The Critical Compass Podcast - Why ＂Stronger Together＂ is a Lie w⧸ 222 Minutes

00:00:00.000 It's not stronger together.

00:00:02.020 You've got one part doing all of this significant heavy lifting.

00:00:06.980 And you've got other parts who would be stronger

00:00:09.980 if you let them go out on their own

00:00:12.040 and actually make something of themselves.

00:00:13.560 Why is it that we have to be the good neighbors,

00:00:17.800 but everyone else can benefit from our wealth,

00:00:20.800 but at every turn they can undermine us

00:00:23.500 by purchasing from somebody else

00:00:25.000 at a dirtier you know more morally corrupt way why are you supporting a system that is

00:00:33.140 enabling corruption across almost all domains and wouldn't you want to structure a system

00:00:40.700 in a way that prevents that from happening and anybody born in sarnia or something like that

00:00:46.580 who said you know what i think that i can do better and if i want to work hard enough i can

00:00:52.240 make a great life for me and my family. And the place where I'm going to do that is the West.

00:01:13.940 Hi, guys. Welcome back to The Critical Compass. My name is Mike. And of course,

00:01:17.680 joining me is james we are very pleased to be joined on the show by twos uh the otherwise

00:01:23.740 known as the uh the eponymous that how you say that word author behind 222 minutes of course

00:01:31.720 the award-winning podcaster ideologically motivated comedic extremist uh we uh we were

00:01:37.560 chatting before the show and um two said that he was going to give us a little rundown on

00:01:42.640 before we started on the award that he won actually like it's not it's not a joke he is

00:01:47.420 an award-winning podcaster so please do tell the story sir okay well thanks for that uh and thanks

00:01:53.000 for having me on here's the thing it is an award and it is a joke so i do i do a weekly show with

00:02:00.300 sean newman it's called the mashup and for a while there we were talking about these

00:02:05.820 journalists in canada that take themselves incredibly seriously and go out of their way

00:02:11.660 to rest on laurels that nobody else even knows or understands like they'll win some award that

00:02:17.660 you've never heard of and then just hoist it around like they're some sort of like they're

00:02:23.540 just proud as a peacock about winning some award that nobody understands or could even name or

00:02:30.500 anything like that and and yet they're just sort of just glad handing each other and making such

00:02:36.560 a big deal out of this months after the fact and so sean and i just talking about how silly it was

00:02:43.260 on the air came up with the idea that we should just give each other awards for uh for um for

00:02:51.520 podcasting so that we can call ourselves award-winning podcasters as well and so i got him

00:02:58.560 I got him a trophy with a rooster on top and it said employee of the month and and he got me a

00:03:08.220 certificate didn't even he just he just put it up he I don't think he's even sent me a copy of it

00:03:13.980 one of us took this way more seriously and at the same time way less seriously than the other one

00:03:20.360 did uh but yeah and then I was rooster slurper of the month or something like that or I run I won

00:03:26.660 the rooster slurper award or something but i have i have won an award and it's every bit as tangible

00:03:34.200 and serious and prolific and and noteworthy as any of these other awards that canadian

00:03:44.900 former journalists with red hair have to their name well you know i'm i'm just gonna this quick

00:03:53.240 story i'm a bit of a formula one fan and uh yeah i've i've been a lewis hamilton fan since the

00:03:58.980 since the you know mid 2000s and um from the 20 dollar bill yep yeah and so there was a time

00:04:05.540 when so when lewis hamilton drove for mercedes it was very uh well known in the paddock at the time

00:04:11.960 that mercedes didn't let was it mercedes or mclaren i'm questioning myself either his first

00:04:17.920 team mclaren or mercedes the second team they never gave the drivers the trophy like the the

00:04:22.720 drivers could not keep the trophies that they won if they got a podium really the team kept the

00:04:28.080 trophies and then they made them a replica that the driver could could keep so all that to say

00:04:33.060 maybe sean actually takes it very seriously and and he that's why he has to keep it and you can't

00:04:38.120 have it no it's it's not that i want his trophy it's that your certificate i went to oh oh i got

00:04:45.860 you but it's digital like he just you just got it digital like it's it's um oh it's it's an nft

00:04:50.960 everything i said he basically made an nft all right well that that changes that

00:04:57.540 james you say something now yes no it's i think legacy media thrives on just

00:05:06.480 needing to kind of announce how important they are rather than letting their work stand for

00:05:14.320 on its own so i think that's partially why people are getting sick of that or it's just

00:05:22.220 there's a lot of hubris and we don't need more hubris at this point and you're you're right and

00:05:29.620 it's just very undeserved like i don't know if you guys ever watched or read game of thrones but

00:05:35.000 tywin lannister has a quote at one point where he says any king who needs to tell people he's a

00:05:42.840 king is no king or something along those lines and yeah any any journalist who needs to tell

00:05:50.500 people that they're any good is not a good journalist the do we tell you that uh i don't

00:05:56.640 know if you saw when jen gerson of the line we shared we shared uh we shared our email thread

00:06:04.840 or some screenshots but um of you with jen we weren't of yeah like we were corresponding in

00:06:12.140 an email because we got a hit piece by prairies exposed and they said that we're part we are

00:06:17.940 foreign funded and we're part of this shadowy network of foreign funded uh influencers and 0.97

00:06:24.260 like we've been volunteering so many hours like where the fuck what receipts did they have

00:06:28.660 nothing nothing it's partially i i think it's just all these articles all these hit pieces 0.67

00:06:35.540 it's like copy paste you can find the same like formula in them trying to demonize anybody in

00:06:42.180 the independence movement or anybody right of center so we asked prairies exposed like

00:06:48.500 if you want to explore these ideas in person or like on our podcast you're welcome to and then

00:06:54.180 he blocked us uh so then after that like the next day out of the blue jen uh jen garrison reached

00:07:03.860 out to us and was asking like who are you guys and like what's your background and what's your

00:07:10.120 full name and what's your history where we work and what our full names were yeah yeah otherwise

00:07:16.640 she wouldn't chat with she wouldn't talk with us because she she made a tweet about sorry i'm

00:07:20.320 jumping in on your story jim she made a tweet about um uh you know she'd love to something

00:07:25.920 about like would would love to be able to talk you know seriously about the alberta independence

00:07:30.620 movement with somebody like she was you know essentially was like a backhanded thing making

00:07:34.840 fun of some you know and that was the same day she sent the email to us as well yeah yeah and so

00:07:41.740 she i replied and i said and i and i just like said you know hey we're you know we're independence

00:07:47.360 you know minded people we have a podcast where we're real you know people we'd love to have a

00:07:51.740 serious conversation about it with you and so she emails us and then yeah says like she gives us 0.92

00:07:56.580 this litany of like you know this shit test that we have to pass for her in order to like 0.68

00:08:00.440 qualify like journalistic standards you know yeah and she wouldn't and i told her i'm like 0.96

00:08:07.160 we're i mean here's our this is these are our first names you know like here's all our social

00:08:12.320 media um but she insisted she wouldn't talk with us if we didn't tell her tell her our last names

00:08:18.100 and what our jobs like what our personal jobs were and i was like we're not doing that because

00:08:23.640 like i don't know who you are i don't know what you know how you're going to use that information

00:08:27.240 but at the time we were going down to calgary to film a um an event that fergus hodgson was hosting

00:08:32.900 the bourbon room event the bourbon room yeah the discussion between keith wilson and um

00:08:38.480 eva chipiak and i was like we're literally like tomorrow going to be in calgary i know that you

00:08:44.020 live in calgary so here's where we'll be at what time you can meet us in person like we'll get you

00:08:48.400 into the event if you want yeah nothing that wasn't good enough so no well i mean serious

00:08:53.660 so she's teamed up with jason kenny yeah to try and tell everybody that separatism is bad and

00:09:01.560 i can't think of a better person to be leading the charge than jason can i how much can i swear

00:09:11.080 on this show as much as you want i can't think of a better person to be leading that charge 0.98

00:09:16.760 than jason fucking kenny 0.98

00:09:18.780 he every time he opens his mouth he uh it's sort of like when the news is on and mark carney is 0.98

00:09:25.700 talking right every time jason kenny opens his mouth he creates more independent supporters

00:09:29.760 doesn't he yeah yep and it's it's wonderful he's he's just he's you would almost think that we're

00:09:39.720 paying him to be a double agent yeah i do honestly get that impression from a few guys involved in

00:09:47.000 like because he has a he has a uh like a teammate too what's his name like ken ken something he's

00:09:54.120 grossin or something like yeah kind of a bozen cool or something yeah sort of a dutch sounding

00:09:59.320 name they're not very cool i know that guy that guy was a signatory on the firewall letter right

00:10:05.880 right yeah and what happened with that have we like i i get the fact that it just came out like

00:10:11.960 25 years ago but have we made any progress on that lately have we i think i think it's a coaster

00:10:18.040 for something as has anything actually happened with that firewall letter you know have we

00:10:22.760 any made any meaningful contributions or steps forward to addressing the issues that were

00:10:28.600 plaguing this province a quarter of a century ago anybody anybody nothing you would hope that it's

00:10:34.600 maybe at least uh 24 years ahead of schedule of whatever happened to that referendum we did in

00:10:42.120 2021 vote equalization right well and there's and there's that too and that's that's exactly

00:10:48.520 jason kenny well what did he do with that he wrote some letters to the premiers and to the

00:10:54.920 prime minister and they were not responded to and he said yeah sorry guys all right tried my best

00:11:03.520 Yeah, I did what I could.

00:11:05.320 You'd think if there was a 62% majority of people in this province 0.99

00:11:12.320 saying that they wanted to get rid of that damn thing, 0.99

00:11:16.040 that he would have gone on a media tour. 0.99

00:11:18.400 He would have been, you know, every possible instance bringing it up. 1.00

00:11:23.200 Hey, guys, you freeloading sacks of shit. 0.99

00:11:25.360 How about we cool the fuck off with this? 1.00

00:11:29.740 And yet there was nothing. 0.85

00:11:32.600 It seems like a loss of momentum as well.

00:11:35.100 And that's what happens with these, like anytime the West, first of all, the West wants in or like bounces between the West wants in and then discontent when we find out that like they don't want us in any meaningful way.

