JJ McCullough is a Vancouver-based political commentator, cartoonist, YouTuber, and columnist with the prestigious Washington Post. In our conversation, we take a deep dive into Canadian politics, assessing the current parliament, the party leaders, and why the fringe, left-wing parties are given more airtime and credibility from the mainstream media than the upstart, right-of-center People s Party. We also get into Canada s history, including Pierre Trudeau s White Papers, the Charlottetown Accord, and the accusations that Canada is a systemically racist country.
00:00:00.000You 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is diverse and, you know, having a government that is reflective of that diversity and then also champion this very outdated, old fashioned idea that Canada is fundamentally a country of two founding nations, only two, the French and the English, and that those communities sort of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.
00:00:23.580One 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.
00:00:32.880Regardless 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.
00:00:48.560My guest on the True North Speaker series breaks that mold, and often defiantly leads the conversation in totally new and interesting ways.
00:00:57.420JJ McCullough is a Vancouver-based political commentator, cartoonist, YouTuber, and columnist with the prestigious Washington Post.
00:01:05.160JJ'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.
00:01:16.180I don't always agree with JJ, but I always appreciate his unique perspective and the ideas he brings to the table.
00:01:22.640In 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.
00:01:37.520We 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.
00:01:47.740We 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.
00:01:58.320I hope you enjoy our conversation. Please like this video, share it with friends and family, and leave me a comment below.
00:02:04.840Don't forget to subscribe to True North, and if you'd like to support this podcast, please visit tnc.news.com.
00:02:22.260I'm joined by JJ McCullough. JJ, thank you so much for joining the show.
00:02:27.260I never know what you're going to look like. I feel like your hairstyle changes so much every time.
00:02:33.240I 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.
00:02:44.080I 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.
00:02:51.700Very cool. Well, you're lucky because during COVID, I couldn't get a haircut to save my life.
00:02:57.460I 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.
00:03:13.860So we just very narrowly avoided an election last week, and I know you were very, you know, on top of it and commenting.
00:03:23.760So 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?
00:03:32.820Well, 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.
00:04:02.640And that kind of thing for this organization.
00:04:04.300And 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.
00:04:10.500But, 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.
00:04:19.240You know, Pierre Polyevre leading the charge in the House of Commons day after day after day.
00:04:23.860And 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.
00:04:36.640And 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.
00:05:03.560And 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.
00:05:16.760It 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.
00:05:29.320And therefore, we're going to just pull out the big guns and prevent it from happening.
00:05:32.740And but in some respects, I think the big story here, because, of course, we know we're not in election.
00:05:37.900So 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.
00:05:47.020They 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.
00:05:55.020Well, I mean, it's not even mysterious. It had to be the NDP. That was just basically how the math worked.
00:06:01.500And, 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.
00:06:13.240But, you know, when sort of push came to shove, they weren't willing to support the creation of this committee.
00:06:18.680They weren't willing to to sort of call Trudeau's bluff and, you know, challenge the his premise that this was a confidence vote.
00:06:27.120He 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.
00:06:40.460The NDP exists to keep the liberal party in power, to keep the liberal government propped up.
00:06:45.820And there's not really any pretense otherwise. Like they can talk a good game all they want.
00:06:50.320But fundamentally, the most important question in Canadian politics is who is running the country?
00:06:55.400What 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,
00:07:02.940whenever 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,
00:07:10.520the NDP always sides with the answer being the liberal party.
00:07:14.560Well, it seems to me that it's the only way that the NDP can have any sort of power in the country.
00:07:20.060One 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.
00:07:29.860That it wasn't there was no, like you said, pretense of like doing anything moral or doing what's right for the country.
00:07:34.680It's like, you know, Trudeau was going to go to great length to avoid having a committee examine whatever happened with we.
00:09:38.940And it gets even deeper because then people are saying, like, well, you know, the NDP doesn't have a lot of money right now,
00:09:43.620as if they ever do. And like they're thus not in a good position to fight the election and this sort of thing.
00:09:48.740So, 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
00:09:54.820that our whole sort of political system, this whole parliamentary system is so is so twisted in some level.
00:10:00.300And it is all just based on partisan calculation and nothing else like this, this whole idea of like a confidence vote.
00:10:07.300Right. Like it was like, you know, I don't know, like a century ago, maybe that meant something as like an idea of,
00:10:13.820you know, how our government structure is is sort of worked out.
00:10:17.120And like the confidence of the of the parliament actually meant something in terms of determining, like,
00:10:22.460you know, who deserves to be prime minister and in some sort of more holistic sense.
00:10:27.000But now it like it means nothing, like it's all like all of these sorts of things, confidence of the House,
00:10:32.420you know, when we have elections or don't have elections, the formation of committees,
00:10:36.780like all of this stuff is now subordinate to partisan calculation.
00:10:40.800And it's just it's it's not great. It's not healthy for democracy at all.
