00:00:13.540This is The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North,
00:00:15.900Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, Wednesday, September 21st, 2022.
00:00:21.480I know we just spoke yesterday, but there's been so much happening.
00:00:25.980we thought we'd throw a little bit of a wrench into the schedule and talk about all these things
00:00:32.900that are happening here. And what I'm going to say is this great period of transition insofar as
00:00:39.320vaccine mandates in this country are concerned. And there is a little bit of good news. I started
00:00:45.280out at the beginning of yesterday's show talking about this report in the Globe and Mail that was
00:00:50.180suggesting the federal government is on track to get rid of the border vaccine mandate, its own
00:00:55.240border vaccine mandate as of September 30th. Now, I think there are a bunch of caveats and
00:01:01.420asterisks I need to put in place here. Number one, they're not deciding to go in and get rid of it.
00:01:07.520They could do that today if they wanted. What they're doing is just letting it expire if the
00:01:12.120reports hold and not renewing it. So they're taking the very cowardly approach here and not saying
00:01:18.480the time has come to end it. They're just sort of just letting it just go, die on the order paper,
00:01:23.860pocket veto, whatever you want to call it. The second aspect of this is that nowhere in anything
00:01:31.060the government has said have they given us an indication that the rescinding of mandates of
00:01:37.340restrictions is ever something that we can accept is permanent. And this is the key theme I want to
00:01:44.160tackle in today's program. I want to discuss what's happening with the ARRIVECAN and the border
00:01:48.880vaccine mandate and also the lawsuit against the federal government that we had a hearing for in
00:01:54.320court today on the vaccine mandate for air travel. This is the legal challenge being waged by Sean
00:02:00.800Pickard, Carl Harrison, two names you might not know, and a couple of names you may well know,
00:02:05.460like Brian Peckford, the former Premier of Newfoundland, and Maxime Bernier, who we had
00:02:10.400on the show yesterday, the leader of the People's Party of Canada. All of this is to say right now
00:02:16.640we're looking at this whole bundle of restrictions that have existed and exist in some form at the
00:02:21.580federal, provincial, and municipal level. And all of these things are interconnected. And we saw
00:02:27.700through the entirety of the pandemic, a lot of buck passing where, you know, if you complain to
00:02:32.100a federal politician, they say, oh, well, you have to talk about the provinces. They're the ones that
00:02:36.220do lockdowns. And then you talk to the provinces and they say, well, yes, but the federal government,
00:02:39.920I mean, they're the ones that did this. And what we saw here was not a jurisdictional issue. It was
00:02:45.460a cultural issue. We had a culture in government that wanted restrictions, a culture in government
00:02:51.380that wanted mandates. And more shockingly and more dangerously, a culture within large swaths
00:02:57.280of the population that invited this, that wanted this, that looked to government and said,
00:03:02.100I want you to regulate me more. Regulate me harder, daddy. That's what I want from you. I want
00:03:08.000the government to crack down on me. I don't want freedom. This freedom thing makes me uncomfortable.
00:03:12.240it's a little overrated. I want you to regulate me. And they say that because they want the
00:03:17.580government to regulate their unvaccinated neighbors. So I'm going to be talking a little
00:03:22.260later on in the show about this ad campaign that the city of Toronto yanked. They pulled the plug
00:03:27.440on yesterday, thanks in large part to people like you that spoke up about this. And that is an ad
00:03:34.060campaign promoting vaccination on children. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But let's
00:03:39.520talk about the mandates here. So there are a number of them, and even if we all look at them
00:03:44.020as being part of one general thing, one big basket of mandates, they are actually different. They're
00:03:49.940authorized by different orders. They're authorized by different ministries. They have different
00:03:54.040expiration dates, and they have different implications, constitutional, legal, and
00:03:58.220otherwise. The case that was before the federal court today was the vaccine mandate for air and
00:04:05.020rail travel. This was the thing that Justin Trudeau announced during the federal election.
00:04:09.780I don't have the clip because it just bothers me too much to see it, but it's where he said,
00:04:14.100and I think it was in Calgary, you know, yeah, you don't have to be vaccinated, but you don't
00:04:18.100have a right to get on a plane. You don't have a right to sit beside someone who's vaccinated.
