Juno News - February 13, 2020Trudeau's Media Bribery, Corporate Cronyism, and Freedom to Blaspheme
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Summary
Coming up: How the Liberal government is buying off the press, Emmanuel Macron takes a stand for free speech, and honouring Christy Blatchford. The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now on Canada's Most Reverent Talk Show.
Transcript
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This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, how the Liberal government is buying off the press.
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Emmanuel Macron takes a stand for free speech and honouring and remembering Christy Blatchford.
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Hello everyone, welcome along to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
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Another exciting edition, I hope anyway, of the program here on True North.
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Back in home turf after our field trip to Halifax for Omar Khadr's event at Dalhousie University.
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If you haven't yet heard it, I did a full post-mortem and recap of that event on the previous episode of the show.
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And we had a lot of great stuff on there, I think.
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So do, like I said, try to get caught up if you haven't.
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But wherever you're listening, it's not a serialization, this show.
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You can pop in whenever you'd like, but I certainly hope you enjoy it enough to subscribe on whatever you listen on.
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I think one person has requested a carrier pigeon.
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But for the most part, we try to be wherever our listeners are.
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So thanks everyone for the support of the program to date.
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I want to get to a few things on the show here.
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But right out of the gate, I want to show how brazen the government is at trying to buy favorable news coverage.
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It's not news in the sense of the fact that this is just absolutely shocking to us.
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But from the $1.3 billion that CBC gets to the $595 million journalism bailout fund to that story that we talked about last week on the show where the heritage minister, Stephen Gilbeau, was committing to licensing news organizations and then backtracking, but not really.
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And now we have a story that is just so brazen that you have to just say, okay, if you're going to be this corrupt, at least hide it better.
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But thanks, I guess, for the transparency, sort of.
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Black Locks Reporter, which is an Ottawa-based publication that I will say has absolutely been killing it lately, has this great story, Government Pays for Climate News.
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I should say not a great story, a well-done story.
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Nothing about the subject matter, however, makes me happy.
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They found that the $50 million local journalism initiative, which is a program in the Heritage Government Department budget that is supposed to be to bolster local journalism initiatives, as the name suggests, has been co-opted to basically push the government's agenda in a lot of areas of journalism.
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So this program has now become a slush fund, including money paid out specifically to get media organizations to cover climate change.
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Now, this is from, Black Lock says, records from the Canadian News Media Association, which is an industry-led group.
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They found that there were organizations that pitched grant applications to the government and received money for the sole purpose of having reporters to talk about climate change.
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One, for example, is the Narwhal, which is based in Whitehorse.
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No existing media outlet, be it local, regional, or national, has an environmental beat reporter covering issues in Canada's Arctic.
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Given the profound ecological changes underway and huge development projects for the region, this is a major gap in civic reporting.
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Another application came from Nunatsiak News in Nunavut, which has a reporter covering,
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A key institution for the study of the effects of climate change on the Arctic.
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Now, the Winnipeg Free Press is the paper of record in a pretty large Canadian city, a provincial capital.
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And they had a reporter that was hired because of government funding, quote,
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Coverage will be balanced and include both the warnings that need to be heeded,
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but also new solutions that will provide hope that a greener future is still within reach.
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The reporter will be dedicated to climate change.
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The beat will include the politics, economics, cultural, social, and environmental aspects of climate change.
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So they say it's going to be balanced coverage, but I want to read this part again.
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It will include the warnings that need to be heeded, but also new solutions that will provide hope that a greener future is still within reach.
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So they don't mean balance between alarmists and those who are skeptical of the alarmists.
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They don't mean balance between these two groups.
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They mean balance between one side of the alarmism and the other side of the alarmism.
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So that's like saying, oh, you know, I prefer a balanced diet.
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I like beer and wine, you know, as far as things go.
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But they say it's going to be balanced, and they're going to focus on the warnings and the solutions
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and try to get us to a greener future within reach.
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Now, provide hope that a greener future is still within reach.
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Now, this is the kind of thing that you would expect to hear from Justin Trudeau.
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That's the kind of thing you would expect to hear from a politician.
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Oh, cher ami, we must provide hope that a greener future is within reach.
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I mean, that's the kind of thing you do to make Greta Thunberg happy.
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And now this is the mandate of a Department of Heritage grant to a private news organization,
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or what's supposed to be a private news organization.
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And by the way, the Narwhal has previously written that it is committed to, quote,
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tracking government commitments to climate change.
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And they've talked about climate activism, and they've highlighted climate activists.
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So these are agenda-driven examples of reporting.
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Now, from a free speech perspective, yes, I think that advocacy journalism has a place in Canada.
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If you want to have a news organization that advocates on these issues, that's fine.
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But you can't have government bankrolling it and not deal with the inevitable problem of government-sponsored
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and or government-approved journalism, which is what's going on here.
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And again, you know, we're talking about a $50 million program that is supposed to be about
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getting coverage of school board meetings, council meetings, all of these things.
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And the reason is that these issues are not sexy.
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The school board meeting in White Court, Alberta, is not as salacious as the crying polar bears
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because the ice caps are melting and all of that,
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which is why it's harder to find coverage of these things.
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And in an age of media consolidation, when local media is dying,
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there's a place to have local media that's doing these things.
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But now this program, which I don't agree with the program,
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but if you're going to do it, you need to do it on those appropriate terms
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and within the parameters that have been set out.
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Now you have people that are covering these sexy federal government-approved issues.
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which are not local issues and getting government money to do it.
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So even though the $50 million is not a lot of money, it's the principle of the thing here
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because you've got government directly financing coverage that will help the government.
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And the reason I say that is because climate change
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is an issue that the liberals have tried to claim as their own.
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It's an issue that Justin Trudeau has gotten up and tried to say that he is the savior of the climate
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and the liberals have tried to say that they're the ones that are going to heal the land,
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cool the oceans, rebuild the ice caps, save the baby seal, all of this stuff.
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So by basically writing checks to news organizations that are covering the climate beat,
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or as the Winnipeg Free Press says, that are covering the solutions for the greener future
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to the beyond, the whatever, you're actually saying that government is able to buy favorable coverage.
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And this isn't to say there aren't local environmental stories across Canada.
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It's that this is not an issue that's ignored by the media.
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This is not an area that we don't have coverage.
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In fact, I'd say we have too much coverage of climate change from the mainstream media.
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I remember back in December, CBC ran a story sharing its discontent
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that we shelve our climate concerns when it comes time to do Christmas shopping.
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And CBC ran a few pieces actually about how Christmas is bad for the environment.
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And media organizations have tried to make climate change narratives pivotal
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We've heard stories about climate change causing this, climate change causing that.
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The fact that they call everything climate change means that they can talk about it whenever they want.
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The liberals want Canadians to keep talking about this because it will then turn around
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and allow the liberals to say, well, this is our issue.
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You have to look at it as part of a pattern here.
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The $500 million bailout, the CBC subsidy, this talk of licensing media.
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The government is trying to intervene and interfere in the press and basically demand favorable coverage in response.
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And the government's been saying all along that it's not going to have a hand in regulating content,
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I mean, imagine if, and I wrote this in a loony politics column,
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imagine if the previous conservative government says we're going to fund national security reporters.
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We're going to fund reporters that are going to specialize in terrorism.
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Imagine if the conservative said we're going to hire firearms reporters,
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people that are going to talk about firearms policy.
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Or heck, imagine if a gun magazine, and there are gun magazines in Canada that do great work,
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Imagine if, I think Caliber is one of them, put in a grant application and said,
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we want a reporter that's going to cover firearms policy.
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How is that any different than an environmental publication going to the government and saying,
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we want money to have a climate change reporter?
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There would be an outcry if the conservatives tried that because you can't buy coverage
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and expect that people aren't going to give you a little bit of pushback on it.
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So the Trudeau government is trying to manipulate the landscape of media coverage right now.
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And it reminds me of when Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former attorney general,
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had testified that Katie Telford, Justin Trudeau's chief of staff,
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backing the decision that Trudeau wanted Jody Wilson-Raybould to make regarding SNC-Lavalin.
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So, you know, Katie Telford's like in the OR and the dying liberal poll numbers are on the table in front of her.
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But this is what the liberals have been able to do.
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They've had these cozy, cozy relationships with media organizations where they're planting op-eds,
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they're buying CBC, they're handing over poutine to, I think it was David Cochran of CBC.
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Unifor, the anti-conservative union getting a place on the journalism panel
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that the government relies on to define who a journalist is
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and to define how that money is going to get doled out.
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So there, I mean, there are plenty of practical reasons
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about why the government shouldn't be bankrolling media in general.
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which, incidentally, I hope conservative leadership candidates will take a stronger stand against.
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I think Aaron O'Toole has said it's gone as well.
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Some industries are the old yesterday's industries, like manufacturing.
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Trudeau says, ah, you know what, get new jobs, retrain.
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And then you've got Trudeau saying, oh, no, no, but we need to save local media.
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But when Trudeau is deciding he's going to intervene to save this particular industry,
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when this particular industry is the one that can decide or can alter the narrative about Justin Trudeau,
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it seems to explain why he wants to give the media sector such preferential treatment
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The carbon tax is killing a lot of sectors in Canada.
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In fact, it's killing sectors that have typically been the backbone of the Canadian economy.
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He cares about S&C Lavalin jobs because, oh, they're in Quebec.
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Because reporters that have been given checks by the Liberal government are either going
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to be directly beholden to the Liberals or, at the very least, will allow a perception
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of that beholden nature to permeate among the readers.
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Either way, it calls into question the media reporting that happens.
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And when the Trudeau government is specifically sponsoring, which is what this program is doing,
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including individual jobs to cover beats that the Liberals want covered, that the Liberals
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are legislating on, there is absolutely no way you can say this is not a gross conflict
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of interest, putting the word gross, I guess, as being the key word in that.
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We'll be back in a moment with more of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
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You know, I mentioned before government cozying up with the media sector, and I've got to
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say corporate cronyism is not entirely limited to the media.
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We had the MasterCard story from a couple of weeks ago, and now we've got another Canadian
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company that seems to be focusing on being in the Liberal good books, perhaps looking for
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This is a story that True North actually broke.
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TELUS is promoting Liberal compliant phone plans on its website.
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Now, this is not, you know, I'm a firm believer in free speech, as you know, and the reason
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I think free speech is so important is because oftentimes if you let people speak their mind,
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You can just say, aha, this is what they think.
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And this is a scoop that comes from a very deeply hidden investigative place, the TELUS
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But TELUS on its website has a new program called the True North Affordability Program,
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which I don't think we have the trademark on True North, but I assure you this True North
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on which this show is broadcast has nothing to do with TELUS's True North Affordability Program,
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which is actually a little stamp, a green maple leaf with a checkmark and a black wording
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And that stamp is on certain phone plans that TELUS is offering.
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Now, what TELUS says is that the True North Affordability stamp means our plans line up
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with the Liberal Party benchmark for wireless affordability.
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As part of their campaign, the Liberal Party pledged to make cell phone bills more affordable.
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Our TELUS peace of mind plan for a family of four provides more data than the sample plans
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For more details, including the chart released on Liberal.ca, please see the Liberal Party
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And then there's a link to the Liberal Party proposal.
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And at that link is a partisan Liberal policy document from the campaign in which the Liberals
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promised what they call more affordable cell phone bills.
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And that was a policy proposal that, according to this document, says the Liberal government
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will take strong action to see cell phone bills come down by 25%.
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This will save a family of four almost $1,000 per year.
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And one of the reasons for this is the lack of competition that takes place in Canada.
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And you remember how much the big three, Bell, TELUS, and Rogers, fought tooth and nail during
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the Harper government when there was a proposal for Verizon to enter the market.
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I was a big supporter of it because more choice means lower prices.
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So the Liberals are trying to artificially manipulate phone companies down.
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And when this was announced during the campaign, there was a lot of confusion as to how.
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And it seems to be based on them asking nicely.
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It's based on the Liberals asking telecom companies nicely to please lower their prices and hoping
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Now, I was skeptical when this was announced that it would actually happen.
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And then Navdeep Bains, who's the industry minister, had written an op-ed in the National
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Post, or I think it was the Financial Post, actually, a couple of weeks ago.
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And in the op-ed, he had said that the government is working with its industry partners to doing
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So whether you like the Liberals or not, whether you're skeptical of the proposal or not,
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the government is trying to do this or is planning to do this.
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The problem with TELUS is that its website is not crediting the government of Canada.
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It's not saying that we're complying with forthcoming government regulations.
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It says we are complying with the Liberal Party.
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Liberal Party, Liberal Party, Liberal Party, Liberal.ca.
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So TELUS is shilling for the Liberal telecom plan.
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I know that we reached out to TELUS, and at the time that I record this, we have not
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However, what's happening here is I think the TELUS person that was contacted really
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This is purely speculation on my part, but I'm guessing the government went to the telecom
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companies and said, listen, this is what we've promised.
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And TELUS said, yeah, yeah, OK, if the government's going to be doing it, we'll go along with it.
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But seem to be mistaken for whether the government of Canada was making the request or the Liberal
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And you may think that is a semantical distinction, but it's not.
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It actually is significant because the Liberal Party is a partisan entity.
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And both of them have different implications when they start telling companies what to do and when
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Because if TELUS, which is one of three major cell phone providers in Canada, decides to go along with
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it because it's a Liberal proposal, well, all of a sudden you've got a multi-billion dollar
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corporation that is, I'll use the word I used earlier, shilling for the Liberals.
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So now if you're a TELUS customer and you're on the TELUS website and you're looking at
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plans, there's a page telling you, oh, the Liberals gave me this phone bill.
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This is this price I can afford because the Liberals did it.
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Now, if the Liberals want to tell you that, that's fine.
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If the Liberals want to run ads saying, hey, that phone bill of yours is cheaper because
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The Liberals have banned companies and, well, actually the Conservatives banned corporate
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But now to turn around and say, but we're going to accept this support from a corporation.
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Now, is this just some marketing intern that just had no idea what was happening?
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But the point is that TELUS is actively promoting a Liberal policy that isn't even law yet,
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that hasn't been incorporated or enshrined in the federal law to which, yes, they would
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They're saying, oh, yeah, we're doing this because the Liberals did it and it's great.
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And we're even going further than the Liberals.
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And they've put forward these samples and we're going along with it.
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And part of me wonders if they just want to get their own little $50 million check after
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MasterCard was able to cash a big one last week.
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So now you've got companies lining up at the trough, which is why I said corporate welfare
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Because when you have government and corporations getting into bed, everyone loses in these sorts
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And this is an area that, I mean, shouldn't be a left-right issue.
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And again, I always, I get tired a lot of the time of the whataboutism.
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But it also is illuminating in some ways because you have to flip everything to see if there's
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You have to say, all right, well, if the Conservatives did this, what would be the response?
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If the Liberals did this, what would be the response?
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And a lot of the time you expose pretty brazen hypocrisy when you do that and pose those thought
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experiments to people because the media response is rarely consistent, rarely consistent, if
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It's, it's, and it's not going to get better unless people call it out.
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I mean, you look at Bombardier, which is a company that's absolutely in the hole right
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now and has been and has always been a company that only exists based on subsidies.
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And that's probably the test case on why corporate welfare is a terrible idea.
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So we'll have an update on tnc.news if we get an update from TELUS, but you can check out
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Before I take a break here, I want to mention something that has been, it's a very online
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And I realize that I'm making it more real by saying it, but I want to address it because
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Over the last couple of days, since I got back from Halifax, I've been getting a ton of
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messages, tweets, Facebook things from people angry that I supposedly ignored a veteran who
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was protesting outside the Omar Khadr event on Monday night in Halifax at Dalhousie University.
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I was out there for an hour and a half talking to a lot of people.
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And there was one particular veteran there by the name of Jeremy McKenzie.
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And the first time I saw him in my life was Monday night.
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And he was interviewed by someone else who was covering this thing.
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The interview has been just, it's gone absolutely viral.
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This guy, very passionate, very angry about Omar Khadr going in, especially with him being
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And the narrative that has somehow emerged with a corner of the internet is that I ignored
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him and that I snubbed him in some way, which was certainly not the intention.
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The reality is I was out there at that event before anyone else was.
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The first veterans to arrive, I interviewed because at the time I was focused on getting
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And I wanted to get a cross section of perspectives.
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People that were protesting Khadr, supporting Khadr, people that were unsure.
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And I spoke with on record, I think three veterans on record, and I chatted with a couple
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There were, I'd say, maybe a dozen and a half, and many of them wearing military insignia.
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And I didn't know this particular veteran was the one that I needed to talk to.
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But everyone's telling me since that I needed to.
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And, you know, it's interesting because I don't like this idea of rushing to assume the
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worst, which is what a lot of people online tend to do.
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That seems to be the entire backbone of Twitter.
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But my rationale, if I'm doing streeters, which is what they're called, talking to people,
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interviewing various people, trying to get a cross section, is you want to get people
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who whose voices are not otherwise going to be heard?
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I don't want to get the same coverage that everyone else is getting.
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So I talked to the other people there that weren't being spoken to by anyone.
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The fact that everyone has seen the video of this guy and is saying, why didn't you talk
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So if you have heard this, I assure you, there's no conspiracy.
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But in true, in true honesty, I thank those who have served for their service.
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Anyone who I spoke to who served, I'm grateful.
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And even those who I didn't speak to, I'm grateful as well.
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But again, the response to our Omar Khadr coverage has been overwhelmingly positive.
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So I do want to thank you again, if you were a contributor to that initiative.
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And we're going to do more things like that when there are events worth covering.
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But in this case, there was basically no one in the media that was prepared to give
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And I've actually looked at some of the other coverage that has come out of that event.
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So I'm glad we were there, especially in retrospect.
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When we come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
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Because the free speech issue, one of the most fundamental issues to Western civilization.
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Certainly one of the issues about which I care more than anything else.
00:27:45.120
And a very positive free speech statement from Emmanuel Macron, the president of France,
00:28:03.600
There was a situation in France that's been going on in the last little while,
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where a schoolgirl posted an anti-religious diatribe on Instagram.
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Now, I don't normally cover schoolgirl Instagram footage.
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But a young teenager named Mila had basically shot from the hip on religion.
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And it has sparked a great deal of backlash because she was taking aim at Islam.
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And she ended up being forced out of her school and was criticized by France's justice minister,
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Nicole Belloubet, calling the attack on religion, quote, an attack on freedom of conscience, unquote.
00:28:53.260
She's not been named in full by the press, but I think she's been identified on social media.
00:28:58.560
And the school apparently has had to, like, they needed to find her a new school.
00:29:05.800
The government has had to find her a new school.
00:29:16.360
So Macron has said something that I think is so essential.
00:29:24.380
Quote, in an interview, he says, quote, in this debate, we've lost sight of the fact that Mila is an adolescent.
00:29:29.860
We owe her protection at school, in her daily life, in her movements.
00:29:33.660
And that he's basically turning back against all of the critics of Mila and saying,
00:29:39.100
you guys need to respect that what she's doing is entirely valid within free speech.
00:29:44.280
He says, the necessity is separate from the criticism of religion.
00:29:49.260
We have the right to blaspheme, to criticize, to caricature religions.
00:30:02.160
It shouldn't need to be said that we have the right to blaspheme, to criticize, to caricature religions.
00:30:07.560
But it's more and more true in this day and age that we do.
00:30:11.480
This year marks 15 years since the Danish Muhammad cartoons were published.
00:30:17.160
Cartoons that got people killed, that got assassination attempts to be the norm for political cartoonists, for journalists, for columnists.
00:30:25.180
We obviously have Charlie Hebdo, another situation that has emerged within the last 15 years where people died because they dared criticize a religion.
00:30:34.480
The so-called religion of peace, whose radicals decide to turn around and kill those who mock them.
00:30:46.880
The radicals don't like that they're portrayed as violent and they respond by being violent.
00:30:53.100
And yes, you are in some ways taking your life into your own hands if you speak freely,
00:30:57.800
but it is not the role of the state to say, oh, you've crossed a line.
00:31:05.680
Good for Macron for saying that because so often anyone who is guilty of wrong speak is subjected to massive victim blaming
00:31:12.760
where people say, oh, well, you shouldn't have said that.
00:31:18.340
And a case that comes to mind is that of Elizabeth Sabadich-Volfe.
00:31:23.220
And she's not a household name, but she was actually guilty.
00:31:27.600
She was found guilty of speaking out against Islam, even though what she said was true.
00:31:37.420
She spoke about the fact that the prophet Muhammad had engaged in a sexual relationship with a child.
00:31:43.340
She went to the point of saying Muhammad was a pedophile.
00:31:47.100
But what she did was part of the free critique of religion.
00:31:55.940
People say vile things about Judaism, about Islam.
00:32:01.780
But it is absolutely permissible in a free society.
00:32:05.100
But Elizabeth Sabadich-Volfe was actually convicted by a European human rights court,
00:32:11.820
a European human rights court for the offense of wrong speak.
00:32:16.920
And this was something that, again, should not happen in a free society.
00:32:23.720
You should be able to say, oh, man, I don't like how she insults my religion.
00:32:27.120
I'm not going to listen to her or I'm going to fight back against her, but not with violence
00:32:34.200
So, again, I feel absolutely terrible about what's happening to this girl in France.
00:32:39.060
But I am encouraged, at least, that the French government is not bending the knee.
00:32:44.560
The French government is saying, you know what?
00:32:46.220
We're going to protect her because the right to speak freely is a fundamental right in a
00:32:51.640
free society, which supposedly there's hope for France still being.
00:32:55.700
When we come back in a moment, a little bit of a tribute to a fallen warrior in the free
00:33:11.800
Before I close things out from the show today, I want to honor a woman that has had a tremendous
00:33:17.760
impact in Canadian politics and Canadian culture and Canadian media.
00:33:27.440
Now, I know that there have been many, many tributes to her and obituaries from people in
00:33:32.420
the last few days since she passed from a cancer battle.
00:33:36.580
And I would encourage you to read some of these because some of them are truly exceptional and
00:33:41.600
The stories that you hear from her about helping those, even those competitors, younger journalists,
00:33:49.520
sharing sources, sharing information, a woman that genuinely cared about her craft and cared
00:33:56.920
And a woman who cared a great deal about all of the people that she covered.
00:34:02.800
Well, I shouldn't say all of the people, but when she was covering crime, the people that
00:34:15.760
And in fact, I will say that I had decided not to interview her anymore because there were
00:34:21.500
two incidents where I had booked her to appear on my show and she forgot and wasn't there.
00:34:27.260
And I was live on air wondering where Christy Blatchford was.
00:34:33.500
And in another case, she just forgot and her mom was on silent.
00:34:36.320
But, you know, these were outliers from everyone else I've talked to.
00:34:42.820
Oftentimes, if she was covering a trial, would be there hours and hours early.
00:34:47.400
And I actually got to know of her through her political writing, which came about in her
00:34:53.920
But I thought that she was so exceptional because of her ability to write and her ability
00:34:59.860
to keep the audience captivated, which was so rare in Canadian media and is so rare in
00:35:12.800
Part of it was that she only covered the stories that she wanted to cover.
00:35:17.200
And in a lot of cases, that resulted in a very wide range of content.
00:35:21.560
For example, I knew her as being the trial columnist and I knew her as being the political
00:35:26.600
She was the one assigned to cover the PyeongChang Olympics.
00:35:41.000
And I've always hated columnists that are one-trick ponies and broadcasters as well.
00:35:45.440
And that was one of the influences that I had when I started out in radio.
00:35:49.300
I never wanted to be the one that just kept myself confined to a box and only did things
00:35:57.220
She did what a lot of columnists don't do, which is leaving the studio, which is going
00:36:02.380
to find the story, which is doing original work, which is never being afraid to inject
00:36:08.720
And there was a reason that her stuff resonated with people because she understood people.
00:36:15.560
Because she was writing about the things that she felt and experienced or the things that
00:36:22.760
And she always had her finger on the pulse of the people that she covered because she
00:36:27.420
covered a lot of the everyday ordeals and struggles or the stories that were emblematic
00:36:34.360
And she ended up being ahead of the curve on so many of these issues.
00:36:38.720
But I also think what's essential to understand about Christy Blatchford is that she was the
00:36:49.680
I mean, she was, in some respects, a fire-breathing right-winger.
00:37:01.400
But she was respected by everyone she worked with.
00:37:04.100
Even people she yelled at for messing up her headlines, apparently, still respected her
00:37:09.700
And that takes talent and skill to be loved by the people that you dress down.
00:37:15.280
But she couldn't be canceled because everyone knew where her heart was.
00:37:22.760
And everyone knew that when she took a story, she was going to bring it to life.
00:37:26.940
And the reason she could do that is because she understood.
00:37:29.600
She understood the core issues that were at the center of what she was writing about.
00:37:35.940
And I want to play, before I say farewell for this episode, a clip from a speech she gave last year
00:37:41.900
at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom's George Jonas Freedom Awards dinner.
00:37:48.820
And she spoke about justice and the importance of maintaining fairness in the justice system.
00:37:56.340
But she captured something that I had never heard before, which was how victims and victimization
00:38:07.500
And how a lot of the victim culture we see now can really come back to some of these changes.
00:38:12.560
And in this, you hear not just her intelligence and her way with words, but also her tremendous wit
00:38:17.840
and the manner in which she communicates and why she was such a powerful columnist for so long.
00:38:24.320
But in the 80s, there emerged this idea that, as one advocate put it at the time,
00:38:30.500
The politicians long ago recognized the needs of criminals, but they forgot about us.
00:38:35.720
A justice system that doesn't want fair treatment for both sides is not a fair system.
00:38:40.100
The problem is, victims of crime were never meant to be a part or one of the two sides.
00:38:47.340
Justice in this country and in most Western democracies isn't supposed to be a contest
00:38:52.140
between victim and perpetrator, but rather one between state and perpetrator.
00:38:57.640
Thus, it's the state of New York versus Blatchford, or in Canada, Regina versus Blatchford.
00:39:03.560
It's not Blatchford versus the poor SOB she killed.
00:39:07.320
And trust me, I have a list of likely contenders.
00:39:10.100
Of course, the broader societal interest of public safety and protection
00:39:16.880
incorporate the narrower interests of those who have been hurt or damaged by crime.
00:39:21.820
But traditionally, that's where the victim's role began and ended.
00:39:28.520
That's what the rule of law at its simplest is.
00:39:31.300
We all agree that we will not seek vengeance and take the law into our own hands.
00:39:37.580
If you burn down my house, I will not burn down yours in retaliation and perhaps rape your wife for good measure.
00:39:46.080
The cops will investigate, and you may be charged, and at some point you may go on trial.
00:39:50.140
But in 1989, the federal government passed the Victims' Bill of Rights.
00:39:56.300
And over the next decade, this being Canada and redundancy always the goal, the provinces passed their own versions.
00:40:03.420
What all these bills really did was provide victims with the right to information about court appearances, release dates of offenders, that sort of thing.
00:40:13.300
But before you knew it, there was also the victim impact statement, which is delivered at sentencing and allows a victim or a victim's family to talk publicly about their loss.
00:40:28.400
In May of 1995 came the trial of the serial killer Paul Bernardo.
00:40:33.600
I suppose if I were truly modern, I wouldn't name him either, but I'm not, so I will.
00:40:38.080
I remember that trial like it was yesterday and could talk about it for weeks.
00:40:44.120
But for these purposes, let me just say that it turned the notion of victims being an uninvolved third party on its ear.
00:40:52.460
Bernardo was accused and, of course, convicted of genuinely terrible crimes.
00:40:57.300
He was a serial rapist who moved on to murder, with his lovely then-wife Carla Homolka at his side.
00:41:02.520
They were co-stars in the deaths of three young women,
00:41:06.980
Homolka's own baby sister, Tammy, and teenagers, Lassie Mahaffey, and Kristen French.
00:41:16.640
Long before Terrant live-streamed his slaughter in the Christchurch mosque,
00:41:21.260
well before Luca Magnata made and posted a video of his killing of the student, John Lynn,
00:41:29.800
It was new, and because it was new, it was especially terrifying.
00:41:35.200
And the first thing that happened was that the trial of Homolka, which went first,
00:41:39.500
was closed to public and to the American press,
00:41:42.820
and subject to so many publication bans, it was essentially held in secret.
00:41:48.140
Then, at Bernardo's trial, the presiding judge, a lovely man named Patrick Lassage,
00:41:53.800
decided at the behest of a lawyer representing the French and Mahaffey families
00:41:58.880
that the public and the press wouldn't be able to see the videotapes,
00:42:03.220
which were the single most critical piece of evidence against Bernardo.
00:42:07.400
This was because, the lawyer for the family said,
00:42:10.120
if the tapes were played in public, the families would have to watch them too,
00:42:15.080
and because to play them publicly would violate their daughter's dignity and privacy rights.
00:42:21.720
The families, through their lawyer, Tim Danson,
00:42:25.000
asked for formal intervenish status in the trial,
00:42:27.860
and astonishingly, though the judge said he was doing it as an indulgence and not a right,
00:42:36.100
Victimhood was also expanded in another way at that trial.
00:42:45.000
in their search of the Bernardo Homolka marital home,
00:42:48.780
the government determined it needed Homolka as a witness against her former husband.
00:42:53.480
And fair enough, for a time, they did need her,
00:43:07.800
No, she was a compliant victim of a sexual sadist.
00:43:18.500
the tapes were belatedly found in a clusterfuck that is too complicated to explain here.
00:43:23.060
But those tapes showed Homolka not as a victim,
00:43:27.520
but as Bernardo's accomplice, an eager, lip-licking participant in the sexual assaults of those three dead young women
00:43:35.420
and several others, and who on tape seemed as perfectly capable of murder as her darling husband.
00:43:41.640
The tapes showed that Homolka had forgotten about some of the sexual assaults
00:43:50.480
At least one police chief and one prosecutor wanted to breach her plea deal because of that,
00:43:56.040
but there was no will to do it at 720 Bay Street where the Attorney General's big guns work.
00:44:01.020
There, they had all bought into the vision of Carly Curls, as she called herself,
00:44:11.500
In fact, Homolka was both participant in the early and middle years of her relationship with Bernardo
00:44:16.900
and their rape and murder spree, and then, in its dying days, but only then,
00:44:26.460
Yet her plea deal, 12 years for her involvement in three deaths, survived,
00:44:32.380
and after serving every last day of her sentence, she was free.
00:44:36.420
Many people persist in seeing her as a victim, just another sad example of the toxic male.
00:44:42.420
One of those people was a lawyer who represented her while she was still in prison,
00:44:48.300
a Quebec lawyer who really believed in Homolka's victimhood.
00:44:52.440
Sylvie Bordelay was a true believer. That's a lawyer.
00:44:56.720
Years later, I learned that it was Bordelay's brother, Theory, who married Homolka,
00:45:01.660
and I remember thinking, fine, you like her so much, you have her at your Christmas table every year.
00:45:08.380
And she did. And that remains one of the few threads of justice in Homolka's story.
00:45:27.380
That does it for me. Thanks, everyone, for your time in tuning into this show here.
00:45:31.640
We'll be back next week with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.
00:45:35.760
I'm Andrew Lawton. Thank you, God bless, and good day.
00:45:39.000
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:45:41.080
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.