00:10:44.640And I I hope that Canadians are starting to to wise up to that, because we're really we are, as you said,
00:10:50.400like we just are living in a in a system in which there is no higher principle governing anything.
00:10:55.840I often wondered that about question period itself, like having this sort of like, you know,
00:11:02.120almost wrote, you know, conservatives ask a question and then Trudeau stands up and like read something off a piece of paper,
00:11:07.260like half heartedly or like, you know, he deflects a question.
00:11:10.080It's like, what's the point of this? I understand that it's part of the tradition.
00:11:13.680I think it's good. Maybe at one point in Canada's history, they would actually have debates.
00:11:17.960They would actually listen to each other and then respond to the point.
00:11:21.520But, you know, what we see today is just very robotic.
00:11:24.440It's like that, you know, the prime minister knows what the question is or he doesn't listen to the question
00:11:29.160and he just reads off talking points that someone read to him.
00:11:32.220It's like, how is this actually getting to the bottom of things?
00:11:35.480Like, is this really holding a prime minister to account, just having him stand up and like say state rehearsed lines?
00:11:41.160Like, how does this how is democracy? I don't know.
00:11:43.780No, exactly. You make you make such an excellent point. Right.
00:11:46.380It's like there's so much of sort of Canadian politics that it's just it's just this like theater and and yeah,
00:11:53.540just like going through the motions of these like increasingly like ritualistic ceremonial kind of activities that really like they're they're fun.
00:12:01.520I guess for people that live in Ottawa, like the professional politicians,
00:12:04.880they sort of want to go through the motions of feeling important and feeling like they're playing the game of being a politician.
00:12:10.540But, you know, at the end of the day, when it comes to issues that matter, they're not consequential at all.
00:12:15.760Although 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,
00:12:29.360but he was, of course, called before that one committee.
00:12:32.060I think it was like a finance committee to testify about what he knew about the Wee scandal.
00:12:37.020And Pierre Polyevra really gave him an intense grilling.
00:12:39.100And in that context, you could see something resembling parliamentary accountability take place because it wasn't scripted.
00:12:45.560The prime minister didn't know the questions ahead of time.
00:12:48.080The prime minister was sort of really on the hot seat.
00:12:50.360And 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.
00:12:59.020It was like it was sort of like a trial, right, like that they were searching for like clear, objective information to help the committee,
00:13:05.600you know, determine conclusions about things as opposed to sort of the partisan spectacle of question period, which is,
00:13:12.060yeah, so sort of ceremonial and, you know, just sort of gummed up with all of this sort of empty, rote, scripted, partisan talking points.
00:13:20.400And 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,
00:13:26.740because independent of like all of this stuff about the election and whether or not we're going to have one and yada, yada, yada.
00:13:31.960It is also just it's sad because like now this committee is not going to be formed.
00:13:36.020And so our ability to actually do that kind of deep dive into the Wee scandal has now evaporated thanks to the NDP.
00:13:42.300And, you know, we'll be off to the next thing.
00:13:43.800And 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,
00:13:51.920because ultimately, I mean, this is this is something else.
00:13:54.780This 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
00:14:03.320is through some sort of parliamentary committee in the context of a minority government.
00:14:07.800Unless the stars all align in that perfect fashion, which only happens, you know, like once every decade or so,
00:14:13.420you'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,
00:14:18.560you know, pointless figureheads as well.
00:14:22.420And I hope the NDP is pleased with itself because they're the architects of this.
00:14:27.000Well, you're pretty you're pretty critical of the NDP.
00:14:29.760You're actually critical of all the parties in different ways.
00:14:32.420So I was hoping we could sort of go through each of the parties here and you could offer your critique,
00:14:37.960because it's interesting. We'll start with the NDP since we were just talking about them.
00:14:41.600But, you know, Jagmeet Singh has a sort of star power.
00:14:44.620I think the media are really into him.
00:14:46.560He's this sort of woke, modern, sophisticated, urban elitist prototype.
00:14:52.720And that's like that's the media's dream, right?
00:14:54.980Like 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.
00:15:00.140So 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.
00:15:16.040You know, it really was the the NDP that went down all across the board in terms of seats, in terms of the vote representation.
00:15:22.880So why is it that Jagmeet gets sort of a free pass?
00:15:26.080Why is he still leading this party when, you know, you pointed out he's broke.
00:15:29.680The party's broke. They bankrupted themselves, basically.
00:15:39.740But but why do you think he avoids the sort of scrutiny that other political leaders get?
00:15:44.820Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very good question.
00:15:46.280And 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.
00:15:56.840And 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.
00:16:03.620And 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.
00:16:13.700But 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.
00:16:21.040I think he's he's quite awkward in his manner of speaking.
00:16:23.460And that's something that a lot of people have have pointed out to me.
00:16:26.160It's like, well, Jagmeet Singh, like he just can't talk that well, can he?
