Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - July 8th, 2021

00:00:00.000 okay let me give that 10 seconds then we're going to go into video

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 yes good morning and welcome to mountain standard time i'm your host nathan guida

00:01:22.520 it is of course july the 8th and we are broadcasting to you live from bc's northern

00:01:29.180 capital before we get too far down the road here we're of course going to do our sponsorship of

00:01:34.360 resistance coffee resistance coffee is based out of wayburn saskatchewan and they have this funny

00:01:39.740 idea that maybe if a corporation does choose to use any of its excess profit for anything it

00:01:45.020 shouldn't be to curtail your freedoms it should be to expand them so whereas other companies are

00:01:50.140 going into woke causes and ideology that tells us that there's no such thing as boys or girls or god

00:01:55.740 knows what else uh that's not what resistance coffee is about resistance coffee is locally

00:02:00.900 based it's roasted in saskatchewan and it wants to make sure that your freedoms expand not contract

00:02:06.620 if you use western standard for your first order you'll get 10 off so again that's resistance coffee

00:02:12.360 and they're coming to you live from saskatchewan all righty well we're gonna go straight into it

00:02:17.380 i do not have an opening statement this morning due to the fact that we had some technical

00:02:21.180 difficulties on our end but thank you for being with us we're gonna have aaron straight away and

00:02:25.540 he's going to give us the bc news roundup aaron it's good to have you back oh it's wonderful to

00:02:30.740 be here good morning to you and i i'll apologize in advance that telus has decided this morning

00:02:35.360 would be a great time to to drill some fiber optic uh into the building that i happen to be

00:02:40.160 in currently so we'll see how it goes i'm sure i'm sure that it'll all be fine i'm sure there'll

00:02:45.160 be no noise disturbance or anything else it certainly won't be smoky outside and hard to

00:02:49.900 breathe it'll all be great yeah there won't be any apocalyptic uh as long as they don't

00:02:54.480 accidentally cut my Shaw cable, I think then we're probably okay. That's how they're going to get you

00:02:59.040 into Shaw. That's their, that's the way they're going to do that. So why don't you take us from

00:03:03.380 the top? Uh, what, uh, what's on the docket for today? Well, it was a fiery, uh, week in BC, pardon

00:03:09.920 the pun. Uh, I, I don't have too much on the story of Lytton to go over today, but, uh, everybody

00:03:16.980 will be fully aware of that. It is, uh, it's, I mean, it's still sort of unfolding what the

00:03:22.800 aftermath of that it's going to look like but as folks know earlier in the week British Columbia

00:03:26.620 lost an entire community I mean 90 90 percent of the town estimated was literally just wiped off

00:03:32.740 the face of the earth in a day and folks had little or no warning which is rather concerning

00:03:38.960 and so you know without showing a whole bunch of photos and and and going through sort of the

00:03:45.100 disaster porn that I think a lot of the media is showing everybody at the moment the important

00:03:49.400 thing to know is that most of that community has been uprooted. A lot of them have gone to

00:03:53.080 Kamloops and other surrounding areas, which is good. But I think other towns and communities

00:03:59.580 in the interior of British Columbia are going to watch this very closely because,

00:04:04.480 I mean, it's a little concerning that Victoria, and this isn't a shot at the BC. I'm not saying

00:04:12.840 that Lytton would still be here if the BC Liberals had been in Victoria at the time.

00:04:16.920 uh what i'm more concerned about is sort of the dynamic between victoria irrespective of which

00:04:22.240 government is there and the focus that's paid on interior communities and it's it was just

00:04:28.600 maddening to me that a good number of folks in lytton didn't know the fire was coming until

00:04:34.480 somebody knocked on their door and said you need to hit the road now and you don't have time to

00:04:37.540 even grab your shoes um how does that happen in 2021 i know that the one of the one of the um

00:04:45.400 indigenous chief councillors in the area he's been I can't even recall his name now but I know

00:04:49.820 he had been he's been chief I think for over 20 years he also happens to be a cattle rancher

00:04:54.360 he was quite incensed because he got a call from one ministry or another probably the ministry of

00:04:59.420 agriculture and the first that was the first call he got from any public official any any

00:05:04.860 provincial representative and they were concerned about his livestock nobody called to find out how

00:05:09.900 the citizens of the of the reserve were doing or or anybody in the nation so um that's a bit

00:05:18.100 concerning but I think you know interior towns that are already a bit wary of uh and and interior

00:05:24.200 folks uh yeah not unlike the fire in Fort McMurray at all actually uh except I mean this one this

00:05:29.700 one hit I mean if you saw it on the news it just hit uh within a day and wiped the town out within

00:05:34.460 a day I mean it didn't really and I'm not sure what the status of it is at this point but interior

00:05:39.080 towns that sort of wonder like you know are we getting a fair deal from the major population

00:05:44.880 center in the south south of the province and then and then sort of the separated power center in

00:05:49.400 victoria they're going to watch this closely because there are few indicators more clear that

00:05:56.740 a government has failed utterly than an entire community being wiped off the face of the earth

00:06:01.520 in a day um and you know i don't i i like i spend a lot of time criticizing the bcndp this isn't

00:06:08.780 something that I'm specifically criticizing them about it is I think it's more of a function of how

00:06:13.620 Victoria relates to the rest of the province and and so we'll see how this one comes out I mean

00:06:19.120 they're gonna have to I mean British Columbians I think want to know why the warning wasn't given

00:06:23.880 much earlier what kind of systems do we have in place that failed or what kind of systems do we

00:06:28.840 not have in place that like I said led to this situation where people were getting knocks on

00:06:33.100 the door saying you need to run now all of this video that's been shown of people leaving the

00:06:37.180 town they're driving through like a burning hellscape it's unbelievable video and it's just

00:06:42.460 you know if you live in vancouver it's literally just a couple hours down the road

00:06:45.580 um so anyway no i i completely agree it's it's a it's devastating to to there's no there's no way

00:06:56.000 of even putting it politely or bluntly or anything else you just look at you look at the pictures and

00:07:00.260 the town is gone like as if it was hit by you know some kind of nuclear weapon it's just been

00:07:06.840 yeah it's been incinerated yeah and there's like i i know the uh there was a chinese museum there

00:07:13.120 that um they carried a lot of important artifacts you know as people know chinese people have been

00:07:19.460 in british columbia for generations many chinese families have been in british columbia for more

00:07:23.540 generations than my family's been in the province and there's a lot of good history about the uh

00:07:30.200 the work that chinese communities did especially during periods of time when they were subjected

00:07:35.340 to racism not just from employers but from the labor movement from unions who had a who had a

00:07:39.940 position of asiatic exclusion at the time officially very racist position um and so a lot of that

00:07:46.700 history has just gone just been wiped out um and linton itself is a is it was a community that was

00:07:52.100 integral to the to the history of this province and its development and so it's i mean i you know

00:07:57.680 sorry to start off on such a you know such a low note but uh i think it's important for british

00:08:03.780 Colombians to be angry about this and to demand that some price be paid, some consequences be 0.88

00:08:10.300 paid by folks in Victoria for whatever process wasn't in place or wasn't followed. You can't

00:08:15.900 really, it's not like you can blame the wildfire branch. I mean, these people are heroes. These

00:08:20.500 are young, generally young British Colombians who are out in the field risking their lives every day

00:08:25.860 trying to save folks. But, you know, if there was a fire on South Island or anywhere in the

00:08:33.520 lower mainland, like it just, you know, you wouldn't have seen that kind of delay in the

00:08:37.300 warning. So it's, this is the kind of thing I think we're going to have to watch. Anyway, that

00:08:41.100 wasn't actually one of the main items. The big news item that was playing out while Lytton was

00:08:45.980 burning to the ground, and it was surprising to me that this became such a big news item, but

00:08:50.840 it was over a comment that one British Columbian of note named Harshawalia made in respect to a

00:08:57.380 Vice article about the spate of burnings of Catholic churches that have arisen presumably

00:09:04.660 in response to the revelation of a number of what are being termed as mass graves of children

00:09:13.680 near residential schools. So here it is. Now for folks who don't know, Harshia Walia, she's

00:09:20.280 fairly well known in British Columbia, mostly in left-wing circles. She is currently the

00:09:26.160 executive director of the bc civil liberties association i think she's held that title for a

00:09:31.860 year or two and prior to that and maybe she's still involved with it i don't know she was

00:09:36.580 the head of an organization or at least a spokesperson of an organization for many years

00:09:40.100 called no one is illegal which spent a lot of their time uh advocating for the rights of

00:09:45.280 you know like undocumented immigrants uh but which we don't have as many of in canada as in

00:09:51.440 the US, but it was more about, I think they advocated more rights for like living caregivers

00:09:56.560 and healthcare workers and stuff that may or may not have had citizenship. And so she's been a

00:10:04.880 controversial figure for quite a long time. I've known her for a number of years. I think you've

00:10:10.180 even met her on occasion. Yeah, I met her down when you came and spoke to us at BCFS,

00:10:16.120 the Federation of Students. Oh, okay. So she was at the same thing. Yeah.

00:10:19.520 Yeah, she was, yeah. And George Davis or whatever, or George Davies?

00:10:24.060 Yeah, he's actually from Prince George. He's another historian. Sheldon Clare would know him. He's a historian at the college here, but he was head of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators at the time, so that makes sense. That's why you would have seen him too.

00:10:34.840 Anyway, so she made this comment, which predictably produced a firestorm of controversy within sort of the teapot that is British Columbia. And so I just kind of followed this. I think this came out Monday.

00:10:49.520 And, yeah, and so this response from Claudette is certainly, you know, reflective of some of the responses that she, many of the responses that she received.

00:11:00.280 And it was interesting to me because, like, irrespective of what you think of what she said, it raised an interesting question about free speech.

00:11:09.400 And I think it ends up being a pretty good test for folks who see themselves as free speech advocates, how they respond to a question like this.

00:11:19.040 Because this is one of those instances where it really tests your principles when it comes to free speech.

00:11:24.560 Because there are a lot of people, and I suspect you're one of them, Nathan, understandably, who are utterly incensed by this comment.

00:11:34.060 And, you know, I don't really have to explain why.

00:11:36.440 It's because it looks like she's advocating or even some people have said inciting people to burn down more churches.

00:11:44.760 So let's just, if, I don't know if we can go through some of the different commentary.

00:11:48.560 Well, first of all, just if you're able to find that Aaron Wedrick tweet we can put up, this is the guy who is the head of the, I think he's currently the head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, made an interesting comment.

00:12:04.120 I don't know if we can zoom in on that, but am I wrong or have more people been arrested in Canada this year than going in this year for going inside a church to worship than for burning one down?

00:12:13.400 I mean, I thought that was an interesting observation.

00:12:17.020 I mean, he's got a good point there.

00:12:18.560 Um, although I, uh, you know, the, the case I think he's trying to make is that for some

00:12:24.180 reason, uh, people aren't being charged for these comments and, uh, but I, I suspect the

00:12:32.020 RCMP are doing everything they can to try to find the people who are doing this.

00:12:35.260 I mean, it, you know, it's literally arson.

00:12:37.140 So, um, are the RCMP, like, is there any evidence that the RCMP is not tracking, trying

00:12:43.420 to do what they can and investigate and try to track these folks down?

00:12:45.920 I haven't seen any evidence.

00:12:46.780 I haven't seen anybody claim that they don't think they're doing their job, but obviously people are frustrated that, I mean, it's a keen observation that people in Alberta are literally getting arrested for going to church.

00:12:58.220 And to date, no one that I know of has been arrested for all of these churches that are being burned.

00:13:04.060 And of course, you know, a number of politicians came out to condemn the remarks as well.

00:13:07.860 So we can probably find the one first by John Horgan.

