Aristotle Foundation Columnist Mark Mielke joins the show to talk about a recent column they put out about organized labour and its grip on Canadian public services. He also talks about the recent strike in Calgary, Alberta, and the government's response to it.
00:02:00.000Good day. Welcome to the Corey Morgan Show.
00:02:05.020Coming live from Calgary, the land of the unwashed due to lack of water, at least those who have chosen to follow the mandates and just shorten their showers and only flush on the occasional pinch.
00:02:17.740Well, Calgary just isn't smelling very good right now.
00:02:20.140But hey, only maybe four weeks to go and they'll get that water line fixed.
00:02:24.400Nobody can move faster than government and fixing something up, eh?
00:02:28.120Well, lots of other stuff to cover today anyways, besides the situation in Calgary.
00:02:33.300Boy, I really appreciate my water well down in Prentice these days, though.
00:02:36.520I've got a guest, Mark Mielke, the Aristotle Foundation coming on in a little bit.
00:02:40.300We're going to talk about a column they put out recently.
00:02:42.660And, yes, lots of news and rants and things going on.
00:02:46.120Make sure you use that comment screen, guys, for the folks who are here for the live broadcast.
00:05:33.500Public service unions have been much too powerful for far too long.
00:05:36.900Governments capitulate to union demands with a little hesitation.
00:05:40.580And as if that wasn't bad enough, C-58 will now empower those unions to hold private companies in fields like trucking, media, telecommunications hostage as well.
00:05:49.840Even pipeline construction is going to be subject to a ban on replacement workers if the pipeline crosses a provincial border.
00:05:56.240I mean, look how expensive the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion was.
00:05:59.620And think of how bad it's going to be now that unions are truly going to run the show.
00:06:03.180So, organized labor doesn't just harm us through the skyrocketing compensation demands and the chronic labor actions and the protection of lazy workers.
00:06:11.240It actively fights against the pursuit of efficiency and changes.
00:06:22.320They're just overpaid flyer delivery boys.
00:06:24.280The Crown Corporation began moving towards centralized mailbox systems until the Postal Union managed to convince Trudeau to end this important evolution in delivery.
00:06:34.160Liberals had an election approaching and they were afraid of the Postal Union.
00:06:37.440So, they bought their support with a promise to maintain obsolete home delivery.
00:06:41.340Now, Canada Post is burdening taxpayers as a chronic money loser.
00:06:46.240Last year, they lost $740 million just in one year.
00:06:50.580Now, while the union control of the postal system is an expense of annoyance, it becomes even more dangerous as unions fight reforms and efficiency in fields such as health care.
00:06:59.820The Canadian health care system is collapsing in every province, every province, under every government of every political stripe.
00:07:05.980The rigid monopoly system has created a monster that costs more every year while the waiting lists for procedures get longer and longer.
00:07:12.340The system itself needs reform, but unions act to fight every effort to change the status quo and they fight it tooth and nail.
00:07:18.600Even the outsourcing of something as simple as laundry services suddenly becomes a hill for unions to die upon and governments back away in fear from pursuing even those minor reforms.
00:07:27.620Meanwhile, people are literally dying while waiting for treatment.
00:07:30.980Unions are there for the unions, not the patients, despite what they claim.
00:07:34.520Teachers unions, they regularly demonstrate where union priorities really are as well, despite their claims to be in there for the students.
00:07:40.440They like to cloak themselves as professional associations and purport to be acting in the interest of the students.
00:07:46.140Somehow the interest of the students always translates into more compensation for teachers, though, with fewer days worked.
00:07:51.160The teachers unions dig deeply into social activism as well and bring their woke ideals into the classroom while fighting against any form of standardized testing to assess whether they're actually effectively teaching children.
00:08:02.000They say every child learns differently, yet they vigorously oppose diversity learning through opposing charter or alternative schools.
00:08:10.140The social activism within unions has really come to a head during the Israel-Hamas conflict.
00:08:15.340QP Ontario leader Fred Hahn's vile demonstrations of anti-Semitism, oh, he hates Jews, have horrified Canadians since the conflict began,
00:08:23.100as he coaxes his union members to actively take part in anti-Israel protests.
00:08:27.100No matter where one lands on that issue, it should be asked why is one of the largest unions in Canada taking any role in that conflict on any side?
00:08:34.100What has it got to do with Canadian worker rights?
00:08:36.780Nobody will ask those questions, however.
00:08:39.140Even Polyev's Conservatives have tightly gagged themselves when it comes to dealing with unions.
00:08:43.540Organized labour is spreading like an infection, while callow politicians purposely look the other way.
00:08:49.280Canada should be looking at right-to-work legislation rather than banning replacement workers in private industries.
00:08:54.320Instead, we see unanimous consent on legislation that's handcuffing industries.
00:08:59.000Sorry, kids, the economy's going down and things are going to get much worse before they get better.
00:09:04.020Either way, yes, I will call out the Conservatives when they do things wrong just as quickly as I'll call out the Liberals.
00:09:08.980And guys, they should have at least spoken up on that bill before it went through.
00:09:12.860All right, let's see what else is going on out there and check in with our news editor, Dave Dealer.
00:10:11.020Anyways, what do we got on the website this morning?
00:10:15.520We've got a Regina doctor who is now being suspended for a month because he gave one of his patients ivermectin to treat him when he was suffering from COVID-19.
00:10:25.800And as we know, the medical societies have said that is a no-no.
00:10:31.960We've got a whole bunch of Toronto schools introducing a new policy for 10-year-olds when they're talking about reproductive health.
00:10:39.660They've removed the phrases men's and women's.
00:10:43.320And it's just, you know, people with a penis and people with a uterus.
00:10:48.660There's no reference to men, women whatsoever involved in it.
00:10:52.520So, if you've got a flight booked on WestJet in the next little while, you might want to double check that it's going ahead.
00:10:59.500Today, WestJet canceled a whole bunch of flights because of a looming strike by mechanics and other maintenance workers.
00:11:06.580And I think, Corey, if there's one industry that you really don't want replacement workers in, it's probably aircraft mechanics.
00:11:13.860Some areas are replaced in others, yeah.
00:11:16.640Yeah, you kind of need the top people.
00:11:19.140Well, the anti-oil wackos sort of crossed the border or crossed the line of decency again today when they attacked Stonehenge on the eve of summer solstice.
00:11:30.140When Druids are about to go, they attacked it and spray-painted it, or not spray-painted it, but covered it with some sort of red fire extinguisher discharge.
00:11:44.760And we had a nice exclusive this morning from our Sean Polser.
00:11:49.740Calgary's first municipal election slate is going to kick off with an event tonight.
00:11:56.940If you remember, the UCP Alberta government changed the rules to allow party slates to run in municipal elections.
00:12:06.820And local conservatives have got together and are taking a run at the sort of the union-backed city council that Calgary is suffering through right now.
00:12:28.920They still think they're going to win it all.
00:12:30.180Well, it'll be over soon, one way or another.
00:12:35.400Well, right on, I'll let you get back to getting that news together, and I'll make sure to send Jane a heads up that you'll be showing up with a towel a little later this evening.
00:12:46.920And this one, I'd like to remind everybody the reason Dave and Jen and Jonathan and all the rest out there are writing all these stories, getting all that content, is because you guys have been subscribed.
00:16:51.840New evils or old evils, rather, and old ills always show up in new ways and possibly often in ways you wouldn't expect, right?
00:16:58.980So, Chong Nguyen and I wrote a column recently on this notion of reverse racism and how this came about, where when you say you're colorblind, now you're considered to be part of the problem.
00:17:12.320And the most famous proponent of this view is Ibrahim X.
00:17:15.620Kennedy out of the United States, a quasi-scholar who has promoted this line of thinking.
00:17:20.380So, how did we get to this place where when you say, look, I want to be Martin Luther King, you know, his famous speech in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where he says, judge people.
00:17:34.580I want my kids to be judged on the color of their skin.
00:17:36.760Sorry, the character, content of their character, not the color of their skin.
00:17:40.000How do we get to a place now in Canada, the United States, and in Western countries anyway, where to say that, to say I'd like to be colorblind, to be treated colorblind, I am colorblind, is now suspiciously looked at.
00:17:54.440Well, really, you're part of the problem.
00:17:56.980And how this came about, in part, is because of the redefinition of what it means to be racist these days.
00:18:03.240Well, it just seems that they're trying to keep the divisions going when we'd actually been making them fade.
00:18:09.180I mean, you know, race is going to be there.
00:18:11.200Cultural differences are going to be there.
00:18:12.600They don't have to be erased or disappear.
00:18:15.160But we, you know, what we wanted to work towards was stopping allowing those differences to control our actions with and to each other.
00:18:22.880But now it's come full circle into trying to embrace and segregate the different cultures and races from each other, which is only going to lead to more friction yet all over again.
