Juno News - Trudeau wants Big Tech to subsidize Big Media

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:04.820 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by TrueNord.

00:00:12.260 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:00:14.760 This is another edition of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show,

00:00:18.100 5.03 Eastern Time, 2.03 on the West Coast, 6.33.

00:00:22.520 If you are one of our very boisterous viewers in Newfoundland and Labrador,

00:00:27.740 I welcome you nonetheless.

00:00:29.040 You know who you are.

00:00:30.000 Thank you so much for tuning into Canada's most irreverent talk show,

00:00:34.420 The Andrew Lawton Show on True North.

00:00:36.320 Striving for irreverence, but never irrelevance.

00:00:38.760 I think that's a very key distinction, and sometimes autocorrect tries to make a different point.

00:00:43.720 Now, this was just about a very different show of me just yelling and screaming

00:00:48.960 and ignoring the show entirely, because like 35 milliseconds before the show began,

00:00:53.760 And I almost knocked over my coffee, which I had the very poor foresight to put in a spot that I don't usually put my coffee.

00:01:01.420 So I'm going to very gently, this is live for you here right now.

00:01:05.260 I'm going to move my coffee over there where I normally put it.

00:01:07.920 But if you do hear me screaming at some point, it's because I made some other faux pas and spilled it all over myself.

00:01:13.700 And then you get a comedy version of the show, because what's better than human suffering?

00:01:18.320 Apparently, if you ask lawmakers in the last few years, nothing.

00:01:22.620 Let's talk about a few different things on the show today.

00:01:25.900 I want to get to the latest update in, I don't like gating things,

00:01:30.820 but China gate is just colloquially what I'll call the rapidly unfolding and expanding China scandal

00:01:37.660 in which Justin Trudeau finds himself.

00:01:40.120 I also want to spend a bit of time on this program talking about the big tech regulations

00:01:44.580 that are coming down the pipeline now.

00:01:47.640 And there's been, let me be clear, a lot of attention on C11.

00:01:51.620 Not as much on C18.

00:01:53.720 Google is fighting back.

00:01:55.640 And whatever you think of big tech companies, and I think there are a lot of issues to take

00:01:58.960 with them, I think they're the ones that we should be siding with in this latest standoff.

00:02:04.000 So that's going to be something I'll talk about in a couple of moments time here.

00:02:07.680 Actually, let's just get to it now, because the one thing that is really at the essence

00:02:12.480 of C18 is that the liberal government is trying to say that tech companies should subsidize

00:02:18.860 media companies.

00:02:20.040 They're trying to say that when Google shows you search results and they have a little top stories bar that shows you all of the things that, oh, I don't know, the National Post has done or CBT News has done, that that is tantamount to theft of journalist content and that they need to pay their fair share for using or stealing that content.

00:02:42.180 And when you say it out loud, it sounds rather absurd, and I'm not even trying to spin it in an uncharitable light here, because that's essentially what the government is claiming, that tech companies are stealing content from journalists.

00:02:57.080 The same goes to Facebook and Twitter.

00:02:59.220 So when you log on to Facebook and you see,

00:03:02.140 oh, what do you know, True North has written this story

00:03:04.600 and that looks interesting, I'm going to click on that.

00:03:07.720 They have this very distorted view

00:03:09.600 that that was not an exchange that True North may have loved,

00:03:13.320 that we may have posted that link

00:03:14.840 because we wanted you to see it

00:03:16.120 and wanted people to click on it,

00:03:17.560 but rather that Facebook is profiting

00:03:19.940 off of the work of journalists.

00:03:22.220 And every time this claim has come up,

00:03:25.120 It's been clear, and social media companies have showed their numbers on this, that media consumption, like news consumption, is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of their overall usage and revenue.

00:03:38.560 I mean, people in the media industry tend to have this overly inflated sense of self-worth when they talk about how important they are and the work that they do on a regular basis.

00:03:48.360 In reality, most people would be just as happy watching family feud highlights and cat memes when they log onto social media and not perhaps learning about federal politics or the China scandal or whatever Joe Biden said or anything like that.

00:04:03.420 Most people do not actually live and breathe this stuff like I do and like many of you do and like we all may wish the general population did.

00:04:10.920 So the thing that I find interesting here is that there is just a fundamental overestimation of the value of news content to social media companies and to tech companies here, and that's really what's undergirding Bill C-10, which I think is a terribly, terribly bad bill.

