Juno News - June 11, 2024


Trudeau laments rise of ＂populist right-wing forces＂

Topics
lng projects and emissions
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Sharon Koivu Pierre Poilievre Jennifer O'Connell Andrew Lawton Adam Chambers Koibu Biden Puer Adam Zeebo Michael Ignatieff Erin O'Toole Vashi Capellos Frank Caputo Mark Carney Mark Miller John Rustad George III Oxycontin Summers and 6 more
Chrystia Freeland admits ＂wrath＂ of middle class Canadians ＂burns hot＂ Calgary is falling apart

Episode Stats


Length

49 minutes

Words per minute

165.66

Word count

8,119

Sentence count

299

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show on TSN, True North's Andrew Lawton takes a look at Justin Trudeau's latest comments on the rise of far-right populist forces and their impact on Canada's democracy.

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 the andrew lawton show on true north it is tuesday june 11
00:01:30 2024 great to have you tuned in here and i was if you've used twitter or x as they call it now
00:01:37 you'll notice it's changed a lot in the last few months since the elon musk take over now some of
00:01:42 the changes are good i'm not worried about being censored or throttled or anything like that
00:01:46 But the algorithms are a little bit weird, yet oddly mesmerizing in the same way.
00:01:51 So I was just looking at Twitter.
00:01:54 I try to get my finger on the pulse of things before the show begins, and I'm seeing some
00:01:58 video clip.
00:02:00 The caption is, she cheated on him and was using him for the game, so he decided to smash
00:02:06 the ball and take all the money, leaving her with nothing.
00:02:09 And it's a 35-second clip from some reality game dating type show that I've never heard
00:02:15 of with people I've never heard of and I have no interest in and I don't follow the account that
00:02:20 posted it but by George I watched that whole clip as though I was just entranced and engrossed in
00:02:25 it so the algorithm is doing something right and I lost 35 seconds of my life that I'll never get
00:02:30 back which I have tried to get back by making you deal with 35 seconds of your life as I tell you
00:02:35 the story but in any event yesterday we had a not a wardrobe malfunction but a caffeine
00:02:42 malfunctioned on the show. So I made sure to like drink half of my coffee today before it got into
00:02:47 the studio. So hopefully I don't spill this all over as I did yesterday. But fortunately, no
00:02:52 equipment was harmed in the making of this show. I can't say the same for Justin Trudeau's polling
00:02:57 numbers, which have been incredibly, and it would appear irreparably harmed in recent months in
00:03:04 particular, where the Conservatives look to have at some points a 20 point lead over the Liberals
00:03:10 And some polls, the NDP could even be there for second place
00:03:13 and the Liberals will be relegated to being the third party
00:03:17 as they were previously before Justin Trudeau took the helm.
00:03:20 But it's interesting when you talk about all of this,
00:03:23 when you talk about all of what's happening to Justin Trudeau,
00:03:27 there is a part that's missing,
00:03:29 which is that he never wants to acknowledge his own part.
00:03:33 He's never wanted to acknowledge his own part in why he is so unpopular.
00:03:37 And we don't do the whole horse race thing on the show where every day I say, oh, this poll has someone up two or down one or up three.
00:03:44 But you have to talk about the big trends.
00:03:46 And when the polls are not moving, when Justin Trudeau continues to be flagging and he continues to be not able to resonate with voters,
00:03:54 there is something there that is not just an anomaly that you can pin down on the Nanos methodology or the Angus Reid methodology.
00:04:02 It's every poll by every pollster.
00:04:04 The only thing that changes is the margin.
00:04:06 So what does Justin Trudeau think is the big issue facing democracy today?
00:04:12 Take a look.
00:04:14 Around the world, a rise of populist right-wing forces in just about every democracy that we've seen.
00:04:23 And it is of concern to see political parties choosing to instrumentalize anger, fear, division, anxiety.
00:04:36 My approach has always been to respond to it, to understand it and to look to solve it,
00:04:42 to roll up our sleeves, work hard and with ambition for this country and for our future.
00:04:47 And I continue to be convinced that Canadians are thoughtful about the challenges we're facing
00:04:55 and ready to see them solved rather than just allow themselves to have their anger amplified without any solutions offered.
00:05:04 oh the rise of far-right populist forces now there are probably some voters that are saying
00:05:11 absolutely it's about darn time but justin trudeau's view is that this is the menace to
00:05:16 democracy now there are a few things here number one is what he's calling far-right and populist 0.70
00:05:21 now i can't separate these comments from the context this week of the eu elections in which
00:05:26 a lot of right-wing parties had tremendous success so much so that there's been a lot of
00:05:31 finger wagging from many people on the left about what's happening. But the part of democracy that
00:05:36 people don't like is that sometimes you lose and sometimes other parties win. And when other
00:05:41 parties win, you shouldn't look at it as some terrible ordeal. You should look at it as a
00:05:46 victory because voters had to decide. And clearly what this other group was talking about mattered
00:05:52 more to people and offered more solutions than what you were offering. But this is where I bring
00:05:58 back into a canadian context justin trudeau complaining about far-rise populist forces
00:06:03 means that he's trying to say that when pierre polyev is doing well in the polls and again if
00:06:08 they keep up if he wins against justin trudeau that what's happening there is actually bigger
00:06:14 it's just a part of some global right-wing evil scary populist wave it's nothing to do with justin
00:06:19 trudeau nothing to do with pierre polyev there's just a global force all the people that went to
00:06:24 the polls. We're motivated by what happened in Europe. They're motivated by Trump. They're
00:06:28 motivated by Orban. And they just decided, yeah, I'm going to vote for this, you know, 0.90
00:06:33 Puer, Puer, Polly, Polly, Polly. I've never heard of him, but I'm just going to vote for him anyway.
