Grocery prices have been on the rise in Canada, and there's no shortage of reasons to complain about it. But the problem is that grocery stores in Canada are not the only ones getting hit by rising prices. They're also being hit by higher taxes, higher fuel prices, and more.
00:01:00.000welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:20.440north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here the andrew lotten show
00:01:30.880on true north the end of another week at least insofar as this program is concerned coming to
00:01:38.080you live from the nation's capital of ottawa where you see strange things around the problem with
00:01:44.900like there are two ottawas there's the real ottawa that is like a municipality like any other in
00:01:49.700Canada. And you've got all your suburbs and communities and people with real lives, real jobs.
00:01:54.840And then there's downtown Ottawa. And I was very sympathetic when the Freedom Convoy came up to
00:02:00.420people saying, listen, I live downtown. But for the most part, it's not normal people that live
00:02:05.760in downtown Ottawa. There are some, but it's like, and by not normal, I mean, it's politicians and
00:02:10.220bureaucrats and stuff like that. They're humans, but they're like a very strange subset of humans.
00:02:14.380And so everywhere you go, you're running into people like there's one guy, Jasraj Singh Hallan, who's the conservative finance critic.
00:02:21.920I've interviewed him before. Very nice guy. I've seen him like nine times in four days.
00:02:26.760And I had thought like I had seen him enough times. And then last night I was in a meeting with someone and he like came in because he needed to see them.
00:02:34.960So that was number nine. So this is Ottawa. And then yesterday I was just walking around Parliament Hill and I saw Jagmeet Singh like riding away
00:02:43.780on his bicycle and it was actually to be honest it was impressive because generally speaking I
00:02:50.040thought you needed a spine to ride a bike and Jagmeet Singh managed to be riding at a pretty
00:02:55.940good clip despite all of the things that he says for example if I'm talking about what's happening
00:03:01.400on Twitter or X as it's now called Jagmeet Singh has done it never ceases to amuse me this is the
00:03:07.500tweet he shared this morning about the rising grocery prices he puts the blame on justin
00:03:14.520trudeau he says it's uh you know the justin trudeau the liberals have been doing this
00:03:18.060and only the ndp are the ones that are going to uh call this out only the ndp are going to this
00:03:26.640was a tweet from a couple of days ago but the thing that i find most interesting about it
00:03:30.480is that he always forgets to include the other part of that you kind of have to really really
00:03:35.400squint and you know really look closely to see oh by the way i'm the one that's keeping the liberal
00:03:40.760government in power right now so uh maybe he was riding his bike so fast yesterday because
00:03:45.800accountability were the things he was was the thing he was trying to flee but nevertheless
00:03:50.440the grocery store debate about what to do with them to the liberals is basically just summon all
00:03:56.600the ceos to ottawa finger wag and say you must produce a plan the liberal government is actually
00:04:01.480unveiling that right now the plan that they demanded by thanksgiving to do something about
00:04:07.160rising grocery costs it's not actually going to do anything at all all we're reminded of here
00:04:12.040is that grocery stores in canada are really coming down to a five day a five company group it's an
00:04:19.560oligopoly aaron woodrick uh posted this tweet here which i i found was quite incisive about the
00:04:25.000problem he said philippe francois champagne this morning was talking about the virtues of competition
00:04:30.040And this afternoon is talking about the federal government essentially working with this oligopoly to fix prices.
00:04:37.040Because the government, and by the way, the NDP, have taken the view that greedy grocery store profiteers are the problem.
00:04:47.020That greedy CEOs, the capitalist system, that's the reason that things are so expensive.
00:04:52.940Not inflation, which as we've discussed on this show, has a number of influencing factors.
