The Candice Malcolm Show - March 17, 2020


The Candice Malcolm Show： A discussion with Douglas Murray

Topics
coronavirus politics illegal immigration illegal immigration
Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Guests
Douglas Murray
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Donald Trump Angela Merkel Matteo Salvini Gaddafi Jordan Peterson Prince William Meghan Markle Boris Johnson Prince Harry Barack Obama Priti Patel Candice Brexit Nada
The Candice Malcolm Show： Trudeau's Coronavirus Spending Spree The Candice Malcolm Show： The economic toll of COVID-19 pandemic

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Length

41 minutes

Words per minute

151.2

Word count

6,246

Sentence count

293

Harmful content

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Join us in conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe, The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity, and his most recent book The Madness Of Crowds: How To Survive A Global Pandemic.

Transcript

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Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Candice Malcolm Show. Today, we are in conversation with a special guest, very excited to be joined by Douglas Murray. Douglas is an international bestselling author, author of the book, The Strange Death of Europe, which came out in 2017. Excellent book, which I recommend. And his most recent book, The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity. Douglas Murray joins me on the line. Welcome, Douglas, and thank you so much for joining us today.
00:00:30.400 It's a great pleasure to be with you, Candice. Thank you.
00:00:33.440 Yeah, so I first, you know, I always look to you, Douglas, for your reaction on sort of global events. You always just have such a succinct and you sort of cut through everything in your analysis, whether it was on sort of the news about Prince William, sorry, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leaving the royal family, or about Jordan Peterson, about any number of events going on in the world. You always have such a great way of looking at things.
00:00:57.600 So, you know, the world is sort of in chaos right now, as the World Health Organization announced the fact that the coronavirus, Wuhan coronavirus, is now a pandemic. So, just quickly, what are your thoughts on what's happening all over the world and the reaction?
00:01:11.720 Well, like everyone, I'm deeply concerned and trying to, you know, learn as much as I can from reasonable and responsible sources and trying to work out that balance between a lack of caution and over caution.
00:01:28.180 You know, and I think it's at times like this one has to be especially judicious and careful with any and all pronouncements. I'm shocked but not surprised at the number of people who've chosen to use this as an opportunity to grandstand as experts in pandemics as well as experts in everything else.
00:01:56.280 But I'm not an expert in pandemics, and so I simply want to hear from those who are.
00:02:01.840 Right. And there's sort of, you know, the two camps. One saying that, you know, this is just like everything else, you know, obvious overreaction, similar to the way they drum up fear about, you know, climate change and alarmism around that.
00:02:14.860 And, and again, yeah, I use it as an example to criticize us and lecture us about xenophobia and how closing borders will react.
00:02:23.160 But then, you know, there's the other camp of people who are looking at the exponential growth in terms of the infection rate and saying this is really scary.
00:02:30.580 I think the latest figures estimate that somewhere between 30 and 70 percent of people in Canada anyway could get it.
00:02:36.340 So where do you fall in those two camps?
00:02:39.840 Well, you see, I think the idea that there are two camps on this is part of the problem.
00:02:43.900 I mean, what this has exposed once again is the fact that in societies like Canada and America and Britain, we are lacking a uniting narrative.
00:02:56.800 There is an almost 50-50 split in some countries, almost exactly 50-50 split down the general public.
00:03:05.580 And we see everything in our day through hyper-politicized lenses.
00:03:12.340 I mean, in America, obviously, there's the Trump, anti-Trump lens.
00:03:16.600 In the UK, there has been until recently, but there are still remnants of it, the pro or anti-Brexit lens.
00:03:21.800 And when people become totally fixated on such a narrative, they need to fit everything available into that narrative. 0.98
00:03:30.300 And one of the things I just strongly urge people to do is to avoid that, you know, apart from anything else, because it makes us stupider, vastly, vastly stupider than we need to be. 0.97
00:03:43.360 You know, coronavirus doesn't need to fit into the lens of, is one anti or pro-Justin Trudeau or anti or pro-Donald Trump or anti or pro-Boris Johnson? 0.96
00:03:56.860 You know, and I just sort of think, for the love of God, can people not see this through the hyper-politicized, simplistic lens through which, in recent years, we have been tempted to see absolutely everything?
