Juno News - Trudeau, blackface, and political hypocrisy

00:00:00.360 So, is anything happening with our election? Any political news going on?

00:00:04.760 Welcome everyone to another True North report. My name is Andrew Lawton, fellow with True North, coming with an election update.

00:00:12.920 And one of the stories that I must say of all of the things that I try to predict, of all the things that I think are going to happen,

00:00:19.400 I did not have Justin Trudeau blackface scandal on my political bingo card.

00:00:24.900 This one admittedly came out of left field for me, but it's still an important issue.

00:00:30.560 And I want to have a discussion here that goes past the memes, that goes past the jokes, of which there are many,

00:00:37.340 and really get at the core of why this is such a telling story first off,

00:00:43.060 and why it's one that reveals a significant issue facing politics more broadly, not just the here and now issue facing Justin Trudeau.

00:00:51.420 So, that's what I'm going to talk about. I've titled this episode, Trudeau, Blackface, and Political Hypocrisy,

00:00:58.060 because it's about all three of those things, and the way they engage with each other, the way they interact with each other.

00:01:03.820 And I want to take a lot of your comments, feedback, questions as we do this.

00:01:08.260 I know a lot of people tune into these broadcasts after the fact, which is great. Welcome to you all.

00:01:13.200 But for those who are tuning in live, if you want to comment, there's a comment box over there,

00:01:17.620 over there, depending on what type of device you're using. Do let me know what you're thinking.

00:01:21.920 Say hello if you're tuning in, because there's a lot here.

00:01:25.480 And one of the things that I've said on Twitter, and I know that Twitter is not real life,

00:01:29.680 but bear with me for a moment, is that I'm not going to jump up and down and say,

00:01:34.420 Justin Trudeau should resign because he made a bunch of stupid mistakes as a teenager in his 20s,

00:01:41.440 when he was even a teacher at 29. I'm not going to do that, because my whole argument has been,

00:01:47.180 whenever these stories have arisen, that you can't turn people into a one-dimensional caricature of

00:01:52.820 themselves based on a snapshot from their past. I think that the most damning thing to Justin

00:01:59.740 Trudeau is not that he wore blackface, or brownface, or blackface again, or was doing minstrel shows

00:02:07.420 in high school, which is pretty damning, admittedly. But the most significant part of this

00:02:12.600 is that he has the audacity to subject everyone else around him to this purity test, while he knew

00:02:21.000 full well that his own past was riddled with indiscretions for which there is no defense in

00:02:26.900 2019. And that's the biggest issue here, is that Justin Trudeau, every time he's called someone a

00:02:33.600 racist for criticizing his immigration plan, every time he's called someone a bigot for making some

00:02:41.180 comment that most ordinary Canadians wouldn't find bigoted, every time he or his hatchet men and women

00:02:48.680 have taken aim at someone because they dare to criticize Trudeau, Trudeau knew or should have known

00:02:56.720 that he had this in his past, this thing that would cause anyone to call him a racist if it were brought

00:03:03.100 up in 2019, in the current context. And that is the worst part of here, because there is an entitlement

00:03:09.840 that exists in Justin Trudeau, that everyone else has to follow these rules, and everyone else has to be

00:03:17.360 a lily-white, porcelain, ivory, whatever substance you want figure with no checkered past, but he can

00:03:25.600 grow, and he can evolve, and he can move on from these mistakes, and he can do these things that

00:03:31.040 don't reflect who he is now. And by the way, there is a lot of hypocrisy, not just from the liberals on

00:03:39.460 this, which I'll get to in a moment, but from both sides. Because last week, the conservative leader,

00:03:45.000 Andrew Scheer, said in response to a string of stories from the liberal war room about

00:03:50.280 this candidate tweeted this, and this candidate once said this, and this candidate once wrote this

00:03:55.020 on a Facebook post, and this candidate once looked at a barista the wrong way, I mean, whatever the

00:03:59.260 case may be. Andrew Scheer said, look, if someone apologizes, and they have these things in their

00:04:05.240 past, we're prepared to accept that apology and move on. That was what Andrew Scheer said. And a lot of

00:04:09.700 conservatives, I think, took that and said, yeah, absolutely, that's the way it should be. And now those

00:04:14.140 same conservatives are looking for Trudeau and saying the apology isn't enough, he needs to

00:04:18.060 resign. And if you are calling for Justin Trudeau's resignation right now, if you are, and I'm not

