Juno News - US extends border ban on unvaccinated, so some Canadians are still trapped

00:00:00.000 We'll be right back.

00:00:30.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:58.080 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:01:05.740 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:01:08.200 This is The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.

00:01:10.840 You're tuned in live to Canada's most irreverent talk show.

00:01:14.640 It is April 21st, Thursday, and I think we're at about 3.01 p.m. Eastern time.

00:01:20.560 So traffic and weather will be coming up momentarily, just like my old radio days.

00:01:24.540 It's good to have you aboard what's going to be a bit of a packed program.

00:01:27.720 We'll be talking to Barry Cooper later on about Quebec wanting more representation despite a shrinking population.

00:01:36.060 Also going to be talking about the United States indefinitely extending its closure of its land border to unvaccinated foreign nationals,

00:01:44.140 including that means unvaccinated Canadians, which combined with the indefinite vaccine mandate for Canadian air travel

00:01:51.580 means people in this country who are unvaccinated are still effectively trapped in Canada. So we'll

00:01:58.000 talk about that later on. But I first want to do something we don't get the opportunity to do,

00:02:02.440 which is go to a live guest on the road as we speak at this exact moment. You may have seen

00:02:08.140 footage of this man, James Topp, a 28-year Canadian Armed Forces veteran who has been

00:02:14.120 marching west to east across this great country, starting in BC. I believe if we can put up the

00:02:19.980 map now i'm going to get his confirmation but you can track his journey at canadamarches.ca

00:02:24.540 and i i believe he's somewhere on the trans canada highway just west of balgonie saskatchewan and my

00:02:31.460 apologies to the people of balgonie if i've mispronounced that uh james top joins us now

00:02:36.420 literally from the road uh james good to be with you thanks very much for coming on today is they

00:02:40.820 am i correct on that you're on the trans canada highway in saskatchewan that's correct we're

00:02:45.920 actually east of Goni now, we're on our way to Capelle, Saskatchewan.

00:02:52.020 Okay, so you're making quite a bit of ground here,

00:02:54.720 because I took that screenshot, I think, about 15 minutes or so ago.

00:02:58.820 How much are you covering every day on this journey of yours?

00:03:02.860 Well, we were a little bit slower at the start because we were getting into our condition.

00:03:08.180 It was a conditioning phase physically.

00:03:11.160 And now we're up to about 50 kilometers a day.

00:03:14.340 uh but the terrain here is more conducive to that kind of thing and i know we've had a fair

00:03:25.220 bit of bad weather in the last few days certainly in ontario i know in alberta as well so it's not

00:03:30.400 necessarily the pleasant spring jaunt you might have anticipated but it looks like you've dressed

00:03:34.300 for it at least yeah yeah we had some interesting weather experiences on uh over the last couple of

00:03:40.940 days so so what is it you're doing why are you walking this isn't just about

00:03:45.440 fitness for you you're trying to make a point what is that point yeah well the

00:03:49.900 reasons why I'm marching so that's a distinction that needs to be made

00:03:53.940 because I'm marching with a purpose and a formed body of people and we're there

00:04:00.440 we're going to complete a mission and that mission is this is a there's two

00:04:04.080 things well actually several components of this mission so number one I

00:04:09.680 I transferred from the regular army to the reserves in 2019, so I basically went from

00:04:18.880 full-time army to part-time. That enabled me to pursue a career in the public service as a

00:04:28.320 civilian with the RCMP, where I had a great job working in Chililac, British Columbia.

00:04:35.600 then

00:04:37.980 we've lost James' audio there.

00:04:55.060 James, do we still have you?

00:04:58.360 Okay, we don't have your audio, James,

00:05:00.380 so we'll have to get that reconnected here.

00:05:03.060 My producer will work with you,

00:05:04.940 and we'll try to get that sorted out.

00:05:06.520 And once we get you back on, we will.

00:05:08.640 Because what I find fascinating about this

00:05:10.960 is that you see,

00:05:12.600 and I want to hear the end of that story here,

00:05:14.440 but just from other bits I've seen of James's story

00:05:16.700 and of what he's doing here,

00:05:18.080 the whole point of what we are seeing now

00:05:21.340 is ordinary citizens rising up.

00:05:23.520 And I don't mean that in a derisive way,

00:05:25.080 but people rising up

00:05:26.780 because they feel that the problems facing society,

00:05:29.900 facing them as individuals

00:05:30.960 are not being solved by government.

00:05:33.140 And this was a big part of the thrust behind the Freedom Convoy.

00:05:36.340 You had a lot of people who were, and we'll talk to James about this, were as individual

00:05:40.880 truckers, activists, social media people just saying, we've had enough.

