In this episode, I sit down with my good friend and long time friend, David Goliath. We talk about what it's like being a teacher in an Indigenous school, what it means to be a teacher, and how to deal with insensitive people in the workplace.
00:00:00.240When someone gets cancelled, you just read about it and then you move on to the next article in the newspaper
00:00:07.000or the next little screen shot or whatever on the television.
00:00:12.940You don't really think about it. There's a human element to it.
00:00:16.460When you cancel somebody, you do a lot of damage, not just to that person, but to his or her community.
00:00:22.800So when you take a teacher away from his job permanently, there's a lot of kids left behind who go,
00:00:30.100where's my teacher, where's my coach, where's my film director, where's my club supervisor?
00:00:34.400Because teachers wear lots of different hats.
00:00:36.780And where's the guy, where's that friendly teacher who just chatted with me at lunch outside the cafeteria and held the door open for me?
00:00:44.680So that's the thing is that people are just so incredibly insensitive.
00:00:48.400They call me insensitive for saying something that they perceive Indigenous people being upset with.
00:00:55.600But of course, they're the ones that are insensitive.
00:00:58.540They're insensitive to the feelings of all the people they hurt by running me out of the school system.
00:01:04.700And this idea, again, that Indigenous children are hurt by their not being all sorts of murdered.
00:01:10.860Indigenous people in residential schools, that they're hurt by the fact that you mean there weren't kids put up in hooks or put in incinerators or burned or thrown in rivers,
00:01:24.860drowned in little babies that were killed after being, you know, their mothers, teen mothers, been pregnant by priests.
00:01:34.900The only way to avoid harm for a teacher is to peddle all these really dark, sinister stories against white Christian missionary teachers 100, 150 years ago to defame the dead.
00:01:49.660Defaming the dead is considered to be perfectly normal.
00:01:51.880And it's easy to do because they can't come back and say, oh, excuse me, I never hurt any child in Kamloops.
00:05:40.160So he's the Eckville, Alberta teacher who, in 1985, got into controversy because he was telling his students that Jews were in gutter riots.
00:05:50.620And so he had some very strong, strong anti-Semitism.
00:05:55.840And anyhow, he was a teacher and he was also the mayor of Eckville, Alberta concurrently.
00:06:02.660So he was a guy that wasn't very, wasn't somebody that many Canadians thought much of.
00:06:10.360And for a good reason, because I don't think he used students as pawns in any political game.
00:06:17.360So I, I obviously wrangled a little bit, being referred to as the second Jim Keegstra.
00:06:25.920And then over time, people recognized that what I said in the classroom was, it's pretty innocuous and absolutely correct historically.
00:06:35.340And nobody is, nobody has proved anything that I said to be wrong.
00:06:39.300But you realize after a while that it's something to do with truth.
00:06:47.060And if you have the regulatory bodies and our employers and all the institutions and certainly the political establishment in Canada against, you know, against anyone who is off script, how do you fight that?
00:07:06.240And so what I've done, and I know, Craig, you're part of this, is you go on, find a form, some forum on social media.
00:08:13.000Trucker con, nothing wrong with the trucker con, but nope, I'm not going to follow along with gender ideology.
00:08:18.680Whatever, whatever the issue is, if enough Canadians stood up and did it, it would just end because it's just, obviously, it's, it's, it's depraved.
00:08:27.220And, but, but in amongst all that gloom and doom that I'm describing to you is the fact that I really believe strongly that, that there's something more important than whether I get my job back or whether I get compensation or whether I win over people to my argument.
00:08:47.140I don't think I'm even going to win people over to my argument because they're changing the language.
00:08:50.800You're saying, well, no, the other side didn't say anything wrong at all.
00:08:54.080And they didn't say there were mass graves.
00:08:55.540They didn't say they found child bodies.
00:08:58.140They didn't say they found actual graves.
00:09:01.880They said they simply found targets of interest.
00:09:06.260So the discovery was of what others think to be potential or suspected graves.
00:09:11.860And you can't say they're wrong because presumably there are graves everywhere.
00:09:16.700You look out the window right now and assume that there's graves on both sides of me in those fields.
00:09:20.680So this is the, this is the problem for me is that the other side will never, they'll just keep changing the language and they'll never admit that they are wrong.
00:09:28.420Of course, it's all written down that a few years ago, including my employer, said that I was guilty of serious professional, extremely serious professional misconduct for not agreeing that there was murder in Kamloops.
00:09:43.360There were all these children who were secretly buried at night, some as young as three.
00:09:47.960Anyhow, it was just the most lurid and fabulous description imaginable of a school where the teachers are mass killers and nuns with guns and so forth.
00:09:59.760And it's just, anyhow, hard to believe.
00:10:01.480So in the end for me, what I'm realizing in my case, wherever it goes, it's going to end well in this sense.
00:10:10.900It's going to end well in the sense that I will know myself and anyone who cares to take an interest in my case will know that I did absolutely nothing wrong.
00:10:20.340And that I was just a victim of a, of a, of a hysteria of a government and media conspiratorial effort to root out anybody who is a stickler for truth.
00:10:33.300And I think they abused hundreds of thousands of school children by telling them these really disturbing, traumatizing ghost stories about all these dead kids everywhere in Canada in residential schools.
00:10:54.320My, my story is I'm winning in a, in a moral sense.
00:10:59.880Well, yeah, it's, uh, there's, there's lots to, uh, lots to fix here in this country, but, uh, I, uh, my inception into all this was running for the PPC in 2019.
00:11:14.640Uh, you know, like the people's party.
00:12:42.240What, what it was is you reacted to, to something that was absurd because all that was reported for years ago was the discovery of suspected or potential graves.
00:12:55.620And how could you argue that there aren't potential or suspected graves on a, in an indigenous community where people have lived for hundreds of years, um, if not thousands.
00:13:06.540So anyhow, so they make it seem as though I'm, I'm some sort of a logical fool.
00:13:12.040Um, and yet, of course, what was said four years ago by them was in telling all the kids everywhere in Canada and getting to put red handprints on their faces or orange, cover themselves in orange and, and, uh, either be indignant enough to the point where they're almost ready to jump out the school window or, or cry whatever.
00:13:31.560There were all tons of kids were crying when the camos broke because the teachers used it as a theater of the absurd.
00:13:37.340They just worked kids into the deepest form of, of remorse and like a wailing wall in, in, um, in Israel.
00:13:50.620That's the important thing is the walls are, are kind of interesting because that's a lot of the teaching.
00:13:54.740It's just the walls, kids are bored in class in many cases and they just look around and you've got all this, you know, these, this flag and that flag and, um, so the wall thing is an intentional analogy by me.