00:02:36.640Yeah, on Dialogue Over Division. I would recommend that if anybody has not checked that out.
00:02:41.900Yeah, amazing show. And, you know, you guys talked about a number of things about the Canadian Constitution, about, you know, what conservatism means, what liberalism means, really, in our context.
00:02:53.800Our listeners tend to be fairly focused at the moment anyway on the issues surrounding Alberta independence.
00:03:02.260And we know that you are a vocal supporter of Alberta independence.
00:03:06.960You're also a vocal supporter of the monarchy.
00:03:09.920And we find that fascinating, actually.
00:03:12.260And maybe if we could start off with a heavy topic like that.
00:03:15.460As a supporter of Alberta independence and as a supporter of the monarchy, tell us how you square those two things.
00:03:21.240Like, how do you think that that might look, you know, in the coming months here as we approach a referendum?
00:03:27.000When it comes to the monarchy, when it comes to independence, it's actually one of the things that I want us to focus on in the independence movement.
00:03:33.440We should be aiming our guns in the right direction, which is Ottawa.
00:03:41.620But before Confederation, we were still part of the British Empire.
00:03:45.400All the various colonies were still crowned colonies and everything was okay.
00:03:50.480And even after Confederation, with the British North America Act, Canada worked pretty well. Yes, it wasn't perfect, but nothing is. And the monarchy is part of that. It actually separates us away from republics. I'm actually not a fan of republicanism and republics, because they tend to be a system that places a written constitution in primacy, which then gives the courts supremacy.
00:04:16.700and instead of worrying about whether a law is good or just, the only question is, is it
00:04:24.300constitutional? And that's a really lousy question sometimes. As we've seen lately, our Supreme Court
00:04:30.260has come to such wonderful conclusions as minimum sentences for rapists are unconstitutional and
00:04:37.300somehow cruel and unusual punishment. It doesn't matter if it's a good idea, it just matters if
00:04:41.720they think it's constitutional. And our monarchy actually protects and preserves us from going down
00:04:47.880that right. Traditionally, in the West, the understanding of law is law comes from God
00:04:55.100through the king and to the people. And in that, we have a protection because there is always an
00:05:00.780accountability structure. And the great principle of Magna Carta is that everybody, including the
00:05:06.840king is under that law. In constitutional republics and republicanism, you actually
00:05:14.520lose that kind of accountability. They talk about accountability, but really all you have
00:05:19.000is every four years maybe a chance to knock the bums out. But that's not real accountability. As1.00
00:05:24.400soon as they're voted out, they go and become a board member and make millions of dollars writing
00:05:28.360their memoirs. There's no real consequence for what they do. Whereas when you have a monarchical
00:05:34.500structure, a monarchical system, that king or that queen has to leave something behind for the
00:05:40.260generations who follow. So it does matter how they rule and whether they are seen to be
00:05:45.720actually a good king or not. I love to point out that King Richard hardly ever actually lived or
00:05:54.460spent any time in England, Richard II, and yet he was known as Good King Richard. Why? Because he
00:06:01.200did the two things a king should do, and it's still true about government. First, he kept the
00:06:05.980country safe. He fought the country's enemies. In fact, he died fighting the country's enemies.
00:06:11.380And second, his justice ruled in the land, and the king's justice was holding down crime and
00:06:17.740evil people, and so people were able to do what they needed to do. And that's the tradition that
00:06:23.620we have in the British constitutional system, one where the monarch is a backstop to protect us
00:06:32.100against the out-of-control power of a prime minister or a president who decided to use their
00:06:39.520popular majority to do anything they pleased. At the end of the day, we always have that crown up
00:06:45.680there with reserve powers able to backstop our entire political system and ensure that hopefully
00:17:25.900And I think people are curious about the checks and balances that prevent a system from becoming corrupt in the way that we see it right now.
00:17:34.820If you take this iron law that essentially any system, if left to its own doing, will become corrupt over time, just rolling it back to a Westminster or a kind of what Canada was, I think people are a little bit hesitant on that.
00:17:55.160It's a harder sell right now because I feel like people are attributing this corruption to the Westminster itself.
00:20:32.580And this is the problem with constitutions that are written overnight or over a year even, with people just coming up with their best ideas. Generally, it's a reactive system. We see something we don't like, so we're going to write into the constitution a solution to that particular problem.
00:20:53.940But then that particular solution becomes the new problem, and you end up chasing your tail, where the British system basically developed over literally a thousand years. And as problems came up, they solved it through convention, through laws in parliament, through subtle changes that addressed the issue or the situation without having to go back and change some sort of a founding document.
00:21:19.540And in political theology, Oliver O'Donovan calls this few laws and much judgment. It's the idea
00:21:28.940that a constitution should be simple, should be basic, and there should be real human interaction
00:21:35.320and good judgment involved in deciding how that constitution is supposed to function.
