In this episode of the Cory Morgan Show, host Cory Morgan talks about the first Canadian election debate, the impact of the Greens being kicked out of the race, and why he thinks we should be worried about Donald Trump.
00:09:19.080We've got all these different parties that have seats in there.
00:09:21.860It led to having five people at debates typically.
00:09:24.580Now, the Greens just got kicked out, and I'll explain why. But it's hard when you've got
00:09:31.380really, realistically, only two contenders for the top job, but five voices eating up all the
00:09:36.960oxygen during the debate. And people just end up tuning it out as they all shout and push around
00:09:41.700and so on. I mean, even with a one-on-one debate, it can get bizarre or odd or nonproductive. But
00:09:46.940when you've got five voices shouting, it really doesn't get anywhere. Now there's only going to
00:09:51.720be four. The bar they set for entering the debates, and it's funny, they make an exception
00:09:57.600to make sure that the bloc will always be able to get in. So you have to meet two out of three
00:10:01.200criteria. One of which, all five had, was do you have a seat or not in the House of Commons? Okay,
00:10:06.700the Greens, the NDP, the bloc, the Conservatives, the Liberals all have seats. That one's down.
00:10:11.880Do you have five percent of the support across the country? Five or four, I think it was.
00:10:17.580And if you've got one of those two, the block has that as well. Then you qualify. The third one, though, is are you running seats all the way or running candidates, you know, over 90% of the seats, I believe it is.
00:10:30.000Now, you see, that's where they make the third qualifier to make sure the block can still get in because they only run in Quebec. Simple as that. So they only need two out of three.
00:10:37.520The Greens recently just dumped 15 candidates, and they did it for strategic reasons.
00:10:45.300They did it in ridings where the conservatives were close.
00:10:48.820It was their way of saying, we're going to dump the race in favor of other parties in hopes that the Liberal or the NDP will win that seat, not the conservatives.
00:10:59.140It's a tactic. It's not illegal, but it's pretty counterintuitive to democracy.
00:11:05.160Do you stand on your principles and running in every seat or not?
00:11:09.060That gave the debate commission a good, and I think solid reason to tell the Greens, you know what?
00:11:14.340You weren't in this election in good faith.
00:11:18.020We don't think your voice is going to contribute if you're going to play it that way.
00:12:30.900But immigration, that's a national issue.
00:12:32.600That's something worth discussing all the way across the country,
00:12:35.440yet they've decided not to touch that one tomorrow.
00:12:39.580Immigration is one of the ones where the conservatives have a pretty strong point on it,
00:12:43.700though Polyev hasn't been all that strong on saying he's going to reduce immigration to a manageable level.
00:12:50.900I mean, he's mentioned it, but he's been a little weak on that one, too.
00:12:55.100There's the frustrations in these elections.
00:12:57.100though. I mean, everybody's worried about the gotcha games. They play in the mushy middle.
00:13:02.020You don't commit to too many things. The other thing tonight that's going to be different and
00:13:07.540difficult for Carney and the Liberals, though, is his French. Now, hey, my French is terrible.
00:13:15.460It's virtually non-existent. So I can't get on a high horse, but then I'm not running to be
00:13:21.040Prime Minister. And I'm certainly not trying to participate in a French debate.
00:13:26.120Apparently, I could tell even from listening to him when he speaks in French, which is better French than mine, but that's a pretty low bar.
00:13:31.760You could tell his accent is very, very thick.
00:13:34.260His pronunciation of those French words is with that English intonation, which must be hard on the ears of a French speaking listener.
00:13:43.540Now, in a debate circumstance, when you're highly stressed, when you're under pressure and you're not fully bilingual, he's going to have a hell of a tough time in there.
00:13:55.200I mean, you know what Polyev and, of course, Blanchet are going to do. They're going to speak fast. They're going to talk quickly. For example, I'm not half bad in translating somebody speaking Spanish if they speak, but they've got to talk slowly and they've got to spill it out. If they speak quickly in Spanish, I'm lost. I don't have a chance.
