00:00:00.000Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:13.080Coming up, a wide-ranging conversation with William Gairdner about conservatism, libertarianism, socialism, Marxisms, all the isms you could imagine, and more.
00:00:24.000The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:30.000Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North. You're listening to Canada's most irreverent talk show.
00:00:36.660And as you've no doubt been aware by now, we do things a little bit different on the Friday show.
00:00:41.000We tend to assemble a crack team of panelists to tackle some of the big issues of our time.
00:00:46.200And occasionally we come across someone who can hold up the weight of an entire panel all by themselves.
00:00:51.520And William Gairdner is certainly one of those people. Legendary author and conservative intellectual in Canada.
00:00:58.480He 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.
00:01:10.440And he joins me on the line now, Dr. William Gairdner.
00:01:13.360Bill, it's good to talk to you. Thanks very much for coming on today.
00:01:17.360Now, 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?
00:01:33.900Oh, 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.
00:01:48.520And I say, I feel like a man who's been standing on a rock in a leftward drifting sea.
00:01:55.720And in the distance, in the fog, I see ships drifting to the left.
00:02:00.940And I hear voices on deck. And you know what they're saying?
00:02:04.160They're saying, look, look, there's a man out there drifting to the right.
00:02:07.220You see, but I haven't moved like an inch from the fundamental positions that I thought were worth arguing for, defending and debating.
00:02:18.760But the country has moved a lot. It's become more somnolent, more sleepy, more left-oriented, more accepting.
00:02:26.700And we see it, especially with this COVID thing, more accepting of statism, government power and rule, more passive people.
00:04:49.320He 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.
00:05:02.020But after a while, he began to realize that it might be easier because it was already broken up into provinces.
00:05:07.900And 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.
00:05:21.600And, of course, the Trump card he had in mind was his Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
00:05:25.600And 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.
00:06:13.060In 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.
00:06:23.120Except the problem is, for Canadians, the U.S. Constitution reasserts the supremacy of the individual.
00:06:29.940Whereas the Canadian Constitution does not do that.
00:06:33.180I'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.
00:06:52.200A 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?
00:07:10.880I 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.
00:07:24.060There are things that the government can't do to you.
00:07:27.160Whereas the emphasis, and that was feared when it started in 1982, of the Canadian Charter is positive rights.
00:07:35.240Here's what the government is going to do to you, or is allowed to do to you.
00:07:38.940For example, equalization payments amongst the provinces, that's something that got written into the Charter.
00:07:45.860It'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.
00:07:58.940It is very statist from that point of view, without being specifically socialistic.
00:08:06.260I mean, in a socialist country, the government kind of owns everything, you know, and gives dictation from the top.
00:08:13.380In 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.
00:08:22.300I actually argue, and I have dear friends who tell me, we need to go back to classical liberalism.
00:08:32.480I 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.
00:08:45.620And all that Lockean stuff, and even the Burkian stuff is gone.
00:08:49.220We 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.
00:08:57.600We're living in an era of libertarian socialism.
00:09:05.340This 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.
00:09:19.660Well, liberalism has a foundation in liberty, right?
00:09:24.680Egalitarianism has a foundation in equality.
00:09:28.100The more liberal we became, the more unequal we became.
00:09:31.300We developed underclasses of poor people that were not going away.
00:09:35.620So 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.
00:09:48.520So inevitably, we ended up in a kind of conundrum.
00:09:52.580What were we going to do about telling people that we had a classical liberal society with, in fact, all these inequalities going on?
00:10:02.320So what theorists decided to do was to split the body politic into two bodies.
00:10:08.140We'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.
00:10:18.180So the body politic was split into two bodies, private body and public body.
00:10:23.660And that's what Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms is really all about.
00:10:28.400For example, you have rights to, you have gay rights, you have divorce rights, you have drug rights, you have abortion rights.
00:10:34.460You have all kinds of individual rights that have to do with you as an individual and your body, you know, your physical rights.
00:10:41.580But 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.
00:10:58.400Canada is now a libertarian socialist nation.
00:11:00.640It's neither perfect libertarianism nor perfect socialism, far from it.
00:11:05.580But 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.
00:11:26.900Give them their bodily freedoms and all those things that they want to indulge in, right?
00:11:31.800But keep them unified with top-down policy coast to coast from the top.
00:11:36.480I would challenge that slightly, and perhaps we're agreeing here fundamentally, and perhaps it's just semantics on my part.
00:11:44.500But I don't think there is that strong of a libertarian foothold in Canada right now.
00:11:50.560My 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.
00:12:02.400And we've seen this in the last couple of years with a number of the COVID lockdown measures.
00:12:06.620The 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.
00:12:16.600Your libertarianism doesn't extend to not getting vaccinated.
00:12:20.340Your libertarianism doesn't protect you against a lot of these lockdowns.
00:12:24.120And it seems then like in a lot of ways it's a very illusory individual liberty that we've upheld.
00:12:29.680Well, it seems illusory when you spell it out like that.
00:15:23.940Young married couples get to buy cheap newlywed housing.
00:15:28.980In some of those buildings, by the way, there's apartments with no dining room.
00:15:34.780You know, they have a common dining room.
00:15:37.020Everybody comes into the common dining room to eat.
00:15:39.600Kind of like in university, you know, when you go from your residence to the mess hall.
00:15:45.080They push you together because they don't want the family ideal to be strengthened in Sweden.
00:15:50.800See, their whole idea was to break it down because it created differences which flew in the face
00:15:56.280of their socialist egalitarian ideology, which is that all citizens should be the same, do the same, and be treated the same.
00:16:04.460We want all women to leave the home, take their kids to government daycare, go get their jobs, support themselves independently from their husbands,
00:16:13.500husbands, or whoever they happen to be living this.
00:16:15.960I can't say husbands, by the way, because marriage is shot in Sweden.
00:16:20.580So they don't even talk about divorce anymore.
00:16:33.320So they just, statistically speaking, they talk about the rate of couple dissolution, which, by the way, happens to be very high over there.
00:16:40.480It's almost as if, well, you get tired of your partner.
00:18:37.260It has turned out through honest studies of all this huge revolutionary change in the kind of public psyche in Sweden.
00:18:45.680That 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.
00:19:19.580So they've been doing that for 45, 50 years now.
00:19:22.440But the Nordic Paradox is that the more that they equalize the sexes in the Scandinavian countries, get this, the more different they become.
00:19:31.720In other words, if you equalize all the policies and the goodies that they get, they decide, oh, well, this is great.
00:19:37.740I'm getting all this free stuff or whatever.
00:20:45.640And 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,
00:20:55.200they 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.
00:21:04.680Now, 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.
00:21:12.000But they gravitate towards the ones that we tend to view as norms for a reason.
00:21:17.600So why does that persist then, I guess?
00:21:20.940Well, I'll tell you, it persists from the politics of envy, which really has always been part of human societies.
00:21:28.000But it really got a kick, and it was made kind of politically official with Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto.
00:21:36.740In that book, well, by the way, I'd like to go back, but we don't have time.
00:21:44.520In the Republic, he outlined his plan for the totalitarian society in which no parent should know his child, nor child his parents.
00:21:53.880The children would be taken away from the parents and raised by the state.
00:21:58.420The women would all be held in common by the men.
00:22:01.000You could have sex with anybody you wanted, right?
00:22:03.840In 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.
00:22:22.120So the Republic was the kind of template for this going forward.
00:22:30.720In 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.
00:22:43.680He said, he said, I thought I was a child of Plato's Republic.
00:22:58.280He's a communist, but also the abolition of the natural family.
00:23:02.220We have to get rid of the natural family.
00:23:03.960And 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.
00:23:17.500And one of the reasons is what you're just pointing to, which is that people do express natural likes and dislikes by Marx.
00:23:25.540So Marx thought, I'm going to get rid of this, right?
00:23:28.660So 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.
00:23:45.360There's always an oppressor class and an oppressed class.
00:23:48.560If 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.
00:24:04.220We've got to persuade everybody that the world is the way it is through oppression.
00:24:08.180And 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.
00:24:22.880I don't like to use the word Marxism, but that's kind of where it got its big push in the 19th century.
00:24:28.800I don't like to use it because most people don't know what it is.
00:24:31.540I've never read a word of Marx and, you know, why do that?
00:24:34.420But the basic theme of his work was that you are a victim.
00:24:38.960You always have oppressors and victims wherever you look.
00:24:43.060And so the way to get the perfect society is to get rid of the oppressors.
00:24:47.000And that's what communism was all about, which he referred to, by the way, and described as the perfect democracy.
00:24:53.140One 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.
00:25:07.220We see this now when it comes to the vaccines for children.
00:25:10.880A 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.
00:25:51.720Now, these are very, very strong feelings, and Plato's complaint about the family was that the private family creates human difference.
00:25:59.460And it's difference, of course, that egalitarians want to get rid of.
00:26:02.760They 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.
00:26:12.100And, of course, radical leftists make a joke about all this.
00:26:15.960I remember the funny line, actually, that some French guy came up with, I don't know, 50 years ago.
00:26:22.760He said, I know you people, you freedom lovers.
00:26:25.080He 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.
00:26:33.140But his point was, you know, your freedom doesn't apply to everybody equally, because they have different conditions in life.
00:26:46.420That's what modern radical feminists are doing.
00:26:48.740They want to get rid of the conditions of traditional marriage, so-called patriarchy, the natural family, and the really radical ones.
00:26:56.480And 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.
00:27:11.440You 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.
00:27:31.660Now, this was not for the true, what I call the truly needy, who maybe we should be helping.
00:27:38.740So, 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.
00:27:47.320So, I got really upset with this, and I wrote a letter to Mulroney, and I said, you're too pink.
00:27:53.340If you don't get more blue, you're not going to see any more of my green, you know, my money donations.
00:28:00.600So, anyway, that ended up in the Globe and Mail somehow.
00:28:04.700Well, 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.
00:28:14.160Yeah, yeah, and her right to free daycare, see, the word right, you know.
00:28:19.180Now, by the way, our own charter, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, you do not see the word obligation in that charter.
00:28:25.420The word duty doesn't appear anywhere.
00:28:27.120And 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.
00:28:40.020Like over the French declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, there was huge fuss.
00:28:45.360They had a huge vote on this thing should contain obligations.
00:28:49.980People have obligations too, and not just rights.
00:28:52.320And it got voted down in a only slightly lopsided vote among a thousand of the people voting on this thing in the French situation.
00:29:14.460I 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.
00:29:28.140You, in the time we've been chatting, have cited Rousseau, Plato, Machiavelli, a number of books.
00:29:34.340I'm going to add to the reading list once we get off the call here.
00:29:37.180But 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.
00:29:47.260I 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.
00:30:00.760So 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?
00:30:10.040Well, 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.
00:30:21.220Sometimes 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.
00:30:32.020And I said, no, they're not bad people.
00:30:34.380I said, they're good people with bad ideas.
00:30:37.720And your job is to change their ideas.
00:30:40.720And 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.
00:30:46.520You 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.
00:30:57.520Most of them couldn't even define what a true liberal is.
00:31:00.600But anyway, that's what I think is the important thing for conservatives to do.
00:31:05.220And 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.
00:31:11.800And 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.
00:31:19.440So 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,
00:31:32.740And then I bought your books and, you know, and so on.
00:31:35.020And 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.
00:31:47.180And so if my books can do that, I'm happy.
00:32:29.400It's because the left is very clever at, I'll tell you a story about this in a moment.
00:32:33.980It's very clever at seizing the tools of leftism, radio, the universities, the lower schools, the teachers' colleges, all these institutions.
00:32:47.720It's like when Gramsci, the Italian communist, when he was in jail, he wrote his prison notebooks.
00:32:53.720And 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.
00:32:59.420But in that book somewhere, there's this business about the long march through the institutions.
00:33:04.680Well, his notion was, we're not going to go to war again to win communism, you know.
00:33:09.020We're going to change the institutions.
00:33:11.480And that began when I was at Stanford.
00:33:57.200So when I got to Stanford in 65, I was still running for Canada.
00:34:01.400And 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.
00:34:17.100That 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.
00:34:38.080And at the time, there was a professor there of American literature.
00:34:42.300I enrolled in his course because he wrote a good book on American literature.
00:34:46.060And I took a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy and all that.
00:34:49.580And 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.
00:35:38.240You know, the Palo Alto, which is the town that Stanford's in, the Palo Alto radio station, the Stanford radio station, the Stanford newspaper.
00:35:47.240Everything was just it was like everything was burning because of the news that William Buckley, this horrible conservative thinker, was coming to Stanford.