00:21:40.740It leaves responsibility with people so that they can't fob it off. The government's favorite
00:21:46.140tactic these days is to say, we're going to test this in the courts. And what that means is they
00:21:51.540don't have the guts to stand behind it. So they do something and then throw it to the court and
00:21:55.680say, oh, we'll let them be the fall guy. We'll let them be the bad guy. And the courts make
00:22:00.260the weirdest decisions. You should be able to know kind of ahead of time what the courts will
00:22:05.960rule on based on, you know, the past and the body of law and all the rest of that. But instead,
00:22:11.460Sometimes they rule and you go, first of all, was that written with a crayon? And secondly, were you high when you made that decision? That's not supposed to be the way our system works. We have a tradition of sober second thought. Our tagline for America, you know, is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if you watched Eva's podcast, you know what Canada's tagline is, right?
00:22:36.200Oh man, I'm so embarrassed I don't, but I know it ends with good governance.
00:22:38.940There you go. Peace, order, and good governance. That's boring. That's not some dramatic utopian, hey, we're going to try and change everything and make it perfect. No, no, no. All we want is peace. All we want is nobody burning crap down. And we don't want Muslims praying in the streets in Montreal while saying death to the Jews. We don't want people blocking traffic and causing problems for everyone. We want to be able to go to sleep at night knowing someone's not going to break in and steal our stuff.
00:23:06.880We don't want to leave our keys by the door so that the criminals have an easy time stealing
00:23:11.280our car. We want order. And guess what? We want a government where the standard is good.
00:23:17.620Good government. Not, well, I managed to get voted in again. Not, well, the polls say I'm happy. But
00:23:23.620is it actually quantifiably good what you are doing? And if not, you're failing as a government.
00:23:29.980And that was the principle in Canada for a long time. This great principle that we have of
00:23:34.620responsible government the idea that government should be on its own accountable that when it
00:23:41.440makes mistakes it owns up to them and the one responsible for that mistake has to resign has
00:23:46.760to lose their job for what they did and that's been lost since pierre trudeau's day so i think
00:23:54.380what you're describing is a fairly um you know to me it sounds reasonable anyway a reasonable like
00:24:00.820true conservative like a true small c conservative take um you know they say that it should be the
00:24:07.680goal of any i can't remember how the quote goes should be the goal of any revolutionary to make
00:24:12.360a society worth conserving something like this you know that's right um but i do wonder though in
00:24:19.120and i i want to be careful to not you know for anyone maybe watching this who is not a fan of
00:24:26.120us and who would use anything against us. I don't want this to necessarily be a racial take, but
00:24:30.860I wonder in the last, you know, 10 years specifically, but maybe you could look even
00:24:38.060to the last 30 years particularly, I wonder if the demographic shifts, the very intentional
00:24:44.200demographic shifts in this country to what many are feeling as the disillusion of the once very
00:24:53.220high trust Western society we had into something resembling more of a of a globalized low trust
00:24:59.500society. I wonder if that puts up some roadblocks in in this conversation where, you know, you talk
00:25:08.780about, you know, very, very rightly, you know, the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution,
00:25:13.060in which you had groups of relatively homogenous people trying very grand ideological shifts that
00:25:20.620just didn't work i wonder in our society now which is so uh uh mixed in in in demographics
00:25:28.380i wonder if there can be such a um such a high level um i don't exactly know how to say what
00:25:37.300i'm saying i think i think you know what i mean like can we all coalesce behind this movement
00:25:42.140properly as it stands so so when we look at the history of canada everybody except the indigenous
00:25:47.980people were immigrants at one point. And they came from wildly different backgrounds, especially in
00:25:53.260Alberta. We had the people that back then were the downtrodden and the people that looked0.98
00:25:59.880sideways at, you know, Poles, Ukrainians, I don't know about those people. And the big difference1.00
00:26:06.140was Canada back then said, anybody is welcome here. But if you come here, you have to be part
00:26:11.420of our culture. You have to be one of us. And so my great grandfather arrived in 1926 from the
00:26:17.200Ukraine. And he still would speak Ukrainian at the Ukrainian club with his friends who were
00:26:22.480Ukrainian. But he would give you hell if you spoke Ukrainian where there was anybody present who0.99
00:26:28.720wouldn't understand. He made a point of going to the United Church, even though he was Ukrainian
00:26:33.560Orthodox, because he was in Canada, he went to a Canadian church. Everything that he did,
00:26:38.840he purposed, he had left his country and he had come to this country, so he was part of it.
00:26:43.920And that goes across racial lines. You look at people from all sorts of backgrounds, from all corners of the world. They came here because they liked what they saw here and they wanted to be part of it. Lately, and again, since Trudeau and this idea of multiculturalism, we're a multicultural state, we've lost any sort of basic cohesion as a country.
00:27:04.680Everyone has been told, you do you, I'll do me, and even if it makes no sense and we don't connect in any way, that'll be fine. That's not fine because guess what? The rule of order, the order and the peace order and good government, the rule of law, collapses if somebody comes from a place where order is not a priority or a value and they don't choose to leave that behind and enter into what we have.
