Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - July 15, 2021

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 We'll be right back.

00:01:30.000 There we go. Sorry about that.

00:01:32.360 Hello, good morning, and welcome to Mountain Standard Time.

00:01:34.700 It's a bit of a rough go here in British Columbia.

00:01:36.880 We're all a little smoked out, so the CO2 in our blood is built up a little bit.

00:01:41.580 But welcome to Mountain Standard Time.

00:01:44.220 I'm your host, Nathan Gita, and of course, we're going to be speaking with Aaron Ekman today.

00:01:47.840 Stuart Parker's not with us.

00:01:48.880 If you've been through a few Thursdays with us, we have, of course, usually Stuart on in the second half.

00:01:54.980 He, unfortunately, is flying off to Vancouver or wherever he's going.

00:01:58.320 and we'll check back in with them next week

00:02:00.560 but we'll be doing our weekly news roundup

00:02:02.500 as we do every week

00:02:03.440 my opening statement this morning is pretty simple

00:02:05.760 and of course we'll do our endorsement briefly

00:02:07.640 you know what, I'd say get outside

00:02:10.380 get outside and enjoy the lake while you can

00:02:13.600 because the simple truth is

00:02:15.760 that God's green earth is out there

00:02:17.020 and it's worth experiencing

00:02:17.920 and we've probably got a federal election coming

00:02:20.360 in a couple of weeks

00:02:21.100 and that's going to be a useless, tumultuous 0.96

00:02:23.900 awful, boring 0.89

00:02:25.340 just wickedly

00:02:27.780 unconscionable sort of experience

00:02:29.780 where nobody talks about anything important

00:02:31.780 and everybody points fingers at things that don't matter

00:02:34.120 and I'd say

00:02:35.740 before that happens and before you and your

00:02:37.780 children are subjected to another banality

00:02:39.880 of Canadian elections

00:02:41.220 get outside, enjoy the sunshine while

00:02:43.800 you can and

00:02:45.360 stay safe, have fun

00:02:47.480 that's what I would say, but we'll bring

00:02:49.680 Aaron on right away just after we

00:02:51.700 get our endorsement going here, we have

00:02:53.600 of course it's the resistance coffee company i gotta get my banner up here to do do do there we

00:02:59.240 go so resistance coffee is based in waver and saskatchewan they bring in their beans and they

00:03:05.340 roast them locally and the thing about resistance is that they don't let them they don't let whatever

00:03:11.340 they're doing get in the way of your freedom so when they find out that there's somebody out there

00:03:15.720 who's trying to extinguish your freedoms or your ability to express yourself or say what you think

00:03:20.400 or believe what you want to believe they get involved and they help support the cause against

00:03:24.400 that so if you're looking for a coffee company that isn't supporting woke causes but instead is

00:03:28.780 just good coffee and it's supporting causes that help with freedom you're looking for resistance

00:03:34.300 coffee so if you use our promo code the western standard that will give you a 10 discount on your

00:03:41.340 first order so there it is on the bottom of your screen be sure to use it all righty so

00:03:46.380 and here we go aaron you are on the stream what is happening this morning

00:03:55.960 well i'm like every morning enjoying my warm cup of resistance coffee and uh and i just i can't

00:04:03.640 stop saying how surprised i am that those saskatchewanians make such a decent coffee

00:04:08.060 there it is so british columbia it's on fire there's a federal election clearly in the offing

00:04:15.140 apparently there's racist math we got a lot of places to go today where should we start

00:04:19.520 well it is uh it is a pretty hot it was a hot week uh and I remember the last time I was on

00:04:26.280 the show I think I started by by telling folks you know take some care to make sure you get

00:04:32.440 through this heat wave um and we had a number of deaths in the province it sparked some concerns

00:04:39.040 in the ambulance sector in the in the health emergency health services sector I know that

00:04:43.700 the Minister of Health, Adrian Dix, had to make an announcement yesterday. The union representing

00:04:48.800 paramedics, QP873, is calling for the dismissal of the CEO of the ambulance services. So there's

00:04:57.440 a lot of concern around the province, and a lot of this is coming out of, you know, just after the

00:05:01.100 fire that decimated, just wiped Lytton off the map, which all towns and municipalities and cities

00:05:08.340 in the interior of british columbia anyway i think are watching very closely uh and literally i think

00:05:14.260 the day after we we did that episode last week where we talked about some of this stuff uh and

00:05:20.100 you asked me the question is there going to be a aaron do you think there's going to be a federal

00:05:25.380 election anytime soon well the day after that of course the prime minister did his sweep through

00:05:30.420 british columbia and made a couple of fairly big announcements one infrastructural and the other

00:05:36.980 on a new social program and as we've reported on this channel a few times one of the big promises

00:05:41.860 of the bcndp government when they first got elected in 2017 and then they re-promised it again

00:05:46.900 when they were re-elected in 2020 was over a ten dollar a day child care plan for british

00:05:52.260 colombians so sort of a universal child care system and so one of the the big name announcements

00:06:01.300 that the prime minister rolled out with was of course this collaboration with the province so

00:06:05.620 So there was a bunch of fanfare coming out of, quote-unquote, progressive circles in British Columbia over this announcement.

00:06:13.120 But nothing signifies more clearly that there is obviously election looming very quickly.

00:06:19.840 We actually have a – we've got a video of the announcement, which we can then pick apart and talk about here in British Columbia.

00:06:25.980 If you don't mind, pull up that third video that we have there of our prime minister in front of that podium.

00:06:33.280 This is huge.

00:06:34.380 As part of the agreement, in the next five years, we'll work with the provincial government to achieve an average of $10 a day child care for all regulated spaces for kids under six.

00:06:47.860 Elbow bump. There it is.

00:06:50.340 Also in the next five years, 30,000 new high-quality spaces will be created.

00:06:56.680 By the end of next year, the average child care fees for BC parents will be cut in half.

00:07:02.540 And there will be more than $12,000 $10 a day spaces available.

00:07:11.160 And I want to add to all of those parents and families watching us across the country right now,

00:07:18.380 wondering when they're going to have the opportunities that the work that British Columbia and the federal government have done together is going to deliver for families in B.C.

00:07:28.220 We're working on it.

00:07:32.540 What a strong way to finish that announcement that if you're wondering when we're going to deliver all of these amazing things we're promising today, 10,000 new places, spaces for child care, all this funding and a $10 a day plan.

00:07:46.260 Well, we're working on it. And that's, you know, I mean, there's no better indication that this is just a raw buy for votes in British Columbia with absolutely no specifics whatsoever, other than these aspirational targets.

00:07:58.280 It reminds me a lot of the jobs-based promises you hear from politicians, you know, in the weeks, months ahead of a federal election or a provincial election as well, where it comes from conservatives as much as anybody else in terms of politicians making these claims that there's going to be a million new jobs by such and such a date.

00:08:15.920 In this case, they can't even really come up with a date. And when he tries to preempt the obvious question, well, you know, what are you actually doing here and when is it going to happen?

00:08:28.160 And his only answer that he can muster is, oh, we're working on it.

00:08:33.200 We're working on it.

00:08:34.200 But, of course, they have to work with the premiers on it.

00:08:36.500 And the premiers have to be amenable to it because child care and education are purviews of the province.

00:08:43.120 So, once again, we're going to have a kind of cross-federalism, right, this partnership that happens.

00:08:49.660 I think it was kind of modeled.

00:08:51.220 It all started with health care, obviously, at the federal level back in the 60s.

00:08:55.600 But, you know, 50, 60 years on, it's kind of like the provinces won't do anything unless the feds show up.

00:09:01.380 The feds won't do anything unless the provinces show up.

00:09:03.220 So all of a sudden, everything becomes a not bipartisan, but it's always two levels of government, always.

00:09:12.020 And sometimes I guess I guess that makes sense for certain aspects.

00:09:14.900 But I never thought child care would suddenly become a federal issue.

00:09:19.360 Well, this is the biggest indication to me that we're not going to ever see this,

00:09:23.100 that the NDP, the BC NDP has never really had any clear plan aside from it being funded

00:09:30.500 substantially by the federal government, getting federal dollars into the project to be able to

00:09:36.080 put anything together that is a sort of a made in BC and a funded through by British Columbians

00:09:41.660 plant, which is worrisome considering that the liberals never follow through on any of their

00:09:47.480 commitments, especially the ones that are made a few, you know, a few months or weeks away from a

00:09:51.960 from a rent drop so this is what's so frustrating and I think you and I can you know sort of debate

00:09:59.020 the merits of this program in any case and probably many of your viewers would would disagree with me

00:10:03.460 that I think that it makes sense to actually pursue from an economics perspective from an

00:10:08.520 economic standpoint the health of the economy of the province to pursue a universal child care

00:10:14.100 plan because one of one of the things that's keeping people out of the workforce if you're

00:10:19.060 small business owner for instance and your concern is the is the price of labor well one of the things

00:10:25.540 that affects the main indicator of the price of labor is supply and demand labor is treated in

00:10:31.060 this kind of economy like a commodity and so the price of it increases and decreases based on what

00:10:36.900 the supply of it is well if child care is so expensive that it no longer makes sense financially

00:10:42.660 for one parent to go to work because they could literally you know they don't make as much money

00:10:48.740 necessarily with all of the costs associated with having to get to and from work you got to insure

00:10:52.580 another car probably especially if you're in the interior you and depending on what your wage is

00:10:57.220 or your salary you may not be making enough to justify putting uh somebody in you know one of

00:11:03.300 your or more children in child care it may make more economic sense for your family to have

00:11:07.940 somebody at home well that causes the supply of labor to decrease and so the price of labor goes

00:11:13.780 up. If it's a single parent family, obviously it's very challenging to be

00:11:17.320 able to work and especially if you don't have a lot of professional skills,

00:11:22.840 for instance, and you generally do unskilled labor, lower wage labor, it's

00:11:27.820 almost impossible to raise a child as well. So there are, from my perspective

00:11:31.480 anyway, and people can disagree with me, economic benefits for this program, but

00:11:35.160 when the BCNDP first came in 2017, their campaign plank was attend at

00:11:41.080 basically a five-year, I think it was a 10-year runway on this $10 plan, which means, you know,

00:11:47.300 how many terms do they have to win to complete this? So it's just such a, you know, far in the

00:11:52.420 distance pipe dream. And then this latest edition of a promise from the federal government right

00:11:59.260 before an election that they're going to fund it with no details. And the only real tangible in it

00:12:04.200 is we're working on it. Trust us. It's just another indication to me that we're never going

00:12:09.580 see this in british columbia irrespective of you know whether the merits of it are there or not

00:12:14.940 from your perspective or others i mean i've always come down on the side of obviously there was a bc

00:12:21.820 politics panel that was being run by stewart for a time um which has also been cancelled thanks to

00:12:26.540 some of thanks to the green party now um every party on the left is slowly but surely uh attacking

00:12:31.980 our beloved friend uh but but what's happened is uh when we were having that discussion about

00:12:37.420 child care there was uh let's see i there was of course an ndp there was a green there was a

00:12:45.120 bc liberal and then myself and we're kind of all talking about different officers they all

00:12:49.500 talked about some kind of you know spaces set aside publicly funded spaces in one way or another

00:12:54.680 or private non-profits all sorts of like kind of third way things i'm all i'm all on the other side

00:13:00.120 of like well i say we just be able to like if you want to stay at home with your child that should

00:13:04.920 be a living wage i don't know what's wrong with that um if we wanted to i think in a way probably

00:13:10.320 a way that would get more social conservatives on side is if with with something like universal

00:13:16.000 basic income is that if you basically said well there is a universal basic income and i mean you

00:13:21.720 don't have to say it that way for those of us who are socially conservative it's like and it's for

00:13:24.700 mothers of children um rather but of course obviously in our world we could say it is for

00:13:30.780 the spouse who stays home and takes care of the child and children that that would probably bridge

00:13:37.340 the gap between the two worlds in a sense because really the idea that everybody needs the universal

00:13:41.720 basic into them is not something that a lot of more fiscally conservative people can kind of

00:13:45.360 swallow they're like well no there's work and there's a way of making a living etc but at the

00:13:50.740 same time again a lot of people regardless of their of their particular philosophical leanings

00:13:55.960 I'd say, no, look, I understand that a parent at home whose whose full time focus is the rearing of the children and kind of keeping the household in order and helping helping with things thereof.

00:14:07.840 That that makes sense. And the reason that it doesn't happen anymore is that wages have stagnated.

00:14:13.040 So now two people have to work to support a family. If we reverse that trend, even if wages don't necessarily change, but there's a fundamental basic income that's being accorded to families in order to raise their own children.

00:14:24.700 that that would get a lot of people on side i think both left and right yeah i think it ceases

00:14:31.140 to be a universal basic income the moment you try to means test it based on one particular attribute

00:14:36.100 like being a mother for instance uh which is why you know i i support a universal basic income

00:14:42.440 across the board and i think a lot of conservatives do as well for some of the reasons that you've

00:14:46.360 mentioned in that it enables a family or a couple for instance who are thinking of having children

00:14:52.560 to make a determination easier on whether or not they want to use that as to replace income that

00:15:02.120 they're foregoing because they're deciding to stay at home to look after a child. And if they

00:15:07.200 decide that they want to work in any case, because a basic income isn't enough for them, which,

00:15:12.300 you know, basic income is not meant to really be enough to keep everybody in the lifestyle that

00:15:16.720 they want to live in necessarily. It's just meant to be able to cover the bare necessities.

