The Candice Malcolm Show - Is Canada still a free and democratic society？

00:00:00.000 Is Canada still Canada? Are we still a free and democratic society? I'm Candice Malcolm and this

00:00:04.760 is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, welcome to The Candice Malcolm Show. Thank you so much

00:00:12.940 for joining us and tuning in today. Now if you're anything like me, you have watched the change

00:00:17.900 that's happened in our society, sort of like a slow motion train wreck has happened over the

00:00:21.960 course of roughly the past two years. And what we have seen is an unbelievable erosion of basic

00:00:28.360 liberties in this country, basic rights and freedoms, things that we took for granted. We

00:00:31.860 took for granted so much so that five years ago, so go back to the first time that Justin Trudeau

00:00:37.120 was elected in 2015. If at that time someone were to say in the Trudeau mandate, Trudeau will

00:00:43.500 completely suspend your rights and freedoms. He will use health quarantine rules to impose lockdowns,

00:00:49.500 make everybody stay home, close down businesses, lock people out of the country, prohibit people 1.00

00:00:55.100 from leaving the country, prohibit people from coming to the country, any of these things. If

00:00:59.740 someone had said that was going to happen, you'd shake your head and say, no, that's a conspiracy

00:01:03.000 theory. That kind of stuff doesn't happen in a country like Canada. If you were told that we

00:01:07.820 would live in a country where neighbours were snitching on neighbours, where there was derision

00:01:12.840 and hatred, people pitted against each other, a huge distrust of other components of society,

00:01:19.200 different groups sort of pitted against each other. Again, you would say, no, not in Canada.

00:01:23.480 Canadians are good hearted. There's a sense of community. Canadians wouldn't do that. If you

00:01:30.080 in any way were to describe the scenario of the past two years to your previous self, to your 2015

00:01:36.040 self, you would have said, no way, not in Canada. And yet here we are. Here we found ourselves in

00:01:41.080 this situation where public health order after public health order, we continue to see people

00:01:46.560 complying, people saying, okay, I'm going to do what you say because you're the expert. I trust you.

00:01:51.500 And at the end of the day, I just want to be healthy. I just want to live. I want my physical

00:01:55.920 health above all else. We live in a society where people are placing their health above their

00:02:01.900 freedoms. And they're willfully doing that. They're willfully doing that. If you were to think about

00:02:06.580 the last election, the federal election in 2021, we had the prime minister of this country, Justin

00:02:11.880 Trudeau, willfully scapegoating an entire portion of the society, blaming a portion of society

00:02:17.760 for the lockdowns, for the fact that we're still in this pandemic, and openly showing his

00:02:24.160 contempt towards people who are unvaccinated. We've never seen anything like that in modern

00:02:29.660 Canada to the point where it doesn't really feel so much like Canada anymore. And I want

00:02:34.380 to talk about this topic today with a brilliant Canadian scholar. My guest today is Travis Smith,

00:02:40.020 a professor at Concordia University. He's a scholar, professor, and writer. He's written a series

00:02:45.000 of thought-provoking essays critiquing our culture in the face of draconian COVID-19 restrictions.

00:02:50.780 One essay I particularly enjoyed is called Have We Become Not Canada. It's really good. It's worth 0.89

00:02:55.760 the read. Smith warns that time is running out to free our country from its pandemic-induced

00:03:00.360 contagion of distrust, resentment, and contempt of our neighbors. Another essay, which is actually

00:03:05.860 a two-part series on the religiosity and the zeal of our society's reaction to COVID-19,

00:03:11.440 as well as this idea that we have put, we've elevated our bodies and our physical health

00:03:16.560 above our minds and our souls. And he talks about the fallout of the sort of thought experiment where

00:03:22.140 we trade off our liberties and our freedoms in exchange for good health, or at least the promise

00:03:27.220 of good health, because no one can guarantee good health. But regardless, very, very good essays worth

00:03:31.840 reading. And to discuss these topics and break down these issues on a bit of a deeper level,

00:03:35.940 I'm very pleased today to be joined in the program by Dr. Travis Smith. Travis Smith teaches

00:03:40.720 political theory at Concordia University, and he did his PhD on the politics of medicine he studied

00:03:47.160 at Harvard University, where he completed his doctorate. And so he's very well positioned to be

00:03:51.940 discussing these topics today, because he's been thinking and writing about them for a very,

00:03:55.840 very long time. So, Travis, thank you so much for joining the show, and welcome.

00:04:00.300 Thanks for having me on the show today, Candice.