00:06:39 It doesn't really work like that. It doesn't work like that at all. So when Justin Trudeau
00:06:44 gets up there and says that all of these things are part of this global trend,
00:06:49 He's trying to say that it's not his fault.
00:06:52 He's trying to tell his own people, 0.94
00:06:54 no, no, no, populism is the problem, not me.
00:06:57 Blame the right, blame the populace, 0.94
00:06:59 blame Trump, blame Polly F, blame everything. 0.98
00:07:01 Don't blame me.
00:07:03 When the reality is it's Justin Trudeau
00:07:05 that's been presiding over this country
00:07:07 for the last 10 years.
00:07:08 If things have gotten so bad that there is this anger,
00:07:11 that there is this,
00:07:12 and Chrystia Freeland even recognized this yesterday,
00:07:15 this burning wrath by average people,
00:07:18 that's the government's fault that's the government's fault because the government
00:07:22 has allowed things to get that bad in the country that people feel that but even if you were to say
00:07:29 that all of this was a big global trend it were it's nothing to do with Trudeau even if you were
00:07:34 to accept that point do you honestly believe Justin Trudeau's second part of that line which
00:07:40 is that he has only brought understanding and solutions understanding and solutions so when
00:07:46 people feel alienated and disconnected. He has just brought understanding and solutions.
00:07:52 It's not like he's ever called a group of fringe minority or anything, right?
00:07:58 To underline the close to 90% of truckers in this country are vaccinated, like close to 90%
00:08:07 of Canadians. Over the past many months and years now, Canadians have stepped up to protect
00:08:17 each other, to protect our frontline workers, to protect our elders, to protect our young
00:08:21 people, to protect people like truckers who are putting food on our grocery store shelves.
00:08:28 Canadians have stepped up to do the right thing, to protect the freedoms and the rights
00:08:35 of Canadians to get back to the things we love to do.
00:08:40 We know the way through this pandemic
00:08:44 is by getting everyone vaccinated.
00:08:49 And the overwhelming majority,
00:08:52 close to 90% of Canadians have done exactly that.
00:08:58 The small fringe minority of people
00:09:02 who are on their way to Ottawa
00:09:04 or who are holding unacceptable views that they're expressing do not represent the views of Canadians
00:09:15 who have been there for each other, who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other
00:09:23 is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, our rights, our values as a country.
00:09:29 Hmm, that didn't sound like understanding or solutions to me. Maybe it was a one-off. Maybe when he's talking in French, he comes across as more understanding and solution-oriented.
00:09:59 often misogynes, often racist, it's a small group, but it takes place.
00:10:07 And there, we have to make a choice as a leader, as a country.
00:10:11 Do we tolerate these people, or do we say, well, let's see,
00:10:15 the most people, almost 80% of the Québécois, have done what they need to do,
00:10:19 they have been vaccinated, we want to come back to what we like to do.
00:10:23 It's not these people that are going to block us.
00:10:26 oh weird okay people who don't get vaccinated who are against vaccines are they're in two categories
00:10:33 one is well maybe we can convince them and persuade them but if we can't do that if they
00:10:37 really don't want to get vaccinated they're misogynist they're extremists they're racist
00:10:42 they're all of this so again i'm not hearing this commitment to understanding this commitment to
00:10:48 solutions this rise against the anger this rise above the anger i'm not hearing it maybe i've
00:10:54 been wrong i know he's done some gaslighting on this in the past when eva chipia the lawyer
00:10:59 representing the organizers of the convoy was cross-examining trudeau during the public order
00:11:05 emergency commission what did he say oh i never called the unvaccinated names no no siree gambling
00:11:11 in this establishment never never happened i'm squinting because i'm just so frustrated by
00:11:16 a lot of this but it's easy and almost hilarious when he gets up there and says populism is the
00:11:21 problem. The far-right forces are the problem. He's trying to say that he is not. And I realize
00:11:27 that the Liberal Party does not have a lot of options. The Liberal Party, if its members,
00:11:31 if its caucus members were to want to get rid of Justin Trudeau, they don't really have a
00:11:36 mechanism to do so. The Conservatives decided to activate this section of what's called the
00:11:41 Reform Act, where caucus members can vote to get rid of their leader, like Aaron O'Toole
00:11:45 did, well, had happened to him. He didn't really do it. He was not too keen on that.
00:11:49 but the liberals don't and it won't be until they have an election lost that they'll really
00:11:54 have a leadership review so there are always rumors swirling I saw some by a journalist this
00:12:00 week saying oh yes Justin Trudeau is going to resign this summer maybe he doesn't maybe he
00:12:05 does doesn't really matter if you're Mark Carney and you're waiting in the wings you probably want
00:12:10 Justin Trudeau to go completely over the cliff and drive your party into collapse and then you
00:12:15 come because whoever leads the Liberal Party into the next election is going to be a sacrificial
00:12:20 lamb. So you want like an interim leader so that the party just accepts, yeah, this isn't going to
00:12:25 happen. We'll take our lumps, we'll get our floggings, our lashings out of the way, and then
00:12:30 the new leader will come in. And that's kind of what happened with Justin Trudeau, post Michael
00:12:35 Ignatieff. But all of this is besides the point in some ways, because right now you do have an
00:12:40 anger and a frustration in Canadians. And there is a lot of victim blaming going on
00:12:45 whenever this is brought up. We spoke about this in the context of media, where people look at the
00:12:51 decline of trust in the media, and they start blaming the people who distrust the media instead
00:12:56 of blaming the media and saying, well, what has the media done to deserve this or not deserve
00:13:01 this? How can the media regain trust? People like Justin Trudeau look at his declining fortunes
00:13:06 in politics. And instead of saying, maybe I'm not the guy that Canadians want right now,
00:13:12 they say something along the lines of, well, you know, Canadians are being co-opted.
00:13:16 Remember the million person march when you had, in a lot of cases, Muslim families, Muslim families
00:13:22 standing up and saying, we do not like our kids being taught a lot of this over the top pride
00:13:28 stuff. And what did Justin Trudeau say? Well, these are just people being co-opted by the far
00:13:33 right in America. Because the idea that, oh, maybe this group that he has tried to claim as his own
00:13:39 political coalition has not exactly fallen in love with what he's done as prime minister.
00:13:46 So right here you have, again, this idea that we should look at everything other than the
00:13:51 perpetrators, everything other than the people who are genuinely to blame for why no one likes
00:13:56 them, why no one is too keen on them. And again, I mean, you got to commit to the bit. Remember
00:14:00 last week when jennifer o'connell that liberal member of parliament said boo who get over it 0.96
00:14:06 in the house of commons committee room because the conservatists were talking about foreign
00:14:11 interference they were talking about foreign operatives that were collaborating wittingly
00:14:16 with canadian members of parliament and senators and she was just saying boo who get over it and
00:14:21 it became this thing where she tried to uh you know do the whole who are you going to believe
00:14:25 me or your lying eyes sort of thing. And she's continued to double down on this. So Frank Caputo
00:14:31 has announced a motion that he wants to have voted on. Now, I think a lot of this is theatrics,
00:14:37 but you can see the motion on your screen here. He basically said that she needs to apologize
00:14:43 for it, apologize for her comments. Now, Jennifer O'Connell has come out and said this, which I
00:14:52 find hilarious frank was hurt i interrupted him only brought up heckling not the very real issues
00:14:58 of foreign interference thin skin cpc mps whining i expose their hypocrisy they lie about me because 0.93
00:15:05 i tell the truth about them looking forward to tomorrow bring it on so uh you know pierre
00:15:11 polyev has bring it home jennifer o'connell has bring it on actually a funny story i think this
00:15:17 is a funny enough story i don't think i'm out of uh out of line for telling it so i ran into
00:15:22 last week, or no, it was a few weeks ago. I was covering a rally that Polyev was holding in
00:15:28 Etobicoke. And Adam Chambers, who was on the show last week, I ran into him and he was there with
00:15:32 his young child. And Pierre's whole thing is, you know, bring it home. That's the tagline.
00:15:38 And the child was like just tired of the rally at this point and said, you know, I want to go home.
00:15:43 I want to go home. And Adam said, no, no, no, bring it home. Bring it home. It was a rather
00:15:48 cute moment that i'm sure the liberals or ndp would turn into something else but but all of
00:15:54 this is i i think interesting right now because we are seeing this liberal disarray we're seeing
00:16:00 the liberals right now really not know what to do and if you're a backbench liberal member of
00:16:06 parliament you're finding yourself at risk of losing your seat if you're a liberal in the gta
00:16:11 that was elected in 2015 if you're a liberal in parts of vancouver and british columbia you are
00:16:17 right now facing a very real loss that is preventable in a way, that would be preventable
00:16:22 if your party, if their party did not actually have the record it had and was so unapologetic
00:16:29 and so unrepentant. And that I think is where we are really seeing the negativity going to come
00:16:36 out in full force. It's why the liberals are doubling down on the abortion narrative. It's 0.84
00:16:40 why they're doubling down. We're going to have assault rifle day pretty soon where the liberals
00:16:44 are going to be talking about all sorts of stuff that no one else but them is talking about. They're
00:16:49 going to be introducing debates that no one is having. And in the past, they've had success with
00:16:55 this. You can't deny that it has been an effective tactic at times, but I don't think it's going to
00:17:01 give them as much success this time. I don't think it's going to give them as much success this time.