00:04:22.520He was just like making, just scoring political points off this idea of segregation. And he
00:04:28.120announced during the campaign that he was going to ban the unvaccinated from planes and trains,
00:04:32.520Not quite automobiles. He didn't go the full John Candy, Steve Martin film title, but certainly from planes and trains.
00:04:38.780And he did it. He made good on that promise in, I think it was October, maybe November, just a couple of months later.
00:04:46.480This challenge, the federal government rolled back in June, this order in council.
00:04:52.860The government rolled back in June, which meant as of June, you could, if you were not a vaccinated person, get on a plane or a train in this country.
00:05:01.760And I said at the time, no one should be grateful to the government for rolling this back.
00:05:06.140No one should be grateful to the government for handing you back a freedom that they never
00:05:10.140had the right, and I just mean morally, that they never had the right morally to take away
00:05:15.040And what was fascinating is that this case, which was filed by, in large part, Maxime
00:05:20.480Bernier, who, interestingly enough, has a novel argument here.
00:05:23.740He isn't just a Canadian who says, yeah, you know, I might want to go visit my grandmother
00:05:27.460or I might want to go and take a vacation to Tofino or something like that.
00:05:31.200he said, I am a federal politician. It is my job to travel this country. And right now I am unable
00:05:37.860to do that. So I'm unable to engage in the duties that I need to engage in as the leader of a
00:05:43.960federal political party. So today the federal government was trying to have this lawsuit
00:05:50.200thrown out. So they weren't actually hearing the case today. What they were hearing was
00:05:54.600a motion to dismiss. So the federal government brought a motion saying to the federal court,
00:05:59.440we don't really need to hear this case because the mandate's gone. And if you listen to the lawyer
00:06:05.160representing the Attorney General of Canada, as I did all morning, his argument was, I mean,
00:06:10.680there is no mandate, Your Honor. So why are we having the mandates gone? The unvaccinated can
00:06:15.560fly. All the people that brought this lawsuit can fly. What's the big deal? Well, the big deal is
00:06:21.040that there was a time when they couldn't. And this government thought it was entirely legitimate to
00:06:26.960do that. This government thought it was entirely legitimate not only to look at its citizens and
00:06:31.280say you don't have the right to travel unless you are vaccinated, but also to effectively say you
00:06:38.840don't have the right to leave this country because we're not going to let you get on a plane and even
00:06:44.360take a one-way ticket to a country that doesn't care about your vaccination status. And when the
00:06:50.260government got rid of this in June. It did not say, we're sorry, we got it wrong, we will never
00:06:57.820do this again. No, no, no. What the government said was, we are temporarily suspending the mandate.
00:07:06.800Temporarily suspending. We totally might bring it back if the situation warrants it. Maybe there'll
00:07:12.840be a new variant of concern. Maybe we will just see a surge in cases in the winter. Maybe we'll
00:07:18.160just do some polling and find out the Canadians really, really, really don't like those dirty
00:07:22.260unvaccinated people. And we can just take away a few more of their liberties to win some votes
00:07:26.960in the Vote Rich GTA. Who cares? They said it was a temporary suspension. So by the government's
00:07:32.520own admission, they didn't even get rid of the air travel vaccine mandate. And it was laughable.
00:07:39.240If you watch the discussion that was taking place in court today, the government was saying,
00:07:43.660I wish I could record it. You're not allowed to record judicial proceedings, even when
00:07:48.100they take place virtually. But the government's lawyer was saying, well, you can't listen to it.
00:07:52.780And they're politicians. You can't listen to what cabinet ministers say in press conferences or
00:07:57.580press releases. That's not the law. So they were saying you can't look into the future and make a
00:08:03.580judicial determination based on something that might happen in the future. And interestingly
00:08:08.500enough, the idea of just not listening to or trusting the words of liberal cabinet ministers,
00:08:14.000I actually don't disagree with in principle, but this is one of those rare cases where they're
00:08:18.960being remarkably transparent about what they want. And they want the right to just at a moment,
00:08:24.520at the drop of a hat, flip a switch and say, we are no longer going to allow this temporary
00:08:30.560reprieve, the unvaccinated, get your rear ends off airplanes. You don't belong there.
00:08:36.700And incidentally to that, I mean, it's not incidental, but unrelated to the core idea,
00:08:41.780The government has also talked about changing the definition, as you may know by now, where they've said what the up to date will be the term that matters, not the fully vaccinated, but the up to date.