00:13:12.580 uh and just as we're pulling that up i've got a quote from mike farmsworth who's the bc ndp

00:13:18.540 public safety minister he was probably the most chastising he said it's just disgusting and

00:13:23.260 reprehensible that somebody who heads up an organization like that meaning the bc civil 0.58

00:13:27.640 liberties association would make such comments so very strong words from the bc public safety

00:13:31.980 minister john horgan of course uh had this to say um burning down churches is not the way forward

00:13:39.580 all places of community worship must be protected it's only by coming together that we can support

00:13:44.120 one another vandalism will not move us forward respect and understanding will this this tweet

00:13:49.340 alone uh generate a lot of criticism from people on the left uh who have have been expressing a

00:13:56.880 lot of concern about the number of uh children that are being found in graves um there were

00:14:03.260 a few instances of people or organizations trying to defend the comments uh and the first one that

00:14:10.640 kind of came out sort of the probably the heaviest hitter that came out in defense of it was the

00:14:14.300 uh union of bc indian chiefs ubcic um which you know to my understanding is an organization that

00:14:24.860 generally represents sort of the hereditary chiefs around the province and not the the elected chief

00:14:29.920 councils so there's there's always sort of a i think a healthy level of tension between what

00:14:34.880 the ubcic says and what what some other first nations uh councils will say etc so here's their

00:14:41.060 statement uh union of bc indian chief stands in strong solidarity with harsha walia in condemning

00:14:46.800 the brutal gruesome genocide of residential school system by canada and church while crown stole first

00:14:52.100 nations land she's a highly respected and valued ally we're grateful for her ongoing support and

00:14:56.180 leadership so this was this was uh this came out i think the next day on tuesday um and for

00:15:06.200 you know for harshie i think it was probably a a big show of support uh and then there another

00:15:12.760 example of of one of the justifying arguments was from diana day who is a indigenous activist in

00:15:20.320 vancouver and people probably won't know her she doesn't have a huge profile she's sort of well

00:15:25.600 known in leftist circles as well she she ran against Melanie Mark for the nomination in

00:15:32.040 Vancouver Mount Pleasant before Melanie Mark was elected it was a face-off between the two of them 0.93

00:15:37.180 and Diana Day was seen as sort of the more lefty kind of radical between the between the two and 0.97

00:15:43.620 Melanie Mark of course ended up winning winning that nomination and went on to get elected in 0.88

00:15:48.600 what is one of the strongest probably the strongest NDP riding in the province so here's her effort to

00:15:53.660 try to justify the comments or defend the comments in some respect. Anger is part of the grief

00:15:59.660 process. Our communities need opportunities to express it in healthy ways. Our people are grieving

00:16:04.000 and mourning huge losses that continue to this day. Millennium scoop, murdered and missing

00:16:08.940 indigenous women, incarceration rates, understand and respect that. Other arguments that I encountered

00:16:15.180 to try to justify the remarks, and actually, like, it was interesting. There were arguments made by

00:16:22.120 folks like me, for instance, that were sort of centered around freedom of speech. I can get to

00:16:26.680 that later. I think they're predictable arguments. But I was interested to see whether anybody would

00:16:30.560 justify the, like, if somebody was to concede that she was, in fact, inciting people to burn

00:16:36.480 more churches, which I don't think she was. I mean, I think the grammar of it, and people will

00:16:40.760 roll their eyes at me and say, well, you know, you're just being technical. But the grammar of

00:16:45.100 it doesn't really support the assertion that she was advocating or trying to incite people to burn

00:16:49.140 down churches. I think if she was trying to do that, she would have said burn them all down 0.58

00:16:52.640 instead of burn it all down. And she had clarified almost immediately afterwards that she is absolutely

00:16:58.580 not in favor of burning churches down. And by it, she was referring to, in her words, systems of

00:17:03.560 colonialism, et cetera. So she's talking about burning all of that system down. But of course,

00:17:09.120 you know, when you're, when you put a comment like that on a article talking about burning churches,

00:17:13.360 people are going to draw conclusions, especially if there are people that are interested in trying

00:17:19.440 to change the channel on the outrage that people are expressing over the number of graves that are

00:17:25.300 being discovered. And of course, the word discovered is a controversial term as a

00:17:31.340 descriptor of it, because some people also make the argument that this isn't something that is

00:17:36.000 now being discovered. We have known, and First Nations people have known for years that those

00:17:40.060 graves over there we're just now getting around with the right technology to be able to to scan

00:17:45.240 properly to find them um but the the argument in favor of what's happening to try to justify

00:17:54.300 what's happening as far as i can tell sort of goes like this similar to what diana day is saying

00:17:59.800 that people need room to grieve uh because such an injustice and they will uh describe it as a

00:18:06.720 genocide, et cetera, has been perpetrated against them. And that, and that we shouldn't tone police

00:18:11.960 them, which is, I don't know if this is a phrase that's used on the right. I don't know if you've

00:18:16.540 encountered it at all, Nathan, but I've heard, I've heard of it. It's not used by us. It's heard

00:18:21.360 by us. Yeah. Uh, probably because it's probably, it's probably thrown at you by, by leftists who

00:18:28.240 in cases like this, where you're chastising them for, for doing or saying something that you think

00:18:35.000 is reprehensible and what they're basically saying is look we're engaging in resistance against what

00:18:40.840 we view to be an oppressive system and and it's not for you to tell us how to gauge in that how

00:18:45.680 to gauge that resistance how to engage in that resistance so that's sort of the it's also

00:18:49.340 something leftists use against each other it's it's you encounter a lot like you know this is

00:18:55.360 this is what leftists were throwing at mike farnworth and john horgan when they came out

00:19:01.520 against this statement they were saying well you're just tone policing indigenous people

00:19:06.320 and that kind of thing so and I know even I agree with you Brenda absolutely I know even

00:19:13.740 Jerry Butts the guy that got tossed out of the prime minister's office over over some other

00:19:19.700 scandal although he might be back in again who knows he got into a debate with somebody who was

00:19:25.120 quite incensed about this and he said something to the effect of I don't condone it but I do

00:19:29.700 understand it and so that set off sort of another uh this is after harsh's comments but another set

00:19:35.980 of commentary about whether whether it's even valid to understand it um and and the violence

00:19:43.520 sort of keeps uh continuing and and uh there are you know there's i don't even know how much you

00:19:48.440 probably know better than i do i mean there's a number of churches now not just in bc but across

00:19:51.840 the country that have been vandalized and or torched entirely in fact i think we've even got

00:19:56.620 a video of, uh, the most recent vandalization of St. Jude's parish in Vancouver. It wasn't a

00:20:03.860 torching, but it was a, uh, there's what appears to be a couple of young, younger women throwing 0.99

00:20:10.040 orange paint at the church. And the reason this video is so valuable to me, uh, as somebody who's

00:20:18.560 observing this is for two reasons. One, it's like so far, as I can tell, the only evidence we have

00:20:24.100 that that people are actually like it's the only evidence that we have to try to find somebody

00:20:31.680 who's doing this but the other part of it that's interesting I don't know if we have I don't know

00:20:36.480 if our producer has that video ready to go or not it's interesting to watch what's clear to me about

00:20:42.120 about this you don't have to look very closely to see that these are not indigenous people

00:20:46.140 right and this was my this was my contention when this stuff first started happening

00:20:52.180 was a lot of indigenous people were getting blamed for this and some people were coming out to sort

00:20:57.980 of defend the burning saying well you know like their children have been killed over generations

00:21:02.560 that you know you have to sort of understand why they're doing it and and my point was i don't

00:21:06.880 think indigenous people are doing this i don't like i've seen a number of indigenous people who 1.00

00:21:10.920 spoke out against it not necessarily the activists in vancouver but the indigenous people that are

00:21:16.900 closest to the churches that are actually being burned usually the ones that are still on reserve

00:21:21.240 or part of the band council,

00:21:24.680 or even in many cases, chief councillors,

00:21:26.980 they're coming out and condemning it,

00:21:28.140 saying, look, these church,

00:21:29.040 like, because they essentially belong to them, right?

00:21:31.740 They're on their land.

00:21:32.520 A lot of them were keeping,

00:21:33.420 like the one in Kamloops, for instance,

00:21:34.840 I mean, that one,

00:21:35.860 they wanted to keep that there

00:21:37.100 as kind of a statue to their pain and suffering.

00:21:41.360 Like they wanted it to be this monument

00:21:42.960 so that nobody would ever forget, right?

00:21:45.780 And there's nothing to be really gained, I think,

00:21:49.180 buying any indigenous people burning these things down and and so the only video evidence we have 0.77

00:21:54.740 shows it confirms what my initial suspicion was which was it's actually the rather than

00:22:00.820 indigenous people it's actually the children of you know upper middle class white liberal elites

00:22:06.540 probably in the lower mainland running around doing this uh because they're living out their

00:22:11.060 anarchist fantasies and they think that doing this is going to incite people to revolt against

00:22:15.300 you know who knows what and and i think if if the police are able to start finding people who are

00:22:21.820 responsible this i think we're going to start seeing you know i mean maybe i'll be wrong but

00:22:25.400 i think we're going to start seeing that it's actually younger anarchistic white people that

00:22:29.080 are doing this not indigenous people um and all signs seem to point to that but again the and i

00:22:35.520 you know i'm curious to hear your take on it you have a particularly unique perspective on it i

00:22:39.280 think and an important one but for me this is one of those really difficult tests if you're a

00:22:45.260 if you're an advocate of free speech, because a number of people came out and said, you know,

00:22:49.880 she should be fired. She should be essentially canceled, uh, for the, for the words that she 1.00

00:22:54.540 said. And my position on that is somebody who's, you know, not to the same scale. I mean, I, you

00:23:00.280 know, I've got like, what is it like 2000 followers on Twitter? Harsha Wally has got somewhere in

00:23:05.520 the neighborhood of like 36,000, right? So, so the, the so-called Twitter mob that, um,

00:23:10.800 that precipitated my dismissal a few weeks ago was probably nothing compared to what

00:23:15.380 what she's enduring as a result of this but a lot of people were calling for a lot of the same

00:23:20.280 people that called for my dismissal were calling for her dismissal um and so can you describe

00:23:26.040 yourself as a free speech advocate i i get that people want to criticize the comment she made i

00:23:30.940 mean i i people should be free to criticize the comment she made but can you call yourself a free

00:23:35.880 speech advocate at the same time you're calling for her to be dismissed and that that's so that's 0.97

00:23:39.800 the first question the second question is is this in fact incitement um because some people are

00:23:45.820 making that case in fact i've got one uh there's one one more picture of a tweet i think and i

00:23:51.260 can't remember the name of the lawyer but he describes himself as a catholic um out of i

00:23:56.860 think eastern ontario um and he took issue with another lawyer uh who appears to be an indigenous

00:24:04.880 lawyer who, after

00:24:06.960 Harsha Walia made her comments,

00:24:09.620 pledged to

00:24:10.880 defend anybody who had been

00:24:13.080 caught burning down churches.

00:24:15.080 So yeah, here's the tweet.

00:24:17.260 And so this fella in response said,

00:24:19.160 look, what you're saying here is in fact

00:24:20.900 incitement, and I'm basically reporting it

00:24:23.000 to the Law Society, and I'm going to

00:24:24.940 try to get you fired. And so that's

00:24:26.920 what he said. And then if you scroll down, you can see part of what

00:24:28.940 she said.

00:24:31.380 Naomi Sayers is the

00:24:32.660 lawyer.

00:24:34.880 And I couldn't get it all there, but yeah, it'll also help defend anyone charged.

00:24:38.100 But she also says, let me be clear, I would help her burn it all down.

00:24:41.580 So those are the two questions.

00:24:45.820 Is this in fact incitement?

00:24:47.260 Because I'm one of those guys who thinks that the claims in the US, mainly by Democrats,

00:24:55.620 but some Republicans, that the comments Trump made on January 6th were an example of incitement.

00:25:02.260 and i know a number of free speech advocates said hang on i mean he

00:25:08.040 you know he he didn't tell anybody to go charge the capital well i mean if you go look at the

00:25:14.140 tape he kind of did right like he kind of did but did he actually mean you know break into it and

00:25:20.320 overthrow the government which is which is what i think is the necessary test to demonstrate

00:25:25.380 incitement well i don't think he did that i mean i don't think he did anything that i haven't done

00:25:30.540 multiple times every time I've been in front of a microphone in front of a crowd of, you know,

00:25:34.920 a couple thousand trade unionists who are on strike or angry about something saying, you know,

00:25:39.480 we're, you know, let's charge the legislature and show them, show them we mean business, right?

00:25:45.160 But because things worked out the way they did, people wanted to charge them with incitement. So,

00:25:48.980 so that's the question I think we need to ask ourselves. If we dispute that Trump made insightful

00:25:55.420 comments on January 6th, are we being hypocritical by suggesting that Harsha Walia also made inciting

00:26:03.540 comments on Monday? My answer to both of those is no. And as much as I may find the comments,

00:26:15.720 particularly in the context she made them distasteful,

00:26:17.920 you know the freedom of speech has to protect our freedom to speak whether people who disagree

00:26:26.980 with us like it or not uh and and that's a principle you sort of have to be unwavering on

00:26:32.300 um so i mean anyway that's a lot of talking i'm interested to get your take on it i think i think

00:26:37.600 that there's a couple of things on my end uh and and i have to wear a couple of different hats

00:26:42.080 throughout that discussion because on the one on the one hand obviously i'm a devout roman catholic

00:26:46.620 and i obviously don't want any of my churches burned uh that's not fun and i don't like that

00:26:55.340 but at the same time i'm not surprised at this action i'm not surprised at it uh the narrative

00:27:03.200 that's being put forward by the mainstream media could definitely incite people to violence that's

00:27:07.460 not that's not surprising uh some of these grave sites were known before it's just the uh the

00:27:14.300 markers have been lost and uh something else that that needs to be noted is that while while it's

00:27:21.700 still a tragedy i'm not arguing that for a second it also we also need to acknowledge that people

00:27:27.480 would often be buried quite quite close to where they died they weren't necessarily shipped home

00:27:32.640 they weren't shipped home during the civil war they weren't shipped home during the first world

00:27:36.980 war we didn't have the refrigeration to do that that didn't happen so those are just that's those

00:27:42.380 are just statements of fact it's not it's not to try and belie what happened and it's not to try

00:27:47.860 and excuse the wrong uh that did occur inside of the residential school system by individuals who

00:27:53.460 are clearly abusing their positions of power which was not everybody but clearly too many and and

00:27:59.060 none is too many in that respect i i admit that um with with regards though to the question of free

00:28:05.080 speech for me for me one of the problems i have with the canadian milieu to use uh one of your

00:28:11.400 often used vocab words i my problem is that in canada we just seem to have no way of responding

00:28:18.640 so so somebody can go and say something outrageous and then outrageous things can even be done but as

00:28:24.620 soon as you go to defend your own property or as soon as you put someone under citizen's arrest or

00:28:28.980 as soon as as soon as you detain someone whatever you end up having to give an argument like oh the

00:28:34.020 gun went off in my hand or oh i mean he started whatever you basically have to lie once you get

00:28:39.980 to get to uh your uh docket and uh and and take your stand uh and are accused of having used

00:28:47.360 excessive force in this instance uh and and you don't get to just say well well i mean i'm sorry

00:28:52.520 you you sow the wind you reap the whirlwind and that's my policy when it comes to most things i

00:28:57.380 would never start a physical altercation with somebody but i would sure as heck make sure that

00:29:01.940 it had a conclusive ending uh and and if and if i lose in that conclusion i do but i didn't start

00:29:08.340 it but i participated in the energy that was being carried forward um and for some reason that's the

00:29:14.040 crime in canada not necessarily the incitement but somehow my response to the incitement so i

00:29:18.780 my latest column which just went up on the standard today i believe or late last night

00:29:24.580 was essentially in as polite a term as possible saying well so there's been a few church burnings

00:29:30.000 and there's been some vandalism uh the congregations have been spoken to by their priests

00:29:35.160 and their pastors and they've reached out into their congregation to say, is anybody willing to

00:29:38.800 help with security? And those of us,

00:29:43.140 I'm a status Indian, there's people here who are recent immigrants or other people who are old

00:29:46.940 stock Canadians, it doesn't matter. All these people have stepped forward within the 0.85

00:29:50.860 congregation to say, yeah, some of us would even be willing to stay overnight at the church

00:29:54.720 or to walk around the church and to use what my doomed attempt

00:29:58.800 in the army was called fire pickets. When you take shifts at night

00:30:02.880 looking for quote interestingly enough fires um so it's the same thing trade unions have had to do

00:30:09.840 to protect their offices for for decades exactly precisely so so it's the exact same concept and

00:30:15.040 and it's very simple for me if i find if i come around a corner and i happen to find you in the

00:30:20.440 act of attempting to burn down my church i mean i'd probably just chase you off to begin with

00:30:25.560 i mean you're probably going to be a coward and run away and and leave your matches and gasoline

00:30:29.780 your barbecue lighters there but in the event that you have some gumption or gumption enough

00:30:35.180 to try and continue with your activity or even even get at me during during trying to do that

00:30:40.980 defend yourself and and continue to do your whatever you're doing like there's going to be

00:30:45.380 an altercation and at the end of that somebody is going to be apprehended right and that's how it is

00:30:50.680 and that was as polite as i could and i said and if i've got enough people to apprehend you i'm not

00:30:56.260 going to tell you that it's going to be the most comfortable time between when i have my hands on

00:31:00.180 you and when i bring you to the local detachment or wait for the rcmp to show up i'm 240 pounds

00:31:06.280 i might just sit on you uh that's not going to be comfortable for you uh it's and that's how it is

00:31:11.680 so go ahead and say it go ahead and put it on twitter go ahead and retweet it talk about how

00:31:15.740 it'll be a glorious day when we rid the world of i don't know all religion or whatever else 0.99

00:31:20.640 uh burn it all down go ahead and say it but if you if you bring the thunder be prepared for the

00:31:25.540 lightning, right? And that's what it is. We're going to defend what we have. And I'm not going

00:31:29.940 to go out there and cite anything. But if somebody comes out of my property, they're going to get a

00:31:33.480 polite word, then they're going to get a stern word, and then they're going to get an unmistakable

00:31:37.460 reprimand that says, this is not going to continue. That's how it is.

00:31:42.460 Yeah, I think I've become a bit of a libertarian on these questions as well. I don't think it's

00:31:46.320 reasonable to expect that the RCMP, or even if we had a provincial police force, which is my

00:31:51.000 preference uh to expect that they're going to be able to to watch every every church in the province

00:31:56.220 uh 24 7 and so um we certainly didn't expect that in the labor movement when when we felt like

00:32:02.360 one of our offices was going to get torched which has happened many times over the history of the

00:32:06.520 province um so you do have to take those matters into your own hands and take responsibility for

00:32:12.080 for the protection of yourself and and your organization and the people that are in it

00:32:16.100 um so i you know i'm encouraged to hear that some of that's happening because clearly there's a

00:32:21.920 this seems to be ongoing and there doesn't seem to be an end to it and it's just so i mean it's

00:32:27.240 it's predictable in the sense that if the people who are doing it are the ones that i think they

00:32:31.080 are it's exactly the kind of conclusion they would draw because their analysis of this whole system

00:32:36.440 is is completely skewed and it's skewed along identitarian lines so these people already have 0.97

00:32:42.000 a completely racist worldview and I'm not talking about indigenous people by the way like you know

00:32:48.360 I mean Maurice C. Clare came out and chastised people for doing this which I think was probably

00:32:56.060 a good thing to do but it's anyway it's I'm glad to hear your comments on it because it's

00:33:04.940 it was a very it's a controversial issue but it was just it was one of those instances where I

00:33:10.060 think you know your first response right away is to call for this person's head let's get them

00:33:15.080 fired let's get them out of there but then you know you have to sort of stop and go and and then

00:33:19.520 what like what's that going to change you're all you're going to do is it's it's the same as when

00:33:24.420 it works in the reverse when the left tries to do this to to people on the right or trans activists

00:33:29.440 try to do it when people are talking about puberty blockers and that kind of thing it doesn't make

00:33:33.600 that person go away it doesn't make their opinion go away in my in my mind it's always better to

00:33:38.160 have these kind of like sunlight is always the best remedy for this stuff you want to know when

00:33:44.720 people have opinions like this so that you can take them on whether you agree or not and if you

00:33:49.720 try to remove them from their platform it doesn't work so so that was that was why I wanted to bring

00:33:57.300 this up rather than to just show the videos but anyway the next item is people probably don't

00:34:06.040 even know that this happened actually but a fellow that you've had on the show at least once before

00:34:10.560 by the name of Aaron Gunn finally announced sort of that he's going to seek the leadership of the

00:34:18.440 BC Liberal Party and it just sort of fell flat which was really surprising to me and I think is

00:34:25.440 a big problem for him now those will remember if they saw your previous episode I mean Aaron Gunn

00:34:32.380 I think has got a fair bit of support. I'm quite excited by his entry. I have been excited by

00:34:37.240 his potential entry for a while, not because I agree with him. Obviously, I don't agree with

00:34:41.560 him on really anything. But I don't think that everybody should see the world the way I do. I

00:34:48.000 think that any society, and particularly our province, has to have a diversity of views that

00:34:52.800 cover the spectrum so that we can balance each other out. I mean, if everybody saw the world the

00:34:57.280 way I did, I don't think it would be a very good place, to be honest. And so I think there's,

00:35:03.480 you know, I think there needs to be conservatives that sort of, you know, moderate some of my most

00:35:08.580 wide-eyed socialist tendencies, and vice versa. And I think Aaron Gunn represents some people

00:35:16.780 in British Columbia, especially conservative-minded folks that haven't seen any kind of political

00:35:21.300 expression for themselves in the BC Liberals for quite some time. Now, I think there's some

00:35:27.820 nuance to that. There's probably some people who feel like, who are conservatives, who don't feel

00:35:33.120 at home in the BC Liberals, who probably also have some disagreements with Aaron on a number of

00:35:38.140 things. But he is also not really, he doesn't come across, or at least he's trying to display

00:35:46.740 himself as somebody who's not out of the party establishment. And this was demonstrated, I haven't

00:35:51.540 got anything to show this, but a few months ago, Mark Marison, who is seeking the mayoralty of

00:36:01.240 whatever that word is in Vancouver, he's going to run against Kennedy Stewart. He's the former

00:36:07.000 husband, I think, of former Premier Christy Clark. And, you know, a real backroom guy in the BC

00:36:15.800 the BC Liberal Party, he was one of the first people to come out to say, like, you know, we

00:36:20.060 can't have somebody like Aaron Gunn in the party, he'll just destroy us kind of thing. And I think

00:36:23.440 Gunn's response was, who? I mean, I don't even know this guy. And everybody who's told me about

00:36:28.920 him, nobody has anything good to say about him. So he's really tried to position himself, you know,

00:36:34.000 as counter to the BC Liberal establishment, which is probably a smart move. He's also got a huge

00:36:38.660 social media following comparative to other leadership candidates. And so he's describing

00:36:43.520 himself as you know the kind of conservative candidate that those disaffected conservatives

00:36:48.560 within the bc liberal tent can be hopeful about but he's definitely i mean what's interesting to

00:36:55.880 me number one is that he's really casting himself as a hyper federalist which i don't think is a

00:37:03.140 good strategy um because this is british columbia and there are people that are really proud of the

00:37:10.560 country but not that proud and it's sort of demonstrated they're not they're not canada

00:37:16.040 proud yeah but there's a reason why that stuff does really well you know out east and probably

00:37:23.480 pretty good in in alberta but in bc it just like it's not that we don't like canada i mean that's

00:37:29.680 the position i've always had it's just kind of like we just sort of joined back in 1872 because

00:37:35.240 it was the right business decision that we thought we could make at the time i agree that it probably

00:37:39.500 was but we were always just kind of like yeah we'll we'll join this as long as it works for us

00:37:44.900 but you guys just do your thing out there and leave us alone kind of thing so he's really tried

00:37:49.620 to um I mean he made his announcement on Canada Day I think that was mistake number one in his

00:37:55.080 mind it made sense I'm sure in his campaign team it was like you know there's this attack on Canada

00:38:00.380 Day people want to cancel it because of the graves that are being found related to the previous item

00:38:05.320 and uh he wants us to to carve out some space as this defender of the canadian brand kind of thing

00:38:12.140 which would make sense if he was contesting the leadership of the conservative party of canada

00:38:17.520 in bc it just kind of falls flat let's put the video up that i have of his announcement

00:38:22.580 uh i've got it i've got it uploaded here so if you put it on the screen i'll just hit

00:38:26.520 anybody here who's proud to be canadian

00:38:29.600 so sounded like a couple of you but let's just ask again see if we can find any more is there

00:38:40.460 anyone here who's proud to be Canadian so the reason I showed that clip is that it sort of

00:38:50.560 demonstrates like even in his in his group of hardcore supporters which they sort of came to

00:38:55.640 like a Canada Day barbecue I don't know if they knew he was going to make this announcement or

00:38:58.900 even they were just kind of like yeah you know you had to ask them twice you had to do like the

00:39:03.400 jeb bush thing where he's like please please clap yeah oh rough and it's not that people are against

00:39:09.360 canada it's just like it's just not what it's not what's ever animated british colombians right

00:39:14.220 because when you say canada people think trudeau and they think uh equalization and they think

00:39:20.260 well it's just people that are as far away from us as japan is telling us what to do and and how

00:39:25.820 to live our lives and what we can't do. And in the case of Alberta in particular, I mean,

00:39:30.360 they're incensed because when it comes to equalization, they put money into Alberta and

00:39:33.980 they get, they've never really got anything or into Ottawa and they've never really got

00:39:37.740 anything back from their perspective. So it's, I think it's a, I think it's a mistake for his

00:39:42.940 campaign to try to wrap this Canadian flag around himself. Um, we'll see, maybe I'm wrong about that.

00:39:48.700 Maybe he's got some data that shows that that's a real demographic, uh, that's going to be

00:39:52.800 supportive of them um then there was let me just if let's put that video up again because i want

00:39:57.980 to show this other clip this was the other part that was curious to me have which is why i have

00:40:09.720 decided to take the next step in seeking the leadership of the terribly branded and soon to

00:40:18.900 be renamed, I think, B.C. Liberal Party and ultimately the premier of the most

00:40:24.100 democratic party. But, and I am doing that before you guys get just too excited by

00:40:34.880 officially rolling out an exploratory committee and I hope to have a final

00:40:39.700 decision very very soon and one that you guys can all be very excited about. So

00:40:45.180 like that's the clumsiest announcement i've ever heard in my life so he basically says i'm

00:40:50.520 announcing that i'm gonna run and to do that i'm gonna start an exploratory committee to decide

00:40:56.980 whether or not i should run and it's like he's already had this exploratory committee going for

00:41:01.100 a few months now like what are you waiting for everybody else is basically announced and even

00:41:06.800 even uh gavin due who nobody probably even knows or has heard of he's some like youth activist in

00:41:13.640 the bc loop that guy's announced and and like is running his campaign so even the no names have

00:41:17.960 announced and he's just sort of holding holding his gunpowder i don't nobody knows what for

00:41:22.660 like piss or get off the pot sorry if that violates the the it doesn't it doesn't that's

00:41:28.560 this is canada so i found that to be really clumsy and then so the media response of course was was

00:41:36.620 quite predictable nobody covered it except the western standard there was one article in the

00:41:41.740 western standard covering his announcement and literally nobody else covered it we have it here

00:41:47.540 actually we can uh we can bring it up we can yeah we have we have the one just just to prove that

00:41:54.120 it exists an insurgency it's an insurgency that's right uh well it's not a very well-known one

00:42:00.520 so i guess it's maybe it's a stealth insurgency still um but i mean it was good to see the i'm

00:42:07.420 not criticizing the western standard at all it was good to see the western standard uh cover this

00:42:11.360 because nobody else did so i'm sure that aaron gun's team is quite disappointed with this i don't

00:42:16.200 know if they were trying to raise some attention with it i they're gonna have to do another

00:42:20.360 announcement i guess i mean first of all to clarify whether he's actually running and second to try to

00:42:24.840 get somebody to pay attention to it say hey look now i know now i know who's in charge of all this

00:42:29.200 stuff i didn't even know so gavin dew kevin falcon michael lee val litman and ellis well i know who

00:42:35.220 ellis is yeah andrew wilkinson of course and then good old shirley bond that's who i ran against

00:42:41.340 back in the day all right but we'll leave that where it is a real real misfire uh and then if

00:42:47.660 you pull up that um pull up that other article if you have it about jagmeet singh because there's

00:42:52.620 this weird correlation between the two so the the toronto star which is a paper i recommend you never

00:42:58.140 read uh put out an article like a real really nothing more than a fluff piece look at this

00:43:04.700 look at this headline jagmeet singh is is a tick tock superstar here's what that means for the

00:43:10.140 next election wow that was a slow news day oh my goodness well and don't read the article but it's

00:43:16.900 it's literally just like this fluff piece about how you know he's got more tiktok followers than

00:43:22.920 anybody else on the trail and this is going to be a factor in that kind of thing and you know my

00:43:28.340 response to this was okay well if there's actually any merit to this then we can expect that aaron

00:43:34.420 gun will be the next premier of british columbia because his whole campaign strategy is to try to

00:43:40.640 leverage his sizable and comparatively sizable social media base and and see if he can turn

00:43:46.880 those into votes the big problem with these huge social media bases is that very like only a

00:43:53.520 i love sheldon's good there's there's only uh there's only so many people in that following

00:44:01.820 that actually are in your writing that can vote for you this isn't the United States when you're

00:44:07.120 voting for a leader like nobody nobody voted for John Horgan except the voters of Wanda Fuca

00:44:12.920 and nobody votes for Justin Trudeau other than I can't remember what writing Papineau

00:44:20.460 Papineau yeah so that's how our system works and so if great you've got a million at 0.4

00:44:26.720 uh tiktok followers half of which are probably in the states and they followed you because

00:44:33.320 uh you know some pop star or oh i think he did a i think jagmeet singh did like a

00:44:40.340 he played a session of some video game i can't remember the name of it because i don't play it

00:44:45.260 with aoc alexandria ocasio cortez one day so that probably got him like you know half a million

00:44:50.380 tiktok followers or something like that like animal crossing or something animal crossing is

00:44:55.380 a respectable game this other one they were playing was some garbage game uh that they

00:44:59.000 probably would never play because they're just not gamers but um uh like the last thing i want

00:45:04.340 to do is offend any uh western standard viewers who happen to play animal crossing that would be

00:45:08.480 i see yeah no that could yeah you sow the wind to reap the whirlwind on that one it's a big it's a

00:45:14.440 big game anyway uh so let's see i mean i think this this claim about jagmeet singh being a real

00:45:20.700 player now because he's got a social media following is not going to mean anything but

00:45:25.620 then again i mean the same challenge exists for aaron gunn uh he's got to figure out if he's

00:45:30.080 going to have a hope and hella winning here of how he's going to translate all of these social

00:45:34.160 media followers into votes and again his first hurdle is to convince liberal party members to

00:45:39.320 vote for him that's the first challenge and it's not a given that liberal that a majority of liberal

00:45:44.520 party members are on his social media following feed right no it's not it's not i think i i hope

00:45:50.420 aaron i hope aaron can kind of do some course correction here because i think that as an a kind

00:45:56.620 of if elvis ross is kind of like the elder version of an insurgency candidate like if you're like

00:46:02.460 just a bit more sober have some real world experience did your time in victoria did your

00:46:06.800 time up north did your time in selectively logging and driving cab like all sorts of crazy things he's

00:46:13.480 done in his life and then and then uh on top of all that being being uh in recovery because he's

00:46:18.940 admitted that too right that he he was an alcoholic and he's been in recovery for 20 years

00:46:23.500 an alcoholic yeah you never stop being one yeah and uh and so so he's got a really compelling

00:46:29.060 story right like a really compelling story and what i was hoping if i have to be so bold is that

00:46:34.540 if if you know while alice was getting was getting uh more endorsements up here right

00:46:40.000 throughout the interior right as kind of the interior guy and then slowly trying to cruise

00:46:44.440 his way down the fraser and get and get more you know get people on his side and especially in the

00:46:48.660 bible belt and that sort of thing because hey you know like you can't you can't trust the lower

00:46:53.440 mainland guys to do this stuff for you at least you know where my values are at least culturally

00:46:57.580 my values are closer to your values and uh and you can rely on me and then finally i was thinking

00:47:03.620 that erin could kind of bring home any sort of insurgency populist perhaps perhaps culturally

00:47:11.040 conserved but certainly certainly culturally anti-establishment uh sort of political leanings

00:47:16.420 in in the lower mainland or in victoria and kind of almost in a sense deliver that for for ellis's

00:47:23.100 campaign uh that was kind of the strategy that i would have tried to follow if if uh erin could

00:47:28.820 could do such a thing as it is i i don't i don't know what's going to happen for poor erin there

00:47:33.420 because he that was pretty underwhelming yeah the announcement's obviously a misfire I mean

00:47:38.820 in his defense he may have not seen it as an announcement he maybe you know just saw it as

00:47:42.780 like a prelude to an announcement we'll see the other challenge for him is he lives in Victoria

00:47:47.520 right and it's like it's NDP land so and he's a conservative candidate in the BC Liberal Party

00:47:54.220 so you know like I think he's he's got a difficult time uh like his first challenge is is to answer

00:48:02.180 the question to any liberal party member like how are you going to get elected in victoria

00:48:06.080 i think his backup strategy if i was him i'd be you know it probably explains why he's been doing

00:48:11.160 some video work out in the out in the piece because he maybe he's thinking well i can i can

00:48:15.140 seek a nomination if i'm elected leader in peace river country and then i'm assured but here's the

00:48:19.980 other challenge if you're like if your main campaign plank is hyper federalism well peace

00:48:26.620 river ain't necessarily going to be that friendly to you either there's still people up there who

00:48:30.780 still got signs on their lawns to say you know site c is not a done deal i i used to say that

00:48:36.060 all the time to my my high tory friends you know very ardent bc liberals good bennett liberals right

00:48:42.380 i just like he's not a done deal we're gonna go up into the hills we're gonna bring our

00:48:46.540 enfields with us and you can't take us and just don't get them rad yeah like like the site like

00:48:52.860 the piece is a diverse area like politically federally and provincially it's conservative

00:48:57.740 And those signs will be posted by conservatives and lefties alike.

00:49:02.940 But it's also, like, it's a pretty militant area.

00:49:06.260 I mean, and they don't like Ottawa telling them what to do.

00:49:10.520 Or Victoria, or Prince George, or...

00:49:13.400 No, I mean, there was Weebo Ludwig's crew up there for years.

00:49:16.800 They were, you know, I mean, we don't know for sure,

00:49:18.740 but somebody was bombing the pipelines up there.

00:49:20.820 Like, they're the kind of people, like, everybody,

00:49:22.660 it's kind of like Prince George.

00:49:23.520 You don't want to go messing around in people's yards

00:49:26.360 because everybody's got a gun.

00:49:27.740 and uh and it's just like if he's gonna if that's his plan because he knows he can't get elected in

00:49:33.660 victoria if he's gonna go to the peace to try to seek a seat there i don't think the hyper

00:49:36.900 federalism is gonna especially for a provincial campaign like people want to know what you're

00:49:40.840 gonna do for the province and in some respect they want to know that the premier of british

00:49:45.240 columbia isn't just gonna cozy up to ottawa i mean that's sort of that's that's the problem that uh

00:49:51.980 erin o'toole is facing right now and and it looks like uh erin gunn is is gonna go down the same

00:49:56.660 path so it's a bit of a misfire i hope he i hope he uh is able to pick it up but i also agree with

00:50:02.640 you i think the the the best chance for him if if things don't turn around uh is to endorse ellis

00:50:09.940 ross if he steps down and and i'd love to see the two of them get elected and and that would sort of

00:50:16.920 guarantee him a cabinet post i guess if they're able to form government and that would be

00:50:19.940 interesting and that would probably be a good move for the bc liberals if they're interested

00:50:25.080 in trying to keep the tent together and not allow the kind of division that is inevitable when you

00:50:30.060 start going down the identitarian path that they have, which sort of sparked off with their expulsion

00:50:35.160 of Laurie Throness in the middle of the last election. So we'll see more on that. I see we're

00:50:40.660 running out of time. So I'll jump onto the next item here quick. For sure. For sure. Yeah, no,

00:50:45.460 I would like to get Aaron on here. I don't know if I don't know if I'm going to get all the

00:50:50.360 leadership candidates on here because i mean i'll say this we've got we've had some pretty

00:50:54.440 heavy opinions said on the show about certain leadership candidates otherwise known as kevin

00:50:58.720 falcon so what i should really do is i should get james to guest host while i'm gone for my honeymoon

00:51:04.660 and uh and he can talk to kevin falcon for me and i don't have to listen to that or stream it where

00:51:10.200 i'm going there's no internet so that'll be fine let me talk to the camera yeah that'll be great

00:51:15.600 uh let's see what what would you like to bring up next year well the only other thing now in

00:51:19.980 the news is uh um that i wanted to bring up was the uh so the bcndp constituency assistants

00:51:27.600 are have voted i think 97 to go on strike which is uh kind of interesting um so people will look

00:51:37.620 at this and and this will probably be quite confusing for a lot of folks like who don't

00:51:41.640 necessarily understand what constituency assistants are they're not what's important

00:51:47.020 for people to understand is they're not the what i would consider to be like overpaid

00:51:52.540 underskilled political hacks that work for political parties and work for caucus in victoria

00:51:58.780 they are the worker bees that work in the constituency offices in your in your area

00:52:04.860 they're usually the people you meet when you go into an mla's office they're the ones that 0.69

00:52:08.780 do all the work locally working on case files trying to get you some assistance when you're

00:52:13.100 you're trying to navigate the bureaucracy of government, they do all the work and the MLA

00:52:16.480 basically gets all the glory. And by comparison, they kind of make peanuts. So their collective

00:52:23.260 agreement, you can see it. It's posted on the BC Collective Agreement database. They make between

00:52:30.860 about $26 and $32 an hour, which is not too bad. It's based on experience, but it's a range of

00:52:38.300 eight to 16% less than what the federal constituency assistants make for federal

00:52:44.540 parties. This is their collective agreement. So you can go through here and just see all of their

00:52:48.220 terms and conditions. They're represented by the BCGU, which used to be called the British

00:52:53.720 Columbia Government and Services Employees Union. And full disclosure, I used to work for that union

00:52:58.080 a number of years ago. They've recently changed their name to the BC General Workers Union, I think.

00:53:03.080 and uh and so they now just because they got a 97 strike vote which which is you know i mean that's

00:53:11.140 high we when i was uh arranging strike votes uh in a past life i never wanted to get a hundred

00:53:17.620 percent strike vote because then it's not the vote wasn't anonymous you know the employer would

00:53:21.600 know that know who voted in favor of the strike so you always want to get as close to a hundred

00:53:26.320 as possible without actually hitting it and keep the vote anonymous but um it's a you know it's a

00:53:30.820 high vote. It doesn't mean they're going to go on strike right away. What it means is that they're

00:53:35.480 going to go into mediation first, but they've got sort of as an additional bargaining chip,

00:53:41.220 this strike mandate in their pocket if mediation breaks down. So that's 57 constituency offices

00:53:47.940 across the province, 12 of which are on the island because it's NDP land over there.

00:53:55.320 the interesting thing is is that they're all they're the only ones that are unionized uh

00:54:02.280 the green party constituency assistants and the obviously the bc liberal party constituency

00:54:08.640 assistants are not unionized so if you were to try to conclude from this development that

00:54:14.580 it's only the bc ndp constituency assistants that are cranky at the moment it's not necessary you

00:54:20.480 can't necessarily draw that conclusion the other two parties constituency assistants don't have the

00:54:24.980 legal ability to go on strike because they don't have a union. But if the constituency assistants

00:54:31.200 are able to get the 8% to 16% pay increase, which they're asking for, which would give them parity

00:54:36.840 not just with the federal CAs, but also with the caucus staff that work in Victoria, so the people

00:54:42.980 that are working closer to the ministers in Victoria, you'd probably see a similar increase

00:54:49.480 in pay for the BC Liberal CAs and the Green Party CAs because, you know, it's just sort of the way

00:54:55.160 industries work. So everybody is kind of set to benefit from it. But the other thing they're

00:55:00.100 asking for, in addition to the pay increase, is job security provisions as well. And so this is

00:55:05.780 the thing that sort of caught my attention because I think this is a tougher one for the public,

00:55:10.180 if the public is paying attention, to really take seriously.

00:55:17.260 The complaint is if a MLA resigns and a new MLA comes in from the same party,

00:55:26.680 the constituency assistant has to rebid on their job like everybody else does.

00:55:31.720 So what they're asking for is some provision that would give them preferential treatment

00:55:35.880 for job security that span those two MLAs.

00:55:39.240 Of course, if NDP MLA loses an election and a BC Liberal comes in, there's no job security

00:55:45.200 provision for them at all because no BC Liberal is going to hire a former.

00:55:48.700 I mean, they can.

00:55:50.020 There's nothing saying they couldn't, but it's not likely to happen.

00:55:53.440 I don't think I'm really in favor of this.

00:55:55.780 I think if a, you know, it's the kind of job that you go into.

00:55:59.100 It's not meant to be, no political job is meant to be a career.

00:56:03.420 A lot of them have turned into careers.

00:56:05.940 That's not a good thing, I think, from the perspective of the public.

00:56:09.240 i'm obviously in favor of the public service having job security of having lifetime staff

00:56:14.980 people that work in uh ministry offices etc that kind of thing um but i don't think it's a good

00:56:21.900 idea to shift to this situation where you know if you're an mla a new mla coming into an office that

00:56:27.760 you're the collective agreement sticks you with this constituency assistant because what if it's 0.54

00:56:32.540 a terrible constituency system what if the whole constituency hates that person because because

00:56:36.900 they're not friendly when they come in the door, they don't think they're competent in dealing with

00:56:40.400 their case files, etc. And you're a new MLA coming in, your political fortunes are sort of tied to

00:56:47.440 this person. So that's a tougher one to get your head around. I think we'll see if they get anything

00:56:51.820 out of it. But one to watch anyway, because the obvious consequence, if they're not able to reach

00:56:57.820 a deal of mediation, is that none of the NDP MLAs have constituency offices available to the public

00:57:03.860 for the duration of a strike i think i think on my end it i have no problem with the idea of people

00:57:15.940 agitating for higher wages uh that that makes sense uh it's it's a gruesome job sometimes i

00:57:22.980 mean you you are dealing with you're you're you're the you're the you're the reason that uh that the

00:57:30.660 the elected member doesn't have to deal with everybody.

00:57:34.320 That's really your job.

00:57:35.460 So you're playing referee, you're playing triage,

00:57:38.420 you're playing, you know, the stop

00:57:42.000 before they get to the big guy in the back.

00:57:45.120 That's your job.

00:57:46.680 And that can be a tough job.

00:57:48.560 It can be a tough job calming people down.

00:57:50.260 It can be a tough job hearing, you know,

00:57:52.840 everybody's complaints.

00:57:53.700 Yeah, the buffer.

00:57:54.920 And I think that that's worthy of a decent,

00:57:57.860 some decent pay,

00:57:58.860 especially for the competency that comes with it uh i would completely agree with you that there's

00:58:03.720 no way to ensure that people in uh when i when the new when a new mp or a new mla shows up they're

00:58:13.600 going to get they're going to bring in their favorite people that's what they're going to do

00:58:17.040 and it's also the people they truff it's it's not just it's not just patronage for patronage sake if

00:58:21.540 i got elected tomorrow i mean our producer who shall remain unnamed would be you know the guy

00:58:27.060 that I'd named to be in charge of of a lot of my staff you know I trust him very much and I know

00:58:33.800 I know that I can rely on him and I'm not going to let some collective agreement stand in my way

00:58:38.300 between getting elected and and and putting the guy that I trust in charge so I I hear you there

00:58:44.480 yeah and the the there's just a bit of delay in your mic sorry to take so long to respond

00:58:49.500 the the other interesting piece just for folks that live in Prince George uh because I know that

00:58:55.320 you've got to bring Stuart on in a second here, is that the BCNDP caucus

00:58:59.980 director, just out of interest, who would be sitting across the bargaining table from

00:59:03.560 the union in this regard, happens to be Roseanne Moran, who is the daughter of

00:59:08.000 the famous social worker in Prince George, Bridget Moran,

00:59:12.020 of whom there is a statue depicting her likeness, I think it's on 3rd Avenue

00:59:15.820 sitting on a bench, at least I think it's still there, I don't think anybody's tore it down yet.

00:59:19.820 So it's just an interesting local connection. But those are the news

00:59:24.000 items for the for this fiery week in british columbia and it's always it's always been a

00:59:28.420 pleasure to uh to bounce them off of western center viewers and get their take on it i i find

00:59:33.960 the feedback really really valuable no absolutely and uh yeah i i'm i'm excited for what's going to

00:59:42.700 develop from here i i mean hopefully aaron's bid goes somewhere hopefully uh churches stop being

00:59:48.880 burned uh hopefully we get a handle on our wildfire situation here in British Columbia it's

00:59:53.860 rather smoky day in Prince George um so you can go outside and take a breath of fresh smoky air

01:00:00.380 if you need it um but it's I mean it's like anything it's going to be up and down actually

01:00:05.580 what just before you go Aaron what do you think's gonna do you think the election's going to be soon

01:00:09.800 federally or do you think it's it's going to be a little ways off well I mean I think conservatives

01:00:14.740 who are concerned that it's going to happen or they got good reason to be concerned all the

01:00:18.060 indicators kind of show that he wants to pull the trigger now and why wouldn't he aaron o'toole is

01:00:22.060 uh just not performing and the conservative party doesn't seem to have any ability to be able to

01:00:28.140 to dislodge him and put somebody else in place and even if they did i mean who would it who would it

01:00:32.940 be really um so you know he's out there getting his picture taken at at graves uh by residential

01:00:40.700 schools with teddy bears and stuff like that um the ndp is i mean sure jagmeet singh's got a tiktok

01:00:49.260 following but like i said i mean i don't think they're going to do much better so yeah it's

01:00:53.260 they're basically having the same internal process i think that the bc ndp was having prior to the

01:00:58.860 2020 election which is it's never going to be a great time to hold an election but it's probably

01:01:04.700 going to get worse. So now might be the time. So I think they're, you know, especially as we get

01:01:11.020 closer to, and that's, I think why you're starting to see, you know, some efforts to try to lift some

01:01:16.740 of the restrictions is so they don't have to deal with the same backlash that the BCNDP got that

01:01:20.920 you're throwing us into this unnecessary election in the middle of COVID. But if you're looking at

01:01:26.960 what's happened in California, I mean, the state governor, I think they're just reinstituted

01:01:32.000 mandatory masks in all public buildings etc again um and so there's going to be this increasing

01:01:38.500 pressure as as as the professional managerial class who's not quite yet ready to let go of

01:01:45.440 the restrictions and the power they have from those lockdowns to try to reinvigorate this stuff

01:01:50.540 as some of the variants take hold and some people who have been fully vaccinated start to come down

01:01:55.720 with covid which is happening uh in limited numbers um it's it puts them in a tough spot

01:02:02.160 but i think they're gonna ultimately i think they'll make the same decision that john organ

01:02:04.840 did which is uh it's not perfect now but it's not going to get better so let's pull the trigger

01:02:09.420 i understand well hopefully we can move forward god help us all but uh thank you aaron thank you

01:02:16.720 we'll see you again next week absolutely i'll enjoy the rest of the show absolutely well uh

01:02:23.140 We're going to go right into it with our favorite omnicide observer and, well, all things general, from the space lizards to the Babylonian captivity.

01:02:33.880 It's Stuart Parker.

01:02:35.540 Good morning.

01:02:36.400 How are you doing?

01:02:37.320 I'm doing well.

01:02:38.420 I'm doing well.

01:02:39.160 and if i if i have to take a pulse on how you're doing i just look at i either look outside to see

01:02:45.560 where the smoke is coming from which is clearly your ears or i i look at your facebook which is

01:02:51.560 also full of full of wrath and fury where where are we at today stewart are we doing okay ah well

01:02:59.000 you know we um so we've had the hottest days unprecedented wildfires linton was incinerated

01:03:07.160 in a few hours. Now, that made news all over the world, but according to John Horrigan,

01:03:13.460 these fatalities are, you know, they're just a part of life, right? A child watching his two

01:03:19.920 parents be incinerated by a blaze that the government did not warn the citizens of,

01:03:28.600 they just warned ranchers. So everybody with cattle who could have been killed by the Lytton 0.98

01:03:33.300 blaze was uh warned by the ministry of the solicitor general uh in fact the only way that

01:03:39.860 the reserve was able to develop evacuation plans was because some of them are cattle ranchers

01:03:46.260 and had had so many people in the reserve not been cattle ranchers um they more people would

01:03:53.860 have died um now it's like oh we have wildfires every year actually no this is an unprecedented

01:04:00.020 wildfire season 285 wildfires burning simultaneously at the beginning of july that's unprecedented

01:04:06.900 the temperatures unprecedented but i know that a bunch of the viewership of this show go no no

01:04:12.660 we've always had it's always been 50 degrees in lytton we've always had weekends where one billion

01:04:20.340 individual marine life forms were killed by extreme heat one billion just a billion uh

01:04:28.180 animals in the intertidal zone perfectly normal and i know that i'm going to be arguing with

01:04:32.500 those people when there's a fire tornado in town i know i'm going to be arguing with those people

01:04:36.900 they're going there's always been a typhoon season in prince rupert you know there's no actual

01:04:43.540 amount of extreme weather that's going to convince a climate denier at this point now what's

01:04:48.900 interesting is justin trudeau who has been saying climate science is settled science

01:04:56.420 his response to the litten blaze was to change his mind he no longer believes climate science is

01:05:02.260 settled that's interesting because perhaps people might scrutinize their policies now john horgan

01:05:10.020 is always the guy who is going to um he's i think for people who wanted doug ford to be a donald

01:05:17.540 trump like character you should just keep your eyes on john horgan the only reason doesn't seem

01:05:22.340 like donald trump to you is because he's with the ndp but he has all the right personality

01:05:27.380 architecture all the right indifference to suffering for people who want to be shocked

01:05:31.700 and so of course we saw all over the world the rest of the world was shocked by the kind of

01:05:35.460 stuff john horgan had to say about the deaths and the extreme heat and not warning the people of

01:05:42.260 leaden uh but uh you know oh he's a new democrat so he must be valuing human life too much no

01:05:49.620 this guy really doesn't i don't think he cares whether anybody lives i don't think cares whether

01:05:54.020 he lives or dies honestly but what was striking was the provincial government's response

01:06:01.940 that they announced new climate policy in response to the disaster in linton and i don't think it

01:06:08.980 will surprise any longtime observer of the bc ndp that um although it's covered in gobbledygook and

01:06:17.620 hogwash and nonsense the actual announcement is they're going to increase fracking subsidies

01:06:24.580 so their response to the climate emergency is again to just hammer the gas into the floor

01:06:32.580 as we go over the cliff see if we can burn it all up two years earlier that's the response

01:06:40.420 and it was announced by the minister of climate change or the minister of fire i guess we should

01:06:45.700 call him now um joyce murray was briefly the minister of fire under campbell i don't see why

01:06:51.220 we can't have another one but uh george hayman i mean he's the one who puts out this nonsense press

01:06:58.180 release which is about supposedly about hydrogen fuel cell technology until you start reading it

01:07:04.340 and you see that it's just full of euphemisms for fracking the bc government thinks it can save the

01:07:10.340 fracking industry in the northeast not just by showering money on it as it does to the tune of

01:07:15.620 about a billion dollars a year now they're also going to increase it by by um claiming that

01:07:23.380 they're going to use fracked gas to make hydrogen fuel cells for zero emission hydrogen trains that

01:07:32.500 don't run anywhere right there are no zero emission hydrogen trains in the western hemisphere because

01:07:39.860 it's a stupid technology it was like a clever technology in the 90s when you know things were

01:07:48.420 different we didn't know as much and honestly our batteries were worse and our solar was way worse

01:07:56.260 and back then hydrogen fuel cells made tiny tiny amounts of sense uh i remember the beast the last

01:08:03.940 ndp government under glenn clark was really into hydrogen fuel cells there was this company called

01:08:08.660 ballard power that was given billions of millions of dollars by the government mainly to hold press 0.75

01:08:13.780 conferences about things they never built and uh but ballard power somebody finally said well how

01:08:19.300 are you going to power this thing you're just going to use fracked gas and the ballard power

01:08:23.780 guys were like no we're going to put a breeder reactor in the trunk of every car and then people

01:08:28.740 went whoa maybe we shouldn't do business with these people you know however unsafe um however

01:08:35.620 unsafe uh you might find uh petroleum and god knows i do um just imagine like vehicles rear-ending

01:08:45.220 each other and suddenly oh dear there's a critical mass we're gonna have a small mushroom cloud over

01:08:49.540 the intersection anyway this is the kind of bright idea we associate with the hydrogen power to get

01:08:55.860 i mean again another harbinger of the times the only person of any public significance who's been

01:09:02.580 shelling for hydrogen in the past five years is van der Zand. Now I love me some van der Zand.

01:09:08.260 Bill van der Zand was a very, very entertaining individual. And, you know, if I were electing

01:09:14.100 someone to have drinks with every Friday night, of course, I'd pick the Zand. But in terms of, 1.00

01:09:19.860 like, rational public policy, that's not really what we go to that guy for. You know, he's into

01:09:25.220 chemtrails now, right? He's trying to stop the mind control planes that are flying over us.

01:09:32.580 And so he's the only publicly prominent hydrogen shill until George Heyman comes along with this half-baked scheme to save North Haverbrook, Ogdenville, and – are those real towns?

01:09:50.800 It just – it sounds like – it's just – it sounds like something someone would make up about Ontario.

01:09:58.020 John's just messing with you, I bet.

01:09:59.820 It's just throwing a shtick at your throat.

01:10:02.460 those are those are not real towns there um you know but on the other hand i used to my friend

01:10:08.860 steve and i used to think john john tory was a hypothetical construct too like now he's the

01:10:14.220 mayor of toronto but i always thought it was like what does john tory think i had no idea it was

01:10:19.580 like an actual person's name and then when you meet him he's exactly like a hypothetical construct

01:10:25.500 he's like grown in a vat that's been trying to produce john tory for the past hundred years

01:10:31.020 so you know these uh anyway zero emission hydrogen trains there's one in germany

01:10:37.580 and it goes uh but uh honestly uh i you know what i've discovered right is that

01:10:47.980 when you actually start crunching the numbers then you go how many years has this party been

01:10:53.180 in government and oh the monorail and more importantly sheldon we all know where that

01:10:58.380 goes the escalator to nowhere i'm holding out for that one so the thing is if you actually look at

01:11:06.300 the record of different parties in government um it's the exact inverse of their public rhetoric

01:11:15.500 so the green party has only been in government for three years in canada during its coalition

01:11:19.900 with john horgan and that government had the distinction of increasing fracking emissions

01:11:26.860 and fossil fuel subsidies by more per year than any other government in canadian history

01:11:31.900 so in terms of legislative record the green party is the single most effective party at increasing

01:11:37.660 carbon emissions whose second place the ndp right john horgan was able to increase emissions by

01:11:45.980 more per year and subsidies for fossil fuels by more per year than christy clark or gordon campbell

01:11:51.260 in fact in terms of subsidies he increased um subsidies to big oil by three times as much in

01:11:58.940 three years the what christy clark and gordon campbell combined had done in 16 and so consequently

01:12:05.260 of course emissions rise faster under an ndp government the same is true of rachel notley

01:12:09.900 right one of the reasons she's ahead of jason kenny in the polls is that for all his bluster

01:12:14.140 he doesn't get pipelines built he doesn't get wells sunk um he shouts at people that's that's

01:12:20.380 his thing so if you want someone to shout about how we need to burn it all up obviously vote tory

01:12:28.380 but if you want someone to actually get the job done if you want someone to actually fry this

01:12:33.980 planet then vote left they'll buy you pipelines they'll um they'll hand six billion dollars to

01:12:41.740 royal dutch shell they'll do whatever it takes whereas conservatives fundamentally are simply

01:12:49.100 less competent at massive environmental destruction um so i might vote tory just trusting

01:12:55.980 that my mp will not be able to cause the destruction he's hoping to cause whereas you

01:13:02.440 know if the polls are so bad for erin o'toole right now the liberals could win this seat or 0.59

01:13:08.820 the ndp like prince george could be a three-way race in the federal election that's how bad

01:13:14.460 erin o'toole is doing right now and you know i think that there are just two different

01:13:20.380 conversations and this is part of the problem with this woke moment we're in nobody actually

01:13:26.380 wants to talk about what's happening in the world people want to talk about the conversation about

01:13:31.260 what's happening in the world right that's why you know look at the comparative cases of michael

01:13:38.620 O'Brien and Harsha Walia. Now, Harsha Walia, head of the BC Civil Liberties Association,

01:13:45.280 who, you know, made the mistake of saying burn it all down in reference to, I guess, colonialism,

01:13:55.340 when a bunch of people were burning things down. And whether, I don't think Harsha Walia actually

01:14:03.680 physically wanted to burn things down. I just think that she was immoderate in her speech.

01:14:08.040 but the point is jonathan kay is on her case everybody's on her case and she's like hiding

01:14:13.080 from the media and everybody's like we've got to stop the subsidies to the bc civil liberties

01:14:18.740 association this is appalling well who the hell is the head of the canadian civil liberties

01:14:24.620 association well he's my former mpp from when i lived in ontario he was ontario's attorney general

01:14:30.700 until he murdered a man in cold blood in front of witnesses right um he got into an altercation

01:14:38.240 with a cyclist when he was driving his car and the cyclist was like yelling at him and held on

01:14:44.240 to the side of his car and his solution to the problem was to go into the median and scrape the

01:14:49.280 cyclist off his car using speed and concrete and metal and so he killed the guy killed him

01:14:54.800 um he could have he could have just you know stopped at the car run away whatever chose to

01:15:03.280 kill the guy hired navigator the greatest uh reputation management firm in the world and

01:15:09.880 what do you know they relaunched him within two years as the head of the canadian civil liberties

01:15:14.360 association who the hell has has said this is grotesque how can you have

01:15:19.560 a guy who murdered an impoverished indigenous cyclist in cold blood in public how can he be

01:15:28.300 the head of the canadian but nobody says that you know why because michael bryant has never written

01:15:33.060 a mean tweet about poor indigenous cyclists he's only killed one with his hands so naturally michael

01:15:42.340 bryant's fine nobody's calling for his resignation there's never been a campaign to get rid of bryant

01:15:48.440 But Harsha Walia, she sent out an immoderate tweet. 0.59

01:15:53.020 So we're going to light our hair on fire about that because we don't give a damn what happens in the world.

01:15:59.680 We just care what happens in the conversation about the world.

01:16:04.060 I want to refer back to this question of why are conservatives less efficient at building pipelines and God knows what else.

01:16:12.560 i think that maybe some of it has to do with is it really as old as as like the enclosure laws and

01:16:19.920 it was really kind of the radicals who were in favor of enclosure when their conservatives maybe

01:16:23.880 couldn't have given a rip and is it go back to manchester liberalism does it go all the way back

01:16:28.740 to like you have the zealots in your populace which are usually to the left and then you have

01:16:33.560 the guys kind of sauntering along waiting for their next coffee break and then they go and they

01:16:37.600 kind of do some work i guess they got to be productive sometime they have lunch and then

01:16:41.100 have another coffee break then they go home is that really what it is a cultural difference of

01:16:45.200 like in conservatism the idea that it might take a while to get there and we're not really worried

01:16:50.360 about it compared to the on the on the left a more ardent sense of urgency it does that what

01:16:56.160 it's not the same kinds of people in the left or the right today most of the people who were

01:17:00.960 who would have been in the right 100 years ago identify as left most of the people who would

01:17:05.360 have identified as left 100 years ago are on the right today right if you think things are bad and

01:17:10.880 you're quite angry about it you're probably on the right if you think um people need to be more

01:17:15.940 polite and show greater deference based on social rank you're probably on the left that was only um

01:17:22.740 that was only a oh wow i had no idea that like ted has gone from being like a somewhat entertaining

01:17:30.060 thing to look at to it's like now i see tedx anything and i run like uh there was some like

01:17:39.000 Neoliberal porn.

01:17:40.720 Yes.

01:17:41.520 Yeah, it's so weird.

01:17:45.020 That stated, if you go back and look at John Hodgman's Love and Aliens TED Talk, it's still a damn good talk.

01:17:51.040 It's still worth it.

01:17:52.440 But you meet people, and there's like TEDx everywhere, right?

01:17:55.340 I think when I encountered the coordinator of TEDx, Everett, that old pulp mill town in Washington, I thought, this TED thing is out of control.

01:18:06.560 anyway um i uh anyway on this question of why so i don't think it's a cultural thing because i think

01:18:16.300 you're describing how tories were not how tories are um and like in terms of like hysteria and

01:18:24.220 panic and desperation i don't think there's a i don't think there's a premier in this country

01:18:29.600 that does that as well as jason kenny everything is on fire all the time everything is always being

01:18:35.200 screamed about everything is an emergency and jason kenney has a great personal talent for

01:18:40.160 turning things that are merely problems into emergencies and i think that's more the problem

01:18:47.600 that what tori tori said this this problem of today of not of having trouble making deals with

01:18:57.520 go along get along guys and that that's what john horgan is right he's a go along get along guy he's

01:19:03.920 not an alpha male by any means. He's just like a blustery toady. But the thing is, if, right,

01:19:15.680 the NDP and liberals can make a deal with each other to build a pipeline because they'll all

01:19:20.160 stand there and go, we are building this pipeline to stop climate change. And their base is happy,

01:19:27.360 their constituency is happy they've agreed upon a line they cut the ribbon um whereas um

01:19:36.240 that's not what tories do in uh this country they've become bad at coalition building

01:19:44.240 when is the last time you saw tories being able to run a minority government it's harper and harper

01:19:52.560 ran those minority governments through fear and intimidation he never built a stable coalition he

01:19:59.200 was never able to sign a deal with another party tories are so culturally isolated that the other

01:20:07.200 parties they can make deals with each other they can make deals with each other because they're

01:20:11.920 just different wings of the same people um greens liberals new democrats there's no significant

01:20:19.520 cultural difference or ideological difference and they're all and they all understand that

01:20:25.280 their policies are a grift they're fake they're there because people want to hear that those

01:20:32.080 parties care about those things and that i think is the other problem tories have with making deals 0.93

01:20:38.160 to get things done canadians want to pretend to care about climate change they don't want to care

01:20:46.560 about climate change they would never vote on mass for a party that was actually going to do

01:20:51.600 something but they want to pretend they care and tories have adopted such a misanthropic rhetoric

01:21:03.360 that people who want to pretend to care about things that the tories don't care about there's

01:21:09.840 no way to pull those people into the discourse. Aaron O'Toole, I think, too, tried to do that

01:21:18.080 on climate, and he has screwed up at every stage. He's alienated his base. He's disgusted swing

01:21:25.900 voters. He's done it completely wrong. But I think the Tories are simply boxed in culturally,

01:21:33.700 and they're boxed in because of cultural changes that are primarily driven by the United States,

01:21:38.820 not by canada there's a there is a larger anglo-american move to define urban people

01:21:49.620 as progressive and rural people as conservative so unless you have the ability to gerrymander

01:21:56.740 your ridings the way americans do it permanently back foots tories because their base is a

01:22:06.020 shrinking demographic um and it's in seats where they pile up gigantic 80 percent majorities

01:22:16.260 so anyway i think the problem is tories unless they get majorities really can't proceed with

01:22:22.180 what they'd like to do the other thing though is um i would say the spite factor um

01:22:31.460 this used to be a thing you only saw in Quebec. So, you know, the Montreal subway system,

01:22:38.660 whenever the PQ would get into power, they would start digging a tunnel under the river to get the

01:22:44.500 subway to the island of Laval. And then the liberals would get into power. And instead of

01:22:50.260 leaving the tunnel there or finishing it, they would fill it up out of spite. And then the PQ

01:22:56.820 get back in they dig all this all the fill out and start on the tunnel again and the liberals

01:23:01.500 would get back in they'd fill the tunnel back up um filling the tunnel back up slows you down

01:23:08.580 it expends resources in inefficient ways because you're just trying to screw the other guy for no

01:23:16.320 apparent benefit and so doug ford might have been if doug ford had simply invested in fossil fuel

01:23:25.520 subsidies the way John Horgan did, then maybe Ford would have been able to increase emissions

01:23:34.840 in Ontario the way they've increased in BC. But he felt it was really important to pay

01:23:40.460 $110 million to dismantle wind turbines. That money just goes away. They were dismantled out

01:23:51.460 of spite. I mean, I understand that there's a small number of Donald Trump followers who believe

01:23:56.620 you can get windmill cancer, but there is no such thing as windmill cancer. And Doug Ford knows that.

01:24:03.460 That was $110 million in spite dollars. And again, I think this has more to do with cultural

01:24:11.060 problems right the new kind of spite based right that was developed in the

01:24:20.100 United States is also just a poor fit for Canadian culture and because Anglo 1.00

01:24:29.060 Canadians are not a particularly ornery bunch and those that are are you know

01:24:37.740 largely in like peripheral rural areas they're not an important bunch i mean there are a lot of

01:24:45.100 ornery americans we've been breeding orneriness into the united states we've got to remember that 0.67

01:24:50.060 both canada and the us were created by the american revolution and the fundamental baseline of

01:24:58.780 canadian culture is upper canada and upper canadians are people who moved from all kinds

01:25:07.260 of nice places all over the united states to live on the north shore of lake ontario in the 1780s

01:25:15.340 because they hated freedom so much that they could not abide living in a democracy and

01:25:23.020 And if that's our starting point, in many ways, the American right has never been conventionally conservative, has never come out of that old Tory tradition, whereas the normative culture of Canada is old school Toryism, old school British imperial Toryism.

01:25:44.600 Now, today we call old school British imperial tourism progressivism.

01:25:51.440 That's the name for knowing your place, knowing society is hierarchical, being mannerly, practicing noblesse oblige if you're rich, you know, ghettoizing minorities into geographic spaces, all that stuff. 0.98

01:26:10.680 There's a whole package of what British imperial tourism is, and it's what Canadians have actually come to believe in more since I've been born.

01:26:20.500 It used to be that that was like an Ontarian way of thinking about the world or a maritime way of thinking about the world.

01:26:28.120 In many ways, the cities of the West have really adopted that way of thinking about the world.

01:26:35.200 the countryside not so much but the cities of the west we're they're old school tories and when you

01:26:42.560 see you know andrew weaver and john horgan shaking hands right that's just that's just old school

01:26:51.360 toryism that's that's just some go along get along guys um figuring out how to help the establishment

01:27:00.400 more and um so i think in many ways the tory's bed is really really made for it that we need

01:27:08.560 actually a revolution in media consciousness in canada before we can actually de-link ourselves

01:27:16.320 from the dysfunctional politics of america as long as the left is getting most of its

01:27:21.840 news from the tonight show and the right is getting most of its news from fox news

01:27:27.280 um canadian politics is being framed by american talking heads it's not being framed by our sad

01:27:37.140 excuse for national broadcaster no i agree with that i agree with that fundamentally the the

01:27:45.100 question then becomes very much so what's what's going to happen in this this upcoming election

01:27:51.540 There's clearly an election's coming down the pipe.

01:27:54.180 Oh, absolutely.

01:27:56.400 And what's going to happen?

01:27:58.300 Oh, I think we know what's going to happen.

01:27:59.760 There's going to be a liberal majority government.

01:28:03.360 I've been looking at the polls.

01:28:07.000 The Tories are in third in BC.

01:28:11.300 Worse yet, Alberta and Saskatchewan look like three-way races.

01:28:18.540 The Tories are barely ahead in Alberta, barely ahead in Saskatchewan, and they're having their clocks cleaned everywhere else.

01:28:30.760 It is possible that Aaron O'Toole can rally during the debate.

01:28:36.400 If the Tories have any sense, they should massively reduce expectations about O'Toole in the debate.

01:28:46.020 They should take the one advantage they've been handed, which is that everybody already thinks they're going to fuck up, screw up.

01:28:52.060 So they just, everybody already thinks the Tories are going to screw this up.

01:28:56.700 So they should do what Justin Trudeau did in 2015.

01:29:01.680 They should ride those low expectations.

01:29:04.860 And then when people see that Aaron O'Toole is a smart, quick-witted man, more quick-witted than Jagmeet singer Justin Trudeau,

01:29:12.460 um they've got a small chance of rallying but i wouldn't say it's good there are some other

01:29:18.720 fundamentals that are looking really bad for them um i know that these things aren't supposed to

01:29:25.920 matter but the ndp was awfully smart getting the only leader they could possibly find who

01:29:30.820 was taller than justin trudeau uh there's people feel secure the ndp won't form government

01:29:40.640 and that means that their vote is rising in all kinds of people who just want to send effective

01:29:50.080 opposition MPs from the West to Ottawa. So in the industrial towns in Ontario and in most of the

01:29:59.300 West, people are like, you know what, Jagmeet Singh will do a better job as opposition leader

01:30:03.720 than Aaron O'Toole, which is a perfectly reasonable assessment to make. And Singh has

01:30:10.280 invested heavily in distancing himself from the anti-pipeline positions he rode to gain the

01:30:17.840 leadership, right? Anne McGrath has been his chief of staff, right? She succeeded Brian Topp as

01:30:25.120 Rachel Notley's chief of staff when she was premier. And McGrath has poured work into

01:30:31.960 to getting Petro workers in Saskatchewan and Alberta

01:30:36.240 to give Singh a second look, and that's working.

01:30:39.820 That's working.

01:30:40.640 His numbers are good.

01:30:42.780 And we also have to remember that people get overtaken

01:30:46.780 by these urban narratives about the problems

01:30:50.860 of being a Sikh candidate, a turban Sikh candidate at that.

01:30:56.500 But we forget that in communities like Prince George

01:31:01.400 and williams lake and whatever seeks are what we would call a model minority the way

01:31:07.640 americans think about chinese people so in any town with a mill right seeks have a reputation 1.00

01:31:15.960 of being self-disciplined hard-working people

01:31:23.080 people it's a types they have in rural canada as opposed to urban canada

01:31:27.960 lots more negative stereotypes in urban ridings um uh in bc not so much uh industrial towns in

01:31:37.080 ontario or industrial

01:31:45.240 singh's going to um look more like the pre-1993 ndp i think singh will recover the old ed broadbent

01:31:55.640 base. That's what his numbers look like right now. First in BC, first in Saskatchewan,

01:32:01.400 second in Manitoba, third in Ontario, total wipeout everywhere else. That's your old NDP pattern.

01:32:12.120 I think he's going to do fine. Now, Justin Trudeau is pretty smart on this in that

01:32:17.960 And essentially what's happened is Justin Trudeau had two key advisors until 2019,

01:32:27.080 Chrystia Freeland and Gerald Butz.

01:32:30.100 Gerald Butz had to resign over the Wee scandal, and Trudeau did something very smart,

01:32:35.400 which is to say, yeah, Chrystia Freeland really is in charge. 0.68

01:32:39.160 And that's effectively what he's been presenting.

01:32:41.680 Hey, I'm the front man.

01:32:43.020 This is the actual prime minister.

01:32:45.320 i think that in the uh this day and age of identity politics um there are all kinds of

01:32:52.680 idiots on the left who are going to vote for probably the most right-wing member of his

01:32:57.800 government because she's female um but he's also allowed her to produce a fig leaf by rolling out 1.00

01:33:06.280 national childcare so the liberals are putting i mean the liberals have been promising a national

01:33:13.160 child care program in every election since 1984. That's not new. What is new is that they're doing

01:33:19.160 some of the spending before the election in an attempt to demonstrate good faith.

01:33:24.360 So I think child care is going to help. I think Trudeau is going to come back with a huge majority.

01:33:31.400 It's going to be like Chrétien's third term or Trudeau Sr.'s third term. He'll come back with

01:33:36.920 an absolute juggernaut i was very interested to see that initially the feds wanted to fight the

01:33:44.520 election on social issues so it was going to be the hate crimes bill the conversion therapy bill

01:33:50.440 all that stuff uh all this free speech suppression um you know go to jail if um you uh misgender 0.88

01:33:59.960 someone go to jail if you say something mean about the government of israel go to you know

01:34:04.360 all that sort of stuff they've now realized they have to downplay that they can see that um they

01:34:11.400 can't win this thing just on social issues that in fact their polls are showing them what i i know

01:34:17.480 the polls are showing them which is that a lot of these social issues are a bridge too far for them

01:34:23.320 a lot of these social issues are too weird or just not interesting to enough people um

01:34:29.240 um and so moving from the social issues to child care is really intelligent and they'll run the

01:34:38.580 child care election like they did in 93 and uh i think they'll um do pretty well at it now in my

01:34:46.100 line of work right now i'm uh doing some work on murdered and missing indigenous women and girls

01:34:51.340 and what i can tell you is um they were probably hoping for when they were going to do social

01:34:57.600 issues they were going to much more prominently feature redoing the missing women commission

01:35:04.560 again just so they could consult more they're going to pour money into more consultation

01:35:11.120 and more of the indigenous industrial cons uh the indigenous consultant industrial complex that

01:35:17.600 i'm now at the periphery of uh again they've realized that um

01:35:23.440 that too many mass graves, this is too incendiary, this could turn on them,

01:35:32.160 especially because there are now more reserves with boil water advisories than there were when

01:35:39.820 the liberals took power. So let's be clear that the thing they promised to fix is like everything

01:35:47.820 else they promised to fix. They've made it worse. The climate, indigenous drinking water,

01:35:54.720 you name the metric, they have made Canada worse. But again, Canadians don't want to 0.62

01:36:03.380 treat indigenous people fairly. They want people to think that they want to treat indigenous people

01:36:10.080 fairly. And Trudeau will get that job done. That guy can cry on a dime. That's his, that's the

01:36:17.940 main skill really he's brought to the prime ministership is the crying on cue. And, but I

01:36:24.060 think they're going to keep the crying a little more under control. I think they're, they're

01:36:28.900 going to try and tell people that, look, there are going to be some improvements in your child

01:36:34.160 care. And that's going to play with all the families that had to do extra child care because 0.99

01:36:39.020 of covid you just keep hammering look we'll take your kids off your hands for a few hours

01:36:45.900 that's yeah that sells pretty well to uh this nation's parents after a year of intermittent

01:36:56.600 school closures fear of schools uh not being able to send your kids out into the world

01:37:02.040 if if that happens and and i don't think you're wrong about any of that assessment

01:37:08.720 to it but if that happens is that going to break the conservative party as it stands today is that

01:37:14.960 going to finally break the consensus and then start another reform period and another alliance

01:37:21.300 period another unification period that's possible but of course the thing to remember is that reform

01:37:31.400 did not initially appear as a social conservative party or as a fiscal conservative party they

01:37:38.240 entered the 1988 election as a sectional party there's their original slogan in 88 was the west

01:37:46.320 wants in so we have to remember that as much as the christian right was a big part of reform's

01:37:53.760 foundation and a much abused part of the foundation they were not the bedrock separatists

01:38:01.920 soft separatists and sovereignists in the west were the bedrock uh and the block and reform

01:38:10.160 came into being at basically the same time because of sectional issues so the danger

01:38:20.560 is going uh it's not going to be this coalition isn't working for people of the right it's going

01:38:29.840 going to be a question of can can there be a sectional party that um uh that that creates a 0.83

01:38:40.360 regionally viable kind of toryism and you know that's obviously in the hands of uh the people

01:38:48.320 running this channel and uh people near them and like them and i don't really know how that's gonna

01:38:54.300 to go. But what I do know is that I can't think of any other way of building a new party without

01:39:06.080 it being immediately branded as so extreme that it's outside the discourse. I mean, look at

01:39:14.280 Maxine Bernier, right? The networks did everything in their power to make the People's Party look

01:39:20.500 like a mainstream party in 2019. They completely rewrote all of their debate eligibility rules to

01:39:27.780 seat Bernier in the debate. And ultimately, the guy got one and a half percent of the vote. He got

01:39:33.480 a smaller portion of vote running in the whole country than Preston Manning did running in a

01:39:39.200 third of the country on his first try. So Bernier, so I think the People's Party is really a sign

01:39:48.500 of the fact that one of the few things

01:39:52.720 the Tories in Canada have going for them

01:39:54.740 is support from Post Media, Black Press,

01:39:58.960 Glacier, all the big media conglomerates

01:40:01.060 always endorse the Tories.

01:40:04.960 And those media companies have no interest

01:40:10.080 in an ideological split within the Tories.

01:40:14.620 A sectional split is something they could handle.

01:40:17.380 and uh so you've got to put section before ideology which is of course dangerous right

01:40:24.440 once again you're submerging um uh the christian right and you're submerging uh libertarians

01:40:33.440 but honestly folks this is why the original electoral reform movement in this province

01:40:40.740 was overwhelmingly driven by the right, not the left.

01:40:44.900 I was there.

01:40:46.340 We put these agreements together.

01:40:48.720 And sure, I was the leader of the Green Party.

01:40:50.860 But one of the reasons I was the public face of the movement in the 90s

01:40:54.880 is because the Taxpayers Federation, the Family Coalition Party,

01:41:00.980 the Christian Heritage Party, all those folks were most of the membership.

01:41:06.400 And they needed people on the left to show it was a cross-partisan endeavor.

01:41:10.740 But honestly, conservatives have got to deal with the ideological conservatives who don't fit with the conservative brokerage politics of a national Tory party.

01:41:22.180 You've got to recognize the only way you're going to get your wish is proportional representation.

01:41:27.060 You can't get what you want under first past the post.

01:41:30.660 And you can look all over the English speaking world to see the same problems in Tory movements there.

01:41:39.820 Right.

01:41:40.740 You have the same kind of national brokerage incoherent Tory party in Australia.

01:41:47.540 You have the same kind of national brokerage incoherent Tory party in England.

01:41:52.900 The only way that the far right gets representatives in the English parliament,

01:42:00.320 Nigel Farage tried all those times, never once got a seat in Westminster,

01:42:03.800 but he continuously had a seat in the European parliament, which was selected by proportional representation.

01:42:10.740 The only far-right people in Westminster are the Democratic Unionist Party, i.e. a Northern Irish sectional party, right?

01:42:21.460 Regionalism is the, you can either use regionalism or you can use proportional representation.

01:42:26.840 Those are your two choices.

01:42:28.900 And Tories right now have got to, they've just got to grow up about that.

01:42:33.740 It's like either you change the voting system or you are going to or you're going to strap your ideas to a regional project, though.

01:42:44.900 Those are your only shots. Tell me I'm wrong anywhere.

01:42:48.960 Look at India, for God's sake. Look at any Westminster Westminster system under first past the post. 1.00

01:42:55.940 There is there's not going to be a family values party in parliament.

01:43:03.740 well i've i've often wondered if canada shouldn't be you know an empire uh something like a loosely

01:43:11.860 federated entity like like hungary was or austria-hungary was or likely ucoslavia was

01:43:17.740 before that turned into a bloodbath or any number of the other places and you and you talk about

01:43:22.020 empire uh and the old empire sometimes in various places especially your blog we we you know our

01:43:28.480 caliph uh has uh has elevated a new satrap oh yes that's uh mary simon has become our governor

01:43:35.540 general so this to me is trudeau's first a signal of re-election uh he has made a clear policy here

01:43:43.100 right on the heels of the of the unmarked graves we finally have uh you know no longer an indian 0.99

01:43:49.600 in the cabinet he exited that we finally have a first nations woman in a woman uh in the governor 0.83

01:43:56.220 general's house yeah and you know i mean you i mean you talk about this historical comparison

01:44:05.260 and i i will take a moment to make it i do think the um uh it's useful so um the ottoman caliphate

01:44:15.100 the abbasid caliphate uh old school empires right the more kinds of people you ruled the more it

01:44:23.980 redounded to the glory of the emperor right and so the job of an empire emperor was to fill his

01:44:31.980 cabinet to fill his to make his political appointments through tokenism so you know

01:44:39.020 you might have the caliph of the ottoman empire was of course a turk because it was a turkish

01:44:45.340 empire that was pulling resources out of the arab and slavic worlds and putting them into turkey 1.00

01:44:51.500 and so in order to keep all the different peoples you governed under control and properly surveilled

01:44:58.520 of course there would be an orthodox greek christian in your cabinet of course there

01:45:03.100 would be an armenian christian of course there would be one jew of course there would be an 0.95

01:45:07.460 egyptian copped right and you would have all of these viziers and the job of a vizier

01:45:11.980 in these old school empires was to keep their people in line they could dish out some patronage

01:45:18.940 those people but in exchange they had to keep those people in the line if they couldn't they

01:45:22.620 would be replaced and the thing is let me tell you in the nile delta when it was announced that oh my

01:45:32.620 goodness the vizier in charge of wheat for the ottoman empire is a copt nobody put on a parade

01:45:43.420 the copts weren't like oh great muslim supremacy is going to end we've broken the glass ceiling

01:45:51.100 no medieval coptic peasant thought that they recognized that

01:46:01.180 a representative can only represent the person who put them in power

01:46:06.540 right you represent the people who voted for you or the people who appointed you

01:46:11.500 and so the point of your coptic vizier was not to represent copts to the caliph it was to represent

01:46:18.860 the caliph's interest to copts but we are so much less politically sophisticated than 12th century

01:46:28.460 egyptian peasants right we're like oh my goodness the glass ceiling is broken oh yay america is

01:46:35.900 going to end racism and police violence because the corrupt cop who's now their vice president

01:46:42.780 is a mixed race dark-skinned woman like that's a trick that was viewed as transparent and 1.00

01:46:51.980 threadbare 2600 years ago when the persian empire was appointing satraps in the nile delta like

01:47:00.860 tokenizing a member of a population you're trying to control is not that population winning

01:47:08.940 but there's so much historical amnesia and such a celebration of credulity and stupidity

01:47:18.380 amongst progressives then of course you're like oh yay yay an indigenous woman has been appointed to

01:47:25.340 a powerless ceremonial position we're on the way indigenous people see through this there's no great 1.00

01:47:34.140 fanfare on reserves but i'm sure there was plenty plenty of fluted champagne glass clinking in

01:47:42.300 downtown toronto as white people cheers to each other over um the uh the appointment of an

01:47:49.820 indigenous governor general. Now, I'm not saying this woman will do some good. Governor generals 1.00

01:47:55.660 do have limited patronage power, and they're sort of similar to an American first lady, right? You 1.00

01:48:01.100 get to run campaigns about non-controversial things. So maybe this governor general, right,

01:48:08.220 will, you know, she'll get to talk about maybe nutrition, like balanced nutrition for kids or 0.99

01:48:15.660 something like i'm not saying she won't be able to do anything but let's be realistic about the

01:48:20.620 job let's be realistic about why she was appointed tokenizing minorities really works right now 0.99

01:48:28.380 um in this day and age because as i said at the beginning people don't want to have a conversation

01:48:35.100 about the world they want to have a conversation about the conversation about the world

01:48:39.420 and uh this governor general fits into that wait till they announce a couple hundred million

01:48:46.580 dollars worth of consultation with indigenous people about why they keep getting killed 0.99

01:48:52.040 um i'm sure we'll we'll have that uh we had that of course um for two years in the first

01:48:59.520 trudeau government and we had that for two years under the harper government before that it was

01:49:05.980 wally opals commission um we try to have a commission every two to five years uh so we

01:49:12.400 can keep ignoring um the conclusions all the commissions have uh we all know what's going to

01:49:19.700 reduce uh indigenous women and girls being murdered uh and we've already decided we're 0.68

01:49:27.140 not going to do it that's why we're asking the question again and this government will keep

01:49:32.520 asking the question because we've got to remember that public consultation is not merely useless it

01:49:39.320 is significantly worse than useless because what it does is it redirects the energy of people who

01:49:47.800 would otherwise be doing something useful into meeting with the government so you just need to

01:49:55.480 send out all these people with those little finger sandwiches and whiteboards and folding chairs 1.00

01:50:04.040 and you can occupy the volunteer hours you can squander millions of volunteer hours of community

01:50:12.120 activists that you can distract into meeting with you while you continue doing the things

01:50:18.840 that they're trying to stop you doing talk and log exactly it's talking log but it's now

01:50:25.000 talk and everything we've um we've expanded that from a very successful set of um tactics for

01:50:32.360 tying up environmentalists in the 80s and that game has gone pro if there's any national game

01:50:38.280 we're good at it's um consulting people and then round filing the results uh i think that canada

01:50:46.760 has a has a lot to teach other fake democracies about uh how to uh distract people and then you

01:50:55.480 hear from from like people the government side it's like yeah but this time we want to make

01:51:00.440 people feel heard it's like well that's adding a level of complexity given that you're not hearing

01:51:06.120 them it's very tough to make people feel heard if you've planned to not listen so uh but they're

01:51:12.120 working on that i'm sure there are people in the lab somewhere it is impossible to wake someone who

01:51:18.520 is pretending to be asleep yeah so anyway i think we got some uh difficult stuff ahead uh

01:51:28.600 the um you know certainly this has been a difficult week on on the climate front a highly

01:51:35.000 predictable week on the election front we should probably say a few words about the insanity of

01:51:39.880 of the green party because uh they are um because of course i was subject to that green party

01:51:48.060 boycott campaign and uh bunch of my guests from my radio show publicly denounced me and claimed

01:51:55.200 that i said you know various things on air that i hadn't said uh because i gave the greens a

01:52:01.860 platform to talk about their internal party crisis well what's great is it's getting clearer all the

01:52:09.720 time now that anime paul is like vetoing candidates all over the country including

01:52:16.920 in some of their strongest pickup writings and continues to stand behind the position that paul

01:52:24.600 manley one of her two remaining mps must be defeated um it's come out right that she wasn't

01:52:31.560 getting an mp's salary she was getting two mp's salaries um and they've now had to lay off half

01:52:37.640 their staff as the donations dry up and anime paul continues to take in 20 grand a month personally

01:52:45.720 on top of whatever her people are being paid now my understanding is that um

01:52:55.960 they just want to be paid off this is like um this is like the problem is the green party is

01:53:01.160 already a grift and her people are trying to grift the grift right they're trying to

01:53:07.000 shakedown the shakedown and uh that's gotten very complicated because the green party has filled

01:53:13.880 its national governing body um with gullible idiots because that that was what was necessary

01:53:21.320 for the party to function so i was like looking at who the bc rep on their national council is it's

01:53:26.680 like oh bob mackie he's the guy who voted to give the money to the looters in the 2009 referendum

01:53:33.720 the 2018 referendum this guy always gives money to looters but the problem is that half of the

01:53:40.760 people in the national council have now figured out that these people are looters the other half 0.86

01:53:46.360 cannot accept that these people are looters so i believe their national council is split like

01:53:52.840 eight seven on whether to get rid of enemy paul um and of course they need some ridiculous

01:53:59.960 majority because they don't believe in democracy internally they have all these high threshold

01:54:05.240 decision making processes so the problem is if anime paul stays what she's going to do 0.74

01:54:11.800 is refuse to sign nomination papers and all their potential pickup writings that's how the

01:54:17.460 shakedown will continue but the problem is that the greens don't recognize it's a shakedown if

01:54:22.700 they just paid her and her people off they'd leave but there are a bunch of people who are

01:54:29.100 going to make up endless excuses for anime paul's sabotage of her own party um and keep voting to 1.00

01:54:37.240 keep her on and the trick is going to be the greens can survive this election only if the 0.83

01:54:44.020 looters are somehow able to make their demands clear while people while not interfering with

01:54:55.660 the personal narratives of these gullible personal narratives of the decision makers

01:55:01.420 in their party. It's a little bit like that Yannucci movie, Death of Stalin, right? Death

01:55:09.980 of Stalin is a brilliant film. And the central character is Molotov, one of the members of 0.97

01:55:16.420 the central committee. And Molotov's wife, right, had ‑‑ he denounced her. Apparently

01:55:25.180 she was like against the revolution in one of Stalin's paranoid moments. He decided that

01:55:30.120 Molotov's wife was counter-revolutionary. Molotov denounced her, and supposedly she was killed.

01:55:36.480 Well, in fact, she'd been being kept in secret by Berea, the head of the secret police,

01:55:40.760 and he gives Molotov back his wife in order to gain his allegiance. But the problem is that

01:55:46.420 this destroys Molotov's theory of why Molotov is a good person. Molotov has been telling himself

01:55:53.600 that he is so devoted to Stalin and so devoted to the revolution that he was willing to kill his 0.76

01:55:59.840 wife over it. So the fact that his wife isn't dead really upsets him. And so he turns against

01:56:06.820 Berea and supports Khrushchev. I think we have a similar kind of problem here. Everybody in the

01:56:13.660 Green Party has a totally insane story of what they're doing there on the party's national board.

01:56:19.080 And the trick is going to be which faction can tell a story that will pull a majority along.

01:56:29.080 And it's going to have to be like a really complicated story.

01:56:33.080 Because the story of we support the Palestinian people, that's not getting the job done, right? 1.00

01:56:41.080 right the pro-palestine faction of the party which may well be a majority of the party um

01:56:49.320 that's not a compelling story for the other nuts uh and they gotta find a compelling story um

01:56:58.760 and uh because there's such a culture of credulity in the canadian greens so my bet is the greens

01:57:05.560 are going to lose Nanaimo

01:57:06.880 because

01:57:09.620 probably Adam E. Paul will just

01:57:11.440 refuse to sign Paul Manley's nomination papers

01:57:13.620 and there'll be no green candidate there.

01:57:17.000 So the

01:57:17.640 NDP will get their writing back.

01:57:21.000 And I

01:57:21.660 think in the Maritimes

01:57:24.020 there has

01:57:25.680 been a real hit in the polls.

01:57:27.480 People have really turned against the federal

01:57:29.300 party, the loyalists of the provincial

01:57:31.540 green parties.

01:57:33.440 I think you're going to see

01:57:35.340 david coon and peter bevan baker

01:57:38.640 being very gentle and kind to jagmeet singh

01:57:44.240 i was already starting to see that out of the pei greens

01:57:48.040 even before i was denounced over um well actually i was denounced because

01:57:52.900 i said anime paul was a looter not because of the thing i was denounced

01:57:56.420 over but uh i think that um peter bevan baker and

01:58:01.500 david coon they're popular provincial leaders who hold seats in their

01:58:04.700 legislatures.

01:58:06.700 Bevan Baker is the leader of the opposition.

01:58:09.780 They are just,

01:58:10.920 I think, going to quietly shake

01:58:12.880 hands and do photo ops with

01:58:14.580 NDP candidates.

01:58:16.260 And the big maritime

01:58:18.460 green project is going to collapse.

01:58:22.080 My bet is

01:58:23.120 that Jessica Antwin will

01:58:24.980 lose her riding, though. I think it'll go

01:58:26.960 Tory. I think that

01:58:29.260 it's like David Emerson in Vancouver

01:58:31.060 Kingsway. It was too much of a sucker punch.

01:58:33.240 for them to work so hard

01:58:37.000 to get rid of the Tories in Fredericton,

01:58:39.020 to get rid of Liberals in Fredericton

01:58:40.620 only to have them come back.

01:58:44.440 Well, we look forward to that with interest.

01:58:47.700 And of course, when it comes to the federal election,

01:58:50.100 they say it's anybody's game,

01:58:53.260 but when you bet Liberal in Canada,

01:58:55.280 that's usually the way to bet, unfortunately.

01:58:57.960 Stuart, thank you so much

01:58:59.280 for joining us again this week.

01:59:01.320 we look forward to seeing you next thursday as well sounds great nathan thanks again bye-bye thank

01:59:06.500 you so much yeah we're uh coming to the end of our hour here we're actually right at the end of

01:59:12.140 our hour so we're not even going to bother with uh with any kind of goodbyes and ados we got to

01:59:17.180 go straight out but hey thanks so much for watching we'll see you again next tuesday 9 a.m pacific 10

01:59:23.080 a.m mountain

01:59:31.320 Thank you.

Western Standard - July 09, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - July 8th, 2021

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