00:00:21.540On this Wednesday, February 15th, we are doing a little bit of a later start to the program.
00:00:27.240I mean, if you're on the West Coast, you're used to Eastern Standard Time supremacy.
00:00:32.340So this is still like the ripe afternoon hour of 4 o'clock for you.
00:00:36.180But 7 o'clock in Ontario, 5 o'clock in Alberta, and really late, by Andrew Lawton Show standards anyway, 8.30 in Newfoundland.
00:00:45.320So 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?
00:00:53.180I was only there for like 12 hours once when I was covering the Aaron O'Toole campaign.
00:00:58.160And my experience was apparently so lackluster that I have forgotten the name of the one place I went to in Newfoundland.
00:01:07.160It has like a, it was on the west of Newfoundland.
00:01:10.180I don't know, I'll figure it out later.
00:01:11.140That'll be the next episode of the Andrew Lawton Show is where in Newfoundland is Andrew Lawton or was Andrew Lawton.
00:01:16.780But in any event, I will say, by the way, I have been to all provinces in this country but one.
00:03:05.160And I was watching and I was saying, wow, this is a really nice video.
00:03:07.960And then I just sort of saw the ode to the dairy farmer and was reminded of the conservative's
00:03:13.160uncomfortable fetish with supply management, which I think needs to end.
00:03:16.420And 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.
00:03:26.640But as it stands, conservatives still love supply management.
00:03:29.540So we're going in every which direction here.
00:03:32.300Let'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.
00:03:41.500According to her statement, she was brought aboard to deal with a few things specifically.
00:03:49.460Now, she writes here that as commissioner, I was asked to modernize and address the RCMP's internal challenges.
00:03:58.480And I know, sorry, and then she says this was a significant mandate.
00:04:01.980And with the support of my senior executive team and the commitment of all employees of the RCMP, we've accomplished quite a lot.
00:04:10.640She says, I'm so proud of the steps we've taken to modernize, to increase accountability,
00:04:16.140address systemic racism, ensure a safe and equitable workplace, and advance reconciliation
00:04:23.680with Indigenous peoples. Our progress can be found on our website. More on that statement
00:04:29.500in just a moment. Let's talk about the circumstances. Her term was coming to an end.
00:04:34.780it could have been renewed. It probably wasn't going to be. So Lucky says here that she has made
00:04:41.340a personal decision to retire. Now this is the first line of the statement. Today I announced
00:04:47.940that I have made a personal decision to retire. Does that not sound like the kind of thing you
00:04:52.820say when someone is standing behind you and they've got like a gun pointed to your head and
00:04:57.560they're saying look into the camera and tell them that you're being treated nicely. I'm not saying
00:05:02.900that's what's happening as dramatically. But when she throws it out there, it makes it sound like
00:05:07.580it wasn't exactly a personal decision. And I have no inside knowledge of this. Maybe it is personal,
00:05:13.740maybe it's not. What I do know is that Brenda Luckey has been an unmitigated disaster for
00:05:19.820policing for the RCMP and for the country. And far from presiding over modernization, she's presided
00:05:27.320over more scandals than I can count in the RCMP, not the least of which is this systemic racism
00:05:33.520boogeyman, which I think at first she said didn't exist and then did exist. And it was tough to keep
00:05:38.280track and you got a little bit of whiplash. She was the one who was running political interference1.00
00:05:43.400for the Liberals when it came to the Nova Scotia shooting, demanding the release of details about
00:05:49.760the specific firearms that were used so that the Liberal government in Ottawa could make a
00:05:54.760politically charged plea to ban certain guns. So this was, again, a political objective rather
00:06:02.120than a law enforcement objective from the commissioner of the RCMP. And she also was
00:06:08.020curiously unable to answer pretty key questions when she was publishing her comments and when she
00:06:14.300was appearing and testifying before the Public Order Emergency Commission. And she was asked
00:06:19.480about, oh, well, were you at this meeting? Oh, I don't know. Meetings all blend together. It's
00:06:23.440tough to say who uh what is a meeting really like she again she couldn't answer anything
00:06:27.940that was relevant to it and really she came across as the one that i realized was going to be the
00:06:34.640patsy of this all and i don't think it is all that surprising that she and again i'm reading between
00:06:41.980the lines here i i am speculating and i don't want you to think i'm speaking authoritatively here i'm
00:06:47.560talking about just the questions that I would be asking. She's leaving five days before the public
00:06:54.060order emergency commission report comes out. Now, is it because if she leaves after it will look like
00:07:00.920she's being punished and she wants to make it look like she's going out on her own terms? Or is it0.94
00:07:05.640that she actually is going out on her own terms before she gets fired? Because if the public order0.99
00:07:10.540emergency commission report comes out with some sort of an indictment, there will be a call for
00:07:16.920some accountability. Someone will have to be served up on the platter to some people in this
00:07:22.840country. Now, yesterday I talked about my prediction for how Justin Trudeau is going to
00:07:26.700take a potentially scathing report and spin it around as being some collective failing that
00:07:32.000really has nothing to do with him. But I think that there are people who are going to want a
00:07:36.440fall person. I can't say a fall guy. That would be too cisgendered of me. So a fall person and
00:07:42.060perhaps Brenda Luckey would have been the fall person. I think she should have been forced to1.00
00:07:46.300resign over the Portapique Nova Scotia killing and her role in that which was absolutely shameful
00:07:53.860and the lack of accountability at the RCMP which is similarly shameful so if you look at what
00:08:01.380Brenda Luckey has actually done she has become the commissioner that has been tied to a period
00:08:09.040of the RCMP in which I think the esteem in which Canadians hold the RCMP has only gone down but I
00:08:16.040want to return for just a moment to her statement she writes she made a personal decision to retire
00:08:22.600yada yada yada this was not an easy decision as i love the rcmp okay yada yada yada historic
00:08:28.460organization tremendous work we've made great progress to meet what canadians expect of us
00:08:33.620she was asked to modernize i'll read the final line again or the second to the final line
00:08:38.560i'm so proud of the steps we've taken to modernize to increase accountability address systemic racism
00:13:50.820now getting right back into the thick of things yesterday we did the retrospective on
00:13:58.060one year since the emergencies act and it's impossible to talk about the emergencies act
00:14:02.660and the freedom convoy without the broader question of what context gave birth to those
00:14:08.960things and that was at the time two years and a little bit of covid policy in canada which has
00:14:14.260been analyzed in a newly expanded book by barry cooper and marco navarro genie called canada's
00:14:21.780covid the story of a pandemic moral panic now we are supposed to be talking to marco and barry
00:14:28.880although marco seems to have drifted off into the ether so uh barry the floor is yours uh solo for
00:14:34.440the first little while here it's uh good to talk to you thanks for coming on today yeah you're
00:14:39.360welcome Andrew yeah the first edition came out in November of 2020 and it
00:14:47.460dealt with events up to about the beginning of the fall we discovered that
00:14:52.980it didn't end in November 2020 and there was so much more interesting stuff that
00:14:58.740came along over the next 18 20 months that we decided we would you know keep
00:15:04.800notes as things were going on and pull this new expanded version together the
00:15:11.460main purpose of it is to document the I don't know how to characterize it
00:15:20.040politely but there's let's say the mendacious acts of governments and
00:15:24.480government bureaucrats the media academics particularly guys in the in
00:15:30.120the medical schools that otherwise it'll be forgotten ten years from now because
00:15:38.820there won't be any record you know there'll be a remembrance maybe that
00:15:42.480some people didn't like the government responses but we basically provided an
00:15:47.160analysis about why people didn't like it because of the lies that were told by
00:15:52.920bureaucrats by docs and especially by politicians in the mainstream media that
00:15:58.980was the purpose of it one of the things just to go back to january 2020 here that i i think is
00:16:05.400important to note is that you know we were looking at the people in the lab coats and the people in
00:16:10.280the suits on television as being authorities on what was happening but they were largely getting
00:16:15.820their information from the same place as we were they didn't know what was going on they didn't know
00:16:20.300what was happening they were looking at the news footage out of china eventually italy and iran
00:16:25.080And I think that was a big problem, is that they seem to be a lot more confident than they should have been.
00:16:31.940And I think that was where a lot of that public trust was eroded quite early on.
00:16:36.640Yeah, I agree. That's exactly what happened, because the rest of us could read the sources that,
00:16:42.360not that very many people did, mind you, but it was certainly available. It wasn't hidden.
00:16:46.500And 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,
00:17:06.660what they said was being contradicted by other people who are just as well credentialed as they
00:17:14.800are in many cases much better they actually knew what they were talking about and and the result
00:17:22.360was since the rest of the world could read this stuff people just just didn't believe them anymore
00:17:28.500it took a while anybody who believes anything that comes out say of bonnie henry's mouth
00:17:34.540right now, you know, is just gullible as, you know, as a frog.
00:17:41.000I mean, I don't know why anyone would after she's been criticized on the basis of facts for so long.
00:17:50.740I believe we might have Marco back on the line now.
00:17:55.140So if so, hopefully he'll magically appear in front of us and we will be able to carry on.
00:18:00.160If not, we'll put you on the hot seat for a couple more minutes and get him on.
00:18:04.540momentarily all right it sounds if there's an issue where he is not appearing so Marco if you
00:18:10.140are there perhaps you can try reconnecting and we'll we'll get you in here and I apologize for
00:18:15.020the technical issues this is the nature of live broadcasting Barry your background is obviously
00:18:20.740in political science and I think one of the interesting things that a lot of people pointed
00:18:25.520out and government officials didn't really acknowledge ever and still to this day have not
00:18:30.060is that their actions seem to be largely driven by political science rather than health science
00:18:35.840and not the good astute political science that you are a purveyor of,
00:18:39.840but oftentimes a more cynical and less freedom-oriented variety.
00:18:44.360And I think this is the big problem that I had with it, is that health policy was,
00:18:49.240and by that I mean the stuff that was being put out by public health officials
00:18:52.340like Theresa Tam or Dina Hinshaw, Bonnie Henry, and so on.
00:18:59.340They'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.
00:19:13.100So 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.
00:19:23.500But instead, what we seem to see was a complete delegation of all decision making to these unelected people.
00:19:31.640Yeah, 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.
00:19:41.720The first thing that happened in Edmonton was the Alberta emergency plan was tossed out the window.
00:19:48.960Nobody paid any attention to it at all, like zero.
00:19:53.480Yeah, but why have an emergency plan if you're not going to use it when there's an emergency, right?
00:19:59.720And 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.
00:20:25.740They just didn't use it for this emergency.
00:20:28.580We certainly have it, and we didn't use it.
00:20:31.400Every other province in the country probably had one, and none of them used it.
00:20:38.600I would say it brings up issues that have nothing to do with either emergencies or health policy.
00:20:44.540It has to do with the anxieties that were clearly present in the politicians.
00:20:50.260They had no clue what to do, and so they basically freaked out and said,
00:20:55.740okay, it's about health. What do you say, Dina? Why should she know anything? She's an MD. She's
00:21:03.980not an emergency person. She's not even a real med scientist. She's not an epidemiologist. She's1.00
00:21:11.400just an MD from U of A. Why should she do it? Or Bonnie Henry, the same thing. It's a political,0.73
00:21:21.580that's why we call it a panic it was a political panic that caused all of the incredible amount of
00:21:28.140suffering that canadians have put up with for the last you know now getting going on to three years
00:21:33.740and it's completely unjustifiable on medical or any other grounds is your belief that they
00:21:41.380i'll ask this in a different way because one theory that i've had is that they were pot
00:21:46.920committed at a certain point and they had invested so much in their narrative that they didn't
00:21:50.860actually have the ability to walk it back without just completely undermining anything they'd been
00:21:55.760telling us for the last two and eventually three years. But the flip side of that is that they're
00:22:00.500true believers and that even now the people that have been championing the policies that you're
00:22:04.960poking holes in, rightfully so, they still believe and will to their dying day that they were the
00:22:11.200right calls. And I'm curious if you have a sense of which camp they're in. Do you think that they
00:22:15.820got so far into it that they couldn't walk it back anymore? Or do you think they're still true
00:22:20.000believers? They could be both, quite frankly. Most, I came from a medical family, and one of the
00:22:29.200things, my dad was a surgeon, my sister was a doc. One of the things that you learn pretty clearly
00:22:35.700is that doctors, particularly when they have responsibility for life and death,
00:22:43.300don't generally take much second thoughts. They, you know, they have a job to do, they do it.
00:22:49.420uh they're not really good at reflecting on whether or not they've done the right thing
00:22:54.220and that's certainly true for uh these sort of uh you know i would i it's not even fair to call
00:23:00.380them second-rate docs but but the the bureaucratic docs uh keep the same attitude without the same
00:23:08.380confidence uh and so that when when you have people who are who are genuinely expert in some
00:23:14.380of these matters, like the people who signed the Great Barrington Declaration that said you've got
00:23:20.860to look after the people who are vulnerable, not everybody. These were the three big universities
00:23:26.220in the world, Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford. That's where these guys were from. Dina Henshaw
00:23:32.380said, oh, we disagree. Like, that was it. She probably didn't even understand what these guys
00:23:38.620were saying and because at the time she had the year of the premier nothing happened they just
00:23:45.260continued the same kind of of uh let's say misguided to be polite about it uh policies
00:23:51.820that they had already put in place i i know to get to the bigger picture and i i'd say the more
00:23:57.900philosophical underpinning of this i i know that the uh the book's blurb draws a reference to hannah
00:24:03.180Arendt, who, you know, the author of the famous book, The Banality of Evil, and her thoughts
00:24:08.500on bureaucratic tyranny, and I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on that.
00:24:12.960Yeah, that's one of my, I've memorized this, and I've mentioned it in class, I don't know
00:24:19.280how many times, it was not actually in the Eichmann book, but it was in another place
00:24:24.100that, that she says the great problem with bureaucratic tyranny, unlike any other kind
00:24:29.680tyranny is that the desperate remedy of tyrannicide is unavailable if you if you get rid of one
00:24:36.000bureaucrat they will be replaced by another one who will behave the other one will behave in
00:24:40.320exactly the same way uh so it really is a problem i mean you can get rid of bureaucrats uh which is1.00
00:24:46.400fine i mean that's one of the first thing that danielle smith did uh was to fire uh fire dina0.98
00:24:51.760handshaw she should have been fired by jason kenny he'd probably still be premier if he you know if0.90
00:24:57.680he'd had the the imagination to do that unfortunately he didn't well
00:25:02.360unfortunately for him I'd say you know it's obviously good for Danielle but it
00:25:06.180was that the amount of of consistent errors that bureaucrats are capable of
00:25:15.680you actually have to know something about how public policy is made in order
00:25:19.940even to believe it and it's it's was in this particular instance was really
00:25:24.980remarkable. They just kept doing the same stupid thing time and time again. Yes, and I think, I
00:25:32.200mean, your point about Jason Kenney, I think, is an important dimension here, because there was very
00:25:37.280little, I mean, some might even say no, pushback to the overarching narrative, regardless of which
00:25:43.960province you were in, whether you had a conservative or a liberal or a new democratic
00:25:48.780premier. And Jason Kenney, again, I mean, at the time, a lion of the conservative movement
00:25:54.360going into COVID. Doug Ford, again, a recent conservative electee in Ontario,
00:26:00.520they ended up doing the same as the NDP did elsewhere in British Columbia, as Francois Legault
00:26:07.480did in Quebec. To some extent, they went even further than that in Ontario. But there really
00:26:13.140was no escape from this across the country. And I'm wondering if when you were analyzing this,
00:26:17.740you saw any major regional variants, or if it was really that everyone was singing from the
00:26:22.860same songbook? It was a remarkable deference of elected politicians, whatever side of the spectrum
00:26:29.660they were on, to the alleged expertise of self-proclaimed experts. And toward the end of
00:26:38.120the book, we started reflecting on Tocqueville, the great 19th century democratic theorist. And he
00:26:47.520makes the point that that fear is inherent in democracies and that
00:26:52.040politicians can see this and because they are not immune from the attractions
00:26:58.620of increasing their power are quite willing to use fear to do so and
00:27:04.800particularly when it's when it's fed up to them by alleged medical experts it's
00:27:11.340a it's a dish that they could not refuse sampling and they certainly did
00:27:15.920And it had nothing to do with their previous ideological predispositions.
00:27:20.700One of the challenges of a book like this coming out now is that there obviously has been now three years of material to analyze.
00:27:30.940But I also wonder, and this is an issue I grapple with even on this show when I decide what I'm talking about,
00:27:36.800if people are less willing or less, I mean, mentally capable of dwelling in this period.
00:27:43.600So 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?
00:27:51.020Or do you really think there still needs to be the beginning of a reckoning?
00:27:56.280I'm sure that I can speak for Marco on this.
00:27:59.120We'd like it to be the beginning of a reckoning.
00:28:01.580I mean, it is a record of what happened.
00:28:05.220But it is also a kind of, not exactly a prediction,
00:28:08.660But nothing that we have seen, particularly from the government of Canada, shows any sense of how they've completely screwed up.
00:28:18.260That has never, I'm sure, entered the tiny mind of the Prime Minister that he has anything to apologize for.
00:28:26.000And in fact, he seems to be doubling down on the kinds of errors that were implicit in the, say, in the lockdowns.
00:28:35.560Well, 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.
00:28:46.760But there's no recognition when they do this that they got it wrong.
00:28:50.180It's, well, now the science supports us doing this is basically their answer.
00:28:55.020So even when they lift these things, there's never any contrition that comes along with it.
00:30:03.420Yeah, 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.
00:30:17.880So 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.
00:30:33.140The book, Canada's COVID, The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, an expanded edition by Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Janey.