00:01:00.000welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:19.640north hello and welcome to you all this is canada's most irreverent talk show here the
00:01:29.460andrew lawton show on true north on this wednesday may 15th halfway through the week on a wednesday
00:01:35.000halfway through the month on a 15th not that you were keeping track because well maybe you are
00:01:40.740because summer is approaching we are finally finally finally leaving winter behind us although
00:01:46.400I will say in Ontario, the winter wasn't too, too bad this year. I know that other people got it
00:01:51.020worse, so I won't complain too, too much. But I will talk about the long winter of Canadian
00:01:56.280politics. I don't know if you caught this yesterday. It was making some waves online.
00:02:01.480Justin Trudeau was, so let me just take a step back here. There is a perception that I think
00:02:07.220is in part earned and deserved that the media is in the bag for the Liberals and Justin Trudeau.
00:02:12.540There is definitely in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, a history of liberal bias. There has been for quite some time, for years, a general media bias that tends to favor the liberals. However, it is not fair to say, in my view, that the media industry in Canada, that journalists are by and large liberal partisans or liberal sycophants, because they will attack the liberals.
00:02:36.600They will go after the liberals. But my longstanding theory on this, which I've shared at a couple of points in the past, is that when these people criticize the liberals, it's because they have failed to live up to the ideal of what a liberal is supposed to be. It's for their character more than anything else.
00:02:53.600when the same journalists go after the conservatives, it's for being conservative.
00:02:58.380It's for their values. It's for their core beliefs, which is why the questions that the liberals get are questions like,
00:03:04.940hey, why did you spend that money when you said you were not going to?
00:03:09.180Why did you kick this person out of cabinet? Why did you do this?
00:03:12.320And the questions you get to conservatives are, why do you believe this?
00:03:16.160Why are you not more like the liberals? That is basically the question.
00:03:19.960So that being said, there are a lot of members of the press gallery that have been very good
00:03:25.040in the last year in particular at calling out Justin Trudeau.
00:03:28.760And I think there's a fair point to be made here that if people who carried water for
00:03:33.460the Liberals for many years are not at all finding any favorable things to say about
00:03:39.520Justin Trudeau or to Justin Trudeau, then how on earth are any other Canadians supposed
00:03:44.800Now, that is not a comment directed at Laura Stone, who's a reporter at the Globe and
00:03:49.120mail. I've always been quite fond of her work. This is a very feisty question that she put to
00:03:55.020Justin Trudeau, however, yesterday, which I think is probably emblematic of a bigger and broader
00:04:00.320frustration that many in the media are starting to have towards him too.
00:04:05.320Prime Minister, I want to ask you about leadership. Polls have put you 20 points behind the
00:04:12.440Conservatives, and it doesn't seem to be getting better despite your recent communications push
00:04:16.960from your from your budget. The public appears to have an overwhelmingly
00:04:20.800negative view of you personally and you seem to have lost control of the
00:04:25.540conversation on some of the key issues that Canadians care about. I think the
00:04:29.340public might be looking at you and your position right now and thinking for the
00:04:33.820good of the Liberal Party, why is he staying on? Thank you for your concern
00:04:38.740Laura, but as you see we're here investing in good jobs for
00:04:46.960today and for generations to come. The world is in a challenging place,
00:04:52.480absolutely. But that's why for eight years this government has been putting
00:04:56.960forward investments and a frame that both fights
00:05:02.400climate change and creates good jobs and economic
00:05:06.240growth, that understands that if you want to
00:05:08.960bring in strong investments and great jobs for
00:05:12.160Canadians, you have to be making investments in things like child care,
00:05:16.240like pharma care like health care i know there are lots of folks in ottawa
00:05:23.520thinking about process i'm focused on results for canadians i'm focused on delivering the kinds of
00:05:30.720things that are going to set canada and canadians up for success over the coming decades this is
00:05:37.440about building a plan for the future of this country that's what we're focused on that's
00:05:42.640what i will continue to be focused on because building a better future for canadians bringing
00:05:48.400in fairness for every generation that's what i am 100 focused on right now
00:05:59.520oh man i'm getting results i'm getting things done all you guys are focused on
00:06:04.480process and well when you are setting yourself up for what looks like one of the biggest defeats
00:06:11.120your party has ever seen in the history of the country, I think the process is actually reflecting
00:06:17.180something else that's going on. And you can say, oh, we're making investments and we're getting
00:06:22.000results, all of these buzzwords that if you turn them into a drinking game, you'd have cirrhosis
00:06:26.680by the time the clip was done playing. And this is now what Justin Trudeau is saying. Now, look,
00:06:31.960I am all for Justin Trudeau staying on as liberal leader. I want him to stay on,
00:06:35.980not just through the next election, but I want him to stay on beyond. Don't let them kick you
00:06:40.700out, Justin, stay there. It's going to be the greatest gift to the country if you are the face
00:06:46.020and the standard bearer of the Liberal Party of Canada for years and years to come, because
00:06:49.960I don't think you're going to get elected again. Now, crazy things have happened. This is a guy,
00:06:55.020though, who does not seem to mind the fact that he is going to be steering the ship, just careening
00:07:00.080it right into the iceberg, and then going down with it, but making sure he takes the ship with
00:07:05.980himself. And this is, I think, not going down himself with the ship, making sure he takes the
00:07:10.580ship down with himself, because there is a path where that ship could perhaps just, you know,
00:07:15.500maybe just skirt around and the side gets scraped by the iceberg, but it sails on to Newfoundland.
