Western Standard - Justin Trudeau’s contempt for individual

00:00:00.000 Identity and individual rights, things like that.

00:00:02.800 I mean, they aren't mutually exclusive.

00:00:04.680 We can respect the individual while still having a collective identity, right?

00:00:08.980 Well, the collective, it's important to make distinctions.

00:00:12.360 And in the 1867 project, I quote Pierre Trudeau, of all people, on these distinctions.

00:00:17.680 Collective action, you know, I'm an individual guy, you know, rights kind of guy.

00:00:21.940 But obviously there's a point for the collective, if you mean government, at some point,

00:00:26.320 ostensibly to do things that as individuals or, you know, private businesses can't be done, right?

00:00:32.220 I mean, only hardcore libertarians think, you know, maybe the trans-Canada should be privatized or something in the highway.

00:00:38.440 But most people grasp or get that, you know, there's a need for government.

00:00:42.260 You know, you need government for courts.

00:00:43.520 You need governments for armies, you know, to fight the Nazis in the 1940s, that sort of thing.

00:00:49.120 So, but the point is the collective exists for that, but they have to treat us all equally.

00:00:55.800 The government has to treat us all equally as individuals.

00:00:58.160 That's the beauty of 500 years of enlightenment thought, and especially in the Anglosphere,

00:01:03.100 where he said the individual is worth something.

00:01:05.220 Treat the individual equally, morally equal, which means what?

00:01:08.320 Which means the state shouldn't be saying to me or you, you're going to be treated differently

00:01:12.940 because of your skin color, your ethnicity, where you were born, your gender.

00:01:16.840 Now, it took a long time to get there, probably until the 1950s and 1960s, really,

00:01:21.240 in parts of the world, or at least in the Western world, rather, especially in the United States.

00:01:26.180 Canada got there before that.

00:01:27.900 But we got there, and it's crystallized in Martin Luther King's famous 1963 speech,

00:01:33.420 that he wanted to see a world, in the case of his country,

00:01:36.860 where his children would be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

00:01:41.340 It took a long time to get there.

00:01:42.880 We have reversed, and we shouldn't have.

00:01:45.680 So people are, again, being treated as something other than individuals in law and policy.

00:01:50.340 But that's a long way of saying, yeah, look, the collective exists.

00:01:53.020 That's government, in essence.

00:01:54.900 But it shouldn't be allowed to take a whack at you or me or anyone else based on irrelevant characteristics.

00:02:02.320 Yeah, well, and a totally different philosophy.

00:02:05.540 I mean, aside from the name Trudeau, and I guess the amount of loathing Western Canada has for him,

00:02:10.260 Justin Trudeau is quite different from his father.

00:02:12.320 I mean, Pierre Trudeau, among his many flaws or whatnot, though,

00:02:16.580 he's still a classic liberal in a number of ways,

00:02:18.800 like things such as getting government out of the bedrooms of the nation.

00:02:22.300 That was, I think, some fine work on his part.

00:02:24.220 I mean, to give a little credit, we're doing.

00:02:25.340 I don't give a lot to Trudeau's.

00:02:26.940 But that was important.

00:02:28.240 It was recognized.

00:02:28.880 These are adults.

00:02:29.500 These are individuals.

00:02:30.340 Their rights are paramount, and it's not our place to regulate that.

00:02:34.480 Whereas Justin Trudeau seems to be getting increasingly intrusive

00:02:38.540 into the lives of individuals and telling us how we're supposed to live.

00:02:41.380 Right.

00:02:43.120 Look, Pierre Trudeau was wrong in many things.

00:02:46.120 And, you know, to be fair to the historical record,

00:02:48.160 he probably introduced a little bit of, you know, collective, you know,

00:02:51.320 group rights type thinking, you know, in part of the Constitution

00:02:54.500 because of the affirmative action clause or, you know, the equity clause, as people call it.

00:02:58.660 I call it the racial and, you know, gender discrimination clause.

00:03:02.040 But, you know, Pierre Trudeau at least would argue he was consistent when it came to Quebec

00:03:06.940 and ethnic collective rights, right, that the French could discriminate against the English.

00:03:12.440 That's why he was such a fervent opposition, you know, oppositional figure, you know,

00:03:18.000 to Quebec ethno-nationalism.

00:03:19.720 But you're right, Justin Trudeau has almost none of that as far as I can tell.

00:03:24.400 He really believes that Canada is some sort of weird post-national state where you don't have any core convictions.

00:03:29.680 And also that it's the government's role to discriminate against people based on the fact that, you know,

00:03:36.960 if you measure different groups, they have different outcomes, but that's silly.

00:03:40.440 You know, the best performing cohorts in Canada are, you know, usually from East Asia or if you're, you know,

00:03:46.440 an Indian extraction, your ancestors, I mean, as in, you know, India in India, not indigenous.

00:03:54.240 And there are reasons for that, higher education levels, career choices, that sort of thing.

00:03:59.520 You have different outcomes between different groups because different choices, different educational levels,

00:04:03.860 different geography, different histories. Very little of it has to do with racism these days.

00:04:08.820 But Justin Trudeau wants to micromanage outcomes to make us all equal, so to speak. 0.95

00:04:14.300 That's silly. As the famous American economist Thomas Sowell once said, people, the same people in a family,

00:04:21.580 brothers and sisters who grow up will have vastly different outcomes, even though they have the same environment.

00:04:26.580 You can't always blame different outcomes on racism, but that's what's driving a lot of this these days.

00:04:31.460 And again, Justin Trudeau, unlike his father, Pierre Trudeau, Trudeau understood that, you know,

00:04:38.180 it's very dangerous to give collectives power.

00:04:41.740 So you give a collective power based on its religion or language or ethnicity to lord it over another collective.

00:04:47.740 Again, the best example in Canada is is what French ethno nationalists do to minorities, including English. 0.90

00:04:53.420 Well, that that's dangerous.

00:04:55.820 It's a liberal, but it's also dangerous because people eventually clash over such things.

00:05:01.460 Well, it's when we talk about, I guess, just, I mean, unity, it's a term we hear a lot all the time.

00:05:07.300 But we seem to be I think I see more signs of regionalism and regional division and even division within the regions.

00:05:14.980 Now that identity politics are really sinking in, the country is actually more fractured than ever,

00:05:20.180 rather than than working in a common direction.

00:05:23.820 It is maybe provincial divisions have always been there.

00:05:28.700 Right.

00:05:29.660 The West, you know, Quebec, Atlanta, Canada.

00:05:32.460 I grew up in British Columbia and the Charlottetown Accord was on that referendum in 1992.

00:05:37.100 I can tell you most British Columbians, even more than Albertans, voted against it because they didn't like the idea of Quebec having special status,

00:05:45.020 which it's got all, you know, it's got all but a name now.

00:05:50.460 So the divisions, I think, have been there, but they've exacerbated.

00:05:53.660 And now the federal government and others have brought in divisions based on color, based on ethnicity, based on gender.

00:06:00.380 This is the wrong direction to go.

00:06:03.100 What's what's a more positive way to think about Canada on candidate or what's what's a better way to go?

00:06:08.540 Well, it's the old fashioned what is known as classical liberal, but today might be considered small, see, conservative ideas that you don't that you celebrate people based on who they are as an individual.

00:06:19.340 You don't discriminate discriminate against someone based on irrelevant characteristics.

00:06:24.380 And what that means is you celebrate the good ideas out there.

00:06:28.620 You know, the the rights of the individual.

00:06:31.020 I mean, classical liberalism that came from John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft and the rights of women can be can be adopted by anyone.

00:06:38.220 These days we see it in Hong Kong.

00:06:39.820 When Hong Kongers protest against Beijing and the crackdowns in Hong Kong over the last several years, you would often see them raising the British flag.

00:06:48.220 Why? They understood that the British inheritance, for example, is about the rights of the individual, about capitalism, about the rule of law.

00:06:55.500 These are ideas and they're good ideas.

00:06:57.180 Anybody can unite around those.

00:06:58.940 And we should.

00:06:59.900 There's bad ideas that people can unite around and they have in history.

00:07:03.420 There's bad ways to unite.

00:07:04.860 And it's, you know, only my religion or my skin color or what have you.

00:07:08.220 And that's rife throughout history, which is why we shouldn't repeat it.

00:07:11.820 But for sure, Canadians can and should unite around laudable ideas that, you know, various founders had a glimpse of and pushed to some degree.

00:07:21.980 But certainly in the 20th century, starting in the 1950s, Canadians were supposed to be united around the idea of the equality of the individual

00:07:29.180 and other other beneficial aspects of modern nation state, capitalism and the rest of it.

00:07:34.700 That's what we should actually unite around these days.

00:07:37.820 Great ideas, not identities.

00:07:39.980 Well, yeah.

00:07:40.380 And we seem to have some, I guess, culture wars going on in Canada.

00:07:45.340 I mean, we've seen some of that just recently in Calgary.

00:07:48.620 City Hall didn't understand why a minor move such as getting rid of fireworks blew up the way it did.

00:07:53.980 But it was because of the reasoning for it.

00:07:56.140 I mean, the bottom line is there are some people who feel that Canada Day is supposed to be a day where we look at our shoes in shame.

00:08:02.460 It's supposed to be when we're supposed to dwell on the negatives that happened historically within Canada.

00:08:06.460 And there certainly have been some negatives rather than taking one day, though, to say, hey, we can still celebrate the positives while acknowledging the negatives.

00:08:15.100 I mean, they treat it as if it's mutually exclusive.

00:08:17.540 And I think it's really making Canadians depressed about their own history.

00:08:22.100 Well, that's one of the things we tried to approach in the 1867 project, right, the new book that, you know, I and 19 other people wrote.

00:08:29.140 We tried to give people a sense of Canadian history with nuance, with balance, with informed history, and also to kind of change the way some people view Canadian history.

00:08:39.540 I think the majority of Canadians think we should feel proud of Canada.

00:08:43.060 They may not, you know, and they're not part of the minority of the chattering classes that thinks we should cancel Canada.

00:08:49.060 So I think most Canadians get that we should celebrate or cherish Canada.

00:08:52.980 They may not fully conceptually have worked out why or why the, you know, those who want to cancel Canada are completely in the wrong.

00:09:00.260 And so what we try and do in the 1867 project is make people think about Canada.

00:09:06.580 And the best analogy I can give you, Corey, is Canada and other civilizations are like oak trees, right? 0.97

00:09:12.500 They take time to grow, to build.

00:09:14.500 They're not perfect.

00:09:16.260 In history, you've seen what I would, the analogy would be diseased limbs.

00:09:20.100 Women didn't have the right to vote. 1.00

00:09:21.700 Indigenous folk were denied the right to vote in the late 1800s by parliament, finally given it in 1960 under John Diefenbaker, that parliament.

00:09:30.180 Those were, you know, the bad policies were diseased limbs that were right to be pruned.

00:09:34.100 But that doesn't mean the project was a bad idea, that the oak tree, which shelters people, is a bad idea.

00:09:39.540 Canada, Canada, as an oak tree, has sheltered tens of millions of people over the decades, unlike, say, Chairman Mao's China in 1960 in the Cultural Revolution.

00:09:49.140 While Canada is giving the vote, rightly, to Indigenous Canadians, Chairman Mao is persecuting his own people and causing mass starvation and famine because of his ideological Marxist beliefs. 0.57

00:10:01.380 So, it's not just that no nation is perfect.

00:10:04.340 That's obvious, and no person is perfect.

00:10:06.340 The key question is, are certain communities preferable?

00:10:09.620 When Hong Kongers celebrate the ideas of freedom, the rule of law, capitalism, what they're saying is, we prefer these to what's north of the border in Beijing.

00:10:17.380 And it doesn't matter if those ideas originated with John Stuart Mill and others in the 19th century in London.

00:10:22.740 What matters is that they're a good idea and anybody can adopt them.

00:10:26.260 You don't have to be, you know, a white person to be an Indian and say capitalism is better than socialism.

00:10:34.020 So, you know, you can take some of what the British left behind and leave what you don't like. 0.85

00:10:39.540 And that's part of Canada.

00:10:41.140 And that's why we should celebrate Canada.

00:10:42.660 We got some great ideas.

00:10:43.780 We've had some great ideas for a very long time.

00:10:45.620 We abolished slavery before almost every country on Earth.

00:10:48.980 We shouldn't look down to our shoes and be ashamed of that.

00:10:51.380 Slavery was once considered normal.

00:10:53.620 It wasn't.

00:10:54.180 It was evil, but it was considered normal.

00:10:56.740 And Canada got rid of it almost before any other country on the planet.

00:11:01.300 So rather than be ashamed of sort of Canada's past, it's like you have to ask the question,

00:11:06.740 why did we break away from that faulty thinking on slavery?

00:11:10.980 Well, there were reasons for that, which I won't go into now.

00:11:13.460 But they matter.

00:11:14.500 And that's why we should cherish Canada and not cancel it.

00:11:17.220 So that's kind of it, which is the subtitle of the 1867 project.

00:11:21.700 Yeah, well, and so with what we've got going on out of Ottawa, though, and mixed signals almost

00:11:26.660 coming from the prime minister.

00:11:28.260 But some of that is, I mean, is it a matter of it being politically expedient for him to play

00:11:32.420 these politics and division and identity?

00:11:34.260 Or has he really got actually some inherent core feelings, you know, that mold his ideology that way?

00:11:40.660 Because I mean, the first one perhaps can be changed if it's entrenched in him.

00:11:44.420 He might continue like this for the rest of his term.

00:11:47.940 Well, maybe both.

00:11:49.140 It's part of good politics, he thinks.

00:11:51.540 Right.

00:11:51.780 If he tells people that, look, you know, privilege is a real thing.

00:11:56.740 White privilege is. 0.55

00:11:58.260 That plays well in certain communities, not all.

00:12:00.980 So it's partly politics.

00:12:03.060 But it's partly probably sincere belief.

00:12:04.820 And I wouldn't rule that out either.

00:12:06.100 But he's mistaken.

00:12:07.220 Again, to quote Thomas Sowell, who I mentioned, I think, in my previous book, but also this one,

00:12:12.340 the 1867 project.

00:12:14.580 Thomas Sowell tells a great story of how, look, if you look in history, the Italians dominate the

00:12:19.140 fishing fleets around the world.

00:12:21.140 The Swiss don't. 1.00

00:12:22.100 Is it because the world was systemically biased against the Swiss?

00:12:25.300 No.

00:12:26.020 The Italians have coastlines.

00:12:28.100 So you would expect over decades and centuries that the Italians to dominate the fishing 1.00

00:12:32.100 industry around the world in the fleets.

00:12:34.740 It's the same with, you know, simplistic looks that say again, outcomes and incomes today.

00:12:39.380 There's a reason why indigenous Canadians are lower than, say, other Canadians. 1.00

00:12:44.500 And why, you know, those of Japanese, Chinese or Taiwanese or Korean ancestry at the top of the

00:12:49.620 income heap, because the latter are more educated.

00:12:53.460 The families are often more together, which matters to stability and other reasons.

00:12:58.180 So indigenous folk often are in rural locations, often on reserves, far from opportunities career

00:13:04.740 wise and education wise.

00:13:05.860 So there's reasons, you know, and I think Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, simplistically looks at differences

00:13:11.620 in outcomes and goes, well, the reason must be due to racism.

00:13:14.900 Why would you be so mono-causal, Mr. Prime Minister?

00:13:18.260 Yeah.

00:13:18.740 I mean, there could be, as you said, a number of factors, I guess, before closing out.

00:13:22.500 I mean, it's a very interesting book, The 1867 Project, and you've got a number of our

00:13:26.660 authors contributing towards that.

00:13:28.180 So it's an anthology or collection of essays, I guess.

00:13:31.780 Before I let you go, then, where can people find your book and get themselves a copy?

00:13:36.020 The 1867 Project is available on Amazon.

00:13:39.540 You can also check out aristotelfoundation.org.

00:13:41.940 We've got some excerpts and videos there, but Amazon will have the 1867 Project.

00:13:47.620 Great.

00:13:47.860 And just with the Aristotle Foundation, so that's a think tank here you're operating?

00:13:54.020 It's a new think tank that I and others have set up, about 30 senior fellows, a great board

00:13:58.100 of directors, and we've already been publishing some material, including the 1867 Project,

00:14:03.300 but we set it up very simply to make people think.

00:14:06.820 Well, we need more people thinking, that's for sure.

00:14:09.300 There's never enough of that going on.

00:14:11.460 Well, thank you very much for joining us again today, Mark.

00:14:13.700 It's good to see you, and I appreciate your work with the book and the foundation.

00:14:17.620 Is there anything you'd like to let the audience know before I let you go there?

00:14:20.100 Sure.

00:14:21.140 I think we need a return to reason, a sensible democracy, and an old-fashioned word, civilization,

00:14:26.180 and that's also what the Aristotle Foundation is about.

00:14:28.500 So buy the book, check out the website, and I think you'll be intrigued by what you see.

00:14:34.260 So thank you.

00:14:36.020 Great.

00:14:36.340 Excellent.

00:14:37.380 So that was Mark Mielke with, yes, the 1867 Project.

00:14:41.140 He's been the author of a whole number of other books.

00:14:42.980 I still remember going way back to Tax Me, I'm Canadian.

00:14:46.020 I remember rushing out to grab that.

00:14:47.220 I believe it was in the 90s.

00:14:48.420 It was a great book when he was with the Taxpayers Federation.

00:14:51.940 So check it out.

00:14:53.620 There's always a lot of common sense coming from Mr. Mielke.

00:14:56.100 So I'm sure we'll talk again soon, Mark.

00:14:58.340 Thank you.

00:14:58.660 You can become a Western Standard member for just $10 a month or $99 a year for unlimited access.

Western Standard - June 30, 2023

Justin Trudeau’s contempt for individual

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