Rebel News Podcast - Who would make a better prime minister, a gardener or a designer？ Interview with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley

00:00:00.000 Hello, my Rebels. Today, I have a future interview with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley

00:00:04.020 from the McDonnell-Laurier Institute. We're talking about his new book

00:00:08.220 called Gardeners vs. Designers. I'd like to encourage you to become a Rebel News Plus subscriber.

00:00:13.840 Just go to rebelnews.com and click subscribe. It's eight bucks a month. You get the video

00:00:18.460 version of this podcast, plus weekly podcasts from Sheila Gunn-Reed and David Menzies.

00:00:24.140 All right, here's today's podcast.

00:00:30.000 Tonight, who would make a better prime minister, a gardener, or a designer? A feature interview

00:00:47.880 with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, the managing director of the McDonnell-Laurier Institute.

00:00:55.060 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:00:58.600 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:01:02.920 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's

00:01:07.340 my bloody right to do so.

00:01:13.600 There are a number of interesting think tanks in Canada that could be loosely called on the

00:01:18.940 right, a little bit conservative, or not liberal. One of them is called the McDonnell-Laurier

00:01:24.280 Institute. And they have some interesting scholars over there, including our friend,

00:01:28.240 Dr. Charles Burton, the great China expert. Well, the managing director of the McDonnell-Laurier

00:01:33.540 Institute is Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, and he has a new book out called Gardeners vs. Designers.

00:01:41.240 I had the pleasure of sitting down with him for about half an hour to talk about the book.

00:01:45.180 Here's that interview.

00:01:58.380 And joining us now via Skype from the McDonnell-Laurier Institute in Ottawa is Dr. Brian Lee Crowley.

00:02:07.520 Dr. Crowley, what a pleasure. The book is called Gardeners vs. Designers.

00:02:13.680 Understanding the Great Fault Line in Canadian Politics. If I had to choose between those two

00:02:19.960 things, I like the sound of being a gardener, but you tell me what it means politically.

00:02:24.980 Well, look, Ezra, you know, the book arises from a realization that I had once when I was listening

00:02:32.600 to, I don't know if it was the prime minister or one of these great and good people who was telling me

00:02:38.360 yet again, what a terrible place Canada was, that it was full of racism and homophobia and sexism.

00:02:45.380 And we really had much to be ashamed of and actually very little to be proud of.

00:02:51.620 And I thought, you know, that's not my experience of Canada.

00:02:55.360 Canada. And it's not the experience of Canada, the vast majority of people I know.

00:02:59.840 And it came to me that what was going on was there was a tremendous effort to delegitimize Canada,

00:03:09.120 the Canada that we have grown up with, the Canada that we have helped to create,

00:03:14.100 so that they could replace it with something else.

00:03:16.540 They are the designers of the book's title.

00:03:19.120 They think that Canada is a problem to be fixed, and they have the blueprint for fixing it.

00:03:25.180 And I'm one of those people who thinks that Canada isn't something that was imposed from the top down.

00:03:30.540 It's not created by experts.

00:03:32.280 It's not created by politicians who have power at any particular moment.

00:03:36.700 Canada has been created by the efforts of Canadians trying to live their best lives.

00:03:42.380 And their experience is embedded in our institutions.

00:03:45.260 And every time they try and replace them with something they have designed, they make our lives worse, not better.

00:03:51.940 So in the analogy, the gardener is someone who just slowly, you know, pulls out weeds, maybe plants something new,

00:03:58.180 but doesn't just raise everything down with a lawnmower.

00:04:01.840 Whereas a designer might get rid of everything and put in like a concrete block or something.

00:04:08.400 I mean, is one of the differences incremental, organic, slow change versus ta-da, here's your new world? 0.56

00:04:17.140 Is that the difference?

00:04:18.520 Well, that's part of it, Ezra.

00:04:20.440 But, you know, I think an important part is the realization that every gardener comes to,

00:04:26.880 that they are not in charge of the garden.

00:04:29.220 The garden unfolds under its own energy.

