Juno News - Why Canada Should be Cherished – Not Cancelled ｜ Launch of the 1867 Project

00:00:00.000 Transcribed by ESO, translated by —

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 hey i think i'm live hi everybody and welcome to a very special live edition of true north

00:01:22.600 for this canada day long weekend or as uh some of us like to still call it dominion day so i hope

00:01:29.780 everyone out there is having a wonderful afternoon getting ready for a long weekend. Drop us a

00:01:35.960 comment in the comment section. Let us know where you are this Canada Day long weekend, what your

00:01:41.280 plans are, and what you're looking forward to the very most. So for us, we have a very special

00:01:49.820 live program today in honor and in celebration of Canada and Canada Day. You know, over the past

00:01:57.540 two years, it's just become far too trendy and far too popular for people to focus on the absolute

00:02:04.020 worst parts of Canada, take the worst moments of our history and pretend that that is what

00:02:08.880 represents our country. Or take a look, you know, even conservatives tend to be guilty of this

00:02:13.540 sometimes, taking a look at the stupidest thing that our prime minister has said and done and 0.99

00:02:18.640 pretending that that somehow represents all of us, all Canadians. So I think it's much more 0.99

00:02:23.660 important to focus on the good things, to focus on the things that we love about Canada, the things

00:02:28.320 that make us proud. And so in that spirit, we have this show today. And I'm very pleased to be

00:02:36.320 joined by a handful of guests who have put out a wonderful new book celebrating Canada, talking

00:02:42.040 about the history. The book is called The 1867 Project, Why Canada Should Be Cherished and Not

00:02:49.200 cancelled. And so I'm pleased to be joined by a few of the authors and the editor today. So let's

00:02:56.380 welcome our guests to the program here. We have, first of all, Mark Milkey. Mark Milkey, PhD, is the

00:03:04.040 editor of the 1867 Project. He's also the founder and the president of the Aristotle Foundation for

00:03:09.660 Public Policy. He's a policy analyst and the author of six books, over 70 studies, and over

00:03:15.620 1,000 columns published in the past 25 years, so a prolific thinker and writer. Mark is also the

00:03:23.240 author of the previous Amazon bestseller book called The Victim Cult. I'm also joined by Matthew

00:03:29.280 Lau. He's an author in the 1867 Project. You probably recognize him from his work in the

00:03:34.840 Financial Post. He's an author over there. He's an analyst with the Fraser Institute, as well as

00:03:40.800 the uh aristotle foundation and then finally my friend jamil giovanni is joining us jamil is a

00:03:46.480 lawyer an author a policy advisor he's the uh graduate from yale law school and he is the

00:03:53.440 author of a great book called why young men he's also a candidate uh running for uh the nomination

00:03:59.920 hopefully he's going to become an mp soon but jamil matthew mark great to great to have you

00:04:06.080 you all here and thank you for joining us thank you so so mark let's start with you so you you

00:04:13.500 edited this book uh why don't you tell us a little bit about the concept uh where the name came from

00:04:18.720 i'm gonna guess it has something to do with the year that canada was founded but why don't you

00:04:22.640 just uh introduce the book a little bit and tell us about it sure well um a friend of mine suggested

00:04:27.400 the 1867 project as a name for the aristotle foundation but i decided to stick with the name

00:04:31.820 of a dead white guy from Greece for various reasons, including how the ancients used to

00:04:36.600 think about what's the good life look like, right? And they debated things we debate today,

00:04:40.920 how to reform democracy, you know, and again, you know, how should we live? So, but I decided to

00:04:47.420 steal the name for the book. And we have 20 authors, including two that you see today,

00:04:52.920 Matthew and Jamil. So, but the basic core, I think, point of the book, the 1867 project,

00:04:59.240 is that when you think about countries or civilizations,

00:05:03.120 it's a bit like an acorn growing into an oak tree,

00:05:06.380 especially when they're liberal democracies

00:05:08.140 and have been successful, as Canada has been,

00:05:10.960 at protecting people, tens of millions of people over the decades,

00:05:14.240 and since its inception, even before, arguably.

00:05:17.920 Well, like an oak tree that shelters people below its massive canopy,

00:05:22.900 a country is like that oak tree, and it takes time to grow.

00:05:26.340 And when you see faults, when you see limbs that are diseased,

00:05:29.240 You don't take down the entire oak tree. What do you do? You prune the limb away and it makes it stronger. And it's the same with the country. So Canada has been a project since 1867 and before. And we pruned off the limb that was the discrimination against Indigenous Canadians where they couldn't vote before 1960 or women in the 1910s across the country. They garnered the vote as they well should have. So those are reforms to Canada.

00:05:54.760 And so I think that's the genesis of the project to say, instead of looking back at history and pretending everybody in history should have been perfect or history should have been perfect or everybody in 1867 should have had the views we have today, you have to look at it as a process, as a project, an ongoing project.

00:06:12.300 So that was really a genesis of it, along with, I mean, the genesis for the Aerosol Foundation, which was, you know, we have a lot of people attacking Canada today and they're anti-reason, anti-reality, anti-responsibility.

00:06:23.900 But the 1867 project kind of began there.

00:06:26.920 Let's look at Canada as a project, not completed, never perfect in history or now, but we can certainly be proud of what has been accomplished and look towards the future.

00:06:37.420 What kind of country do we want to create?

00:06:39.240 well that's that's a fantastic concept and i'm glad that someone is tackling this because

00:06:46.740 we you know we see so much in the news i mean even just recently both toronto and calgary were

00:06:51.960 looking to cancel their canada celebrations they wanted to get rid of the firework display until

00:06:57.940 both the cities were met with massive sort of political backlash and turns out that most

00:07:03.640 Canadians still do want to celebrate Canada. So Jamil, I want to bring you in onto this. So I

00:07:09.760 know you're a very busy guy. And I want to know what made you want to get involved in a project

00:07:14.800 like this. And, you know, you talk to a lot of people across the GTA. I'm wondering if you could

00:07:20.720 sort of give us a little bit of an insight as to what you hear from people in the community that

00:07:26.200 you talk to about Canada. Is there a lot of Canada hating going on or more people wanting to

00:07:31.200 celebrate this country? Well, absolutely more people who want to celebrate Canada. I mean,

00:07:37.020 where I grew up, where I live, where I work, full of people from all different backgrounds,

00:07:41.940 some of whom just got to Canada, some of whom their great-grandparents came to Canada. And

00:07:47.200 what binds a lot of our diverse communities together is an appreciation for the fact

00:07:51.660 that we have a country where people from all around the world can come and make a better

00:07:56.100 life for their children. That is the reason why a guy who might be trained to be a doctor will

00:08:01.640 drive an Uber because he knows if his kids grow up here and go to school here and have an opportunity

00:08:07.320 here that those kids can live up to their potential in ways that almost no other country in the world

00:08:12.260 can guarantee. That's what makes Canada special and yet when we are focused on purely the negatives

00:08:19.360 of Canada we seem to completely forget that and when we forget that it means that we're no longer

00:08:25.360 holding our leaders accountable to making sure we're creating and preserving that same Canadian

00:08:31.600 spirit, that same Canadian dream. What I think is concerning is that when we give our leaders

00:08:37.760 a pass to no longer preserve and maintain and grow what makes Canada special, what draws people in

00:08:44.880 from all over the world, and instead we say to our leaders, you can diminish our country, you can

00:08:50.160 have our flag flying at half mast for a year you can tear us down it reduces the expectations

00:08:57.680 of our communities we no longer expect to be able to afford a home we no longer expect to be able

00:09:02.800 to have a family and start a life and live with relative peace and stability and security and

00:09:08.320 that is why it's important to understand the relationship between how we understand our

00:09:12.320 history and how we understand our present and how we understand our future the best of what canada

00:09:18.000 has been and what canadians have been is exactly what the future of our country needs to be

00:09:23.600 oh i couldn't agree more that's so that's so true and so inspiring i think that

00:09:27.520 our politicians you know that they they've let us down so many times and and it's almost hard to

00:09:33.280 maintain hope in the future when when you hear such negative messages and maybe you know they're

00:09:37.760 doing it all on purpose matthew i want to bring you in as well and uh you wrote a chapter on

00:09:44.400 systemic racism in Canada, so-called anti-racism.