00:04:24.060 saying I am, but I'm saying if that's your approach here, you need to look at it not for the indiscretion

00:04:29.700 itself, if you've taken the position that an apology is enough, but for the hypocrisy of it. And by the

00:04:37.020 way, even Andrew Scheer said this when he gave, I believe it was this morning's remarks, he says, look,

00:04:42.620 Justin Trudeau's past indiscretions of doing blackface and brownface, it's not just those

00:04:48.380 that take away his moral ability to govern. It's the fact that he lied last night, he knew that this

00:04:55.160 other photo was coming. And last night, he was still evasive when asked what incidents there were

00:05:00.400 for which he needed to apologize. And that's the bizarre part about here. I don't know if Trudeau saw

00:05:08.260 blackface as being some sort of party trick, where it was just the regular old go-to, you know, you 0.99

00:05:13.560 want to do Deo in high school, great, blackface. You want to do an Arabian Nights party, great, brownface. 1.00

00:05:18.720 You want to do some little song and dance routine, great, blackface. Like it sounds like that was just 1.00

00:05:23.460 his go-to. But if that is your go-to, you would know that that was your go-to. You'd know, oh my gosh,

00:05:30.960 when I was younger, I used to always do blackface, and I really shouldn't have. And today, 0.84

00:05:34.680 today, he just finished a press conference in Winnipeg. He's saying, oh, I was embarrassed,

00:05:38.700 and I never told anyone about it, and I didn't bring it up when I was applying for vetting as

00:05:43.000 an MP. Imagine if a conservative candidate did not submit this sort of a photo through the vetting

00:05:52.760 process. The liberals would be jumping up and down saying they need to resign. How dare they? You

00:05:59.200 can't withhold that. They're all racist. And this is the problem, is that right now we have let

00:06:04.220 political tribalism define our own ability to say whether something is right or something is wrong,

00:06:11.080 which means we are as a society incapable of judging something on its own merits. We can only

00:06:16.160 judge it based on how it fits in to whatever our partisan worldview is. So liberals right now are

00:06:22.160 saying, oh, it's not that bad. He apologized. He's moved on. We all grow and kumbaya, because that's

00:06:27.260 what fits into their partisan worldview of standing by Justin Trudeau. Conservatives are saying, my goodness,

00:06:32.560 how dare anyone do this? No one should do this ever. It's racist. It's horrific. It's horrible,

00:06:36.200 because it fits into their partisan worldview of saying, you know what, Justin Trudeau shouldn't

00:06:41.740 be around because this is what we believe as conservatives. I actually give a lot of time

00:06:48.560 and credence to Jagmeet Singh here, the NDP leader, who obviously is still wanting to score the partisan

00:06:56.060 points that an NDP leader would in an election against a liberal incumbent, but because Jagmeet

00:07:01.140 Singh actually has a right to be outraged about this more than a lot of the people complaining

00:07:07.900 about it. He has a right to be outraged because he's literally a turban-wearing brown man who's 1.00

00:07:13.760 seeing the prime minister having at 29 masqueraded as a turban-wearing brown man. So Jagmeet Singh,

00:07:19.340 when he speaks about racism and intolerance and all of these issues, he is a lot more positioned

00:07:26.780 to weigh in on those. And it was interesting. I saw, and it sounds like I'm going all over the map

00:07:32.140 here, but bear with me because there's a point that I'm going to bring this all around to.

00:07:36.420 I was watching CBC earlier, and they did a bunch of, they're called Streeters, which is where a reporter

00:07:42.320 just goes and asks random people on the street, what do you think about this story? And they were asking

00:07:47.400 people about what they thought of these pictures. And this was before the third picture was known,

00:07:53.740 or the video, rather, that Global News broke of him wearing a wig and in full blackface. And what I

00:07:59.880 found interesting is that most, and they interviewed mostly young people, is that there seemed to be,

00:08:05.380 and this is not scientific, and I don't know how many people they spoke to versus what they didn't show

00:08:10.000 or did show. But most of the people that seem to be of South Asian descent, of an Indian or Pakistani

00:08:17.560 background or Middle Eastern background, were the ones saying, oh, it's just a costume party,

00:08:22.220 I don't know, I'm not offended by it, or you shouldn't have done it. But the people that seem

00:08:26.400 to be like, this is insane, you know, how dare, are white people. And I found that to be very 0.99

00:08:31.000 interesting, just in that little, just in that little snippet on CDC. And I'm not extrapolating

