Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - June 10, 2021

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Good morning, and welcome to Mountain Standard Time.

00:01:33.980 I'm your host, Nathan Gita, and today I'm joined by Aaron Ekman,

00:01:37.960 our favorite recently cancel-cultured friend,

00:01:41.460 who's going to be doing the morning roundup with us for the news,

00:01:44.160 and then a little bit later we'll be joined by Stuart Parker,

00:01:46.500 who will give us yet another edumacation as president of the Los Alamos Institute

00:01:50.540 on a subject that he will have picked at that time.

00:01:55.000 I hear there's some news out of Alberta,

00:01:57.240 And so just briefly before we get into the BC News roundup, we're going to, well, I've been told not to comment on this in any direct sense, but there is at least, as far as we know, objective evidence that Premier Jason Kenney has been outed for having maskless, booze-filled lunches on rooftops while keeping everybody else out of restaurants in the old Alberta.

00:02:17.240 that's of course pretty shocking but we do have videographic evidence that this occurred

00:02:22.540 and that's pretty damning so i'm guessing that's the final nail in the coffin of premier kenny's

00:02:28.760 disappointing tenure i'm actually sorry to say it and i'm sorry to see it because quite frankly

00:02:34.420 like i said i've told you guys before i did i did work very briefly not saying i was some kind

00:02:39.380 of key player or something i've never said that but i did work very briefly with um mr kenny

00:02:44.060 minister kenny at the time uh in ottawa and i couldn't have predicted any of this i've never

00:02:49.660 thought that uh premier kenny would become the sun king of canada and decide that i am the state and

00:02:55.860 it's uh rules for thee but not for me i couldn't have predicted any of that i seem like a hard

00:03:00.580 working uh fairly decent polite guy and i don't know what's happened i don't know what kind of

00:03:05.560 terrible advice he's been getting i don't know what kind of terrible hangers on he's got who

00:03:08.900 aren't helping him with his image and helping him figure out what's right and what's wrong when it

00:03:12.420 comes to being premier but he's up he's up a certain kind of smelly creek without a paddle

00:03:18.280 now and i don't think he's going to survive this one i think this is the end i genuinely hope that

00:03:24.160 he finds a way forward from there and i'm just very sorry that that's the way things went

00:03:29.500 but that's the nature of power isn't it gets into our heads rather easily and we lack the balance

00:03:35.100 as small human frail creatures to keep from falling into the gravity of our own vanity so

00:03:40.100 Hopefully, we begin choosing our leaders from better stock who have had their ethical

00:03:44.220 backgrounds forged in a fire that can withstand the temperatures of our modern world.

00:03:48.900 So that's kind of my very brief opening statement this morning.

00:03:51.280 I'm going to do a quick endorsement of our coffee people, and then we're going to bring

00:03:54.300 on Aaron right away.

00:03:55.380 So we've got Resistance Coffee Company, and the script goes like this.

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00:04:35.520 you can order their stuff online and enjoy refreshing coffee uh that isn't going to wokeness

00:04:41.120 and everything else that's kind of nonsense uh particularly starbucks if you're pulling through

00:04:44.320 a starbucks you're helping hurt canadians i'll put it that way don't go there that's a bad idea

00:04:48.080 um aaron's laughing because he pulls through starbucks all the time when he comes to the show

00:04:53.000 i'm just kidding whatever drink whatever coffee you want drink this coffee instead uh we'll bring

00:04:57.980 aaron on right away and uh here we go so what what's on the docket today aaron well that's

00:05:03.800 slander i don't drive through starbucks all the time i'm drinking resistance coffee right now

00:05:07.960 actually in my i hate love hate spreadsheets mug and it's great i love resistance coffee it's good

00:05:13.200 it's my kind of name too you know there you go i don't go to starbucks because their their lineups

00:05:18.300 too long all the time you know and plus i mean not to mention they charge you seven bucks for a cup

00:05:23.080 of coffee these days it's ridiculous so i hear not that i go you know i guess they have to charge

00:05:29.000 that much for coffee because they're funding so many social justice causes yeah absolutely

00:05:34.880 absolutely so what's so what what do you think about this news out of alberta before we get to

00:05:39.020 some of the news items here yeah well nobody's told me i can't talk about it and it's uh it's

00:05:43.920 it's and i have to say like it's been tough to sort of keep track of what's going on in bc

00:05:50.100 because things in alberta are so interesting right now my biggest worry is that there's going

00:05:55.560 to be some anti-drone legislation coming down the pipe because i'm pretty sure that's what took the

00:06:00.120 took the video of this sky palace dinner uh so if you're a drone owner uh or a hobbyist i would uh

00:06:07.100 you know expect some gun-like regulations to come down the pipe at some point probably from our

00:06:11.700 favorite conservatives in in alberta um so that's that's what i'm worried about i i love the memes

00:06:17.400 that are being generated of it like especially the ones that insert the trailer park boys like

00:06:20.720 there's this picture of uh of randy without his shirt sitting at the at the table and uh i saw

00:06:26.900 another one of uh mr lahey saying i am the liquor like it's but i don't know is this is this gonna

00:06:33.180 be is this gonna be the end of kenny i don't know i mean i think i don't know if it it's more

00:06:37.680 confirming for anybody than than sort of revelatory i i think he's been he's been he's

00:06:42.880 already the most unpopular premier in the country uh and look if you're jason kenny like your whole

00:06:49.800 trajectory is to try to follow harper to try to become prime minister that's been the game plan

00:06:55.240 from the beginning so we want you know a nice nice rolled up package for that guy would have been

00:07:00.100 to be able to demonstrate that he had the you know the federal chops as a former cabinet minister

00:07:05.460 then he comes back home uh is debatable whether it's his home and he and he's able to unite all

00:07:11.200 conservatives under this new banner and and defeat the socialist hordes under the notley uh regime

00:07:17.040 and uh and then you know jump on back onto the national stage again as this as this western

00:07:24.120 uh advocate in ottawa but you know i mean it doesn't look like that's that's in the cards

00:07:30.800 now but if that's your plan is is he going to just give up on that and and fold his tent now

00:07:36.100 i doubt it i mean i think he'll he's got nine inch claws man he's going to hang on as long as

00:07:40.840 he can and it's the only way to turf him is uh for voters to do it or for there to be a revolt

00:07:46.840 within the party and and vote them out internally and there's been some reports over there in

00:07:51.400 alberta for sure there's been some defections from within caucus there's been calls within

00:07:55.340 caucus to have kenny removed as leader and then and then those people have been stomped out or

00:08:00.900 pushed out as needs warrant but uh i think i think that the bigger the bigger thing for me is that

00:08:06.520 it's just there's a couple of different things here uh i'll take it from a couple of different

00:08:10.180 angles one of the one of the things that is kind of wacky here is who who would have seen this

00:08:16.000 coming right so again like i i i am not a big deal i i was not important in ottawa i i was just an

00:08:22.000 intern i completely i completely acknowledge that's full disclosure to everybody's watching

00:08:25.420 this i i that that's a reality but the the short version of it is that i you know i did get to

00:08:32.880 experience some time with with the minister quite intense time because because it's right at the

00:08:36.780 height of harper government and it just you wouldn't have thought that this guy was going

00:08:42.380 to end up you know eight nine years later no he would have thought he might have been a premier

00:08:47.080 but you never would have thought he was going to turn himself into the sun king of Alberta and you

00:08:51.460 know think that you know it's it's rules for thee and not for me and you know let them eat cake and

00:08:56.540 let them eat on porches that are inside outside because that's how that works the virus can get

00:09:01.140 you inside the restaurant but it can't get you if you make the outside of the restaurant the inside

00:09:04.780 of the restaurant you wouldn't you would never have given that to Kenny as like no this guy's

00:09:09.260 got too much common sense he would never do that he's kind of cerebral yeah like he was a pretty

00:09:12.580 hardcore intellectual conservative but he but he you would never have thought that he would do that

00:09:18.280 so that's one thing so just how things change and how quickly they change that's less than a decade

00:09:22.800 ago and everything's changed for kenny uh for good and for ill now and then the other thing was the

00:09:28.200 other day i was in a news call with the rest of the rest of the western standard staff and and

00:09:33.340 we're we're all we're all there and somebody's bringing up the point well how come how come

00:09:37.060 jason kenney can be so unpopular but not john horgan like and i'm sitting there going like

00:09:41.280 i don't know what's going on over in alberta god bless all of you from alberta that are watching

00:09:45.620 the program right now but but sometimes it feels like the albertans don't understand that that

00:09:51.120 there are other reasons to like or not like premiers because we don't maybe and maybe it

00:09:55.160 is because our identity isn't as formed as your guys is we don't have the same two three check

00:09:59.900 boxes that are like these are the three things this guy's got to do in order for me to keep my

00:10:04.060 respect for him in in bc it's just so diverse that there's a lot of different angles to take

00:10:09.120 it from and as i was explaining the other day in one of my kind of rants uh earlier in the day

00:10:13.680 i was i was explaining that for example the same people stand in front of pipelines are not

00:10:18.200 necessarily the same people standing in front of the old growth logging there there's some

00:10:21.900 crossover but it's not a perfect venn diagram and it's not a complete circle there's a there is

00:10:26.680 overlap but it's not the same and i think maybe you can talk a little bit to this erin of like

00:10:30.960 it seemed like there were people really upset with jason kenny but they were upset like well

00:10:35.460 how could jason kenny be so unpopular like i mean your premiers are doing this too or like your

00:10:39.000 premier isn't as cool as our premier it's like no you don't understand it's not really about that's

00:10:42.740 about something else do you think there's a way to kind of take that angle well there's a few

00:10:46.520 reasons for it and and you've nailed one of them in particular in that bc is like not monolithic

00:10:52.400 at all it's very diverse politically the other thing is is in relation to the conservative

00:10:57.340 movement in Alberta it's it's splintered because it's so big uh you can't like this is the this is

00:11:03.780 the thing that happens when when you have one party that rules for as long as the progressive

00:11:08.360 conservatives did in Alberta and the and the Socrates did before that is that when you

00:11:13.480 effectively have no real opposition one will invariably form from within and that's essentially

00:11:18.700 the story of Alberta politics over the last 80 years or so is that the real opposition to

00:11:24.600 government in Alberta has always come from sort of within the conservative milieu. It's kind of

00:11:28.720 like in some US states, for instance, the same thing happens. You've got the biggest threat

00:11:33.980 that a Republican gubernatorial candidate has is another Republican gubernatorial candidate

00:11:38.440 and not necessarily the Democrats. So that's a challenge, I think, for the conservative milieu

00:11:45.400 in Alberta. But what's different in BC on the so-called left, and I don't really like to

00:11:52.100 refer to it as the left necessarily but without getting into down that rabbit hole the the splinter

00:11:58.500 that occurred back in 2001 when the ndp was reduced to two seats by the by the gordon campbell bc

00:12:05.620 liberal government uh the splinter that that came out of that was basically the burgeoning of the

00:12:10.700 green party and of course you know stewart's a wonderful person to have on because he was

00:12:14.580 you know he was a leader uh in those early days and so he can tell you about you know how sort

00:12:21.180 the green movement extracted itself from the NDP and has never really gone back and so you don't

00:12:27.280 necessarily like the cabinet or the caucus solidarity within the NDP is fiercely enforced

00:12:32.520 number one so you don't like if you step outside people were surprised I think when the when the

00:12:39.280 MLAs in Alberta were were kicked out of the UCP for criticizing Kenny I mean that's exactly what

00:12:44.900 happens in bc in less time um i mean like look look i mean i i was making uh controversial

00:12:52.380 comments a couple of weeks ago and it took literally five hours to get myself turfed out

00:12:57.180 of out of that milieu if if you're an mla i mean you remember bob simpson i mean bob simpson

00:13:04.440 from quenelle he he's not a green candidate by any stretch i mean he's uh like he's my kind of

00:13:11.080 new democrat he's in favor of uh of of prudent development and and that kind of thing and he

00:13:17.540 was very popular in his area all he did was approach carol james and say look you've run

00:13:22.100 a couple of times and you've lost it's it's time for you to move on and he got tossed that day

00:13:26.860 uh and and uh you know and then there was like the whole baker's dozen scandal and that still

00:13:33.240 didn't um i mean they weren't government at the time but it took 13 mlas basically to revolt

00:13:39.780 within the bcndp to knock carol james off to finally get her to resign and she wasn't even

00:13:44.120 party leader or sorry she wasn't uh premier she was just the opposition leader at the time and

00:13:48.760 of course never became premier so in alberta you've got this conservative milieu that i mean

00:13:54.380 it was united under this this one banner largely by kenny's campaign with the promise that we were

00:14:01.360 going to throw out the socialist hordes and defeat the notley government that was successful

00:14:04.640 partially because of a united conservative electoral vehicle also partially because in

00:14:09.760 in this is my opinion the notley government moved away from sort of the pro-development