00:17:07 Simply put, because we are seeing the Canadians are seeing through it. We're seeing that Canadians
00:17:14 are just not buying it right now and and poliev has because i've done so many interviews funnily
00:17:19 enough my book came out uh two weeks ago last week in the week before i just did this marathon
00:17:24 of interviews including by the way i should own up to this so i i've done i think 31 interviews
00:17:32 with cbc so i did one on power and politics am i 31 or 20 29. so i was 31 or 29 but i did an
00:17:42 interview with power and politics i did one uh yesterday with cbc ottawa and i did another one
00:17:47 with uh cbc's the house with uh catherine cullen which came out on the weekend but then you do
00:17:53 this thing where i've never done it before but i've heard about it where you basically just lock
00:17:57 yourself in a room and you do back-to-back 10-minute interviews with every cbc radio market
00:18:03 in the country basically and they all ask the same questions basically one of them you know
00:18:08 know every now and then one might like freelance a bit or go rogue but so by the end of it your
00:18:13 answer has totally changed from the first one just because you got bored of giving the first one
00:18:16 uh but you do this and it was like a three hour interval on one day and a three hour interval on
00:18:21 the next day of just non-stop cbc interviews so it's a lot of fun they're interested in pierre
00:18:26 polyev they're interested in covering my book about him which you can get it's behind my shoulder
00:18:30 there you can't have that one but it is on amazon it's on the toronto stars bestseller list the
00:18:35 Globe and Mail bestseller list. You can get it at Indigo. But the reason I'm bringing this up right
00:18:40 now is because CBC has an interest in Pierre Polyev. The Toronto Star has run three or four
00:18:46 stories about my book. They have an interest in it. So I think you have people that are
00:18:50 on the political left or editorially aligned to the political left that right now are realizing
00:18:56 maybe just maybe we can't treat this guy the same as every other conservative leader. Maybe, just
00:19:02 maybe, he's not actually the guy that we've been trying to make him out to be. Now, some of these
00:19:09 people are reaching this conclusion honestly. They're reaching the conclusion because they
00:19:12 realize that, okay, people are more complex. We don't want to turn them into a caricature. It's not
00:19:17 fitting of democracy. Other people are just realizing, okay, what we're doing now isn't
00:19:22 working. And by the way, I know people all the time will say that this is a pro-Poliev show.
00:19:29 it's not. I've made criticisms of him. I've said things that are supportive of him. My book
00:19:34 does both sides, which I think is why CBC has found so much in there that it wants to talk
00:19:39 about. I lamented the other day that Mark Miller, the immigration minister, had approvingly tweeted
00:19:44 out an excerpt of my book. So clearly the liberals have found something in there. But you need to be
00:19:48 able to have these discussions. And right now, the conservatives are providing the most viable
00:19:54 alternative to the liberals, the most electorally viable alternative to the liberals. So you have
00:19:59 to look at this contrast and take it at face value in a lot of ways. And what it means, what it's
00:20:05 likely to look like is where there's some speculation and debate. And I won't claim to
00:20:11 be able to authoritatively say what a Polyev government would do if he's elected. But I can 0.94
00:20:17 look at the track records of Trudeau versus Polyev just in the last year. And I can look at all of
00:20:24 this and say that right now there are two discussions taking place. There are two
00:20:29 discussions. I'm going to have an interview later this week with John Rustad, who's the leader of
00:20:33 the BC Conservatives. And the left has always said that in BC, everyone is just left wing,
00:20:40 but that's not actually the case. It's not actually all that true. And I think the fact
00:20:45 that we're seeing in BC, the Conservatives do so well right now in the polls, similarly to
00:20:50 the federal conservatives although not quite that dramatically is i think a sign of this and one of
00:20:55 the reasons bc is important to look at is because you've seen a significant divide in the way that
00:21:00 province has dealt with drug policy and this has been an area where even the ndp government there
00:21:05 has reversed itself but this is not exclusively a british columbia problem many of you may know
00:21:10 i live in london ontario and my city uh very quickly i i saw about a decade ago maybe eight
00:21:17 years ago or so started to become just as notable on the drug issue as many other communities and
00:21:25 you had these weird pockets where you'd look at you know vancouver and london and i never quite
00:21:29 understood why that was why london had become this hotbed for it and there are political reasons for
00:21:36 this as well in terms of how london has chosen to deal with this issue over time and some of these
00:21:42 have come to a bit of a flashpoint in recent months as we've seen the debate wage on and one
00:21:48 of the former advocates for what's called safe supply has become one of its most prominent
00:21:53 critics right now. She was on the show in the past on a panel we did exploring a lot of these issues
00:21:58 and I wanted to bring her back on now as she had a fantastic piece in the National Post this week
00:22:04 looking at London as a case study here. Dr. Sharon Koivu is an addiction medicine physician and
00:22:10 joins me now dr koivu good to talk to you again thanks for coming on today thank you very much
00:22:15 for having me so just to start with london here for a moment because this is my own community
00:22:22 it's my own city and i i've spoken to so many people who have uh just refused to go down they've
00:22:27 refused to go to parts of it they've talked about feeling unsafe so so we have this issue here in
00:22:33 the city and i know that for for you you've seen this very closely over the course of your career
00:22:39 but but why has london become so unique in some ways i think that's a very good question and it's
00:22:47 a somewhat complicated answer but i'm going to try to give a quick answer london was a place
00:22:54 that had a significant problem with opioid use during what i would refer to as the purdue um
00:23:01 the purdue driven opioid crisis when we had a lot of use with with oxycontin um we had a lot
00:23:08 of prescribing of opioids that switched to a drug called hydromorph cotton when Oxycontin was taken
00:23:14 off the market. When that happened, we had a problem with people injecting hydromorph cotton,
00:23:20 which led to problems with a heart valve infection and HIV becoming a problem in London.
00:23:28 And we tried to fix that problem by putting more drugs at it, by giving out Dilaudid,
00:23:35 which is the same drug, is hydromorph content. And to people who were high risk, who were sex
00:23:40 workers particularly, we fixed the, or we really helped the problem we were aiming for, which was
00:23:49 to reduce the heart valve infection and HIV. But we've kind of been playing whack-a-mole and we've
00:23:55 been trying to fix things with more opioids. And with doing this, we've created more problems.
00:24:03 So we now have a program in London that gives out large quantities of opioids that aren't witnessed,
00:24:10 refer to it as safe, and I think it's really important to remember prescription opioids got
00:24:15 us into the problem we're in. Opioids aren't safe, they are toxic, illicit fentanyl is toxic,
00:24:24 hydromorphone is toxic. And now we've increased the availability of opioids on the streets of
00:24:32 London. And we did it in a way that most people weren't even aware. I was very involved in the
00:24:38 town hall meetings on the supervised consumption sites. So people knew that we were going to be
00:24:45 having con supervised consumption sites people weren't aware of um the
00:24:53 sort of giving the safe supply program where we're giving out large amounts of opioids to people
00:24:59 and and really weren't able to understand some of the side effects that they were seeing from that
00:25:04 i think some of them they blame the supervised injection site on um but but by doing that we've
00:25:11 really increased we've increased the amount of opioids on the street we've decreased the price
00:25:17 of opioids on the street and um we've essentially flooded london with opioids which has also led to
00:25:25 an increase as people become addicted to to one thing they seek something stronger it's kind of
00:25:32 driven um people to sell their drugs in exchange for fentanyl it's helped drive the fentanyl crisis
00:25:40 So, we particularly have driven that in London, and we can see that London is different.
00:25:49 So, we have a program that's different, and London was similar to Ontario for our overdose deaths, our eMERGE visits, for example.
00:26:00 And since the program has started, we've actually gone up and up and up.
00:26:04 Up and up, we are much higher in our overdose deaths
00:26:08 than the general population of Ontario,
00:26:10 and is significantly higher
00:26:12 in our emergency department visits.
00:26:14 And certainly in what I see in the hospital
00:26:16 with infections related to injection drug use,
00:26:18 particularly dilaudid use.
00:26:21 So we've created a problem that is worse in London
00:26:26 because of what we were trying to fix in the first place.
00:26:29 So you raise an important point there, Dr. Cloivu,
00:26:32 in that there's a knee-jerk reaction
00:26:34 and I think a moral argument
00:26:36 that often gets made about drugs.
00:26:38 But if we want to restrict this
00:26:39 just to the science and to the data,
00:26:41 we now have eight years of data on this.
00:26:43 And we've seen, as you know,
00:26:44 more infections, more patient deaths.
00:26:46 We certainly see diversion.
00:26:48 And I think there are some people
00:26:49 try to downplay that,
00:26:50 but we know it exists.
00:26:52 So how do the advocates of safe supply
00:26:55 account for that?
00:26:56 Because they are convinced,
00:26:58 or at least they claim to be convinced,
00:27:00 that the data are on their side.
00:27:01 I think that I don't have complete control of how they use their data.
00:27:09 But you hear the arguments.
00:27:10 Oh, I hear the arguments.
00:27:12 And I guess what I'd say is something working doesn't mean that its side effects aren't bad.
00:27:18 And one of the things I'd like to compare this to is actually if you're just looking at if something works.
00:27:23 So if you're looking at nausea of pregnancy, for example, and being nauseated in pregnancy can be quite serious.
00:27:30 it can cause problems to the mother, problems to the fetus, so a good treatment is important.
00:27:36 If you're just looking at benefits, thalidomide is probably one of the best drugs
00:27:42 to take to help get rid of nausea of pregnancy, but it has significant side effects to the fetus
00:27:50 if it's taken in the first trimester and can cause a decrease in the limbs. So seeing a benefit
00:27:55 doesn't mean that the side effects don't outweigh the benefits. So when people are saying they see
00:28:03 a benefit, they may be. But I also would say we don't know for sure what the benefits are from.
00:28:11 So when we started this program, we've also got people into primary care. We know primary care is
00:28:18 important wound care hiv care wraparound services housing first programs just engaging in a program
00:28:29 increases um people's ability to stabilize and we didn't really look at what part of the program
00:28:38 was actually effective we so i'm sure that people are seeing for some individuals in the program
00:28:46 they feel that they're benefiting but some of that benefit would have been from the other parts of
00:28:52 the program and they didn't compare it to other programs that are so much safer like opioid agonist
00:28:59 therapy programs and getting people into a um on something like people we've uh we've briefly lost
00:29:11 Dr. Sharon Koivu. We'll work to get her back on the line in just a moment here. It's quite
00:29:17 fascinating to me. And again, I understand the emotionally charged arguments on this. I do. I
00:29:23 understand why people are getting very frightened. Because again, there's an inherent absurdity
00:29:28 to let's give people suffering with drug addiction drugs and think that that's going to work.
