Aaron Ekman joins us to talk about the devastating wildfires that have ravaged British Columbia, the federal election on the horizon, and much, much more. Also, we have our weekly news roundup and our endorsement of Resistance Coffee.
00:06:34.380As 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.
00:06:50.340Also in the next five years, 30,000 new high-quality spaces will be created.
00:06:56.680By the end of next year, the average child care fees for BC parents will be cut in half.
00:07:02.540And there will be more than $12,000 $10 a day spaces available.
00:07:11.160And I want to add to all of those parents and families watching us across the country right now,
00:07:18.380wondering 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.
00:07:32.540What 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.
00:07:46.260Well, 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.
00:07:58.280It 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.
00:08:15.920In 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?
00:08:28.160And his only answer that he can muster is, oh, we're working on it.
00:08:51.220It all started with health care, obviously, at the federal level back in the 60s.
00:08:55.600But, you know, 50, 60 years on, it's kind of like the provinces won't do anything unless the feds show up.
00:09:01.380The feds won't do anything unless the provinces show up.
00:09:03.220So all of a sudden, everything becomes a not bipartisan, but it's always two levels of government, always.
00:09:12.020And sometimes I guess I guess that makes sense for certain aspects.
00:09:14.900But I never thought child care would suddenly become a federal issue.
00:09:19.360Well, this is the biggest indication to me that we're not going to ever see this,
00:09:23.100that the NDP, the BC NDP has never really had any clear plan aside from it being funded
00:09:30.500substantially by the federal government, getting federal dollars into the project to be able to
00:09:36.080put anything together that is a sort of a made in BC and a funded through by British Columbians
00:09:41.660plant, which is worrisome considering that the liberals never follow through on any of their
00:09:47.480commitments, especially the ones that are made a few, you know, a few months or weeks away from a
00:09:51.960from a rent drop so this is what's so frustrating and I think you and I can you know sort of debate
00:09:59.020the merits of this program in any case and probably many of your viewers would would disagree with me
00:10:03.460that I think that it makes sense to actually pursue from an economics perspective from an
00:10:08.520economic standpoint the health of the economy of the province to pursue a universal child care
00:10:14.100plan because one of one of the things that's keeping people out of the workforce if you're
00:10:19.060small business owner for instance and your concern is the is the price of labor well one of the things
00:10:25.540that affects the main indicator of the price of labor is supply and demand labor is treated in
00:10:31.060this kind of economy like a commodity and so the price of it increases and decreases based on what
00:10:36.900the supply of it is well if child care is so expensive that it no longer makes sense financially
00:10:42.660for one parent to go to work because they could literally you know they don't make as much money
00:10:48.740necessarily with all of the costs associated with having to get to and from work you got to insure
00:10:52.580another car probably especially if you're in the interior you and depending on what your wage is
00:10:57.220or your salary you may not be making enough to justify putting uh somebody in you know one of
00:11:03.300your or more children in child care it may make more economic sense for your family to have
00:11:07.940somebody at home well that causes the supply of labor to decrease and so the price of labor goes
00:11:13.780up. If it's a single parent family, obviously it's very challenging to be
00:11:17.320able to work and especially if you don't have a lot of professional skills,
00:11:22.840for instance, and you generally do unskilled labor, lower wage labor, it's
00:11:27.820almost impossible to raise a child as well. So there are, from my perspective
00:11:31.480anyway, and people can disagree with me, economic benefits for this program, but
00:11:35.160when the BCNDP first came in 2017, their campaign plank was attend at
00:11:41.080basically a five-year, I think it was a 10-year runway on this $10 plan, which means, you know,
00:11:47.300how many terms do they have to win to complete this? So it's just such a, you know, far in the
00:11:52.420distance pipe dream. And then this latest edition of a promise from the federal government right
00:11:59.260before an election that they're going to fund it with no details. And the only real tangible in it
00:12:04.200is we're working on it. Trust us. It's just another indication to me that we're never going
00:12:09.580see this in british columbia irrespective of you know whether the merits of it are there or not
00:12:14.940from your perspective or others i mean i've always come down on the side of obviously there was a bc
00:12:21.820politics panel that was being run by stewart for a time um which has also been cancelled thanks to
00:12:26.540some of thanks to the green party now um every party on the left is slowly but surely uh attacking
00:12:31.980our beloved friend uh but but what's happened is uh when we were having that discussion about
00:12:37.420child care there was uh let's see i there was of course an ndp there was a green there was a
00:12:45.120bc liberal and then myself and we're kind of all talking about different officers they all
00:12:49.500talked about some kind of you know spaces set aside publicly funded spaces in one way or another
00:12:54.680or private non-profits all sorts of like kind of third way things i'm all i'm all on the other side
00:13:00.120of like well i say we just be able to like if you want to stay at home with your child that should
00:13:04.920be a living wage i don't know what's wrong with that um if we wanted to i think in a way probably
00:13:10.320a way that would get more social conservatives on side is if with with something like universal
00:13:16.000basic income is that if you basically said well there is a universal basic income and i mean you
00:13:21.720don't have to say it that way for those of us who are socially conservative it's like and it's for
00:13:24.700mothers of children um rather but of course obviously in our world we could say it is for
00:13:30.780the spouse who stays home and takes care of the child and children that that would probably bridge
00:13:37.340the gap between the two worlds in a sense because really the idea that everybody needs the universal
00:13:41.720basic into them is not something that a lot of more fiscally conservative people can kind of
00:13:45.360swallow they're like well no there's work and there's a way of making a living etc but at the
00:13:50.740same time again a lot of people regardless of their of their particular philosophical leanings
00:13:55.960I'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.
00:14:07.840That that makes sense. And the reason that it doesn't happen anymore is that wages have stagnated.
00:14:13.040So 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.
00:14:24.700that that would get a lot of people on side i think both left and right yeah i think it ceases
00:14:31.140to be a universal basic income the moment you try to means test it based on one particular attribute
00:14:36.100like being a mother for instance uh which is why you know i i support a universal basic income
00:14:42.440across the board and i think a lot of conservatives do as well for some of the reasons that you've
00:14:46.360mentioned in that it enables a family or a couple for instance who are thinking of having children
00:14:52.560to make a determination easier on whether or not they want to use that as to replace income that
00:15:02.120they're foregoing because they're deciding to stay at home to look after a child. And if they
00:15:07.200decide that they want to work in any case, because a basic income isn't enough for them, which,
00:15:12.300you know, basic income is not meant to really be enough to keep everybody in the lifestyle that
00:15:16.720they want to live in necessarily. It's just meant to be able to cover the bare necessities.
00:15:20.120They 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.
00:15:31.600That'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.
00:15:44.620And 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.
00:16:11.460don't need any of that if it's universal it goes anyway and remember child care isn't uh i don't
00:16:17.100think it's solely a woman's issue a woman's issue i think it there's lots of uh men that
00:16:22.520are both in relationships where they're the primary caregiver there's also single dads
00:16:27.280and so you know again it makes it easier and i think more economic uh to employ a basic income
00:16:35.520that doesn't require that kind of kinds of means testing and let people decide how they want to
00:16:38.940spend the money uh and and i think it makes makes sense in that regard i definitely think means
00:16:44.800testing can be a waste of a waste of money but of course the mean the means that i'm looking at
00:16:49.160there is is pretty direct obviously in another time you know in duplacis quebec it'd just be
00:16:54.440like well there's only two genders and the gender that is the childbearing one is the one that gets
00:17:00.660the income so that's a different time we don't have that time anymore and so that in our age i
00:17:05.200guess again we would look at to who is the primary caregiver not unlike what we do when it comes to
00:17:10.060the elderly and all the tax credits we have with that um i think to your point that something else
00:17:15.060might be lost if universal basic income is imposed and and all the rest of that i do i do think a lot
00:17:20.820of these things need to be tied up together but we also look at like the way we build out from
00:17:25.300places and kind of kind of the meta infrastructure the way people conceive of things right so there's
00:17:29.920a policy that's ever announced but policies are announced or logistical items are built right
00:17:34.860you know big big infrastructure is is done and and people build out from that so in america you
00:17:42.040have this thing it's called the interstate the most brilliant idea ever conceived when it comes
00:17:45.800to traffic you don't have stop signs on it you don't have lights on it it cruises along and you
00:17:51.320have on ramps and off ramps and that's how traffic remains steady that doesn't mean it's working
00:17:56.020everywhere they need to improve it in a lot of places it's falling apart it hasn't been properly
00:17:59.280maintain but the concept is sound in canada of course because if your road butts into provincial
00:18:06.140and federal highways you get a portion of the funding there is no motivation to take an on-ramp
00:18:12.920off-ramp approach to funding so people build out from the highway you to get a piece of the federal
00:18:19.140or provincial money when it comes to highway taxes and gas taxes and that sort of thing
00:18:22.760to the same point i would say that when it comes to this question of universal basic income or even
00:18:28.000when it comes to the question of kind of
00:18:55.740to agree on on kind of the nuanced way
00:18:57.780of saying it or how it might be politically correct to say it the reality on the ground is
00:19:01.420it looks like we try to fund motherhood one way or another either through the actual benefit
00:19:06.640or through alimony etc so there's something happens there so we already build this this way
00:19:12.080why don't we just be more honest about it back up a step and say well if you want to do the
00:19:17.560universal basic income if you want to try and figure out child care in general it's not that
00:19:21.660it's just motherhood it's it's it's the spouse whose primary job is the primary job primary
00:19:28.240is primarily tasked with caretaking of children and that's what we're going to fund and if we fund
00:19:33.440that a lot of family questions can get built out from there in a more sustainable way because you
00:19:38.480just know you know that this person's fully funded now it's up to everybody else to kind of
00:19:43.280in their orbit know know how to take care of the rest of the cost of the family yeah again i'm
00:19:49.560And 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.
00:19:59.540But 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.
00:20:11.040If 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.
00:20:19.560or employment environment in the province then you'd be really worried that it's dependent on
00:20:26.520federal contributions because they're not going to last forever and so a program like this has
00:20:31.480to be funded uh separate from the feds i think because it's just not i mean you're right that
00:20:40.440in order to roll this out from province to province there absolutely has to be buy-in from
00:20:44.280the province because because of the jurisdictional divides and presumably a
00:20:51.740number of provinces might look at a successful rollout in BC and go yeah
00:20:55.380that actually makes sense we want to do that too in which case BC is now
00:20:59.500fighting other provinces for this this federal funding because there's going to
00:21:05.220be a limit on how much it can it can expand and again if our if our program
00:21:10.500here in BC is dependent on that funding well then it's not a sustainable model
00:21:13.980so it doesn't matter whether you're in favor of this or not what they're promising us is just
00:21:19.040election bluster and there's no way in my estimation that they'll be able to pull it off
00:21:23.280and it and it's also evident in how they uh how they market his trip here right so i've got it
00:21:29.680you know there's a couple of pictures here of of john and justin uh sort of cultivating this
00:21:35.340cult of bromance that they that they both share on the day that uh that justin was in the province
00:21:41.860so there's there's two there one's john and justin there's another one with the two of them at lunch
00:21:46.020and these photos were floating around so we can put one up i just want want to show you the degree
00:21:52.100to which these guys are really kind of cultivating this this bromance between each other so hey look
00:21:57.780at that they're having triple o's this is the second one yeah they're uh you know so great
00:22:03.140great pains going towards making sure the photographers catch them having these tender
00:22:08.420moments with each other that is the other one of them doing the the elbow bump let's see if i can
00:22:15.060find that one just a second john lunch john justin no that's the same one again hold on see if i can
00:22:28.260find it yeah i mean it's not that big of a deal but there you go this one hold on
00:22:39.540there we go yeah a bit anticlimactic but um this always surprises me everybody's doing these
00:22:48.620these elbow bumps it's like you're actually closer to each other than you would be if you
00:22:51.860were shaking hands but anyway um there's a third one there because every time this is what i find
00:22:57.840so funny every time the prime minister comes in and has these you know this this great uh rapport
00:23:04.740with the with the premier and they cultivate this cult of bromance as i like to call it
00:23:09.260you sort of sense coming out of burnaby where jagmeet singh has his writing a little bit of
00:23:14.260jealousy because as everybody knows the federal and the provincial ndp parties are technically
00:23:19.280linked to each other so if you're a member of one you become a member of the other automatically
00:23:23.880so so on the same day i think there was this obligatory post by the premier of
00:23:31.340uh jagmeet singh who for whatever reason you know came over at the ferry on the same day that the
00:23:38.220prime minister was there or i don't i don't know if it was the same day that they were both in town
00:23:41.640or whether they were just saving this picture up so he could post the obligatory no i'm not
00:23:45.980cheating on you with justin picture and every time he meets the prime minister he has to he has to
00:23:51.400follow up with a picture of him with jagmeet it's just funny i don't know if any other premier really
00:23:55.080has to do this and no no elbow bump sheldon says i noticed that as well and no picture of them
00:24:00.640enjoying a nice white spot burger either uh now you're the only one for me baby i you're the only
00:24:06.540one i'm talking to i who this guy doesn't even matter he's just a friend it's not a big deal
00:24:12.040i guess it's just but i heard you were talking about child care no no no it's just an election
00:24:17.180promise exactly anything i was thinking what's a little child care between friends it's just
00:24:22.340nothing it's nothing and then of course in child care wasn't his only announcement he had to take
00:24:27.240You 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.
00:24:36.180Their 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.
00:24:49.520whereas I think environmentalists if anybody should be opposed to this because it shouldn't
00:24:56.260matter so much how many people are in your riding if we have a natural resource-based economy or if
00:25:01.280you're a conservationist or concerned about the environment and we we being the ones who live
00:25:05.380here are stewards of that land then we should have a requisite amount of votes in the legislature to
00:25:11.700ensure that the that that land isn't just sort of run roughshod over and British Columbians don't
00:25:16.220benefit from the extraction of the resources out of it. But they're going to make a pure
00:25:20.480population-based argument. So the Prime Minister knowing this, of course, and the BCNDP eager to
00:25:26.680make announcements in Surrey, they went out and if you just play that first clip again,
00:25:31.580you get a sense of the reaction after this big SkyTrain funding announcement that the Prime
00:25:36.580Minister made. And you can see that the citizens of Surrey or the Lower Mainland, if they were
00:25:41.260coming from from all around weren't quite buying it so if you roll that clip that's all the time
00:25:46.940we have today thank you everybody we're just gonna elbow bump everybody now yeah well and
00:26:08.120you can hear the booze in the background, but, and that was actually the, uh, the most tame
00:26:12.940portion of that whole thing. He was, he was being, uh, shouted down by the crowd throughout the
00:26:18.300entire announcement. Uh, it was, it was quite embarrassing and it, and there was no way for
00:26:22.400them to block the audio of it. Uh, so people had showed up to sort of protest as I suspect most of
00:26:26.960the protesters were of a, uh, of a climate change bent. Um, but they just, you know, if, if the
00:26:32.680intent was to try to generate some excitement over this announcement in Surrey, over more funding
00:26:36.620for skytrains it just kind of fell flat and it was it was a bit humorous to watch uh but nothing
00:26:41.680is more clear uh than their behavior here to demonstrate that there's absolutely an election
00:26:47.600coming up uh and like oprah they're just sort of throwing cars out to everybody uh but until you
00:26:53.280until 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
00:27:02.700just to go back to the question of child care for just a moment here i think that ultimately for me
00:27:08.860my policy is always going to be or rather my stance on this is around these policies always
00:27:14.520going to be that the fundamental building block of society is is the family and so if if we want
00:27:22.380a child care policy that makes sense it has to acknowledge that as first and foremost there is
00:27:28.040there is no government program that can replace parents there is no amount of formation in
00:27:33.380education that can replace a home that's stable uh facilitating that's the best thing we can do
00:27:38.460when i think about the economy and i think about any of these benefits and i've i've grown more
00:27:42.220amenable to them over the years i used to be a pretty hawkish fiscal conservative but i've become
00:27:46.460more amenable to them over the years in a kind of populist streak but nonetheless my fundamental
00:27:51.040attachment to the family hasn't changed so i i think that's where it always has to be phrased
00:27:56.100i don't believe that we have you know three mothers and five dads we don't we have aunts
00:28:00.820and uncles and that sort of thing and who gives primary care is always a bit amorphous i'm not
00:28:05.060arguing that at all but but nonetheless the family is the fundamental building block and
00:28:10.020without an economy that supports the family and then benefits that primarily build the family
00:28:15.700i don't know what hope there is yeah and i don't disagree with you in terms of
00:28:20.180what i what i see is you sort of striving for a for from your perspective kind of the best
00:28:27.260case scenario in terms of the development of a child etc um you know i don't dispute that
00:28:32.360that kind of nuclear family provides with one person at home all the time provides a very stable
00:28:38.220environment for a trial probably a very positive one um but what i don't think any data shows is
00:28:43.960that um that without a child care plan that there's an increase in the in the number of folks
00:28:50.760that like i don't think there's any data that will show that a universal child care program
00:28:55.380would diminish the number of it would decrease the number of people that also strive for that
00:29:00.140same kind of supportive environment um in fact i think without a child care plan what you do see
00:29:06.080is a is a decline in birth rates uh because it just doesn't make economic sense for for for a
00:29:12.200good number of people to have children anymore uh and i think you know when you ask people when
00:29:18.120you poll people on who who are starting to get into their 30s and 40s and haven't had children
00:29:22.520on whether they they plan to have them what they tend to say is it doesn't make economic sense to
00:29:27.080do it and you see that in a number of countries where the cost of having a child sort of outweighs
00:29:34.020whatever perceived benefits there might be uh or the not putting it that way it the cost of raising
00:29:40.560a child outweighs the overshadows the revenue that someone can generate uh through income to
00:29:46.800be able to support that child and so you have people making decisions not to do it so so it's
00:29:51.700interesting i mean i i would love to see somebody put together research if we were able to achieve
00:29:56.980some kind of a universal child care plan whether or not the birth rate increases um and because
00:30:02.520it leads to so many other discussions about the justification or need for more open immigration
00:30:07.740policies if you have a declining birth rate but uh and the the cost of labor is going too high
00:30:14.520from the perspective of people that follow this stuff well you need a higher supply of labor and
00:30:18.600that's precisely what uh what feeds policies both in the u.s and canada uh to increase the number of
00:30:26.300temporary foreign workers or undocumented workers that come into the province if there is a declining
00:30:30.760birth rate and a decrease in the and and the uh the amount that a individual worker whether they're
00:30:36.740in a union or not generally if they're not in a union they can bargain a higher rate for their
00:30:40.380pay because the supply of labor is is so low which which again spurs uh companies especially farms
00:30:47.240etc to try to find and import a source of labor so these things i think are connected um but again
00:30:53.000i'm making economic arguments and i think and as you you know as we tend to do you're you're making
00:30:58.600uh moralistic more moralistic arguments which both i think have validity no i agree i agree what um
00:31:06.700what what's next on the docket here well sort of related to this i mean i and i hate to talk
00:31:12.060about ontario so much but um you know as as i was uh um watching this announcement from the
00:31:20.700from the prime minister coming out of ottawa uh i started looking at sort of what's happening back
00:31:26.300where he came from and there's a couple of items that are a little bit concerning uh one of them
00:31:31.900is that ottawa is and many of you have probably heard about this they're going to spend about
00:31:37.820three and a half million dollars on a new plan and a new campaign to teach and this is this is
00:31:44.860in quotes from a ctv article uh non-racialized canadians about systemic racism so there's a
00:31:52.940i know the there's a picture i took of the headline in ctv about this story it's
00:31:57.820non-racialized 01 there that picture if you put that up and we just there's about uh five slides
00:32:03.900we can sort of put them up in order so this is the headline Ottawa plans to teach non-racialized
00:32:07.900Canadians about systemic racism in a new campaign so this caught a number of people's attention and
00:32:13.580you know we try to focus on BC specific stuff here but this stuff flows across the country
00:32:19.260from province to province as it gets adopted so it's important to watch this
00:32:23.580And I wouldn't put it past the provincial government at all to come up with a very similar plan provincially.
00:32:30.660In fact, they sort of already have a campaign like this provincially, and we've talked about it on this show.
00:32:35.140But 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,
00:32:48.180you know the words that they use the lexicon they employ a lot of people weren't really
00:32:53.900familiar with this term non-racialized and I don't know if you've heard of it before
00:32:59.320sort of what your thoughts are on it but it it really generated a lot of discussion
00:33:03.820I mean as far as I know non-racialized means you look like the majority population
00:33:11.540well it means white I don't know really yeah you know and I so I mean I started going through to
00:33:17.600try to find out how they define this stuff so if you put up the second picture first of all you'll
00:33:22.440see a couple of quotes from a um yeah we're going to get into this this is interesting so there's a
00:33:28.820the second one is a national post article um that was covering the same story and they just if we
00:33:36.820just put that up there's a couple of quotes in there that we should pull sure i uh i don't have
00:33:43.160the national post story it's just it's just the it says non-racialized oh two it just comes right
00:33:47.840after this one you got her hey your cat's back yeah she uh she wants to see this this no that's
00:34:02.720the wrong one it's the second one you got it racist math on racialized oh three non-racialized
00:34:14.880oh two um nope that's the one that says oh two for me okay um well anyway let's blow that one
00:34:25.440up and take a look at it so this actually comes from a report uh yeah i know i know
00:34:30.900okay that's enough she doesn't like this stuff no she doesn't she's not woke so this comes from
00:34:41.020this comes from a document that was uh by an organization in ottawa actually it's a municipal
00:34:45.740document but it's funded by the federal government and i don't know if you can zoom in a little bit
00:34:49.640there but it defines a couple of things that sort of get to this definition of of racialized and
00:34:54.700non-racialized i don't know if you can zoom in a little bit there um but first of all it defines
00:35:00.620it it distinguishes between individual and systemic racism right which a lot of people
00:35:05.700it from my perspective the people that mix this up the most are the folks who advocate it uh where
00:35:12.660they talk about having to fight systemic racism usually what they're talking about are cases of
00:35:16.860individual individual racism uh the beliefs attitudes and actions of individuals that
00:35:23.280support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can be unconscious, conscious, active, or passive.
00:35:29.920So this is like, what this used to mean anyway, individual cases of racism would be, you know,
00:35:34.880instances where somebody commits an act of violence against somebody while they're yelling
00:35:38.540racial slurs. You know, I think the CBC was reporting yesterday that there were attacks
00:35:44.560against Muslim folks, I think in Hamilton, right? So these would be cases of where the assailant
00:35:49.820was actually um you know yelling at them about their hijabs that they were wearing and i think
00:35:55.300there there was a family that was killed actually it was quite quite tragic uh so those would be
00:36:00.120cases of individual racism systemic racism of course is meant to be entire systems hierarchies
00:36:05.960institutions etc in which racism is kind of baked into everything uh all of the processes etc and
00:36:12.400that's that's where you hear a lot of folks uh focusing their attention and that's why you see
00:36:17.300people wanting to rip apart institutions etc they get into this concept of racial skin privilege
00:36:23.400which is quite interesting I'll just read it out the in the invisible advantages that are attached
00:36:29.080to being a member of the dominant white culture in Canada so right off the top you know this is
00:36:34.060where I find this stuff to be quite in their in their terminology quite problematic in that I have0.61
00:36:41.340no idea what white culture is i don't know if if you do but it just seems to me to be remarkably
00:36:49.100racist to make this kind of a generalistic claim about any diverse group of people within which
00:36:56.560there are huge swaths of diversity and cultural differences etc and i've never understood what
00:37:04.340white culture is it's a total social construct from my perspective um and it doesn't actually
00:37:10.820exist like you know perfect example if i was to go over to your house for dinner for instance
00:37:15.340you know we'd probably start that meal with a prayer uh because you're you're practicing catholic
00:37:21.160that never happens in my house that's a huge cultural difference so is that a is that part
00:37:26.520of white culture is you know uh there's all sorts of major cultural differences in terms of
00:37:32.180I think how your family would interact with each other and how my family would interact with each
00:37:35.960other and the different cultural things within our own ethnicity and history. But to try to
00:37:43.200apply this mono-white culture over top of it to me just seems like a total fabrication. I don't0.99
00:37:49.480know what your thoughts are on that. Well, I think it's kind of nonsense because especially for us in
00:37:53.320Western Canada, I think what's kind of interesting is that I bet you where critical race theory will
00:37:58.240always and questions around race generally will always take better hold in a way is is where there
00:38:04.080is a bit more of a monoculture around this stuff if you're up in the northeastern united states
00:38:08.500and and you're a good yankee that you can feel empathetic about some of this stuff you know why
00:38:13.440because because guess what being a yankee like a northeasterner american like it is a little bit
00:38:19.700more monoculturalist it is certain values they of course fought on the freedom side of the civil war
00:38:25.220right they were colonized first they had a different kind of aspect of things like
00:38:29.300that part of the states has a different flavor to it than south of the mason dixon line and
00:38:33.760further west and the same is true of ontario ontario is different than the rest of west
00:38:37.900particularly south you know southwestern ontario and southern ontario but but the point that i
00:38:43.520would make is that if you as soon as you get out of those belts where there were majority populations
00:38:49.220and i'm not saying they're any more racist than anybody else that's not what i'm saying at all
00:38:52.140I'm just saying that there is a culture there that is somewhat geographically defined and culturally inherent.
00:38:58.460But 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.
00:39:06.960Same thing when you go to Chicago in the United States.0.84
00:39:09.760Greeks, yes, they're European, but Greeks are very different from Spaniards, you know, and they're different from Frenchmen.
00:39:17.620And so you have what, again, he called white ethnics.
00:39:20.540You have all sorts of central and southern European cultures.
00:39:23.820Same thing into the prairies of Canada.1.00
00:39:26.600We dumped off Mennonites in there and Hutterites and all sorts of different people off the CPR.1.00
00:39:32.240There are French-speaking Catholics who have never been to Quebec in that area0.99
00:39:35.620and can't trace their family lines to Quebec.
00:39:37.660They trace them back to France or to the Bayou and all sorts of other strange places.0.80
00:39:41.800This is nonsense that there's a single monoculture of whiteness.0.97
00:39:46.560Even white Anglo-Saxon Protestants0.83
00:44:01.100no matter whether you're white or otherwise.
00:44:02.640but they reference this paper that that tries to discount it so people who are white may face
00:44:09.060discrimination based because of their class gender sexual orientation religion or age
00:44:13.880or because of their nationality ethnicity language etc and it's interesting to me
00:44:19.340which groups they list Armenian Italian Jewish etc however this does not erase the racial privilege
00:44:25.560of white people and so I mean this is I want to stop for a second here I want to stop for a second0.68
00:44:31.340did i did i miss the memo where god's chosen people the jews are now white
00:44:37.900are jewish people white they're not white by definition by racial definition they're not
00:44:46.020white they're they're semites and semites are not they're not indo-germanic if we're going to use
00:44:51.600the very as as as as a refined scientific definition that we could use there are groups
00:44:57.660or like ethnography or or i guess uh anthropology there the language group that comes to us all the
00:45:03.940way from the indus valley all the way to the iberian peninsula the indo-germanic language
00:45:08.800group that that's related to all of europe including english and of course french which
00:45:13.380of course is then influenced by the latin and the romantic languages but the point is
00:45:17.080if we're looking at a single ethnicity or or racial group whatever we have we can document that
00:45:23.420it that the jewish people are not white well the i mean the perfect example that should stick out0.75
00:45:31.860everybody's mind the leader of the federal green party right now enemy paul she's she's a black
00:45:36.260jewish woman so i mean it's this is what's so problematic in their terminology about this
00:45:42.080analysis is that it is racist it assumes that all jews are white and that's as you say i mean it's
00:45:47.720just not the case uh so it's yeah so they're trying to acknowledge here that you know some
00:45:55.940white people might face some discrimination based on their income and and all these other things
00:46:00.180etc whether they have a disability or not but it doesn't erase their sort of their innate white
00:46:06.500supremacy so i mean i just would love to see one of these folks walk down to the downtown east side
00:46:11.440in vancouver for instance if you haven't been down there it's uh it's really a a pretty raw
00:46:16.880cross-section of the the real uh poverty that exists in Vancouver uh in this kind of an economy
00:46:23.840and the one thing that strikes me every time I walk down there is you know I mean there's a number
00:46:28.780of Indigenous people uh down there but by far and you can see the community on the street because
00:46:34.100it's a busy neighborhood uh most people just drive through it but if you walk around down the
00:46:38.600downtown uh in the downtown uh east side it can be difficult to walk in a straight line down the
00:46:43.620street because there's you know people there's a whole informal market people got their blankets
00:46:47.540out they're selling stuff and there's just a a community that some of which is homeless some of
00:46:52.900which is transient some of which is in a uh they they stay in night beds and care homes etc and
00:46:57.980they don't have a place during the day so they're just out in the street it's a busy place and what
00:47:01.200always strikes me as i walk down there is how white that community is right and these are the0.98
00:47:04.960these are people in in our economy that are living in in virtually third world conditions
00:47:10.080um and i would love to see some of the people who write these things to go down there and tell these
00:47:15.580folks that um that they're just chock full of white privilege i mean it's just when you think
00:47:22.680about it it just boggles the mind and yet this is what we're spending what what our our federal
00:47:29.280government is spending taxpayer dollars on trying to foist upon the population no it's it's beyond
00:47:36.100nonsense like again the the whole question of of of like listing listing people of jewish descent
00:47:42.300as inherently white with no caveats like that just that literally makes no sense but further
00:47:47.380to your point like this is exactly it this was what well this is what lost hillary clinton the
00:47:52.360election in 2016 but she was telling you know a welder from to larry and wherever else like you
00:47:57.180have 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
00:48:03.940trailer and a truck and i try to support my family and i i weld or i you know i'm a fabricator
00:48:08.840whatever like i i'm a part of the white working class like i'm not a privileged person whatsoever
00:48:13.100i gotta figure out how i'm gonna pay for my kids college i i don't i don't know what you're talking
00:48:17.580about man like i'm certainly not privileged and this is the thing there's the work what's gone
00:48:22.580wrong it's actually yesterday i had i had grant havers on and uh and he and he made the point
00:48:27.140that this has gone very wrong for the left the ref the left used to talk about class and it doesn't
00:48:32.600talk about class anymore it's almost like only the right is willing to talk about class here
00:48:36.060they're talking about race again and they're just waving off classes if it doesn't matter it's like
00:48:40.420well don't you think that people people who are in a marginalized community people are at the end
00:48:45.960of things people are impoverished wouldn't they be in solidarity with other people who are
00:48:49.780impoverished like if you want to make a better world you'd need to combine these two groups and
00:48:54.620what i think the left calls intersectionalism or whatever and they and they would then agitate for
00:49:00.660i don't know clean water on reserves and they're they're you know they're their neighborhood that0.98
00:49:06.580is ridden with crime to be to be improved and that they could get the slum lords out of there1.00
00:49:10.700like i don't i don't understand why we would suddenly divide these people it's like well0.98
00:49:14.000you see this is a reserve so these people are indigenous so obviously they have a certain kind
00:49:17.780of of harm and victimhood that's attributed to them and then these people who are over here in1.00
00:49:22.820this really bad neighborhood but they're majority white they they don't deserve the same kind of0.80
00:49:27.500treatment even though they're they're in the same plight they just happen to live in a different0.98
00:49:31.140kind of neighborhood with a different kind of demographic makeup well you hit the nail on the
00:49:35.800head what this represents on the left is a complete abdication of their historic responsibility to
00:49:42.120provide a class analysis i mean i was quite struck watching your show about a week or two ago you had
00:49:46.940brad trost on um and i you know i'm i'm remotely familiar with with brad uh because he ran for
00:49:54.780leader federally previously but I watched that whole interview and what struck me so much was
00:50:00.340how he had a pretty clear class analysis the likes of which I would love to see the average leftist
00:50:07.420be able to display where he talked a lot about how we could really improve Ottawa by instead of
00:50:14.500putting more people from the ruling class you know CEOs corporate executives lawyers etc not all
00:50:21.120lawyers are part of the ruling class but they generally represent the ruling class if we
00:50:25.120replace some of those folks with more truck drivers and welders and you know like your friend
00:50:28.920for instance uh people like brad you'd see a complete difference in terms of how people
00:50:34.840in the in the parliament would would approach most pieces of legislation and you'd see different
00:50:40.740legislation produced well you don't see that that's a class analysis that's that's basically
00:50:45.600a you know one of what most of the conservative establishment would regard as the far right
00:50:51.000certainly the left would describe him as the far right and here he is the only guy talking about
00:50:55.580putting working people into positions of power rather than you know having more black or women0.95
00:51:02.100or indigenous CEOs and this is what's so striking to me is that most black workers most indigenous0.95
00:51:09.040workers most women who are working they know fundamentally that putting people who look like0.53
00:51:15.440them in positions in the oligarchy or within positions of extreme power doesn't change anything
00:51:21.100for them materially it just means that their boss has a different shape of skin or different genitals
00:51:26.300between their legs i mean that's and working people doesn't matter what their color is they
00:51:31.100understand this that's why you don't see working people advancing this kind of ideology it's why
00:51:36.200you have to it's why the federal government has to spend three and a half million dollars teaching
00:51:40.180the target demographic which is what was in that national post article of basically white males
00:51:45.760between the age of 30 and 43 or 45 uh they have to teach them how systemic racism works and how
00:51:52.420and how to check their privilege and all this kind of stuff they have to teach people understand this
00:51:56.120but the reality of it is this isn't even about going after white men uh it's it's actually about
00:52:03.980going after the working class as a whole but what the ruling class and this is you know you can call
00:52:09.580conspiratorial i don't think anybody is actually sitting around in a room planning this i think it's
00:52:13.780i think hr departments have just sort of figured this out on behalf of the employers they work for
00:52:19.000uh there's the target between 30 and 44 year old years old men living in in rural or urban areas
00:52:24.720and they actually even identify these these three areas hamilton thunder bay and quebec
00:52:29.600which are considered to be racism hot spots which is uh you know i'd love to see the data on that
00:52:37.500um there's a lot of is there a lot of synagogues burning over there is that what's happening because
00:52:42.380as far as i can tell there's a lot of churches burning in canada but i don't know of a lot of
00:52:46.200crimes against either mosques or synagogues or any or agar wars or whatever uh that doesn't seem0.73
00:52:52.220to be a pandemic in this country i'm not saying it never happens and i'm not saying it's okay when
00:52:56.080it does that's not what i'm saying well it's very selective the pandemic that that they're
00:53:01.280they're citing here no you're spot on it's it's always very very selective um i don't know if
00:53:09.840you're hearing any audio issues i'm hearing a few but it is always very very selective but but what
00:53:14.720my point here is that it's it's actually not about i mean they talk about tar they literally put in
00:53:20.800their statements and in their government documents targeting they call it non-racialized because it
00:53:25.520sounds a little less racist than than actually listing you know white men for instance straight
00:53:30.080white men that's actually not who they're after they're here's here's what's actually playing out
00:53:36.160globally um populist politicians like trump for instance who understand fundamentally because
00:53:43.120uh they've got a better read of the working class especially in the so-called rust belt states in
00:53:48.160the us and i would argue a lot of uh some emerging uh conservative politicians in canada like brad
00:53:53.120et cetera, people like Ellis Ross out here in BC understand this as well, that working voters
00:54:00.720respond to messages about bringing manufacturing back home. They respond to messaging about
00:54:06.740international trade and trying to even it out between us and China, for instance, to make sure
00:54:11.560that all of the manufacturing, all of the value-based jobs aren't being shipped over there
00:54:15.620or they're being brought back. The problem is government doesn't really, without getting rather
00:54:20.620socialistic and and employing a number of trade barriers which trump did to his uh credit from my
00:54:26.900perspective uh the only way you can uh the employer class the the folks who actually have the money
00:54:34.140sitting in their bank accounts to be able to set up factors i mean you and i can't just tomorrow
00:54:38.340start up a widget making factory here in prince george we don't have the funds to do that the
00:54:42.500people who do do that they do it in china because it's cheaper even though they're they're north
00:54:47.980American citizens. So the only way to, in their mind, to be able to sort of respond to these
00:54:53.640populist calls for bringing manufacturing back to the base is to lower the wage rates here on
00:54:59.300home soil. That's the only way it works in their mind, because otherwise they're always going to
00:55:03.940be competing against capitalists who are still running their factories out of places like China,
00:55:09.080Cambodia, et cetera, in these really low wage environments. So how do you lower the wage rates
00:55:15.380of working people here at home? Well, first of all, like from my, and here's my Marxist analysis
00:55:21.040coming out again, the way employers have always done this in periods where they've decided they
00:55:25.940have to push wages down artificially, they always go after the most vulnerable group within the
00:55:31.180working class. So you go back to the, over a century ago in British Columbia, they generally
00:55:35.820would go after Asian workers, for instance. And, but instead of going after them, they would,
00:55:41.920they would actually import folks from asia and employ them instead of north american workers
00:55:47.520create all sorts of racism uh between those groups and the ultimate uh outcome was that wage rates
00:55:54.160were were pressed down because chinese workers in particular in those days were they had no choice
00:55:59.840but to work for less money it was the only thing that was available to them so flash forward to0.75
00:56:04.000today who who are the easiest to throw mud at well white men or or you can you can put public uh
00:56:12.880government documents out that specifically target uh this one demographic in this age category
00:56:20.320and and nobody's going to come out and say that's racist and so if you and that ends up being the
00:56:26.160majority of the working class in especially in family supporting jobs that part actually is true
00:56:33.280I 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.
00:56:43.080And that can be pointed out by these diversity activists, for instance, but you can't have it both ways.
00:56:47.380So you can identify that that's the biggest group in the working class, keeping the economy afloat, supporting families, etc.
00:56:54.660So that's the group you want to go after.0.96
00:56:56.320If you can push their wages down by attacking their privilege and that kind of thing, you can push wages down for everybody.
00:57:03.280And that's precisely how this kind of racist stuff is not being used really just to go after white men.
00:57:08.300It's being used to go after all workers.
00:57:11.260The 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.
00:57:21.380And that's, I think, what's behind it.0.82
00:57:24.760And 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.
00:57:36.860It was it wasn't just the idea of there being a 40 hour work week isn't some kind of lackadaisical left wing idea.
00:57:43.680It's an idea that both the left and the right amongst the working class agitated for and and managed to achieve.
00:57:50.540Just 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.
00:58:01.720A 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.
00:58:13.300It's why people don't even want to go to work safe or to workers' compensation board.
00:58:19.280they feel that they're not being listened to they feel like they're not represented anymore
00:58:22.860and people are turning to an alternative form of politics to try and get their voices heard
00:58:27.840but i think something else that kind of strikes me is again to your point of there only being one
00:58:33.540you know only on the right is this actually being discussed again in in another instance of of the
00:58:38.640bc politics panel that i used to be a part of that that stewart was hosting there was a moment where
00:58:44.200it's everybody on on the left was essentially saying when it came to kind of china and the
00:58:50.640manufacturers and that sort of thing and then the issue of international trade they were just
00:58:54.560talking about different forms of neoliberalism you know that maybe we could up this tariff just
00:58:59.200slightly but not really and you know free trade's free trade there's nothing we can do about it all
00:59:03.340of them were resigned and i kind of started arguing that i was like well maybe maybe we
00:59:07.480should impose tariffs here and we should better organize our workers here but we should also
00:59:12.000organize their workers over there and raise their wage rates in those countries to the point where
00:59:17.360they're on parity with us and and and everybody kind of stopped and looked at me and and sir
00:59:23.260park's like congratulations nathan gita you are officially a communist yeah and i'm like i didn't
00:59:29.520because none of the lefties on that panel could have figured that out that's what's so frustrating
00:59:33.000right it's like well and i don't really understand why that makes me a communist i think that makes
00:59:37.100me more of a christian than anything else but nonetheless i i don't know why people i don't
00:59:40.840know why you wouldn't want people to be paid properly. I don't know. It's a reflection of
00:59:45.960the state of the left right now that it takes a conservative to say these kind of obvious things.
00:59:49.820What's so interesting to me about this story in particular, so what I've been quoting here
00:59:53.580has mainly been from the CTV article. There's a video at the top of that article, which we can
00:59:58.140put up in a second here, and it just plays right at the top of the article. What struck me by it
01:00:03.340is that there's no commentary. There's very little editing. It's just sort of a raw cut
01:00:08.120of toronto-based activists that are really sort of in this diversity and inclusion in all sectors
01:00:14.520of society and all facets of our lives community and they just play uh them uncut and unfiltered
01:00:21.740which you know as somebody who's been involved in a number of strikes campaigns you know radical
01:00:26.760uh demonstrations etc over the years i have never ever not myself or seen anybody else sort of in
01:00:33.760trade union movement given that level of just straight across the board we'll we'll broadcast
01:00:39.680exactly what you're saying without any kind of filter or commentary on it and what these leftists
01:00:44.320say in justification of this stuff is quite interesting so why don't we roll this video and
01:00:48.400then chat about it so what can shift what can we change how are we doing that what are people
01:00:54.000willing to give up what are people willing to redistribute um what are people willing to face
01:00:59.280within themselves like i think a lot of times we focus on um what we can change outside of ourselves
01:01:05.680but if we are perpetuating as individuals the same behavior that these systems uh of oppression are
01:01:14.080then we're we're part of the problem as well i just want to pause it right there actually and
01:01:18.400put that little piece back up on uh just this quote this struck me uh as the best indication
01:01:24.800that i've seen of all of this that what these folks are proposing as as much as you may disagree
01:01:30.240with it are not revolutionary at all like there's nothing revolutionary about this whatsoever the
01:01:35.820old leftist mantra uh from the collectivist side of things you know my tradition uh would would
01:01:42.020laugh at this statement that we're going to affect this kind of change based on changing ourselves
01:01:47.860individually i mean this has just never been uh the left's approach sort of the marxist approach
01:01:53.920to addressing some of the systemic issues they're talking about this really is the same kind of
01:01:59.260ideology that is you know undergirls the the green party which is the best way to save the
01:02:05.280environment is for each of us to just individually act better and be be better people and and for the
01:02:10.800whole population on an individual level but at the same time miraculously come to this
01:02:15.440determination that we're all just going to start recycling uh and stop throwing plastic and sandals
01:02:20.160in the ocean i mean it's just it's just magical nonsense and yet these folks that are considered
01:02:25.920and described often by people on the right is like these cultural marxists for instance
01:02:29.640they haven't got a marxist bone in their body uh and really when you get down to pushing them on
01:02:36.400what they want to do to change things they're not talking they talk a lot about systemic racism but
01:02:41.200their solutions have no systemic component to them whatsoever all they talk about is this
01:02:45.580individual-based re-education and basically the old sort of Maoist approach, which is sort of
01:02:53.800where the cultural Marxist connection comes, I think, from analysts on the right. This idea that
01:02:59.640we have to individually be brainwashed and change our approach to see ourselves, especially if you
01:03:06.420happen to be white, a white worker, to see yourselves as inherently racist and part of0.88
01:03:12.240this problem uh and if you don't see it if you're so racist man that you don't even know how racist
01:03:17.280you are you're obviously part of the problem uh and and that's their fundamental analysis
01:03:22.220i think i think what's interesting here is of course maybe maybe the the differing point to
01:03:29.100make here is that theologically uh that that is kind of the argument for us uh on you know those
01:03:35.920of us who hold religious views particularly christian religious views is that we are all
01:03:39.180We are all sinners, and we individually must try and, you know, turn ourselves back in repentance, right?
01:03:45.980So that is the kind of theological basis of reality.
01:03:50.440But at the same time, you know, Christ himself says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
01:03:55.040No one ever argues that the systems themselves aren't in their own—the way of the world is the way of the world.
01:07:04.100i mean i'm not a mathematician by any stretch um but even i know that math is not is like the
01:07:11.280antithesis of subjectivity it's if if anything it's meant to be sort of the the ground zero
01:07:17.900base of laws for most of the scientific community and the one thing that was so beautiful about math
01:07:24.380or should be so beautiful about math is it doesn't matter sort of what what your circumstances or
01:07:28.960identity are the numbers don't lie um and so let's just scroll through and read this stuff
01:07:33.840an equitable mathematics curriculum recognized that mathematics can be subjective so right off
01:07:38.640the top there's this there's this injection of this belief in the ontario uh school system now
01:07:45.360in math that math is no longer objective uh that the numbers can lie apparently depending on the
01:07:51.360color of your skin so here's the here's the description mathematics is often positioned
01:07:56.160as an objective and pure discipline but we know better now that's what the old mathematics that's
01:08:02.800that's what the previous generation thought but but we've come so far however the content and
01:08:08.720the context in which it is taught the mathematicians who are celebrated and the importance that is
01:08:13.840placed upon mathematics by society are subjective so the the main grievance here is that the
01:08:20.000mathematicians who were studying happened to be white and so the the obvious i mean the obvious
01:08:27.440response is that we have to remove any reference to white mathematicians because it's somehow
01:08:33.440alienating uh in their terminology racialized students this stuff should be terrifying um
01:08:43.040because this this matters it's like i i read this stuff i don't
01:08:46.720i don't want to drive across any bridge in ontario that's been built after the day in which the date
01:08:54.080in which this was integrated into their their system of mathematics i mean math is not subjective
01:09:01.120and the idea that that you're going to stop learning from mathematicians like you know so
01:09:07.840we can't can't study pythagoras anymore we can't you know like it's just it's unbelievable to me
01:09:13.200and dangerous i try to find the words to to respond to this i think i'm going to start with
01:09:24.300a pun it just doesn't add up aaron but uh let's uh let's throw that second second screen
01:09:33.280exactly it's like you know what that's it you're you you lose that's that's enough of that um
01:09:39.920there's one more that talks about inserting equity into math as well uh is that a thing you can do
01:09:45.900according to the curriculum on the ministry of education website in ontario
01:09:50.440it absolutely is so i don't think blow that up a little bit
01:09:53.700so research indicates that there are groups of students for example indigenous students black
01:10:02.200students experiencing homelessness students living in poverty students with lgbtq plus
01:10:07.420identities and students with special education needs and disabilities like by the time you get
01:10:12.140to the end of the list of people like why wouldn't they just say anybody who's not a white male
01:10:17.340it would just be shorter you forget what the context of the sentence is by the time you get
01:10:21.100to the end of this list who continue to experience systemic barriers to accessing high level
01:10:25.740instruction in and support with learning mathematics so if we're to believe that
01:10:30.860systemic racism exists within the education system and i'm not even willing to say that that's not
01:10:36.460true i mean you know maybe there are some ways that we can identify systemic racism within the
01:10:41.420education system um does that justify removing mathematicians from the curriculum and their
01:10:49.900ideas and concepts because of the color of their skin uh especially when you're trying to train
01:10:56.060people to build bridges it's you can start to see sort of the dangerousness of this
01:11:02.300uh and they're not taught like and again you can't remove you can't deal with systemic racism
01:11:07.580by by making in like uh by making moves based on individual acts of individual racism or your
01:11:15.100perceived individual racism so you don't you don't address systemic racism in an institution
01:11:19.980by taking out the memory of an individual and their concepts right i mean that's that's what's
01:11:25.360so ridiculous yes i agree with the albertan uh this stuff makes me quite nervous so systemic
01:11:31.280barriers such as racism implicit bias and other forms of discrimination can result in inequitable
01:11:36.180academic and life outcomes okay such as low confidence in one's ability to learn mathematics
01:11:42.480i think that's kind of racist actually um reduce rates of credit completion and leaving the
01:11:48.060secondary school system prior to earning a diploma so there you can see like they're making these
01:11:52.700statements so so hold on hold on because math can be challenging and kind of scary which which i
01:11:58.980mean admittedly like anybody who's not talented at math and then has to face some of the concepts
01:12:05.140that especially in the more advanced parts of math yeah no math is scary like it's it's got
01:12:09.840some challenging aspects to it and some things that really kind of twist the brain and make it
01:12:13.800really work hard that that's going to scare people out of being in high school and get them to leave
01:12:19.100high school well and that's the thing is that they their conclusion on this is that these people are
01:12:25.740leaving high school or they're failing at this because of the color of their skin that's what's
01:12:31.160so racist about this analysis is that it assumes at a base level that because you're black or
01:12:36.920because you're indigenous you're not as good as at this system that's been set up to uh to teach it
01:12:43.960and that is fundamentally a racist analysis from my perspective what's so interesting to me is when
01:12:49.040they go through this list of you know going back up to the top again for example indigenous students
01:12:54.240black students and then this big list they don't mention asian students uh which is one of the
01:12:59.440largest especially in british columbia one of the largest groups of students in in the province um
01:13:04.800so you know if we're talking about racialized groups and anti-asian uh incidents of crime and
01:13:12.480or sorry violence and racism etc are on the increase which you know i'll accept that that's
01:13:17.120actually true um why are they not included in your list of people who are uh subject to systemic
01:13:27.360racism and barriers well it's because statistically if you look at at grade rates of asian students
01:13:33.440they tend to be higher than any other group uh in our society and there's probably all sorts of1.00
01:13:38.560reasons for that many of which you would probably attribute to their culture at home and the way
01:13:42.880way their families are set up and their parents' approach to their education. And I wouldn't even
01:13:47.420disagree with you anecdotally, but what demonstrates best the hypocrisy and the nonsense of this
01:13:53.980approach is that because they've got this inconvenient group, which is actually in the
01:13:59.380States being barred from attending some universities because of their race, because they see them as
01:14:06.240as being too high performing um they have to come up with all sorts of sort of mental gymnastics0.99
01:14:12.360to try to make their their philosophy fit around this apparent contradiction and it's just garbage0.95
01:14:18.280it's just insane completely insane so this is this is uh this is what's happening in ontario
01:14:27.900And 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.
01:14:57.240so when you see this kind of stuff emerge in ontario you can bet that it's going to make
01:15:01.340its way out here as well it is it is pretty mind-boggling because it's just you sit there
01:15:06.180and you're like i mean i thought orwell was like just kidding when he said the two plus two will
01:15:10.800equal five sort of thing and it's like no we're there like we're there now it's like no math is
01:15:15.600subjective it's like i don't know tell that to the spaceship hurtling through the air at mach 5
01:15:20.960i don't know i i don't think it's very a very subjective i think the spaceship needs a certain
01:15:25.900kind of vector and uh the tiles on it have to withstand a certain kind of temperature and i
01:15:32.380mean if you want to if you want that to be subjective you go right ahead but i'm not getting
01:15:35.420on that spaceship okay i got other things to do well i think that's the reaction for most rational
01:15:40.300people but it is this sort of spearhead of this effort uh to try to impose this ideological change
01:15:48.140on society which which says that we can all tell our own truth and i hear this a lot i hear this a
01:15:54.860lot amongst leftist folks i i even hear that kind of language amongst leftist folks who are otherwise
01:16:00.300kind of gender critical about uh and and critical of sort of the racist component of some of the
01:16:05.100stuff they still talk about you know speaking your own truth and that kind of thing and and so i
01:16:10.540mean there's a real philosophical divide there between where the left is now and where the left
01:16:14.460has been historically um and i would argue this is a huge departure also from some from traditional
01:16:20.700kind of marxist thinking um which is ultimately hegelian in its roots it wasn't really a child
01:16:27.820a direct challenge on the state of truth uh it was it was in a different emphasis on certain aspects
01:16:36.940of of the same truth i don't think that sort of traditional marxists and traditional capitalists
01:16:42.380or adam smithites or laissez-faire capitalists actually see the world in terms of its core
01:16:48.140fundamentals any differently from one another their big difference is who should who should
01:16:53.340have control over the wealth and who should be in power that's the big difference none of that is
01:16:58.380being discussed in this kind of analysis all of that class analysis is removed from it and there's
01:17:03.740this advocacy for this individual uh discussion of your own truth and so your truth is just as
01:17:11.900valid as my truth which is a dangerous thought when you start to apply that to the sciences
01:17:19.180and engineering and so that's why this is so terrifying to me i guess i guess that i'm having
01:17:25.340a bit of an epiphany here a bit of an insight into my own thinking and that maybe maybe that's why i
01:17:30.140don't fit in very well with the traditional right uh well traditional right kind of just well whatever
01:17:35.020the fiscal right i'll say fiscal conservatives and and very pro-business right because i don't
01:17:39.580view the world in in those terms whatsoever i don't i don't think about labor and capital and
01:17:44.860that sort of thing i kind of i'm very much more on a kind of low altitude concrete reality of like
01:17:49.980what do what do people have in their own backyard and what do they kind of deal with every day
01:17:54.140i kind of see all all wages that are below a living wage is exploitive in general um and that
01:18:00.780you know just because we're paying our slaves more today doesn't mean that they're not slaves and
01:18:04.700and that's not fair, and I don't understand why we would do that to people.
01:18:08.580Simultaneously, I don't have a lot of time for rhetoric about religion being the opiate of the masses
01:18:13.960and that sort of thing, because as far as I can tell, some religions at this point
01:18:18.880are the only ones still saying things like, well, particularly my religion.
01:18:21.500Like, for example, a woman's cycle is a beautiful thing,
01:18:24.860and it shouldn't be altered with pharmaceuticals just to please the oligarchs in the economy
01:18:30.280so she's more productive i don't i have a problem with that so so like i don't know like i kind of
01:18:37.160i kind of wander around in the world not really understanding the language that's being spoken
01:18:40.880by by kind of players on the left or the right on these questions because i i've always kind of had
01:18:46.560a more human emphasis of like no like there's we're human beings we should probably start
01:18:50.580reasoning from there we're not labor we're not capital we're not resources for people we're not
01:18:56.580even necessarily the underclass or the oligarchs necessarily i use those terms because they're
01:19:00.300familiar but like we're human beings first and we have to probably reason from there and it doesn't
01:19:05.680seem like people do a lot of truck with that anymore i don't know why yeah i um i i think
01:19:12.760and i'm just sort of speculating here but i think part of the reason why you hear some of this stuff
01:19:17.040articulated in in these terms counter to how you see the world on both the left and the right is
01:19:21.740is because interest in the ruling class that would like to reduce the wages of working class folks here at home
01:19:29.020so we can try to compete on the manufacturing level with China and Cambodia,
01:19:34.180they work simultaneously through the left and the right,0.54
01:19:37.480especially in a place like the U.S. where you've got only two real political parties,
01:19:42.140both of which have equal representation and funding by and large from the richest sectors of society.
01:19:49.340And many would argue the same basic dynamic exists here in Canada, given that only two parties have ever commanded a majority in the parliament.
01:20:00.880And so, you know, they've got their ideologues in either camp.
01:20:05.640And again, the goal is to try to keep working people divided.
01:20:11.840Because if you keep them divided, they don't unionize.
01:20:15.120They 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.
01:20:33.280And 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.
01:20:45.120So 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.
01:21:03.620And 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.
01:21:18.760and the and the role that they play and i've played this role myself at the top of some
01:21:23.840organizations as well is to not sell the store not give away the store you have to try to
01:21:28.600protect your your bottom line etc but if those folks are given the most power in society0.92
01:21:34.360then you start to see the the um the living conditions of working class folks go down and0.99
01:21:41.900all of the other negative aspects of that play out through the economy and and my thesis here0.93
01:21:46.980of course, as it often is, is that the most sophisticated way to keep workers divided in
01:21:53.000the current epoch is to use this kind of racist identitarian ideology through unions, through
01:22:01.040HR departments, to try to reduce the rates of unionization and worker organization. And it's
01:22:07.700working to great effect. That's why it's being ramped up. And it's why the federal government
01:22:12.580now on behalf of many of these corporations who are just as interested in trying to bring
01:22:16.920manufacturing back here for populist reasons, but also understand in their mind that the
01:22:23.240only way to do it is to reduce the domestic wages, are quite happy to fund this stuff
01:22:27.960publicly with taxpayer dollars to roll it out and educate the unwashed masses, so to
01:25:23.940The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.0.55
01:25:25.980like it everything's supposed to serve us not the other way around and why we've built a world that
01:25:32.040is so fundamentally inhuman i don't really understand it doesn't seem like a lot of fun
01:25:36.200yeah well and of course i mean my my reaction of course to what's happening is probably predictable
01:25:41.580in that it took in order to develop these phones and a lot of the technology that's enabling this
01:25:48.020kind of data collection actually took massive injections of public sector uh funds uh to be
01:25:53.380to incubate these things which is largely why china is leading the world on this kind of
01:25:58.500technology with 5g etc uh because they're far less inhibited than we are and certainly our
01:26:04.180american friends uh in injecting mass amounts sort of in an incubation stage uh for technology
01:26:11.060to try to produce this stuff what gets problematic is the way in which the private sector will use
01:26:16.260this technology in in ways you're talking about it's absolutely true it's not conspiratorial at
01:26:20.740all uh because they they admit it outright in their um in their terms of service documents which
01:26:26.600you know i have a certain perverse tendency to read um that instagram if you have the instagram
01:26:33.260app on your phone which is owned by facebook it's got its the microphone on your phone's on all the
01:26:38.260time 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
01:26:44.180say the word because it'll start sparking people's phones that are listening to this
01:26:47.280uh you know she'll she'll respond to you well the reason she responds to you is because the
01:26:52.040microphone's on all the time to be able to hear you they said microsoft was doing this back with
01:26:56.540the xbox 360 when they had their little uh camera uh sitting on your on your living room table if
01:27:02.000you said hey xbox then it would uh it would launch so once that microphone's on in your house all the
01:27:07.820time uh corporations that are interested in getting better ad data from you uh will exploit
01:27:14.860that and they sort of get around it by saying we're not actually listening to you there's no
01:27:18.720human listening to you uh there's just an algorithm that is that is parsing your words
01:27:24.360which is easy because it's just a text a speech to text uh script and then it pulls the words out
01:27:31.340that relate to the advertising uh tags that they that they put on your profile and they start
01:27:36.040spitting the ads to you so if you have the instagram app on your phone or or anything
01:27:40.140related to facebook then your phone is actually listening to you all the time and it will play
01:27:45.380these ads and i i can't tell you how many people have said the exact same thing to me uh describing
01:27:49.920this situation um i'm not even really that as concerned about that i mean that's that's
01:27:55.920concerning enough to me that i carry around a nokia 3310 i don't have a smartphone um but it's
01:28:02.160not as concerning to me as governments that also then start using this technology uh and and apply
01:28:09.140that data to to the files that they have on you and the decisions that they make based on your
01:28:13.520ability to access public services this is what's happening in china right now this is what's
01:28:18.520actually concerning about the huawei technology the 5g technology i don't believe all this stuff
01:28:23.880that like they're going to control our brains with 5g waves and like there's nothing more detrimental
01:28:30.060to our health physically uh in 5g technology than there is in 4 3 or 2g technology uh it's all a
01:28:37.040type of radio wave it's just on a different frequency what is concerning about it is that
01:28:41.740because the bandwidth is so much higher the ability for them to to extract more data from
01:28:46.520our everyday lives and then feed that seamlessly into a government apparatus or in the case of
01:28:51.920china their social credit score system is the most terrifying orwellian development um that we0.85
01:28:59.820that we've ever conceived of let alone uh seen manifest and that is what is actually like the1.00
01:29:06.860United States made the right decision when they resisted the implementation of Huawei technology
01:29:13.240in North America. I mean, China would literally have direct access to this kind of data coming
01:29:20.900directly off our phones. It would go right into the Chinese government. So they can collect that
01:29:25.580kind of data on politicians, they can collect it on state officials, they can collect it on people
01:29:30.860that are dealing with classified sensitive information, etc. So we very rightly are worried
01:29:37.540about it. Here in BC, I mean, like politically, we would have, if the Americans hadn't said anything,
01:29:42.960I mean, TELUS was already pretty much full way down the road of adopting Huawei technology and
01:29:46.920still really wants to. And this is a terrifying development. I mean, I keep saying terrifying,
01:29:54.920I 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.
01:30:21.140uh they're not going to be able to resist the urge to go down that same road that's what we0.87
01:30:25.940have to be most vigilant about absolutely i think i think again too when it comes to the question of
01:30:31.640what's going on in china it what's what doesn't seem to make sense to or at least not be registering
01:30:36.960with a lot of people in in the rest of the world certainly with the politicians who are in in thrall
01:30:42.040of china is why why are they making the moves they're making like they're going into the
01:30:49.600Spratly Islands and South China Sea for a reason1.00
01:30:51.700they're rounding up the Uyghurs for a reason1.00
01:31:17.720level again when the algorithms are running the system how do you how do you break the algorithm
01:31:23.160of tyranny but not even the the program developer is around anymore he's been he's been rounded up
01:31:28.920by the algorithm yeah and uh you know there's similar stories we could probably even pull one
01:31:35.960up i remember seeing a couple weeks ago amazon is starting to employ this stuff as well to the point
01:31:40.360where they're integrating algorithms to uh they're designing algorithms to take over hr functions so
01:31:46.200there was this one story of this older fella who I think he was in his 60s or early 70s,
01:31:51.720but he was a good worker and he was a delivery guy for Amazon. And when he'd been working there
01:31:57.320for, I think, seven years or something like that and been pretty good, had one off day and gets
01:32:00.680a gets an automated email from the AI telling him that he's just been dismissed because of poor
01:32:06.280performance. And I mean, this is now at the point where we're going to use AI to make these very
01:32:15.080human decisions that have real consequences potentially life and death consequences
01:32:20.920and it's always going to be corporations that are on the on the front end of this stuff that
01:32:25.640are on the bleeding edge of it and they're always going to use it to try to dehumanize
01:32:30.280aspects of the working class and and the workforce and to try to remove themselves from having to
01:32:35.720make those decisions because if you know if jeff bezos can say well i didn't fire anybody the hr
01:32:42.280system did then you know presumably he can avoid the the fault for it and maybe some of the ire
01:32:47.660um but that's not is that the kind of society we want to live it you know i i really hope not
01:32:53.920because it's the one we are living in we're living this dystopia well but and that's just it like i
01:33:00.840mean how much further down this hole do you want to go that's that's what's kind of mind-boggling
01:33:05.440to 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
01:33:10.760we get into a talk about like the mismanagement of our forests in british columbia we talk about
01:33:16.100the mismanagement of the economy it like there is an alternative way forward i mean wac bennett
01:33:23.520proved that it's not it's not just even grandiose socializing nationalizing of various items it's
01:33:29.340it is even if we have all this energy to start teaching critical race theory we must have the
01:33:35.300energy to try and create a national story that inspires people to want to do more for their
01:33:42.080country or or even if we're going to be good sovereignists on this channel like i mean there's
01:33:47.420got to be it's the old argument of like if you had enough if you had enough energy to fight about it
01:33:52.600or enough energy to argue with me right you're in an argument with your other half or with your
01:33:56.760with with your child and they and they don't have the upper hand they they are they are wrong it's
01:34:01.920like, well, instead of arguing about it, we could be done already, right? Like, that's always the
01:34:06.020thing. You could have pushed all your effort into the wrong direction, or you could have just turned
01:34:09.780it around and pushed it into the right direction. I'm not saying it would be a net zero. I'm not
01:34:13.380saying, I'm not saying it is easy to do virtue, as easy to do virtue as it is to do vice, but
01:34:19.100one has to wonder how we've gone so far down the rail, like, like, just off the rails that,
01:34:25.800that we really will put effort into things that we know are bad for us and and won't and won't
01:34:32.760turn around and i guess you could use the word repent if you want but but just nonetheless
01:34:37.120acknowledge that this isn't going to work and we need to do something different
01:34:40.360yeah like it philosophically it comes down to whether you see the state as the ultimate entity
01:34:49.640that must be protected and advanced at the expense of individuals or whether you see individuals and
01:34:57.160their collective manifestations as superior to the state or at least more important than the
01:35:03.360interest of the state. China is decidedly on the side of the state and quite openly. I mean,
01:35:09.980I actually read the Xi Jinping Thought books. He's released a couple of books. They're extremely
01:35:16.520repetitive, mainly just a collection of his speeches, to try to get some understanding
01:35:20.460of sort of what they mean by the Belt and Road Initiative, etc.
01:35:23.300And, I mean, he very much is a direct continuation of, as a demarcation, like, in some respects,
01:35:33.540a demarcation from where Deng Xiaoping took things after Mao Zedong, but he really is
01:35:38.880this embodiment of Mao Zedong thought, in which the state must be elevated above, like
01:35:45.740the continuation of the state the glory of the state is our prime consideration and there's some
01:35:50.580historical uh merit to this from the perspective of Chinese folks I think in that you know they
01:35:56.920talk a lot about and and and the president of China of course talks a lot about the historical
01:36:01.920century of shame in which China sees itself to have been subjugated by uh colonial powers
01:36:08.060western powers uh and removed from its position of sort of the patron state if I can put it that way
01:36:14.940of all other asian countries which for centuries had paid tribute into china so they've been0.92
01:36:19.260removed from that post and everything that's in xi jinping's um uh positioning is to try to0.88
01:36:27.600re-establish china as uh having been removed or merged from the century of shame to retake its
01:36:34.780place not just as the patron state of asia but indeed of the world now this stuff like i don't
01:36:42.860get as alarmed about that as a lot of other people do a lot of people look at this stuff and they go
01:36:46.580see like this is the evidence of the conspiracy well it's no it's not really a conspiracy it's
01:36:50.640just sort of the aspirations of a state that happens culturally to put the state ahead of
01:36:54.500the individual but we also hear the americans always talking about doing what's in the best
01:37:00.440interest of american interests in fact their foreign policy the justification for the bombs
01:37:05.140they drop on uh most places the justification for destabilizing libya by taking al-marq qaddafi
01:37:10.840the justification is always that we have to do what's in in the interests of of americans so
01:37:16.900there's nothing really different about that what is different is that the average american
01:37:21.740and most politicians would never elevate the american state and the interest of the state
01:37:30.080above those of the individual people like me may argue that they do in practice and in fact canada
01:37:35.100doesn't practice but at least in the rhetoric they don't do that in china the rhetoric is all about
01:37:40.380the importance of the state the glory of the state etc and so you see in all of these urban
01:37:45.640villages in china that are being wiped off the map and there's like these very heroic instances of
01:37:50.380of these people who refuse to sell their the only property rights they have in china to the state in
01:37:56.080order to put these big high rises up for the for the burgeoning class of rich people uh they're
01:38:01.440getting into these very violent confrontations with the construction crews is why you see all
01:38:05.320these pictures in china of they call them these uh what do they call them nail houses because
01:38:09.780there's just like this one multi-story building surrounded by rubble because you got this one
01:38:14.680person that wouldn't wouldn't leave right uh and we we can expropriate things here in canada as
01:38:21.940well um and in fact arguably that's sort of what's happening in the piece uh but at the very least
01:38:28.040there's this effort to try to you know you have to compensate folks and it is there there are more
01:38:32.980rights afforded to those who are trying to resist that um but that's the main cultural difference
01:38:37.440But I would argue, in many respects, the Chinese are just more open and honest about it than we are.
01:38:43.020It doesn't mean that that's the way to go, however.
01:38:46.000And 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.
01:38:55.700I 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.
01:39:20.720but but the the thing that has to always remember be remembered is that the state was erected
01:39:27.240to be an amoral secular non non values based only only answering to itself not answering to a pope
01:39:36.080or a bishop or or to a higher power only answering to itself first in the in the supremacy of the
01:39:41.060sovereign then into the supremacy of its parliaments and its and its legislatures uh
01:39:46.620that was what it was built for it was not it was specifically built to resist moral argument and
01:39:55.260and theological argument and um and well not supernatural but but you know the metaphysical
01:40:02.240arguments around the you know the dignity of man and the rest of it it you always use those
01:40:06.740principles in its rhetoric and i mean the family united states is clear so is the founding of
01:40:11.080France, the refounding of France after the revolution. All these things are clear. We use
01:40:16.400it in rhetoric all the time. But ultimately, the state is built to answer only to itself alone and
01:40:21.460to seek its own preservation at the cost of all else. Yeah, but you're right. And what's so
01:40:28.360troubling about the left today is that, you know, I think there was an understanding of this back in
01:40:33.660the time of the Bolsheviks. I think Lenin actually, you know, for whatever faults might be attributed
01:40:37.360to him and the authoritarianism that he ushered in uh understood that the state at least in his
01:40:43.120rhetoric prior to the revolution understood that the state should wither away um or at the very
01:40:47.960least the state should not uh be ballooned into this thing that is contrary to what you've described
01:40:54.320in that it actually is now imposing moralistic arguments onto people and that's what we're
01:40:58.400saying today is that the left looks at the state uh and they want to attribute to the state all
01:41:06.040sorts of questions that impose on our own individual lives freedoms etc they want to
01:41:11.860turn this state into this massive leviathan that doesn't just provide you know a better rate on
01:41:18.540social programs like child care or dental or universal health care but also now tells us that
01:41:24.340we individually are racist even though we don't know we're racist because we can't recognize it
01:41:29.360yesterday's yesterday's guest said the arbiters of conscience and consciousness the way that we
01:41:34.900conceive of our very selves it's a very good way to put it and the left is driving this uh and it's
01:41:40.580and it and the left never used to drive this stuff i mean the left uh definitely used to talk about
01:41:45.660like you know we've been accused of being large status because we do want to add to the uh to the
01:41:50.800service provision that comes from the states in terms of social programs but the what the left
01:41:55.400has not been able to resist effectively and in fact has encouraged is this massive ballooning
01:42:00.880of this Leviathan apparatus that invades our personal lives
01:42:05.280and tries to impose cultural norms on people and make these masks.
01:42:08.840And then if you get a group of people that want to radically change
01:42:11.380the cultural norms, like, say, you know,
01:42:14.300make all sorts of new declarations on gender
01:42:16.440and really challenge the fundamental tenets of biology
01:42:21.040and molecular biology, the state can now be wielded
01:42:25.520as the main spear in being able to do that.
01:42:30.600It's not the first time that it's happened in society.
01:42:32.720And 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.
01:42:56.420And from my perspective, really nothing Marxist about it.
01:43:00.160uh but that that's why i understand sort of the right-wing critique of what we're seeing in
01:43:04.720universities and nhr departments and through unions etc in describing this as a form of
01:43:10.160cultural marxism it's really more of a form of cultural maoism uh than anything else and most
01:43:14.960most marxists uh are as worried about this as as anyone else and i think to your point i i would
01:43:22.560just qualify that i i have no i have no illusions about the state's ability to impose its own
01:43:28.080values it just answers to no one else's and i would argue that the great irony is that if and
01:43:34.000i think orwell would actually have to admit this as well because he does in pieces of 1984 he talks
01:43:38.640about in his conception obviously the total the total supremacy of of the the roman catholic
01:43:45.840church at the height of the middle ages and the kind of theocracy that it operated in and then
01:43:50.720of course the what came after it with the inquisition um and and but i would say the
01:43:56.480The irony is that while it might have taken three times as long before,
01:44:01.260it took 1,500 years to get to that point,
01:44:03.920then the Protestant Reformation changed things.
01:44:05.960It's only taken 500 years since then to enter a new theocracy.
01:44:09.720What is climate change but a cosmology about our sin with the world?
01:44:14.300What are climate taxes, carbon taxes but indulgences?
01:44:17.820What was COVID and all the control but a new kind of, you know,
01:44:22.560a demonology to talk about this virus ever so mysterious
01:44:26.420it would show up out of nowhere, it would come, it would go
01:44:28.660who knew where it was, who knew what it
01:47:20.080so good now it's a bit of a rough transition but we should probably make some reference to this uh
01:47:34.080uh it's a bit of a disaster actually this this crane collapse in the crane collapse yeah do you
01:47:40.580Do you have a link for me on that one or do I just fire it up?
01:47:43.500I don't. I had a whole bunch of video links and none of them played out because of a formatting issue.
01:47:52.560But I think this happened Monday morning, so it's not the newest news, but quite concerning.
01:47:58.940I'd be surprised if there are people out there that haven't heard of this.
01:48:02.160But 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.
01:48:19.660the really unfortunate part about it was that there were people on the boom there were people
01:48:26.080on the I don't know if it's called the stem which didn't collapse was still sort of in a shaky way
01:48:30.800attached to hanging off the building and then there were people on the ground upon whom the
01:48:36.920boom fell so on the first day they had announced there had been one casualty as a result of this
01:48:41.760it's probably easy to pull up a picture of it the by the second day they had announced four deaths
01:48:47.900and one person still missing under the rubble.
01:48:51.640And I think it had been confirmed since then
01:48:53.560that the fifth person was also found dead rather predictably.
01:49:00.760It reminds me of, if you're familiar with the Bentall Tower
01:49:04.140in Vancouver downtown, I think probably back in the 80s
01:49:08.660when that was being built, there was a similar disaster
01:49:10.820where I think a platform fell right off the top of the building
01:49:14.020and I think there were four or five people killed there as well.
01:49:16.600and I mean that was so significant at the time that every year people from the different trade
01:49:22.160unions show up to commemorate that site etc they do like a ceremony I don't know if we'll see the
01:49:27.780same thing in Kelowna but really kind of troubling that this a disaster that this kind of scale can
01:49:36.740can take place on a worksite like that and so I went through and sort of try to parse some of the
01:49:41.640statements made because the ceo did a press conference like that day uh and and i had some
01:49:46.960video clips but uh like i said they didn't come through but but he was asked it was i was surprised
01:49:51.440to see him do the press conference actually on the day normally they clam up and don't say very much
01:49:55.840so i guess you know we can credit him with doing that but he was predictably asked some tough
01:49:59.720questions like um you know are you going to pay for any medical costs that might not be covered
01:50:05.320or some support for families that depended on the income of the folks that were killed and
01:50:08.980And, of course, the company sort of backed – the CEO backed off of making that commitment.
01:50:14.920What will happen in this case – oh, and the other question was, well, is the job unionized, and it was not.
01:50:20.060So 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.
01:50:28.920Obviously, 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.
01:50:38.880because unionized environments tend to have stronger health and safety committees.
01:50:43.540They tend to sort of follow the rules of it better
01:50:45.400because they're written in a contract in addition to other pieces of legislation.
01:50:48.620But these kind of disasters can happen on a unionized environment.