Juno News - November 02, 2022


Why ‘Vancouver is Dying’ (ft. Aaron Gunn)


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

183.77657

Word Count

2,801

Sentence Count

4


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.920 we're gonna shift gears here a bit i want to bring in my very good friend and fellow uh i don't even
00:00:14.420 know independent media guy just seems too trite but i'll say independent media titan aaron gunn
00:00:20.080 who hails from the west coast uh aaron good to talk to you thanks for coming on today
00:00:24.700 great to chat with you as well andrew it's great to be here so just on the i want to get to your
00:00:30.760 documentary vancouver is dying in just a moment but you're a bc guy and i think oftentimes bc gets
00:00:37.220 very misunderstood by the rest of canada because you really have two provinces there you've got
00:00:42.680 vancouver and then you've got the rest of british columbia and the political culture is very
00:00:47.520 different but a lot of people forget the convoy originated in delta bc and obviously more people
00:00:53.100 joined in alberta saskatchewan but but it was a very key part of this and i was wondering just how
00:00:58.360 that story and bc has unfolded outside of like the the downtown vancouver bubble
00:01:04.180 yeah well bc i mean you mentioned there's two provinces in one it's it's arguably three or four
00:01:10.840 i suppose uh you got the interior got vancouver island um and then to your point where it started
00:01:16.200 in delta there um yeah i think there's been a lot bc is a weird place because we've had some of the most
00:01:21.860 repressive vaccine mandates in the country but also had some of the most relaxed uh other covid
00:01:30.980 restrictions i guess you i guess you might call i remember in ontario you guys were shutting down
00:01:35.340 restaurants and for the most part everything in bc was pretty relaxed so it's kind of a two-phased
00:01:40.880 approach here in in bc um but i think it's for the most part this was a canadian story and what was
00:01:47.360 happening in bc was happening in alberta saskatchewan ontario quebec obviously uh atlantic
00:01:53.340 canada so um i don't think there's anything specific to bc just the same sort of thing that
00:01:58.020 was happening everywhere else one of the stories i think of the pandemic which has not been fully
00:02:04.900 explored yet i think more and more people are starting to talk about it is how the lockdowns
00:02:10.640 the get to covid zero zero cases exacerbated all of these other issues i mean we've heard
00:02:16.140 anecdotally and there's been some data about this of drug overdoses suicides mental health domestic
00:02:21.520 violence a lot of these issues i mean specifically on drugs are very real issues in bc and i was
00:02:28.400 wondering if you could speak uh in general and in vancouver specifically about whether these things
00:02:34.000 have just gotten worse because they've always been getting worse in in the last few years or whether
00:02:38.120 you think there is a connection between that trend and the the lockdown issues that we've seen
00:02:43.460 elsewhere i think the lockdowns basically poured fuel on the fire so it was already bad the policies
00:02:52.080 that the government were pursuing were making the problem worse and then the lockdowns the the impact
00:02:58.840 of reduced government services and also just a feeling of isolation i think for a lot of people
00:03:04.580 i think exacerbated uh that problem uh that was already bad and was already getting worse so i uh
00:03:11.560 we can see now that covid's over the the drug overdoses are still there um so i i think if that if that if
00:03:18.640 that makes sense you had a fire that was already burning and and government policies during covid just
00:03:23.040 threw a whole bunch of uh of gasoline on on top of it let's take a look at the trailer for vancouver is dying
00:03:31.120 people are afraid in vancouver you shouldn't have to walk down the street looking over your shoulder
00:03:39.100 but that's the way it is now you just kind of get used to this being part of what it means to be a
00:03:43.940 vancouverite this isn't normal and this is actually something wrong and that we should hold our
00:03:48.320 political leaders accountable for presiding over something that is clearly not okay we had a good city in the
00:03:54.320 what is happening to vancouver one of the wealthiest and most naturally beautiful cities in all of north
00:04:02.820 america has been beset by skyrocketing crime violent attacks and a crippling battle with addiction
00:04:09.680 that's literally left thousands of people dead but what is at the root of all these problems do
00:04:16.840 police have the tools they need to do their jobs or violent offenders being released with little to no
00:04:22.780 regard for public safety and has an ideological obsession with so-called safe supply and free
00:04:29.500 drugs overshadowed the desperate need for treatment recovery and rehabilitation harm reduction somebody's
00:04:37.160 got a sense of humor man because that ain't helping nobody man it's helping everybody get high more
00:04:41.960 everywhere you look that this stuff has taken hold significantly the cities have become destroyed
00:04:48.520 my name is aaron gunn and this is politics explained
00:04:52.280 the whole thing is incredibly well done not just the the trailer but i think the trailer gives people
00:05:03.300 a sense of it uh it's made i think a pretty significant impact already i think you had the
00:05:08.360 premier of alberta danielle smith uh share it uh just a couple of days ago let me ask you first off
00:05:14.260 why you did this and what the overarching message is of it well i think like some of the other
00:05:20.560 journalism i do in this this series specifically um it was it was an issue that that confounded me
00:05:26.440 and i i wanted to know why as someone who's lived in british columbia coastal bc especially uh you know
00:05:32.780 over the past 20 years and watched as this problem has gotten worse and worse homelessness drug overdoses up
00:05:39.760 from when the problem was supposed to be bad 20 years ago 150 deaths per year now up to over 2000
00:05:46.000 uh what's going on why are we pumping more and more money at this problem and nothing is getting better
00:05:51.740 and then you saw the one of the side effects of this or the symptoms with crime
00:05:55.520 has just absolutely been exploding uh here there's four violent random stranger attacks every day in
00:06:02.300 the streets of vancouver where random people are just getting attacked this isn't gang related or
00:06:06.220 anything like this so what is happening and like trying to kind of peel back the curtain and and
00:06:11.780 look past some of the kind of the same mainstream media talking points and figure out what's actually
00:06:16.840 going on and and like you said it's just uh it's it's been explosive and um i think it's it's getting
00:06:23.120 close to two million views now uh although one thing that we can take away which was great uh week and a
00:06:28.560 half after we released it the municipal elections were held here in in bc and going into it the
00:06:35.080 incumbent mayor who we were very critical of uh was about tied in the polls and ended up losing by
00:06:40.460 about 20 points so uh we'd like to think the the video uh played a little bit of an impact on that
00:06:45.480 result yeah it's always good to get results in such a clear and uh you know rooted in metrics uh way
00:06:52.400 i i will ask you about the the drug thing specifically here because i i know in a lot of cases
00:06:59.040 it's very ideological for people it's it's never been in in my experience where folks discuss this
00:07:05.000 in terms of what's the best way to deal with this crisis they you you have people that very much are
00:07:10.460 part of this permissive ignore the criminal law uh they use terms like harm reduction approach and
00:07:16.180 then you have other people that are the more traditional law and order types are you still
00:07:20.400 seeing that on left right lines or is it starting to change because i think it's very difficult to take
00:07:25.520 the abstract no no we need to give these people what they want attitude when your car is getting
00:07:30.980 broken into when your business is being broken into and that's i've seen it on a smaller scale
00:07:35.000 in my own city london which has a very significant and growing drug problem and i'm curious if it's
00:07:40.260 shifting in vancouver that there is a growing realization which is why i think the video has
00:07:47.780 resonated in the way it has that what we're doing now isn't working i think that is that is that is
00:07:53.840 the consensus that is forming um and also i think moving away from i think what some of those who
00:08:00.920 are big proponents of harm reduction always try to to paint this picture of a of a binary choice
00:08:08.620 between like the war on drugs uh where you know you're throwing people who are using drugs in jail
00:08:14.000 versus what they're doing and that's just not the case there's lots of countries in the world
00:08:17.900 that have taken different approaches um you know just because you're not throwing uh people in jail
00:08:23.280 uh you know for for simple possession doesn't mean that the solution has to be we're now just handing
00:08:29.200 out free drugs there's a case in vancouver where they were putting basically heroin in vending machines
00:08:34.500 uh to supply the the the the drug addictions of these people and i think um the other point i just
00:08:42.080 wanted to go back to your first question of what really got me into this was this there's a big
00:08:46.160 marketing push in british columbia and i think it's happening in other provinces as well about
00:08:50.380 stigma about you know this problem is all to do with stigma we need to de-stigmatize the situation
00:08:56.520 and when you drive down the streets of vancouver victoria you see people lying here and just just
00:09:03.120 dying on mass and overdosing on math it's not it's not because of stigma it's not it's not that there's
00:09:08.540 too much stigma on on drugs it's somehow led to people using drugs and dying it doesn't even make any
00:09:14.640 sense so um really exploring exploring this topic and trying to uh trying to get to the bottom of it
00:09:21.100 was i think important i remember when i first went to san francisco a few years back i had been
00:09:27.420 i had seen the conservative parody of san francisco online of like people defecating on streets and you
00:09:35.180 know homeless people in every corner and drive and i was like okay yeah yeah whatever and then i went
00:09:40.260 there and it was exactly as i had been told like the parody was real and it was actually quite
00:09:46.560 upsetting because i i had seen you know old photos and videos of san francisco looking like a wonderful
00:09:52.360 place and it is just geographically a beautiful place and vancouver is very similar and i don't know
00:09:57.320 if you'd say vancouver is worse or better than san francisco or if it's even a necessary comparison but
00:10:03.140 it's a city that has so much like it's a beautiful city it's got culture it's got dining it's got
00:10:09.820 the ocean but it's also a city that is just like a hellscape in some ways
00:10:15.140 yeah i mean there's a lot of parallels on on the west coast of the united states with what's
00:10:21.440 happening on the west coast of canada british columbia is actually a significantly higher
00:10:25.380 death rate from overdoses than than say washington state or california so the problem is is very acute
00:10:32.440 uh here and the permissiveness around drugs handing out free drugs i mean if you ask the people in
00:10:39.080 vancouver that are pushing these policies they would say that they are the vanguard of kind of
00:10:44.200 progressive drug policy in north america and i would argue that the vanguard of of disastrous drug policy
00:10:49.640 but they certainly are the ones that are pushing the limits the most and this started if you go back
00:10:54.540 to i think it's 2002 where insight opened the first safe injection site in north america where people
00:10:59.780 were allowed to to go and shoot up illicit drugs and ever since that point um it seems to me that
00:11:07.200 as the results keep getting worse and worse and worse their response is always that it's just because
00:11:13.200 we haven't gone far enough and it's just amazing when you contrast that with other countries uh in
00:11:18.640 europe like portugal and sweden and others who have taken dramatically different approaches with with way
00:11:23.540 better results and yet where it's just it's so ideological here in british columbia um and it's
00:11:31.140 it's it's sad to see the results and it's i mean it's not surprising you see the left do this on other
00:11:35.420 issues as well where it becomes almost like this religious like devotion to ideology that it's the
00:11:41.940 point of which you just ignore things that are happening right in right in front of your face which
00:11:45.720 i mean downtown vancouver um you know you'd have to it's it's amazing you can see it visually in
00:11:52.780 front of you the results of these failed policies i i will say it's very inconvenient for libertarians
00:12:00.020 like me who would say in theory yes legalize all drugs you know if you use drug it harms only you
00:12:06.400 not other people therefore it's like it's like smoking it's like if you do it on your own and it
00:12:10.500 hurts you it's no one else's problem what's your response because i know you're you and i see eye to
00:12:15.340 eye on a lot of issues so how do you respond to that where why does the libertarian fantasy break down
00:12:21.660 in reality well uh so there's a couple i mean i mean there's the drug issue there's the criminal
00:12:30.180 justice issue i mean this documentary covers a lot of it but part of the problem is that these people
00:12:37.360 develop drug addictions these drug addictions cost a lot of money to maintain you obviously can't be
00:12:43.440 uh when you're in a when you're perpetually high you can't maintain a job or whatever so you resort to
00:12:50.120 crime it usually begins with petty crime and right now i interviewed the head of the police union
00:12:55.780 uh and police officers who you know they arrest the same person for the exact same crime twice
00:13:02.860 in 24 hour periods repeatedly like they had arrested the literal revolving door literal revolving door
00:13:09.200 they get put in prison they get a they released on a promise to appear they go and commit the exact
00:13:13.560 same crime and the cop just by happenstance ends up arresting them again so um the the criminal justice
00:13:20.600 system the fact uh is a big part of this problem as well what i would say with addiction and libertarianism
00:13:26.860 is um i mean i i kind of view it as as a parallel of if you wouldn't allow um at least i think most
00:13:38.600 versions of libertarianism wouldn't allow for slavery like the right of somebody to basically
00:13:42.740 sell themselves into slavery and i think with these hard drugs like are talking crystal meth
00:13:48.620 and heroin and these kinds of things um eventually these people basically lose the ability to to act
00:13:56.240 rationally um to to to process kind of the uh look out for their own best interests make make uh um as as
00:14:04.700 the addicts i interviewed would talk about they would commit crimes and do things that morally they
00:14:10.420 would never have otherwise done or were never raised it just becomes your sole focus uh in life
00:14:15.640 is achieving the next high and everything ends up revolving around that and i just don't think that's
00:14:20.620 something that is that is really sustainable in a free and open society i think i think there should
00:14:26.460 be as as few rules as possible but we still need uh certain rules uh or else things descend into
00:14:33.460 into chaos and and on anarchy like we're seeing in parts of vancouver uh where can people watch the
00:14:39.220 documentary people can watch the documentary on youtube so uh you can type in vancouver is dying
00:14:45.880 on on youtube uh and it should uh pop up or you can visit my channel which is uh youtube.com
00:14:51.980 slash aaron gunn bc and you should definitely give aaron a follow on youtube anyway but do check out
00:14:58.760 the documentary it's a great one aaron gunn great to see you as always thanks for coming on today
00:15:02.980 thanks for having me thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to
00:15:08.560 true north at www.tnc.news
00:15:12.480 you