The Critical Compass Podcast - November 09, 2024


UCP AGM - Bill of Rights Debate w⧸ Martyupnorth ｜ A Critical Compass Clip


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

166.15335

Word count

1,025

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the Bill of Rights and why the Bill should have been debated on the floor of the United Conservative Party of Canada s AGM. We also talk about what happened at the AGM and why it should be revisited.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Could the current state of the Bill of Rights be explained by deferring to legal experts that maybe gave her bad advice or steered it in a certain direction where maybe she doesn't fully understand what that means?
00:00:19.880 Or maybe she just isn't pushing hard enough for that.
00:00:23.580 But the Bill of Rights is interesting to me because I don't remember us asking about it.
00:00:31.860 It wasn't a campaign promise.
00:00:33.660 It wasn't a big deal.
00:00:34.680 Like, I don't think it was a big deal.
00:00:36.520 But it became a big deal at some point.
00:00:39.260 And it became a big deal because of this group in Medicine Hat, the Black Hats, right? 0.97
00:00:44.640 And I don't know why.
00:00:45.480 And I've talked to them.
00:00:46.480 Like, I've talked to Mitch Sylvester and some of those guys.
00:00:49.060 And I think, let me try and answer this.
00:00:56.400 I don't think it was a priority of hers.
00:00:58.580 And it became a priority.
00:01:00.000 And it became something that she got nervous about.
00:01:02.100 And she needed to do something.
00:01:03.640 I don't think it's a priority of hers.
00:01:04.960 I really don't.
00:01:05.900 And so she passed it off to somebody who drafted something extremely quickly.
00:01:11.740 I mean, I had the Bill of Rights here on my desk.
00:01:13.540 Like, the one that, to be honest, the one that the Black Hats gave her with the 21 points.
00:01:19.060 It's a bit of a joke, right?
00:01:20.360 I mean, like, you know, we have the right to fair taxation.
00:01:23.300 We have the right to, like, it just goes on and on.
00:01:25.520 And let's all this weird stuff.
00:01:26.180 What does that mean?
00:01:28.100 Yeah, exactly.
00:01:29.860 I think she locked onto the Bill of Rights as a quick win for this AGM.
00:01:36.980 You could see it when the Black Hats showed up.
00:01:39.260 They got a victory.
00:01:40.140 Now, I think those Black Hats got played.
00:01:42.300 Because the bill as it stands is not what they wanted.
00:01:47.600 You know, those clauses in there, especially that opening clause, that limitation clause, they're going to regret it if the bill goes through.
00:01:56.960 That's not what they wanted.
00:01:58.660 And were you there?
00:01:59.860 Did you witness the noon debate?
00:02:02.800 No, you guys were doing the...
00:02:04.300 We were doing the youth debate at the time.
00:02:06.380 I was able to watch a recording of it.
00:02:08.720 We were, yeah, we were filming a youth debate.
00:02:11.120 We weren't there in person.
00:02:12.540 But even watching the recording, you could see people were kind of treating that almost as a discussion on the nitty-gritty elements of the bill,
00:02:23.360 rather than a voting it forward as a, yes, this is something that we're pursuing as a matter of policy.
00:02:31.400 Yeah, well, it was a motion, right?
00:02:32.800 It was motion 35, I think, or 36.
00:02:36.080 Like, almost an entire page of motion written in, like, size 6 font.
00:02:40.100 I mean, it was crazy.
00:02:41.160 And people mixed up the motion with the fact that the bill, I mean, the motion, basically, the motion, you know, for the viewers, again, on the floor of the AGM,
00:02:54.560 the organization, the members present motions, ideas.
00:03:01.400 For policy, for the direction, right?
00:03:03.620 I mean, throughout the year, different, every constituency association, even individuals like myself, we could have presented ideas.
00:03:10.740 So, 600 to 800 ideas were presented.
00:03:13.980 Then a committee of volunteers who are members of the UCP pared down that list of 600, found the ones that were in common and adjusted them,
00:03:24.080 and then presented 237 or something like that.
00:03:28.100 And then for the last two months leading to the AGM, we ranked those 200 and 35 made it onto the floor of the AGM.
00:03:37.240 So, motions get debated, and then, and when accepted, they're given to the government to try and potentially turn them into legislation.
00:03:47.000 So, yes, in simple terms, the motion said, we'd like the Bill of Rights to be either strengthened or revised.
00:03:54.260 That's it.
00:03:54.780 That's what should have been debated on the floor.
00:03:57.660 You know, do you want the government to do that?
00:03:59.320 Do you want the government to take a crack at revising the Bill of Rights?
00:04:04.320 Well, weirdly, the government heard that throughout the summer and rushed to revise the Bill of Rights and issued it as Bill 24, like, Monday last week.
00:04:15.060 So, of course, the floor was confused because we're debating a motion asking the government to revise the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights has already been revised.
00:04:22.540 So, there was two groups.
00:04:24.000 The groups are literally arguing with each other.
00:04:25.840 I mean, if you close your eyes, you know, there's a row of guys that are for the motion and a row against the motion.
00:04:32.620 And when I closed my eyes listening to people debate, I couldn't tell on what side they were.
00:04:37.120 And it was obvious that people were confusing the motion and the bill as it exists.
00:04:41.880 It passed.
00:04:43.200 So, what passed on the floor is basically the notion that, or what passed on the floor is that the government should revise the Bill of Rights.
00:04:50.240 So, the Blackhats, they're all happy.
00:04:51.860 They got what they wanted, but I don't think they're going to be happy if the bill stays as is.
00:04:58.980 And you run into the issue, too, of, you know, like you were saying, Marty, if you don't have some sort of limiting principle, some sort of, you know, this is inalienable.
00:05:09.260 We, like you were mentioning your admiration for the U.S. Constitution, which I share, the wording of inalienable and we hold these truths to be self-evident.
00:05:18.640 Like those, that strong language, like that is what you build the country off of.
00:05:22.300 And if you have these sort of weasel words of, you know, subject to reasonable limits and, well, then you run the risk of exactly what we saw happening two, three, four years ago of activist judges not acting in the best interest of a reasonable, objective interpretation of law.
00:05:40.020 But just allowing themselves to be swept up in a moment and allowing, you know, passing maybe fears or emotions to influence something that's very consequential and shouldn't be subject to those things.
00:05:52.120 The Fever Willよ
00:05:57.340 The Fever Will
00:06:08.080 you