Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - July 7th, 2021

00:00:00.000 .

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Hello, and welcome to Mountain Standard Time. I'm sorry, I left a light in the background there. Hold on.

00:01:50.880 There we go. Let's try that again. I should have looked at that before the broadcast started.

00:01:54.680 anyways welcome to mountain standard time i'm your host nathan guida of course we are broadcasting to

00:02:01.220 you live from bc's northern capital if you're listening to this later uh do be sure to like

00:02:07.920 and share and uh just keep the good word going out there of course this is the western standard

00:02:14.220 and we are independent we don't take any government money so if you'd like to support us

00:02:19.320 please take out a subscription online follow us on facebook or follow us on youtube and again

00:02:24.840 share share share hit the like button hit the subscribe button opening statement this morning

00:02:30.140 kind of along the lines of the governor general that's just been appointed that's mary silent

00:02:35.440 and canada has a new governor general just in time for the federal election that is due to come down

00:02:41.000 in august possibly the fall or september but the rumors that i'm hearing is that it'll come down

00:02:47.020 in august i happen to have a pretty good pulse on that one i was worried for a little while

00:02:52.520 regarding the integrity of our constitution if a new governor general was not located before the

00:02:58.080 election was called now that mary simon has been named our vice regal representative trudeau can

00:03:04.060 go on to regain his majority again i'm sure that uh that doesn't sound like welcome news to some

00:03:10.060 people but the fact of the matter is that i think that the trudeau liberals are going to win again

00:03:14.620 and win with the majority.

00:03:15.980 They're not going to be in minority territory anymore.

00:03:18.620 The NDP is weak.

00:03:20.040 The Bloc de Québécois is going to shuffle around a little bit,

00:03:23.280 but they've been supporting the Liberals through and through anyways.

00:03:27.040 And the Tories are divided

00:03:28.240 and not looking like the most unified anti-Liberal force on the planet

00:03:33.620 to the point where it looks like they're just, you know,

00:03:36.720 20 years behind the Liberals in all their policies.

00:03:38.860 I don't think the Tories are going to do very well, to be honest with you.

00:03:42.480 So that might not sound great, but let's move on to this question of, you know, Trudeau's first move to retake Lajarvan is naming an Inuk woman as the head of our government on behalf of, or the head of our state, to be clear, head of state, vice regal, head of state, on behalf of our dear old queen.

00:04:03.940 And Mary Simon is a well-accomplished person.

00:04:06.620 She represents clearly a pivot by Justin Trudeau and his government back to the progressives

00:04:12.160 to try and get them to support them during this re-election.

00:04:15.940 This is an important understanding.

00:04:18.220 This is something that we have to concede that the Liberals have always done better than the Conservatives.

00:04:22.640 How exactly, I'm not sure.

00:04:24.020 I think that Borden and MacDonald, and for that matter, Diefenbaker, and in some ways, Mulroney, and certainly Harper tried.

00:04:35.460 They did do these symbolic moves that helped capture the imagination of a nation, at least for a moment.

00:04:41.220 But the liberals are just so much better at it than us.

00:04:44.600 And this is one of the places where they are.

00:04:46.560 So we've had all these conversations about residential schools, the unmarked graves, etc.

00:04:52.100 and what do the liberals do they seize upon the opportunity the conservatives are still playing

00:04:58.180 they're still playing defense they're still trying to justify the residential school question

00:05:03.160 while also fighting about whether or not the graves were really unmarked or discovered

00:05:07.740 they've completely lost the initiative in the conversation they could stand on principle around

00:05:13.760 say well you can't just tear down statues you can't just you can't just erase our history and

00:05:19.920 There were actually positive things that came out of the residential school system.

00:05:23.680 And the fact of the matter is that a lot of those schools were actually asked for by the local First Nations because they, too, knew that they would not survive as a people group inside of non-Aboriginal, post-contact, industrialized civilization.

00:05:42.980 It wasn't going to happen.

00:05:44.520 If they couldn't read, they couldn't write, they couldn't do sums, they would not be able to survive.

00:05:48.940 And they knew that.

00:05:49.920 did everybody ask for it no did terrible things happen yes did they happen everywhere all the

00:05:56.880 time no should the people who did them be hunted down and prosecuted and again i'd prefer some

00:06:03.860 capital punishment but we got rid of that a long time ago yes they should be not a question but

00:06:09.560 until someone says that clearly on the conservative side they're just stuck sounding completely tone

00:06:16.100 deaf meanwhile the liberals have moved past this conversation and now they've now they've got a

00:06:20.460 positive spin to it oh yeah there are all those terrible things that happened the other week we're

00:06:24.240 sorry about that haven't solved any of it haven't brought fresh water haven't to the reserves haven't

00:06:29.280 fixed the murdering and missing things that happen you know along the highway of tears when young

00:06:34.940 women and girls are murdered and are taken and are never found again none of that's been solved

00:06:40.460 but you know what we did solve we have brought in uh somebody to be a token as our vice regal

00:06:45.860 representative isn't that significant so this is a pivot back to progressives uh and people who kind

00:06:51.480 of pay attention to that sort of thing to be clear and i'm about to say this in the opening statement

00:06:56.480 i don't think mary simon's a bad choice but that is kind of the role she's being asked to play in

00:07:02.780 this time of panic she is trudeau's first step to re-election that's what that's what's going on

00:07:09.120 there so governor general uh simon mary simon is not actually a full-blood inuk is how you say that

00:07:19.520 so inuit is the plural and inuk is the singular uh though i've never really understood that one

00:07:25.720 because inuk means just person or one inuit means people so i mean it'd be kind of like us calling

00:07:33.840 ourselves people or person not canadian or or canadians or canadian it's like i'm a person

00:07:41.760 and we are people but i just say it in a you know ethnic language that would make it sound

00:07:48.220 super cool but but it would be very literal and it wouldn't really make a lot of sense

00:07:51.760 germans don't call themselves leute they call themselves right they call themselves the germans 0.78

00:07:58.800 right so so it's so it's a bit literal i don't really know why we did this with political

00:08:04.420 correctness kind of like first nations like well the first nations that were here before the white

00:08:08.360 men came it's like well why don't we just call them something that kind of is something of them

00:08:13.140 it's like well we can't do that so well i don't really understand how first nations represents

00:08:18.240 me as a term but okay whatever so gg simon is not a full-blood inuk her father was a european

00:08:26.600 are of european descent and worked for the hbc up on top of quebec there that's an important thing

00:08:31.800 to kind of point out maybe i could point that out in a moment when i get a when i get a chance here

00:08:38.040 to stream uh some of the tabs i have open uh but she's from the top of quebec so we all know the

00:08:43.800 rest of quebec the st lawrence seaway she's from the top of quebec that part that dips down like

00:08:49.080 that near the davis straight that's where she's from and she attended a resident not a residential

00:08:56.440 school but a day school okay um which was the same kind of system as a residential school but

00:09:02.280 obviously you went to residential school if your family lived too far away to send you to day school

00:09:07.640 uh this was a day school and eventually went on to work for the cbc like everybody else who's

00:09:13.000 ever been an elite uh before becoming an advocate for pardon me the inuit and northern issues

00:09:23.000 so she was there she's been there for a few things i was looking all this stuff up most of this

00:09:27.480 i have to give credit where credit's due i think i got most of this stuff from a ctv article so

00:09:32.120 thank you uh global ctv or whatever it is uh whoever owns you now one of the big three telecom

00:09:38.200 companies in canada or is there just two left again no idea uh but uh whoever owns you good

00:09:43.800 for you guys uh took most of this from your article um thank you for doing the research

00:09:48.760 for me i didn't really know what to do uh anyways she was there at the repeat repatriation of the

00:09:55.080 constitution that's interesting she's old enough to have remembered that and been a part of it

00:09:58.920 and the creation of none of it as a separate territory she also served as canada's ambassador

00:10:03.960 denmark that's common knowledge uh and that's important because we have to remember that denmark

00:10:08.600 of course has rights over greenland and so between greenland and the canadian archipelago

00:10:15.640 are you know and then some of the stuff up in norway there uh those oh man what are those

00:10:21.720 fabard fabard something like that those those island chains all have a ton of polar bears on

00:10:27.400 them and it's really important for all the environmental circumpolar stuff all those

00:10:32.520 countries have a stake in the question of the circumpolar question and and so she was canada's

00:10:38.440 ambassador denmark then finally uh let's take a look here after being the head of the largest

00:10:43.960 inuit organization in canada she has become our governor general so i will admit i have cautious

00:10:49.400 hopes for this new governor general certainly she is far better adjusted to the role than our

00:10:53.240 previous occupier um i can't say enough bad things about julie payette if you're watching this julie 0.98

00:10:58.920 like seriously leave this country and never speak to any of us again you are a waste of i guess i 0.95

00:11:05.000 have to not condemn your very soul that's up to god himself at the end of your life but like 0.99

00:11:09.080 seriously like please stop taking up the oxygen at least in this country go take up oxygen somewhere 0.72

00:11:14.520 else like you are a waste of space um you were a terrible governor general you completely failed

00:11:20.920 in your role you were off in your little tryst with your little friend there not being a great 0.96

00:11:24.920 representative of your community by the way because we all know that's exactly what was

00:11:28.940 happening there was the trysts going on and you not doing your job while abusing your staff that

00:11:34.580 became public knowledge so i'm not saying anything out of school here um yeah get out is basically my

00:11:40.520 point get out uh and take a train of you know the other liberal elites with you that nobody wants in

00:11:45.760 this country anymore either so just you know i don't know if martin's doing good things anymore

00:11:50.220 if martin's still doing good things he was working really hard for us indians for a while i don't

00:11:53.800 know if it's going well or not but leave him around i guess but you can take crutchin with you

00:11:57.620 and anybody else that's that's kind of become a problem for us and uh yeah just leave that'd be

00:12:02.420 great so anyways i'm glad payettes out and uh we need to be clear here that mary um mary simon is

00:12:10.080 certainly far better adjusted for this her color and her candor are going to be a welcome in a

00:12:13.920 renovation that is clearly the point there's a reason they picked a woman of color for this role 1.00

00:12:18.020 there's a reason that this appointment is happening today yesterday this this time period right now

00:12:23.440 it's that's obvious and the one question though of course is will her political goals make or 0.89

00:12:30.700 break her because she has had to oppose the government before so can she give a voice to

00:12:35.420 the north which has been almost entirely ignored by this current Trudeau government and indeed by

00:12:39.780 all Trudeau governments both senior and junior by all governments basically since Diefenbaker

00:12:45.020 except for a little brief stint with Harper and can she help her people group that's a good question

00:12:50.660 only time will tell but at least we have gone back to uh just one of them out of the country

00:12:56.900 but i must admit that cretchen and martin's versions of ggs which were more competent than

00:13:01.940 the trudeau version of a gg we wish you all the very best mary simon may you reign over us in our

00:13:08.800 queen stead in a way that uh first nations people ought to have always had their peerages 0.90

00:13:13.360 that damn nickel resolution didn't help anybody use your position for good help canada to heal 0.76

00:13:19.580 from his wounds and move towards the future uh yeah i think uh i think that about sums it up as 0.97

00:13:27.060 a starting place i'm uh i i really don't think that that uh julie piet was a good choice i know

00:13:38.840 that people had problems with her like the moment that she was being touted as a possible choice

00:13:43.760 and i don't have enough bad things to say about her she was she was an air cadet uh not just

00:13:50.220 kidding of course not and i'm not going to denigrate the air cadets to be clear but she was

00:13:53.760 she you know i guess that's just it i should have said it literally she was a space cadet she was an

00:13:58.120 astronaut and what did you do for being an astronaut like good for you like that's great

00:14:01.200 that you're an astronaut but apparently you couldn't keep your feet on the ground and do a

00:14:04.620 very basic job which is literally you greet people do your declensions like oh hello like

00:14:11.520 yes you're going to be an ambassador to Canada that's great here let me shake your hand and

00:14:15.400 take a picture with you that'll be another you know three hundred thousand dollars in my bank

00:14:19.500 account this year thank you like it's not a hard job it's not and she couldn't do it she couldn't

00:14:26.580 even not abuse her staff no I have nothing nice to say about Julie Payette and may you know may

00:14:31.160 God have mercy on her soul that's all I have to say so moving right along um I'm I'm looking forward

00:14:36.740 to uh our new governor general here we'll get uh we'll get john on in just a moment here but

00:14:42.580 i'm gonna i'm gonna just take a quick quick quick quick look here with uh with one of these

00:14:48.760 things that we're streaming here let's see use my share screen

00:14:53.580 oh the albertan has some things to say about our our monarch across the sea

00:15:02.260 I swear no oath to an inbred monarch across the sea.

