Rod Taylor, the leader of the Christian Heritage Party, joins us to talk about the Canadian political system and its differences from the United States. He also talks about abortion, abortion rights, and the pro-life movement in Canada.
00:04:24.780And quite often it is the loudest voices, the prime minister being – okay, I should go back up for a second.
00:04:32.880How the prime minister becomes the prime minister is because he or she is the leader of the party that gets the most votes in the federal election.
00:04:45.360So they might not even have a majority.
00:04:47.400In fact, currently our liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, does not have a majority in the House of Commons.
00:04:54.000He has less than 50 percent of the seats represented there, but he has been able to govern and I think govern very badly with the support of a couple of the smaller parties,
00:05:07.640the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc, who basically share his left-wing so-called progressive values, including the killing of the pre-born, the killing of the elderly through euthanasia,
00:05:20.380you know, gender confusion being imposed on the masses in Canada, and excessive government spending.
00:05:29.580So there we have a liberal – I would call it a coalition because – so what happens, there's a couple of ways that an election can be called.
00:05:42.580So if this – especially in a minority government, the liberals have less than 50 percent of the seats, and usually they all vote for what their leader wants.
00:05:52.300When they present a budget, which they haven't been very good at doing, but when they present a budget,
00:05:58.260if over 50 percent of the members of parliament would vote against the budget, that would be considered a vote of non-confidence,
00:06:05.800and the government would fall, prompting an election.
00:06:10.380The other way that the prime minister, if he or she wants to call an election, can go to the governor general,
00:06:18.080who is the representative of the Queen of England, and also the queen, of course, is still our monarch in Canada,
00:06:27.680and her representative, the governor general, needs to dissolve parliament, and then the election is called.
00:06:35.740We call it dropping the writ, and we're scrambling, we and our party, the Christian Heritage Party,
00:06:42.800and all the other parties are scrambling right now to get ready for an election that could start any time in August, September, October, November,
00:06:50.480or even next year, or it could be put off for another two years.
00:06:53.900So that's a little bit about how the Canadian system operates and sometimes how it doesn't operate.
00:06:59.860Yeah, so absolutely crazy. There's a number of neat distinctives, I guess you could say.
00:07:05.240One, you mentioned that the Senate is not elected at all.
00:07:10.280The Senate is appointed by the prime minister.
00:07:13.560You mentioned that the parties don't, you know, people don't vote for the prime minister at all.
00:07:19.600They vote for their local member of parliament in their own riding or district, as you said.
00:07:24.800And then the party that they represent the most of is the one who is the prime minister.
00:07:32.480And then you mentioned about the minor parties and so on.
00:07:35.160It's an interesting system. It's, of course, the British system as well.
00:07:40.200One of the things, I guess, to note is that the monarch or queen or queen's representative here in the governor general,
00:07:48.140the actual power they have is not so much real as figurative.
00:07:52.680The prime minister really dictates what they're supposed to do.
00:07:56.520So that's still, it's more like a figurehead, wouldn't you say, than actual running power.
00:08:02.640That's correct. Now, I don't know if it has to be that way, but that is certainly the way it has been for a long time.
00:08:09.900I often have wished that the queen would exert her authority when some of these terrible bills have been passed,
00:08:18.340you know, the euthanasia bills and some of those things, even some of the budgets.
00:08:24.300I often have wished that the queen would step in and say, no, no, that's no good.
00:08:28.700But that hasn't happened for an awful long time.
00:08:32.080So the governor general basically does really almost the will of the prime minister and is appointed with the approval of the prime minister.
00:08:42.640So the, and the Senate, as you mentioned, they are selected by the prime minister.
00:08:47.060So when the seat becomes vacant, then the prime minister puts one forward.
00:08:52.180There has been a move over the years to have the Senate elected because they have so many seats represented in each province.
00:08:59.280I believe it's a hundred altogether. I'm not sure if it's right around a hundred anyway, senators.
00:09:06.500And depending on the population of the province and provinces and various agreements that have made, been made in the past, each province has so many senators.
00:09:17.160Alberta has done this a couple of times and is about to do it again to hold a, an election for their senator.
00:09:25.120There, there is no guarantee that the prime minister would appoint based on that.
00:09:30.080But Alberta says, yeah, it's time that we start electing our senators.
00:09:36.500So just like in the States, legislation can originate in either the house of commons or the Senate.
00:09:42.620And it has to go back and forth, be approved by both houses and finally get the governor general's endorsement as well before it becomes law in Canada.
00:09:52.760Now, most of the time, I think that we've seen the Senate do some rubber stamping, although interestingly, very recently, with regard to two very scary bills, one on massive control of the Internet information the government was putting forward.
00:10:10.400Basically, it sounded like to clamp down on what they would consider right wing media and so on.
00:10:15.620But also with regard to freedom on the pro-family side of things, it was very, very scary.
00:10:23.900And yet the Senate didn't actually pass the legislation, which was very surprising.
00:10:30.880Those bills, Bill C-6, which is the conversion therapy ban bill, which has been pushed heavily, which would interfere with a parent's right even to counsel their own children regarding their gender confusion or gender questions.
00:10:45.740And face jail time, by the way, if they didn't go along with it.
00:10:50.220Anyway, just to show you how extreme this all is.
00:10:52.360Yeah, with a pastor's right to counsel one of his or her parishioners in regards to, you know, people who have maybe transitioned or gone down the road of what we would consider gender confusion.
00:11:07.180And they maybe want to find their way back to being comfortable in their own skin.
00:11:12.460And if a pastor counsels them in that direction, could be guilty under this.
00:11:43.620And we don't know the timing and all the reasons for the timing of the election.
00:11:47.440But we think that the prime minister wants to get a vote in quickly this year to try to win a majority and maintain his status as prime minister for the next four years.
00:11:58.540And we think next year he may realize that by the time he has to cut off some of these COVID payments to Canadians and maybe raise taxes, he's not going to be as popular as he seems to be today among many.
00:12:11.340The other bill, as you mentioned, C-10, was an Internet communications control bill.
00:12:19.280They they've advertised it as to promote Canadian content, but it actually would do would limit the ability of people with conservative social views to voice those concerns on the Internet.
00:12:34.600And, you know, John Henry, when it starts to get where the government is controlling what you can say, how you can express your opinions, whether it's through the Internet, the written media or in person, it's very scary time for for democracy.
00:12:52.040Definitely so. In fact, one of the other interesting and I think it's pretty novel changes to Canadian politics has been this this whole notion of the approval, so-called, of the candidates for particular parties.
00:13:07.660So there is no freedom like, oh, you think, oh, I'm just going to run for this party.
00:13:19.440Yes. Well, they call it party discipline.
00:13:24.220And of course, you know, discipline can be a good thing if it's used for a good purpose.
00:13:29.260But the we recognize I think most Canadians recognize and those south of the border who may follow our politics a little bit that the liberals, the NDP, the Greens and the bloc are all heavily leaning in the socialist direction, the pro abortion, pro euthanasia direction.
00:13:48.080Heavy spending, heavy spending and so on.
00:13:50.640The Conservative Party historically has been seen as conservative, as holding the line on spending, as retaining respect for the sanctity of life and respect for traditional marriage.
00:14:02.760But in recent years, of course, that's gone downhill.
00:14:06.240There's been a move within the party, unfortunately.
00:14:34.700And when something comes for a vote, it's not like every member of parliament can just vote according to their convictions.
00:14:44.540I mean, they can and they should, but if they do and they vote contrary to the wishes of their leader and the controlling core of the party, they may face discipline, including, up to and including, I mean, they can be kicked out of the party, as Derek Sloan recently was kicked out of the Conservative Party.
00:15:04.580Or the leader of the party might say, well, in the next election, unless you change, I'm not going to sign your papers.
00:15:12.760In other words, you won't be able to run as a conservative or maybe as a liberal if you don't toe the party line.
00:15:21.060And tragically, you know, it's a form of cowardice, but there have been good people who have given up their convictions or abandoned their convictions simply because they want to get reelected again.
00:15:36.160And in some ridings in Canada, they're heavily conservative ridings.
00:15:40.820If you don't run for the Conservative Party, you don't have a big chance of getting elected.
00:15:44.240And same liberal ridings tending to be in the big cities and so on.
00:15:49.480Same pattern as in the states with, you know, social conservatives in the states running for the Republicans.
00:15:56.580But anyway, unfortunately, party discipline has pressured a lot of MPs not to fulfill either the wishes of their constituents or their own internal convictions.
00:16:12.400We need people in Parliament who will stand up for life, family and freedom.
00:16:17.800And we do thank and appreciate those members of Parliament who are doing that in spite of their party's slide to the left.
00:16:25.880I think, particularly Kathy Wagenthal from Saskatchewan, she's a Conservative member.
00:16:31.720She introduced a backbench bill, C-233, which was a bill to ban sex-selective abortion, to keep pre-born girls from being killed just because they're girls.
00:16:43.800And, you know, she's a tremendous warrior for the pre-born.
00:16:49.540But her party leader and a number of her party members did not support it.
00:16:55.220And, of course, the left-wing ruling party did not support it either.
00:17:02.140So this brings us to where Canada is vis-a-vis the United States.
00:17:08.380The reason why this is so strange over here is because we, in some respects, don't have any Conservative Party at all.
00:17:18.440It calls itself the Progressive Conservative Party.
00:17:23.480And there is some history back there with the reform and we can go into that in a little bit.
00:17:27.560But for all intents and purposes, right now, our leader in the Conservative Party, Aaron O'Toole, is a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual marriage with total intolerance for any other view.
00:17:42.240And so this makes for a totally bizarre situation.
00:17:46.500So you have the so-called left, which is all leftist, communist.
00:17:50.400I don't even think they can be called socialists anymore.
00:18:50.100And in terms of your policies, they are pro-life, pro-family, and strongly so.
00:18:57.500And obviously pro-God, your Christian Heritage Party, which is also beautiful.
00:19:01.140But let me talk for a minute about where you are with the whole COVID nonsense, because that has been pushed down Canadians' throat, right, left, center, lockdowns.
00:19:13.060Anything and everything we can do to get the jab.
00:19:18.160Trudeau can't wait to get in front of a camera to say how wonderful the vaccines are and how everybody's going to have to take them.
00:19:25.060So, where is the Christian Heritage Party on this issue?
00:19:30.980Well, of course, we haven't had a convention since the COVID scare began.
00:19:36.580But as a leader and with our core, our national board and so on, and leaders of provinces, we have moved, and I think in recent months, moved rapidly away from following the narrative that's being put forward, both by the federal government and provincial governments.
00:20:00.520For those in the United States, provincial government would be similar to one of the state governments.
00:20:07.440But the lockdowns have been almost uniform across the country.
00:20:12.160There have been different elements of it.
00:20:14.080But we've had pastors arrested for holding church services.
00:20:18.720We've had pastors and churches being given fines, I mean, ranging up to a million dollars.
00:20:24.740Businesses shut down, and all based on the idea that people being close to each other, healthy people being close to each other, is somehow going to spread COVID.
00:20:37.660And this narrative, as you know, has gone around the world.
00:20:40.840It's not simply a Canadian phenomenon.
00:20:42.700I think when COVID came on the scene, I actually was in Washington, D.C. for the CPAC conference back in the good old days when they had a different president.
00:20:55.180But, you know, everyone was kind of aware that COVID was a thing, that it had something to do with Wuhan.
00:21:03.200And, you know, I think we were all willing to, you know, take steps to prevent its spread.
00:21:10.940But as time went on, we began to see that the steps being taken by the provinces and by the federal government didn't make sense.
00:21:21.600I mean, the mask mandates don't make sense.
00:21:24.500In British Columbia, for the first year of, you know, since COVID came on the scene, not one person under the age of 30 died in British Columbia.
00:21:35.320The average age, I think, was 86 at that time, dying from COVID, so-called from COVID.
00:21:40.940We know that those numbers are vastly inaccurate anyway, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they actually died of COVID, not of a motorcycle accident or whatever, as some of the statistics are that far off.
00:21:55.720But, you know, to have children in British Columbia schools getting the jab now, which most people say should not even be called a vaccine.
00:22:07.320It's an experimental biologic product.
00:22:10.200It's a lot of people, there's a lot of negative or adverse reactions to it.
00:22:14.320And for children, there's no need for it.
00:22:18.680And in the meantime, there are other alternative medical approaches that the government has not only ignored, but made very difficult for physicians to use.
00:22:31.360Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, all those things to strengthen the immune system.
00:22:38.100And if someone were to get COVID, you know, handle it anyway, we know that the statistics are that over 99% of the people coming down with COVID survive.
00:22:49.580And, you know, especially in the younger ages, we didn't do a very good job of protecting our seniors in the nursing homes.
00:22:57.420But, you know, we're making kids wear masks while they're gathered.
00:26:07.300So we're creating a second class citizenry.
00:26:11.880I think already in Quebec and maybe it's Saskatchewan, two provinces where they're already talking about, for all non-essential services, if you're not vaccinated, you're going to not be able to enjoy those non-essential services.
00:26:23.680So, yeah, we're getting to that Nazi style in Canada, which was always, you know, the land of our birth and a great free land.
00:26:35.480Rod Taylor, head of the Christian Heritage Party, what is your, what do you see for the future of Canada and what hope do you think there is for Canada in terms of the future?
00:26:45.000What do we need to do to get to a place of hope?
00:26:47.000Well, in a general sense, we need to get back to God.
00:26:52.900We need to get back to the basics of human dignity, respect for life, respect for freedom.
00:26:59.680Our campaign slogan is life, family and freedom.
00:27:04.220And just a little history of the party back in 86, when it was registered, there were some Catholics and Protestants that came together in a little town of Surrey, BC, near Vancouver.
00:27:17.000And they had been working within the bigger parties, even already way back then, and trying to elect pro-life MPs.
00:27:25.060And they found that once they got them elected, that the party whips and party discipline and the temptations of office and whatever career political movements, kind of that they didn't always get the results they were hoping for.
00:27:40.880They were hoping to have some honest, courageous, decent people standing up for the pre-born and for marriage.
00:27:48.900So they said, we need a party that is based on Christian principles.
00:27:52.720Some people say that Christian heritage should have had a hyphen between it because we focus a lot on the heritage.
00:27:59.440And the preamble to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that's part of our Constitution, says Canada is founded on principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.
00:28:14.280Now, that's in the preamble, and some judges and courts have dismissed that as not really a part of so-called Constitution.
00:28:21.780But we think it's a wonderful foundational principle, and our parliament buildings, our government buildings in Ottawa have 25 scripture verses engraved on them.
00:28:35.380And one of them says, he shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river and to the ends of the earth.
00:28:41.860And the thing is, the founders of this country recognize that every blessing that we have comes from Almighty God.
00:28:50.040They recognize that we human beings are made in his image, that we have a responsibility not only to each other, but to him and to his principles, and that the prosperity of a nation, the freedom of a nation depends on our willingness to submit our will to his will.
00:29:11.800You know, Canada is a great nation, has been shown itself around the world for many years.
00:29:17.540Two world wars, two world wars, we have been there protecting freedom of other people, and now we're losing our own freedom.
00:29:27.600But our purpose, we see ourselves sometimes as the conscience of the political elite in this country.
00:29:36.720We stand for election, and we run hard to be elected.
00:29:42.860But even if and when we come to the end on voting day, if we don't get sent to parliament, we still think our duty is to speak truth to the public.
00:29:55.480And so it's a bit of a prophetic voice, maybe a watchman on the wall, we blow the trumpet, you know, and warn of what's coming.
00:30:05.300But we do see hope, I know, John Henry, the LifeSite News, Campaign Life Coalition, Interim, are forces for good, along with a number of other pro-life organizations in the country.
00:30:19.340And you folks have done a tremendous job of working with young people, and that's where I do see hope for this nation.
00:30:28.360There is a growing understanding among young people of Canada about the fact of pre-born human life, that it's not just a blob of tissue, the lies that these generations have been told in the public system.
00:30:43.380And so I am encouraged by that, and I'm encouraged by your faithfulness and that of, you know, Jim Hughes, Jeff Gunnarsson, and others who have worked so hard, Paul Toons, you know, to bring this message to the people of Canada.
00:30:59.520We have a responsibility to keep speaking the truth, even when it is not necessarily popular and not necessarily echoed in the mainstream media.
00:31:08.940But if we fail to speak the truth, then we bear responsibility for, you know, the society not knowing what's happening to us.
00:31:18.120We blow the trumpet, and if they respond, praise the Lord, that's the best possible outcome.
00:31:24.900If the public fails to respond, either at the polls or in other ways, laws that are being passed and so on, well, at least we've done our job and we can, you know, be content.
00:31:38.640Our conscience will rest easy if we've done everything we can do to restore a sense of truth and dignity to Canadian culture.
00:31:49.640Rod Taylor, thank you for being with us in this episode of the John Henry Weston Show.
00:31:52.880So go check out Christian Heritage Party, chp.ca, and good Canadians will have some place to park their vote come this next election, whenever it may be.
00:32:13.940Hi, this is John Henry Weston, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of LifeSite News.
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