The Candice Malcolm Show

00:00:00.000 The world watched as Trudeau crushed political dissent and stamped out a peaceful and democratic

00:00:05.180 protest. How will this impact Justin Trudeau's reputation at home and abroad? I'm Candace

00:00:09.520 Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show. So as quickly as it began, as quickly as the

00:00:18.580 Trudeau government implemented this emergency act, we learned on Wednesday afternoon that

00:00:22.920 the emergency was over. Trudeau lifted it a mere 36 hours after it was voted on and approved in

00:00:27.620 the House of Commons. It's sort of all swept under the rug in the past, and Trudeau would like to

00:00:32.900 move on, I'm sure, as quickly as possible, putting this disastrous episode of Canadian history in his

00:00:39.180 past. And he might get away with that. He might get away with that domestically. There may be enough

00:00:43.100 liberal progressive voters who were just sick and tired of the blockades. They were sick and tired

00:00:47.780 of the protests. They didn't like the truckers, and they wanted that story to go away. Perhaps

00:00:51.600 they're even happy with Justin Trudeau's use of force. I did notice a lot of people on social media

00:00:56.660 sort of thanking Trudeau and praising him for his use of this emergency act. So perhaps we'll get

00:01:03.280 away from it, get away with it domestically. But I'm not so sure about it when it comes to an

00:01:08.720 international level, when it comes to the reaction of people watching from the outside. And to help me

00:01:14.300 walk through the international reaction and perspectives from abroad, I am joined by Kaveh Cherouz. Kaveh is a

00:01:22.700 lawyer and human rights activist. He's a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute Centers for

00:01:28.660 Advancing Canada's Interest Abroad. Kaveh previously worked as a senior policy advisor over at Global

00:01:34.640 Affairs Canada. He's a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Toronto. Kaveh, it is

00:01:39.380 great to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.

00:01:41.640 Thank you.

00:01:41.860 So first, Kaveh, why don't you tell me a little bit about your reaction, your impression overall of the

00:01:49.560 convoy and how Justin Trudeau handled it?

00:01:53.360 So, you know, I think my impression may be a little bit different than the average viewer of your

00:01:58.840 short listener of your podcast. You know, I am very much a believer in vaccination. I think, you know, vaccine

00:02:07.380 mandates have their place, though not probably as widespread as they are. So I watched the protest

00:02:13.560 and the content of what they were arguing for with a little bit of skepticism, I'll be honest.

00:02:18.680 But I was really mystified by how our prime minister and our media reacted. What they questioned

00:02:26.540 at the outset wasn't really the arguments of the truckers and the protesters. It was much more

00:02:30.980 just trying to invalidate their point, calling them racists and white supremacists and sexists and so on,

00:02:36.720 which I think is an unfair way of dealing with the protesters. And, you know, I think what we saw

00:02:43.080 was just a failure of government in various levels and a tremendous government overreach with respect

00:02:47.860 to the Emergencies Act. I'm glad that they've decided to revoke it, but it was never really

00:02:51.500 should have been invoked in the first place. Well, it's so weird, the timeline, because by the

00:02:56.040 time Justin Trudeau declared the emergency, the main sort of artery that people were concerned with,

00:03:01.620 the Ambassador Bridge, had already been cleared using existing laws. And then they canceled debate

00:03:06.520 on the Emergencies Act, because the Emergencies Act had already been implemented. And the police

00:03:11.420 action caused by the Emergency Act made it apparently too hectic or chaotic for them to even be able to

00:03:17.060 enter Parliament, which I think is a farce to begin with, because we had a reporter on the ground,

00:03:21.840 Andrew Lawton. He said that on Friday, the activities were happening over by the Westin and the

00:03:26.900 Chateaurea, which is on a different side of Parliament Hill. The Parliament was pretty open

00:03:30.520 on Friday. It wasn't until Saturday that the police action was there. So the whole thing

00:03:34.420 was sort of a politicized attempt to, I suppose, avoid scrutiny. By the time they finally got around

00:03:40.400 to voting on it, Cave, it was Monday evening. And at that time, the protests had been cleared

00:03:44.800 completely. And so it didn't even make sense as to why they implemented it in a mere 36 hours later.

00:03:50.280 Again, they did remove it. What is your reaction to the sort of, what are your thoughts on the reaction

00:03:59.000 here at home, here in Canada? It seems like a lot of people on social media, a lot of liberals are

00:04:04.560 applauding Trudeau for this use of Emergency Act, a lot of journalists really spinning and justifying

00:04:10.680 it, saying that it was righteous and it was necessary. What are your thoughts on that?

00:04:15.320 Yeah, I've been incredibly disappointed with our media, which, you know, hasn't treated the

00:04:20.840 protest fairly. I don't expect them to support the protesters. I don't expect reporters to be

00:04:24.660 supporting any protests, really, of any cause. They ought to be reporting it fairly. But it seemed

00:04:29.220 like there was very much a particular narrative that the major broadcasters wanted to push, if you

00:04:34.800 read, you know, CBC, CTV, whatever. The line from day one was that this was an illegitimate protest.

00:04:41.040 This was a racist protest. This was a violent protest. And, you know, they cherry picked

00:04:47.640 information to support all that. But by and large, I think what we saw was that this was

00:04:51.960 a nonviolent protest. There were not really very many arrests. Even the leaders of the

00:04:57.680 convoys that have been arrested, I think it's a conspiracy of mischief. I think that's largely

00:05:01.560 a charge, which is not, you know, a tremendously significant or violent charge that's been

00:05:05.900 brought forth. So it's been disappointing. You know, with respect to the people on social

00:05:12.280 media that are praising Trudeau, I put out a question on Twitter a while ago, and I asked,

00:05:16.740 you know, can somebody explain to me why we needed the emergency, like the things that were being done

00:05:21.920 by police? What is it that the Emergencies Act allowed us to do that we couldn't do before? And I

00:05:26.760 don't think I saw anybody, even, you know, people that were praising Trudeau, be able to give me a good

00:05:30.480 answer to that. And I think exactly as you mentioned, like, much of the protest was over by the time

00:05:35.200 the Emergencies Act was invoked. I don't think any of the powers that the government tried to grab

00:05:40.040 for itself were actually needed. So it was really, I think, a disappointing day for a lot of our

00:05:44.420 institutions, our government and our media. Kevin, you come from an oppressive authoritarian

00:05:49.080 country that punishes political dissident. I'm wondering, when you look at the way that, I mean,

00:05:55.620 you mentioned the charges that were laid against Tamara Litch, and the fact that she was denied bail.

00:06:00.360 When you see that happening, does it concern you at all that there is political retribution going

00:06:06.100 on in our systems and in our institutions here in Canada? It does concern me. So first of all,

00:06:11.000 I do want to avoid some of the hyperbolic rhetoric that I see floating around, right? So I don't think

00:06:16.340 what happened, even though some people might like to think of it that way, I don't see what happened

00:06:19.540 in Ottawa as being an example of, you know, totalitarianism, or this is not what happens in

00:06:24.220 China or Iran or whatever. You know, those countries are far, far worse. There's far less room for 1.00

00:06:29.260 dissent. But this was not a very, this was not our shining day, let's just say that. I think,

00:06:36.560 you know, the protesters by and large, because their political message wasn't one that our political

00:06:42.800 elites and our media like, they were portrayed in a very negative light. They simply weren't listened

00:06:48.240 to, they were dismissed. And I think the response, as we've discussed, was a very politicized one. I

00:06:53.680 think, you know, this convoy could have been dealt with in many different ways. Had their message been

00:06:59.780 one that, you know, our political elites supported, I think they would have perhaps met with them, maybe

00:07:05.420 express some support for them, at least, you know, giving them a meeting and try to try to listen to

00:07:10.060 them rather than just try to, you know, deal with it in a confrontational way, as they ultimately did.

00:07:15.400 It seemed very un-Canadian to me. It seems to me that Canadians are known internationally as being

00:07:21.240 good-natured, friendly, willing to listen, you know, the whole quip about how Canadians say sorry

00:07:27.380 constantly all the time, even if it wasn't their fault. That's the sort of quintessential Canadian.

00:07:33.040 And even Justin Trudeau, I had John Kaye on my podcast, I think it's two weeks ago now, and he talked

00:07:38.260 about how, you know, the young Justin Trudeau, when he was first running for office, he would go and he would

00:07:42.960 listen to even separatists in his writing. He comes from an area in Montreal that has a large

00:07:47.480 separatist faction, and he was really open and willing to listen. And to me, you know, I'm not

00:07:54.220 a Trudeau fan, I never have been, but that point that he used to be willing to engage and listen to

00:08:01.040 people even though he disagreed with, it seems like part of the issue here was that, you know, we had a

00:08:07.080 group of people who worked throughout the pandemic, right? They didn't have the luxury of doing what you

00:08:12.100 and I are doing, which is working from home and going on Zoom calls and carrying on with our lives

00:08:17.180 in a digital way. You know, these people had to get up every morning and go face the reality of living

00:08:22.160 in a world with COVID. They had to do grueling work, you know, make sure that we could get, you know,

00:08:27.920 food and supplies and gasoline and all these really important things. It seems like this entire class

00:08:32.060 of people have been taken for granted. And the fact that they showed up in Ottawa, at the time when

00:08:36.920 they showed up, they had a great deal of support. You saw Canadians lining freeways and, you know,

00:08:41.640 hosting big potlucks to feed the truckers and to support them, lining the overpasses, Canadian flags

00:08:47.020 everywhere. It seemed like a little bit of a positive moment of a political uprising saying,

00:08:52.020 you know, let's thank and pay attention and give a due hearing to the working class people that kept

00:08:57.360 our country and our economy going for the last two years. And it's just a disrespect that Trudeau showed

00:09:02.740 them by immediately treating them like they were scum, basically, that they were unworthy 1.00

00:09:08.020 of a hearing. To me, that was so un-Canadian. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And I 1.00

00:09:13.920 think, you know, if you take a step back and look at it, you know, as an outsider, if you're not

00:09:17.960 kind of mired in all these discussions, let's say you don't live in Canada, you're just kind of

00:09:21.320 observing it. You see two things. One, you see Justin Trudeau, the story that had been told about him

00:09:26.480 in the progressive media, the liberal media for many years, that story fell apart, right? Like the story

00:09:30.920 was Justin Trudeau is a man of the people. He listens to the people. He likes to be inclusive.

00:09:35.800 And I think the world saw kind of what we Canadians that have observed this closely have seen for many

00:09:40.680 years, which is that that story is actually not true. There is a limit to what Trudeau is willing

00:09:46.300 to tolerate. There are people, there are classes of people that he's just not willing to listen to

00:09:49.820 if their views clash with, you know, what he, you know, he's pretty self-righteous. And if he thinks

00:09:56.200 that you have abhorrent views, he simply will not engage with you, which is, I think, rather

00:10:03.000 unfortunate. And I think the second thing that people saw was this class distinction that you're

00:10:11.480 describing. Suddenly there were, you know, working class people that don't have the luxury of working 1.00

00:10:16.960 off of Zoom, showing up to the nation's capital, demanding respect. And suddenly there were, you know,

00:10:23.780 there were, again, media and political elites who have managed to weather this pandemic pretty well,

00:10:29.080 not taken very many losses, frankly, in terms of, you know, haven't taken much of a financial hit.

00:10:34.020 And they were sneering and laughing at working class people. And I think that class distinction 0.69

00:10:39.020 really was sharpened as a result of the convoy protests. I think it was hard to look at it

00:10:44.300 and not see that class conflict brewing just underneath the surface in Canada.

00:10:48.620 I completely agree. And it still surprises me to see journalists and sort of talking heads on CBC

00:10:55.740 and the Globe and Mail, you know, dismissing this idea, saying that, no, it didn't have anything to

00:11:00.720 do with class. No, these protesters really were truly dangerous and not even sort of stopping to

00:11:05.480 take pause and take stock of the situation, just out of hand rejecting it, which to me will lead to much

00:11:10.400 more of these kind of problems in the future. I want to shift a little bit, Cave, to talk about

00:11:15.540 the international reaction, because, you know, we're in our Canadian bubble, and we see things

00:11:21.000 every day, day in, day out. Perhaps we get like too deep into it. You mentioned that, you know,

00:11:26.520 people who pay a lot of attention, we know that Trudeau is a charade mostly, and that he's not

00:11:33.120 this open, inclusive person. He's very rigid in his ideology. Let's talk about some of the foreign 1.00

00:11:40.020 reactions. I know that there's been a lot of American Republican politicians who have really

00:11:44.160 been following this closely, really concerned about just some of the practices, seizing bank

00:11:50.560 accounts, shutting down the GoFundMe account. Some of them are using very hyperbolic language,

00:11:54.940 like you mentioned, calling Trudeau a tyrant and a dictator. But some of them are making strong

00:12:00.000 points as well about the dangerous use of power, especially when it comes to seizing bank accounts.

00:12:07.460 Let's talk about American reaction first. What do you think of the idea that Justin Trudeau has

00:12:11.500 become sort of political fodder for the right in the US? And they're kind of using him as a punching

00:12:16.940 bag to warn about what the Democrats would do if they had more power? Yeah, I mean, I think that's

00:12:22.520 what's happening. Frankly, I, you know, if I work for the prime minister, I don't know if I would

00:12:26.780 welcome that or try to fight against it. I'm not really sure. I mean, I think there is some

00:12:32.020 advantage in Trudeau portraying himself as a punching bag of the American right of Fox News,

00:12:36.720 because I think that strengthens his standing with his own supporters here at home who see,

00:12:41.380 you know, any attack from the American right as a sign that you're good and righteous. But I think, 0.50

00:12:47.080 you know, I am not really one that listens a lot to Fox News. Again, I, you know, I'm on your show.

00:12:53.360 I love listening to what you do, but I think my politics may be a little bit different than

00:12:56.600 your average viewer and listener. But I think it is, it is concerning that we are being

00:13:03.440 portrayed so negatively in the United States, at least among, you know, 50% of the population there

00:13:09.720 sees us as sliding towards undemocratic practices. I think that's a really dangerous road

00:13:15.580 for us to go down. And, you know, I don't think Justin Trudeau has really anybody to blame but

00:13:20.880 himself. Like he could have really handled this differently. You know, we saw tweets from

00:13:24.440 sitting members of Congress calling Canada tyranny, welcoming refugees from Canada and so on. You

00:13:30.500 know, a lot of it was hyperbolic, but I think it speaks to the fact that people are realizing

00:13:35.640 Justin Trudeau is not all that he's cracked up to be. And that, you know, Canada is not the nice

00:13:41.880 hunky-dory place where everybody gets along, that there are real tensions here and that we have a

00:13:45.660 government that inflames those tensions. Certainly. And it's not just the American political right,

00:13:50.760 Kaveh, because I've noticed comments from British MPs in the UK, in Australia as well.

00:13:58.720 Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit party, says, I can't quite believe Trudeau's behavior. I knew

00:14:02.360 it was bad, but this is frightening. John Redwood, who's a conservative MP, said, Canada's PM is

00:14:07.180 dividing his country by using strong-arm tactics against freedom protesters. And democracy leaders

00:14:12.460 need to find a way to allow protests or listen to protesters while keeping roads open. To me,

00:14:19.020 that seems very reasonable. And I sort of welcome this sort of outside criticism because, you know,

00:14:25.200 perhaps Trudeau's too ensconced in his partisan world to listen to conservative opposition. He's

00:14:31.520 not going to listen to the truckers. He might revel from Fox News and Republican condemnation. But I

00:14:37.440 think sort of sober criticism from serious-minded officials, certainly in the UK, but, you know,

00:14:45.060 we also saw a member of the European Parliament, Romanian MEP commenting on this, you know, some

00:14:54.040 other sort of big, big, big leaders. Do you think any of that will get through? Or do you think

00:15:00.340 Trudeau is just too, too, again, ensconced in his own?

00:15:03.200 Yeah, I mean, I don't know if Trudeau necessarily cares a lot about what people outside his bubble.

00:15:08.180 Say that's just the impression I have. I mean, I have no mind to just Trudeau or his people. I

00:15:11.920 suspect, though, that he's getting bad advice and he's making a very limited worldview.

00:15:17.040 What I want to talk about is something else slightly, though, which is like, yeah, you know,

00:15:20.600 on Twitter, a lot of politicians, especially on the right, have spoken up. But it's actually,

00:15:25.100 I'm actually perhaps in some ways less interested in what people are saying on Twitter and thinking

00:15:28.940 about what somebody observing Trudeau, you know, in Beijing or in Moscow or in Tehran would think.

00:15:36.220 And, you know, observing Trudeau's reaction to the protest tells them a couple of things. One is

00:15:42.560 that he simply doesn't have a good handle on what's happening in his country, right? Like,

00:15:47.160 we just saw chaos in our country for three weeks. A prime minister who barely took action, who just

00:15:54.400 demonized a part of his population. And then because he hadn't done very much and couldn't

00:16:00.300 get his act together, suddenly decided to overreach, did it for a couple of days, realized that it was 0.59

00:16:04.560 ridiculous and it was pulling very badly. So he just pulled back. So we just end up looking clownish

00:16:08.500 on the world stage. So if you're sitting in Beijing and you look at Canada and Canada just simply does

00:16:12.120 not look like a serious country. And this is just one data point, right? There have been several years

00:16:18.060 worth of data points of Canada just not being a serious country, not having a serious foreign policy,

00:16:22.180 not taking a particularly tough line on any of these bad regimes around the world.

00:16:26.640 So I think that's thing one that they see. And the second thing that they see is, look,

00:16:31.000 this is a perfect justification now for us to crack down in whatever way we want. And we've seen

00:16:34.960 sort of hints of that yesterday. I think I saw a tweet from the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, if I'm not

00:16:38.960 mistaken, talking about, you know, how the crackdown was terrible and we would never behave this way in 0.97

00:16:43.400 China, which is ridiculous. But it's the kind of thing that dictatorial regimes look for to condemn 0.87

00:16:50.840 democratic ones. And I think, you know, we just, we, Canada, the government of Justin Trudeau just

00:16:57.160 handed a win to these dictatorial regimes because they can incorporate that in all their speeches

00:17:01.080 in international fora and point to Canada and say, look at what you did to those truckers. Look at the

00:17:05.260 power grab that you just engaged in. Why, you know, what standing do you have to criticize us?

00:17:10.720 And I think that puts us in a much, much weaker position. This just simply from a foreign policy

00:17:14.160 perspective wasn't really thought through.

00:17:15.580 That's true. How can Canada stand here on a high horse and claim that we

00:17:19.980 are the, you know, spokespeople and the advocates for global freedom and democracy when we use that?

00:17:27.540 Yeah, you're right. There is a, I'm not sure if it's the same one, but someone who's working for

00:17:31.940 a state broadcaster in China said, so Hong Kong cannot invoke the national security law against

00:17:36.380 violent petrol bomb throwing mobs, but Canada's Trudeau can invoke emergency powers to crack down on

00:17:41.100 peaceful pro-freedom protesters. So it makes him seem quite hypocritical. I got to ask you about 0.97

00:17:45.360 this one, Kaveh, former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I haven't heard about him in a while.

00:17:50.380 I know he used to make a lot of press and he used to say pretty outrageous things on Twitter. He was

00:17:53.340 always the person that anytime someone would get kicked off of Twitter, it's like, wait, you're

00:17:58.220 allowing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who's like calling for genocide or whatever he's calling for, but you're

00:18:03.360 kicking off this guy. So anyway, he jumped in and bashed through to, he says, the violent crackdown

00:18:08.460 on freedom convoy has nothing to do with freedom of speech or human rights, how coercion could be

00:18:14.460 related to liberty and freedom of choice, freedom. First of all, to your readers and listeners, I urge

00:18:19.280 you, if you do not follow Ahmadinejad on Twitter, please do so. He'd like, he's regularly quoting

00:18:24.040 rap lyrics, talking about US sports. It's a very, very bizarre Twitter feed. But yeah, I mean, amidst

00:18:30.940 all this Holocaust denial and so on, he decided to take a shot at Justin Trudeau. Obviously, I don't put a

00:18:35.660 lot of stock in what Ahmadinejad says. He's a bit of a clown and he himself should be charged for the way he 0.97

00:18:40.300 reacted to protests in Iran. But I think, again, this speaks to the point I was making earlier, 0.98

00:18:44.960 which is like, there is also an optics war happening that we ought to be cognizant of,

00:18:49.160 right? How do we look to the outside world? And we look terrible to the outside world. We looked

00:18:53.620 dictatorial. There is no comparison between what happened. I want to stress this. I think what

00:18:58.060 happened in Ottawa and what happened in Tiananmen or what happens in Tehran when governments crack

00:19:02.160 down. These are different things. But we look bad. We look terrible. And we should have thought about

00:19:07.460 how this would be interpreted in capitals across the world. And I think next time Iran takes the 1.00

00:19:11.800 stage of the UN or the UN Human Rights Council, when we criticize them, they will turn around and

00:19:15.920 say, look, you had peaceful protesters in your street and you froze their accounts and you attacked

00:19:20.080 them. Who are you to say anything to us? And I think we end up looking silly as a result. So again,

00:19:25.580 as I said, nobody thought this through beyond sort of very petty domestic parochial domestic politics.

00:19:32.100 You're right. You're right. It was like a knee-jerk reaction. It was like Trudeau didn't really do

00:19:36.000 anything. The police kept the peace on the ground in Ottawa for the first two, three weeks. Trudeau

00:19:40.540 kind of poured gasoline on the fire by name-calling and refusing to meet. And then all of a sudden it

00:19:44.120 was such a huge situation that he needed to use the biggest tool in his toolbox, which wasn't even in

00:19:49.640 his toolbox. He had to go out and invent a new tool to use it. You mentioned the freezing of bank

00:19:53.640 accounts. And I want to talk a little bit about this because to me, when I think of people who support

00:19:59.180 Trudeau, I think of the sort of young entrepreneurial class, people who are interested in technology,

00:20:04.460 people who, you know, go out and start companies and might be big into like the crypto world.

00:20:10.500 So I've been really amused and interested to see more and more tech leaders in Canada and around

00:20:15.440 the world outright condemning Trudeau, not just condemning him, but talking about the very dangerous

00:20:20.360 precedent that he is setting for other wannabe dictator, dictatorial regimes in using these tools.

00:20:28.460 So, you know, we had 200, the government has confirmed 208 bank accounts have been frozen.

00:20:32.660 That's more bank accounts than the US government froze after 9-11, right? And there was no due

00:20:38.520 process. There was no, you know, no recourse, essentially. They just froze your accounts.

00:20:44.520 Some of them are being refrozen. Now we don't know exactly why some people's accounts are being

00:20:48.660 frozen. Some people claim that their accounts were frozen, even though they're not part of the

00:20:51.900 convoy, they just donated to the convoy. So I, you know, we have the co-founder of Ethereum talking

00:20:58.820 about how, you know, this is, this is just really difficult to wrap it set around. You had the

00:21:04.840 founder, one of the founding COO of PayPal saying Justin Trudeau just created a cast of economic

00:21:12.060 untouchables. Can we stop this dystopian policy from taking hold in America? I noticed quite a few,

00:21:18.460 you know, obviously Elon Musk has been commenting on this sort of since day one, but I'm, I'm wondering

00:21:22.960 what, first of all, what you think about this in terms of, you know, Justin Trudeau and some of the

00:21:27.560 core people who might have supported him in the past, but also the sort of precedent that this

00:21:32.380 may set for future leaders trying to go down this dark path? Yeah, quite frankly, I mean, I think when

00:21:38.600 it comes to the Emergencies Act, this is the story that we should be focused on, right? A lot of the

00:21:42.860 other stuff I think is maybe just noise, but this is the truly dangerous stuff. And as you mentioned,

00:21:49.220 you know, some people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are pointing it out, and we ought to be listening to

00:21:52.980 this really carefully. The idea that in our increasingly cashless society, you can simply

00:21:58.520 freeze people out because they express the political idea you didn't like. I think we just

00:22:04.020 got the first taste of it. And it's an incredibly, incredibly dangerous sign of what's potentially

00:22:11.540 to come. And I think it's all the reason for us to speak up against the Emergencies Act, its

00:22:15.880 invocation, and now, you know, demanding an inquiry into why it happened, and what the mechanisms were by

00:22:21.700 which the government decided to freeze, or the banks decided to freeze certain bank accounts,

00:22:25.520 because this is a sign of creating, as you mentioned, I think David Sachs was the one that

00:22:31.760 wrote this in Barry West's Substack, of creating a social outcast class, people who have undesirable

00:22:39.600 ideas that we just don't want to deal with. And the way to do that is just to freeze them out.

00:22:44.100 They can't go and set up their own financial institutions, right? The idea had always been,

00:22:47.620 well, you know, if you can't speak on this platform, you can go to some other platform.

00:22:51.560 But if you freeze people's bank accounts, if you freeze their cryptocurrency, they, you know,

00:22:56.180 become homeless, they can't pay their mortgage, they can't do any of the things they're supposed

00:22:59.740 to do. This is an incredibly dangerous sign, as I mentioned, this is, you know, people have been

00:23:06.220 warning about a social credit system to come that, you know, countries like China are implementing.

00:23:10.240 I don't think we're quite there yet. But this does not bode well for what's to come in our future.

00:23:16.860 There was an op-ed in the New York Times by Ross Douthat. And he was talking about, you know,

00:23:22.980 Canada can be understood as kind of the incidents in Ottawa can be understood as a battle between

00:23:27.580 the practicals and the virtuals. The practicals being, you know, the truck drivers and the virtuals

00:23:31.720 being people that work on the knowledge economy. And this is probably the most potent weapon of the

00:23:37.100 knowledge economy, right? Being able to freeze people's assets and make them non-persons in our

00:23:41.660 economy. And, you know, talk about a class war. That is something that the working class ought to 1.00

00:23:47.360 be really, really worried about. And those of us who sympathize, you know, I'm not working class,

00:23:51.340 but I certainly sympathize with the plight of the working class. We ought to be fighting back

00:23:56.360 against this, because this can go down a very dangerous path.

00:23:59.820 Well, it's so true. And that was an excellent op-ed that Ross wrote. But even more than that,

00:24:04.720 it's sort of like taking cancel culture, and like applying it throughout your entire life. It's not

00:24:10.320 just like, oh, you don't, you no longer get a voice on Twitter. It's like, you don't get a house

00:24:14.040 anymore. I mean, it's really scary that the jump there, but it's using the same sort of logic of

00:24:19.180 like, you know, I've worked for big corporations, I don't know if I want to outsource adjudication of

00:24:26.500 these issues to some compliance officer in some bank somewhere, right? Like they are just not

00:24:30.600 equipped to deal with this. And anytime you raise this issue, I think the standard answer is, well,

00:24:34.640 you know, the courts will eventually adjudicate. It's like, well, you know, have you tried working

00:24:38.700 through the court system? Like, you know, you will spend years and years trying to clear your

00:24:43.360 name or unfreeze your bank accounts. Lives are going to be ruined in this process. And this is

00:24:47.700 an incredibly dangerous tool in the hands of governments that want to abuse it. You know,

00:24:52.240 next time, and I say this to my friends that are left of center, that are liberals, like next time

00:24:56.580 the conservatives take over, you may not like who's being targeted by these same rules. So if you

00:25:02.820 don't want the conservatives to use it, maybe you should put that weapon down right now. But anyway,

00:25:06.440 I think this is something that's obviously we've got a sign of it. And in Canada, we're going to see

00:25:09.800 it increasingly, I think, in different democratic countries. And all we can do is just fight back.

00:25:15.920 Scary, scary stuff there, Kaveh. Well, thank you so much for helping us break this down and

00:25:20.880 understand. I want to ask you a final question. I saw you write on Twitter a couple days ago that

00:25:26.520 you think that this will have a long term negative effect for Trudeau that just fundamentally changed

00:25:31.480 the way that people see him. Do you still feel that way? Or do you think Trudeau is going to

00:25:35.520 recover from all this? I do. And I noticed that you responded and you disagreed with me. And I

00:25:40.200 think this is a healthy disagreement to have. I think ultimately, I don't hold Justin Trudeau in

00:25:44.160 particularly high regard. I think he's a man who has a very good sense of optics. And he has sold

00:25:51.260 himself and part of like he has bolstered himself at home with his reputation abroad. And his reputation

00:25:57.660 up until recently has been stellar abroad. As you know, he's this good looking, young, energetic man

00:26:02.760 who's very progressive and whatever. And this incident just made him look very petty and mean.

00:26:08.620 And I think it's really difficult for him to recover his golden boy reputation abroad. And if

00:26:14.800 he doesn't have that at home, he ends up looking, you know, much, much weaker and much less interesting.

00:26:20.140 And I think he's just finally exposed for who he is, which is kind of a shallow and petty man.

00:26:23.640 Okay, well, I all agree with that. We can end it there. Kaveh Shrews, 0.84

00:26:27.760 McDonald-Laurier Institute. Thank you so much for joining the Candace Malcolm Show.

00:26:30.340 My pleasure. Thanks so much, Candace.

00:26:31.960 All right. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm. This is the Candace Malcolm Show.

00:26:34.420 Thank you.

00:26:34.500 Thank you.

Trudeau’s international reputation will never be the same

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