00:15:05.180 How inbred Queen Lizzie II is, I don't know.

00:15:08.640 I'd have to look that up.

00:15:10.560 I mean, actually, the royal family of England has, ironically,

00:15:15.060 has a lot of different occupiers, so it's not nearly as inbred

00:15:18.100 as some of the others were.

00:15:20.660 So I'm going to have to correct you on that part, the Albertan.

00:15:24.500 But I'm a monarchist.

00:15:26.360 I like the monarchy.

00:15:28.120 I think the monarchy is still probably our best bet.

00:15:31.700 I don't know what else we would do.

00:15:36.080 I mean, we could try to do the Republican thing

00:15:38.320 that's happening to the south of us,

00:15:39.760 but voting for your king doesn't seem to go any better.

00:15:42.320 So we need to really think that through

00:15:44.920 before we leave the monarchy.

00:15:46.180 I'm a good Berkey in that way,

00:15:47.620 but I'm also a Tory Catholic,

00:15:49.200 which means that I keep having to fight

00:15:50.700 on behalf of a Protestant usurper, 0.62

00:15:52.760 which isn't great,

00:15:53.620 but what are you going to have to do?

00:15:55.260 I'm sure John will have something to say about that later.

00:15:57.500 Anyways, okay, so a lot of this

00:16:00.420 that I took from my opening statement was here

00:16:02.360 in this, what is this?

00:16:03.840 Is this CTV?

00:16:04.640 And I'm just going to scroll down to

00:16:09.920 some of her early life of the bridge.

00:16:12.160 So she was born in,

00:16:13.440 and I'm just going to scroll down to some of her early life of the bridge.

00:16:16.920 So she was born in,

00:16:18.380 I don't even want to try and pronounce that,

00:16:20.340 but let's give it a go.

00:16:21.740 Born in Kangisgulyjak.

00:16:27.540 I'll say that's how it is.

00:16:28.900 an inuit village in the nunavik region of northern quebec simon attended a federal day

00:16:35.080 school until she was in grade six for the likes of the life which she describes a very traditional

00:16:38.420 lifestyle um and and she does kind of go on to explain a little bit what that would look like

00:16:43.520 and i'm i'm hopeful that this isn't being hammed up okay so one of the problems with our elites

00:16:49.180 these days is they they try to tell us about the calluses on their hands that they don't have

00:16:53.300 i think mary simon is being authentic here but this is like whether we're talking about joe

00:16:58.320 biden or we're talking about you know trudeau talking about his struggles living living in

00:17:03.720 and you know in uh 24 sussex as a young boy like how how how difficult it was to be him

00:17:10.060 how difficult it is to be any of the people who lead us uh they're talking about calluses they

00:17:14.840 don't have i'm hopeful that mary is telling us the full truth here because yeah going on to say

00:17:20.500 you know many months a year we camped and lived on the land hunted and fished and gathered food

00:17:24.000 contained an actual connection with the Inuit heritage maybe that part was written by by you

00:17:28.660 know the staffers but definitely the hunted fished and gathered food thing if that's true I mean and

00:17:34.440 it doesn't have to be literally true to the point of they would have starved if they didn't catch a

00:17:38.800 seal that day that's not what I'm saying but it's it's important for us to understand that in the

00:17:44.140 north it's given that she is actually from the north this is a reality that that is a little

00:17:49.440 bit closer to the chest so while i was up north very briefly uh in churchill i met i met in a guys

00:17:56.580 i met inuit uh people who actually preferred to still call themselves eskimos just like how i

00:18:01.000 prefer the term indian because that's what's still on my card for the love of god when they change 0.98

00:18:05.040 what's on my card i'll stop saying that word but the point is that those guys up north they they

00:18:11.200 would literally get in a boat they'd get in a boat and i mean a boat i'm i do i'm not talking

00:18:16.940 about an ocean liner i'm talking about an aluminum bottom boat or even and even like the fiberglass

00:18:22.460 stuff every now and again but they get into big steel boats that are you know 15 20 feet long at

00:18:27.940 most with an outboard some of them were inboard but lots of are outboard and they would go all

00:18:33.340 the way from rankin inlet down to churchill so they'd be riding the hudson's bay which has tides

00:18:39.540 of no less than five meters in some places,

00:18:43.040 which is to say well over 15 feet.

00:18:45.860 So these guys were wild.

00:18:48.680 They were wild.

00:18:49.420 Like that is life in the north.

00:18:50.920 Like you might,

00:18:51.480 and there are people who have dog sledded

00:18:53.520 all the way from Churchill up to,

00:18:55.320 you know, the next community.

00:18:57.520 I'm not quite sure if they went all the way to Rankin,

00:18:59.600 but they went, you know,

00:19:00.340 quite a ways up into none of it.

00:19:01.800 And it just,

00:19:03.340 that still goes on up there.

00:19:05.400 So what I will say is this,

00:19:06.880 if Mary Simon is telling us the truth

00:19:08.640 about the way she was raised she is a tough lady and she has seen some tough stuff so i'm hopeful

00:19:15.020 that having that kind of toughness which seems to be missing from basically everybody who's in

00:19:20.000 charge of canada right now even our current federal leader who you know ex-military guy

00:19:26.480 whatever else but he's not coming across as very tough strong we can get this done we can rebuild

00:19:31.720 this country we can do what needs to happen to get canada back on track that tough rhetoric just

00:19:37.240 doesn't seem to be anywhere uh in our country right now and uh there's a real lack of leadership

00:19:42.860 a real lack of of heroism courage uh ardor strength and and hopefully mary simon can kind

00:19:50.200 of display that a bit certainly from a feminine side but nonetheless she can kind of stand up and 1.00

00:19:54.640 be like well as as a woman who was raised in the north where i literally had to you know run a dog

00:19:59.820 team or literally had to you know pull pull the blubber off of seals by hand or you know it all

00:20:06.340 that sort of thing. I got to eat beluga while I was up there. That was made by an Inuk guy. It was 1.00

00:20:11.240 really good. It was pickled. Tastes pretty good. But the point I'm trying to drive home here is

00:20:16.660 that if she's a real, if she's a real northerner in that sense, then we have some hope when it

00:20:21.320 comes to our new governor general. So I'm going to punt that from the stream. We're a little bit

00:20:25.960 early here, but I think, I think John's waiting in the wings here. Let me just bring him on

00:20:30.600 uh as soon as i can and uh john welcome good to see you likewise

00:20:37.280 and now i can't hear you absolutely how uh how are things out there uh you can't hear me

00:20:48.160 no i can now can you hear me now yes i can

00:20:52.220 technical issues

00:21:02.900 is that better

00:21:09.000 john i hear you okay perfect well uh let's get started right away what do you think about our

00:21:22.200 new governor general and uh what what she kind of represents as a as a opening bid i think for 1.00

00:21:28.500 the trudeau re-election campaign well yes i mean it blends to look at it because you know

00:21:38.720 Trudeau it seems to be reaching on the other hand so it looks like she's an

00:21:43.480 excellent choice and everything you were saying about her is something I

00:21:47.460 accord with we have had an Aboriginal lieutenant governor before in Ontario

00:21:53.360 we had James Bartleman who held the post down extremely well but again you know

00:22:02.120 an Inuit from the high Arctic it's about time and I completely agree yeah and it 1.00

00:22:13.640 sounds like she does have the so to speak the royal jelly as it were she 1.00

00:22:18.080 can she can do the job and and doing the doing the job it's a I think that that 0.99

00:22:29.820 one of the things that was really missing with our last governor general is that i think she

00:22:35.120 thought it was all about her and not about the role that she was playing and and that was the

00:22:40.520 problem it i think mary simon is very aware that she's in a role and then in that role she gets to

00:22:46.780 be herself if she does the job uh but that's where it has to start she has to play the role

00:22:53.100 the governor general is advice regal they're standing in for the monarch i mean and there's

00:23:00.660 a lot of ceremony but the same time you have to have the touch for the ceremony you are is pointed

00:23:06.040 out to receiving the credentials of ambassadors you are handing out decorations you know orders

00:23:12.320 of canada orders of military merit you know the medals on the people you are listening you are

00:23:19.940 also reading legislation um normally a good prime minister is listening to your input although i

00:23:28.340 don't think the current one was it would listen to anybody um there there are a lot of very very

00:23:35.060 subtle and important roles that the governor general plays and most people you know especially

00:23:40.820 i think you had that call from someone who was making his remarks about the monarchy you know

00:23:44.980 they don't understand what that role entails and what it means and and they are vitally important

00:23:51.300 for us and and it's not just vitally important in a purely symbolic sense the fact of the matter is

00:23:59.140 is that if even from a pragmatic sense like you have somebody who is in the role because they

00:24:06.260 have a competency to it and that's and they're raised to be in it when it comes to the monarch

00:24:10.660 themselves. And if it's not the monarch, if it's a vice regal representative, we're taking them

00:24:15.100 from the echelon that we believe has been properly formed to help make these decisions on behalf of

00:24:22.480 all the people in a nonpartisan way. Now, let's be clear, when it comes to the vice regal

00:24:28.920 representatives of certain appointments, or rather of certain governments, I mean, that was, I think,

00:24:35.080 the other problem that was that was big with julie payette the the trudeau government really

00:24:39.860 did try to you know i don't know it tried to combine all the elixirs of pearson trudeau

00:24:45.380 senior and king and go you know what we'll do we'll really just remake canada in our image and

00:24:51.420 we can totally partisanize the the uh this vice regal representative and see and that'll be fine 1.00

00:24:58.140 we'll just run canada like it's our backyard and i think that's what blew up in their face payette

00:25:03.700 was clearly not just a liberal elite in the way that we know that they all are from the Laurentian

00:25:09.720 Valley, but she really came across as someone who was anti-religion, anti-anybody in Canada who

00:25:17.520 wasn't just, you know, a stone's throw away from where she was living at. And she really did

00:25:24.720 abuse her staff and abuse anybody that got in her way. And she didn't think of herself as

00:25:30.340 needing to represent all Canadians well if you look at the long list of very

00:25:36.660 successful governors general and lieutenants governor that we've had one

00:25:41.300 of the first things you're really looking for is dignity someone who could

00:25:46.400 hold that office down and then someone who's easy to respect and you think

00:25:51.840 back and again some of the more successful the governor's general some

00:25:55.020 of the successful lieutenant governors they were people that were very easy to

00:25:59.560 respect. But they also had, just like the royal family does, they could go into a crowd and talk

00:26:07.400 to anybody. And if you've ever met a member of the royal family, especially the queen, but I've

00:26:14.220 noticed it with others, they come out, you know, a politician wades into a crowd and the politician

00:26:19.940 is normally trying to convince you that he's important. Where, you know, a royal or a vice

00:26:26.520 regal walks into a crowd and they come out leaving you feel that you're important that's a

00:26:32.440 very critical distinction it really is and and what what does seem to be interesting when it

00:26:39.660 comes to when it comes to the question of monarchy versus an elected representative

00:26:44.060 is that in the end the the monarchy is a family it's a family and so our representation of the

00:26:55.100 ideal of the state is not an elected person like i mean there actually have been bachelors who have

00:27:01.740 been elected president of the united states we forget about that there were a couple of them

00:27:05.540 uh and we and the same thing when it comes to even prime ministers of canada i believe that

00:27:11.980 king was a bachelor and so was bennett uh and still so so i mean we have we've had these

00:27:20.020 different representations over time but always in the highest office unless of course you're

00:27:24.220 George III with no legitimate heirs or whatever.

00:27:26.720 The idea is that the monarchy is always a familial representation.

00:27:32.120 This is the ideal of the state.

00:27:33.700 The state is contained within the family, within the sovereign.

00:27:37.340 And I think that's something that we need to keep kind of close to our hearts,

00:27:41.540 especially as we think about maybe renovating our constitution

00:27:44.900 or changing whether or not we have a monarchy.

00:27:47.500 Do you want just one more partisan, hackish person at the helm of government?

00:27:53.120 Or do you want someone who, quite frankly, was basically raised to be in charge or at least understands that they're acting out a role?

00:28:02.500 It's not about them.

00:28:03.500 They're simply putting on the robes, putting on the crown, and acting out a role on behalf of everyone. 1.00

00:28:10.180 After a second, I just got to kill this damn thing. 1.00

00:28:13.580 That's not a problem. 1.00

00:28:23.120 Sorry about that. I guess the point for the monarchy, and I've actually found myself defending the monarchy quite often, and I have very strong feelings about it, but there are three things to remember.

00:28:37.620 I mean, one, parliamentary monarchy, some people just don't get against it.

00:28:45.660 The first thing about a parliamentary monarchy is that you have somebody who is holding all the executive power with the understanding that they never exercise it.

00:29:01.640 So, I mean, if you imagine someone like Pierre Trudeau, say, Sir Justin Trudeau, if he'd

00:29:07.760 been elected as President of the United States, it would have been a huge ego boost.

00:29:11.880 And he would be running in there trying to claim all sorts of power they're not entitled

00:29:16.240 to have.

00:29:17.580 What you have with the parliamentary monarchy is a speed bump.

00:29:21.580 You know, you've won the election, you've got the tremendous ego boost.

00:29:25.640 Now you are asking for permission to form a government for the monarch.

00:29:33.180 It's a tremendous safeguard, it's very subtle, and most people don't get it, but it really

00:29:39.560 is a protection.

00:29:41.700 If you look, there's a collection of political economists, including the Fraser Institute,

00:29:47.200 the cato institute in the state uh an austrian outfit they do an annual report on sorry i'm i'm

00:29:59.120 damn that is very annoying um they do an annual report on basically uh individual freedoms and

00:30:10.320 human rights, and the highest standards consistently in the top 10 are crowded up 0.99

00:30:17.360 with parliamentary monarchies. They have the best record when it comes to protecting individual

00:30:24.160 rights, and you can't argue with that. They also have very high standards of political stability.

00:30:31.200 When was the last civil war that the British had? 1689. Then, say, look at some country like France,

00:30:39.280 you know where the britain you've got one continuous government going on since 1689 in

00:30:45.760 france you've got uh three republics three empires three foreign military occupations

00:30:52.160 sorry and five republics um it's just constant um the other point of course is for canadians

00:31:00.080 it's important you know we should be republic we're a big mature country what we want to be

00:31:06.320 the third republic on this continent and the smallest one we want to lose all of the distinctiveness

00:31:13.920 in our institutions and in our customs that make us different from the united states and from mexico 1.00

00:31:20.800 and lose that much of our history thank you no you you know nothing about canadian history

00:31:26.960 even expressing that opinion means you need to go back to school yeah i understand now it's uh

00:31:34.320 That, and of course, I don't know about you, but I've often enjoyed myself in the United States by sort of engaging in linguistic culture shock.

00:31:46.140 You know, they talk about state land. I talk about crown land. They talk about, you know, judges. I talk about the Queen's Bench.

00:31:54.320 you know they talk about particular regiments or you know the united states name and i say the

00:32:00.060 royal canadian navy or the royal canadian air force or the regiment i served in uh the queen's

00:32:06.440 york rangers which fought on the crown side in the american revolution and came to canada as part of

00:32:13.740 the uh loyalist uh epic so i mean again you know the crown is woven deep in a canada soul and 0.96

00:32:23.500 only an idiot would want to pull it out because they think we're supposed to be mature 0.93

00:32:28.700 there's only a few there's only a few kind of things like that that really drive that home 1.00

00:32:33.500 for some people one of them is when you speaking of regiments when you look at how many how many

00:32:38.220 regiments united states are basically based in numbers they have numbers to try and delineate

00:32:43.180 where they are who they are and then and in canada so much of them are locally based or

00:32:47.740 they're person based they have a name to them or they have a locality to them that that tells us

00:32:52.940 who who they are and what they are i've always found that to be quite quite beautiful actually

00:32:58.140 that that that difference of the way we name things in canada yeah it often means that a

00:33:03.420 unit is a lot more solidly rooted in the community and again you know american formations they come

00:33:10.780 and they go you know the the 15th tank regiment served with distinction you know in korea and it

00:33:17.340 isn't listed anymore it's gone you know but the lord strathcona's you know they've got a history

00:33:23.840 that is epic and around 120 years now so absolutely i if i guess maybe a way to kind of pivot here

00:33:34.840 is to say well if if people are ignorant of canadian history when it comes to the monarchy

00:33:39.260 how how ignorant are people when it comes to these statues that are being removed and vandalized and

00:33:45.420 of course the churches that are being scourged around around and scorched for that matter around 0.93

00:33:49.820 Canada it seems to be a kind of direct connection there that something something's gone kind of

00:33:54.680 terribly wrong when it comes to historical understanding of Canada it's being transformed

00:33:58.780 it's being warped some people are making hay out of it and getting ahead of the curve and some

00:34:03.480 people are getting left behind and seeing seeing their their monuments or their sacred spaces

00:34:08.260 harmed you know um it's this historic phenomenon you know you iconoclasm you know in in the byzantine

00:34:17.300 empire you look at various other points you know the puritans in england walked into all these

00:34:23.060 old medieval churches and erect them you know centuries of art and history were lost uh and

00:34:29.380 again it's the spur of the moment and you look at the sort of people who are out there tearing down

00:34:33.940 on statues and thinking they're doing something,

00:34:37.620 again, they are normally entirely ignorant of history

00:34:41.560 and they're stealing from the heritage

00:34:44.380 that belongs to all of us.

00:34:46.880 We'll have to put those statues back up again.

00:34:51.400 And one hopes that there is a natural justice

00:34:55.240 that these people turn up again in orange jumpsuits

00:34:57.980 under supervision and start scrubbing the statue

00:35:01.680 and manually putting it back up again.

00:35:03.940 but that's our history and like it or leave it it's all part of it and again um one thing that

00:35:10.180 really annoys me right now for example in toronto uh mayor john tory who uh all i can say in him is

00:35:19.060 in his favor is that he wears suits very well but yeah but that's it but uh you know 16 000

00:35:26.820 people apparently signed a petition that they're going to change some names you know the name of

00:35:31.620 young street the longest street in the world and dundas street because you know apparently these

00:35:37.060 people were involved in slavery or something you know over 200 years ago and i'm sorry you know

00:35:43.700 dundas uh was a friend of the first lieutenant governor of the province john grave simcoe who

00:35:50.420 was the colonel of the queen's rangers during the american revolutionary war came back to canada in

00:35:56.340 1792 was the first lieutenant governor of upper canada picked up you know those who wanted to

00:36:01.780 come from his old regiment who were in new brunswick and toronto most of the streets in

00:36:07.460 the downtown core are named for members of the regiment and of course the two big streets young

00:36:14.180 street and dundas well dundas was a personal friend but not only that he was in the british

00:36:20.420 cabinet because he won a key abolitionist legal battle freeing a black slave in scotland and

00:36:28.740 establishing the principle that slavery was no longer allowed in scotland yep because you know

00:36:36.180 he was a british cabinet minister you know 200 years ago you want to change his name and go

00:36:41.060 through all the expense and you know nothing about him uh or the other point of course is that uh

00:36:48.900 john grave simcoe the first lieutenant governor of the province you know two of his former officers

00:36:54.900 aeneas shaw and sam jarvis came with him and they've got shaw street and jarvis street as well

00:37:00.820 as simcoe street downtown toronto and they were former slave owners when they before the american

00:37:06.020 revolution in the american south but they were the men that simcoe talked to he said i don't want to

00:37:12.340 have slavery up in upper canada what's the best way of accomplishing this and these two were said

00:37:18.020 well boss it works like this and you know ontario became you know the first uh entity in the british

00:37:25.780 empire where slavery was no longer possible where it was banned you know but again you know nobody

00:37:31.940 you know the current you know person who wants to throw paint on a statue and then tear it down

00:37:37.780 doesn't bother to do any research no i think their library cards expired um along with most of their

00:37:44.820 ID, but it, uh, it, I think that, I think that something else that's kind of key here is that

00:37:51.160 even, even, you know, John A. McDonald, he was such a, he was such a laughable character. I

00:37:57.380 miss kind of, in a sense, the old liberal party. I miss, I miss the liberal party of the nineties

00:38:01.980 that, that was just trying to undermine any, any, any good ideas conservatives ever had by just

00:38:09.660 making fun of conservatives so

00:38:11.500 Diefenbaker was a bit of a weirdo in every

00:38:13.660 textbook I read and

00:38:15.740 I remember the same thing happened

00:38:17.960 with John A. McDowell

00:38:19.600 he was a drunk

00:38:20.680 Borden was just a bit of a

00:38:23.520 bit of a stickler

00:38:24.620 he was a stickler for rules and whatever 1.00

00:38:26.980 and Bennett was just a rich jerk 1.00

00:38:29.000 there were these caricatures of them 1.00

00:38:31.440 and that was the way that history was taught

00:38:32.580 now we're taught that they might have all as well been

00:38:35.000 crypto-Nazis despite living before

00:38:37.020 Nazism or during Nazism 0.65

00:38:39.140 and hating it or after it, after it had been discarded.

00:38:42.320 And their grave sites or former sites of glory

00:38:46.960 are being desecrated.

00:38:48.520 And the latest happened in Kingston.

00:38:50.040 I'm sure you heard about it.

00:38:52.560 Yeah.

00:38:53.020 And I mean, if you walk around downtown Kingston

00:38:56.000 or did five, 10 years ago,

00:38:58.840 Sir John A. MacDonald was everywhere.

00:39:00.640 He was one of the most famous sons of that particular city.

00:39:04.760 And you could see his statue,

00:39:08.500 see the places where he was and um have lunch in a restaurant that was in his former law office

00:39:15.860 you know he was part and parcel of it the other thing is that again you know i'm sorry people who

00:39:23.540 tear down statues are simpletons and the actual facts of the matter is history is always far more

00:39:30.420 complex than you know and again uh mcdonald was you know and he was her first prime minister but

00:39:39.620 he was also trying to handle things i mean and remember the indian act although that came out

00:39:46.420 uh under the liberals but the whole object of it was to try and get the indians to survive

00:39:52.980 and a lot of people forget what things were like you know we raised the northwest mountain police

00:39:58.420 to protect the plains indians from american whiskey traders who were killing them um and

00:40:06.260 again you know there was the the massacre that was the the final straw and basically drove the

00:40:10.820 mountains out to the prairies um i think the other point is that you know when you you talk about the

00:40:18.260 the hunger that drove a lot of the indians into the reservations most people again have never ever

00:40:23.700 thought about the history of the drove it but the winter of 1883 84 is also

00:40:30.480 referred to in both in some of the Indian records from Canada and United

00:40:35.460 States as the hunger winter and if you look at some of the newspapers from that

00:40:39.980 winter or from that spring you know when the the snow finally melted in early

00:40:44.480 1884 there were corpses coming out of snow banks from Winnipeg to Texas it was

00:40:51.120 a horrible winter you know it killed off a lot of independent farmers independent ranchers it also

00:40:57.760 meant that every indian that was not on a reservation uh was starving because there was

00:41:03.120 no hunting possible uh of course you know if you try and draw the connections it might be that

00:41:09.920 um remember the explosion of mount krakatoa in 1883

00:41:14.400 and well that winter was probably one of the most hideous winters known in north american

00:41:21.040 weather records ever you know we're looking at like 20 to 30 feet of snow you know across most

00:41:27.760 of north america and that's that's what caused it but you know again people think well no i saw the

00:41:33.840 buffalo were shot well actually on the great plains what was left to the buffalo was also

00:41:39.040 was left of most of the cattle they died buried in snowdrifts that winter the in the spring there

00:41:45.680 was nothing and again you know that was suddenly you you've got the the federal government going

00:41:52.240 okay we've got all these indians coming out to all the different reservations and they're all 0.95

00:41:56.400 demanding food and all about that time was small parsimonious narrowly governed but suddenly i mean

00:42:05.120 the demand for rations was incredible and we still haven't got the railroad bills

00:42:10.560 again logistics how did they get food out to these reserves in the far west

00:42:17.360 and and it's funny because i my my band actually does get its name from the massacre you named

00:42:23.200 uh of course the massacre at cypress hills uh carry the kettle is my band's name and that has

00:42:28.320 to do with going back to the kettle during the firefight uh with the whiskey traders and and i

00:42:34.080 I mean, to your point of Indians making demands upon reservations, people throughout the West, First Nations throughout the West, coming to ask the government for help in this moment of crisis.

00:42:46.020 Again, we look throughout the Indian Act.

00:42:47.820 The Indian Act has all these rules around giving out shots and giving out the means for sustenance and self-sustaining and rights around fishing, around hunting.

00:42:59.540 People think that it's just a laundry list of racism.

00:43:02.320 It's like, no, it's a laundry list from a different era around these very issues, which are not issues anymore, because you can go to McDonald's at two in the morning.

00:43:10.900 And that didn't exist back then.

00:43:14.100 Well, I was also more through it than that.

00:43:16.960 I mean, let's face it, you know, there's a lot that went wrong.

00:43:20.380 But again, when the Indian Act was drawn up, I mean, the academic discipline of anthropology didn't exist yet.

00:43:28.940 You know, we didn't know how to study a culture and identify its good points and support it.

00:43:35.940 It just wasn't there.

00:43:38.940 You know, there are other things as well.

00:43:40.940 So, I mean, there was sort of a Victorian ignorance behind the Indian Act.

00:43:45.940 They meant well.

00:43:47.940 And, well, I mean, among other things, the whole object was to make sure that the First Nation survived.

00:43:56.940 but yeah it was a victorian way of thinking that the way they do it is they all learn english and

00:44:02.060 become farmers and we know you know because now that that was you know in some respects uh

00:44:09.660 you can call it cultural genocide but cultural genocide as a term did not exist in the 80s it

00:44:15.740 was not understood no no it wasn't understood at all the i think that as we kind of look at

00:44:25.660 at the wider world then as and kind of try and take up a bit of an international scope here

00:44:29.960 it seems like parts are moving very fast so so for canada i mean up until about 15 minutes ago i don't

00:44:36.740 know how things are going over there in alberta but here in bc we might as well have you know

00:44:41.540 iwo jima's secure as far as we're concerned over here in bc the pandemic is over people i don't

00:44:47.560 know i i didn't really get the memo that the pandemic was hemming or hawing or waxing or

00:44:51.920 waning but it's over like july 1 came and went bonnie henry put herself at the front of the

00:44:56.460 parade and said yep don't worry i'm giving you all permission to do all the things you're already

00:45:00.260 doing and nobody's wearing masks anymore and everything's basically over except for kind of

00:45:04.320 some staff in some places at some stores so so that's over but now we're immediately pivoting

00:45:10.840 into the wildfires and of course some of the church fire stuff but also the wildfires and

00:45:14.620 then climate change it's like it's like rhetoric hasn't changed the same fevered pitch is there

00:45:18.760 they're just singing a different tune um now it's climate change and and what's going on around the

00:45:23.880 world there at an international level are you kind of seeing this same pivot people are no longer

00:45:30.040 talking about the pandemic so much and they're immediately heading into into the question of

00:45:34.200 climate change uh well actually in some respects i wish they were thinking about climate change uh

00:45:42.840 and they aren't um instead it's the usual things that have come up and still came up well covet

00:45:49.640 we were still dealing with kobe yeah and we might see another wave of kobe come as some of the uh

00:45:57.080 south asian strains come creeping out and being appear we might be masked again but

00:46:03.080 you know internationally it's almost like the same old same old um yeah again the palestinians and 0.99

00:46:11.640 you know their return is towards the israelis uh iran acting up china pushing and pushing and

00:46:18.840 pushing and it's like pushing um you know at taiwan it's pushing at uh its other neighbors um

00:46:27.320 and the russia is playing the crane again in fact actually um one of the things that most people

00:46:35.320 missed was that the uh the russians provided another example of what they call uh what we

00:46:40.760 call gray zone warfare where somebody who would drone with a thermite grenade into the ukraine's

00:46:46.920 largest ammunition inventory and blew it up you know just thousands of tons of ammunition cooked

00:46:54.680 off and you know it seems to have been done by a teenager with a drone and accidentally and not on

00:47:03.400 purpose and very very strange and of course yeah the british are still trying to get uh

00:47:12.200 have their eu cake and leave the table the same time and just uh the eu still trying to figure

00:47:19.320 out what to do with the british and brexit and so global warming it doesn't seem to occur

00:47:27.000 the the end of the epidemic doesn't really seem to be registering yet these are real problems

00:47:33.400 no it's it's a fair point it's a fair point well let's let's start from let's we haven't talked

00:47:38.520 about ukraine in a long time let's let's start there what i'm i'm remembering you know it feels

00:47:45.880 like it was so long ago but honestly the ukrainian war cold war the crimea conflict whatever you want

00:47:50.860 to call it it's not really that long ago i feel like i the the number 2014 comes to mind am i

00:47:56.460 right on that 2014 yeah that's when uh the crimea was uh grabbed um and and again you're asking i

00:48:07.260 think especially for angry calls from listeners depending on their own national backgrounds but

00:48:12.700 um ukraine has been trying to come out of russia's shadow ever since and russia's been trying to drag 0.63

00:48:19.260 it back in it's like russians feel an emotional need that the ukraine is part of russia where

00:48:26.220 ukrainians want to be very much out of russia's shadow um and of course you had the very end of 0.90

00:48:33.020 the soviet era the new boundaries of ukraine that were drafted by russians primarily to keep the

00:48:38.700 ukraine tucked in of the soviet union so you've got the eastern ukraine that's sort of more ethnic

00:48:45.420 russian than ukrainian and the crimea which is a well it was actually neither russian nor ukrainian

00:48:52.860 until very very recently but also you have this sort of strange again gray zone conflict

00:49:00.460 um for example um in kiev you suddenly had a power blockage you know the power system got hacked

00:49:07.340 so the capital of ukraine was entirely blacked out accidentally not on purpose at the very same time

00:49:14.380 you know unknown mercenaries and paramilitaries were taking over the crimea and the right and of

00:49:21.740 course moscow's claiming oh it wasn't us it was these groups we don't know where they come from

00:49:26.700 it was just like the other group of cossacks who shot down the malaysian airliner over the ukraine 0.99

00:49:33.260 you know they weren't actually russian military so all right so is a a cossack man but what the

00:49:39.740 heck were they doing with surface-to-air missiles they can shoot down an international airliner

00:49:45.660 30 000 feet up you know that military equipment that doesn't belong to a paramilitary

00:49:54.220 and you have this on again and off again border war all along the uh the new frontier where the

00:50:02.060 russians just keep pushing and again it's it's not the so it's not the russian military it's just

00:50:08.540 There's paramilitary forces that happen to have multiple rocket launchers, modern tanks, are fully stocked with small arms and lots and lots of ammunition, and God knows how they got it, and Moscow's acting innocent.

00:50:26.700 maybe maybe they've kind of taught us exactly how warfare goes nowadays you have to have non-state

00:50:34.300 actors doing the state's work or else you're actually in a hot war and hot wars aren't allowed

00:50:40.060 anymore ever since nagasaki but uh yes on the other hand i mean if you go all the way back to

00:50:47.020 1648 in the treaty of westphalia you know we came out of the all the europe came out of the 30 years 0.86

00:50:54.620 war but before that they came out of centuries of warfare by private actors you know cities would

00:51:00.860 declare war on each other you know the bishop might be fighting with a mercenary company a

00:51:05.900 merchants league had its own warships out at sea and then suddenly it was you know the european

00:51:11.500 countries go we're tired of this war is official now you've got everyone in a uniform with a

00:51:16.540 commission from their national government national flags warfare is for states not for all these

00:51:23.660 private actors but ever since 1990 you know the world is being made safer again how many times

00:51:32.620 have you actually seen nation states in the last 30 years fight each other i guess iraq

00:51:40.620 yeah basically you can probably count all the the nation state wars that were fought according to

00:51:47.820 the old ways you know by national militaries answering the national governments on both sides

00:51:55.500 on one hand with a finger or two left over instead what we have is a new world now where

00:52:03.260 you know mercenaries paramilitaries corporations religious sects tribes are conducting war

00:52:11.820 usually paying for it through organized crime uh narcotics and people smuggling especially

00:52:18.540 but the other point is that the resources are becoming more and more available to them and

00:52:23.420 most people don't don't really understand this but uh remember for example um uh a couple years ago

00:52:31.340 jamaica was trying to stop gang wars in the slums of kingston jamaica and they sent in their army

00:52:37.900 which got beaten you know the the drug gangs chased the the the uh the kings the army out of

00:52:45.820 their own capital pakistan can't control what happens in its major cities anymore same thing 0.72

00:52:52.220 in nigeria you've got these permanent hot zones that even the national government can't interfere 1.00

00:52:59.580 in anymore um the same time we also have a growing number of people you know as we've seen like the

00:53:06.940 the russians who you know somehow or other put thermite grenades on drones and fly them into 0.54

00:53:12.540 ammunition dumps uh or the uh the iranians who are supporting the how the militias in yemen

00:53:19.900 were able to fire scud missiles at the capital of saudi arabia so the technology that's being

00:53:27.020 provided to these people is growing and and we're getting to a stage now where in a few years

00:53:33.100 Warfare might be like it was 800 years ago, a constant fact of life being waged by private actors with the best technology they can get going on around our lives continuously.

00:53:47.400 Which is something that I think it'd be kind of interesting because that'd be kind of the Middle Easternization of the whole world in that case, because that's kind of been in the reality of the Middle East, I'm sure in other time periods. 0.96

00:53:58.040 but as we understand it in the modern time, really from the founding of Israel onwards?

00:54:04.560 Well, remember that most of the Arab states in the 1950s and 1960s,

00:54:10.780 you have the Nasser model, you know, the sort of socialist, nationalist, militaristic state government.

00:54:19.360 But then after 1979, you suddenly got the Islamic militias creeping out and growing. 0.91

00:54:26.520 Now, some states are managing to hold it together, but others are completely dissolving.

00:54:33.940 Libya, for example, is no longer really a national state.

00:54:39.320 Or I mentioned Yemen earlier on.

00:54:42.560 I mean, more or less since it's independence, whatever passes for the government in Yemen can control what happens within rifle shot of the presidential palace and not much else.

00:54:56.520 But there are people interested in that territory and the territory is strategic. So there are hands dipping in there and pushing it.

00:55:05.760 Maybe you can give us a bit of a kind of a survey or a kind of read on history on this question, then it was the state system a luxury.

00:55:15.580 Was it just it happened to work for a time?

00:55:18.960 It was a very Western concept.

00:55:21.440 It was from a certain time period.

00:55:23.180 It was from the terrors of religious warfare. 0.55

00:55:26.660 That's where it originated from.

00:55:28.500 And it was only going to last as long as you could have the metanarratives to hold it together.

00:55:33.280 Now we're losing those metanarratives, these grand national narratives.

00:55:37.420 There's a lot of doubt.

00:55:38.740 Postmodernism has creeped in.

00:55:39.900 are we not just going back to our natural state then of there being independent actors who have

00:55:46.220 decided over some bizarre theological point or some you know probably not even very valuable

00:55:51.960 piece of land or resource or whatever to pick a fight with one another that's that's possible

00:55:58.760 the world is going like that but remember a lot uh there are a lot of strong nation states still

00:56:04.780 And the other point is, is the will, is the willpower exists for the nation state to protect its own interests.

00:56:15.380 You still see it in some cases.

00:56:18.500 And a big part of the sort of the tolerance for these transnational groups.

00:56:26.040 How well do you know you're Rudyard Kipling?

00:56:28.760 A little bit.

00:56:30.400 You remember his poem, The Dane Guild?

00:56:34.780 you know where he talks about is how you sometimes get a modern nation in this case

00:56:39.180 england in the uh in the ninth and tenth century you know things are much too important so you know

00:56:46.540 whoever you are who are causing trouble and you know burning coastal villages and

00:56:50.780 carrying off for citizens here's some money go away and stop bothering us

00:56:54.940 and once you start paying the dane geld you're never rid of the day

00:56:59.420 you know the point is that a nation state either cracks down on this problem

00:57:03.500 harshly brutally and completely or all the structures of the state melt away

00:57:10.920 that's your choice so you you either have order peace order and good government which is what

00:57:18.180 our country is partly founded on or you don't but if you are going to have those things you better

00:57:23.780 be prepared to enforce them and in the post-modernist environment you know with the

00:57:29.240 military is unfashionable as it is, you know, things are starting to get untenable. There are

00:57:35.500 parts of Canada that are not administered by law and order anymore, you know, and if we're not

00:57:43.280 careful, you know, those areas are going to grow and get worse. It's interesting too what other

00:57:51.300 state actors will take advantage of, right, and what strong states or states with more control

00:57:55.720 over the rest of populations than we have will do to us in order to kind of get a leg up. So the

00:58:01.740 thing that comes to mind is, of course, China lecturing us about what happened inside of the

00:58:07.040 residential schools and everything else that's been happening lately, as if as if China has a

00:58:11.980 leg to stand on, you know, they're going to call the residential school system in Canada Auschwitz

00:58:16.900 while they actually run gulag prison camps that harvest organs. It's obscene, but they're getting

00:58:25.660 away with it nobody's calling them back on it no one's no one's responding or fighting back

00:58:30.940 oh i don't know about not having like to stand on but the chinese government does have 60 million

00:58:36.300 corpses to stand on and they're just celebrating the 100th anniversary of the chinese communist

00:58:42.620 party and i'm sort of thinking okay that's a conservative estimate for the number of deaths

00:58:47.180 they've caused yes including you know tibet doesn't exist anymore the genocide there has been

00:58:52.700 successful and they're the genocide of the ouijers but yeah okay china can lecture us on morality 0.96

00:58:59.500 of course you know people have better understand why they are lecturing us on morality because

00:59:06.300 china would really like to make deals for canadian resources with first nations without having to go

00:59:13.500 through ottawa or the provincial capitals so i mean yes they probably like every natural resource

00:59:20.780 uh british columbia has if they can deal with somebody so they can extract them without having

00:59:27.340 to uh put up with trouble from bureaucrats or from canadian corporations so i mean if you go 0.99

00:59:35.020 out to some of the reserves you know there are always going to be one or two idiots out there 1.00

00:59:40.540 who will listen to an overture like that 1.00

00:59:42.620 and those one or two idiots will also uh get money they may have a rifle or two in the trunk 1.00

00:59:52.440 and some other things they can they'll be able to make trouble and if they uh intimidate their 1.00

01:00:00.780 reserve you know they will then start to working on intimidating the rest of us in the meantime

01:00:06.040 you know all those resources will be shipped off maybe maybe part of the problem is john that that

01:00:13.520 our conception of the nation state and and our and our conception of really international relations

01:00:19.100 in general is like people are still walking around with like the billiard ball sort of conception of

01:00:23.800 like well a nation state's this whole connected thing it's it's opaque its will is is singular

01:00:29.780 and uniform and monolithic and they bounce off each other on the billiard table and they can

01:00:34.420 congregate over here they can congregate over there you can stand alone over there and that's

01:00:38.860 how it is but really it's like there's billiard tables within billiard tables within billiard

01:00:43.680 tables about how our international relations really work there are mining interests in canada

01:00:49.140 and various groups interested in those mining interests that are talking to people overseas

01:00:53.980 instantaneously they're not even waiting for the for the carrier pigeon to come home they can talk

01:00:59.320 to them right now on a satellite phone in the middle of nowhere in canada and say i've just

01:01:03.720 made a massive discovery i know i have this fault line i can see where this gold is going this

01:01:08.940 graphene is going whatever and i need you to get on the phone with someone else over here and then

01:01:15.060 they're going to talk to our government and then this is going to happen and now we can finally

01:01:18.660 start building this mine before the regulatory agency even knows that we've made this discovery

01:01:23.240 what how how do we change it is that a good thing for international relations is it bad is it good

01:01:29.040 for the market is it bad for the market what what do we do to make our sovereignty more felt without

01:01:35.600 it just turning into another exercise in red tape rigmarole well i think the big part and and again

01:01:43.120 this goes back to where we fell down you know with the passage of the indian act is we have to

01:01:48.440 exercise our sovereignty but we have to exercise our sovereignty with intelligence you know and

01:01:55.780 and that's the big point and we need to pay attention in ottawa we don't need a large civil

01:02:03.540 service with all sorts of progressive ideas we need a small well-trained civil service that

01:02:10.900 understands what its function is and exercises it yeah and we here's a story from the past um

01:02:21.060 you remember the airborne regiment the one that cretchen dismantled that's right you don't know 1.00

01:02:28.240 about some of the episodes of them in the 1960s and 70s do you no i don't well up in the high

01:02:34.840 arctic we had some very interesting mineral finds and some multinational companies headquartered

01:02:40.940 the united states uh were coming in to exploit them and of course in the high arctic if you run

01:02:47.040 an airfield an airstrip their transport canada has rules about what you have on an airstrip

01:02:53.200 because you know we might need it to conduct a search and rescue operation or to apply relief

01:02:59.280 to somebody but the company was basically told Ottawa run along go away uh this is our airfield

01:03:07.360 and you know we don't need to put up with any of your stuff so the airborne regiment

01:03:12.480 dropped in for a three-week exercise on the airfield you know it was a demonstration sort of

01:03:19.600 this is our territory our sovereignty our rules and our forces and the company realized okay

01:03:27.040 transport canada we will do exactly what you say and do that henceforth you know that was a more

01:03:33.940 robust era but it was also a simpler era and most canadians have never heard the story because

01:03:39.920 nothing ever came of it except that you know the corporation knuckled under

01:03:45.840 and and we don't i i'm not saying that we don't have any ways of showing strength today but we

01:03:51.600 certainly you know i think of the 60s we still had an aircraft carrier uh today i think we have

01:03:56.720 a couple of ships in dry dock that still haven't been constructed completely uh it this is this

01:04:03.440 is the other half of playing this dangerous game in canada of undersupplying our armed forces

01:04:08.640 and our royal navy our royal air force this if we don't get a handle on our own defensive situation

01:04:15.440 and are able to exercise sovereignty within our own borders which is debatable at this point i

01:04:19.120 think if the russians wanted to go do the exact same thing to us have a three-week exercise with

01:04:24.000 their airborne division somewhere in the high arctic i don't know if we would have the means

01:04:28.080 to to go and push them off or politely see them back to their boats or their aircraft i don't know

01:04:32.720 if we'd have the means to do that well it gets better than that um i was uh at a conference in

01:04:38.960 nova scotia a few years ago where the canadian navy was talking about the new shipping control

01:04:43.760 center it has so that i knew every vessel that was in canadian waters coming or going

01:04:48.080 and what was on it but the friend i was with um he said you want to see something interesting

01:04:55.200 the next day we went up to a a small out port in nova scotia you know further up the the coast

01:05:02.240 from Halifax, where a Russian icebreaker was leaving the port with its deck covered with

01:05:08.580 stolen vehicles.

01:05:10.580 You know, there's shipping, cars stolen from all certain places in eastern Canada, off

01:05:18.960 somewhere in probably the Middle East, and of course, we had no clue that it was there.

01:05:24.080 But you go to that community, and that community was carefully entitled to the attentions of

01:05:29.320 one RCMP officer one day a week.

01:05:34.560 So yeah, we were really enforcing our laws

01:05:37.020 and protecting our sovereignty there.

01:05:39.260 And there are other stories like that all over the place.

01:05:42.760 If you remember Weebo Ludwig,

01:05:45.940 you know, you've got an area of the size

01:05:48.200 in terms of population of Prince Edward Island,

01:05:52.560 it's even bigger in terms of territory.

01:05:55.740 And Three Mounties looking after it. 0.99

01:05:59.320 and actually the reason why auto was starting to pay attention to webo ludwig was that we both

01:06:03.800 neighbors were starting to talk about so uh under the law for self-defense if i see a certain car

01:06:11.560 digging up a pipeline that i know has got sour gas in there i'm entitled to protect my family

01:06:17.720 by killing the person in that car and this is you know an alberta farmer talking to a mountie

01:06:24.440 you know that there's problems here we we are not looking after our law and our order and our

01:06:33.220 stability as we should and nothing really exemplified that better in the last few weeks

01:06:40.120 than the fact that like you know if i if i told you uh a few minutes ago that that oh yeah i just

01:06:48.100 saw some more burning churches on tv been like oh uh where in northern iraq or uh in in pakistan

01:06:55.140 or right or maybe it's boko haram is at it again in nigeria and you asked me like where where in

01:07:01.820 the developing world did this happen i said oh no it's happening in canada they're on like church

01:07:06.580 number five or six now they've got many of them vandalized and this is happening i mean you would

01:07:11.980 have been shocked shocked and i'd be shocked too what what is going on in this country where we're

01:07:18.300 having the same behaviors visited upon us that literally are something we see on you know the

01:07:23.960 six o'clock news of some somewhere in the world that isn't here that's that's where that happens

01:07:29.720 that happens over there that doesn't happen over here well it's happening down the street now

01:07:33.280 well i i guess the other side of the equation is is not just you know the hard nuts and bolts

01:07:39.720 of a nation and the sense of a nation that we need to survive.

01:07:47.320 Postmodernism also means you don't teach history anymore

01:07:49.840 or you teach a very specific version of history.

01:07:53.360 I mean, do people really know about the history of the Catholic Church

01:07:56.880 and, you know, the Indians?

01:07:59.840 But, you know, who was protecting the last of the Hurons?

01:08:02.540 Who was sheltering the Mohawks, the Abenakis? 1.00

01:08:06.600 who was running schools for centuries you know in Quebec before the residential

01:08:12.660 schools came up and again some of the points about some of the graveyards that

01:08:17.040 are being found now I mean there's also Catholic clergy nursing sisters and

01:08:24.660 brothers who are I think in one residential school cemetery in British

01:08:31.860 Columbia there's three bishops buried in there who died looking after their

01:08:36.120 charges or i i think another point about one of the epidemics that hit canada uh in the 1840s you

01:08:44.040 know the uh typhus you know the uh you suddenly had hundreds and hundreds of people dying of typhus

01:08:54.200 i think it was in toronto and almost all the nerd the medical staff and everyone else took off the

01:09:01.320 disease was so frightening the city was abandoned there was two sets of people who would volunteer

01:09:07.080 to stay behind and look after the sick and the burial catholic clergy and british military

01:09:15.320 medical you know the medical officers from the british regiment and the catholic church

01:09:20.040 were the only ones who stayed behind we don't teach that history

01:09:25.000 i guess the other side of it too i mean some of the uh

01:09:27.480 the great stories about the first nations i mean champlain surviving his first winter

01:09:34.980 because the micmac are teaching him how to fight scurvy you know i always get a 0.98

01:09:40.520 samuel hearn a great slave lake i always thought that story probably one of the most noble ones

01:09:49.120 in the whole history of canada who teaches it you know how basically his hosts were not going

01:09:55.560 let him go continuous explorations in the in the wilderness in winter because they would not have

01:10:01.200 it said that they would let a stranger die by themselves yeah i uh thinking about up north uh

01:10:10.880 when i was up in churchill uh we actually my employer at the time he was very he was very

01:10:17.100 into the story of samuel hern and so uh he not only was the boat called the sam hern the big

01:10:23.020 boat that looks like a landing craft ready for d-day because of the gate on it and everything

01:10:27.200 uh but uh also the you know the the learning center that he put together about about the

01:10:33.820 northern journey and that sort of thing and the great the great overland journey through through

01:10:38.200 the north uh at that time rupert's land in northwest territories eventually now none of it

01:10:43.180 and of course the northwest territories it these are beautiful stories about canada but where

01:10:49.020 where do they get taught and who's still reading robert's service i mean that's i think robert

01:10:54.500 service did a better job of of explaining what canada was really about and he wasn't even born

01:10:59.100 here uh but uh but there seems to have been so it's like it's like that original i think mark

01:11:04.800 stein said it once of uh of what kind of happened in the post-war era the very end of the post-war

01:11:10.060 era kind of the last edwardians i guess uh was was you know right before the the coronation of

01:11:18.040 Elizabeth Wright at that time, Elizabeth II, that, you know, that Everest is summited, and,

01:11:25.660 you know, there's the four-minute mile, and all these great heroes, and the same thing kind of

01:11:30.480 happened in Canada for its first, you know, 60, 70 years of existence, and things seem to have

01:11:35.540 kind of decamped from there. What happened to our sense of history? What happened to our sense of

01:11:42.160 I guess there's three things that happened to our sense of history. One, we're too close to the United States and the American media.

01:11:52.160 And so we keep hearing their stories and not our own. And then, of course, the second point is that, you know, there is this Canadian reticence, you know, that we don't talk about heroes much.

01:12:07.160 and that's always been our problem you know that we're we're proud of the fact

01:12:12.260 that we're not chest thumpers although we should do some chest thumping and then

01:12:18.000 of course you know even before we could actually really get going I mean Pierre

01:12:22.420 Burton was just starting to write his stories about you know details of

01:12:27.000 Canadian history but the first post-modernists were coming out of our

01:12:30.620 schools you know so again that story is just not remembered but heck you know the greatest

01:12:39.820 triumph of the cbc and filmmaking was the canadian railroad series when when have they ever shown it

01:12:46.360 since it came out in the 1980s i got to see that when i was a kid in school our uh our socials

01:12:55.600 teacher had a copy of it or he had recorded it himself and so of course i still belong to the

01:13:01.340 generation of kids that before smart screens and before tablets in the the the classroom so the big

01:13:07.920 tv on the trolley gets pushed in and we're a great movie day well it turned out to be movie week

01:13:14.660 because we were watching this for every period of the week probably almost two weeks of this

01:13:19.040 canadian railroad thing right we're watching this thing and and it was amazing because like it it

01:13:24.060 wasn't just like why did they ever like why haven't they shown it again it's just it's this beautiful

01:13:28.340 work of art for like the time because it was so campy with the reenactments and everything else

01:13:33.300 the the two that the two things that i will never forget are i guess there's three there was there

01:13:40.760 was pierre burton beginning the introduction to it all when he literally said uh you know children

01:13:46.040 were conceived to the sounds of the cpr going by that i remember i will never forget that uh the

01:13:52.640 second one was that of course the the crazy american uh surveyor who got them through the

01:13:58.140 rockies can't remember his name but that guy um and he wanted his check on the wall he was paid

01:14:04.460 i don't know a million dollars or something uh back in the day and and he and so he cashed his

01:14:09.680 check but he wanted to keep the the original and they they made some adjustments to it to show it

01:14:14.560 couldn't be cashed again but he did keep his original on the wall and then there was the

01:14:19.560 moment where they're dealing with the the tunnels that are being built through the fraser canyon

01:14:24.120 and and of course a blast goes off too soon and unfortunately a a worker uh from from asia

01:14:32.520 uh is killed but the the but the body is hung up on the edge of the fraser and and it results in

01:14:40.360 literally a guy in in buckskin you know who kind of looks like me i guess without the beard uh but

01:14:47.080 but isn't wearing the right costume for that area he's looking he looks like he's from a plains

01:14:51.960 area he's not from the coast but that doesn't matter uh the point being that he all of a sudden

01:14:56.760 pulls out a gunny stack some dynamite and a rope and proceeds to like lower it down upon the

01:15:02.200 precipice where the body is and essentially send that body to where it belongs which is the river

01:15:07.880 it's it's it's just this moment of like i remember watching this in school and being like

01:15:12.840 this is insane like i can't believe they ever made this and it's like well i mean it was a different

01:15:18.200 time but i i mean it's still a better story than most the post-modern stuff that we're coming out

01:15:23.000 with today yeah and again it's part of our our national heritage and our myth and you know good

01:15:31.480 bad and ugly there's a lot in there that we should be familiar with or you know uh i mean canadian

01:15:37.960 military history is well covered if you're interested in it but I mean that's an option

01:15:45.480 um you know again the saga of what we were doing in the first world war most Canadians don't have

01:15:52.520 any idea and of course there's all sorts of other things and you know the heritage moments had uh

01:15:59.480 their moments um and you know some of those stories are fine stories but uh

01:16:05.800 There's a lot of details that still have to be covered.

01:16:09.060 There's a thousand episodes that should be part of our national mythology

01:16:14.800 that show where we can come together.

01:16:18.800 I mean, for example, you know the first synagogue in North America

01:16:22.660 was actually in Halifax?

01:16:26.100 Nobody knows that.

01:16:27.360 Not anymore.

01:16:29.620 Or Europeans used to come to Winnipeg in the 1880s and Marvel.

01:16:33.760 that, you know, here was this cosmopolitan society

01:16:38.120 of people from all over the planet in Canada.

01:16:41.700 Same thing, you know, being thing being noticed, say,

01:16:43.800 in Hamilton or Montreal.

01:16:46.900 You know, we think this sort of multiculturalism from Trudeau.

01:16:50.720 Well, no, we've always been a group of different people.

01:16:54.680 And the wrong word in 1972 was chosen

01:16:58.100 because we're not multicultural.

01:17:00.320 We're cosmopolitan.

01:17:02.020 and there's some very certain profound differences but we've never really understood or honored that

01:17:08.500 except as some sort of modern phenomenon rather than one that goes back a long way

01:17:14.020 and again you know there are aspects of living here i mean

01:17:21.220 canada i mean uh settlement in canada was not led by cossacks or cavalry it was

01:17:26.660 led by sales clerks and that was only possible because the first nations were different this

01:17:33.920 was not a country where we uh somebody had to fight tooth and nail across every foot of territory

01:17:39.640 i mean think about the the number of in if i can use the word indian wars against settlement that

01:17:46.460 were actually fought in canada because you can count them on one hand in most part it was

01:17:52.260 cooperative. Why? Because there's some aspect of our culture and our geography that means you don't

01:17:58.320 make a fuss about strangers because you might need them. And that's a central part of our core.

01:18:04.680 We forget that. We don't really understand it because we've never thought about it.

01:18:10.540 I recall that that was another person that was facing cancellation and denigration. It was General

01:18:16.100 amherst who uh of course was a logistical genius uh his his strategy with the blankets is still up

01:18:23.900 for debate but but i've heard it said at least from the historian whose house i occupy when i

01:18:29.040 do this show that that of course it was it was uh offenders by in some of the first nation raiders

01:18:36.660 that had been spreading smallpox around by grabbing scalps off of bodies that that had 0.98

01:18:42.120 happened as well and that's not talked about either when it comes to biological warfare

01:18:46.640 uh i'm not sure about skills but uh smallpox can hide in cloth for a very very long time so um

01:18:56.560 amherst i don't think actually needed to hand out blankets the first nations i think a first

01:19:02.000 nation for one of pontiac's people you know took a family in the ohio valley and then ran off with

01:19:08.800 their blankets and two weeks later was wondering why smallpox is spreading all through his home

01:19:13.440 village and going on from there no it makes sense makes sense let's let's take our let's take our

01:19:20.880 turn into the international scope here again so we have our we have this new governor general

01:19:26.000 she was the ambassador to denmark uh denmark obviously is a big player in the circumpolar

01:19:33.840 uh world and and the things that happened there maybe you could explain to our our listeners and

01:19:38.240 veers a little bit about how did china get involved with the circumpolar thing they seem

01:19:43.260 to be everywhere even though the fact they don't touch uh anything that is an arctic water by any

01:19:48.580 stretch of the imagination what what what's happening when it comes to the circumpolar

01:19:53.560 question are our countries going to cooperate around it or are we eventually going to see

01:19:58.860 our own little battles up there as we try to extract resources well remember the whole point

01:20:05.220 about the circumpolar conference when it first began for two reasons one is standardized search

01:20:12.360 and rescue because even the remember this was the soviets not the russians the time but a plane goes

01:20:18.860 missing somewhere off siberia or somewhere off of greenland and you want whoever hears the rate

01:20:27.040 the sos to be able to come to answer the other side of things was the ecology you know again in

01:20:32.560 in the 1970s we started to notice the number of polar bears dropping off and then it didn't take

01:20:39.120 much you know to uh get rid of a huge number of you know critical animals like muskox 1.00

01:20:47.600 and then of course you know from there in everything else followed naturally so it was

01:20:50.960 important but yeah the potential resources in uh under the arctic ice

01:20:56.160 to agree on it if you're actually going to go after them because no one's actually got that

01:21:05.120 problem well the chinese are there because they want those resources they've got no actual arctic

01:21:10.560 presence there's nothing there everybody else who's in the circumpolar conference has got

01:21:15.600 territory above the arctic circle except for china so it's sort of it's a poker table and 0.97

01:21:22.240 and a stranger is trying to deal himself in well i i think he'll get away with it to be honest with

01:21:29.040 you i think i think president xi and and the gang have gotten away with pretty much everything

01:21:33.120 they've done so far so i don't i don't really predict a lot of a lot of resistance to him even

01:21:38.240 by the other nations and of course there's a somewhat a friend in russia uh there's and and

01:21:44.080 that's probably all they need well let's face it i mean china is actually going to have a tremendously

01:21:50.240 I mean, a really profound impact in the Arctic Circle, because in 20 or 30 years, that might

01:21:59.840 be the only inhabitable area left on the planet. And that is, China's the one country with what, 0.99

01:22:07.360 1,500 coal power generating plants, you know, which is also contributing to the acidification

01:22:14.320 the pacific ocean i mean they are the worst ecological offenders on the planet bar none

01:22:21.760 and are probably contributing the most to climate change and are getting a free ride on it

01:22:29.920 the only way i could think of is them really having an impact in the arctic

01:22:34.560 well they'll also they'll have to go and build their own greater coast prosperity

01:22:38.480 sphere then

01:22:39.680 it's a very interesting place

01:22:55.440 it is still rather

01:22:57.040 pristine for the most

01:22:59.560 part and

01:23:01.320 the concerns there

01:23:03.540 are this weird blend between

01:23:05.160 international issues of course as you

01:23:07.320 mentioned the ecology of the place and and and and then therefore the tourism ecology that can

01:23:13.000 happen right the ecotourism and then finally uh finally the issue of what kind of economic

01:23:20.040 resources can be got out of the arctic is is canada ever going to take the arctic seriously

01:23:24.680 are we going to be one step behind everybody else in this one too well we have the same

01:23:30.360 problem with the arctic that every other member of the circumpolar conference has uh including the

01:23:35.880 russians distance logistics it's hard to get up there uh it's a long way from anything and there's

01:23:43.960 not many people out there there's not much of a labor force you can put prey on so yes you know

01:23:50.120 the americans might be able to pull some oil off of the north slope of alaska because they've got

01:23:56.440 the resources and and the money and the people in alaska everywhere else i mean if we have oil

01:24:03.720 in hillsmere island it'll stay there you know for 100 years we might not need oil anymore

01:24:11.080 there's no way of pulling it down and again uh ocean resources um

01:24:19.720 how do you how do you drill for oil when you put ice pack

01:24:24.200 how do you mine for manganese on the floor of the the floor of the ocean you know when you have to

01:24:30.760 deal with well ice pack for eight months of the year and some really incredible storms for four

01:24:36.120 months out of the year you know it's going to be very hard uh on the other hand uh well whaling is

01:24:43.160 out of fashion and it can stay that way uh there are valuable fishing stocks in parts of the arctic

01:24:50.600 ocean and you know again we have to be watching after those because if we've learned anything in

01:24:57.560 the last 20 or 30 years is that uh international fishing fleets can clean out a fishing resource

01:25:05.160 faster than you can guess at you know we don't even uh i mean we didn't even know much about

01:25:11.480 the life cycle of the atlantic caught off the grand banks until it was too late and there was

01:25:16.440 something like one percent of ten percent left of the four that were capable of breeding young

01:25:25.160 scrawled you know so that's one reason why the cod won't come back well you know the icelanders 0.96

01:25:32.480 there's fishing grounds north of iceland but again if the international fishing fleets especially

01:25:38.800 not just spanish strollers but you'll see chinese strollers get in there

01:25:42.880 they'll vacuum out the whole area before we understand the the biology of that area was 0.97

01:25:47.900 you've made a few mentions of this throughout the program today john and i i appreciate

01:25:55.020 it i know that your values in mind align very strongly around around a lot of political issues

01:26:01.820 and it's interesting to kind of hear hear a conservative put forward questions around

01:26:06.860 ecology climate and of course preserving preserving our heritage and natural resources

01:26:13.380 maybe something you could help us understand a little bit better here is how how come conservatives

01:26:18.940 have a hard time articulating that in a way that's different from the left wing and would still

01:26:24.520 capture the minds of and imaginations of right-wing people to think about conservation instead of

01:26:30.600 basically a kind of paranoia around even leaving a footprint somewhere

01:26:35.940 um the american national park system was first established by teddy roosevelt he was the one

01:26:46.820 who was really pushing it conservation is integrally a conservative thing stephen harper

01:26:53.720 put in more more canadian territory aside as parks and wildlife refuges than any other

01:27:00.360 prime minister has ever done ecology and in in conservation are at the center of conservative

01:27:09.400 thought you know if you're conservative it partly is you want to protect things

01:27:14.600 and the way they are that includes wildlife um we also know of course you know that uh

01:27:21.880 in canada our first national parks were a result of the uh the railroad which again was the answer

01:27:28.440 john a mcdonald's dream and the national railroad you know having that fundamental structure

01:27:37.960 the fundamental backbone to our economy i think i think those big ideas when it comes to

01:27:43.000 conservatism are what's kind of missing with conservatism today it's there's a way forward

01:27:47.640 there's certainly a way to get from where we are to where we could be i mean i while while kennedy

01:27:53.880 proposed landing on the moon it was a conservative president who saw the moon landing in the form of

01:28:00.280 in the form of nixon um and so this is the question why can't between different administrations can

01:28:07.480 there be a fundamental cooperation for those big picture items that would make canada a better

01:28:12.040 place whether we're talking about programming at a social level or taxation or of course at a

01:28:17.400 at a more logistical level and and a physical level that that building of infrastructure that

01:28:22.520 will see this country improve and be able to assert sovereignty well and i think if you go

01:28:30.680 back to sir john a mcdonald reviled though some people might hold him remember he really had

01:28:38.680 three platforms that were all in integral to him law and order equal for everybody you know

01:28:46.520 in other words canada was safe building an infrastructure so that canada became a place

01:28:52.280 for business and the third part of those is also keeping the finances manageable

01:29:00.360 you know keeping the budget limited and remember we had a very small economy back then um

01:29:07.720 but again that that's part of it and we we now know that say like large sections of wilderness

01:29:13.480 are actually part of our infrastructure we need them um in fact actually in canada we really

01:29:21.720 they're really not appreciated um one of the points again a part of our our national mythology

01:29:29.080 that isn't there but who's taking our school kids out on the land these days teaching them how to

01:29:35.080 canoe teaching them how to camp teaching them how to ski in the winter learning what the canadian

01:29:40.120 wilderness is like safely but so that they've got a a respect for it you know and that's something

01:29:46.760 that is more important than painting pictures about whales on you know on school walls but

01:29:53.080 actually getting out there listening you know to uh glooms listening to a wolf owl you know and

01:30:00.520 that is a part of what that is sort of a natural legacy that every canadian should be able to share

01:30:05.560 but we also need infrastructure we need finances that can support that and of course so we also

01:30:12.400 need a country that's safe which is becoming a rarer and rarer opportunity here and and and

01:30:19.460 seems to be slipping away from us if we don't reinstill peace order in good government soon

01:30:23.420 uh john as we kind of close out here i i just wanted to to leave the floor open to you uh what

01:30:29.940 what what's on your radar as we as it seems like we're going to head down to a federal election

01:30:34.740 soon. I mean, again, we're coming out of pandemic policy. The provinces are opening back up. There's

01:30:40.520 been a talk of, you know, a vaccine passport. There's all sorts of crazy things going on. But

01:30:45.140 what's on your radar as we kind of look into the next two, three months here? We're going to have

01:30:51.080 a federal election likely. What do you think is going to be the top priority? What's going to

01:30:54.300 happen there? Well, I have a very honest view about Justin Trudeau, but it's partly based on

01:31:04.420 own experience personal direct experiences of the man um but basically when he was first getting

01:31:10.980 back into political life around 2004 he was invited to a debate at concordia and i was invited in to

01:31:18.020 debate him and it was supposed to be an academic debate so in other words i would you know deliver

01:31:24.100 my statement he'd deliver his i'd rebut his he'd rebut mine we'd both sum up and of course the

01:31:29.460 audience would vote the beginning at the end of the session and whoever swayed the most people

01:31:34.820 would have won he turned up late delivered a half hour bromide full of all sorts of polemics and left

01:31:43.540 and suddenly realized that yeah he doesn't know the rules doesn't know the material and doesn't

01:31:48.740 care um and i mean there are some people who are running around wearing a uh a baseball cap you

01:31:56.980 make Trudeau a drama teacher again. He is a drama teacher. I mean, he's a lightweight.

01:32:02.420 In 154 years, he's the least prepared and the weakest prime minister this country has ever had.

01:32:10.580 So I'm actually praying he gets defeated. I mean, I might not like some of the choices,

01:32:17.620 especially, you know, that the conservatives are offering, but we need another government,

01:32:21.860 not him and if you actually do care about the liberals the liberals need time you know in the

01:32:28.660 wilderness to to reinvent themselves you know they've been a great party they've had great

01:32:33.700 leaders in the past they certainly haven't got one now uh let them go off into the wilderness

01:32:40.580 and rediscover their roots and then come back um but you know that that's my hope what has

01:32:47.540 me worried right now again china the possibilities of a mistake uh there are some grounds for some

01:32:56.180 true catastrophes in in africa and and yeah especially with a major drought and some of

01:33:03.140 the political violence that's going on underway and again no reporters are covering it but we're

01:33:08.820 looking at the situations that could kill tens of tens of millions of people and the

01:33:18.100 situation in the united states i mean who knows what to believe anymore but the partisan bickering

01:33:24.100 and the incompetence of the major parties you know there is one point i mean i've studied political

01:33:31.620 violence all my life and the one point i'd like to make about is that political violence slides in

01:33:38.820 on a logarithmic curve you know it really does i mean you see small warnings and then all of a

01:33:47.580 sudden there's a crisis right in front of you and there's no way of avoiding it and this is the

01:33:52.560 situation i see now with china with some of the things in africa but also with the united states

01:33:57.840 i mean i hope our neighbors in the great republic you know are not on a suicide run right now but

01:34:04.380 I have my doubts.

01:34:07.460 I do as well, but I guess all we can do is hope and pray.

01:34:13.500 John, thank you so much for joining us today.

01:34:16.280 I appreciate your contributions.

01:34:18.260 We'll have you on again soon.

01:34:20.320 And just as a heads up, when I take my time to go on my honeymoon and everything else,

01:34:27.600 I think we'll be...

01:34:28.180 Congratulations, by the way.

01:34:29.900 Thank you very much.

01:34:30.820 I think that we'll be leaving this in the safe hands of some of our regular contributors.

01:34:36.920 So we'll be in touch about that.

01:34:38.600 And I think our facilitators will be probably either Stuart or Aaron.

01:34:42.260 So we'll figure that out when we get there.

01:34:45.140 Well, I do enjoy talking to you, but talking to Stuart again would also be a pleasure.

01:34:51.100 Absolutely.

01:34:51.840 Well, I think there will be a lot of material ongoing.

01:34:54.140 I'll be gone for about three weeks.

01:34:55.420 And I'm sure that that Stuart and the election can be plenty of discussion with yourself throughout that time.

01:35:02.620 Right. Well, congratulations and talk to you later.

01:35:06.220 Thank you so much, John.

01:35:09.460 Well, we're going to take a few minutes here.

01:35:13.960 And as we kind of close out the day, we're going to walk through some of the comments that we had today.

01:35:19.100 So right back to the beginning, the Albertan reminds us that our new governor general is a Trudeau Foundation alumni mentor.

01:35:28.620 Well, then I guess I spoke too soon.

01:35:34.980 Well, I mean, I don't really know what to say to that.

01:35:40.140 Like, I don't want more Trudeau money and things, and I don't want more MeWe Foundation stuff, you know, going on around here.

01:35:47.840 But at the same time, something I'm having to kind of swallow my pride on a bit is, quite frankly, being less of a Pharisee and less of a Puritan about some of this stuff.

01:36:03.260 So, I mean, it's not that I have nothing good to say about my alma mater and that, whatever else, but, you know, kind of to the point of that scene in Monty Python's The Life of Brian.

01:36:17.320 What have the Romans ever done for us?

01:36:18.580 Well, yes, they brought the roads.

01:36:19.500 Yes, they brought the education.

01:36:20.340 Yes, they stopped the barbarians. 0.94

01:36:21.520 Yes, they made sure trade could happen and whatever.

01:36:24.420 What have the Romans done for us?

01:36:25.700 i i used to be quite quite harsh and pharisaical about for example the post-secondary institution

01:36:34.180 particularly the university to be clear uh here in town um and uh you know i'm dating somebody

01:36:42.600 well not dating was dating i'm engaged soon to be married to somebody who went there and

01:36:47.520 they're doing a lot better in their career than i am um and and obviously that place gave them

01:36:54.480 a good enough education to get to where they need to go

01:36:56.480 and lots of other people.

01:36:59.540 And while I disagree

01:37:00.500 with the funding model for it

01:37:02.760 and I disagree with the values being appreciated,

01:37:04.740 I disagree with the posters on the wall

01:37:06.420 and the rainbow flags all over the place,

01:37:08.200 I disagree with all of those things all the time,

01:37:10.700 every day, the very ground

01:37:12.600 itself, you know, if I had all the

01:37:14.600 authority in the world and I was suddenly

01:37:16.740 made tyrant of this town, I probably

01:37:18.560 would have the ground itself

01:37:20.200 exercised for

01:37:22.200 for, you know, ever being a part of some of these things, but there's still good people coming out

01:37:29.360 of it. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? I believe is what my namesake said in the gospel,

01:37:34.740 Nathaniel, a man in whom there is no guile. I'm not trying to be more full of guile, but maybe

01:37:41.260 there's a place for me to honestly admit that, you know what, good things can come from bad places,

01:37:48.420 not where we would hope but they can come from mediocre

01:37:52.220 lukewarm not necessarily totally virtuous

01:37:56.500 places so we have to be careful with that the Albertan

01:37:59.080 somebody of course there we go Claudette

01:38:03.360 she's a regular on our show here your ticket to GG

01:38:08.340 is just be a CBC presenter five of the last eight have been that's true

01:38:11.640 that's true a lot of a lot of CBC

01:38:16.380 personalities have been involved with governor general um to the point where you know i wouldn't

01:38:20.960 be surprised peter mansbridge gets named next time no he's pretty old and he's white and he's

01:38:25.160 straight that wouldn't work but nonetheless um claudette isn't wrong that a lot of cbc people

01:38:33.460 have been involved with with uh the governor generalship i i have to concede something here

01:38:41.440 i like the idea of there being at least one i don't even want to say if i want to say

01:38:51.660 nationalized but a new service that understands that its entire job is all of canada and canada

01:38:57.020 being a big place again not sure if it needs to be subsidized by the taxpayer but that its mandate

01:39:03.200 is from alert to windsor from you know port hardy to halifax right like that's that's its mandate

01:39:11.220 Its mandate is all of Canada, from sea to sea to sea, coast to coast to coast.

01:39:17.020 And I would love to be involved with whatever that is.

01:39:21.720 I would have loved to do that.

01:39:22.840 I would have loved to have been a part of that as a kid or, you know, younger and gotten involved in it.

01:39:29.060 I've always had a, you know, a bit of a voice for radio sort of thing and enjoyed talking with people online and that sort of thing.

01:39:34.740 Well, you know, in an interview setting, I mean.

01:39:36.920 But, you know, I couldn't join the CBC. I couldn't do it. My values aren't there. Good things can come out of the CBC, I guess, the same point I was just making before, but my values aren't there. I really don't want to be a part of that.

01:39:54.780 It makes me cringe, the idea of being a member of our national press, our federally funded press, that, you know, people are forced to pay for.

01:40:07.100 I don't like the idea of people being forced to pay for something.

01:40:09.280 and even though i want to tell canada story the real stories the stories from churchill from alert

01:40:14.440 from yellow knight from white horse from you know leduc little pieces of canada part of that are so

01:40:21.480 much bigger than the supposedly more popular places can i i'd love to do that and and zip

01:40:27.440 around the country and do those interviews and maybe write opinion maybe write news whatever

01:40:31.320 that'd be amazing to to have done that especially over the last 10 years but my values in the cbc

01:40:38.060 they don't they don't mesh and i do believe that something like that needs to exist i don't think

01:40:43.900 it should be net taxpayer subsidized but i'd throw that to the comments you guys tell me what that

01:40:48.540 would look like i don't know if the western standard is going to figure that out but if they

01:40:51.600 do they can tell me and i'll zip all over the place i'd love to spend two years in each of those

01:40:58.240 places with my family have enough money for me and the family to move to each of these places

01:41:03.860 That'd be amazing.

01:41:05.880 Hope you're new.

01:41:06.720 GG will be a change from all the government channels

01:41:08.640 appointed the last three or four years.

01:41:10.400 It started when Rick Hansen, the man in motion,

01:41:12.320 was overlooked for the GG's position.

01:41:14.280 I agree that they should have put Rick Hansen in there.

01:41:18.200 That would have been its own tokenism, let's be clear.

01:41:20.620 No offense to Rick Hansen,

01:41:21.720 but maybe that tokenism was warranted

01:41:24.460 and it would have been a more inspirational one

01:41:26.300 than some of the other tokenisms we've had.

01:41:28.780 But here we are.

01:41:29.540 we can't

01:41:31.600 we can't

01:41:34.920 we can't choose them all

01:41:38.000 and we can't win them all I suppose

01:41:39.240 but in that case

01:41:40.580 we could have gotten somewhere

01:41:44.100 there was one actually just before

01:41:45.460 Ken Scott pointed out that

01:41:47.160 do we really need this

01:41:49.300 was what he was trying to write

01:41:50.400 when he was talking about the governor general

01:41:52.740 I think John and I's discussion demonstrated

01:41:55.400 pretty thoroughly why

01:41:56.820 we need a governor general

01:41:58.520 versus a lot of other options

01:42:00.520 I'm a monarchist

01:42:03.040 I'm a monarchist but I'm also a monarchist

01:42:05.080 who like believes the Necco resolution

01:42:06.920 was wrong and that sort of thing like I believe in 0.97

01:42:08.940 peerages and I believe in

01:42:10.320 I believe in parishes

01:42:12.740 and little fiefdoms

01:42:14.420 and little duchies

01:42:16.140 I think that Canada needs to be

01:42:18.860 cut up again it's the way that 1.00

01:42:20.760 it's cut up now is garbage 0.99

01:42:22.160 I love British Columbia I'm a British Columbian 0.98

01:42:24.880 for sure but I

01:42:25.880 the borders of British Columbia

01:42:28.200 the external ones are actually pretty useless the internal ones need a lot of work if we were all

01:42:35.140 still going to call ourselves british colombians but i happen to be from the duchy of prince george

01:42:39.000 or from you know the dukedom of north fraser or whatever i would prefer that i would love to say

01:42:43.880 that i was a son of new caledonia you know it's like that's that's where i'm from i'm from you

01:42:48.340 know yes i'm a british colombian but i'm a new i was born in new caledonia and i'm not like those

01:42:52.840 coasties down south like i don't you know i know what winter is and i know how to shovel a driveway

01:42:57.540 And I know, you know, I know how to build a, build a fence and whatever and, and, and, you know, stable up the cows. Like I know how to do that because I'm not from the coast. I'm not, I'm not from down South. I'm not stuck in, in urbanism. I'm, I'm, I'm a New Caledonian. And, and, and so for me, that's what I see when it comes to the monarchy sort of understanding.

01:43:18.880 I guess maybe it's a more European understanding of monarchy is that kind of like the king is down the street.

01:43:23.760 Not that the king doesn't have authority, but the king is he's a bit of a laid back philosopher king.

01:43:28.560 He kind of strolls around, puffs his pipe and, you know, hands out free advice.

01:43:32.200 And yes, he's the king. And yes, his family is the model of the nation to a point.

01:43:36.280 But it comes from a more reserved place. And he's not he's just not that concerned about it.

01:43:42.620 Maybe the pomp and circumstance could calm down a bit, but he probably should have a half decent place to live where he can host people.

01:43:48.240 and that sort of thing. I don't know if he needs palaces

01:43:50.140 upon palaces, but I

01:43:52.100 like the idea of there being kings and

01:43:54.240 princelings and dukes and duchesses and all

01:43:56.260 that sort of thing. And there being a hierarchy

01:43:58.520 in society

01:43:59.760 that is for

01:44:02.340 its own good, though. It's for its

01:44:04.300 own good. It's not just for

01:44:06.340 the sake of whatever. It's for its own good.

01:44:08.300 And that it comes with less partisanship.

01:44:11.140 But at the same time, I'm also a

01:44:12.400 huge believer in there being

01:44:13.620 all but every neighborhood having

01:44:16.300 an elected assembly

01:44:17.280 and that there'd be declensions of elected assemblies

01:44:21.040 all the way up the line.

01:44:22.300 That, you know, eventually at the National Council,

01:44:24.380 it's like, well, I mean, we have a democratic decision

01:44:27.220 because literally, you know, the 10 layers below us

01:44:30.560 that have all sent their representative,

01:44:33.980 which are only separated by one degree from each other, right,

01:44:38.700 till you get out to the 30 million people

01:44:41.120 that we have in this country, 40 million.

01:44:43.100 That would be how I'd solve that problem.

01:44:45.200 But that's another debate for another time.

01:44:47.080 But do we really need this?

01:44:48.180 Well, I think we need it for now.

01:44:53.320 We've got a couple of...

01:44:56.880 Sheldon makes the point.

01:44:58.500 You don't have the sickly-sweet, pseudo-calming CBC voice.

01:45:03.600 Hello and welcome.

01:45:06.240 Today, the Minister of Finance spoke with the Prime Minister

01:45:09.580 and told him we're out of money.

01:45:13.080 Yeah, no, I don't sound like Bernie McNamee.

01:45:15.140 I don't.

01:45:15.520 he's uh he's got you know he was properly trained i was never trained and my poor producers tried

01:45:20.720 to put me through some training but ever since i got engaged or was about to get engaged and

01:45:24.000 was already planning the wedding and blah blah blah i have not had time to uh to do that sort

01:45:28.240 of thing uh let's see what else we got here um daryl letmer wow we got a comment so big it hides

01:45:36.680 my face can you do this no i'm just kidding canada's largest problem in teaching our history

01:45:41.640 it's mainly our school teachers and the cbc most teachers are socialists and anti-canadian or in

01:45:49.360 the cbc's case they're unable to make historical movies we have uh like heroes like samuel benfield

01:45:55.460 steel and others like sir matthew begbie bailey but we'll never learn about them unless we tear

01:46:00.420 down their statues i'm gonna remove that comment not from the stream daryl but just from my face

01:46:06.700 okay thank you you're a you're a good commenter daryl i like you um no you got a point there uh

01:46:12.620 to a point though i think that here's a little here's a little hot take um it turns out that

01:46:19.980 there's a lot of teachers who have a problem with the soji curriculum so sexual orientation gender

01:46:23.900 ideology curriculum gender identity gender ideology it is gender ideology but but the

01:46:29.020 gender identity curriculum and i happen to know for a fact that there are people agitating to get

01:46:34.660 this thrown out of schools. And there are teachers who are left wing, who do not want this Soji stuff

01:46:40.740 preached anymore. They're tired of it. They don't want to preach to their own kids, let alone the

01:46:44.100 kids in their classroom. And they don't agree with it. They think it's not scientifically based.

01:46:48.660 Obviously, being lefties, they don't think that there's something fundamentally wrong with some

01:46:52.840 of it, which those of us to the right and more religious would. But we can agree on on what we

01:46:59.800 disagree with about soji which is it must go uh and and so i would i would hold back on that i

01:47:07.400 think most people are at least pocketbook conservatives and i think conservatives could

01:47:11.720 win more votes by being pocketbook conserves that also assert certain values that are just true

01:47:17.560 okay it doesn't matter which way your sexual proclivities swing consent of age human being

01:47:27.880 being my

01:47:29.920 disclaimers there, caveats.

01:47:32.440 But the point being

01:47:33.880 that you just want a family

01:47:35.780 and monogamous.

01:47:38.580 Monogamous.

01:47:41.000 You just want a family.

01:47:42.900 That is all you really want.

01:47:44.140 If you're listening to this broadcast and you don't

01:47:46.020 want a family, then honestly at a certain level

01:47:47.860 I feel like you have no right to make any

01:47:49.820 kind of policy decisions or have a vote in

01:47:51.780 policy decisions.

01:47:55.680 Family

01:47:56.120 is it. It's all it is.

01:47:57.880 you were born of parents you did not conceive yourself and you did not spring out of a hole in

01:48:02.680 the ground uh so the family is the fundamental building brock building block of society

01:48:09.640 we have to build it we have to make it easier to have a family than not have a family we have to

01:48:13.720 make it easier to be married and stay married than not and and so i guess what i'm trying to get to

01:48:19.880 there is that when it comes to the teachers and the questions of their socialism i think a lot

01:48:24.840 of teachers are actually especially when they get married and they have kids they actually become

01:48:29.480 slightly more socially conservative they don't want their kids put into adult films or the

01:48:34.440 viewership of adult people right in sexual stuff they don't want that they don't want uh their

01:48:39.720 child to be fundamentally confused about their gender or their genitals or any of that stuff

01:48:43.800 they don't want that stuff um if and and so i think that the ultimate question is you know

01:48:51.640 the the fact of the matter is that most people i think are kind of pocketbook conservatives who

01:49:02.120 can get on side with some social conservative values as long as they're presented in the right

01:49:07.180 way which is nobody wants their daughter to end up having to sell her body nobody wants their son

01:49:13.360 addicted to drugs everybody wants their kids to have a a good work-life balance everybody wants

01:49:20.780 their kids to have as good of a life or better than they had. And everybody wants their grandchildren

01:49:25.500 to grow up in a better world. That's what people want. There's nothing wrong with conservatives

01:49:31.340 finding a way to articulate those ideas, even from a more socially conservative stance of virtue,

01:49:37.760 faith and family, or at least putting forward that the family must come first. And I'm going to say

01:49:43.080 once I say it again, if you are someone listening to this broadcast, and you think that somehow,

01:49:47.160 some way the world is supposed to be geared to you and your otherhood which is a which is a play on

01:49:52.760 motherhood right but your otherhood you're not going to be a father you're not going to be a

01:49:55.720 mother you don't think it's your job to raise the next generation you don't you know you think that

01:50:01.340 an urbanite single life is all that's good for you and you don't care about anybody enough to

01:50:08.860 marry them and suffer with them through what is the the cross but also the reward of family life

01:50:14.500 I honestly don't really want your vote or enfranchisement in any public policy decisions or debates whatsoever, except for how small exactly do you want your individual containers to be for your silly little consumeristic lifestyle when you go to the store that sells the very small individualistic containers because going to Costco would be food that spoils for you because it's too much food.

01:50:37.220 Yeah, I don't I don't really want your vote and everything.

01:50:39.540 You can get on the same train as Julie Payette that I was talking about earlier, as far as I'm concerned.

01:50:43.580 but because you were not born of yourself and you have a responsibility to make sure that this

01:50:50.240 civilization continues and so you can either help with that or you can get out of the way would be

01:50:56.260 my my vote but if you're interested in helping with it do vote for the parties that are going

01:51:02.880 to make it easier for that to happen and not harder so that's my two cents on that so um

01:51:10.240 I think that's about it for today's program.

01:51:12.840 I had some stern things to say at the end there.

01:51:14.820 Maybe that was good.

01:51:15.540 Maybe that was bad.

01:51:16.360 Whatever.

01:51:17.480 Always send messages, comments, concerns to the show.

01:51:20.860 You have me at all times, right?

01:51:22.420 N-Gita at westernstandard.com.

01:51:25.460 And just let us know how things are going.

01:51:27.380 Of course, we've got Aaron and we've got Stuart on tomorrow.

01:51:29.920 And we're going to talk with them about everything that's happening in British Columbia and the rest of Canada.

01:51:35.720 Stay safe out there.

01:51:36.820 don't breathe in too much smoke

01:51:38.800 if that's what's happening in your area

01:51:40.080 and

01:51:40.600 we'll see you tomorrow

01:51:43.380 9am pacific 10am mountain

Western Standard - July 08, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - July 7th, 2021

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript