Tyler Hamilton joins the McSpencer Group to discuss the recent election in Canada, and the implications for the future of the Conservative Party of Canada under new Prime Minister, Augustus Invictus. Also, the Bloc Quebecois swept to victory in the federal election, which is a good thing.
00:00:00.000It is October 24th, and this is another edition of the McSpencer Group.
00:00:05.360Joining the panel once again are Richard Spencer and Mark Brahman.
00:00:08.700And a new entry into the legendary McSpencer Group is Tyler Hamilton, a student of philosophy, a published author on the Countercurrents website.
00:00:21.760He'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.
00:00:35.240Tyler, welcome to the program. How are you doing?
00:00:41.060So as regards the recent election, as I understand it, obviously being outside of Canada, Richard, Mark, myself are not quite as plugged in.
00:00:50.460But there were some surprises with the turnout, particularly as it relates to the Bloc Quebecois.
00:00:57.060I 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.
00:01:07.060Well, it was very interesting, and pretty much all the polls were entirely wrong about what would actually go down.
00:01:12.520There was two kind of contradictory opinions in Canada about how this would play out.
00:01:16.880One 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.
00:01:31.000And of course, this corporation is based out of Quebec.
00:01:33.860And so Trudeau, not wanting to get into an election scandal with this prosecution coming out, he essentially blackmailed the prosecutor.
00:01:42.400And so there was that scandal about it. Now she's demoted. She's gone.
00:01:46.220After she went through with the prosecution, she didn't bend, and now she's gone.
00:01:49.940And then there was, of course, the blackface scandal, which to me doesn't really mean anything.
00:01:53.340But to these kind of politics in Canada, it does.
00:01:56.500But regardless, one side was saying he was going to lose a lot of support for that.
00:01:59.900The 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.
00:02:08.240None of these things happened. Pretty much what had happened was completely surprising.
00:02:12.560Liberals won a minority government, and so they're on very shaky grounds.
00:02:16.160I don't predict that's going to last very long at all, actually, and reasons I'll get into later.
00:02:20.620But 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.
00:02:34.420They're pushing for more of that instead of pushing separatism.
00:02:37.120And 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.
00:02:44.400So now you have the Bloc Quebecois, and they beat out the NDP.
00:02:47.420And on the other side of that, Alberta and Saskatchewan are extremely pissed off.
00:02:52.160And 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.
00:03:02.720There's a lot of interesting things going on right now in this election.
00:03:06.200I think, to be quite honest, this is the best thing that could have came out of it, which we can get into, I suppose.
00:03:11.720Well, 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.
00:03:23.980Why should conservatives, right-wingers, or kind of heritage Canadians be happy about this outcome?
00:03:31.640Right. 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.
00:03:44.920And Andrew Scheer is the lukewarm, milquetoast conservative.
00:03:48.560He has no fighting spirit in him whatsoever.
00:03:52.260Bernier, on the other hand, is kind of like the faux populist trying to take on this kind of Trump role for Canada.
00:03:57.140So what had happened was Bernier lost by 1% of the vote.
00:04:02.100And he said, OK, well, we're not going to get what we want as conservatives in the CPC.
00:04:05.920So 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.
00:04:13.480And 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.
00:04:20.740They still want 1.2 million immigrants in the next three years.
00:04:24.560Scheer actually said that, you know, Trudeau's numbers are great.
00:04:28.260Yeah, he still wants to go along with the Climate Accord, the Paris Agreement.
00:04:32.140Everything that Albertan and Saskatchewan conservatives disliked about the Trudeau government, Scheer actually wanted the exact same thing.
00:04:40.840But the interesting thing about Scheer, why he was so damaging, why him winning would have been far worse,
00:04:47.700is because he was trying to carry out a program of depoliticizing the election, saying, well, we're doing this for the economy.
00:04:53.640We don't want to think about partisan politics.
00:04:55.380This isn't about, you know, warring ideals.
00:05:20.300What he meant was, you know, we need a free market.
00:05:22.780We need to get rid of our system of supply management.
00:05:25.820We need to open up the market to the states.
00:05:27.780And he was saying we're all come from immigrants, right?
00:05:31.500He was basically repeating the same dogma about Canada that the left was doing, except he wanted some kind of Trumpism.
00:05:39.500And 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.
00:05:49.060While the liberals, on the other hand, were more in line with American classical liberalism.
00:05:55.180And 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.
00:06:11.340And that's ultimately what toppled Canadian traditionalist conservatism.
00:06:15.140But regardless, the Conservative Party has been lost ever since then.
00:06:18.020And the PPC tried to kind of harken back to this.
00:06:20.960But 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.
00:06:34.900And he wanted to act like there was no distinction between these ethnicities and there's nothing you could do to protect their values.
00:06:40.940Instead, we have a shared Canadian heritage, which simply doesn't exist.
00:06:45.600So Bernier's vision is very, under the guise of nationalism, does not go at all with Canadian nationalism.
00:06:52.480So on the one hand, if you had PPC rising, which again, they had no point, they had no hope.
00:07:00.080You would have had this kind of Americanism.
00:07:01.800And 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.
00:07:13.600Canadian Conservatives all think this stems from Trudeau.
00:07:16.120So 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.
00:07:25.280And they do have seats, not as much as the Liberals, but they do have seats in Parliament and they do have power now.
00:07:32.580And our own Premier in Alberta, he's essentially he was the immigration minister for Harper.
00:07:38.940And he was a part of largely the same kind of multicultural shifts happening in Canada.
00:07:44.000And so his legitimacy is starting to wane as well.
00:07:49.020So 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.
00:07:58.540So there is no better situation that could have happened than what's happening right now.
00:08:04.660Just as a quick follow up question, obviously, the Bloc Québécois, they've been politically kind of insolvent for quite some time.
00:08:13.240And there was some strong resurgence there.
00:08:16.340But in preparing for this program, I also saw that there's a kind of a separatist movement in Alberta as well.
00:08:22.840Is this something that there's a legitimate chance for Albertans to break away?
00:08:29.140I 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.
00:08:36.500Because 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.
00:08:42.440You know, Trudeau went again as a minority government.
00:08:44.460We have all these different voices from all these different parties and we need to work together to solve this.
00:08:49.800The problem is it's impossible to do that.
00:08:52.040So and actually the complete wild card in this situation is the Bloc Québécois.
00:08:57.040I actually think they're more interesting than the Alberta separatists.
00:09:00.740But I don't think they have much of a chance.
00:09:03.760I mean, they're kind of taking hold of this kind of Trumpian rhetoric.
00:09:07.080And I think that's largely damaging to them.
00:09:09.800And regardless, it's forcing it's forcing the parties to actually have to deal with the fact that the minority government could topple.
00:09:18.900The NDP has said they don't want a collision with the liberal government.
00:09:22.320And so they have no recourse to hold on to their power.
00:09:25.620So something is going to have to happen.
00:09:46.400And 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.
00:09:58.860But I'm just looking, thinking about these dynamics at play.
00:10:05.260And 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.
00:10:24.460And, you know, that is definitely at play with Canada.
00:10:27.920There is a French-speaking kind of separatist energy, you know, in Quebec that has a lot to do with culture and language.
00:10:41.040And, you know, the idea of whether we're French or we're Anglos is kind of, you know, being fought out there.
00:10:46.780And then we also have a kind of natural resource battle.
00:10:51.000Of course, the great maple syrup fields and mining of maple syrup occurs in the West, in Alberta.
00:11:02.500I'm just joking, it's oil, but maybe many of our audience just were like, yeah, yeah, that's probably right.
00:11:23.420So 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.
00:11:37.280So there are these kind of, you know, energies like that.
00:11:40.900And then there's this other massive trend, which is multiculturalism.
00:11:44.600And I remember talking with Peter Brimo about this, actually, while we were in Toronto, of all places.
00:11:50.820And he was saying, you know, in the late 80s and 90s, they would talk about, oh, look, we're a multicultural society.
00:11:58.160And they would kind of marry the mass immigration question with the, you know, Quebec question in a way.
00:12:05.760They're like, oh, it's a multicultural Canada, whatever.
00:12:08.200But, you know, they would almost, you know, you'd think that it was a bait and switch.
00:12:12.180You'd think they were talking about Quebec.
00:12:13.600They're really talking about Jamaican immigrants, et cetera.
00:12:16.640And 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.
00:12:24.260But then it's going to be a lot of those energies can't be expressed or articulated in the way that they should be.
00:12:33.560They can't be articulated in the sense of we don't want all this mass immigration.
00:12:37.620I mean, Canada has the same immigration levels as the United States, and it has less than a third of the population.
00:13:40.780There's like the natural federalism and division that's regional and linguistic.
00:13:46.620And then there's this new thing thrown into the pot, which is Canada's multicultural experiment.
00:13:51.720And 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.
00:14:42.640As 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.
00:14:48.900And, 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.
00:15:00.600The 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.
00:15:06.760Because 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.
00:15:15.920But they, so they're, they were traditionally Catholic.
00:15:21.740And then around the time of the 60s, you had these kind of anti-colonial uprisings going along and going around the world.
00:15:27.160And so they said, okay, well, we're subjugated in our nation.
00:15:30.420We want our own, we want our own anti-colonial uprising.
00:15:33.080So that's where you got the terrorist groups, like Front Through Quebecois, that were all a left-wing nationalism.
00:15:38.420They're a Marxist-Leninist, they engage in assassinations and bombings and things like this.
00:15:43.540And so, and they also had, of course, had the parties at the time that were pushing for Quebec separatism.
00:15:49.020And so that kind of energy remained in Quebec.
00:15:51.120They're a very secular left-wing nationalism.
00:15:54.700But they're also very wrapped up in their own language and their culture.
00:15:58.480And that's something they want to preserve.
00:15:59.700And this is, this is why I get to the fact that they're the biggest wild card in this election.
00:16:04.260It's because the current premier, his last name is like Legault.
00:16:08.860I'm not sure how to pronounce it, so I don't really want to try.
00:16:11.460But like Francois Legault or something like that.
00:16:14.440He used to run the nationalist, the separatist party in Quebec.
00:16:19.460And 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.
00:16:29.140And so you take the Liberals and the NDP.
00:16:32.960They're for mass immigration and they're for, you know, the Paris Accords and things like that.
00:16:40.180And so Alberta and Saskatchewan hates that.
00:16:43.540But also at the same time, they're anti-mass immigration.
00:16:47.540So they're kind of playing the role in between both.
00:16:50.860They are, they're, you know, they're against the pipelines, but they're also against mass immigration and they have power now.
00:16:58.980And that's really going to shake things up.
00:17:01.020And in fact, the premier knew this was going to happen.
00:17:03.040So if you want to appeal to the Quebec people, you want to give them their sense of sovereignty.
00:17:09.780And 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.
00:17:25.000They want to force Quebec on the heel.
00:17:26.600And 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.
00:17:44.160So 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.
00:17:55.100And you're not going to be able to push through a strong government that's going to last very long.
00:18:01.760And I think that will lead to a vote of no confidence.
00:18:08.840Because there is no – this is what's so interesting to me about this, is there is no answer.
00:18:13.240So the other interesting aspect, maybe looking forward to seeing how Trudeau's policies – whether they're successful or not.
00:18:23.660He took office as a kind of radical climate change activist, but he also supported the construction of the pipeline.
00:18:33.020I do believe that he initiated the carbon tax.
00:18:35.400This 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.
00:20:10.400But at this rate, this union can't hold.
00:20:13.160And 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.
00:20:25.720Because there's no way they're going to get what they want.
00:20:27.300And there will probably be Alberta and Saskatchewan, and they are full of all kinds of resentment right now.
00:20:35.220It's actually in a bigger, say, North American union structure in which local regions could have greater autonomy is, again, the irony.
00:20:45.840Again, 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.
00:20:56.080And, you know, larger blocks can be an answer to this.
00:21:01.800There's a reason why Scottish nationalists want to leave the UK but want to remain in the EU and things like that.
00:21:08.280I mean, that is a definite dynamic to this whole thing.