The Candice Malcolm Show - Ep 17 ｜ J.J. McCullough ｜ The Canadian Contrarian

00:00:00.000 You can't really have a government that says it's committed to having a country that is diverse and, you know, having a government that is reflective of that diversity and then also champion this very outdated, old fashioned idea that Canada is fundamentally a country of two founding nations, only two, the French and the English, and that those communities sort of will forever be able to dictate the shape and nature of the country.

00:00:23.580 One of my biggest critiques of the mainstream media in Canada is the bland sameness of all the political commentators, columnists, pundits, panelists, and thought leaders.

00:00:32.880 Regardless of what station you tune into, what paper they write for, or what party they claim to come from, there is a rigid, boring repetitiveness being spout from our country's Laurentian elites, who always more or less agree on things, despite claiming to represent the broad political spectrum in Canada.

00:00:48.560 My guest on the True North Speaker series breaks that mold, and often defiantly leads the conversation in totally new and interesting ways.

00:00:57.420 JJ McCullough is a Vancouver-based political commentator, cartoonist, YouTuber, and columnist with the prestigious Washington Post.

00:01:05.160 JJ's columns often trigger an incredible and disproportionate response from his critics, who seem to resent the very fact that he has a large platform and a huge audience to share his contrarian views with.

00:01:16.180 I don't always agree with JJ, but I always appreciate his unique perspective and the ideas he brings to the table.

00:01:22.640 In our conversation today, we take a deep dive into Canadian politics, assessing the current parliament, the party leaders, and we talk about why the fringe, left-wing parties are given more airtime and more credibility from the mainstream media versus the upstart, right-of-center People's Party.

00:01:37.520 We also get into Canada's history. We discuss Pierre Trudeau's 1969 White Papers that sought to abolish the separate system of governance for Canada's Indigenous people.

00:01:47.740 We discuss individual versus collective rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Charlottetown Accord, and we dissect and challenge the accusation that Canada is a systemically racist country.

00:01:58.320 I hope you enjoy our conversation. Please like this video, share it with friends and family, and leave me a comment below.

00:02:04.840 Don't forget to subscribe to True North, and if you'd like to support this podcast, please visit tnc.news.com.

00:02:22.260 I'm joined by JJ McCullough. JJ, thank you so much for joining the show.

00:02:26.420 Thanks for having me.

00:02:27.260 I never know what you're going to look like. I feel like your hairstyle changes so much every time.

00:02:33.240 I also feel like your hair grows really fast. I don't know if that's just the power of YouTube, where I see one video and you've got short, blonde hair, and then the very next video, you've got this big, long flow.

00:02:44.080 I just get bored with hair really easily, and I'm lucky because my mother's a hairdresser, so any crazy thing I want done to my hair, I can usually get done that weekend.

00:02:51.700 Very cool. Well, you're lucky because during COVID, I couldn't get a haircut to save my life.

00:02:57.460 I was in Toronto, and everything was closed, and then when salons finally opened, the salon I go to was booked out for like four months, so I could get an appointment, and I was envious of anyone who had a haircut.

00:03:08.880 Jeez, the struggle is real.

00:03:10.020 Yeah, I know. First world problems, right?

00:03:13.420 Right, right.

00:03:13.860 So we just very narrowly avoided an election last week, and I know you were very, you know, on top of it and commenting.

00:03:23.760 So why don't you walk us through what happened and what you think should have happened with Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, and the whole confidence vote there?

00:03:32.820 Well, I mean, I thought that it was a real sort of low point in the history of the politics of this country, and certainly the history of the Trudeau administration, you know, because you basically had this, the WE scandal, you know, the sort of the allegation that Justin Trudeau had, you know, basically the allegation is that he essentially rigged a government contract to help this WE charity that we know that he himself and his various family members had benefited materially from, that they'd been given, you know, jobs and commission work.

00:04:02.640 And that kind of thing for this organization.

00:04:04.300 And I had really sort of felt like that the sort of the half-life of this story was over, that it was sort of fading into the distance.

00:04:10.500 But, you know, the Conservatives have really continued to hammer on and hammer on and hammer on on this, wanting to know all of the facts, all of the details, who got paid when and who knew what when and all this kind of thing.

00:04:19.240 You know, Pierre Polyevre leading the charge in the House of Commons day after day after day.

00:04:23.860 And then so it sort of culminated in this idea that they were going to get the Parliament to vote on forming a official parliamentary committee to continue to examine the WE scandal and all of its magnitudes.

00:04:36.640 And yeah, and this sort of came to a vote in the House of Commons and the Liberal Party declared that any vote on this matter was going to be a matter of confidence, which meant that if the parties voted in favor of it, then essentially like this would be sort of taken as a sign that the House of Commons had no confidence in the governing party and that therefore the Parliament should be dissolved and we should be plunged into a national election.

00:05:03.560 And I think just a lot of people, myself included, just it struck as just so brazenly cynical, like that there was no pretense of of any sort of higher principle of good governance at play here.

00:05:16.760 It was simply just a matter of that the the Conservatives, you know, were trying to look into something or trying to look into some embarrassing business on the part of the government and the government just didn't care for this to happen.

00:05:29.320 And therefore, we're going to just pull out the big guns and prevent it from happening.

00:05:32.740 And but in some respects, I think the big story here, because, of course, we know we're not in election.

00:05:37.900 So clearly the vote was voted down. But the sort of the key variable was the NDP, right, because we know that the Conservatives can't muscle things through on their own.

00:05:47.020 They need the support of at least one other party. And I think there was a lot of expectation that it would be the NDP if anyone that was going to.

00:05:55.020 Well, I mean, it's not even mysterious. It had to be the NDP. That was just basically how the math worked.

00:06:01.500 And, you know, the NDP always talks a good game. You know, people like Charlie Angus, you know, who have been really sort of bloviating loudly about the we scandal and, you know, giving as good as the Conservatives in some respects.

00:06:13.240 But, you know, when sort of push came to shove, they weren't willing to support the creation of this committee.

00:06:18.680 They weren't willing to to sort of call Trudeau's bluff and, you know, challenge the his premise that this was a confidence vote.

00:06:27.120 He sort of backed down at the last minute, Jagmeet Singh did. And I think that just reflects very poorly on the NDP and sort of has made a lot of people realize that the NDP is fundamentally a coalition partner of the liberal government.

00:06:40.460 The NDP exists to keep the liberal party in power, to keep the liberal government propped up.

00:06:45.820 And there's not really any pretense otherwise. Like they can talk a good game all they want.

00:06:50.320 But fundamentally, the most important question in Canadian politics is who is running the country?

00:06:55.400 What party is running the country? And the NDP, whenever it's challenged, and this goes back to Jack Layton and all the other sort of previous NDP bosses,

00:07:02.940 whenever that central premise of Canadian politics is challenged, who should be running the country, the NDP or sort of the liberal party or somebody else,

00:07:10.520 the NDP always sides with the answer being the liberal party.

00:07:14.560 Well, it seems to me that it's the only way that the NDP can have any sort of power in the country.

00:07:20.060 One of the striking things, from my perspective, about what was going on with all the jostling of the parties was just how brazenly sort of political it was.

00:07:29.860 That it wasn't there was no, like you said, pretense of like doing anything moral or doing what's right for the country.

00:07:34.680 It's like, you know, Trudeau was going to go to great length to avoid having a committee examine whatever happened with we.

00:07:41.660 And the NDP is like the power broker.

00:07:45.400 And, you know, if they force an election, then they might not be the power broker anymore,

00:07:49.920 because there could be a majority government or the Conservatives could win.

00:07:52.940 And then they wouldn't fit into that sort of coalition.

00:07:55.620 I always wonder if Canadians sort of see through it and have become like cynical like me,

00:08:01.220 or if they just believe that, you know, the parties that they like are doing the right thing,

00:08:05.400 because, you know, maybe having an election during COVID would make us all die or something.

00:08:11.100 Well, it's it's it's no, you raise a lot of good points.

00:08:13.680 I mean, as as a British Columbian, it's particularly rich when the NDP is using this line about an election during COVID.

00:08:20.660 Because, of course, here in British Columbia, our NDP government called an election in the middle of our supposed second wave here in B.C.

00:08:27.040 And not only that, but Jagmeet Singh himself has been tromping all around the province, you know,

00:08:31.220 campaigning for the NDP government of British Columbia.

00:08:33.860 You know, Jagmeet Singh is now sort of reimagined that he's a British Columbian because, you know,

00:08:37.840 he parachuted in here last year to win an easy seat so he could get in the House of Commons.

00:08:42.740 So it's just, you know, the NDP has had to do a lot of damage control about this,

00:08:47.420 like because they feel very against the wall.

00:08:49.800 Because I think a lot of their base is kind of cheesed off at them as well,

00:08:53.120 that the that this party exists to constantly just prop up the liberal government and exchange for what exactly?

00:09:00.000 Right. Like that they can imagine themselves as being, you know, the power broker and maybe like, you know,

00:09:05.540 getting a tiny little tweak to the Serb program or something like that here and there.

00:09:10.440 But it's pretty small beans. Right.

00:09:12.180 Like if the if the NDP really believes that the liberal party is wrong for the country and should not be in government,

00:09:18.660 then they have to be able to sort of make a stronger case to that regard.

00:09:22.580 They have to be able to drive a harder deal.

00:09:24.360 And that means being willing to, you know, push them out of power when that opportunity presents.

00:09:29.080 But the other level of cynicism is, of course, that, you know, we look at the polls and we see, you know,

00:09:33.740 the NDP doesn't isn't doing so hot with voters right now.

00:09:37.640 Their poll numbers are not great.

00:09:38.940 And it gets even deeper because then people are saying, like, well, you know, the NDP doesn't have a lot of money right now,

00:09:43.620 as if they ever do. And like they're thus not in a good position to fight the election and this sort of thing.

00:09:48.740 So, I mean, it is in some respects like I would hope that the average Canadian is aware of this because it does sort of show

00:09:54.820 that our whole sort of political system, this whole parliamentary system is so is so twisted in some level.

00:10:00.300 And it is all just based on partisan calculation and nothing else like this, this whole idea of like a confidence vote.

00:10:07.300 Right. Like it was like, you know, I don't know, like a century ago, maybe that meant something as like an idea of,

00:10:13.820 you know, how our government structure is is sort of worked out.

00:10:17.120 And like the confidence of the of the parliament actually meant something in terms of determining, like,

00:10:22.460 you know, who deserves to be prime minister and in some sort of more holistic sense.

00:10:27.000 But now it like it means nothing, like it's all like all of these sorts of things, confidence of the House,

00:10:32.420 you know, when we have elections or don't have elections, the formation of committees,

00:10:36.780 like all of this stuff is now subordinate to partisan calculation.

00:10:40.800 And it's just it's it's not great. It's not healthy for democracy at all.

00:10:44.640 And I I hope that Canadians are starting to to wise up to that, because we're really we are, as you said,

00:10:50.400 like we just are living in a in a system in which there is no higher principle governing anything.

00:10:55.840 I often wondered that about question period itself, like having this sort of like, you know,

00:11:02.120 almost wrote, you know, conservatives ask a question and then Trudeau stands up and like read something off a piece of paper,

00:11:07.260 like half heartedly or like, you know, he deflects a question.

00:11:10.080 It's like, what's the point of this? I understand that it's part of the tradition.

00:11:13.680 I think it's good. Maybe at one point in Canada's history, they would actually have debates.

00:11:17.960 They would actually listen to each other and then respond to the point.

