Juno News - Uncancelling Canadian history

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:10.800 Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:16.280 But I'm going to geek out a little bit on the program today, as I've tried to make it clear every now and then when the opportunity arises, I am a bit of a history buff.

00:00:25.560 And in particular, in recent years, I've become a fond participant and student of Canadian history.

00:00:32.780 And I think it might be because I decided one day that I needed to know more about my own country and its foundations.

00:00:39.380 And it may be because I had a bit of a contrarian impulse. And when everyone started trying to cancel Canada, I said, well, hang on, let's go the other way with it and start learning more about it.

00:00:48.320 And when you study Canadian history, you actually learn a lot more than I think people tend to give Canada credit for about how instrumental it's been in a number of very key ways, such as contributing to the global abolition of slavery.

00:01:02.460 We can thank Lord Simcoe for that and contributing to the unleashing of responsible government across the British Empire.

00:01:12.740 All of these things that Canadians might not realize, and we never would if we malign our history and our historic figures.

00:01:21.520 And we're going to do next week a bit of a pre-Canada Day special in which we'll delve into some of these themes in a bit more detail.

00:01:28.680 And my guest today will be back for that panel discussion. So this is a bit of an appetizer in that sense.

00:01:34.380 But there's a new book out through the Aristotle Foundation called The 1867 Product, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.

00:01:43.760 It is edited by Mark Milkey and has a number of fantastic contributors in it, not the least of which is Mark himself.

00:01:50.780 People like Bruce Party, who was on this show just a couple of days ago, David Millard Haskell, John Robson, Peter Sean Taylor.

00:01:57.700 And I'm just naming a few that jump out off the page. There are many more there.

00:02:01.400 And I am pleased to have Mark Milkey with us here today. Mark, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.

00:02:07.880 Thank you for having me on, Andrew.

00:02:09.500 You know, it used to be that such a book, I think, would be utterly uncontroversial.

00:02:14.520 In fact, it might even be the kind of just based on the premise alone, the kind of, you know, standard government pamphlet that you get around Canada Day,

00:02:22.240 when governments have a bit of extra room in their budget and say, you know, here's a celebration of Canada.

00:02:26.560 But to do that now is subversive in many ways.

00:02:31.580 And I'm wondering when that became the case.

00:02:34.140 When did this argument that you're putting forward become not necessarily a controversial one, but a contentious one?

00:02:40.740 Well, probably the last five years.

00:02:43.080 But I think the core problem and the reason we decided to publish the 1867 project with 20 great authors, or at least 19, I'll exclude me.

00:02:52.480 But the 1867 project with authors even from India.

00:02:56.480 You know, we've got a fellow from Goa, India, an entrepreneur who wrote a chapter saying, Canada, stop canceling yourselves.

00:03:01.740 Stop attacking yourselves.

00:03:03.140 I think the core problem, though, is that weirdly, people today look back and have a utopian view of history.

00:03:11.160 They look to 1867 or 1920 or 1850 or 1950 and say, history wasn't perfect.

00:03:16.500 Therefore, we should cancel Canada in part or in whole.

00:03:19.680 That's a bit like looking at an oak tree with a diseased limb and going, there's a diseased limb.

00:03:24.420 Let's cut down the entire tree. 0.78

00:03:26.200 Why?

00:03:26.740 The oak tree provides shelter.

00:03:28.100 Canada as a civilization, as a country, has provided shelter to tens of millions of all sorts of people from around the world, starting 20,000 years ago before Canada was a blip in anyone's imagination with the first settlers, right?

00:03:40.620 People we now call indigenous and all the way to, you know, yesterday if someone arrives from Ukraine as a refugee.

00:03:46.560 So Canada is is a country that we should be proud of.

00:03:49.820 It doesn't mean there haven't been flaws, but you don't take down the oak tree of Canada because of, you know, a mistake in 1867 or 1950 or prejudice back then.

00:04:00.360 So I think there's a weird utopian approach to Canadian history these days where, again, people want to cancel the country.

00:04:06.580 Some people do if they see an imperfection.

00:04:09.380 And of course there are imperfections.

00:04:11.060 We're human beings.

