Juno News - April 06, 2023


Some Canadians want a government-run grocery store chain


Episode Stats


Length

28 minutes

Words per minute

177.11436

Word count

5,033

Sentence count

222

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

28

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Andrew Lawton talks about grocery stores and why they should be run by the government. Plus, a new idea for a government-run grocery store and why it would be the perfect solution to inflation and food prices.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:05.400 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by TrueNord.
00:00:12.000 It is good to have you on the show.
00:00:13.920 I barely made it back home last night.
00:00:16.960 I was in Montreal, and if you've been following the news,
00:00:20.400 which I hope you do, you know, there was a big ice storm in Montreal,
00:00:25.160 and I was trying to get just from downtown to the airport,
00:00:28.040 which is, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes away, and the taxi I was in, the driver had to scrape the
00:00:35.220 mirrors off three times in that 15 minutes because they were just getting ice stuck to them so much
00:00:42.500 so that he couldn't see behind. And then you get to the airport and every flight is cancelled except
00:00:47.900 for, thankfully, this was like the one time air travel has gone in my direction. The one flight I
00:00:53.200 needed to get out of Montreal was the one that I actually got. So I made it home last night,
00:00:58.480 didn't have to stay in some airport hotel. And I live to tell the tale. And I am doing exactly
00:01:03.540 that today as we wrap things up for an abbreviated week on the eve of Good Friday and the Easter
00:01:10.860 weekend. And if you are one of our Jewish viewers or listeners, I wish you a very blessed
00:01:16.080 Pesach, I believe is the pronunciation or just Passover. And that way I can't butcher it. 1.00
00:01:21.000 And if you are a Christian like I am, I wish you a happy Easter. 0.97
00:01:24.700 I think Ramadan is afoot as well. 0.95
00:01:26.600 So all of you, whatever you are doing this weekend, or if you're an atheist, just have a great long weekend.
00:01:31.500 Thanks to the rest of us.
00:01:33.320 So I want to talk about this ridiculous story, which has stuck with me for several days, probably disproportionately.
00:01:42.160 You may remember we had Sylvain Charlebois on the program last week.
00:01:46.580 And we were talking about inflation, about grocery store prices, about all that jazz.
00:01:51.960 And Sylvain Charlebois had done this study through his office in Dalhousie University on Canadian distrust in grocery store chains.
00:02:02.260 Now, one of the reasons for this, I think, is that you have Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the NDP,
00:02:07.740 going on a crusade against grocery stores and what he says are grocery store profits.
00:02:14.720 He thinks grocery stores are just making so much money off the backs of Canadians.
00:02:19.000 There was one tweet of his where he was saying he's doing the Trump thing.
00:02:22.560 He says, every cent of Greedy Galen's 55% raise deserves to be taxed.
00:02:29.000 So he's now doing the nicknames like Lion Ted or Crooked Hillary.
00:02:33.960 From Jagmeet Singh, you get Greedy Galen.
00:02:37.780 That's the name.
00:02:38.560 And the thing about Greedy Galen's 55% raise is that it deserves to be taxed every cent of it.
00:02:46.040 So if you get a raise and the government takes 100% of the raise, you really didn't get a raise at all.
00:02:52.820 So I think what Jagmeet Singh is saying is that you need to have a permanent salary cap that the NDP decides where to draw the line on.
00:03:00.720 But nevertheless, grocery store profits are a thing.
00:03:03.220 When people are skimping and saving in other ways, grocery stores are still making money.
00:03:08.860 They're still making money throughout the inflationary crisis.
00:03:12.060 And it's quite fascinating to me, though, that there is a subset of Canadians that somehow
00:03:18.440 thinks government is the answer to this.
00:03:22.040 So this is the thing that I plucked out of the Dalhousie Grocer Distrust Survey.
00:03:27.340 they find if you look at the report here that 4.5% so not a huge number 4.5% of Canadians
00:03:36.000 believe the government should create a crown corporation and start its own grocery store chain
00:03:43.320 a 4.5% share of Canadians so 1 in 20 again not huge but more than you would hope are just insane
00:03:56.580 1 in 20 Canadians roughly saying they want a government-run grocery store.
00:04:01.180 Now, I thought of this for a couple of moments
00:04:03.680 and determined that there was only one possible name for it, 0.84
00:04:07.440 which would be LibLaws.
00:04:09.740 And at LibLaws, which would be the Canadian government-run grocery store,
00:04:14.660 it would be designed, in my view, like the passport office.
00:04:19.560 So all of the efficiency and capability and effectiveness
00:04:24.040 that we have at Passport Canada
00:04:25.880 which is a government-run retail-like environment we could now bring into lib laws and you know
00:04:32.380 just look at what the government is doing with bill c11 right now you know that this would be
00:04:37.020 just an ode to mediocrity it would be the can con equivalent of groceries where you walk in and you
00:04:44.060 say oh wow you know i would love to get that uh what's that mexican salsa that i had when i was
00:04:49.060 on vacation in mexico and you go down the salsa aisle and there is no salsa there is just swish
00:04:54.320 chalet sauce packets. And you go to the coffee aisle and you say, I'd love to get some of that,
00:04:59.500 you know, imported blend that they serve at my neighborhood coffee shop. And instead it is just
00:05:04.320 all Tim Hortons all the time. You want to get some fruit. Well, oranges are out of season. So
00:05:09.400 you have to instead dine out on Saskatoon berries and Leamington tomatoes because tomatoes are
00:05:15.300 technically a fruit. So that's all you get in the fruit aisle now. And as you're shopping through
00:05:20.280 Liblaw's Tragically Hip is just blaring overhead on repeat, the same three songs, because that's
00:05:27.020 what Canadian content does. It means there are no songs, there's no selection, and you can only just
00:05:31.860 eat whatever the government wants you to eat. This is my dystopian nightmare of grocery shopping,
00:05:38.960 because grocery stores, if you're a foodie like me, are your portal to the world in a way. You can go
00:05:44.700 and you can try all these different things and broaden your horizons, and you can go sometimes
00:05:48.980 to the really weird, obscure sections of the grocery store
00:05:51.860 or go to the international aisle.
00:05:53.580 And just a Canadian government-run grocery store
00:05:56.280 strikes me as one of the worst things
00:05:58.920 that the government of Canada could ever do.
00:06:01.540 And you would end up in a situation in which you go in
00:06:04.600 and the shelves are empty
00:06:05.940 because the bureaucrat was on his seven-week vacation
00:06:10.160 and forgot to actually order the food to put on the shelves.
00:06:14.780 And again, you also have to have affirmative action hires 0.99
00:06:18.640 in all of the cashiers.
00:06:21.500 So it's actually, when you go to the cash, it's a drag show.
00:06:24.360 And when they're on intermission, they ring through your groceries.
00:06:27.720 So this is how I imagine it.
00:06:29.760 So let me know in the comments what you think shopping
00:06:31.660 at the government-run LibLaws store is going to be like.
00:06:35.520 In fact, if we're going to go down the way here,
00:06:37.840 probably no meat products.
00:06:40.220 So the protein section, when you go to the butcher,
00:06:42.740 you'll say, actually, could you trim a little bit of the back half
00:06:46.160 of that cricket for me?
00:06:47.160 I only want the half.
00:06:48.660 Or, hey, I've got families coming over.
00:06:50.180 Do you have any of the large crickets?
00:06:51.440 So you get crickets every way you want at LibLaws.
00:06:55.380 And Galen Weston doesn't make a penny off of it.
00:06:58.360 It all goes to the NDP campaign coffers.
00:07:00.680 So they might someday have enough money to call an election and run a campaign
00:07:06.240 instead of having to prop up this government they say is so terrible.
00:07:09.840 But not terrible enough to pull the plug on it.
00:07:13.080 I've wasted like 10 minutes talking about a grocery store that doesn't exist.
00:07:16.600 and that only 4.5% of Canadians want.
00:07:19.360 But if any of those 4.5% of you are listening in,
00:07:23.080 what part of that sounds enjoyable?
00:07:25.460 Like what part of that sounds like a good thing?
00:07:28.680 Or if government is even capable of doing it.
00:07:32.160 Again, a government that cannot deliver you your passport
00:07:34.660 is not a government that can do the complex sourcing
00:07:37.760 that is required from all around the world
00:07:40.000 to run a grocery store chain.
00:07:42.500 4.5% of Canadians want this.
00:07:46.080 That is like the Green Party, although I don't know if it's the Green Party because the Green Party actually has their desired grocery store, Whole Foods, I think it's called.
00:07:53.920 So anyway, let's move on to things that are hopefully less insane than that idea.
00:08:00.000 I do want to talk about this one very important dimension to this inflation story because Stephen Gilboa, who is, again, he's kind of like Jagmeet Singh in the sense that you never want to assume that he's intelligent.
00:08:14.420 because I feel you're probably going to be off track if you do that.
00:08:18.760 But I think he's very shrewd, and he knows what he's doing a lot of the time.
00:08:23.260 And I think this time he didn't.
00:08:24.780 He sort of went even too far for the Liberals,
00:08:27.600 who I presume told him to delete this tweet of his.
00:08:31.060 He posted the following,
00:08:33.120 Inflation can be tough on Canadians, but we can't neglect the climate crisis.
00:08:39.680 Future generations will bear the cost of inaction.
00:08:43.540 The context of this is that he was retweeting something from Generation Squeeze that says the prospect of paying for our pollution can feel like there is more than one hand in our pocket reaching for a wallet that is always running on empty, but we can't solve our wallet problems by neglecting our climate problems.
00:09:00.620 So he's agreeing and saying, yeah, inflation is tough, but you know what?
00:09:04.640 Screw you because climate change is more important.
00:09:08.240 So what he's saying there is that if you're a Canadian who now has to pay a 30% increase in the carbon tax as of April 1st, you are supposed to just shut up because this is fighting climate change. 0.99
00:09:21.380 And how dare you be such a climate criminal because you don't like that you have to pay more for your cauliflower, you absolute climate criminal.
00:09:28.420 This is like this scorn of Greta Thunberg raining down upon you through Stephen Gilboa's Twitter account.
00:09:34.400 How dare you care about inflation?
00:09:36.660 because for Canadians who cannot afford groceries they don't have the luxury of saying you know
00:09:43.620 I really want to make sure that the sea levels in the Maldives are no higher than they need to be
00:09:49.940 that's a luxury calculation for people that most Canadians who are hurting who are within $200 a
00:09:56.460 month any given month of having to go into debt or increase their debt they don't actually care
00:10:01.660 right now about the shorelines in Tuvalu, if there is even a connection between the price of
00:10:07.300 groceries thanks to a carbon tax and these things, which is dubious at best. But it just shows the
00:10:14.700 utter disconnect between the people that want to start writing out all of these penalties, these
00:10:19.700 punishments for us living our lives, while not being the ones that have to deal with the
00:10:25.660 consequences. So absolutely shame on Stephen Gilbeau for being so utterly callous as to think
00:10:34.300 that Canadians should care less about inflation, which is putting them into debt and probably
00:10:40.000 bankruptcy, than about your little Save the World Greenpeace pet project, the kind that got you
00:10:46.140 arrested. I mean, he's literally a climate criminal because Stephen Gilbeau has been
00:10:50.160 criminally charged for his climate activism. So actually, yeah, he's the climate criminal,
00:10:54.320 I think by definition there and I again it's not to say I think you know he's not been prepared to
00:11:00.240 move beyond that and own up to that chapter of his life fine but right now instead of just making a
00:11:05.700 big stink and making a scene and yelling at people and holding up the sign he's actually the guy in
00:11:11.580 charge he is actually the guy in charge how that happened is basically because we are not a serious
00:11:18.060 country and you can tell we're not a serious country because of what passes for policy here
00:11:24.080 so we spoke a couple of weeks ago and i actually asked a premier alberta alberta premier daniel
00:11:29.400 smith about this the calgary bylaw that effectively bans protesting drag shows that's that's the bylaw
00:11:37.080 they've worded it in this convoluted way where they talk about oh anything that goes up against
00:11:41.740 an equity seeking group you can't do but but basically they're saying if you protest a drag
00:11:46.580 queen story time at a library or a public venue or whatever the case is, it will be illegal under
00:11:53.040 Calgary's municipal bylaws. The Ontario NDP are taking the Calgary bylaw model and trying to bring
00:12:01.900 it to a province-wide context. Here was Kristen Wong Tam and a drag queen explaining why we need
00:12:08.900 ban protests firstly it enables the attorney general to create a 2s lgbtqi plus community 0.90
00:12:19.620 safety zone to prohibit within a hundred meters of the property any homophobic transphobic act
00:12:26.020 of intimidation threat offensive threats offensive remarks protest disturbance and distribution of
00:12:32.420 hate propaganda within the meaning of the criminal code it also comes with it a penalty of 25 000 0.77
00:12:40.500 if prosecuted successfully we will not let fear win a world without trans people has never existed
00:12:47.940 a world without drag has never existed and it never will queen people have always been here
00:12:53.540 amongst us they are our co-workers they are our brothers our sisters they are our mothers our
00:12:59.060 fathers. They're our families. Drag is art. Drag is culture. Drag is educational. Drag is creative.
00:13:07.360 Drag is comedy, but drag is not a crime. My name is Scarlett Bobo, and thank you so much for your
00:13:13.040 time. So I would agree that drag is not a crime, but neither is protesting drag or protesting
00:13:26.160 anything. This seeks to effectively criminalize it. I mean, when you're talking about a $25,000
00:13:31.820 fine, it's not under criminal law, but they're trying to make illegal the idea of protesting
00:13:37.380 something that you may take issue with. And again, I have actually never cared about the drag queen 0.95
00:13:44.100 culture war that's going on. I don't really care. I have never been to a drag show. I've never 1.00
00:13:50.120 knowingly met a drag queen. It's not something I partake in on the weekends, although everyone 1.00
00:13:55.520 needs a hobby, I don't actually care. I do not care at all. The only time I started to care
00:14:02.320 was when in recent months in particular, I mean, it's been going on for recent years,
00:14:08.020 people started saying that you cannot question any aspect of this, even when it is being done
00:14:14.000 in front of children. Now, I hate debates and discussions that come down to what really looks
00:14:20.000 like pearl clutching. People that say, won't someone think of the children when I believe
00:14:24.320 kids are resilient. I don't believe you need to sugarcoat kids from every ill in the world. And
00:14:29.380 in fact, when people start talking about, well, I'm fine with it, but I don't want children to see
00:14:33.240 it. Oftentimes they use that as a bit of a crutch because they themselves are not comfortable with
00:14:38.860 something. And to look at it from the other dimension, a lot of the times pro-life protesters
00:14:43.600 are attacked on the grounds that, well, I don't want my kids seeing that. I don't want my kids
00:14:50.600 seeing the images of aborted fetuses. I don't want my kids seeing your messaging. And they use
00:14:56.380 kids as a bit of a crutch there. Now, I'm not saying that's what's happening here. I'm saying
00:15:00.900 that's why I dislike the idea of saying that children are these entities, these beings that
00:15:06.600 need to be bubble wrapped and sugar coated. So I don't think that drag queen story times should be 0.65
00:15:12.720 illegal. And I don't think they are illegal. They aren't in any jurisdiction that I'm aware of,
00:15:16.440 except for maybe, I don't know, Sudan or something.
00:15:19.300 So I don't at the same time think that protesting them should be.
00:15:23.560 And Danielle Smith and I had a slight disagreement on this point.
00:15:26.860 She said, you know, people have a right to have their events
00:15:29.380 and parents can make their choices and these events should not be disrupted.
00:15:32.560 And I said, well, protests are not disrupting them.
00:15:36.000 Protests are taking place outside to draw attention to these things
00:15:39.580 that the protesters find uncomfortable and find to be age-inappropriate.
00:15:44.520 And there are lots of cases of these things
00:15:46.640 where a person is sitting down in a silly outfit
00:15:49.680 with their makeup and hair done, however,
00:15:51.440 and they're reading a story,
00:15:52.360 and I don't have to get it to see
00:15:54.280 that it is not a particularly lewd activity.
00:15:57.400 And then you also see all the clips of the inverse happening,
00:15:59.920 where you cannot separate the sexualization from drag, 0.51
00:16:04.340 where it is being done not just around children,
00:16:06.500 but in some cases, physically to children.
00:16:10.160 And I have to question why.
00:16:12.340 Who wants that?
00:16:13.600 Who actually wants that and why?
00:16:16.540 And I think that anytime we have discussions like this in a legal context,
00:16:22.300 we're missing the mark that there's a whole area of society
00:16:26.100 in which we should be able to self-govern as free individuals. 1.00
00:16:30.360 You should have the right to be a drag queen if you want.
00:16:32.400 I should have the right to go if I want. 1.00
00:16:34.200 And I should have the right to stay far away if I want.
00:16:37.040 I think parents should have the right to make choices
00:16:39.300 and other people should have the right to question those choices.
00:16:44.040 If you don't like something, one of the most fundamental rights you have
00:16:47.580 is to dislike it and to raise your concerns and make them known to other people.
00:16:54.160 So when all of a sudden it becomes the role of the state
00:16:57.860 to govern which things you can and can't criticize,
00:17:03.200 which, speaking of abortion protests or anti-abortion protests,
00:17:06.600 already happens in the province of Ontario.
00:17:09.620 Ontario has some of the most restrictive laws
00:17:12.060 governing where people can protest abortion.
00:17:14.960 You can't actually protest abortion
00:17:16.700 or even counsel alternatives to abortion
00:17:19.960 within a certain radius.
00:17:22.040 I think it's 100 meters of where abortion clinics are located,
00:17:26.280 which means the very place you'd want to protest
00:17:28.900 something you are not allowed to go to to protest.
00:17:31.920 So when you allow governments to do this,
00:17:34.740 you're allowing governments to claim a monopoly on right and wrong and start criminalizing dissent
00:17:40.580 and criminalizing opposition and criminalizing the idea of just people disagreeing about something
00:17:46.220 and accepting that that is a normal thing to do in a healthy society. How did drag queens become 0.96
00:17:51.980 this thing that went up on a pedestal that no one was allowed to question or criticize, 0.95
00:17:56.880 especially when many of them are all too willing to have the discussion? I've seen so many drag
00:18:01.680 queens that have gone and done interviews in which they've defended it even against people 0.83
00:18:05.880 that don't understand it. And again, if you want me to interview a drag queen on the show
00:18:10.620 about this, I would happily do that because I do have genuine questions as to where we draw the 0.98
00:18:16.920 line between what is sexualizing to children or sexually adjacent and what is just this harmless
00:18:23.800 little thing that you do that's no different than someone putting on a princess costume to read a
00:18:29.520 fairy tale to kids? At what point does it become one thing that you are uncomfortable with if you're
00:18:35.160 one of the people involved in this pastime? So again, I'm going in different directions on this.
00:18:41.960 I find it egregious that we have a political party in Ontario that's entertaining a ban
00:18:47.580 on protesting. And I find it more bizarre. I haven't heard how the progressive conservatives
00:18:53.820 in Ontario were going to go on this. But there are some members of the PC caucus that I think
00:18:58.920 would show up to the legislature in drag if the media had asked them one critical question just
00:19:04.320 because they thought it was the only way they could get out of it. So I think there are some
00:19:08.380 PCMPPs that I would not be surprised to see voting in favor of this because this is again a party
00:19:14.920 that has endorsed some of the most restrictive measures in the COVID era, a party that doesn't
00:19:19.680 really care about free speech either within its caucus or in the province. So it's entirely
00:19:24.280 possible the PCs will go along with this which will be whatever you think of drag queens whatever
00:19:30.880 you think of drag queens story hour whatever you think of any of this would be an affront to freedom
00:19:36.360 of speech and we need to go back to the first principles here why should the government have 0.52
00:19:40.840 a right to tell you what you can criticize or what you cannot criticize they simply shouldn't
00:19:47.820 And when you see this dynamic, it's important to know just how insane some New Democrat MPs and MLAs and MPPs are, especially in British Columbia.
00:19:58.640 This is in Ontario, but this just came across my radar like, I don't know, 20 minutes before I went on air.
00:20:03.920 A BC New Democrat MLA, who's, again, I've never heard of, I don't follow BC politics, but his name is Amon Singh, has said that, you know what?
00:20:13.460 I don't even think I can tell you what he said without you just hearing it from his own mouth.
00:20:18.760 Take it away.
00:20:22.320 In the wake of an Oscar win for The Whale, a horrifically discriminatory movie that uses fat suits. 0.77
00:20:27.120 And don't be mistaken, a fat suit is just blackface in another context. 0.52
00:20:30.760 And a storyline to paint the protagonist as grotesque, pitiful, is well beyond time we talk about fatphobia. 0.73
00:20:37.260 We talk about racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, sexism, but we don't address the systemic oppression that affects people who live in larger bodies.
00:20:47.580 Fatphobia is the implicit and explicit bias that is rooted in a sense of blame and presumed moral failing.
00:20:54.640 Being fat is highly stigmatized in culture.
00:20:57.060 Anti-fatness is intrinsically linked to anti-blackness, racism, classism, misogyny, and many other systems of oppression.
00:21:07.260 so uh let me just start off here by giving honorable mention to the american sign language
00:21:18.260 interpreter uh showing everyone what fat is uh because like you know here we have this impassioned
00:21:24.180 speech from an ndb mla about uh just how horrible it is that uh society is so fat phobic and then
00:21:30.700 you look at the sign language guy going like i mean this is how i look generally so it's not
00:21:36.820 as noticeable when I'm doing it. But the sign language guy, like, you know, doing the ASL for
00:21:41.100 fat as they're like decrying fat phobia was particularly great. So he's actually been
00:21:45.660 canceled now. The sign language guy has been fired for a fat phobic hate crime for his accurate
00:21:52.080 usage of the ASL term for fat. But here we have an MLA in British Columbia saying that fat phobia
00:21:59.940 is a growing concern, taking aim at the critically acclaimed movie Whale, featuring Brendan Fraser,
00:22:05.480 which won Brendan Fraser an Oscar
00:22:07.440 and this movie was apparently so fat phobic
00:22:10.420 because it made him out to be grotesque
00:22:12.600 and just that throwaway line that fat suits
00:22:15.560 which Brendan Fraser used for the movie are blackface
00:22:19.720 so I should probably take this time to apologize
00:22:24.740 I don't actually look like this
00:22:27.520 I've just been wearing a fat suit for 30 something years
00:22:30.480 and I realize now this is offensive
00:22:32.600 so hopefully at some point in the future
00:22:34.840 I can get the fat suit off and I will not be in that horrific fat phobic appropriate of attire
00:22:41.320 any longer. It's so terrible. How dare I have done that for so long? But this whole thing of 0.72
00:22:48.920 trying to add grievances, just add grievances nonstop. To say that blackface is a pretty bad 0.99
00:22:57.240 thing, I think it's something that we can all get on board with. But all of a sudden, you know, 1.00
00:23:01.060 But if you would have put on a fat suit, that's also blackface. 0.99
00:23:04.940 That's fatface or fat black suit. 0.99
00:23:08.280 No, fatphobia. 1.00
00:23:10.200 It's terrible.
00:23:11.220 How can you do it? 1.00
00:23:12.380 It is not something you're allowed to do because wearing a fat suit is the new blackface. 1.00
00:23:17.720 Blackface. 1.00
00:23:18.200 See, I was joking about messing up the words, and then I started to actually do it.
00:23:23.360 So, Brendan Fraser, you have to give back your Oscar. 0.88
00:23:26.540 You have to apologize to the fat community. 0.93
00:23:29.120 I don't know if there is a fat community, if there is, it's likely those of us gathered around the buffet, but you have to apologize to the fat community for your horrific appropriation of their identity. 0.83
00:23:40.980 Believe it or not, this is an amusing little aside, but it is actually something that people have tried to lobby for inclusion in the human rights code.
00:23:51.900 So they've actually tried to make body size a protected ground against discrimination, which means that if you were to wear a fat suit for some reason, maybe you wanted to audition for a part in a Brendan Fraser movie, I don't know.
00:24:06.300 you could actually be found to have been breaking the law in the Human Rights Tribunal. So a lot of
00:24:12.420 these things that you get MLAs pontificating about, like you can laugh at them and mock them
00:24:16.320 as we're doing now, but there are very real consequences when this sort of narrative gets
00:24:21.120 picked up in law, which is basically what he's trying to do here. You can tell it's the last
00:24:26.620 show of the week because we're just like having fun and we're just like going through everything
00:24:29.640 we can here that we didn't get a chance to get through in the previous days, which brings us to 0.90
00:24:35.820 24 Sussex Drive, which is, I've always said, a rodent-infested crap hole. And I was just 0.91
00:24:45.880 talking about politicians, but now it is literally a rodent-infested, derelict building that has had
00:24:54.320 so many dead animals in the walls, no one knows what to do with it. This story came out just a
00:25:00.440 couple of days ago. It has been closed permanently due to rodent and mold issues, according to
00:25:06.620 documents from the National Capital Commission. So this is normally in Ottawa, the official
00:25:11.220 residence of the Prime Minister of Canada. Since Trudeau took office, he's been living in Rideau
00:25:15.860 Cottage just across the street. And there was always this understanding that millions and
00:25:21.780 millions of dollars in renovations were needed at 24 Sussex Drive. It was not inhabitable the way
00:25:26.960 people discuss it and Trudeau sort of said okay I'm not going to move in there but instead of
00:25:31.980 doing the responsible thing and saying okay we're now going to renovate this thing he has just let
00:25:37.180 it sit there so all the problems have continued to be problems he actually had to evict a guy
00:25:42.780 to move into Rideau Cottage I can't remember who it was but it was like the private secretary of
00:25:48.340 the governor general something who normally lives there that just got like kicked out
00:25:51.620 so Trudeau and his family could live there.
00:25:54.780 And look, this is one of these few areas
00:25:57.380 where I'm technically okay
00:25:59.680 with government spending a little bit of money
00:26:03.320 because like, unless we want
00:26:04.660 just the prime minister of the country,
00:26:06.160 whomever it is to just have some like crappy apartment
00:26:08.820 overlooking Spark Street,
00:26:10.060 which, you know, is probably the way they do it
00:26:11.760 in most European countries.
00:26:13.220 I think generally speaking,
00:26:14.280 a place that you can do business in,
00:26:16.700 a place that you can live in
00:26:18.360 that is somewhat presentable
00:26:19.880 is probably at a minimum something we could all get on board with giving the prime minister of
00:26:25.040 the country. If even the speaker of the house has a private residence, the prime minister surely
00:26:29.120 could as well. So Trudeau screwed this up because every prime minister has screwed it up, by the
00:26:35.300 way, because no one has wanted to vacate the house to do the renovation. So he actually did by not
00:26:40.180 moving in the right thing, but he didn't do the one thing that made that the right thing, which
00:26:45.700 would have been actually doing the renovation.
00:26:48.580 So instead, it's like this weird principled stand
00:26:51.000 of, well, I'm not going to live there.
00:26:52.300 But now it's like, well,
00:26:53.420 no one's going to live there ever again.
00:26:55.200 So like, I don't care if we just tear it down
00:26:57.420 and build something.
00:26:58.680 Maybe we just get, what are those trailers?
00:27:00.860 Are they Airstreams?
00:27:02.720 Not Gulf Streams.
00:27:03.980 Gulf Streams, Airstreams.
00:27:05.140 Anyway, maybe we just like park one of those
00:27:07.280 out on the lot and the prime minister can stay there.
00:27:11.100 Sean, my producer is saying,
00:27:13.380 Trudeau can live in an Airbnb.
00:27:15.700 Um, an Airbnb is an option, but the problem, I've stayed at Airbnbs before and I don't actually love it. I mean, I like the one that actually Sean and I were staying at in separate rooms. Don't, uh, don't get any ideas in, in Davos, because we had like this weird, like moose head on the wall, which was just like menacingly overlooking me as I got up early in the morning, uh, to get work done. And we had this like weird, it was like a very like mountainy rustic theme.
00:27:41.460 So we could actually send Justin Trudeau to the Davos Airbnb WeState.
00:27:45.400 I think he'd probably be far more comfortable living in Davos year-round.
00:27:48.360 So anyway, we've got to end things there.
00:27:51.760 I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful Easter weekend,
00:27:55.000 a wonderful Passover Seder, whatever it is you are doing tonight and this weekend.
00:27:59.500 I hope you enjoy it unless you are trying to nationalize grocery stores,
00:28:03.640 in which case I wish you no luck whatsoever.
00:28:05.580 But we will talk to you all next week with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.
00:28:09.880 So this is The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
00:28:12.460 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.
00:28:16.960 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:28:19.000 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.