Juno News - October 26, 2023The left doesn't care about its 'hate speech' double standard
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Summary
In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, host Andrew Lawton talks about anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and the hypocrisy on the left when it comes to standing up for freedom of speech.
Transcript
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welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
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north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here at the andrew
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lawton show i like moved my mic really aggressively before the show and i was hoping it would stop
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bouncing by the time the camera went on me and it didn't so if you were watching the camera
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wondering like why is that mic just like moving around independently of the guy talking into it
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That's why it's not that I'm blowing so much hot air.
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It is, in fact, the case of me just being, like, very haphazard with my hands in the exciting, riveting pre-show moments,
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which maybe we'll have to, like, package up as an after-hour special at some point to True North Insiders,
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which you could be if you head on over to donate.tnc.news.
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uh later on in the show i have a bit of an exciting announcement about something that is going on
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for me and for this program next week also going to be chatting a little bit later on in the show
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about this conference coming up this weekend that sadly i could not make it to dedicated to free
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speech in medicine which i think before a few years ago you might not have thought necessary
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but certainly is and this is i believe the second time these groups medical professionals doctors
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Students will be descending on an idyllic Nova Scotia town and discussing solving the
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Solving the worlds of the problem will be at their next conference.
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But one thing I wanted to get to today as we wind down another week is the big picture
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of a lot of the discussions we've been having on this show about anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism,
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the attacks on Israel, and the rhetorical battles being waged in North America as a result.
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And I won't play the clip for you, but there was a chilling video you may have seen circulating
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yesterday of students at a university in the United States that were basically locking themselves
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in a library as protesters pounded on the doors wanting to get in. Now, when I say students,
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I should point out I'm referring to Jewish students who were literally being hidden, hidden in the library because there were rabid anti-Jewish students that were attacking and assaulting what most people would argue is the bounds of civility.
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Now, what they would have done if they had got in and were face-to-face with these Jewish students, I have no idea.
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One of the students said in an interview, it felt a lot like being told to go hide in the attic, a la Anne Frank and the Holocaust.
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We've had people that have looked at what happened at that Toronto restaurant, Cafe Landwehr, and said it seems a lot like Kristallnacht.
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It seems a lot like the shades of European anti-Semitism in the 1930s.
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And a lot of the people that we talk to on this show when it comes to free speech will take the view that I do, which is that heinous views, heinous forms of expression still deserve to be protected.
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But I would say that a lot of the rhetoric we're seeing pushes to the very limit of that, if not goes over it.
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Now, as you know, I am a free speech absolutist.
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I believe in about as high a bar as you can have in a free society for freedom of speech.
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and I believe that the criminal code approach that we have in Canada is probably the best way
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of doing this. So no, I'm not being hypocritical when I turn around and say, well, that might not
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actually fit within normal free speech. It's because the speech itself is so extreme, it goes
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into territory where it is threatening in nature, which is to say the free speech is compromising
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the freedoms and rights of others, which is about the only time that I believe one's own rights
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should be curtailed. Now, all of this is to say right now we're seeing people twist themselves
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into knots. Now, there are some people on the right that are normally defenders of free speech
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that I think are being very inconsistent on this. And I've criticized several Jewish groups in
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Canada for, I don't feel, being sufficiently desiring to protect free speech. But I would
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say there's far more hypocrisy on the left. People who do not particularly care about civil liberties
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are all about wrapping themselves in the charter
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and saying, oh, but free speech, freedom of expression,
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the BC Civil Liberties Association calls itself
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the BC Civil Liberties Association, it's not actually because there is a commitment to
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civil liberties. It's just branding. I mean, it would be like if I were to call myself the
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skinny guy show. I can say that, but that's really not believable. And anyone that were
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to look at the show would say that doesn't actually fit with what you're offering to people.
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In the same way, the BCCLA is not offering anything civil or anything focused on liberty.
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You may recall its former executive director a couple of years ago was the one who was
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cheering the torching of churches across the country. Burn it all down was what its executive
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director at the time, Harsha Walia, said. Now, Harsha Walia is no longer with the organization,
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so she is unshackled from the expectations of her board. And it means she can make comments like
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this. How intense is the spirit to get free? How deep is the spirit to get free? How beautiful
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is the spirit to get free that palestinians literally learned how to fly on hand gliders
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how embarrassing idea how intense is the spirit to get free how deep is the spirit to get free
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how beautiful is the spirit to get free that palestinians bulldoze down the apartheid
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Sean was just like commenting on how obnoxious the video guy is. Sean's a videographer. So he
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has no tolerance for a videographer that injects their own commentary into the thing they're
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filming. Yeah, he was obnoxious, but no, no, no, no one was as obnoxious there as Harsha Waliyah.
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How beautiful is the spirit to get free that they paraglided into Israel, that they learned to hang
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glide. How beautiful is the spirit to get free that they bulldozed the apartheid wall. I would
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have actually loved to have heard the uncut speech. I can just imagine Ms. Waliyah sitting around
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working through all the drafts i don't have any like prop paper that i can use saying uh how
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beautiful is the spirit to get free that they beheaded those babies no no that line's not
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going to work uh how beautiful is the spirit to get free that they kidnapped and raped those
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teenagers oh you know man that might not go over very well uh how beautiful is the spirit to get
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free, that they held those elderly people hostage and murdered them in cold blood.
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Like, what a disgusting, despicable human being.
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Did you hear the outcry of support for her when she talks about the beauty of this?
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And she is very much celebrating the acts that Hamas took,
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Like when I, you know, I'm not going to call myself the most romantic person.
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And my wife and I celebrated our anniversary recently.
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And I don't, again, would not say that I'm like the best husband or the most romantic
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But I don't recall like with the vows being like, you're so beautiful, you remind me of
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Like that's not actually a line in the hallmark section of your drugstore when you're getting
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Like you don't actually, like men, normally I'm not going to give you marriage and dating advice, but you're as beautiful as Palestinian terrorism is not the line that you want to give to your beloved.
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Unless, of course, you're going out with Harsha Walia, in which case that's probably the greatest compliment you could bestow upon a woman.
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But here is the problem that we have with this, is that here's a woman representing an organization formerly that stood up supposedly for civil liberties, but was uninterested in civil liberties.
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Now, I don't believe that she should be censored.
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I do not believe that she should be facing any criminal or civil sanction for what she
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She has a right to, and I have the right to condemn it.
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But it's interesting that when people like her are attacked, and we've seen this from
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a number of them in recent weeks, they like to shroud themselves in a right to free speech
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and freedom of expression that they are not prepared to extend to others.
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Let's just look at the BC Civil Liberties Association, for example, which has been a
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big champion of including gender in the BC Human Rights Code. Now, these provisions are ones that
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let the BC Human Rights Tribunal go after you if you use the wrong pronoun for someone, if you
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provide a name that is in identification with their biological sex rather than their chosen
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or preferred gender. So these people will police your pronouns, but so you can't, you know, if you
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don't want to call your colleague Zimzer Ziz, you are a big hater and off with your head. But if
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you want to chant death to the Jews, oh, well, freedom of speech, you know, that's just your
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right there to say and do what you want. And to look at the BC Civil Liberties Association in a
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bit more detail, this is a so-called civil liberties group that, believe it or not, defended
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vaccine passports. Now, this was a section from a policy document they put out. I'll share two with
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but the first one uh sean is the one that starts with broadly speaking this is them explaining
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broadly speaking speaking given the widespread and devastating impact of covet 19 the effectiveness
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and safety of covet 19 vaccines and the absence of an equally effective and less intrusive alternative
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programs requiring proof of vaccination can be consistent with civil liberties and human rights
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principles okay so are there any circumstances i wonder under which the bccla would have opposed
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vaccine passports well let's go to guideline number nine proof of vaccination programs must
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avoid requiring two-spirit trans and non-binary individuals having to use government id and legal
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documents that contain their dead names or inaccurate gender markers so to the bccla a
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A vaccine passport is fine as long as it doesn't use your biological name.
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Yeah, well, you know, having to have a vaccine passport to go to a restaurant, that's fine.
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Calling yourself Timmy when you go by Tammy now?
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Now, this is, I think, a very interesting dilemma.
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Now, let's talk about how the BCCLA has responded to the wave of protests
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and pushback against them in the last couple of days.
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This ostensible and self-proclaimed civil liberties organization put out a statement,
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which I'm not going to read in full, but you can see there that they are in fact disquieted
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by the growing chorus of statements from federal, provincial, and municipal government officials
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and politicians that risk conflating pro-Palestinian sentiments, criticism of the state of Israel,
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or calls for a ceasefire with expressions of hate and anti-Semitism.
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They're disturbed by the recent decision to silence Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament Sarah Jama
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over comments she made in support of a ceasefire.
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Not exactly, by the way, an accurate distillation of what she said.
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More importantly, they are deeply concerned by the chilling effect
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that irresponsible statements and actions from government officials will have
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on the free exercise of charter protected rights in Canada.
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and by the way, as I say, I support free speech. I support free speech for those who support Israel
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and for those who support Gaza. I support free speech for people who want to say very offensive
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or what I would view as intolerable things. But it is interesting that these activists only want
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to extend that freedom in one direction and are uninterested in defending freedom of speech at
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any other points in their existence. What does this all mean? There is a double standard afoot.
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Now, many of you may say, oh, my goodness, you've got them dead to rights.
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Yeah, I wouldn't get too excited about that because, you see, the left does not care.
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My dear late friend Kathy Shadle once had to write me on this, not like, you know,
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W-R-I-D-E, but R-I-G-H-T, because I was so keen and so enthusiastic about pointing out,
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I've got them. I've exposed these hypocrites. And she said, they don't care. And she summed it up
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in a very snappy slogan as Kathy Shadle only could, which is, you know, liberals, it's different
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when we do it. And that is a bit of a nihilistic view of things, but it is an incredibly useful
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one because the left simply plays by different rules. If you expect them to defend and protect
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their own free speech rights just as much as yours, you are in for a rude awakening. If you
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expect them to take the same level of condemnation to anti-Semitism as they do to Islamophobia,
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you are going to be in for a rude awakening. If you expect them to defend civil liberties equally
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and evenly without picking up and defining freedom based on their own preferred pet groups
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and causes, you are, say it with me, in for a rude awakening. They are, I mean, they're rude,
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they're not particularly awake, but you and I will have to be both. And this is the fundamental
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problem. And I'd say it's the fundamental difference between the pro-free speech set
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and the anti-free speech set. And I should clarify, this is not just a left versus right issue. I think
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generally speaking, the right is better on free speech, but not exclusively good. It was
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conservatives that first wanted to ban Holocaust denial in Canada, which I thought
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may be rooted in a noble place, but is fundamentally wrong. And it is many people
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on the left who are dwindling in number but still exist that have this principled defense of free
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speech that goes back to basically that Berkeley era of what the left used to be. So when I say
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the left and the right in this case, I realize it is a crude distillation of groups that are not
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monolithic. But as we were talking about yesterday on the show with Joe Roberts, it's the left here
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that wants to be convenient champions of free speech only when they want the freedom to shout
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out death to the Jews, but we'll go back to censoring anyone that, you know, misgenders Timmy
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or Tammy once tomorrow comes along. And again, you know, if we were to see a bunch of students
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get out of school because they wanted to protest, let's say, gender ideology in schools, we would
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hear denunciation from the teachers union that this was hate, kids need to get in class, they
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shouldn't be protesting. But when you have a display like what's taking place in Toronto today
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where students are sitting out class because they want to protest against Israel,
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this has been met with very little condemnation from the TDSB.
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In fact, some people would say the Toronto District School Board is in fact sanctioning this.
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who's been on the cutting edge of this story for years before anyone else was paying attention,
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joins me now and she has a great piece up at True North yesterday looking at this student walkout here.
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I mean, when students and their parents were protesting a couple of weeks back, they were
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They were told that the schools had no tolerance for absence.
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When students want to sit home and call Israel an apartheid state, the TDSB is just clamming
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In fact, what they said in the note that came from Colleen Russell-Rollins, the education
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director yesterday is that they don't approve of the walkouts and the walkouts are happening in
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several high schools, mostly this afternoon. They don't approve of the walkouts, but they're free
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to walk out. And I'm thinking, okay, who is running the asylum these days? Because what I have said
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on, you know, social media is that if the Toronto School Board had a firm expulsion and suspension
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policy, which they don't, they don't give out hardly any anymore, they could threaten the kids
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with this. Say, you know, you walk out, you're going to be expelled or you're going to be suspended.
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So there are ways of dealing with them, but there are absolutely no consequences.
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and it leads me to believe that the senior executives at the toronto school board and the
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trustees sanction this they they you know they they have no way of stopping them come on who's
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running the show well and there was one school you mentioned this in your column yesterday i
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believe it was the rh king academy where the principal has agreed to move assignments or move
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quizzes to another day. So, I mean, what is that, if not a tacit, or I would even argue explicit
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endorsement of absenteeism on this day? Yeah, I mean, they basically are holding these kids'
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hands and saying, okay, you can walk out the door because we're going to make it super easy for you.
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And I would lay you a bet that absenteeism will be very high today in those schools,
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not even because they're planning to protest, but because they've gotten a free ride.
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I mean, this, you know, aside from the fact that this really disturbs me that these kids are protesting, being a very ardent Zionist and a member of the Jewish community in Toronto, and, you know, the hate fest that have been going on are just appalling.
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um the it speaks to all the things that are wrong with the school system you know academics take a
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back seat to protest 101 and you know they i i can't believe that they're allowing these kids
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just to walk out the door and do what they're doing i mean the only good thing is that it's
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raining today in toronto so yeah and i mean look i take a view i mean i was never so fortunate as
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to have the parents that would pull me out of school for, well, really for anything. I mean,
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I would have to be on my deathbed, I think. Whereas, you know, like my brother, for example,
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has like taken their kids out, you know, to go on a vacation for a few days. I'm like, oh, wow,
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I never got that growing up. And my brother said, I know. But, you know, so parents, I think who want
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to, for whatever reason, make a decision for their kids obviously have that right. I mean,
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the schools are not able to go and round up the kids and, you know, drag them into school.
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But it's about the messages they're sending out. And you mentioned that the TDSB education director,
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This is herself an activist. Now, I don't know if she's commented on the Israel-Palestine issue in the past, but she's very much tried to inject a level of activism into the school board here. So you can make an argument that the schools are taking their cue from the director.
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Well, certainly are. They certainly are in the senior executive team because I've written several stories about the fact that even elementary schools or in particular elementary schools spend, and not all, but many of them, spend at least an hour a day doing something related to social justice or social emotional learning.
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a buzzword for basically, you know, touchy feely stuff like steel drumming and Hindu dancing. And
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I mean, nothing to do with academics. And the kids are getting further and further behind.
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But I mean, the director is an activist. And the thing that's scary is that she's a proponent of
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critical race theory. Critical race theory, by its very ideology, is anti-Semitic. So you draw
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your own conclusions, Andrew. Let me ask you, I mean, one theory that I have on this, and I could
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be overcomplicating this, is that the school is basically dealing with a bit of guilt over how it
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dealt with a lot of Muslim students and families during the parental rights approaches. I mean,
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everyone's heard that clip from that teacher in Edmonton berating the Muslim student Mansour,
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because, you know, Mansour was, you know, giggling at the pride stuff. And the teacher was very brazen
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about how transactional she thought diversity should be.
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It's like, you know, everyone else dealt with your Ramadan stuff,
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so now you need to deal with the trans pride stuff.
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And I wonder if what we're seeing now is a bit of an overcorrection,
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whereas the school is seeing what's predominantly Muslim students
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and families that are voicing all of their issues with Israel
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and Zionism right now, and they're like not wanting to offend
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when I was still with Post Media, there was another insurrection in Israel, and it wasn't as
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blatant as it is this time, but the anti-Semitism coming from the Toronto District School Board
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and from, in particular, some really radical teachers and the teachers' unions was just as
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Pauling. And the director, I don't believe she had come to the school board yet, but
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she was about to start. This wasn't stopped back in 2021. And I don't know if you recall
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that I did several stories on Javier Davila, a pro-Palestinian activist in the board,
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an equity worker who put out manuals that were grossly antisemitic. And they launched a petition
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against me for doing that uh the teachers and the teachers unions and the muslim association so this
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has been going on for a while and it hasn't been um it's been sanctioned it you know there it's been
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enabled and uh it's just on a larger scale now and you see very much a pipeline of this uh you know
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the ideology takes hold in you know in some cases as young as early elementary school into high
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school and it's not all that surprising when you see what we've seen on university campuses including
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my own alma mater of Western, I think McMaster in Hamilton, or it might have been McGill,
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that was the other one, where students who looked Arab were walking around ripping down posters that
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were acknowledging hostages, of which there are still about 200 in Israel. So, you know, that
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dispenses with any pretense that this is about peace for all sides, when these innocent hostages,
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who are innocent by any, any interpretation of the word, but are being acknowledged on posters
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are then getting ripped down by a number of students? Well, you know, again, that is happening
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mostly on university campuses or by university students. I haven't seen instances of that
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actually happening in the board, but I mean, they're all part of the same group and there
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no repercussions it's a very interesting um twitter handle called stop anti-semitism
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and person has been really dogged about pointing out and naming and shaming some of these people
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and some have lost their jobs some have lost their um well many have lost their jobs mostly
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in the states but it's starting to happen here as well um and i think that's what has to happen
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these people have to be exposed because if we wait for our political leaders if we wait for
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the police even I mean the police really have their hands full now I mean I walked by Bielek
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which is a Jewish day school yesterday and there's a command center there 24 7. I mean the resources
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that must be used being used right now in Toronto I can only imagine the bill that taxpayers are
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going to have to foot but you know it's it's our weak political leaders that you know Andrew I
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I don't know if you've heard that there is going to be a bikers rally for Hamas on the weekend.
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They're going to go from Pickering to Yorkdale and go through the Jewish community, which in its Sabbath.
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Are there that many Jew haters and Hamas lovers in this?
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Yeah. And that was the interesting thing is that it didn't take long for the masks to come down.
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like in the first couple of days of this the most rabid anti-semites had the wherewithal to keep
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their mouths shut and i mean even the ndp is i think a great example the ontario ndp knew
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you know we have to start like you know saying the right thing so they begrudgingly issue the
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statements of support for israel and then uh the longer it goes on the more people start to show
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their true colors i mean just today you have two ontario ndp riding associations one in hamilton
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one in Kitchener, calling on Merritt Stiles, the leader of the Ontario NDP, to resign because they
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think she's been, you know, too supportive of Israel by condemning Sarah Jamma, that, you know,
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MPP that was essentially trying to erase the Jewish people from the Middle East in her statement.
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So people are no longer hiding and no longer feel the need to hide these very vile tendencies.
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Well, you know, I'm in touch with a lot of people in the Jewish community, a lot of different groups,
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And the one good thing about it is at least it's coming out of the woodwork now.
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And as I think I told you the last time we spoke, I've been following anti-Semitism since 2009.
00:27:57.320
And you couldn't even say equate anti-Zionist to anti-Semitic.
00:28:10.940
and uh there's a wonderful woman who's based in well she's living in israel but she was in new
00:28:16.640
york and she was her name is brooke goldstein and she's with the lawfare project and i've never heard
00:28:22.280
her so um despairing as she was she spoke at a conference i was at a couple weeks ago but i never
00:28:31.560
heard her the level of despair in her voice as i did yesterday on the news talking about all the
00:28:38.440
anti-Semitic acts and the ripping of posters as you say, the parades, the
00:28:45.900
professors speaking out and we can only hope that these people suffer some
00:28:50.780
consequences for what they're doing and maybe that'll stop them. And and the
00:28:54.680
donors not giving to universities, I wish more would do that here in Canada, here
00:28:59.740
in Toronto, Jewish donors pulling their check books and closing
00:29:06.160
their checkbooks because that's what speaks unfortunately not uh like you were saying in
00:29:11.800
the last segment they don't care there's just no conscience whatsoever unfortunately sue ann levy
00:29:18.240
thank you so much keep up the great work thank you all right we have been talking a lot about
00:29:23.540
free speech now we've been focusing on uh one more specific context here but as you know this has
00:29:28.880
been for me for many years the fight that i choose to take up as the most important it is i've often
00:29:34.320
said, my hill to die on. And it was easy to look more broadly as we did yesterday talking about
00:29:40.500
the last few years of the COVID era at assaults on civil liberties in Canada from freedom of
00:29:45.800
assembly to freedom of religion. But at its core, freedom of speech was one of the first casualties
00:29:52.480
of the COVID era because you lost the ability to even really protest against what was happening.
00:29:58.780
You couldn't get together and have a protest. If you worked in certain fields like law or medicine
00:30:04.120
were unable to speak up about your own opinion, even if it was rooted in your professional
00:30:10.380
background. So it was very enthusiastic. I don't want to say I was excited to see it, but I was
00:30:17.240
pleased given the circumstances to see so many doctors put out so many statements, even knowing
00:30:24.420
what was likely going to await them in terms of the regulators cracking down. And I think it's
00:30:30.120
created a bit of a movement of these dissident free speech loving doctors who have started to
00:30:35.060
come together. And one of the fora in which they've done this is a conference in this idyllic part of
00:30:41.280
Nova Scotia that is called, just to hit you on the head with the name, the Free Speech in Medicine
00:30:47.000
Conference. And it's actually coming up this weekend. So I wanted to chat about it with
00:30:50.840
the co-creator and organizer, Dr. Chris Milburn. Dr. Milburn, good to talk to you. Thanks for
00:30:56.240
coming on today hey thanks thanks for having me so just explain the genesis of this first off
00:31:02.960
um yeah so free speech was a problem in medicine
00:31:10.640
oh it's been a problem in medicine over several decades um i think many people didn't recognize
00:31:18.160
that that was happening but then suddenly colvin hit and it's like oh wow doctors are really not
00:31:23.760
allowed to say what they think. It was very obvious during COVID. In fact, our medical
00:31:31.040
regulators in most provinces put out statements to the effect that all doctors are expected to be
00:31:36.080
on board with all public health measures and are expected. We were told in Nova Scotia not to be,
00:31:42.480
and they use the terminology, not to be anti-maskers or anti-vaxxers, i.e. don't criticize
00:31:46.960
vaccines and don't criticize masks. We were explicitly told that in an email missive from
00:31:51.840
our college so it it became very overt the the restrictions around free speech but truthfully
00:31:58.160
the walls were closing in on free speech for several decades with things like um you couldn't
00:32:04.960
talk about your what's your opinion as a physician what do you think about the trans
00:32:10.480
moment that we're in in society what do you think about harm reduction drug policy all of these
00:32:15.680
things had a right answer and a wrong answer and you had to be very careful not say the wrong thing
00:32:22.640
publicly because there were there starting to be consequences um like myself people can look at
00:32:29.040
jccf.ca and you know if they google the justice center for constitutional freedoms in milburn
00:32:35.680
they'll hear about my case which happened prior to covid um i just wrote an op-ed and i used the word
00:32:41.920
criminals in the op-ed and apparently that's a very offensive word so a left-wing mob came after
00:32:47.680
me and they complained about me to the college and i got dragged through the mud for your behind
00:32:51.600
the scenes just for writing an op-ed which was broadly popular a lot of people agreed with it
00:32:56.800
some people disagreed um and then like i say covet hit and myself and many other people ended up
00:33:03.920
suffering consequences and losing opinions for daring to question the orthodoxy so we just felt
00:33:08.800
that it was time that we needed a venue to discuss all of those third rail nuclear waste topics that
00:33:16.080
nobody wants to go anywhere near so that's what free speech medicine is about it's a bug light
00:33:20.640
for people who think that we need to hear both sides of issues to go to the i guess the status
00:33:29.200
quo here i think anyone that's followed along with what happens what's happening to jordan peterson
00:33:33.280
knows that regulators are very powerful and the government has kind of done something quite
00:33:40.080
insidious here and i think maybe it started off with noble reasons but they say you know we're
00:33:44.400
going to just outsource the regulation of these fields to the fields themselves so it's you know
00:33:48.880
the lawyers that come together and deal with the law and make the law society it's doctors that
00:33:53.040
come together and make the medical colleges and then the government kind of just takes its hands
00:33:56.480
off them but the problem is that these regulatory bodies are incredibly powerful they're incredibly
00:34:02.000
well staffed and and they obviously have this culture that is not prone to respecting free
00:34:06.960
speech but let me ask you if the culture that you see in the colleges is reflective of the culture
00:34:13.760
you see broadly in your field or if everyone else is looking around at each other thinking like you
00:34:20.560
but the college has just become this mammoth that is more powerful than its members
00:34:25.040
Yeah, that's a great question. And actually, one of the topics of discussion
00:34:32.000
at the conference this weekend, we have a panel of lawyers who will be discussing the question,
00:34:35.600
is it nature or nurture? Is regulation creating the political climate or is the political climate
00:34:44.080
creating the legislation? And I'd say to some degree, it's just a vicious circle. They feed
00:34:49.200
on each other. So a bit of both. Certainly, the colleges have become very draconian. And as with
00:34:57.200
many institutions, they've been kind of captured by the left wing fringe. And there's a saying that
00:35:02.300
if you're not explicitly conservative, then you will become very, very progressive. And that's
00:35:07.420
John O'Sullivan's first law. Yeah. Yeah, that's what's happened with the colleges, certainly. So
00:35:12.900
what we've seen inside the colleges is this, what I would say, a movement to have more and more and
00:35:19.040
more wokeness embedded in the college like they put out missives about black lives matter and all
00:35:23.560
that and you know kind of the standard uh boilerplate stuff that we see from all organizations
00:35:29.180
now but and what they what's happened is they use um this term professionalism and i call it i call
00:35:36.660
it professionalism creep it's my own term for it professionalism used to be you know don't get
00:35:42.460
drunk and scream at your patients that's unprofessional and if you did that you would
00:35:47.020
understandably be hauled onto the mat, but then professionalism became a little bit more and a
00:35:51.960
little bit more and a little bit more. And now professionalism is, hey, you forgot to use the
00:35:57.160
correct pronoun for somebody when referring to them in one of your reports, or you called somebody
00:36:03.120
obese in your report. They're 320 pounds and five foot two, and you refer to them as obese.
00:36:09.320
That's unprofessional. So professionalism has crept and crept and crept to it now means if you
00:36:15.140
offend anyone with anything you say that's unprofessional and since you're a doctor we
00:36:20.980
can regulate you so it goes beyond like when i wrote my op-ed that had nothing to do with my
00:36:27.300
my day-to-day practice of medicine the complaints weren't from people who i had ever seen as
00:36:32.740
patients it was just people who didn't like what i said but they used the medical regulatory
00:36:37.620
college as a bludgeon to hammer my political opinion back with and colleges seem only too
00:36:45.060
happy to oblige you'll i've never heard of anybody with an opinion that was too far left-wing for the
00:36:50.820
colleges who they pursued but there's all kinds of people with um with either centrist or opinions
00:36:57.300
that could be considered conservative who they've gone after um is that reflective of what's happening
00:37:02.100
inside medicine to some degree yes medicine has become very uh feminized and not i don't mean just
00:37:08.020
more females but i mean feminized uh so medicine used to be a bit of a cowboy free for all you go
00:37:14.500
out there you work hard you look after your patients best you can a bit of a you know an
00:37:20.260
individualistic rugged kind of profession and now it's guideline driven and it's there's so much
00:37:27.540
about uh physician wellness that we hear every day and physician we're all physician burnout
00:37:33.620
we're all burnt out we all need to pay more attention to wellness the volume of people we
00:37:38.340
see is being cut down to take care of us better as a profession so the profession has become
00:37:44.180
real issues though because i i've heard from male doctors as well that have talked about just
00:37:48.260
increasing workload over the years i i've just i've never viewed those as being particularly
00:37:52.980
gendered issues uh yeah true enough uh true enough but certainly anybody but either by statistics or
00:38:01.620
or by softer measures we are a more feminized profession for better and for worse there's some
00:38:07.060
good things that have happened with that but you know ask ask a teacher if their job is easier now
00:38:12.180
ask a lawyer ask a police officer ask anyone in a position of authority in canada if they feel their
00:38:20.660
job is easier or more stressful in 2023 than it was say in 1990 and and every everything's become
00:38:27.540
more stressful but uh doctors we like to feel i would say we like to feel particularly hard done
00:38:32.580
by fair enough let me then ask you about the kind of the road forward here because i know that in
00:38:40.340
ontario lawyers a few years back and i know you have lisa bildi who's speaking at your conference
00:38:45.220
this year who was instrumental in this kind of did a hostile takeover of their law society and
00:38:49.860
they had some success. They organized around one specific issue. They had a little bit less success
00:38:54.900
in their most recent election. But is something like that possible within medicine? Could you
00:38:59.540
mount a hostile takeover of the colleges? Or is it really not structured in a way where you could
00:39:04.480
replicate what they try to do in the law society? It is not structured in that way. In theory,
00:39:11.220
we have some say in who regulates us. In reality, we have no say. It's still unclear to me exactly
00:39:19.440
how, for instance, the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Nova Scotia has a very bad
00:39:25.220
reputation. If you talk to 20 doctors, you get 20 negative opinions. But how anybody would change
00:39:32.640
that is beyond me. I don't think there's any way to do that. And unfortunately, because
00:39:38.860
medicine in Canada, we are the, you know, I'm not saying it's communist, but it's communist.
00:39:45.240
that it's completely government run completely government regulated there's no doctors are not
00:39:51.000
independent practitioners who do their own thing set their own fees set up the way they want to
00:39:56.120
practice it's all very much regulated on the canada health care act so out of any profession like
00:40:03.080
law law is the wild west compared to medicine um i i think we're you know this is this is a
00:40:09.400
difficult issue you know the in the woke infiltration of the law society is an issue
00:40:13.640
it's way worse and way harder to solve in medicine than it is in law you've got a fantastic lineup of
00:40:20.440
speakers i'm actually sorry i i can't make it this year to uh to report on it you've got kenneth
00:40:24.680
zucker and amy ham who've been very front and center on the the trans issue you've got lee
00:40:29.320
stability you've got my colleague rupa subramania you've got gad sad i mean i i'm just going through
00:40:34.920
the list you've got great names there and i i fear that all the issues that you and i have been
00:40:39.880
talking about are keeping a lot of good people out of medicine and i'm wondering if that's true
00:40:45.240
uh that you've heard even anecdotally if people that have been looking at going to med school
00:40:49.640
are kind of looking around saying i i don't want to be a part of this absolutely it's a problem
00:40:55.240
right so you as well just a little example to get into medical school at dell now during
00:41:05.400
covid they went to an online interview process because you know you don't want to make anybody
00:41:09.800
catch covet so they there was an online interview and you could you could record a video of your
00:41:15.960
answer to the question and you could record it and edit it and then finally send it when you're
00:41:19.400
happy and one of the questions was how are you going to promote diversity equity and inclusion
00:41:24.040
as a physician. Obviously, when you're trying to get into med school, you can go into med school
00:41:30.280
and make lots of money, or you can go and do something else that would be much less well paid.
00:41:36.680
People want to get in, and they know the right answer to that. The right answer is not,
00:41:41.000
I don't think diversity and equity inclusion is a priority for me. I think excellence is
00:41:46.040
a priority, and I just want to give excellent care, and I want to be colorblind. That is the
00:41:51.640
wrong answer and you will not get in so i've talked to numerous young people students who
00:41:58.760
are considering medical school and have heard and know this because it gets around pretty quick and
00:42:03.400
they realize i can either act woke which robs robs me of my soul or i have to actually be woke
00:42:13.560
and those are the two choices so it is going to drive good people out of medicine and and
00:42:18.360
basically, we're going to have more and more and more of an ideological bent on the people who
00:42:23.260
enter the field. And that's happening already. I definitely see that already.
00:42:27.600
Do you anticipate this being an annual thing? Or do you hope that you could actually make this
00:42:31.540
conference obsolete in the next couple of years? Oh, God, that's great. It would be lovely if we
00:42:37.680
didn't need this, right? I have lots of other things I'd rather do. I live here in Cape Breton.
00:42:42.180
I love kayaking. I love cutting a little bit of wood and sitting in front of my fire. But instead,
00:42:46.820
we've been slaving away for three months trying to get ready for this conference um i would love
00:42:51.940
to put myself out of business do i see that happening anytime soon no i think the trends
00:42:58.100
for free speech and medicine are still sadly they're heading in the wrong direction and
00:43:03.380
there's a lot more work to do are we going to turn the tide to some degree uh there are
00:43:09.460
a fair amount of doctors behind the scenes they come up to me in the mail room they make sure the
00:43:13.220
door is shut nobody's there and then they'll say chris i really like what you're doing but i i don't
00:43:17.860
think i can really come to the conference because they just don't want to be seen to be associated
00:43:21.540
with this um so hopefully over the next few years as more and more people are like okay this is
00:43:28.580
crazy this is crazy what we're doing we have to do something but hopefully more people will will
00:43:33.780
grow the courage necessary to to speak out and to start to turn the tide not happening yet but
00:43:41.060
i'm hopeful that it will yeah don't doctors get like professional development credits or something
00:43:45.780
for attending conferences do they get those at yours uh yeah not officially we we couldn't get
00:43:51.780
officially recognized as educational that we would have had to jump through all of the woke dei you
00:43:57.540
would have had to like started off with the land acknowledgement to put pronouns on the name tag
00:44:01.540
and like basically undermine it all like you were just saying right we don't we don't meet the cut
00:44:05.700
we don't make the cut for that yeah good well that makes it all the word that's like real
00:44:09.540
professional development right there screw the credits you're going to learn a lot all right
00:44:13.700
let me just ask you because i know a lot of people listening may be interested maybe perhaps not this
00:44:17.780
year but for the future it are is it just for the medical field field or do you have kind of a
00:44:22.820
layer outside of that of people that are just interested in the field no not at all so when
00:44:27.860
people sign up i ask them it's voluntary but i ask you know what's your profession what's your
00:44:31.220
interest in the conference we have everything from we have lots of doctors we have nurses we
00:44:35.780
have a strange number of strangely large number of dentists uh we have psychologists we have
00:44:43.860
teachers we have contractors we have stay-at-home moms we have um you you name the profession we
00:44:50.740
have some of them coming so it's all over the the map in terms of the people's background the one
00:44:57.940
thing that everybody has in common their interest is they're they're afraid that they're not getting
00:45:03.700
the whole balanced story on these difficult subjects transgenderism drug policy uh the
00:45:11.780
general issue of free speech they they don't feel that they're getting that that both sides of the
00:45:17.300
story and they want to hear it so these the people we have are just above average in terms of their
00:45:22.820
interest their their their desire to dig into things and really find out they're not just going
00:45:29.460
going to listen to CBC TV and formulate their opinion there they want it well yeah I mean when
00:45:34.440
doctors rights are suspended in this way patients rights are as well because if your doctor can't
00:45:39.700
speak their own mind you as a patient are now denied the benefit of what would have happened
00:45:44.300
had you heard that doctor's opinion so very very well said Dr. Chris Milburn one of the good ones
00:45:49.760
who's going to be assembling with the other good ones in Nova Scotia this weekend for the free
00:45:54.520
speech in medicine conference hopefully we'll be able to check out a future one there but Chris
00:46:22.900
This is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
00:46:25.920
It's being helmed by Baroness Stroud in the UK, but also involved are people you might have heard of,
00:46:32.120
like Leslyn Lewis, the Conservative MP, and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist extraordinaire that I just mentioned a few moments ago.
00:46:41.040
The ARC Forum, I mean, how it was originally explained to me is it's like the right answer to the World Economic Forum.
00:46:49.180
Now, I think that doesn't really do itself any favors because I don't know if the right needs an answer to the World Economic Forum,
00:46:54.820
but it's meant to be a global assembly of movers and shakers and thinkers that are focused on ideas
00:47:00.600
that really focus on freedom, responsibility, and citizenship.
00:47:08.120
I know a few other Canadians are going to be there as well.
00:47:11.500
So all next week, I'm going to be doing my show from London, not Ontario, but London in the United Kingdom.
00:47:17.900
We'll be at a different time, just to account for the fact that I'll be holed up in a conference room through the day.
00:47:24.060
So you can catch us at 5 p.m. Eastern or 3 p.m. Mountain all next week.
00:47:28.560
And we'll have reports from the ARC Forum in London.
00:47:32.940
And if any of you are going to be there, I will see you there.
00:47:35.460
But in the meantime, thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.
00:47:39.580
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:47:42.100
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.