Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - April 29, 2021

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:00:30.000 For more information, visit www.fema.org

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:29.980 and good morning of course i'm nathan guida and you're listening to mountain standard time and if

00:01:35.100 you're with us on facebook and youtube you're watching it as well today i'm speaking with

00:01:39.500 stewart parker he's been on the show a couple times before and we're very thankful to have

00:01:43.660 him here good friend of the show and he's the president of the los altos institute we'll be

00:01:47.420 talking about the lockdowns and a few other things here in bc some news items that uh he'd like to

00:01:51.740 bring up i'd like to bring up and then to the second hour uh i'm gonna be alone up here but

00:01:56.700 I'm hoping that you guys send your comments my way and just let me know what's going on where

00:02:00.980 you're at and I can kind of discuss that with you and I'll be bringing up some news stories of my

00:02:04.800 own that I'd like to discuss. The weather has finally turned on us in northern British Columbia

00:02:09.780 after beautiful weather basically from Easter until just a few days ago. We finally have those

00:02:15.600 April showers that supposedly yield May flowers. Hopefully this spring brings forth some new

00:02:23.100 blossoms of freedom, the old tired theme of lockdowns, check stops, case numbers, and drudgery

00:02:28.360 has lost its novelty, and it's become exhausting. As previously stated, I was laid off due to the

00:02:35.200 pandemic in March of 2020. In order to not succumb to dependency and owe the government money because

00:02:41.020 of the CERB, I left town to head up north, way up north, actually, to Churchill, Manitoba,

00:02:47.520 the last stop on the Hudson's Bay Railway

00:02:50.480 I'd been there before

00:02:52.500 once in 2017

00:02:53.760 in fact I was helping my producer up there

00:02:56.440 and now I was helping myself

00:02:58.340 speaking of which my producer needs

00:03:00.480 to expand this for me because it's still

00:03:02.380 minimized

00:03:03.240 just a moment

00:03:14.000 mm-hmm well we'll just go live with uh with stewart there uh stewart you are on with us

00:03:23.940 and of course we uh are thankful that uh you're here today uh what's on your mind and what's uh

00:03:29.880 making you what's making you tick today uh well i i i didn't actually show up with a with a set

00:03:37.300 grievances as i often start my day with which is is pretty nice um i uh but saying that i'm

00:03:46.040 reminded of a wonderful tv show that i followed uh very carefully very sad when it ended uh called

00:03:52.500 rake uh as an australian show and um in the final season the main character is elected to the

00:04:00.560 australian senate and there's this moment where he's being uh he's on this improbable campaign

00:04:06.620 that he's really only engaged in out of spite and because his sister's running for the Liberal Party.

00:04:13.520 And so one of the interviewers says, Mr. Green, I don't understand it.

00:04:19.580 Your platform just appears to be a bizarre litany of personal grievances.

00:04:25.580 And I thought to myself, you know, I remember when BC politics was a lot more of that, you know,

00:04:32.760 different candidates would show up and offer their bizarre list of personal grievances with

00:04:37.940 very little central control. And one of the things that strikes me every morning in BC

00:04:46.500 is how we've gone from being viewed as the most polarized place on earth to being this place with

00:04:55.240 a real policy consensus with um this cross-partisan consensus that everybody is part of um people are

00:05:05.260 shocked right now that sonia first now is criticizing the government's response to the

00:05:11.780 pandemic and all sorts of people are coming out of the woodwork to say you know my god uh how how

00:05:20.380 can you question you know bonnie henry how can you how can you do this this is this is un-british

00:05:26.900 colombian and this is especially noteworthy because of course we're i'm sitting here in

00:05:32.660 the writing of prince george valemont represented by the leader of her majesty's loyal opposition

00:05:39.120 who has offered not a word of criticism for the political and economic and medical decisions that

00:05:49.540 this government has made in fact in her reelection campaign shirley bond did a thing that that it 1.00

00:05:57.940 blew my mind she began showing up to ribbon cuttings uh and announcements by the incumbent 1.00

00:06:05.460 government and essentially ran as though the province had a unity government a grand coalition

00:06:15.140 for the duration of covid and she was part of that government and i i mean she wasn't yet the

00:06:21.620 leader of the opposition at that point but the fact that they would choose the person who ran

00:06:27.540 the lowest contrast campaign of anybody in their caucus who survived that drubbing at the polls

00:06:36.500 is indicative that um there's this sense obviously the opposition's doing some polling 0.99

00:06:43.380 They 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

00:07:09.740 and then the BC coroner's service effectively functioning as a whistleblower entity

00:07:16.480 and directly saying this baby died of COVID.

00:07:20.960 So you would think that, I mean, I remember when the Ministry of Children and Family Development was created

00:07:28.500 and it was understood to be like this terrible thing if you got that ministry

00:07:34.200 because you had just become the minister of dead kids.

00:07:36.880 And 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.

00:08:01.720 and one would think that somebody would be calling for some resignations or something like that but

00:08:08.480 all we have is one of the two green members of the legislature making some fairly polite

00:08:14.740 criticisms of the government's response and you know i'm you know i'm not an anti-masker i'm not

00:08:24.120 an anti-vaxxer and i don't oppose lockdowns the you know my objection to what's going on in bc is

00:08:31.040 that there hasn't been a lockdown. There's been a lot of half-assed announcements that were never

00:08:36.240 even encoded in law. Most things Bonnie Henry announces on TV are non-binding advice. The

00:08:42.900 solicitor general never turns them into orders in council. They're just vague advice for any police

00:08:48.680 authority that feels like following through on that. But of course, when cities or islands

00:08:56.140 attempt more serious lockdowns to have like a Nova Scotia or New Zealand style thing where you

00:09:03.500 just stop travel, get COVID to zero, and then your economy turns back on. The Queen Charlotte

00:09:12.220 Islands, Haida Gwaii, were stopped from doing that by the government last year. One of the reasons

00:09:18.560 Prince Rupert was vaccinated so early as a major global transshipment point, again, was because

00:09:25.100 the Solicitor General overturned the orders for a local lockdown from the Mayor and Council of

00:09:31.820 Prince Rupert. And so there are all kinds of political due process questions that go beyond

00:09:39.360 even COVID, but what is overreach for provincial government? What kind of jurisdiction do Indigenous

00:09:45.940 people have if they can't continue a pre-conquest process of quarantining, which is, you know,

00:09:55.100 one of the things that allowed indigenous people who survived the European epidemics to survive

00:10:00.160 in the first place. So it is really striking that we have all of these issues that turn up day after

00:10:07.640 day about the government's COVID response. And like everything else from raw logs to, well,

00:10:14.480 really anything but real estate, the official opposition is there to endorse the government.

00:10:19.200 to endorse the government it's uh it's a damning thing to say but the fact of the matter is here

00:10:27.860 in british columbia i don't really see a way around uh that statement uh or that statement

00:10:33.120 being proven false i it's it's incredible to think that again as you pointed out bc which which is

00:10:41.400 not famous for its consensus in fact it's famous for its division all these little river valleys

00:10:46.980 all these tribes of tories these tribes of socialists and extremists and cryptocurrencies

00:10:52.180 in church basements and god knows what else is happening around out there this this very bizarre

00:10:58.020 diverse divided place has some very interesting political manifestations i don't know if anybody

00:11:03.060 ever quite took off their shoe and start banging it on the table you know uh but they but i mean

00:11:08.420 there were some pretty strong words both sides there's some pretty great excuses too like i think

00:11:12.580 Ghilardi once said he needed to test the road that's why he was caught going 230 down the number

00:11:18.080 one so if that's the case if that's the world we came from the and indeed that you're a native

00:11:23.900 Vancouverite that was the Vancouver you came from a very dynamic diverse place it was a Tory town at

00:11:29.240 one point in some places uh and now it's blase what what's the answer to our politics if that's

00:11:36.000 what's happened well I think there's there's really two parts to it one is that of course

00:11:42.060 you also you do see this when a policy consensus appears that's when the two sides scream the

00:11:49.720 loudest because they actually have um nothing to argue about so things get very personal or they

00:11:58.080 get focused on really specific wedge issues you know that uh well let's all take strong positions

00:12:05.480 on the israel-palestine conflict or let's all take strong positions on human rights in china

00:12:11.280 So 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.

00:12:24.160 And so Republicans and Democrats perfected that game in the United States of proceeding with a complete policy consensus and screaming at each other.

00:12:34.560 And 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,

00:12:51.420 but because it would actually mean that there wasn't a policy consensus on a significant foreign policy issue.

00:12:59.280 And that was terrifying. That was viewed as undermining America.

00:13:04.600 Now, the thing is that Americans have a tool for dealing with a policy consensus between their major parties,

00:13:11.200 which is that they have an open primary system.

00:13:14.660 So if people want to realign a national party, there's a way to do that democratically.

00:13:20.520 You 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.

00:13:33.960 One 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.

00:13:47.800 the leader of the party had to agree and there had to be a local nominating meeting that was

00:13:54.280 open to all party members to uh that was run democratically candidates anybody who showed up

00:14:01.240 at the nominating meeting who was a member was eligible to run and then there were these huge

00:14:06.480 meetings we remember them from the 80s sometimes thousands of people signed up joined parties came

00:14:13.280 to meetings and voted but in 19 between 1993 and 2003 a series of amendments were made to our

00:14:21.120 federal and then provincial election laws which make the selection of candidates solely the

00:14:27.680 discretion of a party's leader so party leaders can now pick people they will sometimes seek the

00:14:34.320 advice of a local riding association but normally if a party and the local association disagreed

00:14:42.160 the party couldn't run a candidate. That was the state of affairs until 1993, that both groups had

00:14:48.780 a veto. But now political party leaders can simply choose any person they want and appoint them as

00:14:55.860 a candidate in a riding. And sometimes even incumbent members of parliament don't get a

00:15:01.680 chance to run for a second term because the leader of their party will just fire them and replace

00:15:08.040 them with another person and if the leader of the party doesn't think they can persuade local people

00:15:13.240 they just appoint them and so the main the one democratic check we had on the on the centralized

00:15:23.240 power of political parties the centralized uh the emergence of an elite policy consensus was

00:15:28.920 the ability of party members to choose who represented them and that's been eviscerated

00:15:34.200 under the law um and one of the things that has replaced it is this thing called the vetting

00:15:41.400 committee a candidate vetting committee is created by a party leader the names of its members are

00:15:49.400 rarely released to the public uh and what you do if you want to become a candidate for a party now

00:15:56.040 you pay a non-refundable fee to that committee who functions not so much as people say it's like

00:16:02.520 opposition research and just checking to see if you've said anything silly in the past.

00:16:06.340 That's not true. Candidate vetting committees look for people not who weren't embarrassing in the

00:16:11.860 past, but people who will be obedient in the future. What they're looking for is, did this

00:16:18.860 person ever get into a workplace dispute? Did this person, was this person a dissident in student

00:16:25.260 politics at their university? Are they in conflict with the professional association they're a member

00:16:31.560 of. There are all these little signs to find people who will toe the line, who will not be

00:16:37.560 difficult. And so you pay your fee, your $5,000 or whatever. You open your life up to this committee

00:16:44.640 and its anonymous members. And if they don't like you, you may not even get your fee back.

00:16:50.180 They might just keep the money and say, that's how much it cost us to figure out that you

00:16:53.420 couldn't run for us so the implementation of high fees to keep people of regular income out of

00:17:03.500 politics and then this veto process that's conducted by a kind of political star chamber

00:17:09.460 that every party has um and then of course a party like the new democrats adds one additional layer

00:17:17.280 which it got into trouble over last election, which is their argument that if a white man who

00:17:25.340 is not disabled or gay has occupied this seat before, they can't be succeeded by someone who's

00:17:34.600 demographically the same. So the NDP says they must be succeeded by an equity-seeking minority,

00:17:40.640 an equity-seeking group. Now, an equity-seeking group is any group that is oppressed on any basis

00:17:47.860 or discriminated against on any basis except class. There's no equity mandate for working

00:17:55.140 class people in the NDP. There is an equity mandate for any other group, and it's an easy 0.97

00:18:01.440 equity mandate to get through. In Columbia River Revelstoke in 2017, there was a paraplegic woman

00:18:10.100 who was seeking the NDP nomination but she wasn't the party didn't like her very much so they talked

00:18:16.800 a straight white married guy into running for the nomination and all he had to do

00:18:24.980 was to indicate in a private meeting that he had at some point fellated another man

00:18:33.580 and so if you're willing to go through that indignity of if you're straight and you want

00:18:40.460 to misrepresent your sexual orientation then you can and then you meet the equity-seeking

00:18:45.220 criteria of the new democratic party i had a big debate about with harry lally i said no i think

00:18:50.400 this guy is so principled he probably went out and did this as well you know in order to like

00:18:54.820 run honestly but that's a strange um requirement to have of a candidate uh but that's the scene

00:19:02.800 we're in that um and it shows that people who are sitting in our legislature are the ladder climbers

00:19:11.560 you meet at work the people who are trying to get promoted the people who will do anything to fit in

00:19:17.100 to get promoted and they see themselves not as the group that's managing our province's civil service

00:19:23.560 they 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

00:19:30.560 to hear it from your side

00:19:32.240 Stuart because for us on the right

00:19:34.580 especially us on kind of the hardware store

00:19:36.440 populist conservative guy walking down

00:19:38.500 the street sort of Tory sort of understanding

00:19:40.720 we all know this

00:19:42.460 about the federal Tory party

00:19:43.920 that it has gotten completely out of control

00:19:46.180 we see the eliminations happen we see it especially

00:19:48.500 of socially conservative candidates

00:19:50.220 most of whom would pass muster

00:19:52.660 everywhere else they're well dressed

00:19:54.140 they don't swear they're social

00:19:56.520 conservatives

00:19:57.000 they're fine on a lot of counts

00:20:00.460 But 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.

