Juno News - The Andrew Lawton Show： The Dwindling Rule of Law

00:00:00.000 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.

00:00:08.820 Hello everyone, welcome to a live edition of the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.

00:00:14.440 It's the first time we're doing this show live, so we figured we'd have a grand experiment.

00:00:20.400 If anything breaking happens with the blockades, with the protests,

00:00:24.600 if the government perhaps decides to start responding to the blockades and to the protests,

00:00:29.600 we will be well-suited to address and roll with the punches

00:00:33.300 and talk about all the things that are happening in this particular episode of the show.

00:00:38.140 So hello, if you're listening in the East Coast, good afternoon.

00:00:41.800 If you're listening in the West Coast, good morning.

00:00:43.800 If you're listening somewhere else, I have no idea what time it is,

00:00:46.700 but thank you for listening nonetheless.

00:00:48.660 It's my great pleasure to have you tuned in to this edition of the program here.

00:00:53.820 I want to talk about a few different things that are going on, 0.88

00:00:57.400 but really the common thread here is that the federal government seems to be completely ignorant right now,

00:01:04.700 willfully so, to the rule of law and to the price that will be paid by all Canadians

00:01:11.040 if inaction continues as it currently is regarding the blockades that are sweeping the country.

00:01:18.700 And I say sweeping because we're not even talking about an isolated protest here.

00:01:23.000 We, of course, had the main one in BC, then the Solidarity one in Ontario,

00:01:28.000 and then you have all of these other little spurs of protest as well.

00:01:34.980 And we're not talking about a few people with signs demonstrating outside provincial legislatures,

00:01:41.660 government buildings.

00:01:42.580 We're talking about people that are, as a matter of their intent,

00:01:47.480 disrupting Canadian infrastructure, people that are specifically trying to hijack the Canadian economy.

00:01:56.540 I mean, when you camp out on rail lines and you say,

00:02:00.080 I don't believe any commuters should be able to pass,

00:02:02.680 I don't believe any goods should be able to pass,

00:02:05.340 you are actually saying that I want the Canadian economy to suffer.

00:02:10.600 You're saying that you want the Canadian economy to be hijacked by these protesters.

00:02:18.720 And I want to point out a couple of things here that are happening.

00:02:21.800 These are not reflective of what Aboriginal groups, by and large, are saying.

00:02:28.200 I should clarify, what Aboriginal groups that are directly impacted by these projects are saying.

00:02:33.300 What's happening here is you've got a bunch of white, liberal, perennial protesters,

00:02:40.240 people that will protest the price of milk, even if they're vegans,

00:02:44.340 because they just want to not work.

00:02:48.100 They want an excuse to do absolutely nothing, to claim some moral superiority,

00:02:52.960 and to actually get all of this attention, even though they don't care.

00:02:57.720 I mean, we've seen this in activist culture throughout the history of activist culture,

00:03:01.860 even in the last 10 years.

00:03:03.300 The Idle No More, the Occupy, the Tent Cities,

00:03:07.420 all of these groups are filled with the same people.

00:03:11.340 Whether it's Liberate Gaza, whether it's Protest Against Meat,

00:03:15.300 I mean, they're all the same people that show up in every single situation,

00:03:19.820 and this gives them an excuse to do the same thing.

00:03:22.940 Now, that's not to say there aren't indigenous people and indigenous groups

00:03:26.420 that have issues with the development,

00:03:28.820 that have issues with the coastal gas link pipeline.

00:03:32.300 But it is to say that most of those spearheading this are people that have no skin in the game.

00:03:39.080 You know, I just saw about half an hour before I went on air today,

00:03:43.600 Greta Thunberg has decided to weigh in on this.

00:03:46.680 And I'll pull up the exact Greta Thunberg tweet,

00:03:48.960 because I think it's very important that we all destabilize our economy

00:03:53.560 because of what a 16-year-old Swedish girl does.

00:03:55.740 She says, support the Wet'suwet'en nation and the pipeline protests happening now in Canada. 0.90

00:04:02.320 Hashtag Wet'suwet'en strong.

00:04:04.360 So what she is saying here is that we are to support it,

00:04:09.740 and she links to a website that has a Wet'suwet'en supporter toolkit.

00:04:15.240 And on this website, it has the ability to take action, ask for money.

00:04:20.920 My personal favorite is saying there's a travel stipend available for indigenous supporters to travel to the land.

00:04:28.880 So I'm wondering if I should just apply – I know I'm not indigenous.

00:04:32.460 Well, I'm indigenous to where I live, I guess.

00:04:34.400 But I should apply and see if I can get them to pay for me to go and cover the protests.

00:04:39.200 That would be – I'm just looking at this right now.

00:04:41.760 How much funding are you requesting from the travel grant fund?

00:04:45.260 Oh, let me say, a first-class ticket, you know, car service to the airport.

00:04:49.360 I'll put in $5,000 and fill that out later.

00:04:51.900 But that should tell you something right there.

00:04:54.900 They are asking you to give them information, and they will give you money to go there.

00:05:01.320 Now, this is the definition of paid protesting.

00:05:05.840 This is the definition of paid protesting.

00:05:07.900 They literally have a section on their website where you can apply for money to go visit it.

00:05:13.240 Now, they say it's for indigenous people to visit the land, but let's be real.

00:05:16.540 What are they doing on that land?

00:05:17.920 They are having a blockade.

00:05:20.140 They are having a blockade.

00:05:21.520 So they are inviting people and paying people to protest.

00:05:26.880 And look, I'm a capitalist.

00:05:28.820 The irony is the people that are protesting would say they aren't capitalists, but they are behaving in a very capitalist manner.

00:05:35.800 They are protesting for pay.

00:05:37.820 And you know what?

00:05:38.740 This is something that I find fascinating because this demonstration is the epitome of privilege.

00:05:45.900 And 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.

00:06:03.540 And 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.

00:06:17.340 They don't care about the elected chiefs and the elected councils and the elected ban leaders that have said, we think this is great.

00:06:25.180 I 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.

00:06:33.440 I mean, you have these people that are co-opting an indigenous message and an indigenous identity and saying that indigenous voices don't matter.

00:06:42.520 And 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.

00:06:54.120 They'd love you to believe that it's big evil corporations against indigenous demonstrators, but it really isn't that.

00:06:59.840 It's a tiny minority of indigenous demonstrators and indigenous allies.

00:07:05.300 We 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.

00:07:15.160 I 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.

00:07:25.160 But I do genuinely believe, genuinely, that her interloping in this, which is really what it is, proves the point.

00:07:35.300 That this has nothing to do with what the activists that are demonstrating say it's about.

00:07:41.740 It has nothing to do with the top line headline purpose of it.

00:07:45.900 And 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.

00:07:55.800 So you have these blockades across the country.

00:07:59.240 You've had some of them that have been dismantled.

00:08:01.380 You had this week border crossings that were taken over.

00:08:04.440 And I was doing a radio interview this morning on CJBK in London, Ontario.

00:08:09.300 And I said, how quickly do you think this would be shut down if they tried this on the other side of the border?

00:08:14.980 If they tried this on the American side, how quickly do you think it would be?

00:08:18.960 I don't even think they would have stuck their tent poles in the ground before the whole thing was pulled apart.

00:08:26.040 But in Canada, we have these government leaders that are saying, well, you know, we have to listen and we have to negotiate.

00:08:32.040 I mean, I don't want to call them terrorists because that word, I think, means something.

00:08:37.820 But when I use this saying, you'll understand why.

00:08:40.660 That whole we don't negotiate with terrorists.

00:08:42.800 It used to be that the government policy was we will not legitimize people that hold our country hostage. 0.93

00:08:50.880 And regardless of the intents, regardless of how noble you may think their goals are, they are holding the country hostage for their own purposes.

00:08:59.780 When 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.

00:09:21.060 And the arrogance to suggest that this is, oh, this is just civil disobedience.

00:09:26.440 No, civil disobedience, which is oftentimes a word that's used to whitewash criminality, is not what's happening here.

00:09:35.780 What's happening is people are saying this isn't just protesting.

00:09:40.060 This isn't a letter writing campaign.

00:09:42.200 Our demands trump the free flow of goods across Canada.

00:09:46.940 Our demands trump what Canadians want to do.

00:09:49.980 And my goodness, if I were to say, you know what, I'm a United We Rule supporter.

00:09:56.300 I think that United We Rule convoy that went from the west to Ottawa was a great idea.

00:10:00.980 If 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.

00:10:10.660 That would be broken down so quickly.

00:10:14.060 And I mean, again, it's a moot point in many respects because they'd never do it.

00:10:17.600 But that would have been stopped.

00:10:20.400 It would have been stopped because it would have been just plain wrong.

00:10:23.420 If any other group other than an indigenous or indigenous adjacent group did this, it would be over before it started. 0.99

00:10:32.840 But 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.

00:10:51.840 Now, 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.

00:11:09.080 And 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?

00:11:19.220 These aren't indigenous people.

00:11:20.740 These aren't even Aboriginals. 1.00

00:11:22.260 So, yeah, the hereditary chiefs have issues, but they're not the elected lawmakers.

00:11:27.120 They're not the ones that were elected by the people they are supposed to represent to make these determinations and to actually represent them.

00:11:36.940 You know, Mark Miller, who is the indigenous affairs minister, indigenous services minister, did an interview on CTV's Power Play.

00:11:44.700 My question again is, do we do things the same old way or do we engage in that peaceful, respectful process to deescalate?

00:11:51.640 And there is a pathway to deescalation.

00:11:53.020 It's a painful one and it's an hour by hour conversation that involves engagement at the highest levels.

00:11:59.220 Myself, Minister Garneau, Minister Bennett, the prime minister, we're all deeply engaged and it is a moving set of issues.

00:12:07.960 Let me make a couple of points here.

00:12:09.700 The fact that the indigenous leader, the indigenous liaison rather for the government, Mark Miller is doing this, is part of the problem here.

00:12:19.320 Why is this not a public safety priority?

00:12:21.080 Why is this not the public safety minister?

00:12:23.620 Why is it not the defense minister?

00:12:25.440 So already we have an identity based response from the government.

00:12:30.600 And more importantly, I think the big flaw here is that why do we have to meet them in the middle?

00:12:39.220 Why do we have to meet them in the middle?

00:12:40.720 I 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.

00:12:47.500 But 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.

00:12:59.120 That's how we know that the elected chiefs are on board with it.

00:13:02.040 I think it was the 20 bands that signed on to this.

00:13:04.400 That's how we know they're there.

00:13:05.400 This 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. 0.96

00:13:15.440 I mean, this process has already been ongoing.

00:13:17.880 The gas side won.

00:13:19.740 The demonstrators lost.

00:13:21.080 Okay, you don't win them all.

00:13:23.060 You don't get a veto.

00:13:25.280 And this is the whole point.

00:13:26.540 You don't get a veto.

00:13:27.340 And I saw someone on Twitter the other day saying, well, clearly the government gets a veto.

00:13:33.280 Well, yeah, the government is, in theory, the elected representative.

00:13:37.940 The government is the one that's supposed to be able to make the final say.

00:13:42.160 And you do it after consulting, after listening, after hearing.

00:13:45.620 But not everyone's going to be happy 100% of the time.

00:13:49.600 And, by the way, this is not anti-Indigenous.

00:13:55.080 This is quite the opposite, actually.

00:13:57.000 You look at a lot of the Indigenous communities that don't just require the jobs that come from these development projects,

00:14:04.780 but Indigenous communities that rely on the resource revenues as well.

00:14:09.960 And this is paramount, paramount to getting any impoverished community.

00:14:15.340 And I'm talking specifically about the ones that are dealing with poverty on reserve.

00:14:19.180 You need to have development.

00:14:20.520 You need to have some kind of economic force if that is what they want.

00:14:25.040 And for a lot of these groups, it is.

00:14:26.680 I mean, my goodness, listen to Chief Clarence Louis, if you haven't already,

00:14:30.480 about the importance of having an economic path to prosperity for all Canadians, not just for Indigenous Canadians.

00:14:38.940 I mean, again, I'm not going to at all lecture Indigenous people on Indigenous issues.

00:14:46.180 I won't.

00:14:47.120 But I'm also, at the same time, in pursuit of listening, in pursuit of understanding.

00:14:52.400 And, yeah, even in pursuit of reconciliation, I'm not going to cede any moral high ground to someone who's camping out on a rail line

00:15:01.760 and causing not just the economic issues of those who work for the rail lines.

00:15:07.760 You know, CN had to lay off a bunch of people.

00:15:10.720 But you look at this, $850 million worth of manufactured goods.

00:15:15.140 It's $850 million sit idle every day because of these rail stoppages.

00:15:21.360 So that is coming up on a billion dollars.

00:15:24.360 You've got tankers that are just parked in the Pacific Ocean, which how much do the environmentalists love that, by the way?

00:15:30.940 Tankers that are just on idle in the Pacific.

00:15:33.820 And the great irony is, if you were to put forward this national pipeline network that oil and gas sector advocates like myself want,

00:15:44.320 if you were to put together a national pipeline network, they couldn't blockade it.

00:15:48.340 I mean, that's one of the reasons I think a lot of these people don't like the pipelines,

00:15:51.600 because you can't pop your campsite on a pipeline and stop the oil or gas from flowing through it.

00:15:57.860 So the rail system, which has more of an environmental impact than pipelines do,

00:16:05.160 the rail system is the one that they get to use as the linchpin.

00:16:09.600 So I would like very much to see a way forward here that doesn't involve skulls being cracked in.

00:16:18.000 I don't want to see violence.

00:16:19.560 I would love to see what the government has said it's committed to, which is de-escalation.

00:16:24.280 But how can you have de-escalation if there are only two outcomes?

00:16:29.040 I mean, one, the protesters decide to leave, or two, the protesters are forcibly removed.

00:16:35.440 So those are your two options.

00:16:37.220 I don't see, and let me know if the comment section warriors want to give me a third option here.

00:16:42.780 One, they leave peacefully.

00:16:44.320 Two, they leave forcibly.

00:16:46.420 Forcibly.

00:16:48.080 I don't see any other alternatives.

00:16:50.280 So if you have one, let me know.

00:16:52.180 But let's say we have those two options.

00:16:54.240 The way they leave peacefully is they just get up and go.

00:17:00.800 They tire themselves out.

00:17:02.380 They lose interest in it.

00:17:04.120 Or they get what they want and go.

00:17:06.080 Now, what they want is not going to happen.

00:17:09.320 What they want is a complete veto, a complete scrapping of the project.

00:17:13.320 And that's not going to happen.

00:17:15.080 So then you go for the forceful options.

00:17:16.960 And I know that there will be, I mean, like, I can't, I'm trying to think of an example here.

00:17:23.600 If 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.

00:17:37.780 I 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.

00:17:57.640 But that's what they want.

00:18:00.480 That's what the protesters want.

00:18:02.080 The protesters want police to engage them.

00:18:05.060 And 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.

00:18:13.960 And again, you go back to Ipperwash and Caledonia and all of those other things.

00:18:18.080 And I get that.

00:18:19.780 You know, this is not a left-right issue.

00:18:21.740 I'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.

00:18:31.420 There's no way to throw someone in handcuffs that when the media snaps a picture of it, it won't look violent.

00:18:37.440 Arrests are not pretty, especially people that are demonstrating and don't want to go along with it.

00:18:44.020 People that want to put up a fight.

00:18:45.560 It does not look pretty.

00:18:46.940 Heads get smashed to the ground.

00:18:48.480 Blood happens.

00:18:49.340 People get roughed up a bit.

00:18:50.560 And that's what they want.

00:18:51.840 They 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.

00:19:02.260 But, 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.

00:19:14.200 And when this has been going on now for what?

00:19:16.360 For two weeks.

00:19:17.620 What are the options?

00:19:18.540 Look, I would love to have this peacefully de-escalated situation.

00:19:24.100 And, you know, in a couple of the cases, the injunctions are being enforced or they've packed up and moved away.

00:19:30.160 I mean, like we saw with the border crossings.

00:19:33.040 Eventually, they just set up and dismantled after a few hours.

00:19:37.040 But what the demonstrators have done now is proved a concept.

00:19:41.260 They'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.

00:19:49.200 And it's becoming a bigger, bigger issue.

00:19:51.620 And that's why you have the national network.

00:19:55.760 That's why you have this national network of these protests, of these blockades.

00:20:00.980 Michael in the chat here says, cut off supplies to the front lines and wait for them to leave.

00:20:06.340 Well, you know, there's actually an interesting aspect of that.

00:20:10.800 And I don't think it's lawful or constitutional.

00:20:13.100 But, you know, they want to put a blockade up.

00:20:15.260 They want to put a perimeter up.

00:20:16.480 I know you've seen those signs now of having, like, a waiting area where media cannot go past a certain line.

00:20:22.840 Put a line around that and say, all right, no one in.

00:20:26.480 No one in.

00:20:27.200 You guys can leave from there, but no one can get into there.

00:20:31.020 And see how long it takes until, you know, they need the food and water and resources and all of that.

00:20:37.260 Although, I mean, in the age of drones, I know that people are going to be airdropping in stuff like that.

00:20:42.100 So it might only work in a limited sense.

00:20:47.680 But the whole point is, and Doug says in the chat something valuable here,

00:20:51.760 Canada is peaceful and I want to see it stay like that.

00:20:54.260 I agree.

00:20:55.440 I would love to see Canada stay peaceful.

00:20:58.260 And I'm not a hawkish person, but you cannot claim neutrality in times of war.

00:21:03.600 And I'm not overemphasizing what's happening here.

00:21:06.220 But I'm rather sharing a fundamental principle that if someone is attacking you and shooting you and firing at you,

00:21:14.080 you cannot say, oh, but I'm neutral.

00:21:15.680 I like peace.

00:21:16.260 At that point, you're engaged whether you like it or not.

00:21:18.720 So on a smaller scale, they are attacking our infrastructure.

00:21:23.060 They are attacking our economy.

00:21:25.420 They are attacking our rule of law in Canada, which is supposed to be their rule of law as well.

00:21:32.040 So we are engaged whether we like it or not.

00:21:35.000 We are engaged whether we want to be.

00:21:37.280 And we may not have started it, but there's no reason that we can't finish it.

00:21:41.820 And I don't want that.

00:21:43.380 I don't want this to be a violent episode of Canadian history.

00:21:48.640 But right now, they need to know at least that we're serious.

00:21:54.060 And when you have the law being ignored by the protesters, that's one thing.

00:21:59.460 When you have the law being ignored by the law enforcers, and not at their own behest, by the way.

00:22:06.760 I mean, in this case, law enforcement, you know, is taking orders from the government.

00:22:10.860 You know, law enforcement is taking its marching orders from above.

00:22:13.920 Now, it means that the government is no longer interested in upholding the rule of law.

00:22:20.580 And yes, we are as a country between a rock and a hard place.

00:22:24.800 We are as a country in a very difficult situation right now because there is no right answer.

00:22:30.640 There is no easy way out.

00:22:32.260 But at the same time, at the same time, you need a way out.

00:22:40.660 I mean, you look at the fact that we're in the cold right now.

00:22:43.420 Quebec needs to get its natural gas.

00:22:45.560 And whatever issues you may have with Quebec, I don't want them freezing to death.

00:22:49.020 So Quebec needs propane, which is delivered in many cases by rail.

00:22:52.760 Sure, they can do that by truck.

00:22:54.440 Again, environmentally negative response to this.

00:22:57.760 I 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.

00:23:13.200 That vote may be disrupted because of protests from those claiming they speak for Indigenous peoples.

00:23:19.900 So talk about your unintended consequences there.

00:23:22.820 And the list goes on and on and on.

00:23:25.900 So 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.

00:23:43.540 And right now it looks like they're winning.

00:23:46.420 Right 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.

00:23:52.920 So, I mean, the government had this meeting of the Incident Response Group, which is basically a bunch of people sitting down.

00:23:58.920 I 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.

00:24:06.940 Well, you're clearly not doing much of a good job if we're exactly where we were before this all started.

00:24:15.520 We're obviously going to follow this later on this week on The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:24:20.440 I want to pivot for a moment to access to information laws, which are boring to a lot of people, and I apologize for that.

00:24:28.700 But 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.

00:24:39.600 And, 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.

00:24:51.500 We can't do this.

00:24:52.420 We can't.

00:24:53.020 But they have to comply.

00:24:54.620 Under the law, they have to comply.

00:24:56.220 Well, 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.

00:25:17.360 So a man has requested government records.

00:25:20.820 A ruling has now determined him, quote, vexatious.

00:25:23.800 Now, 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.

00:25:38.040 And this is from a story in the National Post talking about how the government obfuscates on ATIPS.

00:25:43.960 And 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.

00:25:55.740 And the government specifically avoided using his name in documents so that when he searches for documents referring to Mark Norman, there's nothing there.

00:26:06.000 And there was one witness who testified that his superior told him, quote, don't worry, this isn't our first rodeo.

00:26:13.980 We made sure we never used his name, unquote.

00:26:17.920 So the government conspiring to not have access to information searchability for its documents.

00:26:24.300 So the information commissioner, Carolyn Maynard, ruled that a man's ATIPS was vexatious because in 17 years he had filed 893 requests.

00:26:35.740 Now, access to information requests have gotten a bit easier in the last few years because you can file them for many departments online now.

00:26:44.160 But 893 divided by 17.

00:26:47.720 I could have done this math before, but I wanted you to really get the whole experience to show here.

00:26:51.540 That's 52 a year.

00:26:53.160 So that's one a week for 17 years.

00:26:55.460 Now, presumably when he was filing them by mail, he was filing them less frequently.

00:26:59.100 It's possible that in recent years he's been filing several a week.

00:27:03.520 But even so, they are the public's documents.

00:27:07.640 Documents obtained from the government under ATIPS are public documents.

00:27:11.840 They belong to the people, not proprietarily speaking to the government.

00:27:16.020 And 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.

00:27:39.320 Now, it may be this guy is a nuisance.

00:27:41.500 I don't know who it is.

00:27:42.240 It may be that he is genuinely a problem, that he's genuinely someone that's causing grief to the government.

00:27:48.660 But 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.

00:27:59.820 When government has a loophole to use, they use it.

00:28:02.920 And 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.

00:28:31.380 And, you know, I haven't filed 893 requests, but I do have some experience with these requests.

00:28:39.500 I have some experience with ATIPS and FOIs and all of these other things.

00:28:43.460 And there are some departments that are dismally bad.

00:28:47.180 For 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.

00:28:59.940 And they say, oh, well, we're overworked.

00:29:01.580 We've got too much going on.

00:29:03.260 So they use that to, I mean, I had one ATIP with RCMP that ended up giving me, I think it was like 30 pages of documents.

00:29:11.100 I mean, tiny, tiny release.

00:29:13.400 And it took a year, a year to get those documents.

00:29:17.580 You know, interestingly enough, I filed an ATI or an FOI at the end of December with the Hamilton, Ontario Police Department.

00:29:25.540 And what I wanted from Hamilton was the record of a roadside detention that I was subject to in September.

00:29:35.540 I was late September of 2019.

00:29:37.900 And 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.

00:29:45.880 And at one point, the RCMP motorcade pulled me over, or someone in the motorcade pulled me over and detained me illegally.

00:29:54.840 It was an illegal detention, and by his own admission, which I got on video, I was doing nothing illegal.

00:30:01.660 And 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.

00:30:10.780 And I wanted to get the record of this.

00:30:12.940 And I got a response from the Hamilton police service that says, okay, we've got your record.

00:30:17.920 You have to come pick them up.

00:30:18.920 And I say, well, I'm not in Hamilton.

00:30:20.100 Can you mail them to me or email?

00:30:21.820 They say, oh, no, no, no, we can't send them.

00:30:23.500 You have to pick them up in person.

00:30:25.600 So I put up a bit of a fight about this.

00:30:28.440 And eventually, she said, all right, well, you're in London.

00:30:31.160 So what I'll do is I'll send them to the London police service, and then you can pick them up from the London police service.

00:30:36.820 And I said, yes, but it occurred to me, well, wait, why can you send them to them, but you can't send them to me?

00:30:43.140 At this point, they're just making a process that's deliberately opaque.

00:30:48.100 And I've also got another one here.

00:30:49.680 So I was, you know, I was getting arrested a lot during the federal campaign.

00:30:54.020 It felt like I was never actually arrested, arrested.

00:30:57.300 And 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.

00:31:04.960 And while I was there, I had my wristband and had my ticket and all of that.

00:31:08.320 And two police officers pulled me out of the line that I'd been in for over an hour, I think, and said, Andrew, right?

00:31:17.140 And I said, yeah, they're like, can you come with us for a second?

00:31:18.880 And I mean, at this point, I have no idea what's happening.

00:31:21.780 And they said, you know, we've been told you're not welcome here.

00:31:25.160 We're going to have to ask you to leave.

00:31:27.040 Being a law-abiding citizen, I didn't, you know, put up my fists or anything like that.

00:31:31.260 I 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.

00:31:47.400 And there are no records on file pertaining to you.

00:31:52.300 So, miraculously, Thunder Bay Police knew that I was banned, banned me, and there is no written record of it.

00:32:00.860 And 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.

00:32:14.060 I mean, I saw a couple of years ago in ATIP where there was an email thread about something or other in government.

00:32:20.460 I can't even remember what it is.

00:32:22.300 And the email said, well, call me so that no one can read this.

00:32:25.740 It 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.

00:32:42.600 I guess, oh, you know, bureaucrats, you never know.

00:32:45.840 But this is exactly what's happening here.

00:32:47.820 And, 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.

00:33:07.300 A guide that was produced by the Islamophobia Industry Research Project at Laurier, which was led by a professor named Jasmine Zine.

00:33:15.740 And this voting guide was basically telling Canadian Muslims who they should vote for, or specifically who they should vote against.

00:33:24.740 And 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.

00:33:32.580 They 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.

00:33:40.020 That was how they got the failing grade, because they did support free speech and didn't support the Islamophobia motion, M103.

00:33:48.440 But this research initiative that led to the voting guide was given a $25,000 grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

00:33:59.500 The 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.

00:34:15.060 The Council was in a bit of a tailspin, these documents show.

00:34:18.960 They were going back and forth the day this was really revealed.

00:34:22.100 And at one point were asking, and you can see this in the emails, you know, is this allowed?

00:34:29.240 And they didn't know.

00:34:30.180 One 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. 0.99

00:34:44.060 And at another point, a representative of the department said the PMO is worked up about it.

00:34:49.580 That would be the prime minister's office.

00:34:51.940 And there was an interesting exchange where they were trying to basically, one person in the department, the government department, was trying to justify this.

00:35:02.160 And 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.

00:35:13.040 And 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.

00:35:21.540 So that was the issue.

00:35:22.540 And then the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council eventually said, listen, this, we had nothing to do with this.

00:35:29.660 We didn't fund this specific project.

00:35:31.800 Eventually, a re-uploaded version didn't have the SSHRC logo.

00:35:36.520 So at Laurier University, the guide is still online, but it's been re-uploaded without that, with thanks to the government of Canada.

00:35:43.580 Although we know from these emails that the government was bankrolling this woman's research and this woman's department.

00:35:50.340 And 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.

00:36:07.900 And their definition of Islamophobia was so broad that you couldn't have any, basically you couldn't have anyone not fall under that definition.

00:36:19.600 It 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.

00:36:29.020 But, but, but ultimately this guide, which flew under the radar until after the election, unfortunately, was one that was indirectly bankrolled by the government.

00:36:39.940 And 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.

00:36:51.100 And 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.

00:36:56.680 And 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.

00:37:07.480 But 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.

00:37:18.580 I mean, in this case, the research is about saying every Canadian is an Islamophobe.

00:37:24.160 There 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. 0.91

00:37:33.020 And it's amazing how much of your tax money is going towards people researching how you are such a terrible person.

00:37:39.480 This is the one thing I've learned from looking through all of these things.

00:37:43.100 In any case, we have to take a quick break here until Thursday, I guess.

00:37:50.160 So not that quick, a couple of days.

00:37:51.860 But I do want to give a big thank you to all of you who tuned in to this live and also to those of you who commented.

00:37:58.440 Bob says, this guy isn't live.

00:38:00.860 I just saw the video skip.

00:38:02.100 Well, 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.

00:38:11.100 Either way, worth the price of admission, which was exactly $0.

00:38:14.980 So maybe it's not worth it.

00:38:16.640 In any case, my thanks to all of you.

00:38:18.000 We'll talk to you in a couple of days from True North for The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:38:21.560 Thank you.

00:38:22.100 God bless.

00:38:22.860 And good day, Canada.

00:38:24.120 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:38:26.260 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - February 19, 2020

The Andrew Lawton Show： The Dwindling Rule of Law

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