Juno News - July 02, 2024


Trudeau ＂committed＂ to staying on as calls for resignation mount

Topics
ground game carbon tax GDP cost
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Lawton Safer Supply Adam Zivo Chris Sims Dominion Day Sharon Koivu Wayne Long Steven Guilbeault Jagmeet Singh Pierre Poilievre Andrea Sarita Liz Truss Southwest Ontario William Macbeth Leslie Church Karina Gould Don Stewart Justin Ling Anita Anand and 10 more
Did rampant antisemitism sway the Toronto—St. Paul’s byelection？ Chrystia Freeland tight-lipped on what she did in Davos

Episode Stats


Length

46 minutes

Words per minute

178.6

Word count

8,273

Sentence count

375

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On today's show, True North's Andrew Lawton talks about Canada Day, the carbon tax, and whether or not Justin Trudeau is the next Prime Minister of Canada. Plus, a look at the "safe supply" program in his own city.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30 Thank you.
00:01:00 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:19 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most reverent talk show here on true north it is
00:01:29 tuesday july 2nd the second day of canada's 158th year i hope well here's to 157 more canada
00:01:39 it is good to have you here and i hope you had a wonderful canada day long weekend or as i tend to
00:01:46 say Dominion Day. But Dominion Day is, I think, a rather interesting example of where we are as a
00:01:54 country, because I've always said Dominion Day just by virtue of it being far more traditional.
00:01:59 And I think Canada Day is a bit of a hokey name. That's not to say it's a terrible name. It's just
00:02:05 Dominion was wonderful. Canada is a dominion. It's a term that comes from the Bible. But the reason
00:02:11 I like Dominion Day is just because it's traditional. But there was this proliferation
00:02:15 I saw online of anytime someone like me or my colleague William Macbeth or anyone else said
00:02:20 Dominion Day, it was accused of being some like weird far right dog whistle, which just goes to
00:02:25 show you how anything is far right to those who basically think that even Stalin was probably a
00:02:31 little bit too conservative for their liking. But nevertheless, hope you had a good weekend.
00:02:35 I went out to one of the small town Canada Day festivities near me yesterday. And on the weekend,
00:02:41 I took advantage of having a couple of days off to do something I have never done before.
00:02:45 I smoked brisket, not like the Justin Trudeau stuff. No, I smoked brisket and I've done pulled
00:02:53 pork. I've done ribs. I've smoked some other stuff like on the smoker. Don't get too many ideas here.
00:02:59 I had never done brisket. I was always very overwhelmed by it because, you know, everyone
00:03:03 says it's so difficult. And this was on, I think it was Saturday, maybe whatever day it was,
00:03:08 I got up literally at 3 a.m. to start smoking the brisket and, you know, put it in there.
00:03:14 It basically was ready at, I think, 6 p.m.
00:03:18 So all of the time proclamations that I had been given as a bit of a warning ended up becoming quite accurate.
00:03:23 To be honest, I was really impressed with it.
00:03:26 The flat part, if you know brisket, was a little bit on the dryer side.
00:03:29 Not dry. It was a little bit overdone.
00:03:31 But the point, which was the main part of the brisket, was phenomenal.
00:03:35 So if you've ever wanted to know how to smoke a brisket, I don't know if I could replicate it.
00:03:40 I'm going to try to do it again.
00:03:41 It is difficult for someone like me to want to invest, what was that, 15 hours in cooking dinner.
00:03:48 But now I've got like enough food for the whole week.
00:03:49 So this is what we do on the long weekends in my household.
00:03:53 But good to have you tuned into the show.
00:03:55 We'll talk a little bit later on about this rather stark realization of the safe supply
00:04:01 or so-called safe supply program in my own city.
00:04:04 but it's one that you would probably find finding similar to in communities across the country.
00:04:09 We'll talk about that with Adam Zeevo.
00:04:11 And also want to talk a little bit about this weird national export of the carbon tax.
00:04:18 The government is not just wanting to make sure Canadians are subject to the carbon tax,
00:04:23 but is wanting to promote and push the carbon tax all around the world.
00:04:27 So we'll talk about that with our good friend Chris Sims,
00:04:29 who returns for a rare Tuesday update in just about 10 minutes or so.
00:04:33 But let's first talk about the state of Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party.
00:04:38 I think last week, it was one week ago today, that we had the definitive ruling of, well, I should say actually no,
00:04:45 it was a week ago today that Torontonians went to the polls in the Toronto St. Paul's riding.
00:04:50 It was a week ago Tuesday morning that we got the finding that the Conservative candidate, Don Stewart,
00:04:56 had been elected the next Member of Parliament for Toronto St. Paul's.
00:05:00 And I think a lot of people may have optimistically expected that Justin Trudeau would not last until the end of the week, that you could basically do what we did with Liz Truss and the lettuce and just have Justin Trudeau versus a head of lettuce and see who can last longer.
00:05:14 In that case, the lettuce outlasted Liz Truss. 0.99
00:05:16 But I think Justin Trudeau is outlasting the lettuce.
00:05:20 If someone were to replicate the experiment here, there has been no massive caucus revolt.
00:05:25 There has been no groundswell of public condemnation from liberal MPs.
00:05:29 You just had cabinet ministers coming out and saying, yes, our leader has the full confidence in us.
00:05:34 We have the full confidence in him. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Go, go wild.
00:05:39 It's basically like that meme of I think the dog sitting in the burning building saying this is fine.
00:05:43 That's basically Justin Trudeau in the Liberal Party of Canada right now.
