RadixJournal - Canada： On The Road To Separation？

00:00:00.000 It is October 24th, and this is another edition of the McSpencer Group.

00:00:05.360 Joining the panel once again are Richard Spencer and Mark Brahman.

00:00:08.700 And a new entry into the legendary McSpencer Group is Tyler Hamilton, a student of philosophy, a published author on the Countercurrents website.

00:00:21.760 He's here today to help us talk about the recent election in Canada, to tell us what's happening with our neighbors to the north, or if Augustus Invictus has his way, our future property.

00:00:35.240 Tyler, welcome to the program. How are you doing?

00:00:38.640 I'm pretty well. How are you guys?

00:00:41.060 So as regards the recent election, as I understand it, obviously being outside of Canada, Richard, Mark, myself are not quite as plugged in.

00:00:50.460 But there were some surprises with the turnout, particularly as it relates to the Bloc Quebecois.

00:00:57.060 I don't want to jump too far ahead, but why don't you just let the audience know, you know, who the players were, what was at stake, and how things turned out.

00:01:07.060 Well, it was very interesting, and pretty much all the polls were entirely wrong about what would actually go down.

00:01:12.520 There was two kind of contradictory opinions in Canada about how this would play out.

00:01:16.880 One was that Trudeau's latest scandals with the SNC-Lavalin Affair, which was this company in Quebec that was essentially paying off Gaddafi to get contracts.

00:01:31.000 And of course, this corporation is based out of Quebec.

00:01:33.860 And so Trudeau, not wanting to get into an election scandal with this prosecution coming out, he essentially blackmailed the prosecutor.

00:01:42.400 And so there was that scandal about it. Now she's demoted. She's gone. 0.97

00:01:46.220 After she went through with the prosecution, she didn't bend, and now she's gone.

00:01:49.940 And then there was, of course, the blackface scandal, which to me doesn't really mean anything.

00:01:53.340 But to these kind of politics in Canada, it does.

00:01:56.500 But regardless, one side was saying he was going to lose a lot of support for that.

00:01:59.900 The other side was saying it was going to be a liberal majority, NDP was going to be third place as usual, and conservatives might step up a little, but they were going to lose again.

00:02:08.240 None of these things happened. Pretty much what had happened was completely surprising.

00:02:12.560 Liberals won a minority government, and so they're on very shaky grounds.

00:02:16.160 I don't predict that's going to last very long at all, actually, and reasons I'll get into later.

00:02:20.620 But the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec Nationalist Party, well, they were coming out of a separatist party, but they're taking a more nationalist line, trying to just push for their sovereignty and what they want the federal government to do on their behalf.

00:02:34.420 They're pushing for more of that instead of pushing separatism.

00:02:37.120 And they're in a very interesting position, and they sweeped entirely all of Quebec, and it greatly knocked down all the liberals down to a minority position.

00:02:44.400 So now you have the Bloc Quebecois, and they beat out the NDP.

00:02:47.420 And on the other side of that, Alberta and Saskatchewan are extremely pissed off.

00:02:52.160 And in about one day, on October 21st, the separatist movement was at about 1,000 people joining their ranks, and overnight it went up to a little over 100,000.

00:03:02.720 There's a lot of interesting things going on right now in this election.

00:03:06.200 I think, to be quite honest, this is the best thing that could have came out of it, which we can get into, I suppose.

00:03:11.720 Well, let's start with that right away, because at least my read on Twitter was that many conservative types, Canadian conservatives, were very frustrated by the results.

00:03:23.980 Why should conservatives, right-wingers, or kind of heritage Canadians be happy about this outcome?

00:03:31.640 Right. So what you had with this election was there was a race last year between, sorry, the year before, for the Conservative Party leadership between Maxime Bernier and Andrew Scheer.

00:03:44.920 And Andrew Scheer is the lukewarm, milquetoast conservative.

00:03:48.560 He has no fighting spirit in him whatsoever. 0.82

00:03:50.400 He's an incredibly boring guy.

00:03:52.260 Bernier, on the other hand, is kind of like the faux populist trying to take on this kind of Trump role for Canada.

00:03:57.140 So what had happened was Bernier lost by 1% of the vote.

00:04:02.100 And he said, OK, well, we're not going to get what we want as conservatives in the CPC.

00:04:05.920 So he left and he formed what's called the People's Party of Canada, the PPC, which I was involved in myself for some time.

00:04:13.480 And the CPC, on the other hand, the route that they were taking with this election was they didn't want to change the immigration numbers.

00:04:20.740 They still want 1.2 million immigrants in the next three years.

00:04:24.560 Scheer actually said that, you know, Trudeau's numbers are great.

00:04:28.260 Yeah, he still wants to go along with the Climate Accord, the Paris Agreement.

00:04:32.140 Everything that Albertan and Saskatchewan conservatives disliked about the Trudeau government, Scheer actually wanted the exact same thing.

00:04:40.840 But the interesting thing about Scheer, why he was so damaging, why him winning would have been far worse,

00:04:47.700 is because he was trying to carry out a program of depoliticizing the election, saying, well, we're doing this for the economy.

00:04:53.640 We don't want to think about partisan politics.

00:04:55.380 This isn't about, you know, warring ideals.

00:04:58.320 We're all Canadians.

00:04:59.680 So this is all about what will work for the economy.

00:05:02.040 And that was the worst thing about him.

00:05:03.440 And then Bernier, on the other hand, which he stood absolutely no chance.

00:05:06.860 And frankly, I didn't want to either because the PPC, well, it's running under this kind of faux nationalism, right?

00:05:13.580 So he was saying it's all about Canadian heritage and Canadian ideals and who we are as a people.

00:05:18.800 And then you push him on this.

00:05:20.300 What he meant was, you know, we need a free market.

00:05:22.780 We need to get rid of our system of supply management.

00:05:25.820 We need to open up the market to the states.

00:05:27.780 And he was saying we're all come from immigrants, right?

00:05:31.500 He was basically repeating the same dogma about Canada that the left was doing, except he wanted some kind of Trumpism.

00:05:39.500 And anyone familiar with Canadian history and conservatism in Canada, Canada is a traditionally, anyways, historically, our conservative parties have actually been very anti-free market.

00:05:49.060 While the liberals, on the other hand, were more in line with American classical liberalism.

00:05:53.520 They wanted to open up Canada.

00:05:55.180 And that's actually what happened in 1962 with the election battle between Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, partly on behalf of John Kennedy, trying to put armed nuclear missiles in Canada during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:06:09.420 And that's what toppled Diefenbaker.

00:06:11.340 And that's ultimately what toppled Canadian traditionalist conservatism.

00:06:15.140 But regardless, the Conservative Party has been lost ever since then.

00:06:18.020 And the PPC tried to kind of harken back to this.

00:06:20.960 But Bernier's proposal of a one Canada vision was basically the same problem that Diefenbaker has, was the fact that Canada was comprised of ethnicities that wanted to preserve their identity in this kind of very uneasy alliance.

00:06:34.900 And he wanted to act like there was no distinction between these ethnicities and there's nothing you could do to protect their values.

00:06:40.940 Instead, we have a shared Canadian heritage, which simply doesn't exist.

00:06:45.600 So Bernier's vision is very, under the guise of nationalism, does not go at all with Canadian nationalism.

00:06:52.480 So on the one hand, if you had PPC rising, which again, they had no point, they had no hope.

00:06:57.060 They were only there for a year.

00:06:58.360 They couldn't have possibly did it.

00:07:00.080 You would have had this kind of Americanism.

00:07:01.800 And then if you had the CPC, you would have had the exact same things about Trudeau, other than the fact that people would, you know, fall for it because it's a spectacle wrapped in Conservatives fighting Trudeau.

00:07:13.600 Canadian Conservatives all think this stems from Trudeau.

00:07:16.120 So you would not have had the anger in the very interesting political situation we have now, which is essentially two provinces that are being shafted.

00:07:25.280 And they do have seats, not as much as the Liberals, but they do have seats in Parliament and they do have power now.

00:07:32.580 And our own Premier in Alberta, he's essentially he was the immigration minister for Harper.

00:07:38.940 And he was a part of largely the same kind of multicultural shifts happening in Canada.

00:07:44.000 And so his legitimacy is starting to wane as well.

00:07:47.040 And so he's in a very tough spot.

00:07:49.020 So this is quite possibly the best thing that could have happened is delegitimizing the CPC and showing that the PPC did not offer a solution either.

00:07:58.540 So there is no better situation that could have happened than what's happening right now.

00:08:04.660 Just as a quick follow up question, obviously, the Bloc Québécois, they've been politically kind of insolvent for quite some time.

00:08:13.240 And there was some strong resurgence there.

00:08:16.340 But in preparing for this program, I also saw that there's a kind of a separatist movement in Alberta as well.

00:08:22.840 Is this something that there's a legitimate chance for Albertans to break away?

00:08:27.720 Or I mean, what's your read on that?

00:08:29.140 I think it's going to force the parties that they're going to have to adopt a very different strategy if they want to remain in power.

00:08:36.500 Because if you follow all the Canadian news, all the talking heads right now, they're essentially saying, look, we have to put aside our differences.

00:08:42.440 You know, Trudeau went again as a minority government.

00:08:44.460 We have all these different voices from all these different parties and we need to work together to solve this.

00:08:49.800 The problem is it's impossible to do that.

00:08:52.040 So and actually the complete wild card in this situation is the Bloc Québécois.

00:08:57.040 I actually think they're more interesting than the Alberta separatists.

00:09:00.740 But I don't think they have much of a chance.

00:09:03.760 I mean, they're kind of taking hold of this kind of Trumpian rhetoric.

00:09:07.080 And I think that's largely damaging to them.

00:09:09.800 And regardless, it's forcing it's forcing the parties to actually have to deal with the fact that the minority government could topple.

00:09:18.900 The NDP has said they don't want a collision with the liberal government.

00:09:22.320 And so they have no recourse to hold on to their power.

00:09:25.620 So something is going to have to happen.

00:09:27.240 And it's a very uneasy situation.

00:09:29.940 But in case a referendum comes up over Western separation, I don't think it will go through.

00:09:35.640 But regardless, Bloc Québécois has, I think, the upper hand in this.

00:09:42.680 Let me throw out some big ideas.

00:09:46.400 And you can either find them interesting or you could say, ah, Richard knows next to nothing about Canada, despite the fact that he actually lived in Ontario for a little while there around 10 years ago.

00:09:58.860 But I'm just looking, thinking about these dynamics at play.

00:10:05.260 And there's a history of American federalism, like properly understood, not federalism as Hamilton understood it, but federalism in the sense of different regions having greater autonomy and generally not liking each other and having different economic interests, etc.

00:10:24.460 And, you know, that is definitely at play with Canada.

00:10:27.920 There is a French-speaking kind of separatist energy, you know, in Quebec that has a lot to do with culture and language.

00:10:41.040 And, you know, the idea of whether we're French or we're Anglos is kind of, you know, being fought out there.

00:10:46.780 And then we also have a kind of natural resource battle.

00:10:51.000 Of course, the great maple syrup fields and mining of maple syrup occurs in the West, in Alberta.

00:11:02.500 I'm just joking, it's oil, but maybe many of our audience just were like, yeah, yeah, that's probably right.

00:11:11.840 They're fracking syrup.

00:11:13.200 And yet all of the waffles are made in Quebec.

00:11:18.160 It's this, you know, so, you know, we're all one community, really.

00:11:21.900 But no. 0.99

00:11:23.420 So you have this kind of idea that we're producing all the energy, we're producing all the money, and yet we're redistributing it to these French-speaking jerks who are complete snobs and hate us and whatever. 0.99

00:11:37.280 So there are these kind of, you know, energies like that. 0.96

00:11:40.900 And then there's this other massive trend, which is multiculturalism.

00:11:44.600 And I remember talking with Peter Brimo about this, actually, while we were in Toronto, of all places.

00:11:50.820 And he was saying, you know, in the late 80s and 90s, they would talk about, oh, look, we're a multicultural society.

00:11:58.160 And they would kind of marry the mass immigration question with the, you know, Quebec question in a way.

00:12:05.760 They're like, oh, it's a multicultural Canada, whatever.

00:12:08.200 But, you know, they would almost, you know, you'd think that it was a bait and switch.

00:12:12.180 You'd think they were talking about Quebec.

00:12:13.600 They're really talking about Jamaican immigrants, et cetera.

00:12:16.640 And so you have this kind of country that's generally unhappy, that's being divided, that's getting polarized, you know, just like the United States.

00:12:24.260 But then it's going to be a lot of those energies can't be expressed or articulated in the way that they should be.

00:12:33.560 They can't be articulated in the sense of we don't want all this mass immigration. 0.99

00:12:37.620 I mean, Canada has the same immigration levels as the United States, and it has less than a third of the population.

00:12:43.400 I mean, that's remarkable.

00:12:44.300 1.2 million is more or less what the United States takes in.

00:12:49.200 And how many, what is the population of Canada's, what is it, 60 million?

00:12:53.040 I don't know off the top of my head.

00:12:55.960 Yeah.

00:12:57.580 Including Eskimos and Igloos, I think it is. 1.00

00:13:02.220 Yeah.

00:13:02.500 And, yeah, 60 million.

00:13:05.260 And every citizen owns four or five canoes.

00:13:09.440 But, sorry, I'm just getting all the dad jokes out here at once.

00:13:15.040 Well, actually, we turned that.

00:13:15.840 We did actually take a canoe down a sledding hill near my house.

00:13:19.900 It's a big seven hill.

00:13:20.980 So we manned four people on the canoe and just went down this big hill on the snow.

00:13:25.060 And you go really fast on this canoe.

00:13:27.300 Right.

00:13:27.740 That's how you travel.

00:13:28.800 Yeah.

00:13:29.100 This conversation has taken on an anti-Semitic turn.

00:13:32.040 So there are kind of two issues.

00:13:40.780 There's like the natural federalism and division that's regional and linguistic.

00:13:46.620 And then there's this new thing thrown into the pot, which is Canada's multicultural experiment.

00:13:51.720 And what Peter Brimler was saying is that in the 80s and 90s, they would talk about multiculturalism, even though Toronto at that time was still basically Anglo-Protestant Toronto, effectively.

00:14:02.740 Now it's not.

00:14:03.700 I mean, I don't even know what Toronto is like now.

00:14:05.460 When I lived there 10 years ago, it was remarkably multicultural and truly multicultural, not biracial.

00:14:13.460 And so you have these kind of two forces, and yet, you know, the people can't really articulate what their problem is.

00:14:21.920 And so all of that energy goes into things like regional separatism and regional hatred and rivalry, etc. 0.73

00:14:29.100 That's my view from the perspective of a American ignoramus.

00:14:36.780 Yeah. 0.64

00:14:37.500 I mean, partly the whole multicultural act was an attempt to deal with putback.

00:14:41.940 Right.

00:14:42.640 As the Canada was always founded on these different ethnic identities that didn't have much in common other than they didn't want to be American. 0.84

00:14:48.900 And, you know, I think, you know, like, you know, English speaking Canadians have a, this is why they're so wrapped up in the Trump rhetoric, is they have a very hard time understanding that they're not Americans.

00:15:00.460 Right.

00:15:00.600 The French, on the other hand, and this is, this is why I'm going to say the Bloc Quebecois is a complete wild card in this situation. 0.89

00:15:06.760 Because if you look at the history of Quebec and Quebec nationalism, and it's important to remember the Bloc Quebecois was acting more as a nationalist party within Canada than a separatist one at this point.

00:15:15.920 But they, so they're, they were traditionally Catholic.

00:15:21.740 And then around the time of the 60s, you had these kind of anti-colonial uprisings going along and going around the world.

00:15:27.160 And so they said, okay, well, we're subjugated in our nation.

00:15:30.420 We want our own, we want our own anti-colonial uprising.

00:15:33.080 So that's where you got the terrorist groups, like Front Through Quebecois, that were all a left-wing nationalism.

00:15:38.420 They're a Marxist-Leninist, they engage in assassinations and bombings and things like this.

00:15:43.540 And so, and they also had, of course, had the parties at the time that were pushing for Quebec separatism.

00:15:49.020 And so that kind of energy remained in Quebec.

00:15:51.120 They're a very secular left-wing nationalism.

00:15:54.700 But they're also very wrapped up in their own language and their culture.

00:15:58.480 And that's something they want to preserve.

00:15:59.700 And this is, this is why I get to the fact that they're the biggest wild card in this election.

00:16:04.260 It's because the current premier, his last name is like Legault.

00:16:08.860 I'm not sure how to pronounce it, so I don't really want to try.

00:16:11.460 But like Francois Legault or something like that.

00:16:14.440 He used to run the nationalist, the separatist party in Quebec.

00:16:19.460 And now he left thinking, okay, well, I have a better chance at power at the premier because I'm going to force the Bloc Quebecois to act as a nationalist bulwark for Quebec at the federal level.

00:16:29.140 And so you take the Liberals and the NDP.

00:16:32.960 They're for mass immigration and they're for, you know, the Paris Accords and things like that.

00:16:40.180 And so Alberta and Saskatchewan hates that.

00:16:43.540 But also at the same time, they're anti-mass immigration.

00:16:47.540 So they're kind of playing the role in between both.

00:16:50.860 They are, they're, you know, they're against the pipelines, but they're also against mass immigration and they have power now.

00:16:58.980 And that's really going to shake things up.

00:17:01.020 And in fact, the premier knew this was going to happen.

00:17:03.040 So if you want to appeal to the Quebec people, you want to give them their sense of sovereignty.

00:17:09.780 And so one thing you have is that the Liberals and the NDP are both in agreement, although they're not in agreement on the mechanism to do it, to basically force Quebec to change their laws that you can't, for example, wear a hijab in court.

00:17:23.880 Right.

00:17:24.020 That's one major thing.

00:17:25.000 They want to force Quebec on the heel. 0.66

00:17:26.600 And CPC, actually, to a lesser extent, while they don't agree with it, they have said they're not doing anything about it, but they also want to make it so they have veto power over the federal government on any immigration requirements that they want to put on Quebec.

00:17:44.160 So you basically have this left wing nationalism in Quebec, and they're going to act, I think, as a very interesting bulwark to whatever the CPC or the Liberals or the NDP want to do.

00:17:55.100 And you're not going to be able to push through a strong government that's going to last very long.

00:18:01.760 And I think that will lead to a vote of no confidence.

00:18:04.420 But what's going to replace that?

00:18:05.580 I really don't know.

00:18:08.840 Because there is no – this is what's so interesting to me about this, is there is no answer.

00:18:13.240 So the other interesting aspect, maybe looking forward to seeing how Trudeau's policies – whether they're successful or not.

00:18:23.660 He took office as a kind of radical climate change activist, but he also supported the construction of the pipeline.

00:18:33.020 I do believe that he initiated the carbon tax.

00:18:35.400 This has been kind of one of many sticking points for Trudeau in terms of being able to deliver on campaign promises to fulfill his kind of mandate as the progressive president.

00:18:48.920 Well, he gave a speech today.

00:18:51.820 Actually, I think it was just a couple of hours ago on this.

00:18:54.420 And he was asked about it by a reporter.

00:18:59.140 We need to work together to find the solution.

00:19:01.780 And there's no way for me to say what the future on this is because ultimately there isn't a solution on this.

00:19:08.380 Just a couple – a few days ago, we had Greta Thunberg in my city. 1.00

00:19:13.920 And there was a truck convoy counter-protest.

00:19:16.900 They made a painted mural of her.

00:19:18.680 And actually, it's already been defaced like a day later.

00:19:22.780 And no one's buying Trudeau that you could just somehow get past it.

00:19:27.160 It's not going to happen.

00:19:28.940 There's nothing that we could do to get around it.

00:19:31.320 And this is partly why I've been supporting the North American Compact that's a part of Augustus' campaigns.

00:19:37.860 Because regardless of how these parties are forced to change, we've been using this.

00:19:45.120 And to a lot of success, by the way.

00:19:46.880 I've had this conversation with many kind of normal conservatives around Alberta.

00:19:51.680 I just read them the platform of the North American Compact, and they're on board like that, right?

00:19:57.760 Because they don't see a future in this uneasy union.

00:20:00.220 And frankly, I don't see there as much as sad as it is for me to say.

00:20:08.100 Like, I'm sorry.

00:20:10.400 But at this rate, this union can't hold.

00:20:13.160 And if it needs, it tries to hold, then one of these kind of, these various blocks of regional identities, one of them is going to have to undergo severe repression and trauma just to stay in this union.

00:20:25.720 Because there's no way they're going to get what they want.

00:20:27.300 And there will probably be Alberta and Saskatchewan, and they are full of all kinds of resentment right now.

00:20:34.960 Right.

00:20:35.220 It's actually in a bigger, say, North American union structure in which local regions could have greater autonomy is, again, the irony.

00:20:45.840 Again, when you say one Canada or one United States, it's this nationalism that you are forcing together different regions that might very well not get along.

00:20:56.080 And, you know, larger blocks can be an answer to this.

00:21:01.800 There's a reason why Scottish nationalists want to leave the UK but want to remain in the EU and things like that.

00:21:08.280 I mean, that is a definite dynamic to this whole thing.

00:21:13.440 Yeah.

00:21:14.000 Yeah.

00:21:14.240 And it should be said that Ontario needs Alberta and not the other way around.

00:21:20.340 That's one thing that's missed when you talk to people in Ontario.

00:21:23.740 It's like, that's why I go back to the de-equalization payments.

00:21:27.340 It's because all this money comes from Alberta.

00:21:30.460 Right.

00:21:30.620 So, yeah.

00:21:32.220 Yeah.

00:21:32.240 Yeah.

00:21:32.280 Yeah.

00:21:32.320 Thank you.

RadixJournal - October 24, 2019

Canada： On The Road To Separation？

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