Juno News - Trudeau still thinks he's not going anywhere

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:19.640 north hello and welcome to you all this is canada's most irreverent talk show here the

00:01:29.460 andrew lawton show on true north on this wednesday may 15th halfway through the week on a wednesday

00:01:35.000 halfway through the month on a 15th not that you were keeping track because well maybe you are

00:01:40.740 because summer is approaching we are finally finally finally leaving winter behind us although

00:01:46.400 I will say in Ontario, the winter wasn't too, too bad this year. I know that other people got it

00:01:51.020 worse, so I won't complain too, too much. But I will talk about the long winter of Canadian

00:01:56.280 politics. I don't know if you caught this yesterday. It was making some waves online.

00:02:01.480 Justin Trudeau was, so let me just take a step back here. There is a perception that I think

00:02:07.220 is in part earned and deserved that the media is in the bag for the Liberals and Justin Trudeau.

00:02:12.540 There 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.

00:02:36.600 They 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.

00:02:53.600 when the same journalists go after the conservatives, it's for being conservative.

00:02:58.380 It's for their values. It's for their core beliefs, which is why the questions that the liberals get are questions like,

00:03:04.940 hey, why did you spend that money when you said you were not going to?

00:03:09.180 Why did you kick this person out of cabinet? Why did you do this?

00:03:12.320 And the questions you get to conservatives are, why do you believe this?

00:03:16.160 Why are you not more like the liberals? That is basically the question.

00:03:19.960 So that being said, there are a lot of members of the press gallery that have been very good

00:03:25.040 in the last year in particular at calling out Justin Trudeau.

00:03:28.760 And I think there's a fair point to be made here that if people who carried water for

00:03:33.460 the Liberals for many years are not at all finding any favorable things to say about

00:03:39.520 Justin Trudeau or to Justin Trudeau, then how on earth are any other Canadians supposed

00:03:43.940 to be?

00:03:44.800 Now, that is not a comment directed at Laura Stone, who's a reporter at the Globe and

00:03:49.120 mail. I've always been quite fond of her work. This is a very feisty question that she put to

00:03:55.020 Justin Trudeau, however, yesterday, which I think is probably emblematic of a bigger and broader

00:04:00.320 frustration that many in the media are starting to have towards him too.

00:04:05.320 Prime Minister, I want to ask you about leadership. Polls have put you 20 points behind the

00:04:12.440 Conservatives, and it doesn't seem to be getting better despite your recent communications push

00:04:16.960 from your from your budget. The public appears to have an overwhelmingly

00:04:20.800 negative view of you personally and you seem to have lost control of the

00:04:25.540 conversation on some of the key issues that Canadians care about. I think the

00:04:29.340 public might be looking at you and your position right now and thinking for the

00:04:33.820 good of the Liberal Party, why is he staying on? Thank you for your concern

00:04:38.740 Laura, but as you see we're here investing in good jobs for

00:04:46.960 today and for generations to come. The world is in a challenging place,

00:04:52.480 absolutely. But that's why for eight years this government has been putting

00:04:56.960 forward investments and a frame that both fights

00:05:02.400 climate change and creates good jobs and economic

00:05:06.240 growth, that understands that if you want to

00:05:08.960 bring in strong investments and great jobs for

00:05:12.160 Canadians, you have to be making investments in things like child care,

00:05:16.240 like pharma care like health care i know there are lots of folks in ottawa

00:05:23.520 thinking about process i'm focused on results for canadians i'm focused on delivering the kinds of

00:05:30.720 things that are going to set canada and canadians up for success over the coming decades this is

00:05:37.440 about building a plan for the future of this country that's what we're focused on that's

00:05:42.640 what i will continue to be focused on because building a better future for canadians bringing

00:05:48.400 in fairness for every generation that's what i am 100 focused on right now

00:05:59.520 oh man i'm getting results i'm getting things done all you guys are focused on

00:06:04.480 process and well when you are setting yourself up for what looks like one of the biggest defeats

00:06:11.120 your party has ever seen in the history of the country, I think the process is actually reflecting

00:06:17.180 something else that's going on. And you can say, oh, we're making investments and we're getting

00:06:22.000 results, all of these buzzwords that if you turn them into a drinking game, you'd have cirrhosis

00:06:26.680 by the time the clip was done playing. And this is now what Justin Trudeau is saying. Now, look,

00:06:31.960 I am all for Justin Trudeau staying on as liberal leader. I want him to stay on,

00:06:35.980 not just through the next election, but I want him to stay on beyond. Don't let them kick you

00:06:40.700 out, Justin, stay there. It's going to be the greatest gift to the country if you are the face

00:06:46.020 and the standard bearer of the Liberal Party of Canada for years and years to come, because

00:06:49.960 I don't think you're going to get elected again. Now, crazy things have happened. This is a guy,

00:06:55.020 though, who does not seem to mind the fact that he is going to be steering the ship, just careening

00:07:00.080 it right into the iceberg, and then going down with it, but making sure he takes the ship with

00:07:05.980 himself. And this is, I think, not going down himself with the ship, making sure he takes the

00:07:10.580 ship down with himself, because there is a path where that ship could perhaps just, you know,

00:07:15.500 maybe just skirt around and the side gets scraped by the iceberg, but it sails on to Newfoundland.