00:04:10.320 You know, I can see the Trump supporters saying, you know, it's just it's just a flu because they worry that with the economy going through a massive stress test, that this is going to impact on their guy.
00:04:23.940 And I can see the anti-Trump people positively willing this to be more apocalyptic than it need to be in order that they can get Trump out of office later this year.
00:04:34.960 And I just I just look at this and think, wow, wow.
00:04:40.160 What does somebody have to become to do that with something that is a non-political human catastrophe?
00:04:50.780 Yeah. And for just sort of the casual observer, it's really difficult to cut through the politics.
00:04:57.260 I think politicians naturally have an incentive to downplay any kind of major world crisis like this because of, like you said, the impact on the economy.
00:05:07.120 We've seen the stock market just absolutely tank.
00:05:10.000 And so politicians sort of have this mantra like keep calm, carry on.
00:05:13.760 We don't want people to panic.
00:05:15.520 That's totally reasonable.
00:05:16.780 But yet, you know, perhaps the more sage advice at this point is that we should make radical changes to our lives.
00:05:24.780 My family and I have decided to self-quarantine.
00:05:27.340 I'm filming this interview in one of the spare bedrooms in my house because we've decided to just stay at home for a while because it looks like there might be an outbreak in Toronto.
00:05:35.740 So do you think that there is a little bit of a lack of incentives for politicians to do the right thing in a situation like this?
00:05:44.160 No, I don't think there's a lack of incentive to do the right thing.
00:05:47.440 I think that these are unusual situations like this are extraordinary tests for politicians.
00:05:55.660 But, I mean, I would like to think that as a society we were able to see people acting as well as they can in positions of power given the information they have.
00:06:07.860 And let's not forget this has all been evolving very swiftly.
00:06:11.080 I mean, it was only a few weeks ago that the mayor of Milan was saying, you know, this isn't going to change Milan.
00:06:19.840 Go out, keep shopping, you know, and a few weeks later his entire city is in lockdown.
00:06:24.820 And I don't think that's because the mayor of Milan isn't a particularly terrible or horrible person.
00:06:34.260 I simply think it's that he was adapting to the information he had and the severity of the challenge.
00:06:42.260 And I wish we had any remaining unity in our countries to view other political leaders in that light.
00:06:51.520 I'm just very sorry, as I say, that in all of our societies we have this opportunity cost from viewing everything through this dull, monochrome, monotone debate about whether you're pro or anti one particular individual.
00:07:12.480 I mean, of course there are opportunities in crises like this for people to try to gain political capital.
00:07:22.460 But there's also a there's also a flip side to that, isn't there, which is public disdain for politicians seen correctly to be doing that or attempting to do that.
00:07:32.980 I mean, my own country in the United Kingdom, the head of the Scottish National Party attended the Cobra meeting on on how to deal with she's the first minister in Scotland and a separatist and nationalist.
00:07:46.400 And she decided, having come out of that meeting, to announce the findings of the meeting first in order to look like a serious, big, national, international stage politician.
00:07:58.180 And I hope that lots of people saw that like I did and just thought, what a thing to do, you know?
00:08:07.580 Yeah. And it also seems, you know, that it has caught several world leaders flat footed.
00:08:12.980 I know you said earlier that there is sort of an instinct to be in like the pro Justin Trudeau camp or the anti camp, just like Trump, just like Brexit.
00:08:21.240 But I think in Canada, there are definitely valid, valid criticisms of Justin Trudeau that I wanted to chat with you a little bit about because I think they touch on some of the themes that you've written about in your book.
00:08:33.280 So Justin Trudeau is sort of known as the, you know, the world's biggest and best virtue signaler.
00:08:38.340 He's sort of embodying the sort of, you know, progressive, liberal kind of idea.
00:08:45.800 He's a proud feminist. And, you know, his favorite thing to say is that diversity is our strength.
00:08:51.780 And yet, you know, right in the middle of the election campaign, we found pictures of him painted in blackface.
00:08:58.560 Oh, yeah. That made it to me as well.
00:09:01.000 Yeah. Kind of like, you know, one of the worst racist tropes out there.
00:09:06.180 And, you know, even when the pictures were taken, it still wasn't OK back then.
00:09:11.340 You know, we're talking about the late 90s, early 2000s.
00:09:15.440 You know, a son of privilege, he was born while his father was prime minister.
00:09:18.980 You think that he would be aware of the sort of inappropriateness of that attire.
00:09:25.080 And yet he sort of offered a humble apology and Canadians just sort of shrugged their shoulders and he was reelected to office. 0.97
00:09:34.280 You know, so why is it that hypocrites like Justin Trudeau seem to get away with this kind of behavior? 0.95
00:09:39.940 Well, to steel man, the argument, it is that the reason that Justin Trudeau got away with blackface would be because he is not perceived to have done other things, which could mean he could be plausibly described as a racist or, you know, a sort of segregationist, should we say. 0.93
00:10:05.660 Whereas, and again, I'm steel manning the argument, whereas, I don't know, if Donald Trump had been found to have in the last 20 years done a lot of blackface, indeed, as much as Justin Trudeau did, which appears to have included evenings on his own without even going to a fancy dress party.
00:10:23.340 I mean, he seemed to have done it so much, he'd sort of lost count of the number of times.
00:10:27.820 If Donald Trump had done that, people would say, aha, this is not a single thing.
00:10:33.420 This is part of a continuum of a president who is a racist and who has done this racist thing and is totally in character.
00:10:43.520 Now, that's the steel manning argument.
00:10:45.140 And I think that what is happening on these cases is that figures who have, broadly speaking, taken the most accommodating, open borders, shall we say, view of this.
00:11:11.200 People for whom race relations and integration and immigration are basically a case of kumbaya.
00:11:20.680 Those people are given the points that allow them to screw up somewhere in the process.
00:11:29.900 So they might misspeak, to use the famous Clintonism.
00:11:33.740 You know, they might have done something dodgy-ish, you know, once, like Justin Trudeau.
00:11:38.920 But it's not seen as seen as being human to fail, whereas there are these other people set up as great bogeymen of the right, obviously, in particular, who are seen to be already mean-spirited and mean-hearted.
00:11:57.460 And therefore, you can't give them an inch.
00:12:01.600 And you have to interpret everything in the most malevolent light.
00:12:05.560 So it is definitely, the Trudeau thing is definitely part of that pattern.
00:12:12.380 And I think that's because that's the direction of the age at the moment or up to the present moment, shall we say, because everything could change.
00:12:19.960 But up to the present moment, for instance, there has been no public virtue benefit to, for instance, being a supporter of restrictionist immigration policies.
00:12:36.060 It is seen as being only a sign of negative political and personal expression.
00:12:43.140 And that can change.
00:12:47.120 It can change incredibly rapidly.
00:12:49.400 It's something that I dealt with a bit in The Strange Death of Europe.
00:12:52.860 You know, what happens when the open borders people suddenly look like they're responsible for an atrocity?
00:13:00.220 You know, at such moments, the whole calculus shifts or it can swing.
00:13:06.140 And maybe, you know, maybe this is such a moment that we're going through now.
00:13:10.900 I mean, only a few weeks ago, Matteo Salvini, the former Italian foreign minister and interior minister and deputy prime minister, effectively, Matteo Salvini said a few weeks ago, he's currently out of office, that the country, Italy, should shut its borders and was condemned as a racist by his political opponents.
00:13:31.680 You know, but now the country has shut its borders.
00:13:35.220 What happens in that situation?
00:13:37.720 Do the people who are on the wrong side of that, as it turns out, make any apology or shift their own situation?
00:13:47.220 I doubt it.
00:13:48.120 But the public can notice these sorts of things.
00:13:51.180 Well, it's interesting that you mention that, because when the first case of corona was reported in Toronto, which I guess was now like late January, early February, a bunch of officials held press conferences condemning racism and saying that it was unfair to the Chinese community in Canada for the reactions that people were having.
00:14:10.360 Without any specific examples, they just sort of jumped right to, you know, Canadians are racist in their reaction.
00:14:16.500 Yes.
00:14:17.580 And they were condemning some of the concepts that were being floated around, like the idea that if you return from a trip to China, you should self-quarantine.
00:14:25.560 That suggestion was being categorized as racist just last month.
00:14:29.800 Yes, the same thing.
00:14:30.900 Yeah, the same thing has happened in America and pretty much everywhere else.
00:14:34.320 Right. So I just wanted to pick up on a point that you just made about how the people who had always been calling for open borders could suddenly shift and then become seen as sort of, you know, part of the problem if there was a catastrophe.
00:14:48.620 That moment certainly has not happened in Canada.
00:14:51.040 Canada has had an ongoing flow of illegal immigration, the largest numbers that we've ever seen in our history, sort of coincided with Donald Trump getting elected president of the United States to Justin Trudeau, sending out a message on Twitter saying Canada will welcome basically any and all refugees.
00:15:08.940 And it was sort of seen as an open border declaration.
00:15:11.400 We've had tens of thousands of migrants streaming across the land border from the United States to Canada.
00:15:17.420 And we've really hit that situation where you're talking about that anyone who criticizes the situation, anyone who even says that it's illegal immigration, gets deemed a racist, gets deemed un-Canadian, and sort of gets every name thrown at them.
00:15:32.700 It's actually funny.
00:15:34.640 Reporters, news reporters in Canada used to commonly refer to this as illegal immigration.
00:15:38.940 Then the Trudeau government held a series of press conferences saying that it shouldn't be called illegal immigration.
00:15:44.880 It should be called irregular immigration. 1.00
00:15:47.180 And then all the news media just sort of fell in line.
00:15:49.680 And it was like that from that day forth, every report called it irregular immigration.
00:15:54.700 And that was sort of like illegal was a dog whistle.
00:15:57.360 So that's a very, but, you know, just that's very similar to what's been happening with the Corona situation.
00:16:04.400 CNN in America has, in recent days, been criticizing various Trump supporters and Trump officials for referring to the Chinese virus or to the Chinese Wuhan virus and so on.
00:16:16.300 And yet there are dozens of videos you can see online of CNN reporters using exactly the same terminology up until yesterday, you know.
00:16:25.940 And so what is what is really going on here?
00:16:29.420 I just said there's two things in each of these cases.
00:16:33.020 One is it's in the face of potentially catastrophic events or at least world changing events.
00:16:41.640 It is much easier as societies like with individuals to focus on the small number of things we correctly or otherwise believe to be within our control.
00:16:52.960 Because there is so much that is outside of our control.
00:16:57.460 You know, we cannot do anything to stop potentially thousands of people dying in Europe, Italy, anywhere else.
00:17:06.620 We can do very little to stop the stock market crashing in such a way that a lot of Canadian house owners are in serious financial trouble at some point.
00:17:23.900 We can do very little to nothing about these things.
00:17:27.460 So we very often, I think, as human beings console ourselves with what we cannot deal with by doubling down, being especially pernickety about those remaining things we correctly or otherwise think are in our control and within our competency at such moments.
00:17:47.980 Like a cat that, you know, sort of grooms themselves at a moment of disaster, you know, because it can't do anything with the wider situation it finds itself in.
00:18:02.080 And I think that that is the first the first thing that is going on.
00:18:07.260 The second is we have and I've written about this a lot, as you know, we all always have in every age sacred values.
00:18:15.320 And in a way, the interesting thing of our age is working out what those sacred values are in Canada, in particular, those sacred values include, you know, openness, tolerance.
00:18:29.320 That includes open borders, you know, unrestricted immigration, not wanting to call anyone illegal and all of that bucket of familiar tropes.
00:18:44.320 And that is effectively a sacred value.
00:18:47.840 The interesting thing at major shifting points is, are your sacred values strongly enough held by you that you will hold them up to and past the point at which they turn out to actually be destructive?
00:19:03.900 And I would say that there is a significant stress test of that at the moment there would be, by the way, in Canada, if you had immigration like, say, Italy or Greece has had in the last decade.
00:19:21.620 You see, my belief is that the Canadian situation is very interesting because, among other things, you have a lot of immigration, including a lot of illegal immigration.
00:19:30.640 But you don't have Africa on your doorstep, you know, you've got America. 0.90
00:19:37.180 If you had a massively growing population continent to your south, only a couple of hours boat ride away, and the Canadian public, forever talking about how grand and open they were,
00:19:54.780 were actually discovering that at some stage, were actually discovering that at some stage it's about whether you take in the whole world or not.
00:20:03.160 I don't think that this sacred value of modern Canada holds any more than it does in the Greek population or the Italian population.
00:20:13.320 And that's when you lose these habits of recent years quite fast.
00:20:21.700 Absolutely. I always say that Canada is sort of blessed by geography and just that we have these vast oceans separating us from any war zone or any trouble spot.
00:20:31.660 And even the people who do stream in from the United States, they are mostly, not mostly, I would say, a lot of them are people who are sort of illegally in the United States,
00:20:41.460 who fear getting deported, so they go up to Canada instead, or they've heard of a sort of a scam, like a global scam where they can fly to the United States,
00:20:50.840 sort of purchase a bus ticket, go to the north, and then travel across to get sort of free health care and all that kind of stuff.
00:20:56.960 But that still is quite a barrier to entry, that you don't just have the sort of most helpless people who are totally destitute showing up.
00:21:07.120 So we do have that sort of buffer, which I think enables us to maintain the sort of image.
00:21:12.920 Yeah, one way of thinking about it is you have the, it's a buffer, and you also can allow yourselves the luxury.
00:21:22.360 You can allow yourselves the luxury of attitudes and poses that you could not allow yourself if you lived in the reality that, for instance, Mediterranean Europe lives in.
00:21:37.140 So you can treat yourselves to it.
00:21:41.380 Have you noticed a major change or shift in attitudes in Europe or in the United Kingdom, I know?
00:21:48.460 It's really interesting, because I think it was a decade ago now that major European leaders declared that multiculturalism was a failed experiment.
00:21:57.400 And yet after that was when they sort of did the big open border call, including Angela Merkel herself said that multiculturalism was a failed experiment.
00:22:06.580 So, you know, it's really curious to understand why a couple of years later she would completely do an about face and open the border up.
00:22:13.720 Supposedly it was for it to help boost Germany's economy and Germany's economy and bring in a bunch of workers.
00:22:19.740 But you look at stagnant growth in Germany, that certainly hasn't happened.
00:22:23.980 Have you noticed a major change in attitudes?
00:22:25.720 You know, all of these games, well, they're not games, of course, but all of these, all of these, let's call them games for the time being, are going on simultaneously, where there is a permissible political discussion.
00:22:40.900 And there is a permissible political discussion on the left and permissible political discussion on the right.
00:22:46.720 And then there's the public discussion.
00:22:48.500 Then there's what the public says in public versus what the public does in the privacy of the ballot box.
00:22:54.920 You know, there's an awful lot going on on these really difficult, complex questions, which do undoubtedly have a moral dimension as well as a practical one.
00:23:04.220 Yeah, the Merkel case you mentioned, I was very interested in.
00:23:10.340 It was in Potsdam in 2010, 2011 that Merkel gave that speech.
00:23:14.580 And it was five years later that she then opened the borders of Germany.
00:23:18.500 And yes, they then made up excuses retrospectively for why they did that.
00:23:24.900 It was simply not the case that Germany, you know, desperately wanted foreign labor and decided that the means of achieving that was not through an orderly process of applying and, you know, asking for a certain number of workers to fill certain roles.
00:23:42.540 And then, you know, sifting them and going through effectively a job application process.
00:23:47.740 It's that's what you would have done if you'd have been serious about that.
00:23:51.060 You definitely what you wouldn't do was to say normal asylum procedures have been suspended and anyone who walks into Germany can be here.
00:24:01.500 So that was just a lie.
00:24:03.480 It was just a it was just a retrospective attempt to justify something they'd done.
00:24:09.880 These things shift all the time.
00:24:12.700 And, you know, for instance, in my own country in Britain, the concern about immigration has actually gone down a bit in recent years.
00:24:20.540 And one reason for that, I believe, is that the British public think by having voted Brexit and now having left the European Union, that they have effectively they've got something.
00:24:34.420 They got a bit of what they wanted.
00:24:36.520 They sent out the message on immigration.
00:24:39.960 And so they feel a bit more relaxed about it.
00:24:43.400 And I think all political leaders should learn something from that, by the way.
00:24:47.660 You know, you I'm not saying that people should do tokenistic things very far from it, but they should learn from the fact that it's when the public feel that they are not being listened to in their concerns that the politics has a possibility of going rancid.
00:25:04.140 Right. And you could probably say the same thing about Americans with Trump, that a way to understand that is just so many people were frustrated with the political consensus and political elites that Donald Trump was like a big middle finger to the elites.
00:25:18.380 And then, you know, they felt better about it and they could relax.
00:25:21.520 Absolutely. Relax a few years and enjoy the show.
00:25:23.880 Yeah. Well, we haven't had any kind of a moment like that in Canada just yet, I would argue.
00:25:29.760 But I think it's building up.
00:25:31.220 Part of the problem with illegal immigration is that, I mean, Canada is such a pro-immigration country.
00:25:36.680 It's such a welcoming place.
00:25:38.460 But the more you have cases and stories and everything of the sort of undermining of Canada's orderly immigration, it really wears on public trust in the system.
00:25:48.720 And eventually there could be some kind of a tipping point.
00:25:51.640 Yeah, I'm not a great fan of the tipping point idea myself because there are so many, you know, you can fool yourself into thinking, aha, this will be the great tipping point.
00:26:02.920 And it passes like everything else and nothing meaningful happens.
00:26:08.080 I lost count of – one of the reasons I'm skeptical about it is because I lost count of tipping points and of writing and thinking, you know, is this a tipping point?
00:26:19.840 And it just wasn't, you know, like if you'd have said to me, how about if the son of a couple of people who'd fled from Libya to the UK because they'd fallen out with Gaddafi because they were members of an Islamist group too extreme for Gaddafi, basically the al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya.
00:26:39.420 Yeah, imagine what would happen if their kid, I mean them being given asylum in the UK, went to a pop concert and blew up more than 20 young women. 0.54
00:26:49.420 Like would that be a tipping point?
00:26:50.940 You'd say, oh, yeah, I'd have thought that would be a tipping point.
00:26:54.080 You're not allowed to do suicide bombings in the UK.
00:26:56.500 It turned out it wasn't much of a tipping point at all.
00:27:00.180 You suck it up.
00:27:00.960 You absorb it.
00:27:02.020 Everyone forgets about it in some way.
00:27:04.860 And actually, of course, in another way, they don't.
00:27:07.440 These things go to some deep underlying sense that is underneath the sort of transitory day-to-day thing of politics.
00:27:17.880 Well, in that specific case, the terrorist, the would-be terrorist, the person who became a terrorist was rescued with a British ship and was able to flee, I think it was Libya, just not too long before he committed that attack.
00:27:31.940 He was brought back to the UK in a rescue effort.
00:27:35.640 So, yeah, I suppose just looking at the data, Canada used to have an overwhelmingly pro-immigration consensus, just public opinion.
00:27:43.820 It was significantly higher than the US, the UK, or Australia.
00:27:48.460 And in the last, I'd say, two decades, it's just kind of come back.
00:27:51.860 And now it's pretty much in line with all the other sort of Anglos-year countries. 0.99
00:27:57.100 Yeah, I noticed that.
00:27:58.380 I noticed that.
00:28:00.300 It's a very interesting phenomenon.
00:28:02.160 And, I mean, I think the way to think about it is probably that the country is coming to the limits of its tolerance.
00:28:10.340 And those are very interesting times to be alive in.
00:28:13.640 And it also really depends, Douglas, on what part of the country you're in.
00:28:17.440 And, like, if you're in Vancouver, there are parts where it's overwhelmingly majority Chinese, where people speak Chinese, signs are in Chinese language, and you hardly see, you know, an English face or a Canadian face.
00:28:31.020 Whereas, you know, other parts of the country are just as they have been for a long time.
00:28:36.800 And then you have places like Toronto, that is a very kind of cosmopolitan, pluralistic society, where it's kind of neat to see how the different little communities interact and coincide.
00:28:47.380 And there's sort of cross-cultural friendships.
00:28:49.500 Like, there's a mosque that's next to a synagogue, and they share a parking lot, and they have these nice, you know, meals together and stuff.
00:28:57.920 And they're always held up as the example of how, in Canada, you know, Jews and Muslims get along.
00:29:03.960 So, you have those sort of moments that make everyone kind of proud and happy of how Canada handles integration.
00:29:12.160 But then, of course, you also have, you know, some of the really unfortunate situation of people who bring their sort of tribal hatreds to Canada, and they manifest in sort of targeted crimes and stuff like that.
00:29:25.780 These things are, these are very interesting questions around here, because there are several things to say.
00:29:32.220 The first is, you know, as I perceive it, Canadian identity is, like most identities, strongly felt but weakly defined.
00:29:45.080 So that you sort of, you feel it in your gut of knowing what it is.
00:29:50.880 But if pushed to define it, you come up with kind of woolly things.
00:29:56.800 And the problem is, is that that holds for a time, but it finds itself under significant pressure when it comes across identities that are very, find it very easy to define what they are.
00:30:14.340 You know, so like woolly, happy, multi-culti sort of societies get along just fine until they find somebody who doesn't want to join in the party, or thinks the whole game is horrible.
00:30:30.200 And then they have trouble, like we have trouble in Britain, you have trouble in Canada, defining what like un-Canadian activity is, or at least you can define it if it comes from somewhat far right white supremacist type, who hates all Muslims or something.
00:30:48.000 That's easy to define as anti-Canadian, but what does a non-white Canadian's anti-Canadian attitude look like? 0.62
00:30:58.080 What would the federal government, what would the government be able to define as being anti-Canadian from such people?
00:31:06.600 What is an anti-Canadian attitude within the Chinese communities in Canada, for instance?
00:31:11.900 Has anyone ever defined them?
00:31:14.520 I doubt it.
00:31:15.480 I doubt it.
00:31:16.260 And then you get to the second one, which is the deep underlying thing beneath this discussion in Canada, America, Britain, and basically the Anglosphere.
00:31:26.500 It's the same in Australia, and it's the same albeit in more complex version across the continent of Europe, is something like this.
00:31:35.420 Do we agree, are we willing to agree to the presumption of the age,
00:31:40.260 which is that basically white European peoples are the sort of totally uninteresting base paint to which you then need to add things in order to produce any color at all?
00:31:58.500 I'm not talking of racial color, I'm not talking of racial color, I'm talking of the color of society as in interest, curiosity, artisticness, productivity, a whole set of other things.
00:32:15.080 Do we just – do we pretend that, as it were, white European – I'm treading very carefully here because I'm conscious as ever of how detractors might try to dishonestly misrepresent what I'm saying.
00:32:28.820 But do we agree to the presumption of the age that sort of white European peoples are uninteresting, uncolored in the ways I've just described people to whom you need to add this mix of the world's other identities to produce anything of any worth? 0.95
00:32:51.280 Is it, as it were, the zero bit on the graph or not?
00:32:59.440 And this is a subject of enormous pain and contention because we all know what we don't want the answers to be.
00:33:09.680 Like, we don't want to give any truck or ammunition to the people who do exist out there, minority though they undoubtedly are, who are actually, you know, supremacists about their race and color and all that sort of thing.
00:33:29.800 Do we want to give them any material or not?
00:33:34.100 And the answer is obviously not.
00:33:39.680 We do a certain amount of lying and fibbing or at least not telling the truth, which is that actually, you know, British people who went to Canada, for instance, are to some extent different
00:34:00.460 and are going to have their own independent culture and norms and mores and much more than a Chinese population, for instance, which arrives or a Vietnamese population or any other.
00:34:16.320 And not only that that's inevitable, but that that's fine, you know, that that's just fine.
00:34:24.440 There's nothing unnatural about it and there's nothing more sinister or less sinister than everyone else.
00:34:30.980 And the problem is that that's what we haven't been able to, we haven't been able to have that conversation really because of our fear of what it might become.
00:34:46.960 But it seems to me not only dishonest but disheartening to an awful lot of people to have it presented in this way that, well, they're Chinese Canadians and these people are Asian Canadians and so on.
00:35:06.120 And then there are just these sort of colourless, cultureless, not right to ever celebrate their culture or even identify it people.
00:35:23.560 And those are the people we'd sort of like to dilute a bit.
00:35:28.620 I mean, I mean, it's this is a horrible conversation to have to address, but it's there.
00:35:34.860 So we might as well start to try to have it out.
00:35:37.600 I totally agree. And the part of the problem is that anyone who even tries to start to initiate conversations like this, as difficult as they may be, often gets completely written off or, you know, maligned.
00:35:50.220 And a couple of years ago, there was a leadership campaign for the Conservative Party and one of the candidates suggested that newcomers to Canada should be asked to pass a Canadian values test.
00:36:01.840 And then that's sort of spun into this whole sort of, you know, crisis of what are Canadian values?
00:36:09.120 No values are Canadian values. No values aren't Canadian.
00:36:12.180 And really sort of trying to say that anyone even suggesting that there are Canadian values must be a xenophobic bigot because they're just trying to stop people probably with, you know, hijabs or something.
00:36:25.960 That must be what it's all about.
00:36:27.520 I'll tell you, by the way, it's worth mentioning because it's quite easy to grouse on this subject and it's important to be positive about it.
00:36:33.820 Let me let me give one argument for positivity, which is worth, I think, more people in Canada and elsewhere picking up, which is one of the things that's remarkable in this age is that the countries that are most open and tolerant are the ones that allow themselves to be most abused for being intolerant.
00:36:51.900 And I have a sort of shorthand way to address this, which is to say, look, here in Britain, for instance, we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer, who's the second most important figure in the Cabinet, basically after the Prime Minister.
00:37:11.140 The Chancellor of the Exchequer is child of son of immigrants, the Home Secretary that's pretty much the third most important figure in the Cabinet after the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer is the daughter of immigrants, Friti Patel, and so on and so forth.
00:37:30.100 In other words, these countries like Britain that are forever being portrayed as somehow racist societies or unusually bigoted societies, should we say, are actually the ones that just visibly, demonstrably don't have such a problem.
00:37:47.200 This isn't to say that some bigotry doesn't exist or some racism doesn't exist, but it is just to say that, I mean, it's sort of provably, like, if you were a racist society, I mean, like, Nazi Germany didn't have very many Jews, you know, at the top, indeed, any.
00:38:02.720 Why? Because they were anti-Jews and they wouldn't have done that.
00:38:05.940 So if you were a racist society in the same way, you wouldn't have, you know, children of immigrants in your Cabinet.
00:38:13.720 Now, but let me flip to the other side of that.
00:38:17.260 I don't know how well you know China or India, for instance, but there is a very interesting fact about both countries, both significant global economic powers and much more, both extraordinary civilizations, apart from anything else, of whom I have an enormous amount of admiration.
00:38:32.900 But, you know, it is not the case that if you or I moved to China or to India, we would ever be able to find ourselves or our children would be able to find themselves at the top of the governments in those countries.
00:38:46.680 Just not the case.
00:38:47.740 These are ethnically obsessed countries that pay no price on the international stage for that fact.
00:39:00.100 Their leaders can, on occasion, I mean, this is more common in the Middle East, condemn Western countries for not being tolerant enough.
00:39:08.740 You know, I mean, like the Saudis condemned the Germans in 2015 for not taking in more refugees.
00:39:14.060 How many refugees did the Saudis take in?
00:39:16.760 None.
00:39:17.220 Zero.
00:39:17.620 Nada.
00:39:18.480 The Iranian government has criticized European countries repeatedly for their so-called bigotry.
00:39:23.760 You know, if you were a non-Iranian who moved to Iran, what's your likelihood of breaking out and up into society?
00:39:34.140 Pretty much zero.
00:39:35.400 To the top of the government, absolutely zero.
00:39:37.860 This has to be borne in mind. 0.93
00:39:41.080 And I think there's something, there's something not just dishonest, but sort of pathetic about seeing Canadians fall for the most malign critical analysis of themselves and taking it as true. 0.59
00:39:56.100 Right, and I mean, you look at a country like Iran, it actually used to have some deal of ethnic diversity until they completely banished everyone who wasn't, you know, a majority Shia government. 0.86
00:40:08.320 I think the United States is a great example of this.
00:40:10.840 You know, just four years ago, well, just before four years ago, they had a president who was a member of an ethnic minority group.
00:40:18.560 I don't think that there's any other country in the world that has that or that has had that.
00:40:23.500 And as soon as Barack Obama was out of office and they elected Trump, it was because it was a white nationalist movement and white lash and America was, you know, a distinctly racist society, which, you know, of course is untrue.
00:40:36.700 Well, Douglas, I really appreciate every moment of your time today.
00:40:40.380 It's been such an intriguing conversation.
00:40:42.620 Absolutely.
00:40:43.360 All the best.
00:40:48.560 Thank you.