00:01:00.000welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:01:19.700north hello and welcome to you all this is canada's most irreverent talk show this is the
00:01:29.780ed roulott and show on true north on this thursday july 4th happy independence day to the americans
00:01:35.700in our midst you are uh dirty filthy traders who betrayed the crown but nevertheless we wish you
00:01:41.540well happy uh whatever you know 2024 minus 1776 is if i get the number wrong you'll never forgive
00:01:47.880me. So as it happens, I hope you're having a great day. I should probably greet you in the
00:01:53.480official language of the government of Canada. Now I am not fluent in Minyan, but I believe
00:02:01.000the proper term is Bello Banana Bapple Choppa Mooka Laka Unana. That's, am I reading that,
00:02:13.400put the graphic up. Am I reading that right? Okay. Bello banana. I didn't do the long ah
00:02:20.620on banana. Bapple choppa mukalaka unana. Unana. Unana. Okay. So that's the Canada Revenue Agency
00:02:30.680there with its minion gif jumping up and down in celebration of what precisely I'm not clear.
00:02:38.600Hashtag despicable me for. I guess there's a movie coming. I didn't even know despicable
00:02:43.380me three had happened so i'm a little bit behind the times there but uh that is a minion jumping
00:02:48.900and cra followed it up with another tweet uh and that second tweet uh is a kind of a bizarre one
00:02:56.180as well i i lost it here let me see if i i have it handy uh the second tweet was oops the minions
00:03:02.420were added again what they meant was the kids wearing you out at least applying for the canada
00:03:08.180child benefit is easy and you can do it one-handed on your phone
00:03:13.380So this is a bureaucrat trying to be clever and trendy and pop culture.
00:03:17.860And I don't want to be a total curmudgeon who just can't see the joy in anything.
00:03:21.580I realize that if you work in the bureaucracy for CRA, you're probably just desiring something that is going to liven things up.
00:03:30.660So I get that minion tweets and memes are probably desirable there.
00:03:34.420But if I'm a Canadian paying tax to CRA, which I am, and I file the ATIP, which I have, so in 30 days I'll report back on this,
00:03:42.600I am willing to bet that there were at least six bureaucrats. My prediction is going to be eight.
00:03:48.260I think there are eight bureaucrats involved in the crafting, reviewing, and approval of that tweet,
00:03:54.040of those two tweets. And I'm guessing that we'll find out that this was a long process that spent
00:03:59.660days and days, if not weeks, has been on the calendar for a while. And as a taxpayer, I'm like,
00:04:04.440is this really, is this really the way that we want things to be? And this is, of course,
00:04:10.460going all the way around the internet. The tweet just went up this morning. Pierre Polyev,
00:04:14.380the conservative leader, has already come out and used what's become his favorite adjective
00:04:19.500on this. He's called it wacko. He says, you're not hallucinating. This is the kind of wacko stuff
00:04:25.660Trudeau's tax department is busy posting to make you forget they are taking more of your money than
00:04:30.820ever. Sign here to ax the tax and the weird post. So when actually it's kind of useful when CRA
00:04:37.980calls you and wonders why you haven't filed your taxes this year, you can just say to the tax
00:04:44.140agent on the line, bello, banana, bapple, choppa, muka, laka, ooh, na, na. You can even improv a
00:04:49.740little bit. Throw some of your own descriptions in there and say, oh, I'm sorry, I thought this
00:04:53.880was the language of CRA, and then hang up on them. Asterisk that should not be construed as
00:04:59.100legitimate tax advice. In fact, any advice I give should probably not be construed as tax advice.
00:05:03.460But I found it kind of interesting because Pierre Polyev, he had, I think it was during the leadership race, during the conservative leadership race, he came out with this pledge, it would have been back in September of 2022, so I think just near the end of the race, in which he said that he was going to require use of plain language in government if elected prime minister.
00:05:24.240He said, government was using complex wording that was not only hurting Canadians, but also
00:05:29.580hurting businesses as they spend hours trying to navigate government regulations. So perhaps this
00:05:34.880is CRA paying back Pierre Paulievre for that. He says, use plain language, don't use complex Latin
00:05:40.620terms. And CRA responds with bello banana, bapple, choppa, mucca, laca, laca, una. I'm just, I'm not
00:05:47.380even bothering reading it. I don't know why I was reading it, why I was like so cautious about
00:05:51.500getting it right. I don't want to inadvertently swear and minion or something. Or, you know,
00:05:56.320maybe my minion was sounding a little bit like Klingon. You never know. But this is the language
00:06:00.280of the government of Canada. But to be honest, bello, banana, baffle, choppa, mooka, laka,
00:06:05.900unana makes a heck of a lot more sense than most things Justin Trudeau has said in recent weeks
00:06:11.960and recent months. So maybe we should actually just cede all political communications to the
00:06:16.840minions and let the minions just have their way. To be honest, the more I think about this,
00:06:21.660the more I think the minions might actually do a better job of running things. I don't think
00:06:26.120the minions would ever push the capital gains tax the way they did it. And if so, they would
00:06:30.560certainly communicate it in clearer terms than Deputy Prime Minister Christian Freeland managed
00:06:36.020to. There's a serious point underlying all of this, though, which is that when the government
00:06:40.820is spending your money to do silly things, you want to make sure you're getting things out of
00:06:45.200Well, the government is, according to numbers released this week by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government is spending $200 million, $200 million to establish the so-called Digital Safety Commission.
00:06:59.780Now, the Digital Safety Commission is the kind, bureaucratic way, again, bureaucratic language, it's the bureaucratic way of describing the censorship office.
00:07:09.940It's the government office that's going to be set up if the so-called Online Harms Act passes.
00:07:15.000And this is going to be the office responsible for enforcing the new suite of digital censorship
00:07:21.280and online regulations that the Liberal government is putting forward and making those happen.
00:10:11.740But even if the cost were $1, the cost were negligible, I still think the function of the office is in and of itself fraught.
00:10:18.380But we also know that the Liberals have a terrible track record at predicting the cost of things.
00:10:22.640Like the long gun registry is one notable example of, you know, it's supposed to just be pocket change.
00:10:27.000then it ends up being a billion dollar boondoggle. I have no doubt that something like this would be
00:10:32.000the same because they realize that from day one, oh, there's so much more to do. We need more people.
00:10:37.880And then you also, as I understand it, have other aspects that would increase costs like the Canadian
00:10:42.700Human Rights Commission, which also is tasked with enforcing parts of this, not under this office.
00:10:48.340And they could find themselves needing a whole new annex to house all the new investigators they
00:10:53.200need to hire. And that could be further millions, couldn't it? Well, I think your point is super
00:10:57.700valid, which is regardless of the cost, this is an unnecessary bureaucracy. The PBO analysis today,
00:11:03.860you know, sort of use a crude analogy, but it's the cherry on a crap sandwich, right? Like it's
00:11:09.420really bad. But to your point, the bill doesn't protect Canadians from online harassment. It
00:11:16.160doesn't amend the criminal code to do common sense things like include deepfake pornography
00:11:21.140as part of Canada's intimate image laws.
00:11:24.140It doesn't do the things that victims' rights groups
00:11:28.220have been asking for to protect Canadians from crime.
00:11:32.920But the fact that they're spending all this money on it,
00:11:36.040essentially, and I mean, this bill has been called Orwellian,
00:11:40.780an extreme attack on Canadians' freedom of speech
00:11:44.460by people like Margaret Atwood, by magazines like The Atlantic.
00:11:49.460Yeah, not hardcore right-wingers here.
00:11:51.640Exactly. These are not bastions of conservative thought.
00:11:54.280And everybody's raising the alarm bells on this.
00:11:56.720And the fact that the government is so dogmatically attached to this, to your point, it just it shows nobody's in charge and nobody cares about protecting Canadians.
00:12:06.060And that's where, you know, I'm really proud of our party's platform, our leaders, Pierre Polyev, talking about how we need to fix the crime with common sense solutions that don't cost Canadians hundreds of billions of dollars in new bureaucracy.
00:12:20.680There are one point that you had in your sub stack on this that I found interesting is that the government has not really provided any estimate of how many complaints it thinks the Canadian Human Rights Commission is going to field on this.
00:12:32.300So they don't even know how big a bureaucratic backlog this is going to cause.
00:12:37.500And on one hand, you may say, OK, they can't predict the future.
00:12:40.040I mean, this government can't even accurately assess the present.
00:12:42.720But it also means that by their own admission, they've not given the PBO the information to really get a sense of how big this number could get.
00:12:49.800Again, another great point. There's been a lot of articles that have been written and experts talking about how reestablishing section, essentially section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act in an age where, you know, you've got cancel culture, online platforms, there will be a deluge of vexatious complaints to try and get people to be silenced.
00:13:13.720I mean, again, the Toronto Star, again, not a bastion of conservative thought over 10 years ago, said that this particular part of Canadian legislation needed to be cancelled, which is what the previous conservative government did.
00:13:28.540The Liberal government want to reestablish it now.
00:13:31.500There's nothing in the legislation to prevent vexatious complaints.
00:13:34.400So, again, what we have here with the PBO report is evidence that the Liberal government is willing to make Canadians pay hundreds of millions of dollars for thought police instead of keeping Canadians safe with common sense measures that we've been proposing from the Conservative Party for months now.
00:13:55.640You know, I think about my colleague, Tim Uppel.
00:13:57.420He had a really common sense bill to prevent extortion.
00:14:02.060And so, you know, it's just so frustrating.
00:14:03.840And Canadians should be outraged when they see the cost of these things and also see the results of the lack of commitment from the federal level of government to protecting their safety.
00:14:23.380Yeah, the bill itself, and you alluded to this earlier, Michelle, it lumps in things that few people would take issue with cracking down on,
00:14:30.220like child sexual exploitation, terror content, with things that are a lot more contentious and
00:14:35.040a lot more fraught, such as hate speech, where there's not a universal definition of what that
00:14:39.520is that people can go alongside. Have you gotten any of the sense from your colleagues in the House
00:14:44.900of Commons that they'd be willing to separate these out when you get to the committee stage?
00:14:48.820The opposite. So in fact, this was asked in the first round of debate and the minister said, no,
00:14:53.560not absolutely not. No go. It's right on the record of the House of Commons. I think overall,
00:14:58.100the bill's approach is flawed like everything that you talked about there um some of the duty
00:15:03.140of care aspects that social media platforms should have like to protect minors from exposure
00:15:08.260to really harmful types of content you know like pornographic images or um you know types of
00:15:14.980material that could induce self-harm the social media companies do have a duty of care to do that
00:15:19.620but what this bill does is it relegates that responsibility to this new bureaucracy that
00:15:25.780won't be done for years into the future whereas you know why doesn't it do something like actually
00:15:31.220legislate that duty of care right into the bill like if they're so concerned about this why aren't
00:15:36.100they doing that and it's because you know they have an obese government to use the words of pierre
00:15:42.260right like that's that's really what they're focused on here they're not thinking about
00:15:45.460protecting canadians and uh you know it it takes away the responsibility from accountable legislators
00:15:53.220and puts it in a back room behind closed doors where social media companies, big tech companies
00:15:58.440can lobby whatever they want. And that's not how we should be proceeding here. It's just ridiculous.
00:16:04.900I know that the Conservatives have obviously come out against Bill C-63 for the reasons you've
00:16:09.980mentioned. But if this bill does pass before the next election and the Conservatives' foreign
00:16:14.600government, would this Digital Safety Commission be gone? Would you scrap it? Absolutely. We would
00:16:18.480absolutely scrap this and replace it with common sense legislation that actually protects Canadians,
00:16:24.400you know, without impinging Canadians' rights and freedoms. We don't believe as Conservatives that
00:16:29.720Canadians should have to give up their rights and freedoms to things like speech in order to be
00:16:34.260protected from, you know, legitimate online harassment or legitimate online harm. And, you
00:16:42.000know, like, why the Liberal government thinks that they have to do this? Well, I know why they do,
00:17:15.720Absolutely. Like the fact that the government didn't start from that premise of how do we use existing agencies? How do we use the criminal code? How do we resource things adequately? It is preposterous. Like, like, that's, you should be thinking about that. That's just basic management. It's something that anybody who owns a small business would be thinking about, right?
00:17:38.520um and not just for cost but also for ease of use for simplicity um so so so these are the
00:17:46.780things that government should be thinking about it's what we will be encourage continuing to
00:17:50.460encourage them to do uh but also developing our own plans and announcing those in in due in due
00:17:56.080course and uh if you get into government any more minion tweets from cra you know when i just have
00:18:02.720a like five second rant on this yeah go for it constituents like one of the top pieces of case
00:18:09.060work i get in my office is people not being able to get through to the cra um you know the rules
00:18:14.980are so crazy and then to see that like i i just like my case worker just she she saw this and
00:18:22.580she was like you have got to be kidding me and rightly so you know the government can't afford
00:18:26.500to be cute right now they have to get their jobs done and uh you know this is just you know some
00:18:31.280people will be like, oh, you know, it's cute. No, it's indicative of a government with nobody in
00:18:35.680charge. And I cannot wait to see the communications decision chain on who approved that. I'm sure it
00:18:41.120was approved by 400 bureaucrats over three weeks. Yeah, I was about to respond to your tweet,
00:18:46.660but I had to go on air. I'm filing an ATIP right after the show. I am too. Okay, well, we'll see
00:18:51.800who gets the response back more quickly. But anytime I ATIP a tweet, like the stupidest tweet
00:18:56.340will have like a chain of 12 people on it,
00:19:22.900knows the internet regulation file inside and out.
00:19:25.660and also has done tremendous work covering a lot of this at the rewrite on Substack.
00:19:31.240And I wanted to get a sense of just the bigger picture there.
00:19:35.380And what we had from Michelle Rempel-Garner was the political dimension of this.
00:19:39.920The Conservatives coming out and saying unequivocally,
00:19:42.120we are going to scrap the Digital Safety Commission
00:19:44.640if it exists by the time the Conservatives may form government.
00:19:47.840Now, as it happens, even if the bill passes,
00:19:50.580the idea that they would set up a 330 person bureaucracy quickly is very unlikely. But
00:19:57.040nevertheless, I think this is a low ball. Peter Menzies joins us once again. Good to talk to you,
00:20:02.080Peter. Thanks for coming on today. Good to talk to you too. Now, there's nothing governments love
00:20:07.080more than just creating more departments, is there? Yes, there's no turf that cannot be claimed
00:20:12.980or department that can't be expanded in a certain worldview. Before getting into the cost aspect,
00:20:20.040What's your view on the idea that a digital safety commission is even a necessary entity in Canada?
00:20:26.660Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I think the issues that it's intended to address are genuine issues.
00:20:31.180I just don't think that's the solution.
00:20:33.000You could look to, I was listening to Ms. Rempel-Gardner there, and if you're looking for a solution, look to New Zealand.
00:20:42.480New Zealand came up with a recently, within the last several months, a code of conduct that it had all the social media companies sign on to, which basically it's the same purpose to address all these child safety and make sure that social media is as safe a space as you can make it and that there aren't predators on there or limit that as much as you can.
00:21:05.580I mean, the world can be a tough place.
00:21:07.780And once you get into it, I mean, danger lurks.
00:21:12.100British Columbia, just last month, signed a deal with Snapchat, X, Google, Meta, TikTok,
00:21:21.400I think that's it, all again to address child safety concerns and that sort of stuff.
00:21:28.060So you can do this through agreements.
00:21:31.260Some people obviously would like to have more power and enforcement, but these agreements
00:21:37.620can also contain penalties if you don't live up to them.
00:21:40.700so yeah look to new zealand i think is probably the most sensible um least bureaucratic um effective
00:21:47.340solution that i've seen of late and it seems as though and i wouldn't say i'm an expert on it so
00:21:53.740you can correct me if i'm wrong here it seems as though they're looking more to australia which has
00:21:57.340this e-safety commission and this e-safety commissioner is that a fair analog from what
00:22:01.740they've proposed in canada yeah i guess so um but i think you know i mean this this bill the online
00:22:06.860harms act is is is such a like it's sort of a three-headed monster there's this digital safety
00:22:13.020commission and 330 people is an awful lot of people well you know it's never going to end
00:22:18.700there like you know that on you know month three they're going to realize oh there's so much more
00:22:22.460work than we anticipated we need to expand well it doesn't even seem to address the extra workload
00:22:27.820that's going to happen at the canadian human rights commission because that's where tons of
00:22:31.340it's going to happen because it empowers people there's the digital safety commission on the one
00:22:36.300side and on the other side with the amendment to the criminal code people will be able to to
00:22:41.900complain directly that speech is racism without it being explicitly racist etc etc to the human
00:22:48.380rights commission and seek justice of some kind there now recently i mean i mean that's just going
00:22:55.420to get flooded every time somebody says something that bothers somebody on on x or tick tock or
00:23:02.300something like that they can go ahead and and file a complaint with the canadian human rights
00:23:06.940commission where you know as often said the process is the punishment it can drag out for
00:23:12.140years and they usually end up shaking you down for some money no matter how innocent you feel
00:23:17.180you might be um just the process just wears you down now i can't imagine that there that wouldn't
00:23:24.700even be more active than the digital safety commission and the costs there aren't included
00:23:30.780in the estimates that uh the pbo estimates that uh michelle was talking about yeah and the one
00:23:38.460thing that i find interesting and it's not a perfect comparison for a number of reasons but
00:23:42.380when the government launched the i forget the the acronym but the air passenger rights bill and then
00:23:48.140the commission that you could go and file your complaint against air canada or west jet with
00:23:52.620it ended up where instantly you just had like a two-year-long backlog because there was this
00:23:57.500deluge of complaints. And I think on the Human Rights Commission side, you're right to point out,
00:24:01.920Peter, it's going to be even worse because you're going to have people that are abusing the process
00:24:06.120because they don't respect its legitimacy. You're going to have people like a kind of a civil
00:24:09.860disobedience of sorts. You're going to have people that genuinely believe everything is an affront to
00:24:14.520their human rights and are filing complaints. And then, you know, buried in there, you might have
00:24:18.280the one or two legitimate complaints, but you're going to have to have some system to adjudicate
00:24:23.080these. And even if they decide that, you know, they're only going to champion or advance, you
00:24:28.560know, 0.01% of them, a human will have to lay eyes and respond and categorize this. I mean,
00:24:34.720it's a massive, massive undertaking. And the government has not even really acknowledged
00:24:38.640how many complaints it expects will be there. Yeah, and that is a huge problem. And one of
00:24:43.840the sad outcomes too is that the legitimate complaints will get in the same queue as the
00:24:48.020illegitimate. There's no way to triage that at the front end. I mean, look at Scotland recently.
00:24:53.800Scotland brought in a very draconian piece of speech legislation, and it used its criminal
00:24:59.680code to do it. As soon as it came into effect, the police were flooded with thousands upon
00:25:06.460thousands upon thousands of complaints, many of which were against the first minister who'd brought
00:25:12.620the law into place. It took them a couple of days to decide that, no, they wouldn't be pursuing
00:25:17.700charges against him but everybody was complaining i mean the the system just got flooded probably
00:25:24.100through a certain amount of you know protest and the irony on it but within two or three weeks
00:25:31.060that first minister who brought in that law in scotland was gone so there is some pushback to
00:25:37.620this and and i i go back to the conversation i don't know if you caught this part of my discussion
00:25:42.020with michelle rempel garner but you know the government has so far been unwilling to to parcel
00:25:46.900out the different parts of the Online Harms Act, the things that are a lot less contentious from
00:25:52.220the things that are more. And I think that's pretty deliberate. But are you optimistic that
00:25:57.520at the committee stage, there will be any ability to affect change and make this less of a dangerous
00:26:03.380piece of legislation? No, I'm afraid I'm not. I mean, I'd like to be, but the way I've seen the
00:26:08.980process work through, and I've been at some of the House of Commons committee meetings and Senate
00:26:15.300and Senate committee meetings for Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, and Bill C-18, the Online
00:26:21.000News Act. And there hasn't been much openness. It's kind of like if the really, the Senate's
00:26:27.480better, to be fair to the senators. There's some genuine questions, people genuinely curious,
00:26:33.100not that they did anything about it, but they were genuinely curious and receptive
00:26:37.780to critiques. The House of Commons was just, it's just kind of a battlefield, right, where you go
00:26:44.500in there and people are trying to get their YouTube clips and that sort of stuff. There's
00:26:50.040nothing serious about the process that makes you think that intelligence suggestions for amendments
00:26:58.560would be accepted. And I think we've already seen with Bill C-11, we've now got two decisions and
00:27:05.680two, or I hear maybe even three, court appeals coming. And the same with C-18, which turned out
00:27:12.100to be, you know, a very predictable disaster. So yeah, they're not going to listen. I wish they
00:27:20.560will. You know, I don't like talking about, you know, the next election as though it's a fait
00:27:25.020accompli, because obviously things change. But as it stands now, the conservatives are on track to
00:27:29.340have a pretty significant majority government if things hold. How easy would it be to roll back,
00:27:35.760you know, the C-18 and the C-11? And C-63, I don't think will be too much of an issue,
00:27:40.620because if it does pass, it won't be that long before the election. But the other things,
00:27:44.660because government has a tendency of just entrenching itself. So dismantling becomes
00:27:48.860very difficult. Well, it depends how complicated they want to make it. I mean, you could just
00:27:52.740introduce one bill that repeals all three acts. It's pretty straightforward if you have a big...
00:27:58.800And go back to life circa 2022 or something. Yeah, you just reset. But what you should be doing,
00:28:04.520and I would encourage those in seeking to form government to be doing that is to have a plan in
00:28:11.860place. Like if you're going to get rid of C-18, right now the media has like a $260 million
00:28:18.340rug that they're sitting on that's been provided by the government. And yesterday, Doug Ford gave
00:28:23.680them some more, right? So they've been very successful in the legacy media in getting all
00:28:30.000these government subsidies. If you have the courage to go and rip that rug out from underneath
00:28:34.220them right away rip the band-aid off whatever analogy you want to use um you can do it right
00:28:39.660away if you want to have another plan for what you know a public policy might look like for the
00:28:48.220industry you know improved things like improved tax deductibility of my newspaper subscriptions
00:28:55.500or other online subscriptions um so that you subsidize my behavior but not but not the newspaper
00:29:02.060you should have those things but if you don't want them just you know you can just rip the
00:29:05.660band-aid off and go from there there'd be a lot of squawking but you would have to do it fast and
00:29:10.940you would have to do it efficiently if uh you know if we get to that point there is the change in
00:29:15.660government can we uh you know put the government up to making you head of the crtc would you would
00:29:19.980you accept that if called upon i think they're smarter than that oh i think i think we could do
00:29:25.820a lot worse than uh having you at the helm there but either way i'm glad you're able to to do what
00:29:30.140what you're doing now. Peter Menzies, check him out at the rewrite on Substack. Thank you so much,
00:29:35.060Peter. Thanks a lot, Andrew. All right. Good to chat with Peter Menzies as always. I want to turn
00:29:40.500from the regulation of the internet to education. It's been a recurring theme for so many people in
00:29:46.180this country, frustrations with what their kids are learning in the classroom. But these issues
00:29:51.360go beyond just curriculum concerns. It's also about the caliber and quality of education. And
00:29:57.780a lot of that comes down to the caliber and qualities of quality of teachers. But Kaylin
00:30:01.980Ford has done her part in Alberta to push back against a lot of the problems in the education
00:30:07.220system, founding the Alberta Classical Academy. And she also had a great piece in the hub.
00:30:12.660Universities have a monopoly on teacher training. They don't deserve to keep it. This was an
00:30:18.680argument I hadn't really entertained before. Actually, a conversation I had with you not that
00:30:23.480long ago, Kaylin, because I had always just sort of accepted the status quo as being necessary,
00:30:28.540that, you know, a teacher's college at a university is the way you train and certify teachers. But
00:30:33.900there's a better way, you say. Tell me about it. Sure. Well, I guess to give a little bit of
00:30:40.600background here, in Canada, this is different in some other international jurisdictions,
00:30:44.640but in Canada, you basically need a Bachelor of Education or a B.Ed. if you want to teach
00:30:48.480in a classroom and be certified by a teacher's college. You can also do a post-degree BED. So
00:30:56.280after you've already obtained a bachelor's degree, you can then go back and do what is in most
00:31:00.180provinces a two-year post-degree bachelor of education. And I think that the reason why this
00:31:06.380has been implemented is precisely for the reason that you alluded to. We think people, you know,
00:31:11.540teaching is an incredibly important vocation. It's one of the most important jobs for sort of
00:31:16.260perpetuating and preserving your civilization is the education of the next generation and you want
00:31:20.860to make sure that your teachers are well qualified to do that and um i need to sort of preface this
00:31:27.180by saying of course there are tons of really brilliant teachers there are also some great
00:31:30.900people in education faculties and not all education faculties are the same so forgive
00:31:36.620the generalization but typically these programs are not producing the kind of training that we
00:31:42.480would expect, given the importance of the job. And a lot of teachers will admit this themselves.
00:31:48.080So one of the things that strikes me as so bizarre is you could have, you know, Stephen
00:31:53.180Hawking, for example, when he was alive, one of the most brilliant physicists in the world,
00:31:57.300would be unqualified to teach a high school science class for lack of a Bachelor of Education. I mean,
00:32:03.540and that's the extreme example. You could have a former Prime Minister of Canada who decides in
00:32:09.120retirement, he or she wants to teach a civics class at high school and wouldn't be able to.
00:32:13.900And there are little ways around that, are there not? Well, it's very limited. But yeah,
00:32:20.160you've hit on one of the absurdities of this B.Ed. requirement. And we've encountered this
00:32:24.800with our charter schools, of which we now have three. We're a specialized program. So we do
00:32:29.700things that are a little different than what a standard public school might do. We offer Latin
00:32:34.980and in high school, ancient Greek, for example. We focus very heavily on history. And it's almost
00:32:42.740impossible in our experience to find a certificated teacher, that is someone with a B.Ed., who can
00:32:47.840teach Latin, let alone ancient Greek. So there are a couple of provinces have devised some
00:32:53.640workarounds, some of them quite rarely used, whereby in Alberta, for example, the minister
00:32:58.120can offer an exemption for an individual to become a teacher. That's not really a scalable solution,
00:33:03.040though so it's not just limited to us i mean there are stem focused charter schools it's very hard
00:33:08.720to find people who can teach high level science and technology or engineering courses or there's
00:33:16.320arts academies similarly that encounter this problem it's also experienced for vocational
00:33:21.200traits um you know if you've got someone who's like a master welder or something or a woodworker
00:33:26.720but they don't also have a bachelor of education then it's very difficult to offer those courses in
00:33:31.280high schools now the the argument i i suppose if i give the the government and sort of the status
00:33:37.600quo the benefit of the doubt here is that teaching is itself a skill that needs to be taught above
00:33:43.200and beyond the knowledge you have and anyone who's taken you know university classes can probably
00:33:48.160attest to this they're brilliant people that are absolutely atrocious teachers so why does the b
00:33:53.520ed not do that in your view or not do it well enough to justify its continued existence or
00:33:58.880requirement so yeah very good point i don't want to imply that just because you have a doctorate
00:34:03.520in literature that you are qualified to teach uh teenagers right um a phd doesn't qualify you to be
00:34:10.320a primary or secondary school teacher but neither does it be ed it takes a special kind of person
00:34:16.880who has the aptitude and the passion to do that and teaching is um you know teaching in the sort
00:34:23.120sort of modern context is very much, it's an art and it's a craft. And what I would argue is that
00:34:29.900in addition to having sort of possessing subject matter content knowledge, which all teachers
00:34:34.420should have, the other dimension is learning the art and the craft of teaching. It takes a lot of
00:34:39.380special skills. There's a real art to classroom management, to assessments, to explicit and to
00:34:44.460providing effective instruction, what we would call explicit instruction. And the best way to
00:34:50.100learn that is in the practicum. So we surveyed 26 of the teachers in our school system and asked
00:34:55.400them what they learned and what they didn't learn in their B-Ed. And the really devastating thing
00:34:59.600was a lot of them were saying that the practicum was really valuable, being in a classroom with an
00:35:04.560experienced mentor teacher guiding them. But very often the mentor teacher was telling them,
00:35:10.200ignore what you've learned in the classroom, in your university, it's bunk, it's not going to
00:35:14.300work in practice. So I recall one teacher actually saying, you know, the damage of my coursework,
00:35:20.340the damage of my B.Ed. was mitigated by having great teachers in the practicum. But the actual
00:35:26.020coursework was of, according to our teachers, it was typically of little to negative value.
00:35:31.600It sometimes actively maleducated them as to what effective teaching and effective pedagogy
00:35:36.280looked like. Interesting. One point that I don't know if it's the same in other provinces, but in
00:35:41.660Ontario, they've, especially in the last several years, changed the length of time it takes to do
00:35:46.980a BED, not based on the material you need, but based on, you know, the availability of teaching
00:35:53.080jobs. You know, at one point, they made it two years because they had too many teachers and
00:35:57.260wanted to slow it down, and then they had too few, so they expedited it, which proves that in a lot
00:36:01.360of ways, it is an arbitrary, an arbitrary degree for people, for some people. Yeah, and to that
00:36:07.620point, you know, there was during COVID era, there were some US states that on an emergency basis
00:36:13.080hired teachers without sort of certification. By the way, a number of US states don't require it
00:36:18.860at all. But they found that in the aftermath of COVID, there was no real difference in the
00:36:25.380academic gains if depending on whether students had a certificated teacher or one of these
00:36:30.480emergency hires without a teaching background or teacher training. So there was no real difference
00:36:35.000there. And again, I don't mean to discount the difficulty of teaching in a classroom.
00:36:39.960It is a really, really difficult job to do it well. But it doesn't seem to be correlated with
00:36:45.480whether you have a B.Ed. or the length that that B.Ed. program took you to obtain.
00:36:49.780What would your ideal model be? If you were the education minister in Alberta and you could just
00:36:54.280start from scratch, what would you make the requirement? Well, I tend to err on the side of
00:36:59.720sort of local authority. So, you know, the sort of the extreme recommendation would be to say,
00:37:05.300give superintendents, the people who are actually in charge of school authorities and who are
00:37:08.600closest to the level of practice and to being able to observe and assess teachers, give them
00:37:13.020the authority to decide who to hire. I know that this would not fly with a lot of, with the
00:37:19.380bureaucracy and it would probably, it would get some people's backs up. So I think another
00:37:25.660solution that we have proposed would be an alternative pathway to teacher certification
00:37:30.220especially for people who already have a degree that is expedited over the two years we've
00:37:35.180suggested a paid practicum centered model so maybe one year rather than two years which is what it
00:37:40.700currently is for a post degree b ed in alberta one year where you're sponsored by a school authority
00:37:46.220you're being evaluated by them they're paying you at least something maybe not a full teacher salary
00:37:50.460but something to minimize the opportunity costs that are associated with for many people a mid
00:37:56.300career uh change in their profession um so make it practicum focused have some coursework but not
00:38:03.340nearly the degree of credits that are currently required because there's very little value it
00:38:06.860seems in that coursework and really focusing on on that practicum experience um and shortening
00:38:12.940the timeline so one of the things we encountered was we have all these people that we've wanted to
00:38:17.420hire but they have a doctorate in classics or philosophy or physics or something they have
00:38:22.860families they have mortgages they can't drop out of the workforce for two years to go get a b-ed
00:38:27.580and so it's about figuring out how you can improve this sort of labor mobility
00:38:31.980and bring exceptional individuals who do have a passion and an aptitude for teaching
00:38:36.060into the profession interestingly i don't believe it exists in canada but in several united states
00:38:42.300states you can do that with law where you can actually practice law without a law degree
00:38:46.860if you apprentice your way in by working under a lawyer and you know again something like that
00:38:51.340would sound so shocking to people but this is not without precedent and the law i'd say is
00:38:55.740again no offense to teachers but a lot more of a complicated thing than uh than teaching is
00:39:02.140yeah and and like teaching though i mean the idea that law is an academic discipline is sort of
00:39:07.420bizarre i mean there are sort of legal scholars but legal practitioners are not academics so
00:39:13.500focusing on coursework doesn't make sense right um actual like articling type experience is where
00:39:18.940the value is if you intend to be a legal practitioner of course you also need to know
00:39:22.940things right so i would hope that people in these both of these professions would come at this with
00:39:27.260a lot of background knowledge that they can contribute um but yeah it's not it's not really
00:39:32.060an academic discipline and faculties of education again i'll qualify this there are some great
00:39:37.980people in these faculties but in general they're not known for their academic rigor
00:39:42.380A lot of the teachers are disconnected both from classroom practice as well as from the serious research when it does occur.
00:39:49.820They're sort of political monocultures. They're heavily influenced by social reconstructivism and critical theory.
00:39:55.720So, you know, I think I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but all the more reason to say this might not be the best approach to training teachers.
00:40:04.780Well, if you want to learn a little bit more about this vision, Kaylin Ford's piece,
00:40:08.680in the hub universities have a monopoly on teacher training they don't deserve to keep it
00:40:13.000uh came out a couple of weeks back but uh very timely now kaylin thanks for coming on today and
00:40:17.240also if you want your kids to get a classical education the alberta classical academy has you
00:40:22.280covered there kaylin always good to talk to you thanks for coming on thanks andrew all right thank
00:40:26.200you uh keeping with the alberta theme this weekend uh one conference that i have had the great
00:40:31.480privilege of speaking out for the last five years is coming back the alberta economic or sorry the
00:40:37.160The Economic Association of Alberta's Freedom Talk taking place in Red Deer once again.
00:40:42.280I first went there in 2019 and then COVID came and everything got all crazy.
00:40:48.140But I was glad they've kept inviting me back.
00:40:50.520Danny Hozak is the chairman there and joins me on the line now.
00:41:23.560Well, I mean, the second part of that is our fate or our choice.
00:41:30.020And of course, our choice is for it not to be our fate.
00:41:32.760and so we're trying to come up with some reasonable solutions to keep us from going over this cliff
00:41:38.400that you know various governments seem to be intent on taking us over and of course we are
00:41:43.820going to miss you but we're looking forward to hearing from you virtually which as you know
00:41:48.020your topic is getting the media back on site and we certainly haven't had a lot of a lot of help
00:41:54.060trying to stop society from going over the cliff from the mainstream media and we certainly thank
00:41:58.780you and your colleagues for the work you do to try and get the message out.
00:42:03.540Well, I appreciate that. And yeah, I remember, I think it was, I don't know, two years ago or
00:42:06.880whatever. I didn't actually know what my speech was about. And I was going, I was in the elevator
00:42:11.980down to the ballroom and someone said, oh, Andrew, I can't wait to hear what you're going to speak
00:42:15.080about. I said, neither can I. So this year I do know, and I am going to speak about the media and
00:42:20.040how it fits into that general question of Western civilization. You have John Robson and Patrick
00:42:25.800more and mark morano stockwell day a former alliance leader will will be speaking as well
00:42:31.080among others but i wanted to ask you about that because your first sort of session is why does
00:42:35.960the west hate itself and that's such a unique thing for the west because every other regime
00:42:41.720in the world every other civilization in the world is very proud of who it is the west is the only
00:42:46.920part that tends to focus on why it's so terrible well and i mean and i think uh you know you just
00:42:54.040We're talking to a lady about the education system, and a lot of the reason that the West hates itself is actually some of our institutions of higher learning have absolutely betrayed us.
00:43:06.440One of the books that I read years ago was Anne Rand's.
00:43:09.380It was for the new intellectuals, and she said we need a new group of intellectuals, and to a certain extent, that's what we're trying to do.
00:43:17.600it's actually called the Economic Education Association and we're trying to get a whole
00:43:23.700lot of ordinary people that understand these issues that government hasn't been our best
00:43:29.480friend and they certainly aren't. And it's going to take a lot of work to get us back to where we
00:43:34.600were. So where would you like to see this discussion go? Because one thing I've always
00:43:39.800enjoyed about your conferences is you always try for there to be takeaways. So it isn't just a