Juno News - June 17, 2024


Trudeau won't say if any Liberal MPs are implicated in foreign interference

Topics
foreign interference in Canadian democracy carbon tax economics government Trudeau carbon tax math global emissions
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Chris Sims Andrew Lawton Jagmeet Singh David McGinty David Hunt Pierre Poilievre Elizabeth May Ryan Alford Matthew Lau Yves-Francois Blanchet Gordon Campbell Thomas Mulcair Michael Binion Stéphane Guybeau David Mulcair Tom Mulcair Lawton
New documentary exposes dark side of MAiD Trudeau says bad polls are because Canadians aren't in ＂decision mode＂

Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

178.12

Word count

8,040

Sentence count

306

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, host Andrew Lawton sits down with journalist Chelsea Nash to discuss the unredacted report by the parliamentary committee investigating allegations of foreign interference in Canada s election, and whether any Liberal MPs are implicated.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30 Thank you.
00:01:00 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:19 north hello and welcome to you all this is canada's most irreverent talk show the andrew
00:01:30 lawton show on true north although i have to say i often revel in being a an independent media
00:01:38 voice not necessarily part of the mainstream media in fact let's be real we criticize legacy
00:01:45 media outlets a fair bit on this show and at true north there was a great i should have given
00:01:49 shauna a graphic to put up there but there was a piece in the hill times today the headline the
00:01:54 mainstreamification of andrew lawton this was just so delightful i've gone mainstream now don't hold
00:02:01 it against me too much i was this was an interview i did with chelsea nash is a very convivial
00:02:07 journalist that we sat down with over lunch i say we it was just me and a photographer for the hill
00:02:13 times. A couple of weeks back in Ottawa, she calls me disarmingly friendly, which I think is a great
00:02:20 compliment. And there was also another term there. Lawton, who is jovial and friendly, no matter the
00:02:26 subject, asserted he is outside the mainstream media. So I will take jovial and friendly, no
00:02:31 matter the subject. I will take disarmingly friendly. It was a lot of fun. And I'm so glad
00:02:36 if you're a Hilltime subscriber, you can check that out in today's edition. I'm getting old,
00:02:40 by the way i on on friday i went to the gym i know breaking news right and i you know strained
00:02:47 my hamstrings just a little bit and uh then i was fine and then sunday i like stood up too quickly
00:02:54 or something or stood up in the wrong way and now it's like pained me to walk uh since then so i'm uh
00:03:00 so if you see me like wincing at some point it's because i like leaned too much on the hamstring
00:03:05 and now i'm re-traumatizing myself but regardless great to have you tuned into the show uh we'll
00:03:10 We'll talk about more serious matters than my hamstrings and my disarmingly jovial nature because the Liberal government has been in no way interested in being transparent about the possibility of foreign interference, of foreign interference that is infiltrating Canadian democracy.
00:03:29 You had Elizabeth May come out basically and say no big deal, everything's fine, she's not worried after reading the unredacted report of the Parliamentary National Security Committee.
00:03:39 Then you had Jagmeet Singh come out and say,
00:03:41 ooh, he has some grave concerns about this.
00:03:44 And now Justin Trudeau has come out and basically said nothing.
00:03:47 He started to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the report.
00:03:51 He says he has issues and concerns with how they've gone about it.
00:03:55 And more crucially, as you see here,
00:03:57 not interested in opening up about whether there are any liberal members of parliament implicated.
00:04:02 Take a look.
00:04:04 Are there currently any MPs in your caucus that are named in the NSACOP report
00:04:07 to be wittingly or semi-wittingly participants in foreign interference the issue of foreign
00:04:12 interference is one that this government has taken incredibly seriously since 2015 we brought in the
00:04:18 national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians over the objections of the
00:04:23 conservative party and indeed uh the strenuous resistance of the harper government for years
00:04:29 We brought in a renewed NCIRA for oversight over our national security instances.
00:04:38 And we created specific bodies of experts, of top civil servants, to ensure the integrity of our elections.
00:04:48 We've also called a number of different reports, including an ongoing report on foreign interference,
00:04:54 that we're working with right now
00:04:57 to see how they can follow up on the NSACOP report.
00:05:00 We've heard from Mr. Singh and Ms. May,
00:05:03 they have both said that there are no members of their party
00:05:05 who are named in their part.
00:05:06 So I'll ask you again,
00:05:07 are there any current Liberal caucus members
00:05:09 named in the NSACOP report that are wittingly
00:05:11 or semi-wittingly participants in form of interference?
00:05:13 I will allow Mr. Singh and Ms. May to speak for themselves.
00:05:19 That was two attempts at asking him,
00:05:21 are there Liberal members of Parliament
00:05:23 implicated two very artful and no not really artful dodges of that the second one they've said
00:05:30 they're a member are there members of yours I'll let them speak for themselves but that prime
00:05:35 minister that wasn't actually the question now as it stands there are some doubts about how
00:05:41 this information or if this information could even be legally disclosed and some of this goes back to
00:05:47 a case that predates this particular report that I wanted to bring attention to now. Ryan Alford is
00:05:54 a professor in the Lakehead University Faculty of Law and joins us now. Ryan, good to talk to you.
