00:04:44.980This is a big deal, but it's one that I have no doubt if it goes the wrong way for Justin
00:04:51.260Trudeau, he will do the same thing, which is, well, here's the statement.
00:04:55.480And you can actually probably write this down, and it's going to be very close to what Justin Trudeau says if this document comes out and indicts him the way that it should.
00:05:06.680He'll say, well, we didn't have a roadmap for this.
00:05:12.540We used the information that we had available.
00:05:15.140and one of the reasons we were so enthusiastic about this process and why we were so transparent
00:05:21.020is because we wanted this to guide us and future governments so that they don't have to do what we
00:05:27.860did which is fly in blind so that they have more information that we had and we welcome this all
00:05:33.120I did it all wrong um so um we um didn't uh have um the um and I was water box uh drinking juice
00:05:47.240water bottle and the emergency oh no sorry that's a different speech I was reading the wrong speech
00:05:52.160my apologies but that's going to be the problem he's going to come out and say this is a learning
00:05:56.360opportunity and now we know and whoopsie daisy didn't matter too too much uh we all just learn
00:06:02.720we live and let live, we move on. There's going to be no contrition. And you can take from that
00:06:07.640what Justin Trudeau has already said, which is, remember this clip when he talked about how serene
00:06:13.320he feels, how at peace he feels about his decision to invoke the Emergencies Act?
00:06:22.080The responsibility of a prime minister is to make the tough calls and keep people safe.
00:06:28.860And this was a moment where the collective advice of cabinet, of the public service, and my own inclination was that this was a moment to do something that we needed to do to keep Canadians safe.
00:06:52.020and knowing full well that this was an inevitable consequence of me signing i agree
00:07:00.480on this note um i was very comfortable that we were at a moment where this was the right thing to
00:07:08.300do and we did it and it is a certain amount of comfort
00:07:19.460that first of all the system is working as it should that people who are defending civil
00:07:27.320liberties are able to say you really should be careful about doing this maybe you shouldn't
00:07:30.980have done it that we have a system pushing back on this because it's a big thing not a small thing
00:07:35.080to do this but that also we were able to solve the situation with it that there was no loss of
00:07:46.680life there was no uh you know serious violence that we were able to get neighborhoods back under
00:07:55.180control a border uh border services opened and um there haven't been a recurrence of these kinds of
00:08:04.840illegal occupations uh since then i'm not going to pretend that it's the only thing that could
00:08:09.920have done it, but it did do it. And that colors the conversations we're having now with the fact
00:08:18.940that these could be very different conversations. And I am absolutely, absolutely serene and confident
00:08:27.440that I made the right choice in agreeing with the invocation.
00:08:31.580serene and confident that he made the right choice so that does not again strike me as
00:08:43.320something that will be shaken regardless of what commissioner paul releau finds now anyone who was
00:08:49.860in ottawa when the freedom convoy protests were dismantled a few days after the emergencies act
00:08:55.380came into play we'll know there was nothing serene about that you had people like alexa
00:09:01.300the rebel reporter that was shot in the leg with a tear gas canister yours truly who was on the
00:09:07.620receiving end of a hefty dose of the pepper spray you can see a picture of that there believe it or
00:09:13.680not some police officer working on justin trudeau's orders i thought that this face of mine needed to
00:09:20.340be more puffy and more bloated than it already was. So that was the image that you all had to
00:09:26.300suffer through as I had to suffer through that as well. Oddly enough, still less painful to be
00:09:31.960pepper sprayed than to have listened to Justin Trudeau try to justify the emergencies act. So
00:09:36.980take from that what you will. But all of this is to say that this is not a situation that Canadians
00:09:44.200should forget. And I wrote an issue of my sub stack earlier, which is the very creatively
00:09:50.440titled Andrew Lawton sub stack. And I was trying to reflect a little bit. So I shared last week
00:09:57.000that I was down with illness for a few weeks after I got back from Davos, Klaus Schwab's
00:10:02.860parting gift, I've called it. And I had some time to reflect on my hands. And there was a surreal
00:10:08.060quality that I said I had sort of felt when I thought back about things that had happened
00:10:13.540over the last three years when I thought back about the fact that, wow, we put caution tape
00:10:19.620around playgrounds and told people not to play on them. Wow, we forced seniors to hug and kiss
00:10:26.040each other through basically like hazmat suits. Wow, we fined people who dared to have an extra
00:10:33.480person at the dinner table, an illegal gathering. We threatened to fined people in Quebec for not
00:10:39.580being vaccinated we banned unvaccinated people from air and rail travel when you rhyme off this
00:10:46.500stuff which is very fresh and very raw for a lot of people for other people it's like oh wow
00:10:52.120our government actually went there that was real that wasn't a bad dream that actually happened
00:10:58.520and the freedom convoy is the flip side of that it's similarly surreal for a lot of people because
00:11:05.780it was such a departure from what life had been for the two years prior. And I've often remarked
00:11:13.340in speeches about this that Canada is not a country that has baked into its national DNA,
00:11:19.180its collective DNA, a sense of rebellion or revolution. The United States was born of
00:11:24.180revolution. The idea of rebelling against tyranny, speaking up against authority, that's a part of
00:11:29.320the American existence. Canada is the contrary. We're a country that was almost an accident of
00:11:34.920history if you learn about how confederation took place we're a country i think we should
00:11:39.040be tremendously proud of but we're not a country built of revolution so we don't have that when
00:11:46.000canadians stand up as they did one year ago one year plus you know two weeks ago when canadians
00:11:52.160stand up that's a big deal and it was a watershed moment in canada it was a watershed moment in the
00:11:57.660pandemic and i had a little bit of delight when the book i wrote about this the freedom convoy
00:12:02.400the inside story of three weeks that shook the world got recategorized on amazon from a politics
00:12:09.080book to a history book at one point they they moved this around so i i wouldn't read too much
00:12:13.960into it but i was i was watching this and i'm like oh wow you know one day i was a bestseller
00:12:18.460in politics and the next day i was like the bestseller in canadian history and i i an old
00:12:23.520history professor of mine uh was quite jealous because his books never made it to the history
00:12:28.020bestsellers list, but mine apparently did. And the reason is because I think there was an
00:12:33.400understanding that this was history in the making when it was happening. The Emergencies Act was
00:12:40.920similarly history in the making and not a good kind of history. This is not a history that we'll
00:12:46.040look back on and be proud of. It's not one that I think Justin Trudeau should look back on and feel
00:12:51.660serene about in any way whatsoever. And if you listen to those comments, I won't make you suffer
00:12:57.520through them again. But if you listen to those comments he made, he was talking about, well,
00:13:02.840it worked. And a lot of the defenders of the Emergencies Act, if you really break through
00:13:08.100their arguments, they don't have a response to what about trampling on civil liberties? What
00:13:14.080about this being used against people you agree with? What about this? What about that? They
00:13:17.900don't have an answer because they don't care. Their argument ultimately comes down to, I didn't
00:13:23.660like the truckers the emergencies act came into place a few days later the truckers were gone
00:13:28.360so there is a Machiavellian defense that you see in here which is now the government's
00:13:35.720sole defense for this Justin Trudeau saying right there well it worked it got rid of them they were
00:13:40.420there we did it they weren't there so I don't want to rehash the public order emergency commission
00:13:46.680because we're one year out from the emergencies act which means there should have been time for
00:13:50.840reflection that goes beyond just the nitty-gritty minute details about, well, how much can a heavy
00:13:57.100tow truck tow and could this tow truck have done it? And if a tow truck is driving east on
00:14:02.820Wellington Street at 40 kilometers an hour and a big rig is parked, at what point does the sun
00:14:09.420intersect? No, there was none of that. We need to talk about the big picture here, which is that
00:14:14.720Justin Trudeau decided that rather than admit he had been wrong, wrong about vaccine mandates,
00:14:21.560wrong about lockdowns, wrong about the divisiveness, wrong about his rhetoric, instead of admitting he
00:14:27.240had been wrong, which is what his protesters that went to Ottawa from all across the country were
00:14:34.000saying, he doubled down on the rhetoric, he doubled down on the mandates, and then he, I would say,
00:14:41.600tripled down by deciding that you do not have the right to protest him on the streets of Ottawa
00:14:48.640if he doesn't like you. And this is basically what it comes down to. Justin Trudeau did not
00:14:56.800support the right to protest his government. He took an approach that he never would have with
00:15:03.580Indigenous protesters, that he never would have with any other group of protesters. I should say0.98
00:15:08.260that there were a huge number of Indigenous protesters in the Freedom Convoy. It just wasn't
00:15:13.180an Indigenous protest in the sense like some of the anti-pipeline blockades ostensibly are. But he
00:15:19.280decided that you did not have a right to take a stand against his government. And there was a
00:15:24.600unity in the Freedom Convoy that I pointed out in my newsletter that cut across political lines,
00:15:30.960it cut across religious lines, racial lines, regional lines. The old story I've told of the
00:15:35.800Quebec separatists and the Alberta separatists hugging each other and partying in the streets.
00:15:40.880This is a silly moment, but it's not silly if you think about it, because what else can unite Quebec
00:15:46.620nationalists and Alberta nationalists? But the Freedom Convoy did. And the Freedom Convoy united
00:15:52.940people in a way that Justin Trudeau certainly didn't. The Justin Trudeau's rhetoric about why
00:15:58.620should we tolerate these people, his rhetoric about, well, these people may have a right to
00:16:02.660be unvaccinated but they don't have a right to get on a plane and spread the virus that
00:16:06.260all of the rhetoric that we've gotten from this government which was divisive
00:16:09.940was answered by the unity of the convoy and and if you talk to real Canadians about it
00:16:19.880there was a huge amount of support I mean my anyone who covered the convoy there's something
00:16:26.220we don't often talk about because it sounds weirdly self-aggrandizing but anyone who tweeted
00:16:30.900about the convoy, who posted about it on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, the following just went
00:16:36.060through the roof through that period. Like my Twitter followers went up astronomically. And no,
00:16:41.940it wasn't all Russian bots. Maybe, you know, Olaf and Boris were in the followers, but it was real
00:16:46.860people from Canada, from the US, from the UK, from Australia that were wanting to know what the heck
00:16:51.840was happening and didn't trust the mainstream media to give them a sense of it. And the reason
00:16:57.480was there was such this huge appetite and when I looked at the messages I was getting every now
00:17:01.880and then you click on the profile and you know it used to be that if I get a message from someone
00:17:05.900that said oh I love your show I'd click on their profile and it's you know proud conservative
00:17:10.660Christian Canadian and that's absolutely fine I love it but the people that were following my
00:17:16.240content during the convoy I would click on their protest and it was like you know lefty earth
00:17:23.320loving homeschool mom or some variation of that. It would be, you know, stoner for life. It would
00:17:30.240be all of these weird, different disparate groups of people that have never been part of the same
00:17:37.220political movement in their lives, but we're all coming together under this. And the Canadians
00:17:43.240that hated it, the Canadians that hated what the convoy stood for overwhelmingly were the poster
00:17:49.660boys of this is your brain on cbc they were consumers of a mainstream media narrative about
00:17:56.220the convoy that was not just slightly wrong but that was just blatantly and brazenly false
00:18:02.100and this is why the convoy became a rorschach test a national rorschach test where you could look at
00:18:09.160it and two people could look at it and see vastly different things because the lens through which
00:18:13.840people were viewing this thing was very heavily tinted by the government narrative, the CBC
00:18:20.220narrative, the CTV narrative, the global narrative, and some of the reporters that went in earnestly
00:18:25.700and just, I think, had real conversations. There were examples of them, but they were relative
00:18:30.540minorities in a landscape that overwhelmingly committed to a narrative before the trucks even
00:18:36.480got to Ottawa and was unafraid to be taken off that narrative. And that was why it was independent
00:18:42.920media's time to shine because people wanted a sense of truth they wanted to know what was
00:18:48.520happening and you couldn't look at what was happening and then what became the government's
00:18:53.400response to this without seeing that it was not what government said it was and here for example
00:19:01.460is Justin Trudeau claiming that the Emergencies Act did not suspend fundamental rights and freedoms
00:19:06.800are you drawing a distinction there between okay the premiers may say it's under control here but
00:19:16.120that doesn't mean it's under control everywhere so they would have had to come to you with
00:19:19.820something that would have solved the big problem as you saw it is that um i think there just would
00:19:25.740have been a sense that that the measures i was proposing weren't going to be useful or effective
00:19:36.280and what i heard on the contrary uh was uh concerns that we'd shared that this might
00:19:46.100inflame the protesters to declare a public order emergency and bring in martial law um which was
00:19:53.800one of the concerns or that they would interpret it as that of course it wasn't martial law and
00:19:58.700it did not suspend people's fundamental rights and freedoms um but it it at the same time um
00:20:06.080they expressed these concerns which we had shared uh but i was balancing off against okay um there
00:20:13.840is a danger of of further uh inflaming the situation but the situation was already pretty
00:20:20.180inflamed and my concern was if we continue to not do anything uh are enough citizens going to start
00:20:27.300counter protesting and taking things into their own hands at various places across the country
00:20:31.780now before i offer any commentary on that let me just shift to another clip here
00:20:40.520of that one you just saw by the way was not beforehand this was after the fact he's had
00:20:46.880time to reflect he's seen all the evidence he knows exactly what happened that was in november
00:20:51.800of 2022 take a look back to february 2022 uh actually this video took place almost seconds
00:20:59.720before i was pepper sprayed and it will give you a sense of exactly how fundamental freedoms were
00:21:08.120protected specifically look for the woman who ends up on the ground in this video0.99
00:21:12.440Oh, come on through. Come on through. What is happening here? Wow. What is this lady doing? Trampling. Trampling horses. Trampling. Stop it. Stop it.0.65