00:04:58.540but the carbon tax is a very big one it's not grocery store profits and in fact if you look
00:05:05.660at the shrinkage that grocery stores have to contend with if you look at the theft issues
00:05:11.300that grocery stores especially now have to contend with if you look at their operating costs which
00:05:16.860are driven up by fuel taxes carbon taxes all that sort of stuff and then just general cost of doing
00:05:22.580things in Ontario for example the minimum wage is going up quite significantly I think it's now
00:05:27.660at $16.55 an hour, which I remember when $15 an hour was seen as a very radical push. And I
00:05:35.160remember when businesses were justifiably talking in Ontario about how difficult it was going to be
00:05:40.040for them to make a go of things at a $15 an hour minimum wage. Now, a few years have passed, mind
00:05:45.920you, that is going up entirely. You may say that even a minimum wage salary today is not enough
00:05:52.040to comfortably live, which I am entirely sympathetic to. But those increases to the
00:05:57.120cost of labor put a responsibility on employers that they cannot just shoulder. The profit margins
00:06:04.700are not thick enough that they can just, with the stroke of a pen, say, okay, yeah, we're paying
00:06:10.160everyone more. That money has to go down to customers. And there was a spokesperson, I can't
00:06:16.800remember if I mentioned it yesterday, from the Bank of Canada, I did mention it, who had said
00:06:20.500we're going to be seeing a feedback loop that inflation is going to cause more inflation which
00:06:24.320sounds like a stupid point and ideally people in the bank of canada would be well aware of this
00:06:28.600but it's also at the same time a self-evident point that the rising costs affect everyone
00:06:33.900including people who have to decide what to price things they're selling at and you put this in the
00:06:40.980context in which i think it's most important to be viewed in which is the effect on individual
00:06:45.060people, not on companies, not on government, but on ordinary people. And it is heartbreaking
00:06:50.400how many people are hurting. And this is something that I should actually one day devote a considerable
00:06:57.160chunk of time to going through some of the emails I've seen that have been very difficult
00:07:00.740on this question. Emails from people who are making very difficult decisions. And I know I'm
00:07:07.000starting to do a wind up like I'm some politician on the campaign trail of, oh, well, I met a
00:07:12.220constituent in Kelowna who said X, Y, Z. But people are hurting. And governments tend to not
00:07:19.180be aware of that in a very real way. They may be aware in an abstract way. People in the general
00:07:25.740sense are hurting. But the individual struggles and the commonalities between those individual
00:07:30.680struggles, I don't think they're paying attention to. This morning, there was a report that was
00:07:36.320released from Dalhousie and we've seen Sylvain Charlebois on the show before he's a probably
00:07:42.220the leading scholar and researcher on food supply chain and food pricing issues in Canada and this
00:07:49.740survey found that two-thirds of Canadians are concerned about the long-term health implications
00:07:56.020of the choices they're making today not because they're making unhealthy choices
00:08:00.000just for sake of preference but because they're having to buy less healthy products
00:08:05.640less nutritious products because of inflation because they cannot afford fresh food fresh
00:08:14.780produce you look further to this and find that half of the respondents of this survey if i think
00:08:20.240it was 47 are doing more grocery shopping at the dollar store than they are at the grocery store
00:08:27.320for the same reason because of inflation now i want to say first and foremost here i am not
00:08:34.220judging anyone for the decisions they make. If you decide, you know what, I can get so-and-so
00:08:38.920for cheaper. I don't care about the name brands. And if I want to get like Dr. Broccoli instead
00:08:44.820of Dr. Pepper, and I can get it for half the price of the dollar store, great. I'm not talking
00:08:49.060about people that are making just frugal decisions for whatever reason, same as some people that
00:08:53.580used to load up at the bulk food store and only get some things at the grocery store. That's
00:08:57.920not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people who are only doing it
00:09:02.060because of the circumstances of the economy.
00:09:06.220People who are only making that choice
00:11:43.920So obviously the announcement today suggests that the government has gotten what it wanted.
00:11:50.340Grocery store CEOs have put their heads together, they've come up with some agreement that they're
00:11:54.020going to do, which I'm guaranteeing right now, and I'm not a particularly pessimistic person.
00:11:59.780Well, no, who am I kidding? I am. I want to be an optimist. I'm like the middle class seeking to
00:12:04.140join it. I'm like the optimist and those seeking to be optimist. But the thing about it is that
00:12:08.980I would encourage you to, when you go to your grocery store this weekend, maybe you're doing
00:12:13.660a big Thanksgiving turkey dinner. I can't stand turkey. I hate that it's become the default
00:12:18.060traditional holiday food for like three holidays every year and some other ones. But nevertheless,
00:12:23.820this isn't about my dislike for turkey I just find it boring now it's not there's nothing
00:12:28.480objectionable about it it's just like the it's like the Aaron O'Toole of poultry it's like just
00:12:33.280it has nothing to offer unless you just load it up with gravy and all these other things so I would
00:12:37.820just prefer to have the gravy but nevertheless the one thing that I'll point out here is that
00:12:43.340I know Canadians are not going to see this stability by Thanksgiving that was promised so
00:12:50.840this tough talk we're not taking anything off the table we're doing this and we're doing that and
00:12:56.520we're gonna put tax measures if we have to by the way like tax measures how are you going to tax
00:13:03.540your way out of a mess that was already caused by increasing prices and increasing costs and the
00:13:11.080government has never answered this I mean I remember trying to make sense of this with Aaron
00:13:14.460Woodrick whose tweet I showed earlier earlier when this happened and I was like how are we
00:13:19.020Like, I'm just, I mean, liberal logic is sometimes difficult to keep up with in general, but oftentimes you can sort of try to figure out at least how they got to the conclusion, even if you realize that it may be a dumb point.