00:05:59 Thanks for coming on the show today. My pleasure, Andrew. Glad to join the mainstream. Thank you very
00:06:05 much, sir. You were raised, I mean, you saw something wrong about how this committee was
00:06:11 structured before this report came about. Explain for people that didn't follow this why that was
00:06:17 and what's happened up until this point? On your clip, you hear Justin Trudeau claiming credit for
00:06:22 establishing NSICOP. Two things bear mentioning. One, it's not a proper parliamentary committee.
00:06:28 It doesn't have the powers of parliamentary committee. It's technically an advisory
00:06:31 committee to the prime minister. So it reports to him, its chair is chosen by him, and he retains
00:06:37 the power to redact its reports. So they can't publish or indeed table anything in parliament
00:06:42 without the prior approval and redactions of the prime minister.
00:06:46 The other problematic element is that its members are stripped of parliamentary privilege.
00:06:51 So you saw when its chair, David McGinty, spoke in a press conference.
00:06:54 He said, we had to accept that we don't have parliamentary privilege
00:06:58 because we serve on this committee and we're made privy to these confidential documents,
00:07:02 which, by the way, parliament has a right to see anyway.
00:07:05 But now when the prime minister is claiming, well, I have issues with the way that they created this report,
00:07:11 not only are they gagged, but their hands are tied.
00:07:14 And one thing that I'll note here,
00:07:16 and this may get into the weeds
00:07:18 for how a lot of Canadians view
00:07:19 the institutions of government in Canada,
00:07:21 but it's very relevant,
00:07:22 is that a prime minister is not meant
00:07:25 to be the guy in charge of parliament.
00:07:27 A prime minister can be fired by parliament.
00:07:29 He has to have the confidence of parliament.
00:07:31 And that's where, even if in a majority parliament,
00:07:34 it looks like the prime minister
00:07:35 may have this autocratic power,
00:07:37 the reality is there is a check and balance there.
00:07:39 Now, in this case, we have a minority parliament, but even if all of the other parties were to gang up, if you will, NSACOP still would be subject to Justin Trudeau, you're saying.
00:07:50 Exactly right. And that's the problem. So in 2005 and years afterwards, there were issues with the production of documents to parliament.
00:08:00 And there was a finding of contempt of the parliament by the government of Canada, which was very serious.
00:08:04 But no one ever doubted that parliament has the right to these documents.
00:08:09 If they say, we want to see this, they have the right to see it.
00:08:11 It's their call because they are the people who hold the government accountable.
00:08:15 That's called responsible government.
00:08:17 So creating a system where the only people who have actually seen these documents are
00:08:22 subject to 14 years in prison, if they reveal in parliament what they're otherwise entitled
00:08:27 to say and discuss, we've got a severe constitutional crisis.
00:08:31 You know, even among the most liberally minded when it comes to access to information, there's
00:08:36 always an understanding that things to do with national security are in a separate category i
00:08:42 mean so so let me ask you why should this be any different why should you be able to do an end run
00:08:47 around national security just because of parliamentary privilege to begin it's the
00:08:53 prime minister's assertion of national security and you can see the problem with that when we
00:08:57 look at the wuhan lab documents so it took years and finally there was a special committee struck
00:09:03 and counsel to it were two former Supreme Court of Canada justices. And the conclusion was that
00:09:08 the reason for withholding the documents wasn't national security. It was because they were
00:09:12 potentially embarrassing to the government. So when documents are withheld on the basis of
00:09:16 national security, it's not really clear that they're being withheld because they are dangerous
00:09:21 to national security. And the question is who gets to make the call there? Is it the prime minister
00:09:25 who stands to lose in this situation when we see that he's been involved in obfuscation and
00:09:30 that he's used this pretext of national security to avoid political embarrassment or is it parliament
00:09:35 because the notion here is that parliament has procedures the gagging provisions of the national
00:09:42 security intelligence committee parliamentarians act apply even if a parliamentary committee was
00:09:47 to hold an in-camera meeting which is to say if the chair of a parliamentary committee like the
00:09:51 house of commons public safety and national security committee says we want to hold a meeting
00:09:56 Under conditions of confidentiality, no one may talk about what's going on in the committee.
00:10:00 And there, a member of this committee spoke about what they saw in NSICOP.
00:10:05 They would still be subject to criminal prosecution.
00:10:07 Here we see that, given that Parliament has its own measures to protect confidentiality,
00:10:13 that the measures in NSICOP are more about maintaining the control of the executive, namely the prime minister.
00:10:19 Yeah, and as you note with the Winnipeg Lab case and other ones,
00:10:23 there have been a number of examples where this government has taken a very selective view
00:10:26 of privilege and confidence. I go back to the Public Order Emergency Commission where
00:10:31 they said, oh, we don't believe in secrets. We're waiving cabinet confidence. We're waiving
00:10:36 cabinet privilege. You can see everything. Oh, but we aren't waiving solicitor-client privilege
00:10:40 because we don't want you to see that document there. So there is this selective nature which
00:10:44 makes you wonder and not even really wonder all that hard about, okay, are they picking and
00:10:49 choosing based on where they know things are likely to blow up in their face.
00:10:53 That's the most pertinent example you could have given, because what we had there was
00:10:57 the whole purpose of the inquiry, the Rouleau Commission, as it was called, to determine
00:11:02 whether or not the invocation of the Emergencies Act was lawful, was stymied, because the document
00:11:08 that presented the legal case, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General's legal analysis
00:11:13 for why this was in fact warranted, which was presented to the cabinet and was the sole basis
00:11:18 for their decision was withheld from the public inquiry. That was absolutely scandalous. If we
00:11:24 had a less supine media, people would have seen this as obviously a cover-up. The point of the
00:11:29 inquiry is purposeless at this stage. But the level of manipulation there really should give
00:11:36 people pause. So you, as I said, were on to this even before we knew this particular issue was
00:11:43 going to come up here. You brought a lawsuit that ultimately went against you at the Court
00:11:47 of Appeal for Ontario, which found that no parliamentary immunity should not protect
00:11:52 you if you're a member of parliament or, I guess, theoretically, a senator that
00:11:55 divulges this. You said you want to take this to the Supreme Court, but explain where their
00:12:01 rationale was at the Court of Appeal. Right. So the Court of Appeal rejected the conclusions of
00:12:06 the Superior Court. The Superior Court said you can't take away parliamentary privilege from
00:12:11 members of parliament because it's constitutional in nature. And there's a lot of Supreme Court
00:12:16 cases that speak to that very point. The most important one, New Brunswick Broadcasting,
00:12:20 it states that parliamentary privilege must be absolute if it's to be effective.
00:12:26 So here they've said, okay, well, with ordinary legislation, we've taken away this constitutional
00:12:32 right of members of parliament. The point of my suit was to say, this can't be done other than
00:12:37 via constitutional amendment. The problem with the bill, as it was introduced in parliament in 2017,
00:12:42 over the objections of the Conservative Party at the time was that members of Parliament didn't
00:12:48 understand that they were amending the Constitution of Canada. They didn't understand that their right
00:12:53 to speak freely in Parliament had constitutional status. And the reason why it has constitutional
00:12:57 status is because it doesn't belong just to them. It belongs to the people of Canada who have the
00:13:02 right to elect representatives who can actually perform government oversight effectively.
00:13:08 Yeah. And that was, I think, a very important point. And do you believe that the government
00:13:13 knew it was doing an end run around the constitution, or do you believe they just
00:13:16 didn't even really consider that? They should have known better. I think the position that
00:13:22 they took, and this was based on parliamentary law officers coming in and testifying before
00:13:27 parliamentary committees, is that no, it isn't amending the constitution. There's a way for us
00:13:31 to do this because it's only a minor abridgment, right? But the problem is they didn't bring in
00:13:37 legal experts who could have pointed to the significance of those supreme court cases
00:13:41 and i i implored them to do it and you can go back and look at my testimony before the senate
00:13:46 committee which was considering this in 2017 i said there are legal academics that might disagree
00:13:51 with me but you should hear from them you should try to get to the bottom of whether or not the
00:13:56 supreme court would view this as constitutional or not before you pass it and they didn't do so
00:14:01 because they wanted this legislation that badly.
00:14:04 So if we look at the way forward here, as it stands,
00:14:07 if a member of parliament were to decide this really needs to be in the public interest,
00:14:11 they could go out and read from the unredacted report but face jail time for doing so.
00:14:17 And perhaps there might be some renegade that wants to do a come and get me over this.
00:14:22 But your view is that there's a way to really keep the spirit of parliament alive here
00:14:27 and make that supremacy of parliamentary privilege apply to ENSECOP.
00:14:33 Absolutely right.
00:14:34 I mean, what I achieved in 2022 in the Superior Court
00:14:37 was for that particular provision of the ENSECOP Act to be struck out.
00:14:42 So the committee could still function.
00:14:43 It could still perform all the valuable services that it's been doing.
00:14:47 But if the prime minister redacts the documents
00:14:50 and then lies about what's in the unredacted document,
00:14:54 they would have the power to correct him on the floor of the House of Commons.
00:14:57 I think that's just basic governmental oversight. That's what I achieved in Superior Court in 2022.
00:15:03 But then the government of Canada decided to appeal against that judgment.
00:15:07 Yeah. And we mentioned, I mean, obviously you're dealing with the legal arguments here,
00:15:10 but you have to not view the politics of this in isolation because this is exactly what's
00:15:14 happening. We have three different leaders who have professed to have read this document,
00:15:18 giving three wildly different interpretations of what went into that document and what is in the
00:15:24 document itself. And, you know, everyone criticizes Pierre Polyev for not wanting to accept the
00:15:30 briefing on this. But if he does, he's then, you know, going to come out and say his own thing.
00:15:35 And realistically, no one in this country can decide who's right.
00:15:40 Well, David Mulcair put it, sorry, Tom Mulcair put it quite succinctly. That's a trap. Why would
00:15:46 you go in there, read these documents, submit yourself to the undertaking that you not talk
00:15:51 about it and then think that you could do something about it afterwards. Very interestingly,
00:15:56 when Elizabeth May was, let's say, rather candid about what she saw, or at least made strong
00:16:00 representations about what she saw, it tended to support the political position of the Prime
00:16:04 Minister of Canada. Do we really think that in that situation, the decision would be made to
00:16:09 prosecute that person? And then we have to think about what would happen in the opposite political
00:16:13 scenario. When someone said the Prime Minister has been obfuscating, I've seen those names and
00:16:18 they include liberal members of parliament. I think in that situation, you have to imagine that
00:16:23 perhaps some prosecution might be on the table. Well, it's a fascinating one. Any idea on the
00:16:29 timeline of getting this to the Supreme Court? Well, the millstones of justice grind very slowly.
00:16:34 I'm filing this this week. The government files their response in about a month. I think by
00:16:39 December, we'll hear if Supreme Court wants to take this case. If they do, the hearings will be
00:16:44 in spring of next year decision potentially before the election all right well appreciate that very
00:16:49 much professor ryan alford always appreciate your insights thank you for coming on always my pleasure
00:16:54 andrew all right good to see you i think i last saw ryan in the london ontario airport he had been
00:16:59 at a little conference down in london always great to chat with him uh we will definitely follow this
00:17:05 but i i want to just make a point on this because online there still is this conspiracy theory about
00:17:09 pierre polyev and the security clearance and all of that ian brody who is the former chief of staff
00:17:15 to stephen harper he's also a phd holding a university of i think he's still a university
00:17:20 of calgary professor yes ian brody has talked about this he said you know polyev is a member
00:17:25 of the privy council he's a member of his majesty's privy council he has by all accounts the
00:17:31 ability to read whatever materials the government wants to put in front of him but he has chosen
00:17:38 because the government has put this ridiculous threshold in place as ryan alford was saying
00:17:44 there they have to accept a gag and read this and just imagine what would happen if pauliev were to
00:17:50 read this report and in the report sees there is a liberal member of parliament shilling for china
00:17:55 say he can now he cannot go in question period and say prime minister why are you not kicking
00:18:01 blank out of caucus he can't do it he can't i mean he could work around it and maybe risk
00:18:08 having the hammer crack down on him, but he could not go to the House of Commons, even on the floor
00:18:14 of the House of Commons, and say whatever it is, say whatever it is that he needs to to hold the
00:18:19 government to account. That's why, as Thomas Mulcair says, as Yves-Francois Blanchet once said,
00:18:23 it is in fact a trap to go along with this. And again, what was interesting too is that the CESIS
00:18:30 Act, I just was alerted to this this morning in a Globe and Mail piece, the CESIS Act actually
00:18:35 gives CSIS the opportunity to go to the leader of a party and say, yeah, you should be aware of this
00:18:41 thing that affects your party. So they won't tell Polyev about a liberal MP. They won't tell him
00:18:46 about a new Democrat. But if there was a conservative MP or a conservative candidate,
00:18:51 CSIS could go to him and tell him what their concerns were. The conservatives say that has
00:18:56 not happened. They have received no such briefing, no such alert from CSIS. Now, CSIS may be fumbling
00:19:03 the ball this has happened on a couple of occasions but it could also be that these are not
00:19:07 issues that are in the conservative caucus these are issues that are in the liberal caucus the only
00:19:12 caucus which by the way the leader has not come out and denied having any members of parliament
00:19:18 implicated so take from that what you will but you should pay attention to trudeau's refusal to even
00:19:24 answer the question uh and you may think that they want to apply this whole national security thing
00:19:30 to anything that makes them look bad, including the government's own carbon tax projections.
00:19:34 They fought tooth and nail to keep these from being published. They told the parliamentary
00:19:38 budget officer, yeah, you can look at them, but don't you dare talk about them. They put a gag
00:19:42 on him. And Chris Sims and her colleagues at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation have figured out
00:19:48 exactly why that is. Chris, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:19:53 Thanks for having us on.
00:19:55 Now, again, the Liberals may want it, but it's not a national security secret. We can talk
00:19:59 about these figures that we have seen what do the numbers tell us it's pretty brutal andrew and it's
00:20:05 no wonder really why now it turns out the trudeau government didn't want the parliamentary budget
00:20:11 officer reporting this number so if i can just rewind the tape back to when everybody understood
00:20:16 from the parliamentary budget office where they had come up with two different scenarios one was
00:20:21 just the base cost okay of monica filling up her little honda civic hatchback how much that cost 0.96
00:20:28 her. Translation, that was around $6 or $7. Oh, look, 8 out of 10 people get more back in rebates 0.75
00:20:33 than they pay out. The problem there was, of course, the PBO did his homework, and they had
00:20:39 a secondary calculation which talked about the economic impact of the Trudeau government's
00:20:44 carbon tax. So that means, of course, how much the farmer is paying to grow the food with the
00:20:48 carbon tax, how much the trucker is paying to fill up the big rig to bring you the food,
00:20:52 how much you pay for home heating. You get the idea. And there, that just blew it out of the
00:20:57 water. There, I think it was over $900 per year per Alberta household with rebates factored in.
00:21:04 Fast forward to very recently, the parliamentary budget officer had said, you know what,
00:21:10 I've gone back and have done some new calculations. And then all of a sudden,
00:21:14 the Trudeau government was like, shh, like, stop talking about it. And so that was super weird,
00:21:20 right? And that, of course, got everybody interested, including the opposition saying,
00:21:24 cough up the data. Well, very late last week, cough up the data they did. Now, we don't have
00:21:30 the breakdown of per person yet or per province yet, but we're working on it. We've got a team
00:21:38 of folks who are working on this in Ottawa right now. So big picture, Andrew, it looks like in the
00:21:44 year 2030, the carbon tax is going to cost the Canadian economy around $25 billion. Now, that's
00:21:54 just in that one year. I need to stress that. That is not the cumulative cost of the carbon tax
00:22:01 between now and 2030. That's just for this singular year. Now, the data sheets and the
00:22:07 spreadsheets we have here are mind-boggling. You know when you open up an Excel spreadsheet and
00:22:12 you've got that little slider on the right where you can move stuff up and down there's so many
00:22:17 rows of data in just one of these tables that that little slider is like the size of a peppercorn
00:22:23 like i can't even remember how many rows of data are in these models so it's pretty crazy but
00:22:29 big shot is that it's around 25 billion by 2030 so it's no wonder they wanted to keep it under wraps
00:22:34 yeah but again so costing the economy that this is the carbon tax that we're told is quote unquote
00:22:39 revenue neutral right yes it's weird that it can be revenue neutral yet somehow have a 25 billion
00:22:46 dollar annual cost to the economy how do we get there yeah exactly just add government that's how
00:22:51 you get there they can just take whatever they want and try to spin a narrative out of it and
00:22:56 in all seriousness uh this is where the math just never holds up and just bringing people back to
00:23:01 the original cause of the carbon tax here in north america in 2008 the bc liberal government brought
00:23:07 in what they called and promised was going to be a revenue neutral carbon tax. That was under then
00:23:13 Premier Gordon Campbell. Now, to be fair, on paper, initially one could argue that it was revenue
00:23:21 neutral because back then it was about three or four cents per liter. And they also put forward
00:23:26 a corresponding income tax cut right across the board. So the nerds in universities and economics 0.99
00:23:33 classes could say, yeah, on paper, this is revenue neutral. But the problem there is it doesn't
00:23:38 factor in the nature of government and the nature of people, right? Because government, of course,
00:23:43 is people. And if they can find a revenue stream, i.e. a vampiric tax they can sink their fangs 0.99
00:23:49 deeper into, that's exactly what they're going to do, Andrew. So after a couple of years in BC,
00:23:54 what did they start doing? They took in, say, a billion dollars for argument's sake for the
00:23:59 carbon tax. And then to make it look revenue neutral on the budget, that's where they just
00:24:03 started filing all their random tax credits for everything. Like old people tax credits, 1.00
00:24:09 fitness gym. So when you're going to the gym and pulling your hamstrings, you got a fitness tax
00:24:13 credit for that. So this is what government does. And now we have the Trudeau government saying
00:24:18 something silly, like you get more back than you pay in. Well, this shows that is obviously not 0.70
00:24:24 true. Yeah. The same isn't true for the Canadian economy. The same isn't true for the country.
00:24:28 this is it and for people people watching your show know the deal but when you're talking to
00:24:33 your uncle or your sister-in-law or somebody who still doesn't quite get it they can say things
00:24:37 like oh well that's just the economic cost who cares about that okay the economy is not some
00:24:43 alien force that does not affect your day-to-day life everything you do where you're filling up
00:24:49 your car when you're purchasing food that was grown when you're thinking of buying a house
00:24:53 when you're fixing your vehicle, all that stuff, that's all the economy. It's working around you
00:24:59 like the force, okay? If you tax that thing and you blow a $25 billion hole in the side of its
00:25:06 hull, you're going to have some troubled waters. Well, and I always want to take the bigger picture
00:25:12 on this because the carbon tax is based on a number of premises. It's based on the premise
00:25:16 that man-made global warming is caused by the emissions that are regulated by the carbon tax.
00:25:22 It's predicated on the fact that the carbon tax will result in the reduction of those emissions.
00:25:27 It's predicated on the idea that even if Canada were to reduce its emissions, that will cause a global reduction.
00:25:35 And one of the arguments Michael Binion from the Modern Miracle Network has made is that you could make Canada's emissions go up and lower global emissions because we are more efficient with our energy production than other countries are.
00:25:48 So that's one argument that's put forward.
00:25:50 but you bring this up all the time. And I think it's important. We have about 1.5% of global
00:25:54 emissions that are Canada's responsibility and no carbon tax proposal, no environmental proposal in
00:26:01 Canada has proposed getting that even down to 1% say. And even if it did, that would be a drop in
00:26:08 the bucket globally. Thank you. And I think this is worth pointing out because you and I, you know,
00:26:14 we can sit here and bang our heads against the wall about the carbon tax quite a bit.
00:26:17 but every now and then I think it's important to reach across the aisle and try to meet people
00:26:22 where they are. So let's say for argument's sake, okay, that your key issue is global emissions,
00:26:29 okay, keeps you up at night, gets you out of bed in the morning. It's the reason why you've gone
00:26:33 to university to pursue a trade or whatever it is that's a calling for you. Okay, let's meet them
00:26:39 there, okay? It still doesn't work. This equation still doesn't work because as you point out,
00:26:45 Canada is responsible for about 1.5% of global emissions, okay? We also have a gigantic honking
00:26:53 boreal forest that a lot of scientists keep trying to gently point out, but few people seem
00:26:58 to understand or talk about. So, okay, let's set that aside. Look at the math. Look at just the
00:27:03 emissions. Even if Canada ceased to exist tomorrow, God forbid, and we stopped heating and eating and 0.68
00:27:09 growing our food and driving to work, it wouldn't make a dent in global emissions. So for the folks
00:27:14 who are truly gripped with this fear that we're all going to boil the planet in the next 18 months
00:27:19 or so and that Canada is responsible and that using a carbon tax will reduce that, that doesn't
00:27:25 even make sense to meet them with their own math, Andrew. So then why not look at the big end of the
00:27:31 arithmetic problem and say, okay, where is there a global democracy with a big population that has
00:27:38 a really heavy emissions output right now? India. Okay, we've worked with India quite a bit. It used
00:27:43 be a commonwealth country there's a lot of interchange there what if we sold them our
00:27:47 natural gas instead of them burning wood and animal dung every single day guess what the
00:27:53 government of india is begging us to sell them natural gas from canada so that would reduce
00:27:59 global emissions that column in that graph would go down and we wouldn't need a carbon tax here in
00:28:05 canada which is doing absolutely nothing by the way here in canada we're still getting increasing
00:28:09 emissions in canada the government's own data between 2023 and 2024 shows an increase in federal
00:28:18 emissions in canada even though we have a carbon tax this lines up perfectly with bc well and that
00:28:24 brings i mean the other premise or one of the other premises is that the emitting activities
00:28:29 are discretionary which is in the case of rural canadians absolutely wrong i'll give an example
00:28:34 of this so i live in southwestern ontario so when i drive to toronto which i i try to avoid but i've
00:28:39 had to a few times as of late you go on the 401 and there's a lane carved out at several points
00:28:45 for carpooling or electric vehicles the high high occupancy vehicle lane and you look in this and
00:28:51 oftentimes it's empty and the reason when you see people in it that have two or more people in their
00:28:56 cars i'm not convinced a single one of them has chosen to carpool to use the lane they are people
00:29:03 who happen to have an extra person in the car and say oh great i can use the carpool lane today
00:29:07 but it's not actually incentivizing behavior. It's just ultimately penalizing everyone else on the
00:29:13 road. And I think the same is true of the carbon tax, where very few people are choosing to live
00:29:19 differently because driving their kids, driving to work, these things for a lot of people are
00:29:24 not choices. These are now things that are simply penalized when you have to heat your home or fill
00:29:30 up your tank. Yes, exactly. And so any way you look at this argument, these folks in the Gibo 0.57
00:29:36 mentality, in Minister Stéphane Guibo's mentality, who are really zealous about this sort of stuff,
00:29:43 they're always lost for an answer. Because any way you come at them with the cost of the carbon tax,
00:29:47 oh, shows you the data is actually costing people big time money. With the emissions, oh, once again,
00:29:53 here in Canada, emissions are going up anyway, and we're not the ones that are contributing to the
00:29:57 big time global emissions. So why don't we focus on that instead? And bingo, exactly this. So I
00:30:04 wanted to quickly talk about this okay so when the carbon tax was first hatched in north america
00:30:08 again going back to bc and trudeau used british columbia as a model that's why i keep going back
00:30:13 to it because it's a template okay government is just like high school you get in with the cool
00:30:17 crowd and you're a follower so this is what they're doing okay i i was never getting in with
00:30:22 the cool crowd you'll have to come up with a better explanation neither but you know here we
00:30:26 are i was a drama kid so take a look there right and so what they were also promising is that with
00:30:32 this big shiny new carbon tax that was revenue neutral when there's a chicken in every pot
00:30:36 is that it would create an abundance of affordable, accessible, abundant, consistent,
00:30:44 alternative energy, okay? That people would be able to switch, okay? It's like switching between
00:30:50 a plastic bag and a little nylon bag that you brought from home. It's annoying, sure, but
00:30:55 that's kind of a switch, right? There's no switch for the vast majority of people to make in Canada.
00:31:01 Yes, there are those hardcore people who managed to live with a pedal bike and a solar panel on
00:31:06 their roof. We're talking with the vast majority of folks. They don't have a way of switching
00:31:10 their energy source. And it's been since 2008. So the government's solution to all of this has
00:31:17 been no solution. It's simply become now a financial punishment for heating your home,
00:31:24 driving to work and feeding your kids. People are backed into a corner and the government
00:31:29 keeps hitting them with this carbon tax, which is a punishment. And the Liberal government,
00:31:33 by the way, used the term punishment in an interview. So now we're at this weird crossroads
00:31:39 where they're trying to move the goalposts, Andrew, and talk more about wealth redistribution
00:31:45 and being fairer to poorer people and taking away from middle class and working class people and
00:31:52 handing it to the folks who could never afford a car in the beginning. They didn't talk like this
00:31:57 when they first launched the carbon tax.
00:31:59 When they first launched the carbon tax,
00:32:00 they said it was going to be revenue neutral,
00:32:03 that it would reduce emissions
00:32:05 and it would create a whole bunch of alternative energies
00:32:08 that everybody could use.
00:32:10 None of those things has happened.
00:32:13 Very well said.
00:32:14 I know you'll keep on this, Chris.
00:32:15 We'll perhaps get an update from you next week.
00:32:17 Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
00:32:19 Always a pleasure.
00:32:20 Thank you.
00:32:22 Our Monday tax fighter, Chris Sims.
00:32:24 Always good to check in with her.
00:32:25 We are packing a lot into the show today, but bear with me.
00:32:28 We're going to move right on here because this is a fascinating one.
00:32:31 And I actually had a conversation about this with someone the other day.
00:32:35 We were talking about this idea of wokeness, which is, I think, increasingly become only a term used by people who are criticizing wokeness.
00:32:43 But the idea itself is one that's certainly championed by a number of institutions, incredibly by governments, by academic institutions and many others.
00:32:52 And the problem with it is that it is ingrained in it as this idea of identity politics
00:32:58 and pitting groups against each other.
00:33:01 We start to define people by their group identity rather than by their individual identity.
00:33:06 And when you look at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies,
00:33:09 you see they're trying to solve one problem and are ignoring, or in some cases, creating another.
00:33:15 Our friends over at the Aristotle Foundation did what I found to be a fascinating study
00:33:20 looking at poverty and race in Canada,
00:33:22 and they found that most of the poor in Canada are white.
00:33:26 So how are these people being helped
00:33:28 by so many of the pro-inclusivity measures?
00:33:31 The fact remains, they really aren't.
00:33:33 This study was done by Matthew Lau and David Hunt,
00:33:36 the latter of whom is the research director
00:33:38 for the Aristotle Foundation and joins us now.
00:33:41 David, good to talk to you.
00:33:42 Thanks for coming on today.
00:33:45 You are muted there.
00:33:47 I don't know if you can unmute on your end
00:33:48 if it's something Sean will have to do. Yeah, I'm not hearing you. All right, well, we'll get
00:33:57 that sorted out in just a moment here and bring David Hunt back in when it's resolved. But the
00:34:02 study is called Poverty and Race in Canada, Facts About Race Discrimination and the Poor. Sorry,
00:34:09 Sean, you say it looks normal. Are you saying that like you hear him and it's just me or?
00:34:13 oh no he doesn't hear him either okay we'll uh we'll get that sorted out and we'll have
00:34:19 david back on but the uh the piece is called poverty and race in canada facts about race
00:34:23 discrimination and the poor uh just since since i have a moment here let me just share on an
00:34:29 unrelated subject this poll that i found interesting uh so you may have seen on the
00:34:33 weekend abacus had a poll that came out showed the conservatives with a 20 point lead over the
00:34:40 Liberals. But also in that poll, interestingly enough, was that Canadians are looking at
00:34:46 immigration as being a top five issue, which it hasn't been certainly in recent memory. Immigration
00:34:52 is now more motivating to voters than climate change. So that's a fascinating point that we'll
00:34:58 probably delve into a bit more tomorrow. But I believe I heard in my ear, David Hunt is with us.
00:35:02 David, good to have you. Thanks for coming on today. Hey, thanks for having me, Andrew.
00:35:06 so let me ask you first and foremost about why you decided to look into this because race is
00:35:11 obviously a bit of a landmine issue especially when your thesis is as it ultimately came out to
00:35:16 be that we have this problem facing white canadians that's not really being explored
00:35:22 hey thanks for that question andrew i think actually this is in part why the aristotle
00:35:27 foundation exists is as you said this is this is a topic that perhaps others don't want to cover
00:35:33 and I think we're a brand new think tank and there are issues we need to talk about because
00:35:38 they impact everyday Canadians. And in the case of this study, it's impacting the most
00:35:43 disadvantaged Canadians. And it's a topic that others don't want to talk about, but we got to
00:35:47 talk about it. And the reality is, hey, who actually are the poor in Canada? And why do
00:35:55 we have funding in this country that is based on the color of your skin? And that in this case
00:36:00 leaves out the overwhelming majority of those who are poor in Canada.
00:36:06 So we have different programs.
00:36:08 I mean, there are anti-racism initiatives, there are anti-Islamophobia initiatives,
00:36:11 anti-Semitism initiatives, there are anti-poverty initiatives.
00:36:14 Are the anti-poverty initiatives specifically targeting diverse groups instead of the poor
00:36:21 whites that you're talking about?
00:36:22 Yeah, no, there will be programs that are available to many, but the fact that there
00:36:28 are any, and frankly, there are a number of programs that are under the guise of anti-poverty
00:36:35 reduction, but whether or not you qualify is not based on a financial criterion or criteria,
00:36:42 it's based on the color of your skin. Do you fall under one of the minority categories? Or in some
00:36:48 cases, it's very specific where it's for perhaps Indigenous only or for that matter, Black-only
00:36:54 funding uh this study frankly we should probably do a follow-up study where we actually go through
00:37:00 and identify like what are all the programs that was beyond the scope of the study we were looking
00:37:04 at here was simply okay here's the statistics canada data of who is poor in canada uh and and
00:37:11 the fact that so many are being left out why frankly is there any programming that is judging
00:37:18 people based on the color of their skin and providing poverty relief based on skin color we
00:37:24 think that's that's illiberal and frankly i'm canadian look if you looked at raw numbers canada
00:37:31 is a 70 white country so if every group was affected by poverty equally you'd have more
00:37:38 impoverished white canadians than minority canadians how is it proportionally though are
00:37:43 minority communities more disproportionately affected by poverty is that how the government
00:37:48 justifies this imbalance i i would assume so because because yes like let's be real um both
00:37:54 especially let's take two groups indigenous canadians and black canadians they are more
00:37:59 likely to be in poverty and that is an issue but what's the root cause what's the reason for that
00:38:04 is race the reason why they're in poverty and and we would argue just by looking at the data 0.99
00:38:10 we would say no race is not the primary factor another study that we did back in october with
00:38:15 matthew lau looks at income in the country and when it comes to income uh white canadians are
00:38:21 actually not even in the middle uh there are many different ethnic groups say or what statistics
00:38:25 canada calls cohorts uh there are many uh that make more income than than white canadians and
00:38:31 what's interesting uh is when you control for education for example just just one of many
00:38:36 things you can control for and just compare your indigenous canadians with non-indigenous canadians 0.57
00:38:42 once education is plugged in there's almost no differences in some areas like for example if you
00:38:49 have a medical degree and you're indigenous you're going to be making more money on average
00:38:52 than those who are not indigenous same as if you have a phd or a master's so the causes of poverty
00:38:59 at least in canada are not based on race where do you live are you living in a metropolitan area or
00:39:05 do you live out in in the country that's going to affect um whether or not you're in poverty and
00:39:09 your income again what's what's your level of education uh are you religious or not religious
00:39:14 there's there's so many different factors what we're saying here is even though yes there are
00:39:18 particular groups that may be disproportionately um in in poverty race is not the cause for that
00:39:26 so if we're going to solve these problems let's not be allocating resources based on race because
00:39:32 we're not going to get to the root issue yeah and it's interesting because you know the left
00:39:36 uses the term intersectionality to talk about, you know, the way that if you're a black trans
00:39:42 indigenous person in a wheelchair, your experience is going to be different than if you're just a
00:39:50 black woman who's able-bodied and all of this. And I think there's truth to that. I mean,
00:39:54 life is full of disadvantages and advantages and no person has, you know, well, few people have,
00:40:00 you know, the best optimal thing in every way of their life. You know, I'm a white male,
00:40:05 but I'm also overweight. And, you know, like, for example, so it's stuff like that. And I think
00:40:10 that what's interesting is that they don't actually look at all of these different categories
00:40:14 and all of these different groups. One area that's often missing is urban rural, which,
00:40:19 as you mentioned, is hugely, hugely influential. And I think even indigenous, if you were to take 0.99
00:40:24 the where they live in the country factor into that, I think you'd see a lot of variety within
00:40:30 indigenous populations and and also education level as you mentioned is is key as well i mean
00:40:35 if you're to use the old like show that you know people of my age are familiar with fresh prince
00:40:40 of bel-air well you know that experience of that black family in i think well in beverly hill and
00:40:45 bel-air is going to be a heck of a lot different than some you know rural white working class 0.68
00:40:51 family from you know northern alberta say and and that's why it's it's critical we have these
00:40:56 conversations and although this study is particularly provocative right because we're
00:41:00 saying hey uh there's more white people in poverty than every other ethnicity combined
00:41:05 but but to open up this this proverbial can of worms to have these conversations in terms of hey
00:41:11 if we're seeing canadians that are falling behind that are disadvantaged well of course we want to
00:41:16 do something about that and that's right but let's get at the root so towards the end of this this
00:41:21 short study what we we we point to the what's called the success sequence and this this was
00:41:26 um not introduced but popularized by the brookings institution down in the states
00:41:31 and thereby by no means a conservative think tank but they popularized this concept and what they
00:41:36 found is in the united states uh roughly 97 of americans who finish high school get a full-time
00:41:44 job get married have kids do it in that order 97 by the time they get to their 30s they're not going
00:41:52 to experience poverty and poverty to find in the absolute sense uh lacking the bare necessities of
00:41:58 necessities of life so that that study was then replicated by scholars at the university of
00:42:02 virginia only a few years ago looking at millennials uh so our our age cohort and and
00:42:08 same thing they replicated the study found 97 of millennials that finished high school then got a
00:42:13 a full-time job and got married had kids did it in that order 97 in their 30s are not in poverty
00:42:20 so that was then replicated in canada and christopher sarlo with the fraser institute
00:42:24 replicated the study in canada just a few years ago and found it's not 97 in canada
00:42:29 it's over 99 that follow the success sequence are not in absolute poverty as adults so is everyone
00:42:36 going to get married no is everyone going to finish high school no is everyone have a full-time
00:42:40 job no but but what the big takeaway there is is there's there's certain cultural norms that that
00:42:47 are tried and true frankly over the centuries and if we put these things into practice and it from
00:42:52 a policy perspective if we make it easier for for more people to get on that yellow brick road so
00:42:58 to speak to get on that success sequence we're going to alleviate much of of the the worst
00:43:05 effects of poverty and frankly there'll be much fewer people in canada in poverty if we follow
00:43:09 things like the success sequence and and whatever those norms are that feed into that well we had
00:43:14 an op-ed from you over at true north about this and people can read the study for themselves at
00:43:18 the aristotle foundation's website uh aristotlefoundation.org david hunt good to talk to
00:43:23 you thanks for coming on today hey thank you andrew all right that does it for us for this
00:43:28 afternoon we will be back tomorrow in just uh what is it 23 hours and 15 minutes with more of
00:43:33 canada's most irreverent talk show uh let us know what you think about this in the comments wherever
00:43:38 you are watching and we will talk to you next time thank you god bless and good day to you all
00:43:43 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show
00:43:46 support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news
00:44:08 We'll be right back.
00:44:38 We'll be right back.