00:11:21.520 But, you know, what we see today is just very robotic.

00:11:24.440 It's like that, you know, the prime minister knows what the question is or he doesn't listen to the question

00:11:29.160 and he just reads off talking points that someone read to him.

00:11:32.220 It's like, how is this actually getting to the bottom of things?

00:11:35.480 Like, is this really holding a prime minister to account, just having him stand up and like say state rehearsed lines?

00:11:41.160 Like, how does this how is democracy? I don't know.

00:11:43.780 No, exactly. You make you make such an excellent point. Right.

00:11:46.380 It's like there's so much of sort of Canadian politics that it's just it's just this like theater and and yeah,

00:11:53.540 just like going through the motions of these like increasingly like ritualistic ceremonial kind of activities that really like they're they're fun.

00:12:01.520 I guess for people that live in Ottawa, like the professional politicians,

00:12:04.880 they sort of want to go through the motions of feeling important and feeling like they're playing the game of being a politician.

00:12:10.540 But, you know, at the end of the day, when it comes to issues that matter, they're not consequential at all.

00:12:15.760 Although I will say that one thing that I was actually kind of pleasantly surprised by was when Prime Minister Trudeau was called before the I don't recall what committee it was specifically,

00:12:29.360 but he was, of course, called before that one committee.

00:12:32.060 I think it was like a finance committee to testify about what he knew about the Wee scandal.

00:12:37.020 And Pierre Polyevra really gave him an intense grilling.

00:12:39.100 And in that context, you could see something resembling parliamentary accountability take place because it wasn't scripted.

00:12:45.560 The prime minister didn't know the questions ahead of time.

00:12:48.080 The prime minister was sort of really on the hot seat.

00:12:50.360 And it was a very focused line of questioning in the context of a very specific sort of committee in which like it was searching for.

00:12:59.020 It was like it was sort of like a trial, right, like that they were searching for like clear, objective information to help the committee,

00:13:05.600 you know, determine conclusions about things as opposed to sort of the partisan spectacle of question period, which is,

00:13:12.060 yeah, so sort of ceremonial and, you know, just sort of gummed up with all of this sort of empty, rote, scripted, partisan talking points.

00:13:20.400 And that's the point of that is, is that makes the fact that we're not having this committee to look into the Wee scandal sort of all the more disappointing,

00:13:26.740 because independent of like all of this stuff about the election and whether or not we're going to have one and yada, yada, yada.

00:13:31.960 It is also just it's sad because like now this committee is not going to be formed.

00:13:36.020 And so our ability to actually do that kind of deep dive into the Wee scandal has now evaporated thanks to the NDP.

00:13:42.300 And, you know, we'll be off to the next thing.

00:13:43.800 And so I suppose the sort of the the the the the cover won't be closed on this particular scandal in the way that we had wanted it to be,

00:13:51.920 because ultimately, I mean, this is this is something else.

00:13:54.780 This says something about our parliamentary system is that the only real way that you can get like a true hard information from a government in this country

00:14:03.320 is through some sort of parliamentary committee in the context of a minority government.

00:14:07.800 Unless the stars all align in that perfect fashion, which only happens, you know, like once every decade or so,

00:14:13.420 you're basically not going to get any accountability because we know that things like the ethics commissioner and all the rest of it are just,

00:14:18.560 you know, pointless figureheads as well.

00:14:20.380 So it's it's really it's really disappointing.

00:14:22.420 And I hope the NDP is pleased with itself because they're the architects of this.

00:14:27.000 Well, you're pretty you're pretty critical of the NDP.

00:14:29.760 You're actually critical of all the parties in different ways.

00:14:32.420 So I was hoping we could sort of go through each of the parties here and you could offer your critique,

00:14:37.960 because it's interesting. We'll start with the NDP since we were just talking about them.

00:14:41.600 But, you know, Jagmeet Singh has a sort of star power.

00:14:44.620 I think the media are really into him.

00:14:46.560 He's this sort of woke, modern, sophisticated, urban elitist prototype.

00:14:52.720 And that's like that's the media's dream, right?

00:14:54.980 Like when he first came on the scene, it's like, wow, he's like Justin Trudeau, except for he's like, you know, from another culture.

00:15:00.140 So that makes him even better. But but but then when it came to the election, he just totally sunk like it was pretty disastrous for the NDP for all the consternation about Andrew Scheer and, you know, how he failed and how he didn't do what he was expected of him.

00:15:16.040 You know, it really was the the NDP that went down all across the board in terms of seats, in terms of the vote representation.

00:15:22.880 So why is it that Jagmeet gets sort of a free pass?

00:15:26.080 Why is he still leading this party when, you know, you pointed out he's broke.

00:15:29.680 The party's broke. They bankrupted themselves, basically.

00:15:32.320 They lost all their seats in Quebec.

00:15:34.060 They have very little, very few seats.

00:15:38.240 Sure, they hold the balance of power.

00:15:39.740 But but why do you think he avoids the sort of scrutiny that other political leaders get?

00:15:44.820 Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very good question.

00:15:46.280 And I mean, I'll I'll I'll confess to my own guilt in this is that I was somebody that was very sort of pumping up Singh's image when he sort of first sauntered onto the scene, because I did.

00:15:56.840 And I think like a lot of media people did this is I think we projected sort of skills onto him that he just objectively didn't have.

00:16:03.620 And I think that there was a sort of fascination with the idea that, you know, he was a minority, you know, he was from this minority faith and that that was going to give him some sort of traction in this sort of era of identity politics and that kind of thing.

00:16:13.700 But then I think there was also just like a lot of fantasizing that, for example, he was a charismatic person, which I don't think he's charismatic.

00:16:21.040 I think he's he's quite awkward in his manner of speaking.

00:16:23.460 And that's something that a lot of people have have pointed out to me.

00:16:26.160 It's like, well, Jagmeet Singh, like he just can't talk that well, can he?

00:16:29.820 He's just he's stumbling and bumbling his way through press conferences like that.

00:16:33.460 He's just and he's also a man who just straight up does not seem like he has clear motivation for why he's in politics.

00:16:39.540 You know, he's sort of he carries himself as someone that's just kind of been cast into this role sort of almost against his wishes.

00:16:45.860 And he's just trying to, like, figure out, tell me what to do.

00:16:48.460 What do I have to do? What do what should an NDP leader be doing?

00:16:51.520 As opposed to someone who has a sort of clear sense of why he's in politics and what his ultimate goal is in sort of playing this game.

00:16:57.920 But this is a bigger problem with the NDP in general is that it does, I think, have that kind of existential dread at its core is that it doesn't really know what it exists to do, because I think that there is very I often wonder if there's ever been that much daylight between the NDP and the liberals.

00:17:13.800 I know that there's kind of this fantasy that there was some glory age in which the parties were very different and only now they've gotten very similar.

00:17:19.720 But I think that when you look back through time, this is actually a more consistent criticism than than some might expect.

00:17:26.520 You know, we know, for example, that that Jack Layton was like constantly trying to make deals with the Liberal Party, even, you know, prop up a liberal minority government in order to keep the conservatives out of power and all of this kind of thing.

00:17:37.860 And I think that, you know, that becomes a sort of existential crisis, because then it's like, well, why are you a separate party then?

00:17:45.160 Like, does do the people that are currently making up the NDP caucus, do they really have more power, more influence doing what they're doing now than they would if they were just a faction?

00:17:54.020 You know, perhaps a further left faction within the Liberal Party itself in the same way that like the Democrats in the states, you know, they have a further left faction, you know, the AOC faction that exerts some influence within the party.

00:18:04.700 And but, you know, the NDP is is has a culture, right?

00:18:08.860 Like, and that's the thing. It's like the NDP is kind of like a culture that has a party.

00:18:12.660 And it's kind of a culture of of a certain clique of sort of far left people in our society.

00:18:18.380 You know, people associated increasingly just with sort of the public sector unions and people in sort of public sector union adjacent, you know, activist circles and professions and things like that.

00:18:29.480 You know, academics, educators, you know, social workers and sort of bureaucrats of various stripes and sort of like people within that orbit are very committed to the NDP because they've sort of grown up learning that the NDP is their party.

00:18:45.060 You know, my mother, for example, is a public school teacher. 0.91

00:18:48.360 And I remember we would get like these magazines from the public school teachers union here in B.C. in the mail every so often.

00:18:54.800 And they'd always be full of like NDP propaganda.

00:18:57.240 So it's kind of like really beaten into your head when you're sort of part of this NDP sort of milieu that the NDP is the only party that's going to fight for you.

00:19:05.100 And it's the only one that's looking out for these distinct interests of these distinct communities.

00:19:08.420 And I think that part of that culture is that it makes people just not very critical and it makes them not really ask a lot from their leaders.

00:19:15.140 I think that when you look through the history of NDP leaders, not only federally, but at the provincial level, is that they're given a lot of, you know, second and third and fourth choices, even in the face of clear signs that they're just like objectively not good at their job, that they're not good at winning elections.

00:19:31.980 They're not good at winning seats. And I think that Jagmeet Singh is a classic example of that.

00:19:36.440 Like he clearly failed at his central job, which was to make the party do better, to make the party gain or at least hold what it already had.

00:19:44.140 He didn't do that. And yet because the NDP culture, I think, is just much more deferential to leaders, particularly leaders that have sort of like, you know, proven their loyalty.

00:19:53.420 Singh is, of course, a man who sort of rose up through the Ontario NDP.

00:19:56.360 And so he's a good NDP man. It's revealing that the the only NDP man who actually did get thrown under the bus was Thomas Mulcair.

00:20:04.180 And that was because, you know, he was somebody that sort of like the NDP true believers always had their doubts about because, you know, he came from a different party.

00:20:12.020 He was a liberal, even flirted with the conservatives. And, you know, you thus could not be sort of trusted.

00:20:18.320 But no, I mean, like, it's just this is just the kind of party that the NDP is.

00:20:23.700 I think it's a serious, un-serious party run by un-serious people that are sort of captive to a kind of fantasy of relevance that's never actually going to come true.

00:20:35.460 Well, it's interesting because, I mean, you talked about wondering Jagmeet's motivation for getting into politics.

00:20:41.140 He did this weird video a while ago, like a long time ago, where he was talking about how his motivation for getting into politics was former B.C. Premier Ujjal de Sange because of his anti sort of Kalistani Sikh separatism position.

00:20:56.140 And so it sort of feels like a leader that's so distracted by a very fringe foreign policy issue.

00:21:04.100 And, you know, there's video of him speaking at a Kalistani, which is a Sikh separatist movement in India, rally in San Francisco, where he keeps referring to India as our country.

00:21:14.560 And so, you know, it's just sort of weird because if if that happened, like, you know, it came out during the last election that Andrew Scheer was a dual Canadian American citizen.

00:21:22.500 If there is ever footage of a conservative saying our country, talking about the United States, that would be the end of them.

00:21:29.560 It sort of was the end of Michael Ignatieff when clips surfaced of him saying another country was our country.

00:21:36.220 But for Jagmeet, that sort of flew under the radar.

00:21:40.820 To me, the NDP was always a coalition of two different groups.

00:21:43.680 It's like the sort of blue collar union crowd and then this sort of environmentalist urban crowd, which Jagmeet clearly fits into the latter.

00:21:53.100 You know, he has a Rolex collection and he has his fancy suits and he just seems so out of place in the party.

00:21:59.160 But the way you describe the culture, you know, those sort of things mesh together because they're so sort of obsessed with the identity politics thing.

00:22:08.500 And let's move on, talk about the Green Party, JJ, because you're probably one of the most outspoken people I've ever met about the Green Party.

00:22:16.200 And, you know, they have a new leader, Anime Paul, who sort of just positions herself as sort of yet another.

00:22:22.480 You know, they call themselves center left.

00:22:23.800 I would call them like fringe far left, like a party that's just focused on social justice and pushing identitarianism.

00:22:31.560 Why don't you give us your overview?

00:22:34.360 My take on the Greens?

00:22:35.360 Well, I mean, like the Greens, the Greens are basically like the party for whom the NDP is like not far left enough.

00:22:42.340 Right. Like and and not only that, it's important, like to even clarify this further, because like the narrative of the Green Party is sort of that all of the parties are corrupt.

00:22:53.660 All of the parties are indistinguishable, which is, you know, a strange belief to have.

00:22:58.400 And that therefore, like you need to have this like pure, like, I don't know, fourth or fifth or sixth party.

00:23:05.160 I don't know what rank we would put them in.

00:23:07.140 But like we need to have like this other party that is like so detached from the mainstream.

00:23:11.600 Right. Like the Green Party is the party of people that really demonize the mainstream and everything that they perceive to be mainstream.

00:23:17.240 You know, the mainstream party system. But then also things like mainstream medicine, you know, big business, you know, mainstream, you know, academia, like any sort of like force of authority in that currently exists in Canadian society is dismissed as being, you know, corrupt and sort of wicked.

00:23:34.020 And, you know, the tool of the capitalists and all the rest of it and sometimes, you know, even more deranged people.

00:23:41.880 And the thing that that causes this or sort of like the consequence of this is that you have a party in which conspiracy theories really tend to thrive.

00:23:50.940 The party really does seem like it is a breeding ground for people that have inherently sort of conspiratorial view of the world.

00:23:57.540 And it attracts these people in great numbers. And Elizabeth May, you know, when she was leader of the Liberal Party, which she still may be in some sort of de facto capacity, you know, did a lot of things during her like, I don't know, 15 year tenure of the party in which she would sort of put a dog whistle suggesting that this party was sort of on on there on the side of the conspiracy theorists.

00:24:19.020 You know, when it came to things like, you know, reading a petition about the 9-11 truth in the House of Commons, like the idea that, like, you know, we need to get to the bottom of this.

00:24:27.360 Right. She read a petition in the House of Commons sort of making that exact case.

00:24:30.720 And we know that there's been 9-11 truther candidates that have run for the Green Party repeatedly.

00:24:34.860 We know that there have been anti-Semitic candidates that have run for the Green Party repeatedly.

00:24:39.440 The man who came in second place against Anna May Paul, Dimitri Laskaris, like he's a man who has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism and at the very least is a man who has made an obsession with the state of Israel, like the central focus of his political life.

00:24:55.480 He is a man deeply, deeply obsessed with this idea of like the Zionist elite sort of doing all sorts of machinations to control, you know, everything. 0.71

00:25:04.620 And this is a man that, you know, came within quite close proximity of being the liberal leader instead of Anna May Paul.

00:25:11.080 You know, you can go expand the thing further.

00:25:13.940 Things like chemtrails, you know, Elizabeth May has made supportive noises about that whole conspiracy theory. 0.98

00:25:19.880 So I think that one of the problems about the way that we talk about the Green Party is that the media, the Canadian media is really obsessed with the Green Party as this kind of story of like the plucky upstart, you know.

00:25:30.640 I don't know how many times in like the last 20 years I've read some story in a mainstream publication where it's like Green Party eyes break through in the next election, right?

00:25:39.820 Like there's always this kind of idea that the Green Party are kind of the lovable losers of Canadian politics and they're just like too principled for their own good and like, oh, shucks, they're going to give it their best and maybe they're going to break through.

00:25:50.860 And now that they've got three seats in the House of Commons, you know, you see the press giving them like undue attention and sort of saying, well, how are the Greens going to vote in this confidence vote?

00:26:00.420 Even though their votes are completely mathematically irrelevant, there's still this desire to believe that they are like a strong and important presence motivated only by like their plucky underdogness.

00:26:10.680 But what I'm what I say is that there is so much evidence that the Green Party has, like I said, been a breeding ground or at least a sort of like welcoming environment for really like the fringe crackpot sort of set of Canadian society.

00:26:23.980 And what exasperates me is just that the press has had no interest in sort of framing the party that way, because the media, of course, has tremendous power.

00:26:32.200 And part of the way that the media has power is how it chooses to create narratives around the political actors in this country.

00:26:38.920 And I think the Canadian the Canadian press is sort of like uniquely brazen about doing this is that they tell you a certain story about a person and then that story becomes the mainstream.

00:26:48.320 Right. So, for example, like, you know, Andrew Scheer, the story, the narrative about him was, you know, kind of unassuming guy, didn't really have what it took, kind of scary, kind of religious kook.

00:26:59.380 And, you know, that's why he couldn't close the deal with the election was because people were afraid of his his, you know, extreme Christian views or whatever.

00:27:06.100 So, like, you can go through the line and like there's little storylines about everybody.

00:27:09.320 And the problem to me is just that the storyline about the Green Party, the sort of the plucky upstart storyline is just it's only true if you ignore so much else that we've seen and that I have done my best to document over the years.

00:27:22.940 You can go to my my website, Operation Tinfoil dot com and see a long, long list of crackpot things that the Green Party has done over the years.

00:27:30.300 Well, it's interesting because, you know, with Elizabeth May, it was like the media just liked her, like she was friendly with them.

00:27:36.940 They knew her. She was such a sort of known figure that they would give her so much attention and then say that she was media savvy.

00:27:43.880 But it was like she's media savvy because you're giving her all this attention. 0.61

00:27:47.900 Like she's pretty crazy and not mainstream at all.

00:27:51.220 I always wish that the Green Party would take more of like a free market approach and not just be like another far left party, but maybe be like a free market party that really supports a green agenda, environmentalist, like not even environmentalist, but just conservation and a clean environment.

00:28:06.560 And then at least we'd have some choice, you know, when it comes to political parties.

00:28:10.180 But I think you're right, as is the Greens are just really, really far left and irrelevant.

00:28:17.580 Why do you think it is that these small fringe parties on the left get so much credibility and so much, you know, spotlight from the press treated like they're really, really important?

00:28:29.060 Whereas, you know, when you have something like the People's Party and Maxime Bernier, it's treated like it's a scary threat and it's somehow, you know, this murky force is here to like subvert Canadian freedom and democracy or something like that.

00:28:42.680 Well, I mean, it again, it just goes to sort of like the storylines that the press sort of really clings to.

00:28:49.620 Right. And so, you know, one of the storylines is that, you know, the environment like climate change and this kind of thing matters a great deal and is, you know, one of the defining sort of political challenges of our time.

00:29:00.720 And that, therefore, a party that ostensibly professes to sort of care about something like that gets treated very seriously, like the Green Party.

00:29:07.900 And so like a lot of the way that the Green Party is framed is not only that they're the plucky upstarts, but, you know, they're the plucky upstarts that are motivated by this kind of like fashionable new cause in Canadian politics.

00:29:18.540 And thus it is logical that there would be a Green Party because, of course, the stakes have never been higher and this sort of thing.

00:29:23.740 And then whereas like something like the People's Party, that fits into this narrative that, you know, all around the world, we're sort of seeing these like sort of pseudo fascist, populist, far right, racist, anti-immigration parties sort of rise up in order to cause chaos and are probably funded by Russian, you know, disinformation campaigns and all this kind of thing.

00:29:41.640 Right. So like that's a very entrenched narrative as well. And it was just a matter of time before some sort of character came onto the scene that sort of fit that profile, that sort of media profile, sort of the confirmation bias and could kind of be part of that storyline in the context of a Canadian sort of media narrative in the same way that, you know, Trump and Le Pen and, you know, I guess even Brexit and like all these kinds of things are in the world have sort of been slotted into that narrative.

00:30:08.540 There was a desire to find out, like, who is going to be Canada's version of that. And so I think the People's Party sort of fit that bill nicely and was sort of framed as such.

00:30:18.360 And I mean, like, I have a lot of problems with the People's Party, have a lot of problems with Maxime Bernier. I think that he was just, you know, I think that he lacks a lot of obvious political talent as well.

00:30:27.480 But, you know, I think it was always pretty obvious from the beginning that this was going to be treated as a sort of just like an inherently sort of sinister force in Canadian politics, just because, you know, that's the storyline.

00:30:40.160 You know, we're all trapped in the storyline of the mainstream press of this country. And it's just a matter of like, what role are we going to be assigned?

00:30:46.920 It's funny, because I feel like everything that happens in Canadian media is framed to juxtapose Trump. So like, the whole coronavirus thing, you know, the media were obsessed with comparing Canada's reaction to the US reaction, which, you know, fundamentally, obviously, there were some major differences.

00:31:04.200 But at the end of the day, both countries got it pretty bad. And you can't really say that one was like, you know, Trump handled it worse, or Trudeau handled it worse, or whatever. It was like, no one really knew what was going on. Everyone handled it poorly. Some people did some things better.

00:31:17.880 But it'd be interesting to go through this sort of media history since Trump came on the scene, and see all the different conservatives that have been compared to Trump. And like, you know, the fear mongering. I remember Kelly Leach, when she was running for leader, you know, they like superimposed Trump's hair onto her.

00:31:33.520 And then it was like, Doug Ford was supposed to be Trump. But then like, you know, he's pretty much governing like a liberal. You know, then we had Andrew Scheer, Jason Kenney, and Maxine Bernier. It's like, the Canadian press just really want a Canadian Trump so that they can like spend years and years dunking on him like they do for the real Trump.

00:31:51.420 No, it's it's it's a you're exactly right, right? Like that there is this idea that like, the phenomenon has to occur. And so we will do whatever it takes to sort of like fit someone into this predetermined little storyline that we have. And of course, like, but it also becomes, you know, there's also, of course, in Canada, there's this sort of other layer of narrative, which is like the righteousness of the good Canadian versus sort of the evil Americans.

00:32:14.940 And thus sort of like somebody like Bernier or Kelly Leach as well, are useful, because then the press can sort of frame them as like Canadians decisively rejected these sort of like sirens, and they're tempting sort of tales of, you know, bad things.

00:32:30.940 And like, this is a reflection of sort of like the inherent morality and the inherent sort of progressivism of the Canadian people that can sort of never be escaped. And sort of like, you challenge that at your own, at your own risk, and this sort of thing, which sort of eliminates the possibility that somebody like Kelly Leach, or somebody like Maxine Bernier, were just like bad politicians, like that they were unsuccessful, sort of, in spite of their views on a number of issues, including immigration, rather than because of them, right.

00:32:56.880 And that's sort of something that I think the Canadian press has a very hard time doing is sort of dealing with those in spite of rather than because of sort of differences and distinctions.

00:33:06.700 But there, yeah, there's always been this kind of idea. And you've seen a lot of sort of articles in the mainstream written about this, like the idea of like Canadians being like fundamentally immune to or allergic to the sort of populist rot that has sort of struck elsewhere in the world.

00:33:20.800 And this, this goes back to this, just, it's just a very sort of standard idea that like Canadians are just fundamentally better people. I think that was literally like a headline that John Kay himself might have written at one point, which is just like, you know, we're just kind of better people and that we're just not corrupted by these kinds of things.

00:33:36.220 And I think this is a sort of a subtle way that, that the press can sort of put their finger on the scale when it turns, when it comes to, you know, sort of just presenting what kind of ideas get a fair shake versus what kind of ideas don't, is that you sort of, you mask a lot of things into this sort of under the cover of patriotism and what is sort of like the supposed inherent character of the Canadian people.

00:33:59.120 Because then it frames things where it's like, well, you want to be a good Canadian, don't you, right? You want to think the things that only good Canadians think, you don't want to think the kind of things that bad, evil, sort of right wing Americans think, do you?

00:34:09.660 And then so you just kind of create this idea where ideas, certain ideas are framed as not only being sort of bad or sinister, but sort of fundamentally unpatriotic and unserious in that respect.

00:34:20.640 And I think that this is an experience that a lot of sort of more conservative Canadians have had is sort of being scolded as being like, well, why do you hate Canada?

00:34:28.000 Why are you, why don't you just move to America and all this kind of stuff? 0.94

00:34:31.900 Right. Well, just, just wait for there to be like a far left government down in the US and Canada will finally come to its senses and have conservatives.

00:34:39.740 And then, and then everyone will fail to understand like what's happening in the world again.

00:34:44.160 It'll be like back to the Harper years.

00:34:45.560 It's interesting, you know, what the media puts forth, because in order to agree with what you said about how Canadians reject populism and this like good Canadian narrative, it's like you have to ignore every poll you see on immigration or integration, which shows that Canadians are actually pretty traditionalist in terms of like wanting newcomers to become Canadian, wanting fewer immigrate.

00:35:08.740 I think every poll I think every poll I've ever seen wants like massive decreases in immigration.

00:35:14.340 That's just something that the media completely ignore.

00:35:17.300 I want to pick up on something you said, though.

00:35:19.200 You basically said that the PPC and that Maxime Bernier, you know, isn't a very good politician.

00:35:25.420 So I wonder what, you know, if you were advising Maxime Bernier or if you if you were in charge of the People's Party, what would you have done differently?

00:35:34.220 And do you think that there is a sort of piece on the political spectrum where they could potentially be like an important political party or political movement in Canada?

00:35:45.160 Hmm. That's a good question. I mean, I'm generally not a big believer in the idea of making new parties.

00:35:52.960 I suppose I'm more of a sort of entryist kind of sort of philosophy, which is to sort of say, like, if you have if you have a perspective, it's sort of better to work within one of the existing sort of coalition parties, because ultimately, like, that's what's going to bring you to government.

00:36:10.740 And it's the government that will ultimately make the policies that will sort of achieve the goals that you're purportedly interested in.

00:36:16.920 Right. And and so, I mean, like you could say that Bernier did what he should have done in the sense that he ran to be head of the Conservative Party.

00:36:25.160 I mean, you could say that he didn't run to be head of the Conservative Party on the agenda.

00:36:29.580 He would wind up championing as head of the People's Party. But, you know, he did what you would expect to do.

00:36:35.500 And I think that what a lot of People's Party supporters should have been more concerned with is sort of trying to champion their perspectives within the context of the Conservative Party.

00:36:46.680 And trying to think about, like, how can we get a leader like that as the next head of the Conservatives?

00:36:52.560 And it doesn't seem like there was any effort to do that in the most recent Conservative Party race, that there was no candidate representing that kind of more populist or sort of like immigration sort of restrictionist or however you want to sort of frame it.

00:37:05.260 That sort of faction of the Conservative Party and movement, which is very large and like prominent, as you said, like there is a lot of polling data to suggest that there is considerable appetite and certainly considerable appetite on the right for an agenda resembling that.

00:37:19.000 And yet, you know, Conservatives, that sort of faction of Conservatives did not mobilize behind a candidate that could champion in their cause.

00:37:26.120 And thus, we're not really a force at all in the in the in the most recent Conservative leadership race.

00:37:31.080 Instead, the Conservative Party has sort of, you know, gone back to its sort of traditional messaging on these issues.

00:37:36.240 And so I think that this is, again, one of the problems when you have sort of these fringe parties is that they sort of become, you know, sort of cordoned off and become this sort of it becomes a more sort of like overtly fringe cause, if you know what I mean.

00:37:52.240 Because then you can say, well, like, oh, the only people that believe that kind of stuff, they're a part of the Maxime Bernier sort of personality cult, like they're not serious people.

00:38:00.300 And, you know, I imagine that this probably happens to some degree when it comes to sort of some of the causes of the further left.

00:38:05.240 Right. Is that, you know, the Trudeau liberals or whatever can sort of say, oh, you know, that's just an NDP idea or that's a Green Party idea.

00:38:12.320 Like these are fringe kind of things. And it goes back to what I was saying before. Right.

00:38:15.560 Like strategic advice to the NDP, I think, would be for them to get rid of their party and just become a sort of further left faction within the Liberal Party and perhaps exercise force and pushing the Liberal Party perhaps further to the left on the issues that they purport to care about.

00:38:29.180 And I would give the same advice to people within the People's Party is that if they truly want to have an influence, why don't they do the hard work of actually being a faction that can't be denied within the Conservative Party itself?

00:38:41.640 And I think that a good role model in that regard would be some of the pro-life movement and the pro-life organization in this country, who I think have refused to go away and have been a stubbornly persistent faction within the Conservative Party.

00:38:56.140 I've heard some people say that there's probably more overtly pro-life Conservative MPs than there have been in decades.

00:39:01.880 And that's a testament to how dedicated the pro-life movement in this country has been to working within the party structure, as opposed to you could imagine if the pro-life people had all just sort of said like, oh, no, the current party system is beyond repair.

00:39:15.000 We're just going to, you know, support the Christian Heritage Party or some new like pro-life party.

00:39:19.420 It would just be even easier to dismiss them. Whereas you see somebody like Aaron O'Toole, even though he is himself pro-choice, he clearly feels the pressure of the pro-life community and has to do something to make some sort of peace with them.

00:39:32.620 In a way, he just doesn't feel the pressure from the more sort of immigration restrictionist or skeptical sort of community, because they are safely now in just this kind of cul-de-sac of the Bernier sort of thing, which seems to be in some sort of death spiral.

00:39:46.640 So it's very easy to just use that and wipe your hands and sort of say, well, you know, that that debate is closed.

00:39:52.820 That's an interesting take. Let's talk a little bit about Aaron O'Toole, because you said that there wasn't really a populist movement within the Conservative leadership race, which I agree.

00:40:00.900 But we do hear some of the sort of rhetoric from Aaron O'Toole.

00:40:05.500 He had a Labor Day message that was very explicitly reaching out to trade unions and maybe people who have been disaffected by the NDP, like you like you talked about before.

00:40:13.920 So what is your assessment, JJ, of the new Conservative leader?

00:40:17.500 Yeah, I mean, I think that as far as that kind of stuff goes, he is he is sort of hitting the right notes.

00:40:21.880 You know, I think that in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election in 2016, there was a sort of in sort of the Conservative intelligentsia on this continent, there was kind of a thinking that the Conservative Party or that the Conservative cause sort of has to be more pro worker in some way,

00:40:41.700 has to be more sort of overtly blue collar friendly, has to be more even more perhaps inclined towards the interests of unionized workers, not public sector unions, but like more private sector sort of unions and sort of make a greater peace with that.

00:40:57.040 Because there was a sort of thinking that Donald Trump's election was sort of built on the back of this kind of new coalition, which is sort of the more downscale, the less educated people in contrast to what, you know, both Republican and Conservative Party consultants tend to push,

00:41:13.700 which is this idea that, like, you know, you have to go after, you know, the suburbs and the urban sort of centers.

00:41:19.900 And that's kind of making yourself palatable to those communities and sort of speaking their language and playing that game.

00:41:25.440 Now, it sort of remains to be seen, of course, we're filming this just, you know, literally a few days before the US election, it remains to be seen whether or not that coalition is strong enough to carry President Trump to a second term,

00:41:36.720 or whether or not, you know, alienating the suburbs in particular, is sort of a too high of a price to pay, and that whether or not, like, if Trump does lose, then there will be sort of a, I think, a vindication of the more sort of traditional advice,

00:41:52.100 which is that, you know, you do actually have to reach out to suburban and urban voters, and certainly, you know, college educated people, college educated women in particular,

00:42:00.940 and that you can't run too far in the other direction, like everything sort of has an equilibrium.

00:42:04.900 But Aaron O'Toole does seem like he has taken a bit from the Trump playbook in the sense that he does seem to have an interest in sort of carrying himself as the more blue collar friendly,

00:42:15.700 the more overtly pro worker kind of party. And, you know, I think that remains to be seen if that will be effective, obviously, but there is there is,

00:42:24.540 I think, a possibility for a, a sort of Trump style realignment with some aspects of the party system in this country, which is to say that there are,

00:42:34.520 I think, when you look at, say, a big map of Canada, one of these big election color coded maps, you can see that there are a lot of sort of like large,

00:42:41.440 sort of like rural or semi rural kind of blue collar ridings in this country that are currently held by the NDP.

00:42:48.440 And as you were sort of saying earlier, like the NDP has moved quite far away from its kind of blue collar working class kind of origins,

00:42:55.720 or even a pretense of being a party for that kind of community, as opposed to being, you know, the kind of the woke party of the academic urban sort of establishment and the big public sector unions.

00:43:06.260 So in that sense, like there is a possibility where you could imagine that rather than, you know, taking seats from the liberals in downtown Toronto or Vancouver,

00:43:15.440 that an O'Toole led party could in theory target some of these NDP held sort of blue collar ridings, you know, in perhaps in northern BC or northern Ontario,

00:43:25.420 or, you know, other sorts of parts of, you know, in Manitoba and places like this, like there is some fertile territory, the Maritimes as well, could possibly represent some fertile territory, too.

00:43:36.720 So I think it's I think it's a good strategy. Like, I think that it's worth a shot. And I think that the conservatives need to have a unique, a unique something like they just need to have a unique strategy,

00:43:47.440 they need to try something different. Because I think that the Harper sort of technique has sort of panned out, I think that Andrew Scheer kind of represented just like, you know,

00:43:57.420 what they call like the dead cat bounce, you know, like one last shot at basically trying to rebuild the Harper coalition. And I think that didn't work.

00:44:05.500 And so I think like, yeah, I'm I and I think a lot of conservatives are willing to give Aaron O'Toole credit for at least trying something new,

00:44:14.060 at least having a theory of the electorate that strikes as being a little bit fresh, a little bit creative, a little bit innovative,

00:44:20.900 and will hopefully suggest that rather than simply targeting like the the big cities, and then, worst of all, Quebec,

00:44:27.940 that they're actually going to try targeting some some territory that have been previously written off by by conservatives as being inhospitable

00:44:35.040 in the way that the sort of the Trump Republican campaign targeted areas like, you know, Wisconsin and Michigan,

00:44:40.520 and Minnesota, and other sort of places like that Pennsylvania, that were sort of seen as being traditionally, you know, part of the blue wall,

00:44:47.640 and sort of the Trump people said, Well, maybe not maybe this actually, on sort of like cultural and economic grounds,

00:44:53.300 if we sort of tweak our message a little bit, make it a little bit more overtly pro worker, maybe a little bit less sort of like globalist,

00:44:59.980 less sort of blindly in favor of things like free trade and open borders and that kind of thing. Maybe we can make some some gains there. And so yeah,

00:45:06.520 again, I think it's I think it's worth a shot. I think one of the things that Trump doesn't get enough credit for was how deeply connected

00:45:13.640 he has been with the sort of rust belt and blue collar Americans, not even in like a strategic political way that just came out

00:45:20.540 in 2015 or 2016. But, you know, going back, like his entire career, he spent kind of marketing himself and branding himself

00:45:28.520 as almost like an everyman American who just became really rich and really successful. And, you know, everything from his forays into

00:45:35.580 professional wrestling and being involved in all of that, to, you know, his, his, his personal brand selling suits and all that kind of stuff. He built a brand

00:45:46.820 that was recognizable for the sort of people who were sort of left out of the political establishment. So it wasn't just like he swooped on the scene

00:45:55.080 and was like, hey, I want to attract blue collar voters. He had been like cultivating that for years and years. And I don't I don't really

00:46:00.840 see that from Aaron O'Toole. But on the counter, Trump really, really puts off suburban women. Like, like, if you look at the 0.99

00:46:09.200 polling numbers, it's it's it's pretty stark men versus women, especially, like you said, college educated women do not like

00:46:15.460 Trump, whereas I think Aaron O'Toole probably still has a shot with that demographic. But, but yeah, certainly, I think that the

00:46:23.560 strategy is interesting. And it's just a little bit refreshing to see something a little bit

00:46:28.620 different. You recently tweeted, JJ, that Doug Ford is the biggest failure and disappointment in Canadian

00:46:34.460 conservative politics. Can you can you expand on that?

00:46:37.980 Well, I mean, I think that I think that there was a lot of hope for Doug Ford when he first sort of came

00:46:43.360 onto the scene. I think that there was a hope that he could be a kind of a kind of populist. You said that he

00:46:48.720 he got reputation for sort of being the Trump of Canada for a brief window of time. And I mean,

00:46:54.400 fair enough, like, he did support Donald Trump, you can watch clips of him on CBC during the 2016

00:47:00.640 election, in which he was very sort of outspoken as and like, I'm going to be pro Trump. And,

00:47:05.680 you know, I'm not afraid to sort of say that. And so I think like that gave people a lot of,

00:47:11.220 I suppose, a lot of people on the right hope for what this kind of guy was going to represent.

00:47:14.840 I think that the fact that he beat, what was her name, Elliott in the in the conservative party

00:47:21.880 leadership election, Christine Elliott, I think that that gave people a lot of hope to like that,

00:47:26.340 that Christine Elliott was sort of seen as this, you know, very sort of like establishment political

00:47:30.760 figure. And that for somebody like, you know, Doug Ford, who still sort of had the aura of his

00:47:35.800 brother's very sort of populist outsider administration in Toronto, that that sort of,

00:47:41.380 sort of like the residual reflected aura of that was sort of, sort of projected onto Doug Ford as

00:47:47.980 well. But the problem is, is that it seems like, certainly during the pandemic, that Doug Ford has

00:47:56.660 not at all exercised any agency to suggest that he is interested in being anything other than,

00:48:06.220 you know, basically governing as, as a liberal, like just being in complete hawk to conventional

00:48:11.560 wisdom, really sort of craving the approval of Ottawa, really craving the approval of the mainstream

00:48:15.480 press, you know, not willing to, I don't know, to just sort of like challenge the, the, the, the

00:48:22.700 conventional wisdom about things like, you know, how strict these lockdowns should be, how long they

00:48:28.740 need to be, how invasive they need to be. And, and also just like, I think that, you know, I've heard

00:48:33.220 people sort of give him the nickname of like, Premier Karen, just in the sense of like, how

00:48:37.400 personally, like judgy, and judgmental, and sort of bossy he's been, when it comes to like, the way

00:48:44.520 he sort of carried himself in his press conferences, and like the lack of empathy that he's shown for

00:48:49.260 people that are on the receiving end of these lockdowns, you know, the business owners that have

00:48:52.640 had to shutter their businesses, and the loss of, of revenue for them and their families, and the

00:48:57.040 massive inconvenience it's been towards parents and all this kind of thing. Like, there's been a sense

00:49:01.480 that Ford has just not really risen to that occasion at all. Like, we're not sort of saying

00:49:06.300 that he needs to go the, the sort of the full Trump and, you know, be, you know, too extreme

00:49:11.940 in the other direction, where he's, you know, rejecting science, or whatever, being openly

00:49:16.220 contemptuous of scientific authority, or whatever the sort of the stereotype of what Trump has done

00:49:20.600 wrong has been. But there is kind of a sense that, that this pandemic has been, like, ideologically

00:49:27.360 divisive in some ways, and that there has been a sort of, like, maximalist position on

00:49:32.180 it on the left, which has sort of been in favor of, like, maximum lockdowns, maximum, like, erring

00:49:37.600 on the side of maximum cautiousness, like, no price is too high to pay for, you know, fighting

00:49:42.020 this pandemic. And then the sort of more conservative disposition, which has been a lot more sort of

00:49:46.100 skeptical, you know, more inclined to sort of challenge the expert opinion, notice that it

00:49:51.880 has sort of changed and morphed over the months, and thus is perhaps not as deserving of the blind

00:49:57.600 deference as some of the other people on the other side have been willing to give it, and sort of say

00:50:01.600 that, you know, that as much as it is important to fight the pandemic and do what it takes to be

00:50:07.340 protected from it, that these sort of things have a cost as well, and that there is a cost benefit

00:50:11.980 analysis that has to be done. And that it's not a matter of just, you know, having a complete

00:50:16.960 lockdown or complete chaos, complete death and destruction and disease. But there is some

00:50:21.780 sort of, like, trade-off that you have to be able to make, where you have to say, well, what is an

00:50:24.860 acceptable risk factor that we can have in order to ensure that, you know, the prosperity of our

00:50:30.000 society, the mental health of our society, our ability to continue to go on living our normal

00:50:34.060 lives that are necessary to uphold our society can also be continued. And it just seems to a lot of

00:50:39.040 people, and certainly a lot of people on the right, when I sort of see what they're saying and

00:50:43.240 writing about Ford and Ford's administration during the pandemic, they don't think that he's achieved

00:50:47.920 that balance at all. And what's worse is they don't even think, they don't even see

00:50:51.760 him as a person that seems interested in achieving that balance, or even slightly skeptical in the

00:50:57.340 way that you expect a supposed conservative populist to be. Instead, like I said, like,

00:51:02.960 he just really does seem like he's courting the approval of the mainstream press and the liberal

00:51:07.800 government in Ottawa, which just is not the kind of thing that I think people expected that they

00:51:12.100 would be getting when they got Doug Ford in charge. Like, is it possible to really sort of

00:51:17.540 conceptualize how this government is handling things differently than a premier win government

00:51:22.640 would be? And I don't think the answer to that is obvious at all.

00:51:26.300 Yeah, it seems very, very top down. Well, JJ, I think a lot of people know you as a YouTube guy,

00:51:31.980 you've got a really popular channel over there. I love your videos. I always learn a lot. I have a

00:51:36.380 Canadian degree in political science, and I still somehow learn things from your videos. But

00:51:40.760 you're also a very serious political commentator, and you have a very serious role over at the

00:51:46.560 Washington Post. Tell us a bit about how you became a columnist for the Washington Post.

00:51:53.200 Why didn't you go this sort of more traditional Canadian route and write for the Vancouver Sun or

00:51:57.640 the National Post or even the Globe and Mail? How did you end up at the Washington Post?

00:52:01.600 Well, I mean, I think that the Washington Post wanted me and none of those other places did.

00:52:05.340 You know, I have not been a popular guy with the mainstream press in this country. I mean,

00:52:10.860 I guess people can reach their own conclusions as to why that is. But the Washington Post,

00:52:15.760 you know, they were nice, and they extended an offer to me, and I took it. I mean, I think that

00:52:20.180 they'd read some of my other writing, you know, I've written for a number of other publications over

00:52:23.860 the years, in both Canada and the US, you know, always sort of talking about Canadian issues. But I try to

00:52:29.120 talk about Canadian issues in a sort of, I don't know, in a fresh way, you know, I think I'm a kind of

00:52:35.120 contrary person. And so I do try to, like, extract myself a bit from these narratives that we've been

00:52:40.920 talking about, and try to assess things in a somewhat more objective way, or sort of say, like,

00:52:45.040 well, how would an outsider see this is let's or let's, like, sort of challenge some of the

00:52:49.440 assumptions that we use to describe how things happen in Canadian politics, like, and I think

00:52:55.540 that there is a problem that a lot of young journalists in particular, don't come at it with

00:53:01.060 that kind of attitude of curiosity and skepticism. Instead, they come at it with an attitude of

00:53:05.580 conformity, and, you know, sort of obedience to the narratives and the sort of the standard

00:53:11.900 practices of who is good and bad. And what is, you know, what is sort of like the larger story in

00:53:17.120 Canada, at any given time. And so I don't know, it's just, you know, I've, I, the Washington Post

00:53:23.800 people just reached out to me, I've been there for, I think, close to four years now. I remember I

00:53:27.820 started there right at the time of the US election. And so I guess we're getting close to the four

00:53:31.720 year period. And they've been great to me, they've been very supportive. And my pieces are popular,

00:53:36.420 people read them. And, and, yeah, so I can't say anything bad about it at all. I've had a great time

00:53:41.580 working there. And, you know, I'm, like, again, like, I've always been a rune, the mainstream press

00:53:48.580 in Canada has not been interested in me. And so I suppose at some point, you just go with the people

00:53:53.120 that are willing to take you. And so that's why I went with the post. Well, I think you still have

00:53:57.920 an outsized influence, though, because you're, you're sort of like outside the Laurentian circle,

00:54:01.620 you're out in Vancouver, and you put forth these sort of contrarian, but kind of underlying

00:54:05.940 conservative articles, and you just really managed to get under the skin of the mainstream media,

00:54:10.520 which we can see play out on Twitter, just about any time you, you put out a piece. But I want to

00:54:15.420 talk about one specific column that you wrote a couple weeks ago, really taking Justin Trudeau to town

00:54:22.380 on his throne speech that that that ostensibly said that he wanted to tackle systemic racism,

00:54:28.240 whereas you juxtaposed that with his obsession with bilingualism, and pointed to the outcome,

00:54:34.560 which was that he doesn't really elect, or he doesn't appoint anyone to federal courts,

00:54:38.900 that isn't basically, you know, an elderly or a middle aged white person. Yeah. So, so I, you know,

00:54:45.580 that was a pretty, just visually when, you know, I don't know if it was you or someone over at the

00:54:50.020 Post, but they put together the pictures of all the people that Justin Trudeau had appointed. And

00:54:53.720 it's like, oh, wow, you know, if that was, if that was happening in the US, it would be,

00:54:58.200 you know, in your face, and everyone will be talking about it, but but it happens in Canada. So

00:55:02.980 why don't you why don't you walk us through that argument that you made?