00:29:34 But even if you overcome that and you don't care about that argument and you move beyond that,
00:29:40 it's not doing what it's supposed to do it's not actually turning this thing which is inherently
00:29:46 unsafe into something that is safe and this was an issue that was raised back when needle
00:29:51 dispensaries and crack pipe dispensaries were becoming a thing and I remember this in London
00:29:56 probably what eight years ago or so and it's happened elsewhere and you'd look at this and
00:30:00 say you know drugs are not unsafe just because of the delivery mechanism they're not just unsafe
00:30:06 because people might reuse a needle they are unsafe because drugs are unsafe and drugs uh
00:30:12 certainly of these uh these varieties are incredibly incredibly dangerous to people so
00:30:18 i i'm i'm looking at this and i'm seeing this big divide between the so-called expert class
00:30:25 and where a lot of ordinary canadians are and i was actually at a a social event uh believe it or
00:30:29 not i get invited to those like once every three or four years i was at a a social event not that
00:30:34 long ago and i was talking to someone very very anti-conservative did not like polyev didn't like
00:30:39 danielle smith didn't like the right uh probably doesn't like me but anyway and this person had
00:30:45 said well you know the one thing i'll say about danielle smith i love what she's doing on drugs 1.00
00:30:51 i love that she's you know going to force people into treatment because this was an issue that 1.00
00:30:56 transcended the left-right divide it transcended that and this was someone who actually found that
00:31:02 this was a a policy because again they're looking in their community and they're seeing they're
00:31:08 seeing what so many others in this country are seeing and they're wondering why no one's doing
00:31:14 anything about it so when you hear and i would encourage you to go back and look at my panel
00:31:18 discussion that i had on this show with uh sharon koivu and uh julian summers dr julian summers who's
00:31:25 a psychologist and adam zeebo the uh journalist with the national post and we talked about this
00:31:30 We talked about it from a number of different angles.
00:31:32 And what's notable about Drs. Koivu and Summers is that they were advocates for this.
00:31:38 They were not just ideologues.
00:31:39 They were advocates for this who saw the data, who saw the research, and then from there
00:31:45 realized that, okay, this isn't actually working.
00:31:49 This is not doing what we thought it was going to do at best.
00:31:52 And at worst, it's making things far worse.
00:31:55 So we have to move on in a couple of moments.
00:31:58 but we do have Dr. Koibu back on now. So I want to just at least get one or two more questions
00:32:03 here before we talk about LNG, which is a far less controversial issue. Dr. Koibu, thank you
00:32:08 for reconnecting here. Let me just ask you, as we kind of look at the way forward on this,
00:32:14 there are people that, like I said, are against harm reduction in general, the people that would
00:32:19 not like supervised injection sites, that wouldn't like needle dispensaries and all of that. Where do
00:32:25 think is the optimal point at you know the harm reduction that works versus the harm reduction
00:32:30 that doesn't i think speaking specifically about harm reduction harm reduction um by definition
00:32:37 can't harm others if it's reducing harm it's really important that it doesn't harm the community and
00:32:43 certainly not other people so i think we really have to be aware of harm reduction but i also
00:32:48 think when i started in addiction work we talked about the four pillars prevention treatment harm
00:32:54 reduction and enforcement. And like anything where you have a structure, if you only have one pillar,
00:33:00 things fall down. And putting all of your emphasis on harm reduction at the expense of prevention
00:33:07 and treatment and even enforcement, we lose the ability to really get a complete
00:33:15 comprehensive approach for people. We need prevention, but we also know prevention
00:33:21 includes about accessibility. When things are very accessible, cheap, easy to access,
00:33:30 you have an increase of people using them. We need to decrease access to opioids. We
00:33:35 knew that during the opioid crisis. We also need to look at social determinants of health
00:33:41 and trauma and really be working to have mental health care and services to help prevent people
00:33:48 from getting into a problem with addiction. We need to have treatment and that treatment needs
00:33:53 to include things that are proven, such as opioid agonist treatment, as well as other options for
00:33:59 people. In harm reduction, I think we have to go back and look at supervised injection sites.
00:34:05 I do think they have merit, but they were meant to help engage people, get them into care,
00:34:13 connect them with resources and help people do motivational interviewing to get into a recovery
00:34:20 program. But extremely important that a supervised injection site engages with the community that
00:34:26 they're in and works to ensure that they're a safe place to be for that community and do not add 0.98
00:34:34 harm to the community. I think that's extremely important. And enforcement, sometimes I do not
00:34:42 feel people should be criminalized for their addiction, which is a mental health issue.
00:34:46 But I think the importance of enforcement in helping to work with communities,
00:34:52 even helping to engage people into recovery is something that we are now really overlooking.
00:34:59 So we need to be balancing all of those pillars and make sure we provide appropriate medical
00:35:06 treatment for medical illness, engage the community, and make sure that while we're doing
00:35:12 this, we aren't making things worse for individuals and for society. Dr. Sharon Koivu's op-ed in the
00:35:19 National Post, quote-unquote, safe supply, has only worsened the addiction crisis in London. And I note
00:35:26 that safe supply is always in quotation marks throughout your piece, which I think is a very
00:35:31 important bit of punctuation there for the discussion at hand. Dr. Koivu, thank you very
00:35:36 much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. We'll certainly talk about this in further detail in
00:35:42 the future. I know it's an incredibly important subject and it's one that's ravaging individuals
00:35:46 and communities alike. And I think we are seeing the tide turning on this, but you certainly have
00:35:52 this small group of very loud activist types that, I mean, Dr. Koivu is very diplomatic in the way
00:35:58 she speaks. Adam Zeebo is diplomatic, but a little less so. He shoots from the hip a bit more
00:36:02 because he's, you know, again, he's in the business of delving in to these groups in a way
00:36:08 that, you know, he doesn't have the patient load to deal with. But I think it's fascinating to me
00:36:13 to see this, to see this discussion and to see it turning. But still, the status quo is, you know,
00:36:19 it's remaining the status quo in a lot of ways. So we'll move on to another subject here. I said
00:36:23 we'd talk about LNG. So this has become a bit of a hobby horse for me because I love when you have,
00:36:29 On one hand, you know, Justin Trudeau will get up there and say there's no business case for LNG export.
00:36:35 And then, as I've joked in the past, and it keeps happening, Vashi Kapelos will interview all these foreign heads of government and heads of state that come to Canada, like the prime minister of Greece and the, I forget it was the prime minister or president of Spain and the chancellor of Germany and, you know, ask all of them about LNG.
00:36:51 And they're all like, oh, yeah, we'd love to buy Canadian LNG.
00:36:53 So there is actually a market.
00:36:55 There is a business case.
00:36:56 One of the holdups, though, has always been the limitation of refineries and export terminals.
00:37:01 Well, we have an export terminal at long last nearing completion in British Columbia,
00:37:06 so I think it's time to have a bigger picture discussion about the future of LNG.
00:37:11 Philip Cross is back. It's been a little while, but it's always good to have him on the show.
00:37:15 He is a senior fellow with both the Fraser Institute and Macdonald-Laurier Institute
00:37:19 and had an interesting piece about this in the Financial Post.
00:37:23 the figures show Canada needs more LNG projects. Philip, always good to talk to you. Thanks for
00:37:28 coming on today. My pleasure, Andrew. Thanks for having me back. So where does this argument that
00:37:34 there's no business case come from? Because every time you see people lining up to buy it,
00:37:38 that strikes me as a pretty compelling business case. Well, it certainly doesn't come from the
00:37:42 business community. And as you noted, it doesn't come from our potential customers overseas who
00:37:47 were very anxious to access Canadian LNG. The idea that it's not economic only seems to
00:37:56 occur in the head of our prime minister and perhaps some bureaucrats who don't know anything
00:38:02 about business cases. But clearly there isn't just a business case, there is an outstanding
00:38:08 business case. It's been proven by the Americans who built any number of LNG terminals and made a
00:38:15 fortune exporting from them to Europe at the peak of when LNG prices hit extremely high levels just
00:38:24 after Putin's invasion of Russia. But there also are opportunities in Asia. The main advantage is
00:38:34 we're going to get a higher price for a product we're already producing. Instead of selling it
00:38:38 for a very low price to the United States, we can access prices overseas. So it's not even clear that
00:38:44 going to have a major impact on emissions or any of that yeah and what's interesting too is that
00:38:50 when canada exports lng or you know canadian oil and gas in general it allows other countries that
00:38:56 are not as quote unquote green realizing that's a loading term to have an alternative to say coal
00:39:02 and and you know one of the things that has always been missing from this discussion
00:39:06 from a lot of people is that emissions are a global calculation not a domestic one
00:39:11 so when and i've heard michael binion of the modern miracle network make this point that
00:39:15 you know we could increase emissions in canada and have a net reduction of emissions globally
00:39:21 if we allow canadian energy which is produced with very high standards to access the international
00:39:26 market but that part's missing and there's so many barriers that are put up really by ideology
00:39:32 towards canada being a major player on this market it seems yeah i can't agree with you
00:39:37 more about the global emissions i mean i have to laugh i heard on the local radio station this
00:39:41 morning driving into ottawa that ottawa is finally conceding that it's not going to achieve its
00:39:47 target of a 43 reduction in emissions well my goodness i can't imagine anything more pointless
00:39:53 than calculating the emissions at the local level uh in the city the city boundaries of ottawa is
00:40:00 going to be one way and once you get out it'll be different yeah yeah i mean it's it's a purely
00:40:05 theoretical calculation anyways even at the national level um in fact i'll be writing about
00:40:10 this in an upcoming uh op-ed in the post about how you know when we measure emissions there isn't
00:40:16 somebody from stack and doesn't go outside and and you know measure something uh or stand on top of
00:40:22 the coach building and start measuring you know emissions uh it's a theoretical calculation
00:40:28 emissions in this country for example blew through the roof last year when we had all those forest
00:40:32 fires. And yet that doesn't enter into the official calculation. So the whole business
00:40:40 of calculating emissions is very vague and model-based at the best of times. But the
00:40:51 broad lines are that we can be sure that LNG from BC is going to have lower emissions
00:40:57 than coal being burned in in china so uh if emissions are your only focus it's still a
00:41:04 no-brainer how much does i mean if it's possible to even quantify but but how much does investor
00:41:11 confidence and investor tolerance wane on these sorts of projects when you see activists that in
00:41:17 some cases very successfully disrupt these things because i know there have been a couple of isolated
00:41:23 examples where companies have said listen this just isn't worth the hassle anymore
00:41:28 well they certainly have had an impact i mean you know kinder morgan sold
00:41:34 got out of the oil pipeline business in for trans mountain because of the fears about the delays
00:41:42 i was just reading the um stephen mayer's book about justin trudel in which he talks about how
00:41:48 Well, Premier Horgan out in BC, he wasn't that opposed to pipelines.
00:41:55 He certainly wasn't opposed at all to LNG.
00:41:57 He let that one go ahead.
00:41:59 But he was just worried.
00:42:00 He wanted to keep his coalition together, and he was worried about environmental activists
00:42:04 disrupting the work sites and embarrassing the government.
00:42:08 So, you know, the militant environmentalists do have an impact and have a disproportionate
00:42:16 uh and excessive voice in in determining whether these projects go ahead or not
00:42:24 so what's happening now because you noted that there's already been since the uh i think it was
00:42:29 the kitamat project was you know basically nearing completion that there's already been
00:42:33 a bit of a resurgence in discussions about others well and not just because we've finally completed
00:42:39 one in Canada, I mean, you know, only in Canada, but it's a combination of a project finally being
00:42:53 completed here in Canada, but at the same time, the Biden administration has given in to their
00:42:58 environmental lobbyists and have temporarily frozen any issue of permits for any new projects.
00:43:06 Now, there are several projects already underway in the U.S. that will continue to go ahead.
00:43:10 So it's not like there's a moratorium, you know, like they impose on the Keystone Pipeline.
00:43:15 But nevertheless, it's an indication that particularly if Biden should get reelected and next year or this year, later this year,
00:43:24 and then, you know, doesn't care about getting reelected again and therefore, you know, gives into the environmental lottery even more.
00:43:31 that, you know, there may be a real opportunity for Canada to gain back some of the very large
00:43:37 amount of market share that we've lost to the US in developing LNG up to now. So, but these
00:43:43 projects take decades to get the permitting and the building done. So it's something we have to
00:43:49 start on right now. We can't wait for, you know, another administration in the US to come and go
00:43:56 before we decide oh yeah maybe there's a market here i think what happened in europe you know
00:44:01 with the german chancellor and so on uh coming over here in a panic shows that you know you have
00:44:07 to have that capacity ready well ahead of emergencies uh you never know when emergencies
00:44:12 are going to come along or when extraordinary events will happen uh and so it's it's best to
00:44:18 have the capacity in place and be ready for them yeah and one of the biggest i think counterpoints
00:44:24 when Olaf Scholz, who I think triggered the discussion of this, certainly from, you know,
00:44:30 the perspective of the business case aspect of it. When that came up, one of the arguments that
00:44:35 was made by critics of Canadian LNG or of expanding it was, well, yeah, I mean, if we started it,
00:44:41 you know, way back, sure. But the whole point is we couldn't do anything now to serve what he's
00:44:46 wanting now. So when you hear that argument happening, it's like, well, great. Well, that
00:44:51 means you know the best time was yesterday but the second best time is today yeah and at one
00:44:56 point you know when lng canada finally went ahead it was part and parcel of what were at the time
00:45:02 20 project proposals uh now some of them were just never going to go were just flyers but clearly
00:45:09 there was serious commercial interest in developing several of them uh and some of them needed to be
00:45:15 in the east coast to access the european markets most of the discussion now is on the west coast
00:45:19 to access Asian markets, we should diversify. I mean, the important thing to understand in all
00:45:25 of this is that right now we are landlocked into just the U.S. market for basically all of our oil
00:45:33 and gas. We have to, and as a result, the Americans, not being stupid, pay us very low prices knowing 0.95
00:45:39 that we don't have an alternative. We need to access overseas markets. It will get us a better 0.95
00:45:45 price and it will give these overseas markets a diversified source of supply and they won't just
00:45:52 be held hostage by the Americans. So it's in everybody's interest to diversify, to access 0.76
00:45:58 higher prices. And to do that, you have to build capacity and you have to do it preferably on both
00:46:06 coasts. But there's any number of proposals out there on both coasts. Businesses have indicated
00:46:13 that they're willing to i mean even if some politicians think that there isn't a business
00:46:18 case as long as businesses are willing to take the risk and absorb the losses i don't know why
00:46:22 it's any business of anybody except them um you know and as long as firms are willing to to take
00:46:30 that risk i i think it's in our national interest to diversify our our our markets and get higher
00:46:37 prices very well said philip cross senior fellow with the mcdonald laurier institute author of this
00:46:43 great piece in the financial post uh that we were talking about here the title of which is
00:46:48 the figures show canada needs more lng projects philip good to talk to you thank you my pleasure
00:46:55 thank you all right that does it for us for today since he mentioned stephen marr's book i got to do
00:47:00 another shameless plug of pierre pauliev a political life available now on amazon indigo and wherever
00:47:06 fine books are sold. And oh, I should probably tell you as well, I have an event coming up
00:47:11 next week in Winnipeg, my first ever foray into Manitoba. So take from that what you will. I've
00:47:18 never been there until now, but this is what's bringing me. And that is going to be on June 20th,
00:47:24 2024 at noon. It's a lunchtime event at the downtown convention center. And if you want
00:47:30 some details about that. You can go to conservativeclubwpg.ca, conservativeclubwpg.ca.
00:47:39 And that's going to be a lot of fun. I've already had a couple of people email me to tell me they
00:47:43 will be there. So see you soon, but also I'll be back tomorrow with more of Canada's Most
00:47:48 Irreverent Talk Show. Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.
00:48:00 dot news.
00:48:30 We'll be right back.