00:08:52.420You have to have been vaccinated within however many months, six months, 90 days, nine months, three weeks, you know, basically by the time your coffee gets cool, you need to go and get another booster.
00:09:03.020So when it comes back, it could be even more restrictive and more stringent.
00:09:06.540so the federal government has never accepted that what it did was wrong and that is so key here
00:09:14.520because right now we have the reports that say the federal government on September 30th is going to
00:09:19.360make a rive can optional the federal government is going to make it so that you no longer need
00:09:23.760to be vaccinated to enter the country so if you've got a friend that lives in the United Kingdom or
00:09:28.380Mexico or France or oh I don't know Tajikistan doesn't matter that has wanted to come here but
00:09:34.500can't because they're unvaccinated, they will, as of September 30th, be allowed to come here.
00:09:40.360This means that cross-border truckers will now be allowed to come to this country if they are
00:09:47.020unvaccinated, which is so key. This is, remember, the core idea that sparked the Freedom Convoy less
00:09:52.940than a year ago. So as of September 30th, this may be what's happening. But when I mentioned
00:09:59.880earlier the process that the government has not admitted it's wrong the government has not admitted
00:10:05.720that it aired the government has not admitted that it didn't have the right to do this they're just
00:10:10.040saying or they will say it's no longer necessary so as though everything that happened was entirely
00:10:17.720valid entirely reasonable entirely correct and that's why the fight has not ended and i don't
00:10:23.080think will end for quite some time now i should say in the interest of transparency here the
00:10:27.800federal government has not actually acknowledged this reporting that it is going to do away with
00:10:32.840this stuff on september 30th quite the contrary omar al gabra who is the transportation minister
00:10:39.240has not really said one way or another his claim is that no decision has been taken take a look
00:10:45.800over there why remove a right can at this point uh look first of all a right can is a critical tool
00:10:52.360to process travelers with the requirement of the vaccine mandate so we're asking it's a tool that
00:10:59.800helps process arrivals as they arrive so you want to keep it mandatory beyond September 30th
00:11:04.600there's no decision has been made we are as we've said all along we're we're we're constantly
00:11:10.960assessing the situation and making decisions based on the information so you think it should
00:11:14.840remain beyond September 30th that's great he just like doesn't know the answer so he just
00:11:22.100walks away. I don't know if this is like a minister that actually just hasn't like checked
00:11:25.920his email lately and doesn't know that people more important than him have already made the decision
00:11:29.640or if this is a case of a guy that just genuinely is, I mean, maybe the report was wrong. I mean,
00:11:35.520who knows? Justin Trudeau might, because he hates the Globe and Mail. So for all we know, this is
00:11:40.280like the Globe and Mail got it right. Now the federal government is changing their minds just
00:11:44.080so that the Globe and Mail doesn't get vindicated. It's like they couldn't do that with SNC-Lavalin
00:11:48.420because that story did get proven right.
00:12:18.240because a couple of years where people say, oh, the mandates are all gone. What are these convoy
00:12:22.420people protesting? What are these people having these freedom rallies over the summer and the
00:12:26.440fall? What's their problem? Life is back to normal. You can hang out with your unvaccinated
00:12:31.060friends. You can go and go to a restaurant. You can get on a plane. What's the big whoop?
00:12:36.820The problem is there needs to be a reckoning and there hasn't been a reckoning. There needs to be
00:12:41.360understanding by a court, by a government, by the political body in Canada, that this never should
00:12:49.780have happened in the first place. And it's enraging to me. And I'm not an angry person. I don't get
00:12:56.760mad a lot. In fact, sometimes people legitimately complain. They write me emails saying, why am I
00:13:02.080not mad? How dare I tell a joke? How dare I smile? Because if you aren't able to laugh at the
00:13:08.040absurdity of the world. And in some case, the callousness of the world, if you aren't able to
00:13:12.380laugh at it, then quite frankly, you're going to die a painful, miserable death because you're
00:13:17.020just going to be consumed by so much negativity. So I choose to turn negativity into something
00:13:21.440slightly positive, slightly empowering. And it also means that when I do feel mad, it ultimately
00:13:26.520has more meaning. So it does madden me. And I say this as someone who, and again, some people may
00:13:32.460not like this, I made the decision early on to get vaccinated. Now, whether the definition of
00:13:37.940fully vaccinated sufficiently changes that I will be just like a dirty, stinking, anti-vaxxer,
00:13:45.560whatever you call it at some point, maybe. But as it stands, I am fully vaccinated.
