Western Standard - Mountain Standard Time - June 24th, 2021

00:00:00.000 You

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 Yes, good morning and welcome to Mountain Standard Time.

00:01:25.100 I'm your host, Nathan Gita.

00:01:26.780 And today, of course, I'll be speaking with Stuart Parker and Aaron Ekman.

00:01:30.500 It is Thursday, after all, and we'll be doing our roundup of the news,

00:01:34.100 as well as some interpretation of it later on in the program.

00:01:37.100 First and foremost, of course, we're going to be doing our endorsement.

00:01:40.420 It's Resistance Coffee, as always.

00:01:42.480 Resistance Coffee, of course, is based out of Weyburn, Saskatchewan,

00:01:45.400 and they are locally roasted here in Canada.

00:01:47.980 They bring in the beans, and they roast them here in Canada.

00:01:50.360 And the big thing about Resistance Coffee is, of course, they don't support woke causes.

00:01:54.740 So they don't skim something off the top and pay into woke causes that curtail your freedom.

00:01:59.280 They actually go the other direction and help support those organizations that are trying to expand or preserve our heritage of liberty in Canada.

00:02:07.000 If you use the promo code, the Western Standard, on your first purchase, you will get about 10% off.

00:02:13.520 It's pretty great.

00:02:14.540 So that's where we're starting off with today, but we're going to bring Aaron on right away, and he's going to tell us what's happening in the world.

00:02:20.420 Aaron, what is going on?

00:02:21.900 uh well this i should start again by saying that what's going on in my house right now is this cup

00:02:27.820 of coffee is amazing i have to say it's there it is there it is and it's and it's as as you said

00:02:34.400 in the outset it's resistance coffee and it's good stuff i they roast some pretty good beans

00:02:38.720 out there in saskatchewan and i recommend that folks get a hold of it i just also like to show

00:02:43.620 off my mug uh which i'm rather proud of i think i found it at a at a value village somewhere or

00:02:50.140 something but we should make sure that the other one of these gets out to you that's uh i don't

00:02:55.000 think they i don't think they have any merch yet so we got to figure out when this is going to

00:02:59.520 happen but yeah i would well it looks like it's a little larger than mine so if you can fit more

00:03:03.520 resistance coffee into that mug that's my kind of mug that's great that's really good feel the

00:03:08.420 resistance that's right now as you know we're uh we're on the cusp of a major heat wave here in

00:03:14.540 british columbia so i do have my window open so if if my uh there's a chandelier hanging over my

00:03:19.180 ahead of it starts to blow around on me I'll close the window but it's people need to I think

00:03:23.860 prepare for this coming weekend it's going to be record high heats and especially those of us in

00:03:29.100 the north that aren't used to you know really high temperatures if you haven't got an air

00:03:33.300 conditioner make sure you you know get a couple of cheap fans and just blow the air through your

00:03:38.060 house I know a lot of people think that you're supposed to blow air from outside into your house

00:03:42.400 during the day the secret is to blow the hot air from inside your house out so point the fans

00:03:47.420 outside blow the air up try to get a breeze going through your house close your blinds and your

00:03:52.340 curtains during the day open all your windows at night i know it's it's uh you know for folks down

00:03:58.040 south that's that's pretty basic stuff for those of us up here that aren't used to it because you

00:04:02.820 know when you're starting to get into the high 30s and and early 40s like they're they're talking

00:04:06.760 about in the soy use in particular uh you know people can start to die from from that kind of

00:04:11.240 heat so um that's that's my psa morning uh message for the for the morning for western standard

00:04:17.540 listeners and it is important to actually realize that here we are uh up in northern northern

00:04:23.680 british columbia uh the the funny thing is that we just don't get heat like this so we're just

00:04:28.640 not used to thank god it's a dry heat like i mean humidity alone just kills us like anybody who's

00:04:34.160 watching us from the great lakes area or out towards manitoba at some parts of saskatchewan

00:04:38.460 but definitely manitoba lake country and then out into ontario i i can't like 20 and humidity kills

00:04:44.860 me like i can do 28 and dry but 20 and humidity is just i uh like just i'm like and i know you

00:04:54.540 know i mean the regular warnings of course don't leave your kids in the car don't leave your pets

00:04:57.900 anywhere other than uh where they're supposed to be and uh but you know i i think that as we do the

00:05:03.660 the news roundups uh throughout the summer it's it's going to start to shift to forest fires in

00:05:08.420 the province that's the that'll be the big challenge for us this we just got rid of masks

00:05:12.820 i don't want to put them on again no i know i mean i was just you know i was driving down to

00:05:16.880 vancouver uh uh last week um uh because i i haven't done that drive in i think over a year now

00:05:24.120 and and i saw three or four helicopters dropping water bombs already so it's uh i think it's going

00:05:30.220 to be a bit of a rough and that's that hits us hard it hits the folks in the caribou really hard

00:05:33.920 I mean they've been evacuated now a couple years running and some of those businesses have never

00:05:37.760 recovered and and so they went through that before the pandemic hit so uh they you know I mean they

00:05:43.340 need some help they need some assistance from the government and it's a good segue I think into

00:05:47.340 one of the three stories that I wanted to highlight for you today in BC uh we'd reported earlier on

00:05:53.780 this on this channel about um uh we'd reported earlier on this channel about the nbc fund

00:06:03.580 uh which has been set up uh by the minister of i i can't remember what his full title is minister

00:06:09.840 of jobs and innovation basically i think that it's one of those ministries where the the title

00:06:13.900 changes each time there's a new government uh but it basically set up a half a billion dollar

00:06:19.840 investment fund to try to seed a bunch of British Columbian companies, sort of a venture capital

00:06:25.080 venture. And what we'd reported on previously was that this particular fund had been removed

00:06:32.740 from the same FOI regulations as everything else in government in BC, which is to say if a reporter

00:06:39.240 is interested in finding out for the public interest, sort of how the money is being spent

00:06:43.180 or where it's being spent or sort of what they're doing with it, they don't have the same ability

00:06:47.600 to get that information so that was troubling there's some new news on that front which is a

00:06:53.780 little less troubling I think in fact it might be a little bit encouraging but we should probably

00:06:59.800 approach with a bit of caution at least critically and that is that a fairly well-known internationally

00:07:05.800 economist by the name of Marianna Mazzucato she's an Italian-American economist with some 0.75

00:07:11.900 international fame uh has just been retained by the provincial government by that ministry

00:07:17.500 uh to the tune of 350 000 and let me um share my screen here and i'll just show you the

00:07:24.700 the story on this and there is that coming up

00:07:36.460 bc hires uk economists to help save capitalism from itself yeah they describe her as a uk

00:07:47.160 economist she's working at the um i think it's a university college of london but she's advised

00:07:51.900 governments around the world and she is a i think she was born in italy but has american citizenship

00:07:57.660 and she's it's it's interesting i mean the reason why i think this is interesting for british

00:08:03.580 colombians to pay attention to is because when a government hires an economist like this

00:08:08.860 uh to advise them on some initiative it says a lot about what direction economically the

00:08:17.100 government wants to go in um i like that little rabbit that was that was pretty cool actually

00:08:24.620 the infinity i call it the infinity hole yeah yeah there you go that was weird i've never seen

00:08:29.660 that before yeah that's what happens when you use this online broadcasting stuff anyway um she

00:08:35.820 i've got a little video that uh of her talking and i have to apologize to folks it's an excerpt

00:08:41.980 from a ted talk and we were joking on the outset here that you know this is what we've descended

00:08:46.540 to is running clips from ted talks but but it does it's an it's an opportunity for us to get

00:08:50.660 a sense of sort of how she's going to advise the government if i just sort of summarize it

00:08:53.680 she is basically uh she's basically um uh she i mean she she she's not a socialist i don't think

00:09:05.380 so so folks that are worried about the kind of economists that the ndp might bring in from the

00:09:10.140 left for instance i don't think they have anything to worry about but she is a big advocate of more

00:09:14.960 public and and by public i mean government involvement in innovation related ventures

00:09:20.800 which is kind of perfect for i mean it sort of tells the story of what the provincial government

00:09:25.760 is trying to do right now with this in in bc fund it's this idea that we need to incubate more bc

00:09:30.640 businesses and try to expand our uh our economic base to some degree and so what she would argue 0.79

00:09:38.080 i think if i can summarize it and i have you know full disclosure here i haven't had it i i wasn't

00:09:42.400 fully aware of her before the announcement so i haven't had a chance to equate myself with her

00:09:46.000 work i intend to read some of her books she's written rather extensively on this stuff but she

00:09:51.280 she talks about how government has to play a role in seeding information she talks a lot about what

00:09:57.200 she calls the entrepreneurial state etc and so what sort of what the questions that pop up in

00:10:03.840 my mind when i hear you know her talks and stuff is is this another way of of trying to redress

00:10:11.040 the old p3 model the private public partnership model where essentially government it takes on

00:10:17.280 all of the risk hires a private company to do the work they make a bunch of money

00:10:22.080 and in many cases at the end of it they also retain the operational rights etc and some of

00:10:26.720 the ownership rights and if and most of the but most of the risk is assumed by government and by

00:10:32.880 extension the taxpayer and i think her whole thesis is that's a problematic arrangement in

00:10:40.240 the sense that bc taxpayers or any public taxpayers are required to assume most of the risk in these

00:10:46.160 ventures and too little of the reward so what she's advocating is if you're going to go down

00:10:51.040 this road to try to seed and incubate private firms to build up your own economy you have to

00:10:56.320 to do so in a way that British Columbians will reap the economic benefit from it and

00:11:03.520 not assume all of the risk.

00:11:05.760 Well, that's easy to say.

00:11:07.500 How do you do it and still sort of attract the kind of businesses you need to do this

00:11:11.400 work?

00:11:13.080 And her thesis is for those I think who would say that government isn't capable of doing

00:11:19.540 anything that's innovative whatsoever, she takes that thesis on head on.

00:11:24.320 if we just switch over to the video clip here i'll just play a little blurb of her addressing this

00:11:31.040 issue we'll just wait for the producer to put it up on the screen there it's already uploaded

00:11:41.920 really cool revolutionary thinking out of the box things in the iphone well you know what actually

00:11:47.600 makes your phone a smartphone basically instead of a stupid phone so the internet which you can 0.88

00:11:51.840 surf the web anywhere you are in the world uh gps where you can actually know where you are 0.94

00:11:56.640 anywhere in the world the touchscreen display which makes it also really easy to use phone

00:12:01.600 for anybody these are the very smart revolutionary bits about the iphone and they're all government

00:12:08.320 funded and the point is that the internet was funded by darpa us department of defense gps

00:12:16.080 was funded by the military's uh navistar program even even the siri was actually funded by darpa

00:12:22.240 the touchscreen display was funded by two public uh grants by the cia and the nsf to two um public

00:12:30.480 researchers public university researchers at the university of delaware now you might be thinking

00:12:34.480 well she's just said you know the word defense and military an awful lot but what's really interesting

00:12:38.960 is that this is actually true in sector after sector and department after department so the

00:12:43.520 the pharmaceutical industry, which I am personally very interested in because I've actually had the

00:12:47.240 fortune to study it in quite some depth, it's wonderful to be asking this question about the

00:12:52.660 revolutionary versus non-revolutionary bits, because each and every medicine can actually

00:12:56.860 be divided up on whether it really is revolutionary or incremental. So the new molecular entities with

00:13:02.660 priority rating are the revolutionary new drugs, whereas the slight variations of existing drugs,

00:13:08.880 viagra different color different dosage are the less revolutionary ones so that's probably a good

00:13:14.800 place to leave it so you see like she makes the case that all of the most innovative parts of

00:13:20.740 technology both in the united states and around the world uh have large and she talks a lot about

00:13:26.580 sort of silicon valley firms etc all of the big tech giants google microsoft uh etc her basic

00:13:34.280 thesis is none of these things would have innovated to the degree they did without massive

00:13:38.760 uh injections of publicly funded research innovation etc and so what what she's saying

00:13:44.820 here is that you can't you can't make it's just not it's a fallacy to say that all of this

00:13:49.960 innovation just spawned from the private sector uh and in fact you know she references a bunch of

00:13:55.100 clips from bill gates etc you know sort of in the early days talking about how you know like

00:14:00.520 how none of what they produced there would have been possible without this wave of public sector

00:14:05.860 investment and research etc but the questions I have about this it's not to say that I'm

00:14:11.200 criticizing them retaining her and you know people might be concerned about the $350,000 price tag

00:14:16.320 for her consultancy I guess it's really not a lot of money when you're talking about government