00:16:29.820He's just he's stumbling and bumbling his way through press conferences like that.
00:16:33.460He'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.
00:16:39.540You 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.
00:16:45.860And he's just trying to, like, figure out, tell me what to do.
00:16:48.460What do I have to do? What do what should an NDP leader be doing?
00:16:51.520As 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.
00:16:57.920But 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.
00:17:13.800I 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.
00:17:19.720But I think that when you look back through time, this is actually a more consistent criticism than than some might expect.
00:17:26.520You 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.
00:17:37.860And 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?
00:17:45.160Like, 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?
00:17:54.020You 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.
00:18:04.700And but, you know, the NDP is is has a culture, right?
00:18:08.860Like, and that's the thing. It's like the NDP is kind of like a culture that has a party.
00:18:12.660And it's kind of a culture of of a certain clique of sort of far left people in our society.
00:18:18.380You 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.
00:18:29.480You 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.
00:18:45.060You know, my mother, for example, is a public school teacher.
00:18:48.360And I remember we would get like these magazines from the public school teachers union here in B.C. in the mail every so often.
00:18:54.800And they'd always be full of like NDP propaganda.
00:18:57.240So 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.
00:19:05.100And it's the only one that's looking out for these distinct interests of these distinct communities.
00:19:08.420And 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.
00:19:15.140I 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.
00:19:31.980They're not good at winning seats. And I think that Jagmeet Singh is a classic example of that.
00:19:36.440Like 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.
00:19:44.140He 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.
00:19:53.420Singh is, of course, a man who sort of rose up through the Ontario NDP.
00:19:56.360And 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.
00:20:04.180And 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.
00:20:12.020He was a liberal, even flirted with the conservatives. And, you know, you thus could not be sort of trusted.
00:20:18.320But no, I mean, like, it's just this is just the kind of party that the NDP is.
00:20:23.700I 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.
00:20:35.460Well, it's interesting because, I mean, you talked about wondering Jagmeet's motivation for getting into politics.
00:20:41.140He 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.
00:20:56.140And so it sort of feels like a leader that's so distracted by a very fringe foreign policy issue.
00:21:04.100And, 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.
00:21:14.560And 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.
00:21:22.500If there is ever footage of a conservative saying our country, talking about the United States, that would be the end of them.
00:21:29.560It sort of was the end of Michael Ignatieff when clips surfaced of him saying another country was our country.
00:21:36.220But for Jagmeet, that sort of flew under the radar.
00:21:40.820To me, the NDP was always a coalition of two different groups.
00:21:43.680It's like the sort of blue collar union crowd and then this sort of environmentalist urban crowd, which Jagmeet clearly fits into the latter.
00:21:53.100You know, he has a Rolex collection and he has his fancy suits and he just seems so out of place in the party.
00:21:59.160But 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.
00:22:08.500And 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.
00:22:16.200And, you know, they have a new leader, Anime Paul, who sort of just positions herself as sort of yet another.
00:22:22.480You know, they call themselves center left.
00:22:23.800I would call them like fringe far left, like a party that's just focused on social justice and pushing identitarianism.
00:22:35.360Well, I mean, like the Greens, the Greens are basically like the party for whom the NDP is like not far left enough.
00:22:42.340Right. 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.
00:22:53.660All of the parties are indistinguishable, which is, you know, a strange belief to have.
00:22:58.400And that therefore, like you need to have this like pure, like, I don't know, fourth or fifth or sixth party.
00:23:05.160I don't know what rank we would put them in.
00:23:07.140But like we need to have like this other party that is like so detached from the mainstream.
00:23:11.600Right. Like the Green Party is the party of people that really demonize the mainstream and everything that they perceive to be mainstream.
00:23:17.240You 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.
00:23:34.020And, you know, the tool of the capitalists and all the rest of it and sometimes, you know, even more deranged people.
00:23:41.880And 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.
00:23:50.940The party really does seem like it is a breeding ground for people that have inherently sort of conspiratorial view of the world.
00:23:57.540And 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.
00:24:19.020You 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.
00:24:27.360Right. She read a petition in the House of Commons sort of making that exact case.
00:24:30.720And we know that there's been 9-11 truther candidates that have run for the Green Party repeatedly.
00:24:34.860We know that there have been anti-Semitic candidates that have run for the Green Party repeatedly.
00:24:39.440The 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.
00:24:55.480He 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.
00:25:04.620And this is a man that, you know, came within quite close proximity of being the liberal leader instead of Anna May Paul.
00:25:11.080You know, you can go expand the thing further.
00:25:13.940Things like chemtrails, you know, Elizabeth May has made supportive noises about that whole conspiracy theory.
00:25:19.880So 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.
00:25:30.640I 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?
00:25:39.820Like 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.
00:25:50.860And 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?
00:26:00.420Even 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.
00:26:10.680But 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.
00:26:23.980And 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.