00:07:20.420 But with Justin Trudeau on it, it is going full steam ahead. I'm sorry, I watched Titanic like,

00:07:26.200 you know, I don't know, 15 years ago. And now that's the only metaphor I have evidently for

00:07:29.820 stuff like this. But I could do a train rack, but a train, I guess a train doesn't really

00:07:33.920 steer all that much. But all of that notwithstanding, it's been interesting how Trudeau

00:07:39.300 has been going on this corporate welfare tour. So when he says you grow the economy from the

00:07:43.800 heart outward, I guess he means that you just have to funnel money into a whole bunch of

00:07:48.680 corporations. He was giving more money for electric vehicle batteries at that announcement

00:07:53.620 yesterday, where he made that comment about the investments and all of that. And I don't know if

00:07:59.000 you saw it, but Doug Ford, who was standing behind him, looked like he was just absolutely

00:08:03.720 loving that because generally speaking, Doug Ford is the guy that everyone hates at a press

00:08:08.360 conference. So when Doug Ford gets to like hide behind Trudeau and Trudeau's the shield, I think

00:08:13.220 Ford is actually pretty happy there. It looked like he was trying to perhaps stifle a bit of

00:08:17.660 a smirk, stifle a bit of laughter there. And then you have Justin Trudeau today announcing that

00:08:23.660 Italpasta, which is a very good pasta company in Canada, good Canadian success story, is the new

00:08:30.820 recipient of, if the price is right, $1.7 million. The government of Canada invests in pasta

00:08:39.300 manufacturer in Brampton. Now, I want to entertain this seriously and also a little bit humorously

00:08:47.800 because sometimes the jokes just write themselves. As I said on Twitter this morning, which tended

00:08:51.860 to start this whole thing, $1.7 million is a pretty penny. But I hear you booing me all the

00:08:59.500 way from like Red Deer over there. Don't boo me. I'm just being few silly here. I should have put

00:09:03.840 on my bow tie actually, but anyway, that out of the way. So the investment that the government

00:09:09.600 says here, $1.7 million, $1.7 million. Now just pull up that press release again, if you don't

00:09:17.300 mind, Sean, I want to read a line from here because you may think, okay, we're going to give

00:09:20.880 1.7 million dollars to a pasta maker great sub headline over 1.7 million dollars to help ital

00:09:29.220 pasta meet growing product demand and create 10 jobs create 10 jobs now i've been noodling around

00:09:40.280 with the numbers for a little while and i don't claim to be a mathematician but 1.7 million dollars

00:09:45.100 for 10 jobs. That strikes me as $170,000 a job. Now, I don't know how much these jobs are getting,

00:09:51.840 are paying people. I suspect not $170,000 a year. And more importantly, they say there's growing

00:09:58.660 demand. You know what other businesses do if they have growing demand? They just keep selling things

00:10:04.480 and you let your demand, your growing demand, your consumer base that's out there, you let them

00:10:09.800 finance your growth and let them finance your expansion. So what the federal government is

00:10:14.220 doing here is once again, picking winners. They've decided that they are just going to fly in and say,

00:10:19.880 okay, we'll give you the check. It's not even our money. It's the taxpayer's money and the

00:10:23.960 taxpayers love pasta. So who that cares? And then 1.7 million. Now I should say it said at least

00:10:30.140 1.7. 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

00:10:43.200 now. He says that's quite the dough nation. That's a very good one, Sean. I was thinking of noodle

00:10:48.460 types. I wasn't actually going to, I wasn't expanding out to the constituent parts of the

00:10:53.960 pasta. So nevertheless, $1.7 million per $100,000. It's not the biggest ticket item here. When the

00:11:01.360 government was spending $13 billion on electric vehicle batteries in St. Thomas, Ontario, and

00:11:07.720 then they're spending more billions in Port Colborne, at a certain point, you're seeing that

00:11:11.920 the government just believes that the only way to have an economic plan in this country is for

00:11:18.820 government to be writing out these big giant checks. And I talked about this with Aaron Woodrick

00:11:22.700 on the show a few weeks back, and we've had the conversation before. Corporate welfare just doesn't

00:11:28.100 work. There is very little in the way of incentive for these companies to truly create jobs. And if

00:11:34.720 the money is going towards companies that are doing really well, it's not necessary. If they're

00:11:40.580 going towards companies that are doing poorly or really need the money and can't finance it

00:11:45.000 themselves through the market, then maybe it's not a business that anyone, government included,

00:11:50.220 should be investing in. Like this is a company that's been around for quite a while here. And

00:11:55.620 like I've heard, I didn't know it was Brampton, but I've heard for as long as I've been alive,

00:11:59.960 I'm pretty sure it's Alpasta. It was founded in 1889. So most of my life I have had this brand