00:07:20.420But with Justin Trudeau on it, it is going full steam ahead. I'm sorry, I watched Titanic like,
00:07:26.200you know, I don't know, 15 years ago. And now that's the only metaphor I have evidently for
00:07:29.820stuff like this. But I could do a train rack, but a train, I guess a train doesn't really
00:07:33.920steer all that much. But all of that notwithstanding, it's been interesting how Trudeau
00:07:39.300has been going on this corporate welfare tour. So when he says you grow the economy from the
00:07:43.800heart outward, I guess he means that you just have to funnel money into a whole bunch of
00:07:48.680corporations. He was giving more money for electric vehicle batteries at that announcement
00:07:53.620yesterday, where he made that comment about the investments and all of that. And I don't know if
00:07:59.000you saw it, but Doug Ford, who was standing behind him, looked like he was just absolutely
00:08:03.720loving that because generally speaking, Doug Ford is the guy that everyone hates at a press
00:08:08.360conference. So when Doug Ford gets to like hide behind Trudeau and Trudeau's the shield, I think
00:08:13.220Ford is actually pretty happy there. It looked like he was trying to perhaps stifle a bit of
00:08:17.660a smirk, stifle a bit of laughter there. And then you have Justin Trudeau today announcing that
00:08:23.660Italpasta, which is a very good pasta company in Canada, good Canadian success story, is the new
00:08:30.820recipient of, if the price is right, $1.7 million. The government of Canada invests in pasta
00:08:39.300manufacturer in Brampton. Now, I want to entertain this seriously and also a little bit humorously
00:08:47.800because sometimes the jokes just write themselves. As I said on Twitter this morning, which tended
00:08:51.860to start this whole thing, $1.7 million is a pretty penny. But I hear you booing me all the
00:08:59.500way from like Red Deer over there. Don't boo me. I'm just being few silly here. I should have put
00:09:03.840on my bow tie actually, but anyway, that out of the way. So the investment that the government
00:09:09.600says here, $1.7 million, $1.7 million. Now just pull up that press release again, if you don't
00:09:17.300mind, Sean, I want to read a line from here because you may think, okay, we're going to give
00:09:20.8801.7 million dollars to a pasta maker great sub headline over 1.7 million dollars to help ital
00:09:29.220pasta meet growing product demand and create 10 jobs create 10 jobs now i've been noodling around
00:09:40.280with the numbers for a little while and i don't claim to be a mathematician but 1.7 million dollars
00:09:45.100for 10 jobs. That strikes me as $170,000 a job. Now, I don't know how much these jobs are getting,
00:09:51.840are paying people. I suspect not $170,000 a year. And more importantly, they say there's growing
00:09:58.660demand. You know what other businesses do if they have growing demand? They just keep selling things
00:10:04.480and you let your demand, your growing demand, your consumer base that's out there, you let them
00:10:09.800finance your growth and let them finance your expansion. So what the federal government is
00:10:14.220doing here is once again, picking winners. They've decided that they are just going to fly in and say,
00:10:19.880okay, we'll give you the check. It's not even our money. It's the taxpayer's money and the
00:10:23.960taxpayers love pasta. So who that cares? And then 1.7 million. Now I should say it said at least
00:10:30.1401.7. That's an approximate number. It's 1.7 million or so. Sorry. I mean, or so, uh, but the
00:10:36.980$1.7 million there is a number that, uh, it's my producer, Sean, he wants to get down on the action
00:10:43.200now. He says that's quite the dough nation. That's a very good one, Sean. I was thinking of noodle
00:10:48.460types. I wasn't actually going to, I wasn't expanding out to the constituent parts of the
00:10:53.960pasta. So nevertheless, $1.7 million per $100,000. It's not the biggest ticket item here. When the
00:11:01.360government was spending $13 billion on electric vehicle batteries in St. Thomas, Ontario, and
00:11:07.720then they're spending more billions in Port Colborne, at a certain point, you're seeing that
00:11:11.920the government just believes that the only way to have an economic plan in this country is for
00:11:18.820government to be writing out these big giant checks. And I talked about this with Aaron Woodrick
00:11:22.700on the show a few weeks back, and we've had the conversation before. Corporate welfare just doesn't
00:11:28.100work. There is very little in the way of incentive for these companies to truly create jobs. And if
00:11:34.720the money is going towards companies that are doing really well, it's not necessary. If they're
00:11:40.580going towards companies that are doing poorly or really need the money and can't finance it
00:11:45.000themselves through the market, then maybe it's not a business that anyone, government included,
00:11:50.220should be investing in. Like this is a company that's been around for quite a while here. And
00:11:55.620like I've heard, I didn't know it was Brampton, but I've heard for as long as I've been alive,
00:11:59.960I'm pretty sure it's Alpasta. It was founded in 1889. So most of my life I have had this brand
00:12:05.960available. It's been going for 35 years now and again if there's such growing demand then why do
00:12:13.220we need to write the checks for it? This is the problem and you look at the money that's being
00:12:17.100spent on anything other than giving Canadians their money back. It's an unrelated story but I
00:12:24.120think it speaks to the same sort of misguided priorities of the government. This came out
00:12:28.320Leanne Rood who's actually a member of parliament not far from me. She had filed an order paper
00:12:33.060question, which is a method by which MPs can actually get some real answers from government
00:12:37.960departments in the House of Commons. And she was trying to get a sense of how much was being spent
00:12:43.000on asylum claimants. And this is the number that she figured out that she got back from the
00:12:48.140government, $224 in food and accommodation per day that's going to house and feed asylum seekers
00:12:57.360who enter the country illegally. So these are people who just walk across the border
00:13:02.040illegally into Canada. They say, the police go and say, oh, what are you doing here? They say,
00:13:08.000well, I'm here to claim asylum. And they say, okay, well, you're under arrest, but because
00:13:12.220you're claiming asylum, we're going to set you up nicely. We're going to put you in a hotel.
00:13:16.120We're going to give you money. And we're going to put you on this queue that goes for months,
00:13:20.020if not years to get a hearing. And if you are unsuccessful in your asylum claim, well,
00:13:24.800you're already here in the country. Maybe we don't get around to deporting you.
00:13:27.820This is an ongoing problem that's been happening in this country for years, that the federal government has aggravated and exacerbated by, you may remember a few years back, Justin Trudeau's infamous welcome to Canada tweet, where he just said, as kind of this middle finger towards Donald Trump, Canada's open and welcome to everyone.
00:13:47.640And people literally took that as a gold engraved invitation.
00:13:50.740They took that as him rolling out the red carpet at Roxham Road and coming in.
00:13:54.660And we find out that we're still paying for every one of these people, of which there are thousands, $224 a day.
00:14:02.000And it may sound like an insignificant number, but it works out to millions and millions and millions of dollars per year for a problem that is not going away, a problem that is only getting worse.
00:14:13.760because this is just well-awaiting process because we can't, we have to put them up while
00:14:19.940they're waiting to go through the claim process and have their claim adjudicated and whatnot.
00:14:25.700By the end of last year, just to put some numbers on this, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship
00:14:31.620Canada had said there were 42,387 pending claims. So that $224 times 42,000 people,
00:14:42.260Just to do some rough math here, well, it won't be rough.
00:14:46.7404, 2, 3, 8, 7 times 224 works out to be $9,494,688,
00:14:55.460all because we as a country have not made an effort to secure our border.
00:15:01.040And look, Canada should, as a free country,
00:15:03.900welcome people that have very legitimate asylum claims.
00:15:07.100People who have those claims are not in the United States.
00:15:10.220the united states is not the persecuting force if they have an issue with their home country and
00:15:15.520they got to the united states that is where they should make the claim and this goes back to the
00:15:20.320safe third country agreement that we've been talking about on this show and at true north
00:15:24.600for several years now but again priorities are entirely out of whack you have governments saying
00:15:30.440that the big things they need to do are giving millions of dollars to pasta companies and then
00:15:34.560you have people in canadian cities looking around and wondering how things got so bad we've talked
00:15:39.840about homelessness and drugs on the show which have ballooned into these massive problems in
00:15:44.680pretty much every community in Canada. One we haven't given as much attention to has been auto
00:15:50.060thefts. Now I'm very fortunate in that my car has been broken into not for several years but it has
00:15:55.940never been stolen. There are people in cities like Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal who have had
00:16:02.140their cars stolen multiple times. This has become such an incredible way of life where I believe in
00:16:08.000Toronto, cars are stolen every 14 minutes. There's a car is stolen every 14 minutes in Toronto. I
00:16:14.280think that's the stat. It's certainly in and around there. So the Ontario government has
00:16:18.920decided to get tough on this. One of the things they're going to do, if you do it more than three
00:16:22.960times, they're going to revoke your driver's license. Yeah, that'll show you. You can't drive
00:16:30.440because now when you steal the car, well, you won't be able to because you don't have a driver's
00:16:34.680license. I look, I'm all for tough on crime stuff. This kind of strikes me as one of these things
00:16:40.140where it sounds good on paper, but it's like a lot of gun control things and a policy predicated
00:16:45.840on criminals following the law, which by definition they are not doing. But let's bring in someone
00:16:51.060much smarter in the ways of the criminal law and the justice system than I, Ari Goldkind, host with
00:16:57.160SiriusXM and Criminal Lawyer Extraordinaire. Ari, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on
00:17:01.900today great to be with you and before we get to this i was just listening to the last few minutes
00:17:06.820of you talking about 200 and something dollars per person per day you're one of the few people
00:17:11.740in canada who has the guts to talk about it it should be at the top headline from the globe and
00:17:16.760mail which used to talk about and write about things like this and god forbid the toronto star
00:17:21.160never will so for whoever's listening i really applaud you for talking about it because it is
00:17:25.660the third rail and hopefully the more people who start to talk about it now with elon musk's
00:17:30.800permission of course I think is the only way to make a difference so I don't mean to divert from
00:17:36.660what we're going to talk about but what you've just talked about is really important and it
00:17:40.660drives me absolutely back fill in the blank because those are my absolutely wasted tax dollars
00:17:46.220and I can assure you Andrew you and your listeners can figure out how much I pay a year in tax well
00:17:52.300no I appreciate that Ari and it affects everyone and like a lot of policies it is a consequence of
00:17:58.740bad policy elsewhere. Because people say, okay, well, we have these asylum claimants here. What
00:18:03.820are we supposed to do about them? Well, yeah, let's go back to the first principle there. Why
00:18:07.560are they here? Because the government has not protected the border and has basically allowed
00:18:12.240this ridiculous loophole in the asylum process to unfold. So anyway, now you're getting me to do a
00:18:17.700secondary rant on that. But I appreciate the kind words, Ari. You always tackle things in a very
00:18:23.000fearless way as well. The auto theft thing in Toronto, in Vancouver, in Montreal, it's actually
00:18:29.300quite ridiculous. And I don't buy that this is going to discourage people, the threat of having
00:18:35.660their license taken away, which is, again, less severe than the threat of, you know, going to jail
00:18:40.560because you stole a car in the first place. So you use the term ridiculous, which is a very good
00:18:45.760word. I use that all the time, too, to describe everything Trudeau. And, you know, I'm not a
00:18:50.220partisan. I've been on your show where I've complimented certain things that he's done.
00:18:54.640To me, I'm issue by issue by issue. Ridiculous sort of minimizes what this is. It's actually
00:19:00.720insidious. And there is a difference between ridiculous and insidious because the Trudeau
00:19:05.780government knows exactly who's doing this. It's not being done by the Mennonite and the Amish.
00:19:11.520They welcome the people by the tens of thousands who come here only to run and ruin havoc on our
00:19:18.180streets this is what we're going to talk about today with the licensing uh the driving the thefts
00:19:23.460the carjacking the home invasions and you know i take a bit of a different view andrew than you
00:19:29.060did in your intro which you know you're right look i'm a criminal defense lawyer people will
00:19:33.400hear me talk here and go wait a minute how does this man defend these that's my day job but that
00:19:38.780also means i understand how the sausage is made so if we want to get to the truth let's get to
00:19:44.400the truth. So you're absolutely right, Andrew, that it's not going to likely deter the kind of
00:19:51.320criminal mind, the kind of teenager, the kind of new Canadian, the kind of criminalized Canadian
00:19:57.580who is not at all concerned with what the rule changes are or even being licensed.
00:20:05.200But that to me, Andrew, while you're right, I still think there's an important thing the Ford
00:20:11.040government did today and if you watch the minister of transportation sakaria who had a very very
00:20:17.520compelling seven or eight minute press conference today and i watched it and then he had the
00:20:22.160volunteer from mothers against drunk driving who lost her father and then her son in separate
00:20:29.600drunk driving crashes to me and i'll pause after this whether or not it deters a criminal a thug
00:20:37.520from doing what they do the fact that you have the ford government essentially coming out and saying
00:20:43.520you know whether it makes a difference or not we're still going to do what we think is right
00:20:48.640we treat having a driver's license as a privilege not a right so whether it makes a difference or
00:20:55.520not i think the changes they've brought forward whether they're symbolic whether they make a dent
00:21:01.600i don't think they hurt and i think they're likely to help and there's a really powerful symbolism
00:21:07.360to me, to the Ford government speaking to taxpayers and saying, you know, we actually
00:21:12.740prioritize you over the criminals you're paying for. That's actually quite a cogent defense of
00:21:20.080this. And if I then sort of realize that you've persuaded me slightly on this, I would also point
00:21:26.000out that it's something that comes relatively no cost. I mean, symbolic policy that comes at a cost
00:21:32.080is dangerous for other reasons, but you know, the amount, this really is the kind of thing that you
00:21:36.900can do i mean government can find ways to blow money on things that you shouldn't think would
00:21:40.900require but but doing something like this really doesn't cost anything really doesn't not cost
00:21:46.420anything it actually saves on the back end because whether you and i are right or wrong
00:21:51.780that it deter look it's not going to deter a thug andrew it's not but if you look at impaired
00:21:57.700which is a great line of work for criminal defense lawyers like me so if something is great for me
00:22:03.300it's bad for everybody else so well that's the same for me as a talk show host by the way the
00:22:09.680worst thing i have to think about that but if it's good for me or if it's good for an immigration
00:22:15.880lawyer it's bad for everybody else now what's the point i make about that it won't deter a thug
00:22:21.940who's going to drive unlicensed uninsured who goes the wrong way on the 401 when he's out on bail for
00:22:27.82013 things. But if you actually look at who commits a lot of impairments, and you know, there's this
00:22:33.520myth out there, Andrew, that they just got caught that one time they did it. It was that one time
00:22:39.880that they had those two extra drinks. No, no, no, no, no. If you're getting caught, it probably
00:22:45.820means you didn't get caught the other 20 times. So why does that link to my point here about the
00:22:50.780costs? A lot of people will hear about this, and if they're going to a Leaf game, they're going to
00:22:56.820a Raptor game to watch both of those teams lose, if they're going to a wedding or a bar mitzvah,
00:23:02.420just something in the back of their mind, and I can't prove this, Andrew, might make them say,
00:23:07.820look, nothing has worked before to deter them. Now my license could be taken away for a year or
00:23:14.580two or five or life, maybe one or two. Now, again, Andrew, I'm making this point very distinctly.
00:23:21.120maybe one or two people a week or a month might say, I'll take an Uber, or I won't drive. But that one or two Perth people could be another Marco Muzzo. And so for this to simply add suspension length, to add driving prohibition length, to add some administrative penalties, to add some interlock does not cost the taxpayer.
00:23:45.260And the greatest denouement I can make to this sentence is look at what your first segment talked about, about $230 a day to people who have no business being here and a lot of the time are grifting us.
00:24:00.340This is a zero dollar investment by the Ford government, and I think is a bit of a shot across the bow, Andrew, to the Trudeau government to say, you be soft on crime, we'll be harder on crime, not that the Ontario government can make criminal legislation, that's a constitutional issue, different story.
00:24:18.960But I think that's a very good place for the Ford government to be. When there's an exodus out of Toronto, there's a real frustration about the increase of crime, lack of social cohesion. You name it, people are not happy with the state of our big cities across this country. Let Trudeau be the guy to own that. Let Ford be the guy to say, I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore.
00:24:42.320well you touch on a very important part of this here which is that criminal law is the domain of
00:24:46.640the federal government and there have been a number of areas of law where the federal government has
00:24:50.960bungled it so much it's really pushed provinces to get very creative and say okay yeah what can
00:24:57.760we do in this realm i mean in the case of alberta and saskatchewan they've done an end run around
00:25:02.400the federal government on a lot of firearms policy in the case of just general criminal law
00:25:07.920for car theft here you have ontario saying okay we can't you know get tough on this uh through
00:25:13.200criminal power but this is the thing we can do they make a because a lot you know look you get
00:25:19.360a number of criminal lawyers on they're all gonna i think they're all oh there's a constitutional
00:25:23.600problem it'll be challenged maybe it'll be over written maybe one judge who really has never had
00:25:30.400anybody killed by a drunk driver will say it's the separation okay wonderful great i don't care
00:25:36.240There is a legitimate HTA purpose here, Highway Traffic Act. They can make, so long as they hire good lawyers to make their case, that there is a nexus. There is a connection here. It is not criminal. They're taking a suspension that would be three days and turning it to seven. It's already on the books.
00:25:53.460they're taking highway licensing, driver's licensing, which is an Ontario or provincial
00:25:59.180thing. Other provinces have done that. If they were to say, look, on your third one, we're giving
00:26:03.880you an extra 30 days jail. That's not what they're doing. So when I see in the last two,
00:26:09.860three days, a lot of comments that, you know, maybe this won't stand up and it's going to be
00:26:13.920challenged. Who cares? That's a Ford government problem that they would welcome. It's like Pierre
00:26:20.220Poliev, as you well know, Andrew, came out last week and said, our bail system is broken. By the
00:26:26.160way, full disclosure, it is. And his position was given a Supreme Court decision on parole and Paul
00:26:32.500Bernardo's and Veltman's, he'll use the notwithstanding clause if he has to. Do you think
00:26:37.720he cares that a bunch of commentators on the equivalent of MSNBC come out and say, oh, he can't
00:26:45.020do that it's not constitutional uh that's a battle that he can easily win and that's a battle in the
00:26:50.820courtroom of the public opinion that i think is a very very wise battle to be fought well yeah i
00:26:57.000mean and anytime you get like the cbc panel assembled to talk about oh the you know the
00:27:02.000the constitutional precedent and all of that you have you know suburban moms in london ontario in
00:27:08.440colonna bc that are looking at yet another press release from the local police department of a
00:27:13.180high risk offender that's been released into the community. And I don't think they give a hoot
00:27:17.040about the charter. The crazy part of it, Andrew, if you really want to stretch this to how crazy
00:27:21.840this is, look at the family that was killed on the 401 where that monster Singh who was out on bail
00:27:27.740on two or three bails. And again, nobody wants to have this conversation. He did not kill
00:27:34.700Caucasian, Caucasian, Caucasian John Smith, which usually makes it disappear in the paper because
00:27:40.800the victim is not chosen. He killed Indian people. He killed a baby. He killed Indian
00:27:47.780grandparents. And nobody wants to point out the fact that are we allowed now to talk about the
00:27:53.680system being broken? Is it okay now? The point that I'm making is there's so much wokeness.
00:27:59.740There's so much identity politics brought into this. I invite people to go back and watch the
00:28:06.240minister who today spoke for five to seven minutes, very powerful. His name is Minister
00:28:11.320Sicaria. I don't know who he is. I've never seen him before. I wouldn't have picked him out of a
00:28:15.600police lineup until I saw this. The words that he said about why they're doing this, about people
00:28:21.300driving, law-abiding, innocent, rule-abiding, drive lawfully people with their families,
00:28:28.240with kids in car seats, that this government will do everything they can to try and make the
00:28:34.460roadways more safe. And then, as I said, brought in the volunteer from Mothers Against Drunk Driving
00:28:40.220who has lost her father and her son to this. Why shouldn't a government with all the powers that
00:28:47.180they have lawfully, constitutionally, do everything they can to send a message to the public
00:28:53.520that there is going to be a price for a decision being made? Andrew, here's the kicker of why
00:28:58.980impaired is taken for granted. It's taken lightly. Impaired driving are usually caused by people who
00:29:09.500should know better. It's not a homeless person stealing a sandwich from Loblaws. It is a person
00:29:15.560usually with a job, usually who knows better, but has been so cavalier with their approach to how
00:29:22.700they treat society and driving. And then they end up, Andrew, only with a $1,200 fine. Explain to me
00:29:29.760why potentially killing people, Marco Muzzo just got unlucky. He went through the wrong stop sign.
00:29:36.620Explain to me why this kind of behavior in this environment where every morning we wake up to road
00:29:42.280rage and crashes and drunk driving and new stats from the OPP. Explain to me why that's only worth
00:29:48.360$1,200, but stealing a sandwich or a homeless person or a drug addict who's not doing something
00:29:53.920violent, they go to jail for two, three months. That's a calculation that will never make sense
00:29:59.240to me. Well, I'm glad you spit fire on this, Ari. We definitely need it and your industry needs it
00:30:05.400and politics needs it. So maybe you could be coaxed into becoming attorney general or something
00:30:10.100in a couple of years' time. And your mouth is somebody's ears. Fair enough. Good to talk to
00:30:14.840Ari Goldkine. Thanks for coming on. All right. Well, I want to shift from one province to
00:30:21.860another here. Do we cover Alberta? I'm an honorary Albertan. I've kind of been adopted by
00:30:27.120many of the good people of Alberta. Now, some of them call me a dirty Easterner, but
00:30:30.800most of them do it, well, I think favorably. But I have an Alberta sensibility. I love the
00:30:36.800province. I love the people there. True North has just an absolutely massive base of support in
00:30:41.260Alberta. But more importantly, Alberta is doing things that can be, and in some cases are being
00:30:48.140done by other provinces on asserting provincial jurisdiction, provincial sovereignty, you might
00:30:54.840say. We've seen Alberta lead the way in this on things such as firearms being followed by
00:31:00.860Saskatchewan. Alberta has paved a way and is doing, I think, very important things. And a lot of it
00:31:06.340has come down not to any legal changes, but a mindset, a mindset that we saw from Premier
00:31:12.400Danielle Smith that has been cemented in law with the Alberta sovereignty within the United Canada
00:31:18.240Act. And of course, in continued rhetoric, I think there's been a lot more of an effort from the
00:31:23.400Alberta government to put Alberta first than we've seen from any province save Quebec in quite some
00:31:30.240time. And when we talk about Alberta's future in Canada, I think it's important to note that this
00:31:35.340is also a story of other provinces if they want to go down this road. There was a fascinating piece
00:31:41.160in C2C Journal that explores this very topic, written by Professor Barry Cooper, not just one
00:31:48.380of the architects of that Sovereignty Act, but also a tremendously influential professor, and also
00:31:53.520someone who I mention in my biography of Pierre Polyev, because he was part of the great Calgary
00:32:00.660School of Political Science Professors at the University of Calgary, which covered in part the
00:32:05.980time in which Paul Yev was a student there. But that shameless plug out of the way. Always good
00:32:10.720to talk to Barry Cooper. Barry, thanks for coming on today. Good morning, Andrew. Good to hear you.
00:32:16.020Now, you have touched on something in this piece, which I think is a great launching off point here
00:32:21.300about why Canada isn't actually the federation we think it is. And I was wondering if you could
00:32:27.060just start there. Yeah, it actually goes back to when I was first taking Canadian politics as an
00:32:36.320undergraduate. We had to read a book by a guy named Livingston, and he argued that federations
00:32:45.100were political responses to what he called federal societies, meaning societies that had,
00:32:51.780say, different cultures, certainly in Canada, different languages, different histories,
00:32:56.040and that the legal structure of the federation was successful
00:33:01.520when it reflected those pre-legal, pre-political differences.
00:33:09.580That is certainly true with the history of the Prairie West,
00:34:46.480And it is not simply that they are loyal, subservient colonies of the old colony of Canada that is now Ontario and Quebec, what I've been calling for some time now, Laurentian Canada.
00:35:00.480That's a part of the country of Canada, for sure.
00:35:04.140But it doesn't have a monopoly on either history or on what Northrop Fry used to call the myths of what it was to be a Canadian.
00:37:26.380Is it one that's coming to just the attitudes that people have in Alberta and in other provinces and certainly in Ottawa?
00:37:32.000Or is the structure itself an issue that needs to be dealt with?
00:37:37.500What is, it was Andrew Breitbart, of all people, who said that politics is downstream from culture.
00:37:44.280And what is downstream from politics is the law, the law of the Constitution.
00:37:48.460So the first thing is that the political differences between the various regions of the country are reflecting historical and cultural differences.
00:38:03.460And eventually this gets reflected as well in the law of the Constitution.
00:38:08.460Constitution. That's what happened in 1867. That's what happened in 1982. And the Sovereignty Act
00:38:16.620is the longer range strategic purpose of the Sovereignty Act is to change the de facto
00:38:24.620law of the Constitution today. That means pushing back against what you quite rightly
00:38:31.260describe as the, let's say, centralizing tendencies of the bureaucracy and the
00:38:38.620government of Canada. I don't think it's really a partisan issue. I think all governments,
00:38:44.780liberal or conservative, have this tendency to think that they are, as Daniel Smith said,
00:38:50.460a national government. And she said it on third reading of Bill 1 that turned into the Sovereignty
00:38:57.580Act. Who do they think they are? A national government? The implication being they're not.
00:39:03.820They're part of a federation. That's what the Sovereignty Act is aimed at restoring.
00:39:11.900So one of the things that I find interesting here is that there is this profound double
00:39:16.740standard in the way certainly Laurentian Canada views provincial autonomy when you're talking
00:39:22.040about Quebec versus any other province. And, you know, politically, I'm wondering why that's been
00:39:27.740allowed. Why other provinces have stood for that? Why has there not been more of a concerted effort
00:39:31.660before now in Alberta? And even then, I think what Danielle Smith is doing is pretty muted
00:39:36.740compared to what Quebec has done on this. Why have more provinces not been uncomfortable with
00:39:43.440that double standard before now? I think it's because a lot of people have swallowed the
00:39:48.800Laurentian myth that Canada is a bilingual country. Parts of Canada are bilingual, but that
00:39:54.440certainly is not true in this part of the world at all. There are French-speaking communities in
00:40:00.980Alberta, as there are in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and in British Columbia, but that doesn't make
00:40:07.080this part of the country bilingual. Quebec can get away with a lot because most Canadians still
00:40:14.440swallow this myth that that we are bilingual when it's uh the evidence for it is non-existent
00:40:22.040yeah and i think that's a very fair point and and i mean bilingualism i mean it's ironic because you
00:40:27.080know quebec has obviously held as part of its national story this idea of of the the so-called
00:40:32.360conquest but it's amazing how the french language has become this uh tremendous uh tremendously
00:40:39.560limiting force for people in every other province where i mean you've got communities in british
00:40:43.640colombia where you know a federal public servant needs to speak french when you know french is like
00:40:48.280the fifth most spoken language of the area yeah yeah that's true i mean uh i remember um
00:40:57.240a survey that was done by um the government of canada probably about 20 years ago and uh my my
00:41:06.520My wife has a French name, so they probably got, we were probably included in the survey
00:42:00.800She simply didn't know what to make of it.
00:42:02.220So to go back to the structural aspect we were talking about earlier, you make a point which is actually, I think, heretical among some people in this country that the Constitution is not set in stone, that this is not something that can never be reopened.
00:42:17.440Now, I think the political practicalities make it very difficult to reopen the Constitution in a way. But if you could, what would you do to it?
00:42:26.680Well, you've already had success writing the Sovereignty Act. I'm letting you write the next charter.
00:42:32.220I would make, I mean, these are political decisions really rather than constitutional
00:43:25.620I think that was, let's say, a questionably decided decision.
00:43:29.880But when you have a government that is, let's say, ideologically persuaded by environmental issues, it means that they are inherently tempted to expand their jurisdiction at the cost of the provinces.
00:43:53.300and especially of this province because of our hydrocarbon resources that are said to have had
00:44:02.260these enormous environmental consequences. That needs to be disputed as well. I mean,
00:44:09.700so you get into sort of factual scientific arguments as well as legal, economic, and social
00:44:15.220ones. It's a very complex political process, but that's where we have to go.
00:44:20.900Well, in your piece in C2C Journal, which we can throw back up on the screen there, you call for
00:44:26.920some sobriety into Laurentian consciousness, which I think is an incredibly, perhaps overly
00:44:32.760ambitious expectation, but I think an important one nonetheless. Professor Barry Cooper, always
00:44:37.400good to talk to you, Barry. Thanks so much for your time today. All right. That does it for us
00:44:43.720for today. Just before we go, I want to let you know I am going on book tour. Yes, when the book
00:44:49.220comes out in just under two weeks I will be going on the road I will be in Calgary on Wednesday May
00:44:55.94029th I will be in Toronto the day after on May 30th I think we can actually put up on the screen
00:45:02.020what the dates are here and then the week after will be in Ottawa but I'm not entirely sure of
00:45:08.080the dates on that yet so we'll we'll let you know there but in Calgary it is the Ranchman's Club in
00:45:13.000Toronto it's the Albany Club and if you want tickets to that come out and get your copy of
00:45:18.260Pierre Paulyev, A Political Life, you can head on over to modernmiraclenetwork.org
00:45:24.460slash Lawton, modernmiraclenetwork.org slash Lawton. And please, if you have trouble finding
00:45:30.200it, send me an email and I'll get you the link directly. And that's andrew at andrewlawton.ca.
00:45:35.280But all of that notwithstanding, I'm excited for it. And thanks to those who have already
00:45:38.380sent me emails saying you've pre-ordered it, come out in person, and we'll have a good old time.
00:45:42.980So that's it. Back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.
00:45:47.200thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show
00:45:52.260support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news