Juno News - Ep 17 ｜ J.J. McCullough ｜ The Canadian Contrarian

00:00:00.000 You can't really have a government that says it's committed to having a country that is diverse and, you know, having a government that is reflective of that diversity and then also champion this very outdated, old fashioned idea that Canada is fundamentally a country of two founding nations, only two, the French and the English, and that those communities sort of will forever be able to dictate the shape and nature of the country.

00:00:23.600 One of my biggest critiques of the mainstream media in Canada is the bland sameness of all the political commentators, columnists, pundits, panelists, and thought leaders.

00:00:32.900 Regardless of what station you tune into, what paper they write for, or what party they claim to come from, there is a rigid, boring repetitiveness being spout from our country's Laurentian elites, who always more or less agree on things, despite claiming to represent the broad political spectrum in Canada.

00:00:48.600 My guest on the True North Speaker series breaks that mold, and often defiantly leads the conversation in totally new and interesting ways.

00:00:57.460 JJ McCullough is a Vancouver-based political commentator, cartoonist, YouTuber, and columnist with the prestigious Washington Post.

00:01:05.200 JJ's columns often trigger an incredible and disproportionate response from his critics, who seem to resent the very fact that he has a large platform and a huge audience to share his contrarian views with.

00:01:16.220 I don't always agree with JJ, but I always appreciate his unique perspective and the ideas he brings to the table.

00:01:22.480 In our conversation today, we take a deep dive into Canadian politics, assessing the current parliament, the party leaders, and we talk about why the fringe, left-wing parties are given more airtime and more credibility from the mainstream media versus the upstart, right-of-center People's Party.

00:01:37.540 We also get into Canada's history. We discuss Pierre Trudeau's 1969 White Papers that sought to abolish the separate system of governance for Canada's Indigenous people.

00:01:47.740 We discuss individual versus collective rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Charlottetown Accord, and we dissect and challenge the accusation that Canada is a systemically racist country.

00:01:58.340 I hope you enjoy our conversation. Please like this video, share it with friends and family, and leave me a comment below.

00:02:04.860 Don't forget to subscribe to True North, and if you'd like to support this podcast, please visit tnc.news.com.

00:02:22.300 I'm joined by JJ McCullough. JJ, thank you so much for joining the show.

00:02:26.460 Thanks for having me.

00:02:27.280 I never know what you're going to look like. I feel like your hairstyle changes so much every time.

00:02:33.300 I also feel like your hair grows really fast. I don't know if that's just the power of YouTube, where I see one video and you've got short, blonde hair, and then the very next video, you've got this big, long flow.

00:02:44.120 I just get bored with hair really easily, and I'm lucky because my mother's a hairdresser, so any crazy thing I want done to my hair, I can usually get done that weekend.

00:02:51.720 Very cool. Well, you're lucky because during COVID, I couldn't get a haircut to save my life.

00:02:57.500 I was in Toronto, and everything was closed, and then when salons finally opened, the salon I go to was booked out for like four months, so I could get an appointment, and I was envious of anyone who had a haircut.

00:03:08.920 Jeez, the struggle is real.

00:03:10.060 Yeah, I know. First world problems, right?

00:03:13.520 Right, right.

00:03:13.880 So we just very narrowly avoided an election last week, and I know you were very on top of it and commenting, so why don't you walk us through what happened and what you think should have happened with Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, and the whole confidence vote there?

00:03:32.860 Well, I mean, I thought that it was a real sort of low point in the history of the politics of this country, and certainly the history of the Trudeau administration, you know, because you basically had this, the WE scandal, you know, the sort of the allegation that Justin Trudeau had, you know, basically the allegation is that he essentially rigged a government contract to help this WE charity that we know that he himself and his various family members had benefited materially from, that they'd been given, you know, jobs and commission work, and that's what we did.

00:04:02.840 And that kind of thing for this organization.

00:04:04.080 And I had really sort of felt like that the sort of the half-life of this story was over, that it was sort of fading into the distance.

00:04:10.540 But, you know, the conservatives have really continued to hammer on and hammer on and hammer on on this, wanting to know all of the facts, all of the details, who got paid when and who knew what when and all this kind of thing, you know, Pierre Polyevre leading the charge in the House of Commons day after day after day.

00:04:23.880 And then so it sort of culminated in this idea that they were going to get the Parliament to vote on forming an official parliamentary committee to continue to examine the WE scandal in all of its magnitudes.

00:04:36.680 And yeah, and this sort of came to a vote in the House of Commons, and the Liberal Party declared that any vote on this matter was going to be a matter of confidence, which meant that if the parties voted in favor of it, then essentially like the this would be sort of taken as a sign that the House of Commons had no confidence in the in the in the governing party and that therefore the Parliament should be dissolved and we should be plunged into a national election.

00:05:03.600 And I think just a lot of people, myself included, just it struck as just so brazenly cynical, like that there was no pretense of of any sort of higher principle of good governance at play here.

00:05:16.800 It was simply just a matter of that the the conservatives, you know, were trying to look into something or trying to look into some embarrassing business on the part of the government and the government just didn't care for this to happen.

00:05:29.360 And therefore, we're going to just pull out the big guns and prevent it from happening.

00:05:32.980 And but in some respects, I think the big story here, because, of course, we know we're not in election.

00:05:37.940 So clearly the vote was voted down. But the sort of the key variable was the NDP, right, because we know that the conservatives can't muscle things through on their own.

00:05:47.060 They need the support of at least one other party. And I think there was a lot of expectation that it would be the NDP if anyone that was going to.

00:05:55.040 Well, I mean, it's not even mysterious. It had to be the NDP. That was just basically how the math worked.

00:06:01.500 And, you know, the NDP always talks a good game. You know, people like Charlie Angus, you know, who have been really sort of bloviating loudly about the we scandal and, you know, giving as good as the conservatives in some respects.

00:06:13.280 But, you know, when sort of push came to shove, they weren't willing to support the creation of this committee.

00:06:18.700 They weren't willing to to sort of call Trudeau's bluff and, you know, challenge the his premise that this was a confidence vote.

00:06:27.160 He sort of backed down at the last minute, Jagmeet Singh did. And I think that just reflects very poorly on the NDP and sort of has made a lot of people realize that the NDP is fundamentally a coalition partner of the liberal government.

00:06:40.480 The NDP exists to keep the liberal party in power, to keep the liberal government propped up.

00:06:45.580 And there's not really any pretense otherwise, like they can talk a good game all they want.

00:06:50.600 But fundamentally, the most important question in Canadian politics is who is running the country, what party is running the country and the NDP, whenever it's challenged.

00:06:59.160 And this goes back to Jack Layton and all the other sort of previous NDP bosses.

00:07:03.060 Whenever that central premise of Canadian politics is challenged, who should be running the country, the NDP or sort of the liberal party or somebody else, the NDP always sides with the answer being the liberal party.

00:07:13.400 Well, it seems to me that it's the only way that the NDP could have any sort of power in the country.

00:07:20.520 One of the striking things from my perspective about what was going on with all the jostling of the parties was just how brazenly sort of political it was that it wasn't there was no, like you said, pretense of like doing anything moral or doing what's right for the country.

00:07:34.580 It's like, you know, Trudeau was going to go to great length to avoid having a committee examine whatever happened with we and the NDP is like the power broker.

00:07:45.420 And, you know, if they force an election, then they might not be the power broker anymore because there could be a majority government or the conservatives could win.

00:07:52.820 And then they wouldn't fit into that sort of coalition.

00:07:55.840 I always wonder if Canadians sort of see through it and have become like cynical like me or if they just believe that, you know, the parties that they like are doing the right thing because, you know, maybe having an election during COVID would make us all die or something.

00:08:11.140 Well, it's it's it's no, you raise a lot of good points.

00:08:13.700 I mean, as as a British Columbian, it's particularly rich when the NDP is using this line about an election during COVID, because, of course, here in British Columbia, our NDP government called an election in the middle of our supposed second wave here in B.C.

00:08:27.260 And not only that, but Jagmeet Singh himself has been tromping all around the province, you know, campaigning for the NDP government of British Columbia.

00:08:33.900 You know, Jagmeet Singh is now sort of reimagined that he's a British Columbian because, you know, he parachuted in here last year to win an easy seat so he could get in the House of Commons.

00:08:42.320 And so it's just, you know, the NDP has had to do a lot of damage control about this, like because they feel very against the wall, because I think a lot of their base is kind of cheesed off at them as well, that the that this party exists to constantly just prop up the liberal government and exchange for what exactly?

00:08:59.820 Right. Like that they can imagine themselves as being, you know, the power broker and maybe like, you know, getting a tiny little tweak to the CERB program or something like that here and there.

00:09:10.400 But it's pretty small beans, right? Like if the if the NDP really believes that the Liberal Party is wrong for the country and should not be in government, then they have to be able to sort of make a stronger case to that regard.

00:09:22.600 They have to be able to drive a harder deal. And that means being willing to, you know, push them out of power when that opportunity presents.

00:09:28.740 But the other level of cynicism is, of course, that, you know, we look at the polls and we see, you know, the NDP doesn't isn't doing so hot with voters right now.

00:09:37.680 Their poll numbers are not great. And it gets even deeper because then people are saying like, well, you know, the NDP doesn't have a lot of money right now, as if they ever do.

00:09:44.500 And like they're thus not in a good position to fight the election and this sort of thing.

00:09:48.760 So, I mean, it is in some respects like I would hope that the average Canadian is aware of this because it does sort of show that our whole sort of political system, this whole parliamentary system is so it's so twisted in some level.

00:10:00.340 And it is all just based on partisan calculation and nothing else like this, this whole idea of like a confidence vote, right?

00:10:07.580 Like it was like, you know, I don't know, like a century ago, maybe that meant something as like an idea of, you know, how our government structure is is sort of worked out.

00:10:17.160 And like the confidence of the of the parliament actually meant something in terms of determining like, you know, who deserves to be prime minister and in some sort of more holistic sense.

00:10:27.040 But now it like it means nothing like it's all like all of these sorts of things, confidence of the House, you know, when we have elections or don't have elections, the formation of committees, like all of this stuff is now subordinate to partisan calculation.

00:10:41.000 And it's just it's it's not great. It's not healthy for democracy at all.

00:10:44.660 And I I hope that Canadians are starting to to wise up to that, because we're really we are, as you said, like we just are living in a in a system in which there is no higher principle governing anything.

00:10:55.900 I often wondered that about question period itself, like having this sort of like, you know, almost wrote, you know, conservatives ask a question and then Trudeau stands up and like read something off a piece of paper, like half heartedly or like, you know, he deflects a question.

00:11:10.120 It's like, what's the point of this? I understand that it's part of the tradition. I think it's good.