00:14:13.180if Carney is dealing with the debaters and they're going to be speaking quickly in French,
00:14:20.420he's going to have a really tough time understanding what they get at. And if you
00:14:24.240want to talk about a tactic, that'll be a smart one. Speak quickly, use big words. It's just the
00:14:30.620nature of it. So it's going to be interesting to watch Mark Carney try and hold his own. And I
00:14:33.860think tonight that's most of what his goal is going to be in the debate. Just try not to mess
00:14:37.800things up seems solid, and it is important to the French voters. You know, that's a big aspect with
00:14:43.440them. They want somebody who's going to comfortably communicate with them in French, and, you know,
00:14:48.960respects, they feel respects and takes their language rights seriously. So we'll see if
00:14:53.680Carney can come across that way tonight. That's going to be his battle tonight, and it's going to
00:14:57.480be difficult in this. I couldn't imagine going into a debate trying to do it in a second language.
00:15:01.760Again, you know, I've certainly got my leanings. I'm not hoping for Carney to do all that great,
00:15:06.520but all the same, it'll be interesting to watch and how they deal with that. All right, let's get
00:15:10.600on to our guest and into some issues, and that's Tristan Hopper, columnist with the National Post,
00:15:14.820as I said, and author of this book, Don't Be Canada, How One Country Did Everything Wrong0.99
00:15:21.340All at Once. Hey, thank you very much for joining us today, Tristan. I really appreciate it.
00:15:26.060Thank you, Mr. Morgan. Thank you for allowing me to shamelessly promote my book.
00:15:29.700Hey, if you can't promote it, well, what's the point of writing it? But I mean, I read it,
00:15:36.920you know, they sent it out quickly to me, and I appreciate that. And you really covered,
00:15:41.720you know, a lot of the issues that, as I kind of said earlier in the show, though,
00:15:45.560the timing you would think for this book would be perfect, but most of these issues
00:15:49.280aren't coming up a heck of a lot in this election or not in depth. It's kind of a frustrating
00:15:54.720turnabout this time around isn't it yeah it's sort of a theme that came up when i was writing
00:16:00.720the book is uh you know if you read the book your sort of jaw is open or on the floor as you're
00:16:07.520reading about a lot of these things and one of the problems we have is that most canadians uh
00:16:12.800don't know that these things are happening and you know will often sort of refuse to accept that
00:16:18.640they're happening um so it's it's one thing um and every chapter in the book i only wrote about
00:16:25.360a failure of canada if we were uniquely bad at it so there's not going to be a chapter on just
00:16:30.480you know we had you know that climate policy or we had we ran up too much debt or we underspent
00:16:36.000in the military because that's things a lot of other countries are doing you know western countries
00:16:40.480are doing um so i only gave it a chapter if we were doing something way more extreme than anybody
00:16:46.400else and experiencing consequences way more extreme than anybody else you know measurably
00:16:52.800but a lot of these issues i think they got that bad because if you explain what is happening to
00:16:59.280canadians um you know they just don't believe you and you start to sound like a crazy person
00:17:04.720so you know in the lead up to writing this book i would write a story from the national
00:17:08.960post and i would be called into a radio interview to discuss it very much like this
00:17:12.720and as i was explaining you know what the law says and you know what is now the rule in canada
00:17:18.560i realized i sounded like an absolute nutbag and i think that is sort of one of our problems i
00:17:25.600i sympathize with the conservatives maybe not hammering on these issues so much
00:17:31.200because they probably have internal poll data showing that if you bring that up
00:17:35.440people are not going to believe you and they're going to think you're making it up
00:17:39.620Well, that's where we can almost, you know, be thankful for social media in some ways to show the absurdity of things.
00:17:44.700I mean, all of these issues, as you said, for every developed country, they've been dealing with these things, like the chapter on the trans issues.
00:17:51.880You know, every country is sort of grappling with it.
00:17:54.240What's the degree of rights for trans people and how much accommodation should we make?
00:17:57.840But we, as Canadians, just seem to have to go far and beyond to the point of that shop teacher or Jessica Yaniv out in the West Coast where it gets unimaginable.
00:18:07.020Yes, somebody with giant fake breasts just has to take it to an extreme or somebody demanding waxing of their testicles, and it makes it hard to discuss the issue with any seriousness, even though it's very, you know, has some gravity.
00:18:19.520Yeah, I mean, that's sort of a great example of a perennial mistake that Canada has made is you've got sort of an issue, you have to decide how you're going to address this issue. And Canada approaches it in a way in which we just have zero imagination for unintended consequences or bad actors.
00:18:37.760So there is no one in the room when you're saying, okay, well, how are we going to deal with
00:18:41.340transgender rights? And then they say, okay, we'll just do self-ID. That's sort of the lowest
00:18:45.120barrier. Anybody who says they're a different gender, they just sign a form, boom, done.1.00
00:18:49.680You know, no red tape on it. And there was no one in the room to say, do you have any, so, okay,
00:18:55.480I can just go into women's change rooms. I can go into women's prisons just by saying I'm a woman.1.00
00:19:00.740You know, even if you have the best intentions, do you not understand how there are people who
00:19:06.700might exploit something like that. And that's something that comes up everywhere from medical
00:19:12.000assistance dying to bail policy. Canada pursues a policy. You look at it now knowing what happened
00:19:18.440and you're like, well, this is obviously what was going to happen. These things were going to go off
00:19:23.320the rails immediately. And at the time, these are relatively uncontroversial. Whether it's before
00:19:28.360the Supreme Court, whether it's before the House of Commons, you have pieces of legislation that we
00:19:32.920now know we're massively impactful, and no one started speaking up about it. And I think it's
00:19:39.320because Canada traditionally has been a relatively well-run country. Just 10 years ago, most
00:19:46.360international headlines about Canada are, you know, if you want a well-run immigration system,
00:19:50.960follow the Canadian model. If you want to get yourself out of a sovereign debt crisis, do what
00:19:54.720Canada did in the 1990s. Canada is home to the world's richest middle class. Income mobility is
00:20:00.140more true in Canada than it is in the United States. So the American dream is actually a
00:20:04.120Canadian dream, if you think about it. None of those things are true anymore. But I think it led
00:20:09.740to, we are very complacent about our government. We trust our government. We assume there's no bad
00:20:15.420actors. We think we don't have to put checks in. We don't have to be suspicious. We don't have to
00:20:20.100worry about corruption. And that means when you get bad ideas hit in Canada, we had zero defenses
00:20:26.480above it. We just opened up the door, let it in, didn't even imagine they could go wrong. And
00:20:32.220that's why a lot of these bad ideas, they exist in other countries, but they're much harder and
00:20:37.280much more prevalent in Canada. Yeah. And you began the book with the medical assistance in dying,
00:20:42.340you know, and with some of the history of it, because that's an issue that's been going for
00:20:45.580a long, long time. I remember Sven Robinson and Sue Rodriguez. I had the opportunity to
00:20:50.220interview one of the lawyers who was representing Sue Rodriguez. And I asked, like, is this what
00:20:55.820you guys envisioned when you were, you know, promoting the medical assistance back then?
00:21:00.860He said, heavens no. I mean, we, again, wanted, you know, the means for people who were terminally
00:21:05.960ill and in terrible suffering to be able to go out with dignity, but to extend it to the point
00:21:10.480of people with mental illness or poverty, they never imagined it would get that far.
00:21:16.640As you mentioned, though, it seems to be, and I know you were careful to try and stay non-partisan
00:21:20.620in this, but there's a pattern. A lot of this really exploded in the last 10 years. And that
00:21:25.540the beginning of the trudeau government yeah yeah i would say he accelerated it so that's sort of
00:21:30.740you're not going to see the name trudeau very much so you know if you're looking for just you
00:21:34.900know a book about how everything is trudeau's fault in canada um i see more of a symptom um
00:21:40.340you know we created him rather than you know he created us um because basically every one of these
00:21:46.980problems was already germinating by the time justin trudeau came into office and that includes
00:21:52.980medical assistance of dying. The Supreme Court case, which essentially legalized it and ordered
00:21:59.460the House of Commons to put in legal medical assistance of dying, that was prior to his
00:22:04.100election. So I guess what was interesting to me is all of these issues existed in some form and
00:22:10.100were already sort of working their way through the Canadian institutions, but if Justin Trudeau
00:22:15.960is guilty of anything, it's accelerating them very, very quickly. Yeah, I mean Canadians have1.00
00:22:20.980had the opportunity or multiple times over the course of that 10 years to change that if they
00:22:24.740wanted to in elections, and they didn't. So we've got to take some of the responsibility for this,
00:22:29.300which kind of comes to as well, especially when you talked about the opioid epidemic and some of
00:22:34.760that. We're also intransigent and stubborn, though, when it shows that some of these initiatives are
00:22:39.280failing, we just don't seem willing to admit an error and back off. It's more like an inclination
00:23:06.740and just nobody cares and nobody notices.
00:23:09.360So I often hear the criticism against the United States.
00:23:13.620You know, they can just have mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting, and there's no fundamental change to access to firearms as a result.
00:23:21.400And we say, well, those heartless Americans, they would rather, you know, just see these mass shootings as a necessary type rather than making common sense gun reforms.
00:23:29.820But you can make the identical argument against Canada just on the issue of a clearly broken bail system.
00:23:36.980I mean, any number of tragedies caused by people who failed multiple interventions, repeatedly given parole, repeatedly given bail, have shown no inclination to follow the conditions of release or bail, just keep getting out, just keep harming more people, and then eventually they kill someone or kill a whole bunch of people.
00:23:58.500And what surprised me is there's any number of these issues that would have been massively controversial in, say, a normal country.
00:24:06.980There would be legislation named after it. You know, you would have mass protests. I mean, the names of the victims in these cases, I'll mention one in Edmonton. This was a man who had a long history of random attacks and random violent attacks.
00:24:24.200So just, you know, unprompted stabbing someone in the back, almost killing them at a bus stop and just repeatedly given release token sentences is given is given parole violates the conditions of the parole is given parole again, just multiple, multiple releases, something we're quite used to in Canada.
00:24:41.600And then eventually a mother is picking up her child outside an Edmonton school. He appears out of nowhere, stabs them randomly to death in full view of a surviving sister. Just as horrifying as you could possibly imagine it. Spring day, broad daylight, they are locking down the school. The school sees this through the windows and just a mother and child randomly killed.
00:25:02.860So you probably don't know the name of that mother and child. It wasn't a national news story. This was sort of, you know, locally tragic. There was, you know, one local vigil, but then it just kind of went away. I'm inclined to say that any more normal country that was more engaged and more apt to engage with the problems of its country. Yeah, that would have that should have spurred more political action than nothing, which is what it did spur.
00:25:31.420Yeah, well, there's a couple of sacred cows you touched upon and one that terrifies politicians0.98
00:32:42.940And if you go to England, they say, it'll take this long.
00:32:44.840And in Canada, you go and they say, have you considered death?
00:32:47.900And the numbers that Tristan covers in this book too, when you offer it, when you push
00:32:52.840it that much, yeah, there's an astounding amount of people who've been choosing medical assistance
00:32:59.980and dying. There was one person who chose it and it kind of coupled in with the healthcare coverage
00:33:04.900that Tristan talks about in there, where he got bed sores so bad the bone was exposed. He was in
00:33:09.360terrible pain. This was a man with a lot of other issues. And rather than deal with months of
00:33:13.480terrible treatment and pain for it, he just said, you know what, I've had it, I'm done. And he chose
00:33:17.800medical assistance and dying. This was not a man in terminal condition. It was a man in bad condition.
00:33:22.840And then we're talking now that it expanded into people with mental health issues.
00:33:28.700Well, if you've got a mental health issue, are you not the worst person at that particular time to judge whether or not it's time to end your life?
00:33:38.080It's quite different than, say, if it's somebody, again, with a terminal disease that is, you know, progressing and leaving them in misery and there's just no way they're going to come out of it.
00:33:48.460And they'd like to perhaps end while they still have, you know, some degree of function and, you know, fine, that's one thing.
00:33:56.780But now they've expanded and call it a right to everybody for the most trivial of reasons.
00:37:04.160But don't say they'll never leave because the secessionist movement there is real. It is real. And it's not like the Western one. We put our Western lens on Quebec independence-minded people and it doesn't make sense to us.
00:37:21.020They would say, well, they're a recipient of equalization, and they're, you know, coddled by the federal system, and they get extra contracts, and they get extra government work, and all of that.
00:37:32.980It would hurt them terribly economically if they left, and that's true.
00:37:36.980And you've got to remember, the Alberta, Saskatchewan independence movements, they're based mostly on looking at the economic aspect of it, but they're looking at it in the cultural and language.
00:37:47.720and I found this out because I didn't, I thought otherwise too until I was leading the Alberta
00:37:51.720Independence Party and I met with some bloc members back then and we discussed a lot of
00:37:56.660things. Gilles Duceppe was leading back then and that's where I really got to see it first one-on-one
00:38:00.440just coffee shop discussion things like that or back in those days more often bar but they want
00:38:04.860out. They don't care. They're willing to lose money to get out. They want their French state
00:38:10.600and nothing less. The true hardcore independence-minded people in Quebec. So the economic
00:38:16.800case doesn't hold the water with them as you think it might. And it's not a matter of them
00:38:21.720just constantly wanting handouts. The true hardcore ones out there, they want an independent Quebec
00:38:26.960no matter what. Whether they'll get there or not, I don't know. And there are opportunists
00:38:30.800with that. An interesting question out of another commenter, Joe Mills,
00:38:35.980saying most of the province of Quebec is indigenous or crown land. Where are they0.81
00:38:38.500going to get their boundaries? You know, there's a discussion that Canada needs
00:38:43.040in general and overall and in a large way, because there's a lot of misinterpretation
00:38:49.260on the authority and scope of what the indigenous lands are. They aren't sovereign nations. We got
00:38:59.160to cut that myth out. We got to quit calling it that. I mean, they're unique creations. They're
00:39:05.120through a treaty. It's through, you know, lands that were set aside. They're governed by the
00:39:09.380Indian Act, which is legislation, but it's off to the side. But people say no province can separate
00:39:14.280without permission of the indigenous. Why? Where? Where do you see that? Where's the clause that0.99
00:39:19.060says we need their permission? Likewise, with infrastructure projects, there's an obligation to
00:39:25.340consult, but there's nothing saying we have to have their permission. We should try. We should
00:39:32.540consult in good faith on any large move that's going to impact them like any other citizen.
00:39:36.780But they aren't sovereign countries, guys. Not even close. Not even close. I mean, we want to talk about sovereign nations. Let's talk about it. You should have your own full governance, your own income, tax your own people, pay your own bills, their dependencies. And it's not their own fault. That's a longer, bigger discussion.
00:39:56.420But we've allowed this myth to kind of come in and think that any province needs the permission from indigenous nations.
00:40:17.740And Joe Mills saying they tried in the last referendum indigenous said, no, I think maybe what you're talking about is the Meach Lake and Charlottetown Accords.
00:40:25.700And that's where we're talking about constitutional reform.
00:40:29.280And that's where it starts getting ridiculous too.
00:40:31.400Yeah, because we can't reform our constitution without permission from a racial group.0.96