Juno News - February 16, 2021Trudeau’s War on Guns is a War on Facts
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Summary
Justin Trudeau's war on guns is also a war on facts, argues Andrew Lawton. Coming up, he says diversity is our strength, but does that extend to education diversity? The Andrew Lawrence Show starts right now on Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
Transcript
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This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, how Justin Trudeau's War on Guns is also a war on facts.
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Also, he says diversity is our strength. Does that extend to education diversity?
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Welcome back to the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
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Great to have you tuned into the program here as we enter a new era in Canada
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in which facts don't matter, laws don't matter, the nature of good and bad don't matter.
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The war on guns is existing from the Liberals, irrespective of all of these things.
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And you know what? We've talked about this in the past, and I get a lot of pushback from people
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who aren't gun owners, who are from cities or whatever, maybe they're just from backgrounds.
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that have never put them in the same room as a firearm.
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But people that think, well, this doesn't affect me, I'm not a gun owner.
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You know what? There are 2 million Canadians who are gun owners.
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But even if you are not, the way the Liberals are taking aim at gun ownership and gun owners
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And the reason why is because if the Liberals and the government more broadly
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has no respect for property, no respect for facts or evidence or constitutional liberties
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or all of these things, then it's only a matter of time before they go after something
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that you do own or something that does affect you.
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The bill that the Liberals tabled today, Bill C-21, an act to amend certain acts and to make
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certain consequential amendments with regard to firearms.
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This is the long-awaited bill on firearms reforms, or let's be real, confiscation measures
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that the Liberals promised after they banned unilaterally and summarily 1,500 different variants
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Now, the reason they did that without actually having the long-standing, longer-term bill that
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they're tabling now is because they did it on the back of a napkin because they wanted
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to use the political capital they thought they seized from the horrific Nova Scotia shooting,
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the one that started in Portapique, and devastated that community, claimed so many lives, and by
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the way, did it without the use of any legally owned firearms.
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They thought they had enough public support and buy-in because of that horrific attack that
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And they're still trying to ride that wave, irrespective of facts, irrespective of all
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of the things that you'd think would matter and actually should matter if you're talking
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about taking Canadians' property and essentially barring them from doing something that is causing
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Because gun crime does not come from legal guns.
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Gun crime does not come from legal gun owners, from law-abiding citizens who happen to like sports
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shooting or hunting or going to the range or even just collecting.
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But let's look at all of the ways that this bill is going to go after them.
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The government is going to introduce a new red flag law that would basically allow anyone
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to go to the court and say, I think you should take away Joe's firearm.
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I don't like the way that he and his wife are behaving.
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You could actually use this to petition the court to have their guns immediately confiscated
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Now, to be clear, I actually don't think a red flag law is necessarily the worst thing
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The problem is that we already have a mechanism in the law that allows police to take away
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guns from someone who is going to cause harm to others.
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So what right is this giving authorities on top of that?
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Also, the surrender of firearms pending legal challenge of license revocation.
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So now you no longer have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
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This would require an individual to surrender their guns during a legal challenge of their
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Actually good to hear the liberals talking about this because they've been pretending that
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the issues are coming entirely from law-abiding gun owners and that there is no border issue
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This is, I'd say, the most dangerous provision, however.
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Support municipalities that wish to restrict handguns.
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So what this would do is actually allow the municipality of whichever, Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, London, Windsor, doesn't matter,
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would allow a municipality to ban you from possessing or transporting a handgun, even if you are legally
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You've proven that you're not a menace to society.
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A municipality could then ban you from having that in your home and also ban you from storing
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So one of the ideas that's been put forward is central storage.
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So if you want to own a handgun, well, you can't keep it at home.
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Now there's a lot of risk with that, but this goes even beyond that because a municipality
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could say the range can't store it, the gun store can't store it, and you can't store it.
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And you can't store it with someone else because then they would need to have a registration
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So what the government is effectively doing is allowing city bylaws to make your legally
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And before you go down the road of, well, who needs a handgun?
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Target shooting, collecting, people that have had a history of family members in law enforcement,
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so they have an affinity for these sorts of things.
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If you're not causing any risk to anyone, you're not shooting people, you do not have
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to justify, or let me clarify, in a sensible society, you should not have to justify why
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Legally, the government has said you're safe, you're secure.
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Here are the rules you have to follow to store it.
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But now a municipal government can go on top of that and take aim at your property and
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Well, what happens if all of the municipalities decide to do this?
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This is only going to further rural-urban divides that are already very significant and
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But this is going to be monumental because, you know, the places like Toronto and Vancouver
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Toronto has actually been begging the government to give them the power to ban handguns for
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I'm not sure how many handgun owners there are in Vancouver.
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You probably would have moved to another city if you were the type of person that wanted
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But nevertheless, cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, which cover large swaths of the population,
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are going to avail themselves of this right from the government.
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Which kind of goes around provincial governments who are supposed to have the ultimate oversight,
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A, of a lot of the firearms restrictions, and B, of the way municipalities structure.
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But this is the whole thing that the government is doing now.
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You could actually be criminalized for violating a municipal bylaw if your municipality decides it
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wants to make it so that you can't have or use or transport a handgun.
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They're going after the ones that they banned last year.
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The AR-15s, the Mini-14, other variations like that.
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They didn't go after handguns, but they're basically rolling out the red carpet for municipalities
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So it will become illegal without the government actually having to have the gonads
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to criminalize the possession of these handguns.
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And ultimately, everyone's just going to have to start, you know, living in Okotoks or whatever,
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because no cities are going to be allowing these things.
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The government will ensure mid-velocity replica firearms are prohibited.
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Now, I'm going to give you the summary of this.
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If you have a toy gun that looks like a government-banned gun, that's going to be illegal to buy or sell.
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So if you have it, you're fine, but if you've got a toy gun, even an unregulated airsoft rifle
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that happens to look like an AR-15 or even, I mean, theoretically, a paintball gun would qualify,
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So you're going to be able to keep your so-called replica, but you can't transfer it.
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You can't import it, export it, sell, buy, anything like that.
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And it's only good if your air gun doesn't look like a conventional regulated firearm.
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So, oh, goody. So you can still have like the giant bright green Nerf gun or whatever,
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but you can't have an airsoft gun that looks cool enough to actually want to own it.
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So toy guns are now part of this so-called scourge on society.
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The irony is this was supposed to be the buyback announcement.
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We were supposed to be hearing about the government's buyback plan,
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but they didn't actually have a buyback plan here.
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They've just said they're going to come up with one in the future.
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The one thing we do know is that it's not going to be mandatory.
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You can sell your AR-15 back to the government or you can hold on to it.
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But if you hold on to it, you cannot do anything with it ever again until the end of time.
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You can't even will it to someone after you've died.
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You are just sitting on basically a piece of metal.
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So this is going to make it so that when people do sell them back to the government,
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which incidentally, how do you sell something back that the government never had in the first place?
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It's confiscation with a little bit of a financial aspect.
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So what the government is doing, again, pretending that it is giving you a choice,
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pretending that it's giving you the opportunity here to make a decision for yourself when in
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actuality, they're just trying to make it so convoluted and so difficult that most people
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will just go along with it because what the heck else are you going to do?
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And again, before you say, well, who needs an AR-15?
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And by the way, as much as the AR-15 tends to get most of the brunt of the discussion here,
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there were a lot of the 1,500 guns and gun variants that the liberals banned that were
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So when they say, well, these were just guns that were used to kill people, for starters,
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even sport shooters are not using them to kill people.
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But there were guns that were owned by indigenous people, people in rural areas, people in the
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north that were actually being used for hunting, were being used for sustenance.
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And the government has now decided that these things are all banned.
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So it's not just about going after AR-15s because, oh, well, who needs one of those?
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There were guns that were actually essential to people's daily lives that were caught up
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They've actually continued to double and triple down on that.
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Even today, with the line that we keep hearing over and over again, including most recently
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from Bill Blair, that the guns the liberals are going after are only for people who want
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Earlier this morning, Minister Lumetti and I had the honor to present to the House Bill
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C-21, a bill that went passed will significantly strengthen gun control in Canada.
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And with this bill, we are keeping our promise to Canadians to reduce gun violence by strengthening
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our laws, prohibiting firearms which were designed only to kill, by placing significant and effective
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new restrictions on guns that are used by criminals, and by creating a regime to remove firearms
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from dangerous situations made deadly by the presence of a firearm.
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On May 1st of last year, our government took the extraordinary and necessary action to prohibit
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These were weapons not designed for hunting or sports shooting activities, but rather for
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They're combat weapons designed to be used in tactical situations.
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They're just trying to stir up this fear, this misplaced fear that doesn't align with the
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We don't have a massive gun crime problem compared to other jurisdictions.
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And when we do have gun crime, it's coming from gangs in cities, not from people or institutions
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or organizations that will at all be affected by this confiscation and disarmament.
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So this is not going to be a package of reforms that will do anything.
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He said, you know, yeah, there have been people that have been gunned down by legal firearms and
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He was talking about the legal with a shooting at Dawson College.
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How is this criminalization going to functionally stop someone from doing that?
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Same as the Portapique, Nova Scotia massacre, the rampage there.
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How would anything prevent someone who already was acquiring guns outside of the law from
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And Bill Blair, during today's announcement, had even acknowledged that in a way.
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He said, well, you know, the problem with the buyback plan is that we don't know where
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Uh, so we're going to force people who don't want to sell them back to register them.
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So the people that don't register them were criminals who don't care about the law.
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So the only people penalized, the only people even affected are those who show a willingness
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and conscientiousness to engage with the law in the prescribed manner.
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As in law-abiding gun owners aren't the problem.
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So anyone who says they are is being willfully disingenuous or actually just has no idea what
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There was one particular point, though, that really jumped out at me that I had to share.
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Because again, we can talk about this person disliking guns, this person liking them.
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But that is different than willingly and willfully making stuff up, which Justin Trudeau did when
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he made this comment about self-defense, about personal protection.
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In Canada, people can use guns for hunting and for sport shooting, not for personal protection.
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And there is no need for military-style assault weapons anywhere in this country.
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You actually can, in this country, use anything for self-defense, for personal protection, as
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long as it is proportionate to the level of risk that you were facing.
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Now, in some way, he is close to something that's correct.
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You cannot own a gun for the purpose of personal protection.
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If you are doing your interview with a firearms officer because you are trying to get a license
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If you say, for home defense, you're not going to get your license.
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So that's true, that you cannot own it for that primary purpose.
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But you are allowed to use your firearm to defend yourself.
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Now, that doesn't mean police won't try to charge you and that you won't have a massive,
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massive fight ahead when you try to have those charges dropped, as has happened in a number
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But you legally can use a firearm for self-defense based on all of the case law we see of people
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So Justin Trudeau is actually saying something that is fundamentally untrue here when he misrepresents
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the law in Canada and says that a gun serves no purpose for personal protection.
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So this is very important because facts still matter.
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Maybe not in the course of making the legislation that we saw today, but they should matter and do
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matter if we want to have an honest discussion about firearms.
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I'm all for an honest discussion because I know that if you have an honest one, it's going to
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lead to facts that do not justify the gun grab that the government is imposing right now.
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When we come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
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Among the most famous words in Canadian politics by now, diversity is our strength.
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Well, is that true in the education system across the country in the various provinces?
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A new report from ARPA Canada, the Association for Reform Political Action, says it is and actually
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lays out some really important recommendations on how we can get more diversity in education,
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which ultimately is more choice for parents and by extension, a better array of options
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It's called Educational Diversity, right to the point about what it's about there.
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Joining me from ARPA Canada is lawyer Andre Schutten.
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Now, like I sort of alluded to earlier, we hear lots of talk about diversity.
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All kinds of different people come to the table with different experiences and different
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And that's usually going to be a strength for us.
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The problem when it comes to education is that when it comes to diversity, we're not
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We're not thinking about a diversity of cultures or a diversity of institutions or of groups.
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And that's where I think we need to see more diversity.
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Right now, while there might be a diversity of people within one big education system, a single
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system, there's not a diversity in approaches to education in different institutions providing
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education for our kids and not a diversity in recognizing that there's different philosophical
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So we're just advocating for a lot more of that.
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We have as available options right now, homeschooling, private schools, even so the vast majority
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of students enrolled in the report mentions this are in the public system and under the
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banner of the public system, Catholic schools, charter schools if you're in Alberta or the
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And I think it's somewhere in the range of around 92% or just shy of that that are choosing
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What's not diverse about the system if parents can choose to go into them and are just in
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large numbers choosing to go into the public stream?
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Yeah, I think that number is actually pretty staggering.
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When we see that 92% of Canadian kids are being educated by the state, by the civil government,
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Our first step is to say, well, who's actually first responsible?
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Who's primarily responsible for the education of our children?
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But when certain options are just off the table because of, let's say, finances or because
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they're not being promoted enough or made available enough, that becomes a problem.
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I think a lot of parents aren't even aware that independent education, education provided
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not by the state but by other actors, that it's a good option, that it's an option that should
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And certainly in some provinces, like in Ontario, there's certainly no financial support for
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Some of the messaging around public education is basically that a good citizen ought to send
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And I think that kind of messaging needs to change as well.
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When I was raised, and I was raised in Ontario, and I've lived here all of my life, the private
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school was just for the really rich kids and the really wealthy kids.
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And that was the image in my mind that the private school had.
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And I've learned later on in life that that isn't in fact the case, that there are a lot
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of private religious schools, I'd say are the most notable examples, where people who
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have very just average middle-class family incomes find a way to scrape and scrounge and put
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And you're right, they have to do it really while paying for two educations.
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Their taxes are still going towards the public school system, and then they're paying a tuition
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One of the recommendations in this report, which I think is very important, is allow education
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funding according to a per capita formula for all public school, independent school, and
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That if you're a parent and you want to go to a private school, you could take that tax money
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that you're paying towards the public school and reallocate it.
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Now, there's different ways of doing it, but that's the basic thrust of it.
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What are we interested in supporting as provincial governments in this country?
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And if it's to support students and to empower parents to make good decisions for their own
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children, then let the money follow the child.
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Don't let the money just go to a system and fund the system.
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And so that kind of a model will, it's going to have a couple of good effects.
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One is going to increase, I think, efficiencies because those schools, various schools will want
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to be able to have your child come to their school so that they can educate them and develop
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But importantly, from our perspective, it's going to increase responsibility, the ownership
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of the responsibility and the decisions of parents.
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Parents are going to be not saying, well, civil government, you take care of making sure my kid
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Rather, it's each parent is going to say, now I'm invested.
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I want to investigate how things are going at that school, because if it's not going
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well at this school, I'm going to pull my kid out and put them in that other school
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where they're learning better, they're reading better, they're doing better on their math
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scores, they're understanding concepts like biology and chemistry better.
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There's no more bullying over here compared to there.
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And that they can make those kinds of decisions and freely do so without too much concern.
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How solid is the evidence on academic performance that you just mentioned in comparison
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So across the board, independent schooling produces a better result for students.
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Their marks are going to be higher than students coming out of the public system.
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In fact, and this is actually really important, is that independent schooling increases the
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performance, particularly for marginalized students and economically disadvantaged students.
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So the people that we should be most concerned about, students from racialized communities,
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for example, or students that are very poor, come from poor parts of cities and parts of the
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country, they're going to do better when we have independent schools in the area.
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In fact, there's even studies that show that where there's an independent school close by
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a public school, that the public school students will do better.
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It'll actually increase even their performance.
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So you see that more in jurisdictions like British Columbia, for example, that does support independent
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Although independent schools don't quite get equal funding compared to the public system.
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I have to go back to that 91.8% number to get the precise figure of people that are in
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the public stream when they have theoretically the choice to go elsewhere, notwithstanding the
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But I do have to ask, is that, in your view, just because of a lack of option or feeling
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Because if that many people or even a large subset of that are just choosing that system,
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is this really just a small minority of parents that you're trying to advocate for a solution
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And I think that there certainly are parents that do just prefer the local school up the
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street, you know, a big, large school that's in their neighborhood.
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And it can also be considerations like, you know, the local school, the local publicly funded
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We'll have a lot more options than a lot of independent schools do, like, you know, larger
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gyms, maybe swimming pools, huge athletic facilities and those sorts of things.
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But again, that would come back down to that question of funding and having, you know, the
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extra financial resources to develop those programs.
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If more resources like that were made available, I think when parents had a fuller range of options
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there, they would start making better use of it.
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I think that there is, you know, there's been a culture that has developed over the last,
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you know, 30, 40 years that that's very dependent on the civil government when it comes to education.
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And it's going to lead to worrying developments down the road.
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I mean, this is more at the philosophical level, Andrew.
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But I think that where we depend on the civil government to not only fund, not only regulate,
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but even to provide, you know, the moral and pedagogical raising of our children, that's
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a problem because it results in, among other things, it results in a lack of responsibility
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on the part of parents towards their own children, a lack of drive and determination to make those
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Then the other thing I would note is that that number is shifting slightly.
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That 91.8% of people in the public school system is slowly but surely decreasing because I think more
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and more people are being a little upset with how the quality of education in public schools and what's
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going on in a lot of these mega schools in particular.
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And actually, this last year with the whole COVID pandemic and what's happened with a lot of the
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schools, I think that's actually provided us an opportunity to really evaluate, is this the best way
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Is it to cram all kinds of kids through a, you know, through a big 3,000 student school
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Or is there better ways to do schooling still maybe with an institutional school, but one that's
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much smaller and it's culturally or religiously connected with the families that support it?
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Going way back to 2007, I remember when in Ontario, the topic of faith-based schools and
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funding faith-based schools publicly became a very toxic political issue.
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Then PC leader, John Tory, who had a great many other flaws, this wasn't one of them though,
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had raised this idea and there was a massive backlash.
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And I realize a lot's changed in the last 14 years, but a lot of people, I think, and I say
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this as a Christian, a lot of people get very, I think, instinctively uncomfortable with the
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idea of funding faith-based schools, irrespective of the Catholic school funding, which people
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seem to find is okay when other denominations aren't.
00:28:18.740
But the curriculum itself, is your view that there would be a core standardized curriculum
00:28:23.340
and then everyone would be able to build on top of that?
00:28:26.060
Or do you think that, honestly, we need to strip it back down and let individual schools
00:28:30.380
or school boards develop a curriculum in accordance with some sort of baseline standard?
00:28:36.860
Yeah, I think those things are definitely things that would need to be explored and so on.
00:28:41.000
But at base, I think the civil government has an interest in well-educated citizens.
00:28:48.100
So, you know, if an independent school, let's use a faith-based school, let's say there's
00:28:52.760
a faith-based school that exists and says, oh, we're educating kids.
00:28:56.020
But by the time these kids hit grade three, they still can't read.
00:28:59.060
By the time they hit grade eight, they can't do basic division or multiplication.
00:29:05.060
And I think that school's not doing what it's supposed to be doing.
00:29:09.060
And I think the civil government has an interest in ensuring some basic standards when it comes
00:29:15.300
to reading, writing, arithmetic, you know, history, science, civics, and so on.
00:29:21.620
But I think it has to be relatively limited because, you know, how far do we want to go?
00:29:26.300
We want to have still a diversity of options when it comes to pedagogical styles, like classical
00:29:32.020
education versus what we see today, which is standard in public education, or Montessori
00:29:37.600
schools, or there's all kinds of different approaches to education.
00:29:41.920
Let's let that diversity happen because there's a diversity of kids.
00:29:45.360
I look at my own family to make it a bit personal.
00:29:49.360
I have a son who's right now thriving in a classical school, which really focuses on the
00:29:56.360
And I have a daughter who's not yet in school, but I don't think she's actually going to do
00:30:01.180
There might be another school where she'll do much better in, where she'll thrive in,
0.95
00:30:05.080
where she has gifts and talents that will be better expressed in a different kind of school
0.99
00:30:11.160
So I think we need to be able to accommodate that.
00:30:14.040
But frankly, sending my kids to two different independent schools will break the bank.
00:30:21.860
The limits that the civil government has when it comes to the diversity of educational options
00:30:26.280
makes it very, very difficult for us to choose what's best for our kids.
00:30:30.460
And that's a problem in a diverse country like Canada.
0.60
00:30:34.200
And it sounds as though being in Ontario like me, you have the worst available option available
00:30:43.160
And again, when you look at the law, and so I'm a lawyer and I often will look at this
00:30:51.360
I mean, there's enough things in our charter, for example, that would encourage a diversity
00:30:59.180
I mean, take section 2023 of the charter, which talks about a multicultural society and
00:31:06.820
how all of our rights and freedoms have to flow through that kind of a lens.
00:31:11.600
Well, a great way to enhance our multicultural society is by enhancing a diverse spectrum
00:31:20.660
That's section 27 of the charter, sorry, not section 23.
00:31:24.180
And actually, when you look at international law, you see even stronger language for independent
00:31:29.580
There's some really neat things that have been passed both at the European Parliament and
00:31:34.040
at the UN, which speak about how we have to respect a child's parents' religious
00:31:41.100
and cultural identity when it comes to issues like education.
00:31:44.720
And I think that we can learn from the international community on this.
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The report Educational Diversity, published by the Association for Reformed Political Action,
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Joining me from ARPA Canada is André Schutten, General Legal Counsel and Director of Law and
00:32:08.640
We'll be back in just a few days with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show here
00:32:17.200
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:32:19.360
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.