Juno News - Singer praised for politicizing national anthem

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

00:00:05.700 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:12.300 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:00:14.880 This is another edition of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show,

00:00:18.360 The Andrew Lawton Show, here on True North.

00:00:20.740 On this Tuesday, February 21st, 2023,

00:00:24.200 if you are in Ontario or Alberta,

00:00:27.580 happy belated family day.

00:00:30.040 I don't know if it's a happy family day

00:00:32.000 that you wish people on family day

00:00:33.840 because you don't really see many people on family day

00:00:35.720 except your own family if you're doing it right.

00:00:37.500 I believe it was Islander Day in Prince Edward Island

00:00:40.580 and Louis Riel Day in Manitoba.

00:00:42.800 But I refuse to wish anyone a happy Louis Riel Day

00:00:46.800 for reasons that will become abundantly clear

00:00:48.940 if you've studied the history of Louis Riel

00:00:50.680 and of Canada itself.

00:00:52.400 And now I'm going to get more of that Manitoba hate mail.

00:00:54.420 But we also have Nova Scotia Heritage Day yesterday.

00:00:57.580 I think we probably had some other holidays that I am missing here.

00:01:01.940 Let me just scroll through.

00:01:02.740 I was going by memory.

00:01:04.040 Let me just go through my list.

00:01:05.260 It's also Family Day in BC, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick.

00:01:09.300 So pretty much everyone gets a holiday except Quebec,

00:01:11.340 which is, I think, the opposite of how things usually go.

00:01:13.900 But nevertheless, busy show today.

00:01:16.420 I want to continue the discussion in just a couple of moments

00:01:19.320 about the Public Order Emergency Commission's report,

00:01:22.520 which came down the pipeline on Friday.

00:01:25.580 I'll talk about that with Christine Van Gein in just a moment here.

00:01:29.480 And a little bit later, I want to talk about this NBA game,

00:01:33.120 which I did not watch because it's a sporting event,

00:01:35.900 and I probably had to confirm before the show what NBA was,

00:01:39.140 but it's basketball, I'm told.

00:01:40.840 And the National Anthem was what penetrated from the sporting world into my world,

00:01:46.460 and singer Julie Black's little ad lib of one word of the National Anthem.

00:01:52.960 She changed a preposition, but it was a rather significant one.

00:01:56.680 So we'll talk about that in just a couple of moments too.

00:01:58.960 But 2,000 pages, ultimately a finding that the federal government was justified in invoking the Emergencies Act.

00:02:06.860 That's what came away on Friday from the Public Order Emergency Commission and Commissioner Paul Rouleau.

00:02:13.560 Not a slam dunk, not a complete vindication, but on the core idea of whether the Emergencies Act was justified,

00:02:22.020 the commissioner sided with Trudeau, and really on the core ideas of how the Emergencies Act was

00:02:28.360 used, the commissioner sided with Trudeau. And there were a couple of little criticisms he made

00:02:33.380 that I think were significant, but generally speaking, he supported the bank account freezes,

00:02:38.240 he supported the conscription of tow truck drivers, and he supported the overall use of

00:02:43.180 the act itself, albeit with the caveat that, in his words, another reasonable person could reach

00:02:48.700 a different conclusion. So there are two big takeaways here. Number one is that this is not

00:02:54.580 the end of the road as far as Emergencies Act accountability goes. There are still federal

00:02:59.400 court challenges, and as we talked about on Friday, there's still the political dimension of

00:03:04.180 this. Voters have not yet in any formal way had their say on this chapter of Canada's political

00:03:10.600 history. And then there's also what the report really said, and going through with a fine-tooth

00:03:15.600 comb, now that we've had a little bit more time to do so, and start extracting what was actually

00:03:20.560 said here, what was actually found, and whether it stands up to scrutiny. And for this, we have one

00:03:25.720 of the best legal minds in the country, certainly when it comes to matters of liberty, Christine

00:03:30.760 Van Gein, the litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation. Christine, I don't even

00:03:36.680 want to ask how your long weekend was, because I assume it was in large part consumed by a bulk of

00:03:42.200 this 2,000-page report? Yeah, it's 2,000 pages when you include the appendices, so it's not all,

00:03:50.060 it's not, you don't have to read every single one of those pages, but yes, I've spent a lot of time

00:03:53.940 going over this. It doesn't get better, but you know, this, as you said, is not the final word.

