Juno News - The World Economic Forum is calling for ＂cooperation＂ to combat crisis

00:00:00.980 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:13.200 Hello and welcome to you all. This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:18.620 You're tuned in to the Andrew Lawton Show live on January 11th, 2023, just after 4.02pm Eastern Time.

00:00:27.280 So that's 1.02 p.m. if you're in beautiful British Columbia.

00:00:31.200 It is, that means, just after 2 o'clock for those of the Andrew Lawton Show's listening and viewing audience in the lovely province of Alberta.

00:00:40.520 And I always get mixed up on where Saskatchewan is in relation to the times of year.

00:00:45.620 Because I know it's, I think it's like two hours, Saskatchewan, right now.

00:00:48.100 And except for when Daylight Savings is off.

00:00:50.280 Anyway, whatever it is, you know what time it is in Saskatchewan and in Manitoba.

00:00:53.460 we are just after three o'clock in Atlantic Canada where it gets really wacky we've got

00:00:58.360 those of you in the Maritimes at five and a nice 5 33 for our listeners and viewers in Newfoundland

00:01:05.360 and Labrador so wherever you are listening from we welcome you to the show this is actually going

00:01:10.800 to be my last Andrew Lawton show not forever but my last Andrew Lawton show from this studio

00:01:16.220 for a couple of weeks because I'm actually tomorrow on my way to Switzerland.

00:01:22.600 I am not doing the big ski trip.

00:01:25.340 I'm not doing a cheese tour.

00:01:27.000 I am not spinning around in a field and recreating a scene from The Sound of Music.

00:01:31.640 I know that was Austria, but the scenery is very similar, and I did that last time.

00:01:36.400 No, I am there for the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland,

00:01:42.060 which kicks off this basically on Monday.

00:01:45.460 but there's a little bit of preparation they do ahead of time that makes it worth being on the

00:01:50.520 ground and i am going there for you true north is for the second time going to be covering

00:01:56.680 the wef's annual meeting and this one by klaus schwab's determination and description this is

00:02:03.560 the founder and chairman of the world economic forum it's going to have unprecedented participation

00:02:10.300 It's going to have more heads of government, heads of state, finance ministers, foreign ministers than they've ever had before.

00:02:18.440 And as I mentioned on yesterday's show, this includes a couple of Canadian cabinet ministers.

00:02:23.420 We know Chrystia Freeland is going to be there.

00:02:26.200 She is the finance minister and deputy prime minister.

00:02:29.020 We also know that Mary Ng, who is the international trade and economic development and small business, middle class, Prospera. 0.55

00:02:39.520 I don't know. That's another one. She's the trade minister. She's going to be there as well. 1.00

00:02:43.100 And as we learned today, we actually have some new information that we didn't have yesterday.

00:02:48.060 Freeland and Ng will actually be speaking at the WEF.

00:02:53.160 Chrystia Freeland, let me just pull it up here, is on a panel called Restoring Security and Peace.

00:02:59.220 She is going to be speaking alongside Fareed Zakaria from CNN and Jen Stoltenberg from NATO

00:03:05.240 and the president of Poland and Avril Haines, who's the director of national intelligence

00:03:10.820 from the office of the director of national intelligence.

00:03:14.180 I think she could probably use a bit of a spruce above her title there.

00:03:18.100 And then Minister Ng is going to be on a panel, not as distinguished, but still distinguished

00:03:23.640 with the Financial Times editor Martin Wolf with the CEO of Holkim, Jan Janish, I believe

00:03:32.900 is his name, and India's Minister of Railways, Communications, Electronics, and Information

00:03:38.580 Technology. Now, there's a portfolio for you. Now, interestingly enough, the topic of Mary

00:03:44.480 Ng's panel here, bricks or clicks, what kind of investment do economies need? So it's basically

00:03:50.880 what should government be throwing away your tax dollars on? Chrystia Freeland, who is the

00:03:56.320 Finance Minister, is speaking about security and peace. Now, obviously, she was Canada's