00:08:37.460 that to any other coverage. I'm not extrapolating that to the population at large, just that one

00:08:42.980 snippet that I saw, where a lot of the people that seemed the most outraged by this were people that

00:08:49.100 were not part of the community that was most impacted by it, which is why I defer to Jagmeet Singh

00:08:54.940 on the racial elements of blackface and brownface. Now, all of that being said, why I think this is

00:09:03.220 such an important discussion here is because there seems to be a lot of buyer's remorse with Justin

00:09:08.780 Trudeau over the feminist bona fides when he fired Jody Wilson-Raybould and then Jane Philpott as well,

00:09:16.100 because people are saying, you know what, this guy said he was the captain feminist, and then he does

00:09:20.840 this to us. And the indigenous people, who as well, felt like he turned his back on them, because he

00:09:26.440 says he's a big ally, and then all of a sudden, he's not making good of these promises. And he's

00:09:30.760 always said he's the racial and multicultural guy. And now people are saying, well, yes, and we didn't

00:09:35.480 realize when he supported multiculturalism, that it was just, you know, seeing how many cultures he

00:09:39.940 himself could embody in his costumes. So all of these groups that Trudeau has claimed to be an ally of,

00:09:47.380 and even in his press conference today, by the way, says he's still an ally of them. These are the

00:09:52.340 people that are feeling, wait, not as advertised. And there's a reason that the conservative branding

00:09:58.240 of Justin Trudeau is that line, not as advertised, which is, I think, almost more powerful than the

00:10:06.980 one that was used in 2015, which is just not, I think it was just not ready. It's more powerful

00:10:11.860 because, okay, he's there. He's got you. He got you. He won. But he's not the way that he was

00:10:18.020 presented to you. He's not the way that he's told you he is. So to bring this all together,

00:10:25.020 I am not going to say, oh my goodness, what he did was so racially insensitive and terrible,

00:10:29.220 because I'm not the one that is qualified to speak about the racial undertones of blackface and

00:10:35.960 brownface and the contextual elements of it. That's not me. There are people that can do it. But what I can

00:10:41.160 speak to is political hypocrisy and the way that the liberals have been trying to undermine and

00:10:48.080 delegitimize, de-person and cancel as many conservative candidates as they've been able

00:10:55.000 to. And this has not just been an accident. This has been part of the core liberal strategy.

00:11:01.420 All of the stories in the last week, two weeks, in which Andrew Scheer has had to defend a candidate

00:11:06.900 or fire a candidate, have really been because of the liberal war room. They've got mounds and mounds 1.00

00:11:12.920 and mounds of opposition research. This candidate's tweet from, you know, 1947. This candidate's Facebook

00:11:19.980 comment from whenever. This blog post, this photo, this video. And they've been getting, whenever Andrew

00:11:26.540 Scheer is campaigning with someone, a local MP or some local representative to post this. And then it

00:11:32.500 gains a little bit of foot traffic on Twitter. And then eventually Andrew Scheer speaks out about it.

00:11:37.080 And every single day, the conservatives are playing defense, trying to say, no, no, no, our candidates

00:11:41.620 are not racist, they're not homophobes, they're not this or not that. And this has been the liberal

00:11:46.000 strategy, is to take aim at the conservatives by calling them terrible people. And this is horrible.

00:11:54.040 It is horrible, it is war, it is bloody, it is cutthroat, and it subjects very good people, very good people

00:12:03.160 to these social media mobs, because they are pawns in this broader political side. And I'll talk about

00:12:11.080 my own experience in this sense a little bit later on. But this has been the entire liberal strategy to

00:12:18.160 deperson and cancel, cancel culture is what it's called here, all of these other candidates, and now

00:12:26.200 their own prime minister, and their own leader, who has been overseeing this strategy, has had more

00:12:35.120 significant, more high profile and more visual examples of what would be called racist if some

00:12:42.620 conservative candidate in Quebec, or some green candidate in BC had done it. But for him, it's a

00:12:49.100 learning opportunity, it's a path to growth, it's something he can move on from, and something that

00:12:54.160 he's learned a lot about. Because everything to Justin Trudeau has always been a teachable moment,

00:12:58.780 which is, oh, we can learn from this, we can grow from this, we can learn, we can grow all of this stuff.

00:13:04.920 And this is fascinating, that to him, everything is a learning opportunity, to everyone else, it's evidence

00:13:11.100 of being racist, evidence of being a hypocrite, evidence of being unworthy of public office. 0.71

00:13:16.140 Remember, and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Andrew Scheer, getting that 15-year-old

00:13:21.000 clip of him arguing against same-sex marriage, that 15-year-old clip proves he's a bigot,

00:13:27.180 Justin Trudeau, three photos of him in blackface and brownface, and oh, well, he's still an ally,

00:13:32.300 and he's used this to grow and learn. And you have never seen so many people twist themselves into knots

00:13:39.400 to say that something that would be reprehensible were it from a conservative candidate is no big

00:13:45.200 deal because Justin Trudeau has been an ally and been supportive of diversity and has done all

00:13:49.280 this other stuff. And Harjit Sajjan, the defense minister, again, a very well-decorated Sikh man,

00:13:57.860 a turban-wearing Sikh who was literally a Sikh warrior. That was the reputation he had when he

00:14:02.840 was in the Canadian Armed Forces, was, I believe it was an RCMP detective, it might have been Vancouver

00:14:07.320 police, I can't remember offhand, but he was doing a CBC radio interview the morning saying,

00:14:11.820 yeah, it's hurtful, but, you know, he wants to define Justin Trudeau by the man he is,

00:14:15.860 the man that Minister Sajjan knows. And by the way, I think that is the way that we should all

00:14:21.780 view these things when they come up. You know, there was a conservative candidate a week ago,

00:14:27.640 maybe a week and a half ago, who was a young guy, I think he's 29 or something, who, 28 or 29,

00:14:33.080 and he had a tweet from 19, where he called a friend in a back and forth Twitter exchange,

00:14:39.180 I don't know if I'm allowed to say the word, so, I mean, it's not TV, but a FAG, it was just FAG. 0.98

00:14:46.040 And this was, again, an indiscreet moment, the kind of thing that most people who are 19,

00:14:53.400 especially 19-year-old boys or young men, would talk about, but again, in the digital age,

00:14:58.320 there's a record, there's a catalog, there's all of these things. And he's not given the benefit of

00:15:04.280 the doubt by the liberals. He's not given the benefit of the doubt by the media. He is given

00:15:09.860 basically a rebranding of his existence as being that of a homophobe. And it was the liberal MPs

00:15:18.000 that were tweeting saying, oh my goodness, this cannot stand, he must resign. His apology is not

00:15:23.080 enough. That was what was tweeted by one of the MPs. His apology is not enough.

00:15:30.120 Now, I haven't checked that MP's Twitter account, but I bet you they are talking about how brave it

00:15:36.920 is that Justin Trudeau has apologized and is owning up to his mistakes and is prepared to move forward.

00:15:43.220 And this is why what's happening now is so disgusting. It's not because Justin Trudeau screwed up

00:15:50.220 on a number of occasions. It is because the liberals have created and fostered and fueled

00:15:57.600 this cancel culture for everyone other than them. But when their leader is in the crosshairs,

00:16:04.560 it is insensitive, or the one thing that I saw, petty politics, to talk about it. I've seen from

00:16:10.820 a number of liberal partisans this called petty politics, smear politics, dirty politics, mudslinging.

00:16:18.060 The only mud is the stuff that Trudeau was rubbing on his face. He immersed himself in mud for crying

00:16:23.920 out loud. But again, if you criticize that as a conservative, oh, you're just, you know, it's

00:16:29.440 negative politics. But if the roles are reversed, and the liberals are the ones driving it, they are

00:16:35.300 being the protectors of Canada. The hypocrisy is the biggest sin in all of this. The hypocrisy is

00:16:44.820 the biggest sin. Now again, when I saw Trudeau give his press conference, I saw someone who was

00:16:52.800 saying all of the right things. And you may think I'm being soft, you may think I'm being deferential,

00:16:57.720 you may think whatever you want. But he said all the right things. He didn't try to excuse it. He

00:17:02.200 didn't try to shuffle around it. He didn't try to revise things. Last night, he was very weak. Last

00:17:07.340 night, he was leaving himself open to really basic questions. And then this morning, when this third

00:17:12.800 incident, the video that Global News published emerged, one thing that I noted, and if you saw

00:17:19.220 his press comments, you would have noted this as well, he was asked three times. He was asked three

00:17:24.780 times by reporters, how many times have you done this? And he wouldn't answer. He didn't answer on

00:17:29.600 any occasion. But he was asked three times, how many incidents, how many occasions have you put on

00:17:35.060 blackface? And he said, oh, well, I'm aware that it's terrible and blah, blah, blah, blah. And when it was 0.99

00:17:40.040 being asked the third time, his press secretary was actually shouting over the reporter, saying,

00:17:45.560 next question, next question, next question. I think she shouted it four or five times. I've got

00:17:49.240 the footage of it. And basically trying to move on. So Trudeau does not want to answer the question

00:17:53.920 of how much of a go-to this was for him. But even then, even then, he was saying all the right things.

00:18:01.180 He was contrite. He was apologetic. Even if you don't take it seriously, there is nothing that he

00:18:07.180 could have said that was better. He didn't try to excuse it. It was, yeah, this is me. This is

00:18:11.940 what happened. So we're back to the primary issue being that such an apology would not fly from

00:18:19.720 anyone else. Of course, now he's being asked about hypotheticals. Oh, well, what if a candidate of

00:18:24.300 yours did this? And he's saying, well, you know, everything's going to be on a case-by-case basis.

00:18:29.380 But the liberals have not been looking on a case-by-case basis. They've been trying to paint

00:18:34.180 everyone with the same brush. And discourse itself is what suffers. I'm going to read a

00:18:42.200 couple of messages that we have coming in here. Sheila writes, in a nutshell, Justin Trudeau says

00:18:46.880 it's not his fault it happened because he was born into a privileged life. That also explains a lot

00:18:51.640 more, for instance, why he doesn't understand living in the middle class means living without nannies,

00:18:56.480 being taxed to death, etc., etc. Yeah, the privilege thing is interesting because we heard this in the

00:19:01.940 press conference today, him talking about how, oh, but, you know, I didn't, I was blind because of

00:19:07.320 my privilege. And I didn't see that this was racist because of my privilege. So he's still

00:19:12.180 feeding into this climate that is going to cause other people to be thrown under the bus for this

00:19:18.080 because privilege is the almighty sin now. To have privilege, to have a life of privilege is just

00:19:23.400 this thing from which you cannot escape. Fern writes, he's going to get back in because he has

00:19:28.680 bought everything he can to make it happen. What has happened to common sense? Look, I want to say

00:19:34.480 that the media on this has been, I think, about as good as you can expect it. Now, I think the real

00:19:41.700 test of the media will be whether the media follows this story through. Remember, this was broken

00:19:45.940 by an American outlet. This was broken by Time Magazine, which is a weird one because I didn't even

00:19:52.140 think Time Magazine broke news even in the U.S. And we don't know, did they give this, did the

00:19:57.940 source give this to a Canadian publication and they passed it over? We know that Global had the video

00:20:03.600 that it published this morning for, since the beginning of the week. And they said, oh, we were

00:20:08.400 trying to authenticate and verify. So Global was sitting on this. They say trying to verify and I have

00:20:13.060 no reason to suspect otherwise. But then they rush it out once it's a big story. And the Liberal Party

00:20:19.380 confirms that, yes, in fact, it is real. Faustina, or Faustina, I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong,

00:20:25.220 says a lot of people have lost their jobs for much less. Well, certainly. And I mean, candidates

00:20:30.340 have lost their entire ability to run for a lot less. And the reason this is such a sore spot for me,

00:20:38.900 if you've read about me, you'll know this. I mean, I was subjected to the Liberal War Room when I ran as a

00:20:46.400 candidate a little over a year ago in Ontario's provincial elections. And things that are out

00:20:52.020 of context, things that don't reflect who I am today, things that I would say don't even reflect

00:20:58.400 who I am or who I was then. These things that are brought up and no explanation, no acknowledgement,

00:21:06.320 and no understanding of who I am today matters when you are a cog in what the Liberal War Room has

00:21:15.680 determined is the enemy, which in the case of my former candidacy was just being a part of this

00:21:20.880 conservative machine. And it's vicious, and it's impersonal in some way because they don't care

00:21:25.100 about you. But it's personal because you're the one that has to deal with that branding. You're the

00:21:30.240 one that has to deal with how you're being tarnished. And again, I think of those days, which were very

00:21:36.620 difficult days for my family, for me personally, and think of, oh my goodness, little did I know

00:21:42.380 that if you're a Liberal and you get busted having made inappropriate comments, having posed for

00:21:48.380 inappropriate photos, whatever, if you're a Liberal, you get to just stand up there and say,

00:21:51.920 oh yeah, well, I was blinded by my privilege. I should have said that last year. Oh, I was blinded

00:21:56.460 by my privilege. No. And in my case, look, I take responsibility, you know, because they found

00:22:03.080 decade-old tweets of mine as well that did not look very good. Attempts at humor, things that I posted

00:22:09.220 when I was in the midst of quite a nasty mental health battle that didn't reflect who I was,

00:22:13.320 where I was behaving in a very reckless way. And I see that candidates are being thrown through the

00:22:20.260 ringer right now. And this is going to be the way that elections are fought. This is how elections

00:22:26.200 are won or lost now. By however many candidates a party has left standing by the end of the campaign.