00:04:00.580 This is not the end of the fight over the Emergencies Act, because we do have a federal

00:04:05.240 court judicial review that we brought separately, independently. This report by Commissioner Rouleau

00:04:12.440 was brought by, it was called and convened by the government, funded by the government,

00:04:19.140 and this judicial review is completely independent and will hopefully reach a different

00:04:25.940 conclusion. So we have a hearing scheduled for that in April. So just on the scope of that

00:04:31.420 judicial review let me ask for people that aren't as familiar with the case are you challenging the

00:04:36.680 invocation of the act the emergency orders and emergency measures that flowed from the act or

00:04:42.180 both in that challenge both so it's sort of uh two things really it's that the emergencies act

00:04:49.200 was invoked illegally that the statutory threshold to invoke it was not met and we can talk about

00:04:55.660 what that statutory threshold means i have a very different interpretation of that threshold than

00:05:00.580 Commissioner Rouleau does, and that my interpretation is more in line with what most legal scholars

00:05:06.640 across the country view as a correct interpretation. And the other thing that we're challenging is the

00:05:13.760 regulations that were enacted under the Emergencies Act. Those would be the measures that froze bank

00:05:20.900 accounts and that created prohibited public assemblies. And we are arguing that those are

00:05:28.560 unconstitutional. So sort of two, two, two approaches, two things that we're, we're really

00:05:33.700 arguing. So when we talk about the statutory threshold, this was obviously a key part of

00:05:39.240 Commissioner Rouleau's report as well. And do I understand from that, that this is not a

00:05:43.400 constitutional challenge? It's not about the moral value of the Emergencies Act, it's about whether

00:05:47.580 they satisfied that test that is spelled out in the Emergencies Act, and by extension, the CSIS

00:05:53.240 act themselves? Yeah, so that's closer to what you would say is the way statutory interpretation

00:05:59.340 operates. So it would be an illegal use of the act. That is what we are arguing, that if you

00:06:04.860 use this legislation when the threshold is not met, that use is illegal, and that therefore the

00:06:10.180 regulations under it are unconstitutional. But the threshold was important to know for a public

00:06:15.740 order emergency, it's like the legislation has all these different parts, and they all kind of

00:06:21.860 interconnected. That's how legislation usually works. But the important thing for your listeners

00:06:26.200 to know is that for the legislation to be invoked, there needs to be a threat to the security of

00:06:34.500 Canada. And that is a defined term in the legislation. It's defined through reference

00:06:40.900 to another piece of legislation called the CSIS Act. And what's fascinating and a huge problem

00:06:47.720 is that CSIS found that under their legislation, there was no threat to the security of person.

00:06:54.180 This is, there was no threat to the security of Canada. And if CSIS found that under their

00:07:00.980 legislation, there was no threat, and there was no separate threat assessment done, how could

00:07:06.840 cabinet reach a different conclusion? It's not reasonable, in our view, for them to reach a

00:07:12.920 different conclusion. The thresholds are the same. The definition is the same. It's completely a

00:07:18.640 strange interpretation, sort of this Hail Mary, let's see if we can make this argument, this

00:07:24.720 novel legal argument and get it to stick. And somehow they convinced Commissioner Rublo of

00:07:31.820 this strange interpretation. I know that we've spent a lot of time on the show talking about

00:07:38.240 this, but I think it is important. And ultimately, it became increasingly clear near the end of those

00:07:43.600 hearings back in October, November, that this was going to come down to a debate about the

00:07:48.180 technicalities of the statutes and not about the fact scenario, not about, you know, whether there

00:07:53.480 was this previously unrevealed threat that was very explicit. It came down to what cabinet

00:08:00.360 believed and what these thresholds were. And when you look at the CSIS Act, which I've had the

00:08:05.500 as fortunate of doing a number of times now as I've covered this, it doesn't make any distinction

00:08:10.360 between the different applications of it. You know, when it's used by CSIS, there's this threshold,

00:08:15.260 and when it's used elsewhere, there's a different threshold. And the Emergencies Act similarly does

00:08:20.120 not put a caveat there. It says this is the definition. It's spelled out right there. So

00:08:24.720 what was the argument that the commissioner found compelling for why CSIS could find there was no

00:08:31.740 threat to the security of Canada, but the cabinet could. It was this notion that different decision

00:08:37.900 makers may rely on different inputs. But in our view, the words of the statute mean what they say

00:08:44.420 they mean. And for cabinet to reach a different conclusion when, in fact, cabinet was lacking a

00:08:51.880 significant amount of information. They did not have a separate threat assessment from CSIS.

00:08:56.620 CSIS had concluded there was no national security threat cabinet had not even been briefed on this

00:09:04.000 novel legal threshold cabinet had not been fully briefed by Brenda Luckey about the existence of

00:09:11.660 additional other laws that could have been relied on to resolve this situation that that the

00:09:19.860 emergencies act was not absolutely necessary which by the way is another part of the statutory

00:09:24.340 threshold. So cabinet reached this different conclusion, even though they were further

00:09:30.600 removed from the situation and had less information than CSIS did. So in our view,

00:09:38.100 it is not reasonable for cabinet to have reached a different conclusion. Even if they could rely

00:09:44.400 on different inputs, they actually had worse, worse information than CSIS did.

