In this episode of Mountain Standard Time, host Nathan Guida speaks with Stacey Parker, the President of the Los Altos Institute, about the lockdowns and other news items that have been happening in BC.
00:03:14.000mm-hmm well we'll just go live with uh with stewart there uh stewart you are on with us
00:03:23.940and of course we uh are thankful that uh you're here today uh what's on your mind and what's uh
00:03:29.880making you what's making you tick today uh well i i i didn't actually show up with a with a set
00:03:37.300grievances as i often start my day with which is is pretty nice um i uh but saying that i'm
00:03:46.040reminded of a wonderful tv show that i followed uh very carefully very sad when it ended uh called
00:03:52.500rake uh as an australian show and um in the final season the main character is elected to the
00:04:00.560australian senate and there's this moment where he's being uh he's on this improbable campaign
00:04:06.620that he's really only engaged in out of spite and because his sister's running for the Liberal Party.
00:04:13.520And so one of the interviewers says, Mr. Green, I don't understand it.
00:04:19.580Your platform just appears to be a bizarre litany of personal grievances.
00:04:25.580And I thought to myself, you know, I remember when BC politics was a lot more of that, you know,
00:04:32.760different candidates would show up and offer their bizarre list of personal grievances with
00:04:37.940very little central control. And one of the things that strikes me every morning in BC
00:04:46.500is how we've gone from being viewed as the most polarized place on earth to being this place with
00:04:55.240a real policy consensus with um this cross-partisan consensus that everybody is part of um people are
00:05:05.260shocked right now that sonia first now is criticizing the government's response to the
00:05:11.780pandemic and all sorts of people are coming out of the woodwork to say you know my god uh how how
00:05:20.380can you question you know bonnie henry how can you how can you do this this is this is un-british
00:05:26.900colombian and this is especially noteworthy because of course we're i'm sitting here in
00:05:32.660the writing of prince george valemont represented by the leader of her majesty's loyal opposition
00:05:39.120who has offered not a word of criticism for the political and economic and medical decisions that
00:05:49.540this government has made in fact in her reelection campaign shirley bond did a thing that that it1.00
00:05:57.940blew my mind she began showing up to ribbon cuttings uh and announcements by the incumbent1.00
00:06:05.460government and essentially ran as though the province had a unity government a grand coalition
00:06:15.140for the duration of covid and she was part of that government and i i mean she wasn't yet the
00:06:21.620leader of the opposition at that point but the fact that they would choose the person who ran
00:06:27.540the lowest contrast campaign of anybody in their caucus who survived that drubbing at the polls
00:06:36.500is indicative that um there's this sense obviously the opposition's doing some polling0.99
00:06:43.380They can't be this dumb all on their own. There's clearly a pollster involved. But it's really stunning to think that the official opposition doesn't have a word of criticism over things like the obvious cover-up of a baby dying of COVID in January, and then the government covering that up for three months until another infant died of COVID.0.93
00:07:09.740and then the BC coroner's service effectively functioning as a whistleblower entity
00:07:16.480and directly saying this baby died of COVID.
00:07:20.960So you would think that, I mean, I remember when the Ministry of Children and Family Development was created
00:07:28.500and it was understood to be like this terrible thing if you got that ministry
00:07:34.200because you had just become the minister of dead kids.
00:07:36.880And it's really interesting that this opposition at this point in our political narrative will not, you know, will not say that, you know, children died because of political decisions, because the chief medical health officer kept insisting that children couldn't even contract COVID while children were hospitalized with COVID.
00:08:01.720and one would think that somebody would be calling for some resignations or something like that but
00:08:08.480all we have is one of the two green members of the legislature making some fairly polite
00:08:14.740criticisms of the government's response and you know i'm you know i'm not an anti-masker i'm not
00:08:24.120an anti-vaxxer and i don't oppose lockdowns the you know my objection to what's going on in bc is
00:08:31.040that there hasn't been a lockdown. There's been a lot of half-assed announcements that were never
00:08:36.240even encoded in law. Most things Bonnie Henry announces on TV are non-binding advice. The
00:08:42.900solicitor general never turns them into orders in council. They're just vague advice for any police
00:08:48.680authority that feels like following through on that. But of course, when cities or islands
00:08:56.140attempt more serious lockdowns to have like a Nova Scotia or New Zealand style thing where you
00:09:03.500just stop travel, get COVID to zero, and then your economy turns back on. The Queen Charlotte
00:09:12.220Islands, Haida Gwaii, were stopped from doing that by the government last year. One of the reasons
00:09:18.560Prince Rupert was vaccinated so early as a major global transshipment point, again, was because
00:09:25.100the Solicitor General overturned the orders for a local lockdown from the Mayor and Council of
00:09:31.820Prince Rupert. And so there are all kinds of political due process questions that go beyond
00:09:39.360even COVID, but what is overreach for provincial government? What kind of jurisdiction do Indigenous
00:09:45.940people have if they can't continue a pre-conquest process of quarantining, which is, you know,
00:09:55.100one of the things that allowed indigenous people who survived the European epidemics to survive
00:10:00.160in the first place. So it is really striking that we have all of these issues that turn up day after
00:10:07.640day about the government's COVID response. And like everything else from raw logs to, well,
00:10:14.480really anything but real estate, the official opposition is there to endorse the government.
00:10:19.200to endorse the government it's uh it's a damning thing to say but the fact of the matter is here
00:10:27.860in british columbia i don't really see a way around uh that statement uh or that statement
00:10:33.120being proven false i it's it's incredible to think that again as you pointed out bc which which is
00:10:41.400not famous for its consensus in fact it's famous for its division all these little river valleys
00:10:46.980all these tribes of tories these tribes of socialists and extremists and cryptocurrencies
00:10:52.180in church basements and god knows what else is happening around out there this this very bizarre
00:10:58.020diverse divided place has some very interesting political manifestations i don't know if anybody
00:11:03.060ever quite took off their shoe and start banging it on the table you know uh but they but i mean
00:11:08.420there were some pretty strong words both sides there's some pretty great excuses too like i think
00:11:12.580Ghilardi once said he needed to test the road that's why he was caught going 230 down the number
00:11:18.080one so if that's the case if that's the world we came from the and indeed that you're a native
00:11:23.900Vancouverite that was the Vancouver you came from a very dynamic diverse place it was a Tory town at
00:11:29.240one point in some places uh and now it's blase what what's the answer to our politics if that's
00:11:36.000what's happened well I think there's there's really two parts to it one is that of course
00:11:42.060you also you do see this when a policy consensus appears that's when the two sides scream the
00:11:49.720loudest because they actually have um nothing to argue about so things get very personal or they
00:11:58.080get focused on really specific wedge issues you know that uh well let's all take strong positions
00:12:05.480on the israel-palestine conflict or let's all take strong positions on human rights in china
00:12:11.280So you pick an issue that's outside your jurisdiction or you pick something that affects a tiny proportion of the people in your jurisdiction or that's, you know, more that's an issue that functions at a symbolic level. Right.