00:11:14.660 Maybe at one point in Canada's history, they would actually have debates, they would actually listen to each other and then respond to the point.

00:11:21.560 But, you know, what we see today is just very robotic. It's like that, you know, the prime minister knows what the question is or he doesn't listen to the question and he just reads off talking points that someone read to him.

00:11:32.260 It's like, how is this actually getting to the bottom of things? Like, is this really holding a prime minister to account, just having him stand up and like say state rehearse lines?

00:11:41.200 Like, how does this, how is democracy? I don't know.

00:11:43.740 No, exactly. You make, you make such an excellent point, right? It's like, there's so much of sort of Canadian politics that it's just, it's just this like theater and, and yeah, just like going through the motions of these, like increasingly like ritualistic ceremonial kind of activities that really like they're, they're fun, I guess, for people that live in Ottawa.

00:12:03.340 Like the professional politicians, they sort of want to go through the motions of feeling important and feeling like they're playing the game of being a politician.

00:12:10.580 But, you know, at the end of the day, when it comes to issues that matter, they're not consequential at all.

00:12:15.800 Although I will say that one thing that I was actually kind of pleasantly surprised by was when Prime Minister Trudeau was called before the, I don't recall what committee it was specifically, but he was of course called before that one committee.

00:12:31.820 I think it was like a finance committee to testify about what he knew about the Wee scandal and Pierre Polyevre really gave him an intense grilling.

00:12:39.140 And in that context, you could see something resembling parliamentary accountability take place, because it wasn't scripted, the Prime Minister didn't know the questions ahead of time, the Prime Minister was sort of really on the hot seat, and it was a very focused line of questioning in the context of a very specific sort of committee, in which like, it was searching for, it was like, it was sort of like a trial, right?

00:13:00.880 Like that they were searching for, like, clear, objective information to help the committee, you know, determine conclusions about things, as opposed to sort of the partisan spectacle of question period, which is, yeah, so sort of ceremonial, and, you know, just sort of gummed up with all of this sort of empty, rote, scripted, partisan talking points.

00:13:20.100 And that's, the point of that is, is that makes the fact that we're not having this committee to look into the Wee scandal sort of all the more disappointing, because independent of like, all of this stuff about the election, and whether or not we're going to have one, and yada, yada, yada, it is also just, it's sad, because like, now this committee is not going to be formed.

00:13:36.060 And so our ability to actually do that kind of deep dive into the Wee scandal has now evaporated, thanks to the NDP, and, you know, we'll be off to the next thing.

00:13:43.920 And so I suppose the sort of the cover won't be closed on this particular scandal in the way that we had wanted it to be, because ultimately, I mean, this is something else.

00:13:54.800 This says something about our parliamentary system is that the only real way that you can get, like, true, hard information from a government in this country is through some sort of parliamentary committee in the context of a minority government, unless the stars all align in that perfect fashion, which only happens, you know, like once every decade or so, you're basically not going to get any accountability, because we know that things like the ethics commissioner and all the rest of it are just, you know, pointless figureheads as well.

00:14:20.200 So it's really, it's really disappointing. And I hope the NDP is pleased with itself, because they're the architects of this.

00:14:27.060 Well, you're pretty, you're pretty critical of the NDP, you're actually critical of all the parties in different ways. So I was hoping we could sort of go through each of the parties here, and you could offer your critique, because it's interesting, we'll start with the NDP, since we were just talking about them. But, you know, Jagmeet Singh has this sort of star power, I think the media are really into him, he's this sort of woke, modern, sophisticated,

00:14:50.200 urban elitist prototype. And that's like, that's the media's dream, right? Like, when he first came on the scene, it's like, wow, he's like Justin Trudeau, except for he's like, you know, from another culture. So that makes him even better. But then when it came to the election, he just totally sunk, like it was pretty disastrous for the NDP.

00:15:07.500 For all the consternation about Andrew Scheer, and, you know, how he failed, and how he didn't do what he was expected of him. You know, it really was the NDP that went down all across the board in terms of seats, in terms of the vote representation. So why is it that Jagmeet gets sort of a free pass? Why is he still leading this party when, you know, you pointed out, he's broke, the party's broke, they bankrupted themselves, basically, they lost all their seats in Quebec, they have very little,

00:15:35.260 very few seats. Sure, they hold the balance of power. But, but why do you think he avoids the sort of scrutiny that other political leaders get?

00:15:44.600 Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a very good question. And I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll confess to my own guilt in this is that I was somebody that was very sort of pumping up Singh's image when he sort of first sauntered onto the scene. Because I did, and I think like a lot of media people did this, is I think we projected sort of skills onto him that he just objectively didn't have.

00:16:03.320 And I think that there was a sort of fascination with the idea that, you know, he was a minority, you know, he was from this minority faith, and that that was going to give him some sort of traction in this sort of era of identity politics and that kind of thing. But then I think there was also just like a lot of fantasizing that, for example, he was a charismatic person, which I don't think he's charismatic. I think he's, he's quite awkward in his manner of speaking. And that's something that a lot of people have pointed out to me. It's like, well, Jagmeet Singh, like, he just can't talk that well, can he? He's just, he's stumbling and bumbling his way through press conferences.

00:16:32.940 Like that he's just, and he's also a man who just straight up does not seem like he has clear motivation for why he's in politics. You know, he's sort of, he carries himself as someone that's just kind of been cast into this role, sort of almost against his wishes.

00:16:45.780 And he's just trying to like, figure out, tell me what to do? What do I have to do? What do what should an NDP leader be doing, as opposed to someone who has a sort of clear sense of why he's in politics and what his ultimate goal is, in sort of playing this game. But this is a bigger problem with the NDP in general is that it does, I think, have that kind of existential dread at its core, is that it doesn't really know what it exists to do. Because I think that there is very, I often wonder if there's ever been that much daylight between the NDP and the Liberals.

00:17:13.680 I know that there's kind of this fantasy that there was some glory age in which the parties were very different, and only now they've gotten very similar. But I think that when you look back through time, this is actually a more consistent criticism than some might expect.

00:17:26.560 You know, we know, for example, that Jack Layton was like constantly trying to make deals with the Liberal Party, even, you know, prop up a Liberal minority government in order to keep the Conservatives out of power, and all of this kind of thing.

00:17:37.860 And I think that, you know, that becomes a sort of existential crisis, because then it's like, well, why are you a separate party then? Like, does do the people that are currently making up the NDP caucus, do they really have more power, more influence doing what they're doing now than they would if they were just a faction, you know, perhaps a further left faction within the Liberal Party itself, in the same way that like the Democrats in the States, you know, they have a further left faction, you know, the AOC faction that exerts some influence within the party.

00:18:04.740 And but you know, the NDP is is has a culture, right? Like, and that's the thing. It's like the NDP is kind of like a culture that has a party. And it's kind of a culture of of a certain clique of sort of far left people in our society, you know, people associated increasingly, just with sort of the public sector unions, and people in sort of public sector union adjacent, you know, activist circles and professions and things like that, you know, academics, educators, you know, social workers,

00:18:34.740 and sort of bureaucrats of various stripes, and sort of like people within that orbit are very committed to the NDP because they've sort of grown up learning that the NDP is their party. You know, my mother, for example, was a public school teacher. And I remember we would get like these magazines from the public school teachers union here in DC in the mail every so often, and they'd always be full of like NDP propaganda.

00:18:56.740 So it's kind of like really beaten into your head when you're sort of part of this NDP sort of milieu, that the NDP is the only party that's going to fight for you. And it's the only one that's looking out for these distinct interests of these distinct communities.

00:19:07.740 And I think that part of that culture is that it makes people just not very critical. And it makes them not really ask a lot from their leaders. I think that when you look through the history of NDP leaders, not only federally, but at the provincial level, is that they're given a lot of, you know, second and third and fourth choices, even in the face of clear signs that they're just like objectively not good at their job, that they're not good at winning elections, they're not good at winning seats.

00:19:32.740 And I think that Jagmeet Singh is a classic example of that, like he clearly failed at his his central job, which was to make the party do better to make the party gain or at least hold what it already had. He didn't do that.

00:19:44.740 And yet, because the NDP culture, I think is just much more deferential to leaders, particularly leaders that have sort of like, you know, proven their loyalty, seeing as of course a man who sort of rose up through the Ontario NDP.

00:19:55.740 And so he's a good NDP man. It's revealing that the the only NDP man who actually did get thrown under the bus was Thomas Mulcair. And that was because, you know, he was somebody that sort of like the NDP true believers always had their doubts about because, you know, he came from a different party.

00:20:11.740 He was a liberal, even flirted with the conservatives and, you know, you thus could not be sort of trusted. But no, I mean, like, it's just this is just the kind of party that the NDP is.

00:20:23.740 I think it's a serious, an unserious party run by unserious people that are sort of captive to a kind of fantasy of relevance that's never actually going to come true.

00:20:35.740 Well, it's interesting because, I mean, you talked about wondering Jagmeet's motivation for getting into politics.

00:20:41.740 He did this weird video a while ago, like a long time ago, where he was talking about how his motivation for getting into politics was the former B.C. Premier Ujjal de Sanj because of his anti sort of Kalistani Sikh separatism position.

00:20:56.740 And so it sort of feels like a leader that's so distracted by a very fringe foreign policy issue.

00:21:03.740 And, you know, there's video of him speaking at a Kalistani, which is a Sikh separatist movement in India rally in San Francisco where he keeps referring to India as our country.

00:21:13.740 And so, you know, it's just sort of weird because if if that happened, like, you know, it came out during the last election that Andrew Scheer was a dual Canadian American citizen.

00:21:22.740 There is ever footage of a conservative saying our country talking about the United States, that would be the end of them.

00:21:28.740 It sort of was the end of Michael Ignatieff when when clips surfaced of him saying another country was our country.

00:21:35.740 But for Jagmeet, that that sort of flew under the radar to me, the NDP was always a coalition of two different groups.

00:21:43.740 It's like the sort of blue collar union crowd and then the sort of environmentalist urban crowd, which Jagmeet clearly fits into the latter.

00:21:52.740 You know, he has a Rolex collection and he has his fancy suits and he just seems so out of place in the party.

00:21:58.740 But the way you describe the culture, you know, those sort of things mesh together because they're so sort of obsessed with the identity politics thing.

00:22:08.740 Let's move on, talk about the Green Party, J.J., because you're probably one of the most outspoken people I've ever met about the Green Party.

00:22:15.740 And, you know, they have a new leader, Anime Paul, who sort of just positions herself as sort of yet another.

00:22:21.740 You know, they call themselves center left. I would call them like fringe far left, like a party that's just focused on social justice and pushing identitarianism.

00:22:30.740 Why don't you give us your your overview?

