00:00:00.000Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:10.800Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:16.280But 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.
00:00:25.560And in particular, in recent years, I've become a fond participant and student of Canadian history.
00:00:32.780And I think it might be because I decided one day that I needed to know more about my own country and its foundations.
00:00:39.380And 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.
00:00:48.320And 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.
00:01:02.460We can thank Lord Simcoe for that and contributing to the unleashing of responsible government across the British Empire.
00:01:12.740All of these things that Canadians might not realize, and we never would if we malign our history and our historic figures.
00:01:21.520And 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.
00:01:28.680And my guest today will be back for that panel discussion. So this is a bit of an appetizer in that sense.
00:01:34.380But there's a new book out through the Aristotle Foundation called The 1867 Product, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.
00:01:43.760It is edited by Mark Milkey and has a number of fantastic contributors in it, not the least of which is Mark himself.
00:01:50.780People like Bruce Party, who was on this show just a couple of days ago, David Millard Haskell, John Robson, Peter Sean Taylor.
00:01:57.700And I'm just naming a few that jump out off the page. There are many more there.
00:02:01.400And I am pleased to have Mark Milkey with us here today. Mark, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:02:09.500You know, it used to be that such a book, I think, would be utterly uncontroversial.
00:02:14.520In 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,
00:02:22.240when governments have a bit of extra room in their budget and say, you know, here's a celebration of Canada.
00:02:26.560But to do that now is subversive in many ways.
00:02:31.580And I'm wondering when that became the case.
00:02:34.140When did this argument that you're putting forward become not necessarily a controversial one, but a contentious one?
00:03:28.100Canada 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?
00:03:40.620People we now call indigenous and all the way to, you know, yesterday if someone arrives from Ukraine as a refugee.
00:03:46.560So Canada is is a country that we should be proud of.
00:03:49.820It 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.
00:04:00.360So I think there's a weird utopian approach to Canadian history these days where, again, people want to cancel the country.
00:04:06.580Some people do if they see an imperfection.
00:04:09.380And of course there are imperfections.
00:04:11.800To 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.
00:04:29.760And 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.
00:04:42.900And I'm wondering if you could just expound a bit on your thoughts on that.
00:04:47.080Any country that is not a result of, how can I put this, that is a conscious, consciously created country, right?
00:04:56.300France 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.
00:05:09.740This is, when you create a country like Canada, you actually need to unite around something, something positive, hopefully.
00:05:18.040If you don't do that, then you can be a country that's based in ethnicity.
00:05:21.860Some countries around the world still is.
00:05:23.560So you have to be of a certain race, you have to be born there, that sort of thing.
00:05:27.440But 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.
00:05:35.460And you have to be clear about what those ideas are.
00:05:37.860So, 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.
00:05:44.980I don't know if they would publish something like this today, where I said, listen, I'm pro-immigration.
00:05:49.000But 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.
00:06:05.480And that's actually been a problem in that part of the world.
00:06:09.760So you need to unite around good ideas.
00:06:12.080In the case of Canada, the good ideas came from 19th century classic liberals who believed in treating individuals as individuals.
00:06:21.420And they believed, and this is why they abolished slavery, for example.
00:06:24.680They thought those who happen to have black skin color were every bit as equal with whites.
00:06:30.340So we had and have an idea culture in Canada, and it needs to be renewed.
00:06:36.360And it comes from classical liberalism in the case of the British.
00:06:38.600It even comes from the French and their idea of liberty.
00:06:41.200So that's what we need to unite around again.
00:06:43.820And to say that we don't have ideas or ideals in Canada, as the prime minister did in late 2015, is simply nonsensical.
00:06:51.180And, in fact, it's a recipe for disaster.
00:06:53.760Because 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.
00:07:07.600That's not going to help Canadian women, for example.
00:07:09.780So we better have liable ideas to unite around as a country.
00:07:12.920Yeah, 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.
00:07:29.480Because, 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.
00:07:53.300And I find often it's sort of the progressivist view in Canada that doesn't realize when immigrants to Canada see in Canada.
00:08:03.480Well, I've been told this again and again, and in fact, in the 1867 project, we have several chapters.
00:08:09.100I referenced one earlier by Gaurav Jaswell from Goa, India.
00:08:13.500I mean, the reason he wrote the chapter is because he sent his sons to Canada to go to university here.
00:08:40.120A colleague of mine, a former colleague of mine and I, wrote a chapter in the 1867 project about immigration and ideas.
00:08:47.100And 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.
00:09:02.160A 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.
00:09:17.700Those freedoms are exactly why Hong Kongers protested against the crackdown by Beijing.
00:09:24.160It's exactly why there has been migration to Canada from Hong Kong and, in fact, China property, because they value the rule of law.
00:09:31.920And 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.
00:09:46.280So they valued, in essence, the British colonial legacy.
00:09:58.800So the last thing we should be doing is downplaying those.
00:10:02.940To 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.
00:10:11.980And, 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.
00:10:22.820But 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.
00:10:41.280And 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.
00:10:56.900So we do seem to see this increasing, this decreasing nuance and this increasing hostility to Canadian history.
00:11:05.660And 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.
00:11:18.880Well, 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.
00:11:25.600It's a question of how you view it, I guess, and how you view a country.
00:11:31.180If you look back, let me back up a moment.
00:11:34.180A lot of people have utopian views these days about history.
00:11:37.420So 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.
00:11:47.840Nonetheless, at least Marxists could argue they were looking ahead to create their perfect society, right?
00:11:52.000They could potentially create it in the future.
00:12:34.860The oak tree analogy is the best one I can come up with.
00:12:37.260If you look at a tree and you see a diseased limb, you don't take down the tree.
00:12:40.620We 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.
00:12:53.280Women didn't get the vote before 1920.
00:12:56.580But 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.
00:13:17.020You don't deny the wrong things that have happened in the past.
00:13:19.440But put yourself in 1920, I mean, the automobile just got started.
00:13:23.840Canada is a rural country for the most part.
00:13:25.600It's, you know, most people are in rural areas.
00:13:28.460I 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.
00:13:38.400I mean, think about the problem for suffragists in a widely, you know, in a country like Canada.
00:13:44.240I 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.
00:13:55.460Think about how difficult it was to get reforms in, you know, before 100 years ago.
00:14:00.400When you think about what people, most people, what their lives were like, they were poor, they were in the middle of nowhere as farmers.
00:14:06.600I think actually we should appreciate how difficult it was to reform.
00:14:12.240Unlike, 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,
00:14:25.480not 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.
00:14:36.780And 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.
00:14:48.120And so it was those ideas in the 19th century that they started, that we built upon, that others actually sacrificed to push forward.
00:14:54.400That's the way to think about history.
00:14:56.300It doesn't mean you ignore the bad stuff.
00:14:58.020It's like, we were not the Soviet Union.
00:15:00.340I mean, this is a question I always get about, for example, Winston Churchill, you know, because he said a few things here or there.
00:15:06.200And it's like, listen, did Winston Churchill contribute to a free and flourishing world?
00:15:38.740It doesn't mean they were wrong to work for the vote for women.
00:15:41.500So 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.
00:15:50.320If 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.
00:16:04.240So that's, I think, the way to view history, I think, more smartly.
00:16:09.440I'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.
00:16:19.320Because 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.
00:16:32.060Now we have the government talking about potentially criminalizing what they call residential school denialism.
00:16:36.560But all of that, we could have a full show on and probably should.
00:16:40.780But 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.
00:16:49.200And it was just one day Justin Trudeau decided, okay, it's going up, and he gave some weird excuse for it.
00:16:54.140But you look at other countries in the world that have a lot more demonstrable evil in their history.
00:16:58.840Germany, which has, you know, less than three generations ago, the Holocaust, which has resulted in a profound level of national guilt.
00:17:05.940You have the United States, which had slavery until later than the British Empire did.
00:17:11.880And you have countries, I mean, just to use those two as an example,
00:17:16.180they do not embrace the self-flagellation that we saw in Canada starting a couple of years ago.
00:17:26.500I mean, do you have any insights on how other countries have dealt with pretty clear-cut injustices and atrocities in their past?
00:17:35.220Well, there was a great book that came out some time ago now by Ian Baruma on the difference between Germany and Japan
00:17:40.700and how they dealt with their wartime records, right?
00:17:43.640And his basic conclusion was Germany did kind of finally acknowledge it and come to grips with it.
00:17:48.620He argued Japan never did agree or disagree with Baruma on that.
00:17:53.240But the United States, I think you're seeing some of the same attempts, though, in the United States to denigrate, again, their own history.
00:18:02.200And, I mean, in comparison, yes, of course, Canada was ahead of the United States on abolishing slavery, for example.
00:18:07.780I mean, it was pretty much abolished in the 1790s here.
00:18:10.200At least new trade in slaves could not happen in Canada, thanks to Governor Simcoe.
00:18:15.240And by 1820, it was pretty much a non-issue in Canada, long before the British Empire even abolished it in 1833.
00:18:30.580If you're indigenous in Canada, the British actually, the last place they fought slavery around the world almost,
00:18:35.820was in British Columbia during the colonial period.
00:18:40.080There's plenty of examples and evidence that slavery was occurring in British Columbia before and after it became a province and joined Canada.
00:18:49.640So Governor James Douglas in the 1850s is battling slavery in British Columbia.
00:18:54.420It takes a much tougher line with British colonialists who engage in this.
00:18:58.440And with indigenous folk in British Columbia, he has to kind of negotiate.
00:19:03.120Sometimes he buys a slave to free a slave from a First Nation.
00:19:06.420But this went all the way to the late 19th century.
00:19:10.080And so the reason I mention this is because there's no perfectly good guys and bad guys in history for the most part.
00:19:17.780I mean, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin accept it.
00:19:21.280In most of human history, if we go back far enough in our own family tree or ancestral lineage and all of that,
00:19:26.800we will find plenty of evil, you know, and so to look back and say, you know, my ancestors were pure and yours were evil.
00:19:35.880And these days, it's the colonials are evil and the indigenous are all good.
00:19:39.140That's actually really simplistic and naive.
00:19:41.600Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident, once said this,
00:19:46.240the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
00:19:49.460And what he meant by that is it's a mistake to say that person over there or that group over there is the problem.
00:19:55.540And I'm the good person and my my tribe is, you know, pure.
00:20:15.620In 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.
00:20:29.140But also, this is the British Empire that abolished slavery, that outlawed bride burning in India, Sati.
00:20:35.820So it's a mixed record, but that's the human race.
00:20:39.520One 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.
00:20:54.640Now, obviously, I had a couple of weeks ago Anne Kavoukian on the show, who's a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University.
00:21:01.340And I sort of joked that you can't call it what it actually is or historically has been, which is Ryerson University now.
00:21:06.980This is where we saw this statue tumble down, the school quickly scurry and rename itself just in the last couple of years.
00:21:16.100And 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,
00:21:24.280I 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.
00:21:34.000But he is one of the reasons we have public education in Ontario and by extension in Canada.
00:21:40.360So, again, when you talk about, you know, have you contributed to a free and flourishing society?
00:21:46.080And the thing about it, though, that I found interesting in McDonald's account is that she is a former New Democrat member of Parliament.
00:21:53.180So 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.
00:22:03.520And 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.
00:22:14.660Well, 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.
00:22:33.860And 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.
00:22:54.240It'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.
00:23:01.580I think so. I mean, I can give you a story.
00:23:03.960I 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.
00:23:21.300And 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.
00:23:30.680I 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,
00:23:48.760that 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.
00:24:17.760Winston 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
00:24:47.740people 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.
00:25:35.740And even later in life becomes one of Canada's heroes for his contributions to the Canadian story.
00:25:40.740And 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?
00:26:06.740Untarnished? 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?
00:26:14.740Well, 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.
00:26:43.740For 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.
00:27:06.740But 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.
00:27:26.740If 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.
00:27:49.740And 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.
00:28:19.740Pierre 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
00:28:49.740collide 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
00:29:19.740distinction. 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.
00:29:31.740There 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.
00:30:01.720Figures. 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.
00:30:29.840So how should we deal with that question of celebration versus acknowledgement?
00:30:36.840Well, 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?
00:30:57.600You 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.
00:31:12.540He 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.
00:31:21.980So 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.
00:31:48.040That 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.
00:32:01.500But the 19th century held them. It's why they abolished slavery. It's why they worked towards suffrage for women.
00:32:06.620It'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.
00:32:18.020We need to get back to that. And perhaps that's how we not judge history, but understand history.
00:32:22.480So 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.
00:32:36.320The 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.
00:32:48.900And 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.
00:32:57.840Addressing, tackling, critical theory, also systemic racism. Matt Lau has a great chapter on that, which I have to dig into again.
00:33:05.820So 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.
00:33:15.540But 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.
00:33:23.560Thank you, Andrew, and the book is available on Amazon.
00:33:26.540All right, well, do check it out. We will be back next week with more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:33:32.200This is the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North. Thank you, God bless, and have a great weekend.
00:33:36.740Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.