00:04:02.000 And so before we get into some of the themes and the topics that you've been writing about

00:04:05.540 in these essays, these essays about COVID, and the sort of overarching heavy handed response from

00:04:11.300 our political class, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, about your background,

00:04:16.020 and specifically your academic research, and the work that you've been doing up to now, because

00:04:19.780 it seems to me like you're perfectly positioned, perfectly prepared to be commenting on the situation

00:04:25.300 that we're that we're in right now, given that you have been studying this exact topic of the sort

00:04:30.180 intersection of medicine and politics.

00:04:33.820 Well, I mainly stick to, as an academic, writing articles about things like early modern political

00:04:39.060 thought, or I teach classical political science, write about thinkers in modern times like Hobbes and

00:04:48.540 Tocqueville. But I wrote my dissertation on the role of medicine and early modern thought in thinkers like

00:04:54.880 Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and tried to understand, you know, what role medicine

00:05:02.300 would play in modern society, in shaping how we regard to the human condition and how we should

00:05:10.000 treat each other and what kind of powers those, you know, those who rule should wield over us and for

00:05:15.420 what purposes. And so medicine was something that in early modern times was right at the very center of,

00:05:21.380 at the core of what they believe the modern political and technological world should look like.

00:05:29.440 And one of the ways it was expressed was that the things that in pre-modern times, people who

00:05:36.520 tried to practice magic or alchemy, what they wanted but could not get through their means, we could,

00:05:42.580 we could get the very same things that the magicians and the alchemists wanted, but through a new kind of

00:05:48.300 science, new kind of technology. And so given that a lot of the goals of magic and alchemy were medical

00:05:55.060 goals, you know, they were just looking for a new way to do the things that they had wanted to

00:06:00.280 accomplish or achieve before, indefinite prolongation of life and so forth, finding ways to change human

00:06:07.380 nature. And so it was also the case that you found that the language that was used was one where they

00:06:16.540 could take old words and give them new meaning. And so you could have, you know, instead of faith in

00:06:21.660 God, you would have faith in human reason that would be applied in a scientific way. Instead of having

00:06:27.060 hope for an afterlife, you would have hope for the future where we would manufacture for ourselves

00:06:33.220 a better world. Instead of charity being about caring for people's souls, charity would be about

00:06:41.060 caring for people's bodies. And the greatest part of charity would be medicine. And another thing that

00:06:48.040 I looked at was how these ideas were not originally articulated in a fashion that was consistent with

00:06:53.320 liberal democracy, but rather the opposite. And so I became, you know, as I was doing this research

00:06:59.840 concerned about whether or not medicine could be used in a way, advanced medicine could be used in a way

00:07:05.380 that would be damaging to liberal democracy. So, you know, we're blessed in Canada to live in a society

00:07:11.100 that has liberal and democratic credential. We are concerned about freedom and equality. Those are

00:07:16.440 our highest political goods, but we're also concerned about things like medicine a lot. It's one of the

00:07:21.480 things when you ask Canadians, what do we care about the most? Medicine has always been one of the things

00:07:25.140 that we say we care about the most. Maybe even before the pandemic, a lot of people would have said they

00:07:29.620 care about medicine even more than freedom and equality. And so the thing is, when the justification

00:07:38.380 for modern medicine was even originally articulated, even like 400 years ago, there was this double

00:07:45.080 justification. On the one hand, you offer a public justification that medicine is for what they

00:07:51.260 call the relief of man's estate. So it would be something that could reduce all human beings suffering.

00:07:56.860 And at the same time, there was an acknowledgement among the scientists, as it were, the people who

00:08:02.340 would be engaging in the development technologies, that all of technology, including medicine, was

00:08:07.280 really for the pursuit of unlimited power. And the moral argument was something that was offered,

00:08:13.100 as I said, for public consumption. But really, the scientists would, and had to, for the sake of the

00:08:19.640 goods that they were pursuing, the goals that they were pursuing, have to be willing to do anything,

00:08:24.060 try any experiment, you know, both human and non-human, in order to find out how we might,

00:08:35.120 the expression was, supersede human nature, or how we might impose new natures upon us.

00:08:45.720 And so that was always there at the beginning. And so the question of something like the role of

00:08:49.840 consent in this has always been ambiguous, the role of freedom in this, we think that medicine

00:08:55.160 is good for freedom, because if we have healthy bodies, you're more free to live your life,

00:08:59.260 right? Medicine is something that speaks to us as equals, because we all have bodies that get sick,

00:09:04.360 we all have bodies that die, so we're equal in those ways. But medicine, like all technologies,

00:09:09.700 can be used in ways that could be negative with respect to our freedoms. And also medicine is

00:09:18.080 something that, or health is something that we see also speaks to the ways in which we're unequal,

00:09:22.580 because some people are healthy, and some people are sick. And even at the get-go of modern technology,

00:09:28.740 they wondered whether or not it might be possible to use all technologies, including medicine,

00:09:33.400 in order to enhance the species, or to reduce the species to a condition of a kind of herd contentment

00:09:42.340 and social control. These were all sort of thought about 400 years ago, at the very beginning of modern

00:09:49.920 political thought. So that's kind of what I investigated there. So when I see today's stories,

00:09:54.260 I saw in the news a couple days ago, a story about some new technology that they can use to read

00:09:59.460 people's minds. Saw this on Smithsonian Magazine. And it's always the case that they say, you know, we

00:10:05.940 develop a technology that will read people's minds, because it's going to help the disabled,

00:10:09.540 which, of course, who could argue against helping the disabled, finding some way for them to have

00:10:15.680 greater freedom, finding some way for their conditions to be more equalized with those of us

00:10:20.040 who don't struggle in the ways they do. So that sounds like it's fully consistent with liberal

00:10:24.900 democracy. But for those of us, you know, who've watched any science fiction movie, we have to think

00:10:32.080 twice about whether or not, you know, technology that can read our minds is something that might not be

00:10:36.920 badly abused by the powerful should they decide to do so, we have to really trust that it doesn't get

00:10:41.880 used in ways that are harmful. You know, or what goes on in our minds, almost looking right now to

00:10:49.140 be the last vestige of our privacy, right, where everything else is surveilled, or everything else is

00:10:54.080 watched. You know, at least we've got our the privacy of our minds, and they will not really,

00:10:59.260 you know, we can we can have a machine that will read your minds too. And so it goes with that,

00:11:04.700 you know, part of it is for the relief of suffering. But part of it is also for the

00:11:10.160 indefinite acquisition of power for whatever purpose the powerful might put it to. And so

00:11:16.060 there's always this tension that is both medicine is always both something that it's it makes

00:11:20.400 perfectly good sense that we liberal democratic people love it, right, and want more of it,

00:11:25.260 almost worship it, depend on it. And at the same time, medicine is among the technologies that is

00:11:32.300 potentially most threatening to most dangerous to the very things that we people who love freedom

00:11:38.440 and equality hold dear. Well, so let's let's bring this all back into the context and Travis of COVID-19

00:11:44.060 and what we have seen go on in the last two years, because, you know, what what at first we were told

00:11:49.800 was, you know, two weeks at home to flatten the curve has turned into an evolving set of restrictions

00:11:55.860 that there's a certain, you know, swath of the population that's just completely happy to do

00:12:01.100 whatever they're told from health authorities. They're happy to, you know, go along with this

00:12:06.520 idea that we can scapegoat people who choose not to get vaccinated. We saw in the news last week that

00:12:11.980 Austria, a country in Europe, is choosing to impose health restrictions and quarantine onto people who

00:12:19.240 are not vaccinated. We see in Australia as well, sort of extreme uses of public health rules to

00:12:26.320 sort of quarantine people who get COVID or quarantine people who aren't getting vaccinated. And so we see

00:12:32.240 people going along with very extreme measures that I don't think that Canadians, in theory, would agree

00:12:38.900 to. But just given the circumstances, given the stress that we're under, you know, almost two years

00:12:44.240 into this pandemic, so many people are choosing willfully to sort of give away certain aspects of

00:12:50.800 their freedom, like you said, their cherished, beloved freedom, in exchange for greater safety,

00:12:55.900 greater security, health. Can you sort of walk us through your perspective on this as someone who

00:13:02.120 sort of studied it from a political theory perspective? Is this predictable? What can be made of

00:13:08.260 it? And how can we sort of start to push back those of us who still cherish the idea of Canada

00:13:13.900 as a country of free individuals? That's a lot, Candace. I'll try my best. Okay.

00:13:23.060 Look, let's give Canadians credit at first, right? I mean, at first, when we were told that there was 0.56

00:13:29.260 this pandemic, and we were told two weeks to flatten the curve, Canadians came together and said

00:13:35.140 to themselves, yeah, that's the kind of thing we do. We look out for each other. Canadians are

00:13:39.180 compassionate. Canadians do have a sense that we're not just, you know, selfish, you know, look out for

00:13:47.100 number one types, but that we care for our communities. We care for the vulnerable. And so

00:13:52.820 appealing to us on that basis was something that Canadians across the political spectrum, in a lot

00:13:58.700 of ways, we say, yeah, sure, that makes sense. We want to protect ourselves. We want to protect the

00:14:03.060 people we care about, our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Canadians, right? And as we're

00:14:10.200 recording, I'm waiting to find out whether or not the Ontario government is going to extend the

00:14:14.460 emergency order through to the end of March next year, which I think some of us have been

00:14:18.960 anticipating they would do anyways, we just didn't know how long they would extend it for. And we've

00:14:23.420 come to wonder whether or not the emergency will ever end. And if there isn't any number of,

00:14:30.340 you know, reasons that they might continue to extend it. You know, we have had a campaign to

00:14:38.860 fight this virus for a long time. And somehow our numbers keep getting worse and worse again,

00:14:45.880 despite all the efforts. At least that's, you know, that's the information we're given. And so

00:14:53.880 we were stuck now wondering, do we ever get our lives back? And there's a sort of I mean, you're

00:15:01.120 you're a mother, right, Candace, you have children, you know, you know what, what you have to do in

00:15:05.320 order to habituate your children to good behavior, what kind of behavior you want out of them.

00:15:11.540 And, you know, I've seen people compare the way in which Canadians have been treated for the last

00:15:17.280 year and a half. Not so much to good parents, but how children are treated by abusive parents,

00:15:24.900 or how people are treated by abusive spouses, or how prisoners have their will broken down by various

00:15:32.300 tactics. And this is like, you know, the, you know, the bad child rearing, in a sense that we're being

00:15:39.880 trained to see what will comply with next. I had a conversation with somebody very recently,

00:15:45.700 where they just said, boy, I wish we'd be rewarded for doing what we're told. But sort of once you've

00:15:52.460 already embraced that mindset, if, you know, you run the risk that, you know, you're not ever going to

00:16:01.160 be rewarded, you're just going to keep being told, because you keep hoping for the reward that may never

00:16:08.520 come. Or if they give you a little bit of reward, they take it away again, very shortly. And this is

00:16:13.100 where I'm concerned, is that, you know, especially, for example, what really got me concerned more than

00:16:18.580 anything else this summer, I mean, I sat on the fence about a lot of this for a long time, and just

00:16:22.280 observed, had lots of conversations with people, just looked at the information my public health

00:16:27.900 unit was giving me, and tried to sort of scrutinize their charts, and make sense of their

00:16:32.620 interpretations. You know, watch the news, and, you know, talk to talk to people in my community,

00:16:42.000 outside of academic circles, it was very important for me to talk to lots of people outside of my

00:16:46.220 academic circle. So a lot of academics get stuck in only talking to other academics, like people in

00:16:51.260 any profession, get stuck mainly talking to people in their own profession. And things stopped making

00:16:56.500 sense. At a certain point, and more than anything else, it was the introduction of the passports

00:17:05.040 or the certificates, and especially the way they were introduced in Ontario, where the public health

00:17:09.640 unit said they would do it if the government didn't. And that struck me as a kind of usurpation of

00:17:14.680 authority of the sort that we've seen from public health. You know, the kind of thing that really

00:17:21.000 should belong to our elected representatives, being something that was being, you know, imposed upon

00:17:26.480 them or threatened, if they didn't do it themselves, that sort of got me upset. I got concerned about

00:17:33.280 the certificates, I got really upset about the mandates. And part of it was, I'd always been the

00:17:38.960 kind of person who was aware of what, you know, the kooky, crazy people said, you know, when this all

00:17:45.860 started. But these kinds of measures were the kinds of things that they had predicted from the get-go.

00:17:51.600 And so when I started seeing that being implemented, my attitude was, you know, gosh, I really hope they

00:17:57.340 stop making, you know, the conspiracy theorists look good. Please stop making them look good.

00:18:04.620 Please stop making it look like they were right about anything. I don't want them to be right about

00:18:07.820 anything. But once they were introduced, and people embraced them, people were excited for them,

00:18:13.860 people couldn't wait to use them and brag about using them. And I got very disturbed when I teach

00:18:19.360 the concept of liberty to my undergraduates, Candace. One of the examples I like to use

00:18:24.840 is the way in which we see no left turn signs when we're driving in traffic.

00:18:31.720 And I grew up in Ontario, and I got used to the no left turn sign, that's the one that has the left

00:18:36.980 arrow, and the red, no, don't do that, right? And then I work in Montreal, and in Montreal,

00:18:44.900 they like the other sign, the one that's got the green circle with the up arrow and the right turn

00:18:49.740 arrow. And I explained to my students, and these are not the same. They say technically they're the

00:18:55.000 same, but they're not the same, because what's the principle behind them? But the principle behind

00:19:00.520 the red, no right turn sign is that you should be, you should assume you could turn in any direction

00:19:06.620 at any given intersection. That's, you know, generally, it's your right is everybody's right

00:19:12.160 to turn in any direction, any given intersection. But for some very specific reason here, you're not

00:19:18.620 allowed to turn left. Sorry, this one, no. But the green, go straight or go right sign, I mean,

00:19:29.020 the naked green, so it sounds nicer, red, it sounds mean. But the green sign, the premise behind it,

00:19:35.160 the principle behind that is, unless we tell you what you're permitted to do, you don't know what

00:19:41.340 you're allowed to do. You have to wait for explicit instructions from the authorities to give you

00:19:46.960 permission to do what you may be allowed to do here or there. So when you come to an intersection,

00:19:54.000 you're like, oh, I get to go right, or I get to go straight here, because they're letting me.

00:19:59.980 And the psychology behind those two is quite different. And when I saw the certificates get

00:20:07.020 introduced, it struck me as sort of a massive sort of implementation of the transformation from the

00:20:13.620 first mindset in Ontario to the other that says your freedoms are the things that the authorities

00:20:18.820 give you. You're only free to do the things that we allow you to do. And unlike rules of the road,

00:20:24.900 these certificates will now apply to individuals, one person at a time. And with respect to particular

00:20:31.420 compliance with respect to one particular requirement presently, but who knows down the

00:20:37.320 road, whether or not any number of other factors might be added into them to give you the requisite

00:20:45.380 permissions to do what you want in life to meet with who you want to meet with to go where you want

00:20:51.580 to go, to enjoy what you want to enjoy. And in a world in which we're sort of trained ever more to

00:20:59.220 always have to make sure we're checking all the boxes so that we can get the requisite permissions,

00:21:05.480 and then we're supposed to call that getting our freedoms back when it's actually having our freedoms

00:21:11.040 taken from us. You know, government no longer being the authority that tries to arrange things

00:21:17.660 so that everybody can exercise their natural rights and freedoms, but instead only getting to exercise

00:21:24.860 what particular permissions are granted by those who deign to make the rules to decide what you're allowed

00:21:31.940 to do on what criteria. That's concerning to me. And so there's a sort of, you know, training of us to

00:21:38.020 embrace and to accept, not even to notice the change. I was saying before earlier about how words get changed

00:21:42.820 without us necessarily seeing the ways in which words get changed. And so here's a way in which

00:21:47.740 freedom has been radically changed in the way in which it's being understood and practiced, and in

00:21:55.500 which sort of, you know, the fact that people don't notice it, or even that they're thrilled to see it.

00:22:00.940 And part of that thrill is because they get, some people get to see that they get freedoms that other

00:22:05.720 people don't get, and that they're being, as they reward it. You know, you're, I said, you're a mother,

00:22:10.800 it's like, you know, you've been a good boy or girl, you get a cookie, but they've been bad, so no cookie

00:22:16.020 for them. And it's just, you know, I understand the, the, the public health justification that's

00:22:23.760 offered for it. We could get into that if you wanted to. But, but it's, it's something, it's something,

00:22:31.740 it suggests something much greater, something more. Right. Well, I, I mean, one of the, one of the

00:22:38.580 things that I sort of picked up on in reading some of your essays, and, and some of the things

00:22:42.160 you're talking about now, is how this pandemic, in so many ways, has brought out the worst in people,

00:22:46.880 that, you know, the whole idea at first was that we're all in it together, and I remember people

00:22:51.380 would go out onto their stoop, you know, the front door in Toronto, and people would applaud and bang

00:22:56.480 pats and pans, thanking nurses for, and hospital workers for their sort of bravery at the very beginning

00:23:01.760 of the pandemic. And there was this sort of sense of community that, that we started to feel.

00:23:05.540 And, you know, that has been completely torn apart to the point now where, you know, you see this sort

00:23:12.420 of, you know, that, that, that, that infamous Toronto Star headline that ran in the, in the front

00:23:17.620 page that ran in the summer, about, you know, let them die, people who are unvaccinated. We saw 0.98

00:23:22.680 Justin Trudeau. Yeah. And, and, and Justin Trudeau during the last election, just willfully, you know,

00:23:30.960 scapegoating and demonizing people who weren't vaccinated and, and sort of running his campaign

00:23:35.520 against them. And, and, and we've seen this sort of ugliness, nastiness come out because

00:23:40.740 I, I mean, to me, I think it's because people are just frustrated with the, with the scenario

00:23:45.000 that we've been put in and they just want it to end. And, and they're told, you know,

00:23:48.820 by their political betters that if you just follow these guidelines, it'll be over. And

00:23:52.360 to your point, we keep following the guidelines and nothing's changing. So just final question

00:23:57.040 for you, Travis, what, what do you think, what do you think we can do as Canadians, as freedom

00:24:00.540 loving Canadians who, who want to restore, you know, the, the, the, the, the basic rights of

00:24:06.140 individuals, putting freedom ahead of all these other things, but also, you know, appreciating the

00:24:11.780 community that we live in and that, you know, Canadians are free so we can have different choices.

00:24:15.520 What, what do you think the best thing that we can do at this juncture in time to, to, to prevent

00:24:21.020 the sort of medical tyranny from continuing to stand up and say enough is enough? What would you,

00:24:26.380 what would you advise in that regard? Um, that's, that's a, that's, that's not an easy question,

00:24:35.260 Candace. Um, what can ordinary Canadians do other than that are upset about this? Uh, and, and, and,

00:24:43.620 uh, what, what can they do to express that? Uh, is, um, uh, you know, there, there are those who are

00:24:53.760 making an effort to express it through, uh, communicating to their MPPs through, uh, showing

00:25:02.220 up at, uh, demonstrations where they're vilified for being at a demonstration, um, or if, you know,

00:25:09.500 if the media covers it, right? Um, and, uh, you know, trying to talk, you know, I make a big point

00:25:18.380 in one of my articles about just trying to talk again. One of the things that the lockdowns have

00:25:22.880 done in isolating us, individuating us, making us feel alone and powerless and weak, um, is that we

00:25:30.840 stop talking to each other. Uh, and I think that it's important for people to actually have

00:25:35.960 conversations with each other again and have conversations with people who don't agree with

00:25:39.960 you about everything. I think that's important too. Um, and, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know

00:25:47.760 where else to, to place my hopes in terms of, uh, ordinary Canadians. Um, uh, I'm, I'm sort

00:25:58.140 of more concerned about what might come down the road. I mean, as I said, we've been sort of

00:26:03.480 trained to go along with one thing or another, with the understanding that if only we comply

00:26:07.320 here, then maybe next time, uh, we'll get rewarded for our compliance, um, only to find out that we

00:26:14.120 have to comply with something else and something more. Uh, and I'm also concerned about the way in

00:26:19.380 which on the other side of things, uh, the people who enforce the rules are being trained to get used

00:26:24.940 to enforcing rules that, you know, challenge, if not, uh, violate people's rights. Uh, and what are

00:26:33.100 they getting used to, uh, going along with? And, uh, the, the, to me, the most, the biggest moment

00:26:40.120 of hope in the last year or so was when, uh, Ontario police declared they would refuse to do

00:26:44.980 spot checks when the government told the police to do spot checks and they said, no, we won't do

00:26:49.040 them. That was the greatest sigh of relief to me. It says to me that people in positions of law

00:26:57.600 enforcement know that there are things that they should not do, uh, know that there, there are jobs

00:27:03.460 that are not appropriate for them to, or orders are not appropriate for them to follow. There are,

00:27:09.960 it's not their job to do that. Um, and, and so I have to continue to, uh, have faith and trust that,

00:27:18.760 you know, should, you know, they be given further instructions that look like they go further in

00:27:26.840 challenging or violating ordinary Canadians rights that they will, you know, say, no, that's not what

00:27:36.680 we do. And so I, I have to have a lot of hope in that. Well, great. I, I really appreciate the,

00:27:43.280 the essays that you wrote. And I think even just, you know, by writing them and articulating some of

00:27:48.500 the problems that we're having, it gave me hope that, you know, some of the fears and concerns I'm

00:27:53.320 having about our country and the way things are going, I'm not alone. And so I, I appreciate,

00:27:58.020 uh, your contributions and, uh, it's great to have you on the show, Travis. Thank you so much

00:28:02.120 for joining us. Thank you, Candice. Thanks for having me on the program. Thanks for everything

00:28:05.860 you do at TrueNorth. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is

00:28:09.480 the Candice Malcolm show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - November 23, 2021

Is Canada still a free and democratic society？

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