00:27:29.920and this has always been the way there has been no bar and to me Alberta is the best place for
00:27:36.560this where there's no bar to becoming an Albertan if you become one of us you're welcome from
00:27:41.900anywhere that has always been the tradition but now we're saying you just keep going with what
00:27:47.600you're going you know if you've got politics at home feel free to have a rumble in the street
00:27:51.500about them here you know if you want to have your your movement and your battle over some political
00:27:57.360issue in your country, go ahead. If your religion is going to be in any way attacked, then you have
00:28:06.060the right to be so hurt. But at the same time, you're allowed to block streets. I mean, I would
00:28:10.180love to know what would happen if I tried to block a road in downtown Calgary and pray
00:28:14.100as a Christian minister. It would take about five seconds before somebody had me bundled into a
00:28:19.160police car. So we see this breakdown that has nothing to do with someone's race or even someone's
00:28:26.660religion. It has to do with the willingness to participate in what's going on here. And if
00:28:32.700you're not willing to do that, you can't have a cohesive society. The British Empire, the Greek1.00
00:28:38.960Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, we have lots of examples of multi-racial, multi-religious
00:28:46.260empires, nations as it were, where people work together despite wildly different backgrounds.
00:28:53.100but there was one uniting law and system that governed everybody and when that was in operation
00:29:01.360it worked quite well when it fell apart that's when you had empires crumble or you had people
00:29:06.400collapse into anarchy because now everybody it was the every man for himself type system or if
00:29:12.500you remember the book of judges it's it's uh there was no king in israel and everyone did what was
00:29:17.160right in their own eyes and a whole lot of crazy things happen when everybody decides to do what's
00:29:22.660right in their own eyes. So I think there's a couple things to unpack there. And I think I've
00:29:30.240heard this described a few times of essentially Canada was formed. It was a mix of you had
00:29:38.060different people, different countries, but they were primarily Christian. And even though there0.99
00:29:44.580some there's a little bit of mixing is like you had this mixing pot of cultures you had a shared
00:29:52.740value structure that helped glue things together and i guess in that case a common good could be
00:30:00.020agreed upon because you had a common backdrop of beliefs and we know that our values and our
00:30:06.500beliefs inform our actions and that kind of disseminates into the rest of society so since
00:30:13.540Since we've seen a dramatic shift and now we have some belief structures with some people that are incompatible with others.
00:30:22.100And if we're returning to something where we try to define a common good, and this is what Bruce Party has mentioned quite a bit, is he's articulated that the common good can be distorted.
00:30:37.460And if it's up to the state to define and or enforce the common good, then essentially you are opening the doors for that to be weaponized against you.
00:30:49.160In the same way that right now we can say that in Canada, well, we're trying to, well, the federal government's trying to preserve peace and order and trying to make everybody happy by invoking hate speech legislation, which is ensuring that nobody is harmed through the harmful words of others.
00:31:09.560And it's defining what hate is. And now at a state level, you are infringing on these other rights, which is I think these are the problems that when you have the more libertarian, which these more libertarian frameworks, which sometimes in practice needs to be weighed out with the kind of with how people really work in the world.
00:31:33.960But when you're going from a first principle standpoint, this is where some of these questions, I think, have value in bringing up because you can see how logically these things can erode into these bigger problems.
00:31:50.000And I think the hate speech legislation is one of those things where it starts to supersede these other rights like freedom of speech because it's trying to define harm in this nebulous way.
00:32:03.200Yeah, and what we've done is we've made the government the center of the universe. It's one of the things that does happen when you take God out of a society. You need a new God, and that God will be the government. And the government will be omniscient, omnipotent. It'll have all the attributes of godhood. But it's a really crappy God, because let's be honest, it's made up of bureaucrats and politicians. Great job. The best kind of people.
00:32:27.300I always say that a bureaucrat is that person when you were a kid in class who said, teacher, teacher, you forgot the test.
00:32:34.080That person grows up to be a bureaucrat.
00:32:36.200My apologies to all the bureaucrats who are listening.
00:32:49.080Because if you went to somebody and you called them a bad name, they punched you in the nose.
00:32:53.100and you figured out pretty quickly as a community that you had things that you could do and things
00:33:00.480you couldn't do things you could say and couldn't say and it wasn't because there was a law it was
00:33:04.440because the general community had a way that they do things and we've replaced that now with this
00:33:10.980idea of communities right instead of your community being whoever happens to be in your
00:33:15.560geographic locale you know your crazy uncle and and that strange person down the road who
00:33:21.040cooks things in the backyard and you kind of wonder what they're cooking but they're all part
00:33:24.940of the community now it's you know the left-handed paper hangers community and it's the the warhammer
00:33:30.44040k community and it's and you've isolated all these groups who then only talk to each other
00:33:36.920and anybody who says anything differently offends them hurts them harms them hates them
00:33:42.380and we used to be more resilient than that because we had real community we didn't need
00:33:47.760the government to enforce community because we did it ourselves. But then the government stepped
00:33:54.300in with its wonderful charter of rights and freedoms, which the entire purpose was to remove
00:33:59.700rights and freedoms because we already had all those rights. But the government said, look,
00:34:03.820I'm giving them to you now, and then I'm going to adjudicate them in the courts and tell you whether
00:34:08.360that counts as your right or not right. And that's when we started seeing these crazy prosecutions
00:34:16.000for human rights, the wonderful kangaroo courts of the human rights tribunals, these crazy rulings
00:34:22.780like the right to life means you have the right to kill yourself, etc., etc. We see a world where
00:34:30.760what we would say common sense doesn't factor in because the government is allowed to make
00:34:36.740whatever rules it wants. And that's because we as people have accepted a modern enlightenment idea
00:34:43.820of the state as God, as the center of all things. And again, the Burkean conservative idea is
00:34:51.160actually a very pre-enlightenment idea where the country is made up of a series of relationships.