00:05:48 There was one letter, one letter signed by one member of parliament, New Brunswick MP Wayne Long, which came out.
00:05:55 I think it was last Friday. And this letter, which was sent to Liberal caucus members,
00:06:00 basically had Wayne Long calling on Justin Trudeau to resign, calling on him to step aside
00:06:05 as Prime Minister, as Liberal leader, and to let someone else lead the party into the next election.
00:06:11 Now, Althea Raj, who wrote about this in the Toronto Star, said she was told that more
00:06:15 Liberals were going to sign the letter, that more caucus members were going to,
00:06:19 and effectively they got cold feet. So MPs are just terrified right now of criticizing Justin
00:06:26 Trudeau. The Liberal Party has managed to make it so that no one who has frustrations with him
00:06:31 and his leadership even has an outlet. They're not calling a national caucus meeting. MPs who
00:06:37 were terrified of speaking up have just decided to be cowed into submission. We had the report
00:06:43 from justin ling also in the toronto star last week that steven gilbeau this this was fantastic
00:06:49 by the way so steven gilbeau was at the union station business lounge in toronto so he's waiting
00:06:55 to get on a via rail train and he's just like openly on the lounge just talking about oh yeah
00:06:59 so and so wants to get rid of him uh oh yeah we need oh so yeah no we gotta rob all the fan he
00:07:05 said this about justin trudeau and this mp and this mp and as it happened sitting like i don't
00:07:09 know, five feet away from him was Justin Ling, who decided to do the grab the low hanging fruit
00:07:16 of journalism as he should have and just say, you know, start furiously taking notes. And he wrote
00:07:21 about that. He wrote about just what he was hearing from Stephen Gilboa waiting to board a train
00:07:25 station in the Via Rail business class lounge. But the amount of damage control that came out
00:07:30 from the PMO after that, after hearing that call, Gilboa saying, no, this was one sided. He didn't
00:07:36 hear everything and other MPs saying, oh no, he should have asked me, I would have clarified this.
00:07:41 The PMO was terrified because they knew that it was evidence of their minister trying to do damage
00:07:48 control. And then they basically came out and said, oh, we never asked him to do that. No,
00:07:52 there was no problem. Again, the nothing to see here defense. So the liberals believe that they
00:07:58 are in an absolutely great place. And because their MPs do not have the temerity, do not have
00:08:04 the courage or the backbone to stand up to their leader. Justin Trudeau is going to stay on the
00:08:08 ballot until the next election. I'm convinced of this. And here, I mean, this is why he's doing
00:08:13 the media rounds now and doing interviews and talking about this as though he knows he's not
00:08:18 going anywhere. Take a look. In terms of personal contemplation, if there's any discussion or a
00:08:25 thought for you of a 10th candidate as prime minister, because as I have you, I would be
00:08:31 remiss if I didn't ask about what has happened in the last week since the by-election in Toronto
00:08:36 St. Paul's and the calls from caucus members and former cabinet colleagues. They say it's
00:08:42 time for a new leader. Listen, there's always going to be lots of reflection after a tough
00:08:47 loss, but there's also so much to do, and I am committed to doing the work of building a better
00:08:53 Canada every single day. So I look forward to next year's Canada Day, and I look forward to
00:08:57 many more canada days this is this is the kind of work that we have to remember really really
00:09:04 matters there are tough days and there are better days but canadians are strong and resilient and
00:09:09 that's why we keep moving forward i look forward to many more canada days next canada day the
00:09:16 canada day yeah all the canada days canada day is great oh by the way i'm not going anywhere
00:09:20 he says he's committed to staying on and of course why would he feel like he's going anywhere he
00:09:25 Justin Trudeau is like the guy in the movies who any movie it happens in many many movies
00:09:31 who everyone thinks is up against the wall the police know they've got him and they're wondering
00:09:36 why this guy is so cocky because they don't realize that someone has like broken into the
00:09:40 evidence locker and destroyed the key piece of evidence so he knows he knows that he's won
00:09:45 and that's the case of Justin Trudeau right now he is coming out here and he is making all of
00:09:50 these claims of him staying on because he knows that his party is not going to get rid of him.
00:09:56 He knows that Wayne Long is the entirety of the so-called resistance against Justin Trudeau
00:10:01 because all these other people that were going to sign the letter have just been
00:10:05 stunned into submission. They've been scared, they've been threatened, whatever. And again,
00:10:09 these are very short-sighted liberal MPs because so many of them know they're going to lose the
00:10:13 next election. So what power it is that Justin Trudeau wields over them, I have no idea and I
00:10:19 don't particularly care but it's amazing if you look at their spin it's evolved considerably from
00:10:25 even last week to now about why they lost Toronto St. Paul's now let's put the map up this is the
00:10:31 map the electoral map the political map of Toronto as of well Tuesday at 4 44 a.m it's all liberal
00:10:39 liberal liberal liberal liberal and then blank right in mid I don't know what blank means but
00:10:43 right in the middle of midtown there is Toronto St. Paul's now represented by a conservative for
00:10:48 the first time in 31 years now why did the liberals lose well the first couple of days of spin was all
00:10:55 ministers coming out and saying well yes we're disappointed but we're going to listen and we're
00:10:59 going to really pay attention and we're going to hear what people want and we're going to
00:11:02 this is it's now evolved it's now about they're no longer interested in what they did wrong they're
00:11:07 no longer interested in listening to canadians they're no longer interested in taking stock
00:11:11 This was Karina Gould, the Liberal cabinet minister, pushing out her own spin.
00:11:17 Liberal MP suggests party needed stronger ground game in Toronto St. Paul's vote.
