Juno News - Mandatory DEI training makes things worse

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.380 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:13.580 Hello and welcome to you all, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show,

00:00:17.960 The Andrew Lawton Show, here on this Thursday, February 15th, 2024.

00:00:23.460 Hope you had a wonderful, lovely, and perhaps romantic Valentine's Day.

00:00:27.240 I won't ask too many questions, so don't worry about that.

00:00:30.760 We, at the tail end of our show yesterday, had some gremlins in the system.

00:00:35.360 I try to normally blame anything that happens on Bill C-11

00:00:38.760 and the Liberal government's internet regulation.

00:00:40.820 I'm not sure I can squarely lay the blame at their feet on this one,

00:00:44.260 but it was in an effort to get our good friend David Haskell on,

00:00:47.620 who is a professor at Laurier University,

00:00:50.060 an associate professor of digital media and journalism on the show,

00:00:54.120 because he had penned a phenomenal study and a very revealing study on DEI,

00:00:59.780 or diversity, equity, and inclusion,

00:01:01.860 and we are very grateful we were able to get him back on to kick us off today.

00:01:07.200 I gave lots of my thoughts yesterday when I was filling time

00:01:09.820 while we tried to sort out the tech issues, so we'll get right to David now.

00:01:13.140 David, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.

00:01:15.480 I'm really glad that we were able to get rid of those gremlins.

00:01:18.380 Yeah, so am I. Let's just start, before we get into the conclusions,

00:01:22.320 why did you want to dig into this in the first place?

00:01:26.440 Well, I think that the most recent reason,

00:01:30.260 I guess my overarching reason for anything that I research is

00:01:34.820 I want to be able to tell the truth.

00:01:37.000 And sometimes when it seems like what I'm hearing really doesn't jive with

00:01:42.220 what the reality of the situation is, then I want to dig into it.

00:01:46.740 But I had a friend who was a high school principal out of Toronto,

00:01:52.520 and he took his own life.

00:01:55.480 And when he did, it was after he'd been part of some DEI training sessions.

00:02:02.120 Now, I'm not trying to make false equivalencies here.

00:02:06.560 I just know that his lawyer said that it was after those DEI training sessions

00:02:13.220 that he had to take, they were mandatory, that his mental health deteriorated.

00:02:19.300 He was really berated in these sessions.

00:02:26.360 And it just demoralized him.

00:02:28.420 Well, anyway, after his death, it was on the website of the consultant,

00:02:35.260 the DEI consultant, that she seemed to want to cover her herself.

00:02:42.700 And she said that, you know, she was trying to make the world a better place.

00:02:47.540 And that Richard's death, it was my friend,

00:02:52.340 it said Richard's death was being mobilized and weaponized.

00:02:59.140 And so anyway, I wanted to challenge her claim.

00:03:03.020 Does DEI make the world better?

00:03:04.540 Because that's what she said is her explanation.

00:03:06.900 And so I started looking into the research on that.

00:03:09.300 And I was grateful for the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.

00:03:12.660 They said that they would commission that work.

00:03:14.880 And so that really led me down the path.

00:03:16.780 And then I found some startling conclusions.

00:03:20.120 Well, let's go into that.

00:03:21.780 What did you find?

00:03:22.840 Well, what I found was that there is no empirical evidence that it does anything good.

00:03:31.220 DEI instruction, this mandatory exercise that we see in businesses, government,

00:03:37.020 all our educational institutes, no empirical evidence that it does anything good.

00:03:41.960 But there's clear evidence that it can do harm.

00:03:45.260 And this wasn't my own original research, incidentally.

00:03:48.940 This is research that is out there.

00:03:51.140 And this is really good stuff.

00:03:52.580 It's coming from Harvard and Princeton and, well, just all these elite institutions.

00:03:59.260 And it's known, but it's not popularized.

00:04:02.960 For some reason, it gets swept under the rug.

00:04:05.440 So I simply am bringing it back so that people can take a look at it.

00:04:09.580 And it's pretty damning.

00:04:12.480 So let's go back and drill into this a bit.

00:04:15.700 Because the premise of DEI is that it is a tool against all of these biases that we all hold in ourselves.

00:04:23.580 I mean, I'm assuming there are a number of premises.

00:04:26.040 But if it were working, what would the data show?

00:04:29.620 Well, that's a great question.

00:04:32.860 The effect would be, so we talk about effect size.

00:04:36.260 That's one of the major measurements we use as social scientists.

00:04:39.600 So the effect size would be great.

00:04:42.640 And it would go like this.

00:04:43.960 You go to DEI training.

00:04:46.120 And if you had prejudices, they would be eliminated or lowered.

00:04:52.140 If you had a predilection not to work with people of other racial or minority groups, then you would be more likely to work with them.

00:05:03.820 But what we've seen through, again, meta-analysis after meta-analysis.

00:05:09.680 So this is where you take hundreds of studies and you statistically aggregate those findings.

00:05:14.640 What we see is the effect size is about zero.