00:55:06.540 Yeah, and it's, it's not just the federal judiciary, either. I mean, it's, yes, every single judge on the

00:55:11.680 Supreme Court of Canada, and I think every one, but like, two judges on the federal court roster is,

00:55:18.000 is white. But also, like, every, I think, all but I think one or two of like, the 30 deputy ministers

00:55:25.780 in this country, who are the people that are actually running the federal government are all

00:55:29.100 white. Everyone, but I think maybe two of the heads of the, I don't know, 30 crown corporations that we

00:55:35.040 have in this country are white. You know, the heads of the armed forces are all white, like you can go 0.99

00:55:39.440 down the list, and it's, it's just all white people everywhere. And well, not just not just white, 0.89

00:55:44.500 but like French Canadian, right? No, it's true. And it's because this is this is bilingualism,

00:55:51.100 like this is the consequence of the bilingual policy that Justin Trudeau believes so heavily

00:55:55.600 in, you know, it's the it's the 50th anniversary of the Official Languages Act. And Justin Trudeau has

00:56:01.400 made I mean, this hasn't been that widely reported. But this has been like one of the key sort of

00:56:06.320 priorities of his government is that in we're going to update and modernize the Official Languages Act in

00:56:11.980 sort of celebration of 50 years of success. And, you know, you might think update and modernize

00:56:16.740 means we're going to be a little bit more conciliatory to the way that Canada is a much

00:56:20.660 more diverse and eclectic linguistic country than it was 50 years ago, when the only dynamic really

00:56:26.900 was between the the the English Canadians and the French Canadians, you know, Canada was an

00:56:31.240 extraordinarily white country, even within my own lifetime until, you know, immigration and and all 1.00

00:56:36.300 the rest of that has has changed it. And you know, that's, that's fine. That's just the reality of the

00:56:39.600 country that we live in now. But part of that consequence of that is that you have fewer and

00:56:44.820 fewer if you ever even had that many, but fewer and fewer Canadians who can speak fluent French and

00:56:49.560 English at the level that the federal government requires, and not only requires, but has systematically

00:56:54.660 strengthened in terms of its strictness for the requirement in order to hold sort of top executive

00:57:00.480 ranked jobs in the government of Canada. You know, they call it, I think, section like 91 jobs,

00:57:06.040 but it's basically like any, any job that Ottawa determines French and English are necessary for

00:57:12.420 the functioning of that of that purpose, you know, you have to be bilingual. And it's usually bilingual

00:57:16.900 at the time of appointment, which is like a very, very high level of fluency that is expected in order

00:57:23.500 to hold any of these jobs that are overwhelmingly executive ranked jobs, you know, and top, like top level

00:57:30.180 jobs as well. And so the problem is, is that you're, you're really selecting for a skill,

00:57:37.720 a mostly irrelevant skill, I would say that is not, in fact, necessary to do a lot of these senior,

00:57:42.820 senior level jobs. But it is a skill that is disproportionately held by, you know, a very small

00:57:48.160 cultural, ethnocultural group of Canadians, which are, you know, mostly French Canadians, or Canadians

00:57:54.880 that are sort of part of a kind of bilingual milieu around mostly Ottawa and Montreal, right? It's

00:58:02.380 something like, I believe it's around 17% of Canadians overall that possess this skill of perfect

00:58:07.820 French English bilingualism, and something like 90% of that 17, or possibly more, are located in the

00:58:14.460 province of Quebec. So you can't really have a government that says it's committed to having a

00:58:21.480 country that is diverse, and, you know, having a government that is reflective of that diversity,

00:58:26.440 and then also champion this very outdated, old fashioned idea that Canada is fundamentally a

00:58:32.360 country of two founding nations, only two, the French and the English, and that those communities

00:58:36.840 sort of will forever be able to dictate the shape and nature of the country. And that's sort of like

00:58:41.260 the only real dominant civil rights issue of Canada is making an environment that is inclusive and

00:58:48.280 welcoming to unilingual French Canadians, which is to say, like, French Canadians who can't speak

00:58:54.040 English at all, which is not that many, and increasingly less and less, despite the Quebec 0.93

00:58:59.240 government's dogged efforts to ensure that Quebecers don't speak English, more French Canadians speak

00:59:04.840 English than ever before, which means that even the demand that, like, even the argument that this

00:59:09.080 is somehow, like, necessary for inclusion or ability to create a functional workplace for

00:59:14.120 unilingual French Canadians is becoming a weaker and weaker argument. So I really view this as one 1.00

00:59:18.920 of sort of like the great existential challenges to sort of Canadian liberalism and Canadian

00:59:23.240 progressivism, but also one that's really just not talked about very much because, I don't know,

00:59:28.760 it's a weird sort of compartmentalization that somebody like Justin Trudeau or Jagmeet Singh or,

00:59:33.880 you know, any sort of left wing Canadian of any prominence that you want to name,

00:59:38.920 like, their ability to sort of, like, believe these two deeply contrary goals simultaneously,

00:59:43.800 that we're going to have a very inclusive, welcoming society and government, and at the

00:59:47.880 other hand, like, there is nothing more important than speaking not one, but two European languages

00:59:53.080 in order to achieve any power or prominence in this country. But you're right, like, this is,

00:59:57.960 in some respects, the ultimate taboo of sort of polite establishment Canadian opinion, Laurentian

01:00:03.720 opinion. And that's why there is nothing I sort of get more of a hard time for than when I say this.

01:00:08.920 And one other thing I would just add is that I always find it, like, funny and weird that at a

01:00:13.640 time when we're talking about, like, systemic racism and systemic barriers to entry for, you know,

01:00:21.400 people of colour, people of colour of lesser means, that, like, your otherwise perfectly progressive 1.00

01:00:27.400 people can turn into these, like, very sort of cold-hearted meritocrats, right? So, like, if you're kind

01:00:33.080 of saying, like, oh, you know, there's not a lot of people that come from non sort of francophone

01:00:38.120 backgrounds or non, you know, Quebec or Eastern Canadian narrow sort of backgrounds in the high

01:00:44.440 levels of our government, you know, a lot of people, including the prime minister himself,

01:00:47.560 will turn around and say, well, maybe they're just lazy and they should just, you know, pick up

01:00:51.160 a book sometime and sort of, like, figure out how to do it. And the only thing that's sort of standing

01:00:55.160 in their way is their own inability to pull themselves up and do what it needs to take. And it's like,

01:00:59.480 not only is that, I think, very ignorant in terms of just what we know about linguistic science and

01:01:04.120 how languages are learned or not learned, which is mostly because you need that language for day

01:01:08.760 to day communication, not because some law somewhere says you have to speak it. But, you know, it is also

01:01:15.080 just a kind of argument that would never be considered acceptable in progressive circles anywhere

01:01:20.760 else, right? Like, if you sort of were to identify, like, a wealth inequality between people of colour and,

01:01:26.440 you know, white Canadians, for instance, you wouldn't just say, oh, well, it's because they're

01:01:29.880 just not working hard enough or because, you know, maybe they should just get better jobs if

01:01:33.160 they're so sad about being poor or things like that, right? It's this, like, very weird sort of,

01:01:38.440 like, Dickensian logic that the left in this country will employ only in this one very specific case.

01:01:44.440 Everywhere else, they'll talk a good game about equality and non-judgment and, you know,

01:01:49.960 bringing down systemic barriers and systemic racism, except for this.

01:01:53.160 Well, it's interesting because, yeah, every now and then there'll be a viral video out of

01:01:57.880 Vancouver of some sort of angry Canadian, you know, shouting at someone, a Chinese immigrant

01:02:04.360 or something, saying, like, speak English in Canada or whatever. And, you know, they get,

01:02:07.640 like, completely bullied and painted as, like, an evil, malicious person. Whereas, like, that's,

01:02:12.920 like, the official law in Quebec.

01:02:14.600 Yeah, no, exactly. Well, I mean, it's technically it's the official law federally as well, right?

01:02:19.320 Like, I mean, they do have to speak English, but then they also have to speak French as well. So,

01:02:22.920 I mean, it is like we can't even you can't even have a sign in Quebec that isn't in French. So,

01:02:28.920 you know, they can use a hammer to enforce their language. But I want to ask you, though, I sometimes

01:02:35.800 wonder with with these like this, I think the reason that the mainstream media sort of resents you,

01:02:40.120 JJ is because you have this big platform that they can't like, you know, that they can't compete

01:02:45.800 with you. You have a huge audience in the US and, you know, they'll try to pick apart your argument.

01:02:51.160 But, you know, you still have your platform, which is great. But I sort of wonder sometimes if you're

01:02:56.680 making these arguments in tongue in cheek to sort of show the hypocrisy of the liberals and the sort

01:03:02.040 of two contradictory views that they have, which I think is completely accurate. But do you actually

01:03:07.560 think Canada is a systemically racist country? I feel like I've heard you sort of make that

01:03:12.600 argument or you're sort of underlying, you know, saying that that it does exist in Canada. I

01:03:17.240 I reject the idea. I don't think that systemic racism is a very clear term. And I don't think that

01:03:21.720 we I myself don't concede that that is the case in Canada. But I wonder what what your position was

01:03:28.200 on systemic racism. I mean, I think that there are obviously discriminatory barriers that exist. And I

01:03:34.840 think that racism is a thing and that racism can be present in sort of subtle cultural ways,

01:03:40.760 or maybe even not so subtle cultural ways, and that that these sorts of attitudes of discrimination

01:03:45.560 can indeed sort of prevent barriers from people of color from from sort of climbing as high as they

01:03:50.200 would like to in their in their personal lives and their professional lives. You know, that being said,

01:03:54.760 like, I certainly don't think that, like, you know, the Canadian government has at its core,

01:04:02.680 like a kind of conscious desire to maintain white supremacy, which is what some people would argue.

01:04:08.520 Like, I think that, you know, all of the available evidence suggests that this is an issue, the issue

01:04:13.000 of discrimination and racism is something that the Canadian government takes very seriously. I think it

01:04:17.480 took seriously under Stephen Harper, I think you can go back many generations and say that this is

01:04:22.200 something that Canadian governments have always been very sensitive to that, like, we want to make

01:04:26.200 a more diverse and inclusive society in which Canadians of all backgrounds can thrive and get

01:04:30.440 ahead. Sort of like the argument that I make is this that I think that I think that barriers to all

01:04:35.960 sorts of Canadians exist in all sorts of levels, not just racial barriers, but you know, barriers that

01:04:40.840 prevent, you know, true diversity from being reflected in our government, you know, in terms of, you know,

01:04:45.400 gender diversity, and, you know, class diversity, and of course, ideological diversity, and just the

01:04:50.680 diversity of having a lot of people that come from different backgrounds and different life

01:04:54.200 experiences, and sort of creating a government and a civil service and, you know, all of the other

01:04:59.400 sort of senior institutions of our society that truly do reflect Canada. And I think it's always,

01:05:04.760 like, I come at it from just a very sort of like simplistic democratic logic, which is that,

01:05:08.440 like, in a democratic society, it is very important for the barriers of entry to be as low as possible,

01:05:13.960 that people that want to have a job in their government, that want to be engaged in their government,

01:05:17.640 that want to sort of like, be playing a role in making the decisions that affect their lives,

01:05:23.160 that path should be relatively sort of unblocked, it should be relatively simple for an interested,

01:05:28.360 dedicated, determined Canadian to be able to exercise some degree of influence in his government

01:05:33.160 and in his society. And so I think that when the government sort of erects barriers to prevent

01:05:37.320 that from happening, whether or not they are, you know, sort of cultural barriers, or like clear

01:05:42.920 legal barriers, like these bilingualism requirements, I think that there are things that that should be

01:05:47.480 opposed. So I know that, you know, I know that when we talk about stuff like systemic racism and

01:05:52.840 that kind of thing, it's become this very sort of like hot and very polarizing kind of issue in which

01:05:57.880 people are sort of thinking about it in this very sort of like, yeah, just one or the other way.

01:06:01.800 It's like either Canada is like a completely racist country that has no redeeming qualities at all, 0.95

01:06:06.120 it's just this white supremacist kind of hell state, or, you know, Canada has basically nothing to 0.97

01:06:11.000 apologize for at all, and that there's no sort of introspection at all that's necessary.

01:06:15.080 And I, you know, I just I kind of reject both of those those polls. And I think that, you know,

01:06:19.000 we should just look fairly at these institutions, we should take seriously criticisms that people make,

01:06:24.200 that doesn't mean that you have to like, this is the problem with the left is that they just

01:06:28.280 uncritically swallow every argument that is made using this kind of language. So like, if they say,

01:06:33.560 you know, I don't like this statue, because I think that statue is a symbol of white supremacism,

01:06:38.920 then the left wing just kind of says, well, you're right, we'll tear it down, right? As opposed to,

01:06:42.920 I think that like, it's possible to hear that argument and sort of say, okay, well,

01:06:46.840 let's have a conversation about that. Let's sort of like discuss what are the actual merits here?

01:06:51.000 Does that argument stand up to scrutiny? You know, can we come to some sort of objective

01:06:55.400 assessment, if that's true or not, in some cases, it might be true, I definitely think that there are,

01:06:59.480 you know, some people, for instance, that don't deserve to be commemorated, because they were objectively

01:07:04.120 bad people, like even by the standards of their time and contributed very little. But then there

01:07:08.440 are people like, you know, Johnny McDonald, who you could say, like, clearly on the net,

01:07:12.680 more positive than negative, and that if there's something sort of morally wrong with trying to

01:07:16.840 eliminate that. So yeah, when it comes to this whole debate, I don't know, I tried to be a little

01:07:21.240 bit pragmatic about it, because I do think that that's, I do think that that's something that's

01:07:25.640 that that conservatives have to be a little bit sensitive to and can be,

01:07:29.320 it can be a little bit self destructive when you're sort of seen as being too immediately

01:07:34.680 dismissive. Well, I think it's important to define terms, because I feel like you're right, 1.00

01:07:40.600 there's definitely nuance to it. And no one's saying that Canada is a perfect country. But the

01:07:44.920 idea that, like, all of a sudden, you know, something happens in the US, and then, you know,

01:07:49.560 every Canadian politician has to genuflect and say that, admit that Canada is a systemically racist

01:07:54.920 country without understanding, like, what that exactly means. Because I think a lot of Canadians

01:07:59.480 would just see it as a total attack on our institutions, and our traditions. And, you know,

01:08:04.520 that's the systemic part. And I think it's intentionally vague, like, instead of pointing to

01:08:08.360 a specific policy, which is what you do, to give you credit, you point at specific policies and say,

01:08:13.480 you know, this is what's, could be problematic, or whatever. They just say, you know, that the system

01:08:19.320 is broken. And then the term racism has this underlying implication of intent, malicious intent.

01:08:26.600 And so even even what you pointed out in the Washington Post, what we're really talking about

01:08:30.600 is sort of an inequality of outcome, but but but not necessarily a racist intent that led to that

01:08:36.440 inequality of outcome. And so I think you have to be careful with the term racism, because it did it

01:08:41.160 did once have that meaning of sort of, you know, malicious race based intent, whereas now it's just sort

01:08:46.520 of means like, you know, that the outcome isn't a perfectly diverse reflection of Canadian society.

01:08:53.240 And then you have to go back and say, Okay, well, was that was that intentional? Or was that sort

01:08:57.160 of an unintended consequence? And what are ways that we can, you know, change the unintended

01:09:01.560 consequence? And I think that's, that's part of the problem. Obviously, there's racists in Canada, 0.64

01:09:06.600 there's racists in every society, I don't think anyone's denying that. But, but to say that it's sort of

01:09:11.320 cooked in, you know, that that that's, that's sort of where my problem lies, as long as we're being

01:09:17.080 clear about what it is that we're, we're talking about, I think you do raise some areas in Canada

01:09:22.920 where there is clearly systemic racism, when it comes to the Indian Act, you know, that that's an

01:09:29.240 entire system of laws that has been designed to have separate governing functions for one group of

01:09:36.120 people basically based on their race and ethnicity. So I wanted to have your take on that.

01:09:43.080 Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting, like, I made a video, one of my favorite videos that I've made

01:09:47.880 recently, where I talk about Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the six classes of Canadian citizen,

01:09:53.960 this is something that is sort of very long forgotten about, but at the time was considered

01:09:57.800 a real big deal, which is why I made a video about it, which was that when the Charlottetown Accord,

01:10:01.800 you know, this constitutional amendment package of amendments that was being proposed by the

01:10:06.040 Brian Mulroney government, with the support of basically all of the Canadian establishment,

01:10:11.560 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former prime minister came out of retirement, and he gave a very strong and

01:10:16.760 powerful speech, in which he was denouncing the idea of Canada getting away from his vision,

01:10:23.160 you know, imperfect as it was, like, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in theory, had a vision of a sort of

01:10:28.600 Canadian society that was based around a kind of like civic, a civic identity, and an identity of sort

01:10:35.000 of liberal democratic rights for all citizens equally, that all Canadian citizens, you know,

01:10:40.360 and it was sort of manifest by, of course, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was

01:10:43.800 an effort to really sort of like define Canada as a nation that was not defined by race or creed or

01:10:49.080 anything like that, but rather by a kind of concept of civic liberalism, as we would say,

01:10:54.120 an identity of civic civil rights for all Canadians, regardless of their distinguishing characteristics.

01:11:00.760 And what the Charlottetown Accord sought to do was instead create this idea and sort of say,

01:11:05.320 like, Canada is not, in fact, a country of equal rights for all people, but it is a country of

01:11:10.200 special collective rights based on your identity as part of certain identifiable groups, and that

01:11:17.080 the Charlottetown Accord basically identified six of these groups, you know, French Canadians,

01:11:21.720 English Canadians, and Indigenous Canadians with sort of different distinctions based on where they

01:11:26.520 lived and all the rest of it. And Pierre Elliott Trudeau sort of said, like, that this is fundamentally

01:11:30.840 bad, and this is not the kind of society that we should want to live into, because when you have

01:11:36.040 a society that is determined, that grants rights on the basis of collective identity rather than

01:11:40.680 individual identity, really what you wind up having is just greater tyranny for various forms of

01:11:46.680 government that purport to represent those communities, because nobody represents an individual.

01:11:51.800 An individual like you and me, we're individuals, we're only lobbyists for ourselves, and, you know,

01:11:56.440 we can fight for our rights through the court system and all the rest of it, but ultimately, like,

01:12:00.280 we're, the government has to recognize our rights as individuals and sort of leave us unmolested

01:12:05.640 through our ability to exercise our rights as individuals. But when you have a collective right,

01:12:09.240 what this winds up doing is that it creates greater powers for these institutions that purport to

01:12:14.120 represent the collective. And what Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, and I think what we would all agree with,

01:12:18.840 is that, you know, by entrenching rights for French Canadians, specifically, well,

01:12:23.800 what this does is it gives more power to the government of Quebec, right, because it professes

01:12:27.640 to be the government of the French Canadians. And you've sort of seen, you know, certainly under this

01:12:32.280 current government in Quebec, I think it has become quite authoritarian, because it conceptualizes itself.

01:12:38.040 It's like, we are standing up for the rights of the Francophone Quebecers, and like,

01:12:42.360 that is our duty. And we will run roughshod over the, you know, the civil rights, the individual

01:12:48.200 rights of anybody who does not conform, including religious minorities and English Canadians.

01:12:53.480 But then to get to your original point, is that this is also the case when it comes to Indigenous

01:12:58.760 Canadians, right? So despite Pierre Elliott Trudeau's warning, despite the fact that we voted down

01:13:02.840 the Charlottetown Accord, the governments have nevertheless continued to progress in the direction where

01:13:07.240 Indigenous Canadians only have collective rights, which is the idea, like, as an Indigenous Canadian,

01:13:12.280 your rights are only able to be exercised through your identity into these sort of like culturally,

01:13:17.240 ethno, sort of distinguished community groups, which then you will identify, you will exercise

01:13:22.920 those collective powers through that group identity, through basically your Indigenous, your Aboriginal

01:13:28.040 government, you know, your Indian Act sort of recognized government, or in some cases,

01:13:32.040 even governments that exist outside of the Indian Act, and sort of as we've seen in British Columbia,

01:13:37.240 with some of the recent pipeline controversies, like just some other competing community that

01:13:42.040 professes to be the only legitimate government of that particular sort of ethno-nationalist

01:13:49.320 Indigenous band, or tribe, or what have you. And the problem with this is that then you get into

01:13:54.200 this business where it's like all of everything that is purported to be a matter of Indigenous rights is

01:14:00.920 really just this kind of government-to-government negotiation. You know, you have the

01:14:05.000 the identified Aboriginal government sort of negotiating with either Ottawa or the provincial

01:14:11.880 government over these very sort of like high-level things that usually just descend into granting more

01:14:16.920 rights to that particular government and sort of the particular gang of politicians that are running

01:14:21.320 that Indigenous government. And the rights of the Indigenous Canadians, the individual rights of the

01:14:25.480 Indigenous Canadians, sort of get left in the lurch, because no one is really advocating for them at

01:14:29.720 that level. You're having these government-to-government, as Justin Trudeau would say, sort of nation-to-nation

01:14:35.080 negotiations and discussions. And that is sort of assumed to be a positive end into itself, where

01:14:40.600 and in the the the rights of the Indigenous people, as exist in a kind of individualistic sense,

01:14:46.840 in the sense of like, you know, their right to safety, security, you know, the security of the individual,

01:14:51.800 you know, their right to health and happiness and liberty, like all of that kind of stuff gets

01:14:56.280 treated as a much sort of lesser priority than these collective rights, which include government

01:15:00.920 power. And also, you know, just, you know, like some of these, like these things like, like cultural

01:15:07.880 rights and rights of consultation, and all of these kinds of rights that are ultimately just collective

01:15:12.440 rights for government rather than rights for the individual. And you're right, like it does ultimately

01:15:16.680 come down to this question of like, well, where do those rights ultimately derive from? And they

01:15:21.000 ultimately just derive from your identity, not as an individual, but as a kind of member of an

01:15:26.600 ethnocultural nationalist group, which is just so contrary to the idea of what this country is supposed

01:15:32.760 to be. And this is another another instance in which I just feel like the left in this country just

01:15:37.960 doesn't really have a good way of compartmentalizing or rationalizing this obvious inconsistency,

01:15:45.960 because on the one hand, most most sort of left wing progressive Canadians would say like, yes,

01:15:49.960 we want to live in a kind of equal rights sort of society. We love the charter of rights. We love

01:15:54.920 this idea of a country defined by, you know, this kind of one size fits all approach to civil rights.

01:16:00.040 But on the other hand, they're also like huge enablers of what I would say is very flawed sort of

01:16:06.200 system and structure for dealing with the rights of indigenous peoples in this country. You know,

01:16:11.240 this kind of broken Indian act, nation to nation, government to government based sort of setup.

01:16:17.800 And I don't know really how they are able to rationalize that inconsistency, other than to

01:16:23.720 just kind of mask over it with this kind of feel good language of reconciliation and, you know,

01:16:30.120 the guilt over the past and this kind of thing. And just to use that as a way of masking critical

01:16:37.080 questions to be asked as to whether or not this actually is the best way that we can go about

01:16:40.920 doing what they're purporting to care the most about, which is sort of improving the lot of the

01:16:44.840 life of indigenous people in this country.

01:16:47.800 Right. Trudeau and his and his cabinet sort of have a lot of empathy, so it feels like they care.

01:16:53.880 But when it comes to what they actually do, I mean, it's just absolutely full of contradictions.

01:16:58.040 And it seems like, you know, the first Trudeau, it was basically the same. I think that he would

01:17:05.320 have been horrified by the idea of, you know, considering indigenous people as separate nations

01:17:10.680 and doing nation to nation. I mean, it sort of undermines the idea that we're all Canadians and

01:17:16.040 that we all have the same basic individual rights. And interesting to your point about Charlottetown,

01:17:21.480 how it was the conservatives of Mulroney who were interested in inserting collective rights

01:17:26.760 into a constitution. You know, you kind of think of conservatives as being the party of

01:17:32.440 individual freedom and individual rights. And it wasn't too long ago that seems like it was

01:17:36.760 it was sort of the opposite. But one of the things that you had in that video, the six types of

01:17:40.920 Canadians, was talking a little bit about how Pierre Trudeau with his white paper of 1969 originally

01:17:47.000 wanted to just sort of do away with the Indian Act and say, you know, enough with the separate 1.00

01:17:53.000 treatment and the reservations and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, once they proposed it,

01:17:57.480 it sort of didn't go very well. And then they sort of backed away from it. It doesn't seem like anyone

01:18:03.160 has ever picked up that mantle to try to go down that path again. What do you think the solution is? I

01:18:11.240 mean, I don't think that anyone can look at the state of, you know, the way that so many people in

01:18:17.000 Canada live on reserves and say, OK, you know, these people have the same opportunities and the same

01:18:22.840 quality of life as Canadians who live in cities or Canadians who are not

01:18:26.920 Aboriginal. I mean, obviously, there's no simple solution. But what did you think about the 1969

01:18:33.320 white paper and Trudeau back then? And do you think that there's anything to that that we could use

01:18:37.880 today to try to move forward with sort of improving the lot for Aboriginal Canadians?

01:18:42.840 Yeah, it's interesting. Like, it's definitely like the speeches that Pierre Elliott Trudeau gave

01:18:49.960 and sort of the official government report, the white paper itself. These are all worth reading

01:18:55.560 today because they're just windows into a very different logic than anything you hear present now.

01:19:00.440 And, you know, the white paper has been sort of imagined as this, like, statement of cultural

01:19:05.800 genocide. You know, when I was in university, my university actually stopped using the phrase

01:19:11.720 white paper to refer to internal government or internal sort of bureaucratic documents because

01:19:16.840 it was taken for granted that that term had been so, like, infused with the negative energy of the

01:19:22.280 of the 1969 sort of initiative that it should never be spoken of again. But it's like when you go back

01:19:27.720 and you read what was actually contained in the white paper and you read what Pierre Elliott Trudeau

01:19:32.440 was arguing. It is an extraordinarily, like, compassionate and empathetic sort of mentality.

01:19:38.200 And I, you know, I don't that should not be a controversial thing to say. Like, I would hate

01:19:43.800 if anybody, like, would try to cancel someone over sort of suggesting that because it is it is clear.

01:19:49.080 Like you can say and I know that like a lot of the a lot of people would say that, you know, maybe it was

01:19:54.520 naive. Maybe it was short sighted. Maybe it was based on an assumption that, you know, is now discredited by

01:20:00.280 contemporary theories or what have you. But it was nevertheless like it was a clear argument. The

01:20:05.000 argument was was that and Pierre Elliott Trudeau said this explicitly is that you cannot have equality

01:20:10.760 in a society that perpetually defines one class of person as being the other. In particular, you cannot

01:20:17.480 have a society. And he said this very explicitly as well is that you cannot have like a society in

01:20:22.840 which one part of the society has a treaty relationship with another part of the society.

01:20:27.960 Like that is just a fundamentally in equal relationship. It puts forever one class of 0.97

01:20:33.240 the society in a subordinate position to the other. And it makes creates this relationship of

01:20:37.320 codependence and, you know, and and paternalism that is just not healthy for either. And Trudeau was

01:20:44.920 very explicit about saying this. And it's it's it's kind of like there there has never really been

01:20:51.800 that I've seen a very persuasive rebuttal of some of the points that he made at that level.

01:20:58.920 Right. In this sort of sense, like, well, if you sort of take the abstract view of this,

01:21:03.000 like if you sort of divorce it from all of like our emotional feelings about this issue as it exists in

01:21:07.240 contemporary Canada, if you just kind of like think about like if we were starting from scratch,

01:21:11.480 how would we sort of set up a society in which we had an aggrieved minority in that way?

01:21:16.200 Would we sort of set up as sort of elaborate architecture of of of of separate rights and

01:21:21.720 sort of treaty rights and creating this category of like status Indian as a completely different

01:21:27.320 sort of status of person and having all of your individual rights not only subordinate to that that

01:21:32.440 that legal class of person, but then sort of further subordinating that to your your your

01:21:37.480 bans government and your ban government's ability to sort of represent you on behalf of you at that level

01:21:43.640 in negotiation with the federal government and, you know, working its way through through legal

01:21:47.880 challenges and court cases and all the rest of it. It just seems like as much as anything else a terribly

01:21:52.920 inefficient and ineffective system for yielding the kind of results that we should all want,

01:21:58.600 which is, you know, to say for Aboriginal Canadians to live free and prosperous, happy, satisfied,

01:22:04.600 independent lives like the rest of us have, you know, in theory. So I don't know. But the problem

01:22:11.560 is now is that sort of since that, you know, since that sort of white paper approach was introduced,

01:22:17.880 you know, Trudeau backed away from it in part because, you know, a lot of the Aboriginal governments

01:22:22.600 themselves opposed it because, you know, in theory, they had the most to lose. And and for what and you

01:22:27.640 can also say, like, fine, maybe it was maybe Trudeau was insensitive in the way that he went about doing

01:22:32.680 it. You know, we, of course, now live in a in a time in which we believe that, you know, consultation

01:22:36.920 is sort of like the most fundamental way to establish any sort of just idea in government.

01:22:43.080 And, you know, perhaps that argument can be made. But anyway, the point is, is that in some respects,

01:22:47.320 this debate is entirely sort of academic because when you go in the years since then, you know,

01:22:53.960 Pierre Elliott Trudeau himself enshrined treaty rights into the Constitution of Canada that was since

01:22:59.640 further strengthened by a constitutional amendment, making aboriginal treaty rights even more entrenched

01:23:04.840 in the Constitution to the point where they have literally like the status of constitutional law.

01:23:09.160 So this kind of stuff can't really be unspooled from the Canadian system in the way that it could

01:23:13.640 in Pierre Elliott Trudeau's time, you know, which was sort of in 1969, you know, Canada was a much

01:23:18.680 different country than it is now. Our Constitution was a lot more malleable. You know, you could dream

01:23:23.640 sort of big ideas and in a way that you just can't now because we're so codified or so sort of cornered

01:23:29.720 in by our Constitution and by Supreme Court precedent and and all of this kind of thing. But so I don't

01:23:35.800 know. It's a very difficult question to answer in terms of like, are we do we have the capacity to

01:23:41.960 imagine a different reality? Do we have an do we have the capacity to imagine a setup for aboriginal 1.00

01:23:49.880 Canadians in this country that is different than the Indian Act regime that is different than this

01:23:54.920 kind of treaty based, you know, Indian reserve based regime regime? Do we have the capacity or

01:24:03.320 are we just so sort of boxed in with the with the laws and the precedents and the court rulings and

01:24:08.840 whatnot and the bureaucracy and all the rest of it that this kind of stuff really can't be conceptualized

01:24:13.960 in any other way and we're just kind of forced to deal with it? I don't know. I mean,

01:24:17.000 that sounds like a sort of fatalistic sort of argument to make. And I also want to be clear

01:24:21.240 that like I'm not I'm not attempting to make the argument that that some sort of like super

01:24:27.160 ultra heavy handed assimilationist agenda is the desirable one either because I think that this is 1.00

01:24:33.880 not a sort of binary thing. I think that though that the question has to be and I think I would

01:24:38.520 like to see conservatives try to think bigger ideas about this and try to think like if we had to

01:24:45.000 start from scratch, what would we do in order to ensure that the rights of all Canadians,

01:24:50.680 including indigenous Canadians, can be sort of most, you know, most ably sort of taken care of.

01:24:57.880 And I just don't see any interest in in thinking those kind of big questions anymore. I just see

01:25:04.040 so much interest in just, you know, continuing to pretend like the status quo is more sustainable

01:25:09.800 than it is. And that it just you know, this is sort of like the line that the NDP uses all the time,

01:25:13.880 right? Like it's just like if we just had the right people in charge, if we just had the right

01:25:18.440 people in charge of the federal government, if we just had the right prime minister, if we just had

01:25:22.520 the right bureaucrats, if we just had more good faith consultation, if we just believed in the

01:25:27.880 reconciliation agenda more than somehow all of this elaborate artifice that has been in existence since

01:25:33.240 19th century would somehow function in a way it hasn't functioned for the last 200 years or so.

01:25:38.280 And I just think like that's that's a fallacy and nothing is ever going to improve. So my my call

01:25:43.000 is just for for more big thinking and more creative thinking. And obviously, this is something as well

01:25:47.400 that, you know, this is not going to be done by just some wise paternalistic white people coming

01:25:52.440 up with some good ideas and telling the aboriginals to get in line. I mean, obviously, that model is wrong 1.00

01:25:57.240 as well. And so this is something that, you know, the indigenous Canadians have to sort of think

01:26:01.080 critically about as well. And they have to look at the status quo and they have to be willing to

01:26:04.840 to to honestly ask themselves and to question their leaders and to to wonder to like to dare

01:26:10.680 to imagine a better future than what they have now and to speak explicitly about what that better

01:26:15.000 future would look like rather than continuing to just hide behind, you know, sort of vague catch

01:26:19.800 all terms like reconciliation. Yeah.

01:26:23.560 Yeah. You know, it's so true that on the left, you know, that the mantra is all we have to do is

01:26:27.560 like care more and and put ourselves in charge. And on the right, it's sad that there just seems to

01:26:32.920 be so many political issues that have become sort of like third rail issues that is better to just

01:26:37.160 ignore than to even talk about because you don't want to step on a rake or say the wrong thing. And

01:26:41.560 that's that's sort of where we are, it seems, with this issue. Although I do wonder, JJ, if you were

01:26:47.320 to just, you know, put it directly to the people, like if there were a referendum for, you know,

01:26:52.680 status Indians or status. I don't even know what the politically correct term is now, but, you know,

01:26:57.640 what they would want for their future governance if they're happy with the status quo or if they would

01:27:02.520 want something entirely different. And just on the point of consultations, you know, we started this

01:27:07.800 conversation talking about how the House of Commons and question period is all just sort of

01:27:12.200 robotic and very meaningless. I've been to consultations with government and I feel like

01:27:18.840 it's really just like group therapy. It's an opportunity for them to just say how they feel.

01:27:23.240 And then it's like, OK, and no one changes their mind and no one changes their opinion. And then they

01:27:27.400 just say, OK, well, we've consulted them and then kind of wipe their hands of any responsibility. Well, JJ,

01:27:35.080 thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. I think we've touched on a very wide

01:27:39.560 range of issues. And I sat down with you last year and we talked about a bunch of different issues,

01:27:43.640 too. So it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

01:27:47.480 Well, thanks for having me. It was great.

01:27:53.480 Thank you.

The Candice Malcolm Show - October 27, 2020

Ep 17 ｜ J.J. McCullough ｜ The Canadian Contrarian

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