00:05:45.240 And that was born of an appetite for someone to do something because the people that are

00:05:50.180 elected to solve these problems weren't doing it.

00:05:53.080 The people in the Conservative Party weren't opposing the government.

00:05:56.180 The people in the government were certainly putting more barriers on people rather than

00:06:00.780 taking them away.

00:06:01.540 And I think that's been the tremendously significant part that we're seeing in just basically this era in Canadian politics.

00:06:09.640 I think I see we have James again.

00:06:11.620 We'll try to get him back on, and hopefully the audio has been sorted out here.

00:06:15.040 James?

00:06:16.280 Yeah, can you hear me now?

00:06:17.260 All right, I can hear you now.

00:06:19.000 So when we lost you, you were telling us about what this mission is that you're on.

00:06:24.540 Yeah, so basically, I was placed on leave without pay for my public service job.

00:06:29.880 I'm still employed in the military as a reservist, and the mandates affected me because, personally, I have strong feelings about disclosing my medical status.

00:06:43.760 Number two, I don't feel that the government has the authority to tell me how to be healthy and what I need to do to be healthy.

00:06:52.560 So that was my issues with the mandates that affected federal government employees.

00:06:57.400 Because I pushed back on that, I refused to disclose my medical status.

00:07:07.520 I was placed on leave without pay back in November, and then I was informed by the military that it would be released on an item 5F.

00:07:15.040 So are you still hearing me?

00:07:16.700 Yep, I can hear you.

00:07:17.480 And what is that item 5F?

00:07:20.620 So an item 5F is an inability or unwillingness to change your behavior.

00:07:25.920 and my behavior was not complying with the chief defense staff direction on vaccination so

00:07:32.820 um that is a threat that has been hung over the heads of a number of canadian forces personnel

00:07:40.340 i don't think it's uh widely known in the public that this kind of coercion is going on so

00:07:45.920 basically the federal government you have comply or you lose your paycheck um what happened to me

00:07:54.380 personally was that uh it affected me deeply psychologically and i was kind of in a state

00:08:02.620 of despair i do receive a pension from my regular fourth service and um that paid my mortgage but i

00:08:12.140 need to supplement it i end up getting a job as a tow truck driver in hope bc where i live

00:08:18.380 and what ended up happening was i came to the uh i came to realize just how hard the canadian

00:08:24.060 public is working out there and it's the canadian public that is paying for the federal government

00:08:29.260 which was in turn paying my paycheck and it was what allowed me to pursue a career in the armed

00:08:35.900 forces for 28 years so uh i saw protests going on i saw a group of people coming together to voice

00:08:44.940 the same concerns i had i saw them in ottawa it inspired me and at the same time i was outraged

00:08:52.700 by their treatment and now we had a federal government that was not willing to listen to

00:08:57.000 its own population not even willing to entertain a dialogue of sorts so and when the people you're

00:09:06.560 referring to there you're talking about the convoy protest correct yeah that's right that's right

00:09:10.340 yeah now let me ask you then james because that convoy brought thousands of people to ottawa

00:09:16.100 truckers non-truckers vaccinated unvaccinated and even with that showing the government didn't

00:09:21.940 relent they didn't drop the vaccine mandate so with all due respect why do you think your march

00:09:26.700 which is a lot smaller it's you and a small group there not hundreds of trucks why do you think this

00:09:31.140 is going to be the thing that can make that difference because what I'm hearing now from a

00:09:37.180 lot of veterans uh they're supporting me on this and they have plans to meet me in Ottawa

00:09:41.740 so my this isn't just me marching to Ottawa to announce that you know I've arrived I'm not going

00:09:49.740 there to throw a tantrum or call people names. I'm going there with a purpose. And the purpose

00:09:54.420 is to reestablish communication with the federal government so that I can remind them who they

00:09:59.880 work for. Why is it going to make a difference? Because I have taken pages from the convoy

00:10:09.340 strategy and talked it over with some folks. How can we make a difference? So we're engaging

00:10:16.980 right now directly with members of parliament through letter writing and emails and we are

00:10:22.820 getting responses from them and we are asking them to come and meet with us when i arrive there

00:10:27.860 in uh in near the end of june yeah now obviously you don't know i mean you said earlier you're

00:10:34.340 doing about 50 kilometers a day there i'm assuming you're going to have good days and bad days so you

00:10:38.580 don't necessarily have a precise arrival time but you're expecting to be there by the end of june

00:10:43.220 i don't but i have what's called we back in the day in the military we have nlt or a no later

00:10:47.700 than date and i want to get there no later than june 30th so that means um whatever happens

00:10:53.860 between now and then um i have calculated that it's doable as long as i can achieve that

00:11:01.860 between 40 and 50 kilometers a day and then take appropriate rest days when necessary

00:11:06.980 so the thing is that gives the members of parliament now plenty of time

00:11:13.440 to try to mull over this and think about the optics of what it's going to look like

00:11:20.100 for them to ignore a veteran and a group of people who feel the same way including the

00:11:27.340 veterans that are going to arrive in ottawa to meet me what the optics of that ignoring

00:11:34.000 that type of peaceful protest are going to be?

00:11:37.980 The treatment of truckers was obviously the force and the spark

00:11:43.720 that galvanized the trucker convoy.

00:11:45.700 The veterans, I saw a lot of veterans that were out in Ottawa

00:11:48.800 and veterans that were supporting the convoy movement

00:11:51.220 because in my view, veterans are very similar.

00:11:55.920 And I'm not saying that the sacrifice that veterans have made is similar,

00:11:58.560 but the dynamic is similar to the essential workers dynamic

00:12:01.180 in that on one hand, you have people in government saying

00:12:03.660 these people are so great. We need to support them. We need to be grateful. And then on the

00:12:07.600 other hand, you have these punitive vaccine mandates that for active duty soldiers and

00:12:11.520 people like yourself, reservists that are just saying, you know what, all of the stuff you've

00:12:15.460 done doesn't matter if you're not going to disclose your medical status here. Would you say

00:12:20.520 that the support from veterans has been as strong as you'd like it to be? Or do you think there are

00:12:24.800 some people that are still saying, yeah, you know, we had to do, because again, the military has a

00:12:29.360 number of vaccine mandates that are required depending on duty the COVID vaccination is just

00:12:34.140 one more the government has said in defense of it. Sorry so the question is do I have the support

00:12:41.940 from the veterans community? Well the question is are you are you confident that you have a lot

00:12:46.720 of support from veterans or do you think that veterans are invited on? I am I am hearing from

00:12:51.540 them number one I only need the support of one veteran and that's my best friend that I'm going

00:12:58.420 hoping to be meeting near winnipeg to be honest but um i the veterans who i have to stop to

00:13:06.500 as part of um they are forming a new group called vets for freedom um and this is uh these are

00:13:15.220 folks who are directly involved in the protests earlier this year from the veteran community

00:13:20.340 and I'm hearing from the founders

00:13:27.200 and the board of directors from my organization.

00:13:32.500 I'm in contact with them.

00:13:35.200 They're in support of me

00:13:36.820 and I'm pretty confident that I'm going to get the support

00:13:44.000 from the veterans community that I need

00:13:47.080 because I think this is where we're at

00:13:50.200 in this country is it's going to take the veterans to stand up

00:13:54.160 to kind of show the rest of the country

00:13:58.180 how it's done.

00:14:01.840 Where are you staying along your journey?

00:14:06.720 Yeah, we are getting accommodations from folks

00:14:10.300 who open their homes to us or they arrange for us to stay in

00:14:14.340 like a town hall or a church basement

00:14:18.200 or they were putting their funds together to get us into a motel or something.

00:14:23.760 When this originally started, I had thought this was going to be a kind of a one-man show

00:14:30.980 and I would be able to self-finance.

00:14:34.100 But as there was obviously a need or a response for this kind of activity,

00:14:40.940 this has become a lot bigger than I had imagined with the group I have on the ground with me.

00:14:46.820 There's nine of us right now.

00:14:48.200 And then plus I have a bunch of online volunteers managing the website and social media.

00:14:54.660 So just to answer your question, that's where we're staying.

00:14:59.280 And it's been a demonstration of the generosity of Canadians.

00:15:04.700 And their support and encouragement has been the driving force in this

00:15:10.220 because I wouldn't have made it this far, this fast,

00:15:14.740 without the ability to be able to put my head down at night on a mattress yeah and is anyone

00:15:21.220 allowed to walk with you or do you have a pretty organized group oh no i get folks like weekdays i

00:15:29.060 get it you know folks are got they got jobs and they got commitments but during the weekends uh

00:15:35.540 interested people will show up like uh like in a soy is british columbia for example

00:15:45.940 uh i think we had about 20 or 30 people marching with me for about you know a good

00:15:52.500 20 kilometers and that's that's the kind of uh that you know folks who are interested you know

00:16:00.420 just showing up marching for a day for a few hours like I got Dennis here he's from the area

00:16:08.180 he's uh also volunteers and helps us with the management of our online activity so he's going

00:16:17.060 to be here for a couple hours just before we got online a dad a fellow named Ram and his dad

00:16:25.540 joined us for a couple of kilometers so anybody can join in as long as they realize that we're

00:16:32.780 moving pretty quick and they're both really dressed and they have some way of getting picked

00:16:37.200 up when they get tired out. Yeah try to do some laps around your city block first just to make

00:16:44.580 sure you can keep up with them. I'm even looking right now and impressed at how much even while

00:16:48.360 you do the interview you're moving along there. You can track James and learn lots more about his

00:16:53.060 journey at canadamarches.ca. I know you've still got a couple of months left on your way to Ottawa,

00:16:58.320 but I appreciate so much you doing this and taking some time with me today, James. Thanks

00:17:02.220 very much and best of luck. Thank you. All right. That was James Taub marching to Ottawa with a

00:17:08.960 very similar message to the message that the Freedom Convoy brought. And again, he's not

00:17:13.680 being explicitly political in that. He's talking about values that are supposed to be above

00:17:18.500 politics, things like freedom, things like patriotism. If you look on his website, he's

00:17:22.940 talking about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And as I mentioned at the beginning, and I'll talk

00:17:27.840 about very shortly in this show, as of today, there's still no end in sight for when unvaccinated

00:17:35.700 Canadians will be allowed to leave the country. The U.S. restriction on unvaccinated foreign

00:17:40.980 nationals has been extended indefinitely. Earlier this week, Justin Trudeau and the

00:17:45.700 Transport Minister Omar Al-Ghabra would not give a deadline at all for when unvaccinated Canadians

00:17:51.840 would be able to board planes again, which means even if there's another country that doesn't have

00:17:56.020 a vaccine mandate or testing requirements or whatever, a Canadian who's not vaccinated has

00:18:01.600 no way of getting there. And that's a big problem in a country with a charter of rights and freedoms

00:18:06.760 that guarantees the right to freely enter, remain in or leave Canada. But again, as we've talked

00:18:12.080 about on this show on a number of occasions. We simply don't have a basic and fundamental respect

00:18:18.080 for a lot of these core freedoms. So thanks to people like James for taking a stand. And we'll

00:18:22.560 talk more about the U.S. border restriction very shortly. But I want to pivot to an issue which,

00:18:27.460 again, some people may think is a bit inside baseball, but is very significant when we talk

00:18:31.680 about representation in this country. Because Quebec is right now facing a bit of a demographic

00:18:37.360 challenge. Its population is sagging. A big part of that has been because Quebec is basically

00:18:43.080 enacting policies that force a lot of English speakers out. They're restrictive towards

00:18:47.820 immigration and less people are coming with the French language as their mother tongue.

00:18:53.480 But even in spite of that, they want more representation in the House of Commons. So

00:18:58.040 less people, more influence, which in a population-based House of Commons makeup doesn't

00:19:02.960 seem to make sense there there was a great piece about this in the c2c journal cal surprise quebec

00:19:08.720 wants more seats in the house of commons that is it was written by university of calgary professor

00:19:14.240 barry cooper who joins me on the line now professor it's good to talk to you thanks very much for

00:19:19.200 coming on today you bet andrew so i mean the basics of democracy in this country fairly

00:19:25.840 representative in nature why is it that quebec thinks it has a justification for more representation

00:19:32.960 Well, this actually goes back to a period before Confederation.

00:19:39.280 It goes back to the period of the Act of Union in 1840.

00:19:44.080 And interestingly enough, although we never talk about this, this was basically a kind of mainstay

00:19:50.960 of British imperial domination of other people in the overseas empire.

00:19:58.480 then the argument was that there were two founding races as they call them uh french and english

00:20:07.440 which is ridiculous canada was not founded it was created by an act of the imperial legislature

00:20:13.600 uh the americans might have they can make a case for a founding because they had a revolution we

00:20:18.480 never did anything like that but the argument was essentially political that if you had a french

00:20:25.400 and a, let's say, non-French, since they weren't just English,

00:20:29.280 they were Irish and Scots and, you know, heaven knows what else,

00:20:33.600 as the founding peoples, then that had to be represented somehow.

00:20:40.120 It was certainly not a democratic idea, which was one person, one vote,

00:20:46.140 or what back in the 19th century they called it representation by population

00:20:49.940 or rep by pop.

00:20:51.800 And interestingly enough, in the early days, Quebec, or what was then Canada East,

00:20:58.560 had a larger population than Canada West, or was bigger than Upper Canada.

00:21:05.980 So they were quite happy with representation by population.

00:21:09.200 But in the decades prior to Confederation, what's now Ontario became more populous than Quebec.

00:21:16.220 And then suddenly we had to have this kind of ethnic equality.

00:21:22.380 And it's been there ever since.

00:21:23.960 It's something that seems to have obsessed Laurentian Canada from, as I said, before Confederation.

00:21:30.920 It's never made much sense in this part of the country.

00:21:34.400 But, you know, not much in this part of the country makes sense, I think, to Laurentians either.

00:21:39.180 So, you know, there we are.

00:21:41.300 Yeah.

00:21:41.740 I mean, well, going back before the Act of Union, you had Lord Durham's report and that famous line of two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.

00:21:49.620 And in a lot of ways, we haven't moved much beyond that, it feels.

00:21:53.160 Well, certainly not in your part of the world.

00:21:55.140 That's for sure.

00:21:56.780 Otherwise, you know, these these kinds of statements and if you actually look at some of the some of the remarks that I quoted in that C2C piece, it's for normal Democratic Canadians.

00:22:11.740 I would say it's incredibly offensive.

00:22:15.040 What these Quebec politicians are saying,

00:22:18.040 we are really, really special,

00:22:20.540 and we don't want to give up one little bit of power.

00:22:25.720 And it was all about power.

00:22:26.980 It was really clear from when they were criticized

00:22:29.780 about what about the democracy, what about Repai Pop?

00:22:33.160 They said it has nothing to do with that.

00:22:35.220 It has to do with the percentage that we have now

00:22:38.220 as a founding people in this country.

00:22:41.740 none of which makes sense to, at least not to Westerners.

00:22:46.700 Yeah, and I think the important takeaway from that

00:22:49.080 is that Quebec doesn't view itself as one province of 10.

00:22:53.000 And every other province would see,

00:22:55.140 even if there are some regional blocks like Atlantic Canada,

00:22:57.740 like the prairies, every other province sees it itself

00:23:00.940 as being one province in 10, whereas Quebec doesn't.

00:23:04.320 And I think that's a key part of the problem here.

00:23:07.220 Yeah, no, absolutely it is.

00:23:08.320 uh i mean this is uh this is why um well a few years ago dave bergerson and i wrote this book

00:23:14.720 deconfederation canada without quebec and it it was it was pretty clear what the argument i mean

00:23:21.280 it's in the subtitle of the book uh we ended it with a nice french phrase bon voyage and bon chance

00:23:28.960 and it was not received well in Quebec, particularly by Francophone Quebecers. 0.86

00:23:42.720 They could not believe that these two rednecks from Alberta said, 0.95

00:23:47.040 you know, buy. Do what you wish. Just don't involve us in your undemocratic special 1.00

00:23:56.660 status requirements because we're not interested. Let's talk about the political response to this

00:24:03.260 here. And I want to make sure I'm getting the facts right here. But the Bloc Quebecois put

00:24:06.520 forward the motion to reject, quote, any scenario for redrawing the federal electoral map that would

00:24:13.260 result in Quebec losing one or more electoral districts or that would reduce Quebec's political

00:24:18.060 weight in the House of Commons. So even if everyone else went up and Quebec stayed the same,

00:24:23.380 they would object to that because of the relative proportion. But what's astonishing is that the

00:24:29.060 Bloc, the NDP and the Greens all voted unanimously for this, as did the Liberals. And a lot of

00:24:35.580 Conservatives, though, also voted for it. Yeah, it's and that's where I think it was it was chiefly

00:24:41.660 a regional division. There were some Western conservatives who voted for it, and they were

00:24:47.440 people, so far as I could tell anyway, who thinks that the kind of Laurentian focus of

00:24:55.320 the Conservative Party should be the most important part. Most of the dissenting votes in the

00:25:03.240 conservative party were from the west uh and it's it was a kind of instinctive um response you know

00:25:11.100 there goes quebec again you know they just want more stuff and uh uh you know quite frankly i

00:25:18.240 think a lot of westerners are kind of fed up with that so explain to me where this goes from here

00:25:25.140 because i i think there's this general fear that a lot of people have of of a revival of quebec

00:25:30.600 separation or separatism and Quebec secessionism. And I think there's probably an increasing number

00:25:36.200 of people in the left that would say, as you say, bon voyage, just, you know, okay, get on with it

00:25:40.840 already. But no one wants a country that's significantly divided if that division is

00:25:45.640 coming from Quebec. I think Western alienation is probably attracting a lot less sympathy from

00:25:49.940 the Laurentian elites. But where do you think this goes if Quebec doesn't get its way? Or do you

00:25:54.200 think that it's a given that will? Well, they've already got their way. They've got, this is going

00:26:00.180 be the law. I suppose the question is what the next conservative leader does about this,

00:26:11.860 particularly if the conservatives form the next government. That will be very interesting to see.

00:26:17.540 I suspect since in order to object to it in principle, you have to be willing to face down

00:26:25.540 or face up to uh the implications with respect to the independence of quebec or eventually

00:26:31.060 you might even say the independence of albert and saskatchewan you know it's it's it's a very

00:26:36.340 divisive uh matter of principle uh and it's it's one that is i don't think it's going to go away

00:26:43.060 uh it'll be papered over for a while but you know after a while even the paper gets a bit

00:26:48.100 thin and you can see through it what strikes me too barry is that it's self-reinforcing because

00:26:55.060 you have the conservative party notably which always has these delusions of a restoration of

00:27:00.180 some significant quebec coalition which it never manages to materialize but the more seats you have

00:27:06.740 in quebec the higher the stakes are of not kissing the ring of quebec politics and quebec politicians

00:27:14.340 and and that is again just very cyclical in nature yeah it's it's it's really quite interesting and

00:27:20.980 I would say that this follows directly upon the various Laurentian myths that I've written about

00:27:28.820 elsewhere, that how this is the center of the country. And as Sir John A. himself said,

00:27:37.300 the Northwest and Rupert's land are, quote, our crown colony. That attitude has not gone away

00:27:43.540 in the 150 odd years since confederation uh and it's particularly a problem uh when western

00:27:52.260 canada has not only an increased population but a much greater uh wealth and resources

00:27:59.940 than it ever had ever had in the past even though it was certainly the source of a lot

00:28:03.540 of wealth for canada through grain and before that through the fur trade

00:28:08.100 i i don't know if you you've delved into this in any substantive way but but what are what

00:28:12.340 are the internal migrations that we're seeing in this country? Because I know in the US there's

00:28:16.020 been a lot, especially in the last few years, of people fleeing New York and California for lower

00:28:21.860 tax and ultimately more conservative jurisdictions like Texas and Florida. Do we see it as starkly

00:28:28.100 in Canada and for the same reasons? Well, we did before the Liberal Party made its, so far,

00:28:36.100 fairly successful attack on the resource economy of particularly this province, but also Saskatchewan.

00:28:41.380 And then COVID messed things up, too. But there was an enormous amount of in-migration to Saskatchewan and Alberta, not just from Ontario, but also from the Atlantic Canada.

00:28:56.400 I mean, for a while, they were saying that Fort Mac was the largest Newfoundland population in the world because there were so many Newfoundlanders who were working there.

00:29:08.180 So I'm not sure that that's true anymore since the oil sands have had an awful lot of damage done to them in the past couple of years.

00:29:18.380 So and demography, I mean, Quebec is just not seeing the growth.

00:29:23.140 And we've talked about, you know, well, we've talked about immigration, birth rates, another factor.

00:29:27.920 So they are facing, I wouldn't say it's a demographic crisis, but they are facing a challenge that's not really with an immediate solution.

00:29:34.740 So just holding on to their political influence is, I guess, the counterbalance against that.

00:29:40.160 Yeah, that seems to be the kind of default position.

00:29:44.960 When you are losing on a regular playing field, then you play the political card.

00:29:50.420 It's certainly true that Quebec is under a lot of stress demographically,

00:29:56.620 partly because of their, let's say, not exactly hostile,

00:30:01.080 but not entirely welcoming uh position with respect to immigrants uh and the the effective

00:30:07.800 of quebec nationalism uh it always has the the consequence of of driving fairly productive

00:30:14.840 members of that province uh to uh let's say happier happier places well it was a fascinating

00:30:22.040 read in the c2c journal kel surprise quebec wants more seats in the house of commons that

00:30:27.000 is and i i've said it many times barry i'll say it again i think more columns need to cite the

00:30:31.080 1840 Act of Union. You didn't slip Lord Durham's report in there, but I made sure to for the

00:30:36.120 interview here. Thanks very much for coming on. You bet, Andrew. All right. Professor Barry Cooper

00:30:41.520 from the University of Calgary. No, it was a fascinating piece. And again, we talk about

00:30:46.860 separation and separatism as being these big things that Quebec used to use as the Trump card.

00:30:54.160 And understandably so. No one wants to see the country just completely ripped up. But again,

00:30:58.920 the capitulation only seems to go towards Quebec when you have Albertans that are raising quite 0.96

00:31:04.540 significant grievances and everyone's like oh yeah they're just a bunch of angry rednecks oh yeah we 0.98

00:31:08.720 don't need to care about them and I say Albertans more broadly it's the west I mean Saskatchewan 1.00

00:31:13.380 most of BC we often think of BC as being Vancouver and Victoria but the bulk of British Columbia as

00:31:20.700 far as land goes and even a lot of the population is not in that which is why if you look at a map

00:31:26.740 of BC politically. Conservatives do quite well there, just not in, you know, the lower mainland

00:31:31.380 and on Vancouver Island and so on. But some parts they do. We'll talk about this more. And I'm

00:31:38.360 actually headed out, as I'll share a little bit more about at the end of the show, to Calgary,

00:31:43.000 just, I mean, like in about an hour, actually, I'm leaving. So I got to race off the race off

00:31:47.540 camera pack and then go. But before I do, I went along with James and then I had Barry lined up.

00:31:52.400 So I didn't get a chance to talk about this as much earlier. But what's happened today,

00:31:56.440 There was a bit of hope, I think, this morning when people saw that the United States' ban on unvaccinated foreign nationals entering through its land border was set to expire today at 11.59 p.m.

00:32:10.540 So folks were looking and being like, wow, is an unvaccinated Canadian finally going to be allowed to cross the U.S. border legally by land as of tonight at midnight?

00:32:20.440 And that means you could essentially have access to the world because the U.S. doesn't have a vaccine mandate for air travel.

00:32:27.440 So if you were a Canadian who's not vaccinated, you could drive across the Windsor-Detroit border, head on over to Detroit-Wayne County Airport, hop on a Delta plane, and you'd be in Amsterdam before you know it and you'd have the whole world at your fingertips.

00:32:41.120 But of course, that did not last. The U.S. sent out a fact sheet today through the Department of Homeland Security, which you can see on your screen there.

00:32:50.160 As of Thursday, April 21st, DHS will extend COVID-related land border entry requirements.

00:32:57.980 Non-U.S. travelers seeking to enter the United States via land ports of entry and ferry terminals are required to be fully vaccinated and provide proof of vaccination upon request.

00:33:08.620 This applies to non-U.S. travelers who are traveling for essential or non-essential reasons.

00:33:14.620 So there's that old trucker mandate.

00:33:16.580 Doesn't matter if you're a nurse, a doctor, if you have a visa that puts you in a category of essential worker,

00:33:22.500 if you're there because you want to go visit grandma.

00:33:24.980 It doesn't matter if you are not vaccinated.

00:33:26.760 You cannot cross into the United States.

00:33:29.180 Now, I will say that I know of Canadians who have gone into the U.S. who are unvaccinated because it hasn't been asked or they haven't checked.

00:33:36.640 So I'm not saying you can't do it, but technically the law as it stands says you cannot.

00:33:42.960 Now, I will say I'm a big believer in countries having the right to set their own immigration

00:33:48.280 policies.

00:33:48.980 I do not have a right to say that the U.S. is wrong.

00:33:52.240 Well, I do have the right to say that the U.S. is wrong, but I as a Canadian do not

00:33:55.900 have the right to demand entry into another country.

00:33:59.060 I have to respect those countries' rules.

00:34:01.660 I can criticize my own country, which I do quite a bit.

00:34:04.640 because Canada's immigration policies, Canada's border restrictions on unvaccinated people,

00:34:10.040 I think quite significantly are the cause of these U.S. policies. Remember, the U.S. closed

00:34:15.680 its border in response to Canada closing its border. And even then, you could always fly

00:34:21.100 into the U.S. Even when the Canada-U.S. land border was closed for, what was it, a year and a half,

00:34:26.480 you could get on a plane if you were a Canadian and fly to Florida if you wanted. And in doing so,

00:34:32.320 Canadians actually had more rights to enter the United States than the reverse because no American

00:34:38.860 tourist could fly into Canada when the border was closed. And it wasn't until August of last year

00:34:44.380 that it only opened to vaccinated people. So right now, if you're an American, you still can't go into

00:34:49.760 Canada as a tourist or an essential worker unless you are vaccinated. So all of these U.S. policies,

00:34:56.480 I think are responses to, are retaliations to Canadian policy. And we know that the Trudeau

00:35:03.400 government and the Biden government have been very tight on a lot of these things, like the

00:35:07.780 trucker mandate. But even if I don't have a trump card and I don't have the right to say to the U.S.

00:35:13.360 that you have to change your policies because I, as a Canadian, think you must, I will point out

00:35:18.800 that this means Canadians who are unvaccinated are still trapped in their country. If you are 0.89

00:35:25.460 an unvaccinated Canadian, you cannot drive into the US legally, technically. If you are an 1.00

00:35:31.340 unvaccinated Canadian, you cannot get on a plane in this country. You cannot take a commercial 0.99

00:35:37.060 ferry to go somewhere. You could technically canoe across the Atlantic. You could technically canoe

00:35:43.660 across the Pacific. If you really, really wanted to, you could probably swim and make it to Japan

00:35:49.420 sometime around when James Topp is going to end up in Ottawa. So technically you could say,

00:35:55.320 well, no, no, no, there's nothing technically stopping you from leaving. Well, when government

00:35:59.680 closes off your means of travel, let's not talk about swimming across the Atlantic and the Pacific

00:36:06.400 as being viable options here. So Canadians, despite a constitutional right to enter, 0.91

00:36:11.420 remain in, or leave Canada, are not allowed to leave Canada. And let alone, by the way,

00:36:17.880 travel internally. You can't very easily go from St. John's, Newfoundland, to, oh, I don't know,

00:36:24.840 to Vancouver, to Victoria. You could do it. It's going to be tough. You could do it though.

00:36:29.660 But it's not practical. Maybe, maybe the best way to go is to take a ferry to St. John's. Then you

00:36:36.660 can canoe from St. John's to St. Pierre and Michelin. And maybe you can take an Air France

00:36:40.840 flight from St. Pierre to Charles de Gaulle. And that's your way out of the country. But again,

00:36:45.440 this is facetious because the whole point is the Canadian government

00:36:48.440 is restricting mobility rights internally and externally for Canadians. And there's no end

00:36:54.360 in sight for this. We talked about this a little bit on Tuesday's show. And that day, Justin Trudeau

00:36:59.860 and Omar Al-Ghabra came and said, well, we're going to continue listening to the science. Well,

00:37:04.180 the science. How is your science different than every other country's science? How is your science

00:37:10.420 saying that we need to keep denying people the right to move when every other country is not

00:37:16.380 just reducing restrictions, but eliminating, obliterating them? Uber Canada, I think this

00:37:23.440 week said that masks are no longer going to be mandatory in Canadian Ubers. But, you know,

00:37:27.860 you get on a Canadian plane and the mask is there. So is Uber using shoddy science?

00:37:32.880 Are all the provinces that are lifting vaccine mandates, are they using the wrong science?

00:37:38.140 The most lockdown happy provinces, places like Ontario and British Columbia,

00:37:42.320 they're getting rid of their vaccine passports. They're getting rid of their mask mandates. 0.98

00:37:46.020 Why is their science different than Teresa Tams and Justin Trudeau's and Omar Al-Ghabra?

00:37:51.620 show us this science. Show us this mythical, mystical science, which is about as real as

00:37:58.120 Quebec's claim to deserve more seats in the House of Commons. It doesn't exist.

00:38:03.600 It's the politics of fear, but it's beyond that because I don't even think that Justin Trudeau

00:38:08.500 thinks COVID is a threat. I don't think Justin Trudeau thinks that COVID is an issue. I think

00:38:14.160 he actually just despises the unvaccinated. He just despises and holds in such contempt people

00:38:21.580 who are not vaccinated. It's not about the science. If it ever was on a lot of these

00:38:27.740 restrictions, which is a big if, it certainly isn't now. It is about punitive measures. He

00:38:33.960 doesn't want to give a single win to the people that made him look like an absolute fool when 0.98

00:38:40.620 they camped out on Wellington Street in downtown Ottawa for three weeks. He doesn't want to give 0.94

00:38:44.800 an inch to these people that prove just how poor a leader he really is. Because if he does, if he

00:38:52.860 gives an inch to these people, it's going to prove that they were right. When the unvaccinated are 1.00

00:38:59.040 either A, just getting out of this country in droves, or B, boarding planes that then have 1.00

00:39:04.080 no subsequent issues, no uptick in cases, no uptick in hospitalizations, it will prove that

00:39:09.560 the government was wrong and they can't have that. We've got to end things there. I'm going to be out

00:39:15.460 in Alberta this weekend at the Freedom Talk. I'll be speaking on covering the convoy. So a lot of

00:39:21.280 the themes we've talked about on the show, but I'll try to put it into a neat little speech form

00:39:25.180 and give some new material there. You can get information on that at freedomtalk.ca. And if

00:39:30.040 you are in there in person, do come out and say hello. We'll talk to you soon. Tomorrow, we've got

00:39:35.680 a one-on-one interview with conservative leadership candidate Scott Acheson and lots

00:39:39.760 more of The Andrew Lawton Show next week here on True North. Thank you, God bless, and good day to

00:39:44.480 you all. For listening to The Andrew Lawton Show, support the program by donating to True North

00:39:51.340 at www.tnc.news.

00:40:05.680 Thank you.

00:40:35.680 Bye.

Juno News - April 21, 2022

US extends border ban on unvaccinated, so some Canadians are still trapped

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