00:20:08.160 And they have lots of new new policy around that.

00:20:10.940 They they don't want to denigrate single mothers or any of that.

00:20:13.440 They want to help people. They want to hand out money.

00:20:15.580 There's there's a very progressive, socially conservative way of looking at that.

00:20:19.240 And that's all great. And then the party sidelines them as if they had said, you know, Hitler was right. 0.95

00:20:25.100 And it's just it's just mind boggling. 0.92

00:20:27.720 So 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.

00:20:37.260 What led to this? Why did we change from having real ideas in politics to this consensus?

00:20:46.040 Well, I think it is, actually, that it is the abortion debate that produced this outcome, both locally and federally.

00:20:56.000 um so during uh so when the liberal party of canada was at war with each other right the main

00:21:03.820 thing statistically that is most likely to make people liberals i'm sad to say for you is is of

00:21:09.360 course catholicism right people who identify as catholic tend to vote liberal unless they live

00:21:16.660 in newfoundland and then the party system is opposite and the liberals are protestants and

00:21:22.500 the Tories are Catholics, but in the rest of the country, that's the thing. And of course, 0.73

00:21:28.480 long before evangelical Christians became concerned about abortion, that was really the

00:21:34.240 issue around which the Catholic Church remade itself in the 19th century after the conquest

00:21:39.840 of the papal states. It went from being the world's largest abortion provider to the world's

00:21:44.780 largest anti-abortion organization overnight in the 1850s. And so when the Paul Martin-John

00:21:54.560 Turner faction was fighting the, you know, Jean Chrétien faction of the party,

00:22:01.560 the especially Catholic pro-life activists saw this conflict within the Liberal Party as a great

00:22:10.920 opportunity for entryism so they created an organization called liberals for life and they

00:22:16.840 won all kinds of nomination meetings in 1984 when the liberals were lost most of their seats when

00:22:24.120 they lost three quarters of their seats the number of pro-life liberal mps increased even in the 84

00:22:32.760 election and they increased further in the 88 election and after 88 brian mulroney declined

00:22:40.920 even though he was invited to by the supreme court enact a new abortion law and so um this was going

00:22:48.600 to be a live issue and the liberal and the number of liberal pro-life mps exceeded the number of

00:22:53.960 tory mps and at that time the votes of social conservatives you know were being competed for

00:23:00.120 on many fronts and the thinking was well those people are mostly going to vote reform in the

00:23:06.600 west and block in the east and uh so chretchen decided to purge the anti-abortion caucus from

00:23:16.200 the liberals and this and so he got the bylaws of the liberal party change in order to conduct that

00:23:23.160 purge and it actually was the beginning of all of the legal changes because once he got into office

00:23:29.160 He 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.

00:23:49.340 And 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.

00:24:17.060 And so there was this sense that Van Der Zand was out of control, and Van Der Zand was a pretty quirky guy.

00:24:24.740 So there was a meeting of the finance minister, the attorney general, and the senior caucus researcher for social credit,

00:24:32.960 and they effectively seized power from Van Der Zand and governed the province themselves for two years.

00:24:41.400 The late George Dubot, a good friend of mine, was the organizer of the coup with Mel Kouvalier and Bud Smith.

00:24:51.340 And so, again, this issue, because it couldn't be manifested in the party system, that there was this false consensus,

00:25:03.060 One 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.

00:25:18.520 And, 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.

00:25:30.120 but she really wasn't in office long enough to push back against that so by the time mike harcourt

00:25:36.640 took power the bureaucracy had been running the province for three years and mike harcourt came

00:25:42.860 out of commission government he had been the mayor of vancouver and in our cities we have this thing

00:25:48.140 called commission government where the way it's structured is that the senior bureaucrats make

00:25:54.220 almost all of the decisions and the city councilors sort of serve um to report potholes to them as far

00:26:01.420 as i can tell i think that that's that's what city councilors do in commission government and so mike

00:26:07.120 harcourt under the ndp and then later gordon campbell under the bc liberals restructured

00:26:13.560 british columbia's bureaucracy and its relationship with the legislature along these municipal

00:26:19.160 commission government lines where the government was going to be post-ideological it was going to

00:26:24.940 use these principles of progressivism that we have to remember was neither a right-wing or

00:26:31.740 left-wing ideology it used to be that every party had a progressive faction and every party had a

00:26:37.780 populist faction and what's happened now of course is that progressives have seized control of the

00:26:45.620 parties of the left, and the only place where there's still a populist faction at all pushing

00:26:51.620 back is on the right. I mean, I vehemently disagree with the positions taken by the people

00:27:01.480 who are pushing back against Erin O'Toole. I believe in climate science. I don't think the

00:27:07.120 cops should be investigating miscarriages and putting anybody in prison if they don't like

00:27:12.180 what they see. I really, I don't have any time for that. But I do think that it's amazing that

00:27:20.360 social conservatives in the federal Tories, this time, broadened their coalition and worked with

00:27:27.380 climate denialists and all kinds of other groups that are also being pushed out of the tent

00:27:32.020 in order to actually make Aaron O'Toole lose a vote at a convention. That was an extraordinary

00:27:37.560 achievement and you know i gotta say well there's i have a lot of disagreement about the policies

00:27:45.460 but i have a lot of admiration for what's going on on the right when it comes to trying to continue

00:27:51.380 to use every lever of power possible to assert democratic control over a party i think that

00:27:58.960 that actually came up in uh something out of the january issue of jacobin i think there was a the 0.99

00:28:05.980 woman who organized strongly in nevada which is a right to work state and she was organizing the

00:28:11.000 hospitality industry she wrote a bit for for jacobin that now that joe biden was going to

00:28:16.260 finally be inaugurated after everything else had happened that said actually if you want to finish

00:28:21.240 reconstruction we need to vote republican yeah i think that at the end of the day there does seem

00:28:28.840 into pushing all of the populists out of the left parties into the right and pulling the

00:28:36.220 progressives out of the right wing parties into the left has produced this thing where

00:28:41.480 it used to be right that one of the reasons we didn't one of the reasons we got rid of having

00:28:46.700 man camps up in northern bc uh in the 30s and 40s is because it used to be that um angry

00:28:57.300 young men with unstable employment were socialists, mostly, in this province, right? That

00:29:07.000 we had better, we'd better build these company towns and domesticate these young men and get 1.00

00:29:12.600 them married because they're going to march on the legislature. And, you know, this will be the 0.95

00:29:17.040 first jurisdiction that flips and sides with the Soviet Union on this continent. That was the 0.91

00:29:21.440 thinking of premier john hart when he created the forest apartment system it wasn't about you know

00:29:28.800 equity and keeping resources and jobs in the interior in the north it was about stopping a

00:29:34.960 revolution and it used to be assumed that if you were angry and didn't trust the system that you

00:29:42.560 were probably a ccf or a new democrat and what's amazing is that the ccf and the ndp you know we

00:29:50.080 don't want you people you know sure you're like 80 of our historic base but you're not our kind of

00:29:56.800 people um instead let's invite um the uh you know let's invite some tory organizers in

00:30:05.600 who really don't like how messy democracy is and uh you know my friend bob ransford's a

00:30:12.000 great example he was a progressive conservative a real progressive conservative those people you

00:30:17.200 kind of drove out of the tories for a little while and you know bob was you know jerry st

00:30:24.160 germain's organizer he's mulroney's man in town still moroni comes stays with him you know that

00:30:29.360 all that sort of stuff his politics which are you know regulation state regular state mandated

00:30:38.960 regulation of oligopolies and you know following the advice of climate scientists and looking at

00:30:46.720 you know these very technocratic metrics his politics haven't changed in the time that i've

00:30:51.680 known him he and i have been friends but the politics that made him a member of the moroni

00:30:58.080 government in 1988 are the same politics that make him a person who votes ndp today because

00:31:06.480 the um the that progressive spirit of state regulation trusting bureaucrats trusting experts

00:31:15.600 has migrated across the spectrum so it's odd how that cultural change happened i don't think we're

00:31:22.640 unique though the same thing happened to the united states the democratic party filled up

00:31:28.560 with the elites of the republican party and it's still filling up right it's still they're getting

00:31:34.240 steve schmidt david from and all those fine folks as the other party becomes more hostile to that

00:31:43.600 kind of progressive policy

00:31:45.700 consensus politics.

00:31:48.480 You know, if you

00:31:49.740 ever want to get in on a group

00:31:51.560 project, Stuart, and we can go and arrest

00:31:53.740 somebody together for treason,

00:31:56.080 I don't know who you'd nominate, 1.00

00:31:58.040 but we can definitely 0.93

00:31:59.740 arrest somebody

00:32:01.800 for treason together. Of course, our

00:32:03.700 mutual friend, John C. Thompson, has been

00:32:05.780 commenting, fascinating, Stuart knows

00:32:07.700 more about Canadian political history than

00:32:09.600 a few other people do.

00:32:11.780 And 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.

00:32:19.280 What is there a way forward? Is there a way forward?

00:32:22.820 Is there any way to kind of break the consensus or to form a new party?

00:32:26.540 Or will that always be stymied by the media?

00:32:29.860 I mean, the Christian heritage tried to do this. 1.00

00:32:32.400 Socons tried to do this for years. Is this ever going to change? 1.00

00:32:35.720 Look at the last set of provincial election results.

00:32:38.360 It's the fever is about to break.

00:32:40.760 I mean, don't look at the Lower Mainland.

00:32:42.260 The Lower Mainland is deeply depressing.

00:32:43.640 But if we look at those 24 ridings that Darcy Reppin and the Rural BC Party identified as Rural BC,

00:32:52.020 we see, despite a complete media blackout and no ability to campaign door-to-door,

00:32:59.780 basically like zero access to voters.

00:33:05.000 We saw double-digit results for the Christian Heritage Party for the first time,

00:33:11.020 double-digit results for the Libertarian Party for the first time,

00:33:15.280 over 30% of the vote for the Conservative Party and the Peace,

00:33:20.680 and the rural BC party also getting over 10%.

00:33:25.280 This was a surprise election that nobody was even able to contest.

00:33:29.240 And 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.

00:33:59.240 And so I do think that the long-term strategy, which had been to de-platform anyone who was outside the policy consensus, right?

00:34:08.640 I was shut out of every leader's debate while I was the leader of the Green Party.

00:34:12.780 It wasn't until there was a successor who was campaigning on these small illiberal policies that they were let in.

00:34:20.080 De-platforming worked when the mainstream media was powerful.

00:34:23.320 But 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.

00:34:51.820 So 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.

00:34:59.700 Very different things are going to happen in the East Kootenays and in the Caribou.

00:35:07.540 And, you know, maybe that can help turn things around in the rest of the province.

00:35:11.760 I don't know. I mean, obviously, I've pulled out of Vancouver.

00:35:14.780 My confidence in the place isn't that great.

00:35:16.960 So 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.

00:35:38.640 I 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.

00:36:02.260 but it was one that was very principled and consistent and the reason john isn't in ontario

00:36:09.320 is because ultimately it ran afoul of stephen harper's appeasement of china and i think that's

00:36:15.880 a great reason that's a great reason um to fall out of favor is taking a firm stand in favor of

00:36:23.500 chinese human rights so john has just a tremendous wealth of knowledge that i know this show benefit

00:36:29.740 from he's the guy who got my my christian tv gig uh when i lived in ontario it's it's something

00:36:37.180 that we're looking forward to as well uh to try and reach out to more people bring more people

00:36:41.340 on of course this is still just our first month so we're just getting our legs under us but we're

00:36:45.340 very thankful for the contributors we've had so far yourself to others who have been here and to

00:36:49.900 all that comment and of course we will be making contact with with john and others uh in the coming

00:36:55.900 days with with that idea then that there is going to be at some point the dam is going to break at

00:37:03.160 some point there's going to be a tide that is going to change what what does that party need

00:37:09.840 to look like or does that party does that possibility not you know as as somebody who

00:37:14.500 would consider themselves you know progressive in their politics or wanting radical changes to

00:37:20.660 towards a greener world and and to things like that steward i'm trying not trying to miscarriage

00:37:25.940 but but i but i just but i guess i guess the thing is that that's that's the argument that

00:37:31.500 your establishment friends all your friends with the nice with the nice cozy job whoever they are

00:37:36.020 um or the people who were your friends but then pushed you out a window or something

00:37:40.080 uh they they they are in their cushy jobs and they're holding on for dear life

00:37:44.840 and they're scared about this new wave that's coming and they're saying that the new wave

00:37:49.840 is going to be fascistic. It's going to destroy everything. Do you worry about that as someone

00:37:56.300 who's politics are at least closer to the people who are currently in charge to a certain extent,

00:38:01.960 not entirely obviously? I mean, I absolutely, I do worry not just on the right, but on the left

00:38:07.560 that different parts of the authoritarianism we saw in the 1920s are coming back. Obviously,

00:38:14.860 I've been a critic of the left's recent embrace of eugenics. I don't think that, you know, once 0.96

00:38:23.960 you develop a political program that involves escalating mass sterilizations of neurologically

00:38:32.340 disabled and indigenous youth, you're running a eugenics program. It doesn't matter what you call 0.92

00:38:39.220 it. And, you know, Chris was on the other day to talk about that. So I see that on the left and on

00:38:43.920 right i see it everywhere i see all kinds of fascistic tendencies popping up because we've

00:38:50.160 been told that this thing we're living under is democracy and so the conclusion more and more

00:38:55.120 people are reaching is that democracy doesn't work and that's why the best thing we could do

00:39:01.680 to push back against authoritarian impulses um where we don't have people beating other people

00:39:09.280 in the street has happened with Chris Elston and doing so with impunity and assistance of the

00:39:14.780 police, right? And we know that, you know, of course, there are places where the police look

00:39:22.320 the other way when it's the soldiers of Odin. And there are places where the police look the

00:39:25.800 other way when it's the people who beat up Chris. But at the end of the day, all of those trends

00:39:31.240 are incredibly worrying. And so we have to continue to engage with people and show them

00:39:37.100 democracy can do something better engagement is the only way forward and it's going to be

00:39:42.620 uncomfortable for a while because there it's not just that there may not be progressives in every

00:39:50.220 party anymore and there might not be populists in every party anymore but there are definitely

00:39:54.540 fascists in every party now and uh and that that's going to mean some uncomfortable work

00:40:02.940 uh but i think that i think that uh you know darcy rapid and his folks are really on the

00:40:09.100 right track that a successful populist insurgency will be cross-partisan it will appeal to populists

00:40:17.100 from the far right to the far left on an agenda of decentralizing the power of the state

00:40:23.740 democratizing the power of the state and placing control over resources in the hands of the people

00:40:30.940 near them and those are things that people are hungry for across the political spectrum

00:40:36.880 and they're also process solutions so it allows people to bracket what the outcome of a

00:40:44.300 decentralized decision will be and focus on the rightness of decentralizing the decision making

00:40:49.720 and uh so i think that um i think it's going to be if there's going to be a successful move

00:40:56.120 It'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.

00:41:06.760 I think the best model we can look to is way out east with the Labrador party.

00:41:12.180 The Labrador has always functioned as a colonial resource periphery for the mainland of Newfoundland, and it developed its own political consciousness as a result.

00:41:22.760 The 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.

00:41:34.520 And, 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.

00:41:52.760 So 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.

00:42:06.400 And 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.

00:42:35.120 So I think there are people, you know, all over the country who'd like to see rural BC get out from under some thumbs.

00:42:42.940 And I think there's, and we see that throughout the West.

00:42:48.040 I think it's, you know, it's unfortunate that a lot of it is built around some fanciful ideas about oil.

00:42:54.880 But I don't think that has to be the center.

00:42:57.060 And 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.

00:43:10.060 That's not a way forward to achieve independence.

00:43:12.840 That can't be the center of something more populist here.

00:43:19.180 Freedom fries.

00:43:22.420 I'll remember that.

00:43:23.700 Speaking 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.

00:43:35.040 They fought hard.

00:43:36.240 They 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.

00:43:45.320 And you know what?

00:43:46.220 Those people were, you know, absolutely entitled to do that.

00:43:50.060 god knows how many canadians went down to help obama in 2008 uh fewer in 2012 with the gray hair

00:43:57.940 but um i remember 2008 and the tremendous amount of political tourism and i think uh you know we

00:44:04.900 live in a strange globalized world there's medical tourism there's political tourism now

00:44:09.140 yes there is there indeed is i know that you have to you have to leave us at around 10 o'clock

00:44:15.340 We'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.

00:44:23.100 Obviously, obviously, you know, I would like things to open back up.

00:44:27.460 I'm sure on your side, there's more there's more of a consensus that it was never properly shut down to begin with.

00:44:33.340 What? Yes. So we got none of the benefits of locking down because we didn't properly lock down.

00:44:38.960 And 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.

00:44:56.620 If 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.

00:45:08.960 So 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.

00:45:19.480 And 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.

00:45:27.920 because unlike other provinces where businesses need to hit quarterly revenue figures,

00:45:37.560 business in British Columbia is so heavily indebted. Our property market has made everybody

00:45:42.360 so heavily mortgaged. Property taxes in downtowns of cities like on Robson Street in Vancouver

00:45:48.260 are indescribably crippling. And so what that means is you just can't close a hospitality

00:45:54.480 sector business completely unless the government's prepared to lend a lot of money or let a lot of

00:46:00.280 bankruptcies happen and so this is the sector that's been most active in forming our policies

00:46:07.540 and the result is of course that bonnie henry gets on her tv show with adrian dix or maybe adrian

00:46:14.980 dix gets on his tv show with bonnie henry who is was already viewed with great suspicion right she

00:46:22.860 had basically retired after her screw-up during the SARS scandal. She's really rehabilitated by

00:46:29.280 the NDP as a kind. I mean, it's great because they craft her image. They spent $60,000 crafting

00:46:38.500 her image, getting her little sayings, be kind, be calm, be safe. And they set all this up because

00:46:46.560 it's her job to make it look like we're taking the pandemic seriously. And they can sack her 1.00

00:46:52.640 any time. She's a political 0.99

00:46:54.880 creation of theirs. She's almost a fictional

00:46:56.780 creation of theirs.

00:46:58.740 And so

00:47:00.600 she's Adrian Dix's human shield.

00:47:03.200 Adrian Dix was Glenn Clark's

00:47:04.700 human shield, you might remember, back in the

00:47:06.800 90s. Memo to file.

00:47:09.360 There will be some other memos to

00:47:10.760 file, and they will have to do with how

00:47:12.780 long he's had notes about Bonnie Henry.

00:47:16.080 So

00:47:16.640 it's her job to cover government 0.63

00:47:18.680 in action. Whenever she announces a

00:47:20.680 rule, it is almost never a rule. It is almost never made an order in council. So if you want

00:47:27.920 to defy it, and you're not somebody the cops are going to have a problem with for other reasons,

00:47:33.540 you get to do whatever you want. Like take this last no non-essential travel. Read what happened

00:47:40.500 with the few people who were caught by that order, because that's one of the few orders they made

00:47:45.440 binding basically the government report says well we found these people in breach of the order but

00:47:52.240 this was only because they needed to be better educated about the terminology they were using

00:47:57.200 what that means is these people were stopped by the cops and didn't use the word essential

00:48:01.760 in order for the cops to let them go so everybody remember to say essential and then this order

00:48:08.560 doesn't affect you right so that's why the provincial government's like well well how are

00:48:14.720 what's happening with all these people staying in hotels oh it's the job of the hotels to determine

00:48:19.140 if those were essential travelers it's not the job of the police it's not the job of health

00:48:23.960 inspectors it's the job of hotel managers apparently to enforce the province's order

00:48:29.080 but that's the exception most of the time bonnie henry will just say something like there's a mask

00:48:34.820 mandate and there'll be no mask mandate if you go and look at the book of orders in council that

00:48:40.620 the government has issued. Most orders in council pertaining to COVID, the single largest number of

00:48:47.660 them are to shut down local governments attempting to implement lockdowns and quarantines. That is

00:48:54.560 the primary purpose of the actual laws that come out in Victoria. But also, what if you don't like

00:49:01.800 Bonnie Henry's show because she's condescending especially to rural people and implies that even

00:49:09.280 asking her questions is unkind and not calm because goodness knows why would anyone not be

00:49:15.260 calm at this point so so when she does that routine many people find it profoundly off-putting

00:49:22.040 I find her press conferences unwatchable does the government try any other method to notify people

00:49:28.920 No. The government doesn't take out radio ads when it's made a new non-order. The government

00:49:36.140 generally takes out radio ads to say, hey, we're managing this really well. Be kind, be calm, be

00:49:42.100 safe. So the provincial government is supposed to create this sense that there's a lot of action

00:49:50.700 going on. And I know for folks who are used to obeying the rules their whole life, this will

00:49:56.480 shut you down to go well i guess my travel isn't essential maybe i shouldn't go but there's nothing

00:50:04.640 actually stopping you uh the only thing we've done that has had any significant impact is to um

00:50:14.880 end indoor seating intermittently at restaurants and this has typically been involved with the

00:50:22.880 major expansion of outdoor seating at restaurants for patio season well it's not in if it's outdoor

00:50:31.500 right if you build inside then yes so i was just walking down george street right and there's

00:50:39.340 people in the outdoors of crossroads pub all unmasked all sitting their cheek by jowl right

00:50:46.120 they're packed in closer tighter than they would be inside and we see the same thing with

00:50:52.300 government street in victoria and all these other places that again this is hygiene theater

00:51:00.060 and this um and who's suffering well you know how the provincial government's main thing also

00:51:07.580 is to deflect blame and blame young people blame young people for getting together and having a

00:51:13.420 good time now young people are supposed to get together when older people have a good time

00:51:19.820 on restaurant patios so these poor kids who don't have an eviction moratorium that means they've got

00:51:28.300 to make rent every month or they're homeless they're in their early 20s they're working in

00:51:33.100 the food service sector and they are dealing with dozens or hundreds of unmasked people every shift

00:51:45.020 And 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.

00:52:07.820 And of course, John Horgan feeds into this with don't ruin it for the rest of us. No, it's people

00:52:13.400 Horgan's age sitting at the bar being waited on by kids who are there because it's a choice between

00:52:19.980 being in a highly infectious environment or being on the street in a highly infectious environment.

00:52:26.340 And they're also shouldering the blame as well as shouldering all the labor. So what this

00:52:32.760 government is doing should be satisfactory to no one. If you're a person who prizes personal

00:52:39.800 freedom above public health objectives, you hate this government. You're at the anti-mask protests.

00:52:46.720 But if you're a person who prizes public safety above freedom of assembly in the short term,

00:52:55.260 you should be equally enraged that this government has undertaken a bunch of measures that have

00:53:01.640 clearly failed that have given us one of the highest positivity rates in the global north

00:53:07.640 giving us the fastest rate of growth in um uh in uh childhood covid because we will never

00:53:17.480 shutter our schools um all of these statistics they're they're horrific but the idea of this

00:53:25.240 pageantry of this tv show uh that everybody has to watch that's that's supposed to hold

00:53:36.840 support in the uh for the government among people who are supposedly really concerned

00:53:44.360 about their neighbor's health and deflecting blame from public policy makers to youth culture is um

00:53:52.520 It's a cheap, crappy trick, especially because a lot of those kids showed up and voted Horgan back in.

00:54:01.200 You 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.

00:54:17.140 i think ultimately when it comes to this this question it it's funny how it is a generational

00:54:24.980 fight again it really is boomers versus the millennials and gen zed especially gen zed as

00:54:31.420 they're coming up in the ranks of being in their early 20s and that sort of thing you're kind of

00:54:35.960 finally breaking up teenagehood and and ultimately i think one of the things that's going to be a

00:54:42.960 takeaway from the pandemic is just like the colossal policy failure it was at what point

00:54:47.320 perhaps you can kind of give us a concluding thought on that steward is there is it is it a

00:54:52.480 stay or go thing do we have to climb into full lockdown or or at some point should we just pull

00:54:58.500 the lever pull out the power from underneath of all these people that have been puppeteering us

00:55:03.080 for a year and just just say look like honestly you could do this better yourself just let it go

00:55:08.980 Well, no, I think because we don't know a lot about the Indian variant, we're not tracking it.

00:55:14.920 There are all these other variants we're not tracking, and we don't know the relative lethality of those variants.

00:55:20.140 So, no, I would like to see actual public health officials run an actual public health program.

00:55:26.360 Now, that might involve some short-term pain for business, and it might involve a bunch of hospitality sector bankruptcies.

00:55:32.760 I 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.

00:55:46.620 And I think there's a pretty clear track record there.

00:55:49.880 Of course, we should proceed very actively with vaccination and all this other stuff.

00:55:54.840 But the other thing is this policy failure is an absence of policy.

00:55:59.160 It's not bad policy.

00:56:00.820 so um it uh all we're really talking about is canceling a tv show not changing policy at all

00:56:08.420 well anyway i'm gonna have to let you go there i know uh yeah i bet i mean that's damning and i

00:56:16.920 don't i don't think there's a lot of ways to correct that again we fall on different sides

00:56:20.700 of some of these issues but on the last one as i've stated before on this program uh we're about

00:56:24.880 building coalitions and two uh stuart parker is just great tv so it thanks very much we'll see

00:56:31.700 you next thursday absolutely thank you so much stuart uh no we're so we're gonna pivot a little

00:56:37.540 bit here i see we did get some stuff in the comments uh we'll we'll start addressing some

00:56:42.100 of that momentarily i want to clarify one or two things on my end uh just before we move forward

00:56:48.080 here i definitely fall on the side of the anti-lockdown um i don't think they've worked

00:56:53.400 and i believe that we've played with that enough time uh and it's just not it's not working there's

00:57:00.720 no nice way of saying it it's it isn't working and we need to move forward into something else

00:57:06.480 because we can't continue to be married to bad policy i've talked about this before and i'm

00:57:10.280 going to talk about it again just briefly here for anybody who hasn't kind of heard me make this

00:57:14.660 kind of rant before but i'm actually so i'm adopted and the family i'm adopted to through

00:57:20.000 my father's side, that side is German. My mother's actually low German because she's Mennonite. So

00:57:24.180 the high Germans and low Germans are all together in my little family. And my father, his mother's

00:57:31.280 still alive, my grandmother, she's a true anti-fascist of the old school. She actually

00:57:37.400 grew up in Germany during a certain time period in history. And she and her family were very

00:57:44.680 against what was happening. They were very angry with it. They did actually agitate with anybody

00:57:48.660 who's in the in the crowd here in the comment crowd that that knows who bonhoeffer is and all

00:57:53.320 that jazz uh they were actually a part of of that same movement not not directly they didn't meet

00:57:58.560 the guy or whatever but they they were a part of that same underground movement that was trying to

00:58:01.860 undermine what was happening in germany and and so she she remembers a lot of things about that

00:58:09.780 time because she was a young girl i think she was probably nine when the war started about 14 when

00:58:14.000 the war ended and the thing that i'm trying to drive home here is that she recalls in no uncertain

00:58:19.900 terms i love her death but i mean you know she she'll actually believe what she's told about

00:58:25.560 from cbc and that sort of thing that's something that we have to go back and forth on sometimes

00:58:29.160 she and i argue about this whether the mainstream media can be trusted um and uh but but whatever i

00:58:36.920 love her very much obviously the point that i'm trying to drive home here though is that she

00:58:40.640 recalls in no uncertain terms that that when she went to England so after the war they tried to

00:58:46.440 mix the children together in order to try and make sure there wouldn't be another war between

00:58:50.900 those belligerents because of course they all had to be on the same side against communism we all

00:58:55.000 we all understand this as a geopolitical strategy and so the children of Germany got into pen pal

00:59:01.180 relationships with the children of France and England perhaps even Canada and the United States

00:59:05.040 but certainly France and England to try and make there to be some cross-cultural pollination in

00:59:08.900 order to ensure that there would still be peace come you know 10 years after the war 15 years

00:59:13.960 after the war 20 years after the war and her pen pal was an English girl uh and and so she was a

00:59:20.180 young woman and but just becoming a young woman and so was the young young girl there just just

00:59:24.800 into her adolescence and eventually a young woman and they finally decided to meet I guess she

00:59:29.320 probably would have been I guess they both would have been probably about 19 just finishing school

00:59:33.060 we have to remember school went longer back then right just like it did in Ontario until recently

00:59:36.920 with grade 13. And what happened was she went to England. We're in the 1950s now. We're probably

00:59:44.220 just into either Churchill's reelection after being tossed out after the war or or just before

00:59:50.720 that. So it's still a labor government and the labor government had decided to marry the war.

00:59:55.440 So there's still rationing and everything else. So she goes to England. The place still looks like,

01:00:00.320 you know, it still looks like the blitz is going on. There's still rubble everywhere. Things have

01:00:03.860 not been repaired. And there's still the rationing, rationing of petrol, rationing of food,

01:00:10.940 right? So people are lining up to take their bare necessities of life. Now, why am I bringing this

01:00:18.700 up? So what happened was they got married to bad policy, and they kept it around for almost a

01:00:24.620 decade. That was fine during the war. Everything had to go to the war effort. We had to win the

01:00:29.480 war we had to sacrifice people were gardening on the boulevards of streets in order to make more

01:00:34.880 food for the war effort like it was an incredible they called those victory gardens it it was an

01:00:39.580 incredible time but at a certain point the war ended and the policy that had gone with the war

01:00:46.660 needed to go out with the war as peace reigned but instead they kept the policy they nationalized

01:00:53.560 their health care industry they they kept the nationalized coal and steel and everything else

01:00:57.800 had happened and and england's economy no longer now uh you know being driven by the war itself

01:01:03.720 started to turn in on itself and things became very stultified and stuck because of course you'd

01:01:09.720 built all these lock and dam systems within your economy in order to control the flow of goods and

01:01:14.260 services in order to win the war we were out of the war you know we weren't directly related with

01:01:22.320 england anymore because of the balfour act but whatever the point is we were out of the war we

01:01:25.860 We were out of the woods, but we were still trotting along as if we were in the middle of it.

01:01:30.280 And 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.

01:01:44.200 We don't line up for gas.

01:01:45.100 We don't line up for food anymore.

01:01:46.400 We 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

01:01:52.720 We're going to rebuild everything after the carpet bombing that happened.

01:01:55.860 And 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.

01:02:16.440 it was bad policy to begin with the idea that somehow you could just lock everybody up and and

01:02:21.800 hope that the virus was going to die out by itself it is it was nonsense to me from the start all we

01:02:27.800 could ever do is take some precautions you know i haven't i haven't seen my grandmother in a while

01:02:32.840 and when i do finally see her i'm probably not going to give her a hug you know i'm just gonna

01:02:37.720 you know say hello to her and and we're gonna you know just chat at a distance probably that sort of

01:02:42.760 thing 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

01:02:49.480 of bridging the gap but the point that i'm trying to make here is that we got married to bad policy

01:02:54.520 bad policy and that doomed us from the beginning our entire mentality was was doomed from the

01:03:02.680 beginning and and we have to back up and we have to rethink this because it's not working and and

01:03:11.080 And we hear that every day that the cases are climbing and that people are there's people in the hospital, et cetera.

01:03:17.820 I still I still think the fundamentally the virus is not nearly as as well.

01:03:22.780 I think it's deadly to those it's deadly to and it isn't to those who it isn't to.

01:03:26.740 I think that's the problem.

01:03:28.640 And, you know, if you're susceptible to it, it hits your heart.

01:03:32.020 If you're not susceptible to it or as susceptible, it hits you differently.

01:03:35.940 And and that's life.

01:03:37.780 That's life.

01:03:38.560 that's how it is you know there's a lot of people there's a lot of people who drag their feet who

01:03:44.420 have tripped on a flight of stairs because they never really learned to lift their feet a little

01:03:48.660 bit higher that's just life that's how it is and simultaneously i'm very short and i can't hit my

01:03:53.740 head against a door jam i'm not i'm not that sure but i'm five foot eight i i am never going to hit

01:03:58.480 my head against a door jam that's reality everything is six feet or more i'm i'm too

01:04:04.580 short to hit my head against a door jam that's the nature of life the nature of the world we

01:04:08.080 constructed. That's how things are. It's kind of tragic. I'm not saying that I want everybody to

01:04:13.580 hit their head against door jams or everybody to trip down a flight of stairs. I'm saying that

01:04:17.260 this is the nature of things. And all you can do is take precautionary steps. You can duck your head

01:04:22.560 or you can lift up your feet a little bit and hopefully not trip on stuff. That's the best you

01:04:26.540 can do. And if you don't take those precautionary steps, then, you know, you go do what you got to

01:04:32.740 do um let's check in a little bit here with uh some of the comments we've had uh the albertan

01:04:38.780 had commented earlier he's he's a regular guy we have on here um he had commented that a lot of the

01:04:45.160 issue with is that the boomer generation grew up in a time where it was assumed government was

01:04:48.740 somewhat benevolent government now is largely malevolent to the individual i think that if

01:04:53.440 we're gonna get into this whole question of what was it like back then versus now i i think that

01:05:00.760 the way to look at that is that if nothing else, the boomers grew up in a time of economic

01:05:07.720 expansion instead of contraction and where business was interested in expansion instead

01:05:12.520 of contraction. That panics were bad and not good. Disaster capitalism wasn't a thing.

01:05:18.520 And the idea of leaning into a crisis wasn't a thing. Maybe politically tried to score some

01:05:23.500 points there, but for the most part, both morally, ethically, as well as just the structure

01:05:29.480 of the system we had built.

01:05:30.980 It wasn't about the underwriting.

01:05:32.220 It wasn't about the insurance.

01:05:33.080 It wasn't about taking the insurance money and running.

01:05:35.820 Your house wasn't worth more in insurance

01:05:38.700 than it was what you paid for it.

01:05:40.420 So you weren't ahead to burn it down.

01:05:44.040 And that's kind of the difference

01:05:45.900 in the time periods we're in, right?

01:05:49.060 Or that the inflationary cost of your housing or whatever.

01:05:51.520 That's a bad analogy.

01:05:53.300 I'll retract that.

01:05:54.380 I'll just say that I was trying to say something else.

01:05:55.920 But 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.

01:06:06.100 That time period was again, it was just there was more opportunity in that time period.

01:06:10.100 Government just didn't have the power it has today.

01:06:12.980 There 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.

01:06:23.720 And it's your property. 0.98

01:06:24.820 So who gives a crap? 0.98

01:06:25.600 why they get to influence that. But now they want to send you a bill from our taxes or get you to 0.98

01:06:30.560 deconstruct them and tell you that you're in violation of some ordinance that nobody can cite

01:06:34.860 by memory. They have to look it up. They don't know where it is. That's the world we live in

01:06:38.720 today. That's where we are today. And that's a literal thing that happened. That's a real life

01:06:44.740 thing that happened. Pictures from a satellite or from a drone used against somebody on their

01:06:49.680 own property who was in the middle of nowhere. And it was irrelevant whether or not they had

01:06:53.880 built this thing or not build this thing or up to code or not. They weren't putting people in it.

01:06:57.640 It wasn't going to light on fire and kill anyone. But of course, they had to be sent their tax bill

01:07:01.640 because God forbid, God forbid you do anything for yourself without having to pay taxes on it. 0.96

01:07:07.740 What I think is the difference between the millennials and the boomers and Gen Zed now 0.87

01:07:13.520 and the boomers is that, again, that ever expanding opportunity or so it seemed versus

01:07:20.840 the ever contracting opportunities or so it seems for a lot of people instability the gig economy

01:07:27.880 and finally that that political question right so there's been moments right like so the bernie

01:07:33.380 sanders revolution in the united states for a lot of young people who are left of center

01:07:36.880 the trump revolution the united states again for a lot of young people right of center trump

01:07:40.920 attracted a lot of young people into his campaign and into his movement and here in canada i mean

01:07:46.900 And I guess I guess Justin Trudeau was kind of the youth candidate on his first election, at least.

01:07:52.440 But 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.

01:08:11.680 or at least something they can recall, something they recall, something really changing that

01:08:16.360 happened or change for the better. Maybe it's a better way to say that. I belong to the generation

01:08:20.600 of 2001 and the September 11th attacks. I belong to the generation of the great crash in 08. And

01:08:28.060 I belong to the generation now of COVID. Three big hits against us, plus the dot-com bubble,

01:08:33.320 depending on how old you are. I'm 31. The people who are just ahead of me are about 40, got the

01:08:37.500 dot-com bubble. People are just behind me. They're now getting the 2008 experience, but with COVID,

01:08:43.060 which is almost worse. We'll debate that another time. And that's the real difference. Ever

01:08:49.260 contracting, ever more crisis, ever more problems, and no overarching narrative either. At least the

01:08:56.780 Cold War for the boomers, we wanted to win the Cold War. We wanted to beat the Russians. 0.95

01:09:01.380 Even if you were sympathetic to the certain collectivist ideas, you didn't want the Russians 0.98

01:09:06.600 us to win you wanted us to win um and and now that we live after that consensus that's really

01:09:12.740 changed things so i think that's one uh one thing that needs to be uh so so uh that's that's one

01:09:20.980 thing that needs to be talked about so there's there's a few other comments along the way here

01:09:25.080 somebody asked about the uh the vaccine earlier if we scroll up to that one i think it was uh

01:09:31.300 Please comment on the experimental jab.

01:09:36.220 I think it's a little bit further up.

01:09:37.960 It might have been from Carrie.

01:09:40.360 No, Jackie.

01:09:41.200 Yeah, there you go.

01:09:41.880 Jackie Franklin.

01:09:44.140 What are your thoughts on the experimental jab, please?

01:09:47.040 I don't want to take the vaccine.

01:09:51.540 I don't want to take it.

01:09:52.940 And I'm going to do everything I can to not take it.

01:09:55.760 Um, I, I don't get the flu shot when I was a child, I was inoculated.

01:10:02.640 Uh, I don't come from a family of, uh, anti-vaxxers, if that's how you want to say those words.

01:10:07.620 In fact, uh, my opinions on vaccine, this is an interesting topic, actually.

01:10:11.040 I, my opinions on vaccines changed over time, uh, because I, I was raised in a medical family.

01:10:17.900 Um, my father's a physician and I was just raised in a family where like, oh yeah, like

01:10:22.040 everything they kind of hand you over the counter is totally fine and everything like

01:10:25.100 that um now my dad has a lot of criticisms over the bulk drugs that canada gets into because uh

01:10:31.520 he doses his patients who need the dose they're very uh you know if they're very unstable they

01:10:37.060 need help and and the name brand is great the name brand has the right amount of stuff in it and it's

01:10:42.900 always better refined and then in a few years of course the name brand turns into bulk and then

01:10:48.080 the canadian government starts printing the bulk brand and it's it's doesn't even taste as good but

01:10:53.820 it also has a lower dose and that's um you know it's a it's a lower dose and it isn't as reliable

01:11:01.000 so obviously there is a difference in pharmaceuticals even to those whom are experts

01:11:06.040 in it and also uh fundamentally trust the pharmaceutical system i'm not going to say

01:11:13.240 industry but just like the idea in western medicine that we have produced and mass produced

01:11:18.720 items that improve your health and then you consume those items and then those things help

01:11:23.800 you be healthier mentally physically etc so that that part of it is what i was raised in so that

01:11:31.700 was my that kind of my pharmaceutical background that i was that was raised in and then as i became

01:11:38.560 actually actually through my journey into into roman catholicism that was actually the first

01:11:42.540 place i ever bumped into anybody who had any ethical objections to vaccines and because i was

01:11:47.960 raised a protestant and so in the roman catholic world um obviously because they're very pro-life

01:11:52.640 and that sort of thing they came up with uh they came up i mean to say that somebody came up to me

01:11:57.820 and said to me uh yeah no i'm i'm going on this trip somewhere and they want me to get this twin

01:12:02.660 rex vaccine or whatever uh i shouldn't denigrate any particular vaccine because i actually don't

01:12:07.220 know which one it was but it was an inoculation for a trip like for you know when they do the

01:12:10.960 hep a hep b sort of thing uh which of course you could just avoid by not having sexual relations

01:12:17.460 with people who you don't know or uh by not drinking water that hasn't been properly filtered

01:12:22.320 and whatever that's just a free piece of advice but whatever um the that person said to me well 0.53

01:12:29.080 and i can't take it because this is one of those vaccines that was developed with aborted fetal

01:12:33.060 tissue and i didn't know that and we have this back and forth and so i started to look into a

01:12:39.800 little bit more nothing nothing super deep i'm not an expert on this but it turns out that there

01:12:43.840 are vaccines that have been developed over the years because of of children that were killed

01:12:52.500 And that blows my mind.

01:12:54.040 I didn't realize that that was a thing.

01:12:55.420 Nobody told me that.

01:12:56.580 Nobody told me that.

01:12:57.600 And I have a strong moral and ethical objection to that fact.

01:13:02.380 So I know that that is also the case with some of the vaccines that have come out for COVID.

01:13:07.960 There are vaccines that were developed without aborted fetal tissue and those that were developed with aborted fetal tissue.

01:13:14.300 And that's I think that's wrong.

01:13:16.140 That should never have happened.

01:13:17.020 And 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.

01:13:28.480 And you can harvest living cells without damaging anybody from from the amniotic fluid from birth, from the placenta.

01:13:36.200 It'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.

01:13:45.420 but but the point is that it doesn't require the death of a child in order to get access to this

01:13:51.820 stuff and that the stuff from the death of children has not has not worked so i don't

01:13:56.900 understand why that's even a thing but the point that i'm trying to drive home here is that uh when

01:14:01.460 it comes to the experimental jab i'm i'm not planning on taking it i i hope that i don't need

01:14:07.540 to take it to do anything in life i don't know why i would have to uh this is a very terrible

01:14:14.080 awful and apparently deadly uh it's coronavirus but but an influenza like thing it's a very awful

01:14:21.880 respiratory uh and and you know uh yeah it's a very awful thing but i don't i'm not worried about

01:14:31.440 that uh i'm i'm hopeful for the others and i pray for those who are sick but i'm not worried about

01:14:36.420 it for myself um and i think that's really important to just put out there that i'm not

01:14:40.980 worried about that. One of the things I wanted to come back to is I actually didn't get to finish

01:14:45.040 my opening statement. So I'm going to bring that back up again. And we're going to expand it a

01:14:49.840 little bit here. And I'm just going to skip to the part that I had there. And I'm just going to finish

01:14:54.680 my opening statement because it pivots right into some of these questions you're asking. So the

01:14:58.800 weather has finally turned on us here in northern British Columbia. After beautiful weather,

01:15:02.880 basically from Easter onwards, till just a few days ago, we finally have those April showers

01:15:07.820 that supposedly yield May flowers.

01:15:09.980 Hopefully this spring brings forth new blossoms

01:15:12.480 and new blooms in freedom

01:15:14.400 as this tired old theme of lockdowns, check stops,

01:15:18.300 case numbers and drudgery has lost its novelty

01:15:20.260 and it has become exhausting.

01:15:22.380 As previously stated, I was laid off

01:15:24.100 due to the pandemic in March of 2020

01:15:26.120 in order to not succumb to dependency

01:15:28.160 or owe the government any money because of CERB.

01:15:31.040 I decided to leave town and head up north,

01:15:33.660 which is to say Churchill, Manitoba.

01:15:35.320 and the last stop on the Hudson

01:15:38.320 Bay Railway. I'd been there before once

01:15:40.480 in 2017. I was actually helping my producer

01:15:42.560 there and

01:15:44.040 he invited me up there. He needed another hand.

01:15:47.000 This time around I was going up there

01:15:48.300 to give aid to

01:15:50.460 myself as it were.

01:15:52.020 I left Prince George BC on May 1st and I

01:15:54.360 got into Churchill on May 5th

01:15:56.400 as you can believe that. It was quite the trip and it was

01:15:58.400 quite quick. And during that trip

01:16:00.480 I was only stopped once. That was near

01:16:02.160 Candle Lake, Saskatchewan

01:16:03.840 where my fellow status indians i was to say one elder and a conservation officer

01:16:08.460 had put up a roadblock to keep out covid carriers at the via rail station in thompson manitoba we

01:16:15.660 were cross-examined like kids at a confirmation do you reject the devil in all of his ways yes we do

01:16:21.860 have you been displaying any symptoms no we haven't uh we answered in chorus we literally

01:16:26.880 answered quite we're not asked individually it was pretty hilarious i remember this

01:16:29.960 These interruptions were the only sign that life had changed from the virus.

01:16:36.500 That's it. That's all I had for evidence up there.

01:16:38.600 And then I think the reason I'm ruminating on all of this is that I'm about to go on a trip again at the exact same moment a year later.

01:16:45.320 This time, it's not a journey away from my community into the unknown, but rather to expand my community and make myself known.

01:16:51.800 I'm meeting my beloved's family by traveling through the interior of British Columbia.

01:16:56.060 However, I am far more likely to be stopped this time than I was a year ago.

01:16:59.960 In 2020, roadblocks were spontaneous community events.

01:17:03.220 Today, they're policy.

01:17:05.140 So what other options are there?

01:17:08.460 I mean, life must go on even in the midst of a pandemic.

01:17:11.220 That harsh conclusion last year is only different in tone for the more lovely trip this year.

01:17:17.340 At least I get to be with somebody on this trip.

01:17:20.560 Last year, I did that trip by myself.

01:17:23.140 All those miles by myself.

01:17:25.360 it was long and I was headed away from home and that that hurt like it hurt to be away from home

01:17:30.800 and to have to leave over such a you know I thought I'd made it I'd had an adult job and

01:17:36.820 everything was going really well and then COVID it was rough and I can understand how some people

01:17:44.000 decided that that was a reason to not go on I didn't make that decision obviously but I can

01:17:49.840 understand why some people felt that the point is that you know i could not stay unemployed for long

01:17:58.120 and owing the government money that was the other thing about serb we owed the government money for

01:18:01.380 it and i can't be a mystery man to those who i'm going to call family soon and draw a debt against

01:18:07.020 their charity right and patience failure to reach my destination wasn't an option last year it's not

01:18:12.960 an option this year and this is common sense to everyone everybody understands what i'm talking

01:18:17.480 about here except our premiers and our provincial health officers perhaps that's why all of it the

01:18:23.420 lockdowns the mass the vaccine fallout seems so surreal i was isolated in churchill for about half

01:18:28.300 a year from it all and in my community we don't really hold any fears about it now the pandemic

01:18:33.600 has changed everything even our habits and speech yet life must go on proper ceremonies observe

01:18:38.280 adventures had promises kept i think that's another big thing promises kept the amount of

01:18:43.260 people who have delayed their weddings because of this stuff last year they had 50 this year they

01:18:46.940 got 10 keep your promises and just move forward there's no there's no holding back there's no

01:18:55.140 waiting for things to be better things won't get better as long as they have the control to do this

01:18:59.240 and we're all living two lives simultaneously we live uh our pious lives under the czars of

01:19:04.420 covid and we make all the right motions and we tell them all the things they want to hear and

01:19:07.680 then we live our real lives where we go and live out our dreams a year ago the weather was so

01:19:11.940 perfect i managed to snap a photo of mount robson like you see in national geographic

01:19:15.840 from my driver's seat while in motion.

01:19:18.000 I'm sure that the cops would love to hear that.

01:19:20.200 And today I'll be lucky to see past the next corner

01:19:22.620 as the drizzle and the mist obscure the sun,

01:19:24.720 muting everything.

01:19:25.980 This is a far happier occasion,

01:19:28.360 but our present circumstances are bleak.

01:19:31.720 And I really do pray that April showers bring Mayflowers.

01:19:35.220 We'll bring back up the comments there.

01:19:36.820 I mean, I was a bit melancholic this morning

01:19:39.000 and maybe a little bit too poetic.

01:19:41.360 But ultimately, what I'm trying to say

01:19:44.600 is that I actually am headed on a trip.

01:19:47.980 It's essential travel in the sense that all travel is essential.

01:19:52.260 All air is essential.

01:19:53.340 If you stop breathing it, you don't exist anymore.

01:19:56.340 At least not in this life.

01:19:58.020 And so the thing is that we're going on this trip

01:20:01.980 because we need to do this.

01:20:04.600 I've talked about this a little bit before on this show

01:20:07.880 that it's very likely that things are going to come together

01:20:11.380 for us rather quickly, rather soon.

01:20:13.380 i've known each other a little while and we're both very happy and of course we belong to a

01:20:18.660 faith that's very clear about living together and that sort of thing and we don't want to do that

01:20:22.580 and and so we so that has certain imperatives and moral implications for us right and to be done

01:20:29.060 in a reasonable and and timely fashion but but the issue is that we also live in a time where

01:20:36.020 nobody's going to see the celebration except on tv the same way we're doing this right the same way

01:20:40.660 we were we're having this discussion is is via live stream via via camera and have an internet

01:20:45.840 connection broadcasting to all the world so we're going to do the same thing for for what we're

01:20:50.780 doing and we're used to that that's fine I it's we're we're well into what's not fine I wish it

01:20:55.620 was an open church and everything but we were really long into this pandemic we all understand

01:21:02.400 how it works that's not a mystery the only question is what's going to happen with meeting

01:21:11.040 people and having to introduce somebody to those people and having having them get to kind of you

01:21:17.040 know endorse us and give us their blessing before this happens and and the thing is that one that

01:21:22.000 one thing that we had which was okay well we may not be able to have everybody come to this thing

01:21:26.400 because we can't because of the rules we live under but we can go to everybody else individually

01:21:31.360 and just meet them and give them our you know give them our two cents well

01:21:37.040 bonnie tried to take that away too you know and so did the other provincial health officers all

01:21:41.520 across this country and so i'm just i'm just trying to state that for the record as best as i can

01:21:46.720 that you know we life has to go on you can't stay here forever we have to move forward and we have

01:21:57.840 to get towards something but we're going to go back to the comments here and uh we're going to

01:22:03.680 scroll up a little ways to uh i think there was somebody who had asked uh asked about you know then

01:22:12.960 um john horgan's age is actually at risk there's something else can please rule

01:22:17.680 rural urban split yeah okay daniel daniel f bearhard here bernhard sorry the rural urban split

01:22:24.240 yeah can you please deal with the rural urban split in opinions so this is a bit of a pivot

01:22:32.260 again into into something else i've lived on both sides of of the rural urban divide i was a when i

01:22:43.140 went to when i went to trinity western that's my alma mater i lived in the lower mainland and yes

01:22:48.840 langley at that time too because that was only that was less than 10 years ago but langley is

01:22:53.440 blown up since then like it was bad then it was expensive then but now it's you know

01:22:57.800 uh so it uh you know that was pretty crazy but it but the other thing that happens is that

01:23:07.740 i was i was in langley so i got to see what an urban setting was like right like you know

01:23:12.760 traffic and everything else cost of places cost of things and i also got to see what urban concerns

01:23:18.180 were like because of course an urban concern is different than a rural concern so then after i'd

01:23:22.500 lived there for for my schooling and i'd come back every year every every summer i came home

01:23:27.160 when i went back when i went back home we actually ended up selling the place that we had which were

01:23:32.880 in the suburbs of prince george i know it's hard to believe that prince george has suburbs but it

01:23:36.720 does and uh what happens what happens is we're we're finally convinced that we want to get out

01:23:45.840 of town my parents decide that they want to buy a farm all places they bought some pasture and

01:23:50.680 they built a house on it, and then they started to farm it. And that was an incredible journey.

01:23:57.060 And looking at the totally different realities of the urban and rural divide. And I'd say that

01:24:02.960 for the urban reality, the fact of the matter is, is that life is just more communal. And you know

01:24:09.140 what, if your garbage can doesn't get picked up, actually, today is garbage day. Okay. Oh,

01:24:14.960 my producer was on ball there. I was not. But you know, your garbage can has to be out and your

01:24:19.960 garbage and you want the your garbage picked up at the right time that's that's like the

01:24:24.420 quintessential urban question is like garbage garbage and sewer and and zoning and permitting

01:24:31.040 and that sort of thing it's very it is very communal like everything's cut into little

01:24:34.380 squares right everything this is a commercial lot this is a residential lot this is a commercial

01:24:39.360 and residential lot this is being reappropriated the city's buying this the city's selling this

01:24:44.240 it's this communal existence and and everybody has a stake in it to a point and in the rural areas

01:24:52.560 there is a there's a community existence um it's not communal in the sense that you might your

01:24:59.140 nearest neighbor might be half a mile away that's it's you you could walk there you can walk there

01:25:04.320 and people walk to each other's will quad to each other's houses ride horses to each other's houses

01:25:07.640 all the time drive to each other's houses but but the thing is that you really are kind of

01:25:12.700 your property is an extension of yourself to a point and something you steward because you take

01:25:20.360 care of it by having your own two hands on it and your own two feet walking around it and you

01:25:24.660 work the land and you walk your dogs on it and you know you have chickens and cows and god knows what

01:25:30.340 else running around and that's that's kind of your relationship with it it's a bit you know

01:25:34.660 it's kind of your little ark little noah's ark in the middle of nowhere next to your neighbor's

01:25:40.140 little Noah's Ark and next to your friends and and with with with urban living it is very much

01:25:46.240 like it's your like your little life raft you don't have the space for everything else so you're

01:25:50.660 just in your little apartment or you're in your little house have your little yard and and everything

01:25:55.420 from noise to complaints to to this you know to the sound of traffic like all those things are

01:26:00.920 experienced communally and there's a different opinion on them all over the place whereas whereas

01:26:05.300 the kind of collective understanding out in the rural areas is that it's very much like you're

01:26:09.200 probably going to have to take care of yourself if there's going to be an intruder you're probably

01:26:12.340 going to have to pull out your own weapon and take care of this you're going to have to you know if

01:26:16.840 there's predators you're going to have to take care of them yourself if if there's a fire hopefully

01:26:22.140 the volunteer fire department shows up and i'm not denigrating that but i'm just saying that you know

01:26:26.680 you're probably going to have to try and put out the fire yourself i think that's a lot of the rural

01:26:30.560 urban divide when it comes to uh canada without without without getting into too many details

01:26:38.240 there it's just it's a quintessentially different experience and ultimately because you can get

01:26:43.440 infinitely more services in a town than you can out of town uh that's a big part of it that's a

01:26:50.680 really big part of it so i keep going through the comments here and uh wander our way towards let's

01:26:56.940 see let's see there's a few different comments in here that were that were really good um

01:27:02.280 solidarity with progressives that's funny um similar some of the the solidarity that

01:27:10.900 progressives have requires a certain amount of disingenuous behavior that we call lies

01:27:14.600 yeah i mean i left i i you know maybe i could have said that comment while stewart was still

01:27:20.380 on but i just i think i think that uh i think that we lie to each other as much as they do

01:27:28.720 that's actually you know i i would do better with these rants alone when i when i have something

01:27:32.800 controversial to say and so so far we've kind of retread a lot of the things we all know that i

01:27:37.280 believe and you guys know i believe and that's not really an adventure so let's let's get into

01:27:42.160 something more controversial here i think that conservatives are just as good at lying as

01:27:48.400 progressives are and i think that we lie to ourselves and to worse a benefit than they do

01:27:54.800 okay i think the benefit is fundamentally less so progressives when they lie to each other and to us

01:28:03.960 they take territory okay did you know did you know that we all used to say the lord's prayer

01:28:10.580 public school private school before school began the progressives won that war now there are

01:28:17.160 progressives who do go to church they go to some liberal churches but they do go to church and

01:28:21.580 there are progressives who don't believe in god and there are progressives who think that all

01:28:24.600 religion should be abolished. And there are progressives who think that, you know, I'm just

01:28:27.820 become one with the spirits and the trees and whatever else. There are progressives all over

01:28:32.200 the spectrum on that question. But together, one way or another, they eliminated the Lord's prayer

01:28:38.120 from school. They won that war. They got it. They have that piece of territory and they will never 0.99

01:28:44.920 give it up. And the Lord's prayer is never coming back to public school. What did conservatives do

01:28:52.200 in response? And where do conservatives

01:28:54.020 lying to each other or not get anywhere?

01:28:57.440 Well,

01:28:59.020 conservatives

01:28:59.580 thinking that they were all on the same page

01:29:02.240 with, say, Aaron O'Toole.

01:29:04.380 Okay? So all the conservatives lied to

01:29:06.220 each other and said, he is

01:29:08.080 both a progressive

01:29:09.740 and a conservative. He will hold

01:29:12.080 the line on

01:29:13.120 he was personally opposed to abortion,

01:29:16.040 but he is also not going to do anything

01:29:18.080 about it. But if you want to be pro-life in this

01:29:20.000 caucus, you'll be welcome there. He was

01:29:21.900 every man to every man right he was anybody he had to be and he he walked down that road perfectly

01:29:28.220 and he got the nomination and now he has a dumpster fire on his hands because

01:29:37.520 because he's not because well because the lies are coming unraveled so everybody knows that

01:29:45.280 Justin Trudeau has a terrible personal history particularly with women and with some others to

01:29:51.780 put it as politely as I can. We're not going to get into false accusations here. If you guys got

01:29:55.660 more evidence where you are, send it our way. We'll research it. We'll put it up there. But the point

01:30:00.720 is that Justin Trudeau has a terrible legacy with a lot of different instances when it comes to

01:30:07.180 women. And we all know that. And that's been widely reported. And yet nothing is done. And

01:30:13.640 everybody who says they're a feminist that's in the Liberal Party knows that they're dealing with

01:30:17.960 an absolute misogynist who who you know it's funny they always say us tories are misogynists

01:30:23.260 well we wouldn't accept him in our circles if he was if he was doing that to our women he would 0.93

01:30:27.860 have gotten tossed out on the street a long time ago but the liberals they all lie to each other

01:30:33.740 they lie to each other about everything and why do they lie to each other because it gets them

01:30:37.640 power and control and so they that's the bargain they make they make a bargain with the devil

01:30:42.140 they will do anything they have to to get more power and control and then they seize that power

01:30:47.020 in control, and then they use the CRA to attack people, especially people that they disagree with.

01:30:52.260 And they use the powers of the state to get into all sorts of funny positions with people,

01:30:58.660 disallow permits, disinvite people, defund people, cancel people, sideline people. They do it. They

01:31:05.300 got it. They figured it out. They have their system figured out. And what do us conservatives

01:31:09.220 get from even the smallest lie or the biggest lie we have? We don't win elections. We don't get

01:31:15.260 anything better. We don't get better leadership. We don't get a coalition that can actually get

01:31:19.680 anywhere. We don't get smart policy ideas. We don't move this nation forward. Why do we even

01:31:26.120 bother having a party, even if it is a party made up of lies and compromises? A compromise and the

01:31:30.640 lies we're making aren't even getting us anywhere. I believe in the Bible said something about even

01:31:36.360 the bad man knows how to give good gifts. If even evil people know how to do good, how much more so

01:31:43.300 should you know how to do good if you are among

01:31:45.240 the righteous? Well, this is exactly the question.

01:31:47.500 If we're the good guys, if we're the conservatives

01:31:49.240 and we're supposed to figure this out,

01:31:52.560 I

01:31:52.760 don't know what to tell you

01:31:54.600 because the lies and the compromises we're making

01:31:57.280 aren't working.

01:31:58.940 They're a complete waste of time.

01:32:01.180 They're a complete waste of time.

01:32:03.100 We need to stop trying to

01:32:05.260 conform to like 10 agendas at once

01:32:07.280 and we need to be honest with ourselves and say

01:32:09.220 we're not going to agree on everything, but we're

01:32:11.280 going to agree on these two, three things

01:32:13.080 and we're going to move forward on those things.

01:32:15.200 We don't want our guns to be gone.

01:32:17.220 The ban that happened, the order in council that happened,

01:32:19.540 the elimination of ARs, this is a waste of time.

01:32:23.160 It wouldn't have done anything for the poor people in Nova Scotia. 1.00

01:32:25.780 It wouldn't have done anything to stop that monster. 0.98

01:32:28.180 We need to be honest with ourselves about that

01:32:29.780 and we need to take a no compromise stance.

01:32:32.060 No compromise.

01:32:33.640 This is my property.

01:32:34.880 You have no right to it.

01:32:36.200 I don't care what happened to your grandma

01:32:38.600 or your best friend or whatever.

01:32:40.780 I'm sorry.

01:32:41.360 it is not because I don't care about you or care about them. I'm saying I don't care what happened

01:32:46.660 because that thing that happened had nothing to do with me. I want that to change. I want people

01:32:53.460 who perpetrate those crimes. I want the death penalty brought back and I want them eliminated 0.99

01:32:57.540 after a jury of their peers, et cetera. But they should be for what happened. And that's it. That's 0.69

01:33:04.340 justice. That's the end. There is no place for you taking my property because of someone else's

01:33:10.480 crime with something that was probably already illegally obtained.

01:33:14.900 That is not my problem.

01:33:19.040 And that's what has to change in conservatism.

01:33:22.360 The lies we're telling aren't getting us anywhere, so maybe we should start telling

01:33:26.440 bold truth.

01:33:33.160 It's just, I just don't know

01:33:36.040 what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you. We keep coming up with these conservative

01:33:40.080 lies right same thing with taxes you know what it doesn't make sense okay it doesn't make sense

01:33:47.920 that we have all these little tax brackets it doesn't make sense that it takes you know advanced

01:33:53.600 degrees to understand our tax code we need to stop that it's actually it's actually a crime against

01:34:00.800 the poor uh and anybody else who can't get access to somebody who is better at doing the taxes than

01:34:07.120 somebody else h and r block doesn't count i'm sorry guys that just runs a very cursory glance

01:34:12.240 through your stuff the algorithm's already built it's not it's not a good system i'm sorry i'm not

01:34:16.720 trying to throw the people at hr under the bus i'm just saying that that's not good enough our system

01:34:22.400 could be better than that and it could be as simple as somebody literally moving a decimal

01:34:27.120 point and times and get by two and then that's it we know what we need instead it is literally

01:34:34.640 Byzantine in its system. It is so many different layers. Look, if you want to fix Canada, then you

01:34:40.420 have to have big, bold ideas. And if you want to be a good conservative, the little lies we keep

01:34:44.060 telling and the big lies we keep telling aren't getting us anywhere. It's already a party that

01:34:47.840 does all the lying. That party is established. That party has all the power. And until that

01:34:53.580 party is destroyed, that is to say the Liberal Party of Canada is destroyed, ended. Am I going

01:35:01.720 say abolished i don't know made so illegitimate that people would be physically disgusted to be

01:35:10.400 associated with it that's what i'm talking about i don't need anything abolished i don't need

01:35:15.500 statist and rule-based things and even constitutionally based things in order to

01:35:19.740 get my will done do you know there are things that we all do and don't do every day entirely

01:35:24.220 based on taboo taboo works so make it a taboo make it a denigration make it an awful terrible

01:35:32.460 wicked evil thing to ever be associated with the party that has done so much damage to this country

01:35:41.020 and watch it evaporate and watch it disappear and watch it burn to the ground and do so with glee 0.95

01:35:46.700 and then move on and build

01:35:50.580 a better world. Build a better world.

01:35:56.080 We are in this terrible time.

01:35:58.940 This terrible time. And when it comes to these questions

01:36:02.440 like we conservatives aren't getting anywhere with our big lies

01:36:05.440 and our little lies. They aren't doing anything for us. They're not giving us our

01:36:10.440 schools back. They're not giving back our hospitals. We used to have elected hospital boards here in

01:36:14.500 BC. How's that going for us? Having unelected ones. Is there even a place to have a debate

01:36:20.560 about the question of abortion? Or anything else for that matter? Or euthanasia? Or how about just

01:36:25.940 the cost of things? Or how about the fact that there's 600 managers and two frontline nurses?

01:36:31.860 Why are we doing that? Maybe we should elect some new leadership. Maybe somebody else should be the 1.00

01:36:38.160 CEO of the hospital and start talking about these issues and start being like, look, we got to take

01:36:42.100 down the management. We got to put more frontline staff out there. We need to cut wait times by

01:36:46.300 having more frontline staff. Where's that controversial idea? It's not a controversial

01:36:49.920 idea. But where is it? Who's saying it? We conservatives are losing the war. We are losing

01:36:59.900 every single day. We lose a little bit more because we compromise and we tell lies either

01:37:05.140 big or small, and they still don't get us anywhere. I'm not saying they'd be okay if they

01:37:09.320 did but then at least they'd get us somewhere and they're not getting us anywhere so this isn't

01:37:16.040 going to work this isn't going to work we had to tell big bold truths my guns are not your problem

01:37:21.520 my guns are my property and you don't get to have them end of discussion full story if you want my

01:37:26.800 guns you need to demonstrably show i committed a crime using my guns because that's the other thing

01:37:32.840 too if i've committed a crime that has nothing to do with my guns that's still not a reason to take

01:37:37.060 my guns away. And that's it. And if I do commit a crime with guns that is violent and especially

01:37:42.680 results in serious harm or death, I deserve the death penalty. Absolutely. Jury appears. Absolutely. 0.96

01:37:50.040 Get out the gallows. It's time to bring it back. You commit violent, wicked offenses with intent

01:37:57.100 in this country. That is absolutely the way things should be. And we need to be big and we need to be

01:38:02.600 bold and we need to tell the truth about that in conservative circles and stop lying about it.

01:38:07.060 to stop finding ways to dodge that question.

01:38:10.740 We do believe in a right to self-defense.

01:38:12.760 We do believe that if you show up on my property

01:38:14.440 and you are feigning violence at my family members,

01:38:17.160 you might get as much as one warning.

01:38:18.700 It's not even a warning shot.

01:38:19.660 You're just going to have a warning that says,

01:38:20.900 son, no, this ain't happening.

01:38:23.740 Get off my property

01:38:24.760 or else you're going to be carried off my property.

01:38:28.500 That's how it is.

01:38:31.160 And I say that as somebody who understands

01:38:34.580 that it comes at you.

01:38:36.080 you give it and you take it i don't do that to someone else's property too if i end up in the

01:38:41.120 wrong situation you know what i might get it carried out of there too so don't do that just

01:38:47.740 be smart you know walk with some caution have some humility don't be thinking you can be marching up

01:38:53.640 to things and doing whatever places that aren't yours and making threats to people that you don't

01:38:58.820 even know super dangerous and it should be dangerous because that's the corrective force

01:39:04.640 I'm sorry. That's pretty blunt, but that's the reality of it. And again, taxation.

01:39:11.160 We need to defang those elements of our taxation authority that are literally being used to

01:39:19.060 persecute people. I can name them for you. They're in non-disclosure agreements right now,

01:39:23.620 so I can't name them for you. But if you ever caught me personally somewhere and I could

01:39:27.520 whisper it in your ear, I would. There are people who are being investigated by the authorities

01:39:33.040 entirely for malicious intent.

01:39:35.640 Entirely for malicious intent

01:39:36.980 to try and undo the good that they do

01:39:39.640 or to try and intimidate them

01:39:41.460 into submission. That happens

01:39:43.400 all the time.

01:39:46.300 And

01:39:46.820 we need to defang that.

01:39:49.340 We need to defang that. We need to bring

01:39:51.480 that part of our government to heal.

01:39:54.400 We've got another comment

01:39:55.700 in here. Yep, we are the only

01:39:57.200 standard society that has daily background checks for the

01:39:59.020 continuous eligibility screening program.

01:40:00.640 not even police or politicians have that level

01:40:02.780 of scrutiny. Legal gun

01:40:04.840 owners are not the problem and self-defense is

01:40:06.820 always paramount. That's Cody Willier. He's

01:40:08.880 a pretty big fan of this show. He's commented on

01:40:10.740 our thing a couple of times. Thank you, Cody, for

01:40:12.540 showing up again.

01:40:15.720 I see Al Gage also made

01:40:16.860 this point about

01:40:17.760 thank you for bringing up the way

01:40:20.760 Trudeau and Blair are attacking legal gun owners to this

01:40:22.840 very day. And they are. They are.

01:40:24.960 Actually, I got another story from

01:40:26.560 here. Well, just two seconds.

01:40:28.580 I'm just waving my producer down here.

01:40:30.640 just one second just one second so last year when i went for that drive when i had to go to

01:40:38.800 and let me tell you that really sucked leaving my community behind it whoever whoever helped

01:40:44.140 this whole pandemic thing happen or whatever and however we've we've made this worse um i'm not

01:40:49.740 happy with you i'm going to say the most canadian thing ever i am slightly upset at you um because

01:40:55.320 that really sucked leaving my community behind really sucked but anyways when i was on that

01:41:01.860 drive my first stop was edmonton alberta so i was leaving prince george i went to edmonton

01:41:06.840 i stayed with my aunt she lives in edmonton and in order to be prepared for my journey i did take

01:41:12.420 that serb money because i was entitled to it because i was laid off due to covid i only took

01:41:16.380 one payment and i walked up to the cabalas in edmonton cabalas south in edmonton and i bought

01:41:22.880 myself a 4570 and 200 rounds and a case and cleaning kit and everything it was great i bought

01:41:32.440 myself that with with the serve money um and then i wrote it off so there you go how's that i can

01:41:39.160 already hear somebody punching this in over at our revenue agency the point is that i did i did

01:41:45.060 these things and i had called in my order hours before and they had it all ponied up for me

01:41:51.340 but it was May 1st and I don't know if you know what May 1st was in 2020 but that was when the

01:41:57.060 gun ban came into effect right there'd been the shooting earlier in that year and that was a

01:42:01.560 tragedy and that was awful and somebody should have taken their rifle or their shotgun or their

01:42:06.820 slingshot and taken that guy out the first time before he got anywhere it is unfortunate that he

01:42:14.380 got as far as he did and that was wicked and evil and that man I I really I really don't think

01:42:20.420 there's any redemption for that guy but the point is that i was in alberta now after the gun ban the

01:42:26.340 day of the gun ban the day the gun ban came down now let me tell you that those people were not

01:42:32.020 amused and anything that was long and rectangular in a skinny box or anything that was a cube square

01:42:38.940 shaped box was was being carried out of cabalas like everything it didn't matter it didn't matter

01:42:46.160 what was it this was a curbside pickup right because we're in the pandemic so this was curbside

01:42:50.120 pickup. This is not people

01:42:52.140 running around the store, grabbing everything and

01:42:54.100 getting out. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. This is

01:42:56.040 them calling it in, sitting in the parking

01:42:58.120 lot. It was actually a really warm day that day. I remember

01:43:00.060 it was actually, I didn't turn on

01:43:02.040 my air conditioning because I don't use air conditioning in my truck

01:43:03.980 ever. But I definitely

01:43:06.060 had to go outside into the breeze and stuff because

01:43:07.980 it was hot in that parking

01:43:09.960 lot, let me tell you. But people were

01:43:11.880 sitting there and waiting for up to

01:43:14.000 90 minutes for an order

01:43:16.100 just so they

01:43:18.100 could have a gun and ammo.

01:43:20.120 that's how upset people were with the gunman.

01:43:24.540 I talked to a guy who'd been working there for 15 years,

01:43:27.260 and he said to me, I've been here for 15 years.

01:43:30.300 I've seen Christmas come and go many times.

01:43:32.460 We're doing Christmas every hour.

01:43:34.800 I've never seen it like this before.

01:43:38.160 Christmas every hour.

01:43:44.620 That's a lot of angry people. 1.00

01:43:50.960 We 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

01:44:02.880 That's the thing about the carbon tax. 0.99

01:44:05.060 It's a little lie being told by all of us.

01:44:07.780 You know, it's a little lie being told by all of us that it's all going to be fine.

01:44:10.540 We'll just we'll just do this little white line, that little white line.

01:44:13.020 We'll do this little compromise and it'll make for a winning coalition.

01:44:15.620 We'll beat Justin Trudeau. 1.00

01:44:16.440 We aren't going to beat Justin Trudeau with stupid little white lies. 1.00

01:44:21.460 We're going to lose. 1.00

01:44:24.380 We're going to lose.

01:44:26.200 Because 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.

01:44:38.080 End of discussion.

01:44:39.540 Full stop.

01:44:41.040 We need to tell big, bold truths.

01:44:42.540 a big, bold

01:44:44.780 or at least big, bold

01:44:46.080 big, bold truths, but also

01:44:48.440 big ideas, big

01:44:50.540 dreams. Canada was built

01:44:52.460 on a dream. It was built on a dream by

01:44:54.380 a conservative who was drunk all the

01:44:56.380 time.

01:44:58.000 John A. MacDonald. He didn't drink

01:45:00.180 scotch, actually. He drank port, if you can believe that.

01:45:02.500 But that's how Canada

01:45:04.400 was built.

01:45:06.260 By basically the sheer force of will

01:45:08.520 of one drunk Scotsman, because he was born

01:45:10.480 in Scotland,

01:45:10.860 whose mom preferred Gaelic and danced

01:45:14.500 a jig when he won his first election. I remember

01:45:16.640 that being noted and I can't remember which one that was

01:45:18.680 the man who made us. It might be Gwynn Dyer.

01:45:21.320 I don't remember who wrote it but

01:45:22.460 the point is that like

01:45:24.240 you know that's how Scottish

01:45:26.520 our founding was and that's how cool

01:45:28.300 our founding prime minister was and

01:45:30.560 he just

01:45:31.960 dreamed up a big big dream.

01:45:34.500 It's like I'm going to build a country.

01:45:37.440 When's the last time

01:45:38.360 we said that as conservatives?

01:45:40.860 what happened to Diefenbaker's plan for Northern Canada?

01:45:44.480 I've worked in Northern Canada, okay?

01:45:46.400 Not even as far as, you know,

01:45:48.280 Calowit and stuff like that,

01:45:49.260 but I've worked at the end of a rail line.

01:45:52.000 There's not even a road to Churchill.

01:45:53.400 There is, well, there's a winter road

01:45:54.500 if you really want to chance that.

01:45:56.140 But there is a rail line to Churchill.

01:46:01.580 How underserviced Churchill is,

01:46:03.400 how underutilized it is,

01:46:04.760 considering that it is literally the gateway to the north.

01:46:08.300 We have the entire Hudson's Bay.

01:46:09.660 If the climate is changing, again, up for debate.

01:46:12.460 No vote from this guy on that question.

01:46:15.940 That means the entire north of Canada is open for business very soon.

01:46:21.080 What's our plan?

01:46:22.100 Where's our plan?

01:46:22.920 What have we thought about here?

01:46:27.420 The Hudson Bay is a giant, very, very cold, salty lake.

01:46:31.200 It's not a bay.

01:46:32.060 It's a sea.

01:46:33.040 It's a gigantic sea, really.

01:46:36.060 It's bigger than, I think, the Black Sea.

01:46:37.560 I think I looked that up while I was there.

01:46:38.800 It'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?

01:47:00.980 it's literally yeah it's my producer just looked this up for me it's literally three times the

01:47:07.440 size it's that's in bay is three times the size of the black sea yeah 400 000 to 1.2 million and

01:47:19.800 we call it a bay i am suing whoever titled it that anyways the point is that yes it's a three-sided

01:47:27.060 body of water that sows, sows the Black Sea. The point that I'm trying to drive home here

01:47:34.140 is that Canada, it was built on a big idea and we can be, we can be, you know, a bigger, better

01:47:43.860 nation. And, and, you know, I know we do kind of the sovereignty thing here at, at the Western

01:47:49.280 Standard. I've, I've told you guys before, I've been very candid about this. I'm, I'm ambivalent

01:47:54.460 about the question of sovereignty i would just rather do canada better and i've always thought

01:47:58.440 that about everything i'm not really a big big i'm not really a big fan of second marriages

01:48:02.660 i just believe you could do your first marriage better you could actually redeem what you have

01:48:07.660 in hand that's something i'm going to try and take as a thought into my marriage i mean obviously

01:48:11.240 roman gather can't really get divorced try and hide it behind an annulment i guess if there's

01:48:15.420 legitimate questions or legitimate questions but i you could just do the first thing better

01:48:21.100 justerton talks about this all the time you could you you could live up to your principles

01:48:25.840 and so we conservatives need to live up to our principles there's some really great ideas out

01:48:30.540 there about how to fix this country and how to make it a better place and how to deal with our

01:48:34.360 military and how to build better stuff and and and better infrastructure and manage things better

01:48:40.780 and make things more equitable for people and give people a stake in the country and have them be

01:48:44.400 able to buy a house there are all sorts of ideas around these questions and instead we're going to

01:48:48.940 get into a fight over the carbon tax and trying to impose a carbon tax that's more complicated

01:48:55.760 and makes less sense of what's there right now and is hated by the base like who's writing

01:49:01.140 Aaron O'Toole's policy like are you drunk actually they're more likely high because if they were

01:49:09.780 drunk at least they'd have some big bold ideas cut the scene of John A but um yeah they need to

01:49:15.680 stop getting high stop it i don't care who you are policy writer person put down the drugs go

01:49:22.900 sober up confess your sins and and get it together good lord anyways i mean as we kind of round out

01:49:32.660 the hour here and i kind of dwell on the last few things that that kind of come to mind i'm about to

01:49:38.040 go on a trip during lockdown during travel restrictions i really hope i'm here on tuesday

01:49:44.300 with you guys. I'm not here on

01:49:46.200 Tuesday. You know where I am. Send

01:49:48.260 money. I'll need it for bail.

01:49:52.660 I'm not really worried about it.

01:49:54.440 It seems to have been basically not enforced

01:49:56.200 at all in this province. I don't think anybody's being detained

01:49:58.360 actually. So the news came

01:50:00.240 out and I was really angry about it. But now I'm

01:50:02.200 just kind of like, it's just another stupid rule that's 0.99

01:50:04.160 come up with Bonnie Henry that nobody's paying attention to. 0.99

01:50:06.420 So congratulations, Bonnie. You've managed

01:50:08.280 to be that school marm 0.99

01:50:10.460 that everybody knew in school who just

01:50:12.120 always had another thing to say about blah, blah,

01:50:14.300 I don't kick the ball too hard. Don't do this. Don't run too fast. Nobody cared what they said

01:50:18.420 because their rules were plentiful and they made no sense. And there was universal nonconformity.

01:50:23.100 And then they just punished people at will. Right. So it just made no sense. But I am going to go on

01:50:27.780 a trip and I am going through the interior of British Columbia. I am leaving my health region,

01:50:33.480 which is kind of hard to do considering my health region is three times the size of France. But

01:50:38.460 it's it is possible to leave your health region. So I will be leaving my health region.

01:50:44.300 And 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.

01:50:57.080 And I don't really see a way around that.

01:51:02.700 I don't think there would be a way for me to defend myself if I were to not do that.

01:51:08.600 and so

01:51:10.680 I don't know

01:51:12.600 if I'm allowed to evangelize on this show

01:51:14.300 or like I would like to encourage people

01:51:16.460 on the show to do things that are currently

01:51:18.560 you know under health order and stuff

01:51:20.480 like that but I will say that like I'm not

01:51:22.620 I certainly wouldn't blame you for

01:51:24.360 making the same choice that I'm making right now

01:51:26.360 I don't know if I'm

01:51:28.560 a model citizen but we need

01:51:30.240 we need to live up to our promises

01:51:32.800 and in our promises right

01:51:34.640 we do hope to love

01:51:36.720 and to hold right and

01:51:38.440 for better for worse and all that jazz those promises

01:51:40.920 of those particular vows but we also

01:51:42.700 promise to take care of our families and

01:51:44.820 being away from them all the time and not able to

01:51:46.800 travel with them doesn't

01:51:48.600 doesn't make

01:51:50.780 sense looks like our

01:51:52.800 favorite commenter well our favorite commenter

01:51:54.740 I mean that's giving you a little bit too much credit isn't

01:51:56.820 it but the Albertan says sounds like necessary

01:51:58.980 travel to me well I with that

01:52:00.780 endorsement you know what when the RCMP pull

01:52:02.760 me over here in BC I'll

01:52:04.460 show them that permission slip

01:52:06.340 that in the constitution

01:52:08.280 that and you know any number of our leaders traveling uh in the middle of the pandemic

01:52:14.740 at will not giving any bleep bleep bleeps about it oh it's nonsense

01:52:20.200 something i actually would like to know is if anybody likes these rants that i'm doing i i mean

01:52:27.180 i kind of see that the viewership it because sometimes it goes up sometimes it goes down i

01:52:30.780 if anybody if anybody has a problem with the fact that i'm doing these rant things because i

01:52:34.820 I'm not saying we don't have any guests. We do have guests, but you know, you got to secure

01:52:40.280 people. And sometimes what happens, like, I don't want to throw them under the bus again, but a

01:52:44.200 certain, a certain Mr. Max, uh, didn't show up on time. And so I had to kind of just keep rolling

01:52:49.840 there, but I, I kind of like doing this stuff. I kind of like riffing. I should probably get some

01:52:53.780 new material, but then again, I got to write all the material. So actually here's, here's what

01:52:57.320 we're going to do. We're going to make sure that this platform stays a people first platform and

01:53:01.660 a community platform. What we need you to do is either comment, you know, right now or comment

01:53:07.340 below later, or send a message to the Western Standard, or even to my email at the Western

01:53:13.020 Standard, which I'm pretty sure is ngida at Western Standard Online. So that's ngide. So my

01:53:20.200 first initial, I'm pointing at it like it matters, I should point this way, because yes, everything

01:53:24.560 and tv is backwards so you just take my first initial and my last name and you get uh at

01:53:34.400 western standard online and that's and that's uh you're good to go there and um and then you just

01:53:42.000 send me a message and just let me know what you think about it all uh and what topics would you

01:53:45.680 like me to discuss and this is the thing too like here's here's the deal i'm gonna level with you

01:53:48.960 guys okay like i got me and i got my producer now my producer is always on the board helping with

01:53:53.440 stuff uh and and that's awesome but the thing is that we don't have time to look up every single

01:54:02.260 thing in the world right we don't have time there we go actually that works so there's the there's

01:54:07.800 the there's the email right there again i'm on the opposite side this is the email right here

01:54:12.240 i gotta learn how to move on tv hey just talking to my producer i gotta be like the weather girl

01:54:19.320 right like i mean you gotta you have to point in the right direction right and this wind is blowing

01:54:24.480 into this wind bonnie henry is full of hot air right there you go so so that's that's the banner

01:54:31.480 there kind of uh kind of makes sense but it just send send some messages oh this is kind some people

01:54:37.780 are already commenting i love the rants i know the ones who love your talk keep it going i that's

01:54:42.920 kind of you i i'm not just looking for adulation i'm not just trying to boost my ego here um in

01:54:48.580 fact the day that i got this job uh i i looked at my beloved and i said look everybody who ever

01:54:54.340 gets into this gig they uh their ego gets too big and uh they uh they always end up with the

01:55:00.940 secretary or whatever and it's not uh yeah well well my my producer is not exactly somebody i'm

01:55:09.280 attracted to in that way but uh but i'm just the point i made to her was you know i just said look

01:55:14.120 i want to bring you everywhere if i learned anything from my father and my mother and their

01:55:17.840 marriage is like you know you got to bring you got to bring your other half everywhere because

01:55:21.080 guess what the dancing girls are everywhere and people can very easily rationalize going off and

01:55:26.600 doing something that they wouldn't otherwise do if they had their beloved with them so it's very

01:55:30.900 clear with her about that and uh i'm not here to do an ego trip that's not what i'm not here about

01:55:35.580 i'm not here for crazy fandom and that sort of stuff what i'm here to do is try to give a platform

01:55:40.120 to people who otherwise wouldn't have a platform because everybody gets canceled nowadays and two

01:55:44.180 I would like to know what you guys

01:55:46.780 want to hear about and want to have discussed

01:55:48.600 right now we have certain parameters

01:55:50.220 I've told you guys before we don't

01:55:52.760 do Holocaust denials we don't do swearing

01:55:54.760 and I was given an update the other day

01:55:56.840 because that's why we were in YouTube jail no offense

01:55:58.840 to anybody else and even to those who hold those

01:56:00.680 opinions we don't do plandemic or

01:56:02.740 scandemic and that's why I'm always

01:56:04.920 I walk right up to that line

01:56:06.780 and I just say look I

01:56:08.600 I don't understand what's happening

01:56:10.760 I think our policy failures speak for

01:56:12.660 themselves. I think at this point, we need to just let it go and give everybody a mulligan and say,

01:56:16.580 you know what, that was nuts. It's a crazy time to be alive. And let's move on. But that's as

01:56:22.600 close as I can get to any of those questions. And for the record, do I think it was planned?

01:56:27.000 No, I think that everybody's just that incompetent and out of out of touch with reality,

01:56:32.900 because you can be nowadays, just can be you can be so far up your own, right? That you that you

01:56:38.220 literally have no idea what's going on. So I would blame incompetence before anything else. But I do

01:56:43.880 think that now that the incompetence is happening, people are leaning into it. That I do believe. So

01:56:51.740 those are two different questions. Was the start of it coordinated? That's the word I was looking

01:57:00.480 for. Was it coordinated? My answer to that question? No, it was not coordinated. But it

01:57:06.860 was I think the result of negligence and then people leaned into the negligence and they lied

01:57:11.360 and then uh we now have people who are just making hay out of you know while the day shines

01:57:17.640 you know if you have this much ultimate power why not just roll with it as far as you can because

01:57:22.560 you don't get you don't get uh you don't get that opportunity many times in a in a generation or a

01:57:28.240 lifetime so that's that's what I think it is that's that's how I think it works that's as

01:57:32.860 closest I can get to on that topic but here's the point number one we need more guests so

01:57:39.820 shoot me guests okay send me guests in the emails suggest them in the comments do get me guests I

01:57:47.480 need them okay I need help and I will if you send me them and you and you've got your name at the

01:57:52.420 end of that email I will make sure that you are credited with that okay we're going to do a shout

01:57:56.740 out to you and make sure that you know that I know that you did the hard work and I was just a lazy

01:58:01.420 butt who just called the guy in the end so send me guests send me suggestions about topics for the

01:58:08.260 show and even topics for rants and stuff like that i do need to type it up myself like those

01:58:14.420 opening statements i make those myself so we've got we've got our producer we got me we got a

01:58:19.820 bunch of equipment in here and uh i did okay that's interesting shell uh i definitely did send uh

01:58:28.900 I did send a message to Todd.

01:58:32.560 Todd did get back to me a little bit,

01:58:35.440 and I don't know where he's sitting with it all right now.

01:58:38.960 Obviously, we at the Western Standard came down pretty hard

01:58:41.580 on Aaron O'Toole with the carbon tax.

01:58:43.480 I know for a fact that there are conserved members of government,

01:58:47.800 well, of the opposition,

01:58:49.160 who are not interested in talking to us right now

01:58:51.360 because we don't look so good to them

01:58:53.380 because we're doing some stuff to their leader.

01:58:56.280 I'm okay with that.

01:58:57.280 I'm OK with the fact that our coalitions kind of come together, they break apart, they come together, they break apart.

01:59:02.040 So that's that's a possibility.

01:59:04.800 And there's a bunch of other possibilities with that.

01:59:08.020 There's a few more a few more suggestions there.

01:59:11.140 I think Shirley Bond, I think I felt like I did reach out to him already.

01:59:17.420 Michelle's got a whole bunch of things like to talk to Tim on the Libertarian Party.

01:59:21.160 Yep, that's another person who could be spoken to.

01:59:23.260 These are all great suggestions, and I'm really appreciative of that.

01:59:25.620 We 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.

01:59:36.140 I just want to close on this.

01:59:41.900 It's been a long pandemic, and this was our first month as a show, and it had some highs, it had some lows.

01:59:49.460 The biggest thing, of course, that was good was you guys, the fans.

01:59:53.580 and the biggest challenge was finding the guests

01:59:56.580 and getting them to be here on time.

01:59:58.200 So there's been some highs, been some lows.

01:59:59.980 But I think the fundamental thing is that, again,

02:00:02.260 here on Mountain Standard Time

02:00:04.320 and here at the Western Standard,

02:00:05.720 we attempt to do the right thing.

02:00:08.020 And the right thing is giving people a chance

02:00:12.400 to actually speak their minds.

02:00:15.140 So send me your guests, send me your thoughts,

02:00:19.380 send me your questions, send me your concerns,

02:00:20.600 and I will do my best to platform those

02:00:23.020 as best as I can

02:00:24.120 and to give that a voice and an ear.

02:00:27.080 Until then, and until next month,

02:00:29.940 our next show will be in May.

02:00:32.600 Thank you so much for watching

02:00:33.900 and thank you so much for supporting the show.

02:00:35.640 Remember to like and subscribe.

02:00:37.000 Remember to take out a subscription

02:00:38.060 at the Western Standard.

02:00:39.120 I'm Nathan Gita, your host,

02:00:40.940 and I'm just so thankful you're here today.

02:00:42.320 We'll see you again on Tuesday

02:00:43.620 at Mountain Standard Time.

02:00:53.020 You

Western Standard - April 29, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - April 29, 2021

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