00:09:50.320 And I should also point out that even if that threat to the security of Canada is found, there are still additional layers for the Emergencies Act to be justified.

00:10:02.600 That threat has to be creating a national emergency, which has its own definition, and it also has to be outside of what existing authorities available under law are capable of dealing with this.

00:10:13.500 Now, I know your colleague Joanna Barron had a great piece in The Hub that really spells out some of these legal articulations here from the commissioner's report.

00:10:23.280 But the one thing that I found particularly not compelling from Commissioner Rouleau's findings is that he really conflates what police failed to do or didn't do and what bureaucratic infighting and this sort of territorial control between different agencies did.

00:10:40.860 and what the act itself says, which is cannot effectively be dealt with under any other law

00:10:47.980 of Canada. So there seemed to be this conflation of can't do and aren't doing. Yeah, I mean,

00:10:54.200 that word effectively is carrying a lot of weight in this report. Because what essentially, I mean,

00:11:02.520 one of my friends, Aaron Woodrick from the McDonnell-Laurier Institute has written in the

00:11:06.660 National Post is using this interpretation that, you know, police not doing a good job,

00:11:12.800 disorganization, lack of communication. That is just kind of typical of government. That's

00:11:19.200 a policing and governmental failure. And incompetence is not the legal threshold for

00:11:26.220 using one of the most powerful laws in Canada, a law that allows cabinet to create new criminal

00:11:34.960 law by executive order you can't just hand cabinet that power because the police were incompetent

00:11:44.080 and look there were a lot of policing failures no one is disputing that we saw that we saw

00:11:49.480 in the commission we actually saw it throughout the the the protests that the police were not

00:11:55.220 doing a great job uh i'm not a police officer so i i mean i know it's a very difficult job but

00:12:01.160 there there's a lot of consensus that the police failed here but that is not the threshold that

00:12:07.760 what they needed was more help from other police not this extraordinary sledgehammer that is the

00:12:14.020 emergencies act that in fact they didn't even really rely on the tools in the emergencies act

00:12:19.080 to resolve the protests they were relied on the criminal code so no one asked for this it wasn't

00:12:27.400 necessary. Things were ultimately resolved using existing law, and the threshold of national

00:12:33.880 threat to the security of Canada, that threshold was not met. So I have a lot of problems with

00:12:38.680 this report, but mercifully, we do get another chance in federal court. And just as a peripheral

00:12:45.620 note on that, to my knowledge, there were never any charges laid under the emergency orders,

00:12:50.220 were there? Well, under the emergencies orders, certainly there were accounts frozen. What do

00:12:55.920 mean by by charge no one was criminally charged specifically using any tool that wasn't already

00:13:01.840 in the criminal code i guess is the question well i i don't believe so i believe that the charges

00:13:08.480 were for things like mischief and um maybe resisting some resisting arrests uh but certainly

00:13:15.920 the power to um freeze bank accounts was used yeah well and that i mean as we've talked about

00:13:21.200 in the past didn't need charges and any other recourse or anything like that yeah and that the

00:13:26.480 tow trucks ultimately were were could have been used uh there was a lot made about the availability

00:13:32.880 of tow trucks and and that all could have been done using uh existing powers as well there was

00:13:37.680 the word that joanna baron used in in her piece in the hub that i think is a sadly accurate word

00:13:43.360 is deferential and and we've seen throughout a lot of the covid related uh cases that have gone

00:13:49.200 before courts, a lot of deference to government, a lot of use of Section 1 of the Charter to say

00:13:55.260 that the cessation of rights in Section 2, for example, are subject to these reasonable limits

00:14:01.320 or so-called reasonable limits. And in the case of the Emergencies Act, is there a legal ability

00:14:07.840 for the government to use this report as a substantive part of its argument, or does it

00:14:14.240 kind of exist in a box on its own and can't be brought into a JR as justification?

00:14:19.540 No, so this is not a finding of liability.

00:14:21.560 This has no legal weight.

00:14:24.200 I mean, it certainly has political weight, but I would encourage the Prime Minister,

00:14:29.160 if he popped any champagne, to put the cork back in because we're coming in federal court.

00:14:33.680 And we are using a lot of the evidence that came up in the inquiry.

00:14:37.700 So that's one way that the inquiry is relevant to the federal judicial review.