00:11:51.620 but i i think that part of the tactic is you oh just forget about it just like give it enough time

00:11:58.380 and like these sentiments will cool or maybe you give them a little bit of a bone but we haven't

00:12:04.580 seen any meaningful change and we've chatted with like michael wagner who has been in it since he

00:12:11.600 was 16 he was volunteering even before he's of the age of being able to vote and he's kind of

00:12:20.740 seen these cycles unfold and that referendum is just another example of like how nothing happens

00:12:27.380 even when you get that level of majority support from uh absolutely from albertans yeah absolutely

00:12:35.300 i mean you've got to have seven of ten provinces signing off on it constituting at least 50 of the

00:12:41.860 population and keep in mind that out of our 10 provinces there are only two who are in any way

00:12:49.700 meaningfully above the average

00:12:51.600 for median

00:12:53.580 income right now. You've got

00:12:55.700 Alberta and Saskatchewan, and then I think

00:12:57.720 BC or Ontario, one

00:12:59.680 of them, is like

00:13:00.960 within a couple hours

00:13:03.840 work of the exact

00:13:05.660 median. And so it's

00:13:07.580 literally the Pareto principle,

00:13:09.560 the 80-20 rule,

00:13:11.380 where 20% does 80%

00:13:13.540 of the work. Well, here you have

00:13:15.400 literally 20% of the provinces,

00:13:18.280 2 out of 10,

00:13:19.120 doing the lion's share of it and oh really the other ones aren't on board with changing the

00:13:25.600 system that sends rivers of money towards them annually this is so baffling quebec has 13

00:13:33.220 billion reasons not to reform equalization exactly and that's and that's just on an annual basis

00:13:40.860 but wait guys everyone in canada pays the same tax rate okay

00:13:47.480 okay i i love this i i just you hear these dishonest things about how equalization doesn't

00:14:00.580 actually everyone pays the same well okay first off just on its head if everyone already paid 0.83

00:14:06.980 the same what in the great and grandiose fuck is there to equalize how how could anything be 0.84

00:14:15.260 equalized if everybody's already paying the same thing okay secondly money is fungible okay it goes 1.00

00:14:23.440 it's sure it doesn't directly go from your pocket to buying a baguette for some frog in fucking 0.99

00:14:31.300 Quebec, right? That's not what happens. It goes through intermediary steps. You pay your taxes to 0.99

00:14:37.660 Ottawa. It moves from this slush fund to that slush fund. Somebody takes a little off the top,

00:14:43.140 whatever's left. Some of it goes here. Some of it goes there. Maybe it comes around a couple times

00:14:47.700 and eventually it makes its way into Gatineau. And there's actually in finance terms, they actually

00:14:56.380 have a word for this it's called laundering yeah yeah fraud when you when you purposely obfuscate

00:15:04.160 the origin of the money and send it to someplace in what seems like a legit way that's literally

00:15:10.880 this is the car wash from breaking bad yeah this is this is what it is okay i get the fact and i'm

00:15:18.260 not disputing because they'll say well you know it's not like alberta pays that money directly

00:15:22.840 to quebec nobody claims that nobody's claiming that but it's a straw man what we're saying is

00:15:29.000 is that our money dances around a few times and eventually goes to the expo or the epcot center

00:15:35.440 whatever the hell it's called and and gets spent on poutine like if i scratch my initials on a loonie

00:15:42.520 and then use that to pay my taxes eventually eventually it's going to be spent on a shitty

00:15:51.300 maple beer at some brassiere in granby end of story i like this uh i like this irritated twos

00:16:02.700 responding to to straw men so i'm gonna say another one but but uh just gonna keep teeing

00:16:09.420 me up and teeing me off at the same time but you know what we get back more than we receive

00:16:15.280 wait we get back we receive more than we give twos in federal does anybody make that argument

00:16:23.700 the federal government we've heard that we've had that on our youtube comments actually i'll make

00:16:30.580 just a slight comment the that exact turn of phrase um i heard from a customer customer of

00:16:36.260 mine in my real day job uh sorry jen gerson i'm still not telling you what it is uh who who worked

00:16:43.260 in the mining industry of all of all things i thought that i could like joke with him a little

00:16:47.180 bit about like ah quebec you know and he's like ah you know i'm sure we get we i'm sure we get

00:16:52.380 back more value than we give we absolutely do not in what in what sense like do we get some kind of

00:17:02.100 a moral fulfillment because here's the thing is that even if you could make that argument even

00:17:07.320 like let's just suppose that we feel better about ourselves the same way that we feel better about

00:17:15.100 ourselves when we have a picture of a starving kid on the fridge and we send Sarah McLachlan a

00:17:20.220 dollar every day okay let's just say that that's the case if that is the case then they're

00:17:28.640 completely undermining it by saying that we don't actually pay into it because everybody pays the

00:17:34.960 same so we don't actually if if they're going to deny us the moral satisfaction of helping the

00:17:43.860 underperforming and underprivileged people who can't bother getting out of bed before 10 a.m 0.57

00:17:48.420 and fucking miramichi then why deny us why deny us that fulfillment yeah yeah good question 0.98

00:17:58.260 James you say something I'm going to think of another 0.99

00:18:01.800 shitty leftist take on something 0.98

00:18:05.140 no the equalization is tricky because

00:18:07.920 it comes from a place of compassion of people saying like well we're one country

00:18:13.200 we love everybody in the country and we should help our fellow neighbors

00:18:16.720 but with the layers of bureaucracy and the

00:18:20.780 the fact that there's no real accountability

00:18:24.200 Like, I don't want to, I don't feel charitable when there's all these intermediate steps involved.

00:18:31.300 And when Dennis Kelma was working with the APP to create the value of freedom document, they had to pull from multiple sources just to get an accurate picture of what inflows and outflows there actually were.

00:18:47.260 Let it be from StatsCan or CRA.

00:18:49.720 and even that they they kind of like well it's hard to tell because that kind of overlaps here

00:18:55.400 and it's not a clear picture that's on there's no reason that they shouldn't have a razor like

00:19:03.640 clear image and accounting of everything in one easy to reference source no there absolutely is

00:19:11.560 a reason and that's because it obfuscates it right because the simplest answer would be that we would 0.72

00:19:16.940 all have like a little brother little sister type thing in in fucking quebec where where every year 0.84

00:19:26.220 we could each cut a check to jacques lemieux for five thousand dollars okay that would be the 0.96

00:19:33.460 simplest answer and that would be it but that would be very stark and very easy to interpret

00:19:39.240 and it would remove all the ambiguity in the gray area the gray area exists because it obfuscates

00:19:45.620 and i gotta push back a little bit james i love you guys but i don't buy into the whole it comes

00:19:53.020 from a good place that's just sexy marketing that's just well we need to make sure that

00:19:58.480 different parts of of canada have roughly equal access to things like health care and education

00:20:04.220 okay there's a difference between stated intentions and outcomes there's a huge difference

00:20:12.700 And that's one thing that has come up when I've been talking with people who are on the

00:20:17.560 pro-Federalist side.

00:20:18.820 They'll say things like, the reason why this exists this way is because, and then they'll

00:20:23.900 say something along those lines, depending on what it is we're talking about.

00:20:28.000 And the point I push back on in that is that it doesn't really matter why you say you're

00:20:35.820 going to do something.

00:20:36.700 The point is to look at the actual net effect of having done it.

00:20:40.300 Okay. 0.57

00:20:40.820 because otherwise the the classic abusive husband i hate you because i love you 0.94

00:20:45.780 oh well i guess you can't get mad at that can you yeah and and not to say that i personally

00:20:53.160 believe it's structured in a way like it's i don't think the foundations of it is truly out

00:20:59.660 of a good place but i believe people support um equalization because they're saying it comes from

00:21:06.840 a good place. So I can understand the relatively uninformed person or somebody who hasn't stress

00:21:14.320 tested these ideas. That's a great way to put it. It's easy for them to feel that it comes from a

00:21:19.600 good place. And I can recognize that when engaging with somebody in this topic, because

00:21:27.020 without unpacking anything, I can't assume malice from the average person. They just see it as

00:21:35.240 we're one big family therefore we have to help yeah thing about it is though is we're not one

00:21:41.480 big family like there's there's some huge fundamental differences between people in

00:21:47.420 the west and and the rest of canada and when i say the west i mean i don't mean the prairie

00:21:54.500 provinces because manitoba for the large part does not fit in with alberta and saskatchewan

00:21:59.440 and i don't mean bc except for the northeast part basically the as much as i hate the rockies 0.91

00:22:07.720 because i'm originally from saskatchewan and i think they should all just be chopped down and

00:22:11.060 and you could grow barley but but they've done something really unique in this country in that

00:22:17.180 they created this big wall where if you wanted to go all the way to that wall there were so many

00:22:24.380 places to get off the train a couple hundred years ago where you'd just be like ah you know what

00:22:28.580 screw it close enough i'm gonna be a fisherman screw it close enough i'm whatever along the way

00:22:36.020 and it's only the foolhardy i can do this bring it on let's make things happen people that that

00:22:47.040 actually went as far as the shadow of the rockies and every time someone got off the train before

00:22:52.780 them they would say this is why no one will remember your name and now you fast forward a

00:22:57.900 couple hundred years because it's just been this that's how it started and then you ended up with

00:23:02.600 this self-selecting cycle where you know if somebody born in this rough area said hey you

00:23:08.580 know what good enough odds are they moved out east and anybody born in sarnia or something like

00:23:15.200 that who said you know what i think i think that i can do better and if i want to work hard enough

00:23:22.300 i can make a great life for me and my family and the place where i'm going to do that is

00:23:27.820 the west and so now you've got you've got all these people self-selecting over successive

00:23:35.160 generations to where we're fundamentally different in the west well in the east

00:23:42.220 they vote for whoever's going to give them the most stuff and in the west we vote for whoever 0.86

00:23:49.860 will fuck the most off and and those two are completely incompatible because one of them 0.97

00:23:56.620 just says just leave me alone and the other one says all your base are belong to us 1.00

00:24:01.840 and if you want to win those guys over you just give them our shit and that's literally what 0.97

00:24:09.060 equalization is that's how ei works that's how um that's how the pensions work literally any 0.98

00:24:16.540 i'm not maybe i shouldn't say literally pretty much any substantive monetary policy that exists

00:24:25.000 across provinces ends up with the money going east not west or in the odd case it's probably

00:24:32.580 something where a trickle will come this way in exchange for a torrent going the other way

00:24:36.380 yeah a lot of Alberta's general like Albertans general mindset and lifestyle it starts to make

00:24:45.080 a lot of sense when you understand that in the late 1800s and early 1900s a bulk of the

00:24:51.440 settling

00:24:54.120 migrating population into Alberta

00:24:56.740 came from the southern US states

00:24:59.020 of cattlemen and ranchers

00:25:01.260 yeah

00:25:02.240 my great grandmother

00:25:05.160 came here from

00:25:06.760 Virginia to Oregon and then

00:25:08.760 up into Canada

00:25:10.500 so I mean

00:25:12.260 it's branched a lot but I'm

00:25:14.740 I don't know one twelve and a half

00:25:16.220 percent

00:25:17.560 basically the

00:25:20.240 the elizabeth warren of of americans start calling you pocahontas yeah

00:25:26.940 so how did you find yourself um getting into this too is like how did you

00:25:32.860 you know what like what did you do before you were known as you know a guy with opinions on

00:25:40.160 alberta independence and you have a weekly show with sean newman like what's how do you find

00:25:44.680 yourself here like did you did you were you like us where you sort of just reached a boiling point 0.54

00:25:48.360 of like shit doesn't make any sense and i need to talk about it with somebody or else i'm gonna go

00:25:53.120 crazy that's basically what the mashup is but that's i would say and it's a good question um 0.91

00:25:59.640 i didn't really think too much or care too much about politics if you go pretty far back and then

00:26:06.200 um a buddy of mine married this lovely lady whose brother was pretty high up in one of the

00:26:14.940 provincial NDP parties and she's very thoroughly on board with everything NDP no matter how little

00:26:23.680 sense it makes like the answer is always just you know the the people will just contort themselves

00:26:28.960 into absolute knots and it was interesting because that was kind of my introduction into politics was

00:26:34.740 her talking about things and me being like I don't know I don't know enough about this to

00:26:43.240 really know anything about it but your arguments are inconsistent and flawed like I'm seeing holes

00:26:50.620 in arguments that I don't I don't understand where the weaknesses are but I can see and then

00:26:56.340 that kind of got me thinking about it a little bit more and then you know as you just kind of start

00:27:01.080 getting involved not getting involved but getting more knowledgeable about this you're curious about

00:27:08.020 it. You start reading about things. And then the 2015 election was kind of what really started

00:27:13.920 getting me a lot more interested in it. And, uh, one of the big things was that John Oliver had

00:27:20.940 done a video with Mike Myers, oddly enough, leading up to the 2015 election. And they were

00:27:26.900 talking about some stuff and I happen to know enough about it to know like, well, that's not

00:27:32.800 true or that's actually

00:27:34.820 true for both of them

00:27:36.280 and and that's kind of

00:27:38.720 only half true and then I'm like

00:27:40.500 wait a second

00:27:42.780 are they lying to

00:27:44.760 me

00:27:45.060 and now

00:27:47.900 come on but it's like I remember

00:27:50.680 having like I could tell you exactly which

00:27:52.600 episode it was where I'm like am I being

00:27:54.780 lied to does the media

00:27:56.660 lie to me and then and then you start

00:27:58.680 getting further and further down

00:28:00.620 into it and the thing that

00:28:02.800 really got me fully on board with separatism i'm a sepi now do you like the slur we have

00:28:08.880 yeah tiny fringe minority tiny fringe minority but there's enough of us there to give us a slur

00:28:14.820 hello if if you're listening to this and you're not on board with it just remember that's our word

00:28:21.760 it's cultural appropriation to use that word yeah but uh but what happened was was as i was looking

00:28:28.680 into more of this stuff i'm like wait the conservatives that are supposed to be representing

00:28:34.840 us here are doing the exact opposite like they'll say this and then they go to ottawa do the exact

00:28:42.200 opposite thing and and then i'm like oh here's another instance and here's another instance

00:28:47.240 and and i would i would attribute the the conservative party of canada for being the

00:28:55.160 wonderful group of individuals who pushed me to the point where i was like this is

00:29:00.640 enough is enough we need to get the hell out of here so jason kenny i was one of the first

00:29:07.500 people you turn into a separatist nothing's creating more separatists than a conservative

00:29:14.820 party that has zero balls in actually fixing canada they're like if they were doing a good

00:29:24.520 draw up right now, the independence movement would not be growing at the rate that it is.

00:29:30.120 It would not be growing at all. One of the first things they did was

00:29:34.500 they, so Bill C-202 passed unanimously in the House. So every party voted unanimously yes for

00:29:44.040 it. Yves-Francois Blanchet put it forth, the leader of the PQ, and it protected the dairy

00:29:50.880 cartel from international trade negotiations. So no matter what somebody wants to do in terms

00:29:57.840 of negotiating with Canada and trade, the dairy cartel is off the table. And so that got passed

00:30:05.280 like a month and a day after the election. So the cheese dick idiot out here who pretends to 1.00

00:30:12.800 actually represent me and my neighbors and my community hadn't even kicked the dust off of 1.00

00:30:19.200 his boots the albertan dust off of his boots before he's already stabbing us in the back by 0.99

00:30:24.580 voting in favor of the fucking quebec dairy cartel yeah just to play devil's advocate you 0.99

00:30:30.140 called him a cheese dick and of course he's gonna support the dairy cartel as a glorified cheese 1.00

00:30:35.900 dick i cannot refute that well played statistically he's got you um the uh if you want to yeah i mean 1.00

00:30:45.660 i i maybe save yourself the trouble and don't do it but if you really want to make yourself mad you

00:30:50.220 can read about the maple cartel as well that quebec has like the maple syrup cartel oh it's

00:30:56.220 it's great it's wonderful and actually you know what it brings up a great point um the maple flag

00:31:03.020 how far do you have to drive alberta hey yeah how far do you have to drive in this country

00:31:08.940 from where we're at right now you got to drive what 2 000 kilometers to find to find

00:31:15.660 the the insignia that is purporting to represent this country

00:31:20.360 aren't there a lot of maples in vermont as well that's the thing it does a better job of

00:31:28.440 representing states than it does western provinces yeah yes yes there is a lot of maple syrup in

00:31:35.000 vermont it's a good point in alberta yeah yeah but about the um the general disillusionment with

00:31:42.880 the um with the conservative party because we you know we've told guests this at you know various

00:31:50.020 points during our our podcasting careers but we we i don't know if you want to call the ignominy of

00:31:56.960 uh of having the distinction of we've both james and i have voted at various points in our lives

00:32:01.540 for every major political party like recovering leftists right recovering leftists yeah yeah so

00:32:09.140 um you know liberal ndp conservative but like the thing that remains consistent is that none of them 0.61

00:32:15.480 give a shit about alberta and you would think that like as a conservative i i always remember 0.80

00:32:19.820 thinking this like isn't it odd even when um alberta went um ndp in in 20 the 2015 election 0.99

00:32:27.620 for rachel notley we were still a federally conservative party a federally conservative

00:32:34.640 province and i never like that never really squared with me i don't really understand why you

00:32:38.580 can, on the one hand, understand that, you know, you, you historically have been wronged by leftist

00:32:44.360 parties in this country and you vote, you know, you'll, you'll never vote liberal again, but you

00:32:48.680 vote in an NDP provincial government. Okay. You're going to say it's the cities. No, no. I'm going to

00:32:55.540 say that it was Alison Redford followed by Jim Prentice and then him calling an election a year

00:33:03.020 early to try and capitalize on the Wild Rose disarray and saying, look in the mirror.

00:33:08.940 And then, and then the thing about it is, is before that election and actually before

00:33:13.880 the debate in that election, the highest the NDP had ever polled provincially was 15%.

00:33:20.560 And so you've got Wild Rose leader, Brian Jean, whose kid had just died.

00:33:27.480 and in the last like in the debate three years before uh danielle smith had kind of got nailed

00:33:35.280 to the wall on social conservative issues and so he wanted to just stay away from them and so he

00:33:40.480 appeared largely feckless and so the conservative strategy if you go back and watch it the obvious

00:33:46.960 conservative strategy was to try and split the i'm pissed off at you and i'm not gonna vote for you

00:33:52.900 vote and so he tried to throw rachel notley who was largely unknown i think they had like five

00:34:01.500 seats at the time tried to field a lot of stuff to her to take away from brian gene but he did

00:34:08.400 too good of a job and she actually showed up really well prepared and brian gene fair enough

00:34:13.260 lots of baggage but he impressed nobody and so then they happened to just the election was right

00:34:20.780 at the crest of their support which went off a cliff right afterwards and that was just enough

00:34:26.500 to get them in for four years it wasn't it wasn't that people suddenly thought the ndp were a good 0.99

00:34:31.920 idea they're not a serious party what they thought was these guys have been sky palacing the shit 0.90

00:34:39.260 out of us for too fucking long they've been thomas lukazic cell phoning us it's just been enough is 1.00

00:34:45.220 enough and i don't care what you call yourselves you're not conservative and you're being dicks 0.98

00:34:51.880 and here's something that here's something else that's different about the east and the west 0.98

00:34:58.560 is that the east doesn't care who wins as long as it's their guy look at every scandal that

00:35:09.000 Justin Trudeau had if that was in like if this was in any way a sensical confederation the the

00:35:18.380 calls for him to not just be thrown out of politics but to be tarred feathered and probably

00:35:25.740 dragged behind some kind of a an old-timey wagon of some kind and and maybe just dipped in a bunch 0.99

00:35:33.300 of chicken shit would have been would have been roaring and instead it was just met with silence 0.95

00:35:39.360 because that's our guy and we don't want their guy we want our guy but when you know Bev Oda 0.99

00:35:47.680 with the $16 orange juice she lost her entire career over $16 orange juice because it was

00:35:54.720 flagrantly disrespecting the taxpayer and the people out west don't stand for that it's it's

00:36:01.320 Again, it's a fundamental difference in what your priorities are and what you not just

00:36:07.420 look for in a leader, but demand in a leader.

00:36:10.680 And the integrity is not there on one side of it.

00:36:17.840 I feel like people are treating independence as a way to, it gives a constitutional convention

00:36:24.520 and an ability to weave into our system more accountability

00:36:29.480 and reduce the ability for any particular person

00:36:33.380 to mess with your life in that degree.

00:36:37.080 So if we look at, like, this is something I will get into

00:36:40.640 with any NDP supporter. 0.64

00:36:42.940 They'll say, well, the UCP is corrupt.

00:36:45.080 And I'm like, well, let's grant you that.

00:36:48.540 I'm going to agree.