00:14:21.160 projects like this especially when you're talking about you know trying to put together a plan on

00:14:26.440 innovation for the province etc and and it's not just her it's also a team of six other economists

00:14:31.520 apparently that'll be working with the ministry uh but keep in mind just to put it in context

00:14:36.180 you know when when the bcndp government first came in they spent two million dollars over two years

00:14:41.800 on a ubc project to write a report on a universal basic income the conclusion of which was you know

00:14:49.500 after the two-year project was over yeah you know we don't really know uh we should probably just

00:14:54.360 continue doing what we're doing kind of thing that was two million dollars so this is a fraction of

00:14:58.200 that and so it'll be interesting to see whether the recommendations that she makes in terms of

00:15:04.640 trying to create this entrepreneurial state to try to incubate bc-based businesses etc can be

00:15:10.520 scaled down to the size of british columbia given that what she's usually talking about are these

00:15:16.020 massive tech firms that have benefited from major statewide state level investment etc i guess the

00:15:24.060 question is does the bc government have the kind of capital she's talking about uh to to be able

00:15:29.980 to produce this level of innovation which can help incubate these firms and indeed in the press

00:15:36.060 conference she did yesterday one of the first things she said was uh we don't want that yet

00:15:40.140 one of the first one of the one of the first although i love seeing b.a johnson but one of

00:15:46.120 the first things that she said was uh and directly to the minister when she was talking was you know

00:15:51.820 this half a billion dollar investment fund is not going to be enough uh in terms of doing what we

00:15:57.180 want to do here i've seen ottawa fund revolutionary research by dnd transfer to private companies who

00:16:02.300 sold elsewhere yes so i would argue john i mean that's a fantastic point i would argue that's sort

00:16:07.100 of the the traditional p3 model and not just in military uh that happens also in um health care 0.97

00:16:15.740 happens in education it certainly happens in construction and i mean like in esquimalt uh

00:16:21.420 Perfect example, I got a tour of the base down there a few years ago from one of the unions that

00:16:27.980 was on site when I was Secretary of Treasurer of the BC Fed. For the last 50 years, the government

00:16:35.100 has basically done most of its production through a private entity. I think it's called Public Works

00:16:40.220 or something, but it's essentially a private corporation. It's got its own profit margin.

00:16:45.660 It doesn't, you know, the revenue doesn't really come back to government kind of thing.

00:16:48.740 So it's, it's, it's kind of, I mean, it's, it should be a crown court system, I think,

00:16:55.440 so that you've got that, the benefit of the public infrastructure, public involvement

00:17:00.060 in the actual construction, but you've also, you also derive the benefit from it.

00:17:04.000 Whereas if you do this P3 model, you basically, the taxpayer is assuming all the risk and,

00:17:09.240 and the private entity assumes all the gain and all the revenue.

00:17:13.740 So the long and short of it is hopefully this economist, Mariana Mazzucato, will help the

00:17:21.180 province better understand how British Columbian taxpayers can better benefit from large-scale

00:17:27.820 infrastructure development projects, etc. in a way that BC taxpayers benefit, not just the private

00:17:33.860 companies that are helping out. But of course, the private companies have to be able to profit

00:17:36.900 somehow, otherwise they're not going to take on the contracts. So it'll be interesting to see

00:17:42.420 whether there's any substance to this the other I mean the other sort of danger I think that comes

00:17:48.240 up in my mind when I think about it is really you know the ministers just sort of set up this half

00:17:53.220 a billion dollar investment fund to play around and in some some tech firms in BC has hired this

00:17:59.260 international economist to try to wrap some credibility around the project but really

00:18:02.660 nothing's going to change but he has made some some positive statements in regards to restructuring

00:18:08.240 forestry and how the tenures are apportioned around the province with an aim to try to

00:18:14.600 move away to some degree from the large three companies to smaller producers and some indigenous

00:18:21.540 producers.

00:18:22.880 And if she's advising on that, that's great.

00:18:24.580 The big question, of course, is, you know, to what degree will this economist reinforce

00:18:32.140 the importance of reestablishing our manufacturing base in British Columbia?

00:18:36.700 because that's not really her bailiwick from my perspective in the limited amount that I've seen

00:18:41.780 so far. And that it doesn't really matter how fancy we get in our investment strategy in BC

00:18:47.040 trying to incubate tech firms, et cetera. It really comes down to manufacturing and international

00:18:51.880 trade for BC. It always has. And none of the other industries, whether they're service or tech

00:18:56.020 related, are going to do very well if we haven't got that foundational base in our economy. So

00:19:00.680 more to come, I'm sure. More to come, I'm sure. I think that what occurs to me as I kind of

00:19:06.020 listen to her one it's pretty clear that she's italian uh it's i i'm part italian too i also like

00:19:13.880 using my hands uh and but but i think i think that something that it became clear as well as

00:19:20.060 like this is someone who's a fundamentally an optimist uh a robust optimist actually uh when

00:19:26.120 it comes to there there are these things i've seen it work before it can work again and we'll

00:19:32.420 use that methodology it it's kind of it's kind of like the bright side of what happens sometimes

00:19:38.200 in conservative circles there are conservatives who are very yeah very happy about what the dairy

00:19:42.700 industry does right and like how we fixed all the dairy problems using the dairy industry or

00:19:46.800 very happy about you know like or even maybe in a more industry side of things maybe of

00:19:51.300 our manufacturing like to haviland like i'm that i when i put that hat on i don't put that hat on

00:19:55.840 a lot i i'm usually kind of a bit of a dreary dour cynical uh you know kind of waiting for the

00:20:02.160 apocalypse kind of guy in some respects but but when i do put the happy conservative hat on i do

00:20:06.980 reference these things i mean there's viking air in victoria they took up all of de haviland's

00:20:11.220 patents and they're able to manufacture all the old beavers and they still manufactured now a new

00:20:17.240 twin otter which is still the single greatest two two engines stole aircraft short takeoff uh short

00:20:23.460 landing eight uh uh you know uh aircraft they so we have these moments of optimism and i'm hopeful

00:20:30.480 that you know and sometimes this is why i like talking to people on the left because they

00:20:33.700 actually have a vision of of the future and they want to get us somewhere sometimes on the right

00:20:38.060 it's hard to find that but but i do guess i do worry that there's a lot of government debt that

00:20:44.920 can be piled up very quickly on on rabbit trails you know i've got a monorail i'd be happy to sell

00:20:50.080 you if you're going to give me two billion dollars and again back to your point of public

00:20:54.180 private partnerships i didn't understand why the bridge was told in vancouver i don't think i ever

00:20:59.720 paid that toll and i i was playing the long game and i won uh it wasn't worth my time i had to

00:21:06.080 underwrite the company that built that bridge why was i going to pay for it that was nonsense

00:21:11.200 so i this is the thing that kind of hits me and and should governments own patents is that how

00:21:16.380 we should do revenue should governments essentially not have any tax base they just have revenue

00:21:20.720 bases because they own things maybe that's a better model i don't know it's a very it's a

00:21:25.300 hard discussion it's a lot of competition yeah and mariana mazucato i mean she talks a lot about 0.94

00:21:31.700 the inefficiency of patents in our current system which is an interesting conversation she

00:21:36.660 you know she talks about how basically the way a patent works is its government uh extending

00:21:41.860 a 20-year monopoly and i think she talks about the american context mostly uh to a private

00:21:46.340 corporation and the payback for that for the taxpayer apparently should be you know according

00:21:52.420 to her would be that after the 20 years has expired then the the information gets to be

00:21:57.140 disseminated and and and that's the payoff but you know her critique of that system is that it 1.00

00:22:02.740 doesn't really work that way uh but 20 years from now if you're talking about innovation in particular

00:22:07.860 especially in the tech sector i mean 20 years from now it doesn't matter nobody wants that tech

00:22:11.460 anymore it's probably been reverse engineered anyway um by somebody else in the private sector

00:22:16.660 And so she talks about how really patents under the current regime are just a way to enforce monopolies and a way for government to award monopolies to big players as sort of a reward and a way to try to spur on innovation because it guarantees that income.

00:22:32.960 Well, it does guarantee income for them, but as she shows through a lot of the data that she's put together over the years, it doesn't actually help innovation.

00:22:41.560 She would argue that it impedes innovation.

00:22:44.020 It gets in the way of innovation.

00:22:44.920 And I think, you know, whatever your position is on vaccines or the pandemic, et cetera, how vaccines were developed in this sort of tempest that was taking place at the outset of the pandemic was a great little microcosm of how our system doesn't really work very well.

00:23:03.220 In fact, I didn't pull up the video, but, you know, the most effective vaccine in the world, apparently, I think it's rated at 92%, where the others are, I think, in the 80s.

00:23:15.440 The most effective vaccine developed was developed by Cuba. It was developed by the public sector in Cuba and is basically being distributed at very low cost around the world, mitigated only by their limited capacity to produce it because they've been under, you know, five or six decades of sanctions, economic sanctions and blockade by the United States.

00:23:34.320 And yet, despite all of those challenges, this tiny socialist country, 60 miles or whatever it is off the coast of Florida, was able to produce their own vaccine and was the first to get it out the door and start distributing it around the world.

00:23:49.340 where the american companies uh they were they were working furiously to try to come up with

00:23:55.440 a vaccine that worked and test it to the degree that they could but they're all hiding all that

00:23:59.520 information from each other because their prime motive was not to help get people vaccinated

00:24:04.560 irrespective of what you think about that their prime motive was to make a buck and to make as

00:24:09.220 much money as possible so you know people can say well that's fine that's that's what their

00:24:15.060 purpose is as private corporations pharmaceuticals and that's great I mean you can take that position

00:24:20.540 but again I don't I don't deal in right or wrong I just deal in you know what we do and what the

00:24:26.180 consequences are of doing it and and if your goal was to try to get as many people vaccinated as

00:24:31.740 possible it doesn't make sense to have a bunch of big private pharmaceutical companies working

00:24:37.760 in a siloed way from each other in secret not sharing any information I mean how much would

00:24:43.100 we have benefited for instance if people have concerns about the side effects of these vaccines

00:24:49.220 and there are some concerning side effects that are that are starting to emerge as they get more

00:24:53.500 data like uh like heart inflammation is the latest thing that the cdc is reporting on in in in young

00:24:59.900 uh individuals for instance still a very low rate and they still say that you know the possibility

00:25:05.440 of you you contracting some level of heart inflammation from covet itself is a higher

00:25:10.680 risk than from these vaccines. But wouldn't it have made more sense for these companies to share

00:25:17.620 all that testing data in advance and everybody try to come up with a, you know, work together

00:25:22.180 to come up with a vaccine that is the highest level of effectiveness and the lowest level of

00:25:27.340 side effects, et cetera, and then distribute it as far and wide as possible. Well, if that's your

00:25:31.680 goal, then sort of the capitalistic free market system is not the most efficient way to do it.

00:25:37.340 And I think that's her point. How does that scale to the British Columbian economy, given that we're a resource-based economy, we're an export-based economy, we don't have the same kind of capital that another country has, that a whole nation has, that we can pile into research and innovation necessarily.

00:25:57.680 But we do have a couple of potentially very successful crown corporations.

00:26:04.320 And, of course, the one I always talk about is BC Hydro.

00:26:07.460 So what I'm worried about in this case, and we'll watch it closely, is that they'll sort of get stars in their eyes about all these grand visions at a national scale that this economist will advise them on.

00:26:19.640 And none of it will really be that applicable to what matters in British Columbia.

00:26:23.780 But on the whole, I think it's far better than trying to bring in an economist like other governments have in the past who just advocate that they conclude from the outset that government can't do anything right.

00:26:37.040 Government should just get out of all business whatsoever and forego any opportunity to generate any non-tax-based revenue and privatize everything, including health care and education.

00:26:50.180 And that's been very disastrous for British Columbia, so much so that Abbott, from one of the former leadership candidates of the B.C. Liberal government, who was a cabinet minister during the time that that was happening, wrote a book saying, look, there was no plan and it was terrible and there was drastic consequences as a result.

00:27:06.160 i mean i mean the the play the ways that we've done things in british columbia when it comes

00:27:18.680 to manufacturing is something that needed to kind of happen when it came to the fast cat fairies for 1.00

00:27:25.060 example that that's i think that's i think probably the classic example of how you know

00:27:31.300 we had all this seed money we obviously had this innovation uh and and the idea was sound in in so

00:27:37.880 far as hey who doesn't want to get to the island a little bit faster but of course uh certain

00:27:42.820 certain elements of society were kind of wondering about the tidal wave that was headed their

00:27:47.440 direction for their nice little spot on uh the various islands and the inside passage all the

00:27:52.640 mansion owners will will innovation always be stymied by kind of nimbyism yeah yeah yeah will

00:28:01.060 it always be stymied by nimbyism uh i mean there will always be nimbies uh but the the degree to

00:28:08.980 which they're effective uh is the degree to which government feels like they have a mandate to carry

00:28:13.300 out what they're doing in terms of the fast ferries i mean i i always thought i was actually

00:28:17.740 in japan at the time so i was a bit out of the media bubble on it but looking at it from outside

00:28:21.480 not being subjected to sort of the political messaging that was coming from the opposition

00:28:25.120 at the time on it i thought well why don't you just slow the ferries down when they're coming

00:28:30.760 into port like you know it it just seemed kind of silly or you know like if you if you have a

00:28:38.600 property that a multi-million dollar property on the banks of of the ocean coming in on horseshoe

00:28:43.820 bay or any any of these ferry terminals that is going to be damaged significantly from the wake

00:28:49.060 made by by a ferry i think you probably need to invest in some flood mitigation measures for your

00:28:56.660 property because there's much bigger tidal waves if there's potential if there's an earthquake just

00:29:01.280 off the coast like what we saw in Fukushima. So it always seemed like just a bizarre attempt to

00:29:07.040 just try to take a shot at that government who, from my perspective, irrespective of how much

00:29:12.320 they spent, were doing the right thing and trying to manufacture boats in British Columbia. That was

00:29:16.940 absolutely what we should have done and it's absolutely what we should be doing now. And my

00:29:20.980 frustration with the BCNDB government, despite them having talked about moving towards re-establishing

00:29:26.520 shipbuilding in british columbia again is they haven't done it uh and and they don't appear to

00:29:31.100 be uh moving in that direction um anyway that's you know that's that's for a historical episode

00:29:38.100 not necessarily this one um there is a little sorry there is a little bit of uh delay in your

00:29:43.980 mic now as well so sorry if i uh interject at what seems like an in or opportune time but i'd like to

00:29:49.220 move on to the another another story just very very quickly i won't spend too much time on this

00:29:54.060 But it's also a follow-up to what we've previously reported on.

00:29:57.900 Folks will remember, perhaps, when I reported a few weeks ago, that a prominent new Democrat,

00:30:05.160 federally, by the name of Avi Lewis, who also happens to be married to Naomi Klein,

00:30:10.540 who many would argue is even more prominent.

00:30:12.760 These are the two folks that sort of co-authored the, what do they call it, the Leap Manifesto,

00:30:17.920 I think back in 2015 which was introduced at the NDP convention in Edmonton where Tom Mulcair was

00:30:25.940 politically assassinated. He announced a few weeks ago that he was going to seek the nomination for

00:30:36.580 the NDP in West Vancouver Sea to Sky country which is probably the most affluent riding

00:30:42.520 in the province and I guess they were I don't know if they're already living out here but

00:30:47.160 they're coming out from Toronto to do it so the latest announcement is both of

00:30:51.180 them both Naomi Klein and Abby Lewis let me just share the screen here have 0.92

00:30:56.780 landed very look what looks like very plum gigs at the University of British

00:31:03.600 Columbia geography department so is that coming up

00:31:17.160 there's a delay on your mic so i can't see i can't get nowhere we got her okay good uh so

00:31:25.280 so this struck me as rather interesting because you know it looks like there's going to be an

00:31:31.320 election uh announced any month here by this year i mean all the signs seem to be pointing

00:31:37.720 to trudeau wanting to pull the trigger on election abby lewis has already announced he's going to run

00:31:42.520 Um, and then he gets hired at the UBC geography department and along with his partner wife,

00:31:49.680 uh, Naomi Klein. 0.81

00:31:51.300 So it raises a couple of questions in my mind.

00:31:53.500 First of all, like, I didn't know that Abby Lewis was a geographer.

00:31:58.320 Um, maybe that doesn't, maybe it doesn't matter.

00:32:00.740 I mean, maybe the geography department is much more diverse than, than that.

00:32:04.880 Uh, I, I didn't know that Naomi Klein was a geographer as well, but, uh, again, same

00:32:09.960 argument.

00:32:10.360 it's surprising to me that they both got jobs in the same faculty like I mean what are the chances

00:32:18.340 if you're doing a job application process that like both a husband and you got two positions

00:32:23.300 that you're you're profiling for and or interviewing for and and you get both a husband and a wife

00:32:30.200 team uh who land both of those jobs um it just makes you wonder sort of like how rigorous was

00:32:37.200 the interview process it seems a little nepotistic to me I mean maybe nepotism is not the right word

00:32:42.460 because it's not like they're hiring each other but it just seemed kind of interesting the second

00:32:46.540 question is like does UBC not know that he's going to run in this election like do they think he's

00:32:51.320 going to be around for a while and do they think he's going to keep the job if he gets elected or

00:32:56.060 during the campaign and if not like why would you hire somebody for such a short period of time

00:33:00.460 the other interesting question of course is like what it is that they're doing in the department

00:33:06.060 So here's the statement from the dean who hired them.

00:33:10.560 I'll just highlight it here.

00:33:12.980 We're thrilled to welcome Naomi and Avi to UBC to advance the urgent social, political, and economic changes necessary to address the climate crisis, says Gage Averill, dean of UBC's Faculty of Arts.

00:33:24.060 Quote, this is a critical moment for the future of our planet, and we are committed to highlighting climate justice in all of our priorities.

00:33:33.060 End quote.

00:33:33.820 So, I mean, this is interesting to me in that it doesn't sound like they're going to be doing any research, right?

00:33:39.500 Like the dean comes right out and says they're here to advance urgent social and political economic changes necessary to address the climate crisis.

00:33:47.060 So he's basically saying we've hired them as advocates.

00:33:49.840 uh and he's already like i mean my understanding of you know the academy and and in particular

00:33:58.300 science is you're supposed to you're not supposed to come up with a with a conclusion first and then

00:34:04.080 go search for research to prove it you're supposed to do the research and then make your conclusion

00:34:08.480 based on what the research produces and here you have the dean of um of the faculty of arts

00:34:14.360 already saying you know this is the state we're in and we're hiring advocates to come in advance

00:34:21.180 to advocate for it so I found that interesting and then the whole thing is sort of about mostly

00:34:29.600 about Naomi Klein because she's higher profile but then it finally gets around to saying what

00:34:36.480 Abby Lewis will be doing at the Department of Geography at UBC it says he will join the

00:34:41.580 university in july is a part-time faculty member so that answers a few questions i guess it's just

00:34:45.480 part-time so maybe he can do this and other things and will teach courses focusing on social

00:34:50.320 and political change communication and documentary filmmaking which to me um i don't know like i'm

00:34:57.880 not a i'm not a scientist i'm not an academic i'm certainly not a geographer uh i don't fully

00:35:04.840 understand how those kind of classes are are going to relate well to the department of geography

00:35:11.100 at ubc um and as far as i can tell i'm probably the only person at this point who said anything

00:35:18.140 that's slightly critical of this decision terry um because the response as i saw the story come over

00:35:27.420 uh the newswire on twitter anyway was just like universal uh celebration that these two high

00:35:33.900 profile folks are going to be joining uh the ubc faculty and so everybody seems happy that

00:35:40.060 that these folks are coming out but to me it's just like you know do they need to work at a

00:35:44.860 university to advocate like why wouldn't they work for for some environmental organization

00:35:49.100 or something like that and would you pay for these classes i i guess people will i mean you know

00:35:54.940 they'll probably be packed classes but it just struck me as slightly i mean nepotistic is not

00:36:00.300 the right word but it just you know i remember i i used to complain years ago about how you know

00:36:05.900 bosses and the rich and the and the conservative elite in my mind always seem to land on their feet

00:36:12.460 you know they always they never really had any trouble getting any jobs or anything like that

00:36:16.460 and things are starting to change a little bit and you've certainly got you know these increased

00:36:20.960 number of instances where people who are definitely sort of the liberal elite in Canada seem to have

00:36:25.960 no trouble getting pretty plum jobs even under conditions where you know no private sector

00:36:31.040 employer would probably hire them under those conditions like why would you hire somebody who's

00:36:35.280 gonna gonna run off to an election in a few months um kind of thing and why would you hire

00:36:40.380 both him and his and his wife like and put them in the same department i mean it the universities

00:36:47.080 what can i say it it definitely seems to me that that i they always seem to find a place to be

00:36:54.680 don't they they land on their feet and like again to your point i didn't realize that you know

00:37:01.780 groundbreaking documentary filmmaking was the purview of the geography department of ubc i

00:37:09.020 didn't i didn't realize that the geography department of ubc was going to become the next

00:37:13.780 pbs and we were going to do the next set of ken burns revolutionary ways of looking at the civil

00:37:21.740 strife over canadian climate change i this is getting a little out of hand to put it politely

00:37:28.240 and and but this is the nature it's funny because you're getting to see it kind of from the right

00:37:32.360 wing perspective now because that is kind of how like the run-of-the-mill working class right wing

00:37:37.740 or hardware store right wing or hardware store conservative you know they just kind of look up

00:37:42.240 from their coffee and and the chat they were having with their friends and they look over

00:37:45.880 and they see on the tv that somebody who was in one glitzy place is now in another glitzy place

00:37:51.780 and there was no delay in between they didn't have to go on ei they didn't have to sell anything

00:37:56.740 They didn't have to move towns or they did move towns.

00:37:59.380 It doesn't really matter if you're in downtown Toronto, downtown Vancouver, the same restaurants, the same people, the same sort of political milieu.

00:38:06.840 So and then he just goes back to his coffee and goes, well, yep, that's the way of the world.

00:38:10.840 Like, well, I'll go pay for my sins on my cigarettes, because that's what that's the sin of the world.

00:38:18.220 The taxes I should pay on my gas, my cigarettes, my beer, my milk.

00:38:23.540 that's that's where the sinning's happening so i'll go do that now i'll see you later

00:38:27.620 well it's also it's also working class uh left-wing union members who look at this stuff

00:38:35.460 and they just shake their heads and and it's not just because these people get these plum jobs

00:38:39.580 universities i think as you say you know working class people however they vote whatever their

00:38:44.600 political leanings i mean they just look at this stuff with disdain because it doesn't relate to

00:38:48.820 them at all but they also catch wind of what these people are saying and so the first the first

00:38:53.900 problem I think is this this tendency for universities now to be training activists rather

00:38:59.840 than uh training people um and like I would argue that universities shouldn't even just be training

00:39:08.440 academics that's my that's one of my criticisms of universities is that they're they see themselves

00:39:13.180 as training more academics well we don't like I would argue like there's a lot of people go to

00:39:19.160 university we don't need that many academics like in fact the economy can't sustain that many

00:39:24.040 academics we need people actually doing work right we don't need to train more people to be teaching

00:39:29.420 in universities um we do but we do need you know I mean people do need to be trained both in the

00:39:34.940 humanities and the sciences that also work in other areas of the of the economy and society

00:39:39.520 probably what we don't need is universities training activists and it's not that we don't

00:39:44.720 need activists or that activists don't need to be trained it's just why would we use universities to

00:39:50.740 train activists uh and and i'm not saying that people shouldn't be activists while they're on

00:39:56.020 campus i mean i was like the most notorious in in my day student activist i've been expelled from

00:40:02.040 three universities in two countries uh and and one of which was for organizing a student union

00:40:08.200 overseas. So I'm not criticizing activism on university campuses, but I didn't get my activism

00:40:14.080 from university. I got my activism from my own politics and my own experience, etc. And I played

00:40:23.000 out those activist sort of plays at university because that's where I was. And that's sort of

00:40:29.380 where students do it, right? And then when you get out of university, you realize, well, the world's

00:40:33.680 a lot bigger than my, you know, the, the lunchroom at the university where I held a rally or something

00:40:38.820 like that. Uh, and, and that's, that's fine. But when you're, when you're bringing people on that

00:40:43.960 are like, they don't even hide it anymore. They're not even talking about the research that they're

00:40:47.140 going to do or how they're going to contribute, um, to the university in any academic matter.

00:40:51.940 They're, they're literally just coming out and saying, we're going to advocate for, uh, the kind

00:40:56.460 of climate justice that we think is necessary. And I might not even disagree with them in terms

00:41:01.300 of their analysis on some of that stuff. Although I mean, I do actually on a fair bit. But it's I

00:41:06.680 mean, universities are really struggling to maintain credibility in the eyes of the communities

00:41:11.200 that they're in, especially working class folks. And this is not a way to help them maintain any

00:41:16.520 credibility. So I didn't want to spend too much time on on these guys. But it's just one of those

00:41:20.560 things to bookmark. So people are aware of it, I think. I think you're right. And and the other

00:41:26.060 thing to kind of note here is that there might be nothing weaker than the political elite so i'm

00:41:33.240 just speaking to anybody out there right now who is part of this nexus uh that thinks that if you

00:41:38.940 get the right celebrities on side you get the right speakers on side bring the right keynote

00:41:43.220 people on side then you can build a political movement that's nonsense these people all need

00:41:48.500 to be paid they all need to be pampered they all need to be perfectly handled and they are some of

00:41:53.280 weakest people on planet earth so so if you're trying to build a movement this is not where to

00:41:59.520 park that boat find somebody else these guys are going to get lost in the tidal wave uh let's let's

00:42:05.040 get into actually uh the point that you were bringing up earlier uh you said that you wanted

00:42:08.960 to address the changes when it comes to bc uh cannabis sales i was just making a joke about

00:42:14.000 sin taxes two seconds ago why don't you why don't you bring us up to speed on what's happening there

00:42:19.200 yeah just a quick report because some of the numbers have come out um from the bc government's

00:42:24.640 venture uh foray into into bc cannabis sales over the last couple of years so i just thought people

00:42:29.680 might be interested to see how they're doing because anecdotally what we've known uh and when

00:42:34.480 i say anecdotally i just mean from the people that i talk to that are that are buying weed from

00:42:39.120 places other than government uh cannabis stores is a lot of people were kind of resistant to buy

00:42:44.800 cannabis from government store for a number of different reasons and so anecdotally you know

00:42:50.100 what the theory was is that the government cannabis stores weren't doing that well

00:42:54.240 that the private sector was doing much better and you might think that if you look at some of

00:43:00.260 the base numbers so in 2019 there were 128 private cannabis stores in British Columbia

00:43:08.600 I'm not sure whether that marks an increase or a decrease over 2018, because a lot of volatility happened around that time.

00:43:16.240 And that, you know, there was a period of time, especially in Vancouver, when Harper was still prime minister, where the federal government was adamant that it was illegal for any cannabis store to exist.

00:43:27.160 the government or sorry the municipal government in Vancouver took a very different tact and

00:43:32.860 decided partially because they're under their own city charter which is separate from anything else

00:43:38.120 in British Columbia in particular and they've got their own police department etc that there was a

00:43:43.780 bit of a gray area there and so for that particular point in time they were essentially kind of turning

00:43:48.540 a blind eye to the number of cannabis stores that cropped up when the federal changes finally came

00:43:53.360 in under the liberal government and things were a bit more legal, Vancouver took the interesting

00:43:58.220 tact of basically shutting down or at least refusing to register or legitimize any of the

00:44:03.980 existing cannabis stores that had been set up. And so the private sector sort of had to redo

00:44:11.520 itself. They had to start over again. And so it took them a little while to get going. But from

00:44:16.320 2019 to 2020, the number of private stores in BC increased from 128 to 270. So that's a big

00:44:25.860 increase, right? It's over a doubling of the number of stores. The number of government stores

00:44:32.320 also increased as they were building new stores. So that's predictable from 11 to 25. So also a

00:44:41.580 doubling over a doubling of the number of stores, but you think, well, because there's so many

00:44:45.680 private sector stores, the private sector must be doing much better. But the report that's come out

00:44:52.000 shows that on a per capita basis, government stores are selling on average about twice as

00:44:58.520 much as the private stores, which is interesting to me because anecdotally we had heard that the

00:45:03.880 traffic was actually kind of down. So it could be that, I don't know, the report doesn't get

00:45:11.060 into any of the reasons by that. In fact, they say we don't know what the reasons for that are

00:45:14.080 yet because it's you know the different areas report differently but what was most interesting

00:45:18.960 to me is that the northern health region posted the highest per capita sales in the province

00:45:25.720 which you know one of the one of the reasons for that might be that per capita there's actually

00:45:32.240 more public stores in in the north uh i think there's two in prince george alone uh and they're

00:45:38.740 in pretty uh high traffic areas one's in the mall right um so that might explain it but the stats

00:45:46.340 also in terms of higher consumption rates and sales rates in northern bc mirror apparently

00:45:52.280 the alcohol consumption rates in the northern region as well so apparently not only do we do

00:45:57.820 we buy more weed up in the north we also buy more alcohol well that second stat doesn't need a lot

00:46:02.940 of explanation i would just say it's because northerners are made of hardier stuff and we

00:46:06.580 drink southerners under the table but i don't think that's a surprise to anybody um but it

00:46:12.020 but more seriously i mean it also could i think some people would probably say well there's

00:46:15.860 probably higher rates of alcoholism etc and some of the social is related to this stuff

00:46:20.260 and the people that put together this report and it's it's out of the university of victoria

00:46:25.460 uh they actually say look uh with higher consumption rates and the tendency that like

00:46:30.420 sales are going up but not only are sales going up but the potency the thc content of cannabis

00:46:35.700 being sold in the government stores is also increasing, which could lead to health issues

00:46:40.080 that look, you know, the government's going to have to deal with and might generate additional

00:46:44.000 costs. So we'll see what happens. I mean, it's, you know, there's, there's no real,

00:46:49.360 I haven't got any sort of lessons or, or anything to lecture anybody on here or any real thesis,

00:46:54.160 but I just thought it was interesting for people to sort of take a look at sort of,

00:46:59.000 you know how it's progressing um and and the bigger question for me is you know for those

00:47:05.800 who don't like buying from government stores you know what's the rationale right like uh for me i'm

00:47:12.020 like i'm a i'm a crown corporation guy i don't believe i i think government messes things up a

00:47:17.020 lot but i don't think that government as an entity itself is inherently the reason why things are

00:47:23.200 inefficient i think people's approach to government and and and and particular uh

00:47:29.760 politicians approach to government is what makes government inefficient uh dale says look at alberta

00:47:34.960 we got a ton of stores here and out uh here in la we have um now does la is la short for lethbridge

00:47:41.740 or is that actually la we have 39 private stores population 100k well i don't think it's la in the

00:47:48.060 states i think it's uh somewhere in alberta but i don't know which part of alberta yeah uh so so i

00:47:55.280 think what dale was saying there is there's a lower number uh of stores or maybe more maybe the

00:47:59.800 same i don't know so it would be interesting to see what it is in uh but basically so that so the

00:48:04.700 way the stats in terms of the amount of production that's being ramped up and again it's not public

00:48:09.100 sector production either the weed's still being produced by private entities lethbridge thanks

00:48:14.100 still. But in 2020, government sold cannabis products containing nearly 8,000 kilograms of

00:48:19.820 THC, which apparently equals 400 million joints. So, and, you know, again, you got to be careful

00:48:26.560 with these stats because it depends, you know, who's making the joints and where you're buying

00:48:31.100 them. The argument I'd make, especially if you're looking at the private sector, if you're buying

00:48:35.280 joints in the West Kootenays versus Vancouver, for instance, well, you might produce 400 million

00:48:40.080 joints but the same amount like if you're buying from nelson it might be 40 joints because they

00:48:46.320 roll them fatter there but it's uh it's it's an interesting uh interesting sign of our times i

00:48:52.280 think and i just i thought i'd put it to you because i know i know you've got a different

00:48:56.180 position than me on sort of whether it should be legal etc from my perspective from an economic

00:49:01.140 perspective i think if the market is going to exist why shouldn't taxpayers uh get some cut of

00:49:08.900 to try to lessen the tax burden and still be able to fund some of the services that we need.

00:49:15.160 It becomes counterproductive, of course, if the industry itself starts to produce

00:49:20.000 health conditions, which end up costing taxpayer more money on the health care side.

00:49:24.720 So it's funny that you jump to that part of the argument right away, that there could be

00:49:29.920 ramifications later, because this, of course, is the old social conservative arguments. Like,

00:49:34.440 why shouldn't the government be into gambling because it'll create gambling addiction why

00:49:38.840 shouldn't it be into alcohol or cigarettes because it'll get married to the revenues from alcohol and 0.66

00:49:44.040 cigarettes and i mean for us you could just expand the argument right so we have all these physical

00:49:48.840 objects and i guess one activity gambling that are that the government likes to play around it

00:49:53.880 and make money off it's like well what's to stop them from from if they legalize prostitution or 1.00

00:49:58.680 if they and if or if porn becomes something that they actually create revenue from there's a syntax

00:50:03.480 on porn not just sales tax for a subscription to your favorite porn site no like an actual

00:50:08.520 syntax the same way that we do it on cigarettes right so there's not there's not sales tax on

00:50:12.440 cigarettes they're inflated by like 600 so why don't we just do the same thing with everything

00:50:18.200 and so the thing is that government will always be married to its revenues and it does they always

00:50:23.080 say well this is to cure a social ill you need people to smoke to keep government coffers topped

00:50:28.120 up you need people to drink and gamble and now smoke marijuana to keep government coffers topped

00:50:33.460 up and so they become they become their own dealer and loan shark and enforcer and addict in a way

00:50:40.680 because they are all the parts of that relationship because they need the revenue if they don't have

00:50:45.980 the revenue they can't keep doing things elsewise because it all goes to the general revenue there

00:50:51.320 is no specified amount that goes to hospitals or schools or whatever else it all goes into general

00:50:55.740 revenue then it gets cut up so it's i think that's where we social conservatives kind of draw

00:51:00.620 the line and go you know what if we have to have this stuff let it let it be only taxed the way

00:51:06.120 everything else is taxed and we'll have private industry do it and if we and if but better yet

00:51:10.540 for some of these items just let it stay underground where it belongs and let the local

00:51:14.560 rastafarian uh make his buck because i don't really want trudeau's lobbyists uh to carve up

00:51:20.220 all of saskatchewan and replant it full of weed and just say that's it that's what we're doing

00:51:24.720 with saskatchewan from now on it's just one gigantic weed farm from the you know u.s border

00:51:29.400 to the pine forest north of prince albert well i'd love to see saskatchewan do that but if they

00:51:35.280 were to take some uh because look they grow they seem to make good coffee so they probably would

00:51:39.840 grow pretty good marijuana too but uh but but i would argue that they should take take some advice

00:51:45.140 from us in bc and that if you're going to plant a whole bunch of marijuana crops don't plant

00:51:48.840 monocrops like like mix it up make sure there's some biodiversity otherwise the weed won't be as

00:51:53.620 good. That's what I would say. But look, your arguments are not wrong, right? That's the thing.

00:51:59.240 All of these things, they have a potential social consequence. We know for alcohol in particular,

00:52:03.400 there's significant social consequences that end up costing taxpayers a lot of money on the back

00:52:07.840 end. And so the argument from the progressive side of the fence for public distribution of

00:52:12.240 these things, and I'm a big advocate of the public distribution model for alcohol, is that you,

00:52:18.660 and I actually was hesitant to see it opened up to the private sector because I think the profit

00:52:24.300 motive in the private sector is far stronger than in the public sector so I mean you've raised an

00:52:30.220 interesting point which is not wrong and that government can get addicted to these revenues

00:52:34.420 absolutely government can get addicted to these revenues private corporations are far more addicted

00:52:39.700 to that revenue which means because they don't have any others I mean that's their revenue right

00:52:44.060 and literally if they stop selling that product they're done and so any of the sort of shady

00:52:49.420 sales practices that would evolve or emerge because of the profit motive is going to be

00:52:55.340 exacerbated like it's going to be way more intensified in the private distribution model

00:53:01.420 and you'll like when would you ever get a private company that's going to make a decision to stop

00:53:05.820 selling a profitable product because they're worried about the social effects that it's

00:53:10.620 having i mean the tobacco industry is the perfect example of this where not only do they resist

00:53:15.340 efforts to shut things down they fund research to try to counter the medical research that's saying

00:53:20.860 that this stuff is killing us right they fund junk research and it starts the same thing happened

00:53:26.060 with marijuana right the same thing with marijuana like marijuana doesn't help with als that's 0.89

00:53:30.380 complete nonsense they just kept handing handing surveys to people while they were high and asked

00:53:36.540 them if they felt like maybe this was helping this has been well documented of course you feel good

00:53:41.180 while you're high of course you think it's working it's not working it has nothing to do with working

00:53:46.540 it just it's an alleviation so it's not actually helping anything it's just an alleviation and you

00:53:51.420 and you say yes of course i want more and then they use that as a statistic yeah look i'm not

00:53:57.020 like i'm not a big advocate for uh uh for the medical properties of marijuana like i i'm a

00:54:03.580 recreational user at best right like i don't i don't have any medical conditions that i would

00:54:07.660 ever use it for i do know a number of people who do claim that it is quite helpful but you know

00:54:11.900 i'm not gonna you know whatever i don't care what i do know is that it's not as harmful as alcohol

00:54:16.760 it's not as harmful as uh cigarettes and it doesn't produce the same kind of social costs

00:54:23.300 on the back end as those things do and people are going to buy it and if there are any social

00:54:29.320 consequences as a result of it or health risks it strengthens the argument from my perspective to

00:54:34.280 distribute it in the public model because it's the only model in which you can actually restrict

00:54:40.120 distribution and pay more attention to making sure miners can't buy it like you know when i go to the

00:54:46.120 liquor store if i go to the public liquor store they i'm 43 years old i get id'd all the time

00:54:51.400 which is wonderful i love it but i never get id'd at a private store right and it's just like it's

00:54:57.080 it's just one more example of how the public store is going to follow the regulations better

00:55:01.700 because the profit motive, though strong, is not as strong for the individuals. There's no CEO

00:55:07.320 who is worried about whether he's going to get his bonus or not because of the profit margin at the

00:55:14.080 end of the year in the public model. Plus, you don't have to pay the CEO as much, so there's not

00:55:18.480 as much waste. But again, I mean, that's the economic argument, and I don't want to discount

00:55:23.520 to any of sort of the moralistic or or the social consequence arguments that you do raise uh but i i

00:55:29.040 i brought it up because i i wanted to try to provoke a bit of a discussion uh and i i'm just

00:55:34.260 looking at the time i know you got stewart coming on but i did have another clip of my one of my

00:55:37.860 favorite musical artists canadian out of uh uh out of hamilton ontario though he's probably living

00:55:43.700 in toronto now his name is b.a johnson he he comes to prince george like once or twice a year he plays

00:55:48.440 uh at a number of different venues i've seen him at the legion most recently he's not everybody's

00:55:53.380 cup of tea but he's got a great song uh on this last item that i that maybe you can play out as

00:55:58.260 i take off and you transition to uh stewart but it's it's just been a delight to be with you

00:56:03.320 absolutely well let's hit play on this thing and see what happens

00:56:06.780 oh man i want to get high but i don't have time to wait for the mailman or the desire to buy it

00:56:14.700 I don't smoke no government weed Cause I still get my weed from Steve

00:56:26.700 I don't pay no tax at the dispensary Cause I still get my weed from Steve

00:56:35.700 Send a text, say I'm here, garage door rolls up, Steve appears

00:56:43.700 Wearing a housecoat, smoking a butt, shuffling in his mom's driveway

00:56:49.540 He waves me in

00:56:53.160 I don't smoke no government weed

00:56:59.480 Cause I still get my weed from Steve

00:57:03.780 i don't pay no tax at the dispensary because i still get my weed from steve

00:57:12.460 tells me about a dream he had says it felt so real i hand him the orange power raid

00:57:22.400 he texted me to bring and i i think i think that's i think that's about as far as we can

00:57:29.520 go down that road perhaps perhaps before we hit copyright or something anyways that was incredible

00:57:35.240 um i i have to admit that i agree with that guy more than i agree with a lot of other things uh

00:57:40.680 sheldon jones is saying sick moves i no i mean i mean it's i definitely believe that that i would

00:57:47.780 rather have people buy it from the rastafarian down the road than than from the government i'm

00:57:52.160 sorry that's where i sit that's i'm i'm you know i'm not even a libertarian but if that's what has

00:57:56.820 to happen that's what has to happen well i'll tell you what nathan i i i'll get in touch with

00:58:00.960 b.a johnson and see if i can get steve's phone number for you there it is there it is yeah

00:58:05.560 because i smoke that stuff so heavily that's that's what i'm known for the weed guy yeah right

00:58:10.960 um thank you aaron thank you for uh subjecting us to this and uh helping us have an important

00:58:16.920 conversation about the nature of marijuana in british columbia marijuana consumption throughout

00:58:21.200 canada i bet you all right well thank you so much aaron we'll chat with you uh we'll see you

00:58:26.820 tomorrow we're gonna grab uh grab something tomorrow and uh and chat a little bit about

00:58:30.360 the direction of the show and that sort of thing so i'll check in with you then right on man all

00:58:35.120 right thank you so much well uh that was an experience um i'm gonna readjust my headphones

00:58:42.580 here holy smokes yeah i never thought that i would be playing a uh a pro buy your weed from

00:58:52.300 steve marijuana video on my show here but uh here we are um i see we lost a couple of viewers for

00:59:00.660 that one that the people went down uh they did not like that uh that's fine uh that's why we do

00:59:07.080 the no cancel policy here at uh at mountain standard time i i i guess if i could articulate

00:59:14.680 my point on this a little bit i i don't smoke marijuana okay i don't so i'm not i it's not

00:59:24.140 very fair i guess in a sense for me to try and tell you what to do with what is now a legalized

00:59:28.540 drug i had marijuana once in university or something i can't like literally literally once

00:59:35.420 once or twice

00:59:36.960 and just to try it out in my last year

00:59:39.940 university. I'm not proud of that fact

00:59:41.940 I don't really feel like confessing this in front

00:59:44.060 of a whole bunch of people but I did do that

00:59:46.000 and I didn't

00:59:47.900 it just made me paranoid

00:59:49.380 I just thought I was the police

00:59:51.360 so that's why I don't smoke marijuana

00:59:53.860 because it just makes me paranoid

00:59:55.560 it makes me think that I'm a police officer

00:59:58.120 and that I should arrest myself

00:59:59.600 even though now it's legalized

01:00:01.000 so that's my two cents on that point

01:00:04.040 And we're going to bring on Stuart Parker right away to talk about what's going on in the wide world.

01:00:09.340 That's Stuart Parker right here from Prince George. Stuart.

01:00:13.820 Ah, good to be back, Nathan. Good morning.

01:00:16.940 Good morning. You just missed us playing, I don't know, B.A. Johnson, whatever the heck his name is,

01:00:21.440 about how he doesn't buy his weed from government stores. He buys it from Steve.

01:00:25.020 That just happened. Aaron just subjected us to this music video.

01:00:29.920 But we're here now. I know, right?

01:00:33.120 In any case, let's go from that high mood into a different mood now.

01:00:38.880 Some bad news out of Saskatchewan, I hear.

01:00:41.320 I could let you give us the narrative on that,

01:00:45.280 let you shape that story to the best of your ability.

01:00:47.760 Go ahead, Stuart.

01:00:49.280 Well, you know, I mean, imagine your elementary school

01:00:55.080 having a large potter's field of unmarked graves.

01:00:58.720 It's pretty disturbing.

01:01:00.860 they um uh it's uh 715 new children's corpses uh that we have unearthed um but i want us to uh to

01:01:13.340 think and so of course the whole question is do we celebrate canada day um the question is not um 0.88

01:01:24.540 the indigenous people were planning to kill next week should we maybe not kill them um that 1.00

01:01:30.700 that question is not on the table we're gonna have a big fight about a holiday um and about 0.87

01:01:40.460 ceremony because that's what canadians like to do when we find blood on our hands it's to blame our

01:01:49.100 ancestors and argue about statues and photos and pictures and ceremonies and holidays um

01:02:00.060 so let's think about the other things that are going on while this announcement uh you know

01:02:06.140 while this horrifying news comes out yesterday in the bc court of appeal the john horgan government

01:02:16.380 represented by the attorney general david eby argued that indigenous title does not exist

01:02:24.140 that it only exists um when created by the government that was the position that the

01:02:31.820 trudeau government the old man trudeau government took in 1969 so the horgan government has made it

01:02:39.820 explicit it does not consider the bill that it passed where everybody got to cry together right

01:02:46.540 all 87 MLAs passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People,

01:02:54.140 and we were awash in settler tears, right? Oh, my goodness, look at all the crying. 0.92

01:03:01.740 Well, let's be clear about what those tears do. Those tears wipe away the blood on our hands.

01:03:12.060 that's the purpose of the tears so of course you know the progressives are going to fight

01:03:20.540 with the conservatives about canada day um you know the and the progressives you know

01:03:28.380 are going to be crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash trays or whatever

01:03:32.940 And then they'll continue doing the thing they want to do.

01:03:38.580 And the thing, so, right, I'm working for Carriers of Candy Family Services.

01:03:43.800 I was asked to look at scholarship.

01:03:46.020 I was asked to look at all basic government, NGO, academic scholarship on the Highway of Tears.

01:03:54.040 Now, it would cost us approximately $10 million additional per year to upgrade the bus service to what the people there have been demanding

01:04:02.260 since 2006. And since 2006, we've cut the bus service on the Highway of Tears. We've

01:04:09.300 canceled all the flag stops. We've canceled the on-reserved stops. And the rate at which

01:04:13.700 indigenous women go missing on that highway has increased. So, and we know what increases it. 1.00

01:04:22.660 It's a lack of bus service and the presence of man camps. But we're not going to pass any laws 1.00

01:04:29.940 that require permanent housing for workers we are not going to find 10 million dollars

01:04:36.980 to upgrade the bus service to what it's supposed to be we found 100 times that much money to give

01:04:44.100 annually to big oil we have a billion dollars a year we give big oil in this province but we can't

01:04:52.820 find one percent of that to prevent some murders not one percent so um a lot you know what

01:05:06.500 this thing i know that there you know some you know indigenous neo-traditionalists will denounce

01:05:12.260 canada day but they were already against canada day um and this idea about these celebrations

01:05:19.300 we're not having because we haven't gotten far enough out of covid to have the big public

01:05:25.380 celebrations right like this is all completely hypothetical it's if we could celebrate canada

01:05:32.980 day would we oh let's have a fight about that let's cry and distract people and then apprehend

01:05:40.580 more indigenous kids and let more indigenous women be murdered um that's our plan and so i'm just 1.00

01:05:48.660 sickened by this obsession with ceremony i'll tell you if people looking back at modern canadians 0.94

01:05:57.940 the word they would use to describe these endless apologies and performances of guilt

01:06:04.100 right they're all recognizable they're what a man who beats his wife does that's what this is

01:06:11.940 these are classic wife beater apologies right we're gonna cry and then the fact

01:06:19.540 that like we've beaten the person somehow you know we're gonna cry about that like it's our

01:06:26.500 emotions that matter it's our emotions we have to perform what this spectacle is is grotesque

01:06:34.820 This is utterly grotesque. We are still poisoning the water in grassy narrows with mercury

01:06:43.140 every day. Every single day. There's more mercury we're pumping into that water.

01:06:49.540 And we have the gall, the gall to get all emotional about this and make this about our emotions

01:06:57.700 while there are children in hospital in thunder bay with minimata disease because we're poisoning them 0.98

01:07:05.860 right now so i just i have no time i have no time for these stupid debates about ceremony 1.00

01:07:13.700 they are disgusting they are narcissistic they have absolutely no business in the discourse 0.99

01:07:21.140 what settlers should be doing is not having opinions about canada day and deciding whether 0.99

01:07:29.220 working folks get to eat some corn on the cob and maybe light off a firecracker no no we're gonna

01:07:36.100 we're gonna focus on we're gonna focus on condemning um regular people who want to have a holiday

01:07:45.220 on judging them the horgan government should be judging itself the civic government of victoria

01:07:52.980 should be judging itself the government here in prince george should sure as hell be judging itself

01:08:00.180 because our current plan right is to destroy a homeless encampment in which indigenous people 0.99

01:08:09.460 are significantly overrepresented with no place to send them some of those people are gonna die

01:08:15.620 some of those people are gonna die in this heat wave because they don't have a safe drug supply

01:08:22.580 they don't have housing because we've destroyed it and they're gonna die and i just uh and we 0.75

01:08:30.740 are going to be arguing about the bloody holiday so um i just i have no patience with canadians 0.99

01:08:38.580 and their white guilt. And let me tell you, this particular kind of ancestor blaming, 0.98

01:08:46.900 which actually doesn't even rise to the level of guilt because it's just shifting blame to people

01:08:51.860 who are dead, this is part of the essence of Canadian whiteness. The tears, the guilt, 0.97

01:09:03.460 the histrionics that's how you show how white you are in this country and it's disgusting 0.95

01:09:14.340 it is absolutely unseemly and i am i i just i find the immediate turn in the debate towards the 0.57

01:09:24.260 holiday uh indescribably disgusting i i don't even i don't even know where to put my anger

01:09:32.420 you see this is improper whiteness because i'm furious i'm absolutely furious um 0.58

01:09:40.820 and uh i know that um you know that's um that is that is not going to register to public policy

01:09:51.300 level until we start doing what we should have been focused on all along which is

01:09:57.780 if settlers want to do something about this or non-settlers or immigrants or whatever the hell 0.99

01:10:04.180 you want to call yourself what we should be doing is focusing on the media outside of canada

01:10:15.540 because canadian foreign policy is all based on the need to sanitize our image so we can continue

01:10:25.380 performing this genocide here so all of the sort of histrionic liberal stances we take

01:10:33.860 on the international scene every time we advocate for the rights of indigenous people in other

01:10:40.580 people's countries every time we talk about how we're on the side of those pacific islanders who

01:10:47.380 want to limit the temperature increase to one and a half degrees even though every year they've been

01:10:52.340 in office. John Horgan and Justin Trudeau have increased fossil fuel subsidies, increased

01:10:57.620 emissions, and then they do photo ops with Greta Thunberg. You know, this sort of nonsense.

01:11:04.340 What we need to do is start hammering this country's image internationally. We need to

01:11:09.700 start showing people in the rest of the world who we really are. Because it's on the international

01:11:17.620 seen where people can actually visit consequences on this country like our mining companies right

01:11:23.380 which are feared by indigenous people from tiara del fuego to alaska canadian mining companies

01:11:32.100 are three times as likely as mining companies from any other country to employ professional

01:11:40.660 rape gangs to commit sexual violence against indigenous women in the territories where we're

01:11:46.740 mining that's the record of barrett gold and these other companies so indigenous people in 0.96

01:11:53.140 the rest of the world are terrified of us as many indigenous people in canada are legitimately 1.00

01:11:59.620 terrified of canadian industry we need consequences to start hitting we subsidize our telecom sector

01:12:07.140 we subsidize our mining sector we go out into the rest of the world and we get permission to do

01:12:11.380 things because of this image we've crafted well we need to start hammering this country's

01:12:16.740 international image so that the telecom sector starts to hurt so that the mining sector starts

01:12:22.340 to hurt and maybe then the message will get to our governments that we want something other than tears

01:12:32.260 something other than tears would be nice in this country because sanctimony seems to be a

01:12:37.220 fundamental canadian virtue it's just simply because we're not the united states somehow we're

01:12:41.780 just a better place i don't don't really know where this came from maybe you can help us

01:12:46.420 understand how canadians decided they were inherently virtuous just because they weren't

01:12:50.820 americans well i think there are two parts to it so one part is the international part

01:12:56.420 if you're campaigning for better health care in america um of course you're gonna point to canada

01:13:03.940 and you're going to dress it up as a kind of social democratic or liberal paradise

01:13:09.380 so it is rational for american leftists to help sanitize canada's image so that they can draw

01:13:17.620 contrast between the u.s and canada in a certain light similarly europeans who wish to criticize

01:13:27.300 the united states by pumping our image up they can use us as a kind of fake rhetorical foil

01:13:35.300 um so the illusion of canada has uses for people who are who are in a dispute with the uh with the

01:13:44.260 united states uh at some level so i understand why misrepresenting us in this way is rational

01:13:52.420 for people outside the country but we have to remember as we are approaching canada today let's

01:13:58.660 talk a little bit about so it was um so stephen harper one of his plans i was really frightened

01:14:06.260 he'd pull off and now i almost wish he had was um so it's actually like we have to remember that

01:14:18.260 the age we've decided canada is its birthday all that stuff those are political questions

01:14:25.060 as a historian i can give you about eight answers as to how old canada was or what day it was founded

01:14:31.700 and they're all correct and you get to pick based on and so what and so what governments do right

01:14:39.540 is they pick the historical narrative that reinforces the agenda of the government

01:14:47.380 so stephen harper when he got his majority in 2011 he created something called the 1812 secretariat

01:14:54.420 and the original plan of the 1812 secretariat was to celebrate canada's 200th birthday in 2014

01:15:04.580 the day the war of 1812 ended and we were going to move we were going to change the narrative of

01:15:11.380 canada because stephen harper believed that canada's values were loyalty um courage in battle

01:15:24.660 um uh allegiance to the british crown and um and um uh and alliance making uh right because

01:15:37.540 we fought the war with the Iroquois Confederacy as our allies. And, you know, and so Canada would 0.52

01:15:45.700 have gone from being, you know, about 125 to being 200 all of a sudden, but Canada would have been

01:15:54.980 refounded with this new story, one that espoused conservative values or at least Stephen Harper's

01:16:02.260 conservative values. The reason Harper thought he could get away with that, it's actually quite

01:16:06.900 funny why the plan didn't work. It relied heavily on volunteer work from U.S. Civil War reenactors

01:16:13.760 and the volunteer Civil War reenactors wouldn't do it. That the idea of them being in a war where

01:16:22.780 they lose to the British was just too appalling. So he couldn't get the personnel necessary to do

01:16:28.440 the original 1812 celebrations he was hoping to. But the reason he thought he could do this is

01:16:34.760 because this is exactly what Lester Pearson did in 1967. He re-founded the country, gave it a new

01:16:41.160 flag, a new birthday, and a new set of values. Because before 1967, Canada described itself

01:16:50.840 very much in the terms that Stephen Harper wanted to re-describe it. As loyal to the British crown,

01:16:58.600 as English, as stalwart in battle like we were at Vimy Ridge, blah, blah, blah.

01:17:07.160 But the Liberal Party of Canada, one of its most ambitious acts,

01:17:13.080 was to re-found the country for its supposed 100th birthday.

01:17:17.400 Now, there is no correct date for Canada's birthday. It was sort of born in 1814.

01:17:24.600 it was also sort of born in 1776 it was also sort of born in 1783 when the treaty of paris was

01:17:32.600 signed um you could pick lots of years that canada came into being but the new but this centennial

01:17:41.000 celebration that the pearson government pulled together replaced the old conservative vision of

01:17:47.640 canada from john a mcdonald to john diefenbaker one language one queen uh all of that stuff

01:17:56.120 um and replaced it with the values of um at the the of of lester pearson and let's be clear that

01:18:04.920 lester pearson was um we know he was like an american planet he was largely controlled by

01:18:12.520 the Kennedy administration. He was a diplomat who spent very little time in Canada. And what he did

01:18:20.840 was he crafted a self-image for Canada that was consistent with our policies, with America's

01:18:29.160 policies for fighting the Cold War. And America's policies for fighting the Cold War was to create

01:18:35.720 welfare states in the countries of its allies so that um anything the soviet union was offering

01:18:44.280 people in terms of social programs our countries would match so we were gonna we rejigged capitalism

01:18:51.720 so that we had all of these wraparound entitlement programs that of course i think are very good

01:18:56.360 but those um oh yes that's true the winning of the uh seven years war well done john um so yeah

01:19:07.000 so there's 1761 1763 when the treaties signed lots of lots of potential dates but the values

01:19:15.400 that we encoded in canada right multiculturalism bilingualism um this um uh and uh uh all of these

01:19:28.680 sort of diversity politics that became the center and we retrojected that into the past

01:19:36.680 to make that who we had always been so the pearsonian liberal state really in many ways

01:19:44.280 our country as we know it, is just a little over 50 years old. It was effectively refounded by

01:19:51.300 Pearson and Trudeau based on fundamentally different values than it was created with.

01:19:58.040 And that's a thing countries can do. And I'm not even saying it's a thing they shouldn't do.

01:20:04.760 There's nothing wrong with refounding your country. The United States is an example of 1.00

01:20:10.420 the danger of keeping a constitution for too long. It gets too confusing, too much stuff

01:20:16.900 accretes to it. The system becomes inefficient. You know, countries need a good house cleaning

01:20:23.220 now and then. So I don't oppose what Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau did, but I think

01:20:29.060 it's important to recognize that who we've always been as Canadians is only who we've

01:20:34.740 always been since 1967 and um you know i i like our canada day celebrations fine you know i um

01:20:45.860 uh the best canada day celebrations before covid were um at the pne in vancouver and one of the

01:20:54.020 things that was striking about it was you'd go down there and you'd realize you're actually

01:20:57.460 in a different city than you thought you were because pne canada day is 25 indigenous

01:21:04.740 in a city that's got about a 1% indigenous population.

01:21:09.740 It was actually a great time to just enjoy our food,

01:21:16.240 enjoy a good time, and mark whatever it was

01:21:20.960 that people were marking.

01:21:22.500 The P&E's Canada Day was masterfully non-ideological

01:21:26.380 because it was focused really on the provision

01:21:30.300 of barbecued corn, which is good stuff.

01:21:34.160 And, you know, so I think that we need some adjustment on our Canada Day now.

01:21:47.300 I think we're definitely in need of adjustment.

01:21:49.980 But what we do not, what we should not be doing is what we appear to be planning to do,

01:21:54.340 which is just have a big national cry day.

01:21:57.120 um i think there is right a larger phenomenon going on in this culture of men not wanting to

01:22:06.880 be men uh and we see it manifest in all kinds of ways and i guess my thing is like

01:22:15.480 suck it up princess this isn't about you or your tears um why don't we try a little bit more 0.64

01:22:25.220 some values that involve taking responsibility rather than shunting responsibility to our 0.99

01:22:33.180 ancestors. And there are ways we can figure out to encode this in our celebrations or in our

01:22:41.300 marking of the day or what have you but um we have to remember that uh these these histrionic

01:22:52.980 uh morning behaviors are not even what we're being asked to do

01:22:58.100 it's what we're deciding to do for fear we might be asked to do something substantive

01:23:05.700 something substantive in this country would definitely be an improvement upon our current

01:23:09.780 situation because regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum it's feel it's felt for

01:23:15.100 many years now that canada has been in a bit of a listless direction uh it in as you put it this

01:23:20.840 the post the post cold war era has not been kind to people conservative or liberal progressive or

01:23:27.220 traditional and and the question becomes then what is a proper way forward for this bizarre nation

01:23:33.520 state i mean we are here on sovereignty tv for a reason and it and this is one of the only places

01:23:38.760 we can have this conversation because the consensus out there seems to be everything's

01:23:42.360 fine never mind the fire well yes and people aren't saying everything's fine they're screaming

01:23:48.460 everything's fine in the way that people only do when things are very very not fine

01:23:53.900 um well i think one of the um there are big questions to ask about how we think about

01:24:03.460 pluralism in canada i think this is what it really comes down to is that our theory of pluralism

01:24:12.380 is um underpinned by this ideology of multiculturalism and we have to remember

01:24:19.920 who gave us multiculturalism multiculturalism is an ideology we got from the united states

01:24:26.740 it was the official ideology of the National Association of Manufacturers. And it had to

01:24:36.240 do with the National Association of Manufacturers tactics for breaking unions. So NAM was strongly

01:24:46.240 in favor of people keeping their European language when they came to North America.

01:24:51.240 They built streetcar suburb ghettos that were linguistically based. Here's the Polish ghetto. 0.98

01:24:56.240 here are all these things that was how we built company housing 100 years ago it was all ethnically

01:25:01.440 and linguistically segregated and the national association of manufacturers gave lots of money

01:25:08.080 to um multicultural uh to national clubs the swedish club the hungarian club etc

01:25:18.560 and the reason for that was to maintain and magnify differences that people brought with

01:25:25.360 them from the old country so that if your union went on strike you could bring in a bunch of 1.00

01:25:31.360 polish speakers you could bring in a bunch of hungarian speakers if the polls went on strike

01:25:37.200 you go down to the black church and bring in some black people and this is multiculturalism was not 0.99

01:25:43.120 a state ideology it was the ideology of the right wing of the american manufacturing sector 0.58

01:25:50.240 and like so many other parts of liberalism we forget that at its core is capitalist explication

01:25:59.840 that that we we liberalism has been so successful in rebranding itself we forget that its main purpose

01:26:10.960 is to unfetter markets to uh in various ways and um you know by making free trade agreements and

01:26:19.360 the like through things like nafta that create investor rights and all this stuff and you know

01:26:25.040 who opposed multiculturalism uh 100 years ago socialists right they we got our famous old

01:26:34.720 labor song, Joe Hill, I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, the story of this copper miner

01:26:42.240 in Salt Lake City who was framed for murder because he was an organizer. Well, if our

01:26:51.840 present woke liberal consciousness looked at that, they would be giving shit to Joe Hill 0.98

01:26:58.640 because he wasn't calling himself by his real name, which was Joel Haglund, a Swedish name. 0.93

01:27:03.840 He was a native Swedish speaker when he came to the Americas, but Joe Hill wrote all of his songs in English because he felt that if the labor movement didn't speak the lingua franca of the people, it could never break down the barriers between the different races and ethnicities so that people could do something together.

01:27:25.940 Now, I'm not saying, I'm not Maxime Bernier, I'm not saying like suppress languages or

01:27:33.280 suppress culture, of course not.

01:27:37.300 But we have this discourse of diversity that recognizes diversity in very specific forms,

01:27:48.180 language, costume, and worship.

01:27:53.300 we live in a society that doesn't recognize or or appreciate or acknowledge diversity when it comes

01:27:59.780 to class to ideology to region to the things that actually are the biggest differences among us

01:28:11.380 right we're we're told that um right it's almost like being working class if you're

01:28:20.900 white is viewed more as a disease than an identity it's like a pathology that you need a doctor to 1.00

01:28:27.620 treat or something and it's embarrassing and something you should cover up um and i think

01:28:34.100 it's really i think i think that we have to acknowledge and permit the forms of diversity

01:28:40.420 that exist you look at a party like the new democratic party and they've they're they have

01:28:45.380 this candidate vetting thing so that local people can't just choose who they want to represent

01:28:51.620 them because they might make the wrong choice. So what they have is something called an equity

01:28:57.780 seeking mandate. So if a white man has been representing a rioting and he steps down, only a

01:29:07.620 a person from an equity-seeking group can represent the rioting. This includes being

01:29:14.860 transgender, being gay, being non-white. Interestingly, it does not include being working 0.51

01:29:23.720 class. Working-class people are not allowed to seek equity because the party requires 0.99

01:29:30.960 you to pay a $5,000 nonrefundable deposit from your own money. And I was debating, like,

01:29:37.020 party's president about this. I said, I mean, isn't this just like US-style voter suppression?

01:29:43.500 It's like, well, if you don't have $5,000 ready to hand, you're not a serious person.

01:29:50.780 That's the New Democratic Party of British Columbia. So what we've got here is we're

01:29:58.300 actually highly intolerant of various forms of diversity. We don't care how you worship, 1.00

01:30:04.300 but if that worship informs your opinion then there's a problem it might cause you to espouse

01:30:11.420 a view that we don't like and so what are we doing in parliament right now we're ramming through

01:30:16.540 legislation so that it will be criminalized by the time we go into the election um if a kid

01:30:24.300 says you know i i think i'm really a girl i think i'm really a boy if you say you know you should

01:30:32.300 really love who you are you should really love your body you're beautiful all people are beautiful

01:30:39.180 that's six months in jail that's six months in jail you've just committed conversion therapy

01:30:44.620 and you're going to jail so we celebrate superficial and cosmetic forms of diversity that look good in 0.79

01:30:54.300 a photo array. We all love a photo array with one turban, one hijab, one afro, and we set them up.

01:31:05.580 Because the way you show your power in the North American version of whiteness is to place non-white 0.99

01:31:14.140 aesthetically pleasing bodies next to yours that shows your level of social power as a white person. 0.64

01:31:22.300 And that's a tradition that goes way back. Canada changed its immigration laws in the 50s

01:31:30.780 because wealthy elites in Canada, there weren't enough black maids and nannies. And you didn't 1.00

01:31:39.340 look as rich as your American cousin if your maid was white because the ability to have a black 1.00

01:31:48.300 body in your space that you control is part of your performance of being an elite white person 0.51

01:31:55.420 so we have to remember that this photo array theory of diversity comes out of two things it

01:32:02.700 comes out of a performance of white power and it comes out of the national association of

01:32:11.500 manufacturers trying to break unions if we celebrated or engaged diversity in a meaningful

01:32:19.820 way in a meaningful way where it meant different opinions where it meant being of a different class

01:32:30.380 uh then you know i think we might get somewhere but this hideous fake diversity this cosmetic 1.00

01:32:39.340 diversity that we are using to paper over um you know a very dysfunctional society it's um it's

01:32:49.740 repugnant and it um it serves no one i can tell you from from my experiences on the left uh you

01:32:59.900 know any sane non-white person hates to be tokenized they hate to think that they're just in the photo 0.83

01:33:08.620 because of how their skin contrasts with the skin of the person standing next to them

01:33:14.380 that's a profound kind of devaluation of other human beings an insult to other human beings

01:33:21.900 and um but we don't care if people feel insulted because the performance is for us

01:33:30.220 the performance isn't for the folks that we claim that we're serving or representing

01:33:36.140 so you know how might canada look if we talked about meaningful rather than cosmetic difference

01:33:45.900 maybe we'd all be at each other's throats and decide to break up that's sort of what happened

01:33:51.500 in the 90s um we nearly got there um but then it was since then we backed away from those

01:33:59.100 conversations brian mulroney forced us into those conversations and it shook the nation

01:34:04.780 right after patriation in 1982 we had 10 years of trying to have a real conversation with each

01:34:12.300 other and the consequence was we nearly broke the country but i think the mistake was to go

01:34:18.300 well then i guess we shouldn't talk about that again because you know how that works in a marriage

01:34:22.860 right if you start talking about the real problems it looks like you're going to break up

01:34:26.140 up? Don't shut up. Like, the marriage is going to live or it's going to die based on

01:34:32.940 the real conversation. But you're just postponing that conversation by kicking it down the road.

01:34:40.220 Now, yesterday was the anniversary of a really important moment in that decade,

01:34:45.660 was the moment that Elijah Harper stood up in the Manitoba legislature and stopped the

01:34:51.820 Meach Lake Constitutional Accord. Stood there with that eagle feather, the only indigenous 1.00

01:34:58.540 person in the legislature, they needed unanimous consent to ram through this emergency legislation.

01:35:05.820 And Elijah Harper said he did not consent. For folks wondering what they might be able to

01:35:13.260 celebrate next week, I would celebrate that if I were you. It was a moment of extraordinary bravery

01:35:20.540 and it was a moment we haven't seen from parliamentarians in the 21st century.

01:35:25.260 We haven't seen parliamentarians who stand up to their leaders and under the pressure of the

01:35:30.700 entire country, 10 premiers all screaming at them, hold their ground with dignity based on principle.

01:35:39.340 And, you know, what a different country it would be if our heroes were people who had taken these stances of principle.

01:35:53.060 But the heroes, our narrative tends to lionize, are go-along-get-along guys.

01:36:00.040 The people who are part of some big fake elite consensus.

01:36:04.260 us oh we all agreed to do this thing together that we've all actually agreed to never do

01:36:09.460 that's those are that's the fathers of confederation uh you know i'm i'm with the

01:36:16.900 more uh i'm uh i'm with the metis nation on this the father of confederation that i celebrate is

01:36:23.760 louis riel uh he had a vision of a meaningfully pluralistic canada a meaningfully inclusive

01:36:32.760 of canada so of course they hunted him down and killed him right that's that's what happens to

01:36:39.560 principled people right that's what the bible tells us if you live right and tell people the

01:36:45.480 truth it should take the government a maximum of three years to hunt you down and publicly execute

01:36:51.400 you that's uh that that's the lesson so we're a society that isn't just not producing heroes in

01:36:59.560 present part of that is connected to the fact that the canadians from the past that we celebrate

01:37:04.840 are not the heroic ones and i've i um and you know you hear this thing i i've had some jobs

01:37:11.640 teaching canadian history canadian history is so boring nothing ever happens in canadian history

01:37:18.840 it's a grotesque humble brag that's what that is it's both a lie and that's how canada sanitizes

01:37:29.000 its history, by telling the story in such a boring way that you don't notice all the

01:37:38.120 corpses of indigenous children, right? That we can just, we'll just bore people away from 1.00

01:37:45.500 this bloody and unjust past. Nathan, there may be a sound delay.

01:37:56.740 one of the parts that that is kind of getting more troublesome in this yeah there is a sound

01:38:05.140 ah what happened to me

01:38:09.220 did nathan just vanish am i on live well this should be interesting oh there we go i was trying

01:38:16.100 to correct my sound okay uh did that work better do i sound better now yeah you're you're all hooked

01:38:22.660 synced up again okay very good i don't know what's going on over here but who cares point being that

01:38:27.600 when it comes to when it comes to the canadian experience it really does seem like we we just

01:38:34.180 won't talk about serious questions i think a case in point is even our socialized medicine or the

01:38:39.640 cancel culture problem that we're having nowadays or you mentioned uh recently in a column that you

01:38:43.740 wrote for the georgia straight that that of course there's the the way we filter out uh insurgent 0.99

01:38:49.620 candidates in every party canada just refuses to have serious conversations we won't be able to

01:38:55.240 sustain the socialized system we have when it comes to medicine we need to change some things

01:38:59.040 inside of it in order to make it uh more state sustainable and and at the same time canadians

01:39:04.900 will spend 12 billion dollars on their teeth but then also have no idea what we should do with

01:39:09.700 emerging i don't i don't know where that conversation starts but it doesn't really seem

01:39:13.700 to matter whether one wants to be in favor of pipelines or not they can't have a conversation

01:39:17.900 about it. So they do both at the same time. There's a protest, but the pipeline gets bought

01:39:21.980 by the government, but you can't have a private pipeline, but we won't have that pipeline. So

01:39:25.600 we'll do this pipeline instead. It's all nonsense. Canada is always talking out of both sides of its

01:39:31.140 mouth at the same time. And I really think it goes back to that moment in 1995 when

01:39:38.220 we only won that referendum because we cheated, right? The S side was going to win the Quebec

01:39:46.540 referendum so we violated all the spending laws for the referendum and all and the airline

01:39:52.300 companies and all these businesses just said just threw everything at um winning that referendum by

01:40:00.440 30 000 votes and i unfortunately we took all the wrong lessons from that we talked about it about

01:40:07.720 a bunch of issues that have been pent up for a long time and we nearly lost the country and so

01:40:13.700 the response was to just to to push real debate away now of course some of this is part of a

01:40:22.640 global trend it's just that it's being felt more strongly in canada because we were always a

01:40:28.820 country or at least since 67 a country that prioritized symbol over substance we're now

01:40:36.080 moving into a time when the world at large is increasingly prioritizing symbol over substance

01:40:44.460 and so it's magnifying traits in this society that we're already completely out of control

01:40:50.400 so one of the arguments i recently made is you know i might vote for the tory incumbent in my

01:40:58.340 riding and the reason for that is this i've now looked at enough governments in canada over

01:41:06.100 enough time to see that the more a government states that it's really important to deal with

01:41:13.220 climate change the faster it increases its carbon emissions so if you vote for parties like the

01:41:22.340 liberals or the ndp that say that climate change is a big priority they will frack more gas pump

01:41:29.460 more oil and burn more coal than jason kenney the climate skeptic um so you're having these debates

01:41:41.460 between people who say climate is really important and climate is not an issue but their governments

01:41:49.060 are doing the precise opposite now i'm not saying that conservatives are trying to reduce emissions

01:41:55.380 let me just say that people who are honest about what they're doing are less effective

01:42:00.660 at increasing emissions uh that brazen liars are much better at that job and you know it john

01:42:13.460 horgan increased fossil fuel subsidies by more than by more in three years

01:42:22.820 than gordon campbell and christy clark combined in 16 years uh and so i'm thinking well like what's

01:42:32.260 what's the point like look how am i supposed to make choices if the choices are not just

01:42:38.660 divorced from physical reality but constitute the opposite of physical reality so everybody's doing

01:42:47.700 this because frankly and i know some of your listeners disagree with this but i think we all

01:42:52.660 know in our hearts of the climate's destabilizing and it scared the hell out of us it scared us all

01:42:59.380 so much that we're all reacting in different crazy ways some people are denying the problem

01:43:06.900 some people are yelling about the problem but the really scary people are people like

01:43:14.100 horgan and trudeau with their false smiles who know perfectly well that they're committing a

01:43:21.060 crime against humanity people who even in their own story aren't the good god like

01:43:28.260 i can deal with a lot of folks on the other side because i know i can i can i can hear the story

01:43:35.380 right that people are telling um they're the good guy because there's some kind of elite consensus

01:43:42.660 that's screwing them and lying to them and and they're pushing back against that i can get behind

01:43:48.500 that i i believe that about certain issues i just believe it about different issues 0.52

01:43:54.420 but these folks who piously quote the science and then do the exact opposite

01:44:01.140 i don't know what's going on inside there and i don't want to look but when you're in a society

01:44:08.680 that's afraid to have a real conversation and canadians have always been really afraid of

01:44:14.160 offending each other when you get too afraid of having a real conversation then it's these

01:44:18.920 sociopathic monsters who end up in charge and uh that's not good for anybody now the capture of the

01:44:27.580 canadian political system you did mention that that's it's the single it's the single most

01:44:32.400 problematic thing we have a first past the post system which means there are only so many

01:44:36.800 mainstream parties at any one given time right there's just a cap because of how the votes get

01:44:42.060 divided so you can have fewer mainstream parties than you could in a european country um and all

01:44:50.040 of the mainstream parties have the same provisions to prevent their members from getting the final

01:44:56.740 say on who their candidates are. And my friend Gary Shaw, I remember I was the first person

01:45:02.920 the NDP used this power on, so I was about to be acclaimed as the candidate for the writing

01:45:09.120 of St. Paul's in 2009, and then the office phoned me and devetted me, interestingly,

01:45:16.680 over a Facebook post about the Gustafson Lake siege in 1995, mentioning that the NDP had

01:45:22.860 shot 14,000 rounds of ammunition at a group of indigenous protesters. So the party sacked me.

01:45:31.340 And my friend Gary Shaw said, you know, they're saying it's over your past statements. But it's

01:45:37.660 not. This is minority report. This is the NDP's pre-crime division. And that's what these parties

01:45:45.020 run. They run a pre-crime division. They go through a candidate's resume. They're not looking

01:45:50.300 for gaffes or bad affiliations, they're looking for a time the candidates stood up to authority.

01:45:59.820 Is this person getting along with their family? Are they in touch with their parents? Have they

01:46:05.420 ever stood up to a boss? Have they ever dissented from a professional body? And that's the

01:46:14.380 information political parties use so the result is that only cowards can be represented in the

01:46:22.620 house of commons people could go well won't one of these backbenchers stand up over this

01:46:27.740 or stand up over that it's like no they're cowards because we because since 2003 we have

01:46:38.860 systematically created mechanisms to remove from our legislatures anybody with warm blood running

01:46:47.420 through their veins we have just we are we are creating a mammal free zone in uh the legislatures 0.56

01:46:54.700 across this country and it shows the distance the distance between regular people with normal

01:47:03.100 personalities and the people representing them it's huge right you know politicians have always

01:47:11.100 been weird people but especially in bc we used to celebrate that weirdness you know on and i'll

01:47:20.060 tell you sometimes and a lot of people right they just want a politics of real people that it's

01:47:26.540 actually more important to them to make sure that their mp is a mammal than that their mp agree with

01:47:33.020 them about climate change. I might even be turning into one of those people. And I remember, like,

01:47:40.940 one of my organizers back in the 90s, Mary Clarkson. Who had she organized before? Where did her 0.99

01:47:48.060 experience come from? She was a van der ZAM organizer. And she saw my propensity to say what

01:47:56.380 I thought as being, you know, it's like, well, the ZAM's out of politics. I'll go with this guy. 0.88

01:48:01.580 he says what he thinks. And, you know, I think that if there's going to be some kind of political

01:48:09.340 renewal in this country, some way we can short circuit this increasing delamination of our elite

01:48:16.300 and our political class from the rest of society, it's going to be about something more basic and

01:48:23.920 more fundamental than policy. This has become a kinds of people question. What kind of person

01:48:33.900 are you? Not what specific views do you have, but are you the kind of person who's straight

01:48:40.160 with people? Are you the kind of person who sticks with their friends through tough times?

01:48:45.500 like and and we're eliminating those people from everywhere except society you know except the

01:48:52.780 street right you can meet those people everywhere except in positions of power in this country

01:48:59.500 because whatever is happening in the house of commons is just a shadow of what the hr industry

01:49:05.660 is doing in our workplaces right people keep complaining about this critical race theory

01:49:11.260 let me tell you none of the down rate mba management consultants who will do anti-oppression

01:49:19.340 and diversity training for your school board has read any more critical race theory than you have

01:49:26.220 these people are hr people who are taking a couple of buzzwords from some ivy league university

01:49:34.380 and wrapping it around a project I think we can all recognize, the desire to organize workplaces where control is more important than productivity.

01:49:52.140 Oh, man. Yes. Well, don't you miss David Icke these days, eh?

01:49:57.680 Like, he makes piles of sense compared to QAnon.

01:50:02.680 Like, David Icke's meta conspiracy theory about the climate, right?

01:50:06.700 Because maybe people don't know David Icke's conspiracy theory.

01:50:09.400 But so David Icke used to be like the Alex Jones of the world until he was just annihilated in the 21st century by people who took his game pro.

01:50:19.240 David Icke had been a pro footballer in England.

01:50:22.140 He was a huge success as a pro footballer.

01:50:24.640 Went on to be a color man on TV.

01:50:27.680 did sports commentary for a number of years, and then he became the leader of the Green Party.

01:50:34.220 And then he announced he was Jesus. And then even the Green Party had to do something about that.

01:50:41.800 So David Icke was thrown out of the Green Party, and he announced his big meta conspiracy theory,

01:50:48.880 which is that the world is controlled by a gang of shape-shifting space lizards headed by the

01:50:55.280 queen. And the thing was, this conspiracy theory could go anywhere because the shapeshifting space

01:51:03.360 lizards were trying to warm the planet. They were trying to cause climate change so that it would

01:51:07.200 be more comfortable for shapeshifting space lizards. But David Icke recruited all these

01:51:16.320 people to his conspiracy theory because you could slap it on top of any other conspiracy theory.

01:51:22.040 And so, like, there's a testimonial on his website from this woman going, you know, I live in Bristol, and every night I would fall asleep, and the entire city council of Bristol would come into my bedroom and rape me until the morning, and then they would leave.

01:51:35.180 And David Ike would go, well, you know why that is?

01:51:37.680 It's because they're shape-shifting space lizards.

01:51:41.300 And so this explained everything.

01:51:45.000 It really does get more plausible all the time, Sheldon.

01:51:48.120 and uh so this became the meta explanation for everything he had actually solved that fundamental

01:51:55.640 problem of all conspiracy theories right because my friend brian stedman used to take the number

01:52:00.600 20 bus in vancouver a lot go down commercial drive and he has one of those really open faces

01:52:05.340 so he would say um so um guys would just sit down next to him and get into their new conspiracy

01:52:13.320 theory. It just happens all the time over there. And so he had a tactic for dealing with it. He'd

01:52:19.300 just look at the person and go, hey, I don't have a lot of time here. So is it the aliens or the

01:52:24.860 Jews? And of course, David Icke solved that problem too. The aliens are the Jews because 1.00

01:52:31.380 they're shape-shifting space lizards. So Icke was an unstoppable force. In 2000, actually, 0.98

01:52:40.020 he claimed I was one of the shape-shifting space lizards, and then 13 years later, I'm on the bus,

01:52:46.480 and I get this phone call. This person goes, hi, is this Stuart Parker? And I go, yeah. He goes,

01:52:53.340 well, I'm David Icke's lawyer. I go, excuse me? Yes, well, he's being sued for libel by Richard

01:53:01.760 Warman, and we'd really appreciate your testimony. And I go, but he accused me of being a shape-shifting

01:53:09.740 space lizard and he goes it's our argument that he's so promiscuous in this accusation

01:53:15.260 that he can't libel people by claiming that they're shape-shifting space lizards anyway i

01:53:20.380 told her she was an anti-semite and hung up but uh that that's so there's so it is funny and

01:53:30.700 there's actually the best moment of david ike's career is he's on tv he's being interviewed about

01:53:34.700 this and he is really letting the shape-shifting space lizards have it for what they're doing with

01:53:39.580 climate change and the uh and uh and then he pauses and he goes no i don't want to be speciesist

01:53:46.780 about this because really they're only doing this because they have very low self-esteem

01:53:56.620 oh i you know we're in week 12 of this show um i think we've had you on almost every week

01:54:04.300 and i didn't think we'd get here in 12 weeks but i'm glad that we did i'm really glad it's just

01:54:11.020 another piece of the puzzle if you want to if you want to assemble the puzzle and figure out what's

01:54:15.260 going on now um there's a lot of weird stuff to pay attention to and if i'll say if i can say one

01:54:22.460 more thing about canadian identity is so damn tragic um it sure has no space for weird people 0.93

01:54:32.060 like say what you will about boris johnson he's a terrible leader and an asshat and whatnot but 0.98

01:54:39.820 like he's obviously a crazy person and people are fine with that they recognize that crazy people 0.99

01:54:47.980 can bring a lot to their job whereas canada is so very interested in its facade in its false 0.93

01:54:58.140 boringness that um we really in addition like we gotta deal working folks back into

01:55:08.620 the mainstream of society we've also got to deal crazy people back into the mainstream of society

01:55:14.060 because um they've got something to offer and right now i think anybody with a view that can

01:55:21.420 even be characterized as crazy is afraid of the social unemployment consequences of just saying

01:55:30.060 what they think well um they said something nice about me on the screen shall i ring off i think

01:55:37.180 we've uh we've gone around the houses as the british would say indeed we have indeed we have

01:55:42.380 steward as always and always it's a pleasure and we're so thankful to have you here uh next week

01:55:47.500 everybody has to take off uh of course thursday lands on a day that shall not be named i suppose

01:55:52.940 i don't know what's gonna happen with that first of july uh going to the fourth of july so it's a

01:55:58.480 false long weekend because nobody in canada is productive after a stat so friday is a write-off

01:56:03.240 but but thursday is a day off so uh aaron and stewart won't be here we'll just have two shows

01:56:07.980 next week uh but so thankful to have you here today stewart pile of fun thanks nathan bye

01:56:13.380 Absolutely. No, I mean, that was that was a journey, wasn't it? We went down some interesting roads today, but important roads, I think. And I was advised by my overlords that we needed to get into what happened in Saskatchewan.

01:56:26.380 Saskatchewan, and so I'm lucky that we had a first-hand interpretation live hot off the presses

01:56:32.020 for how to look at that tragedy and how to maybe think about it. I guess as we head into the last

01:56:37.980 weekend before the summer officially, it's a school summer as it is, and of course our national

01:56:45.420 holiday next week, just a few thoughts. One, if you're a graduating student from high school,

01:56:51.180 I remember my graduation all those years ago. Congratulations. And welcome to the first summer

01:56:57.300 of the rest of your adult life. Don't let it go to waste on you. Have some memories. Maybe stay

01:57:04.160 safe. Don't make any mistakes that are permanent. And also just think through what you want to do

01:57:10.280 next. I wish I knew then what I know now. But I also don't wish that the innocence I did have in

01:57:16.900 that time was taken away so if you are a high school graduating student uh keep your you know

01:57:21.340 keep keep focus but be open to you know a happy summer a final summer before the dreary adult

01:57:29.040 world comes for you uh anything else to kind of announce on that count again there will only be

01:57:34.380 two shows next week tuesday and wednesday 9 a.m pacific 10 a.m mountain and we'll be speaking

01:57:41.240 with a few different people uh one of them actually we've booked him already we're hope

01:57:45.520 hopeful to get mr hinman a leader of the independent wild rose party out there in alberta

01:57:50.060 that we can we can kind of talk about some of the things that have to do actually with with

01:57:54.980 of course candidate and and the rest of that question uh do uh do let us know if you have

01:58:00.640 any thoughts about the show i'll just put up the my email very quickly here do let us know if you

01:58:06.900 have any thoughts about the show any suggested guests people directions you'd like to see the

01:58:11.020 show go i'm going to have a conference about that not so distant future just about i we and we've

01:58:15.980 talked about at the western a little bit the possibility of pre-recorded shows and that sort

01:58:20.080 of thing maybe in-depth conversations with certain people so we're interested in people commenting on

01:58:24.180 the format how has this worked does this not work we're in week 12 right now what's working what

01:58:29.280 isn't working we want to hear from you so there's the uh there's the email let's see if i can

01:58:33.060 remember how to do this

01:58:34.380 i'm not a weather guy there you go so that's the email use the email but in any case uh very

01:58:43.100 thankful for uh everybody's loyal fandom here and all the comments that we received today was a great

01:58:49.100 day for comments it's good to hear from sheldon from cladette from a few others as well john of

01:58:54.060 course terry uh do continue to tune into the show and finally of course we'll be back bright and

01:58:58.940 early on Tuesday, 9 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Mountain. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you again then.

Western Standard - June 25, 2021

Mountain Standard Time - June 24th, 2021

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