Who would make a better Prime Minister: a gardener or a designer? A feature interview with Dr. Brian Lee Crowley, the Managing Director of the McDonnell-Laurier Institute, about his new book, Gardeners vs. Designers.
00:07:08.260I mean, in economic terms, you know, the prime minister thinks that you grow an economy from the heart outwards, to use his expression, right?
00:07:30.820And 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.
00:07:45.020And the idea that this can somehow, well, we can excise, let's say, the oil and gas industry, because that's bad.
00:07:53.260We know we don't want that, whereas we want the green economy.
00:07:59.340You 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.
00:08:13.320I 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.
00:08:25.380You frustrate their ability to make what they know and what they can do available to other Canadians.
00:08:31.560And I think this is a completely wrong notion of how to use political power.
00:08:36.600The 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.
00:08:54.340I 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.
00:09:09.700In 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.
00:09:21.160They're only valuable if they're part of some master design that involves a lot of government spending.
00:09:26.380I wonder if there's any green scheme that can work by design.
00:09:31.780I note that the United States has actually reduced its greenhouse gas emissions, which I know comes as a shock to a lot of people.
00:10:07.200I think that's a very good way of thinking about it, Ezra.
00:10:09.820You see, an important part of the book is talking about what people at the top know.
00:10:17.600Because, 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.
00:10:28.780The whole argument behind that is they know better than we do.
00:10:32.460They have some knowledge that is not available to us.
00:10:36.340And the whole argument of the book is actually that it's completely reversed.
00:10:42.020That all the knowledge that exists in Canada exists in the minds of all Canadians.
00:10:47.860But people at the top don't have an overview of all that knowledge.
00:10:51.380They don't know everything that's in the mind of every Canadian.
00:10:54.200They don't know what petroleum engineers know.
00:10:57.320They don't know what people who are creating green innovations in private companies know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:04.460So 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.
00:11:14.940We'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.
00:11:23.860And 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.
00:11:37.340What 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.
00:11:50.080But the idea that the people at the top know enough to redesign society, to get rid of carbon emissions, I think is completely fanciful.
00:11:58.380You 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.
00:12:06.920You made me think of a very short book.
00:12:09.420I think it was Frederick Bastet who who basically said, how can we feed?
00:12:14.800And I mentioned Paris before, but he was French.
00:12:21.500No one's in charge of getting bread to every house, every corner store.
00:12:28.160Oh, my God, we're all going to starve.
00:12:30.060The 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.
00:12:40.920I need two orders of two loaves of bread.
00:12:44.260So you disperse that knowledge and every baker and every corner store knows a little bit.
00:12:49.780And together you have spontaneous order as opposed to planned chaos.
00:12:54.040You 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.
00:13:03.940I it's terrifying to think of what a designer fails to do because they because of their hubris.
00:13:34.900We 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.
00:13:42.960And all these things where they're constantly wagging their finger at us and telling us, I know better than you do.
00:13:47.900But the whole argument of the book is, you know, this knowledge that they have is mostly statistical knowledge.
00:13:56.720Statistical 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.
00:14:08.380As 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.
00:14:21.280You know, some people are engineers and some people are lawyers.
00:14:24.920It'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.
00:14:37.600We have had everything that makes us human taken out of them.
00:14:43.660And we have to have confidence in our ability to understand our own lives.
00:14:50.860And 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.
00:15:33.560Tell me some of the topics you cover in the various chapters of your book.
00:15:38.800So I'm going to try and hush up now and listen, go through it for our viewers, make the case.
00:15:45.140I'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.
00:16:01.240Because every conservative book, I can assure you, there are 10 liberal books on the market.
00:16:04.920So 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.
00:16:20.640Tell me what's in the book so that we can, as rebels, support it.
00:16:24.700Well, 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.
00:16:41.660And 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.
00:16:57.460You know, why is it that we are one of the societies in the world with the highest share of people born in another country?
00:17:03.520I'm here to tell you, I speak to a lot of audiences of immigrants.
00:17:07.840I'm here to tell you that they tell me all the time that what brought us to Canada was freedom.
00:17:15.060What brought us to Canada was the real life.
00:17:17.040We had lots of other countries we could have gone to, but we didn't go to those other countries.
00:17:21.920We 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.
00:17:39.160But 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.
00:17:46.220And 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.
00:18:13.780We don't have a good sense of why those institutions work.
00:18:18.080So I set out to explain why it is that gardening is superior to designing.
00:18:24.580And 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.
00:18:32.600And 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.
00:18:54.560And 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.
00:19:16.340And 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.
00:19:35.760And the solution, therefore, is to tell Canadians to stop buying houses.
00:19:41.120No, the solution is, you know, designers have made land so expensive that it's almost impossible for Canadians to buy a house.
00:19:49.10060% 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.
00:20:00.180And 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.
00:20:09.460My answer is, no, let's make the designers change their behavior so that they stop obstructing what it is that Canadians want.
00:20:15.900Yeah. I think you mentioned public transit there.
00:20:18.160That'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.
00:20:38.740That's a bizarre answer right there. But to get into mass transit, I never see any of the fancy pants riding mass transit.
00:20:47.680Even 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.
00:20:54.380But boy, there's an obsession. Hate the car. Love expensive mass transit.
00:20:59.680And 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.
00:21:10.260Why do you think it is that people are not using mass transit the way the designers want them to?
00:21:19.000Well, there's a very simple answer to that, Ezra.
00:21:21.720You know, in the United States, they've studied this quite a lot.
00:21:25.320They 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?
00:21:37.660And if you look at New York City, which has got the most developed transit system in North America,
00:21:43.020the answer is you get to six times as many jobs by car as you do by transit within 30 minutes from the average home.
00:21:51.520And in most cities, it's it's infinitely more jobs than that.
00:21:56.960You know, New York is is the most transit friendly example.
00:22:05.500Cities bring people together so that many jobs can be done in one place.
00:22:10.720And, you know, the the the value people can specialize so that they get the greatest value out of what they know.
00:22:17.300And, 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.
00:22:41.080Right. And I completely agree with you, the average person who says people should get out of their car and on to transit.
00:22:47.420What 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.
00:22:55.600And, you know, this this this idea that, you know, all the jobs are downtown.
00:23:02.240And 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.
00:23:15.420And, you know, transit just won't get you to these jobs.
00:23:18.880Well, 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.
00:23:35.800And I mean, I think there's a there's a class divide sometimes.
00:23:40.200I mean, who's who is supposed to take transit?
00:23:43.240I don't see a lot of, you know, busy lawyers and bankers and politicians on mass transit.
00:23:47.860But 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.
00:24:01.580And I mean, regulation and censorship of words and ideas.
00:24:07.240And and even I mean, I remember when the word Indian went out of vogue.
00:24:26.380So let's say the word Indigenous because we're all exquisitely fashionable and there's no need to fight over it.
00:24:31.260But 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.
00:24:51.440I mean, the way they are depersoned and jumped on and deplatformed.
00:24:56.480I've never seen the kind of divide between designers and gardeners as stark as in the battle for what you can say and think.
00:25:05.180And it's very, very much the PhDs in versus, let's say, blue collar folks who don't share those same sentiments.
00:25:14.740What do you have to say about designing versus gardening words and thoughts?
00:25:19.500Well, look, you know, Ezra, this is all part of that larger effort that I talked about, which is delegitimizing where we came from.
00:25:31.840You 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.
00:25:59.160They want to get rid of all this stuff they want to get rid of all this stuff they didn't make up themselves.
00:26:03.980And 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.
00:26:17.640You 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.
00:26:27.160You 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.
00:26:39.760I 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.
00:26:54.940And 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.
00:27:05.660You 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.
00:28:14.980I 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,
00:28:23.000talking about national issues to national policymakers, the national media and the national electorate.
00:28:28.160So I set out to create that institution.
00:28:31.120The McDonnell-Laurier Institute is the result.
00:28:33.280We spend a lot of time talking about three things.
00:28:36.580We talk about national prosperity and how it can be created.
00:28:41.820That's everything about how to keep Canadians safe,
00:28:44.140whether it's from foreign enemies or from internal disruption.
00:28:51.100And we spend a lot of time talking about foreign relations, our relationship with the United States, NATO, Russia, the Indo-Pacific, China,
00:29:03.520which we're huge on China and the Middle East, of course.
00:29:07.880We have a huge amount of work, for instance, on Aboriginal or Indigenous Canada and the natural resource economy,
00:29:17.280where we're one of the biggest voices arguing that Indigenous people should be given economic opportunity
00:29:24.740as the best way to help them enter the mainstream of Canadian society while preserving their own way of life.
00:29:33.360So we have a lot of work that I think might well be of interest to your listeners.