00:18:34.080I mean, the celebration of a Black-only graduation recently and other events where we should be working together, you know, while still celebrating cultural and history and things like that.
00:18:48.100And again, I think it's due to a number of factors.
00:18:50.500One is that people look at differences in outcomes between cohorts, right, statistical cohorts.
00:18:56.260So, you know, you can be, you know, one ethnicity versus another or majority of population white in Canada versus, you know, the Black population or something.
00:19:06.780So you can carve up statistics in this way.
00:19:08.680And, you know, there's some use in doing that to figure out what's going on is some community, some particular community is defined by however you want to carve up, you know, cohort and statistics doing well or better on some indicators.
00:19:21.440So, for example, we know that Indigenous Canadians are not doing well on average compared to, say, other Canadians or compared to Taiwanese Canadians.
00:19:30.220Now, the assumption, though, that a lot of people have is they see a difference in outcomes and they say, OK, that must be due to racism.
00:19:37.080Now, why people pick one factor, you know, is there's a whole bunch of reasons, I guess, but it's it's monocausal.
00:20:06.740Or another factor that can affect incomes is, again, using Indigenous Canadians or First Nations Canadians as a specific example, is a greater proportion of First Nations Canadians live in the middle of nowhere, often not always, but often on a reserve.
00:20:21.220A greater proportion live in rural areas because you live on a reserve in the middle of nowhere.
00:20:25.120Well, we know whether you're white, Indigenous, Asian, Canadian, if you live in a rural area, you will earn less.
00:20:31.720So you add education, you add geography, and all of a sudden this notion that everything can be due to, you know, is assumed to be due to racism today or past racism becomes ridiculous.
00:20:43.060There's lots of other factors that go into why people succeed or not, even why certain cohorts succeed.
00:20:49.680So that's part of the problem is people are thinking simplistically when they see differences in outcomes.
00:20:54.260A famous example I like to give is from Thomas Sowell in one of his books.
00:20:57.360He talks about the differences between Italians, you know, and the Swiss, and apparently historically in fishing fleets around the world, the Italians dominate the fishing fleets.
00:21:23.220And so it stands to reason, you know, if you're from Switzerland, you're less likely to have ever, you know, gotten on a boat and certainly entered the commercial fishing industry.
00:21:32.820There's all sorts of reasons why groups differ in outcomes.
00:21:35.560But we've arrived at a stage where everything is blamed on racism or most things.
00:22:08.400But that's actually really dangerous to think your culture is going to save you.
00:22:11.820But I'll stop there and let you interject, Corey.
00:22:13.920Well, yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things you'll get from activists and the pushback, you'll always say, so you're saying racism doesn't exist or something like that.
00:22:23.060There's still some terribly bigoted individuals out there.
00:22:26.180There's going to be some companies that decline to hire other people based on race or landlords who aren't renting to certain individuals based on race.
00:23:02.020So they conflate the notion that, yes, of course, you can meet a bigot on the street or online these days that says something that's, you know, racist or whatever, ridiculous.
00:23:36.820And so, frankly, it's unscientific and anti-scientific, that claim.
00:23:40.640Institutional or systemic racism is when a white hospital in San Francisco a century ago says to Chinese Americans, you can't come here.
00:23:48.580Or an Ivy League university says to Jewish Canadians or Americans, you know, in the 1930s, you can't enter in, you know, into this university in, you know, above a certain proportion of the student population.
00:24:00.480That is institutional and systemic racism.
00:24:02.880But a lot of this was carved away legislatively starting in the 1910s in some cases.
00:24:09.280In PEI, for example, there was a law that started to work against discrimination that way.
00:24:14.780Most perhaps famously in the largest province in the country in the 1950s, Ontario passed laws in the 1950s against discrimination on, you know, religious grounds or racial grounds and accommodation, housing, hiring in the early 1950s.
00:24:28.860And yet we have people, 70 years later, that think we live in a systemic, institutionally racist country.
00:25:09.140But now these activists didn't know what to do with themselves anymore, and they marched right into different causes because they just, their activism becomes their sense of being.
00:25:31.140But I remember thinking at one point, what if we actually get, you know, a lot of these, you know, what if we get government spending under control, you know, and get them to stop spending money on dumb things as opposed to, you know, the smart things government should spend our tax dollars on.
00:25:44.120What if we get tax rates down to a certain extent where, you know, I'm saying, well, maybe we need a few more tax dollars.
00:25:51.180But, you know, at some point, you know, you keep going as an activist, you know, and unfortunately, we've gone in the wrong direction on those issues.
00:25:57.960But I get the temptation to keep going to find a new cause.
00:26:01.140And I suppose there will always be causes to attach oneself to.
00:26:05.060But then what you want to do is make sure that it's the right cause and you're actually diagnosing the problem correctly.
00:26:09.980Because if you're not, let's go back to the Indigenous Canadians example.
00:26:13.280You know why we shouldn't focus on racism or historic racism as a reason why Indigenous Canadians are in the plight that some of them are today, not all, but on average, again, compared to other cohorts.
00:26:23.400One of the reasons we shouldn't blame everything on racism and most things is because it has to do with geography.
00:26:30.240We know from StatsCan data that if you're a First Nations Canadian, Indigenous Canadian of any stripe, you will do better in cities than you will in rural locations because the educational and career opportunities are there.
00:26:43.160We also know that if you get your education up and if you do an apple to apple comparison among Indigenous Canadians to other Canadians, and I've done these and they're in my past books, you will see that there's no difference between incomes for, you know, the average Canadian, the non-Indigenous Canadian out there, rather, and an Indigenous person in this country.
00:27:02.280If they have the same education level, if they have the same education levels and work full year full time, what does that tell you?
00:27:06.960What it tells you is that some of these problems are solvable through moving off the reserve to a city or nearby a city and getting an education.
00:27:16.080But if you blame everything on systemic racism and you concentrate on this mysterious ether in the air, you're never going to solve anything.
00:27:23.640And so it's actually very damaging to focus on the wrong cause for a wrong assumed cause for an effect that you see out there.
00:27:32.800When people get it wrong and activists get it wrong, they do damage to the very people they think they're trying to help.
00:27:37.500Yeah. So, so not seeing race makes you a racist now, just, it's hard to keep up with where to be right and wrong.
00:27:44.180Or I like to think common sense can dominate, but I mean, here comes the hard part, you know, as a society, we're trying to move forward.
00:27:50.080We're trying to get better. There, there were wrongs. There's still some issues to deal with.
00:27:54.280What should we be doing aside from what has been being done? What's the solution?
00:27:59.540Well, focus on people as individuals, right. And focus on things like poverty as opposed to, and other ways to get people up out of poverty.
00:28:07.480Um, as opposed to what you look like, your skin color, where you're from, right. That makes more sense.
00:28:14.160One of the things we just did at the Aracela foundation is publish a paper by Matthew Lau and David Hunt.
00:28:19.760They looked at poverty in Canada and lo and behold, because, you know, guys, you know, guys and gals with our skin color are the majority of population.
00:28:27.520You would find that the majority of people in poverty in terms of the numbers happen to be white.
00:28:32.160I don't like using language like white and black. Again, I think it divides people unnecessarily, but that's the statistics.
00:28:37.120It's Canada language or non, you know, non-minority, non-indigenous by which stats can means white.
00:28:42.960The fact is, you know, um, some cohorts like black Canadians or indigenous Canadians show a greater proportion of their cohort in poverty,
00:28:50.000but in absolute numbers, the two and a half million Canadians who happen to be Caucasian and happen to be in poverty.
00:28:58.000And rather than focus on skin color or ethnicity, it's better to focus on things like two-parent family on are there actual barriers to people getting into the work force.
00:29:13.140Then that way you're being colorblind and gender blind and ethnicity blind and identity blind, which is what we should be doing.
00:29:18.880Because after all, I mean, I used to use this example before Bill Cosby became toxic, but why would you have an affirmative action program, a quota program,
00:29:27.320which helps the great grants of the grandson of say Bill Cosby based on skin color, as opposed to, you know, some poor kid who's, you know,
00:29:36.940parents survived the great depression or something or grandparents did, um, or maybe a Jewish Canadian whose grandparents survived the Holocaust.
00:29:43.700Why would you help people based on skin color as opposed to poverty? You end up helping the wrong people.
00:29:48.460And in fact, David and Matthew found just this in their Aristotle Foundation study.
00:29:52.540The benefits go to the connected, the politically connected in any group, as opposed to, again, thinking about let's concentrate on getting on,
00:30:00.040on lifting all boats, um, and getting people out of poverty, regardless of their skin killer.
00:30:05.580Um, anything else is really, you don't treat people as individuals and you begin picking on people again, based on their, uh, what they look like.
00:30:18.580Um, he was very much a classic liberal that said, look at the individual, you know, emphasize individual rights over collectivist, at least, you know, non-economically.
00:30:26.260He was a collectivist on the, on the economic stuff, but not the rest of it.
00:30:29.720So I think you have to look at the individual, uh, Corey, that's, that's where you want to start.
00:30:34.260And all of the rest of this is heading down the wrong road that, you know, is much of human history dividing based on characteristics that don't matter and shouldn't matter.
00:30:43.700Well, it's, it's, uh, a place to start too, is having those sensitive conversations, I guess, and have the courage to, to dip into those waters when there's so many people willing to shout you down.
00:30:52.420And Aristotle Foundation has been happy to go into the facts of matters and report on, as, as you interpret, where can people find, uh, your, your work and, and, uh, support you guys if they'd like to.
00:31:02.680And, uh, AristotleFoundation.org, and you can also find, uh, our, our first book, The 1867 Project on Amazon and in local bookstores.
00:31:21.980So yes, that was Mark Mielke of, as you said, the Aristotle Foundation and, and yes, some of the 1867 project, great book, a lot of good work they do.
00:31:29.420And I mean, there's part of it again, it's nobody's saying, and I don't like the shouting down when this conversation comes up.
00:31:35.320That's the problem, uh, when somebody points to other socioeconomic factors that might lead to an identifiable group that's lagging in other outcomes, uh, perhaps race is one of the contributing factors.
00:31:50.420But if you feel that is it, it doesn't mean it's the only contributing factor.
00:31:54.920You can't let that override every other, uh, measure and, you know, and what's going on, what's happening there.
00:32:01.860Why is one community having a better time with things than others?
00:32:05.640And there's certainly a measurable differences we can see, as he said, with indigenous Canadians, with some black Canadians, they're having a harder time.
00:32:13.540Some Asian Canadians are having a, uh, they're very successful and they dealt with, uh, man, Canada treated the Asian Canadians terribly at the turn of the century last, uh, you know, a hundred years ago, but they, they moved beyond it.
00:32:28.440Let's look at what's making the success is rather than worrying about the divisions.
00:32:32.940Again, it doesn't mean you're saying it doesn't exist.
00:32:35.340It doesn't mean the saying the racism isn't there, but maybe it's not the overwhelming and immediate factor.
00:32:41.360And plus when we keep the divisions up, then maybe we can actually, even if well-intentioned, make things worse as we're always working at cross purposes or seeing somebody as a competitor or an adversary rather than just a fellow citizen.
00:32:53.020But either way, they're conversations that we have to have and, uh, we'll carry on having as we, as we go ahead.
00:32:59.780So let's talk about another guy in the conversation.
00:33:13.040He's, he's had a lot of rough goes in his life as it is, but on top of all of that, he's always been just pushing the line before for Rachel Notley's government with the NDP.
00:33:23.500And he's just been a harsh, harsh critic of, uh, Premier Smith and, uh, and, uh, Poliev, you know, with, with hard left criticism, which is fine.
00:33:32.220Everybody has their point of view, but the difference is because he was a darling guest of legacy media.
00:33:36.420He'd always be on to talk about policy and economic issues, particularly with the energy sector and oil field, carbon taxes.
00:33:42.440Well, lo and behold, and he trolls, he trolls on social media.
00:36:30.080Even if their content was better, I, the main one that gets me is a, you know, I spent a lot of time driving and I still listen to, cause it's the only radio stations you can get for now.
00:36:42.120How much does it cost to get a traffic helicopter up and flying around the city of Calgary every day to report on something that people now can figure out on their phone through Google maps in seconds?
00:37:46.080The government keeps bailing them out, bailing them out.
00:37:48.160And they just keep laying people off because you can't bail out a broken model fast enough.
00:37:53.500And of course, then you've got the CBC in the midst of things there, that, that, that giant, ugly monster, that tax funded thing that nobody watches anyways.
00:38:01.880They get a guaranteed 1.4 billion a year.
00:38:03.820And the irony of that whole thing is, of course, that's part of what's crushing the other private, well, private, but bailed out media outlets that are existing out there.
00:38:13.280Because CBC is competing for those same advertising dollars and the eyes of viewers while they're out there.
00:38:17.600It's a sick, ugly model we have in Canada right now.
00:41:05.180I was always thinking, and the problem with that magnesium factory as well is that it was so specialized, the way it was built and everything else.
00:41:12.740You just can't use it for anything else.
00:41:15.120So it just sits there, and you see a security guard there, and you see a light on there.
00:41:18.340So I guess they maintain it and keep it up, but it doesn't do anything.