether they actually knew anything or they just decided on their own without any evidence.

00:30:01.980 It could be either way.

00:30:03.420 Yeah, and I think just on the masks alone, I remember at the beginning when Theresa Tam was telling everyone not to wear masks, and then eventually it became illegal to not wear a mask, and now we're back to it being a choice and mandates not helping, and it's easy to get a little bit of whiplash on this.

00:30:17.880 So let's hope you get the beginning of the reckoning, and not just you and Marco, but I think all Canadians here. I apologize for whatever technical issues were affecting this. We'll happily get Marco on the show next week to broaden this discussion.

00:30:33.140 The book, Canada's COVID, The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, an expanded edition by Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Janey.

00:30:41.840 So, Barry, thank you so much.

00:30:43.980 And Marco in absentia, I thank him as well, but it's great to talk to you.

00:30:47.340 Okay, thanks, Andrew.

00:30:48.720 All right, thanks very much, Barry Cooper.

00:30:50.860 We have to get Barry on to talk about Alberta politics as well.

00:30:53.960 He's an instrumental figure in some of the big thinking that I think goes on in the Alberta movement

00:31:00.080 that we have to spend a bit more time focused on,

00:31:02.880 especially as the Alberta election nears.

00:31:05.720 And again, my sincere apologies to Marco.

00:31:08.560 This is always the challenge

00:31:09.920 because we used to do all the shows pre-taped

00:31:12.060 and then you do this impassioned monologue

00:31:14.500 on something saying,

00:31:15.760 Justin Trudeau needs to do this

00:31:16.880 and if he doesn't do it, it's terrible.

00:31:18.560 And then just as the show is being edited,

00:31:20.780 Justin Trudeau changes course 0.93

00:31:22.400 and the show is useless.

00:31:24.160 So he said, well, we'll do them all live.

00:31:25.640 It's more fun.

00:31:26.260 We'll get live guests.

00:31:27.180 And every now and then you have to deal

00:31:28.620 with a bit of a technical hiccup.

00:31:30.520 So I don't know who we can blame for.

00:31:32.580 Maybe it's C11 already in effect.

00:31:34.180 You only get one guess now.

00:31:35.680 There's a quota per show.

00:31:37.480 But I will say, for now,

00:31:39.760 we have Fake News Friday coming out on Friday

00:31:41.900 and more of the Andrew Lawton show coming up next week.

00:31:44.980 So do keep your eyes peeled for that.

00:31:47.080 And just as we are reflecting on the one-year anniversary

00:31:49.760 of the Emergencies Act and the Freedom Convoy,

00:31:52.160 I'll put in a shameless plug for my book,

00:31:54.280 which I haven't done in a little while.

00:31:55.680 That is The Freedom Convoy,

00:31:57.220 the inside story of three weeks that shook the world you can pick that up on amazon and by the

00:32:03.320 way let me speaking of live indigo one week ago so indigo you may remember this is okay bear with

00:32:10.320 me for 90 seconds here indigo decided it would not carry my book on store shelves and my publisher

00:32:17.580 made a little stink about it the national post wrote about it indigo for the last week has been

00:32:23.080 unable to sell any books online because they had some cyber attack and apparently their webmaster

00:32:29.300 is the same person responsible for picking uh what books to carry and not because they're just

00:32:34.060 utterly incompetent so for a week you have not actually been able to buy anything from indigo

00:32:38.880 and a friend of mine was like oh that's so sad i feel sorry for them and i'm like

00:32:42.480 haven't haven't trouble finding too much sympathy for indigo but all right i had nothing to do with

00:32:48.960 it. Don't take my gloating to be involvement or complicity. Well, the RCMP has no commissioner.

00:32:54.720 We're fine. In all honesty, though, thank you so much. We will talk to you soon. Have a great day.

00:32:59.160 Thank you. God bless and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:33:06.200 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - February 16, 2023

RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki is retiring

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