00:04:39.500So apparently, we're going to hear from someone on this committee
00:04:44.540that's connected to the liberal campaign
00:04:46.480at a meeting that will be scheduled in April.
00:04:48.820And maybe when we hear from the campaign source,
00:04:51.400we'll get a bit more information about what could have happened,
00:04:55.660what might have happened, what didn't happen.
00:04:57.280But I'm not optimistic, and here's why I go back to comments I made several weeks ago about why I'm not holding my breath that a public inquiry, even if we were to have one, would actually reveal as much as people think.
00:05:13.780Because the government has all of these different tricks up its sleeve, all of these tools at its disposal to not give up information.
00:05:20.460I mean, you look at the Freedom Convoy and then the resulting Public Order Emergency Commission,
00:05:25.480the government made a point of saying it was the most transparent exercise in the history of governments anywhere or whatever it was.
00:07:13.280because David Johnson will definitely use the word y'all you can mark my words but all of that
00:07:18.780is besides the point in that I'm not saying we should ignore this thing because this is important
00:07:25.420and where there's smoke there's fire and I don't actually agree fundamentally with what my colleague
00:07:31.240Andrew Kirsch said on the show last week the former CSIS intelligence officer who basically
00:07:36.480took the position that well we shouldn't be celebrating leaks I think at the same time
00:07:40.000time, whether we could hand-ring about what should have happened, we do have this information now.
00:07:46.060We know there was Chinese interference in Canada's elections. We know it was to benefit0.78
00:07:51.260the Liberals, and we know that Justin Trudeau's story of this has changed more times than I can
00:07:56.780count. Remember when it was, well, I was never briefed on funding, and then it was, oh yes,
00:08:01.260I was briefed, but I didn't know the extent of it, and then it was, yes, I've received many
00:08:05.420briefings and then just this week he had like changed tack again and was talking about how
00:08:11.340many times he was briefed on this and how seriously he took it and how they were working
00:08:15.240around the clock to solve it so so which is it is that it was no big deal or is it that this was
00:08:21.400something that you were actively engaged in and you were staying on top of and it's a learning
00:08:25.820opportunity for us all and all that because uh the liberals now have been proven to be trying to get
00:08:32.460very cute with their excuses. Even when Justin Trudeau said that he was never briefed, he didn't
00:08:38.020say technically he was never briefed on Chinese interference. He said he was never briefed on
00:08:43.660China funding candidates. And in the context, he was trying to get people off his back. He was
00:08:50.380trying to make it sound like, oh, this is the first I'm learning of it when the media is bringing it
00:08:54.560up. But what he was actually admitting to is that he did have conversations about the broader issue
00:09:01.860of interference, but he wasn't going to cop to that one specific part of it. So maybe that part
00:09:06.640wasn't brought up in a briefing at that time or something like that, or maybe it was. I mean,
00:09:11.300one of the documents that we've seen in the last couple of days shows just the extent to which
00:09:17.320there were meetings between the CSIS director and the National Security Advisor and the government.
00:09:24.080I'm looking right now at a document, and I just want to get the name of the committee right here.
00:09:30.640This is a document that was published in the committee's digital binder.
00:09:35.600So these are documents that were provided to committee, and they show a list of meetings,
00:09:40.920a list of meetings that are specifically about briefings on foreign election interference.
00:09:46.960October 22nd, 2018, the National Security Advisor met with Justin Trudeau.
00:09:52.320February 9th, 2021, the Director of CSIS briefed Justin Trudeau.
00:09:57.120June 14th, 2022, the National Security Advisor briefed Justin Trudeau.
00:10:03.120October of 2022, the CSIS Director did.
00:10:06.460November 30th, the NSIA, the National Security Advisor did.
00:10:11.120And on March 20th, just, what, three weeks ago,
00:10:14.620the National Security Advisor and the CSIS Director both briefed Justin Trudeau on this.
00:10:20.340You then take another look at this and talk about briefings to ministers.
00:10:25.140And oh my goodness, we have here, I'm looking at the list, August 15th, 2018, October 5th, 2018, November 26th of that year, January of 2019, April 2019, May 2019, June, July, August, August.
00:10:41.380We had monthly meetings in August of 2019, an election year by the way, two back-to-back briefings for the Minister of Democratic Institutions by the CSIS Director, by the Chief of CSE, the Communications Security Establishment, and on and on these went into 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
00:11:06.840So the government was painfully aware,
00:11:10.980vividly so, that election interference was an issue.
00:15:30.720This is not written just for the academic in mind.
00:15:34.260I mean, this was a very readable read, as they say.
00:15:37.560Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to get into academic fights or controversies or anything like that.
00:15:43.400I wanted just to tell the story or to make the argument.
00:15:49.380And, you know, I'm very relieved that you think I succeeded.
00:15:54.520Well, let me hear in your words what you think that argument is.
00:15:59.440What is it that you set out to do with this?
00:16:01.800Well, I mean, I can sum it up with, you know,
00:16:05.640there are a couple of quotations that I include at the end of the book.
00:16:09.500You know, there's that saying from, you know, T.S. Eliot.
00:16:14.840He says, history is now, which is seemingly a paradox.
00:16:18.620history is now. And then there's the other one, history is ourselves, from Kenneth Clark. And
00:16:24.980the point is that we need to find meaning and purpose, every generation needs to find meaning
00:16:32.880and purpose in the past. And that doesn't mean that the past is, you know, uniformly to be,
00:16:39.420you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't be uncritical, we shouldn't be, you know, partisan or blind to
00:16:46.400our past failures, but we have to come to terms with it, wrestle with it, make sense of it,
00:16:53.640and find meaning and purpose in it. One of the challenges politically, and I know this book is
00:17:01.680not an artifact of the culture war, I think you take a much more nuanced and much bigger picture
00:17:06.500view of things, but I'd say one of the challenges that we do see today is that there are a lot of
00:17:11.440people who view the past as irreconcilable with the president. They think, as I alluded to a
00:17:16.600moment ago, that it's something we should run away from, that we should denounce, that we should
00:17:20.280condemn. And I'd say often that's coming from people that have not undertaken to understand
00:17:25.080the past entirely. But what is it precisely that you think makes it so that these things are not
00:17:30.120just reconcilable, but actually that we need to look to the past as we move forward? Well,
00:17:34.840Well, I mean, the fundamental problem is that there is no break in history, there is no break with the past, it's impossible. And attempts have been made, notably in the 20th century, but it doesn't work.
00:17:52.840And sort of disconnecting people from the past is extraordinarily disruptive.
00:18:02.580You can find examples of this from this sort of accidental in the form of the Industrial Revolution,
00:18:12.240people being herded into factories instead of working on their farms and so forth.
00:18:17.260extraordinarily disruptive um or much more sinister in the case of the soviet and nazi
00:18:25.820tyrannies sort of insisting that you know everything that came before is sort of to
00:18:30.860be repudiated and looking far into the future uh toward a sort of utopia um
00:18:38.140it look basically making trying to make that break has not had a good track record and you
00:18:43.820know we we shouldn't try we should try to find as i say meaning we should try to make our peace
00:18:50.620uh with the the evils or the failures of the past rather than trying to um obliterate them
00:18:59.020does the view that western nations have the western world has to civilization align in your
00:19:06.700view with how other cultures are dealing with this and other cultures are doing this because
00:19:11.660I mean, even if you take a strictly Canadian context on this, whatever people think of Quebec politics, Quebec as a society is much more emphatic about protecting its culture and asserting its culture.
00:19:22.040And I think in a lot of the Western world, we see really this idea that we're not allowed to have a culture.
00:19:27.520We're not allowed to celebrate our civilization.
00:19:32.660I know you talk about China extensively in the book.
00:19:34.880And it strikes me that a lot of these other parts of the world, for whatever their faults politically, have actually done a better job of trying to preserve their civilization.
00:19:45.260Yeah, I mean, I think that what I would say is that the Western view of history as a story of progress, that is extremely unusual.
00:22:24.360I mean, you might find sort of relics of it in sort of agricultural areas of Europe.
00:22:30.860but that's sort of that's sort of mostly uh mostly gone um and you know if you think of
00:22:38.860if you think of how much has um how should i put this you think of as useful as the internet is
00:22:46.300and so forth you think how how um different life is uh you know people are somewhat less likely to
00:22:55.340gather in the so-called third place or the you know there's the famous there's the famous study
00:23:01.260uh called bowling alone the study of sort of um fraternal and volunteer organizations in america
00:23:08.980you know that that sort of lifestyle where you know a whole sort of town gets together to you
00:23:17.460know join in a musical performance or you know there are various sort of layers of clubs and
00:23:23.140church organizations or volunteer groups you know that has some it's not totally gone but
00:23:29.380it has somewhat faded away and i think that the the spread of um you know internet technology
00:23:35.780and so forth has somewhat accelerated that um depending on who you ask you know i'm i'm i think
00:23:43.380i'm more on the side of that represents a decline rather than an evolution but the the point for me
00:23:52.020is not necessarily to pinpoint exactly where we might be on some sort of trajectory but rather
00:23:58.580to remind people that what i'm calling civilization is fragile that it needs to be protected and
00:24:06.980nurtured and that we do that or historically we have always done that as a species by looking
00:24:13.540to the past finding meaning there and and imitating what uh what worked uh before
00:24:23.300one of the things that you touch on in the book that i i find very interesting is how contentment
00:24:30.340or satisfaction do not correlate with what a lot of people characterize as progress i mean we have
00:24:36.980as you've noted in our discussion now and in the book we have technological innovations that you
00:24:41.380You know, we're just completely unimaginable.
00:24:44.040Even a generation ago, let alone countless generations ago, you have medical innovations, you have longer lifespans.
00:24:51.320Now, that is a little bit more dubious now, but all of this has, for a lot of people, not made the world a better place and it's not made their life better.
00:25:02.220And I'm curious where you think that comes from.
00:25:07.000Is it a decline in moral grounding or is it something else entirely?
00:25:10.680Well, yeah, that's a very important question. I think that the first thing we should observe, I mean, I'm not a Luddite, I'm not opposed to technologies.
00:25:21.360No, you don't view modernity as the enemy as exclusively as some of your contemporaries might.
00:25:26.100Yeah, and of course, again, there's no break in history going either forward or back, right? So, you know, we are where we are, and we're not going to change that.
00:25:40.020But the fundamental point is that I think in a society in which you would not have had the comforts that you describe or the benefits of science and especially medicine and so forth, that it would have been easier to maintain a view whereby the world requires much more
00:26:10.020input from you, much more work from, you know, you and your family to sort of hold it together to keep the forces of chaos at bay or to sort of, you know, reverse decline and so forth.
00:26:24.540Now it's easier to coast. And I think that a better approach would be to say, well, let's keep our technology, let's improve it, but let's use it to connect ourselves better, to provide more leisure for ourselves, to work at our culture, to form societies, to form families,
00:26:54.540to, you know, ensure that the conditions under which we ourselves grew up and flourished are still there for, you know, for our children and that sort of thing. And I think, I think we've lost sight of that. I think that there was a sense at the end of the 20th century that sort of, you know, triumphant Western liberal order had no enemies left.
00:27:21.540left and it was just time to you know relax and take it easy and so on you know a sort of
00:27:28.680caricature of the of the of the Fukuyama end of history sort of thing but I think we now realize
00:27:35.200that that was mistaken and that you know our institutions and our our civilization need
00:27:42.700significantly more work than we've put into them well one of the challenges too is that we often
00:27:50.100pretend that some things are a lot more enduring than they are and I mean I know you've worked in
00:27:55.760politics I've been immersed in that world unfortunately as well and the reality is
00:28:01.100people put so much emphasis on things that will not last and we know will not last and
00:28:05.880you see that in manufacturing we build things that do not last and there is this I don't know
00:28:13.380if it's an indifference to history or if it's just not understanding what will withstand the test of
00:28:19.580time i'm curious your take on that yeah well i mean i i do think that you're right but what has
00:28:25.500stood the test of time i think is actually so obvious that it's easy to miss i mean if you think
00:28:32.700about it um like civilization or you know what i'm calling civilization is only really about
00:28:41.580um 5 000 years old if you if you consider the the say the old kingdom egypt or you know mesopotamia
00:28:53.180it's it's about that it has it has some earlier origins which i talk about um in the book but you
00:28:59.260know it's fully formed about 5 000 years ago that is a blip in the history of the human species
00:29:07.820that's like a nanosecond in our full existence right and if you think about how many of these
00:29:15.820societies and empires and you know city-states whatever that have come and gone over time some
00:29:23.900of them we didn't even know about until they were dug out of the ground and in the in the 19th
00:29:28.540century that's how um thorough the uh collapse and obliteration uh can be and for all we know i mean
00:29:38.860it's it's it's not impossible but uh i don't know how likely it is but it's it's possible that um
00:29:47.020you know the the very very sort of earliest stirrings of settled life and so forth that they
00:29:54.780they represent um the rebirth from a time when there had already been a decline that's possible
00:30:01.660you know i don't know for sure but what has worked in the past i think is is is very is
00:30:08.460very obvious i mean the earliest states for example or the the earliest societies they
00:30:13.260were not states they were basically agglomerations of households um the earliest states were sort of
00:30:20.380households scaled up. The household seems to scale well. What does not scale up well,
00:30:28.700in my opinion, is the contemporary emphasis on the sort of radical and extreme individualism.
00:30:39.340Obviously, in Western society, there's always been a kind of trend, or some people claim to
00:30:47.660to have discerned this sort of like inevitable trend toward the growth of individualism and
00:30:54.380so forth. And for all the good that that has done, it can be pushed to an extreme. And I think in
00:30:59.900contemporary society, it has been. That is an innovation. That is a new thing that I think
00:31:04.900has not worked well for us. Looking back to the past, we can find things that have worked simply
00:31:16.640because they have been passed down and imitated. And that would be, you know, my recommendation
00:31:23.160would be that's where we should start. Someone recently reviewed the book and she said, well,
00:31:29.640you know, if I understand it right, what we should do is, you know, we should read our
00:31:34.640grandmother's recipes and bake cakes with our children. And I think, yeah, that's great.
00:31:42.660that's where let's let's start there one of the big challenges in being canadian is how distorted
00:31:50.940your view of time can be and of history can be i mean you mentioned 5 000 years being a blip in
00:31:57.740canada if you know an outhouse was constructed in 1920 municipalities will declare it a heritage
00:32:03.100landmark and not allow anything to develop it and you go to you know even the united states which
00:32:08.020has about a century head start on canada and there is this one on the freedom trail in boston i
00:32:13.360remember there's this old 1700s building that was a quintessential part of the american revolution
00:32:17.960and it's now a chipotle um and then you go to europe i remember being in malta and i went to
00:32:23.840this little museum that was in a church and they had something that was uh 3 000 years old and the
00:32:29.100museum director was like here touch it uh here hold it like and i was like i'm terrified of this
00:32:34.200And there is something to this that oftentimes we sort of view through our own society's lens where history begins.
00:32:43.680And in Canada, whether it's, you know, 1867 or whether you go back to 1763 or 1534, wherever it is, we're still talking about such a narrow, narrow slice of what has been in the world.
00:32:55.460And you translate that to architecture to talk about heritage landmarks, and buildings have become, I think, such an interesting case study in how people view history and how people view the past and how people view what is or isn't fashionable.
00:33:11.100And I know you talk about architecture significantly in the book, and I was wondering if you'd explain why you believe buildings are so important in this discussion.
00:33:18.980Ah, okay, yes, I'll get to the buildings in a second, but I just, I cannot resist taking over one.
00:33:23.920So the part of the problem, and, you know, I love history the same way you do, and I think that Canadian history also should be taught and so forth.
00:33:33.460But I think that we have to be wary of this idea that you can hive off something called Canadian history from some other kind of human history.
00:33:44.640Because if you do that, then you're left with an ever-diminishing amount of time that sort of very quickly becomes current events or some form of journalism, potentially.
00:34:00.840Well, and history is a measure of time and also space. You're quite right.
00:34:04.300time and space and that's that's the architectural connection too but i mean people have lived in
00:34:10.380canada or what we call canada you know um for what is it like 40 000 years i mean
00:34:20.060there is there is a history of settlement here which we should not ignore right and obviously
00:34:25.500this is a fraught you know this is a politically fraught question which is very sad to me i don't
00:34:32.300i wish it were not but um all of human history is our collective patrimony and that there we should
00:34:43.020be very wary of sort of hiving it all off into these different things as though there's no
00:34:48.220there's no continuity i mean i'm very big on on continuity obviously there are moments where
00:34:53.660continuity is broken, but the whole point of the civilized attitude is to try to maintain
00:35:03.300that continuity, which means that I'm very, very opposed, or I guess I dislike the sort
00:35:16.360of capital L liberal approach to Canadian history whereby there's this sort of break
00:35:22.140with the past in in in 1867 and then there's another one in 1982 with pierre trudeau and so
00:35:28.780you know i i you know let's just let's just look where you know let's look as far back into the
00:35:36.220past as we possibly can to you know um the ancestors of everybody who's here um to our
00:35:44.220you know our uh our aboriginal past and let's bring it all together into into the most expansive
00:35:52.780and capacious story that we can i mean that's that's my view as for our no it's very well said
00:35:58.700and i i know you do have to go but i i do want to get in a question about buildings here because i
00:36:03.100did tease it and i'm personally interested in it so explain why that's so central well buildings
00:36:08.780Buildings fundamentally symbolize, I argue, what I call the civilized attitude, that you have a place in space and time.
00:36:21.340It is symbolized by building a building, by putting up a structure that is an extension of your, you know, it's basically an extension of your own body, which protects you from the elements and marks out a particular space as a significant one, either because you live there or you work there or it's some kind of official building or it's a monument or something like that.
00:36:50.040The so-called, the anthropology of architecture, I think, is an extremely important notion. Architecture, if it is to be civilized, it should be built on a human scale.
00:37:02.560I don't like the gigantism of modern skyscrapers, which can only be appreciated from a huge distance away, or the sort of distortions of modernist or postmodernist architecture where you don't know where the door is or you can't get in.
00:37:22.760And when you find it, you don't know if it's a push or a pull.
00:37:24.820Yeah, I mean, there's all that kind of stuff, too. But I mean, fundamentally, ancient people had what I would consider to be a different attitude, which is that you've marked out a place where, you know, some particular activity, business occurs, and that it is structured in a way to meet your needs, not to challenge them.
00:37:44.420And I think that that has been, I think that's been lost from urban planning, although there are some, there are some signs that it might be changing. The new king, former Prince Charles, is a big architecture buff. He's written a lot of books that people used to laugh at. But I think that, I think that his position on these things is fundamentally sound, and we might, we might see some change there. We'll see.
00:38:12.160Well, it might be a little bit of a low reach for you,0.63
00:38:14.380but I think we should get you on some zoning boards.
00:38:16.480I would love to see what you came up with there.
00:38:18.940Michael Bonner, the book is In Defense of Civilization,
00:40:31.140The house features 10 bedrooms and nine bathrooms, and they're just like cramming students into this, I guess, to such an extent that you can, for $600 in this house, get the lower bunk.
00:40:42.160Now, so each of the rooms is $1,101 plus utilities and internet, and for two people, there's a $350 charge, and this leads us to the one shared room that is like the hostel equivalent of housing.
00:40:58.600Now, I don't want to begrudge people that need to make tough calls, but I think when we are renting out lower bunks and people think this is an acceptable housing option, perhaps we are not exactly looking at the right way of doing things in society.
00:41:13.900Now, the ad ended up being removed, as I understand it. So I don't know if this is because someone snatched it up or maybe because it got a little bit of negative attention. It got pulled for that reason. But the bizarre thing is, if you look at that, the house is actually lovely.
00:41:27.440I mean, the house actually looks like a lot of fun.
00:41:29.860The kitchen is nice and spacious, has a beautiful island.
00:41:32.640They've even got a French press on the kitchen counter in the listing.