00:22:33.960 And at this rate, the Conservatives, the Liberals, the NDP, they can all have 338 candidates. And by

00:22:39.880 the time you pick off all the ones that once tweeted the wrong thing, we're going to have just four

00:22:43.580 candidates left on election day. And it's just going to be a brawl between those four. And good people

00:22:49.600 are forced out of politics or never get into politics because they know they can never emerge

00:22:55.160 as lily-white as the media requires them to be. And that's wrong. And there's a media side of this

00:23:04.280 that I don't have time to explore today, but a media part of this that needs to be understood,

00:23:09.440 which is that this stuff never comes out about politicians who are seeking re-election.

00:23:16.220 Because politicians who are seeking re-election have already been elected to something. Politicians

00:23:20.500 who are seeking re-election, you presume have already been vetted. So why was this not revealed

00:23:27.940 earlier on in the process? Why was it not? Who was not looking into Trudeau? Now, I take some of the

00:23:34.420 blame for this. I didn't find it either. But I also think that we have journalists that are right now

00:23:40.780 on full-time beats to cover misinformation that's supposedly influencing the election. Yet, for some

00:23:47.680 reason, in the last four years, and the last 11 years since he's become a member of parliament,

00:23:53.520 no one has unearthed photos. But in one case, I think it was Robert Jago in Canada-land,

00:23:58.400 he found a new photo, the one of Trudeau standing in between two genuine Sikhs who are not in brown 0.96

00:24:04.480 face, but who are actually Indian gentlemen. And that photo he found just by looking through an archived

00:24:10.960 copy of a newsletter from the school. And it was from that same Arabian Nights party. And he found

00:24:16.800 this, it sounded like just in the last 18 hours. So no one has vetted Justin Trudeau. No one has

00:24:24.960 vetted him. No one has subjected him to the rule that candidates are supposed to go through. And Trudeau

00:24:31.200 himself did not disclose that this was there when he was seeking the nomination, the liberal nomination,

00:24:37.440 in Papineau, for which he eventually was elected before becoming the liberal leader, and so on.

00:24:42.160 So again, we have this question of why the rules are different for him than they are for other people.

00:24:47.280 And we know the answer to this. But I would actually, rather than saying this incident should

00:24:53.840 be the end of Justin Trudeau, what I would like to see is for this incident to be the end of the

00:25:00.320 culture of delegitimization and debasement of people who have made mistakes in their past.

00:25:06.560 I'm prepared to accept Trudeau's apology if the new reality of our political discourse in Canada,

00:25:13.360 in North America, in the West can be that we allow people to define themselves based on who they are

00:25:19.520 today, not who they were in a yearbook photo or a tweet or some time capsule. I mean, that's the whole

00:25:26.000 point. I will give Trudeau a pass if he and the liberals promise that they will not only run

00:25:32.960 campaigns around trying to slander and malign people for not always being mature, responsible grownups.

00:25:43.680 And by the way, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think we're going to see that change

00:25:47.680 occur between now and the election, which is just in a week or a month and two days.

00:25:53.680 But that would be what I would absolutely love to have happen of this. It is an end

00:25:59.440 to what I've termed and what other people have termed cancel culture.

00:26:04.080 And remember, the revolution will always devour its own, whether it's Me Too, which eventually

00:26:09.120 becomes so big that some of the big feminist allies are taken down, and whether it's anti-racism

00:26:16.160 activists who eventually are revealed that, oh, they've said something or did something racist,

00:26:20.320 or Trudeau who checks off all these boxes and then eventually something like this comes up and

00:26:25.680 people have this existential crisis. Whatever the case is, perhaps we can say, all right,

00:26:32.400 maybe it's time we do embrace forgiveness. Maybe it's time we do allow for growth, accept growth,

00:26:38.000 and encourage growth. I mean, should we not be as a society encouraging and celebrate

00:26:45.120 them? The idea that someone can do stupid things and then eventually grow up, mature out of them,

00:26:51.120 and go on to be the Prime Minister of Canada, go on to do something productive with their life.

