00:08:46.620Tragedy in northern Ontario yesterday where a police officer was murdered.
00:08:50.860Looks like he was murdered by an escaped mental patient who had escaped the asylum and killed this poor officer.
00:09:00.620So that's certainly an avoidable tragedy, isn't it, Corey?
00:09:05.260And more on the terrible scenes in Belfast, where a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead a local resident in the middle of the road,
00:09:17.040literally sawing through his neck to try and chop his head off.
00:09:20.860All sorts of writing last night. Houses were burned. Buses were set alight. Some video of police officers getting a migrant family out of a burning building. Just the look of terror on the kid's face. Just awful stuff.
00:16:54.660I guess Canada's not alone with that, though.
00:16:56.920Well, Corey, I'll tell you the truth is, you know, to be fair, this was not the topic at hand of the committee.
00:17:01.740It was probably far-reaching from the Conservative MP.
00:17:03.960But overall, after the fact that the question was given and there is a clip now on social media that's going viral, the reaction seems to be that conservatives, Andrew Scheer himself, a prolific MP, are getting onto the train on this issue.
00:17:19.140They're trying to reach out to the public and remind them that they're combating social issues and the culture war even after that they've been a little quiet for a little while now.
00:17:28.020As you know, Pierre Paliyev took some stances recently at some events in BC,
00:17:31.980but it seems that the Conservatives are willing not to be muted altogether all the time on such issues.
00:17:36.940So it's an interesting thing to see, especially, again, during Pride Month.
00:17:41.760Yeah. So, well, getting on to some of the other fun going on and sensitive areas.
00:17:46.800I see you wrote there was a Liberal Member of Parliament is proposing a Somali Heritage Month in Canada.
00:17:51.680I guess not harmful in itself, but I mean, how significant is the Somali population within Canada?
00:17:58.020there's a fair number of them uh and do these warrant a whole month i mean we've got pride
00:18:02.900month we got somali month we can only cover so many things for solid months i mean i understand
00:18:07.060giving recognition for days and things but uh where is this coming from well this came from
00:18:12.820the etobicoke center liberal mp yvonne baker who i spoke to earlier this morning in the caucus uh
00:18:17.780pre-media scrum and uh he told me and by the way cory he has proposed three private members bill
00:18:25.940in this session and all three have to do with the heritage month now himself he's a ukrainian descent
00:18:31.620uh so he proposed the ukrainian heritage month an albanian heritage month and then a somali
00:18:37.060heritage month and when i asked him the question he gave me a very specific answer that i mean this
00:18:41.220is some of the makeup in his community uh and i specifically wanted to refer to the somali since
00:18:45.460as you know corey there's been over 1.5 million people last time i checked earlier this morning
00:18:51.220that have viewed that video on x the clip of him standing in the house introducing it
00:18:55.380you know, very, very simple, straightforward private member's bill that usually doesn't get that attention.
00:19:00.160I think it's very much clear that the Minnesota Somali story is flooding into the Canadian media landscape on this particular topic,
00:19:07.360because, of course, there has been that history with certain elements within the Somali diaspora in the United States.
00:19:13.900But more specific to his answer that he told me is that he believes, regardless of the proportion,
00:19:18.620which Somalis I think about one point or 0.18 0.2 percent of the Canadian population obviously
00:19:25.860very small and marginal but he's talking about the fact that regardless of the proportion they
00:19:29.660make impact so it's without logic in mind I'm very curious to have a follow-up with him and0.80
00:19:34.160see exactly how far you want to go well if Albanians and Somalis who again they're a
00:19:38.540community that exists I think they're quite larger number now out there in Edmonton where
00:19:43.040that's a little closer to you in Alberta.
00:20:10.540or an initiative from the cultural community
00:20:12.880itself. If we get the House of Commons starting to pick and choose a month for each and every one,
00:20:17.900as I said, we only have 12 months, we're going to have a lot of overlap. I mean, it leads to,
00:20:21.460I think, maybe people just kind of ignoring the community altogether and having the opposite
00:20:24.940effect of what they want to do in the first place. Well, Corey, I know Ottawa, I grew up here,
00:20:29.260and I've been around in the Brookhole cycle for a little while now, only two months of Western
00:20:33.100Standard. But of course, every day, something else is happening. I think the tradition is this,
00:20:38.360If you have a Heritage Month recognized by the House of Commons, now you get events, you get commentary, you get specific community or diaspora community focused recognition and even FaceTime with politicians on the Hill or elsewhere when you have something like this officialized.
00:20:54.100So I don't think this is giving one month off to every community. You can give one month to five or six different communities.
00:21:00.240I mean, you have Pride Month for the LGBTQ community, you have obviously other national
00:21:04.900and diaspora groups that exist in Canada. So one group doesn't necessarily take away from the other.
00:21:10.700I think it's probably impossible for most people to track. But ultimately, I think it's a bigger
00:21:15.060question of trying to set in stone a party year where this individual politician or this
00:21:20.960government caucus, opposition caucus, whoever, will host events related to this diaspora community.
00:21:26.340So I guess that's kind of what the strategy is for Yoman Baker, who was a substantial Somali community in his area and surrounding areas in his riding.
00:21:33.720So I guess July might be an opportunity down the line. Of course, it's Canada Day, how it kicks off every year, typically.
00:21:40.100But I guess he'll be having some events should this private member's bill be passed and July be recognized as Somali Heritage Month, along with probably other communities.
00:21:51.080Well, I guess, as you said, that's the nature of politics. There's always lots on the go in Ottawa.
00:21:56.380We have a Conservative Member of Parliament in an area of Calgary that's got a strong Chinese population.
00:22:01.060They're going to make sure that they're always speaking up for that population, if only, I would hope, for good reason, but also just for their own political health and their own constituency.
00:22:12.060So being in Ottawa, as you said, it's a busy area, a lot's happening.
00:22:14.680What kind of stories are you working on right now?
00:22:16.340What's coming up and what can we look forward to from you?
00:22:19.080Well, at 4 p.m. Eastern time, which I believe should be 2 p.m. your time,
00:22:22.640I believe Minister Mark Miller, who's heading the Culture and Heritage Portfolio,1.00
00:22:27.880will be introducing the government's bill to ban children who are 16 years and younger users
00:22:34.600from using social media platforms without consent or without parental involvement.
00:22:40.440We don't know exactly what we're looking at right now,
00:22:42.400so I'm not going to give you too much details besides the fact that I'm going to be pressing forward
00:22:45.680for more details as soon as we get any announcements because there seems to be a bit
00:22:49.500of a cross-partisan interest in the idea of protecting children online. It's been part
00:22:53.800of the rhetoric in Ottawa for months now, especially with AI and the takeover of social
00:22:59.180media in Canadian society. But I think what's most interesting is the how, which is the
00:23:04.080delivery method of, first of all, verifying people's age, which requires verifying identity
00:23:08.160as well, and the privacy concerns and the methodology concerns around that. So I'm going
00:23:13.880looking very close to exactly what it is australia brazil a few other countries have studied that
00:23:18.120have done things that are similar in nature but typically involves a lot of private sector
00:23:22.120responsibility before the government even gets involved in some ways where you have a company
00:23:26.760like for example facebook or any website for example running a business where they
00:23:31.160might have children involved even though they have content for example like explicit sexual material
00:23:36.520that is available and ready on their website they might hire a third party to then offer
00:23:41.640for its software to verify people's age.
00:23:44.500I know Discord, a very popular video game chat site
00:23:47.700and platform uses AI to actually look at people's faces
00:25:23.600is a major conversation through multiple pieces of legislation,
00:25:26.920including the banning and criminalization of defig AIs
00:25:30.760when we're using real pictures of real people.
00:25:32.680But that's the source of what we consider on the political level, Nihar.
00:25:36.840What this bill today is really just focused on, for now, from what I heard, the access at the social media platform level for those that are 16 and under.
00:25:48.360So I guess we're looking at Facebook, Meta, even Twitter, all these platforms to have a response mechanism that can allow them to continue their operation in Canada while also ensuring that you don't have unrestricted access at the very least.
00:26:03.780Because as you know, I mean, we all use social media, you access all kinds of material. Unfortunately, there seems to be a spike in sexually explicit material, thanks in part by AI, but also in part by the fact that the adult film industry uses social media to promote their content, that individuals who are involved in the industry on a personal side are also using these platforms.
00:26:24.480So my real question angle that I want to take forward to Minister Mark Miller and his colleagues is how far do you want to go?
00:26:31.040Because if the harm is the real concern here, the harm is platformed by social media.
00:26:35.840It's accessible on a wide scale on social media, but it isn't a source.
00:26:39.720Instagram doesn't produce the pornography or the explicit materials or the violence and the gore or whatever else we don't want children to be looking at.
00:26:49.020You know, we have gore sites, sock sites.
00:26:52.100And of course, we all know that there's these 18 plus buttons you got to click when you want to open these websites.
00:26:56.680But I think that there might be a room for area of a greater conversation on the public policy frontier as to how governments can actually restrict that kind of access.
00:27:05.000Because the real thing that has changed, Corey, in today's society is that we have all these taboo material and media out there in multimedia formats.
00:27:13.060But they're all much more accessible than ever before.
00:27:16.260It is so easy to see these things online, and I think there is a reasonable conversation across the partisan aisles about how the government can combat this.
00:27:23.920But ultimately, it will come later today.
00:27:27.440Yeah, and there'll be real concerns with it.
00:27:29.680I'm wondering, though, have the social media giants reacted at all?
00:27:32.200Because it does sound like the onus of enforcement, perhaps, and being gatekeepers is going to land on them, which I think sort of makes sense.
00:27:39.780But that would be quite a large venture and a large change to their platforms to to make some sort of effective gateway to try and reduce the amount of minors getting onto their platforms.
00:27:47.560Have they spoken up at all about this yet?
00:27:49.640I don't expect them. I mean, typically, we've covered this before at the Western Standard, that social media companies have oftentimes openly criticized directly government policies.
00:27:58.720But typically that only happens once the legislation has been tabled in the House of Commons, once there's a text of a bill, once there's certain languages and provisions that can actually be read before the reactions are issued by the relevant platforms that will be affected.
00:28:12.200So there have not been any that I know of reports of any statements made by these companies who would be affected. No, not yet.
00:28:20.420Great. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing the answers that Minister Miller offers you when you get to get him to the question there when you're up there.
00:28:27.640The time went fast and it was easy because you've written so many stories.
00:28:30.460You've been great and prolific there on the Western Standard in your short time with us.
00:28:35.240Before I let you go, is there anything else you'd like to point our readers toward to make sure to follow what stories you're going to be working on?
00:28:41.900Well, I mean, also today, this is probably the biggest story I've covered today in terms of the amount of time I've spent on the ground.
00:28:48.040On the Parliament Hill, we had a couple hundred protesters with conservative politicians protesting the Altar Project.
00:28:54.840That's the high-speed rail transit project between Quebec City, connecting Ottawa, connecting Montreal, essentially connecting a very small part of the country, geographically speaking, a very small part of the population that would actually be benefiting from this at a tune of $90 billion.
00:29:09.280Of course, all told, there's also concerns with the corporation's connections with the family of Minister Champagne.
00:29:15.360We've heard this rhetoric at least come from the Conservatives for now.
00:29:18.700I didn't have any chance to speak to any government members on this issue today.
00:29:22.700but I've talked to protesters it seems like a lot of people are concerned about the project
00:29:26.420you know blowing through 90 billion or more dollars typically speaking these projects can
00:29:31.660also fluctuate in their cost over time I know very well personally as an Ottawa resident that
00:29:36.640the LRT project this is much much smaller scale project has you know delayed itself has cost more
00:29:43.820and there's always going to be concerns from public because you know taxpayers are the one
00:29:49.540be footing a deal if it's too big and of course the real question here but also is how many people
00:29:54.580are really going to be benefiting from a higher speed transit that can maybe save you one hour
00:29:59.520at most cases or maybe two if you're taking the full lane um in terms of a trip on that part of
00:30:06.560the country and of course the whole nation is going to be footing the cost so and this might
00:30:10.660be again i mean cory you know very well western alienation is happening at uh you know higher
00:30:15.280proportion than ever before and I think this could be one issues that plays into
00:30:19.480that rhetorical conversation at the at the federal level actually so it's
00:30:24.640still very early on even if this project is approved at every stage there's
00:30:29.320decades before we'll actually see this infrastructure in operation but
00:30:33.700ultimately it's something that many people are concerned about and I'll ask
00:30:37.420our viewers to stay tuned for that video report coming out tomorrow great well
00:30:42.260thank you very much for coming on to talk about these stories today well
00:31:09.860So, yeah, folks, as you can see, yes, and Waleed's been doing a great job.
00:31:12.600We cover things, we're the Western Standard, but we still cover, of course, national issues and having somebody on the ground there.
00:31:18.500He's been great at those scrums, getting those direct answers from cabinet ministers at those conferences.
00:31:23.960You need that presence because legacy media, they can be pretty selective about which stories they might want to get into or which questions they might ask and which they won't.
00:31:32.240And Waleed's been excellent in just asking good to the point questions and getting good answers and writing great copy and stories for us.
00:31:40.420So, yes, I'm thrilled he came on to talk with us.
00:31:43.660You know, it's interesting with that Internet regulation bill, like, you know, where they're going with it.