00:05:17.540 And I say about zero, it becomes zero the more rigorous the methodology.

00:05:24.760 So the better the study, the more it was able to prove that DEI does nothing good.

00:05:31.340 So that I find to be quite interesting.

00:05:34.380 Because ideally, you would have people that are invested in this that are motivated by what on the surface could be a very pure thing.

00:05:41.960 We don't want racism.

00:05:43.000 We don't want bias.

00:05:44.000 We don't want prejudice.

00:05:44.900 So you're left with do they either not care about these data, do they not care about these findings, or is the motivation actually something else?

00:05:54.720 Now, I'm inclined to say it's probably the latter, but I'm curious where you land on this.

00:05:59.280 I've given it a lot of thought.

00:06:01.120 And I really, like you, I think that there are some people who truly are coming at this from a very good spot.

00:06:07.800 They want to see racism eliminated, as we all do, or any right person should.

00:06:14.300 They want to see people getting along.

00:06:16.600 And those are noble ideas, right?

00:06:18.440 So I'm sure that there are some people who really do think that that's the case.

00:06:22.300 But they have to.

00:06:24.220 I'm thinking about the people who are setting policy.

00:06:27.520 I'm thinking about the people who are the researchers.

00:06:29.440 They have to know this research.

00:06:30.540 I mean, I was able to find it.

00:06:32.440 And so we do have to look at other motivations because the empirical proofs just aren't there.

00:06:39.280 So why do they keep advancing this?

00:06:41.660 And so I would go through some other motives.

00:06:45.480 One is financial.

00:06:47.400 I mean, as it stands now, after the George Floyd riots, DEIs and industry just exploded.

00:06:54.680 I mean, it was already huge, but now it's a multibillion-dollar industry.

00:07:00.100 So there's an expression that there are none so blind as those whose paycheck depends on them not being able to see. 0.96

00:07:06.860 So there might be some of that going on there.

00:07:09.720 The people writing books on this stuff, like Ibram X. Kendi and D'Angelo, Robin D'Angelo,

00:07:17.240 they're making millions on their books promoting DEI ideas.

00:07:21.680 So they have a vested interest.

00:07:23.280 Also, consultants, they're making a ton of dough.

00:07:27.520 For example, in Toronto, at the Toronto District School Board, the DEI consultant I spoke of who berated my friend Richard,

00:07:39.700 she made around $61,000 for four days of workshops, and that was a sole source contract.

00:07:46.960 That's really good money.

00:07:48.160 You don't want to find reasons why what you're promoting are wrong when you're making that kind of money.

00:07:54.300 But from a business standpoint as well, I think there's motivation among corporations to really push DEI because it diverts attention from other things.

00:08:05.760 I remember when there were the 1% riots or the Occupy Wall Street riots going on, and they were looking at corporate corruption.

00:08:17.460 Well, it was shortly after that that DEI suddenly became something very favored among corporations.

00:08:23.140 It was like, don't look over here, but I want you to look over here.

00:08:26.820 Look how good we are.

00:08:27.640 We could virtue signal.

00:08:29.220 So from a corporate point of view, it makes a lot of sense to turn attention to something else that has a lot of popular appetite.

00:08:37.040 But then you come to those people who maybe they know that it does do harm, and again, we can talk about the studies that actually show it does do harm, and maybe they're okay with that.

00:08:51.440 Maybe they are motivated by revenge.

00:08:54.380 Maybe they are motivated by a desire to see society unravel so they can remake it in an image they like better.

00:09:02.560 You know, one of the things I remember from my old, you know, research methods classes in university, if I'm recalling correctly, is this idea called conceptual stretching, where you kind of morph and, you know, move around a concept so it fits what you're researching.

00:09:18.300 Now, maybe there's a justification for this, but one of the most extreme examples that you bring up in your piece is the idea of changing what white means to adapt to the pre-existing conclusion.

00:09:29.940 Now, normally, in a course of scientific research, you test a hypothesis.

00:09:34.300 If you are finding that's not true, you go back and you can question why, but you don't start changing around the language to make your conclusions fit what you want.

00:09:43.640 We see this with Asians who are ethnic minorities.

00:09:46.680 There's no denying they're ethnic minorities.

00:09:48.780 They tend to have very, very high performance scores in academia, in society.

00:09:54.640 They're very successful.

00:09:55.640 They make a lot of money.

00:09:56.440 So, that doesn't really fit with the DEI mold.

00:09:59.860 So, we have to find ways to call Asians white. 0.84

00:10:03.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:10:04.120 Or white adjacent, you say, in your study.

00:10:06.320 That's right.

00:10:06.860 Well, again, you begin digging into this stuff and you see that there have been school boards in the United States that have actually removed the category of Asian and they just lumped them in with white.

00:10:16.460 And that's DEI, and that's DEI writ large, because what it essentially is doing, it's saying that we're going to create groups of oppressor and oppressed.

00:10:27.520 And as soon as you perform beyond whatever the expectations are of the average or however they define it, suddenly you get into trouble.

00:10:37.620 So, we see that these Asian students in high schools across or in a couple school boards in the U.S., they got lumped in with whites.

00:10:46.560 But we also saw it just recently in the last year with the elite schools like Harvard and North Carolina.

00:10:56.000 They were also being discriminatory against Asian students.

00:11:00.660 They were making sure that they couldn't get in to, couldn't enroll at places like Harvard.

00:11:07.480 They had to have almost perfect test scores.

00:11:10.240 And the rationale, again, this is coming from the DEI office, was there.

00:11:19.220 Oh, we have, we made it for the first few minutes, but we've had a freeze on David's end there.

00:11:25.760 We'll try to get that sorted out and get him back on.

00:11:29.080 But it is fascinating.

00:11:30.420 And this was, again, something we saw specifically in the context of U.S. academia, where the idea of, again, just lumping Asians in with whites, because otherwise you can't actually find a way to let the conclusion work.

00:11:44.220 We have David back.

00:11:45.060 David, that's all for it.

00:11:46.620 Yeah, sorry about that.

00:11:47.640 Again, something's going on.

00:11:48.560 No, we made it through the first 10 minutes.

00:11:50.160 I was happy.

00:11:50.760 Fair enough.

00:11:52.660 I'm just talking about what was happening at the elite universities like Harvard, where they were actually making it more difficult for Asian students to get in.

00:12:01.420 They had to have a near perfect test score in order to get in.

00:12:06.000 The people involved in this actually took it to the Supreme Court and won.

00:12:10.060 They said, you can't discriminate against us like this.

00:12:12.860 But the notion that they could be discriminated against was pumped directly out of the DEI offices at these elite universities.

00:12:20.780 And what their justification was, we can't allow merit alone to allow to let these Asian American students in because there would be too many. 1.00

00:12:32.600 And that wouldn't be the right kind of diversity.

00:12:36.020 Well, that begs the question, what is the right kind of diversity?

00:12:38.940 Is there this golden mean or golden model that's in the heads of these DEI professionals that they get to decide who gets to be part of something and who doesn't?

00:12:51.960 So that's a real worry that we saw.

00:12:54.660 And it was definitely a good decision by the Supreme Court to say that this shouldn't be happening.

00:13:00.220 I think now we just need to have more universities realizing that all DEI, based on the evidence, needs to go.

00:13:06.480 One of the dangers that I would see in this is that some people could look at the findings and say, the problem isn't with the core premise.

00:13:16.160 The problem is just with, it's like the real communism hasn't been tried approach to this.

00:13:20.860 Say, no, no, no, real DEI hasn't been tried yet.

00:13:23.400 We've got to tweak and fine tune it.

00:13:25.060 But I think there are two issues there.

00:13:26.760 Number one, you mentioned that there's this massive demand for DEI right now.

00:13:31.580 I don't really think there's any rigorous investigation into the qualifications of the people that are doing these programs.

00:13:39.380 I think if you say the right things and you put up a splashy website, it's probably pretty easy to get a major contract from Coca-Cola, which doesn't want to be accused of being racist just to pull a company out of thin air.

00:13:50.220 But also, I think you have people that are in this space that are really making it up as they go along.

00:13:57.700 And I fear that the takeaway from some of the studies you've pointed to and even your own work is, okay, we've got to try to find a way to make this more rigorous instead of going back to the basics and saying, maybe this is just a fundamentally flawed premise.

00:14:10.040 Yeah, and I would just go back to the basics, because the basics were actually working.

00:14:17.160 So if you look from the 1960s up into the 1980s, there was a significant drop in real racism.

00:14:25.680 And now DEI, it can look at race or it can look at gender and sexuality.

00:14:33.060 But let me just talk a little bit about what we know about the reality of racism.

00:14:37.560 Any sociological data that you look at from the 1960s into the 1990s, into the 2000s, in fact, showed every measure was going down in terms of racism and going up in terms of acceptance between racial groups.

00:14:55.860 And some of the things that were evidence of that, we often ask questions as sociologists, would you mind if someone of a different race lived next to you?

00:15:05.840 Year after year after year after year, more people were saying, no problem, absolutely.

00:15:12.460 Then another question we ask is, would you be all right if your son or daughter married someone of another race?

00:15:18.220 Again, year after year after year, we were seeing that go up, that people were very accepting.

00:15:25.580 So these were real measures that racism was going down.

00:15:30.180 And what were we doing at those times to make it happen?

00:15:32.920 We were simply saying, treat each other equally.

00:15:35.980 Judge people by the content of their character.

00:15:38.380 That was working.

00:15:39.220 And now we've got a DEI industry that is actually encouraging discrimination.

00:15:46.560 We have people like Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote How to Be Anti-Racist, actually saying that the only cure for past discrimination is present discrimination.

00:15:57.200 That's madness.

00:15:58.640 Wow.

00:15:58.760 Well, it's fascinating research published by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.

00:16:04.360 The study is called What DEI Research Concludes About Diversity Training.

00:16:08.600 It is divisive, counterproductive, and unnecessary.

00:16:12.380 All things that do not describe David Millard Haskell, the author of that, who joins us now.

00:16:16.740 David, always good to talk to you.

00:16:17.820 Thanks so much.

00:16:18.600 It was a real pleasure, Andrew.

00:16:19.760 Thank you.

00:16:20.680 All right.

00:16:21.120 Thank you very much for that.

00:16:23.120 Now, I wanted to move to a different issue entirely, although you might even be able to apply the same findings,

00:16:28.180 which is that the thing that's presented to us as a harm reduction tool is not, in fact, limiting or mitigating harm,

00:16:35.400 and in some cases, maybe exacerbating it.

00:16:37.760 But before we get into this, I want to share this clip of a rather insane exchange that took place on the margins of a Richmond council meeting in British Columbia,

00:16:48.440 where several people from the community, including this lovely, mild-mannered Asian man you'll see on the left of this video,

00:16:54.460 were there to protest the council's advancing of a proposal to put a safe injection site in a neighbourhood in Richmond.

00:17:04.520 Take a look at what happened.

00:17:05.500 There was a need.

00:17:11.220 Our blood form was Canada.

00:17:13.000 This is not what Canada does.

00:17:14.720 Stop! 1.00

00:17:16.720 Stop! 1.00

00:17:18.720 闘争

00:17:20.720 I don't accept the whole life

00:17:22.720 Why are you talking?

00:17:24.720 Have you just taken us away?

00:17:26.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:28.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:30.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:32.720 Stop! 1.00

00:17:34.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:36.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:38.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:40.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:42.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:44.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:46.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:48.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:50.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:52.720 I live here my whole life

00:17:54.720 Now look

00:17:56.720 that woman I in a lot of ways

00:17:58.720 feel a little bit bad for

00:18:00.720 because I don't think she is alright up there

00:18:02.720 but people chanting no drugs

00:18:04.720 are told to go home

00:18:06.720 to get lost they're not Canadian 0.98

00:18:08.720 some things that in a different era we would have been told

00:18:10.720 but when they're directed at people who are

00:18:12.720 standing up for their community

00:18:14.720 it's a bit of a different take away from that

00:18:16.720 I want to talk about that but also the broader issue here

00:18:18.720 and what's happening in British Columbia

00:18:20.720 which is just doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on

00:18:24.720 so called safe supply

00:18:26.720 Adam Zivo is a columnist and reporter with the National Post

00:18:29.720 who has written extensively on this

00:18:30.720 probably more than most others in Canada

00:18:32.720 and it's always good to have him on the show

00:18:34.720 Adam welcome back

00:18:36.720 Hey thanks for having me back

00:18:38.720 Let's just talk about that Richmond video for a moment here

00:18:42.720 before we get into your work on this

00:18:44.720 because I would say that the guy on the left

00:18:46.720 is probably far more representative of a lot of suburban Canadians

00:18:48.720 on these issues

00:18:50.720 Well the thing is that

00:18:52.720 most racialized Canadians

00:18:54.720 don't support the harm reduction radicalism

00:18:56.720 that we see

00:18:58.720 happening throughout Canada

00:19:00.720 I mean yes there's going to be a small portion

00:19:02.720 of activists

00:19:04.720 I think that giving out free drugs

00:19:06.720 is integral to racial justice and social justice

00:19:08.720 but I mean most

00:19:10.720 most immigrant communities are actually quite socially conservative

00:19:12.720 and especially for East Asians

00:19:14.720 when they see opioids being handed out

00:19:16.720 so wantonly

00:19:18.720 for them it's reminiscent of the opioid

00:19:20.720 wars of the 1800s

00:19:22.720 when China was weakened

00:19:24.720 by the UK coming in

00:19:26.720 and essentially plowing their country with opioids

00:19:28.720 so I can understand there's a bit of colonial trauma there

00:19:32.720 Yeah no that's a fair point

00:19:34.720 and to bring it back into the provincial realm here

00:19:36.720 I mean I remember when supervised injection sites

00:19:38.720 or so-called safe injection sites

00:19:40.720 were seen as tremendously controversial

00:19:42.720 but now they're just an accepted fact

00:19:44.720 and the people that were advocating for that

00:19:46.720 have been advocating for safe supply

00:19:48.720 it's not enough just to give someone a clean room

00:19:50.720 and a clean needle

00:19:52.720 you have to provide them with so-called clean drugs

00:19:54.720 and you and I have spoken about this

00:19:56.720 we had a panel on this show

00:19:58.720 with two of the experts who have spoken out about this

00:20:00.720 the data are not showing that this is working

00:20:04.720 and you're saying that BC is aware of that

00:20:06.720 but is still proceeding

00:20:08.720 to some degree they're aware

00:20:10.720 that it's working to another degree

00:20:12.720 they have access to bad research

00:20:14.720 and they don't fully understand how flawed the research is

00:20:16.720 so back in January

00:20:18.720 the British Medical Journal published

00:20:20.720 a study which claimed that safe supply

00:20:22.720 reduced mortality by 55 to 91%

00:20:24.720 and that study was cited

00:20:26.720 by the BC government when they announced

00:20:28.720 that they were going to expand safer supply

00:20:30.720 despite the fact that it was causing community harms

00:20:32.720 and so I found that study a bit strange

00:20:34.720 so I reviewed it with a team of seven physicians

00:20:36.720 as well as a scientist who's trained

00:20:38.720 in stats analysis

00:20:40.720 and we found that the study cherry picked its data

00:20:42.720 so there were two ways that it did that

00:20:44.720 so first of all

00:20:46.720 half of the people received safe supply

00:20:48.720 received evidence-based medications

00:20:50.720 such as methadone and suboxone

00:20:52.720 which are proven to reduce mortality

00:20:54.720 so obviously you ask yourself

00:20:56.720 well what's actually causing the mortality reductions here

00:20:58.720 the methadone or the safer supply

00:21:00.720 the researchers tried to filter out

00:21:02.720 the effects of methadone but there were really

00:21:04.720 big gaps in their methodologies that were kind of

00:21:06.720 inexplicable and we found in the data

00:21:08.720 there was a subpopulation of people who had

00:21:10.720 not received these

00:21:12.720 evidence-based medications in the 30 days

00:21:14.720 before receiving safer supply

00:21:16.720 and for that population

00:21:18.720 there was no statistically significant reduction

00:21:20.720 in mortality for safer supply patients

00:21:22.720 which suggests that any mortality reductions

00:21:24.720 that did exist were driven

00:21:26.720 by methadone and suboxone not by safer supply

00:21:28.720 but they ignored that

00:21:30.720 the second thing is that they

00:21:32.720 measured mortality reductions after one

00:21:34.720 week which is really really weird

00:21:36.720 and if you want to make a comparison

00:21:38.720 imagine if there was a new kind of insulin

00:21:40.720 and some researchers said

00:21:42.720 well we're going to just study what the impact of the insulin

00:21:44.720 is after one week instead of looking at long-term

00:21:46.720 outcomes of repeated

00:21:48.720 administration over the course of a year

00:21:50.720 and when we looked at the data

00:21:52.720 we found out that the mortality

00:21:54.720 rates between the safer supply and the non-safe

00:21:56.720 supply patients was more or less the same

00:21:58.720 after one year indicating

00:22:00.720 that whatever mortality reductions

00:22:02.720 we saw after one week if they even

00:22:04.720 existed at all were meaningless

00:22:06.720 after a year but of course this was omitted

00:22:08.720 as well so this study

00:22:10.720 which showed that safer supply does not work

00:22:12.720 was repackaged as evidence that it does

00:22:14.720 which I think is unethical

00:22:16.720 but the BC government didn't catch up on that

00:22:18.720 now do you think this is an example

00:22:20.720 of you know because there are lots of situations

00:22:22.720 in which researchers start out

00:22:24.720 down a path and they don't really realize

00:22:26.720 or for whatever reason

00:22:28.720 that what they're doing is maybe not

00:22:30.720 providing the best picture or the most

00:22:32.720 whole picture do you think that's the case

00:22:34.720 here do you think it's people that are deliberately designing

00:22:36.720 studies so that they yield a particular

00:22:38.720 outcome it would

00:22:40.720 be hard to say how much of it is

00:22:42.720 deliberate how much of it is just

00:22:44.720 a certain level of incompetence

00:22:46.720 what I will say is that safe supply advocates

00:22:48.720 do have a tendency to

00:22:50.720 exaggerate

00:22:52.720 the quality of their research

00:22:54.720 well they were most caught on self reporting

00:22:56.720 studies which you and I have talked about in the

00:22:58.720 past of you know how do you feel about this

00:23:00.720 program great yes it's working

00:23:02.720 yeah you know Andrew

00:23:04.720 I'm gonna give you some free drugs do you feel

00:23:06.720 like this program which gives you free drugs that you

00:23:08.720 can sell on the street is great oh you think it's great

00:23:10.720 well I guess that means it works and we're not gonna

00:23:12.720 ask anyone else obviously that doesn't work

00:23:14.720 um so this is a step

00:23:16.720 up so they did a quality

00:23:18.720 study but the study didn't give them the results

00:23:20.720 that they wanted to so they seem to have

00:23:22.720 misrepresented it uh so

00:23:24.720 once again it's

00:23:26.720 it's just really I don't want to say

00:23:28.720 that this is intentional because that's hard to

00:23:30.720 prove and I don't want to be sued for definition

00:23:32.720 fair enough

00:23:34.720 it does raise eyebrows

00:23:36.720 yeah and I think that

00:23:38.720 it is impossible to separate out

00:23:40.720 ideology here

00:23:42.720 and ideology among the research and certainly

00:23:44.720 ideology in BC now look if you want to say

00:23:46.720 this is our position this is what we

00:23:48.720 believe this is what we're going to do

00:23:50.720 power to you let the voters decide

00:23:52.720 but it's when people are trying to hide

00:23:54.720 what is ideological behind

00:23:56.720 science that I tend to get a little bit

00:23:58.720 concerned

00:24:00.720 yeah I mean look so I was at the

00:24:02.720 Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine's annual scientific

00:24:04.720 conference back in October

00:24:06.720 so I met a lot of safer supply advocates

00:24:08.720 in real life and

00:24:10.720 seem to be ideological

00:24:12.720 and they're kind of like they're zealots

00:24:14.720 and you can show them whatever evidence

00:24:16.720 that you have that this doesn't this is

00:24:18.720 working that it's being diverted

00:24:20.720 and they do all sorts of mental gymnastics so

00:24:22.720 around that time I

00:24:24.720 was working on a piece where I had found

00:24:26.720 a bunch of examples of people selling thousands

00:24:28.720 of safer supply hydromorphine pills on reddit

00:24:30.720 and I was sitting beside

00:24:32.720 a safer supply advocate

00:24:34.720 in a in a presentation

00:24:36.720 and afterwards I showed her all of this

00:24:38.720 and she was saying well how do we know

00:24:40.720 that it's real and there was

00:24:42.720 some specific packaging which is only used in

00:24:44.720 safer supply and she's saying well how do we know

00:24:46.720 that you know drug dealers didn't go

00:24:48.720 and get that from the garbage

00:24:50.720 and then put you know fake drugs in it

00:24:52.720 and they were doing whatever they could

00:24:54.720 to delegitimize this

00:24:56.720 and after a while it just seemed like they were unwilling

00:24:58.720 to accept the possibility that this program

00:25:00.720 is not working which is

00:25:02.720 sad and I can understand that psychologically

00:25:04.720 because no one wants to admit

00:25:06.720 that this thing that you stake your identity

00:25:08.720 and that you put so much of your effort into advocating

00:25:10.720 for might actually be harming people

00:25:12.720 How do BC

00:25:14.720 health officials square

00:25:16.720 the fact that this situation has just become

00:25:18.720 such a major

00:25:20.720 a major issue in BC

00:25:22.720 relative to other provinces

00:25:24.720 I mean what why do they think that their approach

00:25:26.720 is working when their outcomes

00:25:28.720 don't seem to be better than elsewhere in the country

00:25:30.720 Well I mean the way that they're looking at

00:25:32.720 is that they have this hypothesis

00:25:34.720 which is unfalsifiable

00:25:36.720 so they say that safer supply saves lives

00:25:38.720 and then when they don't see

00:25:40.720 any evidence of that they say well that just means

00:25:42.720 that there's not enough safer supply

00:25:44.720 so in the way that they are framing

00:25:46.720 it it is impossible to disprove

00:25:48.720 their hypothesis

00:25:50.720 which basically justifies

00:25:52.720 the infinite

00:25:54.720 the infinite expansion of safer supply

00:25:56.720 but we do have to keep in mind that many

00:25:58.720 researchers are activists at heart

00:26:00.720 and they really strongly advocate

00:26:02.720 for drug legalization

00:26:04.720 and safer supply is a step towards that

00:26:06.720 and I do want to stress

00:26:08.720 that many of the people who are in this space right now

00:26:10.720 who control addiction policy making

00:26:12.720 they they don't come from a medical background

00:26:14.720 you know they don't actually have medical degrees

00:26:16.720 oftentimes

00:26:17.720 many of them come from public health

00:26:20.720 which is much less rigorous

00:26:22.720 and then they basically have displaced

00:26:24.720 the addiction physicians who are actually fully trained in this

00:26:27.720 so the people who are calling the shots

00:26:29.720 are not fully educated on this matter

00:26:31.720 and that that was I mean the phenomenon we had discussed was on this panel

00:26:35.720 that you were on on the show a few months back

00:26:37.720 with Sharon Koivu in London, Ontario, my city

00:26:39.720 where you know here she's an actual physician 0.58

00:26:41.720 but she's kind of on the sidelines 0.98

00:26:43.720 when a lot of these people you've just described

00:26:45.720 seem to be setting the agenda

00:26:47.720 and that's the problem right

00:26:49.720 is that from what I heard

00:26:51.720 it is the mainstream position in addiction medicine

00:26:54.720 that addiction physicians and psychologists

00:26:56.720 do not support safer supply

00:26:58.720 and that's what I heard at the very beginning

00:27:00.720 when I was researching this

00:27:01.720 and no one wants to speak up about it

00:27:03.720 because they were afraid

00:27:04.720 they were afraid that they would be cyber bullied

00:27:06.720 by harm reduction activists

00:27:08.720 and they were afraid that they would lose access to federal grants

00:27:11.720 there was a culture of fear

00:27:12.720 and slowly that culture of fear has dissipated

00:27:15.720 and now you see more public criticism

00:27:18.720 but fundamentally speaking

00:27:20.720 addiction physicians are being sidelined

00:27:23.720 and they are being told that their very practice

00:27:25.720 is oppressive

00:27:27.720 harm reduction activists

00:27:29.720 for example Zoe Dodd in Toronto

00:27:31.720 she's like one of the main ones

00:27:32.720 she has explicitly said

00:27:35.720 that she wants to dismantle addiction medicine

00:27:38.720 and how do you deal with someone like that?

00:27:41.720 Yeah, no that's a

00:27:43.720 sometimes they say the quiet part out loud

00:27:45.720 so I think that's a very good point

00:27:47.720 Adam Zivo with the National Post

00:27:48.720 always a pleasure

00:27:49.720 thanks for coming on today

00:27:50.720 Thanks for having me

00:27:52.720 All right, thank you

00:27:53.720 and we've been doing a data heavy show

00:27:55.720 we've talked about DEI data

00:27:57.720 drug and addiction data

00:27:58.720 we'll end it off with

00:27:59.720 good old-fashioned budgetary data

00:28:01.720 I know

00:28:02.720 sending you off into the weekend

00:28:03.720 with the stuff you really come here for

00:28:04.720 talking about debt and deficits

00:28:06.720 but it matters and it's important

00:28:07.720 and it's my show

00:28:08.720 so we're going to do it

00:28:09.720 because there's a little bit of good news

00:28:11.720 it's kind of cloaked good news

00:28:13.720 you got to really really search for the good news

00:28:14.720 because we know that the multi-billion dollar deficits

00:28:17.720 which some reports have said could last us decades

00:28:21.720 are leading to a major debt crisis in Canada

00:28:24.720 which is causing there to be more money that we have to spend on interest payments

00:28:27.720 which is then causing more deficits

00:28:29.720 and it's very circular

00:28:30.720 but courtesy of our friends at the Fraser Institute

00:28:33.720 a case for spending restraint in Canada

00:28:36.720 how the federal government can balance the budget

00:28:38.720 the report they have published finds it can in fact be done

00:28:42.720 and if a government really really wanted to

00:28:45.720 the budget could be balanced by 2026-2027

00:28:50.720 well this sounded too good to be true

00:28:52.720 so I wanted to dig into it with Jake Fuss

00:28:54.720 who is the Director of Fiscal Studies at the Fraser Institute

00:28:57.720 Jake always good to talk to you

00:28:58.720 thanks for coming back on the show

00:29:00.720 thanks very much for having me on

00:29:02.720 okay so you're saying it could be done

00:29:04.720 you're not saying it will be done correct?

00:29:07.720 yeah absolutely

00:29:08.720 I mean obviously we've seen a marked deterioration

00:29:10.720 in the state of federal finances since 2015

00:29:12.720 with substantial increases in spending and debt over that time

00:29:16.720 but what we do in our study is just look at a couple different scenarios

00:29:19.720 of how we could actually return back to a balanced budget

00:29:22.720 either by 2025 or 2026

00:29:25.720 2026 I think is a very realistic scenario

00:29:29.720 that just offers a solution for government to really reduce the growth rate in spending over two years to 0.3%

00:29:35.720 it wouldn't actually require you to reduce spending from current 2024 levels

00:29:42.720 we could actually get back to a balanced budget by 2026

00:29:45.720 if the government just simply demonstrates some spending restraint

00:29:49.720 now this is I think an important point

00:29:51.720 because there are ways you could balance a budget that would not be particularly healthy or sustainable

00:29:56.720 I mean the government could raise taxes 500% and balance the budget

00:30:00.720 and you know it's balanced but you haven't actually had a good fiscal portrait

00:30:04.720 what does your version look like?

00:30:07.720 is it just spending cuts?

00:30:09.720 is it revenue increases?

00:30:11.720 or is it a combination of both?

00:30:13.720 yeah so really what we're looking at here is just pulling back on spending

00:30:17.720 so there's actually a lot of important research from some Harvard economists

00:30:21.720 where they looked at past history of fiscal consolidation among OECD countries

00:30:25.720 and they found it was far more effective to either reduce spending or show spending restraint

00:30:30.720 rather than raising taxes to actually balance budgets

00:30:32.720 it's better economically and it was more successful fiscally as well

00:30:36.720 so there's a lot of research around this area

00:30:39.720 and what we're simply proposing is just a 0.3% increase in spending over a two year period

00:30:45.720 so that isn't even asking necessarily for spending reductions from current levels

00:30:50.720 just peeling back on that spending that you have planned projected for the next two years

00:30:55.720 that's really a realistic scenario for the government over a two year period

00:30:59.720 so we've heard in the past and I don't have the whole laundry list of them

00:31:03.720 but we've heard from the parliamentary budget officer some pretty grim projections

00:31:07.720 I mean the one that really stood out a couple of years ago was that the budget wouldn't be balanced until 2070

00:31:13.720 now that's based on the track that the government had set out at the time

00:31:17.720 it stands to reason that the longer we stay on the current track

00:31:21.720 the longer it would take for this course correction you're describing, right?

00:31:26.720 Yeah, that's part of the issue too

00:31:28.720 it's not that we're in necessarily a crisis situation like we were in the mid 1990s yet

00:31:34.720 but if we keep going down this track of continually running deficits

00:31:38.720 continually accumulating debt and with elevated interest rates now

00:31:42.720 that means you're borrowing more and more money

00:31:44.720 more of that money is going towards debt interest costs

00:31:47.720 which are already consuming a substantial amount of revenue

00:31:50.720 over 10% in the current year

00:31:53.720 so that problem really just gets worse over time the longer you put this off

00:31:57.720 I mean the latest fiscal projections for the government show we're not going to balance the budget

00:32:01.720 anytime before 2028 at the earliest

00:32:03.720 and that's only because their projections go out five years and that's where they end

00:32:07.720 so you know other reports from the PBO show it's going to be longer than that

00:32:11.720 so we really need to start talking about actual solutions here

00:32:14.720 rather than just kicking the can down the road and hoping this goes away somehow

00:32:18.720 I know there's often a difference between you know politics and policy

00:32:22.720 and I think both sides tend to be annoyed with the other

00:32:25.720 because they say that the other doesn't you know understand how things are

00:32:28.720 I'm aware of the challenge that there isn't just a line item in the federal budget called waste

00:32:33.720 that you can look at and say all right well let's just cut waste waste is buried and embedded in a lot of different departments

00:32:40.720 so how easy would it be or how difficult would it be to really go in and find ways that you could make some of these adjustments that you're talking about

00:32:47.720 without taking a hatchet to entire programs or departments which politically tend to be very difficult to justify doing

00:32:54.720 well I think they should take the approach that the Kretchen government took in the 1990s

00:32:59.720 they really had a six-step process to evaluate programs and services on a case-by-case basis

00:33:04.720 you know so it was about you know is this an appropriate role for government to be involved in

00:33:09.720 are we running this program or service as efficiently as possible

00:33:13.720 so they had a whole set of criteria that they were looking at

00:33:16.720 and they're not just you know chopping for the sake of chopping

00:33:19.720 they're actually evaluating these programs on whether or not they're actually effective

00:33:23.720 and whether they're serving what what the program actually is trying or intending to do

00:33:28.720 so I think that's a similar approach that the federal government could take now

00:33:32.720 but we know that you know over the years there's many examples of government fiscal waste

00:33:36.720 you know we had one report that looked at auditor general reports between the 1980s and 2013

00:33:43.720 and it found that you know mismanagement or waste of government was well over a hundred billion dollars during that time

00:33:50.720 according to those auditor general reports

00:33:52.720 so we know that this is an area where the government can certainly make changes

00:33:57.720 is cutting back on that fiscal waste or removing it entirely

00:34:01.720 yeah and what you're talking about here largely looks like a question of efficiency not extraneous programs

00:34:07.720 you're not saying we need to cut this or cut that in a sense that would it looks like have a huge effect on service delivery are you?

00:34:15.720 no exactly I mean that and that's just the whole point here

00:34:18.720 it's actually about having effective spending too

00:34:21.720 you know there is a role for government there is a role for programs and services ultimately

00:34:26.720 but the government also needs to have physical objectives

00:34:28.720 they need to have goals and anchors keeping them you know on a certain track as well

00:34:33.720 you know right now we just kind of have policy that isn't even following the government's own self-imposed rules

00:34:39.720 they're not following their fiscal anchors you know or the fiscal goals or fiscal rules however you want to phrase it

00:34:45.720 and so we don't really have anything containing government finances right now

00:34:49.720 so we really need a plan moving forward about not only what we're spending the money on

00:34:54.720 but also taking that bigger picture look at government spending as well

00:34:58.720 who says fiscal policy can't be interesting as we head into our weekend here Jake Fuss

00:35:03.720 director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute

00:35:05.720 the study in question is called a case for spending restraint in Canada

00:35:09.720 how the federal government can balance the budget

00:35:12.720 so I think the real takeaway it can be done if you don't do it

00:35:15.720 it's just because you decided not to so that would be the warning I'd put at the feet of any federal lawmakers here

00:35:20.720 Jake always a pleasure thanks for coming on today

00:35:23.720 thanks very much for having me on

00:35:25.720 all right that does it for us here on the Andrew Lawton show

00:35:28.720 back tomorrow with off the record featuring Harrison Faulkner and Sue Ann Levy as well as yours truly

00:35:34.720 and then the Andrew Lawton show resumes next week

00:35:37.720 not on Monday we've got family day but we will be back on Tuesday

00:35:40.720 so stay tuned for all that

00:35:42.720 and in the meantime thank you God bless and good day to you all

00:35:46.720 thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton show

00:35:48.720 support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

Juno News - February 15, 2024

Mandatory DEI training makes things worse

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