00:36:49.580 I'm going to agree. 0.97

00:36:50.260 And I'm going to say the NDP is corrupt. 0.84

00:36:51.880 And I'm going to say that the federal conservatives are corrupt, and I'm going to say that the liberals are corrupt, and I'm going to say that if the Green Party had any possible amount of power, they would be instantly corrupted.

00:37:07.900 But people are smart enough to not waste their money.

00:37:10.420 The Green Party is keeping alcohol sales alive, so they are doing a good job.

00:37:15.240 that's not really you're you're talking about one statistical outlier who's doing a lot of heavy

00:37:21.480 lifting that is an anomaly yeah yeah so i mean she's upset right now because the straight of

00:37:28.920 vermouth is closed that's perfect so given that there's this corruption my question is to anybody

00:37:39.880 who will dive into this kind of topic is why are you supporting a system that is enabling corruption

00:37:47.800 across almost all domains and wouldn't you want to structure a system in a way that prevents that

00:37:55.400 from happening even if you believe the people wearing your the same colored shirt as you aren't

00:38:01.960 aren't corrupt if there's a risk of somebody else get getting into power who doesn't have

00:38:06.680 your interests in mind who will be self-serving isn't that a existential risk to you and your party

00:38:15.080 as well like people aren't seeing that even just from a pure strategy standpoint

00:38:20.040 like it doesn't make sense it it does make sense though because what you're asking them is to do a

00:38:26.120 lot of intellectual heavy lifting and that's a lot more than the average ndp voters capable of

00:38:31.720 to be honest. It's a very good argument, but you can't arrive at that being a good reason

00:38:38.220 without thinking it through. That's my toxic trait, is assuming that the right logic will

00:38:47.780 convince somebody otherwise. Right. But I mean, in all honesty, this country and largely this

00:38:54.980 world has become more and more about knee-jerk support of of random things here and there than

00:39:02.460 they are cool reason and to be totally honest with you that isn't something that's unique on the left

00:39:09.500 but i i feel as though they're definitely a lot less questioning like nobody really asks

00:39:17.960 does this make sense or does this track like to your to your point i would say don't you think

00:39:24.820 it's weird that you just so happened to support the first politician in the entire history of

00:39:30.440 democracy who isn't corrupt like what a great accomplishment i'm so proud of you maybe that's

00:39:38.020 a great maybe you're missing something well it's a perfect point what you say about the um like

00:39:43.880 this isn't just a phenomenon on the left because like what do you make of the pretty large proportion

00:39:50.940 of conservative Albertans

00:39:53.180 who still haven't figured it out

00:39:55.180 that it isn't possible

00:39:57.700 to reform this country anymore.

00:39:59.960 Like, there is a significant contingent

00:40:01.980 of Albertan conservatives

00:40:03.880 who are forever Canadians.

00:40:07.600 And I just, like,

00:40:08.800 it seems to me to be

00:40:10.080 a fundamentally conservative position

00:40:13.080 to want to

00:40:15.000 limit the scope of government,

00:40:17.860 conserve the last remaining vestiges

00:40:20.360 of what being canadian used to be like i just i don't get it because i we know a lot of them and

00:40:24.960 it's like how are you not on board with this man well i i guess it kind of goes back to that whole

00:40:31.660 stated outcome or stated stated reasoning versus actual outcomes thing like i i listened to a

00:40:39.200 podcast a little while ago with uh with this old farmer and like the whole time i'm just like this

00:40:45.960 guy's a beauty right on i'm just loving everything he's saying and then question comes up at the end

00:40:50.240 about what do you think about alberta separation he said well this country was founded under the

00:40:56.400 idea that we were stronger together and i believe in that and here's the thing though is that

00:41:03.020 it's not stronger together you've got you've got one part doing all of this significant heavy

00:41:11.720 lifting and you've got other parts who would be stronger if if you let them if you let them go out

00:41:19.440 on their own and actually make something of themselves if they'll never vote away equalization

00:41:23.920 will vote it away uh it's it's like those turtles that you know if a turtle hatches and you carry it

00:41:31.600 to the ocean rather than letting it walk it'll die you know that that larva moth or the pupa

00:41:38.800 i'm not sure which stage it is i think pupa you know it's got to be able to get out of that cocoon

00:41:43.760 in order to be strong enough to fly afterwards have you guys ever seen a movie called rocky

00:41:49.360 three i don't think i've watched anything of the rocky movies other than the first one to be honest

00:41:55.180 actually i am grossly offended got some homework okay so so here's here's the basic premise of the

00:42:04.660 film is that after all of the fame and fortune that came into rocky after the first two movies

00:42:11.020 he's wearing chinchilla coats he's got a fancy house he's completely lost his roots growing up

00:42:18.400 poor as hell in philadelphia training by beating um beef carcasses in his buddy's butcher shop

00:42:25.680 okay and now he's just he's gotten fat and soft he's lost the eye of the tiger 1.00

00:42:32.000 okay and so then he gets in the ring with mr t and mr t beats him into oblivion i pity the fool 0.98

00:42:39.280 okay and then he figures out he's got to get back to his roots he's got to reconnect 0.80

00:42:44.400 and then he has a big awesome montage okay and right now the chinchilla coat alberta is the 0.99

00:42:52.320 chinchilla coat that nova scotia is wearing and and they're just going to keep getting their asses 0.78

00:42:58.880 kicked until they take it upon themselves or get forced upon themselves to do their own montage 0.96

00:43:06.640 and at that point they can beat mr t but until then they are the foo okay and so we have referred 0.91

00:43:13.680 to eastern canada as uh the fat welfare moms of this country that we that we support with our

00:43:19.260 taxes i mean it's it's not wrong like it's you know someone could listen to that clip and say

00:43:26.320 hey you know what that's kind of a mean thing to say fair enough is it untrue

00:43:31.240 it's not in fact i would say it's probably being a little bit on the nice side

00:43:38.860 there's

00:43:40.640 there's a lot of really

00:43:41.960 there's a lot of really good monosyllabic

00:43:44.560 words you could use to describe

00:43:46.160 the way they are in confederation

00:43:48.340 and the entitlement

00:43:49.640 that they present

00:43:51.240 I mean look at look at natural

00:43:54.200 resources isn't it just the world's

00:43:56.500 biggest coincidence like

00:43:58.260 not not I would say it's probably even

00:44:00.320 a bigger coincidence than that one guy supporting

00:44:02.340 the first non-corrupt politician

00:44:03.680 ever isn't just the world's

00:44:06.320 biggest coincidence that

00:44:08.860 the province of alberta happened to be exactly on the map where all the oil is no it's it's where

00:44:16.300 the proven reserves are because that's where all the exploration has happened the first well that

00:44:20.780 got dug in canada was in sarnia you've got all of the natural gas that michael binion has been

00:44:26.940 trying to get approval for in quebec to get developed that he kept getting stonewalled

00:44:31.580 about isn't that one billion cubic meters basically like whatever it is but but the point

00:44:38.940 is is that there's a shit ton there right you've got you've got new brunswick and nova scotia

00:44:45.300 banning fracking without any basis in modern geology physics reality uh there's anecdotal 0.50

00:44:53.160 stories of when people first landed in nova scotia they could poke the ground with a stick

00:44:57.700 and light the air it came out on fire okay i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure there's some stuff 0.95

00:45:03.740 that you could develop in in such an area if you ever felt inclined to get up in the damn morning

00:45:09.620 yeah yeah and there are people who would love to have those jobs in those areas that are struggling

00:45:17.580 right now so um one principle is that like if you keep a a town or a city or an individual on

00:45:27.240 welfare they are you've essentially put them in a cocoon of their circumstances that they are not

00:45:33.660 rising above so well they can't and so they got to keep it getting protected by the government

00:45:38.720 and bailed out by the government all the time and it so i would say that there's some towns that

00:45:43.900 might need to relocate like maybe living there okay there's there's no natural resources there's

00:45:50.120 nothing to farm there's nothing to grow uh maybe that's a place that we can't really live or if

00:45:55.880 fishing's only for part part of the year like is that really a sustainable like there needs to be

00:46:00.900 something else but if there's oil and gas in these areas i could say that that might breathe life

00:46:08.460 into some of those towns that are struggling right now that would otherwise not be there

00:46:15.120 if not for welfare yeah and you're i i think you're totally right and the thing about it is

00:46:22.020 is you know i'm being a little bit flippant when we're talking about the east but the simple fact

00:46:26.080 of the matter is is that something like a quarter of nova scotia's annual provincial budget is

00:46:33.660 equalization payments yeah like it you know as as much as it's fun to just dunk on them

00:46:40.500 at the end of the day it wouldn't be a good dunk if it wasn't based in reality and the reality of

00:46:49.380 it is is that sure yeah they might say hey you know what there's a lot of people who don't want

00:46:54.460 this fair enough but the people who do keep voting for people who keep giving it to them

00:47:00.920 and that's diametrically opposed to the mindset several thousand kilometers away

00:47:07.780 yeah and there's a um there's a refrain that we keep hearing too from from people who like we

00:47:14.680 we've gone out um we have some signs i have it in the corner here uh we go like to the u of a

00:47:21.580 and we try to engage you know change our mind style conversations you know yeah yeah and and

00:47:27.120 we've heard a few times um and even in our like friend groups or you know acquaintances and stuff

00:47:32.680 where they talk about the notion of being a good neighbor and you know like using your wealth to

00:47:37.860 help help people who have less than you and and i understand like the impulse you know it's a it's a

00:47:43.380 very you know that's a very social democratic info very human very you know i would say probably

00:47:49.740 misapplied from where it should be you know it's a that's an intrapersonal level feeling that

00:47:56.120 somebody is applying on a on a massive national scale that maybe shouldn't be there but james had

00:48:02.140 a great point he brought up with uh with a girl who was um kind of having at you know having at

00:48:07.760 it with us at one of these uh things that we that we did and she was saying she was using the term

00:48:12.980 like being a good neighbor and uh and then james said well is it is it being a good neighbor for

00:48:19.420 the east coast for for the eastern provinces to accept tens of billions of dollars of our

00:48:24.980 equalization money every year and then you go and you know they've got 150 000 barrels of saudi

00:48:30.500 oil coming into the halifax port every day is it is it a good neighbor that you know bc to the

00:48:36.320 to the to the west of us you know constantly fights us and stops us from exporting our product

00:48:41.520 to market is that being a good neighbor like why why is it that we have to be we have to be the

00:48:47.340 good neighbors but everyone else can they can benefit from our wealth but at every turn they

00:48:52.540 can undermine us by purchasing from somebody else at a dirtier you know more morally corrupt way

00:49:00.280 like why why does the burden fall on us to be the good neighbors when everyone who surrounds us

00:49:05.980 just shits on us that that is a really good point and you know we talk about like the carbon

00:49:12.280 footprint of oil you know as far as like which one's dirtier oh this one used more carbon to 0.97

00:49:17.440 be made and that one used less carbon so it's better how about we just start looking at how 0.99

00:49:22.020 many gay people got murdered by that country during that oil production it's a good metric 0.66

00:49:27.600 yeah yeah um hey by by western canadian oil zero gay people were thrown off buildings 0.99

00:49:36.500 during the production of this oil 100 fewer journalists dismembered in the production of

00:49:42.620 this oil exactly exactly yeah you you need new metrics and at least don't buy your oil all of

00:49:53.100 june like start there maybe just baby steps just for the month of june get non-saudi oil and then

00:50:00.860 uh yeah and then go from there how about this how about this no towers were harmed in the making of

00:50:07.880 this oil demonetized skyscraper friendly oil um well and then there's the environmental can't

00:50:21.360 melt steel beams yeah well played i love the layers to this um i was gonna say even from an

00:50:33.440 environmental standpoint they're concerned like about the distribution and transportation of

00:50:40.240 alberta's oil via rail or pipelines or they're like well we couldn't risk sending a pipeline

00:50:48.020 to quebec and right now they're trying to phase it out in any way so they're that's why they're

00:50:54.100 still shipping it but it's going down the st lawrence and that serves how many like how many

00:51:00.260 towns and cities are in st lawrence and like how many waterways does that influence and they're

00:51:05.220 perfectly comfortable with that many tankers in that proximity to cities look at the whales that

00:51:12.540 killed in st lawrence well the good news if they keep it up there won't be enough whales

00:51:19.420 like they'll have no more whale eventually the whale the whale killings will go down to zero yes

00:51:26.380 honestly we just we just need more tankers and this problem is going to take care of itself

00:51:31.660 but but you're you very nearly made a slightly different point in that they're like well we

00:51:36.620 can't have a pipeline coming through here because we need this land and area pristine but it's okay

00:51:43.180 we'll have it go through the congo yeah yeah right right yeah yeah we don't want it in our backyard

00:51:52.620 but senegal can have it yeah yeah well the the did you hear about the um the it's a some people

00:52:00.940 might know this the quebec is like a major plastics manufacturing hub like they do tons

00:52:05.740 of plastics manufacturing in oh dude go to some of the strip clubs in montreal

00:52:12.620 plastic

00:52:17.100 well i say that because there is um there's a company that manufactures in quebec they manufacture

00:52:24.540 plastic drinking straws that they sell to americans they can't sell them to canadians

00:52:30.140 but they still they manufacture them here they emit whatever you know compounds that emits and

00:52:35.580 in its production and they're selling it just just as fun like it's fine to manufacture them 0.97

00:52:40.160 here but we can't consume them here like talk about a fucking joke like this country is 0.97

00:52:45.820 to your point i think to your broader point uh canada has become like the virtue signaling 0.98

00:52:53.400 capital of the world and as we brag about all the you know single-use plastics that we're taking out

00:52:58.820 the ecosystem china opens like 20 more coal mines today you know absolutely like you know it's you 0.88

00:53:06.740 know we got to save the turtles you know think back to all the catherine mckenna uh just soapbox

00:53:13.540 um sermons about how important it is that we ban single-use plastics because we need to 0.93

00:53:18.420 save the turtles how many how much of your garbage in edmonton do you think ends up in a goddamned

00:53:27.380 ocean the the real reason you were saving the turtles i saw a great picture and it's because 0.82

00:53:35.120 a turtle is doing a line off of another turtle with a plastic straw and they're like we've got

00:53:39.820 to save the turtles from the cells and those plastic straws are doing it oh i was just going

00:53:47.380 to say it's the problem one of the big problems with this country is it's so big that you can't

00:53:52.280 apply one size fits all to it and and the plastic straws to save turtles is a perfect example

00:53:59.100 there's like seven places in the world further away from the ocean than where i grew up i don't

00:54:04.140 think that i was materially contributing to the deaths of sea turtles as a child

00:54:11.820 so funny enough you have a lot of this with how much talk on saving the environment saving the

00:54:23.040 climate and the need for everybody to do their share uh it seems like canada is perfectly

00:54:30.940 comfortable importing people who from places with some of the least

00:54:38.580 least sanitary conditions with some of the least concern for the environment who like

00:54:47.780 let it be littering let it be water like waterways that's not what they call it i saw i saw a video

00:54:53.580 clip where a guy was you know he got caught red-handed and yet he was still saying i am not

00:54:59.860 garbaging so well he's literally works but but that's not that's not their word for it no yeah

00:55:07.840 just phrasing it in a different way doesn't solve the problem so if canada was so strict on like if

00:55:15.820 we just wanted the people who with great values to come here and to help us maintain this pristine

00:55:22.880 country of ours wouldn't you be a little bit more selective about who comes in and who immigrates

00:55:29.660 like absolutely throw that idea and and i would say not even just be a little bit more selective

00:55:34.860 but how about just be a little bit selective yeah well that's racist that's why what race what what

00:55:43.340 race i'm just it doesn't i don't care if you're polish german ukrainian english scottish it

00:55:53.980 doesn't matter i treat them all the same any of them

00:56:00.220 no but that's that's like the the fundamental thing is whenever you talk about anything to

00:56:04.140 do with immigration it's all you're being racist okay but i'm not singling anybody out yeah i'm

00:56:11.180 not saying those specific people it's like when people say criticism of naheed nenshi's racism

00:56:16.620 i don't even know what race he is like i can't even i can't even make jokes about it i can't

00:56:22.860 because down either i really want to i think he's indian it doesn't really matter to me the point is

00:56:29.420 is that i can't if i don't know what his race is i can't be racist against him isn't that um

00:56:37.660 what would uh like what would a gender studies major call that maybe like

00:56:41.980 covert racism maybe let's see now he because his race is covert maybe it's equal opportunity

00:56:49.340 racism that you're ready to be racist but you don't know exactly how you're going to be racist

00:56:55.820 yet which which means you care a lot about being accurate which is which is key he is uh he is

00:57:03.420 indian uh gujarati descent first generation canadian who's uh ismail ismaili muslim parents

00:57:11.980 immigrated to canada from tanzania he's tanzanian or anything like that was

00:57:19.260 there's like five different things in there i know so he's a tanzanian indian from the punja

00:57:27.500 like i i gujarati well i think actually the the um if i'm correct and i think i am the

00:57:34.140 The, the Indians who emigrate from Africa, I think they were, uh, they're primarily Muslim

00:57:42.240 Indians who were actually, uh, acquired as historically, they were acquired as slaves

00:57:47.980 from India and then, uh, enslaved in Africa.

00:57:51.760 But that doesn't make sense. 0.80

00:57:54.140 It's only white people that did slavery. 0.56

00:57:56.300 Yeah. 0.52

00:57:57.160 Well, you'd think, hey, you'd think.

00:58:00.320 i feel like maybe everything i feel like some of the things i was told may not be true did you ever

00:58:06.820 see that uh that clip of you know the uh good is it bad friends podcast yeah bobby lee and oh 0.75

00:58:13.280 bobby lee okay i i don't i don't like shitting on other people's podcasts um i i love bobby lee 0.71

00:58:21.560 as a podcast guest he is so funny but i just i can't get behind bad friends i don't know what 0.57

00:58:28.060 it is i just i can't get into it but bobby lee is one of my favorite people to listen to well he

00:58:33.800 he had a him and he has his moments yeah yeah yeah he had a clip where they were talking about 1.00

00:58:39.100 they must have i didn't see the preamble but they were talking about slavery like koreans can't be

00:58:43.840 racist well he was like we never had slaves we never had slaves and then so they look it up

00:58:48.460 and and bobby reads it out loud and he says so korea had the longest unbroken chain of human

00:58:55.340 slavery out of any culture in human history it's like holy christ like when was the last

00:59:01.020 time you heard about korean slavery what do you mean was the last time i heard about korean 0.97

00:59:04.860 slavery how about the north well yeah that's actually um that's actually a communist paradise 0.69

00:59:12.700 i thought that's why all the that's why all the socialists in the universities in the cities

00:59:18.380 emigrate to north korea yeah well i mean you hear the same thing in canada oh the the economy's doing

00:59:24.380 great the economy is doing great and then every once in a while they'll like accidentally nearly

00:59:28.440 admit something when they're like oh the prices of eggs have gone up 384 percent in the past 20

00:59:34.180 minutes here's my here's my favorite like uh foreign investment has increased and then you

00:59:42.320 look at what form it's taking it's them buying up bankrupt canadian companies that are failing

00:59:49.800 in canada so you're like well is that really a marker of a healthy economy that was that was

00:59:57.580 exactly we talked about that exact thing on the mashup maybe about two months ago or something

01:00:01.600 like that and and they're touting it as a win but with every transaction there's two people involved

01:00:06.940 there's one person selling and there's one person buying and so for every person coming in and buying

01:00:13.740 something there's somebody selling it so that they can get the hell out of dodge you're just

01:00:19.220 saying that because you have a fancy business degree now tell me about why uh the canadian

01:00:24.120 dollar is so strong on the world market right now since when did it get strong

01:00:29.820 i'm transitioning back into the uh i heard that once because somebody said it and i'm just going

01:00:39.900 to repeat that that's how it works okay somebody's saying that the canadian dollar is strong i think

01:00:44.280 it's because carney is really standing up to trump well is you know that's that's really the

01:00:49.960 kind of interesting thing is that everybody who's supporting the liberals is because its elbows up

01:00:56.080 and because carney's standing up to trump and you're like okay but like what kind of deal has 0.50

01:01:00.940 he got right now he's on fucking vacation right now in tuscany that he had to clear with the ethics 0.87

01:01:06.500 commissioner because the ceo of brookfield owns some kind of a dacha out there's whatever the 0.95

01:01:13.200 italian equivalent word is it's it's a dacha and meanwhile the negotiations with the u.s are

01:01:22.000 falling apart a year and a half after the election at what point is he going to get 0.99

01:01:26.940 off his scrawny old british ass and actually fucking accomplish something 1.00

01:01:30.440 really really i mean you say that he's standing up to trump okay well what does he have to show 1.00

01:01:38.720 for it well he got a great deal on the gordy howe bridge he did not and he lied about it

01:01:46.080 multiple times well he here's to be fair he had he he had to redirect funds in order to

01:01:54.440 buy out all those condo developers in bc yeah which division of brookfield bought into 15 days

01:02:02.480 before by the way yeah but that's the small print we don't read the small print we don't talk about

01:02:07.700 i think that was actually very big print it's it's just it's it's amazing you're like this

01:02:15.020 dovetails nicely into this idea of like

01:02:17.540 the cities still need a little bit of a culture shift because these are the kinds of kinds of

01:02:24.260 conversations like i have friends and family members that i'm getting pretty good at not

01:02:29.640 navigating these through me declaring opinions like just try to talk over i'm very socratic in

01:02:36.020 way that'll bring these things up but i hear a lot of these little it's more uh these little

01:02:43.300 buzzwords and then if you push too hard they'll get the thought terminating cliches to try to like

01:02:49.380 a slogan that will end a conversation from going any further absolutely and i know change doesn't

01:02:56.660 happen very quickly and i'm i think it's the cities that are still going to vote for the status quo

01:03:03.380 in the October referendum.

01:03:08.200 But I'm wondering, like, from your point of view,

01:03:11.700 what seeds can we plant or what do you think will resonate with people?

01:03:17.520 Like, how should we be approaching some of these contentious issues?

01:03:20.280 Because the facts that you bring up, I imagine, let it be like,

01:03:24.680 what has Carney done?

01:03:25.700 They'll get into a loop and they'll say, like,

01:03:27.820 well, he's not a pedophile, like Trump.

01:03:30.580 Congratulations.

01:03:31.060 like they'll just think at some point i get the fact that that's an accomplishment in the liberal

01:03:35.640 party but come on we got to draw the line somewhere okay um but that that that is a very

01:03:41.500 good question um dune it's the slow blade that kills and i i've got uh i've got two sisters who

01:03:49.300 are absolutely wonderful but on complete opposite ends of the spectrum for me politically and so

01:03:56.400 quite often when something kind of circles around to one of these things

01:04:01.200 i will ask don't you think it's weird that and then dr whatever it is you know to to mike's

01:04:11.140 point there a moment ago don't you think it's weird that the only foreign organization that

01:04:17.520 mark carney can successfully negotiate a deal with is brookfield and then and then you see

01:04:25.600 you know the the wheels start spinning a little bit the the paint chips start coming off whatever

01:04:32.460 it is that you know the you know you look like you're you're gonna maybe slowly kind of crack

01:04:38.300 through that that armor and and i haven't managed it yet but that's that's where you know and james

01:04:45.520 you're exactly right like as soon as you're just like as soon as you just say the liberals are all

01:04:50.880 substance like they're they're all talking no cock well you know they're doing a lot of things

01:04:56.960 and i heard on cbc and you know they immediately push back but if you just say well don't you think

01:05:02.080 it's weird that you know you um used to be able to buy triple the amount of beef in like five

01:05:09.860 five years ago for the same amount of money and yet the official inflation is only two point

01:05:16.700 something percent yeah like don't you think it's weird dot dot dot now the trick is is that you

01:05:22.580 know we're two months away from the referendum don't you think it's weird is probably too soft

01:05:28.720 of a touch to turn anybody around yeah and i think that the thing about it is is that

01:05:36.180 whether you're urban or rural okay well there's lots of rural people who are already on board

01:05:46.280 with this and and to mike's earlier point there's some of them that aren't yet and there's a lot of

01:05:51.480 people in urban settings who aren't on board yet and they don't know it in their brains but they

01:05:57.220 can feel it in their bones and they just haven't made that connection yet that every time they look

01:06:03.500 at something happening in eastern canada it's like this isn't this isn't something that i would be

01:06:09.580 happy with this doesn't represent me this this is not what i feel or believe and i don't think

01:06:16.280 this is good for my family or my community and there's examples every week of stuff like this

01:06:25.520 happening we've actually you know we joke about recurring segments on the mashup we'll do the

01:06:31.760 whatever random thing of the week the floor crosser of the week the the south american

01:06:38.240 beautiful woman who plummets to her death of the week we had like a ring ring of like five weeks

01:06:45.060 in a row where people were plummeting to their death in random increasingly implausible instances

01:06:50.220 and then the last one was actually in japan where a guy fell out of the 15th story window

01:06:55.480 and landed on a woman and he survived but she died oh god which is kind of dark but also

01:07:02.360 hilarious like think about it you're just you're walking down the street whistling away

01:07:06.720 and some dude lands on you and murders you

01:07:09.380 you got to look at the bright side of life it's memorable it's so anyway um but now on this next

01:07:20.100 upcoming episode we're gonna have we're gonna have the same guy on the on the show for the third

01:07:28.320 or fourth week that he's got these most ridiculous mug shots where he's just got this crazy bug-eyed

01:07:33.940 look and he keeps getting arrested for dumb stuff and getting let out on bail and then he gets 0.91

01:07:41.020 arrested again and gets let out on bail and because we talk about things like the justice

01:07:46.500 system being so broken this specific dude is now a weekly segment on the show and maybe at some

01:07:53.500 point we send him back to eritrea where he's from yeah well that's that would be racist so anyway

01:08:00.600 moving on from that uh i did you go ahead one more one more thought on that um you you touched

01:08:08.160 on something though no this is this is not racist um but i have plenty to dig from if we need to go

01:08:15.080 there the um you're kind of touching on a point and it seems like a lot of the people on the left

01:08:24.220 and mike i'm sure you've kind of seen this with family members they are starting to recognize

01:08:30.900 that something's deeply wrong yes that's true and they like things are going downhill and they're

01:08:40.420 get in that sense but their diagnosis is and their conclusions out of that is completely

01:08:46.980 it's co-opted by kind of a more like mainstream narrative and and it's so strange being in this

01:08:55.140 place where the things that we are doing with our podcast and with like independence advocates and

01:09:03.460 we're working hard and we're trying to lay the foundation for this and i hear the rhetoric and

01:09:09.160 they are treating that as the existential threat and part of the problem that got us to this point

01:09:15.560 of why things are so bad and it seems strange for that like it's it's flipped upside down in a sense

01:09:25.760 but to hear these do these two trains of thoughts inverted and complete opposites coexist within

01:09:34.220 within this proximity just it's hard to wrap my mind around so i i think it's the diagnosis and

01:09:43.140 the conclusion that even if things get like worse and worse and people like we need change what they

01:09:50.460 think like the kind of change that they will advocate for is still beholden through like a

01:09:57.260 postmodernist, collectivist, federalist mindset.

01:10:02.860 So that still kind of needs to change, yeah.

01:10:05.700 There is, I just, you know,

01:10:09.520 one of the things that really stands out

01:10:11.200 when you start looking at the arguments from both sides

01:10:13.500 is that one side is speaking to hope and opportunity

01:10:18.960 and a bright, happy way forward.

01:10:22.860 And it's not going to be a Garden of Eden.

01:10:25.980 let's make like it's it's not it's not going to be some magical paradise it's going to have its

01:10:33.760 own new sets of problems it's still going to have to be dealing with baggage left over and we're

01:10:39.500 going to be facing a very embittered former country that is going to go out of its way

01:10:45.420 to try and punish us as much as possible for having the audacity to say that we just don't

01:10:52.520 agree on things and and we've become we've drifted apart uh and and the other side is saying

01:11:02.000 oh you're gonna be nothing if you leave this is gonna be so bad for you you're just you can't

01:11:08.840 leave you can't leave you're not big enough you're not important enough you're not special enough

01:11:12.780 you're not this you're not that and doesn't it seem weird that one side if you knew nothing

01:11:21.380 about the arguments one side is saying i have a vision i have a dream to to quote somebody famous 0.99

01:11:29.620 i have a dream and the other one is saying fuck you you're nothing without us if an alien came to 0.99

01:11:37.880 earth didn't know anything about canada and just saw those two sides of the argument they'd go 1.00

01:11:43.400 those guys are probably dicks yeah well i i have a thought that i've i've explored with a few other 0.72

01:11:51.680 guests i'm curious about your thoughts on okay and it sort of is a uh i guess maybe canada's 0.96

01:11:57.360 formulation are you familiar with like um they talk about this in uh like new zealand and australia

01:12:02.920 and and and the uk like tall poppy syndrome you heard of this like no one wants to be the tall

01:12:08.420 poppy you get mowed down and you want to be on level with everyone else um i i feel like canadians

01:12:13.380 by and large we have um we've sort of internalized our once you know common uh commonly understood

01:12:24.280 thing about being like the polite you know we're just we're very nice and we're polite like we're

01:12:29.380 a nice polite country and i feel like what it's morphed into is this pathological um chronically

01:12:35.800 low expectations for our society and for those around us and and you see it in ways of like

01:12:42.100 this sort of ties back into the the conservative that isn't on board with independence because

01:12:47.420 like you say uh uh you know canada was founded on uh you know we're better together we're stronger

01:12:52.840 together or whatever i have family members like this who are who are like that they're very

01:12:56.820 conservative generally like they're economically conservative they you know they they're farmers

01:13:02.720 or they've been involved in you know in trades and stuff but but they they still show up every

01:13:09.420 day to the Tim Hortons that has that never gets their order right because no one there can speak

01:13:14.440 English and they still they buy you know their grocery bill goes up and up and up every year

01:13:20.020 and they don't say anything because you know they still got enough at the end of the day to

01:13:23.120 you know make their mortgage payment and you know it's yeah well we just have to live a little bit

01:13:27.620 more frugally and these things come and go and it's like man like you need to just like don't

01:13:33.700 you get at what point like at what point are you to say this is I've had enough of this this is no

01:13:39.080 longer the country i grew up in no amount of pretending or or play acting as if nothing has

01:13:45.220 changed around me from the 80s and 90s like this just isn't going to cut it i mean i'm i'm 37 i

01:13:51.260 grew up in the you know in the the late 90s and early 2000s when like life seemed pretty good to

01:13:56.480 me like you know everyone was and i didn't have many responsibilities but stuff was good and we

01:14:01.500 had a we had a coherent uh social structure and and national identity and ever since like the mid

01:14:08.340 2010s you know from pretty much from 2015 onward it feels like every year it's just another bag of

01:14:14.940 gets dropped on us and it's just like well if you say anything about this that means you're a you're

01:14:20.280 a you're a racist or you're this or you're that does this any like does any of that ring true to

01:14:26.380 you you think i'm on to something here chronically low expectations i i think it's it's absolutely 0.62

01:14:31.420 true i remember the first time i said something to somebody who got my order wrong and i wasn't

01:14:36.680 rude about it but for the first probably three decades of my life probably even longer

01:14:43.720 i'd be like okay right and then and then just like oh you know what i can i can actually say

01:14:51.820 something when somebody screwed up i would challenge i would challenge some of those people

01:14:54.820 the next time you're grocery shopping and somebody just diagonally parks their cart in the middle of

01:15:01.240 aisle just keep pushing don't pick up speed don't slow down just continue at your regular pace

01:15:08.440 pushing that cart along in whatever direction it decides to turn off into because you're not

01:15:14.360 the one in the wrong there they are and and as soon as you realize that you can just

01:15:20.200 you can just push back on these things that are wrong you don't need to politely let them continue

01:15:25.880 well you do that and then the next step is that you become some sort of an extremist

01:15:33.200 uh with no intermediaries but uh but seriously like there's there's a lot of people who kind of

01:15:41.360 feel bad about saying this isn't what i asked for this this wasn't the thing on the menu that i

01:15:47.320 wanted and they're just quietly eating it and there's nothing wrong with just mentioning

01:15:56.780 politely that this isn't what you signed up for and maybe we could do it better yeah i think when

01:16:03.460 you lose it by the way exactly what the when you lose the intermediate like pushback this is where

01:16:12.220 you get full blown like rants and like somebody completely losing it because it's bottled up

01:16:18.860 and maybe we have simple things like um let's just take the immigration issue of like okay 0.70

01:16:25.720 if somebody's here is a temporary resident and they commit a permanent crime maybe that should

01:16:31.740 be a permanent deportation like something as simple as that doesn't need any hate behind it

01:16:36.720 doesn't need this it could be somebody from sweden like i don't care where they're from if they're

01:16:41.140 breaking our rules and they're a temporary resident like that's that's pretty low-hanging 0.64

01:16:47.720 fruit and should not be very controversial at all and the more of these like seemingly reasonable 0.93

01:16:54.560 and common sense things that are omitted from our society that people will take advantage of the more

01:17:02.500 you'll have a this resentment reaching a critical mass that it will actually be it will not be

01:17:10.480 pretty whenever that explodes falling down yeah which mike probably hasn't seen because he's only

01:17:18.300 37 and if you haven't seen rocky 3 you probably also haven't seen falling down

01:17:23.020 have you seen falling down mike no sir the it's essentially yeah the citizen vigilante but

01:17:32.580 it's just a guy a guy just gets stuck in traffic and he can't take it anymore

01:17:37.900 and then it just goes from there okay all right uh it's michael douglas robin duvall i like it

01:17:46.540 already oh it's great wait till you find out what's in the briefcase uh i'm gonna watch it

01:17:55.560 you absolutely then i'm gonna watch rocky two and then rocky three um twos mr twos we've had

01:18:01.960 you for damn near an hour 20 here um just to be respectful of your time sir i mean i've enjoyed

01:18:08.780 this immensely we we it's very obvious that we um approach these issues in in a very similar way we

01:18:15.580 have a similar level of um maybe dark humor about it um i'm gonna ask you two things sure uh the

01:18:23.960 first thing is i ask this of all my guests who i who who i believe are uh very intelligent and

01:18:31.580 forward-thinking people. They say if you want to be taken seriously, you've got to make a prediction.

01:18:36.760 So I'd like to ask you to make a prediction on what you think is going to happen in the middle

01:18:40.920 of October here in our referendum. And then I would also like to ask you after that to bring

01:18:47.800 anything up that you were hoping that we would talk about or that maybe we should have touched

01:18:52.660 on or a point that you wanted to make at some point and we forgot and we got onto something

01:18:56.180 else. So that's what I'd like to say. And then I'm going to give the last word to James.

01:18:59.160 okay well james and i talked about getting into the economy a little bit so maybe we're not quite

01:19:06.080 at last last um last words yet if okay if you guys don't mind sticking around for an extra few

01:19:11.720 minutes please yeah yeah but as far as as far as a prediction i'm gonna say that canadians

01:19:21.560 runoff of not sober sound decision making, but flashpoints. And there's going to be something

01:19:35.140 maybe not quite as dramatic as the two-year-old boy washed up in the Mediterranean right before

01:19:40.840 the 2015 election. But there is going to be something like that or something that is going

01:19:47.140 to be shoehorned into something like that right before this election and whichever way it goes

01:19:55.440 is whichever way that election or pardon me referendum is going to go so that's that's my

01:20:02.980 take on it i think it's a lot closer than anybody in the mainstream media is willing to admit

01:20:07.600 do you view it still as a toss-up at this point like could it could it go either way

01:20:13.880 some people I think it absolutely could I think it absolutely could go either way I think that

01:20:18.760 and I don't really like poo-pooing them because they're doing a lot more work than I am but I

01:20:24.620 think that the people who are going out and talking to people have probably done enough

01:20:29.640 preaching to the choir at this point and they need to spread out a little bit as I sit here

01:20:35.780 comfortably at home fully recognizing the um podcast yeah yeah um now as far as what we didn't

01:20:46.460 talk about uh the economy um you know we hear a lot about how if alberta separates not not from

01:20:54.980 reasonable well thought out people but we hear it a lot from people like jason kenney saying that

01:21:00.580 if Alberta separates, it's going to crater the economy. Jeremy Farkas, uh, citing a very poorly

01:21:06.920 done handpicked, uh, study done by a preselected group saying even then that there's like 58%

01:21:15.300 think that it's going to negatively affect the economy. Think about it is, is there's a narrow

01:21:19.520 sliver of the economy that it absolutely will negatively affect. Well, it'll have two negative

01:21:23.620 effects. One of them is that you're going to have a spiteful ex-wife that is the rest of Canada, 1.00

01:21:28.440 And they're going to do everything they can to screw us over. And two, this is the one I was going to go with first, was that the big multinational organization like BlackRock and Brookfield, they're going to automatically add a modifier of a couple percentage points to any prospective project and what kind of an IRR they need to justify moving forward with it.

01:21:54.760 Because some bureaucrat is going to say, okay, political unrest, okay, add 200 points for that, right?

01:22:02.220 And so for that, the big multi-billion dollar companies who do not have anybody's best interest at heart except for themselves are going to be more reticent to invest in Alberta.

01:22:16.800 I wouldn't say that's a bad thing to begin with, but that you could fairly say.

01:22:20.060 But the problem is, is that that creates an arbitrage where anybody who's a small to medium sized investor is going to look at this and they're going to say, what are the potential downsides? Because you're going to no one's going to look at it and say, Alberta is going to be regulating itself more than the rest of Canada. They're not going to say they're going to create more stupid rules. They're not going to say more stupid things. You're going to say, worst case scenario, it stays exactly the same. Just the logo on the door changes.

01:22:50.060 that's it that's the worst case scenario so they're going to look at it and say in fact though

01:22:55.100 it's probably going to be a little bit better so one some random project doesn't matter what

01:22:59.900 that would already pass this the um the stress test before you start talking about separation

01:23:06.700 has now it's going to be good either way but you've also got a big potential upside

01:23:11.980 and any savvy investors are going to look at that and say yes that's absolutely something i would

01:23:17.060 invest in. But to be very clear, that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to say that,

01:23:24.160 oh, investment's going to dry up. And when in actuality, it's just going to be a narrow sliver

01:23:28.240 of it. Because quite often with these claims, you've got a bunch of people making shitty 0.92

01:23:34.220 arguments based on shaky logic to try and scare you rather than convince you intellectually.

01:23:41.900 Like when they say Quebec, oh, well, Quebec's a perfect example, because look at the way

01:23:46.280 that, uh, look at what the referendum did to them in the nineties. You know, they dealt with all

01:23:51.580 kinds of recession issues after that. Well, fucking course they did. What are their major 0.99

01:23:55.480 industries? Places that get bailed out places that have protectionist cartels and fucking 0.99

01:24:01.320 equalization. If you're going to separate from the rest of the place that gives you all of those 0.97

01:24:06.680 things, of course, investment is going to go away. Okay. If, if there's a boat dragging an anchor

01:24:14.340 and the anchor says, I'm going to cut the chain,

01:24:17.980 no one's going to bet on the anchor.

01:24:20.940 But if the boat says, I'm going to cut the chain,

01:24:24.080 people are going to bet on the boat.

01:24:27.040 And it also ignores the main point too,

01:24:28.660 that actually what started driving business away

01:24:31.640 was not related to the referendum,

01:24:35.620 but it was related to the draconian dual language laws

01:24:38.640 that the province imposed on all their businesses.

01:24:41.280 And businesses went, screw that.

01:24:42.660 Quebec based businesses went screw that and that's why the Bank of Montreal is no longer based

01:24:47.460 in Montreal well I mean you're absolutely right you know they they like to say that they have a 0.98

01:24:54.000 better culture and then you know whenever somebody from fucking Quebec talks about Alberta separation 0.97

01:24:59.000 they say well they don't have a culture let's say we absolutely have a culture and it's been 0.99

01:25:03.260 self-selecting for over a century it's people who want to make something of themselves if you go work

01:25:08.360 out here you don't care if somebody's from manitoba or ontario or uganda are you going to

01:25:16.140 show up here work hard have a good attitude and try and try and make this place better than it

01:25:21.840 was before you got here that's all anybody looks for that's all anybody wants and the ironic thing

01:25:26.620 is that in this country that weeds out a lot of people okay and i would say that that is by far 0.98

01:25:33.300 A more distinct and notable culture than one where you literally have to have riboflavin in two languages in the middle of rural Manitoba just to maintain a language that is going to fucking die without its legal and financial support because it kind of just sucks and you sound like you're chewing on a mouthful of gravel and peanut butter. 0.85

01:25:56.940 the my my favorite anecdote of growing up as a kid as a kid with language on both sides you

01:26:09.400 had french side on cereal and english side there's many weeks that said yummy in english

01:26:14.240 and then the french side would say mmm like we're spending all this effort in all these things like

01:26:23.020 It's no wonder this is a bloated mess.

01:26:26.540 Like this is pretty messed up.

01:26:29.600 Yeah.

01:26:30.340 You know, Tim Hoven, we had Tim Hoven on a few months ago

01:26:33.120 and he said-

01:26:34.780 Remind me who that is.

01:26:35.800 He's Hoven Farms.

01:26:38.380 Regenerative rancher in Southside of Red Deer.

01:26:40.760 Okay, the name rings a bell, but I can't place him.

01:26:42.940 Okay.

01:26:43.220 Yeah.

01:26:43.940 But go ahead.

01:26:44.320 Yeah, and he was a town reeve for a while in his area

01:26:47.800 and super smart guy and his sort of-

01:26:53.020 analysis was that for like the average canadian and maybe the average albertan if we want to

01:26:59.100 localize it things just haven't quite gotten bad enough for them like things are things are shitty

01:27:04.860 i i think that's a fair point yeah things haven't gotten bad enough but james brings his point up

01:27:10.860 all the time and and he god bless him in the uh in the youtube comments because i i primarily uh do

01:27:16.700 the shit posting on x and so if you hear you through you know any hard f's or hard r's you're 0.81

01:27:21.820 hearing thrown around by by the account it's always coming from me he's much too classy to 0.99

01:27:26.780 to talk like that but he responds to these guys on on youtube so well and so eloquently and he

01:27:31.820 tells like my one of my favorite retorts that he brings up whenever you get the the really defeatist

01:27:36.940 sort of response of like you know of how hard and how impossible it's going to be and all the risk

01:27:41.180 he's like sure you can talk about you know the theoretical risks of of forming an independent

01:27:47.580 nation like this this is very uh well known throughout history of course it's a risky

01:27:52.460 endeavor to to uh secede from a from a large country know who's talking about the risks there

01:27:59.580 are of remaining in canada on the sinking ship of the the the uh the the poorest performing g7 and

01:28:08.940 g20 nation and pick a category and we're not gonna be able to call ourselves g7 for much longer

01:28:15.340 no no no kidding what about that risk okay i i just want to point something out here you said

01:28:22.380 secede and i would argue that if we pay the mortgage it's our house and we keep the name

01:28:28.540 of canada and tell them they've got to pick a new one east alberta yeah yes but uh like also

01:28:39.980 you know it just that that whole argument about it's going to be difficult this this isn't going

01:28:46.220 to be easy for you literally everything that everybody in western canada has ever built

01:28:52.700 has been against huge headwinds none of it has been easy it's all been difficult and i get the

01:28:59.580 fact that that argument works for people in eastern canada oh there's gonna be a lot of work

01:29:05.340 oh for short air never mind and bye okay but that doesn't that doesn't work out here in fact

01:29:12.220 it has the opposite effect you're like oh it's gonna be hard sweet perfect sweet i don't want

01:29:17.260 to be bored while i'm doing this and again it speaks to the fact that the people making that

01:29:22.300 argument don't fundamentally understand albertans like we're we're on divergent evolution evolutionary

01:29:30.460 paths here and at some point we're gonna have to recognize that we're just not we're not the same

01:29:40.700 anymore yeah and and maybe a closing thought and i'll kind of propose this thought to you is that

01:29:52.060 when talking with some of these people i try to like try to remind them like what qualities

01:29:59.260 like what does it mean to be canadian and some people maybe they give a surface level analogy

01:30:04.620 or we've used kind of the term a maple syrup flavored nationalism before we've kind of it's

01:30:12.060 very like a surface level sense of identity and even those people with that kind of surface level

01:30:18.780 but it's more of a nostalgic view of like they think of what canada was and they've they're

01:30:24.060 holding on to that kind of feeling that may not actually represent the canada today yeah but you

01:30:30.540 can ask a simple question of like if you took in the next year you took five million people from

01:30:38.140 china five million people from india five million people from germany five million people from south

01:30:43.180 america and immigrated them into canada would it feel more canadian or less canadian simple question

01:30:50.380 Like, would that would that be sustainable, like from our social services and like our infrastructure and all the other welfare that we throw? 0.68

01:31:01.620 Like, would we be able to handle that if we if no, then OK, well, maybe there is a optimal amount.

01:31:08.520 Maybe there is something that value wise that it means to be Canadian that we should be protecting, fiercely protecting.

01:31:16.520 and if that's not being done then maybe alberta independence is the way that we preserve the best

01:31:23.040 parts of canada but going forward absolutely absolutely it's um i'm just piecing this into

01:31:32.500 my head as i'm saying it but canada is it's a lot like rap music sure i like rap music

01:31:40.560 but i can't name you a song in the past decade that i've thought was any good

01:31:45.420 you know yeah 20 30 40 years ago it was all bangers loved it loved it it hits you right here

01:31:53.300 but what rap music's become today when i say i like rap music i just like what i

01:32:00.000 think of as rap music when i look fondly on what it used to be

01:32:03.180 yeah that's a good point nostalgias powerful yeah um all we can cut this from the end but

01:32:13.080 there's a uh one of my favorite rap artists is a guy named aesop rock and he's been dropping

01:32:17.780 albums for like 30 years so yeah we still got a couple of them but uh but yeah by and large 0.88

01:32:24.040 it's all dog shit and that actually applies to all pretty much all genres of music right now 0.63

01:32:28.140 it's very very difficult to and and james knew i know we're talking before we hit record about 0.98

01:32:32.680 how we are um we are musicians as well and uh yeah it's been i don't know i don't think it's

01:32:40.180 us being pretentious i think that there is just a general lower uh lowering of quality of uh of a

01:32:46.200 lot of the arts nowadays that's a that's a different discussion but that's a whole other

01:32:50.560 podcast when was the last time you heard a holiday inn when was the last time i mean

01:32:56.420 i get the fact that it was diddy but shake your tail feather

01:33:00.060 yeah nothing nothing produced and released in the last you know decade plus really is gonna

01:33:07.900 no one's going to look at that in 30 years and go like oh what a what a great time the early 2020s

01:33:13.280 was for our Jurassic 5 were the last people to do anything noteworthy in the entire genre

01:33:18.840 so I will I'll see if I can define it in like 30 seconds but what we're seeing is actually the

01:33:27.200 effects of kind of a postmodern like globalist intermingling and kind of mixing of so many

01:33:38.860 cultures and also deconstruction of anything of value that really helps any particular country

01:33:47.360 or group feel a sense of like cohesion yep it's all it's it's all it's like you're just mixing

01:33:55.200 the soup of all these genres, all these people. And what you're left with is just this like

01:33:59.660 gray morphous, like, it's kind of like, it doesn't really have the shape of anything

01:34:03.820 at this point. And I think that ties into just the more of that kind of philosophy of like,

01:34:10.140 oh, we're just one, one globe, one, like one world, like that we shouldn't have any borders.

01:34:15.800 We should just have like, it's this globalist perspective in practice, but more or less just

01:34:22.420 deconstructing the arts in real time i think you're absolutely right but if you're going to

01:34:28.540 talk to people who are on the fence the world globalist doesn't win right yeah we've had this

01:34:35.260 discussion yeah absolutely it's not that it's wrong it's not that it's wrong it's just that

01:34:39.420 that's that's not the introductory class for separatism and yes and so you got to kind of

01:34:46.340 build your base from there and i think that you know fundamentally if you just get them to 0.68

01:34:53.200 look at just look around them be like i don't want to live in a country full of crackheads

01:35:01.120 and i don't want to you know i i want i want a place that i can be proud of

01:35:07.200 and you might say that you're proud of being in canada

01:35:12.120 but that's your lizard brain talking that's the fight or flight part that's not your heart it's

01:35:19.760 not even anywhere close to it and if you if you ruminate on that for a little while you'll probably

01:35:25.460 come to the same conclusion beautiful beautiful uh a thought to close with um beautiful and sad

01:35:34.520 and true and uh and yeah that's boy it it sure is a weird thing to to be where we are right now is

01:35:43.680 you know just amongst us seppies you know yeah i remember being a very proud canadian for for a lot

01:35:49.780 of my life and and it's that is a very strange thing to be in where we are but you know um boy

01:35:56.000 i sure appreciate guys like you twos and the work you do with sean newman uh you guys are uh in a

01:36:02.240 very in a very dark and and uh and aggressive and very uh um divisive time uh you're you're

01:36:11.540 bringing you're bringing good humor and good discussion and and really truly a lot of valuable

01:36:17.220 insights uh into this movement so thank you for what you guys are doing uh do you want to drop

01:36:21.800 maybe where everyone knows who you are but maybe like where you're where you're where you're visible

01:36:26.800 online i'm constantly admit not constantly like the odd time somebody knows who i am i'm like 0.96

01:36:33.840 really like you listen to that you listen to that crap yeah exactly like with your kids

01:36:44.400 uh so twitter at 222 minutes and uh every friday you can find me on the sean newman 0.96

01:36:53.540 podcast where we do the mashup where we just do rapid fire through things that are happening

01:36:59.860 in the week's news it's a great place to just get caught up on everything you might have missed

01:37:04.460 and uh the whole premise behind that was we just said what if we did the news in a way that didn't

01:37:10.800 suck and that was literally how it came from we do election live streams so we got the quebec one

01:37:18.440 coming up and it was the same thing we said what if we did an election coverage that didn't suck 0.94

01:37:23.900 and that's just it's a very simple business model but it's taken us this far i guess

01:37:32.200 well we really appreciate it and and thank you for for spending an hour and a half with us

01:37:38.360 uh i really hope we can do it again maybe uh maybe either leading up to the referendum or

01:37:43.940 maybe just after, maybe we'll, we'll, uh, we'll chat about how, how it's about to go or how it's

01:37:48.460 going or how it went. And, uh, we, we always like seeing you at all these events. So next time

01:37:53.260 we're, we're in your area, we're going to be in Calgary soon, uh, I think, uh, next month and in

01:37:57.100 October. So 11th and 12th, September 11th and 12th for the capitalism morality. Yeah. We'll be

01:38:03.620 filming it, but we're also on, uh, we're on one of the panels as well. Okay. Don't just disappear

01:38:10.120 after this i i've got a book recommendation for you but um thank you guys so much for having me

01:38:15.080 on as far as i'm concerned like this it's something we've been talking about doing for a

01:38:19.880 while and it's a shame that we haven't had a chance to do it yet yeah anytime you guys want

01:38:25.160 the answers are resounding yes awesome perfect thank you man thanks guys yeah cheers

The Critical Compass Podcast - August 23, 2026

Why ＂Stronger Together＂ is a Lie w⧸ 222 Minutes

Episode Stats

Transcript