00:11:23 So the reason they didn't win is because they weren't canvassing enough.
00:11:26 The reason they didn't win is because they didn't have as good a get-out-the-vote effort as the Conservatives did.
00:11:30 Now, the Conservatives may well have done a tremendous get-out-the-vote effort,
00:11:34 but getting rid of a riding that you've held for 31 years cannot be blamed on mere ground game.
00:11:40 The reality is not that they didn't have enough volunteers.
00:11:43 Leslie Church, the Liberal candidate, was not the problem.
00:11:46 The problem was Justin Trudeau and the Liberal brand.
00:11:50 I just love that.
00:11:51 I find that to be just so fascinating here.
00:11:53 It's, oh, well, the reason we lost was, no, it's not that they hate Justin Trudeau.
00:11:58 It's not that they hate the carbon tax.
00:12:00 It's not that Canada's broke.
00:12:01 It's a ground game, ground game.
00:12:04 That's the one.
00:12:04 We didn't do the ground game properly.
00:12:06 It is insane.
00:12:08 and you see the way that the liberal government has just been so absolutely beleaguered on pretty
00:12:13 much every file imaginable and you wonder where it's going to go from here and unless liberals
00:12:19 start to find a backbone and say we don't want you here to their leader to Justin Trudeau
00:12:24 nothing is going to change now to be clear I am absolutely I don't actually care I don't care
00:12:30 whether Justin Trudeau is there or they replace him with some seat filler until the next election
00:12:36 It makes no difference to me, and I don't really think it makes much of a difference to the country, because anyone that would be there to fill his seat, to be an interim prime minister, they're on the same path. There'd be a path dependency from the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, and nothing they do is going to really depart that dramatically from what Justin Trudeau is doing now.
00:12:58 Now, that being said, I would say that the Liberals, if you look at polling numbers,
00:13:03 there was that one piece in the National Post today that looked at an Angus Reid poll,
00:13:07 finding that even if Justin Trudeau were not the leader,
00:13:09 the electoral fortunes of the Liberals are unlikely to be helped much, if at all.
00:13:14 Canadians are still not going to vote for the Liberals.
00:13:17 So if they want to put Dominic LeBlanc or Anita Anand or Chrystia Freeland or Mark Carney or whomever
00:13:23 in that seat in the next election,
00:13:25 it's not going to make a huge difference.
00:13:28 So we have a few different players here.
00:13:31 The Conservatives have been raring to go.
00:13:32 They're saying, bring on the election.
00:13:34 They want it now.
00:13:34 And understandably so,
00:13:35 because they're on track to have well over 200 seats
00:13:38 in a majority if the election were held today.
00:13:41 But you have two things standing in the way
00:13:43 of any major change.
00:13:45 One is Justin Trudeau is not going anywhere
00:13:47 and no one in his party seems to be too bothered by that.
00:13:50 The other is that the NDP are not interested in having an election. Jagmeet Singh has not yet qualified for his pension, so pay close attention to what happens in February. He might all of a sudden find a bit of a spine come February.
00:14:04 But what's interesting is that there was another poll showing that NDP voters, only 40% of them, sorry, only 40% of Canadians view the NDP liberal deal as beneficial.
00:14:19 40% of NDP supporters aren't even convinced it's a good idea.
00:14:22 So apparently you have just like six in 10 new Democrat voters, new Democrat supporters
00:14:28 that are happy with selling out their whole party, their whole ideal set for the liberal
00:14:35 government to keep it in power a little bit longer.
00:14:37 So NDP voters need to speak up as well and tell Jagmeet Singh they're not too keen on
00:14:42 this.
00:14:42 Again, I do think that the pension theory holds a lot more weight the more you think
00:14:47 about it and the fact that the NDP is just a perennially broke party.
00:14:52 that really can't afford to go to the polls anytime soon but what's happening here Trudeau
00:14:57 is going to skip the Calgary stampede not that winning votes in Alberta was necessarily going to
00:15:01 be what he had in mind for a plan moving forward but he's basically just hiding he doesn't want to
00:15:07 be around people that don't like him and that pretty much leaves out well the entire country
00:15:11 right now speaking of Alberta let's go to our friend Chris Sims here for a rare Tuesday check-in
00:15:17 given the holiday yesterday she is the Alberta director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
00:15:22 Chris, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:15:25 Likewise. I didn't hear that, so he's skipping the Calgary Stampede.
00:15:30 Can you hear me?
00:15:31 That's according to the Western Standard anyway, confirmed by an email from the PMO.
00:15:36 So basically, they are not interested in – well, he's not interested in being there,
00:15:41 and I think Albertans are probably just as pleased because I don't think they were ready to give him the white hat welcome by any stretch.
00:15:46 But we've talked a lot, you and I, over the last year about the carbon tax.
00:15:51 It's become an incredibly unpopular tax.
00:15:53 It's costing Canadians a lot of money, despite the proclamations that it's not.
00:15:57 What I find interesting here, and you drew my attention to this, the government has spent
00:16:01 $1.7 million promoting the carbon tax around the world, so promoting global carbon taxes.
00:16:09 So they don't just want people in Red Deer and Strathroy and Halifax to pay the carbon
00:16:15 tax.
00:16:15 They want people in Baku and Tallinn and Paris to pay a carbon tax as well.
00:16:21 talk to me about this. Yeah. So it's one of those things where I had to take a double take at it
00:16:26 because I couldn't tell right away if it was 1.7 million or 1.7 billion. And the fact that I didn't
00:16:32 blink at the difference speaks volumes because they just as easily could have been a billion.
00:16:37 But in this case, it's 1.7 million dollars with an M. And we found this out through freedom of
00:16:44 information requests with the federal government through our investigative journalist, Ryan Thorpe
00:16:50 there in Ottawa. He and Franco dug this up. And yeah, it turns out they've spent around $800,000
00:16:55 in change or so, Andrew, on bureaucrats keeping seats warm and watering houseplants there in the
00:17:01 national capital region, trying to promote adopting a carbon tax in other countries.
00:17:07 And what I find spectacularly sad about this is that they fail. They're really bad at this.
00:17:15 So not only are they wasting Canadian taxpayers' money on something silly and frivolous, like trying to convince a foreign country to impose a tax on its people, but they're terrible at it. 0.88
00:17:26 They haven't succeeded in doing so.
00:17:28 Like, I'll just point out the United States of America, it's obviously our closest neighbor, biggest trading partner, huge ally, blah, blah.
00:17:35 I just finished driving across three states, actually, came home yesterday.
00:17:38 And they, number one, depending on how you slice it, it really looks like they reduced their emissions under Trump.
00:17:47 And that is largely because they increased their use of natural gas, reading they do not have a national carbon tax in the United States of America.
00:17:56 And even though their chirpy little sister up here in Canada has been urging them to do so, they still haven't imposed one on their people.
00:18:04 So if we can't even convince the United States to have a national carbon tax, why are we wasting money trying to convince countries further afield to do so?
00:18:13 There are two things that come to mind on this.
00:18:15 Number one is that talk about a race to the bottom is that, you know, we've been saying to the government, you know, even if Canada were to bring its emissions to zero, it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans because emissions are global.
00:18:26 So the government says, OK, we'll see you that argument and raise you.
00:18:30 Everyone has a carbon tax there.
00:18:32 You can't say we're ignoring the global picture.
00:18:33 But the other thing, and this is what I think is so key here, the greatest detriment that a carbon, well, one of the greatest detriments a carbon tax poses is that it eliminates any competitive advantage that Canada might have and investing in Canada might have relative to other countries.
00:18:49 So if you're to say, oh, why would I invest in Canada, which has a carbon tax, when I can invest and open up my factory in, oh, I don't know, in Czech Republic, say, because they don't have a carbon tax.
00:19:00 The government's trying to make it so that everyone is being punitive, so that everyone is penalizing industry.
00:19:05 And as you note, other countries are saying, nope.
00:19:09 Yeah, exactly.
00:19:10 Because they know that this is not helping the environment.
00:19:12 They know it's not reducing emissions because if you start punishing people financially for an essential, OK, heating your home in the winter is essential.
00:19:21 Growing and eating food is essential.
00:19:24 Shipping your supplies to people who need it and getting to work.
00:19:27 Those are all essential things.
00:19:29 People aren't flying their private jets around the world to, you know, cop conferences for reducing your emissions.
00:19:35 Right. They're not. This is not a have yacht issue.
00:19:37 This is a normal working class sort of thing, and yet they're still financially punishing us. 0.89
00:19:43 And if you take that viewpoint around the world, of course, they have working people and working
00:19:47 populations and normal families around the world. And Canada, our little academic class there in
00:19:53 Ottawa, trying to say, you know what you guys should do? You should punish people for driving
00:19:57 to work and heating their homes. They're rightly telling us to go get lost. The problem here,
00:20:02 though, of course, Andrew, is that this is again costing Canadian taxpayers money. $1.7 million
00:20:08 and it's not nothing. It's also growing the size of our bureaucracy. And it's the same sort of
00:20:14 thing that the former New York City Mayor Giuliani had when it came to crime. It's the broken windows
00:20:18 theory. If you allow for jaywalking and broken windows and graffiti, you're going to have
00:20:23 increasing levels of crime. Same sort of thing with dumb things like spending money on promoting 0.91
00:20:30 a carbon tax internationally. It doesn't work. It wastes money and it grows government. So again, 0.92
00:20:35 I'm really glad that the folks there at the CTF in Ottawa's office dug this stuff up because it
00:20:40 points out how absolutely pointless this is. I will point out, I just filled up in Montana on
00:20:45 my way back across into Alberta. That's why my voice is so ratch because I was screaming at a
00:20:49 concert for like three hours, but I filled up there. It's like 30 cents, around 30 cents cheaper
00:20:56 there per litre same octane for gasoline than it is even here across the border in Alberta and
00:21:03 that's comparing Montana to Alberta. I can't imagine what the difference would be going from
00:21:07 a really red state to a really liberal state or province up here in Canada. Yeah I think you're
00:21:13 right about that and you know I go back to the race to the bottom dimension of this here because
00:21:18 we always forget that in a well we don't but the government does or chooses to ignore that
00:21:23 in a globalized economy, you have to be able to sell what you are offering better than other
00:21:29 places around the world. Now, obviously there are shipping costs that have to be factored in there
00:21:33 and maybe Canada can say, okay, we have a bit of a comparative advantage to say the US market
00:21:37 because of our proximity to it. But the fact that in Canada, it's so expensive to manufacture
00:21:42 things. Labor is a part of that. Yes, the carbon tax adds to it. And we have to stop looking at
00:21:47 these things in isolation. The left loves talking about intersectionality. Well, let's talk about
00:21:51 intersectionality of taxes and regulations and all of these things here.
00:21:56 I might steal that from you.
00:21:58 It's all yours.
00:21:59 It's all yours.
00:22:00 Really good analysis and spot on.
00:22:01 And to your point, exactly.
00:22:03 So people might remember this big foo for awe that was happening between the prime minister's
00:22:08 office, PMO, and parliamentary budget office, PBO.
00:22:12 Ottawa loves their acronyms just like the armed forces.
00:22:14 So what was happening was the PBO, parliamentary budget officer, had figured out, spoiler alert,
00:22:21 that the carbon tax costs people money, even with their precious rebates factored in.
00:22:26 Every common sense person already knew this, of course, but they did the math there. And what's
00:22:31 really startling is that you take a look exactly to your point, Andrew, the GDP cost. Okay. So we're
00:22:37 not talking just generally people filling up their minivans or their pickup trucks directly,
00:22:42 or even paying, you know, the carbon tax on their, on their heat bill, which is insane.
00:22:46 But if you just look at apples to apples, the GDP cost, so the difference between Bill Jones
00:22:53 starting a manufacturing plant in Montana with no carbon tax versus starting a manufacturing plant
00:23:00 in Alberta with a carbon tax, that difference is costing the Canadian economy billions of dollars
00:23:09 per year. And again, that's just the economic cost that the PBO was factoring in there.
00:23:14 And that, of course, is why the prime minister's office was kicking and screaming for weeks, Andrew.
00:23:18 And they didn't want to release this information, but they finally had to cough it up last week.
00:23:22 And it's really damaging.
00:23:24 And we found that all of the arguments used to justify the carbon tax have not held water.
00:23:30 We know it does penalize Canadians.
00:23:32 There is a, I mean, and that's even just based on the government's own analysis here.
00:23:36 So this idea that, oh, most people are coming out ahead.
00:23:38 Well, if so, there wouldn't be a point in it.
00:23:40 Yeah, exactly.
00:23:41 That's, I always like pointing that out.
00:23:43 because you can flip it around and say, oh, well, okay, if it makes everybody rich,
00:23:48 heck, make the carbon tax $500 a ton. We'll all be rich, right? That's idiotic thinking. That's
00:23:54 childish thinking. I would only insult children. That's really silly to think that because of
00:23:59 course, taxes don't make you richer. And number two, exactly to your point, if it's not financially
00:24:05 punitive to use a substance, then how do they expect the use of that substance to be reduced?
00:24:12 if it's not hurting you in your wallet, so to speak, as they try to say, and deterring you from
00:24:18 using it, then what's the point of it, right? This is the whole argument, right, with using
00:24:24 paper or plastic bags, right? Or having a deposit on your pop can. If it's a deterrent to throw it
00:24:30 in the garbage versus recycling it and getting your money back, that's how their thinking worked.
00:24:35 But the problem is, is that's not how it worked out. In theory, that's what they were trying to
00:24:40 do for years. Spoiler alert, people still need to get to work. They still need to eat. They still
00:24:44 need to heat their homes. And that is why even though Canada has a carbon tax, our emissions
00:24:50 continue to go up. Even though British Columbia has been the oldest jurisdiction with the carbon
00:24:56 tax for the longest time, since 2008, their emissions nonetheless continue to rise steadily
00:25:03 because people use this as essential fuels. And so, yeah, it's not working because it's not
00:25:09 reducing emissions. It's not working because now they're trying to spin this and saying, oh, well,
00:25:14 it was only ever meant to make you richer anyway, and here's a rebate. If that were true, Andrew,
00:25:19 why did the Trudeau government blink when it comes to Atlantic Canada, right? They came out
00:25:26 and admitted, yes, this is a financial burden for people to pay a carbon tax on their home heating
00:25:32 oil, which is largely used in Atlantic Canada, especially in places like Nova Scotia and Prince
00:25:37 Southern Island. Why did they then come forward and say, you know what, we're suspending the
00:25:41 carbon tax, but just on this fuel and just for the next three years, like any way you slice it,
00:25:47 this is not working out for them. So explain to me where you think this is headed, because
00:25:54 we know that, I mean, correlation is not causation, but we know that polyamorous and
00:25:59 conservatives have been surging in the polls for months now. We know that if you could really
00:26:03 attribute one policy to him, even if you're only a casual political observer, it's going to be
00:26:09 axe the tax. So the conservatives have taken up getting rid of the carbon tax, as I'd say at this
00:26:13 point anyway, their flagship policy. That might not be the reason they're doing so well in the
00:26:18 polls, but it certainly isn't hurting them. And I think that, again, even people that were kind of
00:26:22 okay with the carbon tax have realized that in an inflationary economy, it's a luxury item. It's
00:26:28 okay, maybe we could afford it in 2015, we can't afford the carbon tax now. Do you think that will
00:26:33 remain in place do you think that sentiment will remain yeah i think so and exactly to your point
00:26:38 because people just can't afford things so inflation is just astonishing i haven't checked his math but
00:26:45 i would recommend people go look i found him on instagram there's a gentleman there now again i
00:26:50 have not gone in a deep dive and checked his math but it looks generally correct there's a gentleman
00:26:54 that has like a walmart kind of um a shopping cart right i guess you can do that i don't actually have
00:27:00 the app but apparently within the app you can go back through your order history and he shows it
00:27:05 on the screen and he shows that what he used to spend around 100 i'm guessing around 180 or so
00:27:11 back in 2015 he says he's now spending around 400 or so on pretty much the same items and so he was
00:27:20 trying to point this out he was just a regular guy trying to point out what inflation is like
00:27:24 here in canada that was astonishing and it really shows like if anybody who's at the grocery store
00:27:29 who keeps an eye on their prices realizes how much things are costing. Add to that the price of fuel
00:27:34 and the price of housing. It's just astonishing for people. So yeah, to your point, I do think
00:27:39 that axing the tax is going to continue to be a main driving force with the popularity of any
00:27:46 party who wants to promote it, by the way. And it's really interesting to see Pierre Polyev and
00:27:50 the Conservatives make a full 180, thank you very much, after that weird little flirtation they had
00:27:57 with their version of a carbon tax so glad to see them on the right track i will point out by the
00:28:01 way i just i saw that your audible is now available for the pierre pauliev book so i just ordered it
00:28:07 i just ordered it on my phone so i'll be listening to it this week but to your point i do think this
00:28:12 is going to be a major issue and i think it will continue to be a major issue even if we have to
00:28:16 wait for a year and a half because i'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news it's just going to get
00:28:21 worse because the trudeau government they've got a massive deficit they have no plans to ever
00:28:26 balance the budget they have no concept of money and so like the budget fairy gods are not going
00:28:32 to descend upon canada and just fix things they have to balance the budget and do smart things
00:28:36 and they're just refusing to do so so yeah i do think that's going to be a centerpiece
00:28:41 very well said uh chris uh now you might just be stuck with a view of chris right now because my
00:28:47 producer sean just told me his power went out oh there we go i'm back he switched to a uh
00:28:52 a hot spot there so you might have had to just like pick up the show from there because we
00:28:55 We couldn't switch cameras one way or another.