00:14:14.340 uh campaign and position they had during the previous election and they just went full bore

00:14:19.680 down this diversity you know calling everybody a racist kind of rabbit hole and and how do you

00:14:24.640 win on that you don't and so that's what happened so but i wouldn't i mean i think where where people

00:14:30.500 in Alberta looking at BC might get it wrong is assuming that that Horgan's not unpopular I mean

00:14:35.620 in the items that I want to go through today it's start you start to get a picture that Horgan is

00:14:39.200 increasingly unpopular and in fact you know a number of the reasons why the BC NDP government

00:14:44.860 is so secretive about certain bits of data health data polling data etc is because it tells a very

00:14:50.060 clear story which is if they had not called a snap election last year one year prior to when they

00:14:56.800 were would have had to after a four-year mandate uh like if we were moving into an election in bc

00:15:03.180 right now you know i don't think the bc ndp would be in a winning position necessarily

00:15:07.580 and i that's at least i think the conclusion they drew at the time and that's the reason why they're

00:15:12.780 not sharing a lot of information that sort of spells that stuff out i think the other thing

00:15:18.300 that's going to happen there i don't know if we're going to get a perpetual ndp government in bc i

00:15:22.180 mean that's not how it ever goes but i mean it's just it's just interesting to me that we're now

00:15:26.260 perfectly synced with the american election like a week before the americans have their election

00:15:30.740 we have our election so if we actually stick with that date like that noise is going to cover a lot

00:15:36.500 of mishaps in the british colombian election for many decades to come if they can play that game

00:15:43.300 well i think that played a bit into the strategy as well of course you know where i am on this

00:15:46.580 position i i would love to see us get rid of the fixed election dates because i think

00:15:51.060 like you know there are some old so creds within the conservative milieu who still understand why

00:15:57.140 fixed election dates are bad from a conservative perspective and i and i agree with that particular

00:16:02.740 conservative perspective and it is that if you have a four-year mandate with a fixed election

00:16:08.340 date then every single government gets the maximum amount of time available to them by law which i

00:16:14.500 don't think any government should be given i think they should govern as long as they have a mandate

00:16:18.820 or supportive of their legislature or of the populace and as soon as they suspect that they'd

00:16:23.460 no longer have that support go seek more support and i you know i just reject these arguments that

00:16:29.060 there's such a thing as too many elections uh i mean if if if there's anything that we have too

00:16:34.580 much of in democracy it's not elections if anything i you know i'd have them far more frequently uh

00:16:40.820 and i think democracy would be healthier otherwise fair enough and we can get into a deep dive on

00:16:47.060 that another time uh what we'll pivot to now is kind of what is going on in british columbia with

00:16:52.500 the horgan government as you just alluded to obviously there was some polling going on and

00:16:58.180 some looking underneath the beneath the skirts of of kind of the future and what what was coming

00:17:04.020 down the pipe so what what why do you think that they called a snap election what was the reason

00:17:09.140 for that we can bring up some of the news items you have here yeah well let me just uh i wanted

00:17:14.020 to show uh the standard viewers a fella named they may not be familiar with a guy in bc named

00:17:19.620 bob mackin who uh he's sort of running his own little news website he's been doing it for a few

00:17:24.720 years it's called the breaker he's kind of um uh he's he's sort of mocked a little bit by both

00:17:32.840 parties i think they they kind of see him as a bit of a crackpot i think because he's constantly

00:17:38.300 filing fois and trying to get information the reality is he does a lot of a lot of really good

00:17:43.740 investigative journalism in bc and despite how the two major political parties might regard him

00:17:49.240 he's they kind of fear him uh because he he's like a dog with a bone and he doesn't have to

00:17:55.720 answer to any of the big legacy media outlets and so he's able to break a lot of a lot of stories

00:18:00.540 and you know some of them are interesting interesting some of them aren't let me just

00:18:04.600 move over to um this one that i've got here i'll try sharing my screen and see how this works

00:18:09.360 we're learning all sorts of features these days it's uh it's it's a learning process

00:18:15.180 my producer has allowed me to take a mouse and start clicking on things that's uh that's

00:18:19.900 becoming an experience i'm hey what does this end broadcast thing do i'm just kidding

00:18:25.260 so can you see the article up here not not yet uh i thought i we saw it earlier when we were

00:18:32.980 doing the test oh it's not showing up eh oh maybe i think hang on a sec here

00:18:37.800 they have to hit share screen apparently yeah done that there we go oh we're starting starting

00:18:45.180 there we go add to stream yeah this is the headline this is his uh website breaker the

00:18:52.100 breaker.news i encourage people to sort of keep track of what he um covers because macken will

00:18:57.460 go through items that the you know the big outlets don't really talk about right and they're usually

00:19:02.140 the ones that hurt the parties the most now sort of the just to sort of um go over what he what he's

00:19:11.120 uncovered here he's comparing the decision of Doug Ford uh on June 2nd to keep schools in Ontario

00:19:19.580 closed for the remainder of the school year and he's contrasting that against Horgan's decision

00:19:24.940 to essentially leave the schools open throughout the entire pandemic and so and and but and that's

00:19:31.760 that's not the interesting part of the article i think that's the angle that macken wants to take

00:19:35.260 it like he's he is despite not being part of legacy media he is still um of the same mindset

00:19:43.240 i think as many of the media folks down in vancouver and on the island which is you know

00:19:47.900 they wanted a harder and a longer lockdown right like lock us down long and hard and most of their

00:19:53.480 criticism of the bcndp government and this again is another major difference i think between bc and

00:19:59.400 alberta whereas folks quite rightly in my opinion are taking great issue with the degree of lockdown

00:20:05.260 measures in alberta um the general consensus at least down in the lower mainland where half half

00:20:10.420 the population of the province resides is that the lockdowns haven't been intense enough and and

00:20:14.900 that's why i haven't actually criticized the bcndp government about lockdowns very much because from

00:20:19.900 my perspective uh they've been comparatively good here i i haven't really felt like i've been

00:20:25.560 lockdown that much. Although, I do have to say, and I think I've said this before, if you're

00:20:30.060 working in the service industry or the tourism industry, you'd probably have a very different

00:20:34.580 opinion because you probably don't have a business anymore. Anyway, the point that Macken's making

00:20:39.760 here is that there was a no-bid contract for a polling outfit down in Vancouver called Strategic

00:20:49.400 Communications, also known as Stratcom, which people might be familiar with. Now this is,

00:20:55.800 I mean, he's sort of saying here, look, like it's an NDP aligned polling firm and over the 2019,

00:21:02.920 2020 billing cycle, taxpayers were billed over a quarter million dollars to the tune of 358,000

00:21:09.880 just to this company. And then more recently related to COVID polling,

00:21:13.400 there was a no bid contract awarded for close to a hundred, a hundred thousand dollars.

00:21:17.080 uh and basically what um oh and then they they sort of track the ceo here bob penner who's a

00:21:22.860 fellow with the broadband institute if you're not familiar with the broadband institute this is an

00:21:26.960 like a federal think tank which is absolutely ndp aligned i mean it's named after ed broadbent uh

00:21:34.060 who's who's still alive and and is sort of still running the outfit uh and it basically you know

00:21:39.880 they also have this sideline uh outfit called press progress which is kind of like uh um it's

00:21:47.080 it's basically a partisan news and I know you can't see me right now but I'm doing air quotes

00:21:52.120 around news it's basically partisan news and they and they produce stuff that just you know is meant

00:21:58.280 to be shared on social media that that is critical of non-ndp parties anyway um you know I think what

00:22:06.280 Macken's trying to the point he's trying to make here is that we should have done what Doug Ford

00:22:11.320 did and shut the schools down. But what's more interesting to me is that Bob Mackin hasn't been

00:22:20.860 able to get a hold of all this polling that taxpayers have paid for. So presumably, you know,

00:22:26.440 through Stratcom, the BCNDP government has been asking British Columbians questions about whether

00:22:32.100 they should open the schools up or not. And they conducted a lot of this polling on the taxpayer

00:22:37.680 or dime prior to the 2020 election. And so the implication, of course, now, how do I get back to,

00:22:47.480 here we go there. So the implication, of course, is that they were probably asking a lot of

00:22:53.060 questions that had less to do with, you know, what people thought of the lockdown and more to do with

00:22:57.840 whether what they thought their chances were of getting reelected in 2021. And so the, and they

00:23:05.020 spent a lot of money doing it. And so the reason Mackin wants to get the polling data, I think he

00:23:11.140 wants to demonstrate that they had information that suggested that they should have actually

00:23:15.980 locked the schools down. I'm not interested in that at all. I'm interested in how is it possible

00:23:20.580 that a government can spend that much of our money asking questions of us that are clearly

00:23:25.760 in the public interest and then hide that from an FOI request. And so the question that arises is,

00:23:32.820 should a should a government be able to keep that information secret well you know my my response is

00:23:40.040 no absolutely not they should be they should have to share that and why wouldn't they want to share

00:23:44.140 it well the reason they don't want to share it is because it it probably demonstrates two things

00:23:49.440 number one that they were on a downward trajectory in terms of popularity and if the if they waited

00:23:56.020 until the 2021 fixed election date they had a very small chance of getting re-elected especially with

00:24:01.600 reinvigorated uh bc liberal party assuming that well i guess it would have been andrew wilkinson

00:24:06.400 so who knows i mean they could have just repeated the same gone yeah i don't i don't think the word

00:24:11.120 revitalization uh and andrew wilkinson have ever been used in the same sentence including perhaps

00:24:17.360 in his own relationships at home so in any case it uh i'm sorry i mean i had to deal with him in

00:24:24.320 an in-camera in camera i don't care that it was in care it doesn't matter nothing confidential

00:24:28.320 was said the point is that i had to deal with that guy in a meeting and he came to try and

00:24:31.920 tell us what was what because he was administer advanced that as if he had a right to tell us

00:24:36.860 what to do as our board i don't you know i have zero respect for the guy zero respect he came in

00:24:41.220 there hot and heavy with no no like totally no desire to understand what the board was trying to

00:24:46.680 do and and he just tried to tell us read us the riot act and tell us what to do and it's like you

00:24:50.720 know what like you're not from here you don't matter like get out like i have no time for this

00:24:55.120 guy i was back when he was minister of advanced ed yeah yeah a long time ago a long time ago well

00:25:00.240 if it's any consolation uh he he never would have appointed me to the position i used to hold and if

00:25:05.040 if i had been there he would have fired me probably faster than the bcndp did yeah exactly

00:25:10.040 and i mean like speaking of things being kept tabs up i remember when you were talking about

00:25:13.540 this last time we're talking about the unbc board and everybody everybody kind of knew your

00:25:17.040 background and like oh there's talks about your background it's like you know what people knew

00:25:20.580 that i was a bc tory people knew that i was a former bc tory when i got onto the board and like

00:25:24.940 that made the rounds and the information sessions back when the liberals were still in government so

00:25:28.860 people weren't happy about that oh no one of our former enemies is on a board somewhere that was

00:25:33.440 annoying anyways it's not even the politicians that really discuss this it's all the it's the

00:25:37.580 political full-time staff that sort of sit around and and ruminate about this stuff they're the only

00:25:41.960 ones that really have the time to do it you know um anyway the i mean the bigger question about

00:25:47.680 this so how is it that they're able to withhold this information from foi requests and that's

00:25:53.220 sort of the ongoing the the re-emerging trend with this government is like how are they able

00:25:58.320 to keep all this stuff secret because they're keeping a lot of stuff secret whether it's health

00:26:01.500 information site c information uh all sorts of stuff and the way they're doing it this time is

00:26:07.740 there's they're claiming that the polling data is is kept uh secret by cabinet confidentiality

00:26:15.740 and so you know it is possible for a government to not have to disclose information that is the

00:26:22.360 property of cabinet basically but that's a that's a fairly small group that's not the whole caucus

00:26:26.620 that's just that's not all of government that's just uh uh the cabinet ministers and so the claim

00:26:33.140 that they're making is that this polling data was viewed only by cabinet well that's even more

00:26:38.800 troubling if you're a bcndp mla from my perspective like what is it in this polling data uh which was

00:26:47.140 just asked of british colombians that not only they can not only will they not share it with

00:26:52.260 the public but they won't even share it with with their own members of government like they won't

00:26:55.820 share it with other mla like what's in there that's so secretive and of course you know the

00:27:00.820 truth probably is that it wasn't just the property of cabinet they've probably all seen it or those

00:27:05.400 who are interested in seeing it which raises a bigger problem just now they have to lie they

00:27:09.660 have to pretend that they haven't seen it so neither of those situations are very flattering

00:27:14.420 uh for the for the bcndp um and it really just goes to show whether we get to see this information

00:27:22.020 or not that you know despite my own proclivities in terms of you know being opposed to fixed

00:27:27.940 election dates there was no reason to hold the election last year other from the perspective of

00:27:34.720 the bcndp and the premier's office john horgan in particular other than to win because they didn't

00:27:40.480 think they'd be able to win if they waited the full four years i mean that that amount that's

00:27:44.020 clear um so i mean that that's uh i found that to be interesting i think i think though that this

00:27:52.940 is so this is this is one of the places where i kind of fall down on both sides so i was raised

00:27:57.080 by very uh very very uh ethical people strong moral character who had no time for kind of more

00:28:03.440 the conventions convene you know the way the way people kind of just shrug things off on a lot of

00:28:08.280 different accounts whether we're talking about the free market whether we're talking about

00:28:10.720 politics or even talk about interrelationships with your neighbors very blunt very literal people

00:28:15.140 not that they weren't sophisticated but that's just how i was raised so the idea of there being

00:28:19.020 kind of like oh you know that's just showbiz guys like i just i i don't really do that very well

00:28:23.360 but at the same time now that i've been in this to use the word your word of the day and and as

00:28:28.240 always mill you for some time i've also come to understand that you know what maybe not everything

00:28:32.940 is always literal black and white all the time and i got to be able to kind of roll with the

00:28:36.660 punches this is one of those places where i kind of fall down on both sides of the fence

00:28:40.420 simultaneously i feel like i'm being split in half on the one hand i completely agree with you

00:28:44.040 it's come it's ridiculous that the ndp were using public dollars to essentially finance their own

00:28:49.500 re-election at the same time it is the nature of governments to always be doing things in their own

00:28:55.080 partisan interest so which do we say we say ah well that's just politics guys here we go no we

00:28:59.780 should demand some heads roll and it is time for justice and we're going to reform election law

00:29:04.380 and make sure like i don't know i really know which way to go on like do i carry up the torch

00:29:08.540 the pitchfork or do i just like have another beer like i don't i know i don't know which way to go

00:29:14.380 well there's no question that that the bcndp cabinet government cabinet has the ability to

00:29:19.500 hide this information if they're gonna uh if they're actually gonna claim that they're the

00:29:23.980 only ones that have seen it the cabinet's the only one that's seen the information

00:29:26.940 the bigger question is why would you right and that's and again this is what none of these

00:29:31.580 governments seem to learn is that if you keep something a secret if you don't if you're not

00:29:36.780 transparent about something, if you don't provide the information so people can understand what

00:29:40.460 you're doing, we're going to make up our own story to fill the hole, to fill that vacuum,

00:29:45.980 that information vacuum. And it's not going to be a story in our minds that's flattering

00:29:50.220 for you. We're going to assume the worst. And if you've already got this reputation,

00:29:56.060 this record of hiding things, you know, like this half billion dollar investment fund that

00:30:01.980 they're setting up uh to try to help bc businesses for instance and startups i mean nobody has any

00:30:08.540 complaint about that like there might be some hyper libertarians for instance who think that

00:30:14.220 you know no government should provide any kind of startup incubation subsidy whatsoever for a

00:30:19.180 but for a company can hand out vaccine passports to enter their own premises so apparently we don't

00:30:25.180 need a universal one but we could use one to get to walmart yeah well i mean you know the sort of

00:30:30.700 of steel man a libertarian argument i think they'd say well you know freedom is universal whether you

00:30:35.980 like it or not and so if you're going to provide you know sort of rugged individualism for for

00:30:41.900 everybody then they have not only do they not have the right to any public funds to subsidize them

00:30:47.260 but they they also should have the right to determine whatever the circumstances are going

00:30:51.020 to be for entry into the premises that's the libertarian argument i agree with you however

00:30:55.100 um and so in any case you know that we there was a huge scandal over deliberately hiding health

00:31:03.060 information uh it was most you didn't hear conservatives complaining about that so much

00:31:07.240 because it was mostly the professional managerial and the legacy media classes down in uh the lower

00:31:13.720 mainland victoria who were pulling their hair out because there was all this health information that

00:31:18.060 from their perspective demonstrated that we should have been locked down longer and harder right

00:31:22.000 that's what they were angry about i was just unhappy that this government is so secretive

00:31:26.780 and and because again when you when you don't give that information all people will make up

00:31:32.140 their own story to fill in the blanks and there's a huge trend of it they you know they they

00:31:36.160 commissioned all these reports and investigations into site c you know why not just why not just

00:31:41.220 be honest with us like it's not like you know like we can take it people understand that you

00:31:45.440 didn't start that project on in in regards to site c they know that it's uh very challenging

00:31:50.620 it's going to be very expensive. You don't have to hide that information from us, but

00:31:53.660 that's how governments operate. And it's kind of a good segue into this article that was just put

00:32:00.480 into the Vancouver Sun by a UBC poli-sci professor named Maxwell Cameron. I'll just pull that

00:32:07.060 article up for you here because this is one of those articles that didn't surprise me at all,

00:32:14.020 but it's one of those things that just drives me crazy when I see it. So let's see if I can

00:32:20.620 here it is is that showing up yep yep it is yeah so Maxwell Cameron like I said poli-sci professor

00:32:32.180 at UBC and he put this article in here arguing that you know because so first of all it's a

00:32:40.120 it's a response to a special committee that's just been convened by the legislature to review

00:32:44.820 public funding to parties so you know I think they have a very similar system in Alberta

00:32:49.180 and we definitely have a similar system federally, but essentially, taxpayers subsidize political

00:32:58.320 parties based on how many votes they get. Every once in a while, government will review this

00:33:04.340 and make a determination on whether the subsidy should be increased or whether the formula should

00:33:09.560 be changed. I've never been in favor of it. I was in favor of eliminating corporate and union

00:33:17.480 donations but i was never in favor of replacing much of that funding through taxpayers and i

00:33:25.960 don't know where where the majority of uh of standard viewers are on this or you but i thought

00:33:30.920 it was interesting because again we've got the electoral boundaries commission that's uh that's

00:33:35.560 going to do its report in bc to try to recommend to government and it's been set up to do this

00:33:40.680 that there should be fewer seats in the in the interior and more seats in the higher population

00:33:45.560 density areas in the lower mainland further reducing our representation here in the rest

00:33:50.560 of the province vis-a-vis uh the biggest city um and so it sort of ties into that conversation

00:33:57.780 uh but he makes a number of arguments that are just from my perspective flat out wrong and i

00:34:03.240 think people need to push back against this because it's this it's this renewed push to

00:34:08.840 to try to describe political parties as this integral piece of democracy which is something

00:34:15.080 that i've never agreed with in fact i've always kind of you know and i've been a member i think

00:34:21.160 i mean bc has a lot of political parties i've been a member of most of them i've been a member of the

00:34:25.000 bc liberals i've been a member of the bc greens i've been a member of the bc ndp i've been a

00:34:28.360 member of the communist party i'm i've been a member of the rural bc party the wexit party the

00:34:33.800 maverick party like uh you know i sort of have like a political party fetish it's mostly a

00:34:39.000 an intellectual curiosity to see how you know the similarities and the differences between them

00:34:43.640 and sometimes it has to do with my my values as well uh but the one the one common thread

00:34:49.480 i've pulled away from my experience in all of these parties is that none of them are good for

00:34:54.600 democracy especially if you think that you know regional parliamentary representatives or

00:35:02.200 legislative members should be answerable to their constituents and not to victoria or ottawa

00:35:08.840 respectively and i know you were having this discussion on the show yesterday

00:35:11.640 and and my view on this is that political parties actually reduce the amount of democracy and they

00:35:18.060 enforce they make it impossible for any member who's elected under that banner to represent

00:35:24.100 their own constituents unless they're willing to get tossed out of caucus and then likely lose the

00:35:29.980 next election because our system is is rigged in such a way that unless you have an endorsement

00:35:35.340 unless you're running under a major political party brand it's almost impossible to get elected

00:35:40.060 because of how the funding works uh and they've and because once they get into power and they all

00:35:46.040 agree on this point they all agree that taxpayers should then pay the political parties for the

00:35:51.680 privilege of being able to vote for them after the election it just uh it it reduces the ability for

00:35:59.240 any small or new political party to really get going unless the old school parties are sort of

00:36:04.700 wiped out of the way like we saw in Alberta with the creation of the UCP and it just entrenches

00:36:10.540 these tiny and increasingly smaller power structures that are built around these parties

00:36:16.120 and from my perspective you know you the people that support this stuff and support political

00:36:20.940 parties they always make the argument well if you know if you don't like this we'll join the

00:36:26.720 political party and you know get get your your message through the political party but the

00:36:31.100 reality is you don't have any kind of agency within a political party either i've been to so

00:36:36.760 many conventions i've chaired party conventions i've i've sat backstage i've sat i've sat at the

00:36:41.880 executive table where we put together the the convention agendas and i know like the bcndp is

00:36:46.960 no different than any other party in some ways it's even more democratic but the whole structure

00:36:51.500 the whole convention structure is set up to to repress any kind of individual thought or motion

00:36:58.260 from the membership and from the floor and to just turn it into a communications exercise.

00:37:03.580 So this idea that, you know, the average individual voter can affect change or has any agency

00:37:09.080 in our political process by playing a role in their political party is total BS.

00:37:13.700 It's just not how political parties are operated.

00:37:16.440 And if you go through the list of reasons why this Maxwell Cameron from UBC thinks that

00:37:22.640 political parties are vital to democracy, you pick it apart really quick.

00:37:26.280 uh so for instance he says you know here are the reasons why he says political parties are

00:37:31.140 are absolutely vital uh they first he says they provide voters with critical information

00:37:36.220 presumably about candidates well that's not even true political parties actually don't provide a

00:37:41.100 lot of information about local candidates they provide a lot of information about the leader

00:37:45.940 right that's uh in fact i mean this has been this is a huge frustration doesn't matter what

00:37:51.180 political party you're in if you're involved in your riding association the thing that ticks you

00:37:55.340 off the most is that you bust your chump trying to get money raised locally. And most of it

00:38:04.220 probably goes to pay people you've never met that are sitting in front of a laptop in a

00:38:09.600 headquarters somewhere down in Vancouver. And who knows what they're doing. And I'll tell you what

00:38:14.520 they're doing. They're calling people up trying to get more money. They're calling into your

00:38:19.400 riding to fundraise over top you. And that happens in any political party. So this idea that they

00:38:24.740 provide critical information that voters couldn't otherwise get themselves is garbage it's it's a 0.90

00:38:29.600 system set up to take information and focus away from the regions the localities and focus it all

00:38:36.140 on the leader and remember you know in a in our parliamentary system we're not even really

00:38:42.380 supposed to know who the leader is like who the prime minister or the premier is going to be before

00:38:48.120 the election i mean you know traditionally we're that's what the members of the legislature

00:38:52.940 legislature once they're elected are supposed to determine you know we didn't know that wac

00:38:57.380 bennett was going to be the premier because he wasn't even the leader of the so creds prior to

00:39:01.640 his election it took them like a month to figure that out and that's that's kind of the way the

00:39:06.020 system was designed um so that uh all of these representatives who are elected from different

00:39:12.340 regions around the province or the country get together and they decide who's going to be the

00:39:16.620 prime minister it's not decided beforehand and and when we when political parties shifted focus

00:39:23.160 onto the leader and away from the regions and away from the individual mlas and mps uh it reduced a

00:39:31.340 huge amount of agency that voters have and and those and their representatives have in selecting

00:39:37.040 the leader a huge a huge change and i think that kind of pivoting back to this question of what to

00:39:44.480 do with political parties and their fundraising and how how much they cost it is a catch-22 it's

00:39:50.880 funny it's funny i i've actually come to be on maybe the other side of this issue after years

00:39:55.500 of being on the same side that you're on i i kind of wonder if maybe there shouldn't be

00:40:00.720 a single a single budget for everybody and and everybody just gets to run on this single budget

00:40:08.740 and it gets and maybe it does get taken out of the respective parties kind of fundraising or

00:40:14.460 something but it's just there's a limit and everybody gets the same so it's just like i don't

00:40:19.840 care if you're a brand new party down the street you get the same as kind of the tory party and

00:40:25.000 like it's it doesn't come down to money it doesn't come down to be able to project an image or what

00:40:29.520 kind of consultants you hire it's like no it's like it literally the best idea wins it's like

00:40:34.160 okay so with the communists and the conserves and the liberals and everybody in between are all over

00:40:38.700 all up there on stage there's 10 candidates and each candidate gets a chance to say something

00:40:43.520 that has nothing to do with the fact that your party is bigger than that party and has more

00:40:48.640 money than that party. Because as far as I can tell, having more money than another party doesn't

00:40:52.620 mean that you necessarily have better ideas. Well, the problem with the funding system that

00:40:58.200 comes out of taxpayers' pockets is that if you're a big party, you can never again become a small

00:41:03.660 party. And the small parties can't really become larger parties unless there's some major sort of

00:41:09.640 external shift in the in the electorate or some big event changes everything and the reason being

00:41:15.940 is you're funded based on the number of votes you get so you know like in the last election the the

00:41:21.320 bc liberals well sorry go back to 2017 the bc liberals actually got more of a subsidy than the

00:41:25.720 bcndp because despite the the bcndp becoming government with the help of the greens the bc

00:41:30.560 liberals got uh more seats and more more votes so um uh so like they're not diminished in any

00:41:37.760 respect. Now, one could argue that the Green Party was able to finally kind of get themselves

00:41:43.380 to a point where they were able to get elected in a couple of places because of these subsidies.

00:41:48.160 But that's not an argument for subsidies. I mean, that's an argument for a few cookies being doled

00:41:54.920 out to one of the smaller parties while the two bigger parties continue to reap, you know,

00:41:59.080 the massive rewards out of the taxpayer pocket. So, I mean, you know, my experiences in unions

00:42:06.960 for years and years and years and and playing a role both on the elected side but also sort of

00:42:11.280 managing the elected side as i was a staff person for years and what you described is pretty similar

00:42:15.860 to what a lot of unions have done where they there's like a campaign expenditure limit and

00:42:22.380 the and it's pretty low and the full amount for candidates that are running for elected office in

00:42:26.920 a union for instance uh the full amount is reimbursed afterwards but it's such a low amount

00:42:31.340 that it's not a huge bill for the members right and the idea is it doesn't matter where you're

00:42:35.800 from in the province or if it's a national union across the country everybody who wants to seek or

00:42:40.260 what your politics are everybody who wants to seek a leadership position in a union you know

00:42:44.300 the the union membership will subsidize you know like the mailer that you put out like nobody's

00:42:48.800 buying tv ads or anything like that in those kind of elections but it's the same sort of model that

00:42:52.540 you're talking about but i would argue that you can you can use that model which i would support

00:42:57.920 but you could totally bypass the party process you could provide that kind of a flat level of

00:43:04.760 subsidy for individual candidates in each riding irrespective of their party that money doesn't

00:43:09.940 have to go to parties in fact i would argue it shouldn't go to parties because as soon as it

00:43:13.540 goes to parties only a small percentage of it ends up going to the candidate that it's supposed

00:43:17.620 to go to and and again it's it's just funding it all goes toward the vast majority of it goes

00:43:23.100 towards funding the leadership campaign and this huge bureaucracy of of unaccountable staff people

00:43:28.980 who are just hacks trying to trying to get a bigger job in government if they can win that's

00:43:33.900 where the money's going to pay these people to sit and stare at their laptops all day you know

00:43:38.180 you know i i couldn't imagine what those people could be like i've never met i've never met any

00:43:42.680 campaign staffers or anybody who's an apparatchik or the hacks who run our our political system i've

00:43:48.040 never met those people so i i have no opinion and i'm sure that they're very nice wonderful people

00:43:53.500 and they aren't about to cut the feed of this program in any case we'll we'll get back to our

00:44:00.540 other thing you had one other you had one other point you wanted to make here you were doing a

00:44:03.920 screen share for that one too um there's a public i i think there was another item uh that you had

00:44:10.300 up what was that i'm trying to remember uh well no i mean this is the only one i had the screen

00:44:15.520 share for but um uh the the third item was uh just very quickly like on the theme of the bcndp

00:44:25.420 making a number of promises and not carrying through on them you know you have to have a

00:44:30.200 certain perverse a certain perversity to uh to your personality to sit and watch budget estimates

00:44:36.720 on the on the legislature feed um but i've been doing this and the ministry of children and

00:44:42.740 families budget estimate debate is going on right now and because the child care it's sort of a

00:44:48.980 small mini ministry has been embedded within the ministry of children and families it's it's where

00:44:55.100 the minister responsible Katrina Chen is tasked with putting following through on this promise

00:45:01.080 the BCNDP is now made in the last two elections for what they call a $10 a day child care program.

00:45:07.500 So very similar to a universal dental care program there they've promised now twice that they're

00:45:13.400 going to deliver on basically a universal child care program with public spaces so publicly owned

00:45:18.840 and operated child care spaces. And the background for this because I mean if anybody's watching

00:45:24.600 from Alberta they're probably thinking like this is nothing like anything that we would do in Alberta

00:45:29.260 but it's a huge issue for a number of folks in BC particularly in the lower mainland where

00:45:36.160 you know if you're a if you're a two-parent family for instance and you want and you want

00:45:41.900 to have children most of the folks that I know in that situation the decision that they're

00:45:48.100 they're honestly debating is whether or not one of them should continue working or not

00:45:52.760 because because the price of child care is so high they can't make enough to pay for it so it

00:45:58.680 makes more economic sense in in your own family economy to have one parent not work and provide

00:46:05.720 child care because it's cheaper but that creates other problems it creates problems for business

00:46:11.160 in terms of the supply of labor so it actually brings the supply of labor down which drives the

00:46:17.160 price of labor up so it actually puts upward pressure on wages so you know some people might

00:46:21.540 say, well, that's good. But from the perspective of a business owner, it might not necessarily be

00:46:26.680 good. It also becomes a retention issue for existing staff. If they're going to become

00:46:32.880 pregnant, it doesn't matter, mother or father, they might decide, well, I can't work anymore. 0.97

00:46:39.520 So it's tougher to keep people. So it becomes sort of a retention issue for businesses who

00:46:43.320 want to locate there. Childcare is a big issue for them. So some of them are sort of coming up

00:46:48.960 ways to try to fund child care um now the bcndp here's the context the history of this back if

00:46:56.640 you remember long enough ago back when adrian dix was was leader of the bcndp he's now the health

00:47:02.320 minister he he ran on a pretty stringent campaign back in 2013 that's how far back we're going

00:47:11.120 and he was favored to win i mean there's that old vancouver sun uh front page article that had

00:47:17.440 you know a picture of um uh adrian on the front and it said you know this guy could literally

00:47:22.560 kick a dog and still win the election and then a few weeks later of course the headline was the

00:47:26.880 comeback kid because chris christie clark was able to pull it out of the tank um and one of the

00:47:32.000 reasons you know people always speculate about why he lost that election and a lot of people sort of

00:47:37.120 on the on the pro development side of the left said well it was because he came out on earth day

00:47:43.040 against the kinder morgan pipeline we call it the kinder surprise but people that were watching

00:47:48.240 closer um because because he literally didn't talk to anybody but he just announced it on

00:47:53.120 earth day down at i think it was like grandview park in east van right and people were like

00:47:57.360 what um and then you know support kind of plummeted but there were other reasons i think why he didn't

00:48:03.840 win one of them was uh you know public sector unions in particular the bcgu which represents

00:48:10.000 uh provincial employees they were really big on this growing idea of a universal child care plan

00:48:16.240 and they're really big on it for a couple of reasons one uh if there's public spaces and

00:48:20.400 like a public child care plan ideally they're going to represent those child care workers

00:48:24.400 because they're provincial employees and so i you know i was at the meeting where adrian came to

00:48:29.280 talk to a big group of union members and the question was put to him you know where are you

00:48:34.960 on this call for a child care plan and he just said flat out yeah it ain't gonna happen right

00:48:39.600 and so like it just killed sort of that part and that's a huge bait that's sort of like the federal

00:48:43.600 government employees um for trudeau it's a huge support base for him right it's why it's why the

00:48:48.960 federal liberals just before the election they always send an open letter out to the to the

00:48:53.440 bureaucracy saying you know things are going to be okay don't vote for the conservatives they're

00:48:56.640 just going to they're going to muzzle scientists and they're going to cut funding well it's the

00:48:59.840 same kind of effect provincially it just killed everything so you know flash forward to 2017

00:49:04.720 john horgan learned that lesson and promised this grand uh provincial plan uh to bring it down but

00:49:10.880 he put a 10-year timeline on it well you got to get elected three or four times to be able to

00:49:14.640 follow through on that well they're now four years into their mandate so you know the questions are

00:49:19.120 being asked to them in the budget estimate debate what's uh what's the progress here and von palmer

00:49:24.560 from the vancouver sun just did a little recap of it and reminded people that they had promised in

00:49:30.640 in the last election 1.5 billion dollars towards this over the next three years they've only given

00:49:35.880 Katrina Chen the minister responsible about a quarter million dollars over the same period of

00:49:40.720 time to do something with it and what have what have they been doing with that money they haven't

00:49:45.220 been funding new public spaces they've been given the money to the private child care providers to

00:49:51.840 open up more private spaces and then that enables them to come back and say look we're increasing the

00:49:57.060 supply of childcare, we're, we're moving along on our plan. But the reality of it is this,

00:50:02.300 this is set up for failure and it's going to be a huge problem for the BC NDP going forward. It's

00:50:07.440 probably, you know, one of the many reasons why they called the election early, because they knew

00:50:12.500 once they got into this, you know, into the, like the fourth year of their first mandate, and they

00:50:17.280 haven't made any progress on this at all, that's a lot of their left support base is going to start

00:50:22.060 to drive away from them like they did back in 2013 so this is this is something to watch uh

00:50:27.500 because of course the obvious uh conclusion from all this is sure you give a bunch of money to

00:50:32.800 private health care providers but it's not like it's ongoing funding you're going to keep funding

00:50:37.420 these outfits uh to the tune of a quarter million dollars a year uh so they're just getting raw

00:50:42.200 subsidies to open up child care space what happens when that funding dries up well the child care

00:50:46.080 spaces dry up and then we're back where we were again and all of your so-called progress is just

00:50:50.620 erased and that creates a bigger problem so they really just kind of keep kicking the can down the

00:50:55.420 road with a with a model that's not going to not going to be sustainable and they're doing it to

00:51:00.220 try to placate the what is essentially become the private child care lobby because when they make no

00:51:05.600 mistake when they announced this that they wanted a public universally funded program uh the private

00:51:12.520 child care providers freaked out right they formed themselves into uh advocacy associations and they

00:51:17.320 got you know they started lobbying and essentially what's happened is the bcndp government has

00:51:22.820 totally capitulated to that lobby and instead of putting funding into what they promised

00:51:27.640 they would do they've just been funneling the funding over to the private providers

00:51:31.920 so it's the kind of thing that like if you're a progressive it should make you angry because

00:51:37.220 you know they promised you something but if you're a conservative you should probably be angry as

00:51:42.160 well because they're subsidizing private providers so business you know these businesses are just

00:51:45.660 getting more subsidies again which is not sustainable over the long run uh and it just

00:51:49.900 feeds into this ongoing increasing trend of the bcndp making these grand promises and not even

00:51:55.940 really trying to to carry them out uh and it's quite it's it's going to become a big problem for

00:52:01.220 them i i think it's going to become a huge problem for them particularly because the cost of child

00:52:07.000 care isn't going to get any cheaper um certain commenters tried to tell us that if you can't

00:52:12.340 four kids don't have them no one gave us subsidies for our child care no of course not there was no

00:52:18.460 kind of cultural or economic subsidy in the form of more helpers more hands-on and of course easier

00:52:24.800 access to the green stuff that makes the economy flow of course there was no subsidy of any kind

00:52:31.380 well claude claude makes a very good point in fact i was just having this argument with my

00:52:35.040 father the other day because he really want he wants me to have children right he's always wanted

00:52:38.940 me to have children and I've and I've always said to him dad it's just not economical right like

00:52:43.860 it's uh it's not necessarily that I can't afford to have them but it's more like it doesn't make

00:52:47.800 economic sense and so if you extrapolate that you know if you expand that to the larger population

00:52:52.740 that's the reason and I know conservatives are actually more concerned about this than progressives

00:52:56.700 the reason why the birth rate is declining in advanced countries uh in advanced democracies

00:53:02.840 is because it's not economical to have children so if you're concerned about a declining birth

00:53:07.980 rate and many conservatives are i'm not really concerned about it but because i think there's

00:53:10.880 enough humans on the planet and i don't really care who the humans are necessarily to me humans

00:53:15.580 are humans but i know a lot of conservatives are very concerned about a declining birth rate

00:53:19.300 uh and in that case if that's what you're concerned about a 10 a day child care plan

00:53:24.380 actually is a good idea because it suddenly makes it economical again it allows working

00:53:30.060 class families to be able to afford to have children that's a huge reason in my mind why

00:53:33.840 why there is a declining birth rate i think i think it's kind of interesting because it's an

00:53:39.760 interesting debate and i know that i mean stuart parker will be on here shortly and this was brought

00:53:43.780 up i believe it was two months ago now uh during during one of our uh bc political panels that i'm

00:53:51.100 i'm a guest on as well and uh we we uh we discussed this the nature of child care of course i advocated

00:53:57.940 for kind of a i guess you could call the socrate position but certainly a right-wing sort of populist

00:54:01.960 position and perhaps something that we see even in central europe nowadays which is that that why 0.66

00:54:07.180 why should mothers have to work like that's where that's where the subsidy should go should go to 1.00

00:54:11.440 subsidizing motherhood and or being given in a in a block a block voucher to the family or perhaps 0.50

00:54:19.220 his write-offs i mean honestly i mean i'm still pining for the days where jobs paid well enough

00:54:23.840 that there could be a single wage earner and someone could stay at home we live in a more

00:54:28.020 enlightened age if you want to call it that fine it doesn't have to be the person who is male that

00:54:33.680 goes out to work and the person who is female that stays home or if you want to say mother

00:54:38.100 the motherly and the fatherly uh doing opposite jobs i don't i don't care or traditional roles

00:54:43.460 i don't care you set up your family how you want but the point is that i think that there should

00:54:47.420 if we're going to subsidize anything we should subsidize there being someone who can be full

00:54:52.480 time at home or if you choose to take that subsidy elsewhere that voucher elsewhere go ahead but

00:54:57.220 that's just it it's a voucher so it puts it back into the hands of people to make that decision it

00:55:01.680 doesn't just directly subsidize a private or a public sector uh system it is it is a voucher

00:55:06.900 system given to people and of course i mean you know you roll roll your eyes because i i'm a i

00:55:12.540 beat a dead horse on this but the way to deal with all of this stuff um like one way to not even need

00:55:18.340 a child care subsidy program or universal program uh one way to to eliminate a lot of the benefits

00:55:25.720 that people are receiving that are means tested for various reasons is to implement a universal

00:55:29.880 basic income plan, which solves a lot of this stuff. And in the long run can probably be cheaper

00:55:36.680 for the taxpayer because it keeps so many people off of other services that draw down on public

00:55:42.920 revenue. But there's no major political party in British Columbia that's remotely interested in

00:55:51.160 that and you know unions aren't interested in in it either because it it literally reduces the

00:55:57.820 dependence that workers have on on unions in that in that traditional work environment

00:56:02.280 i i just yeah i i guess i mean i don't know which way to skin this cat there's a lot of there's a

00:56:09.540 lot of ways to kind of take this problem and try and work through it but it for me for me it very

00:56:15.160 much is that if there is anything worth subsidizing if there's anything that a conservative could

00:56:20.580 actually turn it around on the most rabid libertarian or manchester liberal or even on a

00:56:25.860 on a progressive who's who's trying to like the kind of progressives who do not appreciate the

00:56:31.420 family kind of progressives who denigrate the family or see it as a form of oppression

00:56:34.840 particularly matrimony i would i think this is the one place where they actually can arm 1.00

00:56:40.620 themselves rather well and push right through and be like no actually you're a moron you wouldn't 0.97

00:56:46.540 exist on planet earth without two people combining their gametes hopefully inside of a permanent 0.98

00:56:51.760 relationship that was conducive to your raising that is the most important building block of

00:56:56.820 society and how dare you attempt to undermine it with with either your obfuscation through public

00:57:02.700 or private means the family is the family and without the family we are doomed so that is the

00:57:09.120 one place where a conservative can say look i may not believe in a single kind of other subsidy

00:57:13.520 anywhere else i'm a harsh libertarian that that there shouldn't be a single public dollar going

00:57:18.360 to a single other entity that is not uh that that isn't earning it in the free market but the family

00:57:24.420 if there's one thing worth protecting either by law or by money or by both it is it is the family

00:57:29.940 i think that's a good way to look at it uh especially from a theological perspective or

00:57:35.000 a moralistic perspective i think that argument holds i look at it from an economics perspective

00:57:39.400 and like what's cheaper on the revenue base of government

00:57:43.920 so that it's cheaper for taxpayers

00:57:45.320 and what spurs business activity?

00:57:49.360 What makes it economically possible

00:57:50.900 for people to have children?

00:57:53.120 And given that we're in this new paradigm

00:57:55.680 where the number of jobs are not going to increase,

00:57:58.100 they're going to decrease vis-a-vis population

00:58:00.680 and dramatically over the next few years.

00:58:03.120 And so if we don't start thinking about

00:58:05.600 some of these things in a very focused way,

00:58:08.540 uh it's going to be too late by the time we um uh we hit those problems i i think that you're

00:58:15.080 absolutely correct there aaron um that that we definitely need to be regardless of whether you

00:58:19.780 want to call it a progressive mentality or not like certainly everybody needs to be forward

00:58:23.320 looking in this especially as things become automated i mean the single the single biggest

00:58:27.100 shock to our economic system after the steam engine is going to be the automation of said

00:58:33.780 no longer steam engines but then internal combustion and then electric engines

00:58:37.480 that also drive themselves across the country when when we get into automatic transportation

00:58:42.600 self-propelled vehicles we are in we are in for a whole world of hurt because i believe that

00:58:48.320 transportation transportation is still the single largest employer across the world if i'm if i'm

00:58:54.700 not mistaken for a little while longer not much longer yeah no absolutely absolutely well i we've

00:59:03.640 come to the end of our hour here Aaron uh hopefully Stuart is on with us soon but uh I'm

00:59:09.060 really thankful for your contributions today and I'm looking forward to more of them of course we

00:59:13.500 love having you on here on Thursdays to tell us what's what maybe as a final thought how's how's

00:59:18.000 the rest of your cancellation going how's how's that been going for you well you know how news

00:59:23.360 cycles work it's like people talk about it for a couple of days and then it's the next day it's

00:59:27.340 like nobody ever knew you existed so so I've sort of descended back into the obscurity that I've

00:59:32.040 enjoyed for so many years and you know it's great oh well i mean it might as well just become the

00:59:39.200 recluse that he always wanted to be right i'd argue i'd been a recluse for many years but

00:59:44.480 i do love western standard viewers no absolutely we all love them very much but again thank you

00:59:51.320 so much aaron and we'll have you on again next thursday you can tell us what crazy shenanigans

00:59:55.600 the horgan government and everybody else is up to uh throughout bc thank you so much

01:00:00.400 right on absolutely well we are waiting for our next guest here in the wings hopefully he'll be

01:00:07.160 here soon i want to go over some of the comments that we've had here this has been really interesting

01:00:11.940 this is a tough topic and it's one of those beautiful things where right wing or left wing

01:00:16.420 people are getting are getting you know up in arms about these questions when it comes to basically

01:00:21.780 whether or not we should subsidize the family now i want to start before i even get into the

01:00:26.700 comments, I want to be very clear that, you know, again, if you if you could take a time machine and

01:00:31.640 go meet the Nathan Gita of essentially 2013, 2012, actually right about the time that I was

01:00:38.020 interning with with Kenny and Harper government, I would have come across as any other kind of

01:00:44.240 blue chip conservative. While personally socially conservative, I would be rather tolerant and kind

01:00:50.820 of plastic around any kind of social conservatism in general i was not a populist i don't know if i

01:00:57.700 would have called myself an elitist but i would have been kind of center right center left on

01:01:01.160 well that we have a democratic system that works fairly well or perhaps we could innovate this that

01:01:05.360 or the other thing but no major radical changes and and fiscal policy would have been pretty tight

01:01:11.000 i i would have called myself essentially a fiscal conservative a socially privately conservative but

01:01:16.480 a socially tolerant not liberal but but or even progressive but just i wasn't going to upset the

01:01:22.400 apple cart and i wasn't going to attempt to necessarily you know try and reverse the decision

01:01:27.220 on gay marriage or even when it came to the question of abortion was i going to make it

01:01:31.020 completely illegal no i probably would have stopped short of that and just said no i just

01:01:34.600 don't want a single public dollar going to abortion that probably would have been my harshest take my

01:01:39.460 hottest take at that time fast forward to about a decade later and i've become pretty reactionary

01:01:46.320 on a lot of counts. But between that and the Trump revolution and everything else that's

01:01:50.980 happened with our politics of disruption and displacement, I have become much more of a

01:01:56.140 populist and far more sympathetic, especially having lived in the precariat for so long.

01:02:01.260 Two more, you know, there are some people who are calling this socialist. I got called a socialist

01:02:06.660 the other day for, again, supposing that maybe one man shouldn't own 10 houses, 10 families should

01:02:11.840 live in 10 houses. Just a thought. And if we all become part of the rentier class, it's not long

01:02:17.440 before the peasants start arming themselves with pitchforks and other things to try and march upon

01:02:22.240 their landlord and demand some more equity and a better stake in their country. That's a different

01:02:26.460 debate altogether. But the point that I would drive home here is, again, like you're talking

01:02:30.340 to someone, or rather you're watching someone, and I'm talking to you through the comments,

01:02:33.940 That really wasn't that far away from just middle-of-the-road understanding around these things. And I think what's kind of mind-boggling is that, well, I've had a complete revolution in thought and essentially came down to a couple of different points.

01:02:53.900 One of them was the economy that was built out of these right-wing ideas, particularly neoliberal ones, never, ever, ever performed for me, ever.

01:03:03.280 It never gave me a ton of benefit, and so that was something that was a big change for me.

01:03:08.240 And the other thing that happened was, especially as I started to kind of get older and be more, I'd always wanted a family.

01:03:14.020 I always wanted to get married and have a family.

01:03:15.700 I was raised by very socially conserved people, good evangelical Protestants.

01:03:19.320 I'm Roman Catholic now, but I was raised by strong Protestant, evangelical Protestants who were all, you know, were all very pro-family and they grew up in a different milieu where having a family was affordable and jobs were plentiful.

01:03:33.380 And so I was growing up in a world where jobs were not plentiful after 2008, after the oil shock, and now after COVID.

01:03:40.680 That changed my mentality a lot.

01:03:42.680 So to the people in the comments who are arguing about this question of socialism or subsidizing the family as to whether or not that's a legitimate idea, do walk for a mile in somebody else's shoes who's below 40.

01:03:53.900 Some of those people did really well, though I would say of my generation, the people who did very well, who were part of the precariat and then quickly switched into being part of the managerial class, are some of the nastiest people I've ever met.

01:04:05.240 Some of them keep their grace.

01:04:06.240 Some of them don't.

01:04:07.080 But the other thing that I would say is that, again, the cost of things has changed.

01:04:12.200 and the reality of things has changed and so we might need to think about how we want other people

01:04:17.960 to have a stake in the country which includes being entitled to some happiness which uh the

01:04:22.920 greatest happiness that we have on earth is our personal relationships and that particularly for

01:04:27.440 those of us of faith and a more conserved bent uh the matrimony itself so if we're not going to

01:04:33.440 facilitate that in family life we might want to think about how that's going to go anyways we've

01:04:38.000 got Stuart Parker waiting in the wings here. We're going to bring him on, and I'm going to click a

01:04:43.160 button here, add to stream, and Stuart Parker is live with us here in BC's northern capital.

01:04:48.700 What's up, Stuart? What's on the docket today? Well, first of all, you'll have to forgive me

01:04:54.700 because my computer is in a foul mood, so I'm basically talking into a frozen screen, so I just

01:05:00.900 want to make sure you can hear me. I can hear you loud and clear. Can you hear me? Okay, that's great.

01:05:05.260 That's all we need. Right. Well, I was just listening to the end of your monologue.

01:05:10.660 And of course, intergenerational inequality remains a huge issue.

01:05:18.540 It and also one of the problems with this idea that we don't need to use the tools of government or to use other collective tools to produce these good individual outcomes is that it denies the past.

01:05:35.980 right after the second world war one of the reasons we associate the baby boom

01:05:41.340 with all of this prosperity all of this independence and of course we're talking

01:05:46.060 about a whole range of independence right um people were very independent to pursue their

01:05:52.060 dreams if they were in the baby boom and that's because the baby boom was underwritten um by

01:05:59.500 this massive wealth transfer to the parents of baby boomers following the second world war

01:06:07.180 we had not spent any money on demobilization after the first world war and as a consequence

01:06:14.860 although only mongolia and russia left the capitalist world there were revolutions or

01:06:21.020 revolution-like events all over the civilized world right the winnipeg general strike fits into

01:06:27.580 a general context of people coming home from war after the first one and finding no resources,

01:06:33.840 no jobs, no social programs, no anything after giving everything they had for their country.

01:06:40.100 And they rose up against capitalism and went, this is unacceptable, right? The Progressive

01:06:44.860 Party became the second largest party in Ottawa, a party we don't even remember the existence

01:06:49.240 of. And so after the Second World War, the thinking

01:06:53.760 was all through the west that we were going to do things differently in europe that meant the

01:06:59.040 marshall plan it meant massive infrastructure spending to create jobs for veterans to create

01:07:06.640 housing for veterans those kinds of things and in canada and the united states it involved startup

01:07:13.280 business funding for every returning veteran or a free ride to college whichever they chose

01:07:20.240 and so we have to remember that this golden age that we look back on a golden age of relative

01:07:27.200 equality um was underwritten by the government completely reordering society after the second 0.98

01:07:36.400 world war and there were winners and losers in that right a lot of women lost their jobs during

01:07:41.840 that period but the point is that we said collectively um people need a fair shake

01:07:48.480 and the free market has never by itself been enough to give people that fair shake

01:07:53.600 so what are we going to do as a society to reward the things that we want to see in people

01:07:59.120 to reward looking after your kids going to work keeping up a nice home how are we going to as a

01:08:06.720 society make those things priorities so i think um there's been no war but there's been a series

01:08:15.120 of massive wealth realignments since 1991. And to act as though those wealth realignments

01:08:23.400 are the responsibility of individuals or can be solved through individual uncoordinated

01:08:29.620 action is just completely unrealistic. And it's not the mathematical properties that

01:08:34.780 free markets have. Free markets over time polarize their wealth. The main cap on a free

01:08:41.000 market's growth is that consumers start running out of money because the owner class has too much

01:08:48.620 of it. And it has always been the state. It has always been the responsibility of someone to step

01:08:54.660 in and produce that churn. And as I mentioned on a previous program, in America, that didn't used

01:09:00.980 to be the state. It used to be business oligarchs who would come in and fix the economy through 0.78

01:09:08.600 anti-recessionary spending in the like we know jp morgan's name not because he was rich but because

01:09:14.520 he coordinated those actions by wealthy americans to churn wealth back into the economy to make the

01:09:22.200 products they were manufacturing affordable to people so you can't actually go back and find

01:09:28.280 a golden age when free markets delivered for people the moment we have within a generation

01:09:33.480 of having free markets we have had uh there have had to be major market realignment interventions

01:09:41.160 whether they're organized by the private sector or the public and so what's happened since 1991

01:09:47.160 i mean obviously the biggest thing would be kind of neoliberalism and and the austerity measures

01:09:52.280 that came in but a lot of people having like i mean i'm i'm 31 which means i was born the year

01:09:57.560 before that i was born in 1990 on january 1st actually i lived without communism and i missed

01:10:01.880 the 80s by 12 hours i'm very lucky uh but i here i am and so i've lived my entire life progressively

01:10:09.000 that i do have some golden memories of the 90s and things get darker as time goes on the dark

01:10:14.200 timeline continues what happened if someone was 40 if i was 40 instead of 30 or 50 instead of 30

01:10:20.920 what would i remember differently what changed well first of all what i want to say is our

01:10:27.320 collective memory is one of the things that is most under attack through social media,

01:10:31.640 conventional media, and the like. Conservatives in some ways have known this for longer,

01:10:38.840 right? They have been objecting to historical revisionism for longer. But I think wherever

01:10:45.480 you are in the political spectrum now, you can see that our history is in the process of constant

01:10:53.000 re-editing and that has a real social impact so it means that people like me and older often

01:10:59.480 can't remember things having been different because there is uh whether coordinated or not

01:11:07.880 it doesn't have to be coordinated but there's a continuous attack on our social memory

01:11:15.000 of other possible ways of living. And Brian Fawcett put this very well in a very strange

01:11:23.240 book he wrote in 1986 called Cambodia. And it's essentially, it's a little bit like the Bible

01:11:31.640 in that he's trying to remember something a very smart deceased friend of his had to say

01:11:36.840 and he can't quite remember it right and he knows he can't. And so there's a wonderful narrative

01:11:42.120 style there. But central to this whole thing is talking about how when you see the clouds

01:11:50.560 of authoritarianism gathering, one of the first things you see is an attempt to control

01:11:55.440 social memory. To make it seem as though what is present has always been the case. That

01:12:02.300 there was no past that was different from the present. And so Brian Fawcett's argument

01:12:09.000 at the end of the book is you must be able to remember a different past if you want to

01:12:15.320 imagine a different future. And that's really what's at stake today. One of the reasons

01:12:22.220 I think we're seeing very strange coalitions of people coming together to fight elements

01:12:26.960 of the neoliberal order is its attack on our ability to remember or imagine how anything

01:12:33.580 could have been different. So, you know, we look back at a Cold War society. So my mother

01:12:42.120 bought her house in 1970 for $21,500. And she sold it in South Vancouver. And she sold

01:12:53.340 it in, I guess, probably 2015 for $2.15 million. In other words, her house increased in value

01:13:04.600 100 fold. And many people associate, see the affordability crisis simply as being about

01:13:13.460 things getting more expensive. But it's not just that. It has to do with how much of our

01:13:21.140 money we pay to banks. Long mortgages pay a lot of money to banks. High interest rates

01:13:28.880 pay a lot of money to banks. High credit card rates pay a lot. And these were things that

01:13:34.700 governments actively regulated through their own authority over borrowing. In 1974, we

01:13:44.700 moved to our current system of currency trading and borrowing, which was done for reasons

01:13:50.740 that have nothing to do with screwing us um opec was shaking the world down by controlling almost

01:13:59.140 all oil production and industrial economies were taking a pasting because most of them didn't

01:14:06.180 contain any oil within their territory canada being the very rare exception so they're having

01:14:11.620 to import oil they couldn't afford it the price of oil keeps going up manufacturing starts collapsing

01:14:17.540 they figure they need to do something so what they do is they end the breton woods world bank

01:14:25.780 currency agreement that had been made is the first part of the united nations order made in 1944

01:14:31.780 they ended the breton woods currency system and what that meant was that money was no longer

01:14:37.540 linked to any commodity it used to be linked to gold gold might not have been a great choice

01:14:43.300 but the point was that money was linked to a real world thing no longer the case money became

01:14:50.180 a bet about money the value of a currency was whatever people bet it would be and the purpose

01:14:58.340 of this was to create investor rights which is what that which is a big part of our current order

01:15:04.180 that we didn't used to have because they needed to recapture all that money that had gone to 0.85

01:15:09.860 opec countries they didn't want the arabs building nice highways and nice universities and things 0.87

01:15:14.740 like that with our money so they created huge incentives for them to reinvest that money in 0.99

01:15:21.140 our stock exchanges and so that meant dropping foreign ownership requirements dropping foreign

01:15:28.900 currency requirements and giving up control of your exchange rate mechanism and what that means

01:15:35.540 is what things are worth now has almost nothing to do with what we do with them what things are

01:15:42.100 worth now is based on speculation and based on investor rights 1988 the canada u.s free trade

01:15:52.180 agreement pioneered the neoliberal order by creating what we call investor rights and what

01:15:58.180 this means is that the rights of foreign capital in your country are greater than the rights of your

01:16:04.580 citizens and so it enabled the um it enabled the sale yeah so there's an example on the screen

01:16:13.940 there pamela talks about a house that in 20 years triple quadrupled in value whereas my mother's

01:16:22.020 house in the space of the time she owned it increased 100 times in value exactly 100 times

01:16:30.580 the value why did that happen because real estate in much of this country is the ultimate government

01:16:39.860 bond it's never going to go down in value it's only going to go up and you can accumulate that

01:16:46.100 real estate and it's better than any currency uh in terms of collecting value in your portfolio

01:16:54.340 and so why wouldn't savvy international investors spend their real estate money in north america

01:17:02.080 where we have especially in canada governments that are terrified of the political consequences

01:17:08.480 of letting house prices go down that so many people my age and older have planned their

01:17:13.840 retirement based on liquidating a piece of real estate they've been holding on to

01:17:19.020 that those people's retirement plans are now in hazard and it's not like we can live on the

01:17:25.820 government pensions that we were supposed to be able to live on when they were created

01:17:31.100 after the second world war so while we've had these hundredfold increases in the value of real

01:17:37.180 estate we have had the value of pensions decline against inflation and we've had the decision

01:17:44.060 by governments to allow companies that loot other companies to take their pension funds

01:17:51.900 and so what that means is that north americans as they see their pensions getting ever less secure

01:17:58.800 and ever smaller are being forced much as we don't want to to bet on real estate and compete

01:18:07.240 against foreign investors and drive up the prices in our hometowns because our one piece of real

01:18:16.620 estate might be the only thing we have to hang on to to make sure that we don't die in one of those

01:18:23.480 horribly underserviced retirement homes that COVID swept through last year. No, that's all

01:18:30.760 pretty bleak, Stuart, but I really don't think you're wrong. Well, the thing is, if we could

01:18:37.740 just remember, if we could just remember the past, remember that there was a 1945, that there was a

01:18:46.060 1974, what those things do is they open up the possibility to say, why can't we do that again?

01:18:52.840 are we somehow dumber or weaker or less worthy than the people who re-engineered their economy

01:19:03.100 to meet the obligations of the state to those who had served it, to help parents meet the 0.97

01:19:09.740 obligations to their children? Those things aren't out of reach. It's only by destroying

01:19:16.680 our ability to imagine those moments in the future, by destroying our ability to remember

01:19:22.440 those moments in the past, that we take things off the table, that we create the world that

01:19:27.940 Margaret Thatcher so eloquently spoke for when she said there is no alternative. Because that's

01:19:36.380 the only argument that neoliberalism has. The only argument for why we had to do the latest crazy

01:19:43.600 thing. The only argument for why we had to give Royal Dutch Shell $6 billion is because there is

01:19:50.540 no alternative. But in fact history is littered with alternatives. And the future can be full

01:19:59.020 of alternatives again too. But the problem is we have a political class that has destroyed

01:20:05.820 its own capacity for imagination. Our political class itself believes that there is no alternative.

01:20:13.980 of. And so one of the best descriptions of like, and of course, right, I'm speaking from a left-wing

01:20:21.200 perspective. I know there were right-wing translations for this. But, you know, I look

01:20:28.480 at the three sort of leaders, three of the leaders I've most admired politically in recent years.

01:20:37.900 Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Bernie Sanders in the United States, and Gary Burrell, who's about to

01:20:43.720 make his second try at becoming premier of Nova Scotia in a few months. And what do these guys

01:20:50.320 have in common? Now, Bernie Sanders is a genuine genius. He's a truly amazing transformational

01:20:55.420 figure. Not so much Gary Burrell or Jeremy Corbin. I really like those guys, but they're not like,

01:21:02.260 they weren't the smartest guy. They weren't the most charismatic guy. They were just old guys

01:21:08.200 who had the nerve to remember how it was and to tell people how it was. And I'll never forget,

01:21:16.280 I'm watching, you know, because I'm such a political geek, I'm watching the leaders debate

01:21:21.160 from the last Nova Scotia provincial election. And Gary Burrell from the NDP turns in just a

01:21:27.400 garbage performance. He doesn't know how to organize a sound bite. He talks way too long. 0.97

01:21:32.520 The other leaders sort of run the table against him. And I'm watching this thing and I'm feeling

01:21:37.000 kind of depressed and we get to the closing statements and gary says and clearly he's

01:21:44.520 rehearsed the hell out of this but it doesn't matter he says i remember as a boy growing up

01:21:51.160 in yarmouth and when my grandmother was about my age he put me up on his knee and he used to talk

01:21:58.760 to me about you would about how society was going and he would say you know we have the widow's

01:22:07.240 pension now and we have the medicare and we have the workers compensation and you know

01:22:16.520 i think about when i was your age gary and i i think about what it'll be like when you have

01:22:23.400 great your grandson on your knee and you're telling him about all the amazing things that we have now

01:22:30.600 that we didn't used to have and then he just pauses and he turns to the audience

01:22:35.160 but but we don't talk to our grandchildren that way and it was it was absolutely arresting

01:22:43.160 i thought it was probably the greatest moment in any canadian election in the past 25 years

01:22:48.040 because it's such a simple truth it's an undeniable truth and it's rooted in our personal

01:22:54.600 experience uh and so you know i think that i think that that really at its core um

01:23:05.240 if we're to get around this thing if we're to get around this sort of neoliberal juggernaut if there

01:23:10.280 is no alternative we will always transfer more wealth upwards we will always make social programs

01:23:15.800 poor we will always push vehicles or homes or things that people might own further away from

01:23:21.960 them um the way the first way to address that at the ground level is to just listen to older

01:23:31.640 people's stories and tell those stories we have within each of our family systems the ability

01:23:40.280 to remember a different past where we had different priorities and some of those priorities were

01:23:46.280 crazy right like we our ancestors i mean they're pretty crazy with the nuclear weapons and all

01:23:51.960 but uh you know that seems nutty to our modern eyes but there are so many things

01:23:58.120 there were ordinary things in people's lives that could be remembered that um we push down

01:24:05.160 it's really sad that we silo seniors in our society the most in terms of their

01:24:12.960 media but it's also no coincidence that media pitched at seniors is the media

01:24:19.780 that is most aggressive in suppressing people's memories of the past keeping

01:24:25.080 those memories just in the present in this world of competitive outrage and

01:24:31.920 and outrage porn, and how all politics is just symbolic

01:24:37.900 and isn't connected to any of the levers

01:24:40.960 that older people used to be able to pull in our society

01:24:44.100 to change its material order when it wasn't working for them.

01:24:49.280 I think there's a lot of connections to make there.

01:24:51.860 Of course, in the fiction world,

01:24:54.720 and from authors inspiring us,

01:24:57.100 of course, we're thinking of both Kurt Vonnegut

01:24:59.420 uh and of course orwell uh that that their mentions of how memory i mean in in 1984 what

01:25:07.260 was what was freedom the right to remember things as they were to not have things go down the memory

01:25:12.320 hole kurt vonnegut of course making the point in uh the the title escapes me the short story but

01:25:18.000 the the the hero who breaks free and everybody's watching the tv and the little noises go off in

01:25:23.840 their ears every time that they actually have a fully formed thought of something bradshaw or

01:25:29.020 something like that, like the guy who's running amok is the title of that short story.

01:25:33.980 And then to the point of remembering how things were, remembering something transcendent,

01:25:38.880 something different than the present, I'm remembering a post that you made not that 0.74

01:25:42.600 long ago of that moment in Doctor Who where the Soviet soldier says, I still believe in

01:25:47.840 the revolution.

01:25:49.980 And I think that maybe for us conservatives and for us ultramontanist Catholics, it's

01:25:56.400 very much, I believe in God.

01:25:57.860 the creed between the creed and the last gospel right and the darkness has not overcome it

01:26:03.200 exactly but also but there's a there's a flip side to the transcendence right there's a flip

01:26:11.580 side to the transcendence when we think of um religion today so one of the one of the things

01:26:17.840 i hear all the time is um just this nonsense people say i'm spiritual but not religious

01:26:24.340 and i said so that means you believe in magic but have no social responsibility around that belief

01:26:31.040 that's a terrible combo that's like i struggle i struggle to believe in a supernatural or

01:26:40.360 metaphysical world but believing in church is that's a no-brainer that's a no-brainer because

01:26:46.360 is religion is about making some tiny piece of this earth

01:26:53.960 fall into line with the order above.

01:26:58.580 That that's what the work is that you're doing

01:27:01.600 when you're mixing Kool-Aid or laying out cupcakes

01:27:04.660 or doing whatever it is for Sunday,

01:27:07.280 filling up the coffee urn.

01:27:11.200 But we turn church, or we turn the idea of church,

01:27:15.440 And I really see this turn with the Pentecostal televangelists in the 70s is where we see this dramatic turn where so many churches today believe that all religion is, is a story about how you won't die.

01:27:32.240 That that's what it's for, that church is about describing, oddly, it's how people treat political parties now too, right?

01:27:40.120 It's just about describing a cosmic order, but never enacting that cosmic order in your life.

01:27:46.500 I think that, you know, the, yes, churches, I mean, God knows we were talking about, you know, those 250 corpses of indigenous children last week. 0.83

01:27:56.640 I think we're all aware that religion can go wrong and it can go very wrong. 0.72

01:28:02.820 But what religion is being reduced to in our present order is this terrible cartoon.

01:28:12.740 It's just a Robert Shuler or a Ernest Aingeley or a Jimmy Swaggart or, you know, any of the Falwell boys standing up there and describing a world and taking your money.

01:28:30.720 And of course, not putting any of that money into making the world they have described.

01:28:37.020 And so, and we've really played into this in progressive societies, that it makes us

01:28:45.620 uncomfortable when we see churches delivering social programs.

01:28:48.840 It makes us uncomfortable when we see churches sharing with the state some of that role of

01:28:55.460 connecting us and being an institutional backbone in our communities.

01:28:59.640 and you know the I think that it's it's most unfortunate we really have

01:29:13.400 there's this way in which religion has more power than it's had in our

01:29:18.240 politics in some ways that it has in a long time but on the other hand that

01:29:23.760 power really is simply about persuading people to maybe act in an election in a

01:29:32.860 certain way rather than persuading people to reach down and pick up the

01:29:37.640 task with their hands and do it themselves and I I think that as long

01:29:45.240 as we're in this spiritual but not religious kind of society where we think

01:29:50.340 the purpose of religion is the coddling of magical belief

01:29:55.120 rather than the purpose of religion being,

01:29:59.760 bringing this heavenly order into being

01:30:03.020 on the surface of the earth where you're located.

01:30:06.220 So I think that in a way we've lost some social memory

01:30:10.160 there too, because people forget that churches

01:30:14.240 were our welfare system, our education system,

01:30:17.660 our counseling system, they're still bearing.

01:30:21.360 I mean, and we instead think that the purpose of church is theology

01:30:29.960 or theological speculation.

01:30:33.320 And I, again, it's that problem of not being able to remember a past

01:30:40.540 that existed before 1945, that that's our time horizon.

01:30:47.660 at best and and so as we try to chart a way out of here we assess the situation as it is again

01:30:56.620 again things are things are bleak uh and uh and and we understand why but but now the question

01:31:04.220 becomes what would chart us out of here you've you've spoken before both privately to me as well

01:31:10.540 as on this program and in your social media posts you've spoken very very uh candidly about the

01:31:16.300 nature of captured space that that every kind of revolutionary uh tool every kind of tool that

01:31:22.700 would bring about renewal has in one way or another appeared to have become captured what

01:31:27.420 what does an uncaptured space look like what does disorganized organized resistance look like

01:31:34.300 well i think the first thing is um you know one of the you know i'm not a particularly

01:31:39.820 politically dangerous person anymore i was more dangerous in my youth but the one thing that made

01:31:46.940 me dangerous was that um my comrades and i could turn out and make a thing happen without spending

01:31:57.280 money um no money needed to flow into our group in order for us to organize 26 simultaneous

01:32:05.680 protests in the province or run 71 candidates in an election or something like that that very much

01:32:13.480 you know i'm a very old-fashioned person in the way i have friends and the way i make associations

01:32:19.520 which is that you build a relationship and there's reciprocity but none of that reciprocity should be

01:32:25.800 in terms of money that that the core of organizing if you are organizing like a human there's only

01:32:33.860 one thing you say when you organize people are like well what should our message be what should

01:32:37.380 i what should we say to these people to get them on board and i go there's only one thing you say

01:32:42.100 if you are building a real organic um intervention at a an activist or a political level you call

01:32:52.260 up your you call up someone you know and you say hey can you do me a favor that's it

01:32:59.300 that a real human way of organizing is just about chains of people trusting each other

01:33:06.900 and doing each other favors. That's it. But one of the ironies of what we call austerity,

01:33:16.340 this process by which government budgets didn't shrink but government programs somehow did

01:33:23.780 after 1991 after the end of the cold war um a big part of austerity was the government spinning off

01:33:33.940 various charitable tasks onto the non-profit sector so various things like looking after

01:33:43.060 mentally handicapped people went from people being paid 30 bucks an hour with real professional

01:33:49.860 qualifications doing it for the government in 1989 to by 1995 in bc people being paid 10.50

01:33:57.700 an hour because they're working through a non-profit that's now looking after those handicapped

01:34:03.780 people and having their work supplemented by volunteers who are being paid nothing

01:34:08.580 but within all that non-profit societies the charitable sector got much richer so while

01:34:18.860 there this produced real austerity real loss of competence real loss of service it bloated up

01:34:26.500 all these charities and around the same time um family trusts got into the business

01:34:35.160 so the charitable sector also became a wash in family trust money so and we saw this early on

01:34:43.140 with the petroleum industry trying to silence environmentalists in bc from talking about

01:34:47.700 climate change so environmentalists in bc didn't talk about climate change between 1995 and 1991

01:34:53.180 because the pew charitable trust the charitable family trust arm of sun core paid them a million

01:35:00.540 a year not to. And so with all this family trust money as the super rich are getting richer and

01:35:07.960 creating things like the Maytree Foundation and the Tides Foundation and what have you,

01:35:13.560 governments are also using nonprofits to do this. And what this effectively means

01:35:18.340 is that real old-fashioned nonprofit citizen organizations don't exist for the most part

01:35:24.460 anymore. Associations or people in their neighborhoods get together and, you know,

01:35:29.720 you create your little board of directors and you see people on them and nobody's being paid

01:35:34.200 and everybody's putting money in. Little tiny bits of money in the form of chocolate chip cookies

01:35:40.760 or old-fashioned postage stamps or a ride to the copying place or whatever it is,

01:35:47.000 you know, a ream of paper they pilfered from work. The point is that organizations

01:35:54.840 that are just made out of honor and loyalty and connection for the most part don't exist anymore 0.80

01:36:02.900 most people don't know how to organize in those organizations anymore so if you were to poach like

01:36:09.060 an adp organizer or a green party organizer and you were to put them in charge of a regular

01:36:15.980 old school citizens organization with no money they wouldn't know how to do anything they wouldn't

01:36:21.760 understand how you could possibly get this stuff done for free. They wouldn't understand what to

01:36:25.840 live on if they weren't being paid. And we don't just see this on the left. We see it through

01:36:31.460 all parts of society where between governments and family trusts, our organizations came to

01:36:38.880 be colonized. And there's a very simple way forward. Organizations that are made out of

01:36:46.740 trust and loyalty and whole human social bonds still work it's still the only way i organize

01:36:54.660 um they still work but they have these crises of confidence because people are told that that kind

01:37:04.820 of organizing is impossible in fact they can't even imagine a past in which it took place so

01:37:11.140 everybody starts to go so where are we going to find money where are we going to find the grant

01:37:14.900 where are we going to find the donors where and and if you just say you know what we're not

01:37:21.140 we're not we're we're gonna do this we're gonna do this the way human beings organized since time

01:37:27.700 immemorial why the hell would the government or the corporations help us organize against them 0.97

01:37:35.140 like that's dumb to even think that they would like like what kind of strategic nut job do you 0.83

01:37:42.020 have to be to go why isn't my enemy working harder to help me it's like that they're not supposed to 0.97

01:37:48.500 they're not supposed to give you any money that's not what's supposed to happen that's not how it

01:37:53.220 works but people lack that confidence because they lack that memory that this is actually how

01:37:58.900 we made most social change in the world so and we do see these eruptions of spontaneous organizing

01:38:07.380 right we saw it with the kids on vancouver island and the seniors on vancouver island

01:38:13.000 some of whom i was in the clackwood blockades with organizing around that old growth login

01:38:17.720 and we'll see and i'm seeing this with um big uh convoy of uh of um uh big rig owners out of

01:38:27.580 vanderhoof who are organizing a convoy down to the coast to commemorate the 215 aboriginal kids

01:38:33.800 we lost and like that's a beautiful thing to see but the problem is that when we actually do

01:38:41.800 non-monetized organizing when we actually do organizing that gets done for free

01:38:47.440 um we don't make an organization out of it we've lost that memory of how to turn

01:38:55.060 a spontaneous upwelling of camaraderie and community and honor and this shared opinion,

01:39:04.660 we've forgotten how to store that in our organizations, right? We're watching

01:39:11.480 organizations in our communities, our fraternal organizations wither on the vine, right? Everybody's

01:39:18.840 dying except the rotarians you know even the masons are in trouble now and uh so there's this

01:39:27.080 missing piece there of connecting spontaneous organizing to institution building outside the

01:39:34.840 state and i think it's a shared loss everywhere i think everybody across this political spectrum

01:39:40.920 has lost the same information and it was hard won information uh building um you know this

01:39:50.080 different way of organizing but instead every time people go yeah we should do that they look

01:39:56.320 at the monumental task of building an organization that is resistant to capture that's democratic

01:40:01.720 that's based on personal connection that doesn't require the patronage of government or something

01:40:06.680 else and then there's this fear it's like but i work for this union and it has like eight million

01:40:14.360 dollars to spend on this kind of organizing i'll just stick with it and i'll try and get that money

01:40:19.560 to come out it's like the money is never coming out that money was never going to get spent on

01:40:25.480 something useful and although it might feel close it's not close and i know people have the same

01:40:31.480 thing with their church it's like if i could just get my church to care again it's sitting on all

01:40:36.440 this real estate it's sitting on this money it's like no these institutions have been captured

01:40:42.040 they've been captured by a sophisticated system of neoliberal patronage that you can't break into

01:40:48.520 and it exists culturally through the executive director class and the person who might be the

01:40:53.320 executive director of you know of uh of an environmental non-profit might be the um you

01:41:01.900 know civil society communicator for a union next year or an assistant or deputy minister in

01:41:07.340 government the year after that right those people aren't going to let that money go that money's

01:41:11.500 theirs it got there because of them and it's not going anywhere and if people keep holding it but

01:41:21.720 people it's hard like and i fell into this trap down during the 2018 referendum

01:41:27.000 if i had simply built my own yes committee in that referendum in bc um i we probably still would

01:41:35.480 have lost but i would have not spent all of my time arguing with people controlling different

01:41:42.200 funds from different unions about why they weren't spending the money rationally on trying to win the

01:41:47.960 referendum but we're actually spending the money on trying to lose it uh and um you know so i

01:41:56.920 understand the temptation you're in this captured institution that didn't used to be captured it

01:42:02.040 used to be part of a thing that was part of yours your stuff and now it's not but now it has all

01:42:07.800 this money and all these resources and like if you could just but you can't you can't it's captured

01:42:15.800 and i think that um it's really interesting looking at how much authority we've already given

01:42:25.080 away in order to make that capture possible you would never guess right that greenpeace

01:42:31.640 came into being because of a vote that people took at a meeting of the sierra club

01:42:37.080 where the sierra club of british columbia split into two organizations

01:42:40.760 over a fight that was democratically resolved um we think now of organizations like that as brands

01:42:49.560 we think of them as corporate brands that um put their label on something and change the meaning

01:42:55.960 of that thing by changing how it's labeled so um yeah i don't think there are easy solutions i think

01:43:03.320 we've had the solution to capture all along and uh the thing that has held us back is laziness

01:43:09.000 uh laziness combined with impatience because that's the other thing if you're you know

01:43:16.440 recognize most people watching this show don't see climate as the existential crisis that i do

01:43:23.840 but just as i spend time getting my consciousness into the bodies uh into people who see abortion

01:43:31.560 as an existential crisis and having imaginative empathy for them i think that there's a thing

01:43:38.280 that both of these movements have in common which is that both movements are convinced that so many

01:43:45.600 people are going to die next year if we don't fix this thing right away that we've got to take some

01:43:51.940 high risk desperate shortcut and i know that like that's one of the reasons you know in terms of my

01:43:59.780 emotional constitution i can get on with pro-life folks in ways that many people on the way out on

01:44:05.180 left of the political spectrum can't because I can understand what it's like getting up in the

01:44:09.180 morning going oh my god this indescribably terrible thing is going to happen and part of it's happening

01:44:14.860 today like I can't even do anything about what's happening today you know I'm just but what if we

01:44:21.900 could do something about what's happening next year well we would have to like do all these

01:44:25.580 crazy shortcuts and take all these really crazy long shots to do that and so there's a kind of

01:44:32.140 of emotional discipline you have to take on to go we we gotta stop we've got to actually come up

01:44:39.000 with a real plan that goes somewhere incrementally that has a shot at succeeding because this endless

01:44:46.980 series of desperate deals and shortcuts every time we take the next shortcut it walks us further to

01:44:54.620 the margins it certainly does it adds it adds to the chaos and then we have an entire industry based

01:45:01.660 on on said chaos that that as it just adds to the noise uh it just makes it makes for more copy

01:45:08.080 right like i mean i'm i'm in media here right the more panic there is the more stuff there is to put

01:45:12.900 into content if the world becomes calm and peaceful tomorrow this show is gonna have to end um

01:45:18.000 fortunately there's no risk of that well there it is but i i think that what you've described

01:45:24.480 steward is actually very helpful uh i think and i think it is very it's very informative too as like

01:45:30.220 to think about these things to have the language to think about these things i think that's

01:45:34.120 something on the right we have a lot of problem with there we have some ways of talking about it

01:45:37.680 when it comes to honor and that sort of thing but to kind of articulate very accurately what's gone

01:45:43.400 wrong when it comes to capture and that sort of thing that's that is a difficulty for us on the

01:45:48.060 right sometimes so i actually thank you for for helping us have the language to do that and and

01:45:53.980 to encourage us to reach across the aisle so we kind of close out the hour here i i'm just you

01:45:59.000 know i'm kind of i'm kind of struck by all these ideas what what's kind of the the key well the

01:46:05.560 key i mean that's terrible language too where where where are you putting a lot of this energy

01:46:10.100 today where where are you trying to to do this sort of human organizing right now what's what's

01:46:16.220 your focus uh at the moment well this actually this dovetails two things i wanted to say

01:46:22.860 so the language of capture is not language that's used on the political left at all um the political

01:46:29.400 left has no interest in talking about how captured it is it doesn't use the term the language of

01:46:34.600 capture is language that i got into because of my conflict with trans rights activists last year

01:46:42.420 um and i was very warmly welcomed into this very interesting community of activists who call

01:46:49.820 themselves gender critical feminists they're folks who oppose things like what chris elston

01:46:56.700 was on talking about a couple weeks ago giving puberty blockers to minors um you know letting um

01:47:05.820 natal males into women's prisons with women's shelters women's transition houses things like 1.00

01:47:12.860 that right that they're they're old school feminists fighting for the rights of women um

01:47:20.140 and who and they oppose the inclusion of trans women in the category of women they don't oppose

01:47:27.820 their equality but they oppose their inclusion in that category and of course gay rights organizations

01:47:35.580 and feminist organizations have been overwhelmingly captured by money from

01:47:42.780 so that they expel gender critical feminists and in fact you get into ridiculous situations like

01:47:48.540 chris's where they actually encourage antifa to beat gender critical feminists in the street

01:47:55.820 right that there's actual violence being perpetrated and they're the movement that

01:48:02.540 that has come up with the best and most effective analysis

01:48:06.280 around questions of capture.

01:48:08.260 I've learned a tremendous amount from them

01:48:10.560 in the past eight months.

01:48:13.500 So that's really where to look.

01:48:15.420 And for conservatives,

01:48:17.000 I would really encourage you to look there

01:48:19.140 because when it comes to things like puberty blockers,

01:48:26.780 gender education in schools, women's spaces,

01:48:30.980 that stuff they are your allies and they in fact will work with people who vehemently disagree

01:48:37.620 with them on questions of abortion in order to fight um this stuff but they're the people who

01:48:44.260 produced a lot of language around institutional capture and for that reason they're a movement

01:48:50.500 that is really aware they're wary they're sharp they're engaged in that analysis and

01:48:57.780 they're a pleasure to organize with um if people feel at sea you know um there's a whole twitter

01:49:07.300 community canadian women's sex-based rights uh cause bar uh great people to get in touch with

01:49:16.340 um in terms of my own organizing uh i have retreated into my institute um there isn't

01:49:24.100 some part of the larger political, I mean, there are allies I find in the larger political spectrum,

01:49:32.580 characters like Derek Jensen and his movement Deep Green Resistance, but they're like

01:49:41.620 my institute. They're small, they're outward looking, they're engaged in public education,

01:49:49.940 And that's really what I'm doing. My institute teaches courses, it runs reading groups, and although it comes from a very distinctively, a particular kind of socialism, one that, for instance, I mean, our motto comes from the Bible.

01:50:06.780 Our organization has a lot of people of faith, although interestingly, they tend to be people from enacted religions like Judaism, Mormonism, and Sikhism, which is a fun religious mix to have on our board.

01:50:21.720 But ultimately, although there are lots of strangers in the organization now and the organization is operating in Europe in ways that I never thought it would, that organization, you know, came out of a gentleman's dinner club organized by my friend Dan.

01:50:44.480 the legal organization had existed before but the team was really born in this informal setting

01:50:52.640 and so one of the other things i would say is the best people to organize with are not the people

01:50:57.200 who agree with you the most the best people to organize with are your friends you find one thing

01:51:02.240 to organize that you agree with your friends about that you want to organize about and that's

01:51:07.680 that's that's what you do um you know i really hope that more people take that turn more people

01:51:16.240 take their courses more people take our ideas into their communities and i know that's happening with

01:51:21.280 all kinds of organizations out there but one of the big problems we have to get over with if we're

01:51:27.280 to move past neoliberalism is to understand that the base unit of society is not the individual

01:51:35.760 what we're constructed out, and you can look back at primates, right? Tell me about all the

01:51:46.700 solitary primates. No, primates have weird things encoded in their genes like restless leg syndrome

01:51:53.660 so that one in every 15 will walk around the family group at night and guard it.

01:51:59.060 uh that's that's how we're built um we're built as communities and it's just about discovering

01:52:08.820 your community and recognizing that there is power in your community if it is made out of

01:52:14.340 something other than money and very quickly the people we're up against are gonna fear that

01:52:21.620 community not because it's big not because it's smart but because it's made out of something it

01:52:29.300 can't make things out of neoliberalism can only make things out of money to fight us and the

01:52:35.940 things that we need to make shouldn't be made out of money they should be made out of older more

01:52:42.420 powerful things and so i know that that that in a way seems overly simple but it actually is that

01:52:53.620 simple if uh if you want to scare the uh the people who are putting your survival out of reach

01:53:03.700 your community out of reach if you want to scare those people just getting together with your

01:53:10.420 friends um and deciding to resist in some small way uh will scare them far more than a government

01:53:21.940 uh or a non-profit society that's on the take um doing some saber rattling because um

01:53:31.940 there isn't a natural power over you there isn't uh that money only has the power over you

01:53:42.040 to the extent that you're willing to take the money

01:53:44.440 if you can't be bought you can't be bought yeah and i um and i think that um you know people are

01:53:56.400 bewildered and frightened i couldn't believe it took the you know i can't believe how much money

01:54:04.160 the green party of british columbia spent on their last provincial election it was like three quarters

01:54:09.200 of a million dollars and they only ran candidates in two of the eight ridings in northern bc

01:54:16.240 i thought well when i was the leader of the party in 1996 when it had a fraction of the members

01:54:23.440 we conducted a provincial election campaign for 71 000 and of course we ran in every riding in

01:54:31.100 northern bc uh you know where that there's a weird way in which you look at people who style

01:54:39.900 themselves as dissidents or you know what have you um in many ways they are some of the people

01:54:46.840 who are most dependent on the largesse of the state and that you know one of the things that

01:54:57.700 one of the things we should recognize if we want to avoid capture is also learn how to recognize

01:55:03.480 captured organizations you want to look at the surnames of the people on that board you want to

01:55:09.560 look at the contracts they have you want to look at what jobs they rotate into when they're not

01:55:14.720 being the thing they're presenting themselves as on television uh irrespective of the issue

01:55:22.400 there it's very much i think in many ways people would do well to study the brazilian dictatorship

01:55:29.600 of 1964 to 85. if you want to understand what neoliberalism is and what it does

01:55:37.680 pretty much everything about our present social order was tested on the people of brazil during

01:55:42.880 a 20-year period. And one of the things about it was that unlike other dictatorships, the

01:55:52.320 Brazilian dictators made sure that parliament kept meeting the whole time they were under

01:55:58.120 authoritarian rule. And that the parliament elected a prime minister. And that two parties

01:56:03.460 with two different platforms competed in the election, even as the generals were vetting

01:56:09.400 the platforms and candidates for both parties. And it's not a little junta of Portuguese

01:56:18.280 speaking generals. But that's the system we have. That's what capture is. Capture is about

01:56:25.080 maintaining the appearance of diversity while making all apparent expressions of dissent

01:56:33.480 dependent on the very system from which one is expressing dissent

01:56:40.520 yeah controlled opposition it's uh the smartest play you can make if you want to keep control

01:56:44.920 for sure all right well on that cheery note um you know maybe next time we can uh we could have

01:56:52.920 we can have some fun uh with uh 1960s brazil there are some most amusing stories i think

01:56:59.560 john thompson who i'm really glad is uh getting on the program regularly smartest guy uh in

01:57:05.240 conservative foreign policy the whole time i've known him uh but uh we might have to uh lead off

01:57:11.560 with thompson's story of um his own personal interactions with the results of the brilliant

01:57:17.080 brazilian dictatorship because that's a fun ride absolutely absolutely well we'll bring everybody

01:57:23.240 together at some point definitely as we get into the summer people's schedules change but we're

01:57:27.160 We're very thankful to have you here today, Stuart.

01:57:29.680 And again, of course, that's Stuart Parker,

01:57:31.760 president of Los Altos Institute,

01:57:33.300 telling us how to get into uncaptured territory

01:57:36.060 and take back the human element.

01:57:38.260 Thank you so much, Stuart.

01:57:39.620 Thanks, Nathan. Bye.

01:57:41.420 Absolutely.

01:57:42.540 Well, that was Mountain Standard time for this week.

01:57:45.360 This was episode 30.

01:57:46.740 Of course, if you have any suggestions

01:57:48.440 for guests and people that we should bring on,

01:57:50.980 always make sure that you send us an email.

01:57:53.820 I've got my email right there.

01:57:55.200 and anybody you'd like to have us

01:57:57.280 have as guests here

01:57:58.640 any questions, comments, concerns you have about

01:58:01.140 the show, please forward them to myself

01:58:03.080 and we can address

01:58:05.120 those and try and make the

01:58:07.140 show as good as we can. It's still a work

01:58:09.140 in progress. We're only 30 episodes in but we

01:58:11.060 really enjoyed our first 10 weeks here

01:58:13.000 at the Western Standard with

01:58:15.180 Mountain Standard Time and

01:58:16.900 we're enjoying ourselves. It's a good time

01:58:19.120 but again, thank you so much for

01:58:21.060 tuning in today and

01:58:23.060 giving us a little bit of your

01:58:25.140 time we're hopeful that in the not so in the not so uh distant future we'll be able to bring on

01:58:32.420 some guests for what is probably the upcoming federal election so stay tuned for that we'll

01:58:36.580 have some announcements about that uh in the not so distant future course will be up bright and

01:58:41.460 early again, 9 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Mountain on Tuesday. We'll see you then. Thanks for watching.

Western Standard - June 11, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - June 10, 2021

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