Philip Slayton, Canada’s only free speech professor and author of Nothing Left to Lose, argues Canadians abandoned dissent due to pandemic-era suppression—like $1,000 fines for park visits—and institutionalized groupthink in universities and media. His publisher, Ken White (former National Post editor), shares his defense of press freedom, while Slayton warns deplatforming and mob-driven censorship stifle debate, even for credible skeptics like Dr. Patrick Moore. Anna Slatz’s bizarre 36-hour arrest, freed via a backdoor hearing, underscores systemic opacity, leaving journalists and legal teams powerless. Slayton’s book emerges as a rare counter to the erosion of intellectual independence, urging readers to reclaim courageous discourse before democracy unravels. [Automatically generated summary]
I'll give you a brief update about the case of Anna Slatz, our reporter who was arrested in New York City.
She's free, and that's the spoiler alert.
And then I have an in-depth interview with a, I think he's the only one in the country, a free speech professor in Canada.
Yeah, I found him.
I called him a unicorn.
I'll let you hear what he thinks of that.
So that's the form of a podcast, but it's also, of course, a video that's our primary medium.
And to get the video, just become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks for the full year, and you get all the videos for these podcasts.
And you get a couple of other shows too.
So you can get all that at RebelNews.com.
All right, here's the podcast.
Tonight, I think I found Canada's only free speech professor, and he's written a book.
It's June 4th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government government is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hello, my friends.
The happy news is that our newest reporter, Anna Slatz, was released today from jail in New York City, where she had been falsely arrested for reporting on the street protests in that city.
She had been kept in custody for more than 36 hours.
And we had lawyered up lots of lawyers and even got the Canadian consulate in New York to help us out.
But so bizarrely, instead of sending her to the hearing where our lawyer had indicated that he would defend her, registered as her lawyer, the jail sent Anna to another hearing where she had no lawyer.
They didn't tell us about it.
And then they just let her out of the jail, but out a back door so she didn't see our staffer Yankee and our lawyer Michael who had been waiting at the front door of the code.
It was so weird.
In one sense, that means all our efforts were for nothing.
Our lawyers didn't lawyer.
But it was, you know, it's like we did nothing, we accomplished nothing.
But on the other hand, I spoke to Anna after she got out and she indicated there was a lot of trickery in the jail that day and she gave me some examples.
And then she was just grateful that we went to such lengths for her and she actually said she wanted to go right back out and do more reporting.
So that's good news.
But today I want to focus on Canada and my guest for a feature-length interview.
He's a thoughtful proponent of free speech and the free speech culture.
Something we used to have in Canada, but I think we've lost it.
That interview is next.
How many free speech organizations are there in Canada?
Well, there's a lot that call themselves free speech and free press.
If you look at their names, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, civil liberties are their middle name.
There's something called Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
There's the Canadian Association of Journalists.
There's Penn International, Reporters Without Borders.
There are almost more free press organizations than there are writers.
But where are they in the recent pandemic where civil liberties were squashed along with leveling the curve?
I didn't see the civil liberties fight for anyone who was slapped with a $1,000 fine for going to the park.
And as Justin Trudeau and other layers of government slowly shrink the bandwidth for free speech, I don't see the Journalists for Free Expression or other groups fighting against that.
Maybe it's because they're now on the dole themselves, a media bailout here, an appointment to the Senate there.
So it is exceedingly rare to find someone, especially someone from the establishment, a former dean of law at a first-rate law school, a 20-year Bay Street practitioner of the law, a professor at McGill, an author.
It's very rare to find someone to come out with a full-throated defense of free speech.
But I am delighted to say we have found the unicorn.
And he joins us in studio now.
His name is Philip Slayton.
He's an author and a lawyer.
And he has written a new book called Nothing Left to Lose, an Impolite Report on the State of Freedom in Canada.
It's so nice to have you here.
Thank you, Ezra.
I've never been called a unicorn before.
I've been called many things, but never a unicorn.
Well, because a unicorn is so rare, one wonders if it even exists.
Well, I exist, certainly.
Well, I'm glad of it.