00:28:58 Oh, be still by eating art.
00:29:00 Yes, that is the book that's over my shoulder there.
00:29:02 Pierre Polyev, A Political Life,
00:29:04 now available on Audible, eBooks, Kindle, Indigo, Amazon.
00:29:08 It's available anywhere.
00:29:09 So Chris, thank you so much.
00:29:10 Hope you enjoy the book.
00:29:12 I will.
00:29:12 Thanks, Andrew.
00:29:13 All right.
00:29:13 Thanks very much.
00:29:15 I was very nervous.
00:29:16 Sean just sent me a message that my power is out.
00:29:18 I'm like, well, okay, but what does that mean for me?
00:29:19 And then apparently it meant that we got a nice long close-up
00:29:23 on Chris Sims.
00:29:23 But you know what?
00:29:24 if you need to close up on someone, uh, better on Chris than on me. So I think we should probably
00:29:29 just do the whole show with her. I could just, you know, dub it and, you know, we'll go, go that
00:29:33 way. But, uh, anyway, let's, uh, let's take a moment here. Uh, this is a story that's closer
00:29:38 to home for me in, I live in, uh, Southwestern Ontario, as many of you well know. And the
00:29:43 reality is in the city of London, it, uh, we used to just be this nice little quiet, sleepy city
00:29:50 It was more conservative culturally, not necessarily politically.
00:29:55 And I remember even a decade ago looking at the drug situation in Vancouver and seeing that as a problem over there.
00:30:01 And London very quickly became, around that time, 2015-2016, one of the worst cities in terms of a drug problem.
00:30:10 London was one of the cities that early on embraced needle distribution, crack pipe distribution, all of these other things.
00:30:17 and all of that is novel and quaint compared to what we're seeing now with the proliferation of
00:30:23 so-called safe supply now this has been an issue we've talked about at a relatively length well
00:30:29 we've talked about it at length I had Dr Sharon Koivu on the program a couple of weeks back and
00:30:34 she used to well she is an addiction medicine physician in London but she used to be a significant 0.99
00:30:39 champion of so-called safe supply and she did what any other scientist and researcher does she 0.79
00:30:44 followed the data. And the data showed her that these things were not only not helping people
00:30:50 with drug addiction, but they were making things worse. She saw another number of key metrics
00:30:54 continue to rise and in fact balloon. Well, now we have another report from our friend Adam Zivo,
00:31:01 who is with the National Post and also is the founder of the Center for Responsible Drug
00:31:06 policies, the seizure, police seizure of hydromorphone pills skyrocketed 3,000% after
00:31:14 the city's safe supply or so-called safe supply expansion going back to the year 2020. This is
00:31:22 massive, a 3,000% increase given that this was finding these hydromorphone tablets were finding
00:31:31 themselves being diverted to the black market. Police were seeing this, didn't really say
00:31:36 boo about it, didn't speak up, didn't take aim at any of these policies in any public way. And in
00:31:42 fact, Adam Zivo, as he's recounted in his article here, he had a heck of a time getting some of the
00:31:47 information that was necessary from police and getting this disclosure. And there was a former
00:31:52 London police sergeant who has now become a documentary filmmaker that was trying to do
00:31:57 similar stuff. He was trying to do research on this and was finding himself getting absolutely
00:32:02 stonewalled. But in early June, the deputy chief of the London police service, Paul Bastian,
00:32:08 confirmed to Adam Zeebo that hydromorphone seizures have gone up. Just to put some raw
00:32:13 numbers on here, in 2019, the London police had fewer than 1,000 tablets seized. In 2020,
00:32:21 that number had increased sharply. And when you get to 2022, over 30,000, and they're expecting
00:32:28 this year, it will match or exceed last year. So we have seen a massive, massive increase
00:32:36 in this. This is just one drug in one city in Canada, but I think there's probably a bigger
00:32:42 picture here that we'll see. Adam Zivo joins us on the show again. Good to talk to you, Adam.
00:32:47 let's just talk about this here because diversion is something that there is irrefutable evidence
00:32:53 it's happening you've pointed to like ads on reddit threads promoting diverted drugs we've seen
00:32:59 these numbers yet still the activists and advocates of safe supply i i mean in some ways
00:33:04 pretend it's non-existent at all or when they are confronted with the evidence just downplay it
00:33:10 considerably but this is not an insignificant increase no i mean like going from 1 000 pill
00:33:16 sees in 2019 to 30,000 pills sees in 2023 is huge. Most people, when they hear these numbers,
00:33:23 they don't really have any frame of reference, but we have to remember that just two or three
00:33:27 of these pills is enough to induce an overdose in an opioid-naive user, such as a teenager.
00:33:33 So essentially, these 30,000 pills is the equivalent of 10,000 overdoses. And as Dr.
00:33:40 Sharon Koivu pointed out when I interviewed her for this piece, these seizures represent just a
00:33:44 drop in the bucket of what is flowing throughout the city overall. So we're looking at probably
00:33:50 hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pills flowing through London, Ontario because of safer
00:33:55 supply. Let me just ask you about this, because if you look at one drug, you look at hydromorph
00:34:01 and you see an increase, it's not all that surprising that if diversion happens, that when
00:34:06 this product is given an expanded access in a particular point in time, that you're going to
00:34:11 see an increase of it. My question would be, and I don't know if we have the data on this,
00:34:15 is there a net increase in drugs in the city or has hydromorph just replaced something else that
00:34:22 would have been seized had these tablets not been? And in that case, you know, the activists would
00:34:26 argue maybe it's healthier because this is better for you than some of these other things.
00:34:30 Well, it's hard to talk about the net number of drugs, net amounts of drugs flowing through a
00:34:35 city. That's incredibly hard to track. However, from my understanding, Safer Supply has not
00:34:40 replaced the illicit drug supply, but has in fact only subsidized it. The reason why Safer Supply
00:34:45 clients sell their drugs in the first place is because hydromorphone, though it may be as powerful
00:34:49 as heroin, is only about 2% as powerful as fentanyl. And so for a fentanyl user, hydromorphone,
00:34:58 even in large doses, is useless. So they sell their Safer Supply to buy fentanyl. And if all
00:35:03 of these Safer Supply clients are purchasing fentanyl and flooding the streets with their
00:35:08 hydromorphone, that indicates the dental market is still very active and that safe supply is not
00:35:13 replacing it or mitigating it, but rather is subsidizing it. And I think that's very
00:35:17 concerning. Now, when we want to look at other metrics that quantify diversion in London,
00:35:24 Ontario, so Dr. Koivu did do a chart review of her patients in Victoria Hospital. So she reviewed
00:35:30 200 patient charts between January and June of 2023. And she found that 30% or 33% of the
00:35:38 patients who were not enrolled in a Safer Supply program, self-reported accessing hydromorphone
00:35:43 diverted from Safer Supply. Also, CAMH recently released a report that looked at self-reported
00:35:50 drug patterns or drug use amongst Ontario high school students and middle school students.
00:35:55 And they do this survey once every two years, and they found that between 2021 and 2023,
00:36:01 three, the number of students who self-reported using pharmaceutical opioids for non-medical
00:36:08 reasons skyrocketed by about 70%. And the number of students who said that these opioids were
00:36:14 easily available also skyrocketed by about 40%. So all of these indicators suggest that there is
00:36:21 a huge influx into the supply of pharmaceutical drugs. I mean, prices used to, like these pills
00:36:29 used to cost $20 each. Now they sell for about $1 to $2. And that it's not dissuading people
00:36:35 from using dangerous substances. It's getting into the hands of kids and hooking them into
00:36:40 addiction, which then eventually escalates to fentanyl use and then kills them.
00:36:45 So if a lot of these drug users are offloading hydromorph to buy fentanyl, who's the market for
00:36:52 hydromorph if a lot of these drug users are getting rid of it because it doesn't do what
00:36:56 they want it to do. Well, that's the thing that's so pernicious about this diversion is that the
00:37:01 people who buy this hydromorphone tend to be newer users. Let's look at kids as an example.
00:37:07 I've interviewed dozens of kids who have told me all about how hydromorphone has become very
00:37:11 popular in their schools or in their communities. This is predominantly in BC. And they say that
00:37:18 they weren't aware of how dangerous the drug was, right? They know that heroin is bad and that they
00:37:25 shouldn't do heroin. And the fact that you often have to inject heroin is a very powerful way to
00:37:31 dissuade people from experimenting with it. But when a kid is at a party and someone hands them
00:37:36 a pill and they hear hydromorphone and they have no clue what it means, and they're told that it's
00:37:41 just a prescription pain medication, which is marketed as safe from the government, they're
00:37:46 much more likely to try it. And they don't realize what they're getting into until they're already
00:37:51 addicted uh now that's one group other groups include uh people who are in recovery and who
00:37:59 have lower opioid tolerances and who know not to mess with fentanyl and not to mess with heroin
00:38:06 but think that hydromorphone is something that they can handle once again because it's marketed
00:38:11 as safe and if the drug is so cheap how serious could it be i interviewed an addiction outreach
00:38:17 worker in ottawa who estimated that 90 percent of safer supply clients in that city divert their
00:38:23 hydromorphone and he had friends because he used to be a heroin user so he had friends and
00:38:28 acquaintances who got hooked onto the drug and a common theme was that they thought it was maybe
00:38:34 as potent as a tylenol 3 which is still an opioid but it's much weaker because the drug was so cheap
00:38:39 you know it was one dollar a pill so what happened in 2020 that changed this in london so much
00:38:48 well so safer supply was first piloted in 2016 it was initially marketed as a way to uh help stabilize
00:38:56 the lives of vulnerable sex workers essentially if we give them the drugs that they want then they
00:39:01 have fewer reasons to sell their bodies on the streets to make money to buy drugs then it was
00:39:06 quickly expanded uh to become what we know is safer supply today so it was available to anyone
00:39:12 really uh who was severely addicted and this was a pilot project and there was a lot of research
00:39:17 that suggested on paper that it was doing well i mean most of these evaluations and studies were
00:39:22 incredibly low quality most of them just involved interviewing safer supply clients and asking them
00:39:27 do you like this program where you get free opioids and when they predictably said yes this
00:39:31 was framed as objective evidence of success so based on these evaluations safer supply was
00:39:37 expanded nationally in 2020. The COVID pandemic was used as the impetus for this. Essentially,
00:39:43 the argument was that we needed new emergency guidelines to provide these drugs to drug users,
00:39:49 to encourage them to shelter in place, or to prevent them from going into withdrawal or
00:39:53 overdosing because they couldn't access their normal drug dealers. And then this emergency
00:39:58 situation was very quickly established as safer supply. As we know today, there was a scope creep,
00:40:04 much in the same way how we saw a scope creep in London, Ontario. So that expansion hit all of
00:40:12 Canada and allowed many more pilot programs to open up and regular prescribers to provide safer
00:40:18 supply. So we saw a huge increase in access and consequently a huge increase in diversion.
00:40:25 Are you convinced that London is any sort of outlier here or that this is something that if
00:40:30 were to get the data in other cities would be pretty much an identical uh identical situation
00:40:36 i would assume that the data is fairly consistent across major cities where safer supply
00:40:41 is being run uh i actually am very interested in reaching out to different police uh departments
00:40:47 and asking them for their data hopefully they'll respond uh what i would say is that the data that
00:40:52 we have coming out of british columbia suggests that there is a huge problem there that is
00:40:57 uh as bad as if not worse to what we're seeing than in london so earlier this year uh a high
00:41:04 level official from the bc associations of police who was the deputy chief of the vancouver police
00:41:10 department testified in parliament that approximately half of the hydromorphone
00:41:15 that is confiscated in bc or has been confiscated in bc recently can be attributed to safer supply
00:41:22 and we have to keep in mind that when you look at the numbers approximately five percent of the
00:41:28 hydromorphone patients in the province are safe supply patients so five percent of these patients
00:41:33 account for fifty percent of the total seizures so that would require them to divert a truly huge
00:41:40 amount of safer supply uh to have such an impact on the market it's it's i wouldn't say i'm
00:41:47 surprised by it but i i'm disappointed that tracking these numbers was not just a given
00:41:53 when rolling out and developing these programs that the governments that approved these that
00:41:58 were pushing these didn't just want this information up front that you're having to
00:42:01 go to police and hope that they hand it over well here's the problem is that safer supply advocates
00:42:08 and harm reduction researchers often do not want this to be measured uh so they make only wonder
00:42:14 Well, yeah. So they make only the most cursory attempts to measure diversion. Oftentimes there's studies that measure diversion amount to asking safer supply clients, do you divert your drugs? And if so, why? As if you're going to get an honest response from that, any quantitative studies that exist, which are very scarce to begin with, make no attempt to measure diversion.
00:42:36 when the Alberta government pushed for tracing elements to be included into safer supply drugs.
00:42:44 So for example, special chemical indicators, special dyes, special colors, the federal
00:42:50 government refused, even though this was highly practical, because these kinds of tracers have 1.00
00:42:55 been used in the United States already to track counterfeit drugs. And in fact, Dr. Andrea Sarita,
00:43:01 who is the founder of the original Safer Supply program in London, who is basically the progenitor
00:43:07 of Safer Supply and the city's main advocate for Safer Supply, said to parliamentarians earlier
00:43:13 this year that she opposes putting in tracing elements because these tracing elements would
00:43:18 be stigmatizing, which is, it's absurd. What kind of mental gymnastics do you need to believe that?
00:43:24 like as if people would somehow feel stigmatized from taking their pink pills on the streets
00:43:32 in full public view versus their white pills, let alone the fact that chemical tracers cannot
00:43:38 be seen by the public. You know, no one's going to notice the worst case scenario, just like,
00:43:43 you know, put it up to your mouth like this if you really need to. Yeah, it's absurd. And when 0.54
00:43:49 when you have safer supply advocates using such absurd arguments to contest the need for tracing
00:43:57 elements in safer supply, I think that's suspicious. And I think that we also have to
00:44:03 keep in mind that many safer supply advocates think that diversion is a good thing. Once again,
00:44:07 Dr. Andrea Sarita has often defended diversion and has said that, you know, it is better for
00:44:13 someone to access diverted safer supply than illicit street drugs. But once again, going back
00:44:18 to my earlier comments. It doesn't seem that people are choosing to use safer supply in lieu
00:44:23 of illicit street substances. This safer supply is merely adding to the total drug supply
00:44:29 and creating a very dangerous gateway into harder substances.
00:44:35 Adam Zivo, great work. As always, the piece in the National Post is, as we've been talking about,
00:44:41 hydromorphone pills seized in London skyrocket 3,000% after safer supply expansion. Great work,
00:44:47 Adam thanks for coming on today thanks for having me on the show all right thank you that does it
00:44:52 for us for today we'll be back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show in just 23
00:44:57 hours and 15 minutes same time same place hopefully with fewer technical glitches but we'll roll with
00:45:02 the punches as we always do thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to
00:45:08 the Andrew Lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news
00:45:17 We'll be right back.
00:45:47 We'll be right back.
00:46:17 You