00:04:02.520 foreign minister. But I find it interesting that she has never wanted to stop being Canada's

00:04:07.280 foreign minister, even when they gave that job to Melanie Jolie. So I think that the rumors that

00:04:13.540 Freeland might be auditioning to become the new Secretary General of NATO are probably, there's

00:04:18.100 probably some truth to that. So we'll see if she aces the audition at the World Economic Forum. 0.90

00:04:23.820 That is on January 18. So exactly one week from today that Freeland's panel is taking hold. And

00:04:30.140 we've got lots of canadians there we've had some time to go through the agenda and we have mark

00:04:35.700 carney who's on three panels i think that might actually be a new record all carney all the time

00:04:40.740 we have the ceo of bmo we have someone from a group called the tamarack institute or the

00:04:48.060 tamarack foundation which i'm not too too familiar with but i'll do a little bit of digging before

00:04:52.960 next week all of this is to set the stage for what last week or last year when i was there

00:04:59.760 someone characterized as billionaire disneyland and it was actually a remarkably apt comparison

00:05:05.480 because you have all of these global elites that fly in on their private jets that take their limos

00:05:10.320 to sessions where they talk about how it is important that we live with less and

00:05:15.100 how it's important that we transition away from fossil fuels and how we do what my personal

00:05:20.820 favorite from last time was install alibaba's carbon footprint tracker take a look

00:05:26.420 ...through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint.

00:05:37.380 What does that mean?

00:05:38.940 That's where are they traveling?

00:05:41.140 How are they traveling?

00:05:42.520 What are they eating?

00:05:44.000 What are they consuming on the platform?

00:05:46.260 So, individual carbon footprint tracker.

00:05:50.100 Stay tuned.

00:05:51.120 We don't have it operational yet, but this is something that we're working on.

00:05:56.420 Oh, stay tuned. Yeah, you got to stay tuned for that. I got to check my phone now. Do I have my

00:06:01.760 personal carbon footprint tracker installed? Nope, not yet. So Alibaba won't know how I got

00:06:07.920 to Switzerland, what I've eaten in Switzerland. It won't be the bug sandwich, I assure you,

00:06:12.720 unless there is, well, nothing else on the menu there. But what's happening that I find

00:06:18.960 fascinating is these discussions are had in a very nonchalant way. And a lot of the time,

00:06:23.580 people don't really pay attention to them and sometimes things will seep out of the hallowed

00:06:29.240 halls of Davos and into the mainstream. For example, that famous essay from a few years ago

00:06:34.780 about owning nothing and being happy. This has now become a bit of a refrain that people are

00:06:41.000 familiar with and one of the more pervasive criticisms of the WEF. But a lot of the time

00:06:46.520 these things are discussed among people that are in very real positions to do something

00:06:52.220 about the ideas they're championing heads of government heads of corporations heads of

00:06:57.320 non-governmental organizations heads of myriad groups as well and well these discussions are

00:07:03.700 not legally binding they tend to lay out a roadmap a roadmap that all of these activist types are all

00:07:10.760 too willing to follow and i told the story previously there was this one weird thing that

00:07:15.960 happened in davos where the un sustainable development goals this is this thing it looks

00:07:20.800 like they've got a logo that looks like a trivial pursuit board with these little different colored

00:07:25.160 pie wedges and you're walking around you see people wearing these sustainable development

00:07:29.720 goal pins and you're like oh wow they must work for the UN oh wow that guy and then at a certain

00:07:34.340 point I'm like wow a lot of UN staff are here and I realized that they were not actually UN

00:07:39.680 employees they were just like one guy the president of Microsoft was wearing a UN sustainable

00:07:44.760 development goals pin just because he wanted to show off how committed Microsoft is to these

00:07:50.020 SDGs. So the challenge that I've always raised with people when they talk about the more

00:07:56.040 conspiratorial thinking of Klaus Schwab pulling the strings of Justin Trudeau, that's not the

00:08:01.340 problem of Davos. That's not the problem of the World Economic Forum. The problem is that these

00:08:07.260 groups are laying out ideological roadmaps that people like Justin Trudeau enthusiastically

00:08:13.000 follow, that people like Chrystia Freeland enthusiastically want to bring back to Canada

00:08:17.780 and know that they have backing and support from the private sector,

00:08:22.360 from other government leaders, from the United Nations, from Klaus Schwab.

00:08:25.900 And that's, I think, more dangerous than there being some puppet master

00:08:30.420 that you could overcome by just voting out the person

00:08:32.860 who is being controlled by the puppet master.

00:08:35.200 That's not what's happening there.

00:08:36.900 What's happening is that there's a platform that's being put forward

00:08:40.060 in which they claim there isn't a particular agenda,

00:08:44.660 that it's all about dialogue and cooperation and these things and everyone comes to the table and

00:08:49.540 they all talk about which ideas they want to champion but the problem is that you can't vote

00:08:54.040 these people out you can't actually vote out the facilitators and conveners at Davos who do have

00:09:00.280 an agenda who do have policy prescriptions and we see that very clearly from some of the things that

00:09:06.100 they decide to entertain and I would want to play a couple of clips for you from the last session

00:09:12.420 just so you understand the value of being there on the ground and following this as closely as we

00:09:18.520 will. But first, I want to share with you a clip from Klaus Schwab himself. Now, this was a press

00:09:23.460 conference that he and World Economic Forum directors held yesterday. And this was, I think,

00:09:30.860 a very fascinating example of how the messaging just doesn't even try to make it so that the

00:09:38.080 Critics have nothing to go on, like Klaus Schwab is single-handedly a content mill.

00:09:43.100 This was how he described the importance of being there in person.

00:09:47.620 It is so exciting that at the beginning of the year, we can meet again in person.

00:09:55.560 Only personal interaction creates a necessary level of trust,

00:10:01.900 which we need so much in our fragmented and fractured world.

00:10:06.400 To bring people together for an informal dialogue in a remote Swiss village such as Stavos can be or should be a good recipe to restore trust.

00:10:23.300 I get that it's important to have everyone under one roof and in-person diplomacy, face-to-face diplomacy.

00:10:30.520 Some things are just not as fun when you do them by Zoom.

00:10:33.560 So I'm all on board with that.

00:10:34.900 it's the idea that, oh, we have to bring everyone to a remote Swiss village.

00:10:41.160 That's the way we understand what's happening in the world.

00:10:44.380 We have to bring everyone.

00:10:45.240 It has to be a remote Swiss village like Davos

00:10:47.580 that's going to give us the preconditions for cooperation, for building trust.

00:10:52.420 That's all what we're supposed to accept and take at face value here.

00:10:56.620 Now, what I find important to note here

00:10:59.460 is that oftentimes Davos is basically a safe space for the elites,

00:11:05.340 where the people that go there are not used to being challenged.

00:11:08.880 They're not used to people asking them questions.

00:11:11.080 I tried to do an interview with Mark Carney,

00:11:13.500 and he actually, to his credit, had a good sense of humor when he was rebuffing me.

00:11:17.940 You can find the clip online.

00:11:19.360 But Mark Carney was basically saying, oh, I don't do spontaneous interviews.

00:11:23.380 And I asked him the next day when I ran into him if we could do the interview then

00:11:26.840 because it would be less spontaneous.

00:11:28.160 And he said, oh, Andrew, but think of how much less spontaneous it'll be tomorrow.

00:11:32.520 Well, tomorrow will be next week.

00:11:34.940 And I'll ask him, you've had a year to cogitate on this now.

00:11:38.500 Perhaps we can have that non-spontaneous interview.

00:11:41.500 But what was fascinating to me is how so many of these elites were not even believing what they were selling.

00:11:49.060 There was one session in particular where India's petroleum minister, Minister Puri, was speaking alongside some other energy and resource ministers.

00:11:57.540 and they're all talking on stage about how we need to accelerate the transition away from oil

00:12:01.860 and gas. We need to get off fossil fuels. Green energy is the future. And I found him on the

00:12:08.400 street. I found him on the street, not like living on the street. I found him walking on the street.

00:12:13.400 I realized that sounded bad. And I just asked him a very fundamental question. Take a look.

00:12:19.320 We're on a panel about oil and gas and energy this morning. Do you think

00:12:22.320 phasing out of fossil fuels is actually a realistic goal?

00:12:25.780 Look, I said what I had to, but, you know, if you were to do that survey in different parts of the world,

00:12:33.320 if you were to do it, for instance, in South Asia or Africa or in Latin America,

00:12:39.060 you'd get results that might be a little different from the kind of results you're getting.

00:12:44.000 So the survey he mentioned was when the moderator of the panel just asked everyone in the room and on stage

00:12:49.520 about the transition and whether they can do it.

00:12:51.860 And they all just put up their hands and say,

00:12:53.180 yeah, we're doing that.

00:12:54.220 And then he admits like an hour later

00:12:56.400 on the streets of Davos,

00:12:58.080 that was on the promenade,

00:12:59.260 which is the main drag there,

00:13:00.940 that, oh yeah, I said what I had to,

00:13:02.560 but if you talk to everyone else outside of the world,

00:13:04.800 they're going to think about it differently.

00:13:06.420 Well, why didn't you say that in the room?

00:13:08.660 Why didn't you say that these prescriptions

00:13:10.520 that are being laid out in Davos

00:13:12.420 do not actually align with what the governed deal with

00:13:16.300 and what the governed think

00:13:17.420 and what the governed have to do in their own lives.

00:13:20.160 So if you want to rebuild trust,

00:13:22.820 don't have it in the remote Swiss village of Davos.

00:13:26.720 Actually have it in Calcutta,

00:13:30.600 have it in downtown Philadelphia,

00:13:33.420 have it in a city that is filled with the very people

00:13:36.920 who are most affected by the things that are discussed

00:13:40.340 in the remote Swiss mountain village.

00:13:43.940 And that's the big frustration that I have with this thing

00:13:47.160 is that they want to have these high-level discussions

00:13:49.700 and they want to have discussions about things

00:13:52.540 that to them are abstract,

00:13:54.100 but to people like you and I are very real.

00:13:57.340 One in particular,

00:13:58.380 just to go through the highlights from May,

00:14:00.380 was Julie Inman Grant,

00:14:02.080 who is the e-safety commissioner of Australia,

00:14:05.220 just nonchalantly talking about how,

00:14:07.400 well, we need to think about things in the modern world

00:14:09.740 and maybe things like free speech

00:14:11.520 don't even need to have the same meaning

00:14:13.860 they always have for us.

00:14:17.160 finding ourselves in a place um where we're we have increasing polarization everywhere and

00:14:23.420 everything feels binary when it doesn't need to be so i think we're going to have to think about

00:14:28.260 a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online you know from freedom

00:14:33.120 of speech to the freedom to you know to be free from online violence or the right of data protection

00:14:40.340 to the right to child dignity.

00:14:44.780 You know, I'm all for having a recalibration of free speech too,

00:14:48.200 but mine is not the same definition of the World Economic Forum

00:14:51.540 when it comes to recalibrating,

00:14:52.920 because I actually want genuine free speech here,

00:14:56.100 not this thing that we have to muddy around

00:14:58.380 and change the name of and change the meaning of for people.

00:15:03.220 And what I find noteworthy about this

00:15:05.980 is that you may have heard in the last few months,

00:15:07.860 Pierre Polyev has really committed to this idea that things are broken in Canada, that people are

00:15:12.720 broken, that people are hurting, that systems aren't working. And Justin Trudeau was so offended,

00:15:18.620 was just so aggravated and angered by this. How dare you say that things are broken in Canada?

00:15:24.300 Things are great. We're working through it. What I find interesting here is that the WEF

00:15:30.560 narrative right now is ironically very similar to the Polyev narrative, not in the same way,

00:15:36.640 But they're saying that everything's broken.

00:15:39.220 They're saying we have crises, we have inflation, we have cost of living, we have war, we have

00:15:43.260 climate change.

00:15:44.280 I don't agree with what they're saying are all the crises, but they're saying that everything's

00:15:48.200 in crisis and the prescription is more cooperation by the World Economic Forum.

00:15:54.340 Well, the World Economic Forum has been meeting for the last 50 years.

00:15:58.320 So I don't actually think the World Economic Forum has been the salvation of the world's

00:16:03.960 problems.

00:16:04.360 Vladimir Putin, two years ago, was a keynote speaker at Davos and about a year ago invaded

00:16:11.940 Ukraine. You may have seen it on the news, made a big splash. People are still going over there.

00:16:15.980 So if the WEF was this great platform for fostering cooperation, how did having Vladimir Putin at the

00:16:21.880 table a year before the invasion of Ukraine do anything to help the people of Europe?

00:16:27.800 It didn't. It absolutely didn't. Xi Jinping has also spoken there. This time around,

00:16:33.400 we've got the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom. So all of these people, you can bring them there,

00:16:41.220 you can load them up into a room, you can have a party bus of world elites. But by your own

00:16:45.740 admission, WEF, the world is not getting better. It's getting worse. So why are we supposed to

00:16:53.380 believe that these people have all the solutions? Instead, they have this, what is effectively a

00:16:59.980 transfer of power and a transfer of resources that they prescribe. We want to transfer away

00:17:05.140 from oil and gas. Great. What it means is more control to governments, more control

00:17:08.660 to the corporations that had the foresight to hang out in Davos with leaders of government.

00:17:15.860 So this is going to be something that we commit to covering next week. As I said, I'm going to

00:17:20.720 be leaving tomorrow night. We'll have a little bit of some scene setting coverage from the ground

00:17:25.700 in switzerland and then all next week we will do everything we can to give you the news that

00:17:30.640 you're not finding anywhere else and if you have any questions by the way do share them in the

00:17:34.520 comments things you're curious about i might do a little bit of an ask me anything type thing

00:17:38.940 probably after but if there's anything you're looking for we can of course find ways to do

00:17:43.940 that and i believe one of our team members here has said that they're going to put a poll out on

00:17:48.200 facebook about how many crickets i should eat at the wef if he does that please please please

00:17:53.640 select zero for my own sake and yours because if i come to this and i have like wings and legs

00:18:00.440 sticking out of my teeth it won't be a pretty sight on there so we'll save the cricket sandwich

00:18:04.220 for afterwards uh want to shift gears speaking of the concentration of government control

00:18:09.840 to something we started off talking a bit about yesterday and i wanted to dig further into today

00:18:15.940 which is the federal government's use of PEI, I'll say abuse of PEI, as a trial run for the

00:18:24.880 national gun confiscation that is coming, the government claims, in spring of 2023. So just

00:18:31.440 to set the stage here, what happened is the government in 2020 prohibited 1,500 types of

00:18:37.600 what they call assault-style firearms. On this list was the AR-15. There was also the Mini-14.

00:18:44.960 There were a number of other guns used for sports shooting, some used for hunting, some

00:18:50.200 that had been used without issue in Canada for years, and the government prohibited them

00:18:54.780 overnight.

00:18:55.800 And if you had one of those, you would be a criminal had the government not put in place

00:19:00.040 an amnesty that lasted two years.

00:19:03.740 And the government said, we're going to buy all these from you.

00:19:06.240 So 2022 comes around.

00:19:08.780 They do not have the buyback program in place.

00:19:11.620 So they kicked the amnesty back to October of 2023.

00:19:15.640 So now the government buys itself a little bit more time.

00:19:18.820 They still, at this point, January 2023, do not have this buyback in place.

00:19:24.560 So what they're talking about is doing one in PEI.

00:19:28.660 And they say it's already underway, commenced in December 2022 and going right to the end of the amnesty period.

00:19:35.280 The RCMP is going to lead this along with the Public Safety Department.

00:19:39.300 That's Marco Mendicino's division.

00:19:41.620 And they're going to use this as a pilot project, collect information, and then in a national rollout in spring of 2023.

00:19:50.180 So coming up, theoretically, as soon as two to three months from now, they'll expand this nationally.

00:19:56.520 So basically, the government is picking on PEI gun owners, making them the first victims of this property confiscation.

00:20:05.500 I want to welcome into the show here a gentleman from PEI who knows the firearms issue very well.

00:20:10.680 He is the president of the PEI Wildlife Federation.

00:20:14.520 His name is Duncan Crawford.

00:20:16.580 Duncan, good to talk to you.

00:20:17.860 Thanks very much for coming on today.

00:20:20.200 Hi, Andrew. Thanks for having me.

00:20:21.900 So first off, what did all of you do?

00:20:23.780 Why are you drawing the short stick here?

00:20:25.380 Why is the government picking on you guys?

00:20:28.180 To be perfectly honest, I'm not 100% sure.

00:20:32.080 It kind of snuck up on us.

00:20:33.580 I never received any official notice,

00:20:36.120 And I deal with our firearms office on a pretty regular basis, being, you know, a small business dealer in firearms and ammunition.

00:20:46.760 So, yeah, it came as a bit of a surprise.

00:20:48.760 And then I've heard through the grapevine that various people have been contacted.

00:20:53.400 Strangely, like folks that are now deceased next to kin have been contacted regarding certain firearms and where they might be.

00:21:00.780 So, yeah, and then, of course, see the article that you would have seen.

00:21:04.820 And as a small shop owner, we've had more questions than answers.

00:21:11.000 Now, just on the note of you being a shop owner, do you have inventory that's been frozen since May 2020?

00:21:18.860 There might be a couple items, not too much.

00:21:21.500 I don't stock a ton of items.

00:21:23.880 I own a taxidermy studio and a number of other things.

00:21:27.420 so I specialize in firearms and ammunition that are strictly used for hunting and more often than

00:21:34.060 not I most of my clientele and customers have very specific wants so they'll tell me what they want

00:21:40.140 I source it I get it in we maintain it quite a small inventory I do know some of the larger shops

00:21:46.680 in the region especially New Brunswick some of them get hung with just you know a pile of inventory

00:21:52.220 um anyway it's it's pretty awful when that happens yeah i mean when i did a documentary

00:21:57.760 about this uh in april of 2021 we went around filming it we had business owners that we spoke

00:22:04.180 to that had like six figures of inventory and i followed up with them a few months ago still

00:22:09.400 sitting there because the buyback hasn't materialized they can't sell it they they can't

00:22:13.660 return it you know government understandably picks pei because it's small and manageable i think the

00:22:19.440 entire island has a population of like 160,000. I don't know how many gun owners there are, but

00:22:25.100 compared to anywhere else, provincially speaking, you'd be looking at a pretty small number, I

00:22:30.780 imagine. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, another shop owner and I were talking yesterday. I mean,

00:22:37.440 you know, I think if we polled the database, there's probably upwards of 1,500 license

00:22:43.020 holders, which is, of course, right around 1%. But in terms of active, we're thinking like around

00:22:52.100 400, maybe. Yeah, so 400 people, the government wants to do this, see how it goes, learn some

00:23:00.340 lessons and export it nationally. And, you know, I think that the PEI case is very important here,

00:23:05.980 because we'll see how many people actually want to do it. I mean, right now, anyone I've spoken to

00:23:12.200 is kind of of the mind that they're holding on to it until the very last day they legally can,

00:23:16.880 because they're hoping that maybe there's some change in course or some change in government

00:23:21.320 that precipitates this. Whereas, you know, if you're in PEI right now, I mean, technically,

00:23:26.420 you can hold that gun legally until October of 2023. I don't know what the motivation is for

00:23:31.660 people to hand it over now. I don't think there is any motivation. I think there's a lot of

00:23:37.440 misinformation and lack of knowledge. A lot of people just haven't taken the time to look at

00:23:42.820 that list. I think a lot of people think that this is targeting specifically, you know, military

00:23:49.040 grade quote unquote firearms, which is a ridiculous misnomer. And quite frankly, when you look at that

00:23:56.200 list, there's, there's antique single shots, there's sporting doubles, there's firearms that

00:24:01.880 are used strictly for hunting uh and don't necessarily have high capacity magazines and

00:24:07.680 all these other buzzwords that they're using um and when you start talking you know some of the

00:24:14.100 older population get get a little bit freaked out so um my concern is you know if somebody's worried

00:24:21.740 and they don't necessarily want to walk into the firearms office what are they going to do right

00:24:25.580 like when the liberal government implemented these new restrictions on handguns last year

00:24:30.600 that was the the single greatest selling of handguns in canadian history any any handgun

00:24:37.420 that was out there basically got purchased um uh out of fear that you weren't going to be able to

00:24:43.140 get them at some point in the future so you know i understand the concept but it's it's misguided

00:24:49.780 and i don't think it's going to achieve what what it is they're trying to do uh and certainly not to

00:24:54.380 the to the effect of of taking you know guns the guns that are creating street violence in canada

00:25:00.140 are coming in illegally. They're being smuggled in. These are not lawful gun owners that are

00:25:07.260 vetted and obviously have background checks and have to submit all their key information. 0.91

00:25:13.100 The whole thing is just, it's ridiculous. How is the political culture in PEI about guns? Because

00:25:20.200 I know it's not an insanely conservative place. You have certainly conservative pockets there,

00:25:26.180 but I know it's elected conservative MPs at some times.

00:25:28.980 It's more liberal now.

00:25:30.700 So do you find that people there who are not gun owners themselves

00:25:34.420 are gun friendly or do you find that's not the case?

00:25:39.380 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:25:40.840 Like, you know, we have a lot of friends

00:25:42.600 that really have no connection to firearms or their use.

00:25:47.300 And generally, I think it's a sentiment of apathy.

00:25:51.140 Like they really, they're indifferent to firearms ownership, right?

00:25:54.880 Like any person, they're against gun violence.

00:25:59.120 Again, on that side of the fence, most of them don't understand the steps that we have to go through to purchase and own a firearm in Canada and the degree to which we're scrutinized and consistently regulated.

00:26:12.680 And when you, you know, if you have an open minded person, you have that discussion, they go, OK, well, that's that's great.

00:26:17.660 I understand. I think like so many things, it's easy to be apathetic when you.

00:26:24.160 you force somebody to have an opinion and they don't have background or they don't have context

00:26:28.320 or family that have used firearms for for whether it be olympic skeet shooting or target rifle

00:26:34.320 shooting um or hunting you know it's pretty hard to get them on side right so uh and i think that's

00:26:42.320 probably true of a lot of canada you know the the people that yeah well and also to go back

00:26:48.400 to your point about the fear-mongering about different types of guns when the government

00:26:52.560 commits to language like assault style, military grade, terms that are political terms that the

00:26:58.700 government has applied because it's convenient, not because they have any universal meaning or

00:27:03.240 even accurate, that does scare someone who has no idea what a gun is. I mean, the number of people

00:27:07.500 that I've heard from in the past that hear semi-automatic and the word that jumps out in

00:27:12.720 that is automatic. So they think they're talking about some Gatlin gun mounted on the back of a

00:27:17.060 truck, like, and because people don't know. And I think the government really uses that to its

00:27:21.040 advantage that there is that lack of knowledge out there of course and like to the math we talked

00:27:26.840 about earlier uh 90 99 of the population that um obviously don't own firearms are going to be

00:27:36.460 afraid of some of that language and i think it's i think it's intentional i think it's targeted

00:27:40.200 um you know and i watched some of uh mr mandicino's um you know question period and stuff i mean

00:27:47.900 when you have somebody that really doesn't understand they're talking about you know what's

00:27:52.320 going to happen when i when i shoot at a deer with a rifle that has you know 10 000 joules of force

00:27:58.560 well hunters don't that that's a ridiculous conversation and it's very evident that you know

00:28:04.080 there's no knowledge uh i i don't think it serves them well that they don't put professionals in

00:28:09.620 that role to assess that i mean there's all kinds of liberal gun owners in canada and i'm sure there

00:28:15.580 must be i mean when i was with the hunter and angler advisory panel we had liberals uh in caucus

00:28:20.760 that i have to think they would be better suited but my guess is they're not being used because

00:28:25.860 they would probably be more aligned with maintaining gun ownership in canada you mentioned

00:28:31.620 the advisory panel and i think this is actually an important thing because the government tried to

00:28:36.100 pretend early on that it was going to listen to gun owners and listen to people with skin in the

00:28:40.880 game but i've talked to other people that have been involved in these consultation processes and

00:28:44.820 everything that was told to them was effectively disregarded when it came time to drafting

00:28:49.600 legislation and orders in council that's correct yeah i mean historically we would we would get

00:28:54.980 emails we would get consultation like the various wildlife federations in canada um indigenous

00:29:01.700 groups like stakeholders that regularly and consistently use firearms hunters fishers

00:29:06.920 outdoors people uh people in the north um ex-military sport shooters i feel like we all at

00:29:14.640 least had some say and there was some opportunity to review like frankly it's been crickets for the

00:29:20.320 last i'm gonna say at least five years around uh legislative change um as it pertains to firearms

00:29:27.360 ownership well keep up the good fight there hopefully we'll get some change there that'll

00:29:32.360 let you guys keep your property and that of everyone else in the country as well. Duncan Crawford

00:29:38.120 joining me from PEI. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Andrew. Appreciate the time.

00:29:42.680 All right. Absolutely. Just one thing I would point out on this report from Public Safety

00:29:47.660 Canada here. They said that they released a request for information to get feedback from

00:29:54.460 the industry on potential capacity to support delivery of the buyback program. So they actually

00:30:00.580 put out a call for, hey, who can help us run this buyback? And this line is great. The request for

00:30:07.200 information closed on August 31st, 2022, with very limited interest from the industry. So they

00:30:13.440 weren't even getting companies that were jumping up and down saying, yeah, we think we can run

00:30:17.360 this buyback, which should tell you something right there. We've got to end things there. I

00:30:21.540 will be here for Fake News Friday on Friday, pre-recorded with the magic of internet. But I

00:30:28.820 will be joining you from Davos, Switzerland next week. So do tune into that. And let me just say

00:30:34.960 that this is a very important assignment, if I call it that, because this is something that

00:30:41.640 matters to a lot of us. It matters because we have a Canadian government that is all too willing to

00:30:45.920 hitch itself to this particular agenda. And I think it's incredibly important. When I was there

00:30:51.200 last time, there was no other journalist from Canada present to cover this. The only other

00:30:58.360 member of the media in Canada was an editor of a publication in Canada who was there as an invited

00:31:05.860 guest of the World Economic Forum. So no one was actually reporting on it except for True North.

00:31:11.740 Rebel was as well but they didn't have any of their Canadian team members there at the time. So

00:31:15.900 if you can support True North's work in this please please do head over to donate.tnc.news

00:31:21.840 donate.tnc.news and if you contribute to enough that I can buy a meal that's not a bug sandwich

00:31:27.320 I would be very grateful and very appreciative.

00:31:31.500 But if you want me to eat the Bugs Sandwich anyway, donate.

00:31:33.840 We should set up like a dunk tank type thing where, you know,

00:31:35.940 if our fundraising hits this level, I have to down the cricket stew

00:31:40.480 or whatever they're serving at the lovely cafe in Davos on the promenade.

00:31:45.820 And that'll do it for me. I will talk to you all soon.

00:31:48.480 Thank you. God bless. And auf Wiedersehen.

00:31:52.640 To the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:31:54.160 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - January 11, 2023

The World Economic Forum is calling for ＂cooperation＂ to combat crisis

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