00:00:00.000Back in 1997, the CRTC gave a license to Playboy Channel so that you could watch pornography.
00:00:07.660But they said no to Christian religious stations that wanted to have radio and TV stations.
00:00:15.460You know, like does a rural, like Montana hunting show, is that an American content that, you know, diverts away from Canadiana, so to speak,
00:00:26.220in a way that's significantly more egregious
00:00:28.980than a, say, a drag queen story hour show
00:00:56.220Hi, guys. Welcome back to the Critical Compass. My name is Mike and we're with James and we are
00:01:07.360very pleased to be joined again by returning guest. He just happens to like us, I guess,
00:01:12.120because he keeps showing up Mr. John Carpe of the JCCF. Mr. Carpe, thank you again for
00:01:18.000joining us. We're here primarily to discuss today a new report that was just released on the JCCF
00:01:24.080site uh mission creep is it time to abolish the crtc and the subtitle here how a federal regulator
00:01:30.800controls what canadians share discover and consume online uh this is a great document it looks like um
00:01:37.280primary author nigel hannaford uh did a great job here we we read through it the other day and and
00:01:42.880we have questions for you and i'm sure you have lots of things you want to discuss about it so
00:01:46.880please sir the floor is yours well glad to be with you guys again with your viewers and listeners
00:01:54.080It's a bit of a radical. I'm not aware of other groups or organizations that have called for the abolition of the CRTC, but we think it's long overdue. It started out in 1968 as a regulator of radio and television, and the purpose was to minimize how much Canadians got exposed to American television and American radio.
00:02:22.060So they said, well, if you want to have a radio or TV station, you need to have a license.
00:02:25.780But if you want to have a license, you have to agree to our conditions.
00:02:28.280And conditions were things that, you know, in prime time, say between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m., whatever prime time was, you had to have, you know, 70 percent Canadian content.
00:02:40.160And there have been arguments over the years, what is Canadian content anyway, because maybe somebody in downtown Toronto would have a very different perspective over what it means to be Canadian compared to somebody in rural Saskatchewan or somebody in Nova Scotia might have a different idea of Canadian than somebody in Montreal.
00:03:05.260all. Anyway, they had these Canadian content rules where they're in charge of that. And the
00:03:12.020purpose was to keep the, to minimize exposure to American radio and television. Now with the
00:03:20.220internet, that's changed things a lot. In 2023, two and a half years ago, we got the Online Streaming
00:03:29.560Act, which actually gave the CRTC, so Canadian Radio,
00:03:33.880Television and Telecommunications Commission, right?
00:03:37.560So it's a government body, uh, quasi independent from the federal government.
00:03:42.760So it's not directly controlled by say the prime minister and the cabinet
00:03:46.240ministers, but they do appoint the people to it.
00:03:48.700So they're going to appoint people that agree with them and, you know,
00:03:53.180do what they want, but there's no direct control.
00:03:55.100So the CRTC with Bill C11 in 2023 got legal authority over the internet and what they've been doing the last two and a half years is manipulating algorithms to push to the forefront that which they deem to be Canadian and it's not outright censorship but it's certainly kind of, you know, I'm giving the microphone to you but not to you and it gives increased exposure to what they deem to be Canadian.
00:04:25.100Which, by the way, one of the debates back in 1997, the CRTC gave a license to Playboy Channel so that you could watch pornography, which I guess was somehow very Canadian, and a golf channel.
00:04:41.020But they said no to Christian religious stations that wanted to simply have radio and TV stations, right?
00:04:49.840Which nobody would be forced, if they had received the licenses, nobody's forced to listen to that.
00:04:54.440If you're not interested, you turn it off or you don't tune into it in the first place.
00:05:00.560This is what happens when you give a government body the power to decide what is Canadian.
00:05:06.220They say yes to Playboy and they say no to Christian broadcasting.
00:05:11.020So is that partially, like it's ridiculous and it's in practice, you're seeing where this falls or like where it falls apart under its own logic. Is that partially because of how it classifies different types of media, which then there's arbitrary rules because now faith-based channels are under a different subset than like the adult entertainment.
00:05:37.220And I know some of this can get into a tricky place because some of these underlying principles are that we want all groups to be represented.
00:05:50.140We want to make sure that we don't have Christians more represented than other faiths.
00:05:56.380So I can see how they would, with that underlying ideology that informs many of the people in these positions, do you think there's an ideological component informing this decision-making?
00:06:17.280I mean, the CRTC, like most government bodies, like most universities, pursues equity, diversity, inclusion, which means the LGBTQ rainbow agenda to, you know, continue to, whatever, that's a whole ideology that is kind of the opposite of, say, Orthodox Judaism or conservative Christianity or Islam.
00:06:42.920kind of a sexual libertine agenda. That's part of the ideology. They promote the idea that
00:06:52.300our legal rights should depend in part on our race or ancestry. So you got special legal rights
00:06:59.540for aboriginals that the other 95% of Canadians are not entitled to. You've got equity, diversity,
00:07:06.720inclusion. You've got the so-called anti-racism. You've got, this is their whole ideological bent
00:07:15.160that we are seeing all around us, which is why the less power that government bodies have to
00:07:22.240enforce that ideology, the better. It should swim or sink. It should rise or fall on its own
00:10:31.060We've talked a little bit about this over the last year,
00:10:34.300just partially because we've been having so many conversations about what Canada used to be and what Canada is now.
00:10:42.760And I feel like that's the difference, is that there are many people who are somewhat nostalgic for the,
00:10:50.740The culture and the things that Canada and the way that Canada used to function.
00:10:56.360And in a way, now, this Canadian spirit is a surface level.
00:11:02.080I've used the term like a maple syrup branded Canadian identity where it's superficial.
00:11:09.520Essentially, what you have with some of these, with the programming that they're prioritizing is you have something that looks like it could take place in Los Angeles just from the stories being told or just the ideological framework, except it's just filmed in Ottawa or Toronto.
00:11:30.540So, and it just has a Canadian backdrop with the most surface level, like identifying things that makes, maybe there's a bit of snow, maybe there's that little bit of an accent.
00:11:43.040But other than that, the framework behind it is no different than like New York or Los Angeles from what it's drawing upon from a cultural standpoint.
00:11:54.160And I would ask the question, like, why do we need a government body to, you know, help us out, so to speak, when we can listen to the, you know, watch a TV show, just decide for ourselves what TV shows we want to watch, what radio stations we want to listen to, without somebody that, you know, we're paying millions of dollars to the, what, nearly 700 employees that they have.
00:12:23.760And why are we doing this in the first place?
00:12:26.640Why do we need that supervision, that regulation in the first place?
00:12:36.260Does it imply that Canadians are too stupid to be able to choose what they want to watch?
00:12:42.360Or we're too fragile that if not for this benevolent organization, we would be harmed?
00:12:52.760automatically harmed by consuming too much American content or American.
00:12:58.300Well, that seems to be the underlying premise, right?
00:13:02.020This is why, again, we've had this around now for 57 years, the CRTC.
00:13:06.820Before the CRTC was created, even going back to the 1930s, we had a radio broadcasting act,
00:13:16.120And then in the 30s, we got Replacement Broadcasting Act and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC was created, was probably, I would make an assumption, it was probably more mainstream at that time and hadn't been taken over by Marxist, woke ideologues.
00:13:40.860I'm making an assumption. I haven't looked at what the CBC was producing in the 30s, 40s, 50s and so on. But definitely there's this idea that, yeah, Canadians are fragile. We need to be protected from American content. Otherwise, we're somehow going to lose our identity.
00:13:59.680And I think there's a kernel of truth in that. If you would, you might remember the late Ted Byfield, who died within the past four or five years and ran Alberta Report magazine.
00:14:17.920And he was 70 years old in 1993, I forget his exact age, but he was born, I think, in 1920-ish.
00:14:32.320And he said in his youth, and until Pierre Elliott Trudeau took over, took power in 1968,
00:14:40.960eight, uh, until pure Elliot Trudeau became prime minister, Canada's identity was British.
00:14:48.940We were British North America, according to Ted Byfield. And we had the Royal mail and the Royal
00:14:54.600this and the Royal that and the Royal everything. And, uh, at movie theaters, people sang God save
00:15:01.600the queen, uh, long before old Canada became popular as back in the day, you just, uh, apparently
00:15:08.620the, you know, when people gathered in a movie theater, it was kind of like a public meeting.
00:15:13.040So people would sing the national anthem, which was God Save the Queen. And so everybody was very,
00:15:20.040very, very British. The country had a British feel to it. We drove on the left side of the road at
00:15:27.660one point in history, although I think it was quite a long time ago that we switched to the right.
00:15:31.320Uh, but so we were, we were this British North America is what Canada was and
00:15:37.680Pierre Elliott Trudeau didn't like that.
00:15:39.960And so he successfully repudiated that British heritage and came up with ideas
00:15:47.100of biculturalism, you know, French, English, and then multiculturalism.
00:15:52.680And then his son, Justin Trudeau told us, you know, Canada's a post national
00:15:57.520state that we don't really, I think he might be.
00:16:01.320Correct, or at least partially correct, right?
00:16:04.560Like when you repudiate the, the, the, the old British heritage and you don't really
00:16:11.640have anything too definitive to replace it with, you're down into this post national
00:16:16.620state and then all you have left is sort of this knee jerk anti-Americanism.
00:16:31.320Kind of the heart of the matter, isn't it? I mean, how are you supposed to, how are you supposed to have anything resembling an objective definition of what Canadiana or Canadian content means? If you, if your prime minister deems the country to be a post-national state, like you say, I mean, it's not, you're not, this is a, this has been a concern that a lot of our guests have, have talked about.
00:16:54.360And we've talked about as well in that Canadians, at least in the modern conception and, you know, say in the last 10, 15 years, it's become very overt, this negative definition of what a Canadian means.
00:17:09.820Like you say, it's not American. That's what a Canadian is. We live sort of in the same area and we speak the same language and we're sort of the same demographics for the most part, but we're not them. We're just not.
00:17:24.360Well, yeah, if you're not making a positive claim on what you actually are, how are you meant to defend that as some sort of cultural institution?
00:17:34.280And essentially, we're just in this shared economic zone, which, again, all this sets—
00:17:41.940Not so much shared as much these days, but yeah, I agree with you.
00:17:45.460That's what Canada is turning into, is a shared economic zone for people to immigrate to.
00:17:53.020So part of this, like the withering down of the identity has opened the doors to a type of immigration that doesn't have the cultural glue where you look at where immigration started from.
00:18:09.060there is a high bar of assimilation and the the amount of assimilation that somebody would have
00:18:18.800to go through is much higher and you'd see people integrate in a way that is not happening in the
00:18:25.160last 10 years to the same degree and I think that goes hand in hand with the more surface level a
00:18:33.280national identity becomes, the less assimilation you're expecting. You've essentially lowered the
00:18:41.320bar that all it takes is to just walk on this magic soil for a certain amount of time, and then
00:18:48.300you get a piece of paper, and then you are that thing. I can't disagree with you. It's a change
00:18:58.140an identity as well. Ted Byfield would have said, and I think this is historically accurate,
00:19:05.360that Canada was not known as this peace-loving, anti-war nation. There's this notion of, well,
00:19:16.640Canada, Americans are a bunch of warmongers. They're always going to war. But we Canadians,
00:19:23.000we're more sophisticated. We're more enlightened. We just really love peace.
00:19:26.960First of all, I don't know if that's necessarily true, but if it was true, it's a very recent thing.
00:19:35.120Because in World War I, the tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, I don't have the numbers in front of me,
00:19:43.760but Canadians volunteered en masse to go fight for king and country.
00:19:49.140And they wanted to fight against the Germans in World War I.
00:19:55.040Now in 2017, three quarters of the way through the war, conscription was made mandatory and they started forcing people, although even that fact too, right?
00:20:05.580First you have waves of volunteers and then the government says, okay, now we're going to force other people who didn't volunteer, we're going to force them to go to Europe and to fight.
00:20:15.460So we were very warlike in World War I. And that's maybe part and parcel being part of the British Empire. And so when England was under attack by Germany, I mean, indirectly, they were at war. The Germans were not invading England, but they were at war. And everybody felt like, we're going to go fight for king and country.
00:20:36.840And then in World War II, Canada was one of the first in, I think it was just a few hours or a day or two after Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. And then Canada was very quick to also declare war on Nazi Germany.
00:20:53.280We also declared war on Imperial Japan, even though it wasn't, you know, it was Pearl Harbor.
00:20:59.260It was the Americans who got bombed on December the 7th, 1941, not Canada.
00:21:17.780So this whole idea that we're, you know, kind of this anti-war, you know, peace lovers that won't fight, that's just fairly recent in Canadian history.
00:21:29.860Yeah. And, and, you know, people forget too that the, um, for decades, you know, the PPCLI and the JTF2 have been considered like world-class forces. I think JTF2 is, is maybe only beyond, uh, maybe only behind, um, I can't think of the name right now of the, uh, the Israeli special forces, but they're, they're considered like even deadlier than the Navy SEALs.
00:21:52.920I mean, it's a very, very, very highly advanced and lethal force.
00:21:57.120So, yeah, no, Canadians, I remember reading a write-up
00:22:00.200about how Canadians were actually volunteering
00:22:04.400in pretty high numbers to take the place of Americans
00:22:07.960who were draft dodging during the Vietnam War as well.
00:22:11.420Like, that was even going up into the 60s and 70s.
00:22:22.920I apologize. I don't know the specific nature of the Canadian government's, um, stance on, on Vietnam. We were not, uh, forcing people to go on and, uh, fight there. There was not a draft or, or conscription, but, um, yeah, now it's like anybody that comes here, you just, you, you be who you want to be, you do what you want to do. And we're all Canadians, you know, but let's not really, let's not please ask the hard questions of what that actually means.
00:22:50.860yeah yeah it's uh well and and so a lot of this when i was reading the document it feels like
00:22:59.500with the history of when the crtc started a lot of this was maybe invisible like it's kind of
00:23:07.220running in the background where okay you don't you we know about the 30 canadian content but we
00:23:14.000the average person doesn't really they don't really see the in and out of all the regulations
00:23:20.380that shape the way that content's made or who gets access or how it's distributed.
00:23:26.460They're not aware of all of that back end.
00:23:29.400So for the most part, it's this layer that's running invisibly shaping the bubble that Canadians kind of exist in.
00:23:36.500And then this is where you get kind of the average CBC viewer has a very curated view of the world.
00:23:43.160You try to talk to them outside of issues that they've seen on CBC or some other mainstream news.
00:23:48.960and it's like it never existed in the first place.
00:23:53.300So these bubbles are partially crafted.
00:24:13.140where before it was a little bit more invisible.
00:24:16.520But do you think the awareness from the average person is high enough that they see the CRTC as a problem? Or is there more awareness and more of a cultural shift that needs to happen to change some minds?
00:24:32.880Well, I think it's the latter. I would venture a guess that the overwhelming majority of Canadians, 60, 70, 80%, you know, might not even have heard of the CRTC or know what the CRTC does.
00:24:50.120And in the big picture, you know, it's one federal body with 700 employees, so it's not as big of a fish as others.
00:25:03.140You mentioned the CBC. You probably heard of our report two months ago on the rising euthanasia, where it's the fourth leading cause of death in Canada.
00:25:18.960And it's gone from rough to like 16,500 people died by assisted suicide in Canada.
00:25:30.100And I think if that assisted suicide program continues to expand the way it is,
00:25:37.000in Alberta now, the government's introduced legislation to make it either illegal or more difficult
00:25:44.580for the healthcare people to push for assisted suicide.
00:25:49.280We've had so many reports where people are, you know,
00:25:54.580they're going in for back surgery or something,
00:25:56.800and it's, oh, by the way, do you want MAID?
00:26:13.900It's because the number of, if the, if the rates of assisted suicide keep on escalating the way that they are, there's not going to be too many CBC watchers left over in a few years.
00:26:25.660And the CBC viewership is going to decline even further than what it has now.
00:26:29.980But even with a little bit of viewership numbers going down, it's still, you're still going to get a billion dollars going to CBC every year.
00:26:37.420Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, the CBC is a propaganda machine for a big government, anti-freedom, woke ideology. And if there was a CBC person joining us right now, they'd be pounding the table saying, we are strictly nonpartisan, to which I would say, yeah, you're strictly nonpartisan as between the liberals and the NDP.
00:27:00.940But it's the philosophy that the CBC promotes that I think has a big influence to get people to vote for the Greens and the Bloc and the Liberals and the NDP.
00:27:16.460The parties of the political left have got daily support from the CBC because its coverage is so slanted.
00:27:24.780It's always, they always interview people.
00:27:26.640when Charlie Kirk got assassinated, okay, the CBC did a smear job and said that he was a fascist
00:27:33.740and he was far right. And just simply by who they interviewed, they would go and they interview
00:27:39.560people who said, you know, Charlie Kirk's probably a racist. He's far right. He's fascist.
00:27:44.960That's a smear job that they do because they only interview those people. They're not going
00:27:48.320to interview somebody who says that Charlie Kirk was a great hero. They're not going to interview
00:27:54.220somebody who understands the difference between conservatism and fascism. Sure, fascism has a lot
00:28:01.760more in common with socialism than what it does with conservatism, but they're not going to
00:28:05.780interview people that see it that way. But everything's kind of, you know, far-right,
00:28:10.480neo-Nazi. If you don't agree with the CBC, you are far-right. And there's just no distinction
00:28:16.500for them between conservatives and fascists. It's all kind of, you know, part of the same
00:28:21.460evil grouping. So that's their daily ideology. So it's unfortunate, but yeah, they might still
00:28:30.040get lots of money, but their viewership, as their viewership declines, they have less and less
00:28:34.920influence, which is beautiful. I'm glad. Yeah. Oh man. Just to clarify a point I made earlier
00:28:42.800before I asked you a different question, in case I misspoke, what I meant to say was the,
00:28:48.200there were Canadians who volunteered to fight on behalf of American forces to compensate for the
00:28:54.840American draft dodgers. So I just looked it up to verify. And apparently there was between 20 and
00:29:00.18030,000 American draft dodgers who moved to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. And they estimate up to
00:29:06.36040,000 Canadians volunteered to fight for the U.S. Armed Forces in replacement. So that's just an
00:29:13.640interesting tidbit of history but that's your elbows up history moment yeah but I couldn't help
00:29:20.440but notice John when I was reading the report it seems to me like the thing that kept popping into
00:29:27.280my head when I was reading this is that it feels to me like a similar thing that the CRTC does to
00:29:34.800what we do in the dairy cartel in this country and it feels like under the guise of you know
00:29:43.060protecting consumers and making sure that, you know, whatever flowery language you want to use,
00:29:47.720it really actually is just simply a control mechanism to prop up an industry that would
00:29:53.140otherwise fail because of, you know, whatever variables you want to say. Is that an oversimplification
00:29:59.680of what the modern CRTC does, or is that kind of on point, you think?
00:30:03.760well the difference is that the the dairy cartel keeps the prices high for canadian consumers and
00:30:14.840and uh every every year they they pour millions of liters of milk down the drain that could be going
00:30:21.000to poor people or food banks or whatever and and they keep the prices a lot higher than what they
00:30:26.640would be. So yeah, and they restrict competition. If I wanted to, you know, start up a dairy
00:30:36.180operation and buy a few cows and milk them and sell the milk, I wouldn't be allowed to do that
00:30:41.220unless I, you know, first had to, you know, spend a lot of money to buy quota. So the CRTC is
00:30:50.360is different in so far as it's not going to prevent me from starting a podcast or a videocast
00:30:57.080or setting up a new website. So not, you know, it's not really blocking the entry.
00:31:08.340It is costing us more money though, because as the paper describes, right, it reduces competition.
00:31:17.280It's got all these rules in place that basically allow TELUS and Rogers and Bell to remain dominant because it's very hard for smaller companies to break in.
00:31:29.220So in that sense, the CRTC is very similar to the dairy cartel in that they make it, the CRTC makes it very difficult for newcomers to come in there and compete effectively.
00:31:40.860It's like, well, that's very hard to do.
00:31:42.920So, yeah, with that element of both them controlling content and then you have the restriction side and then you have the grant side, which another government program where they're subsidizing certain types of content and not subsidizing.
00:32:00.920When you add those two together, the suppression through selective distribution and then the amplification, that's quite a significant tilt.
00:32:15.180And with those two in play, so you will always have people that are ideological.
00:32:23.140But if a system is structured in a certain way, some systems enable corruption more than others, and it will enable people with ideology to take hold of that system.
00:32:37.520So if we abolish the CRTC and put in something else, what essential roles would this new, like this new regulator, what should they do? And what is a structure that would help prevent any future corruption?
00:33:02.940I would replace it with nothing. I think the only restrictions on the Internet should be when people are violating the criminal law. So if somebody is producing, creating, selling, distributing child pornography, the law enforcement, the authorities need to get in there and find out who is doing it and where they live.
00:33:27.260And they should throw the book at those people and, you know, get the search warrants, get whatever they need to, you know, do surveillance on people.
00:33:38.020If you have reasonable and probable grounds that somebody's breaking the law, the police can go to court.
00:33:42.320They can get a court order to do surveillance.
00:33:44.720So I don't believe in an absolute total free-for-all on the Internet insofar as I think we should stop the child pornography.
00:33:53.700And if it was up to me, I'd place restrictions on other pornography as well, because I think it causes an awful lot of damage, although, you know, it's a bit of a tricky issue.
00:34:08.560I believe in individual choice as well, so I have conflicted feelings about that whole issue.
00:34:14.780But we don't need a new CRTC. We don't need somebody to tell us what's Canadian or not Canadian and to manipulate algorithms so that Canadians will more likely see more of some things and less of other things.
00:34:35.480We just don't need that at all, in my view.
00:34:40.180So I don't think we—we need to ensure that there's competition, okay?
00:34:43.900So we've got the Competition Act federally, and this makes it illegal for parties, for large companies to collude with each other and keep the small guy out.
00:34:59.880So that's the role of government is you have a Competition Act.
00:35:03.800You punish collusion. You make sure that there's no unfair barriers to new people trying to enter a market and crack down on crime.
00:35:17.120And that's it. I don't think we need a federal body to be regulating these things.
00:35:24.140Yeah, that pretty much aligns with where James and I stand a lot on, you know, just the general, more of a libertarian stance on those sort of things, I suppose, if you wanted to label it.
00:35:38.660I wanted to ask you, there's a section in the report where it talks about the kind of the gradual expansion of what the CRTC controlled, starting off obviously just with radio and television expanding in the 80s, in the mid-70s, you know, to include telecommunications companies in the 80s with regard to cable TV services and channel offerings, things like this.
00:36:07.360But when, uh, the internet, you know, became a thing and became quite, quite popular and obviously exploded in popularity, uh, the, they did take a, they initially took a much more, um, maybe a cautious approach, I guess you could say.
00:36:22.720Um, there's a section here where it talks about how, um, Stephen Harper, uh, favored minimal internet intervention, believing that governments should adapt to the open free internet rather than regulate it.
00:36:35.000I remember personally in in the 2015 federal election. Now, try not to hit quit on this interview, but I voted for the NDP during that election. And I specifically remember why I voted for them, because Tom Mulcair, as the leader of the NDP, was the only one of the major party leaders to come out very much in favor of net neutrality.
00:36:59.560And he was very, he seemed at the time very committed to the principle of net neutrality. He thought that the negotiations surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership at the time were going to allow a backdoor for ISPs to regulate internet traffic unjustly and all sorts of things.
00:37:16.760So I liked that at the time I was thinking about these sorts of things. Now, it seems to me that somebody on the left side of the political spectrum, a liberal or specifically an NDP voter, they seem to me to be the people who are most in favor of heavily regulating the Internet.
00:37:31.920What, what do you make of this sort of cultural shift that we see now, where it seems like it's conservatives who are approaching this, you know, it's not new anymore, but it's ever expanding. Conservatives seem to be approaching this technology from a much more progressive and libertarian perspective.
00:37:48.900Now, supporters of big government are typically extremely short-sighted, and it doesn't occur
00:38:00.060to them that that same government machinery could be flipped around and used against them.
00:38:06.100So right now, you'd find people on the political left would love the idea of giving the Canadian
00:38:14.560Human Rights Commission the power to prosecute discriminatory speech. So this is not criminal
00:38:21.520hate speech, but it's speech that's discriminatory. We had this provision in the Online Harms Act,
00:38:27.500which fortunately died with the 2025 election. The federal government keeps on saying they're
00:38:33.520going to bring the Online Harms Act back. And one of the provisions in there is to empower the
00:38:39.500Canadian Human Rights Commission to prosecute discriminatory speech with penalties of up to
00:38:45.580$50,000 paid to government, up to $20,000 paid to a complainant. And not to mention the tens of
00:38:54.560thousands of dollars in legal bills, you're going to be out of pocket to defend yourself against
00:38:58.960prosecution. And people on the left think this is great because then we can punish supposedly bad
00:39:06.960people like Barry Neufeldt in British Columbia, who publicly speaks out against the transgender
00:39:13.800ideology and says we shouldn't be harming children by teaching them that it's possible
00:39:20.740to become a member of the opposite sex. And so the BC Human Rights Tribunal has ordered
00:39:28.060Barry Neufeld to pay $750,000 to a small group of, uh, LGBT teachers in Chilliwack.
00:39:38.460So it's just, um, you know, it's just, it's just crazy that way, but people favor this,
00:39:44.860but it doesn't occur to them that if, if the government, uh, if the cultural tides change
00:39:51.620And you get a, uh, maybe you get a Muslim dominated government that, uh, is going to punish, uh, Islamophobia and blaspheming the prophet Muhammad.
00:40:04.740And they're going to, uh, crack down on LGBTQ speech.
00:40:09.300And they're going to say that that's, it's a perversion and it's, uh, it's unnatural and it's sick and it's this and it's that.
00:40:30.600Uh, let's have the government deciding what's true and false, uh, by way of,
00:40:34.960you know, promising to protect us from hate and disinformation, misinformation.
00:40:40.840It's just short, short sightedness is a big part of it.
00:40:43.800These people can't imagine that the machinery of the state would ever be
00:40:47.440used against them doesn't occur to them.
00:40:50.440Can I, can I admit a crime on this podcast right now?
00:40:53.520Uh, this morning I, uh, I conducted a hate crime.
00:40:57.520I had some bacon and well, like I joked, but that could be considered like under the
00:41:06.060right, if the right people get in power, they could, that could be part of some, some, that
00:41:11.840that could be a symbol of hate they could i could even imagine if people troll on the internet
00:41:17.660enough and use the bacon like emoji in a hateful way i could see that kind of a meme being
00:41:26.160treated as like a hate as a hate offense hate simply of like a hate symbol of you're you're
00:41:33.980trying to make fun of somebody's religion and um since they can't eat bacon that is now a hateful
00:41:41.140symbol and you can see how ridiculous these things get when taken to the logical extent of
00:41:49.860just measuring it based on hurt feelings because an emoji could hurt feelings and they could
00:41:54.740maybe they they want to ban an emoji because it's used by enough people that's how any word turns
00:42:02.200into something hateful or a slur it's just it's common enough use that it comes ingrained culturally
00:42:09.860And then at some point they said, like, well, now that's a bad word and you can't say it.
00:42:16.540You know, the biggest threat or one of them, one of the biggest threats to free speech is just this notion that we, that people are entitled to not feel hurt or offended.
00:42:29.600Now, I'd be the first to say that as a matter of civility, as a matter of politeness, as a matter of courtesy, we should try to get our points across as much as possible without being really awful, nasty, vicious towards people who disagree with us.
00:42:53.280So, you know, we should focus on arguments and so on.
00:42:58.340Having said that, invariably, all speech is going to offend at least somebody, okay? If an atheist says that religion is stupid and all religious followers are naive, gullible, credulous, misguided, anti-science, whatever, look, you know, I've got a thick skin. Most of us have a thick skin. We're not going to lose sleep over it.
00:43:27.100but there will be people who are deeply hurt, you know, so why this atheist is calling religious
00:43:30.880people stupid? Well, you know, people criticize Islam, people criticize Judaism, people criticize
00:43:37.440Israel. You're always going to have people that feel hurt or offended by something,
00:43:49.740whether it's a huge number or a small number, you're going to have people hurt.
00:43:53.260And so what's disturbing is that you, a lot of Canadians will say, well, I support free speech as long as it's not offensive.
00:44:01.860It's like, uh, everything, you know, certainly in the realm of religion and politics, uh, but I would say even in every realm, you know, you could have two, you could be running an interior design company and, and criticize a certain style of, of, uh, interior decorating or something.
00:44:22.940can't, you know, somebody's going to be offended. So you can't have this, uh, I support free speech,
00:44:28.920but, uh, as long as it's not offensive. No, free speech necessarily includes a right to offend.
00:44:37.480Not that offending people is your goal. It's sort of a by-product, but it has to include that right
00:44:43.360to offend. Because the moment you say that, that, you know, I have a right to not feel offended,
00:44:47.780you have a right to not feel offended, you no longer have free speech.
00:44:53.560You know, it's a, they say, you know, Jordan Peterson has said this, many, many, you know, various free speech warriors say, you don't need, you don't need provisions for freedom of speech for uncontroversial speech.
00:45:06.360It's specifically only the controversial speech that is the purpose for why free speech laws exist.
00:45:11.980And I think that maybe, uh, points to a, a grander problem right now in our, in our specifically Western culture in general, where, you know, they call this, um, I just, I just looked it up and I, I, apologies if I'm wrong.
00:45:29.000I think this is right. There's an American writer named Rob Henderson who coined a term called luxury beliefs. And and this is a this sort of describes this, you know, this conflation of, you know, words are violence and insult is, you know, to be insulted is the same thing as to be physically harmed.
00:45:47.100And these are things that only people with truly privileged existences can spend time thinking about and worrying about. And I think that, you know, I don't know if you've done much thinking or talking about, you know, this notion of a decadent culture sort of at the pinnacle of its influence, a culture in decline where they, you know, that starts to hyper focus inward on feelings as the walls crumble around them.
00:46:16.180So this is maybe a broader philosophical topic, but do you, do you sense, do you get that sort of feeling you're in your, maybe in your personal, in your day-to-day life of, of that's the sort of culture we're living in, which leads to us having to have conversations about this?
00:46:32.560Any culture that has the word microaggressions as part of its vocabulary is a pretty decadent culture, you know?
00:46:42.680It is. We've become, well, frankly, we've become a bunch of sissies. I mean, you looked at the whole lockdown experience where, you know, previous generations have understood that death is part of life and it's normal for people to die.
00:47:03.460and it's especially normal for older people to die and in prior years, yeah, and I'm not
00:47:11.260trivializing it or making light of it. I mean, when my grandmother died when I was 21 years old,
00:47:18.420I was devastated. It was horrific. She and I were extremely close. So I don't make light of
00:47:25.740old people dying. I do say that it's a part of life that people generally die and
00:47:33.460Most of the deaths are people in their 70s and 80s and 90s, more so than people in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
00:47:42.720And so COVID comes along and all of a sudden we have this narrative that seems to be predicated on the idea that nobody ever dies.
00:47:50.960And COVID's the first time in human history that people are dying and that this is somehow unacceptable.
00:47:57.660And so you have, you know, elderly people who in prior years were dying of cancer and heart disease and stroke and emphysema and whatever, all these different causes and, you know, not featured on the six o'clock news and the five o'clock, four o'clock, three o'clock news, you know, not sort of an hourly reporting on death.
00:48:23.160And then we get COVID and all of a sudden it's as if nobody has ever died before and old people have never died before. And now we're all shocked and terrified that there's people who are already old and have multiple health conditions that are in their last few months or their last year of life and they're dying.
00:48:44.940and there's just this incredible fear of death that I don't think that they could have pulled
00:48:55.260a stunt like this in the 1950s. In fact, we had more severe viruses. The Asian flu of 1957,
00:49:02.640the Hong Kong flu of 1968 were more deadly than COVID and life went on. People said, well,
00:49:08.880it's unfortunate, you know, we've got more flu deaths this year. These were global pandemics
00:49:13.480and they were more deadly than COVID. And people, of course, they were sad when grandma and grandpa
00:49:20.220died, but they didn't have, they kind of said, well, you know, life goes on, old people die,
00:49:28.840and you didn't have lockdowns. And so we had a bunch of lockdowns, which there's no evidence
00:49:34.360placed before courts by governments to demonstrate that lockdown saved any lives. But yeah. So it is,
00:49:41.520There is sort of a heightened sensitivity that wasn't there in the past.
00:49:44.600And it's especially a sick result of the absolute madness that took over the society,
00:49:53.120Western societies in particular, but the whole planet really, that would simultaneously claim
00:49:59.200that they were enacting these draconian policies to protect the elderly, while at the same time
00:50:07.600letting them die alone in nursing homes with bags of hot water filled medical gloves to hold instead
00:50:15.100of their loved ones hands you know like it's i'll never personally i'll never forgive them for that
00:50:20.740i'll never get over it i don't think the way that that yeah so many people had to die alone and uh
00:50:29.500yeah without their loved ones they're in some sort of a sick perverted twisted disgusting rhetoric
00:50:36.520about how we've got to, yeah, you know, we have to protect these people from COVID.
00:50:42.740Therefore, they all have to die alone because it was illegal to visit your loved ones in a nursing home.
00:53:19.120And like all these other details that would shift them from just a random family that just happens to overstay a visa by a month to a high priority case where a lot of the times the surface level gut reaction is somebody reading a headline or they read quickly read a headline and another headline and they didn't die deep.
00:53:41.860And the thoughts have already been planted there. The seeds have been planted. And even if a correction comes out, you don't undo those impressions that are trickled out over time.
00:53:55.160So I feel like this is just another reason to abolish the CRTC, especially that it's now enabling overt censorship with these additional bills that are coming out.
00:54:09.240Um, so it's, it's necessary that there's change and I'm glad that this article is published now, especially that it's more necessary than, than ever to, to have some of these tough conversations.
00:54:29.280Well, the good news is the, uh, the, the CBC viewership is, is decreasing.
00:54:36.300Even other government-funded media, a while back, I was having coffee with one of the donors to the Justice Center, and he told me that his grandson has never heard of global news.
00:56:54.100And I think being kind of smack dab in the middle of the of the millennial, maybe on the I think they define the millennial generation is from approximately 1980 to 1995.
00:57:05.180I think we are probably the last generation that would have ever grown up with our primary news source, at least in our childhood, being on the TV and newspapers.
00:57:16.200And Gen Z, Gen Alpha, I think, is a little bit too young still.
00:57:20.960But Gen Z, having grown up with primarily Internet-based news and social media news, is by far the most conservative generation in 100 years, they say.
00:57:30.300So I don't think that that's a coincidence that once you stop being propagandized directly by your government-funded media that that would happen.
00:57:39.880So, Ms. John Carpe, do you have, just to be respectful of your time here, do you have any events coming up, any speaking engagements, anything you'd like to plug before we let you get on with your evening?
00:57:51.460Well, the winner of the George Jonas Freedom Award for 2026 is Candice Malcolm, who heads up Juno News.
00:58:02.280And so we are going to have an event in Toronto in July, Vancouver in August, and then Calgary will be September 24th to honor Candice Malcolm.
00:58:15.780I am 90% sure that I will be in Edmonton.
00:58:21.240We're looking at a public meeting on Thursday, April 30th in Edmonton.
00:58:27.220I'll email you more information about that.
00:58:30.400And for those who are interested, the Justice Centre, if you want to sign up for an email newsletter,
00:58:38.140we send it out only twice a month, so you're not going to get inundated.
00:58:42.900But if you go to our website, JCCF, Justice Centre Constitutional Freedoms, jccf.ca,
00:58:49.320sign up for our newsletter and that will keep you posted as well if we do have events from time to
00:58:54.840time we do geographical email blast to people in that in the area of the event so yeah we're
00:59:07.160going to keep on fighting till we win you know times are dark things might get worse
00:59:10.560but we just the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing