The Candice Malcolm Show - The Candice Malcolm Show： What it means to be conservative

00:00:00.000 The coronavirus is now in Canada, but are we prepared? And why isn't the mainstream media

00:00:04.040 talking about the origin of this deadly virus? Could it be linked to China's biological warfare

00:00:08.480 program? Plus, we'll talk about the conservative leadership race and what it means to be a

00:00:11.860 conservative in 2020. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:20.780 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for joining this podcast. I'm going

00:00:24.800 to do a quick pitch for our news website, tnc.news. You can keep up with all the breaking news. We

00:00:31.160 have investigative reports, plus a couple of other podcasts. So tnc.news, stay up to date with

00:00:36.740 everything happening in Canadian politics and more. I'm going to talk about the coronavirus

00:00:41.840 today. It's kind of all over the news. Now, I typically kind of roll my eyes this kind of

00:00:46.200 coverage because I do think that it's overblown, you know, just a couple of cases so far, and

00:00:51.520 basically more people are going to be affected and killed, frankly, by the common flu this year

00:00:57.580 and every year than these viruses. But this one's a little different. It's now in Canada. It's all

00:01:02.920 over the world. The origin, of course, is in Wuhan, China, and we're going to get to that a little

00:01:07.140 later on. But first, there's been now two confirmed cases of the coronavirus, both in Toronto, a husband

00:01:13.080 and wife who were on a plane coming from Wuhan province. Ontario's Ministry of Health has confirmed

00:01:19.140 a second presumptive case of the coronavirus in Canada days after the first was confirmed at

00:01:23.320 Sunnybrook Hospital. That's in Toronto. In a news release sent on Monday morning, the province says

00:01:28.320 chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, has confirmed that the wife of the first

00:01:32.720 coronavirus patient in Canada has also tested positive for the virus at Ontario's public health

00:01:38.120 laboratory. Public health officials have said the woman's husband, a man in his 50s, had been showing

00:01:42.880 mild signs since his flight from Hongshu, China to Toronto. They've since been reaching out to those

00:01:48.560 aboard China Southern Airlines flight and those who sat within two meters of the man. Canada's

00:01:54.060 chief public health officers has said she believes there will be more cases imported into Canada

00:01:59.700 because of global flight patterns. But she notes there's little risk of becoming infected here.

00:02:05.420 So basically, the only people that are affected are those at this point, the only people who've been

00:02:09.240 affected are those who were on a flight from this region in China. The illness originated in a very

00:02:15.960 small part of China, which is why so many people are comparing it to the SARS outbreak back in 2002.

00:02:21.560 That was the severe acute respiratory syndromes known as SARS, which originated also in China.

00:02:27.160 It killed 44 people in Canada and about 800 worldwide. The Chinese government says it has ruled out SARS,

00:02:33.080 bird flu and influenza as a cause of this current outbreak. Now, a lot of people are criticizing the

00:02:39.000 Canadian government for not doing enough, not doing enough. My colleague, Anthony Fury, colleague both at

00:02:45.040 True North and at the Toronto Sun, notes that flight tracker sites now show that at any given time,

00:02:51.200 there are always about 12 planes in the air from China to Canada, the same sort of flight that our

00:02:55.900 first infected case was on. Officials have so far said little about their monitoring and prevention

00:03:01.040 strategies. Then he notes again, interesting contrast. The UK has clinicians stationed at airports

00:03:07.340 and is tracking and testing passengers connected to Wuhan, even without symptoms. This is proactive,

00:03:13.140 whereas Canada doing none of this so far is being reactive. And Ezra Levant makes a very similar

00:03:19.060 point. He notes that while Trudeau is taking a second vacation of 2020, other Western leaders are

00:03:25.300 evacuating their citizens from Wuhan. Here's the US, here's France, Russia, Australia, and the UK, 0.97

00:03:33.060 but not Canada. So it's an interesting point. What is Canada really doing to prepare for this?

00:03:38.180 Should we really be doing a lot to prepare for this? Like I said, more people will be affected

00:03:42.500 every year by the common flu. But, you know, this could just be the very beginning of what could become

00:03:48.340 a very large and global problem, again, just given flight patterns. So a lot of people are concerned

00:03:53.620 about that, especially if you have visited China or someone you work with or someone in your family or

00:03:58.980 someone who you interact with frequently has visited China and might have been on a flight with

00:04:03.940 someone else who was infected. Now, this is the angle that I'm a little bit more worried and

00:04:08.900 concerned about, which is interesting because nobody else is covering it. Nobody else is covering it.

00:04:13.220 I noticed this story in the Washington Times over the weekend. It says virus hit Wuhan has two

00:04:19.300 laboratories linked to Chinese biological warfare program. So the deadly animal virus epidemic spreading

00:04:26.980 globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked to China's covert biological weapons program,

00:04:32.660 according to an Israeli biological warfare expert. Radio Free Asia this week rebroadcasted a local

00:04:38.500 Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China's most advanced virus research laboratory known as the

00:04:44.660 Wuhan Institute for Virology, Radio Free Asia reported. The lab is the only declared site in China

00:04:51.540 capable of working with deadly viruses. So Danny Shohan, who is a former Israeli military intelligence

00:04:57.540 officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare. So the Institute is linked to Beijing's covert

00:05:03.220 biological weapons programs. This is a quote from Shohan. Certain laboratories in the Institute have

00:05:08.500 probably engaged in terms of research and development in Chinese biological weapons, at least

00:05:13.860 collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese biological warfare alignment. He told the

00:05:20.660 Washington Times work on biological weapons is conducted as part of a dual civilian military research and is

00:05:26.260 definitely covert, he said in an email. Mr. Shohan holds a doctorate in medical microbiology from 1970 to 1991.

00:05:32.820 He was a senior analyst with the Israeli military intelligence and biological and chemical warfare

00:05:37.380 in the Middle East and worldwide, holding the rank of lieutenant colonel. So that is a little bit

00:05:42.500 concerning. I mean, we don't know anything and I'm not going to speculate, but I'm just saying that,

00:05:46.660 you know, an expert who knows what he's talking about is linking this. We don't really know exactly what

00:05:50.900 the origins are. Nobody in the media is talking about, but it is definitely worth knowing that China's

00:05:56.100 covert biological weapons is centered in the exact same city where this virus was originating. I'll

00:06:03.060 just leave it at that. Not going to speculate, but I think it's interesting, worth noting. Not sure why

00:06:07.300 my colleagues in the mainstream media are completely ignoring that fact. Okay, let's move on. Let's talk

00:06:12.340 about the conservative leadership race because it's really, it's really kind of dismal at this point.

00:06:18.020 There's not a lot of people running. Pierre Polyev, who many believed was the front runner,

00:06:22.660 very surprisingly announced last week that he is no longer considering running. He said that he wanted

00:06:27.220 to spend more time with his family, which is a little bit of a cop-out in my experience. You knew

00:06:31.220 going into it that you would not get to spend that much time with your family. So why would you announce

00:06:35.540 that you're going to run and then like two weeks later say, okay, never mind. I don't want to make

00:06:39.620 that sacrifice for my family. I think what Pierre Polyev did was scared off a lot of other potential

00:06:44.660 people in the race who decided not to run because they thought that he was going to run. And now

00:06:49.460 that he's not running, there might be kind of scrambling left to say, okay, well, somebody has

00:06:53.940 to run. Who's going to be the sort of blue conservative in the race? Who's going to be

00:06:57.940 the one that's pushing forward more traditional conservative values or pushing for more fiscal

00:07:03.460 restraint? I mean, Pierre Polyev was sort of the mantle of that. He was this sort of, I mean,

00:07:07.940 he is this, you know, very strong fiscal conservative, someone who understands the

00:07:14.420 cultural issues as well. And I'm really not sure when I look at the field right now and who's

00:07:19.460 running, it's pretty sad. You know, Rona Ambrose is out. As I said, Pierre Polyev is out. Brett

00:07:25.780 Wilson is not running. Jean Charest is out. We know that Jason Kenney is not going to be running.

00:07:31.140 Doug Ford is not going to be running. A lot of the really high profile conservatives in this country

00:07:35.220 are out, which really just leaves basically Peter McKay, Erin O'Toole, and a bunch of people that

00:07:40.820 no one has ever heard of. So this is really concerning news for the conservative party as

00:07:45.860 well as sort of the conservative movement in Canada. You know, the fact that the person who

00:07:49.460 becomes leader of this party may very well become prime minister. I mean, Justin Trudeau is vulnerable.

00:07:54.180 He was reduced to a minority. The conservatives won the popular vote in the last election,

00:07:58.260 which doesn't really mean anything other than just to say that more people cast their ballot for

00:08:01.780 conservative than any other party. You know, you would think that running this party would be

00:08:06.580 something that would attract a lot of talented people from not just the political realm, but

00:08:11.620 other aspects of civil society. You know, business leaders, community leaders, people who are

00:08:17.140 conservatives in other levels of government, you know, entrepreneurs, people from tech, people from

00:08:23.300 finance, lawyers. You would think that there would be so many people lining up to take this position.

00:08:27.860 And the fact that there really isn't. And at this point, it's just Peter McKay as a front runner.

00:08:32.580 This makes you consider there's so few people that are interested. It's not just because they

00:08:36.740 know that the mainstream media is going to absolutely tear them apart, that there's going

00:08:40.820 to be a microscope over every aspect of their personal life. And then it's, of course, it's going

00:08:45.140 to be a tough, tough journey few years. But you would think that the prize is so big. I think it says

00:08:50.660 something to the sort of state of conservatism in Canada right now that this position is so

00:08:57.860 unattractive. I also think that a lot of the rules that we have put in place, not official rules,

00:09:02.500 but just sort of like de facto rules, also prevent a lot of people from running. I mentioned this on

00:09:07.620 a previous show. But the fact that, just for instance, that the conservative leader in the last,

00:09:12.900 you know, two decades, it's sort of become a mandatory thing that they must speak French, that they

00:09:17.380 must be fluently bilingual in both French and English, not just sort of have a basic working

00:09:21.860 understanding of French, but be able to participate in high level debates. I think that makes a lot of

00:09:27.140 people who would otherwise be very good candidates for this position not want to run, especially in

00:09:32.100 the business world. You know, a lot of people who are interested in politics, people who become MPs,

00:09:36.180 people who are lifelong politicos, they take the time to learn French because it's in their best

00:09:41.860 interests. But, you know, most people who have great leadership capacity, have great, you know,

00:09:47.220 ability to run institutions, you know, they're not really focused on learning French, especially if

00:09:51.860 you're based in, you know, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, basically any city other than Montreal

00:09:57.220 and Ottawa. Ottawa and Montreal, those two cities have a culture where the sort of well-educated,

00:10:02.420 cream of the crop people learn French, but the rest of the country just doesn't really have that.

00:10:05.940 And I think that this weird rule that we've created that you must speak French,

00:10:09.860 it doesn't really make sense. And perhaps it's time the Conservatives sort of move past that,

00:10:13.620 especially given the performance that the Conservative Party has in Quebec. It's not like

00:10:17.700 they're winning a lot of seats. It's not like a lot of people in Quebec are lining up to vote for this

00:10:21.940 party. So why is there such an emphasis on trying to communicate to people who have basically have

00:10:27.460 no interest in voting Conservative? I had a call in the sun on Sunday where I was pretty harsh against

00:10:34.740 Andrew Scheer. You know, the more that I consider what he's done to the party and how he's left the party,

00:10:39.540 I really think he has done a great disservice. I'll tell you what I'm talking about.

00:10:43.380 Andrew Scheer really struggled during the election to articulate his own values,

00:10:47.380 to describe his personal religious social conservative values in a way that sort of put

00:10:52.100 the question to bed, that put the issue at ease in the minds of Canadians. Yes, the media were very

00:10:59.220 unfair. They were sort of bullying him and they didn't let it go. But that's partially because of

00:11:03.300 the way that Andrew Scheer treated the question. And I think by failing to really close that door

00:11:09.060 and give Canadians the assurance that they needed, he's reopened the issue in a way that it hasn't

00:11:14.900 been reopened for decades, frankly. You know, the divisive issues, the divisive social issues that

00:11:21.860 Conservatives really just don't want to talk about, that they want to avoid mainly gay marriage, 0.66

00:11:25.940 but also to some extent, your position on abortion. I think that these two issues under Stephen Harper,

00:11:31.140 he sort of successfully said to the public, you know, rest assured, we're not going to talk about

00:11:35.540 these issues. We know that they're divisive and Canadians don't really want to have a huge national

00:11:39.460 conversation again. We kind of already did that in the 2000s. We don't need to do it again in,

00:11:44.260 you know, 2018, 2019, 2020. Whereas Andrew Scheer just failed to do that. And now he's sort of

00:11:50.100 emboldened the craziest of the crazy to come out and again, try to relitigate these issues. So 0.62

00:11:56.820 last week, last Wednesday, a prospective Conservative leadership candidate named Richard

00:12:04.740 de Carré went on CTV with Evan Solomon. Now this guy is basically an unheard of Quebecer who's never

00:12:11.220 been elected to public office. I understand he used to be a Quebec separatist and then at some point

00:12:16.100 he came in to advise Stephen Harper, but he's not a sort of public Conservative. He's not really in the

00:12:21.940 game. Most people have never heard of him. But the mainstream media love to promote these kind

00:12:26.500 of fringe candidates to try to accuse all Conservatives of holding these kind of views.

00:12:30.740 So de Carré, basically, he did what Andrew Scheer failed to do. He flat out said,

00:12:35.780 yes, I'm a social Conservative. I think that gay marriage is wrong. Not only that, 1.00

00:12:39.700 he said that being gay is a choice. And then he said that he would defund abortion. So he took the 0.94

00:12:45.700 most sort of divisive issues that most Conservatives want to avoid talking about and he just put them

00:12:50.660 right out there. The media love this. This is what the mainstream media want. This is what the

00:12:55.380 mainstream media dream about. They all dream about doing what Evan Solomon did. Evan Solomon made

00:13:00.020 this candidate look like an absolute fool and like a bigot. What about same-sex marriage? 1.00

00:13:05.140 My point of view is that marriage is exclusive to a man and a woman. And traditionally it used to be

00:13:11.300 for religion, from religion point of view. And people are mixed up. When we talk to real people on the

00:13:17.460 street, when we go across the country, we are hearing the same things. We are all mixed up. Our

00:13:23.460 kids are mixed up.

00:13:24.820 LGBTQ people are real people too. I'm just trying to figure out your terms. Are they not real people?

00:13:30.020 I think LGBTQ is a liberal term. I don't talk about people that way. I talk about persons. And I think

00:13:41.380 we all need the full respect for being a human being, simply.

00:13:46.420 Oh, so, okay. So you don't think that being gay, you don't think, what, do you think that's a choice?

00:13:53.700 Or do you think it's biological?

00:13:56.420 I think it's a choice.

00:13:57.380 And this is the problem. This is the problem. Andrew Scheer sort of opened up the Pandora box

00:14:02.020 of social conservatism, which makes other candidates more emboldened. Because the lesson that the

00:14:08.180 mainstream media and talking heads in the media said about the election was basically that you can

00:14:13.780 no longer be a social conservative and become prime minister. Andrew Scheer proved that point.

00:14:18.260 You cannot have personal religious convictions. You can't be a Catholic, a practicing Catholic,

00:14:23.140 and be prime minister. But for many conservatives, and I will say myself included in this package,

00:14:28.580 I don't think that that's why Andrew Scheer lost. I don't think the mere fact that he was a social

00:14:32.660 conservative is why he's not prime minister today. I think it was because of the way that he

00:14:36.900 articulated his social conservative values, or more accurately, the way that he failed to

00:14:41.220 articulate his values. He failed to explain to Canadians what it was that he believed,

00:14:45.220 and how that would differentiate from how he would govern. That's why he lost. And so to many

00:14:50.340 conservatives and many social conservatives, the idea would then become, well, if it was only about

00:14:55.620 how Scheer communicated and not the actual values that he held, then maybe someone else can articulate

00:15:00.900 them better. And I think that's what this individual is trying to do, just trying to say, yes,

00:15:04.820 I have these values. I'm not going to be shy about it. I'm not going to be passive about it,

00:15:08.820 like Scheer was. I'm just going to put it right out there, and I think I can win on these issues.

00:15:12.980 Well, no, I don't think that's a good idea. I'll say, I consider myself a social conservative,

00:15:17.220 and I'll tell you why. I believe in tradition. I think tradition is very important. I think that

00:15:21.860 changes in our society should happen slowly, deliberately, cautiously, that we should really

00:15:28.420 try to think things through before we just jump the gun and, you know, adhere to the latest fad or

00:15:33.780 tradition because we don't really know what the underlying issues might be, these sort of

00:15:38.660 unintended consequences of changing too quickly. And more importantly, I believe that families are

00:15:44.100 the central institution of society, that strong families mean strong society and strong people.

00:15:49.380 And so I think that that's sort of the origin of my beliefs. I also obviously believe in freedom,

00:15:54.500 personal responsibility, and equal rights for everyone. And I think because of these values,

00:15:59.060 I think that conservatives, even social conservatives like myself, should be for

00:16:04.260 gay marriage. I mean, this is a conversation that happened like 20 years ago, so it's almost

00:16:07.860 weird to be rehashing it, but I think there's some value in doing it. I think that social

00:16:11.780 conservatives should be for gay marriage because we should want family and the traditions within

00:16:17.620 family to extend to everyone. We shouldn't want to exclude someone because of an innate feature

00:16:21.860 that they're born with or characteristic. So we should want marriage for everyone. We should want,

00:16:27.140 we should encourage marriage as a social institution and encourage people, whether they're gay or

00:16:32.420 straight, to get married, to go down that path, to start families, have families. That's the important

00:16:39.380 thing in our society. And so, you know, this idea that we're going to all of a sudden try to turn back

00:16:44.900 the page, try to say, no, being gay isn't real and you shouldn't have marriage equality. This is the wrong 0.73

00:16:51.300 approach. And I just cringe when I see interviews like that. I don't think that the conservative

00:16:55.780 party should be promoting people with these views. You know, sure, there's room in the party for

00:17:00.420 all views, all conservative views, and we can have those sort of debates. But having someone like this

00:17:05.540 as a front runner or as a leadership candidate that gets invited on the big programs and gets

00:17:11.060 humiliated by one of the most famous journalists in Canada, not a good look. And I do blame Andrew

00:17:16.740 Scheer for that because I don't think that, I think that if Scheer had taken the approach that Stephen

00:17:20.740 Harper had taken, which was, you know, these are my views. We're not going to legislate on this.

00:17:25.540 And he was firm and he was forthright and he was honest and he was transparent, which were all issues

00:17:30.340 that Andrew Scheer had problems with. We wouldn't be going down this path now where we're sort of

00:17:34.180 scrambling and herding cats and saying, no, no, no, conservatives don't actually think that

00:17:39.060 gay marriage is something that should be rolled back on. So, like I said, I'm really hoping that an 1.00

00:17:44.340 outsider candidate will come in right now. We just have a lineup of career establishment politicians,

00:17:49.620 really insider type people, no one that's really exciting, that has new views, outsider views,

00:17:54.660 a different perspective. So I am holding out that someone new will join the race. Hopefully

00:17:58.660 the barriers aren't too high. And someone with, you know, not a lot of political experience, but

00:18:03.620 has shown, you know, their capacity for leadership, for managing a large organization, someone out there

00:18:10.260 will decide to throw their hat in the race and shake things up because I don't think that it's very

00:18:13.940 good for the Conservative Party to just have a lineup of only career politicians. And to stay up to

00:18:18.740 date on all things related to the Conservative leadership race, check out tnc.news. We are

00:18:23.700 writing reports. We have other podcasts that are focused on this and we're devoting more time and

00:18:28.900 attention than anyone in the mainstream media. So tune in to tnc.news and to this podcast. We will be

00:18:34.660 back on Wednesday. Thank you so much.

00:18:39.620 Thank you.

00:18:40.580 Thank you.

The Candice Malcolm Show - January 28, 2020

The Candice Malcolm Show： What it means to be conservative

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