00:04:32.600 And there are many things about the garden the gardener doesn't control.

00:04:35.840 You know, you can't make plants grow faster by pulling on them, okay?

00:04:40.700 So, you know, it's a philosophy of humility, which says gardeners are important.

00:04:46.780 You know, you don't have a garden unless there's somebody, as you say, who clears away the weeds and so on.

00:04:51.300 But the garden has its own energy.

00:04:54.820 Every plant has its own plan for itself.

00:04:57.560 It unfolds under its own energy and its own intentions.

00:05:01.560 And, you know, the designer doesn't see Canada or any society like a garden.

00:05:09.820 They see it like a machine.

00:05:11.120 They think somebody must have created this.

00:05:13.200 Somebody must have designed it.

00:05:14.360 It was designed to do certain things.

00:05:16.880 And if I pull this lever, I can make it do whatever I want.

00:05:19.900 If I twiddle this dial, I can make it go faster.

00:05:22.500 If I hit the brake, it'll make it go slower.

00:05:24.760 And they think they are in charge of everything, that everything responds to their will.

00:05:30.800 And the idea behind this gardener versus designer distinction is that, you know, actually Canadians have their own plans.

00:05:39.740 They have their own intentions.

00:05:41.140 They have their own ideas about how to live.

00:05:43.600 And when designers come along and say, oh, you know, Canada is a problem to be fixed.

00:05:49.560 And the things that you think are good about Canada are, you're completely wrong about that.

00:05:53.940 We're going to replace them.

00:05:55.280 And we're going to make Canada in our image.

00:05:58.560 The only way they can make Canada in their image is by eliminating us from the equation.

00:06:04.700 Now, I love this analogy.

00:06:06.360 And I'm thinking of so many things that would fit.

00:06:08.860 I mean, how a city evolves.

00:06:11.000 I mean, some of the most beautiful cities in the world evolve over centuries.

00:06:15.220 I think of Paris.

00:06:16.260 I mean, there is some design.

00:06:18.420 But, I mean, you look at soulless design from scratch cities like Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, versus, let's say, you know, London.

00:06:31.560 London.

00:06:31.840 And you just say, well, which one grew up generation by generation versus was a planned city?

00:06:39.020 But let's bring it back to what, I love the gardener versus designer theme.

00:06:43.280 But let's talk about the political stuff that you want to look at through this lens.

00:06:49.080 And I'm just going to start throwing subjects at you.

00:06:52.780 And you tell me how this gardener versus designer dichotomy works on these issues.

00:06:58.500 So let's start with the economy.

00:07:00.200 I presume a designer would have a centrally planned economy and a gardener would be more laissez-faire. 0.70

00:07:06.060 Am I right?

00:07:07.640 Well, yes.

00:07:08.260 I mean, in economic terms, you know, the prime minister thinks that you grow an economy from the heart outwards, to use his expression, right?

00:07:18.800 But remember, it's his heart.

00:07:22.720 It's his heart.

00:07:23.960 And he thinks that an economy is something it is designed.

00:07:28.420 You make it.

00:07:30.820 And I'm here to tell you that the economy of Canada is composed of many millions of people trying to live their best lives, putting their knowledge to work, to benefit other Canadians through, you know, exchange in the marketplace.

00:07:45.020 And the idea that this can somehow, well, we can excise, let's say, the oil and gas industry, because that's bad.

00:07:53.260 We know we don't want that, whereas we want the green economy.

00:07:57.140 And so we're going to encourage that.

00:07:59.340 You know, this idea that somehow there can be in some bureaucrat's mind in Ottawa a plan about how to make the how to fix the economy, because God knows there are many things about it that we don't want.

00:08:13.320 I think that the only way you can do that, let's take the oil and gas industry, the only way you can get rid of the oil and gas industry is by frustrating the plans of hundreds of thousands of Canadians.

00:08:25.380 You frustrate their ability to make what they know and what they can do available to other Canadians.

00:08:31.560 And I think this is a completely wrong notion of how to use political power.

