Juno News - July 13, 2024


Trudeau’s climate ambassador spends $254k on luxury travel


Episode Stats

Length

13 minutes

Words per Minute

200.48132

Word Count

2,749

Sentence Count

186


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:08.740 We spoke last week on the show about how the government is going to spend $200 million,
00:00:13.180 the parliamentary budget officer says, on establishing this so-called digital safety
00:00:17.920 commission. We need a bureaucracy with 330 people to regulate what you do and say online.
00:00:23.800 And as we noted with Michelle Remble-Garner, that does not even count the increased workload
00:00:29.140 to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and other organs that are going to be involved in this
00:00:34.080 operation. I believe this is wrong even if it costs nothing. I believe it's wrong even if somehow
00:00:39.060 government were to make it profitable. But we'd be remiss to not point out the taxpayer issues here
00:00:43.540 and why $200 million never means $200 million when government starts spending. Our good friend
00:00:48.260 Chris Sims is back. She is the Alberta Director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Chris,
00:00:54.120 I hope you had a good weekend. Welcome back. Yes, I did. We had some family in from out of town
00:00:58.760 and so I was a little bit unplugged. So I haven't even watched Pierre's speech yet. I got to catch
00:01:03.080 up on that. Well, you know, you left, you buried the lead. You were partying with Donnie Wahlberg on
00:01:07.720 the weekend. Yeah, I was actually just this past before the last weekend. Don't get me started.
00:01:13.400 I'll take up your whole show. We went to Salt Lake City and partied with new kids on the block.
00:01:17.700 They're really fun. But I did do a little bit of work. Was it ever interesting driving through Montana
00:01:22.820 because their state there is in Helena, their state legislature. And I think they only meet like a
00:01:28.020 handful of times per year. So this has got me thinking now, what are taxpayers saving there? And they pay
00:01:34.180 really low taxes. It's open carry to your point with firearms rights. So it was quite something I
00:01:39.740 couldn't turn my work brain off. But yeah, I'm trying to get plugged back in and caught back up. But what
00:01:44.600 really blew my mind was exactly what you just raised was this censorship industrial complex that the
00:01:50.280 Trudeau government is helping to build here in Canada. The creepy thing is, is that this is
00:01:55.780 happening if you look carefully at a lot of what we would consider Western English speaking countries.
00:02:02.540 In fact, in UK, Andrew, I think they even called it the online harms bill in the same way we're
00:02:08.520 calling it this. So basically, in a nutshell, they're going to they're paying off the mainstream
00:02:14.420 media, they're paying for the CBC, we've got Bill C11, and we've got Bill C63.
00:02:19.960 So it creates this censorship vice on free expression here in Canada, this vice grip.
00:02:26.940 And on top of that, you get to pay for it. So you know, an army of censors doesn't come cheap,
00:02:32.480 right? Taxpayers have to pay for everything. And they're now estimating at the parliamentary
00:02:36.900 budget office that it's going to cost minimum 200 million. And to your point exactly, that's not
00:02:42.360 even touching the massive amount of workload that these human rights tribunals are going to be
00:02:46.900 suddenly flooded with. Can you imagine the snitch culture this is going to encourage? Because you
00:02:52.640 can anonymously call in someone that you think is in the future going to maybe hurt your feelings on
00:02:57.660 the internet, like, saying it out loud is crazy. If we had been warning about this back in 2015,
00:03:03.280 people would have said that you're out to lunch. But here we're, we are, we're this close from it.
00:03:08.360 So the Taxpayers Federation, we are fighting it on the cost, absolutely, because it's going to cost
00:03:12.880 people a ton of money. And we're fighting it on the free expression angle. Because if you can't
00:03:18.280 express yourself freely, guess what, you can't criticize the government. And groups like us
00:03:22.760 would be labeled misinformation like that. Yeah, just just to go back for a second to what
00:03:28.020 you said about the legislatures in the US, I ran, as many people may know, for the provincial
00:03:32.720 legislature in Ontario many years ago. And I was chatting with an American friend of mine from
00:03:36.960 New Hampshire, who was like baffled to learn they make money because in New Hampshire, a state rep
00:03:41.760 makes $200 a term. And so $100 a year is the salary of a New Hampshire state rep. And they meet like,
00:03:48.220 you know, I don't know, maybe twice a year or something like that. And my goodness, I would
00:03:51.520 love it if our politicians only had a couple of hours to make it. Because this happened in Texas
00:03:55.500 not long ago, where there was a filibuster, which means something in the US, because if you don't pass
00:04:00.900 your bill by the closing of business on a particular day, then you don't get another chance for like
00:04:07.400 several months. So when it comes to taxing, like, I would love that the Digital Safety
00:04:11.460 Commission wouldn't stand a chance if the government was only there one day a year.
00:04:14.760 No, exactly. It's funny, some mainstream media organizations contact us sometimes and ask us
00:04:19.220 like, oh, don't you wish they were still hard at work and still having more sitting days and blah,
00:04:23.200 blah? No, no, don't give them more days to mess things up. You add more government, you mess it up.
00:04:29.220 Same sort of thing goes with these ridiculous salaries that are now being paid at city hall levels
00:04:33.760 in most places across Canada. They're like, oh, boohoo, you know, the mayor is only making $200,000 a year.
00:04:40.000 Or boohoo, the city councilor is only making $120,000. And it's like, no, you realize in New
00:04:45.460 Hampshire, exactly to your point, I think they get like gas and sandwich money. It's very similar
00:04:51.080 in Montana. And a lot of states, a lot of provinces could be running their shops this way.
00:04:55.500 The most direct analog that I can come up with on costs, not for the Digital Safety Commission
00:05:01.680 itself, but just in general with government is the long gun registry, which I forget the initial
00:05:06.600 pledge, you might recall better than me, but it was a very paltry sum. They said this thing was going
00:05:10.420 to cost and it ends up being well over a billion dollars. Yes. What's startling is they initially
00:05:16.300 said it'll cost $2 million. That was it. Yeah, it was, I knew it was something like a rounding error
00:05:21.040 almost. A little tiny bit. And it almost, once all the smoke cleared and you start adding lawsuits
00:05:26.500 and fights and stuff, it was close to $2 billion with a B. So remember folks, back when, this is way
00:05:35.280 back with the Kretchen and Martin liberals, when they had the so-called long gun registry. Remember,
00:05:40.000 you probably remember some reform party members as a lark were registering their soldering guns
00:05:44.400 successfully. Silly things like that happening, but it was in order to point out what a mockery this
00:05:49.420 really was. It ballooned in cost. It wasn't quite $2 billion, but it was closing in on that.
00:05:54.940 And to Andrew's point exactly, they'll come out and say, oh, this massive group of censorship police
00:06:01.340 that are, you know, run by a bunch of bureaucrats in Ottawa and Gatineau, it'll cost you $200 million.
00:06:06.900 Well, look at what happened with ArriveCan. Like that little app should have cost around $250,000.
00:06:12.440 It wind up costing us around $60 million. Just imagine how this thing is going to balloon out
00:06:20.200 of hand for a cost. Like the censorship element's one thing, and then there's a huge waste of money
00:06:25.220 on the other. Yeah. And the weaponization of complaints is I think key here. We're going to
00:06:29.980 be talking in just a few minutes with David Clement on the LCBO strike. And the reason I bring that up
00:06:35.460 is because Opsu on its website has a little form where you put in your information and you click a
00:06:40.960 button and it automatically sends an email to Doug Ford's office. And these sorts of tools are very
00:06:45.060 common when people are trying to gin up public support. You basically make it so that there's
00:06:49.620 a ready-made form and you can file it and push it. And it sends it off to maybe the prime minister's
00:06:55.120 office, maybe the premier's office, maybe every MP in the country, because people will do this.
00:06:59.840 And this was, this is the exact kind of thing that I know someone will do with the Canadian Human
00:07:04.000 Rights Commission complaint process, where they'll say, you know, paste the, someone will make some tool
00:07:08.800 and they'll say, paste the link of the tweet you want to report. And it'll auto-populate a form
00:07:13.580 and send it right to the Human Rights Commission. And all of a sudden you have people that are running
00:07:18.120 these campaigns because you actually profit. You can make some money if you file a complaint under
00:07:22.800 Bill C-63, assuming it passes and your complaint is deemed to have standing, even if you were not harmed
00:07:29.640 in any way from it. So no one at the CHRC has said how they're going to prevent against this. And I know
00:07:35.440 being government, their answer is going to be, we need to hire a legion of investigators to sift
00:07:40.360 through all these things. Yeah. Just imagine. And that's exactly to your point. You know, the
00:07:45.680 censorship police and the amount of online gagging that is going on here from the government, or it's
00:07:51.180 going to happen if this passes is hard enough to swallow. But the people forget there's a financial
00:07:57.260 incentive to anonymously complaining to a human rights tribunal about your feelings being hurt.
00:08:04.800 So just imagine if people are long in the tooth enough like me, remember back when Ezra Levant was
00:08:10.680 fighting against the human rights tribunal? I forget for what, he had published Western Standard.
00:08:15.680 Yeah, that was the Muhammad cartoons.
00:08:17.600 Yeah, it was the cartoons, right? And I do remember, to their credit, I do remember mainstream
00:08:22.000 Maclean's magazine, getting into similar sort of hot water. And like, you know, all about that,
00:08:26.980 of course, through Mark Stein. And so imagine that. But now fast forward today's culture of,
00:08:33.900 you know, getting offended by things and make it anonymous and give people the opportunity to make
00:08:40.100 thousands of dollars. Boy, oh boy, like they did not. I hope I'm saying this right. I hope they didn't
00:08:47.220 think this through. I hope it's this much of a disaster, because they're doing this by accident.
00:08:52.300 I'm not so sure sometimes. But folks, we really need to focus on this. And to your point of,
00:08:57.080 I liked what you played there with Pierre Polyev, and your point about no longer being holding back
00:09:03.220 so much and worrying about, you know, don't be offensive, don't be gross, but worrying about
00:09:08.240 talking about things like gun rights, right? Worrying about talking about things like, you know,
00:09:13.900 blowing money during the lockdown. People should be confident enough to speak with their relatives
00:09:19.140 and their friends about this sort of stuff now. And that would be my one little nugget of advice
00:09:24.100 I would give people. And it gives you a little bit of hope and a little bit of agency of just have
00:09:28.620 that confidence and that courage to actually broach some of these topics with people who aren't really
00:09:33.780 that political. And it might help them decide what they want to do over the next few years when it
00:09:38.840 comes to just being in so much debt, the lineups at the food banks, getting rid of something like
00:09:43.580 the carbon tax. I think a lot of us need to realize that we don't need to hold back as much
00:09:48.360 as perhaps we thought we used to. Censorship doesn't come cheap. Neither does fighting to
00:09:53.700 save the planet. As you pointed out here to us, Chris, the ambassador for climate change,
00:09:59.520 which is not a role that existed and should exist because, you know, climate change is not a country,
00:10:04.380 believe it or not. But our Canadian ambassador to climate change, Catherine Stewart, has spent in the
00:10:08.520 less than two years $254,000 in travel expenses. This includes stays at luxury hotels, price tag up
00:10:17.380 to $623 a night. But that's a lot of air travel for someone who is saying we all need to reduce our
00:10:23.760 carbon footprint. Yes, exactly. It's so well summed up in that famous cartoon. I don't know the artist
00:10:29.560 who made it, but it shows what looks kind of like a farmer with like a trucker hat standing next to what
00:10:34.140 I think is his son. And he's looking up in the sky and it's just black with all these, you know,
00:10:39.160 airplane smoke trails. And he said, what's that, dad? Oh, politicians flying to the next climate summit.
00:10:45.800 Exactly. And this lady, I didn't even I to your point, I forgot she existed. I pay her salary. And so
00:10:51.940 do you. And so do all of your Canadian listeners and viewers. But I forgot she existed, number one.
00:10:56.840 And now she's racking up these massive costs. Nothing says save the planet and do your part
00:11:02.760 like sleeping in a $600 a night hotel. And again, it just it really cheapens the efforts that people
00:11:09.880 earnestly make, you know, things like making sure a fish habitat is clean or trying to, you know,
00:11:14.980 protect an endangered species. When you let bureaucrats, permanent government, this lady was not elected to
00:11:21.020 this job. Below your money like this under this greenwashing auspices of, oh, you know, climate
00:11:26.900 change. It does two things. One, it wastes your money completely. Two, it weakens your argument.
00:11:33.460 So the next time you're earnestly trying to say, you know what, maybe we should plant a few more trees.
00:11:38.000 Let's make sure we have clean drinking water here. It sours people on helping the environment
00:11:43.380 because they see what a scam this stuff is. Yeah. And I was reading through her job description
00:11:49.020 because I genuinely was curious what it was. And there were a number of points listed. So I don't
00:11:54.200 want to oversimplify. But the first one, the first one that the government lists is coordinating with
00:11:58.800 Canadian missions. So that's, you know, embassies and permanent offices, coordinating with Canadian
00:12:04.100 missions to put the government of Canada's environmental policies into practice, particularly
00:12:08.060 as those policies relate to climate change. So I'm just imagining her flying around to our embassies to
00:12:13.280 make sure they're using LED light bulbs, basically. So, you know, she flies to the embassy in, I don't know
00:12:18.440 what the capital of Mozambique is. I apologize. You know, she flies to our embassy there and says,
00:12:22.760 oh, well, yep. You know, you're, you got rid of the coal furnace. Great. And then she flies to our
00:12:27.100 UN mission in New York and says, oh, yeah, you got the LEDs in. All right. I've saved the planet here.
00:12:32.800 Let's go inspect your low flush toilet. Let's make sure. Oh, yeah. I can see her with like a,
00:12:38.120 we should, oh, that would be a good stunt. We should send her spools of weather stripping.
00:12:43.300 So the next time she's visiting, she has to take the doors. She's at some embassy, just like
00:12:46.860 slap them across the windows. Yeah. With a tape measure. There it is. They're really easy ones.
00:12:51.560 She's basically like those door-to-door energy efficiency audit salespeople now, but she's
00:12:55.480 getting, you know, 234,000 in travel expenses every two years to do it. Yes, exactly. And again,
00:13:01.560 it's one of those things, right, where, you know, you imagine 250 grand, like think of the down payment
00:13:07.200 on a house that people could make with that sort of stuff. Like every single nickel is coming out of
00:13:12.300 taxpayer's money. Like imagine your elderly aunt, imagine, you know, your cousin who's just trying
00:13:17.040 to get his trade school going. Like every nickel comes from their pockets. And what do you have to
00:13:22.400 show for it? And that's the crucial point here. Emissions have gone up in Canada. All of this
00:13:26.920 government's environmental policy has not amounted to a hill of beans. All right, Chris Sims, we will
00:13:31.360 talk to you next Monday. Thanks so much for coming on as always. You bet. Thanks for listening to the
00:13:35.880 Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.