Juno News - November 29, 2018


The True North Report： Justin Trudeau's Franco-virtue signalling


Episode Stats

Length

29 minutes

Words per Minute

170.9218

Word Count

5,117

Sentence Count

342

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary

In this episode, Andrew Lawton talks about the impact of GM's announcement that it's closing 5 plants across North America, including one in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, and the political response from Doug Ford and the NDP government in Ontario.


Transcript

00:00:00.780 Good afternoon, or I should say good morning for the next 29 minutes if you are in Canada's West Coast time zones today.
00:00:08.980 My name is Andrew Lawton, fellow with the True North Initiative, here to talk about all that is happening in the world
00:00:15.700 and hopefully in true True North Initiative fashion, try to put some solutions on the radar for you.
00:00:21.920 It's been a very busy week for news. I want to get through a few different stories here that have been happening.
00:00:28.420 And actually, I'm finding there is a common thread throughout them, and a lot of that comes down to priorities from the government.
00:00:38.380 I got the first reaction actually a minute ago, and it's an angry face.
00:00:41.420 I don't know if that's an angry face about me bombarding your screen or if it's an angry face about what the actual text of the live video is saying,
00:00:51.020 which is thousands of autoworkers are facing unemployment, and Justin Trudeau decides to wage a bilingualism war with Doug Ford.
00:00:59.120 Well, I guess I told you what we're talking about today.
00:01:01.420 It's huge, though, because we had just a few days ago the news from GM that it was shuttering five plants across –
00:01:09.520 I got another angry face. Okay, I'm just going to assume you are all angry at Justin Trudeau and not me,
00:01:14.340 and I'm sticking to it here. But we have the news that GM is shuttering five plants across North America,
00:01:21.600 two in Michigan, and one very significantly for Canadians in Oshawa.
00:01:26.700 Now, it's not GM's only facility in Oshawa, but it is a large one,
00:01:31.180 and it has been manufacturing Chevrolet products for the last century.
00:01:36.180 And it's as much a part – and I said this in a Looney Politics column today –
00:01:41.320 it's as much a part of the economic fabric of Oshawa and Durham region and all of this stuff
00:01:46.460 as it is about the community fabric in Oshawa.
00:01:50.400 Like, I've always, my whole life, I've known of GM and Oshawa as just being synonymous with one another.
00:01:56.380 I mean, that community built itself, as so many automotive sector communities did, around the plant.
00:02:03.340 And that is so key. And I know that Jennifer French, who we'll talk about in a few moments,
00:02:08.320 the NDP provincial representative there, the MPP, had said that, you know, GM didn't build Oshawa.
00:02:15.880 Oshawa built GM. And quite frankly, the two go hand in hand.
00:02:19.980 Whenever a plant closes, you see the ripple effect it causes.
00:02:24.120 And look, I've spent a lot of time in Detroit.
00:02:27.240 And what's fascinating in Detroit is when you see these plants that have closed down,
00:02:31.900 like the Packard plant or the Fisher plant, these giant plants,
00:02:35.360 you see for blocks and blocks and blocks, all of those abandoned houses of, quite frankly,
00:02:42.120 the people that used to work at that plant.
00:02:44.480 So, yes, these communities become very much defined by their largest employers.
00:02:50.520 And that is so true when it comes to Oshawa.
00:02:54.440 It's true with the automotive sector in general.
00:02:56.700 So I want to preface everything I say here by pointing out that I am with the workers
00:03:04.220 who are finding themselves facing unemployment at GM Oshawa.
00:03:09.260 I get it. And I understand the concerns.
00:03:11.920 And there are some people that I think have a tendency to shrug and go,
00:03:15.080 oh, well, that's the free market at work, you know, ta-da.
00:03:17.540 No, just because it is the free market at work and just because this is part of a natural cycle
00:03:22.300 of economics and employment and unemployment doesn't mean that it's good to watch.
00:03:27.300 It doesn't mean that it's nice to see.
00:03:29.380 And it doesn't mean that we should be celebrating it.
00:03:31.700 We can say this is reality, but that doesn't mean that we have to be happy about it.
00:03:37.380 And where I want to jump off from with this particular video is the political response to this.
00:03:43.960 Because I put a little video out the other day that was taking aim at this incentive
00:03:48.160 that governments are trying to talk about to how can we make them.
00:03:51.600 It's not an incentive. It's how can we force GM to stay here.
00:03:55.160 And Jennifer French, that NDP member of provincial parliament,
00:03:58.520 was saying that this decision must be fought.
00:04:01.480 Well, you can't fight it.
00:04:03.520 Government can't force a company to stay where it doesn't want to be.
00:04:07.760 But again, there is still a significant issue at stake when companies like GM
00:04:13.480 or any other large employer decides to pull up stakes.
00:04:16.760 This is an issue that's going to impact thousands of people.
00:04:19.700 It's an issue that's going to impact the fabric of that entire region
00:04:24.260 and of the manufacturing sector more broadly.
00:04:27.000 And it's one where governments still have to respond to it,
00:04:31.160 but their response has to be dealing with things that are within their parameters.
00:04:36.120 So government has to stay in its lane, so to speak.
00:04:40.540 And that's what Doug Ford has been doing in Ontario.
00:04:42.640 He's been saying, look, it's done, it's gone, we can't bring it back.
00:04:45.800 But what we can do is put the infrastructure in place for the workers who are displaced.
00:04:50.640 So he's looking a year down the road and saying, what can we do about EI benefits?
00:04:54.900 What can we do about retraining potential?
00:04:56.800 What can we do about making it so there is an economic climate for this company,
00:05:03.460 X company, not the spy agency X company, but company X, to say, all right,
00:05:08.040 we're going to move to Oshawa because there's a facility there.
00:05:10.360 We think we can do good.
00:05:11.720 And that Ontario province is open for business.
00:05:14.800 That's what's on all the signs now when you come into Ontario, thanks to Doug Ford.
00:05:19.080 So that's what the government's response should be.
00:05:22.160 Justin Trudeau similarly has to look at what is in his lane, which is how the federal government
00:05:28.120 can make things better for people without pushing it to the point of corporate welfare.
00:05:33.880 And that's not what Justin Trudeau has done instead this week.
00:05:39.240 So you've got a full-blown economic crisis at a local level, and that's what it is at
00:05:44.580 the local level.
00:05:45.320 It's not a national recession or anything like that, but you've got a significant economic
00:05:48.980 issue, and Justin Trudeau decides that he is going to instead take aim at Doug Ford over
00:05:57.940 bilingualism.
00:06:01.020 Yeah, and I bet all of the workers that are going to be losing their jobs in Oshawa soon
00:06:05.240 care so much about whether Franco-Ontarians can go to a university.
00:06:10.660 This is, if you're not from Ontario, you're going to absolutely love this story.
00:06:13.680 So in Ontario, which has 13.5 million residents, 600,000 of those, so if anyone in the comments
00:06:20.880 section wants to do some quick math and tell me what percentage of 13.5 million, 600,000
00:06:25.900 is, I think it's at, I'm not even going to try, I'm just going to embarrass myself, but
00:06:30.140 you've got 600,000 Franco-Ontarians.
00:06:34.780 Most of them, by the way, are in a few select pockets of the province, and Northern Ontario
00:06:40.480 is one of those, and one of the big issues that Doug Ford has found himself facing in
00:06:46.160 Ontario is whether he is going to follow through on spending commitments that were made to appease
00:06:52.960 Franco-Ontarians by the former Liberal government, the Liberal government he defeated in the June
00:06:57.880 election.
00:06:59.300 And this is so key here, because what's happened is he's taken a look at the books in Ontario
00:07:06.040 and find that there is a $15 billion deficit, $15 billion that the province just doesn't
00:07:12.260 have, that it is still on the hook for, that ultimately has to go to debt.
00:07:16.860 So he said, all right, what we can do is we can roll back a few different policies and
00:07:20.500 programs here.
00:07:21.600 One of them was what was going to be millions, tens of millions of dollars spent on setting
00:07:26.940 up a French language university in the province's capital of Toronto.
00:07:32.040 A French university in Ontario, which is technically a unilingual English province, even though there
00:07:39.440 are Franco-Ontarians, it is a bilingual province only in the federal context.
00:07:45.600 It specifically to the province is unilingual, and that is so significant right now.
00:07:51.260 So this was going to cost tens of millions of dollars.
00:07:54.160 A French language services commissioner, which is basically a government bureaucrat to make
00:07:58.720 sure that everyone is offering, you know, things in French to the extent that they can
00:08:02.720 and must, would be there.
00:08:04.700 And this was something Doug Ford came in, he's like, yeah, we don't need that, we don't need
00:08:08.440 that, we don't need that.
00:08:09.600 And by the way, I have been like clamoring for years to find a provincial leader in my
00:08:15.060 province that's just going to come in and say, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
00:08:18.280 Like that's so key right now.
00:08:21.300 So of course, the outrage from the Franco-Ontarians was very swift.
00:08:25.240 There's all of this identity politics nonsense we see with them, where they define themselves,
00:08:31.620 and you even see this in the media coverage about them, the minority, the Franco minority,
00:08:36.660 the French language minority.
00:08:38.120 So they're starting to characterize themselves as a minority, because once you have put minority,
00:08:45.760 and it's mathematically, yes, it's a minority.
00:08:48.220 I mean, I could say people that walk around with cheese graters on their heads, though, are
00:08:52.060 a minority, because there's only three of them.
00:08:53.840 But the, and all of them are in the NDP caucus, I mean, that's the downside.
00:08:58.280 But the fact is that, yes, they're a minority, because it's a small group.
00:09:02.280 And once we start catering to that minority, we are deliberately setting a policy objective
00:09:08.680 where we cater to the few, and only to the few, and then we'll have to cater to everyone.
00:09:16.280 And to illustrate the absurdity of this, I wanted, the French language university was ridiculous.
00:09:21.860 And I want to read a comment here that was in a news report by, I think it was CBC that
00:09:28.620 did the report here.
00:09:29.740 I have a few tabs open, so bear with me.
00:09:32.860 Yes.
00:09:33.440 So Carol Jolin, who's the president of the Francophone Assembly of Ontario, which apparently
00:09:38.280 exists, said when Doug Ford made the decision that it was a black day for Francos.
00:09:44.200 And she said about the French university, this line, quote, the French university was more
00:09:52.300 than just a French university.
00:09:54.420 It's a symbol for the province.
00:09:57.040 And it was a fantastic step forward.
00:10:01.860 Francois Legault, who is the new premier of Quebec, who's actually supposedly conservative,
00:10:07.480 said, I want French in Ontario to be protected as much as possible.
00:10:11.160 And Trudeau, of course, weighs in on this by saying he's deeply disappointed by cuts to
00:10:18.020 Ontario French services.
00:10:20.040 And Trudeau also commissioned like an emergency crack panel of all the party leaders to talk
00:10:25.480 about how the federal lawmakers and policymakers can respond to, you know, the egregiousness
00:10:31.600 of what Doug Ford is doing to Franco-Ontarians.
00:10:34.360 I mean, the level of response to a policy that impacts so few people in Ontario, but costs
00:10:42.540 money to the entirety of the province has been so fascinating to watch here.
00:10:47.940 And this morning, the French, I forget her exact title.
00:10:52.140 She was the parliamentary assistant to the minister of Francophone Affairs in Ontario.
00:10:56.320 The minister is Caroline Mulroney.
00:10:57.860 The parliamentary assistant was Andrea Simard, resigned from the PC caucus.
00:11:04.760 So, or Amanda Simard, rather.
00:11:07.100 Amanda Simard, who was just elected in June, resigned from the PC caucus over this.
00:11:12.540 Now, what's just emerged in the last hour is that she was about to be kicked out of caucus.
00:11:18.080 These two things were happening simultaneously.
00:11:20.640 The caucus was meeting.
00:11:21.860 She never showed up to the meeting.
00:11:23.100 And they were in the middle of a vote to get rid of her.
00:11:26.840 And in the middle of that, her letter was published.
00:11:30.060 The two happened independently of one another.
00:11:32.200 And then she ended up resigning.
00:11:33.680 But they were about to kick her out because she's been stirring up a fuss about this,
00:11:38.640 saying Doug Ford needs to, you know, roll back these cuts to French language services.
00:11:43.580 And it's actually quite astonishing.
00:11:46.240 Now, I don't know Amanda Simard.
00:11:47.920 I mean, she was just elected.
00:11:49.280 By all accounts, she's a hard worker and earned her election in Glengarry Prescott Russell.
00:11:54.860 But she is clearly not a conservative if her commitment to fiscal responsibility is overshadowed by her belief in tokenism
00:12:06.160 and really a handout culture that seems to be promulgated by her for Franco-Ontarians.
00:12:15.120 And this is not to say that Franco-Ontarians have a culture about handouts.
00:12:19.560 It's to say that that's the attitude that the lawmakers saying, we have to give them this, this, this, this, this.