00:13:50.360And I was never directly affected by the mandates about which I have railed so fervently and so
00:13:58.180passionately for years, because it didn't matter to me. It wasn't about me.
00:14:02.460it was about how fundamentally wrong it was that anyone thought this was an acceptable criterion
00:14:09.340to divide this country to divide the people in the country as though moral worth stems from
00:14:15.740vaccination and not from something else and i would happily happily spend time in a room full
00:14:22.780of 50 unvaccinated people before i spent time in a room with 50 people that think
00:14:27.740segregating the unvaccinated is acceptable public policy. And that is, I think, a tremendously
00:14:34.280important thing here, that so many of the people that were standing up were able to fly. And I did
00:14:40.440fly throughout this. And I don't say that to gloat. I did this because it was important and it's a part
00:14:44.120of my job to get from one part of the country to the other. But it bothered me, and it should
00:14:49.060bother everyone in this country, that the federal government wanted to make fundamental movement,
00:14:55.060this thing that had a precondition of vaccination status even as it became more and more apparent
00:15:02.040that these restrictions and mandates and rules were not saving lives we're not doing anything
00:15:09.140towards the stated objective which has had no science i mean keith wilson a lawyer who's been
00:15:15.040on this program a number of times he's one of the council representing brian peckford in the case
00:15:19.980that was before the federal court today he was saying you know if you think that the government
00:15:23.700really had a strong evidentiary basis to put forward this travel mandate, you should actually
00:15:29.740look at the government's own evidence, which show a scramble to try to come up with one.
00:15:34.960They had already decided what they were going to do and were trying to find a way to justify
00:15:39.420and rationalize it. And they decided on an outcome and then searched for rationalization.
00:15:44.900They searched for justification. And the body of evidence filed by the federal government,
00:15:50.320court evidence not medical evidence does not actually have the medical evidence
00:15:55.300so what we've seen here is a vaccine mandate regime that was driven not by science by politics
00:16:02.620and the worst kind of politics the kind of politics that the liberal government
00:16:06.620accuses everyone else of engaging in this divisive hateful nasty anti-human politics
00:16:15.560and it's not going to be over if the government is just dangling your liberty in front of you
00:16:22.600like a carrot saying, if we feel like it, because that's all they need, if we feel like it in the
00:16:28.080winter, you don't get to go on that family vacation. So just, I mean, imagine, and there
00:16:35.240may be families like this where you've got a mom and a dad and they're both, I don't want to be
00:16:40.380heteronormative, but you know what I mean, two parents and they're both vaccinated and they've
00:16:44.640got a few children. One of them's a teenager who, for whatever reason, didn't want to get vaccinated.
00:16:50.580So that family has been unable to travel by air for much of the last year. And on June, they find
00:16:56.780out that, okay, we're actually able to regain our rights as citizens. So they book a flight for the
00:17:01.120winter. Well, there's no guarantee that family will be able to take that family vacation in December
00:17:08.920that they booked in June, in good faith, because the government, by its own admission, is saying, well,
00:17:14.640I mean, a new variant comes along and who knows, we may have to do that as though they're passengers, as though they don't make a choice.
00:17:22.600So how dare the federal government say this is moot?
00:17:25.240This is no longer a logical argument to have before the court when they're the ones saying that this could very much be a live issue in the winter and beyond.
00:17:36.220When the provincial government has not ruled out reinstating mask mandates, reinstating vaccine passports.
00:17:42.380Now, the political climate may have changed to such a point where they don't want to do this.
00:17:47.160But the point is there would be nothing legally stopping them.
00:17:51.400And my message to government is you don't just get to say we're moving on from this.
00:17:56.020You don't just get to say we're not going to have any scrutiny.
00:17:58.300We're not going to have any oversight because we've just decided this is no longer something we want to do.
00:18:03.700No, they need to be told they can never do it again.
00:26:13.360If you look at the numbers for the entirety of the pandemic, for the entire country of Canada, 39 children, 39 children have died and have been logged as COVID deaths since the very beginning.
00:26:24.840Now, I do not want to diminish those deaths.
00:26:27.380Any death, any death of a child, any death of a person is tragic.
00:26:32.060But it's worth noting that in many of those cases, most of those cases, it is a death after a COVID diagnosis.