00:26:56.240 That that candidate in Brampton, yeah, he once said stupid things with his friends, but now he's been a

00:27:00.480 great advocate on all sorts of issues. That Andrew Scheer once took a Catholic position on an issue

00:27:06.720 in the House of Commons, but now he's doing all of these other things. That every single person

00:27:10.960 has a past that is imperfect, that would not stand up to the modern scrutiny lens.

00:27:19.600 That insight, that nuance is completely absent right now. So what I would like to see happen is

00:27:28.720 not going to happen, which means can we at least resist the urge to make this about political tribalism?

00:27:35.360 I've got a great many issues with Justin Trudeau. Top of the list is not that he donned blackface 1.00

00:27:43.120 and brownface. To me, the blackface and brownface are symptoms of a bigger issue that has a lot more 1.00

00:27:48.720 to do with policy than it does about the incidents itself. And that is that he continuously decides to

00:27:54.400 set other rules for those around him than the ones he has to live by. And I talked about this in a video

00:27:59.120 not long ago with Andrew Scheer, whereas Justin Trudeau in 2011 made the exact same point that Andrew

00:28:07.200 Scheer did, which was, I'm personally opposed to legislate it, which is what Andrew Scheer said.

00:28:13.840 I'm personally opposed, but I'm not going to legislate it. But for Justin Trudeau, he can be a

00:28:18.960 feminist and say that. For Andrew Scheer, it makes him an unconscionable bigot to say that.

00:28:24.400 Different rules for him than there are for those around him. Conservative candidates who have a past

00:28:31.520 should resign. Andrew Scheer has to shoulder them and pay his penance. Justin Trudeau can apologize

00:28:36.720 and make it into a learning opportunity for everyone involved. This is the grand hypocrisy

00:28:44.320 policy on full display. And no one can say that politics is better when we force everyone

00:28:53.040 to be defined by who they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. But if you're going to use

00:29:00.240 that mechanism to define others, you have to be prepared to deal with it when it turns itself at you,

00:29:06.320 which is the position in which we find our Prime Minister right now. Now, one thing I will say,

00:29:12.640 and this is a bit of an announcement, is that True North has been covering the election. And I've

00:29:17.440 actually been about to start a cross-country tour, talking to people around the country,

00:29:22.800 talking to candidates, talking about the key issues, uncovering the key issues. So there's something that

00:29:27.920 needs to happen now. And we are in the process, as I speak, this has been something we've been doing today,

00:29:33.440 of getting on the Liberal bus. So my goal is to join the Liberal campaign, not the Liberal campaign

00:29:39.440 itself, but the media that are following around Justin Trudeau, to ask the tough questions and make

00:29:45.120 sure that he is held to account, not for past indiscretions, but for the hypocrisy factor that

00:29:52.400 we're seeing from the Liberals. Now, this is not cheap, and this is the problem right now. We've got a

00:29:57.280 fundraise for it, even beyond what we fundraise to cover the election. And the reason for that is that,

00:30:03.360 to join the Liberal campaign bus, or the campaign plane, or that of any party, you have to pay,

00:30:08.800 you've got to cover your own costs, and it's not even expensive. Bus fare, and plane travel, but it's

00:30:15.520 important because this is the only way to get access to what the Prime Minister, or the Liberal leader,

00:30:20.400 in this case, is doing. So we're doing this at True North, we're working it out right now, as we speak,

00:30:26.160 actually. I've been in contact with the Liberal campaign. We're trying to make this happen starting

00:30:30.480 this weekend, but we do need your help to cover the costs of doing this, because it's not going

00:30:35.360 to be cheap. I know Candace tweeted about it, I've tweeted about it as well. There's a link in the

00:30:39.760 description box over there. If you head on over to tnc.news, there is a donate button, and you can

00:30:45.600 chip in. And because we are a registered charity, you can actually get a tax receipt as well for your

00:30:50.480 contribution. So do head on over and give us a hand if you can. We'll have more as the campaign goes on.

00:30:55.840 Thank you, God bless, and good day Canada. For True North, I'm Andrew Luck.

Juno News - September 19, 2019

Trudeau, blackface, and political hypocrisy

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript