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

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Taxpayers Federation's Chris Sims joins us to talk about the Trudeau government's plan to create a new agency that will regulate what you can and can't do online. She also talks about the dangers of government censorship and snitching culture.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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. 0.98
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 1.00
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 0.94
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 1.00
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 0.99
00:11:43.380 because they see what a scam this stuff is. Yeah. And I was reading through her job description 0.56
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 0.99
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, 1.00
00:12:38.120 we should, oh, that would be a good stunt. We should send her spools of weather stripping. 1.00
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 0.97
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.