Juno News - The Chinafication of Canada

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.040 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:10.620 Coming up, is Canada undergoing a Chinification, and would a new constitution solve this? 0.93

00:00:16.460 I talk about it with Bruce Party and Patricia Adams.

00:00:19.520 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.

00:00:23.240 Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:00:25.120 This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.

00:00:29.080 And I apologize ahead of time if I'm not my usual bouncy, dynamic self today.

00:00:34.180 I don't know if I have COVID or something else, but I have something.

00:00:38.000 And my voice is just a little bit more strained than I like it to be.

00:00:41.660 But you know what? We've got two fantastic guests that will help me with the heavy lifting.

00:00:46.140 Maybe they'll do all of it and you won't even need me.

00:00:47.860 And I can just, you know, bow out and take an early weekend midway through this.

00:00:51.640 Not an April Fool's joke, what we're talking about now.

00:00:54.140 The memories of the convoy and the federal government's response to it are very strong.

00:00:59.940 Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act.

00:01:02.220 We instantly saw a crackdown on the streets of Ottawa and also in bank accounts of people across the country.

00:01:08.940 And despite the promise of oversight and scrutiny, we really haven't seen that just yet.

00:01:14.160 And there was a fantastic piece I read in the Epoch Times about this that said after two days to flatten the bouncy castle, Canada needs a new constitution.

00:01:23.820 The upshot of it is that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms really didn't protect Canadians from these very heavy handed measures by the government.

00:01:32.300 And I want to talk to the co-authors of this piece.

00:01:34.360 One of them is Bruce Pardee, who should be no stranger to a lot of you tuning in as he's been on the show before.

00:01:39.520 He is a Queen's University law professor and also the executive director of Rights Probe.

00:01:45.180 And also Patricia Adams, who's an economist and president of the Energy Probe Research Foundation and Probe International.

00:01:52.800 Bruce, Patricia, thank you both so much for coming on today.

00:01:56.160 Thanks, Andrew.

00:01:56.900 Thanks for having us.

00:01:58.500 Let me start with you on this because, Bruce, you've had an opportunity to talk to my audience before.

00:02:02.740 Patricia hasn't. So I'll start with you, Patricia.

00:02:05.360 What was it that brought you to the position that you put out in this piece here?

00:02:10.080 That, you know what, there's something that Canadians need to know about how they're not being protected by this document that they're told,

00:02:16.580 even as the Emergencies Act was being invoked, was safeguarding their rights.

00:02:21.500 What intrigues me most about it, about the situation that we face, is that it's very similar to what our colleagues in China also face.

00:02:30.120 And they issued in 2008 a charter, which was modeled on the Helsinki Charter.

00:02:39.740 I'm sorry, not the Helsinki, but the one that came out of the Czechoslovakia, Charter 77.

00:02:44.500 And it called for many of the protections that we thought we had that we don't have.

00:02:55.120 And our colleagues, who we've worked with for 30 years, and that includes lawyers and journalists and accountants and economists and so on,

00:03:05.520 have tried to model reforms in their own country based on those that we have.

00:03:13.060 Well, ours are not working very well.

00:03:15.040 And I think this comes as a surprise to them.

00:03:17.040 And I had great difficulty in explaining to them how we don't have a Chinese Communist Party censorship system,

00:03:24.720 but we have censorship in our mainstream media.

00:03:28.660 How does that happen?

00:03:30.240 It's very puzzling to them.

00:03:32.000 Why does this happen?

00:03:33.340 So this is one of the things that intrigues me about the current situation in Canada,

00:03:39.100 is that we seem to be coming a lot closer to China than they are to us.

00:03:45.020 But we're becoming a lot more like them.

00:03:47.220 And the similarities are quite disturbing.

00:03:49.740 And I think one of them that bothers me the most is what appears to be the creation of accusations and infractions of the law

00:04:00.240 against people who are really criticizing government policy.

00:04:04.300 It's very common in China.

00:04:06.120 That's what they do all the time.

00:04:08.100 Whenever anybody wants to engage in a discussion about public policy, they very often end up in jail.

00:04:15.580 First of all, they're accused of picking corals and provoking trouble.

00:04:21.460 And then they end up in jail.

00:04:23.500 So there are some similarities.

00:04:26.240 I think there's been an erosion of our rights in Canada.

00:04:30.860 And it's very disturbing to me because it seems like the trend line is not a good one that we're seeing in Canada.