00:26:32.200And part of the way that the media has power is how it chooses to create narratives around the political actors in this country.
00:26:38.920And 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.
00:26:48.320Right. 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.
00:26:59.380And, 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.
00:27:06.100So, like, you can go through the line and like there's little storylines about everybody.
00:27:09.320And 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.
00:27:22.940You 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.
00:27:30.300Well, it's interesting because, you know, with Elizabeth May, it was like the media just liked her, like she was friendly with them.
00:27:36.940They 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.
00:27:43.880But it was like she's media savvy because you're giving her all this attention.
00:27:47.900Like she's pretty crazy and not mainstream at all.
00:27:51.220I 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.
00:28:06.560And then at least we'd have some choice, you know, when it comes to political parties.
00:28:10.180But I think you're right, as is the Greens are just really, really far left and irrelevant.
00:28:17.580Why 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?
00:28:29.060Whereas, 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.
00:28:42.680Well, I mean, it again, it just goes to sort of like the storylines that the press sort of really clings to.
00:28:49.620Right. 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.
00:29:00.720And that, therefore, a party that ostensibly professes to sort of care about something like that gets treated very seriously, like the Green Party.
00:29:07.900And 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.
00:29:18.540And 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.
00:29:23.740And 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.
00:29:41.640Right. 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.
00:30:08.540There 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.
00:30:18.360And 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.
00:30:27.480But, 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.
00:30:40.160You 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?
00:30:46.920It'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.
00:31:04.200But 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.
00:31:17.880But 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.
00:31:33.520And 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.
00:31:51.420No, 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.
00:32:14.940And 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.
00:32:30.940And 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.
00:32:56.880And 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.
00:33:06.700But 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.
00:33:20.800And 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.
00:33:36.220And 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.
00:33:59.120Because 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?
00:34:09.660And 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.
00:34:20.640And 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?
00:34:28.000Why are you, why don't you just move to America and all this kind of stuff?
00:34:31.900Right. 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.
00:34:39.740And then, and then everyone will fail to understand like what's happening in the world again.
00:34:44.160It'll be like back to the Harper years.
00:34:45.560It'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.
00:35:08.740I think every poll I think every poll I've ever seen wants like massive decreases in immigration.
00:35:14.340That's just something that the media completely ignore.
00:35:17.300I want to pick up on something you said, though.
00:35:19.200You basically said that the PPC and that Maxime Bernier, you know, isn't a very good politician.
00:35:25.420So 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?
00:35:34.220And 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?
00:35:45.160Hmm. That's a good question. I mean, I'm generally not a big believer in the idea of making new parties.
00:35:52.960I 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.
00:36:10.740And it's the government that will ultimately make the policies that will sort of achieve the goals that you're purportedly interested in.
00:36:16.920Right. 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.
00:36:25.160I mean, you could say that he didn't run to be head of the Conservative Party on the agenda.
00:36:29.580He would wind up championing as head of the People's Party. But, you know, he did what you would expect to do.
00:36:35.500And 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.
00:36:46.680And trying to think about, like, how can we get a leader like that as the next head of the Conservatives?
00:36:52.560And 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.
00:37:05.260That 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.
00:37:19.000And yet, you know, Conservatives, that sort of faction of Conservatives did not mobilize behind a candidate that could champion in their cause.
00:37:26.120And thus, we're not really a force at all in the in the in the most recent Conservative leadership race.
00:37:31.080Instead, the Conservative Party has sort of, you know, gone back to its sort of traditional messaging on these issues.
00:37:36.240And 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.
00:37:52.240Because 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.
00:38:00.300And, 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.
00:38:05.240Right. 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.
00:38:12.320Like these are fringe kind of things. And it goes back to what I was saying before. Right.
00:38:15.560Like 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.
00:38:29.180And 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?
00:38:41.640And 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.
00:38:56.140I've heard some people say that there's probably more overtly pro-life Conservative MPs than there have been in decades.
00:39:01.880And 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.
00:39:15.000We're just going to, you know, support the Christian Heritage Party or some new like pro-life party.
00:39:19.420It 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.
00:39:32.620In 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.
00:39:46.640So it's very easy to just use that and wipe your hands and sort of say, well, you know, that that debate is closed.
00:39:52.820That'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.
00:40:00.900But we do hear some of the sort of rhetoric from Aaron O'Toole.
00:40:05.500He 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.
00:40:13.920So what is your assessment, JJ, of the new Conservative leader?
00:40:17.500Yeah, I mean, I think that as far as that kind of stuff goes, he is he is sort of hitting the right notes.
00:40:21.880You 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,
00:40:41.700has 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.
00:40:57.040Because 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,
00:41:13.700which is this idea that, like, you know, you have to go after, you know, the suburbs and the urban sort of centers.
00:41:19.900And that's kind of making yourself palatable to those communities and sort of speaking their language and playing that game.
00:41:25.440Now, 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,
00:41:36.720or 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,
00:41:52.100which 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,
00:42:00.940and that you can't run too far in the other direction, like everything sort of has an equilibrium.
00:42:04.900But 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,
00:42:15.700the 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,
00:42:24.540I 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,
00:42:34.520I 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,
00:42:41.440sort of like rural or semi rural kind of blue collar ridings in this country that are currently held by the NDP.
00:42:48.440And 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,
00:42:55.720or 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.
00:43:06.260So 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,
00:43:15.440that 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,
00:43:25.420or, 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.
00:43:36.720So 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,
00:43:47.440they 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,
00:43:57.420what 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.
00:44:05.500And 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,
00:44:14.060at least having a theory of the electorate that strikes as being a little bit fresh, a little bit creative, a little bit innovative,
00:44:20.900and will hopefully suggest that rather than simply targeting like the the big cities, and then, worst of all, Quebec,
00:44:27.940that they're actually going to try targeting some some territory that have been previously written off by by conservatives as being inhospitable
00:44:35.040in the way that the sort of the Trump Republican campaign targeted areas like, you know, Wisconsin and Michigan,
00:44:40.520and Minnesota, and other sort of places like that Pennsylvania, that were sort of seen as being traditionally, you know, part of the blue wall,
00:44:47.640and sort of the Trump people said, Well, maybe not maybe this actually, on sort of like cultural and economic grounds,
00:44:53.300if 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,
00:44:59.980less 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,
00:45:06.520again, 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
00:45:13.640he has been with the sort of rust belt and blue collar Americans, not even in like a strategic political way that just came out
00:45:20.540in 2015 or 2016. But, you know, going back, like his entire career, he spent kind of marketing himself and branding himself
00:45:28.520as almost like an everyman American who just became really rich and really successful. And, you know, everything from his forays into
00:45:35.580professional 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
00:45:46.820that 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
00:45:55.080and 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
00:46:00.840see that from Aaron O'Toole. But on the counter, Trump really, really puts off suburban women. Like, like, if you look at the
00:46:09.200polling numbers, it's it's it's pretty stark men versus women, especially, like you said, college educated women do not like
00:46:15.460Trump, whereas I think Aaron O'Toole probably still has a shot with that demographic. But, but yeah, certainly, I think that the
00:46:23.560strategy is interesting. And it's just a little bit refreshing to see something a little bit
00:46:28.620different. You recently tweeted, JJ, that Doug Ford is the biggest failure and disappointment in Canadian
00:46:34.460conservative politics. Can you can you expand on that?
00:46:37.980Well, I mean, I think that I think that there was a lot of hope for Doug Ford when he first sort of came
00:46:43.360onto the scene. I think that there was a hope that he could be a kind of a kind of populist. You said that he
00:46:48.720he got reputation for sort of being the Trump of Canada for a brief window of time. And I mean,
00:46:54.400fair enough, like, he did support Donald Trump, you can watch clips of him on CBC during the 2016
00:47:00.640election, in which he was very sort of outspoken as and like, I'm going to be pro Trump. And,
00:47:05.680you know, I'm not afraid to sort of say that. And so I think like that gave people a lot of,
00:47:11.220I suppose, a lot of people on the right hope for what this kind of guy was going to represent.
00:47:14.840I think that the fact that he beat, what was her name, Elliott in the in the conservative party
00:47:21.880leadership election, Christine Elliott, I think that that gave people a lot of hope to like that,
00:47:26.340that Christine Elliott was sort of seen as this, you know, very sort of like establishment political
00:47:30.760figure. And that for somebody like, you know, Doug Ford, who still sort of had the aura of his
00:47:35.800brother's very sort of populist outsider administration in Toronto, that that sort of,
00:47:41.380sort of like the residual reflected aura of that was sort of, sort of projected onto Doug Ford as
00:47:47.980well. But the problem is, is that it seems like, certainly during the pandemic, that Doug Ford has
00:47:56.660not at all exercised any agency to suggest that he is interested in being anything other than,
00:48:06.220you know, basically governing as, as a liberal, like just being in complete hawk to conventional
00:48:11.560wisdom, really sort of craving the approval of Ottawa, really craving the approval of the mainstream
00:48:15.480press, you know, not willing to, I don't know, to just sort of like challenge the, the, the, the
00:48:22.700conventional wisdom about things like, you know, how strict these lockdowns should be, how long they
00:48:28.740need to be, how invasive they need to be. And, and also just like, I think that, you know, I've heard
00:48:33.220people sort of give him the nickname of like, Premier Karen, just in the sense of like, how
00:48:37.400personally, like judgy, and judgmental, and sort of bossy he's been, when it comes to like, the way
00:48:44.520he sort of carried himself in his press conferences, and like the lack of empathy that he's shown for
00:48:49.260people that are on the receiving end of these lockdowns, you know, the business owners that have
00:48:52.640had to shutter their businesses, and the loss of, of revenue for them and their families, and the
00:48:57.040massive inconvenience it's been towards parents and all this kind of thing. Like, there's been a sense
00:49:01.480that Ford has just not really risen to that occasion at all. Like, we're not sort of saying
00:49:06.300that he needs to go the, the sort of the full Trump and, you know, be, you know, too extreme
00:49:11.940in the other direction, where he's, you know, rejecting science, or whatever, being openly
00:49:16.220contemptuous of scientific authority, or whatever the sort of the stereotype of what Trump has done
00:49:20.600wrong has been. But there is kind of a sense that, that this pandemic has been, like, ideologically
00:49:27.360divisive in some ways, and that there has been a sort of, like, maximalist position on
00:49:32.180it on the left, which has sort of been in favor of, like, maximum lockdowns, maximum, like, erring
00:49:37.600on the side of maximum cautiousness, like, no price is too high to pay for, you know, fighting
00:49:42.020this pandemic. And then the sort of more conservative disposition, which has been a lot more sort of
00:49:46.100skeptical, you know, more inclined to sort of challenge the expert opinion, notice that it
00:49:51.880has sort of changed and morphed over the months, and thus is perhaps not as deserving of the blind
00:49:57.600deference as some of the other people on the other side have been willing to give it, and sort of say
00:50:01.600that, you know, that as much as it is important to fight the pandemic and do what it takes to be
00:50:07.340protected from it, that these sort of things have a cost as well, and that there is a cost benefit
00:50:11.980analysis that has to be done. And that it's not a matter of just, you know, having a complete
00:50:16.960lockdown or complete chaos, complete death and destruction and disease. But there is some
00:50:21.780sort of, like, trade-off that you have to be able to make, where you have to say, well, what is an
00:50:24.860acceptable risk factor that we can have in order to ensure that, you know, the prosperity of our
00:50:30.000society, the mental health of our society, our ability to continue to go on living our normal
00:50:34.060lives that are necessary to uphold our society can also be continued. And it just seems to a lot of
00:50:39.040people, and certainly a lot of people on the right, when I sort of see what they're saying and
00:50:43.240writing about Ford and Ford's administration during the pandemic, they don't think that he's achieved
00:50:47.920that balance at all. And what's worse is they don't even think, they don't even see
00:50:51.760him as a person that seems interested in achieving that balance, or even slightly skeptical in the
00:50:57.340way that you expect a supposed conservative populist to be. Instead, like I said, like,
00:51:02.960he just really does seem like he's courting the approval of the mainstream press and the liberal
00:51:07.800government in Ottawa, which just is not the kind of thing that I think people expected that they
00:51:12.100would be getting when they got Doug Ford in charge. Like, is it possible to really sort of
00:51:17.540conceptualize how this government is handling things differently than a premier win government
00:51:22.640would be? And I don't think the answer to that is obvious at all.
00:51:26.300Yeah, it seems very, very top down. Well, JJ, I think a lot of people know you as a YouTube guy,
00:51:31.980you've got a really popular channel over there. I love your videos. I always learn a lot. I have a
00:51:36.380Canadian degree in political science, and I still somehow learn things from your videos. But
00:51:40.760you're also a very serious political commentator, and you have a very serious role over at the
00:51:46.560Washington Post. Tell us a bit about how you became a columnist for the Washington Post.
00:51:53.200Why didn't you go this sort of more traditional Canadian route and write for the Vancouver Sun or
00:51:57.640the National Post or even the Globe and Mail? How did you end up at the Washington Post?
00:52:01.600Well, I mean, I think that the Washington Post wanted me and none of those other places did.
00:52:05.340You know, I have not been a popular guy with the mainstream press in this country. I mean,
00:52:10.860I guess people can reach their own conclusions as to why that is. But the Washington Post,
00:52:15.760you know, they were nice, and they extended an offer to me, and I took it. I mean, I think that
00:52:20.180they'd read some of my other writing, you know, I've written for a number of other publications over
00:52:23.860the years, in both Canada and the US, you know, always sort of talking about Canadian issues. But I try to
00:52:29.120talk about Canadian issues in a sort of, I don't know, in a fresh way, you know, I think I'm a kind of
00:52:35.120contrary person. And so I do try to, like, extract myself a bit from these narratives that we've been
00:52:40.920talking about, and try to assess things in a somewhat more objective way, or sort of say, like,
00:52:45.040well, how would an outsider see this is let's or let's, like, sort of challenge some of the
00:52:49.440assumptions that we use to describe how things happen in Canadian politics, like, and I think
00:52:55.540that there is a problem that a lot of young journalists in particular, don't come at it with
00:53:01.060that kind of attitude of curiosity and skepticism. Instead, they come at it with an attitude of
00:53:05.580conformity, and, you know, sort of obedience to the narratives and the sort of the standard
00:53:11.900practices of who is good and bad. And what is, you know, what is sort of like the larger story in
00:53:17.120Canada, at any given time. And so I don't know, it's just, you know, I've, I, the Washington Post
00:53:23.800people just reached out to me, I've been there for, I think, close to four years now. I remember I
00:53:27.820started there right at the time of the US election. And so I guess we're getting close to the four
00:53:31.720year period. And they've been great to me, they've been very supportive. And my pieces are popular,
00:53:36.420people read them. And, and, yeah, so I can't say anything bad about it at all. I've had a great time
00:53:41.580working there. And, you know, I'm, like, again, like, I've always been a rune, the mainstream press
00:53:48.580in Canada has not been interested in me. And so I suppose at some point, you just go with the people
00:53:53.120that are willing to take you. And so that's why I went with the post. Well, I think you still have
00:53:57.920an outsized influence, though, because you're, you're sort of like outside the Laurentian circle,
00:54:01.620you're out in Vancouver, and you put forth these sort of contrarian, but kind of underlying
00:54:05.940conservative articles, and you just really managed to get under the skin of the mainstream media,
00:54:10.520which we can see play out on Twitter, just about any time you, you put out a piece. But I want to
00:54:15.420talk about one specific column that you wrote a couple weeks ago, really taking Justin Trudeau to town
00:54:22.380on his throne speech that that that ostensibly said that he wanted to tackle systemic racism,
00:54:28.240whereas you juxtaposed that with his obsession with bilingualism, and pointed to the outcome,
00:54:34.560which was that he doesn't really elect, or he doesn't appoint anyone to federal courts,
00:54:38.900that isn't basically, you know, an elderly or a middle aged white person. Yeah. So, so I, you know,
00:54:45.580that was a pretty, just visually when, you know, I don't know if it was you or someone over at the
00:54:50.020Post, but they put together the pictures of all the people that Justin Trudeau had appointed. And
00:54:53.720it's like, oh, wow, you know, if that was, if that was happening in the US, it would be,
00:54:58.200you know, in your face, and everyone will be talking about it, but but it happens in Canada. So
00:55:02.980why don't you why don't you walk us through that argument that you made?
00:55:06.540Yeah, and it's, it's not just the federal judiciary, either. I mean, it's, yes, every single judge on the
00:55:11.680Supreme Court of Canada, and I think every one, but like, two judges on the federal court roster is,
00:55:18.000is white. But also, like, every, I think, all but I think one or two of like, the 30 deputy ministers
00:55:25.780in this country, who are the people that are actually running the federal government are all
00:55:29.100white. Everyone, but I think maybe two of the heads of the, I don't know, 30 crown corporations that we
00:55:35.040have in this country are white. You know, the heads of the armed forces are all white, like you can go
00:55:39.440down the list, and it's, it's just all white people everywhere. And well, not just not just white,
00:55:44.500but like French Canadian, right? No, it's true. And it's because this is this is bilingualism,
00:55:51.100like this is the consequence of the bilingual policy that Justin Trudeau believes so heavily
00:55:55.600in, you know, it's the it's the 50th anniversary of the Official Languages Act. And Justin Trudeau has
00:56:01.400made I mean, this hasn't been that widely reported. But this has been like one of the key sort of
00:56:06.320priorities of his government is that in we're going to update and modernize the Official Languages Act in
00:56:11.980sort of celebration of 50 years of success. And, you know, you might think update and modernize
00:56:16.740means we're going to be a little bit more conciliatory to the way that Canada is a much
00:56:20.660more diverse and eclectic linguistic country than it was 50 years ago, when the only dynamic really
00:56:26.900was between the the the English Canadians and the French Canadians, you know, Canada was an
00:56:31.240extraordinarily white country, even within my own lifetime until, you know, immigration and and all
00:56:36.300the rest of that has has changed it. And you know, that's, that's fine. That's just the reality of the
00:56:39.600country that we live in now. But part of that consequence of that is that you have fewer and
00:56:44.820fewer if you ever even had that many, but fewer and fewer Canadians who can speak fluent French and
00:56:49.560English at the level that the federal government requires, and not only requires, but has systematically
00:56:54.660strengthened in terms of its strictness for the requirement in order to hold sort of top executive
00:57:00.480ranked jobs in the government of Canada. You know, they call it, I think, section like 91 jobs,
00:57:06.040but it's basically like any, any job that Ottawa determines French and English are necessary for
00:57:12.420the functioning of that of that purpose, you know, you have to be bilingual. And it's usually bilingual
00:57:16.900at the time of appointment, which is like a very, very high level of fluency that is expected in order
00:57:23.500to hold any of these jobs that are overwhelmingly executive ranked jobs, you know, and top, like top level
00:57:30.180jobs as well. And so the problem is, is that you're, you're really selecting for a skill,
00:57:37.720a mostly irrelevant skill, I would say that is not, in fact, necessary to do a lot of these senior,
00:57:42.820senior level jobs. But it is a skill that is disproportionately held by, you know, a very small
00:57:48.160cultural, ethnocultural group of Canadians, which are, you know, mostly French Canadians, or Canadians
00:57:54.880that are sort of part of a kind of bilingual milieu around mostly Ottawa and Montreal, right? It's
00:58:02.380something like, I believe it's around 17% of Canadians overall that possess this skill of perfect
00:58:07.820French English bilingualism, and something like 90% of that 17, or possibly more, are located in the
00:58:14.460province of Quebec. So you can't really have a government that says it's committed to having a
00:58:21.480country that is diverse, and, you know, having a government that is reflective of that diversity,
00:58:26.440and then also champion this very outdated, old fashioned idea that Canada is fundamentally a
00:58:32.360country of two founding nations, only two, the French and the English, and that those communities
00:58:36.840sort of will forever be able to dictate the shape and nature of the country. And that's sort of like
00:58:41.260the only real dominant civil rights issue of Canada is making an environment that is inclusive and
00:58:48.280welcoming to unilingual French Canadians, which is to say, like, French Canadians who can't speak
00:58:54.040English at all, which is not that many, and increasingly less and less, despite the Quebec
00:58:59.240government's dogged efforts to ensure that Quebecers don't speak English, more French Canadians speak
00:59:04.840English than ever before, which means that even the demand that, like, even the argument that this
00:59:09.080is somehow, like, necessary for inclusion or ability to create a functional workplace for
00:59:14.120unilingual French Canadians is becoming a weaker and weaker argument. So I really view this as one
00:59:18.920of sort of like the great existential challenges to sort of Canadian liberalism and Canadian
00:59:23.240progressivism, but also one that's really just not talked about very much because, I don't know,
00:59:28.760it's a weird sort of compartmentalization that somebody like Justin Trudeau or Jagmeet Singh or,
00:59:33.880you know, any sort of left wing Canadian of any prominence that you want to name,
00:59:38.920like, their ability to sort of, like, believe these two deeply contrary goals simultaneously,
00:59:43.800that we're going to have a very inclusive, welcoming society and government, and at the
00:59:47.880other hand, like, there is nothing more important than speaking not one, but two European languages
00:59:53.080in order to achieve any power or prominence in this country. But you're right, like, this is,
00:59:57.960in some respects, the ultimate taboo of sort of polite establishment Canadian opinion, Laurentian
01:00:03.720opinion. And that's why there is nothing I sort of get more of a hard time for than when I say this.
01:00:08.920And one other thing I would just add is that I always find it, like, funny and weird that at a
01:00:13.640time when we're talking about, like, systemic racism and systemic barriers to entry for, you know,
01:00:21.400people of colour, people of colour of lesser means, that, like, your otherwise perfectly progressive
01:00:27.400people can turn into these, like, very sort of cold-hearted meritocrats, right? So, like, if you're kind
01:00:33.080of saying, like, oh, you know, there's not a lot of people that come from non sort of francophone
01:00:38.120backgrounds or non, you know, Quebec or Eastern Canadian narrow sort of backgrounds in the high
01:00:44.440levels of our government, you know, a lot of people, including the prime minister himself,
01:00:47.560will turn around and say, well, maybe they're just lazy and they should just, you know, pick up
01:00:51.160a book sometime and sort of, like, figure out how to do it. And the only thing that's sort of standing
01:00:55.160in their way is their own inability to pull themselves up and do what it needs to take. And it's like,
01:00:59.480not only is that, I think, very ignorant in terms of just what we know about linguistic science and
01:01:04.120how languages are learned or not learned, which is mostly because you need that language for day
01:01:08.760to day communication, not because some law somewhere says you have to speak it. But, you know, it is also
01:01:15.080just a kind of argument that would never be considered acceptable in progressive circles anywhere
01:01:20.760else, right? Like, if you sort of were to identify, like, a wealth inequality between people of colour and,
01:01:26.440you know, white Canadians, for instance, you wouldn't just say, oh, well, it's because they're
01:01:29.880just not working hard enough or because, you know, maybe they should just get better jobs if
01:01:33.160they're so sad about being poor or things like that, right? It's this, like, very weird sort of,
01:01:38.440like, Dickensian logic that the left in this country will employ only in this one very specific case.
01:01:44.440Everywhere else, they'll talk a good game about equality and non-judgment and, you know,
01:01:49.960bringing down systemic barriers and systemic racism, except for this.
01:01:53.160Well, it's interesting because, yeah, every now and then there'll be a viral video out of
01:01:57.880Vancouver of some sort of angry Canadian, you know, shouting at someone, a Chinese immigrant
01:02:04.360or something, saying, like, speak English in Canada or whatever. And, you know, they get,
01:02:07.640like, completely bullied and painted as, like, an evil, malicious person. Whereas, like, that's,