00:00:21.400In fact, maybe you are out beating away the crowds at Best Buy to get that like $20 off the big screen TV.
00:00:28.260But if you are perhaps wanting to calm your nerves as you deal with the chaos or really hang up yourself with the sugar coma you are undoubtedly experiencing by staying home.
00:00:41.120Whatever you choose, we are here for you.
00:00:43.560As we are coming to the end of the year, I wanted to do a bit of a look back at the last year.
00:00:50.560Not just a regurgitation of the headlines.
00:00:53.240We'll do that to some extent later in the week.
00:00:54.980But kind of take stock on a big question here.
00:00:58.000And that is the state of the Dominion, the state of Canada.
00:01:01.760You may have recalled a few months back, we interviewed several of the contributors to a book called The 1867 Project.
00:01:09.260Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.
00:01:11.940We spoke about the value of honoring and knowing Canadian history.
00:01:15.920We spoke about wokeism and identity politics.
00:01:19.980We also did a lengthy interview with the editor of that book, Mark Mielke, who is the founder of the Aristotle Foundation.
00:01:26.260So I would encourage you to go and look up those, which are very much timely today, as much as they were back in the summer and fall.
00:01:34.000But I thought we'd bring Mark back and have a bit of a different discussion and talk about the state of Canada as we wind down 2023 and start 2024.
00:01:42.840And also some of these ideas that we believe are so central to the Canadian existence.
00:01:48.420So joining me from the Aristotle Foundation is Mark Mielke.
00:01:51.840Mark, always a pleasure to talk to you.
00:02:00.840So let's talk about this big question here as succinctly as we can to get things rolling, which is, do you believe Canada's best years are ahead or do you think they are behind?
00:02:15.280Well, fundamentally, I'm an optimist and I think people can choose the future for the most part, right?
00:02:21.140So I think our best years are possibly ahead and that's what I and others like to work on.
00:02:26.420And, look, I think last year has been one of chaos and unexpected surprises.
00:02:33.840Look, when I grew up in the 80s, I mean, it was a tough time, say, economy-wise in the early 1980s or, you know, if you were a millennial, you know, you were probably born, right, well, around the year 2000.
00:02:45.500And you may vaguely recall the Great Recession or, of course, you recall, everyone recalls the pandemic.
00:02:50.700So, but not every year is necessarily as chaotic as I think we've been seeing in the past year around the world or past years, whether it's Russia's invasion of Ukraine or what just happened, the Hamas attack in Israel in October.
00:03:03.160But I just have the sense that the world is in a bit of a chaotic state and we haven't quite sorted it out yet.
00:03:09.160You know, you need a crystal ball to figure those things out.
00:03:11.300But, look, fundamentally, I think, at least in Western liberal democracies, where you can choose the future, you know, and we have a fair amount of freedom and no place is perfect.
00:03:22.520I think we have the potential to make the right choices.
00:03:28.040I mean, I think we owe it to ourselves.
00:03:29.800I think we owe it to those who came here before us.
00:03:31.820When we look at past crisis, whether it's economic or otherwise, and perhaps I'm putting on some rose-colored glasses here when I say this, but I would generally say these crises that we've experienced in the past have tended to unite societies and unite civilizations.
00:03:49.340I mean, 9-11 is a relatively recent example.
00:03:51.540I think it was hard to find a country that was more united than the United States of America was on September 12th.
00:03:57.340And a lot of that really bled into Canada.
00:03:59.620That doesn't mean there weren't fractures.
00:04:01.120And certainly with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, that caused some of those.
00:04:43.900I remember someone at the University of British Columbia, I forget her name.
00:04:47.680I think she was a former head of a feminist organization, I'm trying to remember which one, or the status of women.
00:04:54.180And in 2001, came out and basically said, well, the Americans deserved it.
00:04:58.640And that was roundly condemned by most people in most places after 9-11, not universally.
00:05:04.160But you didn't have the same sort of rot within the universities, even then, even though there were problems after 9-11 that you saw after October the 7th.
00:05:12.940And the pro-Hamas crowd is the best way to put it.
00:05:16.560So, yeah, I do think there have been divisions.
00:05:20.760There are greater divisions now than I think in my lifetime.
00:05:24.300I mean, again, going back to the 1980s, which is, you know, my formative period, I grew up in the era of, you know, Brian Mulroney in this country, Ronald Reagan and others, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain.
00:05:34.220There was a divide between those sympathetic to socialism or even Marxism worldwide and those sympathetic to free markets.
00:06:13.420Some of them are useful, some of them not so much.
00:06:15.680But what I think actually is exacerbating the tensions, the raw edges in the past couple of years, is not only governments now, but courts, private organizations are interfering in everyone's lives almost all the time.
00:06:31.980And what I mean by that is if you go back 40 years, the Law Society of British Columbia wouldn't have cared if you were a Christian, an atheist, a Muslim, you know, wanted to practice meditation in the middle of your office in the middle of the day.
00:06:42.280You know, these self-regulating organizations from the Psychologists Association of Ontario, if I get the name wrong, the one that, you know, manages Jordan Peterson that he belongs to, the law societies around the country.
00:06:54.940They are actively, is persecuting too strong, certainly harassing members that don't see things their way, micromanaging them.
00:07:04.080The courts, remember the case a couple of years ago, a gentleman in British Columbia couldn't talk to his 16-year-old daughter about a planned transition.
00:07:12.860He was thrown in jail, even though his position would have been do no harm, sweetheart.
00:07:16.820Maybe wait till you're 18 to think about this or do something physically.
00:07:19.68040 years ago, 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, this would have been unimaginable for a court to interfere in the right of a parent to talk to their children about changing their body.
00:07:35.140I mean, you and I have discussed COVID before in the response.
00:07:37.840We may not be on the exact same page, but there was certainly some overreach there, to put it mildly.
00:07:42.340So I do think a lot of things have been, there's a lot of things that have contributed to the sharp edges in the past several years.
00:07:50.440And I'm not completely sure how do we get out of it.
00:07:53.260I think one of the ways we get out of it, in Canada at least, is to tell professional organizations and government to, with respect or not, butt out.
00:08:02.300You don't have the right to tell parents what to talk to their kids about.
00:08:05.220You know, as long as you're not abusing them physically, you can say, again, maybe on a transition, maybe wait, wait, sweetheart.
00:08:15.820And they think it's the job of their professional organization, you know, as you know, Andrew, police your opinions, my opinions, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:23.620So it's not only the government these days, which, you know, was a problem in some aspects 40 years ago when you and I were younger.
00:08:29.860It's a problem of all organizations from the top down thinking they should regulate our lives.
00:08:35.500Well, and I think when you bring up the gender example there, it probably reveals to what I would posit as being one of the big sources of these divides we've been talking about, which is the obliteration of any sort of real consensus on first principles.
00:08:50.840I mean, you know, it used to be a liberal and a conservative, capital L, liberal, capital L conservative could agree on probably most things.
00:09:27.640Well, you fast forward 22 years, and that is not going to be a consensus you get in the United States that the United States or indeed any national identity is positive.
00:09:38.040Free speech, there is no consensus behind the idea that it is a value that is universal, that is good.
00:09:44.800We can't get on board as a society and have a consensus about whether a male and a female are fundamentally different things.
00:09:51.660And, you know, when I think about it, I don't know what first principle we have left that you could say there is a consensus around.
00:09:59.100And I really am not sure there is one in Canada today.
00:10:02.260Well, there's been a great departure from reality, hasn't there?
00:10:04.840So in the 20th century, the departure from reality was Marxism, right?
00:10:09.180We know how to organize things in the top down, and all of you have to fall in line because that's how utopia, economic utopia and paradise will come about.
00:10:23.200We found that out, or at least I thought most of us did, and most of us were convinced of that before we had to have the debate in the 20th century.
00:10:28.620But now we've got anti-reality all over the place, the notion that you should look at history as perfect, otherwise we're going to cancel you, i.e. John A. MacDonald, we're talking to you, which is an anti-reality position.
00:10:44.180The notion that there is no difference between men and women, and this is just a social construct, to use the language of the deconstructionists and others, really?
00:10:55.060No fundamental difference, no physical difference between men and women, no biological difference, that feelings should trump physical realities.
00:11:05.660So, yeah, we've had a breakdown of reality and not much of an attachment to it.
00:11:11.600And frankly, that's been a problem in human history, but I thought we got through that courtesy of a number of things, developments in the last 500 years, at least in the West.
00:11:19.680Well, and just to interject there for a moment, we have access to more knowledge, and more people have access to a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge, and this has still happened in spite of that, or perhaps because of that.
00:11:30.360And maybe, you know, here's something to think about.
00:11:32.860You remember, well, first of all, Alan Borovoi on your notion of civil liberties, right, this notion that free speech was important.
00:11:40.100Alan Borovoi, now deceased, wrote a book about 15 years ago or 20 years ago, and he was a civil rights fellow.
00:11:46.240I can't remember the organization he was with here in Canada.
00:11:48.540Wrote a great book, Defending Free Speech.
00:11:50.400He was Jewish and, you know, would defend the right of others to, you know, I guess, you know, even like the ACLU would defend the right of the KKK to march in Alabama.
00:11:58.740They weren't thrilled about it, but they would defend the right of free speech.
00:12:02.560You know, these days it seems like people are fairly tribal and don't want others to speak up, and it's a problem of the left and sometimes on the right as well.
00:12:11.320But, yeah, the other thing here that's going on is, look, I think you've got not only a flight from reality, but you've got, you're right, we don't agree on the basics.
00:12:22.480So let's take, you know, some of the pro-Hamas, as I call them, demonstrations in Canada over the last two months that we've seen.
00:12:30.820I don't even think the KKK would necessarily show up to a Jewish business in cities and try and shut them down.
00:12:36.040They would just protest in some small southern town where, you know, they could gather a crowd, I guess.
00:12:40.020These days we have people that think it's okay and they think it's a virtue or they think it's part of free speech to be able to physically intimidate other people and or shut down their businesses, you know, by blocking the sidewalk.
00:13:19.040And I always wondered, would social media, would the rise of the Internet make us more literate or less literate?
00:13:23.780My conclusion is pretty much that people have become even worse than they were with TV in that they look at an image,
00:13:30.440they look at something today on the Internet or even actually from 150 years ago, and they become immediately angry, immediately perturbed, and they're emotional about it.
00:13:43.820And so I think Neil Postman was right.
00:13:45.840TV, you know, in that sense, had the temptation away from literacy and reason.
00:13:49.640And I think in a way that I didn't think would happen, but I think the Internet would make us more able to reason.
00:13:56.540I think it's even tougher because, again, people can just click on something for a second and see an image.
00:14:01.320And that's why people can't figure out where they should be on Gaza or you've got people that look at Gaza and only think, well, isn't that a tragedy in Gaza?
00:14:09.440Do you understand why Israel has to attack Hamas and Gaza and why tragically civilians die?
00:14:13.920Because they've got no peace partner on the other side, because Hamas has been doing this for 18 years.
00:14:19.820So I think there's something about the Internet that produces an immediate effect, just like television did with images.
00:14:25.440And you get all the images you want on the net and people have lost the ability to reason properly.
00:14:31.480Yeah, and there's also been and this has been discussed elsewhere, but there's been a bit of a reorientation around very weird battle lines.
00:14:38.880I mean, we've seen academia taken over by postmodernism, postcolonialism.
00:14:42.980And when you take that colonialism or anti-colonialism framework and apply it to everything, it makes, I mean, politics makes for strange bedfellows, as they say.
00:14:51.800So if you decide Hamas is the oppressed and Israel is the oppressor, then all of a sudden you have to view anything Hamas is doing as being this virtuous and noble postcolonial struggle.
00:15:02.640And you say, well, you know, you've raped women, you've kidnapped people, you've killed babies, but all of that is your struggle for colonialism.
00:16:08.420The first, you know, people who we now call indigenous, their ancestors came over to North America 20,000 years ago.
00:16:13.620That's a blip in the history of human existence.
00:16:16.300French fur traders 500 years ago, everyone built what we now know as Canada.
00:16:20.860And so to have this indigenous versus colonialist divide is absurd.
00:16:24.240In addition, it simplifies other things.
00:16:26.120Was it a good thing or bad thing the British banned sooty, you know, bride burning or widow burning in India?
00:16:32.940Or, you know, was it a bad thing the British colonialists tried to outlaw slavery in northwestern British Columbia in their empire when it had been outlawed everywhere else much earlier when they were fighting indigenous folks in B.C.?
00:16:44.520And I'm not picking on indigenous folks.
00:16:46.560But my point is every ethnicity or ancestry or citizenship has some black marks on it.
00:16:53.280And, you know, we need to grab some more modesty on that.
00:16:58.260But, you know, there's not much in the last two centuries I'd take from Germany, whether it's recent energy policy or their 19th century, you know, illiberal thinking and their 20th century fascination with pseudoscience and anti-science, you know, race theories.
00:17:12.520So one does not have to take one's ethnicity or race or even nationality when it's wrong and support it, you know, my country right or wrong.
00:17:24.160And I think the combination of identity politics, the simplification of that, indigenous versus colonial and, you know, the normal tribal impulse, but this time directed towards identities instead of good ideas, is part of this whole package of creating this, these sharp edges that are, you know, ratcheting up things out there, if I can put it that way, or, you know, are making relationships difficult between human beings.
00:17:51.020We have a prime minister who wants, you know, unironically, and I would say uncontroversially, it wasn't really condemned by that many people, called Canada a post-national country, which is to say Canada does not have a unique Canadian national identity.
00:18:06.380And he was saying this as really an extreme manifestation of what multiculturalism is, which is that we have so many things and so many people here that Canada really ceases to exist.
00:18:17.280I mean, Mark Stein once said Canada is basically like Terminal 1 at Pearson Airport, where its composition is just whoever's walking through at that particular moment.
00:18:25.560And I'd say in retrospect, that was a better position than the one that came about in the last couple of years, where Canada did mean something, and it meant something very negative.
00:18:43.700And, you know, just in December, we saw young Dundas Square as getting a new name in Toronto, because Dundas, even though he was an abolitionist, was deemed too close to that, you know, naughty era that we've decided to condemn.
00:18:56.800And I feel like the new Trudeopian position here is becoming more commonplace, which is that Canada as a country is something to be reviled.
00:19:05.940And I go back to the subtitle of your book, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.
00:19:10.120I mean, you flip those around and you have pretty much the progressive view of this country.
00:19:15.980Both Trudeau opinions were in error and are in error, right?
00:19:21.460So the notion that Canada is a genocidal nation state is word inflation, and it does a great disservice to those who have suffered through actual physical genocides.
00:19:29.100I'm not a big fan of the, you know, the notion that there's cultural genocide.
00:19:32.920Yes, you know, part of your culture can slip away intentionally or unintentionally or be repressed.
00:19:37.300That's not the same thing as physical genocide.
00:19:55.860George Orwell always worried about gutting words and meaning making them into something they're not or something different or avoiding the real issue by using words that are far too cute or clever.
00:20:38.800If you think Jews should die because you're a Nazi or you belong to Hamas, your ideas are not equal to the Western traditional concept that individuals have the right to survive and thrive.
00:20:49.240And increasingly over the, you know, the centuries, we got to treating everyone as an individual and not part of their group.
00:20:55.340That was the Martin Luther King vision, which I thought we had almost achieved until we went into reverse.
00:20:59.860So, yeah, we've got problems with that sort of post-national concept.
00:21:05.200But ultimately, this notion behind it that every idea is equal.
00:21:09.660So if you're in Toronto, as I once wrote in a Globe and Mail column probably six years ago, and I'm not sure if they'd reprint it these days.
00:21:15.160If you really believe all ideas are equal in Toronto, invite up 10 million Texans with, you know, believing the right to bear arms.
00:21:23.080I'm going to guess a lot of Toronto progressives don't.
00:21:25.880But I also don't like ideas of, say, you know, maybe a fundamentalist Mormon breakaway sect that thinks women are property and that it's okay to have 12 or 20 wives.
00:21:33.720But I don't care if it's Mormons or a more fundamentalist, you know, strain of Islam that might believe the same thing.
00:21:40.660I think women have the right to be individuals and not to be treated as cattle.
00:21:45.520So these things, ideas are not created equal.
00:21:48.720But we live in this age where nobody wants to say that some ideas are better than others.
00:21:52.640I prefer monogamy to polygamy because I think ultimately it's a bad deal for women.
00:21:56.740You know, we've had this problem even in like southwestern British Columbia.
00:22:00.800I don't know if that, you know, breakaway Mormon sect is still there, you know, bountiful BC.
00:22:05.460But I remember interviewing someone about 10 or 15 years ago on her book, and she was an escapee from that.
00:22:10.080And you can tell quite clearly that not all ideas are created equal because that particular one oppressed women.
00:22:16.060So maybe that's the core problem, Andrew, is we live in such a morally relativistic age and people don't know how to make distinctions.
00:22:23.440And therefore, they also don't know how to make necessary moral distinctions.
00:22:26.900And now it's showing up in a time of war where people can't think back five seconds to October the 7th and why Hamas is at fault for all the deaths in the Gaza Strip, including those of innocent Gazans.
00:22:40.080Let's not blame Israel, which has no choice, because if it lies down, they're all dead.
00:22:44.120Yeah, and I'll quote Mark Stein again, because I think you've raised an important point here.
00:22:49.500He once said something along the lines of, you could have five middle-aged white women sitting around a table.
00:22:55.660And to use a contemporary example, you add to the mix, you know, Hamas's leading cleric that wants to kill the Jews.
00:23:02.580You've made it more diverse, but you haven't made it better.
00:23:05.560So this idea that diversity is an inherent moral good is incredibly flawed, but it's also, I'd say, an inevitable consequence of the prioritization of group identity and identity politics, which you were talking about earlier.
00:23:21.320And is that consistent with how a lot of real people are viewing the world around them?
00:23:26.140Or is it purely an academia, elite establishment creation?
00:23:32.120No, I think it's seeped into popular culture, though I think most people, you know, I get a sense most people think there's something wrong with what's going on now.
00:23:39.520They just don't know how to push back.
00:23:41.060I mean, look, some of us started a think tank to push back on this, right?
00:23:43.480That's why we started the Aristotle Foundation, you know, to make people think is the short, you know, maybe motto we should use at the Aristotle Foundation.
00:23:50.780We've got another slogan, champion reason, democracy, and civilization.
00:23:54.220But in essence, you can shorten it to, you know, we try to make people think.
00:23:58.820And right, diversity, this is the problem of living on buzzwords or living on the surface.
00:24:02.580Diversity means nothing or everything.
00:24:05.200Look, the United States was very diverse in 1860.
00:24:08.140It had pro-slave holding states and anti-slave holding states, but that's not the kind of diversity you want.
00:24:13.760You know, you want the kind of diversity where, yeah, your skin color doesn't matter and the rest of it.
00:24:18.440That's a good kind of diversity, but it means it doesn't matter.
00:24:21.420So stop paying attention to groups and re-adopt the Martin Luther King preference for, you know, the content of your character and look at that.
00:25:25.200You know, because this is also what we're seeing as well as an attack on empiricism.
00:25:29.300The anti-reality nature of our age is an attack on empiricism.
00:25:32.880And if you force me to say the emperor is fully clothed when I think he's buck naked or if you, Andrew, tell me you're a woman and you haven't transitioned actually to being a woman physically, you know, I'd call you a woman then.
00:25:44.180I won't call you that now because for you to demand that I call you that, Andrew, is anti-reality.
00:25:52.720But it also explains our age because people want you to go along, to get along, to say things that are not true or at least are suspect and should be debated.
00:26:01.380And if you can't debate what should be obvious, the emperor has no clothes, then you're in a very different type of world and it's anti-reality.
00:26:22.860You know, they spoke convenient Brahmides to, I don't know, Marxist historians and Marxist economists who agreed with them.
00:26:33.240You know, but and anyway, not to digress, but I don't think that's the case anymore.
00:26:39.540You know, this notion of truth to power.
00:26:40.940I think it's something that actually the general population would like to see and like to hear, but they're not seeing it because a lot of our academics and some of our politicians are in la-la land and don't want to say the emperor is naked.
00:26:54.260Anyone who's been familiar with the social psychological Milgram experiment, which just to give it a very crude summation, is one where people are effectively going along with administering pain up until the point of a potentially lethal dose of pain to someone simply because someone in a white lab coat tells them to.
00:27:16.100But the takeaway from that is that people are remarkably deferential towards authority.
00:27:20.900And as I reflect on that now, I think a new authority that really wasn't envisioned in that Milgram experiment is the masses and conformity, whereas people just look at the world around them.
00:27:31.780And like you've said, they they're like those people in the emperor's clothes that just don't want to say what they're thinking.
00:27:38.740And they deny that part of themselves.
00:27:40.700They kill that part of themselves because they don't want to stand out.
00:27:43.800My wife and I were on a streetcar in Vienna near the tail end of COVID and Austria had gotten rid of all mandates.
00:27:59.660We look, you know, people looking at us and we didn't have them because we thought they were all done.
00:28:04.100And by the time we had been on this streetcar for five minutes, it was amazing how many masks had started to come off because we had inadvertently staged a bit of a mutiny where other people that didn't want to, but thought they had to were going against it.
00:28:16.840And I mean, people can take from that whatever they want on the COVID stuff specifically, but on speech, it's so important.
00:28:22.160If you deny what you know to be true, eventually you'll start believing the lie, or at least everyone in society will be going along with the lie that it doesn't matter if they believe it.
00:28:32.080Well, and you may be wrong about something, so you can believe something sincerely, but it doesn't make it true.
00:28:37.380I don't believe in your truth and my truth.
00:28:39.140I actually believe in objective truth, you know, but the key point is, yes, you have to tell it as you see it, even if you're incorrect, then maybe you should get your eyes checked or.
00:28:47.080Well, John Stuart Mill, it's that process that lets us learn what the real truth is because you're wrong.
00:29:23.480I just mean, this is also, this shows the importance of leadership.
00:29:27.980If you lack leaders that are willing to tell the truth, if you lack leaders that are willing to be brave, if leaders, you know, political leaders and others, or, you know, leaders in quotes in that case, if those who have some, you know, ability to amplify their voices, and there's a lot more of those these days than there used to be, aren't interested in telling the truth, but are interested in an agenda, an anti-reality agenda.
00:30:05.740And people honestly sometimes don't know who to believe.
00:30:08.240So, you know, I don't have any magic bullet solutions for this, other than, you know, a core value of freedom of expression, yes, does need to be there.
00:30:17.320So you and I and everyone else on this, you know, planet with what are seven, eight billion of us can debate certain things to hopefully arrive at a less error prone position.
00:30:27.720To bring it back full circle, Mark, to how we started here, as we wrap this up, and I asked you then, are Canada's best years ahead or behind?
00:30:57.940So we need to be able to have free expression in our search for truth and make distinctions.
00:31:04.120And I think if we start doing that, you know, saying things out loud that we think are true, and we may be mistaken, but say things that we think are true,
00:31:11.100and ask people to start making distinctions, then I think we're on our way to a bit of a better world.
00:31:20.580But, you know, I mean, the internet is, you know, like drinking from a fire hose, and it's only going to get more that way.
00:31:26.860So, but I think on a personal level, you have to commit to those two things, like try and have a bit of an open mind.
00:31:33.380We all have our biases and, you know, ask other people and yourself to make distinctions.