00:12:24.160And so Republicans and Democrats perfected that game in the United States of proceeding with a complete policy consensus and screaming at each other.
00:12:34.560And of course, you notice how both establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans felt that Donald Trump was an existential threat to the system, not because of, you know, like being a weird guy who runs afoul of the law with some frequency,
00:12:51.420but because it would actually mean that there wasn't a policy consensus on a significant foreign policy issue.
00:12:59.280And that was terrifying. That was viewed as undermining America.
00:13:04.600Now, the thing is that Americans have a tool for dealing with a policy consensus between their major parties,
00:13:11.200which is that they have an open primary system.
00:13:14.660So if people want to realign a national party, there's a way to do that democratically.
00:13:20.520You get behind a Donald Trump if you're on the right, you get behind a Bernie Sanders if you're on the left, highly distinctive policies are put forward, and voters come out in huge numbers to select parties' candidates.
00:13:33.960One thing that Canadians may not know is that until 1993, although we didn't have a primary system, there was a two-stage process legally to selecting a candidate in a riding.
00:13:47.800the leader of the party had to agree and there had to be a local nominating meeting that was
00:13:54.280open to all party members to uh that was run democratically candidates anybody who showed up
00:14:01.240at the nominating meeting who was a member was eligible to run and then there were these huge
00:14:06.480meetings we remember them from the 80s sometimes thousands of people signed up joined parties came
00:14:13.280to meetings and voted but in 19 between 1993 and 2003 a series of amendments were made to our
00:14:21.120federal and then provincial election laws which make the selection of candidates solely the
00:14:27.680discretion of a party's leader so party leaders can now pick people they will sometimes seek the
00:14:34.320advice of a local riding association but normally if a party and the local association disagreed
00:14:42.160the party couldn't run a candidate. That was the state of affairs until 1993, that both groups had
00:14:48.780a veto. But now political party leaders can simply choose any person they want and appoint them as
00:14:55.860a candidate in a riding. And sometimes even incumbent members of parliament don't get a
00:15:01.680chance to run for a second term because the leader of their party will just fire them and replace
00:15:08.040them with another person and if the leader of the party doesn't think they can persuade local people
00:15:13.240they just appoint them and so the main the one democratic check we had on the on the centralized
00:15:23.240power of political parties the centralized uh the emergence of an elite policy consensus was
00:15:28.920the ability of party members to choose who represented them and that's been eviscerated
00:15:34.200under the law um and one of the things that has replaced it is this thing called the vetting
00:15:41.400committee a candidate vetting committee is created by a party leader the names of its members are
00:15:49.400rarely released to the public uh and what you do if you want to become a candidate for a party now
00:15:56.040you pay a non-refundable fee to that committee who functions not so much as people say it's like
00:16:02.520opposition research and just checking to see if you've said anything silly in the past.
00:16:06.340That's not true. Candidate vetting committees look for people not who weren't embarrassing in the
00:16:11.860past, but people who will be obedient in the future. What they're looking for is, did this
00:16:18.860person ever get into a workplace dispute? Did this person, was this person a dissident in student
00:16:25.260politics at their university? Are they in conflict with the professional association they're a member
00:16:31.560of. There are all these little signs to find people who will toe the line, who will not be
00:16:37.560difficult. And so you pay your fee, your $5,000 or whatever. You open your life up to this committee
00:16:44.640and its anonymous members. And if they don't like you, you may not even get your fee back.
00:16:50.180They might just keep the money and say, that's how much it cost us to figure out that you
00:16:53.420couldn't run for us so the implementation of high fees to keep people of regular income out of
00:17:03.500politics and then this veto process that's conducted by a kind of political star chamber
00:17:09.460that every party has um and then of course a party like the new democrats adds one additional layer
00:17:17.280which it got into trouble over last election, which is their argument that if a white man who
00:17:25.340is not disabled or gay has occupied this seat before, they can't be succeeded by someone who's
00:17:34.600demographically the same. So the NDP says they must be succeeded by an equity-seeking minority,
00:17:40.640an equity-seeking group. Now, an equity-seeking group is any group that is oppressed on any basis
00:17:47.860or discriminated against on any basis except class. There's no equity mandate for working
00:17:55.140class people in the NDP. There is an equity mandate for any other group, and it's an easy0.97
00:18:01.440equity mandate to get through. In Columbia River Revelstoke in 2017, there was a paraplegic woman
00:18:10.100who was seeking the NDP nomination but she wasn't the party didn't like her very much so they talked
00:18:16.800a straight white married guy into running for the nomination and all he had to do
00:18:24.980was to indicate in a private meeting that he had at some point fellated another man
00:18:33.580and so if you're willing to go through that indignity of if you're straight and you want
00:18:40.460to misrepresent your sexual orientation then you can and then you meet the equity-seeking
00:18:45.220criteria of the new democratic party i had a big debate about with harry lally i said no i think
00:18:50.400this guy is so principled he probably went out and did this as well you know in order to like
00:18:54.820run honestly but that's a strange um requirement to have of a candidate uh but that's the scene
00:19:02.800we're in that um and it shows that people who are sitting in our legislature are the ladder climbers
00:19:11.560you meet at work the people who are trying to get promoted the people who will do anything to fit in
00:19:17.100to get promoted and they see themselves not as the group that's managing our province's civil service
00:19:23.560they see themselves as part of it it's it's all a bit odd it's all a bit odd because and it's funny
00:20:00.460But they just think that maybe babies in the womb should be left there and not torn to shreds or, you know, maybe they should be adopted instead.
00:20:08.160And they have lots of new new policy around that.
00:20:10.940They they don't want to denigrate single mothers or any of that.
00:20:13.440They want to help people. They want to hand out money.
00:20:15.580There's there's a very progressive, socially conservative way of looking at that.
00:20:19.240And that's all great. And then the party sidelines them as if they had said, you know, Hitler was right.0.95
00:20:25.100And it's just it's just mind boggling.0.92
00:20:27.720So we see that in the conservative side, but it's interesting to hear that it happens in the left-wing side, too, that there's no insurgency inside of the left-wing parties of Canada as well.
00:20:37.260What led to this? Why did we change from having real ideas in politics to this consensus?
00:20:46.040Well, I think it is, actually, that it is the abortion debate that produced this outcome, both locally and federally.
00:20:56.000um so during uh so when the liberal party of canada was at war with each other right the main
00:21:03.820thing statistically that is most likely to make people liberals i'm sad to say for you is is of
00:21:09.360course catholicism right people who identify as catholic tend to vote liberal unless they live
00:21:16.660in newfoundland and then the party system is opposite and the liberals are protestants and
00:21:22.500the Tories are Catholics, but in the rest of the country, that's the thing. And of course,0.73
00:21:28.480long before evangelical Christians became concerned about abortion, that was really the
00:21:34.240issue around which the Catholic Church remade itself in the 19th century after the conquest
00:21:39.840of the papal states. It went from being the world's largest abortion provider to the world's
00:21:44.780largest anti-abortion organization overnight in the 1850s. And so when the Paul Martin-John
00:22:01.560the especially Catholic pro-life activists saw this conflict within the Liberal Party as a great
00:22:10.920opportunity for entryism so they created an organization called liberals for life and they
00:22:16.840won all kinds of nomination meetings in 1984 when the liberals were lost most of their seats when
00:22:24.120they lost three quarters of their seats the number of pro-life liberal mps increased even in the 84
00:22:32.760election and they increased further in the 88 election and after 88 brian mulroney declined
00:22:40.920even though he was invited to by the supreme court enact a new abortion law and so um this was going
00:22:48.600to be a live issue and the liberal and the number of liberal pro-life mps exceeded the number of
00:22:53.960tory mps and at that time the votes of social conservatives you know were being competed for
00:23:00.120on many fronts and the thinking was well those people are mostly going to vote reform in the
00:23:06.600west and block in the east and uh so chretchen decided to purge the anti-abortion caucus from
00:23:16.200the liberals and this and so he got the bylaws of the liberal party change in order to conduct that
00:23:23.160purge and it actually was the beginning of all of the legal changes because once he got into office
00:23:29.160He took the Constitution of the Liberal Party and effectively imposed it on everybody else, that every other federal leader would have the same sweeping powers he did. And he then used that as a way of attacking Preston Manning and Stockwell Day for not purging their anti-abortion MPs.
00:23:49.340And so you're quite right. Historically, it's completely bound up in this. Same thing in B.C. In 1988, Bill Vanderzam attempted to criminalize abortion in B.C., and he also did some very silly things like trying to arrest the leader of the teachers' union for treason and sedition.
00:24:17.060And so there was this sense that Van Der Zand was out of control, and Van Der Zand was a pretty quirky guy.
00:24:24.740So there was a meeting of the finance minister, the attorney general, and the senior caucus researcher for social credit,
00:24:32.960and they effectively seized power from Van Der Zand and governed the province themselves for two years.
00:24:41.400The late George Dubot, a good friend of mine, was the organizer of the coup with Mel Kouvalier and Bud Smith.
00:24:51.340And so, again, this issue, because it couldn't be manifested in the party system, that there was this false consensus,
00:25:03.060One of the first moves that was made was to reassure British Columbians that social credit was not interested in changing policy around women's reproductive systems.
00:25:18.520And, of course, there was an attempt by the majority in the Social Credit Party to resolve that by choosing Rita Johnson as Bill Van Der Zandt's successor.
00:25:30.120but she really wasn't in office long enough to push back against that so by the time mike harcourt
00:25:36.640took power the bureaucracy had been running the province for three years and mike harcourt came
00:25:42.860out of commission government he had been the mayor of vancouver and in our cities we have this thing
00:25:48.140called commission government where the way it's structured is that the senior bureaucrats make
00:25:54.220almost all of the decisions and the city councilors sort of serve um to report potholes to them as far
00:26:01.420as i can tell i think that that's that's what city councilors do in commission government and so mike
00:26:07.120harcourt under the ndp and then later gordon campbell under the bc liberals restructured
00:26:13.560british columbia's bureaucracy and its relationship with the legislature along these municipal
00:26:19.160commission government lines where the government was going to be post-ideological it was going to
00:26:24.940use these principles of progressivism that we have to remember was neither a right-wing or
00:26:31.740left-wing ideology it used to be that every party had a progressive faction and every party had a
00:26:37.780populist faction and what's happened now of course is that progressives have seized control of the
00:26:45.620parties of the left, and the only place where there's still a populist faction at all pushing
00:26:51.620back is on the right. I mean, I vehemently disagree with the positions taken by the people
00:27:01.480who are pushing back against Erin O'Toole. I believe in climate science. I don't think the
00:27:07.120cops should be investigating miscarriages and putting anybody in prison if they don't like
00:27:12.180what they see. I really, I don't have any time for that. But I do think that it's amazing that
00:27:20.360social conservatives in the federal Tories, this time, broadened their coalition and worked with
00:27:27.380climate denialists and all kinds of other groups that are also being pushed out of the tent
00:27:32.020in order to actually make Aaron O'Toole lose a vote at a convention. That was an extraordinary
00:27:37.560achievement and you know i gotta say well there's i have a lot of disagreement about the policies
00:27:45.460but i have a lot of admiration for what's going on on the right when it comes to trying to continue
00:27:51.380to use every lever of power possible to assert democratic control over a party i think that
00:27:58.960that actually came up in uh something out of the january issue of jacobin i think there was a the0.99
00:28:05.980woman who organized strongly in nevada which is a right to work state and she was organizing the
00:28:11.000hospitality industry she wrote a bit for for jacobin that now that joe biden was going to
00:28:16.260finally be inaugurated after everything else had happened that said actually if you want to finish
00:28:21.240reconstruction we need to vote republican yeah i think that at the end of the day there does seem
00:28:28.840into pushing all of the populists out of the left parties into the right and pulling the
00:28:36.220progressives out of the right wing parties into the left has produced this thing where
00:28:41.480it used to be right that one of the reasons we didn't one of the reasons we got rid of having
00:28:46.700man camps up in northern bc uh in the 30s and 40s is because it used to be that um angry
00:28:57.300young men with unstable employment were socialists, mostly, in this province, right? That
00:29:07.000we had better, we'd better build these company towns and domesticate these young men and get1.00
00:29:12.600them married because they're going to march on the legislature. And, you know, this will be the0.95
00:29:17.040first jurisdiction that flips and sides with the Soviet Union on this continent. That was the0.91
00:29:21.440thinking of premier john hart when he created the forest apartment system it wasn't about you know
00:29:28.800equity and keeping resources and jobs in the interior in the north it was about stopping a
00:29:34.960revolution and it used to be assumed that if you were angry and didn't trust the system that you
00:29:42.560were probably a ccf or a new democrat and what's amazing is that the ccf and the ndp you know we
00:29:50.080don't want you people you know sure you're like 80 of our historic base but you're not our kind of
00:29:56.800people um instead let's invite um the uh you know let's invite some tory organizers in
00:30:05.600who really don't like how messy democracy is and uh you know my friend bob ransford's a
00:30:12.000great example he was a progressive conservative a real progressive conservative those people you
00:30:17.200kind of drove out of the tories for a little while and you know bob was you know jerry st
00:30:24.160germain's organizer he's mulroney's man in town still moroni comes stays with him you know that
00:30:29.360all that sort of stuff his politics which are you know regulation state regular state mandated
00:30:38.960regulation of oligopolies and you know following the advice of climate scientists and looking at
00:30:46.720you know these very technocratic metrics his politics haven't changed in the time that i've
00:30:51.680known him he and i have been friends but the politics that made him a member of the moroni
00:30:58.080government in 1988 are the same politics that make him a person who votes ndp today because
00:31:06.480the um the that progressive spirit of state regulation trusting bureaucrats trusting experts
00:31:15.600has migrated across the spectrum so it's odd how that cultural change happened i don't think we're
00:31:22.640unique though the same thing happened to the united states the democratic party filled up
00:31:28.560with the elites of the republican party and it's still filling up right it's still they're getting
00:31:34.240steve schmidt david from and all those fine folks as the other party becomes more hostile to that
00:32:11.780And that's why we have you on the show, Stuart, because because you can just preach at us all day about about the eccentricities of our time.
00:32:19.280What is there a way forward? Is there a way forward?
00:32:22.820Is there any way to kind of break the consensus or to form a new party?
00:32:26.540Or will that always be stymied by the media?
00:32:29.860I mean, the Christian heritage tried to do this.1.00
00:32:32.400Socons tried to do this for years. Is this ever going to change?1.00
00:32:35.720Look at the last set of provincial election results.
00:33:05.000We saw double-digit results for the Christian Heritage Party for the first time,
00:33:11.020double-digit results for the Libertarian Party for the first time,
00:33:15.280over 30% of the vote for the Conservative Party and the Peace,
00:33:20.680and the rural BC party also getting over 10%.
00:33:25.280This was a surprise election that nobody was even able to contest.
00:33:29.240And you can see that folks who are not part of the progressive urban culture of the Southwest that we have a little bit of in Kelowna and a little bit in downtown Prince George, but is mostly a Southwestern phenomenon, people who aren't part of that bubble basically went to the polls, looked at the major parties on the ballot, and a shocking proportion of them voted for candidates and parties they had not heard a word from during the election campaign itself.
00:33:59.240And so I do think that the long-term strategy, which had been to de-platform anyone who was outside the policy consensus, right?
00:34:08.640I was shut out of every leader's debate while I was the leader of the Green Party.
00:34:12.780It wasn't until there was a successor who was campaigning on these small illiberal policies that they were let in.
00:34:20.080De-platforming worked when the mainstream media was powerful.
00:34:23.320But even with social media now chiming in and censoring us and deplatforming us and destroying our accounts or our sites, people, you can see that people are absolutely fed up and they'd rather, you know, at least 10% of them would rather randomly select an unknown party with unknown policies than return another incumbent.
00:34:51.820So I think next election, when we're able to campaign on foot, go door to door, I think very different things are going to happen in northern B.C.
00:34:59.700Very different things are going to happen in the East Kootenays and in the Caribou.
00:35:07.540And, you know, maybe that can help turn things around in the rest of the province.
00:35:11.760I don't know. I mean, obviously, I've pulled out of Vancouver.
00:35:14.780My confidence in the place isn't that great.
00:35:16.960So I do think that the electoral system still might have some teeth in it up here, in these small ridings, whose relative population keeps declining, so they're actually easier to campaign in with time, due to the underservicing by the provincial government of communities like Valmont or McBride or what have you.
00:35:38.640I also just a word about Thompson commenting. I do hope we get I do hope that this show makes use of John Thompson's expertise. He was executive director of the McKenzie Institute, which was I think it remains, you know, it was a it was a, you know, very much a conservative foreign policy think tank.
00:36:02.260but it was one that was very principled and consistent and the reason john isn't in ontario
00:36:09.320is because ultimately it ran afoul of stephen harper's appeasement of china and i think that's
00:36:15.880a great reason that's a great reason um to fall out of favor is taking a firm stand in favor of
00:36:23.500chinese human rights so john has just a tremendous wealth of knowledge that i know this show benefit
00:36:29.740from he's the guy who got my my christian tv gig uh when i lived in ontario it's it's something
00:36:37.180that we're looking forward to as well uh to try and reach out to more people bring more people
00:36:41.340on of course this is still just our first month so we're just getting our legs under us but we're
00:36:45.340very thankful for the contributors we've had so far yourself to others who have been here and to
00:36:49.900all that comment and of course we will be making contact with with john and others uh in the coming
00:36:55.900days with with that idea then that there is going to be at some point the dam is going to break at
00:37:03.160some point there's going to be a tide that is going to change what what does that party need
00:37:09.840to look like or does that party does that possibility not you know as as somebody who
00:37:14.500would consider themselves you know progressive in their politics or wanting radical changes to
00:37:20.660towards a greener world and and to things like that steward i'm trying not trying to miscarriage
00:37:25.940but but i but i just but i guess i guess the thing is that that's that's the argument that
00:37:31.500your establishment friends all your friends with the nice with the nice cozy job whoever they are
00:37:36.020um or the people who were your friends but then pushed you out a window or something
00:37:40.080uh they they they are in their cushy jobs and they're holding on for dear life
00:37:44.840and they're scared about this new wave that's coming and they're saying that the new wave
00:37:49.840is going to be fascistic. It's going to destroy everything. Do you worry about that as someone
00:37:56.300who's politics are at least closer to the people who are currently in charge to a certain extent,
00:38:01.960not entirely obviously? I mean, I absolutely, I do worry not just on the right, but on the left
00:38:07.560that different parts of the authoritarianism we saw in the 1920s are coming back. Obviously,
00:38:14.860I've been a critic of the left's recent embrace of eugenics. I don't think that, you know, once0.96
00:38:23.960you develop a political program that involves escalating mass sterilizations of neurologically
00:38:32.340disabled and indigenous youth, you're running a eugenics program. It doesn't matter what you call0.92
00:38:39.220it. And, you know, Chris was on the other day to talk about that. So I see that on the left and on
00:38:43.920right i see it everywhere i see all kinds of fascistic tendencies popping up because we've
00:38:50.160been told that this thing we're living under is democracy and so the conclusion more and more
00:38:55.120people are reaching is that democracy doesn't work and that's why the best thing we could do
00:39:01.680to push back against authoritarian impulses um where we don't have people beating other people
00:39:09.280in the street has happened with Chris Elston and doing so with impunity and assistance of the
00:39:14.780police, right? And we know that, you know, of course, there are places where the police look
00:39:22.320the other way when it's the soldiers of Odin. And there are places where the police look the
00:39:25.800other way when it's the people who beat up Chris. But at the end of the day, all of those trends
00:39:31.240are incredibly worrying. And so we have to continue to engage with people and show them
00:39:37.100democracy can do something better engagement is the only way forward and it's going to be
00:39:42.620uncomfortable for a while because there it's not just that there may not be progressives in every
00:39:50.220party anymore and there might not be populists in every party anymore but there are definitely
00:39:54.540fascists in every party now and uh and that that's going to mean some uncomfortable work
00:40:02.940uh but i think that i think that uh you know darcy rapid and his folks are really on the
00:40:09.100right track that a successful populist insurgency will be cross-partisan it will appeal to populists
00:40:17.100from the far right to the far left on an agenda of decentralizing the power of the state
00:40:23.740democratizing the power of the state and placing control over resources in the hands of the people
00:40:30.940near them and those are things that people are hungry for across the political spectrum
00:40:36.880and they're also process solutions so it allows people to bracket what the outcome of a
00:40:44.300decentralized decision will be and focus on the rightness of decentralizing the decision making
00:40:49.720and uh so i think that um i think it's going to be if there's going to be a successful move
00:40:56.120It's going to have to be through a party that is either nominally provincial but is clearly making a regional appeal or a party that is avowedly regional.
00:41:06.760I think the best model we can look to is way out east with the Labrador party.
00:41:12.180The Labrador has always functioned as a colonial resource periphery for the mainland of Newfoundland, and it developed its own political consciousness as a result.
00:41:22.760The one NDPer who holds a seat in Labrador is the person who brought back the Labrador independent flag and flies that flag at their office.
00:41:34.520And, of course, before that, there was the Labrador party where there was a party that was seated in the legislature in St. John's to speak up for the people who were, you know, who were delivering all of the ore and all of the timber to the island.
00:41:52.760So I think there are good models. I think that's one of the paradoxes of being a regionalist or a decentralist is that you have to develop solidarity and learn from the other decentralists and regionalists.
00:42:06.400And I think that for authoritarians like Trump, who are not internationalists, part of the genius of the Trump campaign was making itself part of this club of nationalists and exchanging more workers, more strategy, more information across international borders than the internationalists they were running against, than the globalists they were running against.
00:42:35.120So I think there are people, you know, all over the country who'd like to see rural BC get out from under some thumbs.
00:42:42.940And I think there's, and we see that throughout the West.
00:42:48.040I think it's, you know, it's unfortunate that a lot of it is built around some fanciful ideas about oil.
00:42:54.880But I don't think that has to be the center.
00:42:57.060And I don't think this kind of politics will succeed if continuing to just export natural resources and become more and more of an international pariah because people don't like what you're exporting.
00:43:10.060That's not a way forward to achieve independence.
00:43:12.840That can't be the center of something more populist here.
00:43:23.700Speaking to your point of international influence in the American election, ironically, on the Trump side, I do happen to know a few people who went down there.
00:43:36.240They have some things to say about what happened that night and the wee hours in the morning this last election, but we won't get into that just right now.
00:43:46.220Those people were, you know, absolutely entitled to do that.
00:43:50.060god knows how many canadians went down to help obama in 2008 uh fewer in 2012 with the gray hair
00:43:57.940but um i remember 2008 and the tremendous amount of political tourism and i think uh you know we
00:44:04.900live in a strange globalized world there's medical tourism there's political tourism now
00:44:09.140yes there is there indeed is i know that you have to you have to leave us at around 10 o'clock
00:44:15.340We're coming up to a quarter to what let's let's talk a little bit about just just some of the realities of the B.C. lockdown.
00:44:23.100Obviously, obviously, you know, I would like things to open back up.
00:44:27.460I'm sure on your side, there's more there's more of a consensus that it was never properly shut down to begin with.
00:44:33.340What? Yes. So we got none of the benefits of locking down because we didn't properly lock down.
00:44:38.960And so, you know, I think that so the first thing to recognize is that this is theater, that the BC management of the pandemic is political theater to distract people from the tourism and hospitality sectors control of the policy.
00:44:56.620If you want to go to the provincial lobbyist registry, you can read the dates on which different parts of the hospitality industry sent their lobbyists in to achieve policy changes.
00:45:08.960So you could actually see, you can track a timeline for the Solicitor General breaking the Prince Rupert quarantine, the Solicitor General breaking the Haida Gwaii quarantine.
00:45:19.480And the idea is that we're going to keep the schools open and we're going to keep as much hospitality work happening as possible.
00:45:27.920because unlike other provinces where businesses need to hit quarterly revenue figures,
00:45:37.560business in British Columbia is so heavily indebted. Our property market has made everybody
00:45:42.360so heavily mortgaged. Property taxes in downtowns of cities like on Robson Street in Vancouver
00:45:48.260are indescribably crippling. And so what that means is you just can't close a hospitality
00:45:54.480sector business completely unless the government's prepared to lend a lot of money or let a lot of
00:46:00.280bankruptcies happen and so this is the sector that's been most active in forming our policies
00:46:07.540and the result is of course that bonnie henry gets on her tv show with adrian dix or maybe adrian
00:46:14.980dix gets on his tv show with bonnie henry who is was already viewed with great suspicion right she
00:46:22.860had basically retired after her screw-up during the SARS scandal. She's really rehabilitated by
00:46:29.280the NDP as a kind. I mean, it's great because they craft her image. They spent $60,000 crafting
00:46:38.500her image, getting her little sayings, be kind, be calm, be safe. And they set all this up because
00:46:46.560it's her job to make it look like we're taking the pandemic seriously. And they can sack her1.00
00:47:20.680rule, it is almost never a rule. It is almost never made an order in council. So if you want
00:47:27.920to defy it, and you're not somebody the cops are going to have a problem with for other reasons,
00:47:33.540you get to do whatever you want. Like take this last no non-essential travel. Read what happened
00:47:40.500with the few people who were caught by that order, because that's one of the few orders they made
00:47:45.440binding basically the government report says well we found these people in breach of the order but
00:47:52.240this was only because they needed to be better educated about the terminology they were using
00:47:57.200what that means is these people were stopped by the cops and didn't use the word essential
00:48:01.760in order for the cops to let them go so everybody remember to say essential and then this order
00:48:08.560doesn't affect you right so that's why the provincial government's like well well how are
00:48:14.720what's happening with all these people staying in hotels oh it's the job of the hotels to determine
00:48:19.140if those were essential travelers it's not the job of the police it's not the job of health
00:48:23.960inspectors it's the job of hotel managers apparently to enforce the province's order
00:48:29.080but that's the exception most of the time bonnie henry will just say something like there's a mask
00:48:34.820mandate and there'll be no mask mandate if you go and look at the book of orders in council that
00:48:40.620the government has issued. Most orders in council pertaining to COVID, the single largest number of
00:48:47.660them are to shut down local governments attempting to implement lockdowns and quarantines. That is
00:48:54.560the primary purpose of the actual laws that come out in Victoria. But also, what if you don't like
00:49:01.800Bonnie Henry's show because she's condescending especially to rural people and implies that even
00:49:09.280asking her questions is unkind and not calm because goodness knows why would anyone not be
00:49:15.260calm at this point so so when she does that routine many people find it profoundly off-putting
00:49:22.040I find her press conferences unwatchable does the government try any other method to notify people
00:49:28.920No. The government doesn't take out radio ads when it's made a new non-order. The government
00:49:36.140generally takes out radio ads to say, hey, we're managing this really well. Be kind, be calm, be
00:49:42.100safe. So the provincial government is supposed to create this sense that there's a lot of action
00:49:50.700going on. And I know for folks who are used to obeying the rules their whole life, this will
00:49:56.480shut you down to go well i guess my travel isn't essential maybe i shouldn't go but there's nothing
00:50:04.640actually stopping you uh the only thing we've done that has had any significant impact is to um
00:50:14.880end indoor seating intermittently at restaurants and this has typically been involved with the
00:50:22.880major expansion of outdoor seating at restaurants for patio season well it's not in if it's outdoor
00:50:31.500right if you build inside then yes so i was just walking down george street right and there's
00:50:39.340people in the outdoors of crossroads pub all unmasked all sitting their cheek by jowl right
00:50:46.120they're packed in closer tighter than they would be inside and we see the same thing with
00:50:52.300government street in victoria and all these other places that again this is hygiene theater
00:51:00.060and this um and who's suffering well you know how the provincial government's main thing also
00:51:07.580is to deflect blame and blame young people blame young people for getting together and having a
00:51:13.420good time now young people are supposed to get together when older people have a good time
00:51:19.820on restaurant patios so these poor kids who don't have an eviction moratorium that means they've got
00:51:28.300to make rent every month or they're homeless they're in their early 20s they're working in
00:51:33.100the food service sector and they are dealing with dozens or hundreds of unmasked people every shift
00:51:45.020And when there are big outbreaks, some party is always blamed. So that folks like me, who's, you know, my hips really acting up this week, I couldn't dance at one of those parties. And if I'm all, you know, sitting at home being angry about COVID, it's like, oh, those damn kids having fun I can't have. It must be their fault.
00:52:07.820And of course, John Horgan feeds into this with don't ruin it for the rest of us. No, it's people
00:52:13.400Horgan's age sitting at the bar being waited on by kids who are there because it's a choice between
00:52:19.980being in a highly infectious environment or being on the street in a highly infectious environment.
00:52:26.340And they're also shouldering the blame as well as shouldering all the labor. So what this
00:52:32.760government is doing should be satisfactory to no one. If you're a person who prizes personal
00:52:39.800freedom above public health objectives, you hate this government. You're at the anti-mask protests.
00:52:46.720But if you're a person who prizes public safety above freedom of assembly in the short term,
00:52:55.260you should be equally enraged that this government has undertaken a bunch of measures that have
00:53:01.640clearly failed that have given us one of the highest positivity rates in the global north
00:53:07.640giving us the fastest rate of growth in um uh in uh childhood covid because we will never
00:53:17.480shutter our schools um all of these statistics they're they're horrific but the idea of this
00:53:25.240pageantry of this tv show uh that everybody has to watch that's that's supposed to hold
00:53:36.840support in the uh for the government among people who are supposedly really concerned
00:53:44.360about their neighbor's health and deflecting blame from public policy makers to youth culture is um
00:53:52.520It's a cheap, crappy trick, especially because a lot of those kids showed up and voted Horgan back in.
00:54:01.200You know, so there's there's a tremendous disrespect for the party's own voters in proceeding with with this with this prioritization of blame over any other public policy objective.
00:54:17.140i think ultimately when it comes to this this question it it's funny how it is a generational
00:54:24.980fight again it really is boomers versus the millennials and gen zed especially gen zed as
00:54:31.420they're coming up in the ranks of being in their early 20s and that sort of thing you're kind of
00:54:35.960finally breaking up teenagehood and and ultimately i think one of the things that's going to be a
00:54:42.960takeaway from the pandemic is just like the colossal policy failure it was at what point
00:54:47.320perhaps you can kind of give us a concluding thought on that steward is there is it is it a
00:54:52.480stay or go thing do we have to climb into full lockdown or or at some point should we just pull
00:54:58.500the lever pull out the power from underneath of all these people that have been puppeteering us
00:55:03.080for a year and just just say look like honestly you could do this better yourself just let it go
00:55:08.980Well, no, I think because we don't know a lot about the Indian variant, we're not tracking it.
00:55:14.920There are all these other variants we're not tracking, and we don't know the relative lethality of those variants.
00:55:20.140So, no, I would like to see actual public health officials run an actual public health program.
00:55:26.360Now, that might involve some short-term pain for business, and it might involve a bunch of hospitality sector bankruptcies.
00:55:32.760I think that if we're prepared to endure that, we've seen in other jurisdictions that when there's a flare-up and you properly lock down, you are out of the woods within a little over a month.
00:55:46.620And I think there's a pretty clear track record there.
00:55:49.880Of course, we should proceed very actively with vaccination and all this other stuff.
00:55:54.840But the other thing is this policy failure is an absence of policy.
00:56:00.820so um it uh all we're really talking about is canceling a tv show not changing policy at all
00:56:08.420well anyway i'm gonna have to let you go there i know uh yeah i bet i mean that's damning and i
00:56:16.920don't i don't think there's a lot of ways to correct that again we fall on different sides
00:56:20.700of some of these issues but on the last one as i've stated before on this program uh we're about
00:56:24.880building coalitions and two uh stuart parker is just great tv so it thanks very much we'll see
00:56:31.700you next thursday absolutely thank you so much stuart uh no we're so we're gonna pivot a little
00:56:37.540bit here i see we did get some stuff in the comments uh we'll we'll start addressing some
00:56:42.100of that momentarily i want to clarify one or two things on my end uh just before we move forward
00:56:48.080here i definitely fall on the side of the anti-lockdown um i don't think they've worked
00:56:53.400and i believe that we've played with that enough time uh and it's just not it's not working there's
00:57:00.720no nice way of saying it it's it isn't working and we need to move forward into something else
00:57:06.480because we can't continue to be married to bad policy i've talked about this before and i'm
00:57:10.280going to talk about it again just briefly here for anybody who hasn't kind of heard me make this
00:57:14.660kind of rant before but i'm actually so i'm adopted and the family i'm adopted to through
00:57:20.000my father's side, that side is German. My mother's actually low German because she's Mennonite. So
00:57:24.180the high Germans and low Germans are all together in my little family. And my father, his mother's
00:57:31.280still alive, my grandmother, she's a true anti-fascist of the old school. She actually
00:57:37.400grew up in Germany during a certain time period in history. And she and her family were very
00:57:44.680against what was happening. They were very angry with it. They did actually agitate with anybody
00:57:48.660who's in the in the crowd here in the comment crowd that that knows who bonhoeffer is and all
00:57:53.320that jazz uh they were actually a part of of that same movement not not directly they didn't meet
00:57:58.560the guy or whatever but they they were a part of that same underground movement that was trying to
00:58:01.860undermine what was happening in germany and and so she she remembers a lot of things about that
00:58:09.780time because she was a young girl i think she was probably nine when the war started about 14 when
00:58:14.000the war ended and the thing that i'm trying to drive home here is that she recalls in no uncertain
00:58:19.900terms i love her death but i mean you know she she'll actually believe what she's told about
00:58:25.560from cbc and that sort of thing that's something that we have to go back and forth on sometimes
00:58:29.160she and i argue about this whether the mainstream media can be trusted um and uh but but whatever i
00:58:36.920love her very much obviously the point that i'm trying to drive home here though is that she
00:58:40.640recalls in no uncertain terms that that when she went to England so after the war they tried to
00:58:46.440mix the children together in order to try and make sure there wouldn't be another war between
00:58:50.900those belligerents because of course they all had to be on the same side against communism we all
00:58:55.000we all understand this as a geopolitical strategy and so the children of Germany got into pen pal
00:59:01.180relationships with the children of France and England perhaps even Canada and the United States
00:59:05.040but certainly France and England to try and make there to be some cross-cultural pollination in
00:59:08.900order to ensure that there would still be peace come you know 10 years after the war 15 years
00:59:13.960after the war 20 years after the war and her pen pal was an English girl uh and and so she was a
00:59:20.180young woman and but just becoming a young woman and so was the young young girl there just just
00:59:24.800into her adolescence and eventually a young woman and they finally decided to meet I guess she
00:59:29.320probably would have been I guess they both would have been probably about 19 just finishing school
00:59:33.060we have to remember school went longer back then right just like it did in Ontario until recently
00:59:36.920with grade 13. And what happened was she went to England. We're in the 1950s now. We're probably
00:59:44.220just into either Churchill's reelection after being tossed out after the war or or just before
00:59:50.720that. So it's still a labor government and the labor government had decided to marry the war.
00:59:55.440So there's still rationing and everything else. So she goes to England. The place still looks like,
01:00:00.320you know, it still looks like the blitz is going on. There's still rubble everywhere. Things have
01:00:03.860not been repaired. And there's still the rationing, rationing of petrol, rationing of food,
01:00:10.940right? So people are lining up to take their bare necessities of life. Now, why am I bringing this
01:00:18.700up? So what happened was they got married to bad policy, and they kept it around for almost a
01:00:24.620decade. That was fine during the war. Everything had to go to the war effort. We had to win the
01:00:29.480war we had to sacrifice people were gardening on the boulevards of streets in order to make more
01:00:34.880food for the war effort like it was an incredible they called those victory gardens it it was an
01:00:39.580incredible time but at a certain point the war ended and the policy that had gone with the war
01:00:46.660needed to go out with the war as peace reigned but instead they kept the policy they nationalized
01:00:53.560their health care industry they they kept the nationalized coal and steel and everything else
01:00:57.800had happened and and england's economy no longer now uh you know being driven by the war itself
01:01:03.720started to turn in on itself and things became very stultified and stuck because of course you'd
01:01:09.720built all these lock and dam systems within your economy in order to control the flow of goods and
01:01:14.260services in order to win the war we were out of the war you know we weren't directly related with
01:01:22.320england anymore because of the balfour act but whatever the point is we were out of the war we
01:01:25.860We were out of the woods, but we were still trotting along as if we were in the middle of it.
01:01:30.280And meanwhile, a former belligerent and a former enemy, right, in the form of, you know, in form of Germany and then my grandmother visiting England, as she mentioned to the young girl in her family, she said, you know, we don't line up for petrol anymore.
01:01:46.400We just go around to shops and buy the things we need and our economy is fine and we're building the buildings back up.0.97
01:01:52.720We're going to rebuild everything after the carpet bombing that happened.
01:01:55.860And they both looked they all looked really enviously at her as like, yeah, well, you you lost the war, but it looks like you won it. And they were denigrating their own society because they had gotten married to the wrong policy. That's what happened. So why am I bringing this up? I'm bringing this up because what's gone on with the lockdown, in my opinion, is the exact same problem.
01:02:16.440it was bad policy to begin with the idea that somehow you could just lock everybody up and and
01:02:21.800hope that the virus was going to die out by itself it is it was nonsense to me from the start all we
01:02:27.800could ever do is take some precautions you know i haven't i haven't seen my grandmother in a while
01:02:32.840and when i do finally see her i'm probably not going to give her a hug you know i'm just gonna
01:02:37.720you know say hello to her and and we're gonna you know just chat at a distance probably that sort of
01:02:42.760thing but i'm not i'm that's that's the best i can do that's my way of bridging the gap that's my way
01:02:49.480of bridging the gap but the point that i'm trying to make here is that we got married to bad policy
01:02:54.520bad policy and that doomed us from the beginning our entire mentality was was doomed from the
01:03:02.680beginning and and we have to back up and we have to rethink this because it's not working and and
01:03:11.080And we hear that every day that the cases are climbing and that people are there's people in the hospital, et cetera.
01:03:17.820I still I still think the fundamentally the virus is not nearly as as well.
01:03:22.780I think it's deadly to those it's deadly to and it isn't to those who it isn't to.
01:05:54.380I'll just say that I was trying to say something else.
01:05:55.920But the point is that what what our commenter is talking about there when he's talking about that different generation, I think I think it's just fundamentally that time period.
01:06:06.100That time period was again, it was just there was more opportunity in that time period.
01:06:10.100Government just didn't have the power it has today.
01:06:12.980There were not drones come check up on you and take a look at your property and then go rat on you to the assessment authority to come and bill you for the 15 sheds you've built that are just sheds and you just wanted them.
01:06:25.600why they get to influence that. But now they want to send you a bill from our taxes or get you to0.98
01:06:30.560deconstruct them and tell you that you're in violation of some ordinance that nobody can cite
01:06:34.860by memory. They have to look it up. They don't know where it is. That's the world we live in
01:06:38.720today. That's where we are today. And that's a literal thing that happened. That's a real life
01:06:44.740thing that happened. Pictures from a satellite or from a drone used against somebody on their
01:06:49.680own property who was in the middle of nowhere. And it was irrelevant whether or not they had
01:06:53.880built this thing or not build this thing or up to code or not. They weren't putting people in it.
01:06:57.640It wasn't going to light on fire and kill anyone. But of course, they had to be sent their tax bill
01:07:01.640because God forbid, God forbid you do anything for yourself without having to pay taxes on it.0.96
01:07:07.740What I think is the difference between the millennials and the boomers and Gen Zed now0.87
01:07:13.520and the boomers is that, again, that ever expanding opportunity or so it seemed versus
01:07:20.840the ever contracting opportunities or so it seems for a lot of people instability the gig economy
01:07:27.880and finally that that political question right so there's been moments right like so the bernie
01:07:33.380sanders revolution in the united states for a lot of young people who are left of center
01:07:36.880the trump revolution the united states again for a lot of young people right of center trump
01:07:40.920attracted a lot of young people into his campaign and into his movement and here in canada i mean
01:07:46.900And I guess I guess Justin Trudeau was kind of the youth candidate on his first election, at least.
01:07:52.440But the point is that the idea that that that something's really going to change, really going to break, really going to be different just doesn't exist in the minds of those of us below the age of 50 in the same way it might belong in the mind of someone who's above the age of 50.
01:08:11.680or at least something they can recall, something they recall, something really changing that
01:08:16.360happened or change for the better. Maybe it's a better way to say that. I belong to the generation
01:08:20.600of 2001 and the September 11th attacks. I belong to the generation of the great crash in 08. And
01:08:28.060I belong to the generation now of COVID. Three big hits against us, plus the dot-com bubble,
01:08:33.320depending on how old you are. I'm 31. The people who are just ahead of me are about 40, got the
01:08:37.500dot-com bubble. People are just behind me. They're now getting the 2008 experience, but with COVID,
01:08:43.060which is almost worse. We'll debate that another time. And that's the real difference. Ever
01:08:49.260contracting, ever more crisis, ever more problems, and no overarching narrative either. At least the
01:08:56.780Cold War for the boomers, we wanted to win the Cold War. We wanted to beat the Russians.0.95
01:09:01.380Even if you were sympathetic to the certain collectivist ideas, you didn't want the Russians0.98
01:09:06.600us to win you wanted us to win um and and now that we live after that consensus that's really
01:09:12.740changed things so i think that's one uh one thing that needs to be uh so so uh that's that's one
01:09:20.980thing that needs to be talked about so there's there's a few other comments along the way here
01:09:25.080somebody asked about the uh the vaccine earlier if we scroll up to that one i think it was uh
01:09:31.300Please comment on the experimental jab.
01:13:17.020And and I've heard that actually the success of using said tissue is wrong, that it's not that it that it's actually lacked success a lot of the time and that living cells are better.
01:13:28.480And you can harvest living cells without damaging anybody from from the amniotic fluid from birth, from the placenta.
01:13:36.200It's not, you know, we had to take a biopsy out of out of out of me or out of whomever in order to just just have the tissue that'll little whatever that be fine.
01:13:45.420but but the point is that it doesn't require the death of a child in order to get access to this
01:13:51.820stuff and that the stuff from the death of children has not has not worked so i don't
01:13:56.900understand why that's even a thing but the point that i'm trying to drive home here is that uh when
01:14:01.460it comes to the experimental jab i'm i'm not planning on taking it i i hope that i don't need
01:14:07.540to take it to do anything in life i don't know why i would have to uh this is a very terrible
01:14:14.080awful and apparently deadly uh it's coronavirus but but an influenza like thing it's a very awful
01:14:21.880respiratory uh and and you know uh yeah it's a very awful thing but i don't i'm not worried about
01:14:31.440that uh i'm i'm hopeful for the others and i pray for those who are sick but i'm not worried about
01:14:36.420it for myself um and i think that's really important to just put out there that i'm not
01:14:40.980worried about that. One of the things I wanted to come back to is I actually didn't get to finish
01:14:45.040my opening statement. So I'm going to bring that back up again. And we're going to expand it a
01:14:49.840little bit here. And I'm just going to skip to the part that I had there. And I'm just going to finish
01:14:54.680my opening statement because it pivots right into some of these questions you're asking. So the
01:14:58.800weather has finally turned on us here in northern British Columbia. After beautiful weather,
01:15:02.880basically from Easter onwards, till just a few days ago, we finally have those April showers
01:43:50.960We conservatives need to learn how to channel that anger into big, bold truths instead of trying to assuage that anger and find a new coalition with little stupid lies that still don't get us anywhere.0.99
01:44:02.880That's the thing about the carbon tax.0.99
01:44:05.060It's a little lie being told by all of us.
01:44:07.780You know, it's a little lie being told by all of us that it's all going to be fine.
01:44:10.540We'll just we'll just do this little white line, that little white line.
01:44:13.020We'll do this little compromise and it'll make for a winning coalition.
01:44:26.200Because you can't outlie a liar and you can't out left wing a party that builds its entire identity around being left wing for the most cynical reasons and obtaining power.
01:46:36.060It's bigger than, I think, the Black Sea.
01:46:37.560I think I looked that up while I was there.
01:46:38.800It's and it's cold and doesn't care what you think. But the point is that it is this huge opportunity. It's this huge opportunity. And we're just wasting away. Where are the conservative ideas? Where are they? Where are the conservative ideas for how we might do better?
01:47:00.980it's literally yeah it's my producer just looked this up for me it's literally three times the
01:47:07.440size it's that's in bay is three times the size of the black sea yeah 400 000 to 1.2 million and
01:47:19.800we call it a bay i am suing whoever titled it that anyways the point is that yes it's a three-sided
01:47:27.060body of water that sows, sows the Black Sea. The point that I'm trying to drive home here
01:47:34.140is that Canada, it was built on a big idea and we can be, we can be, you know, a bigger, better
01:47:43.860nation. And, and, you know, I know we do kind of the sovereignty thing here at, at the Western
01:47:49.280Standard. I've, I've told you guys before, I've been very candid about this. I'm, I'm ambivalent
01:47:54.460about the question of sovereignty i would just rather do canada better and i've always thought
01:47:58.440that about everything i'm not really a big big i'm not really a big fan of second marriages
01:48:02.660i just believe you could do your first marriage better you could actually redeem what you have
01:48:07.660in hand that's something i'm going to try and take as a thought into my marriage i mean obviously
01:48:11.240roman gather can't really get divorced try and hide it behind an annulment i guess if there's
01:48:15.420legitimate questions or legitimate questions but i you could just do the first thing better
01:48:21.100justerton talks about this all the time you could you you could live up to your principles
01:48:25.840and so we conservatives need to live up to our principles there's some really great ideas out
01:48:30.540there about how to fix this country and how to make it a better place and how to deal with our
01:48:34.360military and how to build better stuff and and and better infrastructure and manage things better
01:48:40.780and make things more equitable for people and give people a stake in the country and have them be
01:48:44.400able to buy a house there are all sorts of ideas around these questions and instead we're going to
01:48:48.940get into a fight over the carbon tax and trying to impose a carbon tax that's more complicated
01:48:55.760and makes less sense of what's there right now and is hated by the base like who's writing
01:49:01.140Aaron O'Toole's policy like are you drunk actually they're more likely high because if they were
01:49:09.780drunk at least they'd have some big bold ideas cut the scene of John A but um yeah they need to
01:49:15.680stop getting high stop it i don't care who you are policy writer person put down the drugs go
01:49:22.900sober up confess your sins and and get it together good lord anyways i mean as we kind of round out
01:49:32.660the hour here and i kind of dwell on the last few things that that kind of come to mind i'm about to
01:49:38.040go on a trip during lockdown during travel restrictions i really hope i'm here on tuesday
01:50:10.460that everybody knew in school who just
01:50:12.120always had another thing to say about blah, blah,
01:50:14.300I don't kick the ball too hard. Don't do this. Don't run too fast. Nobody cared what they said
01:50:18.420because their rules were plentiful and they made no sense. And there was universal nonconformity.
01:50:23.100And then they just punished people at will. Right. So it just made no sense. But I am going to go on
01:50:27.780a trip and I am going through the interior of British Columbia. I am leaving my health region,
01:50:33.480which is kind of hard to do considering my health region is three times the size of France. But
01:50:38.460it's it is possible to leave your health region. So I will be leaving my health region.
01:50:44.300And I'm going to go visit people and I'm going to try and make a connection with the people that matter to my beloved so that I, in turn, can get to know them and we can make a life together someday.
01:50:57.080And I don't really see a way around that.
01:51:02.700I don't think there would be a way for me to defend myself if I were to not do that.
01:59:04.800And there's a bunch of other possibilities with that.
01:59:08.020There's a few more a few more suggestions there.
01:59:11.140I think Shirley Bond, I think I felt like I did reach out to him already.
01:59:17.420Michelle's got a whole bunch of things like to talk to Tim on the Libertarian Party.
01:59:21.160Yep, that's another person who could be spoken to.
01:59:23.260These are all great suggestions, and I'm really appreciative of that.
01:59:25.620We are coming up to the end of our hour, or rather the end of our two hours, and we do have a few suggestions here, so I'm very thankful for those, to be honest with you.