00:14:44.240 that there was there's a lot of evidence is being incorporated into the JR but the government can't

00:14:51.960 just table this report and say listen it was very reasonable they've already found it out here

00:14:56.580 no and they can't bring new evidence at this point anyway so explain to me where you think

00:15:05.000 the strongest argument is in critiquing the emergencies act do you think it is on that idea

00:15:11.560 that the threshold wasn't met there was no emergency it's it's and you know we don't even

00:15:16.180 need to get into the orders because the orders were illegal on that basis alone

00:15:19.480 yeah so i think that my one of the big focuses that we have in our material we actually do spend

00:15:27.460 a lot of time on on the orders uh because the orders are a big problem right the notion that

00:15:32.960 the government can seize your bank accounts because you are involved in a protest that they

00:15:38.520 disagree with politically that's a huge problem and anyone who supports that type of conduct

00:15:43.260 I think you need to ask yourself how you would feel about it if it happened to a protest that

00:15:49.660 you support from a prime minister who you don't support because that's that's really what's at

00:15:55.800 stake here this is a huge tool that gives the government a tremendous power to use against

00:16:03.000 protests that they disagree with in the future. But yes, I think that the main, the big thing

00:16:09.920 that we're going to be arguing in federal court relates to the threshold and whether the threshold

00:16:15.280 was met, whether existing legal tools would have been sufficient to resolve the protest. We think

00:16:21.220 that they would have been. And the question of what the legal threshold is, which is threat to

00:16:26.840 the security of Canada, as defined in the CSIS Act, not as defined in the subjective opinion of

00:16:32.640 this Prime Minister, and then examining the constitutionality of the measures enacted under

00:16:39.000 those, under the declaration of emergency, once that's been found to have been illegally invoked.

00:16:47.180 And what's the timeline for that case? What's the next key date, or key step or date in that?

00:16:52.700 So we filed our factum last week. The government, I think, is trying to bring some new evidence from

00:16:58.940 the inquiry, but we are resisting that. And there's a hearing scheduled for the first week

00:17:04.380 of April. So I'm going to be in Ottawa, looking forward to heading back after those,

00:17:09.700 those weeks I spent there in November, I miss it already. So I'm going to be back and I'll be

00:17:15.880 live streaming, following the hearing to explain what happened every day. So if you guys go on

00:17:20.660 YouTube and subscribe to the Canadian Constitution Foundation's YouTube channel, you can watch

00:17:25.260 my daily summaries of the hearing that will take place over three days in Ottawa.

00:17:30.360 I dare you to say under oath that you miss Ottawa. I don't think anyone could ever do such a thing.

00:17:35.600 I'm not going to be doing that.

00:17:37.320 Yeah, exactly. Is there a trial date set or a time you're anticipating it being?

00:17:42.480 Yeah, so it's a hearing date is April. Let me check my calendar. April 3rd, 4th and 5th. Now

00:17:49.060 that is subject to change. These things can change, but that's currently when I'm planning

00:17:54.260 on being in Ottawa. All right. Well, we'll look forward to that. Christine Van Gein from the

00:17:59.280 Canadian Constitution Foundation. Always a pleasure and keep up the great work. It was great chatting

00:18:03.780 with you, Andrew. All right. Thanks very much, Christine Van Gein. And you can also watch her

00:18:08.020 show on the news forum in which she breaks down a lot of these really key legal discussions in

00:18:13.100 Canada. And I know she was like plugging away in the studio on Friday when I know she'd rather be

00:18:18.060 sitting down with a nice big 2000 page tome instead. Well, maybe not, but it's a labor of

00:18:23.340 love, I'm sure. Let's talk about this in a little bit more detail here. Well, not more detail,

00:18:28.360 but I'd say the bigger picture of this and where I approach this, not as a lawyer, but as someone

00:18:33.240 who's followed the convoy, who's followed the fallout of the convoy, and who followed the

00:18:37.640 emergency commission in the fall. And I know that just to set this aside here, there's been a ton

00:18:44.940 of discussion online about this alleged political or familial connection between Commissioner Paul

00:18:52.160 Rouleau and Justin Trudeau. And let me just say it does not exist. There is no familial connection.

00:18:58.180 The purported connection would have Paul Rouleau, who's like 10 years older than Justin Trudeau,

00:19:04.720 somehow be his uncle by marriage. So it was already a bit of a tenuous connection. It was

00:19:09.900 supposed to, I don't even want to repeat it because it's not true, but the connection that

00:19:13.820 you've seen is entirely a conflation of two different Rouleau families. So that connection

00:19:20.040 isn't there. And the view that I take on this is that you can find enough problems in the actual

00:19:27.320 report if you read it. You don't need to invent new ones. I mean, I think that the commissioner's

00:19:32.780 report is flawed because of what the commissioner's report says, not because Paul Rouleau was, you

00:19:38.000 know, once stood on the sidewalk when within, you know, 50 meters was someone else and that made a

00:19:44.140 conflict of interest. No, you can judge it based on the merits and find enough issues there

00:19:48.400 to poke holes in this narrative, you don't need to invent new ones. So I don't like this tendency

00:19:53.760 for people to just immediately flee to corruption when you don't need corruption to go up against

00:20:00.520 ideology, which is enough of a driving force, I think. And the other aspect of this is that this

00:20:06.460 is not Justin Trudeau pulling the strings on this. You can't say the fix was in from the beginning.

00:20:12.400 Canadians heard evidence on both sides.

00:20:15.420 It did come down to, I think, a very razor-thin margin.

00:20:20.060 And ultimately, the commissioner sided with deference more than he sided with what I would say the letter of the statute is.

00:20:27.200 So, again, we don't need to create a conspiracy.

00:20:31.140 We can just condemn it on its merits and do exactly what I'm doing on this show,

00:20:36.040 which is work through with someone who knows the law very well, who knows the report, who knows the case,

00:20:40.580 and explain exactly why it is wrong.

00:20:43.220 So we'll be following the federal court case.

00:20:45.860 We'll be following the hearing in April

00:20:47.360 and we'll be following whatever comes next.

00:20:49.420 But I also want to tell people

00:20:51.020 that I'm very pessimistic about this.

00:20:53.900 And I was kind of pessimistic

00:20:55.820 about the Public Order Emergency Commission,

00:20:57.940 if I'm being perfectly frank.

00:20:59.560 I got increasingly optimistic as it went on

00:21:02.180 because I was watching this and saying,

00:21:04.040 if Canadians are seeing this,

00:21:06.380 then there is going to be no way whatsoever

00:21:09.020 they can take Justin Trudeau's side. And unfortunately, the way that Canadians viewed

00:21:16.980 this did not really translate to what became the final report. But the facts are still out there.

00:21:22.460 The documents are still out there. People like Eva Chippyuk, a lawyer who's worked with the

00:21:27.740 convoy organizers, formerly with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, she has been

00:21:32.800 doing a tremendous job at pulling out and continuing to tweet out documents that in some

00:21:37.220 cases didn't get nearly the attention they deserved during the hearings. Documents, for

00:21:41.640 example, from Superintendent Pat Morris of the OPP talking about how OPP intelligence found no

00:21:48.080 threat to violence. They saw nothing that was not a peaceful, lawful protest. And there were so many

00:21:55.320 examples of that that I think we need to hold on to. Testimony that was incredibly valuable

00:22:01.380 because it revealed that they were talking about feelings of violence, not real violence, that you

00:22:06.820 had police that were really throwing the federal government under the bus saying, no, we had a plan

00:22:11.660 and the federal government saying, yeah, but I didn't like that plan. Justin Trudeau at one point

00:22:16.220 said, yeah, I didn't like the plan that I saw by police. Did you see the plan? Well, no, but I heard

00:22:21.720 about it. And it's like, you decided the Emergencies Act was the path you wanted to go through

00:22:26.800 without even looking at the plan that law enforcement was saying could have given you

00:22:32.240 the same objective without going through that extreme process, that last resort, not one of the

00:22:39.420 last resorts, but in law, the last resort for emergency management, wartime legislation. I

00:22:46.700 cannot stress that enough. And even if the Emergencies Act broadens the use of the act

00:22:51.480 beyond what the war measures did, it is still the bill that you would invoke in the time of war.

00:22:55.680 Sure, a different section, but it is wartime legislation, which gives you an indication

00:23:00.900 of the caliber of emergency we're talking about here

00:23:04.300 when the Emergencies Act is to be brought in.

00:23:07.900 So I said a moment ago, I was pessimistic at the beginning.

00:23:11.000 I'm very pessimistic about the court case.

00:23:13.160 Sometimes I think the process can be cathartic

00:23:15.520 and the process can be a way that we bring some truth

00:23:18.820 and bring some sunlight to this.

00:23:21.020 But I also have not seen from the Canadian judiciary in general,

00:23:25.040 certainly through COVID,

00:23:26.600 exactly what I would call a ringing endorsement for liberty.

00:23:30.900 And in Canada, this is going to be a tremendous problem.

00:23:34.200 So I go back to the political dimension of this, the political angle, and how important it is to educate Canadians, to continue to talk about this, and to, if I can be so bold, take the wisdom that I tried to put forward in my newsletter last week of never forgetting this emergencies act, never forgetting the last three years.

00:23:53.160 We are now in the fourth year of the COVID era, and while most of it is behind us, these

00:24:01.180 fights are now continuing.

00:24:02.780 The possibility for accountability, for justice, for truth, for transparency, it's only coming

00:24:08.120 up now, and we cannot let that window slip away.