00:34:56.840We are people, not some nebulous thing called a state, where we are actually a group of people
00:35:03.360who all work together, live together, and have to get along. And that means everything comes down
00:35:08.360to our personal relationships in day-to-day dealing and in our relationship to the government.
00:35:14.420Now it's not just about what can I get away with, but we're supposed to actually be a person of
00:35:18.560honor because otherwise the community is going to go after you. And not in a witch hunt, but just
00:35:23.780letting you know loud and clear that that's not the way things are done.
00:35:28.100That also gives room for the odd libertarian. It's a safe place where someone can be weird
00:35:34.000and wacky and different. And in the past of Canada and the British tradition, we have a lot
00:35:39.360of eccentric characters, odd people. I was just watching a video of Noel Coward the other day,
00:35:45.520and he wrote his own ticket his whole way through life. And he was eccentric, he was odd,
00:35:51.860he was different. And it was okay, because there was a place in our society for that type of person.
00:35:57.180The things that he said, many people couldn't get away with, but he did because, oh, that's Noel
00:36:01.880coward. So we had a society that was resilient and able to function with those things. And again,
00:36:08.020since Trudeau decided to revolutionize society, and no joke, he took everything about the way
00:36:14.200Canada worked and turned it on its ear. Since that happened, we've seen the rise of all of
00:36:20.580this insanity that's gotten to the point now where someone just got fined $750,000 for daring
00:36:27.740to speak a truth that is known to a five-year-old. So we won't fix that problem by extreme
00:36:36.760libertarianism, right? Because then we just have everybody running around with, you know,
00:36:42.060guns shooting each other because, well, I feel like it, you know, well, I don't think it's
00:36:45.820harming you, so I'm going to do whatever I want to to you because as long as I do no harm,0.80
00:36:50.640you know, Hitler had that kind of logic. Well, I'm just trying to help the German people,
00:36:53.720So let's go and murder a bunch of Jews.1.00
00:36:56.140Do no harm, depending on whose eyes, is not good enough.
00:36:59.660You have to have a community standard.
00:37:01.360And that's why ultimately you always have government if you want order in society.
00:37:06.040But it must be controlled, it must be limited, and it must know that it is not the center of society.
00:37:14.500Yeah, you know, you may be familiar with a modern-day philosopher named Peter Boghossian.
00:37:21.680And, um, he has this, yeah, he has this notion called, uh, we've talked about it on the show
00:37:25.540before. We have about six, I have about six things that I just reference over every podcast. And this
00:37:30.740is, uh, this is one of them, uh, substitution hypothesis, where as a society, uh, becomes less
00:37:36.840religious, it starts to fill that gap with what you name it, you know, gender ideology or veganism,
00:37:43.980or, you know, some, some form of, uh, uh, group, uh, belonging group membership that, that replaces
00:37:50.600is what a religion used to hold and you know it used to be kind of a uh like a shocking idea you
00:37:56.820know at least you know in the early in the 50s and 60s in the U.S. and Canada that you couldn't
00:38:01.500for some reason that you couldn't get along with your neighbor if you were a you know your neighbor
00:38:06.120went to a Protestant church and you went to a Catholic church like this was just things that
00:38:10.180didn't necessarily separate people in the same way that like you say you know a slight difference in
00:38:15.540uh, in opinion can now everyone gets so mortally offended by it. Uh, you know,
00:38:19.920people worked in their communities and lived amongst each other and accepted these differences
00:38:23.580because, you know, there was a greater binding, uh, tradition behind them. Um, yeah, I guess I
00:38:30.680wonder, you know, in your opinion, when we, when we zoom out and we look into this, this current,
00:38:36.280uh, situation we're in, you know, we're collecting signatures for a, for a petition on Alberta
00:38:40.720independence. Um, most people would, that we've talked to anyway, say that, you know what, the
00:38:47.020next step has to be a constitutional convention. As you mentioned earlier in this discussion, you,
00:38:52.700you think maybe it's, it's, it's a better plan to actually return to something that more resembles
00:38:57.480the country before it was, uh, you know, essentially put to the courts, like what,
00:39:01.680uh, what, uh, Pierre Trudeau did. Um, let's put ourselves there. Let's put ourselves in,
00:39:07.300you know, late October or early November of this year. We've just had a clear and convincing
00:39:12.720majority. The referendum results are with the federal government. We're negotiating the terms
00:39:19.180of our civil divorce. What does Dr. Matthew Rowley do? Like, what is your public statement
00:39:26.940at the time to rally people behind this idea of we need to return to what Canada was in the 60s
00:39:35.080and earlier, rather than what seems to be the prevailing notion now, which is more of a, from
00:39:41.000our experience, more of a Bruce Pardian, if you will, libertarian, NAP style, entire rewriting
00:39:49.020of the Constitution. What's your sales pitch, essentially? Look throughout your life. When
00:39:55.760you've made a drastic change out of hate or frustration, how well has it worked? When we do
00:40:03.560anything quickly it's not necessarily good you know you get fed up with your car and so you take
00:40:10.080a hammer to it because it wasn't working right and then the next day you'd go oh gee why did i do
00:40:14.640that you know when when you get frustrated with something and you throw it across the room and
00:40:19.340break it and then well now it's broken uh essentially if we are first of all we have to
00:40:25.480realize the alberta government day one is in charge not the alberta prosperity project not
00:40:32.280Dr. Matthew Rowley, nobody else, the Alberta government will be responsible for deciding
00:40:37.460what to do. We can say all we want to, well, this has to happen and this has to happen
00:40:41.260and this has to happen. At the end of the day, none of it is true. We will have to hopefully
00:40:47.020have a voice. We'll be able to say, I think this should happen. And if the Alberta government
00:40:52.900is wise, they will listen to their constituents. But we have to be careful with what we promise
00:40:58.420first before that time and then what we advocate for afterwards and my big thing would be any
00:41:04.980change you make make it slowly anything you alter alter it with care because if you cut down a tree
00:41:12.760and then decide actually you like that tree where it was you can't just lift it back up and put it
00:41:18.260back on the stump and it's going to carry on like it did before and in the same way a thousand year
00:41:24.140old system, if you decide to burn it out and replace it with something else, as has been done
00:41:30.000all over the world, you can see the result all over the world. When radical changes happen,
00:41:36.880it usually involves instability in business, in the economy, in the lives of people. It usually
00:41:45.180involves a breakdown of services. There's 101 things about government that right now we don't
00:41:51.320even notice. You know, government picks up your garbage in most places, right? We're talking
00:41:57.340about a system that has allowed the government to grow to a place where it does infect every
00:42:03.800aspect of your life. Now, I might not like that and you might not like that, but that is the
00:42:08.020reality. So before we go making drastic changes, and especially before we go trying to undo
00:42:15.440potential ills or to right past wrongs through dramatic fixes, we should be careful about what
00:42:22.660we do. Just one example is this idea of term limits. Everyone's really excited about term
00:42:27.320limits. We're going to show them. Nobody will be able to be a professional politician.
00:42:32.640My response to that is, wouldn't you love to have a term limit on surgeons and doctors? You know
00:42:39.180what? You can be a surgeon for eight years, can practice really well, get really good. But you
00:42:44.260you know what, after that, it's time to get a new surgeon. Let's get a fresh pair of hands. In fact,
00:42:48.980let's get someone who doesn't even know anything about surgery because they're going to be able
00:42:53.380to do something useful. They're going to change it up. We would never even dream of doing that,
00:42:58.540right? You want the best guy who's been practicing the longest. In government, it's not about length
00:43:04.000of tenure. It's about amount of corruption. One of the best premiers we ever had was Ernest Manning,
00:43:09.860and he was premier for 25 years. And he did a darn good job for 25 years. Now, should we have
00:43:17.760looked at him and said, oh, nope, sorry, as much as you're doing a great job, let's get rid of you
00:43:21.540after eight. That's just one of those examples of we are fed up with bad politicians, but the
00:43:27.480solution is not to get rid of the good ones after a certain amount of time. The solution is to get
00:43:31.860rid of the bad ones and don't wait until, well, they've been in for eight years. No, don't let
00:43:36.300them get in in the first place. And we have that ability actually with a system of responsible
00:43:41.480government, which we used to have. Shame caused them to resign, where now no amount of shame can
00:43:49.220ever unseat a politician. At the end of the day, usually, and you'll probably find this if you have
00:43:55.080kids, you can't make enough rules to make them be good. You actually have to teach them how to be
00:44:01.540good. And it's the same with government and with politicians. It's the same with our entire
00:44:06.460society. We can't make enough rules to make society good. In fact, as a Christian, that's
00:44:12.660one of the things that I argue. The heart is evil, it says, and wicked above all things.
00:44:18.140And if we think that we can make the exterior good and somehow that's going to change our hearts,
00:44:23.260we have the entirety of human history to show us that we're wrong. But if we recognize that
00:44:29.160you must change hearts and therefore make something new, then you're on the right path.