00:08:36.600 The point of political power is not to recreate society in the image of the people with power, but to use power to cultivate the garden so that everyone's experience, everyone's knowledge is valued and given a chance to produce what it is capable of producing.

00:08:54.340 I mean, I've always been a critic of green energy because I've not seen in all of my travels a wind farm that exists without some sort of government subsidy or mandate.

00:09:09.700 In fact, what I often note is that as soon as those subsidies are over, the wind turbines fall into disrepair because they're not valuable in and of themselves.

00:09:21.160 They're only valuable if they're part of some master design that involves a lot of government spending.

00:09:26.380 I wonder if there's any green scheme that can work by design.

00:09:31.780 I note that the United States has actually reduced its greenhouse gas emissions, which I know comes as a shock to a lot of people.

00:09:40.600 But it was by accident almost.

00:09:42.360 It was because they use fracking for natural gas that replaced coal.

00:09:46.900 That was not anyone's climate design.

00:09:49.480 Maybe that's just lots of organic decisions by different people that had a positive outcome.

00:09:57.400 You know, fracking by accident lowered carbon dioxide emissions in a way that I don't think any designs in Canada have done.

00:10:05.580 Is that a good analogy?

00:10:07.200 I think that's a very good way of thinking about it, Ezra.

00:10:09.820 You see, an important part of the book is talking about what people at the top know.

00:10:17.600 Because, you know, the whole argument for letting people at the top design society, replace, you know, oil and gas with the green economy or any one of a thousand things we could talk about.

00:10:28.780 The whole argument behind that is they know better than we do.

00:10:32.460 They have some knowledge that is not available to us.

00:10:36.340 And the whole argument of the book is actually that it's completely reversed.

00:10:42.020 That all the knowledge that exists in Canada exists in the minds of all Canadians.

00:10:47.860 But people at the top don't have an overview of all that knowledge.

00:10:51.380 They don't know everything that's in the mind of every Canadian.

00:10:54.200 They don't know what petroleum engineers know.

00:10:57.320 They don't know what people who are creating green innovations in private companies know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:11:04.460 So when we let people at the top redesign our institutions, redesign our society, tell us how to live, we aren't more successful as a society.

00:11:14.940 We're less successful because we're now acting on less knowledge than when we let people pursue their own knowledge, their own interests, their own objectives.

00:11:23.860 And so to your exact example, the idea that somehow governments are going to save us from climate change, from, you know, greenhouse gases and all this sort of stuff, I think is completely wrong.

00:11:37.340 What they can do, and I think this is a this is a gardener thing, they can create incentives that will accelerate the creation of new knowledge, the discovery of new ideas that will help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

00:11:50.080 But the idea that the people at the top know enough to redesign society, to get rid of carbon emissions, I think is completely fanciful.

00:11:58.380 You know, you made me think there when you talked about how knowledge is distributed and each of us knows a little bit about our block, our neighborhood, our world.

00:12:06.920 You made me think of a very short book.

00:12:09.420 I think it was Frederick Bastet who who basically said, how can we feed?

00:12:14.800 And I mentioned Paris before, but he was French.

00:12:17.300 She said, how do we feed Paris?

00:12:20.120 No one's in charge of it.

00:12:21.500 No one's in charge of getting bread to every house, every corner store.

00:12:28.160 Oh, my God, we're all going to starve.

00:12:30.060 The irony is, if is if it was a command and control economy, you would have people starving because no one person knows what a million Parisians know.

00:12:40.920 I need two orders of two loaves of bread.

00:12:43.680 I need four.

00:12:44.260 So you disperse that knowledge and every baker and every corner store knows a little bit.

00:12:49.780 And together you have spontaneous order as opposed to planned chaos.

00:12:54.040 You just made me think of I mean, imagine if you had one designer saying, I'm I know better how to distribute bread to every house and restaurant in Paris.

00:13:03.940 I it's terrifying to think of what a designer fails to do because they because of their hubris.

00:13:11.880 Yes.

00:13:12.400 Well, you know, this is exactly the the central argument of the book.

00:13:16.900 I say, look, you know, these people at the top who think they're they're so smart, you know, they've got fancy Ph.D.s.

00:13:22.520 They've been to big universities, maybe they've worked for McKinsey or the Bank of England for all I know.

00:13:28.340 And they say, you know, look, we have an overview of society.

00:13:33.420 We know more than anybody else.

00:13:34.900 We are entitled to tell you how to live and how to organize your life and how to contribute to the economy and where you should live and how you should get to work.

00:13:42.960 And all these things where they're constantly wagging their finger at us and telling us, I know better than you do.

00:13:47.900 But the whole argument of the book is, you know, this knowledge that they have is mostly statistical knowledge.

00:13:55.000 And what's statistical knowledge?

00:13:56.720 Statistical knowledge takes, you know, a picture of you and me and every other individual and strips away everything that makes us an individual, strips away everything unique about us.

00:14:06.960 But our knowledge is unique.

00:14:08.380 As you've just said, Ezra, you know, we know a little bit about our local block, about our neighbors, about the car we drive, about where we want to work, about what knowledge we have that other people might value.

00:14:21.280 You know, some people are engineers and some people are lawyers.

00:14:24.920 It's an immensely complex quilt of knowledge which is dispersed across the country and the statistics that give these guys at the top the illusion that they can design society.

00:14:37.600 We have had everything that makes us human taken out of them.

00:14:43.660 And we have to have confidence in our ability to understand our own lives.

00:14:50.860 And we have to resist these guys who think that because they've got these fancy PhDs and have worked for big international organizations that they can tell us how to live.

00:15:00.380 They don't know enough.

00:15:02.360 Yeah.

00:15:02.460 You know, sometimes jargon is a giveaway.

00:15:04.720 I did a show the other day about the word deliverology that was actually all in vogue in Ottawa for a few years under Trudeau.

00:15:12.300 They brought in some expert in deliverology.

00:15:15.300 When a guy starts talking like that, hold on to your wallet.

00:15:18.380 And I think that he would definitely fall into the designer rather than the gardener camp.

00:15:23.760 Now, listen, I've been having too much fun sort of daydreaming about the different categorizations.

00:15:29.760 I love it, gardeners versus designers.

00:15:31.960 But let's get back to your book.

00:15:33.560 Tell me some of the topics you cover in the various chapters of your book.

00:15:38.800 So I'm going to try and hush up now and listen, go through it for our viewers, make the case.

00:15:45.140 I'm going to, I always say to our viewers, if there is a book from our point of view published in Canada, we owe it to ourselves not just to read it, to learn about the freedom oriented, conservative oriented point of view, but frankly, to support a guy who's going to write a conservative book.

00:16:01.240 Because every conservative book, I can assure you, there are 10 liberal books on the market.

00:16:04.920 So I always make a point of saying buy the book to read it, but buy the book to show support for the guy who's doing it.

00:16:13.220 We need conservative movies.

00:16:14.860 We need conservative art.

00:16:16.780 We need conservative books.

00:16:18.000 So give me a sales pitch.

00:16:20.640 Tell me what's in the book so that we can, as rebels, support it.

00:16:24.700 Well, Ezra, I guess the best way to think about it is, you know, there's this huge effort underway, which I mentioned earlier in Canada to delegitimize our past, to tell us that where we've come from is a terrible place.

00:16:41.660 And it suddenly occurred to me that the only reason they can get away with that is because we have forgotten how to understand the great things that made Canada and that made Canada great.

00:16:57.460 You know, why is it that we are one of the societies in the world with the highest share of people born in another country?

00:17:03.520 I'm here to tell you, I speak to a lot of audiences of immigrants.

00:17:07.840 I'm here to tell you that they tell me all the time that what brought us to Canada was freedom.

00:17:15.060 What brought us to Canada was the real life.

00:17:17.040 We had lots of other countries we could have gone to, but we didn't go to those other countries.

00:17:21.920 We came to Canada because Canada is a great society and we know that even though we may not, you know, because we don't speak English perfectly, we don't have all the qualifications that we might have had if we'd been born here.

00:17:39.160 But our children, our children will have those things and our children will succeed in Canada in a way they couldn't in any other country.

00:17:46.220 And it occurred to me that when, you know, these people in charge in Ottawa are constantly telling us that, you know, we're an awful society and we've got to be fixed and they don't know how to fix us, that we on the other side don't have a good understanding of why, you know, the institutions that we have created throughout the centuries of Canada's existence and the colonies beforehand.

00:18:13.780 We don't have a good sense of why those institutions work.

00:18:18.080 So I set out to explain why it is that gardening is superior to designing.

00:18:24.580 And I, you know, I talked about all the reasons why people at the top don't know anything compared to what you and I know about our lives.

00:18:32.600 And then I moved on to talk about how it is that we can defend those institutions that have grown up, the common law, language, you know, federalism, all the things that we have come to value so much that make Canada what it is.

00:18:54.560 And I then apply those ideas, I apply them to the environment, I apply them to life in the city, I apply them to the healthcare system and various other policy issues that, you know, the designers are constantly trying to impose solutions on.

00:19:16.340 And I talk about, you know, why urban transit is vastly inferior to the car, for example, talk about why, you know, when the head of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation says, oh, houses have become terribly expensive, and Canadians are getting too indebted.

00:19:35.760 And the solution, therefore, is to tell Canadians to stop buying houses.

00:19:39.820 And I say, what?

00:19:41.120 No, the solution is, you know, designers have made land so expensive that it's almost impossible for Canadians to buy a house.

00:19:49.100 60% now, according to a study that I quote in my book, 60% of the cost of a house is because of obstructive land controls that prevent land from being released for housing.

00:20:00.180 And so, you know, when the designers say, oh, we've identified a problem, Canadians are too indebted, their solution, let's make Canadians change their behavior.

00:20:09.460 My answer is, no, let's make the designers change their behavior so that they stop obstructing what it is that Canadians want.

00:20:15.900 Yeah. I think you mentioned public transit there.

00:20:18.160 That's something that always gets me because I think there are some people who are almost religiously dedicated to people getting out of cars and either driving their bikes in a country that's the second largest country in the world and one of the coldest countries in the world, snow on the ground, you know, a third of the year.

00:20:38.740 That's a bizarre answer right there. But to get into mass transit, I never see any of the fancy pants riding mass transit.

00:20:47.680 Even Jack Layton would show up on his bike and then he would put the bike in the trunk of the limo that drove him around.

00:20:54.380 But boy, there's an obsession. Hate the car. Love expensive mass transit.

00:20:59.680 And I drive around. And other than for a brief moment during rush hour, all the buses and subways I see here in Toronto, at least, are 80 percent empty.

00:21:10.260 Why do you think it is that people are not using mass transit the way the designers want them to?

00:21:19.000 Well, there's a very simple answer to that, Ezra.

00:21:21.720 You know, in the United States, they've studied this quite a lot.

00:21:25.320 They asked the question, OK, how many jobs can you reach by car from the average house within 30 minutes and how many jobs can you reach by transit within 30 minutes?

00:21:37.660 And if you look at New York City, which has got the most developed transit system in North America,

00:21:43.020 the answer is you get to six times as many jobs by car as you do by transit within 30 minutes from the average home.

00:21:51.520 And in most cities, it's it's infinitely more jobs than that.

00:21:56.960 You know, New York is is the most transit friendly example.

00:22:00.720 Right.

00:22:01.680 And this is the purpose of cities.

00:22:04.060 This is what cities do.

00:22:05.500 Cities bring people together so that many jobs can be done in one place.

00:22:10.720 And, you know, the the the value people can specialize so that they get the greatest value out of what they know.

00:22:17.300 And, you know, any city that comes along and says, well, we're going to cut your access to jobs by in the case of New York City by five sixths so that, you know, you'll take transit instead of your car is is making a decision to impoverish the people who live in that city.

00:22:41.080 Right. And I completely agree with you, the average person who says people should get out of their car and on to transit.

00:22:47.420 What they really mean is they want the person in the car in front of them to get out of their car, get out of the way so that they can get to work faster by car.

00:22:55.600 And, you know, this this this idea that, you know, all the jobs are downtown.

00:23:02.240 And so we build a transit system that that takes people downtown and takes them back out the other way, completely ignores the fact that increasingly jobs are leaving the city center just as much as people are living, leaving the city center.

00:23:15.420 And, you know, transit just won't get you to these jobs.

00:23:18.880 Well, there's a lot of economic things to talk about, but one of the things when I'm thinking about designers versus gardeners and and you've referred several times to experts and PhDs and things like that.

00:23:35.800 And I mean, I think there's a there's a class divide sometimes.

00:23:40.200 I mean, who's who is supposed to take transit?

00:23:43.240 I don't see a lot of, you know, busy lawyers and bankers and politicians on mass transit.

00:23:47.860 But the area where the designers have one way of thinking and the rest of us have another way of thinking, the area where I think that's most stark is on what you're allowed to say, what you're allowed to think.

00:24:01.580 And I mean, regulation and censorship of words and ideas.

00:24:07.240 And and even I mean, I remember when the word Indian went out of vogue.

00:24:12.680 So Aboriginal came in. 1.00

00:24:15.120 But now you can't say Aboriginal.

00:24:16.560 You have to say Indigenous. 0.99

00:24:18.380 And that's fine.

00:24:19.060 I'll keep moving the words along.

00:24:20.560 My friend of mine who's an Indian chief, he wears Indian brand clothing.

00:24:25.060 He's not upset by it.

00:24:25.960 But fine.

00:24:26.380 So let's say the word Indigenous because we're all exquisitely fashionable and there's no need to fight over it.

00:24:31.260 But there's but if there's a regular guy who's not in the world of words, who doesn't, you know, at great length deliberate over every precise, you know, phrase and he says a joke that's politically incorrect or he doesn't properly refer to a transgender person.

00:24:51.440 I mean, the way they are depersoned and jumped on and deplatformed.

00:24:56.480 I've never seen the kind of divide between designers and gardeners as stark as in the battle for what you can say and think.

00:25:05.180 And it's very, very much the PhDs in versus, let's say, blue collar folks who don't share those same sentiments.

00:25:14.740 What do you have to say about designing versus gardening words and thoughts?

00:25:19.500 Well, look, you know, Ezra, this is all part of that larger effort that I talked about, which is delegitimizing where we came from.

00:25:31.840 You know, not only are our institutions rotten, not only is the law nasty, not only are Canadians racist and homophobic and genocidal maniacs, apparently, but our language is is is is just stuffed with nasty things that have to be extirpated so that we can be politically correct and live according to the standards of the designers.

00:25:59.160 They want to get rid of all this stuff they want to get rid of all this stuff they didn't make up themselves.

00:26:03.980 And I have to tell you that because I'm of the view that designers not only aren't superior intellectually to us, but they know less about our lives than we know about our own life. 0.96

00:26:17.640 You know, the idea that they should be telling us what to think and what we should be able to say is an effort to to make society stupider.

00:26:27.160 You know, you know, they think that if we act on the knowledge of these people at the top will be a will be a brilliant society, will have super clusters of innovation and, you know, all this stuff that they talk about all the time.

00:26:39.760 I think on the contrary, you know, what they're trying to do is they are trying to dumb society down to their level and we must resist them at every opportunity because what is in our minds is the greatest natural resource that Canada has.

00:26:54.940 And we must never allow these ignorant experts at the top who happen to have at the moment political power to tell us that the way we live is not acceptable.

00:27:05.660 You know, I was thinking of the book 1984 and one of the themes in that book is that the entire language needed to be redesigned.

00:27:14.520 They called it new speak.

00:27:16.120 They wanted to eliminate all sorts of thoughts that were a little too free.

00:27:20.240 And imagine designing an entire language so that you could limit or eliminate bad thoughts.

00:27:25.800 Well, listen, what an interesting conversation.

00:27:28.080 I thank you so much.

00:27:29.040 We've been talking with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, who's the managing director of the McDonnell-Laurier Institute.

00:27:35.700 Folks, I encourage you to check them out at McDonnell-Laurier.ca.

00:27:39.720 We have a link on this page where you can buy the book called Gardeners vs. Designers.

00:27:47.100 Dr. Crowley, before we go, give us just a one minute on the McDonnell-Laurier Institute.

00:27:52.460 Of course, I follow all your stuff.

00:27:53.760 I'm on your email list.

00:27:54.540 We love Dr. Charles Burton, perhaps the finest mind on Canada-China relations in the country.

00:28:01.360 Give us one minute on what you guys do and what your plans are for the year ahead.

00:28:06.820 Oh, thanks very much for asking, Ezra.

00:28:09.720 I created the McDonnell-Laurier Institute 10 years ago.

00:28:12.880 We're celebrating our 10th anniversary.

00:28:14.980 I thought there was a real hole in Canada's democratic infrastructure in that we didn't have a national think tank in the national capital, Ottawa,

00:28:23.000 talking about national issues to national policymakers, the national media and the national electorate.

00:28:28.160 So I set out to create that institution.

00:28:31.120 The McDonnell-Laurier Institute is the result.

00:28:33.280 We spend a lot of time talking about three things.

00:28:36.580 We talk about national prosperity and how it can be created.

00:28:40.080 We talk about national security.

00:28:41.820 That's everything about how to keep Canadians safe,

00:28:44.140 whether it's from foreign enemies or from internal disruption.

00:28:51.100 And we spend a lot of time talking about foreign relations, our relationship with the United States, NATO, Russia, the Indo-Pacific, China,

00:29:03.520 which we're huge on China and the Middle East, of course.

00:29:07.880 We have a huge amount of work, for instance, on Aboriginal or Indigenous Canada and the natural resource economy,

00:29:17.280 where we're one of the biggest voices arguing that Indigenous people should be given economic opportunity

00:29:24.740 as the best way to help them enter the mainstream of Canadian society while preserving their own way of life.

00:29:33.360 So we have a lot of work that I think might well be of interest to your listeners.

00:29:40.940 Well, I'm sure it will be.

00:29:42.300 And I would like to close how I open, which is it's very interesting.

00:29:46.420 You've got all the gears turning in my head about gardening versus designing.

00:29:50.280 I like using that approach to things.

00:29:52.260 The book is called Gardeners Versus Designers, Understanding the Great Fault Line in Canadian Politics.

00:29:57.380 We've been talking with its author these past 30 minutes,

00:30:00.080 and I would like to encourage all my Rebel viewers to get a copy of this book

00:30:05.020 because it's such an interesting way of looking at the world,

00:30:07.720 and because, as I said before, if there is someone who's going to write a book from our point of view,

00:30:12.900 surely it behooves us to support it.

00:30:15.580 And I will certainly be buying a copy on the Amazon link below myself.

00:30:19.360 Dr. Crowley, great to see you.

00:30:20.640 I hope we can have you back on the show again.

00:30:22.860 Give my best regards to Dr. Burton, one of your great scholars, and good luck with the book.

00:30:27.540 Thank you so much, Ezra. I look forward to talking to you again.

00:30:30.920 All right. Stay with us. More ahead.

00:30:40.080 What do you think about the book?

00:30:46.200 I spent too much time daydreaming about, well, who's a designer?

00:30:49.840 Who's a gardener?

00:30:51.040 How does that apply to, you know, everything, including how to handle a pandemic?

00:30:56.300 Well, that's the book, and we have a link below.

00:30:59.500 I'm going to get a copy of it and read it through.

00:31:01.860 I want to support conservative books, and I hope you do, too.

00:31:05.220 Well, that's the show for today.

00:31:06.640 Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home,

00:31:11.120 good night, and keep fighting for freedom.

00:31:13.100 We'll see you next time.

00:31:28.340 We'll see you next time.

Rebel News Podcast - October 16, 2020

Who would make a better prime minister, a gardener or a designer？ Interview with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley

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