00:15:20.120 They could spend that money, they could choose to spend that money on child care, for instance, and the requirement for direct state subsidization doesn't necessarily have to be quite as prevalent.

00:15:31.600 That's the criticism that comes from the left against universal basic income is that they're terrified that by implementing it, there's justification to start eliminating some other social programs like a universal child care program if we had one, for instance.

00:15:44.620 And they're not really wrong. I mean, it does provide that ability or that justification to remove some of those things, but it does so in a way that still provides that kind of income to people that they need, but removes all of the additional bureaucratic malaise and cost associated with means testing everything, having to hire all these staff to spend their days determining whether or not you qualify for the benefit.

00:16:11.460 don't need any of that if it's universal it goes anyway and remember child care isn't uh i don't

00:16:17.100 think it's solely a woman's issue a woman's issue i think it there's lots of uh men that

00:16:22.520 are both in relationships where they're the primary caregiver there's also single dads

00:16:27.280 and so you know again it makes it easier and i think more economic uh to employ a basic income

00:16:35.520 that doesn't require that kind of kinds of means testing and let people decide how they want to

00:16:38.940 spend the money uh and and i think it makes makes sense in that regard i definitely think means

00:16:44.800 testing can be a waste of a waste of money but of course the mean the means that i'm looking at

00:16:49.160 there is is pretty direct obviously in another time you know in duplacis quebec it'd just be

00:16:54.440 like well there's only two genders and the gender that is the childbearing one is the one that gets

00:17:00.660 the income so that's a different time we don't have that time anymore and so that in our age i

00:17:05.200 guess again we would look at to who is the primary caregiver not unlike what we do when it comes to

00:17:10.060 the elderly and all the tax credits we have with that um i think to your point that something else

00:17:15.060 might be lost if universal basic income is imposed and and all the rest of that i do i do think a lot

00:17:20.820 of these things need to be tied up together but we also look at like the way we build out from

00:17:25.300 places and kind of kind of the meta infrastructure the way people conceive of things right so there's

00:17:29.920 a policy that's ever announced but policies are announced or logistical items are built right

00:17:34.860 you know big big infrastructure is is done and and people build out from that so in america you

00:17:42.040 have this thing it's called the interstate the most brilliant idea ever conceived when it comes

00:17:45.800 to traffic you don't have stop signs on it you don't have lights on it it cruises along and you

00:17:51.320 have on ramps and off ramps and that's how traffic remains steady that doesn't mean it's working

00:17:56.020 everywhere they need to improve it in a lot of places it's falling apart it hasn't been properly

00:17:59.280 maintain but the concept is sound in canada of course because if your road butts into provincial

00:18:06.140 and federal highways you get a portion of the funding there is no motivation to take an on-ramp

00:18:12.920 off-ramp approach to funding so people build out from the highway you to get a piece of the federal

00:18:19.140 or provincial money when it comes to highway taxes and gas taxes and that sort of thing

00:18:22.760 to the same point i would say that when it comes to this question of universal basic income or even

00:18:28.000 when it comes to the question of kind of

00:18:29.980 to say sort of specifically funding

00:18:32.040 motherhood I think

00:18:33.940 I think in a sense we kind of already do this to a

00:18:36.000 point with the child benefit that we

00:18:37.900 have right that was improved by the

00:18:39.960 liberals one of the few things that I have to admit I agree

00:18:42.080 with what the liberals did there because I think

00:18:43.760 feel like Harper's penny pinching

00:18:46.040 on it was a waste of time

00:18:47.280 and second of all I mean

00:18:49.820 let's even look at the way that we change divorce

00:18:51.800 laws in this country so it seems like whether

00:18:53.700 or not we whether or not we want

00:18:55.740 to agree on on kind of the nuanced way

00:18:57.780 of saying it or how it might be politically correct to say it the reality on the ground is

00:19:01.420 it looks like we try to fund motherhood one way or another either through the actual benefit

00:19:06.640 or through alimony etc so there's something happens there so we already build this this way

00:19:12.080 why don't we just be more honest about it back up a step and say well if you want to do the

00:19:17.560 universal basic income if you want to try and figure out child care in general it's not that

00:19:21.660 it's just motherhood it's it's it's the spouse whose primary job is the primary job primary

00:19:28.240 is primarily tasked with caretaking of children and that's what we're going to fund and if we fund

00:19:33.440 that a lot of family questions can get built out from there in a more sustainable way because you

00:19:38.480 just know you know that this person's fully funded now it's up to everybody else to kind of

00:19:43.280 in their orbit know know how to take care of the rest of the cost of the family yeah again i'm

00:19:49.560 And I just remind that the cost associated with having to determine on an individual basis who qualifies and who doesn't, it ends up being exorbitant and I think could be saved in a universal component of it.

00:19:59.540 But what concerns me so much about the prime minister coming to make this announcement is just as you said, you know, irrespective of what your position is on whether we should have a program like this.

00:20:11.040 If your goal is to try to fund something because you agree with me that it makes sense for the economy, it creates a healthier job environment.

00:20:19.560 or employment environment in the province then you'd be really worried that it's dependent on

00:20:26.520 federal contributions because they're not going to last forever and so a program like this has

00:20:31.480 to be funded uh separate from the feds i think because it's just not i mean you're right that

00:20:40.440 in order to roll this out from province to province there absolutely has to be buy-in from

00:20:44.280 the province because because of the jurisdictional divides and presumably a

00:20:51.740 number of provinces might look at a successful rollout in BC and go yeah

00:20:55.380 that actually makes sense we want to do that too in which case BC is now

00:20:59.500 fighting other provinces for this this federal funding because there's going to

00:21:05.220 be a limit on how much it can it can expand and again if our if our program

00:21:10.500 here in BC is dependent on that funding well then it's not a sustainable model

00:21:13.980 so it doesn't matter whether you're in favor of this or not what they're promising us is just

00:21:19.040 election bluster and there's no way in my estimation that they'll be able to pull it off

00:21:23.280 and it and it's also evident in how they uh how they market his trip here right so i've got it

00:21:29.680 you know there's a couple of pictures here of of john and justin uh sort of cultivating this

00:21:35.340 cult of bromance that they that they both share on the day that uh that justin was in the province

00:21:41.860 so there's there's two there one's john and justin there's another one with the two of them at lunch

00:21:46.020 and these photos were floating around so we can put one up i just want want to show you the degree

00:21:52.100 to which these guys are really kind of cultivating this this bromance between each other so hey look

00:21:57.780 at that they're having triple o's this is the second one yeah they're uh you know so great

00:22:03.140 great pains going towards making sure the photographers catch them having these tender

00:22:08.420 moments with each other that is the other one of them doing the the elbow bump let's see if i can

00:22:15.060 find that one just a second john lunch john justin no that's the same one again hold on see if i can

00:22:28.260 find it yeah i mean it's not that big of a deal but there you go this one hold on

00:22:35.140 this is why i'm not the producer

00:22:39.540 there we go yeah a bit anticlimactic but um this always surprises me everybody's doing these

00:22:48.620 these elbow bumps it's like you're actually closer to each other than you would be if you

00:22:51.860 were shaking hands but anyway um there's a third one there because every time this is what i find

00:22:57.840 so funny every time the prime minister comes in and has these you know this this great uh rapport

00:23:04.740 with the with the premier and they cultivate this cult of bromance as i like to call it

00:23:09.260 you sort of sense coming out of burnaby where jagmeet singh has his writing a little bit of

00:23:14.260 jealousy because as everybody knows the federal and the provincial ndp parties are technically

00:23:19.280 linked to each other so if you're a member of one you become a member of the other automatically

00:23:23.880 so so on the same day i think there was this obligatory post by the premier of

00:23:31.340 uh jagmeet singh who for whatever reason you know came over at the ferry on the same day that the

00:23:38.220 prime minister was there or i don't i don't know if it was the same day that they were both in town

00:23:41.640 or whether they were just saving this picture up so he could post the obligatory no i'm not

00:23:45.980 cheating on you with justin picture and every time he meets the prime minister he has to he has to

00:23:51.400 follow up with a picture of him with jagmeet it's just funny i don't know if any other premier really

00:23:55.080 has to do this and no no elbow bump sheldon says i noticed that as well and no picture of them

00:24:00.640 enjoying a nice white spot burger either uh now you're the only one for me baby i you're the only

00:24:06.540 one i'm talking to i who this guy doesn't even matter he's just a friend it's not a big deal

00:24:12.040 i guess it's just but i heard you were talking about child care no no no it's just an election

00:24:17.180 promise exactly anything i was thinking what's a little child care between friends it's just

00:24:22.340 nothing it's nothing and then of course in child care wasn't his only announcement he had to take

00:24:27.240 You know, Surrey is going to be the, you know, we've talked on this show about the BCNDP's attempts to what's going to be coming down the pipe in the next few weeks.

00:24:36.180 Their attempts to reduce the number of seats in the legislature from the interior by making our ridings bigger and increasing the number of seats in their stronghold areas like Surrey and using the population-based argument to make that justification.

00:24:49.520 whereas I think environmentalists if anybody should be opposed to this because it shouldn't

00:24:56.260 matter so much how many people are in your riding if we have a natural resource-based economy or if

00:25:01.280 you're a conservationist or concerned about the environment and we we being the ones who live

00:25:05.380 here are stewards of that land then we should have a requisite amount of votes in the legislature to

00:25:11.700 ensure that the that that land isn't just sort of run roughshod over and British Columbians don't

00:25:16.220 benefit from the extraction of the resources out of it. But they're going to make a pure

00:25:20.480 population-based argument. So the Prime Minister knowing this, of course, and the BCNDP eager to

00:25:26.680 make announcements in Surrey, they went out and if you just play that first clip again,

00:25:31.580 you get a sense of the reaction after this big SkyTrain funding announcement that the Prime

00:25:36.580 Minister made. And you can see that the citizens of Surrey or the Lower Mainland, if they were

00:25:41.260 coming from from all around weren't quite buying it so if you roll that clip that's all the time

00:25:46.940 we have today thank you everybody we're just gonna elbow bump everybody now yeah well and

00:26:08.120 you can hear the booze in the background, but, and that was actually the, uh, the most tame

00:26:12.940 portion of that whole thing. He was, he was being, uh, shouted down by the crowd throughout the

00:26:18.300 entire announcement. Uh, it was, it was quite embarrassing and it, and there was no way for

00:26:22.400 them to block the audio of it. Uh, so people had showed up to sort of protest as I suspect most of

00:26:26.960 the protesters were of a, uh, of a climate change bent. Um, but they just, you know, if, if the

00:26:32.680 intent was to try to generate some excitement over this announcement in Surrey, over more funding

00:26:36.620 for skytrains it just kind of fell flat and it was it was a bit humorous to watch uh but nothing

00:26:41.680 is more clear uh than their behavior here to demonstrate that there's absolutely an election

00:26:47.600 coming up uh and like oprah they're just sort of throwing cars out to everybody uh but until you

00:26:53.280 until you see it arrive in the mail it just ain't real no it's true it's true it's uh i think with

00:27:02.700 just to go back to the question of child care for just a moment here i think that ultimately for me

00:27:08.860 my policy is always going to be or rather my stance on this is around these policies always

00:27:14.520 going to be that the fundamental building block of society is is the family and so if if we want

00:27:22.380 a child care policy that makes sense it has to acknowledge that as first and foremost there is

00:27:28.040 there is no government program that can replace parents there is no amount of formation in

00:27:33.380 education that can replace a home that's stable uh facilitating that's the best thing we can do

00:27:38.460 when i think about the economy and i think about any of these benefits and i've i've grown more

00:27:42.220 amenable to them over the years i used to be a pretty hawkish fiscal conservative but i've become

00:27:46.460 more amenable to them over the years in a kind of populist streak but nonetheless my fundamental

00:27:51.040 attachment to the family hasn't changed so i i think that's where it always has to be phrased

00:27:56.100 i don't believe that we have you know three mothers and five dads we don't we have aunts

00:28:00.820 and uncles and that sort of thing and who gives primary care is always a bit amorphous i'm not

00:28:05.060 arguing that at all but but nonetheless the family is the fundamental building block and

00:28:10.020 without an economy that supports the family and then benefits that primarily build the family

00:28:15.700 i don't know what hope there is yeah and i don't disagree with you in terms of

00:28:20.180 what i what i see is you sort of striving for a for from your perspective kind of the best

00:28:27.260 case scenario in terms of the development of a child etc um you know i don't dispute that

00:28:32.360 that kind of nuclear family provides with one person at home all the time provides a very stable

00:28:38.220 environment for a trial probably a very positive one um but what i don't think any data shows is

00:28:43.960 that um that without a child care plan that there's an increase in the in the number of folks

00:28:50.760 that like i don't think there's any data that will show that a universal child care program

00:28:55.380 would diminish the number of it would decrease the number of people that also strive for that

00:29:00.140 same kind of supportive environment um in fact i think without a child care plan what you do see

00:29:06.080 is a is a decline in birth rates uh because it just doesn't make economic sense for for for a

00:29:12.200 good number of people to have children anymore uh and i think you know when you ask people when

00:29:18.120 you poll people on who who are starting to get into their 30s and 40s and haven't had children

00:29:22.520 on whether they they plan to have them what they tend to say is it doesn't make economic sense to

00:29:27.080 do it and you see that in a number of countries where the cost of having a child sort of outweighs