00:26:39.020It's not even by the record keeper's own admission, a case where it's a COVID-caused
00:26:46.280If you're talking about a healthy child that doesn't have underlying health issues, that
00:26:50.640doesn't have comorbidities, their risk of serious, serious ailment, hospitalization,
00:26:56.140death from COVID is not what it is in an elderly person, a very obese person, someone with
00:27:01.300a lot of underlying health conditions, and we shouldn't pretend it is.
00:27:04.100Denmark, as just one example, a few weeks back decided to ban COVID vaccination of anyone under 18 unless they had an underlying health condition.
00:27:13.960Because they said in Denmark's case, they said that the risks outweighed the benefits.
00:27:18.440The UK has gone a bit of a different direction.
00:27:20.580They've said it's available to kids as young as five, but they're saying it's non-essential.
00:27:25.000And they're saying that you can't take a one size fits all position on this, which is effectively what the city of Toronto is trying to do here.
00:27:31.920say that every child must receive the jab and cannot live a normal life, cannot engage with
00:27:37.640the world around them, cannot do kid-like things without it. Now, the little glimmer of good news
00:27:43.900here is that pretty much everyone thought those videos were awful. Even the city of Toronto has
00:27:49.480acknowledged those videos were awful. Brad Ross, who is the chief spokesperson for the city of
00:27:55.020Toronto, he has said they've been pulled. The city right now has paused the campaign and is trying
00:28:01.280to go and reevaluate the meaning. Originally, he had said that they were retracted, but they didn't
00:28:07.180really apologize for them. But I've seen some other reports. There's one in particular here
00:28:11.920where he acknowledges that the message itself is just wrong. I'm reading an article in the,
00:28:18.660I think it's Global News or it might've been CBC, but he said that the message is not sending,
00:28:25.740or it's not sending the right message here. He's saying that even public health officials were
00:28:30.060unhappy with them and hadn't seen them and hadn't reviewed them. I did a little bit of digging and
00:28:34.740the videos, which cost $4,000 each, I think they should be demanding a refund on that, but it's
00:28:39.840neither here nor there, were produced by some Toronto film program that mentors Black, Indigenous,
00:28:46.800people of colour and LGBTQ2S, I think that's it, there might be another one in there, filmmakers,
00:28:53.820and they do this in a way to, you know, try to foster the development of the media and arts
00:28:58.480industry. And they're the ones that made the video. So at least it wasn't like some really
00:29:03.520expensive $100,000 contract to an ad agency. But even so, the core message of this plays to parents
00:29:11.320that are so fearful, fearful of the world around them, that either furthers them trying to keep
00:29:17.420their children isolated from the world, or it shames parents. Shames parents who, for whatever
00:29:21.620reason, have decided that vaccinating their children against COVID is not something they
00:29:25.920want to do. And when I spoke to Martha Fulford, the infectious disease specialist formerly of
00:29:31.820McMaster University on the show a few weeks ago, I mean, she's been one of the loudest voices and
00:29:36.280most important voices speaking up for children in this country. She said that, you know, the profile
00:29:41.880is going to be different for everyone. And there are going to be myriad reasons why one person may
00:29:46.900decide not to be vaccinated. Maybe it's religious views. Maybe it's just a commitment to natural
00:29:51.800health. Maybe someone they know has had a bad reaction, but you can't individualize or you can't
00:29:58.480de-individualize this and make it where we are saying that this is the path that everyone needs
00:30:04.880to take. And it was a shameful ad campaign. Now, I think that when they say they're pausing it and
00:30:10.420they're going to reevaluate it, I'm going to assume that these videos are never going to see
00:30:13.880the light of day. And there are two more that I didn't play. If you want to look at them, you can
00:30:17.840head to tnc.news and we have them in our story there. You can also head to my Twitter. I've
00:30:22.620posted all the videos there. And I had like some Twitter troll respond to me and say, well, if you
00:30:27.900think these videos are so terrible, why have you uploaded them? I said, because I think people need
00:30:31.880to see them. I think people need to see them not to understand the message they're trying to
00:30:36.680promote, but people need to see them to understand just how unhinged the rhetoric around vaccination
00:30:42.260has gotten and what governments are promoting and governments are publishing.
00:30:47.380And again, you know, my own position on this, the fight I'm taking up is not a fight against