00:10:14.400 and direct evidence as to whether or not this is true.

00:10:39.840 And if you look at, for example, income statistics, you'll find that lots of minority groups outperform the white population. So, for example, East Asians, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, they have higher average incomes. They're more likely to have university degrees. They're overrepresented in fields like medicine.

00:11:01.320 And if you look at the direct evidence, you'll never see a job posting or a sign in a public building that says if you're a minority group, you're not allowed in.

00:11:17.080 And that's something that we have seen in Canadian history.

00:11:20.100 For example, universities in the past might have limited the number of Jews that they could have enrolled and on their campus.

00:11:29.800 But that's just something that we don't see today. Today, if you look at the statistics, if you look at the evidence, this is not a systemically racist country. That doesn't mean there aren't individual acts of discrimination.

00:11:44.220 But if you look at our institutions and the rules that govern our institutions, people aren't perfect, but at least the rules don't allow for discrimination against minorities, which is contrary to the narrative that you might get from the federal government or from the news media or from a lot of professors.

00:12:05.400 issues but over to you candace yeah sure apologies to everyone watching out there i think uh i'm

00:12:18.940 already out at the cottage and my wi-fi is not connecting as well as it should so if i drop off

00:12:23.840 again we'll just get mark to take over uh with the questions matthew i want to keep going on this

00:12:29.320 topic of systemic racism because one of the things that that anyone in canada can observe

00:12:35.720 is sort of a lower standard of living that does exist with first nations people and people who 1.00

00:12:41.080 live on reserves and i know mark you've written extensively about this and i'm wondering if you

00:12:46.360 can address usually when you talk about systemic racism you're talking about specific laws that

00:12:51.480 treat people differently uh well in canada we do have laws that treat people differently because

00:12:55.560 there's a separate set of laws that govern the way that Indigenous people on reserves

00:13:02.120 organize themselves politically. And I'm wondering if this is a topic that you've

00:13:05.960 touched on, you've written on, and Mark, you can feel free to jump in on this question as well.

00:13:12.120 Right, so I think in the first place there has to be a lot of caution when we're trying to

00:13:17.160 interpret statistics, right? We can't simply say one group of people is doing better than

00:13:22.280 another group of people, and therefore some kind of unfair discrimination or unfair rules is

00:13:28.420 necessarily what's causing this, right? So when you try to control for education and, you know,

00:13:38.540 work and all sorts of other different factors, that starts to close the gap in terms of outcomes

00:13:44.120 that people achieve. Now, in terms of the Indigenous population, one of the factors that

00:13:50.360 is really playing into this is where they live. So incomes, for example, tend to be a lot lower

00:13:57.880 in rural areas. And if you try to control for geography and the indigenous population that lives 0.95

00:14:05.980 in cities as opposed to on reserves, you'll get a very different story and a very different set

00:14:11.680 numbers than if you just take the raw data. So in terms of laws that treat different people

00:14:21.200 differently, there are a lot of problems with how policy has treated Indigenous people. And one of

00:14:32.280 the main issues that I think more attention needs to be drawn to is property rights. One of the

00:14:38.940 reasons that people like to invest in property and improve property and improve housing is because

00:14:46.220 they privately own it and they will get the benefits of the investments that they

00:14:50.380 when they put into property investments and we don't see the same level of property rights on

00:14:56.440 on reserves that we see everywhere else in Canada. Absolutely. Mark did you want to did you want to

00:15:05.840 jump on this issue as well? I know you've written extensively about First Nations and ways that we

00:15:10.980 can help bring people who are in poverty out of poverty. Sure, Matthew is bang on. I mean,

00:15:16.800 if you look at income statistics for, say, young Indigenous adults, 25 to 34, and other Canadians,

00:15:22.560 if you get a bachelor's degree, you live in a city, you work full-time, full-year, your income

00:15:26.980 is the exact same as everyone else. So again, doing apple-to-apple comparisons matter. And

00:15:32.460 And one of the reasons we created the Aristotle Foundation, and one of the ideas for the book

00:15:36.720 as well, was to do what I call these Thomas Sowell type analyses.

00:15:40.340 And many of your viewers may be familiar with the American economist Thomas Sowell.

00:15:43.640 He's about 93 now, but he's done work on this for 50, 60 years on race and incomes,

00:15:49.260 and this problem of attributing one cause to an outcome.

00:15:52.580 These days you hear a lot about racism and the notion somehow we're an institutionally

00:15:56.000 racist society, which Matthew deconstructs in the 1867 project.

00:16:01.780 And this is due a lot, I think, to Ibram Kendi, the American professor who's made this very

00:16:05.100 popular.

00:16:06.100 But these monocausal explanations don't work, actually.

00:16:08.580 They're usually faulty.

00:16:10.020 Quick example, Thomas Sowell long ago wrote about the examples of Italians dominating

00:16:15.140 the fishing fleet around the world, unlike, say, the Swiss. 0.99

00:16:19.420 Now is the world fishing industry, you know, biased against the Swiss because they're not

00:16:24.580 really highly represented in the fishing industry worldwide historically?

00:16:27.840 No.

00:16:28.840 The reason should be obvious.

00:16:30.300 The Italians, of course, if you're from Italy, you grew up around coastlines, most likely.

00:16:34.260 You have a lot of coastlines.

00:16:35.280 The Swiss don't. 1.00

00:16:36.540 So geography can explain things that, say, racism explanations cannot or other explanations.

00:16:43.000 So there's lots of causes that cause outcomes between groups.

00:16:46.320 Matthew talked about some vis-a-vis indigenous Canadians.

00:16:49.540 So the key thing, though, when you think about bringing people up is, and the statistic I mentioned a moment ago for young adults,

00:16:56.380 is if you're able to get an education, if you move to a city, then, you know, you're going to

00:17:04.060 prosper. And that apple to apple comparison between indigenous young adults and other young

00:17:08.420 adults is proof of that. So that's the positive part of this. This is changeable. People can move

00:17:12.560 to cities, they can get an education, whether it's a trade or whether it's a university degree.

00:17:18.280 Absolutely. That's so true. Well, you mentioned Abram X. Kennedy, and I know that there's just

00:17:23.460 There's been so much popularity with these, what I think are really corrosive left-wing

00:17:28.700 ideas that push this idea that our culture is just absolutely terrible and there's nothing

00:17:35.060 that we can do to make it better.

00:17:37.220 The 1867 project obviously comes in some way from the 16, what is it, the 1619 project.

00:17:48.020 1619 project, right.

00:17:49.820 And so maybe you can talk a little bit about that, Mark.

00:17:52.480 And obviously, this book is entirely different from that one.

00:17:56.060 But the premise of that book is basically that Americans shouldn't look at 1767 as the

00:18:01.360 year that the country was founded.

00:18:03.320 They should look further back and look at some of the ugliest moments of the British 1.00

00:18:07.140 slave trade and the origins of slavery in North America that would have happened in

00:18:12.660 1619.

00:18:13.660 And presenting America in that light is obviously bad for unity and bad for the country.

00:18:20.680 I'm just wondering why you decided to sort of play on that title. And maybe you can just offer

00:18:25.860 like a contrast between what they're trying to do and what you're trying to do.

00:18:30.120 Sure. And Jamil may have some thoughts as well, especially on the 1619 Project more than I do.

00:18:34.740 But yeah, the idea was to play off a little bit of that New York Times title, the 1619 Project.

00:18:40.380 The 1867 Project, you're right, is the opposite of that, where we're saying,

00:18:44.220 listen, let's not look back in history and expect perfection. And this, I think, is a core problem

00:18:49.300 today. We've always had utopians in human history. And let's look back at the 20th century. In the

00:18:56.240 20th century, the main utopians were Marxists who looked forward and wanted to create a perfect

00:19:01.000 society, perfect equality. You could fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, and I guess have

00:19:05.640 whatever you wanted on your dinner plate or whatever house you wanted. Now, the Marxists

00:19:10.060 were dead wrong about everything, human motivations, how people work, different desires, different

00:19:14.360 abilities. They were wrong about everything. But I suppose Marxist in the 20th century could at

00:19:19.820 least argue in terms of a perfect society, a utopia, they were looking forward. We actually

00:19:25.840 have a chattering class in Canada today. I don't think it's the majority of Canadians.

00:19:30.140 We have some people in Canada who look back to 1867 or look at history, and literally they're

00:19:35.480 a utopian about it. They expect it to be perfect. But why would you expect human beings then or now

00:19:40.860 of being perfect. I mean, Candace, you and I, a hundred years from now, people will look at you

00:19:44.960 and I and say, Mark, Candace, how could you possibly have believed X in 2023? And they'll

00:19:50.240 be right. We will have got something wrong. And so there's a bit of hubris as well, looking back

00:19:54.980 at history. So it becomes a bit silly, but it's also dangerous because you have people that want

00:20:00.260 to kind of erase our past. And what they don't understand, again, like the oak tree, it's that

00:20:05.320 it's it's building on something that allows especially a liberal democracy and in the

00:20:10.580 anglosphere where this has been tremendously successful the ideas of prosperity of capitalism

00:20:15.240 of freedom of expression of you know empiricism um bruce party in the 1867 project writes about

00:20:21.860 these things and says this is the basis of our uh of our societies today especially in the west

00:20:27.120 but increasingly around the world um so don't throw out the past and don't expect the past to

00:20:33.200 be perfect. It's really hubris, you know, because every age has its flaws. But when you look back

00:20:40.800 at the progress that's been made, it's tremendous. So again, coming up to Canada today, we should be

00:20:45.920 celebrating this and celebrating the building blocks of what made us mostly free and flourishing.

00:20:50.920 We're not perfect now. We never will be. But the thing we don't want to do is go backwards.

00:20:56.060 And some of today's policies are doing exactly that. They're taking us back into an anti-Martin

00:21:00.960 Luther King type of view between people. And one of the things I do at the end of the book,

00:21:05.240 and then I'll defer to Jamil on the 1619 project, but one of the things we do in the 1867 project

00:21:11.880 is at the end of the book, a colleague of mine, Van Bikachelen, and I wrote a chapter

00:21:17.620 where we talk about immigration and ideas. And it's precisely because we're such an identity

00:21:23.540 diverse country. We've got people from all over the world that we don't want to divide,

00:21:27.620 categorize and then divide people based on ethnicity, based on race, based on gender,

00:21:31.860 things that are unchangeable. You want to unite around laudable ideas, whether it's capitalism,

00:21:37.700 whether it's the rule of law, whether it's treating people as individuals and not part

00:21:40.780 of some collective. So that's the way forward for Canada, is to look to the future and say,

00:21:45.900 let's unite around laudable ideas, not unchangeable identities.

00:21:49.800 Well, I think that's just such an important message that we should all take on Canada Day,

00:21:54.080 because the stories that we tell ourselves

00:21:57.220 about the purpose of our country,

00:21:58.700 that's why I said that the 1619 Project

00:22:00.680 is so devastating for the United States.

00:22:02.300 Like, sure, you can look at a certain point in history

00:22:04.400 and say, wow, like a lot of the things

00:22:06.460 that they were doing then, we find immoral today.

00:22:09.580 And rightly so, glad that they don't do those anymore.

00:22:13.100 You know, the idea of 1776 in the United States

00:22:16.480 was that there was this concept

00:22:18.100 that that people were rallying around,

00:22:19.620 like you said, Mark, an idea of liberty.

00:22:21.580 And then that was a shared value

00:22:23.080 that they didn't always get right,

00:22:25.080 but they aspired to it, right?

00:22:26.440 And that's the Martha Luther King message.

00:22:28.480 And in Canada, to me, it was so sort of dumbfounded

00:22:32.540 because usually like for my entire life,

00:22:35.760 it was the liberals,

00:22:37.180 people on the political left in the center

00:22:39.760 who celebrated Canada the most, right?

00:22:42.500 They often have sort of an anti-American attitude

00:22:46.820 that we're smugly better than our neighbors to the South.

00:22:50.680 And look at our history.

00:22:52.300 was less violent uh look at look at our history when it comes to the treatment of other people

00:22:57.100 you know uh we were we were the end of the underground railway we were the place where

00:23:01.180 freed slaves would come and have freedom and we have a difference in history which is all entirely

00:23:06.300 true then suddenly a couple of years ago was like you know we saw huge racial tensions and protests

00:23:13.020 in the united states over the death of a person in minneapolis and suddenly a lot of that message

00:23:19.740 is built into canada and and all of a sudden it was like the same people the same smug liberals

00:23:23.980 who once you know loved to look down their noses at americans and and talk about how much better

00:23:28.940 canada was well all of a sudden they were accusing canada of the worst of the worst kinds of crimes

00:23:34.060 and saying that canada's no better and in fact we're worse and look at the way that we've treated

00:23:38.620 different communities and it was it was really surprising for me to see that that twist happen

00:23:43.420 i guess you could talk about you know how liberals don't really hold liberal values anymore people

00:23:47.900 on the left are walking away from that kind of ideal uh jameel i did want to bring you in on

00:23:52.940 this what is what is your perspective uh on the sort of rising anti-canadian canadianism that

00:23:59.020 we've seen recently and and how it connects to the united states some sort of major news issues over

00:24:05.340 there and and to this uh 1619 project the idea that we should look at the worst moments of our

00:24:10.220 history and focus on those rather than the ideals that unite us well you make some great

00:24:17.420 observations, Candace. I mean, it seems to be clear from what you've summarized very well there,

00:24:23.000 and also I think any of us paying close attention to the news can see there seems to be this very

00:24:28.780 strong negative reaction to members of minority communities that do not identify as liberal or

00:24:35.460 leftist. People in minority communities, like the one that I grew up in, mostly Caribbean and South

00:24:41.580 Asian, who are being told, well, if you don't see liberal politics as where you belong,

00:24:47.620 then somehow you don't belong in your community anymore.

00:24:50.760 And I think that's where this kind of impulse to control and dictate to us what we're allowed

00:24:57.480 to say, when we're allowed to say it, who we should vote for, who we should not vote

00:25:01.380 for, the public intellectuals and thought leaders that we should pay attention to and

00:25:06.600 who we shouldn't.

00:25:07.280 This seems to be a bizarre impulse, in my view, to want to control other people. And I think a lot of why the left in Canada has embraced this very negative, in my view, toxic narrative about who Canadians are and what Canada is, is because it serves this idea that if you are a member of a minority community of all different types, that somehow you are in need of a white liberal savior.

00:25:33.340 And, you know, coincidentally, someone like Justin Trudeau, for example, who has the sensitivity to know who you are and how you feel and how you should think and how you should vote and would like to help you because he believes, and I think the left wing political philosophy sort of affirms this, they believe that we can't help ourselves.

00:25:53.780 And ultimately, that is what the question comes down to, whether it's raising our children with our own values, whether it's building our own businesses that don't need to be taxed into oblivion, whether it's growing our own families and building our own strong social safety net in our churches and our mosques and our other community institutions.

00:26:13.500 the left-wing political philosophy seems to want to say to minority communities no if you want to

00:26:20.160 imagine a future here you've got to imagine it through us and those of us who disagree with that

00:26:25.520 I think are often made to feel like we're pushing a boulder uphill and offering a different perspective

00:26:31.740 and a different way of solving what are very real problems we want people to have more economic

00:26:37.300 opportunity we want people to be graduating from school with the skills that they need

00:26:41.280 It's not that if you disagree with the left that you're denying there's inequality, it's that you might have a different solution, and in my view, a solution that involves the community more than the government.

00:26:51.440 Well, I think that's such a much more uplifting opportunity. And just final on that note, I mean, because you've seen the liberals of the left, first of all, to your point, push sort of monoculture, monothought, like, you know, if you're from a minority group, you have to think this way.

00:27:09.240 If you don't think that way, then you're not really part of that minority group, which is pretty appalling way to tell other people how to think.

00:27:16.440 But I think it creates an opportunity for people on the center right and for conservatives to tell a different message, to be the ones that can provide the positive, uplifting message, the message of hope,

00:27:27.780 The message of really caring for people who are down on their luck or who haven't had the best opportunities in life that they can, you know, in this country, unlike so many other countries around the world, they have opportunities to raise themselves out of poverty.

00:27:43.460 One of the things, Jamel, that I found really interesting during the whole George Floyd protest movement and this idea that systemic racism also exists in Canada, and Matthew, I know you wrote that chapter in this book, just was the pure demographics.

00:27:58.580 So I looked up in a Statistics Canada report on Black Canadians and the diversity of the Black population in Canada, an overview.

00:28:07.820 It's a Statistics Canada report, if anyone wants to look it up, that came out in February 2019.

00:28:13.160 And in that report, we see that the overwhelming majority of the Black population in Canada are first-generation immigrants,

00:28:20.760 meaning that they were born somewhere else and then either they or their parents chose.

00:28:24.780 So I think it's, what is it? It's 56% of the black population were born outside Canada.

00:28:32.860 And then I think another 35 or 36%. So only 8% of the black population were born in Canada with

00:28:41.660 their parents also born in Canada, which to me says that Canada is the country of opportunity

00:28:46.000 where people still want to come to. And this message that people are treated so poorly here,

00:28:52.700 and that's the reason that there's different outcomes,

00:28:54.940 just doesn't really add up.

00:28:56.060 Maybe, Jamil, you can just quickly comment on that

00:28:58.020 and then we'll present the same question to Matthew.

00:29:02.120 Yeah, I think another great observation, Candace.

00:29:04.300 So here's the thing.

00:29:06.840 We never wanna make a judgment

00:29:08.640 over other people's intentions.

00:29:10.180 We don't know what people are thinking,

00:29:12.140 how they're feeling.

00:29:13.300 But it does seem to me that there is a portion of people

00:29:16.360 advancing this argument that Canada is a racist country

00:29:20.180 who are not concerned with the actual views opinions and life experiences of black people

00:29:25.700 that in fact calling canada racist is simply just a political tool to advance policies that we have

00:29:32.500 no reason to believe black people actually support that black people want in canada or that we even

00:29:37.860 know are happening in our country and i'll give you a very specific example one of the most

00:29:42.420 controversial things that the trudeau liberal government has done is bill c11 or the online

00:29:47.620 Streaming Act. To justify their expansion of power, their regulatory authority over streaming

00:29:54.240 platforms and social media platforms, they're saying they're doing it for us. They're saying

00:29:59.380 they want to add more diversity quotas to what we would find on streaming platforms. And they've

00:30:05.140 also said that we are such victims of online hate that they need to limit the free speech of

00:30:11.260 Canadians to protect us from hateful comments on the internet. Now this only

00:30:16.600 benefits the federal government, the CRTC, the Trudeau Liberals, it gives them

00:30:21.520 more power over what Canadians see and what they say to each other online. I

00:30:25.420 don't know if any black people, I've got black family, black friends, black 0.84

00:30:29.980 neighbors, I don't know a single black person in Canada who has asked what we 0.64

00:30:33.380 think of Bill C-11 or the Online Streaming Act and yet we've been told

00:30:38.260 that this is being done in our best interest, that somehow as a minority community, the

00:30:43.540 black community, like somehow we don't appreciate free speech, when of course we do. Martin

00:30:48.280 Luther King's activism was based on free speech. Even Black Lives Matter, a group that I have

00:30:52.960 very strong disagreements with, their activism based on free speech, and yet somehow we're

00:30:58.280 being told that we're a community that doesn't believe in free speech and needs the government

00:31:02.280 to regulate speech on our behalf. This is what I mean when I say I can't speak to the

00:31:07.160 intentions of every person who advances these arguments about our country but what I can say

00:31:11.980 is that there are many people in power who clearly don't think don't care what black people think

00:31:16.700 and simply want to use these historical narratives to advance their own political interests

00:31:21.940 sorry about that I was muted but I 100% agree with you Jamil that's such a good point that you make

00:31:31.440 and Matthew I wanted to bring you in because you're sort of the numbers guy and you look at

00:31:35.460 the data and the statistics is canada still a country of opportunity is it a place where people

00:31:42.500 who you know grow up without a lot of resources without a lot of money grow up poor uh still have

00:31:47.540 upward mobility uh you know people who move to this country do they have opportunities do you see

00:31:53.220 you're looking at the data you see upward mobility maybe you can give us a little bit of a snapshot

00:31:56.980 into uh you know so-called income inequality and uh the ability of people to to rise and

00:32:03.380 and fall on the income ladder? Yeah, so I think immigration is a pretty clear indicator that

00:32:09.460 Canada is still a very wonderful place to live. We don't have hundreds of thousands of people

00:32:15.140 and more than we can process in time and let them in, but we don't have hundreds of thousands

00:32:23.460 of people trying to come here so that they can be trodden underfoot and be oppressed by our

00:32:28.220 institutions, right? Obviously, they're coming here because they think and they're correct in

00:32:32.920 thinking, that they can make a better life for themselves and their families. And if you look at

00:32:38.880 the income statistics for immigrants, when they arrive in Canada, over time, their incomes are

00:32:46.040 going to grow like everybody else's. And it was the same in past decades. Canada has always been

00:32:51.540 a country of immigration. And when you have economic growth, it lifts all boats, including 0.89

00:32:58.000 those of immigrants who have just arrived here, or also immigrants who have come here

00:33:04.980 10, 20, 30 years ago. I think a lot of people, you know, they look at immigration and they say,

00:33:16.220 well, a lot of the immigrants coming here are poorer than the average Canadian. Now, 1.00

00:33:22.480 I think that that's a misinterpretation of what's really going on. The reason is because

00:33:27.560 they're coming here from poorer countries, or maybe they're younger immigrants who don't have 0.55

00:33:33.220 as much job experience yet. I think the numbers that you really have to look at is when immigrants

00:33:39.740 come here, it's not what they start with, it's how can they move up. And Canada has always been

00:33:45.480 a country where immigrants, when they come here, they can make a better life for themselves and

00:33:51.500 their families. And that's why immigrants keep coming here. And that's why we always have 1.00

00:33:56.640 hundreds of thousands of people who want to come to this country.

00:34:04.720 So just for anyone just tuning in, we're talking about a new book called The 1867 Project,

00:34:11.240 Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled. And I'm speaking with the authors of this book.

00:34:17.280 Mark Milkey was sort of the brainchild of the entire project and edited it. It has 20 different

00:34:23.380 chapters featuring some of the best writers and policy thinkers in the country, each one picking

00:34:30.260 apart a different sort of myth or talking about a different component of our history and why it's

00:34:36.740 worth celebrating and worth cherishing to copy from the title there. If you're interested in

00:34:44.100 picking up this book, there is a link in the description. You can pick it up right on Amazon

00:34:49.140 there it's a great thing to read over the summer or if you want to read it on kindle you can read

00:34:54.580 it this weekend over the long weekend and i really encourage you to do that it's it's so important

00:35:00.900 not only to support these kind of projects and to support canadian authors but also just to

00:35:06.980 arm yourselves with the facts to to get to know the arguments that the other side is making

00:35:12.660 and to learn the best ways to sort of counter those arguments with facts with the truth with

00:35:18.100 logic and it's so helpful to have a book like this mark um just you know at your fingertips so you

00:35:24.660 can go through and you know you see these kind of arguments every day all you have to do is just

00:35:30.260 look at the news and you know sometimes it can get a little bit depressing to be honest i mean

00:35:35.060 i looked up this uh story the other day the feds are going to replace the name of ottawa's sir john

00:35:42.900 a mcdonald parkway it's no longer going to be called sir john a mcdonald parkway they've changed

00:35:48.500 the name to something that i honestly would have a pretty hard time pronouncing uh it's going to be

00:35:54.340 named kichi zb mccon i think that's how you would say it but i can't imagine anyone actually using

00:36:00.980 that language it's not in english or french and kind of ironic for the nation's capital

00:36:06.660 in a country that the official languages are french and english to remove the name of the

00:36:11.700 founder of our country that the first prime minister and replace it with a first nations

00:36:17.780 word that most people wouldn't be able to pronounce i mean if the people in ottawa hate

00:36:21.940 the founding of our country so much and they loathe sir john a mcdonald so much they would

00:36:26.740 remove his name from a street uh what business do they even have being the capital of our country

00:36:32.020 anymore that's a serious question because if they want to erase every aspect of what is canada

00:36:37.780 including our first prime minister they obviously don't have a very high opinion of the kind

00:36:48.660 a good point um so in the 1867 project what we've done uh is invited a number of contributors one

00:36:56.100 of them is greg piasatsky who's a toronto lawyer uh citizen of the metis nation of ontario and

00:37:02.500 what greg did in this chapter on johnny mcdonald is go through some of the claims against mcdonald

00:37:07.700 And the chapter of his title is provocative for some, and it is that John A. Macdonald saved more Indigenous lives than any other prime minister.

00:37:15.860 Now, how does Greg come up with this conclusion?

00:37:17.920 Well, how he comes up with this conclusion is he says, look, yes, John A. Macdonald had views that we wouldn't hold today.

00:37:24.580 But in his era, also, he fought, again, this is very contrarian for some, for Indigenous Canadians.

00:37:30.160 He set up the Northwest Bandit Police in part to protect earlier settlers, i.e. the people we now call indigenous, from later settlers.

00:37:39.320 He also continued the famine relief, sorry, the smallpox vaccination that was started under the previous liberal government.

00:37:48.320 McDonald continued that and got to 100% vaccination rates, near 100% on some reserves, the smallpox vaccination in a time when Canada was mostly rural.

00:37:58.000 So there are a number of aspects to Canadian history.

00:38:01.860 And when you cancel someone like John A. Macdonald, part of what the 1867 project, what this book is trying to do as well, is introduce some nuance, I would say some modesty, some moderation into claims today.

00:38:13.440 So let me give you one clear example.

00:38:15.160 if you're going to cancel johnny mcdonald because he had some words some views that we wouldn't hold

00:38:20.080 today despite how as i mentioned greg's chapter in the project uh points out where mcdonald actually

00:38:26.980 was was favoring indigenous canadians in a very racist era over people that were much more racist

00:38:32.720 than johnny mcdonald if you're going to cancel johnny mcdonald then you also have to come to

00:38:36.960 grips with other parts of canadian history which are not pretty um these days it's popular to beat

00:38:41.960 up on the British, British colonialism, and see it as all bad. Well, there's another chapter in

00:38:46.380 the book from Chris Champion that points out the British were, of course, the ones abolishing 0.86

00:38:50.460 slavery around the world. And there's another chapter by Marjorie Gann on how Canada abolished

00:38:57.280 slavery early, pre-Confederation, starting really in the 1790s. And it was fully gone by 1820.

00:39:04.780 But there were slaves in Canada as late as the late 19th century. And where were they? In British

00:39:09.920 columbia among some first nations and a colonialist like governor james douglas in the mid-19th century

00:39:15.660 was trying to wipe out slavery in british columbia and he found resistance among some first nations

00:39:20.260 if we're going to cancel john mcdonald with all due respect and you have to cancel the history

00:39:24.680 of some first nations or look look at their history in the same sort of odious way but i

00:39:29.240 think a better way is to not cancel anyone's history and say that's unfortunate but again

00:39:34.200 the idea of abolition just because it was invented by say evangelical christians from britain and

00:39:39.400 here and pushed forward doesn't mean you can't be an abolitionist if you're not an evangelical

00:39:44.440 white Christian. And of course, Indigenous leaders over time also abolish slavery. And that's the

00:39:50.500 positive part of Canadian history. But rather than cancel John A. Macdonald or someone's

00:39:54.500 Indigenous history or not bring it out fully, let's acknowledge the mistakes in history and 0.80

00:39:58.960 then say, yes, but isn't it wonderful that these great ideas caught on around the world and in

00:40:03.600 Canada? Abolition of slavery. But that's the problem with canceling one figure, John A. Macdonald,

00:40:09.260 because you don't like something he said in 1860 or 1880.

00:40:12.860 It really is kind of a truncated utopian view of history,

00:40:16.320 and it's actually morally arrogant.

00:40:18.540 Most people alive today, if they were alive in 1867,

00:40:21.380 would have had the very views that they now think are odious

00:40:24.500 and were odious in some of the people that lived then

00:40:26.880 because most people are followers, right?

00:40:28.900 They're not leaders.

00:40:30.000 And so we have to look back into history

00:40:31.580 and cherish those who took the risk,

00:40:33.460 whether suffragists, whether abolitionists,

00:40:35.360 others who led to the abolition of discrimination against minorities in Ontario.

00:40:42.660 Jamil is probably familiar with this as a lawyer, but it was in the early 1950s that Ontario passed

00:40:47.080 legislation outlawing discrimination based on race and gender in employment and accommodation.

00:40:53.400 And prior to that, we did have institutional discrimination in Canada. And yet, 70 years

00:40:58.880 later, people are still claiming we have institutional systemic discrimination, as if

00:41:03.520 Canada in 2023 was Alabama in 1923. So that's part of what's driving the cancellations is people

00:41:10.280 don't know their history. And part of the 1867 project, part of the reason we published this

00:41:15.120 is to say, listen, let's gain some modesty, but some informed, nuanced history to push back

00:41:21.980 against some of the really simplistic narratives out there. Just to follow up on that point,

00:41:26.960 it seems that Sir John A. MacDonald really gets the brunt of a lot of the rage. I mean,

00:41:31.820 I know we see statues like Egerton Ryerson and Ryerson University getting changed, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria statues getting torn down, anything sort of British.

00:41:42.280 But when it comes to Canada's own history, it seems that Sir John A. Macdonald is the one with a target on his back when you could easily go through and look at just about any prime minister right up into our current prime minister who once a couple of times wore racist paint on his face.

00:41:59.560 Why is it, Jamil, that you think that Sir John A. Macdonald gets so much hate from the sort of mainstream legacy media and politics, whereas other figures, liberal prime ministers, who have also had controversial and you could argue racist policies, including, for instance, Wilfrid Laurier had racist immigration policies.

00:42:21.460 I mean, just about anyone in history can go back and find something that they did that's not popular today.

00:42:27.140 Why is it that John A. gets so much hate, in your opinion?

00:42:36.580 So that it's easy to blame one person and attach such deep injustices to one person's legacy in a way that protects a lot of powerful people today.

00:42:47.300 If we talked about Pierre Trudeau, for example, well, that implicates someone who would like to have power in our country today.

00:42:56.020 If we talk about the reporting of the CBC over the last several decades and the kind of things that they've said on their website, in the radio, on television, about different communities and about different issues,

00:43:10.340 certainly that implicates people like those who work at CBC now who would like to have power in our country today.

00:43:17.300 So I think it's very convenient, you know, who legacy media decides to sort of pin injustices on.

00:43:24.980 And I think it's done in a way that also allows for easy virtue signaling.

00:43:29.240 I mean, the reality is this.

00:43:30.920 They can change the name of a street in Ottawa and no longer call it Sir John A. MacDonald.

00:43:35.920 They can change the street of a name in Toronto or the name of a street in Toronto, no longer call it Dundas.

00:43:41.080 They can pat themselves on the back and say, look how great people we are.

00:43:44.960 We're so enlightened.

00:43:45.860 were so much better than the people of the past and yet very little has actually been accomplished

00:43:50.720 and I think a lot of this is setting very low expectations for what it means to be

00:43:55.660 a transformative leader or someone who's doing the right thing. The reality is if we can learn

00:44:01.180 anything from the past is that doing the right thing is often very hard and difficult and if

00:44:07.740 you think that you're you know doing the right thing by changing the name of a street and somehow

00:44:11.940 you're making people's lives better, I think you're probably guilty of lowering expectations

00:44:16.180 to the point where you can feel like a good person without accomplishing much at all.

00:44:25.220 That's absolutely correct. I want to go to a comment here that was left

00:44:29.380 from an individual named Charlie Gervais. So she writes,

00:44:32.740 it's sad how children in our schools and colleges are being indoctrinated to think

00:44:37.060 that canada is a bad country and therefore have no patriotism and no love of country so you know it

00:44:44.420 is uh canada day long weekend or as we like to call it around here dominion day and i want to

00:44:49.220 just go around and ask each of you uh to say a few words about what it is that makes you proud to be

00:44:55.140 canadian why uh why you're patriotic uh and why other people should should love canada so matthew

00:45:01.060 Let's start with you.

00:45:31.060 Okay, well, why don't we go over to you, Mark, and you can provide your answer, and then

00:45:53.300 we'll go back to Matthew after.

00:45:56.140 I'm very proud right now of the book and the other 19 authors, and we haven't had a chance

00:46:00.000 to discuss some of them, but they're all, you know, they're very proud of Canada. In fact,

00:46:03.440 one is not from Canada. Gaurav Jaswell wrote a chapter in the 1867 project from Goa, India.

00:46:08.980 He sent his two sons here to university and then discovered Canada was beating up on himself. So

00:46:13.160 Gaurav has a chapter at the end of the 1867 project saying, listen, you know, you should be

00:46:19.400 proud of what you've accomplished, Canada. And there are others like Rima Azhar. If you go to

00:46:24.460 aristotelfoundation.org, you'll see a video from Rima in two minutes that talks about her chapter

00:46:30.120 and her experience as an immigrant from Lebanon. And Rima despises identity politics because she

00:46:35.640 came from Lebanon, where there is a civil war, where you were divided based on religion. And

00:46:40.660 you could show up to the wrong roadblock. And if you're the wrong identity, you could be murdered. 0.81

00:46:46.780 And so Rima says, listen, Canada, as someone who came from Lebanon, where identity politics was

00:46:52.020 rife, do not fall into the trap of thinking we should divide based on ethnicity. But look,

00:46:58.100 I'm very proud of Canada because it also provided opportunity for my family. I have a great,

00:47:03.260 great grandfather that came from Prussia, apparently fought on the side, did fight on

00:47:07.320 the side of the North in the Civil War and, you know, in the United States, and then moved to

00:47:11.880 Saskatchewan in the 1880s, I guess it was. And then on the other side of my family, grandparents

00:47:17.540 that came here in the late 1920s from Ukraine and Germany and carved out a life in the Great 0.96

00:47:23.020 Depression and beyond. So I'm very grateful for Canada for the opportunities it's provided. And

00:47:27.600 I think everyone, including, you know, the people we now call indigenous who came across the Bering

00:47:32.120 Plains 20,000 years ago, maybe they had the tougher job more than anyone coming across an

00:47:36.800 ice strewn landscape and, you know, starting what we now know as Canada. So, you know, there's a lot

00:47:43.700 to be proud of in the last 20,000 years ago, in the last two months, because we have people

00:47:48.820 coming from Ukraine here trying to build a life. So very proud of the opportunities that Canada

00:47:53.520 has provided. And that's, I think, what needs to be focused on somewhat more than, okay,

00:47:59.800 history is not perfect. Well, again, that's utopian.

00:48:07.480 If we've lost Candice, let's go back to, oh, okay, there we have Candice. 0.93

00:48:10.260 I think I heard Matthew's mic working again so let's just pop over to you Matthew you can

00:48:16.160 tell us again what makes you proud to be Canadian

00:48:18.100 right well I think I mean I am not an immigrant but I come from an immigrant family and I think

00:48:25.700 one of the things that we all love about Canada is the opportunity it provides for us and the

00:48:32.500 freedom it provides to you know follow your own religion pursue your own values work in an industry

00:48:39.100 that you want to and make a good life for yourself and your families notwithstanding you know this is

00:48:44.620 never going to be a perfect society there is still always going to be some problems with

00:48:50.300 discrimination or this that or the other there's a lot of government policies that make life more

00:48:56.060 unaffordable than it should be but nevertheless we have a very a good society and a society where

00:49:03.420 there's a relatively high amount of freedom and prosperity and i think we should all be grateful

00:49:07.740 for that matthew let's go over to you jameel tell us what's your favorite thing about canada and why

00:49:16.700 should we all be patriotic and proud this year yeah well certainly mark's answer about opportunity

00:49:23.180 i certainly relate to that my father coming to canada from kenya my mom the daughter of irish

00:49:29.180 and scottish immigrants um all of whom were given tremendous opportunity to live up to their

00:49:34.540 potential in this country in a way they would not have gotten in the countries they were born into.

00:49:40.220 And I also agree with Matthew about freedom being very important. I mean, our country was founded

00:49:45.740 on a recognition that people can live together and might not share the same culture, might not

00:49:51.420 share the same religion or all the same views, but respect the freedom of one another to live

00:49:57.180 according to those cultures, those religions. And I think that's a very special part of being

00:50:01.580 Canadian. One thing I would add, and I know a lot of Canadians find this to be a controversial

00:50:07.060 policy topic right now, but if you look at polls, this is something a lot of Canadians agree with

00:50:12.620 is healthcare. And not that our healthcare system is perfect, far from it, but that we are a country

00:50:18.280 that values healthcare. We talk about it. We expect the least fortunate among us to have access

00:50:24.100 to healthcare. I'm a stage four cancer survivor. I would be in a tremendous amount of debt right

00:50:30.420 now if I lived in the vast majority of countries in the world. And the fact that my life was saved

00:50:35.700 in our hospitals and that I'm able to be a fully functioning member of society without being

00:50:41.980 straddled with an insane amount of debt, I think that's because we live in a country that really

00:50:46.660 does value healthcare as something that's important. So I'll say I'll add that to the

00:50:51.060 conversation, but certainly the opportunity and freedom are key. Okay, Jamel, I have to take that

00:50:56.820 bait because if you talk about one of the things that you're most proud of is health care and you

00:51:01.780 say we talk about it a lot i feel like the conversation is pretty limited that we have

00:51:06.260 and i'll just make an observation i was uh just scrolling on twitter the other day and i saw

00:51:11.300 someone who was waiting in an emergency room for six hours because uh the guy's uh his son was sick

00:51:18.020 and so he's sitting in the emergency room and he's tweeting uh pretty vulgar things to the premier

00:51:24.900 doug ford uh saying like f you doug ford this is all your fault um you know i i think that anyone

00:51:31.460 in canada who's had an emergency and needed to go sit in an emergency room knows that sometimes it

00:51:36.580 can take a very very very long time uh to see a doctor not a lot of canadians have family doctors

00:51:41.940 and you know a lot of the uh er hospitals are just completely overrun and so i thought it was a little

00:51:49.140 interesting that so many people on social media were agreeing with this person and blaming

00:51:54.260 doug ford for the long wait times um as if it was something new and i remember uh sitting in an er

00:52:00.660 room for 12 hours at one point because i didn't have a family doctor and i was having a stomach

00:52:05.700 flu or some kind of food poisoning uh it's nothing new right i don't know if it's the

00:52:10.020 current premier's fault ever uh that health care is so long but why why do you think health care

00:52:15.620 has been so politicized in our country and what do you think are some of the things that we can

00:52:19.540 do uh to improve the outcomes other than just you know swearing at the premier on social media

00:52:27.940 yeah so one you're absolutely right we've got a lot of changes that need to happen in health

00:52:31.940 care i mean even the nearest hospital to where i am in bowmanville is one that needs a massive

00:52:36.660 expansion because like many other parts of canada the population growth has boomed and yet the

00:52:42.500 hospital beds have an increased access to care has an increase so it is a feeling that is only

00:52:47.940 getting worse in many parts of canada's feeling of we just don't have a system that's working as

00:52:52.340 well as it should that said what i love about the debates in canada is that it's never a question

00:52:57.620 of whether we should have access to the people least fortunate among us and that's the thing

00:53:02.660 that we have to keep we have to keep that focus on everybody having access to health care but i

00:53:08.020 think what we need to change is much more rigorous policy debate and discussion over how we can

00:53:14.420 manage the population growth we have while also making sure we're not reducing the services that

00:53:19.700 are available to people and i agree with you candace it's unfortunate that you have to go

00:53:23.860 on twitter or you got to go on social media to kind of hear some of the perspectives that are

00:53:27.860 not being covered um in legacy media i think some of that might be a fear that if you open the can

00:53:34.660 of worms that somehow people are scared of what's going to happen but i think we need to show people

00:53:39.780 that you don't need to be afraid of talking about reforming healthcare if you're making it better

00:53:45.100 and you're keeping it universal. And I think that's the thing we have to constantly remind

00:53:48.520 people of. We're not going to take healthcare away, but changes to how the system works need

00:53:53.340 to happen so that I'm not the only person who gets to be 35 and a cancer survivor and gets to

00:53:58.980 go around and talk about it. We need lots of examples of people like me who get the healthcare

00:54:02.860 they deserve and then can go out and live a full life. Well, a hundred percent sure.

00:54:12.140 The seven project, but maybe one day I'll edit a book on that. But I think you brought something

00:54:15.900 up that's key, free expression, right? Freedom to debate these things. One of the things we

00:54:20.220 haven't talked about today is cancel culture. And that's a big part of the first part of the

00:54:24.300 1867 project. And again, if you think of the oak tree analogy that I began with, right,

00:54:29.180 Right. That Canada is an oak tree, a successful country, any countries, you know, potential oak tree or civilization.

00:54:34.760 What do you need for a tree to thrive, to get from an acorn to an oak tree?

00:54:38.720 Well, you need sunshine. That's a bit like free expression.

00:54:41.700 Right. And it helps the tree grow.

00:54:43.680 And a country needs free expression if it's going to revisit its mistakes and improve.

00:54:47.540 And yet we have people across the country today in the media.

00:54:51.300 This is a chapter written by a former editor of the Vancouver Province.

00:54:54.740 that we have people in politics um we have people in government universities that are

00:54:59.340 canceling other people well what does that do it's a bit like you know trying to grow a tree

00:55:03.760 in the dark have 24 hours of darkness you can't you need sunshine to see where the you know the

00:55:09.340 flaws are in the tree if you're going to prune it so but we have people today who don't want the

00:55:14.220 tree to have sunshine the civilization the country to have you know free expression so that's a

00:55:19.680 problem and it's it's one we attack in the 1867 project precisely because that's how you

00:55:24.580 improve things. I'll ask you just, I guess, a final question. We are going to wrap up in a

00:55:32.760 couple minutes here and let everyone start their long weekend and enjoying the Canada Day festivities.

00:55:39.120 Why don't you just tell us, first of all, what's the most compelling chapter? What's your

00:55:45.000 favorite chapter of the book? And then maybe you can just sort of give a final pitch for the book

00:55:49.400 and let folks know where they can purchase it.

00:55:52.520 I don't know if I have a favorite chapter,

00:55:54.360 but what I like about the theme is that it says

00:55:56.480 this is a country that we should be proud of

00:55:59.700 precisely because, listen,

00:56:01.720 compare Canada in 1920 or 1960 or 1867

00:56:05.040 to almost any other country on the planet.

00:56:07.260 The United States just finishes the Civil War in 1867.

00:56:10.780 Meanwhile, we abolished slavery decades earlier

00:56:12.980 as the British Empire did.

00:56:14.860 So what I love about the 1867 project

00:56:17.420 is that it's got 20 authors, all of whom take a different tack to say, listen, either people today

00:56:24.000 don't know their history. And here's an informed view of some of our historical developments in

00:56:30.660 Canada. Or they look ahead like we do at the end of the book and say, it's precisely because there's

00:56:35.160 so many different people from so many different countries around the world. We had better unite

00:56:38.960 around positive ideas. Maybe the best way to put it is this. 10 years ago, I was in Hong Kong.

00:56:45.260 And back then, almost to a person, politicians, bureaucrats, and business people I met said

00:56:50.280 there's three things they wanted to preserve, capitalism, the rule of law, and the British

00:56:54.200 legal code.

00:56:55.060 They were taking the best from the past, and they saw it vis-a-vis Beijing, which was taking

00:56:59.520 those things away and, of course, has done that ever since, too.

00:57:04.340 Imagine in Canada if we said, let's be proud of the things in our past that helped build

00:57:08.580 this into a successful, flourishing, free country.

00:57:10.980 It's not perfect today.

00:57:12.320 We all know that.

00:57:13.200 But let's take those things from our history that actually are worth preserving. Capitalism, free expression, the rule of law, the British legal code, so to speak. The fact that we got to reforms earlier than almost any other country. So let's take that and actually celebrate that on Dominion Day or Canada Day. But let's not cancel Canada.

00:57:32.760 I couldn't agree more, Mark. So well put. Let's just bring Matthew Lau in for a final point.

00:57:41.820 Matthew, you're a columnist for the Financial Post and also with the Fraser Institute. And we

00:57:47.220 had a question for you from Taylor Britton. She wrote that, I like Matt's comment on property

00:57:52.600 rights and reservations. Does he have any other recommendations to read further on this topic,

00:57:58.040 any Fraser Institute studies or the like? Thank you so much.

00:58:02.760 Yeah, the Fraser Institute does have a department that focuses on Aboriginal issues and Tom Flanagan has written a lot of those studies.

00:58:12.360 So if you go to their website, you'll find a lot of good material there.

00:58:16.060 Great. Well, thank you, Matthew, for your time and thank you for joining the live show.

00:58:22.540 You have a wonderful Canada Day.

00:58:23.980 Jamil, I wanted to just get a final comment from you.

00:58:27.480 first of all, I just want to say that we're so grateful and so pleased that you did get the

00:58:33.560 treatment that you needed and that you're still here with us. So I just wanted to say that and

00:58:39.660 thank you for all the work you're doing. Why don't you tell us what you're up to this Canada Day long

00:58:44.040 weekend and what you're going to be doing to celebrate? Well, I'm going to be out in the

00:58:50.140 community, you know, getting to know my neighbours. As Candice mentioned off the top, I'm running for

00:58:55.360 the nomination to be the next MP for the riding of Durham. So I will be celebrating Canada with

00:59:01.240 lots of people in North Oshawa, Scugog, Clarendon, having a great time. And as I said, I mean,

00:59:07.740 these conversations about Canada are far more controversial or contentious in the pages of

00:59:13.840 legacy media newspapers than they are in real life. So everybody, get out in your community

00:59:18.160 and you'll see people love Canada. Canadians love Canada of all backgrounds, all cultures,

00:59:23.280 all races, all religions. Canada is still very popular, thank God.

00:59:31.280 Great way to rebuke, you know, all of the sort of negative nonsense that we see out there

00:59:35.680 is just to go live the experience of Canada, which is so many different people from different

00:59:39.760 communities gathering together, celebrating the things that unite us. So such a great point and

00:59:44.960 we're wishing you all the very best with your nomination and hopefully anyone who is watching

00:59:51.760 from Durham, go out and support Jamil and help him out any way you can. Mark, I'll give the final

00:59:57.920 word to you. What would you like to say to the audience about Canada and Canada Day?

01:00:04.400 Well, there are other things to be proud of as well. I'm probably going to go hike out in the

01:00:08.400 Canadian Rockies this weekend. That always makes me feel very Canadian looking down in Banff or

01:00:12.480 Lake Louise or someplace more remote with fewer hikers around or fewer tourists. But that's part

01:00:17.760 Part of Canada as well is enjoying the great outdoors.

01:00:20.220 So I'd encourage everyone to get into the great outdoors.

01:00:22.960 But you can find the 1867 project on Amazon.

01:00:26.020 And I think True North has provided the link.

01:00:27.700 Thank you, Candice, for the interview today.

01:00:30.580 And if you want to know more about the Aristotle Foundation, you just go to AristotleFoundation.org.

01:00:35.960 But, you know, I think it's long overdue.

01:00:39.160 And I think the majority of Canadians actually think Canada should be cherished and not cancelled.

01:00:42.480 What they may not have are the tools at hand to do that.

01:00:47.320 And so that's one of the things we actually want to do with the Aristotle Foundation.

01:00:50.440 And this being our first release, the 1867 project, the chapters from Jamil, from Matthew

01:00:56.020 and 17 others and myself, I think you'll find a lot of grist for debate there.

01:01:02.660 Absolutely.

01:01:03.280 Well, I flipped through it.

01:01:04.560 I've read the synopsis and read the little intro to each chapter, and it seems like a

01:01:08.680 fantastic book.

01:01:09.420 I'm going to spend the rest of the long weekend running around with my kids.

01:01:12.520 But when I get some quiet moments, I will finish reading the book.

01:01:15.640 And I encourage everyone out there to pick up a copy to support these authors, to support their vision of Canada as a country that we should cherish and celebrate.

01:01:24.740 I hope everyone out there watching, well, first of all, thank you for tuning in.

01:01:28.720 Thank you for your ongoing support of True North.

01:01:31.980 And I hope that you will take the best from Canada, celebrate the best, not the worst.

01:01:37.760 Really have a great, wonderful, long weekend.

01:01:40.900 So thank you to Matthew, Jamil and Mark for joining us.

01:01:43.880 Thank you to everyone for watching.

01:01:45.240 we hope you have a wonderful long weekend happy canada day happy dominion day god bless you all

01:01:51.000 Thank you so much.

01:02:21.000 Thank you.

01:02:51.000 We'll be right back.

01:03:21.000 Thank you.

Juno News - June 30, 2023

Why Canada Should be Cherished – Not Cancelled ｜ Launch of the 1867 Project

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript