Juno News - World leaders see through Justin Trudeau

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.200 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:12.820 Just imagine you are a guy who thinks that everyone loves you.

00:00:18.160 Everyone loves you.

00:00:19.060 You've had your whole life set out for you.

00:00:21.460 Everywhere you go, people fawn all over you.

00:00:23.860 You travel the world.

00:00:25.120 You get adoration from fans.

00:00:27.080 you're in politics, but people treat you like you're a rock star. You're invited to speak to

00:00:31.760 a foreign parliament. You go and you think, wow, everyone around the world wants to cling to my

00:00:37.260 every word. And then it becomes just a laundry list of people who hate you. That is Justin

00:00:46.440 Trudeau's latest trip to Europe. He's in Europe right now. He's been doing the rounds in Brussels.

00:00:51.480 He's been chatting with people in NATO, the president of the European Commission. He gave

00:00:55.920 an address to the European Parliament. And obviously a lot of the people there were quite

00:01:01.500 pleased to see him. They applauded him. They cheered. I don't want to seem like, I don't want

00:01:05.500 it to seem like everyone there booed him. But a lot did. A lot did. There was one MP from Romania

00:01:12.800 who just didn't even go. He just decided this is not at all something that I want to do. His name

00:01:18.820 is Christian Terhas. Terhas. I have a Romanian colleague who's probably screaming at me right

00:01:23.540 now at my horrible pronunciation of a Romanian name. But he wrote on Facebook, I refuse to

00:01:29.580 validate the imposition of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who gave a speech in front of the

00:01:34.920 European Parliament. The reason why I was not in the hall when he spoke, you can't come to teach

00:01:40.020 Putin democracy lessons when you pass with horse hooves over your own citizens who demand that

00:01:46.640 their fundamental rights be respected. The difference between democracy and tyranny is not

00:01:52.180 given by the geographical location of political leaders but by the values that this promotes

00:01:57.720 and this is a tremendously important point he says the west is not a space of freedom as a

00:02:03.740 geographical place but as a civilization so he's saying you can't be arrogant and just assume

00:02:08.640 because you're a western liberal country that you can lecture other people about how to be

00:02:14.680 liberal and how to be democracies that was from christian terhes and there was another member of

00:02:20.800 the European Parliament from Croatia who had very harsh words. I won't play it because his speech

00:02:26.380 was in Croatian, which is for me even less something is something that I'm even less 1.00

00:02:31.400 capable of understanding than Romanian. But the translated version is that under your quasi-liberal

00:02:37.060 boot, Canada has become a symbol of civil rights violations. The methods we have witnessed may be

00:02:43.760 liberal to you, but to many citizens around the world, it seemed like a dictatorship of the worst

00:02:48.980 kind. That was Croatian member of the European Parliament, Mislav Kolikusic. And then there was 0.70

00:02:55.520 this speech from a German legislator, a German member of the European Parliament, who had no

00:03:02.140 love whatsoever for Justin Trudeau, Christine Anderson, who called him a disgrace to democracy.

00:03:08.260 Take a look. Based on Article 195, I doubt that it would have been more appropriate for Mr. Trudeau,

00:03:17.140 Prime Minister of Canada to address this house according to Article 144, an

00:03:22.660 article which was specifically designed to debate violations of human rights,

00:03:27.740 democracy, and the rule of law, which is clearly the case with Mr. Trudeau. Then

00:03:33.640 again, a Prime Minister who openly admires the Chinese basic dictatorship,

00:03:38.740 who tramples on fundamental rights by persecuting and criminalizing his own

00:03:43.060 citizens as terrorists just because they dared to stand up to his perverted concept of democracy

00:03:49.900 should not be allowed to speak in this house at all. Mr. Trudeau, you are a disgrace for any 0.99

00:03:57.000 democracy. Please spare us your presence. Thank you. 0.99

00:04:05.120 Preach it, sister. And she, as you heard at the end there, Christine Anderson, the German MEP,

00:04:09.900 was getting applause. Now, again, I don't know who these people are. I don't follow the ins and

00:04:14.340 outs of the European Parliament. I have two friends who incidentally are members of the

00:04:18.040 European Parliament. Those three do not include the ones that I know. But certainly when Justin

00:04:23.760 Trudeau goes there and he's used to getting the red carpet treatment, the hero's welcome,

00:04:27.960 the rock star accolades, and he goes there and they're saying, what the heck is your problem?

00:04:32.860 You think that you can be the one that preaches and lectures and pontificates about liberalism,

00:04:39.760 about democracy, about freedom, look in the mirror. And what Ms. Anderson was saying there

00:04:45.640 is that you should be here as a leader who's committed human rights abuses, answering our

00:04:50.180 questions, not just speaking as though we have something to learn from you. And that is a huge

00:04:56.520 point. I mean, Justin Trudeau's whole foreign policy from the time he was elected was that

00:05:00.620 Canada was back. The implication there was that under Stephen Harper, no one respected Canada,

00:05:06.080 and under Justin Trudeau, we're now a player on the world stage.

00:05:09.960 And just like at the G7 in London a year or so back

00:05:13.200 when he was trying to solve the Northern Ireland crisis

00:05:16.160 and no one wanted to listen to him,

00:05:17.860 here he is now trying to lecture Europeans about democracy

00:05:21.420 when Europeans have been incidentally far more receptive

00:05:25.760 or far more receptive, rather, to protest movements.

00:05:30.360 Europeans have a much more liberal attitude

00:05:32.940 towards peaceful protests,

00:05:34.280 which is why in a lot of European countries, even ones that had very strict COVID measures,

00:05:39.600 you also had very robust protest movements that were forming to combat those things.

00:05:46.580 But I want to play a clip from Justin Trudeau's speech before the European Parliament

00:05:51.640 to understand why that anger was there.

00:05:54.520 Because you may look at these people and say, oh, they're just cranks.

00:05:56.800 They weren't going to be happy.

00:05:57.780 They're just right wingers.

00:05:59.100 I don't care.

00:05:59.760 You can do whatever name calling makes you feel better.

00:06:02.680 But Justin Trudeau went there

00:06:04.640 and he doubled down on all of his maligning

00:06:07.440 of the Freedom Convoy protests

00:06:09.780 because that's what all of these MEPs are bringing up.

00:06:12.120 His treatment of peaceful truckers and trucker protesters

00:06:16.320 that descended on Ottawa up until just over a month ago.

00:06:21.940 And what he's doing is saying

00:06:24.220 that these people were manipulating others.

00:06:27.940 Take a look.

00:06:28.460 This is from Justin Trudeau's own words,

00:06:30.320 how he views those protesters. No humility whatsoever, even now.

00:07:00.320 In Canada, where 90% of people are vaccinated and our motto as a country is peace, order

00:07:08.540 and good government, we saw anti-vaccine and anti-government protests devolve into illegal

00:07:15.860 occupations of our communities and blockades of our borders.

00:07:20.600 The leaders of those convoys were effective in turning citizens with real anxieties against

00:07:28.560 the system best suited to allay those concerns.

00:07:36.680 The system best suited to deal with those concerns.

00:07:41.860 So he's saying, how dare you protest government when you don't like vaccine mandates?

00:07:47.220 Because government is the body that can solve your frustrations and ease your frustrations

00:07:52.320 with vaccine mandates.

00:07:53.460 Again, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how he gets around to that conclusion.

00:07:57.040 but, oh, they're anti-vaccine protesters, they're anti-government protesters. I think they were

00:08:02.060 anti-this government. They were anti-this government. And you know what? I don't think

00:08:05.840 they have exactly a position that you could say is inherently off base just because they are

00:08:11.200 protesting this government. But that doesn't mean that they were preying on the vulnerable and

00:08:15.840 preying on insecurities. No, it was a grassroots movement. The convoy protesters were a reflection

00:08:22.800 of anxieties, not with the COVID situation, but with government's response to it.

00:08:29.180 And how dare Justin Trudeau get up there? And now, again, I want to just understand,

00:08:34.080 let's go back to the Dixie Chicks here. I don't know if anyone has ever compared Justin Trudeau 0.94

00:08:38.680 to the Dixie Chicks. Actually, they changed their name, didn't they? Aren't they just now? 0.98

00:08:42.400 And one of my producers tell me, what are the Dixie Chicks called now? Are they just called 0.84

00:08:45.420 the Chicks? We're going to get to the bottom of this. We're going to do like a whole investigative

00:08:49.060 series in what the Dixie Chicks are called. But Justin Trudeau and the artists formerly known,

00:08:55.760 they're called the Chicks, Sean says. Okay. So Justin Trudeau is like the Chicks. And here's why. 1.00

00:09:00.860 Because when the Dixie Chicks went over and started trashing George W. Bush, 1.00

00:09:07.360 one of the things that people found the most offensive about it was that they were doing it 0.56

00:09:12.940 abroad in that they were not presenting United Front. Now, again, I felt they got a raw deal.

00:09:18.180 They misjudged their audience, but that was the anger, is that how dare you go and trash

00:09:23.100 this country overseas?

00:09:25.900 Because what Justin Trudeau is doing there, he's taking his show on the road.

00:09:30.080 What he used to do when he was in Ottawa having press conferences, maligning the trucker

00:09:35.140 protesters, maligning the unvaccinated, calling them Nazis, all of that.

00:09:39.220 I mean, I'm not going to defend it whatsoever, but there's one thing to do when you're talking

00:09:43.540 about a domestic audience.

00:09:44.620 Now he's going overseas and continuing that slander.

00:09:48.180 He's continuing the slander.

00:09:50.060 He's saying these people are manipulative. 1.00

00:09:52.240 These people are idiots. 1.00

00:09:53.420 They're anti-vaccine. 1.00

00:09:54.460 When of the three core organizers, incidentally, of the convoy, two of them were fully vaccinated.

00:10:00.140 They were anti-vaccine mandate.

00:10:02.880 They were not anti-government in the sense that they were anarchists.

00:10:06.160 They were anti-Justin Trudeau's government's approach to COVID.

00:10:11.560 But it's amazing how he just tries to reduce it to the most simplistic conclusion possible

00:10:16.860 to make himself the hero of the story so when he goes over to Europe and he starts talking about

00:10:24.540 those truckers it shows he learned absolutely nothing and why does he need to be human why

00:10:31.620 does he need to show humility here why does he need to show humility he's got a majority government

00:10:36.860 now basically because he has the backing of the NDP he's got carte blanche he's got the blank check

00:10:43.180 So in Justin Trudeau's eyes, he won.

00:10:45.960 He doesn't actually need to do all that much

00:10:48.780 because he's in power until 2025.

00:10:51.500 It doesn't matter if the conservatives

00:10:53.240 want to start talking about these issues.

00:10:54.900 It doesn't matter if the conservatives

00:10:56.160 have finally found a backbone

00:10:57.860 when it comes to vaccine mandates.

00:10:59.920 Justin Trudeau has gotten what he wants,

00:11:02.580 what he wanted in September

00:11:03.640 when he called that early election.

00:11:06.060 So I suspect we're going to see

00:11:08.200 a heck of a lot more of this.

00:11:09.780 he'll double and triple down on the very policies that caused that convoy to be so forceful and so

00:11:18.060 vocal. And I don't mean forceful in a violent sense. I mean forceful in its rhetoric, forceful

00:11:23.500 in its dedication and its passion to this. I want to talk about the mandate situation in Canada

00:11:31.180 because there's something in this that's very revealing. When the convoy was happening and we

00:11:35.580 started seeing provinces lifting this restriction and that restriction, the mask mandate in Alberta,

00:11:41.280 Ontario is now mask free. And I realized I hadn't actually enjoyed it. We went mask free in Ontario

00:11:46.700 on Monday. And I don't think I did anything because I just live a very boring life at times.

00:11:51.440 So I hadn't actually been anywhere for a couple of days to enjoy the official mask freedom.

00:11:56.920 But the reason I bring that up is that all of these changes that were taking place,

00:12:02.140 people were looking at and saying, well, this isn't the convoy. This was happening anyway.

00:12:06.000 And I've already talked in the past about how I think the convoy effect was definitely real.

00:12:11.440 But the reason I bring this up now is that there was a lot of pushback to the convoy

00:12:15.960 asking them, why are you focused on federal politics and Parliament Hill and Justin Trudeau

00:12:23.020 when all these mandates and all these restrictions are provincial? And the response to that was that

00:12:28.980 they're all integrated. There are federal restrictions, there are provincial restrictions,

00:12:32.480 and even the holdout provinces like BC are lifting their provincial restrictions. What's left? It's

00:12:37.960 the federal mandates. It's the federal vaccine mandate for travel, for quarantine, for testing,

00:12:43.720 the federal vaccine mandate for air travel, the federal vaccine mandate to work for the public

00:12:49.160 sector, to keep your job. If you're an unvaccinated public servant right now, you are still on unpaid

00:12:55.160 leave or you've potentially been terminated. And the government is giving no indication,

00:13:00.840 zero indication whatsoever of when that's going to change. Take a look. I wanted to play this on

00:13:05.820 the previous show and I didn't get around to it. This is Jean-Yves Duclos unable to give a very

00:13:10.440 clear answer to when life is going back to normal by the federal government's standards.

00:13:17.780 We would all like to know by what time COVID-19 will end. And in fact, we would all like COVID-19

00:13:24.480 to have disappeared a long time ago.

00:13:27.200 The truth is that COVID-19 is still here in Canada

00:13:30.920 and certainly outside of Canada.

00:13:33.060 And that's what I think we should be mindful of

00:13:36.400 as in the way forward.

00:13:37.880 We will want to apply the least disruptive measures

00:13:40.420 in order to protect the health and safety of Canadians.

00:13:43.640 And the conversation will evolve as the situation evolves.

00:13:49.360 If you understood that, I have a job for you.

00:13:53.000 I need you to translate a liberal minister speak to plain English.

00:13:57.340 That's not a French joke.

00:13:58.480 That's a liberal minister joke, by the way.

00:14:00.660 I don't want all the, I don't want the accusations of Francophobia.

00:14:03.420 No, that's liberal phobia.

00:14:04.760 That's not Francophobia.

00:14:06.340 But he's basically not able to give a clear answer.

00:14:09.560 Just, oh yeah, everyone wants to get back to normal.

00:14:11.400 We want to be the least disruptive.

00:14:13.420 Really?

00:14:14.740 It seems like what you're doing now is pretty darn disruptive.

00:14:17.800 Banning people from getting on airplanes, from getting on trains, from having jobs.

00:14:22.280 setting the tone that this is allowed, setting the tone that this is acceptable, that this is

00:14:27.280 a normal way to function in society. I mentioned last week or two weeks ago, British Airways went

00:14:33.800 mask-free on its airplanes. And in the US, this is now a big thing as well. You've got US air

00:14:40.240 carriers that are saying that the second Joe Biden lets us not mandate masks, masks are gone

00:14:45.860 on our planes. There's one story in particular. This one's in the LA Times. The airlines are

00:14:51.880 pushing Biden. The airlines are saying to Joe Biden, we want you to drop the mask mandate for

00:14:56.520 air travel because they know that normalcy is never going to come if people have to cover their

00:15:01.400 faces. No one is ever going to feel normal when they have to wear a mask. And the beleaguered

00:15:08.880 tourism sector is not going to fully recover unless it feels normal to travel. And the mask

00:15:15.420 is a symbol of the pandemic and the unendingness of the pandemic, to make up a word. The mask is

00:15:22.400 a symbol of it. The mask is a symbol of compliance, which is why the mask has become like the greatest

00:15:26.920 cultural artifact of the generation. You get people that are saying, you know, make sure to

00:15:31.300 wear your mask so you tell people the pandemic is not over. They're not even saying that the mask is

00:15:35.880 about protecting them anymore. They're saying they want to be seen wearing it. What was it in

00:15:40.980 mean girls on Wednesdays, we wear pink. Now it's on days that end in wise, we wear masks.

00:15:45.800 This is the statement. This is the fashion item of 2022. If you want to signal your virtue.

00:15:52.380 And my view on this is do what you want. I've never been opposed to masks. I've been opposed

00:15:57.020 to mask mandates. I've never been opposed to vaccines. I've been opposed to vaccine mandates.

00:16:01.660 I've never been opposed to businesses making decisions for themselves. I'm opposed to

00:16:06.320 mandating it. And Trudeau has conflated all of those, which is why he gets up there in front

00:16:13.420 of the European Parliament and starts saying that, oh, these are just a bunch of anti-vaccine,

00:16:17.440 anti-government protesters. Because he has a zero tolerance level for dissent,

00:16:23.120 zero tolerance level for pushback and criticism of his own government.

00:16:28.460 And this isn't going to go away. This is absolutely not going to go away.

00:16:35.000 And the reason I bring up all of these things here is so that we understand how we are not

00:16:40.760 out of the woods just yet. Some of the most locked down jurisdictions in the world are

00:16:45.720 beating Canada to reopening. New Zealand is a great example of this. New Zealand is the home

00:16:50.720 of COVID zero insanity. New Zealand is the country that locked down for like a dozen cases. New

00:16:57.840 Zealand is the country that was like Australia, like the UK, trying to prohibit people from doing

00:17:03.780 very basic things like going outside at certain points, especially in some parts of the country.

00:17:10.580 New Zealand is going mandate free now. Well, in Canada, you cannot get on an airplane unless you

00:17:16.600 are vaccinated. You can't get on a train unless you're vaccinated. You can't work for Canada Post

00:17:21.060 unless you're vaccinated. And there are other examples of this. I just published a story

00:17:25.800 yesterday about Sun Life Financial. I had a number of Sun Life employees separate from one another

00:17:30.980 reach out to me and tell me that Sun Life had imposed a vaccine mandate that was very broad.

00:17:36.400 They used to have one going back to the summer that gave employees an alternative that they

00:17:41.240 could do if they were not vaccinated, which was rapid testing.

00:17:44.100 And now they're getting rid of that.

00:17:46.320 So if you work in an office, if you work in a Sun Life financial center, you have to be

00:17:50.540 fully vaccinated or you're going to be placed on unpaid leave and essentially fired.

00:17:56.460 And again, my position on this, which I know a lot of you disagree with, but my position

00:18:00.420 is that private companies should be able to make their own decisions, but no one should be

00:18:04.560 celebrating those decisions. No one should be celebrating the culture and climate that the

00:18:10.220 federal government is setting. Because again, if you are a sun life and anyone wants to get mad

00:18:15.220 at you about this, you can say, well, listen, I mean, our policy is what the federal government's

00:18:18.640 policy is. So the federal government is very much setting the tone here. When they say masks on

00:18:25.660 airplanes, they're saying that, you know, it's not safe to get back to normal. So other people

00:18:30.920 take their cue from that. When they say that you can't work for the federal public service unless

00:18:34.900 you're vaccinated, other companies are going to say, well, if the federal, I mean, this is going

00:18:38.720 to sound crazy to some of you, but there are some people out there that think, well, if the federal

00:18:43.100 government is doing that, it must be the right thing to do. I know, I know. It sounds like a joke,

00:18:47.620 but believe it or not, this government still has a level of legitimacy and authority to some people.

00:18:53.620 so that's the direction that people go with this and and again this isn't going to end

00:19:01.480 unless people start taking a stand and that's exactly what the convoy was and the convoy did

00:19:07.260 move the needle the convoy absolutely moved the needle again we have a conservative party of

00:19:12.200 canada right now where most of the leadership candidates are very unequivocal that they are

00:19:17.080 against vaccine mandates and vaccine passports the interim leader is taking a harsher and firmer

00:19:22.680 position on this than the previous leader, than Aaron O'Toole did. But as we've seen in the last

00:19:28.480 couple of days with the Liberals and NDP combining forces here, it doesn't really stop them from

00:19:35.340 having that majority level of influence. There's a question here that Emma writes, which is a very

00:19:41.580 good one. She says, Andrew, what do you think comes next after the pandemic is over? Will

00:19:45.680 politicians be held accountable? This is a huge question, and I don't have the answer. I think

00:19:52.780 that if we do get what the Liberals have said we're going to get, which is a period of the

00:19:57.660 next three years uninterrupted with no election, then for a lot of people, they will just move on.

00:20:05.300 COVID will be, we hope, a distant memory by 2025. I mean, Ontario is a great example of this. There's

00:20:10.680 an Ontario election coming up in about two and a half months, which I think is very significantly

00:20:15.540 driving the lifting of restrictions now, because I don't think Doug Ford could win an election all

00:20:21.100 that easily if he were still dealing with a province that had mask mandates or vaccine

00:20:25.780 passports. So he needs to be able to do the mission accomplished thing and say, we won,

00:20:29.660 we beat COVID, and then the restrictions can come back in the fall. And at this point,

00:20:34.620 I'm not optimistic that they won't in some form, either federally or provincially in the fall or

00:20:40.060 the winter, even if there's a bad flu, doesn't even need to be COVID. We could have a bad flu

00:20:43.640 season. And I would not be surprised if the vaccine passports come back, if the mask mandates come

00:20:49.380 back, if two weeks to flatten the curve comes back, all of that. Because what these governments

00:20:53.980 have found is that a lot of people tend to welcome that. So people showing that they aren't actually

00:20:59.500 welcoming that is important. And I understand the powerlessness. I understand the powerlessness.

00:21:05.320 I'm going to have an interview coming out tomorrow with conservative leadership candidate Mark

00:21:09.840 Dalton. And the reason I mentioned it is because I just recorded it before I did this show. He

00:21:14.480 wasn't able to come on live. And one of the things he's advocating is a COVID review. He wants a full

00:21:21.540 review, a full inquiry into the pandemic, not just the pandemic itself, but the government's response

00:21:26.460 to it. And I think that that is an important thing here. Now, Royal commissions, commissions,

00:21:31.480 inquiries, investigations, I mean, these things are limited in scope because they're only as

00:21:35.700 powerful as a government's willingness to abide by them of a government's willingness or interest

00:21:40.880 in their results and with the liberal NDP coalition they have now stacked the deck

00:21:47.120 so they can control any committee just like the emergencies act committee there's going to be a

00:21:53.000 committee investigating the use of the emergencies act but the liberals and NDP are working together

00:21:59.600 on it and they have control of it so I mean the conservatives the Bloc Québécois can you know

00:22:04.560 wave their hands in the air and say, but, but, but, but ultimately there's no need for the

00:22:08.960 liberals to go along with it. The only hope of any accountability there is going to be in the courts.

00:22:13.880 And if you've been a listener or viewer of the show for a long time, you know, I have a fairly

00:22:18.560 pessimistic view of the Canadian judiciary and of the charter of rights and freedoms, not because I

00:22:23.640 don't fundamentally agree with the values, but because a constitution is only as good as the

00:22:29.400 mechanisms that enforce it. And our government has found courts that are far too deferential

00:22:34.920 for my liking, but great for governments when it comes to giving them the latitude to break

00:22:39.560 your charter rights, especially in the COVID era. So I obviously support the legal challenges from

00:22:45.480 the Canadian Constitution Foundation, from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association,

00:22:49.380 all of these challenges into the Emergencies Act. The Justice Centre for Constitutional

00:22:54.040 Freedoms is challenging the federal air travel mandate. A lot of these things. I mean, these

00:22:58.260 lawsuits are all good. The government will be forced to defend themselves. But it won't matter

00:23:03.560 if the fundamental ethic of the government to respect freedom, to respect choice, isn't there.

00:23:12.620 And there is no accountability unless voters in 2025 refuse to forget. If voters in 2025 say,

00:23:19.660 hang on, I know what you did. I remember the Emergencies Act. I remember your crackdown on

00:23:24.580 peaceful protesters. I remember when you went to Europe and started just bashing and trashing

00:23:29.800 those peaceful protesters. I remember all of that, and I'm not going to vote you back in.

00:23:34.820 And again, I'm not telling people how to vote, but I'm saying that if you are

00:23:37.960 angered or frustrated or dejected, whatever the feeling is, you can't lose that emotion

00:23:45.120 going into the 2025 election just because a few years will have passed by then.

00:23:50.820 And that, I think, is the very important point of all of this.

00:23:54.580 I do want to talk a little bit about another story that emerged from the convoy here because

00:24:00.780 I've seen this circulating a fair bit. There's a gentleman by the name, and I don't know him,

00:24:05.260 I've never met him, and I had never heard of him until today, but Martin Joseph Englehart,

00:24:09.440 who is from Hope, British Columbia, and he was a protester in the Freedom Convoy.

00:24:14.920 And there's a CBC story of him saying he regrets going. And the reason he regrets going is because

00:24:20.960 he spent his life savings to support it. And this story is circulating, talking about how terrible

00:24:29.400 the Freedom Convoy organizers were. And it seems to suggest, or when people read it, they seem to

00:24:34.640 be taking from it that someone was making off with huge amounts of money from the Freedom Convoy's

00:24:40.120 organizing team. And I read through the story and the story is actually pointing the blame at

00:24:45.760 government or should be. It should be pointing the blame at government. So here's the too long

00:24:50.580 didn't read version. So he has lost $13,000 because he was buying fuel for people. He was

00:24:57.580 buying food for people. He was giving money to other people there on the promise that he was

00:25:02.420 going to be reimbursed from all of the millions of dollars that were being donated through GoFundMe

00:25:07.160 and later GiveSendGo and in some cases in cash. And CBC has seen this. They've seen his bank

00:25:13.280 statements. He was e-transferring hundreds of dollars here and taking ATM withdrawals and

00:25:18.360 buying stuff from truck stops and all of that. And it was like 13,000 worth. And then he went

00:25:24.100 back home and apparently he had a political disagreement with his landlord. So he got

00:25:28.780 evicted from his home. That's not really the convoys fault, but it just shows that this guy

00:25:33.240 has had a really raw deal in the last little while. And he's blaming the convoy. And people

00:25:38.580 are saying, why wasn't he reimbursed? I'm like, well, the answer to why he wasn't reimbursed is

00:25:42.780 pretty obvious because the government was freezing pretty much every not pretty much the government

00:25:48.660 tried to freeze every single avenue of funding for the convoy so if they were going to reimburse him

00:25:56.840 through give send go money they couldn't because the government prohibited give send go money if

00:26:01.440 they were going to reimburse him through go go send me money they couldn't because the city of

00:26:06.120 Ottawa lobbied GoFundMe to cancel the fundraiser and refund all the donations. If they were going

00:26:12.780 to even reimburse him through crypto accounts, well, they couldn't do that because the court

00:26:16.600 managed to get crypto wallets frozen. The only money that was donated through these official

00:26:23.320 channels that ever got released to the convoy was $1 million that was released from the early days

00:26:28.560 of the GoSendMe account. And when that money got into the TD Bank account for the convoy, TD froze

00:26:34.500 it and then handed it over to the ontario court as a connection to that class action i think it

00:26:40.500 was or it might have been the class action it might have been the ontario government's freezing

00:26:43.780 of it but there was some legal action where the organizers have said they were not able to get one

00:26:48.180 single dollar through those channels to the truckers that's not the fault of them that is

00:26:55.460 the fault of the government that is the fault of the government for making it so that these

00:27:01.780 lawfully given donations these lawfully given donations could not make it to the peaceful

00:27:09.060 protesters that were relying on them and and i feel terrible for this guy because he had a good

00:27:14.980 heart he was saying you know what i trust these people i want to help these people not everyone

00:27:19.620 had thirteen thousand dollars of savings so he people needed fuel people needed food he said

00:27:24.020 yeah yeah i'm gonna do it and and maybe he was too trusting some people are trying to jump up

00:27:28.980 up and down and mock the guy saying, well, sir, if you're right, and you know, blah, blah, blah,

00:27:32.780 blah, blah. But I think it's disgusting. And I think that this is something that we can 0.95

00:27:36.580 squarely blame, place the blame on the government for, not the convoy and not the people. But this

00:27:44.200 is exactly the attitude. People are now rejoicing in this man, feeling like he's in a financial

00:27:49.860 hole from which he's never going to get out. Because you have rhetoric from people like

00:27:54.620 Justin Trudeau in Europe, in Ottawa, anywhere. Rhetoric from people like Justin Trudeau that

00:27:59.280 says, you know, how dare these people, how dare these people protest vaccine mandates?

00:28:04.900 How dare these people protest my government? Who do they think they are?

00:28:09.680 Oh, they're just anti-government, they're anti-vaccine. No.

00:28:13.360 The fact that a guy was willing to drive from Hope, British Columbia to Ottawa

00:28:17.340 and spend $13,000 of his money, regardless of whether he thought he was going to get

00:28:22.200 reimbursed or not is because he was that motivated by it. The story that he had, why he joined the

00:28:29.380 convoy, he says he's not political. He doesn't even know if he agrees with all the convoy,

00:28:34.380 but why he was there is because he couldn't go to someone's funeral during COVID. That was for him

00:28:40.120 the final straw. That was the last straw for him. CJ writes, is he allowed to raise money? I have

00:28:47.180 no idea. I mean, obviously when the CBC story came out, there may be a few people that want to give

00:28:52.460 him some support, but everyone would be so terrified now. He's a guy who by his own admission

00:28:57.880 was a trucker at the convoy. If he were going to say, I'm accepting e-transfers, everyone's going

00:29:02.780 to be terrified that their accounts are going to get frozen if they dare donate to him. Because I 0.57

00:29:07.580 want to read a line from this story here, which I'm trying to do a bit more digging into. Anglehart

00:29:12.860 said he's unable to access his account because it remains frozen. More than 250 accounts linked to

00:29:20.240 people and businesses involved in the convoy protests were frozen after the Emergencies Act

00:29:24.620 was invoked. It is March 24th. The Emergencies Act was lifted, I believe, on February 23rd,

00:29:31.820 so one month and one day ago. The government said that all of the frozen accounts have now

00:29:36.200 been unfrozen, yet this guy says his bank accounts are still frozen more than a month after the

00:29:42.460 emergencies act was lifted uh basically five six weeks almost from when the convoy ended

00:29:49.180 and he's saying his and again i can't verify it this is cbc's reporting so take from it what you

00:29:55.180 will but that's the situation there are still accounts frozen and this guy wasn't an organizer

00:30:00.720 this is just some guy he was a supporter and i guess the bank thought he was a heavyweight because

00:30:06.580 he was transferring money back and forth trying to get support to truckers so that 13 000 made

00:30:11.740 them think that he was one of those big fish that they wanted to go after in the crowd of 250.

00:30:18.480 So if you read stories like this, and I'm sure there are others, if you know of anyone in this

00:30:22.840 boat, please let me know. I want to hear their stories. I want to tell their stories.

00:30:28.540 This is the fault of the government. This is not the fault of the convoy. This is not the fault of

00:30:33.720 the people who supported the convoy. This is a reflection of how the government took an approach

00:30:39.200 that had nothing to do with making the streets of Ottawa safe,

00:30:43.040 that had nothing to do with protecting critical infrastructure.

00:30:45.720 It had everything to do with punishing political dissenters.

00:30:51.460 We've got to end things there.

00:30:52.660 My thanks to all of you for tuning into the program.

00:30:55.240 We'll be back tomorrow with a new edition of the Andrew Lawton Show,

00:30:58.560 an interview with conservative leadership candidate Mark Dalton,

00:31:01.420 and then a whole host of new shows next week.

00:31:03.660 Stay tuned. We'll talk to you soon, folks.

00:31:05.160 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:31:09.200 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:31:11.840 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - March 24, 2022

World leaders see through Justin Trudeau

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