Juno News - The future of conservatism in Canada (feat. William Gairdner)

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:13.080 Coming up, a wide-ranging conversation with William Gairdner about conservatism, libertarianism, socialism, Marxisms, all the isms you could imagine, and more.

00:00:24.000 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.

00:00:30.000 Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North. You're listening to Canada's most irreverent talk show.

00:00:36.660 And as you've no doubt been aware by now, we do things a little bit different on the Friday show.

00:00:41.000 We tend to assemble a crack team of panelists to tackle some of the big issues of our time.

00:00:46.200 And occasionally we come across someone who can hold up the weight of an entire panel all by themselves.

00:00:51.520 And William Gairdner is certainly one of those people. Legendary author and conservative intellectual in Canada.

00:00:58.480 He has some tremendous books like The Trouble with Canada and its much-needed update, The Trouble with Canada Still, The Great Divide, The Trouble with Democracy, The War Against the Family, and many others.

00:01:10.440 And he joins me on the line now, Dr. William Gairdner.

00:01:13.360 Bill, it's good to talk to you. Thanks very much for coming on today.

00:01:16.900 My pleasure.

00:01:17.360 Now, when we look at your life's work here, and I mean a number of tremendous books in there, The Great Divide, The Trouble with Canada, The Update of That, The Trouble to Canada Still, or Trouble with Canada Still, do you find over time that you become more or less optimistic?

00:01:33.900 Oh, man. That's the question of the hour. People ask me how I feel about having spent the last 30 or 40 years in this boxing ring.

00:01:48.520 And I say, I feel like a man who's been standing on a rock in a leftward drifting sea.

00:01:55.720 And in the distance, in the fog, I see ships drifting to the left.

00:02:00.940 And I hear voices on deck. And you know what they're saying?

00:02:04.160 They're saying, look, look, there's a man out there drifting to the right.

00:02:07.220 You see, but I haven't moved like an inch from the fundamental positions that I thought were worth arguing for, defending and debating.

00:02:18.760 But the country has moved a lot. It's become more somnolent, more sleepy, more left-oriented, more accepting.

00:02:26.700 And we see it, especially with this COVID thing, more accepting of statism, government power and rule, more passive people.

00:02:36.240 It's a little scary.

00:02:39.940 It is. And, you know, when I look at trying to win over the hearts and minds, which is, you know, as Margaret Thatcher once said,

00:02:46.920 first you win the argument, then you win the vote, trying to win the big arguments in the time.

00:02:51.420 The one thing that challenges me more and more is that we are less and less able as a society to even agree on first principles.

00:02:59.820 You know, it used to be, for example, on free speech.

00:03:02.020 If someone on the right and someone on the left were in disagreement, you could perhaps reason with them by saying,

00:03:06.740 ah, but, you know, policy X would compromise free speech, ergo, it's a bad thing.

00:03:11.160 Whereas now you couldn't even agree that free speech is a good thing.

00:03:15.040 And I know a lot of your work has put forward a first principle that, again, I think is a very controversial one.

00:03:21.420 In Canada today, which is that the family is the fundamental building block of a society.

00:03:26.920 Such a thing is heretical in the modern political discourse, but it still is, I think, tremendously important.

00:03:33.180 Oh, I do too. More important than ever.

00:03:35.600 And I think we're beginning to see the consequences of letting that idea go in the West.

00:03:42.200 Actually, I'm doing a series of videos now.

00:03:44.840 They're available from my own YouTube site on the war against the family.

00:03:49.420 There's kind of an hour on each chapter.

00:03:53.080 And it's just shocking to realize that this all began in Sweden in the 50s, as far as the Western world is concerned.

00:04:01.260 I mean, never mind communism and fascism and Nazism and all those things.

00:04:08.280 Sweden was supposed to be the middle way.

00:04:10.940 That's what Trudeau called it when he was walking around with Jean Chrétien, you know.

00:04:16.460 Well, we should be imitating Sweden. 0.96

00:04:18.520 Neither vulgar American capitalism nor, you know, jackboot communism.

00:04:25.020 Sweden is the middle way. 0.51

00:04:27.500 And if we follow some of those ways, and this is, I'm quoting Trudeau, we can plant socialism in every province, quote unquote.

00:04:37.200 And when he began his work, and this is what my article was about, which I think brought you and I together today, you and me together.

00:04:47.440 He had a Machiavellian moment.

00:04:49.320 He had started out thinking that Canada's confederation was going to make it impossible to ever turn Canada into a more socialistic type of government.

00:05:02.020 But after a while, he began to realize that it might be easier because it was already broken up into provinces.

00:05:07.900 And the fact that they have different disagreements all the time about A, B, and C might make it easy to sort of on a one-at-a-time basis convert the whole nation into a more socialistic enterprise.

00:05:21.600 And, of course, the Trump card he had in mind was his Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

00:05:25.600 And the whole idea behind that was that he could get rid of what he called British-style checkerboard federalism forever by imposing a Charter of Rights and Freedoms with unitary principles in it that everyone in the country would have to abide by.

00:05:42.500 And he got it done in 1982.

00:05:46.160 So my article was about what that meant for us as Canadians.

00:05:50.280 Basically, it meant we got recolonized.

00:05:52.320 You know, we used to bow to the judges in Britain.

00:05:55.380 Now we bow to the judges in Ottawa.

00:05:58.220 You know, what's the difference?

00:05:59.800 6,000 kilometers.

00:06:01.500 Yeah, but you raise an important point there.

00:06:03.540 And I'll put up that column of yours on the screen here.

00:06:05.780 The Charter at 40, how Canada got recolonized.

00:06:08.640 I would encourage people to go and look at that in the Epoch Times.

00:06:11.680 But you are right there.

00:06:13.060 In a lot of ways, Canada was trying to do that American-style constitutionalism by having a constitution that would give a form of judicial supremacy.

00:06:23.120 Except the problem is, for Canadians, the U.S. Constitution reasserts the supremacy of the individual.

00:06:29.940 Whereas the Canadian Constitution does not do that.

00:06:33.180 I'm interested in what you're saying, actually, quite a lot, because I'm musing on the possibility of writing an article for Epoch Times, comparing the French Declaration, the American Declaration, and the Canadian Charter, and trying to explain to people the ways in which it is the same and the ways in which they differ.

00:06:52.200 A huge difference, because, you know, when I first started thinking about Canada's charter and that article, I asked myself, how close is what we did to what the Americans have done with their Declaration of Independence and their Bill of Rights, which they tacked onto their Constitution to please the states?

00:07:10.880 I think the major difference is, and I think the major difference is, and I think the major difference is, and I've not done my homework completely yet, but the major difference is that most of the so-called rights in the American Constitution are what we call negative rights.

00:07:24.060 There are things that the government can't do to you.

00:07:27.160 Whereas the emphasis, and that was feared when it started in 1982, of the Canadian Charter is positive rights.

00:07:35.240 Here's what the government is going to do to you, or is allowed to do to you.

00:07:38.940 For example, equalization payments amongst the provinces, that's something that got written into the Charter.

00:07:45.860 It's of a socialistic, you know, Canada is not a socialist country, but it's socialist in top-down style like that, you know, forced equality and forced rights from coast to coast.

00:07:58.940 It is very statist from that point of view, without being specifically socialistic.

00:08:06.260 I mean, in a socialist country, the government kind of owns everything, you know, and gives dictation from the top.

00:08:13.380 In a socialist-style country, it's just some of these coast-to-coast policies that the government can get away with that are like socialism.

00:08:22.300 I actually argue, and I have dear friends who tell me, we need to go back to classical liberalism.

00:08:27.980 And I say, forget it, it's gone.

00:08:31.240 What do you mean?

00:08:32.480 I say, well, that idea, which, you know, you, my imaginary interlocutor here, which you tell me you think is summed up in the American Declaration of Independence and all the rest of it, all that stuff is gone.

00:08:45.620 And all that Lockean stuff, and even the Burkian stuff is gone.

00:08:49.220 We are living, and I think all the Western democracies have gone this way at faster and slower rates, depending which democracy you're talking about.

00:08:57.600 We're living in an era of libertarian socialism.

00:09:00.980 What?

00:09:01.700 How can it be?

00:09:02.660 I say, well, it's easy.

00:09:05.340 This whole thing, this whole thing bumped along from over the last 300 years to a situation where we fell into a contradiction in terms of our fundamental foundation.

00:09:18.080 What contradiction?

00:09:19.660 Well, liberalism has a foundation in liberty, right?

00:09:24.680 Egalitarianism has a foundation in equality.

00:09:28.100 The more liberal we became, the more unequal we became.

00:09:31.300 We developed underclasses of poor people that were not going away.

00:09:35.620 So we had to get into all these socialist style policies to make sure they had a more or less equal life to the rest of us, paying the money, giving them rights to goods and things like that, you know, goodies from the state.

00:09:48.520 So inevitably, we ended up in a kind of conundrum.

00:09:52.580 What were we going to do about telling people that we had a classical liberal society with, in fact, all these inequalities going on?

00:10:00.820 We've got to fix them.

00:10:02.320 So what theorists decided to do was to split the body politic into two bodies.

00:10:08.140 We're going to have a libertarian body for the individual, and we're going to have a public body when it comes to national rights that can be enforced coast to coast.

00:10:18.180 So the body politic was split into two bodies, private body and public body.

00:10:23.660 And that's what Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms is really all about.

00:10:28.400 For example, you have rights to, you have gay rights, you have divorce rights, you have drug rights, you have abortion rights. 0.58

00:10:34.460 You have all kinds of individual rights that have to do with you as an individual and your body, you know, your physical rights.

00:10:41.580 But when it comes to whatever the government is, is certain that it can supply equally to everybody through equalization payments and policy, then we're into like socialist style programs, forced equality from the top down.

00:10:58.400 Canada is now a libertarian socialist nation.

00:11:00.640 It's neither perfect libertarianism nor perfect socialism, far from it.

00:11:05.580 But it's enough of each to say that that's the kind of entity we now live in, and all the Western democracies have gone this way.

00:11:12.640 It was smart, Machiavellian.

00:11:14.540 They figured, look, we can't live with the contradiction.

00:11:17.340 We can't live with the idea that we have all these glaring inequalities in a country that's preaching liberty.

00:11:22.960 We have to do something about it.

00:11:24.440 Give them liberty.

00:11:25.700 Give them their appetites.

00:11:26.900 Give them their bodily freedoms and all those things that they want to indulge in, right?

00:11:31.800 But keep them unified with top-down policy coast to coast from the top.

00:11:36.480 I would challenge that slightly, and perhaps we're agreeing here fundamentally, and perhaps it's just semantics on my part.

00:11:44.500 But I don't think there is that strong of a libertarian foothold in Canada right now.

00:11:50.560 My sense has been that you only have liberty to make decisions that fit within the approved values framework set out by the courts and set out by, I'd say, broadly the culture here.

00:12:02.400 And we've seen this in the last couple of years with a number of the COVID lockdown measures.

00:12:06.620 The libertarians have been losing several of these challenges because your libertarianism only extends to perhaps have an abortion and have a gay marriage and do all of these other things.

00:12:16.600 Your libertarianism doesn't extend to not getting vaccinated.

00:12:20.340 Your libertarianism doesn't protect you against a lot of these lockdowns.

00:12:24.120 And it seems then like in a lot of ways it's a very illusory individual liberty that we've upheld.

00:12:29.680 Well, it seems illusory when you spell it out like that.

00:12:32.960 I agree with you.

00:12:33.720 It seems maybe a contradiction to what I'm saying.

00:12:36.320 But I think that what I have said has been going on for 50 years.

00:12:40.140 It's in the woodwork, so to speak, of our nation.

00:12:45.600 All these individual bodily rights are here now.

00:12:48.880 You know, in 1950, they weren't.

00:12:50.760 You couldn't smoke marijuana in public, right?

00:12:53.320 Divorce had to be the consent of both parties.

00:12:56.020 You couldn't just walk in and say to your wife or your husband, I divorce you like the Muslims do, you know? 1.00

00:13:00.960 You couldn't do that. 0.95

00:13:02.480 Now you can.

00:13:03.260 So I say marriage is gone because it used to take two to make it, two to break it.

00:13:08.440 Now it's two to make it, one to break it.

00:13:10.920 Libertarian, see?

00:13:11.820 Up to you and your choice.

00:13:13.300 Abortion is about your choice, right? 0.89

00:13:15.720 All these things come down to individual choice.

00:13:18.340 It may not apply, as you say, to this crisis we're going through now with respect to COVID.

00:13:23.580 That's because, you know, the whole idea of public safety has overwhelmed everything,

00:13:27.380 including all the crazy exaggerations that we have to live with.

00:13:30.680 But once it ebbs and it goes and COVID is gone and all the rest of it, back to square one,

00:13:35.700 which is a libertarian social society.

00:13:38.020 In other words, we give the people enough of these personal appetitive wants that they have

00:13:45.740 that they can express any time they feel like.

00:13:48.560 There are no laws against them anymore, right?

00:13:51.420 And they're not going to complain about egalitarianism, socialism, and any other aspect of their lives.

00:13:57.020 They just put up with it, pay more taxes.

00:13:58.800 What's the poster boy for this?

00:14:01.120 It's Sweden.

00:14:02.340 Highest tax rate in the world, right?

00:14:04.360 Most government services in the world for a free society.

00:14:08.500 And here's the conundrum.

00:14:09.860 And I ask my libertarian friends this.

00:14:11.880 We have arguments about it.

00:14:13.680 Can you explain why the Swedes seem so happy with their libertarian socialism?

00:14:19.900 Why are they so happy with it?

00:14:21.460 They can't explain it.

00:14:22.540 It shouldn't be true.

00:14:23.500 You know, 57%, 60%, 62% tax rates and all that kind of stuff.

00:14:29.000 But if you ask the average Swede, and I did last week, I contacted a fellow.

00:14:32.840 He's 88 now.

00:14:33.980 But he wrote a great book years ago.

00:14:35.840 His name is David Popeno, a professor from, I forget where, Johns Hopkins, I think.

00:14:40.380 He wrote a great book on the breakdown of the family.

00:14:43.000 And Sweden was the poster boy leading that attack on the natural family. 0.99

00:14:47.320 It was a huge experiment in social policy in Sweden.

00:14:51.760 The book was called Disturbing the Nest.

00:14:54.360 So I thought, you know, I'm going to try to see if he's still around.

00:14:57.920 So I Googled for him and I found him.

00:14:59.720 And you know where he is?

00:15:00.740 He's living in Sweden.

00:15:03.080 Sweden was one of the big chapters in his book.

00:15:05.640 He said, I can't explain it.

00:15:07.120 These people love it.

00:15:08.340 And if you ask them about taxes, you know what they'll say?

00:15:11.060 They'll say, I would pay more tax for the life I have.

00:15:14.540 It's great.

00:15:15.080 Government does everything for us, you know.

00:15:18.480 In other words, you know, the baby's born, it's government daycare.

00:15:21.900 The baby goes to government schools.

00:15:23.940 Young married couples get to buy cheap newlywed housing.

00:15:28.980 In some of those buildings, by the way, there's apartments with no dining room.

00:15:34.780 You know, they have a common dining room.

00:15:37.020 Everybody comes into the common dining room to eat.

00:15:39.600 Kind of like in university, you know, when you go from your residence to the mess hall.

00:15:45.080 They push you together because they don't want the family ideal to be strengthened in Sweden.

00:15:50.800 See, their whole idea was to break it down because it created differences which flew in the face

00:15:56.280 of their socialist egalitarian ideology, which is that all citizens should be the same, do the same, and be treated the same.

00:16:04.460 We want all women to leave the home, take their kids to government daycare, go get their jobs, support themselves independently from their husbands, 1.00

00:16:13.500 husbands, or whoever they happen to be living this.

00:16:15.960 I can't say husbands, by the way, because marriage is shot in Sweden.

00:16:20.580 So they don't even talk about divorce anymore.

00:16:23.920 You know the term they use?

00:16:25.900 Couple dissolution.

00:16:27.780 Wow.

00:16:28.220 There is no divorce because people are not getting married, roughly speaking.

00:16:32.220 I mean, it's very low.

00:16:33.320 So they just, statistically speaking, they talk about the rate of couple dissolution, which, by the way, happens to be very high over there.

00:16:40.480 It's almost as if, well, you get tired of your partner.

00:16:42.640 This thing is over.

00:16:43.600 Go find another one.

00:16:44.500 Yeah, and then, well, you've got some countries, I think Spain notably, that don't even put mother and father on the birth certificate.

00:16:52.100 I think it was progenitor A and progenitor B or something like that.

00:16:56.360 So you are right, though.

00:16:57.520 And, you know, what you're describing in Sweden, I think, comes down to the old input and outcome, or input and output forms of freedom,

00:17:06.140 where someone could say, well, yes, things are great in Cuba.

00:17:08.940 They're very free because the government gives them X, Y, and Z.

00:17:11.540 Except it's not a true freedom in that sense.

00:17:14.680 But you're right.

00:17:15.200 I mean, the Scandinavian example is key because a lot of times, on a number of just personal well-being indicators,

00:17:22.280 these countries do rank higher than Canada, higher than the United States.

00:17:26.220 It's embarrassing for true libertarian thinkers in the West why they like it.

00:17:32.560 They're not supposed to like it.

00:17:34.200 People are not supposed to like the state controlling almost everything in their lives.

00:17:39.120 But these people do.

00:17:40.180 One of the many results of it, and there was a book written years ago by a fellow named Roland Huntford.

00:17:46.260 It was called, the title is, The New Totalitarians.

00:17:50.100 It was a really interesting book.

00:17:51.920 And I think almost everything he said has come true.

00:17:55.200 Like in the statistical evidence is there now.

00:17:57.460 This was like 35 years ago.

00:17:59.540 It's all there now, the evidence.

00:18:01.080 The marriage breakdown, the laziness at work, people calling in sick.

00:18:05.720 I don't know, 20% of all Swedes call in sick every week or something like that.

00:18:10.660 I'm picking the numbers here.

00:18:11.860 I don't have them at my fingertip.

00:18:13.240 But it's a larger number than in any other country.

00:18:17.460 You know, so the work productivity and all that stuff has fallen away and the expectations.

00:18:23.540 However, there's something everybody's talking about today with respect to the Scandinavian countries.

00:18:29.760 And they call it the Nordic Paradox.

00:18:32.640 Remember the phrase, what is the Nordic Paradox?

00:18:35.700 Well, it's really interesting.

00:18:37.260 It has turned out through honest studies of all this huge revolutionary change in the kind of public psyche in Sweden.

00:18:45.680 That one of the reasons they wanted to do all this was to get rid of what they thought were the biologically determined natural differences between men and women.

00:18:55.800 They said, no, they're not natural.

00:18:57.580 It's all social.

00:18:58.600 They're just here because of social pressures, stereotypes, all that kind of language, you know.

00:19:03.340 And we can get rid of it by changing the stereotype.

00:19:06.120 We're going to force them out of their homes.

00:19:08.220 We're going to make it embarrassing. 0.99

00:19:09.680 We're going to refer to the housewife who wants to stay home, the homemaker, as a parasite. 1.00

00:19:15.860 And we'll use that language in public, you know, that kind of thing. 0.99

00:19:18.480 Shame people.

00:19:19.580 So they've been doing that for 45, 50 years now.

00:19:22.440 But the Nordic Paradox is that the more that they equalize the sexes in the Scandinavian countries, get this, the more different they become. 0.72

00:19:31.720 In other words, if you equalize all the policies and the goodies that they get, they decide, oh, well, this is great.

00:19:37.740 I'm getting all this free stuff or whatever.

00:19:40.180 Now I can do what I want.

00:19:42.360 And they become naturally biologically expressive in a way that they maybe were embarrassed about before.

00:19:49.880 This is interesting.

00:19:50.960 I have a neighbor who had three girls. 0.97

00:19:55.120 And, you know, we had, my wife and I had five kids and two of them were boys.

00:19:58.680 So after a few years, our neighbor turned to my wife and said, I've got some boy toys.

00:20:03.280 Would you like to have them?

00:20:04.720 And so my wife said, sure.

00:20:05.880 So she brings over, you know, the fire truck, the dump truck, the Jeep, the stuff that they play with in the sandbox, whatever, you know.

00:20:12.560 And my wife says, my gosh, she said, how old are these toys?

00:20:15.940 And she said, oh, she says, they're four years old.

00:20:17.900 My wife says they're brand new.

00:20:19.680 I know.

00:20:20.100 She said, my girls never played with them. 0.83

00:20:22.180 And then she told her this story.

00:20:23.820 She says, you know what happened?

00:20:25.380 She said, the first day I bought this fire truck, I gave it to my daughter.

00:20:28.740 And she was, yippee, this is great.

00:20:30.600 Wow, I got a fire truck.

00:20:32.080 When I went up at night to kiss her goodnight, when she went to bed, the fire truck was in the doll bed with a blanket up to the cab.

00:20:42.280 True story.

00:20:43.160 That's actually quite amusing.

00:20:45.640 And it is interesting that for all that society right now and a lot of the academics and political elites and media try to talk about the need to de-gender the world,

00:20:55.200 they forget that a lot of these norms and some cases you may call them stereotypes exist because they stem from a lot of very natural impulses.

00:21:04.680 Now, I'm of the mind that if a little girl wants to play with a fire truck or a boy wants to play with some conventional, quote unquote, girl toy, have at it.

00:21:12.000 But they gravitate towards the ones that we tend to view as norms for a reason.

00:21:17.600 So why does that persist then, I guess?

00:21:20.940 Well, I'll tell you, it persists from the politics of envy, which really has always been part of human societies.

00:21:28.000 But it really got a kick, and it was made kind of politically official with Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto.

00:21:36.740 In that book, well, by the way, I'd like to go back, but we don't have time.

00:21:40.720 It began with Plato.

00:21:42.960 You know, Plato wrote his Republic.

00:21:44.520 In the Republic, he outlined his plan for the totalitarian society in which no parent should know his child, nor child his parents.

00:21:53.880 The children would be taken away from the parents and raised by the state.

00:21:58.420 The women would all be held in common by the men. 0.98

00:22:01.000 You could have sex with anybody you wanted, right?

00:22:03.840 In other words, they wanted to break all the connections, the family connections, so that Plato could end up with a perfect egalitarian society, free of all rancor, free of all anger, free of all differences between people that caused, which he thought were the cause of human dissension.

00:22:22.120 So the Republic was the kind of template for this going forward.

00:22:26.940 Well, Marx certainly knew about that.

00:22:28.860 So did Rousseau, by the way.

00:22:30.720 In fact, Rousseau, when he was walking around and somebody criticized him for why he dropped all his five children off at the orphanage, where we know that they probably died because no one's ever found any traces of them.

00:22:43.680 He said, he said, I thought I was a child of Plato's Republic.

00:22:49.440 That's how he explained it.

00:22:51.100 Well, then you get to Marx in 1848 with his communist manifesto in which he says the abolition of private property.

00:22:57.400 Okay, fine.

00:22:58.280 He's a communist, but also the abolition of the natural family.

00:23:02.220 We have to get rid of the natural family.

00:23:03.960 And in my own book, The War Against the Family, there's all kinds of evidence for how this has popped up again with modern radical feminists, for example, who say that there will never be equality until we get rid of the natural family. 1.00

00:23:17.500 And one of the reasons is what you're just pointing to, which is that people do express natural likes and dislikes by Marx.

00:23:25.540 So Marx thought, I'm going to get rid of this, right?

00:23:28.660 So the way he decided to get rid of it was in his manifesto and later his buddy Engels, who wrote a whole tract against the family and against marriage and so on, was persuading people that human condition is the way it is because of oppression. 0.56

00:23:45.360 There's always an oppressor class and an oppressed class.

00:23:48.560 If we can just persuade people that the whole world always divides into oppressors and oppressed, then it doesn't matter whether it's capitalists and workers or, you know, professors and students or generals and soldiers or parents and children.

00:24:04.220 We've got to persuade everybody that the world is the way it is through oppression.

00:24:08.180 And that really took off so that today, if you're talking about radicalism and our society here today, you're talking about modified forms of Marxist Marxism on that theme.

00:24:22.880 I don't like to use the word Marxism, but that's kind of where it got its big push in the 19th century.

00:24:28.800 I don't like to use it because most people don't know what it is.

00:24:31.540 I've never read a word of Marx and, you know, why do that?

00:24:34.420 But the basic theme of his work was that you are a victim.

00:24:38.960 You always have oppressors and victims wherever you look.

00:24:43.060 And so the way to get the perfect society is to get rid of the oppressors.

00:24:47.000 And that's what communism was all about, which he referred to, by the way, and described as the perfect democracy.

00:24:53.140 One of the theories I would put forward on that, and you sort of touched on it there, is that family is one of the only units that would be held up in greater significance to the average person than government.

00:25:07.220 We see this now when it comes to the vaccines for children.

00:25:10.880 A lot of parents that are saying, no, no, no, you know, you can do what you want to me, but you can't touch my kids.

00:25:15.480 That's sort of the argument.

00:25:16.380 So it stands to reason that if you want to strengthen the power of the state, you have to undermine the power of the family.

00:25:22.840 Yes.

00:25:23.300 Well, the biggest reason that Plato came to, and it's the same with Marx, is that the family generates the notion of private property.

00:25:31.000 They want to create wealth, you know, vegetables, food, animals, whatever, and wealth for their own family.

00:25:37.060 They don't want to create it for their neighbors.

00:25:39.400 Good heavens, the neighbor's drinking beer all day and he's lazy as can be.

00:25:43.520 Why would I want to give him some of my sheep, right, or some of my tax dollars?

00:25:49.540 No, I'm going to focus on my family.

00:25:51.720 Now, these are very, very strong feelings, and Plato's complaint about the family was that the private family creates human difference.

00:25:59.460 And it's difference, of course, that egalitarians want to get rid of. 0.94

00:26:02.760 They want to get rid of all differences, and, you know, some families are smart, some are stupid, some are lazy, some are hardworking, some are rich, some are poor, you know. 0.98

00:26:12.100 And, of course, radical leftists make a joke about all this. 0.99

00:26:15.960 I remember the funny line, actually, that some French guy came up with, I don't know, 50 years ago.

00:26:22.760 He said, I know you people, you freedom lovers.

00:26:25.080 He said, you say that even the rich are free to sleep under the bridges, you know, which, of course, they're not going to do.

00:26:33.140 But his point was, you know, your freedom doesn't apply to everybody equally, because they have different conditions in life.

00:26:40.120 So we have to change the conditions.

00:26:42.700 Well, so that's what Plato was doing.

00:26:45.220 That's what Marx was doing.

00:26:46.420 That's what modern radical feminists are doing. 1.00

00:26:48.740 They want to get rid of the conditions of traditional marriage, so-called patriarchy, the natural family, and the really radical ones.

00:26:56.480 And some of them have been very influential in Canada, by the way, were themselves former Marxists, who were dictating policy to our government, which, under Trudeau in particular, but even some of those who followed him, have swallowed it whole.

00:27:11.440 You know, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, most of the policies they were pushing, like national daycare, and even Brian Mulroney, who was supposed to be a conservative, when I got going thinking about politics, he was into a national daycare scheme, which he said was going to cost $4 billion.

00:27:31.660 Now, this was not for the true, what I call the truly needy, who maybe we should be helping.

00:27:37.580 This was for everybody.

00:27:38.740 So, the Rosedale woman with the mink coat and the tennis racket, she gets to drop her kid off free at this national daycare place, you see. 0.70

00:27:47.320 So, I got really upset with this, and I wrote a letter to Mulroney, and I said, you're too pink.

00:27:53.340 If you don't get more blue, you're not going to see any more of my green, you know, my money donations.

00:28:00.600 So, anyway, that ended up in the Globe and Mail somehow.

00:28:04.080 I don't know how.

00:28:04.700 Well, the Rosedale woman with a fur coat and a tennis racket, I think that's probably the best way to sum up the demographic you were going for there, Bill.

00:28:14.160 Yeah, yeah, and her right to free daycare, see, the word right, you know. 0.99

00:28:19.180 Now, by the way, our own charter, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, you do not see the word obligation in that charter.

00:28:25.420 The word duty doesn't appear anywhere.

00:28:27.120 And it's interesting because when Western man, so to speak, and woman, if you like, most of them were men, started thinking about how to create these charters and these constitutions, there was a tremendous amount of fuss.

00:28:40.020 Like over the French declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, there was huge fuss.

00:28:45.360 They had a huge vote on this thing should contain obligations.

00:28:49.980 People have obligations too, and not just rights.

00:28:52.320 And it got voted down in a only slightly lopsided vote among a thousand of the people voting on this thing in the French situation.

00:29:03.540 But you see, here we are, 2022.

00:29:08.600 You don't see the word obligation in our charter.

00:29:11.000 You don't see the word duty.

00:29:13.140 It's as if there aren't any.

00:29:14.460 I want to go back to how we started, you talking about, you know, people perhaps viewing you as drifting to the right, even though you're the one staying put and everyone else is drifting to the left here.

00:29:28.140 You, in the time we've been chatting, have cited Rousseau, Plato, Machiavelli, a number of books.

00:29:34.340 I'm going to add to the reading list once we get off the call here.

00:29:37.180 But at the risk of trying to toot your horn a little bit, or maybe I will just do it outright, you're one of the leading conservative intellectuals in this country, but it's a very small group.

00:29:47.260 I mean, the number of people in the right in this country that really try to advance, not just on particular issues or political agendas, but advance an intellectual basis for conservatism is a tiny, tiny, tiny number.

00:30:00.760 So why do you think the right in this country has failed so much to produce this generation of great thinkers that I think we could greatly benefit from?

00:30:10.040 Well, it's an interesting question, Andrew, and I've always felt, in fact, in all my books, what I've tried to do is what I'm just going to explain.

00:30:21.220 Sometimes when I'm giving a public speech, you know, someone will come up, come up to me afterwards and talk about how terrible these liberals are, meaning they're bad people.

00:30:32.020 And I said, no, they're not bad people.

00:30:34.380 I said, they're good people with bad ideas.

00:30:37.720 And your job is to change their ideas.

00:30:40.720 And you can only do that if you give if you can give them a higher ideal than the one that's motivating them right now.

00:30:46.520 You know, that's the objective, and that's what I've tried to do in all my books, is to give people a higher ideal than the one they've been operating on as a so-called liberal.

00:30:57.520 Most of them couldn't even define what a true liberal is.

00:31:00.600 But anyway, that's what I think is the important thing for conservatives to do.

00:31:05.220 And if there were only one person came to a talk I was asked to give, I would still give the talk, because you never know who that person is.

00:31:11.800 And they never know what kind of effect they're going to have on the whole nation someday, maybe nothing, but maybe something very powerful, you know.

00:31:19.440 So if you can get them going on the right ideas, and I can't tell you, I don't mean to boast here, but today I got two emails from people I've never met, who just wrote me, found me through my website and said,

00:31:30.580 Oh, I met you 25 years ago, whatever.

00:31:32.740 And then I bought your books and, you know, and so on.

00:31:35.020 And they explained their journey from traditional leftism, which is what they all were taught, even in lower school, to becoming a more independent, free-thinking, conservative thinker, you know.

00:31:47.180 And so if my books can do that, I'm happy.

00:31:50.200 Is it enough?

00:31:50.940 No.

00:31:51.560 This thing's been like a tsunami washing over us, you know, and it's still rolling.

00:31:56.260 But, you know, you keep fighting, right?

00:31:59.480 I have an American friend who said something very inspiring.

00:32:02.580 She said, listen, we have a duty to be optimists.

00:32:06.200 And I believe that.

00:32:07.900 And it's true. 0.56

00:32:08.420 That's the only way I can operate anyway.

00:32:10.580 I always think there's a way to win, you know, to win the war of ideas, too.

00:32:15.740 So to go back to that ship analogy, how do we get that ship moving back in the right direction?

00:32:22.800 Well, that's part of the tsunami.

00:32:24.060 It's drifting leftward for a reason.

00:32:26.400 Because that's the way things are now.

00:32:28.300 Why is that so?

00:32:29.400 It's because the left is very clever at, I'll tell you a story about this in a moment.

00:32:33.980 It's very clever at seizing the tools of leftism, radio, the universities, the lower schools, the teachers' colleges, all these institutions.

00:32:47.720 It's like when Gramsci, the Italian communist, when he was in jail, he wrote his prison notebooks.

00:32:53.720 And it's a terrible book, but I think it was in that book, which I tried to read, but it's, you know, it's like indigestible. 0.98

00:32:59.420 But in that book somewhere, there's this business about the long march through the institutions.

00:33:04.680 Well, his notion was, we're not going to go to war again to win communism, you know.

00:33:09.020 We're going to change the institutions.

00:33:11.480 And that began when I was at Stanford.

00:33:13.560 I went to Stanford University.

00:33:15.460 You know, the motto of Stanford University is still, get this, where the wind of freedom blows.

00:33:22.300 Well, I'll tell you, it's in German, you know, but the wind of freedom does not blow at Stanford anymore.

00:33:28.260 The wind of oppression blows at Stanford, you know, racial oppression, bigotry, gender oppression, everything you could name.

00:33:36.580 You know, the oppressions of true history has happened.

00:33:39.620 Stanford has been, I'm embarrassed to say, because I loved my time there, but I was there when it was free.

00:33:45.480 But it was beginning to change, you know, beginning to change.

00:33:48.680 Like the oppression narrative was in the air.

00:33:51.140 I had a really good friend.

00:33:52.320 I used to be a runner, you may know.

00:33:53.940 I was ran in the Olympic Games in 64.

00:33:57.200 So when I got to Stanford in 65, I was still running for Canada.

00:34:01.400 And so one of the guys I trained with, who eventually became a Rhodes Scholar, he went over to a Safeway store one day because he needed some dinner.

00:34:08.660 And he stole a steak.

00:34:10.580 And I said, Del, what the hell are you doing?

00:34:13.020 Oh, come on, he said. 0.97

00:34:14.600 Capitalists are all stealing from us.

00:34:16.080 I'm just taking it back.

00:34:17.100 That was his notion, was he was justified in taking a steak from Safeway because capitalism had been stealing wealth from him and his family for decades.

00:34:28.860 What's your problem, Bill, you know?

00:34:30.360 I mean, I was disgusted, but you couldn't make a dent in his thinking.

00:34:34.480 Well, Gramsci would have been proud of him.

00:34:36.360 Pardon me?

00:34:36.840 Gramsci would have been proud of him.

00:34:38.080 And at the time, there was a professor there of American literature.

00:34:42.300 I enrolled in his course because he wrote a good book on American literature.

00:34:46.060 And I took a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy and all that.

00:34:49.580 And anyway, he comes into the class the first day and he says, listen, he says, if you want to know about American literature, he says, read my book.

00:34:58.680 Now let's talk about Karl Marx.

00:35:01.300 In other words, this is the way these people take over these institutions.

00:35:05.420 They infiltrate and I had a wonderful, dear professor friend there who ran something.

00:35:11.640 He initiated and ran something called the Stanford Conservative Forum.

00:35:16.000 You're going to love the story.

00:35:17.540 So we called him Prof because there's the Prof.

00:35:21.440 And he invited William F. Buckley to come and speak at Stanford at his forum at Tresor Union there, I think.

00:35:31.220 It holds about a thousand people.

00:35:32.560 So the news got out that William Buckley was coming to Stanford to speak.

00:35:37.240 Oh, my God.

00:35:38.240 You know, the Palo Alto, which is the town that Stanford's in, the Palo Alto radio station, the Stanford radio station, the Stanford newspaper.

00:35:47.240 Everything was just it was like everything was burning because of the news that William Buckley, this horrible conservative thinker, was coming to Stanford.

00:35:55.860 This was in the 60s, you said, right?

00:35:58.120 This would have been 1967.

00:36:00.740 So this was before when a lot of people really started to become aware of this trend on campuses.

00:36:05.960 But it was still very much real.

00:36:07.780 Okay.

00:36:08.200 Okay.

00:36:08.460 Yeah.

00:36:08.760 But listen what happened.

00:36:09.820 So Buckley comes to the campus and there's an uproar everywhere.

00:36:12.540 And the Prof shuts him down.

00:36:13.740 He says, listen, Bill, he says, we got an issue here.

00:36:16.340 There's a lot of upset in the air and I'm worried about your safety.

00:36:20.620 Maybe we should cancel.

00:36:22.420 And Buckley says, no way.

00:36:24.060 We're not going to cancel.

00:36:25.660 And then the Prof says, okay, well, then I have an idea.

00:36:28.620 He says, why don't we do this?

00:36:30.580 There'll be a podium on the stage.

00:36:32.820 The hall is already oversubscribed.

00:36:34.660 It's going to be more than a thousand people there.

00:36:37.100 I'll go to the podium.

00:36:39.280 And excuse me, neither of us will go to the podium.

00:36:42.300 I will not introduce you, but when I think it's time, I'm just going to like go like this.

00:36:47.620 And you'll come out of the wings.

00:36:49.280 You'll come out of the wings, go right to the podium and start your speech.

00:36:52.240 Don't give them a chance to start booing you.

00:36:55.340 And, you know, if I don't introduce you, that won't give them a chance either.

00:36:58.840 So there was, you can imagine the tension in the air.

00:37:01.600 So this, the night comes and the Prof goes like this.

00:37:05.480 And Buckley comes striding fast out of the wings, goes right to the podium.

00:37:09.260 He pulls a speech out of his jacket because he always spoke from a printed copy.

00:37:14.740 He never spoke ad lib, a great speaker too, but he puts it down on the podium and a thousand

00:37:20.900 people stood up and gave him a 10 minute standing ovation.

00:37:24.780 It was unbelievable.

00:37:26.000 He was just floored.

00:37:26.980 And so was the Prof.

00:37:27.860 They just went, oh my God, what just happened here?

00:37:30.440 You know, the Prof said, William, he said, he called me, William.

00:37:33.560 He said, the lesson is that it was five or six people who created all the bonfire.

00:37:39.640 The two guys at the Stanford daily newspaper, the two guys at the Stanford radio station

00:37:44.340 and so on.

00:37:45.720 They, in other words, they seized, they seized the political instruments that were essential

00:37:50.640 to create the fuss.

00:37:52.600 Just like you're at your microphone right now.

00:37:55.340 If they were here, they would come in and tell you nicely to leave. 0.74

00:37:59.260 If you didn't, they'd shoot you.

00:38:00.540 Yeah, I was going to say, they might not tell me all that nicely.

00:38:03.020 You never know.

00:38:03.600 Yeah, well, they start that way.

00:38:05.360 Yeah.

00:38:06.020 Then, you know, then you're done and they've got the microphone.

00:38:11.080 Well, that's all you need.

00:38:12.020 And I studied the takeover of Eastern European nations by Russia, by the USSR, as it was known

00:38:20.300 then, from a great professor at university.

00:38:24.800 And he made it clear that this was the case in every one of these countries.

00:38:27.800 You just get those, those instruments for spreading the word and you've got everybody.

00:38:36.240 All the sheep will follow. 0.97

00:38:38.560 Yeah.

00:38:38.880 That's what happened at Stanford.

00:38:40.260 And that's what happens in our country.

00:38:42.200 Look at our universities.

00:38:43.880 And they're very open about it.

00:38:45.220 If you ask a professor at York where I used to teach, what's your political persuasion?

00:38:50.080 Who do you vote for?

00:38:50.860 They will always say a new Democrat or liberal or something like that.

00:38:55.520 I mean, the number of conservatives on most Canadian campuses is like, what, three, four

00:39:00.240 percent of the faculty.

00:39:01.740 And they're all shrinking, hiding, you know, afraid to speak up, especially today.

00:39:07.860 So it's been done already.

00:39:09.440 Gramsci was successful in his suspicion that if you can take over the institutions, you can

00:39:16.560 run the country.

00:39:17.200 My daughter went to the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education.

00:39:21.640 She said there was a guy sitting beside her.

00:39:23.760 He was a 50-year-old man, immigrant to Canada from Romania, which used to be a communist country.

00:39:29.600 And she didn't like what she saw.

00:39:31.460 Her first few weeks at OISE was terrible brainwashing and indoctrination about all sorts of things,

00:39:37.060 you know, gay rights and feminism, God knows what. 1.00

00:39:39.680 And so she wanted to, you know, put her hand up and complain. 1.00

00:39:43.520 And he leans over to her and he says, Rusan, her name is Rusan.

00:39:46.920 He calls her Rusan. 0.99

00:39:48.140 He said, shut up. 1.00

00:39:50.160 She goes, what? 1.00

00:39:51.420 He said, shut up. 0.99

00:39:52.380 He said, he told her he was from Romania. 0.98

00:39:54.560 He said, when I was in Romania, he said, I translate Orwell's book, Animal Farm, into a

00:40:00.960 Romanian language, he said.

00:40:02.420 And I had to escape Romania, the shooting at my back, shooting at my back for translating 1.00

00:40:09.620 that book.

00:40:10.460 He says, what is happening here in Canada?

00:40:13.140 He said, exactly what we did, exactly what happened in Romania.

00:40:17.260 Same words, same sentence structure, same concepts.

00:40:21.680 It's all like a nightmare to me watching it happen over again in your Canada.

00:40:26.980 But he said, you can't do anything about it.

00:40:29.340 Nice try, you know.

00:40:31.100 Wow.

00:40:31.200 Well, I'm reminded of John O'Sullivan's famous wisdom, O'Sullivan's first law, or as he told

00:40:36.480 me once, O'Sullivan's only law, which was that any institution that is not explicitly

00:40:40.840 conservative will over time become explicitly liberal.

00:40:43.760 And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that, that people on the right need to know.

00:40:47.140 You're always going to be swimming upstream, but you can't stop swimming because then you're

00:40:50.980 certainly going to lose.

00:40:52.540 I know swimming, you were a runner at heart, but you were a decathlete, so I'm going to assume

00:40:56.520 you can do anything.

00:40:57.840 And you've certainly been swimming against the current.

00:40:59.520 And we are all the better for it.

00:41:01.560 William Gardner, always a pleasure.

00:41:02.960 Thanks so much for joining me.

00:41:04.200 Thanks, Andrew, very much.

00:41:06.320 That was author, former Olympian Olympic medalist, as a matter of fact, William Gardner here on

00:41:12.300 The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:41:13.240 Such a font of wisdom and insight.

00:41:16.360 And I truly meant what I said at the end there, that the conservative movement and indeed

00:41:19.860 the country are better off thanks to his work.

00:41:22.320 If you haven't checked out any of his books, I really enjoyed The Great Divide, which was

00:41:26.640 one we, I wanted to get to it.

00:41:28.120 We just ran out of time talking about, you know, Gramsci and Rousseau and all that, but

00:41:31.640 it was talking about a lot of those first principle problems that I spoke about earlier with

00:41:36.520 basically the left and right just fundamentally not being able to agree on certain things.

00:41:42.160 And also the trouble with Canada and its update are very enduring.

00:41:46.060 So do check those out.

00:41:47.160 In the meantime, we've got to wrap things up there.

00:41:49.220 My thanks to you all for tuning into the show.

00:41:51.480 We'll talk to you soon here on The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:41:53.740 Thank you.

00:41:54.180 God bless and good day.

00:41:55.700 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:41:57.780 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - February 25, 2022

The future of conservatism in Canada (feat. William Gairdner)

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