00:04:11.800 To bring it into a current context, one of the great challenges that I see on this issue, and it's one that you tackle in your concluding chapter, I think it is, is the idea that to say there's a Canadian identity, to assert that there is an identity, let alone define what that is, becomes fraud.

00:04:29.760 And you have people like Justin Trudeau, and I would say a lot of modern progressives in this country that really shy away from the idea of having an identity and of distinguishing that there are Canadian values and Canadian ideals.

00:04:42.900 And I'm wondering if you could just expound a bit on your thoughts on that.

00:04:46.720 Sure.

00:04:47.080 Any country that is not a result of, how can I put this, that is a conscious, consciously created country, right?

00:04:56.300 France in 1789, Canada in 1867, the Americans in 1776, where you, in essence, you start and say, okay, we're going to create something here, or at least make it official.

00:05:09.740 This is, when you create a country like Canada, you actually need to unite around something, something positive, hopefully.

00:05:18.040 If you don't do that, then you can be a country that's based in ethnicity. 0.84

00:05:21.860 Some countries around the world still is.

00:05:23.560 So you have to be of a certain race, you have to be born there, that sort of thing. 0.99

00:05:27.440 But if you want to create a country that provides for free and flourishing culture and for free and flourishing people, you have to unite around good ideas.

00:05:35.460 And you have to be clear about what those ideas are.

00:05:37.860 So, I mean, to be more clear about this, I once wrote an article in the Globe and Mail, a column in the Globe and Mail several years back.

00:05:44.980 I don't know if they would publish something like this today, where I said, listen, I'm pro-immigration.

00:05:49.000 But there's a difference between admitting someone who, say, is a 30-year-old physician from Islamabad, who's female, who kind of gets the modern age, so to speak, versus maybe a 70-year-old from northwest Pakistan or northwest Afghanistan that thinks it's a sin for girls to dance.

00:06:05.480 And that's actually been a problem in that part of the world.

00:06:09.760 So you need to unite around good ideas.

00:06:12.080 In the case of Canada, the good ideas came from 19th century classic liberals who believed in treating individuals as individuals.

00:06:21.420 And they believed, and this is why they abolished slavery, for example.

00:06:24.680 They thought those who happen to have black skin color were every bit as equal with whites.

00:06:30.340 So we had and have an idea culture in Canada, and it needs to be renewed.

00:06:36.360 And it comes from classical liberalism in the case of the British.

00:06:38.600 It even comes from the French and their idea of liberty.

00:06:41.200 So that's what we need to unite around again.

00:06:43.820 And to say that we don't have ideas or ideals in Canada, as the prime minister did in late 2015, is simply nonsensical.

00:06:51.180 And, in fact, it's a recipe for disaster.

00:06:53.760 Because if everyone can have ideas that, in fact, are in opposition to each other, say, poor treatment of women if you come from certain cultures or views, well, that's not going to do very well in Canada.

00:07:07.600 That's not going to help Canadian women, for example. 1.00

00:07:09.780 So we better have liable ideas to unite around as a country.

00:07:12.920 Yeah, and to return to the immigration context for a moment, I mean, in my experience, and it's anecdotal, but I think it would bear out if you did a larger statistical study, it's oftentimes immigrants to Canada that are the most clear, I think, on what Canadian values are.

00:07:29.480 Because, you know, if you're someone who lives in some country that is not as developed, that doesn't have as much liberty, that doesn't have women's rights, gay rights, whatever the case is, and you're looking to anywhere in the world that you want to emigrate to, you're picking Canada, if you pick Canada, because you distinctly see something in Canada and in Canadian values that you would like your life to be and that you would like to become your identity.

00:07:53.300 And I find often it's sort of the progressivist view in Canada that doesn't realize when immigrants to Canada see in Canada.

00:08:03.480 Well, I've been told this again and again, and in fact, in the 1867 project, we have several chapters.

00:08:09.100 I referenced one earlier by Gaurav Jaswell from Goa, India.

00:08:13.500 I mean, the reason he wrote the chapter is because he sent his sons to Canada to go to university here.

00:08:18.380 They're still here.

00:08:19.520 And he discovered, though, that Canadians were starting to beat up on themselves.

00:08:23.600 And so he wrote this chapter precisely to say, listen, Canada is a wonderful country.

00:08:27.760 You should be proud of it.

00:08:29.420 You know, he's proud of being an Indian.

00:08:31.280 He loves much about his home country.

00:08:33.140 But he noticed this weird sort of attack on Canada and its history.

00:08:37.680 And he advises the opposite.

00:08:40.120 A colleague of mine, a former colleague of mine and I, wrote a chapter in the 1867 project about immigration and ideas.

00:08:47.100 And he, along with others, point out in the book, look, one of the reasons many immigrants come to Canada is to, you know, come to a place with the rule of law, with hopefully a stable government, hopefully a lack of corruption.

00:09:02.160 A good example of this, actually, is immigrants over the last 30 years, 40 years from Hong Kong, even before the regime in Beijing did what it's been doing now in the last couple of years to Hong Kong, there was always a fear that Hong Kong would lose its freedoms.

00:09:17.700 Those freedoms are exactly why Hong Kongers protested against the crackdown by Beijing.

00:09:24.160 It's exactly why there has been migration to Canada from Hong Kong and, in fact, China property, because they value the rule of law.

00:09:30.660 I was there 10 years ago.

00:09:31.920 And business people and politicians and civil servants, almost to a person, said there were three things they valued, the rule of law, including the British legal code, capitalism, and the anti-corruption efforts in Hong Kong, dating from the 1970s.

00:09:46.280 So they valued, in essence, the British colonial legacy.

00:09:49.160 That's what they were telling me.

00:09:50.640 Imagine people saying that in Canada today.

00:09:52.660 Well, a lot of immigrants come here precisely to escape a corrupt society.

00:09:56.940 They want opportunity.

00:09:57.880 They want the rule of law.

00:09:58.800 So the last thing we should be doing is downplaying those.

00:10:02.940 To talk about the history aspect here, I mean, one thing that I've always thought has been a tremendous flaw in any Western society is not knowing your history.

00:10:11.980 And, again, to go back to immigrants, people that have taken the Canadian citizenship test, I feel, often would do better than most Canadians if they were to do the same test, who have been born in Canada and are lifelong Canadians.

00:10:22.820 But I also think that knowledge of history in and of itself is not the be-all and end-all when you have this belief that everything in history and everyone in history needs to be recast based on this impossible standard and based on these modern litmus tests that are not realistic.

00:10:41.280 And I think, you know, even James Daschuk, who I think his work clearing the plains really laid the groundwork for declaring Canada a perpetrator of genocide, was a lot more nuanced than the debate that followed that and then the policy that Daschuk's work influenced and so on.

00:10:56.900 So we do seem to see this increasing, this decreasing nuance and this increasing hostility to Canadian history.

00:11:05.660 And I'm wondering how you break that because you can't educate your way out of this problem if people don't want to listen and if people have already decided that John A. MacDonald and Egerton Ryerson and Wilfrid Laurier are all villains.

00:11:18.880 Well, I think, again, the core problem is, you're right, it's not enough to have an understanding of history or to know your history.

00:11:25.600 It's a question of how you view it, I guess, and how you view a country.

00:11:31.180 If you look back, let me back up a moment.

00:11:34.180 A lot of people have utopian views these days about history.

00:11:37.420 So in the 20th century, the utopian project, one of them, was Marxism, where at least it was dead wrong about everything from human behavior to economics and the like.

00:11:47.840 Nonetheless, at least Marxists could argue they were looking ahead to create their perfect society, right?

00:11:52.000 They could potentially create it in the future.

00:11:54.100 That was their excuse.

00:11:56.160 But when you look into history and you expect history to be perfect, I mean, it's bizarre.

00:11:59.760 Why would you?

00:12:00.400 It's utopian.

00:12:01.600 First of all, history is done.

00:12:02.900 You can't rectify anything.

00:12:04.700 By definition, history is done.

00:12:06.700 But also, why would you think people in 1867 or now should be perfect?

00:12:11.460 You and I, Andrew, I mean, one day, 100 years from now, people will look at us and say, Andrew, Mark, how could you possibly believe X?

00:12:17.840 I mean, they say that now about me, in fairness.

00:12:19.600 Well, exactly.

00:12:20.900 But they, you know, none of us have an omniscient full view of everything that we do personally or, you know, in a society.

00:12:29.900 What's the exact proper act?

00:12:31.480 We do the best we can in most cases.

00:12:32.840 So I think it's a flawed view again.

00:12:34.860 The oak tree analogy is the best one I can come up with.

00:12:37.260 If you look at a tree and you see a diseased limb, you don't take down the tree.

00:12:40.620 We have people today that actually want to take down the oak tree that is Canada because before 1960, the diseased limb was we denied voting rights to indigenous Canadians unless they gave up their status.

00:12:53.280 Women didn't get the vote before 1920. 1.00

00:12:56.580 But one of the reasons we published the 1867 project with these 20 authors and a good chunk of that in the book is chapters on history about women, about indigenous peoples and the rest, is to say, listen, the point about history is in a liberal democracy anyway, you build on the sacrifices and successes of the past.

00:13:17.020 You don't deny the wrong things that have happened in the past.

00:13:19.440 But put yourself in 1920, I mean, the automobile just got started.

00:13:23.840 Canada is a rural country for the most part.

00:13:25.600 It's, you know, most people are in rural areas.

00:13:28.460 I mean, it's amazing, actually, that anyone in, you know, before the modern age, before 100 years ago, before the development of the automobile or anything else, was able to reform anything.

00:13:38.400 I mean, think about the problem for suffragists in a widely, you know, in a country like Canada.

00:13:44.240 I mean, the fact that they were able to get the vote, you know, where you just had newspapers and later on a little bit of radio long before TV, long before the Internet and only when the automobile was starting.

00:13:55.460 Think about how difficult it was to get reforms in, you know, before 100 years ago.

00:14:00.400 When you think about what people, most people, what their lives were like, they were poor, they were in the middle of nowhere as farmers.

00:14:06.600 I think actually we should appreciate how difficult it was to reform.

00:14:10.440 But the key thing is this as well.

00:14:12.240 Unlike, say, Joseph Stalin's, you know, Soviet Union or Lenin's Soviet Union or Chairman Mao's China, the ideas in the 19th century from classic liberals that today we might call small, c, conservative or libertarian, the worth of the individual,

00:14:25.480 not treating people as a member of their collective or tribe, the rule of law, capitalism, you know, open markets, all of this was what set the groundwork for a more successful country over time.

00:14:36.780 And in fact, admitting more people and giving more people rights because it became impossible, given the logic of individual rights of classical liberalism, not to give women the vote, not to give indigenous peoples the vote.

00:14:48.120 And so it was those ideas in the 19th century that they started, that we built upon, that others actually sacrificed to push forward.

00:14:54.400 That's the way to think about history.

00:14:56.300 It doesn't mean you ignore the bad stuff.

00:14:58.020 It's like, we were not the Soviet Union.

00:15:00.340 I mean, this is a question I always get about, for example, Winston Churchill, you know, because he said a few things here or there.

00:15:06.200 And it's like, listen, did Winston Churchill contribute to a free and flourishing world?

00:15:10.440 Yes or no?

00:15:11.280 And the answer is yes.

00:15:12.640 The original anti-fascist, you could say.

00:15:15.060 Well, exactly.

00:15:15.920 Well, Mahatma Gandhi, do you know that Mahatma Gandhi praised Hitler in 1938, 1939?

00:15:20.160 And I don't think you're, I can't remember the exact word, but the devil that people make you out to be.

00:15:25.900 And of course, he was wrong.

00:15:27.040 And he advised Jews to try and negotiate with the Nazis. 0.78

00:15:29.620 Bad, bad advice.

00:15:31.180 That doesn't mean, though, that Mahatma Gandhi was wrong to work for Indian independence.

00:15:36.300 The suffragists were eugenicists. 1.00

00:15:38.740 It doesn't mean they were wrong to work for the vote for women. 0.98

00:15:41.500 So if you look back at history and say, unless they have exactly my view today, we must abolish them, we must cancel them or somehow denigrate them.

00:15:49.380 No.

00:15:50.320 If they contributed to a free and flourishing society, which would be the standard I suggest, then you can start to appreciate that, at least in the case of the Anglosphere, we actually built on some very good ideas starting in the 18th and 19th century.

00:16:04.240 So that's, I think, the way to view history, I think, more smartly.

00:16:09.440 I'm curious, and I don't recall any chapters that dealt with this question, but I've always wondered about how Canada compares to other nations in this regard.

00:16:19.320 Because we had, just over two years ago, the infamous residential school unmarked grave announcement, which has triggered a lot of very, very nasty debates in some cases, very tense debates.

00:16:32.060 Now we have the government talking about potentially criminalizing what they call residential school denialism.

00:16:36.560 But all of that, we could have a full show on and probably should.

00:16:40.780 But at the time, the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill was lowered to half-mast, where it remained for months without really an end point in sight.

00:16:49.200 And it was just one day Justin Trudeau decided, okay, it's going up, and he gave some weird excuse for it.

00:16:54.140 But you look at other countries in the world that have a lot more demonstrable evil in their history.

00:16:58.840 Germany, which has, you know, less than three generations ago, the Holocaust, which has resulted in a profound level of national guilt.

00:17:05.940 You have the United States, which had slavery until later than the British Empire did.

00:17:11.880 And you have countries, I mean, just to use those two as an example,

00:17:16.180 they do not embrace the self-flagellation that we saw in Canada starting a couple of years ago.

00:17:24.140 And I'm wondering why that is.

00:17:26.500 I mean, do you have any insights on how other countries have dealt with pretty clear-cut injustices and atrocities in their past?

00:17:35.220 Well, there was a great book that came out some time ago now by Ian Baruma on the difference between Germany and Japan

00:17:40.700 and how they dealt with their wartime records, right?

00:17:43.640 And his basic conclusion was Germany did kind of finally acknowledge it and come to grips with it.

00:17:48.620 He argued Japan never did agree or disagree with Baruma on that.

00:17:53.240 But the United States, I think you're seeing some of the same attempts, though, in the United States to denigrate, again, their own history.

00:18:02.200 And, I mean, in comparison, yes, of course, Canada was ahead of the United States on abolishing slavery, for example.

00:18:07.780 I mean, it was pretty much abolished in the 1790s here.

00:18:10.200 At least new trade in slaves could not happen in Canada, thanks to Governor Simcoe.

00:18:15.240 And by 1820, it was pretty much a non-issue in Canada, long before the British Empire even abolished it in 1833.

00:18:24.040 But the other thing is this.

00:18:25.420 A proper understanding of history should make us more modest about all of our ancestors.

00:18:29.440 So let me be blunt.

00:18:30.580 If you're indigenous in Canada, the British actually, the last place they fought slavery around the world almost,

00:18:35.820 was in British Columbia during the colonial period.

00:18:40.080 There's plenty of examples and evidence that slavery was occurring in British Columbia before and after it became a province and joined Canada.

00:18:49.640 So Governor James Douglas in the 1850s is battling slavery in British Columbia.

00:18:54.420 It takes a much tougher line with British colonialists who engage in this.

00:18:58.440 And with indigenous folk in British Columbia, he has to kind of negotiate. 0.84

00:19:03.120 Sometimes he buys a slave to free a slave from a First Nation. 0.93

00:19:06.420 But this went all the way to the late 19th century.

00:19:10.080 And so the reason I mention this is because there's no perfectly good guys and bad guys in history for the most part.

00:19:17.780 I mean, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin accept it. 0.78

00:19:21.280 In most of human history, if we go back far enough in our own family tree or ancestral lineage and all of that,

00:19:26.800 we will find plenty of evil, you know, and so to look back and say, you know, my ancestors were pure and yours were evil.

00:19:35.880 And these days, it's the colonials are evil and the indigenous are all good. 1.00

00:19:39.140 That's actually really simplistic and naive.

00:19:41.600 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident, once said this,

00:19:46.240 the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

00:19:49.460 And what he meant by that is it's a mistake to say that person over there or that group over there is the problem.

00:19:55.540 And I'm the good person and my my tribe is, you know, pure.

00:19:59.560 No, no, that misunderstands it.

00:20:01.360 So I think the great sin today is the great sin that we've always had in human history is that we don't treat people as individuals.

00:20:07.240 And we're back into the soup again with, you know, that where people are pronounced guilty based on their ancestral lineage or color.

00:20:14.280 This is this is bizarre.

00:20:15.620 In any case, in the 1867 project, Chris Champion does a great job in one of the chapters, the longest chapter in the 1867 project of discussing the British colonial record in Canada and around the world.

00:20:27.300 Were there warts in it?

00:20:28.300 Of course.

00:20:29.140 But also, this is the British Empire that abolished slavery, that outlawed bride burning in India, Sati. 0.60

00:20:35.820 So it's a mixed record, but that's the human race.

00:20:39.520 One of the chapters that I found quite interesting, both for the substance of it, but also the meta aspects of it that I'll explain in a moment, was Lynn MacDonald, how a maker of Canada was framed, the unjust treatment of Egerton Ryerson.

00:20:54.640 Now, obviously, I had a couple of weeks ago Anne Kavoukian on the show, who's a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. 0.62

00:21:01.340 And I sort of joked that you can't call it what it actually is or historically has been, which is Ryerson University now.

00:21:06.980 This is where we saw this statue tumble down, the school quickly scurry and rename itself just in the last couple of years.

00:21:16.100 And I think Egerton Ryerson is, again, a figure that if you were to ask all the people who are pulling down the statue and spray painting around the grounds of the school what he did,

00:21:24.280 I don't know if a lot of people would know, because he's always been sort of one of the B-list of the founding fathers, I think, you know, next to the McDonald's and the Cartiers.

00:21:34.000 But he is one of the reasons we have public education in Ontario and by extension in Canada.

00:21:40.360 So, again, when you talk about, you know, have you contributed to a free and flourishing society?

00:21:44.500 Absolutely, he has.

00:21:46.080 And the thing about it, though, that I found interesting in McDonald's account is that she is a former New Democrat member of Parliament.

00:21:53.180 So she's coming at this from the political left and often, certainly when we talk about cancel culture, it tends to be construed as a right versus left battle.

00:22:03.520 And I'm curious if you think that Lynn McDonald is an outlier on the left or if you think that there is actually a broader coalition around your thesis that extends on both sides politically.

00:22:14.660 Well, I can only guess, but Lynn McDonald's chapter in the 1867 project, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Canceled, her chapter in the book does a great job of explaining Ryerson, right, and his history and how, frankly, he was close to and friends with and lived with the Ojibwe, for example, and they cherished him.

00:22:33.860 And so, again, to take a simplistic view of history, that indigenous good, colonialist bad, or vice versa, if you go back 50 years, right, to a John Wayne movie, which is simplistic in reverse, you know, to take simplistic views of history is to really miss the full, you know, breadth and depth of human beings and their age and ours.

00:22:54.240 It's hard to say, you know, if the Canadian progressive left, as they like to think of themselves, you know, is also waking up to the problems of cancer culture.

00:23:01.580 I think so. I mean, I can give you a story.

00:23:03.960 I was on an airplane a couple of months ago with an Air Canada pilot who said his very left wing aunt from Surrey, British Columbia, and all that would represent a teacher in British Columbia, who often are very left wing and the propaganda they get from their teachers union is very left wing, was very concerned about what was being taught in the schools these days.

00:23:21.300 And he shook his head. So even his left wing NDP voting woke aunt, counterculture hippie aunt, has some concerns about what's going on in the schools these days. 0.96

00:23:30.680 I suspect most Canadians have a concern. And that's another reason we decided to write the 1867 project, me and 19 other authors, because it's important to think about Canadian history and build on these sacrifices and successes of past generations, instead of taking some simplistic utopian view,

00:23:48.760 that frankly does a disservice to their sacrifice. One of the problems, Andrew, actually, we talk about, you know, people taking a kind of a, you know, self righteous approach to this these days, or virtue signaling, you know what it actually is, it's a virtue preening, we have people these days, that look back, and they see a horrible thing that happened, I think, Oh, I would have changed that right away, as if they would have had the maybe courage to, you know, face up to the Nazis in 1935, a la Winston Churchill.

00:24:17.760 Winston Churchill, or if they would have fought for suffrage, you know, decades before it happened. You know, most people are followers. And in fact, it is the generations that fought for suffrage for the vote for indigenous Canadians, it is those who fought in World War Two and before and sacrificed blood and treasure that contributed to the modern day Canada. And we should appreciate that. And today, though, you get people that look back and think they would have been at the front of the parade. I'm not so sure. And it's a form of moral preening. And they're immodest actually about themselves. Because most

00:24:47.740 people are followers. And so we should actually treasure and appreciate those in Canadian history, that did push ahead the reforms. And that would be nice if we could do that, say on July 1, this year, and every other year, instead of letting the people who want to cancel Canada and Canada Day dominate the headlines.

00:25:35.740 And even later in life becomes one of Canada's heroes for his contributions to the Canadian story.

00:25:40.740 And I fear that now it's entirely reversed, where, you know, there's a, you know, yes, you get appreciated a little bit later on in life. But then if you exist in memory longer than that, you start going the other way. And I don't know how much we will be able to rebuild that. And I guess I'll ask you on that. Do you think that names that have been tarnished as part of this wave of revisionism can be untarnished?

00:26:06.740 Untarnished? Or do you feel that once those sort of identities, these new identities are cemented, it's difficult to take them back or to add that needed nuance?

00:26:14.740 Well, I think, I think, again, a deeper understanding of history shows that things, you know, can kind of go in cycles. And I think now we're in the cycle where a lot of the chattering classes, for whatever reason, and they're varied everything from critical theory, which, you know, Bruce Party talks about at the beginning of the 1867 project, to some utopian view of history, you know, to some dissatisfaction with the colonial era from those who didn't always benefit during it, you know, and some that did.

00:26:43.740 For all those reasons, I think we're in this weird era, where again, yes, it's impossible to look at people in history as human beings, with good and bad. Instead, we're, you know, we're trying to wipe the slate clean and start from year zero, at least some people are, you know, look, I think it's possible to renew respect, for again, the sacrifices of past generations and understand what they were going through.

00:27:06.740 But again, also to hopefully grasp onto the notion that the ideas that got us to where we are today, mostly a free and flourishing society, you know, if you compare Canada in 1920 to Lenin Soviet Union, or Canada in 1960, when we gave indigenous people the vote, rightly, though late, to China, China under Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

00:27:26.740 If you compare again, I think, especially the Anglosphere, which glommed on to the ideas of liberty, almost before anyone else in the world, and the reasons for that, I think that's possible to renew. And again, we better renew that because as I point out at the end of the book, the 1867 project, Canada is now an agglomeration of people from all over the world, all sorts of identities.

00:27:49.740 And you can't unite people around their ethnic identity, we don't have one ethnic identity anymore in Canada, if we ever did. What you need to unite around people are good ideas. And good ideas are the rights of the individual, not the collective. So, you know, and sub, you know, sub to that, you know, the rights of women, for example, or on and on. So you want to unite people around good ideas, and you're better, otherwise, you end up in a train wreck of colliding collectives. And actually, interestingly enough, and I write about this in the 1867 project in the end chapter.

00:28:19.740 Pierre Trudeau, of all people got this, unlike his son, Pierre Trudeau, and I quote him in the 1867 project, talks about how dangerous it is to prefer the collective over the individual. Now, he was a collectivist in terms of the economy, he believed government should have more powers. But he, but there's a clear distinction in Trudeau's mind. He wants people be treated as individuals equally before the law and a policy. It's why he was he hated ethno separatists in Quebec, because he thought they were dangerous. They were collectives. And he says, look, collectives eventually

00:28:49.740 collide and you end up with with civil strife and civil war. And so he emphasizes again, and again, the rights of the individual as an individual law and policy. And he also says they precede the state that you as an individual, your rights don't come from the state, you in essence, you lend them to the state, so they can get some things done, you know, taxes all for some common public good that can only be done through taxation, that sort of thing. But you lend your rights to the state, they don't come to you from the state. And that's an important

00:29:19.740 distinction. And this is Pierre Trudeau talking. So I quote him at length in the 1867 project, precisely because he understood the value of the individual in a way that modern politicians and a lot of our chattering classes today don't.

00:29:31.740 There are of the people who generally tend towards canceling Canadian history, I think two distinct types. There's one that's the, I'm going to go up and spray paint this statue and tear it down. And then there are others that say, no, no, no, I don't want to erase history. I just want to move the statue to a museum. I want to take the name off this place so we can better contextualize it. And I'm wondering where you think, just as we conclude here, we should land on celebrating inventions.

00:30:01.720 Figures. Because, you know, you could argue that, look, if you're going to offer the context and say, we've got to learn the bad and learn the good, that that doesn't necessarily mean we have to celebrate, which would generally speaking, confer a certain endorsement to a figure. And that's one where we are continuing to see names being stripped off schools. In my city, there used to be a John A. McDonald school. And now that's been changed. But somehow we have like the Louise Arbor school named after some Supreme Court justice in Canada.

00:30:29.840 So how should we deal with that question of celebration versus acknowledgement?

00:30:36.840 Well, and often people, even when they move statues into a museum or talk about, again, you know, the British, say, or early Canadian founders, their contextualization is still very simplistic, right? That era bad, us good, right? You know, very black and white. So, again, I think the key question is, did they contribute to human freedom and flourishing?

00:30:57.600 You know, John A. McDonald wasn't perfect. But actually, as Greg Piazatsky in the 1867 project in a chapter points out, look, this is a politician who early on actually provided famine relief over the objections of the liberals who wanted less.

00:31:12.540 He set up the Northwest Mounted Police precisely to protect the first settlers, those who came across the Bering Strait or their ancestors 20,000 years ago from later settlers.

00:31:21.980 So Greg Piazatsky in the book argues that, look, we need to rethink this. Look, I think I think we can appreciate, again, those in the past as a mixture of good and bad and bad and good, as opposed to demonizing them and not understanding not only the limited choices they had, but more positively, again, in the Angus for at least.

00:31:48.040 That a lot of the ideas that germinated in the 17th, 18th, 19th century of individual liberty and the rest, we only were able to come a cropper with them, you know, in the 1950s and 1960s, really in Canada, because those ideas existed.

00:32:01.500 But the 19th century held them. It's why they abolished slavery. It's why they worked towards suffrage for women.

00:32:06.620 It's why they refused in the Anglosphere, you know, why Winston Churchill in World War Two refused to allow the Americans to segregate troops in Great Britain, because they had this notion that the individual was worth something.

00:32:18.020 We need to get back to that. And perhaps that's how we not judge history, but understand history.

00:32:22.480 So I think, I think actually full context is necessary. I just don't think that many of the woke folk these days are providing that very well. And so that's one of the reasons why we came up with the 1867 project.

00:32:36.320 The book, as Mark has so made, so, so dedicatedly, dedicatedly made sure to tell you, which you should definitely know, the 1867 project, it is why Canada should be cherished, not cancelled.

00:32:48.900 And I should say, we've been focusing, because of my own indulgence here, on the history aspect, but there's a lot in terms of contemporary themes as well.

00:32:57.840 Addressing, tackling, critical theory, also systemic racism. Matt Lau has a great chapter on that, which I have to dig into again.

00:33:05.820 So it's a great book, and I would encourage you to read it. Mark is going to be back next week for a more well-rounded discussion with some other voices on this as we lead into Canada Day.

00:33:15.540 But this was great. Mark Milkey, thanks so much for coming on today, and great work on editing this through the Aristotle Foundation. Good to talk to you.

00:33:23.560 Thank you, Andrew, and the book is available on Amazon.

00:33:26.540 All right, well, do check it out. We will be back next week with more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:33:32.200 This is the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North. Thank you, God bless, and have a great weekend.

00:33:36.740 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:33:45.540 True North at www.tnc.news.com.

Juno News - June 23, 2023

Uncancelling Canadian history

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