Now, I had the pleasure of reading an early manuscript, a confidential review copy, sent to me by your publisher, Ken White.
And I have to disclose that I even play a cameo role in your book.
You mentioned twice, Escan.
Oh, I know.
Well, thank you for that.
Favorably both times.
I read it.
Some of my battles against free speech.
Free speech battles are fought in many different forums, whether it's a law society telling a lawyer he can't speak out, or a human rights commission saying you can't use this or that offensive word.
That's quite true.
Critical Minds and Cultural Appropriation00:15:06
I mean, I think part of the problem, Ezra, and I discussed this, as you know, of course, in the book, is this ingrained habit of deference to authority that Canadians have.
I mean, we defer to authority.
If somebody has a big title or wears a fancy uniform or somehow is president of a bank, we naturally and instinctively defer to them.
They must know something we don't know.
They must understand something we don't understand.
Therefore, we should essentially do what they say.
And that's reinforced, I think, by the often praised Canadian predilection for politeness and civility.
It's not a good thing to speak out.
It's not a good thing to be critical.
Just kind of keep quiet.
Get on with your life.
I think we saw a lot of that during the pandemic.
There was a lot of experts who were trotted out who we had never heard of before.
But they called themselves expert.
Maybe they called themselves doctor.
And everyone did exactly what they said.
And then they flipped their position and we did exactly what they said again.
Wear a mask.
Don't wear a mask.
Go outside.
Don't go outside.
And the deference to anyone who wore like a high priest's wizard hat was shocking to me.
Well, I agree with that.
And I think there's an added problem in this particular case, the case of the pandemic, and that is it's so complicated.
The science is so uncertain.
The statistics are so suspect.
The real causes of death are often, it seems to be misstated.
I mean, if somebody who's 85 or 90 years old with underlying conditions, heart disease, diabetes, whatever, gets COVID-19 and dies, that's a death from COVID-19.
So the whole question of causality is fudged, I think.
So there's all kinds of complicated reasons why, in the case of the pandemic, the Canadians' instinctive deference, Canadians' instinctive respect for experts may not have served them very well.
But how about on matters that no one is really an expert on?
Like, for example, political ideas.
We can each have a legitimate idea.
And just because someone's a PhD in this or that doesn't mean they're a better thinker.
In fact, it might mean they're worse.
For example, the mania that's sweeping even Canada on race relations.
I think Canada is one of the most harmonious countries in the world, especially when you compare it to any other one.
And yet the kind of rigid group think and the narrowing of opinions allowed, that's not because, I mean, you could say it's because the issues are complex, but I don't think, I don't think it's about experts or complexity or risk.
I think it's just we've lost the reverence for individuality, the odd eccentricity.
I mean, there used to be a time where we appreciated someone being a bit quirky, a bit funny, a bit odd.
That was sort of a character.
And now we hate anyone who is out of step with the mainstream.
Well, I mean, I think essentially I agree with you.
I mean, you've had more personal experience of this than I have.
But I think essentially I agree with you.
And of course it has a chilling effect, this attitude.
People become afraid to speak out.
People become afraid to say, you know, that's what everybody says, but I don't agree for these reasons because they may be tarred as, you know, racist.
They may be tarred as something else that's unacceptable.
And it's all part of the political correctness movement as well, which unfortunately has been stoked and fostered by universities, for example, which it never used to be.
Universities used to be places for independent critical thought.
Universities used to be places where students were taught, as I like to say, how to know a good argument from a bad argument.
Now, in my opinion, they're not so much.
Now they are places where, you know, by and large, the party line is offered and the party line is bought.
So all this goes to deprive the general population of a kind of an independent, inquiring, critical mind.
And as I say in the book, sometimes it's not a bad thing to be impolite.
Sometimes it's not a bad thing to be critical.
Sometimes it's not a bad thing to take a line that is not the popular approved line, even though it may cost you to do so.
There's lots of examples of that.
But my fear for our country, for Canada, is for a whole bunch of reasons, the much-vaunted liberty, freedom of expression is part of it, but there are other things too.
The much-vaunted liberty that we like to sort of congratulate ourselves for is to some extent a shimmerer and it's something that's rapidly evaporating.
You know, you're saying we used to learn a good argument from a bad argument.
I mean, they used to teach, and I'm talking a generation or two ago, what they call logical fallacies, the appeal to authority.
I'm an expert, so believe me, that's not logic, or ad hominem.
Or there's so many, there's a list of these little logical flaws that if you learn what they are, you can have an eye appeal for them and you can point out, well, that's not an argument, that's not an argument.
But these days, if I had to sum up the number one argument being taught by the left to the left, I see it everywhere.
The number one argument that's taught is, as a fill in the blank of your grievance group, I believe.
It's a pure, it's not even an argument by authority, it's argument, it's an appeal to the authority of my racial group as a black man, as a Jewish woman, as a left-handed person, as a frontline nurse.
So you're not even saying, listen to my arguments.
It's I'm going to tell you what I believe in based on who I am.
Here's my credentials.
And you cannot argue with me.
Well, and if you disagree with my argument, which is likely poorly thought out because I'm hanging in on my identity, I won't take it as a refutation of my ideas.
I will take it as an insult against the, as such-and-so.
I just said I'm saying this as a black man.
I just said I'm saying this as a Jewish woman.
And you're disagreeing with me?
So you are negating my blackness, my Jewishness, my woman-ness.
So it's a trick, it's a trap, it's an unfairness, and it's a baiting.
And it's if you dare disagree with me, I'm telling you in advance, if you dare disagree with me, you're negating my lived experience as a left-handed person.
Well, I think actually Ezrid even goes beyond that.
He goes to the point where, for example, you cannot question or disagree with or even really comment on, let's say, a black person talking about the black experience, or an indigenous person in this country talking about the indigenous experience, or whatever, the Jewish woman talking about the Jewish female experience.
Because you're not one of those.
And if you're not one of those, you cannot understand, so the argument goes, you cannot understand how they feel, how they think, and you're not qualified to offer an opinion.
A very good example of that, I think, is a whole cultural appropriation argument that raged in the very small world of Can Lit for a while, which said things like, if you are not an Indigenous person, you cannot write about Indigenous people.
If you are not a whatever, you cannot write about the experience of those people, which to my way of thinking negates the whole kind of intellectual integrity and history of writing.
Well, of writing of any sort of act of imagination.
Yes.
Of all fiction itself.
Oh, how can you write about Star Wars?
You're not actually living on this planet.
Or suppose a farmer in Saskatchewan who had never left Saskatchewan wrote a brilliant novel about the Holocaust.
And people would say, it doesn't matter that it's a brilliant novel.
It doesn't matter that it shows an extraordinary understanding and sensitivity.
This man did not experience the Holocaust.
Therefore, he is unqualified to write about it.
So, I mean, that whole movement in Canada, Joseph Boyden was to some extent, for example, a victim of that.
He wrote novels like Black Spruce about the Indigenous experience.
And then some said, well, wait a minute, is he really an Indigenous person?
He claims to be.
Let's look into his background and see.
Can you imagine that doing a genetic test on whether or not your book was good?
So it pervades, I think, many aspects of Canadian life.
And it's, to me, worrying, and that's why I sat down and wrote this book about that and many other things, which in various ways erode our liberties in this country, our freedom in this country, if we properly understand what freedom is.
You know, I remember growing up as a kid in college.
I was in political clubs, and there was a real custom of having debates.
And it was just expected that every political party would attend the debate.
And there was even sort of a speaker's corner when I went to school, University of Calgary.
And there were large assemblies where students would have debates.
And if you refused to attend, it was not even so much that you were a chicken, it's that you weren't serious about being in the public debates.
It was, you were expected to participate, and it was an honor to be asked.
And if you declined, it was sort of a surrender.
These days, I don't think there are debates like that anymore because deplatforming is the response, and I think it's mainly a leftist response.
I have never seen a conservative, and let's just go specifically, I've never seen a member of the Conservative Party, I've never seen a pro-life group, I've never seen a right-of-center speaker try and deplatform a leftist.
Maybe I've missed it, but it feels like a one-sided thing.
If it's a two-sided thing, correct me.