00:24:12.140 And when I wrote that and talked about it on my show, I had people saying, yeah, I'm

00:24:15.960 on board, but what does that entail?

00:24:17.400 Is it writing letters to my member of parliament?

00:24:19.460 Is it writing letters to the editor in the newspaper?

00:24:21.820 to which I say yes call your member of parliament actually go and talk to them don't be abusive

00:24:26.540 don't harass certainly never take out your frustrations on members of parliament's office

00:24:32.220 staff I think that's a terrible thing to do there are people that

00:24:34.780 talk to your members of parliament and I'm very curious one-on-one privately how a lot of liberal

00:24:46.460 members of parliament would speak about this outside of ottawa face to face with a constituent

00:24:52.700 especially if they don't know if you i mean don't go in wearing your we the fringe hoodie with a

00:24:57.140 canadian flag on your car because that might give you away but but if you go in and actually put

00:25:01.080 forward some earnest complaints i don't know how many might break that red line that the liberals

00:25:06.900 have had i mean just for example uh this week anthony housefather who i've disagreed with on

00:25:11.720 a number of things. The Liberal Member of Parliament from Montreal tweeted out that Roald Dahl, who's

00:25:17.980 the late author who's being cancelled now and his books are being posthumously edited to, you know,

00:25:23.360 make women more empowered or something like that. This is a book about a giant peach that you can

00:25:28.380 live in. I mean, some of what Roald Dahl has written about. So I really don't think realism

00:25:34.000 is within the parameters of what we need to strive for in Roald Dahl. But anyway, Anthony Housefather

00:25:39.180 tweets that Roald Dahl's work and all work should be read as it was originally written. That is like

00:25:44.620 heretical to the left today. So a little bit of independent thought there. I congratulate him for

00:25:50.500 it. Joel Lightbound from Quebec, we know, has famously criticized the Liberal government's

00:25:56.360 handling of COVID. And Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, a very far left member of the Liberal caucus,

00:26:02.660 went along with it, but not without expressing on the record his criticisms.

00:26:09.360 So there are some liberals that, again, I'm not going to hold them up as being

00:26:13.900 these virtuous bulwarks for liberty here,

00:26:17.840 but they, I think, might be teetering on the edge of realizing

00:26:22.480 this was not something they should ever have done.

00:26:25.380 And certainly the NDP, I think it's a tremendous shame

00:26:28.800 that they've gone along with something that will be used against their pet causes in the future

00:26:34.320 without a doubt, because now it's been out of the box. It's been taken out of the box. The glass

00:26:38.960 case has been smashed with the hammer. The big red button has been hit. And now federal governments

00:26:44.160 have this tool in their arsenal a heck of a lot more readily than they had it before Justin Trudeau.

00:26:50.240 So we're going to put this to bed right now and revisit it in the future as necessary. Let's talk

00:26:55.880 about O Canada though, which I believe it's still called O Canada. Who knows? They keep changing the

00:27:00.760 lyrics now. Julie Black, the Canadian singer, R&B singer, tremendously talented. She's Canadian,

00:27:08.200 so she's not like a household name, but she's very well known in certain circles. And again,

00:27:13.700 it's very talented. I've liked some of her songs. She does a cover of that great addict James number

00:27:18.760 whose name escapes me right now. But she decided she wanted to do a little bit of ad-libbing when

00:27:25.120 she was singing the national anthem at a, no, not a football game. See, I knew I was going to do

00:27:30.860 something like this. A basketball game, NBA, National Baseball Alliance or something, an NBA

00:27:36.720 game in Utah. And this is what she sang in those opening lines.

00:27:55.120 Our home on a native land.

00:28:04.160 Our home on, she enunciates that word as if to say, you better make sure you hear what I'm saying.

00:28:14.500 Our home on native land.

00:28:18.060 Now, that is not actually the lyric, if you are unaware.

00:28:22.680 The lyric is our home and native land because it is not native in the noun sense as Canada's native people.

00:28:32.000 It's native in the adjective sense as if to say it is our home and native land, a very clear meaning.

00:28:40.940 But she wants to make the political point.

00:28:44.580 It's our home on native land.

00:28:48.320 It is now a preposition that that opening line needed.

00:28:52.060 She's very proud of herself. You can see her smirking at the camera there and normally politicizing the national anthem because she's making a political point. 0.99

00:29:00.500 She's even said in interviews after the fact, quote, I sang the facts, unquote.

00:29:07.320 She said to CBC, we are walking, breathing, living, experiencing life on native land, on indigenous land.

00:29:14.300 Now, she was in Utah. Now, Utah, of course, was once home to Indigenous nations, like most other parts of North America. But again, it's a weird place to stage this sort of protest because, you know, the Utah people don't actually care about Canadian Indigenous policy, I would suspect.

00:29:31.940 But our home on native land, she makes the point and is given accolades by the media here.

00:29:38.460 I just want to give you a few examples of the response.

00:29:41.840 So CBC does that glowing interview.

00:29:44.000 I sang the facts, they say.

00:29:46.680 What else do we have?

00:29:47.740 Toronto star Julie Black's national anthem is making headlines.

00:29:52.620 What would it take to make the change official?

00:29:55.560 So the Toronto star is saying, yeah, we really like how she named those lyrics.

00:29:59.280 We need to make those part of the official lyrics.

00:30:02.860 CBC Kids has this piece,

00:30:05.560 because you can never propagandize enough to children.

00:30:08.340 Julie Black recognized Indigenous land when she sang O Canada.

00:30:13.480 So we're talking about this being virtuous.

00:30:16.180 Yahoo News does a roundup here of big reactions to the lyric swap.

00:30:20.940 And oddly, all of the reactions seem to be positive.

00:30:24.580 And the ones that are negative are just from a bunch of randos on Twitter.

00:30:28.820 So everyone in the media is coming out with a tremendous display of support for Julie Black.

00:30:35.100 Indigenous leaders are saying, yeah, you go, girl.

00:30:37.620 It's funny, though.

00:30:38.440 I remember a few years ago when it was a lot less popular to make a lyric change at a sporting event to the national anthem.

00:30:45.800 Just ask Remigio Pereira of the Canadian Tenors.

00:30:58.820 sisters all lives matter to the great

00:31:06.900 now I will say that there's a bit of a difference in changing one word that could be mistaken for

00:31:17.320 the original word in general and just writing in a whole line that has nothing to do with anything

00:31:22.100 so I think lyrically speaking Julie Black wins over Remicio Pereira of the Canadian tenors who

00:31:27.920 are now the tenors because they decided that the Canadian part was holding them back. So they got

00:31:32.580 rid of Romigio Pereira. They got rid of the Canadian. They're just the tenors now. They've

00:31:37.360 added a new one. Again, very talented singers, but this guy ruined his, had his career ruined.

00:31:44.140 This guy was canceled. He was kicked out of the band, had his career just decimated, and he's

00:31:49.620 never really rebounded because he dared to sing All Lives Matter in the national anthem. And if

00:31:56.180 you listen to how he described that this is not a guy who was making an anti-black point this is a

00:32:01.460 guy who was saying that we need to love everybody he was making some hippie piece and love point 0.99

00:32:05.140 and as i said at the time i thought it was stupid you don't grandstand in that way certainly not 0.97

00:32:10.240 during the national anthem and i say the same thing to julie black but i'd be remiss to not 0.95

00:32:15.700 point out the utter double standard between what happens when a guy makes a claim like

00:32:21.020 Remigio Pereira did and when a woman like Julie Black does and aligns with a cause that is very

00:32:26.880 much on vogue right now and we see that the rules are that you can politicize the anthem only if

00:32:33.000 your thoughts are right if you are one of the woke set you can do it you can get away with it and you

00:32:38.020 know what your career is probably going to be better I was when the Julie Black I interviewed

00:32:43.000 Julie Black many years ago believe it or not she was a very lovely woman and when this whole thing

00:32:48.440 happened, I was trying to just go through, hey, what are those big songs of hers? I just wanted

00:32:52.340 a bit of a primer. And I looked her up on YouTube and on YouTube, like almost the entire, I'm going

00:32:57.620 to do it again for you right now, just to make sure I'm not leading you astray here. But if you

00:33:02.700 type in Julie Black with the proper spelling, two L's on YouTube, the first hit is a Shopify ad. So

00:33:10.620 we go past that one. It's her performance of the national anthem, then a piece from CTV about the

00:33:16.260 national anthem and then hey this show this show here is number three well that's good good for

00:33:20.580 true north on there we've uh penetrated the the youtube rankings and then a city news piece about

00:33:26.120 changing the national anthem uh then an interview she did four years ago with global and a bunch of

00:33:31.840 other things that have nothing to do with her music so you actually have to get down like halfway

00:33:37.500 down the page to get a julie black song which is to say that she's getting a lot more intrigue

00:33:43.340 for her changing of the lyrics to O Canada than she has for her music in a little while. And again,

00:33:49.580 that's not an indictment of her music. It's that now we are talking about this person who wanted

00:33:54.660 to use her platform to make a point. But if she did this in any other forum, no one would have

00:33:59.280 cared. If she just tweeted out, you know what, we really need to talk about Indigenous issues.