00:44:33.780So my real pitch is let's not change anything. Let's just get rid of Ottawa and then start
00:44:41.420cleaning up the mess. The criminal code, Canada Health Act, Indian Act, all of these federal laws
00:44:49.320and federal impositions that have done so much damage. Let's fix those things and then see where
00:44:54.940we are maybe then we say hey we want to change this or we want to change that but let's do some
00:45:00.480change see how it sits go slow go steady and then we're not going to get to a point where one day we0.68
00:45:07.580go oh man we got rid of the czar because he really sucked and now we've got the communists and they're
00:45:12.340killing us interesting so i can see where you're coming from but i i might push back on this idea
00:45:21.180that it's for a lot of people that it's purely out of purely a reactive or like a hate like an
00:45:27.920anger lashing out kind of a situation where um the movement's not new it's like we're it's 120
00:45:36.600years old you have observations and you have kind of these these lessons learned over a long period
00:45:44.840of time, different thinkers analyzing in different ways. Also, I think when it comes to how some of
00:45:53.140these ideas for a new structure, it comes from looking at, well, here's what's common in all
00:46:03.680these different countries, all these different systems. We're seeing some of the breakdowns
00:46:09.040because of this or that, or you are essentially observing and diagnosing based on more of a
00:46:18.080critical analysis through first principles. I think that's how you'd get to some of this.
00:46:23.200And just to push back on the term limits is it's assuming that you need the level of management
00:46:34.440required that that needs a surgeon level of skill to run a government versus a system that
00:46:43.040puts more of the responsibilities on like individuals families communities and building
00:46:48.760from the ground up rather than top down so i i think this is where some of these ideas
00:46:53.880they are starting to challenge some of these fundamental pillars of do we need a managerial
00:47:02.120state to manage people? Or do you set up a framework that limits certain things? Like you
00:47:10.480can't go around, you can't just shoot random people. You can't infringe on other people's
00:47:14.460rights. And you need somebody to adjudicate like these fundamental laws. But do you need somebody
00:47:21.480micromanaging the way that you live? And I think these are some of the conversations that are
00:47:27.100underpinning some of these suggestions when it comes to revising the system.
00:47:32.120Yeah, and certainly I'm all for, like I say, gentle revising. Like I say, since Trudeau screwed the whole thing up, certainly we have some things that we have to fix. The micromanaging, all that, the authoritarianism, the idea that government is the answer to all things.
00:47:46.500historically though show me a society that doesn't have politicians that doesn't have leaders that
00:47:55.440doesn't have a professional class of those who guide the country they might not be named the
00:48:03.140same thing but at the end of the day there is always people who end up in leadership and who
00:48:08.120do the job of government it is complex government is just as much as any other complex organism
00:48:15.620difficult to understand and difficult to master. And the ones that are good at it are really good.
00:48:21.860You might see the picture of Winston Churchill that I have there. He spent the majority of his
00:48:26.740life in parliament. And one could argue that he was a far better parliamentarian at the end than
00:48:31.960he was at the beginning. He learned a lot of things. He had some bumps in the road. He made
00:48:36.240some mistakes, as any of us do in our careers. The idea that we should get rid of that and that
00:48:41.780government's not that complicated. Usually I hear that from people who've never had any sort
00:48:47.160of connection with government. It's somewhat like I've had many people say to me over the years,
00:48:52.760I don't need a piece of paper. I've got all the learning that I need. You might notice I have a
00:48:59.020couple of pieces of paper there. You know how many people who have those pieces of paper say that it
00:49:03.580is just a piece of paper? None of them. Why? They know what it took to get it. They know what it
00:49:09.920involved, they know how many books they read. In the same way, someone who lives on the edge of
00:49:16.820government and has only negative or at best neutral interaction with government might look at it and
00:49:23.620say, ah, anybody can do that. You know, we're all lovely armchair quarterbacks. It's one of our
00:49:28.140abilities in democracy that we can all play government from our home table, sitting there
00:49:34.180arguing with our friends. Government is a complex organism and it does take a lot to do it well.
00:49:39.660And to do it well is important because government does have a couple of key functions.
00:49:45.960So yeah, we can remove all the functions that government shouldn't be involved in.
00:49:50.000Why in the heck should government be telling you what you can and can't say?
00:52:46.660And so they boldly go and they make the same mistake.
00:52:49.020their father and their grandfather made but they're confident while they do it and so yeah we
00:52:55.060need to look at government and say whoa our government is so out of hand it's insane and
00:53:01.040Trudeau meant it that way Pierre Trudeau meant it that way he put the government into everybody's
00:53:06.040business at every level that's not our historical way of doing things in Canada praise God we also
00:53:11.440don't have a model where it's all laissez-faire we do believe that there are times Jim Dinning
00:53:18.600said it really well. Government should be as hands-off as possible so that it earns the right
00:53:23.980to reach in with its meaty claw and do something from time to time. And that's the way Alberta
00:53:29.580generally has functioned. We do need to shrink multiple bureaucracies. We do need to get rid of1.00
00:53:35.160whole departments that shouldn't exist. And then we need to look and say, okay, what does government
00:53:40.940need to do? You know what? We need somebody to keep order. Guess what? Police are for our benefit.
00:53:48.600they do actually keep the order. We don't need the police to be going door to door and arresting
00:53:53.200people for posting memes on the internet. They've got more important things to do, right? It's that
00:53:57.480again, more judgment, fewer laws. It's not about how do I create a constitution or a series of
00:54:05.140rules that will make it so that no human can ever do wrong. All we do is create opportunities for
00:54:10.220loopholes with that. We make a simple constitution like government, do good. And then we evaluate
00:54:16.260wait, government, did you do good? No, you didn't. And that's how we actually come to solutions.
00:54:21.380The proliferation of laws is a sign of the death of a society. And I believe that is true. It's
00:54:28.800not an original quote from me. I can't remember who off the top of my head, but it's very true.
00:54:33.280Any dying society multiplies its laws. You go back and look at simple societies, the code of
00:54:40.340Hammurabi that was written on one stone, the 10 commandments that are quite literally 10
00:54:44.420commandments. Good societal law and good government doesn't take much. You don't have to
00:54:50.860have a huge, gigantic thing. It still will be a complex structure that will require specialists,
00:54:56.920but it doesn't have to be one quarter of the population of the nation, because that's insane.
00:55:06.180And so it's that type of thing that in independence we can change. We can say,
00:55:10.820We love government. Government is a force of good if it keeps itself within bounds. But the answer isn't to try to outrule it. The answer is to remind it of its position. You're not the center of the universe, government. You're just the ones that keep the army going, keep the police going, keep the courts running, maybe help here and there with certain things as we need.
00:55:37.940but you don't get to be the source of all things for all people. And we don't owe our allegiance
00:55:44.820to you. It's one of the reasons why I like the crown. The government dies. It's dissolved
00:55:50.100regularly. The crown lives on. The government is not eternal. That in itself is an important
00:55:56.980principle that we should remember. Two things. First, the quote, even though maybe we'll just
00:56:06.300will attribute it to you in the comments, uh, was by Cicero, uh, the more laws, the less justice.
00:56:12.200Yeah. Uh, second, are you familiar, sir, with, um, Andrew Wilson?
00:56:18.940Don't know if I am. What's he written?
00:56:21.440He's a, uh, he's actually a, uh, an Orthodox Christian. Um, he's a, like a, a debater,
00:56:28.620really. He's like a professional debater essentially. And he does, um, a lot of garbage
00:56:33.700that he probably shouldn't waste his time on, but he does a lot of actually fairly high level
00:56:37.180theological and political debates. I'm curious as to your thoughts on this. So this is my
00:56:46.840question and this is why I'm asking it. In an independent Alberta, to what degree would you
00:56:55.820like to see Christian ethic represented in our laws and in our courts? And the reason I ask this
00:57:03.100is because Andrew Wilson makes the argument as an Orthodox Christian that in as much as
00:57:11.240any other ideology group is within their rights to lobby the public and sway public opinion to
00:57:20.280their ideology, a Christian is just as justified in trying to sway people to a Christian ethic to
00:57:28.680to rule their society. And so I'm curious as to your opinion as a, um, as a missionary professor,
00:57:35.840uh, and, uh, you know, a very educated Christian man, what, uh, what is your opinion on that?
00:57:41.760And, uh, what do you think is maybe what's your opinion on it? What would you like to see? And
00:57:46.340what is, what is reasonable to expect? Uh, Western society, it's an uncomfortable
00:57:54.720truth for some, was founded on Christian principles. And what we have done really since
00:58:01.700the 19th century is we've said, we really love this beautiful house called Western society,
00:58:08.700but we don't like that foundation called Christianity. It's so unkind. It's so exclusive.
00:58:16.020It's got all these nasty things like, I don't know, love your neighbor and do good to those
00:58:20.920who hate you. It's just an awful, awful philosophy that's done such harm. Religion has done such harm.
00:58:28.740So let's pick up the house. Let's move it off the foundation and let's let it hover in the air. And
00:58:34.900it will be just as beautiful as it always was without the foundation. Surprisingly, we've found
00:58:41.740that Western society and Western civilization is crumbling because we've stripped away the
00:58:47.320spiritual foundation. It's another uncomfortable truth. We are spiritual beings. We are not
00:58:53.340merely mechanistic cogs in the giant government machine, but we are living spiritual beings who
00:58:59.800have spiritual relationships with one another, and what we believe matters. There is a truth,
00:59:06.460and if that truth is denied, it does cause problems. That was the understanding that
00:59:12.460built Western civilization. The other beautiful thing with Western civilization is we did not
00:59:18.160believe, unlike many other civilizations or cultures built around a religion, we didn't
00:59:23.420believe that you had to force at gunpoint. Again, this is the British tradition. You didn't have to
00:59:28.840force at gunpoint someone to believe what you believe. You could say, you know what, we're
00:59:34.800following this basic set of principles. We're not going to go around on Sunday to check if you're
00:59:39.500in church. But as a society, we have these standards. You know what? Life is valuable
00:59:44.680because all life is made in the image of God. So don't kill people. Why? That's a basic
00:59:50.480Christian principle, that people matter, that they're worth it, that no matter who you are,
00:59:56.180how low, how unimportant according to the world, whether you're an orphan, whether you have some
01:00:02.480sort of mental problem, whether you have a disability, you are still loved by God and
01:00:07.700valued by God and made in the image of God. So we preserved humanity. People forget that prior
01:00:13.760to Christianity really becoming a thing and Western civilization, women were considered
01:00:18.780chattel. It's actually Christianity that caused people to go, oh wait, women are made in the image1.00
01:00:24.200of God. The Bible actually speaks of the creation of the woman as a unique and different individual
01:00:29.560who was not just a carbon copy of the man and who was not somehow lesser. So therefore we should
01:00:35.300value her. Christianity was the one that said, you know what? Making slaves is a bad idea.
01:00:41.600Slavery has been throughout history, and it's only Western civilization that said,
01:00:45.360maybe we shouldn't enslave people. On and on and on it goes. So I would love to return
01:00:51.580to more of the classic principles that made our civilization, and an acknowledgement that,
01:00:58.380guess what? You can't have the beautiful house without having the good foundation.
01:01:03.360And that still leaves people room for difference and disagreement for believing different things, even as they acknowledge the, I just was reading John Cleese, one of the arch atheists of all time, a great guy. And he just yesterday on Twitter was saying, Britain's a Christian country with Christian foundations. And even he values those Christian principles that made the country what it was, even as a stark atheist who doesn't want to believe.
01:01:30.420Yeah. So it's not that we want to enforce belief or somehow create some Christian ethnostate. That's insane. But we need to value our history and understand that we got here somehow. And if we strip it all away and then try to carry on as if nothing ever happened, all we end up with is the building collapsing around us. And we can pretend it's not and try to prop it up with odd random scraps of wood. But the thing is going to fall down if it has no foundation.
01:02:00.120So, James, I just got to piggyback here for just one second, and then I'm going to let you have the final word with our guest. I wonder, though, I'd love that answer. I think it's very reasonable. And I think I tend to agree with pretty much all of it.
01:02:13.660I wonder, though, if we might find ourselves in a bit of a paradox of intolerance where we have a we have such a large carrying capacity in this country of people who belong to religions that I'm speaking here specifically of Islam that fundamentally don't hold those principles of, you know, like it is a very it is a very unique kind of quirky Christian ethic that we can hold our personal beliefs.
01:02:43.660And want to build a healthy society that is respectful of others' beliefs. But that's not how many other religions and parts of the world function. And I wonder if we might unknowingly find ourselves at a point where we, I don't know how to phrase this, where we might need to be more forceful about it, lest we be overrun by people who don't respect that and would, in fact, take any opportunity to enforce their particular beliefs.0.57
01:03:13.660worldview that is incompatible with Western ideals? There is a place where we do have to say
01:03:21.240your worldview is incompatible with our way of doing society. A perfect example, I don't know
01:03:27.940if you've ever heard of Westboro Baptist Church. Yes, yeah. It's a cult. It happened to have
01:03:33.120Baptist Church in the name, but it had nothing to do really with Christ. But they would go around0.99
01:03:37.080with signs and say hateful, hateful, horrible things about homosexual people. And they were
01:03:43.800doing it in the name of God. And they would go to soldiers' funerals and say, good, we're glad
01:03:49.680that you died because you were defending an ungodly state and horrible things. It's important
01:03:56.380that for a society to function, people who choose to utterly hate and want to destroy that society,
01:04:05.000while they have the right to believe that personally, they do not have the right to
01:04:09.840impose that type of a belief upon that society. And that's one of the contracts that we make as
01:04:16.200a society. We say, hey, you do have the right to believe something different, but you don't have
01:04:21.960the right to get special treatment for your belief that is antithetical to our national culture.0.87
01:04:30.620And that's a line, you know, Westboro Baptist is such a good example.
01:04:33.960They weren't arrested and thrown in prison.
01:04:55.240The thing that's causing the problem right now is that the government is actually making laws that stop society from righting itself in healthy ways, by challenging things, by having an argument, by saying, hey, hold on, we don't do that here. You know what, if you want to beat your wife, there are other countries in the world where maybe that's permissible and even legal. In this country, we don't believe beating your wife is good. And I don't care who you are or what background you are, you can claim that that's your religious beliefs.
01:05:24.520No, I'm sorry. Here we don't beat our wives. I love the quote from the British governor in India when they were busy burning their widows. And they said, well, this is just our cultural beliefs. You have to respect it. And he said, I deeply respect your cultural beliefs. In England, our culture is that if people burn widows on a funeral pyre, we hang them. And so you can have your culture and I will have mine.1.00
01:05:49.960And it's that type of thing. We have to have a standard for our society. Within that, there's lots of room for healthy diversity, but that diversity cannot overtake the unity that we have in our society. And it's about setting that bar low, quite frankly, right? There are basic things that we all have to agree with, but guess what? You don't all have to wear the same clothes as me. You don't all have to like the same music as me. You don't have to go to the same church as I do.
01:06:17.320You don't even have to like the same political system that I do.
01:06:20.700But at the end of the day, here's how we function as a society.
01:06:24.080You know, if you want to rape people, you go to jail.