Juno News - Steven Guilbeault says the federal government will no longer fund roads

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:20.440 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here it is valentine's day

00:01:30.900 i decided to put on my i don't even know what color this is it's like uh let me google before

00:01:36.440 i say it uh it's kind of a not really a fuchsia fuchsia is more pink like it's a i'm just imagining

00:01:42.380 ross from friends screaming faded salmon it's a it's a purple shirt it's not red but i've got

00:01:47.280 like a little valentine's red undershirt so i have i put you in a romantic mood yet this is

00:01:52.320 what romance looks like how i ended up getting married i have no idea but i try not to question

00:01:56.540 that in any event good to have you tuned in to the program here canada's most irreverent talk

00:02:01.420 show busy day it's become a busy day we'll have our good friend david millard haskell on the show

00:02:06.900 in about 30 minutes time to talk about his report on diversity equity and inclusion and why they do

00:02:14.100 not cause there to be more inclusion, more diversity, or more equity. And in fact, they

00:02:19.240 often have adverse consequences on these things. We will also have to have a conversation about

00:02:27.100 this ridiculous thing that Stephen Gilboa has said, which I realize is a very, very large 0.66

00:02:33.960 category. So I should narrow it down a little bit more. The ridiculous thing this week has to do 0.60

00:02:39.200 with Rhodes and his position on Rhodes, which probably wouldn't shock you, but we'll talk

00:02:43.880 about it anyway and it is because it is valentine's day again nothing more romantic than it being the

00:02:48.940 two-year anniversary of justin trudeau's invocation of the emergencies act so we'll chat about that

00:02:55.000 with our good friend tom marazzo that's coming up in about 12 minutes thereabouts but uh stephen

00:03:00.900 gilbo was doing his favorite thing he was speaking in montreal before a group of activists and

00:03:07.740 advocates in the public transit world and what he was talking about with them was why we need to go

00:03:13.200 all in on public transit this is like home field advantage if ever there was one he is talking to

00:03:19.240 them all discussing the idea of climate change and public transit we all need to walk more he said

00:03:25.140 the government's spending more money so the people can walk more i don't know why government grants

00:03:29.500 are required for walking i guess just to come up with a trail of sorts that you can walk down

00:03:34.080 but then he said the following and i want to read exactly what he said because this will become as

00:03:40.880 you'll learn in a few moments, a bit of a difficult thing to square with what he later

00:03:45.900 claimed he said. The quote, our government has made the decision to stop investing in new road

00:03:53.880 infrastructure. Of course, we will continue to be there for cities, provinces, and territories

00:03:58.800 to maintain the existing network, but there will be no more envelopes from the federal government

00:04:04.600 to enlarge the road network. The analysis we have done is that the network is perfectly adequate to

00:04:09.960 respond to the needs we have and thanks to a mix of investment in active and public transit and

00:04:15.180 territorial planning and densification we can very well achieve our goals of economic social

00:04:19.860 and human development without more enlargement of the road network so he's saying that the road we

00:04:25.660 have enough roads we don't need more roads yeah if you want to repave the existing roads fine

00:04:30.120 but the roads we have are good enough he says we should take the money that is regularly invested

00:04:36.960 in asphalt and concrete and instead put it into fighting climate change and adapting to its

00:04:44.420 impact. So Stephen Gilbeau, we don't need more roads. And he said, to put a finer point on this,

00:04:50.700 that the problem with roads is if you build more roads, people want to drive on them

00:04:54.820 and roads encourage car use. Yeah. Okay. So we have a little bit of a problem here. Canada has

00:05:03.580 a very ambitious goal when it comes to increasing immigration and increasing the population size we

00:05:09.980 have a country that wants to bring in about 1.5 million people over the next three years it stands

00:05:15.980 to reason that some of those people will want to drive on our road so for population growth alone

00:05:21.900 we need to be talking about the way that we move people i live in london ontario it's about a two

00:05:26.380 hour drive well in theory a two hour drive from toronto although oftentimes it can be a three three

00:05:32.220 three and a half, at some points, even four hour drive. If you want to get from London to downtown

00:05:37.080 Toronto, because there need to be more lanes on the road in the absence of other options,

00:05:41.120 I would be fine with a high speed rail option that gets me from London to Toronto.

00:05:45.780 There is a price tag on that that would probably make a lot of people bristle.

00:05:49.860 We have a society and a culture in this country that is built around driving

00:05:53.760 and built around roads. What Stephen Gilboa is talking about here is wanting to effectively

00:05:58.780 socially engineer the population out of wanting to drive. Because, well, if we don't give them

00:06:04.120 roads to drive on, they won't want to drive. He wants to make driving such a miserable process

00:06:09.860 and a miserable ordeal that no one does it. And the way you can make that happen

00:06:14.020 is by not giving the people roads, which is like, it's the old joke of libertarians that,

00:06:20.120 you know, when a libertarian says government shouldn't fund anyone, someone says,

00:06:23.320 but my roads. And now the federal government is literally saying, well, we don't even want to fund

00:06:28.200 the road so stephen gilbeau gets called on this this morning while he's at the house of commons

00:06:33.960 walking around and it was david aiken of global news that decided to put his quote to him and

00:06:39.320 stephen gilbeau decides to go with the old i never said that excuse take a look

00:06:46.280 that's not that's not what i said yes it is wait i can read it back to you what what i have said

00:06:51.560 is that the solutions to our transport challenge passed by many different things including massive

00:06:57.000 investment in public transit including investment in electrification of

00:07:01.620 transportation and of course we're funding roads we have we have programs

00:07:05.560 to fund road what we have said and maybe I should have been more specific in in

00:07:09.840 the past is that we don't have funds for large projects like the troisième

00:07:14.040 lane that the CAC has been trying to do for for many years

00:07:18.840 I just told you that I should have been more specific in in that statement and

00:07:25.560 and and specified that it was project like the troisième which myself and many of my colleagues

00:07:30.520 have said many times that the federal government had no funds for a project like this and you can

00:07:35.160 look back and you will see you will find numerous statements like myself and many other cabinet

00:07:39.480 colleagues on on on this specifically you said we had all the roads we need you said get all the

00:07:47.400 and then at a certain point someone asked him about gc strategies and arrive can and he just

00:07:51.640 just pivots to that because yeah look it's possible he was incoherent it's possible he was

00:07:55.760 also trying to brag to his public transit environmental friends in montreal the kind

00:08:01.480 that he used to i don't know scale the cn tower with and he was doing this and then you know when

00:08:06.560 he gets called on and he walks about and says no no no i didn't say i don't want to find any roads

00:08:10.780 i said i don't want to fund some roads and but but even that is incredibly incredibly flawed

00:08:18.500 because we have I mentioned the population aspect here we have a massive population boom coming to

00:08:24.980 this country through immigration the birth rate's not high but the population rate is growing so

00:08:29.620 there are going to be more people and I've been a long time advocate of the idea that we shouldn't

00:08:33.920 be centralizing our population as dramatically and aggressively in cities now look you've got

00:08:40.300 transit infrastructure in Toronto and in Vancouver and to some extent in Calgary and Montreal but you

00:08:47.700 don't have that in other cities. Now, people like Stephen Gilbeau would take from that, great, we

00:08:51.980 need to build a subway in every city. You want to build a subway in your town of 40,000, we'll give

00:08:56.000 you a billion dollars to do it. But the reality is that is not the way we operate. That is not

00:09:01.240 feasible. That is not desirable. So if we assume that people in this country are going to need to

00:09:06.180 drive to get around, which is happening with suburbanization, it's happening with people

00:09:11.360 living in rural parts, the federal government shouldn't be doing any of this. We're not going

00:09:16.980 to fund roads shtick. Now this has been criticized and I'm very grateful it has by some provincial

00:09:24.120 premiers. Danielle Smith had very harsh words about it. Now she and Stephen Gilboa haven't

00:09:28.960 exactly been on good terms generally as we spoke about in my interview with her last week in

00:09:34.560 Toronto. Doug Ford who again has often been all buddy-buddy with the federal government he posted

00:09:40.140 on X that he was quote gobsmacked. He says a federal minister said they won't invest in new

00:09:46.740 roads or highways. He doesn't care that you're stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. I do. We're

00:09:52.700 building roads and highways with or without a cent from the Fed. So the federal government is

00:09:59.960 basically saying, yeah, we don't want to build any new roads. The provinces are saying we've got

00:10:04.360 people that are in very heavily congested traffic. And I think it's probably important to have

00:10:08.840 roads so these people can get around. So this is to me quite astonishing, but not unsurprising

00:10:16.340 because this is a radical environmental activist

00:10:19.120 who's ended up becoming the environment minister

00:10:21.140 of this country,

00:10:21.900 which under the Trudeau government

00:10:23.700 is an incredibly important file,

00:10:26.100 an incredibly important file.

00:10:28.000 And it's one that we should be very cognizant of,

00:10:31.260 the government making moves on this

00:10:32.840 in the way that Gilbo has described.

00:10:35.460 Now, I've taken a more nuanced position

00:10:38.100 anytime 15-minute cities have come up as a topic

00:10:41.740 because the idea of a 15-minute city to me

00:10:44.200 is not a problem

00:10:44.920 because the government is banning you from leaving your home more than 50 minutes in either

00:10:49.320 directions. The problem with 50-minute cities is that it's government trying to socially engineer

00:10:54.200 a way of living which does not make economic sense and does not really align with how people

00:10:59.040 choose to organize and orient their lives. And when Stephen Gobeau is talking about we need to

00:11:05.340 have more walking and less driving, we need to have fewer roads and more walking paths and walking

00:11:10.280 trails. He's talking about that exact phenomenon. He's not saying it's a ban on going 15 minutes

00:11:16.620 outside your home, but he's saying it's effectively that the government wants to,

00:11:20.860 remember what Emmanuel Macron said during COVID. He said he wanted to, I can't really use the

00:11:26.640 English translation because it would be a naughty word on this otherwise family-friendly show,

00:11:30.760 but he said he wanted to emerday people who were critical of COVID restrictions and lockdowns,

00:11:37.160 which to put a sanitary translation on,

00:11:40.640 he wanted to annoy the heck out of people

00:11:43.860 that did not like his COVID mandate.

00:11:46.240 And this is what Stephen Gilbeau is doing

00:11:48.940 in the context of drivers.

00:11:52.260 He wants to just make life so miserable

00:11:54.400 that they are forced to adapt to this way of life

00:11:57.820 and this way of organizing their lives

00:11:59.480 that he's trying to impose on them.

00:12:02.000 And you know what?

00:12:02.840 Some people may go along with it,

00:12:04.240 but I think others will just not go along with it at all.

00:12:07.300 And I think that you're gonna see in places like Alberta

00:12:09.240 where it's lovely.

00:12:10.700 One thing I absolutely love is parking in Alberta

00:12:13.140 because this is a province

00:12:15.120 that has built parking spaces for pickup trucks.

00:12:17.900 So it doesn't matter how bad you are at backing into a space,

00:12:20.520 you'll be able to get your car in there

00:12:22.000 because it's not like these tiny rinky dinky European things.

00:12:24.920 Like when we were in Davos, we had this big giant van

00:12:27.100 and we were like backing it into spaces

00:12:29.600 that I swear were made for smart cars.

00:12:32.420 So thankfully, Sean and Cosman are quite, you know, skinny.

00:12:36.520 So they were able to just like, you know, squeeze out in between the two cars with,

00:12:41.440 you know, four inches between one door and the other.

00:12:44.040 Whereas I, you know, had to squeeze into the eight inches on the other side,

00:12:46.940 which I assure you did not look pretty, but we got it done.

00:12:49.700 So that's kind of the Stephen Gilboa vision here is we want to make a world

00:12:53.600 which is so inconvenient for drivers that they just look out the window and say,

00:12:57.380 maybe I'll just walk.

00:12:59.280 So when you want to walk from Red Deer to Calgary because the government won't build a road, you have Stephen Gilboe to thank for that.

00:13:07.860 And this is what the federal government is doing, all in the interest of public service, because you can always trust whenever all is said and done, government to look out for you, right?

00:13:16.640 It is absolutely absurd.

00:13:19.320 And just on the note of Arrive Can, because this was a development we heard from our friends at La Presse.

00:13:25.100 I don't know if they're our friends, but I just said that because I was feeling charitable this morning.

00:13:29.280 The press reported that the company that was responsible for delivering ArriveCAN,

00:13:34.020 that's GC Strategies, which has two people, I believe, working for it

00:13:38.420 and doesn't actually produce anything.

00:13:39.720 They just subcontract it all out.

00:13:41.600 So it's basically a vendor that solely exists to cash government checks.

00:13:45.140 They have cashed $258 million in government checks

00:13:50.760 since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015.

00:13:53.400 So this company has been awarded contract after contract.

00:13:56.420 arrived can was basically just one fifth of their overall haul in federal money in the course of

00:14:04.900 the last nine years and we're supposed to believe that this is just the way a functioning society

00:14:11.120 and a functioning country and a functioning government well function so the conservatives

00:14:15.380 have said they want a full investigation into this this was michael barrett this morning

00:14:19.700 Solar Press has reported this morning shocking news that the two-person firm, Justin Trudeau's favourite two-person firm being used by the government for IT work that has done no actual IT work, has been paid a quarter of a billion dollars, 250 million dollars in contracts from the government to this two-person firm.

00:14:46.800 while Canadians are lined up at food banks in record numbers

00:14:50.580 and Canadians are struggling just to feed themselves and keep the heat on.

00:14:57.520 Today, Conservatives are going to be calling for the Auditor General

00:15:01.140 to open an investigation into every contract,

00:15:05.160 every penny that has been paid to GC Strategies

00:15:09.760 because it's beyond reason that a two-person company operating out of a suburban basement

00:15:19.320 could be doing $250 million in business with the federal government.

00:15:26.700 And so today, that's why we're calling on the Auditor General

00:15:29.100 to investigate every penny that has been paid to them.

00:15:33.660 You know, I'm a firm believer in the fact that government contracts

00:15:37.960 should generally be awarded on an open tender.

00:15:40.440 You should also have situations in which

00:15:42.200 you're working with the people

00:15:44.620 that are making the product.

00:15:45.800 Now, maybe a company needs to subcontract

00:15:47.920 out something very technical,

00:15:49.440 but the fact that these people

00:15:50.700 have made a quarter of a billion dollars

00:15:52.600 on producing nothing,

00:15:54.480 the only thing they produce is a bill.

00:15:57.200 That is the only thing that GC Strategies

00:15:59.500 and companies that are modeled like that

00:16:01.020 create and produce.

00:16:02.720 The rest, they get to go to other people

00:16:04.580 to get a fraction of that money.

00:16:06.260 Well, they're sitting there and what?

00:16:07.620 cashing a finder's fee just for for putting this out like this is how if you ever saw that movie

00:16:12.100 war dogs with uh jonah what was it was jonah hill and i forget who the other one was it was based on

00:16:18.180 a true story but they had it was these two random guys from the u.s that started an arms dealing

00:16:24.560 business they did not make or produce or have any connection to firearms they just sort of realized

00:16:29.040 that uh there were all these companies that were and they could be the ones that picked up the

00:16:32.900 Defense Department's call and coordinate it with the manufacturers and get it done. And it was this

00:16:38.560 great little grift, and I'm pretty sure it ended in jail time. Now, I'm not at all suggesting that

00:16:42.740 GC Strategies has done anything illegal, quite the contrary. I think the problem is the federal

00:16:47.280 government either being unwilling or unable to do due diligence and realizing that they were paying

00:16:53.420 someone to create something that had no interest in creating it at all. And in the case of Arrive

00:16:59.940 can, what was supposed to be $80,000, racked up tens of millions of dollars in costs, so much so

00:17:06.280 that the Auditor General couldn't even figure out why it was and how much it was that this thing

00:17:12.460 ended up costing as much. So there's a cautionary tale on that. I mentioned at the outset of this

00:17:18.020 program, it is Valentine's Day and nothing puts me in the mood more than talking about constitutional

00:17:23.100 law. This is the two-year anniversary of the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Now, normally

00:17:30.540 this would be a bit more of a sour note, but I should also point out that it's only a few weeks

00:17:34.980 back that this act and all of the things it was used to achieve were found unconstitutional by

00:17:40.560 federal court. To talk about this anniversary and its implications, Tom Marazzo is back. He is the

00:17:46.620 author of the People's Emergency Act, Freedom Convoy 2022. Tom, always good to talk to you. I

00:17:52.720 don't know if happy anniversary is appropriate here, but what is your sort of top line reflection

00:17:58.320 with all that's happened over the last two years? Oh, you're either feeling very quiet or there's

00:18:07.560 an audio issue. So we will try to get that sorted out in a moment. That is, yeah, I don't think Tom

00:18:13.560 can hear me there. So we'll get that sorted out. But the other thing that is related to this,

00:18:18.680 and I'm going to get Tom to weigh in on this, is that CSIS has released a report through access

00:18:24.000 to information. Now, this was a request from the Canadian press. Now, this is where, when I read

00:18:29.140 this, and I haven't read the original briefing document, I only read the report on it, the

00:18:33.700 Canadian press published. It was a report from CSIS on the freedom movement and their perception

00:18:40.060 and contextualization of it. And it kind of made me wonder if the intelligence community is really

00:18:45.800 doing all that much of use because this is what our top secret spy agency has determined

00:18:52.440 the freedom movement began to emerge as a protest against covid restrictions

00:18:58.040 and now has generally morphed into a protest against government overreach wow

00:19:04.680 good for you guys you figured that one out i don't want to you know rag on you know people

00:19:09.320 that are doing a very difficult job and doing it for not a lot of money and no prestige or glory

00:19:14.840 But it was kind of a weird and like, well, duh moment when they've identified what anyone who's

00:19:20.580 been following the evolution of this movement could have identified in the last two years,

00:19:24.620 which was that, you know, COVID restrictions were a symptom and not the cause of government

00:19:30.580 issues. And I think that's probably the point that I would frame this around is that COVID

00:19:36.760 restrictions and vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, all of that were government revealing

00:19:42.480 its authoritarian impulse. The impulse was there. Government showed us the level of control they

00:19:47.640 want to wield, the level of power they want to wield, but they hadn't really been given a pretext

00:19:51.820 to wield it all before a pandemic came along. And that was what happened there. I think we have

00:19:56.480 Tom Morazzo for real this time. Tom, are we functioning? Are we good?

00:20:03.420 No, we're not. I can't hear you now.

00:20:07.780 There we go. I heard that, whatever you just did there.

00:20:09.840 let's see all right the joys of live media well as i mentioned tom two year anniversary of the

00:20:16.160 emergencies act what's your perspective on that now looking back uh well it's i hope you can hear

00:20:22.480 me now i can yeah okay sorry um yeah it's a it's a much different atmosphere this time around

00:20:29.680 because of the decision that came out from justice mosley a few weeks ago which declared that the

00:20:35.520 emergency act use or invocation was illegal um and outside of the scope of the the law so that

00:20:44.400 has a different feeling two years after the fact than it did even a year ago when we had justice

00:20:50.320 rouleau who basically cited reluctantly i don't i don't know how you want to phrase it but sort

00:20:58.000 of cited with justin trudeau but sort of didn't he gave himself a lot of wiggle room to get out of it

00:21:03.200 But yeah, so I think the spring in everyone's step this year is because of the fact that

00:21:10.080 Mosley's decision just came out a few weeks ago.

00:21:13.900 Yeah, and it does change the discussion a little bit.

00:21:17.140 Sorry, Andrew, I just keep losing audio.

00:21:18.460 Okay.

00:21:19.240 Okay.

00:21:19.600 Yeah, well, I just wasn't talking.

00:21:20.640 That might have been it.

00:21:21.200 I hadn't started yet.

00:21:22.280 I'm good.

00:21:22.740 I'm good.

00:21:23.320 I think it raises an important point here because, you know, there was a lot of skepticism,

00:21:28.460 I think from legal scholars, even people that weren't fans of the convoy when the Emergencies

00:21:33.420 Act came out that, okay, I don't like these guys with the trucks, but I really don't like this.

00:21:37.580 And now that the government has doubled down in the wake of that ruling, I think it's reinvigorated

00:21:43.680 that, has it not? In the sense that the government, even with this judicial ruling, is still saying,

00:21:47.920 no, absolutely, this was the right call. We should have done this. So there's been no

00:21:51.580 contrition from anyone in those ranks. No, and I've said this before too,

00:21:55.880 they're going into an election cycle. So what choice do they have other than they have to fight

00:22:02.500 this? This isn't really for them about the law or abiding by the law or accepting the decision.

00:22:09.120 This is a political decision on the part of the liberals to launch the appeal. In actuality,

00:22:16.380 the proper moral ethical thing to do would be to say, yes, we violated the law and we're going to

00:22:22.720 accept the court's decision but they can't do that going into an election because they know that

00:22:27.580 everybody's going to make them wear this around their neck like a thousand pound yoke so they

00:22:33.580 don't really have a choice they have to fight this from a political perspective only i wanted to get

00:22:40.160 your sense on this i don't know if you've read i haven't read the actual document as i mentioned

00:22:45.100 but this uh report i saw from the canadian press uh on the evolution of the freedom movement i mean

00:22:49.940 this was kind of plain as day apparent to anyone who had been watching. Even, I mean, the summer

00:22:54.680 of 2022, I remember you had all of these like little mini convoys popping up that were not even

00:22:59.760 protests. They were just summer festivals of people that had found camaraderie in folks they

00:23:04.720 met during the Freedom Convoy online in Ottawa, elsewhere in the country. And I do think there

00:23:10.560 was something, you know, accurate about that, that it has created a movement that really didn't exist

00:23:15.160 in Canada before January, February of 2022? Do you think that's a fair characterization of what's

00:23:21.520 happened? I think to go back, the best way to answer that question is to go back to the briefing

00:23:29.440 note that CSIS wrote to the cabinet in the IRG prior to invoking the Emergencies Act. CSIS disagreed

00:23:39.120 with the idea of invoking the Emergencies Act for the simple reason is that they believed

00:23:45.760 that it would set the conditions for an IMVE-like atmosphere within the hearts and minds of 0.84

00:23:55.660 Canadians. And so the spy agency themselves that are cited in this article, and I find it hysterical

00:24:03.200 and typical of the mainstream media that they would cite Barbara Perry of all people as a source

00:24:09.200 or an expert in this subject. Barbara Perry, of course, is, you know, connected to the anti-hate

00:24:14.680 network. She makes a ridiculous amount of money teaching her theories that can't be backed up by 1.00

00:24:21.540 evidence. And she's nothing more than a hate baiter. And if you want to know more, talk to 0.98

00:24:25.360 Cosman, one of your own excellent writers. Yeah. And just if I can give the context on there, Tom,

00:24:31.860 So Barbara Perry had said in a report, however many years ago, that there are 300, I forget if it was hate groups or far right groups or far right hate groups, some variation of that. And I was like, oh, wow, that's terrible. But she will not provide the list. So for all I know, you know, the Andrew Lawton show is listed as, you know, one of the 300 because she won't give it. And Cosman has been in a fight with the Freedom of Information Commissioner in Ontario for however long now trying to get access to that list, which she won't provide.

00:24:59.740 So I had to provide that little footnote there.

00:25:02.040 I apologize for cutting you off.

00:25:03.560 No, that's fine.

00:25:04.340 That's fine.

00:25:04.740 Because it's good background, good context.

00:25:06.400 And I think people should know, you know, the type of stuff that's happening in a Canadian

00:25:11.380 university right now.

00:25:12.460 Barbara Perry is on the Sunshine List.

00:25:14.360 She makes over $200,000 a year for peddling in hate baiting. 1.00

00:25:19.640 She can't back up any of her claims with any evidence.

00:25:22.820 But yet this sort of group within the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, they go in constant circles

00:25:28.380 And they just, you know, it's a self-licking ice cream cone with that particular group of people, but yet the legacy media likes to reference them as somehow being a bunch of experts and they're not.

00:25:40.260 So to go, you know, back to your original question, you know, CSIS, CSIS said, if you invoke the Emergencies Act, given the state of Canada right now, the level of anxiety, you are going to not provoke.

00:25:57.480 I don't want to use the word provoke, but you're going to disenfranchise Canadians even further. 0.98

00:26:04.020 I mean, remember, millions of Canadians supported the Freedom Convoy going to Ottawa,

00:26:08.140 and they donated millions and millions of dollars.

00:26:12.180 And so when you've got that many Canadians supporting a movement, which, by the way,

00:26:17.900 is a manifestation of the tyrannical behavior that every level of government

00:26:22.720 provoked in the Canadian population. So as a reaction, the convoy came into existence to go 0.58

00:26:32.540 back to, or to go to Ottawa to fight for their own freedoms. Now, when you invoke the Emergencies

00:26:37.620 Act, they doubled down on the very tyrannical behavior that the convoy went to Ottawa to fight

00:26:44.440 against. So of course, CSIS was correct in their assumption that it was going to disenfranchise

00:26:51.400 more Canadians. But to say that it's producing an IMVE, I think is fundamentally flawed and a

00:26:57.760 little bit ridiculous. And it feeds into the liberal media's narratives. Of course, the media, 0.79

00:27:04.300 as you know, better than I do, supports the liberal government. You got the anti-hate network

00:27:09.900 that is, again, a self-licking ice cream cone that just perpetuates the same garbage in a giant 0.76

00:27:15.460 circle and CSIS, who works for the federal government, they're just sort of contributing 0.97

00:27:22.100 in a, let's say an overt manner to this, this narrative.

00:27:27.800 So it's, it's really frustrating to watch this, read articles like that, to be perfectly

00:27:34.260 honest, because what I haven't seen in an article yet to this day on two years of the

00:27:39.980 anniversary of this invocation, I haven't seen one article from mainstream media come

00:27:44.700 out and say, why did Canadians go to Ottawa in the first place?

00:27:50.760 Let's get to the root of that question before everything else, because I think

00:27:54.660 what happened after was secondary to the reasons that the convoy even went there.

00:27:58.760 Was there IMVE?

00:28:00.120 No, it was Canadians who had a protected charter right to do what they did in

00:28:04.820 Ottawa, and that's why they use the mechanism with our own constitution to

00:28:09.860 go and fight for their rights.

00:28:11.220 It wasn't IMVE.

00:28:12.580 It was abiding by the principles of this country in our most fundamental document in terms of

00:28:19.240 outlining our rights to push back against the government. And that's what they did. It's not

00:28:23.520 I. And just for people not familiar with that term, that stands for ideologically motivated

00:28:27.920 violent extremism. And I reject that characterization. But the part that I found

00:28:32.240 interesting was just CISA stating the obvious that, you know, this wasn't this was not just

00:28:37.760 about vaccine mandates. And this was not just about COVID restrictions. And the fact that it

00:28:42.060 took them so long to seemingly come up with that position, I found quite odd. And to put this in

00:28:49.940 the bigger and broader context here, over the course of the last two years, government has

00:28:55.740 dug its heels in on the very things that it started doing throughout the COVID era, and really did

00:29:01.460 during the convoys time in Ottawa. And I think there's been a lot more, I mean, the reason you

00:29:06.420 see more resistance is because there's been a lot more stuff that needs to be resisted.

00:29:10.960 Yes, absolutely. And, you know, I read that article and I looked at the little laundry list

00:29:16.680 of things that they were really referring to as conspiracy theories. I'm sorry, but they're not

00:29:22.420 conspiracies. I mean, you've got presidential campaigns in the United States right now

00:29:28.200 talking about a lot of these issues. Okay. They're real things. Canadians now more than ever,

00:29:35.180 probably in our nation's history are more politically aware and more um aware of the

00:29:41.980 actions of ngos like the wef the world health organization even the u.n uh to some extent

00:29:49.180 you know the actions of the the um uh i think it's the united nations assembly like they are

00:29:57.020 deliberately doing things and canadians are just paying attention so how is that some sort of

00:30:02.300 ridiculous right-wing extremism that's what you call an engaged citizenship or citizenry that's

00:30:09.180 what that's about it's not imve or any other thing canadian one of them one of them on that 0.85

00:30:15.100 list by the way actions of the government opposition to communism they list as being a problem like

00:30:22.380 i found this hilarious the line is well this perceived tyranny is widespread across the

00:30:26.140 movement other narratives are becoming increasingly common among adherents uh the brief says citing

00:30:31.420 opposition to drag queen story times, perceived increase in control by institutions like the UN

00:30:37.760 and the World Economic Forum, and communism. So if you believe that communism is a bad thing,

00:30:43.520 you may be an ideologically motivated violent extremist. It is absolutely bizarre to see them

00:30:48.940 actually put this into print, isn't it? Like, we brag about being this socialist country. And I

00:30:54.100 think for a lot of Canadians that had always a different meaning, it's sort of a hidden meaning.

00:30:59.960 But the very, you know, essence of socialism is really the first step before communism. And so Canadians are waking up to a very different definition of socialism that they thought they lived under and realizing, no, you know, we are sliding more and more into an authoritarian type of state.

00:31:20.240 And again, to use you as a reference, personally, look at what they're doing with the CRTC.

00:31:26.320 Look at the steps that they're saying for our own good is to fight misinformation and

00:31:31.620 disinformation.

00:31:32.560 Therefore, we're going to regulate the internet, the news that you can see, independent journalists

00:31:37.920 like yourself.

00:31:39.540 Okay.

00:31:39.740 That is, you know, that's more tyrannical.

00:31:43.420 That's communism.

00:31:44.240 That is the control of information to your citizens under the guise of doing it for our own safety, as if though we're not smart enough or educated enough or even sophisticated enough to determine or make decisions for ourselves based on the news or the information that we receive.

00:32:02.200 We can't make our own decision, apparently, without the help of the communist liberal government of Canada.

00:32:07.940 Very well said. Tom Marazzo, author of The People's Emergency Act. Always a pleasure, sir. Thanks for coming on.

00:32:13.280 Thanks, Andrew. Thank you.

00:32:14.920 All right. Thank you again to Tom.

00:32:16.860 I've been looking forward to this one since we lined this up.

00:32:20.120 David Millard Haskell has been on the show in the past.

00:32:22.380 He's a tremendous free speech fighter at the Laurier University,

00:32:27.300 which as Lindsay Shepard's ordeal has revealed,

00:32:30.600 desperately, desperately, desperately needs a fierce free speech fighter.

00:32:35.360 So he's been in a lonely but not completely solitary group there.

00:32:39.400 He's got a couple of others on campus that have been in the trenches with him.

00:32:42.140 But he has also taken aim in a very academically rigorous and thoughtful way at diversity, equity, and inclusion.

00:32:50.020 DEI, which has become a very common refrain on university and college campuses, but also we've seen DEI programs in the workforce.

00:32:58.660 Certainly, government has been a significant purveyor of these programs.

00:33:02.640 And if you look at this, there was a new study that came out that was written by David Haskell from the Aristotle Foundation.

00:33:10.040 Foundation. We've had Mark Mielke, who founded the Aristotle Foundation on this show in the past.

00:33:15.420 The study finds that diversity training is divisive, counterproductive, and unnecessary.

00:33:22.040 So they actually have looked at, it's called a meta-analysis. He's looked at a number of other

00:33:27.260 studies that have been done on DEI programs and the like over the course of, I'll ask him precisely,

00:33:34.160 but over the course of several years. And he has found in looking at this, that there is not a

00:33:40.000 correlation, not a positive correlation between the presence of DEI programs, instruction,

00:33:45.940 ideology, and outcomes that align with what DEI is supposed to do. So in a nutshell, DEI,

00:33:53.540 diversity, equity, and inclusion programs do not cause there to be more diversity, more inclusion,

00:33:59.420 and more equity. Now, a sensible person would look at that and say, what on earth is the point?

00:34:05.020 But the interesting thing is that this study found that DEI training reinforces existing biases and

00:34:12.200 doesn't eliminate them. So not only does it not help, but it likely makes things worse. So that

00:34:20.440 to me is, I think, a very, very important element of this. And again, in a serious society, we would

00:34:25.660 be having people and having academic institutions interested in studying this and interested in

00:34:31.300 really probing and interrogating whether their attitudes and approaches were doing what they

00:34:35.940 were supposed to be doing. But instead, we just funnel massive, massive, massive amounts of money

00:34:40.120 as evidenced by Richard Bilkstow's ordeal. Now, this is quite a tragic case, but Richard Bilkstow,

00:34:48.580 if that name is not burned into your memory, I hope it will be after this. He is the Toronto

00:34:53.500 principal who was a very progressive, progressive, open-minded guy. And he took issue with the

00:35:01.880 messaging that was being put to him and other Toronto educators, putting to them this very

00:35:07.800 grim picture of diversity in Canada by an instructor named Kike Ojo Thompson. And Richard

00:35:14.100 Bilkstow just very politely said, well, actually, I disagree with your premise. And no, I've been in

00:35:18.120 the US. I've been in Canada. Canada is not a more racist place than in the US. And he does this.

00:35:23.500 and he's then accused at a subsequent meeting of reinforcing and upholding white supremacy by

00:35:30.640 Ms. Ojo Thompson. And so he was bullied. He tragically, tragically ended up taking his

00:35:38.560 life. His lawyer, Lisa Bildy, who's also been an alumna of this show, has said that it was the

00:35:44.580 bullying that he went through as a result of that that led to it. Now, there is outstanding

00:35:49.740 litigation and that claim has not been tested or proven in court, I should make a point of saying.

00:35:55.300 But certainly even without him ending his life, you could hear the audio of that session and read

00:36:01.980 the transcript and say, wow, this is a guy who was bullied because DEI did not leave space for

00:36:09.560 dialogue. DEI did not leave space to have a conversation. DEI did not and does not leave

00:36:16.460 space to engage with these issues in a way that most people think, I hope most people, I don't

00:36:24.920 actually know if it's most people, but in a way that I hope and suspect most people would want to

00:36:29.340 do. And that's the problem with this. So, I mean, people have made the comparison that DEI is just

00:36:36.620 not an acronym, an anagram. That's when you move around the letters. I learned about that from a

00:36:41.700 Dan Brown book, I think, probably the Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons or whatever. But it is

00:36:45.720 an anagram of D-I-E. So David Millard Haskell has said in his work that D-E-I needs to D-I-E.

00:36:53.200 So we will talk about that with him. But it's a fascinating, fascinating subject. And I did,

00:36:59.360 at one point, I was going to write a book about the proliferation of political correctness. And

00:37:03.860 in the end, for a number of reasons, I walked away from it. But I did, through that process,

00:37:08.680 a deep dive into it. And the thing that I was finding that was so fascinating is that people

00:37:16.380 in universities were trying to warn about the trend in university thinking. They were trying

00:37:23.460 to warn about this years ago. I mean, we're talking decades ago. Like Alan Bloom wrote a

00:37:28.400 tremendous book in, I think it was 1986 or 1987. It was in and around there called The Closing of

00:37:35.260 the American mind. And talk about a book that has proven prescient and prophetic. It was a book in

00:37:43.820 which Alan Bloom, a university professor, he was seeing the beginnings of what is now commonplace

00:37:49.260 and what I think has probably gotten so crazy that even Bloom would have been shocked by,

00:37:53.300 but he was seeing the beginnings of it in the 80s. And when in the 90s, we had the heyday of

00:37:57.240 political correctness like that town in, I think actually it might have been San Francisco, not a

00:38:01.720 town that banned using the word manhole because it was gendered. And people saying, oh, no, no,

00:38:07.140 you can't have a brainstorm because that's offending epileptics. Or you can't say blackboard

00:38:12.060 because that's going to be racist. Like all of these things that almost seem silly and novel. 0.70

00:38:16.800 Now, this was all a product of that political correctness craze in the 1990s. And we all sort

00:38:23.360 of made the mistake back then of just chuckling at it and laughing and rolling our eyes and not

00:38:29.980 realizing that it was a step towards something that has become quite significant. So I think

00:38:34.840 you can draw a direct line between the people who say you can't say manhole or blackboard

00:38:40.320 in the early 90s and the people saying that you are a white supremacist if you reject that Canada

00:38:46.860 is a systemically racist country in 2024. And you can draw a direct line because that's what happens

00:38:54.380 if ideology like this goes unchecked.

00:38:57.240 That is what happens if you do not question

00:38:59.240 or interrogate or push back or challenge these things.

00:39:04.100 And this is, I think, precisely why

00:39:05.920 so many of the problems we're seeing on campuses now

00:39:07.980 have proliferated into the so-called real world.

00:39:11.620 I mean, again, the fact that there are companies

00:39:13.720 that are offering the same sort of trappings

00:39:15.740 of university campuses,

00:39:17.700 companies that are offering things like,

00:39:20.120 oh, we're gonna do therapy rooms

00:39:21.840 and we're gonna do all of this stuff

00:39:24.200 and we're going to bring in the dogs.

00:39:25.900 I mean, look, I love dogs.

00:39:26.800 I would love it if someone brought a therapy dog

00:39:28.660 to my workplace.

00:39:29.260 But the idea that I could not function without that

00:39:31.700 is kind of what we're seeing happen here.

00:39:33.940 And look, anyone who's ever been in a hiring capacity,

00:39:36.480 and I hear from people all the time

00:39:38.760 who have gone through this,

00:39:39.820 where they talk to young people

00:39:41.300 that, again, are products of this university environment.

00:39:44.740 They're products of this.

00:39:46.380 And they're looking around and seeing like,

00:39:48.860 why on earth has this been allowed to exist?

00:39:54.200 and the reason it has is because you have a society and you have a culture that did not

00:40:00.380 realize what was happening and and refused to kind of hit head on when something was happening

00:40:05.740 on campus so there's a reason at true north we have a series and my colleague ellie kenton nantel

00:40:11.180 is the one predominantly driving it called campus watch where we write about stories of campus

00:40:15.620 craziness and over the last couple of months a lot of it has been anti-semitism related but we

00:40:21.160 have talked about this time and time again on this show and we've talked about it on True North

00:40:25.800 because you need to kind of understand the hotbed of this issue and where it is coming from so that

00:40:33.040 you can stop it from really taking over later on so unfortunately this is the second day in a row

00:40:38.940 we've had some major guest issues here we were unable to get David Millard Haskell on today

00:40:43.900 hopefully we can get things sorted out and have him on the program tomorrow but if in the absence

00:40:49.420 to that if you do check out uh tnc.news we have a new story about his study which was quite

00:40:54.520 significant and we will of course delve into a bit more detail if we're able to get him back on

00:40:59.060 the show but i will end things there this is canada's most irreverent talk show here on true

00:41:03.540 north thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show

00:41:09.480 support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

00:41:19.420 We'll be right back.

Juno News - February 14, 2024

Steven Guilbeault says the federal government will no longer fund roads

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