(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon discusses the latest in Canadian politics with Andrew Lawton, including court cases pertaining to the Freedom Convoy, the end of Canada’s COVID restrictions, new Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, and more.
The lifting of Canada’s COVID restrictions — the vaccine mandate to cross the border, board an airplane, and the required use of the ArriveCAN app — is unquestionably a positive development. But Lawton notes that the government’s motivation for repealing the restrictions isn’t necessarily anything to write home about.
“Even setting aside the fact that they’ve even said in the announcement they could come back … my issue is that there was no acknowledgment of wrongdoing,” he says. “They weren’t dropping them because they said, ‘You know what, we messed up and we’re sorry.’ They dropped them because they said, ‘Well, the science now says we can do it.'”
“So they’re claiming that they didn’t get it wrong, that the circumstances have now just evolved to a magic day where they can, as of 11:59 p.m. with the stroke of a pen, get rid of these things,” Lawton adds. “And that to me is quite problematic because if there’s no acknowledgment it was wrong, they’re not shattering this idea that this was a concept that they get behind that could be applied to other things.”
The libertarian podcaster and writer, who had declared his neutrality on the Conservative Party leadership race back in March, is not surprised by Pierre Poilievre’s decisive victory, but he sees in it a potential pitfall.
“The challenge with that is that when you win with such a decisive mandate, there is no incentive to be magnanimous, and there’s no incentive to reach across the aisle,” Lawton says. “Contrary to Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, he didn’t have to owe his victory to social conservatives, and he’s the first leader in quite a while that I think has a coalition of his own that didn’t require assembling blocs through ranked balloting.”
“So the freedom candidate, which was what Pierre Poilievre tried to carve out for himself, was very appealing, even if Poilievre, by his own admission, has no social conservative streak on abortion, on assisted dying, and so on. So I think the question is, what does he do now?”
Listen to this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show below. While you’re at it, be sure to check out the latest episode of The Andrew Lawton Show here and Lawton’s Substack articles here.
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