00:04:32.480 and the thing that is particularly noteworthy here is that it's been tried elsewhere notably

00:04:37.660 in australia and facebook then was the one that really took this tough position and facebook said

00:04:44.020 we are not going to let you share news links on our platform and eventually the government backed

00:04:50.640 off a little bit of the bill and facebook backed off of its protest for whatever reason and i've

00:04:56.080 never actually gotten to the bottom of this uh when this happened my website which doesn't have

00:05:02.280 much going on because I don't use I don't update it regularly it's not like my sub stack but my

00:05:06.240 website andrewlaughton.ca.ca as in like a Canadian domain name was somehow viewed as Australian by

00:05:14.260 Facebook and I don't know how I don't know why but you I could not share links to my own website

00:05:20.100 while this was going on and it was particularly unfortunate because I had been like a big

00:05:25.280 supporter of what Facebook had done and I said yeah you know power to Facebook good for this

00:05:29.420 protest. And then I'm like, okay, I'm with you guys, but can you let me like, you know, post

00:05:32.580 stuff on my Facebook again? And eventually I was able to. So be careful what you wish for is the

00:05:38.060 line here. Brian Passifiume in the National Post had a column where he was actually not as a

00:05:43.340 journalist, but as a Google user, one of the ones that's in this now test group that Google is doing

00:05:49.400 in Canada of blocking access to news content. So he can now actually not even search for his own

00:05:56.900 content his own written work using google unless he logs out of his account or opens up an incognito

00:06:04.320 browser or something like that i didn't get the specifics but he basically is now blocked from

00:06:09.140 doing his job as a journalist because google is making its play against the government now now

00:06:14.500 it's easy to look at google and say well you know these big tech companies they censor people they

00:06:20.000 manipulate what we see through the algorithms and all of that and fair fair enough i don't expect

00:06:25.660 anyone to whitewash big tech. But right now we're talking about big tech versus big government. And

00:06:31.600 even if I don't like either of them in different contexts, when the two are together, I'm going to

00:06:37.440 side with big tech. I'm going to side at the very least against big government. And really what's

00:06:44.080 happening here is the government is trying to say that big tech needs to subsidize big media.

00:06:48.920 and why this is at all within the purview of the government or big tech to subsidize is another

00:06:56.740 discussion entirely but we'll certainly touch on themes of it here and I want to welcome to the

00:07:02.660 show and it's actually been I should say mea culpa far too long that I have not had this man on and

00:07:09.080 there's no reason for it it's just because C11 has come and gone C10 has come and gone and I've

00:07:14.340 wanted to have Peter Menzies on for quite some time and we figured out that we should not wait

00:07:18.920 any further. He joins us now, the former vice chair of the CRTC or a former vice chair and also

00:07:24.600 a researcher fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Peter, good to talk to you, sir.

00:07:29.740 Thanks for coming on today. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for choosing me.

00:07:35.540 Well, no, it's more magical than that. Your work obviously rises to the top on this because

00:07:41.800 relatively few people are speaking out about this at least at the outset it's gotten a little bit

00:07:47.760 more uh now in in the terms of people speaking up but let's just start with the fundamental

00:07:53.600 premise here you know my summation of this is that government is essentially looking at tech

00:07:58.360 companies and saying you now have to subsidize media companies but there's a weird sort of

00:08:04.220 double speak going on here because when government puts forward a bill like c18 they say you're

00:08:10.440 stealing content that's effectively the claim and then when google says okay we're gonna you know

00:08:15.700 no longer show that content it's all you're blocking content well well which is it are they

00:08:20.240 are they stealing content that's not theirs to use or are they blocking content that is supposed to

00:08:24.460 be on the platform nobody is stealing anything from anybody the traditional media have lost

00:08:31.480 something they've lost a lot they've lost advertising and they've lost it because of a

00:08:36.200 technological revolution pretty much on the same scale as the invention of the printing press

00:08:41.480 so um the an industry that survived for 200 years or so newspapers uh can no longer produce

00:08:49.860 profitably with their uh in the current environment right the what happened is tech came the internet

00:08:57.320 came along all kinds of things happened kijiji and craigslist stole all the uh all the classified

00:09:03.560 advertising then facebook launched and other other people launched and that's where people

00:09:09.040 went to have fun and advertisers will go where people's eyeballs are and that's where people's