00:34:03.880 No one would have cared. It would have been another celebrity mouthing off. If she had just 1.00

00:34:07.400 written a letter to Parliament and said, hey, I know you guys changed the lyrics to the national

00:34:11.460 Anthem a few years ago. Clearly you're open to changing the lyrics. I've got a lyrical suggestion

00:34:16.140 for you. I'm a songwriter. I'm a Juno winner. You should listen to what I have to say. And they

00:34:20.800 would have taken it, looked at it and said, oh, okay, fine. Yeah. Next. So she hijacks a sporting

00:34:27.060 event, which again, I don't really care about it. I'm not one of these people that think sporting

00:34:31.280 events are these sacred places. I watched the Superbowl and that is the only sporting event

00:34:36.040 of the year I watched because I enjoy football, but not enough to watch all the other games every

00:34:39.860 year. I'm wearing right now a Talladega shirt because I went to a NASCAR race with my father

00:34:44.700 and brother, which I did not because I had a love of NASCAR, but because I had a love for my

00:34:49.100 father and brother. So I am not one of these people who's offended because she ruined a

00:34:53.860 sporting event. I'm one of these people who believes you should be called out when you have

00:34:59.500 this utterly hypocritical approach to when we accept politicization of the national anthem.

00:35:05.720 And this is not Justin Trudeau's fault, but I think it is the fault of people like Justin Trudeau who have decided that Canadian symbols do not matter.

00:35:16.600 Remember that Justin Trudeau flew the Canadian flag at half-mast for the better part of half a year because he just held in such contempt the idea of Canada, the idea of Canadian pride, the idea of any sort of Canadian nationalism, and didn't care about it.

00:35:32.360 It was a lot easier to pander to the woke mob by keeping the national flag and the Canadian flag down indefinitely

00:35:39.780 than it was to have a real discussion about issues that matter to people in this country.

00:35:46.860 And the national anthem is the same.

00:35:48.420 When the former member of parliament, who's now passed away, decided he wanted to change the lyrics to

00:35:55.340 In All of Us Command instead of In All Thy Sons Command, we decided that we're just going to change the lyrics.

00:36:01.500 It doesn't matter that it doesn't make grammatical sense.

00:36:03.980 We have to be gender neutral.

00:36:05.800 So tradition does not matter.

00:36:08.560 Canadian symbols do not matter.

00:36:10.960 And how else are you going to have a country rally around a national identity

00:36:15.440 if we've decided that all the markers of our national identity

00:36:19.180 are things that we're to be ashamed of?

00:36:21.920 That our national anthem is something that should be changed on the fly 1.00

00:36:25.300 because we want to make a ham-fisted political statement about Indigenous people 1.00

00:36:29.160 without actually offering any solutions. 0.96

00:36:31.980 So one CBC thing that they did that I really enjoyed

00:36:36.360 was a bit, I can't play it on air

00:36:39.980 because it's copyrighted

00:36:41.040 and I'd have to play the whole thing.

00:36:42.260 So it's not a fair dealing,

00:36:43.920 but it's a bit they did in a show

00:36:45.780 called the Baroness Von Sketch Show or something.

00:36:48.320 And it was about land acknowledgements.

00:36:50.900 And there's someone in a movie theater

00:36:52.400 that's doing a land acknowledgement

00:36:53.740 and someone in the audience says,

00:36:55.680 oh, should we leave then?

00:36:57.220 I mean, you just said it was not our land.

00:36:59.020 So should we go? And then the person at the theater saying, no, no, no. I mean, it's the theater's land now. And then the person in the audience says, oh, but just, you know, a little bit of our ticket price go to indigenous people. They're like, no, it goes to the movie theater.

00:37:10.360 But it was a really great example of how virtue signaling has become the norm in a way that is completely unquestioning.

00:37:18.940 And it comes at a cost, though.

00:37:21.100 It comes at a cost because all of these things become a very lazy way of making a point without actually contributing to anything.

00:37:30.180 So I don't know if Julie Black has really taken a keen awareness of Indigenous issues.

00:37:34.980 And I don't know if she's decided to contribute some of her earnings, such as they are, to Indigenous drinking water.

00:37:40.920 I don't know if she's lobbied the government for Indigenous changes.

00:37:44.160 I don't know if she's advocated for the abolition of the Indian Act. 0.71

00:37:47.880 And that's not her job. She's a singer. I don't expect those things of her. 0.98

00:37:51.200 But now she's decided that she's the one that has to solve these issues.

00:37:54.500 If you want to get in there and solve the issues,

00:37:56.540 maybe do something more than slipping a two-letter word into the national anthem to get your 15

00:38:03.380 milliseconds of fame we've got to end things there when we return tomorrow we'll have more of

00:38:08.960 canada's most irreverent talk show here on true north this is the andrew lawton show

00:38:13.740 thank you god bless and good day to you all

00:38:16.340 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north

00:38:23.600 at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - February 21, 2023

Singer praised for politicizing national anthem

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