But I know lots of conservatives who want a debate.
I'm one of them.
But deplatforming has ended the concept of a debate.
Well, I think from what I know, what I understand is mostly a phenomenon of the left, but not exclusively a phenomenon of the left.
If you have a counterexample, I want to hear it.
I can't bring one readily to mind, but I think there's one or two that I mentioned in the book.
But beyond that, the underlying phenomenon is you cannot speak.
I will not listen to your ideas because of who you are.
Not because of the validity of your ideas.
Let me give you an example.
I'm just going to give you who you are.
Global warming, the theory of man-made global warming.
Yes.
It's a scientific theory.
I think it's more than a theory.
Okay.
I mean, you could say the theory of gravity is more than a theory, but I hope it's a fact, because if not, we're going to flip away.
There are, you know, the BBC, the CBC, just to give two state-run broadcasters as an example, they have explicit editorial policies never to interview skeptics.
Well, that's clearly wrong.
But I'm saying it's not based on the personal identity of the spokesman.
For example, Dr. Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace.
Amazing credentials, wonderful man, big heart.
So he's personally inoffensive in every way.
But it's because of his ideas that they will never give him a platform.
So it's not just...
Yeah, when I say because of who they are, I don't mean tall, short, white, black.
I mean the whole makeup of the person, including their ideas and commitment to particular principles.
But I think it's clearly wrong.
I mean, I personally believe in global warming.
I think it's, despite all the other trouble we've had recently, it's the great challenge, difficulty, fear of our age.
But that doesn't mean that people who, for whatever reason, have a qualified view of it, maybe even deny it, and there are people I know who do deny the whole phenomenon, shouldn't be given an opportunity to speak.
I mean, the best response to a bad argument or a bad theory is a critical analysis offering a good argument and a good theory, not shutting them down.
As you put it, de-platforming them.
Hear them out and say, here's why I don't agree with you, and here's why I think you're wrong.
And let the audience, Canadians who are, on the whole, sensible, reasonably well-educated people, make a judgment.
You know, and I mentioned Dr. Moore.
He was invited to be one of about 30 speakers at a City of Regina conference.
But he was the one who was a skeptic of the theory of man-made global warming.
So they de-platformed him.
One voice out of 30 was too much for this.
Well, I mean, I'm not familiar with that particular incident, but I think if it happened as you describe it, it's clearly a mistake.
I mean, if somebody has a bad theory, here's a bad argument, don't take the platform away from them.
Put them on the platform, let them speak, let them say what they have to say, and judge them as you wish.
But I know how it works, because I've seen it, and it's come for me more than once.
The mob.
The mob comes to your house.
It's a lovely little house, but it's quite flammable.
And they've all got their pitchforks and their torches, and they say, hey, we're going through the neighborhood finding out if you're on our side or the demon's side.
So you've got about 30 seconds to tell me, will you pick up your torch and come for the enemy with us, or should we torch your house too?
So it's a domino effect of them going through and saying, are you with this guy?
Tell me now, because if so, we're going to make you an enemy.
And so every, like in the city of Regina, everyone said, oh, the mayor, the alderman, the conference, oh, geez, don't come for me.
Yeah, go after Dr. Wayne.
And I'm just giving you an example of how it works.
Please don't come for me.
I'll join with you and kick the tar out of this bad guy.
Well, I think in a way what you're talking about, or what I hear is social media.
I mean, so for example, somebody can be overnight on social media, tried, convicted, and hanged without any opportunity to present their own case, to defend themselves appropriately.
Often this trying, convicting, is hanging is done by people who don't even really understand the facts, don't understand what happened.
Sometimes if an opportunity is subsequently given to have a real trial with real evidence and real legal protection, it turns out they were wrong.
But lives are ruined.
Lives are ruined.
People are destroyed by Twitter mobs, the kind of mob you talked about, but in this case on Twitter or other forms of social media.
That's deeply concerning.
It happens on social media, but I think it happens in real life too.
I mean, I think journalists often are the worst.
They call up an institution, a debate, a platform, and they say, oh, I noticed that your conference has this odious person.
Hmm.
My deadline's 5 p.m., you tell me which side.
I mean journalists call up Facebook and Twitter all the time as little tattletales, little hall monitors, and say, I'm writing a story on why you're allowing a Nazi that I've just judged to be an artist, or why you're allowing a global warming denier at your conference.
My deadline's at 5 p.m.
Hey, Facebook, let me know if you're going to deplatform him.
So it's not even journalism.
It's not scolding.
It's tattling.
It's a form of activism posing as journalism.
That, I think, is a form of censorship out there because these companies, even TikTok, the Chinese company, is now terrified of being called unwoke.
They recently banned Tommy Robinson from a Chinese company.
You know, the country of Channel Square.
Oh, Tommy Robinson, he's too spicy for us.
Journalism's Decline?00:13:07
Well, I mean, I do think, in general, as you're suggesting, as you're describing, the climate for people who have views that are in, let's say, a distinct minority, who have views that may be somewhat eccentric, have views that are not favored by those who run our society and run our government.
The climate for those people is very bad.
It's a combination of all kinds of things.
Social media, I think, is important in this.
But it's very bad.
And it takes someone of considerable courage to say something that they know is going to be unpopular, that they know is going to expose themselves to criticism, even physical danger.
That takes a lot of courage.
And once people with views that are unpopular, once people with views that are in the distinct minority, whatever those views may be, once they shut up because they're scared, then we are in serious trouble.
That's when our democracy dies.
That's when we live in a state which is essentially authoritarian.
And it's extremely dangerous.
And I think there's been a failure across the board in Canadian institutions and Canadian life when it comes to protecting those people and those ideas.
In all kinds of respects, I won't go through the whole long list.
It's all in the book.
But it's a bad thing.
You look at young people, my grandchildren, for example.
They don't really, I mean, it's inculcated in them.
They know they've got to be careful what they say.
They know, for example, my eldest grandson is just about to go to university.
When I went to university, it was like an opening up of a whole new life where you could speak your mind, where you were respected for what you had to say, when people wanted to engage in discussion and debate.
That's not the way it is now.
Yeah, let's be careful.
There's traps.
You have to be careful, very careful, and the traps can be sprung very quickly.
You know, you can go home one evening and overnight a Twitter storm can erupt, a Twitter mob can erupt, and you can wake up in the morning having lost your job, lost your respect, and being in physical danger.
It's happened many times and continues to happen.
Well, tell me some of the chapters in the book.
I mean, I did skim through the copy that Ken sent me, your publisher.
What are the other things that you cover in the book?
Well, there's a variety of things.
I mean, the first major chapter deals with what you and I have discussed already, which is the Canadian habit of deference to authority.
I give a number of examples in that respect.
I mean, give me one instance.
I talk about how the Canadian Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, is to some extent revered, certainly not questioned.
And the judges who are, by the way, appointed, they're not elected, as you well know, they're appointed and decide fundamental questions of social policy, public policy in this country.
Really, the big questions, if you look at the history of the court and the judiciary journey since the Charter of Rights was enacted.
But that court, our court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the judges on that court are treated with extraordinary deference and respect, seldom questioned, even by the legal profession.
Whereas in the United States, for all its flaws and all of the criticism you can level at it, the U.S. Supreme Court and its judges is very much kind of a vibrant, almost participatory body, where, and part of the mainstream, the judges go on television, they give lectures, they write books, they're part of an evolving, dynamic environment.
But in Canada, we have this habit of deference, that's one example.
I talk about how universities, again, we touched on this earlier, how universities no longer see as their mission giving people the intellectual tools that you need to lead a life as a responsible, concerned, inquiring, participating citizen.
They no longer teach you how to know a good argument from a bad argument.
And God knows there's a lot of bad arguments out there.
No longer teach you how to say, well, wait a minute, you say that, but I'm not sure I see why you say that.
I'm not sure I see the premises behind your argument.
I'm not sure I see the evidence behind it.
Universities don't do that.
There's been a failure to some extent of the candlelit world, particularly in the cultural appropriation area.
The police, I talk about the police.
Human Rights Commission is a particular favorite of yours, I know, who tend to see a breach of human rights around every corner and tend to characterize as human rights things that may be important, but they're not human rights, and so on and so on and so on.
You know, by the way, one other thing I'll mention too, and that is the increasing power, because it's come to the fore in the pandemic, the increasing power of the executive branch, which in our country means essentially the prime minister and the premier provinces, to do what they want to do, to ignore the legislature.
I mean, when was the last time the Parliament of Canada met in any serious fashion?
So there's a whole bunch of things happening, and the cumulative effect of which is, to me, very disturbing.
And I think the point of the book is to blow a whistle, to say, watch out.
Don't be too complacent, Canadians.
There are real dangers we face.
I think it was 15 years ago that the Danish cartoons of Mohammed were published.
Yes, that's a long time ago.
And I remember when my little magazine at the time, the Western Standard, republished them with commentary.
I remember that.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle, but there was a pollster named Compass, and they surveyed dozens of working journalists.
So it wasn't a random public opinion poll of strangers.
It was actually calling up working journalists directly.
It was a survey of them.
So it didn't purport to say this is what all Canadians think.
It was, we talked to 150 working journalists and here's what they said.
So it was like a pulse of the industry.
And I only remember one statistic from 15 years ago.
70% of working journalists back then thought that not only should I have published the cartoons, but that every media outlet should have too.
So it was overwhelming that journalists said, no, not only was Levant right to do so, but we should have done so too, and we didn't and were sort of shy about it.
Fast forward 15 years, I am certain that if you were to survey 100 plus working journalists with a similar question, it would be flipped.
It would be at most 30% would say, oh, yeah, we should.
The rest would say it would be Islamophobic.
It would be dangerous.
I'd be held before a Human Rights Commission.
I'd be Twitter mobbed, like Rex Murphy has been over the last couple days for his article, claiming that Canada's not racist.
Everyone's outraged by that statement, apparently.
I think that not only have journalists lost the flame in the last 15 years, but in a way they've been encouraged to, because so many journalists now have, in some ways, merged with government.
There's very few media that aren't reliant on a government bailout of sort.
Newspapers just took the $600 million payment.
I think that's made them more timid.
The largest employer of news journalists, more than all others combined, actually, is the CBC.
So I think that you've actually corrupted the independence out of Canadian journalists.
What do you think of that?
Well, I do think that the whole story behind journalism in this country over the last 30 or 40 years is a very sorry story.
I have a chapter, needless to say, a chapter on this in the book.
Sometimes I think I have a chapter on everything.
And I talk about how journalists, independent journalists, for a long time were an essential and vital part of really, not the government structure, but the way we governed ourselves, the way the country ran.
The Fourth Estate, right?
The famous Fourth Estate.
And they had an essential role to play.
Their role was to keep everybody honest.
Their role was to be the cop on the beat.
Their role was to blow the whistle when they saw something that shouldn't happen.
There was a famous journalist in the United Kingdom who was asked why so many British journalists went to the United States and were successful, very successful.
And he said it's because of the attitude that British, Backwell, the attitude that British journalists had when they interviewed a politician.
They went into the room and their basic attitude was, why is this guy going to lie to me?
What's he going to lie about?
Deep skepticism, a deep attitude of show me, tell me why you say that, prove it.
And that has served, that served us all very well when you had a cadre of journalists doing that.
Those people have largely gone up for various complicated reasons.
And they've been replaced by the Twitter mob, the social media mob.
Which is the opposite about speaking truth power.
It's about being a bully of the moment.
Being the bully of the moment, exactly right.
Where you can say things without any real argument, without any real evidence, and before you know it, it'll be recreated thousands of times so you've got something going.
Yeah.
You know, Boris Johnson, now the Prime Minister of the UK, he's been a writer for a long time.
And I remember a wonderful piece he wrote.
He said, we need a gutter press to keep the gutters clean.
And I thought, you know what, that's so true.
And he was making a defense for the most extreme form of snoopy, gossipy, tabloid-y journalism.
But there's some truth there.
And I don't think we have much of that spirit left in Canada.
Very little.
Except some pockets on the internet, but those are stamped out rather quickly.
I mean, the other thing about the traditional newspaper back in the old days was there was some kind of serious quality control.
I mean, you had an editorial process.
You had an editor who would look at something and say, you know what, you haven't convinced me on this.
You've got to take it back, rethink it, make some more phone call, and so on.
So there was some substance to the process.
There was some credibility to the process, which certainly doesn't exist on social media.
I mean, it's essentially a catastrophe.
How does the average citizen figure out what the hell is going on?
Where does the average citizen get his information?
Where does he get opinions that are credible, that could be relied upon?
Where does he hear good arguments?
Where do they come from?
How do you know?
How do you know, Ezra, what's really happening?
Who do you believe?
Well, that's a question that we can apply to our entire lives and every aspect of it.
And for me, the answer is we have to think for ourselves and be the judge of that.
I remember there was an epiphany I had probably in my early 20s, and it was any story in the newspaper that I actually knew firsthand about, I could spot all the factual errors.
Every story I knew about, they got something wrong.
So imagine all the ones I don't know about.
And I learned to look at the byline who wrote it.
So I learned to be a skeptic at an early age.
I think the internet forces us to take that skeptical approach to everything.
And by the way, I don't think that the CBC, for example, or the Toronto Star fare too much better than an accomplished blogger, Twitterer, YouTuber who has built up a following because of his quality.
I think that things sort themselves out in the market of ideas fairly quickly.
Well, I mean, another thing that I've certainly noticed over the last while is increasingly the media, certainly the tradition media, and also to some extent social media, no longer really provide us with factual stories.
They no longer present facts.
They're full of opinions.
I mean, you pick up one of Canada's major newspapers, I won't mention anyone by name, and what you find is a compendium of opinions.
Everybody's got an opinion on something.
We've all got opinions.
I've got opinions.
And you find a collection of these opinions.
But where do you find the facts?
Where do you find the dispassionate, objective reporting on facts so you know what happened and you can then formulate your own opinion and not buy into somebody else's or reject somebody else's but formulate your own opinion yeah well I think that's one reason why people are rejecting these papers is because people say well my opinion is just as good as that opinion and I don't have to pay $1.50 for that opinion.
Well Philip it's been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit and I'm always interested in books published by your publisher Ken White.
He was an early writer and editor of Alberta Report way back in the day.
MacLean's Magazine and its heyday Saturday night and the National Post, all of those magazines and newspapers at their peak.
So he really was one of the greats and I'm delighted he's in the book publishing business and when he sent me the review copy of your book I thought this is amazing.
This is so great and I would like to encourage our viewers not only to read it for its own sake, that's obviously why you read a book, but I think we've got to support the unicorn and his equally rare publisher.
If there is a publisher and if there's a former dean of law who is willing to make the case for freedom of the press and freedom of speech, not only should we read it to learn from it, but we should read it to support the project.
So I personally, even though I have a review copy, I'm going to personally buy a copy online.
Good man.
Well, my pleasure.
And we're going to have a link under this video.
And buy it because you'll like it.
I read it.
But also buy it because, for God's sakes, there's enough books on the other side, don't you think?
We ought to support the one guy who's doing the books on our side.
All right, there you have it.
Well, Philip Slayton, what a pleasure to have you in this.
Thank you, sir.
It's been a pleasure.
Right on.
Supporting the Prepared Lawyer00:00:57
Stay with us.
Well, it was a big day for me because we had been working so hard to get Anna Slats out of jail.
And we were so prepared, and we lawyered up, and we were working on this and that.
And then we just learned that she was released from jail through a back door, and she went through a hearing we weren't even told about.
Extremely frustrating.
I was so disappointed.
And I felt like we really let Anna down.
But I spoke to her, and she says she knew she was fighting hard, we were fighting hard for her, and that she's just ready to get back out there and keep fighting, keep reporting.
So I guess all's well that ends well.
Thank you for your support, those of you who supported us.
Anna is so new.
I've only had her on my show once as a guest, and she's only done a few videos for us, but I hope over time she becomes a great journalist.
She certainly has the courage for it.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubble World Headquarters to you at home, good night.