Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - April 13, 2021

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00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 hello and good morning of course i'm nathan guida i'm the host of mountain standard time

00:02:14.620 today i'll be speaking with dr grant havers chair of the trinity western university's philosophy

00:02:19.320 department as well as james stytle a local advocate for forestry reform bc be sure to

00:02:25.040 like and subscribe to the western standard on facebook and everywhere else you find us on

00:02:29.620 social media and take out a subscription in order to support our content. We get no government

00:02:34.500 dollars and that's the only way we can keep this stuff rolling. Conservatism and conservation,

00:02:39.560 these words have the same root for a reason. Ultimately, when we speak of keeping or maintaining

00:02:44.140 things, we're talking about conserving them. At a political level, conservatism is about

00:02:48.980 maintaining the situation that will ensure that the values of a civilization survive and that it

00:02:54.000 continues to propagate. At a practical level, that means policies that ensure prosperity

00:02:58.220 and endurance of our human as well as natural world. One of the problems in modern conservatism

00:03:03.380 is the opposition contained within itself. Simply, well, to make it as simple as possible,

00:03:07.980 there's this question of should we make the economy roar despite what that might do to both

00:03:12.980 our natural world and our human world, or should we move back to a more natural state of things?

00:03:17.940 But that can ensure a certain kind of stratification, see the medieval ages and other

00:03:22.900 manifestations of that as well. In Canada, they say there are two kinds of conservatives, those

00:03:27.380 LARPing as Brits and those LARPing as Americans. We see the same divide within these ranks. Rule

00:03:32.700 versus urban, economy versus environment, the family versus the individual liberties or society's

00:03:38.480 liberties. And a lack of consistent answers about all of these issues has led to several electoral

00:03:44.080 defeats for the Conserved Party of Canada, in my opinion, and for conserved movements throughout

00:03:47.920 Canada. What does it mean to be a conserved? Well, there's a lot of diversity, a diversity of answer

00:03:53.180 to those questions. I happen to live in a city in middle northern Canada, and we all have enough

00:03:58.340 amenities here, more than enough amenities, but we're still not a very big centre like Vancouver

00:04:02.760 or Calgary, and we don't have the same poll federally or provincially. And the truth is that

00:04:07.100 within our region, there are resentments between even us, who are, again, not a very big centre,

00:04:12.200 and the more rural areas. This division does not bode well when we ask Ottawa or Victoria for

00:04:17.460 things, but it makes a great way to fill up column inches in the paper. I guess the point that I'm

00:04:23.020 trying to make here is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all to all these problems the

00:04:26.320 opposition that we find within the movement as well as articulating our values but if conservatives

00:04:30.640 ought to be able to agree on anything is that a coherent set of values needs to be made manifest

00:04:34.440 I hope to explore that a bit with our guests today even if the discussions are political at

00:04:38.400 least they will have some sense of place we all need a home a stake in the country that sounds

00:04:43.440 like the beginning of a discussion on values to me let us know throughout the show if there's

00:04:47.280 any questions you would like me to ask our guests we'll do our best to get to the comments as best

00:04:51.200 we can and in the meantime sit back relax and enjoy mountain standard time and of course my

00:04:56.160 first guest dr grant havers dr havers are you with us i am good to be here it's wonderful to have you

00:05:03.120 on the program and i'm just so lucky to have you here because of course you're former professor

00:05:07.680 of mine i'm still part of my alma mater and uh you're you're kind of the bastion uh you and maybe

00:05:13.600 one or two others are the bastion of conservatism at my old school let's let's take a let's take a

00:05:19.120 a short walk through maybe your own background as well how did how did you become a conservative

00:05:24.200 and what what do you think conservatism holds that liberalism doesn't well and initially time

00:05:31.260 for true confessions uh when i was uh in my late teens and and early 20s i i was actually a marxist

00:05:40.700 or at least i considered myself a marxist kind of demonstrated uh churchill's dictum or at least

00:05:48.780 attributed to churchill that if if you're not a communist in your 20s you have no heart and if

00:05:55.260 you're not a conservative by the time you're 30 you have no mind uh but uh in any case uh i i began

00:06:03.660 on on the far left uh but uh gradually moved to the far right well what is called the far right

00:06:12.140 today uh by uh people who like to use that label um but i let's say i moved into a conservative

00:06:22.060 direction uh partly because i i think the left uh changed uh in in ways that um uh do not really

00:06:33.260 cohere with its history maybe we can talk about that too but uh i i moved to the right because

00:06:39.500 i i believe that first of all the the right is not as monolithic as the left as you suggested

00:06:46.540 in your opening comments there's uh one size does not fit all and in fact the right is far

00:06:52.540 more pluralistic and uh less monolithic than the left and so out of that came an appreciation that

00:07:01.020 the right broadly speaking uh is more concerned with liberty than the left or more concerned with

00:07:11.020 freedom so uh and of course there are differences on what freedom means uh in in conservative

00:07:18.060 circles but i think it's hard to understand conservatism apart from a commitment to freedom

00:07:24.700 that can be religious freedom, intellectual freedom, freedom from the power of the state to

00:07:34.300 interfere with your life unduly. Now, that almost sounds like libertarianism, but I think the key

00:07:40.540 difference between conservatism and libertarianism is that conservatives also believe in ordered

00:07:46.300 liberty. They do not endorse libertinism, but they do adhere to a standard of liberty

00:07:55.360 that is compatible with order and with the preservation of tradition within a society.

00:08:02.280 This is what Frank Meyer, a famous American conservative, called fusionism. Conservatives

00:08:09.280 need to embrace fusionism because they need to bring together both the preservation of tradition,

00:08:15.180 at least traditions that are worth preserving, but also an appreciation of liberty.

00:08:21.600 Easier said than done.

00:08:22.880 I mean, there are tensions between liberty and tradition, but that's why I came to the

00:08:30.960 right, because obviously freedom is an incredibly valuable thing, and I just saw that the left

00:08:40.240 was becoming increasingly anti-freedom.

00:08:43.320 that's definitely true in our own time we see this identitarian movement in the left and and

00:08:51.080 for that matter we can see identitarianism in the right as well in the extreme right or

00:08:54.680 things that call themselves extreme right though admittedly the identitarian movements of the 20th

00:08:58.920 century were actually far more socialistic than anybody's willing to admit one one of the things

00:09:03.620 that maybe you can help us understand a little bit better uh dr havers is that canada canada's

00:09:11.180 conservative tradition where is it supposed to be based in there are people who think that we're

00:09:15.860 supposed to look like the americans and have a more lock-in system but obviously that's not the

00:09:20.560 route we chose we chose to stay with the monarchy what does what does a conservative element that

00:09:26.760 has lots of belief in individual liberty how does it reconcile itself with still being not british

00:09:32.040 subjects but still subjects of a monarch well i think one key difference between canadian and

00:09:38.580 american versions of conservatism is that historically broadly speaking uh canadian

00:09:46.260 conservatives and the conservative party as a whole have tended to be more open to the use of

00:09:53.620 the state in um achieving certain goals uh among which are the the preservation of traditions so

00:10:03.460 So, I mean, personally, I don't think Canadian conservatism, whether it's in the West or

00:10:09.980 the East, is particularly Lockean, despite some rhetoric or ideological posturing.

00:10:20.820 But if by Lockean one means a small state, one that leaves the individual alone at all

00:10:27.920 times unless the police have to intervene to investigate a crime. I would think that

00:10:37.480 generally most Canadian conservatives are not as obsessed with keeping the state

00:10:44.900 so limited or to turn the state into a kind of night watchman state that just maintains law and

00:10:54.260 order i i think conservatives from sir john a mcdonald onwards have argued that at times the

00:11:00.820 state has to intervene i mean we we wouldn't even have a country if the state had not intervened

00:11:06.980 with the building of the national railway mcdonald clearly believed that the state and

00:11:15.620 big business at the time had to be involved they had to work together

00:11:20.580 to build the railroad.

00:11:23.860 And as you know, that's what made our country possible.

00:11:28.940 So with kind of the intellectual history in Canada

00:11:34.020 that always maybe sees, I guess, you know,

00:11:36.740 people argue that Grant, you know, that George Grant,

00:11:40.920 that is to say, George Grant,

00:11:43.120 he made the point that Canada kind of imploded

00:11:46.960 or was made a vassal state after, you know,

00:11:49.620 Stephen Baker was kicked out by Pearson with the help of the Kennedys.

00:11:53.540 I'm interested to hear your take on that.

00:11:55.520 Was his idea that the Richard Hooker tradition, again, a kind of a common law tradition or a tradition of deep Toryism through throne and altar,

00:12:04.740 was that the answer to where Canadian values were coming from and then it became a liberal state later?

00:12:10.360 What happened to Canada?

00:12:12.160 Yeah, and George Grant is one of the few political philosophers that our country has

00:12:19.280 actually produced, and so he's very important. But in Grant's view, Canadian conservatism

00:12:29.460 was partly indebted to the old British conservative tradition. You mentioned Richard

00:12:34.480 Hooker. One could also mention Coleridge and Jonathan Swift, to a British tradition that

00:12:40.840 had a more organic idea of society in which it was understood that there was nothing wrong with

00:12:48.880 preserving traditions that might even retain certain hierarchical social arrangements across

00:12:57.180 the political order. I don't think it was necessarily a copycat version of British

00:13:03.820 conservatism, though. Grant thought that Canadian conservatism, had it been allowed to evolve over

00:13:12.280 time and not be impeded by classical liberalism, would have preserved the best features of

00:13:21.120 British conservatism without having to adhere to a landed aristocracy that, of course, is consistent

00:13:29.540 with the feudal history of britain along with all other european countries so it's not as if grant's

00:13:35.220 conservatism wanted to bring about uh feudalism or wanted to go that far back to a pre-modern age

00:13:44.660 but i think grant wanted a truly canadian conservatism that was not lockian but at the same

00:13:52.260 time um preserved tradition in a way that would also preserve the freedom of canadians

00:14:02.580 uh that that would enable canadians uh to uh conserve canada as a nation state so one other

00:14:10.020 feature of conservatism especially canadian conservatism is the preservation of the nation

00:14:15.540 state uh george grant was very committed to that although he felt this was his main argument in

00:14:23.060 lament for a nation came out in 1965 uh the main argument of that book was that the canadian

00:14:30.660 nation state was finished uh that in fact our ruling class he didn't mind using marxian terms

00:14:37.220 had sold out uh to uh the americans and as a result we had lost what was really most important

00:14:46.420 to a canadian conservative our our pres the preservation of our nation state without that

00:14:51.620 you can't really preserve anything else so i think that's what uh grant thought was most valuable

00:14:58.980 about the british conservative tradition again i'm speaking with uh dr havers he is the chair

00:15:05.860 of the philosophy department trinity western university which just happens to be my alma mater

00:15:10.180 full disclosure we we're talking about canadian conservatism and and conservatism in general

00:15:15.540 maybe we should actually make a quick pivot here to the united states and just have some analysis

00:15:20.820 then of what what happened uh in in the united states and actually in the rest of the anglosphere

00:15:26.500 so maybe maybe it's this is how we can connect it back to canada we've seen in the united states

00:15:31.780 that there was this clear rise of populism, right?

00:15:34.780 Through the rise of Donald Trump,

00:15:35.920 we saw a fundamental pivot back away from neoliberal values

00:15:40.140 in the conservative movement to homegrown,

00:15:43.060 you know, the hearth, the people, the Volk,

00:15:45.380 if you want to use that.

00:15:46.580 And the same thing happened in the Brexit vote.

00:15:49.900 We've seen this in the rest of the Anglo world.

00:15:52.100 I don't know if there's burgeonings of it in Australia 0.99

00:15:53.980 and other parts of the English-speaking world,

00:15:55.880 but in Canada, somehow the same populism,

00:15:58.300 I mean, it looked like it was there with Ford

00:16:00.500 when he got elected as premier,

00:16:01.780 But other than that, there's where is this happening in Canada?

00:16:04.880 Why can't Canada do what's happening in America?

00:16:06.940 Maybe we could start with what happened in America and Britain.

00:16:09.080 What do you think happened in America?

00:16:11.540 Yeah. And before we get into that, I should say briefly, speaking as a political philosopher, that populism is a wild card.

00:16:20.200 It can, as you know, it can go to the right and to the left.

00:16:23.800 And the main premise of populism, i.e. the people are always right, hence the term populist, coming from the Latin word for people, that's pretty hard to square with conservatism.

00:16:36.820 From a traditional conservative point of view, constitutional government or democracy can be a good thing, but it would be naive to assume that the great mass of people are always right.

00:16:51.060 the mass of people can go against tradition. They can go against liberty. They can vote their

00:16:58.140 liberties away. But you referred to Trump or Trumpism, which I don't think is going to disappear.