00:29:34.020 whatever perceived benefits there might be uh or the not putting it that way it the cost of raising

00:29:40.560 a child outweighs the overshadows the revenue that someone can generate uh through income to

00:29:46.800 be able to support that child and so you have people making decisions not to do it so so it's

00:29:51.700 interesting i mean i i would love to see somebody put together research if we were able to achieve

00:29:56.980 some kind of a universal child care plan whether or not the birth rate increases um and because

00:30:02.520 it leads to so many other discussions about the justification or need for more open immigration

00:30:07.740 policies if you have a declining birth rate but uh and the the cost of labor is going too high

00:30:14.520 from the perspective of people that follow this stuff well you need a higher supply of labor and

00:30:18.600 that's precisely what uh what feeds policies both in the u.s and canada uh to increase the number of

00:30:26.300 temporary foreign workers or undocumented workers that come into the province if there is a declining

00:30:30.760 birth rate and a decrease in the and and the uh the amount that a individual worker whether they're

00:30:36.740 in a union or not generally if they're not in a union they can bargain a higher rate for their

00:30:40.380 pay because the supply of labor is is so low which which again spurs uh companies especially farms

00:30:47.240 etc to try to find and import a source of labor so these things i think are connected um but again

00:30:53.000 i'm making economic arguments and i think and as you you know as we tend to do you're you're making

00:30:58.600 uh moralistic more moralistic arguments which both i think have validity no i agree i agree what um

00:31:06.700 what what's next on the docket here well sort of related to this i mean i and i hate to talk

00:31:12.060 about ontario so much but um you know as as i was uh um watching this announcement from the

00:31:20.700 from the prime minister coming out of ottawa uh i started looking at sort of what's happening back

00:31:26.300 where he came from and there's a couple of items that are a little bit concerning uh one of them

00:31:31.900 is that ottawa is and many of you have probably heard about this they're going to spend about

00:31:37.820 three and a half million dollars on a new plan and a new campaign to teach and this is this is

00:31:44.860 in quotes from a ctv article uh non-racialized canadians about systemic racism so there's a

00:31:52.940 i know the there's a picture i took of the headline in ctv about this story it's

00:31:57.820 non-racialized 01 there that picture if you put that up and we just there's about uh five slides

00:32:03.900 we can sort of put them up in order so this is the headline Ottawa plans to teach non-racialized

00:32:07.900 Canadians about systemic racism in a new campaign so this caught a number of people's attention and

00:32:13.580 you know we try to focus on BC specific stuff here but this stuff flows across the country

00:32:19.260 from province to province as it gets adopted so it's important to watch this

00:32:23.580 And I wouldn't put it past the provincial government at all to come up with a very similar plan provincially.

00:32:30.660 In fact, they sort of already have a campaign like this provincially, and we've talked about it on this show.

00:32:35.140 But the big question, I think, that stuck out in many people's mind, many people who aren't really acquainted with a lot of the jargon that this industry of diversity facilitators and academics,

00:32:48.180 you know the words that they use the lexicon they employ a lot of people weren't really

00:32:53.900 familiar with this term non-racialized and I don't know if you've heard of it before

00:32:59.320 sort of what your thoughts are on it but it it really generated a lot of discussion

00:33:03.820 I mean as far as I know non-racialized means you look like the majority population

00:33:11.540 well it means white I don't know really yeah you know and I so I mean I started going through to

00:33:17.600 try to find out how they define this stuff so if you put up the second picture first of all you'll

00:33:22.440 see a couple of quotes from a um yeah we're going to get into this this is interesting so there's a

00:33:28.820 the second one is a national post article um that was covering the same story and they just if we

00:33:36.820 just put that up there's a couple of quotes in there that we should pull sure i uh i don't have

00:33:43.160 the national post story it's just it's just the it says non-racialized oh two it just comes right

00:33:47.840 after this one you got her hey your cat's back yeah she uh she wants to see this this no that's

00:34:02.720 the wrong one it's the second one you got it racist math on racialized oh three non-racialized

00:34:14.880 oh two um nope that's the one that says oh two for me okay um well anyway let's blow that one

00:34:25.440 up and take a look at it so this actually comes from a report uh yeah i know i know

00:34:30.900 okay that's enough she doesn't like this stuff no she doesn't she's not woke so this comes from

00:34:41.020 this comes from a document that was uh by an organization in ottawa actually it's a municipal

00:34:45.740 document but it's funded by the federal government and i don't know if you can zoom in a little bit

00:34:49.640 there but it defines a couple of things that sort of get to this definition of of racialized and

00:34:54.700 non-racialized i don't know if you can zoom in a little bit there um but first of all it defines

00:35:00.620 it it distinguishes between individual and systemic racism right which a lot of people

00:35:05.700 it from my perspective the people that mix this up the most are the folks who advocate it uh where

00:35:12.660 they talk about having to fight systemic racism usually what they're talking about are cases of

00:35:16.860 individual individual racism uh the beliefs attitudes and actions of individuals that

00:35:23.280 support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can be unconscious, conscious, active, or passive.

00:35:29.920 So this is like, what this used to mean anyway, individual cases of racism would be, you know,

00:35:34.880 instances where somebody commits an act of violence against somebody while they're yelling

00:35:38.540 racial slurs. You know, I think the CBC was reporting yesterday that there were attacks

00:35:44.560 against Muslim folks, I think in Hamilton, right? So these would be cases of where the assailant

00:35:49.820 was actually um you know yelling at them about their hijabs that they were wearing and i think

00:35:55.300 there there was a family that was killed actually it was quite quite tragic uh so those would be

00:36:00.120 cases of individual racism systemic racism of course is meant to be entire systems hierarchies

00:36:05.960 institutions etc in which racism is kind of baked into everything uh all of the processes etc and

00:36:12.400 that's that's where you hear a lot of folks uh focusing their attention and that's why you see

00:36:17.300 people wanting to rip apart institutions etc they get into this concept of racial skin privilege

00:36:23.400 which is quite interesting I'll just read it out the in the invisible advantages that are attached

00:36:29.080 to being a member of the dominant white culture in Canada so right off the top you know this is

00:36:34.060 where I find this stuff to be quite in their in their terminology quite problematic in that I have 0.61

00:36:41.340 no idea what white culture is i don't know if if you do but it just seems to me to be remarkably

00:36:49.100 racist to make this kind of a generalistic claim about any diverse group of people within which

00:36:56.560 there are huge swaths of diversity and cultural differences etc and i've never understood what

00:37:04.340 white culture is it's a total social construct from my perspective um and it doesn't actually

00:37:10.820 exist like you know perfect example if i was to go over to your house for dinner for instance

00:37:15.340 you know we'd probably start that meal with a prayer uh because you're you're practicing catholic

00:37:21.160 that never happens in my house that's a huge cultural difference so is that a is that part

00:37:26.520 of white culture is you know uh there's all sorts of major cultural differences in terms of

00:37:32.180 I think how your family would interact with each other and how my family would interact with each

00:37:35.960 other and the different cultural things within our own ethnicity and history. But to try to

00:37:43.200 apply this mono-white culture over top of it to me just seems like a total fabrication. I don't 0.99

00:37:49.480 know what your thoughts are on that. Well, I think it's kind of nonsense because especially for us in

00:37:53.320 Western Canada, I think what's kind of interesting is that I bet you where critical race theory will

00:37:58.240 always and questions around race generally will always take better hold in a way is is where there

00:38:04.080 is a bit more of a monoculture around this stuff if you're up in the northeastern united states

00:38:08.500 and and you're a good yankee that you can feel empathetic about some of this stuff you know why

00:38:13.440 because because guess what being a yankee like a northeasterner american like it is a little bit

00:38:19.700 more monoculturalist it is certain values they of course fought on the freedom side of the civil war

00:38:25.220 right they were colonized first they had a different kind of aspect of things like

00:38:29.300 that part of the states has a different flavor to it than south of the mason dixon line and

00:38:33.760 further west and the same is true of ontario ontario is different than the rest of west

00:38:37.900 particularly south you know southwestern ontario and southern ontario but but the point that i

00:38:43.520 would make is that if you as soon as you get out of those belts where there were majority populations

00:38:49.220 and i'm not saying they're any more racist than anybody else that's not what i'm saying at all

00:38:52.140 I'm just saying that there is a culture there that is somewhat geographically defined and culturally inherent.

00:38:58.460 But if you get out of there, when you go into the prairies, you're into different, as I think Pat Buchanan called them once, white ethnics.

00:39:06.960 Same thing when you go to Chicago in the United States. 0.84

00:39:09.760 Greeks, yes, they're European, but Greeks are very different from Spaniards, you know, and they're different from Frenchmen.

00:39:17.620 And so you have what, again, he called white ethnics.

00:39:20.540 You have all sorts of central and southern European cultures.

00:39:23.820 Same thing into the prairies of Canada. 1.00

00:39:26.600 We dumped off Mennonites in there and Hutterites and all sorts of different people off the CPR. 1.00

00:39:32.240 There are French-speaking Catholics who have never been to Quebec in that area 0.99

00:39:35.620 and can't trace their family lines to Quebec.

00:39:37.660 They trace them back to France or to the Bayou and all sorts of other strange places. 0.80

00:39:41.800 This is nonsense that there's a single monoculture of whiteness. 0.97

00:39:46.560 Even white Anglo-Saxon Protestants 0.83

00:39:49.860 Are not monoculture

00:39:51.520 A monolithic culture

00:39:54.020 In how they view the world 0.66

00:39:55.720 Let alone even what they practice

00:39:57.480 There is such a thing as high and low Anglicans

00:40:00.620 There is such a thing as broad church Anglicans

00:40:03.920 There's such a thing as people

00:40:06.180 Who are more into the charismatic stream

00:40:07.980 And went into a more work-based theology

00:40:11.440 Around service

00:40:12.380 And people who are more intellectual

00:40:13.860 The idea that there's a single white culture

00:40:16.360 even in the english-speaking protestant side of things is nonsense and everybody knows that and 0.86

00:40:21.880 no one would have tried to propose this outside of a time where people are completely ignorant of

00:40:26.760 the fact that you know what a dumpling and you know and a roll cooking and a you know pierogi

00:40:32.840 are not the same thing and the people making them are all very different well i remember years ago

00:40:38.120 when i was a student in kelowna at you at the university there i used to live in the university

00:40:43.080 dormitories and every once in a while like every couple of months or so uh and i'll there i want

00:40:48.680 to refer back to the second paragraph of that uh that piece as well every every couple of months

00:40:53.240 or so there would be like this poster that would get put up around the residence and it was clearly

00:40:58.040 being put up by actual white supremacists because it you know it had this picture of this young

00:41:03.160 uh white girl who was probably like i don't know four or five years old or something like that and

00:41:07.560 the headline was like you know aren't you worried about there being no future for white children

00:41:12.280 kind of thing and you turned it over and the rhetoric yeah i mean it was like there has been

00:41:17.580 a bit of a history very limited but there actually are white there have been white supremacists in

00:41:21.940 the okanagan for a number of decades some of them were involved with uh health food stores and sold

00:41:27.500 sort of white supremacist books and literature through these health food stores it was a really

00:41:31.220 that's bizarre it's such a weird uh rabbit hole to go down there was a guy up at the college

00:41:36.600 in penticton i think it was by the name of david lethbridge who used to sort of track this stuff

00:41:41.880 he ended up getting sued by them in all big rabbit hole anyway we would actually see some

00:41:46.360 of this literature the reason i'm bringing this up is when you read the read the back of these

00:41:50.380 pamphlets they were the only people i ever saw talk about this white culture right like it was

00:41:56.460 just it was only the far right wacko nazis who were actually putting up you know this white

00:42:01.980 supremacist stuff it maybe was like two or three people per town or something like that and they

00:42:07.420 were the only people that would ever talk about white culture and they would try to fabricate

00:42:11.660 this white culture because obviously they're trying to build some semblance of culture around

00:42:15.740 which to rally and recruit people to to their cause what alarms me so much is it's no longer

00:42:21.420 those people that are talking about white culture predominantly it's these diversity

00:42:25.460 uh people who are are really pushing this idea of a white culture it's a dangerous idea it's

00:42:31.180 totally inaccurate it doesn't exist and if we can just i don't know if you can put that thing

00:42:35.040 back up on there again um but the second second paragraph sort of gets into some of this stuff

00:42:41.180 uh well first of all back up to the first paragraph uh it says many white people don't

00:42:46.480 recognize the privilege that comes with having lighter skin in our society example they're

00:42:50.700 unaware of race and racism now i i agree uh there are a lot of people i think that probably

00:42:55.880 uh either choose not to acknowledge or or just sort of blind to some privileges in society that

00:43:03.120 they might have because of the color of the skin i don't i don't deny that like i've got jobs uh

00:43:07.640 over the years that, that I didn't think I was necessarily the most qualified person for, but

00:43:11.800 you know, somebody maybe on a, on a construction job site or something, they were just more

00:43:17.000 comfortable hiring me because they didn't think they were going to have to have any,

00:43:20.940 uh, take out, you know, carry out any accommodations for, for somebody else based

00:43:25.340 on diversity or whatever. Um, but you, you can acknowledge those privileges, uh, but still

00:43:31.760 reject this idea of white culture. Right. And, and it's their idea that they marry these things 0.56

00:43:36.340 and try to put everybody into the same boat.

00:43:38.280 And I know a lot of people will say,

00:43:39.460 oh, there's no such thing as white privilege.

00:43:41.100 I'm not here to sort of debate that. 0.63

00:43:42.500 I think you can make that argument

00:43:44.840 and some folks will even agree with you.

00:43:47.120 My point is these things are not married to each other.

00:43:50.580 And then the second paragraph there,

00:43:51.940 people who are white may face discrimination.

00:43:53.600 This is interesting.

00:43:54.320 There's sort of this attempt to try to acknowledge

00:43:56.920 that there is racism of all forms,

00:44:01.100 no matter whether you're white or otherwise.

00:44:02.640 but they reference this paper that that tries to discount it so people who are white may face

00:44:09.060 discrimination based because of their class gender sexual orientation religion or age

00:44:13.880 or because of their nationality ethnicity language etc and it's interesting to me

00:44:19.340 which groups they list Armenian Italian Jewish etc however this does not erase the racial privilege

00:44:25.560 of white people and so I mean this is I want to stop for a second here I want to stop for a second 0.68

00:44:31.340 did i did i miss the memo where god's chosen people the jews are now white

00:44:37.900 are jewish people white they're not white by definition by racial definition they're not

00:44:46.020 white they're they're semites and semites are not they're not indo-germanic if we're going to use

00:44:51.600 the very as as as as a refined scientific definition that we could use there are groups

00:44:57.660 or like ethnography or or i guess uh anthropology there the language group that comes to us all the

00:45:03.940 way from the indus valley all the way to the iberian peninsula the indo-germanic language

00:45:08.800 group that that's related to all of europe including english and of course french which

00:45:13.380 of course is then influenced by the latin and the romantic languages but the point is

00:45:17.080 if we're looking at a single ethnicity or or racial group whatever we have we can document that

00:45:23.420 it that the jewish people are not white well the i mean the perfect example that should stick out 0.75

00:45:31.860 everybody's mind the leader of the federal green party right now enemy paul she's she's a black

00:45:36.260 jewish woman so i mean it's this is what's so problematic in their terminology about this

00:45:42.080 analysis is that it is racist it assumes that all jews are white and that's as you say i mean it's

00:45:47.720 just not the case uh so it's yeah so they're trying to acknowledge here that you know some

00:45:55.940 white people might face some discrimination based on their income and and all these other things

00:46:00.180 etc whether they have a disability or not but it doesn't erase their sort of their innate white

00:46:06.500 supremacy so i mean i just would love to see one of these folks walk down to the downtown east side

00:46:11.440 in vancouver for instance if you haven't been down there it's uh it's really a a pretty raw

00:46:16.880 cross-section of the the real uh poverty that exists in Vancouver uh in this kind of an economy

00:46:23.840 and the one thing that strikes me every time I walk down there is you know I mean there's a number

00:46:28.780 of Indigenous people uh down there but by far and you can see the community on the street because

00:46:34.100 it's a busy neighborhood uh most people just drive through it but if you walk around down the

00:46:38.600 downtown uh in the downtown uh east side it can be difficult to walk in a straight line down the

00:46:43.620 street because there's you know people there's a whole informal market people got their blankets

00:46:47.540 out they're selling stuff and there's just a a community that some of which is homeless some of

00:46:52.900 which is transient some of which is in a uh they they stay in night beds and care homes etc and

00:46:57.980 they don't have a place during the day so they're just out in the street it's a busy place and what

00:47:01.200 always strikes me as i walk down there is how white that community is right and these are the 0.98

00:47:04.960 these are people in in our economy that are living in in virtually third world conditions

00:47:10.080 um and i would love to see some of the people who write these things to go down there and tell these

00:47:15.580 folks that um that they're just chock full of white privilege i mean it's just when you think

00:47:22.680 about it it just boggles the mind and yet this is what we're spending what what our our federal

00:47:29.280 government is spending taxpayer dollars on trying to foist upon the population no it's it's beyond

00:47:36.100 nonsense like again the the whole question of of of like listing listing people of jewish descent

00:47:42.300 as inherently white with no caveats like that just that literally makes no sense but further

00:47:47.380 to your point like this is exactly it this was what well this is what lost hillary clinton the

00:47:52.360 election in 2016 but she was telling you know a welder from to larry and wherever else like you

00:47:57.180 have white privilege and he's like well i'm i'm a welder i don't i just you know i have a i have a

00:48:03.940 trailer and a truck and i try to support my family and i i weld or i you know i'm a fabricator

00:48:08.840 whatever like i i'm a part of the white working class like i'm not a privileged person whatsoever

00:48:13.100 i gotta figure out how i'm gonna pay for my kids college i i don't i don't know what you're talking

00:48:17.580 about man like i'm certainly not privileged and this is the thing there's the work what's gone

00:48:22.580 wrong it's actually yesterday i had i had grant havers on and uh and he and he made the point

00:48:27.140 that this has gone very wrong for the left the ref the left used to talk about class and it doesn't

00:48:32.600 talk about class anymore it's almost like only the right is willing to talk about class here

00:48:36.060 they're talking about race again and they're just waving off classes if it doesn't matter it's like

00:48:40.420 well don't you think that people people who are in a marginalized community people are at the end

00:48:45.960 of things people are impoverished wouldn't they be in solidarity with other people who are

00:48:49.780 impoverished like if you want to make a better world you'd need to combine these two groups and

00:48:54.620 what i think the left calls intersectionalism or whatever and they and they would then agitate for

00:49:00.660 i don't know clean water on reserves and they're they're you know they're their neighborhood that 0.98

00:49:06.580 is ridden with crime to be to be improved and that they could get the slum lords out of there 1.00

00:49:10.700 like i don't i don't understand why we would suddenly divide these people it's like well 0.98

00:49:14.000 you see this is a reserve so these people are indigenous so obviously they have a certain kind

00:49:17.780 of of harm and victimhood that's attributed to them and then these people who are over here in 1.00

00:49:22.820 this really bad neighborhood but they're majority white they they don't deserve the same kind of 0.80

00:49:27.500 treatment even though they're they're in the same plight they just happen to live in a different 0.98

00:49:31.140 kind of neighborhood with a different kind of demographic makeup well you hit the nail on the

00:49:35.800 head what this represents on the left is a complete abdication of their historic responsibility to

00:49:42.120 provide a class analysis i mean i was quite struck watching your show about a week or two ago you had

00:49:46.940 brad trost on um and i you know i'm i'm remotely familiar with with brad uh because he ran for

00:49:54.780 leader federally previously but I watched that whole interview and what struck me so much was

00:50:00.340 how he had a pretty clear class analysis the likes of which I would love to see the average leftist

00:50:07.420 be able to display where he talked a lot about how we could really improve Ottawa by instead of

00:50:14.500 putting more people from the ruling class you know CEOs corporate executives lawyers etc not all

00:50:21.120 lawyers are part of the ruling class but they generally represent the ruling class if we

00:50:25.120 replace some of those folks with more truck drivers and welders and you know like your friend

00:50:28.920 for instance uh people like brad you'd see a complete difference in terms of how people

00:50:34.840 in the in the parliament would would approach most pieces of legislation and you'd see different

00:50:40.740 legislation produced well you don't see that that's a class analysis that's that's basically

00:50:45.600 a you know one of what most of the conservative establishment would regard as the far right

00:50:51.000 certainly the left would describe him as the far right and here he is the only guy talking about

00:50:55.580 putting working people into positions of power rather than you know having more black or women 0.95

00:51:02.100 or indigenous CEOs and this is what's so striking to me is that most black workers most indigenous 0.95

00:51:09.040 workers most women who are working they know fundamentally that putting people who look like 0.53

00:51:15.440 them in positions in the oligarchy or within positions of extreme power doesn't change anything

00:51:21.100 for them materially it just means that their boss has a different shape of skin or different genitals

00:51:26.300 between their legs i mean that's and working people doesn't matter what their color is they

00:51:31.100 understand this that's why you don't see working people advancing this kind of ideology it's why

00:51:36.200 you have to it's why the federal government has to spend three and a half million dollars teaching

00:51:40.180 the target demographic which is what was in that national post article of basically white males

00:51:45.760 between the age of 30 and 43 or 45 uh they have to teach them how systemic racism works and how

00:51:52.420 and how to check their privilege and all this kind of stuff they have to teach people understand this

00:51:56.120 but the reality of it is this isn't even about going after white men uh it's it's actually about

00:52:03.980 going after the working class as a whole but what the ruling class and this is you know you can call

00:52:09.580 conspiratorial i don't think anybody is actually sitting around in a room planning this i think it's

00:52:13.780 i think hr departments have just sort of figured this out on behalf of the employers they work for

00:52:19.000 uh there's the target between 30 and 44 year old years old men living in in rural or urban areas

00:52:24.720 and they actually even identify these these three areas hamilton thunder bay and quebec

00:52:29.600 which are considered to be racism hot spots which is uh you know i'd love to see the data on that

00:52:37.500 um there's a lot of is there a lot of synagogues burning over there is that what's happening because

00:52:42.380 as far as i can tell there's a lot of churches burning in canada but i don't know of a lot of

00:52:46.200 crimes against either mosques or synagogues or any or agar wars or whatever uh that doesn't seem 0.73

00:52:52.220 to be a pandemic in this country i'm not saying it never happens and i'm not saying it's okay when

00:52:56.080 it does that's not what i'm saying well it's very selective the pandemic that that they're

00:53:01.280 they're citing here no you're spot on it's it's always very very selective um i don't know if

00:53:09.840 you're hearing any audio issues i'm hearing a few but it is always very very selective but but what

00:53:14.720 my point here is that it's it's actually not about i mean they talk about tar they literally put in

00:53:20.800 their statements and in their government documents targeting they call it non-racialized because it

00:53:25.520 sounds a little less racist than than actually listing you know white men for instance straight

00:53:30.080 white men that's actually not who they're after they're here's here's what's actually playing out

00:53:36.160 globally um populist politicians like trump for instance who understand fundamentally because

00:53:43.120 uh they've got a better read of the working class especially in the so-called rust belt states in

00:53:48.160 the us and i would argue a lot of uh some emerging uh conservative politicians in canada like brad

00:53:53.120 et cetera, people like Ellis Ross out here in BC understand this as well, that working voters

00:54:00.720 respond to messages about bringing manufacturing back home. They respond to messaging about

00:54:06.740 international trade and trying to even it out between us and China, for instance, to make sure

00:54:11.560 that all of the manufacturing, all of the value-based jobs aren't being shipped over there

00:54:15.620 or they're being brought back. The problem is government doesn't really, without getting rather

00:54:20.620 socialistic and and employing a number of trade barriers which trump did to his uh credit from my

00:54:26.900 perspective uh the only way you can uh the employer class the the folks who actually have the money

00:54:34.140 sitting in their bank accounts to be able to set up factors i mean you and i can't just tomorrow

00:54:38.340 start up a widget making factory here in prince george we don't have the funds to do that the

00:54:42.500 people who do do that they do it in china because it's cheaper even though they're they're north

00:54:47.980 American citizens. So the only way to, in their mind, to be able to sort of respond to these

00:54:53.640 populist calls for bringing manufacturing back to the base is to lower the wage rates here on

00:54:59.300 home soil. That's the only way it works in their mind, because otherwise they're always going to

00:55:03.940 be competing against capitalists who are still running their factories out of places like China,

00:55:09.080 Cambodia, et cetera, in these really low wage environments. So how do you lower the wage rates

00:55:15.380 of working people here at home? Well, first of all, like from my, and here's my Marxist analysis

00:55:21.040 coming out again, the way employers have always done this in periods where they've decided they

00:55:25.940 have to push wages down artificially, they always go after the most vulnerable group within the

00:55:31.180 working class. So you go back to the, over a century ago in British Columbia, they generally

00:55:35.820 would go after Asian workers, for instance. And, but instead of going after them, they would,

00:55:41.920 they would actually import folks from asia and employ them instead of north american workers

00:55:47.520 create all sorts of racism uh between those groups and the ultimate uh outcome was that wage rates

00:55:54.160 were were pressed down because chinese workers in particular in those days were they had no choice

00:55:59.840 but to work for less money it was the only thing that was available to them so flash forward to 0.75

00:56:04.000 today who who are the easiest to throw mud at well white men or or you can you can put public uh

00:56:12.880 government documents out that specifically target uh this one demographic in this age category

00:56:20.320 and and nobody's going to come out and say that's racist and so if you and that ends up being the

00:56:26.160 majority of the working class in especially in family supporting jobs that part actually is true

00:56:33.280 I mean, there are more men working in these kind of jobs in the working class in Canada that can support families and white men than any other group.

00:56:43.080 And that can be pointed out by these diversity activists, for instance, but you can't have it both ways.

00:56:47.380 So you can identify that that's the biggest group in the working class, keeping the economy afloat, supporting families, etc.

00:56:54.660 So that's the group you want to go after. 0.96

00:56:56.320 If you can push their wages down by attacking their privilege and that kind of thing, you can push wages down for everybody.

00:57:03.280 And that's precisely how this kind of racist stuff is not being used really just to go after white men.

00:57:08.300 It's being used to go after all workers.

00:57:11.260 The first time in my lifetime are able to target white men because this happens to be the group right now that you can get away with this stuff on.

00:57:21.380 And that's, I think, what's behind it. 0.82

00:57:23.160 I think that's a very good analysis.

00:57:24.760 And I think the other side of what's what's happening here is that, quite frankly, I mean, we've also just lost we've lost hope in the idea of there being a more equitable kind of working arrangement.

00:57:36.860 It was it wasn't just the idea of there being a 40 hour work week isn't some kind of lackadaisical left wing idea.

00:57:43.680 It's an idea that both the left and the right amongst the working class agitated for and and managed to achieve.

00:57:50.540 Just the same with workers' protections, the same with making sure that there was a duty of care by employers to not just make profit, but that in making that profit, workers were kept safe.

00:58:01.720 A lot of this has been captured, to borrow from Parker's phraseology, and that capture is disillusioning people, which is why union halls are empty in the private sector.

00:58:13.300 It's why people don't even want to go to work safe or to workers' compensation board.

00:58:19.280 they feel that they're not being listened to they feel like they're not represented anymore

00:58:22.860 and people are turning to an alternative form of politics to try and get their voices heard

00:58:27.840 but i think something else that kind of strikes me is again to your point of there only being one

00:58:33.540 you know only on the right is this actually being discussed again in in another instance of of the

00:58:38.640 bc politics panel that i used to be a part of that that stewart was hosting there was a moment where

00:58:44.200 it's everybody on on the left was essentially saying when it came to kind of china and the

00:58:50.640 manufacturers and that sort of thing and then the issue of international trade they were just

00:58:54.560 talking about different forms of neoliberalism you know that maybe we could up this tariff just

00:58:59.200 slightly but not really and you know free trade's free trade there's nothing we can do about it all

00:59:03.340 of them were resigned and i kind of started arguing that i was like well maybe maybe we

00:59:07.480 should impose tariffs here and we should better organize our workers here but we should also

00:59:12.000 organize their workers over there and raise their wage rates in those countries to the point where

00:59:17.360 they're on parity with us and and and everybody kind of stopped and looked at me and and sir

00:59:23.260 park's like congratulations nathan gita you are officially a communist yeah and i'm like i didn't

00:59:29.520 because none of the lefties on that panel could have figured that out that's what's so frustrating

00:59:33.000 right it's like well and i don't really understand why that makes me a communist i think that makes

00:59:37.100 me more of a christian than anything else but nonetheless i i don't know why people i don't

00:59:40.840 know why you wouldn't want people to be paid properly. I don't know. It's a reflection of

00:59:45.960 the state of the left right now that it takes a conservative to say these kind of obvious things.

00:59:49.820 What's so interesting to me about this story in particular, so what I've been quoting here

00:59:53.580 has mainly been from the CTV article. There's a video at the top of that article, which we can

00:59:58.140 put up in a second here, and it just plays right at the top of the article. What struck me by it

01:00:03.340 is that there's no commentary. There's very little editing. It's just sort of a raw cut

01:00:08.120 of toronto-based activists that are really sort of in this diversity and inclusion in all sectors

01:00:14.520 of society and all facets of our lives community and they just play uh them uncut and unfiltered

01:00:21.740 which you know as somebody who's been involved in a number of strikes campaigns you know radical

01:00:26.760 uh demonstrations etc over the years i have never ever not myself or seen anybody else sort of in

01:00:33.760 trade union movement given that level of just straight across the board we'll we'll broadcast

01:00:39.680 exactly what you're saying without any kind of filter or commentary on it and what these leftists

01:00:44.320 say in justification of this stuff is quite interesting so why don't we roll this video and

01:00:48.400 then chat about it so what can shift what can we change how are we doing that what are people

01:00:54.000 willing to give up what are people willing to redistribute um what are people willing to face

01:00:59.280 within themselves like i think a lot of times we focus on um what we can change outside of ourselves

01:01:05.680 but if we are perpetuating as individuals the same behavior that these systems uh of oppression are

01:01:14.080 then we're we're part of the problem as well i just want to pause it right there actually and

01:01:18.400 put that little piece back up on uh just this quote this struck me uh as the best indication

01:01:24.800 that i've seen of all of this that what these folks are proposing as as much as you may disagree

01:01:30.240 with it are not revolutionary at all like there's nothing revolutionary about this whatsoever the

01:01:35.820 old leftist mantra uh from the collectivist side of things you know my tradition uh would would

01:01:42.020 laugh at this statement that we're going to affect this kind of change based on changing ourselves

01:01:47.860 individually i mean this has just never been uh the left's approach sort of the marxist approach

01:01:53.920 to addressing some of the systemic issues they're talking about this really is the same kind of

01:01:59.260 ideology that is you know undergirls the the green party which is the best way to save the

01:02:05.280 environment is for each of us to just individually act better and be be better people and and for the

01:02:10.800 whole population on an individual level but at the same time miraculously come to this

01:02:15.440 determination that we're all just going to start recycling uh and stop throwing plastic and sandals

01:02:20.160 in the ocean i mean it's just it's just magical nonsense and yet these folks that are considered

01:02:25.920 and described often by people on the right is like these cultural marxists for instance

01:02:29.640 they haven't got a marxist bone in their body uh and really when you get down to pushing them on

01:02:36.400 what they want to do to change things they're not talking they talk a lot about systemic racism but

01:02:41.200 their solutions have no systemic component to them whatsoever all they talk about is this

01:02:45.580 individual-based re-education and basically the old sort of Maoist approach, which is sort of

01:02:53.800 where the cultural Marxist connection comes, I think, from analysts on the right. This idea that

01:02:59.640 we have to individually be brainwashed and change our approach to see ourselves, especially if you

01:03:06.420 happen to be white, a white worker, to see yourselves as inherently racist and part of 0.88

01:03:12.240 this problem uh and if you don't see it if you're so racist man that you don't even know how racist

01:03:17.280 you are you're obviously part of the problem uh and and that's their fundamental analysis

01:03:22.220 i think i think what's interesting here is of course maybe maybe the the differing point to

01:03:29.100 make here is that theologically uh that that is kind of the argument for us uh on you know those

01:03:35.920 of us who hold religious views particularly christian religious views is that we are all

01:03:39.180 We are all sinners, and we individually must try and, you know, turn ourselves back in repentance, right?

01:03:45.980 So that is the kind of theological basis of reality.

01:03:50.440 But at the same time, you know, Christ himself says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

01:03:55.040 No one ever argues that the systems themselves aren't in their own—the way of the world is the way of the world.

01:04:02.000 That's never discounted.

01:04:03.720 So it's kind of interesting that there's a sort of naive, not really, I would even call it

01:04:08.100 pseudo-theological view of like, well, if we all just are better people, then all the systems will

01:04:13.980 change. It's interesting, though, because that is like a religious tenet from a tradition that's

01:04:19.000 pretty far away from most of the things that they're proposing. I mean, she did in the previous

01:04:24.940 comment sort of allude to redistribution and this kind of stuff. So these old sort of Marxist

01:04:29.560 tenants of redistributing wealth etc but they're not they just sort of spout

01:04:35.460 that stuff off without really understanding like there's no tangible

01:04:38.980 proposal for for who is gonna have to have their wealth redistributed for

01:04:43.240 instance these people never talk about the billionaires they never talk about

01:04:46.000 the oligarchs they never talk about Richard Branson having enough money to

01:04:49.180 launch himself into space I wish perfectly honest I think I think the

01:04:53.800 left is wrong on this as well as opposed as they are to billionaires being

01:04:57.220 launched into space i think traditionally the left should be arguing that we launch all billionaires

01:05:01.520 into space but they're just so so bloody confused on all of this stuff and this is another example

01:05:06.680 of how when you really start to peel back the layers there is no leftist or marxist basis to

01:05:11.660 any of this stuff at all it is actually coming from hr departments who are rolling out policy

01:05:17.840 on behalf of the people who have the most money in society and they're doing so to try to keep

01:05:23.000 workers divided as possible and ultimately to reduce the wages of everybody under the guise

01:05:27.900 of eliminating privilege from the largest group of the working class, which happens to be white

01:05:34.920 males within that age demographic. That's what this is all about. And it really is something

01:05:45.140 that can spread like wildfire across the country. And so even though this is the stuff that's

01:05:49.220 playing out in Ontario we have to watch it very closely because it can come this way as well

01:05:54.040 it's related to another thing that's happening in Ontario which is the the the revelation I

01:06:01.720 suppose one could say in the Ministry of Education through their grade nine math curriculum that math

01:06:09.960 is also somehow racist and discriminatory and that and it's another example if you read the

01:06:16.760 curriculum, which I can show you, of how these people really believe that this identitarian

01:06:23.420 ideology must infect and infest every aspect of society. And they actually just come out and say

01:06:30.780 it. I mean, I first encountered this in a labor movement where consistently you'd get these

01:06:35.240 proposals that equity, diversity, and inclusion have to be integrated in our work in all areas.

01:06:40.660 It is the most cult-like approach, and it's ultimately injecting racism into every component of what we do.

01:06:49.080 So we've got a couple of pictures of this grade 9 math curriculum that is being pushed through Ontario right now.

01:06:57.440 The first one is called Racist Math Subjective there, if we can put that up on the screen.

01:07:02.360 It's interesting to see this.

01:07:04.100 i mean i'm not a mathematician by any stretch um but even i know that math is not is like the

01:07:11.280 antithesis of subjectivity it's if if anything it's meant to be sort of the the ground zero

01:07:17.900 base of laws for most of the scientific community and the one thing that was so beautiful about math

01:07:24.380 or should be so beautiful about math is it doesn't matter sort of what what your circumstances or

01:07:28.960 identity are the numbers don't lie um and so let's just scroll through and read this stuff

01:07:33.840 an equitable mathematics curriculum recognized that mathematics can be subjective so right off

01:07:38.640 the top there's this there's this injection of this belief in the ontario uh school system now

01:07:45.360 in math that math is no longer objective uh that the numbers can lie apparently depending on the

01:07:51.360 color of your skin so here's the here's the description mathematics is often positioned

01:07:56.160 as an objective and pure discipline but we know better now that's what the old mathematics that's

01:08:02.800 that's what the previous generation thought but but we've come so far however the content and

01:08:08.720 the context in which it is taught the mathematicians who are celebrated and the importance that is

01:08:13.840 placed upon mathematics by society are subjective so the the main grievance here is that the

01:08:20.000 mathematicians who were studying happened to be white and so the the obvious i mean the obvious

01:08:27.440 response is that we have to remove any reference to white mathematicians because it's somehow

01:08:33.440 alienating uh in their terminology racialized students this stuff should be terrifying um

01:08:43.040 because this this matters it's like i i read this stuff i don't

01:08:46.720 i don't want to drive across any bridge in ontario that's been built after the day in which the date

01:08:54.080 in which this was integrated into their their system of mathematics i mean math is not subjective

01:09:01.120 and the idea that that you're going to stop learning from mathematicians like you know so

01:09:07.840 we can't can't study pythagoras anymore we can't you know like it's just it's unbelievable to me

01:09:13.200 and dangerous i try to find the words to to respond to this i think i'm going to start with

01:09:24.300 a pun it just doesn't add up aaron but uh let's uh let's throw that second second screen

01:09:33.280 exactly it's like you know what that's it you're you you lose that's that's enough of that um

01:09:39.920 there's one more that talks about inserting equity into math as well uh is that a thing you can do

01:09:45.900 according to the curriculum on the ministry of education website in ontario

01:09:50.440 it absolutely is so i don't think blow that up a little bit

01:09:53.700 so research indicates that there are groups of students for example indigenous students black

01:10:02.200 students experiencing homelessness students living in poverty students with lgbtq plus

01:10:07.420 identities and students with special education needs and disabilities like by the time you get

01:10:12.140 to the end of the list of people like why wouldn't they just say anybody who's not a white male

01:10:17.340 it would just be shorter you forget what the context of the sentence is by the time you get

01:10:21.100 to the end of this list who continue to experience systemic barriers to accessing high level

01:10:25.740 instruction in and support with learning mathematics so if we're to believe that

01:10:30.860 systemic racism exists within the education system and i'm not even willing to say that that's not

01:10:36.460 true i mean you know maybe there are some ways that we can identify systemic racism within the

01:10:41.420 education system um does that justify removing mathematicians from the curriculum and their

01:10:49.900 ideas and concepts because of the color of their skin uh especially when you're trying to train

01:10:56.060 people to build bridges it's you can start to see sort of the dangerousness of this

01:11:02.300 uh and they're not taught like and again you can't remove you can't deal with systemic racism

01:11:07.580 by by making in like uh by making moves based on individual acts of individual racism or your

01:11:15.100 perceived individual racism so you don't you don't address systemic racism in an institution

01:11:19.980 by taking out the memory of an individual and their concepts right i mean that's that's what's

01:11:25.360 so ridiculous yes i agree with the albertan uh this stuff makes me quite nervous so systemic

01:11:31.280 barriers such as racism implicit bias and other forms of discrimination can result in inequitable

01:11:36.180 academic and life outcomes okay such as low confidence in one's ability to learn mathematics

01:11:42.480 i think that's kind of racist actually um reduce rates of credit completion and leaving the

01:11:48.060 secondary school system prior to earning a diploma so there you can see like they're making these

01:11:52.700 statements so so hold on hold on because math can be challenging and kind of scary which which i

01:11:58.980 mean admittedly like anybody who's not talented at math and then has to face some of the concepts

01:12:05.140 that especially in the more advanced parts of math yeah no math is scary like it's it's got

01:12:09.840 some challenging aspects to it and some things that really kind of twist the brain and make it

01:12:13.800 really work hard that that's going to scare people out of being in high school and get them to leave

01:12:19.100 high school well and that's the thing is that they their conclusion on this is that these people are

01:12:25.740 leaving high school or they're failing at this because of the color of their skin that's what's

01:12:31.160 so racist about this analysis is that it assumes at a base level that because you're black or

01:12:36.920 because you're indigenous you're not as good as at this system that's been set up to uh to teach it

01:12:43.960 and that is fundamentally a racist analysis from my perspective what's so interesting to me is when

01:12:49.040 they go through this list of you know going back up to the top again for example indigenous students

01:12:54.240 black students and then this big list they don't mention asian students uh which is one of the

01:12:59.440 largest especially in british columbia one of the largest groups of students in in the province um

01:13:04.800 so you know if we're talking about racialized groups and anti-asian uh incidents of crime and

01:13:12.480 or sorry violence and racism etc are on the increase which you know i'll accept that that's

01:13:17.120 actually true um why are they not included in your list of people who are uh subject to systemic

01:13:27.360 racism and barriers well it's because statistically if you look at at grade rates of asian students

01:13:33.440 they tend to be higher than any other group uh in our society and there's probably all sorts of 1.00

01:13:38.560 reasons for that many of which you would probably attribute to their culture at home and the way

01:13:42.880 way their families are set up and their parents' approach to their education. And I wouldn't even

01:13:47.420 disagree with you anecdotally, but what demonstrates best the hypocrisy and the nonsense of this

01:13:53.980 approach is that because they've got this inconvenient group, which is actually in the

01:13:59.380 States being barred from attending some universities because of their race, because they see them as

01:14:06.240 as being too high performing um they have to come up with all sorts of sort of mental gymnastics 0.99

01:14:12.360 to try to make their their philosophy fit around this apparent contradiction and it's just garbage 0.95

01:14:18.280 it's just insane completely insane so this is this is uh this is what's happening in ontario

01:14:27.900 And I think we have to watch this stuff because there is absolutely a coordinated effort to try to integrate this ideology under the guise of diversity, inclusion, and equity, this racist, identitarian ideology that subverts everybody and reduces everybody to their base immutable characteristics, to try to integrate that into our work in all aspects of society.

01:14:55.480 And they talk like that openly.

01:14:57.240 so when you see this kind of stuff emerge in ontario you can bet that it's going to make

01:15:01.340 its way out here as well it is it is pretty mind-boggling because it's just you sit there

01:15:06.180 and you're like i mean i thought orwell was like just kidding when he said the two plus two will

01:15:10.800 equal five sort of thing and it's like no we're there like we're there now it's like no math is

01:15:15.600 subjective it's like i don't know tell that to the spaceship hurtling through the air at mach 5

01:15:20.960 i don't know i i don't think it's very a very subjective i think the spaceship needs a certain

01:15:25.900 kind of vector and uh the tiles on it have to withstand a certain kind of temperature and i

01:15:32.380 mean if you want to if you want that to be subjective you go right ahead but i'm not getting

01:15:35.420 on that spaceship okay i got other things to do well i think that's the reaction for most rational

01:15:40.300 people but it is this sort of spearhead of this effort uh to try to impose this ideological change

01:15:48.140 on society which which says that we can all tell our own truth and i hear this a lot i hear this a

01:15:54.860 lot amongst leftist folks i i even hear that kind of language amongst leftist folks who are otherwise

01:16:00.300 kind of gender critical about uh and and critical of sort of the racist component of some of the

01:16:05.100 stuff they still talk about you know speaking your own truth and that kind of thing and and so i

01:16:10.540 mean there's a real philosophical divide there between where the left is now and where the left

01:16:14.460 has been historically um and i would argue this is a huge departure also from some from traditional

01:16:20.700 kind of marxist thinking um which is ultimately hegelian in its roots it wasn't really a child

01:16:27.820 a direct challenge on the state of truth uh it was it was in a different emphasis on certain aspects

01:16:36.940 of of the same truth i don't think that sort of traditional marxists and traditional capitalists

01:16:42.380 or adam smithites or laissez-faire capitalists actually see the world in terms of its core

01:16:48.140 fundamentals any differently from one another their big difference is who should who should

01:16:53.340 have control over the wealth and who should be in power that's the big difference none of that is

01:16:58.380 being discussed in this kind of analysis all of that class analysis is removed from it and there's

01:17:03.740 this advocacy for this individual uh discussion of your own truth and so your truth is just as

01:17:11.900 valid as my truth which is a dangerous thought when you start to apply that to the sciences

01:17:19.180 and engineering and so that's why this is so terrifying to me i guess i guess that i'm having

01:17:25.340 a bit of an epiphany here a bit of an insight into my own thinking and that maybe maybe that's why i

01:17:30.140 don't fit in very well with the traditional right uh well traditional right kind of just well whatever

01:17:35.020 the fiscal right i'll say fiscal conservatives and and very pro-business right because i don't

01:17:39.580 view the world in in those terms whatsoever i don't i don't think about labor and capital and

01:17:44.860 that sort of thing i kind of i'm very much more on a kind of low altitude concrete reality of like

01:17:49.980 what do what do people have in their own backyard and what do they kind of deal with every day

01:17:54.140 i kind of see all all wages that are below a living wage is exploitive in general um and that

01:18:00.780 you know just because we're paying our slaves more today doesn't mean that they're not slaves and

01:18:04.700 and that's not fair, and I don't understand why we would do that to people.

01:18:08.580 Simultaneously, I don't have a lot of time for rhetoric about religion being the opiate of the masses

01:18:13.960 and that sort of thing, because as far as I can tell, some religions at this point

01:18:18.880 are the only ones still saying things like, well, particularly my religion.

01:18:21.500 Like, for example, a woman's cycle is a beautiful thing,

01:18:24.860 and it shouldn't be altered with pharmaceuticals just to please the oligarchs in the economy

01:18:30.280 so she's more productive i don't i have a problem with that so so like i don't know like i kind of

01:18:37.160 i kind of wander around in the world not really understanding the language that's being spoken

01:18:40.880 by by kind of players on the left or the right on these questions because i i've always kind of had

01:18:46.560 a more human emphasis of like no like there's we're human beings we should probably start

01:18:50.580 reasoning from there we're not labor we're not capital we're not resources for people we're not

01:18:56.580 even necessarily the underclass or the oligarchs necessarily i use those terms because they're

01:19:00.300 familiar but like we're human beings first and we have to probably reason from there and it doesn't

01:19:05.680 seem like people do a lot of truck with that anymore i don't know why yeah i um i i think

01:19:12.760 and i'm just sort of speculating here but i think part of the reason why you hear some of this stuff

01:19:17.040 articulated in in these terms counter to how you see the world on both the left and the right is

01:19:21.740 is because interest in the ruling class that would like to reduce the wages of working class folks here at home

01:19:29.020 so we can try to compete on the manufacturing level with China and Cambodia,

01:19:34.180 they work simultaneously through the left and the right, 0.54

01:19:37.480 especially in a place like the U.S. where you've got only two real political parties,

01:19:42.140 both of which have equal representation and funding by and large from the richest sectors of society.

01:19:49.340 And many would argue the same basic dynamic exists here in Canada, given that only two parties have ever commanded a majority in the parliament.

01:20:00.880 And so, you know, they've got their ideologues in either camp.

01:20:05.640 And again, the goal is to try to keep working people divided.

01:20:09.780 That's always been the goal.

01:20:11.840 Because if you keep them divided, they don't unionize.

01:20:15.120 They may want higher wages, but without some level of coordination, they don't have the ability to negotiate them, at least not beyond sort of the few individuals that might be in the top tier of productivity and skill level, for instance.

01:20:33.280 And of course, you know, employers in big outfits like this, they're never really opposed to paying on a merit base people who perform the best high level because those people are always going to be the vast minority.

01:20:45.120 So it's always more expensive to try to pay everybody a bit more. But there are consequences in our economy for that in that if you reduce the amount of buying power that your consumer base has, you reduce your own ability to sell your own goods to a higher number of folks in your own market.

01:21:03.620 And so that's sort of the capitalistic contradiction that plays out. But on an individual basis, rich people or employers, they don't really worry about that because they don't hold responsibility for the economy. They only hold responsibility for their own firm.

01:21:18.760 and the and the role that they play and i've played this role myself at the top of some

01:21:23.840 organizations as well is to not sell the store not give away the store you have to try to

01:21:28.600 protect your your bottom line etc but if those folks are given the most power in society 0.92

01:21:34.360 then you start to see the the um the living conditions of working class folks go down and 0.99

01:21:41.900 all of the other negative aspects of that play out through the economy and and my thesis here 0.93

01:21:46.980 of course, as it often is, is that the most sophisticated way to keep workers divided in

01:21:53.000 the current epoch is to use this kind of racist identitarian ideology through unions, through

01:22:01.040 HR departments, to try to reduce the rates of unionization and worker organization. And it's

01:22:07.700 working to great effect. That's why it's being ramped up. And it's why the federal government

01:22:12.580 now on behalf of many of these corporations who are just as interested in trying to bring

01:22:16.920 manufacturing back here for populist reasons, but also understand in their mind that the

01:22:23.240 only way to do it is to reduce the domestic wages, are quite happy to fund this stuff

01:22:27.960 publicly with taxpayer dollars to roll it out and educate the unwashed masses, so to

01:22:34.520 speak.

01:22:36.800 What a strange world.

01:22:39.620 It is.

01:22:40.420 uh in many respects it's not strange but it's um because there's nothing really new happening here

01:22:48.020 i think what's so terrifying is the level of sophistication that this particular iteration of

01:22:54.340 it employs and and how it really is orwellian in so many ways and that it's it's introduced

01:23:01.100 as anti-racism and it's the most racist thing we've encountered it's it's described as inclusive

01:23:06.560 and yet it's the most divisive process we've ever encountered.

01:23:11.760 And I think the other side of it is that speaking of sophistication,

01:23:16.060 it's only possible, I remember this being a thesis

01:23:18.780 about the tyrannies of the 20th century and the totalitarian regimes.

01:23:23.900 It required mass communication.

01:23:26.080 It required the radio.

01:23:27.300 It required the film, the cinema.

01:23:30.100 Propaganda was a key element to all of the totalitarian regimes,

01:23:34.640 including the resistance of totalitarianism uh throughout the world that was key mass mass media

01:23:40.620 mass consumption media was important and so here we are at the same time again with uh now now with

01:23:46.840 you know devices in our homes that listen to us your phone listens to you if it's not in an rfid

01:23:52.200 bag right and you can and i mean you mentioned something i remember the other day that you know

01:23:57.280 i had to go and i get a particularly uh feminine use only product for my beloved just because she

01:24:03.640 she needed it uh and my phone immediately my phone immediately uh a day or two later began

01:24:09.600 showing me ads i'd never looked for that online or anything i just mentioned it out loud my phone

01:24:14.540 heard me and immediately began to send me ads for alleviating treatments for that particularly uh

01:24:21.440 female uh cross to bear but the but the thing is that it's just that's the time we live in it is

01:24:28.340 completely sophisticated so beyond our control the algorithms are running the asylum

01:24:32.900 and i don't i don't really know what the way out of that is except in a very much and maybe i'm

01:24:38.980 just too much of an apocalyptic or whatever on that count but i i very much see a bend back to

01:24:45.020 then you know kind of the homesteading the the get back into nature like even the way i opened

01:24:50.640 the show today i'm like you know what the federal election is coming turn off your tv and go outside

01:24:54.720 because nothing important is going to happen on tv for the next six weeks and it's the same thing

01:24:59.660 Just get outside, get involved with real people, have real conversations.

01:25:04.660 It's one of the things we try to do here on the show, obviously.

01:25:07.540 And we're not going to be slaves to the narrative.

01:25:11.960 Try and shape your own narrative.

01:25:13.720 I don't know if that sounds profound or not.

01:25:15.860 I'm not trying to sound profound.

01:25:17.060 I just don't understand why we're letting...

01:25:20.340 Again, it's that line from Aldous Huxley, right?

01:25:22.680 Man was made... 0.68

01:25:23.940 The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 0.55

01:25:25.980 like it everything's supposed to serve us not the other way around and why we've built a world that

01:25:32.040 is so fundamentally inhuman i don't really understand it doesn't seem like a lot of fun

01:25:36.200 yeah well and of course i mean my my reaction of course to what's happening is probably predictable

01:25:41.580 in that it took in order to develop these phones and a lot of the technology that's enabling this

01:25:48.020 kind of data collection actually took massive injections of public sector uh funds uh to be

01:25:53.380 to incubate these things which is largely why china is leading the world on this kind of

01:25:58.500 technology with 5g etc uh because they're far less inhibited than we are and certainly our

01:26:04.180 american friends uh in injecting mass amounts sort of in an incubation stage uh for technology

01:26:11.060 to try to produce this stuff what gets problematic is the way in which the private sector will use

01:26:16.260 this technology in in ways you're talking about it's absolutely true it's not conspiratorial at

01:26:20.740 all uh because they they admit it outright in their um in their terms of service documents which

01:26:26.600 you know i have a certain perverse tendency to read um that instagram if you have the instagram

01:26:33.260 app on your phone which is owned by facebook it's got its the microphone on your phone's on all the

01:26:38.260 time i mean if you uh if you say um you know if you got an apple phone and you say hey and i won't

01:26:44.180 say the word because it'll start sparking people's phones that are listening to this

01:26:47.280 uh you know she'll she'll respond to you well the reason she responds to you is because the

01:26:52.040 microphone's on all the time to be able to hear you they said microsoft was doing this back with

01:26:56.540 the xbox 360 when they had their little uh camera uh sitting on your on your living room table if

01:27:02.000 you said hey xbox then it would uh it would launch so once that microphone's on in your house all the

01:27:07.820 time uh corporations that are interested in getting better ad data from you uh will exploit

01:27:14.860 that and they sort of get around it by saying we're not actually listening to you there's no

01:27:18.720 human listening to you uh there's just an algorithm that is that is parsing your words

01:27:24.360 which is easy because it's just a text a speech to text uh script and then it pulls the words out

01:27:31.340 that relate to the advertising uh tags that they that they put on your profile and they start

01:27:36.040 spitting the ads to you so if you have the instagram app on your phone or or anything

01:27:40.140 related to facebook then your phone is actually listening to you all the time and it will play

01:27:45.380 these ads and i i can't tell you how many people have said the exact same thing to me uh describing

01:27:49.920 this situation um i'm not even really that as concerned about that i mean that's that's

01:27:55.920 concerning enough to me that i carry around a nokia 3310 i don't have a smartphone um but it's

01:28:02.160 not as concerning to me as governments that also then start using this technology uh and and apply

01:28:09.140 that data to to the files that they have on you and the decisions that they make based on your

01:28:13.520 ability to access public services this is what's happening in china right now this is what's

01:28:18.520 actually concerning about the huawei technology the 5g technology i don't believe all this stuff

01:28:23.880 that like they're going to control our brains with 5g waves and like there's nothing more detrimental

01:28:30.060 to our health physically uh in 5g technology than there is in 4 3 or 2g technology uh it's all a

01:28:37.040 type of radio wave it's just on a different frequency what is concerning about it is that

01:28:41.740 because the bandwidth is so much higher the ability for them to to extract more data from

01:28:46.520 our everyday lives and then feed that seamlessly into a government apparatus or in the case of

01:28:51.920 china their social credit score system is the most terrifying orwellian development um that we 0.85

01:28:59.820 that we've ever conceived of let alone uh seen manifest and that is what is actually like the 1.00

01:29:06.860 United States made the right decision when they resisted the implementation of Huawei technology

01:29:13.240 in North America. I mean, China would literally have direct access to this kind of data coming

01:29:20.900 directly off our phones. It would go right into the Chinese government. So they can collect that

01:29:25.580 kind of data on politicians, they can collect it on state officials, they can collect it on people

01:29:30.860 that are dealing with classified sensitive information, etc. So we very rightly are worried

01:29:37.540 about it. Here in BC, I mean, like politically, we would have, if the Americans hadn't said anything,

01:29:42.960 I mean, TELUS was already pretty much full way down the road of adopting Huawei technology and

01:29:46.920 still really wants to. And this is a terrifying development. I mean, I keep saying terrifying,

01:29:54.920 I don't want people to lie awake at night. There are ways to get around it. But as we move into this new era of vaccine passports and governments who, in our experience, describe themselves as democratic, but are looking across the Pacific at China going, ah, you know, we kind of like the ability that the Chinese Communist Party has to conduct surveillance on its own population.

01:30:21.140 uh they're not going to be able to resist the urge to go down that same road that's what we 0.87

01:30:25.940 have to be most vigilant about absolutely i think i think again too when it comes to the question of

01:30:31.640 what's going on in china it what's what doesn't seem to make sense to or at least not be registering

01:30:36.960 with a lot of people in in the rest of the world certainly with the politicians who are in in thrall

01:30:42.040 of china is why why are they making the moves they're making like they're going into the

01:30:49.600 Spratly Islands and South China Sea for a reason 1.00

01:30:51.700 they're rounding up the Uyghurs for a reason 1.00

01:30:53.840 they're using organs for a reason 1.00

01:30:55.820 they're implementing social scores

01:30:57.780 for a reason, like they are

01:30:59.040 they are going to become perfect totalitarians

01:31:02.060 and

01:31:03.020 one of the ways that

01:31:05.740 we used to resist totalitarians is that it was

01:31:07.780 imperfect and it was largely

01:31:09.500 based in ego, Stalin had an ego

01:31:11.940 Hitler had an ego, Mussolini

01:31:13.740 had an ego and there was a way to 0.79

01:31:15.640 kind of outflank that on a very human

01:31:17.720 level again when the algorithms are running the system how do you how do you break the algorithm

01:31:23.160 of tyranny but not even the the program developer is around anymore he's been he's been rounded up

01:31:28.920 by the algorithm yeah and uh you know there's similar stories we could probably even pull one

01:31:35.960 up i remember seeing a couple weeks ago amazon is starting to employ this stuff as well to the point

01:31:40.360 where they're integrating algorithms to uh they're designing algorithms to take over hr functions so

01:31:46.200 there was this one story of this older fella who I think he was in his 60s or early 70s,

01:31:51.720 but he was a good worker and he was a delivery guy for Amazon. And when he'd been working there

01:31:57.320 for, I think, seven years or something like that and been pretty good, had one off day and gets

01:32:00.680 a gets an automated email from the AI telling him that he's just been dismissed because of poor

01:32:06.280 performance. And I mean, this is now at the point where we're going to use AI to make these very

01:32:15.080 human decisions that have real consequences potentially life and death consequences

01:32:20.920 and it's always going to be corporations that are on the on the front end of this stuff that

01:32:25.640 are on the bleeding edge of it and they're always going to use it to try to dehumanize

01:32:30.280 aspects of the working class and and the workforce and to try to remove themselves from having to

01:32:35.720 make those decisions because if you know if jeff bezos can say well i didn't fire anybody the hr

01:32:42.280 system did then you know presumably he can avoid the the fault for it and maybe some of the ire

01:32:47.660 um but that's not is that the kind of society we want to live it you know i i really hope not

01:32:53.920 because it's the one we are living in we're living this dystopia well but and that's just it like i

01:33:00.840 mean how much further down this hole do you want to go that's that's what's kind of mind-boggling

01:33:05.440 to me is that it's it's like there's got to be a way to reverse this i mean it's the same argument

01:33:10.760 we get into a talk about like the mismanagement of our forests in british columbia we talk about

01:33:16.100 the mismanagement of the economy it like there is an alternative way forward i mean wac bennett

01:33:23.520 proved that it's not it's not just even grandiose socializing nationalizing of various items it's

01:33:29.340 it is even if we have all this energy to start teaching critical race theory we must have the

01:33:35.300 energy to try and create a national story that inspires people to want to do more for their

01:33:42.080 country or or even if we're going to be good sovereignists on this channel like i mean there's

01:33:47.420 got to be it's the old argument of like if you had enough if you had enough energy to fight about it

01:33:52.600 or enough energy to argue with me right you're in an argument with your other half or with your

01:33:56.760 with with your child and they and they don't have the upper hand they they are they are wrong it's

01:34:01.920 like, well, instead of arguing about it, we could be done already, right? Like, that's always the

01:34:06.020 thing. You could have pushed all your effort into the wrong direction, or you could have just turned

01:34:09.780 it around and pushed it into the right direction. I'm not saying it would be a net zero. I'm not

01:34:13.380 saying, I'm not saying it is easy to do virtue, as easy to do virtue as it is to do vice, but

01:34:19.100 one has to wonder how we've gone so far down the rail, like, like, just off the rails that,

01:34:25.800 that we really will put effort into things that we know are bad for us and and won't and won't

01:34:32.760 turn around and i guess you could use the word repent if you want but but just nonetheless

01:34:37.120 acknowledge that this isn't going to work and we need to do something different

01:34:40.360 yeah like it philosophically it comes down to whether you see the state as the ultimate entity

01:34:49.640 that must be protected and advanced at the expense of individuals or whether you see individuals and

01:34:57.160 their collective manifestations as superior to the state or at least more important than the

01:35:03.360 interest of the state. China is decidedly on the side of the state and quite openly. I mean,

01:35:09.980 I actually read the Xi Jinping Thought books. He's released a couple of books. They're extremely

01:35:16.520 repetitive, mainly just a collection of his speeches, to try to get some understanding

01:35:20.460 of sort of what they mean by the Belt and Road Initiative, etc.

01:35:23.300 And, I mean, he very much is a direct continuation of, as a demarcation, like, in some respects,

01:35:33.540 a demarcation from where Deng Xiaoping took things after Mao Zedong, but he really is

01:35:38.880 this embodiment of Mao Zedong thought, in which the state must be elevated above, like

01:35:45.740 the continuation of the state the glory of the state is our prime consideration and there's some

01:35:50.580 historical uh merit to this from the perspective of Chinese folks I think in that you know they

01:35:56.920 talk a lot about and and and the president of China of course talks a lot about the historical

01:36:01.920 century of shame in which China sees itself to have been subjugated by uh colonial powers

01:36:08.060 western powers uh and removed from its position of sort of the patron state if I can put it that way

01:36:14.940 of all other asian countries which for centuries had paid tribute into china so they've been 0.92

01:36:19.260 removed from that post and everything that's in xi jinping's um uh positioning is to try to 0.88

01:36:27.600 re-establish china as uh having been removed or merged from the century of shame to retake its

01:36:34.780 place not just as the patron state of asia but indeed of the world now this stuff like i don't

01:36:42.860 get as alarmed about that as a lot of other people do a lot of people look at this stuff and they go

01:36:46.580 see like this is the evidence of the conspiracy well it's no it's not really a conspiracy it's

01:36:50.640 just sort of the aspirations of a state that happens culturally to put the state ahead of

01:36:54.500 the individual but we also hear the americans always talking about doing what's in the best

01:37:00.440 interest of american interests in fact their foreign policy the justification for the bombs

01:37:05.140 they drop on uh most places the justification for destabilizing libya by taking al-marq qaddafi

01:37:10.840 the justification is always that we have to do what's in in the interests of of americans so

01:37:16.900 there's nothing really different about that what is different is that the average american

01:37:21.740 and most politicians would never elevate the american state and the interest of the state

01:37:30.080 above those of the individual people like me may argue that they do in practice and in fact canada

01:37:35.100 doesn't practice but at least in the rhetoric they don't do that in china the rhetoric is all about

01:37:40.380 the importance of the state the glory of the state etc and so you see in all of these urban

01:37:45.640 villages in china that are being wiped off the map and there's like these very heroic instances of

01:37:50.380 of these people who refuse to sell their the only property rights they have in china to the state in

01:37:56.080 order to put these big high rises up for the for the burgeoning class of rich people uh they're

01:38:01.440 getting into these very violent confrontations with the construction crews is why you see all

01:38:05.320 these pictures in china of they call them these uh what do they call them nail houses because

01:38:09.780 there's just like this one multi-story building surrounded by rubble because you got this one

01:38:14.680 person that wouldn't wouldn't leave right uh and we we can expropriate things here in canada as

01:38:21.940 well um and in fact arguably that's sort of what's happening in the piece uh but at the very least

01:38:28.040 there's this effort to try to you know you have to compensate folks and it is there there are more

01:38:32.980 rights afforded to those who are trying to resist that um but that's the main cultural difference

01:38:37.440 But I would argue, in many respects, the Chinese are just more open and honest about it than we are.

01:38:43.020 It doesn't mean that that's the way to go, however.

01:38:46.000 And I know that advocates of freedom, for instance, will always resist efforts by the state and the bureaucracy of the state to try to elevate the interest of the state over that of the individual citizens.

01:38:55.700 I think it's important to note historically as well, something I cite a lot to my fellow papists often, is that the state was founded specifically as a way of resisting the religious violence that had overtaken Europe in the post-Reformation period, in the Thirty Years' War, which saw perhaps as much as 30% of the population, at least of Germany, decimated.

01:39:20.720 but but the the thing that has to always remember be remembered is that the state was erected

01:39:27.240 to be an amoral secular non non values based only only answering to itself not answering to a pope

01:39:36.080 or a bishop or or to a higher power only answering to itself first in the in the supremacy of the

01:39:41.060 sovereign then into the supremacy of its parliaments and its and its legislatures uh

01:39:46.620 that was what it was built for it was not it was specifically built to resist moral argument and

01:39:55.260 and theological argument and um and well not supernatural but but you know the metaphysical

01:40:02.240 arguments around the you know the dignity of man and the rest of it it you always use those

01:40:06.740 principles in its rhetoric and i mean the family united states is clear so is the founding of

01:40:11.080 France, the refounding of France after the revolution. All these things are clear. We use

01:40:16.400 it in rhetoric all the time. But ultimately, the state is built to answer only to itself alone and

01:40:21.460 to seek its own preservation at the cost of all else. Yeah, but you're right. And what's so

01:40:28.360 troubling about the left today is that, you know, I think there was an understanding of this back in

01:40:33.660 the time of the Bolsheviks. I think Lenin actually, you know, for whatever faults might be attributed

01:40:37.360 to him and the authoritarianism that he ushered in uh understood that the state at least in his

01:40:43.120 rhetoric prior to the revolution understood that the state should wither away um or at the very

01:40:47.960 least the state should not uh be ballooned into this thing that is contrary to what you've described

01:40:54.320 in that it actually is now imposing moralistic arguments onto people and that's what we're

01:40:58.400 saying today is that the left looks at the state uh and they want to attribute to the state all

01:41:06.040 sorts of questions that impose on our own individual lives freedoms etc they want to

01:41:11.860 turn this state into this massive leviathan that doesn't just provide you know a better rate on

01:41:18.540 social programs like child care or dental or universal health care but also now tells us that

01:41:24.340 we individually are racist even though we don't know we're racist because we can't recognize it

01:41:29.360 yesterday's yesterday's guest said the arbiters of conscience and consciousness the way that we

01:41:34.900 conceive of our very selves it's a very good way to put it and the left is driving this uh and it's

01:41:40.580 and it and the left never used to drive this stuff i mean the left uh definitely used to talk about

01:41:45.660 like you know we've been accused of being large status because we do want to add to the uh to the

01:41:50.800 service provision that comes from the states in terms of social programs but the what the left

01:41:55.400 has not been able to resist effectively and in fact has encouraged is this massive ballooning

01:42:00.880 of this Leviathan apparatus that invades our personal lives

01:42:05.280 and tries to impose cultural norms on people and make these masks.

01:42:08.840 And then if you get a group of people that want to radically change

01:42:11.380 the cultural norms, like, say, you know,

01:42:14.300 make all sorts of new declarations on gender

01:42:16.440 and really challenge the fundamental tenets of biology

01:42:21.040 and molecular biology, the state can now be wielded

01:42:25.520 as the main spear in being able to do that.

01:42:28.580 That's a terrifying development.

01:42:30.600 It's not the first time that it's happened in society.

01:42:32.720 And in fact, this is, you know, this is why I view the Maoist tendency with such distaste is that that was, you know, one of the first examples of, you know, this cultural aberration, this imposition of a new culture, of a determined culture on the populace through the state with terrifying results.

01:42:56.420 And from my perspective, really nothing Marxist about it.

01:43:00.160 uh but that that's why i understand sort of the right-wing critique of what we're seeing in

01:43:04.720 universities and nhr departments and through unions etc in describing this as a form of

01:43:10.160 cultural marxism it's really more of a form of cultural maoism uh than anything else and most

01:43:14.960 most marxists uh are as worried about this as as anyone else and i think to your point i i would

01:43:22.560 just qualify that i i have no i have no illusions about the state's ability to impose its own

01:43:28.080 values it just answers to no one else's and i would argue that the great irony is that if and

01:43:34.000 i think orwell would actually have to admit this as well because he does in pieces of 1984 he talks

01:43:38.640 about in his conception obviously the total the total supremacy of of the the roman catholic

01:43:45.840 church at the height of the middle ages and the kind of theocracy that it operated in and then

01:43:50.720 of course the what came after it with the inquisition um and and but i would say the

01:43:56.480 The irony is that while it might have taken three times as long before,

01:44:01.260 it took 1,500 years to get to that point,

01:44:03.920 then the Protestant Reformation changed things.

01:44:05.960 It's only taken 500 years since then to enter a new theocracy.

01:44:09.720 What is climate change but a cosmology about our sin with the world?

01:44:14.300 What are climate taxes, carbon taxes but indulgences?

01:44:17.820 What was COVID and all the control but a new kind of, you know,

01:44:22.560 a demonology to talk about this virus ever so mysterious

01:44:26.420 it would show up out of nowhere, it would come, it would go

01:44:28.660 who knew where it was, who knew what it

01:44:30.680 could do, and then of course our

01:44:32.660 high priestesses throughout 0.97

01:44:33.960 all of our provincial

01:44:36.580 health authorities, they would

01:44:38.460 declare things safe or things unsafe

01:44:40.680 they would open the gates and close the

01:44:42.680 gates, what you bind in heaven shall be bound

01:44:44.760 on earth, and so this is the

01:44:46.660 world we live in, we live in a secular theocracy

01:44:48.740 now, and I would say this, at least 0.99

01:44:50.800 the non-secular theocracy 0.88

01:44:52.680 the formerly sacred theocracy produced 0.94

01:44:54.520 some very beautiful art

01:44:55.740 and some nice churches uh some incredible music we still sing today i don't really know what

01:45:02.480 secular theocracy is giving us other than terrible sitcoms and uh and diabetes as and and a huge

01:45:09.780 amount of fear and neurosis yeah and and a new way to live apparently and to viewer view ourselves 0.81

01:45:16.000 through a radically different gender lens um but this is uh you know this is the conclusion that

01:45:22.680 these folks have drawn that the state can be transformed and wheeled into an instrument to

01:45:26.980 impose these ways of viewing the world and you know you can speculate that they might be successful

01:45:34.300 it's not impossible for them to be successful and many would regard uh i mean like things are so

01:45:40.020 different just in the last five years in my estimation especially in the labor relations

01:45:44.120 world in terms of the omnipresence of this kind of theory um that it's a real testament to how

01:45:50.700 fast this stuff can spread and how dangerous it can become. Um, but that they've obviously made

01:45:55.640 this, uh, determination that this is the way to impose this stuff, but whether you agree with it

01:46:00.440 or not, um, it, it poses some real consequences, uh, because it's just not the case, despite the

01:46:08.880 degree to which the sort of upper middle-class white liberals who propagate this stuff as much

01:46:13.600 as they do believe that they're speaking on behalf and for the interests of, you know, the,

01:46:18.420 the disenfranchised people of color and disability and differing gender and sexual orientation,

01:46:25.540 they're really only speaking for themselves. And through their efforts and through the

01:46:31.120 transformation of the state, their ultimate goal, whether they're aware of it or not,

01:46:34.640 is to keep all those folks divided. All of the things that you've mentioned in terms of what,

01:46:38.480 you know, as you term it, secular theocracy has produced,

01:46:42.380 uh what of what among those things have done anything to increase the amount of

01:46:48.920 what i would describe as solidarity between working class people spanning religion and

01:46:53.900 race and gender and sexuality nothing it's done only the opposite to keep folks divided and that

01:46:59.760 there is the best indication of what the real program is you always look at who's benefiting

01:47:04.800 and and what the what the result is and and the result is not greater solidarity amongst working

01:47:11.480 class people quite the opposite um it's like lennon said right you look at who benefits and

01:47:17.740 i am the walrus no donnie no

01:47:20.080 so good now it's a bit of a rough transition but we should probably make some reference to this uh

01:47:34.080 uh it's a bit of a disaster actually this this crane collapse in the crane collapse yeah do you

01:47:40.580 Do you have a link for me on that one or do I just fire it up?

01:47:43.500 I don't. I had a whole bunch of video links and none of them played out because of a formatting issue.

01:47:52.560 But I think this happened Monday morning, so it's not the newest news, but quite concerning.

01:47:58.940 I'd be surprised if there are people out there that haven't heard of this.

01:48:02.160 But a crane owned by an organization called Mission Group, which does this kind of work in Kelowna, although the actual crane operation was subcontracted to another company, which to my knowledge hasn't been named, the boom section of it just fell and collapsed all over the building.

01:48:19.660 the really unfortunate part about it was that there were people on the boom there were people

01:48:26.080 on the I don't know if it's called the stem which didn't collapse was still sort of in a shaky way

01:48:30.800 attached to hanging off the building and then there were people on the ground upon whom the

01:48:36.920 boom fell so on the first day they had announced there had been one casualty as a result of this

01:48:41.760 it's probably easy to pull up a picture of it the by the second day they had announced four deaths

01:48:47.900 and one person still missing under the rubble.

01:48:51.640 And I think it had been confirmed since then

01:48:53.560 that the fifth person was also found dead rather predictably.

01:48:58.360 So just a total disaster.

01:49:00.760 It reminds me of, if you're familiar with the Bentall Tower

01:49:04.140 in Vancouver downtown, I think probably back in the 80s

01:49:08.660 when that was being built, there was a similar disaster

01:49:10.820 where I think a platform fell right off the top of the building

01:49:14.020 and I think there were four or five people killed there as well.

01:49:16.600 and I mean that was so significant at the time that every year people from the different trade

01:49:22.160 unions show up to commemorate that site etc they do like a ceremony I don't know if we'll see the

01:49:27.780 same thing in Kelowna but really kind of troubling that this a disaster that this kind of scale can

01:49:36.740 can take place on a worksite like that and so I went through and sort of try to parse some of the

01:49:41.640 statements made because the ceo did a press conference like that day uh and and i had some

01:49:46.960 video clips but uh like i said they didn't come through but but he was asked it was i was surprised

01:49:51.440 to see him do the press conference actually on the day normally they clam up and don't say very much

01:49:55.840 so i guess you know we can credit him with doing that but he was predictably asked some tough

01:49:59.720 questions like um you know are you going to pay for any medical costs that might not be covered

01:50:05.320 or some support for families that depended on the income of the folks that were killed and

01:50:08.980 And, of course, the company sort of backed – the CEO backed off of making that commitment.

01:50:14.920 What will happen in this case – oh, and the other question was, well, is the job unionized, and it was not.

01:50:20.060 So you'll probably hear in some quarters in the labor movement this predictable response that, well, if they had been union, this wouldn't have happened.

01:50:28.920 Obviously, that's not necessarily true, although you could probably make the argument that statistically safety considerations and safety regulations are followed more strictly on unionized environments.

01:50:38.880 because unionized environments tend to have stronger health and safety committees.

01:50:43.540 They tend to sort of follow the rules of it better

01:50:45.400 because they're written in a contract in addition to other pieces of legislation.

01:50:48.620 But these kind of disasters can happen on a unionized environment.

01:50:51.820 In fact, they have.

01:50:52.860 Like I said, the Benthal Tower was definitely a unionized job site.

01:50:58.300 What's more concerning is that what I really hope doesn't happen

01:51:03.320 is that the families that are probably seeking some redress

01:51:05.520 don't get caught up in this bureaucratic garbage 0.90

01:51:09.280 where their employer mission group 0.98

01:51:11.920 tries to blame it on the contractor

01:51:13.780 who was the direct employer,

01:51:14.880 doesn't take any responsibility from it.

01:51:16.600 And then the contractor tries to say,

01:51:18.440 well, it was a mission group site,

01:51:20.820 so we're not responsible either.

01:51:22.080 And these folks are just sort of left in the balance.

01:51:25.800 But it's quite troubling.

01:51:27.960 They had to shut the whole downtown core down,

01:51:30.780 I think for the better part of two or three days.

01:51:32.840 and it puts a real chill not just on the job site but a bit of a chill on the industry as well

01:51:40.220 so what will probably happen is WCB will conduct some kind of a investigation and the company will

01:51:45.640 probably get some kind of a fine and and most of us will probably think the fine isn't isn't

01:51:51.000 significant enough but the other interesting piece here is if this had happened in the U.S.

01:51:55.280 where they don't have like a workers compensation system like we do each individual employee or

01:52:01.840 family that's surviving would be able to sue that employer directly potentially for much more money

01:52:10.000 and that's one of the criticisms that even comes from the left of the workers compensation system

01:52:15.200 in british columbia is that it's a it's mandatory for the employer to pay premiums into it the

01:52:21.280 result of it is that the injured or killed or surviving family of killed workers they've we

01:52:29.400 forego our right we have no right to be able to sue the employer directly so you're kind of limited

01:52:35.560 in terms of redress to whatever wcb decides they're going to give you and that may or may

01:52:40.020 not come out of whatever fine they assign to the company and they may not assign a very large fine

01:52:44.320 to the company so we'll have to watch this and see see how it transpires but it sort of exposes

01:52:50.800 some of the peculiarities about british columbia and how it plays out yeah no it's uh it's a sad

01:52:58.260 note to end on but all we can do is uh hope for a safer environment in the future and uh to pray

01:53:05.300 for those who've passed aaron thank you so much for joining us today of course uh and thank you

01:53:11.220 for spending the whole time with us uh we'll be back on our regular schedule next week i believe

01:53:15.780 but uh thank you and we'll bring you up to speed shortly always a pleasure all right and i think

01:53:23.060 that as we kind of

01:53:24.240 head off into the weekend

01:53:26.900 here, that's the end of Mountain Standard

01:53:28.940 time for this week. Again, I

01:53:31.000 would like to reiterate that

01:53:32.780 if there's going to be a federal election

01:53:36.860 very shortly, we're all going to get

01:53:38.940 overdosed with all sorts of political things

01:53:41.060 that are

01:53:43.100 just totally irrelevant. And there's

01:53:45.100 no need

01:53:47.000 to pile on. So I'm going to

01:53:49.100 end off with no

01:53:50.400 grandiose statement, no exhortation

01:53:53.060 education except to say that please please get outside take your kids uh enjoy uh what we have

01:54:00.020 as a blessing in this country no matter what region you're in of it there's a beautiful part

01:54:03.540 to this country i've been i've been into the north even the bleakest parts of the north

01:54:06.740 have beautiful pieces to them so head outside and uh enjoy enjoy the weather while you can

01:54:12.900 and uh try and shake off uh what's been surrounding us these last few months with the lockdowns and

01:54:19.640 restrictions, now the fires

01:54:21.440 and the cultural divides

01:54:23.660 we're facing. Get out there.

01:54:25.780 If you see another human being, be friendly

01:54:27.260 and enjoy what

01:54:29.140 we have as our stewardship

01:54:31.500 and our heritage on this planet

01:54:33.520 we call Earth. In any case,

01:54:35.520 thank you so much for tuning in today. We'll be back

01:54:37.620 again, 9 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m.

01:54:39.880 Mountain, next

01:54:41.700 Tuesday. This was Mountain Standard

01:54:43.560 Time. Thank you for watching.

01:54:49.640 Thank you.

Western Standard - July 16, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - July 15, 2021

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript