Juno News - October 05, 2020
Inconsistency and Incoherence
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170.73383
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Summary
Coming up, the federal government says no to Thanksgiving, lockdown inconsistency, and Brian Lee Crowley on his newest book, Gardeners vs. Designers. The Andrew Lawton Show starts on Monday, October 5th, 2020, right here on the True North Talk Show.
Transcript
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This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, the federal government says no to Thanksgiving,
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lockdown inconsistency, and Brian Lee Crowley on his newest book,
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This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.
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It is Monday, October 5th, 2020, and the never-ending lockdown is continuing.
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Yes, Theresa Tam, the Chief Public Health Advisor in Canada,
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has said that Thanksgiving is something that we should approach with caution.
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Now, I don't actually like Thanksgiving dinners in general,
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so this is actually great advice for me because I get to be like,
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oh no, Theresa Tam told me I can't have turkey, but I kid.
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I do it because I like the people involved, so I am going to get together with my family.
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But that is potentially a no-no, potentially not a no-no.
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We don't exactly know, no, because Theresa Tam is not giving any particular hard and fast rules.
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She's just saying, ah, you should have caution for Thanksgiving.
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Keep your indoor gatherings small and ensure social distancing at outdoor gatherings.
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This is dovetailing on when Justin Trudeau mentioned a couple of weeks ago
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in his address to the nation that Thanksgiving is gone, it's a write-off,
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but we might, might, might be able to cling to the idea that potentially,
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When the federal government is telling us if we're good and we behave,
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we might get to have Christmas in two months, give me a break.
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Because right now, the public health advisors can't actually figure out
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So you've got Theresa Tam on the federal level saying,
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but not putting any hard and fast rules forward.
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And then you've got in Ontario advice that really restricts the size of your social bubble
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and ultimately doesn't go back to the lockdown measures we saw a couple of months ago.
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which I believe you need an enigmatologist to decipher.
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our goal for COVID-19 response remains to minimize severe illness and deaths,
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With schools and businesses open, everyone's efforts are crucial.
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This time, we've got to bend it like Canadians,
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give it the old double-double by layering personal risk assessment and prevention practices
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and reconfiguring and downsizing our in-person hashtag contact bubble as and where possible.
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Give it the old double-double by layering personal risk assessment
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and prevention practices and reconfiguring and downsizing.
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I don't know if you're listening to the Andrew Lawton show on a subwoofer or some Bose system,
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but I have to give it like the full capital letter gusto when I read these tweets.
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No one has any idea what she's saying, by the way.
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There's a lot of cases where the left hand doesn't know what the far left hand is doing.
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And one notable example of this is the city of Toronto,
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where their chief public health officer, Dr. Eileen Davila,
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has put forward a sweeping list of recommendations to Toronto
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that she wants the Ontario government or the Toronto government to impose.
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for restaurants and bars, I request the suspension of indoor service for a period of four weeks.
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Four weeks represents an interruption of two incubation periods for the virus.
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These venues would still be able to continue outdoor takeout, pickup, and delivery services.
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for athletic facilities, I request the suspension of indoor group fitness classes
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The nature of these activities creates a real risk of virus spread.
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And we have seen exactly that in our community.
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Again, I propose this suspension for a pilot period of four weeks.
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She says here she does not want a return to the lockdown that we saw last spring.
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My proposals are meant to prevent the conditions that would force a large-scale lockdown.
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Yet, I also have a trouble accepting that when she says in her recommendations this,
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I'm recommending that individuals only consider leaving their homes for essential activities such as work, education, and fitness, to name a few.
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So if we're going back to a mentality where you only leave home when you absolutely have to,
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you only leave home for essential business, we are actually laying the groundwork for a lockdown like we saw in spring.
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So yeah, you can say that maybe it's a little bit more liberal or a little bit more relaxed than it was from a legal perspective.
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But what we have being recommended from the public health officer of Canada's largest city is that we go back to staying indoors,
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the whole stay home, save lives shtick, where we don't actually get to go out unless we're going to the grocery store, going to work, or going to school,
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which in most cases moot because she even says, listen, everyone should be working from home anyway.
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On one hand, you've got recommendations that the government's going too far from activists, from advocates, from businesses that are saying,
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listen, we barely survived the first lockdown. Now you've got some public health officers that are saying go further.
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You've got others that are just shrugging and using some combination of capital letters that makes no sense to anyone.
