In this episode of the Andrew Lawton Show, we discuss the massive pipeline blockades that have been taking place across Canada, and the lack of federal government response to them. We also hear from a 16-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, who has been leading the charge against the blockades.
00:05:38.740This is something that I find fascinating because this demonstration is the epitome of privilege.
00:05:45.900And I know conservative leader Andrew Scheer got attacked for saying that, but it is the epitome of privilege because these are people that don't seem to care about energy independence, people that don't have to worry about their work, people that don't seem to really have any grounding in reality.
00:06:03.540And people that are so content with their ideological opposition to oil and gas that they don't even care about the approval of First Nations bans for this project.
00:06:17.340They don't care about the elected chiefs and the elected councils and the elected ban leaders that have said, we think this is great.
00:06:25.180I mean, the irony of this, and I think it was John Iveson had a great column in the National Post about this, talking about the new colonialists.
00:06:33.440I mean, you have these people that are co-opting an indigenous message and an indigenous identity and saying that indigenous voices don't matter.
00:06:42.520And that's the funny thing here. I mean, the left would love to have you believe that this is, you know, white person versus indigenous person, but it really isn't that.
00:06:54.120They'd love you to believe that it's big evil corporations against indigenous demonstrators, but it really isn't that.
00:06:59.840It's a tiny minority of indigenous demonstrators and indigenous allies.
00:07:05.300We hear this all the time, ally theater, these people that theatrically and performatively pretend that they're allied with a group when really they're using that group to advance their own agenda.
00:07:15.160I mean, Greta Thunberg, I make a point of not taking aim at Greta Thunberg because I think she herself has been co-opted by other people.
00:07:25.160But I do genuinely believe, genuinely, that her interloping in this, which is really what it is, proves the point.
00:07:35.300That this has nothing to do with what the activists that are demonstrating say it's about.
00:07:41.740It has nothing to do with the top line headline purpose of it.
00:07:45.900And the fact that people are having so much difficulty following what's going on here, I think, is indicating that that is what's going on.
00:07:55.800So you have these blockades across the country.
00:07:59.240You've had some of them that have been dismantled.
00:08:01.380You had this week border crossings that were taken over.
00:08:04.440And I was doing a radio interview this morning on CJBK in London, Ontario.
00:08:09.300And I said, how quickly do you think this would be shut down if they tried this on the other side of the border?
00:08:14.980If they tried this on the American side, how quickly do you think it would be?
00:08:18.960I don't even think they would have stuck their tent poles in the ground before the whole thing was pulled apart.
00:08:26.040But in Canada, we have these government leaders that are saying, well, you know, we have to listen and we have to negotiate.
00:08:32.040I mean, I don't want to call them terrorists because that word, I think, means something.
00:08:37.820But when I use this saying, you'll understand why.
00:08:40.660That whole we don't negotiate with terrorists.
00:08:42.800It used to be that the government policy was we will not legitimize people that hold our country hostage.
00:08:50.880And regardless of the intents, regardless of how noble you may think their goals are, they are holding the country hostage for their own purposes.
00:08:59.780When someone can't take the train from Toronto to Ottawa anymore, when truckers are forced to get around blockades, when people can't cross the border to visit grandma in Albany, when people can't do all of these things that are required for personal life and for work, they are being held hostage by these protesters.
00:09:21.060And the arrogance to suggest that this is, oh, this is just civil disobedience.
00:09:26.440No, civil disobedience, which is oftentimes a word that's used to whitewash criminality, is not what's happening here.
00:09:35.780What's happening is people are saying this isn't just protesting.
00:09:42.200Our demands trump the free flow of goods across Canada.
00:09:46.940Our demands trump what Canadians want to do.
00:09:49.980And my goodness, if I were to say, you know what, I'm a United We Rule supporter.
00:09:56.300I think that United We Rule convoy that went from the west to Ottawa was a great idea.
00:10:00.980If those truckers had said, you know what, we are going to just park our trucks on the Trans-Canada Highway, block all lanes, no one's going to get by.
00:10:20.400It would have been stopped because it would have been just plain wrong.
00:10:23.420If any other group other than an indigenous or indigenous adjacent group did this, it would be over before it started.
00:10:32.840But government has a fear, a fear of reliving Oka and Caledonia and Ipperwash, but more importantly, a fear of the virtue signaling social justice warrior Justin Trudeau with his Haida tattoo being seen as not a supporter or an ally of Aboriginals.
00:10:51.840Now, I think the easy antidote to this is to separate the elected indigenous chiefs, the ones who are supporting this and the ones who are directly impacted by this project and by other pipeline projects as well from the people that will protest absolutely anything.
00:11:09.080And again, you look at the videos of these, it looks like a vast majority are not indigenous and there have been indigenous leaders that have said, you know, who are these people?
00:11:22.260So, yeah, the hereditary chiefs have issues, but they're not the elected lawmakers.
00:11:27.120They're not the ones that were elected by the people they are supposed to represent to make these determinations and to actually represent them.
00:11:36.940You know, Mark Miller, who is the indigenous affairs minister, indigenous services minister, did an interview on CTV's Power Play.
00:11:44.700My question again is, do we do things the same old way or do we engage in that peaceful, respectful process to deescalate?
00:11:51.640And there is a pathway to deescalation.
00:11:53.020It's a painful one and it's an hour by hour conversation that involves engagement at the highest levels.
00:11:59.220Myself, Minister Garneau, Minister Bennett, the prime minister, we're all deeply engaged and it is a moving set of issues.
00:12:09.700The fact that the indigenous leader, the indigenous liaison rather for the government, Mark Miller is doing this, is part of the problem here.
00:12:19.320Why is this not a public safety priority?
00:12:21.080Why is this not the public safety minister?
00:12:25.440So already we have an identity based response from the government.
00:12:30.600And more importantly, I think the big flaw here is that why do we have to meet them in the middle?
00:12:39.220Why do we have to meet them in the middle?
00:12:40.720I think the response that was given earlier on was the valid one, which is, okay, you get rid of the blockades and we'll talk, we'll listen.
00:12:47.500But again, what the demonstrators fail to realize or don't seem to care about, what they don't seem to care about is that there already was consultation.
00:12:59.120That's how we know that the elected chiefs are on board with it.
00:13:02.040I think it was the 20 bands that signed on to this.
00:13:05.400This wasn't just some willy-nilly experiment where some, you know, redneck from Coastal GasLink just stuck a shovel in the ground and said, oh, let's try this and see if anyone's bothered by it.
00:13:15.440I mean, this process has already been ongoing.
00:17:15.080So then you go for the forceful options.
00:17:16.960And I know that there will be, I mean, like, I can't, I'm trying to think of an example here.
00:17:23.600If you were to forcefully remove a lot of these demonstrators, there's going to be probably half a dozen at each site at least, where if you were to so much as blow in their direction, they would like dramatically fall on the ground and say, oh my goodness, I've broken my back.
00:17:37.780I can't move like there's no way that this does not get exaggerated to the point where, you know, people are going to either bait police into a violent interaction or people are going to, you know, hold up a stub toe as being some massive assault by the police state against individual demonstrators.
00:18:02.080The protesters want police to engage them.
00:18:05.060And the protesters want there to be a violent or semi-violent standoff because then they get to say, oh, because then police cower because of the PR stuff.
00:18:13.960And again, you go back to Ipperwash and Caledonia and all of those other things.
00:18:19.780You know, this is not a left-right issue.
00:18:21.740I'm actually sympathetic with the fact that the liberal government right now is in a very bad place because what they do is going to look bad.
00:18:31.420There's no way to throw someone in handcuffs that when the media snaps a picture of it, it won't look violent.
00:18:37.440Arrests are not pretty, especially people that are demonstrating and don't want to go along with it.
00:18:51.840They want the optics of just these, you know, innocent little naive demonstrators getting thrown to the ground by the big burly police officers in their militarized gear.
00:19:02.260But, you know, just because they want that, just because they want that doesn't mean that it's the wrong thing to do if there are no other options.
00:19:14.200And when this has been going on now for what?
00:19:18.540Look, I would love to have this peacefully de-escalated situation.
00:19:24.100And, you know, in a couple of the cases, the injunctions are being enforced or they've packed up and moved away.
00:19:30.160I mean, like we saw with the border crossings.
00:19:33.040Eventually, they just set up and dismantled after a few hours.
00:19:37.040But what the demonstrators have done now is proved a concept.
00:19:41.260They've proved the concept that if they just go along with all of this and just keep protesting and keep demonstrating, the government is not going to intervene.
00:19:49.200And it's becoming a bigger, bigger issue.
00:19:51.620And that's why you have the national network.
00:19:55.760That's why you have this national network of these protests, of these blockades.
00:20:00.980Michael in the chat here says, cut off supplies to the front lines and wait for them to leave.
00:20:06.340Well, you know, there's actually an interesting aspect of that.
00:20:10.800And I don't think it's lawful or constitutional.
00:20:13.100But, you know, they want to put a blockade up.
00:22:54.440Again, environmentally negative response to this.
00:22:57.760I know that a few people have shared this story that it was actually a conservative MP that drew attention to where a vote might be delayed on whether to change the citizenship oath to include a line about respecting Indigenous peoples.
00:23:13.200That vote may be disrupted because of protests from those claiming they speak for Indigenous peoples.
00:23:19.900So talk about your unintended consequences there.
00:23:25.900So right now you have something that if you don't address it, it will be the go-to response to any energy project in Canada's future if they prove it works.
00:23:43.540And right now it looks like they're winning.
00:23:46.420Right now I think they're on the right side of this in their minds because, well, the government's not stopping them, so clearly it's working.
00:23:52.920So, I mean, the government had this meeting of the Incident Response Group, which is basically a bunch of people sitting down.
00:23:58.920I think they met for seven hours and came out and said the same things they were saying before, which is, well, we're working and we want to de-escalate and all of these other things.
00:24:06.940Well, you're clearly not doing much of a good job if we're exactly where we were before this all started.
00:24:15.520We're obviously going to follow this later on this week on The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:24:20.440I want to pivot for a moment to access to information laws, which are boring to a lot of people, and I apologize for that.
00:24:28.700But they're also important in many respects because they're one of the only tools that a citizen has to shine a light on the government and on the government's conduct.
00:24:39.600And, you know, one of the things that happens with access to information is you get death by bureaucracy where, you know, the government will just spin its wheels and say, oh, no, it's going to take too long.
00:24:56.220Well, the federal government is right now employing a loophole to avoid having to comply with the law on access to information by making a man have the determination that he is a vexatious, a vexatious access to information seeker.
00:25:17.360So a man has requested government records.
00:25:20.820A ruling has now determined him, quote, vexatious.
00:25:23.800Now, this was a ruling made possible because the liberals put a loophole into the access to information laws, letting someone basically be disqualified from filing ATIPS, as they're called, filing access to information requests.
00:25:38.040And this is from a story in the National Post talking about how the government obfuscates on ATIPS.
00:25:43.960And one example of how they did it was in the Mark Norman case when a vice admiral or former vice admiral Mark Norman was trying to get information that was being discussed about him.
00:25:55.740And the government specifically avoided using his name in documents so that when he searches for documents referring to Mark Norman, there's nothing there.
00:26:06.000And there was one witness who testified that his superior told him, quote, don't worry, this isn't our first rodeo.
00:26:13.980We made sure we never used his name, unquote.
00:26:17.920So the government conspiring to not have access to information searchability for its documents.
00:26:24.300So the information commissioner, Carolyn Maynard, ruled that a man's ATIPS was vexatious because in 17 years he had filed 893 requests.
00:26:35.740Now, access to information requests have gotten a bit easier in the last few years because you can file them for many departments online now.
00:26:55.460Now, presumably when he was filing them by mail, he was filing them less frequently.
00:26:59.100It's possible that in recent years he's been filing several a week.
00:27:03.520But even so, they are the public's documents.
00:27:07.640Documents obtained from the government under ATIPS are public documents.
00:27:11.840They belong to the people, not proprietarily speaking to the government.
00:27:16.020And the fact that this guy was nullified from having them is, I think, a massively problematic development because it means that if government doesn't like someone that is onto their trail, basically, they can put this title on him and no longer have to go along with any requests he's submitting.
00:27:39.320Now, it may be this guy is a nuisance.
00:27:42.240It may be that he is genuinely a problem, that he's genuinely someone that's causing grief to the government.
00:27:48.660But as Duff Conacher said, who is the co-founder of Democracy Watch, any loophole put in there is there for the government to hide something that people have a right to know.
00:27:59.820When government has a loophole to use, they use it.
00:28:02.920And that's the big problem here is that, you know, even if there is in the spirit of the law some wiggle room, government is always going to push itself to the outer boundaries of that wiggle room and most likely beyond unless someone is going to constrain them, which in this case, it doesn't sound like the information commissioner is doing because the information commissioner is going along with what the government has wanted in this particular case.
00:28:31.380And, you know, I haven't filed 893 requests, but I do have some experience with these requests.
00:28:39.500I have some experience with ATIPS and FOIs and all of these other things.
00:28:43.460And there are some departments that are dismally bad.
00:28:47.180For example, the RCMP, which doesn't just ignore its own legal obligations under access to information laws, but even ignores directives from the information commissioner, especially on deadlines.
00:28:59.940And they say, oh, well, we're overworked.
00:29:37.900And if you followed me for a while, you know this, that during the federal election campaign, I was following the liberal campaign from stop to stop.
00:29:45.880And at one point, the RCMP motorcade pulled me over, or someone in the motorcade pulled me over and detained me illegally.
00:29:54.840It was an illegal detention, and by his own admission, which I got on video, I was doing nothing illegal.
00:30:01.660And it ended up being where that police officer was a Hamilton police sergeant who was traveling with the RCMP that day while Justin Trudeau was in Hamilton.
00:30:10.780And I wanted to get the record of this.
00:30:12.940And I got a response from the Hamilton police service that says, okay, we've got your record.
00:30:49.680So I was, you know, I was getting arrested a lot during the federal campaign.
00:30:54.020It felt like I was never actually arrested, arrested.
00:30:57.300And one of them was in Thunder Bay, where I was at a public event that the liberals were holding at Lakehead University, a public event.
00:31:04.960And while I was there, I had my wristband and had my ticket and all of that.
00:31:08.320And two police officers pulled me out of the line that I'd been in for over an hour, I think, and said, Andrew, right?
00:31:17.140And I said, yeah, they're like, can you come with us for a second?
00:31:18.880And I mean, at this point, I have no idea what's happening.
00:31:21.780And they said, you know, we've been told you're not welcome here.
00:31:25.160We're going to have to ask you to leave.
00:31:27.040Being a law-abiding citizen, I didn't, you know, put up my fists or anything like that.
00:31:31.260I went willingly and I filed a freedom of information request and got from that, please be advised that an exhaustive search has been conducted of the records of the Thunder Bay Police Service regarding yourself with the personal information as provided.
00:31:47.400And there are no records on file pertaining to you.
00:31:52.300So, miraculously, Thunder Bay Police knew that I was banned, banned me, and there is no written record of it.
00:32:00.860And a lot of this makes me wonder if the stuff that was happening in the Mark Norman case is happening, where people are specifically putting records in such a way that they can't be subject to FOI.
00:32:14.060I mean, I saw a couple of years ago in ATIP where there was an email thread about something or other in government.
00:32:22.300And the email said, well, call me so that no one can read this.
00:32:25.740It was like the email, it said, like, call me so no one can search the email or something like that, which is great because you'd think if you know enough to know that you should talk on the phone so it's not ATIP-able, you wouldn't put in an ATIP-able email that that's the reason you are wanting a phone call.
00:32:42.600I guess, oh, you know, bureaucrats, you never know.
00:32:45.840But this is exactly what's happening here.
00:32:47.820And, you know, speaking of ATIPs, I will say there was this great document release that Blacklock's reporter had gotten just this week, as a matter of fact, about an issue that I covered when it came up back in October, which was the Laurier University Muslim Voting Guide.
00:33:07.300A guide that was produced by the Islamophobia Industry Research Project at Laurier, which was led by a professor named Jasmine Zine.
00:33:15.740And this voting guide was basically telling Canadian Muslims who they should vote for, or specifically who they should vote against.
00:33:24.740And it was saying, don't vote for Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives, don't vote for Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada.
00:33:32.580They were giving them failing grades because they don't support BDS and they don't support free speech and all of the, or they do support free speech.
00:33:40.020That was how they got the failing grade, because they did support free speech and didn't support the Islamophobia motion, M103.
00:33:48.440But this research initiative that led to the voting guide was given a $25,000 grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
00:33:59.500The Council had given this Islamophobia Industry Research Project $25,000, and one time that the media started to do the right thing on this, the National Post, the Toronto Sun wrote about it.
00:34:15.060The Council was in a bit of a tailspin, these documents show.
00:34:18.960They were going back and forth the day this was really revealed.
00:34:22.100And at one point were asking, and you can see this in the emails, you know, is this allowed?
00:34:30.180One of the women said, and I love this, she said, yikes, because she was like not sure if the politically charged motivations of this were permissible under government grants.
00:34:44.060And at another point, a representative of the department said the PMO is worked up about it.
00:34:49.580That would be the prime minister's office.
00:34:51.940And there was an interesting exchange where they were trying to basically, one person in the department, the government department, was trying to justify this.
00:35:02.160And they're saying, well, you know, we give researchers a lot of latitude and trying to come up with all of these other examples when government has funded a group that's done something similar to a voting guide.
00:35:13.040And they came up with a bunch of environmental stuff and LGBT stuff, nothing that was explicit as we are guiding you on how to vote.
00:35:31.800Eventually, a re-uploaded version didn't have the SSHRC logo.
00:35:36.520So at Laurier University, the guide is still online, but it's been re-uploaded without that, with thanks to the government of Canada.
00:35:43.580Although we know from these emails that the government was bankrolling this woman's research and this woman's department.
00:35:50.340And if you look at her grant application, she didn't disclose the specific voting guide, but she was very candid that she wanted to start profiling politicians, what she calls alt-right or Islamophobic media outlets.
00:36:07.900And their definition of Islamophobia was so broad that you couldn't have any, basically you couldn't have anyone not fall under that definition.
00:36:19.600It was so broad unless you were, you know, one of the activists that were behind the guide or with the National Council of Canadian Muslims, which had partnered with it.
00:36:29.020But, but, but ultimately this guide, which flew under the radar until after the election, unfortunately, was one that was indirectly bankrolled by the government.
00:36:39.940And the government was in that immediate aftermath of learning about it, more focused on, well, did we fund, like there was one great email where they actually weren't sure if they did fund it or not.
00:36:51.100And people were going back and forth saying, well, don't say anything until we can figure out if we actually were involved in this or not.
00:36:56.680And I think there's a story to be told there about big government, when government is so big that the people handing out government grants have no idea what's received them and hasn't received them.
00:37:07.480But also it's important about the problem of a lot of these researchers, because you look at the list and they're doling out these $25,000 grants to people that are doing any number of absurd things with them.
00:37:18.580I mean, in this case, the research is about saying every Canadian is an Islamophobe.
00:37:24.160There are other research projects that I saw getting grants about colonialism and everyone's a racist and everyone's a settler and everyone's this and everyone's that.
00:37:33.020And it's amazing how much of your tax money is going towards people researching how you are such a terrible person.
00:37:39.480This is the one thing I've learned from looking through all of these things.
00:37:43.100In any case, we have to take a quick break here until Thursday, I guess.
00:38:02.100Well, that might be a problem with the video, but I read your comment, which means either I'm live or this is like the most detailed artificial intelligence initiative in the history of True North.
00:38:11.100Either way, worth the price of admission, which was exactly $0.