00:22:33.740 My take on the Greens? Well, I mean, the Greens, the Greens are basically like the party for whom the NDP is like not far left enough.

00:22:41.740 Right. Like and and not only that, it's important, like to even clarify this further, because like the narrative of the Green Party is sort of that all of the parties are corrupt.

00:22:53.740 All of the parties are indistinguishable, which is, you know, a strange belief to have.

00:22:58.740 And that therefore, like you need to have this like pure like, I don't know, fourth or fifth or sixth party.

00:23:04.740 I don't know what rank we would put them in, but like we need to have like this other party that is like so detached from the mainstream.

00:23:10.740 Right. Like the Green Party is the party of people that really demonize the mainstream and everything that they perceive to be mainstream, you know, the mainstream party system.

00:23:18.740 But then also things like mainstream medicine, you know, big business, you know, mainstream, you know, academia, like any sort of like force of authority in that currently exists in Canadian society is dismissed as being, you know, corrupt and sort of wicked and

00:23:33.740 you know, the tool of the capitalists and all the rest of it and sometimes, you know, even more deranged people.

00:23:40.740 And the thing that that causes this or sort of like the consequence of this is that you have a party in which conspiracy theories really tend to thrive.

00:23:49.740 The party really does seem like it is a breeding ground for people that have inherently sort of conspiratorial view of the world and it attracts these people in great numbers.

00:23:58.740 And Elizabeth May, you know, when she was leader of the Liberal Party, which she still may be in some sort of de facto capacity,

00:24:05.740 you know, did a lot of things during her like, I don't know, 15 year tenure of the party in which she would sort of put a dog whistle suggesting that this party was sort of on on their on the side of the conspiracy theorist, you know,

00:24:18.740 when it came to things like, you know, reading a petition about the 9-11 truth in the House of Commons, like the idea that like, you know, we need to get to the bottom of this.

00:24:26.740 Right. She read a petition in the House of Commons sort of making that exact case.

00:24:29.740 And we know that there's been 9-11 truther candidates that have run for the Green Party repeatedly.

00:24:33.740 We know that there have been anti-Semitic candidates that have run for the Green Party repeatedly.

00:24:38.740 The man who came in second place against Anna May Paul, Dimitri Lascares, like he's a man who has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism.

00:24:47.740 And at the very least is a man who has made an obsession with the state of Israel, like the central focus of his political life.

00:24:54.740 He is a man deeply, deeply obsessed with this idea of like the Zionist elite sort of doing all sorts of machinations to control, you know, everything.

00:25:03.740 And this is a man that, you know, came within quite close proximity of being the liberal leader instead of Anna May Paul.

00:25:10.740 You know, you can go expand the thing further.

00:25:13.740 Things like chemtrails, you know, Elizabeth May has made supportive noises about that whole conspiracy theory.

00:25:19.740 So I think that one of the problems about the way that we talk about the Green Party is that the media,

00:25:24.740 the Canadian media is really obsessed with the Green Party as this kind of story of like the plucky upstart.

00:25:29.740 You know, I don't know how many times in like the last 20 years I've read some story in a mainstream publication where it's like Green Party eyes break through in the next election.

00:25:38.740 Right. Like there's always this kind of idea that the Green Party are kind of the lovable losers of of Canadian politics.

00:25:44.740 And they're just like too principled for their own good and like, oh, shucks, they're going to give it their best and maybe they're going to break through.

00:25:50.740 And now that they've got three seats in the House of Commons, you know, you see the press giving them like undue attention and sort of saying, well, how are the Greens going to vote in this confidence vote?

00:25:59.740 Even though their votes are completely mathematically irrelevant, there's still this desire to believe that they are like a strong and important presence motivated only by like their plucky underdogness.

00:26:09.740 But what I'm what I say is that there is so much evidence that the Green Party has, like I said, been a breeding ground or at least a sort of like welcoming environment for really like the fringe crackpot sort of set of Canadian society.

00:26:23.740 And what exasperates me is just that the press has had no interest in sort of framing the party that way, because the media, of course, has tremendous power.

00:26:31.740 And part of the way that the media has power is how it chooses to create narratives around the political actors in this country.

00:26:38.740 And I think the Canadian the Canadian press is sort of like uniquely brazen about doing this is that they tell you a certain story about a person and then that story becomes the mainstream.

00:26:47.740 Right. So, for example, like, you know, Andrew Scheer, the story, the narrative about him was, you know, kind of unassuming guy, didn't really have what it took, kind of scary, kind of religious kook.

00:26:58.740 And, you know, that's why he couldn't close the deal with the election was because people were afraid of his his, you know, extreme Christian views or whatever.

00:27:05.740 So like you can go through the line and like there's little storylines about everybody.

00:27:08.740 And the problem to me is just that the storyline about the Green Party, the sort of the plucky upstart storyline is just it's only true if you ignore so much else that we've seen and that I have done my best to document over the years.

00:27:22.740 You can go to my my website Operation Tinfoil dot com and see a long, long list of crackpot things that the Green Party has done over the years.

00:27:29.740 Well, it's interesting because, you know, with Elizabeth May, it was like the media just liked her like she was friendly with them.

00:27:36.740 They knew her. She was such a sort of known figure that they would give her so much attention and then say that she was media savvy.

00:27:43.740 But it was like she's media savvy because you're giving her all this attention like she's pretty crazy and not mainstream at all.

00:27:50.740 I always wish that the Green Party would take more of like a free market approach and not just be like another far left party, but maybe be like a free market party that really supports a green agenda.

00:28:00.740 Environmentalists like not even environmentalists, but just conservation and a clean environment.

00:28:05.740 And then at least we'd have some choice, you know, when it comes to political parties.

00:28:09.740 But I think you're right, as is the Greens are just really, really far left and irrelevant.

00:28:17.740 Why do you think it is that these small fringe parties on the left get so much credibility and so much, you know, spotlight from the press treated like they're really, really important?

00:28:28.740 Whereas, you know, when you have something like the People's Party and Maxime Bernier, it's treated like it's a scary threat.

00:28:34.740 And it's somehow, you know, this murky force that's here to like subvert Canadian freedom and democracy or something like that.

00:28:42.740 Well, I mean, it again, it just goes to sort of like the the storylines that the press sort of really clings to. Right.

00:28:49.740 And so, you know, one of the storylines is that, you know, the environment like climate change and this kind of thing matters a great deal and is, you know, one of the defining sort of political challenges of our time.

00:29:00.740 And that therefore a party that ostensibly professes to sort of care about something like that gets treated very seriously like the Green Party.

00:29:07.740 And so like a lot of the way that the Green Party is framed is not only that they're the plucky upstarts, but, you know, they're the plucky upstarts that are motivated by this kind of like fashionable new cause in Canadian politics.

00:29:18.740 And thus it is logical that there would be a Green Party because, of course, the stakes have never been higher and this sort of thing.

00:29:23.740 And then whereas like something like the People's Party that fits into this narrative that, you know, all around the world, we're sort of seeing these like sort of pseudo fascist, populist, far right, racist anti-immigration parties sort of rise up in order to cause chaos and are probably funded by Russian, you know, disinformation campaigns and all this kind of thing.

00:29:41.740 Right. So like that's a very entrenched narrative as well. And it was just a matter of time before some sort of character came onto the scene that sort of fit that profile, that sort of media profile, sort of the confirmation bias and could kind of be part of that storyline in the context of a Canadian sort of media narrative in the same way that, you know, Trump and Le Pen and, you know, I guess even Brexit and like all these kinds of things are in the world have sort of been slotted into that narrative.

00:30:08.740 There was a desire to find out like who is going to be Canada's version of that.

00:30:12.740 And so I think the People's Party sort of fit that bill nicely and was sort of framed as such.

00:30:17.740 And I mean, like, I have a lot of problems with the People's Party, have a lot of problems with Maxime Bernier.

00:30:22.740 I think that he was just, you know, I think that he lacks a lot of obvious political talent as well.

00:30:27.740 But, you know, I think it was always pretty obvious from the beginning that this was going to be treated as a sort of just like an inherently sort of sinister force in Canadian politics,

00:30:37.740 just because, you know, that's the storyline, you know, we're all trapped in the storyline of the mainstream press of this country.

00:30:43.740 And it's just a matter of like what role are we going to be assigned?

00:30:46.740 It's funny because I feel like everything that happens in Canadian media is framed to juxtapose Trump.

00:30:52.740 So like the whole coronavirus thing, you know, the media were obsessed with comparing Canada's reaction to the US's reaction, which, you know, fundamentally, obviously there were some major differences.

00:31:03.740 But at the end of the day, both countries got it pretty bad.

00:31:07.740 And you can't really say that one was like, you know, Trump handled it worse or Trudeau handled it worse or whatever.

00:31:12.740 It was like no one really knew what was going on.

00:31:14.740 Everyone handled it poorly. Some people did some things better.

00:31:17.740 But it'd be interesting to go through this sort of media history since Trump came on the scene and see all the different conservatives that have been compared to Trump.

00:31:25.740 And like, you know, the fear mongering. I remember Kelly Leach when she was running for leader.

00:31:29.740 Oh, yeah.

00:31:30.740 You know, they like superimpose Trump's hair on to her. And then it was like Doug Ford was supposed to be Trump.

00:31:35.740 But then, like, you know, he's pretty much governing like a liberal.

00:31:39.740 You know, then we had Andrew Scheer, Jason Kenney and Maxine Bernier.

00:31:42.740 It's like the Canadian press just really want a Canadian Trump so that they can like spend years and years dunking on him like they do for the real Trump.

00:31:51.740 No, it's it's it's you're exactly right. Right. Like that. There is this idea that like the phenomenon has to occur.

00:31:57.740 And so we will do whatever it takes to sort of like fit someone into this predetermined little storyline that we have.

00:32:03.740 And of course, like but it also becomes, you know, there's also, of course, in Canada, there's this sort of other layer of narrative,

00:32:10.740 which is like the righteousness of the good Canadian versus sort of the evil Americans.

00:32:14.740 And thus sort of like somebody like Bernier or Kelly Leach as well are useful because then the press can sort of frame them as like Canadians decisively rejected these sort of like sirens and their tempting sort of tales of, you know, bad things.

00:32:30.740 And like this is a reflection of sort of like the inherent morality and the inherent sort of progressivism of the Canadian people that can sort of never be escaped.

00:32:37.740 And sort of like you challenge that at your own at your own risk and this sort of thing, which sort of eliminates the possibility that somebody like Kelly Leach or somebody like Maxime Bernier were just like bad politicians,

00:32:48.740 like that they were unsuccessful sort of in spite of their views on a number of issues, including immigration rather than because of them. Right.

00:32:56.740 And that's sort of something that I think the Canadian press has a very hard time doing is sort of dealing with those in spite of rather than because of sort of differences and distinctions.

00:33:06.740 But there, yeah, there's always been this kind of idea and you've seen a lot of sort of articles in the mainstream written about this, like the idea of like Canadians being like fundamentally immune to or allergic to the sort of populist rot that has sort of struck elsewhere in the world.

00:33:20.740 And this this goes back to this just it's just a very sort of standard idea that like Canadians are just fundamentally better people.

00:33:27.740 I think that was literally like a headline that John Kaye himself might have written at one point, which is just like, you know, we're just kind of better people and that we're just not corrupted by these kinds of things.

00:33:35.740 And I think this is a sort of a subtle way that that the press can sort of put their finger on the scale when it when it comes to, you know, sort of just presenting what kind of ideas get a fair shake versus what kind of ideas don't.

00:33:48.740 Is that you sort of you mask a lot of things into this sort of under the cover of patriotism and what is sort of like the supposed inherent character of the Canadian people, because then it frames things where it's like, well, you want to be a good Canadian, don't you?

00:34:02.740 Right. You want to think the things that only good Canadians think you don't want to think the kind of things that bad, evil sort of right wing Americans think, do you?

00:34:09.740 And then so you just kind of create this idea where ideas, certain ideas are framed as not only being sort of bad or sinister, but sort of fundamentally unpatriotic and unserious in that respect.

00:34:20.740 And I think that this is an experience that a lot of sort of more conservative Canadians have had is sort of being scolded as being like, well, why do you hate Canada?

00:34:27.740 Why are you why don't you just move to America and all this kind of stuff?

00:34:31.740 Right. Well, just just wait for there to be like a far left government down in the US and Canada will finally come to its senses and have conservatives and then and then everyone will fail to understand, like, what's happening in the world again.

00:34:43.740 It'll be like back to the Harper years. It's interesting, you know, what the media puts forth, because in order to agree with what what you said about how Canadians reject populism and this like good Canadian narrative,

00:34:55.740 it's like you have to ignore every poll you see on immigration or integration, which shows that Canadians are actually pretty traditionalist in terms of like wanting newcomers to become Canadian, wanting fewer immigrants.

00:35:07.740 I think every poll I've ever seen once like massive decreases in immigration is just something that the media completely ignore.

00:35:16.740 I want to pick up on something you said, though, you basically said that the the PPC and that Maxime Bernier, you know, isn't a very good politician.

00:35:24.740 So I wonder what you know, if you were advising Maxime Bernier or if you if you were in charge of the People's Party, what would you have done differently?

00:35:32.740 Do you think that there is a sort of piece on the political spectrum where they could potentially be like an important political party or political movement in Canada?

00:35:44.740 Hmm, that's a good question. I mean, I'm generally not a big believer in the idea of making new parties.

00:35:52.740 I suppose I'm more of a sort of entryist kind of sort of philosophy, which is to sort of say, like, if you have if you have a perspective,

00:36:02.740 it's sort of better to work within one of the existing sort of coalition parties, because ultimately, like, that's what's going to bring you to government.

00:36:10.740 And it's the government that will ultimately make the policies that will sort of achieve the goals that you're purportedly interested in.

00:36:16.740 Right. And and so, I mean, like you could say that Bernier did what he should have done in the sense that he ran to be head of the Conservative Party.

00:36:24.740 I mean, you could say that he didn't run to be head of the Conservative Party on the agenda.

00:36:28.740 He would wind up championing as head of the People's Party.

00:36:31.740 But, you know, he did what you would expect to do.

00:36:34.740 And I think that what a lot of People's Party supporters should have been more concerned with is sort of trying to champion their perspectives within the context of the Conservative Party.

00:36:45.740 And trying to think about, like, how can we get a leader like that as the next head of the Conservatives?

00:36:51.740 And it doesn't seem like there was any effort to do that in the most recent Conservative Party race, that there was no candidate representing that kind of more populist or sort of like immigration sort of restrictionist or however you want to sort of frame it.

00:37:04.740 That sort of faction of the Conservative Party and movement, which is very large and like prominent.

00:37:10.740 And as you said, like there is a lot of polling data to suggest that there is considerable appetite and certainly considerable appetite on the right for an agenda resembling that.

00:37:17.740 And yet, you know, Conservatives, that sort of faction of Conservatives did not mobilize behind a candidate that could champion in their cause and thus were not really a force at all in the most recent Conservative leadership race.

00:37:30.740 Instead, the Conservative Party has sort of, you know, gone back to its sort of traditional messaging on these issues.

00:37:35.740 And so I think that this is, again, one of the problems when you have sort of these fringe parties is that they sort of become, you know, sort of cordoned off and become this sort of it becomes a more sort of like overtly fringe cause, if you know what I mean?

00:37:51.740 Because then you can say, well, like, oh, the only people that believe that kind of stuff, they're a part of the Maxine Bernier sort of personality cult, like they're not serious people.

00:37:59.740 And, you know, I imagine that this probably happens to some degree when it comes to sort of some of the causes of the further left. Right.

00:38:04.740 Is that, you know, the Trudeau Liberals or whatever can sort of say, oh, you know, that's just an NDP idea or that's a Green Party idea.

00:38:11.740 Like these are fringe kind of things. And it goes back to what I was saying before. Right.

00:38:14.740 Like strategic advice to the NDP, I think would be for them to get rid of their party and just become a sort of further left faction within the Liberal Party and perhaps exercise force and pushing the Liberal Party perhaps further to the left on the issues that they purport to care about.

00:38:28.740 And I would give the same advice to people within the People's Party is that if they truly want to have an influence, why don't they do the hard work of actually being a faction that can't be denied within the Conservative Party itself?

00:38:40.740 And I think that a good role model in that regard would be some of the pro-life movement and the pro-life organization in this country who I think have refused to go away and have been a stubbornly persistent faction within the Conservative Party.

00:38:55.740 I've heard some people say that there's probably more overtly pro-life conservative MPs than there have been in decades.

00:39:01.740 And that's a testament to how dedicated the pro-life movement in this country has been to working within the party structure.

00:39:07.740 As opposed to you could imagine if the pro-life people had all just sort of said like, oh, no, the current party system is beyond repair.

00:39:14.740 We're just going to, you know, support the Christian Heritage Party or some new like pro-life party.

00:39:18.740 It would just be even easier to dismiss them. Whereas you see somebody like Aaron O'Toole, even though he is himself pro-choice,

00:39:25.740 he clearly feels the pressure of the pro-life community and has to do something to make some sort of peace with them.

00:39:32.740 In a way, he just doesn't feel the pressure from the more sort of immigration restrictionist or skeptical sort of community,

00:39:38.740 because they are safely now in just this kind of cul-de-sac of the Bernier sort of thing, which seems to be in some sort of death spiral.

00:39:45.740 So it's very easy to just use that and wipe your hands and sort of say, well, you know, that that debate is closed.

00:39:52.740 That's an interesting take. Let's talk a little bit about Aaron O'Toole because you said that there wasn't really a populist movement within the conservative leadership race,

00:39:59.740 which I agree. But we do hear some of the sort of rhetoric from Aaron O'Toole.

00:40:04.740 He had a Labor Day message that was very explicitly reaching out to trade unions and maybe people who have been disaffected by the NDP like you like you talked about before.

00:40:13.740 So what is your assessment, JJ, of the new conservative leader?

00:40:16.740 Yeah, I mean, I think that as far as that kind of stuff goes, he is he is sort of hitting the right notes.

00:40:21.740 You know, I think that in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election in 2016, there was a sort of in sort of the conservative intelligentsia on this continent.

00:40:32.740 There was kind of a thinking that the conservative party or that the conservative cause sort of has to be more pro worker in some way,

00:40:41.740 has to be more sort of overtly blue collar friendly, has to be more even more perhaps inclined towards the interests of unionized workers,

00:40:51.740 not public sector unions, but like more private sector sort of unions and sort of make a greater peace with that,

00:40:56.740 because there was a sort of thinking that Donald Trump's election was sort of built on the back of this kind of new coalition,

00:41:03.740 which is sort of the more downscale, the less educated people in contrast to what, you know, both Republican and conservative party consultants tend to push,

00:41:12.740 which is this idea that, like, you know, you have to go after, you know, the suburbs and the urban sort of centers.

00:41:19.740 And that's kind of making yourself palatable to those communities and sort of speaking their language and playing that game.

00:41:24.740 Now, it sort of remains to be seen. Of course, we're filming this just, you know, literally a few days before the US election.

00:41:30.740 It remains to be seen whether or not that coalition is strong enough to carry President Trump to a second term or whether or not, you know,

00:41:37.740 alienating the suburbs in particular is sort of a too high of a price to pay and that whether or not like if Trump does lose,

00:41:46.740 then there will be sort of a I think a vindication of the more sort of traditional advice, which is that, you know,

00:41:52.740 you do actually have to reach out to suburban and urban voters and certainly, you know, college educated people,

00:41:58.740 college educated women in particular, and that you can't run too far in the other direction.

00:42:02.740 Like, everything sort of has an equilibrium. But Aaron O'Toole does seem like he has taken a bit from the from the Trump playbook

00:42:09.740 in the sense that he does seem to have an interest in sort of carrying himself as the more blue collar friendly,

00:42:15.740 the more overtly pro worker kind of party. And, you know, I think that remains to be seen if that will be effective, obviously.

00:42:22.740 But there is there is, I think, a possibility for a a sort of Trump style realignment with some aspects of the party system in this country,

00:42:32.740 which is to say that there are I think when you look at, say, a big map of Canada, one of these big election color coded maps,

00:42:38.740 you can see that there are a lot of sort of like large sort of like rural or semi rural kind of blue collar ridings in this country that are currently held by the NDP.

00:42:47.740 And as you were sort of saying earlier, like the NDP has moved quite far away from its kind of blue collar working class kind of origins or even a pretense of being a party for that kind of community,

00:42:58.740 as opposed to being, you know, the kind of the woke party of the academic urban sort of establishment and the big public sector unions.

00:43:05.740 So in that sense, like there is a possibility where you could imagine that rather than, you know, taking seats from the Liberals in downtown Toronto or Vancouver,

00:43:15.740 that an O'Toole led party could in theory target some of these NDP held sort of blue collar ridings, you know,

00:43:22.740 in perhaps in northern BC or northern Ontario or, you know, other sorts of parts of, you know, in Manitoba and places like this.

00:43:30.740 Like there is some fertile territory. The Maritimes as well could possibly represent some fertile territory, too.

00:43:35.740 So I think it's I think it's a good strategy. Like, I think that it's worth a shot.

00:43:40.740 And I think that the Conservatives need to have a unique a unique something like they just need to have a unique strategy.

00:43:46.740 They need to try something different because I think that the the Harper sort of technique has sort of panned out.

00:43:53.740 I think that Andrew Scheer kind of represented just like, you know, what they call like the dead cat bounce, you know,

00:43:59.740 like one last shot at basically trying to rebuild the Harper coalition.

00:44:02.740 And I think that didn't work. And so I think like, yeah, I'm I'm I and I think a lot of Conservatives are willing to give Aaron O'Toole credit for at least trying something new,

00:44:13.740 at least having a theory of the electorate that strikes as being a little bit fresh, a little bit creative, a little bit innovative,

00:44:20.740 and will hopefully suggest that rather than simply targeting like the the big cities and worst of all, Quebec,

00:44:27.740 that they're actually going to try targeting some some territory that have been previously written off by by Conservatives as being inhospitable

00:44:34.740 in the way that the sort of the Trump Republican campaign targeted areas like, you know, Wisconsin and Michigan and Minnesota and other sort of places like that.

00:44:43.740 Pennsylvania that were sort of seen as being traditionally, you know, part of the blue wall and sort of the Trump people said, well, maybe not.

00:44:48.740 Maybe this actually on sort of like cultural and economic grounds, if we sort of tweak our message a little bit, make it a little bit more overtly pro worker,

00:44:56.740 maybe a little bit less sort of like globalist, less sort of blindly in favor of things like free trade and open borders and that kind of thing.

00:45:03.740 Maybe we can make some some gains there. And so, yeah, again, I think it's I think it's worth a shot.

00:45:08.740 I think one of the things that Trump doesn't get enough credit for was how deeply connected he has been with the sort of rust belt and blue collar Americans,

00:45:16.740 not even in like a strategic political way that just came out in 2015 or 2016, but, you know, going back like his entire career,

00:45:24.740 he spent kind of marketing himself and branding himself as almost like an everyman American who just became really rich and really successful.

00:45:31.740 And, you know, everything from his forays into professional wrestling and being involved in all of that to, you know, his his his personal brand selling suits

00:45:43.740 and all that kind of stuff. He built a brand that was recognizable for the sort of people who were sort of left out of the political establishment.

00:45:52.740 So it wasn't just like he swooped on the scene and was like, hey, I want to attract blue collar voters.

00:45:56.740 He had been like cultivating that for years and years. And I don't I don't really see that from Aaron O'Toole.

00:46:01.740 But on the counter, Trump really, really puts off suburban women.

00:46:06.740 Like like if you look at the polling numbers, it's it's it's pretty stark men versus women, especially like you said, college educated women do not like Trump.

00:46:15.740 Whereas I think Aaron O'Toole probably still has a shot with that demographic.

00:46:19.740 But but yeah, certainly I think that the strategy is interesting and it's a little bit refreshing to see something a little bit different.

00:46:28.740 You recently tweeted, JJ, that Doug Ford is the biggest failure and disappointment in Canadian conservative politics.

00:46:35.740 Can you can you expand on that?

00:46:37.740 Well, I mean, I think that I think that there was a lot of hope for Doug Ford when he first sort of came onto the scene.

00:46:43.740 I think that there was a hope that he could be a kind of a kind of populist.

00:46:47.740 You said that he he got reputation for sort of being the Trump of Canada for a brief window of time.

00:46:53.740 I mean, fair enough, like he did support Donald Trump.

00:46:57.740 You can watch clips of him on CBC during the 2016 election in which he was very sort of outspoken as like, I'm going to be pro Trump and, you know, I'm not afraid to sort of say that.

00:47:07.740 And so I think like that gave people a lot of I suppose a lot of people on the right hope for what this kind of guy was going to represent.

00:47:14.740 I think that the fact that he beat what was her name, Elliott in the in the Conservative Party leadership election, Christine Elliott.

00:47:23.740 I think that that gave people a lot of hope to like that that Christine Elliott was sort of seen as this, you know, very sort of like establishment political figure.

00:47:30.740 And that for somebody like, you know, Doug Ford, who still sort of had the aura of his brother's very sort of populist outsider administration in Toronto, that that sort of sort of like the residual reflected aura of that was sort of sort of projected onto Doug Ford as well.

00:47:48.740 But the problem is, is that it seems like certainly during the pandemic that Doug Ford has not at all exercised any agency to suggest that he is interested in being anything other than, you know,

00:48:06.740 basically governing as as a liberal, like just being in complete hawk to conventional wisdom, really sort of craving the approval of Ottawa, really craving the approval of the mainstream press, you know, not willing to

00:48:17.740 to I don't know, to just sort of like challenge the the the the conventional wisdom about things like, you know, how strict these lockdowns should be, how long they need to be, how invasive they need to be.

00:48:30.740 And and also just like I think that, you know, I've heard people sort of give him the nickname of like Premier Karen, just in the sense of like how personally like judgy and judgmental and sort of bossy

00:48:42.740 he's been when it comes to like the way he sort of carried himself in his press conferences and like the lack of empathy that he's shown for people that are on the receiving end of these lockdowns, you know,

00:48:51.740 the business owners that have had to shutter their businesses and the loss of of revenue for them and their families and the massive inconvenience it's been towards parents and all of this kind of thing.

00:49:00.740 Like there's been a sense that Ford has just not really risen to that occasion at all.

00:49:04.740 Like we're not sort of saying that he needs to go the the sort of the full Trump and, you know, be, you know, too extreme in the other direction where he's, you know, rejecting science

00:49:13.740 or whatever, being openly contemptuous of scientific authority or whatever the sort of the stereotype of what Trump has done wrong has been.

00:49:20.740 But there is kind of a sense that that this pandemic has been like ideologically divisive in some ways and that there has been a sort of like maximalist position on it on the left,

00:49:32.740 which has sort of been in in favor of like maximum lockdowns, maximum like erring on the side of maximum cautiousness,

00:49:38.740 like no price is too high to pay for, you know, fighting this pandemic.

00:49:42.740 And then the sort of more conservative disposition, which has been a lot more sort of skeptical, you know, more inclined to sort of challenge the expert opinion,

00:49:50.740 notice that it is sort of changed and morphed over the months and thus is perhaps not as deserving of the blind deference as some of the other people on the other side have been willing to give it.

00:50:00.740 And sort of say that, you know, that as much as it is important to fight the pandemic and do what it takes to be protected from it, that these sort of things have a cost as well.

00:50:10.740 That there is a cost benefit analysis that has to be done and that it's not a matter of just, you know, having a complete lockdown or complete chaos, complete death and destruction and disease.

00:50:20.740 But there is some sort of like trade off that you have to be able to make where you have to say, well, what is an acceptable risk factor that we can have in order to ensure that,

00:50:28.740 you know, the prosperity of our society, the mental health of our society, our ability to continue to go on living our normal lives that are necessary to uphold our society can also be continued.

00:50:37.740 And it just seems to a lot of people and certainly a lot of people on the right, when I sort of see what they're saying and writing about Ford and Ford's administration during the pandemic,

00:50:45.740 they don't think that he's achieved that balance at all.

00:50:48.740 And what's worse is they don't even think they don't even see him as a person that seems interested in achieving that balance or even slightly skeptical in the way that you expect a supposed conservative populist to be.

00:51:00.740 Instead, like I said, like he just really does seem like he's courting the approval of the mainstream press and the liberal government in Ottawa, which just is not the kind of thing that I think people expected that they would be getting when they got Doug Ford in charge.

00:51:13.740 Like, is is it is it possible to really sort of conceptualize how this government is handling things differently than a premier win government would be?

00:51:22.740 And I don't think the answer to that is obvious at all.

00:51:25.740 Yeah, it seems very, very top down.

00:51:28.740 Well, JJ, I think a lot of people know you as a YouTube guy.

00:51:31.740 You've got a really popular channel over there.

00:51:33.740 I love your videos.

00:51:34.740 I always learn a lot.

00:51:35.740 I have a Canadian degree in political science and I still somehow learn things from your videos.

00:51:40.740 But you're also a very serious political commentator and you have a very serious role over at the Washington Post.

00:51:47.740 Tell us a bit about how you became a columnist for the Washington Post.

00:51:52.740 And why didn't you go this sort of more traditional Canadian route and write for the Vancouver Sun or the National Post or even the Globe and Mail?

00:51:58.740 How did you end up at the Washington Post?

00:52:00.740 Well, I mean, I think that the Washington Post wanted me and none of those other places did.

00:52:04.740 You know, I have not been a popular guy with the mainstream press in this country.

00:52:09.740 I mean, I guess people can reach their own conclusions as to why that is.

00:52:12.740 But the Washington Post, you know, they were nice and they extended an offer to me and I took it.

00:52:18.740 I mean, I think that they'd read some of my other writing.

00:52:20.740 You know, I've written for a number of other publications over the years in both Canada and the US, you know, always sort of talking about Canadian issues.

00:52:27.740 But I try to talk about Canadian issues in a sort of, I don't know, in a fresh way.

00:52:32.740 You know, I think I'm a kind of contrary person.

00:52:36.740 And so I do try to like extract myself a bit from these narratives that we've been talking about and try to assess things in a somewhat more objective way or sort of say like, well, how would an outsider see this?

00:52:46.740 Is let's or let's like sort of challenge some of the assumptions that we use to describe how things happen in Canadian politics.

00:52:53.740 Like and I think that there is a problem that a lot of young journalists in particular don't come at it with that kind of attitude of curiosity and skepticism.

00:53:03.740 Instead, they come at it with an attitude of conformity and, you know, sort of obedience to the narratives and the sort of the standard practices of who is good and bad.

00:53:12.740 And what is, you know, what is sort of like the larger story in Canada at any given time?

00:53:19.740 And so I don't know, it's just, you know, I've I the Washington Post people just reached out to me.

00:53:24.740 I've been there for, I think, close to four years now.

00:53:26.740 I remember I started there right at the time of the US election.

00:53:29.740 And so I guess we're getting close to the four year period.

00:53:31.740 And they've been great to me.

00:53:32.740 They've been very supportive and my pieces are popular.

00:53:35.740 People read them.

00:53:36.740 And and yeah, so I can't say anything bad about it at all.

00:53:40.740 I've had a great time working there.

00:53:41.740 And, you know, I'm like, again, like I've always been around the mainstream press in Canada has not been interested in me.

00:53:49.740 And so I suppose at some point you just go with the people that are willing to take you.

00:53:53.740 And so that's why I went with the post.

00:53:55.740 Well, I think you still have an outsized influence, though, because you're you're sort of like outside the Laurentian circle.

00:54:01.740 You're out in Vancouver and you put forth these sort of contrarian, but kind of underlying conservative articles.

00:54:06.740 And you just really managed to get under the skin of the mainstream media, which we can see play out on Twitter just about any time you you put out a piece.

00:54:14.740 But I want to talk about one specific column that you wrote a couple of weeks ago, really taking Justin Trudeau to town on his throne speech that that that ostensibly said that he wanted to tackle systemic racism.

00:54:28.740 Whereas you juxtaposed that with his obsession with bilingualism and pointed to the outcome, which was that he doesn't really elect or he doesn't appoint anyone to federal courts that isn't basically, you know, an elderly or a middle aged white person.

00:54:43.740 So, you know, that was a pretty just visually when, you know, I don't know if it was you or someone over at the post, but they put together the pictures of all the people that Justin Trudeau had appointed.

00:54:53.740 And it's like, oh, wow. You know, if that was if that was happening in the US, it would be, you know, in your face and everyone will be talking about it.

00:55:00.740 But but it happens in Canada. So why don't you why don't you walk us through that argument that you made?

00:55:05.740 Yeah. And it's it's not just the federal judiciary either. I mean, it's yes, every single judge on the Supreme Court of Canada.

00:55:11.740 And I think every one but like two judges on the federal court roster is is white.

00:55:17.740 But also like every I think all but I think one or two of like the 30 deputy ministers in this country who are the people that are actually running the federal government are all white.

00:55:28.740 Everyone but I think maybe two of the heads of the I don't know, 30 crown corporations that we have in this country are white.

00:55:35.740 You know, the heads of the armed forces are all white. Like you can go down the list and it's just all white people everywhere.

00:55:41.740 And well, not just not just white, but like French Canadian. Right.

00:55:45.740 Well, that's that's the critical thing. No, it's true. And it's because this is this is bilingualism.

00:55:50.740 Like this is the consequence of the bilingual policy that Justin Trudeau believes so heavily in.

00:55:55.740 You know, it's the it's the 50th anniversary of the Official Languages Act and Justin Trudeau has made.

00:56:01.740 I mean, this hasn't been that widely reported, but this has been like one of the key sort of priorities of his government is that we're going to update and modernize the Official Languages Act in sort of celebration of 50 years of success.

00:56:13.740 And, you know, you might think update and modernize means we're going to be a little bit more conciliatory to the way that Canada is a much more diverse and eclectic linguistic country

00:56:22.740 than it was 50 years ago when the only dynamic really was between the the the English Canadians and the French Canadians.

00:56:29.740 You know, Canada was an extraordinarily white country, even within my own lifetime until, you know, immigration and and all the rest of that has has changed it.

00:56:36.740 And, you know, that's that's fine. That's just the reality of the country that we live in now.

00:56:39.740 But part of that consequence of that is that you have fewer and fewer if you ever even had that many, but fewer and fewer Canadians who can speak fluent French and English at the level that the federal government requires and not only requires, but has systematically strengthened in terms of its strictness for the requirement in order to hold sort of top executive rank jobs in the government of Canada.

00:57:01.740 You know, they call it, I think, section like 91 jobs, but it's basically like any any job that Ottawa determines French and English are necessary for the functioning of that of that purpose.

00:57:13.740 You know, you have to be bilingual and it's usually bilingual at the time of appointment, which is like a very, very high level of fluency that is expected in order to hold any of these jobs that are overwhelmingly executive rank jobs, you know, and top like top level jobs as well.

00:57:30.740 And so the problem is, is that you're you're really selecting for a skill, a mostly irrelevant skill, I would say, that is not, in fact, necessary to do a lot of these senior senior level jobs.

00:57:42.740 But it is a skill that is disproportionately held by, you know, a very small cultural ethnocultural group of Canadians, which are, you know, mostly French Canadians or Canadians that are sort of part of a kind of bilingual milieu around mostly Ottawa.

00:57:59.740 Ottawa and Montreal, right? It's something like I believe it's around 17% of Canadians overall that possess this skill of perfect French English bilingualism and something like 90% of that 17 or possibly more are located in the province of Quebec.

00:58:15.740 So you can't really have a government that says it's committed to having a country that is diverse and, you know, having a government that is reflective of that diversity and then also champion this very outdated, old fashioned idea that Canada is fundamentally a country of two founding nations, only two, the French and the English, and that those communities sort of will forever be able to dictate the shape and nature of the country.

00:58:39.740 And that's sort of like the only real dominant civil rights issue of Canada is making an environment that is inclusive and is welcoming to unilingual French Canadians, which is to say, like French Canadians who can't speak English at all, which is not that many and increasingly less and less, despite the Quebec government's dogged efforts to ensure that Quebecers don't speak English, more French Canadians speak English than ever before.

00:59:05.740 Which means that even the demand that like even the argument that this is somehow like necessary for inclusion or ability to create a functional workplace for unilingual French Canadians is becoming a weaker and weaker argument.

00:59:16.740 So I really view this as one of sort of like the great existential challenges to sort of Canadian liberalism and Canadian progressivism, but also one that's really just not talked about very much because I don't know, it's a weird sort of compartmentalization that somebody like Justin Trudeau or Jagmeet Singh or, you know, any sort of left wing Canadian of any prominence that you want to name, like their ability to sort of like believe these two deeply contrary goals simultaneously, that we're going to have a very inclusive, welcoming society.

00:59:45.740 And government.

00:59:46.740 And at the other hand, like there is nothing more important than speaking not one, but two European languages in order to achieve any power or prominence in this in this country.

00:59:56.740 But you're right, like this is in some respects, the ultimate taboo of sort of polite establishment Canadian opinion, Laurentian opinion.

01:00:03.740 And that's why there is nothing I sort of get more of a hard time for than when I say this.

01:00:08.740 And one other thing I would just add is that I always find it like funny and weird that at a time when we're talking about like systemic racism and systemic barriers to entry for, you know, people of color, people of color of lesser means that like your otherwise perfectly progressive people can turn into these like very sort of cold hearted meritocrats.

01:00:30.740 Right. So like if you're kind of saying like, oh, you know, there's not a lot of people that come from non sort of Francophone backgrounds or non, you know, Quebec or Eastern Canadian narrow sort of backgrounds in the high levels of our government.

01:00:44.740 You know, a lot of people, including the prime minister himself, will turn around and say, well, well, maybe they're just lazy and they should just, you know, pick up a book sometime and sort of like figure out how to do it.

01:00:53.740 And the only thing that's sort of standing in their way is their own inability to pull themselves up and do what it needs to take.

01:00:58.740 Right. And it's like not only is that, I think, very ignorant in terms of just what we know about linguistic science and how languages are learned or not learned, which is mostly because you need that language for day to day communication, not because some law somewhere says you have to speak it.

01:01:12.740 But, you know, it is also just a kind of argument that would never be considered acceptable in progressive circles anywhere else.

01:01:20.740 Right. Like if you sort of were to identify like a wealth inequality between people of color and white Canadians, for instance, you wouldn't just say, oh, well, it's because they're just not working hard enough or because, you know, maybe they should just get better jobs if they're so sad about being poor or things like that.

01:01:34.740 Right. It's this like very weird sort of like Dickensian logic that the left in this country will employ only in this one very specific case everywhere else.

01:01:44.740 They'll they'll they'll talk a good game about equality and and non judgment and, you know, bringing down systemic barriers and systemic racism except for this.

01:01:53.740 Well, it's interesting because, yeah, everyone every now and then there'll be a viral video out of Vancouver of some sort of angry Canadian, you know, shouting at someone,

01:02:02.740 a Chinese immigrant or something saying, like, speak English in Canada or whatever.

01:02:06.740 And, you know, they get like completely bullied and painted as like an evil, malicious person.

01:02:11.740 Whereas like that's like the that's like the official law in Quebec.

01:02:14.740 Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, it's technically it's the official law federally as well. Right.

01:02:18.740 Like, I mean, they do have to speak English, but then they also have to speak French as well.

01:02:22.740 So, I mean, it is like you can't even you can't even have a sign in Quebec that that isn't in French.

01:02:28.740 So, you know, they can use a hammer to enforce their language.

01:02:32.740 But I want to ask you, though, I sometimes wonder with with these like this.

01:02:36.740 I think the reason that the mainstream media sort of resents you, JJ, is because you have this big platform that they can't like, you know, that they can't compete with.

01:02:45.740 You have a huge audience in the US and, you know, they'll try to pick apart your argument.

01:02:50.740 But, you know, you still have your platform, which is great. But I sort of wonder sometimes if you're making these arguments in tongue in cheek to sort of show the hypocrisy of the liberals and the sort of two contradictory views that they have, which I think is completely accurate.

01:03:06.740 But did you actually think Canada is a systemically racist country?

01:03:10.740 Because I feel like I've heard you sort of make that argument or you're sort of underlying, you know, saying that that it does exist in Canada.

01:03:16.740 I I reject the idea. I don't think that systemic racism is a very clear term.

01:03:20.740 And I don't think that we I myself don't concede that that is the case in Canada.

01:03:25.740 But I wonder what what your position was on systemic racism.

01:03:29.740 I mean, I think that there are obviously discriminatory barriers that exist.

01:03:34.740 And I think that racism is a thing and that racism can be present in sort of subtle cultural ways or maybe even not so subtle cultural ways.

01:03:42.740 And that that these sorts of attitudes of discrimination can indeed sort of prevent barriers from people of color from from sort of climbing as high as they would like to in their in their personal lives and their professional lives.

01:03:52.740 You know, that being said, like, I certainly don't think that like, you know, the Canadian government has at its core, like a kind of conscious desire to maintain white supremacy, which is what some people would argue.

01:04:07.740 Like, I think that, you know, all of the available evidence suggests that this is an issue.

01:04:12.740 The issue of discrimination and racism is something that the Canadian government takes very seriously.

01:04:16.740 I think it took seriously under Stephen Harper.

01:04:18.740 I think you can go back many generations and say that this is something that Canadian governments have always been very sensitive to, that like we want to make a more diverse and inclusive society in which Canadians of all backgrounds can thrive and get ahead.

01:04:30.740 Sort of like the argument that I make is that I think that I think that barriers to all sorts of Canadians exist in all sorts of levels, not just racial barriers, but, you know, barriers that prevent, you know, true diversity from being reflected in our government.

01:04:43.740 You know, in terms of, you know, gender diversity and, you know, class diversity and, of course, ideological diversity and just the diversity of having a lot of people that come from different backgrounds and different life experiences and sort of creating a government and a civil service.

01:04:57.740 And, you know, all of the other sort of senior institutions of our society that truly do reflect Canada.

01:05:03.740 And I think it's always like I come at it from just a very sort of like simplistic democratic logic, which is that like in a democratic society, it is very important for the barriers of entry to be as low as possible.

01:05:13.740 That people that want to have a job in their government, that want to be engaged in their government, that want to sort of like be playing a role in making the decisions that affect their lives, that that path should be relatively sort of unblocked.

01:05:25.740 It should be relatively simple for an interested, dedicated, determined Canadian to be able to exercise some degree of influence in his government and in his society.

01:05:33.740 And so I think that when the government sort of erects barriers to prevent that from happening, whether or not they are, you know, sort of cultural barriers or like clear legal barriers like these bilingualism requirements, I think that there are things that that should be opposed.

01:05:47.740 So I know that, you know, I know that when we talk about stuff like systemic racism and that kind of thing, it's become this very sort of like hot and very polarizing kind of issue in which people are sort of thinking about it in this very sort of like, yeah, just one or the other way.

01:06:01.740 It's like either Canada is like a completely racist country that has no redeeming qualities at all.

01:06:05.740 It's just this white supremacist kind of hell state or, you know, Canada has basically nothing to apologize for at all and that there's no sort of introspection at all that's necessary.

01:06:14.740 And I, you know, I just I kind of reject both of those those polls.

01:06:17.740 And I think that, you know, we should just look fairly at these institutions.

01:06:20.740 We should take seriously criticisms that people make.

01:06:23.740 That doesn't mean that you have to like this is the problem with the left is that they just uncritically swallow every argument that is made using this kind of language.

01:06:31.740 So like if they say, you know, I don't like this statue because I think that statue is a symbol of white supremacism, then the left wing just kind of says, well, you're right.

01:06:40.740 We'll tear it down, right, as opposed to I think that like it's possible to hear that argument and sort of say, OK, well, let's have a conversation about that.

01:06:47.740 Let's sort of like discuss what are the actual merits here.

01:06:50.740 Does that argument stand up to scrutiny?

01:06:52.740 You know, can we come to some sort of objective assessment if that's true or not?

01:06:56.740 In some cases, it might be true.

01:06:57.740 I definitely think that there are, you know, some people, for instance, that don't deserve to be commemorated because they were objectively bad people, like even by the standards of their time and contributed very little.

01:07:07.740 But then there are people like, you know, Johnny McDonald, who you could say, like, clearly on the net, more positive than negative.

01:07:13.740 And that if there's something sort of morally wrong with trying to eliminate that.

01:07:16.740 So, yeah, when it comes to this whole debate, I don't know.

01:07:18.740 I try to be a little bit pragmatic about it because I do think that that's I do think that that's something that's that that conservatives have to be a little bit sensitive to and can be it can be a little bit self-destructive when you're sort of seen as being too immediately dismissive.

01:07:34.740 Well, I think it's important to define terms because I feel like you're right, there's definitely nuance to it.

01:07:41.740 And no one's saying that Canada is a perfect country.

01:07:44.740 But the idea that, like, all of a sudden, you know, something happens in the US and then every Canadian politician has to genuflect and say that admit that Canada is a systemically racist country without understanding, like what that exactly means.

01:07:57.740 Because I think a lot of Canadians would just see it as a total attack on our institutions and our traditions.

01:08:02.740 And, you know, that's the systemic part.

01:08:04.740 And I think it's intentionally vague, like instead of pointing to a specific policy, which is what you do to give you credit, you point at specific policies and say, you know, this is what could be problematic or whatever.

01:08:16.740 They just say, you know, the system is broken.

01:08:19.740 And then the term racism has this underlying implication of intent, malicious intent.

01:08:25.740 And so even even what you pointed out in The Washington Post, what we're really talking about is sort of an inequality of outcome, but but but not necessarily a racist intent that led to that inequality of outcome.

01:08:36.740 And so I think you have to be careful with the term racism because it did did once have that meaning of sort of, you know, malicious race based intent, whereas now it's just sort of means like, you know, that the outcome isn't a perfectly diverse reflection of Canadian society.

01:08:52.740 And then you have to go back and say, OK, well, was that was that intentional or was that sort of an unintended consequence?

01:08:57.740 And what are ways that we can change the unintended consequence?

01:09:01.740 And I think that's that's part of the problem.

01:09:04.740 Obviously, there's racists in Canada.

01:09:06.740 There's racists in every society.

01:09:07.740 I don't think anyone's denying that.

01:09:09.740 But but to say that it's sort of cooked in, you know, that that's that's sort of where my problem lies, as long as we're being clear about what it is that we're what we're talking about.

01:09:19.740 I think you do raise some areas in Canada where there is clearly systemic racism when it comes to the Indian Act.

01:09:27.740 You know, that that's an entire system of laws that has been designed to have separate governing functions for one group of people basically based on their race and ethnicity.

01:09:38.740 So I wanted to have your take on that.

01:09:41.740 Yeah, I mean, it's it's interesting, like I made a video, one of my favorite videos that I've made recently where I talk about Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the six classes of Canadian citizen.

01:09:53.740 This is something that is sort of very long forgotten about, but at the time was considered a real big deal, which is why I made a video about it, which was that when the Charlottetown Accord, you know, this constitutional amendment package of amendments that was being proposed by the Brian Mulroney government with the support of basically all of the Canadian establishment.

01:10:10.740 Pierre Elliott Trudeau former prime minister came out of retirement and he gave a very strong and powerful speech in which he was denouncing the idea of Canada getting away from his vision.

01:10:22.740 You know, imperfect as it was like Pierre Elliott Trudeau in theory had a vision of a sort of Canadian society that was based around a kind of like civic, a civic identity and an identity of sort of liberal democratic rights for all citizens equally that all Canadian citizens, you know, and it was sort of manifest by, of course, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was an effort to really sort of like define Canada as a nation that was not defined by race or creed or anything like that.

01:10:49.740 But rather by a kind of concept of civic liberalism, as we would say, an identity of civic civil rights for all Canadians, regardless of their distinguishing characteristics.

01:10:59.740 And what the Charlottetown Accord sought to do was instead create this idea and sort of say, like, Canada is not, in fact, a country of of equal rights for all people, but it is a country of special collective rights based on your identity as part of certain identifiable groups.

01:11:15.740 And that the Charlottetown Accord basically identified six of these groups, you know, French Canadians, English Canadians and Indigenous Canadians with sort of different distinctions based on where they lived and all the rest of it.

01:11:27.740 And Pierre Elliott Trudeau sort of said, like, that this is fundamentally bad and this is not the kind of society that we should want to live into into, because when you have a society that is determined with that grants rights on the basis of collective identity rather than individual identity, really what you wind up having is just greater tyranny for various forms of government that purport to represent those communities because nobody represents an individual.

01:11:51.740 An individual like you and me, we're individuals, we're only lobbyists for ourselves and, you know, we can fight for our rights through the court system and all the rest of it.

01:11:58.740 But ultimately, like we're the government has to recognize our rights as individuals and sort of leave us unmolested through our ability to exercise our rights as individuals.

01:12:07.740 But when you have a collective right, what this winds up doing is that it creates greater powers for these institutions that purport to represent the collective.

01:12:15.740 And what Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, and I think what we would all agree with is that, you know, by entrenching rights for French Canadians specifically, well, what this does is it gives more power to the government of Quebec, right?

01:12:26.740 Because it professes to be the government of the French Canadians. And you've sort of seen, you know, certainly under this current government in Quebec, I think it has become quite authoritarian because it conceptualizes itself.

01:12:37.740 It's like we are standing up for the rights of the Francophone Quebecers and like that is our duty and we will run roughshod over the, you know, the civil rights, the individual rights of anybody who does not conform, including religious minorities and English Canadians.

01:12:52.740 But then to get to your original point, is that this is also the case when it comes to Indigenous Canadians, right?

01:12:59.740 So despite Pierre Elliott Trudeau's warning, despite the fact that we voted down the Charlottetown Accord, the governments have nevertheless continued to progress in the direction where Indigenous Canadians only have collective rights,

01:13:09.740 which is the idea like as an Indigenous Canadian, your rights are only able to be exercised through your identity into these sort of like culturally ethno sort of distinguished community groups,

01:13:19.740 community groups, which then you will identify, you will exercise those collective powers through that group identity through basically your Indigenous, your Aboriginal government,

01:13:28.740 you know, your Indian Act sort of recognized government or in some cases, even governments that exist outside of the Indian Act and sort of as we've seen in British Columbia,

01:13:36.740 with some of the recent pipeline controversies, like just some other competing community that professes to be the only legitimate government of that particular sort of ethno nationalist,

01:13:48.740 Indigenous band or tribe or what have you. And the problem with this is that then you get into this business where it's like all of everything that is purported to be a matter of Indigenous rights is really just this kind of government to government negotiation.

01:14:03.740 You know, you have the the the the identified Aboriginal government sort of negotiating with either Ottawa or the provincial government over these very sort of like high level things that usually just descend into granting more rights to that particular government and sort of the particular gang of politicians that are running that Indigenous government.

01:14:22.740 Right. And the rights of the Indigenous Canadians, the individual rights of the Indigenous Canadians sort of get left in the lurch because no one is really advocating for them at that level.

01:14:29.740 You're having these government to government, as Justin Trudeau would say, sort of nation to nation negotiations and discussions.

01:14:35.740 And that is sort of assumed to be a positive end to itself where and in the the the rights of the Indigenous people as exist in a kind of individualistic sense and in the sense of like, you know, their right to safety, security, you know, the security of the individual, you know, their right to health and happiness and liberty.

01:14:54.740 Like all of that kind of stuff gets treated as a much sort of lesser priority than these collective rights, which include government power and also, you know, just, you know, like some of these like these things like like cultural rights and rights of consultation and all of these kinds of rights that are ultimately just collective rights for government rather than rights for the individual.

01:15:14.740 And you're right, like it does ultimately come down to this question of like, well, where do those rights ultimately derive from?

01:15:20.740 And they ultimately just derive from your identity, not as an individual, but as a kind of member of an ethno cultural nationalist group, which is just so contrary to the idea of what this country is supposed to be.

01:15:32.740 And this is another another instance in which I just feel like the left in this country just doesn't really have a good way of compartmentalizing or rationalizing this obvious inconsistency, because on the one hand, most most sort of left wing progressive Canadians would say like, yes, we want to live in a kind of equal rights sort of society.

01:15:52.740 We love the charter of rights. We love the charter of rights. We love this idea of a country defined by, you know, this kind of one size fits all approach to civil rights.

01:15:59.740 But on the other hand, they're also like huge enablers of what I would say is very flawed sort of system and structure for dealing with the rights of indigenous peoples in this country.

01:16:10.740 You know, this kind of broken Indian act nation to nation government to government based sort of set up.

01:16:17.740 And I don't know really how they are able to rationalize that inconsistency other than to just kind of mask over it with this kind of feel good language of reconciliation and, you know, the guilt over the past and this kind of thing.

01:16:32.740 And just to to use that as a way of masking critical questions to be asked as to whether or not this actually is the best way that we can go about doing what they're purporting to care the most about, which is sort of improving the lot of the life of indigenous people in this country.

01:16:46.740 Right. Trudeau and his and his cabinet sort of have a lot of empathy. So it feels like they care. But when it comes to what they actually do, I mean, it's just absolutely full of contradictions.

01:16:57.740 And it seems like, you know, the the first Trudeau, it was it was basically the same. I think that he would have been horrified by the idea of, you know, considering indigenous people as separate nations and doing nation to nation.

01:17:11.740 I mean, it sort of undermines the idea that that that that that world Canadians and that we all have the same basic individual rights.

01:17:18.740 And interesting to your point about Charlottetown, how it was the Conservatives of Mulroney who were interested in inserting collective rights into a constitution.

01:17:27.740 You know, you kind of think of conservatives as being the party of individual freedom and individual rights.

01:17:33.740 And it wasn't too long ago that seems like it was it was sort of the opposite.

01:17:36.740 But one of the things that you had in that video, the six types of Canadians, was talking a little bit about how Pierre Trudeau, with his white paper of 1969, originally wanted to just sort of do away with the Indian Act and say, you know, enough with the separate treatment and the reservations and all that kind of stuff.

01:17:54.740 And, you know, once once once they proposed, it sort of didn't didn't go very well.

01:18:00.740 And then they sort of backed away from it doesn't seem like anyone has ever picked up that mantle to try to to try to go down that path again.

01:18:08.740 What do you think the solution is?

01:18:10.740 I mean, I don't think that anyone can look at the state of, you know, the way that so many people in Canada live on reserves and say, OK, you know, these people have the same opportunities and the same quality of life as Canadians who live in.

01:18:23.740 Canadians who live in cities or Canadians who are not Aboriginal.

01:18:27.740 I mean, obviously, there's no simple solution.

01:18:30.740 But what did you think about the 1969 white paper and Trudeau back then?

01:18:34.740 And do you think that there's anything to that that we could use today to try to move forward with sort of improving a lot for Aboriginal Canadians?

01:18:42.740 Yeah, it's interesting.

01:18:44.740 Like it's it's it's definitely like the the the speeches that Pierre Elliott Trudeau gave and sort of the official government report, the white paper itself.

01:18:53.740 These are all worth reading today because they're just windows into a very different logic than anything you hear present now.

01:18:59.740 And, you know, the white paper has been sort of imagined as this like statement of cultural genocide.

01:19:05.740 You know, when I was in university, my university actually stopped using the phrase white paper to refer to internal government or internal sort of bureaucratic documents because it was taken for granted that that term had been so like infused with the negative energy of the of the 1969 sort of initiative that it should never be spoken of again.

01:19:25.740 But it's like when you go back and you read what was actually contained in the white paper and you read what Pierre Elliott Trudeau was arguing, it is an extraordinarily like compassionate and empathetic sort of mentality.

01:19:37.740 And I you know, I I don't that should not be a controversial thing to say.

01:19:42.740 Like, I would hate if anybody like would try to cancel someone over sort of suggesting that because it is it is clear like you can say and I know that like a lot of the a lot of people would say that, you know, maybe it was naive.

01:19:54.740 Maybe it was short sighted. Maybe it was based on an assumption that, you know, is now discredited by contemporary theories or what have you.

01:20:01.740 But it was nevertheless like it was a clear argument. The argument was was that and Pierre Elliott Trudeau said this explicitly is that you cannot have equality in a society that perpetually defines one class of person as being the other.

01:20:15.740 And in particular, you cannot have a society. And he said this very explicitly as well, is that you cannot have like a society in which one part of the society has a treaty relationship with another part of the society.

01:20:27.740 Like that is just a fundamentally unequal relationship. It puts forever one class of the society in a subordinate position to the other.

01:20:34.740 And it makes creates this relationship of codependence and, you know, and and paternalism that is just not healthy for either.

01:20:42.740 And Trudeau was very explicit about saying this. And it's it's it's kind of like there there has never really been that I've seen a very persuasive rebuttal of some of the points that he made at that level.

01:20:57.740 Right. In this sort of sense, like, well, if you sort of take the abstract view of this, like if you sort of divorce it from all of like our emotional feelings about this issue as it exists in contemporary Canada, if you just kind of like think of it like if we were starting from scratch, how would we sort of set up a society in which we had an aggrieved minority in that way?

01:21:15.740 Would we sort of set up as sort of elaborate architecture of separate rights and sort of treaty rights and creating this category of like status Indian as a completely different sort of status of person and having all of your individual rights not only subordinate to that that legal class of person, but then sort of further subordinating that to your your your band's government and your band government's ability to sort of represent you on behalf of you at that level in negotiation with the federal government.

01:21:45.740 Right. And, you know, working its way through through legal challenges and court cases and all the rest of it, it just seems like as much as anything else, a terribly inefficient and ineffective system for yielding the kind of results that we should all want, which is, you know, to say for Aboriginal Canadians to live free and prosperous, happy, satisfied, independent lives like the rest of us have, you know, in theory.

01:22:08.740 So I don't know, but the problem is now is that sort of since that, you know, since that sort of white paper approach was introduced, you know, Trudeau backed away from it in part because, you know, a lot of the Aboriginal governments themselves opposed it because, you know, in theory, they had the most to lose.

01:22:25.740 And for what and you can also say, like, fine, maybe it was maybe Trudeau was insensitive in the way that he went about doing it.

01:22:32.740 You know, we, of course, now live in a in a time in which we believe that, you know, consultation is sort of like the most fundamental way to establish any sort of just idea in government.

01:22:42.740 And, you know, perhaps that argument can be made. But anyway, the point is, is that in some respects, this debate is entirely sort of academic because when you go in the years since then, you know, Pierre Elliott Trudeau himself enshrined treaty rights into the Constitution of Canada.

01:22:58.740 That was since further strengthened by a constitutional amendment, making Aboriginal treaty rights even more entrenched in the Constitution to the point where they have literally like the status of constitutional law.

01:23:08.740 So this kind of stuff can't really be unspooled from the Canadian system in the way that it could in Pierre Elliott Trudeau's time, you know, which was sort of in 1969, you know, Canada was a much different country than it is now.

01:23:19.740 Our Constitution was a lot more malleable. You know, you could dream sort of big ideas and in a way that you just can't now because we're so codified or so sort of cornered in by our Constitution and by Supreme Court precedent and and all of this kind of thing.

01:23:33.740 But so I don't know, it's a very difficult question to answer in terms of like, are we do we have the capacity to imagine a different reality?

01:23:43.740 Do we have an do we have the capacity to imagine a set up for Aboriginal Canadians in this country that is different than the Indian Act regime that is different than this kind of treaty based, you know, Indian Reserve based regime regime?

01:24:01.740 Do we have the capacity or are we just so sort of boxed in with the with the laws and the precedents and the court rulings and whatnot and the bureaucracy and all the rest of it that this kind of stuff really can't be conceptualized in any other way?

01:24:14.740 And we're just kind of forced to deal with it. I don't know.

01:24:16.740 I mean, that sounds like a sort of fatalistic sort of argument to make.

01:24:19.740 And I also want to be clear that like I'm not I'm not attempting to make the argument that that some sort of like super ultra heavy handed assimilationist agenda is the desirable one either, because I think that this is not a sort of binary thing.

01:24:34.740 I think that though that the question that has to be and I think I would like to see Conservatives try to think bigger ideas about this and try to think like if we had to start from scratch, what would we do in order to ensure that the rights of all Canadians, including Indigenous Canadians, can be sort of most, you know, most ably sort of taken care of?

01:24:57.740 And I just don't see any interest in in thinking those kind of big questions anymore.

01:25:01.740 I just see so much interest in just, you know, continuing to pretend like the status quo is more sustainable than it is.

01:25:09.740 And that it just you know, this is sort of like the line that the NDP uses all the time, right?

01:25:13.740 Like it's just like if we just had the right people in charge, if we just had the right people in charge of the federal government, if we just had the right prime minister, if we just had the right bureaucrats, if we just had more good faith consultation,

01:25:25.740 if we just believed in the reconciliation agenda more than somehow all of this elaborate artifice that has been in existence since 19th century would somehow function in a way it hasn't functioned for the last 200 years or so.

01:25:37.740 And I just think like that's that's a fallacy and nothing is ever going to improve.

01:25:41.740 So my my call is just for for more big thinking and more creative thinking.

01:25:45.740 And obviously, this is something as well that, you know, this is not going to be done by just some wise paternalistic white people coming up with some good ideas and telling the aboriginals to get in line.

01:25:55.740 I mean, obviously, that model is wrong as well. And so this is something that, you know, the indigenous Canadians have to sort of think critically about as well.

01:26:01.740 And they have to look at the status quo and they have to be willing to to honestly ask themselves and to question their leaders and to to wonder to like to dare to imagine a better future than what they have now.

01:26:12.740 And to speak explicitly about what that better future would look like rather than continuing to just hide behind, you know, sort of vague catch all terms like reconciliation.

01:26:22.740 Yeah, you know, it's so true that on the left, you know, the mantra is all we have to do is like care more and and put ourselves in charge.

01:26:29.740 And on the right, it's sad that there just seems to be so many political issues that have become sort of like third rail issues that is better to just ignore than to even talk about because you don't want to step on a rake or say the wrong thing.

01:26:40.740 And and that's that's sort of where we are, it seems, with this issue.

01:26:44.740 Although I do wonder, JJ, if you were to just, you know, put it directly to the people, like if there were a referendum for, you know, status Indians or status.

01:26:53.740 I don't even know what the politically correct term is now, but, you know, what they would want for their future governance if they're happy with the status quo or if they would want something entirely different.

01:27:03.740 And just on the point of consultations, you know, we started this conversation talking about how the House of Commons in question period is is all just sort of robotic and very meaningless.

01:27:14.740 I've been to consultations with government and I feel like it's really just like group therapy.

01:27:19.740 It's an opportunity for them to just say how they feel and then it's like, OK, and no one changes their mind and no one changes their opinion.

01:27:26.740 And then they just say, OK, well, we've consulted them and then kind of wipe their hands of any responsibility.

01:27:33.740 Well, JJ, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure.

01:27:36.740 I think we've touched on a very wide range of issues.

01:27:39.740 And I sat down with you last year and we talked about a bunch of different issues, too.

01:27:43.740 So it's always always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

01:27:46.740 Well, thanks for having me. It was great.

01:27:48.740 Thanks for having me. It was great.

Juno News - October 26, 2020

Ep 17 ｜ J.J. McCullough ｜ The Canadian Contrarian

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