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And the level of inconsistency in this is astonishing.
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Right now, I mentioned that the left hand doesn't know what the far left hand is doing.
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We're being told by some officials that we have to stay home, save lives.
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And by other officials, we're being told that, hey, we can just do whatever we want.
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I was watching Wheel of Fortune last week, which is, believe it or not, still on and is a great show.
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And I came across an ad that something jumped out at me from.
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And I want to play this ad for you because I found it online and see if you see it as well.
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Because the last time we were really together, just the two of us, was, I don't even know.
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And this time, no, it's not your birthday or a holiday or some special occasion.
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Okay, so that was the very ad that I saw on TV.
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An ad telling everyone that in lockdown, you can drift away from your family members.
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But you can come back and you can go out with Grandma and have a great time in Niagara Falls.
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Because the whole point is that we're supposed to stay home to save Grandma's life.
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Whereas this ad is telling us we should visit Niagara Falls with Grandma and have a grand old time.
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Now, this is specifically filmed knowing the coronavirus pandemic is going on.
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Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario.
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This is a federal government funded advertisement.
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oh, you know, you got to stay home and you shouldn't have too many people at Thanksgiving dinner
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and we can get through this is now advertising tourism or funding the advertisement of tourism.
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Now, to be clear, if you want to go to Niagara Falls with Grandma, have at it.
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But it's yet another example of the gross inconsistency
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between different levels of government and in some cases between
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different departments in the same level of government.
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Advertising tourism while, on the other hand, saying that, you know,
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And this was, remember, what Justin Trudeau said during his address to the nation
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In the spring, we all did our part by staying home.
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And this fall, we have even more tools in the toolbox.
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So he doesn't specifically say that staying home is something we need to do right now,
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but he mentions basically that it's one of the tools we have in the toolkit.
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And this is the speech, of course, where he said that we still have a fighting chance
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Now, I reached out to Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada to ask them about this.
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Say, listen, the advice is still to not travel abroad.
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What is the official advice on traveling domestically, on traveling in Canada?
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And they did not give me at all a straight answer.
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I was told that, yes, Andrew, domestic land travel is indeed interprovincial territorial
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and should follow provincial and territorial measures and rules.
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I asked, is it recommended or is it advised against?
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And I'm pretty sure they don't want to answer because they know that it will expose
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huge inconsistencies in the advice that has been presented.
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So on one hand, we're being told to stay home, save lives.
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And on the other hand, the government is bankrolling ads telling us to literally bring
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When we come back, Brian Lee Crowley and I chat about his new book here on The Andrew
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You've no doubt heard of liberal versus conservative, left versus right, globalist, populist, all
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of these great divides that exist in Canadian and international politics.
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There's a new one that you might not be as familiar with that's being put forth in a
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book by the great Brian Lee Crowley, Gardeners versus Designers, Understanding the Great Fault
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Thanks very much for coming on today and congrats on the new book.
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So this dichotomy that you put forward, what is it?
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I don't know if any of your audience have had the same experience, but I kept listening
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to all these people tell me about what a terrible place Canada was, that it's full of racists,
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it's full of homophobes, it's full of genocidal maniacs.
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And I began to say, but this doesn't correspond to my own experience of Canada.
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And it doesn't correspond, I think, for example, to the fact that something like 40% of the
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population of our great urban areas in Canada are actually people born in another country.
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They came here because they had lots of choices.
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They could have gone to many places, but they chose Canada.
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And surely they didn't choose Canada because it's a terrible place.
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And so I began to ask myself, so what is really behind this?
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And how can we begin to understand what a great place Canada is?
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Well, we shouldn't be, that Canada is not a problem to be fixed.
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Canada is instead a rich inheritance to be enjoyed.
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And that gets us to this idea of gardeners versus designers, because my view is that what
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the designers want, the people who really want the top-down model, they want to be able
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They want to tell us how to get our health care.
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They want to, you know, just organize our lives, how to get daycare, you name it.
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They've always got a way to fix what's wrong with Canada.
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And what I wanted to do in the book was to say, well, actually, every time we let the
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designers have their way, they tell us how they're going to fix Canada, it actually turns
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The alternative is to elect Canadians through their own experiences, their own knowledge,
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their own understanding of their own circumstances, of themselves, about what's important to them,
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They solve their own problems in a way that's pretty impressive.
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And what we need to do is we need to support these grassroots solutions to our problems
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And that's the opposition I'm talking about between gardeners and designers.
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One of the things that I found when I was reading through it, there's almost a similar
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parallel to some of the ideas you see in foreign policy and international relations discussions
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of people on one side that want to view the world the way it is and work within that, and
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then the cursed idealists on the other side that are so focused on this abstract vision.
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And I don't know if that was something that you thought of when you were formulating this,
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but it does seem like there is that contrast between, on one hand, the people that sort of
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refuse to look at how the country is and are trying to make it into something else.
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Yes, I think there's a lot of truth to that, Andrew.
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And in fact, you know, the people who are enamored of, you know, the United Nations as,
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you know, the great hope for democracy, the same organization that just elected, what was
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it, Iran and Russia and China to the Human Rights Council, as if these are people who are going
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to defend human rights around the world at the time when they're abusing them without apology at home.
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I, you know, one of the reasons why I think genuine Democrats are rather concerned about this creeping
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internationalization, you know, that we take our lead from the UN and, you know, the IMF and,
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you know, the World Economic Forum and so on, is because, you know, these idealistic organizations
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are very far from the real world that we inhabit. And only democracies, I think, are able to defend
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democracy. We can't look to non-democratic countries to defend our interests.
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Do you see the gardeners and designers as falling strictly on what we would understand as left,
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No, I don't think so. In fact, you know, it's one of the reasons I wrote the book. I said,
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you know, we don't think very well about these things. And in fact, part of what I'm saying is
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that at the moment, designers seem to be in the ascendant, you know, the kind of progressives,
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the people who, you know, every day they're, they're tweeting, you know, Canada should be ashamed
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about X. And we have a plan to fix Canada. And I think the gardeners have kind of almost forgotten
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what it is that's so great about Canada, how it became one of the most attractive societies in the
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world. They need to be reminded what it is that made Canada great and how we can harness, you know,
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the intelligence of Canadians and their knowledge about themselves and their communities
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in a way that makes Canada an even better place. I don't think there's any political party
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that really gets this yet. It's true that there are probably more people in the Conservative Party that
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are going to read about gardeners and say, gee, yeah, he's articulating something that I feel,
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but I've never been able to put into words. But you know, the fact of the matter is that for
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100 years, the Liberal Party was a gardener's party, no doubt about it. Sir Wilfrid Lurie was
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a gardener of the first water. So the Liberal Party has forgotten its gardener roots. And I think
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both the Liberals and the Tories need to be reminded that there is an alternative to the top down
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program. Canada is a problem to be fixed. You mentioned in that response there,
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knowledge. And one of the arguments that I found really unique, and I hadn't actually considered it
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in the book, was how you equated freedom to knowledge, and specifically in the context of
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freedom to pursue, to explore, to experiment as being really the direct path to knowledge. And I don't
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think a lot of people traditionally view liberty in those terms. I think people, and for good reason,
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look at freedom as a means and as an end unto itself. But you're saying there's something more
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fundamental to that about true human progress. Well, yeah, I mean, without getting into a
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technical discussion, you know, the fact of the matter is that if we act on mistaken ideas,
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you know, if we're wrong about how things work, when we exercise our freedom, you know,
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we make mistakes, we get things wrong. And so the truly free person is always seeking
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the most up-to-date, the most effective, the most real, the most proven knowledge on which to act,
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right? And so the question then becomes, free people have a tremendous interest in having the
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most knowledge available. You know, the best knowledge about how to provide healthcare,
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how to provide daycare, how to provide prescription drugs, how to, you know, how to get an education,
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all the things that make up our lives in order to be effective in exercising our freedom. We want to
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have the most knowledge possible with which to exercise that freedom. And, you know, part of the
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argument of the book is that people at the very top, you know, the people designing all these fabulous
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programs that are going to fix all our problems, they're the most ignorant people in society. They're
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ignorant about our lives. They're ignorant about, because every one of us is unique. You know, we are not
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a statistic. Statistics take away from us everything that makes us an individual and makes us this abstract
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number. And, you know, because people at the top have to be guided by statistics, because they can't
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possibly know Andrew Lawton's life and Brian Crowley's life and Joe Smith's life and Jane Smith's life.
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You know, only you and I have the knowledge about who we are, about what we want, about what's
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important to us in our community. And so when we let people at the top tell us how to act, we're actually
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less free and we're actually acting on less information than when we can make our own decisions for
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ourselves. That's a key part of the book. And your chapter on identity, which I think needs to be
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required reading in every high school across the country, by the way, really expresses that well.
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You talk about how most people cannot be reduced down to the identity group of whatever it is,
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you know, a woman identity, LGBT identity, a racial identity, and so on. But there does seem to be in
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the designers this idea of pushing that as being really the trump card, more important than however
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anyone else identifies. Yes, well, you know, you can't assign, in my view, you can't assign a person
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to a group like, okay, your skin is black, therefore you're black. And that's now we know everything that
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matters about you because you're black. Yeah, but the fact of the matter is, if you get into the mind of
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someone who's black or someone who's female or someone who's Chinese or something, pick your
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identity group, it doesn't matter. As soon as you get inside their mind, you realize they're not
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reducible to a single dimension. They are complex people. They have ideas. They have things that are
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important to them. They have objectives in their lives. They have different people that they care
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about. Sometimes they're workers, sometimes they're trade unionists, sometimes they're mortgage holders.
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So there's a zillion things that make up every individual. And when we reduce them to membership
00:20:32.980
in a group, it's always the designer to say, ah, you see, I've found the one thing that we need to
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know about this person in order to help them or fix them or, you know, bring in a program that will
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make their lives better. And the argument I'm making in the book is the only thing you need to know about
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a person is what's in their head. It's what they want. It's what's important to them.
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The color of their skin, you know, the ethnic group, their origin, whether they're an immigrant
00:21:02.420
or a native, these are all, they're not irrelevant, but they're small things compared to what's in our
00:21:09.940
heads. And only we know what's important to us as individuals. And lest anyone think this is a
00:21:16.500
theoretical problem, I would point out that there are a great many hiring practices, as you note in the
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book, and we see this especially in the Canadian government, that are based on that idea of what
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we would call identity politics. So it's not just a theoretical issue you're raising here, but one
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that we're seeing in practice, and probably increasingly so.
00:21:37.060
Absolutely. And part of the argument I make in the book is, it's, it's just math, you know, if you
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genuinely wanted to say, well, all employers must have workforces that are representative of the
00:21:50.420
population by which they mean, all the groups that they can identify that they think are important,
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you mentioned LGBTQ, etc, etc. There is nobody, no country, no company, no group, no organization,
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including the federal government, that has a workforce large enough, that it could be truly
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representative in that sense. And as soon as we start focusing on group membership in things like,
00:22:14.740
how, you know, the employees you have, rather than the competence and the knowledge of the people
00:22:19.940
themselves, we move away from meritocracy, and, you know, picking the best person for the job,
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which I still think is one of the, one of the, one of the gardener institutions that we've developed,
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you know, we are a society in which people get ahead, not because of who they are, who they know,
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but be, but because of what they know, if we allow that to be, you know, shunted aside in favour of,
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oh, let's make sure every group is represented in every workforce, it will be a tremendous loss
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to Canadian society. When you look at choices and freedom, I have to point out this line that
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jumped out in the book, the state does not protect your choices, it protects you, the chooser.
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What does that distinction mean? And why is that so important?
00:23:07.140
Well, I guess the, the thing to remember is that what makes your life, what makes my life,
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what makes the life of every human being is the choices that we make. This, this is how we make
00:23:20.500
our lives. This is how we make our character. This is how we make our profession. This is how we choose
00:23:26.820
our mate, you know, everything about our life is what we choose for ourselves. And the important thing,
00:23:35.220
therefore, is to protect our ability to choose, not to say, gee, you know, if you knew as much as I know,
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I'm, I'm the great, you know, minister of X, or, you know, I'm, I'm the head of Statistics Canada,
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if only you knew what I knew, you would make the right choice. But we, you see, that's exactly what
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we can't do in a society of free people, is we can't let people at the top say, we know more than
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you do. So we're, we will make choices on your behalf. So the important thing is not the role of
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government is not to make choices for us, because we're too ignorant to make our own choices. The
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role of government is to make sure that nobody interferes with our ability to make our own
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choices. That's when we get to live our best life, according to our own understanding, our own lights,
00:24:26.580
what we care about, and who we know. And that's especially timely in the last eight months,
00:24:31.780
where we've been subjected to some people would argue for good reason, others would argue not so
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much rule by experts. Yeah, well, I mean, one of the themes of the book is that we defer way too much
00:24:44.260
to experts. You know, this is, again, part of the designer idea that, you know, we, we at the center,
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we in government, we advise by the most important experts in the world know far more than you do.
00:24:58.740
So please, you know, just be quiet and let us tell you what to do. And I, in the book, I talk about
00:25:05.860
COVID as a, as an example of, well, you know, how realistic is this idea that experts are going to
00:25:12.500
fix things for us? And I, I look at, you know, all of your listeners, Andrew, will remember that
00:25:20.180
at the beginning of COVID, you know, the idea that we would close the border was nonsense. Then
00:25:25.380
we closed the border. No, no, wearing masks, according to the experts, won't make any difference.
00:25:30.260
Now we're all wearing masks. And the list goes on and on and on of experts. Well, experts learn too.
00:25:38.980
Experts don't know everything. In fact, experts mostly know the past. They know, well, yes, okay,
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we have historical knowledge of what happened in other pandemics, etc. But every bug is different.
00:25:53.620
Every circumstance is different. And now, you know, we're, we're deep into COVID. And there,
00:26:00.340
the expert advice is changing every day. And different countries have different experts
00:26:05.300
offering different advice. The idea that there is some kind, some kind of expert consensus driven
00:26:10.580
by science that gives one answer that we should all capitulate to is absolute rubbish.
00:26:17.940
Do you think that the designers are so integrated in the Canadian bureaucracy,
00:26:24.180
in academia and other institutions, perhaps in the media that there really
00:26:28.580
is not an easy path forward to reclaim the gardener mentality?
00:26:32.340
Well, the thing that gives me hope, Andrew, is that, you know, no matter how much designers claim
00:26:42.020
that they're acting on the best knowledge, thanks to the best expert advice, the fact of the matter is
00:26:47.860
that most of the time they get it wrong. And they make mistakes. And those mistakes ramify,
00:26:54.340
you know, they multiply, you know, just think about the Ontario government, its attempt to bring in a
00:27:01.620
green economy and how they ruin the, the electricity system, and that had huge knock on effects on
00:27:08.420
employment, etc, etc. And now the federal government is trying to reproduce that the the it would be hard
00:27:16.420
to defeat the designer mentality, if designers got it right, and their solutions worked.
00:27:23.780
Fortunately, they often don't get it right. In fact, most of the time, they don't get it right.
00:27:29.140
You know, our circumstances evolve. And even if they got it right, when they brought it in,
00:27:33.060
their program soon is outdated and based on outmoded information. Whereas gardeners are always able to
00:27:41.060
be at the cutting edge, because they're always asking people to use their own knowledge. You know,
00:27:46.980
what you and I know about our lives is always more up to date than anybody else can know about us.
00:27:53.220
And so when, you know, gardeners say, No, let's, let's rely on what people say they want,
00:27:58.900
let's rely on their own efforts, let's encourage them, let's give them support and making their own
00:28:04.580
choices. The outcomes are better. And I think that as we move into an era of, you know, designer dominance
00:28:16.980
in our in our politics. It's a bit like Margaret Thatcher, used to say, you know, yeah, you know,
00:28:23.620
socialism is okay. Spending other people's money is okay, except eventually you run out of other
00:28:28.580
people's money. Eventually, you run out other people's money. And people start saying, Well,
00:28:33.700
wait a minute, you're taking a lot of my money to provide programs that don't actually work very
00:28:38.900
well for me. And that's when you start to get the pushback. Do you see populism as being an inherent
00:28:45.140
byproduct of this gardener approach? No, I think populism is an inherent outcome of the designer
00:28:51.780
approach. You know, really, that is that populism is a reaction against designerism. It's a reaction
00:29:01.780
against the mentality that says, you know, I'm at the top of the political food chain, I'm really smart,
00:29:09.460
I've been to a fancy university, I have a big PhD, I hire the best experts. And I'm telling you what's
00:29:16.500
good for you. And if you don't like it, well, you're obviously an ignorant redneck, and your opinion
0.86
00:29:22.820
can be completely dismissed. This drives people crazy, Andrew. It's it's the basket of deplorables
00:29:29.780
mentality. And I think that populism is an inevitable outcome of a designer dominated political
00:29:39.940
era, when people say, I'm sick and tired of politicians telling me that what I know about
00:29:45.380
my own life doesn't matter, is unimportant, is ignorant, and in fact, is embarrassing.
0.90
00:29:52.820
So I guess with that being said, do you think that the designer
00:29:55.780
uh realm is going to collapse on its own? Or do you think there is a response of sorts that's needed
00:30:02.900
to steer things back into the gardener column? Well, you know, look, I think that it's inevitable
00:30:11.060
that people come to realize that designerism doesn't work. But I also think that it's amazing how hard it
00:30:19.220
is and how much work it takes to make something inevitable happen. It doesn't just happen by itself,
00:30:25.140
Pete. Yeah, people will still keep trying to ram the square peg into the round hole.
00:30:29.380
Yeah, people have to make a decision that no, look, we tried this doesn't work, move on.
00:30:37.300
You know, making the inevitable happen is a big effort, you got to push that rock up the hill.
00:30:41.300
And it may well be that I remember talking to one former politician the other day, and she said,
00:30:51.220
well, you know, the problem is that it seems that the designers always win at election time. And I think,
00:30:58.660
well, I've heard people say this, but then, you know, think about, I mentioned the Ontario government,
00:31:06.660
you know, the Kathleen Wynne government, you know, they were kind of designers par excellence. And
00:31:12.500
finally, people said, No, this is not working. And they were out on their ear. So sometimes you have
00:31:19.140
to let these things run their course. But you have to keep reminding people what the alternative is,
00:31:24.820
so that when they understand that this has run its course, and it doesn't work, they say, Oh,
00:31:29.060
wait a minute, wasn't there an alternative here? So I part of the part of the purpose of the book
00:31:33.940
is to keep these intellectual tools sharp and available to the population. So that when people
00:31:42.420
say, Yeah, boy, this really doesn't work, they say, Oh, wait a minute, but there was an alternative. And
00:31:49.860
and that alternative is there, easily available within reach, so that we can put it to work. And
00:31:55.780
people will realize that it actually works for Canadian.
00:31:58.820
And I guess the one thing I would end with here is asking you if you were to put forward a roadmap
00:32:05.860
that you were going to share with all of the political leaders of Canada, and I guess you have
00:32:10.100
to some extent done it in the book, but something more tangible, because we know I don't think they
00:32:14.420
are always reading, reading the books they need to, what would be the approach that you would recommend
00:32:20.340
that would really help write the course if it is not, as you mentioned earlier, strictly a left,
00:32:28.580
Yeah, well, I think that politicians need constantly to draw a contrast between, you know,
00:32:37.380
these, these arrogant politicians, you know, telling us what a terrible place Canada is,
00:32:44.340
and how they have the the expertise that's going to fix it. And to contrast that with the experience that
00:32:50.980
Canadians have every day, of what a fine country this is, and how pleased they are to be here,
00:32:58.500
how many of us came from other countries, is to be here, because this is the best place in the world
00:33:03.780
to be. And I think if we keep reminding people, compare your experience, compare your day-to-day life,
00:33:12.180
compare what you see around you, and what people say to you about living in Canada, compare that with what
00:33:18.500
the politicians are telling you. And soon you'll realize that the politicians live in a world of
00:33:24.580
abstraction, which has nothing to do with the life of Canadians. And it's the life of Canadians,
00:33:30.740
and what they love, and what they care about, and what, you know, motivates them, that should drive the
00:33:36.260
politics of this country. I think if we, if we were able to communicate that message to people, to be
00:33:41.780
proud of being Canadian, not to be ashamed, I think you would find that Canadians would vibrate
1.00
00:33:48.900
very strongly with that message. The book is Gardeners Versus Designers, Understanding the Great
00:33:54.740
Fault Line in Canadian Politics. The author, Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, joining me on the line. Brian,
00:34:00.500
thank you so much. Fantastic book. I really appreciate you taking the time to share a bit about it.
00:34:06.500
That does it for me. My thanks again to Brian Lee Crowley and all of you for tuning in to the show
00:34:12.180
today. We'll be back on Thursday with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show. Thank you,
00:34:16.980
God bless, and good day Canada. If you enjoy the show and want to hear more of it, we need your
00:34:22.260
support. Head on over to andrewlaughtonshow.com and click donate to support the work that we're doing
00:34:28.340
and stand up for independent media. Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the
00:34:32.820
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