00:13:32.180In this one, I'm like, how are tax measures going to penalize grocery stores to bringing their prices down because they will have to pay this, you know, penalty tax because they didn't lower the price of turkey?
00:13:47.080And how are they going to recoup that?
00:13:49.020Well, they're going to increase the price of turkey or gravy or whatever the case is.
00:13:53.900So, like, it literally makes no sense whatsoever.
00:13:56.740and when Canadians are buying their groceries at the dollar store they are dispensing maybe
00:14:03.200there's a dollarama out there that has a decent selection of romaine lettuce or something but
00:14:07.720any dollar store I've seen uh has which by the way I mean how dollar stores have survived now
00:14:12.640I have no idea because you know nothing is a dollar so the groceries they're selling
00:14:18.720are heavily preserved foods things that are not healthy and I no one is looking at me and being
00:14:25.660this is the guy I'm taking health advice from. I'm not giving you health advice. My problems did
00:14:29.940not come from buying food at the dollar store, I assure you. But I am making the point here
00:14:34.900that when people are making these decisions, not because they're choosing them, but are making
00:14:40.480them because the economic realities are forcing them to, this is a problem. And it's not going
00:14:46.320to surprise me if we see in five, 10 years, the consequences of this, of children who have been
00:14:53.400developmentally delayed who have been malnourished in some way of people that haven't developed in
00:14:58.980certain ways because they haven't been eating as much they haven't been eating as right i mean
00:15:02.420these are the types of things that are lagging indicators where they take a fair bit of time
00:15:06.200to catch up with what the consequences are of the decision uh bill peace has a message he says
00:15:14.060turkeys are 46 51 at food basics happy thanksgiving now that actually doesn't seem like a terrible
00:15:20.720price for turkey i didn't wait i didn't even know we could put the comments up on the screen there
00:15:25.560that's great that's just like i should read comments more often i didn't know we had that
00:15:28.560in our uh in our program here i get all excited small things amuse small minds as they say
00:15:32.800but that like again food basics they're supposed to be one of the inexpensive
00:15:36.900grocers not one of the really high-end ones this isn't like loblaws or sobeys or anything like that
00:15:43.020i mean sobeys is a pricey store they they have good quality stuff oftentimes when i've been there
00:15:48.520But this is exactly where things are, I think, moving along.
00:15:52.220Now, one of the big challenges, and I'm going to be talking about this a little bit more
00:15:56.240next week, obviously, once I've had a chance to look through whatever is being proposed
00:20:56.800when I see a government so committed to this idea
00:21:00.280that ending your life with a state's assistant is a right
00:21:02.980that no one has the ability to interfere with
00:21:06.740because I know it's a regime that if it were in place in 2010, I would have been very motivated
00:21:12.640to avail myself of. And the doctors, the care workers that told me, no, you don't get to end
00:21:19.860your life, we're going to help you, would have been compelled to do the opposite, to assist me
00:21:26.660with what was a very flawed and ill approach. Now, this is a lengthy windup to a private
00:21:34.060Members Bill that's been introduced by Conservative MP Ed Fast. It was introduced in May, but it's
00:21:39.220actually this week getting a hearing, which I'm very grateful for. It's called Bill C-314. There
00:21:45.020was a press conference about it just a couple of blocks from where I am earlier this week.
00:21:49.360Alex Schattenberg is the Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and joins me now.
00:21:55.000Alex, it's good to talk to you. What does this Private Members Bill do?
00:21:59.320Well, actually, the private members bill is very clear.
00:22:02.040It would just reverse what was already passed by Bill C-7 in March of 2021.
00:22:09.340So Bill C-7 was the bill that expanded euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada we call MAID.
00:22:14.640It expanded it to include people who are not terminally ill.
00:22:17.580One of the things that bill did is it allowed for euthanasia for mental illness alone, but they put a two-year moratorium on that.
00:22:24.500And you might remember last December when the government was getting a lot of heat over the issue of people with disabilities who were dying by MAID because of homelessness and poverty and inability to get medical treatment, etc.
00:22:39.460And these stories were coming at them one at a time consistently that they decided to delay the MAID for mental illness until March of 2024.
00:22:49.880So Ed Fassbill would actually end that prospect and say that it is not part of the law to allow MAID for mental illness alone.
00:22:59.240This has been, I mean, obviously there's an ideological aversion to assisted suicide in general among a lot of social conservatives in Canada and some other people as well.
00:23:08.600The mental illness criterion has galvanized a lot of people that do not identify as pro-life, don't identify as social conservative.
00:23:17.080We're talking about disability activists, mental health activists, a lot of medical providers that are at the very minimum concerned, at another level, completely outraged by this.
00:23:28.120But even so, the government has been unflinching.
00:23:30.260It's like they've said, well, we'll consult, we'll talk about it.
00:23:32.560But they really haven't shown any signs of walking this back, have they?
00:23:37.420And in fact, the Canadian Association of the Suicide Prevention Organizations, they're against, you know, made for mental illness.
00:23:47.120In our own press conference, we had two young women give very similar stories to your story, talking about, you know, the times they went through when they were, you know, one was hospitalized for over a month and had constant relapses into deep, deep, deep depression.
00:24:02.100And her story was, well, if you had offered it to me then, I would have taken it because I wanted death.
00:24:06.080Another one attempted suicide unsuccessfully, thankfully, seven times and said, you know, if you had offered me medical aid in dying, I would have taken it in a second because I thought death was my only option.
00:24:19.220I felt like I was caught into this deep, dark place and I couldn't get out any other way.
00:24:25.120And yet, of course, now they are both much better.
00:24:27.340But the point of it is, is that Ed Fassbill I really like because as much as I'm opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide in general, he has just carved out this part of the legislation saying no to that because clearly Canadians oppose that.
00:24:42.220A recent poll done by Angus Reid showed that 82% of Canadians thought that this should
00:24:49.040not happen until we improve mental health supports, but only 28% of Canadians actually
00:24:54.280supported the concept of euthanasia for mental illness alone.
00:24:58.940Yeah, and actually, you raise an important point there, and I know you don't work for
00:25:02.720Ed Fast, you're an advocate on the issue, but Ed has done something very important here
00:25:06.960because when C7 came up, the problem was this was really an issue that was being debated
00:25:38.000So it's having its second hour debate actually today.
00:25:40.680The fact is that you might remember the history of it is that Bill C-7, when it came out, originally did not allow MAID for mental illness.
00:25:47.780And then what happened is a certain group of senators got together saying that they would not support the changes to the legislation if it didn't include that.
00:25:57.700So what happened, it went back to Parliament, and Parliament then passed it.
00:26:01.100But I see a lot of them never even debated it.
00:26:03.320They didn't even think that this is what they were doing.
00:26:06.920What I'm also concerned about is this issue of democracy.
00:26:09.400You know, why am I saying this? There's a lot of members of parliament who are saying, you know, I agree with Ed Fass, but I have to support with my I have to vote with my liberal party.
00:26:18.120Well, this is a private members bill. It's got nothing to do with liberal policy.
00:26:22.160It's got nothing to do with a budget or anything like that.
00:26:24.620It has to do with a private members business.
00:26:27.140So therefore, there should be clearly a free vote.
00:26:29.020But the liberals and the NDP, they have been, how would you say, they've been whipping the vote on this issue.
00:26:35.060and that to me is ridiculous if you consider the fact of where Canadians are at and how Canadians
00:26:40.020simply oppose this. Let me ask you about the the other issue of this that we see in Canada which is
00:26:48.460increasingly stories of made being offered to people who are not dealing with mental illness
00:26:54.320or physical illness people that are dealing with housing insecurity people that are dealing with
00:26:58.680poverty and and you know I was talking earlier on about rising cost of living problems about
00:27:03.580grocery store prices, these are contributing to these broader social ills that we know are at
00:27:10.280least in a handful of cases, more than I would say we can call isolated, converting to people
00:27:16.540being recommended or seeking out assisted dying. Now, the reason I bring that up is because the
00:27:22.040law, as I understand it, and as I read it, does not allow that. This is practitioners of this
00:27:27.720going above and beyond what the regulations and the law says. And I'm concerned that we already
00:27:33.400have this attitude in parts of the medical community that doesn't really care about legal
00:27:39.880restrictions, it seems. And I'm wondering what your take on that is. Well, first of all, there
00:27:44.180is a small group of doctors who do a lot of euthanasia, medical aid and dying. There are
00:27:50.440some that do a little bit of it, but there's a small group that do very many of them. And you
00:27:55.740see that in some of the articles. But what happened is, is that they actually technically
00:27:58.780allow this and we the reason is is that they uh bill c7 when it got rid of the uh the type of a
00:28:05.300terminal illness requirement it led to the fact that essentially what you need now is to have an
00:28:09.940irremediable medical condition because they say you have to be suffering but as you know andrew
00:28:14.540i if you tell me you're suffering i can't tell you you're not suffering so there's nothing
00:28:18.320objective about it you can't you can't gauge that so yeah men like suffer from like the cold
00:28:23.560or the flu in a way that like some would argue is irremediable. Yeah.
00:28:28.660Well, you threw that in because your wife probably reminded you of that. But anyway,
00:28:31.960the fact of it is, is that, you know, the fact of it is, is that if you have an irremediable
00:28:36.300medical condition, essentially means that people with disabilities really do qualify almost all
00:28:41.880the time for medical aid and dying in Canada. And that's what's been happening. So these people who
00:28:46.380are going through really quite extreme poverty or homelessness, or a lot of them, they had a
00:28:51.300situation where they were really having a hard time getting the medical treatment they needed
00:28:56.400so that had to do with the access to our medical system which is also a whole nother issue that we
00:29:01.220we uh we know is a serious problem anyway they were then saying i have no choice because
00:29:07.060i cannot continue living this way so i will ask for euthanasia made they were being approved
00:29:12.580based on their disability so they weren't being approved based on their poverty they were
00:29:16.780requesting it based on their poverty or their homelessness or the inability to get their
00:29:21.520medical treatment. And there's a few other reasons that are all social issues, serious social ills
00:29:26.660within our country. And of course, the thing of homelessness is just exploded. And there's many
00:29:31.740reasons for that. And you could do multiple shows on that one. But the fact of it is, is that when
00:29:36.360you're getting such a high level of homelessness, you can see how somebody with a disability who
00:29:40.560can't get access to social housing because they have a limited income, they're sick enough that
00:29:45.900they can't work, they can't get access to social housing, they're in fear of ending up on the
00:29:50.860streets, but they do qualify for euthanasia. So we can't get them a house or a place to live,
00:29:56.460but yeah, we can kill you. And that's somehow going to be about freedom, choice, and autonomy,
00:30:00.600which is, of course, the big joke of the whole thing. It's not about freedom, choice, and autonomy
00:30:03.880at all. It's really about abandonment when it comes down to it. Yeah, it's heartbreaking all
00:30:08.520around. I'm glad Ed Fast is, who, by the way, I mean, look, I don't know Ed Fast all that well.
00:30:13.060he's not exactly like a hardline social conservative culture war creator so he crusader
00:30:18.800so he's actually probably one of the best people to put this forward because he's fairly moderate
00:30:23.260and I uh it's it's unfortunate from what you've said that the other parties are not taking it in
00:30:27.800in that uh tone and and working with him on this but uh hopefully if we get the public pressure up
00:30:32.860there that might be able to change Alex Schattenburg Euthanasia Prevention Coalition thanks for coming
00:30:37.580on Alex thank you so much for having me thank you all right thank you and uh we're just like
00:30:42.360rapid firing through topics today. We had a lot going on, all the things we couldn't get to earlier
00:30:46.460in the week that we're trying to cram in before the weekend, but trying to give each one a little
00:30:51.680open air breathing because some of these are very important topics. And I've said time and time
00:30:56.820again, free speech is my hill to die on. And that means, you know, legal free speech that is
00:31:01.760to stand up against censorship and regulation of speech by government, but also academic freedom
00:31:07.260and cultural free speech, the idea that we must foster in society an attitude that encourages
00:31:13.620and welcomes the exchange of ideas and information rather than discourages and cancels.
00:31:20.100And I was, of course, very intrigued by this course that was not offered when I was in
00:31:26.520I'll read the proper name of it because I don't want to give it a crude summation, but
00:31:31.340the proper name of the course is, and it's a study of woke ideology here, and I lost the
00:31:38.180thing here. There we go. It is called Woke, the Origins, Dynamics, and Implications of an Elite
00:31:45.680Ideology. Now, this is not being offered at a Canadian school, not yet, but it is being offered
00:31:50.600at the University of Birmingham by a Canadian professor, Eric Kaufman, who joins me now.
00:31:56.280Professor, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
00:31:58.860Good to be here, Andrew. I should just one slight correction. It's University of Buckingham,
00:32:03.260not Birmingham. I'm so sorry. I get my hams. It was all the Thanksgiving talk. I'm getting my
00:32:08.480hams mixed up here. Buckingham, yes. And I should say University of Buckingham is like a very,
00:32:13.980well, you've said it's the only free speech university really in the UK.
00:32:18.540It is, yeah. I mean, it has a strange origin because it was founded through Margaret Thatcher
00:32:24.280And it sort of, you know, even though most of the staff and students still lean left, it's got more viewpoint diversity than you'll find on a typical British campus.
00:32:32.940So it's somewhat more hospitable and the leadership is very much in favor of moving it in this direction.
00:32:38.680So what is your class about? I mean, obviously, you've got 15 weeks of material here.
00:32:41.920I don't expect you to give it all in a few minutes. But what is this course about?
00:32:45.700well it really is sort of begins with the intellectual history the you know the how did
00:32:50.260we get to this ideology how does it relate to for example socialism liberalism anarchism and these
00:32:56.980other isms that go back earlier into the 19th century and then we kind of look at what happens
00:33:02.420in the 60s uh how the left shifts you know from class towards identity and and then how that plays
00:33:09.460out into our own time i then move on to looking at public opinion data sort of who supports
00:33:16.180something like cancelling jk rowling for example i mean it would tend to be younger people would
00:33:20.580tend to be is it more female than male is it more left than right and so on and then how this is now
00:33:26.020affecting electoral politics uh the culture wars the politics of the culture wars and speech
00:33:32.100boundaries uh you know critical race theory all of that and then finally looking at the philosophy
00:33:37.620the questions that it raises, free speech versus so-called equal speech. So that's kind of a very
00:33:44.340quick and dirty. I mean, it's certainly there on the website. If you go to my Twitter, you can sort
00:33:48.820of see a link. But we're going to do this sort of very empirically. I mean, there's a lot of
00:33:54.760academics. There are thousands of papers on the populist right, lots of courses on it.
00:33:59.520I've taught in that myself, but there's nothing on the woke left because it's just too uncomfortable
00:34:03.640to do. One thing I'm curious about, I years ago sought out to write a book about political
00:34:10.860correctness, and I did years of research on this and just ultimately, for a number of reasons,
00:34:15.460walked away from it. But one of the things that I found in doing that is that political correctness
00:34:20.260as a word or as a term, when it was first introduced, was described and used by the
00:34:27.340people that wanted political correctness, and they wanted to be politically correct. And then
00:34:30.640it morphed and was only used by people that were decrying it and criticizing it. And am I correct
00:34:37.280in saying that woke has kind of gone through a bit of a similar phase where it was introduced as
00:34:41.360a very positive, favorable concept by the woke people? And now they've sort of backed off of the
00:34:46.220word and it's only really being used by people that are calling out wokeness. Yeah, you're
00:34:51.600absolutely right about that. I mean, what I would say, I mean, there's no question people abuse the
00:34:56.660word and stretch the word to mean anything they don't like. Well, some people just use it as a
00:35:01.820stand-in for left, which I don't think is entirely accurate. No, I don't think it's accurate and is
00:35:07.220somewhat of a way of devaluing what is actually quite a useful, I think, empirically tight
00:35:13.420social scientific term. So I have a one-sentence definition. It's the making sacred of historically
00:35:22.200marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. So once you erect these groups as sacred,
00:35:29.400anything that might offend the most hypothetically sensitive member of one of these groups
00:35:34.840is blasphemy or criticizing anything that's done in the name of helping
00:35:40.680such as these groups such as anti-racism or trans affirmation or whatever. If you criticize
00:35:46.120any such movement that is also a violation of the sacred and therefore cause for excommunication or
00:35:52.520cancellation so there's this very religious quality to it and i think it is a useful term
00:35:57.000and it describes uh something that is very real and has emerged strongly in our time
00:36:02.760based on that definition can wokeness be separated from victimhood and this veneration of victims
00:36:08.680It very much, it springs from the victimhood culture. So the wider ideology is based on,
00:36:18.200you might call it a victimhood culture, and sort of emotional safety, emotional trauma prevention
00:36:24.840is sort of the mantra. But of course, that is broader than just race, gender, sexuality could
00:36:31.000apply to disability, even potentially class in theory would fit into the victimhood model. But
00:36:38.680there is a focus very specifically in wokeness on just race, gender, and sexuality. I think the fat
00:36:44.520stuff, the class stuff, that doesn't have the same pickup. It doesn't seem like there's as much
00:36:49.940energy in canceling and pushing for DEI along those axes. So I think it's much more specific
00:36:55.700to these three categories. Is your view that the woke, whoever they are, and maybe that's something
00:37:03.180you want to define, do they see wokeness as a tool, as a vehicle to get to where they want,
00:37:07.640or is it the destination? I think it is the destination. Jonathan Haidt has his moral
00:37:15.760foundations theory, and there's really two foundations. One is equal outcomes. So all
00:37:21.280identity groups that could be black, white, male, female, et cetera, should have equal outcomes in
00:37:27.200terms of income, in terms of honors and esteem and so on. That would be one prong of it. The
00:37:32.600other prong is, again, this microscopic, even microaggression, sort of harm protection. So
00:37:39.120anything that might offend or upset in any way, somebody's emotional state must be prevented,
00:37:45.200which is why they're going after free speech, for example, which speech which might offend,
00:37:49.880right? So I think there is something real there and is rooted in these two moral foundations,
00:37:56.080but just taken to the extreme. Your description of it as making sacred,
00:38:01.160I think is incredibly appropriate because a lot of people have seen that religious-like fervor
00:38:05.880from people who, again, would identify as fundamentally anti-religion in a lot of cases
00:38:10.780and would talk about the harm of religion against certain groups. And it's interesting how blind
00:38:17.020they are to what this does to several groups and people as well. And I guess I wanted to ask a
00:38:23.700little bit about that because by making it sacred, you have to elevate it above other things that
00:38:29.240have had a level of sanctity in society. Freedom of speech is a notable one. I mean, it used to be
00:38:34.320that even people who are fairly progressive would still operate within the parameters of free speech
00:38:40.300is important. And, you know, they'd use free speech to make their point. That was, I think,
00:38:44.440the dominant force you'd saw in progressives for much of the last 50 years. And now freedom of
00:38:50.940speech no longer has any sacred value. In fact, it's viewed as an evil that needs to be dealt
00:38:56.140within society by a lot of these people. Yeah, and that's been documented in opinion survey data
00:39:03.200in the U.S. going back to the 70s, that there's been a shift from kind of a more moral relativism
00:39:08.400toleration to moral absolutism in young people. But I don't want to, I think it's a mistake to
00:39:16.200see this as completely new. And I think, you know, if you talk about political correctness in the 80s
00:39:21.920and 90s. Was it acceptable to offend minority groups in the late 80s and early 90s? No,
00:39:30.880is the answer. They had speech codes at US universities. I actually think you already had
00:39:35.520a pretty restrictive speech climate. The doors were kind of, I think, pretty wide open. And
00:39:40.880that's why you did see episodes of cancel culture. You know, the UBC political science department in
00:39:46.020the mid-1990s was just one episode. It just was less frequent because you didn't have social media
00:39:51.040to organize flash mobs. If I could jump in though, Professor, I feel that what happened there,
00:39:58.460you're right, the acceptability was already established or the unacceptability. I feel
00:40:02.680what happened is the threshold was changed, is that what a fence was, was redefined. And I wonder
00:40:08.700if that's the goalpost shift that leads us to where we are now as well, the same idea. I mean,
00:40:13.060being a racist has been out of vogue for many decades, but the definition of racism has changed
00:40:20.220a lot in that time. True, true. I mean, I think you're right. You know, the idea of hiking being
00:40:25.140racist and punctuality being a white thing, you know, that there's no question that they've taken
00:40:30.760it to the next level. The only thing I would say, though, is you can find examples, you know,
00:40:36.640in the mid 70s, evolutionary psychologists who argued that genetics mattered. And this wasn't
00:40:43.300race IQ. This was just genetics mattering for social behavior. They were ostracized. They had
00:40:47.940open letters. So I'm, even though you're right that there are some new, there's been some new
00:40:54.420conceptual stretching, I think quite a bit of that had already occurred. And certainly in academia,
00:40:59.780if you look at the published work already in the 70s and 80s and 90s, you know, critical race theory
00:41:06.480dates from the 70s, you know, Chris Rufo in his book talks about this. So these ideas were already
00:41:12.400there. It's just that they hadn't spread as widely. And yes, there were some innovations,
00:41:18.000the trans thing is new, but I would stress the continuities more than the discontinuities.
00:41:24.780Social media is more quantitative scaling up rather than a qualitative change in my view.
00:41:30.640One of the challenges that I would have, and again, I'm basing this off of how I've used woke,
00:41:37.000not necessarily the parameters that you've set for it, is that there's a prevailing theme in it,
00:41:42.980and there are commonalities in how it's applied. But is it coherent enough to be an ideology in
00:41:51.080the sense that do the woke apply the rules they set equally, in your view? If someone's committed
00:41:57.600to wokeness, do you find that they're consistently applying it, or do you think that there are
00:42:02.080inconsistencies in that? Well, I think if you narrow it to the sort of sacred categories,
00:42:07.980then it's pretty consistently applied. So any time there is a disparity in outcome between
00:42:13.960white and black, let's say in terms of entering Harvard or in terms of wealth,
00:42:18.900they will be on top of that. If there are more black people being incarcerated or excluded from
00:42:25.980school, they'll be on top of that. Now, what they won't apply that to is, for example,
00:42:30.360So if Jews are doing better than Gypsy and Irish travelers here in Britain or if West Indians or sort of East West Africans are doing better than West Indians within the black group, they don't care about those distinctions.
00:42:45.960So because those distinctions aren't the sacred ones. So I'd say they're being inconsistent in ignoring a lot of different social categories where there are inequalities of outcome.
00:42:55.600but on their sacred categories, I think they're applying those fairly consistently. So the rules
00:43:03.340are simply, yeah. So I'm just like, look, in Canada, as you're well aware, in the last few
00:43:08.800weeks, we've had the boiling point in the parental rights movement, where we've had trans activists
00:43:13.900and Muslim activists that are in conflict. And generally speaking, I'd say the woke left has
00:43:18.140sided with the trans activists, despite the Muslims being their sacred cows for much of the last
00:43:23.02020 years. So I'm just curious with your approach to this issue, how you would explain that
00:43:28.100phenomenon? Well, there is a sort of hierarchy of oppression points. You know, there's the top
00:43:34.200of the totem pole, and then there's the white male cis hetero type at the very bottom of the
00:43:39.220totem pole. Yeah, I don't stand a chance. No. So the question that is, right, is who's got more
00:43:44.140points? Is it the Muslims who have more points or is it trans who have more points? And I think it's
00:43:49.600as simple as trans having more points. It's just like trans gets more points than feminist
00:43:55.660and female. And I think it's as simple as that, is who is seen as punching up and who's seen as
00:44:02.840punching down. I don't think it's more complicated really than that. And of course, what matters are
00:44:08.380those sacred categories, race, gender, sexuality, and it's just who has more points.
00:44:12.880So I'm just curious, and I don't know the student profile at the University of Buckingham,
00:44:16.520But what would you love to see in your class? What's the enrollment profile of your class you'd absolutely love here? Because I think secretly, or maybe openly, you might like the really like woke, lefty, non-binary with the purple hair student in there, having it out with someone who loves free speech and all of that.
00:44:33.940Yeah, exactly. I think it would be ideally it would be 50 50. I mean, a lot of the data we have from fire in the US would show, you know, when you have a roughly 50 50 mix, you've got the least self censorship going on. I'd only want you know, I would want somebody who is was woke and I want plenty of left wingers. I don't want it to be an echo chamber. If we're going to get somebody in there who was woke, but who was willing to defend it in a Socratic style to say, well, I think, you know, equality, Trump's liberty and
00:45:03.360this is important for human flourishing, or the speech
00:45:06.120boundaries should be much tighter than they are. I mean, I
00:45:08.740think that kind of debate would be really interesting. The
00:45:11.580problem, of course, is when you get people who just stick a
00:45:15.060label on others and think, okay, they're toxic, and I'm going to
00:45:17.800be polluted by hanging out with them. And so no, we have to no
00:45:20.760platform. I mean, once you're into that or emotional blackmail,