00:04:38.020 Yeah, and I think a lot of people use the Chinas and the North Koreas and the Venezuelas of the world 0.89

00:04:44.600 to rest on our laurels in the West and say, well, you know, it's not like we're doing that.

00:04:49.500 It's not like we're as bad as they are.

00:04:51.060 And I think it deflects from some very real problems we do see in Canada specifically.

00:04:56.140 And I want to talk to you both about this.

00:04:58.180 Let me ask you, Bruce, about one in particular.

00:05:00.260 Because if you were to pull most Canadians on the street and say, do we have press freedom in Canada?

00:05:04.680 They think, oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:05:06.000 We have journalists that are able to criticize the government.

00:05:09.880 People have free speech.

00:05:11.100 They generally would believe that to be the case, even though you and I can go through a laundry list of ways in which government can and does limit free speech.

00:05:19.140 But you look at the convoy, for example, and the day after police did the big breakdown of it, it was a Sunday, I was walking out of my hotel in downtown Ottawa, and police were questioning me, asking me to justify why I was walking down a street.

00:05:33.600 I would say, well, I'm a journalist.

00:05:35.040 I'm covering what's happening.

00:05:36.080 And they'd say, prove it.

00:05:37.800 Well, press freedom is part of freedom of expression.

00:05:40.060 It's not a special category that journalists have as far as freedoms are concerned.

00:05:44.620 But right there, I couldn't wave my charter in the face and say, I have press freedom.

00:05:49.360 On the ground, I didn't.

00:05:53.640 Right.

00:05:54.360 Yeah.

00:05:54.700 So this is a very difficult thing for people to get their head around.

00:05:59.300 Because we have a charter that's written in black and white, and it says we have freedom of expression along with a number of other freedoms.

00:06:07.160 And so they think, well, it therefore must exist.

00:06:09.780 And yet in its execution, like the situation that you're describing, it often just isn't so.

00:06:17.580 And so how can that be?

00:06:19.880 And the answer in part is that governments are now in the practice of doing things indirectly so that they do not directly infringe the charter and get into trouble.

00:06:33.040 So a lot of the things that have been done during COVID, for example, the providing of authority to employers, for example, to require vaccination.

00:06:47.800 Now, that's not holding you down and making you get a jab or fining you if you don't.

00:06:54.080 It is simply providing the authority to other parties to do that.

00:06:57.880 So when people come up and say, well, I'm being forced to vaccinate against my will without consent, the problem is that that's not exactly true.

00:07:09.540 And the protection you have, you have liberty, you have security of the person.

00:07:14.060 It's not clear that those rights have been directly infringed, just like in the situation that you're talking about.

00:07:19.600 It's not like they said, well, you can't print or you can't speak as a journalist.

00:07:23.520 You just shouldn't be here right now because there's an emergency, right?

00:07:28.720 So it's done strategically and done carefully so that the constitutional protections that we appear to have just don't seem to work.

00:07:39.340 What Bruce is saying there, Patricia, strikes me as from my limited understanding.

00:07:45.320 I'm not an expert in China, but something I do understand about China, which is the blurring of the line between the public sphere and the private sphere, between the state and private enterprise.

00:07:55.540 Now, I'd say that, you know, the line is more blur than line at this point because we know that even ostensibly private corporations all have the tentacles of the state in them in some way.

00:08:04.800 But it does sound like that is part of the same dynamic there of, you know, even when government's not doing something, that doesn't mean government isn't behind a layer or two from what's happening.

00:08:15.680 Yeah. And really, government is behind everything that happens in China.

00:08:20.900 And it's true there are private enterprises.

00:08:24.560 That's actually one of the things that the Charter 08 signatories asked for was the right to start a business.

00:08:31.160 You know, it's interesting that they would put that in there, but all of the big private corporations like Alibaba and and so on are essentially run by the government.

00:08:43.080 The government is there.

00:08:44.980 They've got committees internally.

00:08:47.520 If the moment Jack Ma steps out of line, he disappears.

00:08:52.060 Very common.

00:08:53.240 But there is the head of a major corporation who simply disappeared.

00:08:57.680 And so they're they're everywhere.

00:09:01.680 They they influence everything.

00:09:03.840 So, for example, if you if you are a journalist in China now, of course, you everybody works for state media.

00:09:10.020 That wasn't always the case.

00:09:11.320 There was a private media company, an excellent media company in the south part of the country.

00:09:16.600 Oh, 10, 15 years ago.

00:09:18.200 They had some freedom, but not total freedom.

00:09:20.420 But if you're a journalist, you walk in to your job on your shift.

00:09:24.840 The very first thing you do is you read the list of subjects that must not be covered that day.

00:09:31.540 So that's exactly backwards to what we think a journalist should do.

00:09:36.340 You're you're a journalist here.

00:09:37.900 Hopefully you go in to your shift and you want to find the story that's news and you want to beat everybody else to it.

00:09:44.620 Not there.

00:09:45.160 You get that list.

00:09:47.440 You must not cover these subjects.

00:09:48.840 Well, of course, what's interesting about that list is that's really the news.

00:09:52.480 The list that they're given of things they must not cover is what's really interesting.

00:09:56.280 So they are everywhere.

00:09:57.840 The state is everywhere.

00:10:00.080 And one of the things that Charter 08 signatories asked for was an end to the the the criminalization of words.

00:10:09.320 And this is something that Bruce has spoken about in the current situation here, that it is against the law to criticize the government.

00:10:20.180 So if you do, you're you're in big trouble.

00:10:23.020 And that applies even to the country's top constitutional law scholar.

00:10:27.880 He is now under house arrest.

00:10:29.880 He is not allowed to teach.

00:10:31.220 He has no job.

00:10:32.020 He has no income.

00:10:33.020 He can't use the Internet.

00:10:34.460 He's a top scholar in the country.

00:10:36.260 And he he dared to criticize President Xi and the governance system.

00:10:42.920 So it affects academics.

00:10:44.940 It affects NGOs and NGOs really aren't non-governmental organizations.

00:10:48.980 They're mostly governmental.

00:10:50.060 It affects the so-called private sector.

00:10:52.800 Of course, it affects the state owned enterprises.

00:10:55.520 It really the Chinese Communist Party controls everything, all aspects of society.

00:11:00.160 This is one respect in which the situation in Canada is becoming closer to that in China, right?

00:11:06.420 So you have we we have an aggressive, expanding administrative state that is involved in more and more things over time with respect to the press.

00:11:18.960 For example, it's not that the government is telling the press, here's what you can say and here's what you cannot say.

00:11:24.800 Instead, the government is subsidizing legacy media.

00:11:30.320 And and it's they don't have to they don't have to.

00:11:32.740 And in some cases, regulating, expanding the the ambit of its regulatory powers to go after online publishers.

00:11:40.260 So it is becoming bigger and bringing more people in its regulatory orbit.

00:11:44.960 Right. But exactly so, exactly so.

00:11:47.800 But but the more the more influence and control the government has, in fact, the less explicit the instruction has to be.

00:11:56.980 You don't have to pass a statute saying here are the things you can't say.

00:12:00.380 You don't have to, because if you are a certain kind of media outlet, you know where your interests lie and you know what kind of story that you know, you should you should be telling.

00:12:10.400 And of course, there's a very much shared ideology in all of these kinds of institutions.

00:12:15.320 So there's not much, very much pushing that has to happen when when your government and your business interests and your media are all on the same page about what is true and what is good.

00:12:29.360 Then you're likely to fall into a situation where dissent from that belief will get you into hot water.

00:12:37.620 Patricia, what Bruce is talking about there, I find fascinating because in a lot of contexts, the worst thing than being told what you can't say is to just inherently know that you aren't supposed to say it.

00:12:52.100 It's that self-censorship, which Orwell talked about, which a lot of people have talked about in the era of political correctness, that is more insidious than censorship because you can't really blame someone.

00:13:02.560 You can't challenge it. It's just about I know what's going to happen if I step out of line.

00:13:06.800 And I would assume that when you talk about people disappearing, that's very much the fear in China as well, is that even if that list weren't there when they went into work, they just know that if I cross this line, something bad is going to happen.

00:13:21.080 For sure. And the professor that I just spoke about, the constitutional law professor, when he was put under house arrest, he was defended by a very prominent publisher in the country.

00:13:31.160 Well, then she was arrested, and then her husband was arrested. So they're all in jail now.

00:13:36.060 So in China, they say, you know, you kill the chicken to scare the monkey. And that's exactly what they do.

00:13:42.500 And of course, when somebody is picked up and disappears, it affects the entire family and not just the immediate family, but the extended family.

00:13:51.820 It affects your friends. Anybody who's associated with that person then becomes suspect. It breaks families up.

00:13:58.180 You can imagine what it does. The stress that it puts on on spouses and on children, on parents, grandparents and so on.

00:14:06.220 And it's especially cruel. You know, we're not that at this point yet in Canada, but in there, what they will do is when they pick

00:14:15.820 somebody up and somebody disappears, no one knows where they are. And there have been many situations where

00:14:21.620 the spouses will walk from prison to prison looking for their husbands in these cases. And they will

00:14:30.220 literally go and say, have you got my husband here? And of course, the officials are under no obligation

00:14:34.760 to admit that they have. So they just say no. And so this can go on for months and months and months.

00:14:39.240 And in some cases, they're very brave lawyers in the country who are called the 709 lawyers.

00:14:46.900 They were there were 300 of them rounded up in 2015, July the 9th. And they are essentially asking for

00:14:55.800 the enforcement of the law because the law from the Communist Party's point of view is there for them 0.74

00:15:02.240 to use. And so these lawyers will try to defend people. And if they step out of line from the

00:15:08.860 government policy, they will be arrested. And then and then the lawyers that their families are hired to

00:15:15.680 defend them, they get arrested. So it's just it there's an extreme amount of fear. And I think it's starting to

00:15:22.220 happen here. I think people in Canada, doctors are afraid of their regulatory boards. Lawyers may may have to

00:15:31.580 worry also about being disciplined. I think all kinds of people, especially after the funds of the donors

00:15:38.800 to the Freedom Convoy were had their their accounts frozen, then people had to worry that maybe they

00:15:45.620 were going to be associated with the convoy. So this the fear spreads quietly and it's very insidious.

00:15:53.760 And and I'm sure that it's going on in the country right now. But we have to resist becoming the monkeys.

00:15:58.620 Now, I'm going to say one thing we should point out is that there are court challenges to the invocation

00:16:04.440 of the Advergencies Act, which haven't been heard yet. So we don't know for sure if the courts will

00:16:10.400 will uphold the way the act has been used. But part of the concern is the record through the rest of the

00:16:17.940 COVID era. And there have been lots of challenges to COVID rules of various sorts. And the success in the

00:16:25.760 courts on those grounds has been very, very limited. And so in that respect, it seems like

00:16:32.060 on the on the whole, the the courts have have embraced the government narrative over the so-called

00:16:41.040 pandemic. So as we as you know, we will await to see what happens to the challenges to the

00:16:47.500 emergency to act. But the disturbing thing at the moment is that the government appears to have believed

00:16:55.160 that what they did is perfectly fine, charter compliant. And if no charter, if charter rights

00:17:01.580 happened to have been infringed, then surely they will be considered a reasonable limit under section one.

00:17:08.600 Since you bring up reasonable limits, let me ask about that, because I know a lot of people have brought up this

00:17:13.520 idea that that that's the real problem of the charter is that you have this one section that

00:17:18.200 basically is being used by governments, and in many cases, courts as a trump card for violating other

00:17:24.300 sections. And I spoke a few weeks back with Brian Peckford, a former premier of Newfoundland, who was

00:17:30.040 the premier when the charter was inked. And he believes that the section has an important role, but that

00:17:35.040 governments and courts are distorting the meaning of that role. But but if you were to take that out,

00:17:41.140 does that solve the problem? Or is that too simplistic a proposed solution to the structural

00:17:46.760 concerns that you're raising about Canada's charter?

00:17:50.220 It would not solve the problem. It would probably be better off without it,

00:17:54.900 given its history, but it would not solve the problem. The problem in some of these cases is

00:18:01.060 even getting over the threshold of establishing that a charter right has been infringed in the first

00:18:05.600 place. You don't get the section one until you establish that the the right has been infringed.

00:18:11.960 Yeah, that to be has been infringed, or seven demonstrate that exactly. So and as I was saying,

00:18:18.480 in some situations, getting over that threshold will be difficult. So going back to my vaccine mandates,

00:18:24.640 example, if, if you are required to get a vaccine in order to keep your job, and let's just for the sake of

00:18:30.400 arguments say the job is with a government so that the charter applies to it. It's not clear that

00:18:36.080 that's a violation of your liberty or or security of the person because you're not actually being

00:18:42.160 made to that's the way it's being characterized that the story being told is no, this is a choice.

00:18:47.120 You can get the vaccine or you can get another job. But of course, the broader the practice,

00:18:52.720 the less likely it is you can get another job because all of them require you to get a vaccine.

00:18:57.200 So the question is, at what point does the broad requirement across the board constitute

00:19:06.000 essentially the equivalent of a mandatory vaccine? And that question hasn't been asked. But that's

00:19:12.560 that's an example of one of the weaknesses in the way these charter rights have been expressed.

00:19:17.600 And I'll put that to you, Patricia, because obviously, this charter eight that your Chinese 1.00

00:19:22.960 colleagues have put forward has things that would be great in a liberal democracy to have

00:19:27.520 an enshrined in a written constitution and then enshrined in law. But but even if that were to

00:19:32.400 happen, it wouldn't force governments to comply unless there's a, I mean, an infrastructure there

00:19:38.640 that can enforce government compliance. And also if there's a cultural desire and a cultural impetus in

00:19:43.920 a society to do it, there are lots of dictatorships that have written constitutions that on paper

00:19:48.800 would suggest the country respects all sorts of rights that it doesn't actually. So I mean,

00:19:53.600 even if something like this were in place in China, it wouldn't deal with any of these underlying

00:19:59.760 concerns that Chinese citizens have.

00:20:01.520 I completely agree. And I think this is where we meet each other. And I think they realize that too,

00:20:10.000 because their constitution isn't that bad. And they've actually got some good laws. The problem is,

00:20:15.600 the courts are really the Chinese Communist Party courts. They're doing the bidding of the Chinese 1.00

00:20:20.640 Communist Party. The laws are there to serve the party, not to serve the people. So they've got an

00:20:28.800 extreme case of what I hope we never get to. And that the only way, as you say, to change this is for the

00:20:39.520 people to say, we won't stand for it. We'll throw this government out of power, or we will have so

00:20:46.000 many legal challenges to make our point. I mean, there are, I guess, lots of ways that you can change

00:20:53.040 public opinion and change the culture so that the courts follow the people. I mean, one of the problems,

00:21:03.040 I think, is that government has become so big, has so many regulations, controls so much of our lives,

00:21:10.560 that we really are beholden to the government. So we're afraid of governments and regulators and

00:21:17.120 officials. And we've forgotten the... I don't know if you remember this, but when I was a kid growing up,

00:21:27.760 if you were in a playground and another child said to you, or a bully, you know, tried to get you to

00:21:34.560 do something you didn't want to do, you would say, you can't make me do that because this is a free

00:21:41.840 country. We all said it. We all knew that expression and we said it to each other all the time. And it was

00:21:48.480 a way of dealing with mean kids as well and bullies. But would a child today ever think of that?

00:21:55.520 Do Canadians think that way? We should be a free country. We were a free country.

00:22:06.640 But I think that there's been a shift in the culture towards the nanny state. And with that

00:22:11.040 has come a fear of officials. And that's where we are. We're like the monkeys. We're afraid.

00:22:17.520 I think, yeah. And somehow we have to change that culture.

00:22:21.520 I think that's right on the money. I think that's one of the keys to this,

00:22:26.240 that one of the things that is not provided for in our constitution, in the charter or otherwise,

00:22:32.400 not in an explicit way, is the existence of a nanny state, the existence of an expansive

00:22:39.760 administrative welfare state. I mean, it has happened. It has grown. It has, you know, taken

00:22:46.400 over the governance of the country, but it's not provided for in the constitution. And yet,

00:22:52.400 in moments where it's in doubt whether or not the administrative state, this managerial state,

00:22:59.680 can coexist with the various, the other constitutional provisions that do exist,

00:23:05.840 the Supreme Court has proceeded apparently with the presumption that the administrative state must

00:23:14.240 be allowed to exist and function. Because it is a given that we cannot have a civilized country

00:23:21.040 without it. And as long as we are proceeding with that assumption, then we are in a lot of trouble.

00:23:26.960 Because that means the needs of the administrative state essentially come first. And whatever it

00:23:32.160 needs to do in order to do its programs and directives and subsidies and planning and so forth,

00:23:39.680 that's the kind of, that's the kind of thing that will be carved out and made room for.

00:23:43.600 And what we really need is a constitutional regime that puts that ability into question. Essentially,

00:23:53.920 a constitution that says, no, no, no, no, no. This nanny state is incompatible 1.00

00:24:00.000 with our individual rights. The nanny state has to go, not the rights. 1.00

00:24:05.920 When I read some of the COVID court decisions that have come out in the last two years, it has been

00:24:12.080 quite astonishing just how deferential to the idea of government, I don't even mean the specific

00:24:17.920 government, but to that idea that Bruce describes of big government in solving this. Like some of the

00:24:23.120 decisions we're accepting as a given, well, obviously government needs to do X, Y, Z. And I'm

00:24:27.600 like, well, wait, this wasn't demonstrated. So I think there is something to that, that we as a society,

00:24:33.280 and I think courts have internalized this, Patricia, have just sort of accepted that

00:24:36.880 government is the answer to most questions. And I think we also trust the government. And that's

00:24:44.160 where Chinese citizens have a huge advantage over us. They don't trust the government. They've seen 1.00

00:24:49.280 the worst of it. And in Charter 08, they refer to the overlords, getting rid of the overlords and

00:24:55.920 this top-down control because they know how evil it can be. And, and how, well, how really hard on the

00:25:04.240 citizens lives that it can be. But I think in Canada, we, we haven't seen that maybe until COVID.

00:25:11.920 Now we're starting to see a very aggressive government that's forcing people, not directly,

00:25:19.520 as Bruce points out, but, but not leaving people with much choice to get a vaccine or not,

00:25:24.320 even if they think that it's not good for their health. So, so I think we're starting to get a taste

00:25:30.400 of what, what that, uh, very authoritarian type of government that the Chinese citizens are very

00:25:35.680 used to. They, they completely understand. We don't, we don't really, we haven't internalized

00:25:40.240 that because I think we think the nanny state is a nice nanny. It's like Mary Poppins, you know,

00:25:44.880 but it's, it's not, the potential for abuses are huge and they, and they are, they're happening.

00:25:50.480 One thing that we hear a lot of talk about in, in Canada now, which we haven't really is this

00:25:57.440 idea of social credit. And, and whenever you say it, people immediately kind of put their, uh,

00:26:01.920 you know, clothes off and think you're delving into conspiracy theory, but we do know in China,

00:26:05.920 the, the social credit system is very real. And in Canada, we don't have a China-esque social

00:26:10.880 credit system that's been proposed, but we do have government putting forward aspects that it

00:26:15.920 thinks are values of citizenship. And now vaccination status is one of them. You have to be vaccinated

00:26:21.200 to be on a plane. You have to be vaccinated to work for the public service. So how concerned are

00:26:26.080 you that, that a more ingrained social credit style system of some kind, even if it's an unofficial thing

00:26:33.360 could take hold in Canada? Oh, very much. It's in the works already in various provinces in the

00:26:39.920 federal government and the, the COVID vaccine passport is a good example of what's possible.

00:26:47.520 It's, and it's easy. It's easy. So once you combine these two things, a digital ID that you can use on

00:26:53.840 your phone, along with the potential for a digital currency, you put those two things together. And

00:27:01.200 that means the government essentially is able to keep track of every single transaction that happens in

00:27:07.360 the country. And that's not the kind of surveillance that, that you want if, if, if, if you want to

00:27:14.160 believe that you live in a free country. And so there's nothing on the table right now that says,

00:27:21.200 oh, you know, we're going to bring in a digital ID. It's going to be compulsory. You have to do this.

00:27:25.760 You have to do that as a social credit system. That's not the way these things work. You start out

00:27:31.840 by developing a system that's convenient for people and people can choose to use the digital

00:27:37.200 ID or the normal thing that they have. It'd be completely voluntary. Don't worry about it,

00:27:43.760 everybody. It's voluntary. It's not compulsory. No big deal. You're overreacting. It's a conspiracy

00:27:48.400 theory. You introduce it. You, some people adopt it. You get people used to it. And then sometime down

00:27:53.920 the road, you say, oh, well, you know what? The other system's too old now. It's out of date. It's too

00:28:00.080 much of a pain in the ass. We're just going to have the digital ID left. And in order to operate your life, 0.99

00:28:06.640 to get, to renew your driver's license, to go to the hospital, to buy your groceries,

00:28:12.640 as the case may be, maybe even to drive your car, you know, you have to use the digital ID

00:28:18.320 because that's just what we have. And, and people, because it's being introduced carefully in this way,

00:28:25.840 I haven't, I'm afraid that people would simply see it as a convenience and not detect that they,

00:28:33.200 they, the very dark potential that, that lies beneath and not very far beneath, frankly.

00:28:40.960 Well, one interesting aspect of that, again, to deflect against the people that are invariably

00:28:45.120 saying, oh, that's conspiracy theory. When the vaccine passports came out in my province of Ontario,

00:28:50.560 and in most places, you could just go in and show basically any old piece of paper that said you were

00:28:55.440 vaccinated if you wanted to go and eat. And by the end of the program, if even if you had been

00:29:00.880 triple dosed, quadruple dosed, you had a, you know, certified notarized authorization from the CDC that

00:29:07.280 you were vaccinated, unless you were using that particular government's QR code, it would not be

00:29:13.120 accepted. And the government said, well, it's respecting privacy rights and all of that. But this

00:29:17.520 idea of something starting out as a convenience and ending up as mandatory within a system is not

00:29:23.680 foreign and we have precedent for it within the last six months. Patricia, has China ever done what

00:29:29.040 Bruce has described there, which is putting something out and saying it's an option if you

00:29:32.960 want it? Or has China generally gone straight to you must do this? Well, I think they've gone straight

00:29:38.400 to you must do this. And what the way they started it actually was to document people who had been

00:29:46.560 picking corals and provoking trouble. So that's how it all got going. And then if you if you happen to

00:29:53.520 step out of line and say the wrong thing about the government, then they they can track everybody's

00:29:58.000 got an identification there. Anyway, everybody's got cell phones. So they would and the closed

00:30:03.280 circuit surveillance has been massive. I saw something a while ago where they picked a guy

00:30:08.000 out from the city of Beijing, I think within five minutes. Yes, yeah. So they they are tracking people

00:30:14.400 all the time. They've been tracking people for many years. But in the old days, it was it was much

00:30:19.440 harder because they would have to have eyes on on somebody. But now they can do it electronically.

00:30:26.480 And during the Olympics, what they forced all the participants, the athletes, the coaches,

00:30:32.480 all the support staff and so on, had to use a particular app going in if they were going to be

00:30:38.560 in the village, the Olympic village. And everybody realized, including Citizen Lab, which is based at

00:30:44.640 the University of Toronto, that this was a very compromised app, would allow the government to have

00:30:49.040 access to virtually the Chinese government to virtually everything on your cell phone. So I think

00:30:53.840 most people who went to the Olympics took burner phones because they they wanted to somehow restrict

00:30:58.720 it the the Chinese government's access to your to all of your data. So they are very good at this. I

00:31:06.240 mean, they they've been surveying people for for years and years and years and they're of course

00:31:12.000 surveying the internet and they it's very hard for citizens today inside inside China to get over the

00:31:18.160 wall. Still, they have a wall that that VPNs will assist them getting access. But still,

00:31:24.560 it's very difficult for them to get over the wall. And it's dangerous to use a VPN as well. If you're

00:31:28.640 caught using one, then you're in trouble. When we look at the way forward, Bruce, you and I have had

00:31:34.000 a number of discussions where we tend to just outdo each other on just depressing everyone so much

00:31:39.600 about the state of affairs here. But but you ended or might have been Patricia, I don't know who ended it,

00:31:44.720 actually. So I might have to eat crow here, but ended this column with somewhat of an optimistic

00:31:49.200 note, which was that no one would have thought Canada could be on the front lines of this

00:31:54.880 revolutionary idea we're talking about. And I mean that in a philosophical sense, not a violent sense.

00:32:00.160 But you said that was before the truckers. So do either of you and I'll start with you,

00:32:05.760 Bruce, think that we are on the cusp of something or could be on the cusp of something

00:32:09.440 that serves as a positive turning point in Canada. Yes, could be. I mean, it's not a

00:32:16.080 sure thing at all. Only time will tell. I hope it will. I mean, the truckers created a moment

00:32:24.880 in which an awful lot of Canadians saw themselves in what the truckers were doing and didn't realize

00:32:31.440 that there were so many other people who saw what they did. And so there was a real coming together.

00:32:35.840 I mean, I was in Ottawa for a few days to take it in and get some commentary. And, you know,

00:32:41.440 what I saw in the crowd was joyful. I mean, they were happy. They were happy to have discovered each

00:32:50.720 other, I think. And when people describe them dancing in the snow, I mean, they're being accurate.

00:32:56.480 This is what they were doing. They were waving flags, dancing in the snow, cheering on, singing,

00:33:01.520 you know, playing with their kids on the Bounty Castle and so on. It was really not just a friendly

00:33:06.960 crowd but a joyous one. And it is that kind of spirit that I hope will be lasting and will cause

00:33:18.880 people to believe that actually there's something here. Something that as a country was not apparent

00:33:27.280 before. As a country, you know, as a country, we have the reputation for being obedient followers.

00:33:34.640 And for the most part, through COVID, we lived up to that. All our governments of all political stripes

00:33:42.880 were very much on the same page about the very heavy handed measures they brought down. They've been

00:33:48.720 relatively little resistance to it until this time. And the fact of creating this idea that maybe,

00:33:57.840 just maybe, the answer is no, not anymore. It got attention from around the world. And,

00:34:05.120 you know, as we said in the column, you know, no one would have thought that maybe the tipping

00:34:10.640 point or the inflection point between these two choices might have started here. But, you know,

00:34:16.480 maybe so. And I'll end with you on this, Patricia. Do you think that there is reason for optimism in

00:34:22.640 Canada? And also, if you could speak to China, is there ever going to be a convoy moment in China

00:34:27.360 within our lifetimes? On Canada, I am hopeful. I think what the truckers did was they brought people

00:34:38.880 together who had been separated and segregated by our governments. And I think people were feeling

00:34:46.000 very, very sad about the state of the country. And then, when there was this very graphic

00:34:52.800 illustration, when the truckers started in Vancouver and started driving across the country

00:34:58.960 and gaining strength and more people joined them, more truck trucks joined them, the convoy was what,

00:35:04.640 70 kilometers long. People were cheering them along the side of the road and on the overpasses.

00:35:11.760 I think people were reminded that this is a very good and decent country. People are good. But I think

00:35:19.520 during the last two years, it's become a meaner and nastier country where people have been turned

00:35:26.720 against each other. And I think, in a way, that's been the most depressing thing for Canadians. And the

00:35:32.560 truckers broke through that. They brought together people. And just the people who didn't even go

00:35:38.880 to see the convoy would watch it on TV and see the flags and the signs and people cheering. And I

00:35:44.800 think people were reminded that this is a good country. Because I think we've been told for two

00:35:51.200 years that we're not, that there are some bad people in this country. And that's been a very discouraging

00:35:58.480 thing. And I think the fact that it's spread around the world is really, really interesting.

00:36:02.880 And it was picked up everywhere, maybe except China. I did send messages through to colleagues to

00:36:10.160 say, have you heard about this trucker convoy? I don't think they would get very much information

00:36:15.520 about it. Whether it will ever come to China, I hope so. There are a lot of people in the country

00:36:23.680 who are fed up with the control. I mean, it's more than control. It's the oppression

00:36:31.840 by the government of the people. And I would never say that that's going to last in China.

00:36:37.280 I don't know how it can. Because I think there's more and more communication between Chinese citizens

00:36:42.000 and the rest of the world. And they see what the alternatives are. But they are just as savvy,

00:36:48.960 maybe more savvy about the dangers with government. And we have a lot to learn from them.

00:36:56.560 Well, we'll hold out hope for the convoy to Beijing and hopefully reclaiming Hong Kong as 1.00

00:37:01.280 well. Though I know that's another discussion entirely. I want to give a huge thank you to both

00:37:05.760 Bruce Party and Patricia Adams for writing this piece. You can read it at the Epoch Times.

00:37:10.320 After two days to flatten the bouncy castle, Canada needs a new constitution. A lot to chew on in

00:37:15.760 there. And I'm glad we're able to extrapolate it on it here. Bruce, Patricia, thank you both so much.

00:37:20.720 Thanks, Andrew. Thank you very well. Yep.

00:37:23.040 That'll do it. Thank you again so much to Bruce and Patricia. I'm glad I made it through.

00:37:27.200 I did that all in one take, believe it or not. Thanks to you for tuning in. Do have a fantastic

00:37:32.640 weekend. I'm going to be off next week. But my colleagues at True North have you covered with

00:37:36.880 great content. And I'll be back in a couple of weeks for more full strength The Andrew Lawton Show,

00:37:41.280 we hope. If you want to support the work True North is doing and keep the lights on for this show,

00:37:45.840 you can do that by heading over to donate.tnc.news. Donate.tnc.news. We'll talk to you soon,

00:37:52.240 folks. Thank you. God bless and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:37:57.040 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - April 01, 2022

The Chinafication of Canada

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