00:12:05.960 available. It's been going for 35 years now and again if there's such growing demand then why do

00:12:13.220 we need to write the checks for it? This is the problem and you look at the money that's being

00:12:17.100 spent on anything other than giving Canadians their money back. It's an unrelated story but I

00:12:24.120 think it speaks to the same sort of misguided priorities of the government. This came out

00:12:28.320 Leanne Rood who's actually a member of parliament not far from me. She had filed an order paper

00:12:33.060 question, which is a method by which MPs can actually get some real answers from government

00:12:37.960 departments in the House of Commons. And she was trying to get a sense of how much was being spent

00:12:43.000 on asylum claimants. And this is the number that she figured out that she got back from the

00:12:48.140 government, $224 in food and accommodation per day that's going to house and feed asylum seekers

00:12:57.360 who enter the country illegally. So these are people who just walk across the border 1.00

00:13:02.040 illegally into Canada. They say, the police go and say, oh, what are you doing here? They say,

00:13:08.000 well, I'm here to claim asylum. And they say, okay, well, you're under arrest, but because

00:13:12.220 you're claiming asylum, we're going to set you up nicely. We're going to put you in a hotel. 0.98

00:13:16.120 We're going to give you money. And we're going to put you on this queue that goes for months,

00:13:20.020 if not years to get a hearing. And if you are unsuccessful in your asylum claim, well,

00:13:24.800 you're already here in the country. Maybe we don't get around to deporting you.

00:13:27.820 This 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.

00:13:47.640 And people literally took that as a gold engraved invitation.

00:13:50.740 They took that as him rolling out the red carpet at Roxham Road and coming in.

00:13:54.660 And we find out that we're still paying for every one of these people, of which there are thousands, $224 a day.

00:14:02.000 And 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.

00:14:13.760 because this is just well-awaiting process because we can't, we have to put them up while

00:14:19.940 they're waiting to go through the claim process and have their claim adjudicated and whatnot.

00:14:25.700 By the end of last year, just to put some numbers on this, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship

00:14:31.620 Canada had said there were 42,387 pending claims. So that $224 times 42,000 people,

00:14:42.260 Just to do some rough math here, well, it won't be rough.

00:14:45.240 I'll do it exactly.

00:14:45.960 Let's see.

00:14:46.740 4, 2, 3, 8, 7 times 224 works out to be $9,494,688,

00:14:55.460 all because we as a country have not made an effort to secure our border.

00:15:01.040 And look, Canada should, as a free country,

00:15:03.900 welcome people that have very legitimate asylum claims.

00:15:07.100 People who have those claims are not in the United States.

00:15:10.220 the united states is not the persecuting force if they have an issue with their home country and

00:15:15.520 they got to the united states that is where they should make the claim and this goes back to the

00:15:20.320 safe third country agreement that we've been talking about on this show and at true north

00:15:24.600 for several years now but again priorities are entirely out of whack you have governments saying

00:15:30.440 that the big things they need to do are giving millions of dollars to pasta companies and then

00:15:34.560 you have people in canadian cities looking around and wondering how things got so bad we've talked

00:15:39.840 about homelessness and drugs on the show which have ballooned into these massive problems in

00:15:44.680 pretty much every community in Canada. One we haven't given as much attention to has been auto

00:15:50.060 thefts. Now I'm very fortunate in that my car has been broken into not for several years but it has

00:15:55.940 never been stolen. There are people in cities like Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal who have had

00:16:02.140 their cars stolen multiple times. This has become such an incredible way of life where I believe in

00:16:08.000 Toronto, cars are stolen every 14 minutes. There's a car is stolen every 14 minutes in Toronto. I

00:16:14.280 think that's the stat. It's certainly in and around there. So the Ontario government has

00:16:18.920 decided to get tough on this. One of the things they're going to do, if you do it more than three

00:16:22.960 times, they're going to revoke your driver's license. Yeah, that'll show you. You can't drive

00:16:30.440 because now when you steal the car, well, you won't be able to because you don't have a driver's

00:16:34.680 license. I look, I'm all for tough on crime stuff. This kind of strikes me as one of these things

00:16:40.140 where it sounds good on paper, but it's like a lot of gun control things and a policy predicated

00:16:45.840 on criminals following the law, which by definition they are not doing. But let's bring in someone

00:16:51.060 much smarter in the ways of the criminal law and the justice system than I, Ari Goldkind, host with

00:16:57.160 SiriusXM and Criminal Lawyer Extraordinaire. Ari, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on

00:17:01.900 today great to be with you and before we get to this i was just listening to the last few minutes

00:17:06.820 of you talking about 200 and something dollars per person per day you're one of the few people

00:17:11.740 in canada who has the guts to talk about it it should be at the top headline from the globe and

00:17:16.760 mail which used to talk about and write about things like this and god forbid the toronto star

00:17:21.160 never will so for whoever's listening i really applaud you for talking about it because it is

00:17:25.660 the third rail and hopefully the more people who start to talk about it now with elon musk's

00:17:30.800 permission of course I think is the only way to make a difference so I don't mean to divert from

00:17:36.660 what we're going to talk about but what you've just talked about is really important and it

00:17:40.660 drives me absolutely back fill in the blank because those are my absolutely wasted tax dollars

00:17:46.220 and I can assure you Andrew you and your listeners can figure out how much I pay a year in tax well

00:17:52.300 no I appreciate that Ari and it affects everyone and like a lot of policies it is a consequence of

00:17:58.740 bad policy elsewhere. Because people say, okay, well, we have these asylum claimants here. What 1.00

00:18:03.820 are we supposed to do about them? Well, yeah, let's go back to the first principle there. Why

00:18:07.560 are they here? Because the government has not protected the border and has basically allowed

00:18:12.240 this ridiculous loophole in the asylum process to unfold. So anyway, now you're getting me to do a

00:18:17.700 secondary rant on that. But I appreciate the kind words, Ari. You always tackle things in a very

00:18:23.000 fearless way as well. The auto theft thing in Toronto, in Vancouver, in Montreal, it's actually

00:18:29.300 quite ridiculous. And I don't buy that this is going to discourage people, the threat of having

00:18:35.660 their license taken away, which is, again, less severe than the threat of, you know, going to jail

00:18:40.560 because you stole a car in the first place. So you use the term ridiculous, which is a very good

00:18:45.760 word. I use that all the time, too, to describe everything Trudeau. And, you know, I'm not a 0.90

00:18:50.220 partisan. I've been on your show where I've complimented certain things that he's done.

00:18:54.640 To me, I'm issue by issue by issue. Ridiculous sort of minimizes what this is. It's actually 0.91

00:19:00.720 insidious. And there is a difference between ridiculous and insidious because the Trudeau 0.96

00:19:05.780 government knows exactly who's doing this. It's not being done by the Mennonite and the Amish. 0.99

00:19:11.520 They welcome the people by the tens of thousands who come here only to run and ruin havoc on our 1.00

00:19:18.180 streets this is what we're going to talk about today with the licensing uh the driving the thefts

00:19:23.460 the carjacking the home invasions and you know i take a bit of a different view andrew than you

00:19:29.060 did in your intro which you know you're right look i'm a criminal defense lawyer people will

00:19:33.400 hear me talk here and go wait a minute how does this man defend these that's my day job but that

00:19:38.780 also means i understand how the sausage is made so if we want to get to the truth let's get to

00:19:44.400 the truth. So you're absolutely right, Andrew, that it's not going to likely deter the kind of

00:19:51.320 criminal mind, the kind of teenager, the kind of new Canadian, the kind of criminalized Canadian 0.52

00:19:57.580 who is not at all concerned with what the rule changes are or even being licensed.

00:20:05.200 But that to me, Andrew, while you're right, I still think there's an important thing the Ford

00:20:11.040 government did today and if you watch the minister of transportation sakaria who had a very very

00:20:17.520 compelling seven or eight minute press conference today and i watched it and then he had the

00:20:22.160 volunteer from mothers against drunk driving who lost her father and then her son in separate

00:20:29.600 drunk driving crashes to me and i'll pause after this whether or not it deters a criminal a thug

00:20:37.520 from doing what they do the fact that you have the ford government essentially coming out and saying

00:20:43.520 you know whether it makes a difference or not we're still going to do what we think is right

00:20:48.640 we treat having a driver's license as a privilege not a right so whether it makes a difference or

00:20:55.520 not i think the changes they've brought forward whether they're symbolic whether they make a dent

00:21:01.600 i don't think they hurt and i think they're likely to help and there's a really powerful symbolism

00:21:07.360 to me, to the Ford government speaking to taxpayers and saying, you know, we actually

00:21:12.740 prioritize you over the criminals you're paying for. That's actually quite a cogent defense of

00:21:20.080 this. And if I then sort of realize that you've persuaded me slightly on this, I would also point

00:21:26.000 out that it's something that comes relatively no cost. I mean, symbolic policy that comes at a cost

00:21:32.080 is dangerous for other reasons, but you know, the amount, this really is the kind of thing that you

00:21:36.900 can do i mean government can find ways to blow money on things that you shouldn't think would

00:21:40.900 require but but doing something like this really doesn't cost anything really doesn't not cost

00:21:46.420 anything it actually saves on the back end because whether you and i are right or wrong

00:21:51.780 that it deter look it's not going to deter a thug andrew it's not but if you look at impaired 0.99

00:21:57.700 which is a great line of work for criminal defense lawyers like me so if something is great for me

00:22:03.300 it's bad for everybody else so well that's the same for me as a talk show host by the way the

00:22:09.680 worst thing i have to think about that but if it's good for me or if it's good for an immigration

00:22:15.880 lawyer it's bad for everybody else now what's the point i make about that it won't deter a thug

00:22:21.940 who's going to drive unlicensed uninsured who goes the wrong way on the 401 when he's out on bail for

00:22:27.820 13 things. But if you actually look at who commits a lot of impairments, and you know, there's this

00:22:33.520 myth out there, Andrew, that they just got caught that one time they did it. It was that one time

00:22:39.880 that they had those two extra drinks. No, no, no, no, no. If you're getting caught, it probably

00:22:45.820 means you didn't get caught the other 20 times. So why does that link to my point here about the

00:22:50.780 costs? A lot of people will hear about this, and if they're going to a Leaf game, they're going to

00:22:56.820 a Raptor game to watch both of those teams lose, if they're going to a wedding or a bar mitzvah,

00:23:02.420 just something in the back of their mind, and I can't prove this, Andrew, might make them say,

00:23:07.820 look, nothing has worked before to deter them. Now my license could be taken away for a year or

00:23:14.580 two or five or life, maybe one or two. Now, again, Andrew, I'm making this point very distinctly.

00:23:21.120 maybe 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.

00:23:45.260 And 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.

00:24:00.340 This 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.

00:24:18.960 But 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.

00:24:42.320 well you touch on a very important part of this here which is that criminal law is the domain of

00:24:46.640 the federal government and there have been a number of areas of law where the federal government has

00:24:50.960 bungled it so much it's really pushed provinces to get very creative and say okay yeah what can

00:24:57.760 we do in this realm i mean in the case of alberta and saskatchewan they've done an end run around

00:25:02.400 the federal government on a lot of firearms policy in the case of just general criminal law

00:25:07.920 for car theft here you have ontario saying okay we can't you know get tough on this uh through

00:25:13.200 criminal power but this is the thing we can do they make a because a lot you know look you get

00:25:19.360 a number of criminal lawyers on they're all gonna i think they're all oh there's a constitutional

00:25:23.600 problem it'll be challenged maybe it'll be over written maybe one judge who really has never had

00:25:30.400 anybody killed by a drunk driver will say it's the separation okay wonderful great i don't care

00:25:36.240 There 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.

00:25:53.460 they're taking highway licensing, driver's licensing, which is an Ontario or provincial

00:25:59.180 thing. Other provinces have done that. If they were to say, look, on your third one, we're giving

00:26:03.880 you an extra 30 days jail. That's not what they're doing. So when I see in the last two,

00:26:09.860 three days, a lot of comments that, you know, maybe this won't stand up and it's going to be

00:26:13.920 challenged. Who cares? That's a Ford government problem that they would welcome. It's like Pierre

00:26:20.220 Poliev, as you well know, Andrew, came out last week and said, our bail system is broken. By the

00:26:26.160 way, full disclosure, it is. And his position was given a Supreme Court decision on parole and Paul

00:26:32.500 Bernardo's and Veltman's, he'll use the notwithstanding clause if he has to. Do you think

00:26:37.720 he cares that a bunch of commentators on the equivalent of MSNBC come out and say, oh, he can't

00:26:45.020 do that it's not constitutional uh that's a battle that he can easily win and that's a battle in the

00:26:50.820 courtroom of the public opinion that i think is a very very wise battle to be fought well yeah i

00:26:57.000 mean and anytime you get like the cbc panel assembled to talk about oh the you know the

00:27:02.000 the constitutional precedent and all of that you have you know suburban moms in london ontario in 1.00

00:27:08.440 colonna bc that are looking at yet another press release from the local police department of a

00:27:13.180 high risk offender that's been released into the community. And I don't think they give a hoot

00:27:17.040 about the charter. The crazy part of it, Andrew, if you really want to stretch this to how crazy

00:27:21.840 this is, look at the family that was killed on the 401 where that monster Singh who was out on bail 1.00

00:27:27.740 on two or three bails. And again, nobody wants to have this conversation. He did not kill

00:27:34.700 Caucasian, Caucasian, Caucasian John Smith, which usually makes it disappear in the paper because

00:27:40.800 the victim is not chosen. He killed Indian people. He killed a baby. He killed Indian 1.00

00:27:47.780 grandparents. And nobody wants to point out the fact that are we allowed now to talk about the

00:27:53.680 system being broken? Is it okay now? The point that I'm making is there's so much wokeness.

00:27:59.740 There's so much identity politics brought into this. I invite people to go back and watch the

00:28:06.240 minister who today spoke for five to seven minutes, very powerful. His name is Minister

00:28:11.320 Sicaria. I don't know who he is. I've never seen him before. I wouldn't have picked him out of a 1.00

00:28:15.600 police lineup until I saw this. The words that he said about why they're doing this, about people

00:28:21.300 driving, law-abiding, innocent, rule-abiding, drive lawfully people with their families,

00:28:28.240 with kids in car seats, that this government will do everything they can to try and make the

00:28:34.460 roadways more safe. And then, as I said, brought in the volunteer from Mothers Against Drunk Driving

00:28:40.220 who has lost her father and her son to this. Why shouldn't a government with all the powers that 0.99

00:28:47.180 they have lawfully, constitutionally, do everything they can to send a message to the public

00:28:53.520 that there is going to be a price for a decision being made? Andrew, here's the kicker of why

00:28:58.980 impaired is taken for granted. It's taken lightly. Impaired driving are usually caused by people who

00:29:09.500 should know better. It's not a homeless person stealing a sandwich from Loblaws. It is a person

00:29:15.560 usually with a job, usually who knows better, but has been so cavalier with their approach to how

00:29:22.700 they treat society and driving. And then they end up, Andrew, only with a $1,200 fine. Explain to me

00:29:29.760 why potentially killing people, Marco Muzzo just got unlucky. He went through the wrong stop sign.

00:29:36.620 Explain to me why this kind of behavior in this environment where every morning we wake up to road

00:29:42.280 rage 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

00:29:53.920 violent, they go to jail for two, three months. That's a calculation that will never make sense

00:29:59.240 to me. Well, I'm glad you spit fire on this, Ari. We definitely need it and your industry needs it 1.00

00:30:05.400 and politics needs it. So maybe you could be coaxed into becoming attorney general or something

00:30:10.100 in a couple of years' time. And your mouth is somebody's ears. Fair enough. Good to talk to

00:30:14.840 Ari Goldkine. Thanks for coming on. All right. Well, I want to shift from one province to

00:30:21.860 another here. Do we cover Alberta? I'm an honorary Albertan. I've kind of been adopted by

00:30:27.120 many of the good people of Alberta. Now, some of them call me a dirty Easterner, but

00:30:30.800 most of them do it, well, I think favorably. But I have an Alberta sensibility. I love the 0.74

00:30:36.800 province. I love the people there. True North has just an absolutely massive base of support in

00:30:41.260 Alberta. But more importantly, Alberta is doing things that can be, and in some cases are being

00:30:48.140 done by other provinces on asserting provincial jurisdiction, provincial sovereignty, you might

00:30:54.840 say. We've seen Alberta lead the way in this on things such as firearms being followed by 1.00

00:31:00.860 Saskatchewan. Alberta has paved a way and is doing, I think, very important things. And a lot of it

00:31:06.340 has come down not to any legal changes, but a mindset, a mindset that we saw from Premier

00:31:12.400 Danielle Smith that has been cemented in law with the Alberta sovereignty within the United Canada

00:31:18.240 Act. And of course, in continued rhetoric, I think there's been a lot more of an effort from the

00:31:23.400 Alberta government to put Alberta first than we've seen from any province save Quebec in quite some

00:31:30.240 time. And when we talk about Alberta's future in Canada, I think it's important to note that this

00:31:35.340 is also a story of other provinces if they want to go down this road. There was a fascinating piece

00:31:41.160 in C2C Journal that explores this very topic, written by Professor Barry Cooper, not just one

00:31:48.380 of the architects of that Sovereignty Act, but also a tremendously influential professor, and also

00:31:53.520 someone who I mention in my biography of Pierre Polyev, because he was part of the great Calgary

00:32:00.660 School of Political Science Professors at the University of Calgary, which covered in part the

00:32:05.980 time in which Paul Yev was a student there. But that shameless plug out of the way. Always good

00:32:10.720 to talk to Barry Cooper. Barry, thanks for coming on today. Good morning, Andrew. Good to hear you.

00:32:16.020 Now, you have touched on something in this piece, which I think is a great launching off point here

00:32:21.300 about why Canada isn't actually the federation we think it is. And I was wondering if you could

00:32:27.060 just start there. Yeah, it actually goes back to when I was first taking Canadian politics as an

00:32:36.320 undergraduate. We had to read a book by a guy named Livingston, and he argued that federations

00:32:45.100 were political responses to what he called federal societies, meaning societies that had,

00:32:51.780 say, different cultures, certainly in Canada, different languages, different histories,

00:32:56.040 and that the legal structure of the federation was successful

00:33:01.520 when it reflected those pre-legal, pre-political differences.

00:33:09.580 That is certainly true with the history of the Prairie West,

00:33:14.600 also true of British Columbia,

00:33:16.580 that Canada's interest in this part of the world

00:33:21.300 is not the same as the history of the human beings who lived here

00:33:26.080 long before Canada had any interest in ruling us.

00:33:31.880 So bring this into the modern context,

00:33:34.840 and why does that theme loom so large in your perspective

00:33:39.200 on what's happening in the West and in Canada right now?

00:33:43.440 Well, federations change.

00:33:46.780 The Maritimes were the most wealthy part of Canada

00:33:50.380 during the initial confederation period.

00:33:54.120 By about the 1880s,

00:33:56.140 they were pretty much dependent on Canada,

00:33:58.320 on upper and lower Canada,

00:34:00.180 or Canada, Houston, Canada, West,

00:34:01.880 or just the old colony of Canada.

00:34:03.740 Well, just to jump in there,

00:34:05.580 I think it was PEI had been very hesitant to join

00:34:08.860 because they were worried that, you know,

00:34:11.360 they would lose all this stuff they had.

00:34:13.080 And I think anyone who's followed Atlantic Canada

00:34:14.820 in the last 40 years would be quite amused by that,

00:34:17.700 that Atlantic Canada was worried

00:34:19.000 it would be putting more into Confederation than it was getting out.

00:34:22.560 Yeah, I mean, that's exactly true.

00:34:24.180 I mean, Nova Scotia was, during the American Revolution,

00:34:28.780 were considered the neutral Yankees.

00:34:31.580 And what ensured that they were neutral was the Royal Navy base at Halifax.

00:34:37.260 So the history of Atlantic Canada, what we now call it now, Atlantic Canada,

00:34:43.820 is really very complex.

00:34:46.480 And 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.

00:35:00.480 That's a part of the country of Canada, for sure.

00:35:04.140 But 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.

00:35:13.960 We all have our different histories.

00:35:15.320 and the federation is supposed to reflect that yeah and and i think it's interesting too that

00:35:22.640 we have i mean obviously the benefit of a federation or a pseudo-federation i don't

00:35:28.280 want to get into a debate with you about that at this point is that you know every province has the

00:35:32.220 ability to develop its own culture and in some ways that's happened certainly an albertan is

00:35:37.120 different from an ontarian is different from a quebecer but in recent years and i i would say

00:35:42.520 it's recent. You may think it's not. It seemed like there's been less of a desire to respect

00:35:48.500 that. And we've seen more of a centralization of power. And I don't know if that's maybe just that

00:35:55.800 I've only been paying attention lately, but it does seem like it's worsening in the last

00:35:59.260 15, 20 years. Yeah, I think you're right. Here's the way, the context that I would use to put this

00:36:09.000 whole problem in. You can see the 1982 Constitution Act as a response by the entire country

00:36:18.760 to major changes after World War II in one part of the country, namely Quebec.

00:36:25.880 Quebec went from being a very pious, insular, inward-looking, and very religious society

00:36:33.880 to probably the most secular society on the entire continent. And that, I would argue,

00:36:40.360 was reflected first of all in the Constitution Act, the 1982 Constitution Act. And then when

00:36:49.080 things got, well, let's say when some Canadians thought Quebec were serious about independence,

00:36:55.960 which does not include me, I don't think they were ever serious, then they passed,

00:37:00.280 Parliament passed the Clarity Act to try and give some legal structure to how Quebec can go forward

00:37:08.060 into the sunny uplands of independence, if that's what they really wanted.

00:37:13.680 I don't think they ever did, but that's another question.

00:37:17.780 So explain to me whether we are looking at a cultural problem or a legal problem.

00:37:23.980 Is this the issue that you see?

00:37:26.380 Is it one that's coming to just the attitudes that people have in Alberta and in other provinces and certainly in Ottawa?

00:37:32.000 Or is the structure itself an issue that needs to be dealt with?

00:37:37.500 What is, it was Andrew Breitbart, of all people, who said that politics is downstream from culture.

00:37:44.280 And what is downstream from politics is the law, the law of the Constitution.

00:37:48.460 So the first thing is that the political differences between the various regions of the country are reflecting historical and cultural differences.

00:38:03.460 And eventually this gets reflected as well in the law of the Constitution.

00:38:08.460 Constitution. That's what happened in 1867. That's what happened in 1982. And the Sovereignty Act

00:38:16.620 is the longer range strategic purpose of the Sovereignty Act is to change the de facto

00:38:24.620 law of the Constitution today. That means pushing back against what you quite rightly

00:38:31.260 describe as the, let's say, centralizing tendencies of the bureaucracy and the

00:38:38.620 government of Canada. I don't think it's really a partisan issue. I think all governments,

00:38:44.780 liberal or conservative, have this tendency to think that they are, as Daniel Smith said,

00:38:50.460 a national government. And she said it on third reading of Bill 1 that turned into the Sovereignty

00:38:57.580 Act. Who do they think they are? A national government? The implication being they're not.

00:39:03.820 They're part of a federation. That's what the Sovereignty Act is aimed at restoring.

00:39:11.900 So one of the things that I find interesting here is that there is this profound double

00:39:16.740 standard in the way certainly Laurentian Canada views provincial autonomy when you're talking

00:39:22.040 about Quebec versus any other province. And, you know, politically, I'm wondering why that's been

00:39:27.740 allowed. Why other provinces have stood for that? Why has there not been more of a concerted effort

00:39:31.660 before now in Alberta? And even then, I think what Danielle Smith is doing is pretty muted

00:39:36.740 compared to what Quebec has done on this. Why have more provinces not been uncomfortable with

00:39:43.440 that double standard before now? I think it's because a lot of people have swallowed the

00:39:48.800 Laurentian myth that Canada is a bilingual country. Parts of Canada are bilingual, but that

00:39:54.440 certainly is not true in this part of the world at all. There are French-speaking communities in

00:40:00.980 Alberta, as there are in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and in British Columbia, but that doesn't make

00:40:07.080 this part of the country bilingual. Quebec can get away with a lot because most Canadians still 1.00

00:40:14.440 swallow this myth that that we are bilingual when it's uh the evidence for it is non-existent

00:40:22.040 yeah and i think that's a very fair point and and i mean bilingualism i mean it's ironic because you

00:40:27.080 know quebec has obviously held as part of its national story this idea of of the the so-called

00:40:32.360 conquest but it's amazing how the french language has become this uh tremendous uh tremendously

00:40:39.560 limiting force for people in every other province where i mean you've got communities in british

00:40:43.640 colombia where you know a federal public servant needs to speak french when you know french is like

00:40:48.280 the fifth most spoken language of the area yeah yeah that's true i mean uh i remember um

00:40:57.240 a survey that was done by um the government of canada probably about 20 years ago and uh my my

00:41:06.520 My wife has a French name, so they probably got, we were probably included in the survey

00:41:14.380 because of her name.

00:41:16.580 And the person from Ottawa said, she called me Monsieur Guichon.

00:41:23.040 And I said, no, no, I'm Monsieur Cooper.

00:41:25.700 And she said, oh, okay, do you speak French at home?

00:41:30.100 And I said, oh, yes.

00:41:31.980 And she said, well, who do you speak it with?

00:41:34.140 I said, with our daughter, she's in French immersion.

00:41:37.500 Oh, does your wife speak French?

00:41:40.720 I said, well, she can, but she doesn't really speak French with our daughter.

00:41:46.520 She said, but you do.

00:41:48.380 I said, yes.

00:41:49.620 She said, well, that's a bit odd.

00:41:51.380 You're not French. 1.00

00:41:52.760 I said, well, no, but my French is better than my wife's.

00:41:58.680 She didn't know what to make of that.

00:42:00.800 She simply didn't know what to make of it.

00:42:02.220 So 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.

00:42:17.440 Now, 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?

00:42:26.680 Well, you've already had success writing the Sovereignty Act. I'm letting you write the next charter.

00:42:32.220 I would make, I mean, these are political decisions really rather than constitutional

00:42:41.320 amendments that we're looking at.

00:42:43.500 And even Jason Kenney said, when he was premier, stay in your lane, when he spoke to the governor

00:42:50.980 of Canada.

00:42:52.280 And what he meant by that was what is determined in section 91 of the old British North America

00:42:59.040 Act, the Constitution Act 1867, the government of Canada does have some major responsibilities

00:43:06.420 and sort of the provinces.

00:43:07.980 They're set out in section 92.

00:43:11.820 Everything should reaffirm that.

00:43:13.160 Every bit of legislation should reaffirm that, especially by the government of Canada.

00:43:18.680 And when, I mean, there's some shared jurisdictions like the courts have decided that the environment

00:43:24.620 is.

00:43:25.620 I think that was, let's say, a questionably decided decision.

00:43:29.880 But 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.

00:43:53.300 and especially of this province because of our hydrocarbon resources that are said to have had

00:44:02.260 these enormous environmental consequences. That needs to be disputed as well. I mean,

00:44:09.700 so you get into sort of factual scientific arguments as well as legal, economic, and social

00:44:15.220 ones. It's a very complex political process, but that's where we have to go.

00:44:20.900 Well, in your piece in C2C Journal, which we can throw back up on the screen there, you call for

00:44:26.920 some sobriety into Laurentian consciousness, which I think is an incredibly, perhaps overly

00:44:32.760 ambitious expectation, but I think an important one nonetheless. Professor Barry Cooper, always

00:44:37.400 good to talk to you, Barry. Thanks so much for your time today. All right. That does it for us

00:44:43.720 for today. Just before we go, I want to let you know I am going on book tour. Yes, when the book

00:44:49.220 comes out in just under two weeks I will be going on the road I will be in Calgary on Wednesday May

00:44:55.940 29th I will be in Toronto the day after on May 30th I think we can actually put up on the screen

00:45:02.020 what the dates are here and then the week after will be in Ottawa but I'm not entirely sure of

00:45:08.080 the dates on that yet so we'll we'll let you know there but in Calgary it is the Ranchman's Club in

00:45:13.000 Toronto it's the Albany Club and if you want tickets to that come out and get your copy of

00:45:18.260 Pierre Paulyev, A Political Life, you can head on over to modernmiraclenetwork.org

00:45:24.460 slash Lawton, modernmiraclenetwork.org slash Lawton. And please, if you have trouble finding

00:45:30.200 it, send me an email and I'll get you the link directly. And that's andrew at andrewlawton.ca.

00:45:35.280 But all of that notwithstanding, I'm excited for it. And thanks to those who have already

00:45:38.380 sent me emails saying you've pre-ordered it, come out in person, and we'll have a good old time.

00:45:42.980 So that's it. Back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.

00:45:47.200 thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show

00:45:52.260 support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

00:46:17.200 We'll be right back.

00:46:47.200 We'll be right back.

Juno News - May 15, 2024

Trudeau still thinks he's not going anywhere

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