00:17:07.680 I mean, there were certainly conservative features within the Trump movement, not least of which was

00:17:14.460 commitment to nationalism the preservation of uh the nation state but on the social conservative

00:17:21.900 side uh the commitment to traditionalism in that vein was not completely coherent uh i mean

00:17:31.820 certainly ex-president trump uh opposed abortion and and opposed uh what i earlier called uh social

00:17:41.740 libertinism, at least in terms of policy and rhetoric. So there were some conservative

00:17:48.180 features, but I think his nationalistic populism is not necessarily the same as traditional

00:17:58.940 conservatism, partly because, again, populism is a wild card. So there's nothing wrong from

00:18:06.400 a conservative point of view with a populism that is actually conservative, and obviously

00:18:13.780 there are many people who thought Trump was a conservative, even though I tended to see

00:18:18.720 him as a centrist Democrat, he would have fit quite well into the Democratic Party of

00:18:23.940 the 1990s.

00:18:25.800 Quick footnote here, but Trump, of course, was very insistent on controlling illegal

00:18:33.960 immigration at the border.

00:18:35.280 Well, heck, Democrats like President Clinton often used the same language in the 90s, denouncing illegal immigration.

00:18:44.960 So, again, the Democratic Party has changed too.

00:18:48.900 But, again, populism is a wild card, and sometimes it can be conservative, but it can also change.

00:18:58.820 Trump's voters were not opposed to an interventionist state, per se.

00:19:04.160 They didn't want to get rid of Social Security.

00:19:07.960 They didn't want to get rid of minimum wage laws.

00:19:12.980 They certainly weren't libertarians, but they weren't terribly concerned with the power of government, provided that it benefited them.

00:19:23.580 So, again, there are these tensions between populism and conservatism that are very interesting,

00:19:30.160 But they also raise a question about how long that coalition can actually last.

00:19:36.800 And that applies to Canada, of course.

00:19:40.600 And I think just to kind of pivot a little bit into the Brexit question, ultimately,

00:19:45.520 we saw that entire swaths of people have been completely misread by the political establishment.

00:19:51.760 They thought they could get them to vote one way.

00:19:54.540 And of course, they wouldn't.

00:19:56.540 They wouldn't vote.

00:19:57.340 They didn't want to vote against their own values.

00:19:59.040 And I think ultimately that was the lesson of Brexit or that, you know, kind of living after so many years of austerity, particularly in Britain, austerity in Britain has been extremely harsh.

00:20:09.000 And, of course, the post-recession reality since 2008, they voted their values and their values were, you know what, the arrangement as it stands, the social contract as we have it today is not helping me.

00:20:20.320 I'm out of here. And a lot of people were surprised by that. Were you surprised by that?

00:20:23.720 Um, I was surprised that Brexit was successful. Yes. But I think it's worth noting that most Brexit voters were not conservative in the sense that the late Margaret Thatcher was conservative.

00:20:42.960 You might recall Thatcher once said that there's no such thing as society.

00:20:49.940 And I think what she meant by that is that we're simply individuals, at least outside of our family.

00:20:57.120 We should treat each other as individuals, and that's the kind of state that we should want.

00:21:02.480 There's certainly merit to that argument.

00:21:04.400 I have some respect for that libertarian tradition.

00:21:07.660 But at the end of the day, it's not conservative.

00:21:09.940 And conservatives definitely believe that there's such a thing as society.

00:21:15.140 They're not against all versions of individualism and certainly support a market economy within limits.

00:21:23.900 But to say that there's no such thing as society is tantamount to saying that there's no such thing as a nation either,

00:21:31.600 a nation with clear traditions and a clear identity.

00:21:35.400 And I think many Brexit voters did not accept, could not have accepted, that kind of old libertarian ideal.

00:21:46.620 I don't know whether Mrs. Thatcher would have supported Brexit anyway.

00:21:50.420 There's a lot of speculation about that.

00:21:52.860 But I think Brexit, the Brexit voting base was kind of a synthesis, again, we're back to fusionism, a synthesis of certain features of conservatism with populism.

00:22:06.660 Again, whether that can hold is another question, but I would also suggest that conservatism today gets its rocket fuel from populism, too.

00:22:20.660 So it would be equally mistaken for conservatives to dismiss populism altogether.

00:22:29.340 But again, these tensions, I think, are not going to disappear.

00:22:35.340 So coming back to our own country, here we are.

00:22:40.700 Obviously, we're a bicultural country, at least.

00:22:44.160 I'd say there's more than just two dominant cultures in this country.

00:22:47.320 But nonetheless, we are obviously bilingual.

00:22:49.120 and of course we have the legacy of new France becoming Quebec and we have upper Canada that's

00:22:54.900 Ontario we have Catholicism on the one hand Protestantism on the other of course perhaps

00:22:59.540 dwindling forces today but nonetheless that's at least the motif and the founding of our country

00:23:04.060 and and so if we're an Anglo power at least to a certain extent everywhere but Quebec and a few

00:23:09.240 other areas throughout the country why isn't our Anglo conservative tradition following in the same

00:23:16.480 Instead, it's what happened in America and happened in Britain.

00:23:20.740 What's going on there?

00:23:23.700 So the real question would be, why is populism not taking hold in Canada?

00:23:31.640 My quick answer is, well, we'll wait and see.

00:23:35.500 Because, of course, as you know, there are populist enclaves within Canada, especially

00:23:42.040 Western Canada and then particularly Alberta.

00:23:46.480 I think there's potential for populism to grow in Canada.

00:23:53.980 It hasn't grown yet, not to the extent that it has in the UK or the USA, perhaps because our economy is in better shape,

00:24:06.620 or at least the class divide that one sees in the United States and the UK is not quite as severe here.

00:24:16.480 uh in uh canada and that's another thing to keep in mind about uh populism populism today is

00:24:24.440 almost a version of class warfare uh not in the marxian sense but from a populist point of view

00:24:32.560 there there are two groups of people in any society uh you have the people on one side the

00:24:39.640 hard-working people who want to preserve their way of life on the one hand and then you have the

00:24:45.100 elites, both corporate and government, who are trying to destroy that way of life for their own

00:24:53.020 gain. I think there is potential for that polarization, especially when it comes to

00:24:59.740 the oil and gas industry. Of course, that's a huge part of Western Canadian politics and,

00:25:07.180 and, of course, our economy. Of course, the governing liberals believe in a greener version

00:25:16.020 of our economic system and are penalizing the oil and gas industry with the carbon tax and

00:25:25.720 other measures. I think that could fuel populism in the near future because the oil and gas

00:25:35.360 industries, the resource-based industries in general, lift working-class people into the

00:25:42.240 middle class. They pay well. And there aren't many industries like that anymore. It seems that

00:25:50.040 the liberals in Canada, like the Democrats in the United States, despite their rhetoric in favor of

00:25:57.340 the people, are more comfortable with big tech. They're more comfortable with the gig economy.

00:26:04.660 that doesn't produce a lot of jobs, at least not high-paying jobs.

00:26:09.400 They are not lifting people into the middle class.

00:26:13.340 So I would think one way that conservatives and populists can get together in Canada

00:26:19.140 is to encourage industries that grow the middle class.

00:26:25.160 The middle class is slipping away in Canada.

00:26:30.140 As you know, young people cannot afford a home. 0.84

00:26:34.660 like their parents or grandparents could. Wages are stagnating. They've been stagnating at least

00:26:41.900 since the 1980s. The middle class is drowning in debt. So these are real red flags, but they're

00:26:50.780 also political opportunities for a savvy conservative populist movement. I think the

00:26:58.120 liberals and the NDP, I mean, certainly they use rhetoric that is pro-working class, but in fact

00:27:06.920 their policies are not particularly conducive to lifting the working class into the middle class.

00:27:15.500 So I think the danger of an eroding or disappearing middle class is going to be more of a

00:27:25.480 flashpoint in Canadian politics and an opportunity for the right. If the Conservative Party is smart

00:27:32.340 enough to take advantage of that opportunity, we'll see. If they're smart enough, I think this

00:27:38.940 is exactly the problem. I don't mean to throw, I guess, our party under the bus, though there are

00:27:45.840 times where I question, you know, how much I feel at home in our party. But it does seem at times

00:27:52.640 like the best the best issues are given away and the worst issues are carried like footballs to the

00:27:58.080 end of the field one of the places where this has been an interesting bifurcation inside of

00:28:02.960 conservatism is of course right now we're uh almost 15 months into the pandemic uh we're

00:28:09.060 we're moving along at a good clip here we're definitely over a year in most places depending

00:28:12.860 on where your lockdown came down and who you were listening to at the time what what do you think

00:28:18.020 the conservative response to covid should have been it seems like at least if you look across

00:28:23.240 the country liberal premiers and for that matter even the liberal prime minister for for all of

00:28:28.220 his foibles and mistakes throughout all of it and the scandals that even broke during it

00:28:31.760 he's still enjoying you know a popular boost the ndp government won re-election i don't know if

00:28:37.280 the ford government would or or the kenny government i'm not sure what's going on but

00:28:41.440 it appears that whether it's alistair kenny or ford or or any anywhere else uh unlike their

00:28:46.840 conservative counterparts in South Dakota and Florida, for example. Conservatism in Canada

00:28:51.920 didn't seem to get the COVID thing right. It almost seems like they have the harshest measures

00:28:55.460 and their rhetoric around it is the least convincing. Yeah, and I'm not an expert in

00:29:03.540 healthcare or public health policy at all, but I would think that a conservative response to

00:29:12.360 the COVID crisis would be to really educate the public on how important it is to fight the

00:29:21.140 pandemic without killing the economy in the process. So obviously, it's a question of

00:29:29.700 striking a balance here. And of course, if one kills the economy, especially the small business

00:29:35.880 economy not only is that harmful in an economic sense but there are many health problems both

00:29:43.800 mental and physical that arise from that so i i would think that i mean i would give credit to

00:29:53.960 canadian conservatives for not being so ideologically opposed to the use of vaccines

00:30:01.560 or to the wearing of masks.

00:30:03.580 Certainly in the United States,

00:30:05.820 those kind of attitudes have emerged

00:30:08.860 because of a libertarian tradition.

00:30:11.480 But at the same time,

00:30:12.800 I think conservatives need to argue

00:30:15.920 that it shouldn't be an either or.

00:30:18.720 We shouldn't destroy our economy

00:30:21.680 in the process of fighting the COVID pandemic

00:30:27.520 because that's really a terrible choice to make.

00:30:32.460 So there has to be more of a balance struck there.

00:30:36.640 And I don't think the liberals have achieved that balance at all.

00:30:44.980 It's been quite the journey,

00:30:47.120 such as we see the debt piling up and, for that matter,

00:30:51.200 the question of religious liberty, that's been up in the air as well.

00:30:54.280 maybe that's a way to kind of bring bring this argument or a little bit more home of this

00:30:58.520 discussion a little bit closer to home is that i mean right now we're in a upgraded lockdown in

00:31:04.040 british columbia they've closed they had the churches closed since november so that means

00:31:08.700 easter and christmas were completely kibosh but but now they've just re you know implemented only

00:31:15.080 takeout from restaurants or patios or you know if you built a patio to be inside outside that's okay

00:31:21.480 So if you built an entire house outside and called it a patio, that's fine, but you can't eat in the restaurant.

00:31:26.700 This has all gotten a little absurd.

00:31:28.420 On the question of religious liberty specifically, though, what went wrong here?

00:31:33.460 And how did conservatives need to agitate or at least organize in a way or social conservatives?

00:31:38.380 Anybody who is religiously minded or values minded, how did they need to make their argument that you couldn't just shut churches and leave Costco open, that this didn't make sense?

00:31:47.900 Well, that's exactly what they should have said.

00:31:52.780 I mean, there are certainly some voices in the conservative movement who expose the massive

00:31:59.000 contradictions in policy that have come out of the BC government and other governments

00:32:06.880 across Canada.

00:32:08.880 But that's right.

00:32:09.880 doesn't make sense to close churches altogether while allowing, at least until a few weeks ago,

00:32:18.140 indoor dining and shopping at Costco and all kinds of public activities. I mean,

00:32:28.340 I think it was a Supreme Court justice who asked Dr. Bonnie Henry, or at least

00:32:36.380 her legal representative hearing this case for an explanation. I mean, why is it that churches can

00:32:44.860 be closed but other institutions cannot? And so far, none of us has heard an explanation

00:32:52.120 as far as I know. So, and speaking of populism, going back to that, I mean, that kind of

00:33:00.200 contradictory message is conducive to the building of populism. Because from a populist

00:33:07.500 point of view, if the state cannot explain itself, if powerful people like a public health

00:33:14.040 officer cannot explain why she imposes these measures, then we have a problem.

00:33:21.220 That doesn't sound terribly democratic. But I think in general, when it comes to religious

00:33:28.220 freedom or other examples of freedom that are perhaps under threat in Canada, I think

00:33:36.680 the Conservatives need to emphasize that they're the Freedom Party.

00:33:41.900 You haven't brought this issue up yet, but maybe I can.

00:33:46.480 The whole cancel culture phenomena, I wish more prominent Conservatives would get involved

00:33:52.700 in that debate and argue that the opposition on the left is not tolerant, they're not into

00:34:00.480 diversity, they're not into peaceful disagreement, they are a threat to freedom, not just religious

00:34:09.520 freedom, but philosophical freedom or just freedom of speech. I think that conservatives need to

00:34:18.260 emphasize their principled commitment to freedom more and more.

00:34:25.380 Yeah, it's an ongoing debate, isn't it?

00:34:29.480 With cancel culture, it's just mind-blowing to me.

00:34:33.300 I mean, right now, I'm blessed to have this platform.

00:34:36.080 I have no idea when they're going to come for me.

00:34:39.020 Sometimes, I'm not on Twitter, so, I mean, they can't find me.

00:34:43.660 Very wise.

00:34:45.000 It's a starting place.

00:34:46.260 But the thing that kind of hits me is that it just, I thought it was people to the left of center for years.

00:34:53.800 I thought it was liberals who told us that we needed to be able to talk about anything.

00:34:58.880 We needed to be talking about the most garish things.

00:35:00.780 We needed to be able to talk about the most controversial things.

00:35:03.700 And now it's the liberals saying we can't.

00:35:05.500 The people who used to fund the ACLU and the Canadian versions of it, right, the Civil Liberties Union, are they even around anymore?

00:35:13.080 What happened to that movement of liberalism that said, it didn't matter how upset you were by something obscene or whatever, they had the right to express it, and off they went?

00:35:23.120 What happened to that?

00:35:24.880 I think it depends on who's in power, because as you know, in the 1950s and 60s, particularly in the United States, there were people on the right who wanted to suppress freedom of speech.

00:35:37.340 There were people who, I'm thinking of William F. Buckley, the late editor and creator of National Review magazine, who excluded several voices on the right from writing for his magazine because they didn't support anti-communist crusades with enough fervor or with as much fervor as he wanted.

00:36:05.360 There are people on the right who did not believe and still don't believe that America's mission is to interfere with the rest of the world and impose its values on the rest of the world.

00:36:17.700 So in a way, the right invented cancel culture, although probably not as severe as what we're facing today.

00:36:24.840 So at the time, the left was in favor of freedom of speech and even sounded libertarian because they were out of power in the 50s and most of the 60s.

00:36:37.420 But today, of course, many people on the left believe that history is on their side.

00:36:43.340 They actually have the support of big corporations.

00:36:46.600 That just fascinates me.

00:36:49.160 Big tech is very left-leaning, but is certainly not libertarian.

00:36:57.120 I mean, we have four companies, Amazon and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft, that have as much wealth taken together as the gross domestic product of France.

00:37:11.680 But they also have the enormous power to suppress opinions that they don't like.

00:37:19.160 and uh many people on the left think that's great they they think that uh big tech and the state

00:37:27.560 ought to suppress uh freedom of speech uh especially right-wing freedom of speech so

00:37:34.440 you're right there has been quite a reversal there and i think it's partly because uh

00:37:40.680 many people in the left feel that the wind is at their back uh that history is on their side

00:37:46.840 and it doesn't really matter whether people on the right have freedom.

00:37:53.780 They're so dangerous and such reprobates that they should have their freedoms taken away.

00:38:01.560 So again, I think conservatives in Canada really need to make that more of an issue

00:38:08.000 and uh they they they've got to present themselves as the party of of ordered liberty or freedom

00:38:19.020 what might that ordered freedom look like in our time it does appear as you mentioned

00:38:25.080 in canada we have always had a more amenable attitude to the state uh to the government

00:38:30.720 being in our affairs it was the only thing big enough to build the railway it was the only thing

00:38:36.040 big enough to build the dams we have. We don't have the mega corporations that other places have

00:38:40.700 to do these things, except maybe in mining and gas exploration. Outside of that, we're just a

00:38:47.800 middle power. There's one and a half flavors of everything. There's at least two or three in

00:38:52.160 America, but there's maybe one and a half, including political parties, as it turns out,

00:38:55.500 in Canada. How does ordered liberty work? What could we possibly do to make sure that we can

00:39:03.140 grow our economy, have the values that would sustain our civilization, but at the same

00:39:07.680 time, not fall, I guess, into the hands of being a vassal state of someone else, because

00:39:14.020 that seems to be where we're headed, perhaps in a vassal state of China.

00:39:18.200 Wow, a lot of great questions there.

00:39:19.900 I would think that from a conservative point of view, there's no substitute to the market

00:39:27.500 economy uh i mean certainly central planning or state planning hasn't worked anywhere so uh there

00:39:35.980 shouldn't be any debate about whether the market economy is the most effective mechanism to

00:39:40.700 distribute resources or not i i think it is but there's also such a thing as market failure

00:39:47.500 if markets cannot uh fulfill a demand for some kind of service

00:39:54.620 then I think the state needs to step in and work with the private sector. So,

00:40:03.340 for example, there's tremendous demand for services that help autistic children or autistic

00:40:13.100 human beings. So there's a great deal of demand, but so far the market, in my opinion, has not

00:40:19.180 really filled that demand has not provided enough resources, neither has the state, but I think

00:40:27.560 that's where you have an opportunity for the state to intervene and help families who have

00:40:35.920 relatives that are autistic. I mean, there's not a lot of money in that industry. I think that's

00:40:43.800 the main reason why there's market failure. So I think in the interest of compassion and the

00:40:50.440 common good, that would be an example of where the state should intervene, as long as there's

00:40:56.540 evidence of market failure. I don't think there's anything unconservative about that.

00:41:05.940 This is an old debate. It's been a debate for a long time. Where does the state begin? Where do

00:41:12.860 I end and you begin, I believe. I think that's actually an old Radiohead song. But the point

00:41:17.300 being that it's this ongoing debate around where the state needs to get out or where the state

00:41:23.540 needs to come in. I think if I could articulate my own political views for just a brief moment

00:41:28.300 here, I think that where I've come down in my evolution of political kind of ideology is that

00:41:35.040 at least as a blunt statement, I'm a rather anti-austerity conservative. I think it's a

00:41:40.960 really good way for conservatives to lose elections and i have no time for government bloat per se

00:41:46.960 but every time something gets cut somehow it's always access to the service that gets cut

00:41:53.180 and frontline people so the so the least of these the citizens who need the most help citizens who

00:41:58.720 need to talk to someone in person to get something done they lose out and somehow the managerial

00:42:05.000 class of anything health care education the government bureaucracy and and for that matter

00:42:09.320 private entities just grows. How do we move away from this managerial system? How do we get rid of

00:42:15.820 the managerial state that is just sucking up all the resources without providing necessarily any

00:42:20.820 value? Yeah, that's a big challenge. I mean, the managerial class or state is basically the ruling

00:42:29.420 class of our time. And it's not just government bureaucracy, but also corporate bureaucracy. And

00:42:37.460 And, of course, bureaucracy can often make a problem even worse by drowning the process and paperwork without actually helping people.

00:42:48.820 I would think one solution to that is to give more powers to local government to administer health care and other important services.

00:43:01.400 And perhaps they should receive some funding from the federal and provincial government as well.

00:43:07.100 some of that already happens uh of course but uh i think uh to use another conservative theme

00:43:15.060 there should be more intermediary institutions uh that's a term that uh conservatives at least

00:43:22.560 in the past used to uh mention quite a bit so intermediary institutions being institutions

00:43:29.180 literally between the government uh and the people i mean the churches places of worship

00:43:35.220 are the classic intermediary institutions that used to provide social welfare

00:43:41.120 in the New Deal era in the United States, for example.

00:43:46.560 But there are many others that I think could be used for that social purpose.

00:43:53.920 So I think there should be more decentralization or localization of control

00:44:00.020 in order to reduce the managerial bureaucracy that you referred to,

00:44:06.140 and at the same time not rely on austerity measures

00:44:12.260 to somehow kickstart individualist initiatives

00:44:16.720 that can somehow address these problems.

00:44:19.700 I'm not holding my breath for that.

00:44:22.120 So that's another thing that conservatives could emphasize.

00:44:26.140 I just yeah I think that I think austerity is a really good way to lose elections you just talk 0.91

00:44:32.060 about cuts cuts cuts and everybody knows everybody knows that it just isn't going to be their jerk of

00:44:37.340 a boss three stories above them that is you know as is one of 12 managers all making six figures

00:44:43.520 doing nothing it's not going to be that guy it's going to be three of us down here and that

00:44:48.840 and that's just it right and there's more people down here to vote than there are people up there

00:44:52.780 votes. So it just creates a very big problem. I think that coming back to the question then

00:44:59.880 of Canadian conservatism, it just had such a hard time articulating itself basically after

00:45:04.820 Diefenbaker. What are we? I mean, through the 80s, we became pro-free trade, which was never

00:45:10.340 a conservative argument for a long time, at least in Canadian conservatism. And then throughout the

00:45:15.960 90s, we were kind of lost in the wilderness as populism and reform and then the old stock and

00:45:21.920 what was going to be Canadian conservatism. Harper, you know, holds off a miracle, welds the

00:45:27.580 party back together, and wins a majority eventually. But even now, it seems like there's a lot of

00:45:33.080 division within the conservative movement. What are those divisions based in, and are they valid?

00:45:38.800 What way does the Conservative Party have to go to get anywhere?

00:45:43.320 Well, of course, one problem which you alluded to is that conservatism fragments along regional

00:45:51.100 lines so what is called conservatism in ontario and the maritimes is rhetorically different from

00:46:01.100 what it is in western canada so of course there's more populist conservatism in the west

00:46:07.260 than there is perhaps in the east although we shouldn't ignore the doug ford movement

00:46:13.660 either. But I would think one way around that is for the Conservative Party to present itself as

00:46:24.520 a nation-building party. Now, of course, that flies in the face of regionalism at first glance,

00:46:32.360 but I would think conservatives need to do a better job of developing economic policies to

00:46:38.980 build the nation and i'm not denying that there would be enormous obstacles to that especially in 0.86

00:46:45.220 quebec it's hard to um convince most quebecers that they need pipelines going through their province

00:46:54.020 uh to connect with the maritimes but i i think um something like what randolph churchill called

00:47:02.900 tory democracy or uh of course he was the father of winston churchill or or what benjamin disraeli

00:47:11.460 called one nation conservatism i i think that's perhaps uh where the future lies now some of my

00:47:18.660 conservative friends would probably rebel at me uh saying that because they some do believe that we

00:47:24.820 don't even have a nation per se i i don't quite accept that notwithstanding all the doubts that

00:47:32.340 George Grant aired over 50 years ago. But I think that in turn is consistent with the use of the

00:47:40.500 state as a necessary instrument to build the nation. I think we very much have to preserve

00:47:48.820 our nation state. You mentioned China. I mean, from a libertarian or free market point of view,

00:47:54.500 there's nothing wrong with Chinese capitalists coming in and buying the oil and gas industry.

00:48:02.260 That was an issue during the Harper era that, in fact, many Chinese companies that are completely

00:48:09.460 tied to the Communist Party of China wanted to buy up important assets in the oil and gas industry.

00:48:16.500 From a libertarian point of view, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just an economic exchange.

00:48:21.620 from a conservative point of view there's plenty wrong with that uh because we need industries

00:48:28.340 that uh not are not just economically viable but in fact preserve uh the nation's state so

00:48:35.780 i i think uh we of course we need to avoid xenophobia uh and and justifying the preservation

00:48:43.220 of a nation state but we conservatives uh need to uh advance that argument more so that the nation

00:48:51.940 state uh is something we need to conserve something that comes to mind with with that

00:48:59.760 question especially of course here at the western standard uh both uh hard firewalls about you know

00:49:06.380 transferring payments to ottawa and to the rest of the country to outright sovereignty all these

00:49:12.120 things are debated at the western standard quite a bit is there is is there a conservative way

00:49:17.940 to look at at sovereignty or is that always kind of a reactionary or or or liberal stance is that

00:49:26.340 the same ideas is that everybody's supposed to understand that america is actually a radical

00:49:31.120 republic if george grant who is properly listened to because they separated from britain is this the

00:49:36.680 same understanding we're supposed to take around the question of sovereignty that actually to leave

00:49:40.840 the Canadian heritage behind might be a radical thing to do, or is it a preservation of values?

00:49:46.700 This argument goes back and forth all the time. Yeah, and speaking as a native Albertan, I grew

00:49:52.360 up in Calgary, so I guess I have a dog in this fight, but I can understand the frustration that

00:50:01.840 my fellow Albertans are feeling towards the federal liberals with the carbon tax and a

00:50:09.780 general hostility towards the oil and gas industry I hope it doesn't come to a

00:50:17.520 separatist version of sovereignty because if Alberta did separate it

00:50:22.560 would be even more isolated and it's part of the world I think there'd be

00:50:28.140 plenty of anger in BC BC being cut off at that point from the rest of Canada and

00:50:35.160 And I'm not sure other Canadian provinces would be more amenable to working with Alberta and getting its resources to market.

00:50:45.760 But again, I can understand the frustration. I think we need a new government that, first of all, respects provincial authority over resource issues and powers.

00:51:00.540 And we need a government that does not vilify the oil and gas industry.

00:51:08.880 And conservatives need to use the argument that green capitalism or a green economy will still require fossil fuels, will still require viable resource-based industries.

00:51:26.580 And at the same time, green capitalism, or whatever they want to call it, green economics, is not going to help the middle class a heck of a lot. It's not going to produce the kind of jobs that the oil and gas industry or the steel or manufacturing industries did in their heyday.

00:51:47.800 So there has to be an honest conversation about the extent to which Canadians, especially middle class Canadians, really want to foot the bill for this green economy, which I think has very dangerous utopian features.

00:52:06.740 I mean, I'm just amazed that governments believe that by increasing the carbon tax at the pump, somehow that will decrease traffic on the road.

00:52:17.660 I don't think there's any real evidence for that.

00:52:21.220 People will drive their vehicles regardless of how high the carbon tax is.

00:52:28.940 So we also need better economics.

00:52:32.140 The Liberal Party used to have good economists, especially in the time of Prime Minister Paul Martin.

00:52:37.940 And nowadays, it seems to me that the Liberal Party is full of economic illiterates who

00:52:46.480 do not understand basic things like supply and demand.

00:52:50.920 So as boring as it might sound, conservatives need to re-educate the people on economics

00:52:58.380 as well, as a way of not just providing jobs, but also preserving our nation state.

00:53:05.960 you know uh i thought that the budget would balance itself turns out that that's not true

00:53:11.900 it uh it gets you it can't just leave it there and it'll take care of itself hey

00:53:16.560 it's it's it's something that it's something that too like we look at just the amount of

00:53:24.280 personal debt being carried around by canadians uh and how they keep telling us that people are

00:53:28.520 just you know not even their paycheck away less than a percentage of their paycheck away from

00:53:33.480 everything falling apart how how did this happen what what what and what do we do as as conservatives

00:53:41.060 to help people get out of this situation to make a more sustainable Canada yeah I'm not an economist

00:53:48.440 but I would think that uh low interest rates a low interest rate policy uh is is is creating

00:53:59.900 some pretty dangerous scenarios or potentially so like a real estate bubble I mean the only

00:54:06.840 reason that the real estate market is doing so well right now that despite the pandemic

00:54:12.940 is because of low interest rates which will not remain low over time and economists have

00:54:21.980 been warning about this business people have been warning about this governments have been silent

00:54:27.900 or almost silent on this issue, that at some point the party is going to end,

00:54:33.840 the music will stop, and people will be grasping for chairs.

00:54:38.840 So the combination of an interest rate hike with massive consumer debt

00:54:46.460 that is connected to the real estate market is very dangerous.

00:54:52.920 Canada might be setting itself up for a kind of 2008 style real estate meltdown that the American economy incurred.

00:55:04.200 So, again, I think conservatives need to educate people on how economics work.

00:55:10.120 I really wish that high school students were required to take a couple of courses in economics before they graduate instead of learning about identity politics.

00:55:22.120 I would choose economics over that in a heartbeat.

00:55:28.540 I'm just going to mention to my producer here just a moment.

00:55:31.380 Our next guest is in the wings, but he is going audio only, just so our producer isn't panicking.

00:55:37.980 But we have just a couple more minutes here, or perhaps we'll see if that works out.

00:55:42.940 But we'll leave that for a moment.

00:55:44.900 I think you're absolutely correct, though, when it comes to the question of low interest rates and everything else.

00:55:48.720 I think that we have to be very careful about what's happened to our country and to other places.

00:55:54.420 I mean, we all have the lesson of the 1920s and what happened in Germany, but nobody seems to ever learn the lesson.

00:56:00.800 Everybody seems to play with the interest rates and see what moves forward there.

00:56:04.380 I think perhaps that's a place to kind of bring it all into a conclusion is, you know, Dr. Havers, what happens if conservatives fail to articulate a vision for the country?

00:56:15.980 What happens if they fail to make it clear which way we should go and leave it to the other side or just stay in the vacuum?

00:56:23.500 What will happen?

00:56:25.800 Well, I think we'll be in trouble, not least because of the massive debt, the government, but also corporations and individuals are piling up.

00:56:36.460 And I understand that in a time of pandemic, you have to borrow more money to fight the effects of the pandemic.

00:56:49.280 So no argument there.

00:56:51.380 But I think over time, if the Liberals and the NDP do not develop a sound economic policy, and I'm not holding my breath on that, then not only is our economy going to suffer, our nation state will fragment even further.

00:57:12.920 i mean we're both familiar with the effects of the carbon tax on western canada but i also

00:57:21.880 worry that many investors many corporations are writing off canada altogether they they

00:57:28.280 see it as a a country that is hostile to an investment uh that cannot uh reduce its debt

00:57:36.520 effectively that has embraced environmentalist policies that are very draconian i mean it's

00:57:47.680 amazing that canada an oil producing nation is being punished for that fact while other oil

00:57:53.320 producing nations like norway are booming precisely because they can sell their oil

00:57:58.900 So I think if the Liberals continue to stay in power, our economy will continue to suffer and along with that, everything else. So the Conservatives need to up their game and educate people more about what is at stake there.

00:58:18.180 absolutely well i think that's as good enough a place to leave it as any and i think it's very

00:58:24.480 informative obviously uh canada needs a way forward and uh the sooner we figure that way

00:58:29.880 forward out especially as conservatives and maybe we can start building up this nation again i've

00:58:35.020 been speaking with dr grant haviers of course he's the chair of the philosophy department at

00:58:39.280 trinity western university my alma mater and we've been talking about conservatism in canada and what

00:58:43.960 it means today. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Nathan. Good to be here. Absolutely. We're

00:58:49.900 going to go right into our next guest. Our next guest, of course, is James Steidl. He is a part

00:58:54.700 of, or rather, the lead guy on Stop the Spray in BC. And we're going to have him tell us a little

00:59:00.960 bit more about that and what that means. James, welcome to the program. Hello. Thanks for having

00:59:07.160 me, Nathan. Just before we get started, can you hear me okay? I'm just out here in the bush and

00:59:10.800 We've got ExplorNet for the internet connection.

00:59:15.960 Yeah, no, I can hear you loud and clear.

00:59:19.100 Okay, right on.

00:59:20.060 Yeah, so the glyphosate issue, this is, you know, a big issue in BC.

00:59:25.480 It's also a huge issue in Alberta, actually.

00:59:27.120 It's growing in Alberta.

00:59:28.440 And the issue is for modern forestry practices, we've got this idea that the only acceptable

00:59:34.120 species for the most part is conifers, that's pine and spruce trees.

00:59:37.580 So you log a mixed stand that had a bunch of aspen in it, typically, and aspen regrow

00:59:44.960 after a disturbance, and that's a problem.

00:59:49.820 We look at these aspen that are naturally growing, and they grow, they're not coming

00:59:53.200 from seed, right?

00:59:54.200 This is an important distinction.

00:59:55.200 They're growing from a pre-existing root, and the aspen root system might be 10,000

01:00:00.240 years old.

01:00:01.240 The common belief here is that they were established after the retreat of the last ice

01:00:06.380 sheets the seeds came in and they established themselves the the climate was nice and moist

01:00:11.800 for them to do that and we're basically they're uh eternal they just keep growing and uh they

01:00:18.460 survive for for indefinitely basically so you log a place these ancient aspen roots send up their

01:00:23.780 new suckers and we've got to like get rid of those so we spray them with glyphosate that glyphosate

01:00:28.180 goes right into the root system it exterminates the whole root system for genetically distinct

01:00:33.500 clones and you'll get a few survivors if they don't hit everything with the glyphosate you

01:00:38.020 might get a few survivors but research is showing is that these survivors are contaminated

01:00:41.960 and that contamination will last indefinitely so they're finding glyphosate and blueberries

01:00:46.900 a year after being sprayed that are higher than the default amount allowed in stores okay so they

01:00:53.780 always told us this stuff just kind of disappears after a couple weeks and that's not true at all

01:00:58.400 like it's it's causing long-term ecological damage and it's causing long-term contamination

01:01:04.400 and the other thing we're not even looking at just ignoring all of the you know negative uh

01:01:10.880 things with contamination and whatnot uh we're getting rid of the most fire resistant tree

01:01:15.200 species in the forest that's the aspen so in a study in alberta there the pine uh over 35 year

01:01:21.120 period the pine burnt about 900 more land area than the aspen everything else being equal okay

01:01:28.160 So like if a fire comes through a forest that hits an aspen patch, basically it can stop

01:01:32.960 dead.

01:01:33.960 That's not entirely true.

01:01:34.960 Like in the spring, aspen will burn.

01:01:35.960 So the Fort McMurray fire, you saw a lot of pure aspen stands burning, but once they leave

01:01:40.260 out there, they're really resistant and the fire will basically smolder in the understory.

01:01:46.200 And so that's why you need these species on the landscape, either a fire break and they're

01:01:51.040 the most important food for moose.

01:01:53.700 So well, second most important after willow.

01:01:57.360 So if the aspen's there, right, if the aspen isn't on landscapes in north of Prince George,

01:02:03.780 you know, you'll get more subalpine fur.

01:02:05.340 They kind of, they'll subsist on subalpine fur quite a bit in birch.

01:02:09.320 And there's definitely places where aspen doesn't exist, higher elevation, wetter areas.

01:02:13.880 But where there's aspen, the moose will, it's their second most consumed food after willow.

01:02:19.700 And yeah, it's important.

01:02:22.000 I could go on and on about this stuff, Nathan.

01:02:23.380 I don't want to overwhelm you here.

01:02:24.560 So I don't know if you want to butt in with a question.

01:02:25.900 No.

01:02:26.260 Feel free.

01:02:27.360 No, we, so we've got, I mean, we've got an hour and we're here to talk about this and I'm happy to be talking about it because again, like I was telling this to you over the phone the other day when we were meeting up and again, I'll remind everybody who's listening that that's exactly what we do here.

01:02:42.080 We bring on everybody and anybody to bring up their point of view. And we're here to be educated, to understand things and to get the real story on things that you're just not going to get on some of the other broadcasters. That's why we do what we do here. So I'm happy. I'm happy to have you, James. This is, this is important to the, to the point of,

01:02:57.360 the spray and and for that matter let's even talk about aspen themselves like i mean

01:03:01.680 you know uh basically even from little on i never really thought about this kind of

01:03:06.000 indoctrination that happens here in bc schools and everything else but we're always taught how

01:03:10.160 wonderful the conifers are and everybody treats aspen like whether we're talking about firewood

01:03:14.880 anything else everybody always talks about aspen as if it's not valuable wood well is there value

01:03:19.120 in the wood itself and and what kind of value is there oh yeah that's that's hilarious you bring

01:03:25.120 up firewood because and you know the training that you got in school that's exactly what i

01:03:29.120 went through you know like in elementary school we'd go on tours of the tree nurseries in prince

01:03:33.100 george we'd go to the pulp mills you know there was tons and tons of indoctrination for school

01:03:38.720 kids basically of how wonderful the forest industry is and how everything's so well managed

01:03:43.480 nothing ever spoken about aspen i mean i grew up thinking that aspen would literally fall apart in

01:03:49.320 your hands as wood you know it's just like complete and utter garbage like you never do 0.89

01:03:54.060 anything with it. And the point you make about firewood, I mean, that's kind of a good one is 0.57

01:03:58.960 because if you look at the BTU charts, aspen is actually better firewood than spruce. And a lot

01:04:05.660 of people will burn spruce in their fireplaces and they won't touch aspen. But the aspen will

01:04:10.820 actually throw out a few BTUs. I mean, it's not the best firewood. The birch is a better firewood.

01:04:15.320 That's also coincidentally another species that we spray. But yeah, it's good firewood. I have a

01:04:22.700 little wood miser sawmill so i actually mill up aspen and i'm not the first guy to do that a lot

01:04:28.280 of people and in the prairies will cut aspen um it's uh there's actually learned all this from a

01:04:33.880 guy called pete stoner he's uh lives in stoner bc there between quenelle and prince george and he

01:04:38.860 built uh you know walls and his houses are built out of aspen he built a shed out of aspen he's got

01:04:44.920 20 foot uh um roof joists that are made out of cottonwood uh he would cut you know they use

01:04:53.000 cottonwood as kind of the traditional wood for barn floors and they use it for flatbeds on trucks

01:04:58.940 because it doesn't splinter so in a wood shop i would use aspen for rails on my sled on my table

01:05:04.100 saw and i did comparisons with fur and the fur would just splinter and get chewed off and it

01:05:09.960 like really brittle like the like the bond between the grains lengthwise isn't as good as on aspen

01:05:15.720 so the aspen rails are still rock solid like there's no splintering whatsoever so they have

01:05:21.780 every wood you know as a woodworker you got to realize that every wood has its advantage and

01:05:25.780 every wood has its disadvantage and yeah aspen is actually strength to weight it's basically

01:05:30.960 comparable to spruce pine and subalpine fir it has superior risk and resistance to impact bending but

01:05:37.360 thing is it's not a high density wood it's a low density wood is very much like western red cedar

01:05:42.080 so it's going to be um if you want to have the same strength as a pine two by four you'd have

01:05:46.960 to build a bigger stud but the weight of that stud would be the same as the pine stud and you'd have

01:05:52.160 the same strength right so um and osb let's not forget uh aspen is used in commercial applications

01:05:59.840 all the time so osb is primarily aspen and cottonwood uh you know lp pacific up in fort st john

01:06:07.120 like they have mountains of aspen and that's uh anytime you see a new house construction and

01:06:11.760 they've got osb siding that's all aspen so aspen already is a commercial wood uh it's just not

01:06:16.960 really advertised that much certainly in prince george where we consider it a weed and a lot more

01:06:24.400 could be said about birch as well about the commercial applications of birch um so again

01:06:29.520 Nathan, cut me off if I'm rambling here, but I will tell you an interesting story about

01:06:34.160 the foundation of Canfor and West Fraser in a central interior. I just actually recently

01:06:39.900 learned this. There's a really significant bomber from World War II called the Mosquito

01:06:47.120 Bomber, and that was almost all wood construction. That's right. No, it was extremely fast.

01:06:52.560 The narrative that I heard, oh yeah, it was the fastest aircraft in the war there for a few years.

01:06:59.300 And the story I always heard was that it was made out of spruce from the Haida Gwaii.

01:07:03.060 That that was what it was made out of in spruce plywood.

01:07:05.460 And all the foresters will tell you the same thing. Oh, it was spruce, you know.

01:07:09.300 But actually, it was the most of the plywood was birch.

01:07:13.540 And half of the entire British birch supply came from Quennell during the war.

01:07:19.140 And this is the Quennell archives have a whole write up on this.

01:07:22.260 And there's a website about it.

01:07:23.460 And it's just a little forgotten part of the lumber industry in the central interior.

01:07:28.420 During World War II, these brothers called the Patchett Brothers, they went and logged

01:07:32.100 birch along the Fraser River between Quennell and McBride, and they sent that down to New

01:07:37.300 Westminster to a factory called Pacific Veneer, and they manufactured the birch plywood.

01:07:43.140 And the irony here is that Pacific Veneer turned into Canfor, and the Patchett Brothers, their mill

01:07:49.540 in Quennell, turned into West Fraser. So two of the biggest softwood corporations that do the most

01:07:54.900 spraying in western canada that they spray birch all the time these two companies actually got

01:08:00.180 their foundation on birch the exact tree species that they're calling a weed and that they refuse

01:08:06.100 to invest in so i think that's a little bit of a ironic kind of development in the in the history

01:08:11.620 of our lumber industry and which also goes to show that these trees aren't weeds like they have

01:08:15.220 incredible value i know it's good enough for the fastest most advanced aircraft in world war ii

01:08:19.620 and it's not good enough for our sawmills today so stop the spray we got to like learn how to

01:08:25.620 value these trees like we once did and we need more diverse forests because really what we're

01:08:30.640 doing when we spray all these these forests we're we're creating monocrops of one or two

01:08:36.740 tree species that's mostly spruce and pine and like we just had the pine beetle ripped through

01:08:41.480 here and you look at the forest we're regrowing it's like pine where it wasn't only pine before

01:08:46.880 like it's we're actually making we're setting ourselves up for a worse disease outbreak than

01:08:51.340 what we were already hit with because a lot of the stuff that was hit with the pine beetle there's a

01:08:54.980 lot of spruce in there there's a lot of aspen there some places had douglas fir and we're

01:08:59.880 we're harvesting like 100 douglas fir areas around quenelle and prince george and they're all pine

01:09:05.280 now like we're doing ecological conversion right is what's happening i think we're getting rid of

01:09:11.500 our diverse forests, killing moose food and beaver food and making them worse off. So it's

01:09:17.880 just ridiculous what's happening. I think maybe a way to kind of help people understand this a

01:09:24.040 little bit is really in a sense to try and blow it out towards agriculture proper. This was always

01:09:30.080 something that kind of confused me and forgive me if this is an ignorant statement, but I just

01:09:35.420 always thought like I don't understand I don't understand how how this can be so confusing when

01:09:41.400 it comes to forestry because it's forestry it's just macro macro agriculture like it's as big as

01:09:47.840 it gets for agriculture like I guess we call it silviculture but I mean the point is that

01:09:51.780 if we're going to harvest and then plant and then harvest again like I mean that's just

01:09:56.940 agriculture it's just done over a 20-year period instead of a two-year period so why can't we

01:10:03.120 figure this out? And why can't we understand that maybe there's a need for crop rotation,

01:10:08.140 right? Again, if we're going to call trees crops or treat them that way. I mean, this has been

01:10:13.000 going on since the Middle Ages in some parts of the world and earlier, obviously, in some parts

01:10:19.140 of the world. How come we can't figure that out? How come we can't understand that there needs to

01:10:24.600 be a rotation and there is a diversity to put nutrients back into the soil? This is basic

01:10:29.080 farming for other people.

01:10:33.120 Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. And just to elaborate on your point there about

01:10:42.900 the idea of crop rotation, and foresters might think that's ridiculous, but there is a disease

01:10:48.380 that hits spruce trees. I forget the scientific name, but it's a root rot, and it'll stick

01:10:53.620 around in the soil for about 50 years. Well, that's just the same amount of time that aspen

01:10:57.320 stick around for. So if aspen dominate a stand after a spruce are logged, or maybe they all

01:11:03.060 die because they had root rot and the aspen dominate then you have the root rot can't sustain

01:11:09.040 itself and disappears from the soil and then the spruce can come back in there and it'll grow

01:11:12.900 healthy again so i mean that's a good example of crop rotation and also just the the nutrient

01:11:17.260 cycling that aspen do and it's just phenomenal uh stuff we're learning about the mycorrhizae

01:11:21.760 networks of the fungus associations between tree roots and and the fungi that can unlock minerals

01:11:28.160 from literally from rocks they can eat rocks and extract like calcium from it and stuff

01:11:32.860 the trees don't do that the fungi do and aspen are associated with way more fungi than spruce

01:11:40.220 or pine trees so if you have aspen in your stand they can unlock these nutrients that the conifers

01:11:44.300 can't right so then so then we've got to uh fertilize them with chemical fertilizers but

01:11:51.660 back to your other point there about you know why can't we figure this out and how long

01:11:55.360 basically silviculture is being going on for and this idea that our forests are you know a crop of

01:12:00.240 carrots. And if you want to grow carrots, you got to get rid of the weeds. This idea was really

01:12:04.760 institutionalized in Germany. You know, and they really started to apply the science to it

01:12:10.480 back in the 16 and 1700s. And the idea was, well, you know, we need to know how much of this forest

01:12:16.660 we can cut today with an expectation of revenue, you know, 50, 60 years down the road. So they

01:12:23.720 would calculate their yields and figure out how much girth the trees were putting on. They developed

01:12:28.060 into a real science. And this is basically being exported all across the world and is the foundation

01:12:32.220 of modern science, modern forest science, which is to say it's basically accounting, right?

01:12:37.720 Forestry is basically an accounting practice is what it is. And diversity gets in the way

01:12:43.960 of that practice, right? If you have multiple species that are doing different things, it's

01:12:47.480 really hard to figure out your yields because you've got more unknown factors. And that's one

01:12:52.640 of the reasons why we don't want diversity in our forests is because it's too confusing. We don't

01:12:57.520 know and then maybe there's some new technology like lidar that will help us deal with this

01:13:01.440 but we're going to have to deal with it whether we like it or not and this is happening in germany

01:13:07.220 already so the place where they developed all this modern forestry practices is actually turning it

01:13:12.720 back i wouldn't say completely but in a big way on traditional forestry so if you go to germany

01:13:18.320 their spruce plantations are dropping like flies right now from the drought from climate change

01:13:24.260 they've got these really hot summers now that they've never really had before dry summers and

01:13:30.740 yeah there's i've been there i went on tours with forest scientists there i've interviewed them

01:13:37.380 the spruce plantations are are dying and they've enacted policies there's a whole movement called

01:13:43.620 mishbald forestry where it's basically mixed forest forestry and it's actually federal law

01:13:49.060 in a lot of jurisdictions to not plant conifer monocrops anymore and they actually are planting

01:13:53.060 a lot of beech trees and like some birch and other deciduous, a little bit of aspen, but

01:14:00.560 they've, they've, they've changed their, their whole, they've, the realities of what's happening

01:14:05.400 and the vulnerabilities of these monocrops is, has caused a complete and utter shift

01:14:09.960 in how they look at forests.

01:14:12.080 So to answer your question, things are changing and actually the heart of modern forestry

01:14:18.380 is changing to the germans so they're they're totally uh adapting to the new scenario and we

01:14:23.980 need to do that immediately here in canada like we actually have better reasons to grow aspen

01:14:28.460 because of forest fire uh but um it's not quite happening yet as we as we kind of look at these

01:14:37.020 different situations and and what what they mean maybe something that we can touch on is again your

01:14:42.060 your background how did how did you come to these conclusions what what motivated you to start

01:14:48.220 the stop the spray movement in british columbia have you had any success in that area and what

01:14:52.700 what are you looking for with with other people to partner with you to move forward

01:15:02.700 yeah i i started doing this because they sprayed like my parents have a ranch down in punchaw and

01:15:07.740 they sprayed right up to our property line is basically why i started looking at this and

01:15:12.620 and i was like well why are you getting rid of these aspen and i've always loved aspen trees

01:15:17.260 like I we grew up with aspen all over the place and uh the rangeland which is also something else

01:15:22.560 that we could talk about uh our rangeland had an aspen forest on it it's called rosebud mountain

01:15:28.580 natural aspen stand it's been there as long as anybody can remember it's 100 aspen and it's

01:15:33.100 really good cattle grazing it's like the life in an aspen forest is exponentially greater than life

01:15:37.580 in a conifer forest like there's there's and they've studied this for rangeland studies you

01:15:43.040 get over a thousand percent more forage understory forage in an aspen forest compared to like a pure

01:15:48.800 mature conifer stand so it was just really cattle the moose were always hanging out up there that

01:15:55.160 place actually used to be called moose mountain and it was just obvious to me i'm like this is a

01:16:00.220 great treat um why are you guys spraying it and the reason they gave me wasn't very good so i just

01:16:06.000 thought i'll like look at this as like a journalist and try to like write a speculative piece and shop

01:16:11.720 it around so i interviewed a bunch of scientists and nobody wanted to publish the article

01:16:15.100 and uh that was disappointing so i'm like well i guess i'll just have to be an activist now and

01:16:21.540 dedicate basically this part of my life to to pushing for change in forestry because the more

01:16:29.300 you look into it nathan it's it's pretty pernicious you know this idea of conifer forestry

01:16:35.500 Like it's everywhere. And like even the universities where they should be talking about all sorts of different attributes of aspen and forests and deciduous forests with respect to mitigating flood risk.

01:16:49.880 like they absorb more water they feed beaver which can help with beaver dams that can also

01:16:55.280 reduce flood risk uh wildfire prevention um you know nutrient cycling there's all these amazing

01:17:02.280 things about aspen and they're being completely overlooked and nobody's advocating for these

01:17:05.900 trees it's just and then you look at silviculture so i tree planted on and off for you know 20 years

01:17:10.940 23 years i have friends that did brushing and spraying right i know all about silviculture

01:17:17.360 it's relentless okay like we we go into every single cut block and if there's an aspen problem

01:17:23.520 we get rid of the aspen it's like almost like we're robots in you know with like a program

01:17:28.920 that we can't uh we don't even question and so that's my role is to is to question this

01:17:35.740 this kind of article of faith basically that we as a nation of foresters and lumber lumber people

01:17:43.680 you know are are implementing to great harm to our wildlife and to our forests

01:17:49.600 so that's basically the short answer no i i appreciate you sharing uh how you got involved

01:17:57.520 with this it's interesting you make the point of can for and west fraser i mean it's it's one of

01:18:02.720 these kind of potato potato sort of problems with with the the advent of the amalgamation of the

01:18:09.040 the mills i mean this is an interesting point right going back to the 50s and 60s right there

01:18:14.720 were there were several dozen mills all over the place and of course classically there were lots

01:18:18.880 of mills and of course there weren't the roads to transport lumber everywhere so you had to mill your

01:18:23.820 lumber uh closer to home and in your community nest lake had a mill sinclair mills right penny

01:18:29.200 all these places had mills and then of course with the amalgamation now we have really big mills and

01:18:35.480 course they have to run all day to pay for themselves and then we have really big machines

01:18:39.240 they have to run all day to pay for themselves do you think that some of some of what's going on

01:18:44.120 here and monoculture and the issues presented by it it's all kind of tied up with the fact

01:18:49.000 that there's a lot of sunk capital in it that that's uh that's definitely that's definitely um

01:19:01.960 I think what the issue revolves around, it's not jobs. Let's make that clear. I mean,

01:19:08.040 the argument that I come up against is that we're spraying for jobs, that we have to maximize the

01:19:13.760 land base for these one or two tree species to keep people employed. I mean, that's a complete

01:19:19.800 and utter fabrication. It's a lie. It's not about jobs. This is about huge multinational companies

01:19:29.820 maximizing our revenue, okay? If you had aspen in your forest, okay, when you would log that forest,

01:19:36.800 you'd have, it's more work to do that, right? You'd have to like separate your piles. You'd

01:19:42.320 have different trucks going to different mills. That's a cost that these big companies want to

01:19:47.540 avoid. If you have a huge endless sea of a single tree species, all the same age, okay, it's all

01:19:54.340 going to the same mill. It's way cheaper to do that. It's less jobs, okay? They can fire people

01:19:59.240 to do this that this is what it's all about it's about maximizing efficiency for these humongous

01:20:06.680 corporations so that they can pay their shareholders and basically you know screw over

01:20:12.580 the communities and that's what's happening it's been happening for 30 years i mean today look at

01:20:17.180 mckenzie right they've got record lumber prices can't force shut the mill down and uh they've got

01:20:23.980 enough wood and they 1.00

01:20:25.760 shut her down. The community 0.99

01:20:27.660 screw care about people. They don't

01:20:29.800 care about jobs. Let's not make

01:20:31.780 that mistake. I grew up working.

01:20:33.720 My dad worked at Clear Lake Sawmills.

01:20:35.740 This was a little inefficient mill, like one of those

01:20:37.640 mills you talked about.

01:20:41.060 We've had

01:20:41.880 120,000 board

01:20:43.800 feet of production a shift and there's

01:20:45.740 probably about

01:20:46.800 150 guys a shift between

01:20:49.740 the planer and the saw

01:20:51.360 mill.

01:20:53.420 All the

01:20:53.980 production the polar at bearer lake okay they do 1.2 million board feet shift that's 10 times the

01:20:59.620 production uh and i believe i have like um 40 guys a shift so the the production has just

01:21:10.020 expanded exploded exponentially and the number of people has declined precipitously okay and

01:21:17.220 and now we talk about uh you know and you and now let's talk about the provincial media you know

01:21:21.320 guys like von palmer uh rob shaw when they write about the forest industry it's always about oh

01:21:26.800 we've got to make it easier for these big mega corps because they're going to take their investment

01:21:30.260 and they're going to take it elsewhere we're going to lose all this this uh you know forestry is

01:21:34.680 going to be a bad place to invest in well you know what all that investment was just to fire people

01:21:39.440 every time they'd invested in sawmills it was to invest in automation to invest in technology buy

01:21:45.580 robots from germany okay it was good for germany not good for the workers in prince george because

01:21:49.900 when i invested

01:21:51.320 And that technology is basically people are getting canned is what's happening.

01:21:56.520 And, you know, being a woodworker and dealing with wood, you realize that you can make a lot of money with not very much technology, not very much investment.

01:22:05.400 Like a wood miser and two guys can make a good living.

01:22:08.480 And the big companies don't, right?

01:22:10.500 So they make it very hard to run small mills.

01:22:14.100 It's the whole setup, the way the government runs forestry, access to wood and all that, it like squeezes out the little guys.

01:22:21.320 and um so back to the reason why we spray no it's absolutely not about jobs

01:22:28.360 if we worried we would be talking about these big corporations doing what they're doing that's

01:22:33.560 that's the threat to jobs not a few aspen trees on your landscape that are going to stop fires

01:22:37.960 and feed moose for people to to hunt and live on so that's like i think that's one of the big

01:22:45.480 the big points i think that that we need to hammer home in this in this fight is that

01:22:49.240 But the forces of unrestrained, monopolized capitalism is a huge threat to not only forestry, but our economy and our society in general.

01:22:59.640 You know, and you don't have to be a socialist or a liberal.

01:23:07.340 This is a conservative radio show.

01:23:09.740 So I think conservatives really need to get on board with the fight against monopolies and big corps.

01:23:17.320 They're a huge threat to capitalism.

01:23:18.800 Right. The competition is the hallmark of capitalism, and that's not happening.

01:23:22.700 If you have one gigantic corporation running your town, which is what's happening in Prince George with Canfor,

01:23:29.160 if you're a logger and you've got one company to work for, they have you over a barrel.

01:23:32.720 If you're one logger in Quesnel, you've got a deal.

01:23:36.060 You've got one company, West Fraser.

01:23:38.000 Right. So, you know, the folks in Victoria are like, oh, it's a competitive marketplace.

01:23:43.980 You know, they're competing on the global marketplace.

01:23:46.000 They've got other areas to compete with.

01:23:48.080 you know we can't uh there's no monopoly but they're not realizing that a monopoly can take

01:23:54.720 you know many forms and a specific term would be a monopsony where you have one buyer and that's

01:23:59.020 what we have in these regional marketplaces is a monopsony and we need to start looking at

01:24:03.000 monopsony is the same way as a monopoly it's it's negative impact on competitive markets it's not a

01:24:09.640 free market and i think that kind of gets to the heart of of the issues that we're facing as a

01:24:14.480 society. And it's the same with the oil fields, right? I mean, if they're, they automate and

01:24:18.840 there's, you know, bigger and bigger corporations are running that show. And a lot of them are

01:24:23.280 foreign owned and like the Canadians even benefit from all these big industrial developments.

01:24:28.000 And I think that's a pretty, pretty questionable that they do. We need to step back and start

01:24:33.160 developing smaller scale stuff. That's more owned by locals, you know, and for local markets.

01:24:37.980 i think enough of shipping wood raw logs overseas and buying the completed furniture back again

01:24:44.640 that's ridiculous we should be manufacturing all of our stuff here in canada um and i could go on

01:24:50.600 and on about that stuff too but uh no i i think that's actually a good place to kind of pivot

01:24:55.760 well i it make my job easier if i don't have to ask as many questions i if you know i mean we can

01:25:03.220 go to some of the comment sections here if we want to, but so far we only have the most

01:25:08.600 profound one, as usual, always follow the money. Always true. Always follow the money.

01:25:16.020 I think when we talk about these large corporations, I mean, in British Columbia with a long legacy

01:25:23.360 of kind of oligarchy and the big oligarchs and how that works, of course, a reference

01:25:29.460 there to corporatism a corporatocracy i think that let's pretend for a moment that somehow

01:25:38.900 the oligarchs come hat in hand and they tell and they tell us you know it look like we all know

01:25:44.660 that that we're you know we're in charge we're the big big bruisers in town and that's that's

01:25:49.060 what's happening okay fine but but we need to understand that we it's it's the international

01:25:54.260 market that's doing this to us, or even if we could do more biodiversity, the problem would be

01:26:00.740 that the people that we sell to overseas only want to take our J-grade lumber, which is made

01:26:07.620 of conifer, as they're telling us, and sink it in their harbors and then bring it back out when

01:26:12.640 lumber goes up in price or whatever they're doing over there. I heard that rumor when I was a kid

01:26:16.400 that all our J-grade lumber got bought overseas and sunk in harbors and seawater waiting until

01:26:22.220 lumber prices went up. The point is that this is the argument, right? The argument is like,

01:26:27.160 well, we have to do what we have to do because we have to do it. And I think that that's a poor set

01:26:32.760 of arguments, obviously. How do we respond to that? And how do we, in the same way that people

01:26:38.260 talk about trying to move off of fossil fuels, I think this is a fair challenge in the same respect.

01:26:44.340 If we're going to try and move away from big employers with big sawmills and things that

01:26:50.820 have to pay for themselves and all the industry and all of the heavy equipment. How do we move

01:26:55.280 away from that into more of the two man sawmill situation? And how do we know that that's going

01:27:00.100 to be a sustainable transition? I think a lot of people might be worried about that, James.

01:27:10.680 Well, we're already, I mean, no, we shouldn't be worried about that. We should be worried about

01:27:15.780 these big mills, you know, canning entire towns and communities right now, right, happening today. 0.71

01:27:22.420 Look at McKenzie. I mean, the forest industry just hung them out to dry. I mean, there's, you know,

01:27:29.720 Facebook posts of people in McKenzie right now, like who've lost their health coverage, looking

01:27:33.440 for advice on how to get affordable coverage that they lost because their mill has arbitrarily

01:27:39.560 shut down like nothing to do with environmental policies or you know people like me getting my

01:27:46.600 way and saying you know we got to like reduce our cut because we're gonna have more aspen in the

01:27:49.780 forests this is entirely to do with these uh with these corporations um basically uh i mean to be

01:27:57.140 realistic here what's happening is can for has a huge lumber supply in the u.s south and they're

01:28:02.700 playing the the north american lumber market they're getting cheaper logs in the south

01:28:08.880 and they make more money wherever they're going to make more money off their logging

01:28:12.240 that's where they're going to focus production so they're focusing production right now in the u.s

01:28:15.540 south and even though there's lots of wood to be had and and you know like i think i think the the

01:28:24.040 debate the focus is on the wrong player here i think we need to be less concerned about

01:28:29.380 conservationists like myself or you know some of the people that want to preserve more of these

01:28:33.540 irreplaceable thousand-year-old old growth stands on vancouver island and we need to put the focus

01:28:38.100 on these corporations that will uh that don't really care about communities that care about

01:28:45.220 their bottom line and that that's the bigger issue now as far as like the glyphosate issue

01:28:52.340 this is entirely the respray is entirely uh theoretical right it's all about um the theoretical

01:28:58.740 production of lumber 60 years down the road the stuff we're spraying today we're never going to

01:29:02.660 profit off that log it whatever for 50 years okay so it's all based on this huge string of

01:29:09.440 assumptions and if we were to stop and and so these assumptions feed into the amount that we

01:29:14.800 can cut today right so if you stop spraying the theory is we'd have to reduce our cut today to

01:29:20.480 account for the slightly lower conifer saw log growth in the forest

01:29:28.740 And I don't even think that that's realistic because these models don't account for pests.

01:29:35.340 They don't account for loss to wildfire.

01:29:38.580 So, like I said, they're entirely theoretical.

01:29:41.720 And this is why we're going to basically, you know, make moose hunting worse, starve moose, starve beaver, make cattle ranching less profitable.

01:29:50.440 We're going to do all this right now into today's timeframe based on something that's going to happen 60 years down the road tomorrow.

01:29:57.540 And we don't even know what the market's going to be tomorrow, right?

01:30:00.180 Like, we're also assuming that aspen isn't a commercial species 60 years down the road.

01:30:06.220 Like, what crystal ball did these guys have that said aspen won't be a valuable species, or birch?

01:30:11.380 I mean, 50 years ago, birch was the most valuable species coming out of the central interior, and now it's not.

01:30:17.180 So how do you know that won't shift again?

01:30:19.800 So that's what I would have to say to that argument, is that I'd say just listen to common sense and listen to rationality.

01:30:27.280 And I think a model with like a few factors doesn't account for a lot of things that we need to account for.

01:30:35.200 And the simple minded idea that we need to grow our forests like a carrot farm is way too simple.

01:30:40.760 And it's a silly idea and it's going to backfire and it's going to it doesn't even make economic sense.

01:30:46.380 I mean, there's a lot of guys that could make money off Aspen with a small sawmill.

01:30:50.080 And that's actually what did happen.

01:30:52.880 In the 90s, there was this thing called the Wood Enterprise Center in Quenelle.

01:30:56.320 there was 30 small wood miser operations not just wood misers but you know hawk mills and other

01:31:02.260 other brands between quenelle and prince george 30 of these guys and they were making birch and

01:31:09.740 aspen products flooring paneling all sorts of stuff and they were milling it at this government

01:31:15.520 funded place it was called the wood wood enterprise center in quenelle that had a

01:31:19.220 shaper and a molder like a four-sided planer so they could make tongue and groove lumber and

01:31:23.460 And that thing supported all these little mills, you know, with basically helping people

01:31:28.980 create value out of a product that didn't have commercial value, a very, very small

01:31:33.840 government investment.

01:31:36.240 There are some complaints from some guys in town and, you know, the BC Liberals shut that

01:31:40.060 down in 2002.

01:31:41.060 And now we have basically when Pete Stoner was the only guy that kept doing the Aspen

01:31:46.220 thing.

01:31:47.220 So, I don't know, with a little bit of government help, I think you could really open, expand

01:31:53.440 um markets like this for a species that the big mills don't want and we might complain about

01:32:00.080 subsidization but let's be honest these big mills are subsidized all the time with the with a lot

01:32:06.320 of different a lot of different respects you know we we pay for the glyphosate sprain people don't

01:32:11.600 realize that that comes off a stumpage we pay for the road building that comes off stumpage

01:32:17.280 um tons and tons of things but anyway i'll i'll stop there and shoot me a question if you got it

01:32:23.440 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, I think that articulates things very well. And again, something that was noted the other day to me by Bill Barnes, actually, a guy who did the Value Vote ballot. I had him on the other show that we do here in D.C.'s northern capital, Ramon's Day.

01:32:43.580 and we chat a little bit about value vote ballot and that sort of thing.

01:32:49.680 But the thing that kind of came up there was that, you know,

01:32:52.140 it's medium and small businesses, right, that have, they duplex, right?

01:32:58.220 They have multiple people doing the same job

01:33:02.220 because everybody needs an accountant, everybody needs a bookkeeper,

01:33:04.740 everybody needs somebody in receiving and shipping.

01:33:08.600 And if you just build a gigantic Walmart or, you know,

01:33:11.600 an amazon center somewhere whatever you just have one of those at the top being paid a decent salary

01:33:15.980 and a whole bunch of you know wage slaves down at the bottom unfortunately and that that needs to be

01:33:20.560 thought through in in precisely that way mom and pop shops same thing right obviously you know

01:33:27.300 often dad is doing the driving if it's a truck driving business and mom is doing the book and

01:33:31.640 and that that complementarianism results in there being uh maybe not all the wealth in the world but

01:33:37.600 enough wealth to keep a family going maybe something that you could help uh even me actually

01:33:43.620 on and i hopefully some of our listeners here and viewers is that i i must admit that i don't

01:33:49.820 really even know what an old growth force means like i assume it's old and it's grown uh other

01:33:56.320 than that i don't really know much about it i assume that it's never been cut i assume that

01:34:01.800 it's it's in its state of nature so it was what it looked like when uh first contact between uh

01:34:08.440 my people and uh all non uh first residents of uh of north america came together that would be my

01:34:15.480 assumption if somebody asked me what the old growth forest is but what what are we talking

01:34:18.840 about in a more kind of specific biological and biosphere sense we're talking about old

01:34:23.400 growth forests and why is that important especially with what's going on in vancouver island

01:34:31.800 yeah so in in my neck of the woods here in prince george you know between i'm kind of

01:34:41.000 more familiar with plateau i call it so it would sort of stretch from maybe like babine lake down

01:34:48.300 to clinton and these forests you know we don't really get old forests uh the douglas fans they

01:34:54.560 can survive fire so you'll get three four hundred year old douglas fir patches uh very rare on the

01:35:01.280 landscape um the further north you go so in prince george there's like 200 year old fur stands are

01:35:08.300 like less than one percent of the land base right so i think when it comes to discussions of old

01:35:13.180 growth it's like well what is the what is the forest that is there's not very much of and i

01:35:17.840 think that's what we need to be worried about so in the interior i'd say it's the old dug fur stands

01:35:22.720 uh you get further east of town you get the inland temperate rainforest and you don't get

01:35:27.720 disturbance from fire there they they don't uh some areas they don't even have a record of forest

01:35:32.620 fire so you get cedar there that are 600 years old you know and spruce can get get uh i don't

01:35:38.660 know about that old but they can not sure exactly how old i'd imagine they get about 300 years old

01:35:44.520 uh some of the hemlock can get quite old so in those places you know like if if that's how old

01:35:50.140 these things are getting then you can't just turn it into a fiber farm on 30 40 50 year rotations

01:35:55.800 like you got to respect that that temporal balance of the forest and i think that's kind of the same

01:36:01.240 on a lot of the coastal forests so in southern vancouver island like the fairy creek watershed

01:36:07.480 that's basically the last watershed on the southern end of vancouver island it's old growth

01:36:11.840 other than other than some parks right and i think it gets to the the point i think of forestry in

01:36:19.580 in bc is that if it's not a park and if it's not private land it's going to get logged that's the

01:36:24.000 plan okay it's all going to be a working forest like everything's going to get logged and you

01:36:30.220 look at google earth other than parks you look at google earth like we're almost there right it's

01:36:34.800 just clear cut after clear cut now what they're doing is they're going in between the clear cuts

01:36:37.620 and hitting the leaf strips and then we're turning all of this into plantations of one or two species

01:36:44.660 like it's not the same we're taking something and dramatically changing it and that's going to have

01:36:50.260 a big impact on on a lot of things it's going to impact fire resistance it's going to impact

01:36:56.300 resiliency it's going to impact what kind of wildlife species can survive there so you know

01:37:02.700 I might stop the spray thing it's not really about old growth there's other people that

01:37:07.380 advocate for that better than me I kind of feel like our role is to advocate for the 97% of the

01:37:14.100 productive forest that is basically going to be serving the lumber industry. So a lot of people

01:37:24.440 are making a big stink about a very, very small amount of forest that's left. So there's like

01:37:27.860 3% of big tree old growth left, what was once out there. We're not talking like little scraggly,

01:37:33.500 you know, ancient trees up in the high Alpine that are never going to be logged. We're talking

01:37:38.860 about the big cedar and Douglas fir and the valley bottoms, right? I mean, that's all being logged.

01:37:44.100 So, yeah, we can fight for that last 3%, but I kind of feel like it's almost more important 0.99

01:37:49.300 that we make sure that that other 97% is being sustainably dealt with, and that we're not

01:37:54.820 just doing these glyphosate sprayed, and not everything is glyphosate sprayed on average.

01:37:59.520 It's about 7% to 10% of everything logged province-wide gets sprayed, and that number

01:38:05.320 obviously is way higher in Prince George, where 90% of the spraying is.

01:38:09.080 And so, you know, I think we need to just make sure that the stuff that we're growing for timber is more diverse.

01:38:17.500 And, like, I don't want to see a situation where we get that last 3% of old growth protected in exchange for sacrificing the other 97% to fiber farms.

01:38:29.760 You know, I don't want to see that happen.

01:38:31.140 I want to see some old trees left in these stands.

01:38:33.240 I want to see more selective logging.

01:38:34.780 uh and then you know here locally in prince george freya logging are doing an excellent

01:38:40.260 job in that regard they're showing that industry can do such logging and make money doing it so

01:38:45.060 there's some cuts by west lake that i actually just did a video on on our facebook page i don't

01:38:49.600 know folks listening and haven't have heard of our facebook page but stop the spray bc

01:38:53.840 check it out we've got a lot of videos on there you can watch and you know we're not anti-logging

01:39:00.560 by any sense of the means.

01:39:02.780 I mean, I make my livelihood off of small-scale logging.

01:39:05.940 And Liam there shows that you can actually do

01:39:07.700 larger-scale logging selectively.

01:39:11.460 I think what a lot of people don't realize

01:39:12.940 is how important these old snags are for wildlife.

01:39:15.520 If you have a dead tree with holes in it,

01:39:17.320 that's going to be where the fisher are going to live.

01:39:19.020 Fisher are an endangered species,

01:39:21.340 or threatened, red-listed species anyway,

01:39:23.100 here in the interior.

01:39:24.280 That's because we cut down all their homes.

01:39:26.240 We cut down all the big snags where they live, right?

01:39:28.560 and we're growing like just just miles and miles of young 20 year old pine trees now

01:39:33.940 you know and we would leave they would also make holes in big old cottonwoods and big old aspens

01:39:38.740 what we broadcast spray the works of glyphosate those surviving aspens die and so there's nothing

01:39:45.760 left that's the other crazy thing like we leave the aspen trees we call them wildlife trees and

01:39:49.920 we spray them with glyphosate like it's just insane and uh yeah so it's important to like

01:39:56.440 leave have more retention leave little patches there when you do a logging clearing and that's

01:40:00.360 where the moose can hang out in the winter time uh squirrels and birds like chickadees they need

01:40:05.600 a tree with a cavity if you don't have a tree with a cavity the chickadees aren't going to be there

01:40:09.000 they in the winter time they all huddle together in a little bundle 30 or 40 of them will find a

01:40:14.180 little cavity and they'll keep warm that way if they don't have a cavity they're not going to exist

01:40:19.000 and if you don't have that stuff your wildlife are going to suffer so you know trappers and

01:40:23.820 hunters all know this stuff the guide outfitters like we're just devastated by seeing what's

01:40:28.440 happening the interior forests of just these endless clear cuts and it's got to change like

01:40:35.400 it's not just about these big corporations and these big machines it's you know we can we can

01:40:41.300 make a go of it with small operations it's quite clear and you know like you did make a comment

01:40:48.580 there about the beans and i chatted with you on the on the phone there before the show about this

01:40:52.160 point, you know, all of this is like, it's just about volume and scale, and we need to move away

01:40:59.840 from volume and go for value. Like when you have a huge machine doing these clear cuts, like how

01:41:05.620 much of that clear cut is just to pay for that machine? Like a big chunk of it, right? A lot of

01:41:10.580 this investment, like it just creates more incentive to log more to pay for the investment.

01:41:15.320 So it's just like a never ending downward cycle. Then you got to the more, you know, then you want

01:41:20.940 to get more volume you got to get bigger machines and you've been you know the forest more of the

01:41:25.620 forest has to be taken just to support the machinery never mind the people so that we've

01:41:31.020 created this endless loop of of um exploitation that sees no end okay if they could have like a

01:41:39.960 massive machine that was run by one guy that basically just sucked up trees and and crapped

01:41:46.500 out two by fours they would do it without a doubt that would be a machine that would exist okay then

01:41:51.580 that's probably where we're going to end up one day if we don't stop it and shut it down and move

01:41:56.940 to small mills small logging selective logging that kind of thing you know we should there's

01:42:02.400 something like a thousand feller bunchers in the interior and there's maybe okay look up the

01:42:07.360 difference between those two machines we need more harvesters we need less feller bunchers

01:42:10.840 feller bunchers clear cut they they have a big spinning blade and they take down everything they

01:42:15.960 mop down little 30 year old spruce that should be left standing and so much of the pine forest that

01:42:21.080 we salvage logged that love we got completely leveled them there was tons of spruce growing

01:42:26.040 in the understory that all got chopped down and then burned in slash piles like we could have

01:42:31.640 left all that stuff it would have been 30 years ahead on the next rotation so it's just like it's

01:42:35.720 inefficient it's it's not even to the benefit of the industry because we basically set ourselves

01:42:40.360 back to square one all the time when we do these clear cuts uh so yeah there there's there's

01:42:45.740 absolutely a future and a way forward i just um the problem is all of the the political power

01:42:51.800 that these big mills have i think i think that it's an interesting point it's and it's one of

01:42:59.960 those things that i i mean and i'm not going to try and peg anybody's politics here but i mean i

01:43:04.340 i declare myself a conservative through and through how how much i agree with what people

01:43:09.200 think conservatism is is another question entirely but but to the to this point this has always been

01:43:14.980 an interesting tension for me especially ever since my family got got into farming very late

01:43:20.240 in in our family trajectories life my parents are almost 60 uh and then they ended up buying a farm

01:43:26.120 not so long ago and playing playing around with mixed farming and that sort of thing and just some

01:43:30.840 of the points you're bringing up here they kind of they kind of hit me the same way whether i'm

01:43:34.840 talking about well the you know the fact that you know the dairy lobby gets subsidized we don't

01:43:40.340 right and various other industries get subsidized and we don't get subsidized because we're not that

01:43:44.660 kind of farm and then further to that that whole problem of that the cost right that the kind of

01:43:50.960 self-perpetuating you know uh petrochemical industrial complex this this old problem right

01:43:57.180 i mean the miracles of what of being able to tap into the internal combustion engine do for us

01:44:03.680 there's no arguing that. There are more people alive today because of what the internal combustion

01:44:09.220 engines do and widespread access to cheap energy can do. Simultaneously, of course,

01:44:15.880 this also results in its own make work and a certain amount of waste in just the materials

01:44:21.640 that get left behind, let alone the other waste pollution. And this is a constant tension. I mean,

01:44:27.280 my father purchased quite a few back to the land books when we first got on the property and

01:44:33.680 I read a lot of them and, you know, a lot of those southern agrarians, that is to say

01:44:38.180 that from the southern United States, making the point that, no, it's about getting back

01:44:43.220 to the land and trying to find natural ways of doing things that we've now manufactured

01:44:47.760 or turned it to, well, we've plasticized them.

01:44:52.900 They're not real anymore.

01:44:54.180 They're man-made.

01:44:54.900 We don't use the natural system anymore because it supposedly takes too long.

01:44:57.980 I think for anybody worth their salt within any kind of milieu, but certainly within my milieu of kind of conservatism, maybe some populism in there, but certainly a kind of very, very concrete understanding of reality and the way things work and values, deep values.

01:45:16.900 I think that this is something that's important.

01:45:19.940 And with respect to what you're talking about, James, I value it a great deal.

01:45:25.380 What do you think is kind of the, I don't know if I want to say political philosophy,

01:45:29.340 but certainly kind of the life philosophy that needs to be articulated there in order

01:45:33.580 for us to move forward in such a way to a more sustainable future on this count in a

01:45:39.080 variety of aspects?

01:45:44.020 Yeah.

01:45:46.900 Yeah, sorry, Nathan. I think the internet connection here might be a little bit compromised.

01:46:00.440 I can hear you just fine. 0.99

01:46:02.560 Oh, damn it. Nathan, can you hear me? 0.99

01:46:06.500 I can. Yep, I can.

01:46:09.400 Okay. I have a few little funny anecdotes to tell you about the technology, but I'll first say, like, I think the solution is just there's some really simple things that we could do to get smaller people going in forestry.

01:46:29.960 I think one of the easiest things we could do is with regards to commercial firewood. So a lot of people don't know this, but you can't legally sell firewood in this province.

01:46:39.400 You can cut it for your own use. But if you want to sell it, and I've looked into this,

01:46:43.180 I've gone to the forestry ministry there and asked what I need. You need tenure. You need

01:46:47.460 some kind of legal right to crown land. So you could do that. The most realistic way to do that

01:46:53.080 is a small scale salvage. And you would probably have to hire a forester to do that. It's a lot of

01:47:02.880 work to get a small scale salvage. You would have to, or you could maybe get a permit to get slash

01:47:08.620 pile you wouldn't have to get a forester in that case you'd still need a permit and the company

01:47:12.840 would probably need to give you you'd have to some kind of legal waiver because it's their

01:47:16.940 slash pile full of good firewood that they're just going to burn

01:47:22.040 and then if you did pull it out of the slash pile even though they never the companies never

01:47:27.360 got charged stumpage for that waste they consider it waste as soon as anybody adds value to waste

01:47:32.320 you get charged stumpage on it you have to pay stumpage so you would actually have to scale that

01:47:36.660 wood and pay stumpage to the government

01:47:38.800 before you can sell it to someone else.

01:47:40.780 That's how the rule works. You might think that

01:47:42.660 sounds crazy, but I'm pretty sure, 100%

01:47:44.840 sure that's how it works. 0.77

01:47:45.740 The government needs their cut. 0.99

01:47:48.280 Obviously, they could

01:47:49.460 change the law and say, you know what? You could get

01:47:51.640 all the firewood you want out of these

01:47:53.700 files and you can

01:47:57.700 sell it and start doing it. I don't know

01:47:59.700 why they don't do that.

01:48:01.660 There's a story, a guy down in Kamloops who did that.

01:48:03.780 He pulled a bunch of firewood out of

01:48:06.660 slash piles, and he got $200,000 worth of firewood confiscated. There's a big article on it in the

01:48:12.440 Campbell's paper there. It was just two years ago. So I mean, there are legal repercussions if you

01:48:17.800 try to sell waste product to the public in the form of firewood. So that's an easy thing we could

01:48:23.160 do. Some of the rules around small sawmills, like if I buy a birch log off of a private piece of

01:48:32.360 property and transport it to my sawmill site, I can't do that, right? I have to, the guy who's

01:48:38.560 selling the wood has to get a timber mark. You would have to, and then that wood that comes to

01:48:43.620 my place, I would have to report, even though it's all private wood and the government doesn't get

01:48:47.540 any of it, I still have to tell them how much I cut. Like they want reports on all the wood

01:48:52.360 production, even if it's all private wood. And then I've got to like set up a mill site. I have

01:48:58.340 like be subject to inspection for a little woodmiser little portable sawmill like the rules

01:49:03.940 around this stuff are just are just crazy like why well why do they have these rules and i think

01:49:08.580 that's a really good question that kind of gets at the heart of political manipulation and sort

01:49:14.180 of the professional class i think a lot of a lot of this has to do with um people in government

01:49:20.340 needing to justify their jobs right a lot of desk jobs we got a lot of universities pumping out

01:49:25.700 people who aren't doing physical labor and uh they need to justify their job so i mean a lot

01:49:32.020 of foresters are like that like you go out and like you got to spend all this money on foresters

01:49:37.780 to just tell you like stuff that doesn't really even matter i mean look at these huge clear cuts

01:49:42.580 like why do you got to pay someone to justify that like it's it's it's bs what they're doing

01:49:48.020 like what you're going to make it better by hiring a forester to say that that's okay like

01:49:52.020 Like, anyway, that's what I have to say about that.

01:49:57.720 Now, back to your point about technology.

01:49:59.940 You know, out here in Punchaw, we're kind of like a backwater area.

01:50:02.600 They're south of Prince George.

01:50:04.820 We're kind of between Prince George, Quennell, and Van Der Hoef.

01:50:08.720 And there were some really neat examples out here of farming before the internal combustion engine.

01:50:13.700 So back in the 40s and 50s, there was a guy out here who did all farms.

01:50:20.960 they'd have these crazy tripods set up out in the hay fields and they would

01:50:24.920 with a basket on the end and with a counterweight and you'd cut down all the

01:50:29.080 the hay with a horse-drawn mower and then you'd gather it all in these

01:50:33.680 baskets and kind of make these big haystacks and this guy fed 50 or 60

01:50:38.000 cattle a year without a single internal combustion engine was all wagons and

01:50:42.800 horses and I think it wasn't until like 1961 I think that he bought his first

01:50:47.960 tractor and it just it just threw everything out of whack for him he realized that to pay for that

01:50:55.240 tractor you know he had to like increase his production to such a point that um he didn't

01:51:02.760 just wasn't it wasn't possible like at all the profits from the operation went into pain for

01:51:07.720 this technology and you can read like things from will um you know thorough from back in the 1800s

01:51:13.400 you know walden's pond it wasn't written in that book but he had an interesting anecdote about

01:51:20.040 when a train came that would take him from walden's pond to i don't know one of the towns

01:51:24.840 area massachusetts lexington or concord to to pay for the ticket he would have to work

01:51:30.680 uh for the same amount of time that would take him to walk there right so

01:51:36.760 back to like forestry and logging a lot of this a lot of these big technology advancements it's

01:51:41.480 It just creates another level of cost, another burden on the planet that isn't even to support humanity.

01:51:47.960 It's to support machinery and technology.

01:51:51.360 And at some point, this can't go on forever.

01:51:54.980 There has to be a limit to this.

01:51:56.900 There has to be a point where we do things for the sake of humanity and not for the sake of technology.

01:52:03.840 And how you get people to stop worshipping technology, I don't know.

01:52:07.840 But we might not have a choice at some point.

01:52:11.480 I don't know. I think it's a profound point.

01:52:16.120 Something that always strikes me, you know, it's that line, right?

01:52:21.060 Of course, put so well by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.

01:52:26.260 The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

01:52:29.440 And it does seem that we are creating a more inhuman world on this count.

01:52:35.060 It doesn't matter which way we try to square it.

01:52:37.180 even our politics become more inhuman,

01:52:40.240 let alone the various other methodologies we have

01:52:42.620 kind of keeping ourselves warm and dry

01:52:44.380 or what we're willing to do to one another

01:52:46.840 in order to keep our comfort.

01:52:48.860 I think that on this count,

01:52:50.780 before we get off into that tangent,

01:52:52.420 because we don't have a lot of time left here,

01:52:54.100 is that if we have to start local,

01:52:56.800 if we have to start at the ground level,

01:52:58.840 if we have to start with our neighbors

01:53:00.300 and move forward,

01:53:02.540 what would you hope that people interested

01:53:05.540 in the advocacy that you do,

01:53:11.060 how would you like them to help you?

01:53:13.960 And what way would you see them

01:53:15.500 moving forward in solidarity with you?

01:53:23.800 Well, I think we need,

01:53:26.100 yeah, I don't know.

01:53:27.980 I mean, most of what I do

01:53:29.300 is just kind of awareness,

01:53:30.780 public awareness.

01:53:32.760 The solutions that I think are necessary

01:53:34.700 are are pretty hard to achieve and i think that's like we need some kind of institutional reform we

01:53:40.080 need a devolution of democracy to the local level so i'm not going to say like northern separation

01:53:47.720 that's not realistic i don't think but we could definitely have like a northern regional district

01:53:52.320 that is more powerful uh our district forester he or she should be elected by the people of

01:54:00.220 prince george and surrounding area uh i think um i don't know i think that this could be a realistic

01:54:07.860 way forward you know like you we could also talk about uh ranching and like slaughterhouses and why

01:54:13.600 don't we have a significant slaughterhouse in prince george why we have one little facility

01:54:18.220 it can't support the people of prince george with their food needs uh you know rancher you have to

01:54:23.000 send your cattle to alberta and then they send it back again and you know make jimmy pattison with

01:54:28.380 to save on a grocery store monopoly in Prince George, Richard.

01:54:31.720 So we've talked about this for a long time.

01:54:35.120 There have been a lot of reports written on this,

01:54:36.480 but we've never gotten a result.

01:54:37.980 It's very simple.

01:54:39.020 Like we could relax some of the regulations

01:54:40.940 around selling our own beef here in Prince George locally.

01:54:44.940 And it never happens because of the institutional problem

01:54:48.820 of Victoria being Victoria in the Lower Mainland

01:54:52.280 and us being Prince George being 700 kilometers away

01:54:56.920 and they don't care about us.

01:54:57.980 Okay, we're just a little town that, you know, we could we could do all this stuff would have zero impact on them. It would have tons of benefits for us. But it doesn't happen because they don't care. Okay, so this is this is where you need the people that are impacted by a policy. The most need to be in control of that policy.

01:55:17.360 so let's go back to the aspen thing and on the landscape and like why we spray aspen well that

01:55:23.120 was an arbitrary rule that somebody in victoria came up with and it's totally disrespectful of

01:55:28.240 our ecosystem like uh for instance in the bobtail lake area southwest of town they did a study that

01:55:34.480 20 of the forest is aspen the rule says it's got to be you're only allowed at most five percent

01:55:40.320 aspen in the regenerating cut blocks and preferably it would be zero percent that's

01:55:45.040 literally how the rule is written okay and this is like somebody in victoria wrote this

01:55:49.520 and we have zero control over that and i can rant and rave and you know we got 120 000 signatures on

01:55:55.360 our petition you know a whole bunch we get tons of shares on our posts doesn't matter because they

01:56:00.800 don't care so we need we need to take back the power from victoria and these metropolitan areas

01:56:06.480 and and gain it for ourselves up here uh and yeah i think i think having a regional district with a

01:56:13.440 a more powerful regional board of directors is a way to do that and instead of like being so focused

01:56:19.080 on electing mps and mlas who don't do anything for us they can't do anything for us we need to

01:56:25.820 have powerful regional directors that have control over things like you know how forest

01:56:31.600 standards are implemented who gets the wood you know like these big mega corps with head offices

01:56:38.380 down in vancouver they get all the wood and nobody in prince george gets it you know we need

01:56:43.280 to take that control back from these metropolitan areas and reclaim it for ourselves.

01:56:48.680 So I'm not sure how that's going to happen, but that's the idea.

01:56:51.960 You know, you spread an idea far enough and wide enough, maybe it catches on at some point.

01:56:56.120 So that would be what I would say.

01:57:01.320 I think that, of course, regardless of which side of the political spectrum you're on,

01:57:07.500 lots of people say that, you know, the day you start to fight is the day that you start

01:57:12.620 to win.

01:57:13.280 so again thank you for your time James of course I've been talking with James

01:57:17.900 title he is the head guy for stop the spray and the biggest agitator for it

01:57:23.420 and we're thankful to have him on today to tell us about what needs to happen

01:57:28.040 when it comes to the Aspen in British Columbia and what's going to happen

01:57:32.780 going forward with forestry in DC thank you for joining us AJ

01:57:37.420 all right thanks for having me nathan really appreciated it if anybody wants to check out

01:57:46.540 our facebook page stop the spray it's got the bc at the end there stop the spray bc

01:57:50.540 and there we got a website as well so appreciate it thanks again thank you so much well that was

01:57:57.180 our program for today uh we kind of wandered around a little bit but if there was a central

01:58:01.980 theme i guess we could simply say that once again that if you want to use the catholic term

01:58:06.460 subsidiarity or if you want to use a more modern term the devolution of uh well the devolution of

01:58:13.420 of power bringing power back to the people and articulating values thereof with the sense of

01:58:19.260 place uh is the most important thing but uh we're thankful to have had uh the guests we've had today

01:58:25.620 and we're thankful that you tuned in tune in again tomorrow uh for more from mountain standard time

01:58:36.460 Thank you.

Western Standard - April 14, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - April 13, 2021

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