Juno News - January 27, 2020


The Candice Malcolm Show： What it means to be conservative


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

198.38086

Word Count

3,692

Sentence Count

211

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The coronavirus is now in Canada but are we prepared? And why isn't the mainstream media
00:00:03.980 talking about the origin of this deadly virus? Could it be linked to China's biological warfare
00:00:08.420 program? Plus we'll talk about the conservative leadership race and what it means to be a
00:00:11.800 conservative in 2020. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:20.720 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for joining this podcast. I'm going
00:00:24.760 to do a quick pitch for our news website tnc.news. You can keep up with all the breaking news. We
00:00:31.100 have investigative reports plus a couple of other podcasts. So tnc.news, stay up to date with
00:00:36.680 everything happening in Canadian politics and more. I'm going to talk about the coronavirus
00:00:41.780 today. It's kind of all over the news. Now I typically kind of roll my eyes this kind of
00:00:46.160 coverage because I do think that it's overblown, you know, just a couple of cases so far and
00:00:51.460 basically more people are going to be affected and killed, frankly, by the common flu this year
00:00:57.520 and every year than these viruses. But this one's a little different. It's now in Canada. It's all
00:01:02.880 over the world. The origin, of course, is in Wuhan, China, and we're going to get to that a little
00:01:07.080 later on. But first, there's been now two confirmed cases of the coronavirus, both in Toronto, a husband
00:01:13.020 and wife who were on a plane coming from Wuhan province. Ontario's Ministry of Health has confirmed
00:01:19.080 a second presumptive case of the coronavirus in Canada days after the first was confirmed
00:01:23.060 at Sunnybrook Hospital. That's in Toronto. In a news release sent on Monday morning, the province
00:01:27.940 says chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, has confirmed that the wife of the
00:01:32.420 first coronavirus patient in Canada has also tested positive for the virus at Ontario's
00:01:37.240 public health laboratory. Public health officials have said the woman's husband, a man in his 50s,
00:01:42.420 had been showing mild signs since his flight from Hongshu, China to Toronto. They've since been
00:01:47.440 reaching out to those aboard China Southern Airlines flight and those who sat within two
00:01:52.440 meters of the man. Canada's chief public health officers has said she believes there will be
00:01:57.780 more cases imported into Canada because of global flight patterns. But she knows there's little risk
00:02:03.200 of becoming infected here. So basically, the only people that are affected are those at this point,
00:02:08.660 the only people who've been affected are those who were on a flight from this region in China. The
00:02:13.400 illness originated in a very small part of China, which is why so many people are comparing it to
00:02:19.440 the SARS outbreak back in 2002. That was the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, known as SARS,
00:02:25.200 which originated also in China. It killed 44 people in Canada and about 800 worldwide. The Chinese
00:02:31.380 government says it has ruled out SARS, bird flu and influenza as a cause of this current outbreak.
00:02:37.560 Now, a lot of people are criticizing the Canadian government for not doing enough,
00:02:41.160 not doing enough. My colleague, Anthony Fury, colleague both at True North and at the Toronto
00:02:46.060 Sun, notes that flight tracker sites now show that at any given time, there are always about 12 planes
00:02:52.520 in the air from China to Canada, the same sort of flight that our first infected case was on.
00:02:57.320 Officials have so far said little about their monitoring and prevention strategies. Then he notes,
00:03:03.120 again, interesting contrast. The UK has clinicians stationed at airports and is tracking and testing
00:03:08.680 passengers connected to Wuhan even without symptoms. This is proactive, whereas Canada doing none of
00:03:14.660 this so far is being reactive. And Ezra Levant makes a very similar point. He notes that while Trudeau is
00:03:21.880 taking a second vacation of 2020, other Western leaders are evacuating their citizens from Wuhan.
00:03:26.960 Here's the US, here's France, Russia, Australia and the UK, but not Canada. So it's an interesting point.
00:03:36.000 What is Canada really doing to prepare for this? Should we really be doing a lot to prepare for
00:03:40.280 this? Like I said, more people will be affected every year by the common flu. But, you know, this
00:03:45.840 could just be the very beginning of what could become a very large and global problem, again, just
00:03:51.020 given flight patterns. So a lot of people are concerned about that, especially if you have visited
00:03:55.980 China or someone you work with or someone in your family or someone who you interact with frequently
00:04:01.540 has visited China and might have been on a flight with someone else who was infected. Now, this is
00:04:06.520 the angle that I'm a little bit more worried and concerned about, which is interesting because
00:04:10.920 nobody else is covering it. Nobody else is covering it. I noticed this story in the Washington Times over
00:04:15.940 the weekend. It says virus hit Wuhan has two laboratories linked to Chinese biological warfare program.
00:04:24.780 So the deadly animal virus epidemic spreading globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked
00:04:30.440 to China's covert biological weapons program, according to an Israeli biological warfare expert.
00:04:36.020 Radio Free Asia this week rebroadcasted a local Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China's
00:04:41.680 most advanced virus research laboratory known as the Wuhan Institute for Virology, Radio Free Asia
00:04:48.100 reported. The lab is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses. So Danny
00:04:54.780 Shohan, who is a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare,
00:05:00.160 said the Institute is linked to Beijing's covert biological weapons programs. This is a quote from
00:05:05.980 Shohan. Certain laboratories in the Institute have probably engaged in terms of research and development
00:05:10.860 in Chinese biological weapons, at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese
00:05:17.540 biological warfare alignment. He told the Washington Times, work on biological weapons is conducted as part
00:05:23.820 of a dual civilian military research and is definitely covert, he said in an email. Mr. Shohan holds a
00:05:29.560 doctorate in medical microbiology from 1970 to 1991. He was a senior analyst with the Israeli military
00:05:34.760 intelligence and biological and chemical warfare in the Middle East and worldwide, holding the rank
00:05:39.520 of lieutenant colonel. So that is a little bit concerning. I mean, we don't know anything and I'm not
00:05:45.160 going to speculate, but I'm just saying that, you know, an expert who knows what he's talking about
00:05:48.800 is linking this. We don't really know exactly what the origins are. Nobody in the media is talking
00:05:53.040 about, but it is definitely worth knowing that China's covert biological weapons is centered in
00:05:58.760 the exact same city where this virus was originating. I'll just leave it at that. I'm not going to
00:06:04.240 speculate, but I think it's interesting. Worth noting, not sure why my colleagues in the mainstream
00:06:08.360 media are completely ignoring that fact. Okay, let's move on. Let's talk about the conservative
00:06:13.120 leadership race because it's really, it's really kind of dismal at this point. There's not a lot of
00:06:18.840 people running. Pierre Polyev, who many believed was the front runner, very surprisingly announced
00:06:24.180 last week that he is no longer considering running. He said that he wanted to spend more time with his
00:06:28.380 family, which is a little bit about cop-out in my experience. You knew going into it that you would
00:06:32.800 not get to spend that much time with your family. So why would you announce that you're going to run
00:06:36.540 and then like two weeks later say, okay, never mind. I don't want to make that sacrifice for my
00:06:40.480 family. I think what Pierre Polyev did was scared off a lot of other potential people in the race
00:06:45.720 who, you know, decided not to run because they thought that he was going to run. And now that
00:06:49.640 he's not running, there might be kind of scrambling left to say, okay, well, you know, somebody has to
00:06:54.180 run. Who's going to be the sort of blue conservative in the race? Who's going to be the one that's
00:06:58.700 pushing forward, you know, more traditional conservative values or pushing for more fiscal
00:07:03.480 restraint? I mean, Pierre Polyev was sort of the mantle of that. He was this sort of, I mean, he is this,
00:07:08.860 you know, very strong fiscal conservative, someone who understands the cultural issues as well.