00:12:24.920 That's the idea they're putting forward.
00:12:27.480 And I want to put this in context here because a French university in Ontario that that one spokesperson says is a symbol.
00:12:35.040 It's a symbol.
00:12:36.180 Symbols are expensive and they do nothing.
00:12:37.860 It's not a symbol for me.
00:12:38.920 But let me actually tell you how many Torontonians there are who speak French as their first language, who are Francophone Torontonians.
00:12:48.100 1.3%.
00:12:50.500 1.3%.
00:12:52.700 That's it.
00:12:54.180 So of the people in Toronto, 1.3% of them identify with French as their mother tongue.
00:13:01.660 And by the way, not all of those are French Canadians.
00:13:04.460 Some of them are actually like actual France, French people.
00:13:10.640 But this is what we're looking at here.
00:13:12.240 1.3%.
00:13:13.920 And this is the list in the 2016 census data that says the top languages of Toronto.
00:13:21.420 French is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12th on the list.
00:13:30.060 So of all of the languages that are people's first language in Toronto, French is number 12.
00:13:36.820 Let me share with you the first ones.
00:13:39.080 English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog.
00:13:42.660 Tagalog is number 4 at 3.1%.
00:13:45.120 Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Tamil, Farsi, Urdu, Russian, and then French.
00:13:51.760 So if we are to put a multi-million dollar university or college in place in Toronto for the French language minority, where's the Russian university?
00:14:03.320 Where's the Tagalog university?
00:14:04.980 Where's the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Tamil, Farsi?
00:14:07.880 I mean, at a certain point, we're going to have a street where all of the universities are basically just the United Nations because we've had to appease every single minority group possible for the sole purpose of buying votes in three or four different ridings.
00:14:21.000 And that's so absurd.
00:14:23.760 And I wish Doug Ford hadn't walked back the French languages commissioner thing.
00:14:29.220 That was one where he said, all right, we'll keep the French language services commissioner in place, but the university college still gone.
00:14:35.500 I mean, we can't afford it.
00:14:36.840 He wants to do it.
00:14:37.820 He says, look, this is something I support down the road, but we have a $15 billion deficit right now.
00:14:43.840 This is a luxury item, and it's one that we can't afford.
00:14:46.980 And that is so entirely reasonable.
00:14:49.980 Right.
00:14:51.000 If the French want a university so badly, or a college, rather, I keep using the two interchangeably here, then let them pay for it.
00:14:59.760 And there are schools, by the way, already in this space.
00:15:02.120 This wouldn't be the first example of someone being able to get French language education.
00:15:06.600 The University of Toronto offers French language studies.
00:15:09.540 You can go out of province.
00:15:10.720 There are places like Collège-Barre-Léal.
00:15:12.860 There are options for you to get a French language post-secondary education.
00:15:17.040 But why does this need to be something that we have in downtown Toronto with a multimillion dollar price tag for what is 600,000 people across the province and 1.3% of the population in Toronto?
00:15:32.540 That is ridiculous.
00:15:33.540 But it's Trudeau who, while we have people flooding across the borders, while you have thousands of Oshawa residents that are facing unemployment, decides he is going to devote his efforts to waging a bilingualism war against Doug Ford and the province of Ontario.
00:15:54.160 And I feel bad here for Andrew Scheer, because Andrew Scheer has to be the conservative leader that's not going to alienate Quebec, because Quebec cares not just about the French language in Quebec.
00:16:06.640 Quebec cares about the French language everywhere else.
00:16:10.100 So this is great.
00:16:11.080 Quebec, which wants every other province in...
00:16:13.400 This actually is making me mad.
00:16:15.300 It really is.
00:16:16.080 Because Quebec, which wants every other province in Confederation to leave it alone, has the gall to start telling Doug Ford and the Ontario government all the things they have to do to keep the French language alive and well.
00:16:30.060 Quebec, open up your damn wallets.
00:16:33.040 If you think other provinces need to do what you've decided is your job, to protect and preserve this French language culture within Canada.
00:16:41.500 Quebec should start giving money.
00:16:42.780 If Quebec wants to start, you know, colonizing French language pockets across the country, they should pay.
00:16:49.160 They should pay.
00:16:49.820 Let Quebec's government give a grant to the Ontario government to set up this college.
00:16:54.400 This is ridiculous that this is the discussion we're having in 2018.
00:16:59.920 That because the French language minority comes together and says, you know what, we think we need this, this, this, this, this, this.
00:17:06.180 In a unilingual province that has been, for too long, I think, pretending it's a bilingual province, why should it be incumbent on everyone else to pay for it?
00:17:19.540 And by the way, this is not a lack of appreciation for French culture.
00:17:23.280 It's not.
00:17:24.060 I'm not fluently bilingual, but I have a passing knowledge of French.
00:17:27.840 I love French Canada.
00:17:29.020 I love going to Quebec, Montreal, Quebec City, and I like that we are a country that has that.
00:17:35.140 But I only like that to the extent that it happens organically and naturally, not when the government tries to force it.
00:17:43.340 I mean, can you imagine right now the Quebec, let's just flip this, the Quebec government, which is so resistant to English-speaking operations, even private businesses.
00:17:52.180 If someone went to the Quebec government, if Doug Ford went to the Quebec government and said, I'm angry that you're not opening up an English university in Quebec.
00:18:01.080 Anglos are a minority in Quebec.
00:18:03.500 English-speaking Quebecers need to be protected because they're a minority.
00:18:07.740 No, if you were to say to the Quebec government, you know, we're concerned that the English pockets are eroding and the English minority is getting smaller, they would throw a parade.
00:18:18.500 They would cheer about that.
00:18:20.240 So I will not take any marching orders on how to deal with language harmony from a province that is hell-bent on eradicating its language minorities.
00:18:31.580 Quebec needs to butt out of this.
00:18:33.780 But Justin Trudeau is doing the same thing, where he's going to a province in Ontario and saying, we need to come up with a federal government response.
00:18:41.400 Look, bilingualism is a federal issue.
00:18:45.700 Bilingualism is a federal issue.
00:18:46.960 So if there is a concern with how language minorities are being treated, let the federal government pony up its cash.
00:18:53.680 And this is, by the way, what the Ontario government said a while ago, that if the federal government is going to make this an issue, it has to be prepared to put its money forward.
00:19:03.280 It has to be prepared to put its money where its mouth is here.
00:19:06.220 And the fact that Justin Trudeau is now deciding to come up with issues facing the Canadian francophony with Jagmeet Singh, with Elizabeth May, with Andrew Scheer, and with Mario Beaulieu, who's the interim Bloc Québécois leader, like that's his priority this week.
00:19:23.240 That's all. If you were to send someone to look at all the headlines across the provinces and the country and all of that and say, what are the biggest issues right now in Canada?
00:19:32.720 They would say, well, based on what Justin Trudeau is doing, it sounds like this is the one, the language issues.
00:19:41.420 And yes, I get that he can walk and chew gum.
00:19:44.940 I get that Justin Trudeau is able to look at multiple issues and do that.
00:19:49.740 But right now we've got a very significant challenge that involves the Prime Minister of Canada and Doug Ford, and that is the government's response on employment insurance and other social services and retraining and all of that stuff.
00:20:03.720 And instead, Justin Trudeau is picking a fight on bilingualism.
00:20:07.600 And this discussion, I fear, is never going to go away in Canada.
00:20:12.520 I don't think it will.
00:20:14.200 And this bugs me so much.
00:20:16.060 If you haven't been able to tell, and it's funny, I didn't think that I would get all worked up about this.
00:20:21.640 But I do because of the arrogance in so many of these people right now that are saying, Ontario has to pay for this, this, this, this, this.
00:20:30.000 The money simply isn't there.
00:20:33.140 And you know where else the French are a minority?
00:20:35.680 Alberta, B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba.
00:20:38.320 And I would love to see how this discussion would go over in Alberta.
00:20:42.340 And I get that Franco-Ontarians are a group, and I'm not denying that.
00:20:48.420 Franco-Ontarians are a legitimate demographic group.
00:20:51.820 600,000 people is not an insignificant number, but it is, by definition, a very small subset of the population.
00:21:00.220 That's less than 5%.
00:21:01.980 That's less than 5% of the population.
00:21:04.800 And, you know, even that I find to be a little bit hard to believe in most parts, because I could go down the street in London, Ontario, and 1 in 20 people are not going to be Franco-Ontarians.
00:21:16.280 1 in 20 people are not going to be French-Canadians.
00:21:19.260 It's going to be, I think, in the city of Toronto, well, 1.3%.
00:21:22.740 So, you know, 1 in 90 people you'll meet there will be French as a first language.
00:21:28.720 It's in cities like Ottawa.
00:21:30.620 It's in cities like Timmins.
00:21:32.480 It's in ridings like Glengarry, Prescott, Russell.
00:21:35.460 But I actually wanted to put some numbers to you here.
00:21:38.240 And this came about from a report that CBC's Eric Grenier did.
00:21:43.480 And it's about the, it's about the riding math, basically, when you look at some of the numbers here.
00:21:51.060 Because the reaction to Doug Ford doing this, LeJoy called it a black day for Francos.
00:21:58.120 And, oh, I forget the line that Le Devoir, Le Devoir, oh my goodness, that was such an Anglo way of saying it.
00:22:04.140 Le Devoir.
00:22:05.820 I don't have their line here.
00:22:07.400 But, I mean, the media coverage from outside of Ontario was bad.
00:22:11.080 But here is the math on this, if I can find it in this story.
00:22:17.720 So, outside of Quebec, there are four ridings that have majority Francophone populations.
00:22:24.820 This is nationwide.
00:22:26.280 Outside of Quebec, four ridings.
00:22:27.740 Three of them are in New Brunswick, which is actually Canada's only officially bilingual province.
00:22:33.240 And one in Ontario.
00:22:34.900 There are 14 ridings where Francophones make up 10% of the population.
00:22:42.380 New Brunswick, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba.
00:22:45.500 So, in the entire country, outside of Quebec, there are just 14 ridings.
00:22:52.480 14 political ridings in the country where Francophones even make up 10% of the population.
00:22:59.100 And half of those voted Conservative in 2011.
00:23:03.240 So, the Conservatives don't want to rock the boat on this much.
00:23:06.460 But we're looking at, in Ontario specifically, a tiny, tiny, tiny number of ridings that are impacted by this.
00:23:15.440 And it's not to say that decisions like right and wrong should be made based on the political math.
00:23:20.720 But we know that politics is going to be the driving force behind a lot of these decisions and whatnot.
00:23:27.620 But it is actually so tremendously upsetting to me that we are entertaining these discussions where someone says, a group says, I want my French language college.
00:23:40.580 Therefore, you've got to pay for it.
00:23:42.860 And let's look, I mean, you can find other languages that are spoken by similar numbers.
00:23:49.000 And these groups, like I said, in Toronto, which is where the school will be going, Tagalog.
00:23:53.120 Okay, let's bankroll the Tagalog University on Yonge Street.
00:23:56.440 And then we'll go after the Urdu University.
00:23:58.880 But, oh, no, you don't want to alienate the Farsi.
00:24:00.840 So, the Farsi University and then the Tamil University.
00:24:03.760 And like I said, you've got the United Nations of government-funded post-secondary institutions here.
00:24:08.580 Just because we've got groups that have this political clout.
00:24:13.760 And Amanda Samard, who, again, I don't know.
00:24:16.960 I've never met her.
00:24:17.840 Even though I thought I had met most of the PC caucus members, I've never met her.
00:24:22.540 And that she would step aside from a career that she could have had for a very long time.
00:24:27.800 She's, I think, 20, 29 years old or something.
00:24:30.320 She was born in 89.
00:24:31.440 So, she's one of the younger MPPs.
00:24:33.320 And she could have been there in that riding, Blengarry Prescott Russell, probably for the next 25 years.
00:24:38.580 If she wanted to.
00:24:40.020 And the fact that she would resign from caucus.
00:24:43.020 Because a woman who got elected, and I was a candidate in that election.
00:24:46.820 I know the message that we were telling people was, we've got to start tightening our belt.
00:24:51.520 We, as a province, have to live within our means.
00:24:53.520 We, as a province, can't spend money on luxuries and can't waste money.
00:24:57.380 She would have been selling that same message to voters in her riding in June.
00:25:01.420 But that all of a sudden, when it comes to a handout that specifically targets her and her community, all of a sudden, she throws that out the wind and says, we want it.
00:25:12.900 We want it now.
00:25:13.520 And this is the problem.
00:25:16.080 Anyone who takes that attitude of entitlement is someone for whom I have very little time.
00:25:21.960 And we're seeing a lot more of that.
00:25:23.880 And after this, I think we're going to see that become the norm and the normal response from anyone.
00:25:29.780 I mean, we've got Sikh MPPs, and you've got Muslim MPPs, and you've got Jewish MPPs.
00:25:36.280 I mean, all of them now.
00:25:37.140 Okay, we need a Jewish university.
00:25:38.740 We need that.
00:25:39.360 And none of those have the constitutional protections and the national identity ingrained like the French language does.
00:25:45.880 I realize it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
00:25:49.640 But we are talking about, and the way this issue is framed, protecting the French minority.
00:25:56.940 That's how it's termed.
00:25:58.020 That's how the Quebec premier discusses it.
00:25:59.980 That's how Justin Trudeau discusses it.
00:26:01.880 And that's how the media discusses it.
00:26:03.560 And when they frame it as protection of the minority, that logic or lack thereof is what makes it a launching point for any group imaginable that wants to take that minority status to say, all right, well, now we need to protect our minority.
00:26:21.120 And before you know it, we are more defined by our differences than we are by our similarities.
00:26:28.020 And there is no way that the cultural fabric of a province or a country can be maintained with that.
00:26:35.560 And more importantly, it's just not economically viable, nor is it practical, to make that the way that you govern yourself.
00:26:43.220 So most people, and this is the rationale here that I think is interesting, is that 95% of the province does not care about this.
00:26:53.840 95% of the province of Ontario, for whom the French language is not their first language, are hearing this story and being like, what the heck?
00:27:01.240 Like, and especially people in my city in southwestern Ontario, people in Toronto, people in Windsor has a bit of a French population, but not huge.
00:27:09.800 People in these cities are like, I don't, who are these people?
00:27:13.440 And they do exist.
00:27:15.340 They exist in and around Ottawa.
00:27:17.000 They exist in Glengarry, Prescott, Russell.
00:27:18.860 They do exist, but they are now hijacking this national discussion, despite occupying less than 5% of the demographic makeup in Ontario.
00:27:33.400 And for Amanda Simard, look, if she made this decision on principles, power to her.
00:27:38.100 But I question her principles when it becomes more about getting a targeted handout than actually sticking to the values that she was elected to champion.
00:27:48.860 We've got to wrap things up here.
00:27:50.580 If you want to reach out to me for this or anything else, my email address is andrew at andrewlotton.ca.
00:27:57.500 And thanks to all for your comments here.
00:27:59.560 I'll read a couple of them before we wrap up here.
00:28:02.260 Maluska writes, I apologize if I didn't get that.
00:28:05.180 See, Maluska sounds like a non-English origin name, so maybe you can get a university.
00:28:10.460 How about we think about paying off as much of our deficit before we add more debt?
00:28:14.440 Yeah, that's huge.
00:28:15.140 That's the whole point of this thing is that we can't afford it in Ontario.
00:28:20.440 Karen writes, divide Canadians even further.
00:28:23.500 Yeah, that seems to be the attitude.
00:28:25.520 And Dave writes, just give them directions to Quebec.
00:28:28.800 Done.
00:28:29.340 Well, yeah, and quite frankly, if you are a Franco-Ontarian and it's really, really important that you protect your French language, go to a French school.
00:28:37.880 Or go to one of the existing ones, go to Ottawa U, which is Ottawa you walk around and the population of English speakers versus French speakers there seems very similar to one another.
00:28:48.300 And let's see what else we have here.
00:28:50.320 Mike says, go after Wynne to pay the debt back.
00:28:52.640 Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
00:28:53.980 Doug Ford's first year in office will just be undoing the damage that Kathleen Wynne did.
00:28:58.460 And Rennie writes, it's called diversionary politics.
00:29:02.000 They must think we're all a bunch of herded sheep.
00:29:04.260 Well, I think they have very cynical views of the Canadian voters.
00:29:09.660 Certainly that's how Justin Trudeau is managing this.
00:29:12.440 All right, thanks everyone for tuning in.
00:29:14.240 We'll be back next week and have a little video commentary as well.
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00:29:39.540 We're trying to keep this discussion going.
00:29:41.240 But I do think that it is so important that if you do value what we're doing that you throw in, it can be a couple of bucks one time.
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00:29:53.100 So thanks very much to all.
00:29:54.580 Thank you.
00:29:54.980 God bless.
00:29:55.560 And good day, Canada.