In this episode of The Western Standard, host Corey Morgan talks with Gabrielle Bauer about her new book, "Blindsight is 2020: A Year in the Life of Alberta's New Premier, Danielle Smith." They also discuss the similarities between the 1993 election and the current election, and why Smith's victory in that election is so similar to the current one.
00:07:25.380That's all I can offer for Premier Smith right now.
00:07:27.660And then, like I said, she's getting advice all over the place
00:07:30.320from all sorts of quarters, but, you know, stick to your plan. Don't let them push you off it
00:07:36.020because you won't win. They just see the weakness. They'll smell the blood in the water
00:07:40.300and they will keep coming after her. All right, let's see what else is going on in the news and
00:07:45.000check in with Dave Naylor, our news editor. Hey, Dave, how's it going? I don't know, Corey. I think
00:07:50.580I'm going to need your help in the next week. I think I'm suffering from PWS. PWS. Pole
00:07:58.740withdrawal syndrome we used to get four or five polls a day who was gonna who was gonna win the
00:08:05.540election and now for two days we've had none i can't i can't deal with it cory i mean where's my
00:08:11.620polls uh anyways thank goodness thank goodness the election's over uh newswise busy morning as
00:08:22.580always uh at the western standard uh leading off the site right now is bad news for the uh
00:08:28.100for the oil patch uh massive norwegian oil company has uh not pulled the plug but has delayed
00:08:36.020the uh massive uh bay du nord project off the coast of newfoundland uh for at least three years
00:08:43.140that's a 16 billion dollar project that is is now on uh corey our education uh columnist uh john
00:08:52.100John Hilton O'Brien has filed a piece on the fact that even though the UCP has won, the parents still need to fight for what's happening in the education system.
00:09:03.540I don't know about you, Corey, but when I was growing up, there was nothing I liked more than a Duke of Hazards episode with the, you know, following the tales of Bo and Luke Duke and their very Daisy Duke short friend, Daisy.
00:09:19.920car chases and whatnot they they were all part of life in the dukes of hazards and there was a real
00:09:25.040life one recently down in georgia which was caught on tape which some driver flew off the back of a
00:09:32.240of a pickup truck and went hundreds of meters or hundreds of feet in the air barrel rolling so
00:09:37.120that's a good fun to check out uh our educational and there's uh nico playing it uh playing it there
00:09:44.720for you now. What else do we have? Our real estate expert, Mike Thomas, has got a piece
00:09:54.600looking at the June 7th Bank of Canada interest rate. Interestingly, the GDP that is higher
00:10:00.820than expected could cause the bank to raise the rate on June 7th. And we've got also video
00:10:07.800of the dramatic incident yesterday involving a Chinese fighter jet, which buzzed right in front
00:10:15.580of an American aircraft. And that's up there for you to see. And coming up in a few minutes,
00:10:21.580Corey, we'll have a story. We'll reveal who becomes Hollywood's oldest dad lately. Which
00:10:27.760Hollywood legend has just become a dad at 83 years old. We'll have that story up in just a
00:10:34.160couple minutes. All right. Well, thank you for the updates, Dave. And we're looking forward to
00:10:40.420the full story on the geriatric breeder there. Yeah. And if he's doing it at 83, you have any
00:10:48.480thoughts of maybe getting back in the baby making game? No, I got neutered back when I was 27 and
00:10:54.400there's no reversing that for me, but maybe some others might want to take up the challenge later
00:10:59.040on there you go all right thanks dave the show that is our news director dave naylor again
00:11:06.480covering everything from the important to the fun and trivial such as uh celebrity child birth and
00:11:14.220uh dukes of hazard style crashes going on but also of course we're covering the election federal
00:11:19.240politics provincial politics like any good large news site this is when i remind everybody get on
00:11:24.660there and take out a subscription that's how we stay independent that's how we pay the bills that's
00:11:28.660how, again, most important of all, we aren't beholden to the government for a nickel. We do
00:11:33.280not take any tax dollars. And that's thanks to you guys who have subscribed. $9.99 a month,
00:11:40.040$99 a year. You get full access, get beyond the paywall and see all of those news stories as
00:11:46.720they come out. But we've got a large news crew across the country here putting stuff out. I mean,
00:11:51.300it's one of the things that came out recently, you know, where, or as we saw during the election,
00:11:57.280And Calgary has next to nothing left with Canada, the Calgary Sun and the Calgary Herald for newspapers.
00:19:21.560How important is it to the society for children to go to school?
00:19:25.080You know, there are no formulas to tell us when to close schools and when not to.
00:19:30.120It's always going to be a value judgment.
00:19:31.900I mean, data can inform that value judgment, but it's never just a question of the science,
00:19:37.020so to speak, no matter how good the science is.
00:19:39.840So, and yes, as far as the political divide, and that's another issue that I address in
00:19:44.460the book, you know, about this ridiculous left-right thing, because traditionally the
00:19:49.120left has really paid attention to um the working class and the struggles and the need to earn a
00:19:56.240living and a dignified living and all that stuff and that completely went out the window and um
00:20:01.920there are so many people like myself that i've met through all this that came from perhaps a more
00:20:09.120left-leaning um background and and just got thoroughly disillusioned with the left over
00:20:17.600the past three years three years and and now find ourselves politically homeless you know i mean we
00:20:24.480we've come to appreciate some things from the right but we still are kind of in this no man's
00:20:28.400land and and we disrupted socially disrupted an entire generation at some of their most formative
00:20:34.640periods i mean that the fear and and the division and some of the things imprinted upon children
00:20:40.560when the schools were shut down and so much fear was being spread around and even when the numbers
00:20:44.720were coming in. I can understand some panic in the early part of a crisis. Okay. We don't know
00:20:49.060how this is going to move. We don't know who it's going to hurt. We really don't want to act and see
00:20:52.900if we can't get under control. But I mean, after a year, we had a pretty good idea that thankfully
00:20:57.420children were virtually immune from harm from this virus. But even then we couldn't get them
00:21:03.740back into the schools. We had hazard tape going around playgrounds. We wouldn't let them get
00:21:08.080outdoors and socialize and that's going to affect them for the rest of their lives.
00:21:12.860yes and then and to add to that all the guilt that we lay on them that was another thing that just
00:21:17.980really disturbed me from the start is this idea of telling children well don't do xyz or else you
00:21:24.060might kill grandma well no i mean if you inadvertently transmit a virus to someone
00:21:29.760you're not killing anyone you know of course we try to be careful and we don't do these things
00:21:34.300on purpose but humans and viruses have coexisted since the beginning of time you cannot make a
00:21:40.560child feel guilty for inadvertently doing something that is just biology you know so i found that
00:21:47.920outrageous and i think that really affected a lot of children and i'm still hearing about it today
00:21:54.160where they just you know oh my god if i take off my mask who am i going to kill you know it's just
00:21:58.320just crazy stuff um it really was like the world it's the title of one book that i quote in my
00:22:04.320own book the year the world went mad by an epidemiologist a mainstream epidemiologist
00:22:10.000and that is in fact what happened the world went mad i believe for three years without doubt and
00:22:15.040rationality went out the window and so many things that we can't take back you know we had family
00:22:20.160members who might be passing away of something that is clearly terminal nothing is going to save
00:22:24.400them the most important thing in the last period of their lives is to try and see some loved ones
00:22:29.280one more time before they go and we kept loved ones out who cares if you're going to give them
00:22:34.400an infection of covid when they're going to die of cancer in a week they just
00:22:37.600exactly somebody's hand one more time and exactly that it just amazed me that that people lost sight
00:22:44.560of that you know and that is a theme that i return to a lot in the book you know what is
00:22:48.720what are we here for you know and what is um what do we want in the last moments of our lives do we
00:22:54.240want to be you know protected from humanity or do we want to reach out and and sort of look over our
00:23:02.160lives and think and connect and make memories you know it just it was such a monolithic response
00:23:09.840you know there's these epidemiologists with with their hammer is just looking for this one nail
00:23:15.040and that is you know probably the central theme in the book is that this is not just an
00:23:21.520epidemiological problem it's a human problem that has mental health dimensions social dimensions
00:23:26.480spiritual philosophical dimensions and the response just swept all that aside which really went
00:23:34.000against all previous pandemic guidance you know and that's why i enlist even the the sort of the
00:23:40.480thoughts of a comedian some musicians um several novelists i found that novelists often had the
00:23:47.120deepest insights about the pandemic you know obviously they can't advise us on virology or
00:23:53.200transmission patterns but they can tell us a lot about sort of the philosophy of of managing a
00:24:00.080pandemic and what needs to be done and what shouldn't be done well and these things matter
00:24:04.880i mean the distrust in the entire system and authority in general i mean we were ill used or
00:24:11.760a lot of us certainly feel we were and if an emergency comes down the road i imagine there's
00:24:17.120always another one coming there's going to be a lot of people resisting possibly perhaps resisting
00:24:21.680on the wrong side but they've just lost so much trust in the authorities and the establishment
00:24:25.840that they won't listen to them when when the time comes that they probably should
00:24:30.080well that's right you know and and i didn't see any sense of restraint it was always you know
00:24:36.800great overreach um i didn't see any sense of restraint oh well things are looking better
00:24:41.760you know let's pull back now let's talk let's bring in some expertise from other areas um
00:24:46.480um and of course we all know you know the whole the push the insane push toward vaccines is the
00:24:53.680only solution now I'm vaccinated myself I'm boosted like I personally didn't have an issue
00:24:59.200with the vaccines I worried about the vaccines as little as I worried about the virus which
00:25:03.760might seem strange to some people but you know it's how I'm built so it wasn't an issue for me
00:25:08.080personally but as the months went on in 2021 2022 and I just saw how insane the vax wars became a
00:25:16.420us remember that cover spread on the toronto star um with quotes from the people who wanted you know
00:25:22.580the anti-vaxxers to die and go to hell and wanted their children to die i mean like what is this
00:25:27.700that just seemed far far more harmful to me than any virus you know and one thing that i guess i
00:25:32.420take pride in is that you know although i got vaccinated myself i i resolved very early on
00:25:39.460that i was never going to question or shame anyone for their decision because i trust
00:25:45.700that my friends who decided not to get vaxxed have good reasons for it and so i never asked them i
00:25:52.020never made socializing contingent on it and it became also clear very soon that the vaccine was
00:25:58.100not stopping transmission which really removed any ethical justification for the mandates
00:26:04.900um so i just didn't get into any of that you know so many of my friends are you vaccinated
00:26:09.620are you not you know and i remember meeting a friend who was not vaccinated and um we were
00:26:16.660walking outside and she burst out crying in the middle of our walk i described this episode in
00:26:21.540the book and she she just said she was so afraid of meeting me because she thought maybe that i
00:26:25.700wouldn't want to hang out with her once i found out she wasn't back we were outside walking you
00:26:29.300know i just thought wow yeah and then another aspect that turned into almost a bizarre measure
00:26:37.140of I think two degrees virtue signaling maybe began with some medical rationale but was masking
00:26:42.660I think part of it's because you wear a mask you're showing your visible effort that you're
00:26:46.900trying to stop this despite the fact that it was showing that it wasn't doing a heck of a lot to
00:26:52.460stop anything but it was annoying the heck out of people it was dividing people and again it just
00:26:57.560came down to I think a symbolic thing of uh of just showing authority and pushing down on people
00:27:03.460Absolutely. And as you say, virtue signaling, and I have to admit, I have a little bit of an allergy to that, you know, the holier than thou, look at me, I'm a good person, you know, and that was so much a part of this. So I've written quite a lot about masks, like, you know, if anyone looks online, they'll find a lot of my articles about masks.
00:27:21.320um because ultimately it my most recent one of my most recent ones was it's it's really not
00:27:27.560even so much about the data you know you go on twitter and you're gonna see these endless
00:27:32.840arguments masks work no they don't yes they do no they don't yes they do no they don't and
00:27:36.760both sides just fling data at each other and stats and studies and all that underlying all this i
00:27:43.000firmly believe and have from the start is really a difference in world view you know and the side
00:27:50.680that just believes that protection from a certain threat from a biological threat trumps everything
00:27:59.000else in life that side is going to justify masking they're going to interpret a five percent
00:28:04.840reduction as well it's worth it even if it's a one percent reduction whatever it takes the side
00:28:09.960that sees humanity in what i call a more holistic way and sees safety from a biological hazard is
00:28:18.280only one dimension and who also appreciates human connection and um in that holistic way
00:28:27.800is is going to resist the idea of a perma-masked society and so that's why i've always believed
00:28:35.640that there are what i call data agnostic arguments behind all this you know there's just two sides
00:28:41.320that see the world a little differently and that want a different kind of world and my book sort
00:28:46.600of argues for side b you know this is the kind of world we want and this is why you know yeah
00:28:53.000and in the battles unfortunately you're still going on but i mean a part of what we can hope
00:28:56.440for the most we can hope for is that we learn from it and correct some of our past actions the next
00:29:00.680time we hit a challenge uh so i mean that's part of i guess what you kind of go through and come
00:29:05.240towards in the book we've kind of run out of time but where then i i see the brownstone institute
00:29:09.880you have plenty of columns there where can people find copies of blindside is 2020 along with with
00:29:14.760your other boards um well you can always go on my website gabriellebauer.com and all the information
00:29:21.880is there blindside is 2020 i mean brownstone institute is a non-profit so the book is
00:29:28.040available through all amazon stores on lulu as well um so it's very easy to find you just google
00:29:34.840the book google my name you can find ways to order the book if anyone speaks spanish it has
00:29:41.720also been published in spanish by a madrid publisher so all that's uh available on my
00:29:46.520website and just by googling my name well excellent well thank you for writing that
00:29:50.840we really need to examine what we've done to ourselves and and try to do better in the future
00:29:55.640and this this book's an important part of that and thank you for coming on today to to share part of
00:30:00.200that uh with us uh well i thank you all right well i hope we get the chance to talk again soon i'm
00:30:06.200I'm certain there'll be more to discuss.
00:30:10.660So that was Gabrielle Bauer and, or Bauer, I should say.
00:30:14.020I'm terrible with the reading on there.
00:30:16.140And the book again is hindsight or blindsight is 2020.
00:30:20.760And again, yes, it can be found at brownstone.org.
00:30:24.280There's connections, Amazon, all over.
00:30:27.020We really need critical discussion of what happened.
00:30:31.660We need to look in that rear view mirror and scratch our heads.
00:30:35.360and hopefully, you know, some people are letting some of those shields down a little bit. You know,
00:30:40.780we've got to watch it too. What I've hated the most, what I've despised seeing was the social
00:30:45.980division, the people who got so upset and fought and haven't talked with each other since. Well,
00:30:52.280it doesn't matter if the other person wanted you to mask or vaccinate. If you can get over it
00:30:58.840and start talking again, it's worth it. Okay. Let it get behind us. We can discuss the other
00:31:03.600things. We could fight about other stuff later, but seeing lasting damage, seeing family split,
00:31:07.680seeing friendships lost, social circles broken. You can't measure these things. And that's part
00:31:13.080of what was important with this book, with talking to artists, comedians, people though,
00:31:17.640who look, observe the social aspects of us, because you can't clinically measure social
00:31:23.740damage. There's no easy way to do that. So you can't get a list and see just what happened
00:31:30.760to that family over there or that sports team or those friends from school. But there was damage
00:31:37.420a lot and with so little benefit. And that's, I think, a lot of what was lost in this whole thing
00:31:43.680too. Gabrielle kind of covered a little of that at the end, talking about, you know, if the masks
00:31:49.080helped with 1% or 5%, somebody could come up with some data to say it helps. Okay, fine, fair enough
00:31:54.820if you're reducing it a little. But everything comes with a cost. And when it comes to cost
00:31:59.320benefit analysis, we threw the cost part out the window. There is a cost to wearing a mask. There's
00:32:04.980the social aspect. I mean, some of it's just somebody saying, I don't want it on my face.
00:32:09.620Well, you have to respect a little bit of that. That's important. I myself, and as my wife will
00:32:14.140remind folks, I'm supposed to have hearing aids. I don't have good hearing. I've really, during the
00:32:19.180pandemic, discovered just how much I come to rely on seeing a person's lips move when they speak to
00:32:23.680me. And when they're behind a mask, I'm asking them to speak up a lot. Now, imagine somebody who
00:32:28.180was fully hearing impaired. What was that three years like for them? For what benefit? To protect
00:32:33.400them from a 1% or 5%, you know, a little less of catching, again, a virus which was definitely
00:32:39.760real and definitely dangerous, but to most people, not so much that perhaps it was worth the cost of
00:32:46.220imposing the masks. And the other part that was thrown out was any concept of bodily autonomy
00:32:53.560or individual choice. You have to respect somebody else's choice. Even if you disagree with it,
00:32:59.260you can even yell at them to disagree, but don't have the state step down and get on them. People
00:33:04.020got on my case. I remember that during the show and it's bad on both sides. I've never hesitated
00:33:09.060to point out that I got vaccinated twice as well, but I've always supported choice. And yes, I don't
00:33:16.020see coercion as choice because yeah, that's what people say. Well, you never were forced to. Yeah,
00:33:21.480No, as long as you're willing to lose your job, lose your ability to travel, lose your ability to go to a restaurant, you lose your ability to be on sporting teams, have post-secondary education, it's your choice.
00:33:33.160That's not a realistic choice for a lot of people.
00:33:35.820And when we talk about bodily autonomy, and I'll throw in the hand grenade when it comes to it, if it's a choice that really, why can't an employer, say, who has deep-seated feelings about abortion say,
00:33:48.340well, you know what? I want to have access to the medical records of my employees and any who've
00:33:52.240participated in abortion, I want the right to fire them. It was a choice and there's consequences,0.90
00:33:55.860right? Choices have consequences. Now that employer would be brought up in front of a
00:34:00.340human rights commission so fast your head would spin if they pulled that. I don't want to see
00:34:07.840something like that, of course, but that's what I'm talking about. That whole principle is it's
00:34:13.060very personal. Somebody who strongly, strongly feels that they should not be vaccinated as none0.96
00:34:18.140of the employer's business, particularly once it was clear that it didn't stop transmission.
00:34:22.320There was no more moral argument anymore. He wasn't going to make co-workers sick by not being
00:34:26.600vaccinated, wasn't putting anybody at risk. Why do you still have the gun to that person's head?
00:34:31.360And there's still some places doing that. It's absurd. It's wrong. And I know people are almost
00:34:36.040sick of hearing of it. It was a horrible period of time for everybody. And we don't want to talk
00:34:40.800about it. We can't forget about it. We can't stop talking about it. Because as I said, there's going
00:34:46.360to be another crisis. There always is. So all we can do is hope that we do better in the next one.
00:34:51.740So let's learn from the last one. What did we do wrong? Let's not repeat those mistakes. We can
00:34:56.820make a whole bunch of new mistakes when the next crisis comes. But we've got to study these things
00:35:01.840and we can't let them go. All right, I'm going to move on to some other news items to cover some
00:35:07.060things. As I said, I can only handle so much COVID talk after so many years. It's so important,
00:35:11.260but I can only take on so much per session. Let's sort of lighten things up. But an interesting
00:35:16.960when it comes to individual choice, this ties in. We had a plebiscite that was held during the
00:35:23.100Alberta election down in Southern Alberta in the town of Cardston. Now people not familiar with
00:35:28.260Alberta, we have a very strong Mormon population in a lot of those Southern towns, Cardston,
00:35:33.840McGrath, Raymond, predominantly Mormon individuals living down there. Cardston has not allowed1.00
00:35:40.780liquor sales for over a hundred years in that town. So they finally, yeah, you can't get a
00:35:47.500drink anywhere. You can't go to a bar. You couldn't get a, uh, uh, go to a liquor store
00:35:52.720because they could use the ability of, uh, you know, local business licenses. So booze wasn't
00:35:57.460banned, but you had to go elsewhere to get it. You couldn't get anywhere. And, uh, it was still
00:36:01.840close. Uh, uh, 49, 491 people voted, uh, 53% of them to say, yes, we should allow some liquor
00:36:08.980sales to 441 who voted no. We'll see. It depends on who's on the town council and whether they'll
00:36:14.320drag their feet and still allowing and giving licenses. But this again comes down to why,
00:36:20.120guys? Why? It's a legal product. If you're not into it, your faith says you shouldn't drink it,
00:36:25.480so on. Then don't. But don't use the arm of the law, the state, to stop other people from having
00:36:34.000that choice. It's ridiculous. And even to this day, it gets too far. I mean, you know, go door
00:36:41.940to door. We know the Latter-day Saints certainly have no shyness about that. Try to create converts
00:36:48.300and get people to choose not to drink. I'm not one who's saying that, you know, excess booze use
00:36:54.340and then liquor is a good idea. I've had my challenges with alcohol. I haven't had a drink
00:36:58.420in years, but it's not good for everybody, that's for sure. But I don't begrudge somebody else
00:37:04.120from responsibly enjoying it. If you can go out and enjoy a drink or a few, or even, you know,
00:37:09.560go on a bender now and then have some fun with it, go to town responsibly. It's not for me,
00:37:14.240that's all. But we as a society, we've got to get better at that, don't we? We've got to get better
00:37:19.980being able to say, I'm not into this. This other person's into this. I just won't do it with them.
00:37:26.580I'm okay with it, though. I don't have to stop them. I don't have to intervene on them. It gets
00:37:30.440back to the libertarian principles. If it's not hurting somebody else, stay out of
00:37:34.580it, particularly the state, particularly
00:37:38.800the state. Now, some people, and fair enough, I'm going to go on one
00:37:42.600of my sidetrackings, because that's what I do. When we talk about
00:43:36.820And it certainly gave me an impression of just how powerful that stuff is because, yeah, you know, the little bit injected into me and I barely remembered anything.
00:43:44.880And they're wheeling me out of the room a little more humbled and a little tender in the backside, but no worse for wear.
00:43:54.920Let's turn the page on to something quite different and talk to Jim Boosicum of Marketplace Commodities and get some updates on things.
00:44:05.340we're starting to see a drought starting to intensify and people are starting to get
00:44:09.380concerned. Before the last time I talked to Jim, Jim, there you are, you were saying, you know,
00:44:14.760producers shouldn't be sweating the weather patterns quite yet, but now it's a, is it
00:44:18.840starting to entrench a bit? Yeah. So we're roughly about one month into the North America growing
00:44:24.660season. That's both here in Western Canada and most of the United States. So while some areas
00:44:32.520have been getting more or less regular precipitation we've also seen areas like
00:44:38.680southern alberta eastern side of alberta um you know actually become drier this conditions when
00:44:46.600they were planting the crops was good they had you know plenty of moisture to germinate the crops but
00:44:53.080now that those crops are growing they require more moisture to mature properly to produce the seeds
00:45:01.080and um yeah we're starting to hear some rumbles about uh you know production issues if this
00:45:08.920weather keeps up the way it is so it's very common i mean we do go through most growing seasons where
00:45:16.200it's there's always imperfections there's always issues and these things affect the markets so
00:45:23.160So what we have seen, though, is that we had really high prices in 21, 22, and even the start of 23, and these markets are actually continuing to go down.
00:45:36.640So one might ask, well, what's going on?
00:45:39.260Like usually if you have a drought situation and you have potential production issues, you should actually see prices start to react to that and go up.
00:45:48.380Well, I think the issue is today it's still too localized.
00:45:53.160The trade, as you might want to call it, or those that are speculating on the markets are saying, look, we're not we're not buying it yet.
00:46:01.100It's still too small of a drought. So it depends what happens for sure as we go into the next two weeks.
00:46:08.920By the middle of June, it'll it'll set some ground as to where it's going to be.
00:46:14.400Yeah. So, I mean, a producer, of course, can't control the weather.
00:46:17.180but but i guess watching those trends can really impact how a producer uh what they're going to
00:46:21.740going to produce or plan for seed or uh i guess in finances yeah so i i think what a producer
00:46:29.180needs to do in this situation is uh understand that there's two markets out there so the futures
00:46:35.980market is more forward thinking it sees the overall whole market not just your localized
00:46:43.580area or even one province it sees basically all of western canada it really sees the whole world
00:46:49.420and at any given time when that market is open whatever the bias is of that moment that is priced
00:46:56.140into the market whereas in the cash markets where we're buying from a farmer selling to a feedlot as
00:47:02.380a just the easiest example you may have a bias on that market but i think we tend to forget that