00:07:15.720 And I'm really not sure when I look at the field right now and who's running,
00:07:19.740 it's pretty sad. You know, Rona Ambrose is out. As I said, Pierre Polyev is out. Brett Wilson is
00:07:26.240 not running. Jean Charest is out. We know that Jason Kenney is not going to be running. Doug Ford
00:07:31.640 is not going to be running. A lot of the really high profile conservatives in this country are out,
00:07:35.700 which really just leaves basically Peter McKay, Aaron O'Toole, and a bunch of people that no one has
00:07:41.320 ever heard of. So this is really concerning news for the conservative party as well as sort of the
00:07:46.500 conservative movement in Canada. You know, the fact that the person who becomes leader of this party
00:07:50.520 may very well become prime minister. I mean, Justin Trudeau is vulnerable. He was reduced to a minority.
00:07:55.820 The conservatives won the popular vote in the last election, which doesn't really mean anything
00:07:59.380 other than just to say that more people cast their ballot for conservative than any other party.
00:08:04.060 You know, you would think that running this party would be something that would attract a lot of
00:08:08.000 talented people from not just the political realm, but other aspects of civil society. You know,
00:08:13.720 business leaders, community leaders, people who are conservatives in other levels of government,
00:08:20.200 you know, entrepreneurs, people from tech, people from finance, lawyers. You would think that there
00:08:24.980 would be so many people lining up to take this position. And the fact that there really isn't,
00:08:29.720 and at this point, it's just Peter McKay as a front runner. This makes you consider there's so few
00:08:34.240 people that are interested. It's not just because they know that the mainstream media is going to
00:08:38.820 absolutely tear them apart, that there's going to be a microscope over every aspect of their personal
00:08:43.460 life. And then it's, of course, it's going to be a tough, tough journey, few years. But you would
00:08:48.560 think that the prize is so big. I think it says something to the sort of state of conservatism
00:08:54.960 in Canada right now that this position is so unattractive. I also think that a lot of the rules
00:09:00.040 that we have put in place, not official rules, but just sort of like de facto rules also prevent
00:09:05.380 a lot of people from running. I mentioned this on a previous show, but the fact that just for
00:09:10.260 instance, that the conservative leader in the last, you know, two decades, it's sort of become a
00:09:14.880 mandatory thing that they must speak French, that they must be fluently bilingual in both French and
00:09:19.840 English, not just sort of have a basic working understanding of French, but be able to participate
00:09:23.880 in high level debates. I think that makes a lot of people who would otherwise be very good
00:09:29.000 candidates for this position not want to run, especially in the business world. You know,
00:09:33.600 a lot of people who are interested in politics, people who become MPs, people who are lifelong
00:09:37.320 politicos, they take the time to learn French because it's in their best interest. But, you know,
00:09:42.940 most people who have great leadership capacity, have great, you know, ability to run institutions,
00:09:49.000 you know, they're not really focused on learning French, especially if you're based in, you know,
00:09:53.160 Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, basically any city other than Montreal and Ottawa. Ottawa and Montreal,
00:09:58.580 those two cities have a culture where the sort of well-educated cream of the crop people learn
00:10:03.560 French, but the rest of the country just doesn't really have that. And I think that this weird rule
00:10:07.840 that we've created that you must speak French, it doesn't really make sense. And perhaps it's time
00:10:11.640 the conservatives sort of move past that, especially given the performance that the
00:10:15.520 Conservative Party has in Quebec. It's not like they're winning a lot of seats. It's not like a lot
00:10:20.000 of people in Quebec are lining up to vote for this party. So why is there such an emphasis on
00:10:24.980 trying to communicate to people who have basically have no interest in voting Conservative? I had a
00:10:31.180 column in the Sun on Sunday where I was pretty harsh against Andrew Scheer. You know, the more
00:10:36.100 that I consider what he's done to the party and how he's left the party, I really think he has done a
00:10:40.760 great disservice. I'll tell you what I'm talking about. Andrew Scheer really struggled during the
00:10:44.900 election to articulate his own values, to describe his personal religious social Conservative values
00:10:50.700 in a way that sort of put the question to bed, that put the issue at ease in the minds of Canadians.
00:10:57.780 Yes, the media were very unfair. They were sort of bullying him and they didn't let it go. But
00:11:02.380 that's partially because of the way that Andrew Scheer treated the question. And I think by failing to
00:11:07.220 really close that door and give Canadians the assurances that they needed, he's reopened the issue
00:11:13.540 in a way that it hasn't been reopened for decades, frankly. You know, the divisive issues,
00:11:19.440 the divisive social issues that Conservatives really just don't want to talk about, that they
00:11:23.980 want to avoid, mainly gay marriage, but also to some extent, your position on abortion. I think that
00:11:29.640 these two issues under Stephen Harper, he sort of successfully said to the public, you know, rest
00:11:34.720 assured we're not going to talk about these issues. We know that they're divisive and Canadians don't
00:11:38.180 really want to have a huge national conversation again. We kind of already did that in the 2000s.
00:11:42.740 We don't need to do it again in, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020. Whereas Andrew Scheer just failed to do
00:11:48.600 that. And now he's sort of emboldened the craziest of the crazy to come out and again, try to relitigate
00:11:55.980 these issues. So last week, last Wednesday, a prospective Conservative leadership candidate named
00:12:04.180 Richard de Carré went on CTV with Evan Solomon. Now, this guy is basically an unheard of Quebecer who's
00:12:11.080 never been elected to public office. I understand he used to be a Quebec separatist. And then at some
00:12:15.960 point he came in to advise Stephen Harper, but he's not a sort of public Conservative. He's not
00:12:21.460 really in the game. Most people have never heard of him. But the mainstream media love to promote
00:12:26.200 these kind of fringe candidates to try to accuse all Conservatives of holding these kind of views.
00:12:30.880 So de Carré, basically, he did what Andrew Scheer failed to do. He flat out said, yes, I'm a social
00:12:36.560 Conservative. I think that gay marriage is wrong. Not only that, he said that being gay is a choice.
00:12:42.440 And then he said that he would defund abortion. So he took the most sort of divisive issues that
00:12:47.900 most Conservatives want to avoid talking about, and he just put them right out there. The media love
00:12:52.760 this. This is what the mainstream media want. This is what the mainstream media dream about. They all
00:12:56.840 dream about doing what Evan Solomon did. Evan Solomon made this candidate look like an absolute fool
00:13:01.880 and like a bigot. What about same-sex marriage? My point of view is that marriage is exclusive to a
00:13:08.280 man and a woman. And traditionally, it used to be for religion, from religion point of view. And people
00:13:14.680 are mixed up. When we talk to real people on the street, when we go across the country, we are hearing
00:13:21.400 the same things. We are all mixed up. Our kids are mixed up. LGBTQ people are real people too. I'm just
00:13:28.080 trying to figure out your terms. Are they not real people? I think LGBTQ is a liberal term. I don't
00:13:34.680 talk about people that way. I talk about persons. And I think we all need the full respects for being a
00:13:45.660 human being, simply. Okay. So you don't think that being gay, what do you think? That's a choice? Or do you
00:13:54.120 think it's biological? I think it's a choice. And this is the problem. This is the problem. Andrew
00:13:59.680 Scheer sort of opened up the Pandora box of social conservatism, which makes other candidates more
00:14:05.840 emboldened. Because the lesson that the mainstream media and talking heads in the media said about the
00:14:11.860 election was basically that you can no longer be a social conservative and become prime minister.
00:14:16.720 Andrew Scheer proved that point. You cannot have personal religious convictions. You can't be a
00:14:21.540 Catholic, a practicing Catholic, and be prime minister. But for many conservatives, and I will
00:14:26.960 say myself included in this package, I don't think that that's why Andrew Scheer lost. I don't think the
00:14:31.380 mere fact that he was a social conservative is why he's not prime minister today. I think it was because
00:14:36.120 of the way that he articulated his social conservative values, or more accurately, the way that he failed to
00:14:41.320 articulate his values. He failed to explain to Canadians what it was that he believed and how that would
00:14:45.940 differentiate from how he would govern. That's what he lost. And so to many conservatives and many social
00:14:51.660 conservatives, that the idea would then become, well, if it was only about how Scheer communicated and
00:14:57.000 not the actual values that he held, then maybe someone else can articulate them better. And I think
00:15:01.920 that's what this individual is trying to do, just trying to say, yes, I have these values. I'm not going
00:15:06.660 to be shy about it. I'm not going to be passive about it like Scheer was. I'm just going to put it right
00:15:10.380 out there. And I think I can win on these issues. Well, no, I don't think that's a good idea. I'll say I
00:15:15.660 consider myself a social conservative. And I'll tell you why I believe in tradition. I think tradition is very
00:15:20.900 important. I think that changes in our society should happen slowly, deliberately, cautiously, that we should
00:15:28.080 really try to think things through before we just jump the gun. And you know, adhere to the latest fad or
00:15:33.820 tradition, because we don't really know what the underlying issues might be, these sort of
00:15:38.760 unintended consequences of changing too quickly. And more importantly, I believe that families are
00:15:44.220 the central institution of society, that strong, strong families mean strong society and strong
00:15:49.020 people. And so I think that that's sort of the origin of my beliefs. I also obviously believe in
00:15:53.840 freedom, personal responsibility, and equal rights for everyone. And I think because of these values,
00:15:59.120 I think that conservatives, even social conservatives like myself, should be for gay marriage. I mean,
00:16:05.200 this is a conversation that happened like 20 years ago. So it's almost weird to be rehashing
00:16:08.760 it. But I think there's some value in doing it. I think that social conservatives should be for
00:16:13.620 gay marriage, because we should want family and the traditions within family to extend to everyone,
00:16:19.060 we shouldn't want to exclude someone because of an innate feature that they're born with or
00:16:22.840 characteristic. So we should want marriage for everyone, we should want we should encourage
00:16:27.960 marriage as a social institution, and encourage people, whether they're gay or straight, to get
00:16:34.100 married, to go down that path to start families, have families, that that's the important thing
00:16:39.740 in our society. And so you know, this idea that we're going to all of a sudden, try to turn back
00:16:44.900 the page, try to say no, being gay isn't real, and you shouldn't have marriage equality. This is the
00:16:50.860 wrong approach. And I just cringe when I see interviews like that. I don't think that the
00:16:55.420 conservative party should be promoting people with these views. You know, sure, there's room in the
00:16:59.500 party for all views, all conservative views, and we can have those sort of debates. But having someone
00:17:04.740 like this, as a front runner, or as a leadership candidate, that gets invited on the big programs and
00:17:10.600 gets humiliated by one of the most famous journalists in Canada, not a good look. And I do blame Andrew
00:17:16.740 Scheer for that, because I don't think that I think that if Scheer had taken the approach that Stephen
00:17:20.800 Harper had taken, which was, you know, these are my views, we're not going to legislate on this. And he was firm,
00:17:26.560 and he was forthright, and he was honest, and he was transparent, which were all issues that Andrew
00:17:30.760 Scheer had problems with. We wouldn't be going down this path now where we're sort of scrambling and
00:17:34.980 herding cats and saying, no, no, no, conservatives don't actually think that gay marriage is something
00:17:40.420 that should be rolled back on. So like I said, I'm really hoping that an outsider candidate will come
00:17:45.800 in. Right now, we just have a lineup of career establishment politicians, really insider type people,
00:17:51.560 no one that's really exciting, that has new views, outsider views, a different perspective. So I am
00:17:56.180 holding out that someone new will join the race. Hopefully the barriers aren't too high. And
00:18:00.560 someone with, you know, not a lot of political experience, but has shown, you know, their capacity
00:18:05.440 for leadership, for managing a large organization, someone out there will decide to throw their hat
00:18:11.460 in the race and shake things up, because I don't think that it's very good for the Conservative Party
00:18:15.200 to just have a lineup of only career politicians. And to stay up to date on all things related to the
00:18:20.440 Conservative leadership race, check out TNC.news. We are writing reports. We have other podcasts that
00:18:25.760 are focused on this, and we're devoting more time and attention than anyone in the mainstream
00:18:30.460 media. So tune in to TNC.news and to this podcast. We will be back on Wednesday. Thank you so much.