00:09:13.860 eyeballs are so uh traditional media lost a lot of advertising revenue and basically they they

00:09:20.860 approached the government and said we lost our avid our our advertising revenue somebody must

00:09:26.320 have stolen it from us right and the government said who has your advertising revenue and they

00:09:32.240 said big tech and they said we'll go and get it back for you right which is you know i mean this

00:09:39.000 analogy is used a lot but it's but it's it's the one that works for people it's it's like telling

00:09:44.640 automobile companies that they have to subsidize horse and carriages right something new has come

00:09:51.540 along that is better now that said government may wish to um declare journalism to be a public good

00:09:59.820 of some kind and try to make some sort of arrangement and that sort of stuff and tech

00:10:04.280 companies you know there are issues with them they are big they dominate things and they may

00:10:10.120 have too much market power for media to be able to get a fair deal that's worth looking at but in

00:10:16.200 terms of anybody stealing something nobody's stolen something in terms of google google's

00:10:21.820 experiments with what are we going to do if this bill passes and basically what happened is if

00:10:28.580 I typed Andrew Lawton into the search tool, a whole bunch of Andrew Lawtons would come up,

00:10:36.540 but True North wouldn't, right? So no news links associated with Andrew Lawton would show up.

00:10:45.320 Your articles wouldn't show up and that sort of stuff. Your LinkedIn page might, if you have one,

00:10:51.200 and that sort of stuff. But here's the solution for Brian Passifield. When I read his piece,

00:10:56.520 i thought use another search engine yeah right yeah and and he he sort of gets to that point

00:11:02.600 near the end of it you know because he wasn't actually i was hoping he would come out with

00:11:05.940 this really kind of big political point but he made more of a human point in his thing which is

00:11:10.020 that we've become far too reliant on this and and you know i'm a chrome user generally but

00:11:14.600 we all forget that there are other browsers out there we forget there are other search engines

00:11:19.120 out there even if google is now we do the verb that we use as a stand-in for to search in a search

00:11:24.260 engine yeah and and it's a good reminder um for that because google may have to go down that road

00:11:29.800 right and a lot of it has to do with the structure of bill c18 google did roughly the same sort of

00:11:39.240 thing it's not perfectly analogous but it was a copyright legislation matter in spain

00:11:46.020 and they did not link to news for eight years in spain that issue just got resolved last summer

00:11:52.900 after Spain made some adjustments to their,

00:11:56.660 I believe it's their copyright laws.

00:11:59.260 Chechya, which most of us know as the Czech Republic,

00:12:03.440 recently lost the benefit of Google search as of December

00:12:07.800 with a similar sort of dispute.

00:12:10.340 So, you know, if people are worried they're bluffing,

00:12:13.220 maybe they are, maybe they aren't,

00:12:14.400 but if the bill goes through as it is,

00:12:19.580 they will probably have to make a decision,

00:12:21.360 And some of that decision will be, well, if we get out of the news search business in Canada, how much business are we actually losing?

00:12:28.480 How many users are we going to lose to Bing or other search engines?

00:12:32.800 You know, that might not be a bad thing when you think about it.

00:12:35.020 I mean, Google's got about close to 90% of the market.

00:12:39.180 If they stop doing something that caused somebody else to get a little bit more of the market, that might be a good thing.

00:12:46.720 Apple's working on a search tool, so it's not the end of the world.

00:12:50.320 when when you bring up google i it's it's odd that i instinctively put it in a somewhat different

00:12:56.680 category and not wrongfully i mean it's a private corporation they offer products people use those

00:13:01.640 products and uh so on and i use many of them myself you know facebook and twitter though

00:13:06.520 are more we we define facebook and twitter more as being user generated i post you read you post

00:13:14.260 I read. And so on Google, we almost view as something that is a public good. And, you know, for example, a Gmail address, which most people have or many people have or some variation of it.

00:13:25.520 You don't own that. Someone could theoretically at any time say you don't get to have your email address anymore and shut it off and you would have very little recourse.

00:13:33.920 But it is still at the end of the day, a private company and not a public good.

00:13:37.360 And it's right now, despite how powerful and wealthy it is, being forced to do something that the government wants to do, which is subsidize Canadian news media.

00:13:47.960 Yeah, well, I mean, it is a public, it's a public, it's a private company, publicly traded, right?

00:13:53.640 It has shareholders.

00:13:55.480 It will behave, they are rational people running and they will behave rationally and in the best interest of their shareholders.

00:14:03.380 This bill, the way it's written with, there's no cap on it, right?

00:14:07.220 there's no there's no height on it if somebody could probably go to google and said hey this

00:14:11.700 will cost you 100 million bucks they might go hmm do a little math okay right there's no more right

00:14:19.140 100 million bucks and we're done right they might do that but the problem with bill c18 is there's

00:14:24.260 no limit right and some of the some of the people expecting to get cash um you know some of the

00:14:30.740 broadcasters particularly have very very high expectations and a lot of the news companies

00:14:37.220 have a very flattering view of their popularity online it's difficult for them to understand that

00:14:46.740 actually nobody really makes very much money if any money on them right i bet you you could probably

00:14:53.860 get one of those companies facebook or google to give 100 of the money they make either from the

00:15:03.460 data that they gather from the from from the postings or from any advertising that they

00:15:11.140 generate themselves because all they do is send people to the company's web page right

00:15:17.460 if if the national post posts something on facebook people click on that link and they

00:15:22.500 go to they go to the national post page right so but they could probably give them 100 of the money

00:15:27.700 there and if the government is really that the government can do a couple of things it can

00:15:33.060 come up with some sort of reasonable accommodation for this right if nobody that i've read in in the

00:15:40.500 big tech side is saying no way are we going to do something they seem to recognize that they've got

00:15:45.940 some reputation management to do here they they they didn't want to kill journalism it's kind of

00:15:52.740 like oops you know like sorry guys um we didn't mean to kill you um and we think you know we don't

00:16:00.100 want to wear that so they're they're trying to do something to help but you know if the government

00:16:05.700 can behave reasonably with c18 or just not even do a c18 and come up with something else come up

00:16:12.180 with what i've suggested the country needs is really a national policy for news organizations

00:16:21.220 there's nothing going on right now that talks like that the bill c18 will what it'll end up doing

00:16:29.860 according to the senate leader when he introduced bill c18 in the senate he said this will cover

00:16:35.620 35 percent of newsroom costs in canada okay so great what do we get out of that we get a news

00:16:42.420 industry that owes that has is 35 of its newsroom costs dependent on offshore monster tech companies

00:16:54.340 right and it has that and only a handful of them at that that's right and it has that thanks to

00:17:02.340 the government. What are the two biggest threats that people would see in their lives to their

00:17:09.300 independence and freedom? Big tech and big government, right? And all of a sudden, you've

00:17:14.600 got your media dependent on both. So you need to come up with some kind of structure, and government

00:17:20.940 policy can be involved in this, that makes sure you have an independent media thriving and adapting

00:17:27.400 to this technological revolution we're going through. It's going to be, and you're going to

00:17:31.720 have to accept that some are going to die right some of the old standards like many have the

00:17:38.600 you know the moose job moose job newspaper died five years ago but you can you know if you if you

00:17:45.960 look search for news and moose job you can find four websites delivering news the news hasn't

00:17:51.140 gone away the platform that delivered it went away because it wasn't a good fit for the 21st century

00:17:58.420 People, I find, and this gets into a bit of a different discussion,

00:18:01.340 but people are very selective about what things they choose to sentimentalize.

00:18:06.620 I mean, even if you look at the early days of the Internet,

00:18:08.580 there are a lot of companies that were part of that first wave,

00:18:11.660 Trailblazers, your MySpaces, your Napsters, that are now nothing.

00:18:15.960 And, you know, obviously that's more on a micro level,

00:18:18.180 but it's not the responsibility of the successful companies to say,

00:18:22.140 well, you know what, we built off of them, so we have to keep them going.

00:18:25.520 And no one seems to want to talk about or have a solution for how do we make a new business model that is not dependent on all of these externalities.

00:18:37.780 And I'm not seeing it.

00:18:38.880 I'm not saying that individual outlets have not done it.

00:18:41.580 But as a sort of that macro level, the comments that we see from the National News Media Council, they're not talking about innovation in the least.

00:18:49.980 No, and I mean, if you read Facebook's response after 12 months of them paying out in Australia,

00:18:58.080 they're very unhappy.

00:18:59.440 They feel like innovation has ground to a halt.

00:19:01.580 And that's one of the problems with this, too, is you're not moving into the future.

00:19:07.120 500 news organizations have died in Canada over the last 10 to 15 years, right?

00:19:13.600 200, more than 200 have started up, right?

00:19:17.600 so your focus you know it's sad don't get me wrong i was a newspaper man for 30 years right

00:19:23.440 it's sad when these old things die they were you know they were wonderful in the day but you know

00:19:31.840 all things must pass right so your focus should be on the next thing not the last thing and if you

00:19:37.520 start passing legislation to prop up failed business models that never will succeed in in

00:19:44.960 in a new tech environment you're doing it um you're causing harm to the new guys who are trying

00:19:52.480 to start off to the innovators and and that's what we need is ingenuity and innovation to build new

00:19:58.720 ways of doing things and platforms uh to create news because there's actually there's not a lot

00:20:04.400 of shortage of news you know there's you know there's because of the internet we can access

00:20:10.480 news from all over the place there's a shortage of local news the old weekly newspaper that we

00:20:15.120 used to have but you know a lot of those places too they have radio stations that now have websites

00:20:21.280 where you can go you know when you want to go and find out your local news and that sort of stuff

00:20:26.400 and maybe entrepreneurs will start up i mean i know of some small towns where some of them are

00:20:32.960 pretty cheesy but there's still a way to get the news out you know for for for things around but

00:20:37.920 But that's what the government should be focused on.

00:20:40.060 As for if it's worried about search engines,

00:20:42.480 if the government's that concerned

00:20:43.860 and it sees it as a public good,

00:20:45.320 why doesn't the government start one?

00:20:47.280 Oh, gosh.

00:20:48.580 You know, everything else they do

00:20:50.420 is like the reverse Midas touch.

00:20:51.980 So I don't know if we'd want to use the search.gc.ca,

00:20:55.800 but stranger things have happened.

00:20:57.540 Peter Menzies, always a pleasure to read your commentary.

00:21:00.260 Thanks for coming on today.

00:21:01.700 Thanks very much, Andrew.

00:21:02.660 You have a great time.

00:21:03.580 All right, yourself as well, Peter Menzies.

00:21:05.020 You can catch up with him at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and he tends to pop up in many other venues as well.

00:21:11.780 You know, I'm going to talk about this a little bit more.

00:21:14.180 I mean, just to put a bow on it and not a nice looking bow by any stretch.

00:21:18.940 There's a wholesale assault on Internet freedom right now that this government is responsible for.

00:21:25.120 And you can combine Bill C-18 with Bill C-11 with the former Bill C-36, which will be at some point coming back.

00:21:33.040 And I think there's a private member's bill from, believe it or not, I think it's from Kevin Vuong that tries to do what C36 was going to do.

00:21:40.080 And that's the one that talks about online hate speech and forcing social media companies to take things down and all of that.

00:21:46.740 And all of these things the government is saying are about modernizing.

00:21:50.940 But it's very peculiar, perhaps not actually, but it's very noteworthy that government views modernization as centralization.

00:22:01.000 The government views increasing its own control, its own authority, expanding its authority is part and parcel of modernizing.

00:22:08.920 And I don't think modernization needs to be that.

00:22:11.800 And I don't think it should be that.

00:22:13.340 Certainly when we're talking about the Internet, which was created to be a decentralized, more grassroots.

00:22:19.600 And if I can say it, populist access to information that did not have to be streamlined.

00:22:24.820 To use Pierre Paulyev's old line about the gatekeepers.

00:22:27.980 why are we gatekeeping the internet even more than it already is so we'll talk about that more

00:22:33.760 as it comes but I'm decreasingly off I'm never really optimistic about this but I'm an increasingly

00:22:38.720 pessimist on this I mentioned Pierre Polyev just there I said I was going to get into this

00:22:45.680 yesterday and then I sort of ran out of time so didn't get into it here and I don't have a lot

00:22:50.660 to say because it's now almost a week old but what happened last week was Christine Anderson

00:22:56.980 the German member of the European Parliament, was doing a tour of Canada. By all accounts,

00:23:01.780 she was selling out at every venue she went to in Alberta and Ontario, even in Quebec.

00:23:06.760 And the meetings she had at some point along the tour involved three conservative members

00:23:13.440 of Parliament, Colin Carey, Leslyn Lewis, and Dean Allison. I've spoken to all three of them.

00:23:18.860 I don't know Colin Carey as well, but I've had Leslyn Lewis on this show a number of times.

00:23:22.980 I've followed and tweeted back and forth with Dean Allison, and all three of them have been

00:23:29.120 fairly outspoken on COVID mandates, certainly less than Lewis. So Christine Anderson, who rose

00:23:35.340 to fame for her rejection of Justin Trudeau's heavy-handed crackdown on the truckers, is

00:23:42.860 obviously going to want to sit down with members of parliament, fellow legislators that have

00:23:47.460 a similar, if not identical, outlook as she does on this issue. Now, this is deliberately a

00:23:56.080 charitable interpretation of events. And I'm going to talk about it this way, and then I'm going to

00:24:00.780 flip to the less charitable side, and you can decide where you land on this. But

00:24:04.420 I don't think, and I could be wrong, that Christine Anderson knew every single view

00:24:11.760 that Lesley Lewis held when they sat down for that lunch.

00:24:15.280 I don't think that Christine Anderson knew every single view

00:24:18.860 that Dean Allison had, that Colin Carey had.

00:24:22.920 I think there was an opportunity for these two people

00:24:25.440 that knew they were on the same side on COVID mandates to sit down.

00:24:29.480 Now, when I interviewed Christine Anderson on this show a few weeks ago, 0.98

00:24:32.640 I did not know huge amounts of information about her. 0.81

00:24:35.400 I knew those viral clips that were shared online,

00:24:39.180 such as her rebuking Justin Trudeau in Brussels.

00:24:42.300 I had done my own research after we booked the interview

00:24:45.080 and saw some of these claims that the AFD, her party in Germany,

00:24:49.680 was called an extremist group by the German government.

00:24:52.560 I looked into it, and I saw in my preliminary research

00:24:56.180 no evidence that she was racist, Islamophobic, or anti-Semitic.

00:25:01.700 Now, I have still seen no evidence that Christine Anderson

00:25:06.180 is racist, Islamophobic, or anti-Semitic.

00:25:10.500 And the claim by Pierre Polyev in that statement that was first reported by Brian Lilly

00:25:15.340 that she was and that she never should have come to Canada is capitulating to the left.

00:25:21.120 It's absolutely capitulating to the left.

00:25:23.200 It feeds into the attacks that people are making about the Conservatives

00:25:27.240 and was unaccompanied by anything resembling evidence.

00:25:31.180 Now, before I go any further, there are some people that are saying,

00:25:34.640 oh, but that wasn't Pierre Polyev, it was a staffer. Okay, let's pause here. This is the way

00:25:40.120 political communications works. You rarely text, in fact, you never just text the leader on their

00:25:46.040 personal phone. You go through spokespeople who will give statements, which are oftentimes for

00:25:51.460 attribution to themselves, and oftentimes are for attribution to the politician for which that

00:25:57.900 staffer works. Now, in this particular case, I don't know if Pierre Polyev wrote the statement

00:26:03.500 himself. I don't know if someone else wrote it and he saw it and approved it, but by Brian Lilly's

00:26:08.600 reporting and other outlets reporting, it was for attribution to Pierre Paulyev. So if it wasn't

00:26:13.700 him who said it, someone should be fired in his office and he himself should be coming out and

00:26:19.380 clarifying. But I don't think that's the case. His deputy leader, Melissa Lansman, has tweeted out

00:26:24.700 a screenshot of the statement herself. And again, I am not going to endorse 100% of what Christine

00:26:31.840 Anderson has said and done, because I don't know 100% of what she's said and done. But the idea

00:26:36.800 that we think accepting these premises, which are often putting people in the least charitable light

00:26:43.900 in bad faith, will ever help conservatives. If we think that's going to happen, you are so sorely

00:26:50.540 mistaken. How many people since this denunciation of Christine Anderson have said, yeah, you know

00:26:55.880 what? I'm really glad the conservatives took it seriously. No, you look on Twitter and everyone's

00:27:00.740 still saying the conservatives meet with Nazis. The conservatives meet with racists. They say

00:27:04.960 Leslie Lewis, the black woman member of parliament, is a racist. And Justin Trudeau, the guy that's

00:27:10.880 done blackface so many times, he doesn't know how many times he's done it, is not. He has the moral

00:27:16.140 high ground. Conservatives are the dirty, racist, neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic troglodytes. It's almost 1.00

00:27:22.100 as though the critics to the right do not care about facts. It's almost as though they do not

00:27:28.960 care about reality because they do not live in reality. Conservatives are never going to get a

00:27:37.120 pass. Conservatives are never going to have their honest, good faith explanation of things accepted

00:27:43.520 because you cannot prove to someone that you are not a racist, Nazi, homophobe, Islamophobe 0.94

00:27:50.860 when they believe you are. And they just look for pieces of evidence and data points they can use

00:27:58.200 to make that point. All of the people accusing Lesley Lewis and Dean Allison and the conservatives

00:28:03.000 of being Nazis right now do not believe that they're Nazis because they saw that picture of

00:28:09.020 Christine Anderson with the three members of parliament. No, they believe it because they

00:28:13.580 hate conservatives. They hate people on the right. And the three of them could have met with the

00:28:20.660 chief rabbi of Israel, and they're still going to be called anti-Semites. They could have met

00:28:24.740 with the entire African Union and said, we love everything you guys are doing. We're going to

00:28:29.560 give you money. We think cultural diversity is great. They're still going to be called racist.

00:28:34.000 The criticisms are not in good faith. And people will say, well, are you saying that conservatives

00:28:40.400 are trapped? Absolutely, I am. Because unless you start confronting the premises, you're always

00:28:48.080 going to be beholden to the conclusions. The premises are that Christine Anderson is a racist 0.96

00:28:54.860 Nazi. Therefore, by meeting with her, yes, it's absolutely terrible that the conservatives did 0.94

00:29:00.080 that. So you have to challenge the premise. You either say, well, hang on, we didn't meet with

00:29:03.780 her. Well, that's not true. They did. You say, hang on, she's not a Nazi, which I don't believe

00:29:08.280 there's any evidence saying she is a Nazi. And you can also say, hold on, we should be meeting

00:29:13.520 with all kinds of people? Why are you telling us that we shouldn't meet with people that have

00:29:18.240 raised issues? And isn't it coincidental that a woman who embarrassed Justin Trudeau on the world 0.71

00:29:22.980 stage is the one who's getting denounced and condemned by Justin Trudeau for having the

00:29:29.880 audacity, the temerity to sit down with a few conservative members of parliament?

00:29:35.740 This is a distraction from issues that matter a great deal right now. And like I said, I agree

00:29:42.880 with a lot of what Pierre Polyev is doing.

00:29:44.860 I think this was a tremendous

00:29:46.440 miscalculation on his part

00:29:47.920 and it has not helped him one bit.

00:29:51.060 No one who was angry about the meeting

00:29:53.280 is less angry now

00:29:54.880 and all he's done is alienated the people

00:29:58.040 that thought Christine Anderson

00:29:59.200 might have had something worth listening to

00:30:01.600 and which category you're in

00:30:02.880 you can decide for yourselves.

00:30:04.820 I got a little ranty there

00:30:05.940 and I don't apologize for it

00:30:07.600 because every now and then

00:30:08.380 you need to get a little bit ranty

00:30:09.840 and I hope you have been okay

00:30:11.660 to indulge me on that I did want to talk just a little bit in the remaining few minutes of the

00:30:17.100 program about what's happening in the China file today this is the scandal that keeps on unfolding

00:30:23.600 I don't want to say keeps on giving because uh well basically the Chinese Politburo is the gift

00:30:27.980 that keeps on giving to the liberals uh this one was great that they wanted to build a statue to

00:30:33.360 Mao in Montreal and that I think was even a little too on the nose for Justin Trudeau he said okay

00:30:38.580 hang on i'm okay with uh you know you guys mucking around in the elections but don't don't make us

00:30:43.720 look at the statue of mao in montreal i mean montreal wouldn't have liked that at all because

00:30:47.920 it would have uh well violated probably bill 21 or something but anyway so the thing that's

00:30:54.060 fascinating here is the national security advisor to justin trudeau jody thomas who has become a bit

00:30:59.860 of a mainstay in canadian politics with her comments on the freedom convoy her comments and

00:31:04.800 sorts of other things lately but jody thomas was testifying before parliament and she acknowledged

00:31:09.920 that cesus gave the trudeau government and gave trudeau multiple briefings on election interference

00:31:19.120 how many times was the prime minister briefed about beijing's interference in the 2019 and 2021

00:31:27.360 elections the prime minister would have been briefed on foreign interference in the elections

00:31:32.240 multiple times between 2019 and 2021 and 2022. We will endeavor to get you those dates.

00:31:41.920 So you will undertake to provide the dates and the agencies and those involved in briefing

00:31:49.760 the Prime Minister? We will endeavor to get the dates for you. Every instance that he was briefed

00:31:55.280 in respect of Beijing's election. I will do my best but again I was not in this job at the time.

00:32:02.240 Okay. So that's fairly specific. She's saying, I'm going to need to get the dates to you and

00:32:08.660 we'll send those over by fax at the earliest convenience, maybe 2037. But yeah, multiple

00:32:15.360 briefings, multiple briefings Justin Trudeau got on election interference. Now, this struck me as

00:32:20.420 a little odd at first because I recall Justin Trudeau denying he was given any such briefings.

00:32:25.640 There was this comment in the House of Commons not that long ago.

00:32:32.240 The question is, has he been briefed since November 7th about whether or not a foreign power funnelled money to Canadian federal candidates, yes or no?

00:32:43.540 The Right Honourable Prime Minister.

00:32:46.580 Mr. Speaker, as I have said a number of times in this House, to this moment, I have not, in all the briefings I have received,

00:32:55.840 There has never been information around candidates receiving money from China in the 2019 election or in the 2021 elections.

00:33:10.020 We have independent public servants who are engaged to oversee the integrity of the elections.

00:33:16.340 They confirm the elections did complete themselves with full integrity.

00:33:22.480 well that's a little bit clever also a very specific answer he said something very similar

00:33:30.480 at this press conference as well which i believe was in november if memory serves

00:33:35.800 our government has always taken very seriously the responsibility of protecting canadians of

00:33:45.900 working with our security agencies to do everything we can to keep canadians and our institutions

00:33:51.180 safe against foreign interference.

00:33:54.200 I have asked my officials to examine these media reports

00:33:59.300 and give all the possible answers, everything they can,

00:34:06.100 to the parliamentary committee that's looking into this.

00:34:10.560 But let me be clear.

00:34:12.880 I do not have any information, nor have I been briefed,

00:34:17.100 on any federal candidates receiving any money from China.

00:34:26.400 Again, an oddly specific answer.

00:34:29.680 I have never been briefed on candidates receiving money from China.

00:34:34.900 He's not saying I've never been briefed on interference,

00:34:37.500 although in context of the questions,

00:34:40.040 that was how people took his answers at the time.

00:34:43.480 He said, no, no, no, no one's ever briefing on that one specific thing.

00:34:47.100 So it would strike me that there's a little bit of wordplay there and that odd that CSIS and all of its many briefings, its multiple briefings.

00:34:54.500 I didn't mention that, yeah, there were some financial resources going towards candidates here.

00:34:58.700 I wonder if he was briefed on the donation to the Trudeau Foundation.

00:35:02.460 So far, he has not answered that.

00:35:04.560 So I asked in the title of the show yesterday if this would be the end of Trudeau.

00:35:08.780 And I caution that we have had political career-ending scandals from this government, like the Aga Khan Island vacation, like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, like the WE Charity scandal.

00:35:21.140 And all of them have proven to have reduced Trudeau's exterior, not to the shine of blackface, but to a hard nonstick Teflon coating.

00:35:31.300 So I don't believe we should say at face value that this would be any different.

00:35:35.680 In fact, the NDP would probably love to have a tight relationship with China, although even they are coming out right now and saying we need a public inquiry, maybe because they know a public inquiry is going to take years, it's going to release an ambiguous report, and they will still be able to keep the supply and confidence agreement.

00:35:52.180 You're not allowed to call it a coalition government.

00:35:54.600 The supply and confidence agreement going until the next election would be anyway.

00:35:58.020 So I wouldn't even hold out too much optimism that even the NDP is ready to get serious with the Liberals on this.

00:36:05.320 More of this in the days and weeks ahead.

00:36:07.220 You can catch all of that at truenorthtnc.news.

00:36:09.840 And if you are minded to support the work that we do,

00:36:12.840 which as you heard from Peter Menzies,

00:36:14.980 we've got to get some innovation in the media sector.

00:36:17.340 So True North is trying to do that.

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00:36:20.580 We are supported by people that believe in the work we do.

00:36:23.640 So if you count yourself in that group

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00:36:31.900 That does it for me today.

00:36:33.020 back in just a couple days time with more this is true north and the andrew lawton show thank you

00:36:37.860 god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show

00:36:43.840 support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

Juno News - March 01, 2023

Trudeau wants Big Tech to subsidize Big Media

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